MacBreak Weekly 1011 Transcript

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko's here, Jason Snell filling in Dan Moren. We're going to talk about those new AirPods that might have cameras in them. I don't know about that. Here come the new MacBooks. Watch out, iPhones are going to the moon. And why you might want to turn on lockdown mode. All that more coming up on MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:30]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1011, recorded Tuesday, February 10th, 2026. Oy and Whoop! It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is back from his visits to, I don't know, Cupertino? I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:00:51]:
No, I just sat on a beach for a week. It was great in Even Hawaii. better. Having a good time. And now I'm back and I'm wearing my hoodie because it's just cold here in California.

Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
It's almost winter.

Dan Moren [00:01:03]:
Only 55 degrees.

Jason Snell [00:01:05]:
Hawaii it is. So yeah, but it's good to be back.

Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
The blue sands, the yellow sky, the.

Jason Snell [00:01:12]:
Blue sands of Arrakis.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
Welcome back, Jason. We missed you, but we didn't miss your 6 colors. No siree.

Jason Snell [00:01:20]:
I saw the, the thumbnail of the YouTube version of the show last week, and I— one of my charts was on it, and I just nodded. And I'm like, look, Jason, I always.

John Ashley [00:01:29]:
Have to use your charts whenever we talk about your charts.

Jason Snell [00:01:31]:
I appreciate it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
Speaking of six colors, look who's here.

Jason Snell [00:01:35]:
It's another color.

Leo Laporte [00:01:36]:
In the Merlin Man seat, it is Dan Moren. Hello, Dan.

Dan Moren [00:01:40]:
Hello. In the honorary Merlin Mann seat.

Jason Snell [00:01:42]:
Honorary Merlin seat. The Mann.

Dan Moren [00:01:44]:
The endowed chair.

Jason Snell [00:01:45]:
The endowed chair.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
The Merlin Man chair of MacBreak. Yeah. Darn it. I I should, should have brought brought this, the stack of Moren books out. It's over there on the bookshelf. I see them behind you though. So that's good.

Dan Moren [00:01:56]:
Yeah. I always, always representing. They're a little blurry in the background, but they're there.

Leo Laporte [00:01:59]:
What's the latest? What's latest? the.

Dan Moren [00:02:00]:
Uh, the latest one was The Armageddon Protocol, which came out in 2024. Uh.

Leo Laporte [00:02:06]:
What'S going on?

Jason Snell [00:02:07]:
Are you slacking off?

Dan Moren [00:02:08]:
Yeah, it takes— weirdly enough, it takes a lot of time to write a book, I've discovered. Even after you— you think I'd be better at it after like half a dozen of them, but it still takes time.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:18]:
Only if you've got this old-fashioned notion that a book has to be good, Dan.

Leo Laporte [00:02:22]:
Come on. That's Andy Anatko. Join us from anatko.bluesky.social. Hello, Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:30]:
Hello, Jason. You've got— as soon as I saw on the feed, you have what my mother would say, "Oh, you got some color.".

Jason Snell [00:02:39]:
That's right. I'm tanned. I'm rested.

Dan Moren [00:02:41]:
I'm ready.

Leo Laporte [00:02:41]:
Oh, I didn't even notice, but I thought your hair got whiter, but no, you got darker.

Jason Snell [00:02:45]:
That's it. My hair got— I mean, progressively my hair probably did get whiter, right? I mean, like there's a really good chance that keeps happening.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:53]:
It's been a tough news cycle for all of us.

Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
Why would it stop?

Dan Moren [00:02:55]:
Bring out the Pantone color swatches. See if we can isolate the exact shade.

Jason Snell [00:02:59]:
Yeah, there was a week where I had come back from Hawaii and they took my photo for my Macworld column, you know, whatever, 15 years ago. And I had to look at that stupid column photo for like a couple of years. And you can see where my sunglasses.

Dan Moren [00:03:16]:
Were on my face.

Jason Snell [00:03:17]:
And I'm like, we got to take that picture again.

Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
Raccoon The look. Yeah, you know. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:03:22]:
Not my favorite.

Leo Laporte [00:03:23]:
Some people actually aspire to that.

Jason Snell [00:03:27]:
But some people do.

Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
Not you, apparently. Yeah, you know, maybe you don't care about health so much. It turns out neither does Apple. Mark Gurman says Apple's changed its mind about something it never announced. Isn't that interesting? That is good old Mark. Uh, he says that AI-based health coaching service that I was talking about, uh, Apple's not gonna do it.

Jason Snell [00:03:52]:
So I, I want to say, because Eddy Cue apparently made this decision because Eddy Cue was put in charge of all this fitness and health stuff, right? He, he, he took that over with the departure of other executives. He is now in charge of it and he's Mr. Services, right? And look, we don't know how it's going to go. And I think there's been a lot of fair criticism of Apple maybe being too services-oriented. I know I was here a couple of weeks ago complaining about Apple turning the iWork apps into freemium, which I think is a lousy decision that makes the product worse. But I will say this, Eddy Cue appears to have rolled in to them making this kind of cockamamie Health+ service and said, it's not good enough. Why is this a service? And the truth is he seems to have recognized that the health apps, the baseline health apps are way behind the competition and that adding new features and withholding them behind a service is exactly the wrong thing to do. So, you know, I want to be optimistic about this.

Jason Snell [00:04:50]:
I think this is maybe a good sign that, not just an Apple executive, but Mr. Services came in to see this group building a service on top of a lackluster base and said, no, let's just roll those— these features are just getting going away, and let's put these features in the app instead of trying to sell it as a service. So like, I, I love that. That is, that is a great story if that is what happened, and that even Eddy could— Cue can— who is just all about services revenue, right? If he can look at this and be like, no, we need a good base product before we can build a service on top of it. So I think this is like really good news. This is, this is a sign of life and care at Apple at the executive level to say not everything can be a service and maybe we shouldn't be building services while withholding, you know, standard features that every competitor already has.

Leo Laporte [00:05:45]:
Gurman writes, Q has told colleagues that Apple needs to move faster and be more competitive in health. He added that newer rivals, including Oral Health— Aura Health— Oi, I didn't know that was its name. I'm wearing a ring and I didn't know it was called Oi. And Whoop Incorporated offer offer more, more compelling— well, Oi and Whoop, man, how can you beat that?

Dan Moren [00:06:05]:
More compelling onomatopoeia.

Leo Laporte [00:06:07]:
Yeah, really more compelling and useful features. Uh, the longtime Apple executive didn't think the company's existing plan met that bar. He's also considering changes to Fitness+. Now, Gurman mentions Peloton, which has been tanking of late. So I'm not sure Peloton is the best comparison, but yeah, I think there's an opportunity. I actually did stop subscribing to my— I have a Peloton bike. I stopped the $50 a month Peloton subscription because I already got Fitness+. Yes, their spin classes aren't as good as Peloton's, to be frank.

Dan Moren [00:06:41]:
Uh.

Leo Laporte [00:06:43]:
But it's— I've already paid for it. Dan, do you use any of this stuff?

Dan Moren [00:06:48]:
I use Fitness Plus, actually. I mean, and I've used since January— they did, uh, put out like a, uh, 4-week sort of, you know, oh, you know, start off your fitness comeback thing, which I thought was kind of an interesting program. And it seems to me that they've worked a little harder on trying to make something a little more cohesive, as opposed to just having like, here's a bunch of classes, figure out for yourself what you want to do. Which is sometimes a bit user hostile if it's like, well, I don't know where to start. And I think this is kind of something that the, the idea of an additional service on top of this isn't— that's like the itch it's looking to scratch in a certain sense, is, hey, I need more than just give me a bunch of classes. I need like structure, I need a plan, I need how do I get from point A to point B. And I thought for a while that this is something that it feels like they— it's a good opportunity for some of those models and stuff like that to be able to say, we have all your health data, right? We have all this stuff that your Apple Watch has collected, we have all this stuff that you have done. And if you say, hey, my target is I want to lose some weight or I want to improve my cardio fitness, it should be able to look at your metrics and be like, okay, here's a plan that we built for you.

Dan Moren [00:07:53]:
Like, all the ingredients are there.

Jason Snell [00:07:55]:
Yeah.

Dan Moren [00:07:55]:
And if it wasn't meeting that quality bar, then it suggests they were not taking enough advantage of it. Or maybe this is part and parcel of some of their, their AI struggles.

Jason Snell [00:08:04]:
There's table stakes in, in in this app area, right? The bar has been raised. There are a bunch of apps mentioning Whoop, for example, but like Athletic, which is an app that for iOS that my friend Mike Hurley really loves, which uses machine learning models to analyze your health data and give you things that are actionable in a way that Apple just hasn't done, like even now. So I like the idea that maybe Eddy Cue came in and said the base product is just not good enough. Like the competition is leaving us in the dust and they got to do something about it. Sorry, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:35]:
No, no, I was just— I was going to say something exactly like that, that unfortunately it seems like Apple Health is definitely in its like Android moment, if that makes sense, where it's like, great, you were the industry leader, you blew everybody away, you made everything change, and now everybody has caught up with you. And the only— and you don't want don't want to be— you the Apple Watch particularly to be a product that your customers use because you make it damn near impossible for them to switch to a Garmin or to switch to a Samsung watch or any other type of fitness watch. So they really have to deliver now.

Leo Laporte [00:09:08]:
It's interesting because there is a big AI component in a lot of these programs, and I use a lot of these programs. And, but what's interesting is that they add the AI on top of connecting to Apple Health. Yeah. So this this is, is my Withings scale. And by the way, it says, I don't know why, Withings is a French company, my vitality is very low.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:31]:
So I am in deep trouble.

Leo Laporte [00:09:34]:
But you see, It the— Sacré bleu! Votre est très, has vitalité très— Have.

Dan Moren [00:09:42]:
Some red wine.

Leo Laporte [00:09:42]:
It gives you a double daily snapshot of your available energy.

Jason Snell [00:09:46]:
Liberty, equality, vitality.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:49]:
Why am I suddenly thinking it's been a while since I've listened to the incomparable radio theater?

Jason Snell [00:09:54]:
A lot of fake French accents.

Leo Laporte [00:09:56]:
If you ever want to do, you know, Les Misérables, I volunteer to be.

Jason Snell [00:10:01]:
But you're right, Leo. I mean, they're eating Apple's lunch here. And I got to think that exactly what they that's did. And they're using Apple's tools.

Dan Moren [00:10:07]:
Logging the calories from eating their lunch in.

Jason Snell [00:10:09]:
They are, they are not too many calories. It's just a salad. So I think this is actually one of the upsides of all the, um, we've been talking about the changes at Apple, right? How there are obviously a lot of executive changes happening and there are more to come, right? And this is a great example of that where I think Eddy Cue rolled into this group. Again, I'm, I'm based, I'm reading between the lines of this report, but Eddy got put in charge of this and what a good opportunity for a new leader to come in with a fresh pair of eyes who doesn't have any ego invested in the, the the path that the group has been walking down and look at it and say, this doesn't make any sense. We don't— we launch it. I mean, it's a little like that Jim Mora playoffs. It's like, you know, Health Plus, our health app isn't good enough. Why are we talking about a plus when the health app has— is being left in the dust and all these other apps are using the health data and then doing better things with it? Like, people are building add-ons to our database that do interesting things while we just sit here.

Jason Snell [00:11:07]:
And I, I think that's what he probably did. And that gives them. I mean, I think the more new executives come in, the more opportunity is for, for change on, on that level.

Dan Moren [00:11:16]:
It does feel like a little bit like a vestige of kind of where Apple was maybe 7 years ago, of let's just have a central repository and be the place where all the data lives and let the third-party apps take advantage of that. Because this is a place where, as you said, having the services revenue play a part in it, where it's like, look, we can do something else with this, right? We are not content to just be— if you open up the Health app today it's just a list of stats. There is no information. There's very little information to look at to even get like a top line, like, how am I doing? Um, and so I think, you know, right, you're dead. I don't know, like, it doesn't give you anything about like what is your current, current health. It just gives you, here's, here's a bunch of numbers, here's a bunch of trends. They're going up, they're going down. Are they good?

Andy Ihnatko [00:12:03]:
Are they bad?

Dan Moren [00:12:03]:
Man, they're trends. So, you know, I, I think there is an argument there that, that you're right, that having somebody who's got some, maybe some skin in the game about it and isn't just about like, hey, you know, maybe this is a service we can sell, but like somebody coming in with the experience of saying like, I know how we have built up services in the past that we have turned into things that we are charging for. This is not going to meet that, that bar yet, right? This isn't going to get us to the point of somebody being willing to give us money because we're not doing enough with it.

Leo Laporte [00:12:32]:
So it is a great opportunity, and you know, maybe Apple This is what Microsoft did with Windows. They were a platform, and their huge success was that they were a platform that developers could build on. And I don't know if it's a bad thing to make the platform Apple Health that people like Gentler Streak and Oura, oi, and whoop. And I use Cronometer for my calories. I use a Withings scale. I use the Oura Ring, and they're all tied together. And they all use Apple Health to get the information from one another. So you can choose the kind of— In fact, I just signed up for a new service that does the glucose monitor and then uses AI to compare your calorie intake to your spikes and gives you advice.

Leo Laporte [00:13:21]:
Why not be the platform? Why not be like Windows and say, "We're the health platform," and let a thousand flowers bloom? The risk is if they start doing it all, that these, all these very nice, I think, third-party tools might go away.

Jason Snell [00:13:34]:
I think there's base functionality. This is the classic Sherlocking argument, right? But I think the truth is there is base functionality that Apple feels that needs to be in their platform, and they don't want it to become— and it's not there yet— an assemble-yourself platform, right? Where it's like, well, what you do is you get the iPhone and the Apple Watch, and then you gotta subscribe to somebody's service. And, and yes, they want to enable third-party developers and services to add on. But there is— you don't want to sell them an empty box, right? And I think Apple and Eddy Cue is looking at the, at the health stuff and saying Apple's kind of an empty box right now where there, there is, there is— it's not even like state-of-the-art. It literally, like I said, they've raised the bar where there should be room for an app like Athletic to play where they're doing— they have a different take on it that's reaching a particular audience. But like, should Apple Health have some of these features just out of the box when you buy an iPhone and an Apple Watch? I think the answer is yes, that they are beneath that point. And now the third-party developers are bailing Apple out instead of adding on to what Apple provides.

Dan Moren [00:14:39]:
And to your point, like about the competitors, like the base moves over time, right? The state of the art changes. So what you built 10 years ago is not necessarily as relevant today, or everything has continued going. And this is one of the problems I think that we do see at times with Apple is They have their fingers in so many pies that trying to keep all of those things, like juggle them all. Why are you juggling pies? I think through my metaphors here. No, but you working on all these.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:07]:
Things.

Jason Snell [00:15:07]:
Clicks, always the.

Dan Moren [00:15:09]:
You you gotta, gotta keep iterating on all of these things. There's a lot of stuff that they do where they're like, all right, we did it, we're done. And they don't think about it again. I mean, I would throw the Home app in there as well, like as a thing that they've updated.

Leo Laporte [00:15:21]:
This is very similar to the Home, isn't it? They have a hub. And then other people make hardware and have apps. But the difference is you live in the hub. You don't— you use— buy other people's hardware.

Dan Moren [00:15:31]:
I live in my body. That's what the health is for.

Leo Laporte [00:15:33]:
Yeah, right. So good for you, by the way.

Jason Snell [00:15:38]:
Uh, I'm trying to get as far.

Leo Laporte [00:15:39]:
Away as possible, but if you want to live there, go right ahead. All right, so Gurman is giving us good news is what you're— what you're saying.

Jason Snell [00:15:46]:
I think so. I think this is good because this is an actual executive at Apple, you know, reportedly going into a group and saying your idea for a brand new service, and you know that everybody's been pushed to do that, doesn't meet the bar. It doesn't really make sense. We shouldn't just push out another service to say we will. And in fact, a lot of what you've built should just be in the app because we need to provide that to all our customers. I like that attitude. So I think this is a really— because like the narrative has been Apple's— everything Apple's doing is services. They just are trying to sell you another subscription and, and, and they're letting some of their base kind of feeling.

Leo Laporte [00:16:23]:
That way, isn't it? Like they're getting greedy now.

Jason Snell [00:16:25]:
Yeah. And so for Eddy Cue of all people, right, who's in charge of services, to come in and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is not a service, you need to put stuff in the actual app because our app needs to be better. I, you know, whether that's his judgment or he listened to different people than the old manager did or whatever the reason, they seem to have, have done it. And I think, yeah, I think that's a fantastic sign. I would love Apple across the board to to say new service is a real high bar, and the last thing we need to do is neglect all of our base stuff and just shove all our improvements in services, because that, that's a bad place to go.

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:01]:
And also, by contrast, and to be fair, part of the hell of trying to do fitness on other platforms with other watches is that stuff that you— if you appreciate the Apple Watch, that you feel, well, of course you're gonna give me this kind of tracking, of course I can— you can give me access to this sort of sensor data— that's like, oh no, you need— we need $7 a month from you, we need $9 a from you, and you month you do get a lot of stuff basically by virtue of the fact that, yes, you you paid, paid us for— you, you, we're going to give.

Dan Moren [00:17:28]:
You.

