MacBreak Weekly 1018 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Very special edition. Of course. Andy and Christina and Jason are here, but so is one of the early MacBreak Weekly panelists, David Pogue. You may remember him from the New York Times and CBS Sunday Morning. His new book is out, Apple: The First 50 Years. And David celebrates with us next on MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is MacBreak Weekly. Episode 1018, recorded Tuesday, March 31st, 2026: 50 Years and Still Going Strong. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Hello, everybody. You're glad you're here.

Leo Laporte [00:00:48]:
The day before Apple's 50th birthday, I am very pleased to introduce our fine panel. Jason Snell is here from Six \Colors.

Jason Snell [00:00:56]:
Hello.

Leo Laporte [00:00:58]:
Buenos dias.

Jason Snell [00:00:58]:
Good to be here.

Leo Laporte [00:00:59]:
Andy Ihnatko from the library. Hola. Hello.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:05]:
Your beautiful text. How was your work?

Leo Laporte [00:01:08]:
Ms. Christina Warren of GitHub fame. Hello, Christina. And her giant microphone. Hello.

Christina Warren [00:01:15]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
I think it's a perspective thing.

Christina Warren [00:01:19]:
It's a perspective thing. I'm still trying to dial in my setup, but we'll.

Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
I feel like there's a gap to Mr. Jobs left on your shelving there. Is there. Was there something there before?

Christina Warren [00:01:31]:
Yeah, no, there's a laptop and it fell and I need to, like, put it.

Leo Laporte [00:01:35]:
Yeah, the laptop fell. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, you know, because we are coming up on the 50th anniversary. April Fool's Day is 1776. No, 1976. Although that would be good. Apple was incorporated, and we thought it'd be kind of fun to celebrate with a guy who just wrote a rather large book all about it, Mr. David Pogue.

Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
You know him from CBS Sunday Morning and many, many other places. Hey, David. Good to see you.

David Pogue [00:02:10]:
Good to see you.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
Of all, congratulations. The book came out a day. A day after your birthday, I think it did.

Jason Snell [00:02:18]:
Sorry to make you vomit.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
I apologize.

Jason Snell [00:02:22]:
He's allergic to praise.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:23]:
This I just book tour where you're like, I can't stand talking about the book anymore.

Leo Laporte [00:02:30]:
Poor guy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:31]:
I'm out.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
He's so sick of it. He's been on every show, every podcast. This is the last one, David. Then you get to rest.

David Pogue [00:02:39]:
I was at a book signing last night and this. This guy came up to get his book signed. He goes, you have taken over my podcast.

Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
It's true. Well, sorry, one more. By the way, Larry Thomas, Clack Shaker Heights Class of 81 says hi.

Jason Snell [00:02:55]:
Oh, my gosh.

David Pogue [00:02:58]:
Hi, Larry.

Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
Watching on YouTube.

David Pogue [00:03:00]:
That's cool.

Jason Snell [00:03:02]:
Podcast Larry has seen you on this month.

Leo Laporte [00:03:05]:
Do you go to your high school reunions, David?

Jason Snell [00:03:07]:
I do.

David Pogue [00:03:08]:
And I spoke last week at a thing called the City Club of Cleveland, and my class, Shaker High class of 81, behind my back, bought a table. Twelve of them showed up to surprise me.

Leo Laporte [00:03:21]:
Well, that's nice. That's nice that you're still on good terms with Larry.

David Pogue [00:03:24]:
Thomas was not there.

Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
No. Well, Larry's here via YouTube, and he looks well. Although, as everyone else at your high school reunion, they all seem to get so old, didn't they? I don't understand how that happens. Maybe that hasn't happened to you yet, David. Apple the first 50 years. Beautiful book. You obviously. Well, your publisher spent a lot of money making a full color.

Leo Laporte [00:03:50]:
Huge. Could it have been any bigger? It was the limit.

David Pogue [00:03:54]:
It was. They gave me a words per page count to aim for, but they said, 600 pages. That's it, because otherwise we lose money on this book. And so I turned it in according to their formula at the right length, and they said, no, you got to cut another 150 pages.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:13]:
God bless them.

Leo Laporte [00:04:14]:
So. So is there anything, really, any juicy gossip and anecdotes that fell to the cutting room floor?

David Pogue [00:04:20]:
There are some pretty good ones. There's the great story about Woz showing off the prototype Apple II at the first CES that he attended. And he'd never been to Vegas before, and he went out and did the town. He was really exhausted. He stayed up till four in the morning, and then he came back and he thought, you know, there's only one disk with the OS and my programs on it. I should probably make a backup of that. And he was so tired, he wound up copying the blank onto the software. And so he wound up, before the show opened, he wound up having to retype the entire operating system from memory.

Leo Laporte [00:04:59]:
No, come on, really?

David Pogue [00:05:02]:
I put that in the audio book because I could, but it's no longer in the prints.

Leo Laporte [00:05:07]:
Wild. Did you record the audiobook?

David Pogue [00:05:10]:
I did. It's 23 and a half hours long.

Leo Laporte [00:05:14]:
Oh, my gosh.

David Pogue [00:05:15]:
And you know what? I did nobody tell anybody this. This is a secret. 21 hours in, I recorded an Easter egg. Like, I'm in the middle of, like, talking, talking, talking. And then I go, by the way, if you're still listening, send an email to this special email address, and I'll send you a PDF of outtakes. And it's so much fun to see who's finally getting there. We're up to like a thousand people so far.

Leo Laporte [00:05:39]:
Well, G.E. geeking Tom, in our club, Twit Discord said there's an Easter egg in the book. I listened to the whole thing. Geeking. Tom, did you get your secret PDF yet? That's awesome. Well, we won't give away any more of the secrets. We'll make people. Well, you just did.

Leo Laporte [00:05:55]:
I guess now people are. But that's okay because it makes them

Jason Snell [00:05:58]:
listen to all 21 of the audiobook now.

Leo Laporte [00:06:00]:
Yeah, brilliant. Yeah. He says he hasn't emailed you yet. He just got busy.

David Pogue [00:06:05]:
Oh, fine. Wow, look at the screen. You have up Amazon selling this thing for $34.

Leo Laporte [00:06:14]:
32% off.

David Pogue [00:06:16]:
That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:06:17]:
Do you know you have. How many books have you published now?

David Pogue [00:06:22]:
Well, it's like 125, but that's counting new edition, like iPhone 10, the missing manual. IPhone 11, the missing manual. It's, you know, not.

Leo Laporte [00:06:31]:
You farm those out. I mean, I wrote 13 and I only really wrote two.

Jason Snell [00:06:37]:
Dude, why didn't I think of this?

Leo Laporte [00:06:41]:
I hate you.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:42]:
Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:06:42]:
I sent you.

Jason Snell [00:06:43]:
I know.

Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
I sent you pictures earlier from the cruise that we were on back in. I think it was 2007 or something. 2006. And you were working on the boat on a book. Oh yeah, nonstop. I mean, you don't do 125 books without a non stop. Are you going to ever stop or you just. You love doing it?

David Pogue [00:07:01]:
You know, I've sworn to my wife I'm taking the second half of 2026 off this, this Apple book. I mean, it very nearly killed me. It was like any. As you know, any other book, if you get sick or things get busy, you can shift the ship date by a week or two. But this one, like April 1st deadline, that's not moving. So this book had to be out.

Leo Laporte [00:07:24]:
Amazon is cooperating. I see. I can get free delivery tomorrow if I order it right now for and at 32% off. Why wouldn't you?

David Pogue [00:07:33]:
That's crazy. That's. How can they be making money? I mean, maybe they don't care.

Leo Laporte [00:07:39]:
No one's ever asked that. How could Amazon be making money?

Jason Snell [00:07:44]:
They make it up on volume.

Leo Laporte [00:07:46]:
That's it. And advertising. Yeah. I don't want to monopolize you. We've got a wonderful panel, Andy. I know you know everybody on the panel, they're all fans of yours. I know. So if anybody.

Leo Laporte [00:07:58]:
Andy or Jason. Jason, you already interviewed David.

Jason Snell [00:08:02]:
Yeah. We talked on Upgrade about this and it was a really nice conversation, David. So I want you to talk about the theory that I had, which I think you share, which is Apple. One of Apple's secrets is that they make the whole thing themselves. Like the IBM PC came and swept every other computer maker away and Apple was like, nope, we're just going to make it ourselves. And they still. And it's 50 years later and they're still like, it's literally their, their business model was formed in the 70s and they still have it.

David Pogue [00:08:35]:
It's funny because, you know, there's this famous story that Steve Jobs told Tim Cook on Steve Jobs deathbed. Never ask what would Steve do? Just do what's right. And yet, and yet, if you look at what Apple does, I mean, his ghost is in every meeting at Apple. Like all, all those through lines like you just mentioned, like build the whole widget, secrecy, focus on very few features and very few products, make tiny targeted acquisitions, not big ones. All the things that Apple always, that Jobs always believed in, Apple still believes in. So they really haven't deviated much from the Steve precepts.

Leo Laporte [00:09:12]:
Now, obviously Steve wasn't around for you to enter. Jobs wasn't around for you to interview for this book, but I know, I'm sure you've talked to him many, many times.

David Pogue [00:09:20]:
I did. Well, I mean, when I was at the times for 13 years, you know, like, like the other journalists for big publications, I got 15 minutes with him twice a year.

Leo Laporte [00:09:29]:
You know you got the first iPhone, right? You were one of the six.

David Pogue [00:09:32]:
I was one of those lucky four. Four, yeah. And I. And I lost it. Did I ever tell you this story?

Leo Laporte [00:09:36]:
No. What?

Christina Warren [00:09:37]:
Oh, my gosh.

Leo Laporte [00:09:38]:
Did you leave it at a bar?

David Pogue [00:09:40]:
No, no, I. It was Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, and Newsweek. We four guys got the original iPhone before it was shipping.

Leo Laporte [00:09:51]:
David Polk, Stephen Levy, Walt Mossberg and Ned Big.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:55]:
Ed.

Leo Laporte [00:09:55]:
Big Ned Big.

Christina Warren [00:09:56]:
Yeah.

David Pogue [00:09:57]:
And I had a talk to do in Lake Como, Italy, and so I got on a red eye, put the thing in my pocket, and in the taxi on the way to the speaking engagement, I kind of slumped back. And you remember the first iPhone was like a capsule. It was shiny plastic back. It slipped out of my pocket into the taxi seat and, And I know. And then fortunately, fortunately there's a happy ending because otherwise Apple never would have spoken to me again. I had the receipt when I got out and we called the taxi company and they got the guy to come back and he was screaming at me in Italian because I wasted his time. I, I emptied my wallet to this,

Christina Warren [00:10:37]:
I was going to say, gave him every dollar, every euro. I did like, here you go.

Leo Laporte [00:10:42]:
I was going to Say, you know, I got this call from an Italian taxi driver and he found this in the backseat of his car. David, I don't know if he'd want.

Andy Ihnatko [00:10:50]:
It's a beautiful cigarette case, but I can't get it open.

Leo Laporte [00:10:52]:
What am I doing with it? Probably he had no idea what it was. Right? He didn't.

David Pogue [00:10:56]:
He thought it was like a pager or something.

Jason Snell [00:10:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:10:58]:
Because no one had this thing. So what do you think Steve would have thought? I mean, this is rank speculation, but what would he have thought on this anniversary tomorrow? Did he have any idea it would last 50 years, for instance?

David Pogue [00:11:13]:
It depends on which Steve you're talking about. Right. I mean, There was the 1.0 Steve and there was the 2.0 Steve that did the imac and the ipod and the iPhone. I think he probably had a good idea that this thing was going to roll. There are some things I don't think you would like. He would not like the proliferation of models. He would not like the iPhone getting so big.

Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
He famously, when he came back to Apple, drew a quadrant of four products. You know, business, consumer, portable desktop. And they. And said we should have four products. That's it.

David Pogue [00:11:48]:
Yeah. And he. And they were shipping 50 at the time. They were shipping 50.

Leo Laporte [00:11:52]:
That's because they had clones back then.

Christina Warren [00:11:55]:
But even aside from that, all the performas.

David Pogue [00:11:57]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Jobs argument was, you know, if we only have four, then we can put our top engineers on every machine.

Christina Warren [00:12:05]:
And.

David Pogue [00:12:05]:
And the part that I learned researching the book was that this was not a popular decision. Jobs was not hailed as the savior coming back to save Apple. I mean, he had never had success. I mean, the Apple II was kind of wozes. But the Apple III failed, the Lisa failed, the Macintosh essentially failed. While he was there, next failed. So he'd never really had a hit. And now he came back to Apple as the conquering hero and the first thing he does is.

David Pogue [00:12:31]:
Is cancel every engineer's projects.

Leo Laporte [00:12:33]:
Yeah, that's not a good way to.

Jason Snell [00:12:35]:
People were leaving.

David Pogue [00:12:36]:
I mean, it was a.

Leo Laporte [00:12:37]:
How about. Was what you've talked to us for the book.

David Pogue [00:12:39]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:40]:
Was he surprised at the success of Apple?

David Pogue [00:12:44]:
I don't think so. He, you know, he created that Apple one, that original board for the purpose of. Remember at the time, computers were not anything that people owned or had even seen. They were. Computers were big things in movies and industry. And his whole idea was we could make this so individuals could own one, mainly him. And that's arguably still Apple's mission. Right.

David Pogue [00:13:10]:
Taking complex technology and Making it beautiful for everybody.

Leo Laporte [00:13:13]:
You said Steve wanted it to be small. He didn't like the idea of a giant phone. He would have kept the iPhone mini.

Jason Snell [00:13:21]:
Yeah, but then he would have seen the sales figures and he would have changed his mind and said, oh, no, no.

Leo Laporte [00:13:26]:
After all we know now.

Jason Snell [00:13:28]:
Yeah, because he did. He was a good. I mean, I think that's one of the great lessons of Steve Jobs as a manager, is he held onto these ideas until he was proven that they were wrong, and then he immediately would just drop them and switch sides. He didn't hold on to him. Yeah, smart.

David Pogue [00:13:43]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:44]:
Well, speaking of CEOs, like, I want to. I want to know your opinion on what was Scully's biggest contribution to Apple. Even looking back all this time, like, what did. What did he lay the foundations for that Apple really, really benefited from, for the future of the company.

David Pogue [00:14:00]:
I mean, that that period when Jobs was gone and Scully and the other CEOs took over is generally sort of disregarded from the Apple history. It's considered a big crash and burn. But Sculley, for example, he did a lot. Remember, he launched the Power Books, the first really successful laptop in the world. He successfully moved the Macs onto RISC processors that made them much faster and much better. And on the first page of the book, there's this. In the introduction, there's this list of things you probably didn't know. And the last one is sort of provocative.

David Pogue [00:14:34]:
It's that the Newton saved Apple. And I will now, for the first time, except in the book, explain that. So Scully was looking for a processor for the Newton. They had had one from AT&T and it was too complicated and too power hungry. So they found this tiny company in England called arm. Arm. And it was low power, very fast RISC processor. And he's like, this would be perfect for us.

David Pogue [00:15:05]:
Let's invest $3 million in this tiny company. Well, ARM, of course, went on to license their chip to everybody and everything. And now there's one of its chip designs in every iMac. IPhone, iPad, watch that anybody owns. By the time Apple was ready to buy next in 1996, that $3 million investment was now worth $800 million. Without it, they never would have been able to buy NEXT and bring Jobs back to.

