MacBreak Weekly 1027 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 and Andy are here. Both have some very big announcements and filling in for Christina Warren, Shelly Brisbin will talk about the new accessibility features in iOS 27 and what they may portend for the future. We'll predict what's going to happen next Monday at WWDC. And we'll take a look at some of the new shows debuting on Apple TV this month. That and a whole lot more. Plus the vaunted Vision Pro segment coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:00:40]:
This is MacBreak Weekly. Episode 1027, recorded Tuesday, June 2, 2026. The Paris of the South Bay. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you've joined the show that covers everything, including Vision Pro. It is the premier Vision Pro podcast in the world. Jason Snell is here, soon to be in Cupertino, California.
Jason Snell [00:01:05]:
Yes, we cover other things. When there's not Vision Pro news to
Leo Laporte [00:01:08]:
talk about, sometimes we talk about it.
Jason Snell [00:01:10]:
So that's good.
Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Yeah. Hello, Jason.
Jason Snell [00:01:12]:
Hi, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:01:13]:
Ready to go to the Paris of the South Bay?
Jason Snell [00:01:15]:
Paris of the South Bay, yes. Cupertino Supertino, if you will. Yes. Always good to go to Apple park, which I'm always reminded when I set foot at Apple park, that I don't think they intended for the press to be inside at Apple Park. I think that that was always. We were always intended to be elsewhere. But then Covid happened and they changed what they decided to do for WWDC and now they just let all of us commoners into the ring and it's just a thing that they do. And it's a treat because that's such a really amazing, staggeringly built building.
Jason Snell [00:01:49]:
And so to be there is not just because it's Apple, but because the architecture and the money that's been spent on the landscaping and stuff, it's pretty incredible to be in there. And I do remind myself, like, I wasn't supposed to be let in here, but they let us in now.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:03]:
It's great.
Leo Laporte [00:02:04]:
Never intended for you to cross that.
Jason Snell [00:02:06]:
No, I think they figured that they would be. The events would happen elsewhere, not at Cafe Max. But that's where they do it now is they open up their Cafe Max area at the Ring and we just. Then they give us folding chairs and we sit there and watch a video. I'm looking forward to it. I'll bring my sunscreen.
Leo Laporte [00:02:21]:
The press is like a vampire. Once you invite it over the threshold, that's it.
Jason Snell [00:02:25]:
It's There, we're in there. We want free food.
Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Andy Ihnatko also here. He's at the library in the Paris of New England.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:34]:
I think the Venice of southern New England.
Leo Laporte [00:02:36]:
Yeah. You're near the water. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:38]:
And we get some floods, so we just like Venice. Exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
And you don't want to be there in the summer, all of that. Now Christina has the day off because she's at Microsoft Build. She is a. She does work for GitHub. So I guess that was part of the. Part of the deal. But good news, we've got the wonderful Shelly Brisbin here.
Shelly Brisbin [00:02:56]:
Hi.
Leo Laporte [00:02:57]:
Now I'm saying Brisbin. Do you like Brisbin or Brisbin?
Shelly Brisbin [00:03:00]:
Brisbin. Brisbin is like. You don't know me, do you? Because you haven't read my name and you don't know how it's spelled. That's what it is. Also, I'd love to go to Australia. Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:03:08]:
Yeah. And by the way, Brisbin, which is spelled Brisbin in Australia, which is not
Jason Snell [00:03:12]:
how they pronounce it.
Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
Yeah. Isn't that funny? From the beautiful Texas Tribune, the Paris Texas Standard.
Shelly Brisbin [00:03:18]:
Standard Texas Tribune are our dear friends, but not me. Standard Texas Standard Portland of Texas here in Austin.
Leo Laporte [00:03:27]:
That's right. Or sometimes the People's Republic of Austin.
Shelly Brisbin [00:03:30]:
I've heard exactly. We answer to both.
Leo Laporte [00:03:32]:
Yeah. Yep. I asked my chatbot to take a Pulse check on WWDC 2026 and they say this is the Apple AI redemption keynote coming up. Lots of heat, but still more rumor blog energy than broad developer social consensus. Apple has to show that Siri is no longer an embarrassment. The major big expected headline Major Siri Rebuild Skepticism is loud. People are still grumbling about liquid glass and the low contrast ui. I think Shelly would agree on that.
Leo Laporte [00:04:10]:
Less translucency theater, more usable controls, software, heavy macOS name leak. The WWDC x hashmoji file name apparently references Project Big Bear 2026. So everybody's thinking that the next version of Mac OS is Big Bear. I think that's a good name for it, actually. I wonder if it will be Big Bear is. Where is that, Jason? It's in California.
Jason Snell [00:04:36]:
La. La LA Ski area.
Leo Laporte [00:04:39]:
Okay. Well, they like ski areas. Do you really?
Andy Ihnatko [00:04:43]:
Do they really want to invite like sarcastic people to like Big. Does the Big Bear blank in the woods? If the trend for Syria is the same, maybe.
Jason Snell [00:04:53]:
So is it Big Bear, just a little cub.
Andy Ihnatko [00:04:56]:
It's so easy.
Shelly Brisbin [00:04:57]:
Well, it's. It's the. The compromise between the cats and the California names, I suppose, are back to animals of some kind. Even though that's not how it's meant,
Leo Laporte [00:05:04]:
you know, just because I just have.
Shelly Brisbin [00:05:07]:
Because I miss the cats.
Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
I would not. In fact a lot of people do. They say this should be the Snow Leopard version.
Shelly Brisbin [00:05:14]:
Return to Snow Leopard.
Leo Laporte [00:05:16]:
Well, in the sense that it's going to be a fix and a minor upgrade. We shall see.
Jason Snell [00:05:23]:
Snow Leopard had hundreds of features. I'll just say they talked a big game but they did actually have like hundreds of changes and features in it.
Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
It's hard not to. They collect those features all year long.
Jason Snell [00:05:32]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:05:33]:
And they can't just leave them in the basket. They have to empty the basket. No, I mean my AIs take Apple's bar is no longer quote announce AI, it's quote show working personal privacy preserving agentic Siri without vaporware stink.
Jason Snell [00:05:48]:
Okay.
Shelly Brisbin [00:05:50]:
Delivered by other AI.
Jason Snell [00:05:51]:
We've been replaced by.
Andy Ihnatko [00:05:54]:
Settle down. I mean it's like, it's like so long as so really so long as Apple like managed to manages to tell a coherent story with a beginning, middle and an end about. Here is our new track for AI for artificial intelligence. And also importantly, here is why you can actually sort of trust us. Even though we were really, really, really, really misdirecting two years ago when we announced our previous strategy for AI. So they don't have to ship everything that has to that turns turns iOS into a, into an agentic intelligent operating system. They don't have to do something as scary as what Google dared to announce with Android a couple of weeks ago.
Leo Laporte [00:06:34]:
Google really went crazy.
Andy Ihnatko [00:06:37]:
They just have to say that by the time that you drop your fear of AI and by the time you decide that you want AI on your phone, we will have a phone that has good AI features and that's all they have to do.
Shelly Brisbin [00:06:48]:
We probably won't get the Tim Cook John Turnus AI AI AI Supercut. Like with the Google thing.
Leo Laporte [00:06:53]:
No, that would be funny. Well, let's see what an actual human says. A guy named Jason Snow writing at Macworld WWDC. Is 2026 the year of the do over?
Jason Snell [00:07:05]:
Yeah. I mean 2024, we all know what happened wasn't good. 2025 was like, we're sorry. We promise that everything we show you now will ship this fall.
Leo Laporte [00:07:17]:
Did it?
Jason Snell [00:07:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:07:18]:
Okay.
Jason Snell [00:07:19]:
Yeah. If they didn't, if they weren't confident it was going to ship, they didn't ship it. I mean they didn't announce it and then they added stuff later.
Leo Laporte [00:07:25]:
Right.
Jason Snell [00:07:25]:
But it doesn't really address what happened in 2024. Right. It was sort of like we want to show you that we, what we promise we can deliver. But it didn't really answer the question about the AI stuff that got kicked, that can got kicked further and further down the road into this year, according to Mark Gurman, out of this spring into this fall. So the question is, what do they, what do they want to announce and what can they deliver this year in AI in terms of AI features and that, you know, they've, they had two years, if you want to count it that way, since the debacle of 2024, to, you know, figure out what to change. They got rid of a bunch of people, they reorged, new people are in charge. Okay, great. That we know they made a deal with Google.
Jason Snell [00:08:11]:
So now what? Like, this is, this is where they have to say what is our vision for what's coming with how AI integrates into Apple's platforms? And I think what's fascinating about this, what's going to be wor watching next week, is how aggressive do they push here? Because like, they tend to be pretty conservative with product things. But two years ago they felt the pressure to prove that they cared about AI. And there's a, they're really threading a needle here because there's the like, really careful version that they could announce which people will say, oh, it's kind of behind everybody else and it's kind of boring and it shows that Apple doesn't get it. But if Apple gets too aggressive, they're back in 2024 where they may be overpromising and they may not be able to deliver and they don't want to do that. So, like how you thread that needle and get something that you can ship, but that is showing that you care and that you're on a path. And so in my piece on Macworld, what I said is what I really would like, and I know this is going. They have to step outside themselves a little bit is to say announce features, sure that you're going to ship this year, great. But also kind of give us a framework, give us a vision, tell us how you think AI is going to fit in with your operating systems going forward in general.
Jason Snell [00:09:27]:
And that's not pre announcing features necessarily, but like, I think they need to go beyond. Here are eight things you'll see in the fall to say sort of like, here's how we think AI works with our platforms. And if they could do that, even if they don't ship ad features in the fall, it'll be okay because they will have explained what they're, you know, not detail of what they're working on, but how they're choosing to view it. That's, I think that's what the most important thing for them to do is like explain to me how you're actually your new leadership, how you're thinking about AI and your platforms.
Andy Ihnatko [00:10:01]:
Yeah. So so long as they just lay out the story that we understand. We have like we have a roadmap. Here is our plan. We don't have to tell you the specifics of the plans yet, we don't have to announce specific features, but we are going to make it very clear to you that our plan is to, for example, as much on device AI as possible because we think that's fast, that's ecologically sound, it's private and it speaks to our expertise for Apple Silicon and tying everything together. However, we're also going to be as open as possible for cloud based stuff so that you can run the models that you want and access the features that you want that you've been growing to rely on over the past year or two. And whatever happens after that, happens after that. But that's basically the two prongs of our thing.
Andy Ihnatko [00:10:43]:
And we're also relying a lot on our outsourced partner for foundation models. That's accelerating our progress and we will continue to rely on that fruitful relationship over the coming years. Again, if they say here is the brand new, they don't have to say here is the brand new Siri and everything that it has to do that gives them a whole bunch of stuff that they're going to have to actually deliver. If all they say is that, by the way, the Dynamic island is now going to be basically your point of contact for Siri and most of these features. We will be showing off more of these features later, but basically get used to the idea that Siri lives inside the Dynamic island, then again, that's telling the story, making sure that we understand that they have thought about this. They're not just simply allowing marketing to dictate what has to be in the keynote to make people happy and get people off their backs. But again, we figure out we don't know how we're going to get to Pismo beach in three years, but we have a plan for how to get there.
Shelly Brisbin [00:11:41]:
I just feel like accuracy is important even if it's not specific. So that instead of in 2024 when you promised a version of the Moon and weren't able to deliver it, you have to be able to say in 2026, this is what we're going to give you as a general matter, this is our philosophy and all the features that come from it have to be consistent with that philosophy and some sort of acknowledgment that we're fixing Siri. Whether they say it that way or whether they can present it as a better value proposition that doesn't have to admit fault. They have to acknowledge in some we have to be able to parse out as pundits after the fact. Yes, they acknowledge that Siri is a problem and they have a roadmap to fix it. And there are deliverables down the way that may not be as specific as we would like them, but that are going to be brought forward consistent with what we're given next week.
Leo Laporte [00:12:32]:
So a couple of weeks ago Apple, and this is kind of was Glad we could get you on this week, Shelly, to talk about it, announced new accessibility features and updates which they headline said Powered by Apple Intelligence and a lot of us speculated this might be a preview of some of the things Apple Intelligence might bring to all of us. Tell us what you think. First of all of the new accessibility features.
Shelly Brisbin [00:12:57]:
So when I wrote about those features for Jason six Colors, my headline included a reference to Apple Intelligence and a precursor to WWDC. And I think that was accurate in the sense that I think the theme for WWDC is definitely going to be Apple Intelligence based, just as these announcements were. But these accessibility announcements, and they've been doing them for five years now, previewing before WWDC almost never have a direct thread between the accessibility part and the WWDC part. It is not like a preview of the theme. So in 2024 we didn't get great promises about what Apple Intelligence is going to be. And in fact I've actually had having had time to think about it, this is kind of a small bore release for accessibility and it's really enhancements to things that are already there. For example, there's a video where you have a blind user using their iPhone to navigate and to read signage and to do image description and to, you know, basically describe the environment in an AI based way, which is it gives good demo and it's great.
Leo Laporte [00:14:02]:
It's kind of like Be my eyes right?
Jason Snell [00:14:03]:
Or not exactly.
Shelly Brisbin [00:14:04]:
It is very much like be my eyes. And that's actually the new part. What I was going to get to there is that that ability to describe your surroundings has existed for several years. They're just improving on it and what be my ey my eyes gave you and what Apple Intelligence will theoretically what will give you, based on the announcements, is the ability to interrogate those descriptions, ask questions and get further information. And that's the AI. Cool sauce. And I guess you could say some part of Be my AI is Be my. Be my AI is part of Be my AI is part of Be my eyes.
Shelly Brisbin [00:14:36]:
Be my eyes is a larger thing, but you could say that that's being Sherlocked. But my thought is that Apple's probably going to find some ways to make that better and more interesting, but it doesn't feel like a revolutionary new thing from the point of view of accessibility. A lot of people have talked about the voice control feature. So the way voice control has worked in the past is that if you can't touch the device and if you interact with it using your voice, you can either reference a grid that has a numbered grid, so, you know, act on number 14 over there, or a, you know, a specific labeled icon or item. And now voice control is going to make it possible for you to just describe something you see on screen. It doesn't necessarily have the precise label that voice control required. And people got excited about that because they're thinking, well, that means that AI will be able to interact with what you describe on screen. That with voice commands you can make your phone do all sorts of things.
Shelly Brisbin [00:15:34]:
That's potentially true, and voice control as described here is potentially proof of concept. I don't feel like that's going to come this year. As a direct result, I'll also say that that technology in smaller form has been available as something called screen recognition. That's part of voiceover for years. And what screen recognition's job was, if there was a voiceover item, was there an item that was not labeled on a voiceover screen? If the developer or even Apple itself had not labeled a back button, screen recognition would go in and say, I think that looks like a back button, and it would call it a back button, and you could then act on it in that way. And so it's not like this is completely revolutionary or completely new. It's interesting that the AI connection is being made and that people are all excited about how you could agentically interact with your screen. I still divide it into two parts.
Shelly Brisbin [00:16:26]:
First of all, there's the I know what's going on on the screen. I can identify it as something and I can issue a command. But the AI part of it actually interacting with it and saying, okay, I have this. Going to combine it with this other information and do something agentically that feels like an entirely separate thing. It doesn't mean it's not going to happen. It just means that voice control probably isn't. This voice control feature probably isn't as sort of immediately revolutionary as some people would like to think.
Leo Laporte [00:16:57]:
So in that video, they show the blind woman putting in a pair of AirPods, right? And I think some of us thought, oh, is that going to be the AirPods with cameras? She still has to pull out her phone because it isn't. But do you think that will be something Apple will talk about?
Shelly Brisbin [00:17:16]:
I don't know if it'll happen right away. I mean, whenever they're ready to do AirPods with cameras or eventually when we get glasses. I mean, I think glass is going to. Is going to be the real thing when that happens, because people are already, people in the blind community are already using the Meta AI glasses and a lot of people sort of hold their nose and are like, well, it's not great, but it does provide me navigational assistance. There's even a Meta AI sort of app ecosystem. There are several apps out there that take advantage of the Meta AI glasses and you can download them and have them do specific things. Some of them are navigation apps, some of them are image identification apps. The Meta AI glasses will do that on their own.
Shelly Brisbin [00:17:52]:
But, for example, there's a be my AIs integration and Aira integration, both of which are designed to help describe your physical environment using the, the glasses. And so that, that app ecosystem is super interesting. And I would be watching to see whether that kind of thing happens when we get Apple smart glasses or when we get AirPods with camera cameras.
Jason Snell [00:18:11]:
One of the points I really like
Leo Laporte [00:18:12]:
is that Meta is going to announce at least two or three more pairs of Meta glasses this year. So they're moving fast. Apple, you know, which want, who wants to play in that space, is probably feeling the heat. Go ahead, Jason.
