MacBreak Weekly 1039 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. Andy, Christina, and Jason are here. Turns out Jason knew yesterday about the big story today. New Macs are here. We've got the deets coming up.

Leo Laporte [00:00:17]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1039, recorded Tuesday, August 25th, 2011. 2026: The Hand of Ryan Tedder. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. And there seems to have been a little bit of Apple news dropping from the tree at 6 o'clock Pacific, which we will talk about with Christina Warren. She's Developer Relations at GitHub and like me, an AI aficionado. We will, we will both Be looking at our credit cards soon. Andy Ihnatko is also here from the library, where he just borrows, never steals.

Leo Laporte [00:01:02]:
Hello, Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:03]:
Sometimes I even buy. They have a very, very good, like, secondhand book and CD exchange.

Leo Laporte [00:01:08]:
Oh, well, if Amazon doesn't get to it first. And also with us, Mr. Jason Snell, who immediately told me—

Jason Snell [00:01:15]:
I've been up since 6 AM. Hi!

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
He knew all about it all along!

Jason Snell [00:01:19]:
Yeah, yeah, we—

Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
The embargo has lifted.

Jason Snell [00:01:21]:
Hey! An Apple product announcement in the summertime. That's weird.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
This might be in many ways the least expected. Nobody, I don't think anybody telegraphed this. I don't think—

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:34]:
Yeah, there wasn't—

Jason Snell [00:01:35]:
Even Mark Gurman yesterday was like, I'm hearing that there might be a Mac mini.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
Yeah, that was my top story.

Jason Snell [00:01:41]:
Maybe before the iPhone, and I don't even know what chip is in it. And I'm sitting there reading the story going, well, I know, Mark.

Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
When did Apple call you yesterday?

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:50]:
You could have won a mug, Jason.

Jason Snell [00:01:51]:
They did briefings yesterday and put us, you know, the, the old embargo NDA thing, which is, which is great. But it was surprising 'cause I didn't, I was like, maybe Mac. I, I, one of the PR people that was talking to me, their name was on a, a, an M5 press release. And I was like, oh, could it be? And, uh, but it's interesting. It's also, I would say the least surprising in some ways because the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio had been hovering, like, when are they gonna do it? Very clearly they needed an update. And I think we all suppose it got delayed because of all sorts of other supply chain issues involving availability and prioritizing, you know, laptops and things like that for Apple. So in that way, it's like, yeah, but, but to do it the, you know, a week or two before we expect the iPhone event to happen and to do it with the details that they did, because they essentially launched, launched a new chip generation while also closing the book on an old chip generation all at once in one— well, in 3 press releases.

Christina Warren [00:02:51]:
So.

Jason Snell [00:02:51]:
That was, it's, yeah, interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:02:53]:
I can tell you the first thing I said to myself is, damn it, I bought 2 Sparks. Christina, so this to me really looks like Apple saying, oh yeah, that whole pro creator thing, forget that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:09]:
Oh my God.

Leo Laporte [00:03:10]:
We're your AI guys.

Christina Warren [00:03:12]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:12]:
These are machines designed to appeal to the AI audience.

Jason Snell [00:03:16]:
100%.

Leo Laporte [00:03:17]:
And so let's just quickly say new Mac Minis and new Mac Studios.

Jason Snell [00:03:19]:
Mac Studios.

Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
And the Mac Mini. is the M5 Ultra.

Jason Snell [00:03:26]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:03:26]:
With 256 gigs of RAM. And then late next month, 512. 512. Where the hell are they getting that RAM from?

Christina Warren [00:03:35]:
They're, they're not. I mean, I think that, uh, that, that is part of the issue, right? Like, that's why it's, it's delayed. I think that they're probably, if it were my guess, they're going to— one of the reasons they're waiting a month is that they're going to be kind of looking at Okay, what are our yields and what are our preorders like on our phones so that if we need to allocate certain chips for, for the number of 512 machines that we sell, which I don't think will— I mean, I think they'll sell everyone they have, but I don't think that this is designed to be a mass, you know, like a number of units sold item. Just because if you— if we look at the pricing just on the, the 256 version, it's like $13,000. If you max it, you know, if you max it, if you put an 8 terabyte drive in.

Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
But you shouldn't do that.

Christina Warren [00:04:23]:
No, you shouldn't. But even if you just have 256 gigs of RAM and the smaller amount of storage, it's still 10 grand, right?

Leo Laporte [00:04:29]:
Yeah, you pay $1,300 for the processor upgrade from 64 to 80 GPUs, and then you— you're $204,000 for 256 gigs of RAM. Let's just put a terabyte drive in that sucker, right? And you still got it up to $10,800.

Christina Warren [00:04:47]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:04:48]:
So, so you think this is a small— but I gotta tell you, that is— that is— this is gonna be comparable to what I paid for 2 Sparks.

Christina Warren [00:04:56]:
You're not wrong.

Leo Laporte [00:04:57]:
And it's a lot faster. It's 1.2 terabytes a second.

Christina Warren [00:05:01]:
Yes, but I think that the difference here is that, you know, A, NVIDIA has never been like— they're not a mass market, like, other than—

Leo Laporte [00:05:08]:
This isn't CUDA, of course.

Christina Warren [00:05:10]:
This is metal. And, and, but, but also, like, you know, obviously their, their, uh, GPUs you know, for gamers aside, that's obviously a mass market thing. But like the Spark is designed as a high-end developer professional tool aimed after a certain audience. It's an AI machine, right? Right, exactly. And so—

Leo Laporte [00:05:25]:
That's all it's doing. I don't even have a monitor plugged into it. It's just sitting there running a model.

Christina Warren [00:05:29]:
Well, that's exactly it. Whereas, you know, the Mac is a little bit different. And I do think they're going after the same crowd, but I think that it is the same type of demand, which is not to say, again, like I think they'll sell all of them. But you're also for 512 gigs of RAM and like, it's gonna be 20 grand.

Leo Laporte [00:05:45]:
It'll be 20 at least.

Christina Warren [00:05:46]:
At least, right? And so that is gonna— there will be plenty of companies and maybe enthusiasts and rich people who will be willing to buy that. I think that there are going to be, but it's not the typical audience that you had even last time we had a Mac Studio release, right? Which was at that point, yes, it was still a workstation and a professional and it was the thing you would buy rather than buying a Mac Pro. But it was not $20,000.

Leo Laporte [00:06:13]:
So I think— Yeah, but I gotta tell you, 20 grand for you and me might be a lot, but for a lot of companies that are looking for—

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:19]:
I don't agree.

Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
Local AI.

Jason Snell [00:06:20]:
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [00:06:21]:
And it's gonna be timed very nicely because I expect we're gonna see some, we already have seen some very good local models. You could run DeepSeek V4 Flash on this.

Christina Warren [00:06:30]:
Well, like I said, I think they'll sell every single one they have. I just don't know what their yields and their allocation are going to be on this, right? I don't know how long of a wait you'll have to have. I mean, even Nvidia, who arguably has better access than anybody else, You know, it took well over a year for people to be able to buy the Sparks in any sort of, you know, like to make it easy where you could just click buy from the website from when they announced it, right? So, yeah, plenty of businesses, plenty of companies will be looking at doing this. The tooling still is not—

Leo Laporte [00:07:02]:
Not a few YouTubers.

Christina Warren [00:07:03]:
Sure, sure. But I think that's going to be less— And a few influencers. Yeah, but I think that's going to be less than you would expect. I mean, I think they might go for the $10,000 thing. Maybe they'll return it.

Leo Laporte [00:07:15]:
There's a guy on X who has a $100,000 Spark station.

Christina Warren [00:07:19]:
I mean, I mean, congratulations. But like, I don't know the value of that, right? It's like, okay, so you're flexing. A, I don't know how many people are actually being influenced by this. I feel like if you have the money for that, right? And if you have the money for that, you're not looking at some influencer on X or YouTube to tell you how great it is. You're a business who has other things.

Leo Laporte [00:07:38]:
It seems like Apple wants to position themselves as, as local AI.

Jason Snell [00:07:43]:
Of course they do.

Christina Warren [00:07:44]:
Yeah, of course they do.

Jason Snell [00:07:44]:
The reason, the reason is that they sense an advantage here. This is something that they've realized over the last— right. We had that big moment where everybody was buying Mac Minis to do for local AI. And they see an advantage here with the hardware and with the chips they're building. There was that Mark Gurman report about how they were going to leap over the M6 Pro and Max entirely and go to M7 because of advanced AI performance that they're going to be able to get in the M7 generation because they, they, that's going to be the chip that they designed knowing that local AI was a thing. But, you know, by the end of the year, there will be somebody somewhere who will write a story about what it's like to take one of those when they ever they arrive 512 systems of the, of the Studio Ultra times 4.

Leo Laporte [00:08:30]:
So they are 80 times You can quite reasonably tie them together.

Jason Snell [00:08:35]:
And then you tie them together and you've got access to—

Leo Laporte [00:08:37]:
You'll have GLM 5.3 running locally.

Jason Snell [00:08:40]:
You got some, a couple terabytes running locally with pretty good performance. I think what Apple said is 4 of these Ultras connected together will generate roughly like 3x performance. So it's not, you know, there you lose something in the fact that there's a lot, they're wired by Thunderbolt, but it's a lot of memory. It's a, it's a lot of performance. And my favorite detail of my briefing about this was that they had a shot of that 4 Mac Studio array plugged into a power strip plugged into a single outlet.

Leo Laporte [00:09:15]:
That's important.

Jason Snell [00:09:16]:
And that's what they said is like, you can run something with pretty impressive power on a single power outlet because Apple Silicon lets them do that. And it's not, you know, They're not, they're not building a cloud. Right. But I think Apple, part of it is self-serving. They are, they are pressing their advantage. They— this is a place where Apple Silicon actually gives them some benefit. And so they're trying to push that. But also, I do think that within Apple, they're like, this may be increasingly a thing.

Jason Snell [00:09:44]:
I know I talked to some people about this, the idea that if you could pay $100 grand and get a pretty performant AI system that stayed in your office, and had no token costs, maybe that's interesting, right? Like, not necessarily in the future, not necessarily everything goes in the cloud, right?

Leo Laporte [00:10:03]:
Because companies are paying through the roof for private cloud serving at Amazon or Microsoft, uh, and it's very expensive and it's an ongoing bill. If you were to build something with higher-end NVIDIA cards, The power consumption would be hundreds, if not thousands a month. This is a very interesting proposition. I think there are a lot of small to medium-sized businesses who might say, you know, this makes sense. It's not that you don't save money, but you have private control.

Christina Warren [00:10:38]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:10:38]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:10:38]:
I think that's really important. I think people underestimate how important that is.

Christina Warren [00:10:41]:
I don't disagree that it makes sense. I do question— I don't know just how big that market is. Well, not even that. I don't know how much supply they have. To be able to do it.

Leo Laporte [00:10:49]:
I think the market's unlimited. I think they could sell, as you said, every one of them.

Christina Warren [00:10:52]:
I think they'll sell every one they have. But I think when you're a company like Apple, you have to basically make a decision. You have a certain number of components right now, components, there's a shortage. So you have to basically decide how are we going to allocate these things and are we going to focus on this market, which has obviously potentially, you know, a lot of margin because they can charge more for storage and more for other things to try to make up where they're losing margin on their laptops and phones. Right. Well, exactly. Holy cow. And, and, but, but, but, but I guess you have to balance that with, okay, your core business is iPhones.

Christina Warren [00:11:27]:
So are you willing to forego however many, you know, iPhones so that you can sell these systems in mass quantities?

Leo Laporte [00:11:34]:
Does the iPhone use DDR5 though? Does it use the same RAM?

Jason Snell [00:11:38]:
They're probably foregoing MacBook Pros a little bit. Mac, Mac, uh, MacBook Airs or MacBook Neos or things like that a little bit. But yeah, I mean, that's why I think it got delayed to this point is that they wanted to know they had at least a little bit of a buffer. Little bit of, of supply. And, you know, honestly, at those margins, it's kind of hard to say no.

Leo Laporte [00:11:56]:
I also think— okay, this is, uh, it's not as the most important point, but 2 weeks before the iPhone announcement, uh, it's— it will also make the iPhones look cheaper.

Jason Snell [00:12:07]:
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [00:12:09]:
It's so expensive.

Jason Snell [00:12:10]:
And, and they raised the base price by $100. Um, and I noted that, like, if you go back to What, 2 years ago when the, the M4, um, Mac Mini was introduced? Uh, it's 50% price increase in 2 years on the base model of the Mac Mini because it, it was $599, right? So it, it, it is. And they, they increased it, but then again they increased it with the M6 Mac Mini.

Leo Laporte [00:12:36]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [00:12:36]:
It's an additional $100 on top of already what they had done. So everything is way more expensive than it was even at the starting prices, which Makes me a little sad to see that starting price on the, on the Mac Mini.

Leo Laporte [00:12:47]:
But do you think people forgive them? Because people know it's costing them—

Jason Snell [00:12:51]:
Everything is like that now. I think they, I think nobody's happy about it, but I don't think it's like, oh, Apple is the only one out there doing this. Everybody is doing it. I, I did have a conversation with a friend of mine. He and I both bought M4 Max MacBook Pros last year and we're both like, well, that's looking like a pretty good investment now, isn't it? Because everything is so much more expensive now.

Leo Laporte [00:13:11]:
The smallest Mac Mini you could get with the M6 And new M6 chip. 16 gigs of RAM and, uh, 256 gigs of storage is still $900.

Jason Snell [00:13:22]:
Yeah, $899 for that one.

Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
That's a big jump.

Christina Warren [00:13:24]:
It is a big jump. I, what I would say to people, if you were actually looking at getting a Mini and, and you have the budget for it, because at this point it's no longer an inexpensive computer, right? You're talking about $1,000. Yeah. Um, uh, you know, taxes before AppleCare, anything else, it's a $1,000 machine. So like Um, at that point, I would very seriously consider if this is a machine you're wanting to use seriously for a long time. I think that getting the M6 with 32 gigs of RAM and the 512 storage, it's $1,499. That's still expensive. That is, in my opinion, a much better machine that will last you much, much longer.

Christina Warren [00:14:04]:
Um, the, the thing that, because I have an M4 Mini and I don't use it that much and part of, and I'm going to use it more, but part of the reason is that I got the base model, which was smart of me, but the base storage, 256 gigs, is not great. And macOS does not handle external drives super well. Like, you can work with a NAS and whatnot, but if you are doing a lot of things with iCloud and if you want to be part of that ecosystem, it is not designed to do well with that at all. And that's a thing that I really wish that Apple would focus on fixing and making better, at least making their, their, you know, cloud file APIs that they now force everyone to use work better so that I don't have to have so much stuff cached because it really does impede on your ability, not even just for AI, but just for regular usage. If you're a regular person and you were buying a $900 computer with 256 gigs of RAM, I don't care who makes it, I'm going to be worried for you for that, you know, for the longevity of that machine. So I feel like at this point, like we'd had an era where it was undoubtedly the best value in computing. It was $599, but it was very easy to get them for $499. That Mac Mini was, unfortunately, I think in retrospect, we'll look back as probably being the greatest value Apple computer that ever existed.

Christina Warren [00:15:14]:
And I don't know if we will ever get a computer that is that much of a value ever again.

Leo Laporte [00:15:19]:
Can they still make the Neo?

Christina Warren [00:15:22]:
I mean, they can, but like the Neo—

Jason Snell [00:15:23]:
They raised that price too.

Christina Warren [00:15:24]:
They raised that price too. And the Neo is 8 gigs of RAM and it's a phone chip. It's not in the same kind of, it's not the same category to me, right? Like the Neo, my opinion is in a lot of ways, inferior to the 6-year-old M1 MacBook Air. And so I'm not mad at it. I'm glad it exists. But it just— you went from having like a very good $600 computer to now a computer that we understand why it costs $900. But I don't know if you're looking at using this as an actual computer, let alone any AI stuff, if this is what I would do if it were my money. And I'm actually looking at this myself.

