MacBreak Weekly 454 (Transcripts)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly, Rene Ritchie has the day off but hey, great news from MacWorld.com, Susie Ochs joins Adam Engst from TidBITS.com and of course Andy Ihnatko. We'll talk about the latest Apple news. Some, you know, three week in reviews of the Apple Watch and a whole lot more. Plus, a fix for a bug that's been bugging me for some time. It's all next on MacBreak Weekly.

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Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 454. Recorded Tuesday, May 12^th 2015.

Hey Schlomo!

Leo: MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by LegalZoom.com. If you're looking to get a trademark, copyright or provisional patent application and more, LegalZoom can help you get started the right way. LegalZoom is not a law firm but can connect you with an independent attorney. Visit LegalZoom.com and use the offer code MBW in the referral box at check out this month for your special discount. And by Audible.com. To download the free audiobook of your choice, go to Audible.com/macbreak. And by SquareSpace. SquareSpace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Go to SquareSpace.com and enter the offer code MacBreak at checkout to get 10% off. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news with Apple experts. Of course, Andy Ihnatko our regular in-house from the Chicago Sun Times and the celestial waste of bandwidth, cwob.com. Andrew.

Andy Ihnatko: I'm hungry and I don't really know why.

Leo: I can't imagine.

Andy: I had a big breakfast, I had two slices of cold leftover pizza not 45 minutes ago and suddenly I want a snack. Preferably out of a paper bag.

Leo: Mhm. We've got some artisanal snacks. Including, I guess you saw this on Shark Tank. Micro... mini popcorn. (laughs) That's artisanal, the world's smallest popcorn. Look at that, it's teeny.

Jason: Like a little Mickey Mouse or a Minnie Mouse, yeah.

Leo: Did they get funded on Shark Tank?

Andy: I believe they did though I can't remember which shark backed them.

Leo: And it's not Mark Cuban for sure. Hey look who else is here, Adam Engst from TidBITS, the longest running Mac publication ever. In history.

Adam Engst: Nice to be here Leo.

Leo: And you will never be eclipsed.

Adam: (laughs)

Leo: I pretty much guarantee that.

Adam: Not unless someone gets that time machine thing doing something other than backup.

Leo: Adam, you're standing up aren't you?

Adam: I am. I do work at a standing desk.

Leo: Your feet don't get tired?

Adam: No, no that's not the problem. Actually if anything my back gets tired sometimes, but I have... let me do show and tell. I have this thing called a varier stool.

Leo: The hell is that? That's not standing if you sit on a stool.

Adam: It's, well, you don't sit on it you sort of lean on it.

Leo: Oh.

Adam: It's round so I can just sort of perch a little bit here.

Leo: It's like Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz, when she was tired they put her in a leaning ward because she couldn't sit down in her... whatever. And you know what? We've got a newbie, everybody's gotta be nice, best behavior. Susie Ochs is here, she's executive editor at MacWorld.com.

Susie Ochs: Hi.

Leo: Speaking to us from her own professional MacWorld.com studio. Nice to see you Susie.

Susie: Thanks, nice to be here.

Leo: It's... just a little tip, jump right in. If you have anything to say, don't be polite.

Susie: Okay, I'll try.

Leo: Just jump right in.

Adam: Try not to be polite, really hard.

Leo: This is the last place to be polite. How many... Dvorak was so funny. He was saying, “There's a fashion salute, Apple Watch.”

Andy: (laughs)

Leo: Yeah, see. Yup, yup. We're all doing it. Wait a minute, that's a Moto 360! Wah, wah, wahh.

Andy: What do you mean wah wah? I'm doing the one... I'm using the one that actually has like customizable watch faces.

Leo: Oh shut up.

Andy: And has, you know... eh.

Leo: Oh shut up.

Susie: I can customize the watch face any way Apple wants me to.

Leo: Any color you want as long as it's black with Mickey.

Andy: I'm kind of waiting for WWDC, I hope that somebody has the forethought to make T-shirts establishing that the official like colors of Apple developers now are powder blue and sort of a grayish metal. Because every time I'm talking to a developer they have like the one kind of Apple Watch that was available in an expedited purchase mode to developers and they're all like powder blue band and brushed aluminum.

Adam: Hey, that's why I wear white.

Leo: I like yours. And you're a runner Adam, how's it working out for you as a runner?

Adam: Pft. Oh, well come on let's get real. It's not in the slightest bit worthwhile for running.

Leo: Oh. Well that... I think Jony's going to be a little disappointed to hear you say that.

Adam: Well, does he run?

Leo: Apparently not.

Adam: Okay, so there's two ways you can use it and I will give them credit for this. You can use it when it's attached to your iPhone. So you carry your iPhone when you run. This is annoying, iPhones, particularly say an iPhone 6+, attach it to your arm you look like Christy Turlington Burns, she could take off with that thing on her arm. They're just... they're big, they're heavy, they're annoying. So you don't have to carry an iPhone with you when you run because the Apple Watch has an accelerometer in it and it can tell when each, when you take a stride. And if you run with it some with your iPhone, it calibrates your stride length. So if you...

Leo: Somebody told me that on Twitter which is interesting because I've been using on a treadmill. So I'm not going anywhere, and so it's been wildly inaccurate measuring calories and steps compared to what the treadmill is saying. But somebody said no, you need to go out and you need to run outside so the GPS can adjust for your... it adjusts to your stride?
Adam: Yeah it adjusts to your stride, because if you think about it every time you take a step there's a shock, and you move your arm and there's a shock. So there's a shock, shock, shock.

Leo: So it knows how many steps, it just doesn't know how far I went.

Adam: Precisely. And so once it calibrates it's actually not too bad. However, it's not too bad as long as you always run at the same pace on a flat surface because as soon as you start going uphill or downhill your stride length changes, as soon as you start going different paces your stride length changes and then it gets less accurate.

Leo: I realize it just confused the hell out of my Apple Watch, I came in on a Segway today.
Adam: (laughs)

Leo: So it says you just went 2.2 miles and took three steps. You must have the stride of a giant, my friend.

Adam: So it's... it's really, it's interesting. I mean I've been enjoying playing with it. But it's really one of those things where I'm having... I'm having to really think about what other people might do in terms of fitness related activities to figure out if it's going to be useful at all. I mean calories is the other thing, it's very big on calories. It wants to tell you how many calories you're burning.

Leo: But it doesn't really know, does it?

Adam: Well let's assume for the purposes of argument, I don't know, did you see that video that Apple did where they had people hooked up to oxygen masks and all that.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: Let's assume that it's actually pretty good at calculating that, although I'm dubious about that because how fit you are determines how many calories you burn for the same exercise. I burn fewer than someone who doesn't run at all.

Leo: Do they ask... do they ask your age, your weight?

Adam: Yes.

Leo: They do, so we...

Adam: Yes, it asks age, weight, height and gender.

Leo: Okay so it does set it, at least set itself up that way.

Adam: But here's the thing. What difference does it make? I went for a run today, according to the Apple Watch I burned 567 calories. What does that mean?

Leo: Right.

Adam: And before people say “Well that means you could eat 567 more calories,” I don't think that has any meaning either because how many calories are in different macro nutrients, protein fat and carbohydrates. You don't process them 100%, so if you eat 2,000 calories of Hagen Dasz it doesn't mean you're going to process 2,000 calories.

Leo: Well but that's true of anything, that's not an Apple Watch issue.

Adam: Oh, not a tall. But it's more that the Apple Watch is focusing on calories as this primary measurement without any... I can't, I won't say any science behind it because I'm sure there's science behind it, but I'm trying to figure out what the takeaway is for someone. I mean, all I can really come up with is more calories is better. If you burn more calories, that's good. But it's not something you can plan on, you know. It's like well if I burn 300 calories, that's going to make some difference as opposed to if I burn 250 calories.

Leo: So I rowed yesterday and it says I went to... I rowed for half an hour, indoor rowing, and it says 319 calories which is... you know, that's like if you looked it up in a book you'd see that. You know, although that seems like a lot for half an hour actually, I don't know if I got...

Adam: But you know, I had... there was a package of M&Ms I had on the plane the other day that claimed it was 250 calories.

Leo: Right.

Adam: So is there a connection there? No.

Leo: No.

Adam: I don't think there's a connection there.

Leo: They're not related, are they?

Adam: Right, so why are we bothering with this measurement at all then?

Leo: Right.

Susie: It's such a disconnect from the other fitness bands which are all steps. They say 10,000 steps and just take 10,000 steps and you're on the road to health and so they said...

Leo: Then we should mention there's...

Susie: You can't set the goals here in steps, you can only set the goals in calories.

Andy: But it's kind of... it's at least viable in that, I'm thinking of the line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where, the actual book, The Hitchhiker's Guide where it's inaccurate, at least it's definitively inaccurate. So I mean...

Leo: Definitive and consistent.

Andy: Even if your bathroom scale is off by like four and a half pounds, it will still tell you that you're heavier today than the day before and so if it's at least consistently inconsistent by saying that I'm low balling you in your number of steps by consistent factor every single day it will still help me understand how much I'm moving or not moving on a day-to-day and then a week by week basis. It's when you get the... it's when you get accumulation of data that these things really pay off.

Leo: I want a print out for people who are new to the watch that there are actually, with the watch, come two different fitness applications. We're... the calorie measurement and things like measuring your distance running and stuff is the workout app, which you actually have to launch.

Adam: You have to launch it, and actually I will note that it's also very hard to see in the sunlight.

Leo: Yeah. Yeah. And you have a choice, you can set a goal for net calories, as you say calories. Set time, set miles, or what I always do is open, and when you press start it goes “Beep, beep.” And now I'm running...

Adam: And here's the other thing...

Leo: By the way the other thing that's cool is that it pings you every mile which is kind of neat, right?

Adam: Yeah. Standard in all running watches, but yeah.

Leo: Oh it is? Oh, never mind.

Adam: Yeah. The other thing that's annoying actually is that you can't see all your metrics on one screen.

Leo: Right, you have to swipe.

Adam: So if you're running, you want to see your distance, your time and your pace... I mean, you don't want to see calories because calorie is completely irrelevant to running. But beats per minute, your heart rate possibly, but you can't customize those screens. So you can choose a little bit of what shows, you can get... sometimes you can get two of them showing, you can get elapsed time and one of the others. Possibly elapsed distance and one of the others. But again it's for what you might want to see you actually have to like interact with it while you're running which is just kind of difficult.

Leo: Yeah, that's...

Adam: And of course you have to interact with a touch screen, most running watches you can reach over and press a button without looking at it so you don't have to be trying to manage the little touch screen interface.

Leo: So what you're saying is this does not compare with dedicated runners watches, like the new Garmin which just came out which does heart rate built into the watch.

Adam: Not in the slightest. I run with a Garmin 620, Tanya just got a Garmin Vivo Active and they just work way way better. Aside from the fact that they had the GPS chip built in so they can actually track where you are, and they're uploading to things like Garmin Connect and Stravos so that you can do all the social aspects and web tracking of what you want. One thing that people may not realize, when you do a workout, you can see the details of your workout right afterwards, and you can save it. But once you've saved it you can't see the details on the Apple Watch any more, you have to go to the activity app on the iPhone to be able to find out what you did in the past.

Leo: Now that's the other app, and that's one... I don't know, I'm going to say I'm not a runner, so the workout app you know for me... it's just like keeping track of my workout. But the activity is that circle circle thing. And you have a glance for that, and that's the one that says stand up every hour.

Adam: It tells me to stand up every hour even though I'm at a standing desk, so...

Leo: Well see this is the thing that's weird, it doesn't count the fact that you're doing something as having done anything. So it just does it every hour, it says “Time to stand up.”

Adam: So here's the thing, I've been looking into this because I'm trying to figure out what those moves ring. There's move, exercise and stand.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: And so the stand is just you have to have stood for a minute in the last hour, but I think it does check whether you have changed. So if you've just been standing for an hour it doesn't know.

Leo: It doesn't matter. (laughs)

Adam: Exercise...

Leo: Is heart rate probably, right?

Adam: Yeah, it seems to be related to... let's see... I'm blanking between the difference between exercise and move. One of them is what Apple calls a brisk activity, but they don't...

Leo: That's exercise.

Susie: That's exercise, yeah.

Adam: Yeah. And so again, I don't know what that means. Like if you're walking around but your heart rate goes above some number, that counts as brisk exercise.

Leo: So I have been, I have burned 81 of 500, my goal of 500 calories for the day in the move section, although I have not had any brisk exercise and in fact that's what it says, 0 of 30 minutes in exercising.

Adam: In all of those if you swipe up you'll see a graph with more stats.

Leo: Yeah, previous...

Adam: It's just a different display of the same thing, through a graph.

Leo: Right, here you go... what time, you know, hour by hour basically. So you could... I mean, this is... it has more cool factor probably than any real health benefit.

