MacBreak Weekly 1049 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]:
It's MacBreak Weekly time. Jason Snell sitting in for Leo. Got Christina, got Andy, got special guest Steven Robles joining us to talk about MacBook Pro with Touch and OLED, Apple's results— who has all the money? It's Apple— and so much more. 27.3 beta's dropped with surprise new features, and Christina's gonna give us her iPhone Duo review. That's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

Jason Snell [00:00:37]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1049, recorded November 3rd, 2026. Touch it if you like. It's MacBreak Weekly, your regular dive into Apple news. And again, All we needed to do was wait for Leo Laporte to leave, and then all the Apple news happened, and I get to be the beneficiary of it. I'm Jason Snell, usually a panelist, today once again guest hosting for Leo, joined by a wonderful panel to discuss another week full, chock-full of Apple stuff. I'm frankly— I want them to stop. Stop, Apple. Stop announcing things.

Jason Snell [00:01:18]:
Please. Anyway, that is really antithetical to the news business. Uh, I, I, uh, I apologize. Let me introduce Christina Warren, one of our usual and excellent panelists. Christina, hello.

Christina Warren [00:01:30]:
Hello, hello.

Jason Snell [00:01:31]:
You have your iPhone Duo?

Christina Warren [00:01:33]:
I, I do have my iPhone Duo. Hello, iPhone Duo's here. Yeah. Um, which is actually— we will talk. Yeah, I got it on Friday. Um, Verizon delivered it a week— a day early, rather. So It, it all worked out.

Jason Snell [00:01:46]:
That's good. It's good. We will, we will definitely leave space in this enormous show for some hands-on with the iPhone Duo. Um, Andy Ihnatko, of course, joins us as he usually does from the public library, a wonderful institution containing a wonderful podcast panelist. Hi, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:05]:
Thank you. Yes. And we, we can be grateful for lots of news because if you ever turned into the local news and you realize that, wow, things are so dead, They're at like 5 minutes into the newscast saying, now let's meet Nutty, the squirrel who's a SwiftUI developer. Then cut to the B-roll, it's like, okay, nothing's happening. They sent somebody out with a truck to interview a squirrel.

Jason Snell [00:02:25]:
Did you get to meet Nutty? Nutty didn't answer my emails.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:28]:
Well, you gotta, I'll send you a DM. You gotta know, you can't go through the press office. You have to like go through the management office.

Jason Snell [00:02:35]:
I was gonna say, you know, after that, that gate he was involved with. Um, he's got a lot to say about it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:42]:
And Apple PR doesn't like that. He's had his last app in app review for 3 weeks without a word of explanation. So he'd be a great guest, frankly. If Steven— excuse me, if one of our guests did not show up today, I could have booked him for you.

Jason Snell [00:02:55]:
Well, actually, I try to have Steven on when I guest host, I guess. Steven Robles is here. Uh, the bearded gentleman, although most gentlemen are bearded these days. Uh, but this is a very special one, content creator. beard.fm, got a YouTube channel. It's really nice. Got a podcast, so much going on. Hi, Steven.

Stephen Robles [00:03:15]:
Hey, Jason. I'm equally exhausted as you are just trying to cover all the things. I'm over here. I'm tethered trying to update to the 27.3 beta. And I got my iPad mini over here juggling, just juggling constantly.

Jason Snell [00:03:25]:
So much to talk about. In fact, really, we could start in so many different places, but I think we need to start with what was announced last Wednesday. which is the new high-end MacBook Pro. Depending on how specific you want to get, you could call it the MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR display. That's what Apple is calling it because Apple brands everything it does. And it didn't get rid of the old models. They're still there. So these go on top of those old models, at least for now.

Jason Snell [00:04:00]:
Maybe next year, maybe the year after, they'll vanish. It's very much what happened with the Retina MacBook Pro, where they did a Retina version of the MacBook Pro and sold it at more expensive prices, but they kept the old MacBook Pro around. Well, no new chip as Mark Gurman foretold. It's M5 Max, M5 Pro. Those are your options. The M6 Pro and Max seem to accurately reported by Mark Gurman be not happening. And then maybe next year we'll get an M7 generation, including Pro and Max. The big, I think this is the most interesting thing about this product is What is important for the product as a differentiator is that it's got a beautiful— I've seen it, I was in LA— a beautiful tandem OLED display.

Jason Snell [00:04:44]:
It gets real bright, it gets real dark, it's gorgeous. They did an amazing job with it. That is why you pay the extra $400 on top of the already large sum you're paying to get a MacBook Pro, is for that Pro LED display, because it is gorgeous. That is why you should buy this product if you're in the market. You're somebody who cares about that kind of display quality. But for those of us who care about the Mac and what it all means about the Mac as a platform, it's also Apple's first touchscreen Mac. And while I would say there is no reason for you to run out and buy this product just because you want a touchscreen, and I do think that ultimately touch will come to Apple's laptops way before Tandem OLED comes to the rest of Apple's laptops. The fact is, for today, it's also the standard bearer for how Apple is viewing touch on macOS.

Jason Snell [00:05:36]:
So, so much to talk about. I did— I have seen it, so I can talk about that a little bit as we go through it because I did get to spend a little bit of time with it down in la-la land. But like, how do all— how does this hit you? The whole— Stephen, Stephen, were you in LA? Did I see you in LA? Were you there? You did not.

Stephen Robles [00:05:57]:
I was not in LA. Um, I want to know, did you go to that DJ, uh, rave that happened at night?

Jason Snell [00:06:01]:
No, there was a DJ set with a DJ I'd never heard of. I was sort of right on the precipice of the DJ starting his set, and I left because I was really hungry and exhausted and wanted to go back to the hotel and watch the World Series. So I did not do that. All right, so I'm the only one. I can, I can pitch in, but All of you as longtime Mac observers too, like, what do you make of this? Like the touch, like the touch is really fascinating, right? But it's funny that it's actually kind of not the most important thing in the product. I don't know, it's weird.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:30]:
Yeah, I think I kind of approve of how they did this. I think that there were only 2 ways they could have gone. They could have completely reinvented the Mac for touch and that would have been a very, very good way to go. Or they could have just simply said, you know what, it's long, it doesn't cost us that much. We don't have to work all that hard to implement touch. And gosh, those touchscreen laptops, to be awfully darn popular over the past 6 or 7 years. Sure, we'll, we'll, we'll put— we'll put out one of those, uh, and maybe we'll develop it further. But for now, yeah, you can touch the screen, you can scroll the screen if you want.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:59]:
We'll do a couple of quick enhancements, but we won't go too into it. I thought that either of those 2 polls was exactly the right way to go, and I'm not disappointed that, uh, they went the simple route, because even the simple route is like— it will prevent you from doing that thing where like you go from your tablet, your phone, onto your laptop, and then you touch the screen of your laptop. Damn it, why do I keep doing that?

Jason Snell [00:07:19]:
Just an okay button. I just reach out, I'm like, okay, oh, right.

Stephen Robles [00:07:24]:
I will say there was an interview, Wired got an interview with Ternus, Surugi, and Greg Joswiak. And in that, Greg Joswiak talked about how they're looking at the next generation of creators, a younger generation. I have 3 kids, my oldest is 17 now. He got a MacBook Pro this summer, but he has been using an iPad his entire life. And he will still prefer to use Logic Pro on his iPad because he's accustomed to it, the UI interacting with touch. And so I do think part of it is just getting the MacBook line ready for the next generation of creators and younger people. But I also have another theory. I talked to David Sparks with this in Mac Power Users on Sunday, but I think that for those of us maybe in like the keyboard maestro, use things called HyperKeys, we do all those kind of like macros with our Mac.

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:09]:
Key bindings, key bindings, key bindings.

Stephen Robles [00:08:11]:
Yeah, I do wonder if it is a kind of the Venn diagram is a little spread out between the audience who does all of those kinds of things versus the audience who might actually get around faster if they can just tap what they see on the screen as opposed to HyperKeys and launchers and doing all that kind of custom work. So maybe both things.

Christina Warren [00:08:29]:
Maybe. I mean, I don't know. I still, I think there are, there's probably a small group of people who would be faster touching something than doing key bindings. I think the bigger thing would be that there are most people who just won't set up key bindings, right? Like I think that's just the reality. more people should because you can be so much more productive. Um, I, I, I tend to kind of believe them that maybe this comes down to as simple as like this, this was expected. This is now what is expected. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:08:53]:
Of a high-end laptop in 2026, 2027 is for it to have touch capabilities. Now, how far we go with that, how much we commit to that, how important that is to the average user, that's going to vary. There might even be some things, and I'm not positive about this, but it, it's possible that when they are getting the displays from the display manufacturers that they already have The, the, the touch sensors, you know, already kind of melded there. I don't know if that's the case or not. It doesn't sound like it.

Jason Snell [00:09:17]:
It sounds like it was an Apple-built thing and they just decided to do it with this one as they were building it. But, but, you know, I, that's what they say, but they could obfuscate a little bit about, about it. But I, I, you know, it does feel to me like there was some dogma here, right? Like Steve Jobs made a pronouncement a long time ago about touch.

Christina Warren [00:09:37]:
And it wasn't just Steve, it was a lot of Apple execs over a lot of years.

Jason Snell [00:09:41]:
Steve made a pronouncement. Let me, let me finish this thought because it's— Steve made a pronouncement and then nobody can go back on what Steve said. So everybody just reinforces, they all double down on the official dogma, which is that nobody wants this, even long after it became obvious, even on their own product with the iPad and the Magic Keyboard, that it's fine. Like, it's just not a big deal to have a touchscreen that you use as a laptop. And then people started to expect it. from all of their other devices. Um, but, and, and so like, it's not earth-shattering, but it, it is them finally going back and breaking through that thing that was— it never made a lick of sense that they're like, no, never, we'll never ever do it. It was just not a— not like this, right? It's not a big deal.

Jason Snell [00:10:25]:
It didn't require any rethinking. They just had to get over themselves, and I guess they finally did.

Christina Warren [00:10:31]:
Yeah, I mean, I guess they did. I just— I'm trying to like look for like if there's like a business reason that the kind of force them into that either. And I don't know if there is. I mean, and it might even be as simple as we can now charge $400 more for a product that is effectively the same. And granted, it's like it's the OLED charging for that. Well, it's the OLED, but the OLED is not a $400 differential. I mean, like, like the bill of materials, that is not a $400 price difference. Like, this is, I think this is 2 things.

Christina Warren [00:10:54]:
I think, and I don't think that most people who are buying this are going to be that spurred by the difference between the OLED and the very good display that's already in the MacBook. I think that it's, it's the touch is the thing that the buyer is going to be like, ooh, this is better, this is newer. Apple can charge a premium and, and, um, maintain higher margins when their other component costs go up potentially, right? Like, that's just me being cynical, but I, I mean, I'm not mad at it. Um, I, I don't necessarily think that if you were in the market for a Mac right now that, that this makes a lot of sense unless you just really need the blackest of blacks and, and whatnot, just because. you can get the exact same machine for $400 less. Um, if this was like an M6, if this was like a different processor thing, if there were other features that were better, then maybe I could like understand it more. But like for me, just trying to think about like who I would, I would recommend this to, I, I would certainly, I would be like, if you're gonna take that $400, I would put that in a bigger SSD or upgrading your RAM. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:11:54]:
I would not be looking at, oh, this, this, this new touchscreen or, or even this, this higher quality display, which I'm sure is lovely, is going to be such a life-changing difference that that's to be worth it for 2 machines that are essentially otherwise, you know, spec for spec identical. Yes, the new one is lighter and, and whatever, but like, it would be different for me if you were comparing this to a newer processor and it had this. But, but if it's the same, I, I just, I personally would recommend to most people being like, put that $400 into something else.

Andy Ihnatko [00:12:27]:
Yeah, I'm 100%. More RAM is always going to be like, whatever you, however much more money you have an opportunity to put more RAM in any computer, you should do that. Um, but I, I've read that same Steve Levy Wired article about Jon Ternus talking about, and the team talking about the new MacBook. And another thing that kind of pleased me, like we'll never know how, what kind of storytelling Tim Cook would've done had he been launching this product. And we're not gonna speculate about that. I was very pleased that Jon Ternus did not go into the, the thing is the technology wasn't mature enough and we didn't think that it was a right choice but finally we got the right— we got this right for everybody. You can almost, you can almost hear the shrug as he's, as he's answering this question and say, well, you know, I mean, you know, kids are growing up with multi-touch and, you know, it seems to make a lot, a bit more sense. And which, which definitely reflects how it was implemented.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:25]:
Again, we are not gonna revolutionize the Mac and turn it into a 360-degree foldable convertible tablet or anything like that. We just decided that, you know, people, a lot of people like touch on screens. We don't feel like there's a, there's a problem with breaking with our old tradition. And so yeah, we decided why not, let's do that. And that was exactly the— there was— that was exactly the take that I was hoping for. Compare and contrast to— it was the 10-year anniversary of that awful— was the 2016 MacBook Pro?

Jason Snell [00:13:52]:
Yeah, last year.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:53]:
Where every, every terrible decision had some sort of justification that made Apple sound, oh well, the reason why in our Pro MacBook we decided to take out the SD card slot is that we think that photographers are using Professional photographers are using Wi-Fi to connect. It's like, you don't, you don't believe that. I know you don't believe that.