Christina Warren [00:16:00]:
I'm like, okay, would I get a 32GB M6 Mini with 512 gigs of RAM. And would that be like paired with a monitor, a good kind of day-to-day workstation? And, and I still don't like the price, but I feel like I am at least getting more for my money there than I would be if I were getting something that, yes, it's better than what came out 2 years ago, but is it 50% better? No, I don't think it is.

Leo Laporte [00:16:24]:
They are. Let's talk about the M6 because this is probably the only time we're gonna see, we'll see it in a laptop too, right?

Jason Snell [00:16:30]:
And then— Well, it'll be in the, it'll, it'll be in the Air. And, uh, the base model Pro.

Leo Laporte [00:16:35]:
Apparently a new iMac is coming, maybe.

Jason Snell [00:16:36]:
And an iMac. I mean, we're gonna see the M6, but what we're not, what we're not gonna see is a Pro format.

Leo Laporte [00:16:40]:
It's gonna be a brief shining moment.

Jason Snell [00:16:43]:
According to Mark Gurman.

Leo Laporte [00:16:44]:
They do talk about it as an AI chip though. It's a 2-nanometer process and it has more NPUs, right?

Jason Snell [00:16:49]:
Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a, it's a, like a, a 16-core neural engine, a dual 16-core neural engine actually, I think.

Christina Warren [00:16:57]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:16:57]:
So like, They said twice the peak compute over previous generations on AI workflows that use the Neural Engine, the NPUs. And in the M5 generation—

Leo Laporte [00:17:08]:
But you max out at 32 gigs of RAM, so you're not gonna be running big models here.

Jason Snell [00:17:12]:
No, but it's like, you know, if you're running, you're gonna be running smaller models, but for a base chip that's gonna show up in base Mac mini, MacBook Air, iMac, it's pretty good that, you know, and it also points to Apple finally, this is, This is a design that you look at and you go, oh, Apple's been starting to bake more AI stuff into the chips. So in the M5 generation, they added all those neural accelerators to the GPU cores, which they didn't have before. And of course, there was no M5 Mac Mini. So you're going from M4 to M6 there. So you pick that up as well. So there's much more kind of like AI power even in this base chip, which I think is telling because I think this is Apple You know, we are seeing that, that ship slowly turn. And if Gurman's reports are right, you know, the real card playing that they're going to do is they're going to put down that M7 generation, which apparently has even more AI features that are, that are, you know, they realized that they needed to lean into that even further than they did. I mean, Neural Engine has been around forever, but like they're realizing how important it is and that they've got an opportunity on the desktop.

Leo Laporte [00:18:18]:
I want to caution people a little bit because most people who are gonna buy these are gonna be using AI in the cloud.

Jason Snell [00:18:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:18:27]:
They're not gonna be running it local. So it doesn't matter at all. Yeah. You could use a Neo if you're using Anthropic or OpenAI or, or you, you, you don't need any processing locally particularly.

Jason Snell [00:18:40]:
Right, right. You need an app that's using a local model. Some of Siri AI stuff might be on a local model. There are some, but you're right.

Leo Laporte [00:18:46]:
But they're gonna run what we think of as cloud. Yeah, it's not gonna be demanding.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:50]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:18:50]:
I think it's important 'cause I don't, I want, I don't want people to buy a 16 gig M6 and think they're gonna run, you know, AI models.

Christina Warren [00:18:58]:
No, no, no, exactly. They're not. But what I also would caution that is that, or that they need to, or that you need to, right? The only thing I would say is that even with those cloud models, if you started to get into more agentic computer use where, you know, it is doing things in apps, running Copilot or, or Hermes, right? Or, or, or Hermes or whatever else. And, and it's opening up your applications. And it's able to control things and it's able to, you know, um, do things faster for you within your applications and that sort of thing. That again, like I think 16 gigs of RAM is, is probably okay there. But you know, you have to keep in mind it's not like all the activities that your cloud AI is doing will remain on the cloud.

Leo Laporte [00:19:34]:
For a lot of people, and this is the push right now, you're gonna be using something like GroqBot or Perplexity Computer or, There are a lot where the computer is in the cloud too. So really your device is a thin client to cloud computing. So for most people, you know, if you say I want to run AI, you have to decide, am I going to run AI in the cloud or an agent in the cloud, or am I going to run that locally?

Jason Snell [00:20:01]:
And Apple is trying to cover both. I mean, a MacBook Neo, for example, will run Claude just fine.

Leo Laporte [00:20:08]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [00:20:08]:
Because it's happening in the cloud.

Leo Laporte [00:20:09]:
It's all in the cloud.

Jason Snell [00:20:10]:
But they're also trying to lean into the sort of like, I think you will see further features from Apple and that they will evangelize to their developers as well, 'cause they wanna try to press this advantage and say, if we've got better compute on device, are there things we can do with that? Is there more agentic stuff we can do? What can we do if we have a Mac, a bunch of MacBook Airs out there with the M6 on it, which they will eventually. Is there stuff we can do on device that makes the overall AI experience better instead of having it all be in the cloud? We'll see if they're able to do that. But they're also like, that's why they, you know, make a MacBook Neo is like you really don't need anything but a thin client to do that up in the cloud. I, I wanted to mention something about the M6 that I also think is interesting. We made a lot of jokes about the M5 when they came out and they renamed their processor cores because they said, well, You know, performance cores are now super cores and efficiency cores are now performance cores or something. It was like, what are they doing rebranding these things? And different chips have different cores. And it's a real— this is a real hold my beer moment. The M6 has all 3 kinds of cores.

Jason Snell [00:21:18]:
It's their first base model with a 12-core CPU and they've got 2 super cores, 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. So 3 different kinds of cores. And I asked them about it, and it's interesting. So Apple clearly decided that they really wanted to optimize their cores 3 different ways, and so they decided to build 3 different types of cores. So efficiency is what we've already known. It's the, especially for background tasks, it's like, is there a, are there cores that we can set these basic tasks to that are super low power so they're not gonna kill your battery? Okay, those are, those are your efficiency cores, and they crank up and they can do more work. They— all of these are CPU cores and they can do work, but they're designed to be super efficient. Performance cores, according to Apple, are all about multi-threaded performance.

Jason Snell [00:22:06]:
So you're taking either multiple apps or apps that spawn many, many different threads. It's your multiprocessor power core. That's what the performance cores are. And the super cores, of which there are 2 on the M6, are designed for single threaded performance, which is different, right? That's, I just have a thread that needs to crank as fast as possible, use as much power as you need to to get through this task. 'Cause the truth is when you look at Activity Monitor or you consider how your programs are built and the programs that you're running are what they're doing, some tasks are very much multi-thread, some are very much kind of like background, not important, but they need to get done. And some are, super highest priority, go to the max, uh, and, and do as much work as you possibly can. And so I don't know what this means for the future of other Apple Silicon designs, but this M6, they've built all 3 core types into their— and this is the base model, right? This is just the vanilla M6. We may not see another M6, but this is an interesting direction forward for Apple Silicon in that way that they, they apparently have decided 2 CPU core types was clever and all, but what if we're doing 3 blades, right? Basically is what's going on here.

Jason Snell [00:23:27]:
It's interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:23:27]:
It's very interesting. I feel like they had somewhere a secret stock of RAM chips that they were hiding. I mean, how do you announce this product?

Jason Snell [00:23:38]:
It may be why this product got announced now and not 3 months ago is that they just kept putting more chips in the little cardboard box in the corner until they could ship them.

Christina Warren [00:23:46]:
No, I mean, I think it probably was that. And then maybe they had to also make decisions about potentially delaying laptop releases. Right. We don't— we don't know if there had been plans or if those plans have changed for what they might have been doing in the fall on that end. And maybe they said, OK, if we can't get the yields right or if we don't feel like we can get the pricing where it needs to be, because that is decidedly going to be— even if it's prosumer, that is a laptop that's a little bit different. You can make the argument here, OK, even if You know, we're we're foregoing some of our enthusiast Mac Mini audience. The Mac Studio audience has always been professionals, and it's always been workstations. And yeah, now they're going to pay whatever we charge them, and we're going to sell all these things.

Christina Warren [00:24:24]:
Maybe it was just a matter of going, okay, now it's as good a time as any. I also think, and and I'm curious, especially what Jason and Andy think about this, but doing the price increase after we'd already had the price increase. I wonder what this portends for in a couple of weeks when we see iPhone pricing and how they're going to approach that, because so far we've been insulated, but we know that's not going to last. And so I wonder, too, you know, someone had mentioned earlier that that might be kind of their testing ground of like making people more comfortable with just what the prices on things are. But I, I'm curious about, about the timing on that, too, because not to say they won't sell all these things, but the fact that it's a Tuesday, you know, press release at, at 6 AM, um, it does kind of indicate that this is like, okay, we're trying to kind of burn this off. Not that we don't want people to buy it, but we have much bigger things we'll be talking about presumably in a few weeks, and we don't want to be marred down with, with this. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:25:25]:
Yeah, so is there another shoe gonna drop, uh, this week or next? I don't think we've seen the end of this, right? This is before the— let's say September 9th.

Christina Warren [00:25:36]:
iPhone.

Leo Laporte [00:25:37]:
Are they going to clear the decks with all the Macs?

Jason Snell [00:25:40]:
I don't think so. I think this is it.

Leo Laporte [00:25:42]:
This is it.

Jason Snell [00:25:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:25:43]:
Sorry, Andy, go ahead.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:44]:
Oh no, uh, I would— I was just going to say that my, my biggest reaction is, of course, the— now the cheapest Mac desktop Mac is $899, and we're fresh from around where it used to be $600, $599. So basically the cheapest point of entry for a Mac desktop just went up 50%. And that is just a damn shame. I mean, because this— it was such a neat little solution because a lot of people will have like an extra display that's kicking around. A lot of people will have an extra keyboard, an extra mouse from whatever computer they used to have 4 or 5 years ago kicking around. And so they could basically put a Mac in the family room. They could put a Mac that the kids could have for their own. Schools could have like a big blister pack of these things.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:28]:
They could buy more than they otherwise would.

Leo Laporte [00:26:29]:
I'm sure Apple agrees with you, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:30]:
This isn't anything— No, I'm not saying— again, I'm not, I'm not saying to hell with Apple about this. I'm saying that that's the thing that is mostly most on my mind. I don't know whether this is Apple deciding that, look, we've got a very, very limited supply of RAM. We're buying it at prices that we've never seen before. We just can't afford to put them in a $599 machine anymore. We have to stop marketing the Mac as a Volkswagen machine, and we have to start marketing it towards AI people who are not really very price-conscious. Again, if that were the case, I would totally understand that. But nonetheless, let us not— like, uh, let's— and as part of the discussion, let us note the passing of a really, really great era.

Andy Ihnatko [00:27:15]:
Uh, and basically that, again, I've, I've always thought that, uh, one of the best things I've seen of Apple in the past 5 years, maybe the past 10 years, probably closer to 5 years, is that they used to not really care about gaining the, uh, gaining the slogan that Apple is unless you have upper middle class money, they don't care about you. Go be poor someplace else, as written in Latin above the Apple logo in an Apple Store. That was at least the vibe they were giving off 10 years ago, that we just don't care about you unless you've got premium money. And they seem to have turned out in the past 5 years, really turned that around so that there is at least a good option for people who are coming in at the high end of the budget range or at the low end of the moderate range. And so again, a moment of silence, please, for a computer that filled, I thought, a very, very important and valuable role in the Mac lineup.

Leo Laporte [00:28:14]:
If I were to order this Mac Studio with the M6, or I'm sorry, M5 Ultra right now, November 3rd or October 27th. So it's end of October anyway.

Jason Snell [00:28:26]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:28:27]:
Why so long? I don't remember Apple ever— I mean, we're in August. This is, this is more than 2 months. I've never seen Apple, uh, pre-orders, offer a pre-order for something for 2 months from now.

Jason Snell [00:28:40]:
Well, I mean, I've seen that with iPhones.

Leo Laporte [00:28:43]:
Yeah, towards the end of the— yeah, but, but if you got in day one, like now.

Jason Snell [00:28:49]:
Yeah, well, keep in mind it doesn't ship for a month, so it's starting a month out.

Leo Laporte [00:28:53]:
Oh, okay. So I'm, I'm already seeing the lag.

Jason Snell [00:28:56]:
September 22nd, I think is the ship date, which is pres— and, and these only run, so some other details, these only run Golden Gate. So I mean, it'll be out by then.

Leo Laporte [00:29:05]:
It has to wait till the Golden Gate's out.

Jason Snell [00:29:06]:
It'll be out by then. But yeah, also it requires Golden Gate. So that's, that's part of it. You mentioned the, the Ultra and shopping for an Ultra. I did have the, a, a thought, which is this is why they put out together that program so you can lease a computer. 'Cause some of these things are so expensive. It's like leasing a car.

Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
But the business likes that because I mean, I don't know if it's a real lease, but—

Christina Warren [00:29:27]:
Oh, a business wouldn't do this. A business would never use Klarna. A business would never use Klarna.

Leo Laporte [00:29:31]:
Oh, they wouldn't use Klarna.

Christina Warren [00:29:32]:
You're right. Absolutely not.

Jason Snell [00:29:33]:
But under the circumstances, they probably have some other mechanism. And they would lease it because, um, the other detail, a tech nerd detail that I think our listeners might appreciate is I had some people asking me, how is, how is M5 Ultra formed, right? Uh, how, how is that? How is it? How is Ultra formed?

Leo Laporte [00:29:51]:
Ask Yahoo.

Jason Snell [00:29:51]:
And the answer Is so the M5 Max is made up of two two chiplets basically, right? That they're that attach together that are the the CPU and the GPU basically. And so the question that I I got from somebody today was, oh, is this some sort of like they they did a a bigger GPU chiplet and then they attached the CPUs and all that? And the answer straight from Apple's mouth is no. It is two M5 Maxes attached together with UltraFusion. So that means in the package there's 4 triplets instead of 2, but it's much more dense and much faster bandwidth than the previous UltraFusion was.

Leo Laporte [00:30:32]:
It's incredible. It's 1.2 terabytes a second.

Jason Snell [00:30:34]:
Exactly. So it allows them to weld those chips together in a way where you have access that's very fast to all the memory on either of them and all the cores. And so you get essentially, but that's what an Ultra still is. It is still defined as being essentially 2 Max chips together. Or in this case, if you wanna think of it that way, the 2 chiplets that are in the Max are now 4 chiplets in the Ultra. That's how they do it.

Leo Laporte [00:31:00]:
Can I just say 1.2 terabytes a second is mind-boggling. That's basically instant. That's like—

Jason Snell [00:31:07]:
Right. Which you want in a chip, right? You want it in your chip that you're moving memory around or you're right like that. It has to be, or there's no point in connecting them together. But it's a mind-boggling—

Leo Laporte [00:31:17]:
It's almost 5 times what these very expensive DGX Sparks can do. It's, it's mind-boggling. By the way, this is the most pathetic image of all. What's in the box? A Mac Studio and a plug.

Jason Snell [00:31:30]:
Yep. BYODKM, I think Steve Jobs said, and that is still the case.

Leo Laporte [00:31:37]:
But I have to point out, I think I would run this headless. To be honest, I think a lot of people might run this at home because you put it in the closet and it's a server. It's amazing. All right. Let's take a little break and then we'll talk about stuff for poor people. I don't know what that will be. It probably won't be—

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:58]:
My time to shine.

Leo Laporte [00:31:59]:
I don't think it'll be anything Apple's offering. Maybe that cloth. Cloth.

Christina Warren [00:32:05]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:05]:
50% discount on cleaning cloth.

Leo Laporte [00:32:07]:
All right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:08]:
The dream is alive.