Leo Laporte [00:15:35]:
Wow, what a story.

Jason Snell [00:15:38]:
Also, I mean, and this is in the book, David, I read the whole thing on my vacation. As you know, the. The fact that, like, Jobs didn't want to put slots in a Mac. Like the Mac didn't take off in terms of sales until the Mac 2, which was a product that Jobs refused to make. It was only after Jobs left that the Mac took off. Up until that point, the Mac was just kind of like he shipped the original Mac. But the, the, the growth of the Mac as a product happened in Scully's era, not in Jobs first era.

David Pogue [00:16:06]:
Yeah, that's right. And for all Jobs gift of taste and focus and knowing what the future is, he made that same botch three times. So he botched the Mac by keeping it closed after having the lesson of the Apple 2 with eight slots. So he couldn't.

Jason Snell [00:16:23]:
Which he hated too. But Woz insisted.

David Pogue [00:16:25]:
That's right, that's right. Woz gave an ultimatum. He did it again with the ipod, insisting that he would never make it for Windows. So the ipod didn't sell especially well the first year.

Christina Warren [00:16:36]:
No, in the second year, it was when they brought it to Windows, that second gen, that it suddenly became not only a huge seller, but ironically a massive reason for people to buy Macs because they liked the ipod experience so much.

Leo Laporte [00:16:48]:
I have in my hands a framed Apple II FX motherboard which stood for two effing expensive.

Jason Snell [00:16:56]:
Yeah. Oh yeah, look at fast though there

Leo Laporte [00:16:58]:
it has those three slots, right?

Jason Snell [00:17:00]:
Yeah, that was opening the Mac 2 totally changed the game. David, after people read your book, which they should absolutely buy and read in May, there's a book coming out by Jeffrey Cain called Steve Jobs in Exile. And I read that, I read a pre release of that and boy, you want to talk about a list of all the things Steve Jobs did wrong. Oh boy, you just say next.

David Pogue [00:17:22]:
I mean, I'm reading it now too. It's really good.

Jason Snell [00:17:25]:
Oh, it's brutal though. It is like that guy Steve Jobs, say what you will about him. Not infallible.

David Pogue [00:17:31]:
Not infallible. I mean, he made the same mistake a third time with the iPhone, right? He said you're going to have 16 apps and that's it. There's going to be no app store, closed systems, and for the first year, it didn't sell very well either.

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:45]:
Yeah, there was a lot of dogma, like in the history of Apple that still sticks around, like where you have to ask a question. What rational engineer, what rational product designer would make this choice in the face of overwhelming votes from the audience? They're parking at that. This is what we want.

Jason Snell [00:18:02]:
And.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:02]:
But they're not going to do it because again, Dogma, it's like, I'm not going to eat, I'm not going to eat meat on Friday. Why? Because of dogma. That's the way we were all trained.

Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
We're talking to David Pogue, the well known, of course, David Pogue, the author of a brand new book, lavish, if dare I say book, about the first 50 years of Apple computers. Apple, the first 50 years. It is out now and you can get it on Amazon for 32% off, delivered just in time for Apple's birthday tomorrow.

Jason Snell [00:18:32]:
You order now. I want to specify too, it is not a coffee table book. There are beautiful color photos in it. There are lots of them. It is great. But this is a reading with your eyes book like, or a listen with your ears book that David did so many interviews. There are many words to read. It is not one of those.

Jason Snell [00:18:48]:
There are those books and they're beautiful where it's like, oh, pictures of old computers and stuff. And David's got the pictures of old computers, but it's all text wrapped around them so that he could fit all his words in 600 pages. And so it's a real, I mean it's a real deep history. I mean what we were saying on Upgrade is it's a biography of a company instead of a person. And it really reads like that.

Leo Laporte [00:19:09]:
One of our Club Twit members says one of the things. Geeking Tom says, one of the things I appreciate about the book is he stayed with the company itself and kept telling the story during the exile years rather than following Steve off to Pixar and Next and all of that.

David Pogue [00:19:24]:
I know I was emailing with Jeffrey Cain, the author of the Steve Jobs in Exile book, which is about Jobs during the next years. And we agreed that our two books should be sold as a set because not only did we choose the same cover photo of Jobs, but his book fills in the 11 years of jobs life that I didn't stay with.

Christina Warren [00:19:47]:
So yeah, that's cool.

Leo Laporte [00:19:48]:
I think it's really a great insight that John Scully wasn't the evil, you know, replacement that some people paint him as. You might say that about Gil Amelio or.

Jason Snell [00:20:00]:
But you got to say, okay, Gil, like I just did a piece about kicking off David's book, 10 other great books about Apple history and I. The 10th book in there is on the Firing Line by Gil.

Christina Warren [00:20:10]:
Oh my God, it's amazing. It's amazing.

Jason Snell [00:20:13]:
It's super self serving and all that. And yet it does get across that idea that when Gil Amelio came in, he started Turnover Rocks where they're like, we totally have a new OS strategy and he turn over these rocks and the bugs would crawl away and he'd be like, what is happening here? You got to give him credit though. He made. I mean, maybe the ARM acquisition is a better one, but like, isn't the choice to buy next ultimately maybe the best business decision Apple ever made?

Christina Warren [00:20:36]:
Yeah, sure.

Leo Laporte [00:20:38]:
It wasn't their first choice, right? Didn't they want to buy.

Christina Warren [00:20:39]:
They wanted us. Yeah. And then that and then, and then I think that. And it's. I don't know. On the Firing Line is one of my favorite books because it is so self serving and is such a cope. And he wrote it right after he'd been fired and the whole thing is basically just him trying to be taking credit for everything good. Steve Jobs, you know, was being lauded for.

Christina Warren [00:20:59]:
And I was like, okay, but yet the one area where he does kind of try to beg off as you know, it was like you could have just taken the W and been like, well, I brought back this guy. That, that can be my legacy. But no, he spends like whole like pages about how bad his shirt was at a, at a certain like Mac World event. Like he literally talks about how terrible the shirt was and how he looked bad because people made fun of him. It's fantastic.

David Pogue [00:21:20]:
If you can believe it. I tracked Gil Amelio down and interviewed him for the book. And the one thing that sticks with me both from that interview and from the book is he would, they would have a meeting with the executive team and they would draw up their path forward. And he said, here's what we're going to do. Here's the marching orders. And nobody would do anything. They would just ignore the CEO. And then later I interviewed Jas.

David Pogue [00:21:44]:
Greg Josiak, who's now the global head of marketing at Apple, who had been there during the Gil Amelio years. And he said yes, of course we ignored him because the ideas were stupid.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:56]:
So that's why the takeover was like there was a huge vacuum that Steve Jobs filled. There was nobody moving the chess pieces. And he said, okay, great, I'll move them for you.

Leo Laporte [00:22:04]:
We should mention that David's writing a weekly column again, which you can get from his website, davidpoag.com It's a substack. Is that. Cause you just can't get enough writing.

David Pogue [00:22:15]:
You know, I really miss writing the only writing I've. I mean, I quit writing a column 12 years ago.

Leo Laporte [00:22:21]:
Right.

David Pogue [00:22:21]:
And I write my scripts for CBS Sunday Morning and I write this book, but I really miss the weekly cadence and opining. So yeah, it's a free substack newsletter

Leo Laporte [00:22:32]:
just for fun and you're always welcome to come here and opine anytime you feel like it.

David Pogue [00:22:38]:
Opine next time I have an opinion.

Jason Snell [00:22:40]:
I highly recommend David substack.

David Pogue [00:22:42]:
The.

Jason Snell [00:22:42]:
We got to the bottom of what happened on his. His landing in San Diego. I mean, it's varied and funny and, you know, I mean, David, you're such. I was one of David's editors at Macworld for a little while, and, like, David's. David's such a funny writer, and he's such a good writer, and that. It all comes through in that substack, so people should check it out. I am a happy subscriber.

Leo Laporte [00:23:02]:
Is that a nuclear power plant control panel you're standing?

Jason Snell [00:23:05]:
That is.

David Pogue [00:23:05]:
That's Three Mile island right there.

Leo Laporte [00:23:07]:
Oh, great. Don't push that button on the left there.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:11]:
That's fine. It's fine.

Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
It's all fine now.

David Pogue [00:23:14]:
I made the same joke when I was there. I said to the guy, can I press this button?

Jason Snell [00:23:20]:
Is this where Homer Simpson sits right here?

Leo Laporte [00:23:23]:
Is this where. It does look like it, doesn't it? Where's the donuts? How did you get into the Mac? I know the story a little bit, but I'd like to hear it from you. Get into this whole Apple Macintosh thing.

David Pogue [00:23:35]:
I was and is a musician. I've always been.

Leo Laporte [00:23:38]:
Do you still, by the way, do your parody songs Every.

David Pogue [00:23:40]:
I do every bookstore stop I've done on this promotional tour. I bring an electric keyboard, and I do the songs.

Leo Laporte [00:23:48]:
Worth. Worth seeing him for that alone. Just. Those are so great. So great. So you were a Broadway pianist?

David Pogue [00:23:56]:
I was. I was a conductor and an arranger and keyboard pit player for 10 years before I started doing the tech stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:24:03]:
But.

David Pogue [00:24:04]:
But the Apple thing, I mean, weirdly, I was never a computer guy. I never built one or could code or anything like that. But senior year in college, Apple had this ingenious program called the Apple University Consortium, where kids could buy Macs for half price. And my friend said, dude, you're about to graduate. You should grab that at that discount. So you have a computer. And that was my introduction to Max. And, you know, there was all this music software coming out, and it was just a natural fit for a creative guy like me.

Leo Laporte [00:24:35]:
You also became kind of computer expert to the rest of Broadway, I understand.

David Pogue [00:24:40]:
I did. I had a lot of celebrity clients.

Leo Laporte [00:24:43]:
A certain Stephen Sondheim, for instance.

David Pogue [00:24:45]:
Steed.

Leo Laporte [00:24:46]:
Yep.

David Pogue [00:24:47]:
I was this tech guy for 30 years.

Leo Laporte [00:24:49]:
And when did you start writing?

David Pogue [00:24:51]:
Immediately. Immediately. When I got the Mac, there was a. I was at Yale, and there was a Yale Mac.user group ymug, and they had a newsletter, and I started writing for them immediately. So I can truthfully say I've been writing about the Mac for 42 years.

Leo Laporte [00:25:07]:
David was at Yale a little after me. We had a Yale System 370 user group, but we didn't. There was no Apple at the time when I was actually there. No. Well, there might have been. There was the first year of Apple when I was there. You were class of 81. I was four years before that.

David Pogue [00:25:24]:
I was 85.

Leo Laporte [00:25:24]:
Yeah. 85. Sorry. Yeah. High school class.

Jason Snell [00:25:27]:
High school. 81.

Leo Laporte [00:25:27]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Pogue [00:25:28]:
We're old, man.

Leo Laporte [00:25:30]:
Not as old as I am, but you're getting there. You're a little grayer than you used to be, that's for sure. But who isn't? Well, let's see what else. I don't want to monopolize it. Christina, did you have anything you wanted to ask David about?

David Pogue [00:25:45]:
Well, you know, if I may, we were talking about Jobs in the App Store. I. I have to tell you one of my favorite stories from this book that's never been told before, and it's on that topic. Scott Forstall was the head of software. He did, you know, the aqua interface for Mac OS X. He did the iPhone stuff. And he left Apple after that Apple Maps debacle. He'd been in charge, and Tim Cook fired him in a really uncomfortable way.

David Pogue [00:26:13]:
And he's never done another press interview since that day.

Leo Laporte [00:26:18]:
Really.

David Pogue [00:26:19]:
And what he did was he became a Broadway producer.

Christina Warren [00:26:23]:
Yeah, Fun Home.

David Pogue [00:26:24]:
Yes, he did Fun Home. He did Hadestown. And so I tried and tried to get him to do an interview for this book. And what I wound up doing is I made a video of me at the piano doing a parody of Hadestown. That's so smart, where the lyrics were all like, you know, do a.

Leo Laporte [00:26:44]:
Do.

David Pogue [00:26:44]:
Do an interview with me. And he finally agreed, and he told me the most incredible story. So when the iPhone came out, it had 16 apps, and you were happy. That was. That was all you could have. And over the ensuing months, people began jailbreaking the phone, hacking it so they could install their own apps. And Jobs said to Forestall, what are we going to do about this, man? Some of them are actually pretty cool. Forestall said we should create an app store where anyone can write apps.

David Pogue [00:27:10]:
And jabs is like, no, we're not opening up the iPhone ever. But I'll tell you what we will do. This weekend, you and I are gonna meet in the office, and we're gonna sit down, and we're gonna make a list of every app there could possibly

Jason Snell [00:27:25]:
be,

David Pogue [00:27:27]:
and we will write them all. I will write you a blank check to assemble the largest conglomerate of software engineers, and we will write every app. And so Forrestal said, okay. Okay. And then he went back to his team and said, start writing the App Store.

Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
Yeah. You know, it must have been hard to work for Mr. Jobs.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:48]:
Colonel Kurtz has gone upriver again.

Leo Laporte [00:27:50]:
You're coming in this weekend, and let's just come up with every possible app,

Christina Warren [00:27:55]:
every app that we can.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:56]:
Not grandiose at all. No, no, no.

Christina Warren [00:27:58]:
I did have a question for you, David. First of all, your book was fantastic. I enjoyed it so much. And. And the work that you put into it is so evident. And we were saying this on an earlier episode, like, there's no better person than you, I think, to write this book. But kind of going through, especially since you've been so deep in this, as this process for you personally, like, is there an era of Apple that sticks out as, like, your personal favorite that you might have? Like, you know, either it's because of your own experiences, either as a journalist or as a user or anything else. Is there an era in history that is your personal favorite?

David Pogue [00:28:31]:
You know, Steve Jobs came to Apple twice and left Apple twice, if you think about it.

Christina Warren [00:28:37]:
Yeah.

David Pogue [00:28:37]:
And the two beginning stories were the most thrilling. I mean, that those early years when he was 21 years old and scruffy and smelly and wore no shoes, but he had this vision of making computers, which were then metal and industrial and equipment looking, his idea was, let's make them a household of plants, make them beautiful. Which was a weird thing to think in 1976. Like, you don't care about how your socket wrench looks. You know, like, why would your tool need to be beautiful? So that period of trying to get the money, trying to launch this company, and then trying to launch it again in 1997, when he came back, I mean, this company was six weeks from bankruptcy. They had 50 Mac models. They had 12 ad agencies, and it's so much duplication and redundancy. My favorite story.

David Pogue [00:29:27]:
Phil Schiller told me that there was a day in 1995 when two Apple lawyers showed up in trademark court to sue each other.

Christina Warren [00:29:37]:
Oh, my gosh.

David Pogue [00:29:38]:
And so in a year, in a year, Jobs fired the board. He replaced the retail channel. He canceled all 50 Macs. He fired all the ad agencies, killed the Newton, shut down the Advanced Technology Group, like, in one year, he focused the entire outfit on these four machines. Return to profitability in a year. I mean, that's the greatest turnaround there's ever been and thrilling if you were there.

Leo Laporte [00:30:01]:
There was always this story, I don't know if it's apocryphal, that Apple had a very short Runway and that Microsoft kind of pulled their iron out of the fire with that $150 million investment. Is that true? Was Apple really close to folding right when Steve came back?

