MacBreak Weekly 425 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly, we have a lot to talk about. New iPads, Apple Pay, Yosemite. Fortunately we've got the experts for you. Rene Ritchie and Andy Inhatko, MacBreak Weekly is next.

Announcers: Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by CacheFly. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com.

Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly episode 425 recorded October 21^st, 2014.

Area Man Uses Apple Pay

MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Personal Capital. With Personal Capital you'll finally have all your financial life in one place, and get a clear view of everything you own. Best of all, it's free! Sign up, go to personalcapital.com/macbreak. And by SquareSpace. The all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code MacBreak. And by Shutterstock.com. With over 42 million high quality stock photos, illustrations, vectors and video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level. For 20% off image subscription packages on your new account, go to Shutterstock.com and use the offer code MacBreak1014. It's time for MacBreak Weekly the show where we cover all the Apple news and there's a lot of it today. Rene Ritchie joins us from iMore.com and his office in Montreal. Quebec, Canada. Hello, Rene!

Rene Ritchie: Hey Leo! I've made it back, your side of the world is much warmer than my side of the world.

Leo: It's not snowing in Montreal yet is it?

Rene: No but it's cold, and you have such lovely weather.

Leo: Actually we've got the cold weather starting to come. It's 60 degrees now, it's freezing.

Rene: I must have left it behind, I apologize.

Leo: Also here from Boston or the Environs, somewhere in New England in his secret lair is Andy Inhatko. Yup.

Andy Inhatko: Greetings from the great white Northeast.

Leo: From the Chicago Sun Times. What's the picture behind you there?

Andy: This is from New York Comic Con a few weeks ago. A whole group of people that decided to dress up as the entire Scooby Doo cast plus the old caretaker dressed up as a ghoul.

Leo: He's not a ghoul, he's the old caretaker!

Andy: Notice the lady dressed up as Scooby which I did not even notice when I took the picture.

Leo: I like the girl though, she's got it.

Andy: I feel like she's changed the relationship between Scooby and Shaggy.

Leo: (laughing) You're a girl! It does look like Simon Pegg on the right, that's not Simon Pegg on the right is it?

Andy: That is not Simon Pegg on the right.

Leo: It does look like it though.

Andy: One of the things I enjoy about Cons is taking pictures of people in costume, and I always just in the back of my mind am playing a game called “Do you know who you should cosplay as?” Yes, he should be cosplaying as a Shaun of the Dead character. I passed by someone who I almost wanted to just stop and interrupt what they're doing and say “I know that you're not in costume, but you could so totally be David Bowie in the 1970s. You could be Ziggy Stardust, you could be the Thin White Duke, you could be that freaky guy in the clown makeup. You should totally go with David Bowie next time! I don't even want to be paid for my consultancy fee in telling you what to do, but please!

Leo: Please! Is that on your flickr stream, that picture?

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: AndyI on flickr.

Andy: AndyI on flickr.

Leo: Oh yeah, there it is.

Andy: Usually instead of waiting a couple weeks and posting an album of like 100 pictures, I've seemed to be now just posting one a day. Because now people have the patience to see one photo a day.

Leo: I like this.

Andy: Now people have the patience to see like one photo a day when.. here's a half hour of your life to get through all this stuff and everything I've written about it.

Leo: This really stands out. And Velma is hot, you're right chatroom. And that doesn't look so much like Simon Pegg once you see the blood on his face. Alright, let us move on ladies and gentlemen because we have a lot to talk about. Apple released its quarterly end fiscal year results yesterday, and you know I think it's a walk off home run in the bottom of the 9^th frankly. It looks pretty good, I'll be doing baseball theme metaphors throughout the day today. Looks pretty good, Apple market share its highest since 1995!

Rene: Yep.

Leo: Still single figures, I mean it's not like they have 20% market share. But still the max surged.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: Really good performance for the Mac. Fourth quarter surge of 21% year over year, revenue growth up 18% year over year. Luca Maestri, the new CFO, says we saw great demand in the back to school season for both desktops and portables, especially strong growth for Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. Double digit Mac growth across most markets around the world. That's important, with particular impressive performance in emerging markets where Mac sales were up, get this, 46%. Is this the halo effect? Are they using iPhones now and they're going “Hey I should see what else Apple offers.”

Andy: I don't know about merging markets, but have to pay attention to the fact that I think there was a lot of pent up demand for the Mac Pro and so they sold lots and lots of those to people who weren't routinely buying Macs. These are people that had been deferring that purchase for about a year and a half.

Leo: Did they break it down by model? The Mac Pro?

Rene: No.

Andy: No, but I'm guessing that if there's a reason it's certainly possible for there to be a halo effect but I believe that must have contributed because I can't think of another Mac release that has been so eagerly anticipated as that one. When we had people who were saying “I'm done waiting for you, I'm going to now build a compatible Macintosh tower out of available components and hack the operating system to run on it. That's how long I've been waiting for you to release an update to the Mac Pro.”

Leo: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, says the momentum may just be starting. Because remember the iMac, the new 5k iMac is no in this.

Rene: One thing that I think also is that while the point bombs weren't that impressive this year, they price cut many of the Macs. They dropped them by $100. And even though it's only $100, over the price of a Mac that's pretty good incentive.

Leo: Yeah. I do think that, especially in emerging markets that Mac or Apple awareness is driven by iPhone and iPad, don't you think?

Rene: Yeah there's a halo and there's a continuum now where people are introduced to those devices and people thought that we'd be going from the trucks to the cars but there's still a lot of things that trucks are better for, and even the new Mac mini that was introduced, it's gone back to its original price, $499. $100 cheaper again, when you combine those two things I think that gets people moving.

Leo: By the way that price point is probably the more important bullet point when you talk about the Mac mini than the fact that you can't update the RAM, that it's basically a Macbook Air in a different enclosure. A lot of the geeks were disappointed, they wanted a better Mac Mini but the price point is where Apple was headed, right?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely. That's something that really stands out to you when you look at the Mac Mini lineup. There is such a huge disparity between the entry level model and the very next step up. The middle model and then the best model, they look like sister and brother. This one looks like a cousin in terms of its relative power, the processor it uses, the amount of resources that are available to it. And I stifled my reflex to say oh, of course. It's a woefully under-powered machine. But no, it's not under-powered it will run everything just perfectly fine and if this is a sign of what Apple had to do to get the price down below $500 I'm all for it, because the next level up is a big jump, it's like 50% more expensive. A little less than 50% expensive. So that's going to be a very important $200 for a lot of people, so if it lets people choose a Mac instead of a better configured Windows machine that's a desktop box, even though they wanted a Mac, that's a great move.

Leo: It's interesting because it's at the same price point as the entry level iPad.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: Which is kind of interesting.

Andy: And you don't get the screen.

Rene: No screen.

Leo: Yeah. Let's talk iPhones, so iPhone 6 was out for less than two weeks in this fourth quarter, so I don't know how much the iPhone 6, well we could actually do the math because they said how low.

Rene: It was launch quarter though, I mean it was the launch weeks which are always high.

Leo: That makes a big deal, even if it's just the first couple of weeks of the launch. It was the iPhone's third best quarter ever. They sold 39.3 million phones in three months, that's up 12% compared to the previous quarter, 16% year over year.

Rene: It's a license to mint money, Leo.

Leo: It really is!

Andy: Yeah. It really just puts you in the mind of why Apple really wants to move into consumer goods like the watch, because how many desktops can they-- (signal interrupted) –people will have $100 and they'll have a few hundred bucks just to blow on cool stuff so it's .. (laughs.) I think this time next year we could be looking at some numbers that are like “Now we must fear Apple and beg for its forgiveness for past things we might have said about it.”

Leo: Yeah, I'm starting to worry. Cumulative iPhone sales, which is kind of a silly figure, but they did put out a graph so I'm going to show it. They now have sold close to, this is wrong. 600,000,000 iPhones?

Andy: Yeah, I know.

Rene: It's not as many as Android phones but wow are those profitable.

Leo: Whaaa!

Andy: And all sold by one company. I encountered that figure at 400 million a while ago, and I had to double check it because it doesn't make sense that this company could sell anything in a number that could be expressed as a fraction of a billion dollars. Now it's over half a billion, not half a billion dollars, half a billion items.

Leo: Half a billion phones!

Andy: Times how much money they're making on every phone and it's like, we praise our new Apple overlords as a host on a popular podcast, I can do much to sway public opinion and to get law enforcement in line for your new directives. I can be quite useful to you Apple. Please don't crush me like the ant that I am.

Leo: Apple's margins are up too. There was some concern in the market and among users, analysts. That the margins seemed to be tumbling but they were up for the first time in some quarters, and revenues for the iPhone were up 20% compared to last quarter, 21% year over year. Profits up even more.

Rene: They're selling more of the higher margin products now. Which is good for them.

Leo: Right. Wow. Of course, beats analyst expectations, you always want to do that. Apple's very good at damping down the expectations and then over-performing which is good for the stock price. Usually the stock market buys on the rumor, there's been plenty of those, and sells on the news. The news was of course yesterday. But the stock price was going up up up, it's up another 2% today.

Rene: And once again, they could not make enough to sell, I think Tim Cook said it was on the same planet, the supply they could make to reach the demand. How many could they have sold if they were in balance? It's ludicrous numbers.

Leo: In a way they should be punished a little bit for that. They make such a great product and they can't make enough of them to sell them all.

Andy: I would quit any boss who said I know, I know. You sold 40 million but you could have sold 42 million. We've only filled that swimming pool up to an inch overflowing with gold doubloons. I want your resignation letter on my desk by 2pm. I bet you'll screw that one up too.

