MacBreak Weekly 1024 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, Andy, and Christina are all here. I'm back home. We have lots to talk about, including maybe $25 that Apple owes you. We'll tell you why. We'll talk about the Supreme Court saying, no, Apple. You got. You gotta make some concessions to Epic and Tim Cook goes back to China.

Leo Laporte [00:00:22]:
That and a whole lot more coming up on MacBreak Weekly, next. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1024, recorded Tuesday, May 12, 2026: Good Talk. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Yes, the show. We cover all the latest Apple news.

Leo Laporte [00:00:52]:
I'm back home, but Christina Warren has moved.

Christina Warren [00:00:55]:
I have.

Leo Laporte [00:00:56]:
You're in the beautiful somewhere. Look at the greenery and the angel window.

Christina Warren [00:01:01]:
Yeah, it's so green out. So I'm in Atlanta. I'm in my mom's office and came to visit for Mother's Day. And it was funny, actually, because a Facebook memory came up of a photo I guess I posted where 5 years ago, I guess it was this week, my nephew made his podcasting debut because he was in my arms as I was on an episode of this Week in Tech. And I held him the whole episode. And he was. At that point, I think he was maybe eight days old.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
You held a baby for three hours?

Christina Warren [00:01:30]:
I did.

Jason Snell [00:01:30]:
I did.

Christina Warren [00:01:31]:
And he was good. And he was good while his mother napped. That was my Mother's Day gift to her.

Jason Snell [00:01:35]:
Aw.

Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
I dimly remember that. Which episode was that?

Christina Warren [00:01:39]:
I don't remember now, but I have to find it. But it was.

Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
We'll find it. Pull it up.

Christina Warren [00:01:43]:
It was super cute, though, because he even had his own chiron, like, and it said, like, you know, like Christian Warren baby as his title.

Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
Sweet. Is that. That's Andy Ihnatko. Not holding a baby. Baby. Probably holding a tome of some sort because he's at the library. Hello, Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:59]:
Hello, Christina. Was his first words as a consequence of that, like a name of like a mattress or a food prep company, you know?

Christina Warren [00:02:09]:
No, but you know what? I spent too much of my time napping all day.

Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
I don't have time to cook a good, healthy meal.

Christina Warren [00:02:16]:
Okay, here's the real thing, though. The kids, they watch so much YouTube and they're exposed to this stuff, even though my sister claims that she has, like a, you know, low screen home. But come on. That when he plays YouTube, like, which is what the kids do now, he is like, like. And subscribe.

Leo Laporte [00:02:32]:
Oh, does he have a little YouTube, like, Fisher Price YouTube set. They should do that. My.

Christina Warren [00:02:39]:
They should do that. Yeah, he just, he just, you know, kind of build his own kind of thing. But no, somebody should, like, like Fisher Price or, or somebody should create like a creator set of fake cameras and, and backdrops and stuff that honestly, I'm saying this out loud. I'm like, that's. This is actually a really good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
Also here, his ink stained fingers now recovering from many, many colors. Jason Snell of sixcolors.com. Hello. Good to see you.

Jason Snell [00:03:04]:
Good to be seen.

Leo Laporte [00:03:05]:
We did the same thing. You were in Hawaii preparing for Jeopardy. Working. I was in Hawaii, did five, four shows in Hawaii. But I'm back now. All I brought back was a little tan in this shirt, so. Oh, and somewhere I have a lei. Aloha, Aloha.

Leo Laporte [00:03:23]:
What a great trip. It was, it was so much fun. And while I was gone, a few things happened. For instance, the. We knew this would affect you, I think, Jason, you said this would happen. Supreme Court instantly turned down Apple's appeal in the Epic Games lawsuit. You said, I remember. And I was kind of surprised that you said it with such confidence.

Leo Laporte [00:03:44]:
There's no way the court will uphold or.

Christina Warren [00:03:47]:
I said that.

Leo Laporte [00:03:47]:
You said, christina, let's give her credit where credit's due.

Christina Warren [00:03:51]:
Sorry, no. Only reason I say that is because I was, I think Jason would probably would have hedged more, which would be the smarter thing. And I was just like, no, they're going to, they're not even going to hear this.

Jason Snell [00:04:00]:
No, no. I mean, I would have said something like, these days, who knows what the Supreme Court is going to do? But yeah, the Supreme Court just basically Apple's like, please, sir, we, we, we must spare us from the law. And the Supreme Court was like us from the law.

Leo Laporte [00:04:14]:
Yes, that's exactly what they were saying.

Jason Snell [00:04:18]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:04:18]:
Elena Kagan, on behalf of the court in the shadow docket, declined to pause a ruling by the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals considered Apple in contempt. This is Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Epic lawsuit. Contempt is literally the word, I think, on App Store fees. That's it. Boom. So it goes right back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers. Now they're. Now the fight is over what commission Apple can charge.

Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
Not 27%, I'm thinking, because she felt that was a little bit of malicious compliance. Tim Sweeney, of course, taking the victory lap again. The Supreme Court has considered Apple's delaying motion and found it unworthy. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:05:00]:
I wonder if Google's settlement or planned revision of how they run the Play Store, which they did hand in hand. With Sweeney is going to affect how the judge rules on this. It's okay. Well, you know what? A company that has as big an app store as yours dealt with this company, and they decided that 10% was pretty much okay. Scaling up to, I think it was like 15 or 16%. Tell me why you should not have your fees reduced to the same thing. I don't know where the argument goes, like, legally, but that can't be a good thing. That there is this other app store out there that seems to have had a negotiated settlement and they have accepted, and Google has accepted way, way, way under 27%.

Leo Laporte [00:05:46]:
It's ironic because Apple told the Supreme Court in its filing, regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate Apple may charge on covered purchases in huge markets outside the United States. To which Elena Kagan said, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's why. Going back to the judge to figure it out.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:05]:
That's why we're not gonna screw this up.

Leo Laporte [00:06:06]:
Yeah. So we'll see what happens. The contempt, by the way, the civil contempt ruling also holds. So that gives the judge additional ammunition to do something, I don't know, fine, Apple or something. So we'll see what happens. It's going back to the judge in the original case, Judge Gonzalez Rogers.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:31]:
They did get one victory in another case. Another thing we're talking about a couple weeks ago with DOJ in the States doing their antitrust thing against Apple, where Apple tried to stall, stall, stall, stall, stall, by all of a sudden deciding, hey, Judge, we can't move forward because we have to petition the government of South Korea to let us have access to Samsung's stuff. And the judge basically slapped them, saying, yeah, it's really suspicious that you had about a year and a half to think about this and only, like, a week before we're supposed to move forward. You decided this. Apparently. Apparently another court basically said, yeah, we'll let you do that. We'll let you go. We'll let you get your discovery documents from Samsung.

Andy Ihnatko [00:07:11]:
But before we move forward. So I don't know how that. It must be nice to. There must be, like, this weird leaderboard somewhere in the legal wing of the spaceship campus about wins and losses of like, okay, our little horsey got two steps forward, only took one step back. This was a good week, everybody. This was a good week. We get to have calzones on Friday.

Leo Laporte [00:07:33]:
Not a good week for Apple. A $250 million settlement has been reached now over the Siri delays. And the reason I mention this Is you might, well, all of us might well be getting some money from Apple up to $95 per device in this settlement.

Andy Ihnatko [00:07:51]:
Yeah, I think the minimum was 30 or 40, I think $25, $25, 295

Leo Laporte [00:07:56]:
depending on how many users submit claims. So they divide the total 250 minus the lawyer's fees by the number of people who ask for the money back.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:04]:
Once it's a multiple of burritos, it's worthwhile.

Leo Laporte [00:08:06]:
It's going to be the lower number, right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:08]:
Probably, but still it's going to be worthwhile.

Christina Warren [00:08:10]:
Has anyone set up like the website yet where you can, I haven't seen it yet. Do your claim.

Leo Laporte [00:08:13]:
So that's the next thing is the, is the lawyer to set that up? Yeah, yeah, I think, I think you

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:18]:
have to have about a 15 or 16. It's basically the complaint was basically about people who might have seen the WWDC keynote about hey, in just a number of months we're going to be giving you all these wonderful AI features that we're demonstrating for you right now and we promise, promise, promise that you're going to be getting them very, very shortly. So it's on the basis that anybody who might have bought a brand new iPhone like around the time the keynote came out, all the way through the time where they decided that yeah, we, about that. No, they might feel as though we bought this based on a promise of a feature that you actually did promise to deliver that you did not deliver.

Leo Laporte [00:08:52]:
The class action lawsuit said that Apple quote, promoted AI capabilities that did not exist at the time, do not exist now, and will not exist for two or more years. It added that Apple saturated the Internet, television and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone's release. Actually that ad did not run for very long, but I, I guess it was emphatic though.

Jason Snell [00:09:16]:
Yeah, it was, yeah, yeah, it was running during football playoffs and stuff and it was, it was stating it as if those features already existed. It actually sort of stated that like they were, they were basically there or coming shortly and that, you know, they never shipped them. So I, I, it's kind of nice to see that there's at least a little bit of recriminations for saying things that aren't true in commercial announcements.

Leo Laporte [00:09:40]:
It's kind of, when I was a kid, I don't think kids say this anymore, we used to say, oh it's on an ad, they can't lie on ads. I think we know Better now. Right. But you can't, you have, there's a risk if you lie on an ad.

Jason Snell [00:09:56]:
You can't lie on ads. You can, you can market and, and you know, emphasize and do all, there are all sorts of things you can do. Ads can be misleading, but you cannot actually lie about facts about the product that you're advertising. It's not protected speech. This is one of those things that comes up sometimes which is like, oh, what about the First Amendment? I can say whatever I want. Commercial speech is not really protected in the same way that, that, that a person's speech is. Because the idea there is that the law is protecting the people being spoken to and that just lying to them because it's your free speech right to do so is not actually okay. So that's why.

Jason Snell [00:10:36]:
Yeah, you will see issues with the FTC striking things down and then class action lawsuits and all sorts of stuff like that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:10:44]:
That's, that's why we, as we say every time we talk about the quarterlies, it's unusual because it's a, it's the only time during the, during the year in which the senior executives have to answer questions. And if they say anything that is even marginally misleading there they wind up, as has actually happened with Tim said something about the China, the China market is, is the iPhone market going to be facing headwinds or whatever. Said something that turned out to be not only not true, but Apple should have known it was not true. And they got sued by shareholders to the tune of half a billion dollars.

Jason Snell [00:11:15]:
SEC will literally like look into it. If you say something that. Because you have a responsibility to be truthful to shareholders.

Leo Laporte [00:11:23]:
Yeah. You know they actually find Elon Musk for lying on Twitter about the value of Twitter. They actually find him like 11 3/4 million.

Jason Snell [00:11:31]:
I know he had just, he had to search his pocket for that pocket.

Leo Laporte [00:11:36]:
Let me see here. It's in my coin purse.

Jason Snell [00:11:38]:
Yeah, in the coin pocke.

Andy Ihnatko [00:11:42]:
You know something, when our self driving kills a pedestrian, we don't even pay half of that. Don't worry about it. We got that money.

Leo Laporte [00:11:47]:
So I guess my point being I wouldn't count on the SEC or the FTC really enforcing these rules. But you know what class?

Jason Snell [00:11:55]:
$250 million for Apple. I mean, how much, how, how much time in revenue is $250 million from Apple?

Leo Laporte [00:12:02]:
Well, they spent more in lawyer's fees, no doubt.

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

Leo Laporte [00:12:06]:
Although these lawyers are on retainers, so they're spending.

Andy Ihnatko [00:12:08]:
And once again they settled. They did not let this go to trial.

Leo Laporte [00:12:10]:
This did not go to trial which could have more expensive. Right.

Jason Snell [00:12:13]:
And nobody wants to discover. Yeah. Discovery is dangerous.

Leo Laporte [00:12:17]:
As part of the settlement. They agree. They said no fault of ours. We admitted no wrongdoing. But we're just as. We're nice guys and we're just going to give them a little money just

Jason Snell [00:12:28]:
because we feel bad. We feel bad our mistake.

Leo Laporte [00:12:31]:
No wrongdoing. Now this will all be made good this in next month, right? Wwdc, all of those features will suddenly appear.

Jason Snell [00:12:39]:
I don't think so. I mean this is our speculation. Right. But like it feels like there was a bit of a pivot because they were originally trying to ship all those features in the spring and then they said we're going to not do that and ship it this summer. And I think everybody is starting to think that they've shifted gears from can we make good on all our promises from 2024 to let's not think about what we promised in 2024 and think about what we can deliver in 2020.

Leo Laporte [00:13:07]:
$25 and, and forget what you saw here.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:10]:
Yeah, but I mean this is seriously exciting though because this is like, like both, both Google and Google I o next week and Apple WWC next month are going to have an amazing keynote. I'm looking forward to both in the way that I have not for either of them in a couple of years now. Because Apple, whereas they had a lot of promises a couple years ago and then last year they had eat a lot of crow with their hat in their hand. I'll add a third metaphor which I'm not going to come up with. But now they're like, it's a crow in the hat. Is in the hat and they have

Leo Laporte [00:13:42]:
to eat a turduck.

Jason Snell [00:13:43]:
Is the bird in the hand if it's in a hat in the.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:47]:
But now it's like, okay, well, again we decided to have like one of the premier foundation model makers make us our foundation model. So we're on top of that. Number two. We're also deciding that we're going to make our platform ecumenical to any, any AI that wants to run on it because we don't. We figure we win so long as you, you buy our iPhone. We don't have to do that. It seems as though they're, they're positioned in a. And also they, they have learned their lesson very, very well.

Andy Ihnatko [00:14:13]:
I feel this is not going to be a Steve Jobs, you're holding it wrong sort of thing. This is. Okay, what Tim Cook, what can we learn from this? And how can we come out from this even stronger.

Leo Laporte [00:14:22]:
What did. So just out of curiosity because it was a while ago, what did they promise?