David Pogue [00:30:18]:
Yes. Apple was spending $50 million a month and bringing in almost nothing. So the Mac had less than 2% market share. Apple was telling the public 5, by the way, but they had less than 2% market share. They were in dire straits. The Bill Gates deal was helpful, but really the big part of it was their chief financial officer, this guy Fred Anderson, who. Who doesn't like the limelight. He doesn't do interviews, doesn't like this story to be told.

David Pogue [00:30:47]:
But in six months, he did this amazing series of financial tweaks that pulled the company out of the fire. He renegotiated $400 million worth of loans from Japan. He re dealt with his suppliers. Apple was paying them 30 days after acquiring the parts. He renegotiated to what the rest of the industry was doing, which was 90 days. Just a lot of simple stuff like that that bought the company breathing room.

Leo Laporte [00:31:14]:
I want to take you back to April 1, 1976. Ron Wayne has resurfaced one of the original Apple founders who everybody said was bought out because he chickened out for 300 bucks. He says now, no, I still own 10% of Apple. You didn't talk to Ron Wayne by any chance, did you?

David Pogue [00:31:31]:
Of course I did.

Leo Laporte [00:31:32]:
You did.

Jason Snell [00:31:33]:
He was at your event at the Computer History Museum.

David Pogue [00:31:37]:
That's right. So he. He basically vanished off the face of the earth. He had 10% of Apple in 1976, which today, of course, would be worth $350 billion. And 11 days later, he backed out of the deal because he was much older than the two Steves. They were janky and smelly and amateur wobbly startup. And they just taken out a loan for 15 grand. And he's like, if that gets called, I'm.

David Pogue [00:32:04]:
I got to pay 15, 10% of that. I'm not up for this startup ride. Excuse me. So jobs gave him 800 bucks, and that was that. He wrote a memoir in which he says nothing about changing the story. That's the story he tells in his memoir. So when he showed up, excuse me, dust. When he showed up at the Computer History Museum event a couple of weeks Ago, I hopped off the stage, he was in the audience, and I held up the microphone and interviewed him for a couple minutes to tell the story.

David Pogue [00:32:38]:
And this is when he started up with this new thing about, actually, I never sold my shares.

Jason Snell [00:32:43]:
I still have them.

David Pogue [00:32:44]:
And everyone's like, what? What are you talking about?

Christina Warren [00:32:47]:
Well, I had dinner with him 16 years ago. And yes, I was. I was at a dinner at a. At a mackerel, I think, in like, in like 2009 or 2010. And that was not the story at that dinner. His story at the dinner was the same as what he'd said before, which was that he kind of got cold feet and regretted some things. So that's really interesting.

David Pogue [00:33:09]:
Yeah, he's in his 90s and sort of rewriting history. The other thing he said, he's a rascal. He said before the event began, I got to meet him. And he said, before you take the microphone away from me, ask me what I'm working on now.

Leo Laporte [00:33:26]:
Oh, Lord.

David Pogue [00:33:27]:
And then so I did. And in front of this audience of 400 people in the whole Internet, I said, so, what are you working on now? And he goes, I've reinvented the computer. I've got a new kind of computer that's 100 times faster than anything anyone's ever done before, and it's going to revolutionize the world. I'm like, oh, man, you had us on the palm of your hand until that moment.

Leo Laporte [00:33:49]:
Computer History Museum has that amazing event celebrating Apple at 50. Somebody said Craig Federighi is also visible in the audience.

Jason Snell [00:33:56]:
Oh, Craig and John Ternus are right there in the front row, I think, with Jawiak.

David Pogue [00:34:01]:
I think they were all with Jaws. Yeah, yeah, they were there. It was amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:34:04]:
What do you think about Turnis taking over, just out of curiosity?

David Pogue [00:34:07]:
I mean, I don't know him well. I interviewed him for the book without knowing that he's the heir apparent. He's very quiet, he's introverted. He's a, you know, very meticulous guy, much like Tim Cook. But, you know, he's also the director of hardware engineering. He's been responsible for working on some of the most recent products. He knows hardware, he knows software. So he.

David Pogue [00:34:28]:
He is more of a product guy than Tim Cook was. Plus he has the meticulousness. So maybe. Maybe he could bring us back to those cool new, mind blowing, you know, jobs like, inventions.

Leo Laporte [00:34:42]:
David, I thank you so much for spending some time with us. I know you've been talking to everybody in the world, and you're probably Ready to take a little break? We appreciate you.

David Pogue [00:34:50]:
I was just rehearsing for this, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:34:52]:
That's what it was all about, getting ready for this. David's website is davidpogue. P O G U E dot com. You can go there to read all sorts of stuff about what David's up to. You can also get his column. There's a link at the top of the page there. And of course, you can get the book there. I imagine you probably, I would hope, have an Amazon affiliate link there.

Leo Laporte [00:35:13]:
So if you buy it there, some of that 32% off gets eaten up by David Polk, which is exactly the way it should be. You can get the book in a number of places. Barnes and Noble still has it at list price. Maybe you should buy it there. I don't know.

David Pogue [00:35:27]:
Or your local bookstore. Local.

Leo Laporte [00:35:29]:
I like that. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:30]:
Another sad story of an author being compensated for his work. When will it end?

Leo Laporte [00:35:37]:
David, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. It's great to see you again. Thank you so much for everything you've done, and especially thank you for the book.

David Pogue [00:35:45]:
And thank you, all of you guys. I. I just admire all of you and your. Your excellent taste in books so much.

Leo Laporte [00:35:52]:
Thank you, David. Have a great week. Take some time off.

Christina Warren [00:35:55]:
Thank you, David.

Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
Spend some time on the beach.

David Pogue [00:35:58]:
Good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:35:59]:
All right, take care. David Pogue, everybody.

Jason Snell [00:36:01]:
Cheers.

Leo Laporte [00:36:02]:
We're gonna take a little break, come back with the rest of Mac Break weekly in just a moment. Fun to see David Pogue again. He used to be on the show in a fairly regular basis back. Way back in the day, I think, predating even you, Andy.

Jason Snell [00:36:15]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:36:15]:
Maybe not.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:16]:
Yeah, well, I'm. I'm also pretty excited because. And. And Jason is my witness here. He did promise me in public that anytime he gets a really sweet gig and then moves on, I get the old gig. So when he moves on from CBS Sunday Morning, it's. You got his macro column and just.

Leo Laporte [00:36:30]:
Just like

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:33]:
I got a lot of cosmetic surgery in my future.

Jason Snell [00:36:35]:
I miss you at the. At the New York Times, but I'm sure that was just a paperwork thing.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:40]:
You know, the Sun Time just made me better off.

Jason Snell [00:36:42]:
Yeah, that's true.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:43]:
They're the plucky upstart, the tabloid. I'm more of a tabloid guy.

Leo Laporte [00:36:47]:
Anyway. Anyway, great. Great to see him and thank him for the book. And you all have read it, so

Christina Warren [00:36:53]:
it's so good and genuinely, like, I bought. I bought it. Like, I did the rare thing where I got, like, I used an audible credit I bought the physical book and then I also got the ebook. So David got a lot of my triple play.

David Pogue [00:37:05]:
He did.

Christina Warren [00:37:06]:
He did.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:07]:
One of the many things I love about David Pogue is that he is. There's an alternate reality in which he is on stage as a professional performer in some way and he could have done as good a job with that as with the way his career went. And you see every time he performs, whether he's like doing a half hour on our show, whether he's on CBS Sunday Morning, whether he's on stage giving a presentation, he just lights up when he has an audience and you just want to engage. It's just wonderful. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:37:36]:
You mentioned, Jason, you'd written an article for sixcolors. Com about other great Apple history books.

Jason Snell [00:37:44]:
Yeah. Other than David's, of course.

Leo Laporte [00:37:46]:
You start with David, but there are interstices that other books can fill. Like I think Steve in the Wilderness. I think that's a very interesting.

Jason Snell [00:37:54]:
Steve Jobs in Exile, Coming in May by Jeffrey Kane. I have read it. It is very good. Apple in China, I think is the best book written about Apple in the Kim Cook era. Ken Kashendis creative selection, which is. He thanked me yesterday for mentioning his book, which was very sweet of him, but he agrees with me. What I said was, I'm not convinced the definitive insider history of the creation of the iPhone has yet been written. David's book has some of it.

Jason Snell [00:38:18]:
Ken Kashenda's book has some of it.

Leo Laporte [00:38:20]:
Ken was there, right?

Jason Snell [00:38:21]:
He was there. He worked on the keyboard. And that's sort of the core of creative selection is about that. I think the problem is it's still too soon because. And you think, wow, 2007, like that was kind of a long time ago now. But so many of those people are still at Apple.

Christina Warren [00:38:39]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:38:39]:
And you really. For the really juicy stuff. You got to get people out of there and they got to be willing to talk, which is going to be a challenge because they will have been there so long in the PR managed environment and they'll probably still have some stock and they'll probably have friends who are still there. I wonder how good the tell all is going to be when it comes out. But I feel like it's still out there. The ultimate iPhone book is probably still out there to be yet to be written. Just. I should write that a little too soon.

Jason Snell [00:39:10]:
I don't know. I mean, Steven Levy, I was going

Christina Warren [00:39:13]:
to say if anybody could do it, he would be.

Jason Snell [00:39:15]:
I don't know. He wants to do something like that. But he wrote two books on my list which is obviously insanely Great, which is written about 10 years after the Mac was created. But it is the definitive story from an outsider's perspective, putting it in historical context of how the Mac was created. Great pairing there with. With Revolution in the Valley by Andy Herzfeld, who worked on the, on the Mac. And then the perfect thing is Steven Levy, five years after the ipod came out, talking about the creation of the ipod.

Leo Laporte [00:39:43]:
Yeah, those are all complete. The trilogy. He could do the trilogy.

Christina Warren [00:39:47]:
He should do it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:48]:
And on top of everything else, like, he's not just focused on Apple. He has a very broad perspective that I think that amongst all the voices that can tell valuable stories about the history of Apple, he can bring that. That not a whole lot of other journalists can bring.

Christina Warren [00:40:07]:
I would also think insanely great. Start going.

Jason Snell [00:40:09]:
I was just going to say that insanely great. I read, after I read Hackers, which he wrote about kind of early 70s Computer hacker culture and hacker culture in general, iconic. And when you look at Insanely Great and I had forgotten this and I was, I was leafing through it this week, it's. It's kind of a sequel to Hackers. And that's what I mean by like placing it in the, like the social context of computers and technology in that era. Because Steven has this broad context about, about that. About the history of technology in a way that, you know, you might not. If you like.

Jason Snell [00:40:44]:
We're super focused on Apple. It's really good.

Leo Laporte [00:40:46]:
You have a nice guest post today from Anthony Johnson. Anthony Johnson, who many people will recognize his name. I always. Anthony Johnson.

Jason Snell [00:40:55]:
It's the worst. It's Anthony Johnston. Yeah, he gets a lot of. Anthony Johnson, video game writer, novelist. And Shelley Brisbane is writing one. She wrote one for Tomorrow.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:07]:
Very similar.

Leo Laporte [00:41:08]:
They echo our own feelings. He wrote this Machine Changed My Life. It's about how he was introduced to the Mac and so forth, just as David talked about how he was introduced to it. And I think that those are. They're fun because they resonate, I think, with the reader. Anybody who's reading Six Colors has a similar story. Right.

Jason Snell [00:41:27]:
Presumably. Although I feel like the Mac origin stories are receding into the background into the history books now a little bit, which is a little concerning. But Christina, I know you had another book that you wanted to talk about and also I just wanted to bond again about the fact that we somehow plugged in Gil Amelio's book, which is, again, I'm not sure I call it a good book, but It's.

Christina Warren [00:41:48]:
Well, no, it's one of my favorite. I'm with you because I was going to say, well, Fred Vogelstein's Dogfight, I think that's actually a good one about, like, the kind of the history of Android and the iPhone as that came out. But no, on the firing line, genuinely. I have the hardcover. I also have the paperback, which was slightly updated. There were very few changes there. I don't know why I have two copies of that book, but I do. But it's genuinely one of my favorite Apple history books.

Christina Warren [00:42:14]:
Just because it is such an interesting time and place of that era that no one else has ever really covered. I agree with you. I think Steven Levy would be the ideal person to do the story of the iPhone. The only other person I could think of, and I don't think he would want to take it on, would be Michael Lewis, but that would be the only other writer who I think would maybe be able to. It would just depend on who's going to talk, though. That, I think, is the challenge.

Leo Laporte [00:42:38]:
It might be too late to reconstruct it at this point. Right.

Christina Warren [00:42:40]:
I mean, it might be. Right. Well. Well, that's the problem too. Right. Is that at this point, I would even. Even if people are willing to talk, it's like everybody. It's, you know, it's almost like the Ron Wayne kind of stuff.

Christina Warren [00:42:51]:
It's like people's own, I guess, their memories. Yeah, yeah. They added their memories. Things change just based on. Even if you're not intentionally doing it, you know, based on what you've heard. And then people have their own ways of wanting to, you know, recontextualize their own role in. In what's happened. Right.

Christina Warren [00:43:07]:
And so that's. That's. That's what's hard, is that I. I would hope that maybe some of these stories exist and people's, you know, personal diaries or things like that, but we might not ever get the real definitive story. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:43:18]:
Insanely great. Insanely great was 10 years later, and it's almost 20 years now. Right. So.

Leo Laporte [00:43:24]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:43:25]:
It would be that that book is going to be harder to do. And like I said, I. I'm sure that if for no other reason, that creative selection has a very specific focus. And obviously Apple, the First 50 Years, David's book is so broad that there is probably a book yet to be written that entirely focuses on the creation of the iPhone. And I'm sure it will have some more detail, and I'm looking forward to that book whenever it happens because it is I just am not satisfied. I've gotten a lot of anecdotes spread out over the years and more are coming out. But there's a moment in David's book and the iPhone, fortunately, is just as the door is closing. So you get a good story from David about the iPhone.

Jason Snell [00:44:03]:
It's not like it's just a few chapters, but you get a good story. But as David's book moves to the present, that door, you can see that door swings shut where a lot of information just kind of dries up. And it's not David's fault. It's that now he's got to talk to people who still work at Apple and they're very trained and constrained and they're just not going to give you the really amazing, juicy stories because they're not, they're not, they're trained not to do that.

Christina Warren [00:44:30]:
Well, and even if they weren't, I mean, even if people had left, right? Like, it's just, Apple is a very different company than it was when, you know, Insanely Great was written. Right. Like, it's much easier to be almost open about what happened when Insanely Great is written and it's 10 years later and the company is kind of on the precipice and you don't know what's going to happen even, even with like the perfect thing. Right? Okay. Apple is on the upswing, but it's still not like Apple as it is now, where it's like the, the biggest company in the world and by, by a large margin. And you know, I mean, you know, market cap might, might, might, you know, hinder you're there. But like, it is undeniable, like the just mammoth impact it's had. And that's going to change just even if you weren't trained by the Apple PR gods, it's like that's just going to, I think, adjust what people are willing to say and, and their own fears about what can I say, what can't I say, and that sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:45:24]:
Who wrote that Dogfight book you mentioned, had a great piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine about the launch of the iPhone. And he talks, I'm sure you remember this. It came out 13 years ago. It's called. And then Steve said, let there be an iPhone. And he talks about Andy Grignon who was in the audience taking shots as the rest of them were. As Steve was doing the demo of the first iPhone. They would take a shot every time he got through one stage of the demo because they were so nervous that

David Pogue [00:45:57]:
it Wouldn't make it right.

