MacBreak Weekly 877, Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex, and Jason are here, but we also have a special guest, Ray Maxwell's back. He bought the 2019 Mac Pro at a great expense. He also just got his 2023 Mac Pro. Pros and cons on the Mac Pro plus a whole lot more. Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly
(00:00:23):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This this is Tweet. This is Mac Break Weekly episode 877, recorded Tuesday, July 11th, 2023. Too small to be dangerous. Mac Creek Weekly is brought to you by zoc. The free app where you can find and book appointments online with thousands of top rated. Patient reviewed Physicians and specialists filter specifically for ones who take your insurance are located near you, and treat almost any condition. Go to zoc do.com/mac break and download the Zoc doc app for free. And by Ag one. Take ownership of your health with a simpler, effective, and investment with Ag one. Try ag one and get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free Ag one travel packs with your first purchase of a subscription. Go to drink ag one.com/mac break and buy ZipRecruiter. If youre hiring, you're dealing with a slowing economy and that adds to your challenges.
(00:01:33):
Thankfully, there's a hiring partner who's focused on you and your needs. Ziprecruiter, four outta five employers who post on ZipRecruiter. Get a quality candidate within the first day. Try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/mac break. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple and the regulars are in the house. Let's say hello to Alex Lindsay of Office hours.global. Hello. Hello. Perfect sound and picture five outta five room Raider Loves the Shot. Also, Andy Anco from WG BH in Boston Radio guy, but he also looks mighty fine. Hey there, Heather there. Thank you very much. And you're not flooded out. You're, you're, you're, you're not wearing your waves. Mentally always, but as far as the home, no, no problem. Good. Pleased to hear it. From Marin just down the road, a piece. Jason Snell of six colors.com. Hello, Jason.
Jason Snell (00:02:30):
Hello, Leo. Good to be here. Did
Leo Laporte (00:02:32):
You get your vision pro yet?
Jason Snell (00:02:34):
Alas. I think I'm gonna have to wait a while on that. I'm not, I'm not sitting on the front porch hoping that a box
Leo Laporte (00:02:39):
Is delivered. You and everybody that way. Yeah. I also wanted, but that's great because just, just quickly that the fact that he answered the question means that he doesn't have it. Doesn't have it. Right. He, he's canary right then. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're gonna do this from now through next year. Remember, remember if that, if that, if that g4 imac screen is ever tilted off, off, that means he has the vision pro. It's a vision pro
Ray Maxwell (00:03:02):
There. I'm legally
Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
Required to say no. <Laugh>. Yes. Something like that. Or just tug your ear. We'll know somehow. And now let's say hello to Ray Maxwell. Long time friend in the network. I'm Ray, former hosted Hi Leo Maxwell's house. Good
Ray Maxwell (00:03:18):
To drop in and come back for a little visit.
Leo Laporte (00:03:20):
Nice to see you all the way up in bc. Ray is not only a colorist and a hang glider aficionado and
Ray Maxwell (00:03:31):
So sail plane knocking glider. Oh, there's a difference
Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
There. Oh, I meant soaring. Shh. Yes, I know the difference. Yes. and he's unpowered flight. He just kind of glides up there. But you drive the, the lead plane. You, you, you drag him up into the air, right? Yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:03:48):
Oh yeah. I've, I've flown over 50 different types of airplanes and nice sliders and I fly the tow plane. Yeah. If the tow pilot isn't there, nothing happens. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:03:57):
Right. <Laugh> gotta get 'em up in the air. First. Ray's also kind of an autodidact, polymath an expert in many, many things. And he, he seems to love the Mac Pro cuz every time a New Mac Pro comes out, Ray buys one <laugh>. Some would save more money than since. Ray, are you happy with the new M two? What is it? M two Ultra MAC Pro?
Ray Maxwell (00:04:24):
Yes. Yes. I'm, I'm quite happy with it. I knew what I was getting. I knew why I wasn't getting the studio. And later I'll explain all that
Leo Laporte (00:04:35):
Actually. That's the real, that's the real question, isn't it? I'm also, yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:04:38):
Yeah. I'm also what's known as an early adopter. Yeah. I have the first, the last three Mac Pros I ordered on the first day they were available. And of course that means I'm called an early adopter. Some people call me a fool. <Laugh> and others, and others call me an unpaid beta tester for Apple. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
You probably, I'm guessing cuz you're a colorist, have the pro display X D R attached to that thing.
Ray Maxwell (00:05:08):
I have, I have the xcr attached and I have two of the ACEs pro arts. So I have three. Well, here have a look. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
Look at that. <Laugh>. He should be on office hours with you. Yeah. Goals. I was gonna say we gotta get Ray back on when I'm
Ray Maxwell (00:05:28):
Getting Ray back on. Yeah. Yeah. I, I have a problem with six o'clock in the morning, but <laugh>, other than that
Leo Laporte (00:05:34):
Me too. Me too,
Ray Maxwell (00:05:35):
Alex. I do check into after hours off and on and, and they, the first thing I did after I got the New Mac Pro was go on after hours and say, is it all working? And work on my video and audio. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:05:48):
That's great. So you're using the Mac Pro right now to talk to us
Ray Maxwell (00:05:52):
This very moment. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:05:54):
So M two, tell us the, of the MAC Pro that you got.
Ray Maxwell (00:05:59):
Okay. I got a 128 gig memory and I I got it with two terabytes of of S S D and that pretty Well that's, that's,
Leo Laporte (00:06:16):
Those are your choices. Choices you get. I'm gonna think you didn't, did you get the 76 core GPU for a thousand dollars more? Or did you settle for 60 cores?
Ray Maxwell (00:06:25):
I, I settled for 60.
Leo Laporte (00:06:26):
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. What do you, what do you, are you doing color with the, with this thing or, or what?
Ray Maxwell (00:06:32):
Oh, yes. I'm doing a Photoshop final Cut Pro DaVinci resolve you know, all the bits and pieces and there's a number of other, yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:06:45):
So I'm just spec it out in the us You're, you're in Canada, but in the US that would be $8,199. It does include a mouse. It does not include wheels. Did you buy the wheels? <Laugh>?
Ray Maxwell (00:06:56):
No. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
Okay.
Ray Maxwell (00:06:58):
I did, I did not buy the wheels.
Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
Okay. So I will not add the $400 wheels.
Ray Maxwell (00:07:04):
It, it is a static Mac bro. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:07:07):
It just sits there. It don't roll nowhere. I have to say the design is nice. Is this identical to the Old Mac Pro case?
Ray Maxwell (00:07:14):
The case is virtually identical from the outside. You can't tell the difference.
Leo Laporte (00:07:20):
Okay. From the inside.
Ray Maxwell (00:07:23):
Ah, from the inside. Let's, well, although let's start now. I'm doing the transition from the 2019 Mac Pro, which is Intel based to the 2023, which of course is Apple silicon based. And so let's first have a peek inside my, oh, look
Leo Laporte (00:07:42):
At that
Ray Maxwell (00:07:43):
2019 Mac Pro. Okay. And starting down at the bottom is the power supply. And then the next thing up is I had an internal against Alex's advice <laugh>. I have a 32 terabyte rate array from Promise. And then the next thing up is I have the double G dual G P U card, the Rayon Pro Pro Vega two duo. And then the next thing up is the afterburner card, which is the ProRes decoder. And then there's a blank slot shown in this picture, but there was a Blackmagic 4K deck link Extreme 12 g video IO card. And that's my that, that's my universal video in and out. It'll do S D I H D M I component composite, you name it. And so that is what we started with.
Leo Laporte (00:08:46):
I, I do want to, before you go to the next one, I do remember you had pro problems with the Promise card initially, right? In fact, they did the Ray Max 12
Ray Maxwell (00:08:53):
Fix. Yes, I did. Well, I, I'm very proud of the fact that when the 2019 MacPro came out, there were two system software updates immediately after it was released due to my discoveries. <Laugh>. Yes. You broke it first is what you're saying. Yeah. I, yes. I broke first. It first
Andy Ihnatko (00:09:16):
You found, you found, you found the rake in the tall grass. You stepped on that and your broken nose saved everybody else's
Ray Maxwell (00:09:23):
<Laugh>. Right. Smack say in my face, you know. Anyway, it hold on a second, Alex, you wanted to interview.
Alex Lindsay (00:09:32):
I was gonna, you know, there were two updates so that, that Ray hit him twice. So anyway, but the <laugh>. But, but, but, but I think that Ray Ray shows like what the, the Target MAC Pro user, you, you can see that, you know, using up all that card space and putting those in. That's the difference between the studio and the, and the, and the stu and the macro. Let's
Ray Maxwell (00:09:52):
See. The new one, Ray. All right, just a moment here. So remember, oh, it's a lot more open in there. Oh yeah. Now this is, this is the way it came. Ah, okay. This is not with my cards in it. Yeah. Gonna stick stuff in there. Yeah. Alright. Now my plan, my plan was to put the raid array in here and to put my black magic video card in here. And then there's a third card that I was gonna buy. I'll tell you about that later that I wanted to put in here. But as I looked at this very picture before my new 2023 Mac Pro arrived, I said, uhoh, this isn't gonna work. So I discovered my first problem before the thing even ended up on my front porch and <laugh>. The first problem is, if you, if you look at the 2019, it has what are called MPX slots, which are PCI slots with an additional power connector.
(00:11:01):
Oh, yeah. To, to the left of, in this picture. Now, by the way, notice how the motherboard of this New Mac pretty crazy, has practically nothing's going on. Yeah. That's really remarkable. Everything is in that, in that system on a chip, you know. Wow. Up under the little metal thing. Yeah. So any rate, but when I looked at this picture, I said, you know what, my 32 terabyte promise Pegasus is not going to work Uhoh, because there's no place for the power connector. And so I immediately called Apple and Promise and said, Hey, and by the way, if you look at the Apple site, the US site, you will see that they still offer the 32 terabyte Promise Pegasus mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And it says, we'll work in current Mac Pro. Hmm. Not true. Mm-Hmm. Not true. Cuz it doesn't have, the new MacPro does not have M PX slots. They're straight pci. Now they are, what is it called? Class four? Or, you know, the latest where the 2019 was class three. Anyway, so I called them and I said, is this gonna work? And at first they both said, oh yeah, it just needs a PCI connector. And I said, come on guys. Look at the picture. <Laugh> it's mpx and, and you know, this isn't gonna work. And no, that's the J two.
Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
This is not the
Ray Maxwell (00:12:33):
One. Yeah, no, the for Fori. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:12:39):
Because I, I wanna see the listing that says it's gonna work cuz that's, you know.
Ray Maxwell (00:12:43):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:12:44):
It, it is. It's, but this, this page is jumping all over on me. Here. Hold on. I'll scroll down to that.
Ray Maxwell (00:12:51):
Yes. no. Not there yet.
Leo Laporte (00:12:53):
Not there either. Maybe they took it off. Huh?
Ray Maxwell (00:12:54):
You're on the US site. There it is. There's right there. Yeah. Yeah. Get there.
Leo Laporte (00:12:59):
32 terabytes. It's sold out.
Ray Maxwell (00:13:02):
And that's the goodness. Now, now slide down to highlights. Whoa. Stop right there. Yeah. And see current version.
Leo Laporte (00:13:10):
Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:13:12):
Current generation. No, that's a lie. Okay. Won't work. Now, I talked to Promise and Apple again the second time, and they said, oh, you know what? You're right. <Laugh>, it won't work.
Leo Laporte (00:13:25):
Oh my
Ray Maxwell (00:13:26):
Goodness. And Promise said but we have good news. You have a bunch of R four Raider arrays, don't you? And I said, yes. And so by now,
Leo Laporte (00:13:35):
They know you pretty well. Is that what you're saying? <Laugh>? Oh,
Ray Maxwell (00:13:38):
Yes. <Laugh>, yeah. Oh yeah, sure. Ray 2019. Yeah. Yeah. So, so they said you realize you can take those eight terabyte hard drives that are in your raid array, and you can move them over to an R four A chassis, and they'll work just fine. And by the way, they did, the only thing you have to do is you must install the New Promise Pegasus utility and upgrade firmware and software. Okay. So you
Leo Laporte (00:14:09):
Had to open, open up the, the, the case and take the the four drives out of there. Is that right?
Ray Maxwell (00:14:14):
Yes. That, that involved a screwdriver and so forth, removing the hard drives, putting them in the holders for the R four chassis, and they work just fine. Okay. Okay. That's the good news. Do you lose
Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
Any capability because you're doing that?
Ray Maxwell (00:14:29):
No. Okay. They run just, they, they run it, they keep in mind they're, they, they go back a while. So they only run it 600 megabytes a second. Okay. Okay. But they still run at that same speed. So this
Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Is your, this is your online slow storage. This is not your high speed.
Ray Maxwell (00:14:44):
That's right. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:14:45):
The two terabytes are probably pretty darn fast.
Ray Maxwell (00:14:48):
Yeah. The SSD is 6,000 megabytes second.
Leo Laporte (00:14:51):
Yeah. 10 times faster. Okay.
Ray Maxwell (00:14:52):
Yeah. Yeah. But now this brings us to the third card I wanna install in this machine. And that is a card by O W C, which is the eight M two. And this card fasten your seatbelt when it works properly. It can go at 26,000 megabytes per second, and you can get it up to 64 terabytes. I think I'm gonna get the 16 terabytes. This is the
Leo Laporte (00:15:22):
Excel Excelsior that you're talking about.
Ray Maxwell (00:15:24):
That's it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:15:26):
Wow.
Ray Maxwell (00:15:26):
That's the card. There's only, there's a problem though. Notice right under the title directions for 2023 Max Studio and Macro Pro compatibility.
Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
Yes.
Ray Maxwell (00:15:37):
Yeah. There's no, which is known as, whoops. It won't work just yet, folks. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:15:42):
Man. So,
Ray Maxwell (00:15:44):
So I'm now waiting for the next system software. Apple, apple knows about this and Promise and Apple are working together.
Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
There's gonna be another Ray Maxwell Fix. Okay. You,
Ray Maxwell (00:15:55):
You, you got it. Found that rake. It's, it's me, you know. Hello Apple. It's me again. <Laugh>. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:16:01):
Well, thank God somebody's doing this right. And I'm sure there'll be others follow in following in your footsteps, but good for you for doing this. So,
Ray Maxwell (00:16:10):
But, but can you imagine having that card as your scratch disc for your videos work?
Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
Terabytes. Wow. You're gonna get the eight days. Well,
Ray Maxwell (00:16:20):
I'm gonna get the 16. Oh, why? But you can go
Leo Laporte (00:16:22):
Up to Sure. Why you
Ray Maxwell (00:16:23):
Stop. You can go <laugh>. Yeah. You can go to 64, but that's $10,000. So
Leo Laporte (00:16:29):
You're good. You're, you, you got, you've got the Mac with the police, the police pursuit package. That's like suspension. The Bully Bar, the <laugh>. Wow. Okay. So the o WC is probably using somebody else's SSDs in here, I would guess. Right? I don't know what they use.
Ray Maxwell (00:16:51):
Yeah, have a look there. It's really
Leo Laporte (00:16:53):
Fast. They're that's amazing.
Ray Maxwell (00:16:54):
The, the, the problem is if you use their soft SSD software ade. Yeah. and you install this in a Mac Pro right now, the thing won't boot <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:17:07):
That's too bad. So Yeah, I'm using a, it shuts you down. I have their little, their little M two box and I have to use Soft Raid with it. I'm not a fan of ade, but I guess it's okay. I'm, I'm using that on my Mac Studio. That's external. If you,
Ray Maxwell (00:17:21):
If you want the 26 gigabyte transfer rate, you have to use theirs. You, by the way, the workaround right now is you can buy this, plug it in and use apple Raid in the util you know, the disc utility and set it up. But you'll only get 13,000. And by the way, you have to set it up on another Mac. You can't set it up on the Mac Pro. And then you have to plug it in after you've set it up and striped it with the Apple Raid software. Okay. So
Leo Laporte (00:17:54):
What do you do with all this storage? Ray <laugh>? That's a lot. <Laugh>.
Ray Maxwell (00:17:59):
How much much
Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
Was the total? Now I've, I've lost count. I can't add that high.
Ray Maxwell (00:18:03):
Yeah. Well if you, if you have cameras that shoot ProRes,
Leo Laporte (00:18:08):
You're doing a lot of drone stuff, aren't you?