Jason Snell [00:14:28]:
Personal. So the idea was that they were going to do an on device semantic index of your personal information that then an on device model was going to be able to look through and make some intuitions about stuff that you could do. So it was things like answering questions about who did I email with last month that did this thing. Or the classic one is the my mom is coming in, when do I need to get her at the airport. And it knows to get your mom's like text message about her flight and look at a flight info thing and find out when her arrival is expected and then look at maps and see what the time is for the airport and like build up these. There's this idea of like mining your personal information and also doing multi step automation so that you can. Which is great. Like it's kind of agentic we would say.

Jason Snell [00:15:20]:
Now the problem was that like the app intents frameworks that are probably responsible weren't there and the model was not strong enough and and we haven't heard a lot of detail. I love the idea of building a personal index on device that is not getting uploaded somewhere and then being able to do some intelligent kind of parsing of that information. But will they be able to pull that off? It's unclear. I mean some of that stuff is absolutely still happening. But whether they, whether they're going to bite off that whole thing or whether they're going to be a little more restrained about. About app intents because app intents the whole idea. There is apps making features that they can do available to the system so that the system driven by an LLM basically by an agent can say I'm going to use this lookup from Maps and I'm going to use this thing from Mail and I'm going to take this thing from a third party app and get an answer and then give you the answer. And that's the dream, right? And we see it's funny today it seems more understandable than in 2024.

Jason Snell [00:16:28]:
I would argue like today we've seen more agentic stuff that 1996 it's like

Leo Laporte [00:16:33]:
club Twit member Nightscape points out this is the Newton Agent wish list, a

Jason Snell [00:16:37]:
knowledge navigator kind of things like Open Claw and I'm doing this right now

Leo Laporte [00:16:44]:
with my own agent and I can do it telegram on my iPhone and have my Apple watch telling my asking my agent for any of that stuff.

Jason Snell [00:16:52]:
My agent can go to So I think it is doable on a certain level. But whether they'll try to replicate like every feature that they promised in 24 or whether they'll be like let's, I think they need to recalibrate and say let's start with what we can do.

Leo Laporte [00:17:05]:
But this would be, this would be crucial because I can do this because I know what I'm doing and I've spent hours, days, you know, coding all this with my, with Claude first and now Hermes with ChatGPT. And this would make all of those capabilities available to normal people who aren't willing to or able to do that. That would be pretty cool. I think people would appreciate that. Especially I mean remember Google also promised something similar ages ago with its cards on Android. But of course that means Google knows everything about you and you have to use Gmail and all this For Apple to be able to do it privately I think would be very desirable. I think people would look what they're doing with Minis, they're buying Mac Minis to run openclaw. If you could do all that in your iPhone, that'd be a hell of a product and I think it's doable.

Leo Laporte [00:17:54]:
I know you don't think they'll do all of that, but I think with Gemini local models they could do a lot, they could do a lot of that for sure.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:01]:
I do think that this is the past is the past. They can't go backwards in time and undo what they did a couple years ago. But if you look at it this way, it can be a benefit that the world is different in 2026 than it was in the 2024 set of plans that they made. Now they can basically react instead of saying we have to build our own AI and we have to build, we have to be our own island. They basically say so long as we are an open port for whatever the people who are Google spending $190 billion this year on infrastructure. We don't have to spend that because we can have all the features that Google is making for their own age on our stuff. We can spend a penny on the dollar to get that same kind of functionality on our thing. They get to take all the, all the hits, they get to do all the support, they get to put build the infrastructure.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:48]:
All we got to do is build a thousand dollar phone that people are going to want to run this stuff on.

Leo Laporte [00:18:54]:
Well, I think people want it and I will very. You're right. It's going to be a very interesting couple weeks.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:59]:
I can't See the new version.

Leo Laporte [00:19:01]:
Do you think Google will offer something like that?

Andy Ihnatko [00:19:04]:
Oh, next week is going to be. If you just look at what they were talking about for cloud customers and then you extrapolate that to now let's see what they can do for Android. They're having their Android video event today, so we'll find out whatever they want to show off for Android today. Next week is when they show off whatever the new user facing version of Gemini is going to be as opposed to corporate facing one. And a lot of the stuff that is that they've been, that's been leaking. And remember, Google is not really good at keeping secrets. People just talk and talk and talk. So there's already a whole bunch of stuff that's leaked about the new Gemini that is agentic and not in the sense of a developer who's building a workflow by clicking things together in some sort of scripting language, but simply creating a prompt that says start by doing this, then do this, then do this, and seeing how well that works.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:00]:
And again, I'm not predicting it's going to be fantastic, wonderful, groundbreaking stuff, no more than we're predicting that Apple's going to be doing groundbreaking stuff in June, but it's going to be very, very interesting. We're at the point in which I guess, remember when these have demos of walking robots in which it's tethered to a machine at the top for all the power and for all the compute and it can do sort of human speech and then now it's at the point where like it's actually doing like dance numbers and actually like folding laundry and sorting parts. I feel as though we're both Apple and Google have again in terms of making a consumer mobile operating system and desktop operating systems. We've gone past the point in which this is interesting research, through the point where we've built these tools and these features. We're hoping to convince you that you want to change how you live and work so that they will be relevant to you. And now they're in at least the potential, both Apple and Google, where they don't have to make that sales pitch, they can just simply say name one thing that you have to do every day or every week that is annoying because it's boring and repetitive. If you can describe it to a human assistant, we can basically have our assistant do it for you and you'll have to talk to it a couple of times to get to iron out some of the creases. But basically you will no longer have to Be coordinating three different calendars and three different sets of cars to get all of your kids to the right rest.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:35]:
Wrestling practice and soccer practice.

Leo Laporte [00:21:36]:
We'll be covering that, of course, keynote on Club Twit. In fact, both keynotes, the WWDC keynote and the Google I O keynote, will be only for Twit members because, alas, we don't want to get strikes against us on our YouTube channel. So if you're not a member of Club Twit and you want to watch our coverage. Yeah, this is going to be very exciting. Christine has pointed out that Google has already announced stuff which kind of is interesting. They announced a Chromebook successor.

Christina Warren [00:22:05]:
Yeah, they announced a Chromebook successor and they announced, I guess, the next version of Android, which makes sense because I know Last year at I.O. the emphasis was definitely more on a lot of the AI stuff. And so they're clearing the deck so

Leo Laporte [00:22:17]:
they can have to waste time on.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:19]:
They did the same thing last year where all the Android stuff was a week before and then they.

Christina Warren [00:22:22]:
It was exactly the same.

Leo Laporte [00:22:23]:
Well, in fact, they're bringing back that Android show that they do before.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:26]:
Yeah, exactly. Second year.

Leo Laporte [00:22:28]:
Christina, you have to cover this because working at GitHub, you have to be ecumenical about these things.

Christina Warren [00:22:33]:
Yeah, of course. Well, no, and I'm just interested in all this stuff anyway. I am too, so it's cool. Yeah. Nobody announced their Chromebook successor. The Google Book that's running a new os, aluminum, which is, I guess not aluminium.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:46]:
No, actually it is aluminium.

Christina Warren [00:22:48]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [00:22:49]:
Well, we have to say aluminium now.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:51]:
Yeah. Even in the us in the sense that it's a successor to Chrome. That's why they call it Aluminum Chrome.

Leo Laporte [00:22:57]:
Emily Alu.

Christina Warren [00:22:59]:
That's actually cute. I'm assuming that this was the Project Fuchsia stuff that was then involved in that. I'm not really sure.

Jason Snell [00:23:07]:
It's not going to be the final branding. That's just the code name.

Leo Laporte [00:23:09]:
Is it more Android, do you think, than Chrome os?

Christina Warren [00:23:12]:
Well, they're claiming that it's a combo. It's a fusion of the two.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:16]:
The idea is to bring something to Android similar to what we have in iOS, where a developer can write a phone app that will then basically with, with either minor changes or maybe no changes, be an iPad app. And then if you were to run this on for Apple Sense, on an iPad that has a trackpad and keyboard, it will also run trackpad and keyboard. The idea is to have that kind of like multitasking, multi windowing, multi app thing going for Android. Let's see if it actually works, because they still don't have the apps like they have for iOS and iPadOs, but it's a good one.

Leo Laporte [00:23:51]:
I think it's going to be very interesting, especially for competition for the Neo, because right now, if you get a Lenovo, one of the Lenovo chromebooks with the MediaTek Companiono chip, which is a terrible name for actually surprisingly good chip, you're getting basically M2 performance on a $650 box. Yeah, I think there's some competition here for Apple. I've seen a number of people say, my favorite laptop is my. Is my MediaTek based Chromebook.

Jason Snell [00:24:26]:
I'm sure Google is well aware of what the advantages are of Chromebooks and Chrome os, but anytime they tinker with it like this, I have that moment of like, I sure hope they know what they're doing. Not because of their track record as much as that history is full of examples where a company has big ambitions and they don't understand the thing that makes their product successful and they mess it up. And I wasn't going to mention like George Lucas, but like I just did. But this idea that sometimes the people who are in charge.

Leo Laporte [00:25:02]:
Are you saying this will be the Jar Jar Binks of Chromebooks?

Jason Snell [00:25:06]:
Well, sometimes, I would argue sometimes the people who made the thing are not necessarily the people who understand it the best and the danger. And I'm not saying this is the case. I've only read a couple of stories about the new Google Book kind of thing, which the name alone makes me worry that it's a little bit of an ego trip. But like, what is great about Chromebooks in some ways is their simplicity, the fact that they fit into a school so easily. And like, they gotta be really careful here because they could make what is a better computer. But if they risk the thing that makes people love Chromebooks, they could put that whole part of the market at risk. So I just, I'm always a little worried when somebody comes in and says, oh, we're doing a whole new thing now. It's like, did they.

Jason Snell [00:25:50]:
Are they taking care not to destroy the other thing?

Leo Laporte [00:25:54]:
Actually the show title. Yeah, the Jar Book.

Jason Snell [00:25:57]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:58]:
Sorry, go ahead.

Christina Warren [00:26:00]:
A lot of kids, like, who grew up on the first, like on, on the second trilogy, they love Jar Jar. Like that's their childhood. Like that's this weird thing. Right? So, so, and I know this because I talk.

Leo Laporte [00:26:12]:
So it works on two levels.

Christina Warren [00:26:13]:
Levels talk about how like their favorite thing, you know, was like their childhood, which to them it's, you know, the films that the trilogy that started in 1999, not 1977. So I agree with you, Jason. Like, I think they need to be careful. At the same time, from what I've read, and I haven't read a lot about this either, they have a lot of succession planning around this. They have a lot of support things in place. I don't doubt that they have. You know, I mean, I know this personally and everybody does. Google has more telemetry data and metrics than probably anybody on the planet about things.

Christina Warren [00:26:46]:
Now that's not to say that you can design that way. It is just to say though that it's not as if they're going into this, I would hope blind about how are people using this, this product. I think the real thing is what the challenge has been with Chromebooks and this is part of the reason I think what the MacBook Neo is such a special device is that a Chromebook is a great device for not just schools, but for businesses too. Like you can actually do a lot with them and you can get them to be much more powerful than you would think. And they can have Windows apps. And it's not just the web browser experience. The problem is when you run into those applications that are not available as a web app or that have not been packaged in a certain way for Chrome os, which is a not insignificant amount of applications, you're stuck. And so the NEO has this advantage in that you can run regular Mac apps, right? They might not run perfectly and they might not be suited for all tasks, but you can run them especially most apps out there are going to run really well.

Christina Warren [00:27:39]:
And you can also run iOS apps which how they run on Mac OS, regardless of how powerful your laptop is, I think kind of depends on the application, but you can do that. And so I think a big part of this is basically saying you can have access to all of the Android ecosystem apps on this device alongside any of the web apps. And if people create more customized things too. And that I think helps them close a gap they've had for a really long time, which was that they had this Linux base, but nobody's building Linux applications. And Google certainly doesn't want to be in the business of trying to distribute Linux binaries. So this is, at the very least, I think this could be some good competition to help hopefully keep Apple's eye on the ball and keeping the NEO and the future neos moving in the direction that they've had it moving. And just since we've seen it in

Leo Laporte [00:28:30]:
March, we're going to take a little break. There's lots more news. In fact, a big, big announcement. But we'll get to that in just a little bit. You're watching MacBreak weekly with Christina Warren of GitHub where she's in developer relations. Andy Inotko and Jason Snell of sixcolors.com. So the other very big announcement this week, Apple has made a deal weirdly with intel to make chips.

Leo Laporte [00:28:55]:
We knew this was a rumor, but, but it's official now.

Jason Snell [00:28:58]:
Wall Street Journal.

Leo Laporte [00:28:59]:
Wall Street Journal said on Friday that a preliminary agreement has been made. So you say that's not official, it's just preliminary.

Jason Snell [00:29:06]:
Yeah. So Mark Gurman at Bloomberg last week said they were talking, right, intel and Samsung were talking with Apple and then the Journal advanced the story this week and said there is a preliminary agreement, which, whatever that means. Does that mean they signed something or does that mean they've agreed that this is the framework but they haven't put it into like there's a lot of semantics there. And Mark Gurman had a really, a very passive aggressive response on Twitter where he basically was like, you read my story. He didn't even mention the Journal. He's like, read my story from last week. But I think it's another one of these cases where Mark Gurman's a little offended that some other news organization advanced the story that he was working on before he could. But so he's like, oh, there's still, it's still in process.

Jason Snell [00:29:46]:
But like I tend to think the Wall Street Journal probably has a good source here, that there is, that there is momentum and that they are, they've basically agreed that this is going to happen. And the idea here, and I don't want to overspin this because people, I've seen some reports that are like, oh, Apple and Intel, what's happening here? This is actually like phase two of Apple's find places to make chips that isn't, that aren't in Taiwan. Phase one was with tsmc, their chip partner and they are working on a chip fab in Phoenix, Arizona with tsmc.

