MacBreak Weekly 1019 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. Jason Snells here. Andy Ihnatko, Christina Warren. We're going to talk about iPhones in space. AirPods 2. We also will be talking a little bit about rumors about what's coming. Don't worry, the iPhone fold is still on schedule. We'll explain all of that.

Leo Laporte [00:00:19]:
And then local AI running on your Mac and iPhone. I'll explain how all of that coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1019, recorded Tuesday, April 7, 2026: Furious, Eloquent and Unrestrained. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news with our great Apple panelists like Jason Snell from SixColors, only his 50th podcast of the week present.

Jason Snell [00:01:04]:
Hello, hello. I'm here. I'm here. Principal Laporte. I made it. I'm in my chair at class time. It's happy. Yeah, a lot of podcasts. It's true, it's true.

Jason Snell [00:01:14]:
But this one is not like any of the others. It's special.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
This is my podcast.

Jason Snell [00:01:19]:
It's wild. You never know what might happen. Stay tuned, everybody. You never know. Never know.

Leo Laporte [00:01:24]:
The gags and laughs come fast and furious in this fun filled battle of the sexes. And now, now, Andy Ihnatko. Hello, Andrew from the library.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:34]:
The fun part about this for Jason is that this is not a podcast that Jason owns or has founded. So basically, if he could burn anyone, if he has to burn one podcast to the ground, this would be the one he'd probably choose. I would not blame him for it because again, it just simply makes sense.

Jason Snell [00:01:49]:
So that's why Leo has cleverly hedged by placing on the panel somebody I've known my entire career who I consider a friend. And it's like, oh, I mean, I could burn it all down, but Andy would go down with it. No, I can't do that to Andy. I've known Andy so long now. And Christina and I go way back too. It's true.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
It's true. And then there were four. Christina Warren from GitHub is here. Hello, Christina. Let us. There is really so little to talk about.

Jason Snell [00:02:21]:
That's great. We'll keep it to two hours then. I think I have a good feeling about this.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Andy did put in a lot of stuff from the 50th anniversary, but I feel like we did that. I don't know if we.

Christina Warren [00:02:32]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:34]:
And also, like, I don't know why I Just I'm not as excited about it as I'm. As 10 years ago I would have guessed that I would have been. It's just that there's been so much talk about. Even I was surprised that there's April 1st. It was like there are two things that I came to dread annually. You dread all the April Fool's posts. But then it's like if all these posts and all these articles and all these videos were absolutely sincere and I'm not, I'm not singling anybody out. It's just that it just felt like a lot for celebrating a fort.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:06]:
I. Again, I'm trying to bump people out. I realize that I'm bumming myself out

Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
and I live in a hype.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:13]:
I'm amazed that I'm just surprised that I wasn't as excited as I might have been.

Jason Snell [00:03:17]:
Was a lot. It is the 50th anniversary. Although again, I'm just going to point out that they actually incorporated January 3rd of 1977. So we can do this all again in a few months.

Leo Laporte [00:03:28]:
But was April 1 then? I thought that was.

Jason Snell [00:03:30]:
They filed the partnership. So Apple Computer Co. Was filed legally as a partnership on April 1, but then they, they incorporated the following year. So there's, there's a bunch of detail, but I'm right there with you. I mean I, I basically between that and Jeopardy, it basically took over the first three months of the year for me. Like I wrote two pieces for the Verge. I wrote the review of that David Pogue book. I wrote a bunch of stuff for $6 in Mac World.

Jason Snell [00:03:56]:
And like, oh yeah, I was, I was absolutely tired of it all. But it also like 50 is a. That's a big number. Like I don't expect that every April 1st we're going to get more Apple remembrances. Although I will point out that next year is the anniversary of the iPhone. 20th anniversary.

Leo Laporte [00:04:14]:
IPhone.

Jason Snell [00:04:15]:
So for that one, everybody. But. But no, I. It was, it was a lot. But I do think it was a special occasion. I. I was happy to be part of the Verges package. I think the Verge did a really good job of trying to cover the whole era and they asked me to talk about the Apple II and about how weird it was when Jobs wasn't there.

Jason Snell [00:04:31]:
And that was fun writing those stories. But I don't disagree. I mean like by the end I was so done.

Christina Warren [00:04:40]:
Well, that's kind of the problem.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:41]:
It's like a destination wedding. Let's.

Jason Snell [00:04:43]:
Let's put that.

Leo Laporte [00:04:43]:
It's like when Christina talk.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:46]:
No, I just want to add to that, that we're good.

Leo Laporte [00:04:47]:
Of course you do.

Christina Warren [00:04:48]:
Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. And you're not wrong. It is kind of like destination wedding thing. But I think that this is kind of a more kind of general problem that we kind of run into with, with. With fandoms, as it were, which I think weirdly like Apple, you know, even though it was a company, kind of falls into that thing too. Is that because there is the whole content ecosystem around it and all of us are part of that ecosystem, there then becomes like kind of a machine to kind of celebrate these things. And so it's like, okay, we have to do these packages, we want to do these remembrances.

Christina Warren [00:05:17]:
And like that can, I think, kind of become overwhelming even if you're part of it and even if you like it, just because so many people are wanting to. To comments off. And the final thing I'd just say is I love Jason's contributions to the Verges special, but I also thought the art direction that the Verge did was actually really incredible and it was clear they put a lot of work into that.

Jason Snell [00:05:38]:
Yeah, yeah. Like each piece has original art that was designed to fit together and stuff. Like that's magazine level work. You don't see that.

Christina Warren [00:05:47]:
Absolutely.

Jason Snell [00:05:48]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:05:49]:
Now that magazines are dead.

Jason Snell [00:05:51]:
Well, I mean, yeah, basically, like. And you don't web publishing. Look, I've been publishing on the web forever, right. But like it's mostly just templated, right. So you just stick things into fields and press, press, post. And so for the Verge to go and do art direction and get like special headers that are designed around, you know, animations of. And collages of Apple history and stuff like. Yeah, it's above and beyond.

Jason Snell [00:06:16]:
But they do, they do some really good work over there.

Leo Laporte [00:06:18]:
Good on them.

Jason Snell [00:06:19]:
Good job, Nile.

Leo Laporte [00:06:20]:
Good job. This is. Somebody's getting ready for the 2027 anniversary of the iPhone.

Jason Snell [00:06:30]:
Yeah, there's always something.

Leo Laporte [00:06:32]:
Yeah. This is a picture of every iPhone

Jason Snell [00:06:35]:
ever, I will say. So, like, people are interested in this. Like the, the. The. I have been writing a column for Macworld's website since I left. Right. So since 2015, early 2015. It's been a long time now.

Jason Snell [00:06:51]:
And the feedback I've gotten is that the stories where they pick like, here's an anniversary that happened and you use it to tell a story that maybe ties Apple of today into the past. It does work for them. So I mean, it happens for a

Leo Laporte [00:07:09]:
reason is what you're saying.

Jason Snell [00:07:10]:
But I think kind of empty nostalgia is not as much Fun as it is to kind of like connect the dots to the past. But that's me because I am not a. I'm not an Apple historian. I am somebody who writes about Apple. Like I always say when Neelay Patel at the Verge emails me and says here's a story about an anniversary. Jason, would you like to write about it? I'm like, you know, I also write about the present, Neelay, but he's got people to do that part of the job. He doesn't need that. I like to.

Leo Laporte [00:07:36]:
This is actually kind of an interesting site called the Data Drop with a weird URL they do. I guess one of these every month is the 40th one and they did a. I have a feeling it's AI generated but it's really nice the history of the iPhone where it's got a lot of not only details about each model, but kind of stats like how the cameras got better and so forth. So I think there's a price graph which is kind of interesting when you look at it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:05]:
That really is the magazine sort of effect these days that even. Especially New York Times and other publications that have the money for it. It's like, you know what the days of laying out left page, right page, spread page. Even the days of laying out. Okay, let's have a nice scroll that has. Now it's like, no, this needs to be an. Even though it really is just about a long like 2000 word piece of text, it needs to have some. Would it be wonderful if there's a way we could put across all the information with some interactivity and making it not necessarily an app or a video, but making it just do things as you navigate through it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:38]:
This is such a lovely visualization of a design story.

Leo Laporte [00:08:43]:
Sheets Works data viz, every iPhone. I suspect Sheets Works is maybe a place where you can do data visualizations would be my guess. Yes, it is. So maybe that's their little ad for themselves.

Christina Warren [00:08:58]:
I mean they did a great job with that. I mean even the attention to detail. Like I'm sure that AI was probably used as it is for most things these days, but the fact that even the wallpaper that's included on each phone is updated to what the wallpaper was.

Leo Laporte [00:09:09]:
That's cool.

Christina Warren [00:09:10]:
You know, for each of those models, you know they have the different and prices like they, they. It's. It's. It's pretty cool. And then like I, I look through this and I'm just like, oh my God, I don't have them all. Obviously I've usually trade them in every year. But I'm like, I've. I've owned almost every single phone on this list, which is absurd.

Leo Laporte [00:09:28]:
Oh, I have two. Well, not. No, not every. But one per year.

Christina Warren [00:09:32]:
What? Right. I was going to say. No, not, not. Not every single variant, but you know what I mean? But at least like one per year. I'm like, okay, my God. Like, I had, like, you know, didn't have the 5C, for instance, because I had the 5S, but, you know, like, yeah, every year I had one of these.

Leo Laporte [00:09:46]:
Basically, it's been my daily driver since it came out. The last phone I had before that was the BlackBerry Pearl, and it's been a daily driver ever since. IPhone in space, thanks to Annie, collating a bunch of good bits, including this one from Macworld. I thought. Now Macworld says this was shot on the iPhone. I thought that they weren't able to trans to get pictures off the iPhone yet, that we'd have to wait till they got back.

Jason Snell [00:10:15]:
So there's been a lot of questions of this because there's also shots of the astronauts using AirPods to do their workout. And the answer is there are PCs on board, famously running multiple copies of Outlook at once, which they had to reboot. And they had all sorts of troubleshooting issues with that. And there is Bluetooth connectivity, so there's no like WI fi or anything like that. But the Bluetooth radios are allowed. The PCs use them. The AirPods obviously use them. And I would imagine that there is an.

Jason Snell [00:10:42]:
Some sort of, if not airdrop, then a cable connect, because you can also just connect your iPhone and it shows up and you can import photos. And so I'm sure that they've got an iPhone data dump system where they get connected back to that PC probably, and then imported. And. And I don't think they're sending everything down. I think they're like literally picking the ones they want to send on a relic because they're using the deep space network, which is very low bandwidth, but so they can get iPhone photos back too.

Andy Ihnatko [00:11:09]:
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how they. How Apple, excuse me, how NASA segregates this stuff. There is. They do have an official Flickr account where you see, oh, my God, there's the new version of Earthrise, and they're all being shot on Nikon D5s. But of course, everybody who's watching the live feed, one of the most exciting screen grabs that someone posted was, oh, my God, there's one of the astronauts, one of the crew, like, took A picture of the lunar surface with her iPhone. You could see the screen, even though it's like a little tiny, like little postage stamp in the middle of this, like, streamed video. It looks like it's going to be awesome. I can't wait for them to actually post this direct stuff.

Andy Ihnatko [00:11:43]:
I think it really is going to be like if the New York Times had a very, very long piece about how iPhones got certified and how they got on. On the, on the craft. And they haven't really said how. They haven't really said if this is going. These are official NASA photos or if these are personal photos that are just kind of. We're only going to see if and when. If and when these, the crew, like, actually post to social media. But I feel as though like in the days after, after splashdown, we're going to see some amazing posts to see that Apple is going to really, really want to take advantage of because we just really can't wait to see how well this stuff works.

Jason Snell [00:12:23]:
It's pretty cool. And just shows how consumer tech has advanced so much. That's. That's the really amazing thing. Also, the, you know, the Nikon camera that they're using, like, it's not a, it's not the Hasselblad with film that they use in Apollo 8. Right. But it's like modern digital camera technology is, Is so amazing. And then the fact that they've got.

Jason Snell [00:12:41]:
I was always chuckling because they're like, they have so limited time that they've got it. They've choreographed it out. The astronauts are in the windows. They're shooting the moon as they go past it. Shooting the moon, literally. And. But it's like, I had to laugh because they're like, all right, now we're going to rotate. Be sure to bring your SD cards with you.

Jason Snell [00:12:57]:
And like, there's a lot of talk about where the SD cards go.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:00]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [00:13:01]:
Because instead, because with Apollo 8, it was all like, hey, can you get me some more of that color film? And now it's like, don't forget your SD cards. And they do all of that. And then presumably when all that is done, then somebody is triaging those photos, those SD cards on the PC that they've got to pick which ones they're going to put in the uplink queue. It's a, it's just amazing to see that whole, like, digital photography workflow happening in the open on the radio as the spaceship flies past the moon.

Leo Laporte [00:13:27]:
Here's a guy, I don't know if he is doing a Selfie while he's shaving or actually using the iPhone as a mirror. That's an interesting use of one on Macworld. Michael Wiseman says it's the best shot with iPhone ad ever. These pictures, right?

Christina Warren [00:13:41]:
Oh, I mean it's funny, right? Because it was Samsung who did like the AI generated moon shots, remember? Right. So I mean, so it's kind of funny to think about. You're like, okay, the actual. Right. No, you can't bring that actually though, that would be hilarious if you've had that. You're like, okay, is it going to try to AI the moon on top of the moon?

Jason Snell [00:13:59]:
It's just green cheese down there now.