Ray Maxwell (00:18:10):
Yeah, I'm doing some drone. And you, you know, the thing I I shoot with the most now is my, my iPhone 14 pro.
Leo Laporte (00:18:22):
Really? If you had the hustle blood, you don't shoot with your hassle blood, you shoot with your iPhone 14 Pro.
Ray Maxwell (00:18:30):
Well, it's 48 <laugh>. 48 Megas. It's it's
Leo Laporte (00:18:33):
Medium format. Absolutely. Yeah. <Laugh>. Wow. That's hysterical. Do you find the quality is almost as good?
Ray Maxwell (00:18:41):
Well, you know, you can go in and pixel peep and, you know, decide that it isn't quite the same. I have the, I have the Cannon fived Mark four as well. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice. Canon. And and yeah, I have still have the, the hassle Blad is now a museum piece.
Leo Laporte (00:18:56):
Isn't that funny? But you took such great images with that. I, I just, and the, the the depth of focus you were able to achieve. What were you doing? I forgot. There was something clever you
Ray Maxwell (00:19:09):
Heard. Well, the, the big thing was a dynamic range in those days. That's right.
Leo Laporte (00:19:13):
Yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:19:13):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I had that oh, I can't bring it up quickly, but I had that picture.
Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
I remember window the
Ray Maxwell (00:19:19):
Table
Leo Laporte (00:19:20):
Where you could see Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:19:22):
You could see the interior and you could see white clouds. And it had detail in both the amazing of the dynamic range. Yeah. But nowadays, almost all the cameras can do that.
Leo Laporte (00:19:33):
It's amazing.
Ray Maxwell (00:19:34):
Wow. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
So tell us more. Give us your thumbnail review of the Mac Pro.
Ray Maxwell (00:19:40):
Well, the, the bottom line is if you need IO slots and IO cards you do that you wanna add to this Yes. Then you want the back pro. Otherwise, if you don't need that, by all means get the studio. They're, they're exactly, you know, same horsepower.
Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
Yeah. Do you run the deck link in there as well?
Ray Maxwell (00:20:00):
Yes. Yes. You're, you're seeing me through the deck link at this very moment.
Leo Laporte (00:20:04):
That's how you control those mon, all those different monitors.
Ray Maxwell (00:20:07):
Yeah. I ha I have the black magic 6K Pro. That's what you're seeing me. He's
Leo Laporte (00:20:13):
In now, Alex, he's in 6k, Alex, that's gotta be, those are fighting words, <laugh>, but that's seven K <laugh>. Yeah. And we're squishing it down to seven 20 p by the way. I just wanna let you know. Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (00:20:32):
Yeah. You, you know, it's, it's the 10 p is still still the, the the big player at the moment. We, but a lot of us are working at 4K or eight K the, the 12 K has I, I found as be a little excessive, you know? Yeah. Like it's, I haven't, haven't found a lot of use for the 12
Leo Laporte (00:20:48):
K. Well, if you, that's the thing. When you go to 12 K now you need a Mac Pro with 3000 terabytes of storage and a Tech link card and all that
Alex Lindsay (00:20:58):
Stuff. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is, the big limit, like with the Black magic cameras, is really how to get it
Leo Laporte (00:21:04):
Recorded.
Alex Lindsay (00:21:05):
Yeah. You know, so when you record a, you know, it's getting a a, a drive fast enough. And just the throughput, just the u s BBC on the 12 k on the black magic 12 K isn't fast enough to really get us the, the, the compression rate that we want at eight K or 12 K. So if I'm doing like eight K, one 20, I'm, I'm still stuck at about 900 megs a second coming out of that. But it's still
Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
26 gigabytes a second. Should be fast enough, shouldn't it? Well, but
Alex Lindsay (00:21:30):
You can't plug that into the camera. Oh. So yeah. So you're, it's, it's, getting it out of the camera is the problem at the moment. Right, right. For most of these things. And then once you get into it, you're, you're absolutely right. You have but that drive speed is so important because you're, you're, especially if you start stacking, you know, you got 3, 4, 5 tracks of data, and then you're starting to apply, and this is where you start, you start applying effects and you start doing other things. But that drive speed, delivering those frames to the CPU is, is a big deal. So that speed is, is really key.
Leo Laporte (00:21:59):
Ray, you've been doing this even longer than I have. Is it kind of still thrilling to you to see how much you can, how much power you could put on your desk, how much storage, how much speed?
Ray Maxwell (00:22:10):
Oh, absolutely. And AI is, you know, I'm just the, this selection capability <laugh> in Photoshop and on my iPhone now, you know, the, the ability to point at something and select it, I re, I used to spend 20 minutes selecting something in a photo. And, and the horsepower and ai all of this just blows me away. And the generative fill now in Photoshop. And have
Leo Laporte (00:22:40):
You played with Firefly? I think I was gonna ask about Firefly. Have you played with that a little bit?
Ray Maxwell (00:22:44):
Oh, yes. Yes. In fact, when we get to plugging my friend's book, the cover was done with Mid Journey.
Leo Laporte (00:22:53):
Let's see this, so you did this cover. This is a book about AI robots, a sci-fi book from a good friend of Ray's, take down the lower third so we could see his name Guy Omega Super Earth Mother. And you did that in Mid Journey. I sh Alex probably would've recognized it. <Laugh>. He's TheJourney guy here.
Ray Maxwell (00:23:13):
Definitely
Alex Lindsay (00:23:14):
Looks like great mid journey
Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
Work. Great mid journey work. Yeah. Yeah. You're using 5.2 now? Ray?
Ray Maxwell (00:23:21):
Yeah, I, I believe so. Yes. Yeah, he did it. I I I did not.
Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
Oh, he did it. Oh, nice.
Ray Maxwell (00:23:27):
Yes, he did the cover.
Leo Laporte (00:23:28):
And illustrators all over the world are grinding their teeth as we speak.
Ray Maxwell (00:23:33):
Oh, I know, I know. It's, this is, you know, talk about the, the looms and the Luddites <laugh>. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
Yeah. Here they come with their bats. Yeah. Yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:23:43):
Here they come. You know what's,
Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
What's, what's guy's book about, this is a friend of yours, you, you act, went to school with,
Ray Maxwell (00:23:49):
I went to school with him at the University of Missouri. We met in the Ham radio club. Oh, wow. And we're both our engineers. And he ended up moving to Vancouver, lives here in Vancouver. And after he retired, he started writing hard science fiction. I love everyth. Everything in his science fiction is possible. And in this book, I want you to imagine that we're at a time when things aren't going so well here on Earth. And there's a moon base and there's a kind of interesting character who has built a rocket ship that can travel between the stars. And he has built an ai, several ais that are going to care for a library of genetic material and some incubators, if you will, to incubate this new genetic material. And he will modify the, the AI will modify the genetic material to suit the exoplanet that is 20,000 years away. And so they're going to send this ship on a 20,000 year trip. And when it gets there, it's going to create human beings that are adapted to this new exoplanet. Now, what could possibly go wrong? <Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (00:25:21):
And, and by the way, the entire thing is exclusive on Amazon Kindle right now through the end of August. So if you wanna read it, it's Kindle Select, and then the print book and the ebook comes out everywhere. September 1st, you can go to Kinetic. This is, I think this is his site, right? Kinetic worlds.net. Gaia, yes. Yeah. And read all about it.
Ray Maxwell (00:25:44):
He, ever since he was in the Peace Corps in Niger, Africa, he goes by gh
Leo Laporte (00:25:49):
<Laugh> gh. Oh, Aldon Mop. <Laugh>. Actually, G is great. Not Guy. I like gh Good for him. <Laugh>. And you can cut me, Leo. So Ray, if you, if somebody came to you and said all right, I wanna buy the most powerful Mac I need, w would you, would you approve of a purchase of a Mac Pro? Or would you steer him towards the studio? I think you'd probably steer him towards the studio. Yeah.
Ray Maxwell (00:26:17):
Yeah. It's, it, I would steer him towards the studio unless he needs PCI io. Right. Cause that's what the Mac Pro is all about. If you want PCI io or you want these super fast SSDs to plug in, then you're gonna need to go to the Mac Pro. And you know that, here's the bottom line. This, this thing is anywhere from two to seven times faster than the 2019 Mac Pro. Wow. and of course you can put much faster storage in it than the 2019, because by the way, it's only class three. And so, you know, the, the new 20 thir 23 M Pro is gonna get you up to 26,000 megabytes per second. That's just amazing. With this o wc,
Leo Laporte (00:27:12):
Just
Ray Maxwell (00:27:12):
Amazing. Any rate, all all of this speed and stuff, I mean, again, going, I mean, I go back to 80, 80 days and yeah. 400 k, yeah. Six inch floppy disc. Yeah. <laugh>. And, you know, this just blows my mind. And, and that's why I'm an early adopter. It's fun. You know, I, the last, the last three Mac Pros I bought, I bought them on the first day. They were, you're crazy available for order.
Leo Laporte (00:27:39):
Is there anything you feel like you can't do with Apple Silicon that you were able to do with your Intel MacroPro?
Ray Maxwell (00:27:45):
I haven't run into it yet. I, I am very pleased with how all of my Intel Base software runs using. Is that
Leo Laporte (00:27:53):
Remarkable? Isn't it? It's just remarkable.
Ray Maxwell (00:27:55):
Yeah. I, I, and of course, most of the ma major apps, all, all of the big apps that I'm running, they're all universal, right. And they're already, I the transfer over was quite easy using the migration assistant. Good. And I haven't had, I haven't hit any problems other than oh, the one problem I missed telling you about was I did have problems with the Black Magic Card. This was really weird. I still don't know how we fixed it. <Laugh>, I hate that. I put the Black Magic card in, and the system software said, yes, I see the card, but the desktop video card or desktop video software from Blackmagic said, I can't find the card. And so I called up Blackmagic and they were very helpful and they know me as well, <laugh>. And anyway, they they said, well go back a couple of versions and let's try that. And we went through two or three different versions and then he said, okay, go back to the latest version. We went back to the latest version and suddenly it worked. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:29:04):
Oh, I love computing. I swear to God, that's just nuts. Which, which Dick, which deck link again? Was that The eight K?
Ray Maxwell (00:29:13):
That's the 4k 4k deck link Extreme 12 G. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:29:19):
So if you're having trouble getting it working, go to an only older version of the software, then go to the newer and everything should be just fine. It sounds
Ray Maxwell (00:29:28):
That's what happened, imp
Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
Plausible, but
Ray Maxwell (00:29:30):
I hate that one. When
Leo Laporte (00:29:31):
That, that sort of thing happens. There was, you know, a little, it just, you need a little it had a little hitch and it's get along and you just need a little nudge to just just get going. Yes. Well, Ray, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I miss working with you on the Maxwell's House. I think we probably all have to bring that back in the club. We'll bring it back a lot of the older shows in the club. But I'm just thrilled that you're still buying the most expensive computers out there, <laugh>. And, and,
Ray Maxwell (00:29:57):
And, and, and by the way, on the first day that Vision Pro is available Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:30:03):
Yeah. You know
Ray Maxwell (00:30:04):
Who's got place in
Leo Laporte (00:30:05):
Order. Oh yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. We're gonna count on you early 2024 for your review of Vision Pro Ray Maxwell. And I want to hear how accurate the color is, cuz that's Ray's real real field here.
Andy Ihnatko (00:30:18):
Ray, if I, if, if, if I can be a spoiled sport here, you realize that. Are you really testing it? If you're not able to be wearing a Vision Pro while also looking at another vision Pro objectively, I really think you
Leo Laporte (00:30:30):
Should buy two of them. You need two? Yes,
Ray Maxwell (00:30:35):
Of course.
Leo Laporte (00:30:37):
Oh, do you have any other Macs or is this the only Mac that you use?
Ray Maxwell (00:30:42):
I, I have, I have another laptop. I have the by the way, you were looking at images from my iPod Pro. What?
Leo Laporte (00:30:51):
Wait a minute. What? Your iPod?
Ray Maxwell (00:30:53):
Yeah, the, sorry. Ipad. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
God. I was really confused. Now, <laugh>, well, you know, I've figured out a way, if you revert the version on the iPod, you can get it to show pictures. Okay. Your iPad Pro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Yes. And what are you switching? What are you switching cameras with?
Ray Maxwell (00:31:12):
The atm. Mini.
Leo Laporte (00:31:13):
Mini. Okay. Very nice. You
Ray Maxwell (00:31:15):
Know you know, you, you get involved with Alex. All right.
Leo Laporte (00:31:19):
I know, I know,
Ray Maxwell (00:31:20):
I know. And you get into expensive trust me. To, to after hours and so forth. And, and, and, and everybody asked me, said, oh, you're in this group. Said what does it cost to join? And I said, oh, it's absolutely free. <Laugh>. Of course,
Leo Laporte (00:31:35):
After,
Ray Maxwell (00:31:36):
After I worked with this group for, while I think the last count I had spent $8,000
Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It's a little pressure to, I keep up with the
Ray Maxwell (00:31:45):
Lindsay. Yeah. I, I ha I have the the ATM mini, I have the mix pre three. You know, I could go down the list.
Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
Oh, you and I are in the same boat. I know exactly how you feel. <Laugh>. What
Andy Ihnatko (00:31:58):
About the exchange rate is between a Ray and an Alex <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:32:02):
Oh, that's interesting.
Andy Ihnatko (00:32:03):
It's like the euro where they tried to keep it
Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
To keep it Yeah, they're apparent. Apparent. Yeah. They try to keep it
Ray Maxwell (00:32:07):
On par. Remember, it's even more with me cuz I'm in Canada. Yeah, that's
Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
True. Yeah, that's true. Exactly. Ray Max. Well, what a pleasure. It's great to see you. Thank you for your review of the Nuac Pro. I'm thrilled that you got it and got it all fixed up and working great. And
Ray Maxwell (00:32:23):
Yeah, I'm very happy with it. Everything is clicking ticky boo, and as soon as I get that OWC card, I'll be a very happy camper. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:32:32):
Yeah. I want to hear about that too. Thank you, Ray. And maybe we'll see you in after hours on office hours.global <laugh> sometime soon. Take care. Ray Maxwell. Ladies and gentlemen, former host of Maxwell's House Colorist Hang Glider Pilot. No, I s did I say soaring? Not hang glider. Soaring sail. Plane power sail. Plane. Sail plane. Yeah. Pilot and and a man about town. Thank you, Ray. Have a great one. We're gonna take a little break. We come back, we have lots of Apple news to talk about as well with Jason. Ha, Jason Snell. Who?
Jason Snell (00:33:06):
Somebody,
Leo Laporte (00:33:06):
Jason's, she said you stayed quiet in the background there, but I know you were, were you drooling or were you just thinking nom Not gonna
Jason Snell (00:33:13):
You know, I, I was on a podcast where I refer to the Mac Pro sort of negatively this week. Oops. And so I'm glad that there's some equal time
Leo Laporte (00:33:20):
Over here. Equal time for the Mac Pro. We'll talk about that. We're gonna call you on the carpet after this word from Zoc Doc. You know that feeling you get when you finally find the thing, you know the thing you've been searching for on the internet. You spend hours researching and reading thousands of reviews and you, you know, you finally find it. This thing. Be it I don't know, sparkly disco pants. This is the stuff I buy on Instagram late at night. Designer dog hoodies, whatever it is, you know, just checks all your boxes. Five stars arrives at 48 hours. How is it? You can get perfectly machined aluminum pill boxes in, in just two days. But if you want a good doctor, it could take forever to get an appointment. Why is that? And how do you even know if they're good?
(00:34:09):
Where's all the reviews? Well, there is a way. It's called Zocdoc, a place to find and book great doctors who have amazing reviews. Many with appointments within 24 hours. Zocdoc is a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online. We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top rated patient reviewed doctors and specialists. You can even filter specifically for ones who take your insurance or are located near you. And it's not just doctors. Almost any condition you're searching for. Dentists and chiropractors. And I was looking for gerontologists. They got 'em all with verified reviews from real patients. Actual patients, not bots. The average wait time to see a doctor booked on Zocdoc 24 to 48 hours. So sure you can get those disco pants tomorrow. You can get a doctor tomorrow too. That's it. You can even score same day appointments.