Leo: Of course the iPad, mixed in with all this wonderful news I think it was not only a record quarter but it was a record year. Fiscal year. Is that right? I should look up the actual numbers.

Rene: Yeah. I don't recall..

Leo: I think they said this is the best year ever.

Rene: You kind of want that every year.

Leo: Yeah, well yeah. I guess, yeah.

Rene: The iPhone by itself is capable of driving them to that, which again is scary. They have such a successful business but for that to be your most successful business..

Leo: Record profits for the fourth quarter. And I think record revenue. We didn't give you the bottom line, which is.. sales, total sales of 42.1 billion and a profit on that of 8.5 billion.

Rene: In one quarter.

Leo: Yeah. Improved profit.

Rene: They just can't empty those vaults fast enough.

Leo: Gross margin 38% compared to 37% year over year. International sales, 60% of the quarter's revenue. Good news for Ireland and the Cayman Islands. A lot of cash could be flowing in.

Andy: A lot of good for truck drivers on the money delivery route from the air ports to the Apple post office box where all the checks go.

Leo: (making truck noises) I've got all the franklins in the back!..  iPhone sales up 16.2%. iMac sales up 20%. iPod sales, let's save iPod sales. iTunes sales up 8%, accessories up 12%. Now.

Rene: iTunes and app store is getting really interesting.

Leo: Yeah, what did they say 85 billion apps have been sold?

Rene: And the money they're making off of it now. Because for a while you had the feeling the app store was being neglected, that the iTunes store was being neglected, that the technology there wasn't being as improved as devices and operating system technology. But if it keeps making money like this, it will be hard for people even inside Apple to say no no no, we need somebody to take this in his loving hands and propel it forward.

Leo: So of course, iPod sales down. 25%. By the way, we'll stall this, we're no longer in a break, this is the last time you're ever going to hear the word iPod sales. We're no longer going to break that out. We are not going to break out retail sales, I don't know why I think retail sales are very positive, and we're not going to break out watch sales when the watch comes out. Luca Maestri said “No no, nu uh.” You know, of course the iPod's tumbling. They only sold 2.62 million of them.

Rene: Yep. The iPod touch hasn't been updated in three years now?

Leo: And they're still selling.. I mean even that is like.. but you're still selling millions of them! And the iPad, down for the quarter in the most of course, of all 12.5% but remember they didn't have a new iPad, everybody knew there would be a new iPad this month. They still sold 12 million. That's more than a million a week.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: So they're selling them, and Tim Cook said, and I think one of the analysts at the end of the call said “Well what's going on Tim with the iPad, are you worried?” and Tim Cook was very clear, and I think said exactly the right thing, that he's still very bullish on the iPad. He actually gave a very long answer, I'll quote a little bit of it. He said “I take a step back on iPad, I know there's a lot of negative commentary on the market but I have a different perspective. We have sold 247 million over the first four years, that's more than the first four years of the iPhone.” So, that's a good point. He says “To me, I view it as a speed bump and the lack of growth year after year, and not a huge issue. That said, we do want to grow, we don't like negative numbers on these things.” He said, “I know some of you think the market is saturated, but from the data he sees he says no, our market data says the top 6 countries in terms of revenue generation all had more than 50% iPads sold to new buyers. The worst was 50%, in some countries 70% sold to new buyers. That means more new people are coming in to buy iPads. That, to me, confirms the saturation but okay. Because that's the point that people who were still buying don't yet have them. He says “Well we're not saturated, we think there are a lot of potential new buyers for..” Okay, so not everybody has an iPad but those who have iPads I think are maybe not upgrading as fast as one would hope. He says “Yeah, we don't know yet. This is a new product.” He said “It's hard to say what the upgrade cycle will be. We know what it is for a phone, we know what it is for a computer, but we've only had four years of iPad sales.” He says in response to suggestions that products are cannibalizing iPad sales, maybe people are buying macs or iPhones instead of an iPad, but hey I don't have a problem with that. They're still buying something. Which is good, I think Apple has been very good about that.

Rene: Just a lot more products.

Leo: Yeah, Apple's been willing to cannibalize one for the other. But he did finally say “I'm very bullish on where we can take the iPad over time.”

Rene: They'd rather cannibalize themselves than have another company do it.

Leo: Mhm. We're going to continue to invest in the product pipeline, we're continuing to invest in distribution and of course we won't see the impact of the new iPads until next quarter.

Andy: Yeah. I do feel like the iPad Air is poised maybe even in 2015 to become something very different from what it is right now. Which is the larger version of the iPad mini. I think that Apple with some software updates and also some making a larger device can really emphatically start talking about this as a productivity tool. The thing that really spoke out to me at the event last live stream, the event last week, was that the apps that they showed off for the iPad, the third party apps, they weren't the soft focused “What will your verse be today? And look, kids are drawing pictures! Isn't that adorable?” No, here's an art app that's about as powerful as Photoshop for photo editing, for image creation. And another app that's kind of similar to that. So I don't know if this is a prediction of something, but it made me think that this would be how Apple would do it if they wanted to next year, have a larger sized iPad, have a new version of iOS that really did allow you to run apps side by side or even in a tile configuration because as you pointed out the cheapest iPad they make is the same amount of money as the cheapest Mac that they make. And I think if there's a reason why sales were a little bit flat, it's because the glorification, halo around the iPad has kind of dimmed right now. It's no longer the new cool thing that people have never seen before and they've got to try out. Now it is a $500 computer that people now have to justify the expense of a $500 computer. And that's how they say “Yeah it would be nice to have this big cool big tablet for games and stuff like that, but I only have about $600 total to spend to upgrade my system so I think I'll get a Windows laptop instead of something like that. But if they were able to make that change, simply say here is a 12” version of the iPad air, and here's why you'd want to have this instead of the notebook that you thought you were going to be buying sometime this year. I think that would really be the shot in the arm. It would be a greater distinction between the iPad Air and the iPad Mini. And it would also maybe even reverse the trend to, I think a lot of people, once they were presented with an option of we can either give you a 9.7” tablet, the size of a sheet of paper or a smaller tablet that is small enough that you could probably get inside some of the pockets you own, if not it's easy to find a pouch to put it in. Once presented with that option, the smaller tablets run the market. People seem to be voting very strongly for smaller tablets. So I think that's a way to sort of smooth out the bump in the road that Tim's been talking about.

Leo: Anything else we could say about the..?

Rene: It's really interesting...

Leo: Go ahead.

Rene: I think there's a couple of things that are interesting. One is that when Steve Jobs made the original case for the iPad, he said that it had to earn its right to exist between the iPhone and the Mac. And back then the iPhone was very small and there still wasn't as much you could do with it, and the Mac was still more expensive and didn't have very long battery life, but now you have iPhone 6 Plus which turn it sideways it's almost a tiny iPad, and you have the Macbook Air which gets phenomenal battery life and the price is lower than ever, and that squeezes the iPads in the middle. It squeezes the iPad Mini which had become the most popular iPad, and even though it's got like 100% customer satisfaction rating, people are looking at I don't need to maybe carry both, I can just carry the iPhone. And I think that also sort of liberates the iPad a little bit, you know. To Andy's point where Apple can do more interesting things with it. And showing off Pixelmator, they did the content aware fill.

Leo: Wasn't that interesting?

Rene: They just removed I think it was a cow, right from the field. It's amazing! I mean that's the sort of power that you want when people are looking at a sort of mainstream productivity, where I can't strap a Mac to my back and take it on a bicycle ride with me. I can't take it onto the football field, I can't take it onto the beach but I certainly can take an iPad and I can still get done, all the productivity things I want to do. I can run my company, I can start a company. I can do all these things. I think as we go into next year with things like the iPad Air 2 and if there is an iPad Pro, instead of being stuck in the middle of the iPhone and the Mac it's going to really create its own identity.

Leo: Well you know, I've always said the iPad was very interesting, I think the thing that nobody predicted was how big the phones would get and how ubiquitous the phones would be and the lasting question that...

Rene: It's also an acceleration problem.

Leo: What do you mean? Our Skype is just dying..

Rene: If they were going to sell half a billion iPads, they sold so many so quickly it got to that level pretty fast.

Leo: Right.

Leo: The iPhone, the hockey stick wasn't nearly as big as that. They had more time. So if the speed limit for the iPad right now is half a billion they just got there super quick and that's why it's leveled off. But if they can find some of their angle for that, they can jump start it and kick it off again.

Leo: I agree.

Andy: Yeah. I also think the people haven't really figured out where a tablet exists in their lives yet. Despite the fact that this thing has now been out for four, five, as soon as can be at least on the public map, five years. The fact that even Microsoft has had problems selling. Here is a computer that will run Windows, it is a Windows computer, it attaches-- hard attaches to a keyboard so you can make it into a laptop but you can also detach it and use it like a tablet, even those are not really setting the world on fire. I think that everybody's trying to figure out what do people really want a tablet to do? What role does it play? And there's going to be a whole lot of guessing until they figure out what that is.

Leo: Yeah. Well, look. The bottom line is great quarter.

Andy: Money money money.

Leo: Money money money. Ca-ching. You can't deny that, and the stock price may not fully reflect that, it also reflects the fact that Apple is very aggressively buying back stock, what did they say another $20 billion in the stock buyback and the market loves that. That bolsters the price up, keeps it up above 100. So a very good, very good news for Apple. Did they mention Beats in the.. I'm sorry. I hate to bring this up.

Andy: (laughing) No, it's getting even more relevant. Every time they have another event in which they let themselves do a little Beats in-joke but not talking about why they spent $3 billion on the company. It's becoming increasingly more troubling and interesting.