Christina Warren [00:14:00]:
But no, I mean, yeah, this is, it's a perfect shot on iPhone ad. I mean you couldn't have asked for better free publicity.

Leo Laporte [00:14:09]:
And if you go to Flickr, NASA has preserved the EXIF information from the shots so you can actually see.

Jason Snell [00:14:16]:
Yeah, you can also go to images.NASA.gov and they've got EXIF on that too. And all the photos they shoot will come back. That's part of the deal. Ultimately they will all be posted from.

Leo Laporte [00:14:28]:
Yes, I can actually show these on YouTube without getting taken back.

Jason Snell [00:14:31]:
It's true, it's true. They belong to all of us.

Andy Ihnatko [00:14:34]:
That about.

Jason Snell [00:14:35]:
Yeah, but that's, it's just, it's, it's. This is one of those moments where you see how, because it's been. Talk about 50 years, it's been 50 years how technology has advanced along so many different axes, including ones you don't necessarily think of in the context of a, for example of digital photography and space flights. But this is, you know, a lot of the advanced tech that's in space stuff now is also, I mean it works both ways. There's a lot of space stuff that is powered by the fact that smartphones got so good because you need. For space you also need power sipping technology. You need small, not necessarily light, but you need low mass and fits in a small space. And it turns out when the last shuttle launch I went to and there were iPhones on board that one, a company called Nanoracks had a couple iPhones on that mission.

Jason Snell [00:15:28]:
And I was talking to them and they said everybody in space loves the fact that the iPhone and smartphones are doing this because their priorities turns out just sort of by happenstance, their priorities are our priorities. And so now, 20 years almost later, so much space stuff benefits from the miniaturization, the low power, all of those things. All the tech that gets used in space now Is. Is much more advanced, I think, than it would be if you didn't have a huge consumer product need that drives the tech forward.

Leo Laporte [00:15:59]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:59]:
And I love the idea of just as a sociological thing, I love the idea of astronauts taking. Having their own personal cameras and being able to take pictures that are not on the schedule, that are just. I wanted to capture this just as the same way that if I'm at Six Flags, I want to. I want to capture some pictures of my friends because something cool is really happening at the moment. And when you see the livestream, occasionally you do see, like, someone whip out a phone and just shoot video of, like, the other crew members of what's going on. And of course, we have the pictures like that from basically every NASA mission that's ever existed. But there's something. I don't know, it's something about something that we're all familiar with, things that we do on the ground every single day, happening 245,000 miles away from home, that is part of the great storytelling of a mission like this.

Leo Laporte [00:16:46]:
I think it's great. Jessica took. It looks like she did this with her iPhone. This is the one where she's wearing the. The AirPods. She says, Apologies for the noise. It's really noisy in the space station. Which is why you might want to have AirPods with the noise cancellation.

Leo Laporte [00:17:07]:
I love it that she did this. This is really kind of amazing. They have rather elaborate exercise paraphernalia because, first of all, you can see they're weightless, so it's hard to get exercise. And then they don't have a lot of space, but they managed to quite a bit in this small area. And I love it that she put her iPhone up just as you might at the gym.

Christina Warren [00:17:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:17:32]:
And shot her workout.

Christina Warren [00:17:34]:
And can we just take a second to just comment on how cool it is that we are at this point where, you know, it had been so long since we've had any sort of mission like this and to finally have another one and to finally, like, for it to coalesce at a time when we have the technology to actually document what's happening in real time so that we can all follow along from the Internet, we can see the photos that they're uploading through a satellite that is going to flicker. Right. That they're going to eventually have the full things that people. That we have technology in our pockets that we can take up to space and record things that we have wireless headphones. I don't know. It's easy to get cynical about things sometimes, but it's freaking cool.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:12]:
You're reminding me of the lines from Apollo 8 where there was an HBO series from the Earth to the Moon. I'm sure you've seen. And they did a whole episode about Apollo 8 and about all the turmoil that was happening in 1968, like all the unrest, Vietnam and everything like that. And then there comes this moment where Apollo 8 goes around the Moon and does this Christmas broadcast in which they read from Genesis and Earthrise comes out and they found an actual historical thing where someone amongst the telegrams was, thank you, Apollo 8, you've saved 1968. And maybe this is kind of a similar moment in which we don't. We are. Nobody is intended, Nobody is. I don't know how to put it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:57]:
Bad things are happening that make us all very, very worried and we still need to focus on that. But it's good to have a break from that, to be reminded of the arc of history. And the arc of humanity is long and the arc of history is better and more important than any one moment. Moments like this with Artemis are part of that positivity that pulls us through into the future.

Jason Snell [00:19:21]:
Humans are capable of amazing things. It's good. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that. From the Earth to the Moon is great. Tom Hanks was the executive producer of it. It's on hbo, Max. You can go watch it now. It's still great.

Jason Snell [00:19:34]:
You will see it's star studded. There are lots of people you will recognize in there. I watched that Apollo 8 episode, Apollo 8. Seriously underrated, by the way. That's a great mission. Great space Mission with Jim Lovell and company. And that's a great show. It's worth revisiting if you've got moon fever.

Jason Snell [00:19:52]:
Yeah, I want to mention we take things for granted. Christina mentioned we have this amazing technology. The one thing that we don't have is deep space bandwidth because they're using the Deep Space Network, which literally usually it's for like Mars rovers and orbiters at Saturn and Jupiter and stuff like that, but they're using it for this. However, there was a good story, I wish I had a link to it, I don't right now, about how there is actually a set of relay satellites that are being designed that will be put in lunar orbit or Earth orbit. But basically what you need, if you're going to be at the South Pole, if you're going to be behind the moon, on the far side from Earth, and if you want the bandwidth that we kind of expect, if we want, because all of this we were seeing like they have to send their telemetry back plus the video. So the video is all blocky and not very good quality, even though they're shooting this incredible quality stuff. They are working on building a set of satellites that are relay satellites that will allow moon missions and, you know, future Artemis missions to have bandwidth, the bandwidth to which we on Earth are now accustomed. And I think that will be very exciting because we are going to get probably in the next few years, the ability to see a moon mission where we will actually see live HD full frame rate video.

Jason Snell [00:21:17]:
We're not this mission didn't have that, so we had to wait. And it's still very impressive, but like that's coming too. And that's also really exciting because you could see the part of the chain that was not upgraded which was the speed of the deep space network. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:35]:
But isn't it amazing not to hear the eep? Yeah, it's really great over here.

Christina Warren [00:21:38]:
Eep.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:38]:
It's almost disorienting because that's the user interface for understanding moon communications.

Leo Laporte [00:21:45]:
Yeah. This NASA site is also great images.NASA.gov be great wallpaper source too, because you can get to download the large file sizes, which is great. So highly recommended. And thank you NASA, for a little inspiration in a difficult time. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Inacco, Jason Snell, Christina Warren will be back with more in just a bit. I don't know if we even care, but here's a review of the new AirPods Max 2 from Engadget. I think as far as we could tell, it's exactly the same except for the H2 chip, right? I mean, literally nothing's different.

Christina Warren [00:22:27]:
Nothing's different in terms of the. I mean, except that the sound is going to be better, right? It's going to have better noise canceling. They said that they improved the drivers, but all the reasons that I think some of us were critical of the AirPods before are still there. Right. And so it's kind of a mixed bag. I feel like, unlike the ones that came out a year and a half ago, that I bought the USB C upgrade, which was literally just a USB C port, although they did eventually add the ability to listen losslessly. If you had a USB C, I guess a 3 1/2 millimeter cable or USB C to USB C cable, that was one nice thing. If you bought those, that was not a great buy because they were basically the same as the ones that came out in 2020.

Christina Warren [00:23:12]:
Seems like these are a Decent upgrade. I think it just comes down and so if you liked your 2020 AirPods Maxes and you're looking to get a better experience and you can get these on sale, I feel like maybe the takeaway is this is decent. I feel like the. The problem that we've talked about before is just that there's a lot of other options in this space for these types of headphones that are in many cases better suited towards things like travel or for other types of listening experiences and that aren't as heavy and have a better case and have better battery life. But this is a good upgrade. I just wish that they had done this a year and a half ago rather than kind of doing this staggered thing where you have three identical looking sets of headphones. And it feels like the only reason these got an update at all was that they just ran out of H1 chips and wanted to use what they've got and continue selling askew. Right.

Christina Warren [00:24:07]:
It didn't seem like it was driven from any sort of product development of let's make enhanced better version of this. It was just like, well, we ran out of the thing we used to put in here. So here you go, here's an upgrade.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:18]:
Yeah, I think iFixit did their usual teardown video and they basically seemed to. Their takeaway was that it seems to be the exact same stuff inside. Or at least the construction is still the same. They're still complaining about glues.

Leo Laporte [00:24:32]:
I've talked before about a guy named George Hotz. Very interesting fella. He was the guy who created Commodot AI which was a self driving vehicle. Add on you could put on your iPhone and have it drive your car.

Christina Warren [00:24:44]:
He's also the teenager who first jailbroke the iPhone.

Leo Laporte [00:24:47]:
He first jailbroke. He's a really cool guy and he has a little company called Tiny Corp, which among other Things makes a $10 million EXA flop server you can buy which is very cool as well as some regular computers. But they've done something for the Mac crowd that I think is pretty exciting. They have a driver that lets you use an EGPU with your Mac and an Nvidia card and Apple has signed the driver.

Christina Warren [00:25:18]:
That's what's so cool, is that Apple. I mean now you can't use it for what you can't use it for graphical workloads. You can only use it for AI inference type of stuff. But still massive.

Leo Laporte [00:25:28]:
If you're buying an Nvidia video card these days, chances are you're doing it for AI. It's for sure expensive.

Christina Warren [00:25:34]:
Absolutely. I mean, and that's, that's I think probably why they were able to get the driver signed right at this point.

Leo Laporte [00:25:39]:
Like Apple didn't want to sign it if it was for gaming.

Christina Warren [00:25:42]:
I don't think so.

Leo Laporte [00:25:43]:
So strange. I know Apple has, you know, resisted Nvidia GPUs ever since Apple Silicon came out.

Christina Warren [00:25:51]:
Even before that. I mean their thing, Jason would probably. Andy, you guys might remember more than I do, but they used to have like the Nvidia GPUs and the laptops. And then there was something I think with one of the versions of the MacBooks. It might have been in like 2009 or 2010. I don't remember when it was. It might have been the Nvidia models or not the Nvidia, the first Retina models. Actually there was some sort of problem with those graphics cards.

Christina Warren [00:26:12]:
And the rumor is that, you know, Apple got very angry with Nvidia and basically cut them off. And so they haven't had any, you know, official driver support for any Nvidia products even in Mac Pros that, you know, back when you could actually put a graphics card in a Mac Pro and so there's just been like a 15 year cold war.

Leo Laporte [00:26:31]:
It's amazing. It was posted on X on April Fool's so I would forgive you for thinking it was a joke. Here's from George the tiny Corp. If you have a Thunderbolt or USB 4, EGPU and a Mac, today's the day you've been waiting for. Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and Nvidia. And there is a beautiful Nvidia video card running bare naked to the world next to a Mac Mini. And of course as you pointed out, Christina, it doesn't work going to your monitor. So you can't accelerate games.

Leo Laporte [00:27:04]:
That's why you can't accelerate games. It doesn't can't drive your monitor with it, but you can certainly drive your

Jason Snell [00:27:10]:
AI with it because Apple Silicon doesn't support that concept at all. But outboard GPU, it, it'll do.

Leo Laporte [00:27:16]:
Okay, if you insist. Yeah, it's Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4. You don't even need Thunderbolt 5 to do it. Although I wonder if it's faster. I guess it would be with Thunderbolt 5.

Jason Snell [00:27:26]:
I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:28]:
This is 2026 versus 2016. The world has given Apple a reason to believe that, oh, if we support GPUs that will help us sell more Macs because we want to sell more AI platforms When it was back before we wanted really super fast gaming or we want a tiny, tiny niche of researchers to be able to have access to GPUs. It just wasn't worth the trouble of signing this stuff. Now it's a totally different world.

Leo Laporte [00:27:55]:
And by the way, it's free. I mean, the GPU's not free unless you got one lying around somewhere. But thanks to Tiny, they're making that available. It's just a little curl to bash, which is something we all do these days. We're all curling to bash, as dangerous as that sounds. And you get a little tiny GPU app and then it will install the driver extension, which is Apple sign. So you're not going to get any complaints from Apple. Pretty impressive.

Christina Warren [00:28:26]:
That's very cool.

Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Yes. So that's our new product lineup. EarPods Max 2 and a driver. All right, let's talk about what's coming. The foldable iPhone, which I think I'm going to buy. I really want to if I can. Because according to Nikkei, there are some engineering snags, shipment delays, possible, say sources. I don't subscribe to Nikkei Asia, so I don't have the deets.

Leo Laporte [00:28:59]:
Maybe you guys do.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:01]:
Yeah, the Reuters picked it up. Everyone else picked it up. Everyone else picked it up. They're saying it's true that more issues than expected have emerged during the early test production phase and additional time will be needed to resolve them. Quoting a force source familiar with the matter.

Leo Laporte [00:29:15]:
So we don't even know what that means. A month, a week, a year.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:19]:
Yeah, but this is a time where we're probably going to get more news about that. As we often speak about, if Apple really is intending to ship something in the fall, this is the time where they actually stop thinking about conceptually, how would we do this and engineering wise, how do we solve? Now they probably have samples of what the final product is going to be and they're finding out that, ooh, we found a manufacturing snag that was not going to be discovered until we started a trial manufacturing run, things like this. So it doesn't mean that the project's doom. It's not that it's the Star Crossed iPhone fold project or anything like that, but if anything, it's a good indication that, yeah, this is a real thing and maybe Apple really is going to ship this in September or October.