Leo Laporte [00:45:58]:
Because it's a real wonderful story and this is the kind of story I would love. Maybe Fred should put.

Christina Warren [00:46:04]:
Maybe Fred could. Right? I mean, I honestly really like that book. And I almost. The only bad thing about the book is almost that it was written in 2013, you know, 2011 or whenever it was written. And so 2013, I guess. And so, yeah, I just looked. Yeah, I bought it on November 12, 2013. And so is that it was at that point only five years after, like, the launch of the.

Christina Warren [00:46:29]:
Of the iPhone, four years after the launch of Android. And so on the one hand, it's great because you get some of those anecdotes and you get some of those stories, but on the other hand, it's like has had enough time passed where you could maybe get some of the really deep insights?

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:42]:
Not only that, but you need. This is true of any sort of, like, nonfiction history. You need perspective. We can't figure out the meaning of what happened 10 years ago until 40 or 50 years have really passed. Not for real. Which is why most of the best biographies happen decades after that person has passed on. Because, sorry, so long as the people who are around to know that person could give their testimonies, you need to know the perspective. Or else these are just incidents that just sort of abut each other chronologically and so.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:18]:
But the most interesting thing is that there aren't a whole lot of companies where when they pass a major milestone like that, you know, see, that's. Okay. Well, gosh, CNBC decided to do. It's the. It's the anniversary of Hewlett Packard and he. And they found some. Some person who pitched a story about the anniversary. And so there's going to be something on the website or maybe they found a half an hour on CNBC on the cable channel to do it for.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:43]:
Can you think of any other tech company that has that kind of impact where this seems like not just something to celebrate for the fandom, but something that this feels like a moment, a time to look back and not just think about Apple, but think about the relationship of technology. Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:47:57]:
In the industry? Even IBM? Yeah. Yeah. I can't think of another company that's made such an impact. Chris, you're watching MacBreak weekly, so that.

Christina Warren [00:48:03]:
Right. I mean, I mean, I mean, even like, even like last year, like Microsoft, you know, had their 50th anniversary and they did a lot of. Of stuff. And I think that, you know, there's. There's a lot to be said about that. But it's not the same as Apple. I mean Disney would be maybe the only Disney. Maybe Disney the only company.

Christina Warren [00:48:16]:
And that's an interesting one too because they went through periods of time of very similar to Apple. Although, you know, different timeline where like, you know, after the founder died, like it, it suffered. And I would compare it more like after Steve Jobs left, you know, Apple the first time.

Leo Laporte [00:48:33]:
There's one name that we did not mention and that is Walter Isaacson. I don't think we want him to write the iPhone book. No, I notice his Steve Jobs bio is not on your list.

Jason Snell [00:48:44]:
My list, I mean again, I was focused on Apple history. There are things in his book that are really interesting. I don't want to relitigate it. When it came out, a lot of people kind of felt like Walter Isaacson didn't really understand a lot about the subject matter. He got all this great access, but it was written by somebody who kind of didn't get it. And so it's a frustrating read from time to time. You know, there are great, there are great details in it. He spent a lot of time with Steve and talk to him like there's a lot of good things about it.

Jason Snell [00:49:14]:
But I don't think, I think recommending a book about Apple is very different from recommending a book about Steve Jobs. And I mean, I feel like Steve Jobs and his legacy has gotten so much oxygen that I like how David, you know, when I ask David and I praise him for writing a biography of Apple, I am kind of praising him for not doing, you know, a hero worship biography of Steve Jobs. Because we got a lot of those. We don't need more of those.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:43]:
I'm sure there is, but if there isn't, there should be an epic anime about Steve Jobs, about the legend of. He went out, he came from the. Came from the Apple grove and started a revolution and then was cast out from the empire. Then came back when the, when the, when the kingdom was at its lowest and brought it back to. Yeah, that's, that's why it's like Scully, Emilio, all these other CEOs, they don't get Spindler. Absolutely. For various reasons get dissed in the narrative. But there are some things that each of them did that was like again like the purchase of arm that basically.

Andy Ihnatko [00:50:17]:
And also just like, you know what? We actually do need a grown up. Even though basically I think that without the perspective and scholarship that Pogue has done, I always thought that Scully did bring in the. This is a time in which we do need A grownup in the CEO position. Not that the Apple. Apple at that time was like a kindergarten of just, oh, let's just randomly do things. But at some point, you needed a structure so that the tens of thousands of people that you're hiring understand how to move an idea into a proposal, into a product, into something that makes money. And so that's one of the many things I loved about his book, that it really, again, like Jason said, it's not the story of Steve Jobs triumphant return or whatever. It is the story of Apple, like you said.

Andy Ihnatko [00:51:01]:
I mean, this is a character in a story and Apple is the character. And we're basically at the midpoint of the story right now.

Leo Laporte [00:51:08]:
It feels like, you know, it's interesting. Last week was the 25th anniversary of Mac OS X. Yep. So amazing. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:51:19]:
Yeah. Which is like, I mean, again, like, you talk about, like, best business decision, obviously, I think, like, Apple ever made was obviously acquiring Next. And they, you know, took like, the basics of that. And. And that was also, I mean. And look, Emilio, again, as Jason mentioned, like, to his credit, he was able to recognize the OS strategy was a mess. Right. And it was.

Christina Warren [00:51:38]:
And that was very smart of them to look and say, okay, what we're working on is not working. Copeland is not going to be a thing.

Jason Snell [00:51:46]:
Never going to happen.

Christina Warren [00:51:46]:
It's never going to happen. This is too much of a mess. We need to. We have to buy our way out of it. Right. And whether it was going to be B or, you know, next. And unfortunately, it was Next. But the culmination of that is obviously with Mac OS X.

Christina Warren [00:52:00]:
Right. Which is still kind of the basis for everything that we're doing now, which is kind of incredible.

Jason Snell [00:52:05]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:06]:
Every OS is based on OS X. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:52:08]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:08]:
And also part of the fun story of OS X was we all remember that.

Leo Laporte [00:52:14]:
Great, great.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:14]:
Here's OS X is finally here. And. Oh, it doesn't really print yet. And now the network doesn't really work.

Christina Warren [00:52:19]:
FireWire doesn't work.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:20]:
Exactly. Why is the Apple Menu in the middle of the menu bar? It took until, like, 10.4, until it was really stable.

Christina Warren [00:52:26]:
I would say, like, 3. I would. But before I would say, like, that's when they brought Spotlight and that's when they started to do the Intel. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, it was like, you know, 10.1, 10, 2 were kind of rough. 10.3. I feel like you really kind of got the sweet spot.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:39]:
But we were just glad to have multithreading, like, or.

Christina Warren [00:52:42]:
Well, that was the thing.

Andy Ihnatko [00:52:43]:
Just Just the idea of people again, it's not as though like Apple had been beaten down by competition or that, gosh, they were too ambitious. It's like, no, they were lost. We were in a time where wind, where people were switching from Mac to Windows because it's more, it was better. It doesn't crash on them and take down the entire workspace with them and has more features and the networking is better and it's more forward thinking and it behaves better. This is why people broke this. So many people, it broke their hearts to switch to Windows. But they're like, I feel like I'm a fool for keeping this relationship alive when Apple doesn't care about the experience I'm having on this, in this, in this work I have to do every day.

Jason Snell [00:53:19]:
So I wrote a piece for the Verge. It went up today, it's called Between Jobs about this era. And I, I'm coming to the conclusion that the Mac and how brilliant it was was actually sowing the seeds of Apple's almost destruction in a way. And follow me here, Mac OS had been the original Mac right system. You read those books, insanely great and all that brilliant people working on it kind of hacked together like. And it was so early and so often you get that early tech that, that takes the prize of being first and then often it stalls out because they have to, they have to hack it together. And it's not built for the future, it's built to ship it and, and then the second or third wave comes along and it's built for the future using the original as a guide and macOS. The truth is macOS was a hack.

Jason Snell [00:54:16]:
They hacked multifinder onto it. System 7 was better, but it was still super hacky. And if you clicked on a menu and held it down, the whole system stopped. Like it just didn't do. And because it was coming From a late 70s, early 80s OS era, it didn't have any of those features that came to be seen as necessary because if you don't have protected memory, your computer crashes every day. I remember when my Mac OS 8 Power Mac Mac User magazine, I had to force reboot it after a hard crash at least three times a day. Like it was bad. It was real bad.

Christina Warren [00:54:49]:
I was, I wasn't sorry to do this to you guys. I was in middle school in that era and I was like working in like, and I was working in fairness

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:57]:
guys, she was held back like 10.

Christina Warren [00:54:59]:
It's true, it's true.

Jason Snell [00:55:00]:
It's bad student.

Christina Warren [00:55:01]:
It's true. And and, but, but we work in the Mac lab and it would be that sort of thing. And like the Mac OS 8 era, where the machines would crash and like the network stuff would, would die and, and, you know, kids would get very upset that, like, their, you know, disks went away and like in 8th grade we put like windows 95 machines like they put in those, like, in the schools. They started to, to take the max out. And you. Part of that was because IBM paid a lot of money to the schools to do that, but another part of it was like, just you couldn't rely on them in that way.

Leo Laporte [00:55:33]:
Yeah, it was not part of a whole Verge thing. On the Apple 50th, you might want to tell the Verge, though, that that Apple office computer building is not in San Francisco, California.

Jason Snell [00:55:42]:
Yeah, I, I did not get to supervise the captions, many of which are wrong. So. Yeah, it is. So. So that's what Gil Amelio came in. When I talk about him flipping the rocks over, like under Spindler. And then Emilio, they. This is the original sin part, right? It's like, yes, they kept, like, they couldn't.

Jason Snell [00:56:00]:
First off, Windows had come on and they, and they, and they had given. They had lost. I mean, the interface was weird because Microsoft has no taste, but technically it had everything. And if you're Apple, like the, if you're a consumer looking at the Mac in this period, you're like, well, why would I make. Get this thing that is slightly better but entirely incompatible and crashes all the time versus this other thing? So Apple had to maintain compatibility or they'd lose literally all of their customers and that the company would go out of business. But how do you maintain compatibility with this existing operating system that's made of, you know, bailing wire.

Christina Warren [00:56:35]:
Exactly.

Jason Snell [00:56:36]:
And so they were like, we'll do Copeland, and they did the Pink project that became Taligent. And like, there was a period in there, and this is when they fell apart, is they kept trying to figure out how to transition off the Mac and they just couldn't do it. And you could argue that although Gil Amelio made and with Ellen Hancock, they made the right technical decision to basically dump it and buy somebody else's os, which really hurts. Right. Like, we have to go, we can't make a new macOS. We have to do this. So they do that. But also, you got to give credit, and this is in David's book, you got to give credit to Steve Jobs, but to Avi Tavanian.

Christina Warren [00:57:12]:
I was going to say Avi doesn't Get enough credit because people are angry at him for unrelated reasons. And the macronal was his ad at Carnegie Mellon and he led the OS project and for such a long time for them to.

Jason Snell [00:57:25]:
As the company's on fire, he has to guide a project full of his next developers and a bunch of angry Apple developers to build an OSM there.

Christina Warren [00:57:35]:
Right?

Jason Snell [00:57:35]:
Because yeah, yeah, to build an OS that is based on NextStep but looks like the Mac and has Mac compatibility on top of it. Because if they can't ship Mac OS X with both of those things, a future and a past, nobody will buy a Mac and Apple will go out of business. And they did it. It took them several years. Right. I mean Jobs came back in January of 97 and they shipped OS 10 in 2001. Right. So it took them four years to get it out the door, but they did and without that the company's out of business.

Christina Warren [00:58:11]:
Agreed. And that's honestly why I feel like the imac to David Pogue's point earlier is like such a, kind of an incredible story of like Steve Jobs coming back in is because being able to simplify the lineup, come out with this very flashy, very, you know, great looking like desktop that kind of reinvigorated what people's idea of a Mac was and getting people to kind of think about the idea of buying a home computer. I think between that and also putting out some, some fairly good laptops in that era really helps them get to that finish line so that they could eventually get to like you know, OS10 coming out and in 2001 and actually getting good by like 2003.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:48]:
Yeah. Also there are many. This was people's first experience with Unix at a time when nobody was using Unix before UNIX became the underpinnings of pretty much everything that you would use and would want to use anymore. I still remember my first briefing with OS engineers saying that we are very much a UNIX operating system. Our goal is that if you go look, if you go, if you don't go looking for the UNIX here and you find it, we screwed up. If you go looking for the Unix and you do not find it, we also screwed up. And that has, that seemed to have paid off like in so many different ways.

Leo Laporte [00:59:32]:
We are talking about Apple's history, but I think we should talk a little bit about Apple's present and future as we continue. Well, you know, have a party tomorrow, we'll wear funny hats and there'll be confetti and all of that. But there is also news and we're going to get to that in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Christina Warren. Great to have you. From GitHub where she's a senior developer advocate. Andy Ihnatko from the library where he is working on his blog every day, guaranteed to give you great content the minute the doors are open. And of course, Jason Snell, who's writing, writing, writing about Apple's 50th everywhere.

Jason Snell [01:00:13]:
Yeah, so much.

Leo Laporte [01:00:15]:
Are you done now?

Jason Snell [01:00:16]:
I'm almost done. I think I have one more piece to write and then I'm done. And that'll be fine. But yes, you could also introduce me as from his garage next to the laundry. But I was on the Vergecast this week and David Pierce was looking at what MacBreak Weekly viewers know is a zillion old Macs behind me. And he was like, whoa, what is that one? And walk us through it. And it was very sweet because, you know, I bought a bunch of shelves and old computers and set it all up and it was nice for somebody. So I'm out here with my old computers.

Leo Laporte [01:00:51]:
Not all Macs. Isn't that an Apple ii?

Jason Snell [01:00:53]:
I have an Apple iic. They all work though, all old Apple products and they all run. And one day I will set the day, the holiday, one of these MacBreak weeklies. I'll turn them all on to prove that they're right.

Leo Laporte [01:01:04]:
Oh, that would be fun.

Jason Snell [01:01:04]:
Today is not that all those 240

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:06]:
watt power supplies from, from the 70s and 80s.

Leo Laporte [01:01:10]:
You won't be able to do any clothes drying or anything or your refrigerator is going to power down. But other than that, you'll be ready to go.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:15]:
You'll find, you'll finally find that one that you forgot to recap the capacitors.

Jason Snell [01:01:18]:
You know, I think the, I think the 2C just sips power. It'll be fine, actually.

Leo Laporte [01:01:23]:
Yeah. My, my Classic Mechanics original Mac, I think 128k Mac is still being repaired. The caps are still being replaced by Burke.

Jason Snell [01:01:31]:
None, none of mine have been recapped. So we are just living by the seat of our pants.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:35]:
Make sure there's video rolling when you switch them on.

Leo Laporte [01:01:38]:
I just smelled a funny smell when I turned it on and I in an abundance of caution turned it right off and said burke, take a look. And he did go inside and it didn't look good.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:48]:
So.

Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
But he's been able to find a lot of those.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:51]:
Oh, it's great. I have an SE30 that like at this point I don't want to open it up and look Inside. Because there's probably a leaking battery that's a time bomb. And I'd much rather think of it as it is right now. A beautiful object that could conceivably work if I turned it on, rather than. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:02:07]:
Oh. Burke says beyond just replacing the caps at this point. Well, what, what more do you need to do? Is there a lot of.

