MacBreak Weekly 1047 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.

Jason Snell [00:00:00]:
Coming up on MacBreak Weekly, we're going to be anticipating Apple's Pro event next week. OLED touchscreen MacBook Pros, could it be? Also, we're going to be looking back a week later at the Home event. Apple TV 4K, Home View, what does it all mean? And of course, it's iPhone Duo week. Did we order? Are we getting something before 2027? All will be revealed with special guest Glenn Fleischman joining us next on MacBreak Weekly.

Jason Snell [00:00:41]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1047, recorded October 20th, 2026. Warm up your zombie arms. Welcome back to MacBreak Weekly. I am Jason Snell sitting in for Leo Laporte. Was that sufficient Leo energy? I don't know. I tried. I tried to get the Leo energy going. We are here to talk about all the latest stuff that Apple is doing, that they did, that they're going to do.

Jason Snell [00:01:05]:
It's past, present, and future here, as always on MacBreak Weekly. And we've got our wonderful, wonderful panel. I'm not on it because I'm instead filling in for Leo, who is on assignment. Uh, that's what you say when you don't know where he is. Uh, but we— our usual people are here. And that starts with the most usual of all people, Andy Ihnatko. Hi, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:01:22]:
Hello. So, you know, have you been experimenting with like, you wanna have like on, like on, was it broadcast news or the newsroom where it was like, I wanna have, I need to have a signature take care of each other to close the newscast with? Are you, are you having your own like signature subbing in weekend anchor? Like, hey, welcome back.

Jason Snell [00:01:40]:
Anything is possible. Although I always just think that I could just be like Dan Rather and say courage at the end and everybody will wonder what's wrong with me. Yeah. And then we'll move on. Also here from the usual panel, but the most unusual, it's Christina Warren. Hello.

Christina Warren [00:01:56]:
The usual panel, but the most unusual.

Jason Snell [00:01:57]:
I didn't want to call you usual.

Christina Warren [00:01:59]:
I appreciate that.

Jason Snell [00:02:00]:
You're not usual.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:01]:
Reliable.

Jason Snell [00:02:03]:
Yes.

Christina Warren [00:02:03]:
I don't know if I would say that either, but yeah, I'm something.

Jason Snell [00:02:07]:
It's good to have you back. And here's our guest today. It is 2-time Jeopardy! champion, Blogger, Kickstarter maven, Glenn Fleischman. Hi, Glenn.

Glenn Fleischman [00:02:18]:
Well, hello there. Thank you for having me on. I have, uh, I've got nothing to say as usual. I'll be quiet the whole show.

Jason Snell [00:02:25]:
Sure. That's right. He sits quietly and ruins it from afar. It's amazing. His powers. He has incredible power to do that. Uh, no, no, it's great to have you all here. Glenn, thank you for joining us since we were light a member with Leo being gone.

Jason Snell [00:02:38]:
Um, let's get started by talking about what's next. See, past, present, future. It's a theme. Apple, announced what we always kind of knew, but they put out a thing on social media and sent to members of the media a new, uh, event or experience, I suppose, that's going to happen in LA on October 28th. So a week from tomorrow. This is the Pro and Tell event. And, uh, everybody, you know, the question everybody's asking is, Jason, are they making you go to LA? And the answer, friends, is yes, they are making me go to LA. So I'll see you all in Hollywood next Wednesday.

Jason Snell [00:03:22]:
Don't look for me. I'll be hiding. I'll have the dark glasses on.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:26]:
You'll be in a Spider-Man suit on Hollywood Boulevard because you're drawn to the audience.

Jason Snell [00:03:31]:
Yeah, I assume. I mean, let's just assume that that's me.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:34]:
Good.

Jason Snell [00:03:35]:
How about that? We'll just assume it. Just, you can do that. So, of course, Mark Gurman has always been doing his best to make us all know exactly what's going to be in the, the Pro Intel event. Um, and the top of the list, it's a touchscreen MacBook for the very first time. This is the moment where Apple, after priming the pump with a bunch of like curious touchscreen-related features in macOS 27, has finally decided they're going to do their first touchscreen MacBook. It's also their first—

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:08]:
Toaster fridge. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:04:11]:
Everybody. Yeah. Warm up your zombie arms.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:13]:
Turns out it's not, it's not nonsense whatsoever, is it, Tim? Huh, Tim? Oh wait, you decided to retire before you could appear drowsed in shame. I'm just gonna go for it.

Jason Snell [00:04:24]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the toaster fridge argument was a little bit different, but yes, it is. It is Apple doing what every PC maker has done forever, but deciding to do it now, which is interesting. I don't know why other than the fact, like the, it feels like the best time to do a touchscreen MacBook was 10 years ago, but the next best time to do it is now. If that makes any sense, you gotta do it eventually, right? Like, 'cause, 'cause again, it's not like you're gonna control your laptop. Anybody who's used a touchscreen laptop knows that it's not like you spend all the time with the zombie arms out. It's more like we're all so conditioned now that you wanna do like a quick flick on a browser window and you do it on a Mac today and it doesn't do anything.

Jason Snell [00:05:06]:
And it's kind of frustrating.

Glenn Fleischman [00:05:07]:
I'm always pinching screens. Every screen I see, I'm trying to pinch and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So it'd be nice for consistency's sake.

Christina Warren [00:05:15]:
Well, I mean, and at this point, especially since the iPad, you know, um, Sidecar like supports the fact that you can, you know, touch your, your, your Mac that way. And, and there are iPad apps, um, and, you know, iOS apps on the Mac, which Apple has been trying to sell as, oh, you just only need to write once, run everywhere. It's a terrible experience, but, you know, it's, it's the story nonetheless. I mean, it just makes sense, I think, to just be more consistent. So I'm better late than never. Yeah. I think you're right. Um, I, I still think that I personally, it's gonna be just like my other touchscreen, uh, computers.

Christina Warren [00:05:47]:
Yeah. I will use them occasionally, but I'm just too muscle memory not to use them. But you know, who knows? I may, maybe somebody will come up with some sort of fantastic Mac app and, and shock me. But, uh, yeah, I'm glad to see it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:05:58]:
I, I, I think that like people, people who, I never met anybody who thinks that touchscreens on a laptop are useless, who didn't begrudgingly change their minds at least a little bit once they accidentally got a laptop with a touchscreen on. They're not useless. They will find a use for it. It's not front and center. You are not going to be holding it like to your chest and drawing stuff on it. But like, that's like, oh my God, I didn't, I hate, I wish I hadn't written that editorial 3 years ago 'cause now here I am at Starbucks like with one lazy arm doing the scrolling so I can just sit here and do the other thing. Okay, if I didn't have to pay extra for it, I suppose I found a use for it.

Glenn Fleischman [00:06:34]:
That's what I've been trying to figure out is all the rumors are it's just gonna be a laptop with a touchscreen. There's no like articulation or anything, no fold back, no hide the keyboard. Baby steps. Just, so it's right. And I'm like, there is still that distance thing. There is a zombie arms thing. It's like, how do you get a laptop? What are you doing where it's more comfortable? I mean, I just like, you know, I just released some ebooks and people always want EPUB versions of them. And I've been slowly trying to make sure EPUB versions look good, but it's very hard to read a PDF or EPUB at the right size when it's graphically rich.

Glenn Fleischman [00:07:07]:
Like, it's one thing if it's flowing text and you have all these options. And I've thought, is that— The market. It's not that your laptop is suddenly a great e-reader, but there is something nicer about you position it in the right place, you're reading, and you can flip with your finger instead of having to do keyboard manipulation. But that's a very tiny segment. I think.

Jason Snell [00:07:25]:
My experience, like 95% of my experience with touchscreen laptops is using an iPad and the Magic Keyboard, right? Which is not the same, but it is the same. It is a laptop at that point. And The truth is, and I also used a Chromebook that had for a little while, a nice Chromebook that had a touchscreen. And it wasn't any different than the way that I use my iPad, which is my hands are down on the keys with a trackpad. I'm never reaching for the screen because I'm in that mode. But sometimes I'm literally sitting there, got my hand on my face. I'm like, what am I going to write next? Or I'm reading something and a thing pops up or I want to scroll a webpage and I reflexively reach out and go boop. Tap or swipe.

Jason Snell [00:08:10]:
And to my mind, it's like, that's what it's for. It's not for like, I'm going to be in Photoshop pushing around a lot of pixels. It's more like it's common grammar of using a computer now or using a device now is some of the very basic touch actions. And that's why I say the next best time is now for Apple is like, at this point, it's more baffling when your touch, when your screen doesn't accept a touch. So having something there is good. I'm not sure. I look forward— here's a question for all of you. What case does Apple make? What is the story Apple tells to say why now is the time? And like, are there like incredible creative uses that are unlocked by being able to reach out and swipe something on a screen?

Glenn Fleischman [00:08:54]:
Image Playground. Image Playground, the most important technology introduced in macOS. Gotcha. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:01]:
No, I was going to say, I think the easiest question is the most basic. All the kids who are buying, uh, who, who have the— get the— who have their first, uh, MacBook Air, whether buying it for high school or college, they never knew a world without a device where they had a touchscreen. They grew up with, with touchscreen devices. This is what they're expecting. It's like, it's like at this point, like any of— okay, maybe not. Maybe Christina, maybe not the rest of us, but like, imagine, like, imagine in the '90s, like, or 2000s being shown, oh, well, here's a command line interface. Yeah. Have fun.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:31]:
Like, wait a minute, that's not what a computer is. A computer has a mouse and it has Windows and it has stuff like that. What do you get? What do you want with that? So I, I'm hoping, like, like you said, Glenn, I'm hoping that this is a step towards an actual tablet Mac or one with a 360, like a yoke display, but baby steps. And now they have to, they have to do it because that is the table stakes. Everybody growing up knows that there, that there are touchscreens on screens.

Christina Warren [00:09:53]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:09:53]:
And you mentioned this is a MacBook. You mentioned the MacBook Air. This is a MacBook Pro and it's a high-end MacBook Pro. I don't think their argument is going to be only Only our, you know, most professional customers need a touchscreen. I think this is where they're starting. But come on. Yes. In 5, in 5 years, if not less, every Mac laptop will have it.

Christina Warren [00:10:10]:
Every Mac is going to have it. No, absolutely. Every Mac is going to have it. And I think that's actually the more interesting thing I'm kind of thinking about, like long term. Like, what does this mean for the conversions between, you know, you mentioned the iPad, Jason, and like we're both iPad users and, you know, I've had the Magic Keyboard and I've had, you know, the Magic Pen, the Apple Pencil, and I've done the whole thing with it. And I think that as much as, you know, rightfully Apple was dragged for saying what's a computer because that was a terrible and flawed like ad campaign or whatever, the lines between those 2 devices, it really just comes down to the fact that one runs a good operating system and one runs iPadOS. But, but other than that, like they're very similar, you know, kind of experiences. And so I do think that that's, that's what I'm kind of looking forward to is, okay, if we no longer have this artificially inserted barrier of saying the thing that separates these 2 things is that, oh, you can touch an iPad and you can draw on an iPad.

Christina Warren [00:11:06]:
What does that look like if we unlock that for a Mac? Does that mean that we get iMacs where we can, you know, have touchscreen iMacs that might be more useful? Does that mean that we eventually do get more, you know, Surface-style devices or, you know, convertible devices where we can draw on screens, where we can do more fine, high-end work? What, what does that mean? And does that maybe even eventually mean, yeah, we're going to maybe give you the ability to kind of go from one mode to— I, I think this is— I'm, I'm not expecting this, but, you know, maybe eventually one day, uh, someone will say, hey, yeah, you could run your hardware in either an iPad mode or in like as an actual computer.

Glenn Fleischman [00:11:45]:
Yeah. I mean, the, the drawing aspect, I mean, you can't overestimate, uh, or I think that's the right word. Underestimate drawing is there's tons of cartoonists and other illustrators and graphic designers who, uh, work with a stylus, work with an Apple Pencil, uh, you know, Wacom or some of the other competitors. And, uh, I don't know what part of the market that is. I assume that's largely the— not the cartoonists. Cartoonists unfortunately don't make very much money, most of them. But, but the, uh, design market has always been the higher end of the market. I don't know if that's still true today.