Leo Laporte [00:30:18]:
But those aren't the high end chips.

Jason Snell [00:30:20]:
Well, well, these intel chips are not going to be at the cutting edge.

Leo Laporte [00:30:24]:
They'll be the intel can't.

Jason Snell [00:30:25]:
Intel's cutting edge is not, not TSMC is cutting edge. Intel is behind tsmc. So these are not going to be on the cutting edge, but they will be first off geographically, a different location than Taiwan, second off politically and just keeping your, you know, keeping, keeping your bets spread around an American company and a Different company, Intel. It also means that Apple is giving some money in exchange for products to intel, which builds intel up a little bit as an alternative to tsmc so that Apple isn't completely beholden to TSMC and only tsmc, which they are right now. And so yeah, I mean the question is what are these chips? And I think it does make you wonder. Up till now, Apple strategy about differentiating Apple silicon has been they build a few chips with TSMC and then they bin some of them in order to, you know, some of them that don't qualify for the high end, they, you know, use those as bin chips in a lower end and they make it work. But once you're making chips at someone else's foundry, what are those chips? Right? Like you have to, my understanding is, you know, you can't just like save as to a different foundry. So like I start to wonder if Apple strategy in America making chips is going to be like, like, do they come up with like essentially a second tier set of processor designs that are not for your iPhone Pro, but maybe for your iPhone, not for your iPad pro or maybe even your iPad air, but maybe your base iPad, like maybe for your MacBook Neo, maybe these are the chips that don't have to be on the latest 3 nanometer, then 2 nanometer, then whatever comes under 2 nanometer process from TSMC.

Jason Snell [00:32:10]:
So it'll be interesting to see how that do this because it's a different strategy to have these other foundries if they're, if they're making systems on chips, which it sounds like is kind of the plan, but like it's not. It's to be clear for people who hear intel and have a flashback like this is the foundry part of Intel. This is intel doing the foundry business that they, they lost or they refused to do for a while, where they're going to take Apple's designs and make Apple's chips.

Leo Laporte [00:32:36]:
This does solve really though the problem of Taiwan. Does it?

Jason Snell [00:32:39]:
If they can, it does in the sense that first off intel, you're investing in intel, which means that intel is going to make every, you know, they're going to try to catch up to TSMC eventually. But it also means that if you, if you're making SoCs systems on chips at intel in the United States and something catastrophic happens to TSMC in Taiwan, you can still get SoCs for your products. They might not be as good as the ones from Taiwan, but right now all of them are from Taiwan. So having some of them be made in America has a few Advantages.

Leo Laporte [00:33:16]:
Yeah, but there's no advantage. If you have a laptop that's got everything but the cpu, you're kind of still not shipping.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:23]:
Laptop.

Jason Snell [00:33:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:33:25]:
You know what, there are PCs.

Jason Snell [00:33:25]:
If you've got a second fit laptop, you can get away with it.

Leo Laporte [00:33:28]:
There are PC manufacturers who are shipping computers without RAM saying, you know, get the RAM wherever you can. We can't. So at least you can buy something.

Jason Snell [00:33:37]:
Good. Good news.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:38]:
We've made this laptop 8 ounces lighter.

Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
I don't think Apple's going to do that. So you think the Neo that they could make something like an A18?

Jason Snell [00:33:48]:
Well, I think the question is I my understanding, and I'm not a chip person but my understanding is that you can't save as right. Like if you're going to design for Intel's fab, you can make a variant of a chip you've already designed maybe, but like it's not.

Leo Laporte [00:34:02]:
They don't have that 3 nanometer node.

Jason Snell [00:34:04]:
It's not as easy as all of that. So that's a complicating factor here. But yeah, I think if they're going to be making SOCs in the United States and maybe, I mean they've got the packaging technology there so who knows, maybe they're making some parts and then they're going to package them together with other parts. I don't know what they're going to do here but one option might be to use these to make, make chips that don't need to rely on being the latest and greatest process and that they're a little bit behind. But, but they, you know, because Apple does sell lower end products that back in the day would have been, you know, cheaper intel parts and now what they are is binned TSMC parts or they're from the next step down. They're not an M chip, they're an A chip or whatever. But like they may, so they may tweak their chip strategy in order to take advantage of whatever they're building here. Unless again, unless the work can be put in to say like we're going to make two different kinds of a 20.

Jason Snell [00:35:02]:
One of them at TSMC and one of them at intel. But, but I've heard some people say that that's not as likely as them doing a different design on Intel.

Leo Laporte [00:35:11]:
They opened this morning, intel opened this morning at 132 bucks, big leap forward probably because of this but they've gone back down to 117. So it's been very volatile. It sounds like the market is not convinced that this is going to be anything. Remember this could merely be another sop to the Trump administration because they have 10% of intel. They, you know, know, hey, yeah, we're going to build in America. And that's all apparently the Trump administration cares about is that statement rather than

Christina Warren [00:35:42]:
that's all they want is the statement. Yeah, well, but to Jason's point too, I mean I think, I think that maybe this is why the market is volatile, is that we don't know what types of chips these are going to be. Right. Like if it's, if it's taking existing designs and modifying them onto Intel's node process, which again, I don't know but that does seem unlikely. Or if it's saying, okay, we will use this for specific types of choice chips that we can then put in the many types of components we sell that aren't just the most high end phones and laptops. I don't know if that material matters to Intel's success or not. I think at this point just the fact that anybody is using intel at all is a good thing for Intel.

Leo Laporte [00:36:20]:
Apple really is struggling keeping their Macs on the market now. According to Mac rumors, the 32 gigabyte and 64 gigabyte variants of the Studio are no longer available for purchase. The M3 Ultra with 256 gigs of RAM is off the shelf. So the 512 is long gone. So now you know you're going to have to settle for 64 gigs if you can get it. The M3 Ultra, I'm sorry, 96 is the only variation available in Mac Studio. M3 Mac Studio and M4 Max Mac Studios are now out nine to ten weeks. And I know Apple would love to make these but boy it sounds like they're running out of chips.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:06]:
It's terrible. The thing that kind of breaks my heart is that so they've dropped like the entry level M4 Mac mini off the price list completely. And so which means that like the cheap. It was so lovely to have a $599 dollar, absolutely perfectly useful, performant, broad use sort of machine on the, on the list. And it breaks my heart a little bit that now the cheapest one is now 200 more. I hope, I hope we don't see

Leo Laporte [00:37:35]:
the same blame the AI Bros for this. Right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:37]:
Absolutely.

Christina Warren [00:37:38]:
No, I think, I think we can blame a lot of people for this. Obviously the data center is part of it, but I don't think it's just the AI.

Leo Laporte [00:37:44]:
You bet.

Andy Ihnatko [00:37:45]:
My reflex action is AI Bros. Oh yeah, let's Blame that I don't know what for everything.

Leo Laporte [00:37:51]:
Yeah. I mean there's a shortage all around. Data centers as well.

Christina Warren [00:37:54]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:37:54]:
Yeah. People are buying these Mac Minis. It is a shame because there are people who want to buy a Mac Mini because they want a Mac Mini, not because they want to do local AI.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:05]:
And it's a great price. And that's why I hope that for the MacBook Neo it wouldn't be as bad a hit if they were to drop the 256 gig one and just simply start. Because that. But instead of being a $599 laptop, the cheapest one would be now $699. And that cuts so much slack to all the Windows laptop makers and Google who's now going to be trying to sell these Google books at the end of the year. Because 599 for a device of that quality was absolutely untouchable. Whereas $699, you have enough wiggle room where you can say okay, that's not a dirt cheap machine. That's where we actually are going to give you an aluminum body.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:44]:
That's actually where we can say that hey look, we've like a useful number of ports that will make this a lot more pleasant to use on a day to day basis that $100. But is remember that for all the people who are saying, oh my God, it's great that this thing is so cheap. There are so many people for whom, God, I really only have $500 to spend. That's as high as my budget will go. But you know what, I can stretch it for a little bit to get a MacBook. But that extra hundred dollars says no, there's absolutely no, I cannot afford 699. I could barely afford five and I'm grateful for it, but I cannot afford 699. So that would break my heart if they had to do that.

Christina Warren [00:39:26]:
Well, and I was just going to say to add insult to injury and I don't think they're going to change the price on that. I don't think they can. I think that hurts them. But you know, they changed the way that the U.S. education Store verification happens now.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:38]:
Yes.

Christina Warren [00:39:38]:
And so you have to verify through unidays. Now look, that's fine. That regular. It was a nice loophole and I definitely, I mean I primarily was buying it for other people. But like I'm not going to lie here on this podcast and pretend that I didn't use that for other things before too. I'm a student of life. After all, here's where this concerns me. Here's where this concerns me because I don't care, I can, I can afford it to pay the regular price when they made this change, which a.

Christina Warren [00:40:04]:
I don't like because you have to give your information over to a third party data broker and I, I'm firmly of the opinion, I don't care how many companies do this, that if you want to collect that data that the company should do it themselves. But the real problem is, is that now they, what they've done is that you can only get the student discount if you are about to enter college or if you are a, you can be a teacher of any type including a homeschool teacher. So if you have a homeschool kid and you're, you know, have a letter of intent, you can get the student pricing. But if you have a kid in K to 12 and you're not a teacher, you can't get the education pricing anymore. And that I think is actually really bad and I'm really upset by that. I think there would have been a better way to do a verification scheme that would have been able to include K through 12. But to your point, Andy, I think that if you, when you combine those two factors, right, where there are people who were looking at like oh, I could get this for $500 now that option is not there unless you're a college student who are not the people who should be getting a MacBook Neo. Anyway, I don't think a MacBook Neo is enough for college.

Christina Warren [00:41:04]:
So you know, I would be shocked if they did anything about the Neo pricing. I think they're just going to take the hit on it as long as they need to for this generation. But my real fear is that because of all the external market conditions, this gives Apple cover to raise the price on the subsequent releases of the Neo and the Mini. And that I think would be a real shame.

Leo Laporte [00:41:27]:
So apparently according to Scuderx in our cloud club, Apple has been using Unidays in other countries.

Christina Warren [00:41:33]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:41:34]:
And then YZF donor says Unidays didn't ask for any of my email except my school email address. Then it handed me off to my school's SSO and then returned me. So I guess the school does the verification.

Christina Warren [00:41:49]:
I think it varies from, from depending on how you're doing it because in some cases, like if you're, if you're not in their system then you have to give them some documentation. From what I understand the process isn't that bad, but again it does not work for people who are K to 12. Unless your kid is homeschooled and then the parent can apply as the homeschool thing. And that I think is a much bigger deal. Right? College students, fine, you can do that. And it's not that big of a deal. But you're cutting off the people who really. I think the Neo especially, this was like a really great thing for families, frankly.

Leo Laporte [00:42:21]:
And they are going to accommodate homeschool students as well?

Christina Warren [00:42:24]:
Well, well, no, but they're the only ones who are accommodated. That's my point, Leo. If you are K through 12, you do not get this discount. Do not get it unless you are a teacher, period. End of story.

Leo Laporte [00:42:34]:
Educators in the U.S. canada and Chile can use the app or website to verify their academic standards. I'm reading this from Mac Rumors.

Christina Warren [00:42:42]:
Yes. And if you go to the Apple

Leo Laporte [00:42:43]:
actual email address from an educational institution, a student OR staff photo ID or another valid education document, but not K12, not K12.

Christina Warren [00:42:53]:
When you go through Apple's actual process, it says that it is qualified students who have been accepted to college are K through 12 teachers or are homeschool teachers. So if you attend college or have been accepted to college, so if you are graduating next year and you've already been accepted or I guess if you're one of the kids who's in an early college program, then you qualify. Now Apple could make changes to this, but Unidate does not verify because they can't people under 16. So this is, you know, cut out anybody who's just wanting to be able to get a MacBook Neo or an iPad or anything else for their kids.

Leo Laporte [00:43:33]:
Completely appropriate person.

Christina Warren [00:43:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:35]:
For this I would say. Apparently Mac Rumor said Apple used Unidays back in 2022 briefly, but for like two days complaints about it caused them to drop it. So maybe this is just another, this will be another abortive attempt. That would be. So it's. It is. Apple Watch is now also included, which is nice, I guess. So this is really just kind of a spiff for college kids is really what it is.

Leo Laporte [00:44:02]:
And, and teachers, which is good. Which is good.

Jason Snell [00:44:04]:
Yeah. But I do think to. To talk about the, the Neo pricing just quickly. I know there's a lot of talk about, well, is Apple going to really eat margins? Apple loves margins. And I just a realization I had is on a $599 product, you know, if you lose some margin, like in the grand scheme of things, this is not driving enormous amounts of Mac revenue anyway and you've got a product that's a hit. So I have a hard time imagining that they will do anything to slow the momentum of a brand new hit product that is putting the hurt on their competitors even if they lose some margin short term. Because is the MacBook Neo really a margin play anyway? It's like a market share share play and I know that's different for them but like a 599 computer is not going to throw off huge profits anyway regardless. Right.

Jason Snell [00:44:51]:
So they'll give back a little bit more. But as long as they're making money on the Neo and they're hurting their competitors by selling with every Neo they sell, I think that they should, they should be happy to just keep it at the existing prices. With the only caveat there being I'm sure they're looking at the next generation of the Neo and say how do we get our margins back up?

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:12]:
Also, also, it's a very, it's a very. The finances on the Neo are, are, can be subtle. 5. When, when Apple sells someone a $599, a new user, an Apple, a Mac MacBook Neo, that basically brings somebody into the tent where they're going to stay for three or four or five years and then maybe the next phone is going to be an iPhone and then they'll pick up an Apple Watch and then the next time when they need to replace the, the new or hand it down to one of their kids, now they're buying a MacBook Pro. The same thing doesn't happen when Someone buys a $699 Acer laptop for the first time. It's just a laptop. They could go anywhere else. But once it's been proven, proven, proven by so many analysts that once you get someone inside that tent for the first time, Apple makes them very, very happy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:58]:
They love the way that things work together. There's a certain prestige to the logo as well as fit and function that they don't see out at the, on the other machines at Best Buy or Costco. And yeah, I agree with you Jason, like I do. I don't think they, I don't think they want to lose any money on any one of these. But if they. Somewhere, somewhere there is a line on a graph in Cupertino that says so long as it doesn't go below this line. And we still got a lot of air over this line. It is worthwhile holding the line at $599.