Leo Laporte [00:30:02]:
Gurman said today that it's still going to ship at a planned time frame. So whatever the delay, I mean, that's what Gurman says.

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:09]:
Who knows?

Christina Warren [00:30:10]:
I'm sure that that's probably what their target is. Right. And who knows? I think the report, one of the aggregations of the report that I read said that the next few weeks are critical for them. I guess figuring out how long of a delay, if there is one, will happen. And look, I mean, I think worst case, unless there's something truly catastrophic in the supply chain, which I. I doubt, the worst case would be that this would be like many other iPhone launches where Apple announces something and then it ships a month and a half later. Right. Like that.

Christina Warren [00:30:40]:
That.

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:40]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:30:40]:
You know, they did that during the pandemic. They've done that at other instances.

Leo Laporte [00:30:43]:
Could do that. Huh?

Christina Warren [00:30:44]:
Yeah, so. So I feel like that's a case where you, you know, you have your big announcement, you show it off, you even have samples that you can give out to selected press, and then you just say, and this will be available for preorder in November. Like, they've done that a couple of times.

Leo Laporte [00:30:57]:
I guess I could live with my iPhone 17 Pro for a few extra months.

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:03]:
And that's. Christine, that's a good observation, because when you think about it, I think that when Apple releases the folding phone, which is going to be a moment not just for iPhone, but also for the category of folding phones in general, it's going to suck the air out of any iPhone release that they even would consider doing next to it. So maybe they will want to give it a separate event just to make sure that they get attention for the next iPhone. Nothing before it.

Jason Snell [00:31:29]:
They can kick it to spring. They've got. The plan is to do a spring event, so they could kick it to spring potentially. I mean, I'm not sure they want to do it, but they could do it if they. If they had to, if they have to. And, and remember, it's not a. This is the classic, like, what's late mean? It's not late by their standards, because they haven't announced it, but it's. It's late by their reported expectations.

Jason Snell [00:31:50]:
And I, you know, it's. Andy's right. We're going to hear. And I mean, this is. This is not. Oh, they got months yet. It's like, we're going to hear, like, this is going to either work or it's not going to, and they're going to have to recalibrate. But, you know, it's not the end of the world for them because it is not a product that exists.

Jason Snell [00:32:05]:
It's not a product that, while we're all anticipating it, they could get away with doing it a Little later. I actually think that there's probably a drop dead here because if you're going to announce this in September, as they usually do, like if you can't ship it by November, certainly like by early December, you can think back to like the iPhone 10 shipped late, right?

Christina Warren [00:32:26]:
Yep.

Jason Snell [00:32:27]:
But like there is a moment where you're like, forget it. Just we're not going to make the holidays. Yeah, let's re rerack. And it won't be like January. They'll push it back into the spring and do a spring event, I think.

Christina Warren [00:32:38]:
Well, that's what they did for Apple Watch. Right. Because. Because Apple Watch was. Did they even announce it in the fall? They might not have announced in September without a date. Then they showed the preview in January. Yeah. April came out and then they had the preview, I guess like in March.

Christina Warren [00:32:51]:
Right. So. Yeah, yeah, so. So, I mean, they could, worst case, they could do something like that if it really came down to it. I feel like if they are going to ship this, if for whatever reason there was a delay, it would probably be better to preemptively let people know that the fold is coming. Not so much to like just, just to not have people, you know, maybe who aren't as in touch with things be like, okay, well, I'm not going to, I'm going to buy the Max. I'm going to buy something else who might have otherwise been in line for the fold. But even then they could just hold the whole thing for the spring, if that's what it came down to.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:29]:
The good news is that the Nikkei report? I'm sorry, I just refreshed myself on it. The Nikkei report says it's not due to supply constraints. So it's not as though we can't find the RAM, we can't get the panels, we can't get the CPUs. It really is about manufacturing and it seems like something you wouldn't have said a couple years ago, but. Oh, I feel as though they can solve a manufacturing problem more readily than could have solved the DRAM problem.

Christina Warren [00:33:49]:
Oh yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:51]:
And another factor is that although foldables isn't like an international phenomenon of monster sales across all categories, there is enough sales data to get analysts to have some theories about how people buy these things. And most of them agree that I would have been surprised to learn this, that this is not a second device for people, that people are trading in their own, their old phones to pay down the expense of the phone. So it's not even necessarily if they were to Decide to simply show it off in September and October, maybe even somewhat alongside a new iPhone event. Maybe it's possible that that really wouldn't have a bad impact upon the iPhone Pro. Maybe people would buy them and then say, you know what, if I like what I see in May, I'll just trade it in against this one and I'll probably get a really good price against it.

Christina Warren [00:34:41]:
Yeah, I think, I think so because I, because I feel like there will be some people who will have both. But I think like what I'm personally anticipating doing is keeping my 17 pro max. Usually I trade it and keeping that around and then getting the fold, but. But not trading it in for it just because I don't know how powerful it's going to be. I don't know how much I'm gonna like the whole thing but, but I feel like most people would not be in that position where they're just gonna be like, okay, if I'm gonna spend the money on this, I'm going to either do some sort of trade in or have some sort of. I've just already determined that I'm getting this, this device, you know, because. Yeah, because I think most people do use it as a primary device, as you should. I mean, if you're going to spend that much money on something, it shouldn't be something that, that you, you don't feel like you can, you can have.

Christina Warren [00:35:23]:
And to me, I mean like if what it comes down to being is basically like an iPad mini that you can fold up, which when they redesigned the iPad mini, that was the first thing I thought I was like, oh man, if this could fold in half, this would be the perfect device. And if that's what they of kind can give us some approximation of, I mean, I think it'll be expensive, but there'll be a lot of people who will be excited by it. I think more people will be excited still though. Buy the regular phone and the Pro models.

Leo Laporte [00:35:49]:
The stock market thinks the fold's pretty important. When that Nikkei report came out, Apple's stock price dropped 5%, which is huge. Gurman today says Apple's foldable phone remains on track for a September debut despite that. Nikkei reporting rebutting concerns, he says, about major manufacturing snags. So somebody from Apple immediately called Mark

Christina Warren [00:36:15]:
and said, I was going to say, so somebody was immediately there like, actually this is fine, don't worry about it. We promise we're going to have it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:36:26]:
He does say the complexity of the new display materials may limit initial supply for several weeks. So you might be right about that, Christina. Yeah, you know, I'm excited about it. I've had folding phones, all of them. I still have the Galaxy latest Galaxy Fold and been less enthused about them. But I think Apple might have something with the os with a rumored square aspect ratio. I think they might have something there.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:55]:
And on top of everything else, it might be the least clumsy transition from stock phone to unfolded tablet that we've seen in the industry yet. I don't know. I said they're not. Well, they're not, they're not particularly clumsy right now. They were clumsy as hell at first. But in terms of I'm starting an experience with this thing I just simply took out of my pocket. Then I realized, ooh, actually going to need to reply to this a little bit more detail. You unfold it and without even having a mental blip of you feel as though you just simply ended one sentence, open the phone and then continue with the next sentence.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:26]:
And also the ability to view split views, split view, leveraging off of stuff that we, that they've been building for the iPad for, for a mighty long time.

Jason Snell [00:37:34]:
Yeah, the iPad is the is. I wrote about this like six months ago. It's that moment when you saw that it was going to be a little squatter and a little wider and more iPad like when it's open. It's like their secret weapon here is they've been making iPads for 16 years now. And like iPadOS is good apps on iOS and iPadOS that get larger, they get larger in an intelligent way. They do that better than Android. It's an advantage they have over Android and they're going to press that advantage.

Leo Laporte [00:38:00]:
There's no even you'd agree. I know you're an Android phone user, but the drawback really to Android folding phones is that the software just doesn't adapt.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:09]:
Samsung had to basically build their own solution to what happens to a phone app when it suddenly appears on a tablet. I mean it was only like three or four or five years ago that Google even sort of explicitly acknowledged that yeah, we should really get on that about making Android into something that does not look like. It doesn't look like an expanded phone app when you put it on a thousand dollar tablet.

Christina Warren [00:38:33]:
Right. Well, I mean even this going back even further than this when the, when Microsoft made the Surface Duo, right. Which was, you know, a different type of phone.

Leo Laporte [00:38:40]:
I loved that and I bought one.

Christina Warren [00:38:43]:
Yeah, it was, it was an interesting device. I think it was a little bit underpowered when it came out. But there were a lot of interesting designs.

Leo Laporte [00:38:48]:
Software.

Christina Warren [00:38:49]:
Yeah. And the interesting thing there though was that the Microsoft Team actually Google at the time told them, we will let you own kind of this foldable experience about again, to your point, Andy, about how these things expand and what these things look like. Because Google at that point was so not committed to any sort of tablet experience. Now obviously Samsung went beyond that and now, you know, Google has their own, you know, the pixel folds and things like that too. But you know, and that was like seven years ago or whenever the Surface duo came out and they just didn't have that ecosystem. I think Jason's exactly right. What will make this work is that if it's folded in one realm, it operates just like the iPhone you've already known. And if you open it up then it can work just like an iPad that you've always known if that's what they wind up doing.

Christina Warren [00:39:33]:
And I think that that would be like they do. That's what I hope they do too because I think that would be like the perfect interaction method. Especially now that iPadOS has the windowing abilities and things like that. You could really have the side view, the different views, you know, different apps as widget types of things and can could really make it nice. And then again when you fold it up and it's just kind of like when you plug your Mac into a bigger screen and everything just kind of comes in one place, back again back to you and kind of resized, it'd be kind of like, okay, now it's just going to go back to the single view the way that it was before.

Andy Ihnatko [00:40:01]:
I'm really keen to see if Apple goes so far as to say now there have been no rumors to the effect that this is going to be a 360 degree display. I mean that basically doesn't exist for a folding display. But if they would, I would love to see if they decided to say what if we decide to do sort of a tented mode where the fold, you've got it open kind of like a laptop. So we're going to have the vertical screen be one experience and the horizontal screen be a separate experience. Whether it's here's where a persistent on screen keyboard is going to be, or we're going to allow app developers to basically put their own UI there to

Leo Laporte [00:40:35]:
say that that's what the duo did. Actually it was very cool. It was exactly.

Andy Ihnatko [00:40:39]:
I love the duo. You're right. I've been such a fan of not even just folding Screens, but just screen to the left, screen on the right, a hinge in between. And the number of experiences that that can enhance. Whether it's I'm reading a book versus I am reading my email and taking notes on another screen. I'm so surprised that that never took off. Maybe not so surprised after I used that Microsoft device for a couple of weeks, but still, I thought there was so much potential in there. And it kind of breaks my heart that it never really found its footing.

Christina Warren [00:41:08]:
Yeah. Now, what do we think? Do we think that we'll have any way to have any. I think it would have to be a different stylus. But do you think we'll have any sort of Apple pencil support on this thing? I tend to think the screen might be too sensitive at first.

Jason Snell [00:41:23]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:41:24]:
Kind of my fear. Yeah, exactly.

Jason Snell [00:41:25]:
I think. I think they want to do it. I think they do want to have an Apple pencil experience when it's open someday. But I don't think they'll be able to do it for the first one.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:35]:
I think it'll get scratched up like hell.

Jason Snell [00:41:37]:
Even.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:37]:
Even with the Apple pencil. I think that it'll get scratched up like I want to put that up for future opportunities. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
These plastic screens.

Jason Snell [00:41:43]:
Exactly. I mean, they'll make the pencil. I mean, I think if. If there are way. If there is ultimately a way, maybe not with the first one for them to design even a special.

Christina Warren [00:41:53]:
Exactly. That's what I was thinking. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:41:54]:
That works with it in any way. I think they will be motivated to do it because again, that is one of those iPad features that they've gotten really, really good at. And the software is good. And it turns this into like open it up and it's a sketchbook. I can see the commercials now. Right. But I don't. This feels like minimum viable Apple folding, unfolding phone.

Jason Snell [00:42:15]:
And I think that Apple pencil is just not there yet.

Leo Laporte [00:42:18]:
When the first Galaxy Note came out, which wasn't folding but had a much larger screen and had that stylus at CES that year, they stationed artists with easels all over Las Vegas drawing on their Galaxy Note. I remember that. And that was the pitch. So maybe Apple will bring that back. Gurman is less than. In fact surprisingly throws a little shade at Apple in his Sunday newsletter talking about the AirPods Pro Max 2, saying it's really a triumph of marketing, not of products. In fact, he says, imagine if the recent product updates themselves were as impressive as the advertising mark talking about biting the hand that feeds you. But he's right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:08]:
You can't say he's wrong.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:10]:
You wouldn't want him to burn that relationship that he has with Apple corporate.

Leo Laporte [00:43:13]:
Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, that's right. AirPods 2 Max blurs the line is the headline between marketing and innovation. Not much else in the Sunday we usually have a Mark Gurman Sunday report on Tuesdays, but not a whole lot else that most of the prose was

Jason Snell [00:43:31]:
about that can't break even Mark GURMAN can't break 52 weeks of stories. Yeah, some weeks are quieter than others.