Leo Laporte [00:32:12]:
Uh, wow. Uh, I have to say, I was kind of bowled over. I did not— I don't, I don't think I expected this. Did you? Did anybody expect anything like this? I might have held off on the purchase of the Sparks if I had known this was coming.

Christina Warren [00:32:27]:
Well, Leo, you can, you can absolutely sell those Sparks and make—

Leo Laporte [00:32:31]:
Oh, that's a good point.

Christina Warren [00:32:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:32:34]:
Yeah, it's roughly the same, you know.

Christina Warren [00:32:36]:
Yeah, so if you'd rather have macOS instead of CUDA, you can— I promise you, you can make all your money back.

Leo Laporte [00:32:43]:
Yeah, I actually asked my, uh, I asked Hermes this morning, did I make a mistake? And he said, no, no, you're okay. Patted me on the head. Uh, we are talking about Apple. There will be more, not just the, uh, the high price spread, but more to talk about in just a little bit with Christina Warren from GitHub, Andy Inoco, From the poorhouse? No, I'm the one in the poorhouse. Andy's in the library. Uh, and Jason Snell, who had the scoop yesterday. You know, aren't you glad, Jason, that they announced this today and not tomorrow? Because you would have had to sit here.

Jason Snell [00:33:15]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:33:16]:
For an entire show.

Jason Snell [00:33:18]:
Yeah, yeah, I did, I did all of Upgrade yesterday, but I hadn't been briefed yet. I just knew there was a briefing, so I was able to move. But, but it is— I've, I've done that before. It sucks to be Under embargo and have to, have to play dumb. But you know, sometimes it happens.

Leo Laporte [00:33:33]:
That's why I don't, uh, ever do those because I have no ability to keep my mouth shut as people probably already know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:33:42]:
So, so dear listeners, if you ever, if I ever say something and say, my God, Andy just said the dumbest thing ever, there's a good chance maybe I'm under embargo on something and I'm actually smarter than I sound. Give me the benefit of the doubt. It's probably not true, but still.

Leo Laporte [00:33:58]:
Uh, you're watching, uh, Mac Break Weekly, and it is, it is, it is breaking the bank, that's for sure. I will be out of the country when that comes available for order, thank God. Let's hope I don't have any internet access. How much do you think an M5 Ultra— but see, here's the other thing, this is built for regret because you buy the M5 Ultra, you get the 512 gigs of RAM, You get it home, you open the box, and then next year they announce an M7.

Christina Warren [00:34:28]:
Well, I mean, I think it depends. Again, I think that who buys the, the Ultra, the Studios, it's not consumers who are going to be concerned with that sort of thing necessarily. You're buying this for compute. No, it's business systems. You're buying it for the compute that you need now. And I know from friends of mine who bought, you know, Mac Studios and got the Ultra chips, which are always at least a year or so behind because of the the couplet process that they need. Like, that's a trade-off that you make because of the performance that you need. And so it'll be 2 years before there's an M7 Ultra.

Christina Warren [00:34:57]:
Exactly. If we even get one, right? Because they skip generations too. So, I mean, I think this is one of those things where if you have the budget for it, if you have the need for it, you know, and if you accept, which I unfortunately think we all have to, which is that the prices are not going to get any better, this is, this is probably not, you know, a bad I think depending on your needs, right? But I have a friend who has wanted one for his home lab for quite some time, has been waiting for this for quite some time. I don't know if, you know, $10,000 is going to be something that fits in his budget for his home lab. That's, that's a pretty expensive home lab. But if that's the scenario you're in, I mean, I think that you recognize if you're that class of buyer, I think you recognize that you're not going to be having FOMO for whatever comes out next year because this is a different type of product. This has always been a different type of product.

Leo Laporte [00:35:46]:
I think it really is businesses, people who are— who, uh, because you look, there's no economic rationale for this with how cheap some of these models are on the frontier now.

Christina Warren [00:35:59]:
No, no, there's not.

Leo Laporte [00:36:00]:
I mean, you don't save money by buying this, you— but you get privacy. You get—

Christina Warren [00:36:04]:
You get privacy and, and potentially, you know, depending on, I guess, how many people are going to be using things and how many You can serve things, it can be better. But even then, I'm not even sure how much right now it makes sense for people to— even privacy aside, it's like, okay, if I could run local models in private compute on a cloud, am I going to amortize that? Is that going to be better than me making this, you know, multiple, you know, $10,000 purchases and linking these things together? I don't know. Businesses will have to do the math, the performance costs. On that, but if you're doing things like reinforcement learning, if you're doing other types of research and materials and what you know and stuff on these on these devices, that's honestly you know a little bit different. Could you still probably do better in some regards by buying a bunch of 5090s and running those in an array? Maybe that's also going to be massively power like the. the power around that is going to be much, much higher.

Jason Snell [00:37:04]:
Yeah, right.

Christina Warren [00:37:05]:
And so to Jason's point, the fact that they showed off like kind of in the demo that they had them all plugged into, that was intentional. The fact that it's all on a power strip and it's one plug, that is a compelling argument to make too, because when you're looking at the kind of the total cost of ownership for these things, like that all goes into it. But this is, I mean, this is a really cool product. I am unfortunately not a Mac Studio customer. That is, that is not a thing that, uh, I am, as much as I would like to be. That's just not where I'm at. Uh, but I'm, I'm happy for the people that are. Um, but I do think it's interesting that what you said at the top of the show is that they have very much shifted, and I think smartly, from going, who, okay, our bed and our bread and butter enthusiast— not enthusiast— our bread and butter professional audience was audiovisual.

Christina Warren [00:37:53]:
Um, users. And now they, I think, have finally kind of realized, no, it's, it's going to be AI builders.

Jason Snell [00:37:59]:
And not to say that they don't care about the other group too, but I was going to say they, they did, and it's in the press release, they did talk about AI a lot, but they also did talk about video production workflows, especially with 4K and 8K video and, you know, and computer graphics workflows, the most high-end audio workflows.

Leo Laporte [00:38:22]:
They said it's, it's true.

Jason Snell [00:38:23]:
But here's the— and I think this And I think this is why they're embracing AI too. It's not just because everybody is embracing AI. One of the reasons, okay, I'm gonna be a little, just gonna throw out a theory here. One of the reasons that tech is embracing AI so much is because our tech has become so powerful that we were running out of applications for the more powerful tech.

Christina Warren [00:38:46]:
Exactly.

Jason Snell [00:38:47]:
And Apple is certainly in that. And I'll give you one example, which is I appreciate that you can now buy a Mac Studio or a MacBook Pro with a high-end chip on it for those high-end video production workflows. And those, they do exist. And, and those people want that power and that's great. But the fact is that it used to be you needed to buy a MacBook Pro to do, you know, this level, a fairly high level of video. My— I just bought a laptop for my daughter to do all of my podcast video production in Final Cut Pro. And I bought— I didn't just even buy her a MacBook Air, I bought her a refurbished M4 last year's model MacBook Air because it's plenty, plenty fast enough to do HD video production.

Leo Laporte [00:39:35]:
She's not doing, uh, 33 streams of 8K ProRes 422.

Jason Snell [00:39:39]:
Exactly. She's not using DaVinci Resolve to color correct 8K video, right? And like I said, that's a real thing, and those people are going to be happy. But like, the problem is that's not a volume business.

Leo Laporte [00:39:49]:
That's an even tinier market than the AI.

Jason Snell [00:39:50]:
It's not a volume business.

Christina Warren [00:39:51]:
Exactly. No, it's not. It's not.

Jason Snell [00:39:53]:
So how do you, how do you deal? And one of the reasons you see AI and you're like, oh my God, finally something that needs enormous amounts of RAM and processing.

Leo Laporte [00:40:00]:
Right.

Christina Warren [00:40:01]:
We can sell that.

Jason Snell [00:40:02]:
And so they do.

Christina Warren [00:40:03]:
No, I, I, I, that's a good point. That's, that's a great point. I fully agree with you. I mean, the other thing too is even with video workflows, yes, you have those scenarios where you need multiple 8K streams and you're doing all this live production and this and that. And again, yeah, those audiences exist. But since the M1 series, I mean, this is one of the brilliant, you know, facts of Apple Silicon, but also it's been a little bit of a problem for them, I think, to get people to upgrade is that the media encoder has been basically the same no matter what chip you get generation to generation, meaning that if I'm buying, you know, a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio for doing certain types of encoding, for video, it's going to take the same amount of time. There's a, there's a thermal headroom, right? There are some differences, but that, that encoder is the same, which to your point means, okay, so how do I now get people excited to buy something else? And it's like, yeah, well, AI is where you can see the big difference.

Jason Snell [00:40:56]:
Generally what they've done in Apple Silicon is that it lags a generation. So like they'll put the new encoders in the Pro and Max chips. And then the next generation that's just in the base chip. So there's a little, they try to save a little for the high-end user as a treat. But you're right. Like, I mean, my daughter was using an M1 Air to do our video production. And it was honestly, I think it was mostly that the storage was slow because they've also improved the storage. But like a modern Air, even the SSD is so fast and the memory is fast and the chip is fast and all of those, encoders that are on the chips to go to any video format you might want to encode to are so fast.

Jason Snell [00:41:39]:
Like, so this is, this is a challenge. And that's why I think with the MacBook Pro and whatever that touchscreen OLED MacBook Pro is that's coming out, like, I think the number one selling point of the MacBook Pro is that it's got a nice big beautiful screen and then it'll have touch and it'll have OLED. And it's— and you end up selling high-end systems that used to mean performance, still have some good performance, but You start to have to code it all as just being luxury, being nicer, because in reality, if all it is is about performance, you can't sell any of them because that market is so small. So instead you're like, well, no, I'm selling to the people who want to buy the high-end system because they've got the money and they want the nicest thing, not because they need it. It's a Ferrari.

Leo Laporte [00:42:21]:
You never drive it at the top speed.

Jason Snell [00:42:23]:
But AI gets, you know, gets you to have— that's why Apple is really, especially on these desktops, right? Because desktops is a great example of this where they are leaning into it because they think that they may have, they may have some opportunity down the road. And I think, you know, I think they may. We don't know for sure. But like local AI is, I'd say, a curiosity. It's like an area of interest because the cloud is sort of where everything's happening right now. But who knows where that's going? And it's a place where Apple Silicon gives Apple an advantage to press. So they're gonna press it and we'll see what happens.

Leo Laporte [00:42:56]:
We talk about this a lot, of course, on Intelligent Machines in our AI user group. But the distance between the frontier models, the very, very, very best models and the local OpenWeight models that you can run is shrinking. It's now— it was a year and 6 months, and I think you can make a credible case it's only a few months behind. So that means early next year you'll be able to run what is effectively the best model today.

Christina Warren [00:43:19]:
Potentially.

Leo Laporte [00:43:19]:
On a Mac.

Christina Warren [00:43:20]:
Potentially. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:21]:
Appealing to people.

Christina Warren [00:43:23]:
I think that's appealing. I mean, I think the thing too is that, you know, our notion of like how— and this happens for AI as well, but I think it's not just that the gap between the open weight models and the frontier is shrinking. But it's also like, okay, you get to a certain point and you go, all right, I can really get a lot done now. What more is possible? And is it worth paying whatever that additional price is?

Jason Snell [00:43:47]:
Right.

Christina Warren [00:43:47]:
And that's the challenge that the AI labs have had for always, right? Which is, okay, how do we get to that next level? And there might be another point where we go, oh my gosh, this was never going to be, you know, we never thought we could do anything like this. And this is the base standard of where we need to be. Our last moment like that was, was in the end of November with, with the, you know, the big Opus, like, 4 or 5, right?

Leo Laporte [00:44:08]:
That, that was the 24th, a day I will never forget.

Christina Warren [00:44:12]:
I mean, that, that was a massive inflection point. But you look now like there was an article, I think it was in the Financial Times, it might have been somewhere else that like noted that like, you know, Anthropic is, is selling a lot less Fable than they are Opus because Fable is so much more expensive. And yes, it's more powerful. But businesses and users would much, would much rather just— Opus is good enough. And so that also, I think—

Leo Laporte [00:44:35]:
What if you could run 4 or 5 locally?

Christina Warren [00:44:38]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:44:39]:
And I think soon you will.

Christina Warren [00:44:40]:
And I think soon you might be able to. Yeah. I mean, I think there's still—

Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
Next week.

Christina Warren [00:44:44]:
I mean, I still think that we're probably overselling a little bit how easy it is to set those things up.

Leo Laporte [00:44:49]:
Well, you need the hardware.

Christina Warren [00:44:50]:
Well, not only that. That's the problem. Well, not only do you need the hardware, but you need to be able to like make sure that you've got your harnesses set correctly, and that you've got the right quantitized version of the model, and that it's going to be, you know, running, you have enough storage and other stuff like it. It's not a set it and forget it thing for regular folks yet. I don't want to make people think that it is. It's not difficult. But you're going to have to put more time into it than, you know, you might want to. So it's not one of those things where you're just like, oh, well, I just, you know, spent $2,000 on a desktop.

Christina Warren [00:45:16]:
And now all of a sudden, I can do everything. It's like, no, you're going to have to put a lot of work in. And then It's a consistent process. Every time a new model comes out, I need to test this. I need to figure this out.

Leo Laporte [00:45:26]:
And the cadence, I gotta tell you, the cadence of these new OpenWeight models is getting faster and faster. The reason I said it might be next week is we're waiting for Z.AI to release a new OpenWeight 5.3. And when they do that, that is pretty close to Opus, certainly Opus 4.5, pretty close to Opus 4.8. It's, it's like I said, it's moving really, really, really, really, really fast.

Jason Snell [00:45:49]:
Yeah. And I think Like, again, the chip design ship turns real slow at Apple. But I think that they want— again, I don't think they necessarily even have confidence about where this is going, but they know where they can throw some stuff into the mix and see what happens. And if you think that there's a chance that in a few years the more common kind of AI approach is some agentic models that maybe run locally, and then maybe sometimes go out to the cloud when they need to run certain things. And that if you— and when we talked about like how the M6—

Leo Laporte [00:46:23]:
We'll probably have home AI servers, I believe, in about 5 years.

Andy Ihnatko [00:46:26]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:46:26]:
Well, and even if we talk about the M6 and what they're doing there with, with that, that chip, that's just the base chip. No, you probably don't need the M6 for like local AI or anything, but like if they're doing that, is it possible that on an M8 bog standard MacBook Air, you, in a few years you would be able to have a setup where there, you know, you had a lot of agentic AI running locally. Um, maybe, right? And again, maybe not. But if you're Apple and Apple Silicon is one of your great advantages, it's a, it's a direction to head for because we know what Apple's disadvantages have been in AI, right? But their chips are, are not that. So they're, they're— it's, it'll be interesting to see it because I, I I think I might have even mentioned this last week, but I've been doing this long enough. Leo, you've certainly been doing this long enough. Andy's been doing this long enough. The swing between everything's going to be a thin client and then everything's on device and then everything's going to be a thin client in the cloud and then on device.

Jason Snell [00:47:23]:
This is not the first time we've had this conversation.

Leo Laporte [00:47:25]:
Oh gosh, no. And it's really funny how it goes back and forth.

Christina Warren [00:47:28]:
Everything—

Jason Snell [00:47:29]:
building data centers is great and there are things that data centers are amazing at. But also what ends up happening is On the client, you end up with the ability to do more stuff locally, and then there are advantages, and then the pendulum sort of swings back the other way. I'm not saying that will happen with AI. Every situation is different, but it does make you wonder if maybe the pendulum will swing back a little bit. And Apple, I'm sure, is hoping for that because Apple's whole game is we're selling you hardware, we're making really good chips, not we're building data centers with cloud infrastructure in them.

Leo Laporte [00:48:01]:
No, but if it's low power data, I mean, I essentially have a data center in my house at this point. That's a— I think that's very compelling.