Jason Snell [00:46:28]:
And how much can they give away in margin, you might ask? Because what they're going to have to do is they're going to have to crank that a 18 Pro production line back into operation and make more. And they're going to be more expensive because first off they were using just the bin chips which have a lower price. But these are going to, if you do a new run, it's going to include fully functional chips that, that the GPUs work on. And then they're going to have to disable them in software and all that. So it's going to cost a lot. But just look at the education price. Apple is comfortable selling this thing for $100 less to a certain market. And I assure you they're still making a profit at 499.

Jason Snell [00:47:04]:
So they have room. They have room. They have to, you know, they won't make as much profit per unit. But again, it's a cheap enough system that the number almost doesn't matter. It matters in aggregate. If they sell 10 million of these, they're still going to affect their profits. But like, like the price is the point. 599 is the point of the product really.

Jason Snell [00:47:26]:
So you can't, you can't run away from it. And you, you know, if you lose a little margin in the short term, they don't want to do it in the long term, but they can afford, if the education price is $100 less, like there's a lot of room in there for them to eat some margin. And again, I'll also say they're selling those at the expense of competitors in the market. And that is a thing you want to keep doing.

Christina Warren [00:47:47]:
And the big deal is.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:49]:
And they. I'm sorry, I just wanted to quickly say that. And Apple doesn't. I think, I think we might be saying contrary things, but a compliment, complementary things that. Contrary things. But Apple doesn't care if it doesn't care if the school system buys 200 of these and they're running Google Classroom on it. They don't care if A company buys 100 of these and they're using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 on it, so long as they sell the machine itself. People are going to want to use this lovely device as opposed to this thing where they're aware of when they.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:18]:
I have a friend who uses these things and they love their Windows laptops, but there is a stacking order in their backpack of I cannot have this laptop, this Acer laptop, at the last thing on my back because it's going to flex with all the other stuff I've got in this backpack. I need to put something else behind it just to make sure it doesn't flex so much that it doesn't destroy the screen. That's not something you have with any Mac, even the cheapest one.

Leo Laporte [00:48:43]:
Let's take a break. When we come back, more MacBreak Weekly with Andy, Christina and Jason. Mr. Cook is probably right about now getting on an airplane. President Trump is flying to China and he's bringing 16 CEOs with him. Would have been 17, but the CEO of Cisco said he had to wash his hair this week. Larry Fink of BlackRock is going. Blackstone, Boeing, Cargill City, Coherent, GE, Arrow Space, Goldman Sachs, Aluminum, MasterCard, Meta, not Zuck.

Leo Laporte [00:49:14]:
He's. He also has to wash his hair. But Dina Powell McCormick, who's there? Government liaison Micron Qualcomm. Interesting. Qualcomm's going. Tesla, Elon Musk will be going and Visa. Not going, not invited. Jensen Huang of Nvidia, he's in the doghouse, I guess.

Leo Laporte [00:49:35]:
But Tim and Elon, I wonder if they're on the same plane. No. Each of them has their own corporate jet, right?

Jason Snell [00:49:40]:
Yeah, probably.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:41]:
I kind of, you know, I really wish Tim writes his memoir because I want to know what, what, what transition in life do you go through that says that, you know what, I'm willing to give up all of the super, super fun things about being Apple CEO, but I'll still be the person who has to spend 16 hours on a plane to go to China and then hang out with Elon Musk Musk in a ballroom for a couple of days. That's not what you were hoping for at age 65.

Leo Laporte [00:50:06]:
Oh, no kidding. There's a very funny website which is predicting the apocalypse now based on private jets and how they're flying. So it's called the Apocalypse Early Warning System. I imagine it's going to be going off big time on today as all those 16 executives fly to China. Currently, our emergency level is only one out of five. This is Kyle McDonald built this. He said in the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks that in real time.

Leo Laporte [00:50:49]:
I guess you're flying to Beijing. That doesn't really qualify as escaping a city center. Wow. So anyway, if you want to keep an eye on this, this is very useful. You can also track military jets if you want to include that and see all the activity that's going on. This is what AI has wrought, right? This kind of website. So Mr. Cook will be going.

Leo Laporte [00:51:13]:
That's probably good for Apple right now.

Jason Snell [00:51:19]:
I think it's maybe good for everybody because he's got so many great connections in China.

Leo Laporte [00:51:24]:
That's the guy they should be.

Jason Snell [00:51:26]:
He's. He actually, I mean, there was that piece during the first Trump administration in the New York Times about how a lot of people felt like Tim Cook was basically an ambassador to China, not for the United States, but for Apple. But still that, like it was a connection that he had made and that they had been working on for a very long time. So it's probably in the United States's best interest to have Tim Cook kicking around. And I wonder, I mean, I don't, I don't know if we, maybe we should do a vibe check here. I kind of feel like now that we know that Tim is going to, to be executive chairman and that this is the kind of stuff he's going to have to keep doing is his job. I wonder if, I wonder if like I shrugged when I saw this because instead of it being like, Tim, oh no, you got called to the White House again. Instead, my reaction is kind of like, well, this is your job now.

Jason Snell [00:52:14]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
I wonder if Tim will bring up the tariff situation with the President. The President's response to the Supreme Court overturning his initial tariffs and ordering refunds, incidentally, was to announce another 10% global tariff under a different emergency. And apparently the, those are also illegal according to a judge. So maybe more refunds, I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:52:40]:
But Tim has already played his hand there, right? Because on the, on the, on the earnings call he said, oh, any money we get back, we'll invest in US manufacturing. So he.

Leo Laporte [00:52:50]:
Don't worry, Mr. President, President, we're behind you.

Jason Snell [00:52:52]:
It's all we got. A tube that just takes the money, it comes in and it goes right back out again to the US

Leo Laporte [00:53:00]:
that is politic. He is good at this, isn't he?

Jason Snell [00:53:03]:
Yeah, he is. For a guy that when you look at him you'd say he just seems like a gray man in a gray suit doing a gray job. But actually sometimes I think that's what you want. I think he's.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:21]:
We didn't talk about this a couple weeks ago. I just want to mention that, like it's amazing that he is such a public facing figure, not just as a CEO, not just as person of Apple, but basically someone whom, like there's an SNL cast member that has to be designated as if we ever do a Tim Cook sketch. You're going to be playing Tim Cook where people know what that name is, they know what he looks like. But he's still. After 14, 15 years, he's still very, very mellow. He didn't go Hollywood at all. He didn't become a star. Like which happens to so many like tech CEOs when they become go from vice president who just does their job to oh no, I'm the superstar.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:58]:
I'm the head of the. I'm the face of the company. I represent all that's good and great about. About technology and. And the economy. He's still high. This is still. This is Tim.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:07]:
We've had the greatest quarter ever and we think we're going to love the new iPhones.

Leo Laporte [00:54:12]:
He's very zen. I wonder what his very mellow. We know we don't know a whole lot about him, his, you know, worldview and philosophy and so forth, but he seems.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:21]:
Yeah, he seems like Norway entitled to. But he's got that southern.

Leo Laporte [00:54:24]:
But he might meditate every day or something. He must be doing something. Maybe he just smokes a lot of weed. I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:32]:
Maybe like, maybe before, like they cleaned out like Steve's drawers in the office.

Leo Laporte [00:54:36]:
They basically.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:37]:
Because, you know, sometimes, like sometimes things like get behind the drawer because the drawer is too full.

Leo Laporte [00:54:42]:
Sure. The seeds and stems, they always fall in there. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:44]:
What are these? Postage stamps. Oh, I should look them.

Leo Laporte [00:54:50]:
I was surprised in Hawaii to see that 26. 5 came out. In fact, I'm gonna have to go because I wasn't home. So I'm gonna go all around the house and update my Apple TVs.

Jason Snell [00:55:00]:
Update your things.

Leo Laporte [00:55:01]:
My Vision Pros, all 12 of them. I'm gonna have to classic. All of that stuff is gonna be updated. What do we get with 26.5? This is the last. Last.

Jason Snell [00:55:10]:
Yeah, this is the sweeping the last sawdust into the bin kind of release the biggest. I think the biggest thing in 26. Five is support for encrypted RCS messages. Yep. So which requires. There's a lot of asterisks there about what carriers and what phones are talking to what other phones. But it does mean that if you're having an RCS conversation. So iPhone to Android you.

Jason Snell [00:55:35]:
If it's. It's the right carrier in the right circumstance and all of that, it will be end to end encrypted, which is good.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:42]:
But they do have a support document that says basically for actually for carrier. For carrier. For carrier. Not just for RCS and encryption. But here are all the features that are going to be enabled on each of these carriers for the United States and Canada. And like I so long as you're not getting your phone service through a card you bought at a truck stop. I recognized like all of the different carriers that at least offer rcs. But you're right, you don't know you're getting end to end encryption until you see the icons like in the traffic.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:12]:
But it's still in beta technically. So whereas in previous releases it was in beta for the purpose of carriers testing this and Apple testing this, now it's basically it's in the hand of the hands of the users and Apple is figuring that okay, we're all beta testing end to end encryption on this, but I don't know what a fail looks like. You get a knock on your door because you said something you thought was private. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:56:34]:
Apple does have a page thanks to Byte for Byte in our discord our club member a wireless carrier support and features for iPhone in the United States and Canada. So you can actually go to this page, look at your carrier and see whether RCS is supported along with a bunch of other features.

Christina Warren [00:56:53]:
Yeah, yeah this is actually you can see like what type of if they get like voiceover, LTE or visual voicemail or whatever the case may be and in the United States anyway and I know it's different like region to region. It looks like like Andy said, even some of the the gas station services have the end to end encrypted. It looks like Simple Mobile who I don't know who they're a reseller for is is the only one that I see on this list and a of lot Alaska, Alaska, GCI and Appalachian Alaska and Appalachian Wireless. So maybe some of the really really

Leo Laporte [00:57:26]:
small but AT and T really small

Christina Warren [00:57:28]:
ones but your Boost Mobile, your mint Wireless, Verizon, AT&T T Mobile, Xfinity Avada

Leo Laporte [00:57:35]:
Wireless is not getting it but C Spire is Carolina West Wireless is not getting it, but cellcom Wisconsin is. So it really is a bicarrier thing. I suspect that the MVNOs mostly will get it right because they're just reselling

Christina Warren [00:57:52]:
well no, that's what it's looking like at least on this look it looks because most of those regional things are probably MVNOs in some capacity too but it looks like like Mint Mobile and Metro by T Mobile Cricket Total Wireless, all of these are included Optimum Pure Talk, Red Pocket.

Leo Laporte [00:58:13]:
I'm sorry if you subscribe to Panhandle Wireless that is not RCS enabled there but you do get Volte so that's you know, there's something pure talk is getting.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:24]:
If it's if, if, if there's a

Leo Laporte [00:58:25]:
pocket's getting it, if there's a carrier

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:26]:
that's just for like the Texas Panhandle, you probably already know the people.

Leo Laporte [00:58:31]:
You don't really need encryption so much.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:33]:
What I thought was really funny. So both Apple and Google like basically put press like announcements on their own respective sites, on Apple's newsroom and on the official Apple Google blog. And they both use the exact same phrase. Google and Apple have led a cross industry effort to bring end to end encryption to rich communication services. And the rest of the sentence is different from Google or Apple. But that was one of those sentences that was argued that was agreed upon word for word for word. And I remember over the past like five or six years the theme of Google I o keynotes for Sundar Pichai have been brow beating Apple into like supporting RCS and hold campaigns with animated versions of the Pixel phone and an iPhone about how iPhone is not being open enough to talk privately with a cartoon Pixel phone. So I'm glad that they finally, when they found themselves in the same foxhole, they decided to become friends.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:27]:
But yeah, there was some animosity there for four or five years.

Leo Laporte [00:59:31]:
Sunday Mark Gurman, Power on newsletter While he wasn't. I don't want to call him babyish. Let's not. I will stop right there. While he wasn't talking about the Wall Street Journal or not talking about the Wall Street Journal, talked about Mac OS 26 and the next version of Mac OS, which will have a slight change to Liquid Glass. He says, yeah, yeah.

Jason Snell [00:59:59]:
I mean, again, Mark Gurman's got the best sources in the business and he does some really good reporting this article. Like, okay, there's a lot in here. I mean, first off, it's very clear that one of Mark Gurman's best sources is designers at Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:00:18]:
Right.

Jason Snell [01:00:18]:
And that's been the case for a while. I think it's why he had a lot of really sympathetic stories about Alan Dye leaving. I think he hears a lot from designers. It's hard not to read that into this where it's like, first off, he reports that it's not the designer's fault. Liquid Glass isn't really the designer's fault. It's the software people. They didn't do it. Right.

Jason Snell [01:00:37]:
That's literally a thing that's in there which is wild. And then the other thing he tries to sell us is the idea that the problem with Liquid Glass on the Mac is That it was really more designed for OLED displays and there aren't any OLED displays on the Mac right now. And so it doesn't look as good. Which if is nonsense. And that's not a word I used when I read that story. I shouted a different word out loud that I will not repeat here, but it's nonsense. So there was a lot. Look, again, I like Mark Gurman as a reporter, but he's.

Jason Snell [01:01:08]:
He's carrying a lot of water for Apple designers who want to run away from all the liquid glass backlash and say it's not their fault and that they were trying to have a higher vision for something that has not. They literally blame the hardware and the software for the failure of their design and it's just complete nonsense, he says.

Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
A quote, slight Redesign for Mac OS 27. With the next update, Apple aims to address the shadows and transparency quirks. This is the quote. Last year's operating systems didn't necessarily suffer from design problems, I'm told, but rather a not completely baked implementation from Apple's software engineering team.

Jason Snell [01:01:46]:
Yeah, it's not our fault.

Leo Laporte [01:01:48]:
Not our fault. We didn't. So a little cleanup. I think everybody likes the idea of a little cleanup.

Jason Snell [01:01:53]:
Well, I mean it needs.

Christina Warren [01:01:54]:
Yeah, it needs a lot of cleanup.

Jason Snell [01:01:56]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:57]:
Of course corrections, like the mid course corrections, this was going to be a journey of 235,000 miles and that they're just going to keep doing little adjustments until they get it just right. I just don't think anybody expected the first version of it to be quite so harsh.

Leo Laporte [01:02:14]:
He confirms rumors we've seen in other places of automatic grouping of tabs in iOS27, iPadOS27 and Mac OS27's Safari. Automatic tab grouping, I presume, with AI. Right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:30]:
Can I say, as a sidebar, Safari needs a whole lot of love. I cannot believe it's looking more and more frumpy with each year as Chrome and Firefox and Arc and other browsers continue to bring new ideas that make this into a wonderful platform for running web apps and getting things done and basically exploring the web the way that you do it. 2026, not the way we used to do it in 2015. Safari is just not an app that I use at all because it works fine. But browsers have moved forward so far. I've got the Show Doc in Google Docs right now, and I'm taking advantage of the fact that they've got vertically stacked tabs and mini icons. So now the tabs are no longer taking up the Whole top of the window, I've got split views so that I can have like one document in one side of the window, not two separate windows, but basically a full screen app in which things are very, very well organized. There are so many complaints you should have about Chrome about its assault on individual privacy, but man, is it a handy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:42]:
It's a very, very good place to spend the afternoon when you're trying to get stuff done.

Leo Laporte [01:03:46]:
Did you let chrome download that 4 gigabyte local AI model?

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:50]:
No. You didn't let it do it? It was something that.

Leo Laporte [01:03:53]:
It's weird, but

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:56]:
isn't that weird? Because so Google had to basically explain like what was going on because there was like a security research. Oh, did you know that stuff downloading secretly this 4 gigabyte AI model. And Google had to say, well yeah, because that's actually a privacy thing. We've been doing that like since 2024. But we have a local model so that we don't have to send your information up into the cloud. So a it's faster, more responsive and also more private. Also it's a smart download so that if we ever sense that, oh, this device is running low on storage, we delete that model and then if there's another opportunity later on, we will redownload it. So yeah, maybe they should have sent beforehand and not let it be a surprise.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:32]:
But I see that as more of a faux pas than a scandal. Although people can disagree with me on that.

Leo Laporte [01:04:40]:
Yeah, you can't just delete the 4 gigabyte file. You actually have to turn it on. Look for a setting in your system settings for on device AI and toggle it off. If you don't have that toggle, and some people apparently don't, you can go to Chrome Flags and delete a very obscure command. There are articles about doing that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:08]:
Sidebar. This is exactly why you make sure you turn on if you use your phone as a hotspot, you turn on that feature that says please use this for low data because I'm very, very smart in not like streaming videos when I'm streaming for my phone phone. But I might not know that. Oh, I did not know that of my 40 gigabytes of unlimited of high speed data, I've just choked 10% of it on an AI package that I did not ask for and was not aware of. Yeah, hopefully it respects that. I don't know if that. It does.

Leo Laporte [01:05:39]:
Let's see. According to the register, Mac OS 27 threatens to bury Time capsule. They they.

Jason Snell [01:05:49]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:05:50]:
Tell me about this they want to remove the Apple filing protocol. AFP support.

Jason Snell [01:05:55]:
AFP is going away in 27 and that means that old. We talked about this. The old time capsules and stuff won't be supported.

Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
The old ones.

Jason Snell [01:06:02]:
Okay, well there's no new Time Capsules, it's discontinued. So there are a lot of people out there who are going to look for new backup solutions now because they're using that for the Time Machine backup.

Leo Laporte [01:06:09]:
Sorry, I'm thinking Time Machine.

Christina Warren [01:06:10]:
Time Machine.

Leo Laporte [01:06:11]:
This is the hardware where WI FI router plus hard drive time.

Jason Snell [01:06:17]:
Exactly. The old Apple filing protocol. So it's just not going to work anymore.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:24]:
Like 14 years ago Apple basically replaced it with SMB and they've kept it around for compatibility. But this is the year they say, okay look, we're not continuing this anymore after this.

Leo Laporte [01:06:35]:
This is not Time Machine. That's continuing. This is.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:37]:
So if you do have a Time Machine capsule in your closet, that might be a good excuse to take it out and make sure that you've already, hopefully within the last 10 years you already exfiltrated all the data out of it. But you never know, maybe like you exfiltrated it at the time onto DVDs that you then lost or then have now rotted away. So it might be a good idea to take it out of the closet, fire it up and just put it onto icloud or put it onto something so that you know that this stuff from 14 years ago is still good.

Leo Laporte [01:07:04]:
Did we talk about Tim Kolpin's piece that Apple is is about to step up, ramp up production of the 18A 18 again for the neo tangentially when

Jason Snell [01:07:15]:
we were talking about intel chips. But he is the former Bloomberg reporter who has his own newsletter now and he wrote the speculative piece about what was Apple going to do and then this time he said they are officially going back to TSMC to do a hot lot of a 18 pros. Which is why when we were talking about about NIO pricing, that's one of the reasons you've got to wonder about the NIO pricing is that they're going to make 10 million NEOs instead of whatever 5 to 7.

Leo Laporte [01:07:44]:
Yeah, they're doubling it. So I guess.

Jason Snell [01:07:46]:
Yeah, so they were originally original run was 5. They're going to make 10 million now and that means they have to go back to TSMC and order some more chips of the A18 Pro. And how will that affect the price? I think we made, we all kind of made the case for having it not affect the price and Apple Just eating some of the margin. In the meantime, it will be on much more expensive part than the ones that they were taken out of the bin from last year's iPhones. But, you know, they've decided they're not going to slow the. The momentum of that product. So that's what Tim Collins reports.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:14]:
To say nothing of the fact they might have to pay TSMC extra to get to skip to the head of the line. Yeah. What, what Tim was. Tim was saying that. No, we're not. When, when there are, when there are machines that are out of stock and are out of stock for the next couple of months, we're not, we're not dry for, for. For Dr. We don't have many access to manufacturing lines for SOCs.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:35]:
That's where our choke point is. So that's going to be another expense.

Leo Laporte [01:08:40]:
Well, we'll see what happens. Let's see what else, I guess since Mark now goes on to talk about changes to the Vision Pro, we might want to, after a little pause, begin our Vision Pro segment. You're watching MacBreak weekly, the nation's premiere Vision Pro podcast with Jason Snell of Sixcolors.com who actually owns a Vision Pro and he's pretending he's wearing it.

Jason Snell [01:09:06]:
Right. I do. I do buy one.

Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
Sorry, you don't.

Jason Snell [01:09:09]:
For my work.

Leo Laporte [01:09:10]:
Yeah, yeah, right. I had to buy one. Is the new excuse. Andy Inaka, who does not have a Vision Pro. And I can't remember. Christina, did you buy a Vision Pro?

Christina Warren [01:09:18]:
No, no, no. I, I think that I was like, made the very good choice for once in my life where I was like, this is going to sit on a shot shelf. Don't buy this. And that's what it would have done.

Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
Yeah. Nor did I. Nor did I. Although we don't really know what the future holds for the Vision Pro, do we? Well, let's, let's, let's line up.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:41]:
Let's wait till we open the. Open the.

Jason Snell [01:09:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:09:44]:
Let's begin. Oh, the Vision Pro segment.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:50]:
It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
This might be a good time to buy a Vision Pro. Buy a used Vision Pro, sure. Right. Prices are plummeting.

Jason Snell [01:09:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. So this, I feel like, Leo, we were ahead of this last week on our foremost Vision Pro podcast because there was that story, that weird 9 to 5 max story that had a headline that said Vision Pro is dead. And then the story didn't really back it up and was reporting stuff in Markers had reported the previous year. So it was like, why is this even a story? And Gurman kind of went off on it this week saying a lot of the stuff that we said, which is he already, you know, what they, what they weren't doing is killing the group. They were moving the OS people into the OS group. They were moving the hardware people to the hardware group. They are primarily focused on, on maintaining Vision OS and adding some features in 27 for Vision OS.

Jason Snell [01:10:43]:
And then the hardware people are focused on these glasses products that are coming, coming. And the one bit of information that Gurman had that I thought was really good this week was he said, on the other hand, please do not listen to people who point at Apple's job postings for Vision Pro and Vision OS and say, see, they are actively hiring Vision Pro hardware engineers. That is proof that they're still working on Vision Pro hardware for the near term. Because what he said is, no, they're using those job postings to get engineers who they're going to put on the unannounced glasses product.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:16]:
Product.

Jason Snell [01:11:16]:
Right. But they're not going to say we're hiring people for a completely unannounced Apple related glasses related hardware project that hasn't been announced. And nobody say anything. Instead it just says Vision Pro on it. So he said, don't get carried away with that as proof that they're actively working on the Vision Pro successor. That's not what they're doing right now because they've mobilized all of those sort of Vision OS and Vision hardware related people people to get the, you know, their answer to the meta Ray Bans going instead. So it's what we said last week. And then he had even more detail above that.

Jason Snell [01:11:52]:
And then, and then Vision OS 27, you know, they're going to keep it rolling and they're going to have it sync up with what's in the other 27s. And you know, that's, that's where it is. Actually, I would say Vision Pro is where it deserves to be right now, which is a product that floats out there that is interesting but not really a product anybody should buy. And, and that is meaningful mostly in what it might mean for the future someday.

Leo Laporte [01:12:17]:
He says a couple of important data points. He says Apple continues to advertise positions related to Vision OS on the job site. And of course, if Apple does AR glasses, that would still be Vision os, I think.

Jason Snell [01:12:31]:
So they said it would be based on some of the same technology.

Leo Laporte [01:12:33]:
Yeah, yeah. He says though, that while there are Vision Pro hardware ads, the majority of those are actually for the glasses.

Jason Snell [01:12:42]:
Yes, right. And they can't Say so.

Leo Laporte [01:12:44]:
So they say to that end, Apple has deprioritized work on any major new enclosed headsets. And then he italicizes this for the time being, right? So the focus is on glasses. But it doesn't mean they've killed the nerd helmet.

Jason Snell [01:12:59]:
I think it's one of the things that we've been saying, it's been a recurring theme of this segment here on the world's most advanced and important Vision Pro podcast, which is, is what would they do? Like what would that hardware be that they would be working on now? And I think that they've all come to the conclusion that right now if they were to work on a new Vision Pro or Vision Air or whatever, they couldn't get the price down to an acceptable price. The feature with the features that they want because this is, the hardware is so aggressive that like it's just not ready for hitting that price point. And so I think John Ternus, the reports go, looked at their Vision Air idea that they were trying to do, which is a light, a lighter weight, lighter priced version and he killed it. And my guess is he killed it because it wasn't good enough and it was still too expensive. And I think that's really where this hardware is right now is until they can make it for an accessible amount of money, why would you even try? I mean, and it's so overpowered, it's got an M5 in it, that that screen is still state of the art. Like the hardware that they've got will serve as the tinkering place for immersive video and for Vision OS and for apps and whatever. They don't need something fresher and anything that they would make would not be successful in the market because it would still be overpriced and probably too heavy.

Leo Laporte [01:14:23]:
They have a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, because if they aren't behind it, developers aren't going to develop for it. And if developers don't develop for it for it, then you really don't have a platform.

Jason Snell [01:14:32]:
But until it's a, until it's going to ship at volume, developers aren't going to develop for it. And I think that that's what everybody understands now is that until you can get it down a lot from 30 $500, nobody's going to buy it other than like any, I know, like surgeons and stuff. I know, I know there will be those industrial uses for it, but as a mainstream kind of like consumer product, if there is a place for, for, for VR headset and I Think there probably is. Right. I think that there are certain applications that could be really cool. Yeah. But until it's $900 or $1200 or something like that, like don't even bother. And I think that's where they are is.

Jason Snell [01:15:12]:
I think Ternus looked at it and said I don't see what this gets us. And by the way, we're now behind Meta on exploring this from the other direction. So why don't we, why don't we step two on that for now.

Leo Laporte [01:15:23]:
So here's a guy selling a brand new unopened vision Pro for $10,000. I don't think that that's a market price. I am seeing some pre owned ones for.

Jason Snell [01:15:32]:
Is there cocaine in it?

Christina Warren [01:15:34]:
Right. Speculation like what kind of money laundering is this?

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:38]:
Right, yeah, cocaine in there. But there is some dram in there.

Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
I'm seeing that. It seems like for a used Vision Pro, the kind of going price is around $2,000, which is. That's a lot less.

Jason Snell [01:15:49]:
It's still a lot of money though, right? Still a lot, a lot of money.

Christina Warren [01:15:51]:
Yeah, still a lot of money. And it's a lot of money. I don't know. This would be the interesting thing to see if with the new, you know, Apple Care subscription thing, if you could add a Vision Pro into your existing subscription plan. Right? Because I don't know because I always would freak out about this. Be like buying one that's, you know, $2,500. I'm like, okay, but if this breaks, it's going to cost me more than that to fix it. So.