(00:35:05):
Once you find the doc you want, you can book 'em immediately with just a few app tabs. No more waiting awkwardly on hold with a receptionist. This is simply put the best, easiest, fastest way to find the right doctor for you. Go to zoc doc.com/mac break and download the Zoc Doc app for free. I know you can get it, you know, just go to the app store. But would you do me a favor and go to the website, zoc doc.com/mac break. That way they know you saw it here. Zocdoc.Com/Mac break. It's free, it's fast, it's easy. Find a book, a top rated doctor today, zoc.com/mac break. Apple put out a big emergency update yesterday, <laugh> to iOS and Mac os. I rushed what I read about at the Rapid security update. Rapid security response update. I rushed to my iPad and my iPhone and my Mac to download it. And it was gone. They pulled it. How fast did they pull it? Was it like 10 minutes? It feel, feels like, I
Andy Ihnatko (00:36:09):
Think it was much less than an hour. I think
Leo Laporte (00:36:11):
It was very quick. And the reason being what? That it broke some websites according to reports on Mac rumors forums and on Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, zoom and other websites started giving a warning about not being supported on Safari. Oops. it was a zero day, actually an active zero day. That's a little concerning in WebKit. But they did apparently change the safari user agent to identify it as patched with a parenthesis. A parenthesis and some websites, which who are, I think I honestly you wanna blame the website who are looking specifically at the user agent said no. Mm-Hmm.
Andy Ihnatko (00:37:03):
Yeah. But, but when, when Facebook and Instagram like aren't inaccessible after an update, that's not Facebook and Instagram problem, that's not a problem if you pushed out an update like that, you know?
Jason Snell (00:37:13):
Yeah, but that's also why all the browser info is not real, because everybody lies about it. Because they wanna maintain compatibility. Yeah. And it's like, like Mozilla, right? They're all like Mozilla. And so, I mean, I get it, but it's weird that whatever string they should have tested, right? Well, let's change the string. Oh, it breaks everything. We can't change the string. And that's a, that's a mistake. I was gonna make a joke here that their rapid security response obviously means that it's only out there, it's very limited time. You have
Leo Laporte (00:37:39):
Very little time, limited time.
Jason Snell (00:37:40):
Get it quick. Are you gonna, are you gonna miss it? I just
Leo Laporte (00:37:43):
Missed it and I felt, I felt at a loss. I was
Jason Snell (00:37:46):
I mean you're gonna prioritize the zero day over maybe some last minute testing of things like user string, you know, agent strings and your web browser, but, whoops. So I guess
Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
It's a testament. Yeah, I appreciate that. To how urgent they felt it was. Right? They saw it was active in the wild, they go, crap, we gotta fix this. And they didn't ha they didn't have time to test it. The user agent is how the browser identifies itself to sites. Its visits. And you can see, you know, as you said, there's a lot of, most browsers lie and say they're Mozilla <laugh> just for compatibility reasons. And apparently these websites were looking, they saw Safari and they saw then parenthesis, a parenthesis said, oh, oh dear, I don't know
Jason Snell (00:38:25):
About you. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:38:27):
What is this? Ah, I won't
Jason Snell (00:38:28):
Serve anything. No.
Leo Laporte (00:38:30):
Which is not the right response either. I guess Apple apple's probably doing the right thing cuz they, of course they could have just taken the A off <laugh> and shipped it and I guess they decided not to do that. Apple says they will, it will be a, a re a response, which has a parenthesis B in it will be available soon to address the issue. So, okay.
Andy Ihnatko (00:38:55):
That's, that's, that's way more serious than a, than that moth. That's that that Admiral Grace Hopper
Leo Laporte (00:38:59):
Found serious. This is a bug baby. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko (00:39:02):
But, but at least, but at least now it's, it's easy to like revert for like a rapid security update. Like in, in the olden days, like once you updated Apple was like, why would you ever want to undo an update? That's right. So because the, I mean, the first time something like this happens and you're stuck with a problem until Apple fixes it, that's when people like, by default say, I'm not gonna trust a security update until everybody else's, until the end of the month when I don't need to use a Mac for anything. And that's when it's most critical to actually apply these damages.
Leo Laporte (00:39:26):
Yeah, this is the one you really want and you wanna apply right away. Apple has a page support page HT 21, 3827. If you applied rapid security response, iOS 16.5 0.1 A here's how to roll it back. And it turns out you can just go into settings and remove it. Yeah. On the Mac it's a little bit more complicated. You have to go to about this Mac then more information under Mac os click the info button next to the version number, click remove and restart. Click to confirm. Much easier on iOS. There's a remove security response entry in the version settings. So
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:05):
I do, I do think that was a negotiated piece inside of Apple, deciding that if we are gonna push these things out without an an immense amount of testing, we need to make, I I will approve this so long as there's a way to undo it in case the the patch creates more problems than it solves. Yeah. I I could really see there being an argument about saying, Hey, we can't, we, we, we can't do this without having a, a real good system in place.
Leo Laporte (00:40:27):
Thank you're right. Makes a lot of sense. It's Prime day. Don't everybody turn off the show at once. <Laugh>. There, there goes John Ashley, we lost him. <Laugh>
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:39):
So many offers on string lights. Oh my God. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:40:44):
I have not bought anything. Actually there, there is a pretty good deal on am Amazon does this once a year, right? The prime day. There is a pretty good deal on an iPad mini, which is like 120 bucks off and I like the iPad mini. Yeah. So
Andy Ihnatko (00:40:57):
Yeah, I, I keep, I, I keep waffling on upgrading my my Kindle knowing that I need something that's has with U S C and has a larger screen, but I definitely don't want another Kindle. And every time I look at like, one of the really nice e-readers that Jason recommends, I'm like, yeah, but for a little bit more I can just have an a Mac, an iPad mini, even like a last generation one. I don't care that it lasts, it doesn't last 30 hours on battery. It's gonna be a really nice e-reader and it can be the thing that I carry when I don't even want to carry my iPad Pro with me.
Leo Laporte (00:41:26):
I I I
Andy Ihnatko (00:41:27):
Love that
Leo Laporte (00:41:27):
Device. I'm always Yeah, yeah. The mini is is my, my bedside computer basically. It's small enough. Yeah. It's a little bigger than a phone.
Andy Ihnatko (00:41:36):
And it's too small to get you into any trouble. Like, I'm not gonna start a project. I, I, I've started projects on my iPad thinking that, oh, I'm just gonna read comics. I just need this big screen. And then, hey, what if I just open up the Ulysses and just jot down these couple notes and then, hey, it's 6:00 AM and I need to be somewhere at two hours. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
Is there such a thing? Is too small to get you in any trouble? I don't <laugh> I get in trouble with the smallest things. Ibel, I believe is, is there anything to read into this price? Is there any reason not to buy it from Amazon? I don't. I, I really like, don't think so. No.
Jason Snell (00:42:10):
Apple and Amazon now have a deal that actually
Leo Laporte (00:42:13):
Involves it chips from Apple, right?
Jason Snell (00:42:14):
Yeah. Yeah. They, they cleared, basically they got Amazon to clear a bunch of apple product resellers of questionable quality out of the store in exchange for making a deal, ah, with Amazon and Apple. So they, that stuff is, it's pretty solid and if you get a good deal, it's a, it's a good deal. I'm unclear whether there's a new mini coming or whether it's just that they've got, you know, they've got lots and they wanna move some and that they've got Apple. The beauty of being Apple is your margins are so huge that you can discount a little bit if you wanna move some stuff out of the channel and they can manage it.
Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
120 bucks off was 500 now three 80. That's the only thing I'm gonna mention. Oh, but Leo, there's another good deal here. Uhoh, wait a minute. The Delgado Stream deck, which we like 15 teams. Okay,
Jason Snell (00:43:01):
John, how did you know? I literally bought that during the show. You're kidding. I did. Seriously, I literally bought that during each show. I, I'm about to
Speaker 6 (00:43:07):
Buy this one and then there's the one with the knobs for $20 off. That's
Jason Snell (00:43:10):
Actually, yeah,
Alex Lindsay (00:43:11):
I, I bought it kn with
Leo Laporte (00:43:12):
The
Jason Snell (00:43:12):
Knobs, you know, you lose a lot of buttons there. And I, in my in, I like automating stuff myself and like little twisty knobs and stuff are not very automatable. So I'm skeptical of that one. I haven't tried it, but I, I'm a little bit skeptical of that. And I, I wanted a, a newer stream deck, so I got that.
Alex Lindsay (00:43:29):
I haven't, and it, I don't, you can see that it's not plugged in. Yeah.
Jason Snell (00:43:32):
Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:43:32):
Wow. Yeah,
Jason Snell (00:43:34):
I used it. I mean
Leo Laporte (00:43:34):
It's, I'm, I'm figuring out.
Alex Lindsay (00:43:36):
I I use it with Resolve. Some of the encoders work, these encoders work pretty well, but I haven't found it. And, and as a general purpose, I actually bought another El Gado right before the show because I, you know, I've been using it, I have like three stream decks right now, plug in different computers and I was like, oh, another one.
Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
But wait,
Jason Snell (00:43:53):
That was, I thought too,
Leo Laporte (00:43:54):
But wait, because you could buy for Amazon or get the same price at El Gado, they're doing their own prime deals and you get a little cover for your, here's the,
Alex Lindsay (00:44:05):
The, here's the, the problem with buying anything directly, and this is the big advantage that Amazon has shipping is
Leo Laporte (00:44:10):
Whole Foods. Oh, whole Foods. Whole Foods. You pick your, you pick your, if I don't like it, you pick your stuff up at, if I don't like it, just take it back. Oh, I know. If I don't
Alex Lindsay (00:44:17):
Like it, I don't even have to put it back in a box. Yeah. I literally take it to Whole Foods and hand it to them and, and the money is, is the credit is put back in my account in like a day, you know, like, or hours and, and it's just, it's so seamless that I, it, at first I thought I do return a lot more now than I did before. I used to be like, oh, I'll get around to it. Never got around to it, but I now, b it's the lock-in is super serious because if Al Gado, I, I have tried to <laugh>, I have attempted to return things. It, the return policy and the process is
Leo Laporte (00:44:50):
Oh, that's a good
Alex Lindsay (00:44:51):
Point than Amazon. So, and, and
Leo Laporte (00:44:53):
Really, really, do you really need a face plate for your steam deck? Honestly, I mean, no, no. <Laugh>
Alex Lindsay (00:44:59):
No, you do not.
Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
So a free $10 face Deck is not gonna convince you to get it from Elgon on Amazon. You're right. That's what I, you know, it's really I I was asking about this. I have never returned anything, but it is a really great way to return stuff and they just, I think they throw it, somebody told me they throw it in a container out back and then the truck No, they,
Alex Lindsay (00:45:22):
It's a box.
Leo Laporte (00:45:23):
Oh, you were telling me. Yes.
Alex Lindsay (00:45:24):
Yeah. It's a, so they, they have a big box there and what they do is they scan your stuff on the way in. Yeah. So they, you, you have it there. You, you know, they'll tell you if it's more than a couple hundred or more than like $150, they want you to put it back in the box. But if it's less than that, generally they just say, just bring it back. In fact, they tell you not to put it back in the box. Anyway, so then you, you hand it to them, they scan your phone, they throw it in a box. The box now has a, has a contents in it. Random says what? Everything's in it random. And then people bid on these, right. That's, I dunno if they bid on them or, or Amazon, but people buy the boxes. You were the one that told from Amazon <laugh>. And then they then they sell 'em on eBay. Like, I mean, that's,
Leo Laporte (00:46:01):
There's a business
Alex Lindsay (00:46:02):
Model story. People to buy these boxes of used stuff and sell 'em on Good deal. So they're buying 'em, you know pennies on the dollar from Amazon. And Amazon has figured out the math that it's better than throwing 'em away, which is what they were doing before. They're just throwing everything away that you sent back. And
Leo Laporte (00:46:15):
Scooter X tells us, by the way, this just in the Aldo Stream deck app for iOS now offers six free buttons. Yes, it's true. Yes,
Jason Snell (00:46:24):
It's true. It's silly that they charge, they charge for more buttons, but it, it does mean that if you are a Stream Deck fan and you're traveling without your stream deck, you can use your iPhone as a stream deck and get six buttons
Leo Laporte (00:46:35):
Free. They're not free on Android. Just want you to know <laugh>. Okay. somebody
Andy Ihnatko (00:46:46):
Put, thank you for reminding me. I just, I just bought a two terabyte s SD <laugh>. Yep. I wa you know what?
Leo Laporte (00:46:51):
I wasn't gonna mention Prime Day at all.
Andy Ihnatko (00:46:54):
It's just that it's, it's like there are things that are, I don't, I don't just scroll through the list. It's more like I'm waiting to buy storage on things on days like this. I was like, yeah, I wanted to get an M two ssd. Okay. Okay. That's half price. That's
Leo Laporte (00:47:06):
Okay.
Andy Ihnatko (00:47:07):
Okay. I'm gonna close the window or else this is gonna be Yeah, I
Leo Laporte (00:47:09):
Can tell you right now, I'm gonna,
Andy Ihnatko (00:47:11):
I'm gonna, I'm gonna be in the red on this show if I, we haven't even gone to Alex's picks yet.
Leo Laporte (00:47:15):
God, thanks <laugh>. But, but I don't think you should buy a Mac Pro with a deck link. Card <laugh>. I'm just saying I think in the promise storage, I think you should stay away from that. There is testing in from Linus Tech Tips. I have not seen this video. Who put this in the show notes they take? I
Andy Ihnatko (00:47:33):
Did actually. I saw, yeah, I saw it last night and I thought it was so interesting that I actually generated a transcript so that people could read it. So
Leo Laporte (00:47:40):
Tell us about this.
Andy Ihnatko (00:47:42):
It was a really good in-depth review in that it's not just, oh, well, you know, it's too expensive and it's not really that much faster. Like they were, they they were looking at first, they, they start with the marketing stuff the, the, the, the charts about, oh, here's how much more how much faster the M two is than last year's M one, and here's how faster it is than this core i nine and a pointing out that okay, you, I see, I see some graph series where the legends aren't actually labeled, and I see benchmarks here where you didn't actually explain what the benchmark did. And so the famous
Leo Laporte (00:48:12):
Apple graphs, right. They just, they yeah, they're comparing it to an Intel machine from five years ago and things, right?
Andy Ihnatko (00:48:18):
Yeah. And, and so they, they, they were very, actually, I think Linus actually went specifically and said that the, I'm not quoting here, but that the marketing images here, marketing claims are just malarkey. It's incrementally faster, but not monumentally faster. It's not that much faster than comparable Intel hardware in many cases. It's slower than comparable Intel hardware. Oh, that's interesting. But however, there was, there was huge praise for just for the power management. Basically.
Leo Laporte (00:48:46):
That's what Apple often does, is they say power per wat instead of Yeah, exactly. Raw power.
Andy Ihnatko (00:48:52):
They're, they're making, they're making the point that the entire the, the entire Max M two Ultra Max Studio consumes less power than just the Intel CPU U or just the graphics card in the PC that they built to to stack it <crosstalk>. Well, if
Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
You're looking for speed and you're plugging it in, you may not care, right?
Andy Ihnatko (00:49:11):
Yeah. I mean, I, I think, I think that they, I think it was very balanced and fair in that they were basically saying that actually in the first 10 minutes five minutes, they said that if all they said was this is more better and more faster. It's the new, it's the new M two Ultra Studio all would be Jake. It was just that they were making specific claims that they couldn't reproduce. Actually, I think that they were also trying to reproduce like the Black Magic Studio
Andy Ihnatko (00:49:36):
Benchmark that they, that they mentioned and they couldn't reproduce it. And even Black Magic, when they talked to Black Magic, they couldn't reproduce it either. They're claiming. So this is, this seems like a really, really weird set of claims. Again, it's, they weren't saying don't buy it. They actually, they were, the, the other point they're making is that if you, if you don't necessarily need a Mac, you can buy a comparably equipped or even over equipped Windows box for the price of like a top of the line for the price of a top of the line M two Ultra Studio. You can get a top of the line Windows box that has easily the same specs and still have $1,700 left for another Mac Mini or, or, or an M two MacBook. And so I thought that was very fair are what I like about it. They were really quick.