Jason Snell [00:48:09]:
And in the long run, I mean, we've been talking about the Mac a lot, which is great because this is MacBreak Weekly, but in the long run, you can extrapolate that to phones too, right? Like, yeah, the ideal in your pocket is that if you can do some, some stuff on your own device and not have to go over the wireless network and not have to, you know, you're burning your own battery at that point, but there are going to be situations where maybe that, that is, you know, a better way of doing it. And if so, Then Apple, that would make Apple very happy because Apple is a phone company. So yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:48:39]:
By the way, people have been asking, the Mac Mini supports 3 monitors. So not a big upgrade there, but the new Mac Studio can do up to 8 displays. Or if you want to use the 5K Studio Displays, 4 of them at full 5K resolution. So they definitely aiming at some of this at that creative crowd.

Jason Snell [00:48:59]:
Of course, the editors, And it's a thing to do with Thunderbolt 5, right? Like Thunderbolt 5 is so capable now. And the, um, the base, the base mini only does Thunderbolt 4, but the rest of 'em all do Thunderbolt 5. And that, that gives you a whole lot of, uh, of power and flexibility too. It's not all just about AI. It's also—

Leo Laporte [00:49:16]:
all right, we're done talking about AI. We're gonna talk about Tim Cook's farewell party in just a moment. And actually, speaking of farewells, I guess we probably should mention, uh, cuz I know Christina, you didn't know about it until the show had already begun, that Dolly Parton passed away today. Everybody's very sad about that. She was quite the legend. And it's really interesting how her career took off even more late in life.

Christina Warren [00:49:44]:
Just an amazing—

Leo Laporte [00:49:45]:
She became discovered.

Christina Warren [00:49:47]:
Just an amazing, amazing person. And a good person. A good person.

Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
I think that's one of the reasons. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:53]:
Yeah, people have to lose good people.

Leo Laporte [00:49:55]:
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:56]:
And she was— but she was the best. She was up there in pantheon with Mr. Rogers.

Leo Laporte [00:49:59]:
Really beautiful tribute, uh, at the New York Times with an amazing picture of her. And yeah, um, sorry about that. Uh, we will have more in just a little bit. Actually, speaking of farewells, Tim Cook's farewell party with One Direction performing.

Christina Warren [00:50:19]:
His favorite band.

Leo Laporte [00:50:19]:
Is that his favorite band?

Christina Warren [00:50:21]:
It's OneRepublic. It's not One Direction.

Leo Laporte [00:50:23]:
OneRepublic.

Christina Warren [00:50:23]:
Yeah. No. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:50:24]:
I don't know.

Christina Warren [00:50:25]:
No, OneRepublic.

Leo Laporte [00:50:26]:
Your kids' bands.

Christina Warren [00:50:27]:
I don't know. Neither of them are unfortunately for the kids anymore. I mean, Harry Styles, I guess, still is technically. But yeah, no, OneRepublic is his favorite band. Like, he loves him some Ryan Tedder.

Leo Laporte [00:50:37]:
So that's hysterical.

Christina Warren [00:50:38]:
It is very funny.

Leo Laporte [00:50:39]:
That's really cute, actually. And he did mention his partner for the first time, I think, that I can remember. So that's kind of neat. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. And by the way, I guess in a couple of weeks, maybe 2 weeks from tomorrow, we might see some new, more new hardware from Apple. They've done this in the past, clear the decks a little bit for the iPhones because they want all the attention to be on the iPhones when they announce them, right? That's, that's kind of typical. But you're, you're, you're convinced now?

Jason Snell [00:51:08]:
I know, I don't feel like—

Leo Laporte [00:51:09]:
tug your ear if you've had a briefing.

Jason Snell [00:51:11]:
I'm not under any, any embargoes right now. Um, I don't know, they've cleared the decks for some things before, but that The iPhone, not so much because they usually are pretty fallow in the summertime.

Leo Laporte [00:51:22]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:51:22]:
This is weird. And then you'd put those out in the fall. I think this is just a spring—

Leo Laporte [00:51:25]:
You might announce this in June at WWDC. It's a spring product.

Jason Snell [00:51:27]:
Well, yeah, it's a spring product or June WWDC product set that got delayed because this would have made a very good developer story in June. But I think for all the reasons we've indicated, they were not comfortable announcing these products then. So they do it now.

Leo Laporte [00:51:43]:
Um, Tim Cook. Little party at the campus. The Information must have had somebody there because it was only insiders invited. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow, did a tribute. This was the day before yesterday on Sunday at Cafe Max, the company cafeteria inside the spaceship campus. OneRepublic performed in the outdoor courtyard. There is a photo on X. Well, there was, because when I went to the photo on X, it said this photo has been removed.

Jason Snell [00:52:18]:
One Republic fan page Twitter account had that removed, didn't they? Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:52:23]:
This is super secret.

Jason Snell [00:52:25]:
The hand of Ryan Tedder.

Christina Warren [00:52:26]:
The hand of Ryan Tedder.

Jason Snell [00:52:27]:
No, away.

Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
200 people, according to the information at the event, entirely Apple employees, the person said. Jeff Williams, Apple's COO who retired last year, spoke, Eddy Cue, and of course the guy who's going to take Tim's job in a week, John Ternus. Cook also spoke. He, in his remarks, according to the information, acknowledged the presence of his partner, calling him by his first name, Mike. Cook rarely discusses his personal life in public or semi-public settings. So That's notable. I'm sure Mike was happy.

Jason Snell [00:53:09]:
I think that's great. I always was a little concerned that Tim Cook was kind of a lonely man who—

Leo Laporte [00:53:13]:
Yeah, we're glad to know he's got friends.

Jason Snell [00:53:15]:
Gets up and goes to work and goes to the gym and then comes home late and goes back to sleep and occasionally watches a TV show laying down in the Vision Pro. So good that he's got—

Leo Laporte [00:53:25]:
He's got a life and he's going to have more of a life. He's going to be now the executive chairman of Apple. His main job will be, quote, engaging with policymakers around the world. The worst job at Apple.

Jason Snell [00:53:37]:
Yep.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:37]:
Yep.

Jason Snell [00:53:38]:
Easily.

Leo Laporte [00:53:40]:
Uh, can you have any RAM?

Jason Snell [00:53:41]:
Could you spare any RAM, please?

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:42]:
Don't worry, you still get to sit— your seat in the dunking booth is still going to be reserved for Tim Cook. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:53:49]:
Tim, you're going to retire. You're going to retire. We got a great job for you. You're going to— you're going to— you don't have to do any of the work you did before. He's like, uh-huh, I like this except for one thing. And he's like, hmm, what's the one thing?

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:01]:
Yep.

Jason Snell [00:54:01]:
And then that's when Donald Trump emerges from behind the curtain. He's like, no, oh, come on. And Xi Jinping is here too. Oh no.

Leo Laporte [00:54:11]:
Information. One more interesting tidbit, and I, I don't know what to make of this, but Cook's executive assistant is not leaving, is going to continue as John Ternus's EA.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:22]:
His Radar O'Reilly is still in place.

Leo Laporte [00:54:24]:
And that's not typical when this kind of transition— I think that's an interesting attempt at continuity.

Christina Warren [00:54:29]:
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, you never know with these things, right? Like, I mean, maybe it works out, maybe it doesn't. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, that'll be interesting to see because usually, you know, execs already have their—

Leo Laporte [00:54:40]:
he's got his person.

Christina Warren [00:54:41]:
Exactly. Uh, so I, so I don't know if that, if that, you know, he'll be bringing his person up to have additional duties or what. I I don't pretend to know the intricacies of that, but yeah, that is interesting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:54:54]:
Um, anyway, uh, I'm sure it was poignant. Um, I'll just have to project because I was not invited. Uh, but, uh, actually, I think I'm still persona non grata. We had scheduled an interview tomorrow that I was going to pre-record with the guy in charge of sports at Apple because I wanted to talk about the baseball thing. And they offered him and then canceled at the last minute. I think they said, wait a minute, that Leo Laporte? No. So maybe, uh, maybe you could do the interview, Jason. I think they still like you.

Leo Laporte [00:55:27]:
Uh, Apple will launch a bunch of new products, a bunch of new products before the end of the year. 10 according to 9to5Mac, or I guess— is that— yeah, that's 9to5Mac, although they're probably—

Jason Snell [00:55:40]:
I'm gonna guess— Apparently Mark Gurman's Quoting Mark Gurman. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:55:44]:
That includes, uh, 3 new iPhones: the Pro, the Pro Max, and what we're calling the Ultra, the folding phone. Apparently that's what they call it around the house as well. Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, uh, perhaps new iPods with AR/IR cameras, although Mark says I think that's not till next year now, right?

Jason Snell [00:56:03]:
He says that that was a mistake and it's next year.

Leo Laporte [00:56:06]:
Yeah. New Apple TV 4K. There is evidence there'll be new, um, HomePods. Uh, HomePod Mini 2, a HomePod 3, and a HomePod Pad.

Jason Snell [00:56:18]:
Which is that screen that can be a HomePod with a screen or be a thing that you put on the wall.

Leo Laporte [00:56:23]:
Follows you around.

Christina Warren [00:56:25]:
That's—

Jason Snell [00:56:25]:
yeah, no, it doesn't follow you around. No, you— I mean, you carry it around with you. Camera follows you around most objects.

Leo Laporte [00:56:31]:
The camera follows you.

Christina Warren [00:56:33]:
But yeah, it's a dumber iPad.

Jason Snell [00:56:35]:
Yeah, it's a dumb—

Leo Laporte [00:56:37]:
I actually have that. Google tried that and quickly, uh, got rid of it. Yeah, it's that Pixel, uh, tablet that attaches to a speaker stand, which seemed like a good idea at the time, which is why I bought it.

Christina Warren [00:56:52]:
Right. And then you just realize that, okay, the, the— at least for me, the way I look at it, I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna have the screen, I don't just want it to be a dumb screen. I would like to be able to use it the way I would use anything else. So if you could let me use my iPad or an iPad Mini also as a HomePod—

Leo Laporte [00:57:08]:
A base for the iPad.

Christina Warren [00:57:09]:
Great. But, but if you're saying, oh no, you're going to buy this device that can really only— it's for this purpose and it's a dumb screen for this purpose, I don't see the value. But I'm not going to say other people won't buy it. People who are really into that stuff might enjoy it. At the very least, from what we've heard over the years, and Jason has talked about this before. It seems like they've had this stuff ready to go for years, and it's been a software issue. It's been, it's been because of Siri and everything else that's been going on there that has been holding this back. So who, who knows? I mean, you know, these— I, I'm joking here, but like, you know, those boxes might still have the Apple stickers in them.

Christina Warren [00:57:42]:
That might be how old, you know, they are.

Jason Snell [00:57:44]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:45]:
According to Felipe Esposito on Engadget, he looked into the macOS beta code, and it's kind of based on tvOS. With a display that looks kind of like an Apple Watch.

Jason Snell [00:57:56]:
Yeah, it's, it's, uh, I think the, the rumor is that it's going to be HomeOS, uh, but it's based on tvOS. And, um, the detail that I thought was interesting, because the question was like, okay, this thing's not going to have an app store, so how is it going to work? And the answer is it's going to have its own software on there, but also it's going to run widgets, and it's going to be able to run widgets that are projected from your phone, which is a technology that, in a classic Apple move, Apple trialed by putting it in macOS, where as of, I think, Tahoe, you could project from your phone a widget that would just sit on your Mac on the desktop.

Christina Warren [00:58:33]:
Oh, right.

Jason Snell [00:58:34]:
That would come from your phone.

Leo Laporte [00:58:35]:
Right. That was weird.

Jason Snell [00:58:36]:
And that's how you get, that's how you get personal widgets from third-party apps onto a platform that doesn't have third-party apps is it'll be projected from your, from your phone. to this device, which is, I think, an interesting idea and obviously something that Apple, to Christina's point, Apple's been thinking about this for a long time because they've had, they wanted to ship this product, but Siri hasn't been good enough. And that's undoubtedly the story with the HomePods too. It's like, these are the ones that are enabled for better Siri and there was no better Siri. So maybe now, maybe now.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:08]:
If, if that turns out to be true, that's, that's interesting because I would, I I would hope that Apple makes a case that here's why requiring it be tethered to a phone makes this product better, as opposed to we thought we'd screw over— we basically create more lock-in by saying this product is useless unless you're an iPhone user.

Jason Snell [00:59:27]:
Not requiring, right? The idea here is that it would have its own set of features and functionality that's built into the OS that includes all of Apple's apps and all of that. But if you would like to personalize it with widgets from your phone, you can add those to the stacks and they will also display. So it's not required. It's like you can, it's, it's the, it's another level up, which I mean, counter that, I would say if I bought one of these things and it didn't support any of my third-party apps, only Apple's own widgets, that would be a problem.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:58]:
Yeah. But where do you get the widgets from? It's like my question, listening, listening to that and reading about, reading about again, what people think they know about it so far. It's like, okay.

Christina Warren [01:00:09]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:09]:
You can also buy a car that has an AM/FM radio and vinyl seats and no air conditioning, but that's not the car that people want. People would want a smart device like that, which is not going to cost a trivial $99. They're going to be charging Apple money for it. It better do more stuff than just adjust the temperature, turn lights on and off, and set kitchen timers. It would bum me out if there was what I perceive to be a needless reliance on one type of device when they could simply say, we're going to create a brand new widget platform that is compatible We're going to make it compatible with Mac widgets. We're going to make it compatible with iPad widgets. This idea that you must have an iPhone to make this work, I'm not saying that it's bogus. I'm saying that it is innately suspect.

Jason Snell [01:00:57]:
There's no, there's no must. There's no must. Again, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to tie, I wouldn't want to tie my home device to a Mac that goes to sleep, uh, whereas iPhones stay awake. Why you couldn't push one from an iPad, I don't know. That's probably—

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:12]:
Oh yeah, of course.

Jason Snell [01:01:12]:
You probably should be able to do that. You probably should. Also, I would say a couple of things. One is the choice to not have an App Store on it is simplicity, right? Because not— I think we learned the lesson with the Apple Watch and Messages and like not everything needs an App Store is part of it. And, you know, yeah, they are leaning on their ecosystem. The other thing I would say is at some point it's an iPad and the goal of this product is to not be an iPad, to be less than an iPad. And that's not just in terms of price, although it is, but also in terms of it being simple. And once you're running apps and you've got an app store and all of that, I think that there is complexity there.

Jason Snell [01:01:49]:
So I think, again, how do you get people to be able to leverage that app that they love that is not an Apple app that's on this device? Projecting from your iPhone when your iPhone is around is a way you could do that. And so that's what they're trying here. Yeah, we'll see how it is. I have bought— I had the Amazon one, I had the Google one. I still have— I still am running the Google one right now.

Christina Warren [01:02:15]:
Mm-hmm.

Jason Snell [01:02:15]:
I think these are simple devices. I think that they're, for the most part, my frustration with a lot of these things is that, um, that there's just some built-in feature that they don't support. But at least the idea that I could say, I have my own weather widget that I prefer to yours, can I just show you? Look at my weather widget is nice in the long run. Should there be some kind of third-party story here so you don't have to have an iPhone running and projecting, and then when you walk outta the house, those widgets disappear? Yeah. But I also appreciate the idea of drawing a line and saying, we're gonna keep this simple. We're not gonna shove another app store in here. We're, we're not gonna have a sec— a separate developer story, and we're gonna start simple.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:50]:
I can, I'm, I'm, I'm okay with ending this by just simply saying, I don't, I agree with everything you're saying, and I don't think that any of what, any of the features and the, and the ease of use that you mentioned is incompatible with getting projecting widgets from a Mac or projecting widgets from an iPad. I do— like I said, I would like to hear Apple— if Apple goes this way, I would like to hear Apple make the case that this is something that could best be done, only be done with an iPhone, and we're going to require an iPhone to make this anything, to make this more smart than what you can buy from anywhere for $99. That's just my thought.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
Well, we'll all find out. Will they do a separate announcement? They have to. They don't want to clutter up the iPhone announcement, or do they?