Leo Laporte [01:16:17]:
So Gurman does say that if there is a new Vision Pro, it's gonna be two more years at least given the focus Apple has on the glasses. He says to be clear, the end result is certainly on the table and it wouldn't surprise me. I even hope it happens. Well, okay, so I mean it's not a priority product for Apple at this point.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:44]:
He did have something that was kind of. I think we can put this in the Vision Pro segment. One of his scoops this week that was super interesting was he saying that those AirPods that have integrated cameras are now at the next level of production, meaning that they have working test units that people inside Apple are able to wear to test the engineering. The next step after that being a sample that tests the production, tests the manufacturing. But basically there are working versions of this, which means that it's. And he's saying that yeah, if they were intending to ship it later this year, then yes, that would be on track for doing that. I mean, I'm still. I want this to exist only to find out exactly where the cameras are, how they work.

Leo Laporte [01:17:29]:
Cameras seems to be the wrong way to describe it because that implies it's going to have a take.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:34]:
No, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:17:35]:
But it's not.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:36]:
He did exactly. He did have the detail that it's basically cameras to basically add a stream of data to Siri. Not for taking specifically, not for taking pictures, not for taking videos. But even so, I mean, when I'm taking my walk and I meet a friend in the street, I really do have to, like, take my earbuds out because with my sideburns, they are not going to be able to see that I'm actually wearing one of these things. It's basically serious. Like, okay, you seem to be stuck in tall, tall, dry grasses and weeds. Let me. Do you want.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:06]:
Do you need a helicopter to extract you from this meadow? Like. No,

Leo Laporte [01:18:13]:
actually, this is a problem. They are so good at sealing out background noise that really, when you've got them on Pete, you can't hear people talking to you. And it is a social. I think it's kind of a social problem.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:25]:
Well, I mean, but that's.

Leo Laporte [01:18:25]:
I don't leave it in transparency mode.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:28]:
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:18:29]:
Just.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:29]:
Just quickly. But what I was getting at is that, like, people who have facial problems, hair, like beards and stuff like that, how are they positioning the camera so that a. You don't look like a dang fool with this hovering, like, little dealy bobber thing sticking to the sides of your. Of your ears? Or do you simply say that? Okay, you know what, if you got a beard? This is not the product for you. I'm sorry. Well, at some point, maybe you'll decide that the functionality of Siri with cameras is worth shaving, but we can't help you.

Leo Laporte [01:18:57]:
Well, isn't that the case that you. The Apple Watch doesn't work that well if you're sleeved. If you have tattoos, wear this for some people. That's true. Yeah. You can't make it for everybody.

Christina Warren [01:19:06]:
And. And I think it'll depend on the implementation because beards are one thing, but, I mean, long hair is another. Right. Because I'm wearing AirPods right now.

Leo Laporte [01:19:13]:
Oh, yeah.

Christina Warren [01:19:15]:
Far more people are gonna, you know, be impacted that.

Leo Laporte [01:19:17]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:19:18]:
So I. I don't know how they'll have the sensors working. It is interesting, though.

Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
I'm assuming as popular as long hair. I think you're right. I think that's a good point. I didn't yeah.

Christina Warren [01:19:27]:
So it'll be interesting to see what, what the, what the. I guess value add is for having that data. Right. If it's going to be something that would help you with your mapping or if it's something that, you know, Siri could tell you, you know, what's in front of you or whatever. I, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:19:41]:
I hope they're testing it with people with long hair. That's all I do too. And mutton chops.

Jason Snell [01:19:47]:
I'm. I'm really skeptical. I will say, though, about the transparency thing. The smart transparency model is great.

Christina Warren [01:19:52]:
It's fantastic.

Jason Snell [01:19:54]:
It is filtering out the broadband hum noises that you don't want to hear while letting, like I do that. I use, I do not use noise canceling, but I do use the transparency mode, the smart transparency mode when I'm walking my dog. And what it means is I can't hear the freeway, but I can hear a car coming around the corner. And that's what I want is I want it to be a little quieter, but I want to hear anything that's important and like, I can hear people talking to me, me just fine in that mode, but I'm not hearing the annoying kind of background noises. It's pretty great. So Apple has done a good job there. But as for AirPods with cameras, I mean, come on. I just, I would love to be impressed by what they will do for me.

Jason Snell [01:20:35]:
And I, I just like, there are so many issues. The hair issue, the fact that it's looking, even if it's got like a really broad view, which would be degraded because they would be like. It would be like fisheye and they would be lower resolution every, everywhere, like, they're looking out this way. They're not looking forward. What are they seeing? What value do I have there? I just, I know that there are lots of arguments about, like, oh, we'll use AI to. It'll understand where you are and stuff. But I'm like, but what is my benefit from having, you know, things that are going to hurt the battery life and increase the weight and maybe look weird and like, why? Why? I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:09]:
I keep, I keep coming back to give me, give me like a magnetic pin or something that's just a simply simple thing that just simply has a lens and a camera on it and let my, my smart assistant, whether it's Siri, whether it's Claude, whether it's. Whether it's Gemini, access to that camera. And I can, whenever, when I'm in a position where I don't want that kind of help or it'd be rude to have a camera on my, on my person. I simply take it off and now I don't no longer have a camera. I don't.

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

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:34]:
Like I said, I'm not saying that's a stupid idea. I'm saying that I can, I cannot imagine how this could be designed in such a way that, that you don't look like you're like Grogu cosplaying or the cameras actually just don't have any actually function.

Leo Laporte [01:21:51]:
What about always listening instead of looking? What about always listening? I, for a number of months wore a variety of devices that were always listening with the idea of feeding it into AI And I think they could do the same thing with that that they would do with the camera, which is say, no, we're not taking pictures. Features were just listening for keywords and stuff that we're going to then add to Leo's diary or something. How about that?

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:17]:
Yeah, that could. As long as the people around you are not. Are okay with you, basically even they're

Leo Laporte [01:22:23]:
going to be freaked out by the.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:23]:
Even if it's not recording. Well, even if they're not recording audio, like they're still just generating a transcript. And that in and of itself is like, I don't want everything I say to be transcribed without context with anything like that. At least with a camera I can basically see that little LED light on someone's frames. These earbuds with the camera. The Germans report says, yeah, there's actually also a light there too.

Leo Laporte [01:22:43]:
Oh, okay.

Christina Warren [01:22:44]:
There has to be.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:46]:
But if I'm wearing my usual, like walking around earbuds, I'm not trust. I'm thinking that, okay, this is. I bet they have transparency mode. They're not being rude and continue to listen to their podcast while they talk to me. I'm okay with that. I don't want to worry that if someone asks me, hey, what do you think about the problem in Palestine? Like saying, okay, that's a. I don't want to be trapped into saying something that. Because I'm having a casual conversation and I'm speaking imprecisely because I really just want to play with your dog that you're taking for the walk.

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:18]:
I'm distracted. I'm not thinking about world situations. And then it comes back to me two years later that, can you believe that he said something so glib about such a serious thing and then he just said, ooh, who's a good boy? Who's a good boy? Boy, you know, I used to respect that, man. Like, I don't. And I mean, there's an argument that a lot of people that I respect have said, which is that, look, we're just, we're living in the Panopticon whether we want to or not. And that's just a fact of life. That is true. And you basically, you have to live in the world that you find yourself living in.

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:49]:
But that doesn't mean that at this early stage we should not be pushing against it and saying that we're not okay with that. There is going to be be a price that if you're using this technology, we're going to expect you to be circumspect or we're going to expect you to be a little bit embarrassed that you're in this particular space and that there is a transcript of everything that's being said around you.

Leo Laporte [01:24:09]:
You will, as a Vision Pro owner, get Vision OS 27. Mark Gurman says don't expect a lot. It'll be light on features compared with Vision OS 26. Instead, focus on performance bug fixes and paradigms with the other 27 operating systems. That means adding the new Siri.

Jason Snell [01:24:28]:
Yeah, I mean, don't expect a lot, but if they can actually do usable voice control and AI and stuff like, remember the guy in charge of Siri now is Mike Rockwell, who shipped the Vision Pro. And famously they were going to make the Vision Pro very, very Siri forward. Which makes sense, right? I use Siri more on the Vision Pro than any any other device I use because instead of like going around and finding a thing, I can just say launch this app and it does it. And Rockwell was frustrated by how bad Siri was and he apparently like got it. And I don't know about fights, but like was really vocal about how bad it was. And they had to re architect how the UI worked to make it less Siri forward because they were let down. And now he's in charge of Siri. So I would not be surprised if Vision OS27 actually is a lot better just because it will theoretically have a good Siri, which is what Rockwell wanted all along.

Leo Laporte [01:25:24]:
Are we taking any bets on how much Vision Pro we'll see on stage?

Christina Warren [01:25:29]:
I think it'll be a slight mentioned

Jason Snell [01:25:31]:
Vision Pro mentioned, vision OS27 mentioned.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:34]:
And our customers continue to love their Vision Pro.

Jason Snell [01:25:38]:
You see that surgeon who did that thing?

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:40]:
17 new applications in the.

Leo Laporte [01:25:42]:
So it will make an appearance in a video probably.

Christina Warren [01:25:46]:
It's the new Apple tv. It's going to be the New Apple tv, I think.

Jason Snell [01:25:48]:
And then also.

Leo Laporte [01:25:49]:
But it will. But no one will wear it on stage, right? I don't think we'll know.

Jason Snell [01:25:53]:
It remains a platform in our lineup of platforms for 27.

Leo Laporte [01:25:57]:
Okay. Okay.

Jason Snell [01:25:59]:
And it's coming. It's the kind of thing where it's like. And it's coming to iOS, macOS, ipados, watchos and vision OS.

Leo Laporte [01:26:07]:
When you.

Jason Snell [01:26:08]:
TVOs and vision.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:09]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:26:09]:
And it'll just be in there.

Leo Laporte [01:26:10]:
When you do your draft on Upgrade with Mike Hurley, I want you to really take a wild card and say someone will appear on stage in a Vision Pro. You could get a lot of points.

Jason Snell [01:26:20]:
I don't want to lose.

Christina Warren [01:26:23]:
I don't think they want to call attention to it. Leo, to be completely candid, like maybe I'm like being overly negative here, but I think this is one of those products that they have. They're continuing to update and support. But especially if you're trying to reset things with AI wwdc, you have a really big event. Do you really want to remind people of your past?

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:42]:
Shame they're not going to talk about the car either. I think. I think you're right, Christina.

Leo Laporte [01:26:46]:
Well, it's not as dead as the car, I hope. True.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:48]:
That is actually one last thing. The iracing simulator is now available for Vision Pro. That was announced just yesterday or they just released it yesterday. It's not an app that runs on Vision Pro. It's just free. It's just streaming from Nvidia's cloud thing. But still it's another reason to see. Another reason to remember which drawer you left it in and then maybe see if the battery still holds a charge after not having been charged for five or six months.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:16]:
Oh, Lord, I'm sorry. I'm being mean.

Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
All right. You are mean. And that is your Vision Pro segment.

Christina Warren [01:27:22]:
Now you see, now you know, we're done talking. The Vision Engine Pro.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:30]:
The US Mint has now announced the coin with Steve Jobs sitting cross legged on the back of it. We mentioned that they were going to do this. You can get it for a mere. I don't understand. $61 or $154. I guess it depends on.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:47]:
Yeah, you have to bag us. You have to buy a sack of them.

Leo Laporte [01:27:50]:
Oh, it's a sack. 25 or 100. I get it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:53]:
25 for 61 bucks or 100 for $154. And of course the obvious joke is that it's very, very appropriate that an Apple Apple person's thing has an insane markup that they can't possibly justify.

Leo Laporte [01:28:06]:
So these are $1 coins.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:08]:
Actual legal tender $1 coins.

Leo Laporte [01:28:10]:
And the D is the mint. Right. So that's the Denver Mint or the Philadelphia Mint. Is that your. I'm not a numismatist.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:15]:
Yeah, me neither. But it's. But it's nice. It was. So each state has a state quarter for innovation. And California, as they decided to. They decided to have Steve Jobs in a meditative.

Leo Laporte [01:28:25]:
Meditative quarter.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:26]:
This is a buck. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. A dollar with a legend. Make something wonderful. United States of America. Steve jobs.

Leo Laporte [01:28:34]:
So for 25, you get $25 worth for $61 or a hundred dollars worth for $154. There you go. That's it. Let's see the. Let's see the video. That's it. The video is just moving, moving. And then it flips over and there's the Statute of Liberty on that.

Leo Laporte [01:28:51]:
And by the way, it does say not available. So I guess it's still not available. Currently unavailable. Oh, it's out of stock. That's why they sold out. Okay, what are some of our other.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:04]:
How can it be out of stock on money? Isn't that an indicator of a problem? Aren't you.

Leo Laporte [01:29:10]:
The Mint make more? Or maybe TSMC is making those in Thailand.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:17]:
I don't know how many nanometers are in his cowlick on that engraving.

Leo Laporte [01:29:22]:
So the 3 nanometer dollar, it's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:26]:
I think they even have the New Balance on them. They got the. It's. It.

Leo Laporte [01:29:31]:
It's a new balance. It's a different balance than the.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:33]:
No, he's wearing. He's wearing New Balance sneakers.

Leo Laporte [01:29:36]:
Oh, New Balance sneakers.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:37]:
He's got the mock turtleneck, but he's got like the. The return. The ice haircut.

Leo Laporte [01:29:43]:
Well, you're really human in it.

Christina Warren [01:29:45]:
It's a little amalgamation of all the various looks of Steve.

Leo Laporte [01:29:48]:
Does it look like Steve Jobs?

Christina Warren [01:29:50]:
I don't think it does. I was going to say the same thing. I don't think it looks like Steve Jobs.

Leo Laporte [01:29:53]:
No, it's more like Christina Warren than it looks like Steve Jobs, to be frank. Okay. Okay. I like how he's got his fingers steepled. That's his famous steepled.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:08]:
But imagine his, like, he's just steely gaze focused on you because you said good morning and that's the stupid. He thinks that's the stupidest thing anyone could ever do to start a meeting with.

Leo Laporte [01:30:17]:
And I'm in an apple orchard.

Christina Warren [01:30:19]:
I was gonna say the same thing. Leo, we have to presume he's at an apple orchard.