Glenn Fleischman [00:12:13]:
Maybe it's more like, you know, 80th, 90th percentile instead of 95th. And I've wondered if an Apple Pencil plus a, uh, a future Mac is With articulation is a, is a thing too, because then you're like, well, I could get a 17-inch MacBook Pro. Maybe it costs $7,000. God knows what it'll cost, but a 17-inch MacBook Pro or even a 15-inch and articulate it and use that to tilt it and lock it in position to draw on. I can use it as a touchscreen. I use it as a Mac, use it as an iPad. I mean, but I don't know if that's enough of a use case either. Why will people pay an extra of like $1,500 for this or $1,000 for this?

Jason Snell [00:12:51]:
I mean, It's going to be the high-end MacBook Pro. I don't think they're going to pay. I don't think they're paying extra. That's the funny thing about us talking about it being a touchscreen.

Andy Ihnatko [00:12:58]:
There's an Ultra out there.

Jason Snell [00:12:59]:
Yeah. As Mac fans, we think like this is a seminal moment. They're adding a touchscreen to a Mac, but in reality it's just a feature that they're adding at this time to a high-end Mac that also is going to get an OLED screen for the first time.

Christina Warren [00:13:13]:
I was going to say the OLED, I think, is the bigger thing.

Jason Snell [00:13:15]:
A bigger deal. And then it's going to be a new MacBook Pro design. So supposedly it's going to be thinner and lighter as well. There's a lot more going into it. It's just that this is a— they are crossing the Rubicon here a little bit and saying, yep, macOS does touchscreen now. And that's the thing. I, I'll just throw out my hot take that I don't know if I've said here before, but there is a moment where I start to wonder if the iPad Pro makes more sense, if it is a device that can run it. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:13:41]:
Once the Mac can run— essentially the Mac can— they don't, but they can run all iPad software and Macs have touchscreens. The Mac's practically an iPad at that point. At that point, why would you not have the iPad run macOS in an iPad mode when it's a touch tablet? And when you attach a keyboard, you get, I mean, you already get a menu bar, right? So you just get Mac. We're so close to that world where something we think of now as an iPad Pro is actually a multifunction device that can be a touch tablet or a full-on Mac laptop if you connect the right stuff. That, why not?

Glenn Fleischman [00:14:16]:
My minor epiphany, which is this is all part of Siri AI, right? You don't introduce a touchscreen until you have a working assistant that can answer most of your stuff and do most of what you need to do. So you don't have to resort to a keyboard. So once you have voice control actually close, you know, much closer to functional, then a touchscreen makes more sense because you're not interacting with the keyboard as much. You could use it entirely in touchscreen mode for a lot of the things that you want to do that aren't like directly writing unless you're doing dictation. So that's part of the change possibly.

Andy Ihnatko [00:14:45]:
Yeah. I think I'm a little bit cynical here, but Part of it, you have to think, is in the conversations inside Cupertino, part of the conversation is why would we encourage somebody to buy a MacBook or an iPad when we can keep them buying both? Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:15:02]:
I mean, the problem I see is that the iPad Pro particularly doesn't make a lot of sense given its price and given its lack of capabilities. And it would make more sense if it was actually a Mac laptop at that price. that also worked as a touch tablet at the high end of the iPad market. I'm not sure. I feel like they've been converged on whether they want to build a convergence device or not. They're converging in the iPad Pro. And again, plug in an iPad Pro to a, to a keyboard and sit like I sit in my backyard and it's a laptop. It's got a menu bar, like it's, it's got windowing.

Jason Snell [00:15:38]:
It's so close to being a Mac that there is a moment where I think, why isn't it just a Mac at this point?

Christina Warren [00:15:44]:
And you're absolutely right. It's frustrating that it's not. To the point that like, absolutely, there are those little things that you can't do on it that you can. And, and I say, you know, I, I, I love my iPad Pro, but also, yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I, when you look at the pricing, like when I bought my iPad Pro and I got it fortunately before the, the price went up, you know, if you were to get the pencil, if you get the keyboard, if you get the whole, if you get the, you know, model with 16 gigs of RAM or, or whatever the case may be, like it costs more than an iPad Air and—

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:11]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:16:12]:
Or than a MacBook Air. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's in, it's like a MacBook Pro territory. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:16:16]:
Yeah, it is. It's in MacBook Pro territory and you do it because, okay, well, this is really lightweight and I can watch videos on this better than I can in a more comfortable way than I can other things. And it is nice to be in bed and to be able to have the fact that it's detachable and just this one device, right? There are those trade-offs that you make. But yeah, when you're paying that much money for it, A, you're not buying it very often. It's, you know, probably like a once every 4 or 5 year device. So less often even than you're buying a laptop, I think for most people. B, you know, I think most of us who've had the iPad Air, there are, I'm sure, exceptions, but like, I have not used it, or not iPad Air, sorry, iPad Pro. I have not used my iPad Pro and I've had one since the very first iPad Pro any differently than I used my first iPad.

Christina Warren [00:16:59]:
You know, there are more things I can do with it, but I think that if I, you know, continued to get an iPad Air or, you know, done other stuff, it's, I, I don't feel like Apple's made the, the qualitative argument to me that says, oh, there are all these. you know, applications that are really necessary to have the Pro chip. And, and that's why you have this overpriced tablet. And so, yeah, if you're going to converge them, I don't know, maybe just have those.

Jason Snell [00:17:22]:
The chips have converged already. That's the other thing is you can't pretend like, oh, an iPad can't do that. My iPad Pro is an M5, right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:17:29]:
I mean, you're both, you're both absolutely right. And because this is my iPad is the only thing, the only expensive thing of my tech stuff that I have not upgraded this So I'm waiting till 2027 to do that. But the thing is, like, I realized that back when the first— I, I'm still running the first M1, like, iPad Pro. My previous iPad was an iPad Pro, like Christina's. I was like, well, of course I'm gonna go with an iPad Pro, 'cause chiefly because I want an iPad with a larger display, a product, something that could be productive that's smaller and lighter than, uh, than my MacBook. But the thing is, one of the reasons why I bought it was because I was sort of looking forward to saying, oh, if it's not an A-series processor, if it's the same processor that's in a Mac, over the life of this device, what features are going to arrive here that are going to make me really, really happy that I went for the Pro? And it has lots, it has lots of stuff that I really, really appreciate. I love it. It still works great.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:20]:
I'm going to be using it until it's end of life. But I am eager to— I'm thinking about— I will probably be buying a new iPad next year, but I can't convince myself to get a Pro. It's going to be an A-series or a Mini because not being— and that's not to denigrate the M1. It's just that— No. If I have the 10% of experience on the iPad that makes it miserable that it's not running a real operating system is not worth the benefits of having a device that's truly as expensive. I mean, like you said, Christina, I've got like 4— between the device, the Pencil, and the Smart Keyboard, I easily have $1,400 like inside this. And if I were to treat that as a budget to solve mobile computing problems, I would not be throwing the dice entirely on this one device. I would be buying 2 or 3 different ones for like to cover 2 or 3 different situations or just be sensible and just spend $700 for a good smaller size, even more compact A-series iPad.

Jason Snell [00:19:18]:
Can I ask?

Glenn Fleischman [00:19:19]:
Oh, sorry. Oh, can I ask you, do you think, is there an interest in Apple's side to, Encourage updates. Like I've talked to people who have said, you know, actually I was talking to a friend the other day who needed to update an older Mac and he's like, ah, they're trying to get me to buy a new one. And I'm like, well, what can you update to? And it turned out Sequoia. And he's like, last time it was disaster. He did it and now he has essentially a new machine. He's very happy with it and he didn't, you know, buy a new computer. But I'm wondering, you know, this is kind of the M series now A18 Pro dilemma is like, how does Apple push you from like an M2 or M3 chip MacBook Pro to a newer one and it is a touchscreen, like, oh, I was thinking, you know, it's powerful enough, but now I— and does that give them a goose on the high end? It's hard.

Glenn Fleischman [00:20:02]:
I mean, I figure it's in a spreadsheet somewhere, but I don't know how important that is either.

Jason Snell [00:20:06]:
I feel like the OLED, it comes back for a pro laptop that especially will be pitched to creative types. Yeah. The OLED is going to be the thing that wins the day more than anything else. But I do agree that We don't— we aren't yet at the point where Apple starts to say, you know, M1 is looking kind of old. That's going to be a big moment when Apple actually says they're going to be Apple Silicon Macs that are not supported with an OS update. I think that might not happen for a few years yet, but it will be a big moment.

Glenn Fleischman [00:20:34]:
Yeah, we did mention— so that's good.

Jason Snell [00:20:36]:
All this iPad talk. There is some iPad anticipation as well for next week. Next, next Wednesday, um, we mentioned the iPad. We should talk about the fact that there's going to be, uh, it sounds like an iPad mini update, which is exciting because this is one of those products that doesn't get updated very often. And the people who love it love it an awful lot. And it sounds like it is getting a real glow up with an OLED screen. And the, uh, they're doing the iPad modern iPad thing where the, the camera is going to move to the long edge instead of the short edge. which I'm a fan of because I hold mostly my iPad in horizontal and not vertical orientation.

Jason Snell [00:21:17]:
So it's way better for that. I don't know if you all have those deep feelings. I haven't used an iPad mini in a while now, but people really love it and they love it for, it's funny actually, we were talking about how iPads tend to be general purpose. Yes. But like iPad mini is the iPad that means something specific in a way that's kind of an iPad Air or an iPad Pro doesn't. You couldn't see it, but Glenn and Andy were holding up iPad Minis. So maybe you can see them.

Glenn Fleischman [00:21:45]:
It's great podcast material holding things up. I know. I love it.

Jason Snell [00:21:48]:
I love it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:48]:
Actually, it's good press for big influencers.

Christina Warren [00:21:51]:
Actually, I didn't even realize mine. I've got one right here too.

Jason Snell [00:21:55]:
Oh my goodness.

Glenn Fleischman [00:21:56]:
I got an iPad Mini when I was traveling more and I wanted, I needed an iPad for testing, for writing. I didn't wanna get a full-size one. And I wanted one when I didn't wanna bring my laptop and wanted to watch movies on planes and I could bring a little keyboard and work remotely, but I didn't need to do a lot of work writing, it was mostly catch-up stuff. And the Mini is like, I feel, is a perfect form factor. It's not like the iPad is that big, but once I get up to that size, then, well, maybe do I add the clip-on keyboard or something like that? And then it's like, well, I'll just bring my laptop. So the Mini is like just big enough to be different than my iPhone, especially for film watching on planes.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:31]:
Yeah. It's, I mean, it's sensational. As a matter of fact, I was a little, I was a little bit cagey there because This looks like an iPad Mini, but it's actually an Android tablet. Oh, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about this as a future pick of the week, so I'm not gonna talk that much about it. But, but basically I wanted to test out like what is an 8-inch, because my, my iPad Mini is so old, like it's—

Glenn Fleischman [00:22:57]:
how old is it?

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:59]:
Why, it's, uh, so old that, uh, the

Jason Snell [00:23:01]:
only app it can run blank.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:04]:
It's still so old it still has Touch ID.

Glenn Fleischman [00:23:07]:
You can't use a stylus, you have to use a chisel with it.

Jason Snell [00:23:10]:
Oh, these are the jokes, everybody.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:13]:
But I mean, again, just to finish the thought, like, I've been basically— the thing is, like, whereas 5 years ago the thought is I want something that is more mobile than my MacBook to give me more opportunities to get stuff done and to be entertained on the go, and that used to be, okay, easy answer, it's going to be an iPad Pro. Now it's like I can trade off a lot of that power and a lot of that storage and a lot of that screen size for something that is so freaking small that now that it's— now that it's fall, it is actually pocket-sized. Yeah. And the thing is like— And

Glenn Fleischman [00:23:44]:
because, Andy, that's an incredible statement and I totally support it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:48]:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, all I'm saying is that— so unfortunately, it's small enough to have it because, as I was about to say, like, the thing is like, it really is like No, no, no OS updates, the apps won't update. And also because the browser is old, none of the apps that are still working will authenticate anymore because it doesn't trust my out-of-date browser. So it really, so it really is just like a nostalgia thing. Oh my gosh. And because you can't— and because the bootloader is not unlockable, it's not like I can put something more useful on it. It's still really great, but I can't use it anymore. Anyway, the point being that I think that a lot of people shouldn't— people shouldn't sleep on the iPad Mini.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:22]:
It's not just, oh, isn't this like weird thing that basically is used for pilots and as ebook readers is like, no, again, for a lot of use cases, including, I mean, just to wrap this up is that I was at a wedding on the Cape for 3 days and it's like, I really shouldn't bring my laptop with me, but I am gonna have downtime in which I am, it's 3 days and I'm not gonna be at the wedding for 3 days, but I want, so I wanna take something with me and I had to take my iPad Pro even though it seemed like way, way overkill for what I needed, whereas I could have saved myself a little bit of baggage and simply taken a Mini and a folding keyboard and a mouse, and it would have been just perfectly fine.