Christina Warren [00:14:15]:
Well, what was interesting there too, um, um, Andy, is, you know, I remember being at like that launch event and, and it was, it was funny 'cause I had to fly across the countries. There was the Surface had a launch event and then, um, Apple had a launch event like literally the next day. And it was just, it was such a pain. So I remember this distinctly, but that, that was an interesting one because the Touch Bar, that was one of the first times that I ever started touching a Mac screen. I'd never done that before. And because of where it was positioned, You started to see, oh, okay, now I kind of want to interact with the screen. And it was interesting. I wasn't the only one.

Christina Warren [00:14:46]:
I remember watching in like the demo area, everyone was doing that. And I, that was the first time it clicked for me where I went, oh man, they, they picked the wrong thing. You know, there's an argument to be made that they should have done. I think that if they were going to introduce touch, they should have introduced it the way they did it now years ago. I'm glad they finally did. I don't think it's, we've been hurt by not having it. But it's interesting to look back because they, they did these little things, try to kind of get close there. You know, they had this stupid Touch Bar that no one wanted, no one used, that actually got you much more closer to interacting with your screen than, than anything else.

Christina Warren [00:15:22]:
It's, it's kind of funny to think about.

Jason Snell [00:15:23]:
So here's my hot take of the week, which is hearkening back to that bad time 10 years ago, which is what Apple did then is they took the product that all their pro customers relied on and then they decided to do weird stuff with it. It's like, look, we're going to be cutting edge. It's weird, but yeah. And the response was, no, you don't understand. We don't need it to be thinner. We need to have better battery life and better cooling so it runs faster.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:45]:
We type on these things.

Jason Snell [00:15:47]:
A thin keyboard that was in the MacBook. We don't need— we do need SD card slots and we do need ports and we still have USB-A devices. Now we have to buy a bunch of dongles. That was— it was bad because they were taking a product people counted on and making it Making it cutting edge and weird. So here's today's Apple. What didn't they do with this new MacBook Pro? They didn't reimagine what a MacBook Pro could be into something weird like a convertible or whatever. And like, I'm not saying I wouldn't love to see Apple try that, but this product is not that. This product is your standard.

Jason Snell [00:16:26]:
If you never ever use the touchscreen on it. It's just a MacBook Pro with an OLED display. It's just, it's what you, it's still got the SD card slot. It's still got all the things and it's, and it's 3 pounds, which is really nice. That is a huge win for people who are carrying this around in, in their bag all day long, but they didn't get weird with it. Mark Gurman had some reports where he was talking about like, oh, there's going to be like this flyout ring that's going to be, and they were like, no, It's just a Mac with touch. It's probably what they should have done 5 or 10 years ago, which is just like, play it cool. It's not that big a deal.

Jason Snell [00:17:03]:
And the longer they left it, the more pressure built up. But now that pressure is going to release and it's going to be like, oh, it's fine. It's just normal. So if they did, I, you know, I saw some disappointment out there that they didn't do the weird stuff. It's like, this is how Apple works. If they have a product where the weird stuff is necessary, That's when they'll roll out the weird stuff. And this thing doesn't flip around. It isn't a convertible.

Jason Snell [00:17:26]:
You do have to reach out over the keyboard in order to touch it. And as a result, all those things that Apple always said about like poo-pooing touch, they're not wrong. You wouldn't want to do an entire Photoshop session where touch was your primary thing, but it turns out that's kind of not what touchscreen laptops are for. And that's okay. And if you wanted to do a convertible that folded around and gave you kind of a 3-pound tablet with Apple Pencil support, and touch and ran iPad apps, but also ran macOS. Well, that would be a really interesting, weird product that you should probably call something like MacBook Studio and not sweep the rug out from under all your pros who rely on a traditional pro laptop. And they didn't. They could have done that move like they did 2 years ago and they didn't do it.

Christina Warren [00:18:09]:
I'm really glad they didn't. I'm glad, I mean, and making it lighter I actually think is a huge move. I mean, like I'm, and this is me saying, I think that, you know, People can spend their money however they wanna spend their money. If it's in your budget, go for it. But, you know, right now, if I were choosing between the 2 laptops, I'd probably get the, the heavier one. But that said, as somebody who has carried around a 16-inch MacBook and a 14-inch MacBook for years, both of them together, losing that half a pound, like that's not insignificant at all. And, and I think that, but, but, but the fact that they, you know, the battery life seems to be the same, they kept all the ports, they didn't move ever, they didn't change anything else, I think is huge. Yeah.

Christina Warren [00:18:45]:
And then maybe, Maybe in the future we can look at a world where we could get into convertibles or weirder devices or even hybrid devices. And that would be really fun. But I, I am glad that they seem to have learned the lesson from that disaster 10 years ago, which was to, you know, to your point, like, don't mess up people's tools. And I think it's especially true when the, you know, especially in the Apple Silicon era, like the, the M1 series and beyond has been so enormously successful for them that it would be a shame to, to undo that work. And so if you can just basically streamline it, Um, having the, the Apple logo on the back, I think is a really nice touch. Like that's a— Oh,

Jason Snell [00:19:22]:
so good.

Christina Warren [00:19:22]:
That, that's A, it's great to come back. B, it's also like the perfect way to signify that I've got the new one. You know what I mean? Like it's, it's, it's the perfect thing.

Jason Snell [00:19:30]:
It's unnecessary, right? Like that is extra engineering that Apple did and extra cost and extra complexity in order to have a cool light up logo on the back of their laptops again, which yes, it's great for branding. I think it was a real own goal for their branding that they got rid of it. Used to be able to walk into a room and all the Apple logos are lit up. But like they went the extra mile to do that.

Christina Warren [00:19:51]:
I love that.

Jason Snell [00:19:51]:
I asked them how they did it, by the way, and they said it was magic. And I'm like, okay, iFixit will disprove that next week. But all right, it's magic. But like it is work they had to do. There is no natural emitting light source back there. They had to put something back there to do that. And that's, I just think that's such a great sign because that's Apple saying, you know what? The delight of using our products has value where there was a period in there, especially in the late 2010s where it was clear that the people in charge did not think delight had any value.

Stephen Robles [00:20:22]:
I'm curious, I'm curious too, Jason, you've been in this a long time. You said the Retina MacBooks, when those came out, the regular MacBooks were around for a while. You could buy the more expensive and get the Retina, but then eventually they all went Retina. And it seems like now with the new Pro LED, Dynamic Island is where the MacBook Pro line is going. That's where the, you know, rather than a notch, we'll get Dynamic Island. Do you think 5 years from now every MacBook Pro will have a touchscreen? Because right now there's a weird bifurcation. Like if you go on Apple's website, you either choose the Pro LED version or the regular MacBook Pro, and you have the M6 or the M5. And like there's a lot of SKUs right now.

Jason Snell [00:20:56]:
Yeah, it's very confusing.

Stephen Robles [00:20:57]:
Do you think it's gonna, yeah, like M7 or some other future line, do you think it's all gonna be touchscreen on the MacBook Pros or is there gonna be like a configuration option?

Jason Snell [00:21:05]:
Gurman suggests it could be as soon as next year that they don't have the 2 high-end sets. of MacBook Pro and MacBook Pro with Pro LED that it may just be the Pro LED models. That's what I would expect. You know, some, it sort of depends on the price points they can hit. I would guess given that they're only $400 apart, that that's what they'll do and that the line will be much simpler next year. But to answer your question, I think 5 years might even be, um, too long a horizon. I wonder if even within 3 years every Mac laptop has a touchscreen, but not an OLED and certainly not a tandem OLED. Maybe they, I mean, Gurman says that they're working on an OLED for the MacBook Air.

Jason Snell [00:21:43]:
But it won't be a fancy tandem OLED. It will be a cheaper OLED, just like how the iPad mini has an OLED, but it's not the one that's in the iPad Pro. It is a different kind of OLED. But touch, I think they're just going to put it everywhere and then it'll just be like, oh yeah, Mac touchscreens are just a thing.

Stephen Robles [00:21:59]:
And what was it like touching the menu bar? What was that like, Jason? Because those are some small touch targets.

Jason Snell [00:22:04]:
Reaching out and touch is extremely weird to touch your Mac and actually expect things to happen. It's very weird. All that happens is like it opens. And if you touch on a menu bar item, the menu is a little bit, has a little bit more spacing so that each individual item is spaced out a little bit more, but that's it. Um, and it's all navigable. It's all fine. And then dragging something in the Finder or trying to do a control click in the Finder, you know, you do a tap, tap and hold and release, or you do a tap and drag. The one that got me.

Jason Snell [00:22:38]:
Um, is I think, I think you double tap to select text in Safari, which is kind of weird. Like a double tap to select text is not how you do it on an iPhone. Most of the gestures, like I was standing there at the demo station doing 4-finger swipes back and forth between apps. And like, it just does all the stuff that you'd kind of expect it to do. But yes, as somebody who's been trained now, do not touch your Mac screen because it won't do anything except leave a big ugly fingerprint. And now it's sort of like,

Stephen Robles [00:23:03]:
eh,

Jason Snell [00:23:03]:
touch it if you like. Whatever, we don't care. It's, uh, that's, that's, that's really different. But I, I think that's— I don't think they're going to gatekeep touch over time. I do think that it will come everywhere. But the OLED stuff, it's obviously very expensive and engineered, uh, to be really good. And, and to Christina's point, who should buy it? It's like the people for whom having a, a, an OLED at that level of quality matters for their work.

Andy Ihnatko [00:23:31]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [00:23:31]:
Which is a It is a tiny market, but I do think that ultimately next year that'll just be what the high-end MacBook Pro is.

Christina Warren [00:23:37]:
Yeah, no, I, I, that, that's what I expect. I expect that next year that's gonna be the high end. What'll be interesting to see, and, and I would not be surprised if they kept this around, is it like that entry-level MacBook Pro, you know, 14 that is, is, you know, lesser than on every level. If they kept that maybe without touch or if they introduced touch the same way to that, the same way that they do the the, the Air and, and eventually, um, the Neo. But yeah, I mean, I, my, my bet would be like that they're, they're keeping the one. I think probably the only reason they're not getting rid of the ones they've already made is like they're already in channel. They probably already have a lot of people, uh, you know, especially like companies who buy them in bulk, you know, like, like my company buys many, many, many Macs a year, you know, and, and, and so you, you go through like, like places like, like, like Zones and, and other, um, CDW and places like that that have these things kind of stockpiled that they're like, okay, we'll just keep this on the channel until the next version. That would be my expectation.

Christina Warren [00:24:31]:
I have no idea, but it would be odd for them to keep them in the same time. If I recall correctly, with the Retina MacBook Pro, it came out with the 15-inch first, and then it came to the 13-inch 6 months later, I want to say. And I think that they— and they obviously never brought— they didn't bring Retina to the MacBook Air until they stopped pretending that they hated the MacBook Air. And that was in 20— 2015. 18. Um, yeah, uh, but, but yeah, but, you know, um, and, and I guess like the— there was the, you know, the, the, the 12-inch MacBook. But, um, but they, uh, I'm trying to remember when they cut out the, the non-Retina products. I think it was fairly soon, if I remember correctly.

Jason Snell [00:25:10]:
2 years, but I'm just making that up. And I, I— it's because it feels like if Mark Gurman is right and this is done next year, it feels like that might actually have been a little bit more. But I think the I think the price spread was greater than this is too, but I haven't done it.

Christina Warren [00:25:24]:
It was.

Jason Snell [00:25:25]:
I haven't done it recently, but that's, that's why they lingered more than you'd expect is because they like literally they said we cannot charge this price up here for our get-in-the-door MacBook Pro. We can't do it. People won't buy it. And so they had to keep the cheaper one around. But, you know, they don't want to do that if they can, if they think they can get it to a price that's in reason. And we live in an era of unreasonable prices across the board. So maybe that changes their decision too. It's like, look, it's already very expensive, so now it's $400 more expensive or $300 more expensive or whatever it is, or, yeah, or more depending on how Ramageddon goes.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:03]:
It does feel like we're heading into a sort of a bifurcation of even— we used to have, okay, there are 2 different types of Mac— of MacBooks. There's the MacBook Pro for people who want ports and want extra displays and want the most power and the most RAM and the most storage, most everything. And then we've got the MacBook Air for people who have lighter duties duties, so such that they don't mind only having a couple ports, they don't mind only having one external display, they don't mind, uh, not having a fan and having to deal with thermal throttling. Now it seems like there is sort of like a tripartite system going on, because with this bifurcation of— there are the ones that have the really, really hot AI-style processors and the touch display and the really good OLED display, and then there's like the Entry-level MacBook Pro, that's like the version of the car on the lot where vinyl seats, fat— no, no air conditioning, the factory audio system. And I wonder, it almost feels as like— again, I will— I'm defending it because this— that is exactly my— what I need in a MacBook Pro. I don't need 512 gigabytes of RAM, nor could I afford it.

Jason Snell [00:27:09]:
That's why they sell that one, right? Is there companies that aren't going to buy a consumer laptop? They're not going to buy a MacBook Air. There's no way. They want a MacBook Pro, but they look at those pricey MacBook Pros and they're like, oof, we're not buying that. And so they created this thing. They actually did this 10 years ago. It was the one that had the Escape key on it. Yeah. That didn't have the Touch Bar.

Jason Snell [00:27:24]:
And it's evolved over the years, but they've, they, they're like, no, we're gonna make a different MacBook Pro. And then during the product cycle, like eventually it starts to pick up features. So like today's M6 MacBook Pro is actually very similar to the high-end MacBook Pros and not the, not the new ones, but the old high-end models, but it took it a few years to get the nice screen and all of that. But yeah, that product is super important. I imagine it sells incredibly well because people want to buy MacBook Pros, but then they look at the price list and they're like, oh, not those. How about this one? Right. And I hear from people— Christina, I don't know about your organization, but I hear from people in other organizations who are like, yeah, I'm getting a new MacBook Pro. And I'm like, oh, that's exciting.