Leo Laporte [00:43:41]:
It's tough.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:41]:
Sometimes it's the same story in a minor key instead of a major key because there is like, oh, I've heard the same story from someone else now. So yeah, you're right. It's a terrible thing when your reputation is every week there's going to be something dramatic and surprising that everybody's going to be talking about that's like, oh, but actually, truly nothing has happened. Everybody was I've got pictures. The only insider stuff I got from Apple is pictures from people's like Trip to the Falls. It's like, I can't really write a piece about that.

Leo Laporte [00:44:09]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy and Jason and of course, Christina Warren. We're so glad you're here, especially thanks to our club members who make this show possible. We really appreciate your support. Let's see. Also in rumors, AirPods Pro new ones coming this year. Wait a minute, they just released new ones? More new ones. We just got the three last fall. Could it be the four?

Christina Warren [00:44:38]:
The rumor says that it won't be the four, but it might have IR cameras or some other sorts of.

Leo Laporte [00:44:42]:
Oh, this is the camera one.

Christina Warren [00:44:44]:
But maybe it would have like some sort of, you know, like it'll be kind of like the twos, which had, you know, multiple variants. I don't know. Let me ask the panel because I have my opinions. But of those of you who have who went from AirPod Pros twos to threes, what does your kind of opinion been now that we're kind of like six months in?

Jason Snell [00:45:05]:
Well, the day one opinion was that they felt weird in my ears, but the six months in opinion is that they sound fantastic and I love them.

Leo Laporte [00:45:13]:
Me too.

Jason Snell [00:45:14]:
It took some getting used to because they're more aggressive in filling your ear holes. But the increase in noise cancellation and I tend to use the, the smart noise cancellation mode, which allows me to hear cars that might run me over and stuff, but get rid of a lot of background noise and that, that sounds when I'm Walking the dog.

Leo Laporte [00:45:35]:
Like I've been very happy with a concert Saturday night. I wear them instead of ear protection. They make excellent ear protection.

Christina Warren [00:45:43]:
They do, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:45:43]:
They sound good.

Christina Warren [00:45:44]:
Yeah, they do, they do. I mean my, my take I think is largely similar. I think at first they felt a little bit weirder. I will say I still don't think the sound signature is as good on them as it was on the twos. Or maybe I was just used to the twos for so long, I don't know. That said, the noise canceling is so much better, especially in kind of the, you know, automatic kind of mode and the, the battery life is such an improvement that, that I, that I feel like I finally come around like at the six month mark where I'm like, okay, these. Because I was still kind of going back and forth between the two. And I'm at this point I think I'm primarily on the threes.

Leo Laporte [00:46:19]:
Let's talk about the App Store. There's a little controversy roiling. First of all, Apple says, yes, we're going to the Supreme Court. Again, the never ending story. You may remember that a district court finally last week we talked about it, said no, epic one, you go away. Apple had appealed it to the Supreme Court, which sent it back down to the district court or the lower court. And now that the lower court is ruled against Apple, Apple's going back to the Supreme Court. I guess you could.

Leo Laporte [00:46:48]:
I mean, at this point that was kind of the message from the Supreme Court is, well, let the lower court rule and then we can talk about it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:55]:
Yeah, I think that specifically they're asking the court to revisit some of the data that was presented that formulated the judgment of what Apple has to do to conform with the court order. I think it has more to do with their defi. When they decided, yeah, okay, guess what, we're complying. But we're going to our way of compliance.

Leo Laporte [00:47:13]:
Malicious compliance.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:14]:
Exactly. We're going to let, we're going to let you do. And let developers use an outside, outside payment processor outside of the Apple system. But we're going to load you down with so much bureaucracy and so much paperwork and we're also going to be charging you 27 instead of 30%. I think that they're asking the Supreme Court to please revisit that. And the, the judge said, yeah, we are not amused.

Leo Laporte [00:47:36]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:36]:
And this is specifically what Apple is the. That.

Leo Laporte [00:47:39]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:40]:
Appropriately enough, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:47:42]:
Petulant may be in court as well. According to San Francisco Business Times, a San Francisco AI startup Called X Human whose racy chatbots have attracted controversy is taking on Apple. Two of their apps removed the app store and X Human says Apple's withholding half a million dollars in revenue generated through those apps. So one of them is Botify which is an AI companion platform, lets users have chats with the AI and apparently you know, has some sexually charged conversations including in character as celebrities. Other user created bots, impersonated Millie Bobby Brown at a teenage years. Emma Watson. Not appropriate. And then there was the Photify.

Leo Laporte [00:48:36]:
So that was Bodify Photify which also as one might imagine generates images of real people wearing revealing outfits without their consent. I can see why Apple might have pulled them down. Apple said it was dishonest or fraudulent activity that caused the takedown. Exhuman said that's all they told us. We wanted specific examples. We'll see.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:57]:
They're going this comes down to there's no rule, there's nothing in the rulebook that says that a mule can't be automatic on the football field as a place kicker and basically saying no, there's common sense rules. Why that? No, it doesn't say specifically explicitly that. However we hold that we have rules that cover that and they're. Yeah, I mean Crimea River. These are the sort of apps that kind of define the reasons why Apple tries to have control over the App Store content. And that's it. You know what we really don't want to be whatever, whatever giant controversy you are destined to become part of in three and a half months, we would rather not be part of that.

Leo Laporte [00:49:35]:
Jack Dorsey had a interesting chat app, Bluetooth based chat app that was used widely in protests because it didn't use the public Internet. It actually was a mesh system. China asked them to take it down and Apple has complied. Bitchat, launched in July last year has been used in protests in Madagascar, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia and Iran. All places where the Internet is being restricted. And of course China is the first and foremost among those. Dorsey not happy but I don't know if there's much he can do about it. Anything to say about that? I don't no.

Andy Ihnatko [00:50:20]:
It's just that this is the classic Apple is forced to comply with whatever laws are they operate sometimes though it really is. This was designed specifically and directly to allow people to have private communications that could not be surveilled upon by a, let's call it heavy handed surveillance state. And so of course in many jurisdictions the government has decided this app has to go. So I don't think Apple has crossed a line here, but it does show the amazing amount of tension that they are under every time they simply have to say, we have declared this as a rule. We are going to have to follow that rule. But it does show. I don't know. Again, I wonder if there's going to be a breaking point at which Apple is going to get tired of simply saying that there is no commute.

Andy Ihnatko [00:51:08]:
It goes from there are specific apps that get banned by these governments. There's also a report from a Russian newspaper that's not controlled by the state about how Russian takedown orders for different VPN apps and privacy apps have accelerated amazingly in the past year. There's a new crackdown on vpn and I wonder at one point Apple starts to worry that the App Store will stop going from. Excuse me, the relationship between these governments and the App Store stops being here is a specific app or a specific class of apps that has to be taken down versus as part of the app approval process, we require you to hand over to our organization. We get to examine this app before you even get to approve it. And I wonder how far away Apple is from having that kind of a thing where they have to invite governments into the fundamental app approval process. Because I don't know what the. I'm sure that Apple has limits, but I don't know what the limits are for certain governments that are in this world today.

Leo Laporte [00:52:09]:
We talked last week about some Vibe coding apps being removed from the App Store. I don't think Apple's going to be anxious to remove too many because according to the information, Apple's App store saw an 84% jump in New apps.

Jason Snell [00:52:23]:
Well, that's the difference between apps. You use to vibe code and ask that you do Vibe code.

Leo Laporte [00:52:27]:
Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah, it's been a boon for Apple. Remember, they make money on these.

Christina Warren [00:52:32]:
Yeah, well, it's been a boon, but it's also. I'm kind of curious. From the perspective of the panel here, it's been great to see kind of an influx of new applications come out because it's always exciting, I think, to see people get excited by what they can do. But the quality is. Is pretty sus. Like if you go to like R. Mac apps, like almost all of the apps that used to be kind of a good place to kind of discover hidden gems, and now it's just vive code after vive code. And that can be fine, to be clear, especially if you have somebody who is, I think, using these tools the right way and understands the code base that's being generated and whatnot.

Christina Warren [00:53:11]:
I think the fear though, that I have is that a lot of people, just because the coding models are so good, they get code that compiles fine, but they don't exactly understand what it's doing. They haven't necessarily taken some of the basic precautions for, you know, things like, you know, user data privacy and stuff like that, which are things that Apple can't really check for beyond, you know, kind of doing kind of their, their cursory checks. Are you using any libraries that you're not supposed to use? And, and so, yeah, can imagine the.

Leo Laporte [00:53:39]:
I mean, an 84% jump in apps means Apple swamped with their review process. I mean, it was already bad.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:47]:
There have been some devs that have been complaining on Reddit and elsewhere about, oh my God, it's taking so long for Apple approvals to come through. They've made enough noise that Apple has response. I know we feel as though volumes are still okay. The people and of course the developers who do not feel as though they're experiencing delays are not complaining on Reddit about it. So we have to find this out on the long term. But it is what an interesting problem for Apple to have because, yeah, the thing is, not only do they benefit from, hey, more commercial apps, more apps on the App Store, more, not only more money, but also more diversity. Like there's on one level, like if you do a search for, you're looking for Joplin or Obsidian or Ulysses, you want a really good like markdown Notes editor and suddenly there are like a hundred. Here's Andy's super awesome Notes app.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:37]:
Notes aplenty. How many of these do you have to wade through before you get to the ones that are from an actual developer who knows how to build code, knows also how to do customer support, knows how to deal with security, as Christina says, all this sort of stuff. So that Apple needs to defend the App Store against a lot of slop. But on the other hand, there's also the question of should Apple be in the position of saying that this particular take on a Notes app is crap and we don't need it?

Christina Warren [00:55:06]:
Right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:07]:
If only 10 people say, my God, it is exactly the reason why I have never used a Notes app before. I've been looking for something exactly like this. So this another indication of Apple being in between a rock and a hard place.

Christina Warren [00:55:18]:
Well, I mean, in fairness, I think that this is a rock and a hard place that is completely of their own making because they are the ones who basically came out like when they started doing the App store guidelines in 2008, that set the tone over, like, even when they started disallowing certain types of apps because they said there are too many of these things and they've used that for their own reasons over the years, even when it might not necessarily be a valid critique. So I think that Apple set the standards and the rules, and I agree with you. I don't know if it's their place to be able to be in the position to say who are we to decide if this app is superfluous or not? And to make judgment calls. I would agree with that. I would also agree that because they took on a stance at the beginning to say we're going to curate the App Store. And that was their argument in the epic log lawsuit, that they should probably curate it. What I would say, though, is that what seems to me would be like a solution of sorts, I mean, this probably never work on the iPhone, but certainly, you know, would make things, you know, easier, I think, on the Mac. And this is what a lot of Mac developers do, is that, you know, separating the notion between something being notarized and versus something being approved for the App Store.

Christina Warren [00:56:23]:
And I think that this is where, especially if we were to see these types of things increasing and we'll, we'll see it, you know, in iOS apps too, if we haven't, you know, I've been seeing a lot of Mac apps, but I'm sure that's been happening on iOS apps as well be to say, okay, well, then maybe there's one standard for letting something be in the official App Store. And then maybe if we, if they would in other regions other than the EU allow alternative App Store, say, okay, you can have those standards and you can, you know, let all of the, the apps that, that anybody wants go out there and we'll just, you know, provide that this is. Meets our notarization requirements.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:03]:
I don't know, what do you think about the idea? And I'm not, I'm not suggesting this is just something that occurred to me of there being sort of a varsity version of the App Store and a junior varsity, where the varsity means that through whatever criterion that seems to make sense, these apps are established either through. No, actually it got 80,000 downloads in the past month. It's new. But everybody wants to talk about this right now. Versus, yeah, this is something. Someone as a tabletop developer made this released. It hasn't really touched it in a couple of weeks or a couple of months. It should exist.

Andy Ihnatko [00:57:35]:
People should be able to find it. But we want to make sure that there's a difference between the marked path that has all the restroom facilities in the park versus if you want to bushwhack you, you can bushwhack. But here is at least, if you want to see the stuff that we feel as though through AI metrics, not through an editorial policy, we see some signals from this app that says that this belongs in the varsity group as opposed to the jv. Have at it.

Jason Snell [00:58:03]:
I think realistically that'll just get Apple accused of putting its thumb on the scale in a different way. And as long as the App Store is the only store that's out there, anything you do to pick winners and losers or even to, to sequester different apps in different locations, somebody's gonna say, how dare you do that? You are favoring the winners and favoring the success and not allowing anyone else to rise to that level. I think that's the core problem with any editorial judgment or content judgment or the current. I mean, Elon Musk completely lost it about the sales charts that are just downloading sales charts for the App Store. And he was like, no, it's a conspiracy against, against me. Like, I just. This is the side effect of Apple being the only game in town, in many regions for this sort of thing, is that even if they were to do something that we would all interpret as helpful, the truth is that would also be attacked as Apple completely distorting the market because anything it does distorts the market because there's only one App Store. So I mean, that's the downside.

Jason Snell [00:59:03]:
I don't think, I don't think you're wrong. I think that there are ways that, I mean, and they've done things like the privacy labels and, and the accessibility labels where you could maybe have some better labeling and some better filtering and let people kind of understand. But it, you know, the problem also is the App Store still kind of primitive. Like, yeah, it's not a super. I mean it's. It's basically the itunes music store hacked over the course of 15 years or whatever. But like, it's not super sophisticated in a lot of ways.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:33]:
So I don't know, how about if Apple just made those signals available through search? Like, what if there were a new Schlomo powered app store search that allowed me to use coded language that essentially translates to, I'm looking for a notes app, but only show me ones that have been around for more than six months and have more than, more than have a Substantial number of down download downloaded installs and a substantial number of comments back to it and feedback from the developer and a regular number of updates. So that even if you were interested in creating that kind of a filter, you could.