Glenn Fleischman [00:25:04]:
That would have been a hell of a wedding if it was 72 hours straight, no downtime.

Andy Ihnatko [00:25:08]:
Uh, there was a dunk tank, and people just want to keep throwing balls until the mother— until a certain member of the wedding party got absolutely soaked.

Jason Snell [00:25:15]:
Yeah, exactly. I mean,

Glenn Fleischman [00:25:17]:
this is the brother-in-law.

Jason Snell [00:25:18]:
This is— if I was still writing a weekly, uh, column for Macworld. I used to have like a, uh, a thing that I would write like, ooh, Macworld column idea. And maybe I'll write this somewhere, but here's my Macworld pitch. You can all hear it too. Are you ready? The iPad Mini is in some ways the best iPad because it knows what it is and it's for something in a way that the rest of the iPad lineup is a little more nebulous. And you all leaning forward about it, this is part of it, right? It's like, it is smaller. It fits in more places where it might, where a laptop might not go. The other iPads are bigger.

Jason Snell [00:25:55]:
They're not laptop size, but they're, they're closer to it. I hear people who say, well, I use it as an e-reader. Now I use an e-ink reader, but there are people who are like, no, this is my simple, small hold-in-one-hand reading device. And I use it for books and I use it for RSS and maybe I use it to read email, but I'm also not doing work on it. Like, I think there's an argument to be made. That I'm spitballing here, but like that, that it is because it is specific in a way that sometimes I think other iPads aren't. You're like, which, which iPad should I buy? And they're like, well, they're all kind of the same except for the specs, but the iPad mini isn't. It's very different.

Jason Snell [00:26:31]:
And now it will get its glow up, which like I said, I think is great to get, get the OLED in there and get it to be a little more modern.

Glenn Fleischman [00:26:37]:
Well, and I, yeah, I like to do, uh, Apple Intelligence on it. And the one I have is just too old. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to buy a new one now just for that. So I'll stick with it. And it also lets me, from a testing standpoint, test non-Apple AI stuff on, uh, on iOS or iPadOS 27. Um, but I was thinking it reminded me of The Onion headline, Tim Cook releases iPhone for your other hand. And I was like, the, uh, iPad mini is kind of like, you know, Apple introduces— it's like, I figure eventually there's like, you have to own 4 different iPad sizes, all of which have a purpose. Like that's eventually you'll have like 7 Apple devices or 8.

Glenn Fleischman [00:27:10]:
Right. Because each of them is a niche. Like, no, no. Well, let's, We're not going to do the Steve Jobs, it's a phone, it's a messaging device, whatever, all the things it was, a music player. It's like, it's just one iPad of one size, the iPad Mini, for one purpose. And iPads of a different size are, like you say, ambiguous, but also now with this blend, it's like, well, what is the iPad's role with the touchbook Mac? That's going to be the exploration next that Apple has to give an answer for. That's a great thing for John Ternus to answer because he gets to come in and he's taking over obviously You know, years of stuff in the pipeline, but it's a great future answer is like, what is the iPad for now that you've done what you've done?

Jason Snell [00:27:49]:
The other products we should talk about, chips a little bit next, next Wednesday. And we have a whole other MacBreak Weekly to talk about this. So we'll talk about it again. This is like your little, little, just, we're just whetting the appetite for the day before. But, um, the MacBook Pro is rumored again, mostly by Mark Gurman, to be coming in M5 chips, right? His report was that there are going to be no M6 Pro and Max chips. So the MacBook Pro is going to be using the same chips that the current MacBook Pro is in, which is interesting. So not a chip update, right? It's a body and screen update. So that'll be interesting to sort of see what they do that's different and what's the same.

Jason Snell [00:28:26]:
However, we do have the base M6 chip out there, and Gurman reports that we are going to see some new Macs as a part of this event that that integrate that M6 chip. And that would be a new M6 iMac that will presumably be exactly like all Apple Silicon iMacs have ever been, but still nice to give it an update. Also a product that means something. It is very specific in a way that has very specific use cases. And a 14-inch MacBook Pro, the base model MacBook Pro, which currently is at an M5, that one will go to M6 because that's the— and it's not gonna inherit the new design because that's the one that they price for people who want to buy something called a MacBook Pro but don't want to pay full price. They get that base model. So those are also apparently coming. And, you know, that we're going to have some interesting chip complexity conversations because the idea that these are going to be new MacBook Pros that maybe don't have new chips in them, haven't seen that one in a while.

Jason Snell [00:29:27]:
All right, let's move on. You guys are so good at talking. It's so easy to host this show when people talk a lot. It's great. Um, but I want to talk about this week's big news. Again, we're talking about the future, but we're coming closer to today. Friday is iPhone Duo Day. And, and last Friday was iPhone Duo frustration attempting to order.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:52]:
iPhone Don't Day.

Jason Snell [00:29:53]:
iPhone Don't Day, more like.

Glenn Fleischman [00:29:55]:
Don't do. Wait, how do you say that?

Jason Snell [00:29:57]:
So, I mean, 5:00 AM I was up. How'd everybody do? Did you order an iPhone Duo or not?

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:03]:
I'm proud to say that I've successfully ordered exactly as many iPhone Duos as I planned to.

Glenn Fleischman [00:30:10]:
Me too,

Jason Snell [00:30:11]:
thanks. Christina, spill.

Christina Warren [00:30:13]:
So, okay, I was up at 5:00 AM and I was immediately open the app. Just so happens. Yeah.

Glenn Fleischman [00:30:20]:
Christina doesn't sleep, come on. You think that Christina sleeps?

Christina Warren [00:30:22]:
No, I don't actually. I don't actually. It's true, but no, but I set an alarm for 4:30, for 4:45 and make sure that I was awake. And I immediately like, In years past, I've always used the Apple app on the iPhone because that's worked better. This year, that was not the right move. This year, the right move would have been to use the website because it took 2 or 3 minutes before they would even let me open up my preorder to go through the process. So by the time I got through the checkout flow, there were no, there was absolutely nothing available for in-store pickup, period. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:30:56]:
Um, and then they were telling me November 23rd through December 1st. And so at that point, I placed the order, but I'm annoyed and I'm very not happy because who wants to wait a month for a phone, especially if you're spending this much money on it? So then I'm like, okay, well, let's try Verizon. So Verizon did have devices available, but, and this is my fault, and I'd even set an alarm for this to remind myself to do this and I didn't do it. SIM was locked, I guess, for, you know, for protection or whatever. And as a result, I had to wait 15 minutes to turn that off before it would let me buy the phone. By the time I got the phone through the setup process, now I'm not getting one until October 31st, but it'll be, it'll be a week after. So I will get, uh, an iPhone Duo on October 31st. I won't get one on Friday.

Christina Warren [00:31:46]:
I'm okay with that. Um, at least it's not January. Like that, that was the insane thing because I was, As I'm waiting for Verizon to kind of catch up, I placed the Apple order, but, um, that was going to be arriving during Thanksgiving. I'll be out of town. The last thing anybody wants is to have a $2,500 phone go to a location where you're not at. Um, uh, you know, because people steal things and, and I, I was in zero. Yeah. Also, Apple then won't let you change the delivery address, uh, because it, depending on how you pay, it was a whole thing.

Christina Warren [00:32:18]:
So I was, I was kind of, screwed. And so while I was waiting for— to see, I guess, basically where I was in the rising queue on things, I was, you know, refreshing and watching everyone on the internet kind of, you know, melt down and realize how quickly these things— which we knew that they would sell out. And I knew that this was going to happen. I had a feeling it was probably a combination of low yields and high demand. And I knew that it was going to be a bloodbath. Totally. I knew it was. And that's why I set my alarm for 4:30 in the morning.

Christina Warren [00:32:47]:
But if I hadn't had the hiccup with my phone being locked, you know, Verizon trying to prevent me from being phished, I probably would be getting one on Friday. But I wasn't in that situation. Best Buy did have some. I was looking at potentially like, okay, do I get one in a color I don't want if I can get it, you know, same day at Best Buy? Do I want to go through that rigmarole? And I thought about it and I was like, honestly, no, I'm going to be out of town next week anyway.

Glenn Fleischman [00:33:13]:
You should order 2 and then you could have sold one for $5,000 and then you— and then kept the one that got there. And

Christina Warren [00:33:19]:
then I'd be a terrible person and then I'd be a terrible person.

Glenn Fleischman [00:33:21]:
Well, I have feelings. I don't know if you'd be— I don't know. I love arbitrage on new goods as long as someone's not actually stealing them.

Christina Warren [00:33:29]:
Yeah, I guess I just— I— for commodity items, I just never feel good about selling them at inflated prices.

Jason Snell [00:33:37]:
Christina, what If people are going to ask what color, what, uh, 512

Christina Warren [00:33:43]:
and, uh, white.

Jason Snell [00:33:44]:
All right, I'm, I'm, I'm 256 in night sky, whatever color that is. The color of the night sky is black, but I think it's a dark blue. But I also slid back. Um, I'm not going to be at my house on Friday, and so I got to the last screen where it was like, yep, available Friday, and I, I had to put in a different address, and then I pressed okay, and it said No. Okay. For 2 weeks from now, I'm not going to be there then. So then I switched it back. And so, yeah, I'm a mid-November as well.

Jason Snell [00:34:13]:
And yes, they are out into January of next year now, although, you know, they'll all creep back a little bit. But the bottom line here— and Apple did put out a statement saying there was extraordinary demand. They aren't talking about how much supply that they had. We all assume— and Christina mentioned it— we all assume That they are they're making these as fast as they can, but it is hard for them to do it. There were also a bunch of reports early on before it was announced that they had had some production issues that they were working through, and what that that matters because they spend the summer building up a backlog for the big moment when they ship it in the fall, and I get the feeling maybe that they had some issues that made the backlog smaller. So I think they knew it was going to sell out fast. I still sort of suspect that they're selling more than they thought. And there was a report that I saw that said that they may have actually increased their order for iPhone Duo, along with saying that they were going to— I think wanted more Pro Max and fewer Pro.

Jason Snell [00:35:14]:
They wanted more iPhone Duos. So I do think there's more demand there than they expected or that they planned for. But the bottom line is they don't have enough. And I saw— I don't know. I mean, In, in my day, selling, having a product so popular that you can't make them fast enough was a good thing. Mark Gurman referred to this event as a disaster because Apple doesn't have enough. And I thought that was a bit—

Andy Ihnatko [00:35:38]:
that's, that's heavy.

Jason Snell [00:35:39]:
I thought that was a bit strong.

Christina Warren [00:35:40]:
I think that's strong. I will say this, though. The one thing I will say is that when you do look at dates again for commodity items going back to January, when you're talking about, you know, 3-month delays, At that point, that changes, I think, in a lot of people, their internal calculus. Is this worth it for me? Yeah. And for a high, um, value item like this, that is for most people not a must-have. This is not like the, the, this is a nice-to-have thing. This is not a thing that we need. The longer you wait, the more you go, okay, the phone that I have is fine.