Adam: Yeah I mean what I keep trying to figure out is what's the goal? You know, let's say you want to be improving your health in some way. Will this help? And that's what I want to, I'm trying to suss out.

Leo: I think it will. It will for me. See, you're a trained professional. You run because you... you're a runner. I am not. I am a sitter. So for me anything, and this I've... but I've had the same experience with the jawbone up and the FitBit and everything else, anything that kind of says oh your goal is 10,000 steps and you've got 8,000. I'm more likely to take the stairs or to walk or park further away and walk, incents me to try to make the goal and I think that's valuable. It's not going to be valuable to you Adam because you're trying to do something else. I don't know what it is. Run away from the past.

Susie: Yeah for Adam it's a step down from what he normally uses but for a lot of people it's a step up from what we normally use which is nothing. But the problem I've had, I want to know what the heart rate threshold is because I have a fit bike at home, I got it on Amazon, fit bike 2.0 so it's a little stationary bike with a desk attached. So I can sit there and do my work and get some peddling in, or I can just put my iPad there and watch a movie and do like a real workout. But if I'm working and peddling it's... I'm not... it's not very vigorous, I'm just kind of you know... I'm still moving, so it's more like a standing desk than like a treadmill desk. But yeah, so I clocked 40 minutes on there with the workout app just to kind of test it out but I was sort of dogging it for the first fifteen minutes and that didn't count as exercise minutes, my exercise minutes weren't the same as my time spent in the workout app, so yeah there is a threshold there where if you're not working hard enough, that got credited to my move ring in the activity app but not the exercise ring, and... yeah. And took a road trip this weekend and I got this stand thing and I just did a little chair dancing in the car and it said great you stood, so...

Leo: Yes, all you have to do to stand is go like this.

Susie: Yeah.

Leo: Wave your arm around.

Susie: And then sometimes when it tells me to stand I use that as an opportunity to go over to the fridge and get a snack, so...

Adam: (laughing)

Leo: That counts.

Susie: Not exactly an intended use but at least I stood I guess.

Adam: So Susie I think you could probably hack the exercise thing by when you get on your fit bike, just peddle really hard for say 20 seconds, get your heart rate up and boom, you're good for a while.

Susie: Oh, okay. I'll try that.
Andy: This is the problem. It's like... every time you hand us a game, there's always... you'll play the game and enjoy it and then you find out how to fix and rig the game.

Adam: Yeah, right.

Andy: We've got our own version of deflate gate happening every second with the watch. Where it's... but I really do think that the most valuable thing that fitness watches, no matter what they are, can do is simply expose data that is normally invisible to us. The latest thing that I've been sort of paying attention to with the experimenting with the Microsoft band is like sleep time, that's actually... it's very very easy to... you wake up and the watch says “Oh, are you up now?” and press a button and well this... and this will log you in as being awake as opposed to asleep, we've been watching for the past x hours and you get your score for sleeping and it's like... after a week or two I've been wearing this now for two or three weeks and like wow. I really don't get enough sleep. And so I'm aware of all the times I went up until 2 or 3 in the morning working and I don't have an appointment in the morning so I'll just sleep until whenever and I think that I'm still getting like six, seven or eight hours just like... okay, got three hours that night and then four hours the next night, slept in and got four hours the next day. Okay, new rule, we're in bed at midnight and we don't get out of bed until 8:00 for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't have figured out unless I had numbers saying “here's how many we think you slept.”

Adam: Really? You didn't figure this out on your own? With a basic clock? I mean, come on, you know when you go to bed, you know when you get up. It's not that hard!

Leo: (laughing) I need an app for that.

Susie: You know when you went to bed and when you got up this morning.

Andy: It's different.

Susie: But if I ask you when you went to bed like four days ago you'd probably have no idea.

Adam: It was like 11 to midnight.

Andy: I can tell that I'm really tired because there was something I needed to finish last night so I'm on about 4 hours of sleep right now, and normally the way I correct that is saying “Okay make sure we go to bed nice and early tonight and we sleep in the next day.” But you don't really look at here's how many times you've been pulling that kind of crap on yourself, and it's the sort of thing that says here is a deficiency not just in how things went Monday night but here is your deficiency in your whole attitude towards sleep. That means that you need to apply a new mission rule that says that there is no being... there is no being out of bed and in the office after midnight. At midnight you are in bed, and not only are you in bed but the lights are off, the screens are off, the laptop is closed. You have to make sleeping a priority, now fortunately sleeping is a lot easier and a lot less rough on my body than walking six miles a day. I think I can handle sleeping six to eight hours a day. But that's the sort of thing that we're talking about.

Adam: So is the Microsoft band suggesting that you take a nap right now Andy?

Andy: If it were I would buy three of them right now.

Adam: Does the Microsoft band suggest you take a nap?

Andy: I would buy three of them right now, one on each ankle, one on the free wrist and just one free wrist for the Moto 360 and that will be good for me.

Susie: I'm testing the Jawbone Up 2 right now and I've been using it as a sleep tracker because unlike the Apple Watch it lasts you know a week on a charge, and part of that is because they want you to use it to track the sleep and yeah, I pulled an all-nighter last Thursday to write something big that I really wanted to get up on Friday and yeah, it's... and it suggests, it says “Okay, you've been averaging three and a half hours this whole week, you have not been sleeping well.” And it suggested to me, so Friday, I don't sleep during the week and then Friday I go to bed as soon as my son is in bed I go to sleep at 9:00 and I kind of try to catch up, it's not a good habit.

Leo: Sleep when your children sleep, that's the rule.

Susie: Yes. That's the rule.

Adam: Unless you have teenagers.

Leo: Yeah if you have teenagers, do the opposite.

Andy: I really think that...

Susie: Yeah Jawbone has this thing they call the smart coach and so on Friday it was trying to just nudge me back down, it didn't know about my cranky habit so I was like how about tonight you try to get in bed by 1:00AM, because that would be a huge improvement over what I was doing all that night and I said “”Oh, Jawbone, I'm going to bed at 8:30 so you don't worry about it.”

Leo: Oh Jawbone, you silly...

Susie: The smart coach is kind of cool, I like that feature. It looks at your patterns and then it says, okay compared to other Jawbone users that are your age, that are your gender, you're doing better or worse. It gives you some of the science, it says on days that you don't sleep you're going to be tired the next day but it gives you better insights than that.

Andy: Once again the knowledge of how the human brain works. That son of a bitch, I work and sleep more than me, screw him, nobody sleeps more than I do! I'm going to sleep twelve hours tomorrow just to beat him and grind his butt.

Susie: I love sleep, that's where I'm a Viking so it's been really helpful, and...

Adam: I read somewhere that for every... what is it, for every hour of sleep... is it every or every ten minutes? Some amount of sleep that you lose at night you will spend 8.4 minutes more the next day browsing the web aimlessly. Just wasting time.

Susie: Yeah.

Adam: Because your focus will be gone.

Susie: You're just not all there.

Leo: In my day we called it wool gathering.

Andy: There's something very nice about kitty pictures.

Leo: The less sleep I get the more wool I gather.

Andy: But yeah, I mean you're right in that I think that it's interesting when like tech reviewers are writing about this stuff because it's mostly... most of the piece is going to be “Oh my god I didn't realize I'm sleeping so poorly.” But as soon as I finish this review of the new Jawbone I'm going right to bed. But yet...

Susie: It's concerned.

Andy: That's one of the nicest things about the Microsoft app. It, after it's collected a certain amount of data it says “Okay here are some things we seem to have figured out that... we're just going to put this in front of you.” It basically does the intervention like... “Andy, you were on the place of peace and safety, now we don't want you to actually tap any buttons, we just want you to look at this data as all of our sensors go around the room and say about, talk about how watching your inactivity has affected us.”

Leo: So is it safe to say that the Apple Watch is not a good choice, if you're choosing it just for exercise, sleep monitoring, health purposes.

Adam: Well you can't use it for sleep monitoring at all because it... battery won't last.

Leo: Obviously it's a bad choice for that, yeah.

Adam: Yeah, I think it really is not... if that's your goal, you really should get a device that does those things specifically.

Leo: Dedicated devices that do a much better job.

Adam: They're cheaper and they're more capable. That said, the Apple Watch does some things which are really really cool, but those should be the reasons why you're buying it.

Leo: Hey, maybe you know, I get achievements. They're stupid, but I get achievements. Can I go back and get them or...?

Adam: They're in the activity app.

Leo: The activity app will have my achievements?

Adam: No, the actual activity app on the iPhone.

Leo: Oh there's an app. Wow. I don't... I'm so...

Adam: Yeah, it's where the (cuts out) goes too.

Leo: Oh I didn't know that.

Susie: Yeah when you set up your iPhone it puts the activity app on there.

Leo: Ohh, I get... oh!
Susie: So there's your rings, it's got all your data...

Leo: Look! And look at all my achievements, I got a red button.

Adam: See that's what I said, they're kind of inscrutable.

Leo: And I got... wow, but I got a green button. So...

Adam: Apple has a video where they explain several of the achievements. I don't know... most of the rest of them that are just, as I look at them I just don't know what they mean. Does this mean I'm on star patrol or what?

Leo: First walking workout. So you get stars just for the first thing you do. This is kind of cool, you get a calendar. Hey, thank you. I didn't know there was an app on here. I don't know where Apple put it.

Susie: I'm surprised there's no social component. A lot of the fitness things let you compete against your friends and that's just totally absent from here.

Andy: Or at least support each other.

Leo: This doesn't seem to have much of anything in it really, it's just...

Adam: Susie I actually think that it won't be coming later, because you think about what Apple's done, they really are all about I, me, mine. It's synced between your devices, not sharing with other people. They don't do social, they don't do sharing, that kind of thing. So I'd be really surprised if they would push this in a big way. I mean, maybe they'll get you can share a work out to Facebook or something like that via the share sheets but if it's not there now it just seems odd that they wouldn't, they wouldn't have had it at the start.

Susie: Well they were so gung-ho on like game center challenges and game center leaderboards and stuff that...

Leo: They should have gamified this, yeah.

Susie: They should gamify the fitness a little bit and just have you challenge your friend like “I can burn more calories than you can this week and winner buys snacks.”

Adam: Do people still use game center?

Leo: No.

Susie: No.

Andy: They ruined it when they removed the green felt on the tabletop.

Adam: I signed...

Andy: It's interesting to think about how it's been well publicized all the fitness experts that Apple hired in and all the medical people they hired in to beef up the health aspects of Apple devices, including the watch. I'm really curious to know how many absolute civilians they brought in to really sort of give that reality check saying that “Yeah I know that you think these charts are fascinating.” You're talking to a person who will walk a mile, who will take a car a mile to go to the library instead of walking. You're not going to get me to look through, be impressed by my progress through graphs and charts and little stars I have to launch an app in order to get.

Leo: So this stuff goes into... alright so this is good to know which I didn't know. And apparently when it installed this it just automatically stuck it in the folder that I'd already had called health, which is where HealthKit was so it must have known.

Adam: Health is the other one.

Leo: Which one?

Adam: Yeah, that's totally inscrutable. Totally inscrutable.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: I mean, if you go and I mean half the time you look at those things and you say “Show all data” and it just dies. I mean it can't even do it. But the axes on that graph are almost impossible to figure out most of the time. It is just...

Leo: What is this? All recorded data? Oh, I guess I can get my heart rate for... yeah, no. I guess not.

Susie: My favorite analogy for the health app is that it's kind of like your medical chart where like they have to show it to you, like it's your data, it would be really awful if they were like “You can't see your own chart.” But when you look at your medical chart like, it's a medical chart, and you have no idea what it says.

Leo: Here's the sleep analysis I got. No data. I guess if I had another, if I tied it into the Jawbone or some other device it would...

Andy: I think this is an opportunity of Siri though. Siri can do so many great things. If it's been, if it's thought of as something more than a hands free device. Imagine that if you... if yes all this data is there but it's like... just in case people have that feature turned on, I will say “Hey Schlomo, how's my health doing?” and it will just simply say “Over the past three days you achieved your walking goals, however you haven't been getting up enough and I wish you would, and it looks like you should get some more sleep.” And just put it into one sentence. The way really good weather apps that will give you the charts, the barometers, the weather maps, but the thing you zip right to is tell me in two sentences what the weather's going to be like tomorrow and it's always “It's going to be cold tomorrow but it's going to warm up into the 70s or 80s and there might be some rain at 4:00.”

Leo: By the way I think we are now, from now on officially dubbing SIRI “Schlomo.” From now on, if anybody has to say the “S word” just say Schlomo.

Andy: I've been doing it for... ever since getting like no fewer than like seven like sort of testy emails saying “Yeah, your last podcast, here's what happened when you set it for ten minutes.” So it's hey schlomo.