Jason Snell [00:18:25]:
Apple's moving now, right? Like Mark Gurman's reported, like, and John Ternus is into this and they are, they are actively working now on this and going down the glasses path. I just wanted to point out that, you know, a lot of what we're talking about here, and Shelly knows this is the Apple trick, right, where they're like, oh, there's this amazing thing that happens with your AirPods when you hold your iPhone out. It's like what they. When they were working on the Vision Pro and they had all this AR stuff and it was all like, look, you can hold up your camera and then see AR on the iPhone screen. And you're like, well, yeah, but that's not really ar, it's you looking at your iPhone screen. But, but it was their way of describing what they were working on without announcing a future product. And I feel like with the, all of the sort of like, look what you can do holding out your iPhone camera and getting descriptions, it's their way of saying obviously we're going to be doing this with some other cameras that you don't have to hold out like this. But we can't announce those yet.
Jason Snell [00:19:21]:
So just think about this now and you know, we, we will get there. I, we've discussed here. I don't know what those cameras on the AirPods are going to be able to see and if they're going to be useful or not, but certainly John Ternus is driving them toward having something you can put on the, on the front of your face. And Mark Gurman this week. Mark Gurman has, he has some interesting takes, I will say but I think he made a point this week and I've seen it in a couple other places which is you, you discount Apple's ability to affect the glasses market at your peril because the example he gave was watches. He's like, you know, Rolex is fine but on this sort of like he mentioned fossil, like this kind of mid level of watches, it's been rough because a lot of people who used to buy those watches buy smartwatches now and a lot of those smartwatches, most of them are Apple watches. And what he said was, you know, don't, he's not saying they will win but like there is a possibility here that Apple rolling in here could potentially take this kind of mid range of people who wear glasses and just convert that, convert it all from regular glasses to Apple glasses and the competitors, I don't, I wouldn't predict that it's going to be easy for them but Apple's track record here is actually pretty good. So I wouldn't discount them either.
Jason Snell [00:20:44]:
And if John Ternus thinks this is a priority, I think that that shows you that Apple is making it a priority since he's, he's going to be the boss.
Andy Ihnatko [00:20:50]:
I agree with that. Just the only thing that I would add is that the United States has a, Apple has a different kind of stranglehold on the US Market than it does worldwide. And if Apple does what they're probably going to do, which is to say, no, there's no actual technical reason why you have to have an iPhone in order to use our glasses, but we're going to make sure that you absolutely have to have an iPhone to use our glasses. Even if you have an iPad, even if you have a MacBook, even if you have. No matter what, we are not going to let you activate these unless you're activating them to an iPhone. And if you don't like that, then you should probably switch to iPhone. So, so, but that's just a factor. Again, I do agree with the idea that discount Apple at your peril.
Andy Ihnatko [00:21:30]:
I don't think it's exactly the same as watches, but I do think that yeah, all things are possible, including Apple becoming just like just a player amongst many players because other players are going to add more freedom and more flexibility all the way to. Apple's going to have to add way, way, way more styles of frames way, way faster than Google is going to have to for Android xr because more people are going to be using these even just in the United States. If everyone who has an iPhone, who wears glasses or sunglasses is going to want to have at least one pair of smart glasses, they're absolutely going to want them to be made by Apple.
Jason Snell [00:22:10]:
Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Shelly Brisbin [00:22:12]:
And I also think that one of the advantages Apple has stored for smart glasses specifically in the accessibility world and probably applies everywhere else as well, is just the lack of friction. I mean, the Meta AI glasses work fine. You can use apps with them. I've been on some beta apps and I've had rough goes with those as well as some shipping apps. But generally speaking it's been possible to make them work to the extent that they can. But I feel like that's an advantage Apple's always going to have. As Andy says, especially when you have an iPhone, when you put those glasses on, they're just going to do a thing that you expect them to do, whether it's for accessibility, whether it's navigate or image identification or whether it's provide you information. And I think now that we've meta has sort of to some extent paved the way.
Shelly Brisbin [00:22:56]:
But like the modern kind of glasses that you have don't necessarily have a display in your eyeballs. The display is looking out from your eyes, you know, just through the glasses and your phone. I feel like that gives so much more opportunity than you had to have than back when you had the Google Glass where you had to rely on a display that was embedded in the glasses, which for an access point of view, just as, you know, kind of terrible. But I, I look forward to it both as a general Apple enthusiast and as an accessibility advocate.
Leo Laporte [00:23:26]:
So it's interesting because Meta doesn't have a phone, but of course the meta glasses pair to your iPhone. Do you think that's not as good as Apple will be able to do?
Shelly Brisbin [00:23:36]:
Just I. Right. Because Apple is Apple. I mean, I can't tell you how and why, but I think friction is going to be a huge win for Apple if they get this done. If they get a product out there that is Apple, like they just being Apple is probably going to get them a long, long way.
Jason Snell [00:23:55]:
That's what I was going to say is I know we talk on this show a lot about like, oh, I don't know, beta's way ahead. But like historically Apple is so big and their brand is so powerful that Apple tends to be a validator of markets. And this goes back to what Andy said is Apple may not not end up dominating the glasses market or anything like that. Right. Not even close. But if there is a sort of tech glasses category that takes over a lot of the glasses market, eventually what you may see is that Apple's entry into it becomes the kind of the validator of that market because it is such a powerful brand because it's so, got so much strength, especially in the US to start the ball rolling and being behind. It doesn't factor into that necessarily because sometimes what you need, you've got the early adopters, the early people who are out there, like Mehta, who are like, let's try this, let's see. People are experimenting with that.
Jason Snell [00:24:49]:
But when Apple rolls in, I think a lot of people are like, oh, I get it now because Apple's explained it to me and they might not all end up using the Apple products, but I think it also just kind of primes the market. And there are plenty of examples. I keep thinking about how Apple was not even close to being first with a NFC payment system, but Apple entering and pushing hard on Apple pay, got a lot of, of companies in the US to upgrade their equipment and start accepting NFC payments. And now, you know, you don't have to use Apple Pay, but it helped push it. And I, I do think that. I agree, Mark Gurman may be going a little too far here, but I think there's something there about like, and also there's prescriptions involved, which makes this way more complicated then although retail glass sales now has made it less complicated than it used to be. It's easier to buy a pair of glasses than it used to be. But like just that validation.
Jason Snell [00:25:40]:
If Apple comes in hard, they're going to do a lot of effort and use their brand to Prove why you might want a product like this and the whole potential market for that product category does benefit from Apple being there.
Leo Laporte [00:25:54]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. Mark said Apple. This is his Power on newsletter from Sunday Apple to overhaul iOS 27 Siri AI features. Here's a first peek and he had images. Actually these were renders generated by Bloomberg from the descriptions that his sources. This information is viewed by Bloomberg and people with knowledge of the company's plans. Why asked not to be identified, blah blah, blah. Do you think this is pretty accurate? I mean we're awfully close to the release date.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:25]:
It does line up with the teases that Apple's been making about All Systems Glow. It lines up with other rumors.
Leo Laporte [00:26:34]:
It just came out, right. All Systems Glow.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:37]:
That that's going to be basically your cue that Siri is now up active and listening to you for a conversation, for an AI session.
Leo Laporte [00:26:46]:
So you interpret that as the glow signals that Siri's listening and that will be everywhere on the iPhone now.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:53]:
Yeah, that the Halo is going to be like more specific. And again, I do like the idea that he's putting forward that the dynamic island is going to be your point of contact for Siri. That this isn't just something where you hold down a button and your entire screen goes kerflowy and turns into an AI thing. But that conceptually that AI, when you want AI, AI is out of the way, but when you reach for it, it's going to be right there. It seems like a very good paradigm. Particularly.
Leo Laporte [00:27:22]:
Can I just point out how brilliant it is for Apple to take a. To take a lemon and make lemonade. I mean they've really turned that Dynamic island, which was really a necessity from hardware to have those cameras there and made it actually a virtue.
Andy Ihnatko [00:27:38]:
It's genius.
Leo Laporte [00:27:39]:
It's amazing.
Andy Ihnatko [00:27:40]:
I would miss it if it went away. And actually we, we haven't heard that much. No matter what the hardware maker about the idea of getting rid of the notch. Getting rid of under. Yeah, there are a lot of. They got rid of like under display fingerprint sensors. There's some other technology for under display cameras. Whether or not Apple can make all of those face ID emitters and sensors work through the screen is another thing entirely.
Andy Ihnatko [00:28:08]:
I mean they could probably just create a dynamic island, virtual Dynamic island in front of the sensors when they need to, I guess. But yeah, I would actually miss it. I think that's one of the most brilliant things that Apple has come up with, user interface wise. And again, it was a way to basically get people to stop complaining about how we paid for a 6.4 inch screen and you've stolen 196 pixels of that display from us. And how do you intend to compensate us for that? Like, okay, we can either compare you a check for 73 cents or we can give you this nice feature where every time that you're looking up for something that's in progress, such as an Uber that's coming your way or a song that you're playing or whatever it will, you know exactly where to go because that's what you associate that information with.
Leo Laporte [00:28:56]:
What else? Let's see. The Siri revamp, the biggest in the assistance history, 15 year history, will be released to consumers as early as September, obviously iOS27. And this will be Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook's final major product launch. Actually. Really look like John Ternus in some ways I think it'll be Ternus that'll be announcing it on stage. But I guess. How much will we see of Tim Cook on Monday?
Jason Snell [00:29:23]:
This is one of those keynote bingo questions. He is the CEO and this is probably his last major Apple event. So I think we will see him do an introduction. I think the question is, is there a passing of the baton? Maybe even literally, like, wouldn't it be cool if both of them came out
Leo Laporte [00:29:38]:
and said in unison, good morning?
Shelly Brisbin [00:29:41]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [00:29:41]:
Yeah. Or maybe, maybe it's a. I mean, I would, I would probably pitch that they do it as a bit where they're backstage and, and, and you go, John. No, you go, yeah, Tim, it's your last one. Like you, you wait, John. Or whatever it is, that's too. But I think, I think we'll see them both. I do.
Jason Snell [00:30:00]:
But I think that this is Tim Cook having his last hurrah as well.
Andy Ihnatko [00:30:05]:
I think.
Shelly Brisbin [00:30:06]:
Just hope they're not racing cars or flying planes. I hate that stuff.
Andy Ihnatko [00:30:10]:
I want, I want them to see if they could license a song from the Sondheim estate where they, they come out and start singing like from. From Company Side by side. And then, and then John Shrugie comes, jumps in by side, everything side by side. And the hardware guy by side.
Jason Snell [00:30:27]:
You're trying to tune the day after the Tony Awards.
Shelly Brisbin [00:30:29]:
That would be good. Andy.
Andy Ihnatko [00:30:30]:
I like it because I have an idyllic idea of what the future can be and I'm unsatisfied with the present that we have.
Shelly Brisbin [00:30:38]:
Well, and keep in mind, I think the sort of handoff stuff for the bingo card is very interesting. But keep in mind that more and more of these keynotes are anchored by the CEO. But more and more of them are done by other people on the team. And so we'll probably see them at the beginning or the end or the beginning and the end. But most of the rest of it is going to be all of those guys and gals who run the departments.
Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
Yeah. See if the template that Google had at last and then Google IO a couple of weeks ago where Sundar Pichai came out very briefly.
Jason Snell [00:31:07]:
Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:31:08]:
He didn't even close. The. I was surprised that the keynote ended because I was. You're used to the CEO coming back to just wrap things up. But ended with, by the way, robots will take over the world. We think. We think it's going to happen in the next three years. Have a great time.
Shelly Brisbin [00:31:20]:
We don't need to see you. We have the robots.
Jason Snell [00:31:22]:
See you later.
Leo Laporte [00:31:23]:
Sundar was so low energy, I thought, oh, he's kind of depressed. He doesn't have anything to say. He's going to hang out.
Shelly Brisbin [00:31:28]:
He's been replaced by AI already.
Andy Ihnatko [00:31:30]:
He's tired from counting the money. But actually the other day I was thinking that of course, the last time we had a CEO handoff, Steve, of course, was in no shape to be part of an event or part of a transition. It would be interesting. I'm not predicting anything, but it would be interesting if they were to arrange for Tim to have sometime in August to have his own. Not a. Not an event, but a video in which, like he basically is, well, this is the last time I'm going to be speaking to this community and the world of our products as CEO. He did that as a letter a couple months ago. That might suffice.
Andy Ihnatko [00:32:11]:
And it's kind of hard for those of us who've been watching Apple for so long to imagine a CEO doing something so personal. But it was also maybe 10 years ago, tough to predict whether or not Apple was going to celebrate a 50th anniversary of the company in any sort of a visual way other than, hey, wow, we've got new watch band 50th anniversary. Hey, wow, we've got. We've got this thing on our site with a couple pictures on it. I don't think that anybody might have predicted that they were going to do something as spectacular as weeks of events culminating with Paul McCartney doing his full arena.
Leo Laporte [00:32:42]:
Yeah, that was amazing at Apple Park.
Andy Ihnatko [00:32:44]:
So anything's possible.
Leo Laporte [00:32:45]:
Here's the renders from Gurman's newsletter of how the dynamic island interacts. He also says, which is interesting. Yes, you'll still be able to say, hey, Shlomo. Or actually you won't even have to say hey anymore. Or hold down the iPhone's power button. But there's also Apple plans to let users swipe down from the top center of the phone anywhere in the system to launch a new search or ask interface. So we already have that as search.
Andy Ihnatko [00:33:11]:
Yeah, I was wondering if that was. Makes things more complicated because now the swipe. Swipe down now has two different modes. Excuse me, two different actions. If you swipe from the corner. Exactly. You swipe down from the corner, you'll get all those settings. If you swipe down from the middle now you're going to get Siri and also notifications.
Andy Ihnatko [00:33:31]:
Or it's the sort of thing where either we'll get used to it faster than we think or we'll think, oh God, did we really want to start to make. This is like the multi touch version of corded keyboards where you have to start to remember there's nothing instinctive that says notifications are a center, settings are upper right hand corner. You just have to learn what the difference is.
Leo Laporte [00:33:54]:
This is the great challenge is to add features.
Shelly Brisbin [00:33:57]:
One more swipe for voiceover users, which already exists. So it's like, oh no, another swipe. Permutation.
Leo Laporte [00:34:03]:
So you're already suffering.
Shelly Brisbin [00:34:05]:
Yeah, suffering might be stretching it, but still.
Leo Laporte [00:34:10]:
Okay.
Andy Ihnatko [00:34:11]:
There's nothing wrong with having people learn stuff, but sometimes it's like, are you just trying to solve a problem by putting it on us or are you
Shelly Brisbin [00:34:18]:
basically, is it as intuitive as it could be?
Andy Ihnatko [00:34:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:34:21]:
Well, get ready. So this is what Gurman says, and again, this is just rumor, but this menu also shows the same interface in the current iOS that displays Siri suggestions. Right. This is, I guess, replacing that, which includes eight frequently used app functions. There's also a panel for showing weather in the morning or evening. From there, users can launch apps, start text messages, ask about the weather, add calendar appointments, search through notes, trigger shortcuts within apps, or search the web using Apple's new AI powered search systems, which competes with tools like Perplexity. Results are displayed in a rich text card that pops out of the dynamic island. It's hard to do this in words, I guess.
Leo Laporte [00:34:56]:
Maybe once we see it, it won't be so complicated. Users can then swipe down further to open a chatbot style conversation inside the Siri app.
Jason Snell [00:35:05]:
I think that's the most exciting thing, honestly about this is the idea that you would have a Siri interaction that involves understanding the context of the conversation, potentially that you could refer back to earlier Conversations, because that's part of this idea too, that basically everything that we are used to now from AI chatbots and have great value because you can have different conversations with different contexts and move among them. Imagine the ability to also have a back and forth with Siri where you could say, you know, I'm, you know, I'm thinking of going to see this movie, what are the showtimes? And then like come back later and say, why don't we book that 8:30 and it knows what movie you're talking about and what showtime you're talking about, instead of saying, I don't understand because it has a memory that's, you know, 10 minutes long or two minutes long. So having again, table stakes for, for chatbots these days, but Siri has never been able to do it. So I think that's really important for them to get there. And, and more important to that, how do you build that in a nice way into the default iPhone interface? Right. Because it's one thing to say, well, you know, if you care enough, download an app and then open the app and then have that conversation and all that. But like, where do you put that to have it be globally available in your os?
Andy Ihnatko [00:36:17]:
Yeah. They also need to make sure that they don't waste a lot of time securing people's loyalty and faith in Siri as their point of contact for such things. Because already we're seeing Gemini Sparks are starting to. People who pay the most for the top tier Gemini subscription now have access to Sparks. And it turns out that the thing kind of works already. And so if people are. You want Apple to get into a position where people are excited to start using the brand new thing that Apple is providing them with as just a basic feature of the phone. You don't want them to, you don't want to approach them saying, here is a thing that is not.
Andy Ihnatko [00:36:56]:
Might not be as good as what you've been trusting for the past nine to 11 months, but we hope you'll give it a try. And then if you give it a try, we hope that you will find it an okay substitution and worth building a personal relationship with this one after spending so much time developing a personal relationship with the other one.