Jason Snell [00:28:03]:
They're like, well, yeah, but you know which one it is. It's the, it's the one that our corporate buyer gave me, which is the cheapest one.

Andy Ihnatko [00:28:10]:
It's the MacBook Thick Air.

Christina Warren [00:28:11]:
Well, what's funny is that we have, we, we have, we have different, um, configurations depending on your job type. And so an engineer, like, like I have like an M4 Max with 64 gigs of RAM, and which very nice. I'm very, very happy with that. Um, the standard issue for like regular people, I believe, is a, is a MacBook Air with 24 gigs of RAM, which to be honest is fine. Um, it's honestly like a fine thing, but, but I, but I think the configuration differs. Just to put a pin on this, just to get an idea of how long they might sell this non, like this, this, you know, like lesser MacBook Pro, the 15-inch MacBook, um, when the Retina came out, that replaced the 15-inch across the board. So they stopped selling the non-Retina as soon as that was available. The 13-inch, they had a mid-2012 version that was 6 months before, 3 months before, whatever, before the first Retina MacBook that was actually sold or was not discontinued until, so it was introduced in June 2012.

Christina Warren [00:29:04]:
It was not discontinued until October 2016. I imagine that that particular one was primarily sold through education. I don't think that was in stores, but that, that was one that was available. I think for all intents and purposes, after the first year or so, you were getting a Retina MacBook if you were getting one, but they did have the MacBook Air that was still on the market and they had that lesser Retina Mac 12, uh, uh, 13-inch MacBook Pro. for 4 years. So that's just some data. I don't think they'll— I don't think they got a lot this

Jason Snell [00:29:35]:
time,

Christina Warren [00:29:36]:
but no, not at all. Not, not, I mean, they, they, they wouldn't make it that long, but I just, just, just, um, if anybody was curious, I did look that up.

Jason Snell [00:29:42]:
Yeah, it is. I mean, part of the story here is how they manage. Like, I like that Andy is talking about like a bifurcated product line, the laptop line right now. And this is because Apple has a strategy, but they cannot pull every trigger at once because that's just not how their product rollouts work. So today you have the super high-end Pro LED MacBook Pro 14 and 16, right? And then you've got the same chips, M5 Pro and Max, but no Pro LED, no touch, that are below that. Then you've got the M6, brand new, but it's the low-end model. Then you have the MacBook Air, which also comes in 2 sizes. And then you have the MacBook Neo.

Jason Snell [00:30:21]:
There are lots of laptops, which On one level, you know what, what, 3 quarters of Apple's Mac sales are laptops. Like there should be options, but there are a whole lot of options right now.

Christina Warren [00:30:33]:
So many.

Jason Snell [00:30:34]:
It is. Uh, but, but anyway, these, these systems are interesting. I think touch is going to end up being not a thing. I do, to, to say again, I would love for them to see, to do something weird with, uh, with Mac mobility, but I don't think the MacBook Pro that people rely on to do their jobs is the right place to do something weird. We did that. It was bad.

Christina Warren [00:30:53]:
It was bad.

Andy Ihnatko [00:30:54]:
And Ternus did say— we're going to be talking about the earnings call later on— but I think he said during the Q&A that very, very definitively that nope, the iPad's going to be the iPad, the MacBook's going to be the MacBook. We are not interested in converging the 2 platforms in any way, shape, or form, except for again making the iPad look— windowing look like the Macs and make a lot of the clumsiness on the back. But still, it's not as though there's going to be a, hey, we're going to do something like what Windows did, saying, hey, we're going to have a— our tablet operating system is going to be our desktop operating system.

Jason Snell [00:31:21]:
And then he said, and if we were doing something like that, I wouldn't tell you.

Stephen Robles [00:31:25]:
Exactly.

Jason Snell [00:31:25]:
I love— he just was like, yeah, I'm not— you know I wouldn't tell you. Because it's like, the kid has learned. The kid has learned. Um, all right, we will take a break and we have so much more. We are going to talk about Apple's earnings call, the money, money, money, money, money. Apple's fiscal results for their fiscal 4th quarter wrapping up fiscal 2026 came out on Monday. It— I feel like I just have to say it. Here we are again.

Jason Snell [00:31:51]:
It's another record quarter. It's a 4th quarter record for them. They forecast that next quarter, which will be the holiday quarter, which is traditionally their largest quarter, will be their largest quarter ever. So just number goes up. Enormous gross margin, although down a little bit, which we can, we can get into. Great iPhone numbers. It turns out this whole iPhone 17 cycle has been just a huge hit for Apple. They have sold so many iPhone 17s and 17 Pros.

Jason Snell [00:32:24]:
We're just getting a hint, and they didn't really talk about it, of what the 18 and the Duo will be because that didn't really start. It's— this is sort of the end of September is when this all closes out. But Great iPhone quarter, end of a great iPhone year. Great Mac quarter, end of a great Mac year. Interesting tidbit there. John Ternus actually said they sold more Macs in this fiscal year than they've ever sold in a fiscal year before. And I looked at the numbers. It's not the most Mac revenue ever.

Jason Snell [00:32:55]:
So— So it's the Neo.

Christina Warren [00:32:57]:
It's the Neo.

Jason Snell [00:32:59]:
Get good numbers. It doesn't make a lot of money, but it's good numbers.

Stephen Robles [00:33:03]:
I mean, Ramageddon too, right? I mean, less margins, could that have affected this past year?

Jason Snell [00:33:07]:
Sure, although revenue doesn't get affected by margins, right? Revenue is revenue. It's just that the machine costs more. And in fact, they raise prices, so their revenue goes up when they raise prices. And so that's factored into it too. Um, but so anyway, good, good Mac and iPhone, uh, iPad and wearables, home, and accessories down. Services continues to go up, although it was a little softer. It was a little less up than it usually is, although they blame that on foreign exchange because there's always somebody to blame if a number doesn't look as shiny as, as you want. But in other words, like, I think you have to look at the details of what they're reporting because, um, oh, and iPhone, 50% of the total revenue, which is like, as the iPhone goes, so goes Apple.

Jason Snell [00:33:55]:
And And really services is part of the iPhone if we're not kidding ourselves. So of course, yeah, it's a it's a another another good quarter. But you know, Ramageddon is threatening here. The margins are down; they're going to be down more. Wall Street doesn't like to hear about Apple's very nice fat profit margins going down, but they they were unflinching in that in a in a presentation that's often full of excuses or. obfuscations, all legal of course, because the eyes of the government are on them. They said, no, it's going to be rough. They spent $30 billion in new procurement contracts in the last quarter, and it's going to be expensive, and there's no end in sight, they said.

Jason Snell [00:34:40]:
So there's that. That is happening.

Andy Ihnatko [00:34:43]:
The stink of that was all through from the opening statements down to the last Q&A. Because whether you're talking about simple things like, hey, why didn't you have enough stock on hand? Well, not only was it not getting parts, but also not having enough manufacturing capacity to do everything we wanted. How come some expenditures went way, way up? A lot of the questions about net cash neutral, which is now dead, dead, dead. Well, now we are basically in a position where we need to have cash on hand to buy when we have an opportunity to buy. We also are making a lot more long-term investments to protect ourselves against A, B, and C, really from start to finish. Even talking about services, where that was one of the shining points of a pretty positive report, I think it was 76% margin on services versus about half of that for for iPhone hardware. And also hints from Ternus that he was— it's not— he's not— he wasn't hinting at software as a service. Like basically every time you wanna like mouse up, there's gonna be an extra surcharge if you wanna add that to a monthly Apple subscription.

Andy Ihnatko [00:36:02]:
But he was fainting towards like, we're gonna be doing a lot of stuff that is going to be Apple services, iCloud services, whereas they were once about— I can't quote him, but whereas they were once about, hey, selling more storage or more access to photos, Now it's going to be, well, here's a feature that you can't do on device. And so therefore we're gonna make that an add-on pay-to-play sort of feature as you go.

Jason Snell [00:36:23]:
I can detail that. He was talking about iCloud Plus, which they are turning from a storage product into a service with other features in it. And they started this with some of the like hide my email and all of those features, but really they're like, oh, this is interesting. Could we take this thing that's a subscription and bundle a bunch of more stuff? So 100 countries, That now gets you Apple TV and Apple Arcade along with the storage. They kind of stuck those in there. And the other thing it gets you is essentially AI tokens that above a certain point that you get for free as an Apple user, if you find yourself using the retouch tool in Photos a lot, or, you know, or any other kind of like cloud-based AI stuff that is baked into Apple stuff, At a certain point, if you really heavily use it, it will say, I'm sorry, you've done too much for today. Come back tomorrow. And if you have iCloud Plus, you will not hit that limit.

Jason Snell [00:37:21]:
And so they're definitely recasting it as being more like, do more with your Apple devices by giving us a monthly tithe. That's what they want from it. And then separately, the other thing they boasted about was AppleCare One Family and the idea of, of, of more, because AppleCare. is basically another, uh, revenue-generating service for them now. So they're innovating on ways to sell you AppleCare+ as well.

Christina Warren [00:37:46]:
And doing everything they can to push you to, to buy it for your whole family, pay $600 a year to protect all your devices. It's like, come on.

Jason Snell [00:37:53]:
Well,

Stephen Robles [00:37:54]:
I will, I will say I, I actually have 40 devices in my iCloud family. So as far as— I actually saved money when I switched to it, but that's the only one I'll defend.

Christina Warren [00:38:04]:
Well, Well, I mean, you save money if you were to buy it on every single device. I think that there's a question to be said for most people, which is, would I actually protect every single device and would I care and would I be paying like Apple's prices on that? And I think that, that, that, that becomes more complicated because it,

Stephen Robles [00:38:19]:
I

Christina Warren [00:38:19]:
don't know, I just look at them like $600 a year. Look, look, look at your homeowner's policy and look at what your deductible is before, before, you know, jumping into that. But if you have 40 devices, maybe, maybe.

Stephen Robles [00:38:30]:
The one part that got me is because I'm a huge Apple Home user is the Apple Intelligence Summaries for cameras, which I already pay for iCloud Plus. I pay for the, you know, subscription, the Premier Apple One Premier, and I pay for the 6 terabyte iCloud storage because I use it instead of Dropbox and Google Drive. That iCloud storage is just my thing. So I pay already for 8 terabytes of iCloud, but I still only get 2 cameras for Apple Intelligence Summary in Apple Home. And like, I have my entire list of cameras here and I have a good number of cameras. Yeah. And I can only toggle on 2 unless I jump up to these $60 a month, uh, the 12 terabyte plan, I believe it's on iCloud. And that's, uh, it's a bridge too far for me.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:08]:
Vinyl seats, no AC. You could do— you'll deal with that for the first couple months and say, okay, damn it, here, have my money.

Stephen Robles [00:39:15]:
And I do actually— I was joking about the Apple Intelligence summaries early on during the beta period because a lot of them were just kind of funny. Like you would have like ellipses in random places. Like someone is at the door, you know, and it's kind of like this ellipsis making us feel spooky. But having so many cameras, it has been beneficial at times. But yeah, it does feel like in the services and revenues play, like when it comes to that iCloud storage and gating some of these features, like how many cameras you can enable these summaries for, feels like it's part of that revenue play.

Jason Snell [00:39:43]:
Yeah. And I think also you're— they're doing the, um, the, the health club thing, right? Where they roll a bunch of things into one product. And you're going to pay for all of it, even if you only really need one of them or two of them. And if you can find that they provide value, that's great. But if all you want is camera summaries, you're going to still be buying more storage. And depending on what country you're in, you're going to get Apple TV and, and you're going to get Apple Arcade. And that's just how it is. But it's part of their business.

Jason Snell [00:40:12]:
And like, I understand it. It's very weird. The margins are enormous. And, um, and they keep talking about their install base growing larger and larger. So it's just, it's a big part of, of what they're doing. Um, other, other takeaways from it, like we, we talked about Ramageddon and components, like it's gonna, it's gonna bite them. It's gonna bite them for a while. I'm surprised that they didn't even say we have a plan.

Jason Snell [00:40:40]:
They're like, they're, they're riding it out. I think I feel like fundamentally you have to accept that this too shall pass, not just philosophically, but economically. Like supply and demand do not stay locked like this for long because either something will happen to demand, it will lessen. That would be the AI belly flop that some people think will happen, or the massive demand will increase supply. Which is the other way that this could go. But how long will that take? Because the supply takes years to—

Christina Warren [00:41:15]:
Well, it takes years. And I think what's scary about this, and this isn't unique to just Apple, is everybody who's relying on this is that when you listen to like Micron or SK Hynix's earnings call and like the other memory manufacturers' earnings call, like they are besides themselves with glee at their 600% margins and how much has increased. And they're giving that money back to shareholders as dividends. They're not investing that in new capacity at all. And, and that's a real problem. So, um, I— and, and to me, that feels illegal. And I feel like if we had working governments, um, and not just the United States but like across the globe, then maybe people would be looking into that. But we don't, so we're not.

Christina Warren [00:41:55]:
Um, and but, but like, because these companies have already been held accountable in courts before for price fixing and for not investing in things. Like, this is not new. Um, but, you know, I mean, it— I— if I'm Apple, I'm wondering, you know, you have this sort of capital expenditures, you've done this. Like, I wonder if they've thought about the fact, like, okay, what would it take? What sort of investment would we have to do? How long would it take for us to spin up our own memory, um, fabs?

Jason Snell [00:42:21]:
Yeah, or just pay a partner to do it, right?