Christina Warren [01:00:05]:
I mean, that would be nice. I mean, I think the problem to Jason's point with any of this is that if you start to even have those signals in there, and I feel like that would be a nice search parameter to be like, how long has this developer been around? Right. More or less than a certain period of time. But I honestly fear that what will happen then is that people will just start to sell their developer accounts.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:22]:
Oh, God, that's. That's a good point. Yeah. I'm just disappointed that it's so hard to. Maybe it's because I've been around for. We've been around since the App Store began, so we remember a time where you could just say, the thing is, none of my notes. Apps are doing it for me. I know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:38]:
I'll scroll through the App Store and just look through the listings of apps. And now they're just maybe a. Because as Jason said, the App Store is not terribly sophisticated, but also because there's so much volume, you can't just simply find those hidden gems anymore or it's really, really hard.

Christina Warren [01:00:51]:
Well, I mean, that's the thing I think that Apple could probably do to improve things the most would just be to improve discoverability. Right. Regardless of where the apps come from, regardless of whether it's a new developer or an established one. Because the primitive way that they've done discoverability so far, which has either been through some editorial judgment of, you know, lists and things like that, which, you know, don't seem to be updated very often and. And are kind of, you know, sometimes feel like they're stuck in a certain era or. Or charts which kind of have their own signals for things. If there was a way to beyond just the stuff search terms to be able to find out, okay, these are apps that do these types of things, right? I feel like that would be great, but I don't know, there's so many things to solve with that. But I feel like discoverability has remained for the last however long a real problem with the App Store.

Leo Laporte [01:01:42]:
Our club member, Darren Okey, who's a regular in our AI user group and is a coder himself, said when the App Store first came out, he put out a whole bunch of apps and made $50,000 and they were crappy apps. But that was brand new, right? And there weren't very many apps there. He says, now I put out a bunch of apps that are actually good and have been updated and I have like two downloads. He says there's just too much stuff on the app store for anyone to find it. Although I like these apps. These are, he calls them orientation lock apps that stay put. He says your iPhone, when it locks, stays in portrait mode, but maybe you want landscape mode because you're lying down. So he has a bunch of landscape mode apps so you don't have to worry about it.

Leo Laporte [01:02:30]:
They're just going to stay there. It's very clever. Good job, Darren. And I presume you Vibe coded these. There's, there's contract bridge, which is ol, which means it's landscape mode, so you can lie down on the couch. He has a variety of common situations. Lying in bed, on the couch, walking, stuck in landscape. He says, watch one video, now everything's sideways.

Jason Snell [01:02:58]:
I love that.

Leo Laporte [01:02:59]:
That's not good. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Darren, very clever, but he does make a good point that having a lot of apps is not necessarily a blessing, is it? Yeah, it makes it hard to find even good apps. I guess you pointed that out too, Andy. There's a lot of stuff in there. Apple has not approved ol videos. He keeps trying to get it through, but they don't like that for some reason. Depends what the videos are, I guess.

Leo Laporte [01:03:26]:
Darren, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Katrina Warren's here from GitHub. You're still on leave or are you going back soon?

Christina Warren [01:03:35]:
I'll go back on Monday, so.

Leo Laporte [01:03:37]:
Oh, boy. Are you excited or you.

Christina Warren [01:03:39]:
No, I'm excited. No, no, no, I'm excited. I'm excited. I. Yeah, I had some, you know, it took a while to kind of deal through all the post surgery stuff, but. But no, I'm very excited to be back at 100%.

Leo Laporte [01:03:48]:
I'm sure your coworkers miss you, so that's great. And you do developer relations. What does that mean?

Christina Warren [01:03:53]:
So I mean basically that, like, I am kind of trying to be the voice of the developer, try to, you know, listen to their feedback about what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and promote that internally. Give talks about the new things that we're doing, create content. Creating a lot of content.

Leo Laporte [01:04:09]:
Oh, God. You did that with Microsoft at Plan nine, you did a lot of stuff. And I. Even when you were at GitHub, you did a lot of stuff back in the day, so. Good. I'm looking forward to seeing your videos once again. Jason Snell's a Podcaster from Mill Valley, California.

Jason Snell [01:04:23]:
That's true. Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:04:24]:
Johnny Gilbert, what's your anecdote for today's show?

Jason Snell [01:04:29]:
Oh, I could go to the list prepared many. I will tell you. So in writing about this Apple 50, I had my friend Phil Michaels, who I have worked with for years and I went to college with, and he used to be a Tom's Guide. And he wrote a piece for me about his 10, like, weird anecdotes about covering Apple. And the last one was that, you know, everybody always emails me and says, is that you in the ipod launch video? Because that was a town hall. And it was weirdly shot. There are a lot of reaction shots because Steve Jobs is like playing music. And then they're like, let's show the audience.

Jason Snell [01:05:04]:
And send. I'm in there, along with my boss at the time, Rick lepage, and John Cef, another editor for Macworld. And Phil pointed out I also went to that event and nobody sees me in the video because. And he said, I feel like this is the perfect encapsulation of my career is that I'm just off camera, off to the, you know, right next to Jason, off to the left. So I was like, I want to fact check this. So I scrolled through the whole video and I actually found Phil. He was a row back and off to my left. And I actually put up a.

Jason Snell [01:05:36]:
We ended up posting an image where I was like, I found you. And he had to revise his story to say, okay, it's not that I wasn't visible. It's that I was barely visible behind and off to the left. Okay, that's fair. But it was kind of fun. Cause I've always laughed about the fact that people always spot me and that Phil was. I know Phil was there. He rode down and in.

Jason Snell [01:05:59]:
In the car with me to that event, but you never see him. But if you, you know, a zaprudering of that video has led me to declare that, yeah, he, he was there. And he's sitting right next to Christina De Nyck, who was our, our, our lab director at the time. And, and who Leo knows because she was one of our regulars on when we, when we did the mackerel Tip of the Week or Tip of the Day on Call for Help on. On Tech tv. And I mentioned this to my editor, Roman, who used to work at the screensavers at TechTV.

Leo Laporte [01:06:26]:
Married to Christina.

Jason Snell [01:06:27]:
He's married to Christina. And he said, says, yeah, Christina will never let me forget that she got invited to the ipod event. And I Didn't. So that's my story.

Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
I'm. I'm looking through the video right now trying to find somebody. I know I was not there because I was working at tech at.

Jason Snell [01:06:42]:
And Johnny I've is kind of up fairly close as.

Leo Laporte [01:06:47]:
Is that Tim Cook. That's Tim Cook.

Jason Snell [01:06:48]:
Tim Cook is. Oh, yeah. In the front row.

Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
It's all Mike Mansfield.

Jason Snell [01:06:51]:
It's all the greats.

Leo Laporte [01:06:54]:
The executives sit in the front.

Jason Snell [01:06:55]:
Yeah. Johnny's a little further back, but crowd shot. Yeah. So I'll. I'll drop in in our.

Leo Laporte [01:07:04]:
I think it's Jim Ladderback. That's who went from Tech TV in our district.

Jason Snell [01:07:08]:
And there's Rick LePage and John Ceph right there. And I'm right to the left to Rick's left off on the right a

Leo Laporte [01:07:14]:
little bit in that.

Jason Snell [01:07:15]:
And if you look in our members discord, I posted in a link, the live listeners at least can see the. The picture I found I dug up of Phil and Christina back in 2001. We all looked. We all look a lot younger then. None of us had kids.

Leo Laporte [01:07:32]:
That's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:33]:
We were still optimistic.

Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
We still. Jim came back. I think Jim came back with a bunch of ipods from that event.

Jason Snell [01:07:39]:
They gave everybody an ipod.

Leo Laporte [01:07:41]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:07:41]:
In a bag. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:42]:
Yeah. Wow.

Jason Snell [01:07:43]:
That's true. Anyway, so that. That was. It was kind of fun to revisit it. Cause I always. That literally one of my Jeopardy. Anecdotes was I get an email every few months saying, is that you in the ipod launch video? And I was like, yes, it's still me. Even though my hair didn't have nearly as much gray as it does now.

Jason Snell [01:08:00]:
But I got to kind of like take it all apart and identify some other people in there. And yes, there is photographic evidence that Phil Michaels was at that event now right next to Christina.

Leo Laporte [01:08:12]:
So now we know.

Jason Snell [01:08:12]:
What a relief. He can't paint himself out of Apple history.

Leo Laporte [01:08:17]:
And Andy, wait. When Jeopardy. Finally calls you, what will be your Jeopardy. Anecdote?

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:22]:
Oh, gee, I don't. If. If I'm. If it's day three, God forbid. And like the other week, I'm feeling as though I'm now people are now.

Leo Laporte [01:08:30]:
Okay, let's not get too far ahead of yourself. They still haven't even called you once. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:35]:
I'm saying that probably share the story about the time I met Steve Jobs or for the. Actually, no, probably the chief. The quickest one was, oh, I got to you. I got to use an iPhone like five months before.

Jason Snell [01:08:45]:
It was actually, oh, that's a Good one. They've not heard that one before. Andy, by the way, you're. You're a Jeopardy. Anecdote. 100%. Should be something about your relationship with Roger Ebert, I would say. I think that's a really special, wonderful story about a person that everybody has fond feelings for.

Leo Laporte [01:09:01]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:09:01]:
So that's what I would choose for you.

Leo Laporte [01:09:02]:
That's a very, very good idea.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:04]:
Yeah. Thank you. That's. Yeah. Again, I'm sorry. I was. I was thinking. Actually, I was thinking about him last month.

Jason Snell [01:09:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. I. Yeah, he's in my mind a lot too, and I didn't have a personal relationship with him, but I still think there's a lot of stuff that happens in the world that I'm like, what would Roger Ebert have said about this crazy movie or media thing that happened? And no, I've been thinking about it a lot.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:26]:
He might have even retired from movie criticism. To speak full on as an editorial page columnist, with the way that things are today, he would have been unrestrainable. He would have been furious, eloquent, and unrestrained.

Leo Laporte [01:09:38]:
We could have used his voice. Yeah, I missed that guy on We Go with the show. Let's see what else. Now we've all done our Jeopardy. Anecdotes.

Jason Snell [01:09:47]:
What a relief.

Leo Laporte [01:09:49]:
I wish I had those cards Ken had. I could have asked you in a more pointed way. I hear you. New Roger Ebert.

Jason Snell [01:09:56]:
Yeah. I mean, literally, I'm like, I could get out the card and see.

Christina Warren [01:09:59]:
Oh, look, there it is.

Leo Laporte [01:10:01]:
Oh, you got it.

Jason Snell [01:10:03]:
These aren't that interesting. It's probably good that I lost. By the way, I have a Jeopardy. Update for you, which is my last tenuous connection to Jeopardy. The guy who beat me, he's on the top 10 lists now as an all timer. He's still playing.

Leo Laporte [01:10:15]:
Oh, boy.

Jason Snell [01:10:17]:
Still playing. So we didn't get that.

Christina Warren [01:10:20]:
I was gonna say you got beat by.

Jason Snell [01:10:22]:
He is. He is now in the top 10 money list for regular season play and in the top 10 most consecutive games won.

Christina Warren [01:10:29]:
So, oh, my gosh.

Jason Snell [01:10:30]:
So there's no doubt about it now. And trust me, I'm rooting for it because, like, the bigger, more legendary he gets, and I can be like, oh, I got beaten by the best. And honestly, do I have a spreadsheet where I've analyzed our game's performance versus other games that he's played? Yes, I do. You do. And I have to say, I think my game and the game right after mine were the two best games that people have played against him so far. So I'm Feeling pretty good about losing to Jamie Ding, who is a lovely guy and now has like half a million bucks. So good job, dude. Good job.

Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
Isn't that wild?

Jason Snell [01:11:02]:
Peter Rowland.

Christina Warren [01:11:03]:
That's amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:11:04]:
Paul McCartney went. Paul, but the Beatles. Steve Jobs loved the Beatles.

Christina Warren [01:11:09]:
He did.

Leo Laporte [01:11:10]:
I know that and I'm sure Paul knew that. And this was part of the 50th anniversary celebration. Paul McCartney performed at Apple HQ.

Christina Warren [01:11:20]:
I mean, that's the most ultimate flex you can possibly get is having having a Beatle, having a Beetle perform, you know, at your company. Like, you know, like anniversary celebration for all your employees. Like, that's incredibly cool.

Leo Laporte [01:11:33]:
It was in Apple Park. Employees had enter a lottery, according to the New York Post, to gain admission. There wasn't enough room for anybody. And it was a 25 song set. It was a full show concert.

Jason Snell [01:11:47]:
It's a huge, I mean also that place is huge. So the fact that they were, they were gating it. I mean, the truth is not all of Apple works at Apple Park. So there's like. And they had a lot of alumni came back. I heard about like John was it. John Rubenstein was there. I know Scott Forstall was there.

Jason Snell [01:12:01]:
People saw like, they had a lot of alumni back as well. So I understand why they did the crowd control. Although even then you could just, you could watch it from inside the glass at the Loop if you wanted to, like, I would assume. I mean, it's an enormous space. But yeah, right down. He did, he did Beatles, he did Wings, he did Solo, he did Live and Let Die with the pyrotechnics, which is, is always fun. And in our show notes, there's a. I guess he did a Facebook post where he said, it's hard to believe that it's been 50 years since Steve Jobs gave me an iPhone.