Leo Laporte [00:37:12]:
It's interesting because, you know, I'm a heavy AI user and part of it is just to keep up on what's going on and try a lot of different interfaces and stuff. And that seems to me that's where everything is going with AI these days is this notion of an agent that has memory, has knowledge of Context that carries that with it. Because up until recently when you started a new chat in Perplexity or chatgpt, it would just be, hey, I know nothing, what do you want? It'd be start from scratch. They've slowly added memory. But the people who are working with OpenClaw and I'm using Hermes really have elaborate memory systems that allow it to have a lot more context and that makes it hugely more valuable. If they can manage that with Siri, manage it in a private way, manage it so that your phone now carries your context, carries information about who you are, what you need, that could be hugely valuable. That's what a personal assistant is.
Shelly Brisbin [00:38:12]:
I mean, and another thing that I guess is table stakes for chatbots. If you use the same one on multiple devices, but the ability to sync your Siri conversations across devices so that I can be on my Mac one minute and my phone the next, I think that's going to be a win for a lot of people who may not have gotten into AI, who have only done it sporadically. If you say, well, no, you, you can start a conversation on your Mac about going to that movie, but then later on when you're on the way, you can refer back to that on your phone. Hey, that's actually useful information that I can surface extremely quickly.
Leo Laporte [00:38:43]:
Yeah, that's why I run my agent on a central server that everything else connects to so that there is a single source of truth. And Apple must maybe use icloud for that. They'll have to do something like that. So there's a single source of truth.
Shelly Brisbin [00:38:58]:
It's got to be icloud or it's got to be some other seamless way because most people don't run a server. Those are not words that 99% of the people speak.
Leo Laporte [00:39:07]:
And I wouldn't expect them to.
Shelly Brisbin [00:39:08]:
Right, of course not.
Leo Laporte [00:39:09]:
Right.
Jason Snell [00:39:09]:
That's the secret sauce that Apple can add, is trying to find a way to add that connectivity.
Leo Laporte [00:39:12]:
And they could do it already to
Jason Snell [00:39:15]:
Andy's point that, you know, I think what I would like to see, I think this is where they're headed, is a multi tier strategy where they need to ship a good assistant in the box from Apple, even if it's powered ultimately by Gemini. They need to, because you can't ship it as an empty box. You can't say, well, plug in somebody's AI here. They have to do it and they have to have it be decent. They have to have it be that if you never download another AI app, you never sign up for another API, whatever it is, that you can get some AI goodness out of your phone to solve problems that you have. But the other part of that strategy that they seem to be heading down, which is great, is if you are a fan of some other AI provider, you can link that provider and use that as a source for your, for your requests. And I like that idea. I think that that is.
Jason Snell [00:40:05]:
I don't think Apple needs to hide the competition, especially because nobody listen. I mean, forget it, it's not hidden, everybody knows that it's there. But if you work well with it and say, look, so many people, because this is kind of Apple's game, it's like, why there's no such thing as Sherlocking in my mind, which is like Apple's version is always for the masses. It's always for the 70, 80, 90%, and then they're the people who want more. And that's why, you know, if you write an app and Apple completely replaces your feature set and you're completely hosed, you know, that's a problem because you did the obvious part. And the edge cases are where there's power. And the same goes for this AI stuff is Apple needs to be good. And yes, there are going to be people who say, this is not enough, I want more.
Jason Snell [00:40:47]:
And whatever percentage that is, if they can say, great, you can do that too. Go over to Claude, go over to Chat, GPT. We're all, we're fine with that. You can add those in here too. It's all running on iPhone. And then, and then they're good. That is phase two. Phase one, though, is table stakes.
Jason Snell [00:41:02]:
It's like, yeah, but the thing that comes out of the box can't be bad, right? It can't. You can't be driving people away to other assistants and making them do the work, but also integrating with the, the other options. I think what we've said all along here is the great hand that Apple holds regarding AI is that they're the platform owner and all of their AI competitors that they have to beat are running apps on their platform. Right? So it's like being a good host for those things is not losing. It's actually kind of a smart thing to do. So I hope we see both of those.
Andy Ihnatko [00:41:34]:
It does.
Leo Laporte [00:41:34]:
Sherlock. A lot of people in the, in the images that Mark Gurman put in his Power on newsletter, there's an example that clearly Sherlocks Google's news, what happened in tech and world news today, and what are the biggest stories I should know about? You don't go To Google News, Apple presents you with this very similar grid it Sherlocks. There are a number of apps that tell you what that plant is, what that flower is. Siri will do that now. In fact, Siri is integrated tightly into the camera app, according to Gurman. These are all imagined, by the way. These are all imagined renders from text descriptions that Mark got for people. Some of these renders might be influenced by what is out there in the world now.
Leo Laporte [00:42:11]:
Or so they may not.
Jason Snell [00:42:13]:
They're not screenshots, they're illustrations. But yeah, although, again, I'll say it like Sherlock. Like, again, if you're Sherlocked by a feature that should be a base OS feature, you're not doing it right. If your app, all it does is the table stakes, then you're going to get killed. Yeah, but what ends up happening is a lot of those apps end up being like, well, yeah, Apple does 80% of it, but like our users are the ones who want to do the cool stuff that's on the edges. That's the other 20% and that's, that's great. But also, as a platform owner, you can't sit there and say, well, you know, there's apps that do this, so we don't ever have to do it because most people, most users won't download those apps. But if they're in the camera app or, you know, some other system, then they will use them.
Jason Snell [00:42:53]:
And that's what, that's what Apple needs to try to do is please those people. That's. While we're, we're all tech nerds here and we get so focused on, on the edges. And that's great because there's cool stuff happening on the edges. But one of the reasons Apple doesn't always do what we want them to do is because Apple isn't thinking about the edges, they're thinking about everybody that's kind of in the middle there and making, you know, it's a mainstream. It's like saying like a niche cable TV show versus a big network show that's number one. Like, you know, Chicago Fire. Is that a show now? Or whatever is like a lot less cutting edge.
Jason Snell [00:43:25]:
Right. But lots of people watch it. The tracker. Right. Like, people watch it, it's got, it's got big ratings, even though it's not, you know, an Apple TV show. And, and as a platform owner, that is sort of in general what Apple has to do. It's a kind of crowd pleasing.
Leo Laporte [00:43:40]:
Making Stiller not the David E. Kelly of, of AI.
Jason Snell [00:43:44]:
Yeah, I would say, like I would
Andy Ihnatko [00:43:46]:
say that the Tim Hyde, Dick Wolf of Dick Wolf.
Jason Snell [00:43:50]:
Yeah, I mean, I mean we could take it too far because Apple does try to do quality. But the point is more that Apple is thinking about the 90% of the users of the iPhone, which is a lot of people who are not so technical that they're going to do what we require. And, and this I firmly believe is the core problem with Siri that they have to address, which is yes, you can flee to a chat bot. That's better. Yes, you configure your action button to get it to work right. You can do all of those things. But how many people first off don't do it and are just frustrated or have been driven to do it because the Siri experience is so bad and that reflects badly on Apple. So they got to make that default experience good, even if they're also saying yes.
Jason Snell [00:44:31]:
And you can add Claude if you want because a lot of people don't want.
Leo Laporte [00:44:35]:
So this is an interesting conversation actually going on in our YouTube chat. Gixer Scott says they can't compete with the foundation models. David says they don't need to especially. And then says Ahatha Beth, if you can plug in someone else's models.
Shelly Brisbin [00:44:51]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [00:44:51]:
Their foundation model is, is. Is Gemini.
Leo Laporte [00:44:54]:
Gemini, yeah. And if you can, as, as the rumor has it, also use anthropic, also use OpenAI, you, you could do whatever you want.
Shelly Brisbin [00:45:03]:
Well, but in first, first table stakes is Siri has to not be a joke because the thing talk about things that are mainstream. Siri being a joke is a mainstream thing. We may have very specific tech nerd reasons that we think that we know that Siri has let us down. But if people on whether they're late night Talk shows or YouTube channels or in comedy clubs or whatever, if they can say Siri, am I right? That's a big problem for Apple. And if Apple can somehow sort that out, whether it means compromising what we models or whether it means providing multiple models, whatever they have to do to make Siri not be a joke, once they get that sorted out, I think that's only a win for them. But they have to get there first. And that's what this year seems like it's all about.
Leo Laporte [00:45:45]:
You could argue that's what killed the Newton is joking about the Doones break, joking about Newton's handwriting. Everybody decided, yeah, it's no good. And that was that.
Andy Ihnatko [00:45:54]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:45:55]:
But the question is, have people decided that about Syria? Can their minds be changed?
Andy Ihnatko [00:46:01]:
But Apple also has a big advantage in that the advantage of an app that comes pre installed on the device cannot be overestimated. It is just people are willing to use a rippingly subpar app if that's the one that just simply was pre installed. And they're not necessarily a, they're not necessarily aware that there are alternative email clients or alternative web browsers or alternative calendar apps, even if they are particularly available, that those exist. They're going to have to find, they're going to have to really hit their head hard on the ceiling of whatever the default app is, the pre installed app is before they're going to even start looking at alternatives to those sort of things. And if the alternative is something that costs them money, oh my God, that's strike three. So yeah, Apple does have an advantage that they are free to squander and I hope that they do not squander it.
Leo Laporte [00:46:51]:
Well, we'll find out. It's only a week away. We will be covering Apple's keynote. Micah Sargent and I will be signing on right at the beginning and we've got our bingo cards in front of us. I'm sure you too. Do you bring a bingo card to the Apple campus with you, Jason, or do you just have it in the car?
Jason Snell [00:47:08]:
I don't. I do admit that I will look up the Mike Hurley and I just did our draft and I will look at the draft scorecard a little bit to see if I'm winning or losing so I can cheer on when you know, somebody mentions agentic. I think that's one of Mike's picks is somebody says the word agentic right and it's like that's great. Say the secret word, win $100. So I do a little bit of that. But. But yeah, 10:00am Pacific on Monday. So what a way to start your week.
Leo Laporte [00:47:35]:
We'll be. I should just as a program note, we won't be streaming that in public as we do with all of our other shows only because Apple has in the past taken us down and given us Strikes on YouTube. So that'll be club members only. If you're not in the club. YouTube.com, sorry twit.com club twit. You can join the club and then just quit a month later if you want. But it would be nice if you stayed. We would like that.
Leo Laporte [00:47:59]:
Actually. I think we have a two week trial so you can even do that for free. TWiT TV Club TWiT. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Christina Warren has the week off. She is at Microsoft Build, but we are so thrilled to have Shelly Brisbin with us from the TechSoup standard radio. That's why she sounds so good. She's got radio voice.
Leo Laporte [00:48:20]:
I love it. Also Andy Ihnatko and Jason Snell. More from Mark Gurman's Power on newsletter. Apple's going to be testing naturally. He said it may not arrive in the first version of iOS3 2027 in September, but they'll be testing natural language prompt based editing of photos so you can ask via voice or text for specific edits like cropping or changing colors. Can you do that now on the pixel, Andy?
Andy Ihnatko [00:48:47]:
I'm sorry, repeat that.
Leo Laporte [00:48:49]:
Text based prompting of photo edits.
Andy Ihnatko [00:48:52]:
Yes you can. That's built into the photos app and it gets a little bit more sophisticated as you go.
Leo Laporte [00:48:58]:
So maybe Gemini already has that and they're just going to apply it.
Andy Ihnatko [00:49:01]:
I don't know there.
Leo Laporte [00:49:03]:
Also, and this is the big news we talked about this last week, planning a revamped shortcuts app that lets people create automations using natural language. That will be huge, I think.
Andy Ihnatko [00:49:15]:
Yeah. Again, the sooner we get away from the weird agentic where people associate with openclaw and we start to get into well what if your chatbot can actually do stuff for you that you describe that's going to be better because that's a feature that people are going to sort of trust. Particularly if Apple spends a lot of time explaining here's what the guardrails are and here's why it's not going to be able to delete every single one of your emails and or repeat to your boss the complaints that you've been making when you were having a therapy session with Siri and email that as
Leo Laporte [00:49:47]:
all blast if you are creating your bingo card or your draft. Bloomberg also says there are AI created wallpapers, a system wide grammar checker for text input. It another Sherlocked app revamped Image Playground app that offers improved quality. Well, couldn't be any worse.
Jason Snell [00:50:06]:
Yeah, yeah, good.
Leo Laporte [00:50:07]:
And Genmoji custom emoji.
Shelly Brisbin [00:50:10]:
Well take one out of four of those. Three of the four sound pretty lame, but yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:50:15]:
Okay. Which one do you like?
Shelly Brisbin [00:50:17]:
I like the grammar checker. I don't get the point of the other. I mean not that I desperately desire one, but if you're, you know, that's one that seems like it actually has some value.
Jason Snell [00:50:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:50:26]:
You know I pay for Grammarly so.
Jason Snell [00:50:28]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:50:29]:
Yeah, right. I mean it's bad news for Superhuman, but. Which is a sponsor by the way. But it's funny what I think a Lot of normal people are aware of is Genmoji and Image Playground. That's Apple, right?
Andy Ihnatko [00:50:42]:
Yeah, but that's. But can they compare with things like nanobanan and other tools where. No, I mean the built in features. Features in Google Photos is good, but especially with the latest version, it is literally the. Why. Why would you use Photoshop when you could just simply say increase the contrast of the sunset so that you can see the clouds more and also remove that, the third guy from the left and scooch everybody over again and it just simply works. That's really. That's not just congratulations, we are rebuilding.
Andy Ihnatko [00:51:13]:
We just relaunched all of our AI. That's not the stuff that you do with you first relaunch an AI. That's when you have been, you've been launching stuff to the moon and now you're basically preparing to go to Mars because the moon stuff has been working so great. The technology is so mature.
Leo Laporte [00:51:29]:
Yeah. All right, well, it's going to be an exciting WWDC definitely. Are the betas. We're seeing some betas now. 26. 6. I just saw a very brief.001 update that apparently fixed a charging issue or something like that with the iPhone. I haven't applied it yet and I don't.
Andy Ihnatko [00:51:51]:
Yeah, there were a couple of very minor things. Also there's a problem. There was a minor bug with M5 based machines that I didn't get too deep into it, but supposedly something that really only really affects people in enterprise. So if you are an effective, an effective, a affected party, you'd be very interested. Otherwise it's just, you know, good for them, feel good for them.
Leo Laporte [00:52:15]:
So we'll see 27 iOS 27 previewed on Monday. Mac OS 27 Big Bear. I don't think they're going to call it Big Bear, but I wish they would.
Andy Ihnatko [00:52:25]:
Big Bear. Oh God. We're going to hear a million Duh Bears names. Our Duh Bears,
Leo Laporte [00:52:33]:
all the other 27 OSes. Now typically, Jason, there's a developer preview immediately, right?
Jason Snell [00:52:42]:
Yeah, there's usually a developer beta one that will be that week, maybe even Monday afternoon, which even the bravest among us should resist strongly. Unless you've literally put it on your second iPhone. You're testing iPhone. If you, if you don't have a testing iPhone, don't do it. Like just don't do it because it will be broken, it will be busted and then, you know, every three or four weeks thereafter through the summer they will do, you know, maybe two, three, four weeks. They'll do other developer beta releases, and usually in July, they do a public beta. Public beta is a signal that Apple is not going to destroy everybody's devices. And so the general public, who's brave, can install that.
Jason Snell [00:53:33]:
So be warned that, that, you know, if you don't have like on a Mac, you could do it on like an external drive or something, but if it's like an iPad or an iPhone, just don't do it. Unless you have another device that is your test device, which, you know, developers have those. Journalists have those that. Yeah, because that first developer beta is busted and you get real excited. You're like, oh, but I want to use the thing. And it's like, yeah, that feature might be there, or it might be there, but busted. And all the other things that you use your phone for might also be broken. And the saddest thing is when somebody has flown out to California for the developer conference and gotten real excited and they're at the developer conference and they install it on their phone and now their phone doesn't work and they're in California and they have to fly home and it's like, it's not good.
Shelly Brisbin [00:54:15]:
It shouldn't last.
Leo Laporte [00:54:17]:
What does it sound like you've been bit before, Jason?
Jason Snell [00:54:20]:
I know people who have been because
Shelly Brisbin [00:54:21]:
he lives in California. Hi.
Jason Snell [00:54:23]:
This is, this is my job to express to people the dangers here. I generally have another computer, another device that I can do this on because I don't want to be bitten by it.
Leo Laporte [00:54:35]:
Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:54:36]:
And just to make sure that we're really clear here, we're not talking about, oh, wow, the new smart assistant sometimes screws things up or sends me to Wikipedia. No, we're talking about the phone doesn't work. We're talking about you cannot connect to mobile broadband. That's how. That's, that's the fear that you should have.
Leo Laporte [00:54:54]:
So I'm in danger.
Jason Snell [00:54:56]:
Yeah, No, I know it seems exciting, but, like, watch the screenshots and the screen recordings and stuff like that. Don't do it.