Christina Warren [00:42:23]:
Or pay a partner. Well, absolutely. But, but you know what I mean? But like, just to have their own kind of supply. I mean, they've done it with, with their Apple Silicon and whatnot. just to, if anything, try to get ahead of this. I'm sure they've had those conversations. It might not work out for them, um, to do it. But that's, that's the problem, is that, um, even if the, the things even out, like, when do we get more capacity? When do we get more supply? Because these companies who make this are not investing.

Christina Warren [00:42:46]:
We are prevented from even looking at the Chinese options. Apple's prevented from even looking at the Chinese options in China. It seems like everybody's best chance is that China will make some sorts of breakthroughs without um, uh, you know, using, uh, parts that they're not allowed to use, and that will ease the supply on the Chinese device side and, and maybe, you know, make it better for the rest of the world. But I— who's to say?

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:09]:
Yeah, it was— I think it was super interesting that this is the, uh, again, first, first, uh, first call with, with Ternus as CEO, but also he brought in the chief operations officer, like, just to sit in with him. And I don't know whether that was just something that made sense to— that just always made sense to him, and hey, let's, let's start off with that with a new policy, or if it was, look, a lot of the stuff that we're going to have to inform investors of and a lot of the questions we're going to get are about things like where are you going to source your supplies from? And also, again, where are you going to source your manufacturing from? I don't have a note in front of me of who was saying this, but during the Q&A, they were fielding questions about that where Ternus parried off a question about, hey, so you're not shipping an iPhone 18 this year. Is that because you don't have manufacturing capacity to do that and the iPhone 18 Pro. He parried that off by basically rattling off like what they've already announced and stuff like that. But I think it was the CEO who, in a different portion of the Q&A, was saying, yeah, we've got a whole problem with like we can't make— we can't get access to assembling and manufacturing like we used to. And so, and so that's going to affect— that's going to be a headwind. And Jason, just, and just as you said at the very, very top, one of the things that we love about these calls, particularly the Q&As, because it's the only place where the C-suite of a corporation has to answer questions that they did not— where they were not specifically called out for in advance. They have to answer the stuff on the cuff they're prepared for, but also they have to be absolutely honest in their answers.

Jason Snell [00:44:38]:
Yeah, they're basically on the spot.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:39]:
They can decline to answer and parry it off, but if they mislead in any way, shape, or form, At best, you wind up with a half a billion dollar class action suit from investors,

Jason Snell [00:44:48]:
right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:48]:
At worst, you wind up getting a knock on the door with somebody from the SEC saying, yeah, we're going to look at everything you're doing from now on and you're in trouble.

Jason Snell [00:44:55]:
It also, if you, if you're wise, and I think Apple sometimes is wise about this, you use this as your opportunity to broadcast things to the financial community that you want them to know. And sometimes the tidbits that happen in the, in the call are, are very much like that, where it's sort of like, um, you know, we didn't put this in the press release, but you should know. They, they said, give me a little more color, and they give them a little more color. You talked about the chip supply. Um, one of the funny quirks is that some of the supply will be better now, they said, because now that they're up and running on the new 2-nanometer process at TSMC, which is where the A20 Pro and the M6 are coming from. Yeah. That means that they are not relying on the old process for the iPhone 17 Pro because they're now making the 18 Pro on a different process. And for the M5, because now a bunch of those products have been revved to be M6 on the new process.

Jason Snell [00:45:53]:
And that means the older process now has some bandwidth and they're going to be able to fulfill, fulfill more of the older product plus the newer product. It gives them a little more bandwidth than they had, which is just a very specific detail. I'm sure that happens all the time. It usually just doesn't matter like it matters right now because they're having such a hard time. So that gives them a little bit. I do. This is a provocative thought, and I know that everybody's got like everybody has opinions about AI and there are lots of different kinds and lots of different opinions. But I'll just say to Christina's point, doesn't it feel a little bit like the RAM manufacturers and Apple are not willing to bet that RAM consumption will— to data centers for AI will continue to go up? Because like, if you knew that investing $2 billion in a new RAM factory was a license to print money in 5 years, you'd do it, right?

Christina Warren [00:46:45]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:46:46]:
And nobody's doing it, which says to me, even if they've got the money and Apple's not doing it either, so far as we know, it says to me that none of them truly believe that that investment today will actually pay off in 5 years because RAM prices will go back down. Now, maybe that's a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-unfulfilling prophecy where if nobody does it, the prices just stay high forever. But I don't know. I find that really interesting that there's nobody out there saying, we think that this number just is going to keep on going up. And so we're going to build more factories. We're going to reinvest all of the takings that we've had. We're going to reinvest it and build more factories. And I don't think they're doing it.

Christina Warren [00:47:25]:
Well, I think it's 2 different things. I mean, I think one is whether Apple is making the hedge or whether the RAM manufacturers are. I think the RAM manufacturers it's in their best interest to hope that the prices and the demand stays high.

Jason Snell [00:47:36]:
Sure.

Christina Warren [00:47:36]:
And that the most they can artificially constrain supply, the better, which is what I think they're doing by giving money back to shareholders and actively not investing. Because again, they knew 18 months ago, they knew 2 years ago when orders were coming in what direction things were going in. They could have made investments then. They chose not to. Now they've tried to blame Apple and people like that and saying, oh, well, you didn't give us any breaks. when our prices were so low and this and this and this. And that's hogwash. This is how the, the game works.

Christina Warren [00:48:05]:
They could have, 12 months ago, they could have made investments. 6 months ago, they're still not. And, and, and that's the problem. Now, why companies like Apple and others are not investing, I don't know if it's too difficult. I don't know if, if like the, you know, the, the number of, of, of places, um, or even, you know, suppliers who would have the expertise to be able to build this out is too much. I'm not sure. Um, You know, I don't know if it's, if it's expecting that people will just pay whatever you have to pay and, and that will go on. But at a certain point where, and I think we're very quickly approaching that, at least in the consumer space, like we're at that breaking point where people are going to be priced out of buying things.

Christina Warren [00:48:44]:
And if, if the, the message that we're getting as a public is you're just going to rent your computer now, I don't think that's going to work.

Jason Snell [00:48:52]:
Sam Altman message.

Christina Warren [00:48:53]:
Um, Sam Altman, definitely. Yeah. He's like, no, everybody, you know, it's selfish for you to have RAM in your own computer. Okay. I've, I've 2 letters for you. I'm not going to say, I'm not going to say them because this is a family podcast. But, um, no, but, but I do wonder, like, 5 years, I'm not sure. But, you know, these memory manufacturers are saying they're sold out through 2030.

Christina Warren [00:49:13]:
So yeah, I, I, I don't know.

Stephen Robles [00:49:17]:
I'm curious, Jason, too, because one of the things that changed in this, the R&D spending, it was a 32% increase year over year. Going from $34 billion to $45 billion and thinking about like, where's the R&D money going if it's not for RAM development? They also signed a multi-year deal with Google for Gemini and Siri AI and Apple Intelligence. So I don't think they are building their own frontier models. So where is that increase of R&D? Like, what is that about? What are they spending it on? Does anybody— theories? If not AI and RAM, what are they— what are they doing in R&D? on that much?

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:54]:
I think they— I, I think they said, yeah, it went up from $32— it went up almost a third to $45 billion. I think that one of the stuff about it was, uh, a lot of money is going into personnel. Um, if they've— if it's increased— if it's great, I, I know I was reading— I was reading an, uh, like, not a tech analyst but like a Wall Street analyst who was basically saying that one of the things that keeps Apple so attractive is that They're not really putting a lot of money into investing into hardware, that they really are investing more in people. That's one of the reasons why they were able to do $86 billion in stock buybacks, which is $86 billion better than Google was able to do last week.

Jason Snell [00:50:35]:
Yeah, it's a real question. I think that they're trying to do a lot of not building frontier models, but they're trying to spend a lot of money having people work on AI integration and Agentic and using the Siri AI framework to really kind of because they're still behind there, but at least they have a foundation from which to grow. And I think they're spending a lot of money again. Yeah, on people in that particular part, and they're also doing some some M&A, right? They're still they're buying companies from time to time. But yeah, it's it's it's fascinating because this is one of those games that Apple used to play really well. And as Andy pointed out, turnabout is fair. It's business. Like when Apple played this game, they got cheap deals with long-term contracts, and they guaranteed themselves.

Jason Snell [00:51:16]:
A completely understandable rate for their supply, and it was really good for a while. And now the tables have turned. And there was that weird Wall Street Journal story about that guy who works for the RAM supplier who was like shooting his iPod and stuff like that. And it's like, as Andy said, it's business. Like, breaking news, businesses try to take advantage of favorable business conditions. And, and like, I'm not sure, it's like, they were so mean to us, now we're mean to them, is as strong an argument argument as they think it is, but that's fine. The shoe is on the other foot right now. And that's the question of like where this goes next.

Jason Snell [00:51:50]:
It's, it is. I just feel sometimes like everybody's playing a game of chicken. We're like, we don't know what's going to happen. So we're just going to wait it out and see what happens. And Apple's like sweating and being like, I don't want to wait

Christina Warren [00:52:01]:
it out. No, they are. I mean, I mean, speaking of that, like they, they had to raise the education price of the MacBook Neo, right? Like that's now $600. $650, which, so that, that is now, right? Right. That's what I'm saying. So, so, so it goes from $500 to $650 in 6 months. That's crazy. And I'm not saying for people not to buy a MacBook Neo, although again, the only people who qualify in the United States are college students.

Christina Warren [00:52:26]:
And this is not a college student laptop, but whatever. But, you know, it might still be better than everything else you can get right now because the prices are so insane, but it, it, it undercuts your whole kind of strategy of In your earnings report, you're talking about how many Macs you're selling. It's like, okay, well, that's great. But, you know, it's now your lowest cost Mac is, is significantly more expensive than it was 6 months ago. And, and I'm sure that's because you want to need to maintain your margins for Wall Street and this and that. But that also doesn't speak well to, okay, what, what's the, the next one going to cost? Right? Like, are we just going to be looking like a $700 and $800 laptop? Because that's not compelling.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:06]:
Yeah, but the, the, uh, I, I, I got a little bit of clarity some years ago when I started thinking of Apple stock as one of Apple's products, and that they care as much about that product as they do almost any other thing that they make. And the thing is, like, the fact that the— like, you compare, you compare Google's analyst call last week to Apple's, and you get into things like, okay, well, we can't get— we're going to be diluting the stock price by Google saying, not only are we not going to be doing any buybacks, we're also going to be actually diluting the value of your stock. We've gone from being driven towards Google Search, which is just simply like, we don't have to invest a whole lot of money in capital expenditures to keep expanding that product, and it makes money hand over fist, to, we are spending money hand over fist to build new AI, which is probably going to actually undermine the value of Google Search. Whereas everything that was in Apple's call was about, we are still very, very low in debt. We are still a very, very good buy. Again, we are, we are doing $86 billion in buybacks, which means that there's going to be fewer shares that are on the open market so that your shares are going to be more valuable. They— we're gonna— we're taking on a little bit more debt, but that's sort of temporary. All this sort of stuff that makes the— it's the OLED display, it's the touch— it's, it's the touchscreen, it's the chamfered angles.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:28]:
That's, that's what they're putting on the stock price. And that's part of, uh, how they're leading their company right now. It's, it's not— I, I, I could overstate this, but— No, I mean, you're right.

Christina Warren [00:54:38]:
Yeah, no, I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying, like, I, I, I just think, I think that when you, you look at, okay, like, how long can we continue to, like, have sell these things in these volumes and whatnot? Like, right, that's what I kind of try to— and that, that's the, the game they're all gonna have to figure out is that, okay, supply is— or demand is great right now. What's it going to be in the future when you potentially price people out so you can maintain your margins. Right.

Jason Snell [00:55:00]:
And to put a button on this, I will say one of the most fascinating moments in the call on Monday was an analyst quite rightly asking the question that you both have brought up, which is, what do you know about elasticity? Like, as you're raising prices, how does your demand reduce? Right? Because that's the theory, is they raise prices and a bunch of people are like, no, I'm not going to do it. And you've got to try to find that balance. And Apple's response was really interesting. They said, as this has all been going on, we've also been out of balance of supply and demand and essentially have been selling every one we can make. So we don't know what the elasticity is. We don't actually know yet. Now, at some point they're going to have to find out and they will find out. But I find that interesting too, that Apple's in a little bit of uncharted territory where I think that they, that they are making some guesses, but they don't have a lot of good evidence because again, you raise the price of the MacBook Neo, but if you still end up selling so many MacBook Neos that you don't know what to do, or iPhones or whatever, you don't really have a data point yet.

Jason Snell [00:56:05]:
And what happens when you reach the breaking point? Do you miss that you've already passed the breaking point? That's all. I mean, what will— it's going to be really interesting next year to see how this continues to play out because it is, it is uncertain uncertainty for a company in Apple that hates uncertainty. But that is where we are right now going into '27. All right.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:24]:
I'll let you button it up. I have to, I have to say one last thing that like the Bob Dylan song Like a Rolling Stone has never been more accurate for Apple. Like, again, you thought you, you thought you were the big deal and now you're on the streets just like everybody else. It's

Jason Snell [00:56:37]:
like, yeah, just, just counting your hundreds.

Andy Ihnatko [00:56:38]:
How does it feel, Apple? How does it feel?

Jason Snell [00:56:40]:
Counting your $70 billion in cash. Like everyone else out there on the streets. All right. We will be back with so much more to talk about. Okay. As this is like breaking news, as breaking as it gets on a podcast, which is the 27.3 betas dropped, uh, about an hour before we started this podcast. And Apple knows now that what happens in the news cycle is developer beta 1 of something comes out and there's new features in it. And it used to be like.