Jason Snell [01:02:14]:
Oh, no, I know he's.

Leo Laporte [01:02:17]:
You know what? I'm leaving him to it. He's good. He's gonna fix it. I know it'll boot someday. Meanwhile, I have that little teeny weeny Mac behind me, the Pico Mac. Actually, did you see the picture of Scott Canastor?

Jason Snell [01:02:30]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:02:31]:
Wasn't that hysterical? Long time Apple document writer, great guy. He took his little teeny weeny Mac and brought it to the Computer History Museum for the Apple Tech Fest to meet the regular Mac. There's the little teeny, the regular and they have a giant Mac, a 22x Mac. And he's got all three of them together, which is hysterical. Hysterical is that when that's a demo Mac somebody built for the Computer History Museum. I guess. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:04]:
You gotta think. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not terribly interested in getting my old Macs running because I think it's much more interesting to try to get VMAC working on this $11 microcontroller. And it all works, and all the software works and now it's on an SD card. Whereas I think my joy in getting that SE3 running again would be limited to. Wow, it's working. It's great. Oh, I can't really get information off of it. Oh, right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:29]:
And now, and now, and now the hard drive is making clicking noises that I probably shouldn't. Okay. I really wish that I'd just gone to Adafruit, give them about $11 and install a bunch of open source stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:03:39]:
I think it was you, Andy, who told us about the Pico Mac Nano. Nick still making them. You can get it at one bit. Rainbow.

Jason Snell [01:03:44]:
Yeah, you just have to assemble them yourself, which is fine.

Leo Laporte [01:03:46]:
Yeah. Apple was pretty generous saying, well, you can't do this and that, but you can still sell them.

Jason Snell [01:03:52]:
So I think, I feel like with retro computing at this point, Apple seems to have a policy which is they know they can't give you permission because the problem with like Apple giving away their OSes is that there's license code in there probably that might get. Might cause a lawsuit or whatever. So they just say kind of like whatever. Like they just don't want to get involved unless it comes to something like you're literally selling a Mac replica.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:19]:
The complete with the box, complete with the brand.

Jason Snell [01:04:22]:
The mini Mac was so like, so like just back. But really they just told him back it off a step and have sold the parts and let people build it themselves. And then they're like that's a more like a fan project and it's fine. And I like that because I think they can't. It's unlikely that somebody's going to go through and research all the legalities of taking Apple operating systems or the ROMS in an Apple II or the ROMS in an early Mac. Like, and like what's the encumbrance of that legally? And it's like they're not going to do that. So I think they do the right thing and just sort of like turning a blind eye when they can.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:54]:
I saw a blog post or someone finished their Apple one or was it even an Apple to emulator for the Commodore 64? So vintage computing inside vintage computing. And it's like, does Apple, does Apple really care about like shutting down something like that? Yes, it's yes, they should be licensing the ROMs and they should be licensing the source code. But again, I believe that the number of people inside of Apple, if it's not a zero number who actually want to do something about that, is outnumbered 100 to 1 by people inside of Apple. Wow. That is super, super cool. Is there still an ordering page for that?

Leo Laporte [01:05:25]:
Yeah, I think they just have to do it to preserve the trademarks and all that stuff. Exactly, exactly. That's running an actual Mac OS though, right? System three, I think.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:32]:
Yeah, it's probably 6.02, I think if it's running VMAC. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:05:38]:
I don't know. Anyway, the whole thing is at one bit rainbow. If you want to read all about it on We Go with MacBreak Weekly in the news, Apple has been rebuff by the United States Supreme Court, the Court of last appeal. Apple was trying to get them to rehear the epic Games case. The 9th Circuit had denied its rehearing and now. Oh no, it was just the ninth Circuit.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:08]:
It's not the Supreme Court.

Leo Laporte [01:06:09]:
We still have to go to the Supreme Court or.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:10]:
No, that's a court of last resort now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:06:12]:
Are they gonna appeal?

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:14]:
I think they kind of have to. But the thing is this was unanimous. Like the decision was one. Was a one page PDF and we just said nope, we all agree 100 there is no reason for this to retry this is cut and cleared. You're done. So unless they've got. Apple's got some really great photos of a Supreme Court justice that that justice does not want to ever see again.

Leo Laporte [01:06:34]:
I think the Supreme Court, they did appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court sent it back to the 9th Circuit. I guess they could go back, but I have the feeling that justices would take a pretty dim view of that.

Christina Warren [01:06:45]:
Yeah, I mean, at this point, it'd be. It'd be hard. Their lawyers would have to make some sort of challenge that there was some sort of egregious, like, illegal, you know, malfeasance happening because their arguments have been. It hasn't even been close. You know, every. Every court has. Every. Every lower court is ruled against them.

Leo Laporte [01:07:00]:
I think we can declare it over. Do you think?

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:05]:
Never say, never say never.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:07]:
When it comes to lawsuits, some of these things are evergreen. Like, again, part of the history of Apple was how much they collectively institutionally hated Samsung and they just wanted to watch them burn. And Steve had to be talked down from. There is no point in continuing from this. We are not going to win. We've won anything. We're going to win. Everything from that is simply a waste of resources.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:29]:
But it was still. No, no, no, no, no. So this is kind of like the same Popeye and Bluto sort of struggle where it either goes on eternally or they decide that, you know what, we're getting old.

Christina Warren [01:07:39]:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, I feel like another part of it would be, you have other antitrust concerns going on. Do you want to continue to poke this bear? Especially when the, you know, original court ruling was basically admonishing your legal counsel and, you know, many of your witnesses and was basically saying you have not followed, you know, the orders that we have issued out here and whatnot. Like, do you. Do you really want to continue to poke that bear when you have other, perhaps more important legal challenges, you know, going on?

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:07]:
Like, yeah, you still have guys. You still have to figure out how to defend yourself against the allegation that you're giving Apple music benefits and privileges as an app that you're not extending to any other platform over and over and over again for all the other apps you have and platforms you have? You really need to save your ammo for fights that are imminent and happening and already unfolding.

Leo Laporte [01:08:28]:
Yeah. After the show last Tuesday, Apple updated all of its stuff to 26 for. And if you have more than one Apple thing, this cascade is really kind of annoying. I have phones and iPads and Computers and there's a lot to update. We got the new emoji we talked about last week, but also fixes for 35 security issues on the iPhone so probably shouldn't wait on this one.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:55]:
Yeah, we talked about that recently because of how bad it was, especially for older phones. Apple actually up the ante last week by actually sending out a push update to older phones that are still running OS18 saying no, no, no, update up. This is not like us trying to annoy you. This is us trying to prevent you from losing your. All your Bitcoin and all your retirement savings. Update now. Yeah, that's how serious it is.

Leo Laporte [01:09:19]:
There's security content in Tahoe 264 as well, so you should probably update that also.

Christina Warren [01:09:24]:
Yeah, I mean they also dated Sequoia,

David Pogue [01:09:27]:
so Yeah, that usually tells you something

Leo Laporte [01:09:30]:
when they do that.

Christina Warren [01:09:30]:
Yeah, when they do the. I mean, although at this point they, I think they, they commit to like one year of, you know, security updates or whatever on the past OS's. It's when they'll go back multiple versions. I think that, you know that it's bad, bad. But yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely worth updating all of your, your machines.

Leo Laporte [01:09:48]:
Couple of other things. They added search to the web interface on icloud drive.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:55]:
Good for them.

Leo Laporte [01:09:56]:
Apparently everybody else has it, they didn't have it. I think Apple doesn't want you to use that icloud drive. They do not as a cloud drive but you do have web access to

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:07]:
it but it's in the far away.

Christina Warren [01:10:09]:
Apple does not want you to use the web is I think really how I feel increased. Honestly, I feel like Apple goes out of the way to make use accessing their services on the web as difficult as possible. At least the App Store is finally back on the web so we can view, you know, things that way. But yeah, they.

Leo Laporte [01:10:25]:
Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about this update. It's probably a good idea. I use the Apple Terminal a lot. They've updated Terminal. If you attempt to paste in commands, which people do a lot now thanks to AI and other things, you may get a warning. Possible malware paste blocked. And this comes from the fact that scammers will, and this happens on Windows even more often, try to get you to paste in a command saying, oh yes, well, we need to check to see if your computer's been compromised. Paste this command into terminal.

Leo Laporte [01:10:58]:
Of course it's a dangerous command so Apple is blocking it. You can still. There is a paste anyway button if you want to press it. But I think I guess this is okay. I haven't run into it. So if I start running into it a lot, I might be a little annoyed.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:13]:
It's becoming the bad people have found this as a vector. As a matter of fact, I think last year week there was, there was evidence that security researchers had discovered that. I don't know whether it was Brew or Flatpak, where if you do a Google search for Homebrew. Thank you for Homebrew. For Homebrew. Like people, bad people are buying the number one search result to take you to. Hey, great. Just run this terminal command that will install the homebrew that you.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:36]:
That your friends and savvy podcasters have told you to do when actually you're just basically blowing up your computer.

Leo Laporte [01:11:43]:
The basic rule is do not Google. Do not Google search for stuff and then assume that the stuff you found is right. And you got to blame Google a little bit. I was going to say letting bad guys buy ads.

Christina Warren [01:11:57]:
I was going to say I totally blame Google on this. Right. And I say this. I will admit my own biases here. The main maintainer of Homebrew is a friend of mine and I know they work on those things.

Leo Laporte [01:12:08]:
Thank them for me. Is amazing.

Christina Warren [01:12:11]:
It is amazing. And you know, they do it, you know, with, you know, very little resources and it's massively used. But like, but because it's little resources, if someone else is going to buy your SEO out from under you and Google is going to serve that there, like especially Google, I will criticize them here too. Like internally, a lot of people at Google use Homebrew. So, you know, it's like these are the sorts of results that you should just get rid of because it's, it's potentially going to be. Not even potentially. It is a security problem.

Leo Laporte [01:12:40]:
So tell your friends and family if you do a search for Homebrew or Brew install or something like that and you see an ad at the top that says sponsored result. That's not it. Do not click that. You'll see right below it. Brew sh.

Christina Warren [01:12:57]:
I was going to say Brew sh is the one to go for. And so, you know, I don't understand

Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
why Google doesn't have better protection. It's such an automated system to buy ads. That's why, I guess. And they just don't. There's no human in the loop.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:13]:
Yeah, it's a problem. Christine is absolutely right that this is not a problem that Google should be like distance should be just distancing themselves from because they are so completely responsible for it. It's a problem with all app stores, however. But people need to understand that. Do you realize that when you did a search for Microsoft Office or anything in any app store, basically you are seeing ads because people bought, oh, Microsoft Office. I'm going to try to steer people towards something else instead, and oftentimes it's not. What gets me is that it's not. Okay, well, I know that this app is not Microsoft Office, but the thing is, so many times I've done a search for like, something that I might have heard of, like Joplin before I started releasing Joplin and said, okay, well, oh, that sounds like I really want to try it out.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:56]:
And I get a markdown editor that has a blue rounded square logo with a letter with a thick shape to it that kind of looks like the Joplin logo. And if I were not thinking and reading carefully, I would think that this is the actual Apple. And that's bad enough. That's bad enough. Even though that like this, the app has been vetted for security by the Play Store and by the Apple Store. But it's like, it's annoying that it's not obvious to the user that you are seeing a paid placement ad. The fact that it's not surrounded by a box that simply says, by the way, you're seeing this not because it's relevant, but because you're making us money right now. Thank you very much.

Leo Laporte [01:14:34]:
Sigh. I guess you should be happy though, because Windows PCs crash three times as often as Macs, so it could be worse.

Jason Snell [01:14:43]:
Thank you, Avi. Tavanian and OS X and the Mach Microkernel and everything could be worse.

Christina Warren [01:14:48]:
Hey, you know what? Yeah. Tool callback. Although the problems with Windows I don't think have anything to do with the kernel. But yeah, we'll still give Avi.

Jason Snell [01:14:55]:
I mean, it's just what a. Remember when. And now she was on the other foot. It's fine. Absolutely. It's all good.

Leo Laporte [01:15:02]:
This is a study from Omnissa's 2026 State of the Digital Workplace that says that Windows PCs crash three times as often as Mac. Lag behind Macs and security and lifespan as well. I'm just saying it because we're all Apple enthusiasts here. So if you have to use Windows, that's okay. That's okay. You know, that's life.

Christina Warren [01:15:26]:
Hey, hey, if you want to play games, that's your option. I mean, Linux is getting better, but if you want to play games, it's

Leo Laporte [01:15:32]:
like, although, yeah, I will confess to having spent $450 last week on the Switch 2.

Christina Warren [01:15:38]:
Yes. Well, yeah, because.

Leo Laporte [01:15:40]:
Pretty awesome.

Christina Warren [01:15:40]:
It is awesome. Pocopia is great. And.

Leo Laporte [01:15:43]:
Oh my God, I'm just. I'm still playing Super Mario World or whatever, but totally there it. The screen is gorgeous. It's much bigger. I didn't. It really is a nice upgrade.

Christina Warren [01:15:54]:
It's a very.

Leo Laporte [01:15:55]:
I wasn't gonna get it, but.

Christina Warren [01:15:56]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there are finally some, like, games that are. That make it worth, you know, getting over the Switch. Procopia was the first one because I got it when it came out last. Last summer, like the release day and. But it, you know, kind of sat unused remotely.

Leo Laporte [01:16:10]:
I tried to get it, but I was thwarted.

Christina Warren [01:16:12]:
And then you kind of like lost interest.

Leo Laporte [01:16:14]:
Yeah, and then I lost interest. So I just got it last week. I was just curious, can I just buy it now? And it's the same. I had heard they were going to raise the price of stuff, so I thought, well, I should get it.

Christina Warren [01:16:22]:
Yeah, Well, I mean, honestly, like, there was a. I saw some people's like, messages on social media last week and this was true because they raised the price of the PlayStation 5 and the PlayStation 5 Pro again. And it's like, okay, you know, like my investment that is, you know, I guess had like the best return on investment is like my 2020 PS5. Right. It's like nothing is.

Leo Laporte [01:16:43]:
Should I get Pocopia? You think that's.

Christina Warren [01:16:45]:
Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:16:46]:
Okay, so here's my pitch for Pocopia. This will be like an early kind of.

Leo Laporte [01:16:49]:
Because I'm a Pokemon fan. I play Pokemon Go.

Christina Warren [01:16:51]:
Okay. So it is to take Minecraft, take Animal Crossing and kind of take like the world of Pokemon and. And put it in like a blender. And that is Pocopia.

Leo Laporte [01:17:00]:
Three of my favorite games.

Christina Warren [01:17:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:17:03]:
Okay.

Christina Warren [01:17:03]:
So you could build your own world and do ridiculous things, but with Pokemon characters. It's so fun.

Leo Laporte [01:17:07]:
Sounds Good. Let's see. 26. 5 is now out developer betas, new Apple Maps match maps feature for trending places. I think Apple wants to beef up Apple Maps because as we know, they're going to put ads in it. And I think they want to get used to. To kind of start paying attention to trending places, things like that. Just like Google.