Jason Snell [01:30:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:24]:
Okay, Very nice. Too bad you can't get them. They're sold out.

Christina Warren [01:30:28]:
Collectors will sell them to you for more for the next few weeks than I'm sure. I'm sure you guys, in like a year. You can probably get these at near face value.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Maybe you'll get them in a Walmart and change. You never know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:41]:
Maybe go to the casino. I would. I would actually like to have one of these. I would. I'm not gonna spend 61 for a big bag of them, but I would like to have one of these.

Christina Warren [01:30:54]:
It'd be a great gift. Honestly, like, if I worked at Apple as a manager, I would be trying to put an order for this just as like team gifts, because this would be like a fun super.

Jason Snell [01:31:03]:
Apparently they sold out almost instantly, which is silly. They should make. They should totally make more. Do another pressing or whatever. But yeah, I would. I mean, I. Because I. I would give them to friends.

Jason Snell [01:31:13]:
Right? Like, I'd be like, when I would see somebody at WWDC or at our. The relay telethon that we do in Memphis, I would be like, okay, you get a Steve Jobs coin and you get a Steve. I would be awesome. That's hilarious.

Leo Laporte [01:31:25]:
A lot.

Jason Snell [01:31:26]:
Love it.

Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
So we mentioned that Google, besides doing their I O keynote next week, we'll be doing their I O. Actually today they just did it. Right. Their Android show was today. I missed it. Oh, well, did you watch it, Andy?

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:41]:
No, I think it started at 1pm Eastern time. I was focused on my duties here.

Leo Laporte [01:31:47]:
Good man.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:48]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [01:31:50]:
This is the announcement from Samir Samat ofandroid on x dot com. There were some comments that the Android logo kind of got a little liquid glassy.

Jason Snell [01:32:01]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:02]:
So they put up a teaser for the show like a couple weeks ago. It's just like the Android Droid mascot. Just like, hey, the words, hey, the Android show. Tune in for what's great and new. And he's doing a little dance and looking up at the thing. And people noticed two things. One, if you're following Google, the gap between the mouth and the body seems to have a ring of lights, which was playing off the idea that there's going to be support for, like notification lights on the. On the Google Book and maybe even on the Pixel phones.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:35]:
But also that he looks like he's made out of frosted glass. He looks like maybe a liquid glass version of it. And you could tell that some people were just having a bit of sport, having a bit of fun, a Bit of japery. But others were like, is that the new direction for Android? And so Google's head of Android basically, oh, you people are idiots. Of course we're not going in that direction. And retweeting what he said.

Leo Laporte [01:32:59]:
Speaking of things that are sold out, Woot was offering the famous $600, sorry, $700 Apple Wheels kit for your Mac Pro for a mere $129.99.

Christina Warren [01:33:12]:
That's a great deal if you have still one of those and you need wheels for it, you know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:15]:
But wow, I want to put it on my $599 Mac mini just to make a statement.

Christina Warren [01:33:24]:
Just have a statement.

Leo Laporte [01:33:26]:
And by the way, five star ratings on Amazon customer reviews because Amazon owns Woot now. So no negative ratings. Nothing but five star ratings.

Christina Warren [01:33:36]:
Nothing but fives.

Leo Laporte [01:33:38]:
Actually, there are no reviews. This is interesting that they say it's five star reviews and there are in fact no reviews. So is that the default? You get five stars unless somebody says otherwise? I guess.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:50]:
So I think if you have the Mac Pro that this fits. You have staff that leaves reviews for you. So that's, that's. And there's an agentic AI now that they've been fired and replaced by. That's not working correctly. That's my guess.

Leo Laporte [01:34:02]:
Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. All right, let's pause and we will come back with our picks of the week. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Inaco. Still, you said maybe you'd have something to announce this week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:15]:
I have to write some stuff. I'm sorry, I thought I would get. The thing is. And we will talk about this next week, but I have some obligations to some people that I wanted to take care of before I. Andy's waiting until

Leo Laporte [01:34:28]:
the Iranian peace talks come to resolve and the Strait of Hormuz opens and then he'll have an announcement to make.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:36]:
Well, basically I want to make sure that I can rewrite every single thing that I might have written so that I look like I was an absolute prophetic genius.

Leo Laporte [01:34:44]:
You're ahead of it. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:46]:
Because it'll be dated like April.

Leo Laporte [01:34:48]:
But I just want to point out I have been very. I think I've been very good. Not saying anything like I told you so about the Vision Pro at all. I haven't mentioned it.

Jason Snell [01:35:00]:
You have been very good, Leo. You've been a good boy.

Leo Laporte [01:35:03]:
I'm sad. I think the Vision Pro should be a success. Although I had.

Jason Snell [01:35:07]:
Absolutely. That's a lie. You're lying. This should be a success.

Christina Warren [01:35:10]:
Come on.

Jason Snell [01:35:10]:
There could be a class action lawsuit. Don't lie.

Leo Laporte [01:35:13]:
I. I am a liar. I admit it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:16]:
I should also say because I was a little bit churlish, if I could have, if I could afford to spend $3,500 on a piece of fun. That seems exciting. It doesn't have to make back for me any amount of utility. I just have some mad money and I have 3,500. I would have bought one.

Leo Laporte [01:35:33]:
No, not me.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:34]:
$3,500 is so far.

Leo Laporte [01:35:36]:
I just, I look at it in my mind.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:37]:
I could have spent for something that's not.

Leo Laporte [01:35:39]:
I don't understand. I'm with Neal Stephenson, who says nobody wants to put any. Put a computer on their face. Christina Warren is also here, developer advocate@GitHub. Back to work. Although I notice you immediately took a vacation for Mother's Day, so that's okay.

Christina Warren [01:35:54]:
Well, no, I'm. I'm working from. From. So, yes. So I'm working remotely. Yes. So I am back at work. I just happen to be, you know, 3,000.

Leo Laporte [01:36:01]:
How's mom? You said she doesn't like her iPhone air too much.

Jason Snell [01:36:04]:
She.

Christina Warren [01:36:05]:
I was so disappointed. So I thought that floppy. Yeah, she waited until we could spend time together because over Christmas we bought her an iPhone air. And I did go through the pros and cons with her and I was like, look, the pros are going to be this is going to be lighter than your current pro max. I think she had a 15 Pro Max. And so you're complaining about, you know, how heavy your purse is. This is going to be really good for that. The cons are going to be the battery life is not going to be great.

Christina Warren [01:36:33]:
We're going to have to buy you a booster and that the camera is not going to be as good as what you're used to. But. But I think with the stuff you do, you'll be fine. I had talked to her and I had assumed, because she didn't want to tell me, that everything was great. She does not like the phone and she regrets getting it. So she still has her old 15 Pro Max, but she did not trade in. And so she's still kind of using sickly as like a glorified, you know, like ipod iPhone. So in the house, like, she'll use that for listening to podcasts when she's on WI Fi and whatnot.

Christina Warren [01:37:02]:
She doesn't have cellular service on it and use it for some photo stuff. But yeah, so it is too bad. So I think, unfortunately this will be one of those things where we will Trade it in in December and then get her whatever the, you know, either the, the pro or the, the Pro Max variant of the. Of the 17.

Leo Laporte [01:37:19]:
I see that it says flip flop season on the sign behind you. So we're that.

Christina Warren [01:37:23]:
So it's true. Yeah, it is Flip flop season. Yeah. No, she, she just didn't want to tell me because she was. She, she felt bad. And, and so when I talked to her yesterday, she was like, I don't like. I don't like my phone.

Leo Laporte [01:37:33]:
I don't like it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:34]:
Did she say why? I'm just curious.

Christina Warren [01:37:37]:
It's the battery life and it's the camera quality.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:39]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:37:40]:
I'm worried. You know, it's funny, my very good camera. I took two very good cameras to Hawaii with me and ended up kind of leaving them behind often because the iPhone is. The Pro Max is so good.

Jason Snell [01:37:54]:
So good.

Leo Laporte [01:37:54]:
The zoom is so good that I just. And now I'm a little worried because I really do want to get the folding phone, but I think it'll have the same problem as the air. It's so thin that the cameras may not be as good as the Pro Max first.

Jason Snell [01:38:07]:
Right. And there's going to be a step up on the Pro next time too. Right? With a variable aperture. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:11]:
So now am I going to have to buy two phones? What am I going to do?

Jason Snell [01:38:15]:
Yep, at least two. Maybe more.

Christina Warren [01:38:17]:
Maybe more. Leo? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:38:18]:
I'll have to get that vest that Scott Bourne wanted of the iPhone.

Christina Warren [01:38:21]:
Oh, I had one of his. I had one of the, the Scotty vest transfers once. I took it to CES or something.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:27]:
Great, aren't they?

Christina Warren [01:38:28]:
And it was amazing. I literally had like my carry on on my person. I had like 10 pounds worth of electronics on me. It was pretty great.

Leo Laporte [01:38:35]:
I wear my Scotty vest. I wore it to Hawaii. I wear it on the plane because it's the best way to carry a lot of stuff.

Christina Warren [01:38:42]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:38:42]:
Take it off, put it on the conveyor belt as you go through.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:46]:
No, no, no. Exactly. Right. No joke. So this is, this is my favorite watch. It is like a vintage now like 12, 13 year old, like Casio G Shock, one of the first ones with Bluetooth and my favorite thing and I lost it. I couldn't find it. Couldn't find it, couldn't find it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:59]:
And it wasn't until I had my Scotty vest like multi pocket shoplifting coat and I was wearing it, I was taking it out of storage. I was wore it for like the third week that in one of the 800 pockets. I found it in the very, very bottom. Amazing, because I know exactly what happened. For me, it's not so much to get a carry on. It's like I'm going to take everything off while I'm in line and put them in these pockets and then put the coat on. And because it was the watch, like, I just, for whatever reason, never retrieved it. But, yeah, again, they're.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:32]:
They are their most amazing. It's not just, I'm sorry, I'll wind this up, but it's not just, you will think it's silly that, oh, my God, 50 pockets. That's just crazy stupid. It's not just that, but it's also that even if you only use four of them, the thing is, because there are pockets everywhere. It's like, what I really want is I want a pocket, like on my forearm where I can put my transit card so that it's always there when I need to beep through a thing. Okay, well, there's a pocket, zippered pocket, on the forum, and I want to keep my phone in this exact spot. Again, there happens to be a pocket pocket right at the spot where you want to put that phone. You don't have to guess.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:11]:
You don't have to compromise.

Christina Warren [01:40:12]:
It's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:12]:
And they're nice coats, too.

Christina Warren [01:40:14]:
They are. That's the thing. And then it lays flat. Well, like, it doesn't look bad. Like, I, Honestly, I. This is unpaid, but we're fans. All of them. We're fans.

Leo Laporte [01:40:24]:
And Jason Snell of Six Colors.com and many, many podcasts. You have a little bit of a respite before wwdc or are you still writing? Writing. Writing?

Jason Snell [01:40:36]:
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, I have been enjoying the fact that I have a little break between the Apple 50 stuff and June, because June's gonna be crazy. But, yeah, so a little, A little bit of a respite is nice this time right now. I want it, I like it a little quiet this time of year because I know what comes next and it's going to be a lot. So, yeah, I'm enjoying it. Cut.

Leo Laporte [01:41:04]:
We will have more MacBreak Weekly right now, actually. I'm not going to lie. Well, no, you know what? Before, before we get back to your picks of the week, which is coming up next, I might mention that it is so nice to have so many great people in our club. Twit Discord. And as Flyer Scott said, I liked all this talk. And as Jason Snell said, good talk, everybody. Buddy.

Jason Snell [01:41:27]:
Yeah. Good episode. I mean, like, really, we, We. Andy And I had a little back channel where we're like, this is a good episode before the first commercial.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:34]:
Like, oh my God, I got. I gotta shut up because I'm having.

Jason Snell [01:41:38]:
It only took us a thousand days, by the way. It's 1024. It's a momentous, momentous episode.

Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
It's our 1K episode, ladies and gentlemen.

Jason Snell [01:41:45]:
And we killed it for 1K.

Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
I'm saying now it's time for picks of the week. I'm going to continue my run of picks of the week. I have a couple amazing, amazing. I know I stopped for a while and I thought, what the heck, Let me see. How about this silly one? I've been doing a lot of menu bar apps lately. This one is probably one you don't need. But imagine if you plug in a USB C cable and a small macOS menu bar app tells you what that cable can do and why your Mac is charging so slowly. It's free.

Leo Laporte [01:42:24]:
At least you could try. Is pretty cool. It's on GitHub, of course. It's called what Cable By Darrell Morley. And actually you can see screenshots if you go to whatcable.uk and see it or install it from GitHub. Imagine having a menu bar app that tells you what that cable can do. You can also install via Homebrew, which is nice. Just Homebrew install what cable? I think this.

Leo Laporte [01:42:53]:
You know what, if you've got room on your menu bar, if you're running one of those great menu bar utilities we talk about all the time. So you can expand your menu bar like this, Put it in there. Why not have a little more in your menu bar? What cable uk. Christina Warren, Pick of the week.

Christina Warren [01:43:14]:
Yeah. So I'm sure that you guys have talked about Obsidian before, the note taking

Leo Laporte [01:43:19]:
app, which is Obsidian Fan.

Christina Warren [01:43:21]:
Yeah. Which is fantastic. I'm a big fan too. And you know, it's kind of a plain text writing app, but there are a lot of plugins. There's a big ecosystem around it. And what actually happened this week, today actually, is that the Obsidian team launched their Obsidian community, which is a new directory. And then there's like a developer dashboard for Obsidian plugins and themes.

Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
Oh, we need this. Because there's. There are thousands of plugins now.

Christina Warren [01:43:48]:
There are. And the process, they've had a bottleneck. They're only seven members of their team and so they've had a bottleneck trying to get as many things available. And so it's community, Obsidian md and then they have things organized by category when things have been updated and then they're doing what they can to try to take security and things like that seriously. Obviously there's gonna be some stuff where I think they have some automated scans and they're doing some scorecards, cards and some disclosures about what permissions things might ask. But I think this is great. This has been a kind of a problem. There have been a lot of people who've tried to kind of step in, I think, to make this space, but having this officially part of Obsidian, they've done a really good job with it.