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:31]:
A a, a, a, a lot, lock, a lock-in bonus by giving you features for free that we would have charged $6 or $7 for if we allowed other people the freedom to access that information.

Leo Laporte [00:17:38]:
Mark Gurman, not the only rumor monger this week. There is a rumor that Apple's next AirPods Pro will come with a camera. Or cameras.

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:49]:
Yeah, that's a— that's been kicking around a lot. It's— it kind of— it started off with, oh well, there's going to be optical— oh no, so that's that's a— a mistranslation. It's not cameras. It's going to have optical sensors inside so it can actually do some like Apple Watch type sensors inside your ear. Yeah, but then— but then like there's— it's persistent that, oh no, there's actual like cameras inside the thing.

Leo Laporte [00:18:11]:
And he said next AirPods Pro can see around you. At same Yeah, I'm price. trying. And that doesn't necessarily— camera, does it?

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:18]:
Yeah. And nobody has any details about like what this thing would be used for. I mean, yes, again, as as someone— someone who has facial hair, I'm trying to figure out what camera— camera in.

Leo Laporte [00:18:28]:
My ear is gonna take a picture of anything I want except the side of my head.

Jason Snell [00:18:32]:
Well, I think a camera is exactly what I mean.

Dan Moren [00:18:34]:
But the utility of cameras, like to Andy's point, like the utility of cameras varies, right? I mean, there's been a lot of rumors about being an infrared camera. Obviously, if you're using an infrared camera, it's gonna tell you something different than if it's a, you know, camera you're taking pictures with, is this being used as a sensor, right? Is it being used to see things, objects? Maybe it alerts you when a ball is hurtling towards your head.

Jason Snell [00:18:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. But what can it see from inside, right? Just outside the opening of your ear? What can, what can it see? And for some people, it's going to.

Dan Moren [00:19:05]:
Be hair, hats, scarves. I, it's, you know, Andy will back me up here. It's the, it's the winter. We're all bundled up. That AirPod's not seeing anything.

Jason Snell [00:19:15]:
Yeah, yeah, it's weird.

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:18]:
It can sense our impatience for spring, but other than that— yeah, I don't.

Jason Snell [00:19:22]:
Get— I mean, look, I am ready to be wowed by some amazing lens that sees things and it's useful in some way, but this, this has never really made sense. It feels more like a desperate attempt to avoid building what we talked about, you know, a couple weeks ago, which is a sensor that you wear on the front of your body that looks out because— well, the worst thing would.

Dan Moren [00:19:44]:
Be looking out of your ears.

Leo Laporte [00:19:46]:
Little cameras coming out of your ear holes.

Jason Snell [00:19:48]:
Yeah, yeah, they stick right out and they look around.

Leo Laporte [00:19:50]:
My favorite Martian, you know.

Jason Snell [00:19:51]:
Yeah, little Martian antenna.

Dan Moren [00:19:53]:
I actually think it'd be worse if they were looking in. It's like, yeah, you got some earwax built up there. You really do need to clear that out.

Leo Laporte [00:19:59]:
So I think this is a misinterpretation of what this Japanese leaker is saying. What he may be saying, and this makes sense, you know, there's cameras on the watch the, the sort of in a way they're infrared sensors, right? So that's maybe what he's thinking is, is, is measure your temperature, things like that.

Dan Moren [00:20:16]:
They added some of that, Yeah, yeah, right? yeah. Has that temperature and heart rate.

Leo Laporte [00:20:21]:
So it's true.

Dan Moren [00:20:22]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, but seeing around you, I don't— yeah, I, I don't know if that's the ideal— as Jason said, I don't know if that's the ideal place to put those. But maybe they're thinking like, well, we already got them, just shove some cameras in there.

Jason Snell [00:20:33]:
Yeah, I mean, it's possible. I mean, if they're building them, then they've done some due diligence. They're probably not just desperately throwing them in there even though they're useless. I do wonder if it might end up being something a little bit less exciting but interesting, like taking some of the gestures from the Vision Pro so that if you, you know, if you hold out your hands sort of like off to the right or the left and do a tap or something, you can, you can do some controls and it's gestural or something maybe. But like, I just am really skeptical of that, of what they can see, uh, and especially if Can they see it in, you know, in most cases, or is it like 20% of the population that, you know, got no hair over there? And it's— I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:15]:
Particularly when you consider how tiny, tiny, tiny an AirPod is. So you're compromising in terms of physical space. You can put an extra component in that doesn't exist anymore. You're talking about demands on the battery, which are already— is anybody willing to trade an extra 45 minutes of playtime or phone call time for a camera feature that may or may not be particularly compelling to them. It's going to make it more difficult to manufacture. Uh, it it won't, won't affect the repairability or recyclability of these things because both of those are already at zero. So there's good news there.

Leo Laporte [00:21:46]:
As long as we're talking rumors, let's go to Max Tech. Vadim Yurayev. We go from Japan to, I don't know, Soviet Union. Actually, Vadim's, I think, in the US. But anyway, Holy smokes, he says. I just figured out why Apple's M5 Pro chip did not show up in the recent— He doesn't talk like that.

Jason Snell [00:22:05]:
I don't know. I'm loving it though. Boris and Natasha are telling us chip news. Let's go.

Leo Laporte [00:22:10]:
Hey, Moose and Squirrel say Apple's using new 2.5D chip tech. They're using a single M5 Max chip design for the M5 Pro and M5 Max models. I don't know how he knows this. I guess because it's the same H17C designation.

Jason Snell [00:22:24]:
Yeah. What happened is that they looked and they can't find two different chips in some of the like leak leaked code and they're like, oh, wait a second. Why is there only one high-end chip? It's funny though.

Dan Moren [00:22:33]:
Like, are you getting it yet? Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:22:34]:
I mean, so the, so the, in.

Leo Laporte [00:22:36]:
The early days of Apple with binning, right?

Jason Snell [00:22:39]:
Well, it's, it's not quite binning. I think what's going on here. So in the M1 and M2, what Apple did is the Pro and the Max were basically, the Max was a mirror of the Pro. They basically had two Pros that kind of like just were, they chop, you know, you chop it off and it's a, and it's a Pro. You leave it and it's a Max. And that was a way they did it. And then as the chips evolved in the M3 M4 generations especially, what Apple did was interesting in that they went away from that approach and they ended up like— I'm not sure whether it was M2 or M3— they ended up with a different approach where they were very clearly distinct chips. They built a high-end chip.

Jason Snell [00:23:16]:
It wasn't just a chop to make the mid-range chip, and the mid-range chip was, uh, a little bit more like the base model. Um, so it was really interesting, like they were optimizing for a manufacturing cost, I think, because they know they sell way more Pro chips than they do Max chips, right? And here it sounds like they're going back to a— it's a little bit different, but it's more reminiscent of the early days of Apple Silicon on the Mac, where they would— they've got a system where, you know, basically it's the same core stuff, and then they are— I don't know whether they're chopping or whether there's some sort of aspect of packaging going on. Basically, like, you can order scale your GPUs and CPUs. And, um, and that is what may determine whether it's a Max or a Pro. It's literally just like the Max just means it's got way more GPUs and CPUs, or maybe just GPUs. Right now, that's sort of— GPUs are really what differentiates the Pro and the Max. That's been the case. So maybe they've got a chip design where, you know, there's, there's a bunch of extra GPUs and maybe they're binned or maybe they're chopping, but you know, that, that it, it may not seem any different, right? Which is probably why Apple's calling it presumably Pro and Max chips anyway.

Jason Snell [00:24:32]:
It's just like a different way, either going back to the first way or it's a third way of them building out the differentiation. And since they are the ones designing their chips, they can kind of experiment with it and figure out what the best mixture is in terms of offering performance to the high end while having it be affordable for the mid-range.

Leo Laporte [00:24:49]:
Max Tech says he predicts 24 cores on the Pro, 48 cores in the M5 Max. Uh, he says the Max is one CPU chiplet plus two GPU chiplets plus RAM chiplets. The M5 Pro is just a single CPU chiplet with two of the performance cores disabled and a single GPU.

Jason Snell [00:25:10]:
So modular chiplets. Yeah, chiplets.

Leo Laporte [00:25:14]:
Do so do you, you think that they disable them, that this same chip that's got stuff disabled? You said it's not binning where you test the chip and if it doesn't live up to the specs.

Jason Snell [00:25:22]:
If that prediction's right, they're probably, they're probably binning on the CPU cores. If that's true, if they disable a couple of CPU cores, those presumably would be bin. Yeah. There's new packaging processes going on here. And that's also really fascinating, right? The idea that Apple is trying to, you know, they're not going to let it be modular like GPU at the, at like a Mac Pro level, presumably, but at the chip level, if they can build like these different chiplets and then just Attach them in different configurations for, for, uh, high-end and mid-range. That's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
You can't see into the box, so the only thing the consumer will know, and most consumers won't even care, but the sophisticated consumer will know, is benchmarks. It'll show up in benchmarks, right?

Jason Snell [00:26:05]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:26:06]:
Yeah, that's the whole— that's the difference.

Dan Moren [00:26:08]:
I assume a big part of this also is just the efficiencies of operations, right? I mean, if they can— if they're figuring out ways to package stuff more efficiently and use stuff in multiple products, that allows them to be maybe even more dynamic about, you know, supply and demand. We need more of these types of chips, we need fewer of these types of chips. I mean, we've seen a lot of that already. They reuse stuff, right? I mean, that's the idea with all these cores kind of being the same, right? If you run a single-core benchmark on anything from an M5, it's an M5, right? Because it's the same cores pretty much everywhere.

Leo Laporte [00:26:39]:
It may also solve a problem because TSMC— they are no longer TSMC's number one customer. Customer. And so they may not be able to say, hey, can you spin up another node just for this, just for that? Go ahead, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:52]:
No, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's like they used to be able to say, oh, chip lad, we were quick. Here's how much we insist you give us today and make it snappy and bring us a fresca while you're at it. And now it's like, hi, brought your fruit basket. We love you guys. And could you just take our call before you take— don't do a deal with it? Yeah. Again, It's Apple's— Apple is definitely in a position they've never been in before, in which now they don't have the power to absolutely call the shot.

Leo Laporte [00:27:22]:
Nvidia is calling the shots. Nvidia's got the billions.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:25]:
So, so it would make sense that if you— if we could just get one— if we can reduce the number of fab lines that we absolutely require to make our product load, our product line, that is going to be very important in the next 2 or 3 years.

Leo Laporte [00:27:36]:
I don't know, he's usually pretty right on these things. March.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:42]:
Yeah, yeah, we we do, do seem to be backed up with like all kinds of rumors from all kinds of sources have been persistent for the past 2 or 3 months, but something is imminent, imminent, imminent, like, and as soon as, as soon as like the basically business reopens, uh, at the start of the year, as the usually there's some downtime between like November and January, but at some point like in February or March, boy, there's a lot of backed up product that has to be released. And I can't think of a category that's pretty much untouched by these rumors, but desktop Macs maybe. But it seems as though if everybody, everybody who is, who has like $1,000 or $2,000 put away for a new iPad or a or a new, new MacBook or new AirPods are hesitant to spend because they are waiting for something to actually be released.

Leo Laporte [00:28:32]:
So, and by the way, Keith512, who's following all of this in our club, says it's a new packaging, the 2.5D integrated circuit. Jason, you found an article on Wikipedia about this.

Jason Snell [00:28:43]:
Yeah, this is— TSMC announced this a few years ago, like 3 years ago. And whenever we talk about this chip stuff, we have to keep in mind there's current events and then there's when this chip was designed 3 or 4 years ago, because it takes that long. But this was a new thing that TSMC introduced that allows you to package different chiplets together to build a chip, basically. Because what is a chip and what is a package and what is a system on a chip? I mean, like, it's all over the place, right? But it gives some modularity that lets.

Leo Laporte [00:29:10]:
Apple cut out chiplets. I mean, Is it?

Jason Snell [00:29:12]:
I think so. I think they, yeah, I think they, they attach them. They manufacture them separately and then they attach them and stack them. And so they can connect and even stack. And then they, that is what should it. call Made as a package.

Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
They remind me of that. Remember, do you remember Chiclets?

Dan Moren [00:29:26]:
My grandmother always had that in her purse. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:29:29]:
I guess I'm just old as your now. grandma.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:30]:
I'm letting the box loose.

Jason Snell [00:29:32]:
Leo, imagine the M5 Pro chip as a red Chiclet for the GPU and a yellow Chiclet for the CPU.

Leo Laporte [00:29:41]:
That's a YouTube I'd watch. They even had little mini Chiclets that were really small, and you could probably put a few of those on.

Jason Snell [00:29:48]:
You I think it's more like could. the Chuckles.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:50]:
Candy where they're all lined up in a row.

Jason Snell [00:29:53]:
This is very reasonable stuff. I like how we are taking the incredibly complicated science of chip manufacturing and just boiling it down so it's candy. I love it. That's what we're here for.

Leo Laporte [00:30:04]:
John Ashley just found it, the tiny size Chiclets. Now, John Ashley, do They still make these, or is it— I don't think so.

Dan Moren [00:30:11]:
I remember having these often though.

Jason Snell [00:30:13]:
Yeah, some kid probably choked on them and died, so they don't do it.

Leo Laporte [00:30:16]:
I loved them. They were so little. They were really good. They were good. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:30:21]:
Yeah. Because it's mostly just the candy coating.

Leo Laporte [00:30:23]:
For those of you. Yeah. Flavor-coated gum.

Jason Snell [00:30:26]:
Now that, now that M5 Pro is going to come out and every, uh, person who listens to MacBreak Weekly will be thinking of Chiclets. So congratulations to us, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:30:35]:
Yes, Joe Title, we win again. Uh, Mark Gurman says— oh boy, there's a lot, uh, in his Sunday column.

Jason Snell [00:30:43]:
It's like a logic problem he did. He's like, this can be released but only after this is released. So which is— and if, if Apple is in the, in the passenger seat and, uh, Eddie Cue is driving, but he doesn't want to sit in front of Tim Cook, and he was in.

Dan Moren [00:30:56]:
Cupertino driving 70 per miles hour.

Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
It's a weird word problem. The new 17E is due imminently, which, you know, like any day now. And that will be the A19 from the iPhone 17 and MagSafe charging, uh, he says. And it's shifting to Apple's newest in-house cellular wireless chips. I can confirm.

Jason Snell [00:31:17]:
Yeah, I, I am assuming that's the C1X and not the C2, but who knows, right?

Leo Laporte [00:31:22]:
Uh, $599, same as this, you know, 16E or whatever it was.

Jason Snell [00:31:25]:
They're never going to tell us why there wasn't MagSafe in the 16E. It's so weird.

Dan Moren [00:31:30]:
Yeah, they're not magnets.

Leo Laporte [00:31:31]:
Magnets Yeah, get— you know, how do they work?

Jason Snell [00:31:34]:
How do they work?

Leo Laporte [00:31:36]:
Updated iPads coming soon. Hello, all you Juggalos. Including a refreshed entry-level model in iPad Airs.

Jason Snell [00:31:44]:
Yeah, uh, means the base iPad will run, uh, Apple Intelligence for the first time.

Leo Laporte [00:31:49]:
That's what you want, right?

Jason Snell [00:31:50]:
Assuming they ship an OS that has Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:31:54]:
Nobody wants Apple Intelligence.

Jason Snell [00:31:57]:
You want AI features, right? They're gonna bring in the new Siri and they're gonna You don't want to have Gemini running at all and you need to have— I was at the.

Leo Laporte [00:32:05]:
Apple Store picking up Lisa's laptop that was getting repaired. And there would have that, you know, have those classes in the Apple Store and there were much of people much older than me learning about AI and mostly it was Genmoji.

Jason Snell [00:32:17]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:17]:
And I thought, you're not learning about AI.

Jason Snell [00:32:21]:
This is not— Giving them something to do. Come on.

Leo Laporte [00:32:23]:
It's something to do. There was a woman there who was taking notes in a paper notebook, like really seriously paying attention.

Dan Moren [00:32:29]:
It's amazing that you saw my mom at the store.

Jason Snell [00:32:33]:
I love the Venn diagram of people who take notes about computers in a paper notebook and people who are, you know, interested in AI. Like, what's the overlap there?

Leo Laporte [00:32:42]:
She dropped the candy, so it came up and offered it to her.

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:46]:
So Apple's going to turn the Notes app into a subscription model, and then you'll be so into paper notebook taking.

Leo Laporte [00:32:52]:
Because— start that rumor.

Jason Snell [00:32:54]:
Um.

Leo Laporte [00:32:56]:
Let'S see, the entry-level iPad A18 chip, right? Uh, iPad Air M4. Wow, that's pretty good for an Air. Wow.

Dan Moren [00:33:02]:
Um.

Leo Laporte [00:33:05]:
Also several MacBooks coming, the new 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros and the MacBook Air with an M5 processor. What about the MacBook Nothing? We— that's imminent, right?

Jason Snell [00:33:15]:
So he he said, said that that is coming and that he says that's the highlight of the first 6 months. Um, the tidbit in there that I I ran aground on this time was that he said it was a smaller than 13-inch screen. I had been assuming it would be the M1 Air screen because I've been thinking of this as just a recycled M1 Air in a lot of ways, but that's like a 13.2, and he says it's less than 13. I'm wondering if they may take it down to the 12.9.