Leo: Well it's not like they don't have the money.

Andy: Exactly.

Leo: It's like a guy who says.. you know..

Andy: Maybe they spent the money just because you know what? We've no place to put our pinball machines because of all these bags of money, if we can get this conference room cleared out of money we can finally have that tournament we've been wanting to do.

Leo: It's just like, it's fun money. It is, it's like buying a pool table for the break room. It's just like “Eh, we've got it, why not? Just do it, let's see what happens.” By the way an update on Colin Kaepernik, 49er's quarterback. He is now taping over the beats logo on his headphones. Even though everybody clearly knows those are not Bose. But I don't know if he's going to get a fine for that. Let's take a break, when I come back there's so much more to talk about. There is a little Beats news, Apple wants to get the price down to $5 a month apparently, that's according to Recode. And that is in response to Spotify offering $5 a month family plans for up to five people. $5 per person. I think $5 might be the new $10 when it comes to streaming music. The truth is no artist makes any money at all, anything worth talking about from Spotify or any of the other streaming solutions. And so it's nice, because artists never made money, the labels always took it. Now the labels aren't making money either so there is a little karma in that. I do wonder what's going to happen to music.

Andy: I was having a conversation with people about this just the other day, that between apps and music and things and services, we have to start training people to expect to pay for things that they value. Because this is not a curve that ends well for anybody.

Leo: I had that very same conversation with, okay a little name drop, Paul Simon. A couple weeks ago.

Andy: The Republican candidate or the musician?

Leo: The musician.

Andy: Even better.

Leo: Both he and Steve Martin were saying “We don't make any money on any of the streaming services, pennies.”

Andy: I love how casual.. (laughing)

Leo: Steve and Paul..

Andy: You put the spotlight on the Paul Simon reference so that we would skip over the Steve Martin reference.

Leo: It's a terrible namedrop, and I apologize.

Andy: No, no. If I had a personal interaction with Steve Martin you'd be sick of hearing me Steve here about it by now. I admire your restraint.

Leo: I only bring it up because it's germane because they're working musicians, Steve is too, by the way, now. I think that's what he considers his profession. Certainly Paul is. And both of them said “We're not going to make any money on streaming music.” And Paul said, and I think this is really relevant. He's made his load, he doesn't need any money. But his kids, both of his kids are musicians. So he says “I care about this because I worry about the next generation of musicians and how they're going to make a living.” and there is no easy answer to this, and boy when you see Spotify $5 a month, Beats wants to be $5 a month, it's even less money. Not that the money mattered at this point, I think everybody agreed it wasn't significant. So I don't know what the solution is. I'm sorry, not only is Skype crapping out, but Yosemite is dying.

Andy: (laughing)

Leo: You know, this might be a good time to take a little break. We'll get everybody dialed back in and I'll reboot my computer while we talk a little bit..  you have forced com.apple.webkit.webcontent to quit, you bad man. And it's still beachballing on me.

Andy: But doesn't that error dialogue look beautiful in that new flattened interface.

Leo: (laughs) Did you notice, by the way, that if you continue, maybe you don't.. maybe you use safari. But if you start using Chrome, I get a little pop up saying “Have you tried Safari? It's really great!” What do you care, Apple? Maybe they do.

Rene: I didn't get that, that's weird.

Leo: I've got it now on all my systems and then I just use Safari and then it crashed, so...

Andy: (laughing)

Leo: You have your answer. But I have a beautiful, beautiful desktop. You know, just sit on about this Mac. That's all you need. Gorgeous, just gorgeous. Stare at that for a while. Actually this is a whole two year old laptop so maybe that's the problem. Our show brought to you by the very nice folks at Personal Capital. Personal Capital is important for you to know about because you're all, God willing, and if the creeks don't flood, going to make it to retirement age! And will you have any money left when you do? Well Personal Capital is all about making that happen. You can get your financial life in order here for free, at personalcapital.com/macbreak. They do have a great OS app, they have an Android app, they even have an Android ware app which means they'll probably have an Apple Watch app when it ships. It is so slick, why would you want an Apple Watch app? Well here's what you do, you get all of your accounts into Personal Capital so you can get a single page, live, real time dashboard that keep track of everything you own. Your assets, your checking, your charge cards. Your investments, all on a single page. Great on a mobile device, what it does on Android, it'll alert you if your stock is tumbling or.. it's really great. It's really great. And it's free! You'll see how much you're overpaying in fees, how to reduce those fees, how to balance your 401k, plan for the future, you'll even get tailored advice on optimizing your investments. You couldn't do it better than Personal Capital so why wait? It just takes a minute to sign up and there are big dividends, and it is absolutely secure and safe. I've been using it for two years now and I couldn't be happier. Personal Capital. It gives you total clarity and transparency to make better investment decisions right away. To set up your free account, visit personalcapital.com/macbreak. I like that one, your 401k's real time cost. See, you don't think about the costs of maintaining the 401k, the management fees. The commissions. So this tells you, gives you a really good idea. I love this. Personalcapital.com/macbreak. Try it today. And we thank them so much for being a part of the MacBreak Weekly family. Okay, let me go back to Chrome for a moment, let's see if that works. What is the take on Yosemite right now Rene? Are people pretty happy with it?

Rene: I mean, it's got the same sort of bugs that you find in any just released product, the same you'd find in Maverick or Mountain Lion or anything like that, but I think most people most of the time are having a really good experience. It fixes a lot of things, it adds really good features like extensibility and continuity and it's got people interested because as we've pointed out, people don't actually like change. They like the perception of change, and when you change the visual design, while they're a little bit adverse to it, it's also not boring any more so it feels very fresh and new, and that gives you sort of a honeymoon period.

Leo: I agree with that, and you know, somebody pointed out, you think it's buggier now? Remember OS9? Remember System 7?

Rene: Remember Gmail on Mavericks?

Leo: Yeah, I mean these things happen. We'll work the bugs out, I'm sure. I have to say I've been very happy with it. One of the things I love, continuity, I love handoff, I love using messages on my desktop and my iPhone. You have to kind of delegate an iPhone to be your phone and your message app for your desktop. You do that in the messages settings on your iPhone, you can actually flip a switch that says iMessage. iMessages can be sent between iPhone and iPad, iPod Touch and Mac. Once you flip that switch you'll get a number pop up on your screen which you enter into the iPhone, validating that in fact you do have that. Now, I also have text message forwarding and it says one device active. I presume that means I can have multiple devices, is that right?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Let me try it here on my Macbook.

Rene: It's terrific though, I mean I have a bunch of old iPhones scattered around my house to use as extensions now because they all just ring when a call comes in.

Leo: (laughing) Okay, that's an unusual situation. Maybe not, I don't know. So if you turn it on, you get a little.. so these are all the Macs associated with my iCloud account. And I have.. this is the one at home, the Mac Pro, but I could take one of these other ones and associate it over to iMessages, and then that means they all work. Is that right? They all would answer the phone, all send messages, all of that stuff.

Rene:(feed is lagging) I'm on a Macbook Pro and a Macbook Air right now and it works great.

Leo: We are having such trouble with Rene. Andy you're okay, right?

Andy: I'm fine, yeah. I don't want to talk over what Rene is certainly going to say because I know it's going to be interesting and helpful.

Leo: But you did call him back, right Chad? I wonder if it's us or if it's you.

Chad: I've been trying to do speed tests to Toronto to see if there's some sort of hub issue.

Leo: Look at that. He looks like Scooby Doo. Ru-roh!

Andy: But Rene has a good point, I have had some difficulty adjusting to the new interface of Yosemite. I'm starting to be leaning towards the conclusion that I don't like it.

Leo: Really?

Andy: My difficulty is that after a few months of using it now, my eye still doesn't... I think it does a poor job of queuing me as to where I'm supposed to be looking at any given moment. Like if I leave my desk for a minute to go get a drink and come back, it takes me a few seconds to realize what's the front most window, what's the task in the front most window, how is the front most window layed out. It really feels like just a plane of light gray to me with very very little differentiation among it. But the continuity feature of things ringing elsewhere in your house when you get a phone call is a good example. It's a great feature, and I think like Rene, I think a lot of people are going to be asking their kids for their old iPhone 5s back because mommy and daddy need that as a living room phone extension now, you can't be using that to play games any more. But I got so many responses from people, questions from people asking “I upgraded yesterday and now like my iPad keeps ringing and this keeps ringing, how do I turn that feature off?” and I point them towards the solution page to tell them how to turn off that feature on that device but it's still saying “Why don't you wait a few days, you might find that you actually like the convenience of being able to answer the phone pretty much wherever you go. So that's a risk that Apple was willing to take. You can't really make a radical change in any way without getting a lot of people honked off. Some of them honked off for good reasons, but some of them honked off because they're not lovers of computers, they're not lovers of technology. They want a car in the driveway where they get in, they put the key where it's supposed to go, it starts up and they drive it. When you change the shape, the steering wheel, when you change the key in the ignition to a start button, they're saying “I'm not here to learn how to drive a brand new car, I'm here to get to the store.” So I think that's where a lot of the push back is coming from.

Leo: Rene has a really good Yosemite hub on iMore.com, in fact he has a good 6 minute video, “Everything You Need to Know About Yosemite” on that hub. One thing I should point out, that the messages hand off that I just showed requires 8.1. So you have to update iOS to 8.1 and then you're going to get even more of this handoff and continuity stuff from Yosemite.