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:31]:
Depends on how big the iPhone— depends.

Leo Laporte [01:03:33]:
It's a big announcement.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:35]:
Well, it depends on if they put the iFold— I still want to call it the iPhone. Yes, it depends on like whether I fold—

Leo Laporte [01:03:42]:
Andy, that's okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:43]:
It's P-H-O-L-D-E. Oh, with an accent over the E and an umlaut over the O. I mean, I think it's— I, I, I, yeah, it's— they probably aren't gonna I don't want to crowd this up. The thing is, both with the iFold and with this new home device, you have 2 devices that are unprecedented for Apple. And so they each are going to require a lot of storytelling.

Christina Warren [01:04:07]:
Yes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:07]:
So, and, and given that they don't— they no longer have to do this as a stage show where they have to basically have act 1, act 2, act 3, and now here's, uh, and now here's Dua Lipa to sing us a song or do a video. They can actually do, well, here's immersive. Here's a very, very thorough 10-minute video about this one thing that tells the whole story. Here's another 15-minute video that tells a story about this thing. And the thing is, there's going to be people out there that are covering it that will be there essentially, whether explicitly or not, to cover the iFold. Some that are there explicitly to cover the home device. I don't know. I mean, I find it hard to— I would find it hard to believe them not having one big extravaganza instead of a dog and pony show, a dog, dog and pony show.

Jason Snell [01:04:55]:
It feels to me like this event has room for 3 big ideas in it. And so if, and if you were a launch, I mean, seriously. So first off, the iPhone, biggest event they do by far. We all cover it like we cover WWDC and other Apple events. It's, but it's not, it's way bigger. It's an order of magnitude greater in terms of international attention. So it's a place you can can push something or launch something. So they're gonna have fewer phones than they usually launch.

Jason Snell [01:05:20]:
They're gonna have a couple Apple Watches, but as far as we can tell, they're not that interesting. What else do you do with the time? You don't have to do anything with the time, but you got people there, you got press, to Andy's point, people flown all over the world to be here. If you were, say, Apple's new CEO, and if you had been pushing for the last couple of years, for example, for Apple to finally do something resembling anything in the smart home market where they have basically ignored it or done as little as possible for years now. And you had a bunch of products that you could announce or pre-announce, right? Because you're not shipping versions of them. And you could say, we're also doing a camera. It's going to come out next year. But here's what it looks like. And tell that story of like Apple is getting into the home in a big way too, in addition to the phone and the watch.

Jason Snell [01:06:08]:
It would seem to me that this is the time to do it. Yeah, maybe they don't feel ready, but like a home event in October is not going to do it compared to what they can do now if they, if they've got it ready. You talk about—

Leo Laporte [01:06:20]:
You could do what they did for the Mini and just have an Instagram video.

Christina Warren [01:06:23]:
I mean, you, you could, but, but I, I think to Jason's point, kind of pathetic really that this was the entire announcement was on Instagram. But okay, I mean, you know, look, they did something similar with the NIO too, and that worked well for them. So I don't know. But I think to Jason's point, the other thing I would say is that when you're looking at the big story and the big reason— the fold aside, right? Like if you're looking at somebody who's like, all right, prices are going up, why am I going to be considering buying a new 18 Pro or Pro Max phone if I have a 16 or, you know, 15 or lower or whatever? And that video is very funny.

Leo Laporte [01:07:03]:
This is the stop-action video for the Mini doing its— I guess this is going to be an ad for the Mini.

Christina Warren [01:07:09]:
Yeah. I mean, it's cute. But if you have— but if your big story is, you know, why are we doing this is that, you know, Apple intelligence, Siri, whatever, is no longer garbage. And we are here to show up with AI in a big way. Then to me, if Home works, that's your third pillar, right? Because to Jason's point, no one cares about the watch. We're not going to have as many phones. And so having like this big part of it, which is not just that you have the new foldable thing, but we now finally have— this is Apple's way of doing this, you know, agentic intelligence stuff that our competitors have been doing for a long time. And we can show you this whole ecosystem.

Christina Warren [01:07:46]:
We've got a new TV device, we've got a home device, we've got new HomePods, and maybe we've got a camera for next year. And we've got, you know, our whole existing, you know, HomeKit ecosystem that will now works seamlessly with all of these things and you can just talk to it and it'll infer exactly what you want and be perfect. Like, I, I don't, do I believe that story? No, I don't. But do I think that's a compelling narrative to tell? Yes, it is.

Jason Snell [01:08:08]:
It's a good story.

Christina Warren [01:08:08]:
It's a very compelling story.

Jason Snell [01:08:09]:
You made an excellent point there, which I wanna reemphasize, which is threaded through this entire event. Because remember, it's not just the iPhone event, Apple Watch event, and maybe a Home event, but it's also the coming out party for OS features. And I've learned over the years that we can talk all summer about new OS versions. Nobody cares until they ship and then they pay attention. So this is undoubtedly a coming out party for Siri AI. So, so it allows you to hammer home Siri AI's capabilities in the iPhone section, in the Apple Watch section, and in the Home section. And that becomes a thread that runs through the whole event too, because it is really like, yay, our AI Our voice assistant is capable, finally, after forever, right? They won't say it that way. They'll be like, oh, it's even better.

Jason Snell [01:08:57]:
But we know. And that, you know, again, sometimes when we predict this stuff, you don't even think about the tech as much as you think about what's the narrative thread that makes sense, that connects all these things, and that puts Apple in the best light. And as Christina said, it does. You don't have to believe it, but it, it's, you know, it matters that Apple Apple wants you to believe it. That's the, that's the storytelling part of it.

Christina Warren [01:09:21]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:21]:
And, and to, to Apple's credit, they're probably going to get a lot more enthusiasm for making Siri the common thread of everything they talk about for an hour, for an hour straight than Google has during their Pixel events saying Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. It's like, oh, for God's sakes, could we have one? Can I change the volume without having a smart assistant interfere for me and do it with AI?

Leo Laporte [01:09:45]:
How about the Ultra? Uh, this is a pretty important product for them.

Jason Snell [01:09:52]:
The, the phone?

Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
The iFoldable. What are you calling it, Andy? The iFoldable.

Jason Snell [01:09:56]:
There's an Apple Watch Ultra too, which is not a pretty important product, but it's nice.

Leo Laporte [01:09:59]:
No, no, not the—

Jason Snell [01:10:00]:
The foldable iPhone.

Leo Laporte [01:10:02]:
That's why Ultra probably isn't a good name. That's a good point you just made. The iFoldable. Um, yeah, anything more to say about it?

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:12]:
Gurman had, Gurman had an article in which he had sources that were saying, hey, people at Apple have been—

Jason Snell [01:10:18]:
They really like it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:20]:
My gosh, do they like it.

Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
Even people outside Apple like it. They think it's so cool. Everybody likes it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:24]:
Yeah, and the only complaint that he was, uh, that he was reporting was that it's got not the greatest cam— not a pro-level camera because not enough room for all those lenses and all those sensors. I mean, still, but there's still just so many questions to be answered about that. I mean, it's gonna be, it's gonna be super, super exciting, whatever, whatever they do. And, but there's a long list of questions that are not going to be— we're so close to the reveal, we think, unless they, unless they were to do a totally separate event for it, which doesn't seem likely. It's an iPhone, so they're gonna do an iPhone event. It is kind of amazing that we haven't seen anything more concrete concrete, then here is like a machined metal buck that people— that case manufacturers are using to figure out if the fit and finish of their device, of their products are doing okay. And this very sort of thin, yeah, surprise, surprise, there are people inside Apple that have access to the hardware and can take it out and are basically having favorable reactions to it. It's amazing we haven't seen a single screenshot of, of here's, here is an operational one Here's what it looks like unfolded, even if it just looks like an iPad Mini, uh, screen-wise unfolded.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:32]:
It's amazing that nothing like that has leaked out, even in the most offhanded oblique reference, uh, yet. This is because this is the time, as I'm, as I'm, uh, fond of saying, this is the time where they have to let in so many people into the, into the tent of secrecy that they're letting in the riffraff that they would not have given these secrets to any time before the last possible minute when they absolutely had to. People have to be trained. People in stores are gonna have to be trained for, for how to do this. And nobody at any— nobody at Verizon, nobody at AT&T, nobody at any of the international partners— a price list has not leaked in Germany or anything like that. Usually we can count on somebody slipping up, but it's still absolutely on lockdown. And that is— That is something.

Christina Warren [01:12:20]:
I mean, I think the lawsuits worked.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:22]:
True.

Leo Laporte [01:12:23]:
Honestly, Jon Prosser is out of commission.

Christina Warren [01:12:26]:
I was going to say, I think that's part of it. I think the other thing too, I mean, sometimes obviously case partners, we've seen things like I remember, and I remember this distinctly because I was at the Apple event. This was before they moved them to the new campus. And so I guess we were at whatever that theater was in San Francisco and it was like I think for the iPhone 7. And we were waiting to go into the auditorium. And somebody leaked something from Amazon. They had cases, like official cases for the phone went out. And I had to assign and copy edit the story from my phone before I walked into the event.

Christina Warren [01:13:01]:
Thank you, William Turton, for, for getting that, that up so quickly. But it was very— it was one of those kind of awkward things. I was like, well, I remember showing everybody I was in line with. It was like, well, We all now know what the what the phone looks like, but that kind of takes the fun out of it a little bit. A little bit, but you know, we at least had that. But yeah, it is interesting we haven't had more more leaks. But I I wonder if some of that is that so much of the I think the success of the Ultra, the Fold, whatever we want to call it, it really is going to become dependent on the software experience and how well Apple can sell that. Like even putting the price aside, putting the The fact that there are going to be trade-offs, which I think plenty of people will make aside, they're going to have to sell that really strong software story.

Christina Warren [01:13:44]:
And I, I think that they can probably do it right. I think that, you know, people who have used foldable devices for years seem to really like them. If anything is going to make them go mainstream, it's going to be this. This is exciting because to me, I and I don't count the Vision Pro here. I just really don't. I think that the last time we had this type of kind of. Uncertainty with something from a major product category from Apple was probably the iPad. Where there was anticipation and we all knew that the tablet was coming, we didn't really know— I mean, in that case, we had a January event where Steve Jobs showed us what it looked like and then it shipped in March.

Christina Warren [01:14:22]:
So we had a little bit of a precursor, but it was just years of speculation and all of us just trying to envision, well, what will an Apple tablet look like? It wound up being different than what, you know, some of us thought. It was, I think, a very good thing, but it was not what we all kind of envisioned. And so that's kind of the fun about this right now is that we, we all know what's coming. But to Andy's point, these things haven't leaked and we don't really know how it's all going to be threaded together and what that story is going to be. But I think that this is, in a good way, as risky as that, that iPad story was. Because we don't know what the response is going to be. This could be one of those things where it reinvigorates people getting into a whole new category. It could even be a thing where people are like, okay, I'm going to have to have my second phone, you know, my Pro maybe that's older and keep that around and use that for my camera.

Christina Warren [01:15:15]:
But I really want this to be able to do more productivity stuff or whatever the case may be. I don't know. But it's— I'm I'm excited to find out. It's kind of unprecedented because it's been so many years. AirPods, I guess that was a surprise too. But that's a— even though it's a big category, it's a much smaller product. I can't really recall any time when— no, I'm wrong. The Apple Watch.

Christina Warren [01:15:41]:
The Apple Watch. That was a big thing too. But it's been a decade since we've had one of these devices where we just— we don't know what it's going to look like. We don't know what it's going to do. We're just kind of, you know, all of us are kind of waiting in anticipation.

Leo Laporte [01:15:54]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:54]:
And one thing that was— that I've been thinking about is that you bring up the iPad, that, uh, something that was— we know, we just like the iPhone, we know they're working on it. We know they're building this. We don't know when they're going to release it, but we know this is not just something they're playing with. They actually have a date that, that in mind to ship this. Um, and also with the, uh, with the MacBook Neo that we know that they're working on a budget level or a less expensive MacBook that's based on iPhone processors, A-series processors. But we don't know when they're going to release them. We don't know what they're going to cost. And in both times, it was so much less expensive than anybody guessed, like $200 or $300 less expensive.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:34]:
I think the— with the iPad, nobody was expecting it to be as cheap as that. They were expecting, oh, $800, maybe $700 at the They weren't expecting it to be as affordable as it was. And so here we are. We've been— we're all correctly kind of concerned or curious about like how expensive Apple can put a sticker price onto an iPhone. Is this going to be a $2,300 base level phone? Is this even going to be a $2,500 level base level phone? And could they even sell it at that price? But there's room for maybe they're going to surprise people. People is when they're— it's not as— there's a non-zero chance that oftentimes Apple encourages rumors of higher prices so that when they do actually release a device and it's still kind of spendy, but it's a lot less expensive than we thought it was going to be, it actually seems a lot less expensive than it actually is. I mean, Apple does have the advantage that people are going to be willing to spend $200 or $300 more than the equivalent Pixel Fold or the equivalent Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 to because it's an it's an Apple product, so they'll they'll get there in the end. But that's still boy, it'll be difference between a aspirational but reachable aspirational but attainable phone or something like the Apple Watch Edition, which is wow, this these ceramic ones they really look do do look nice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:56]:
Of course, I can't spend a thousand dollars on a on an Apple Watch, so that'd be just crazy. But boy, does that look really, really nice. It's, it's, it's gonna be a very, very fine thread they're gonna have to thread the needle with on this.

Leo Laporte [01:18:08]:
So Lisa's having, uh, problems with her— let's see, I think it's an M3 Max MacBook Pro. The Shift key's sticking, and she says, I'm gonna get a new one.

Jason Snell [01:18:17]:
I said, wait, wait, maybe fix the key.

Leo Laporte [01:18:21]:
Yeah, that's what I said. Let's fix the key because But how long will she be waiting? I'm talking about this, uh, imaginary M6 MacBook Pro with a redesign and a touchscreen and an OLED screen. This year? Yes, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:38]:
When?

Jason Snell [01:18:39]:
Uh, late this year or early next year. It's always been— Gurman's always said that they like— they seem to want to think they might be able to hit late this year.

Leo Laporte [01:18:47]:
Maybe they took all the RAM out of those and put it in the new Mac Studio and Mac Mini?

Jason Snell [01:18:51]:
I mean, maybe. Maybe. I, I think given the environment of available hardware, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this slipped till early next year. That said, it's going to get powered by the M6, which has now been announced. So that, and the, and right, like the M6 base model, well, actually that's going to be next year. No, it'll be the M5 Pro and Max. They're just going to redo the M5 Pro and Max. And then they, I think the Gurman report is that early next year they'll update that M5 version to be an M6 version.

Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
So the M6, the mini is going Own the M6 for the rest of this year and some of next year.

Jason Snell [01:19:27]:
Probably. Although again, you never— don't discount the ability to— for Apple to do a Mac event in late October. They often do a Mac event in late October or some version of, of what we call an event. So I would— I wouldn't be surprised. I, I guess the question is, will that OLED touchscreen Mac make it this year? I wouldn't bet on it just because everything seems to be shipping later because of availability of of parts, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:51]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:52]:
Let's, um, uh, do the last Vision Pro segment.

Jason Snell [01:19:58]:
No, we won't, because they're doing immersive baseball on Friday.

Leo Laporte [01:20:01]:
It's the last Vision Pro segment. We're going to announce at this time our brand new, uh, MacBreak Weekly cleaning cloth segment, which will be for the more affordable end of the Apple products starting next week.

Jason Snell [01:20:18]:
No, it seems pretty cheap now, doesn't it?

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:22]:
I'm not—

Leo Laporte [01:20:22]:
I don't— I'm being facetious, but we did see, uh, rumors. More than rumors, I guess.