Jason Snell [01:12:35]:
But it's true.

Leo Laporte [01:12:35]:
He got the first. He was one of the people got

Jason Snell [01:12:37]:
the first iPhone 50 years ago. No, it's not true. But it made me laugh because I thought that Paul, that Paul is a rascal.

Leo Laporte [01:12:45]:
He knew better. You're right. That wasn't a slip. He did.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:49]:
He did get like during the encore, one of the videos, there's like, I won't do the Paul voice, but he says, oh, I got to be good friends with Steve. And you know, I still haven't, I still haven't removed his name from my address book. Literally, like, everyone, everyone, like starts like, it just, it just would have broken my heart. But the problem is that like, he's great, but he is so experienced at being the public, Paul McCartney that sometimes you wonder if it's like, you know what, this would be a good time to say this weather, you know, Well,

Leo Laporte [01:13:21]:
I mean, imagine going to that and they open the concert with help. He was, you know, in his early days, he didn't want to play any Beatles songs. Right when he first started playing Beatles songs at his shows, people were like, it was yesterday, I think. And people were blown away.

Jason Snell [01:13:33]:
He's, yeah, he's over it all come around.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:36]:
But it's an amazing playlist.

Leo Laporte [01:13:37]:
I.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:38]:
As soon as, as soon as it got published, like, I couldn't, I couldn't wait. And I just basically built myself a playlist for it. It is like, it is the same playlist. It is an expanded version of the playlist he did like in LA a couple of weeks ago when he did that 1200 seat thing. And I'm sure that it's basically his arena playlist that he modifies night to night. But my goodness, what an A to Z encyclopedia. Walk through his history as he Got

Leo Laporte [01:14:04]:
to Get yout Into My Life, Let Me Roll it, which is a Wings song. Getting Better Beatles Let Him in my Valentine, 1985 maybe. I'm amazed. Would have loved to have seen that. I've just seen a face every night Love Me Do Then Blackbird. That was one of the shows. The songs he used to play at his shows. Solo shows now and then Lady Madonna, something Band on the Run, oh blah D Obla Da Get Back, Let It Be, Live and Let Die and hey Jude is mostly Beatles music.

Jason Snell [01:14:35]:
That's okay, that ain't bad.

Leo Laporte [01:14:36]:
And then the encore is the backside of Abbey Road. Golden slumbers Carry that weight in the end.

Christina Warren [01:14:43]:
Which is like one of the best trilogies of music ever.

Jason Snell [01:14:45]:
He's been doing that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:47]:
It's amazing. I'm telling you. It was like 2am When I put together this playlist. And I was up until 3:34 in the morning because I just started playing it just to see. And then I could not turn it off until the very, very end. It is a banger that must play.

Christina Warren [01:15:04]:
And I was just remembering and it feels like it was yesterday, no pun intended. But I do remember when, I guess it was 2009 when the Beatles finally came to itunes. And that was a huge moment when Apple finally got the rights to have the Beatles music digitally because they weren't on any digital service at the time. And this was obviously before streaming or anything else, but I remember that being a really big PR moment. They had like, you know, stuff in the, in the, in the Apple stores, remember, like, they had like, you know, signage everywhere and that sort of thing.

Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
And here's the selfie that Tim Cook took with Paul. Although I have to say I'm surprised somebody hasn't taken some AI to this and had Paul fade into the bushes like Homer Simpson. It's kind of begging for that.

Jason Snell [01:15:56]:
Not really a selfie. Right. It's just a picture.

Leo Laporte [01:15:58]:
Yeah, yeah, you're right. It's not a selfie.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:00]:
Well, the thing is when you're constantly surrounded by a system, distance.

Leo Laporte [01:16:02]:
Yeah, he doesn't.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:04]:
Congratulations. Your job title as an intern is you are Tim Cook selfie stick.

Leo Laporte [01:16:08]:
I think we can, yeah, we can. We can give Tim dispensation and say it's a selfie. He just doesn't have to do them himself anymore.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:16]:
Anybody who has a picture of himself next to Paul McCartney is by definition pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [01:16:21]:
Like, he's got a selfie person.

Christina Warren [01:16:22]:
Well, yeah. And like, and like I said, I mean, just what a flex. Just to be like, yes, we will pay whatever his fee is and have him here for our 50th anniversary celebration for employees for a private event. Like, because I don't even want to think about what the fee was. But I'm sure it was, I'm sure it was very expensive. And, and they just.

Leo Laporte [01:16:38]:
Oh, you don't think he did it just out of the goodness of his heart? He just.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:41]:
Oh, but, but

Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:46]:
A few weeks ago we were talking about, like, I think Jason, you've like, speculated that maybe when, when David Pogue started basically knocking on doors at Apple saying, hey, the 50th anniversary is coming up, I'm going to start, I'm saying, starting writing a book on 50 history. Was that the moment that Apple decided, ooh, we really need to do something good about this? It made me, it suddenly make me think, how far ahead do you have to book Paul McCartney to see if there's going to be space in his tour schedule? And maybe. And is part of the reason why he happened to be on the west coast and able to do a 1200 seat venue because he knew he was going to be there anyway. May as well make another $2,000. You know, get part, get part of the gate.

Jason Snell [01:17:20]:
Yeah. As a savvy businessman, I think it's. Yeah. A little from column, a little from column B. I know when we, when we've tried to do criminology on like when they did the big in person wwdc, they would always have like a Thursday night concert as well. And you're looking to see who's touring. And I think it's, I think it's a little of both. Right.

Jason Snell [01:17:38]:
They probably had a list of like 10 artists that are top shelf artists that they would have loved to have. And McCartney was undoubtedly high on that list. But then there's the. Who's touring, who's touring, who has a

Christina Warren [01:17:51]:
set list ready to go, who's still in a place where they can tour.

Jason Snell [01:17:57]:
Exactly.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:57]:
For that matter, which band or bands collected a quarter million dollar payday to be on standby in case the Paul McCartney gig fell through. But also. So you mentioned the counselors of wwdc. What I was thinking about is how rare it is, despite again playing a, a 2000 seater in LA a couple weeks ago, to see an arena artist of that scale at something that's kind of more like essentially a lawn party, so a little bit more intimate. And the number of times that like I got to see Foo fighters in a 1200 seat auditorium, the full band, I got to see U2 in 150 seat auditorium in Town hall. And the number of times that we got to see Elvis Costello, same place, like 150 people. Like the number. Probably the biggest advantage that, the biggest, the biggest benefit of being like, specifically like an apple journalist is occasionally saying, well, guess what? I was close enough to actually, like, it was there.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:58]:
There was nobody holding up a phone. There's no. There was a pause, a dramatic pause during a lyric and nobody shouted who? Because, okay, admittedly because of the 150 people, 80 were probably typing because they had to file like in 20 minutes. But still there's a, there's an intimacy and a unity of the audience that you miss when you're at, like when you're at a football stadium.

Christina Warren [01:19:21]:
Yeah, well, it was always fun too, because there would be like kind of the generational, I guess, like, difference between like the crowd and like, who, what artists they would have sometimes. Like, like, I remember having to explain to Lance Ulanoff who the Weeknd was. And I was like, like, he's singing. It was like, you know, he's singing about cocaine right now. Right. And, and, but, you know, but it was, but they, yeah, but that was. The thing is they bring in people who sometimes different crowds, like, some people be newer artists, some people who were like more classic stuff. And like no other company has ever had that kind of pull.

Christina Warren [01:19:52]:
I mean, obviously Spotify would be the one exception. I would say Spotify's holiday party in New York in 2011 or 2012 is still to this day, one of the greatest musical experience of experiences I've ever had. They had Frank Ocean, they had Janelle Monae and they had a Vampire Weekend. All doing like sets, just like set up just things at the holiday party.

Jason Snell [01:20:14]:
Amazing. Yeah, I feel like it's a great. If you're in tech journalism, it's a great, like two truths and a lie kind of fodder to have this, you know, that I can be like, yeah, I've seen the Weeknd live and Kanye. And they're like, there's no way those are both true. And they are both true because they both performed at Apple events. And so, yeah, that's. I've seen Can't Feel My Face and Gold Digger performed live, like feet away from me by those two artists. It's like that Jason Snell did not see that.

Jason Snell [01:20:45]:
That's not true. It can't be. But it is. And I also. Did I impress my daughter with both of those facts? Yeah, are you kidding?

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:53]:
I like to refer to this as the best stuff in your list of personal stories that are number one, absolutely true. Number two, you hope they don't dig too deeply into it. That was once the number one best selling book in all of Amazon. Please don't ask a follow up question. True.

Jason Snell [01:21:11]:
End of story.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:14]:
I wrote material that was performed on the David Letterman show. Please don't ask a follow up question.

Jason Snell [01:21:17]:
Yeah, you do end up with. You kind of COVID Apple long enough. You go from it seeming like the musical guests are being, are, are a little bit old to being right down your, you know, your taste to being a little too young for you. Yes, that happens too.

Leo Laporte [01:21:34]:
Amazing.

Jason Snell [01:21:34]:
Like, because of you too. I was like, oh, it's my boys. It's you too. It's great. And then, and then with, with, with with the Weeknd, for example, I didn't know who he was. I thought the song was awesome and I was so great. I was like, yeah, yeah. Then I became a fan of the Weeknd.

Jason Snell [01:21:49]:
Right? Because it's like, oh my God. Because this is so good. And I went home and I told my daughter and she's like, yeah, can't

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:57]:
you imagine, can't you imagine yourself like, at. Because again, we've been to these events, like how like chaotic it can be before, like the open the room. And I can totally imagine myself like asking a marketing person, hey, is the demo room going to be open like immediately after and be heard. Actually, I'm the musical headliner. I've sold 10 million copies of my last thing like, oh, love the hair, love the energy. Can't wait to hear that.

Jason Snell [01:22:20]:
Great interviewers.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:21]:
That.

Jason Snell [01:22:21]:
It's all good. Yesia. I didn't even mention Sia.

Christina Warren [01:22:23]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Sia was there and then. But it had, like, the disguise thing, which was. Which was really cool. And. And I think I had the. The dance mom's girl, like, danced while she, like, sang behind her thing. Yeah, that was cool.

Christina Warren [01:22:37]:
The dance mom girl met Maddie Ziegler. She was a dancer on the television show Dance Mom Bumps. Became famous from that as a child and then became, like, Sia's muse that Sia used for many years in her music videos.

Leo Laporte [01:22:51]:
Oh, I saw her on the video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Christina Warren [01:22:54]:
So. Yes, so, yeah, exactly. Sorry. That's how my brain works. I'm like, oh, no. I know, I know. From Abby Lee Miller's Dance Academy.

Jason Snell [01:23:01]:
My favorite Apple musical moment. I mean, at least comedically, because I. Again, I've never seen you two live outside of an Apple venue, but I've seen them twice live in an Apple venue, which is pretty awesome. But. And, well, the Sphere tickets were really expensive, but no, there was an event where Chris Martin from Coldplay came out and they played a song on the piano, and I was sitting next to Chris Breen, our longtime writer. And then he went and worked with Apple. He's retired now.

Leo Laporte [01:23:28]:
And musician.

Jason Snell [01:23:29]:
And an amazing musician, especially a piano player. And sitting next to Chris Breen while famous. Chris Martin of famous Coldplay at their height playing. And Chris Breen turns to me and he goes, I hope he's a good rock star because he's a terrible piano player.

Leo Laporte [01:23:47]:
Oh, that's hysterical.

Jason Snell [01:23:48]:
And I was like, this is the most amazing thing that has ever happened. I like, oh, go, Galen. Get him. Get him, Chris. Get him.

Christina Warren [01:23:57]:
That was great.

Jason Snell [01:23:58]:
It's just amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:23:59]:
That is very fun.

Jason Snell [01:24:00]:
Good, Good stuff. Good stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:24:02]:
Let us play the Vision Pro theme because it's time for the Vision Pro segment on America's number one Vision Pro podcast. The best graphics ever. Oh, my God. Wow.

Jason Snell [01:24:18]:
Yep.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:19]:
Always be branding to explain the ethical problems of AI generated art.

Jason Snell [01:24:24]:
I know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:25]:
It's better than you possibly have done yourself.

Jason Snell [01:24:29]:
We need to be a little crazy. I'm gonna get a little crazy today. Yeah, that's right. That's like, here's the crazy ones.

Leo Laporte [01:24:34]:
Yeah, there's not really. The Vision Pro segment is really barely a Vision Pro, but we're going to do it. We're going to do it. Epic Earth has released. You might have seen their famous IMAX 3D adventure films. And now you can watch them in your Vision Pro.

Jason Snell [01:24:52]:
This is one of the things I love about the Vision Pro is everybody who's made content for IMAX or 3D or planetariums is like, finally, somebody could see this, Right?

Christina Warren [01:25:07]:
Well, no, that's kind of the thing. Yeah. It's like these things used to go to museums and whatnot. And a lot of early VR filmmaking was the same way, where they're kind of like, okay, how are we going to distribute this stuff? How will people see this outside of a certain realm? And now it's like, well, we can put this on the Vision pro for the 600 people who still pick it up.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:24]:
Every honey I need to go to the storage locker. There's something way in the back that's suddenly valuable again.

Leo Laporte [01:25:34]:
50% off right now for the months of April and May. So this would be a good time if you want to stock up on those very famous IMAX films. I don't know if they look IMAX y on the. Have you. Have you watched them yet, Jason?