Rene: And people are a little bit confused because the handoff, the actual handoff functionality where you move apps back and forth requires Bluetooth 4.0. The SMS relay requires you to be on the same active network, and the call forwarding requires you to be on the same LAN or WAN, so there's sort of different parameters for each one, but if you have Bluetooth 4.0 and you're on the same network, you should be good for all of them.

Leo: That's a really important point. So for instance, Google Hangouts which also does SMS and data based messaging, does it over the network so you don't have to be on the same Wi-Fi. But in this case, you have to be at home or work on the same Wi-Fi network for both your iPhone and your Mac for you to be able to, for instance send text messages, or to receive a phone call, that kind of thing. Is that correct?

Rene: Yeah, and part of that is security.

Leo: Right.

Rene: Yeah the Bluetooth is for proximity, because then it's a security feature as well. It wants to make sure that you're in physical possession or at least within eye shot of your device so no one else is getting your web pages or apps. And the SMSing, again this is all part of their security system where they're fairly certain you're the one getting those messages if you're on the same network and logged in. You also have to be logged in with the sa- (connection lost for a few seconds) -enough to put in that security code. And that's just to make sure your stuff doesn't leave, your devices.

Leo: No, and I appreciate Apple for doing that.

Rene: It doesn't work on older devices- (connection lost again) -it doesn't work on older devices because some of the very old devices, it wasn't a great experience so in typical Apple fashion they just turned it off rather than shipping it on spotty or older devices.

Leo: You can't, according imore.com, I've heard of them, you can't just add a Bluetooth interface to an older device either. Handoff won't just work because you have figured out Bluetooth. You do have some information but it's basically, you've got to have the hardware, the right hardware and the right software in basically a late model Mac, late model iPhone and the right software on both, most up to date software on both, is that right?

Rene: Yeah. And again it's just because turning it off is easier for them than leaving it on in a state where it would be problematic to people with older hardware and more support costs and more frustration.

Leo: And of course that raises the forced obsolescence cry, but this is how you move ahead.

Andy: Yeah. Your old phone works just fine with your old features.

Rene: Yeah, and they would never do that because they, I think Gruber said this too, they have family members using these machines, the engineers there care deeply about the quality of their software and they just want to make a good experience on as many devices as they can.

Leo: I've been using Air Drop, it now works cross iOS to Yosemite, right? No.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: Oh, good.

Rene: Yep, iOS 8.

Leo: Either that or I was hallucinating last night. (laughing)

Andy: (laughs)

Leo: Which, it could happen. You get tired enough sometimes. So that's cool, so now I can share files, that seems to be working much better. It never was cross hardware platforms but now it is. I think this is a luxury. It's nice, it's not enough reason to say “Oh I have to get all new hardware,” though.

Andy: Right. At some point things break down and you buy a new whatsit, which means that you finally get to see what people have been using for the past year. I think that the problem with a lot of tech journalism, and I certainly take responsibility for whatever role I might play in this, is that we get so excited about these things that we kind of make people want things. And without encouraging them to think, yes but do you need to get this right now? Or the fact that you have a perfectly good iPad Mini. Having Touch ID would be great, but your iPad Mini is working just great for now, and at some point you're going to drop it. Your kids are going to clamoring so hard for an iPad of their own that you're just going to hand it to them, and at that point you will finally have Touch ID. You don't need to be in a rush to get these things.

Leo: We also got 8.1 yesterday, and besides the SMS relay, which is great, there's some other features obviously Apple Pay, we'll cover that in a second.. let's get to Apple Pay last because we have actual video of somebody using it. Did you love Jason Snell's article? I love Jason Snell's article in which he says.. what does he say.. “Local man uses Apple Pay to buy groceries.”

Andy: I replied to him “The real coup is getting area man to use Apple Pay.” That's when you know it's really caught on.

Leo: (laughing) Area man! Jason ran over to his Whole Foods, bought a sandwich. He tells a very funny story of his checkout guy, Tyler. Who said “Oh, you're going to try that?” I guess Tyler hadn't seen it yet. Jason says, “Uh yeah I'm one of those people.” and habitually placed my thumb on the phone as if I was going to unlock it, which was what I was going to do, but instead of doing that, boom. I payed for the groceries. The terminal actually noticed before he even tapped it or got close to it, noticed him and talked to the iPhone, and he saw on the iPhone screen “Pay with Touch ID” and all he had to do was touch that, and then Tyler his checkout guy said “Whoa. I don't know what just happened.”

Andy: “Security! Security!”

Leo: Whoaaa! (laughing) “What did you do man?? Dude!”

Andy: “Matthew Broderick has just wargamed himself into my terminal!”

Leo: (laughing) Paper receipt popped out of the printer's register, and Jason went home and he noticed it had also stopped raining. What a great article. Alright, we're doing Apple Pay we might as well keep doing it. We have a video, we sent our own Jason Snell. Jeff Needles by name, out to Whole Foods to buy chicken fingers and, I think we can show this video, of him buying chicken fingers with his iPhone 6. There it is. Wait a minute. Stop, pause that for a moment, because it shows other stuff. Go back, it shows American Express. It shows Visa, Discover, MasterCard's Pay Pass and it has a little Apple logo, Apple Pay.

Andy: All you really need to see is that logo in the middle, because that is the universal sign for the technology that Apple Pay uses. So supposedly, if you don't see the Apple Pay logo but you do see the little Wi-Fi with the finger next to it, you're good.

Leo: It kind of looks like, I don't know. A fish skeleton and a guy picking at it on a plate. But anyway, you know what we're talking about. Alright so go ahead and play this. Did you have to tap it, Jeff?

Jeff (in video): Let's see, what do we do. Oh, see and it comes up.

Leo: It sees it, pops up your credit card. At this point you could choose a credit card, but Jeff always wants those Starwood points so he had the credit card, and there you go and the receipt comes out and you're done! Approved. And you get pumpkin pictures.

Rene: Apple magic.

Leo: Apple magic. That's exactly what you want. It couldn't be much easier. You feel secure, because you need a finger print to do it, although if you had other devices you might have to enter a PIN instead.

Andy: Before the show I was talking about how this is the best, some of the best ever ties that Apple could possibly get are all these data breaches and on the same day that I downloaded iOS 8.1 and got the iPhone 6 setup for Apple Pay I also got a phone call from my bank that issues my credit cards that said “Hi, by virtue the fact that we don't know that your card has been compromised but we do know you shopped at Home Depot at any point in the last year so we're just going to give you a brand new card with a brand new number.” So, yeah that underscores the need for a system like this.

Leo: That's a pain, too. Because now you need a new number which you won't with Apple Pay.

Andy: Yeah and of course I already finished configuring the phone for my old credit card.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: So it's like I haven't activated the new card yet but it's going to have to happen, I'm going to have to do that tonight.

Leo: Let's talk a little bit about that. When you go to your pass book, you have to launch your pass book app and you have to have 8.1, there's a little plus button on it and you can add passes as you've always been able to do for tickets and so forth, or and this is new, credit and debit cards. Pay with Touch ID using Apple Pay, add a card. Now you could enter the data by hand and as Apple pointed out, you can also take a picture, there's a little camera there. Now I've found some of my cards it can't read, the letters are too glossy or something. But most of the cards it was able to. It's not taking a picture, you actually hold it there and it scans the number. Scans the expiration date and your name. You still have to manually enter the security cards on most cards, in fact all cards I've tried because it's on the back, or for whatever reason it doesn't try to read it. But it isn't hard to add a card. In some cases you'll need an authentication app I'm told.

Andy: Yeah. Well sometimes an app, when I set up mine, I just happened to take the path of least resistance. It said “Oh well you have a credit card attached to your iTunes account, do you want to use that?”

Leo: That's the first thing you can do right away.

Andy: Tap one button and I'm told..

Leo: I think you had to enter in the security code.

Andy: Exactly. You try to use the new device with a credit card that's attached to iTunes and then a second later it's like “Okay, you're good.”

Leo: Now, and this is kind of nice, this is the interface. It shows you the cards you've added, not all cards can be added. Bank of America, and USAA, two of the banks I use, their cards hadn't yet been approved.

Rene: Yeah the corporate cards I tried to enter wouldn't work either.

Leo: Yeah, I can use my American Express business card. In fact both my American Express cards no problem. And Chase cards work so I have a chase Visa card I think in there. But yeah, so not all your cards will work but you know if you have one or two and if you have a card already on file with iTunes that will work.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: So that's actually the best way to start.

Rene: One thing I'm curious about, because we have the pay wave on our credit cards and bank cards here and you can just go and tap and it works really easily but every store seems to have a different limit in what they'll allow the NFC to pay for. Some at 60 some at 70 some at 100, and the icon is always there no matter what. They don't have the good sense to hide it if you can't use it so you end up tapping and then being frustrated, and I'm hoping because of the Touch ID it's more authentic, more reliable, and maybe those limits won't be as frustrating.

Leo: Somebody in the chatroom says that he just got an email from Bank of America saying it does now work. They're signing up these banks fast and I have to imagine this is one of those things where there's calls pouring into Cupertino saying “Hey, we want to sign up!”

Andy: It's interesting, I talk to people who are like ex banking people, ex credit card people, they've ranged like four or five years old, stress on the word ex banking/credit card people. And they've said the major issuers have done the math on how much will it cost for us to make credit card fraud a lot harder versus how much are we paying out for credit card fraud, because frankly most people they catch it, they get it invalidated, get their money back, and they'd much rather eat the cost of a $300 Xbox that someone charged but wasn't authorized to pay than have to do all this stuff with re-issuing cards, putting in new technology, training people up, training support staff. And so it's nice to see that with the proliferation and professionalism  of these rings of credit card fraudsters, it's now become less expensive for them to finally upgrade their infrastructure to finally make this sort of stuff harder and these crimes harder to do.