Dan Moren [00:33:40]:
What other panels do they make? Yeah, that would have to be that iPad.

Jason Snell [00:33:44]:
Yeah, that, that, that might be what they do, and that would be a way to maybe save money me, uh, because this is so cheap. I, I will tell you though, as a user of MacBook Airs, that it already feels like the OS barely supports screens that size. And so if there's a 12.9, I mean, maybe it'll be scaled differently and all of that, but I did have that thought of like, wow, that Jason.

Dan Moren [00:34:06]:
The 11-inch MacBook Air could still live.

Jason Snell [00:34:09]:
I know. Well, that's— I mean, when he— yeah, I saw this report, it was like, 12-inch PowerBook is back.

Andy Ihnatko [00:34:13]:
Yeah. Well, also, also, they're, they're walking it, they're walking a tight line. Like, maybe Maybe people are not buying $1,000 MacBook Airs because they think $1,000 is absolutely the right amount of money to charge for that. Maybe they're spending it because that is simply the least amount of money they can possibly spend on such a device. And so if you were to cut the price by $300, suddenly, unless there is tremendous differentiation between the budget MacBook and the MacBook Air, they're probably super concerned about cannibalization of that platform. One of the things that kind of stuck out to me about one of the rumors that came out last week was, uh, 8GB of system RAM, which is okay, that's enough, but it's not an ambitious amount. That's the sort of thing where anybody who anybody who should— should be steered into a higher-end machine is quickly going to be frustrated by having only 8GB of RAM. Uh, there was another— I think this was a supply chain rumor that said that Apple is projecting or anticipating or targeting that this will make up 25% of— I actually can't remember whether it's MacBook sales or Mac sales, which— don't know if that's— that seems like a very high number, but it could be anticipating, again, how much pent-up demand there is for a machine, a MacBook that costs this little, and also how many people are really, really looking forward to not using Windows 11 anymore and have.

Dan Moren [00:35:43]:
To.

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:46]:
Ditch their Windows 10 machines and they're not quite ready to take take the, the vow of silence and go into Linux yet.

Leo Laporte [00:35:52]:
Desktop's also on the way, says Gurman. Upgraded Mac Studio desktop's coming, shouldn't arrive too long after the spring Mac refresh. Spring one is next month. Uh, there's also a long-awaited update to the Studio Display, which people say is— he says, and others— that it looks very similar to the current Studio Display.

Jason Snell [00:36:10]:
Yeah, it sounds like it's gonna be a 90Hz refresh rate. I got the shocking moment of seeing a news story about how, I think it was MacRumors said, uh, we've got a, a source that tells us that it's going to be a 90Hz refresh, which is not 120. So I guess it's disappointing in that way, but it is a higher refresh rate display, which is a good thing. Um, what shocked me was that at the beginning of that news article, they said, uh, as previously reported last year on Upgrade, my podcast with Mike Hurley, because we did have an anonymous person who said it was going to be a 90Hz display. And I guess, wow, I guess we accidentally scooped things there. So that's great. So yeah, that's, that's cool. I do wonder, I mean, just to key off of something that Andy mentioned about that low-cost laptop.

Jason Snell [00:36:53]:
I mean, to me it's not, there's no pent-up demand for it as much as there is, they want to have it be there. And then, cause I, that strikes me as a long-term seller, right? Like you just want to have like the M1 Air is now at Walmart. You just want to have it there and you have it there for back to school, have it there always so that it's available. I'm not sure whether they'll get a big sales spike for it. It at the beginning or not? Probably not, right? It just doesn't strike me as the audience who's as focused on that sort of thing. And it's more like Apple needs to just make that product and have it be there so that when people are shopping for a laptop, they go, oh, I can get that. And that's, you know, they keep it around for years after that. Maybe they update that A-series chip every year or something, but basically it just sits there at that price point for a long time.

Dan Moren [00:37:40]:
Speaking of the earliest laptop they've ever.

Jason Snell [00:37:42]:
Made, Yeah, it would would be, it be only only that, the $499 Mac Mini, $599 Mac Mini didn't last long. Yeah, yeah, but like only the Mac Mini is below that price, so that would be wild for a laptop.

Leo Laporte [00:37:54]:
You know why, by the way, they might want to do new Mac Minis, which are also apparently coming out this year according to Gurman? Uh, they are the hottest item for setting up your claw bot, uh, your AI agent. Uh, people don't want to do it on their main machine because, well, it's terrifying.

Jason Snell [00:38:10]:
So many reasons.

Leo Laporte [00:38:11]:
Yeah, it's a security nightmare. So they think, well, buy a separate machine for it. The Mac Mini is the kind of the machine of choice.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:18]:
It has never been faster or simpler to lose your entire photo library and not know how— what happened.

Leo Laporte [00:38:23]:
What happened? Yeah, truly. I set it up briefly on my Mac Mini and then thought better of it.

Jason Snell [00:38:28]:
Well, the Mac Mini— I mean, this is why the Mac Mini is so great, right? Is that it's, it's not like, what is the Mac Mini for? It's like, it's for whatever you want it to be. And it's always been— back there was that period where they hadn't updated in a long time and people like, are they going to kill it? And, you know, the argument I made back then was this is the pressure release valve of the Mac. Like what I need a Mac to do something. And it could be, I mean, they use them in like theatrical lighting. They, I mean, there's so many weird, sorry, theater lighting people. I don't mean you're weird. I'm just saying there's so many niche applications for the Mac mini. It's just good to have a little, and now it's so little and it's cheap and you can do whatever with it.

Jason Snell [00:39:02]:
And so, you know, Apple didn't build it thinking about, about ClaudeBot or whatever it ended up being. Molt whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
It's Clawbot now.

Jason Snell [00:39:09]:
Clawbot now, come on.

Leo Laporte [00:39:10]:
It was OpenCloud, then MoltBot.

Jason Snell [00:39:12]:
What will next week's name be? Anyway, they didn't think about it, but it didn't matter. Having it there, having it mattered.

Leo Laporte [00:39:19]:
You mentioned Upgrade, and I should probably, this would be a good place to mention that Stephen Hackett is retiring from Mac Power Users, and our good friend Stephen Robles has his own show now with David Sparks.

Jason Snell [00:39:32]:
David Sparks said it's great because I don't have to remember what the name of my co-host is.

Leo Laporte [00:39:35]:
Well, they had the the chairs, director's chairs with the first name on it, and They just thought, well, and they.

Jason Snell [00:39:39]:
Both have, they both have facial hair.

Dan Moren [00:39:41]:
So they're basically swap. No place to be named later.

Jason Snell [00:39:44]:
They're basically the same. Yeah. Stephen Hackett is, is still working on Relay. He's still doing Connected on Relay. He's still doing a bunch of stuff with David Smith, uh, who does, uh, Widgetsmith. But, uh, he realized that the companies that he's doing, uh, which is CrossForward that does Widgetsmith and Relay needed more of his time than he, he had basically. So he had to drop something and MacPowerUsers is a great show, but it is— take it from me, it is a heavy lift. Like, they put a lot, a lot of work.

Jason Snell [00:40:13]:
There's more work put into that show document of planning and research than any podcast I've ever been on. And so I, I could see why Stephen would look at that and say, I, I need that time back to do the rest of my stuff. So he's still very active in doing stuff, but, um, but Stephen Robles also, he's so great. We know because we've had him on here. He's so great. He's going to do great at that job.

Leo Laporte [00:40:32]:
Yeah, I'm really happy So glad to give them a little plug. We're going to take a break. Come back, more stories, more news, AI too. So glad Dan Moren can be here filling in this week. Let's see, we got another week of fill-ins. I think it's Dave Hamilton next week. And then Christina Warren joins the show as our permanent co-host on the 22nd. Is that right? No, the 24th, if my math is correct.

Leo Laporte [00:41:02]:
So we're excited about that. So Christina Warren will be here in 2 weeks. Uh, but Stan, I'm so glad you could, you could be here. I know you're— yeah, I don't want to slow down the novel writing process.

Dan Moren [00:41:13]:
So I'm working on it right now. I'm just, I'm multitasking.

Leo Laporte [00:41:16]:
That's good. I want you to keep— this novel.

Jason Snell [00:41:18]:
Is taking a weird turn suddenly about chiplets.

Leo Laporte [00:41:21]:
You're not using WordPress though, right? I hope.

Dan Moren [00:41:23]:
Uh, not for writing it. That's for sure. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:28]:
No, WordStar.

Jason Snell [00:41:29]:
Saved it on the web.

Dan Moren [00:41:29]:
WordStar. WordStar.

Jason Snell [00:41:32]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:41:32]:
S. Q. Ctrl+K, Ctrl+W, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Snell [00:41:35]:
K, S. Sure.

Leo Laporte [00:41:36]:
Yeah, Ctrl+K, S. Yep. Uh, it's funny, once you get that in your fingers, it, it never goes away.

Jason Snell [00:41:41]:
The classic era of the two-letter keyboard shortcut, right? Which I— Mac users find subtly baffling, but I, I did use WordStar briefly on an Apple II, and, and yeah, the idea that you'd have to hold down Control and press a couple of keys in a row in order to do things So weird.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:58]:
In college, I had a weird, weird laptop that ran CP/M on an LCD panel and it had WordStar built in. So yeah, that stuff is kind of perfect.

Leo Laporte [00:42:05]:
I still use Emacs where you may use as many as 5 fingers at the same time for a command. So I'm just saying, Ctrl+K+S, not too hard. Our show today brought to you by Zocdoc. Oh, I love Zocdoc. Life can feel like a puzzle. You're constantly trying to fit all the pieces together, your career, your passions, and of course, your healthcare, but it's a lot. Finding healthcare should not be the trickiest piece to fit in everything else going on. It should not be the lowest priority.

Leo Laporte [00:42:36]:
Should probably, I think, be the highest priority, right? Well, Zocdoc makes it easy to find and book an appointment. Zocdoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high-quality in-network doctors so you can find someone you love. Yeah, it's pretty important that you have a rapport with your doctor. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 150,000 providers, all 50 states, and not just MDs. You're looking for dermatology, dentistry, primary care, eye care, health, mental health. They're all the services I use them We for. have— I've used them recently for finding a gerontologist for my, my mom, and it's fantastic. More than 200 specialties offered by Zocdoc.

Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
Zocdoc. So you can easily search by specialty. You could search even by symptom to build the care team that's right for you. And if you want to see your doctor in person, great. You prefer a video visit, they can do that too. You, the thing is, you know, ahead of time. And by the way, the best thing, one of the best things about Zocdoc is the thousands of patient reviews, verified patient reviews. So you really get a sense of who that doctor is.

Leo Laporte [00:43:48]:
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Leo Laporte [00:44:59]:
And we thank Zocdoc for sponsoring this message. Thank you, Zocdoc. zocdoc.com/macbreak. Uh, hey, iPhones in space for the first time ever. NASA is going to allow astronauts to take their iPhones with them. In fact, it's specifically the Artemis astronauts. They're going to be able to take— or other phones. I, I don't know why it specifically says iPhones, but I guess it could be an Android phone.

Leo Laporte [00:45:33]:
Jared Isaacman, the new NASA administrator, says we're giving our crews the tools to capture special moments.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:41]:
I would say that being in space, every moment is kind of special.

Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
Yeah, I would argue It feels like a Kodak commercial.

Dan Moren [00:45:49]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:45:49]:
These are the times you'll remember.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:52]:
Yeah. I mean, it's— I absolutely understand the idea. When I first saw it, I'm like, okay, look, how much money are we paying these people to be out in space? You shouldn't be saying, hey, what's up, selfies to your gram.

Leo Laporte [00:46:05]:
You know that that's what they want. They want social. Yeah, that's what they want.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:09]:
But— and it is. But I know it's not about that. It's like they're— I think that I've always thought that— like that famous line, I think it's from Contact, like, "Oh, they should have sent a poet up here." All the pictures that get taken are taken with a 2016 Nikon digital camera. Big, bulky, big lenses. There's nothing spontaneous about it. There's nothing, "Hey, can I take 5 seconds to take this picture because this is kind of interesting?" That's the sort of stuff that will make the NASA archives more rich and more interesting. It's also pretty And you're doing a.

Leo Laporte [00:46:41]:
Good job ignoring Paul Anka.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:42]:
Keep up the good work. Again, is it one of the 3 speakers on my desktop, or is it.

Jason Snell [00:46:48]:
Just in my mind?

Dan Moren [00:46:48]:
Am I losing my mind?

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:51]:
But I'll just wrap up. Ars Technica had a good article that sort of fleshed that out. It really was just this tweet basically saying that it's part of a program saying, look, we have all— normally it would take years and years and years to certify a new device for deployment on a NASA vehicle because of 100,000 different safety reasons.

Leo Laporte [00:47:10]:
They take all, like, really really old Nikons.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:12]:
I mean, right, because they, they know it's— the batteries are not going to cause a problem.

Leo Laporte [00:47:17]:
2016 Nikon DSLR was the newest camera. Yeah, alongside GoPros that were a decade old.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:25]:
Yep. So that's the— I mean, that's why, again, a lot of the technology you see up there is really, really old, and it is because it takes a long time for this stuff to be certified. And so the new NAS administrator is saying, let's not YOLO everything onto this vehicle 'But let's be on the lookout for, for procedures that had a really good purpose back in 1983 but might not be quite so relevant right now.' Uh, do you think that they're gonna.

Leo Laporte [00:47:50]:
Have rules like, 'Okay guys, you cannot play Candy Crush while you're trying to maneuver the rocket ship'?

Dan Moren [00:47:57]:
I think they're gonna have to replace airplane mode with space flight mode because.

Leo Laporte [00:48:00]:
Space flight mode— oh, there's no—.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:03]:
I was just like, you go I when think the real— I think the, the rule should be like, okay, you have to activate parental controls and we get to be the parents to basically say that nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, no.

Dan Moren [00:48:12]:
Purchases while you're up there.

Leo Laporte [00:48:14]:
Do you think they'll have a little special little pouch on the, uh, on the suit for the iPhone, like a little place to stick it?

Jason Snell [00:48:20]:
I think there are pockets. I think they have pockets. This is they're a— compatible. It's a very automated mission. They're not really doing much steering, going around. They're not stopping. So having it there to detail, I think it makes sense. Uh, yeah, because like you said, the— there, there's big hardware on there.

Jason Snell [00:48:34]:
And, and I mean, I'm reminded of the Apollo missions where they had a, you know, enormous Hasselblad.

Leo Laporte [00:48:39]:
Remember the Hasselblad that they took the pictures?

Jason Snell [00:48:41]:
They stuck against the window and took pictures of the moon surface. But using it as a way to connect with people— I mean, there have been iPhones in space before. Uh, the last shuttle mission, there were iPhone 4s on that. Um, I'm not sure whether they use them or not, but that was a— that was part of that mission. Was to, to do that. But again, this is the thing with space, like you said, Leo, is they check this stuff out and they're like, oh, we've got a whole process that they— we have to verify. And it it can, can be ridiculous and it can go on too long. And so I kind of like the idea that Isaacman's like, you know, we, we need need to, we to connect with people where they are.

Jason Snell [00:49:14]:
And so that sounds great. I, I would love to know about the details of like— I assume that means that there's a Wi-Fi, like actual Wi-Fi something or other in the capsule that then connects to back, you know, over their radio system to Or not.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:30]:
It's, it's, it's the, the tweet mostly said, oh, because it'll be an important part of documenting the science portions of this mission. It just— he was— the, the tweet was really about, hey, they want to— maybe they want to capture their own special moments.

Jason Snell [00:49:42]:
So maybe we're if not sending anything back, exactly.

Dan Moren [00:49:44]:
I mean, we just sent an iPod Touch. I mean, it just does the same stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:47]:
But you think, you think it costs a lot of money to access the internet on a cruise ship?

Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
But where are you gonna get it?

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:52]:
Left. Someone.

Leo Laporte [00:49:54]:
No, they're right. You You know, know what, it's probably cheaper. They're right next to the satellites. It's easy. It's just a hop, skip, and a jump over to Starlink there.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:59]:
But do you have the dongle? That's a hell of a dongle.

Leo Laporte [00:50:01]:
Actually, I think honestly that some of this is influenced by Elon and the amazing pictures you see on these Starlink missions and SpaceX missions.

Jason Snell [00:50:12]:
Certainly we've come a long way. I remember after the second shuttle accident, the Columbia, they needed to mount more cameras in order to do more surveillance of whether the foam was falling onto the shuttle and things like that. But the net result was that we got these angles and we got like live video of from the shuttle as it launched for the first time and those last few shuttle launches. And then SpaceX has taken it further. So I also think that that's true, that there's this context in which audience expectations are not where they were 30, let alone 50 years ago. And if you're going to the moon, you kind of expect live streaming and HD video, 4K video, and all of those things. So having— whether, whether they're, they're transmitting off those phones or not, or copying files to be sent back, or whatever it is, um, the more of that— I mean, because the goal of NASA— when I went to Kennedy Space Center for a NASA thing, I mean, honestly, one of the things that, that they do is outreach. Like, those are the two things they want to do: space things, and they want communicate to the, the public about what their tax money is being spent on.

Jason Snell [00:51:24]:
And so it is super important to document and share. And today's audience has a very different idea of what documenting and sharing is versus like putting it on the color TV on CBS at 6 o'clock or something.