Christina Warren [00:36:09]:
And if I've gotta wait 3 months, should I just wait until maybe they're gonna come out with the Duo 2? And maybe they don't do that, right? Like maybe they This is a thing they only do every other year. Who's to say? But I think that changes the value calculus, especially for an item like this, when this is not like a, I have to have this. This is, you know, this, you know, must-have thing. You go, okay, well, I'm buying this because I'm an early adopter. I'm buying this because I have the disposable income to spend on this. If you're making me wait this long, do I just go even longer or do I have to reconsider? What are the reviews? How am I going to use this? What are the use cases? I think That's the danger, not that this is a disaster. Or do I just buy an iPhone 18

Glenn Fleischman [00:36:47]:
and bag it? Exactly. The flip side, no flip jokes here, is that other people may be waiting to see what the reviews are, and they're more cautious spenders. So now they're like, now I get a few months to see all the problems. We'll find out what the repair rate is, like how many people are like, oh, I got a horrible line there, or everyone's saying, this is amazing. I've folded and unfolded it 1,000 times and it looks great and I love it. And so I'm curious. This is that thing about how do you manage backorder and pent-up demand if the orders are out till January? Does Apple do, you know, is it like another drop like LeBooBoos or something? It's like, yeah, we're going to— we've got a whole bunch of Duos and you got to preorder at 5:30. I mean, they can't do that.

Jason Snell [00:37:24]:
I mean, the beauty of the way Apple does it, unlike I would say especially video game companies where they're just like, we're not selling it, is Apple will take your order and you can put down your money and they will give you a date. And the way Apple does that Also is, and I alluded to this earlier, is the date you get, the further out you get, it's less likely that it's the actual date. Apple underpromises and overdelivers when it comes to ship dates. I found generally the closer it is, it's accurate. But like if they say it's going to be December 13th, you'll probably get an email saying it'll be December 5th. Right. That is generally how it works. No, we don't know how it's going to work in this case, but generally they're pretty conservative about that.

Jason Snell [00:38:06]:
As orders get canceled, as things get returned, whatever it is, and as they ramp up supply, they're able to kind of like compact a little bit. But and then, you know, everybody else kind of comes closer and then you place an order, you know, next week and it says late December or early January when before it might have said February. And they kind of like accordion the whole thing. point, which I, again, I think he— it was a hot take saying it's a disaster. And Christina, I think you made an excellent, excellent statement there. The idea that the longer you wait, the longer you have to rethink. Yeah. But Gurman's point was maybe they should have stuck with their original plan to just sell this in the US and China at launch, because then they could have fulfilled demand and the rest of the world would have been very angry.

Jason Snell [00:38:53]:
Yeah, it would have been pent-up demand in a different a different kind of way that they might have been able to target if they said, okay, now, now it's in Europe.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:00]:
Yeah. The area in which Apple is maybe ripe for some criticism here, I don't think it was a disaster, but that this wasn't like, oh my God, honest to God, we thought that— we thought that the stock that we had would be enough to last us through the year. We had no idea what the demand was going to be when, like, again, a reporter would say a follow-up question. you did, you, you did know that you were many— that you were having not only, uh, production problems on the displays but also production problems on the assembly line. So you were definitely assembling— you're definitely furnishing a lot fewer of these devices than you thought you would at this time, unless all this reporting is incorrect. So maybe on that basis, that might have— it might have been worth considering to say perhaps we should restrict availability immediately just to make sure that We don't— we wanted— we would much rather disappoint our customers at the point of the press release in which we announced that it's only going to be available in the US and China. We don't want to dismiss them because they were up at 5:00 AM and now they've got to do a 9:00 AM meeting call on 90 minutes of sleep and they didn't get the phone that they wanted.

Jason Snell [00:40:06]:
Yeah, it's— it's— we should also say, because Christina mentioned some of the classic— I love it. I love it. We've done this so much now, Christina, and all of us, we know we We know, we know every single move. It's the right— it's the, it's the preorder. Get it set to go. Go to Apple. But maybe it'll be at a carrier, but maybe it'll be at Best Buy. Maybe always a little outlier.

Glenn Fleischman [00:40:26]:
But you know what, store up.

Jason Snell [00:40:27]:
You know the one that, that doesn't hold water this time?

Glenn Fleischman [00:40:31]:
What's that?

Jason Snell [00:40:32]:
Apple retail staff have been told, yeah, that if people come and say, so I can just come in on Friday and wait in line and get a Duo, right? They have been told that that's not going to be the case because often what happens— and I've given that advice on this show many times— is they like to hold some stock at retail. Yeah. So that you can go in and buy so that somebody who's not up at 5:00 a.m. can have an experience where they come in in the afternoon and they do have some models for them. It's a nice thing when you have some supply, but it sounds based on reports, based on what Apple retail people are telling contacts in the media about this, that this is not the case where there's going to be supply, that it's so supply constrained that you may not— in fact, like, don't try. I would, I would argue, I would not wait in line. Do not try to go early in the morning and wait in line and hope to get a Duo because it sounds like you will be disappointed, which is not always the case, but I think it's going to be the case.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:32]:
Can I just, can I just say that there are a lot of personal assistants showing up at the Apple Store and the New York and New York City store that are going to get so harangued by their high-profile executives. Oh yeah, it just doesn't exist. This is the next— this is the— this is your— no, no, I tried. I got those eBay sellers too. Yeah, exactly.

Christina Warren [00:41:51]:
Well, and that's the problem, right? Like people were already talking about and I was saying this, like people were looking like, oh, we're camping out like a week early to go to the store to buy a mass market phone. Okay. No, no, I've done the line before at Fifth Avenue. I've done the line. many times, actually. And I've waited overnight, you know, for— which is dumb, but like, it's fun. It's a vibe. It's fun.

Christina Warren [00:42:10]:
Being there multiple days, that's stupid. This is a mass market item. If you can't get it when it's going to come out, like, okay, but like, it will be out eventually. And it's one of those things, again, like, I think the longer, you know, it takes for them to get their supply chain under control, the worse it is, because then people have time to think about, well, would I rather put this money someplace else? Is Is this really worth it? Like you don't want people to have that, you know, time. But like, but the FOMO alone, you know, I think, you know, people like miss, they misunderstand this is a mass market item. There will be devices out there. And obviously what Apple does, and I was fully expecting this, it was interesting to see that like Verizon had what capacities they had in stock, what colors they were clearly, you know, putting in the channel. The same thing was true for Best Buy.

Christina Warren [00:42:54]:
Best Buy and some of the other carriers. And, you know, that's why the dates move around because they figure out, okay, how many fraud cases did we have? You know, what was— who was heavier here? Who was heavier there? How can we move stuff around? And, but yeah, I've heard the same thing you have, Jason, that they're not going to have them in the stores. I think that— but I've also heard some reports of people saying the same thing that we say usually every year. Oh, you know, Go to the store, they might have some. And I think it's like, no, this is going to be one of those years. This is going to be like the iPhone, you know, 10 year. This is not going to be one where you can just expect to walk in and buy the phone. They're going to definitely have them available for people to look at.

Christina Warren [00:43:35]:
Yes, I think that they will have displays, but that's not the same thing. And I always feel bad for like the staff at the Apple stores or any store launches like this because I've I worked on them when I was in high school. And, you know, you have these throngs of people coming out and you just, you don't have more than you have. And so I hope that they can at least be like, to me, it'd be better if Apple would just come out and say, we're only going to have this many per store, or we're not going to have them on at the store on release day. I know they won't do that, but that to me would be better all around because it just winds up creating disappointment. It winds up creating, you know, markets that probably don't need to exist of arbitrage and, and other types of, you know, stuff. And, and like—

Jason Snell [00:44:23]:
This is the closest— I think that's the closest they get.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:26]:
Christina, that was a super polite word and I commend you for it.

Jason Snell [00:44:29]:
This is the closest they get, which is tell all of their retail employees to tell people not to come in. I don't think they could do more than that. But I think that I mean, not could, would, right? Like, it's like, what would Apple do? I think the answer is tell all retail staff, discourage line waiting, discourage your customers from coming in, don't get their hopes up. And that's because Apple doesn't want a bunch of angry people waiting in line and not getting anything. It's bad publicity when they want positive spin on this. So, so I think this is, this is Apple's, in their own way, Apple saying don't expect to come into a store. Now, wait. I mean, Somebody will be like, but I went to Fifth Avenue and I got the one that they had.

Jason Snell [00:45:09]:
And like, good for you.

Andy Ihnatko [00:45:10]:
Aren't you special? Yeah. And you're absolutely— one of the things that, Christina, you said that I hope that everybody takes to heart. If you want a Duo, you will be able to buy one. You just won't— you won't be able to get one maybe in 2026. And that's just too bad, but that's fine. But don't make like a panic buy because it's like, gee, I don't know if I want one or not, but if I miss this window, I will never be able to get one. No, they will make more.

Glenn Fleischman [00:45:36]:
I like this chart of like rationality, time of day, and supply. Like, like the longer you have to wait, the more your rational mind, you know, it's, I think it's an economic theory, right? Is the point is that you make certain decisions that are, you think are intelligent, but they're impulsive. But if you have time, then they're not impulsive.

Christina Warren [00:45:51]:
But if you have time. Well, I can, I can tell you, I can give you a real example of this. So when the iPhone 13 came out, this was actually the only iPhone since 2009 that I have not had. And the, the, I'd ordered the, the, the Pro Max. Um, they had that baby blue color and it was hard to get. They were having weird supply chain issues. This was 2021, so it was not as bad as it was in 2020, but they still had some sort of constraint. And I'd ordered it and it was going to be a couple of weeks later than it usually was.

Christina Warren [00:46:20]:
Well, when it arrived at the Apple Store, I was out of town. And if you don't pick it up after like 5 days or whatever it is, then they put it back. Right. And so, I got the email that says, put it back. Well, I meant to go in and buy it. I meant to go back in and, you know, buy the phone, but I didn't. And then, by the time I kind of— it all clicked for me, we're at December. Well, at this point, I'm now going, okay, well, am I really going to buy a phone, you know, at the middle end of December? Am I really going to do that when, you know, 9 months from now, I will just be buying another one? No, I'm not going to do that.

Christina Warren [00:46:53]:
So I kept my iPhone 12 Pro Max and that was like a smarter move, right? And, but it was one of those things I bought it, I literally paid for it. It was at the Apple Store. I was out of town, happened to not be able to pick it up. And just that, the fact that I had that, you know, 2-week gap or whatever it was of not being able to get the phone, you know, I wound up actually ironically, I kept that iPhone 12 until last year when I traded it in for my secondary phone. Yeah. So I, you know, I'm not saying this is how everyone operates with things, but I think that it is one of those things where kind of like, I kind of realized, and this is a different case, like the Duo is a different use case, it's a different type of device. I think people who are buying this are going to be getting a different experience than say if you're gonna get like an 18 Pro or Pro Max. But for me, you know, like 5 years ago whenever that happened, I was like, no, my phone that I bought last year for $1,000, is just fine.

Christina Warren [00:47:51]:
I don't need to buy another one.

Glenn Fleischman [00:47:53]:
I had this happen this year is I wasn't going to get an 18 Pro. I have a 17 Pro and I was happy with it. And then I was like, well, what is Apple offering me to trade in? And they offered me a ridiculous amount of money. So it was going to be $400 to upgrade. And so of course, then I got up at 5:00 AM and I bought an 18 Pro. And if I'd had more time to think about it, I probably would have done it.

Jason Snell [00:48:11]:
That's how they get you. I mean, it's buying psychology stuff. And that is the That is the danger here. I think the truth is that they felt like they needed to ship this product and they just didn't. They knew it was going to be constrained and they're just kind of going with it. But it's, it's going to be— it's been a while, right? It's been a while since Apple has had a product quite like this. And I'm looking forward to hearing about it and seeing what everybody, you know, who does have one of those dates on Friday has to say about it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:40]:
One last thing. This is not not important to the whole world, but I just hope that there are enough in the media pool that they are not just sending duos to a handful of the most trusted people. I hope we see the usual very broad spectrum of people that are going to approach this with a whole bunch of different perspectives, a whole bunch of different attitudes and expectations. Because if it is like, here are 18 people that It's not guaranteed we're going to get a good review, but we understand their point of view and we pretty much are sure that the audiences that they have will cover the audiences that we absolutely have to, have to get to with this release.