Leo Laporte (00:50:21):
But are they anti Apple? I mean, is there some bias here or No, I, what
Andy Ihnatko (00:50:26):
I, if everyone has bias, there's no such thing as a lack of bias. And also they are primarily like a PC oriented almost. I mean, largely few think you have to use Windows is one of the disadvantages of that box. Yeah, exactly. And they, and they, and they point, and he, and they point this out very fairly, that look, if you wanna Mac that, you know, fair point, that's perfectly fine. However, one things I, one thing that I really, really respect about them is that they're putting a lot of money into a really expensive testing lab. So it's not just, Hey, we ran some benchmarks and we copied down the numbers. It's no, we actually have <laugh> like commercial testing equipment for power supplies, commercial testing equipment for power consumption and thermals. And so when they make a claim, they at least say, well, here is our data.
(00:51:08):
If we screwed up, it's gonna be very clear to everybody how we screwed it up. So they're not just just saying, oh, well, you know, rah rah team windows max sucks. They are, I, the, the, the reason why I put it in the, in the show notes is that it did seem significant that they were very, very firm on the idea that the marketing stuff that you see on the product page is not something that you should even take with a grain of salt. That it does seem to be actively misleading and in some places, maybe even deceptive.
Jason Snell (00:51:35):
I the way I view this video is that it's not even a video about a computer. It's a video teaching people about how marketing works. Yeah. And in that, I think it's actually valuable, I should disclaim here that a lot of the people who used to work in the Mac World Lab work in the performance marketing group at Apple now, and they are ta doing, I will say this because I think it is left as a question in that video, they're doing real tests and they're getting real results. Now let's talk about what they, what Apple markets, right? Does Apple publish all the numbers? No, they don't. They leave it to your imagination. Do they choose the hardest comparison products to compare their product to? No, they do not. They choose the most favorable comparison. Although I would argue that an M two Mac is probably, in terms of upgraders, it's probably more likely somebody coming from Intel than coming from an M one, because it is incremental from there.
(00:52:25):
So I can understand it, but they're also gonna choose the most favorable because it is marketing. Right. And then do they, this is, and again, again, I don't know this from those people, I just know it because I know it from dealing with Apple for many years, have they done 50 different tests and then Cherrypicked the five that look the best for Apple? Absolutely. And have they done, in this case with the Linus Tech tip video, have they done a bad job of properly footnoting, which they used to do, I'm gonna say it, they used to do a better job of doing this properly footnoting and disclosing what test got run and what the configurations were so that you can reproduce the results. And I think the answer here is kind of no right? Like that, that, that, the most damning thing in this video for me was that Linus Tech Tips is sort of like, we don't know.
(00:53:12):
We don't understand what this test is or how they got the result. And the problem with that is then you can't reproduce it. So I think that that's, like I said, I think this is a, a good educational video. Everything Apple says in its marketing about num the numbers is true, but they only share the numbers that are the most favorable for Apple. And that is always the case. And that's why you should always look to independent sources of information. So in some ways, what this video is, is learn about marketing and why we spend a lot of money doing our own lab testing. And to that, I've gotta give them credit. The, the, the PC versus Mac thing I rolled my eyes at. Cuz it's like, oh, you could get a PC that does that. It's like, yeah, but if you're buying a Mac, you're probably buying it because you want to use a Mac and not a pc. But the rest of it, I mean, that's the truth of it, it's marketing. I am always, when I'm watching an Apple presentation, I am always noticing like, what did they choose as the comparison computer? And yeah. And, and you've seen it with the M one and the M two, especially the M two. They talk a lot about Intel computers, partially because a lot of upgraders are coming from Intel, but also that's a bigger number. So it's better for marketing purposes. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko (00:54:24):
Yeah. And there, there are a lot of times during a keynote, whereas I, I, I will literally put like a symbol, that means wow, what an interesting way of phrasing that, that they chose. I'm gonna look into this. I, I will say, however, I do think this went a little marketing is marketing, you're absolutely right that they're, they're always going to, the purpose is not to produce an independent set of test results, to get a certification from the FCC or anything. It is to get people excited about getting this new product. It's all, but I, I always think about these things though as like committing a foul, like on, in basketball, it's like, okay, you're gonna, that you're, you played high contact basketball, that's professional sports, but then, okay, you drove an elbow right into somebody's eye socket at this point. I'm gonna have to flag you on that, which that's, that's severe playing playing hard, hard ball. Yeah. And
Jason Snell (00:55:16):
That's, I,
Andy Ihnatko (00:55:17):
I don't,
Jason Snell (00:55:17):
Yeah, so that's the thing about the footnotes. I mean, I, I think that's the key to this, this performance marketing is it ought to be reproducible and understandable, right? Even if you're cherry picking, right? Even if you're choosing comps that are the easy comps instead of harder comps, it's marketing, we get it. But when you put numbers down, there should be enough information attached and they footnote everything. If you've ever looked at an Apple Reviewer's Guide or an Apple website, there are so many footnotes. And sometimes I look for the footnotes and I can't find 'em, which is very weird, right? Where it's like, wait, wait a second, where's number small? Number six? It's not, I, I can't find it. But if you're gonna do this with performance marketing, that's where you get into trouble, I think, is when you make a claim and somebody like Linus Tech Tip Tech Tips is looking very, they're trying so hard to understand what you're claiming and they can't figure it out that that shouldn't happen. You should be able to look at the footnote and get the answer of what they did. And that's the most troubling thing in this whole report to me, is like the, when they and Black Magic can't verify a black magic test. Yeah. What is that about? Right? Like, that's not great.
Andy Ihnatko (00:56:22):
Yeah. This isn't like, like some YouTuber like running a cine bench and saying, oh my God, the cine bench scores are terrible. And then like, writing in the comments is like, yeah, you do know that the cita bench test has not been optimized for Apple silicon yet <laugh>, and maybe it's not a good, good metric to use. Well, even
Leo Laporte (00:56:36):
In this video, he's running stuff that's not optimized for metal in some cases. Right? So this is the hard thing. I mean, you know, go ahead Alex.
Alex Lindsay (00:56:44):
Yeah. All I was gonna say is that, is that the, almost nothing's been optimized, you know? And so, so the thing is, is that there's been a lot of stuff that's made universal. It'll run really well on the M one, but it's not really taking full advantage of the libraries. And that is important. I mean, if you talk, if you look at, you know, the kind of things that I, I, again, we, I go back to Zoom iso, if you look at what Zoom did, or you know, what the liminal team did is they're squeezing an enormous amount of performance out of a Mac Mini. Because they're taking full advantage of the entire, they're optimizing and working with Apple to tie all those little things in. And you're getting, you know, eight 10 piece streams out of a little Mac Mini. And so when you, when you really talk about optimizing and really talking about using the libraries, there's, you know, I think that there's still a lot of, a lot that a lot of developers are leaving on the table for a variety of reasons.
(00:57:34):
Mostly that it's a lot of, it's expensive to rewrite all the code into, you know, to optimize it. And it's, you know, it's only part of the market, but universal and optimized are and truly optimized, you know, for the, for the platform are two different things. And we're gonna see, continue to see that grow across that platform. And so I think that, you know, I think it's hard because you know, any tests are gonna show some things to be faster. And I do think that, you know, I was, I was actually talking to Andy about this a little earlier, which was, you know, you can build a PC that's gonna be faster than the Mac studio. I mean, you know, at, at a lower price, you know, but you have to build it <laugh>, you know, like, you're not gonna buy it.
(00:58:12):
And, and it's got, you know, it's not gonna be as sleek and it's not gonna be a Mac. You know, and, and, and a lot of people who are buying it want to have a Mac, and it's important to have these higher end Macs because the people who are buying them, like there's definitely solutions that I need that require more than the Mac Pro, you know, that there are $20,000 boxes, they've got a bunch of Quadro cards in them. I need the Nvidia chip sets, I need all of those things. So it's not that Apple is gonna give you the highest end of all of those things, but as a Mac user, knowing that I can buy in at $500 and seamlessly go up to about $12,000 and get enough performance for what, 90% of the market, maybe 99% of the market needs is a, is a pretty good, you, you have to have that whole gamut. And I think Apple's doing that pretty well. I do, I do agree that, you know, they everybody is finding everybody, every manufacturer is going to find the bench sets that make the most sense for them, <laugh>, you know, and, and that's why, that's why there are magazines and other things. Yeah. And Linus Tech tips to
Leo Laporte (00:59:11):
Unfortunately there really aren't the magazines anymore. <Laugh>. Well, and,
Alex Lindsay (00:59:16):
And
Leo Laporte (00:59:16):
The sites like an non-tech and Extreme Tech. And Tom's Hardware of All Anon is still doing benchmarks. I, i, having worked with Patrick Norton for years, and he used to work at CD Labs and did was their benchmark guy, I really know that benchmarks lie just as much as statistics and marketing graphs. And it's very difficult for an end user to, to know. And I
Alex Lindsay (00:59:40):
Don't know how much they, I, I, I'll be honest, I just don't know how much they matter. Like, you know, like it's, well, that
Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
Okay, that's the point. Yeah, I
Alex Lindsay (00:59:46):
Agree. You know, like, like, I don't know how much, like when we say, oh, well this is faster. Well, I know that it's all I know is my Mac studio, which is the first version of Mac Studio and only a max is one of the fastest machines I've ever had. Well, you know, and it does all the things that I need it to do. And now I know that they're releasing one that is incrementally better than the one that I have. And when I upgrade, I'll upgrade to that. You know, I think that, cuz I think that the other thing about Lin a executives is they're, they're like, are you going to choose for them? Linux, pc Mac are all just outputs. You know, like, they're, they're any, they're even hardware, you know, to them, because they mostly use PCs and Linux and the Mac is something that they
Leo Laporte (01:00:21):
Jump into. Well, I'm, I'm gonna go a little farther. I think if you're watching any YouTuber, all this stuff is optimized for clicks, not for content. Right? Right. Sure. And and so you know, the title of this is Apple Fans. Start Typing Your Angry Comments. Now, the thumbnail, of course, is all of Linus LTTS videos is some aghast. I mean, he does a, look, I'm not saying he doesn't do a great job, but I'm not saying he does not now have the resources of even something like ZD Labs. But I also think there's an editorial slant to this that you can, can't, it's
Jason Snell (01:00:55):
Marketing actually. It's
Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
Marketing. You can't ignore
Alex Lindsay (01:00:58):
Marketing. Is that, just to take it slightly more gently is I'll say, you know, his isn't primary marketer, PC users. And, and number one and number two is that he is a, he is, again, assuming that these are, like, you're gonna make a choice based on performance and price about whether you're using a Mac or a pc, which from a PC and Linux user view might make sense, but Mac users are using Mac <laugh> and we just wanna know that they're gonna be powerful enough to do what we want to do. You know, and, and
Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
So like, we're not, we're not really, you're, if you're
Alex Lindsay (01:01:29):
Using, you have to use a pc. If
Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
You're using Cross-Platform tool, you're using DaVinci Resolve or Photoshop, it's reasonable to ask. Cuz you know, you know, our editors use Windows, not, they're not really using Windows. They're using Premiere, and they very rarely see Windows. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's reasonable to say what's, what's the best machine to run this particular program? That's a different group of people than most of us who are saying, well, I'm gonna run a variety. It's a general purpose PC for me, and I want good performance, but I also want fit and finish. I want an operating system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Jason Snell (01:02:01):
Well, Leah, when you say that the, the benchmarks are not necessarily you know, fair, I think that what's interesting about it is to think of benchmarks as being objective, but the choice of benchmark as being,
Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
That's what I mean, objective,
Jason Snell (01:02:13):
And that's the, that's the truth of it, right? Like it's
Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
Lies truth, lies statistics and benchmarks
Jason Snell (01:02:18):
And has a different weight or different specific benchmark that matters to them. So like when I'm, I, I, I have to review systems like this and I choose a bunch of things and I choose, you know, geek Bench, which is a very general gross tool. But it, it, it is real in this sense. Like, is this faster or not? You want to check that kind of stuff. But, you know, personally, and I will do this, sometimes I like an isotope d reverb, which is a very specific audio plugin that I use because I do podcasts with people in echoey rooms. Ah, and I spend hundreds of dollars trying to get the echo out. And, you know, a a tool like that, or one of the other isotope audio plugins, or a different audio plugin to me is like the number one reason to upgrade my system.
(01:03:01):
And somebody else will have a complete, Alex has a different number one reason and a number two and a number three. And that's the challenge with all of this. And and it goes to Apple too, where Apple's got its rank and what it's just trying to do is right. Again, put itself, I I had a, a conversation with an Apple PR person a few years ago where she straight up said, look, my job is to sell, I'm a salesperson, right? Like PR is not, don't imagine that it's anything but sales. That's what it is. And those, they are gonna market the numbers that work best for them. And that's just, that's just how it
Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
Is. I am gonna add to that, that Avery YouTube successful YouTube channel is is designed to attract hits so much more so though almost now than, than even magazines and, and websites. Were, and so there is also a perverse incentive there. I mean, look at these thumbnails, these, these guys are not just however they play themselves. None of these guys, none of the big YouTubers are are honest actors in the sense that, I mean, they're, they're really in order to succeed, they really have to say stuff that's gonna get people, you know upset and, and interested. And I, I think Ltt is very good, but I don't, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to slant stuff. Is the primary point of this one that you can get an Nvidia 40 90 and it's gonna outperform the the Mac? Is that, no, that's not
Andy Ihnatko (01:04:26):
The pri the, the primary point is simply that there are claims being made that in the, in the early prior of the, of the video. I think he, he actually even puts it in context of like, this is the sort of thing we would call out a Windows PC maker for Yeah. Or, or graphics card. They're
Leo Laporte (01:04:41):
Right to do that.
Andy Ihnatko (01:04:41):
Absolutely. Therefore, yeah. And I do, and I do want to add a personal opinion that you are correct that ab obviously that you, the business of YouTube is to make sure that you bill and sustain and grow an audience, and that you can monetize that audience. If you are starting out, you do have to do ex I think that, that you are someone is very likely to do very extreme things. There are a couple channels I will not name that keep popping up my recommendations where it's always shocked, like, oh, the vision pro sets fire to farm with baby ducks. And like, okay, you're, you, you have no credibility and you're squandering what little credibility you have with the problem. I, I think that with Alliance Tech, ticks, again, tips. My only, my personal opinion is that they've spent a lot of time doing a lot of hard work, and now they have a reputation.
(01:05:27):
So if they were to just simply say, oh God, I, I real, oh God, is this really another Mac? Let's, let's do a hit piece on Mac. Hit pieces on Mac really play off really, really well, they're gonna start to burn off. That kind of stuff and that sort of stuff, you don't get back. And also they're, they're, they're being very thorough and they're showing their math. They're not just simply offering personal opinions. Thirdly, that there is a difference between a point of view and a bias. I think they have a point of view, but they, but I don't think they necessarily have a bias that way. And I think that it's important to talk about people who it's important to have in, in the collection of reviews, people who review it on the basis of, I'm not necessarily gonna look upon this as this is one of the three Macs that I, three computers I can possibly buy because I need the, my next computer to be a Mac as, as a outfit that games on everything that works, on everything that edits, edits, video on everything.
(01:06:17):
We are going to create our own benchmarks. Because if we don't understand what Apple is doing and getting these numbers, we're gonna create actual project workflow. So we can try to do an apples to apples. We're gonna create an Xcode project to try to do an apples to apples project to find out like where these numbers guys, so again, I do see the equity and I don't, I don't, and I, while I, I'm sure that they will choose a title and a thumbnail to get people to click, like if you're subscribed or it gets rec recommended, once you get into the video itself, I tend to trust what they say. I don't always agree with it, but I tend to respect what they say.
Leo Laporte (01:06:46):
Well, okay. If the point of your video is don't trust Apple's marketing numbers Okay.
Andy Ihnatko (01:06:52):
On this one.
Leo Laporte (01:06:53):
Yeah, I think I just said that and I think we've said that all along. Okay. I don't think that needs to <laugh>. Okay, fine.
Jason Snell (01:07:02):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:07:03):
I feel bad for people who are trying to figure this, suss this out because it's hard to find these days objective numbers anywhere. And I think YouTubers really have a strong incentive to drive traffic. And that does, you know, as we've said, benchmarks can be, you know, the, the benchmarks and numbers are not lies, but the way you choose unuse, them can mislead. And there's a lot of incentive to do that. And so I, I've, I'm pretty mistrustful. I know l t t is good, but I'm very mistrustful of YouTubers and their reviews because there's a perverse incentive there. That's all I'm saying. I mean, we, and I only I can say that cuz we don't have a Perus incentive cuz we don't give a goddamn crap if you watch our videos or not <laugh> so
Jason Snell (01:07:52):
Well, well, I mean, we podcasters tend to be a subscription relationship where you have a long term relationship.