Andy Ihnatko [00:55:05]:
This is when you, you, you bring your oldest child into, into the living room, say son slash daughter. I need that iPhone 15 back because I need a second device to run this thing on. Enjoy, enjoy the, enjoy the, this Google Nexus 5 with a swollen battery from the back of the drawer that you're going to be using for the next two months.
Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
We are not done with 26 though. Their first betas of 266 are out. This will be the last, though. Or will it. Or I don't know, will there be a 26 7.
Jason Snell [00:55:36]:
Sometimes there is an even later one after they ship. It depends. Like they ship this and all that. But it's maintenance at this point. It's like little, little bits, little maintenance just to. Just to park it somewhere safe.
Leo Laporte [00:55:49]:
Will there be any hardware announcements on Monday? Like something that's like a new MacBook or something?
Jason Snell [00:55:55]:
I think the time is right and the topic is right. And remember, we don't have M5 Mac Minis and Mac Studios yet. So the time is right. And again, it's a developer, it's not a hardware show. They don't have to. What I always say is like WWDC is not about hardware, but sometimes there's hardware there anyway.
Leo Laporte [00:56:16]:
Hardware.
Jason Snell [00:56:17]:
They do, they do. And having like a Mac Studio would be a fun thing to throw into the mix. And they could boast about AI use with the Mac Mini. But do they want to ship those products right now when they're struggling to get M5s into other things? I'm not sure they do. That's the part that gives me pause because they totally.
Shelly Brisbin [00:56:36]:
Given all the memory issues.
Jason Snell [00:56:38]:
Exactly.
Shelly Brisbin [00:56:39]:
You're going to developers and you're saying, hi, buy a Mac studio. Except you can't get the gigabyte of RAM that you want.
Jason Snell [00:56:45]:
Right? Right. So they could do it. I think it's non zero, but I think it's more likely that they're just like, not now. Do not do this now. And they don't need to. Right. They don't need to make hardware announcements at WWDC. They just don't.
Jason Snell [00:56:57]:
They can do that later this summer or in the fall. And. And if they're having supply issues with all of these chips, why stoke more demand right now if you can't even supply what you can what you're already.
Shelly Brisbin [00:57:09]:
Unless you wanted to do a slick video about the M6 is coming. Not right now, but it's coming. You know something? No, I don't think so either. But in theory they've done that in the past when they've had a chip that is like in the lab that's about to be put into a Mac. But it seems unlikely.
Jason Snell [00:57:24]:
We're not close to the M6 though.
Andy Ihnatko [00:57:26]:
But also Apple Silicon has always been like a big part of like the sort of like public State of the Union, like flying the flag, trooping colors sort of thing. And when they want. Given that, they are definitely going to want to underscore how great a platform the Mac is for AI, not just for Siri, but also for people who are working on AI or who want to build new models, or who want to build agentic stuff or use it simply as a platform for their own models, they're going to want to basically say, and by the way, we're introducing the new M5 whatever, which has X X times performance for this, X times performance for that. Again, securing the idea that if you are working in AI, not just a user of AI, you don't want to have to mess with a whole bunch of janky Windows or Intel stuff or AMD stuff. You want Apple Silicon powering your jam.
Leo Laporte [00:58:18]:
Should point out that Nvidia was at Computex. Jensen Huang gave a keynote yesterday in Taiwan, which he announced a new chip for PCs. In fact, Microsoft today at Build will probably announce a new Surface laptop aimed directly at Apple. Because the idea of these new chips, these will be designed by MediaTek to incorporate much more AI capability. It's gonna be an RTX Spark PC chip. And Huang said it'll reinvent the PC for the AI era. There will be devices from Dell, hp, Lenovo, Asus, that Microsoft, Surface I mentioned, and msi, all coming this fall. So that is going to be somewhat of a challenge to, I mean, Apple.
Leo Laporte [00:59:07]:
Everybody agrees the Apple Silicon is fantastic for AI. And in fact, even the DJX Spark, the desktops that Nvidia's been offering don't really kind of come that close in some ways to the bandwidth of the Apple Silicon. So this will be interesting. This is going to be a battle. It's a good thing for consumers. There'll be competition.
Andy Ihnatko [00:59:30]:
Absolutely. I mean, it's going to be exciting to see how long the MacBook Neo revolution lasts before other chip makers figure out how to either accelerate their timetable or simply move ahead on the timetable they already had. Dell released a new XPS 13. I think it was just today using Intel's wildcat lake structure CPUs. And again, we'll have to wait and see whether or not they can have the same build quality. But there's definitely. We've also. The Windows side has already sort of demonstrated that if there is one vulnerability they can definitely exploit, it's that, well, we can basically, instead of giving you like one USB C port and a half, we can actually give you two very, very useful ports.
Andy Ihnatko [01:00:15]:
We can give you, or at least before the world turned upside down, maybe we can give you more storage, but we can give you a backlit keyboard, basically. Whereas a couple of months ago it felt like the NEO is just absolutely running the table, because it absolutely did with these new CPUs that are actually designed for that. It's not a case of the Windows platform and the Linux platforms not being able to respond to it so much as. Because they have to get basically three or four cats running in the same direction eventually once they do, yes, maybe they can compete with the neo.
Leo Laporte [01:00:45]:
Well, don't confuse. Okay, so there is, you know, definitely a lot of movement in the PC marketplace to try to make NEO comparable cheap laptops. But this is probably not going to be a competitor for the. This is going to be $5,000. This is a competitor for the M5 Max, the M5 Pro, the M5 Ultra, the M6 when that, if that's comes out. This.
Andy Ihnatko [01:01:07]:
We're talking about Nvidia.
Leo Laporte [01:01:08]:
Yeah, the RTX Spark is going to be. We don't, we don't know what pricing is going to be but it is going to be very, presumably very expensive. And you know, the device he showed had 128 gigs of RAM. So that by itself is going to double the price. They're really aiming these though at he says it's going to launch a new era of agentic computers, agentic laptops. And I think that's very interesting for those of us who cover AI, I think that that's going to be very interesting and will. I believe they're looking at the sales of Mac Minis and Mac Studios and saying, you know, we want some of that business. He held up a couple of laptops playing video games.
Leo Laporte [01:01:52]:
You know, they were definitely aiming, I think anyway, aiming directly at Apple with these and these new MediaTek processors. Traditional app centric PCs turns into agentic AI. Personal computers is what Jensen Huang said.
Andy Ihnatko [01:02:11]:
I mean, never bet against Nvidia, but I wonder how far off we are from people just simply trusting a voice to a computer with no interface if that's one of the directions that are available.
Leo Laporte [01:02:23]:
Unfortunately, the interface seems to be Windows, which is definitely a deal breaker for me. I don't care how great the Surface is, I ain't running Windows. If I could run Linux, maybe. So Apple does still have this advantage of Mac os, which is a huge advantage. Apple by the way, the stock market today reacted fairly poorly to this. Although I don't know if you can trust the stock market as being an indicator to anything. Nvidia stock is down, Microsoft stock is down, down a lot and Apple stock is up a lot. That typically you want to buy on the rumor and sell on the news.
Leo Laporte [01:02:57]:
So that may be what we're seeing, right? I don't know. I think it's Gonna be. Look, this is good. You want competition and if the RTX Spark competes with the iPhone or the Mac, that's great. We shall see. We shall see. Anything else we're going to be looking for? What was your draft? What were your draft picks, Jason?
Jason Snell [01:03:24]:
Oh, geez. What did I, what did I pick here?
Leo Laporte [01:03:27]:
You published that, right?
Jason Snell [01:03:28]:
Upgrade cards is the website Upgrade cards I picked Photos app gets. Gets new AI editing tools. More third party AI support in the OS. Not just OpenAI shortcuts gets AI powered shortcuts creation.
Leo Laporte [01:03:44]:
Now do you guys work it out? So like Mike says, well, are you gonna wreck, are you gonna talk about the photos app? Oh, I won't say that we have
Jason Snell [01:03:49]:
a list from which we pick but ah, you, you don't. We alternate our picks. So. So yes, he's gonna have, you know, John Turnus appears as one of his picks and, and improve genmoji quality. Right. Like every time one of these comes off you're like, yeah. Somebody says agentic. He's like, yes, because that's a question.
Jason Snell [01:04:08]:
Digging. Oh, I've got Mike Rockwell. I think Mike Rockwell will appear at some point in this.
Leo Laporte [01:04:12]:
Oh, I like that.
Jason Snell [01:04:13]:
He got put in charge of Siri. So I think he will appear and I am. It's a Where's Waldo situation. I have picked that, that little finder mascot that they have in all those TikTok videos will make a cameo appearance somewhere peeking over the corner. And it's a keynote draft. So basically if it's, if it's in Developer State of the Union or in a press release or anything like that doesn't count. It's what's in that streamed keynote which is kind of fun. It, it allows us, I mean just like we're doing here.
Jason Snell [01:04:41]:
It's a framework. The draft is for us to discuss what we think might happen and, and
Leo Laporte [01:04:46]:
who has the California Bear trophy now?
Jason Snell [01:04:48]:
I have the California Bear trophy. We had a sad state of affairs last year where Mark Gurman spoiled the name of macOS right before we were going to draft and so we had to do like a supplementary draft. But this year we've been able to do it where we both picked two California place names and whoever comes geographically closest.
Leo Laporte [01:05:07]:
Oh, that's a good way to do it.
Jason Snell [01:05:09]:
Will win the California Bear trophy, which is a refrigerator magnet, a wooden of a bear.
Leo Laporte [01:05:14]:
So.
Jason Snell [01:05:15]:
But that is the official. Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:05:16]:
Santa Barbara.
Jason Snell [01:05:17]:
I basically got Northern California and Southern California and Mike has Central California. Yeah, I picked Shasta and Santa Barbara. He picked Santa Cruz and Golden Gate.
Leo Laporte [01:05:25]:
Oh, I Like Golden Gate.
Jason Snell [01:05:26]:
I love that name.
Leo Laporte [01:05:27]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:05:29]:
So we'll see how that goes. But that's our little bonus.
Leo Laporte [01:05:32]:
Nobody picked Big Bear.
Jason Snell [01:05:33]:
No, but I get Big Bear because it's in my.
Leo Laporte [01:05:35]:
You would get it. You're closest to Big Bear.
Jason Snell [01:05:37]:
I tried to use my knowledge of my California.
Shelly Brisbin [01:05:40]:
I was gonna say, is Mike gonna come back and say, you know, I only know what the map says. You have integrated life knowledge.
Jason Snell [01:05:46]:
Yeah, that's. That's it. I mean I, I absolutely strategically pick things that would give me all of Northern and Southern California because I want to be.
Leo Laporte [01:05:52]:
Mike will be in much better shape when I. Apple starts using Great Britain.
Jason Snell [01:05:56]:
Oh yeah. Then I mean, Wookie Hole came from
Shelly Brisbin [01:05:58]:
the 17th century or something.
Leo Laporte [01:06:02]:
Mac OS Henry VIII, now that I watch.
Jason Snell [01:06:08]:
Sure.
Leo Laporte [01:06:09]:
Richard III. It's the humpback Mac OS. All right. Okay. So this is interesting. This will be interesting. And I don't want to Andy, turn my back on this idea of these Neo competitors. Do you think this XPS 13, which is 700 bucks, is a reasonable competitor to a Neo?
Andy Ihnatko [01:06:30]:
It's going to depend on. The thing is like there are people who, I wouldn't say like Windows, but switching away from Windows is not as palatable as Mac users think. Everybody Mac users tend to think that every Windows user wants to be a Mac user. That's not. Not really the case. But it does show that there is a long term roadmap that everybody is.
Leo Laporte [01:06:50]:
There is something called Stockholm syndrome. And Windows users.
Jason Snell [01:06:55]:
Hard change is hard.
Andy Ihnatko [01:06:57]:
Exactly. And it also bears thinking that they announced this back in I think January. W. Excuse me, WWDC at ces. And so if you think so if anybody's thinking that, oh wow, look, it only took them about a month and a half to like suddenly roll out a competitor. I don't know, maybe that meant. Maybe it made them realize that we're going to have to make sure that the price point doesn't assume that the cheapest MacBook is going to be $1,100 anymore. But it does mean that this has been a concern for the Windows platform and chip makers all along, that there has to be a way to make quality stuff that takes care of the economically the economy line and the low mid range line and actually the XPS
Leo Laporte [01:07:39]:
line is if you're going to use Windows, probably the. I mean that's my favorite. I love XPS's. I've had owned many of them.
Jason Snell [01:07:46]:
Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:07:46]:
And they're great. But Apple still has the advantage where my God, like every time that every time I think that, wow, that actually looks like a very, very attractive package. And then like, I'll get one in for, for test or like, I'll happen to have experience with one. And like, it's like really like the screen has this, you can, you can bend the display this much. And like, I mean, again, I've got a backpack to the left of me right now that when I'm setting up here for the live stream, it's pretty well full. But I don't worry one bit that my iPad or my MacBook's going to get damaged by the fact that I've got it in a fully loaded backpack on many of these machines. It's like, tell you what, why don't I have a little satchel in addition where that only this laptop comes in. But I'm glad that this, this is something that benefits everybody, accessibility and affordability.
Andy Ihnatko [01:08:35]:
That I'm glad to see that they are feeling the pressure not just to make cheap Windows notebooks, but cheap and good Windows notebooks. And we're seeing the fruits of that.
Leo Laporte [01:08:44]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell and Shelly Brisbin Pill filling in for Christina Warren. According to the information, Apple is going to. This is a report from Aaron Tilly. Renew its push for AI that runs on devices instead of the cloud. That is Apple's sweet spot, of course, but not easy to do. They're squeezing Gemini hard.
Shelly Brisbin [01:09:05]:
Yeah, it was Gemini in there.
Jason Snell [01:09:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:09:07]:
And Google actually has a pretty good small version of Gemini that does fit in a phone. It's also going to continue to run the Google cloud in a licensed version in Apple's data centers.
Jason Snell [01:09:25]:
That's key for Apple. I mean, the privacy issue and also the fact of like in the future, it's hard to imagine Apple silicon is an advantage for them. It's hard to imagine this is not going to continue to be a place where, guess what, chips are going to get better and better. That's going to happen, right? That's going to continue to happen. I don't think that's a big prediction on my part to say chips will get better and better. And so having more AI processing happen, even if it's pre processing or judging where it should go and what model should be used, the more of that stuff that you can have happen on the phone, I think, I think it's probably for the better. I know that there are issues where, like it would be faster to go over the Internet, deal with the latency and have a very fast model act on it on the, on the other side of the Internet than running it on a slower model on a phone. But like it feels tactically for Apple, like having really good models that run on device is an important part of what they're doing.
Jason Snell [01:10:23]:
It's not, it's probably not for a very long time going to be the only thing you're going to want to do. But I think it fits into their privacy conversation and I think they also, it fits into their ability to make really good chips that they should probably have some really good on device models to run on those chips.
Leo Laporte [01:10:39]:
It also fits into the pattern that's going on right now in the AI world which is that it's getting more and more expensive to run AI and running locally is a lot cheaper than running on the cloud.
Shelly Brisbin [01:10:50]:
Well, and I wonder if as a practical matter, since you have multiple models available and since you're perhaps trying to prioritize or to encourage people to use one that runs more better on device, is there a way to give people choice either about the kinds of requests that are made or the scale of them and so that you can say, well you, you could do this on this model that's built, you could do this on device. It's probably faster, it's certainly more private. Or if you want to, you can go out and get information from this other source and that there's some way of grading those options for the user. That is not complicated. Nerdy. I don't know how that looks exactly but it seems like, I mean it's like the different, the whole private cloud compute thing versus just going out to the Internet to to get access. It's also about speed as well as on device processing and privacy.
Andy Ihnatko [01:11:43]:
Yeah, for that matter, this is just something just to occur to me for the first time. Like there, there are indicators at the top of the screen that tell you oh by the way location, location tracking is on, by the way the microphone is on. I wonder, I wonder if Apple would decide that we're going to have a little dot indicator that says that you are using it. You have an AI that's sending data to an AI compute facility that is not controlled by Apple just so that they can be aware of when it's happening, when it's not happening. And also sort of like in a tiny, tiny like 98% user positive 2%. We would really like to make people not inherently trust any operation which is sending data outside of Apple.
Shelly Brisbin [01:12:24]:
That's the positive stuff for Apple. The opportunity is that they could eventually charge for you. You're accessing Something that they control which isn't ideal for a customer. But as AI gets more expensive and as Apple looks for more ways to ring services revenue out of those interactions. But that's what I always thought was going to happen right away with private cloud compute, that they were going to set up a pricing structure and and so I wouldn't be surprised if something like that happened, especially if this catches fire and people are excited about would
Andy Ihnatko [01:12:55]:
probably have to be an Apple Intelligence Pro subscription as opposed to being charged for tokens. I mean already Google's getting a lot of kickback for they didn't actually announce that they were putting new caps on token usage for Gemini Pro subscribers and Gemini Ultra subscribers. But nonetheless people still started realizing discovering that okay, well I'm cut off for the next five hours and also I've been using it so heavily for the past three days, I'm now cut off for the next week. And that was not a thing that happened in the past. They certainly don't want to have a situation where, which is happening at the corporate level where, oh, we just spent $500 million on AI after telling all of our employees to use AI for literally everything as though it costs nothing.