Jason Snell [00:49:18]:
I think it'll be very similar to the iPhone 18 rollout and previous iPhone rollouts where you're going to get, as we record this on a Tuesday, presumably tomorrow the embargo reviews will drop and we'll get that. That is your A-list, but that is also a very tightly curated group of people. And then Uh, there is a second wave of reviewers who get review units and those people will get review units and they will, they will, um, you know, have to scramble because those first reviews will already be out. And this is, as somebody who's often in that pool, that can be challenging. But, um, I think that they, they have, my guess is that they've set aside for those reviewers and they'll do a standard review program for this, but we'll have to see. We'll have to see who says, hey, I got a, I got an iPhone Duo on Friday. Um, and, and we'll find out who those people are. Uh, we're going to take a break.

Jason Snell [00:50:05]:
We have, uh, a week looking back at, at the big Home event that happened last week and things that we've learned and thought about in the meantime. Of course, last week we got Apple's Home event. We got the Home View. We got a new Apple TV 4K at $299. And we got the iPod Mini, or sorry, HomePod Mini, not iPod. I'm thinking iPod. Uh, this week for reasons because Friday is actually the 25th anniversary of the iPod being announced, by the way, just throw that out there. Um, but, uh, HomePod mini 2.

Jason Snell [00:50:35]:
So I wanted to start with the Apple TV 4K. There's been a lot of thought about that $299 price. I wrote a piece on Six Colors about how I thought that, uh, there was something I said here, I think last week, but the idea that another shoe probably needs to drop. I don't actually believe that Apple thinks that the Apple TV 4K should only be available at $299, but That's where we are right now, and that's not great. Guess what? Our own Glenn Fleischman did a chart about historic, historic Apple TV prices in current dollars. Uh, hey Glenn, what did you learn?

Glenn Fleischman [00:51:13]:
Well, um, holy cow, has inflation been crazy. Yeah, in recent years. It's one thing to know it. I actually am thinking about building a site that's called What Did a Nick What did bread for a nickel cost today? That would just let you, like, it would match commodities and then also show you inflation at arbitrary times. There are places that do that. But I'm like, I am now my grandfather and the nickel loaf of bread problem. 'Cause I'm like, what was the original, the Apple TV first generation? I had completely forgotten this. It launched at $300 in 2007, and that's nearly $500 in 2026 dollars.

Glenn Fleischman [00:51:48]:
Yeah. That is one data point. But the other issue is, every subsequent Apple TV generation has launched at a price that, in today's dollars, in 2026 dollars, is substantially lower than this entry price. Even if you look at the first-generation Apple TV 4K, it launched at $164— sorry, $179, rather, the first gen. It retained that price. And then the second generation also launched at that price. And those are— so the, the 20— uh, sorry, the 2018 launch was— is about $244 today, and the 2021 launch is about $224. So still well below $300.

Glenn Fleischman [00:52:31]:
And you could say like, well, what's the difference between the, um, oh, the Apple TV 4K and all these different generations and what we're getting today? And it's like, is it really like $50, $60, $70 more when you're looking at $2026? No. But I also take your point, Jason, that you made on a different podcast, I think, which is that Apple's introducing it at this price because they don't want to change the price for a long time. Inflation remains higher. So in a few years or a year or two, $299 might not seem as out of scale as it feels today. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:53:00]:
And it's overspecced because they want to keep it on sale for 4 years because that's their, that's their thing is that they want it to be compatible still 4 years from now when they're still selling it. I think the thing that jumped out at me from your chart, Glenn, is yes, first off, that original, let's be honest, Mac-based Apple TV. It ran basically macOS inside. It was wild. It was very expensive. But, uh, but the reason we're getting whiplash is in part because we're coming from the second lowest in real dollars Apple TV entry price. ever to the second highest. And that is the— I think that's what we're all feeling is in the course of 6 months with that, with that price increase and then this price increase with a new model, we're really feeling that.

Jason Snell [00:53:48]:
I still think that maybe because of weird supply issues, I'm not— I think it's possible that there will be a decontented version of this product that doesn't have that Ethernet port. Yeah. But like, you can't go out with that as your only model Because all the people who want an Ethernet port will be furious. So you go out with this one, you make a lot of money in margin for the people who will buy it, and then you backfill maybe later. I still feel like either there's a light version of this product that will come out or there's a new-ish Apple TV, tvOS product that they're working on and that the timing just didn't line up. And so because I refuse to believe that Apple thinks that $299 as the only option is a viable price for Apple TV. I think people will buy it at $299. I heard from a bunch of people over the last week who say, oh yeah, we're happy to buy this for our particular, you know, school or enterprise or hotel or whatever.

Jason Snell [00:54:41]:
But I think as a consumer product, they need a lower price entry point, if that makes sense. And they just— I think they just are incapable of doing it right.

Glenn Fleischman [00:54:50]:
They need a $249 model, probably maybe $229, but probably $249. Because I mean, $190—

Jason Snell [00:54:56]:
do I hear $199?

Christina Warren [00:54:57]:
$199.

Glenn Fleischman [00:54:58]:
Yeah, $199 would be great.

Christina Warren [00:55:00]:
Because, because what's interesting, what would be interesting to compare here, Glenn, would be if we looked at like inflation across different categories. Because obviously this inflationary thing is interesting, but if you look at TV prices and how TV prices have come down even with inflation, the average price of a TV— now that's for a lot of reasons. They spy on you, do they do this and that? Fine. Sure, that, that doesn't— that doesn't— but that, that's irrelevant when people are looking at the fact that an Apple TV is $300 and a 55-inch TV is $300. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:55:26]:
You walk into Costco and get a, get a 4K TV for that price. We literally did that last— There's apps on it that are bad, but it's, it's got it there. And that's, yeah, great point.

Glenn Fleischman [00:55:35]:
But yeah,

Jason Snell [00:55:35]:
it is. Uh, also if you look at the premium boxes, look, I, I, I've, I have made this point several times, but apps, apps are table stakes now. Every TV's got apps on them. So we're no longer in an era like we were for a while where if you wanted to do streaming on a TV, you needed to buy a stick or a box or something. You don't have to do that. Every TV ships with something now. Now, all of us know it's not that great because those are really commodity parts and they're very slow and sluggish and all of those things. But it works, which means now the market is for the— it's a much smaller market of people who actually care that the, that the apps are slow and are going to do something about it.

Jason Snell [00:56:12]:
And there is room to play in there. I looked again at the price because they all went up. But the price of like a Roku or a Google or an Amazon premium streaming box, not the cheapo models, but the premium streaming box that actually competes with the Apple TV. And the fact is they're all $150 or $200. So it's not as far away. Exactly. In fact, Apple was kind of in the game for a while until their recent price increases. But now you look down there and you say, you know, Apple doesn't actually have to be $150.

Jason Snell [00:56:43]:
It doesn't really need to be $200, but it needs to be close to $200. And $299 is not close to $200. And so, yeah, it does feel like there's something cheaper at $220, $230, $225 that, that would make it make more sense. I think in the market that you're paying a premium for Apple, but it's not a massive premium over what you'd pay for Roku or Amazon or Google. And I'll say it again, I tested all of these last year and Google's streamer box is pretty good. I mean, it's pretty good. Yeah. It is as good, roughly as good as Apple TV.

Jason Snell [00:57:20]:
And if you are in Google's ecosystem and if you're a YouTube TV subscriber, it's probably better. It's certainly as good. I don't like Amazon's or Roku's at all. They feel really gross to me, but the Google one is actually a pretty good product. And so, I mean, if Apple wants to be not too— just a hair above that kind of product, I think they're in the ballpark because Apple's not playing the $20 game and there's not much of a $20 streamer stick game left because it's kind of irrelevant. But as a premium streamer, $299 cannot be your entry price. And that's where it is right now.

Christina Warren [00:57:56]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:57:57]:
Can't do it.

Glenn Fleischman [00:57:57]:
Is it— is it a fish or fowl thing too, where it's like, what is a $299 Apple TV? It's not a home It's not a HomeView. It's not an iPhone. It's not an iPad. It's its own creature that can listen to you and it can talk. It's always-on, always-available Siri. It's got Siri AI.

Jason Snell [00:58:13]:
Yeah, it'd be your home hub.

Glenn Fleischman [00:58:15]:
Right. But it's not— it doesn't replace— it's not a home— I mean, I guess that's the thing. If you compare HomeView and Apple TV, an Apple TV shouldn't be a HomeView, but HomeView, it's got HomeView-ish features, right? But it's not, right?

Christina Warren [00:58:30]:
If it had that, if it had that, and I even I made that argument last week. Like, if it had the same features, like if you, instead of having the screen, you know, it, you were using your TV display, but you were able to do the same types of things. Yeah. Then I think that you can justify the $300 price, right? Agreed. Then I think you can absolutely say, that's fine. You're bringing your own screen. The reason that they're priced the same is because they are different modalities. They do different types of things, but great, that's fine.

Christina Warren [00:58:54]:
But when you don't have that, right? When you, you claim, oh, well, we're the home hub, but you're not. And well, we can do all these other things, but you can't. Oh, but you can game, but no one cares. Then it's like the— it's kind of runs into the same problem that I think the iPad has run into with the price hikes too. We were talking about before, which is that the core reasons you use your iPad are in many cases fairly rudimentary and you have to kind of grapple with the fact like, why am I paying this much money to watch Netflix or to watch Google TV or whatever the case may be? And it's really hard. to make that argument, especially like when Jason says like you can get a premium Google TV streamer, which is a good device. I have one of those too. I travel with it sometimes because they actually work better in hotels than Apple TVs do with, with captive networks.

Christina Warren [00:59:41]:
But I, you know, even at those prices, which I also think are ludicrous, to be clear, I'm like, okay, the experience is really close and Netflix is— and the apps are spying on you anyway, right? Like— Yeah. That's the thing people don't want to acknowledge, but the apps themselves may still have— like, you might be able to turn off some of that stuff, but like, it's not as if, you know, they don't have information about what you're watching inside that app itself. So it's, it's, it's kind of a question you have to ask, which is like, what are we paying for? And if the answer is this is just what we like and I'm happy to buy this at this price and know that I don't have to think about buying another set-top box for, you know, 4 or 5 years, great. But otherwise, I think it's, it's a, it's a really hard sell.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:29]:
Yeah. But one thing, the biggest problem for me is it's, it's just that, um, I mean, Jason, you're absolutely right that like the years of the decent $30 streaming stick are not gone, but they're not, it's not where people are spending money on these things. But I still think the Apple TV is like the $12 jar of peanut butter in the supermarket. where it's like, let me, let me explain the story of how we source the peanuts and how we, we treat the peanuts with dignity and respect. Like, okay, I can accept that you— I can accept that you have to charge $1,212 for this jar of peanut butter, but nobody has— very few people have need for $12. It's like, at that point, you're not giving me— you're not giving me that much benefit over a $4 jar of Skippy. And that's not the problem that Apple has to solve.

Jason Snell [01:01:14]:
It's not the people It's not that people won't buy it because they will, because I live next to a Whole Foods.

Christina Warren [01:01:19]:
Of course,

Jason Snell [01:01:19]:
it's that most people won't buy it. And Apple— and I think for Apple, the challenge here is what I think— I think I may have said here last week is I bought one. You know, that's not the problem. The problem is if I have a friend who's complaining and swearing at their stupid TV apps because it's so slow and buggy, what I'd like to do is say, you know, for $200, you can get an Apple TV and it'll work with your ecosystem. And it's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:44]:
It's just— it's not—

Jason Snell [01:01:45]:
I'm not going to do that at $299. It's not.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:47]:
It's not twice as good as a $150 Google TV.

Jason Snell [01:01:49]:
Yeah, or a Google Streamer, which is—

Christina Warren [01:01:51]:
Which is great. Well, that's the problem because I used to be able to make that exact same argument, Jason. Like I would just go to Costco and I would say, okay, get whatever the last generation Apple TV 4K is. Um, and they might have it for, you know, $50 below whatever the current model was going for. Or, you know, you could buy it for $10 or $20 less and it would come with AppleCare bundled in and you go, okay, fine. You know, this is going to sit in your house. Um, it's going to do what you need it to do. This is gonna be easy.