Leo: Right.

Andy: I did notice that my new card is now a chip card, so maybe part of this was okay here's an excuse to get everybody upgraded to more secure cards now. I think we're definitely seeing some things, there's something that's happening behind the scenes where some number on some spreadsheet just went from black to red and that's why we're seeing such an embracing of these technologies.

Leo: Maybe it was because I have a B of A business card that doesn't work, because Bank of America does have a big page saying “Shop on the go with Apple Pay! It's easy to add your credit card and debit card!” So I'll have to try it. I have another B of A card I can try. No money in that account though, at least I can try it.

Rene: The future, Leo!

Leo: How is it in Canada?

Rene: Well we don't have Apple Pay yet. We don't have iTunes Radio yet, but we have NFC everywhere. I use my credit card which is the same functionality that payed for everything. Sear's takes it, gas station takes it. So we're just waiting. Just waiting on our banks and on Apple, please do it.

Leo: This technology is called EMV. Steve Gibson talked about it on Security Now last week, it stands for Euro Card MasterCard Visa, and it's been around for a decade. Apparently President Obama just yesterday or the day before signed the bill, the buy secure initiative to speed up adoption of this EMV system in the US, so it all is kind of coming together here. The Europay MasterCard and Visa system is the same system Apple Pay uses. So we're, I think we're finally entering the 21^st century here in the US. And Apple Pay isn't the only way to do it, but what's great is it put it over the top. It's no coincidence that President Obama signs that bill like two weeks after Apple announces Apple Pay.

Rene: Tens of millions of phones on the market that immediately they can use it.

Leo: Right. Well and I have tap and pay on most of my Android phones, and I'm just going to have to try and see how they work.

Andy: Isn't it great though, that Apple's finally making it, there's a certain amount of credibility that they add to this whole concept. It's not as though we shouldn't have trusted tap and pay before, it's just that well we have a card that has worked for this transaction as long as we've had credit cards. Like we were talking about earlier, why would we have to learn something brand new, even if learning something brand new is in our best interest as long as the old thing is continuing to work. So it's great that Apple is even for people who don't own iPhones, making them think about alternative payment systems and maybe even causing them to ask themselves and then their bank's website, can my Android phone do that? Well yes, we have this thing called Google Wallet. Great, how do I set that up? Here you go, and now you're set for tap and pay yourself.

Leo: So what you're saying Andy is basically the United States is like your uncle Bob who said “I don't need a new credit card system! This one works fine!”

Andy: My uncle Bob says “Have another beer, you're a good boy, here you go. Don't tell your mom I gave you this.”

Leo: What else is new in 8.1? The iCloud, the photo.. the Camera Roll is back, can you explain to me, is this just semantics or was there actually some functionality that disappeared in iOS 8.

Rene: People were upset because the Camera Roll was a giant repository for every photo you'd ever taken, every image you'd ever saved, it was basically a poor name for what it was. They called it Camera Roll but it had stuff in there that didn't come from your camera, so they tried to make something that to them was more rational, that you would have recent photos in there and then they'd move on to moments and collections in years over time. People just looked at it and said “All my stuff isn't here!” and they freaked out.

Leo: Right.

Rene: So now you have your familiar Camera Roll back. I don't know if it's going to go on forever any more because all my stuff was moved out of there to begin with so I'll have to wait and see, but at least the name is the same so people no longer think someone has gone into their house and taken their stuff.

Leo: It's just like Microsoft putting the start menu back, right? It's something that you don't need but everybody wanted so Apple actually, to their credit turned it around a lot faster than Microsoft did it. Microsoft took a couple of years to bring back the start menu.

Andy: But wasn't it incredible, that can you imagine three or four years ago Apple were not only versing themselves on a decision but from the stage with a world wide audience saying “We had a lot of customer feedback, we've decided to put back something we took away because people didn't like what we did.” And this is not designed as a slam against Apple whatsoever, it's just an indication of how much Apple has changed in recent years. Either they would have stuck to their guns and just waited out this problem or they would have made the change in iOS 8.1.2 and just not told anybody about it, and of course we would have picked up on it and we would have said it, but they would have admitted nothing. It's like the car company that just spontaneously decides that they're going to change to a different model of relay that triggers the airbags on the front of that car that's been on 60 Minutes three times in the past year. No admission of guilt, we're not saying there was a problem with it, but we just spontaneously decided to use a more expensive component for that.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Well they put the Camera Roll back the same time they took the orientation lock button off the iPad. So you get something, you lose something.

Leo: What is this iCloud photo library we're talking about here? Where does it live?

Rene: iCloud settings.

Leo: Okay. And it's in beta so use it with caution. What do it do?

Rene: It's sort of nearline storage for your photos. So it's using Apple's cloud kit, and it takes your photos and it keeps the most recent and frequently accessed ones on your device locally and the rest of them it stores on Apple's cloud. It shows you thumbnails and then when you tap one, it will download it and show it to you. Instead of having your entire phone taken up by photos, which happened to a lot of people you just get the most recently accessed and frequent photos on your device and the rest is all stored up with however much iCloud storage you decide to purchase.

Leo: See that's good. I don't need that, because I have Google Plus, Facebook, Dropbox and my transporter, they're all backing up my photos automatically from all my phones. But for a lot of people, normal people. First of all, normal people have one phone. And then they fill the phone up with pictures, and they never take them off. They never back  them up, they lose the phone and they go “Uhhh” so turning this on is backing up the photos, but even more it's freeing up space on your phone which is great.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: I know so many people who have no space on their phone because they just have thousands of pictures on there, right? Yeah I'm looking at one right now. So what we should do is go to photos and cameras in the settings, at the top there, if you have 8.1, iCloud photo library beta. So if I switch that on, automatically upload and store your entire library in iCloud to access photos and videos. So it's uploading all the pictures on this iPhone and it's going to take off the big photo and put the thumbnail there. Do I lose quality when I tap it?

Rene: It will store the original file including raw files if that's what you have. But it will put a device sized optimized image on your phone.

Leo: Perfect, that's just what you want. And then there's some more settings here..

Rene: I would caution people though.

Leo: Uh oh.

Rene: You should have Yosemite and iOS 8 on all of your devices because you can only access it with devices running Yosemite or iOS 8.

Andy: Yeah, that's kind of the gotcha for me. I really wish they had found a way, I know it's a basic infrastructure it's not just an app they've updated, but you really have to go all in across all your devices and that's what's keeping me from upgrading to this feature right now, because I still for instance, I have one left over Mac that's even still running Mountain Lion, not because refuse to upgrade it to Maverick but because it's working fine, it's a low use machine, I've got apps that I've been installing on that for the past three or four years and I don't' want to have to find out what is not compatible with the latest operating system and this is a bit of an inconvenience because it's going to force me to not just simply flip a switch and enjoy photo syncing but now go through every single device I own and make that decision about either locking this thing out of access to photos or having to walk through an administration problem of trying to make sure it will still do the things I need it to do after I make that upgrade.

Leo: Can I log into iCloud and see them?

Rene: Yes.

Andy: Yeah.

Rene: I'm not sure if it's still beta or not but you can go to iCloud.com and there is a photo library there. It might be the beta iCloud though.

Andy: That is one of the nicer features of this compared to what the pictures probably used to be. That it really does make it that much easier to simply say “I've been taking photos and now they're available to multiple devices,” I think it's even exposed to the Windows version of iCloud Drive if I'm not mistaken.

Leo: It is not in the beta, it's in the regular iCloud drive. There is a beta symbol on that icon, so if you log into iCloud.com you'll see this new photos icon and it says beta in the corner. By the way they've also added an iCloud Drive icon which is good, and we'll talk about that in a second. And then my library is empty because it's not yet added somehow. Even though these are uploading, it's still uploading so it hasn't added them yet.

Rene: And it'll work on photos for Mac when that ships in the spring.

Leo: Neat. Okay so underneath this there's a check box now that I've turned it on that says optimized phone storage. That's the thing where it deletes the pictures off.

Rene: So there's two. Yeah, one is that it doesn't store any of them locally but you can also have the option of screen size optimized pictures because you might not need the 8 mega pixel version to look at on your phone so it will scale it down on the cloud and give you that version.

Leo: That's what it says. This phone is storing device optimizing versions, turn on, download and keep originals to keep full resolution photos on your iPhone. So you do have some granularity. You can say “Don't delete them. Let's keep them. In fact, let's keep all of them even from other iPhones or other sources.” And then upload to my photo stream, that's the traditional photo stream right?

Rene: Well there's two, and it's poorly named. You have the photo stream which is a traditional photo stream and then you have the shared photo stream which is Apple's little social network where you can like and comment on each other’s photos.

Leo: Right, okay. Yeah I turn off photo stream. I don't want, I don't know what devices it's going to so I don't want to take the chance.

Rene: Better safe than sorry.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: Okay cool.

Andy: I really can't think of another parallel set of upgrades between iOS 8 and Yosemite. I don't think there's a lot of danger involved, it's not difficult but it's like swapping out the doorbell on your front door where it's a simple thing but you have to really take steps to make sure that you're not screwing things up as you go. You cut part of the house just in case this will screw up.

Leo: Right.