Jason Snell [01:20:31]:
Apple laid off some people in Siri, and they laid off some people in Vision Pro. Um, Siri—

Leo Laporte [01:20:36]:
Vision Pro folks. Yeah, 200 total. I immediately texted Alex Lindsay, said I'm not in that division.

Jason Snell [01:20:42]:
Good. I, I I, so, so I have, there's 2 different kinds of Vision Pro layoffs that happen. And one of them I'm baffled by, and one of them I kind of understand. The one I'm baffled by is the people who are involved in gaming because what—

Leo Laporte [01:20:56]:
Yeah, it was the gaming division. Did they even— what were they doing?

Jason Snell [01:21:00]:
Encouraging Apple Arcade games or something like that? Game story is nonexistent in the Vision Pro. There's like, I can count on a couple on, on like on my fingers, how many games stories there are for the Vision Pro. There are a few, but like, it's just not there. And they did the Sony hand controllers, but it's like, it's just not a thing on the Vision Pro. And it's not gonna be a thing for, even if they, even if they came out with a new Vision Pro-based hardware in like 2 or 3 years, it would still not really be a gaming story. So there's like, I don't see the point. I don't know what that group was doing. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me.

Jason Snell [01:21:35]:
The other part is the people who are involved in immersive video, But even there, I—

Leo Laporte [01:21:40]:
Which to me is the one product that is compelling about the Vision Pro.

Jason Snell [01:21:43]:
This is, this is my understanding about those layoffs is they're— they geared up. So in the early days of, of Vision Pro development, it wasn't possible to do immersive video. So they hand-built basically immersive cameras and produced a lot of immersive video themselves because no one else would do it. And there wasn't even a Vision Pro yet.

Christina Warren [01:22:05]:
Ah.

Jason Snell [01:22:06]:
I think what you're seeing there, and, and when I went and Alex and I both went to that event down in Cupertino, now that the Blackmagic camera is out, um, there's a lot less need for Apple to bootstrap immersive video. There are people who are capturing immersive video that Apple can partner with to put that stuff on the Vision Pro. They don't need to build it themselves. And that seems to be the indication of Gurman's report, is that that group, you know, was not really about, um, that people should do Vision Pro on or should do immersive video on Vision Pro. That group was kind of like, oh God, how do we do, you know, immersive video on Vision Pro? And they did it, but like, they don't need to do that anymore. So that's my— that's, that's that one I kind of understand in that like, now that the Blackmagic cameras have shipped and there are tools, I'm not sure Apple needs to be making immersive video content for the Vision Pro so much, especially in an area where like the live stuff is new and interesting. And on Friday they're gonna do an immersive baseball game. But like the rest of it, it's, it's like the tools exist, filmmakers are kind of interested.

Jason Snell [01:23:11]:
Let's see what happens. Probably not an area Apple needs to spend money.

Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
Is that the same rationale for laying off Siri people? That—

Jason Snell [01:23:19]:
Yeah, well, the Siri story is really interesting 'cause it sounds to me, and, and, and there was a statement that Apple gave to Mark Gurman. I forget exactly the details, but they, the question is like, are these all layoffs that are going to be net of people leaving Apple.

Leo Laporte [01:23:31]:
Apple says it's to evolve our business to deliver the best experiences for our users.

Jason Snell [01:23:36]:
Right. Well, and there's a suggestion that some people, some jobs will— there's— it sounds to me like what they're doing is what they needed out of Siri in the old Siri days is not what they need out of Siri now. And what they need about like voice and AI today is more integrated in the Teams than it was maybe back when it was that— remember that group that was trying to paddle to Hawaii and all of that? And that, and that this, this strikes me as a reorg where those people are going to be given an opportunity to apply for other jobs at Apple, but that those jobs may not line up, and at which point they will leave Apple. That's sort of how I read it.

Leo Laporte [01:24:13]:
The shift requires a change in the necessary expertise.

Jason Snell [01:24:16]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Prompting the company to eliminate a small number of existing roles, reallocate resources, and create new positions supporting the updated Siri. It's because Siri's changing.

Jason Snell [01:24:26]:
Right, because it's not the old Siri anymore.

Christina Warren [01:24:28]:
It's not the old Siri anymore. And, and that— this is what happens sometimes. And I, I know from, from people that I've talked to, uh, internally that Siri has been borrowing engineers from other teams, uh, for the last year. And so, um, uh, like, that, that's, that's been a thing that, that's happened. So clearly there's been a difference in what they've needed for the new Siri going forward and, you know, how they'd hired for it before. And, uh, you know, I would blame leadership on that, but that leader who was in charge of those things is no longer with the company. So I guess, you know, some of that was taken care of. But yeah, I mean, it's always unfortunate to see people lose their jobs, but this does seem like a much, at least in this instance, a much more clear restructuring of saying, yeah, we're not deemphasizing Siri.

Christina Warren [01:25:11]:
It's just the people that we'd hired for in a pre-Transformer world are not necessarily the right people that we want, uh, in, in the, the agentic Siri area that we're in now.

Jason Snell [01:25:23]:
Exactly.

Christina Warren [01:25:24]:
That, that's really what it is.

Leo Laporte [01:25:25]:
Keith Statenfield.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:25:28]:
Uh, 37-year Apple veteran.

Christina Warren [01:25:31]:
Wow. That's hard. That hurts.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:32]:
Not just, not just that, but like, he's one of those— he's a kind of a legend. He's like one of the keeper, true keepers of the flame that like when, when new engineers come and join Apple, he can teach. He basically has so much of the knowledge of what Apple is and how they do business and how they can get things done.

Leo Laporte [01:25:48]:
Keith, let me tell you what Jeff Raskin's standing lunch order was.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:53]:
No, but, but I mean, like, there, there's, there's, there's senior members of staff that can really basically take a new hire and get them integrated into the way things work in 2 months instead of 2 years. And Keith was one of those people. He's kind of a legend. It's very surprising that he was simply laid off as opposed to, like, I We know this because of a Mastodon post that he made, or I know this because of a Mastodon post that he made. So, I mean, but—

Leo Laporte [01:26:21]:
Senior Apple software engineer, started in 1989, worked on macOS starting in '95, led NetBoot, served as overall technical lead of macOS 9. In fact, his license plate reads macOS 9. Nothing I'd celebrate, perhaps.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:39]:
Well, I mean, longevity. His footprints are like Billy of the Family Circus going all the way through the neighborhood. Name a product, name an initiative, and basically his footprints go through it. So like I said, it's kind of shocking. I would have thought that he would have been offered a retirement package that he could basically tell, we're giving you an option of leaving, as opposed to, hey, how come my key card doesn't work anymore? That's not what happened. But it's like, I would hope that they basically realize that this is a 37-year veteran and you just don't simply say, well, Nope, we're done with you. Goodbye. I hope that there's a—

Leo Laporte [01:27:14]:
He has other work. LinkedIn says he's, uh, also the chairman of a local credit union. So yeah, of course.

Jason Snell [01:27:20]:
Yeah, it's the same. You got to wonder, like, is somebody who's been at Apple for 37 years— is there not some applicable— like, you, you almost want to keep people like this around. I know you can't just hire him as like the keeper of the knowledge, right? I suppose. But like, Apple is not going to be made or broken I feel like there is— it strikes me that there's not really a scenario where somebody with 37 years of institutional knowledge leaving is a net positive for your organization, even if you have to pay him to be there. But we don't know the details.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:55]:
Information we do not have. It's just very, very surprising.

Jason Snell [01:27:58]:
But it's unfortunate.

Christina Warren [01:27:58]:
Yeah, it's incredibly unfortunate. It's incredibly unfortunate. And yeah, I mean, it sucks You see this at a lot of companies where people who have been around for a long time are, for reasons that almost never have anything to do with their own skills or anything else, but it's just somebody at the top is making decisions about where resources need to be allocated, and that's made. But this one really, when I saw that, this was very surprising to me and it was very sad. And he did very good work. And I do worry, you know, the same way I would When this happens at any other company, when you do have people who have such long institutional knowledge, when they leave, things change and it is a loss. And it's great that we are moving forward as quickly as we are with progress. But there is something to be said, like Jason said, like, I wish that there could be a role where you're just like, yeah, this is the person that's going to keep the lore.

Jason Snell [01:28:49]:
Who knows where all that code came from. And like he said in his Mastodon post, I wish I thought I would be working with younger engineers on stuff. Like, it's like, well, why is he not? Like, that we don't know. But like, yeah, you lose something there. And, and, and there will be— I mean, I guarantee there will be a moment, if there hasn't been already, where people are like, oh, what about this thing? Who knows about that? And the answer is, well, Keith knows, but he's not here anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:29:13]:
He even says that in his LinkedIn post. He worked on Mac OS X and iOS. He— I mean, he touched so much of the things we use every day. Launch Services, Apple Events, File Bookmarks, Carbon Core, Handoff. He led Handoff, he led Add to Dock. He says, plenty more that never even got external names. There's a lot of stuff I've been the sole responsible person working on it for the past decade. And if I have any regret, it's that Apple never successfully hired and kept someone on to learn how my code worked.

Leo Laporte [01:29:43]:
So there's gonna be some poor new engineer given a bug they have to fix and figure out something that may never have been written before they went to kindergarten. And I guess I'm not gonna actually get Going away party. That is sad.

Christina Warren [01:29:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:29:57]:
And I hope OpenAI offers him a big job and he brings all his documentation with him.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:03]:
Just bring his brain with him. That's deadly enough.

Leo Laporte [01:30:06]:
Yeah. That is sad. I'm sorry, Keith. Keith Statenfield. I did not have the pleasure of knowing him, but now that I know what he worked on, I think we all touched a lot of his code in our time. We're gonna take a break. Come back. We'll be right back with more.

Leo Laporte [01:30:19]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Christina, and Jason, you've written all about the new Macs on 6 Colors. You had a little lead time, so you're able to file at 6 AM our time.

Jason Snell [01:30:31]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:30:32]:
Is that when you push the button?

Jason Snell [01:30:34]:
Uh, it went up automatically, but my alarm went off at 6 AM so I could make sure.

Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Yeah, you don't want to push it and then they say, uh, never mind.

Jason Snell [01:30:41]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:43]:
So if you're looking for a deep dive, uh, Jason's been working on it. He's got it there. Lo, these many years. Oh, and I forgot to do it, but I'm going to do it now. And that concludes our last Vision Pro segment.

Christina Warren [01:30:57]:
Now you see, now you know, we're done talking the Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [01:31:02]:
When's the first baseball game?

Christina Warren [01:31:04]:
Friday.

Leo Laporte [01:31:05]:
Friday. You'll be, you'll be sitting in front of your TV with the helmet on?

Jason Snell [01:31:09]:
I won't be near my TV, but I will make sure I am—

Leo Laporte [01:31:12]:
Oh, you won't need your TV.

Jason Snell [01:31:14]:
ballpark. That's right.

Leo Laporte [01:31:15]:
You won't need it.

Jason Snell [01:31:15]:
That's how the Vision Pro works, Leo. You don't watch TV while you got it on.

Leo Laporte [01:31:18]:
I don't understand these newfangled devices.

Jason Snell [01:31:20]:
It's fine, it's fine. You don't watch TV, Grandpa?

Leo Laporte [01:31:24]:
Well, how do you see it?

Christina Warren [01:31:26]:
Well, no, but this is exciting because that means we're gonna have like actually net new like Vision Pro like hands-on or eyes-on content, I guess, uh, next week. So that's exciting.

Leo Laporte [01:31:36]:
Yeah, so there will be another Vision Pro segment.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:39]:
Finally, finally.

Leo Laporte [01:31:42]:
Um, let's see what else. Apple service outages, who cares, it's back. Uh, oh, the EU. There's quite a bit of EU news.

Christina Warren [01:31:50]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:31:52]:
So, um, John Gruber, uh, characterized the deal that the EU gave Apple as a sweetheart deal. Apple, uh, if you, if you have your own app store on the, in the EU, Apple Apple only gets 27% of the total, which so that doesn't seem like such a. I don't know why the EU even approved that. I'm sure they're not going to judge Ivan Gonzalez Rogers.

Jason Snell [01:32:20]:
New regulators who don't care as much about this aspect of EU politics as the old regulators did. This feels to me very much like the EU saying we're not interested in this any. Let's just be done.

Leo Laporte [01:32:33]:
Let's move on.

Christina Warren [01:32:34]:
Yep. I, I think that Gruber actually summed it up quite well. Uh, I'm gonna paraphrase what he said, which was basically that this was always just about for the bureaucrats kind of checking boxes. Now they can say, yes, we did in fact allow competition and allow a third-party marketplace and allow these other things, and we've done it. Now, does that demonstrably change anything for the end user? No, it does not. Has it created a bunch of unnecessary pain paperwork for people? Yes, it has. Is it going to have any sort of net impact on consumer rights? No, it's not. But maybe that wasn't ever the goal.

Christina Warren [01:33:09]:
And I think that's why some of us have been critical of some of these notions to begin with. And it's not because we are against what they're ostensibly trying to accomplish. It's just you look at the bureaucracy of these things and you know where it's going. There were some people on Bluesky that were very, very, very angry with me because I dared say— and I'm sorry, but I was correct— that because PayPal and other payment providers were cutting off certain types of game content from places like itch.io and Steam and whatnot. And to be clear, this content, not good content, not stuff that I would want to defend. And basically those platforms said, well, we're not risking our payment providers for this sort of content, so we're just going to to get rid of it entirely. And people are saying, oh, well, the EU will save us because they're going to force people to have a sovereign payment processor that the state controls. And I'm going, yeah, and that sovereign payment processor is going to have, if anything, stricter terms of service than what Stripe and PayPal and anyone else has.

Christina Warren [01:34:14]:
It's the same sort of thing here where, yeah, the European Union and the regulators can come up with their own kind of sovereign ways, you know, for interoperability and whatnot. But it doesn't mean that it's going to actually be any better for the end user. And I think that looking for regulation to, I guess, do that is sometimes a misguided endeavor. Like, good, good policy can sometimes do that, but regulation in and of itself rarely can.

Leo Laporte [01:34:45]:
He says this is a near-total victory for Apple. The only real concession for apps in the App Store using Apple's own payment system, the main commission drops from 30% to 26% in the EU. So they got 4 points, and all apps have to pay that 5% core technology commission. We talked about that last week. Yeah, it doesn't really seem like— so, but now Apple has to make a presentation to Judge Rogers, Judge Gonzalez Rogers. She was not happy with their 27%. What do you think Apple's gonna do? Are they gonna say, well, you see, Your Honor, in the EU it's 26%? I How would you feel about that?

Christina Warren [01:35:21]:
I don't think that matters. I mean, honestly, I think that they're completely different jurisdictions. I don't think that a US court is going to care what the European Union did or did not agree to, right? I mean, she's going to be basing things on—

Jason Snell [01:35:32]:
That's a precedent.

Christina Warren [01:35:33]:
Well, but it's not. It's an international— it's a precedent happening in the European Union. I mean, I don't— we rarely make decisions lockstep with the decisions that other governments governments have made. Sometimes we do, but that's not a super common thing. So I think she's going to look at it and say, does this fit the terms of what I said, what I outlined in my agreement? Was this a good faith term or not? And she'll make her determination that way. The irony, of course, would be if we wind up getting better terms in the United States than the EU did. Like, that will be sort of ironic. But no, I mean, at this point, The folks I really feel bad for are people who've invested a lot, both in time and money and other things, in trying to build third-party ecosystems in the EU, which Apple has gone out of the way to make as difficult and as onerous as possible.

Christina Warren [01:36:25]:
Because at this point, if you're paying this sort of pricing anyway, maybe there are a few applications you would not be able to get otherwise. There are some advantages there. Why would you bother? Like, honestly, why would you bother? You're just going to be giving Apple the same amount of money regardless. So what's the point? You're going to have a smaller audience. You're going to have to work much harder to reach any sort of audience and even convince them to download a third-party app store. What's the point? I hate to be defeatist about it, but if I'm in the EU, I'm certainly not feeling great about my digital marketplace act. No, no, I don't know.