Shelly Brisbin [01:13:36]:
Whoops.
Andy Ihnatko [01:13:36]:
That was a tactical error that we're going to have to explain to our show.
Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
You mentioned this earlier, but I think it might be worth digging a little bit more into it. When Apple released the Apple watch, it really hurt the fancy watch market. It really changed the watch, the wristwatch market dramatically. It introduced wristwatches to a bunch of people who haven't worn wristwatches in years, including me. But it also hurt companies like Swap as well as the high end watch market. Will Apple's glasses do the same thing? This is part of the Power on newsletter this Sunday. Apple believes its strong brands, industrial design and iPhone integration will lead people seeking new regular glasses to spring for an Apple pair instead. And they want to do it at the low end.
Leo Laporte [01:14:25]:
They don't. And that's important because, you know, my glasses man. And the costs have skyrocketed for eyewear. It's almost 1,000 bucks a pair now, including lenses. They're really expensive. If Apple could get in this market at a low cost, it might change everything. He says. Mainstream eyewear companies should be bracing for impact.
Leo Laporte [01:14:50]:
Just as Fossil and Swatch were upended by the Apple Watch, the company's entry into eyewear has a possibility, the potential to fundamentally alter how consumers think about buying glasses. Jason, you're an eyeglasses wearer, as am I. Do you Spend a lot of money on your eyewear.
Jason Snell [01:15:07]:
I mean, yeah, I mean it's prescription and it's got to be. It's gone up a lot, hasn't it, for high index. And I mean I have some, I have some insurance coverage but still it's not, it's not cheap.
Leo Laporte [01:15:16]:
Yeah, I get from Kaiser, I get $1,300 pair of glasses every two years. It does not cover my cost.
Jason Snell [01:15:23]:
Yeah, yeah, same. So yeah, look, this would be an additional area where Apple could come in and eat other companies lunch a little bit. And it was like I was saying earlier, like the Apple Watch is not an ideal comparison but like if you, if you as Apple stake out ground saying, and then for other tech companies too saying actually glasses these days really need to be tech products because reasons.
Leo Laporte [01:15:52]:
And that's the question for correcting your vision anymore.
Jason Snell [01:15:56]:
Right? Because reasons for fashion.
Shelly Brisbin [01:15:58]:
Fashion is a big part.
Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
Fashion is a big one.
Jason Snell [01:16:00]:
Yeah, but, but because reasons. And, and, and I want to say because reasons there because they, the tech companies have to make the case and I think they. Right meta's trying to make it. And Shelly talked about a lot of the great accessibility reasons. I think there probably are reasons where you would, you're having your assistant see what you see could have some real value in terms of wait assistant for these. Yeah. And I think, I think honestly one of the things you're seeing now is a realization that having creepy glasses that peep at people and record things and stuff is not a selling point. But having it be a data source for feeding AI to help you might be a selling point that they're going to try that.
Jason Snell [01:16:37]:
But if they do, you know, and you're Apple and you're looking at the eyeglasses market and you're like, you know, we took how much of the, of the watch market and now we're going to take how much of the glasses market. And even more than that, that if they really do become useful, maybe people start wearing glasses who don't even need glasses because they're useful. This is also why they're working on that little, that little pin pendant thing. Right? It's like what if you, if you make this really great as glasses. But people don't need glasses. What do they do? And the answer is, well, maybe they've got something they can just put on their shirt that sees for them instead.
Leo Laporte [01:17:11]:
And I want the most offensive form. I want something that records audio and video. Video, constantly feeds it to my AI for record.
Shelly Brisbin [01:17:19]:
You're a twitch streamer all of a
Andy Ihnatko [01:17:21]:
Sudden bright LED lights so that make sure you get the highest frame rate and the best.
Shelly Brisbin [01:17:25]:
It's like a strobing light.
Jason Snell [01:17:26]:
I said this years ago and I'm going to be proved a visionary. Smart hats. Smart hats is where it's gonna deal with.
Leo Laporte [01:17:32]:
Yeah, I'll wear.
Shelly Brisbin [01:17:33]:
As a hat wearer. I, I'm a fan of that.
Jason Snell [01:17:35]:
It's got a camera up there. There's room for a battery. Honestly, up there there's plenty of room. You can put a whole.
Shelly Brisbin [01:17:39]:
You got a lidar there so that you can navigate. I think that's a great idea. You're a waymo, is what you are.
Leo Laporte [01:17:45]:
This would be my smart.
Jason Snell [01:17:47]:
Go around, Shelly. What a great idea.
Leo Laporte [01:17:49]:
Put cameras in the ears.
Shelly Brisbin [01:17:52]:
Absolutely. I'm gonna be a waymo.
Jason Snell [01:17:55]:
I'm gonna describe my thing on the top. Yeah, we'll put a propeller on it so people think it's one of those nerdy propeller beanies, but it's actually lidar.
Andy Ihnatko [01:18:02]:
We, you know, we, we joke. I noticed that a lot of YouTubers have started ever since those little clip on, clip on Bluetooth microphones have become popular. A lot of them like just will clip them onto their. The bill of their. The bill of their baseball cap or even like the size of their glasses. And that's why I think that that is. I hope that that is a form factor for these kind of wearables that people pursue. Because there are a lot of things that are, there's that are applicable when you're comparing watches to glasses, a lot of things that are absolutely not applicable.
Andy Ihnatko [01:18:32]:
And one of them is that I don't care what these glasses do. I don't care if Apple makes them. I don't care how private they are. If I don't like the design, there's no way I'm putting them on my face. Whether it's an Apple watch, it's under your, you know, it's under your wrist. Brass. It's part.
Leo Laporte [01:18:46]:
A lot of people complain about the Apple watch, though, that it's.
Shelly Brisbin [01:18:48]:
I mean, I don't love it. I don't love the design of it, especially as a woman with small wrists. It's not my jam. I don't like a square watch. I wear it because it gives me some utility, but I don't wear it all the time. And I gave up a perfectly nice watch, which I probably don't need anymore, but I keep in my nightstand drawer because I really like it it and I gave that up to wear an Apple watch and glasses. I'm much Less of a design person than for on, on glasses than I am than a watch. But I think there are many more frames out there, many more styles of frames.
Shelly Brisbin [01:19:19]:
I think for a lot of people that's going to be a big. And seems like to me, I mean, Apple doesn't necessarily work this way. They never work this way. But it seems like the move would be. What Meta has done is partnered with people who actually make glasses and put the technology inside of them them.
Andy Ihnatko [01:19:34]:
Same thing with Google. They part. They've partnered with like two different eyeglass established eyeglass designers. And yeah, they're gonna have, they're gonna have to make a lot of people very, very happy. I mean one of the, one of the reasons why I don't like the Apple watch, I realize this is kind of lame, is that, oh God, am I just gonna be like another nerd who has an Apple watch like ever? Like, we're like, we're part of some sort of like a tribe or a cult, which is, which is sometimes nice. But it's like it's you if, when it comes to glasses, you're reminded of like if you've, if you have friends who've been in the army that realize that they wear glasses, like you have to wear the exact same style of glasses.
Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
Army glasses, exactly.
Andy Ihnatko [01:20:11]:
And, and even when like you're, even when it's the weekend, you're just, you're in your civilian clothes, you're still wearing the same army glasses that as identifies you. It's like I don't want my identity to be defined by this organization that provided me with this, this eyeglass tech. I want.
Leo Laporte [01:20:25]:
But now, but now I want to be. But it could be an ironic statement, right? Your army glasses.
Jason Snell [01:20:30]:
Sure.
Shelly Brisbin [01:20:30]:
And even if you're not a prescription glasses where if you're like me, you have particular sunglasses that you like. A lot of people choose sunglasses specifically for design. People like me choose it for the particular lenses. They have to be a certain level of darkness. But that means everybody who has sunglasses has to have the equivalent of prescription glasses if they're going to have Apple glasses. It's just like it could potentially be a mess and I don't know how they resolve it. I do think that the benefit of Apple waiting or having to wait for technology reasons to release these to their version of glasses is that right now Meta is having a glass hole moment that they didn't have before when they weren't as popular. Now that they're popular, everybody's like, they're terrible.
Shelly Brisbin [01:21:08]:
They're Showing, you know, that's Meta for one thing. And it also has these cameras that are invasive. But by the time Apple's glasses come out, I wonder if either the moment is going to have moved on somewhat or if Apple's going to find a way to disclose in ways that make those make glasses more acceptable out in the world. It just seems like for them, they've kind of dodged a kind of bullet by not having them out now when Meta is being pilloried for their invasive, you know, privacy invading glasses.
Leo Laporte [01:21:35]:
Yeah, I just found the Army Spectacle Request Transmission System website where. And this. And by the way, it says it's optimized for Internet explorer version 9. So you got that going for you. The Spectacle Request Transmission System or SRTS is a web based application that provides the United States Department of Defense military ordering facility clinics and fabrication facilities with an automated mechanism to order and track military eyewear. So there.
Andy Ihnatko [01:22:07]:
I'm surprised that's still up. I would assume the headsets would have said, hey, if you're for. If you're. We don't want any four. Four eyes. This organization. If you can.
Leo Laporte [01:22:14]:
Yeah, no, yeah, no four eyes.
Shelly Brisbin [01:22:15]:
I was holding back on a Hegseth joke. I had one queued up and I was like, you know, I'm not gonna do it. Thanks Andy, I appreciate that but sure, I'll take.
Leo Laporte [01:22:23]:
I am wearing the opposite of military eyewear. This is going to be all the rage soon. The apple hat with the apple glasses.
Jason Snell [01:22:31]:
I mean eventually it's called the apple suit.
Leo Laporte [01:22:34]:
The Apple's next.
Jason Snell [01:22:35]:
It's like a jumpsuit containing all tattoo.
Leo Laporte [01:22:37]:
Culturally though, we could get used to the idea that somebody is wearing and always recording device just as we got used to.
Shelly Brisbin [01:22:43]:
I hope not, honestly. I mean, I don't know what the solution is, but the idea that we normalize a device that's always recording, that's not my idea of a happy place.
Leo Laporte [01:22:53]:
So I guess I can't have.
Jason Snell [01:22:54]:
I think what we do maybe, I mean society's part of it and I think regulation.
Shelly Brisbin [01:22:58]:
Turn your back, Leo.
Jason Snell [01:23:00]:
Like indication regulation about how that stuff can be used. Regulation about how the indicators have to be, you know, you know, lights come on or whatever it is. Like there's, there's a combination of things that we can do. The problem is, and we've seen this again and again is it takes time, right? Like there's always. The first thing that happens is the tech comes out and there's trouble and we all have to adapt and then the culture adapts and then maybe there's some regulation that comes in as well, and then we're in a better place. Right. But the disruptive period is not like that. And I also wonder how society is going to react to things like, well, I'm recording you, but all I'm doing is using an AI summary that says that I saw you and that what, maybe a summary of what we talked about, but it's not actually keeping your recording, nor is it transcribing every word you said.
Jason Snell [01:23:49]:
Is that better or. Or is it still. It is better. It is better. But is it on the side of okay, or is it still no, you're monitoring me without my consent.
Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
I have in my doctor's office. I just went to my annual. There's a sign that says, I am recording this.
Jason Snell [01:24:06]:
Yes, all doctors do that now. It's a whole new trend in medicine,
Leo Laporte [01:24:10]:
and you just have to accept it.
Jason Snell [01:24:11]:
Right?
Shelly Brisbin [01:24:11]:
I mean, you know, so one of the big issues with the meta glasses is when they tried to roll out facial recognition and everybody instantly went, that's terrible. That's terrible. Everybody who uses those meta glasses for accessibility went, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, I want that. And that is sort of a microcosm of a kind of dissonance between. These things are so amazing for accessibility, whether it's facial recognition or navigation assistance or image description, all the wonderful things they can do. I'm actually writing a story about this for an AI special we're doing on the show versus privacy versus I don't want to be recorded all the time versus no, you can't. You don't have a right to recognize my face. With technology.
Shelly Brisbin [01:24:52]:
If your eyeballs can't do it, why should you be allowed to do it with technology that I have no control over? And it's a. It's a real issue. And some of the. The accessibility disability community is reacting by going, too bad. This is something that we need to make our lives better. Tough. And others are going, I'm just going to put my head in the sand and kind of pretend it doesn't exist, because while I have these features, they're beneficial to me. And if I don't talk about it, maybe nobody will notice.
Shelly Brisbin [01:25:19]:
And then there are other people like me who insist on interrogating it and who haven't exactly figured it out, but who recognize that there is a huge amount of dissonance between. And this happens in, in AI and technology generally, too, where even the. Even the tech companies will use the idea that something enhances accessibility to basically validate it and whitewash it basically. And it's an interesting situation and I've been writing a lot about it.
Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
Yeah, I bet. Don't be visionist about it. Even those of us I'll try that who have eyesight. But it's, you know, for instance, I'm, you know, I'm elderly. At some point my memory is going to start to fade. This could be a huge benefit to me. In fact, one of the reasons I'm really intrigued in investigating it is the memories point. Part of it will be huge.
Leo Laporte [01:26:05]:
And the sooner I start recording everything and keeping track of your names, the better. By the way, I have another disability which is invisible, which is I don't have face recognition. I have something called aphantasia, face blindness. I've seen people's faces. I'm face blind. So I may meet you and have no idea who you are are.
Shelly Brisbin [01:26:26]:
And I have, I have essentially have that. I don't think it's that. That diagnosis. But essentially because I'm as nearsighted as I am, I don't recognize people. It's the same thing. But I think like what you, what we were saying before about, about glasses prescriptions that affects older people because their glasses prescriptions are going to change more quickly than other people. So what does that mean in terms of wearables? Like if you're 20 and you have a glasses prescription and you get yourself a pair of apple glasses, you're going to be great for. For X number of years.
Shelly Brisbin [01:26:54]:
But if after you're 50, those prescriptions are going to change often enough that it's going to be a considerable expense to keep up to date with those smart glasses.
Leo Laporte [01:27:01]:
Well, that's fine as well.
Andy Ihnatko [01:27:03]:
Well, maybe not. I mean I've had the same fr. I do have eyeglasses. I don't tend to. I, A while ago I decided that they trouble my vision is, is better because I don't have to keep those lenses clean 247 than just simply going without them. That's why I tend to. I only wear them when I drive or at the theater or something like that. But it's, but it's always.
Andy Ihnatko [01:27:23]:
I've had the same frames because you can always just have lots of. You can always get popped under the frames prescription. But it is interesting that to think about. There are laws that already prevent the use of these devices. They weren't put into place to prevent the use of smart glasses with cameras. But there are rules about. No, you cannot bring a camera into a public bathroom if you are or if you're Like California is a two
Leo Laporte [01:27:46]:
party consent state, so I can't record our conversation without your consent.
Shelly Brisbin [01:27:49]:
Well, there are cruise lines that have disallowed meta glasses specifically. But I know what Andy's saying, it's a broader thing than that.
Andy Ihnatko [01:27:55]:
Yeah, and like talking to like, again, if you're at a little league game and you're just, you're just like cheering on like your niece or nephew. Am I allowed to quote, record unquote strange children with these things? In some territories there is just basic, there's guidance against that. It might be interesting, however, that, that there is also. There are also laws against bringing dogs into restaurants, Bringing dogs into place.
Leo Laporte [01:28:16]:
Nobody adheres to that anymore.
Andy Ihnatko [01:28:18]:
Well, no, but I'm saying that it's possible that.
Leo Laporte [01:28:20]:
Look at me, I get to go to restaurants all the time.
Andy Ihnatko [01:28:23]:
Well, you wear your dog on your head, you sneak in.
Jason Snell [01:28:25]:
That's good.
Andy Ihnatko [01:28:26]:
But it's possible that one solution would
Leo Laporte [01:28:28]:
be like taking this off.
Andy Ihnatko [01:28:30]:
Just like you can basically have a, you get a pass from those laws by simply saying this is actually a service answer animal. These are actually service glasses. These aren't just me trying to be able to manipulate my Spotify playlist or my Instagram while I'm.
Leo Laporte [01:28:45]:
I was getting my labs done the other day and there was a woman with a Chihuahua that had a service animal coat on it. And it's like this is a medical facility. You're bringing a dog into it, but they can't stop it because it has this little, nice little.
Shelly Brisbin [01:29:00]:
And not to go too far down a tangent, but there's. There have been laws in various states, mostly including an attempt to pass one in Texas. There are a couple laws where a couple states where it actually pass, where there is a service animal certificate that you can get and there are specific requirements about the service animal and that you're supposed to include on the service animal's harness. So that if you go somewhere where dogs are not normally allowed that you can, you can check and then there's controversy over. Well, those service animal certificates can be basically ordered or printed from wherever. There's no real force of law.