Christina Warren [01:02:16]:
It'll fit with your ecosystem. Great. Yes, you're paying a premium over the, the Fire TV Stick or the Roku, but it's a better experience. And, and you, you can make that trade-off. It's very hard. Again, like we were saying, okay, instead of going to Costco and buying a streamer, you're buying a TV. And you know, you're, you're gonna like that because that, that's what the pricing is. It's just, it's really hard.

Jason Snell [01:02:37]:
Yeah. The, um, talk about the Home View. This interesting product that's not coming out for a month. We did get more information about it over the course of this last week. The app story is fascinating in that there isn't one, but there sort of is one. So Apple's put some of its apps on this thing, which means there is a way to write a HomeView app that is probably an adapted iPhone app, but we don't know. And there's no way for a third-party app to go on it as an app yet, although Part of me thinks that maybe they're just taking it slow. The last thing they need to do is drop another thing on, on developers.

Jason Snell [01:03:12]:
But I wouldn't bet against the idea that at some point Apple has a WWDC session or maybe just a developer.apple.com session that's like, so HomeView, how you could adapt your iPhone app so that it could also run on HomeView. And I don't think they're ever going to do a HomeView App Store. I think it would be more like with the Apple Watch where you just sort of sync some of your iPhone apps. They'd have a HomeView version that would sync over. But right now they have Safari and they've got a handful of Apple apps. The app— third-party app strategy for HomeView, it turns out, is CarPlay because they needed to get entertainment apps on this thing. Yeah. And it just so happens that this summer Apple announced video entitlements for CarPlay apps.

Jason Snell [01:03:58]:
And the way they sold it was, hey, sometimes your car is in park and you're charging your car and you want to watch a video. And you can do that with CarPlay now because you can't legally play video when the car is going. Right. But now, oh, now you can. Well, I mean, now we know it's actually for Home View plus audio, which gets them Spotify and it gets them Overcast and other podcast apps and it gets them Libby for audiobooks. Great, great. And this video entitlement, I think no streamers support it right now other than the Apple TV app. But I will, I had a conversation with somebody whose app does video and I literally said to him the day after the announcement, hey, did you know that you can be on the home view if you get, if you build AirPlay for, or CarPlay for video? And the next test flight I got for his app was like, hey, we just added CarPlay.

Jason Snell [01:04:48]:
And I'm like, yeah. I mean, again, if you could do it, why, why not? It's not a lot of extra work if you're already supporting CarPlay, but that's it. And we— I'm of two minds about it. I'm curious what you all think. Like, on one level, I think it's okay. And I've seen some takes like this to be critical of like, why doesn't it have an app store? On another level, I give you the iMessage App Store and— Yeah.

Glenn Fleischman [01:05:14]:
Holy cow. Like, it's a great example.

Jason Snell [01:05:16]:
Not everything needs an app store. And if we're going to look at a model for the home I kind of feel like Apple Watch is better, which is like, look, these are adjuncts or they're widgets you're sharing from your phone. Or maybe eventually there's something that sideloads over from your iPhone. But like, I'm, I'm kind of glad there's not another app store. It does mean this product's gonna be kind of scarce at launch, 'cause it really is sort of like all the recipe apps are like great cooking appliance that you can't run a recipe app on. You just need to go to the app store. load a web page. But, um, I don't know what you all think about, you know, should there have been more here, or is it maybe okay that there isn't a whole big app story here?

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:56]:
I'm— again, I kept— I keep coming back to the price. I mean, it's, it's a beautiful— as a home decor item, and I don't mean this in a dinging way, it's every penny of $299. It looks so much nicer than the $100 smart displays that, uh, that you, that you get for, for, for other platforms. But the thing is, like, it's still a screen that's going to show you information like the weather and that will let you control your home and that you can respond to your home assistant with. Apple has to make sure that they're basically making sure that at least— I won't give it to— I won't make this requirement at launch time, but I would expect them to follow the same arc that they did with the Apple Watch. Coming back to that, if 2 years from now it doesn't feel like it's a real thing, that it's a real value over that $100 smart screen, Apple will have missed a big opportunity. I'd be happy with them if they just simply said, you know what, this is a very, very simple thing. We don't even think that apps are a great idea for it at launch, but hey, our minds are open.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:53]:
If it turns out that that makes a lot of sense in 2 years' time, guess what? We'll send you an update and the one you bought today will work just great. I think a lot of people's disappointment is simply that it really does feel like it's just another one of those when Apple hasn't done their job, hasn't done their usual process of we're gonna watch and see and learn and then keep adding features that make sense to it as it goes along. For now, it is a $300 thing. And unless it, unless you really want that kind of beautiful design, it might be a hard sell.

Glenn Fleischman [01:07:19]:
I feel like the theme of this episode is Apple has stuff that we don't know, and maybe they don't know what it's for exactly. Yeah. It's like, you know, it reminds me when they originally introduced the Apple TV and Jobs was like, it's a hobby thing as opposed to like a serious product. And eventually it evolved into something that I don't know if it was exactly what they envisioned it as, which I think they thought it was gonna be much more like a games device ultimately than it turned out to be. And it's like, what is HomeView? HomeView is a spot in their matrix. It's a place where you don't have a good place to put an Apple device. And it's like, what's the difference between HomeView and an iPad with a magnet? Or a stand? And it's like, well, the cost. iPads, if you want to get the size, you'll probably spend more, certainly if you get a used one.

Glenn Fleischman [01:08:03]:
And also, the integration and voice activation, all the kinds of things that are coming with it. But it's like, What, what is the HomeView going to evolve into? And it may be that Apple is like, people said they sort of wanted something like this. So we're going to ship it and make a lot of money off it on margin. And eventually it will evolve into the thing like CarPlay has, like Apple TV has, like the iPad has.

Jason Snell [01:08:26]:
Like the Apple Watch. I was going to say, this is the part that reminds me the most about— not only does it look like a giant Apple Watch, I think that the best way to put apps on it would probably be like Apple Watch and sync to it. I know there's an Apple Watch app store. Again, there shouldn't be, but there is. But it is the beauty of the Apple Watch is when it started, Apple was so unfocused with what it was for, right? I always refer to that keynote as the what doesn't it do? It was like a Ginsu knife. It does everything. And it's like you need to focus your product. And yeah, and now it's a decade later, it's a lot more focused.

Glenn Fleischman [01:08:58]:
Fitness and health. It's got a story you can tell it every update. So what is Home View in the future is, is, you know, I think about, you know, this is the Apple— comes back to— I have said this for years. I know other people have as well, is Apple doesn't seem to understand that there are multiple people in a family or a household. They say they do. Right. They increasingly add features for it. But like Apple TV users, like that's not, you know, it's kind of like if it was— you sort of— I mean, I have a Withings scale and when I step on it, it knows who I am because my weight is approximately whatever.

Glenn Fleischman [01:09:32]:
And it's different than everybody else in the family. So everybody who steps on it just knows who we are. I kind of want like a HomeView that actually understood what different people wanted in the family. So as they approached it, Apple Watch, iPhone proximity, different apps, different display, whatever.

Jason Snell [01:09:47]:
Yeah. That needs to be the goal. I agree.

Glenn Fleischman [01:09:50]:
That would be a great thing compared to a thing that is sort of like an Apple Watch. And yet it is not as good as an Apple Watch. It's just bigger.

Jason Snell [01:09:56]:
I don't know if I said this here. I said somewhere last week, something that was wrong where I said I thought it was very clever that one of the things they're doing is actually scaling the information density based on how close you are to the display. So the idea is if you're far away, it's not a lot of information, but it's big. And as you get closer, it all actually gets smaller and more information fills in. And I thought that was a very interesting new feature. And somebody pointed out, and this will probably be our only Vision Pro reference today, but visionOS actually does that. The widgets If you pay— if you post a widget on a wall, it gets more information. That's— or it can— or an app, more information dense when you get closer to it and less when you get away.

Jason Snell [01:10:33]:
And that is obviously technology that they are also building into, into Home View in the real world, which is actually kind of exciting and kind of brilliant. And it goes to that point of like the ideal is it knows where I am in space and what I need to see and who I am and what's coming from my phone. There's a lot of potential there, but I this does feel a little bit like a product that currently is is more like well there are like ten possible problems it solves, and you saw them in that video the the you know video with a family that everybody freaked out about, and it's like it's an infomercial of course it's unrealistic they're actors. But what I thought was impressive about that silly video was that they did manage to script in every single feature that it has. Like I'm gonna listen to music stop. With your music. It's like, well, now we've got— check, we did the music part. But like, there's so many features.

Jason Snell [01:11:23]:
And in the end, I think they're going to realize, and the only way to do is to ship it, that, oh, these are the 3 things people use this for. And that, that I think that's good. I think, I think that if they don't know, that's not good. But like, your customers will tell you what they want for the product. And if you listen to them, you will make a better product, right? If they know that Oh, it turns out these three things are what everybody uses the Home View for. And there's other stuff that, like remember digital touch when the Apple Watch came out? It's like you can send your heartbeat to a friend and do a little tap, and it's and feet taps on their wrist. Isn't it fun? And then they were like, oh, nobody does that. It's stupid.

Jason Snell [01:12:00]:
And they moved on. And I feel like Home View, the same thing needs to happen. It will just need to evolve as they learn where this thing fits. And I do think that the use case where it's sitting. On a table in your kitchen is different from the use case where it's mounted on your wall. I think that those are actually 2 different interesting uses. So, I mean, we'll see. We'll see where it goes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:20]:
But I can say that I hope it's an opportunity for Apple to show its sense of whimsy in this display as a very, very personal home device where you're going to be walking past it and glancing at it on your way in through the kitchen and the way out through the kitchen on the way past the door. Every family member I like the fact that, hey, look, there's a little bit of, a little bit of a Snoopy animation to show you what the weather's going to be. I think that we've all been noting with a certain amount of sadness that, hey, remember how there used to be that really, really fun icon that had like a little Easter egg of the, here's the crazy ones? Yeah, unfortunately the whimsy detector at Apple found it and quashed it because we cannot have whimsy.

Jason Snell [01:13:01]:
More Snoopy is what you're saying. More Snoopy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:03]:
More Snoopy. Find ways to make it more fun.

Jason Snell [01:13:07]:
I agree. I agree. I do think in a home product, that actually is a pretty good idea of like giving it personality and having it be fun and having it know who you are on top of that. These are, these are all, these are all good things. Let's take another break. And there's much more. I mean, there's so much. Let's also say it's stacked right now for Apple stuff.

Jason Snell [01:13:25]:
Like they don't stop. They're not— who will stop Apple? And the answer is nobody. Maybe Santa Claus will stop Apple, but not until then. They keep rolling. Well, well, well, look who's here. Not all of us. I mean, Apple and Meta holding a press event, inviting people to come to Cupertino into a room with 2 Mac Minis with 512 gigs of RAM Thunderbolted together to show Muse Spark Open, the Open Weights model from Meta running on Apple Silicon. And despite these companies being at each other's throats for a decade, you know, some things will bring people together.

Jason Snell [01:14:13]:
Who— what doesn't bring people together like local AI? And that's what we got last week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:19]:
Like corporate self-interest. It's— it reaches the reach of your reach across the— across the aisle is that much better when you realize that, oh wait, they can actually help us with our agenda of not getting killed by this shift in the industry. Hi. The pictures on the— we said pervert glasses. We didn't mean your pervert— your glasses. We meant others.

Glenn Fleischman [01:14:40]:
The pictures on the CNBC article about this, it looks like Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have just been convicted of crimes. I don't know why they chose those photos, but it's like—

Christina Warren [01:14:48]:
I know, this is fantastic.

Glenn Fleischman [01:14:50]:
Those are too much.

Jason Snell [01:14:51]:
You got to get the mood.

Glenn Fleischman [01:14:53]:
It's just like, what happened?

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:54]:
They're going to— they're going to be quitting to spend some more time with their families.

Jason Snell [01:14:59]:
I do wonder, you know, we can ascribe too much to John Ternus taking over, but like, it certainly is easier to change the temp— the tenor of conversation when there's somebody new in charge, whether it would have made any difference or not. But the truth is, yeah, Apple Silicon is a place where Apple has had some success because local AI is a place where Apple actually is doing some good, interesting things in AI. And so and then, you know, Meta's got an open weights model. So, you know, it is expedient, as Andy said, like it serves both companies to have an event like this. It's still quite fascinating, though, to see these 2 there. But I mean, I'll say At WWDC, I went at the Steve Jobs Theater lobby. I got to see an array of Mac Studios attached together via Thunderbolt, and they were running open-source, open-weight models. They were running like Quen, a version of Quen.