Leo: You know what the funniest thing is, first of all, in order for that to do that, you have to have that feature turned on that when your iPhone is plugged in, it's listening. And I'm surprised the number of people who have it turned on because I gotta tell you... mine... my phone is waking up all the time.

Andy: A lot of people listen at their desks and they've got it plugged into a charger.

Leo: Yeah but like the TV is on, all they have to say is “In Syria today...” “What, yes? I'm sorry, I don't know what you just said.” It's...

Adam: Someone was telling me that he actually had his phone and his watch talking to each other.

Leo: Mhm.

Adam: You know, that the phone said something, the watch thought it said “Hey Siri” and then the phone thought the watch said... I guess it kept calling back and forth. I gave up on it, my wife and I tend to listen to iTunes view lectures to help us go to sleep.

Leo: Oh, that's a good way to go to sleep.

Andy: (laughing)

Adam: We learn so much in our subconscious, it's great. But I mean the iPhone was hearing itself say “Hey Siri” Which is just stupid, I mean come on.

Leo: Come on... that's, by the way, hey schlomo. And from now on whenever we say instead of okay the “G word” we're going to say “Okay Gary.” So that's it, from now on I think that...

Adam: How about Okay Goober.

Leo: No, see it might wake up. Or a car might arrive out front saying “You called for an Uber?” So we don't...

Adam: Hey... there's an Uber app for the Apple Watch.

Leo: I used it.

Adam: And it's not really clear what you do and at some point I tapped it and called and it was like “Oh man stop it, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it!”

Leo: Yup, one of the reviewers reviewing the feature said it's a little buggy and I ended up calling seven Ubers. (laughing)

Andy: Yeah, who's the person who did a YouTube review and was showing how well the Amazon app responds to voice commands accidentally bought an Xbox. I said okay, I'm going to cut the video because I need to go onto the web now and cancel this order.

Leo: Yeah.

Susie: (laughing)

Andy: Literally we're in a building year in which both the watch is learning about how the humans work and the humans are learning about how the watch works.

Leo: My general take on the Apple Watch is... and correct me, you tell me if I'm wrong on this. It's fun. I think this is what, I think this was Gruber's take too. It doesn't do anything particularly well, it's not... something you have to have by any means. In many cases it's easier to actually take the phone out of your pocket and do whatever it is you want to do on the phone. But it's a cool thing to be able to take a... for instance, taking a call is a good example. You're probably not going to want to do a lot of having phone calls on the watch. But the fact that you can has some coolness.

Andy: Yeah, it's weird. I'm still waiting for my, I'll get my review hardware when it's my turn to get review hardware, but in the mean time I've been talking to a lot of friends who have them and a lot of people who are just civilians who have them, and it seems as though the things they love about them are the most common sense things about a smartwatch which is simply notifications and voice commands. The other razzle-dazzle is stuff that they really, they like but they could live without.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Which I think is kind of interesting.

Leo: Yeah. None of this is, by the way I just want to let you know I've completed my outdoor run workout that I started earlier and I went two feet in 19 minutes and burned 27 active calories, 45 resting calories, 72 total calories.

Andy: Leo, have you ever tried leaving the watch on top of your washer/dryer during the middle of a spin cycle?

Susie: There you go.

Andy: Just to see if it will get through your entire day's of walking.

Leo: You do feel like Apple was at some point Apple said to itself well we're just going to put some stuff in... as much stuff as we can for fun, and it's decorative. They... I'm sure they felt a little disappointed they couldn't make it... my other question is does any of this go to research kit or do you have to... you have to sign up for research kit right?

Adam: You have to sign up.

Andy: Research kit is something that... I'm sorry, go ahead Adam.

Adam: I'm curious actually, Susie, my wife and I both have them and we actually think that for a married couple both having them is good because that means one of us doesn't kind of disappear into it, but Tanya actually I think...

Leo: You're both distracted all the time!

Adam: Precisely! We're distracted the same things, so it's a bonding experience. But Tanya actually likes hers more than mine because being a girl she doesn't have pockets that it fits in or doesn't necessarily have pockets at all or her phone is on her desk or it's in her purse or whatever so she's actually liking it a lot more because the watch is with her.

Susie: Mhm.

Adam: So she can make a reminder or set a timer or whatever it is without having to go find her phone. Is that something that you're seeing too?

Susie: Yeah, definitely. The lack of pockets in ladies outfits is a national disgrace but the problem with the watch that I found in my review is that it needs Bluetooth and wi-fi so if you turn off Bluetooth on your phone, even though the watch and the phone are on the same wi-fi network, the watch can no longer see the phone. So if I'm at my house the Bluetooth... my house is small so Bluetooth will go pretty much everywhere, so it doesn't matter, I can use the watch anywhere in my house. But if I'm at the office, the wi-fi network goes over the whole floor but if I leave my watch on my desk, I mean if I leave my phone on my desk and walk away, the watch loses it pretty quickly. So if I'm wearing a dress and I don't have pockets, like I end up having to carry my phone with me everywhere if I want the watch to still work, so that feels like it could be a lot better. But yeah, I do use it for a lot of things. The things I like it the most for are yeah, I like setting timers and alarms with Siri, I do that a ton with my phone too. Being able to do it with a watch is super handy. I like using it as a remote. I love using the remote app to control my Apple TV, because it's strapped to your wrist, you don't have to look for that little metal remote, you don't have to dig out your phone and unlock it. That's just been so convenient. I like the camera remote app and I think it's going to be a game changer when these companies can finally ship their HomeKit compatible devices because those will all be controllable...

Leo: That might be a big breakthrough. Yeah.

Susie: So I'm really really looking forward to that, I covered a lot of HomeKit stuff at CES and now we're just waiting, waiting, waiting for it to all drop and that's going to change everything.

Andy: Yeah I think that like to Leo's point, I don't think that it was a case of Apple throwing a lot of features into the first generation, I really think this is... to me, it's really clear that if there's any frustration inside Apple, it's that oh I wish we could show everybody how we see this platform in 2016, that we have to have the hardware in place to receive all the software that's going to be coming out next week to all the API's that we're going to release once we let developers start to run their own stuff and once we show them the stuff that we're releasing ourselves in 2016, I think that it's very very appropriate that even today the people who are buying these are people who are still, like I've been saying, the early believers. Because now, even now I'm really... I gotta say that if I thought that it would still take you until July to order a watch and get one, I certainly would have done whatever I had to do to be... to stay up on the west coast and make sure that I bought one like one second after it got released because right now even the people who are buying them right now are not people who are making a typical consumer purchase, they are buying something... they are placing an order for something they know is not going to arrive for two months, which suggests a certain unusual level of interest in the product. But I believe that once they... once it's the end of this year or early next year when more pieces of the puzzle are in place, I think this watch is going to make a lot more sense and hopefully you will be able to actually convert money in your hands to a watch on your wrist in something less than 48 hours.

Leo: It feels like it's a sketch. It's an outline, of what they want it to be.

Andy: It's potential, I mean it's...

Leo: It's like the first sketch that a Michelangelo might do on the wall before he actually puts temper on plaster, just kind of sketches the outline and then one hopes that it will be filled in before we have to buy version 2.0 anyway.

Adam: Well and I'm going to be really interested to see what the third party developers can do with it. I mean, the current apps are terrible and it's not their fault, I don't blame any developers. They were writing to complete... you know, guesses, as to what this was going to look and work like. Marco Arment had a piece about that recently where he was... sort of said, I started thinking it was an iOS device...

Andy: It was Overcast, yeah.

Adam: And then I realized it's not. It's basically this kind of little view port into my app. And kind of a remote control, and when you think of it that way it changes the way you think entirely. So developers are going to figure this out much more quickly now, so we're going to see that but the thing that I'm frankly a little stressed by is that I don't see, and I think Andy you've talked about this with the Moto 360, I don't see Apple going the next step. They're providing the tools but they're not using the tools in such a way as to predict what might be useful to me right now. So... you know, yes you can get pass book stuff but you've got to go to the notifications to do that. It's not like knowing that I'm in the airport and that pass book should be the thing that comes up every time. So as soon as I go into the boarding line I've got to fiddle with my watch to get the boarding QR code up. It was easier to use the iPhone, frankly.

Andy: Yeah, it goes back to I like the philosophy of Android Ware which is that this is a wristwatch, in that every time you do this, it is the watch's job to figure out why you did that and display that one piece of information that you probably most intensely want so that you can put it down again. I love the fact that... this is valuable to me despite the fact that I rarely have to interact with it or tell it what I want. Even though it's less ambitious.

Susie: Yeah I think Android Ware has a big advantage just because Google Now is so darn useful.

Leo: Those cards are really useful.

Andy: It's amazing.

Leo: And that's an example of... it knows you're in an airport, and will pop up the notification... the QR code immediately. What about... Walt Mossberg, by the way, finally wrote his piece. And I think he did the right thing which is he wore it for four weeks before he wrote his review of the Apple Watch. And one of the things he said was a great experience and this is an example I think of what you just said Adam. Once developers figure out how to do it. Checking in at the W Hotel, he says “As I walked into the lobby my room number appeared on the watch, I walked right by the front desk, went to the room and used the watch as a key.” That, if I had that experience, now you have to stay at one of the several hundred Starwoods that support that right now, but that would be the kind of experience that would make you say “Yeah, I'm glad I bought this.”

Andy: Yeah.

Adam: Yes.

Leo: We need more of those. If you have five of those...

Adam: Yeah, I was just at a conference and you know I had the little swipe-y card and things like that, and it's not a big deal, but this was a hotel conference so I'm going up and back and forth to the room three or four times, probably more five or six times a day. And no it's not a big deal, I can get the little swipe-y card out of my pocket and swipe it, but if the watch actually opened the door for me, that would be something which I would notice every time I did it.

Leo: And not waiting in line to check in even, especially at a conference would be a great thing. So it's... it is, I'm really open to the idea that in six months we can revisit and say “Yeah, now there are some really useful apps.” The Uber experience wasn't bad, but I basically, just to be sure I knew what was going on I brought out the phone.

Adam: Yeah, same here.

Leo: And I think that that's going to be a problem. If you can't be good enough to leave the phone in the pocket, it's not going to solve that problem. Let me ask you about this heart beat. And so you and Tanya have it.

Adam: Yes.

Leo: Susie, does your husband have one or no?

Susie: No, he doesn't... so yeah.

Leo: You sounded so sad when you said that.

Susie: He wouldn't even have an iPhone if I didn't keep forcing my old iPhones on him. He's not quite as techie as I am.

Leo: Yeah. Lisa, my wife, has one. And for the first few days... we drew pictures and sent heartbeats and then never again.

Adam: Yeah, no it's a total gimmick. It demos well. I shouldn't say that. It's a gimmick to use with the other person. It doesn't actually demo that well. We've found demoing the watch, because you know, we've had dinner with friends and whatnot and they see it “Oh it's the Apple Watch.” It's really hard to demo.

Leo: Yeah I have the same problem because you have to hold it funny.

Adam: You have to go around the the person on the right side so they can see, otherwise you're craning your wrist and...

Leo: It's like tying someone else's necktie. You've got to get behind them.

Adam: It's turning off the screen all the time.

Leo: Yup.

Adam: And the messaging is not really tight enough. In other words I'll get a message on my iPhone, often 30 seconds to a minute before it comes through on the watch. And so... so you notice just when you're trying...

Leo: That happens to me too, sometimes 20 minutes.

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: That's annoying.

Adam: It's one of those things where if the phone's in my pocket, well it's got to come through on the watch soon.

Leo: A perfect example of that and another example of “Oh I had to take out the phone,” was we ordered pizza, now the pizza delivery company texts you when they get to the restaurant, when they arrive out front, so it was here at work so I knew that I would get a text when they were out front so I didn't have to worry, I just went right to the front door, except that the watch didn't. The phone did. I never got those texts, so I just ended up taking out the phone. And that's a little bit frustrating. Let me show you... the other, the sad thing... I'm not going to do it right now, is when you send your wife a heart beat, and she doesn't respond.

Susie: (laughing) Aw.

Leo: And that's really depressing. So here I'm going to... oh I force pressed it, gosh darn it I hate it when I do that.

Andy: While we're waiting...

Leo: While we're waiting...

Andy: That's surprising to me because I've been joking with friends, now I have, I've typically got the Microsoft band on my right wrist, the Moto on this wrist, so every time I get a text message, I'll feel a buzzing in my pocket and then like two and a half seconds later it will appear here and here like I'm having a stroke or something. I never have to wait more than a few seconds for it to propagate through my personal body network.

Leo: Yeah. That's a tricky, I mean I'm sure that's a tricky thing to do and Lisa and I are on different networks, she's on Verizon I'm on AT&T so that might also be an issue because maybe she's not getting... I think sometimes she gets my heart like a day later.

Adam: (laughs)

Andy: Or maybe Verizon simply feels that you're unworthy of love, Leo. Have you ever figured that?