Jason Snell [01:25:47]:
I haven't. This is from McGilveret, but Sandwich did a bunch of partnership with Planetarium Video. And that was all really, actually a lot of fun too. Even though it's not quite Apple immersive, it is not stuff that you can watch on your TV set and have it make any sense. So I'm looking forward to trying this out too.

Leo Laporte [01:26:06]:
Yeah, these are, you know, 70 millimeter IMAX films.

Jason Snell [01:26:09]:
I mean, it's clearly the best. The best thing about Vision Pro as we've gone all this way in is like, the media is. Media consumption is amazing. It's just now. Now we have to put that asterisk up there. That's like in a 240 foot type, which is. Yeah, but you're not going to pay $3,500 to. To just watch some movies, so.

Leo Laporte [01:26:28]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:26:29]:
You know, tbd, as with everything in the Vision Pro world, tbd. But more content, the better. And I think it's cool that this stuff that basically was not viewable outside of very specific venues is viewable, right?

Christina Warren [01:26:44]:
No, yeah, no, we've talked about that before, Jason, but I feel like just from an archival perspective alone, it's cool just to at least have it someplace else, at least until it eventually leaves the App Store. But yeah, just having it available and preserving it in these ways is really great.

Jason Snell [01:27:00]:
Yeah. You don't have 3D TVs anymore, so, you know, exactly. How are you going to watch a 3D movie at home this Is kind of it.

Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
Thanks to the pinko Andy for this excerpt.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:13]:
Proud supporter of labor. I don't care how many Pinkerton goons you send to the library to flush me out. My voice shall not be stilled.

Leo Laporte [01:27:21]:
I got a signal message from somebody the other day saying, I used to listen to you, but you're such a pinko.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:27]:
I'm gonna quit bunker one of our pinko.

Leo Laporte [01:27:32]:
I haven't heard that in a while.

Jason Snell [01:27:33]:
Good one.

Leo Laporte [01:27:34]:
Yeah. Red diaper baby.

Jason Snell [01:27:35]:
Don't get too excited with that person because they might fall and break a hip.

Leo Laporte [01:27:40]:
I know you, pinko. No, I just blocked him. Excerpted from Mutiny the Rise and Revolt of the College Educated Working Class Gnome Scheiber. There is a Vision Pro connection, okay, because the college working class, some of them worked at Apple Stores. And this excerpt in Wired magazine from that book, how the Vision Pro Rollout Inflamed Tensions at Apple.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:07]:
Yeah, this is a book, upcoming book that's written by a New York Times labor reporter. So it's not about Apple, it's not about technology. It's about like a generation and a style of work workforce. And it's Vision Pro relevant because it talks about how poorly a lot of the Apple Store workers felt as though they were trained, that they felt as though they basically had to get through this training module, this training slide deck, super, super quick and be able to recite this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom to customers coming in. That the setup process to do one of these demos was incredibly fussy and created an acute amount of anxiety amongst Apple Store workers who felt as though they were totally unprepared to do what Apple was basically insisting on them doing. And the entire chapter is, that's interesting enough, but the reporter decides to. Again, I haven't read the book, so I can't reflect on this, but basically talks about the history of the Apple Store, about how Steve Jobs, when it was first formed, decided, we're going to invest a lot in our workforce. We're going to basically pay them really well.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:15]:
We're going to give them great benefits. We're going to create an environment in which they feel as though they're nurtured and as though they're part of a culture so that we will have essential. I mean, career retail is not going to be a thing for everybody. But we want basically people who've been there for years because that will reflect, they will be able to represent our products very, very well. And so he tells the story about Tim Cook's tenure, about how there was a lot of Back and forth about cost cutting, cost cutting, cost cutting, and as often happens, let's cut costs in terms of the workforce, which led to, let's kind of go away from expensive hires that go through a lot of training and get a lot of benefits. Let's try to do seasonal temporary hires as much as we possibly can, which was going to reflect on the quality of service that the Apple stores were able to deliver. So it's Wired has a very. Has an extended excerpt.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:08]:
It's very, very interesting. The history seems to be on point.

Jason Snell [01:30:11]:
Point.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:11]:
I'm not in a position to say whether or not his observations about Apple are accurate. However, it tracks with memories of what the Apple store used to be at the very, very beginning. Because you got a lot of people who felt as though economically they were never going to be able to be lifers, but they were going to be happy to work there for several years during a period of their lives where it made sense for them to be working retail, albeit a very, very upscale and a very, very nice retail environment in which management felt as though you are a critical part of this puzzle. We are not just simply pieces that we can swap out every three months,

Leo Laporte [01:30:50]:
which is how it is now, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:51]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:30:52]:
They're more transient.

Jason Snell [01:30:53]:
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:54]:
And again, maybe the reality. I do not have knowledge of American retail in 2026, thank God.

Leo Laporte [01:30:59]:
But I have to say, knowing some young people, it's kind of a nightmare because you don't get a schedule anymore. When we were young, they'd say you're going to work 9 to 5, Monday through Friday or whatever your schedule is. But now it's all over the place. And they do that on purpose. They move people around like crazy. And it is very stressful by itself, let alone having to set up a vision Pro thing, basically a couple hours training.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:23]:
And that's part of the great sins of American management right now. The implication there is like we're asking the olden days of 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it's like, okay, we're hiring you for mostly Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays from 2:00 clock until close, whatever, okay? That means you can schedule your life around that. Whereas now it's like we are assuming that, yes, we're paying you a little bit more than minimum wage. However, we own your entire week. You cannot make any commitments until the week before. Before when we tell you what your next week's schedule is going to be. And that is basically, in effect, you're saying we are hiring you as a 40 hour, a week employee, but we are paying you as an employee at will, part time. And this is something that Roger would have absolutely railed against because labor was another one of those really important issues to him.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:15]:
And it's something that needs to be always frontmost center in the conversation. I've always believed that the way that a company, any company treats its labor is a reflection of how, what the character of that company is. If you treat your labor, particularly your most dispensable labor, like crap, that reflects upwards. And that does make me think, great, so is this phone as good as I think it is or is the attitude filtering upward? Anyway, I do think that's an important metric to judge any company, including Apple.

Jason Snell [01:32:52]:
Sounds like pinko talk to me.

Leo Laporte [01:32:54]:
Pinko talk, absolutely.

Jason Snell [01:32:55]:
Get him everybody.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:56]:
I'm also one of them. Women's liberty.

Leo Laporte [01:32:58]:
It's gonna be mayday soon, you know, and we gotta raise the red flag in March. Everybody, fists held high. Actually, I feel bad for anybody in this generation. I mean, the entry level jobs are terrible. The pay is awful. You can't buy a house, you can't have a family.

Jason Snell [01:33:17]:
No, they don't even. I mean, so much of. As a parent of somebody who is a relatively new member of the workforce and somebody who's about to graduate from college, I can tell you the other thing that I've noticed is there are not a lot of full time jobs out there. Instead, a lot of companies just have decided because for lots of reasons in the United States, you know, when you hire somebody above a certain threshold, you have to pay them like benefits and healthcare is expected and stuff. So they just hire Everybody at like 20 hours a week and, and figure so people can work full time if they want, but not for the same employer and not with any benefits. It's a disaster.

Leo Laporte [01:33:52]:
So meanwhile, in England, they give you a vision Pro as you come to the doctor. And I think that's, you know, that's

Jason Snell [01:33:57]:
nationalized and that closes the world's most.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:02]:
No, no, it's not over.

Leo Laporte [01:34:03]:
There's another story from the BBC.

Jason Snell [01:34:07]:
Oh, fine. This is the world's most left wing vision Pro podcast.

Leo Laporte [01:34:11]:
It is. The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is giving endometriosis patients vision pros to visualize what's going on and what their potential surgery might be like, why you're feeling the way you're feeling. I think this is really interesting. Thanks to Andy for finding this Virtual reality helps patients prepare for endometriosis surgery.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:35]:
Come, let us march through your lower duodenum together.

Jason Snell [01:34:41]:
I mean, this is the Other what is the Vision Pro good at? It's all these kind of high end kind of industrial applications, medicine and things like that where it's used for surgery, it's used for visualization. It's. It's cool that they're doing this good job to the uk.

Leo Laporte [01:34:58]:
Yeah. And if you've ever wanted to see your womb in 3D, well, now you can.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:07]:
Just not on public wi fi. You want to put that through a VPN for sure?

Jason Snell [01:35:11]:
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [01:35:12]:
Now that's the most left wing Vision Pro segment, pro segment in the world.

Jason Snell [01:35:20]:
We're done talking.

Leo Laporte [01:35:22]:
The Vision Pro.

Jason Snell [01:35:26]:
Vision Pros of the world unite.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:29]:
You have nothing to lose but your tethers to your battery packs.

Jason Snell [01:35:31]:
Yeah, well, and the power will go when you lose your tether to the battery pack, but that's okay.

Christina Warren [01:35:36]:
That's fine.

Jason Snell [01:35:38]:
We'll workshop it. We'll workshop it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:40]:
Immersive is the opiate of the masses. Sorry, I'm not helping my case here, am I?

Leo Laporte [01:35:46]:
This is MacBreak Weekly with Andy and Ako, Jason Snell and Christina Warren who's

Jason Snell [01:35:52]:
wondering how she got here and possibly Karl Marx.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
Yeah, hiding in the corner there. It is time for Marx Brothers. Yeah, he was one of the Marx brothers.

Jason Snell [01:36:05]:
Yeah, sure. Carl Carlo.

Leo Laporte [01:36:08]:
Groucho. Yeah, Harpo and Carl. Time for our picks of the week. I'll give you a few. How about let me kick things off. I don't usually do this, but I got more than a few.

Andy Ihnatko [01:36:25]:
Very aggressive.

Jason Snell [01:36:26]:
I'll give you some pics of the week.

Leo Laporte [01:36:27]:
I'll give you. I'll get you pics of the week right here. This actually is from Scooter X. In our Discord chat, He mentioned the Artemis 2 iPhone wallpapers which are available from basicappleguy.com he's reformatted the them so that you can put them on your iPhone with the proper aspect ratio. His favorite. That's beautiful. Wouldn't you like that on your iPhone?

Christina Warren [01:36:50]:
That's awesome.

Jason Snell [01:36:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:36:51]:
Far side of the moon and all of that. Artemis in eclipse. A new view of the moon. Anyway, some beautiful ones. So thank you, Scooter X, for recommending that. I've got a couple of interesting AI picks. First of all, Google has made available its new Gemma model, which is a tiny model that runs interestingly not only on a Mac. In fact, it runs if you're using Ollama or, well, I guess if you're using a llama 20 or 19 or 20, it'll run using MLX extensions.

Leo Laporte [01:37:24]:
So it'll run natively on your Mac. This is a model based on Gemini that is extra small using a new technology Google has developed to really compress these. But you can also run it on your iPhone and I have been. It's in the Google AI Edge Gallery Gallery, which is an app you can download for the iPhone. It's free and you can install an appropriately sized Gemma on your iPhone if you want to play with this new model. It's, you know, it's good. It has the virtue of being completely local both on your Mac and the iPhone. So you can run it locally at no cost to you and completely privately.

Leo Laporte [01:37:59]:
So I just thought I'd mention that. And then you believe it or not, your Mac already has AI on it. Apple Intelligence. And it doesn't just have to be for Genmoji and writing because somebody has made a very simple way of making the Apple Intelligence available to you as a chatbot. It's called Apfel. Apfel, the free AI already on your Mac. If you have Tahoe or later, it ships with a 3 billion parameter version of Apple Intelligence and you can run it right in your command line. So let me.

Leo Laporte [01:38:37]:
You just type appfl and what should I prompt it with? You got a. You got a good something to say to appful? Who's the biggest winner on Jeopardy so far? Now, one of the problems with Apple Intelligence is it hasn't been trained past a certain point. Yeah, past a certain point. So biggest jeopardy G E J E O P A R D Y.

Jason Snell [01:39:07]:
That's first test to get on Jeopardy

Leo Laporte [01:39:12]:
so far. So it won't be, it won't be super up to date what's going on here? What's going on?

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:17]:
Well, Fleming announced that over $8,000 from the 80.

Leo Laporte [01:39:21]:
Yeah, it might be that old. I asked it some. I asked it it where Artemis was right now. It said Artemis is still. Is still in space. It's not working anymore. Oh, there it is. Here we go.

Leo Laporte [01:39:34]:
As of my last update, the highest ever cash winnings, ken Jennings.

Jason Snell [01:39:39]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:39:40]:
$10 million. And then Brad Rudder, which is we knew is 7 million. I don't think anybody's eclipsed those yet. So that's really not a great test. Yeah, but it's kind of cool. I asked it for, as you could see, a Hawaii joke itinerary has to do a little math problem for us. It can do those. So it's kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:40:01]:
This is appful. It is free. What is the capital of the Belgian Congo? It knew that it's now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo and it's Kinsasha. What's the weight of water in a 10 square meter room that's full to 1 inch? It figured it out. 254 kilograms. So you have this, it's already on your machine and if you want to use Apple's intelligence models as a chatbot, you can with this appful which let me find the URL a pfel f R-A-N-Z-A I.com franz apple in German. Apple in German. Yeah, because I think they're Austrian is what I think.

Leo Laporte [01:40:42]:
It's got a brew install by the way, so you don't even have to go to the website. If you want to just brew it, you can. Although you have to know what to type.

Christina Warren [01:40:50]:
Yeah, you need to know, you need to know their cat.