Leo Laporte [01:29:32]:
Even though I'm all for service animals. Animals, obviously. But when it becomes a comfort animal and it's a snake or a peacock.
Shelly Brisbin [01:29:41]:
But who is going to arbitrate that? Like if you're in public spaces where service animals are allowed. The advantage of a law or a certificate that can be made official in some way is that the restaurateur or the other patron or whatever can actually have a basis to Say, no, you're not allowed here, or, yes, you are
Leo Laporte [01:29:58]:
here in Northern California. Every restaurant now has animals in it, and no server wants to be put in the position of saying, well, is that a legitimate service animal? They just say, okay, fine.
Andy Ihnatko [01:30:07]:
Yeah, I think legally you can only ask, like, what. What is this a service animal? And what specifically is the service animal trained to do? I mean, I could be corrected if
Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
I'm wrong, but no, that's right.
Shelly Brisbin [01:30:17]:
Again, those are. It's. It. It varies from state to state. Yeah, that might be the California rule,
Leo Laporte [01:30:21]:
but, yeah, that's what it is in California anyway. So, yeah, I mean, this is this. You see all these challenging issues, and you have to cover these shells. The issue of, you know, look, I have a disability. I should be able to wear that kind of eyewear, or I should be able to have a service animal with me. And then the issue of people like me going around with recording everything. But you don't know that I have aphantasia. So this helps me a lot with face recognition.
Leo Laporte [01:30:46]:
I just. All I do is say, look, I'm terrible with faces. What's your name? Who are you? Have I met you before? Do I know you?
Andy Ihnatko [01:30:54]:
It's not all disabilities are visible.
Leo Laporte [01:30:56]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Shelly Brisbin [01:30:59]:
And even the visible ones are often misunderstood by everybody else. And those of us who have them don't particularly want to spend our entire lives explaining them to you.
Leo Laporte [01:31:07]:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, good. One of the reasons I love having you on, Shelly, you sensitize us to that, and I appreciate it. Thank you. And I thank Lamine Yamal for wearing the new pink Beats. I don't know who. Or is it Lamine or. I don't know how you even pronounce it.
Leo Laporte [01:31:28]:
Lamine. Lamine is a influencer who was caught in the wild with pink beets.
Jason Snell [01:31:36]:
A footballer.
Leo Laporte [01:31:37]:
A footballer. Ah, like soccer. Football, yes. Okay. And there they are, the pink Beats. You know what? It's nice. Is. Is.
Leo Laporte [01:31:48]:
Okay. Is. Is. Is. Is. This is just a landmine. I'm a minefield. Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:31:55]:
It's a guy. Okay.
Jason Snell [01:31:56]:
He plays for Barcelona.
Leo Laporte [01:31:57]:
Okay. And he is carrying a Chanel purse with pink Beats. I don't know what his pronouns are, but he's a footballer. He actually is quite dashing in his Chanel jacket as well. So a fashion statement.
Jason Snell [01:32:12]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:32:13]:
Okay. And this is apparently going to be the next Beats Studio Pro.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:19]:
Yeah, there's no way that that was put up that he posted that without permission of Beats.
Leo Laporte [01:32:24]:
This is almost an announcement.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:26]:
Obviously, Beats are different than an Apple product.
Leo Laporte [01:32:28]:
Even though it's technically not a production product, it's a fashion product.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:31]:
And that does tie in with, I think last week there was. Someone had discovered that Beats had filed an fcc, got FCC approval for. For a new audio product, indicating that there's going to be something. There was something.
Leo Laporte [01:32:45]:
And I'm going to even go so far as to say Lamine might have been paid for this, because if you look at the Instagram, his Instagram post, here he is. Go ahead, show this if you can. And then you get a video of him sitting in a car. And what is the most prominent feature of the video? It's those pink Beats around his neck. I would say this was a good lighting choices for.
Shelly Brisbin [01:33:07]:
For accentuating those.
Leo Laporte [01:33:08]:
Yeah, yeah. And this might be a. It doesn't say paid, but maybe in Spain, you don't have to. You don't have to tell the world that you're getting paid for that. Okay, so if you were curious, something else coming. Everything coming for Apple TV in June. Oh, we. You know what? Let's pause for the pause that refreshes.
Leo Laporte [01:33:28]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Anoco, who has a big announcement at the end of the show. Shelly Brisbin, who is, of course a stalwart on Texas Standard Radio, which you can hear on the Internet@texastandard.org texastandard.org Bong, bong, bong. And Nick Bilton will not be running the Nexus Radio.
Shelly Brisbin [01:33:52]:
No.
Jason Snell [01:33:52]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:33:56]:
Okay. This is completely. Oh, and Jason Snell from Six Colors.
Shelly Brisbin [01:34:01]:
Wait, I don't have an announcement. I need to work with one. You guys have an announcement?
Leo Laporte [01:34:04]:
I was just shocked. I'm reading along about all the upset. In fact, I think I was watching the news. It's Scott pelley, the CBS 60 Minutes anchor, was yelling at the new head of 60 Minutes and then shocked, I tell you, shocked to find out that was Nick Bilton, who used to be on our show all the time when he was the New York Times tech columnist.
Shelly Brisbin [01:34:25]:
Now, see, that's something I didn't know. I. I heard him identified as a tech journalist, and I was like, wait, so do I know somebody who knows him? And now I know I do.
Leo Laporte [01:34:33]:
And they're saying he has no broadcast experience. And I just want to say he was a regular on Twitch. So there you go. I don't know if that qualifies you to run 60 minutes, but that's a story for another day. I just. It was like, Nick. What? He has risen far and fast since his appearances on Twitter. We Got to the point where he became so successful, he couldn't.
Leo Laporte [01:34:54]:
We couldn't get him. Him on Twitter anymore. So, like Kara Swisher, he is. He is ascended to the furnace.
Jason Snell [01:35:00]:
Too big. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:35:01]:
Yeah. Apple tv. Have you been watching Widow's Bay? Anybody see that?
Jason Snell [01:35:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:35:09]:
What do you think?
Jason Snell [01:35:09]:
I think it's great.
Leo Laporte [01:35:10]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:35:11]:
I love it. It's so. It's. It's so. It's Matthew Reese, and it's a. You know, it's a. An island that's kind of like a Martha's Vineyard kind of place, except.
Leo Laporte [01:35:19]:
Well, it wants to be.
Jason Snell [01:35:21]:
Except it's cursed. Yeah. And so it's like a horror comedy. I mean, really, what I love about it is that it is trying to do horror things and be scary, but it never forgets that it's funny. And the executive producer of it has a track record in doing comedy.
Leo Laporte [01:35:41]:
It's so weird because at points, laugh out loud. Funny.
Jason Snell [01:35:44]:
Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:35:45]:
Many other points, terrifying.
Jason Snell [01:35:48]:
It's that kind of thing where it's like, yes, there is the ghost of a woman who is chasing you, and if she finds you, she's going to kill you, but. But with a smile. And then it's also like. And then how will she do that? And it's like, well, she'll sit on your face and suffocate you. And he's like, what? And it's all from the perspective of the mayor. The other way I could sell this show to you is imagine if the mayor from Jaws was in a show and he's trying real hard, but there's a shark and it's going to kill people. It's a little like that. Matthew Reese is the mayor.
Jason Snell [01:36:19]:
He's trying to make this town, like, more successful, but it is cursed in, like, every conceivable way. And I don't know, it is quirky and funny and. And if you're not watching it because you're like, well, horror is not really for me. It's like, horror is not really for me either, but it's just so funny that it's. It's. It's almost like it's. It's not a parody of horror, because it is. It does have some legitimate scares in it, but it is, you know, like, even the horror, because, you know, in some horror, it's so ridiculous that you laugh.
Jason Snell [01:36:51]:
This whole show is so ridiculous that you laugh in a good way. It's just. It's really good. Steven Root is in it. I love Steven, who's great in everything, but he's so he's so serious here. But that's why he's so funny, because he's the expert on all the things you should not do on this haunted island. Oh, man, it's so good.
Leo Laporte [01:37:11]:
It's really a hoot. So that will wrap up this month. There's a couple more weeks of episodes, and I'm just dying to see how it wraps up. Another very weird Apple TV show called Sugar, which starts off as just a great noir detective story, but then takes a really weird twist, a weird turn that's gonna come back. And I can't wait to see how they accommodate the weird twist, which I
Jason Snell [01:37:39]:
won't give you if you're Colin Farrell in that.
Leo Laporte [01:37:41]:
Colin Farrell, Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:37:42]:
Noir detective, except actually it's sort of sci fi. And how does that happen? Did we mention Star City? Star City started last week.
Leo Laporte [01:37:50]:
I saw the promos for that. This is kind of a spinoff of
Jason Snell [01:37:54]:
the For All Mankind.
Leo Laporte [01:37:55]:
For All Mankind. But it's the Russian point of view.
Jason Snell [01:37:58]:
It is. It's the Soviet Union in the late 60s, early 70s and their space program, which in the For All Mankind universe, they were the first ones to the moon. And it's inside this kind of hermetically sealed sort of city where all the cosmonauts are and all the engineers are and all the KGB people who spy on the cosmonauts and engineers are. And so it's a drama that's got like slots of 60s and a lot of Cold War spy vibes as well as this sort of early space race vibes. And it's like, you know, if space doesn't kill you, the KGB might. It's good. I like it a lot. I've seen the first five of that.
Leo Laporte [01:38:34]:
It's really good. Yeah. I haven't decided whether to watch it or not, so. Okay.
Jason Snell [01:38:39]:
I heard from people who are like, kind of like got over For All Mankind. The last two seasons haven't been as strong, although I. I still think that show is fun. This is going back to, you know, there are some characters that appear later and for all mankind that are in it. But, like, you don't really need to have even seen For All Mankind because it explains the premise right up front when the first man on the moon dedicates it to the Marxist Leninist way of life, and you're like, oh, okay, then. And then you go from there. But it's really. If you like, especially if you like old Cold War spy stuff, like John Le Carre kind of vibe.
Leo Laporte [01:39:13]:
Love that stuff.
Jason Snell [01:39:14]:
That's what Star City has. Because one of the main characters is basically working for the KGB and kind of rising within the ranks of spying on the people and discovers like, there's a question of like, is the US smuggling spy stuff into Star City? And it's. Yeah, it's really. Plus the for all mankind stuff where it's like, it's fictional timeline. So they're like, let's send cosmonauts to various places that you won't expect. It's really good.
Leo Laporte [01:39:41]:
There's something for Andy coming June 26th. Camp Snoopy season two. Do you like these later versions of the Peanuts shows? I know you like the originals. Of course.
Andy Ihnatko [01:39:54]:
I'm not a big fan because I do think that without turning this into like a 20 minute digression, I don't think that they captured what made Charles Scholsson penis characters special. I think they're pretty kind of generic kiddie sort of stuff. But on the other hand, if you look at the entire history of Peanut special being co. Even ones that were co written by Charles Schultz, supervised by Charles Schulz, not all of those were super, super great either. It's like, it's, it's. It's Flash Beagle Charlie Brown where it's about Snoopy doing flash dance and aerobics. Okay, maybe that wasn't peak Peanuts either. I'm just, I'm just glad that we have this entry point for like a new generation of kids to like.
Andy Ihnatko [01:40:37]:
Hopefully, hopefully this will be the entry point and then their parents will say, peace. But here's. Let me show you. How about 1975? Oh, the arc where Peppermint Patty is entering a skating competition. Okay, read that. And that.
Leo Laporte [01:40:52]:
You really can't appreciate Peanuts unless you've seen the Ricky Gervais original. I think, personally, I am unfamiliar and I'm just teasing. I'm just teasing you on that one. That's just a joke. I am excited about Cape Fear. So excited that Elisa and I watched the original Cape Fear with Robert Mitchum, which is so good. And then we watched the more recent Cape Fear with Robert De Niro, which was so good. And now it's a series.
Leo Laporte [01:41:18]:
It starts in a few days with. It's directed. It's inspired by the Martin Scorsese remake produced by Steven Spielberg. Amy Adams, and Javier Bardem plays the scary Max Cady. He is. That's good casting. I think Cape Fear will be. Will be good.
Leo Laporte [01:41:40]:
That will be very good. There's a very tense kind of the. The. The Scorsese version was basically a Hitchcock movie, a tribute to Hitchcock. So that should be a lot of fun. Oh, and then finally we might see the Jessica Chastain show that was put off. Variety says that July is the target date, but some are saying, well 9 to 5 Mac is that it could premiere in June.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:08]:
The savant, at least it was in the upfronts. At least there was a time where you could be forgiven for thinking that no, they don't want to actually air this, we'll never see this again. Because it was kind of unprecedented that in the same year that this series was delayed, an actual like another Snoopy summer special and another, another program that was accused of got mixed up in a plagiarism scandal. Both of those got pulled shortly before their premiere as well. But in both cases they very, very quickly said here is a new date in which these things are going to air. So when the Jessica Chastain one was postponed and then said we don't know what we're going to be doing with this, we still own it, but we have no comment about when it's going to be restricted scheduled, that was.
Leo Laporte [01:42:56]:
I think what you can safely say is that Apple's TV offerings have really dramatically improved over the last few years
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:04]:
and they were already pretty high.
Jason Snell [01:43:06]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:43:08]:
Microsoft is killing office 2019. You know that so called perpetual license. Not so much, not so much for Mac and iPhone. Sorry, that's just.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:19]:
It was perpetual. You should have bought the eternal license. Sorry, read the brochure.
Leo Laporte [01:43:24]:
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Apple, which purchased a big stake in globalstar when it added globalstar as its satellite backend for that satellite calling, is now gonna have to sell that part off to Amazon.
Jason Snell [01:43:44]:
They get a few billion, don't they?
Leo Laporte [01:43:46]:
Yeah, I don't know. It's part of the Amazon purchase.
Shelly Brisbin [01:43:50]:
Of course some money will be changing hands.
Leo Laporte [01:43:51]:
I'm pretty sure Apple has 20% and apparently the FCC says, the filing says Amazon is going to acquire that 20%. Maybe they didn't have to. They could keep that. Maybe they didn't want to be in bed with Amazon, I don't know.
Jason Snell [01:44:03]:
No, but that's actually going to be one of those things that's probably going to show up on one of Apple's financial statements. Is that that Global Star selling global star, 20% of it back to Amazon is going to make them, I don't know what the actual number is. Some number of billion or two that they're going to probably have to report and say, yeah, well we got that.
Leo Laporte [01:44:24]:
We made some money. It was a good investment.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:26]:
I'm sure that Amazon didn't want Apple to have have a company like Apple to have a voice in the direction of the company. So if, if they, if they had the checkbook out and this was before they blew up a launch pad and they realized they're going to need some extra cash then they may as well write that check.
Leo Laporte [01:44:41]:
I think Jeff has a little bit of extra cash somewhere hidden away in his jeans pocket. I'm in the market for a new car at the end of the year and immediately crossed off the list gm although I love the Chevy Bolt and Rivian because neither will have CarPlay Tesla too. CarPlay to me is a non starter. When asked about this Nilai Patel interviewed him on decoder. Rivian's chief software officer said you don't need CarPlay. What do you want CarPlay for? Customers he said will appreciate the lack of CarPlay.
Shelly Brisbin [01:45:17]:
Customers want to buy our stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:45:21]:
They're going to appreciate that.
Jason Snell [01:45:22]:
You won't believe that the guy in charge of the software on the Rivian doesn't want anyone else's software on the Rivian.
Leo Laporte [01:45:31]:
What we're seeing right now with the advancement of AI technology is just another reason why I deeply believe that our made the right choice by investing in our own technology and software. Cars are moving from as you said the buzzword Software defined to AI defined. Oh God. Possibilities now for such deep AI integration in the car make the entire CarPlay debate completely obsolete and makes me gives me the opportunity to just cross Rivian
Jason Snell [01:45:56]:
right off the street buy on their own supply. This is a classic thing where it's everybody thinks that they can make a computer interface and app platform better than the one that's in your pocket. Every, every carmaker has this delusion that that the most important device in their customers lives is their vehicle and it's not. It's their phone. That's it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:46:21]:
But no it's it's even simpler than that. Like they don't they the data that happened that transacts between the driver and and the car is so valuable that they don't want to give up up anytime.
Shelly Brisbin [01:46:32]:
Right. It's about profit. It isn't about ego. It's about making either direct profit from selling services like the here's an account that gives you more software stuff in your car whether it's AI or whatever as as well as what Andy said which is just the pure data transfer that's a ton of money. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:46:53]:
But do watch for this rhetoric because it's very similar to the rhetoric OpenAI has about their phone, which is, no, you don't need apps anymore, you just need AI and AI will do it for you. And so what do you need CarPlay for? AI is just going to do what you want it to do. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true either.
Andy Ihnatko [01:47:13]:
That's a generational shift sort of thing. That's not a. We cracked it.
Jason Snell [01:47:17]:
We.
Andy Ihnatko [01:47:17]:
Congratulations. Everybody's been striving for if only we didn't have apps on the phone. If only we didn't have anything to interact with. With on the screen.