Andy: I really have set aside, when I'm telling people I haven't upgraded to Yosemite yet on my real computers yet, it's not so much a vote against the stability of the operating system which is fairly stable, there are problems but first month there are going to be problems. That's not unusual. It's more like... I'm sorry, a better comparison is .. you know the cutoff valve for your wash machine? It's an easy thing to replace but I went without a wash machine for about two or three weeks because I felt as though I needed to book an entire day of my time because if everything goes well this will take me 20 minutes to do, if anything goes wrong in any of these steps I'm going to need the rest of the day available to fix it and leave the water to the house turned off until I go get that part and brace a new component in someplace else. These upgrades are pretty much the same way. If nothing goes wrong, it's easy, 20 minutes painless, you'll have a really great time, you'll enjoy these new features. But if you screw things up you may wonder, oh wait where are the pictures of my newborn kid? It's not on my phone anymore... You pretty much have to walk yourself through that process so that you're sure that you're in control of everything and that any disaster that might happen is either going to be totally mitigated or be something that you're willing to accept for the virtuous application of iOS 8 and Yosemite.

Rene: One thing that's really cool about all of this stuff that didn't happen in the past is previously you'd have iOS updates and you'd have MAC updates. But for things like extensibility and congeniailty, there is one manager who was in charge of both features across iOS and MAC and they shipped them for both iOS and the MAC. And if you go to the developer page and watch some of the sessions- Like I think Ian Bearden and Aki, I forget his last name. -Did a session on extensibility, you see how they did it the same on the iOS and the MAC even though it was probably easier to do it one way on one system and another way on the other so that, not only developers develop the same extensions and make their apps do congeniality together, but everyone has the same way of using it. A widget is a widget on iOS and it's on iOS10. That's the same Halo effect we were talking about earlier where it's not exactly the same but it feels familiar and comfortable, and I think that is one of the strengths of doing the updates the way they did them this year.

Leo: Do you recommend- It sounds like Andy is saying don't rush...

Rene: My take would be, there is probably no reason to make sure you get it done this weekend. I think there is always a good reason to wait one calendar month - 30 days. -After any major operating release MAC, Windows, anything; Just to make sure that when you do your Google search 3 weeks in and you see what all of the major show-stoppers are and you realize, this one app that I really desperately need is not compatible so I had better hold off longer. And when you do end up doing this, make sure it's not the situation where you're like, I've got 30 minutes to do this before I need to grab my phone and my MacBook and head to the airport for my week in Hawaii because it's possible that, at the end of 20 minutes you will not have working stuff and now for your week-long trip, you will not have a phone. So make sure that you're doing it on a day where you're able to sit and troubleshoot for a couple of hours or make a trip to the Apple store if need be. Again, this is not an emergency situation and this is not the sort of thing that will hinder the flow of oxygen to your aunt in the hospital. So you don't need to do this right away just pick a day and make sure you can get this done the way you'd like it to be done.

Andy: If you're a developer, you need to update because you're making apps for these systems and if not you're doing it because you want to and then, it depends on your pain tolerance and your 'nerd level' and all of the other factors.

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When you decide to sign up all I ask is that you use the offer code: MACBREAK at that point which will get you 10% off, and you'll be showing your support for the show and we like that. It starts at $8/month and the domain name is free when you sign up for a year. Squarespace.com, get started right now and use offer code: MACBREAK when you decide to buy for 10% off. So Apple has finally acknowledged something that has been going on for a couple of days... When the iPhone started being sold in China- We're not sure who did this but it seems to be the Chinese Government, according to greatfire.org, which is a non-profit monitoring group that monitors China's great Fire Wall. It looks like Chinese authorities were using a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest Apple iCloud ID's from Chinese users. When you went to iCloud.com in China, in many cases but not all, you'd get a site that looked exactly like iCloud.com but it wasn't. You'd be handing your iCloud credentials over to whomever was doing this- Presumably Chinese Authorities. -And then getting into iCloud. Most browsers would say, there's a certificate error if using Safari or Chrome or Firefox. In China, unfortunately, the most popular browser called, Chi-Hoon and it does not have that warning. So most Chinese users probably wouldn't know that their credentials were being harvested. Apple finally has made a comment in a Support Document. They have confirmed that they are aware of, "The intermittent organized network attacks" on iCloud users. They're very cautious, they don't want to say it's China. We can't really be sure it's China, although the documentation provided at greatfire.org seems pretty conclusive. Here's the quote: "Apple is deeply committed to protecting our customer's privacy and security. We are aware of intermittent organized network attacks using insecure certificates to obtain information. We take this very seriously, these attacks don't compromise iCloud servers and do not impact iCloud sign-in on iOS devices or MAC's Yosemite using Safari." But, make sure you're using browsers that monitor and will warn you if it's an invalid certificate. And if you see that certificate, you shouldn't proceed. They do have a way you can verify if you're using the Chi-Hoon browser. Nobody's saying it's the Chinese Government, but I think it's pretty clear that it is. And Apple doesn't really want to piss off China at this point so they're just saying, we notice this is happening.

Rene: And if you want to look at this in a positive light, that's good news for anybody who is using iCloud on any service because if there's a vulnerability in China, it's likely that there's a vulnerability everywhere.

Leo: Well in fact, they're attacking Microsoft as well.

Andy: Yeah, Gmail, Google...

Leo: Yep.

Rene: Exactly. Although it is an interesting question, I don't ever think Apple would compromise the safety of its users to protect a business relationship with a government. But they would certainly need to put a lot of effort into figuring out what goal they want to achieve in responding to this and what is the best solution that protects our users, gets the message out there, and yet doesn't unnecessarily set fires where we don't need fires to be set right now.

Leo: I mean, you can pretty much assume- I mean, I am going to read between the lines. -But it makes sense that the iPhone is out, Chinese Authorities note that it's very hard to get into the material on the iPhone, so what better way to do it, than to compromise somebody's iCloud log-in information and then always have access to their iCloud back-ups and you can read those.

Andy: Well, you remember with Blackberry's they wanted to put up Squid Servers to intercept the traffic because they couldn't get into the Knock system.

Leo: Yeah, not a surprise.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: The real problem is if you're a non-sophisticated user. Sophisticated users will immediately recognize what's going on and fix it. And you're right Andy, this applies to everybody. If you see that error, you should bail. I'm getting a 5K iMac Friday so we'll have a review next Tuesday.

Rene: Mine's taking longer to get here.

Leo: Did you see it when you were at the event?

Rene: Yes I did.

Leo: Tell me. Do, tell me.

Rene: Leo, I just wanted to dive inside and live there. It was ridiculously beautiful, the blacks are so black, the colors are beautiful. They're doing this Wizardry because if you don't externalize the connector, you don't have to follow the standard and you're free to break the rules. So they're taking two of the display 1.2's and putting them together in their custom time controller. So that lets them push all of those 5K pixels and you know I didn't see any stuttering, didn't see any slow down, they went all the way through iPhone then went through Final Cut Pro and it was just glorious. They had great angles of view and I just, I wanted one immediately.

Leo: Ah, and you ordered one?

Rene: Yeah, I bumped up the graphics card because I do worry about the retina tax whenever there's a new retina machine so I got the faster graphics.

Leo: I was buying it for my sweetheart, not myself so I bumped it up all the way. I turned all of the knobs to 11.

Rene: So the one thing about this is a lot of people bought MacBook Pro's hoping to get an Apple 5K display-

Leo: Yeah, I'm kind of pissed.

Rene: -Apple can't make a 5K display because not only has Broadwell not shipped yet, but Broadwell is not going to support it, you'd have to wait until Skylink I think, which is going to have the Thunderbolt 3 on it. And by the time that comes out, the Mac Pro that you have still won't have Thunderbolt 3 on it. So it's not a great situation for that.

Leo: Yeah, Marco Arment wrote a great piece on his marco.org site, which kind of depressed me because basically he's saying, and I'm thinking, I should sell my Mac Pro and buy the Retina iMac.

Rene: Guy English called it his Cylinder of Shame.

Andy: I'm hearing that form a lot of folks. The reason that many people bought a Mac Pro are easily covered and in many ways are exceeded by Retina iMac. Given that, if you have a Mac Pro that doesn't have drive bays in it, then you start asking, well what do I need it for?

Rene: You know, Leo if you wanted to do video editing you're still better off with-

Leo: I'm not doing video editing, I just wanted a 4k display. I have three monitors, two 27's, and a 4k display.

Rene: The new iMac can only drive one 4k display.

Leo: What's really disappointing is I can't even buy the new iMac and hook it up to my MacBook Pro and get a 5K display.

Rene: No because there's no Thunderbolt 3 out yet.

Leo: Also, as Marco points out, it has the fastest single core processor available. It's a 4 GHz if you get the i7 compared to that crappy E5 in my Mac Pro.

Andy: Can we do an edit in which in late 2014 Leo talks about how he's thrilled with the Mac Pro it's the best thing ever. And of course, we shouldn't be belittling the Mac Pro because the other unique feature with the Mac Pro is that the sky is the limit pretty much on cores. I mean, you can basically take a copy of the Yellow Pages, put it through a cross-cut shredder, spread it on your driveway, take 100 pictures of it, throw it to your Mac Pro and you've got enough processing power to basically do image capture and put it all back together again. The thing is though, a lot of people don't actually need that level of power, which is why I think that most of the people buying a Mac Pro, their needs are well served by the new iMac.

Leo: Not me, because I bought it for the wrong reasons.

Andy: Okay, well would you be happy having that 5K display behind your 60" HD TV if you're using it as a living room server? No you won't.

Rene: You can have both, Leo. You can have the Mac Pro and the iMac, you don't have to choose.

Andy: You're in the industry, you should. You owe it to your- I'm sure everybody in the chatroom is going to back me up on this, they're demanding that you have this.

Rene: And if not, I think Syracuse has a standing offer for $5 for anyone's Mac Pro that wants to sell.