Andy Ihnatko (01:07:57):
Relationship
Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
Is with the audience.
Jason Snell (01:07:59):
Exactly. And, and, you know, YouTubers would love to have a subscription relationship, but even the subscription relationship and the notification touch that Bell relationship YouTube's algorithm overrides all of it. Exactly. And in the end, they have to make their business that way. It's, it's a tough business to be in. And I think that actually, in the grand scheme of things, what you want are YouTubers that play the game, but then drop the game as quickly as they can. And so that l t t video, I think is a good example of that, where it's kind of probably not the angle that they would take if they weren't trying to get attention. And the thumbnail is what it has to be in order to, you know, work in the algorithm. And I would argue the top of the script is a little more inflammatory. And then the further d further you go in the video after they've got you, it's perfectly reasonable. Right. <laugh>. Like, it's, but that's the game that they have to play. And that's, it's, that is a tough business to be in knowing some YouTubers, oh, it's murder. If you don't play the game, you will not make it. That's right. Like you have to do it. That's, that's how
Leo Laporte (01:08:52):
It's, that's the perverse I'm talking about. Yep. Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. And then we will talk about the fact that Apple as a 3 trillion company doesn't really care what Linus says. <Laugh>
(01:09:06):
more, we're gonna take the, we're gonna take the headphones Jack off of everything from now on. Yeah. Right. We're unstoppable. We're answerable to no one but God. And we're even putting a buyout offer on God. Our show today brought to you by G one. Love my ag one. That's a, what a great way to start the day. It's the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. You know, I like you, I bet wanna support my health, but I don't want to incorporate more pills or, and a God forbid, drink something that tastes awful. Through a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients, G one delivers comprehensive support for the brain, for the gut and the immune system. Since 2010, AG one has improved their formula 52 times, they are in the relentless pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible super high quality ingredients, rigorous standards.
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Andy Ihnatko (01:11:25):
I re I respect.
Leo Laporte (01:11:26):
It's, it's tough. I mean, I really miss the days when you had, I mean, Anand actually went to work for Apple <laugh>. They still do. I think they still do good geeky benchmarking and stuff like that, but it's just hard for any anybody to, to look at the benchmarks and, and understand Yeah. What they mean. And as you say, Alex, it's much more than just raw speed that we're, or, or power per watt that we're talking about. It's, it's a whole experience. Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (01:11:55):
I mean, I, I think that I, the thing that I often do, cause I have, again, PCs and we have in the office, we have lots of PCs and Linux and, and and Apple and I, when I'm thinking about my own personal setup, I'm mostly considering my time. Like, how long does it take me to do everything? You bet. And, and as soon as I add my time in, then everything, the price points all change Yeah. Because of the amount of time it takes to set up one thing versus another.
Leo Laporte (01:12:19):
Yeah. My you know, at home, just for my bonafides, I've got a Mac Studio on my home desktop Mac Studio on the left. I've got an a MD based Nvidia based machine on my right, which does not run Windows, runs Linux. And I would say I spend more time on the AMD machine these days than I do on the Mac. Of course. I have a Mac laptop. This is a Linux in front of me. <Laugh>, I'm pretty ecumenical when it comes to operating systems. Absolutely, yeah. As you are, I know, Andy, you carry an Android device, you know,
Andy Ihnatko (01:12:50):
And the, and that's, and it's great when being ecumenical, like you say, is great because it really makes you appreciate the strengths of a MacBook even more, or the strengths of an iPad or an iPhone even more. And it also makes you appreciate its specific failings. But again, you have specific reasons behind it where you can say, oh God, here's this feature on Android that I wish I could do on the iPhone, but I can't. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:13:13):
Well, for instance, if you joined the Hot New Threads <laugh>, you would probably be better off doing it on an Android device, cuz you could be in the beta and try new features that you cannot try on the iOS. There's an example. Are you on, are you, we don't need to talk about threads. This is a Mac show. Yeah. But you know, it is the hottest thing going right now.
Andy Ihnatko (01:13:36):
Yeah. It's, it's like it's, it's, I mean, no wonder, because Facebook is already the largest social media network in the world, and they created this app that doesn't simply say, oh, th thank you. Welcome. We're, we're, we are gonna try to make you feel at home here. Here's a tour that, and if you wanna post something, it's like, hi, welcome to Threads. Hey, here's everybody that we think, you know, click this button to follow all of them. They'll be notified and hey, here's a thousand people you can invite to have,
Leo Laporte (01:14:01):
Well, it's kind of, it's kind of to Jason's point when Meta, when Facebook started, and I guess when YouTube started we didn't have algorithmic feeds. Right. And what these companies have absolutely learned, and TikTok is a perfect example. Twitter didn't have algorithmic feeds in the beginning is if you go to a site and it and requires you to figure out who to follow and, and, and, and you have to do it well to get a good experience, that's not the ideal experience. So, unlike the way Twitter launched Threads launched this with a, with a TikTok style algorithmic feed. And actually I liked it at first cuz I could add the people. Oh, they're there. That's not, oh, that's a good one. Oh, that's good. And, and, and this is to, to your point exactly, Jason Al algorithm is starting to Trump relationship, but I understand why it's just a lot easier to get started.
Jason Snell (01:14:53):
Yeah. Their argument is that the algorithm, once you implement it, engagement goes up. And that's true. Although I think we all know that the road to Hell is paved with increasing engagement. Right. <laugh>, there is a, there is a limit to that. Just
Leo Laporte (01:15:05):
We were just talking about that. Yeah.
Jason Snell (01:15:06):
And there's value, there's value to both, right. I think that's the thing that threads right now they say there will be a non algorithmic version that you can look at too, but it was like, there's value in both and people can find value in both. Like, you know what the
Leo Laporte (01:15:18):
Real
Jason Snell (01:15:19):
Value is, example,
Leo Laporte (01:15:20):
It's rehabilitated. Mark Zuckerberg's reputation, <laugh>, we
Jason Snell (01:15:24):
Hated Mark.
Leo Laporte (01:15:25):
Then along came Elon and said, hold my beer <laugh>.
Jason Snell (01:15:28):
Yeah. He, mark Zuckerberg stands still doesn't, you know, don't move, don't blink. Just stand there and let Elon Musk rock it past you. And there you go. Now suddenly also Instagram, let's talk about just briefly, they laundered this through Instagram. Oh yeah. Instagram always was success felt less awful than Facebook. Right. I know lots of people who despise Facebook, who still use Instagram. Cause one of them I'll say, yep. I, I'll say, you know, but you're still on Instagram. And the answer is, well yeah, it's, it's not as bad as Facebook. And it's like, it's the same company, but they're Right. It it, it is, it does seem to have a different set of of, I don't wanna say values regarding Facebook in any way, but a different set of decisions that they're
Leo Laporte (01:16:09):
Making. Instagram has already gone farther down the in acidification trail though, right? Instagram has turned into Oh, sure. A nasty ad based, I mean, it used to be every tense post. Now it's like every third post there's an
Jason Snell (01:16:21):
Ad there's a lot of desperation in the, in the ads in there. Yeah. But anyway, so they wrap threads on Instagram and I, I think that they do that in part in order to make it, oh yeah. The onboarding not as bad as if they wrapped it in Facebook. <Laugh>, you couldn't
Leo Laporte (01:16:31):
Have an easier onboarding experience as well cuz you just, you know, I mean, it's bad in one respect cause you're taking your Instagram handle and and account with you. But Go ahead, Alex. Well,
Alex Lindsay (01:16:41):
I, I don't know how many people also did what I did, which was I don't wanna lose my handle like that. That's my whole thing is I have my name, my, I don't want, I want my hand. So every time there's a new social media thing, I jump on, I establish my handle. And then with Threads I jumped on, I made sure I had my handle. I played with it a little bit, and then I deleted off my phone because I like my battery. And so, so I was just like, you know, like, I don't have any meta tools on my phone. I still use them on the web here and there, but I don't put 'em on my phone because my battery lasts so long now. Like, it's like, you know, and it, and it was, it was, I, I don't care what anyone says. Like when I take the meta apps off, my battery lasts longer. I I don't have any paranoia about it. I don't have any, you know, there's not no upset. I just like my battery to last, you know, and whatever they're doing. Yeah. They ty up a lot of battery powers.
Leo Laporte (01:17:28):
So threads is 17% of my battery usage
Alex Lindsay (01:17:32):
Of all of your battery usage of it. Yeah. Ford One app. The Ford
Leo Laporte (01:17:36):
App to get into my car is 11%. Tiktok is 10%. Right? Yeah. So between those three, a third of my battery is used by those three apps.
Andy Ihnatko (01:17:45):
Yeah. Chrome's Chrome's feeling pretty good about itself right now. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:17:48):
<Laugh> that is though the real Phil Siller on threads. I don't know if Apple's created an account yet. A a what was interesting about Threads is how many brands, how many news brands and PR consumer brands immediately jumped on like they were happy to get off
Alex Lindsay (01:18:06):
Twitter, everyone's, everyone's like, they wanna get off Twitter, but it feels a little like jumping out of the off the pan and into the fire
Leo Laporte (01:18:12):
<Laugh>. Well, that'll be interesting. See Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (01:18:14):
Choice between two. Schiller
Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
Deleted his Instagram account and so he must have recreated it. He also nuked his Twitter account, but he is Phils Schiller oh oh seven.
Andy Ihnatko (01:18:29):
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (01:18:30):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:18:32):
And by the way, happy birthday to the app store, 15th birthday today. And iOS today did devote their entire show to the celebration
Andy Ihnatko (01:18:40):
Omni Group had a nice blog post about being like, I think the, the either one of the, one of the very, very, very first apps on the app store, but also like the first like number one top amazing seller when they had the, the iPhone version of OmniFocus on it. Yeah. And no, no wonder they are, they are a marvel of Mac and iOS development.
Leo Laporte (01:18:58):
We were not here on the 4th of July. I hope you all in the US had a good celebration. And I'm sorry to the friends
Andy Ihnatko (01:19:05):
Fingers. Check everybody. Fingers check. Yep. 10 for everybody. All 10 of them. 10. 10.
Alex Lindsay (01:19:10):
Alex, there you
Leo Laporte (01:19:11):
Go. You seem like growing up you might have blown things up out in the cornfield, <laugh>. I don't know. I'm just thinking,
Alex Lindsay (01:19:17):
You know, when you're I have a horrible story about that. Anyway, so <laugh>,
Leo Laporte (01:19:22):
He doesn't wanna tell it though,
Alex Lindsay (01:19:23):
Does he? <Laugh>? No. My, when I was 18 years old, my, my I'll tell a story. I guess I can tell the story now. When I was 18 years old, my, my father was a federal prosecutor, and and I was, you know, I lived in the country. And so FBI agent took me out for my birthday when I was 18 years old. He just said, I, my present for you today is to remind you that when you're under 18 and you're blowing stuff up, you're precocious. And when you're over 18, you're a felon, <laugh>. And he goes, and he goes, and we have a file on you about this thing. Ooh. And he goes, he goes, anything that goes, boom, within 50 miles of your, of your house, you show up on the short list, <laugh>, you're
Leo Laporte (01:20:01):
The usual suspect.
Alex Lindsay (01:20:02):
Yes.
Andy Ihnatko (01:20:03):
What a what? Acal away.
Alex Lindsay (01:20:05):
So that was it. That I, I've had no experience since then. But before that, I, I will say that I was precocious, you know you know, I, I have
Leo Laporte (01:20:12):
A dear friend who grew up in the corn fields of Nebraska. And they actually had stadium seating. They built stands out in the cornfield <laugh> for the 4th of July. And they would have quite a, they I think it was his uncle three finger, Fred who was the <laugh>, the ringmaster.
Alex Lindsay (01:20:30):
My, my uncle saw me going down that path and he just said, I only have this advice. He goes, no metal, no glass. Yeah. And, and, and that was it. So I burned myself a lot. I still don't grow hair in parts of my legs, but but but anyway, but yeah,
Andy Ihnatko (01:20:44):
I, I,
Alex Lindsay (01:20:46):
My shins, my shins are perfectly smooth from a, from a blast. That was a little too close. <Laugh>. So don't worry, George.
Andy Ihnatko (01:20:51):
Don't. There's a, there's a kind of fun with computers that I stopped engaging in like around 18 or 19. Cuz I had, I didn't have the talk, I had that reation that, oh, I'm not a, a precocious teenager who's simply exploring with computers. Ah, I'm an adult who is possibly Yeah, yeah, exactly. Maybe, maybe I should just go into programming instead of exploration <laugh>.
Alex Lindsay (01:21:12):
It was really on Henry the fifth moment for me. I just had to, I had to give up false staff and just
Andy Ihnatko (01:21:17):
Sliding, sliding doors. There's, there's a version of Alex that's in a cabin in a wood on pa on page 70,000 of his manifesto.
Alex Lindsay (01:21:24):
<Laugh>. Exactly. So
Leo Laporte (01:21:25):
There were a few stories from last week we didn't get to talk about, but I'll bring up a couple of them. One Goldman is looking for a way out of its partnership with Apple. They're, we had talked a couple of months ago about the fact that they lost a billion dollars on consumer finance. And that's primarily, I would guess the Apple card. They're talking with American Express, at least what they were last week, according to the Wall Street Journal to take over all of the consumer stuff except for their high interest rate savings account, Marcus. But they would like to retreat from Apple and credit cards entirely. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko (01:22:03):
It's, it's not necessarily a, a a, a slam against Apple about, oh, it's a bad deal, or this is a, this is financially untenable. It is. Like they made a really big gamble into saying, we are a financial investment bank and a financial services company. We want to become a consumer bank and we want to issue credit cards. We wanna have saving savings accounts. They made a lot of investments and a lot of purchases and acquisitions based on that in the past three or four years. And they just, the bill came due and they're like, okay, we're out. This is not wor we, we don't have a plan for turning this around. And so therefore it's best that we just simply fold.
Alex Lindsay (01:22:35):
And I don't think they, they have, they don't necessarily have a mechanism for it. Like, I think that the thing is, is that to do this consumer business, the consumer business is hard everywhere. Every time you start saying, I want to sell to an average person who's going to be measuring things in single dollar units or $10 units, you have to be, you have to be extremely efficient, you know, to make that actually turnout. You know, when you deal with businesses, when you deal with large investments, there's a lot of wow and flutter that that can protect you. But so many small transactions are super, super hard to do efficiently. And the companies that do it well do it well. And the company trying to get into it, I think they found a little bit harder. I think it was good for Apple because Apple has figured out a lot of things and we can see, see Apple add it continuing to add features. I think they also may be looking at, we're gonna put all this investment in and eventually Apple's gonna pull it in house and then we're not gonna ever turn a corner. You know, like, you know, like there, you know, the apple's in this process right now, it seems to be building out all the other things that you would need to be a bank <laugh>. So, so, you know,
Andy Ihnatko (01:23:34):
Goldman was the Motorola or the Intel of banking. Oh
Leo Laporte (01:23:37):
God.
Andy Ihnatko (01:23:37):
And at some point oof. They're going to Apple banking. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:23:41):
Yeah. Or the what was the, what, what was, what was the phone company before it became At t.
Andy Ihnatko (01:23:46):
At t
Leo Laporte (01:23:46):
Yeah. But, but, but it wasn't att singular. Singular. Singular. They're the singular. Did you see
Alex Lindsay (01:23:50):
Blackberry? Yes. Have you seen Blackberry?
Leo Laporte (01:23:52):
What a great movie. Oh, good. What a So good fun that be not a great movie, but a lot of fun. Really fun.
Alex Lindsay (01:23:58):
I thought it was a good movie. I thought it was a good movie. I thought it was fun. I mean, it, it really was a lesson <laugh> in a lot in so many things.
Leo Laporte (01:24:03):
The story of the rise and fall of the Blackberry you know, research and Mo motion. And they meet with they meet with singular in at t Yeah. Yeah. Trying to sell 'em the Blackberry and really was you, you know, you, they they showed the iPhone just killing it dead. Yeah, yeah. You know who was smart? One of the three founders. The
Alex Lindsay (01:24:24):
One that was crazy guy. The,
Leo Laporte (01:24:25):
That the crazy with the headband, the hippie. He, soon as the iPhone came out, he sold, he sold his, he sold his rib stock stock and he's billionaire.