Jason Snell [01:15:56]:
And like, that was nice and all, but this is a, this is a newer model and it's an American model, which may or may not matter to some people, but it does, I think, matter to some people. And if you listen to AI in-the-know AI people, this is not— this is less than a year behind the frontier and it can run on a Mac, on a couple of Mac Studios attached together. Like, it's not a— it's not an uninteresting, you know, promotion from these 2 companies. It's just a little surprising, right? Christina, help me out here.

Christina Warren [01:16:30]:
Yeah, no, it's definitely surprising. But, but it's also not like— it's weird. Like, I think the timing of it kind of surprised me a little bit. But then I thought about it and I went, okay, who's the common enemy for both of them? And I guess in some ways it would be Nvidia to a certain extent. And then obviously a much bigger case, it's the Chinese models. And so this is a way where both companies can kind of say, rah-rah USA, look, we can run, you know, open USA-made open weight models trained on our own, you know, theft on USA silicon.

Jason Snell [01:17:03]:
On our flags and eagles. Yes,

Christina Warren [01:17:05]:
exactly. Exactly. So we, you know, we can run our own models on our own silicon. And I think that that kind of helps them give it a story. But I think that, yeah, they both kind of have a common enemy to a certain extent, which is like NVIDIA, and are able to— like, the enemy of my friend is my— the friend of my enemy is my whatever the line is.

Jason Snell [01:17:24]:
Enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Christina Warren [01:17:27]:
Thank you. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And that's kind of what I see this a little bit, a little bit side-eyed. And then I also see it a little bit, frankly, is just kind of like, okay, well, yeah, if you are Meta or if you're OpenAI or if you're Anthropic or if you're any of these companies and you're looking at what is the device that we can get, which is not going to be the most powerful for the bang for the buck. I do want to point that out. Even with like the, the crazy pricing, like you can do better or you can at least, if not better, you can, you can get similar performance. I think actually better performance if you were to pay the same amount of money getting like NVIDIA GPUs and whatnot. But then you're going to have to have a tremendously massive computer and heatsinks and power supplies and other arrays and not things that you can just plug into your house or your business that looks really nice, right? Like that's the thing that Apple has.

Christina Warren [01:18:15]:
It's not that it's like the most powerful machine out there because it's not, but it's the most powerful when you're looking at, okay, something that comes in a form factor that I can just plug into the wall and it's not going to be, you know, sounding like a turbine is going off in the other room or, you know, sucking down, you know, 500 watts of power. So, um, who else can you use in that case? And I think that it probably behooves Apple to be like, yes, please use our platform for, for your agents, even if we're not making them ourselves, we can still show that we are the center of this. This is what you know, the high-end developers want to use. This is where the cutting edge wants to be. They want to use our hardware and our software and not the competition.

Glenn Fleischman [01:19:01]:
Christina, you just gave me this image when you described the sound of that server. I was like, oh, everyone— so the choice is between living with a data center that you buy and put in your own house. It's so loud, it makes noise, it uses too much power, it runs up your electricity bill. Or so it's like, do I want to live next to a data center? Do I want to live next to an Apple store? store as another example. It's like, I'd rather live next to an Apple store, so I'll get a Mac Mini that's maxed out instead of the, you know, the Nvidia chip-laden box because I don't want to live next to a data center either.

Jason Snell [01:19:30]:
I mean, there's a lot of back and forth. I mean, when I started working in tech journalism, everybody was talking about thin clients and like, and everything was in the cloud, right, Glenn? And like, you know, it goes back and forth. It is because there are things that you can do early that you can do in the cloud essentially. But it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. And I've seen arguments about Apple's and Meta's little link up here that say it's all irrelevant because everything will always be in the cloud forever. And it's like, I mean, maybe this time it'll be that way, but I've seen enough of the pendulum swings to doubt that that's the case. And there are advantages to being local. The one that I keep bringing up is I talked to somebody who works at a law firm who said, we really— we want to embrace AI, but we will not let any of our data leave our premises.

Jason Snell [01:20:18]:
We don't care if they guarantee that it's private. It's never leaving our premises. And you can plug a couple of Mac Studios into a wall and have it look at all your data and it doesn't ever get exfiltrated. And then there's a second argument here as well, which Ben Thompson made on Stratechery this week, which is the idea that once tokens don't cost anything.

Glenn Fleischman [01:20:42]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:20:44]:
How you approach AI problem solving changes. And Ben's example was You could literally— because we all— we look, I don't know about all you. I know Glenn has, has vibe coded several websites. I've, I've vibe coded 3 apps that I use. Okay. It's up to 3 now. And what Ben Thompson pointed out is these, these are all this concept of a one-shot, which is you set up a project and you build the app and then you iterate on it and you fix the bugs and you fix all the UI disasters because—

Glenn Fleischman [01:21:13]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:21:14]:
Little sidebar, AI is so terrible at user interface anyway because it's a computer. It doesn't know. Uh, maybe it'll get better at that, but it's really bad now. So I'm like, okay, this is a Mac app. You need a settings window, all of that stuff.

Glenn Fleischman [01:21:24]:
Now that it can iterate and look at stuff much better than it was.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:27]:
I've been using Argon for the past couple weeks. I'm like, oh my God, stuff that it was crap at is actually decent. It's getting better. I mean, I can think of—

Glenn Fleischman [01:21:34]:
I got your general— yeah.

Jason Snell [01:21:35]:
I don't think it's got good taste, but yes, I, I, and it will get better. But Ben's, Ben's point is these are all one-shots where there's a through line from the start to the finish. And Ben's point is if you, if tokens are free, you could literally set it at building the same app or the same feature multiple different ways and then compare them. Because remember, AI, everything is going to be a little different every time and find the right solution, whether it's based on aesthetics, whether it's based on speed or efficiency or something else. And I thought that was an interesting argument that I hadn't really heard before, which is like just the ramifications of having tokens be free. Because again, the The computers are plugged into your wall. You're not charging yourself for that.

Christina Warren [01:22:14]:
And you've already paid for it, right? Like, you've already— and you can amortize it depending on your business's needs and write it off however you want to write it off. But like, you've already paid for it. So yes, maybe you're paying— your outlay costs might be more than what you would spend on cloud, but in your mind you're going, okay, well, that expense is done. So now tokens are free and we can go hog wild.

Glenn Fleischman [01:22:34]:
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Oh no, I didn't mean to. I'm sorry. I'm so excited about it. Yeah. This is where I think about Private Compute Cloud as a dial instead of a pipe, right? So right now, Private Compute Cloud is Apple controls it all. You don't know exactly what's going where. You can't say, don't send this to Private Compute Cloud.

Glenn Fleischman [01:22:52]:
They've built as secure a model as they can. They've gone into it in great depth and technical depth. I think it's a reasonable approach for what they're trying to do. But imagine if Private Compute Cloud were a switch or a dial. And if it's a switch, Apple gets to a point where they're like, all the local models can do 83% of what you need. So we can actually tell you when we can't, you can have a switch and you can choose, like it used to say, hey, I can't do this. Do you want me to use ChatGPT? Right. And I think Private Compute Cloud provides that, you know, basis.

Glenn Fleischman [01:23:20]:
And then it also, I don't know if Apple will ever want to get into this, but then you get like the way we have private cloud technology now where like a law firm or another company will use that with certain partners. that have been vetted and meet certain standards, they will have a private cloud that nobody else has access to. Right. And so do we have private compute cloud that is company-specific that Apple segregates out in a different way for big enough companies, or can you buy it? So I think there's like local to cloud is, is a, is right now it's kind of, it's a binary option because of how it's set up in Apple. It's a fluid thing we can't control, but I'm just imagining a dial or a switch that could be very powerful given how powerful Apple's processing capability is even today.

Jason Snell [01:24:02]:
Yep. It's— look, again, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is going to turn out this way, but this is the way that Apple has an advantage. So Apple is going to press their advantage there and we'll see how it works for them. But, you know, I think that that's one of the reasons you see this. And the hybrid, something you mentioned, Glenn, that I'll just throw out there is that is sort of what Siri AI is trying to do is this idea that you've got these agents that are running locally that are intelligent enough to do some. And you see this with a lot of AI. This is not revolutionary, but the difference is that Apple's got access to all of the data in your Spotlight database on your phone. And so you've got an agent that's good at making search queries and throwing back a bunch of search results.

Jason Snell [01:24:41]:
And then what ends up happening is the results often will get bundled up and sent to Apple's private cloud compute, which again, Apple it's encrypted and all of those things, like nobody can see it but you, but it's not— they don't have to have all your data in the cloud. Right. But if a smart agent can find the subset of data that's worth looking at and can pass that to an agent that is more beefy that's in the cloud and say, here's the dataset that I found and here's the query, give me an answer. You've got— it's, it's a mixture, but you've got something interesting. And that's what Apple's trying to do with Siri AI. So Because that is their advantage is that, again, it's on, it's on device. It's stuff that you don't want to upload necessarily to for the world to potentially see. We're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back.

Jason Snell [01:25:25]:
And believe it or not, it is time for the picks of the week. And you're not going to believe Glenn's pick of the week. And I say that is not derogatory. That is positivity about Glenn's pick of the week. All right. Pick of the week time. Let's begin with our guest, Glenn. Blow our minds with your pick of the week.

Glenn Fleischman [01:25:44]:
This is the greatest thing I think of all time. It's the greatest piece of technology I believe I've ever purchased. It's made me happier than anything I've ever bought. This is the Vivor automatic tape dispenser adhesive electric tape cutter packaging machine tape cutting machine.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:59]:
Somebody watches Taskmaster.

Glenn Fleischman [01:26:01]:
Somebody watches Taskmaster. Thank you. I'd like to say thank my personal friend Armando. Iannucci for bringing in his wife's tape dispenser to a Taskmaster episode as a prize task. And I saw it, I was like— and Greg Davis, who loves stationery, as they call it in England, he lost his mind. And so did I. And I thought, this is incredible.

Jason Snell [01:26:22]:
The man loves a laminator. Of course he would love this.

Glenn Fleischman [01:26:25]:
He loves laminator, loves lamination. And what it is is a device you can programme to dispense adhesive tape. It has 6 presets you can set in millimetres. Or you can just push a button and it comes out. It comes out and it goes— I wish I had done a demo reel of it. It's just— it's the most incredible thing. Now, this isn't for everybody. I have shipped thousands of packages from my home in the last few years as a micro-publisher.

Glenn Fleischman [01:26:50]:
I've just learned recently that I should be calling myself a micro-publisher, not a publisher of my own books that nobody wants to read except they buy them. So, I'm a micro-publisher. And so, I do ship signed copies. It's cheaper for me to ship at home internationally than from the warehouse. And I have been like a mug. I've been using a tape gun. I've been using a tape gun. This thing costs $74.

Glenn Fleischman [01:27:12]:
I think it saves me 2 minutes every time I wrap a package and every time I push the button and it dispenses a perfect exact length. And I think it anti-statics it. I think it slightly striates the top. So when you pull it off, it doesn't stick to itself. And then you put it on the box. And I have all these premade boxes from a company that I like. And so I just put it on and it's exactly the right size. It is, uh, it's like Christmas every day, except you could also use it for Christmas.

Glenn Fleischman [01:27:36]:
That is my pick. Incredible product. If you need it—

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:38]:
Can I recommend that people who are listening to this over podcast, go to the— go to YouTube and see how happy Glenn is as he's describing this. It's a delight to see.

Glenn Fleischman [01:27:48]:
Oh my God. I, I also bought a Zebra thermal label printer, but that's not for everybody. That's, that's huge for printing lots of shipping labels. But this product, I think everyone could find a place in their heart for an electronic tape cutter, electronic label cutter. Tape cutter.

Jason Snell [01:28:00]:
That's amazing. I'm, I'm shopping. I'm pricing them right now, Glenn. I returned enough review units to Apple that I could really use this.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:08]:
I will ask you the question that I would have asked on Taskmaster had I been in the audience. Like, yes, it's safe, it's clearly saving you lots of time, but how much money do you lose because you just keep wanting to push the button and you cut tape you don't need just to see how much it works?