Jason Snell [01:37:06]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:37:07]:
Hey, here's some good news. Walmart is adding Apple Pay and Google Pay. You can touch to pay at your favorite Walmart store.

Jason Snell [01:37:13]:
Wow, like it's 2014.

Leo Laporte [01:37:16]:
They fought this forever, but as of yesterday, uh, just—

Jason Snell [01:37:21]:
it's turned on in some places and they've got to roll out different hardware over time because remember, there's an enormous— it's huge, you know, fleet of Walmart stores and they've all got checkout counters and they all have equipment, and not all the equipment is configured to do it. But if there's equipment that does contactless, it will now do contactless payment, including Apple Pay. And they— yeah, they fought that for a long time.

Leo Laporte [01:37:40]:
They wanted their own app, the CurrentC.

Christina Warren [01:37:44]:
Yes, yeah, they sure did.

Jason Snell [01:37:46]:
They all forgot about it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:47]:
That before NFC payments, like, basically became— before the bank said, no, no, that's okay, we'll take care of contactless digital payments, there was a consortium of retailers that basically wanted to create their own private, really, really horrific system for electronic payments.

Christina Warren [01:38:05]:
It was called ISIS.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:07]:
Yeah, exactly.

Christina Warren [01:38:08]:
No, genuinely, it was called ISIS.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:09]:
Yeah, exactly. And it was just absolutely the most anti-consumer thing imaginable, right? It looks like the sort of thing you would ask for if you were 7 years old and you basically are being asked by very indulgent parents, what do you want your birthday party to be like? Like, I want everything, literally everything that could be possibly coming to me, I want to have it. And Walmart was the— basically, after, after, after the industry figured out that, yeah, people are not going to go— you've made these things way too complicated. Uh, it should be as simple as basically, uh, contact your— text your— basically an app through your bank that basically validates the, the contactless payment chip inside of, inside a device. That's all that it should actually be. would be required. Nobody was going to the other things, and Walmart was just the last holdout to basically figure out that we are Walmart, we are so huge that people don't— people are never going to want to not shop with us because we only do our own contactless payment system. And yet here I was basically making sure that I was never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to sign up for any sort of Walmart payment system.

Christina Warren [01:39:13]:
Yeah, I mean, uh, what's funny is I do have to give the EU a little bit of credit here since I just, you know, uh, was critical. We would not have contactless payments in the United States if it had not been pushed so heavily. And frankly, for much, much longer than it ever was in the United States. They had contactless payments both through chip and PIN and then later with NFC long before we did. And yeah, now I think it's just kind of a table stakes thing. Like, hopefully most of the stores will get a software update relatively quickly because to my knowledge, you haven't even been able to buy a point-of-sale system that didn't do contactless payments that would work with, you know, Apple Pay, you know, Google Pay, Samsung Wallet or whatever it's called, and other systems like that haven't even made those available in probably close to a decade. So hopefully it will be a relatively smooth transition. But this is an area where the United States was behind for many, many years.

Christina Warren [01:40:06]:
And we were behind because the payment processors and the consortiums who did not want to support this sort of thing because they were going to lose a potential revenue source. And so they wanted to try to control everything. And one of the beauties of Apple Pay, because a number of other people had tried for many years, you know, Google was early, PayPal was trying to do things. Apple, by sheer size of the number of devices and active devices and especially devices amongst people who tend to, you know, spend more and have credit cards and do that kind of thing was really able to successfully push adoption to a point where I don't think we would have had it otherwise. I have not lived in a state or city, I guess I should say, that actually has a Walmart in it in 17 years. So I don't shop at Walmart. So this has not impacted me personally. But it is ridiculous that one of the you know, biggest retailers, I think probably still the biggest retailer, you know, physical retailer in the United States, did not have a way to accept Apple Pay.

Christina Warren [01:41:10]:
I mean, I think you could do, like I said, like, like, like tap to pay with your, you know, credit card or whatever. But the fact that you couldn't pay with your phone is absurd.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:19]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:41:19]:
We're all coastal elites here, so we don't have— but when I visit my mom in Arizona, it's all Walmart all the time. And it always is that thing, a little like Costco was resistant for a while too, and they have it now. But like, yes, there's that moment where you get up to the front of the store and you're like, Oh, right. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:38]:
I think, I think it's weird. I think, I think one of the things— yeah, I think one of the things that really cracked it was when, uh, all of your—

Jason Snell [01:41:44]:
all of—

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:44]:
all debit cards now are NFC. They don't— they're no longer like magstripe. So it wasn't— so whereas they could maybe tell themselves that, well, only people who have a relatively modern smartphone will be able to use it, people will prefer to use like our own system that may not require an app that will basically not require X, Y, or Z. But now that— look, the people who— a lot of their consumers who basically, if they've got a debit card, they got a credit card, they've got NFC, and now they're basically expecting— it's now a generation old of people who are not expecting to have to do anything but simply tap the thing against the other thing and walk out with their stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:42:23]:
What do you think of the— have you played with the new Pixel camera? Do you think Apple should And as 9to5Mac says, adopt that new non-accurate imaging. What do they call it? They call it Camera Looks. I think it's just like an Instagram filter, I think.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:41]:
Yeah, well, this is my brand new Pixel 11 Pro XL.

Leo Laporte [01:42:44]:
Oh, you did get one.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:45]:
I did get one.

Leo Laporte [01:42:47]:
That thing's pretty.

Jason Snell [01:42:48]:
It's photographic styles on the iPhone, right? It's very similar to that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:50]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:42:51]:
It's the same thing.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:52]:
it's basically the same thing. It's in the pipeline. It's another case of these 2 companies basically leapfrogging each other with every other thing. The digital AI zoom is kind of a— is more interesting. I was taking pictures of it at the Boston Public Library over the weekend. Of course, that's my usual— like, for me, the gold standard of testing phone cameras is Boston Public Library. I then take pictures of squirrels in the Public Garden. And I was pretty amazed by what it was— the detail that it was able to get from a 120-year-old John Singer Sargent mural 30 feet up in the air in a very dimly lit hall compared to what the last iPhone that I tested there was a couple years ago.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:34]:
But it was like absolutely nothing like the detail that I was getting here. Of course, on the flip side of that is this is where we get back to something I said earlier. It's like, I don't mind Gemini everywhere in this phone. And in the launch event, it was all Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. But it's like, give me, especially on the camera, give me a switch that says, fine, give me digital zoom, but give me like machine learning assisted digital zoom. Let me switch off the AI generative stuff because on some pictures I think it was, it's actually is doing a really, really good job when you consider it's a 50x zoom, actually higher than that even over a 5x optical zoom. But I took a picture of the moon, nearly full moon the other night. And oh boy, did it bite it hard.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:20]:
It was like, I mean, it was like I'm used to taking, you're used to taking those kind of pictures where of course it's not going to be a really great picture, but hey, wow, look, look how orange the moon was tonight. I want to send that to my friend about, or my partner or whatever. And it decided to say, I don't know what this is, but I'm going to try to make some sort of sense of it and add details to it. So it was this like gray sky with a dark black halo around this egg-shaped thing with moon-like features on top of it. Um, there's a— it's, it's gonna be an interesting compare this year. The, the camera is still real, really good. DxOMark gave it a super high score. I personally have always favored the look of, uh, Pixel's photos over the iPhone's photos, not so much on a technical level kind of like the difference between you kind of prefer a certain film stock that seems more natural, it seems more correct, it seems more like, like the real world but better.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:19]:
Whereas I think the iPhone tends to over-process things a little bit, but not as badly as Samsung.

Leo Laporte [01:45:27]:
Samsung is really terrible.

Jason Snell [01:45:28]:
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:29]:
I mean, it really is famous for overcooking it. And to Google's credit, when it does do that AI stuff on the, on the superzoom, it actually saves 2 versions of the picture, one that's not AI'd, the other one that is AI'd. Oh, that sucks. That's trash. But I'd much rather basically turn that off entirely if I've decided that I don't wanna even take the risk. But basically, it's gonna be an interesting compare between the two. I think that from what we know of the iPhone 18, it too is not going— is gonna be more of a refinement over last year's models as opposed to something super revolutionary. Actually, also similarly, the big, big feature, like kind of what we've been talking about earlier, is that they're gonna be talking about all these wonderful Siri things that, uh, that the iPhone can now do because of this wonderful Siri updated AI version of Siri, uh, as opposed to, wow, we've got this brand new camera sensor, wow, we've got this brand new, uh, fingerprint sensor on the side of the phone that works better than whatever.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:20]:
Uh, it's going to be interesting compared this year. The power, the power level is probably going to go to, uh, the iPhone. There's— they're going to have much, much better processors, but it's— but the total fit and function is going to be like I said, a very interesting compare.

Leo Laporte [01:46:36]:
Let's see. I think Apple TV's been hitting it out of the park of late. Ted Lasso premiered and they're actually already getting ready for another season. There's some big movies coming. I watched Lucky. I thought that was quite good. Slow Horses is coming. Mayday, well, an action comedy with—

Jason Snell [01:46:54]:
Dark Matter is coming back. That's a great show.

Leo Laporte [01:46:56]:
Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Last Seen, a TV show Thriller. I'm always up for slow horses. That's the 16th.

Jason Snell [01:47:07]:
Silo finishing off shortly.

Leo Laporte [01:47:10]:
I'm not sure I want to see Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson together in anything, but okay. They can do a little hacky-sacking and, you know. So yeah, very—

Jason Snell [01:47:24]:
Weren't they True Detective season 1?

Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
They were good in True Detective, actually.

Jason Snell [01:47:28]:
And that was great. That was a great show.

Leo Laporte [01:47:29]:
That was very good. No, you're right. In this show, which is coming September 23rd, it's a comedy. They play fictionalized versions of themselves. It's called Brothers.

Jason Snell [01:47:39]:
Yeah, that doesn't sound that great.

Leo Laporte [01:47:41]:
Thrown into chaos when they uncover a decades-old secret. They're lifelong friends who might actually be brothers. The gags and laughs come fast and furious.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:51]:
Misunderstandings and merry mix-ups galore.

Leo Laporte [01:47:55]:
Yes, sir. Women in Blue, a Spanish-language crime drama. Uh, this is gonna be good. I think, uh, they've— they— I don't know if it's those 2 Sony executives they hired, but it feels like, uh, Apple struggled at first, but the Apple TV is pretty darn good if you can live with the long lag between seasons of Severance and Pluribus.

Jason Snell [01:48:15]:
Right, but there's other stuff that— I mean, like Slow Horses, they produce those 2 seasons at a time. Those are fast. Those come out and they, they do a lot. I mean, the, the Ted Ted Lasso, um, the— that report this week that they're going to start producing, start shooting Ted Lasso's next season beginning of the year. So like, Apple does a lot of stealth renewals, or stealth, uh, we'll pay you to start working on the scripts kind of things. Um, and then they often do multiple multi-season renewals, but they, they couch it so that they can have another PR moment to say, oh, Ted Lasso is doing great and it's coming back for another year and stuff like that.

Christina Warren [01:48:51]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [01:48:51]:
So they, but yeah, there, there, there are the shows that they know are gonna be back, uh, soon. And there are the shows that, that are not gonna be back soon. And that's just, that's, I saw, I saw, I was watching then the HBO, uh, show Lanterns on Sunday, which I'm enjoying. That's a DC Comics show. And, uh, there was a trailer for The Pit coming back for season 3.

Leo Laporte [01:49:15]:
It's amazing.

Jason Snell [01:49:16]:
In January.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:16]:
Check that one out.

Jason Snell [01:49:17]:
It's like, remember when TV shows—

Leo Laporte [01:49:18]:
Season 6.

Jason Snell [01:49:19]:
Came back every year. Remember that? Oh, good times. 15 episodes and then—

Leo Laporte [01:49:24]:
Handcrafting every episode.

Jason Snell [01:49:27]:
It's just different kinds of TV, right?

Christina Warren [01:49:29]:
Different types of TV. I mean, and, and, you know, uh, The Pit is, is produced by, by John Wells, who comes from, you know, broadcast television, ER.

Jason Snell [01:49:37]:
And shot on one set.

Christina Warren [01:49:38]:
Well, I was going to say, they also have— exactly, they have one set. Um, it's, it's even a smaller set than ER. ER at least had setups where you had people at home and you had the surgery ward and whatnot. Like, the pit is literally one soundstage that they're moving around, which is fantastic if you need to start shooting in, you know, June, I think is when they start shooting every year. And they're probably wrapped up by the, you know, middle of September or October, and then you can be airing in January. And that's— it's crazy that, like, we look at that now and we're like, oh, that's fantastic. I'm so excited that my favorite show is back. Because, yeah, we used to see that every single year.

Jason Snell [01:50:15]:
9 months of the year.

Christina Warren [01:50:16]:
Right. Well, exactly. I mean, even shows like— I look at House of the Dragon, which ended a couple of weeks ago, and we're gonna be 2 years out on that. And I am a little frustrated. Like, I can't help it because—

Leo Laporte [01:50:27]:
It's hard to contain, especially for that show. Remember who's doing what, when, where.

Christina Warren [01:50:32]:
Well, exactly. But not only that, but we had Game of Thrones every single year, right? Like, there really was— there were periods of time where things would take longer, because of writers' strikes or, you know, other things that happened. But then what happened with streaming is because it's not produced on a weekly basis, it's all produced at once, and then you drop it and you kind of see the results, that slows down production cadences. So, you know, the pickup versus, you know, the renewal versus cancellation conversations happen much later. And it's just— I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:51:04]:
I think you young people just aren't as ambitious as my generation. Well, also, also, 27 episodes of I Dream of Jeannie in 4 weeks.

Andy Ihnatko [01:51:13]:
You know, Mr. Sorkin did— wrote basically— so, so Sully wrote like 2 or 3 seasons of The West Wing. It wasn't because of ambition, it was because of Lady Cocaine.

Leo Laporte [01:51:22]:
Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, Peruvian marching powder, amphetamines.

Andy Ihnatko [01:51:28]:
And the writers' room in the '80s and '90s, they had certain metabolic, metabolic efficiencies that that the writers of today do not have access to.

Christina Warren [01:51:36]:
Well, unless you're Taylor Sheridan, unless you're Taylor Sheridan, in which case you are somehow able to write however many episodes of television he writes in a year, right? And that, that is— he's probably like the only other kind of corollary. And even they still have, you know, time between seasons.

Leo Laporte [01:51:50]:
But, you know, the Taylor Sheridan universe, which is all the same show, it's whether you have cowboy hats and horses or helicopters and camo.

Christina Warren [01:52:00]:
Well, it's Dallas. but, you know, in the 2020s.

Leo Laporte [01:52:04]:
I love Billy Sheridan. No, no, it's good.

Christina Warren [01:52:07]:
It's fine. I'm just saying, like, that's probably the one, like, counterexample where you can go, okay, you do have a prolific kind of single-person producer who does make an inordinate amount of television yearly, but it's just a different cadence. We used to have, you know, 9 months of the year, like Jason said, you know, we had TV shows. There were shows that would air sometimes, like on Fox, they would do 36 episodes episodes in a season, they would have to do 2 weeks at a time because they couldn't shoot more than that, which is ridiculous, right? And it's like, okay, please, could we just go back to the happy medium of— I think the pit at 15, I think that's actually really nice. If you can't commit to 22, 15 episodes is nice. But I am glad that Apple TV at least seems to— because it's not just a problem they face, all the streamers face this— where it's like, okay, how quickly can we get back into production? And I'm glad that it seems like some of the, the shows are, are moving more quickly because certainly the industry needs it, um, for so many reasons.