Alex Lindsay (01:24:36):
Yeah. They said he's quietly one of the richest people in the world. <Laugh>. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:24:38):
You did. I, yeah, exactly. Hysterical. Hysterical. Let's see. Oh, let's, there's a lot of rumors. We guess we should probably cover these. Apple, according to Mark Germin is going to have to well first of all, it's gonna launch in stores and you're gonna have to make it appointment to buy one apple Plans. This is from MCG Garmin a slow appointment only rollout of its Vision Pro. You will have to get measured. You will have to go in and give them your eye prescription. There's gonna be a lot. They are not gonna sell it. You know, it sounds like they're not gonna sell it online. Germin, that makes, that makes sense. Yeah. Germin also says App Apple's cheaper model will not be out next year, will not be out in 25, will be out in 2026. So this is a long runway for this jet to take off.
Andy Ihnatko (01:25:39):
We, we, we all knew that. And, and I think that it makes perfect sense that they're gonna have, when they sell these the vi the First Vision Pro, it's gonna have to be a concierge process. Because Apple, one of the, one of the hallmarks of Apple for every generation has been, we want the consumer to have the best experience possible. If we see a nail sticking up that they might catch on or step on, we're gonna hammer that thing down. And there's so many opportunities for someone to sign for a box off of FedEx, try to get this thing working, not have a great experience because they didn't get the right they didn't get the right eye interface, they didn't get the right eyeglasses things. They didn't get the first, the, they didn't get the a great first 30 minute demo walking them through. Like, here is what we're doing. Hey, look, I'm, I'm also in the space with you cause I'm also wearing this. And I can show you like how you can actually activate things. They need to make sure that the people who spend 3,500 bucks for this and then blog about it or, or make YouTube videos about it or even just people who are just excited. Consumers don't simply say that, oh wow, I could have just gotten a quest. This is, this doesn't work any, anything better than anything else.
Jason Snell (01:26:41):
And this is not a move that you make if you're gonna sell tens of millions of something. Right. But it's a move you can afford to make. And in fact, maybe even want to make, when you're resource constrained, you can only sell, you know, a few hundred thousand of them total. So you limit you, you know, you make an appointment, you limit the regions and the stores that might even offer them. I'm not, I don't think Gerber's Report says they're not gonna sell them online. But, and, and they were acting at Wwtc, like they were gonna sell them online too, but like in store, they're gearing up for this very complex concierge style process. And I think that's why is because they can afford to, and it, it actually kind of helps gate the availability. And I think that's important because they don't have very many, they won't have very many.
Alex Lindsay (01:27:29):
Remember when you got glass, they fitted you absolutely mean, I had to go, I had to go into the Google Office, glass office in, in San Francisco, and they did the whole setup and put everything together. So, you know, these, it's, it's not an unusual thing to do actually. Right?
Andy Ihnatko (01:27:44):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
And this also from the Financial Times citing unidentified people close to Apple and Lux Share, which is the Chinese firm that's assembling the device LHA said Apple was only asking for enough parts for 130,000 to 150,000 units in the first year. The financial time says Apple was preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units in 2024. So they had originally planned a million. Yeah. So yeah. Another reason why they're not in a hurry to sell 'em to you. They, they don't have that They,
Andy Ihnatko (01:28:19):
That that, that, that doesn't scare me at all. I don't think that should scare anybody at all. I think that I I, the, it's makes me interested in how they're going to, how they're going to sell. If they have limited numbers and they are reasonably sure there's more demand than supply, how are they, are they gonna choose to allocate these and make sure that, look, we're gonna have a, there's a percentage that we're only gonna be able to sell. We're gonna only gonna sell three developer channels so that you have, they're gonna make sure that there are people who are not just buying it, doing a video or having fun with it on the yacht on 4th of July weekend and then putting it in a box and never using it again. Each one of these is an investment for Apple in future experiences and future developers. And so if they only have a couple hundred thousand to sell, which is peanuts, particularly when you think about the volumes in which Apple usually transacts hardware, it seems as though they're, it would behoove them to make sure that it goes into the hands of people who can do the most good for Apple.
Alex Lindsay (01:29:09):
I think they're gonna pr prioritize it based on the people at 5:00 AM that are sitting there going refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. I think that's gonna be the, maybe because there's a whole bunch of people are gonna sit there just, just grabbing onto it, trying to, trying to get ahold of it.
Andy Ihnatko (01:29:22):
Or maybe, maybe there'll be like Ferrari or where it's gonna be like, well we, we can't sell you an F1 unless, unless you also, unless in the past three years you've bought this car, this car and this car. Maybe that's how they're gonna show sell all those Mac, all those, those Mac pros now where it's like, well <laugh>, we only want our most valued customers. So <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:29:43):
No rumor that that's gonna happen. There is a rumor that the Apple's working on alar according to Germin larger than 30 inch iMac, but don't expect it until late next year. It's more than a year out. I think some people will be disappointed by that. I think most of us have just grown accustomed to the idea that we'd buy a Mac studio or a Mac Mini and a and a nice screen and be done with it.
Jason Snell (01:30:07):
I think my question about this product rumor is who wants an iMac that's that big and doesn't just wanna buy an external display? Right? Like, what is the market for that? And I'll tell you Yeah. Cuz I don't know. But <laugh>, but I'm not gonna tell you the answer. I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna ask another question here. When I have talked to Apple people in the past about the iMac, what they've always said is, you gotta understand the iMac sells. You know, it's the most popular desktop Apple sells and they sell a lot of them. It's, it's actually pretty big business. And they go to weird places. Some of them go to schools, a lot of them go to like reception areas and in hotels. Yeah. And like it's a piece of furniture. They get people, some people park one in their house, even if they've got laptops, cuz it gives a general purpose computer in their house.
(01:31:00):
The impression I get is that Apple sells more IMAX than you'd think. They are used in a really wide variety of ways. More than many of us, sort of like computer expert type people think of and who would know better than Apple, how many they sell and where they go and all of that. And so when I see a rumor like this, and I'm a little bit baffled about why, and I like a big iMac. I have the 27 inch iMac for years. But now that they've got the external display thing going on with little Apple silicon computers to drive, it seems much more efficient that way. I've gotta believe that Apple would not be even talking about making this product if they didn't think they could sell a bunch of them to somewhere. Yeah. I I just am not sure where that is. The 24 fits, I mean literally physically fits in a lot of spaces that the 32 does not. But obviously, like, I'm not gonna question this. Like, if, if it is gone to the point where it's in development, apple seems to be convinced that they know that there's an audience for it, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Andy Ihnatko (01:32:03):
Yeah. quiz quickly. I'm, I'm with you. It's like, if, if I had heard that rumor from a, a less reliable source, I'd say, okay, well a lot of people have lots of ideas about what Apple's gonna be doing <laugh>, but it's a really, it's a really good source. And the first thing I thought was just like, what you thought was that, okay, obviously Apple has access to better sales numbers than I do. Maybe this is, maybe they're aware of a certain region of the globe in which these big all-in ones are much, much more relevant product than, like you say, a really nice iMac and a really nice display. Cuz I don't get it. One
Leo Laporte (01:32:35):
Of the reasons Apple sold the iMac towards the end was in order to derive a 5K display, they had to have special circuitry, special hardware. 5K was a breach. They don't, that's not the case anymore. Right. So
Andy Ihnatko (01:32:49):
Yeah, it was, it was their apology for the the, the, the Quaker roots box. Cylin, cylindrical, macro <laugh>, like how quickly can we get a high performance intel super, super cool machine in the hands of developers who are now muting.
Leo Laporte (01:33:02):
Yeah. I wanted to ask Alex about this picture, a leak on Twitter from David Alizer. Rumor Apple has been shooting all their Apple TV plus shows in one handed 80 degree virtual reality. This is the, he's using this as the evidence, a leaked photo of a 180 camera rig set on set. First of all, Alex, do you recognize this camera? And second is this screen I
Alex Lindsay (01:33:27):
Recognize the warehouse.
Leo Laporte (01:33:28):
Oh, so, so,
Alex Lindsay (01:33:29):
So the okay. <Laugh>. So yeah, so, so anyway, that's PG bad house Lindsey. Yeah. That's not, that's not on a set. So that's, that's a this a rental that's
Leo Laporte (01:33:37):
G a rental
Alex Lindsay (01:33:38):
Rear house. It's a rental house. It's a big, well it's a big event slash rental house prg. And those are, those are big warehouse. Those are all those road cases. Yep. That'll get loaded into something. So I don't think that this is shot from a set. I think that they might have sold it as that, but that's not, that's not a set, that's a, that's PRGs like supply house. They have a bunch of them. They're big. The what that looks like is the, it looks like the Cannon r r series dual 180 lens on mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and it's most likely attached to a Raptor. So the Red Raptors, the, the two big cameras that people are testing right now with those are the R five C and the Raptors. And then you have the dual lenses that you, the both of them are, you know, mounted, mounted there.
(01:34:21):
So, so those are the, those are the ones that people are, are playing with. Obviously the Raptor gives you greater dynamic range. If you were gonna shoot something that was at Apple's level, you'd probably end up using the Raptor. If you wanted to experiment, you'd probably use the Canon R five C. I don't have any doubt that Apple is shooting some content with that setup <laugh>. Like, like I think that they are. Absolutely. And by the way, the reason that dual, that's one lens it, it takes those two, it puts both of those images onto on the sensor together, then that means they stay synced and it's a lot easier to process. It has to be a full frame sensor and it's an eight K sensor and that that means that you have the, the left. Right. You know, that, that are there all in the same sensor.
(01:35:02):
Otherwise you have to build a much more complex rig, which have become very valuable in our, our market. You mentioned that. Yeah. Yeah. So they, so the so anyway, so those, but the, it's much, much easier to, to, to develop with these two. What I think is most likely happening is that Apple is probably shooting scenes or pieces of scenes or behind the scenes of shows with that rig. And I wouldn't, I'd be blown away if they didn't. I would do that. I would shoot little scenes to show you what that looks like, or I would shoot the behind the scenes so you can see what it looked like. I'd be shooting MLS with it. I'd be doing, you know, so there's, there's so many places experimenting though not shooting all your content that way. It's so hard. Like, so here's the problem with, even with, with 360, it's really, really hard.
(01:35:44):
We did a lot of 360, but with 180, it's still hard. Remember that when you're shooting a film, there's a lot of stuff happening right outside of Frame. There's flags, there's you've got flags, you've got boom mics, you've got rigging, you've got all these other things that are happening. And usually they're either right outside the frame Right. Or sometimes garbage mapped or roto because they were in the frame <laugh>, you know, 180 lens. You get to see all of that. Yeah. And so, so it, it, it's much less now you could clean a set or do something for certain shots that you get that 180. But I think that now as, as a, as your extra day extra content that movies behind the scenes with the stuff. So it'd be great. You get your Mission Impossible stuff. Yeah. And, and you get some behind the scenes shots of it.
(01:36:27):
Wow, that's gonna be great. <Laugh>, the kid's gonna be so cool to stand there and see in 3D and be able to sit there as, as if you were watching and looking back and forth. And and you know, I think that the, and and we're hearing that, that they're asking for, you know, 120 frames a second mm-hmm. <Affirmative> from a lot of folks. And so, so you know, the AK one 20 is, you know, kind of the still the mark that Apple's kind of looking for, which is still higher. I still think that the next version of the Pro headset's gonna be 120 frames a second. I think that the 90, what we see in the f first form factor is going to be what the normal headset is that's less expensive two years from now. The pro will go, I think up to eight K, one 20 you know, as far as the delivery method. And so, so I think that that's probably where we're anyway, so I think that it's, it would be crazy for them not to be shooting that kind of content, but I don't think that they're shooting like whole shows in it that way. Yeah, yeah,
Jason Snell (01:37:20):
Yeah. Its, it's so telling that even the biggest budget Hollywood movies they shoot in 2D and then do a 3D conversion because shooting in, they just, the, and Alex has talked about this on Previ previous shows, shooting in 3D is very difficult. And generally they don't bother. They just don't bother.
Alex Lindsay (01:37:43):
Well, and it, and it, it's what ruined their industry, you know, like, like the, the 3d, when Avatar came out, we were like, wow, I, I could watch a lot of things this way. And then everyone came in and cheated. And what you ended up with is something like, eh, it's okay. I don't think I wanna pay for that anymore. Yeah.
Jason Snell (01:37:57):
But it doesn't look as good. Right. Not at, like, you can tell when you watch something that was shot in 3d, it looks beautiful. Yeah. But it also caught, like, people, the impression I get other than James Cameron is people do it once and then they're like, oh, I'm never doing that again. <Laugh>, that's the end of it. And, you know, he
Alex Lindsay (01:38:12):
Has a, a different
Andy Ihnatko (01:38:12):
Budget says he made just one 3D movie even, but it was a magnificent three movie the best. And it was, it was with three. You think that, oh wow. He's playing with 3d. It's like, no, 3D is absolutely essential to the progression of the story he's telling. But you have very few filmmakers who are, who are using 3D the way the Cameron does or, and the way the Scorsese, this is
Leo Laporte (01:38:30):
The IMAX 3D camera and it's, it's a, it's a big sucker. It is not. It's a beast. Yeah. You, you're not gonna, I mean you could take it up on Everest I guess, but
Jason Snell (01:38:42):
I saw a viral video the other day cuz people were talking about IMAX a lot because we've got the whole Mission Impossible versus
Leo Laporte (01:38:47):
IMAX
Jason Snell (01:38:48):
Thing. Nah. And I saw a video that was great cuz it was from the set of a scene being shot in an IMAX camera. And the thing that you don't realize unless you've been on one of those sets is that the IMAX camera, in addition to being huge and only being able to short for a shoot for a very short amount of time, sounds like a chainsaw. <Laugh>, yeah. Big. So literally it's amazing. People are walking down the street and there's an IMAX shot and the chainsaw is going and they're like, well, if you ever asked yourself, are we gonna have to loop every little bit of dialogue in this entire movie? The answer is yes. It's
Leo Laporte (01:39:19):
Imax This is like the old days of Hollywood. Hollywood changed completely when they had quiet, portable cameras. This is like going back to those old studio cameras. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Alex Lindsay (01:39:29):
Yeah. And, and, and, and the, you know, the 3D stuff has, the fortunate thing for people who are doing stuff for vision or anything else is that we did go through this huge sprint where there was a bunch of technology that was built for it and the controllers and lots of things were figured out you know, back, you know 10 years ago or whatever. But, you know, it's still, you know, I do think that when people see eight K one 20 you know, I, you know, it's gonna be something that it's gonna make a difference and, and what it's so cheap. I mean, it's much cheaper to shoot behind the scenes or shoot certain scenes when you're already doing production, you know, and, and add that in because you own the production. The hardest part is negotiating all of that 180 and all the extra shooting with a, a production company that is, you know, gonna go out for features. Because Apple is building their own content. They have a lot more, they can say, Hey, we would like to do this <laugh>. We're not asking. I
Leo Laporte (01:40:19):
Think I really, I wanna go see Oppenheimer in a, in an imx cinema. Although I would AMC you'd be interested to hear, because people are worried, how do I choose Barbie? Oppenheimer Barbie, Oppenheimer AMC is selling double Bill Heimer tickets, <laugh>. And they've earned, this is really a
Alex Lindsay (01:40:37):
Crossover between Barbie and Alpen. Apparently.
Andy Ihnatko (01:40:40):
I could say
Leo Laporte (01:40:41):
I would say, you know, the wife might wanna see Barbie and the husband might wanna see
Andy Ihnatko (01:40:46):
Heim. I think, I think, I think that's why I'm like, you take someone out to ice cream after, like you tell them that, that their dog died. So I I, I do see wisdom of, Hey, let's go see a Pink Barbie movie after seeing how the entire planet is now. I just
Alex Lindsay (01:41:00):
Love, I just love the by
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:01):
The devil.