Susie: Aw.

Leo: Hey did you see Verizon just bought AOL.

Andy: Yep.

Adam: (laughs) I don't even know what to say to that. I mean, it's like... really? Huh.

Leo: Huh. Wall Street Journal's take on it was “Two crumbling empires together at last.”

Adam: What does AOL actually do these days anyway?

Leo: Mobile and video apparently, that's what they said.

Adam: Really?

Andy: They've got an ad network that actually works. And Verizon would very much like to not just simply be the water and power company, because once you're paying your monthly bill for water and power...

Leo: It's the worst thing to be. Yup.

Andy: Yeah, I mean it's like...

Leo: Especially as Google and others get into the business, it's less and less valuable. By the way the other...

Adam: They just want all those dial-up lines.

Leo: But the big issue, if you're Engadget, one of the AOL properties, and Verizon owns you... does that make it difficult to do your job?

Andy: Yeah. Evidence tends to say that there is always going to be firewalls that are put into place, there are always going to be promises made, but that's... nice that they say these things, it's nice that they mention that in interviews, but wait until one year later and then two months after that when the first people, editors who quit in disgust aren't willingness to talk about the experiences they had because...

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: Didn't CNET have that with CBS?

Andy: Yeah, there are a bunch of stories, and I'm scrambling to remember actual names but stuff like that where a story is get killed for... I think it was... oh god, I couldn't guess.

Adam: It was to CES. There was... CNET tried to...

Leo: Oh, you're right.

Adam: CNET had some kind of hardware they really liked...

Leo: They gave the best of CES awards to the hopper, which was the Dish Network device that let you skip commercials and CBS said “Uh uh” and they retracted the award. Perfect example. Bingo.

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: Alright, we're going to take a break. Both Andy and Adam are having trouble with so we're going to re-call you on Skype and see if we can get that... Susie you're perfect.

Susie: Woo!

Leo: Don't move. Our show today brought to you by LegalZoom.com. If you're looking to get a trademark, I found trademarks to be very useful. A copyright, a provisional patent application, if you're ready to start a business, are you the next world famous entrepreneur, maybe you don't care about fame. Maybe you just want to help people, maybe you just want to have a business. Whatever your motivation, if you're an innovator, you can launch your dream especially easy this month, with LegalZoom.com. We used LegalZoom to incorporate our LLC, and we registered TWiT and the TWiT logo as trademarks. We don't have any patents, but if you have some patents they'll help you do that. Over the past decade they've helped over a million people just like you, turn their ideas into reality. For a limited time, special savings on any trademark, copyright or provisional patent application at LegalZoom.com. And if you're not sure where to begin, even though LegalZoom is not a law firm, you can get advice from LegalZoom's network of independent attorneys, they're in most states. You could choose your attorney based on profiles and unedited consumer reviews. You get guidance you need to get your idea off the ground, legal help here, as well as all the stuff you'd need to make the trademark or copyright or provisional patent application. It really is great. Make the smart choice for your business at LegalZoom.com today, don't forget to use our offer code MBW when you check out, and you get that special discount. Trademarks, copyrights, and provisional patents this month. LegalZoom, it's innovation month. Did you know that? LegalZoom.com, promo code is MBW. And actually it makes it so easy, in a way this is really good, you tend to do more of that stuff that you should be doing because it's easy. Instead of putting it off saying “Yeah, yeah I'll get that trademark someday. When we're doing really well...” But no, it's great. You can do it now. Adam Engst is here, he is from the fabulous must subscribe absolutely free, although they wouldn't mind a little support, TidBITS. The longest running Macintosh publication, I get it every week and I love it. You can also go to TidBITS.com and read it there, and boy I am going to read this Jeff Carlson article because photos has been driving me crazy. Crazy. All the information, all the news is right here, TidBITS.com, also here with us, I'm really glad to have her, her first time on MacBreak Weekly, Susie Ochs. Editor at MacWorld.com. @sfsooz on the Twitter. S-F-S-O-O-Z. Andy Ihnatko also here from the Chicago Sun Times. Anybody else having problems with photos? Is it working good for you?

Adam: (laughing) We are getting, we are getting so many comments. Um...

Leo: Any time that you're forced to do something like move from iPhoto to photos, you're going to have people who are just unhappy. But I have to say, it has... I cannot use it any more. It crashes every time, and I've tried rebuilding, I've tried everything and it's just crashes on my Mac Pro. It's depressing.

Andy: Yeah. It's been stable for me...

Adam: I think that photos is going to be an interesting one, Apple has, I mean we're hoping this is a little bit of the Final Cut Pro situation where it's going to get better over time as they bring back the features that just disappeared and the process from even iPhoto much less aperture. But I will say that honestly, I wrote a book about iPhoto 1.0 way back when and went through five editions so I have a lot of experience with that product, and they never really quite got it. That it was just never a solid thing that seemed to do what it... seemed to live up to its potential, so I'm kind of hoping the photos group is a completely different team. I worry a little, though.
Leo: What are you hearing Andy?

Andy: I'm just sorry that they really seem to have cleaned house and like lost the... members of the aperture team and people who have been doing stuff in Photos on the Mac and iOS that I've thought were very very good, that said I had my first real live fire exercise with photos during that week I spent in Yosemite and it was extraordinarily positive. It helps that wasn't importing a legacy library, I was simply starting from scratch treating this Macbook like it was a brand new Macbook, which technically it was, and suddenly dumping two or three hundred photos per day into it.

Leo: Maybe that's what I should do is just start over.

Andy: Yeah, I mean... it's... I also have to say that I am a little bit worried about trusting my entire photo library to an Apple proprietary product. Especially when you get the... when you get to the point where after X number of months and a couple of years, you're going to have so many photos up there that is going to feel like such a titanic undertaking to switch to a different phone, or switch to a different tablet or switch to a different operating system, that I'm not necessarily saying that platform agnosticism is the... ecumenicalism is the most important consideration, but given that other services like Flickr that recently went to a all you can eat sort of model plus we're going to, we want to host, we want to back up and be your central photo library for everything. If you subscribe to Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Creative Suite you can sync between platforms really really easily, it happens pretty much automatically.

Leo: I know, thank god Lightroom exists, because...

Adam: But you have to specify specific albums, it's not...

Leo: Collections, yeah.

Andy: Yeah but you can solve that by simply... you can, A you can basically if you want to take everything that you ever put onto your Macbook and have it backed up and have it available in that central repository, you can do that and secondly a lot of the people who have been coming to me with their own observations and their own questions have been like... “There are pictures that are really personal and I don't want them anywhere that's outside of my personal control.”

Leo: Mhm.

Andy: I would at least like to simply say these are private, private... and we're not talking about you know, stuff that... video nasties or anything like that, we're talking about look these are pictures of my kids, this is pictures of my... I could imagine a situation in which some people like to document even the most horrible parts of family life including an illness, and the idea that I don't have control of these pictures of a loved one who's going through the worst time of all of our lives, I don't want that to be anywhere but on a device that I control. I'd like to simply say, don't back this up anywhere, don't upload this to anywhere, don't have any situation in which this could be the football that's on the field in play because this is personal and private. I don't think Apple has really screwed anything up here, I think that it's a wonderful articulate, it's a very very modern way of expressing the idea of photos that's very much in tune with a generation and time where people don't think as photos as even albums that get handed around but as devices where they want to find the one thing that spontaneously they want to show to somebody. And the editing features are a lot better than I... way better than I even imagined them to be one point on release. But it might be one of these systems that's going to take a number of months, like the Apple Watch, to take it from something that works for people who are testing it and now has to be something that tens of millions of people all across the world are going to be very very comfortable using.

Adam: I agree that it's a real issue with this sort of locking yourself into someone's ecosystem. We're getting a lot of questions from people saying “Hey can I use this with Dropbox?” You can put your photos library in Dropbox but I'm not entirely certain how that works when you start switching between machines and does it sync well and certainly you wouldn't be able to see it in iOS and all that. I will say that the one thing, the big thing that I have, I wanted ever since the iPhone and iPad, particularly iPad, came out is iClub photo library. I want to be able to see my library, the whole thing from any of my devices and be able to do anything I want. It's a little bit weak on that still in terms of being able to keyword stuff and title photos and things like that on an iOS but it at least edits and that kind of thing to pass through. So that's all good but I do agree there's a little bit of concern with are you committing all of your photos to a particular roach motel? And you know, that's going to happen with sort of... with anything but if you do, if you stay outside then are you giving up photos as a management tool? Do you have to go to... you have to go to Lightroom as a management tool at that point which... nothing wrong with Lightroom obviously except for the fact...

Andy: You have to pay every month for it.

Adam: It's a lot, like yeah it's kind of expensive.

Andy: Yeah.

Adam: I'm looking at like $5 a month for iCloud photo library for the number of photos I have but that's a lot cheaper than having another subscription to... you know, a separate subscription to creative... luckily I already have creative cloud 2 for in design and Photoshop, so never.

Andy: I guess my difference is that I use these two tools differently and that I already have solutions for backing up a photo library so I'm not worried about that, and what I like about Lightroom is that just the idea that again, coming over from Yosemite I've got at least five, six, seven hundred photos that... and the hardest thing to do, and the thing that keeps me sometimes from actually getting to the business of organizing these things is when am I going to sit down and go through and look at each and every one of these and choose which ones are at least worth my further attention. And when I'm on commuter rail or something where I'm waiting for a train and I just remember that “Oh, by virtue of the fact that I've enabled syncing on that collection in Lightroom, that means that all of these photos are now synced in some form onto this iPad.” I can simply use this beautiful like 8x10 prints of each one of these pictures to say “Yes, no, no, no, no, yes, no, hell yes, no, no, no, no...” And that's what I tend to use it for.

Leo: You can do that with Lightroom too .

Andy: I'm talking about Lightroom.

Leo: (laughing) Oh. I thought you were talking about photos. But can't you do that with photos? I mean doesn't anything you do on your phone transmit to...?

Adam: Yeah.

Leo: The photos on your desktop?

Adam: Yeah.

Andy: So you can, yeah, you can create collections...

Leo: You know what Proteus suggests and I think he's right, Apple should create an incognito folder that is encrypted, private, and does not sync.

Adam: So if you, so the way photos works is you have a system photo library and that's the one that can sync to iCloud photo library. You can have multiple other photo libraries and open them either by just double clicking them in the finder or holding on option when you launch photos, and those will not sync.

Leo: The problem is that my photos that I'm worried about are on my phone. I take them on the phone, and I think this is universal.

Adam: In that case you're just hosed.

Andy: (laughs)

Leo: Yeah! You don't... you know, there's... a cute little naked puppy in front of you and you want to take a picture and you know, you don't. Because you don't know what the hell is going to happen to it. Right?
Adam: Absolutely.

Leo: It's a natural paranoia. Well that's annoying. Create an incognito, that's what you need to do.

Andy: It is about control, and that's... it's what people, even if it's the illusion of control, sometimes that's good enough for a lot of people.

Leo: The illusion would be happy. I'd be happy with the illusion. (laughs)

Andy: One thing I will say that they're, Lightroom and photos, they're two different approaches towards the same problem. What I like about Lightroom is that it does preserve the idea of a work flow towards a goal.

Adam: Yes.

Andy: As opposed to photos is that look, you're going to take a lot of pictures, it's our job as your photo resource to make sure they're safely on every single device that you will ever want to use them with and that you can improve some of them if you feel as though some of them need to be tweaked whereas with... if people who take pictures like me, which is again I've got 900 pictures of which only about 80 are going to be worth ever showing to anybody and of those, maybe 12 are going to be worth posting someplace. And that's, and photos isn't as good at that as Lightroom is.

Adam: And Lightroom also has better connection to Photoshop for people who actually want to do serious editing. Photos cannot use an external editor at this point.

Leo: Adobe's so smart with that, $10 a month photographer's pack bundle where you get Lightroom and Photoshop.

Andy: That's just genius. You have no idea how much power is in Photoshop. You think about Photoshop as okay, here's like how I do a spot exposure on this, and this lets me like erase out from the background the person in the wedding party who like dumped your sister like three months after the picture was taken, but it also... it really is almost like an operating system for digital images. And the more time you spend on like Lynda.com or other like video tutorial sites and you realize that “Oh so you mean that if I can't... if I want every single thing in the field of view of this camera to be in focus, all I have to do is take five or six pictures and keep adjusting the focus in every one and I don't have to do any like masking, I just simply open them all up with this one command, and then blend them with this other command and tell, basically tell Photoshop make sure when you blend you don't blend anything that's not in focus and then three seconds later, oh my god.” And it's like this has been in this app that I've had on my computer for the past year and four months and I have never used it because I have never looked at more than one level deep into menus, and for $10 a month it's like there is no problem that there is not a solution to with this app. It's like don't be intimidated by Photoshop, it wants to help you. It's like that neighbor that has a rec-room and like a garage full of tools and a machine shop and they're never in use and the one thing he would love is for you to come over and like use the lathe that he bought a year and a half ago that's never used. That's what Photoshop is... please come over, let me do wonderful with your pictures. For $10 a month, it's great. It's like Netflix only with creating things.