Andy Ihnatko [00:51:36]:
And then if Alan Bean points the, points the camera at the sun, which he's not supposed to do, suddenly there's no TV from the moon for Apollo 12. It's like, it's nice to have some redundancy. Yeah, let's just say there are— I'm.

Leo Laporte [00:51:46]:
Gonna guess that our friends at Rod Pyle and Tarek Malik will be talking about this on Thursday on This Week in Space, and probably we'll have a more informed conversation about this. This is their bread and butter.

Dan Moren [00:52:00]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:00]:
So can I just suggest one rule? One rule, that's all I want. If you're gonna be— have the iPhones up there, you are not allowed to do selfie video while singing Imagine or It's a Wonderful World, okay? You don't get to do either of those two things, and that's okay? fine.

Leo Laporte [00:52:14]:
That's actually— remember, uh, how great The videos were from— who was our Canadian astronaut friend? I can't remember his name.

Jason Snell [00:52:23]:
Oh, Chris Hadfield.

Leo Laporte [00:52:24]:
Chris Hadfield did some great videos.

Jason Snell [00:52:26]:
Yeah, played Starman, did some stuff like that from the ISS.

Dan Moren [00:52:30]:
You're watching Apollo 13.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:31]:
Nope, Major Tom.

Leo Laporte [00:52:34]:
Ground control to Major Tom. Yeah. So I think that may also have been a little bit of an inspiration. We can't let the Canadians get ahead of us.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:43]:
Not that we're going to top that though. That's an ambitious thing.

Leo Laporte [00:52:45]:
No, that was pretty good.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:47]:
Pretty— we'll land on Mars before we will— Chris Hadfield setting aside time during his personal downtime using a guitar that got broken down specifically so that it would fit within the cargo limitations, and then getting— yeah, that's pretty amazing. Sorry, we're not going to top that, as we do in many things.

Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
Andy, obviously you haven't gotten the memo. Elon says we're not going to Mars after all, we're going to the moon. you Just, know, let's get this— let's just get this straight.

Dan Moren [00:53:12]:
Changed their spoiler alert, we're not going to the moon either.

Leo Laporte [00:53:17]:
Spoiler alert, we might go by the moon, but we're not getting out. We're just gonna go around.

Dan Moren [00:53:21]:
We're not, we're not building the city there. Yeah, the city. Sorry.

Leo Laporte [00:53:24]:
Don'T Yeah, you think so?

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:26]:
Remember our first indication that this guy might be a little bit off when he said, how about we do a mission to Mars where we just send people there, they don't have to come back, they'll figure it out when they get— they'll expect to die on Mars, but hey, they'll have a great 8 days.

Dan Moren [00:53:39]:
And he didn't volunteer them.

Leo Laporte [00:53:40]:
Most crucially, he probably wanted to send some of his hundreds of children though.

Jason Snell [00:53:46]:
The truest sign— because I did a space podcast for a few years with aforementioned Stephen Hackett, and during that period, like, that— the truest sign of what Elon was all about is that he's a very ambitious man, but like, then he would say this stuff and it's like, what are you even doing? And he'd be like, oh, we're going to be on Mars in 2 years, we're going to launch this thing in 3 years. And it's like, if he gives you a year count Don't even like try to calculate out what he actually means. He doesn't, he's just making it up.

Dan Moren [00:54:11]:
Right there with the full self-driving Teslas.

Jason Snell [00:54:13]:
Yeah. It'll be here, you know, in a year or two, that new Roadster is going to be here in a year or two. Right. That he said in 2017, like that. But, but a lot of the stuff like, well, we'll be on Mars in 4 years. It's like, you know, and so when he says we're going to have a city on the moon in 5 years, because otherwise we could go to Mars, but it would take 8 years. It's like, those are not just, please do number blindness. Just pretend.

Jason Snell [00:54:35]:
He didn't say years at all because they don't mean anything. They're like dreams or goals, but don't report on them with any credulity because he— that guy, that guy, all other things about him aside, his concept of like what he can do in a certain amount of time, he always overpromises and underdelivers. That's just part of the deal with him.

Leo Laporte [00:54:57]:
So you, before you left for Hawaii and your well-deserved vacation, listened to the earnings call that Apple did, uh, and they pretty much dodged every question there was uh, about, about AI and about their, their deal with Google, right? Right. In fact, they even said, I'm not going to tell you.

Jason Snell [00:55:14]:
Yeah, they literally said, I'm not going to talk about our deal with Google.

Leo Laporte [00:55:18]:
I ain't going to tell you.

Jason Snell [00:55:19]:
We're happy to have it. We're not saying anything.

Leo Laporte [00:55:22]:
So Alphabet had its earnings call, uh, last week. Uh, Sundar Pichai said, and I think he stirred up a little hornet's nest, we're collaborating with Apple as their preferred cloud provider and develop the next generation of Apple Foundation models based on Gemini technology.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:41]:
And that, and that, that, you know, that, that was a negotiated statement that this is what we're allowed to say, but probably between Google and Apple, because that exact same terminology, almost that exact same phrase was recycled by uh, by by their, their, their vice president, president, vice their, their finance chief, uh, in his prepared statements and also during the Q&A, which, which is such a— it's not exactly a word salad, but it's like, okay, so you're saying that it's not just you're building and shipping off from the factory a foundation model, you're also providing ongoing cloud compute services, which.

Leo Laporte [00:56:16]:
Sounds like you're running on Google's cloud, right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:19]:
Well, I mean, at minimum, it would mean that that we're— we're— the cloud services would involve— we— all of these Apple models are going to be trained on app— on Google compute. Compute, meaning that just the training of these models is going to be on an ongoing basis, which would mean that no, that still leaves it open that Apple-owned and Apple-operated servers are going to be running the thing. But you're right, all the way up to no, we are going to also be hosting— when you do a lot of transactions on your iPhone that can't be done on device, it's going to be sent up to a Google server to do. So it's a great example of if you had said nothing, it would have been much, much clearer than if you had said what you just said.

Dan Moren [00:56:55]:
Well, all this stuff is carefully vetted like 6 ways on Sunday by every lawyer and finance person and business, you know, all these people get to weigh in. I mean, preferred cloud provider community, like, yeah, sure, we prefer if they use.

Jason Snell [00:57:06]:
Ours, but we can't make them, or.

Dan Moren [00:57:09]:
We only— a fraction of the things will actually get there. So, you know, they want to be cagey, and I'm sure Apple wants them to be cagey about it because Apple doesn't want any more than it already has of an image of looking like it can't deliver server on any of this stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:57:23]:
Does it matter whether— I mean, I guess to some people it matters whether— I mean, in fact, I think there are people who say, I am only going to use these AIs if it's— I know it's running on Apple's cloud in those very private— probably some of that.

Dan Moren [00:57:36]:
I mean, I'm sure Apple would like to maintain everything it's talked about, and I believe in some of the conversations they've alluded to, essentially, like, you know, Google launched its own sort of equivalent of a private cloud compute. I'm sure that played a part in it as I think, again, whenever you're talking about Apple customers, we're talking about matters of enormous scale, right? Even if there are a percentage of people that care about it, their representation within the entire group of Apple customers is small. And so, you know, there's the matter that a lot of people won't know, won't even have heard that the Apple, you know, uh, foundation models are being developed by Google. The average customer customer. All they care about is whether or not it works. And at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters.

Leo Laporte [00:58:22]:
Well, they may be getting a, a customer back in the form of Jennifer Patterson Tuohy, who's a regular on our shows. She writes about home automation for The Verge. She says the Alexa app is so bad, I'm using Siri again, which is pretty funny.

Jason Snell [00:58:37]:
That's a sick burn.

Leo Laporte [00:58:39]:
Yeah, that is a sick burn.

Jason Snell [00:58:41]:
This is the danger of relying on these models to do this. So I— it's something we've been talking about. Oh, please bring the good Siri, bring the good Siri. But I don't think we've talked about what if AI Siri isn't the good Siri? What if it is actually just problematic in new ways? And, and if any, if you've used an AI chatbot, like they are capable of some amazing things. They are also capable of some incredibly stupid things. And so, yeah, I think this was a real red flag about if you're going to launch an LLM-driven chatbot or, or, or voice assistant. And you better get it right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:17]:
Yeah, I mean, the Alexa Super Bowl ad was.

Leo Laporte [00:59:21]:
The worst ad I've ever seen.

Jason Snell [00:59:24]:
May kill you, but hopefully not.

Leo Laporte [00:59:26]:
Yeah, that doesn't seem like a good.

Jason Snell [00:59:27]:
Way to— Hi, I'm Chris Hemsworth, and I may be killed by Alexa. And he.

Leo Laporte [00:59:32]:
Thought it was gonna kill him, and there were like scary things like how— 9th house, like he's in the swimming pool and decides to close the, the lid. Yeah, I Is that a good way to advertise your, your thing?

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:44]:
It's great if you have no sense whatsoever about how people feel about AI, about the threat posed by it. Otherwise, no, it's a terrible way to do it.

Dan Moren [00:59:52]:
Or if it's very accurate, if you're worried about getting sued for having inaccurate advertising, then maybe it's great.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:56]:
Alexa I Mean, I it really is a case study in the worst possible way to do an AI chatbot. Like every— it seems like every single thing you could do to make it something you would never want to have a piece of, they've done. Done it in terms of not being— not a, not being very good and useful. Number two, collecting data. Number three, pushing ads to you whenever it can. It's like, I don't want to have— I have— I still have— I still have an Amazon Echo, but basically as a display unit because, okay, it looks kind of cool, plus I actually own it. But my thoughts about ever plugging it in and giving it access to the internet are less than nil.

Leo Laporte [01:00:32]:
I have Echoes all over the place. And unfortunately, they kind of forced a word plus on it. And sometimes it's great and sometimes it's incredibly infuriating. But we used to think that— it's so funny how the mighty have fallen. We used to think Elon was a genius, that he was Iron Man. We used to think that Jeff Bezos really understood customers and super served them. And we've really Honestly, I think we've seen that our idols have clay feet.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:02]:
Won'T— We I mean, we won't turn this into a necessary 2-hour-long diversion, but add Tim Cook to that list. Yeah, although there was some good news this week that I think was kind of forced. I'm— maybe I'm being a bit cynical here, but yeah, I think we're all being calibrated to the idea of, no, no, no, I know he's worth either a a billion, multiple of a billion dollars, or a meaningful fraction of a billion dollars, but he's really He's a real person. We can relate to him.

Leo Laporte [01:01:28]:
He's a good man.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:29]:
And that's kind of on us.

Leo Laporte [01:01:30]:
Yeah. Well, marketing is certainly a big part of what these companies do. Apple is at great pains to say, we have brilliant AI engineers. They keep releasing models, not for you to use, but something that, you know, just so you know, we're not laggards in this. There's a new Apple AI model that can generate sound and speech from silent videos. It's in the lab. It's not— it's called VSS Flow. And ironically, 3 Apple researchers and 6 researchers from China developed it, Renmin University.

Leo Laporte [01:02:11]:
It's it's not— not in the public. It's not released. It's just— it's a paper. But I think that Apple puts these out because they're really trying to say, no, really, we got good people here working on this stuff. It's, it's good stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:21]:
It seems like every paper they put out has two purposes. Number one, like you said, to say, you know, we're not sitting on our hands here, we actually have a really good, really good crew here. But also to basically push back on the idea that to do AI well, you can't do it on device, you have to have access to enormous cloud compute. Almost every paper that makes that, that, that kind of makes it to the surface on the Apple machine learning blog is all about, hey, we figure out a way to do this that costs about 8% the compute of a traditional method. Hey, wow, we found a way to do this incredibly tricky image generation entirely on device. Hey, we found a way to generate a UI again on the fly, completely on, on device. They are definitely making— they're definitely telling a story about how we are not an AI company, but that doesn't mean that we can't do— we are not doing AI in a way that's meaningful to our customers.

Leo Laporte [01:03:11]:
Now, they're not releasing it to the iPhone as Google often does. And, uh, I mean, they may turn.

Jason Snell [01:03:16]:
It into a product. The problem is that AI is now defined as basically being LLMs. And Apple is, you know, Apple missed the boat on LLMs, but Apple has been doing all sorts of machine learning research and building it into their chips. And they've been doing it for a decade or more.

Leo Laporte [01:03:30]:
That's a good point.

Jason Snell [01:03:31]:
And this is a great example of that. This is not a chatbot. This is a different kind of LLM. They just bought that, uh, the AI company. Yeah. Yeah. To talk to, to analyze like your, what is moving in your face. And, you know, the Vision Pro is looking at your eyes and like there's lots of ML on-device stuff that can be enabled by Apple Silicon that Apple actually has been doing a lot of research and finds very important.

Jason Snell [01:03:54]:
What they aren't doing is the stuff that, you know, unfortunately for them has become the obsession of everybody. That's the part that they poo-pooed and are now paying for, but they've got a lot of other stuff going on. In fact, these are the kind of researchers who probably aren't feeling like they need to go to Meta or somewhere because they're not valued at Apple, because this is the kind of stuff that ends up being part of you a, know, secret sauce of an iPhone or something like that down the road that Apple really, I think, intrinsically values in a way that maybe they never really intrinsically valued the idea of text translation.

Leo Laporte [01:04:27]:
This technology uses GAN, generative adversarial networks, which are a new kind of neural network. To their credit, they put the code on GitHub, and they say they're gonna put the model weights— they haven't done it yet— they say they're gonna open source the model weights. So this will be an open source model. So good for them. To their you know, yeah, credit, also.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:48]:
And also there was in the financial news, now that both Google and Apple have had their, their quarterly results, some analysts are basically saying that there are a lot of investors that are responding very positively to the fact that Apple is the only major tech company that their capital expenditures is actually going down. Like, they're not blowing snowblowing cash into AI the way that Google and Meta and Amazon and pretty much everybody else is. So they they can, can turn Yeah, so they can turn a so-called weakness into, at least from the point of view of investors, a strength.

Leo Laporte [01:05:17]:
It is kind of pathetic because they only have 7 stars on their GitHub repository. Compare that to OpenClaw, which has, I don't know, last time I saw, a couple of quarter a of million or something.

Dan Moren [01:05:28]:
Well, to Jason's point, right, it's what's flashy and what's got everybody's attention is, is very different necessarily from what is very useful. And Apple, Apple has always been focused on on what are these small improvements that we can make that we can do in seamless fashions. A lot of that machine learning stuff, the computational photography stuff, like, you know, Google's worked on that as well. But like, you know, at the end of the day, for Apple, it's about how do we translate that into features that people are going to use. And sure, I think they, you know, you always risk missing the zeitgeist if something takes off that you weren't super invested in. And by all accounts, they weren't super into the idea of chatbots, and now they've had to scramble to catch up. But it doesn't mean they don't have a deep bent and I think, you know, part of this is also— it's good, not exactly marketing, but it's good signaling that like, look, if you do want to come work on AI stuff that maybe isn't an LLM, maybe we're a good place to do that. And maybe we don't care about losing these people who are going to leave and go to Meta because that is not our primary— I mean, the fact that they have turned to Google and been like, well, maybe Google supplies this for us, and that's enough, and we keep working and having our AI people work on all this other stuff that translates into features eventually.

Jason Snell [01:06:37]:
Yeah, because Apple's focus is features. Like Dan said, it's features. And that, that's what got them in trouble, because they didn't think chatbots were a feature. And I get why they didn't think that, and they were proven to be wrong. And in all of that, large language model stuff has proven to be incredibly powerful. But they are and have been pretty good at doing really focused stuff that leads to a feature, leads to functionality. That's what Apple's always been good at. And, and that's why maybe the deal with Google is going to be great, because they just get the engine behind the scenes and they can build features on top of it, which is kind of what they excel at.

Jason Snell [01:07:13]:
And so yeah, whether it was like Photos— it's been like more than a decade that Photos scans, uh, every photo you take and auto-tags it. And I used to manually tag all my photos with like who was in it and where was it taken and all these things. And now it knows, you know, this has got a horse in it, it's got a hillside in it, it's it's got this person in it, it's got, you know, grass in it, it's got a sky in it. And then when you search, you find all that. That's all been there for like more than a decade in Apple's machine learning. So they, they, I just, that's a thing to watch is Apple's always going to be better when it comes to seeing like a feature that they can build that will be something in the OS or something in a future iPhone or whatever than they are if they don't see that. And I think that is ultimately the blind spot that hit them with LLMs is that they just, they, they poo-pooed a chatbot. I think it's that simple.

Jason Snell [01:08:02]:
They're like, who cares about that? And then it turns out everybody cares.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:05]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:08:06]:
And by the way, I want to correct myself. 182,000 stars on Open Claw. Some have said that this is going to be the year of agents, of agentic AI. The chatbots actually aren't it. Well, they are a form of it, but they're only the beginning of it.

Jason Snell [01:08:20]:
It's a start.

Leo Laporte [01:08:21]:
It's a start. And, and I wonder, you know, it's like this conversation we had about the health that maybe be— is Apple not satisfied to be a platform company? Uh, they, they certainly would make an excellent platform for AI even if they don't have the software, right?