Christina Warren [01:17:30]:
Yeah. I mean, and if I can be like a contrarian here, because I know most people's instinctive thing is to be upset about ads and maps. Here's the thing. If the ads and maps mean that the people who actually own the locations will actually update their Apple Maps stuff more regularly, Then I'm all for it. Because one of the reasons why I don't use Apple Maps in general is because, and this point, I think depending on if you're in a large enough city, I think that the quality of the stuff is fairly even. But Google, because of the, you know, ad manager and because of other stuff like if hours are going to change, if somebody's be closed, if it goes out of business, whatever, like they update that instantly, whereas it can lag days, weeks, whatever, where before, you know, business owners even think about, oh, I'm going to update the Apple stuff, so maybe this will improve that. I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:17]:
Yeah, Apple. The difference between Apple Maps and Google Maps has always been Apple Maps is much more of a joy to navigate and use. It's much prettier and that's a function thing, not just an appearance thing. But Google really gets to, they've been doing this for so long that they know every trick and every single detail down to the fact where I'm just not going to trust the business information I get from Apple Maps not because it's necessarily been gamed or incorrect, but because I know that Google has been very, very aggressive and making sure that I want to know exactly when this store closes. If they're closed for two weeks, I want to know that this closes, this is closed for two weeks and make sure that all the users know about it. Although I am glad that Google did finally see the light and say, you know what, maybe it would be great if Google Maps for Android Auto did not look like garbage and it was easy to see like where your next exit is and what the building you're handing to without having to stare at your center console screen. I'm glad that they finally got the idea that we don't have to be like grad school students about how a map should look like.

Leo Laporte [01:19:18]:
Apple's adding finally RCS end to end encryption to messages. That's in the 26:5 beta as well.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:26]:
Yeah, that's very good news. It was in 264 for testing purposes. So let's cross our fingers that it's in the beta for 20. For 20 it is. It's in the 26.5beta1 it's in the beta, but let's hope that it means it's on track to be released. A lot of this, you know, a lot of the stuff that you're seeing in, in this new beta is very compliance forward and basically eu forward a whole list of things to lay the groundwork for. Okay, we're Going to have to support notifications for non Apple watches. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:55]:
We're going to have to make sure the third party Bluetooth earbuds can pair as quickly and easily as other stuff. This could be one of the best for someone like me who really loves interoperability and have thought that I really want Apple to address this, even if they're being forced to. This could be one of the most interesting releases that Apple has done in quite some time.

Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
Yeah, live activities now for third party accessories. So if you use a Android watch, you'll be able to see notifications.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:21]:
They've pushed out a whole bunch of new developer notes by saying, here are the rules now for how you can handle this sort of data, a lot of it. And they're being very, very thorough about it, saying that, okay, you can get this notification from the iPhone, however you are not. You have to process it on the watch itself. You can't send this data anywhere else for any reason. Like not, not even, not from even. They're obviously worried about marketing stuff, but they're also being so diligent about this that yeah, maybe you'd actually have a legitimate reason to send this off the watch, but you can't even do the legitimate reasons for it. Because we want to hold, we want to hold that covenant of trust between ourselves, the company and the users. So now that they.

Leo Laporte [01:20:59]:
And we don't got any more fines from the eu.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:01]:
Exactly. I mean, they, let's face it, it's

Leo Laporte [01:21:03]:
the EU that's making this all happen.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:05]:
Oh, no, no, I think, and thank God, because Apple, Apple was using this as a kind of what I thought was a really, really fraudulent excuse that. No, no, we can't have a notification sent to a watch because that's the sort of market. No, people actually just, people bought this Garmin watch, they spent $900 for it because they want to get notifications. They're okay with it. Ask them the question, have them click a box that says, okay, fine, I'm okay with all of this. But Apple's saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're like children. We really can't.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:32]:
We have to make sure that they can't put their, their hands on that hot, hot stove. Well, no, you just want to make sure that you have to buy an Apple Watch.

Christina Warren [01:21:39]:
Right. And the irony is, it's that it's like, look, most people are still going to buy an Apple Watch. Yeah. You know, I mean, like if you're going to buy like, I don't know many people who would choose I mean, a Garmin because it's specialized and it doesn't.

Leo Laporte [01:21:51]:
Do you very well have a Garmin?

Christina Warren [01:21:53]:
Absolutely. But, but they're going to be. Look, will the, Will there be people who knowingly like, buy like a Pixel Watch or like the Samsung watch or whatever to use? Sure, but that's not a common thing at all. Like, if you have an iPhone, you're buying an Apple Watch unless there's a very specific reason why you don't want to, which is going to be incredibly niche. I mean, like, just own it. Like the same thing, kind of. The, the headphone thing is annoying too. It's like, look, there are plenty of, like, most people who are going to be getting in earbud headphones are getting AirPods of some variety if they have an iPhone because they're just better.

Christina Warren [01:22:29]:
Like, you won. Don't make this more difficult. You won. Don't make this more difficult for everybody else to have a lesser experience.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:38]:
I'll say that earbuds are a different case, though. I 100% agree with you that most people who have an iPhone would want to have an Apple Watch. I think it's still annoying that even the other way around that you can't have an app activate an Apple Watch with anything other than an iPhone, because I also think that's bogus. But there are so Many really great $50, 60 pairs of earbuds that.

Christina Warren [01:22:56]:
Sure.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:57]:
And I am of the mind, or at least of the tendency to lose things that I don't want to spend $200 or even the cheapest. I don't even want to buy the cheapest set of AirPods because I want to have. I want to be able to. If and when I lose one of these earbuds in a pocket someplace, I want to be able to say, damn it, okay, well, I'm out $50 or 60 bucks at least. I'm not out $250. I think I do see that as a completely artificial limitation. And most of my objection is pretty much just if you made a better argument about why you're doing this instead of saying you're really asking us to believe that you're just doing this out of the kindness of your heart and protecting your users. Come on, we're not 12 years old where we understand that you just want to lock.

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:46]:
You just want people locked to. You just want to lock people into an ecosystem and you're just being petulant about it, even in the face of regulations that saying, no, we're telling you to do this. And Apple says, well make us and. Or. Yeah, okay, fine. Hey, look, I'm not, I'm not. You told me not to touch you. I'm not touching you.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:00]:
I'm not touching you. Like. Okay, you know that's not what we meant.

Leo Laporte [01:24:04]:
Apple like on Thursday we called it 12:30 Thursday afternoon. Apple killed the Mac Pro. There was some question about why they were still selling an intel version of a Macintosh.

Jason Snell [01:24:19]:
No, it was.

Christina Warren [01:24:19]:
No, no, they weren't.

Jason Snell [01:24:20]:
It was Apple Silicon.

Leo Laporte [01:24:21]:
Oh, it was silicon. Okay. M2 ultra M2. That's right. Yeah. So behind you can't buy it anymore. I like this upside down Mac Pro from 9 to 5Mac.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:32]:
Nice, nice $600 wheels for the first. For the last time.

Jason Snell [01:24:35]:
Yeah, yeah, wheel it away.

Leo Laporte [01:24:38]:
It was pretty. It was pretty, but so was the cube.

Jason Snell [01:24:41]:
What, what a. I mean here. Okay, so talk about mal, malpractice, I guess a little bit. I mean the truth is. Okay, who, who killed the Mac Pro? First thing is computers got so fast that it used to be back in the Power Mac era, like mainstream, like mid range Mac users would get a Power Mac which was the equivalent of the Mac Pro back then because that was like above the consumer level stuff if you wanted a little more power, a little more flexibility. But like I bought, I had a power Mac G4 but in, you know, by the 2000s I just would get an imac and imac when it started was super low end, right. It was really slow and pro users would be like, I'm not getting that toy. But computers got better.

Jason Snell [01:25:25]:
And, and so that, that wedge of the market that was that power Mac just got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller till the point where the latter day Power Mac G5 when it became the Mac Pro like Apple kept talking about, well, we're using it in biotech. They're sequencing DNA. Like the niche has just gotten narrower and narrower. And then they did the trash can where, which would, I would argue this one behind me, I would argue was. Would actually have been a great design for an Apple Silicon Mac Pro because. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just, you know, keep it cool and you can't put anything in it and it doesn't matter.

Christina Warren [01:26:02]:
Exactly. Expandable. You can swap out the memory, but that's it.

Jason Snell [01:26:05]:
The storage, it's not what the niche wanted. Whoops. And then they apologize for it. In that era where they, the Mac really lost its way and said that they would do it. But like Stephen Hack had pointed this out this week or last week, the Mac Pro Intel Mac Pro, the promise kept came out like eight months before the Apple Silicon transition. What, what are we even doing? Like in hindsight they should have just given up in 2012.

Christina Warren [01:26:34]:
I mean I agree with you actually. I feel like the 2019 Mac Pro I feel like is a tragedy in a lot of ways because it was a really great final kind of like that. I think in like the 2020 iMac were like actually really good intel machines. But you know, they did listen in 2017 they had that famous kind of roundtable with members of like the press and whatnot and they basically said, okay, you tell us why you're so angry, you know, about this, this, this, you know, Mac that we released four years ago. Because at that point the Mac, you know, had been that the Mac Pro or whatever had been out for, for four years, three and a half years, whatever. And I think that they, it seems to me like in hindsight like that they started work on the Mac Pro at that point, comes out, you know, two and a half years later. The timing just was unfortunate. It was a good machine.

Christina Warren [01:27:19]:
It did, it obviously didn't have Nvidia cards but it allowed, you know, people to do upgradeability. It had the PCI slots, it was powerful. And I, and I think that, you know, I feel bad for people who maybe invested $10,000 in one and then six months later realized oh, this is kind of on the outs but hey, at the time you had like a very, very powerful intel machine that you could continue to run and do a lot of other things on. What I still can't defend and I still don't understand why they ever released it was the 2023 Mac Pro, the Apple Silicon version. I don't know why that ever existed. I feel like they never should have released that product because, and part of me a little bit like, I don't want to blame buyers here, but I feel like if you bought one of those you were either getting some sort of business write off or something else. Because for all intents and purposes you should have bought a Mac Studio. That should have been what you did.

Christina Warren [01:28:06]:
I don't know why the 2023 Mac Pro existed. And the whole point of the Mac Pro, as everybody who liked it always says, was the fact that it could be expandable. The fact that you could add more either PCI slots or add in more storage or upgrade RAM or whatever. And if you take all that away and all you're basically saying is well, we're going to give you some PC, you know, four lanes and you can add in some storage cards for some stuff. I mean, okay, great. But I don't know why this product exists, especially at a multiple of the Mac Studio.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:40]:
Yeah. Also most of the reasons why, legitimate reasons why people were clamoring for a Mac like the Mac Pro. I love it when the answer to when people ask the question, well, gosh, I want expandable storage. And like, no, you don't want expandable storage. You don't want drive bays inside. You don't want that specifically. You just want to be able to attach a storage unit, a storage module, storage drive that is as fast as what you're used to. Okay, great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:07]:
Well, you don't have to use a storage bay. You can actually use it. We're giving you Thunderbolt for that. And now it's so fast that you don't have to care about, okay, what's next? Like, well, I want to be able to use like an external gpu. Again, we've set this up so that if you want to architect it that way, you can actually attach it with Thunderbolt. Okay. But we want colossal computing power. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:26]:
We're going to give you ways to stack most of many of our devices together so that they can actually compute together. If you were doing that kind of a research where you need to build as much compute as you possibly want. And so there's still going to be some people that for whom. But there was a need that's not being served. But Apple has now, I feel as though, as of a year or two ago, has really addressed every different reason that someone would have for wanting to have a big aluminium box with card slots and with drive bays and with the other stuff that we're sort of used to having a Mac Pro. I think you're absolutely right. The idea of if you bought a Mac Pro willingly, you probably did not do enough research and you were not able to think in the abstract about why you wanted the things you wanted. Because you would discover that a Mac Studio is actually going to give you everything that you need.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:13]:
And we'll do a much, much better job of it.

Jason Snell [01:30:15]:
Yeah. The reason to buy a Mac Pro for the last few years has been because you are used to it, or you think the way that you work should just remain the way you work even though the world has moved on. And I think you're right, Andy. Apple has kind of either. Either with their product choices, their architecture choices, and also the speed of the processors and the speed of Thunderbolt has kind of eliminated any reasonable answer why you might have to Have a Mac Pro and a Mac Studio won't do it for you. But I'll mention the other thing here, which is just like it's not Apple's responsibility to fulfill every need of every possible customer. I think there are so few Mac Pro. This is why I say it should have probably been years ago is because this has been a dwindling market for so long and at this point at least when they ship the Mac Studio, we had the answer.

Jason Snell [01:31:08]:
I think before then there was like, does Apple not make a Mac for pros at all anymore? But once they ship that first Mac Studio with the Ultra chip, we had our answer. And, and that's, that's just, that's what it is going forward.

Leo Laporte [01:31:22]:
Is that, is that the best Mac you can get now?

Jason Snell [01:31:25]:
Yes, it's been for a while. It's actually been since the last they updated it. The Apple Silicon Mac Pro when it came out was not better than the Mac Studio that came out the same day. They were identical in all ways other than their case. So it's been over for a while. And again I feel for people who are like, but I really loved it. And maybe they're out there and said, you know, it sucks when Apple says, you know what, there are a few dozen people left and we're not going to serve you anymore. But it doesn't make sense.

Jason Snell [01:31:51]:
It hasn't made sense for years.

Christina Warren [01:31:53]:
I mean, Steve, I mean, sorry, Jason, you and I are both 27 inch iMac users or were, right? So we understand this very well. Because I am no longer an imac user because I mean, I still have my, my intel one, but I'm not going to buy an Apple Silicon one because it doesn't meet my needs. But I loved my imac. It was my, my, my go to kind of desktop machine for years. And so I do understand people being upset Apple's no longer catering to me. I just feel like when the 2023 model came out, like it was obvious. It was like, this product doesn't need to exist.

Jason Snell [01:32:27]:
No, because they didn't have, we were all waiting to see like, okay, Apple Silicon. That decision seems to have killed it because the GPUs are integrated. That's the whole benefit of Apple. Apple Silicon. The number one reason you buy a Mac Pro is to put in a bunch of GPUs and you can't do that now. It doesn't make sense. So we all kind of like were like, I don't know, maybe Apple will have like a really clever answer for how you could do that. And the answer is no.

Jason Snell [01:32:48]:
No they don't. Apple Silicon is what it is and it closed. When they made the decision to take the whole Mac platform to Apple Silicon, that closed the door on this product.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:59]:
Yeah. And on top of everything else, Windows exists and people. People.

Christina Warren [01:33:03]:
Yeah, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:04]:
And people who want that kind of things that only a Mac Pro can give, they can get it so much better and so much more. They can literally build exactly the power and the flexibility that they want on the Windows side or Linux side of things. So why would any sensible person who knows enough about their specific needs to want that sort of stuff, why would they look at all the options to say I want to buy a Mac Pro instead of simply buying either off the shelf super powerful Windows workstation or just build it from some scratch.