Jason Snell [00:57:10]:
First rule of developer beta is no one talks about what's in the developer beta, but that was a long time ago and it's the internet. And what happens now is if there's a new feature in a developer beta, it will be covered in minutes by the, by the press. They will be installing that developer beta. They'll be taking screenshots of it. And so what Apple's decided to do is get out ahead of it and treat these developer beta drops as news events. And just as if we didn't have enough going on. The 27.3 betas, which will ship as finals in December according to Apple, so this is by the end of the year, have a bunch of new features in them. First off, watchOS is getting Siri Recap and Live Rewind.

Jason Snell [00:57:54]:
So all those predictions that Apple maybe would never ship the feature, well, they've shipped it as a beta. We'll see what happens next, but it is coming out. And in fact, they detailed A lot more about how that's going to work. I got— because this is the thing is they told me about it last week because they're trying to get out ahead of this and said, when we post this, you can talk about it. So, you know,

Christina Warren [00:58:13]:
that's new.

Jason Snell [00:58:14]:
It is what— yeah, I mean, this is what they're trying to do. So the idea here is that these features, you know, the Live Rewind is last 15 seconds of text as a transcript. But the, the other one, Siri Recap, is, you know, you can set some locations and times, I believe, but it is It is not listening. It is transcribing and summarizing. And it actually does this thing where it like, it detects whether this is a conversation or whether it's like somebody at another table. And like, it actually tries to intelligently, like, it's not going to summarize what the people next to you were saying at lunchtime. Um, so it tries to make some judgments there. And then though, it streams the audio to the iPhone and then the iPhone, I believe, generates a transcript with a lot of personal information removed, and then passes that, I think, to private cloud compute, which then generates the notes of the event.

Jason Snell [00:59:11]:
And then the notes of the event are what show up in the new Recap tab in the Siri app on your iPhone. So that's how that's gonna work. And now, you know, we're gonna have all those conversations about, wait a second, is my watch listening to me and listening to everybody I talk to and everyone I interact with? Um, and then if you don't interact with that Siri recap for, I forget, Steven, is it like, is it a week or is it a day? Anyway, after some period of time.

Stephen Robles [00:59:39]:
I thought it was 30 days unless you kept it or no, maybe it's a week.

Jason Snell [00:59:42]:
There's a timeout where basically it just wipes it if you don't interact with it. If you're not editing, if you edit it or refer to it or whatever, then it sticks around, but otherwise it sort of like ages out. So I don't know. So that up first, these are those audio intelligence features that Everybody was talking about. And at least people with the developer beta are going to be able to try these out. And, and, uh, and so that's going to get interesting.

Stephen Robles [01:00:05]:
I, I installed the beta already on my iPhone Duo. It is installing on my watch as we speak. And, um, there's also a bunch of other features that, I mean, we'll probably get to, like you said, vertical tabs.

Jason Snell [01:00:15]:
Yeah, yeah, let's say, let's say, yeah, yeah, let's stay on this for now.

Stephen Robles [01:00:18]:
The Siri recap is so fascinating to me. Um, I've been able to get some clarity on it, you know, because If you leave it on just always recapping all the time, always be Siri recapping, then you're going to get a bunch of interesting recaps. Like if you're listening to a podcast in the car and it's playing through the speakers of your car and your Apple Watch is just recapping, you might get a recap of that podcast, which is wild. But Apple has also said it's going to redact important information. So some of the conversations I thought of was like, well, what if you're talking to your accountant? and you have a bunch, you know, long conversation, maybe you're talking about retirement and investing and whatever, but it's gonna redact certain accounting numbers. So you might get a Siri recap, but without the numbers.

Jason Snell [01:01:00]:
Right.

Stephen Robles [01:01:01]:
But also if it's a shorter conversation and there was just a lot of sensitive information, you might not get any recap at all. So it's gonna be very curious over the next few weeks. I mean, I'm gonna leave it recapping everything all the time just to see what gets generated. Like how many do you get a day? Like if I have a mock and/or real argument with my spouse? Is he— am I gonna get a recap of that the next day? I wanna know.

Jason Snell [01:01:21]:
The one, the one thing that I, I, in my briefing that, that we talked about was what happens if I'm driving around listening to a podcast in my car? And their answer was, you may get a summary of your podcast.

Stephen Robles [01:01:33]:
Yeah. You may get a summary. Yeah. It's, it's, it's wild. Now there's been times, like I went on a field trip, uh, last week and it was about the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. We were walking around this college campus and honestly, I would've loved to see a recap of that. You know, I would've loved to look back and see like, oh, what were the interesting facts? And things I want to research later. Obviously, if you work in a place where you have in-person meetings all the time, I think it could be really useful.

Stephen Robles [01:01:56]:
But I think depending on your workspace and workplace, there might be some bosses, some managers who are very paranoid about this kind of feature. I know I've worked in places where going forward, it might be at the start of a meeting, people say like, everyone make sure your Siri Recaps are off. Like you might get that. And you could do all the explanation in the world, which Apple has done. which is to say you don't get an audio transcript, it doesn't get attributed to speakers, there's no speaker naming or attribution, there's absolutely no way to get the audio file. You can make all those caveats, but I think there's just going to be some feelings about it, especially in some places and secure workplaces, too, whether it's medical services, you know, if you're a doctor or whatever. And so, I'm very curious how the public is going to respond

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:39]:
to this. It's not my responsibility as a member of the general public to educate myself on what risks I might assume I might suffer by the first of the fact that you have a device with an open microphone on you. And Apple can make all those arguments, and I'm sure they've— I'm sure they wouldn't have done this, this product, this feature, unless they feel as though they've done it in a very, very sensitive way. But again, it's not up to me to say— it's not my responsibility to read up on it if I'm worried about it. It's your responsibility if I'm talking to you and I know that, hey, what's that device you've got clipped to your, to your, to your, to your chest there by magnet? Oh, it's one of those AI devices. Like, yeah, you're gonna have to take that off and throw it into the harbor or put it in your pocket and keep it there until, until our lunch is over. It's a bad time. It's a bad time with, with, with the, with the pervert glasses from Ray-Ban and, and Meta on the market.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:28]:
Apple's gonna have to work 4 times as hard to make sure that no, we have, we have not done a heel turn here. This is consistent with everything we've been saying about what we feel about privacy.

Stephen Robles [01:03:37]:
What's also interesting is the live rewind feature, whereas the last 15 seconds of audio you can ask it and you get a transcript of whatever conversation was being had, there is an audible trigger to say, like, when you ask your Apple Watch what was just said, it's going to play an audio sound and then you're going to see it there on your Apple Watch face. Siri Recap, there is no visual or audio cue because you might have it just on all the time. And so someone just could be wearing an Apple Watch and there is no way to tell, is this being recapped? Right.

Jason Snell [01:04:08]:
I think the way they justify that is saying that's not a transcript, right? Like the transcript is in the moment and warning, but the rest of this is a summary of a— I mean, it's literally like a game of telephone a little bit, whereas like the audio gets processed and then turned into text, which is then reprocessed into a summary, which is then sent back. But, you know, as Andy pointed out, we can rationalize this, we can talk it out, we can make philosophical arguments. How the culture responds to it is kind of out of all of that. It's just really like, do people— are people And I don't know how it's going to go because it can go different ways. Like some, some stuff, the pushback from the culture is enormous. And then other stuff that seems super bad, people just shrug and say, whatever, I don't care. And so I don't know how it's going to go. I will say though, accessibility-wise, there are things about this feature that I can see the value.

Jason Snell [01:05:02]:
Yeah. I can see the value of like, my mom called me and was really upset because she had gone to the car place to get her car serviced. And, and she came back and it was not what she expected, and they didn't fix the problem that she had. And the truth is, if I could have seen a summary of what was discussed, it might have helped me guide her. Or if she could have read a summary of what happened, because it all happened very fast and she's in her 80s and it takes her a long time to process it, she might have been able to process it better looking back at what the recap was. Or I remember I had a, I had a small medical procedure and the doctor gave me lots of instructions right after I was out. of the anesthetic and like, I didn't remember any of that stuff later. And I thought, well, that wouldn't have been a bad time to have a summary.

Jason Snell [01:05:44]:
Um, so I can see value in it. And I think Apple is probably doing it the right way. But the bottom line is like, Apple's not the only player here. Apple's not the one that gets to set the conditions of the debate. And culturally, sometimes there's going to be pushback and sometimes there's not. And I don't know what's going to happen with this one. I, I, I, everything I know about this, Apple has done to Andy's point, I think the right thing, as far as one could do the right thing, doesn't mean it'll necessarily be right, if that makes any sense. So.

Christina Warren [01:06:18]:
Well, and I would go one step further. I think that even if Apple is doing it in the best way that they can, and maybe they're doing all the right things, as you mentioned, they're not the only player here. So if this entire category has a stink on it and has negative connotations, then every single player is going to have the same connotations regardless. Like you can't make the argument, oh, but the Apple Watches is the one area where it's okay. If the culture decides we're rejecting this, they're going to reject this across the board, in my opinion. Now, I, I, and, and I, I don't know if that's going to happen or not. It probably won't. I think that it'll probably be one of those continue to be like frog boiling things where we all give up our privacy and our, our autonomy and, um, the privacy, frankly, of people around us that we don't even have the right to give up.

Christina Warren [01:07:01]:
Um, and, and it'll, it'll be what it is. But, um, I think that, that, that's the, the thing that for all these things, that it's not just Apple, right? They can do everything correct. But if everyone is freaked out by things, the entire category gets painted in a different light.

Jason Snell [01:07:16]:
Yeah, I always say the entire category. Although that was my big brain theory when they announced this was Apple's going to do it right. And either Apple's way will be accepted and maybe they've even set the tone or the entire category will be rejected. But if the entire category is rejected, means that Apple's not behind.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:32]:
Yeah, but I, I will say, I mean, Christina, you make, you make a good point about how, like, we— it's not as though we had a vote and we decided that it's okay to use your phone during a movie at a movie theater. It's just that so many people did it that we just simply had to either start strangling strangers and make it legal to strangle random strangers in a movie theater, or simply accept that this is what the reality is now. But that's— that is balanced, uh, I hope that we as a society accept that silence is not compliance. I really wish that we could forge a new chapter of the social contract that says that, yeah, we have these recording devices, AI summary devices. They're super useful, as Jason said. I'm focused on getting a really heavy diagnosis and some instructions from my doctor. I don't trust that I'm going to remember or be able to take notes on this stuff. If it's part of the social contract that we all have these devices and at some point someone might ask, hi, this is a really important conversation.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:34]:
Is it okay if I turn on this recording device so that I can at least not record every— not transcribe every word that's being said, but at least a summary that can jog my memory hours later about what's going on? Accepting that this is not a ridiculous spyware sort of thing that people are doing, but simply a feature that people can choose to enable or disable. as politeness and the circumstances, uh, require. I just hope that we just don't accept that, well, well, because people have, have cameras in their glasses, we're just gonna have to accept that. I'm going, I'm going to, uh, a Comic-Con this weekend, Rhode Island Comic-Con, and right there and all, there's this— in all modern Comic-Cons, there's like a whole list of what they expect regarding behavior and like what policies. And actually, not very, very far down the list is Ray-Ban specs are not allowed anywhere on these premises. If you have them, you are not— you're not— we're not even telling you don't use them. We're telling you take them off and put them in a pocket, because if we see you with these glasses on, we will tell you to remove them. And if you don't remove them, we will remove you.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:35]:
So I hope the tide is turning towards not simple acceptance, but asking for permission. And when permission is denied, you just simply— you can't just simply yell that, hey, I paid $11 for this movie ticket, I can do whatever the hell I want. But yeah, you're not going to be in this theater anymore.

Jason Snell [01:09:51]:
So it just trails the tech, right? The social cues trail the tech. But if we're lucky, that's whether it's a very open, frank discussion or whether there are legal cases or whether there is a wear a device that emits a certain tone and you'll be removed from things. I don't know what that is though, and we don't have it now.

Stephen Robles [01:10:14]:
So real-time follow-up, I now have Siri Recaps enabled. I feel legally obligated to tell you all, although my watch can't hear any of you, it's just me. So I'll get a Siri Recap of myself.

Jason Snell [01:10:23]:
One man's descent into madness.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:25]:
Hey, Christina and Jason, remember when Steven told that really, really lewd and inappropriate joke? He said it was lewd and inappropriate.

Christina Warren [01:10:32]:
He can't hear us.

Stephen Robles [01:10:32]:
He can't hear us. He can't hear anything you're saying. He can't hear anything you're saying. So when you set it up, it actually, you might've heard it, it plays a sound from your Apple Watch to your iPhone. So your iPhone needs to be able to hear a sound. Your watch makes, and then once it's set up, I now have a Recaps tab in the Siri AI app. It's it's empty right now, but it'll be your conversations and then recaps. And then in the Apple Watch app specifically, under the Siri Recaps, you can set a schedule, and you can say either by time or location to yes recap or start recap or stop recap.

Stephen Robles [01:11:05]:
So if you want to say do not recap at my home location, you can do that.

Jason Snell [01:11:10]:
Yeah.

Stephen Robles [01:11:10]:
Or only start Recap at work. You can do that. And don't Recap from midnight to 7 AM, which I might do because if I talk in my sleep, I never ever want to know about it.

Jason Snell [01:11:19]:
I'd love a Recap of that. That'll be great.