Shelly Brisbin [01:47:26]:
It ignores interfaces. I mean, whatever you want to say, whether it's delivered through apps or web pages or through whatever means, ignores that people appreciate interfaces, that they understand what they're viewing, what they're interacting with based on some sort of interface. And I say that as somebody with visual disabilities, I believe in interfaces.
Leo Laporte [01:47:47]:
Well, it's more than that too. I mean, I don't want to use the built in maps function in my car when I could use Google or Apple sample maps. And AI is not going to solve that. It's not going to be a mapping tool also.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:01]:
I mean, you know, language is. Has its place, but it could be. Would you rather explain what you explain to us to an AI what you want to do, or would you rather have a toggle switch on the dashboard that says AC High?
Leo Laporte [01:48:13]:
Yeah, that's a really good point. My car, you can say things like, you can actually say, hey BMW, I'm feeling cold. And it will turn on the steering wheel heat, it will turn the heat on and the seats and stuff like that. But that's, you know, there's no control at all over that. It's just what it's going to do. If you say I'm feeling cold.
Shelly Brisbin [01:48:34]:
And that becomes worse as you disassociate things like physical buttons. People already, including my husband and myself with our Kia, already have complaints about having to use software for climate controls. Or in some. I found it. I read the other day that there are car. I have no idea. I don't buy new cars all the time. But I read the other day that there are in fact cars where to get to the glove box.
Shelly Brisbin [01:48:59]:
You have to use software. You have to use a Tesla model. Are you serious? Really? I'm not surprised.
Leo Laporte [01:49:05]:
Pushing a button on the screen.
Shelly Brisbin [01:49:06]:
But I think there are others and that's just. That would be a deal for me. And it has the navigator in the passenger seat. I'm like, no, that's not okay at all.
Leo Laporte [01:49:15]:
No, it's cray cray. That doesn't. Yeah, well, car manufacturers will learn. I have to give a lot of credit to Jon Gruber and Daring Fireball for coining a new term that we will all be using from now on. The dickover. What is a dick over? Go to his article about it and it says what is a dick over? And then suddenly, boom, you get a dick over. A modal panel, popover or curtain presented by a website or app deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory, mandatory interaction. For example, asking the user to accept cookies, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website's mobile app, agree to a terms of service or anything else the user couldn't give two poops about.
Andy Ihnatko [01:50:00]:
Yeah. Can I say that one of the most annoying interactions with websites every single day is. Wow, this is actually very, very useful. It's so useful for a fact that I'm going to actually click my bookmark manager in order so I can remember it and when. But I move that pointer to the bookmark manager. Wait, wait, don't go away yet.
Jason Snell [01:50:18]:
Let me take a look.
Leo Laporte [01:50:22]:
By the way, the accept button on the Dick over on Jon Gruber's Daring Fireball site is gross. Press the gross button and it goes away.
Jason Snell [01:50:30]:
I think it actually is random. There's a bunch of different show up. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:50:34]:
Oh, that's funny. Let me try it again. Let's see. Oh, this sucks is another. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Good on you, John. He coined the term and I have a feeling like many of the terms he has coined in the past, this one will last.
Jason Snell [01:50:50]:
Well, what's good about it is it's super insulting to the thing which is going to make everybody embarrassed.
Leo Laporte [01:50:55]:
There's so many of them now. It's universal.
Jason Snell [01:50:58]:
Yeah. The ones that I hate the most are the ones where you've already. They built it all. They built the infrastructure for it in order to get in the way of somebody who's like, like not a subscriber and you are a subscriber. And rather than turn it off. And I think the New York Times does this. There's some sites that do this. Rather than turn it off, they just make it a promo for something else.
Leo Laporte [01:51:22]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:51:22]:
Give it to your friends.
Shelly Brisbin [01:51:24]:
Very common in media sites. I, I go to 10 or 12 newspaper sites every day and it's, it's everywhere. And yet people are having enough trouble getting print media attention. And then now we're covering the sites up in this way that makes it completely undesirable to go to and probably inaccessible too. And we subscribe to them. I mean, I have. I have 10 newspaper subscriptions and I can't without clicking.
Jason Snell [01:51:47]:
They still get in our way because they just can't. Once they create that pattern, once they build that, that weapon, they use it. And, and I do think it's a. There's a laziness factor too, where it's like, well, let's not turn it off for our subscribers. We'll just make it a promo for something instead. It's like, what are you even doing?
Leo Laporte [01:52:03]:
Well, use it.
Shelly Brisbin [01:52:04]:
My favorite one is I pay for the Houston Chronicle. All the, the. All the papers in Texas are owned by the same people now, which is delightful. Anyway, so you have in for all these papers and you get a link in Slack or in Blue sky or somewhere, and you click it and it gives you the popover that says, you know, and I'm, I'm. I was logged in before. I don't know why I'm not logged in anymore. And it says, go back home. So the only choice you have to get out of the dick over is to go back home and then you have to log in and then you have to navigate back to the article you wanted to read in the first place.
Andy Ihnatko [01:52:35]:
Yeah, yeah, it's super annoying. There's a, There's a. There's a. An accessibility feature for Android that I've used for, for a long, long time. I think it's called Reading Mode, where I can just pull down the notification banner and touch a button and it will take whatever's on the screen, particularly if it's a website, and simply strip away all the formatting, strip away all the graphics, strip away everything, and just turn it into simple, unformatted text. That's very, very readable. I use it not because I need the accessibility feature, but because it used to be able to simply say when there's, When I only have this little, like, letterbox sort of slot on my phone where I can read the actual article. It will get rid of all that and just give me the article.
Andy Ihnatko [01:53:12]:
And now they've, they've. Within last year, they figured out how to, like, defeat that completely because now I tap the button says, can't read this content.
Jason Snell [01:53:19]:
It's like, yeah, the iPhone hasn't read it. And it's the same thing where they figured out how to break it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:53:24]:
Because for other people it's like, congratulations, you've just made your site Totally inaccessible.
Shelly Brisbin [01:53:28]:
Which is why I aggressively use a combination of RSS and Instapaper and speed. I have a whole workflow of stuff that. I'm actually writing an article for you, Jason, right now that talks about all the RSS things I do to defeat stuff like this.
Leo Laporte [01:53:42]:
And then the sites reasonably complain when we can't monetize because everybody's got ad blockers and content blockers.
Jason Snell [01:53:49]:
But it's really, there's a reason why
Andy Ihnatko [01:53:51]:
we have content blockers.
Jason Snell [01:53:54]:
True, they spend a lot of engineering to market their services by making their sites terrible, which is a choice. But what they don't do is they don't spend a lot of time thinking about, about how do we make it not terrible for the people who give us money? Because once you give them the money, it's almost like they move on. And that's the, that's the worst of it is like, I pay for Bloomberg. Bloomberg wants me, like, Bloomberg thinks it's a bank. Bloomberg wants me to like answer a captcha every five days when I am trying to read a Mark Gurman article, right? It's like, what are you even doing? And actually, even if I am logged in on the first login, it like 50, 50 will, will think I'm not logged in until I reload and then it realizes that I'm actually already logged in and just again, so hostile to paying customers.
Shelly Brisbin [01:54:41]:
And for non paying customers, why would I ever become a Bloomberg or a Wall Street Journal subscriber? Because I get nothing. You know, give me, give me my, my first taste is free. Make me want to buy your service. But they don't even do that.
Jason Snell [01:54:53]:
I'm gonna, I'm gonna pile on the Washington Post as well, because this is a thing that I realized the Washington Post would be like, oh, just register and you can, you can read an article for free and then we'll email you forever. You don't have to pay, but eventually you will have to pay. But you do that. But what I discovered is I subscribed to them a while ago and then I canceled. And after you cancel, you don't get to read it ever, because they know who you are and they said it, they read it and it's like, oh, did this person, is this person a potential new customer? Customer? Well, yes, we'll give them this offer. Oh, is this somebody who used to pay and doesn't anymore? They don't get to come in. I'm like, what? Who decided that? Who made that decision? So I, as a result, I, I mean, I never Click on Washington Post links now because there's no point.
Andy Ihnatko [01:55:42]:
Yeah, you hate just. You hate to be punished for supporting them. New York, New York Times is my pet peeve because number one, every time that I try to access one of those. One of their articles on phone, it will not let me do it before it says, hey, did you know that we have an app? It's better than the app. Do you want us to download, Install the app? Like, no, if your app were better, I would be using it. I would have installed it. Actually, I installed it a while ago and then deleted it a while ago. And the second thing is exactly what you were talking about, Jason, where it's like, gee, this person has paid for a subscription.
Andy Ihnatko [01:56:11]:
Why don't we fill this banner with a promo for hey, would you like to add family members subscription? And I can't read the article until I dismiss this every single damn time. As opposed to, okay, you know what? The dudes click no on this so many times in a row, I, I feel as though we're jeopardizing. Jeopardizing his continued subscription to the New York Times. Perhaps we should lay off right now. It's like, don't punish me for help for, for giving you money. Especially when there are ways to get around your firewall that are so easy and free.
Leo Laporte [01:56:41]:
I'm searching. I'm looking, I'm looking high and low for a story about Vision Pro.
Jason Snell [01:56:47]:
Don't think so. Not this time.
Shelly Brisbin [01:56:50]:
While you were searching, I will just quickly say that because of all these subscriptions subscription foibles, if ever a subscription lapses because our. Our corporate entity, to forgive for lack of a better phrase, pays for our accounts. If ever the subscription for the newsroom lapses to the Times or the Chronicle or anything, it's a catastrophe. Because we can't do our jobs and we can't get around it in any way other than getting the credit card done right now. And even then, you have to cash reload everything. And it usually doesn't take until the second or third time. And the entire newsroom comes to. To a grinding halt while we're waiting for the newspaper subscription to work.
Leo Laporte [01:57:29]:
Yeah, I think John, he touched a nerve there with his piece.
Shelly Brisbin [01:57:36]:
I mean, I don't like the phrase any better than I like in shittification, but I'll accept it.
Leo Laporte [01:57:41]:
I know, but you know what? Sometimes when the shoe fits.
Shelly Brisbin [01:57:46]:
Yeah, fair enough.
Leo Laporte [01:57:46]:
Gotta put it over your head. Gruber's talk show, he does the annual thing at WWDC. Last year he couldn't get any Apple executives? Do we know if he's gonna have Apple executives?
Jason Snell [01:57:58]:
Because there'll be guests. It was a good show last year with Joanna Stern and Neelay Patel. I would be. I would think that there would be Apple execs, but who knows? They are counter programming it again. But I think that's reasonable that Apple wants to provide the developers who are coming all the way with something to do on Tuesday night. And so they're going to show Mandalorian and Grogu at the Steve Jobs theater with a special.
Leo Laporte [01:58:20]:
Oh, are you going to go? Yes. The big. That's the counter programming is pretty good.
Jason Snell [01:58:23]:
I will. I will almost certainly. I've already seen that movie. I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun. I will almost certainly go visit my friend and watch his talk show instead.
Leo Laporte [01:58:33]:
Yeah, there you go.
Jason Snell [01:58:33]:
You can look for me. I'll be there. If you're going to be there, I'll be there.
Leo Laporte [01:58:36]:
Give up the $5,000 Steve Jobs leather
Jason Snell [01:58:39]:
seats and I would love to see a movie there, but you know, I'm going to, I'm going to support. Support independent tech journalism instead.
Leo Laporte [01:58:48]:
There you go.
Andy Ihnatko [01:58:48]:
Yeah. Remember that last, last year there was an argument to be. There's. There was reason to speculate that perhaps he was in the doghouse because of very pointed, very, very well structured arguments and very, very critical posts that he had recently made about Apple, about Apple at the time, which seemed suspicious. Again, one possible interpretation was that this was coincidentally and suspiciously talked about, timed so it'd be if. If. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:59:18]:
It's like Apple carries grudges for years and years.
Shelly Brisbin [01:59:22]:
It's not like they were smarting last year over promises they made the previous year that didn't come true and that the questions wouldn't have been a little difficult.
Leo Laporte [01:59:29]:
Yeah, and years. Oh, wait. I found a Vision Pro story. Quick hit the Vision Pro them. There's no look. It's going to get thinner and thinner on the ground. We've got to maintain our status as the America's number one Vision Pro podcast. This is a single line from Mark Gurman's Bloomberg Power on news.
Shelly Brisbin [01:59:54]:
Oh, we do without Mark Gurman.
Leo Laporte [01:59:56]:
Thank God. Apple has been working on a slimmer, lighter headset to succeed the $3,500 Vision Pro. But I don't anticipate to launch before. Wait a minute, late 2028 or 2029. Okay. Apple needs to fix the design and pricing problems that turned the first Vision Pro into a flop. Ooh, ooh, John. I mean, Mark.
Leo Laporte [02:00:19]:
You may not get an invite to the next Apple event. And that category will essentially be on ice until then.
Jason Snell [02:00:25]:
Yeah, well, I mean, nobody can with the materials. Nobody can make one cheaper. That's at that level. And so. And they've retasked all those people to work on this glasses initiative now. So that makes sense. So that's. Yes.
Jason Snell [02:00:38]:
Great story for the Vision Pro segment. Although if Apple does glasses, I wonder if we're gonna have to recompose the Vision Pro theme and have a whole sort of like vision products theme and talk about glasses and stuff too, because that's what those people are.
Leo Laporte [02:00:51]:
What do you see? What do you know? Let's talk about that Apple hat.
Jason Snell [02:00:55]:
Yeah, that's right. Hat squad in color.
Shelly Brisbin [02:00:58]:
I expect an invitation as soon as that happens, man.
Andy Ihnatko [02:01:01]:
Love it.
Leo Laporte [02:01:02]:
And that's your Vision Pro segment for the week. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell and the wonderful Shelly Brisbin filling in for Christina Warren. Christina's at Build this week, but she will be back next week. Your picks of the week coming up. Actually, let's do them now. Pick of the week time. And Shelly, as our guest, I will allow you to begin the. Begin.
Shelly Brisbin [02:01:33]:
Oh, thank you. My pick is a wonderful app from independent developer Brett Terpstra. He makes wonderful things. His latest is marked 3. I've been using Marked for a long time when I put together books in HTML and then Markdown. I use Marked as a previewer, as a preview for Markdown and that's mainly what it does, but it'll preview all sorts of other things. You can also even export marked stuff out into docx format. Now you can edit within Marked, which is really fun.
Shelly Brisbin [02:02:04]:
Brett is always, always produces really clever stuff that does what you want it to do and does it well. It's really solid and sturdy. He switched to a subscription model for this. You can still buy the older version. You can pay a one time fee for it. But I think mostly what he's counting on is a subscription model. I'm not going to argue that case here because everybody who develops software these days has made the decision that unfortunately they need to to do that to survive. But I'm going to buy Marked three because I think Brett is a really good example of an indie developer that gives you far more than you pay for.
Leo Laporte [02:02:37]:
This is really quite nice and we do love Brett. Very good. Marked 3, the ultimate markdown preview. And it is MarkedApp.com thank you, Shelly. I should mention another developer we love releasing an update To Halide Halide Mark 3, which includes film looks and an upgraded photo editor. I know Sebastian DeWitt now is at Apple, right. But that doesn't mean Halide does not continue. So Halide mark three one time purchase $59.99 or you can subscribe for $19.99 and and we always want to keep up on this one because this is a great alternative camera app for iOS.
Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
I'm actually going to have some difficulty I think at the end of the year whether I want the folding iPhone with the lesser camera or the iPhone 18 Pro Max with the better camera. That's going to be a challenge. I don't know what I'm going to do anyway. Andy Inako well actually let me let Andy finish this show.
Jason Snell [02:03:45]:
That's good.
Andy Ihnatko [02:03:46]:
That's good.
Jason Snell [02:03:47]:
I'm going to be entirely self serving here. I started a Kickstarter. It started yesterday. It's for a new podcast called Design in California which is about Apple history. It's a look at you go narrative storytelling podcast about the history of Apple across all 50 years. We'll be telling stories from all over those five decades. It's me and Mike Hurley. I'm going to do the writing.
Jason Snell [02:04:08]:
We we funded yesterday and the first, we actually funded the first two hours. We're we're at $106,000 as we speak. But I'll tell you this, there are a lot of great things you can get. You can get a signed poster of art, you can get a pin and you can also just sign up and become a member in advance for a good price. That will get you the first year. We're going to do 50 episodes plus members are going to get monthly bonus episodes with me and Mike. There are other bonuses coming. We haven't revealed the official show art which we're commissioning a professional illustrator to do.
Jason Snell [02:04:39]:
We haven't revealed the theme song. We haven't revealed all sorts of other things. We've got more stretch goals that we're going to do. There's a lot of other stuff coming. The campaign runs the whole month. The show will start coming out later this probably at the end of the summer. Although if you subscribe to Upgrade, we're going to post preview episodes in the upgrade feed this month. So there'll be four sample episodes at least for people to listen to as well.