Leo: Is anybody using the new Macbook? Susie are you using that?

Susie: Yeah a little bit.

Leo: Is it fast enough to do... you know, Photoshop and, I mean I love how thin it is.

Susie: I haven't put Photoshop on it. I'm Pixelmator all the way, and it's great for that.

Leo: Oh Pixelmator works, right?

Susie: Yeah it's great.

Andy: My Macbook review is... should be arriving, hitting the Sun Times either today or tomorrow.

Leo: Oh, good. What do you think?

Andy: I think... one of the last things I did was to install the full Photoshop on it and I was very very surprised that it actually works and doesn't even just halfway work, for things that... the way that I had put it, and this extends to Final Cut and other like really professional level apps I put on it, it's probably doesn't perform well enough for people who make their living with these apps.
Leo: Right. That's not me.

Andy: But for someone like me who occasionally uses Photoshop it works just fine. You'll be able to get your jobs done, one of the things I was doing to sort of really test it to the point of ridiculousness was in taking an hour long HD video that I captured off my DVR and then converting it from that weird DVR file format to an mp4 file with Handbrake and I did it on my 2013 Macbook Pro which has a really good processor on it, I did it on the Macbook Pro. Excuse me, the new Macbook. The new Macbook did it in about 20% more time but it did it, and it wasn't like it took two or three times more. So it's not optimal for that sort of stuff, but you can do it. Nothing's really off the table. And the other thing is, for stuff that's not really professional grade, iMovie had no problem cutting out all of the commercials out of that TV show and mixing it down, Garage Band had no problem recording live audio and also editing the multi-track. Again it's not optimal for stuff if you're making money off of professional apps, I certainly wouldn't use it as an Xcode test bed if I'm doing lots and lots of builds, but I don't really think if there are really any apps that are off the table for the new MacBook, and that really surprised me.

Leo: Reason I ask is, well first of all Lisa's ordered one, she's going to get one soon. Andy, were you using the base model or the stepped up model?

Andy: I'd have to double check. Even the stepped up model isn't that much hotter of an item.

Leo: I know, it's a lot more expensive.

Andy: It's an Apple loaner and matter of fact, I have to send it back tomorrow.

Leo: Well, the hard drive will tell you. If you have 256 Gigs that's the base model, if you have 512 that's the up a level. But the only reason I ask is because Kevin Rose had one when he was in studio on Saturday doing the new screen savers, yesterday Jim Louderback was on Triangulation, he had one, and when I see two kind of power users use them it's intriguing because man is it thin and light.

Andy: It's really quite attractive, and I don't know if I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but traveling, I don't think that you can possibly review this unless you spent a couple of weeks traveling with this through multiple airports and suddenly having, the difference between a 13 inch MacBook and a 12 inch is substantial, way more than you think it's going to be.

Adam: Really?!

Susie: It made my MacBook Air feel heavy.

Leo: What? Really?! Wow!

Susie: Yeah, my 13 inch MacBook Air I was like “Oh, it's so much heavier!

Andy: Susie, did you have the same experience I was having especially when traveling with it? I feel myself touch, I'm not carrying even my laptop bag, I'm carrying my larger Ipad bag, the little shoulder like thing, and I keep like having to touch the inside of it to make sure that I have it hiding somewhere-

Susie: Make sure it's there.

Andy: -because it's like, even with the Air, and certainly with my 13 inch MacBook Pro, I'm used to having some sort of sensation that I've got a laptop with me, only this new device it just reads totally like an iPad.

Susie: Last year I did like three trips in a row and on my third trip I got to the airport, got out of the Uber and like slung my bag over my shoulder and was like Wait a minute my bag wasn't as heavy as it should have be and realized that I had left my MacBook at home. I had to like get back in the Uber, I only live like ten minutes from the airport so it was fine, I made the flight. But with this MacBook I don't know if I would be able to tell just like throwing it on my shoulder like that like I might have to start like really looking through before I go through security to make sure I have my MacBook because yeah, it's really light, it's noticeable.

Adam: I like what you said Andy about how using a different bag because one of the things I've run into is that I actually, long a go, thought jeez these laptops keep getting lighter, how come my bag isn't getting lighter? I ripped my bag apart and literally weighed every object in it. It was amazing how much crud you carry, I mean the laptop was the least of it in some ways. All of the cables and adapters and dongles and-

Leo: Well, you do need a dongle on this one. With one Type C port you're gonna want to get that $79 dongle that has True USB, HTMI, and then another Type C for power, yeah.

Andy: But here's another great thing, if you have like a really good like heavy duty battery pack, like for the the sort of thing that can charge your phone six or seven times and your iPad like twice, it will actually charge and extend the battery of the MacBook because it's just USB-C and there's nothing proprietary about the charging protocol. So long as it's connected to a source of power it will charge and so I find that with this little $40 Anchor battery pack that is almost always in my bag because I like to have a couple of days worth of power with me when I travel, I'm getting like 18-19 hours of up time. It can charge about half as quickly as it would from the wall board, but the ability to take this on an overnight and for that 24-36 hours I don't even have to care if I'm ever going to be near a power outlet, that's another huge one.

Adam: So, that's really interesting Andy because Julio Ojeda-Zapata who reviewed it for TidBits said that he tried charging it from an iPad charger and it wouldn't do it. But you're saying just plugging it into a battery will work.

Andy: No, I got tricked too. Did he actually, I'm serious, I scrounged up like the, everybody who has the ability to make a USB-C anything. There's like seven press releases in my inbox, I had a couple of cables and so I plugged in like one USB-C to a USB-3.0 cable and it reported to this battery pack and it reported not charging and you got the “gadunk” so you could tell it was connected to something that could deliver power but it was reporting not charging so I unplugged it “Ah dammit, oh well, that's too much to expect.” And then I thought “Wait a minute, what if it's actually charging but it's not, it doesn't recognize it as a power adapter”, left it going and it was actually putting on about, again it took about, if it takes about two hours to charge it from zero to full on the included adapter, it would take about four hours to charge it to about 89-90% and then a curve would flatten to the point that it wouldn't get much above 90%. But the really cool thing is if you are simply working with it and you keep it plugged into that battery pack, you will not be taking any power off of the internal battery as it's going.

Adam: That's great! And the fact that you can actually have external batteries that are both generic enough to run the iPad and the iPhone and the MacBook as well, that's very neat.

Andy: I did ask Apple that question explicitly and they explicitly said there is absolutely nothing proprietary about the chargers, absolutely nothing proprietary about the protocol, if it is, if something is capable of delivering power across USB-C it can conceivably charge this device, and no doubt we'll start seeing people who are developing battery plates that are specifically designed to work with this thing. You might even have a Mofi cafeteria tray that you just chunk it into that gives you like 48 hours of power at the expense of making it look like a compact from 2003.

Leo: I also feel like Type C connectors are going to be ubiquitous in the next, it won't happen right away but in the next year or two.

Andy: It's a pain in the butt, really, because, and I was determined during my trip to Yosemite to use this as my sole computer come hell or high water, and in order to deliver a presentation to VGA I had to carry with me a VGA to HDMI adapter, plug the HDMI adapter into an Apple TV, connect, have a little portable like Wifi base station creating a private network, and then have like AirPlay streaming from the MacBook to this device and all of that, and I put that in the review just to be funny, but this is a problem that solves itself during the summer once it, it's unfortunate that you'll have to spend $79 I think to get the little dongle that contains those three little extra connectors on it but once you have, that problem is effectively over with. And to be fair even on the MacBook Pro, you still need to travel with some sort of dongle because this is a VGA world, you cannot count on HDMI and so you'll be traveling with some sort of adapter anyways and so it may as well be this USB-C one.

Leo: I also have the Pixel, the Chromebook Pixel that Google did with the Type C, and they did the right thing and I wonder, I guess the next generation-

Adam: Two ports!

Leo: -two ports! One on each side.

Adam: Two ports!

Leo: There are a couple of benefits. One, you can power it on either side right, so that's convenient to have ambidextrous power, but then the other port can be used with a dongle or used with, I think lots of devices and most phones will be Type C. I'm hoping the iPhone 6S will be Type C.

Andy: The good news is that USB-C makes it a lot easier to do things like a hub as opposed to a simple, an un-powered adapter. That was a frustrating limitation of the MacBook Air where it only came with one USB port, and it was difficult to put more than one device on it unless you have a really good powered USB hub. The devices that I've been seeing, I haven't' actually put my hands on them, but I've been talking to some of the engineers who are building them, make it seem as though you have this, it'll be possible to build this one like harmonica like device that will have VGA, it will have a couple of USB-3-

Leo: Harmonica like!

Andy: -Yeah, I mean because that is what it looks like , it looks like a harmonica, a white harmonica with a little pigtail connected to it. Really what you really need is the ability to have at least two USB3.0 ports going at the same time because figure on I need something to act as a SD card reader and I need something to act as, I can take my Photo Library from my desktop office to, and carry it with me when I travel. So there are a bunch of solutions to that, and again these are things that are going to solve themselves as people start making these devices. I think everybody should be happy that we are free from the tyranny of the proprietary power plug that you, people have to be able to buy and license that connector, and Apple wasn't allowing people to license that stuff so there are limits to what people could buy. Because this is just simply bog standard USB-C, anybody can build anything they want that conforms such standard, and Apple will supposedly is not going to do anything to interfere with whatever anybody wants to build.

Leo: Amazing!

Adam: But I do miss MagSafe.

Leo: Do you?

Adam: I mean MagSafe, you know, I mean you just “Oops, oops, I just unplugged my laptop, oops!

Andy: I was about to say, at distances further than 12 feet I can't really shoot it with one shot, I have to get a shotgun to really blow a hole inside it, which is what I, again, there are very few things that Apple has designed in the past ten years that I can, without any reservation whatsoever say, is just badly designed, that I don't understand how that design ever left the engineering department, because it is so clearly emphatically ill suited for the purpose of maintaining a power connection to a device that requires a lot of power, that it must be nice to only work on a desk where you have the ability to simply put a strip of gaffers tape down on the cord so that it never ever, ever, ugh, I just hate it. I've been using this machine for over a year and a half, it's still frustrating that I'm on the sofa, I just simply like move my leg a little bit, off comes the connector. Or I'll leave, I'll simply get up, put it on the sofa cushion, I'm sure the power is connected, go back upstairs and go to bed, come back the next day thinking that “Okay, I've got a whole busy work to do inside the library at least my, nope it's not charged up because it popped of during the night and now there's basically 20% power left”. Oh you bastards, oh you bastards, you bastards, you bastards.

Susie: Yeah, I traded MagSafe for that external battery charging, because I used to have a hyper Mac battery that had a MagSafe thing on it, and then they had to discontinue that, it wasn't licensed or something, they had a really crazy work around where you had to buy the Apple accessory that you would use in airplanes, and then you had to plug that into the battery, and then the other side into your MacBook, and it was a mess so I clung to this super heavy hyper Mac battery like for dear life because that was the only way to charge my MacBook on the go so MagSafe was cool when it worked on a desk but like Andy says, yes sometimes I'm working on a couch or on a bed and as soon as you put it down or tilt it a little, all it has to do is one little corner to come up and it doesn't work. So I would rather have USBC charging and be able to use external batteries, and then you don't have to worry about being tethered to a plug which makes MagSafe's whole point.

Leo: And I've got your harmonica like device right here, thanks to Scooter Exner in our chat room. This is a kick starter called Hub+ from a company called Nonda      , you've seen this. $80, and it does exactly what you were talking about. It plugs into the Type C port on your MacBook and then it gives you every other port with another Type C out the back. I think this seems like a good idea.

Susie: Yeah, we'll be seeing some good docks in the future.

Leo: Yeah, and this is the same price, by the way, as Apple's overpriced $79 dongle which doesn't do nearly as much. This has got a card reader, it's got a battery in it, -

Adam: It's got a battery?!

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: How much power does it get?

Andy: To be fair, I'll bet the inside of the Hub isn't painted as well as the outside.

Leo: Okay! You're right. And the holes may not exactly be level.

Andy: Can you put a price tag on that?

Leo: Let me see, I'm looking to see..

Susie: It comes in gold!

Adam: It comes in gold.

Leo: Oh, ho ho ho ho. That's if they make their stretch goal gold. This, you know, by the way, they've already funded, they were looking for $35 grand, they've got $192,000 and 34 days to go. I'm trying to find the specs on the battery.

Adam: Yeah, so what's the battery for? Is it going to actually power anything?

Leo: Built in lith, oh for phone.

Adam: Oh for charging a phone.