Stephen Robles [01:11:21]:
Right. So it is, but it's recapping now. Um, and one other point too, as I was doing that setup and it played the sound, I think one of the interesting parts too is Handoff with now the iPhone Duo and 18 Pro and people dual iPhone lifing right now. The Recaps and Live Rewind, it is tied to one phone because you can only What's that?

Jason Snell [01:11:40]:
Single phone.

Stephen Robles [01:11:41]:
Yeah, single phone, because you can only pair, you can only pair your Apple Watch to one phone. So if you have an iPhone Duo and an 18 Pro and it's using Handoff, you just pick one up and you use whatever for your cell carrier. Whichever phone your Apple Watch is paired to is the only one that can be used with Recaps. So for instance, I have my Apple Watch paired to my iPhone Duo right now. If I were to leave my iPhone Duo at home and go to work with my 18 Pro, I get zero recaps for the day because it is not processed on your Apple Watch. It requires the iPhone to be nearby and connected in order to do that Siri recap processing. Yes. So if you've been doing the dual iPhone lifestyle or you're like using multiple devices, maybe you have an Android on the weekend, but you wear your Apple Watch anyways, you're not gonna get any Siri recaps.

Stephen Robles [01:12:27]:
And I don't believe Live Rewind either if you don't have that paired iPhone with you.

Jason Snell [01:12:33]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:12:34]:
That's good to know. And that's also, I'm glad you pointed that out because that's, that's like an interesting and I think bad, like limitation of the new, um, iPhone Handoff feature, which, um, I'm on Verizon, so I still don't have it yet, but I will be using it when, um, it comes out.

Jason Snell [01:12:48]:
They got to fix that, right? Like they have to, they can't let the Apple Watch be tethered to a single phone with that feature out there, right?

Christina Warren [01:12:55]:
No, they can't. And it's been a problem because, and it hasn't just been a problem, you know, for people who have before this instance had multiple phones, although that has been an issue and people I think have complained about it for years. There are people who have, you know, Apple Watch plans that are tied to maybe a different number or they get through like a different carrier than like the phone that they use. And they have that. That's been, that's been an issue too. And so it's, it's like a, or like, I guess like the Apple account might be different or whatever. So like, okay, I have, I have a plan with my Apple phone that I got through an MVNO that I pay like $5 a month for because it's cheap and I can't use the same Apple ID with that and, um, my phone, like in the same way. So yeah, they're going to have to fix that where you can, where you can pair it with, with multiple phones.

Christina Warren [01:13:38]:
Um, they're, they're, they have to, like, I think, I don't think you can meaningfully say we have this Handoff feature and then like, you know, my watch doesn't work now because I, because I decided to use Siri AI, frankly, or Siri AI.

Jason Snell [01:13:52]:
If you're out and about with the wrong phone, Siri won't work either because it's not talking to that phone. It's talking to the other, other device that isn't there. You, uh, there's more in 27.3. Uh, you are watching MacBreak Weekly. We have Andy and Christina like always. I'm sitting in for Leo, but I am still normally here. And sitting in for me, I guess, because I'm sitting in for Leo, is Steven Robles. Uh, always a pleasure to talk to all of you.

Jason Snell [01:14:17]:
27.3 now. Also made huge introductions of new features in Safari. And, you know, again, party like it's several years ago, but Apple finally has done the thing where you tab mavens out there on iPhone Duo, iPad, and Mac, vertical tabs is now an option. Finally. That's right. Vertical. Your tabs can go the other direction if you want them to. Steven Robles is showing it to us on his iPhone Duo.

Jason Snell [01:14:49]:
That's right.

Christina Warren [01:14:50]:
Nice.

Jason Snell [01:14:50]:
It's, you know, it's a, again, I wonder, we were talking earlier about touchscreen Macs. I wonder if this ended up being like, if this was just not a big deal and they're like, we will get to it. Or if there was some maybe design dogma that got thrown out and they're like, why would we not do that? But vertical tabs, I know people love them. I'm not a big tab person. I try not to leave tabs open. I know, imagine, right? But I do pin tabs. And, but fundamentally, here's what I'll say about vertical tabs. Most of the screens we use are wide, not tall.

Jason Snell [01:15:22]:
So height is at a premium and width, I got lots of, I got lots of screen width here to deal with. So I think this is a, I think this is a smart move. Everybody else out there, I don't know if you're, you're using vertical tabs on other browsers or not. Tell me the story of why I should care about vertical tabs, please.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:37]:
Um, it's a— it's got definitely a personal preference. Uh, I find it— I find the— my, I— my eyeline has a collision with that horizontal bar of tabs, and that, that visual cognitive clutter goes away when they're all shifted over, shifted over to the, to the left. Also, the fact that you can, at least on Chrome, you can either— you can either have them like stacked tab style where you can actually see partial names, or you can just simply have a collapse where you only see the mini icons. So Very useless.

Jason Snell [01:16:07]:
I can give you the detail here. So you can display icons or you can display the larger width where you actually see part of the title of the tab. And if you are just showing the little icon, if you, if you mouse over, it will tell you the name of the tab on that icon. And if you hover a little longer, it actually opens a little box with a preview of the page.

Christina Warren [01:16:31]:
Nice.

Jason Snell [01:16:32]:
They, they, they, when they did it, they did it right.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:34]:
Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:16:36]:
And that's good. I, for me, I run into a problem with horizontal tabs sometimes where I have so many of them that I literally cannot see, like it will, it will prevent, it will prevent you from seeing the next ones and you have to close tabs before you can even see what the, what the next, um, are like they're open, but you can't access them. And, um, you know, so vertical kind of gets rid of that because you can just continue to scroll through your list. Which is, which is nice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:00]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm just glad to see Safari get a little user interface love and modernity because it really looked practically unchanged from 10 years ago, and things have gone so much further, further into the future since then. Like, Chrome got that a while ago. Chrome also finally added split views, which has revolutionized the way that I use that browser. The ability to simply maximize, to simply have 2 pages side by side within the same window without any UI clutter between the two of them, to be able to move the, move the dividing bar left or right. The number of times where I've got a Google Doc for like a podcast show doc and like a PDF or a webpage with a news story that I'm taking notes from, it has just made— it's so, it's so relevant to the ways that browsers are not what they were when they were running exclusively on NeXTcubes. They really are an application platform and just a canvas through which user interface gets projected. And so Safari needs a lot of love. I'm glad that there seems to be some more attention being paid to it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:09]:
Uh, so I'm glad, and I'm very, very happy for everybody using Safari who prefers Safari over all the alternatives because they're going to get a much, much better experience over the next year.

Stephen Robles [01:18:18]:
Yeah, I'm already a believer. I just turned it on on my iPhone 12 and I already love it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:21]:
It's like that, isn't it?

Stephen Robles [01:18:23]:
It is. I was a big tab group user. You know, I use tab groups all the time in Safari, especially for podcasts. Like every episode is a tab group. Then I can run shortcuts on all the links in that tab group. But it's really nice on the iPhone Duo. Strangely, when you have iPhone Duo in landscape, you can expand the vertical tabs so you can see the names of all the websites. I like that.

Stephen Robles [01:18:42]:
But you can't do that in portrait mode. Not enough room.

Christina Warren [01:18:46]:
Yeah. And that kind of makes sense.

Stephen Robles [01:18:48]:
Yeah, it makes sense. The other thing I wanted to—

Jason Snell [01:18:50]:
oh, go ahead.

Stephen Robles [01:18:50]:
Yeah, go ahead. The only other feature in Safari, which I didn't know this was coming, was adaptive dark mode.

Jason Snell [01:18:55]:
Okay, yes, this is the— Steven, you're just getting ahead of the conversation.

Stephen Robles [01:18:59]:
I'm sorry, I was too excited. I was getting all the latest.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:01]:
Steven, you're a visitor from the future.

Jason Snell [01:19:03]:
I'm just saying everything's coming out okay. Tab groups are covered with vertical tabs and the auto, kind of like auto-organizing tabs where Apple will use Apple intelligence to like try to organize your tabs into sort of groupings. They're not quite tab groups. Those are all featured as well. Yes. Hey, Steven Robles, did you hear Apple is going to support natively in Safari a thing that I've been using, uh, since 2021, which is using the Noir extension? Apple is supporting adaptive dark mode. Yes, Steven broke the news here moments ago. The idea is some websites don't support dark mode, and it's infuriating because you're in dark mode, Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:19:45]:
You're in a dark room, you're clicking around, and suddenly white background blares in your face. And so now if a website does not support dark mode, Apple will adaptively alter the color palette when you're in dark mode to get it to look better. And they said that it's, you know, they're trying to be sophisticated. They're actually inverting some logos and graphics. They'll recolor some vector artwork. They will lift raised surfaces. They will rebalance layered shadows to try to make it nicer. But what it— what they won't do is if the designer of that website said, no, we, we do not actively do not want to have a dark mode, we just want one mode, it won't override that.

Jason Snell [01:20:26]:
It will honor the web designer's wishes. If they don't want their site to be recolored, it won't be. But there are a lot of sites where they're just not paying attention and they're loud and annoying when it— when you're in dark mode. And this fixes that, which I think is great. Um, Noir is still available, uh, which will force those websites that don't want to play ball. Uh, so there's still a third-party opportunity here, but this is great. This is such a— again, it's one of those features that should have been there in 2018, but I'm glad they did it, right? Again, it's sort of like, yeah, you waited too long, but at least you were, as Andy said, showing Safari and Safari users some love now because it's, it's a big problem. Now I asked them immediately, The questions were, will it work in a web view? So you've got an app that slides open a web view.

Christina Warren [01:21:11]:
Of course not.

Jason Snell [01:21:12]:
It won't. Maybe later, but not yet. And will it work in Mail? And the answer is no, this is a Safari feature. And it's like, HTML Mail is the worst because that also is all white background blaring in your eyes and needs to be better in dark mode. So I hope this is the start of a rollout across other parts of Apple's, uh, Apple's product, but like, it's, Noir has been a game changer for my browsing experience, so I'm very happy that people who are not gonna go install a Safari extension will actually get the benefit of not getting their eyes blasted by a website that doesn't care about them.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:46]:
Yeah, there's been a lot of movement after one of the, uh, one of the, the WebKit team at Apple posted something to their developer page basically about essentially saying that Read between the lines that, yeah, we know that Safari on the Duo isn't the best experience possible, so we're evaluating a bunch of changes to WebKit that would make it less awkward when you're using a device like the Duo. Again, they didn't say it explicitly, but they really wanted to signal that this is an evolving thing. We have— we're not just simply saying, you know what, let's go, let's go home and get some waffles. No, we're gonna— we're sticking around and we're basically trying to make WebKit and Safari as good as it can possibly be. Like I said, I'm so glad to see some life and the life being put back into it because it is a wonderful— it's a— I don't, I don't envy— I have Safari on my devices. I could use it. I prefer Chrome, but I do love how clean Safari is compared to Chrome. And I do love how organized and how it has a point of view, whereas Chrome feels like it has to be the browser that can handle literally everything for literally everybody.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:49]:
Again, as the browser that 81% of the the web uses. I mean, duh, but it's nice to have an app. But Apple, as usual, one of the best things they do is have a point of view and put that point of view into every product and every piece of software they make. And Safari reflects that. Absolutely.

Jason Snell [01:23:05]:
Yeah, for sure. One more feature. I'm gonna get it out before Steven breaks the clock.

Stephen Robles [01:23:09]:
I was gonna say, I'm not saying anything else.

Jason Snell [01:23:11]:
I just am trying to do these in sequence. One thing, Steven, you would fit in really well regularly on MacBreak Weekly because this is the thing that we do is like We're like, big news. Oh, tangent. And we're in the tangent for so long that by the time we're out of the tangent, we forgot what the big news was.

Stephen Robles [01:23:24]:
Um,

Jason Snell [01:23:25]:
so

Stephen Robles [01:23:25]:
get it out.

Jason Snell [01:23:26]:
Okay, here it is. Siri AI integration with Safari is the other thing here, which is subtle, but is going to lead to some really cool stuff. So, uh, Siri AI can now understand the complete context of a webpage you're viewing. It used to work in the previous versions of 27 a little more like a pixel scraper. It was looking at what was on screen. Now it knows, basically knows the DOM of the webpage. It knows what is in the webpage. So if you ask it a question about the contents of the webpage that are way down on the webpage, it will give you an answer 'cause it knows what the whole webpage looks like.

Jason Snell [01:23:59]:
That's a big deal. It knows about tabs that are not foreground. It can, you can ask it about the content of those tabs. So this breaks open a lot more information about what you're browsing. And it will let you take direct action. So you can ask Siri AI to group all of the tabs about a particular topic together, and it can do that, or close a bunch of tabs from Amazon or whatever, and it'll do that. You can ask it to wipe your history or your history for a particular site, and it will do that. So there's a lot more, and I really like to see this, right? Because this is Apple adding some good hooks to control its apps from an AI that might get to be, you know, in the future a little more agentic.

Jason Snell [01:24:45]:
But even now, just being told, can you do this thing? And having Safari not be dumb and say like, I don't even know what my tabs are. So I am encouraged that this is in a 0.3 release. They have got more Siri AI control on Safari. It's a good

Christina Warren [01:24:59]:
sign. I was going to say, that's, that's a good start. Obviously where this immediately made my mind go as you were describing that was, okay, that's a good start. But I immediately want the agentic capabilities. I want the ability to let it do it. And, and I, I hope, I really hope that for Apple's sake that they can push that before iOS 28, because I don't think that people will want to wait a year. Yeah. Um, I, I just, and I don't think that they can, to be totally candid.