Christina Warren [01:33:29]:
And in the intel era, I mean I still feel like it could have made sense, right, because you had like, you could run VMware, you could, could put multiple operating systems on the Intel Mac Pros. And that I think you could make an argument if you were to spec out buying a separate Mac and buying a workstation PC, you could even make the argument that yeah, this is actually going to be more economical to get a Mac Pro if this is what I need. But as soon as they move to their own architecture and they got rid of the compatibility and that's not going to be a thing anymore unless it's through virtualization, which is not the same thing, and you lose that hardware storage support, then yeah, I mean, I feel like, you know, 2019, that the timing was not great and it was disappointing, I'm sure, for people who really worked hard on that machine and they did finally kind of give the Pros almost everything they'd wanted. But if you're not going to continue to be able to maintain A alternative OS compatibility and B supporting, you know, peripherals outside of certain I O cards and maybe stuff that could be served using your Thunderbolt lanes, like, no, unfortunately this doesn't have a reason to exist. Especially, especially. And this is like to me, what killed me when it was so much more expensive than the Mac Studio, right? Because even then you could still be like, okay, well maybe I do want the bays or I'll do this or that. But it's like, is it, is it worth twice as much? Yeah, no.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:48]:
And the other thing that, another thing is that in the intel day on intel architecture, once you pass a certain power threshold, you need the sort of cooling that only a tower configuration can give you. And once Apple was putting all their power into Apple silicon, which runs so much more. Cool. Again, another reason dropped off of here's why the Mac Pro needs to exist. We don't need a tower for any reason whatsoever. Again, it's sad for old timers, but for anybody who has a modern idea of what computing is about and what Apple does, well, it was long overdue.

Jason Snell [01:35:24]:
At least a lot of people are

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:24]:
going to have a lot of really nice little end tables from now on. I have two Mac Pro end tables in my living room.

Leo Laporte [01:35:29]:
I apologize for bringing this up. If you covered this last week. I forgot I wasn't here. Thanks, by the way, Jason, for hosting and just.

Jason Snell [01:35:36]:
No, this happened after this. I think this happened.

Leo Laporte [01:35:38]:
And did you cover the Death of the 32 inch XDR as well?

Jason Snell [01:35:43]:
I don't think we mentioned it. We didn't get through more than like a quarter of the things that were on our list.

Leo Laporte [01:35:47]:
You got to spank people, Jason. You got to whip them.

David Pogue [01:35:50]:
It was great.

Jason Snell [01:35:50]:
We just, you know, we went where we needed to and yeah, I think that's fine. And that was fine. But yeah, the xdr. I mean, the XDR died when they announced the, the new studio xdr.

Leo Laporte [01:36:00]:
Yeah, but it's not as big, Right? The XDR was 32 inches, right? 27.

Jason Snell [01:36:03]:
Yeah. Right. It's not a PRO display, but I mean, the writing was on the wall for the Mac Pro then too.

David Pogue [01:36:08]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:36:08]:
Like it really was moving on. That's a different era.

Christina Warren [01:36:11]:
Yeah. And I Wonder if the 32 inch of that was just. That was a custom panel that Apple had had that. They were the only ones who used those, that specific resolution in that panel. There are other 32 inch 6k panels. I wonder if that was just kind of a sourcing thing and kind of also maybe hearing from people. Yeah, we'd rather, you know, buy 227 inches or whatever. But yeah, to me, I felt like I, I was surprised when the announcement happened last week, especially when it was just kind of a, a confirmation press statement.

Christina Warren [01:36:36]:
They just removed it from the website. But I think that most of us probably knew like the writing was on the wall when they, you know, got rid of the, the stuff. The PRO display. Xdr.

Leo Laporte [01:36:45]:
Yeah. Let us pause for one moment. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Just, just a little breather here.

Jason Snell [01:36:53]:
Pause the refreshes, Pause the refreshes.

Leo Laporte [01:36:55]:
Jason Snell, Andy Anako and Christine Warren. Great to have you. And now it's time for the Vision Pro segment.

Christina Warren [01:37:04]:
What do you see? What do you know?

David Pogue [01:37:06]:
It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:37:15]:
Ladies and gentlemen, there is Vision Pro news. Oh, I'm sorry, I have a spam caller trying to get in. Just, we'll just, we'll just press that button there.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:24]:
That's not the news.

Leo Laporte [01:37:25]:
Yeah, that is not.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:26]:
Listeners know

Leo Laporte [01:37:29]:
when they have spam on the Vision Pro. That's the day I'm retiring.

Christina Warren [01:37:32]:
That's.

Leo Laporte [01:37:33]:
That's iracing on the Vision Vision Pro. Actually, I saw a lot of people talking about. Well, iracing is a game that is. I think you play through GeForce, right? That it's Nvidia's Cloud XR technology. A lot of people are saying this GeForce now, now that it's been tuned for Vision Pro is really a pretty good experience. Have you tried it, Jason?

Jason Snell [01:37:57]:
I'm afraid not. I haven't tried it yet. But, you know, I. Oh, look at him. I'll get to it sometime.

Leo Laporte [01:38:04]:
He looks like some sort of weird bug.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:06]:
You can see all humans but the sensor, but you are very Borg like, because the sensors are firing into the camera.

Jason Snell [01:38:14]:
You will be assimilated.

Leo Laporte [01:38:18]:
Apple Insider Malcolm Owen writing says GeForce now streams Apple Vision Pro faster and better than to meta headsets. Anyway, so if gaming's your thing, I think Apple might have made a little bit of a tactical error not focusing on gaming on the Vision Pro. That's really the thing that's keeping the meta quest alive. But maybe Nvidia has come in to save them as a white knight.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:40]:
I mean, it's giving, it's giving people more reasons to like actually take this thing out of the drawer. But Apple was never going to sell a $3,500 system for playing a handful of immersive games like 500.

Leo Laporte [01:38:52]:
Never underestimate gamers and their ability and willingness to spend an absurd amount of money.

Christina Warren [01:38:58]:
Well, yeah, but you need the games. That's the problem.

Leo Laporte [01:39:01]:
Well, that's what I'm saying. If Apple had, they couldn't get the AAA titles over there, correct?

Christina Warren [01:39:05]:
Yeah, correct. Because no one's going to. Still, no one's going to build those for the Mac.

Leo Laporte [01:39:08]:
It's too small a market.

Christina Warren [01:39:09]:
No one's going to build that for the Mac, period.

Jason Snell [01:39:10]:
That's why they showed a bunch of iPad games when they demoed it, because that's what they had.

Christina Warren [01:39:16]:
I mean, that's why. And it's great that you can use the GeForce now service and stream it to your Vision Pro. And I'm sure it is better than a meta quest. It's also many times the price. So it should be right. But the fact is, is that you're having to rely on a cloud service to be able to do that. And that's, you know, I mean, I'm sure it can be very immersive and actually I feel like driver sims and flight sims, like that's actually a really great use case for an immersive, you know, VR headset.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:43]:
But yeah, isn't it just disappointing that I was sure that I don't think anybody thought that this was going to be a blockbuster on the level of an iPhone or an Apple Watch or anything. But I was hoping that at least after a year, because Apple has such a vibrant community of creative developers, that there would be some people who saw something in it that Apple never planned on that no one could have predicted that wouldn't send people running out to buy a $3,500 VR headset, but would say, wow, this is a really good use case for it. Or this is something that gets me excited about the platform. It's disappointing that here we are two years later and every time that there's a piece of news, it's all about, hey, this existing entertainment platform has now arrived on the Vision Pro. Hey, the BBC is doing a classical music concert in Apple Immersive video. It's like there's nothing. Hey, there's this new app that is really catching on and really is a good demonstration of exactly what this platform can do. It's disappointing.

Leo Laporte [01:40:39]:
Are you saying Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor is not a killer app for the Vision Pro?

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:45]:
What I want is what I'm hoping for and this is just a rumor. So take this under, you know that cartoon in which, in which, in which Bugs Bunny is trying to play the concerto, but there's a mouse that's interfering with them. Rumor has it that they're going to put that mouse in that piano and you will be able to see the perspective of the mouse hitting the little hammers on the thing and trying to put a mousetrap on the piano's fingers. But at least they're.

Leo Laporte [01:41:08]:
This is the BBC Proms concert.

Jason Snell [01:41:11]:
It looks great.

Leo Laporte [01:41:11]:
Did you watch that? It does.

Jason Snell [01:41:12]:
It looks great. I mean, I mean, Andy's not wrong because I think that the third party developers are not in a good place with their relationship with Apple right now and they're less inclined to throw money time at a platform that is very small because, you know, out of, out of the goodness of their heart because they're really not feeling it when it regard to their relationship with Apple. And So I think that's been a problem. And so instead what we get is a lot of content. And the content is great. There's not a lot of it, but when we get it, that's the news we get is, oh, here's an amazing thing. Like, that concert is really great. Live stuff is great.

Jason Snell [01:41:44]:
They're going to shoot the Artemis launch tomorrow in Immersive. Apparently Major League Baseball has a new version of their app for the Vision Pro that last year you could watch a game and you'd see little dots move around on the field. This year you can watch a game, you can have the audio on, and it's actually 3D players moving in space based on all of the measurements that they do of those players.

Leo Laporte [01:42:09]:
I thought I saw a picture of that, I guess.

Jason Snell [01:42:11]:
Looks great. It's such a huge upgrade from last year's version of it.

David Pogue [01:42:15]:
It.

Jason Snell [01:42:15]:
It's really nice. They did a really good job with that 3D field and all of that. So, like, there's stuff going on. But Andy's not wrong. It's sort of big partners and stuff that involves content, like, because the content is really good when you get there. But. But I agree. I had been hoping that somebody would devise something that if not a killer app, would point the way toward where this platform should go and, and some combination of the cost and the low sales and the fact that nobody really wants to help Apple right now, and Apple is not doing what they probably should have done, which is give huge incentives to developers to develop for the Vision.

Christina Warren [01:42:56]:
Yeah, here we are. Absolutely right. I mean, honestly, like I've said from the beginning, like, it was a fantastic dev kit and it always, in my opinion, should have been positioned not as a ready to go mass consumer, consumer product that is going to be, you know, some sort of computer equivalent, but instead said, this is going to be a developer kit kind of an idea we have, but we will let the general public buy it. Right. I think that if it had been positioned that way, then you would have had a lot more developers and smaller developers. Maybe the bigger ones still would not have gone out on a whim for it because of their relationship with Apple. But you might have had other folks who would have been like, well, you know what, this is interesting and I'm going to buy this and tinker with it and feel like this is something that I can do because now I feel like I'm being allowed to buy this dev kit. Right.

Christina Warren [01:43:41]:
Whereas, like the video game consoles, you know, only select number of game makers in the early days are allowed to buy the developer machines. And so I think that that would have been one way to kind of get around the fact that when it launched, like the software stuff just isn't there. And I think that Apple in their hubris expected everyone to show up the way they've showed up to their other platforms and instead like the relations have been not been good and for very good reasons. And you know, there are a lot of people who are angry at, you know, YouTube and who's now finally there but you know, Netflix for not letting their iPad apps work. And I'm thinking, okay, we've never worked in software development or in QA or in support because even if it will work fine, if you just check this box, this is now going to add a support load request. We're going to have to put, you know, a PM on this. We're going to have to dedicate resources that we wouldn't have to do otherwise. And for what? Right, for a company that we're in a battle with over, you know, percentages of sales and other stuff and why should we help build their platform for them, right? Like why, why should we do that now? If I think the sales have been through the roof, then the scenario would have been different, but it wasn't.

Christina Warren [01:44:48]:
And it also didn't help that like to your point, like going out of your way to maybe bring more developers in. I think that the developer, like, I guess like the, the cable to be able to do the dev stuff isn't like $200 or something the developer strap.

Jason Snell [01:45:01]:
Yeah, yeah. No, it is Apple policy basically that like of course you're going to want to develop for our platforms because we'll get you rich because our platforms are amazing. And they decided to just go with that for Vision Pro when they should have been, I think, a lot more humble. I think that's absolutely true. It's funny, it's such a weird product because it is amazing hardware and I think the OS is really good and the software that's been written for it I think is, I think is really good. The interface is really good. These are not the problems. It's not a bad product, but there's nothing in it and, and it costs a fortune.

Jason Snell [01:45:37]:
And these are the problems that, that they're, they're intertwined. Nobody's going to buy it unless there's a killer app and nobody's going to developer develop for it because there's no incentive because there's nobody using it. And I don't know how they ever get out of that. Unless, like in five years they do a new version of it that's way cheaper or something. But it is frustrating because when I talk to people, a lot of my colleagues bought them to cover them like I did.

Christina Warren [01:46:00]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:46:00]:
And what they say is, and I agree with this too, I am looking for reasons to put it on, because when I'm putting it on and using it, it's kind of amazing. But then I use up all the reasons and I'm looking around like, give me another reason to stay on this thing. And they don't exist. And so the killer is they. They made an amazing piece of hardware with some great software on it, and it's kind of empty and that. And it costs too much for it to fill up because nobody's going to buy one. So I don't know. I don't know.

Jason Snell [01:46:35]:
It's really weird. It's unusual because it's not. It's not a loser of a product in the sense that it's a good product, but it's a complete.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:41]:
It's a.

Jason Snell [01:46:42]:
It's nobody.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:43]:
It's a good product for the alternate reality in which that became a thing in 2026.

Jason Snell [01:46:48]:
Or it costs $1,000.

Leo Laporte [01:46:50]:
Right, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:51]:
If, if they had set their sites later saying, this is going to be simply a VR screen in which apps project.

Christina Warren [01:46:55]:
Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:55]:
I mean, the thing is, like part of a persistent part of Apple folklore is that, oh, one of the great things about Apple is that they skate to where the puck is going to be. And the thing is like, okay, maybe they do, but sometimes they skate there and the puck never arrives. And this is, you know, this is the case. It took so long to develop. They really wanted it ready for a future that never actually came to be.

Jason Snell [01:47:13]:
Yeah. And if it does count, I think, because technically it's so hard, that's the other thing. And I think meta found this out, and I think everybody's found it out is like, like, maybe there's something here. I do believe that augmented reality in some form is going to reach us eventually. But, like, if you look at the technology and what's being done, it's so far out there. I mean, this is not a. It's right around the corner in a year. This is more like, let's check back in in 10 years.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:35]:
Well, not, not just, not just that, but the backlash against meta Ray Bans is building, building and building. Like the, the, the stuff they, they. For a miraculous year or so, they escape the backlash that Google Glass hit. It's like, oh, My God, what list this. Blank, blank. Who's wearing this camera on his face? And because it was so cool and so rare and they look like Ray Bans, they managed to get a grace period. But now that's. The entire conversation is about these.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:00]:
Look at this. Who's wearing these cameras on creepy glasses. Creepy glasses. And recording my conversation without telling me the. Recording the conversation. The social stigma behind these might be impossible to overcome if these glasses stay in their current form, as opposed to one of the other rumors. Is that just simply a pin that has a camera on it that you can put on, take off, maybe turn around so that the camera does not face anybody, but you still get the AI microphone? This is going to be a problem that society may just simply reject outright.

Leo Laporte [01:48:28]:
Yeah, well, that's disappointing. I just ordered mine with my prescription.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:32]:
You look great with them, though.

Christina Warren [01:48:34]:
You do. The annoying thing about kind of the backlash, and it's valid, I think, for various reasons, is that I felt like with the. The meta glasses, they did actually kind of achieve something kind of remarkable because they, you know, they're decent Bluetooth headphones, right? Like, it's. It's a decent way to kind of capture, you know, video if you want to. If you're kind of on the run. Right. They also act as sunglasses or prescription sunglasses. Like, they're.

Christina Warren [01:48:55]:
It's not a bad tech product, actually. It's. And it's affordable, right? Like, it's actually. It kind of works.

Leo Laporte [01:49:00]:
You think it'd be more acceptable. Think it's meta. That's the problem right now.

Jason Snell [01:49:03]:
Doesn't help. Yeah, doesn't help. That's not a beloved company that people think has their best interests at heart. Right. It's more like. But I talk to people who use Instagram even they're like, yeah, I don't do Facebook anymore, but I still can't drop. It's like nobody really likes them, so that. That can't help.