Glenn Fleischman [01:28:21]:
It is— I haven't hit that point yet because I've been able to— I've had to ship out hundreds of books the last few days, or a few last few weeks from new titles. So that may come next. That is, for people watching Taskmaster current season, there's an item that was brought in related to your foot that people might find a similar gratification from. You don't have to use tape for that.

Jason Snell [01:28:43]:
So Glenn, my question, all the pictures show it with 2 rolls of tape in it. Will it also just cut one wider roll of tape? Yes,

Glenn Fleischman [01:28:49]:
absolutely. It can cut up to 60 millimeter wide, and it has like an adjustment thing so you can push it in from either side. It cuts all kinds of tape. It cuts high-temperature tape.

Jason Snell [01:28:58]:
Incredible.

Glenn Fleischman [01:28:59]:
It's acetate Scotch tape. So I take my heavy-duty Scotch tape, stick it in there, and it just

Christina Warren [01:29:05]:
goes— Amazing.

Glenn Fleischman [01:29:06]:
It's amazing.

Jason Snell [01:29:07]:
I love it. Uh, we're, we're revealing a lot about all of ourselves here today. Um, moving on, Andy, what do you have?

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:15]:
Mine is something that is tech-related but simple. It is a bag that turns out to be perfect for a lot of the stuff that I'm doing these days. It's, uh, I love Tom— Tom Bihn makes amazingly great bags. This is my backpack that I bought like 10 years ago after, and I'd be, I use it to carry all my stuff for this podcast every week. Loads and loads of stuff. It still looks great. It's well-built. It's such a happy purchase.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:38]:
And they make all kinds of bags. But I finally picked up a bag I had my eye on. It's the Tom Bihn Small Cafe Bag. The thing is, I had been overlooking it because it is way too small for a laptop. And that is like, well, at minimum I need to carry my iPad, my 12.9-inch iPad Pro or my 13, 14-inch MacBook. But now it's like, you know what? There, again, there have been times where it's like, I'm going out to dinner with friends, I'm going into the city, I'm gonna be walking around the city. I don't really wanna be carrying a laptop bag, but I want to carry like something that I can watch movies with on the train into the city or stuff like that. It is the perfect size for like a regular-sized iPad or an iPad Mini.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:19]:
It's the perfect size for just a bottle of water and your book. And then you were at a farmer's market while you were waiting to change trains and you got a couple of scones. It is the perfect size for, I want to, I don't wanna look like someone who's hauling around a laptop bag everywhere he goes, but it is the perfect like little sack of holding, so to speak, just for a few essentials. And if you get, if you get like a, a Duo, if you get an iPad Mini or even if you have a regular iPad and it's Like, I will carry with me a folding keyboard and a mouse because I'm going to be having 90 minutes of work to do. It's the perfect thing to just hold all that stuff and you don't look like quite such a, you know, such a, such a schmo. Again, when you're at the, when you're at the dinner party with 6 of your friends and all of them are nicely dressed and you did the best you can, but you're also carrying like the same like battered over laptop case that makes people think, did you, what did you have like 3 consulting jobs before you came over here? Was this just? Anyway, looks nice. It's just as complicated it needs to be. $85, which is 4 times as much as you would spend on Amazon for a random no-named small bag like this.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:26]:
But it's built really, really well, and it's gonna last you 10 damn years.

Glenn Fleischman [01:31:30]:
I'll tell you, Tom Bihn, based in Seattle— they're down in south of the factory neighborhood— and I went down there and bought a bag 2 or 3 years ago. My last bag had totally fallen apart, not from there, not from them. Yeah. And they have a little You can go in there, you see everybody working away, sewing on machines, making the bags, and they have a little factory— it's not a factory outlet, it's a factory store showroom. And I just bought a bag off the shelf and got a good price. And US-made, if that means something to you, you got to see people producing an item of quality at a reasonable competitive price in the United States.

Jason Snell [01:32:02]:
Yeah, it's a good, good pick.

Andy Ihnatko [01:32:03]:
My go-to for any camp peg.

Jason Snell [01:32:05]:
Yeah, I have a shipment update. This is going to be very exciting. I'd like to announce a new shipping date. This date is October 24th. That's Saturday. Not for my iPhone Duo, it's for my tape cutter that I just bought.

Glenn Fleischman [01:32:20]:
All right, join the tape cutter.

Jason Snell [01:32:23]:
So thanks, Glenn. Um, yeah, your comments— Map Break weekly picks just cost me money. That's just how it is.

Glenn Fleischman [01:32:31]:
100 of those vivos.

Jason Snell [01:32:32]:
Yeah. Oh man, Christina, what's your pick of the week? So let's sell some more picks.

Christina Warren [01:32:36]:
Yeah, okay, sell some movie tickets. Movie tickets. So yes, incredible. I will not spoil anything, uh, don't worry, Andy. But the, uh, um, I— You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes-Nathan Fielder documentary, uh, came out. We talked about it when the trailer launched. The film is out now. I saw it last week.

Christina Warren [01:32:56]:
It is absolutely fantastic. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And, uh, if you're a fan just of the movies in general, no matter— I think I've talked to people who who knew a lot about the case going in, people who didn't know anything about the case. Everyone's reaction has been, even if your interpretation of things is different, everyone's reaction has just been, wow. To me, this is absolutely the film of the year. I think this is going to be probably— it very well might be the very first documentary film to be ever nominated for Best Picture. Mm-hmm. Ironically, it might not get nominated for Best Documentary because that wing of the Academy is weird.

Christina Warren [01:33:33]:
But I— it's an incredible film, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Andy Ihnatko [01:33:38]:
Oh, I can't. I'm telling you, I just— amazing, because just last night, I was like picking out which theater I'm going to be seeing it at. And I, I was not that excited about— sorry, there is a very big movie in IMAX that is the rage all this summer. And I did not make it out to the theaters to see that. But it was like, no, no, there's no way. I am not— I also, I want, I want to experience it the way that everybody else experiences it. I don't want the conversation. I don't want to wait a month from now when it's like, oh, exactly, but then the time when Barack Obama came in, it's like—

Glenn Fleischman [01:34:14]:
I can't find anybody who wants to see it with me because they're afraid of how hard it is to watch. Because— but I'm like, no, I gotta go. I— when the trailer dropped, I didn't recognize Elizabeth Holmes originally, and I thought, oh, they're doing some weird AI thing. Like, is this some kind of new— like, what? Like, I was so freaked out about it. It was so uncanny. And then it was— then people like, no, that's Elizabeth Holmes. It's like, oh my God, what did they— so yeah, so I'm, I'm glad that it lives up to the hype.

Christina Warren [01:34:41]:
Yeah, I honestly, I did not expect it. I mean, I was— I had high expectations and I was hoping it would be good, and then I saw it and I walked out and I went, okay, the last time I saw a movie that was this good in the theater was Parasite. And, and so that just kind of tells you the level of the quality that it's at, where when you just kind of walk out of the movie theater and I mean, people were applauding in our theater in Seattle and that doesn't happen very often.

Glenn Fleischman [01:35:05]:
Wasn't the second highest grossing film?

Christina Warren [01:35:08]:
Documentary. Second highest grossing documentary after Fahrenheit 9/11. And that one had way wider release. It was only in 800— it was only on 800 screens.

Glenn Fleischman [01:35:17]:
Yeah, made a lot of money, like sold out. Yeah. How— I mean, I love it. This is one of those things where people say like people aren't reading anymore, people won't read long form, they won't watch, they won't pay attention. And it's like, no, you can make a documentary about it. You

Christina Warren [01:35:29]:
can make a 3-hour documentary and they could have made it twice as long.

Glenn Fleischman [01:35:32]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:35:33]:
Incredible. Honestly.

Jason Snell [01:35:34]:
Yeah. Amazing. Well, that brings us to the end of the show. I want to thank our special guest, Glenn Fleischman. Where can people find you and all the many things that you do?

Glenn Fleischman [01:35:43]:
Oh, people can find me. You can go to glenn.fun. It's the easiest place to go. There's 2 N's and I'm going to hold up 2 books. Let's see if they show up. These are my latest books, Shipping: Long Time No Sea and Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It. I'm producing 4 books this year. 3 are— 2 are now printed.

Glenn Fleischman [01:35:58]:
One is at the printers. The 4th is coming soon. I have lost my mind. Please buy books from me because I have many of them now. Many have been sold, but now they're in the warehouse.

Jason Snell [01:36:06]:
And you, you are the editor and publisher of that one Matt Bores comic, which is—

Glenn Fleischman [01:36:11]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [01:36:12]:
Curious. You critique publishing and you participate in it.

Glenn Fleischman [01:36:16]:
It's a very funny book. We're doing one— we're analyzing one panel that became a meme. And my joke is like, next I'm going to do like one head in one strip, and then it's going to be like the eyeball or one pixel.

Jason Snell [01:36:29]:
Yeah, but you've got— I mean, and it's amazing because it's a bunch of cartoonists and other people who have been involved. It's about cartooning. It's about meme culture. You've got the artist, it's Ward Sutton, right? Who did the Sickos meme.

Glenn Fleischman [01:36:44]:
Yeah, he's great.

Jason Snell [01:36:45]:
And you've got Elliot Kalan, who wrote the, I don't wanna cure cancer, I wanna turn people into dinosaurs, which became a meme. You've

Glenn Fleischman [01:36:51]:
got K.C. Green, the This Is Fine dog guy, Dan Perkins, or Tom Tomorrow. Got some great thinkers, some great nonfiction writers. What's funny is Dan Perkins is a cartoonist, of course, wrote an essay that's amazing. He was running a little late, and then he had a— on it. And he had a root canal and he said, all right, I got it for you. And he sent me like 2 hours later, it just all came to my head. And it's an incredible piece of writing.

Glenn Fleischman [01:37:18]:
Root canal thinking, we call that. So that One Matt Bores comic, which you can find at thatonematborescomic.com, of course. And there's a little preview of the book there you can flip through.

Jason Snell [01:37:28]:
And you can, you too can participate in society curiously. Andy Ihnatko, thank you so much for being here. Ihnatko.com. You're still posting links and there's a membership and it's so, I'm so happy to not have to forward promote and tease enaco.com. It exists. It's always a pleasure to spend time with you.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:48]:
But please continue to promote it if you will, because again, I'm, I'm, I'm short of that. I'm short of the 10,000 members that my goal was for the end of 2020. That might've been a little bit ambitious. You know what? I can admit that now. We had my eyes were bigger than my—

Jason Snell [01:38:02]:
I'm also short of that goal for 6 colors. So I— and it's not co-spelled. I have no actual technical knockout. That's how you spell that. We'll try that one this time.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:13]:
Okay.

Jason Snell [01:38:14]:
And Christina Warren, uh, at GitHub. I didn't even mention that. Film Girl on all the socials.

Christina Warren [01:38:20]:
Film Girl on all the socials.

Jason Snell [01:38:21]:
Anything else we should promote about you?

Christina Warren [01:38:23]:
Well, okay, so next week, um, I will not be on the show because, uh, GitHub Universe is happening. It is happening the same time as Apple Day. So, you know, I know that this audience will more than likely be tuning in to look at the new Macs. But as you look at them and you're probably going to be thinking about, you know, maybe doing computer programming things, whatever, check out the GitHub. Think of GitHub. Yes, please.

Jason Snell [01:38:46]:
And thanks again to everybody out there who tuned in, listened via podcast. What other phrases can we use? I hear people say stay tuned and I'm like, that is not a thing that has been relevant for 55 years, the idea of tuning in that way. But anyway, we still say it. So thank you all for consuming MacBreak Weekly in whatever form you do. We will be back next week. Leo will still be on assignment. I will be holding down the fort. We have to find a replacement for Glenn and a replacement for Christina.

Jason Snell [01:39:13]:
I don't know what we're going to do. We're working on it. We're working on it. John Ashley and I are working on it. We will be back next week. right on the eve of Apple's big Mac event in LA. But until then, I'm sorry, you have to go back to work because break time is over. Bye, everybody.