Christina Warren [01:25:21]:
I think people are expecting now that they can do these things, but this is a really big benefit because to your point, it's been so annoying about the fact that like Siri didn't have any context about anything that's happening in the browser. or anything else. And it's like, but I'm giving you permission and you're literally like supposed to be like the most, you know, privileged like AI on my device. You're the only one that, that I can give permission to do these things with. And you're still not. I'm glad that that's, that that's an option. So that, that's, that's really good.

Stephen Robles [01:25:48]:
I will, I will say, um, I've been using Claude Duet for like the past week. Um, I tried Muse before. Don't recommend it. Don't put it on your Mac. All the things. All the disclaimers, but Cloud Duet has been really good and I give it access to my Fastmail. Even now it can, it can send emails for me. But I honestly am losing— using browser less because Cloud Duet can just do a bunch of things and then give me the information I need.

Stephen Robles [01:26:13]:
So I use Safari as my main default and I have Brave in the background with the Claude extension, but I never look at it because it will just use whatever browser it needs. Exactly. And like, yeah, it would be nice if Siri could do that. And I think for the average user, most iPhone users, that will be nice if they can just ask their phone and their phone does it. But I've been great with, I actually kind of like that separation. Like I use Siri AI for some things like general world knowledge, personal context and this. And then for maybe research or wider things, I'll go to Claude Duet. And the best thing is it's all on my iPhone.

Stephen Robles [01:26:46]:
Like I just have everything on my iPhone and it's on my Mac and it's everywhere. So. Wow. Sorry, Andy, you go ahead.

Andy Ihnatko [01:26:52]:
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it was— it wasn't going to be anything as important and as eloquent as what you just said.

Stephen Robles [01:27:00]:
Oh, well, I appreciate it. Now I want to bring more news.

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:02]:
Which is to say that I was so engaged with what you were saying that I forgot what comment I was going to make. So it was that important.

Stephen Robles [01:27:07]:
Oh, thank you. I don't want to break any more news before you, Jason. So were you going to say more about Siri or can I break it?

Jason Snell [01:27:11]:
No, go ahead, go ahead. Tell us what else we need to look for in 0.3.

Stephen Robles [01:27:16]:
Well, Siri AI can do more stuff, not just in Safari, but apparently everywhere, like Finders and Files. So you can ask Siri AI to organize things in your Downloads folder by content. And you can even ask it where were like the coffee shops I visited. And it will look into Maps and it will look into more like even Messages. You can ask it to schedule a message with Siri AI, which is not something you could do. You could tell it to send a message and you can ask it for context in your messages. But now you could say, schedule a message to Jason at 1 AM to wake him up, and it will just, just do all of that, uh, by default. So you're gonna be trouble, aren't you?

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:52]:
He's

Stephen Robles [01:27:53]:
like, he's a

Andy Ihnatko [01:27:53]:
maverick, he's a firebrand, he's untamed.

Jason Snell [01:27:55]:
You're gonna be trouble. This goes to what Christina said earlier, which is like, that's good, it's a start, it can't be the end of the story. But it's, it's not about like— Apple was so far behind, and what they've been saying is Siri AI gives us a platform to actually start to build. And yeah, I feel like every one of these dot releases, we need to see more integration. We need to see them continuing to sweat because like a platform with nothing on it is an empty platform. It has no value. You need to start plugging more stuff into it. And so that's really encouraging, but also we've seen Apple, you know, ship stuff and then walk away.

Jason Snell [01:28:30]:
Like, more please. You need to keep— you're not caught up. You're still catching up. Keep working at it. But it's a good sign that they are doing this, right? If the— if 0.3 came out and there was just tumbleweeds rolling through Siri AI, I would be really concerned, right?

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:44]:
Yeah. I'm sorry, Jason. You just triggered me a little bit. Uh, I

Jason Snell [01:28:48]:
apologize.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:49]:
I'm just, I'm just saying that I've, I've had 27.2 in my devices. And so as you know, like big project every Tuesday morning, Monday night is putting together like a stories list for the, for the show doc. I've used OmniOutliner. And I have never told a feature to go fuck itself so many times in the production of today's show, Doug, the first one since 27.2, as Siri AI. Because every time I've needed to like click to move something in, oh, I'm sorry, but the Siri button is in the way and it wants me to actually auto-type something. Yeah. Oddly enough, and ironically, it's made even like the Gemini app oftentimes unusable because Oh, I want to attach a PDF or an image file to this, to this conversation. Like, oh, I can't because the button I would need to click that is covered by, you guessed it, the Siri AI button.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:43]:
So I'm like, I'm not really— I'm not real happy with Siri right now. I get it.

Jason Snell [01:29:48]:
You're not speaking.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:49]:
I'm not,

Jason Snell [01:29:50]:
which is ironic because it's a voice assistant.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:52]:
Yeah, freezing it out. It's like the, the best feature about it is going to be— I haven't actually looked for it yet, but how do I turn this off? I will say I will set myself like a reminder, say in 2— in a month's time, 2 months' time, go back and see if they fix these problems. But I just don't want to be in a deadline situation in which— thank you, thank you, Siri, you're actually making this job exactly 11% more difficult than it was before you decided to help me.

Jason Snell [01:30:18]:
Yeah, it's a little needy.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:19]:
Don't help by helping, help me by not helping.

Jason Snell [01:30:20]:
The UI intrusions of Siri, especially on the Mac, are very They feel very needy to me. Like, I get it, I get it. It's, it's, it's okay. We know, we know you're there. You don't need to keep telling me that. Now, uh, what we do traditionally at the end of this show is our picks of the week. Uh, but before that, I do want to talk to Christina and get a little bit of a download about her time with the iPhone Duo. This is MacBreak Weekly, of course.

Jason Snell [01:30:46]:
Christina Warren, Andy Inaco, Steven Robles. Hi. Christina, iPhone Duo download, you got it for me?

Christina Warren [01:30:53]:
I, I got it. Yeah. And, and I, I've got, I've got my Duo. Um, I have my, my PopSocket on the back. That's going to be a little bit of a preview of, uh, of my pick of the week. Um, Steven, I want to give you a shout out. I really liked your, your, uh, your Duo video and your review and your content that you've been doing on that. You knew great stuff on it.

Christina Warren [01:31:09]:
So I got mine, you know, I ordered it within minutes of it coming out and then Apple said they weren't going to get it to me until Thanksgiving. And I'm like, I will be out of of town. That is not good. Um, there were delays in me even being able to get the order from Verizon, but they got it to me on October 30th. So I've had it, you know, for 4 or 5 days now. My overall feeling, I think, is probably fairly similar to like what a lot of other people have said, which is I think that this is really interesting. I think this is a really fun phone. I'm enjoying using it.

Christina Warren [01:31:38]:
But, and there is a but, if you were to ask me to recommend this to an average person, my answer would unequivocally be no.

Jason Snell [01:31:45]:
Oh no.

Christina Warren [01:31:46]:
Without a doubt. Absolutely no. No, no, no, no. And, and, and not only that, I'll go one step further and I'll say, even if you're somebody who's buying this, I think that the ideal buyer, you have 2 phones. Because if I had to use this as my only iPhone right now, I have 3. I have my work phone. I have still my 17 Pro Max, which I have been doing everything I can to not use it and just use the, the, the Duo. But I feel like I would be, you know, missing out on, on various things.

Christina Warren [01:32:11]:
But I, I, I, it's really fun. I think that it's, it's beautiful. It's incredibly well designed as, as so many people have said. I have not had any issues. Yeah. issues with the screen, you know, like knock on wood or glass, I guess, as the case may be. I'm confident that whatever those issues are will be taken care of for folks. But of course, that's always a concern with an item this level.

Christina Warren [01:32:35]:
Immediately, I thought that— I really thought that the complaints about no Face ID were overblown. Unfortunately, they're not. And even if you're wearing an Apple Watch, even if you set up many parts of your finger and whatnot. It's, it's just annoying. It's annoying not having it. Um, I, I also think that there are a lot of apps that are, including Apple apps, that are just not optimized for the, the form factor right now. The biggest issue I'm running into right now is in the Messages app where I can't easily copy, um, uh, uh, like a, a text or a tweet or an embed that someone sends because the copy button is too far down and I can't scroll and find it. So I literally have to open.

Christina Warren [01:33:13]:
Messages into the dual screen mode to be able to select the copy command in Messages.

Jason Snell [01:33:19]:
It's a lot of UI.

Christina Warren [01:33:21]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:33:21]:
They're like lack of polish.

Christina Warren [01:33:23]:
Absolutely. But, but, but it's weird because I think they get a lot of the big things right. I will say, and, and, and I saw a tweet today that I thought was good. It was like, you know, I want iPadOS on my, on my, um, iPhone Duo and I want, you know, like macOS on my iPad Pro. And yes, I feel that way. sometimes, right? Like I, I'm happy largely, I think, with the trade-offs between, you know, how they've optimized, you know, iPhone OS versus, you know, just putting iPad OS on it. Having said that, like, I, I do have concerns. I'm like, there are lots of apps, games especially, and things that have very good iPad versions that would work great in the dual screen on this device that don't work and that you can't access.

Christina Warren [01:34:03]:
And that, you know, maybe if the, maybe developers can do some work and make it easier. But Apple certainly isn't, isn't making it super easy for them to, to do that, um, right now where it's like, okay, I get the crappy iPhone version when, if I—

Jason Snell [01:34:15]:
I know you have an iPad version of this, but Apple has said no, that's not good enough.

Christina Warren [01:34:20]:
Exactly. And it's, and it's, and it's in a universal, you know, app, right? So it's like, okay, it's the same thing that's installed. And like, I, I, me as an end user shouldn't have to think about it. And frankly, the developer shouldn't be having to think about this either. I think that's a representation of many years of Apple's decisions about how they want to handle, you know, um, automatic layout and, and, and, and screen sizing and things like that. And, and this is when it comes to hurt you. Um, but I mean, I, I don't know. I think it's a really fun device.

Christina Warren [01:34:46]:
The battery life has been really good. I think the, the underlying question that I kind of have for myself, and I'm still not sure like where I kind of stand on this, is, is like, is this like, what are the real, I guess, advantages? Like what makes this better than just buying an iPhone 18 Pro and an iPad Mini because they cost about the same. If you're to do those 2 things, it costs about the same as an iPhone Duo. And if I'm being completely honest with myself, I think that you probably get an overall better experience both ways. Granted, you don't have this really cool thing you can have in your pocket, which can be really nice to pull out. But, you know, I don't know how often you're in those use cases where like, oh, I have to have my iPad Mini on me right now when I'm in a scenario where I would normally have my, my only my phone, right? Like maybe, you know, if I'm traveling, if I've got my backpack, I could put my iPad Mini there and pull it out if I needed it. So some part of me, I feel like this is fundamentally a product kind of looking for its use case, but it's so cool. And, and as a gadget lover and as an early adopter, I'm really appreciating that aspect and seeing kind of where things will will go.

Christina Warren [01:35:54]:
Um, but if, if I had to use this as my only phone, I wouldn't. Um, I, I'm fortunate that I'm not in that position, but I think, you know, I, I'd made a comment, you know, a month or so back, um, about how I felt like this was kind of an irrational purchase. I still feel that way even more so, which is not to say that it's not worthwhile and that you won't have a great time with it. But I, I just like, if I were to take my own circumstances out of it and go, okay, should I spend $2,400? Because this phone was $2,432 with tax, all right, for the, for the 512 version. That's a laptop. Like, that's a, that's a pretty decently specced MacBook. I mean,

Jason Snell [01:36:33]:
not as good as it used to be, but still a good laptop.

Christina Warren [01:36:35]:
Yes, exactly. But that's a decently specced, like, MacBook Pro, okay? So if you're trying to— if I'm trying to, like, rationalize, would I rather spend $2,400 and would I get more value out of laptop or this? I'm so sorry, right now it's going to be the laptop. But I think that for a first-gen product, I think for what they're doing with it, it's great. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to keep it. I've got 3 weeks to decide, but I don't anticipate I'm going to be returning it. But I also can't say confidently that if we were to check in in 6 months, that the primary phone that I'm going to be reaching for every day is going to be this device. And that's just kind of where I'm at right now.

Christina Warren [01:37:16]:
Maybe things will change as the software evolves. And as we can get more interesting ideas around it. But I am still floored every time I pick it up and hold it because I do feel like it's so incredibly made. And they really nailed that aspect of it more than any other foldable that I've seen. And if we can work through some of the software bugs and maybe also if this can be an encouraging way for developers to think about some interesting things they can do, I think that'll be great. But I think that this is one of those products where like their ideas are so great. You can see when they can bring in a Face ID sensor, when they can, you know, make some other changes, um, maybe to, to reachability and whatnot, where this is going to be like, you know, the, the next one is going to be like, okay, this is a lot more compelling for a lot more people.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:08]:
Yeah. I think that's, that's, I, I love everything you said. Uh, it's a first generation device for people who are really, really keen to own it. They're going to have a good time with it because if they come with the right attitude. I think that one of the most critical things when you're buying one is you're not buying an iPhone, you're not buying an iPad, you're buying an iPhone Duo. So adjust your, your settings, your mental settings accordingly. Also, Christina, I think the return policy is 14 business days.

Christina Warren [01:38:34]:
Verizon's is—

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:35]:
oh, I'm sorry, good.

Christina Warren [01:38:37]:
Okay, so if you're buying, if you're buying this from an Apple Store, it's 14 days. So keep in mind of that. And I don't know about other carriers, and Verizon will charge me a $50 restocking fee. So if I were to return it, I'd give that up.