Jason Snell [01:08:37]:
And do they need— like, I feel like the secret sauce is much more baked in. I guess it's like a lasagna or something, it's baking in the secret sauce. But I feel like the secret sauce is much more an implementation of features for end users on their platforms than it is the engine behind the scenes that drives it. And, and I'm sure they'd like to have the engine too, but they don't. So they've got Google, and if they can execute on the stuff that's on top, you know, I think they'll be pretty happy with that, honestly.

Leo Laporte [01:09:03]:
I think, um, we're going to live in interesting times. I think the incumbents are all going to be struggling in a world that is very, very different, and that may happen in the next year.

Dan Moren [01:09:16]:
It is interesting. I saw a good take on this somebody posted, uh, from Blue Sky that was pointing out that they thought that AI is kind of the equivalent of radium, where it's really good at specific things, but maybe don't shove it into every single product that you make, like kids' toothpaste or, or, you know, licking watch dials and stuff like that. So, and it won't be maybe until later that we realize, oh, maybe that wasn't so smart after all. Like, it's good, it's good at specific things, but, you know, I always think about my mom talking about going to the shoe store and getting her foot X-rayed. And it's like, why did we have X-ray machines? Yeah, that was a bad idea.

Leo Laporte [01:09:52]:
Not a good idea.

Dan Moren [01:09:53]:
Yeah, that was a good idea. X-rays, extremely useful. You could do without them.

Jason Snell [01:09:57]:
Maybe they shouldn't be at people trying.

Dan Moren [01:09:58]:
To sell you shoes.

Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
That might be a good— that might be a good analogy. Yeah, for right now it's like X-rays.

Jason Snell [01:10:05]:
Yeah, it is, it is. Well, and they don't know, right? The other analogy that works here is the throwing the spaghetti at the wall, right? Because it's like, this is amazing technology, what's it best at? And I think we already kind of know what it's best at, which is writing software. Everything else I don't know, but it's really good at writing software because it's— guess what? Computers are good at doing computer things.

Leo Laporte [01:10:23]:
It's good at computers.

Jason Snell [01:10:24]:
And there's an enormous amount of, of, uh, of documentation and, and source material about how to program computers. And they're really good at that. Other you stuff, know, yeah, it's, it's kind of hit and miss, but, um, it yeah, it is, is going to be interesting. I wrote a I a piece, wrote piece the other day. I think it was Ben Thompson who said, that he was a little worried about Microsoft. And I thought that was really interesting, right? Like, we— all of the giants are threatened because even if they're— they seem to be doing well, the question is, do we know what business models we don't will work or not work in an AI future? And we don't. Is Apple's business model blown?

Leo Laporte [01:11:02]:
Making buggies in an era where the car is about to emerge?

Jason Snell [01:11:06]:
This is the thing, is Apple, if they're really good at making beautiful hardware, might survive if that's the thing that survives. Whereas something like what Microsoft is doing, where they've got a lot of enterprise clients running software and they've got a cloud that's doing Azure, but like, it's possible that that business model will fall apart instead, and then Microsoft will be devastated by this. But nobody really seems to know right now.

Dan Moren [01:11:29]:
Well, that's the side of that is the like, is the who, whose business model survives the bubble, if there's a bubble, right? It may be that Microsoft could come out the other side, but if they they end up crashing and burning in the meantime because everybody's looking in the other direction, uh, they still may not.

Jason Snell [01:11:45]:
It's like waiting for the music to stop in musical chairs, right? But I, I think the advantage that the tech giants have is they have so much money. Yeah, I think this is part of Apple's strategy, honestly, is if they wait long enough, they may be able to scoop up a bunch of stuff on the cheap because they are just— in the meantime, they are selling iPhones. And unless there's a moment where people just stop buying iPhones and then Apple doesn't have the money money, and then there's a bubble that bursts. But like, that's, that's pretty tough timing, and if it happens, it's going to be really bad for Apple. But I think a lot of these tech giants are like, they're, they're playing the game, but they may also be at the point where they're going to be able to sweep in and get a bunch of stuff for cheap because they have money and nobody else has it.

Leo Laporte [01:12:25]:
Yeah, I am the wrong guy to ask because I'm like one of those people who, uh, I, I saw Jesus in a piece of toast and now my mind is blown and I Ever can't stop.

Jason Snell [01:12:34]:
Now you're running Linux. You're just all over the place.

Leo Laporte [01:12:36]:
Yeah, but I mean, I'm a— I am a true believer, so I'll preface this comment with that. But I do think that what we're about to see is such a big transformation that it's almost impossible to predict what's going to happen. But this will be the year of agents. And Apple has an opportunity because they are a really good manufacturer of consumer devices to be on the forefront of that. We don't know what the form factor is. We don't know what they'll connect to. We don't know what's going to be on the back end. We don't know if Google is going to be hosting it.

Leo Laporte [01:13:10]:
We don't know any of that stuff. But they have— they must be under immense pressure right now to try, as is everybody, to try to figure this out. And knowing that OpenAI and Jony Ive are breathing down their necks, everybody is.

Dan Moren [01:13:24]:
Is.

Leo Laporte [01:13:25]:
And but Apple, if you were gonna say, well, which of the current incumbents had an opportunity, I would say it'd be Apple.

Dan Moren [01:13:32]:
Well, because there's a, there's a large degree of synergy there, right? Like, this is the company that envisioned and productized, right, the graphical user interface and the, like, let's move computers from typing arcane commands into a command line and instead let's have a graphical user interface. Yes, they didn't invent it, but they commoditized, they turned it into a product. And their, their sort of ethos has always been about let's help people do stuff with technology and let's make it easy for them.

Leo Laporte [01:13:58]:
But we also know the innovator's dilemma and how attached to that mouse are they, because I don't think the future is going to be mouse.

Dan Moren [01:14:04]:
Well, it doesn't have to be about that, but that's the philosophy. Ethos is how do we make it easier for people to do stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:14:09]:
They have to stick to that and not say, but we make, you know, mice.

Jason Snell [01:14:14]:
I will tell you though, I will tell you, I am 100% sure that they teach about the iPod Nano moment moment at Apple University when they're talking to people about Apple's philosophy. And the iPod Nano moment, for people who don't remember it, is Apple made the best-selling consumer music player. It was the iPod Mini. It was hard drive-based, and they discontinued it. They discontinued— they could have kept selling it alongside the iPod Nano, which was flash memory-based, and so it didn't have a spinning hard drive and all those things that were great about it. They just— Steve Jobs was like, no, it's gone.

Leo Laporte [01:14:45]:
They could do that because they had a CEO who was not craven, who was not— who was willing to eat.

Jason Snell [01:14:51]:
And maybe they will again. Who knows, but, but this is part of their culture. And so that is, I think it's, it's not a fait accompli at all, but I think they are positioned in a way where they make— the other thing is if we live in an agentic future, again, I've said this before, but like constellation of devices, being good at building interconnected hardware, being good at building AirPods and a watch that has sensors on your wrist for your biometrics. Um, you know, maybe they've got a pin or glasses or things, but they've got the smartphone in your pocket that's got compute and it's got battery and it's got a screen because screens are nice sometimes, even in an agentic future, and it's got a connection to your cellular network or your Wi-Fi network. Like, Apple's good at that stuff. That stuff probably still remains important even in a like super AI-driven future. Maybe not, but like, I, I, that would seem to be a much more disruptive future. And we don't know.

Jason Snell [01:15:44]:
I feel like there's percentages you could put. That seems like a low percentage to me, but it's not zero. And it's way higher than I would have said it was, like 5 years ago because this is all changing so fast and that there's potentially some transformative moments. Leo, I don't know if you read or if any of the other people on the panel read, well, um, I was on the beach, literally. I read, uh, Dario Amodei's article, The Adolescence of Technology, while I was on the beach, where he's talking about all the ways AI can kill us in the future. Beach reading, uh, you can't beat it. But like, what I really away— took.

Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
Makes you want to stay on the beach, doesn't it?

Jason Snell [01:16:16]:
What I— oh yeah, yeah, just, I'm gonna stay right here and just wait and see what happens. But, but what I really got from that, and he's obviously, he's the CEO of Anthropic, he is a, he's a true believer in this. But what I got from that is just this idea that somebody who thinks about AI every day is concerned that we are on the precipice of dramatic change, whether it's good or bad, or we don't know what it is, dramatic change. And I think if you're the CEO of Apple or Microsoft or Google or obviously Meta or any of these other giant companies, that's the keeps you up is that like maybe 5 years ago you're like, I don't see any way that we don't just keep gliding to billions and billions of dollars. And now AI comes and you're like, oh, I, I do see some ways that this is the key.

Leo Laporte [01:16:57]:
Waste is not to worry about losing the race right now, is, but to skating where the puck is going. And it's very hard to know, but I, and I, I, you know, Apple isn't hurt by not being in the race today. Apple will be hurt if they don't go to where the race is going.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:13]:
To be at the end.

Jason Snell [01:17:14]:
If they're irrelevant in 5 years.

Leo Laporte [01:17:16]:
They could be irrelevant.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:17]:
Yeah, it's, it's fun to speculate because really almost anything is possible. I mean, I think I, I think Apple's— that, that, uh, my— Apple might be in a good position because so long as people need a device to run these AI— to— as long as consumers need a device of some kind, they make half of their money off devices. They can absolutely do that. So they're, they're— they might be in good shape. A company like Google is in good shape because because they are a compute services company. This thing requires a hell of a lot of compute services, whether it's training the model that someone else is going to be using, running a model that someone else is going to be using, software as a service companies needing to run AI, companies that want to put software as a service businesses out of business by developing their own AI solutions. They got that covered and they've got enough money to basically sit these things out. The difficulty is is that, and this is something that was put out in a, predicted in a 2018 paper by Dr.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:13]:
Timnit Gebru and Dr. Margaret Mitchell, who formerly were of Google's AI ethics team, and they were fired. They were basically fired because of this paper, pointing out the fact that this is going to be a technology that only companies, organizations, entities with the power of a nation state are going to be able to operate in, because you just need so many resources in order to build these tools and actually to deploy these tools. The idea of an upstart company funded on only a couple hundred million dollars, they absolutely are not going to be able to compete with us on any level. And that's going to really tilt the scales towards companies like Apple, towards companies like Google, towards creating services that are marketable for those companies as opposed to just simply good ideas. Unless everything gets open— unless open source, uh, becomes open source on local compute, becomes the, the the lingua franca of artificial intelligence, that could be a very, very bad tipping point.

Leo Laporte [01:19:09]:
We're going to take a little break here. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. So glad to have you, Dan Moren. And anything you— besides the fact that Dan is a regular at sixcolors.com and appears on many podcasts with Jason Snell, I'm sure. I wouldn't know, but I'm sure he does. Probably.

Dan Moren [01:19:32]:
Odds are good.

Leo Laporte [01:19:33]:
Odds are good.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:34]:
He's appearing with— on him with one now, as a matter of fact.

Leo Laporte [01:19:36]:
Yes, in fact.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:39]:
It'S statistically likely that at this moment he would be doing a podcast with Jason Snow.

Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
You don't have a book currently out, but you, you can get the whole series right now, right?

Dan Moren [01:19:48]:
Uh, yes, yes.

Leo Laporte [01:19:49]:
Where do they— should get it from you, right? Where should they go?

Dan Moren [01:19:51]:
I mean, I— it's, it's sold in bookstores everywhere.

Leo Laporte [01:19:54]:
Of course.

Dan Moren [01:19:54]:
Yeah, you can go, go to your local— I always advocate for your local neighborhood bookstore. Support it, please. Bookshop.org is a good resource for that. They'll, they'll tell you where your, your local store is. But you can buy it on Amazon or Kobo or Barnes Noble if that floats your boat. Um, there will be an announcement coming end of the month-ish about, about the.

Leo Laporte [01:20:16]:
Next in the Galactic Cold War series.

Dan Moren [01:20:18]:
Different, different book, different book. Yeah, standalone, new, new book. I can say Jason's read it because he's sitting right there.

Jason Snell [01:20:26]:
I did read that. I did read it.

Dan Moren [01:20:28]:
Um, but yeah, it's not— it's not been officially announced yet, but keep your eyes— but you can always go to my site, dmorrin.com, and it's got— we'll have all the details there. I got a newsletter, sign up for that. Yeah, you'll be among the first to know.

Leo Laporte [01:20:42]:
The first to know. And jasonsnell6colors.com, where we had all the colors of the graphs.

Jason Snell [01:20:49]:
They were very interesting. They're for the world. I make the charts for the world to see about money.

Leo Laporte [01:20:55]:
And Mr. Andrew and NotCo. Have any of you tried the new Codex app? It was funny, as soon as Claude came out with Cowork, Anthropic Claude Cowork for the Mac, which was actually really interesting, it was Mac only and, uh, did some really interesting, uh, virtual machine things to keep you safe, uh, OpenAI said, wait a minute, uh, we got one too, Mac only. It's called Codex, came out this week. I haven't played with it. Uh, Codex is their coding tool, right? Um, right.

Dan Moren [01:21:26]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:21:27]:
So it's a command center for agents.

Jason Snell [01:21:30]:
Yeah. And so you you can, can run it and it's got MCP integration and it's running as a Mac app and it can do stuff on your system.

Leo Laporte [01:21:36]:
And it's very much like what Anthropic did with CodeWork.

Jason Snell [01:21:40]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's good. I mean, we— they uh, they bought, bought software applications, Right. So they bought the old, old Shortcuts team and they've got some stuff. I wonder if we'll end up in something like this down the road, but also interesting that you can, you can put your API key in here. One of my big complaints about these AI companies is they want to sell consumer subscriptions and they also want to sell API subscriptions. And it's very frustrating because like, if you've got a consumer subscription and then they, then you want to do something and it's like, sorry, this requires the API. You, you have to sign up for that too and all that.

Jason Snell [01:22:14]:
And this is interesting because it asks for an API key. It basically wants to charge you, uh, metered access per token, which I actually kind of like it because it's just use-based and I, I don't need to also tithe, you know, $20 a month or whatever to OpenAI. That's kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:22:30]:
Yeah. I spent a lot of money on my Claude, uh, subscription except Claude Max, but I still have to buy API tokens.

Jason Snell [01:22:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:37]:
I hate that.

Jason Snell [01:22:38]:
You should get some, you should get some tokens with your subscription, I think.

Dan Moren [01:22:41]:
I do, I do the Claude thing where it's like, because all the programming projects I want to do are just purely like hobbyist things where I don't really care, I am still on the like, let me ask you a bunch of questions before you cut me off for the day. Which I feel is not like like—.

Leo Laporte [01:22:54]:
It'S like, job, and we'll see you back here at 1:00 AM.

Dan Moren [01:22:57]:
It's like, it's not unlike bothering my, you know, my friend who's a Python developer. Like, I only feel like I can ask him so many questions before he's gonna be like, I gotta go make dinner. So, you know, it's fine, that's fine.

Jason Snell [01:23:08]:
I don't need it.

Leo Laporte [01:23:09]:
I, uh, this morning I, I, uh, set up a whole system with Claude Code doing all the configuration. It's a very good sysadmin. It's great for— just as you said, Jason, it's great at computers. It knows computers. Really?

Jason Snell [01:23:21]:
Computers are great at computers.

Leo Laporte [01:23:22]:
Yeah, turns out. Surprise.

Jason Snell [01:23:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:23:27]:
Uh, all right, back to work. Break time's Break time is over. Oh no, no, no, not the show, just, uh, just the commercial break time. iPhone 17 Pro Max has the best battery life of 35 smartphones tested according to CNET.

Jason Snell [01:23:46]:
It's a big phone.

Leo Laporte [01:23:48]:
It's big. I feel like even it's gonna be bigger still.

Dan Moren [01:23:51]:
The 17— I have a 17 Pro and I have found it to be even just the 17 Pro non-Mac Pro Max, bananas. Like, I, I don't think I have come close to running out of battery in the, what, 3, 4 months that I've been using it. It's like, you know, and I've taken some, some long trips and stuff like that, you know, where I'm out for a day, and, you know, I don't think it's even gotten into the little red bar. Hey, you, you're getting a little risky here. So it doesn't shock me at all to know that the Pro Max, which has an even larger battery, like, you know, it has even better battery life.

Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
Yeah, and I think they've done a lot under the hood too. It's not just the physical battery size, they really have tuned it.

Dan Moren [01:24:30]:
They've done a great job with the optimization of battery life in general over the last several iterations of the iPhone. Like, honestly, I, I pretty much never worry about it. I rarely even— you know, I travel, if I'm going overnight, I travel with a charging cable, but if I'm going out for the day, even like a full day, I don't bother.

Leo Laporte [01:24:49]:
It's CNET surveyed using YouGov readers about smartphones. They found that battery life was number one, and AI, they care even less about it than they did last year. We don't care about AI, which is kind of interesting. 11% of smartphone upgrade owners chose to upgrade the device because of AI features. That's down from 18% last gear.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:16]:
Yeah, I I think, think for— on the consumer space, caring about AI is a lot like caring about GPU, because you don't care about the actual stuff that's in the phone, you care about what the phone does. Never mind that, yeah, if it weren't for that GPU, you would not have that buttery smooth interface. But they do care about that interface, so that's a by— good— indirectly they care about GPU.

Leo Laporte [01:25:36]:
Yeah, the impact. Um, what motivates you to upgrade your smartphone? 2,129 adults in the US responding. Price number one, 62%, but then longer battery life, 54%. Yeah, more storage, 39%. I think that's because a lot of people have iPhone 4s and they've run out of room for their— well, I.