Alex Lindsay (01:41:02):
I just love them. Them grappling with the non-zero chance that when we set this off, it might not stop. So, anyways, so
Leo Laporte (01:41:08):
Like, this might, oh, I know. I can't wait
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:10):
To see it. That's one, that's one of the great, Matt, when you know that Matt Damon is playing, is playing like the, the, the colonel, you give him a line like, well, it's, it's, well, what kind of chance would you like ideally Zero <laugh> Chance that
Alex Lindsay (01:41:24):
Kill
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:25):
And the world?
Alex Lindsay (01:41:26):
Well, and, and the, you know, I, what's interesting though is the other pressure really is looking at Mission Impossible. If you wanna see Mission Impossible in imax, you have to see it this week because it only got a one week window in imax because the commitment to Oppenheimer happened a long time ago, lot, a long time before Mission Impossible was scheduled. So Mission, I think Mission Impossible got scheduled at Paramount, and they were like, Hey, what's the deal with the one week? They were like, came in too late. You were a year too late for that. And so so yeah, I would, I would definitely see Oppenheimer in a, a big screen.
Andy Ihnatko (01:41:55):
You, you also, you don't, you don't say no to you don't, you don't say no to Macquarie slash Cruz and imax. It's like they are people who absolutely love movies, not just, Hey, we're gonna have a nice window before we put this out to screaming. It's like, no, we are gonna sell damn popcorn. Well, Oppenheimer damn popcorn to people.
Alex Lindsay (01:42:14):
Oppenheimer, I think is a a hundred day window. Yeah. Like, it's got a, it's, it's a, it's a really, really long window. And again, when something, when they say something shot for imax, I think it's a lot more fun to, to go watch it. Cuz it really takes a, I don't know if it's really worth oftentimes seeing stuff that isn't shot for imax Right. In an IMAX is I,
Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
Is Oppenheimer shot for imax?
Alex Lindsay (01:42:34):
Yeah. Yeah. They shot it with camera. Yeah. Did they shoot the whole thing or? I, I remember when I saw the dark night. I think it was
Leo Laporte (01:42:40):
Put your glasses, put your glasses on, and imax Yeah, put your glasses on. Okay, now take your glasses off. Okay. Now put your glasses on. Okay. Now take your glasses off. That was not fun. I, I did not enjoy that.
Alex Lindsay (01:42:48):
I, I, yeah, I think that I think that they shot the whole thing for imax. I, I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent certain, but I I'm pretty sure that it's almost all, cause again, with, well,
Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
I know Nuclear, nuclear blast. You want an imax, right?
Andy Ihnatko (01:43:02):
Yeah. I was, you know, I, I hope that, I hope that it's one of the reviewers, like actually does the math and figures out like how watching Oppenheimer and IMAX is the equivalent of having how many chest x-rays in one day.
Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
Christopher Nolan says, like, Dunkirk and Tenet Oppenheimer is filmed entirely on large format film stock, meaning a combination of IMAX 65 millimeter and Panovision 65 millimeter. That's then projected in 70. And
Alex Lindsay (01:43:27):
And the interesting thing for Oppenheimer is I believe that they developed a new black and white film just for the film, just, just for this, for this piece. Cuz they didn't want to color, they didn't want to just, just do mono of the color film stock. So they, they actually got their own film stock of black and white to, to do it. So I, it's a, I mean, Nolan is pushing the out like he, he, he and, and Cameron and a couple have the Jews to say, I'm gonna make a film exactly the way I'd like to make a film. Yeah. And you will all figure it out. You know, and there's not that many directors left that can do that. Here's a
Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
Picture of of Nolan attacking Cian Murphy the Star with an IMAX camera. So <laugh>, he's,
Jason Snell (01:44:07):
There's picture of the sound of the Buzz song. <Laugh>. Yeah,
Alex Lindsay (01:44:11):
Exactly. There's some behind the scenes of that. You see it, it's, it's incredible.
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:14):
Now we're gonna lock this down and the, we and the rest of the crew are going behind this lead lined wall. Yeah. <laugh>, while we turn on the camera. There's the
Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
There's the 65 millimeter film stock. Look at the size of that. Yeah. Wow.
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:25):
I mean, they're, there're, there're there are directors who are making events and there are directors who are making movies. These people are making movies.
Jason Snell (01:44:31):
Yeah. I'll just wait and watch it on my iPhone. Watch her.
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:34):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
But that's not, I haven't been a
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:38):
Theater in picture. Right. I
Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
Haven't been to a theater in three more than three years. That's what it's gonna take to get me out into the theater.
Alex Lindsay (01:44:45):
That's the only time I go out. It's the only time I go out.
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:48):
Was the, that was the first movie theater I've been in since like 2019. Yeah. Was
Alex Lindsay (01:44:52):
It worth it?
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:53):
Yes. I thought it was, I thought it was terrific. Not a perfect movie. What Barbie? But I'm let bunch
Jason Snell (01:44:57):
Indiana Jones.
Andy Ihnatko (01:44:58):
Indiana Jones. Oh, Indiana Jones.
Jason Snell (01:45:00):
Okay. Fun movie
Andy Ihnatko (01:45:01):
Again. It was, it was that one. Another one where it was a movie, not an event.
Jason Snell (01:45:04):
Also very happy to see the Spider Verse sequel in the theater. I've seen both of those movies in the theater. Pretty cool. And it's like, it is funny how we've sort of recalibrated to being, do I really wanna see this on a big screen? <Laugh>. And and that's the funny thing about Oppenheimer and really the mission Impossible is that they're probably best viewed on a big screen. Yeah. So I regret, I, I, like, I saw Top The Top Gun sequel and I was like the script is terrible, but it's kind of exciting. And I get the impression that if I had seen it really loud on a giant screen, I would've been like, oh, plane. Yeah. And that would've been better.
Alex Lindsay (01:45:35):
I was holding out for better seats and I, and I just didn't get to see Maverick on, on it and at home it's really great. But I know that, I mean, talking to my friends who saw it on an imax, they were just like, oh, it was truly something to see. So, yeah.
Andy Ihnatko (01:45:48):
Yeah. Alex, getting back, getting back to Apple though, one thing I I wanted to ask you, like, when do you think is gonna be the first Apple keynote that has special content for Vision Pro users? Or like a soundcast that is? Oh,
Alex Lindsay (01:46:00):
I, I think it'll be next year. Sometime next year. You know, know what?
Leo Laporte (01:46:03):
That's the first thing I've heard that would make me wanna buy a vision
Alex Lindsay (01:46:06):
Pro. Well, I, I just think, I think that the Apple needs to, they're gonna wanna prove that model, you know? And I think that there's, it's much easier when it's not live. You know? So, so the fact that they can do the whole thing in shoot it that way, I think that, that, that it would make sense to do it sometime next year. I don't have any, you know, it, it, when it's doing, when you're doing it in post, it should be relatively straightforward to
Andy Ihnatko (01:46:26):
Do that. Tweeted, sorry.
Alex Lindsay (01:46:28):
The one thing I'll say is that they don't, it's not very hard because they're probably not going to, they're probably gonna put it on a screen. So, you know, when you think about, they're gonna put it in a window that sits inside of a space. So the space will most likely be the theater and the window will be there. Now they can make that window 3D if they want, you know, so they can shoot it in 3D so it pops out. I'd be surprised. So I think that they would deliver it that way. The problem really is the way that they do the, you'd have to figure out how they do it, and they could theoretically do it this way, which is that there's a lot of things that they do in the keynote now, now that it's not on stage. That would be hard to do.
(01:47:01):
It'd be hard for someone to watch because, so when you put, when you create the space that the video is sitting in so if you use the, you know, of course in the vision, there's the windows, there's volumes and there's spaces. The windows is what you would typically play a movie inside of the space is the environment. But it's the one, it's the 360 slash 180 environment. When you put that in there and you start cutting cameras really fast, or you start doing big jib shots or moves and all the Craig, Craig shots, <laugh> or those big moves where they move from one floor to another. Oh, it's a lot of people that will
Leo Laporte (01:47:34):
Get sick. Sick. That's making me nauseous. Just
Alex Lindsay (01:47:35):
Thinking about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so everyone's stomach will pull up into their, you know, in, into their, into their throat as, as that moves down there. Maybe they want to do that, but I think that the other thing that they could do is they could recreate, quote unquote a stage experience where they're gently going so that the, the vision version is much different. It doesn't have as many moves. It's more like sitting on a stage and it's gonna deliver you. And now you can still change scenes in it, but it, it may, they, I think eventually they could get to that. So I, there's gonna be, I mean, developing the 180 content for this is gonna be pretty, I think pretty exciting. So, we'll, we'll see how far they push it, but I think most likely they would do a 3D version inside of a window at first.
(01:48:19):
Maybe even shifting you, you know, you can shift back and forth. So you, I think this is where we're gonna see mls, where you're gonna see, you're gonna be watching it in a 16 by nine window, then they score and the, the window disappears and you're suddenly getting a replay in stereo. Or, you know, like in 180, like you're there on the or they just every once in a while take you to a certain part of the field and let you experience that in, you know, full 180. I think that's gonna be really interesting.
Leo Laporte (01:48:46):
Jason Snell just dropping this in our club. Twi Discord, the new Apple developer betas have just yeah,
Alex Lindsay (01:48:54):
Dropped.
Jason Snell (01:48:55):
And in new, I'm gonna put that in quotation marks cuz these are still beta three, but they're incremented build numbers. Now why would they do that? Why would they possibly do that? Well, one reason is, this is about the time every year where the public beta comes out. And I wonder if perhaps they had to make a few adjustments to beta three to fix some things before they unleash it on the public. So keep an eye out pro. They only said July, so it could be at any point between now and the end of the month. But this would, like, if you're looking for public betas this I think is a smoke signal that they're probably on the way soon because Apple likes to run. Here's how it works. Apple likes to run the developer beta by the people in that group to find showstoppers.
(01:49:40):
And they, they, they did that today. So you would think it would be imminent if there weren't showstoppers. So if you're a developer on the betas update now, and if you're not or you're listening to this in a, in, in the next week, maybe the public betas are even out by then. It, it really, there's no way to tell until Apple will. They, they sometimes will go right up to the moment and then be like, forget it. Not today. Not today. Yeah. Yeah. Got a problem. But this is super suspicious that it's not beta four. It's just beta three incremented. Like a couple, like the Mac one went from like G to I, right? Like in the internal build system, they didn't even increment the number. It's very clearly just a slightly more recent build than that. But that'll make it public. I mean, there are more people on the public beta. It's easier to get into the dev beta than it used to be, but the public betas are very popular these days. And and I think we maybe are very close now. You've
Leo Laporte (01:50:36):
Been using the developer betas, would you? Yeah. presuming, but that these will come out before next Mac Break weekly. Would you warn people away from the public bes or,
Jason Snell (01:50:46):
I'd say it's the standard warning. Like you should be prepared. Like if it's something that you rely on to get your, your day-to-day work done, you should probably not do it. If it's something that you want to do for fun to get a preview, or you're willing to suffer maybe worse battery life, it's a, if it's a mobile device, maybe some apps that don't behave quite right, but you're willing to chance it. Like I haven't had any big problems at all with any of them. But, you know, there's also on the Mac, there's software that I rely on that does not work on the public beta. And so I have to have a second system so that I can run that software anyway. So, you know, you just gotta be careful. But these days, my beta warnings are a lot less than they used to be.
(01:51:28):
Because Apple has this whole public beta process. Apple is trying very hard not to ruin everybody's summer. And so it's, it's not quite as dangerous as it used to be. I also point out, if you're a Mac user, unlike the iPad and the iPhone a Mac user, you can install the OS on an external drive and do it. Ah, that's true. Yes. And then reboot into the old operating system. You can still do that, which is nice. Okay. And safe. You can't do that on the iPad and, and the iPhone, so you're just gonna have to risk it. But that all said, I have not had any real problems with it. And some of the features are fun. So if you're willing to take the risk, but like, if, if like, literally you're gonna lose your job, if this app doesn't work, do not do it. Yeah. Just don't risk it. Don't risk it.
Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
There's a lot of interest in iOS 17 and as a, as the only Mac podcast in Sonoma County, I think we probably should adapt <laugh> that I son.
Jason Snell (01:52:16):
It's gonna be a good year for for Sonoma County, right? Yeah. Like, this is the year we
Leo Laporte (01:52:20):
Got. It's your time. I, I don't know what happened in Ventura County, but I hear it was big. We're expecting good things big year. Yeah. <laugh>. Alright, your break your picks rather the week coming up after a break. So prepare those boys. I do want to give a little plug to Club tick, cuz we've got some great events coming up in our Discord on Friday. The inside twit after hours, the alcohol fueled inside Twit. Aunt Pruitt, our community manager, Leo, hosting the Hangout. It's not
Speaker 7 (01:52:51):
Alcohol. Okay. It's gonna be alcohol
Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
Fueled. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's alcohol fueled it's funny. Cars and kerosene and jet fuel. And John's shaking. John Sena is shaking his head. John Ashley says, yes. John Sena says no. Okay, well, we'll find out. You should tune in. 5:00 PM Pacific Friday, July 14th. The following, a couple weeks later, a fireside chat with Ron Pyle. I'm really glad to see that. An's gonna do what he calls coffee time, live photo critiques in the club that starts August 4th, 4:00 PM The Club is the place to be these days. It's inexpensive, it's $7 a month, and you get ad free versions of this show. And every public show we do actually, every show we do, you get access to shows that we don't do in public. The new AI show with Jason Helen, Jeff Jarvis will launch in the club first. That's how we did it with this week in's space with Rod Pyle.
(01:53:47):
Then it went public after we built a large enough audience. Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson, Micah Sargents, hands on Mac, hands on windows with Paul throughout the Untitled Linnux Show with Jonathan Bennett and Company, the GIZ Fizz with Dick DeBartolo. These are all shows that are in the club. Only somebody was asking emailed me, said we're, I've been looking everywhere for that Hugh Howie interview that aunt Pruitt did a couple of weeks ago. Where is it? It's in the club and the TWIT plus feed. So I think we give you a lot of value. And I have to say it's also really important to our financial future because podcasts is struggling just a little bit these days and we've already had to cancel a couple of shows. I don't want to cancel any more shows and I definitely don't wanna you know, turn out the lights.
(01:54:31):
So if you wanna keep the lights on, keep the shows going. TWIT TV slash club twit and I thank you in advance. We love our club members. They make a lot of things possible that we wouldn't be doing otherwise. As do our advertisers are show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. If you're hiring, well, you're dealing with economic uncertainty, right? That adds to the challenges businesses like, it's like what's going on now more than ever. It's important to hire the right people faster and more efficiently. You wanna keep your overall costs down, you wanna keep your staff going. Thankfully, there is a hiring partner who's focused on you and your needs. And that's ZipRecruiter for pricing to technology. Everything ZipRecruiter does is for you and what works best for you. They've got their fingers on the pulse of employers and employees everywhere, and they know ZipRecruiter is the best right now.
(01:55:27):
You can try it for free. Yeah, for free. At ziprecruiter.com/mac break, lemme give you some of the many ways ZipRecruiter prioritizes your needs. Pricing very straightforward. You know exactly what you're gonna pay before, post your job. No surprises. You know what your budget is and you can stick to it. You'll reach more qualified people right away, cuz ZipRecruiter sends your job post there to more than a hundred other job sites. So you're casting the broadest possible net. Plus their smart technology helps you find great candidates faster and invite the best matches to apply for your job. Beat out the competition for talent. Ziprecruiter lets you invite candidates you really want to apply to your job before those other guys can snag them. Hire the best with the help of a partner who is all about you. Zip Recruiter, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. It's what we use and it's true, it really works. Go to this exclusive web address to try. Ziprecruiter free. Ziprecruiter.Com/Mac break. Again, ziprecruiter.com/m a bak ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire Alex Lindsay, I think you should kick things off with your pick of the week. Andy has not spent enough money yet today. <Laugh>
Alex Lindsay (01:56:51):
Mine's not very expensive. I mean, it's connected to something that's expensive, but it's not expensive itself. It's called Monitor Plus. And for those of you using Sony cameras like myself, a monitor plus lets you tie your iPhone to it. One of the big problems with not using a Black magic camera with all the other black magic stuff is I can't shade the camera anymore. Ah. and so, so I was complaining about it. And of course people started sending me the links and I started downloading the links. And the one that I found to be the most stable is Monitor Plus. It's actually pretty easy to lo link into. Once the phone is said, I can be controlled. You simply turn it on, it will ask you, do you want to join the wifi you know, connection, and then you basically get an I I'm having trouble getting my phone to output to my switcher, but, but I was able to connect to it. So you'll see here, this is what I see, which is I, I have a little bit of a, oh, look at that. I have a histogram, his scope of scopes. That's great. And then I have that, and then I have controls. And so now with my phone, I can look at it and I do this to make, can you
Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
Apply a lot while you're watching?