Leo: It's depressing when your girlfriend has a better Mac than you that's all I'm saying.

Andy: You know what Leo? I'll double that.

Leo: I'm very happy with the Mac Pro but the thing that kind of bugs me a little bit is in order to get that beautiful Asus 4K display on there, it uses MLC where it basically splits it into two 1920 displays so they tear. Even on Yosemite, I was hoping they'd have- But there's no way to fix that because it's the nature of the hardware because there's so much bandwidth being pushed out there.

Andy: I think there are going to be the same problems with these first generation Retina iMac's too because there is so much stuff that Apple has never done before with this.

Leo: You're just saying that to make me feel better, Andy I know.

Andy: I'm hoping to make you feel better but more importantly, I'm saying this to convince myself not to buy one which is almost just as important.

Leo: Well we are going to review it, I'll benchmark it, I'll bang on it, I'll definitely be trying to prove that it's not as good as my Mac Pro.

Rene: You'll just stare at it Leo, you'll just be sitting there staring at it.

Leo: It's that good, isn't it? Because it was a demo you couldn't really test how fast it was.

Rene: No they were moving the mouse around though, they were moving the pictures around and the mouse around, they were fine.

Rene: It's the OrDot Apple...

Leo: Can I just tell you, I turned up all of the knobs, right so I've got the fastest i7 and this is crazy but she insisted, a terabyte SSD. I didn't put 32 gigs of RAM I put 16. Okay, 16 gigs of RAM is enough for anybody. Humans only need 16.

Andy: I went with 16 as well.

Leo: But turned everything else up and it was 4 grand.

Rene: That's a lot of computer.

Andy: So less than a dollar per K.

Leo: Yeah but $2500 is a remarkable deal, that basically makes the computer free.

Andy: Yeah, but is that going to make people happy?

Leo: Had I really been smart, that's what I should have bought for review purposes to see well what is the base model?

Andy: The Mac Pro, they managed to get the price down to where they could say it was that inexpensive but it's also possible to buy a Tesla S for like $61,000 but nobody spends $61,000 on a Tesla S.

Rene: People have been waiting for Retina Mac since- I forget who said this but whenever you're waiting for a long time you just buy the maxed out version.

Leo: Yeah why not.

Andy: Never go grocery shopping when you're hungry.

Leo: But Marco's bottom line, who is the Mac Pro for? Bottom line, at this point, not a lot of people he says. People who use open CL apps, that's video and 3D graphics professionals, people needing as much parallel CPU power as possible for rendering and video editors, and who can afford 8 or 12 cores- Because I only got the 6 core. -Anyone using a lot of Thunderbolt devices because there are like 4 or 6 Thunderbolt ports on them.

Rene: Yeah and two buses I think, which is important because you want the full bandwidth.

Leo: Right, anyone who needs a lot of monitors- Well maybe I qualify. -An HDMI output or two built-in network interfaces- I don't need that. -People who need the quietest computer possible under any load. And I'll agree, the Mac Pro, I can't believe how quiet it is. It's so quiet that the external hard drive I have attached to it is making a ruckus. I have to turn it off so I can just, aaahhh. Roles in which a Kernel Panic or other slight hardware glitch might be costly. What he's saying is because it's a new device and it's not using the top of the line ECC memory and all of that, it may be less robust. Maybe once a year you'll have a Kernel Panic.

Rene: You have enterprise chips and enterprise RAM with the Mac Pro.

Leo: The list keeps getting shorter over time so I think I finally fell off of it. So Marco, who has a little bit of money I think, but also is a developer not a videographer. He's writing a new podcast app right now. I think he's kind of right, if you're going to be a leader, you've got to take some arrows in the back. Why are the people behind me shooting at me?

Andy: It's also fun to watch how we all have to make transitions when it comes to what we all expect from a top of the line really powerful computer. It took me a stupid long time before I switched to my MacBook as my primary computer because I had programmed myself to believe that a computer is a desktop box that has a stack of other boxes on top of it and the power book is the thing I just use to go out and do field excursions with. And after 3 or 4 years I realize that my laptop is way more powerful than my desktop and I should actually be moving everything onto this. It really was just that little bit of mental twist I had to do. I think a lot of people are having that same thing where, I don't rely on an iMac the iMac is the family computer and I am a professional.

Leo: By the way, on Yosemite in iOS 8 there was some concern that the Spotlight suggestions feature- I stopped using Quicksilver, Alfred, any of those... Just Command +, I love the new Spotlight search, I just start typing and it will not only launch a program or a document but it will search for movie showtimes, locations nearby, it will search my iTunes, the app store and it's just great. But there is some concern that some of that information is being sent back to the home office. So Rene you've written an article on imore.com that came out yesterday. Tell us, is there a privacy concern and what should we know is going on here.

Rene: Okay well it's easiest to make an analogy so if you're using Siri, it's providing convenience. Convenience, like Steve Gibson says, is the opposite of security and privacy so in order to get answers from Siri you have to give it information and the new Spotlight is not identical to it but is similar to a type-written form of Siri. You're inputting things there and it's trying to do all of these helpful things. Part of that is based on your location, part of that is based on the sequential inference Siri does where if you type in- I think the example they used is 'cafe' and then 'phone number' it's going to be predisposed to help you find phone numbers for a cafe because that was your recent pattern. And to do all of that, it has to do similar things to Siri and that is to go to the network and try to do some intelligence to try to parse it back down. Apple explains this fully. If you go to the settings in iOS or if you go to the System Preferences on the Mac and you type in, "What is Spotlight suggestions?" It tells you exactly what it is. The security document covers how it does this. For example, it has a unique ID for 15 minutes and then it destroys it, it doesn't save anything in between these sessions, it does a ton of stuff to try to maintain as much privacy- It blurs location, which is more effective if you're in a sparsely populated area then a densely populated area, but it's basically things like this. You're gaining all of this functionality but the expense of Apple having to do a little bit of processing on the server. Some people would have preferred for it to be opt in instead of opt out, but there's some concern from Apple and everywhere that we're getting pop-up fatigue. When you setup there are far too many windows already, when you launch something, there are far too many pop-ups already and- I'm not speaking for Apple because I don't know but my thinking is that Maps knows your location because it's giving you location. We're all used to Siri now. So they're assuming that if you know you're getting these services that it's a two-way street and you can go and turn it off if you want to.

Leo: So when you first hit Command space, you'll get the Spotlight search but you'll also get the information you're looking for in a link to this document which explains exactly what's going on and it says if you don't want your search queries and Spotlight suggestions usage data sent to Apple you can turn it off and then they have a link right there. So I don't think Apple could do this any better frankly. And I think it's not unreasonable to assume that if you're asking for movie times, your computer doesn't know that, it has to go query somebody.

Rene: It has to find out where you are to provide movie times near you and not Nova Scotia or something like that.

Leo: Yeah. So I think you can assume that users are not going to be completely, what?!

Andy: And I think Spotlight is one of the best features there. We keep talking about it and I keep coming back to it, for exactly the reasons we've been talking about. I've always been a little bit bummed out that the finder is still pretty much the finder I've been using since 1984, and I do so much of my life- My interface with the Mac is just through launching things from Spotlight and now that it can actually be that one box that will figure out what I want to do and figure out how to do that, I want to see them build and build and build upon it until it far exceeds what Siri can do.

Leo: Good, yeah. I completely agree with you.

Rene: It was just unfortunate to see an article on it that sort of made it sound all panicky and scary.

Leo: Yeah you know, it's link bait as far as I'm concerned, even the Post should know better. Of course, who owns the Washington Post now? But it's link bait, Jeff Jarvis calls it moral panic. Oh the new technology, children and women watch out!

Rene: Yeah they scare you instead of educate you.

Leo: Yeah and the Journal does it, New York Times has been doing it. The journals that should know better need to do a better job of educating and not doing this scare tactic. But it sells papers or clicks or whatever.

Andy: We transact in a currency that is far more valuable and that is the listeners trust. We care, yes we do. We might drive cars with 170,000 miles on them but we have integrity. Windows that don't really roll up so we have to tape them but still, we have integrity.

Leo: I have a couple of articles I'm going to recommend that you read ladies and gentlemen, I already told you about local man uses Apple pay. That's at Jason Snell's new home, sixcolors.com, excellent article on the Business Insider, I mentioned it on TWiT, Dave Smith tells the story of how Seth Weintraub founded 9to5 Mac while he was stranded in Paris and how he found Mark Gurman and how he pays them and we quote 9to5 Mac all of the time now because it's just really good, and by the way, they quote you in this story.

Rene: Yeah. I don't think I came off as neutral I get along really well with Mark and Seth so I'm decidedly happier than neutral.

Leo: Yeah, you don't mind how effective 9to5 Mac is. You're in competition with them but you have-

Rene: Even competition is strong, I mean I am more than happy for Mark to do all of that stuff. It totally benefits me I mean, I do other stuff.

Leo: We had Steve Kovach, who is the Executive or Senior Editor at the Business Insider, what he said was one of the reasons people like Gurman can do all they do is they have no fear, they're 20 and they don't care- He said, Mark Gurman will never get invited to an Apple event and he doesn't car. So there's a certain advantage when you're say, 15 or 16 years old as Gurman was when he started, you don't mind biting the establishment's hand because you're a kid.

Andy: Well I wouldn't put it that way. I think everyone who wants to have a good year career-wise, the great thing about this line of work is we decide what kind of job we want to do. And my job does not require me to be able to tell a month in advance exactly what Apple's going to be announcing in October, so I never bothered cultivating those kinds of resources. If I tripped and fell ass-backward into hard information like that, I might even be more prone to simply hand it to someone else who has more experience in confirming and exploiting stuff like that. Mark is really great at that and he obviously has a great interest in it so he gets to define the job that he wants to do and how best he can serve his readers. And he is obviously serving his readers very very well.