Dan Moren [01:25:56]:
Mean, it's necessities, right? Like, your battery life goes down over time, you start to run out of storage over time. Like, all those things are finite, and, you know, I think that's— it's unsurprising that those are the things that are going to drive you. I would assume, you know, camera features are probably up there somewhere too, just because that's— it's very visible, right? Like your phone takes worse pictures than your friend's phone, you're gonna be like, oh, maybe I need a new phone. But people don't care about the AI stuff, especially to Andy's point, the AI stuff is mostly not happening on the phone, so it doesn't matter, right? If you're, if you're worried about like a chatbot thing or a, you know, ChatGPT, your iPhone 17 and your iPhone 12 are probably just as good as talking to ChatGPT as one another.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:37]:
Yeah, they care about how good the photos are, which is a reflection of how good the AI hardware is on phone. So that's the sort of stuff that's going to be— this is why, like, it's fun to talk about, like, Apple's opportunities and obligations and problems with AI, but the thing is, like, right now you can slide by. There's not yet a clear indicator of what is going to crack the nut for about— consumers I absolutely— the table stakes for my phone are 1, 2, 3, 4. What is going to cause AI great feature number 5 that if my phone does not have this, why am I even considering this when I'm at the Verizon store or the AT&T store? And that's— that is still a big question mark, and Apple has a couple years to figure that out.

Dan Moren [01:27:17]:
I was really worried you were saying your PIN was 1234. That was the same code on my So, you luggage. know, thank you very much.

Leo Laporte [01:27:26]:
You know, I, I don't know what's wrong with 0000, but if that's— if you insist on making it complicated, well.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:31]:
See, that's, that's why, that's why, like, if you've got If you're on a popular podcast, if you say it out loud, then you're basically going for the double fake because people say, well, okay, I know it's not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 because he wouldn't have said that.

Dan Moren [01:27:41]:
Never do that.

Leo Laporte [01:27:41]:
Then, yeah. And I thought this was a good, another great article from Howard. Howard Oakley's just amazing. Yep. Oakley. Last week on my Mac, this is from his Eclectic Light Company blog, why E-cores make Apple Silicon so fast. The only thing that's interesting about this, I mean, it's very interesting, But the takeaway from this article is by having efficiency cores, all of those background tasks, those little maintenance tasks that are always going on can run on those efficiency cores. So the performance cores are available when you really need performance.

Leo Laporte [01:28:16]:
So you shouldn't feel too bad when you look at Activity Monitor and you see that your efficiency cores are pegged out all the time. That's how it's supposed to be. That's the good idea.

Jason Snell [01:28:27]:
Yeah. And that those P-cores just sleep when they're not needed to do anything. And the more powerful the E-cores are, the more, the less needs to go to the P-cores. And the P-cores are, you know, Apple wants to make those energy efficient and they want to make the efficiency cores powerful, obviously. And there's a little bit of a, you know, they're, they're doing the traffic routing, right? There is a, there is software that is actually minding like what processors get what and how it's prioritized and all of that. And, and, you know, I'm sitting here looking at my, I've got, you know, 10 cores right now. Now on this Mac, and 4 of them are efficiency. And I'm, I'm doing a video podcast and all of that, and like 1 performance core is doing a little bit of work and everything else is going on the efficiency cores.

Jason Snell [01:29:10]:
And that's, that's how you get better battery life. That's how you get overhead to do super intensive tasks when you need it. But like all the general Apple, no, Apple's profiled its system. It knows what low-level stuff is going on in the background. That can be done just on the E-cores. And that's how you get the really, really great battery life, is, is having good E-cores that just don't use power.

Dan Moren [01:29:32]:
It's like, why not make the entire plane out of the black box material?

Jason Snell [01:29:38]:
Only efficiency cores.

Dan Moren [01:29:39]:
Only— it's all— oops, all the way.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:43]:
Down.

Leo Laporte [01:29:44]:
Actually, you know, that's, that's the moral to that story. You need efficiency cores so that the performance cores can do their thing.

Jason Snell [01:29:49]:
Or yeah, or go to sleep Not eat your battery is the other, right? Like one of those.

Leo Laporte [01:29:54]:
Yeah, it was such a brilliant thing to do that everybody now does it. Intel does it, AMD does it. ARM, of course, has been doing it all along. That's where it came from. Qualcomm's doing it. And you know what? All computer users are benefiting from it. So thank you. It's good.

Jason Snell [01:30:10]:
It's good.

Leo Laporte [01:30:11]:
FBI said, oh, this is such good news. I love this. Remember when they sent the FBI, after a Washington Post reporter because she had the temerity to do her job. They took her phone, they took her computer. The FBI could not get into her phone because she had turned on lockdown mode. It works.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:35]:
Yep. Good news, they they were, were unfortunately able to get into her MacBook because she's— she was locking that down with biometric, or she hadn't shut it down, she hadn't put it into anything.

Leo Laporte [01:30:44]:
Yeah, the really That's important, by the way. Yeah, the courts have said that they can, they can use— in fact, they had a warrant that said, you know, you have to unlock your phone with your fake face or finger. But courts have held that the password can't— they cannot force you to give.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:00]:
The law is hysterically funny. It's a password because it's a piece of information that's inside your head, and the law cannot compel you to give you information that's inside your head. Whereas your fingerprint is not that. It is simply a intangible fungible publicly available object, and therefore they are entitled to force you and compel you to use it. Yeah, so it's like, wow. As I said, the, the law cracks me up sometimes.

Leo Laporte [01:31:22]:
Um, yeah, so that's, that's the moral of that, is if you um, you are, know, trying to protect your sources, um, or if you just have something you don't want the feds to get into, uh, lockdown mode right? And, uh, works, and it's not for everybody, right?

Jason Snell [01:31:35]:
It's like super lockdown mode. Super, super, uh, inconvenient if you're a regular user. So, but if you're a reporter for the Washington Post who's got secret sources inside the government and stuff like that, yeah, you should talk about probably it. But for most people, it's a, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:31:50]:
About— well, here's the good news, there aren't any reporters.

Jason Snell [01:31:53]:
And yeah, yeah, there are very few left. It's a, it's an increasingly or decreasingly relevant problem. I was going to say the other thing for everybody to keep in mind about while we're talking about biometrics is, um, is that you can tap— what, you hold down the wake/sleep button and the up volume button on your iPhone and it will lead to the— or you can, what is it, press the side.

Dan Moren [01:32:14]:
You.

Jason Snell [01:32:14]:
Button?

Dan Moren [01:32:14]:
Can just even hold the side button at this point.

Leo Laporte [01:32:16]:
I think that's— hey, can you wait to arrest me till I get— I have to look up how— yeah, but.

Jason Snell [01:32:20]:
You can literally, you basically press these buttons in your pocket and there are a couple of different ways to do it. And then it triggers the screen that says slide to shut down.

Leo Laporte [01:32:27]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:32:28]:
Once that screen is triggered, triggered, your biometric authentication on your iPhone is turned off.

Leo Laporte [01:32:33]:
You have to enter a password.

Jason Snell [01:32:34]:
And so you can just actually just press those buttons in your pocket, and at that point, they are not going to hold your phone to your face and unlock it. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:32:43]:
God, sad that we live in a world where have you to worry about that.

Jason Snell [01:32:46]:
It is.

Leo Laporte [01:32:48]:
Oura has been lobbying the FDA. They had their lobbying budget, their government lobbying budget, this ring I'm wearing, was in 2024 was $40,000. Last year it was $1 million. They realized if we're gonna make a health device, we better have some lobbyists in DC. They've been trying to convince lawmakers to loosen the health monitoring regulations for wearables. You know, in other words, you don't have to get full FDA approval for it. It is a device, it's not medical grade. It is a general wellness product.

Leo Laporte [01:33:24]:
And actually the piece in Apple Insider is this benefits Apple Watch because they also can turn on features as a general wellness device, not as a medical-grade device, which means you don't have to have those extra and costly and time-consuming reviews for safety and effectiveness. Uh, so I guess Oura is having some success. Uh, the FDA changed its rules so that wearables could warn users to seek a more thorough medical evaluation from a physician. It also opened the door to devices measuring blood pressure and blood sugar without necessarily needing the medical device approval beforehand. Uh, the— that's the good news. The bad news is these devices really can't do anything useful along those lines yet anyway, but if they ever can.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:11]:
Yeah, the runway is open. I think that's an Obama-era change to the way the FDA operates. They created a new classification that basically said we are— the reason technology runs evolves much, much faster than the FDA approval process. Let's create a new classification for technology-based devices that will put limits on what they can actually do or tell and advise the, the owner. But we're gonna let things like blood oxygen sensors go through, we're gonna let all these heart rate monitors go through because that's something that it can do very, very well. And if it goes through 5 years worth of testing, by the time it gets to market, it's of no value. So yep, it's ready.

Leo Laporte [01:34:51]:
Yay!

Dan Moren [01:34:51]:
Uh.

Leo Laporte [01:34:53]:
Let'S see what else. Um, oh, how exciting, your Apple Music Replay 2026 is now live if you want to see what you listen to. Jason, last year you were saying it was kind of occupied by stuff you listened to while you worked.

Jason Snell [01:35:10]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's always the problem, right, is that there's not a lot of context there. So I have a playlist that I do when I'm writing. There are a couple playlists that I can write while listening to because they're very, very familiar to me. But, um, and I've heard people talk about this with like they're playing music in the car for their kids, or they're playing music to have their baby go to sleep, and, uh, it's just.

Leo Laporte [01:35:31]:
Not aware of though.

Dan Moren [01:35:32]:
You lose different contexts. That's literally me. I had mine not last year but the year before, it was all like kid songs for me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:39]:
So yeah, yeah, I I don't, don't know anybody who's really, really happy with it. Mine is contaminated because— because like Jason, one of my favorite— like, I need to get some work done, but I can't be distracted by dancing around the office or something like that. So I have a favorite opera that's 3 and a half— the recording's like 3 hours long. And even if I'm not necessarily listening to it every single day, it so contaminates my stats that, oh, your number one favorite musician is Leoncavallo. Like, okay, no, actually not really. I mean, I don't listen to that while I'm— it's like, yeah, I'm amazed that they haven't— there isn't like sort of a war, at least amongst pride of developers inside those services, says we got to make these things actually better. Not everybody's listening to 100 different things every single day.

Jason Snell [01:36:27]:
In November, Spotify did come up with a feature called Exclude from My Taste Profile, where basically you can say, this is not a song I listen to because I like it. It don't— do not use this to judge. Do not judge. Judge.

Dan Moren [01:36:44]:
I don't even like that song.

Jason Snell [01:36:46]:
Exactly.

Dan Moren [01:36:46]:
Listen to it 100 times just to make sure. Well, I make sure I don't like it.

Jason Snell [01:36:50]:
You can use it to lie to yourself, but more likely it's going to be like, oh, I don't need that kids album to be recommended. Oh, you, you listen to kids albums, so here's a playlist full of kids songs. Like, I don't want that.

Dan Moren [01:37:01]:
That's like my YouTube— my YouTube homepage is just full of videos of trains because all my child does is watch videos of trains.

Jason Snell [01:37:08]:
You want— like, all of these services that have these algorithmically generated things ought to have an incognito mode, essentially, to say, like, what I'm going to listen to now, do not pay attention to it with your algorithm. Because, because I, I do that, Dan, too, with YouTube. But sometimes I gotta click on a YouTube link somebody sends me about something, and I'm like, oh, okay, this is kind of interesting. But now I hesitate to click on the link because I'm like, oh, what's this going to do to my algorithm? It's going to ruin it. It's going to think that I like whatever this thing is, and maybe I do, maybe I don't. I don't I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:37]:
Delete from history. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:37:39]:
Yeah.

Dan Moren [01:37:39]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:37:40]:
You can do that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:40]:
There's nothing I'm ashamed of. There's just, please, please, please. I checked, I checked out this LaBooboo video because I want to know what the hell is a LaBooboo. Please don't give me 800 hours of LaBooboo content for the next 2 weeks.

Leo Laporte [01:37:52]:
This is what's wrong with algorithmic recommendations in general. Just dumb.

Dan Moren [01:37:55]:
Yeah. They're not smart enough. That's just it. They try to be smart.

Leo Laporte [01:37:59]:
They to know more about us. need.

Dan Moren [01:38:00]:
And they're smart. Yeah, that's right. That's where they need more data about us.

Leo Laporte [01:38:03]:
More data.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:03]:
Data.

Leo Laporte [01:38:04]:
If we could just carry a microphone around at all times, it would listen in and would— and you could just say, hey, I don't like this song, I hate this song, I hate it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:14]:
We could understand so— we could recommend so much better music for— if you would tell us which of these 4 brands of tires are you considering buying in the next 4 months.

Leo Laporte [01:38:22]:
Exactly. Uh, have you seen Johnny Ive's new Ferrari? Now I'm not talking about the car he's driving, he designed designed the Ferrari Luc electric car along with Love From and, uh, and his, his buddy, um, what was it, what's the other guy's name? I can't remember. But anyway, Mark Newsom. Mark Newsom, thank you. Uh, it's pretty, it's a pretty, pretty car.

Dan Moren [01:38:46]:
No, I think, I think he's better at designing cars than he is at designing technology right now. I mean, a car is technology, but I mean, you know, I, I saw a comment where he pointed out that like, you know, he's trying to minimize touchscreens, for example, and then physical controls. He's 100% right. I mean like anybody who's driven a car made in the last 5 to 10 years has probably been frustrated by trying to use a touchscreen while driving, which is not a thing that you want to be doing. So I don't want to buy an incredibly expensive Ferrari so I can have switches for my air conditioning, but it'd be sure nice if everybody else listened to that too.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:19]:
He gave an interview to thedrive.com and said, yeah, I think a large touchscreen practically functionally doesn't work. That's incontrovertible. You have to look at it, which you shouldn't be doing. You've designed something that's layers and layers deep.

Leo Laporte [01:39:31]:
The steering wheel looks like a kid's busy box. It's got cranks, knobs, dials.

Dan Moren [01:39:36]:
I love it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:37]:
Or like an F1 driver's. Like, I love, I love the idea that has this tiny, tiny little like touchscreen like embedded in that shows, oh, here's the YouTube, here's your YouTube Music app. Like, okay, I can sort of see that. I can sort of see how you'd want your face pointing at the, at the airbag so that when you are distracted and you crash into something, at least you are positioned so you're not reaching it. You're not gonna be be hitting the side with it. But yeah, it does look nice, and that is exactly like lots and lots of little screens to take, take the.

Leo Laporte [01:40:03]:
Place of mechanical switches.

Dan Moren [01:40:05]:
Yeah, I mean, I, I drive a.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:07]:
Center dash, like, touchscreens. I hate them.

Dan Moren [01:40:09]:
I, I drive a 2012 Volkswagen GTI that's a stick shift, and let me tell you, it is about as low-tech as it comes. And even it does have a CarPlay unit because I put one in. But like, I love that it's like my air conditioning controls are like 3 dials. It's like, how much fan? How hot is it? Which direction is it going? Yeah, those are all things I want to be able to change without having to really think about it. And I— the newer ones that have touchscreen, everything. I mean, I rented a Tesla when I went to WWDC one year, and I'm driving on— I get on 101 and I'm driving down and I realize I don't know how to adjust the side mirrors on this car.

Leo Laporte [01:40:44]:
You have to open the screen.

Dan Moren [01:40:47]:
I'm driving on a highway. I just got off a plane I've been on for 6 hours, I'm going to die.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:51]:
Yeah, not only that, but like, you, you only need to be driving your new car for like maybe a week, week and a half, 2 weeks before— oh, because I need— oh, it's not— the AC isn't high enough. You reach out to a tactile control, your finger finds it, and you know that if I turn it like this, it'll go up a little bit, versus it's a touchscreen, I'm touching an undifferentiated plane of glass that now I absolutely have to look at this glass. And every— again, every time I'm in a car like that, after I have to think, is it worth— is— I have to wait for a moment of absolute zero distraction. That's just because I really— I'm burning up in here and I want some more AC. And that's bad design.

Dan Moren [01:41:28]:
It is. Yeah. I mean, I see why it's— well, I see why the manufacturers like it, right? It is probably a lot cheaper to have one giant slab of glass than to design all these little things. Probably a lot easier to manufacture. But it's bad. It's a bad experience, and they should feel bad.

Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
Applications now open for the 2026 Swift Student Challenge. This is a great opportunity for, uh, for kids. They always highlight the winners and give them a lot of airtime at WWDC. Uh, applications close February 26th. Uh, you can be working with Swift Playground as well as Xcode if you want, so that's kind of cool. Um, Apple will announce 350 winners. Uh, among the winners, 50 will be— 350 winners, 50 will be selected as distinguished All winners get a special gift from Apple. They don't say what it'll be, but in the past it's been jackets or pins.

Leo Laporte [01:42:22]:
In 2025, it was AirPods Max. So it's whatever Apple has too many of and needs to get rid of, you could pretty much count on. And a free year of membership in the developer program worth $99. More importantly, the 58 distinguished winners get an all-expenses-paid invitation to Apple Park for the 3 days of WWDC. And will be featured at WWDC. So if you, if you know a young person who likes to program, I guess you have to be, what, a high school student? Can you do it? No, they're college students.