Andy Ihnatko [01:38:48]:
But nobody wants Verizon for $50. That's a good bargain.

Christina Warren [01:38:51]:
I mean, I'd be right, but, but Verizon's— Verizon says $30, and, and I, I did pay like in full. So unfortunately, like, that, that card hit my Amex, or that, that charge hit my Amex. Like, this is— I did not put this on any sort of, um, you know, carrier plan. That's actually one thing that I, I do want to kind of maybe caution people on, or at least not caution but make them think about. If you're looking at the Duo, A lot of the carrier deals are really compelling and the trade-in things are really compelling. They're going to stick you with a 3 or a 4-year period of time to pay it off.

Jason Snell [01:39:21]:
Right.

Christina Warren [01:39:22]:
I'm going to be completely candid. This is not a phone you are going to want to carry around for 4 years.

Jason Snell [01:39:26]:
No, that's true.

Christina Warren [01:39:28]:
At all. And I don't even think 3 years. And so I think that that's, you just need, people just need to be aware of that when you're doing your own like calculus on, can I afford this? Does, is this in my budget? Does this make sense? That the, the normal type of, you know, oh, I can keep an iPhone, you know, 18 Pro for 3 years, no problem. I, I don't feel like this is a device that you're necessarily going to want to, to have for, for 3 years. It's certainly not for—

Jason Snell [01:39:51]:
No, it's for people who want to have fun and explore new ideas, new, totally like different kinds of iOS, uh, functionality, which is fascinating. Like there's so much about it that's really interesting, but like you gotta be someone who is going to be entertained by the fact that you're on the cutting edge and you're exploring and you're having a good time. If you're a practical person, this is not the phone for you. And I mean that like with several underlines and all capital letters, like it is not for you. But you know who you are if you're like, oh, but folding iPhones, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're that person, then great. And I think a lot of those people, probably a higher percentage than normal, listen to MacBreak Weekly and they know who they are. And for those people, like, it's going to be a blast.

Jason Snell [01:40:37]:
I am having a blast with it. I'm using it as my only phone and like, it's hilarious and fun and weird. But at the same time, like, I love that you did that pivot, Christina, where it's like, but would I recommend it? I was like, no, no, no. Unless I had a very particular friend that I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll, you'll get something out of this. But most people will not.

Christina Warren [01:40:56]:
No. Yeah. But we all know those friends and those are the people who, some of those folks fast me, I'm like, no, absolutely. And if you've got one on order, keep, keep it coming. And if you hate it, return it. Um, like, you know, because I had— I've had some people be like, oh, should I, should I return this? I'm reading these, or before it's even arrived. I'm like, no, you know, especially if you haven't been charged yet. Let it, let it come and, and, and give it a shot.

Christina Warren [01:41:17]:
Uh, but it, you know, exactly. I think, I think you're going into this being like, this will be the only phone I have. And maybe you can get away with it, but I think that this is going to be for like a lot more people to be like, Even if this was the only phone I was carrying day to day, this is not the only phone that's in my arsenal. I think this is the only phone in my arsenal that, that would be, I think, really hard for, for a lot of folks, even, even, even the people who are on the cutting edge.

Jason Snell [01:41:36]:
Even the weird, even the sickos that are out there. Um, all right.

Stephen Robles [01:41:39]:
Can I just say, as a sicko, please, please. I'm an iPhone Duo sicko. I just love remoting into Macs. Yes.

Jason Snell [01:41:47]:
I know.

Stephen Robles [01:41:47]:
I did that.

Christina Warren [01:41:48]:
Beautiful screens. It's great.

Jason Snell [01:41:50]:
I was doing screen sharing and I was doing some SSH from the airport because I had to deal with an issue on my Linode. Ubuntu box. And like, I brought up on the big screen on the Duo and I'm like,

Stephen Robles [01:42:01]:
oh,

Jason Snell [01:42:02]:
this is like, this is a neuromancer now. We're in the cyberpunk world now. It's amazing.

Stephen Robles [01:42:07]:
Also, you'll appreciate it. Ferrite, which is the app that I will edit audio podcasts on, on iPhone Duo with Apple Pencil.

Jason Snell [01:42:13]:
With Apple Pencil. Yeah, I've got the USB Apple Pencil here. That all works really well. Oh, by the way, I'll make a wild prediction, which is having written on that little tiny exterior screen with an Apple Pencil, They're gonna bring Apple Pencil support to all the iPhones, right? Like, why would you not? It's like, if you're, if you're gonna put on the little tiny screen, you're gonna put on the

Christina Warren [01:42:33]:
tiny

Jason Snell [01:42:33]:
one, then, then yeah, you've— the horse is out of the barn now. Just put it everywhere. Just, just do it. Why not? You got big— like, the Pro Max totally deserves Apple Pencil support. So

Stephen Robles [01:42:44]:
yeah,

Jason Snell [01:42:44]:
we'll get there. Now, um, before we go, pick of the week time. I've left it to the very end. So packed. We again The leftovers that you'll see maybe on innotco.com later this week where Andy compiles this list. There's so many stories we didn't even get to, but I do want to give everybody a chance, uh, to give their pick of the week, and that includes you, Steven. So think of something really fast. Christina, you already previewed what you're gonna pick, but let's do it.

Christina Warren [01:43:09]:
But, but I'll share it. So, so my pick, all right, I think all the cases right now for the iPhone XR are, are terrible and absolutely obscene. I, I tried like the, the TechWoven case Um, I would never pay $130 for that personally. I think TechWoven is a terrible fabric. I think $130 for that case is criminal. Um, and, and people who are cutting it in half to make it work, what are you doing? Um, you have AppleCare. That's going to be my case. That said, you want like a, it's nice to have a little kickstand and it's nice to have a little grip on the phone.

Christina Warren [01:43:37]:
I've never been a big PopSocket person, but the PopSocket, um, uh, um, uh, what is it? Lowepro is great. Um, I, I know some people really like the, um, the, the other company, OhSnap. who makes one. I've read that there's some issues with polarity there and, and MagSafe charging. So it's $40, which does feel like a lot for a PopSocket, but it's completely flat. It has a little, um, a flip-out case that can be modified. It does pass-through charging. It has a nice little grip.

Christina Warren [01:44:05]:
And so I, this is one of those things where I was like, I feel like if you're going to have an iPhone Duo, you probably need a grip. This is the one that, that I've landed on. And I do think the, the purple color that I have Looks nice and, uh, and girlish on my white phone. So that's, that's my pick.

Jason Snell [01:44:21]:
Very nice, very nice. Andy, pick of the week?

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:24]:
Uh, one of my favorite apps, uh, Snapseed. It is this— it's an ad— it's a phone— a free photo editor that was— the app was bought by Google and was treated like a first-class citizen by Google for a number of years, and then they sort of kind of let it languish without canceling it. But I don't know what happened in the past year But it has suddenly been reinvented as one of the best photo editing apps available, paid or not paid. And recently they came out with— they just released version 4.2, which in addition to all the great things they've been adding this year, they've added color grading and you can import LUTs into it, which means that if you're in Photoshop, Lightroom, anything, and you say— and you— there's a, there's a, there's a color grade or, or a LUT that you really, really like, like you want a certain type of like film look to it. You can just import it directly into the app and just simply apply it to your photos. And I wouldn't say it's as good as Photoshop or as good as even, uh, one of, one of Apple's, uh, Creative Suite apps, but my goodness, the, the, the, the line from an okay photo that a typical smartphone creates— again, they're not bad, but they're just trying to make every single user not unhappy with the picture, which is different from creating a really, really beautiful interpretation of the photo. Just drop it, even create your own LUT in, in whatever photo app and just import it in. And now suddenly it's look— it doesn't look just like a good picture, but it looks like exactly the way you want it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:51]:
And that's on top of all kinds of other really cool features. And again, it's free, free, free, free, free. No, no, you don't have to be on like a Google Cloud paid tier. It's not an adjunct to Google Photos. It's just simply a free app that has suddenly had a rocket sled put under its butt. Because if you have not used it in a while, you should really start having fun with this app. Um, I've, I've— especially if you're, if you're using like a 2-year-old phone, 3-year-old phone, a 5-year-old phone. One of the things I usually admire and envy about getting a new phone is, oh God, I want the new image pipeline, I want the new sensor, I new want this, that, and the other.

Andy Ihnatko [01:46:27]:
When actually the most important thing that happens to my to a phone that I take, it is just spending upwards of 20 seconds making just minute adjustments to turn it from a good photo to exactly the way I want it. And I cannot picture a better app for doing that than Snapseed. And again, it is free. And oddly enough, the iOS app usually gets the big new updates and features ahead of the Android app, so go figure that one out. But again, it should be on your phone. It is the— I've said before, the reason why I don't have games on my phone is because Editing photos in Snapseed and Lightroom is basically what I do when like my train is late. It's what I have fun on the phone with. And it's a— and Snapseed is one of the most powerful vectors for fun I can imagine.

Jason Snell [01:47:12]:
Very nice. Thank you. And Stephen, what do you have for your pick of the week?

Stephen Robles [01:47:17]:
It just got back in stock. And so if you're looking for a MagSafe battery for iPhone Duo, I love MagSafe batteries. I have like a dozen of them. One of the One of the first ones that I think fit the best, it's super thin. This is the Baseus AM72 MagSafe battery. It fits the iPhone Duo like a glove. It is actually, you know, it fits it lengthwise. Both sides.

Stephen Robles [01:47:39]:
So it's not hanging off the bottom. It is the perfect width and it is a very thin MagSafe battery. So even holding your iPhone Duo with the battery attached, it is pretty good. It's Qi 2, not Qi 2, 2.2, 25 watts. So it's, you know, not the fastest charging, and I believe it's 5,000 milliamp hours, but it's really the only one that fits perfectly. On Amazon, there's one that's like a BMX brand, and I actually have that one also. It hangs off the iPhone Duo just a little bit, um, and I don't really recognize the brand, but I do know Baseus. So if you're gonna buy any MagSafe Duo battery, at least right now for the iPhone Duo, I would go with the Baseus AM72.

Christina Warren [01:48:17]:
Nice.

Jason Snell [01:48:18]:
Very nice. If you need a 3rd battery on your iPhone Duo, Steven's got you covered.

Christina Warren [01:48:22]:
Well, no, but it's a great point because your existing ones hang off and then if they're thick, it's annoying. So like, yeah, all the MagSafe—

Jason Snell [01:48:29]:
I mean, my— I have a MagSafe wallet and it's completely useless now because it hangs off the bottom. So I'm gonna have to get a different wallet or whatever. I don't know, just use that wallet in my other pocket.

Stephen Robles [01:48:38]:
Or one of the most comical things is to put the iPhone Air MagSafe battery on the iPhone Duo. You have to do the crucifix position. Yeah. Yeah.

Christina Warren [01:48:46]:
Oh my God.

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:47]:
It's like that LG, uh, early phone with a T-shaped screen. Yeah, beautiful.

Stephen Robles [01:48:53]:
Great nostalgia.

Jason Snell [01:48:54]:
All right. We have reached the end. It's been a great time. Uh, so much to talk about. Uh, I'm again, Apple, stop. They won't stop. They won't stop. They won't stop.

Jason Snell [01:49:06]:
There's going to be more next week.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:07]:
Just know it.

Jason Snell [01:49:08]:
Stephen Robles, thank you so much for joining us on this jam-packed week. It was great to hear from you.

Stephen Robles [01:49:12]:
Thanks for having me.

Jason Snell [01:49:13]:
Where can people find your stuff?

Stephen Robles [01:49:15]:
Oh, you can go to beard.fm and you get links to all my stuff, the videos, the podcast. It's, it's all there. beard.fm.

Jason Snell [01:49:22]:
Love it. Andy Inako, as always, a pleasure. Thanks for being here.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:26]:
Thank you, the, the, the, the, my friend who taught me how to do boldface in HTML. That's how far we go back.

Jason Snell [01:49:32]:
Way back.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:33]:
There's a meme about 2 beefy arms clasping, but neither of us had the physique to pull that off. No, thank you for being— for— thank you for being in the picture for so long.

Jason Snell [01:49:41]:
I'm honored to just be even considered with that meme, even though it doesn't fit me. And Christina Warren, thank you so much for being here from GitHub.

Christina Warren [01:49:49]:
Thanks for having me.

Jason Snell [01:49:50]:
Film Girl on the socials. Anything else going on with you?

Christina Warren [01:49:54]:
Not so much, not so much. Um, but I mean, just, you know, living the— my, my, my duo, uh, my best duo life.

Jason Snell [01:49:59]:
Just with your 3 phones, living life.

Christina Warren [01:50:02]:
Live, live my, my 3-phone life. Look, it's 2 phones primarily. Like, the 17 Pro Max is not had a lot of, uh, like use. But yeah, just— but yeah, just trying to live my best Duo life. That's about it.

Jason Snell [01:50:13]:
That's cool. That's all good.

Christina Warren [01:50:14]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:50:15]:
Uh, and I want to thank everybody out there for watching MacBreak Weekly and of course, uh, for, for allowing me to fill Leo's virtual seat for the last— I think it's 3 episodes. Leo will be back next week and I will be gone. So—

Christina Warren [01:50:29]:
So will I.

Jason Snell [01:50:30]:
Out of here. Well, it's going to be exciting. Who's going to be here? We don't even know. We're going to figure it out. John Ashley is pondering. So I'll be out for a couple weeks, but Leah will be back, and that's going to make you all very happy. But until then, one more time, I have to tell you the bad news, which is you have to get back to work because break time is over. Bye, everybody.