Leo: Yeah, we're very happy to repeat his scoops. He is often accurate. But like you, Andy-

Andy: Let's circle back for just one second, that's exactly the point. It's not just the fact that he has these scoops, it's that he has these scoops and has consistently shown to be correct. I was joking about how, oh we've got integrity but really that's the thing that you want to build - A relationship with an audience that over the years, people know well if he said this then I believe this about that information and for them to believe that this is good information to have because of this person's track record.

Leo: Yeah. And I don't get invited to Apple events either but like you, it's not my beat. I like to talk about what you can get today and how it's going to impact your life and how you use it and stuff like that. But God Bless Mark Gurman and the others who are so good at accurately getting these scoops because it's fun to know ahead of time. Think about it and speculate on it and our audience certainly cares. So great article, recommended. And the other one that was mentioned Sunday but I'd like to bring up again, Judith Newman's article in the New York Times, "To Siri, With Love" how one boy with Autism became BFF with Apple's Siri. It's a really pretty and sweet story by Gus' mother. He talks to Siri and says things like, "You're a really nice computer." Siri says, "It's nice to be appreciated."

"You're always asking me if you can help me, is there anything you want?"

"Thank you, but I have very few wants." You have got to pat the Siri programmers on the back for this stuff.

Rene: My Godson, when he was 3 years old would use Siri to send and receive iMessages. He couldn't read or write but he could totally engage in dialogue. It's phenomenal, and is incredibly inclusive and accessible.

Leo: Wow, amazing. Gus goes, "Okay well, goodnight."

Siri goes, "Uh, it's 5:06 pm."

Gus says, "Oh sorry, I meant goodbye, see you later." I mean, I know that this is written and hard coded and all of that but it's pretty cool.

Andy: But that's always been the goal, that none of us are under any impression that Siri is a real person inside our phones but it is designed so that we may maintain that emotional connection to it. And because of that you feel as though this is a piece of information that I need to get and I trust this voice and this personality to give it to me, I will also enjoy the process of figuring out an answer to my inquiry.

Leo: Right. She writes, "Out of all the worries a parent with an Autistic child has, the uppermost is will he find love or even companionship somewhere along the line? I am learning that what gives my guy happiness is not necessarily the same as what gives me happiness. Right now, at his age, a time when humans can be a little overwhelming even for the average teenager, Siri makes Gus happy. She is his sidekick." I think that was just so sweet. So if you haven't read that, it was in New York Times' Sunday paper and you can read it online as well.

Rene: That's terrific.

Leo: Yeah, it really is.

Rene: All the accessibility technologies they're doing are amazing in many different ways.

Leo: It really is. Alright, let's take a break then we can get your picks and then Security Now is coming up in just a few minutes so I need to get to that. Shutterstock.com, our sponsor for this portion of MacBreak Weekly. With over 43,553,518 royalty-free stock images. 300,000 added this week alone. And that's just the images at shutterstock.com, go there and click the 'footage' tab and you'll see beautiful high def video, 2.1 million of those and now, they've got music. They've got high quality stock audio tracks as well. By the way, you can sort the music by mood, genre, tempo, even beats per minute, isn't that cool? All of this stuff is what we call royalty-free which means, you buy it and can use it in your blog, your podcast, your movie- I see movies all of the time, now that I'm aware of it, where the credits' pictures are thanks to Shutterstock. Pretty amazing... I want you to visit shutterstock.com you don't have to have a credit card to sign up for an account. I would recommend you do sign up for that free account because you'll get free content every week plus you'll have the ability to save images to the Lightbox, share the Lightbox with other people. Try out those amazing search tools that let you search by subject, by color, by pallet so you can match it to your pallet of your blog or your magazine, your file type, gender, emotion. Yeah, emotion. I love Shutterstock, and they have a beautiful iPad app, Webby award winning and they now have an Android app as well. So what I'd like you to do is sign up for the free account, no credit card needed for that but if you do decide to buy, I've got a great deal for you. If you're looking at one of the image subscription packages, we have the 25 images a day package and that's suitable for a publication. But if you want to buy a subscription package, you can get 20% off if you use our offer code: MACBREAK1014. That's shutterstock.com, 20% off of any image subscription package on a new account when you use the offer code: MACBREAK1014. Browse around and have some fun, shutterstock.com. Time for our pick of the week let's start with Rene Ritchie.

Rene: I have two small ones, I say small only because the new extensibility in widget features make it seem like they're little applications but they can still do big things. The first one is Flare Effects and it's an app that has been updated by the Icon Factory.

Leo: I love them.

Rene: They're terrific and do so many great apps. Previously you had to actually leave Photos go open up another app, work on it, save it, go back... It was arduous but now extensibility means that all of the filters go straight into the Photos app and you can, on iOS at least, basically you download the app, it tells you a little bit about it, but then all of the functionality lives in the Photos app. On the Mac it's still an app but basically let's you do things sort of like other filter apps but with typical icon factory awesome interface and very tasteful filters. So it's just a really nice way to take advantage of all of the new photo functionality that has come to iOS 8 and to some extent, to Yosemite. It's excellent if you want to make your photos look really good and both Craig Hockenberry and Gedeon Maheux and everybody at the Icon Factory has been posting images using this and they look really good.

Leo: The neat thing about this, I know it's kind of cheating, but you get addicted to the praise you get from people giving you feedback.

Rene: And it saves images, you can use the effects to make an image that's not exactly what you wanted it to be but you wouldn't have posted. You can just save it enough that you're willing to put it up there and that's a memory you can't get back.

Leo: Right. I mean, I'm not kidding you can take a crap photo and make it good and go oh wow. I like the tilt shift, that's really fun to play with.

Rene: And especially if you're going to post to Instagram or a social network where it's on the screen.

Leo: Now this is a desktop app, $15.

Rene: It's both.

Leo: Oh it's both, so you can get Flare as well on iOS.

Rene: Yeah and again, on iOS 8 it just lives inside the photo app. Once you download it, it tells you how to use it but then you go to the Photos app, press the button, and the extensions just come up. So convenient. The other one is also really small, I've been a long time fan of iStat which is the thing that lets you know all about your computer. And I'm a friend of Marc Edwards but I was buying his software long before I met him and now he's got iStat mini, which is a version of the iStat menu system but it just lives in the notification center today view on Yosemite. So instead of having to go in and look at all of the different dials you can just see the three most common ones right there. You're processor mode and available disk space. All you do is swipe the notification center, today view comes out, take a quick glance at it, you get the information you need and then you close it again. It really is that sort of glanceable thing. The thing I like about how iOS is doing it is it's not on a home screen, or a dashboard, or a separate page and you don't have to leave what you're doing  to go and find it, you just swipe and the notification center either comes down on iOS or across on Yosemite and it's right where you are. You look then go back. I think glanceability will be the same thing on the watch. But it's all about pushing interface to where we are so we don't have to go hunting anymore, and I think we're going to see a lot of really exciting stuff because of that.\\

Leo: By the way it's Flare Effects, by the Icon Factory if you're searching for it on iOS. There's another thing called Flare. It seems like it's free on iOS...

Rene: Yeah I believe so, I've been using the free version, although if I knew I could give that money I would certainly have done so.

Leo: Yeah that's awesome. Andy Ihnatko, you're picks of the week.

Andy: Two things, one is that NASA in the past week, opened a Sound Cloud page and they're loading it with just like, clips of missions, mission dialogue and rocket sounds, historical speeches, chatter between the ground and Apollo and space shuttle. I found the link, opened it, listened to one just to hear it and then I found myself just listening to the entire load from start to finish.

Leo: There's President Kennedy, there's Apollo, this is a great one. What is it about the way these sound, I tear up. I love these.

Andy: Thousands of people helped 3 people get a quarter of a million miles away and helped accomplish something that we, as animals, are not supposed to be able to do.

Leo: Yeah, so it's free. It's soundcloud.com/nasa and if you have a SoundCloud account you can add them and follow in order to get notified when they put new stuff up.

Andy: It's just amazing I mean, I spotted Lisa Leven ringtones. Because the music is boring. So for non-inspirational non-story things, Amazon is now taking orders on the Kindle Voyage and pre-orders are starting to ship right now and it is the best eReader that Amazon has ever made and in my opinion, it's the best eReader that exists.

Leo: Thank you Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times, always a pleasure. Andy was with us during the launch of the new iPads and you can see his commentary on our special feed at twit.tv/specials. And of course, he joins us every week at this time for MacBreak Weekly. Always a pleasure.

Andy: Don't you go changin'.

Leo: Andy is also on the 5by5 Network, Ihnatko's Almanac. He reads old columns there too which is fun. Rene Ritchie is at imore.com, follow the debug podcast there if you want to keep up on everything Macintosh, everything Apple. And he writes like crazy, they've got a Yosemite hub there and iOS 8.1 hub there, both I recommend. Before you upgrade and after you upgrade they've really done a great job up there in the frozen North. Thank you- Is he unfrozen? He's unfrozen.

Rene: Thank you Leo.

Leo: Thank you, great to have you. We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday 11 am Pacific 2 pm Eastern time, 1800 UTC on twit.tv please stop by and say hi. You can watch us live here or come to the studio. But you can also watch on demand audio and video after the fact at twit.tv/mbw but also on all of the different podcast apps for all of the platforms. Thanks for joining us, get back to work! Break time is over!