Christina Warren [01:44:32]:
And I'm such a big fan of what they've built with Obsidian, so I wanted to share that.

Leo Laporte [01:44:35]:
So. Great. Yeah. And this is, you know, I have mixed feelings about Obsidian plugins because on the one hand, hand it's plain markdown and if you don't install a plugin, it's plain text and you can see it and read it everywhere forever. But I do have 28 plugins installed, so. Because, you know, it ends up being making it even more functional and can do so many interesting, useful stuff.

Christina Warren [01:44:59]:
Well, that's the thing, right? You can get so many integrations, you can connect it to other services and then pull those things into your Obsidian vault. And yeah, then that is plain text too. So there's, there's a lot of really cool stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:45:10]:
And it's great with AI. The other wonderful thing about Obsidian is because it is plain text, your AI can easily ingest it and write to it. And so I in fact, have a whole AI folder of stuff that my AI creates all the time. In fact, I even planned my entire travel using AI and Obsidian for my itinerary, and it was just fantastic. So. And now I have a diary that it turned into a webpage and I can just go on and on and on. There's so many wonderful things you can do with Obsidian, especially if you're using AI. So I'm glad that they finally did this.

Leo Laporte [01:45:48]:
What. What is the address of the Obsidian?

Christina Warren [01:45:51]:
It's Community Obsidian md.

Leo Laporte [01:45:54]:
Okay. Community Obsidian md. Obsidian MD is the base directory, is the base site.

Christina Warren [01:45:59]:
Yeah. So it's just their community site and they've got everything organized into, you know, different categories. It's great.

Leo Laporte [01:46:05]:
Look at this. 280 AI plugins. Wow.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:09]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:46:10]:
Alone. Andy Inocco, Pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:14]:
Let me introduce you to the great source of stress that all of us have when we have an app that we absolutely love. But it has not been updated in ages and ages and ages because part of you is thinking, oh, well, that Means that when they get around to it, they're going to make a huge, huge, wonderful update that's going to double my joy in this app. And part of you is wondering, no, they've forgotten it's existed and at some point there's going to be an OS update that breaks it and they're not going to fix it. I'm going to have to lose my greatest. Fortunately, it was the first thing with Snapseed. This is Google's image editor and it is. There's. I'll say it again, there's a reason why I don't have games on my phone.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:54]:
It's because I have too much fun in Adobe Lightroom and in Snapseed, just basically I was waiting for a train and I took a random picture of something and now I'm on the train and I will spend 40 minutes editing it in Snapseed. Not because I'm a persnickety artiste, but because Snapseed makes it so much fun to explore. What can I do with this photo? It's not about Canva, it's not about I'm going to put a puppy dogs and put a decorative thing on this. I'm going to use AI to put. Put a tap dancing penguin in the back. No, it is photographic editing things. But both the simplest damn interface you can possibly have where there is a stacked list of scrolling through of brightness, contrast, saturation, white point, dark point, bottom. And you can stop there or you can say, you know what, I want to go with details and I want to go with specular highlights and I want to go with gradual toning and you know what, I want to go and adjust the curves but I want to adjust the blue curve because it's a snow scene and the snow is very, very blue.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:56]:
I only want to take the blue out of the. You keep exploring and having more and more fun until you're left with. I had pancakes for on Friday and it was a fine picture. And as I was waiting for like the train to take me home, I just kept editing this picture of pancakes because those blueberries could have been more blue and there could have been like more sharpness. And snapseed is the app that lets you kind of do that. The built in editor you get with Apple Photos doesn't do that. Even Google Photos, its editor, they kind of screw it up because they make it way too complicated. This is very, very focused on.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:33]:
Here is a picture that was taken by your phone, camera or something you imported through. Whatever you're going to play with it with a whole Bunch of tools, some of them very, very dramatic, some of them very, very subtle. Until this is exactly the piece of art that you want it to be. One of the big things they added. So they made one big upgrade. Like a few months ago, they made a second big upgrade in February or March by which they added a camera mode to it, which it never had before.

Leo Laporte [01:48:58]:
So

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:01]:
I've been playing with that and I've been getting more used to wanting to use it because it has vintage film stocks or film looks where you basically on the camera mode, you scroll through and you choose. I want Fuji X100 for this because even now I remember because I was shooting film as a kid. Oh, lots of greens, lots of reds. Okay, I want. Oh, but this is a fall scene, so I want Kodak Chrome. You don't have to mess with that if you don't want to. But I'm amazed that this is the first time that I've actually been kind of messing around with a non stock camera app on a regular basis. I'm still experimenting with it, but it's fun to play with and again, I don't have to play with it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:42]:
All the edits are non destructive. Of course, you can rewind to whatever you want. You can do things in layers, so you can just basically be experimenting. Like I said, it is the most fun and direct photo editor I ever saw. And I wouldn't go so far as to call it a Photoshop killer or a Lightroom killer or an Adobe Creative Studio subscription killer. But if you want to do something with photography that goes beyond what the stock photo app will let you do, whether it's an Android phone or an iPhone or an iPad or whatever, definitely get yourself some Snapseed. It's free. Also, it's being supported by a $4 trillion company, so it probably is not going away.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:20]:
The fact that they finally updated it after I don't know how many years, that means that. Okay, so that means it's going to be compatible with iOS 26 and 27. It's going to be compatible with Android 17, 18, 19 for the foreseeable future. And thank God, because my phone would be a lot less fun, my photography would be a lot less fun if Snap C did not exist. Go to the App Store, go get it.

Leo Laporte [01:50:40]:
Version 4 just came out and I have it too, and it is really amazing. Yeah, really is great. I guess that leaves Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

Jason Snell [01:50:50]:
I've got a pick update. I picked Indigo a little while ago when it was in beta. It is out now in the App Store. Indigo is a client for Blue sky and Mastodon in one place. I've been using it for the last like two months. It has replaced all my other clients. It's iOS but also Mac, and it does what it says on the tin. Those are the two social media platforms I use the most, and now I can use them in one app.

Jason Snell [01:51:17]:
It does some deduping, which is very smart. If it's a cross post, you can cross post easily, but you can also read and it supports threading and it supports all the things. Things. So if you're somebody who's using both Blue sky and Mastodon, I find it very pleasant to be able to read my timeline in one spot for both platforms. It's just two in one. Instead of having to do the work of saying, well, now I've finished this timeline, let's go over to this timeline. It's just all in one place. You control what post to where, where you put everything that you do.

Jason Snell [01:51:48]:
And then you can also see it all. And it's got nice little flags. So you know that was was from a Blue sky user and that's from Mastodon user. Although if you're like me, depending on the tone of the post, you can tell you'll know which it is. I got a. I got a very weird piece of feedback yesterday from a podcast I did where the person was both did not understand what I said and took it the wrong way and was very upset and I was like, oh, Mastodon. Mastodon is where this came from. But.

Jason Snell [01:52:18]:
But I have a real pick too. So that's Indigo. It's out now. And also a Mac utility. It costs seven bucks. It's from my friend Lex Friedman. It is called Gnome. Here's what Gnome does.

Jason Snell [01:52:29]:
It's a menu bar app and you press a keyboard shortcut and you get a search box and you find an animation in a file format that's spelled gif. Now, Lex, being a very funny fellow, has said his. He's called it Gnome because. Because gnome is how you pronounce g, which is not to pronounce it at all, but yeah. So I'm going to say it. It's a. It's a gif. I said it.

Jason Snell [01:52:54]:
I'm from the 80s. I remember when they were pronounced gif. A gif or gif, if you prefer. Quick search, menu bar, app, keyboard shortcut, type your search and then it's optional. But there's a great option that when you choose it, it just auto pastes it wherever you Are. Are. So you can get that GIF in there really quick or GIF or gnome and a feature of it that I really love. If you've got a little folder somewhere that's full of the ones that you use, you can point GNOME to that and it will use that and the search engine that it's using.

Jason Snell [01:53:31]:
So that I have access to all of my Spider man gifs from the Animal animated Spider man and all of my this is Spinal Tap GIFs, but also the rest of the world. So it's a. It's really nice. And Lex is just charging seven bucks single purchase. But I. I love it. So if you're conversing with me and I send you a bunch of GIFs, that's why that's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:53:55]:
Lex has a great brain. Every time I see. Every time he creates something, it's like, I think Lex has a great brain.

Leo Laporte [01:54:00]:
At some point we have to take to count all the menu bar apps we've recommended on this show and maybe somebody should just install them all and just see how.

Jason Snell [01:54:10]:
One of the best things about being a Mac user is that you have the menu bar for a lot of utilities. I love utilities.

Leo Laporte [01:54:18]:
Yeah. And you get to kind of customize it as you wish.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:22]:
I'm still testing it, but I actually have at the top of the screen of my MacBook, it's like one of those tape measures. You can. You can just pull it out and it's a flexible strip of oled so I can have all of my menu bar items visible at the same time.

Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
Oh, nice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:36]:
Broken it 8 times since it costs $800 to fix every time. But still, it's a good idea if you like menu bar items like I do.

Jason Snell [01:54:42]:
Great idea.

Leo Laporte [01:54:43]:
And I did want to thank you, Jason, for your pedometer plus pus pick a couple of weeks ago because I put it on my watch and it was a really great tool to see as I walked around the islands.

Jason Snell [01:54:54]:
It's a great watch app. There are not a lot of. Lot of truly great Apple watch apps, but pedometer is really like David Smith sweats the details on.

Leo Laporte [01:55:05]:
Well. And I'm really into complications because I have the info, you know, watch face. And so having it as a complication really is fantastic. I really like that. I should mention I picked it many years ago we brought the Shaka guides along with us. I really like GPS driving tours. And when you go to the islands, when you go to Hawaii, having these Shaka guides are great. We got the Big island audio tour and as we were Driving.

Leo Laporte [01:55:32]:
You do a lot of driving on the Big Island. It was telling stories, playing Hawaiian music, describing sites saying, turn left here if you want to see the Akaka Waterfalls and things like that. It was really, really great. So if you're going to Hawaii, any of the islands, look at the Shaka Guide self guide guided GPS driving tours. And they have them for the national parks now as well. They've expanded out a little bit. But I really, I used it when we, like many years ago, I think, when we were in Maui and I thought, oh, I should get this for the Big Island. And yeah, it was fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:56:09]:
The guy's a little bit like a DJ voice and a lot of false laughter, but, you know, I can put up with that.

Jason Snell [01:56:15]:
That's okay.

Leo Laporte [01:56:16]:
But a really useful. And I now know a lot more about where we were. Okay, I think we have done it.

Jason Snell [01:56:25]:
Good talk, everybody.

Andy Ihnatko [01:56:27]:
Good game, good game, good talk, good talk.

Leo Laporte [01:56:30]:
We do MacBreak Weekly on Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. As I learned last week, 8am Hawaiian Time. That's 1800 UTC. If you want to watch or listen to the show live, you can. Of course, if you're in the club, you can watch, watch in the club. Twit Discord behind the Velvet rope. Special access, but everybody gets to watch on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn or Kick. And you can even chat with us while you're in any of those platforms.

Leo Laporte [01:56:58]:
And I see all the chat comments flying by after the fact on demand versions of the show available in audio or video at our website, twit.tv/mbw. There is a YouTube channel that is dedicated to the video. That's actually a great way to share clips. You can, if your mom is about to buy a iPhone, air, you can share that little clip of Christina's mom's dissatisfaction and save her a lot of money because it is Flip Flop Week. I'm just, I just want you to know, is it Flip Flop week all the time in Atlanta or just some of the time?

Christina Warren [01:57:31]:
Just, just some of the times. But it is, it is definitely Flip Flop season right now for sure.

Leo Laporte [01:57:35]:
Okay, so season not just week, but it's the whole season, ladies and gentlemen.

Christina Warren [01:57:39]:
I guess so. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:57:40]:
And then, of course, best way to get the show subscribe and your favorite podcast player. Thank you, Christine.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:45]:
Before we go to screen, Ted Turner died this week. Is Atlanta in, like, mourning because he's so associated with Atlanta?

Christina Warren [01:57:52]:
I mean, I think so. Well, it's interesting.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:55]:
I'm sorry to reopen the bag.

Christina Warren [01:57:56]:
No, no, no. We can talk about this more offline. But like my. My family actually has a history. Had a history with it with Ted. And so my dad.

Leo Laporte [01:58:02]:
Good one or a bad one?

Christina Warren [01:58:04]:
A good one, actually.

Leo Laporte [01:58:05]:
I have a lot of respect for him.

Christina Warren [01:58:07]:
And so my dad was sharing some stories the other night about him and how kind he was to my family over the years. More than once I found this. I'll just share this because this was bizarre. He came to my parents house. Not the house I'm in now, but the house I grew up in for New Year's Eve more than once.

Leo Laporte [01:58:25]:
What?

Christina Warren [01:58:26]:
Well, they were close, but also. But it's the suburbs. Like you're Ted Turner.

Leo Laporte [01:58:33]:
Why are you at the New York City go. Doesn't Jane Fonda have a party that you could go to?

Christina Warren [01:58:38]:
He was married to a different Jane at the time. But yeah, but, but yeah. I mean. But definitely huge loss for Atlanta because for. We wouldn't have. Everybody says cable news. Obviously that would be different. But we would not have cable television without Tetrar.

Leo Laporte [01:58:53]:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad we could mention that. Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:58:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
Thank you, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:58:57]:
He was, he was also on a Think different poster. So he's. He's connected to the Mac, to the Macro show.

Leo Laporte [01:59:01]:
He definitely did that. Well, I am sorry to say this good talk, like all good talks, has to come to an end now. So thank you for joining us and it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work because break time is over. See you next week.