Dan Moren [01:42:56]:
I think it's 13 and over.

Leo Laporte [01:42:58]:
Yeah, from 13 till as long as you're in school, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, the application's online. If, if you're, if you're that smart, you can figure out where I hope. Um, have you played Civ VII? I've been playing it on the iPad. I, I'm not sure I agree with Andrew Orr at Apple Insider who says it's good but falls short of greatness. I guess what he misses is the you downloadable, know, packs, which you won't get, but it is free if you're an Apple Arcade subscriber, which has a lot to say for it. And it turns out Civ really works well on a touchscreen.

Leo Laporte [01:43:35]:
Screen.

Dan Moren [01:43:36]:
Very scared to tell my wife about this because she really enjoys playing the classic Civilization games and I'm worried if I tell her she's got access to this for free, I will never see her again.

Leo Laporte [01:43:45]:
Yeah, uh, it's, it's beautiful. It's a big download. You have to have a lot of memory. Um, but I think the touchscreen works beautifully for this. Makes it much easier to drag your little people around and so forth. And it has all you know, all the, the features of the base model of Civ 7. Oh, the anniversary update is now on Apple Arcade. Thank you very much.

Dan Moren [01:44:10]:
Uh.

Leo Laporte [01:44:12]:
Andy, I'm looking at your list of— that's all of everything I have. Uh, what was on your list that you wanted to talk about?

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:21]:
Uh, a couple things. Uh, so German had the, uh, a transcript of Tim Cook said a lot of stuff during company meeting, apparently trying apparently trying to— to address a lot of long-standing simmering disappointments with his public-facing comments regarding things going Yeah, on, uh, and.

Leo Laporte [01:44:41]:
Thereof, or lack thereof.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:41]:
They— so basically, so there are a lot of interesting quotes here. He addressed, uh, the operations against immigrants and has sort of upgraded his language from I think that we need a de-escalation, which is what he said a couple of weeks ago, to I'm heartbroken by what's going on there. If you're here from— we value the fact that we get the best people from all over the world. We are valued here. The people who are here under different visa programs, we love you. We want to support you. We don't want you to be scared about leaving the country to go home for family events and to risk not being able to come back. Swore, he swore that he is having active conversations with the administration about this issue.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:28]:
He feels so strongly about it. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's better than nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:45:35]:
I I think, think he's trying to play both sides, and it kind of feels a little hypocritical and two-faced to me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:41]:
Yeah, I mean, here's, here's the thing, like, this time, like, last year, I would have thought that, well, there might be a lot of different reasons why he hasn't spoken publicly about this similar sort of situation. I would've said, Tim has built up enough credit with me that I believe that maybe there's some stuff that he has not seen a need to talk publicly about, but he is actively concerned and actively tracking and actively working on these problems. Today, after the past year that he has spent where he has just stood there in the batter's box watching pitch after pitch after pitch go by and say, nope, I'm cool with that. Nope, I'm cool with that. Nope, I'll let that happen too. Nope, I have no vocal options. Opposition to this whatsoever. I think it's correct for us to wonder at what point does he simply say, I actually don't really care about it that much in terms of my role as Apple CEO, but now I have to worry that my own employees are very, very upset with my performance as CEO, so I have to do a course correction.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:35]:
I don't know if that's necessarily what he's doing or feeling, but that's something that I have to definitely put into the pot this year much, much more strongly than I might have a year ago.

Dan Moren [01:46:41]:
Look, Yeah, talk is cheap. Talk is especially cheap when you're a billionaire. And I think that the challenges here are that even if it— even if he doesn't like it, even if he's gritting his teeth and bearing it, it doesn't matter because the outside appearance is exactly the same either way. And so while I'm not somebody who thinks that he is necessarily in favor of the stuff that's happening, there's no way for me to know, right? He can say all this and it doesn't matter. There's nothing I can check him on. There's nothing I can verify. What, what's kind of extra galling about it is he's still being very cagey about it because he treats it like it is a— you know, Apple loves to post whenever there is a natural disaster, we're supporting the Red Cross, we're saying this. But you can't treat this like it's a natural disaster because it's not just a thing that happened.

Dan Moren [01:47:24]:
And so, you know, the idea that it's like if he were friends with the wildfires as they rage through California, it's like, oh, I'm talking to the wildfires, I'm trying to get them to back off. I think that would be about as effective at this point. So I don't know, it feels feels certainly cold comfort, I think, to anybody out there. I think what's interesting about— there's sort of a failure to take a longer view here, right? Because everybody talks about, look, you gotta protect the interests of the company, the shareholder value, etc., etc. And there's, there's something to that, but I think that we've treated that as a very much like a single metric problem, whereas in fact it's a multiple metric problem. Because if your employees are unhappy and your employees start leaving, or are doing things to show they aren't happy, that will also hurt your company, right? That will also hurt your bottom line. Just viewing it about the stock price or about whether or not the government could put tariffs on you is only one dimension of this problem. And I think I, I would have said prior to this that Tim is smart enough to realize that, and now I feel like maybe he isn't, or maybe he's just worrying too much about threat.

Dan Moren [01:48:27]:
And the, the bottom line is sooner or later there is going to be a thing that he is going to have to stand up and, and take issue with, right? Because it's just— look at the trajectory, that's the way it's going. And the answer is, if you're gonna have to do eventually, why not do it now, right? I mean, he did it yesterday.

Leo Laporte [01:48:45]:
Apple did sponsor Bad Bunny's halftime show.

Dan Moren [01:48:48]:
That's the nearest of mere things. And it's not like it didn't help them, right? I mean, yeah, I love Bad Bunny, it's great, says Tim, as you know, people get hauled off the streets. It's, it's just not It's not— as.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:01]:
You'Re at the premiere of a movie of the first lady, which is— which is— that's the— that's the stuff that can— it galls me more than it probably should because I can sort of see, okay, you know what, you got a new president coming in, you're going to donate a million dollars to the inaugural committee. Okay, I guess I get that. I understand like why that is almost a non-optional thing to do, but that was such an optional thing. You did not have to go to the movie premiere of a movie that already another oligarch paid $40 million to acquire because it was going to be such a great boon for his streaming service. Did Tim like actually get into a bidding war with Jeff Bezos— with Amazon, excuse me, with Amazon over it? Or was it just, oh, well, gosh, I'll let you just go. It's all the stuff that he does not— I feel as though he does not have to do that he does anyway. Way that also going to the mix is that whereas a year ago I might have thought there are things you kind of have to do when there's a new administration, you have to make sure that you have an open conversation, you have open conversations and access, and some things are very easy. When things are easily for sale and you can afford to buy them, you buy them.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:09]:
Okay? However, I do think that the line is very fuzzy between Tim saying, well, I just have to do what's best for the company and we are in a defensive position. We want to be able to talk about We want to be able to defend ourselves against all these policies that might be affecting us. How much of it is that versus how much of the pie chart is we see an unprecedented opportunity with a presidential administration that is willing to roll over for us on all kinds of things that were absolutely unattainable for us in the previous two Democratic administrations. We need to strike while the iron's hot because we can make so many gains here at the expense of a whole bunch of entities that we don't really care about. These are now questions that I was— I'm asking very, very actively myself today that I was like, okay, last year that's a possibility because again, businesses are businesses. But now it's really part of— it's part of the foreground of the conversation as opposed to a list of things that have to be considered. They have, they have a credibility problem they did not have a year ago, and that's voluntary on the basis— on the, on the part of Tim Cook.

Jason Snell [01:51:10]:
I was struck by the damage control aspect of this because obviously that happened. He went to the premiere when there was somebody lying in the street in Minneapolis. And I agree. I think that, you know, that's when you, you know, oh, I had some, I had some bad chili earlier. I gotta go. Uh, but, but then he came out, he felt like he needed to come out with a statement. So he released a memo to Apple employees, which got leaked obviously immediately. And they knew it would.

Jason Snell [01:51:37]:
And what's funny is that obviously wasn't enough because that, that was a very restrained, like, I just, I, I emphasize de-escalation. And so then he does a very rapidly— I mean, I got several people who are like, is something going on at Apple? Because we just got an all-hands meeting that happened very quickly. And in that, he basically tried to, you know, he said a bunch of words to try and say, you know, something similar to what he said before, because that first time didn't work. And I don't think it was particularly effective the second time either, because clearly they've intimidated. They don't want to challenge the administration because they're afraid that they will be punished. And I guess the question is, will there come a time, like Dan said, will there come a time when something happens that some of these people in power say, okay, I can't go along to get along anymore? And it hasn't happened yet, so maybe it never will. But I think that's the open question there. Because as for his reasoning, I really believe that when he refused to go to Saudi Arabia to vet, uh, MBS, and Trump complained the whole time that Tim Apple wasn't there.

Jason Snell [01:52:47]:
I think they were like, okay, he's tracking our every move. And, and Tim Cook is like, all right, I'm gonna say yes to everything now. And, you know, right or wrong, I think that's what happened.

Dan Moren [01:52:57]:
Yeah, I think they could have taken it a step further to make him do something, but I understand the natural— I mean, again, the corporations are conservative by their nature. They have money, they would like to keep it, and And, you know, I've written this a bunch on Six Calls and elsewhere, like, you don't look to the corporations to be the one leading political change because they will not. There is not really an incentive in it for them. That's the system that we've built for ourselves.

Jason Snell [01:53:19]:
Their incentives are financial. I, I, you know, all I ask is that I, I want to see Tim Cook stop making these posts about how concerned they are about things happening in the world. Like, yeah, just, you know, be that— you own it now.

Dan Moren [01:53:31]:
This is who you are celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday.

Andy Ihnatko [01:53:34]:
Yeah, that's nice.

Leo Laporte [01:53:37]:
We've talked about lines in the sand and, and bright red lines, uh, before with Apple about China and about Russia, and we've yet to come up against any of those bright red lines. I don't see that happening, uh, here either.

Dan Moren [01:53:50]:
Well, they drew a line in Yeah, it was small Russia eventually. enough that.

Leo Laporte [01:53:54]:
They could do it.

Dan Moren [01:53:55]:
Another country, right? Yeah. But yeah, yeah, I mean, we It seems like it's going to take a lot more than that, but it does feel like that's certainly a thing that could happen. And, and the question is, to Jason's point, as this escalating level of damage control— if this town hall didn't cut it, is he going to be forced to take some additional actual action to try and assuage his employees further? Whether it's even just like, let's donate.

Leo Laporte [01:54:22]:
Some money, you know, I'm just trying to save your job here.

Dan Moren [01:54:25]:
And maybe they say, what.

Jason Snell [01:54:26]:
Have.

Dan Moren [01:54:26]:
Know, yeah, do you You we— I'd rather be unemployed.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:30]:
Again, particularly when it's like, I think Google and Apple and a couple other companies were actually advising their, uh, their, their employees that, hey, if you're here on a visa, maybe don't go home for the holidays because we don't know if you're going to be able to come back in. This isn't an abstract, oh gosh, I really wish that he would take a firm stance. Like, these are employees that are like, I don't know if I have a future in this country. I have have a, I a spouse in I have kids, I have property here. And if I— if my mom is dying overseas, I don't know if I can afford to go back there to basically say goodbye to my mom because I don't know if I'll be able to come back into this country. You're our CEO, fix this. Pretend that your employees have a certain amount of value to you. So that you can see the level of frustrations just building and building and building because again, standing in the batter's box, watching pitch go by after by after past you after past you, at some point point people kind of start connecting dots and saying he is never going to take a swing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:23]:
There is never a situation in which he's going to do anything other than what seems like the most calculated, positive— excuse me, calculated beneficial thing for the company in a broad abstract way. Meanwhile, a lot of people here in your company are actually suffering.

Dan Moren [01:55:40]:
So, and it— he's not alone in that either. I think it just cuts deeper because, A, Apple used all these values to say— talk a really big game, right? They talk a great game. They use it marketing. We care about this and this and this. And that— I think there's— people also have an emotional connection with the company in the way that they don't with many other companies. And that makes it feel more betraying when something like this happens, because people build their identity around these things.

Leo Laporte [01:56:04]:
And so that's why Apple's unusual. I don't think anybody would be surprised if the CEO of Ford went to.

Dan Moren [01:56:09]:
You know, the Milan— or even Microsoft, right?

Jason Snell [01:56:12]:
Like, people are like, yeah, I give.

Dan Moren [01:56:13]:
Microsoft money, they give me a —business thing. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:56:16]:
More than just a company. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:19]:
And that's on us. If we ever thought that— if we ever thought that a $4 trillion company is— no, no, two hippies in a garage— yeah, that really is on us. And there's a course— if maybe it's good that there's this necessary course correction that— and again, and all this conversation, I might be saying harsh things about Tim Cook. I don't think he's a bad guy. I'm not attacking him. And I don't think, oh gosh, he's a piece of scum, he's a piece of gum that I want to scrape off issue. I'm sure he's a fine gentleman. It's just that there is some course corrections that are happening here in public perceptions that perhaps were necessary and a long time coming.

Dan Moren [01:56:53]:
And don't, don't kid yourself that anybody who took his job wouldn't have to do the same thing. I mean, that's the other thing. People advocating for him to leave is like, the next guy is going to have the same exact problems. And especially if it's somebody coming in who has no political capital in a business where they are the brand new CEO, they can't afford to go and just immediately switch on a dime. I mean, I mean, yeah, they're kind of stuck in this way, and that's a tough position for Tim Cook. But there's also the flip side of that, which is he has leverage. He is incredibly successful as their CEO. He has done so much for that company to grow it from where it was when Steve Jobs handed over the reins to him.

Dan Moren [01:57:28]:
You can use that and force, you know, people to try and make decisions, at least try.

Jason Snell [01:57:32]:
Try.

Leo Laporte [01:57:34]:
Yeah. We're gonna take a break. When we come back, picks of the week. So if you would prepare them, I would be very grateful. Our show today brought to you by our club members. I just looked at the numbers for this year and the club now pays about, or supports about a third of our operating costs. That's a huge amount. So thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:57:56]:
I am very grateful. And if you're not a member of the club, I'd love to get you in the club. It makes a big difference to us, keeps us going, keeps the shows going, keeps our hosts paid. Keeps our, our staff paid, and you get some benefits. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club, the Club Twit Discord, all the special programming we do. If you're not a member, can we have it? Can we please join us? twit.tv/clubtwit. We'd love to have you in the club.

Leo Laporte [01:58:25]:
Time for our picks of the week. Mr. Dan Moren, why don't you kick things off?

Dan Moren [01:58:30]:
Sure, uh, a TV show that I've really been enjoying recently— I, it kind of been sitting there because it came out I think at the end of last year, and I've sort of filed it away as, oh, I'll get to it one of these moments, uh, and I didn't until just last week or two— is Ponies on Peacock, which I love the trailer.

Leo Laporte [01:58:47]:
I haven't seen the show yet, but I love the trailer.

Dan Moren [01:58:49]:
It's very good. Uh, Ponies, Persons of No Interest— the premise is it's 1977 in the Soviet Union There are two women who are basically wives of CIA agents at the Moscow station, and their husbands are killed during an operation, and they want to figure out what happened. So they basically volunteer themselves as agents for the station. It manages to do a great job of walking the line between having some like legit great thriller and tension moments, as well as being very, very funny. Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones is the lead. Lead, uh, and she's paired with a young actress who I wasn't really familiar with before this, Haley Lou Richardson. They're both great. They have an incredible dynamic.

Dan Moren [01:59:34]:
I appreciate how much this show is willing to not only foreground two women as these characters but also just like have a sensibility about it that deals with some of the positions of these women who are like essentially, you know, trailing on after their husbands in these assignments and then get the ability to literally become agents in their own life as well as have agency over their own life. Uh, great supporting cast. Adrian Lester from the fantastic BBC— or BBC show Hustle from many years ago is in this. Um, a bunch of other folks from little roles, and then just a ton of people who they've like— I swear, straight out of central casting for like Soviet Russia in the 1970s. They really— they nail the look, the feel, the production values are great. I am obviously a huge Cold War spy fan, and this really scratched the itch for me. Good.

Leo Laporte [02:00:25]:
I love that. I love that.

Dan Moren [02:00:27]:
It's good.

Jason Snell [02:00:28]:
It's a lot of fun.

Dan Moren [02:00:30]:
Um, I, I just, I'm literally, I, I think I have like half of the last episode to go, so maybe it all falls apart in those last like 20 minutes. But so far I would definitely recommend it if you're, you enjoy that kind of thing. I don't know if they're doing a second season or anything. I haven't really, since I'm just watching it, I hadn't seen any news about that one way or the other. But, uh, I feel like it's been really solid.

Leo Laporte [02:00:50]:
Peacock, ponies, persons of no interest. I watched Train Dreams last night. I'm trying to watch all the Academy Award-nominated movies. That is a beautiful, beautiful— it was.

Dan Moren [02:01:00]:
A little, little depressing though. It's, it's a very light these days. I know, it's about.

Leo Laporte [02:01:04]:
You.

Dan Moren [02:01:04]:
Life.