Leo: It doesn't charge the, although I don't know why it couldn't charge the computer or at least give it a little extra juice. Well it doesn't matter right, that's the whole point of this, to your point Andy, that t doesn't need a whole lot of watts, it could trickle it.

Adam: It just wouldn't, at least I think it would just suck it dry too quickly, probably.

Leo: Oh yeah, well I mean how much could it be in there.

Adam: Yeah, like, I just need two more minutes!!

Leo: It's got an USB-C in and out, it's got an SD card reader, lithium ion battery, USB-A+ charging, USB-A+ charging, USB-A+ charging, three of those. I like that it's got a mini display port, so kinda cute! Three USB +, yeah, look at that, I don't know what's going on there with the green, but...

Adam: Charge signal.

Leo: It's charging.

Susie: Flow of the...

Leo: Oh, that's the Flow-a-through, it's flow-through charging.

Andy: It's just a rough interface there.

Adam: If the cables actually did that I would buy it so quickly!

Leo: There is a cable somebody told me about that has LEDs in it!

Susie: They go faster when it's charging, and then when it gets to 90 and it starts trickle charging they slow down and then when you're all the way charged they stop. Yeah. I can't remember what they're called but they're pretty neat!

Leo: I can't either, I saw them at NAB.

Adam: I will say that the thing that's, I was just traveling so I was in a hotel room, and all the LEDs, man you've gotta really like, put your cloths over everything so you can actually sleep at night!

Leo: They light up the room. They don't do night lights anymore, they don't need to. Everything is lit up. The room glows! I'm going to order one of these and I'll let you know. I have such bad luck with Kickstarter.

Susie: Yeah.

Leo: It's not a store, kids. Hey let’s take a break, we're going to come back with more Andy Ihnatko at Chicago Sun Times, Susie Ochs from MacWorld, yes there's a MacWorld still, MacWorld.com. Were you at the Print Publication too, Susie?

Susie: I was at Tech hive. So, I was at MacLife for seven years and then Tech Hive-

Leo: Ah, yeah I love Tech. That was Jason's, Tech Hive was kinda Jason's side.

Susie: Yeah, that's how I came to (unintelligible).

Leo: I love TechHive, yeah.

Susie: Me too.

Leo: Is it still going, right?

Susie: It is, they've kinda pivoted to being a smart home, streaming media, cable cutting kind of site. So they're just doing Smart Home, but Mike Brown's running it and he's a Smart Home genius so they're putting out a lot of good stuff.

Leo: Good, good. And of course Adam Engst from the immortal tidbits, he's immortal. They guy he looks 25, he's looked 25 for 25 years I don't understand it. Amazing.

Adam: Yeah well, you didn't see my hair back then.

Leo: Amazing feat. Oh, it's white, not blond? Okay, now I feel better.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. Oh sorry, I didn't realize the video wasn't that good.

Leo: It's MacBook Gold my friends!

Adam: MacBook Blond.

Leo: MacBook Blond.

Andy: No, see that's yet another benefit of being a competitive runner you can say, “Oh no it's not going gray, I spend so much time running the sun just keeps bleaching and bleaching it, but what can you do?!”

Adam: The surfer claim, yeah right.

Leo: I'm gonna buy two of these, I'm going to go all in on this Hub +, gonna buy two of them. Because Lisa's..

Adam: And then if you daisy train them, then what happens?

Leo: Oh I think it's like crossing the streams. I think the universe ends but I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. Lisa ordered one, but now after hearing you guys talk about it, I'm thinking I'm going to get a MacBook too. Sounds awfully nice.

Andy: It's pretty cool, I had one of those really dangerous reactions especially now that I'm packing it up to send to Apple. It's like, I have $1300, I'm going to make another $1300 very quickly. I can have this if I want.

Leo: That's the big negative, it really is pretty pricey. It's kinda..

Andy: It is pricey but again, for people who do nothing but travel, travel, travel it's like, I think they'll forget about, if they have that kind of money they'll forget about that purchase after that first trip with it. This is one of the pictures that goes with the review. My friend has a 17 inch MacBook Pro, and I had to take this picture of the new MacBook on top of it.

Adam: It's a mini me.

Leo: It feels like you could close the MacBook Pro and it wouldn't even know there's another computer inside of it.

Andy: It's like, here's the novelty like greeting card that Apple ships with the MacBook Pro. Here's your start up guide.

Leo: Ibookery is posing an interesting Apple Watch. Could I use the Amazon app, which does have one click purchasing on the Apple Watch, to buy a MacBook from my watch?

Andy: There's one way to find out!

Leo: It was just a test!

Andy: And Leo, because we've got at least another half hour like on this show, you won’t be able to rescind the order!

Leo: Oh noooooooo! Our show today.... (laughing)

Andy: Yeah, I've put a devil on your shoulder!

Leo: You are! Put Andy on my left shoulder, and I'm afraid there's nobody on the right!

Andy: Angel Andy is also saying, “You know what, I think you can be more productive. Your mission is to reach out to your great listeners.”

Susie: The next one will have two ports!

Leo: Well that's what I am wondering, I will have to wait, there he is! So Susie get on my left shoulder and tell me things like “But the next one will have two ports”.

Susie: The next one will have two ports, and maybe it will be $100 cheaper.

Andy: Also, don't share any of those snacks you received this morning.

Susie: They love bumping it down by $100.

Andy: You're the one that keeps this entire system afloat Leo.

Leo: Angel Andy, you're small enough to eat this micro popcorn. Let me just give you a little bit. Micro popcorn ahhhh!

Our show today brought to you by Audible.com. Having Audible is like having little Andy on your shoulder or a little book reader on your shoulder reading to you. You know I was cooking yesterday and I put my iPhone in my pocket with my speaker pointed up, and I listened to my audio books as I'm going around. I love Audible.com. First of all, I love to read, who doesn't love to read? But as I've gotten older, it's harder on my eyes. I spend every waking moment doing something like driving, or shopping or walking the dog, or on the treadmill so I can't hold a book. Audible means I get many more hours of listening time in and man, I just love Audible. Lisa is listening to a great Audible book right now, it's called The Girl on the Train, and she says “Oooh does this have a twist”. The Girl on the Train from Paula Hawkins, she's loving it. And this is one of the things Audible does so well, you know, there's several narrators in the book, so each of them has a different reader. Clara Corbett, Louis Brealey and India Fisher, and that's great. That, in a way, that's something that you can't do with a printed page. It really makes it like you're listening to this incredible story. It's reminded me a little bit of Gone Girl, which we also listened to at Audible.com. I like to listen to non-fiction as well, and that's how I read the Becoming Steve Jobs book, and I loved it. Neal Stevenson's new book comes out in just a, this would be the one if, okay so here's the deal, we are going to get you a free book. And if I were you, the new Neal Stevenson comes out in a week, I might just say, yeah I'm going to get this as my free book. First of all 31 hours and 55 minutes you are definitely poundage wise you're getting your money’s worth. Here's what's going to happen, you go to audible.com/macbreak, you'll sign up. You won't pay anything for a month. In that month you'll get a credit for the free month. You'll also get the Daily Digest, and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal every day and you can cancel any time in that first 30 days, paying nothing. The book will be yours to keep forever. See, but I think the deal is, I think you're going to love audio books but Audible understands. Oh, Jurassic Park, oh wow. Was that ever on audio? Oh my gosh. Oh Scott Brick reads it, he's one of their best. I think that probably people say, yeah the reading is brand new, 2014 or 2015 I should say, by Brilliance Audio. Apparently this is the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park the novel. You might wonder, what's it like. I can play a sample, every audio book has a sample at audible.com. (Book playing) I want to stop the show and finish the book, you don't mind do you? Audible, try it, your first book is free. Audible.com/macbreak. The only challenge is picking just one, but you know what, next month you get more! Audible.com/macbreak.

Leo: I didn't ask Andy, usually I just ask Andy! The problem is whenever...Uh oh! C'mon Susie, talk me out of it. C'mon Andy, talk me into it. C'mon Susie, talk me out of it. Every time we do an Audible I like to ask Andy what he's been listening to. And the problem with that is that it's doubled the list of books that I have. I just got the Patton Oswalt book. What are you listening to today, Andy? What should I add to my list?

Andy: The last Audible book I bought was, Dick Cavett has been writing up a whole bunch of essays for, opinionator essays, for the New York Times. So he has a new book, Brief encounters Conversations, Magic Moments and assorted Hijinks. And it is a whole bunch of these essays read by Dick Cavett.

Leo: Oh, I love him. I love his voice!

Andy: Exactly. He's a broadcaster, so he knows how a tell a story, and he knows not to have the microphone right next to his nose, and stuff like that. He makes sure he has the coffee before he goes and does that sort of stuff. But they're well written pieces. They're just good old fashion, old style like opinion pieces that you'd find like in the New Yorker during they hay day of the place. And it, like Patton Oswalt's book, somehow it almost seems like it's better suited to spoken word spoken by the author than it is on the page because I think I read most of these when they were originally printed but hearing him talk this way about being at the funeral for James Gandolfini, I was not representing anybody perhaps, it was like “Oh goodness, I will make my Apple Watch happy by completing my circle and doing some more walking, if it means I get to hear the rest of the story”.

Leo: (Book playing) He's getting on. Did you hear that smile? I feel like he's always making a joke. I feel like he's a little.... Audible.com/macbreak. Thank you Andy for yet another Audible book that I have to add to my endless list.

Andy: Yes, I'm here to make you want things, acquire more things. I only wish you could be a material possession and could burden you.

Leo: I wish I had a commute! I like Audible so much I wish I had a commute! I don't so, that's why I listen like every moment while I'm cooking and stuff, I just have it playing.

Andy: I've said it before, a subscription to Audible has really upped my housecleaning game because, it's like, I cannot motivate myself to spend 45 minutes vacuuming and dusting the living room, but if I know I've got another Neil Gaiman's book of short stories, I will clean until the end of this next short story, and sometimes I screw myself because oh, this is one of the ones that actually takes 3 hours, okay. Well, I guess I'm going to have to have Neil Gaiman tell me a story while I vacuum. Oh shucks.

Leo: That's another one I added, the new Neil Gaiman. Um, Apple Pay. Some big Apple Pay wins. First of all, according to Time, Apple Pay is creaming Current-C in the mobile payment wars, and what a surprise, Walmart's Current-C is the worst idea ever. But there are a number of retailers who've signed up for this, not just Walmart but CVS and Target. They created the Merchant Customer Exchange and they said instead of using Apple Pay they're going to use this Current-C, which involves a trade of QR codes, it's like so clunky. And obviously, it's one of the chief benefits of Apple Pay, which is that merchant doesn't get your credit card number, or any of your personal information. That is why Walmart doesn't like it! The good news is, it isn't working. I went to the CVS the other day and I tried to use my Apple Pay and they said “No those things aren't hooked up”, and I just said “Well the I'm not hooked up either, I'm outta here”. Actually I did buy it, but it's enough to make me not want to go.

Andy: Yeah, I do find myself shopping at places if I can use my Google Wallet to pay for it. Not that I'm going to buy something I wouldn't buy otherwise but, that's part of, it actually makes buying things kinda fun. Or at least you feel better, it's easier, you get emailed receipts and it's a lot more trusted transaction. I must say though, I did read that report, and I was a little bit confused by it because I wasn't aware that Current-C was actually deployed.

Leo: It isn't at my CVS, I don't know.

Susie: It's not out yet.

Andy: Yeah, I think it's still being tested, but I mean..

Leo: So how it could be a winner or a loser is what you're saying.

Andy: Yeah, but, well, it's a loser, definitely.

Leo: It's obviously a loser, that's how.

Adam: Because it's always a horse race.

Leo: You're right, it always has to be a horse race, doesn't it?

Andy: Just on technical specs it's terrible. It's exactly what a coalition of national stores would create for themselves. They would say, We don't want to bother ourselves by having to install special equipment that makes it easy for the stuff to operate. So we could just do the cheapest way possible and make as difficult as possible for the consumer. Also we're going to be collecting as much data as possible, stuff that we could never get if we were just doing Apple Pay, and also we're going to share this information with all of the other people in our coalition and guess what, because this is also an app we can actually have the app tracking our user and making sure we know exactly where that person is at all times, and it's just such jerk behavior that I've been actively telling people, just don't even install it, don't even use it. Whenever it ships. It's so the wrong way to do it I can't imagine that it will get anything like a toe hold on phone payments that NFC, Google Wallet and Apple Pay have. It's just ridiculous.

Susie: Yeah, they want to cut out the credit card companies entirely, and they want to go from Current-C...

Leo: That's right, it doesn't use your credit card, does it?