Jason Snell [01:49:21]:
But there are also lots of other cultural issues going on there. And, and once it. It's almost like to Andy's point, when it broke containment. What broke containment is also that creeps disabling the lights on them and stuff broke containment. Like the, The, The. The spreading of the product also spread to the point where the creeps got involved and that ruined it for, like, it's. Yeah, it's a real. It's a real question.

Jason Snell [01:49:45]:
It makes me wonder sometimes if Apple wanting to do like, you know, what if. What if Apple's got, like, a pin that you could wear or not and AirPods that could hear but are not, you know, are not videoing and your phone is in your pocket. Wondering if the constellation of devices approach might actually be better than the all in one I see everything, I do everything approach.

Leo Laporte [01:50:07]:
I may also just get used to it. You know, this is a cultural thing.

Jason Snell [01:50:11]:
Could be.

Leo Laporte [01:50:11]:
You know, I haven't disabled the lights. Did you use MLB's app to watch this on the Vision Pro? This is a pretty good look. How do you do this on the Vision Pro?

Jason Snell [01:50:21]:
Yeah, it's great. That's the new MLB app and. Okay. And it's now got 3D players, so it's a little like you're watching a video game, but it's based on their, on their metrics on the field because they capture all of that. You might see what it falls going.

Leo Laporte [01:50:33]:
It is for the Visual Pro.

Jason Snell [01:50:34]:
To be honest, it's, it's pretty good. I heard from somebody who said that they use it. They were blacked out and couldn't see their, their, their local team's game. So they put on audio and watched the Vision Pro version of it. And I, I tried that. It's actually pretty good.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:49]:
Oh my God. That. Because that's classic. Actually any, any longtime sports fans knows about the uncle who, who taught you the hacks that. No, no. Turn on the radio, watch it on TV announcers.

Leo Laporte [01:51:00]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to pause the TV so that the radio catch up with the radio. But other than that, it's a nice technique.

Jason Snell [01:51:07]:
Yeah. So they did. They did a good job. It's, you know, again, it was hovering discs last year and now it's 3D players because they've got, you know, whatever their licensing agreement is with the players association.

Leo Laporte [01:51:16]:
I wish they do this with F1. I don't know why they haven't done it with F1. I thought they would by now.

Jason Snell [01:51:21]:
It wouldn't surprise me if F1 is working on something.

Leo Laporte [01:51:23]:
They got to be. We'll see. And that's your Vision Pro segment.

Christina Warren [01:51:27]:
Now you see. Now you know. We're done talking. The Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:51:34]:
Bug eyes. Bug eyes. This is MacBreak Weekly. I think it's time for our picks of the week. Why don't we start with you, Ms. Christina Warren?

Christina Warren [01:51:47]:
Sure. So this was one. Actually, I guess this came out yesterday, but Ollama, which is kind of a Mac app where you can run local models. It's kind of like LM Studio. You might have talked about it before, but they just released a preview version, the latest version of Ollama, which actually is powered by MLX in the background. And so if you just bought a new, you know, MacBook Pro, like one of one of the M5s, or if you have an older model, as long as you have at least 32 gigs of RAM, this is actually going to be a lot more efficient in terms of like the time for first token than what they were using before, which was just using like the llama or llama.com CPP backend. And so yeah, I just wanted to kind of shout this out. But if you've ever wanted to like the, the local model story and there was some chatter about this in the Discord chat, it is not as good as like the Frontier models.

Christina Warren [01:52:40]:
Like it's not going to be as good as Opus or, or you know, 5.4 or anything like that. But you can do a lot of stuff. And what you can actually do, and they have kind of instructions on Olama's website how to do this, is you can even connect Claude Code or Codex to Ollama and say, okay, basically for smaller tasks use my local models and then maybe for bigger tasks use the Frontier work. But I just thought this was great. The fact that this is something that people have wanted for a long time, the fact that it's got the MLX on the back end and I think MLX is one of the best things that Apple has done in terms of kind of their AI story. So that's great to see.

Leo Laporte [01:53:19]:
There's huge potential. You know, right now almost all of the local AI models prefer having Nvidia cards and Cuda. But Apple has such a great story with ML processing and their unified memory. And it's a lot cheaper to get 128 gigs of Apple memory than it is 128 gig video card, if you even could. So I think Apple really needs this. The MLX support really is important. So I'm glad to hear that. That's really good.

Leo Laporte [01:53:50]:
I'll try it right away. I've been using Ollama on my framework, but I'll have to give it a shot on the Apple now that it supports Apple's hardware directly. Thank you, Christina.

Christina Warren [01:54:00]:
No problem.

Leo Laporte [01:54:00]:
Andy Ihnatko, Pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:02]:
This is such a big one. Humble bundle. You're used to this organization where for charity they'll let you basically buy these packages of digital books and digital content at incredible discounts. There is a Humble bundle right now that will let you get every single Peanuts, Charlie Brown, Snoopy strip ever published, all 25 volumes that were in print that collect every Single strip, plus all 10 volumes where they did an additional editions that are just all the Sunday strips in full color, plus a couple of additional collections. $25. And you download them as completely unlocked PDFs.

Leo Laporte [01:54:40]:
They're PDFs. They're not in a comic book. Comic book format, CBX or something.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:44]:
They're fine.

David Pogue [01:54:45]:
They're okay.

Leo Laporte [01:54:46]:
And you can read them and it's okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:48]:
Exactly. And I could not buy this fast. I could not believe I had a reread. So that's. That's not just like the minimum. No, no, no. That is the. That is an amazing amount of the classic content.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:59]:
Beautiful stuff. I can't. I can't recommend it highly enough. And it's like, I do this for

Leo Laporte [01:55:03]:
Bloom county and then I'll be happy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:05]:
Yeah, well, Calvin Hobbs someday. That's fine. But. But I mean, all the.50.

Leo Laporte [01:55:11]:
This is pretty good for 25 bucks. That's amazing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:13]:
That's like. It's one of those things where just buy it and at some point in life you will say, oh, my God, thank God all this stuff is on my iPad. Because that's one of the reasons why you buy lots of storage on your iPad. So that if you do acquire every single Peanuts comic strip ever published in collected form, you can put half of it or all of it on there and just simply have something to put

Leo Laporte [01:55:32]:
it on your airplane.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:33]:
Take refuge in.

Leo Laporte [01:55:33]:
Yeah. Next time you're on the airplane board, read the Sunday comics.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:38]:
Yep. So humble. Humblebundle.com and I think it's going on until like the 20th of April, but 25 bucks. Don't even think about it. Don't you. You want to risk forgetting about it?

Leo Laporte [01:55:48]:
It supports the Canine Companions charity, so.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:51]:
Indeed. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:55:52]:
Yeah. You're. You're actually doing good for yourself and for some little doggies somewhere.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:58]:
I own all of those Fantagraphics books, like, in hardcover. Like, I. I was the person who, like, pre ordered it every single time it was announced. So I do have, like, a master. All the other books in my library and in my house might, like, at some point be packed away or given away or something like that. I want that. Just like you used to be proud of that set of encyclopedias you had, like, in your living room. This is like, I'm proud of.

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:18]:
Like, I'm puffing on my pipe as I'm giving people the tour. Thoughts. Oh, this, of course, is my complete published hardcover edition of the Peanuts.

Leo Laporte [01:56:25]:
I have the complete hardcover Sandman, but I don't tell anybody about it, so. So that's itchy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:29]:
Yeah, that's on a lower shelf now. I still have them, but it's no longer.

Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
Yeah, it's a little troublesome. All right, Jason, your pick of the week.

Jason Snell [01:56:39]:
All right. I'm going to pick an indie app that is fun. It does run on the Vision Pro, but it also will just run on your Apple TV or other devices. I think iPad and iPhone and it's called Coax. It is replicating, flipping through the cable box, except using a Plex server. So if you have a Plex server, it will do just your cable box. You flip between channels. You can set it up however you want.

Jason Snell [01:57:05]:
It's all about serendipity. Flip like movie. This is a TV show. It'll. But you can set it to, like, group a bunch of episodes, like make a marathon of a TV show or have it be totally random. That's it. That's what it does. It is.

Jason Snell [01:57:17]:
Imagine if your video collection that you've got on your computer somewhere was just a TV interface that you could flip through live. And you never know what you're going to get. And it's just delightful. It's a really. It's a really fun idea. It's. You know, there's a free trial. You can buy it weekly or yearly or buy a lifetime.

Jason Snell [01:57:38]:
Try it out. See, I tried out on my Apple tv. I thought it was just hilarious. It's like you're watching cable, except you picked all the stuff because it's only the stuff that's on your server.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:48]:
Jason, is every third movie mannequin to just really duplicate that table experience.

Jason Snell [01:57:53]:
It can be if you want it

Leo Laporte [01:57:55]:
to be Coax out to lunch, channel surf your home media server. And it is on the App Store.

Jason Snell [01:58:05]:
Yeah, it's on the App Store for all the platforms. But like I said, Apple TV was even Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:58:08]:
I see.

Jason Snell [01:58:09]:
Even Vision Pro. But like, Apple TV is where this thing was made for. Because then. And I've got a bunch of movies and TV shows and stuff in a Plex server in my house. And this is just another way of looking at it. It's really. You can create channels. It's kind of addictive to do that.

Jason Snell [01:58:21]:
It'll do stuff automatically. It's just fun. It's just fun to take and surfaces. You may never think, I want to watch that movie, but at some point, you put that movie on your server and then you're flipping around and it'll automatically make, like classic movies and action and all these different channels based on the content that you've Got in your library and then you're just flipping and you're like, oh, yeah, that movie, right? And then you could just sit there and watch. Watch it. It's fun.

Leo Laporte [01:58:43]:
Is this in lieu of Plex or something like that? I mean, don't you have.

Jason Snell [01:58:46]:
It uses Plex as the back end. Plex. Plex doesn't do this, though. Plex. You're, like, going through menus, trying to see like. Like there's an app called Channels that does something like this.

Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
But it's mostly Channels before.

Jason Snell [01:58:58]:
Right. But it's. It's sort of mostly for, like, you know, you're running your own DVR and stuff like that.

Christina Warren [01:59:03]:
Yeah, like iptv. Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:59:04]:
This is just an interface in front of your Plex server that is kind of intelligently building these fake channels using your content that you can flip through.

Leo Laporte [01:59:13]:
It's fun. Okay.

Jason Snell [01:59:15]:
If you're looking for a new way, if you're one of those people who's got terabytes of video on a Plex server, I think you should try this out. Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. But the serendipity for me was kind of amazing because I was like, oh, yeah, I do have that movie. Or here's a random episode of News Radio. I'm pandering to Christina there. Great, let's watch it.

Christina Warren [01:59:35]:
Thank you for pandering to me. I actually bought. No, no, you don't. This is wild. I literally. It showed up on ebay last week. Somebody, like, found some sort of, I guess, trailer that had a bunch of old scripts in it, and there was a pilot script of Newsradio that had the original network notes on it.

Jason Snell [01:59:51]:
Wow.

Christina Warren [01:59:52]:
Belongs to me.

Jason Snell [01:59:54]:
Amazing.

David Pogue [01:59:55]:
I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:59:56]:
That's cool.

Jason Snell [01:59:58]:
There's an episode of News Radio that you. That if you listen hard, you probably can't hear my laugh, but it's in there. I went to an episode. Yeah, I went to the taping of an Episode Radio.

Leo Laporte [02:00:08]:
So I got a free little app for a power user that you might like. It's called Ghost Moon at ghostmoon app. Don't look for this on the App Store. Apple doesn't like it, but you can install it. You'll have to, of course, use the X ATTR command or use the Open anyway command and security to run it. But once you do, you're going to get a nice little menu here that gives you all sorts of power. Tools. Clear Clip, Clipboard, Start Screensaver, Sleep displays, Keep Mac away.

Leo Laporte [02:00:38]:
All of this stuff in a single menu. Switch to Dark Mode accessible settings, eject, internal drive, audio interface, one menu, soft reboot all the power tools. You can see your IP address public and local. You can do other things. It's free. I'm going to set it up to launch at login because I love having that menu there. In fact, I'm going to unhide it so that I don't have to do this every time I've got a menu hider going on there. We talked about that a few weeks ago.

Leo Laporte [02:01:08]:
So if you are a power user, this is a free app called Ghost Moon at Ghostmoon app. I'm sorry, it's@mgrunwald.com ghostmoon I don't know if that's the same Grunewald as in Harry Potter maybe, In which case you might be nervous about this. No, don't. It works fine. It's very cool. Every feature you need, two clicks away. The essential power tool for macOS. Ghost Moon.

Leo Laporte [02:01:37]:
Thank you. Christina Warren. How's everything in your life? I didn't get to ask you up front because we had that David Pogue guy here.

Christina Warren [02:01:44]:
Oh, no, no, no. Not problem at all. No, things are going well. My recovery is going well.

Jason Snell [02:01:48]:
So when do you go back to work?

Christina Warren [02:01:51]:
The week after next, so.

Leo Laporte [02:01:52]:
Oh, are you enjoying your time off though? You must be.

Christina Warren [02:01:55]:
Well, now I am now that I. I'm having a little bit more. I've had some issues kind of with medication stuff and now that's finally over. So. Yeah, but. Yeah, but I am looking. I'm like at that point where I'm like, yeah, I'm ready to go back to work.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
Enough sitting around the house.

Christina Warren [02:02:08]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:02:08]:
There's only so much Poketopio or whatever it was.

Christina Warren [02:02:12]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
I can play. Thank you, Christina. Andy Ihnatko. Great to see you, my friend. I hope the weather's turning nice in New England.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:21]:
I wore my outfit Apple Campus. Like, look at that. Apple. Apple. Apple hoodie. And it was too warm to be outside wearing this.

Leo Laporte [02:02:29]:
I'm.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:30]:
I can't say how thrilled I am that the weather is. Weather might be over. I'm not going to jinx it.

Leo Laporte [02:02:34]:
I should have. I have sealed in a box my Apple T shirt from the store, but I should have worn that.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:41]:
None of people have asked about it while I was walking around so I could say, oh, well, no, don't go looking for it. You have to have gone to the Apple Campus.

Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
You had to have been there. Sorry, Jason Snell. The 50th anniversary is almost over 6.

Jason Snell [02:02:55]:
I know, right?

Leo Laporte [02:02:56]:
What a shirt. There you go.

Jason Snell [02:02:58]:
Yeah, I'm flying the six colors today because why would you. As I download all of Peanuts in the background same.

Christina Warren [02:03:05]:
I was going to say thank you, Andy. I had to pause my download. I was like, this is my problem. This is much bigger than I was

Jason Snell [02:03:10]:
expecting it to be.

Leo Laporte [02:03:10]:
You guys, you're hysterical. Thank you all three of you. It's always fun to do this show. We do MacBreak weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you want. Of course, the best way to watch is in our club, Twit Discord. You get behind the velvet rope access. I can see Jason in there and Christina chatting away with our Discord members.

Leo Laporte [02:03:33]:
Even if you're not in the club, you can watch us live on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. We like to make it available to as many people as possible after the fact. On demand versions available also free at our website, twit.tv/mbw. There are even more ads on the YouTube version@YouTube.com and then of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically the minute we're done. And if you would leave us a nice review that helps spread the word about one of the oldest Apple podcasts in existence, MacBreak. Second oldest after MacGeek GaB, MacBreak Weekly. Thank you everybody for being here.

Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
But now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over. See you next week. Bye bye.