Jason Snell [02:05:04]:
Well, it's going to be a lot of fun. It's also not yet another tech news podcast. You're already listening to or watching one and maybe more if you've gotten to this point in this show. So this is different. It's it's. It's me telling stories about really interesting and I think in large part undercovered or not as well understood parts of Apple's history. So for the 50th anniversary that was kind of the inspiration to do it. We've got, I got.
Jason Snell [02:05:30]:
We don't. We funded the first year year we've got like three, four at least years of ideas and growing so we could do this a long time and oh I should also say yes. So if you support it at the, at the membership level you get an ad free feed. If we do a four episode series about something you get all four episodes at once. Whereas the. There will be a feed with ads in it that will release weekly. You'll get everything as soon as we make it and then there's a bonus episodes and some other benefits. So it's going great.
Jason Snell [02:05:58]:
The more money we make in this, the more other stuff we're going to be able to do in terms of the quality of the show. You know, I'm gonna have you know, more people looking at my scripts to make sure that they match the, the historically accurate details and like there's lots of other stuff we can do and there's some stretch goals that maybe we'll do some events or meetups or something like we're still working out the details but really happy to have funded it but also really still we have the whole month to get other people on board to, to to get you know, get listening to Design in California and I'm really excited about the project. I'm so happy that it's going to happen now because we did this all sort of like is it going to happen? And now you know it is going to happen so we can get going and get the, the rest of the work and it is independent media. The other thing is so much on Kickstarter these days it feels to me is like a product that's ready to go and all they're really doing is using it for marketing. We did this because we really needed to know that there was going to be an audience for it because it's going to be so much work to do it and we didn't feel like we could just do it and hope that people showed up because that was too. It's too much work for that. So now we've gotten that support from people and could use more so designed dot FM to check out Designed in California.
Leo Laporte [02:07:09]:
Is this the first time you've done a Kickstarter podcast?
Jason Snell [02:07:12]:
It is the first time I've done A Kickstarter period. Mike has done a few for the pen Addict with Brad, but those are more, you know, they're pen related and a little less more about Brad's website than about their podcast. It's my complete first time for me, we use Glenn Fleischman as our consultant because Glenn has done about approximately 9,000 Kickstarters as a, as a person who does them and also as a consultant for other people who do them. So Glenn's been a lot of help in getting it going. But.
Leo Laporte [02:07:40]:
And what is clear is this is a non trivial effort. This is not like this show, you know, this takes, this takes no effort whatsoever.
Jason Snell [02:07:48]:
Talking about the news is what we do here. It's what I do on Upgrade. Like you get a list of stories.
Leo Laporte [02:07:55]:
I'm not doing that clean. My hands are clean.
Jason Snell [02:07:59]:
This is different, right? This is me. I have like every book that's ever been written about Apple on every Mac.
Leo Laporte [02:08:05]:
These.
Jason Snell [02:08:06]:
And a lot of it you're telling these stories and there's like different accounts in six different books and you're trying to square them all together. And you know, David is really great, but there are, there are he. It's 650 pages and he has to, you know, kind of boil down some of the stories because he's got to get on to the next story. And with this, these are we're going to do in the first year we're going to do 5030 to 45 minute long episodes where we're going to. I get to tell these stories with the details. Like that time that Steve Wozniak's dad said to Steve Wozniak's brother, Steve Jobs is going to come over and I'm going to make that guy cry. And he didn't call him a guy, he called him a bad word and he did make him cry and he said a bunch of mean stuff to Steve Jobs and what happened next. Like I'd never even heard that story before.
Leo Laporte [02:08:52]:
I never heard it.
Jason Snell [02:08:53]:
So it's just, it's. There's some. Yeah, yeah, there's great stuff. So I'm looking forward to taking the plunge. And so I wanted to say, I mean Shelly knows this because Shelly and I work together back at Mac User. It's like I realized the other day that I've been writing about Apple for about two thirds of its, its existence, which is what. But so that'll be fun because there are parts of it where I was there and I'm at least, you know, I have some eyewitness accounts of what we were, what was happening as a, as a user or as a writer then. But even the ancient history stuff, like there's, there's some.
Jason Snell [02:09:24]:
So many good books, so many of which are out of print. So like, yeah, the short version is like, I love. The rest is history podcast, but that's two trained historians and what they do is they read the dry academic history but book that's 900 pages long with really small type and then they boil it down into like the most interesting stories and they tell those stories. And that's kind of the role that I'm taking here is I'm the one who's got the 15 different out of print Apple history books and I'm digging through them and then I'm trying to translate that into fun stories about the, one of the most, if not the most influential corporation of the last 50 years. So yeah, it's.
Leo Laporte [02:10:00]:
So you're going to, you're the writer, you're the storyteller. And then Mike's just there for color.
Jason Snell [02:10:04]:
Mike is, Mike is my partner in a lot of stuff in terms of production and marketing. And then while we're doing it, not only we do we have a good rapport for Upgrade, but like he's doing a lot of asking good questions about, you know, what I think of this or whatever he is. He's reacting in real time and sometimes he asked me a question, I'm like, oh, that's really interesting. He said, what do you think about this? There's some of that or, or he'll give it. This gives me the impression it's a good battle and forth. I think people will hear it. It's a good dynamic and we've been doing Upgrade for so long now that we, we really do fit find a rhythm there. And we're going to have some guests too about certain episodes.
Jason Snell [02:10:41]:
So I'm not going to give anything away yet. But like you might bring in like one of our colleagues who's also a particular subject matter expert and have them kind of have some opinions as I tell the story, which is also a lot of fun. So yeah, I think it's going to be good.
Leo Laporte [02:10:56]:
This is very interesting. A new way to kind of create, create podcast content. We're thrilled to see how quickly you funded and wish you the best. I think it's very exciting. Of course we'll talk about it more as the weeks and months go by. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the final pick of the week. A long awaited pick from Mr. Andy Ihnatko.
Andy Ihnatko [02:11:17]:
Yeah, my blog is now open. My site is now open. Go to ihnatko.com. And the, and the fun thing is the reason why I've been like I, I thought like a week away, a couple weeks away for like a couple months now is because like people, people were. There was a point in October where I had to take it live so I could test it and people found it. So okay, as long as I don't tell people about, that's okay. And then I was, when I hooked up like the stuff for members memberships and member supported stuff, I thought I had hid all the controls for like sign up so I could test to see and people found it.
Andy Ihnatko [02:11:52]:
And to my shock and surprise and gratitude, the next morning, like lots of people had signed up for paid memberships. Okay, so that was accidental too. All that was left was that I wanted to, as I, as I kept telling myself, I want to make sure that like the, the dinner table is set. Like all the stuff that I've been writing for when I didn't think any, didn't think anybody was watching, they're still in my drafts folder. I want to make sure those are finished and polished. And every single week I'm like, oh come on, just, you know, just push the button, just do it. And something was resisting. And this morning like I actually, I love that.
Andy Ihnatko [02:12:25]:
I love how this is so typical. I actually put out a post to members saying, okay, you know what, I think I'm just going to be another week because I do want to finish A, B and C. And then like after a couple of different members message saying, oh, you know, I think you're good, I think you're ready. And they were very, very compelling. And people that I trust and respect, I'm like, you know what? I'm sick and tired of like having to make that call every Monday night, whether I stay up until 6am and do some more work or whether I simply declare it, you know, open enough. And so literally like an hour before the show I sat down and wrote five to 800 words. Okay, you know what, we're done, it's open. Go ahead.
Andy Ihnatko [02:13:02]:
So I will say that it's like a new restaurant where the cooks are still learning the menu. But I think you'll get a good idea of what's going on. If there's going to be some very, very high profile news from the past two or three weeks that are not present because they are completed in my drafts folder and I need to continue to edit it. But rather than keep waiting another week, another week, another week to edit down all this stuff. It's open. It's a. Basically, the point is that it's things that I think are interesting, things I think are fun, things I think that are important. All three of those things.
Andy Ihnatko [02:13:32]:
I would like it to be a balance of things that are just fun and impulsive on my part, as well as things that took me a couple weeks, if not a month or two, to really nail down what I wanted to say and how I want to say it, a whole bunch of those things. One of the reasons why as soon as I clicked post on that announcement a couple hours ago, the thing that reminded me that got me thinking that, okay, you know what? This is the hand of divine providence behind my back. This is the right thing to do. This was post number 100 on the blog. Exactly. Number 100.
Leo Laporte [02:14:04]:
You have 100 before you even open the door. So that's pretty good.
Andy Ihnatko [02:14:07]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [02:14:08]:
This is why we've been telling him to turn the lights on for the whole. We got there.
Leo Laporte [02:14:13]:
Yeah, I'm great.
Andy Ihnatko [02:14:14]:
So I'm grateful to everybody who. Particularly to people who signed up for it, like a month and a half ago. Again, I could not. You cannot. I cannot explain how shocked I was when at 2am I'm like, I finally got the. I'll write a blog post in the future about everything that I had to go through to get the site built and all the decisions I made. But it's like, okay, so I wrote all the CSS and all the stuff I need hooking up, like, all the membership stuff. Okay, I've got the new bank account for the stripe payments, and I've got this.
Andy Ihnatko [02:14:38]:
I think this got this connected. Okay, great. So all I got to do now. I got to do now is like, I'll do tomorrow morning. I'm too tired right now. Tomorrow morning I'll just, like, make a pay, sign up for my own membership and see if that goes through. And like, that was at 2am and when I woke up, oh, my God, there are a whole bunch of. There's a whole bunch of money in my stripe account because people found the link, even though I thought I hid it.
Andy Ihnatko [02:14:59]:
So even without promoting it, even without, like, explaining, like, what this was going to be about, I'm very, very flattered and grateful that there are people who said, you know what? Here you go. I want to support your site. So thank you very much to all that. For the rest of you, I hope that you see there's going to be free stuff as well as memberships. Membership stuff. There's going to be a lot of stuff right now that seems as though it's only for members. That is not the correct balance of what's going to be. Obviously for the past month it's been, oh, I got to make sure I have some member exclusive stuff because I've got members that I'm very, very grateful for.
Andy Ihnatko [02:15:29]:
So there's going to be a whole bunch more free stuff and it's going to to be a balance of stuff for all visitors and a balance of stuff who are supporting through, through their cash. So I'm very, very happy with it. Again, later, sometime later on, once I've got this thing up and running, I will tell the story about how long, why it took me so long and how many dead ends I went through. There was a lot of investigation. I had neither desire and probably not the money to hire like an actual designer or a coder. So I had to do like all the design and coding myself. And that was, was a, hey, that was a bobsled ride of an adventure. But I'm very, very happy with what I've got.
Andy Ihnatko [02:16:04]:
I'm glad I didn't launch it in October when it was good enough. I'm glad that it's at a state where it's good and after we've got it on its feet in five or six months, I got some things I'd like to add. But right now I can just simply enjoy this space where I can write stuff and publish stuff and enjoy my time behind the keyboard because I've been having a lot of fun writing stuff for it.
Leo Laporte [02:16:23]:
Congratulations. Congratulations. I H N A T K O.com and you remember how to spell it by the mnemonic. I have no idea how to spell it. Yes, I have no I H N and the rest you know, Ihnatko it's easy.
Andy Ihnatko [02:16:38]:
I will tease. Like the pinned and promoted highlight of the current site is, I did write about the time when David Letterman licked my iPad to celebrate the end of the Late show on cbs.
Leo Laporte [02:16:52]:
I thought, I will never watch this iPad again. Again.
Jason Snell [02:16:55]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:16:56]:
Thank you, Andrew. Congratulations. Yay. It has launched.
Andy Ihnatko [02:17:00]:
Thank you very much.
Leo Laporte [02:17:01]:
It has launched as has the new Design show with Jason Snell. So you both, you two are making me look like a slacker.
Jason Snell [02:17:11]:
I don't think so.
Andy Ihnatko [02:17:13]:
You're only behind a microphone nine hours a day, six days a week. I know.
Jason Snell [02:17:16]:
I also while we're all on the four shots on the video version, I want to point out that I recently acquired this Mac user mug, which is important because, Leo, you're surrounded by The Mac User mafia right now.
Shelly Brisbin [02:17:33]:
That's true.
Jason Snell [02:17:34]:
Shelly and Andy and I all had our words in Mac User back in the day on a regular basis prior
Leo Laporte [02:17:42]:
to your tenure, I actually wrote some stuff for Mac User.
Jason Snell [02:17:44]:
Yeah, this, this is. I. It's actually a great story that one of the past editors in chief of Mac User Swag. Nice. Shelly, did you, did you work with John Zilber?
Shelly Brisbin [02:17:56]:
Yeah, a little bit, not much.
Jason Snell [02:17:57]:
Okay. So he, he passed away. I, I started right after he left. He passed away recently and I got to help his family with some like old Macs trying to figure out how functional they were and all of that. I got to, you know, brought, brought down the ADB keyboard, brought down the blue scsi, did a bunch of stuff to see if I could do that. And one of the things, things that I got to walk away with was a, a Mac User mug. I was like, how many people are going to get this? But I got it. So I'm.
Jason Snell [02:18:23]:
But I know Andy and Shelly would get it too. So that's great.
Shelly Brisbin [02:18:26]:
I have an Apple AUX mug. That's my claim to 90s fame. But no Mac User mug.
Andy Ihnatko [02:18:33]:
I have an Apple Linux mouse pad. I have a ZDNet Mac coffee mug. Okay, I've got a Mac. Exactly. It's like stuff that. Stuff that like I could have thrown away 15 years ago, but now, no way.
Shelly Brisbin [02:18:45]:
See, I threw away a lot of stuff and every time I would. I threw away the quick Mail mugs and various other, you know, Trotsky's and stuff. But whenever I would get to the AUX mug, I just couldn't bear to part with it. It is in my utility room right now. It's right next to my podcast studio. But it's, it's not in use, but it does exist.
Leo Laporte [02:19:03]:
Very nice. Yeah, and I did. I know I've written articles for Mac User. I mean probably it was before your time. There's a vintage Apple Mac user. February 1987. Were you a Mac user in 1987?
Jason Snell [02:19:17]:
I wasn't even using a Mac in 1977.
Shelly Brisbin [02:19:20]:
I was, but I wasn't working there. I was, I was actually. That was the age when I was probably staring at the magazine cover going, I'd really like to work there one day.
Leo Laporte [02:19:30]:
It's probably a review. Early on I realized the only ways I'm gonna get free software is by writing reviews. So it's undoubtedly a 400 word review. But that counts. That counts, right?
Jason Snell [02:19:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:19:47]:
Not a feature or anything like that. Well, thank you all of you especially. Thank you Shelly Brisbin for spending some time with us. We always love having you on the show. You'll find her at Texas standard radio. Texas Texas standard.org.org and she's also on Bluesky Guy as Shelly.
Shelly Brisbin [02:20:04]:
This guy Mastodon. Six Colors all the places everywhere.
Leo Laporte [02:20:08]:
Thank you. Shelly. So great to see you. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. Andy Inaco. He is the man in charge of inaco.com I can finally say that I H N a t k o.com you'll also find him on Blue sky at Ihnatko and Mr. Jason Snell.
Leo Laporte [02:20:24]:
6colors.com does many, many podcasts including that new one.
Jason Snell [02:20:28]:
What are you going to launch?
Leo Laporte [02:20:29]:
What day will that launch?
Jason Snell [02:20:30]:
Well, the samples will be out in the upgrade feed this month, the full on podcast which will have a free version with ads that people can get if they don't want to pay. I'd say by the end of the summer. We don't have a date yet that is official and we're going to give ourselves flexibility. The weird thing about Kickstarter is that Mike and I are both like how are we launching? We don't have the theme song and all. It's like we're not launching the podcast, we're launching the Kickstarter. So the podcast is still coming together, but I would say I'd be shocked if it isn't out by the end of the summer.
Leo Laporte [02:21:05]:
Exciting. Very exciting.
Jason Snell [02:21:07]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:21:07]:
Thank you Jason. Thank you Andy. Thank you Shelly. A special thanks to all our Club Twit members who make this show. We do this show and everybody can watch it when we do it live. Every Tuesday 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. There is a live stream for the Club Twit Discord, but there's also a live stream on YouTube, X.com, Facebook, Twitch, LinkedIn, kcik.com so watch where you feel like it after the fact. You can also get copies of the show at our website, twit.tv/mbw.
Leo Laporte [02:21:39]:
There is a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly so you can always watch there. And that's useful too for sharing clips of things like if you want to tell your friends and family about a knockout or the new design podcast, you could just share that little clip with them and Everybody can see YouTube. Good way to help promote the show. And the best way to get the show probably subscribe audio or video or both in your favorite podcast client. And by the way, that is another benefit for club members. I always forget to mention we can't do chapter markers on the ad supported downloads because unfortunately those have variable lengths due to the the ad insertions after the fact, but we can do it in the ad free version so Club members also get chapter markers in all of our shows so it makes it easy to skip around and listen to the stuff you care about. Thank you everybody for being here, but I am sad to say as been my duty for the last 20 some years, I must tell you that you have to get back to work now because break time is over by Bye Bye.