Alex Lindsay (01:57:50):
I can apply a lot, but you can see me. I'm, that's my phone. I'm just sitting there with my phone. Oh, wow. Adjusting my, wow, that's awesome. My, that's my iso. You know, so I have, you know, I can actually go in here and, and make some of, I haven't tried to change the LUT for it itself, but I definitely can, you know, make adjustments to a lot of parts of it. And again, having the histogram built right into it is really nice. Yeah, that's nice. Cause I can take a, take a look at it and just know whether I'm, you know, kind of in the right space or not. So it's, it's a pretty pretty slick, like I can go into my, into my color. For instance, Sony has
Leo Laporte (01:58:21):
Changing its own app, which is total crap. The imaging, whatever they call it. Sony Imaging. Plus I use an A seven R four. And yeah, this would be great. Is it just for video? It's just for video.
Alex Lindsay (01:58:34):
I only use it with video. It might do other things. I, I have to admit, my my experience right now has been mostly to control of video, but it
Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
Does support all of their vlogging cameras too, which is would make a lot of sense. Yeah.
Alex Lindsay (01:58:45):
So it, it it's been, it's one of the big gotchas when you're not, because the great thing about the Black Magic cameras is once you plug 'em into the switcher, you're able to control 'em, shade 'em, do a lot of other things. And so having something else that gets closed, it's not quite the same level of control or fluidness that you have with a black magic camera. It's just that the auto focus on the Sony is really nice. <Laugh>. So, so anyway, so it's but but anyway, monitor Plus works pretty
Leo Laporte (01:59:08):
Well. Great. Hey, this just in too, thank you. Scooter X in our I R C half an hour ago, apple pushed out new firmware for the Beat Studio Buds, the AirPods Pro. This has been promised, and I think this would be the transparency stuff and the auto adapt adaptivity stuff and so forth. So I don't think if you have beats Pros or AirPods pros, you'd have to do anything. I imagine as soon you hook 'em up to your phone, it'll update the firmware. So that's good news. That's good news. And Alex's pick once again, monitor Plus it's on the app store from Hanon.
Alex Lindsay (01:59:50):
Yeah. It's not very good. And, and it was one of the things, there's a lot of other people that made them, I just found this one to be the easiest one to connect. That's and have, it's why that's and have it work and it's free and it's,
Leo Laporte (01:59:59):
So yeah. And you can use it with wifi, but it also supports earlier like the A 73 with usb, so you can use it wired. Thank you, Alex, Andy, and not co You have a pick. Make it good. Yes.
Andy Ihnatko (02:00:13):
It's ki it's interesting, something I hadn't seen before. I'm try, I'm, I'm evacuating myself from Evernote <laugh>, which, because it's so much turmoil there. Sad. You,
Leo Laporte (02:00:22):
You're still there. Really? Wow. Well,
Andy Ihnatko (02:00:25):
Because for, and I'll, I, it gets into my pick as a matter of fact because one of the things in my workflow is that I need to be able to, when I find something on the web that I need to refer back to for research, when I'm writing about something or preparing to talk about something on NPR or on a podcast, like I need to have the actual, I I've, I've, you know what happens? Things tend to disappear or you lose internet connectivity when you're kind of desperate to actually get access to it. So part of my workflow is to clip the entire webpage on Evernote via its plugin was really, really, oh,
Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
Yeah. I used to use that all the, the time. I loved the Evernote
Andy Ihnatko (02:00:58):
Plugin. Yeah. And, and, and it was great. Like when I, when I board the train to go into Boston to do radio, I just, you know, pull, pull up my iPad, click on the sync button on Evernote. And now every single website that I, every single web article that I'm basing a lot of my talk, talk on mm-hmm. <Affirmative> is gonna have this stuff on it. So I'm looking for other workflows for, I need to be able to capture webpages. I found this plugin for pretty much every web browser out there. It's called a Mark download. And it's just a simple plugin. You click a button and it will download your current webpage as in markdown format. And it's very, very robust. It gives you, it, it, it creates a readability version of it. So it's not as though it's gonna try to download all the buttons and all the ads and stuff, stuff like that.
(02:01:41):
But it gives you, it presents you with a window of here's the markdown that I've captured from this. And you have the ability to edit it before it gets saved. And then you can save it. You can also create templates so that if you want to, like I was experimenting with it's not just the content. I also wanna make sure I'm capturing certain metadata so that maybe I can script or automate certain things about these pages that I'm downloading. And so you could create a, here's what the header should look like. Here's what the footage should look like. You can select just parts of this, of the site to, of the webpage to, to capture. It may not be the one that I use permanently, but it was unusual. And boy does it work well. It also integrates really, really well with obsidian for people who are using the obsidian note taker.
(02:02:21):
And the fact that, like, my, my now go-to app for most of my re my like study and and writing is Ulysses, which is based on markdown. They're a bunch of other really great apps that are based on markdown now. So the ability to simply drag that webpage into a, as a new note into Ulysses without having to worry about, oh, it doesn't, I can't attach a PDF or I can't attach it as this, working it with it as a native thing that could then cut and paste text without worrying about where I'm selecting. That's a pretty interesting process. I think it's gonna, it's
Leo Laporte (02:02:51):
Not a screenshot, it's an actual textual Exactly. Markdown based version of the page. I think that's right. You, you
Andy Ihnatko (02:02:56):
Wind it with a, a markdown text argument that's properly formatted. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:03:00):
I'm installing it right now in Firefox. That would be very, very handy. Yeah. and it's free Mark downloads. It's free. It's get from GitHub. It's on GitHub baby. Mr. Jason Snell. You wanna plug your friend's book, don't
Jason Snell (02:03:15):
You? Since we're plugging friends novels today, I am going to plug my friend's novel. All Souls Lost by Dan Moran comes out October 17th. It is available for pre-ordering now. I had the good fortune to read it a few years ago. It's been sort of in process for a while. It's really good. It's an urban fantasy. And the relevance to this show, well, there's a big tech company in it where mysterious, potentially supernatural things may be happening. And if you think that Dan might write what he knows and that that big tech company might resemble, oh, I don't know, apple in some way, well, you know, no no similarities between anybody living or dead. Certainly, certainly not. It's, it's a, it's a fun read and it's coming out finally. Everybody else in the world gets to see it. And definitely, I laughed at the big tech company that the main character works for,
Leo Laporte (02:04:12):
Because this looks really fun.
Jason Snell (02:04:13):
It's really familiar. I love Will be audio book. They haven't, they haven't announced the audio book yet. This is his first book that is not in his Galactic Cold War series. Yeah. Which is ongoing. Yeah. it's an urban fantasy and it's just a kick. And the fact that yeah, if you know about Apple and then you will, you will recognize things in it. That's all I can say.
Leo Laporte (02:04:31):
Say hello to Mike Lucifer, spiritual consultant. He's back in town to take care of. Unfortunately, when business is good, things must be very, very bad.
Jason Snell (02:04:43):
Yeah. He's like your typical noir detective who really doesn't want to be involved and gets involved and then gets his life threatened and, you know, it's, it's that kind of thing. It's, it's noir detective fantasy setting, urban fantasy thing. It's great. So people should
Leo Laporte (02:04:56):
Check it out. It feels kinda noir. That's exactly the kinda of mess what it drove him from home Hometown of Boston to a sunny beach in the bottom of a bottle
Jason Snell (02:05:04):
And the bottom of a bottle. <Laugh>. Yep. I love it. Yeah. But now he's back in town and he's in trouble. It's a great setup. It's a fun book. And and yeah, October 17th, but you can order it now and that's what you should do. Nice.
Leo Laporte (02:05:17):
Very good. Dan Moore.
Andy Ihnatko (02:05:18):
We all know Dan. It sounds as though it sounds like something that Dan had a lot of fun writing. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:05:22):
Yeah. Oh yeah, she does. Yeah.
Jason Snell (02:05:23):
Yeah. It's written in his wheelhouse.
Leo Laporte (02:05:25):
I want to give a little plug to an app that you've picked before. Andy, I know you know it and like it and the fact, I thought you might make this your pick of the week. Bear just came out with version two after five years of working on it, all new editor and lots of new features. This is a markdown editor that is apple only iOS iPad os and Mac os free to use. Although if there are some advanced features, you might want to pay a measly 30 bucks a year for like sinking. It has full encryption and it is fully marked down capable. So very nice. A lot of people like it. Very nice editor. I know you used it or have used it, right, Andy?
Andy Ihnatko (02:06:07):
I've used it. I obviously, when I first used it, it seemed too similar to Ulysses for me to consider switching. And but now this looks like it really has. It's, it's got into a really nice Ford versus gm, a Ford versus Ferrari sort of battle, which is like, oh, they, they've, they to, to us together have shown the world that really great markdown based note taking apps are very muscular and useful. And now we're basically going to start serving this market in a much more much more professional way. It does So many more things. I have, I have not, I I downloaded it. I have not tried, I've not started playing with it, but I did see a lot of things that I wish that Ulysses had. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:06:46):
But
Andy Ihnatko (02:06:47):
The, but the great thing about, but the great thing about Markdown is that I could simply take all of my Ulysses if I decided to switch to pair, I just switch from one folder to the other. If I, if I decide to sync to create a shared Google Drive folder with all of my, like Ulysses projects and markdown projects, I could even like edit Markdown on my Android phone. And when I open up on my Mac or on my iPad or on my iPhone, it won't care.
Leo Laporte (02:07:11):
So this is, this is why, that's the idea of it. This, this,
Andy Ihnatko (02:07:12):
This, this is why using a, using an open standard that's based on text files is such a powerful thing. Cuz you never know what changes it's gonna make in the future. And you're ready for it.
Leo Laporte (02:07:20):
You probably already know Mark down, even if you've never heard of Mark down John Gruber created it many moons ago. And it is a very simple text-based way to create formatted text many years later. It's, it's kind of a power tool and bear that's Bear's file format, which means you know, it's, it's open and you're not stuck. And Bear is famous for its editor. They've got a new editor now that they've put
Jason Snell (02:07:45):
Out. I've been on the test flight of that editor for like three years. Ah, <laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:07:49):
Three. A
Andy Ihnatko (02:07:49):
Freaking, it's, it's a long, it's long in the way. It's, yeah. It's not just, Hey, now we've added curing. It's like, no, we basically <laugh> we, we basically decided to do a frame off restoration of this. Yeah. And now it's basically a brand new car. It looks
Leo Laporte (02:08:03):
Real. If it were cross-platform, it'd be a no-brainer for me. It really looks good. And, and yeah, your stuff is stored locally and that's important. Although if you want the syncing, it's in iCloud as well. That I, we got Jason, we got Andy, we got Alex. I think we got everybody. A, a special thanks to Ray Maxwell for showing us his Mac Pro today. Got glad to get that review in. If you don't like the Mac Pro <laugh>, then listen to update this week and you'll feel much better about your life. Right, Jason
Jason Snell (02:08:37):
<Laugh>. Exactly. You know, it'll change. Now my, look, my, what I said about the Mac Pro is that it's the least important Mac, but that's to Apple because it sells in such small quantities. Right. But if it's the Mac for you, then it's the most important Mac. That's what I'm
Leo Laporte (02:08:50):
Saying. Upgrade is one of the many podcasts Jason does. This one's on Relay fm. If you go to six, found me six. I found you six colors.com/jason. You'll find everything. Jason does. Thank you Jason Stone. We always appreciate it. Thank you Leo. In here. Yeah. Thank you Andy. And aco, when are you gonna be on gbh? Next
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:09):
Thursday at 1230 Eastern time. Go to WGBH news.org to stream it live or stream it later.
Leo Laporte (02:09:15):
Wonderful. And stay dry. Get your hip waiters on and go go down to the seven 11 to
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:21):
Celebrate, you know, now that staying inside, we'll do it. But I also have air conditioning, so I will also be staying dry from my own <laugh> from my own self basting for the first year. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (02:09:31):
How nice. Congratulations.
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:33):
I'm, I'm already, I've, I've, I've, I've rejected every impulse that my inner dad voice has given me saying, oh, come on. It's only 81 degrees. It's not really hot yet, but when you can just simply say, how about if we just keep it 68 degrees, the entire house? Always like, dammit, that's a
Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
Good argument. It's a nice feeling when you finally give in. Cause I know exactly how you feel and turn it on and it's suddenly cool and it's like, oh, <laugh>, that's available. I'm,
Andy Ihnatko (02:09:58):
I'm, I'm no longer having to swallow the air because it's so thick. It's actually dry potable air. The
Leo Laporte (02:10:04):
Planet may be burning, but I'm comfortable. Thank you very much. Thank you Alex Lindsay, office hours.global. Tell us about what's up there. We had a nation. Ooh.
Alex Lindsay (02:10:17):
Yeah, we, I mean we had a, it's a busy week as always. You know, we had a great session with a project manager from AWS yesterday, talking really about how to plan projects today. We talked about the overall pipeline of 3D production, which was really, really great. Alan Hawks who's just an incredible production 3D production person, was really giving the overview. He's gonna do a year and a half at once a month talking about different aspects of the 3D pipeline. We're talking about acoustical panels tomorrow cause it's audio day. The we have Chris Seger, who's NBC Universal's Director of Advanced Content Production coming in on Thursday with Michael Dresden and, and Jim Toten. These are the guys that work on Thursday night football. Wow. And they're gonna be talking about H D R objective color metrics. I mean, this is a deep hour and you'll, you might like that me <laugh>. So you know, I think that Ray might enjoy this one. Oh yeah. This is,
Leo Laporte (02:11:11):
These are the guys they do, Ray, you better show for this one. Yeah, yeah.
Alex Lindsay (02:11:13):
They are spending, he, you know, they've been building the N B C Lutz and all the other things to figure out how to do consistent, perfect color going from sdr, R to H D R, back to SDR r, all those other things. So they're gonna be talking about that Friday, Friday's a little more relaxed. We're just showing a bunch of our projects and talking about what worked and didn't work and answering questions. And then Saturday we were talking about audio description with Joel Snyder, who is really one of the key people who created it. And our, our accessibility Saturdays have turned into quite a thing. I mean, we're experimenting with adding accessibility. We have dev panelists and asl and we're, you know, adding a lot of other bits and pieces and really understanding what the, what the challenges are and, and working with everybody. And it's turned out to be a really good Saturday. So, anyway, that, that's the, that's this week
Leo Laporte (02:11:58):
Free, open to all Busy Week. You can be in this Zoom if you want. You have to go to the page and ask, fill out the Join Us form. But you can also watch the hour on YouTube. Best place to go Office hours.global to find out about that. And if you wanna hire Alex for your next streaming event oh nine oh Media is the place to go. Thank you Alex. Thank you Andy. Thank you Jason. And thank you Ray Maxwell and thanks to you for being here. We do Mac Break Weekly, Tuesday's 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live. There's a live audio stream and video stream at Live dot twit tv. If you're watching Live Chat Live the IRC is open to all, all you need is a web browser to go to IRC dot twit tv.
(02:12:48):
Of course, if you're a club member, you can also chat in the Mac Break weekly section of our Discord. And that's open all the time as well after the fact on demand versions of our show available at twit tv slash B w. When you're there, you'll see links to the YouTube channel dedicated to Mac Break Weekly. You'll also see links to various podcast players. You can subscribe there. It's really the best way to get the show is to subscribe. And that way you'll have it whenever you're in the mood to listen to Mac Break Weekly. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time. Now it's time to get back to work cuz break. Time is over. Bye-Bye.
Mikah Sargent (02:13:27):
Oh, hey, that's a really nice iPhone you have there. You totally picked the right color. Hey, since you do use an iPhone and maybe use an iPad or an Apple Watch or an Apple tv, well you should check out iOS today. It's a show that I, Micah Sergeant and my co-host, Rosemary Orchard host every Tuesday right here on the Twit Network. It covers all things iOS, tv, os, HomePod, os Watch, os, iPad os. It's all the OSS that Apple has on offer. And we love to give you tips and tricks about making the most of those devices, checking out great apps and services and answering your tech questions. I hope you check it out.