Susie: No, so Walmart and those big stores, they pay their credit card fees, and that's billions of dollars a year for them so they want to cut out the credit currency and Walmart would want basically to become your bank at some point. And so they're trying to save money so it'll be good for them, where as Apple Pay is set up to be good for the consumer and I think that you know, they've done a really good job of that. Like Andy says, it doesn't track you , it doesn't pass along your credit card information. Home Depot, who I think was part of this MCS Merchant Exchange possibly, but now they're saying “No, we're going to go do Apple Pay, we want to get in on Apple Pay” and that's one of the reasons that people use Apple Pay is because there was that Home Depot breach, and everybody had to get new credit card numbers. So, the consumer isn't liable for fraud or anything, but that still, that's a pain in the butt. So you get consumer protections with your credit card, and you're not liable for fraud, but the merchants have to pay a fee every time you use it and that's what Current C wants to eliminate.

Leo: Home Depot says 2,000 stores, it'll be the largest installation of Apple Pay anywhere. I think you're right, I seem to remember their name in that Current C list. They want to put it in 2,000 stores and of course, those of us who are Apple fan boys will actually shop there more right, because they have Apple Pay. I don't find it that much more useful, although with it on the Watch it is, I mean I just find that I still have to do so many, at least at our grocery store across the street, so many fiddly bits. I still have to say credit or debit, on my ATM I have to give them a pin, I still have to say cash back or not, and so by that time the savings just..

Adam: Paper or plastic!

Leo: Yeah, that's well, no, we don't get that choice in California.

Andy: Cruelty free.

Leo: Mostly it's, “Do you want to buy a bag?”, is the one I get all the time now.

Susie: Yeah.

Leo: So, the customers apparently were able to use, if you're saying “Wait a minute, the Home Depot had Apple Pay”. Some of the Home Depots had Apple Pay.

Susie: Yeah, the store doesn't have to be officially supporting Apple Pay, if they have an NFC terminal you can try it and it works. I used my Apple Pay on my iPhone 6 on launch day and then the next day they turned it off.

Leo: They turned it off, so annoying.

Andy: Yeah, me too.

Susie: So a lot of places, if you see that little symbol like a Wi-fi symbol turned over on it's side, just give it a try and most of the time it works.

Leo: Oh wow, that's very cool.

Adam: I wonder if the question is if it really works or if in fact those charges go into never, never land.

Leo: But does it reeeally work?

Susie: Yeah, it really works.

Leo: Or does it go down a hole?

Adam: I've never been able to test it unfortunately.

Leo: Let's talk, apparently Beats is imminent. Some are saying that Apple will announce it at WWDC, which seems about right for the time line. That would be late June. We would also get iOS 8.4 at that time. Stories all over, we mentioned last week that Apple was getting a little kind of the stink eye from the federal government for going to the music labels and saying “It would be nice if you wouldn't give out free music on Spotify”, hint hint. Which is obviously anti-competitive. Spotify is accusing Apple of anti-competitive behavior as well. Does anybody have anything to say? I feel like the silence here tells me that you are all in the Beta of Beats and you are laughing at me now.

Andy: No, I'm just curious-

Adam: We're just waiting.

Andy: -it's kind of like, it's interesting. It'll be an interesting test to see why Spotify is so popular that if , let's say that the labels that have a lot of motivation to turn off free streaming because they want to make money from subscriptions, they want to make money period. It'll be interesting to see if the reason why Spotify and some of these services are so popular is because people like not having to pay for things and even if you tell people just to pay $8-10 per month that's not a hell of a lot of money, but that's the difference between free and not free. So it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Adam: Personally I think that a lot of it's gonna come down to user views. This is, once you have one of these services you tend to use it a lot, you tend to live in it. And so, I personally use Rdio rather than Spotify, because at the time I was making the decision Spotify's interface wasn't as good, and I think that will be a question with Apple. If they're forcing us into iTunes and it's the usual iTunes interface it may just be annoying to a lot of people, if it's a separate app, maybe not. I don't know, we'll have to wait and see. I do feel as though they're all offering kind of the same thing, so it's six of one, a half dozen of another, and you'll be making your decision based on personal preference in terms of interface or maybe the price will be just a hair different if you get a family plan, that kind of thing.

Susie: Yeah, I use Rdio too, and one thing I like about using it on my Mac is that I don't really launch iTunes very much anymore.

Adam: Yeah, same here!

Susie: So that's been a hidden benefit. But then, and I love using it, it's very cross platform. I use it on my iPhone, but when you have all of your music in the music app on the iPhone you can have Siri play you a song. I can't do that with Rdio. So Apple has an advantage that they can build whatever service they have like so deeply into the ecosystem that you're already using, so that'll really help. And like Adam said, all of the services are really similar. So what Beats I think is trying to do, and also Tidal since Jay-Z relaunched it, is they're going for exclusives. So they want to get Taylor Swift to pull all of her music off Spotify, they want to make her a sweet deal so all of her stuff is on Beats, and that's where they're gonna try to hang their hat is the curation and the exclusives but, you know, it'll remain to be seen if that's enough to get a lot of people to switch.

Leo: How sticky are these services?

Adam: Well, they actually are fairly sticky, because once you've got a big collection in one of them it's a pain in the butt to move!

Leo: Collection, you mean like playlists?

Adam: No, I mean, maybe people do it differently than I do. I don't make playlists, but I go through and I favorite stuff.

Leo: Okay.

Susie: Yeah.

Adam: And so I can then play my favorites just in a big, randomize everything, or I can go to a specific artist. I tend not to do playlists.

Leo: So, it's not the different, it's not what's. Yeah, because that's the question. It's the same music on all of it right?

Susie: Yeah.

Adam: But how do I get that list out? I found all of these great weird bands on Rdio and I like their music, but I'm going to have to go and literally write them down, unless I can find a playlist somewhere.

Leo: Well, I wonder, wouldn't it behoove Apple to have some sort of import capability? Or maybe they need cooperation from Spotify.

Adam: I'd think they need cooperation unless there's some way of you know, from Spotify

Leo: Can you export Spotify collections?

Adam: I don't know about Spotify, in Rdio there's no way to do that. What I've been hoping is there's deep in the system somewhere there's a p-list file that keeps track of all this but I don't think so, I think it's just a web interface.

Leo: Jay-Z says you can import playlists from Spotify to Tidal, according to the chat room. But Jay-Z's been known to say many things.

Susie: Yeah that would be really handy, if you could take your playlist with you when you left, but I don't know why Spotify and Rdio would want to let you take your playlist with you when you left.

Leo: But boy that would, that's the stickiness right? In every other respect you could move around, the prices are the same. Everything is $10 a month. Except for Tidal, you pay extra for high quality if you want it. Warner music, which is one of the big five record labels, I guess it's down to big three, I don't know how many there are anymore, says streaming revenue surpassed revenue for downloads for the first time ever. I don't understand, because aren't they saying over and over again how streaming is losing them money, blah blah blah. In this quarter, says Warner, we saw streaming revenue, it surpassed download revenue for the first time in the history of our recorded music business. 43%-

Adam: You're losing money but making up for it in (unintelligible)

Susie: So that's revenue for the record label.

Leo: -43.9% of the total revenue to Warner is now streaming. That's a .7% improvement.

Susie: Wow.

Leo: So, I don't know, what is the rest, if they're roughly equal, that means we would get 10% of revenue from other sources. Cocaine sales? I don't know what that would be. Anyway, I for one will be very interested to see what Beats does. I use Google All Access, and there is a feature both Amazon and Google offer that Apple could offer that would beat Rdio and Spotify, that's the ability to upload your existing library. And Apple, because it has iTunes match, it probably already has that information, right? If they included that in Beats, would that be interesting to you? The reason I say that, for instance, I have the entire Beatles collection which you can't listen to on, I don't think, on Spotify or Rdio. But because it's in my library, I can listen to it on Google All Access.

Adam: I thought Rdio let you access your music on a local device, I don't do that because-

Leo: But it's not local, it's not going to be on my phone, it's at home, but because I uploaded it to Google Music, I can stream it on my phone.

Adam: Yeah, I almost listen to Rdio almost entirely on my main Mac, so I don't really care too much about the phone for the amount that I'm using it there.

Leo: Okay, but that would be a competitive advantage. If they did, and by the way, for me it would be a disadvantage, if Beats doesn't do that there's not a chance in hell I'm gonna switch over. But there are a lot of people like me who pay $25 a year for iTunes Match. Apple knows my music library, they have my entire music library.

Adam: Well, thinking about it, it makes sense that Apple would build this into iTunes, as much as I hate to say that. And as soon as the music is into iTunes, one would hope that you would be able to access your existing library at the same time.

Leo: Well, we'll just see. I have a fantasy, which I realize is a total fantasy, that Apple has been rewriting iTunes. Like-

Adam: Again.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: -to like, totally rewriting iTunes and that this will be a re-release, a brand new iTunes in addition to Beats.

Susie: Didn't they say version 12 is already rewritten?

Leo: It's not rewritten, it's rewritten to break it, but it's not..

Andy: Yeah, I mean I, the thing-

Adam: Because different is good.

Andy: -I realize that the one thing that would get me as a user really interested in Beats, is if they said “The first part of a half hour presentation of music on an Apple devices is we threw out iTunes, we.. ”, if they did something as radical with their music app as they did with their photos app, that would get my attention in a huge, huge hurry because it's like Susie was saying earlier, I'm looking for ways to avoid using iTunes if I can possibly not use it.

Susie: Yeah.

Andy: One of the reasons why like I'm using the Amazon music app and the Google music app is because it's not iTunes, and it's not the built it iOS music app. I still remember when I was testing, when I got the iPhone 6 to review, and here is what it took to import my entire library from Amazon music. Tap two buttons, and then like about 20 minutes of downloads later, all of my music was on this device. And yet I had an Apple device connected to an Apple Macintosh using and Apple Music service and nothing, for no amount of please, or any other worldly entity, could get music off of this machine and into that phone, and I'm like, Apple built their whole, Apple is the company that fixed music on devices, how did they break it again?

Leo: Any shot at high res music? The Apple hardware I don't think can play it back. If you go to the MIDI app you can turn it up to a higher sampling rate, but you can't do 24 bit, I don't think.

Andy: Is there any indication that people would pay money for it, that people would care about that?

Adam: No, most people can't hear it.

Leo: I would but. Yeah, it's just a small market right?

Susie: I can't hear it.

Adam: People listen to music in the car, end of story.

Leo: Actually I take it back, you can go to 96x24. I don't know if that is done in the Daq or if it's up-sampled but you can do that. You have to use the audio MIDI set up to turn up the resolution. Alright, let's see, what else before we take a break and get out Picks. Anything else you guys want to talk about? We did briefly mention Marco Arments article on Redesigning overcasts for the Apple Watch. If you haven't read it, you should read it. Iphone 6X, according to the Apple insider will come, nobody knows, but according to Apple Insider will come in rose gold featuring 2 gigs of ram. Believe it or not the iPhone is still a gig of ram, right, and a 12 mega pixel camera. We're hearing lots of rumors about that camera being some sort of interesting new ray tracing camera or something. This is from Ming Chi Kuo's is pretty good.

Adam: I want an x-ray camera.

Leo: X-ray.

Adam: X-ray specs just like in the comic books.

Leo: Just like in the comics.

Andy: I want an MRI. So that..

Leo: Oh yeah, how about a functional MRI?

Andy: Exactly.

Leo: You start thinking about things and it can see and hear.

Andy: Do I need to go in for this appendicitis thing right now or can I complete binge watching Game of Thrones?

Adam: Oh, oh that tooth Leo, that tooth!

Andy: And three floating shaving heads.

Leo: While you're shaving it's diagnosing your jaw.

Andy: Keeping your face kiss-ably smooth.

Leo: The iPhone could be so much more, don't we agree?! No.

Andy: You're going to need a towelette for your phone though.

Leo: Yes!

Adam: Cross-over, that's what we're talking, cross-over.

Leo: Actually, I guess the amount of ram in an iPhone isn't really meaningful to compare that to say this 3 gigs of ram in my Galaxy S6 because the operating system is tuned for that space, right?

Andy: Yeah, but I don't think anybody has ever said “Oh my, this thing is so slow, there's just so much damn application ram in this thing.”

Leo: It's a good point, good point.

Andy: I would never fault an iPhone for having less than another phone that runs another operating system, but none the less I wouldn't think it's necessarily a bad thing if they added more ram.

Adam: It's like calories, more is better.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: When you're burning it anyways.

Leo: Or fewer..

Adam: Or fewer is better if you're eating it, and not anything else. Meaningless number which people..

Leo: Burning or eating?

Andy: I need my watch to tell me which one is good.

Leo: Should I eat or burn?

Andy: I am literally rudderless without my smart watch to tell me how I'm living my life.

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Leo: Time for Picks of the Week, I'm going to kick things off because I got a little thing for Andy Ihnatko. This is from NewerTech, it's called a Snuglet. Have you seen these?

Andy: I've seen them, yep.