Leo Laporte [02:01:05]:
Did ever see Werner Herzog's Perfect Days? It's like that. It's a just a kind of day in the life of— well, a life of a life, because this one goes on. But, uh, I thought it was quite beautiful, but Um, yeah, good. I'm going to watch ponies. Thank you.

Jason Snell [02:01:19]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:01:19]:
Thank you. Um, I'm going to mention, I haven't tried it yet, but I am going to mention it as a, as a pick. I don't usually do picks, but I do use prompters, teleprompters. And I thought this is such a clever idea, a teleprompter for your Mac that uses the notch. Well, it doesn't, it can't use the notch, but it's right under the notch. And since the notch holds your camera, that's a perfect place for the teleprompter. It's called $49 Moody, or $59 for a light lifetime. I haven't tried it because I have my own actual teleprompter over the camera.

Leo Laporte [02:01:53]:
But I think if you do a lot of Zoom calls and you— or you're a YouTube star and you're trying to read stuff on camera, this is probably a pretty clever idea. Just came out this week. Moody. I like the name too. And I just love the idea of using the notch for something. Something, anything. Andy and Notco pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:13]:
This is Hourly Comics Day, at least this week is kind of Hourly Comics Day. 20 years ago, a bunch of artists, cartoonists, decided that, hey, let's all do a challenge together where we will spend the entire day drawing like a com— basically documenting our day, like one comic strip, like an hour on like what's going on in the day. And so, and this is the 20th year that they've been doing it, uh, and the results are really, really amazing. I'm finding that if you go to the Hourly Hourly Comics— Comic Day hashtag on Instagram or Tumblr, almost anywhere, you're bound to pick up a list of really, really good cartoonists that you're going to want to follow, whose work you're going to enjoy for many, many years to come. And it's, it's a really, really tough challenge. There are some that do amazing, like, finished, polished comic strips, like 8, 9, 10 of them that cover the course of the day. And maybe they'll wait a few days to, like, actually finish writing them up. Maybe they won't.

Andy Ihnatko [02:03:08]:
Some of them are just— some people are just like, I'm just gonna do— draw and post one an hour as quickly as possible. And even that's kind of interesting because it's a very, very loose sort of composition, but it's something that I look forward to like each and every year because once again, there's some of my favorite cartoonists I discovered like Lucy Nicely, uh, mostly because of, hey, wow, it's Hourly Comics Day. Who is that? My God, that art is wonderful. Her storytelling is impeccable. And wow, she has graphic novels. I'm going to buy like almost all of them. Uh, so, uh, there is there is a, a website hourlycomicsday.com that has links to like hashtags on the services. But again, if you just go pretty much everywhere, where graphics gets uh, and, posted, uh, and do a search for Hourly Comic Day, Hourly Comics Day, HCD.

Andy Ihnatko [02:03:50]:
Uh, put aside a couple hours because you're gonna have a lot of fun looking at a lot of great cartoons.

Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
Yeah, it's just, uh, blue skies full of them. Instagram, uh, really cool, really neat. So they have to do one comic in one hour? I don't— what is it?

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:04]:
I mean, it's, it's loosey-goosey. They can do it however they want. Some of them actually do it like has a sprint where every single hour they're gonna spend like 5 or 10 minutes finding something to draw about.

Leo Laporte [02:04:13]:
Oh, neat.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:14]:
Some of them, however, like I think like Lucy Nicely, like my friend Daniel Carcetto, will basically do just keep notes on what they want to draw and then over the next 2 or 3 days, they will draw all of the scenes that they basically took notes on over the course of the day. They can implement this any way that they wanna do it, which is why, again, there's some, the ones that are really, really polished are great. The ones that are really, really spontaneous are great.

Jason Snell [02:04:37]:
Great.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:37]:
There's so much to choose from that it's, it's, it's quite a nice little artistic buffet.

Leo Laporte [02:04:43]:
Here's one called oops.png. Oops, I forgot about Hourly Comics. Yeah, thank you, Andy. Uh, Jason Snell, you're, you're the last but not least pick of the week.

Jason Snell [02:04:55]:
All right, we're actually going to go back to Peacock a little bit. I didn't know Dan and I were such in such sync that we were going to talk about NBCUniversal streaming service, but I am I am pick— picking— it's, it's not a draft, whatever. My pick of the week is, uh, curling. Yeah, the entire sport of curling.

Dan Moren [02:05:11]:
Curling, Jason?

Jason Snell [02:05:12]:
All of curling, Dan. All of curling.

Leo Laporte [02:05:15]:
It's an Olympic sport, ladies and gentlemen.

Jason Snell [02:05:17]:
It's an Olympic sport. It's a Winter Olympic sport. The Winter Olympics are happening now. The US won its first mixed doubles medal ever. Um, it is— that happened today. Canada didn't even make it to the medal round, folks.

Leo Laporte [02:05:31]:
Shocking.

Jason Snell [02:05:32]:
Uh, and, uh, and you, wherever you live, are probably near a curling club, so also So if you don't want to just watch it on Peacock, go to the Olympics tab and click on curling. It's very fun. The men's and women's team sports are— our team events are about to start, uh, on Wednesday, tomorrow as we record this. Uh, but you can also, uh, if you're in the United States, find a curling club near you. All the curling clubs in America are definitely doing learn to curls. They're probably happening elsewhere. Try curling events where you come out and you can do it. You you can, can be out there for a half an hour or an hour and be doing curling.

Jason Snell [02:06:07]:
It is an Olympic sport. It is very hard at the high level, but actually it's not that hard to get started and play and actually get the rock all the way down and into the house. So you can go to usacurling.org. When you go there, you can click on Start Curling and you'll, you'll be able to find a club right there.

Leo Laporte [02:06:26]:
That's your club, isn't it?

Jason Snell [02:06:27]:
The San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club is my club. And, uh, and we are doing lots and lots of tri-curling events, especially in the aftermath of— during and after the Winter Olympics, because you figure there'll be.

Leo Laporte [02:06:39]:
A lot of interest, huh?

Jason Snell [02:06:40]:
Leo, I started curling 4 years ago. You tell me. I mean, literally after the Winter last year. Olympics And, uh, yeah, and if you're in the Bay Area, we have a dedicated— some places they do it, you know, at weird hours on ice rinks that are also used for figure skating and hockey, stuff like that.

Leo Laporte [02:06:55]:
You're in the Silicon Valley Curling Club, do it in the Sharks arena.

Jason Snell [02:06:58]:
You can. Arena ice is not as good. It's not as consistent as dedicated curling ice, which is what we have in Oakland right now. We're the only club in California that has dedicated ice. But, um, regardless of what ice is near you, try it out. I thought it was a real kick. It is known as chess on ice. It is strategic.

Jason Snell [02:07:17]:
There's a lot of strategy involved. It is something you got to think about, but also then it's physical. I, I often will liken it to playing chess chess where you can't just play chess. You have to take the piece and stand like several feet away from the board and toss the piece and hope it lands on the right square. So it's not only is it strategic, one of the fun things about curling strategy is when your shot goes awry, uh, it's like you just stop thinking about that strategy and you get to make a new strategy up every time because you just got to play the board as it is in front of you. It's a lot of fun. I love it. I do it twice a week.

Leo Laporte [02:07:51]:
And it's a nice community. You like the people who are other curlers?

Jason Snell [02:07:54]:
Curling is a super welcoming community. Uh, there are no officials on the ice. Actually, you'll see at the Olympics, it is— unless they call for like a measurement, it's the spirit of curling. Everybody shakes hands afterward. The winner buys. You always go and buy beer for the other team afterward. That's called broom stacking. It is all part of this very friendly and open, uh, community.

Jason Snell [02:08:14]:
So I highly recommend it. My wife and I tried it 4 years ago and we love it. Now we do it twice a week. So, um, and It's super, uh, super open in the sense too, that we've got, we've got little kids who are curling and we've got people in their like seventies who are curling. Uh, there's wheelchair curling, which is very easy to do. There's lots of, lots of openness for people to try it. And, uh, you may get hooked.

Leo Laporte [02:08:35]:
So people won't laugh at me if I come out there and— Oh no, not at all.

Jason Snell [02:08:39]:
Not at all. It's a, we, it's super welcoming. And then if you don't want to do that and you just want to sit on your couch, you know, all of that curling is on Peacock and a bunch of it's on USA Network and, uh, CNBC in the, in the US. But also if you're in the US and you're just streaming, just look at Peacock and check it out. It's fun.

Leo Laporte [02:08:56]:
In fact, right after this show, you can go watch the— You can go.

Jason Snell [02:08:59]:
Watch the replay of the gold and the bronze medal matches of mixed doubles. And then like I said, the 4-person version will be starting tomorrow.

Andy Ihnatko [02:09:06]:
Jason, can I ask a relevant question? Does Apple Watch do curling tracking?

Jason Snell [02:09:12]:
I absolutely have a curling workout on my Apple Watch. It is in there. And the answer, the, the, the sort of sub-question there is, is it a workout? And it's like, if you're sweeping, it is really a workout. Sweeping the ice, which you do in curling, you sweep the ice to make the rock go further.

Leo Laporte [02:09:29]:
Everybody gets to sweep though, right? There's no, there's not just one sweeper.

Jason Snell [02:09:32]:
Yeah, no, everybody gets to sweep. You kind of rotate around as you're, as you're shooting when you're playing the 4-person game. And the, and the idea is you push the rock down the ice. You can't make it go slower, but you can make it go faster by sweeping in front of it, which causes friction. It's a little sort of sandpapery texture on the broom, and that makes it— you know, there's a lot of debate about exactly how curling works in terms of physics to this day, but basically—.

Leo Laporte [02:09:55]:
I was thinking it slightly melts the ice to give it a— yeah, that's.

Jason Snell [02:09:59]:
Basically— it slightly melts the ice. It may also, uh, kind of like make it a little less smooth, which actually might help. But you can make it go further, or you can hold it steady or make it curl a little bit more depending on where you want the rock to go. So you can steer it a little bit, but if you throw it too hard, it's gone. Isaac Newton's in charge then. You can't do anything to stop it. They can do— so there's a broom.

Leo Laporte [02:10:19]:
But there's also another thing. There's like a little scraper thing, right?

Jason Snell [02:10:22]:
Uh, no, that's the— that's the broom.

Leo Laporte [02:10:23]:
It's all brooms.

Jason Snell [02:10:24]:
It's all broom. That's all. They scrape the ice to set it up, but like, it's all brooms and the— and rocks and stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:10:30]:
That's it. And the rocks can only come from one place in Scotland, right?

Jason Snell [02:10:34]:
There's a whole story about like the granite comes from Scotland and they weigh 42 pounds, and all of that is true, but you don't ever have to lift them. I know it also seems intimidating because like those rocks are really big. They stay on the ice, and the ice is real slippery. Also, you don't need any special equipment because you can just go out there in your shoes.

Leo Laporte [02:10:51]:
What?

Dan Moren [02:10:51]:
And there's a little street.

Leo Laporte [02:10:52]:
And there's a little—.

Dan Moren [02:10:52]:
Shoes?

Leo Laporte [02:10:52]:
Yeah, special curling shoes?

Jason Snell [02:10:55]:
No, you can't— you can get them, but you can, you can curl in your street shoes. They should be clean, you know, but we got a little sticky stuff for you to step on. And then there's a little slider you can get, um, when you need to do the sliding. You, you step on the slider, and then you shoot the stone, and then you step off the slider again. So you can do it. You don't need any special equipment. Equipment to start? All of curling.

Leo Laporte [02:11:13]:
I like things like, uh, croquet and bowls and stuff, and pétanque. It's similar to that except it's on ice.

Jason Snell [02:11:20]:
It is, yeah. The only difference is you got to wear a jacket.

Leo Laporte [02:11:23]:
Yeah, a little chillier.

Jason Snell [02:11:24]:
It is, it is. Our ice house is probably in the kind of like mid to upper 40s in order to keep that ice frozen down, down low. But it's, uh, you know, I just wear, I just wear a jacket and some gloves.

Leo Laporte [02:11:37]:
There was no— in other words, there's no curling on the beach in Hawaii.

Dan Moren [02:11:41]:
No, that's a different sand curling.

Jason Snell [02:11:43]:
Sand curling is the whole friction, but no one can win.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:46]:
Thinking about curling. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:11:49]:
Jason Snell, SixColors.com, that's the place to go. All of his podcasts at SixColors.com/Jason.

Jason Snell [02:11:56]:
Yes, indeed.

Leo Laporte [02:11:57]:
And of course, uh, you do, together with Dan Moren, you do the Six Colors podcast.

Jason Snell [02:12:02]:
Yes, that's for for our, our members. So you gotta, you gotta give us some money and you can listen to a podcast that we do that I think is really good. Members say they, they love it. That, that may be the reason they give us money as well.

Dan Moren [02:12:11]:
And we don't coerce them at all. They just unprompted, they say how much they love it.

Jason Snell [02:12:16]:
They kind of do. It's wild. It was it was never, never a core part of our membership strategy, and yet— so people love podcasts, Leo, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:12:24]:
I've heard that. I've, I've yet to see the evidence, but I've heard it.

Jason Snell [02:12:28]:
One day we'll know.

Leo Laporte [02:12:29]:
One day we'll know. One day they'll look back and say, well, they must have known something, inventing this thing called podcasts.

Andy Ihnatko [02:12:35]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:12:36]:
Dan, it's so great to see you. Thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. It's always a pleasure. Sixcolors.com. Also, uh, don't forget his books at— what is it, danmoran.com?

Dan Moren [02:12:45]:
That'll work. dmoran.com, danmoran.com. I own them all.

Leo Laporte [02:12:48]:
You own all the Morens.

Dan Moren [02:12:49]:
I took Emma Stone's advice about all the domain names.

Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
That was very funny, that Squarespace ad, until I think about $8 million plus whatever they paid Emma Stone. And whenever they paid your ghost for directing it. That's the amazing thing.

Dan Moren [02:13:04]:
They could, they could throw a little bit of that to some of my other podcasts.

Leo Laporte [02:13:07]:
We could use— exactly, they used to advertise on our show. They said we were too expensive.

Dan Moren [02:13:13]:
For the return. Yeah, well, we give them a stone.

Leo Laporte [02:13:16]:
It's no fun watching the Super Bowl with Lisa because half of our advertisers are on it, and, and she says, they said it was too expensive, they said it was too expensive. Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you, it is not $8 million per 30-second ad. We give you a full minute. Okay, I'm just saying.

Dan Moren [02:13:33]:
It's good stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:13:34]:
Thank you, Dan.

Dan Moren [02:13:35]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:13:36]:
And uh, Mr., Mr. Inatko, thank you so much for being here. Thank the librarians for letting you once again occupy their domain.

Andy Ihnatko [02:13:45]:
As always, this is— again, this is a safe, warm space I don't have to heat myself, which is why there's a lot to be said for that. I'm I'm sure, sure that Dan's in the same boat where it's like, how— I don't have to be completely warm in the house, do I?

Dan Moren [02:13:59]:
Just close all the doors to the office, get a hoodie.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:02]:
What's that my dad used to say? Just put on a sweater. Yeah, I think that's— yeah, I think I'm gonna do that.

Leo Laporte [02:14:06]:
It's been a cold couple of weeks. Where, where are you located, Dan?

Dan Moren [02:14:09]:
I'm in Boston. So.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:12]:
We'Re near— we every— we've, we've had the longest unbroken series sequences of like sub-freezing weather Either normally, normally we'll get like, hey, wow, geez, it's going to be 22 degrees today and only like 9 degrees overnight. Gosh, that's going to be a hard night and night or two nights. And it's like, is it going to be above freezing any day next week?

Leo Laporte [02:14:31]:
Yeah, it usually doesn't last this long. Okay.

Dan Moren [02:14:33]:
It's been a lot.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
We had Lou Maresca on Sunday on Twitter. He's out your way as well. And he said, yeah, we got another 18 inches last night. I said, what? Yeah. Because when I was a kid growing up in Providence, it rarely snowed. Oh well.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:47]:
Yeah, I think that, I think that come, come March when things thaw out, I'm finally going to fix those two windows that are a little bit leaky because they have, they have, honestly, I'm not irresponsible that way. It's just that they have never come into play where it's like if those two, if that little crack were completely sealed as opposed to just stuffed with things, maybe I would gain that extra 2.2 degrees that I absolutely need in early February. It's never been the Bad. I rarely— it's been this bad.

Leo Laporte [02:15:13]:
Well, stay warm, you guys. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, uh, 11 Pacific. That's, uh, 14— you— 1400 East Coast time. I think that's right. Yeah, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do the show live. We stream it on Discord for the club members, but also on— Patrick Delahanty, is that your backyard? Holy moly! Holly, we stream in— I'm sorry, our, uh, our engineer, our, um, our ops guy lives in Massachusetts and he has quite a bit of snow in the backyard there.

Leo Laporte [02:15:50]:
Um, we also stream on YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick, so you can watch us there as well if you're so inclined. After-the-fact on-demand versions of the show available at our website, twit.tv/mbw. You can also, um, you can also find it on YouTube. There's a video that, you know, all the videos, dedicated videos on YouTube. Or subscribe, you get your choice of audio or video on your favorite podcast client. Leave us a good review if you will, help spread the word about MacBreak Weekly. Thanks again to our club members for your support, we really appreciate it.

Leo Laporte [02:16:26]:
For the rest of you, I think it's time to get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next week.