Leo Laporte [01:40:53]:
Arthur Fisch tab tab, Apple. But anyway, if you search for Apple and AI, it's pretty cool, pretty neat. Apple is probably gonna shut it down as soon as it can. Doesn't actually call out to the network, it's all local. So there's two local AIs you can run. Christina Pick of the week.

Christina Warren [01:41:12]:
Yeah, so okay, this is a fun one. Someone on Twitter actually I guess they were dared at DEFCON to do this and then did it. And the reason I chose this was because while I've been on medical leave I've actually been working on a similar concept but this person beat me to it. Anyway, if you are a Linux user or Linux dabbler, you may be familiar with the famous infamous Linux distribution known as Hannah Montana. Linux?

Leo Laporte [01:41:38]:
What? No, I've never heard of that.

Christina Warren [01:41:40]:
Okay, it was a joke obviously, but it was an actual Linux distribution that came out in the mid aughts that was just a Linux, it was just Ubuntu or something themed like Hannah Montana and it became kind of. Exactly. The whole thing is very funny. And so someone has basically created a new version of Hannah Montana Linux and Hannah MontAnalytics 2.0. So if you search that up on the Internet archive, it is there and it is. But here's the thing. The reason I chose this is again I actually had been trying to kind of vive code and do an updated version of this for the last couple of weeks. And when I saw this yesterday, a colleague pointed it out to me, I was like okay, well I'm glad that someone.

Christina Warren [01:42:28]:
I'm glad there's another sicko out there who had the same idea as as me. So yeah, this is great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:34]:
Maybe, maybe you can do like the big rewrite like the Miley Silas Release.

Christina Warren [01:42:40]:
Yeah, that's actually Exactly. Yeah, you totally could have Miley Cyrus Linux Two weeks from now.

Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
Two weeks from now. The 20th anniversary special with Miley.

Christina Warren [01:42:50]:
Well, that was the whole thing. Is that what happened? They had like a anniversary special a couple weeks ago and that was what put the idea in my head.

Leo Laporte [01:42:57]:
I was like, oh, oh, it wasn't. It was two weeks ago.

Christina Warren [01:42:59]:
And so I was like, I was like, oh, okay, I should like put something together for this. And someone else beat me to it. But I'm so glad that it exists. And what I might wind up doing is pivoting mine into like just like a website that's interactive, like an interactive kind of version of a modern day thing.

Leo Laporte [01:43:16]:
I'm showing the Hannah Montana reel, but I guess our esteemed producer does not want to get us taken down.

Christina Warren [01:43:23]:
Probably not.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:24]:
Yankee Doodle Went to Town Riding on a Pony song. So we don't get it though.

Jason Snell [01:43:32]:
Legally. Unencumbered music.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:38]:
Your pick of the week, friends. You've heard me talk about notes apps pretty much non stop because I collect notes apps the way that some people collect hot sauces. It is an endless series of things I'm interested in as I used to have. I'm counting them right here. One, two, three different. Actually four different notes apps that launch at startup. I added a fifth one a couple weeks ago because this is. I did not know there was a gap in my notes arsenal.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:06]:
It's an app called heynote. It is written by the Swedish developer Jonathan Heyman and what it is is it's just one window in which you can basically create hit command, hit command return and create a new divider and then a new text area all in the same scrolling area. And what you paste in there is going to be plain text, but it can be, it could be markdown, it can be HTML, it could be whatever. You can basically say, oh, by the way, this content area minus setup, so that's always marked down but you can say, oh, by the way, this is formatted as HTML, this is formatted as CSS and it is the perfect thing for. I don't need to create a document and create and fill it with this thing and then save it under file name. I'm just about to make a Change to this 1000 line CSS file on a project and I'm worried that I'm about to screw everything up and not be able to revert to what I had before. Oh, I know I will hit command enter in hey note. Paste it in as it is so that If God forbid, everything goes kerflowy, I can just go right back here, get that code back and replace it with what I had before.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:15]:
I have so many windows open in BBEdit for exactly this purpose. Like something that I just need to stash a piece of text right here because I'm going to need it either for backup purposes in the next half hour or just because this is Infinite Scroll.

Leo Laporte [01:45:28]:
Does it just go forever?

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:30]:
It just goes forever.

Leo Laporte [01:45:33]:
This is actually really cool. This is kind of like what Evernote was. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:38]:
And it's just one window. It's not a project oriented thing like again, like every other notes app you've seen where you have folders and projects. No, it is literally an endless scrolling pane of sectioned off blocks of text that again, could be. Sometimes it's been like just a couple of sentences. Sometimes it's been again like several pages of something that is needed to keep a hold of. And it is just amazing. It is like the. Again, it's easy to find.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:03]:
It's easy to find the one or two apps that are. Here's what's going to handle 90 to 95% of what I need an app like this for. You are so grateful when you find something. I did not know what a gaping hole I had in my productivity or in my needs until this app. I discovered this app and it's free, it's on GitHub, it's available from multiple platforms. I think it's written in JavaScript or something, but it's very, very polished. The other nice thing is you could

Leo Laporte [01:46:30]:
do your mermaid in this. This is nice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:32]:
Yeah, you can do anything in it. It's wonderful.

Leo Laporte [01:46:36]:
Python, Ruby, rust and there's a little

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:38]:
bank of buttons at the bottom of the window as you can actually have it so that it floats above everything else. So that if it really is something where again I'm going to be cutting and pasting things back and forth. My goodness. It's like I want to. Is there a PayPal donation button button anywhere on this site? Because I want to give this Jonathan Heyman fellow some money. Because I can't tell you how many problems this facilitate how many problems this addressed, facilitated or simplified for me. So give again. It's esoteric.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:07]:
Again, as the person who has like 20 or 30 bottles of hot sauces on in the kitchen. This is not just another one of those. This is. No, no, this one goes like next to the stove. Because this is like one of my go to.

Leo Laporte [01:47:18]:
This is wild.

Christina Warren [01:47:19]:
This is great.

Leo Laporte [01:47:19]:
Yeah, very nice. Hey, note free heynote.com I've just installed it as you can see and I'm.

Christina Warren [01:47:29]:
Yeah, I have too. No, this is great because I, I am totally a person who has this sort of use case and like you, I have an addiction to note taking apps. But no, this, this is, this is very cool.

Leo Laporte [01:47:39]:
Well, for one example, when we're doing a, like a keynote or something, I'm constantly like transcribing, writing as we're talking. So I have the notes from it, but I don't really want to preserve them. I've been putting my Obsidian, but I like, I really want that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:52]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:47:53]:
Later. But no, this would be a perfect place to put it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:55]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:47:55]:
Yeah, I usually just have an empty text editor open that I just kind of fill in and then you know, blow away when I'm done. But yeah, this is even better to have just like a, especially like that, the tab feature, like being able to have like different sections for different things. Like that's really, really nice.

Jason Snell [01:48:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:48:12]:
Thank you, Andy. Another great recommendation. Another note taker to add to my. Exactly. My collection. Another bottle of hot sauce.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:19]:
Five and counting.

Leo Laporte [01:48:23]:
Mr. Jason Snell. Wrapping things up with the last pick of the week this week.

Jason Snell [01:48:27]:
Yeah, it's a, what I like to think of as sort of a classic Mac utility. You know, Mac utilities, they're all about like productivity boosts while you're using your Mac. I love them. And this is drop zone 5. New version just came out. Drop Zone's been around for a while. It's 25 bucks on sale right now, 35 regularly. It's a shelf basically.

Jason Snell [01:48:49]:
It lives in your menu bar. You can drag stuff out of anywhere on your Mac up to the shelf. You can either store stuff, you can move stuff around and you can perform actions on stuff that you drag up there. It looks really good. It's got nice animations, it's got very nice graphics. There are a bunch of new features to do.

Leo Laporte [01:49:06]:
So it's like a dock for your menu bar.

Jason Snell [01:49:09]:
It's kind of like a shelf on your menu bar, but you can also use it to perform actions. So like you can drag up there and kick off an airdrop or drag up there and kick off a URL shortener or attach it to an email. Those are all like defaults. It's got lots of different actions you can do. You can move things into particular folders. It's, you know, again, it's not like Apple doesn't make some of this stuff available, but they're trying to do the extra mile to make it replace the

Leo Laporte [01:49:39]:
share sheet because I always want to do the same share and it never is in the right spot. I always have to dig around. I could put this right there. This is great.

Jason Snell [01:49:48]:
Yeah, it looks great. The animations are really nice. It's got a bunch of smart features. And also if you're a SetApp person, it's in SetApp. You can just get it from there. The new version is there. Version 5.

Christina Warren [01:50:01]:
I honestly, I use it like that's how I airdrop. Because it's just so much easier to use Drop Zone than it is to airdrop in Finder or any other way. It's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:11]:
And that's like, these are great for like MacNeo, where you have not a whole lot of screen real estate, where ideally in a multi screen environment, you'd have a window open to the finder for this folder you're dropping things into, or an app that you're sending things to, but the ability to simply say, no. I've got this persistent drop zone that just simply hovers into place when I need it. That's how you, that's how you handle like traveling two weeks on a 12 inch screen without any external support.

Leo Laporte [01:50:41]:
I'm buying it right now, especially at 25 bucks. That's a deal. Drop zone.

Jason Snell [01:50:47]:
Drop zone.

Leo Laporte [01:50:48]:
Thank you. Wow. Some good recommendations this week. Well, except for Hannah Matanoletta. I'm not installing that.

Christina Warren [01:50:54]:
No, no, no. I mean, that's just a fun one. I'm just glad that somebody else had the idea of doing that. And hey, maybe you can have it in a VM and just experience every once in a while, new old days.

Leo Laporte [01:51:05]:
Yes, this could pop up.

Andy Ihnatko [01:51:07]:
This is finally going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Leo Laporte [01:51:10]:
This could be Hannah. It could be Hannah Matano.

Christina Warren [01:51:12]:
It could be. It could be.

Leo Laporte [01:51:13]:
Could be. Christina Warren. Great to have you as always. We're so glad that you joined the panel. We appreciate that very much. Enjoy your return to work. We'll see you after your first day next week on Tuesday.

Christina Warren [01:51:26]:
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [01:51:27]:
And everybody should check out GitHub. I guess. GitHub's going crazy right now.

Christina Warren [01:51:33]:
Yeah, yeah. So you might have noticed, I don't know, that this AI coding thing has really taken off in the last six months. And so, yeah, we've had like a, I don't know, like 1200% increase in usage.

Leo Laporte [01:51:47]:
It was, it's phenomenal.

Christina Warren [01:51:48]:
It's ridiculous. So that's. But that's one of the reasons why the downtime is, has not been as great as we would like it to be because. Because, you know, you don't expect literally like orders of magnitude more usage to happen on your platform when things had been you know, increasing at a steady pace. Then all of a sudden two of the big models come out and you go, oh, okay, well.

Leo Laporte [01:52:11]:
And they all use GitHub. I mean, I. All of a sudden I have a dozen repositories on GitHub.

Christina Warren [01:52:15]:
Well, that's the thing, right?

Leo Laporte [01:52:17]:
They never had before. And they're all vibe coded projects. Right?

Christina Warren [01:52:21]:
Well, that's the thing, right, is the agentic coding. What are people going to use? They're going to use GitHub as their platform. And you were like, oh, okay, well, so we have work to do. But yeah, it's fun.

Leo Laporte [01:52:31]:
Oh, you're doing a great job. I appreciate it. Thank you, Christina. Thank you. Andy and Otko, great to see you, my friend.

Andy Ihnatko [01:52:37]:
Great to be here.

Leo Laporte [01:52:37]:
Pink ou.

Andy Ihnatko [01:52:39]:
God bless America. I don't want to love it or leave it. I want to love it or and stay here and fix it. Dar.

Leo Laporte [01:52:46]:
There you go. Now you're talking.

Andy Ihnatko [01:52:48]:
Come on, let's go to Kelsey Sparrow, finish the fight over there.

Leo Laporte [01:52:51]:
Great to see you. Jason Snell, sixcolors.com Jason's podcast at sixcolors.com. Jason yes. And anything else coming up that you want to plug, please go right ahead.

Jason Snell [01:53:03]:
Oh, I'm, I'm happy to not be studying for Jeopardy or writing about Apple's 50th anniversary for the first time in three months.

Leo Laporte [01:53:10]:
It's great free time.

Jason Snell [01:53:13]:
Yeah, yeah. Get back to my to do list now, which is very long, actually.

Leo Laporte [01:53:17]:
I bet it is.

Jason Snell [01:53:18]:
It's good.

Leo Laporte [01:53:19]:
We'll put it in drop zone and then you can forget about it.

Jason Snell [01:53:21]:
Drop it right in there.

Leo Laporte [01:53:24]:
We thank you all for joining us. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. We stream it live as we're doing it. If you want to watch live, it's, you know, I mean, it's. I guess it's fresh. The live streams are on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We're also on our Club Twit Discord. If you're in the club, you can watch there and you certainly can hang there and chat with us.

Leo Laporte [01:53:51]:
We really love seeing you. If you're not a member, please join YouTube.com- I'm sorry, twit.tv/clubtwit. We would love to have you. The show also ends up on the website twit tv/mbw you after we're done polishing it up. There will also be a video on YouTube, YouTube.com/twit for all the different channels. And then you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Probably the best way to do it. That way you'll get it automatically every Tuesday as soon as we're done.

Leo Laporte [01:54:22]:
Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. Thanks guys. We'll see you next week. But now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you got to get back to work because break time is over. Bye!