Leo: It helps prevent accidental disconnection of MagSafe 2 connectors. What the Snuglet basically is is a shim, a little metal shim that you put around your MagSafe 2 just to add a little bit to the size and heft of it, right. And then, it's not going to fall out as easily, because I don't, you know, it doesn't particularly bother me but everybody agrees that Magsafe 2 seems to fall out a little bit easier for some and so, it's a snap to just literally snap it in, put it into your Magsafe and it's going to be snugger, oops, it just sucked it right off there. It's going to be snugger, can you see this? I guess I can't get this into the shot, than it ever was before. Sometimes it's so tight they have to give you a little Snuglet removal tool that lets you pry it out. NewerTech, they do good stuff. And this is actually a really interesting kind of solution to a problem that Andy has been bitching about for a long time. Snuglet, how much is it? Does it say? I don't see. $10 for two of them. I literally can't get my cable out now, it's stuck!

Andy: Problem solved!

Adam: It's hardwired now!

Leo: Whoops! I can't, it's not!

Andy: You just succeeded in creating the K Pro 2000.

Leo: But now the Snuglet is stuck in there, that's why you need the Snuglet removal tool.

Andy: I'd like to circle back to my earlier point that perhaps this was poorly designed and Apple should revisit their design.

Leo: Oh crap! I can't get it out! Alright now I have to buy a MacBook. Oh man! Oh. Andy, do you have a pick?

Andy: Indeed I do, we were talking about photos earlier, and this is something that I saw promoted at the Mac Store over the weekend and downloaded the demo and was buying the full version like 20 minutes later. It's called Noiseless and it's a really simple noise reduction app for your photos, especially when you're taking pictures at night and your iPhone or even your SLR has to up the iSOs to get it to see the proper exposure because there's so much more power being dumped into the image sensor, there's a lot more heat, and it creates these random like coloring spackling noises and since time immemorial there has been software that tries to make this stuff less noticeable. I don't think I've seen another app that makes it as easy as Noiseless. It will analyze the image for content and try to apply the best level of noise reduction, the most intelligent level of noise reduction, and if it guesses wrong it's not, the actual app isn't that much more complicated than what you're seeing in this web demo. You can just do quick A B's there are about, it gives you like big buttons on the other side of the screen that simply say, More Intense, Less Intense and for each one you can do fine tune things or you can take it fully off of automatic and get just this page full of sliders that let you adjust things. I took some pictures at 6400 iSO which is really high iSO for the camera that I have at Yosemite, but I had to because I'm using a long zoom and I'm taking pictures of a moving critter. You see there on the left, you sort of have to settle for there's going to have to be a lot of noise. That was even with Adobe Lightroom doing noise reduction. That's the best I could get it with Adobe's Lightroomsbuilt in noise reduction.

Leo: Wow, that's amazing!

Andy: Exactly, and on the right there, that was about 30 seconds and it was really no more than, it automatically shows intense, which sort of smoothed it out so much that you couldn't see all of the details in the feathers. I went two clicks lower then and even then took the slider for moderate and took it down a little bit, so I didn't even have to go in the really super sophisticated like fine tune controls, it was just, nope, less, less, okay that's about right, a little bit less than that, perfect. Let's ship that one. And because it can work as a hand off app for Lightroom and other apps, you can use it in Pixelmator and just simply, at this point I want to apply some better noise reduction and then it hands off to Noiseless, and then you're done, and then that TIF file gets handed right back to the app and it gets round tripped and you don't even have to deal with it. So it really does show off the fact that the extent to which having a big camera with really a sophisticated sensor isn't quite important if you have 30 seconds to put this into a desktop app, or even a really good mobile app, to just an app that does nothing but take care of noise reduction for you. So this is why we're all paying close attention to what Apple does with the iPhone 6S because there is an argument to be made that maybe it's not quite so important to have a really fancy shmancy image sensor if the CPU on the device is powerful enough to do post processing later on. But as you can see it's pretty much as quick and easy as that, and as I said, it's one of those wonderful things where $18, I don't really know if I want to risk $18, oh there's a demo. Okay I guess I'll use a demo, and then $18 doesn't seem like a lot of money! Let's buy this for $18 right now and lets reprocess everything I've posted on Flickr for the past 6 months.

Leo: Actually $18 is cheap for a plug-in like this. That's nothing.

Andy: Yeah, and it's, and the great thing is it exists as a stand-alone app so it's not necessarily getting a minimized striped down interface. Really easy to use and I can't argue with the results.

Leo: They also have the Pro version for $50 that has additional features including RAW, which is..

Andy: Yeah, I think it will, in Lightroom at least, Lightroom will export a TIF file that is the same bit depth as a RAW file. So I have to plead ignorance, all I saw was the price differential between the regular version and the Pro version and said “Well, I tell you what, why don't I just give them the $18 for this and then later on I'll convince myself if I need the Pro version.” And the ordinary version seems to work just fine for me.

Leo: Neat, it's from Macphun. M-a-c-p-h-u-n.

Andy: Mac P Hun.

Leo: Mac P Hun, oh that's how you say it. Susie Ochs! You got a pick for us? I don't know, did they warn you?

Susie: No, they didn't!

Jason: You know what, I didn't, I apologize about that.

Leo: Oh my...!!!!

Susie: It's okay!

Leo: Think if you want, I'll have Adam do it.

Susie: No, I got one.

Leo: Okay, fire away!

Susie: So, one of our awesome freelancers, Andrew Hayward, did a round up of Apple Watch games. And I know you're thinking, Why would I want to play a game on my Apple watch, that's bananas.

Leo: It'll kill the battery fast.

Susie: No, but there are a few of them that are kind of cool! I've been playing one called “Lifeline”. It's $3, you buy it on the phone and then it has a watch thing. So it's like Text Adventures, remember Text Adventures? So it's you and another person like, well not another person. You're texting back and forth with the character in the game and it's a real time thing so he crash landed and he says “Okay I've got to go over there and see something, it's going to take me like 2 hours to hike there” and you say “Okay, go check it out!” and then 2 hours later like your watch is going to buzz.

Leo: Oh, that's good! That's a good way to use that!

Susie: Yes, real time thing all day and it's not, it's easy to control, it's easy to get into, and the story really sucks you in. I'm really not a great gamer, I can't play shooters, I can't play driving games, but I'm a sucker for a good story, and this has a good story. So, $3, check it out. I really like it. If you have an Apple watch and you want to do something unique that's built right for the watch and it's entertaining.

Leo: Lifeline.

Susie: Lifeline.

Leo: It's like real time Zor, which is cool.

Susie: Yeah.

Leo: I like that idea. Yeah, Megan talked about this on iPad Today yesterday and it really seemed like fun, yeah. That's not to diminish the contributions Susie.

Susie: Well yeah, now your just another endorsement.

Leo: No, no, no, no. And then you should go to MacWorld.com and read all of them right?

Susie: Yeah, he found 10 and I was really, I was like, Apple watch games....

Leo: Does he like Trivia Crack, because I see I could do it on the watch.

Susie: That one's in here, yeah.

Leo: The watch is so limited because it doesn't do animation, it really just does slide shows so you, it's perfect for something like that. Text it. Adam Engst! Tidbit.com. Giant penguins sneaking up on you!

Adam: They're not very stealthy.

Leo: Quack!

Adam: Okay, so I have an unusual one, a website. Applespecialist.com. When I was, in fact, I was out by you last week. I was in San Francisco on a field trip up to Novato to see Drivesavers. I was there for the ASMC conference. This is a bunch of Apple specialists. We talk a lot about Apple Stores, you know, the big gleaming glass edifices of commerce, but there's still hundreds and hundreds of independent Apple resellers and service people out there. And I had no idea! It really didn't occur to me that there were this many of them, and I was at their conference, so I was like “Wow, there's a whole lot of people here! Who knew!” So these are the Mom and Pops stores that are helping small businesses they're doing training, they're doing all sorts of cool stuff that (coughs) Apple Stores, maybe not so much. Where you walk in and you're thinking, Oh my goodness, there's a whole lot of 20 somethings in t-shirts here. One person I talked to said that the Apple Specialists are Apple Stores for grown-ups. So I would just encourage people if you are looking for an Apple reseller who will sit down and talk with you, go to the Applespecialist.com site and see if there's any around you!

Leo: I'm glad they exist still!

Adam: Yeah, I said I was just surprised. I gather it's a tough business!

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: Apple will actually open stores around the corner from them putting them out of business, but, non the less there are still a lot of them out there and they're doing great stuff! You know, in terms of, you need something a little different. Or, you know, frankly the Apple store gets too busy or what not and they say Yeah, go take your broken iPhone off to these people, you know, Macfusion in San Diego somewhere and they're doing the same kind of service. They are all totally Apple authorized, they're selling totally official Apple devices, they can't get the Apple Watch yet but they do sell the iPad, and the Mac, and they're getting better at the iPhone, there's carrier issues with that. So, but again, I was surprised, I think people should hey, support your local businesses and if you can do that while buying your Apple products, all the more power.

Leo: I couldn't agree more. Actually this week on Enterprise Tech we had a sponsor, a New York company that did that.

Adam: Tech Serve?

Leo: Tech Serve, yeah that's right.

Adam: They're one of the big ones.

Andy: They're famous.

Leo: Yeah.

Adam: Yeah, they're very well known, they do great work down there.

Leo: And you want them if you're like setting up Newspaper running on Macs, or something like that, where you really have a specialty and that's much better than a Apple Store with somebody who would come in and really do a system upgrade.

Adam: Yeah. People doing great audio stuff, you know you want to set up a recording studio. Who are you going to buy from?

Leo: Perfect example. Yeah. Thank you Adam. ASMC, what's the site again?

Adam: Applespecialist.com

Leo: Applespecialist.com Hey, I didn't mention, but I will briefly mention Craig Hockenberry's post on his website, furbo.org. You guys know what I'm talking about.

Andy: Yeah.

Adam: Can you say this on air?

Leo: I can't, and so don't, don't look too closely at the screen.

Andy: He's said all he can stand and he can't stands no more.

Leo: But I love Craig Hockenberry, he's a very smart guy, and he did discover some sort of weird error in demon that runs on most Macintosh computers. Part of Yosemite, he says he filed bug report after bug report. It said, the Discovery D Demon and he says, This piece of software's responsible for a large portion of the thousand cuts. Personally I've wasted many hours just to keep my devices talking to each other. As soon as he published this article I did what he recommended. First of all, if you're using the latest version of Yosemite, that's the first fix. But then, because Discovery D will be cached and the errors that it creates will be persistent, his suggestion is to go around and unplug , it screws up bonjour, to go around and unplug your Apple TVs. He says it's ironic that the people who get bit by this are the most devoted Apple fans who have a lot of Apple stuff like and Apple router and Apple TVs. Unplug all of your Apple TVs, all of your Apple routers. Then replug the router, let it sit for a second so it forgets all of the data that's in there, replug your router and then plug in the Apple TV and while I can't, I was having a lot of trouble with the dropped networks and discovery issues, and I can't say for sure that it fixed it, I haven't had a problem since. So maybe it's Voodoo, maybe it's an actual prophylactic work around, but reboot everything and un-poison. He says “What happens if someone running an older version of OS 10 connects to your network and poisons it? Reboot again. So make sure you have up to date devices on your system and then reboot it all. Discovery D is not related to Tenacious D. Thank you to everyone! Susie, thank you for stopping by, it was so nice to have you! Please come back soon!

Susie: Yeah, anytime! That was fun.

Leo: Love it! MacWorld.com. @Sfsooz on the Twitter. S-o-o-z. Adam Engst is tidbits.com. If you're not already a subscriber please, don't miss out, every week you get something really useful and of course he's got the books, he's also got a place where you can donate and I think that's a good thing. Become a supporter. Tidbits.com if you want to know more. Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times. So nice to have you on.

Andy: Always a slice, Leo.

Leo: And we'll see you on next week. Rene Ritchie is, was he out for, was he on assignment?

Andy: Ah, I guess Imore had kind of an off-site thing going on.

Leo: Ah, they had an off-site, okay. So he'll be back next week along with Andy.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: And I hope you will too. We do MacBreak Weekly 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1800UTC every Tuesday. We'd love for you to join us live, but if you can't, don't worry! You can come back and watch any time. We've got on demand audio and video available at twit.tv/mbw. It's on iTunes, it's on the Podcast app on your iPhone and your iPad and you can also, you know, there's many, many other Podcast apps like Overcast. You'll find Twit and MacBreak Weekly in every single one of them including the dedicated Twit apps that our communities written, thank you! I'm Leo Laporte, thanks for being here, thanks to our producer Jason Howell for actually finding stories this week, it was not easy but you did it.

Jason: I do what I've gotta do.

Leo: It's your job man!

Jason: I cover all of the corners of the Internet.

Leo: Yep. We'll see you next time. Now get back to work because break time is over!