Leo Laporte [01:53:02]:
Uh, all right, let's take our last, uh, break and we will get your picks of the week in just a moment. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Christina Warren, Film Girl at GitHub where she's in developer relations and saving up her pennies for a Mac Studio. 200 million pennies. Oh my God. Andy Anaco, who makes pennies a day there at the library selling used books. No, I don't know. He likes the library because I don't know what, it's cozy. It's cozy.

Leo Laporte [01:53:35]:
It gives you— gets you out of the house.

Andy Ihnatko [01:53:36]:
It gets— it's nice to have like a 4-hour slot in which I should finish this before I leave and get dinner, as opposed to, you know what, I'll take a few hours off, and then you discover an archive of Columbo episodes and that's it for the rest of the day. No, it's, it's nice to have these, these time, uh, off-site productivity zones, uh, set up for yourself.

Leo Laporte [01:53:59]:
I think it's fun. How long does it take to walk there?

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:02]:
Uh, about a 15-20 minute walk.

Leo Laporte [01:54:03]:
Oh, that's good.

Christina Warren [01:54:04]:
That's perfect.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:04]:
Or a longer one if I decided to take the scenic route.

Leo Laporte [01:54:07]:
Yeah, go down by the waterfront.

Christina Warren [01:54:09]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:54:09]:
Get yourself a— see a lobster roll and clams.

Jason Snell [01:54:13]:
I think you mean the road less traveled by, do you not?

Leo Laporte [01:54:17]:
There was a fork ahead in the road And that's Jason Snell, the literary guru. Uh-huh. Uh, sixcolors.com, where he scribbles away every day. He's also got a bunch of podcasts.

Jason Snell [01:54:30]:
Many podcasts. Many, many, many, many, many, many podcasts.

Leo Laporte [01:54:33]:
Uh, don't listen to Upgrade though, because he didn't know about the Mac Studio. Thank God.

Jason Snell [01:54:37]:
We had a nice conversation about other things. Other things, other things.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:42]:
But listen to it anyway, because you get to hear Jason in his coy voice.

Jason Snell [01:54:46]:
Yeah, that's right. No, I didn't know.

Leo Laporte [01:54:48]:
I mean, other than those, I didn't know what I knew.

Jason Snell [01:54:50]:
I just knew something was happening.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:51]:
Something's happening.

Leo Laporte [01:54:52]:
Something's strange. Oh, I don't know.

Jason Snell [01:54:54]:
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [01:54:56]:
Pick of the week time. And I have kind of an oddball pick. I know many of you sitting there on your Macintoshes look over at Windows machines and go, gosh, I just wish I had that Sysinternals Task Monitor that that great Mark Racinevich wrote. And you're thinking, if only I ran a Windows machine.

Jason Snell [01:55:18]:
No, you're not.

Leo Laporte [01:55:18]:
I know you're not. But Mark Racinevich, who is a brilliant programmer, really brilliant, so much so that Microsoft actually bought his company and brought him in. He ran Azure. I think he's still running Azure. He took a challenge. He said, I bet I could get it, make a Vibe-coded version of the Sysinternals Task Manager to run on Linux. Oh, that's cool. and Mac.

Leo Laporte [01:55:40]:
And he did, and look at it. It's a thing of beauty. This is T-Mog. It's absolutely free. Don't judge it because it's vibe-coded. Yes, I know you have Activity, you know, that resource monitor, but isn't this great? And Christina, I don't know if you know Mark, but—

Christina Warren [01:55:57]:
I, I, I've met him. I've interviewed him a few times. Um, he's one of the most brilliant, you know, minds out there, and, and, uh, I think this is is awesome that he was just like, all right, coded it, right? And, and let's, let's all be very clear, like, Mark Rusinovich vibe coding something that's going to be very different from the average, average person. Like, this is incredible. Yeah, you know, I mean, he's someone who can actually look at the code that's coming back and, and really steer it out. I wouldn't even call this vibe coding. I would just say that this is just agentic coding. Um, but the fact that he was able to do this, um, well, he had the original source, right?

Leo Laporte [01:56:32]:
of course. So he was able to use that as a spec. I just think this is just— he's done such a good job. And there is a pro version, but the version you're seeing right now is free. You can even, uh, look at this. Would you like Ctrl+Shift+Escape to automatically start Task Manager TMOG? Yes, I would. Um, and then, uh, I mean, just— there's just so many cool things that are built into this, including You know, I used to download that Blackmagic Disk Monitor. I don't have to do that anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
There you go, it's installed now. You can get a TMOG score. I just think it's pretty as heck, and this is all the information, everything you've wanted to know about what's going on inside your Macintosh, and you can get it online. Let me go to the TMOG site. Here it is. Your whole machine, one live view. TMOG. And it's— it's called a beta, but I don't, I don't know why you would call this a beta.

Leo Laporte [01:57:30]:
It's pretty darn polished. The clarity of Activity Monitor, the depth of Task Manager, the speed of a cockpit. Good job, Mark Russinovich. Right on, right on, right on, as Woody Harrelson might say. I'm sorry, no, that's, uh, that's that other—

Christina Warren [01:57:46]:
That's Matthew McConaughey. That's Matthew McConaughey. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:57:50]:
All right, all right, all right. Christina Warren, what's your All Right Pick of the Week?

Christina Warren [01:57:55]:
Okay, so, um, as, as we mentioned, uh, elsewhere in the show, uh, sadly, um, Dolly Parton is no longer with us, which is a real shame. And so my— like, I, I, I, I don't even know how to talk about it because I haven't even internalized it yet. I literally saw it.

Leo Laporte [01:58:11]:
Wait a minute, Dave Plummer wrote this, not Mark Krasinovich. I apologize.

Christina Warren [01:58:15]:
Oh, okay.

Leo Laporte [01:58:16]:
All right. I thought it was Mark. Now I'm looking. Oh, well, Dave's Attic Guy. Dave, sorry.

Christina Warren [01:58:23]:
Okay, that's less impressive. Not, not taking anything away from Dave Plummer. I enjoy his YouTube channel.

Leo Laporte [01:58:27]:
He wrote the original Task Manager for Windows. I'm sorry, I got that all wrong.

Christina Warren [01:58:31]:
Uh, but, um, it's not Sysinternals. Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mark.

Jason Snell [01:58:37]:
Uh, sorry, Mark.

Christina Warren [01:58:38]:
Uh, Dave is still, still an impressive thing to do that.

Leo Laporte [01:58:42]:
Oh, yeah.

Christina Warren [01:58:42]:
Okay, so Dolly Parton is no longer with us. I checked, and there are so many Dolly films and albums, but 9 to 5 is actually available for $4.99 right now on Apple TV+. But what I wanted to add to that in terms of a pick of the week that can last beyond just the movie, although everyone should watch 9 to 5 and listen to her albums and read about her, and she was an incredible person, There is an app and a website that I've used for years and years and years called CheapCharts. It is a website and an iOS app. Basically, what it does, the web will let you track things across a number of different streaming or purchasing services, so Apple TV, Prime Video, Fandango, Google Play. I primarily care about the Apple ecosystem, but the iOS app basically lets you create alerts when an item you want for a TV show or movie or a book or audio— I use it for movies and TV shows— when it goes down in price, you get an alert and then you can buy it directly from the app. So sometimes, like, I've bought an inordinate amount of content over the years on Apple TV, and then the Movies Anywhere content will also then be available on other platforms too. So depending on what studio it's from, you might be able to view that content even on YouTube or Google Play or Amazon app or whatever.

Christina Warren [02:00:07]:
But it's a great application, CheapCharts.com. And the app is great too. And just if you're somebody who— because sometimes they remove services, they remove TV shows from these streaming services. These deals are not forever. Gilmore Girls is going to be leaving Netflix. Even the original movies that they made for Netflix are going to be leaving Netflix. In November because the 10-year agreement is going up. Now, will they go to another streamer? We don't know.

Christina Warren [02:00:33]:
But you know what you can do? You can buy them from the app— from the Apple TV Store. And so I might want to set an alert for some Dolly Parton movies that are not on sale. But while you are there, $4.99. It's $4.99 on Amazon, on Apple TV, and on Fandango. So, uh, 2 picks in one. And then CheapCharts, which is just— it's a— there's an iOS app and then there's a website too, and it tracks all of your stuff. And it's nice. I've used it for I don't even know how long, but it's, it's a great way.

Christina Warren [02:01:05]:
There are also bundles that will happen occasionally where you'll be able to get like, I don't know, like, uh, 10 movies for $20. That's not frequent, but it happens sometimes. Um, that's cool.

Leo Laporte [02:01:15]:
This is a good thing to know to keep on— keep track of.

Christina Warren [02:01:18]:
And I do it for TV shows because a lot of times what is that you'll get full series for like $19.99 or $24.99.

Andy Ihnatko [02:01:23]:
Right.

Christina Warren [02:01:24]:
And again, these things leave the streaming services. They don't last forever. And so I'm not going to pretend like Apple, I can count on them for having, you know, my content for the rest of my life. But I do trust them more than Sony and some of the other companies out there. And so I've, maybe to my detriment, I've put tens of thousands of dollars in, um, in, in Apple, you know, movies and TV show purchases. But CheapShirts is, is how I do it because I can track, um, when something gets to $4.99, or if there's a TV series that gets to a really insane price, I can just instantly buy it. So—

Leo Laporte [02:02:00]:
And you ain't seen nothing if you haven't seen Dolly and Lily Parton and Jane Fonda tie up Dabney Coleman.

Christina Warren [02:02:09]:
So good. So good.

Leo Laporte [02:02:11]:
This is the ultimate office workers revenge movie. If you haven't seen it, see it. And if even if you have, it's a great way to pay tribute to Dolly and, and 2 other fabulous actors.

Christina Warren [02:02:23]:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:02:25]:
Andy Iannaccone, pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:27]:
My recommendation, my pick is also Dolly Parton related, and it's also a trio, but it is one of my favorite albums of all time, not even just limited to Dolly Parton.

Leo Laporte [02:02:36]:
You've recommended this before. In fact, I bought it because of you.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:38]:
So it's, it's amazing. It is called Trio. It's with Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris. Already, any one of these 3 is a recommendation in and of themselves. I was amazed to discover that this album was recorded and was released in the mid-'80s, like '86 or '87, because I know that they've been performing together on each other's albums and on each other's TV specials since the '70s, because they had been Friends and collaborators and just mutual fans, uh, for years and years and years. And that absolutely shows— shines through on every single track of this album. These are 3 people that are so tightly together in performance, uh, and in creation of art that if you put this on because, hey, I want something very pretty to listen to while I vacuum, that's not going to work because it's— I guarantee you that 1/3 of the way through the very first track, you're going to put the vacuum down and you're just going to sit. And lean your head back and close your eyes and smile and just enjoy every single track of this.

Andy Ihnatko [02:03:43]:
This is one of my desert island discs for sure.

Leo Laporte [02:03:46]:
Isn't it great? Uh, both of these picks, she's collaborating with 2 other women who are also heroes. Uh, and it just shows you the generosity of spirit, uh, uh, that Dolly had. And that's really fantastic.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:01]:
This is her entire story. Like, the more you read about of like, just when you think you've gotten to the absolute ceiling of how awesome she could be, you see that no, that was just— there's another staircase going to the top.

Christina Warren [02:04:12]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:12]:
And as you say, a lot of it just really is all about, hey, but you know what, I've got a lot of money. If I could write this person a check, we can solve this problem together. Or collaborating with people and not necessarily deciding that, well, this is going to be a Dolly Parton jam and we've got this person coming in. She was nominated for— when she was nominated for a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and there are people saying, well, geez, she's not really rock and roll. And Dolly, again, ever self-effacing, ever humble, said, you know, that's probably correct. They haven't like done— and so what did she do? She did a rock and roll album by calling all the people in rock that she absolutely loved. Yeah. Anyway, we could go on for several hours.

Leo Laporte [02:04:52]:
And by the way, another way to celebrate Dolly's passing and to celebrate her memory would be to contribute to her Imagination Library.

Jason Snell [02:04:59]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:05:00]:
She has given 332 million books to children.

Andy Ihnatko [02:05:04]:
Indeed.

Jason Snell [02:05:04]:
And that's why it's my pick of the week.

Leo Laporte [02:05:07]:
Oh, good pick. Excellent.

Jason Snell [02:05:09]:
Uh, the Imagination Library. So my wife is a librarian, and, uh, and this is— she's— Dolly Parton is a hero. That's just the bottom line. Imagination Library sends books to kids regardless of, uh, the money in the house. There's no means testing or anything. This is in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. There is now a program for bilingual books in the US in English and Spanish, which is pretty awesome that my brother and sister-in-law are doing for their kids. Yeah, 332 million books gifted.

Jason Snell [02:05:42]:
You basically sign up a baby, a young kid, and then every so often a new book comes for free from Dolly Parton. That's so cool. That's it. That's the whole thing. And in fact, today, When Dolly's family and friends announced her passing, they said, in lieu of flowers, please donate to the Imagination Library, which is such a great thing that she has made possible in the world. And the goal here is really simple. She remembered when she was young that there were a lot of kids who did not have a lot, and the materials for school and books were hard to come by. And so she created this program where 3 million books go to registered children every month.

Leo Laporte [02:06:28]:
Every month.

Jason Snell [02:06:29]:
It's free. It's in those 5 countries. And yeah, it just, it's a great program. If you've got a little one, you should sign up for it. And if you want to honor Dolly Parton in some way, I could not think of a better way, nor could all of her friends and family, than supporting the Imagination Library.

Leo Laporte [02:06:49]:
You can do it right now in memory of Dolly herself. And I think that's a great, great way to celebrate her life. I love that. That is so cool. Well, we're ending on a bittersweet moment, but thank you.

Andy Ihnatko [02:07:06]:
It's nice that when someone passes, you can— you're sad, but you can cheer yourself up by thinking about all the good that this person did and all the good that her institutions are going to continue to do for decades after her passing. So that's where I am right now.

Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
I didn't know this. Christina's just told us that Taylor and Travis gave the library $2 million to celebrate their wedding.

Christina Warren [02:07:27]:
Yeah, as part of the donations that they made to offset all the, you know, costs of the wedding and everything else, they gave a lot to a lot of different places, but they gave $2 million to the Imagination Library, which is pretty incredible. So I know that there were some questions in the chat about funding will continue. What I really hope happens, because it's just— I can't even imagine Dolly not being with us, is that the people who do have money and are philanthropists and whatnot will choose to support organizations like the ones that she championed for and that her legacy will continue far beyond you know, her music and her entertainment because she really was an amazing person.

Jason Snell [02:08:10]:
Sure, she had a lot of plans about taking care of the charity she cares about too. I have a very short, fun Dolly Parton story. You know, one of the least told, although it's been told a little bit more now, stories in television history is that one of the reasons that Star Trek existed is because Lucille Ball produced the show and used some of her clout to get it on the air. Star Trek was a Desilu show before.

Christina Warren [02:08:35]:
Sure was.

Jason Snell [02:08:36]:
It was a Paramount show. It was a Desilu show. And she used her money and her clout to make that and Mission: Impossible 2 extremely expensive TV shows with interesting, groundbreaking social aspects to them as well. And she made that happen. Now, you're saying, well, what about Dolly Parton? The answer is Dolly Parton was a silent partner, but apparently active in the background at Sand Dollar Productions, which was the company that ended up producing my favorite TV show of all time, which is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So thank you to Dolly for being maybe, you know, maybe not necessarily at the Lucille Ball level, but not far off in making an all-timer happen kind of behind the scenes, using your money and clout as an entertainment industry person to get other stuff on the air. Dolly Parton did that too. So thank you to her.

Jason Snell [02:09:26]:
Wow. Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:09:30]:
Thank you all for being here. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in the club, of course, Club Twit Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at twit.tv/mbw, or on YouTube. There's a dedicated channel for MacBreak Weekly, or Subscribe in your favorite podcast client, and that way you'll get it automatically the minute we're done, which we are now. And you know what that means— it's time for me to tell you something: get back to work, because break time is over. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.