MacBreak Weekly 900 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell is here, Andy Ihnatko is here, Alex Lindsey's here and we are going to celebrate our 900th episode. Holy cow, last episode of 2023. We'll talk about Beeper. We'll talk about those iPhones that shut down randomly at the Chicago holiday party and why it happened. We'll talk about the Adobe Figma acquisition I guess it's all over and a whole lot more, including why you won't be able to buy an Apple watch in a couple of days. MacBreak Weekly. is next.

0:00:41 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 900, recorded Tuesday, december 19th 2023. Will Work For Eggnog. MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Discourse, the online home for your community. Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime, anywhere. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-serve plans. and by our friends at ITProTV, now called ACI Learning, keep your IT team's skills up to date with the speed of technology. Visit go.acilearning.com/twit. TWiT listeners you'll get up to 65% off an ITPro Enterprise Solution Plan. The discount is based on your team's size, so fill out the form to find out how much you'll save. And by SecureMyEmail. SecureMyEmail provides easy encryption for your current personal and business email addresses. Set up only takes minutes and you can start your free account or enjoy a 30-day free trial of a premium plan with no payment info required. And they have a special offer for TWiT listeners to boot. Visit securemyemail.com/twit and use the code TWIT at checkout. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple News, our last show of 2023. It also happens to be episode 900. And look who's here our the 900 Club. Jason Snell who has done probably 900 podcasts this year alone. Hi Jason.

0:02:21 - Jason Snell
Sure, but only 100 of episodes of this podcast. Yes. Good to be here again, nice to have you, happy 900. Thank you To you and all the little Mac breaks.

0:02:31 - Leo Laporte
We are going to at the end of the show list everybody who's ever been on Mac break weekly, and then I think it'll go right through Christmas, Andy Ihnatko. WGBH in Boston. Hello Andrew.

0:02:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Mary Jingle, Mary Jingle and Mary 900.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Happy holidays. You have a little time because Orthodox Christmas comes late.

0:02:55 - Andy Ihnatko
That's usually my buffer zone, where, if there's something that I forgot or something that I want, like getting Christmas decorations up, I've got, I believe, a little bit of extra leeway, because they're going to be staying up until like mid January anyway.

0:03:08 - Jason Snell
So I'm jealous. That's awesome. Cheers for orthodoxy that's awesome.

0:03:13 - Leo Laporte
Three cheers for orthodoxy. And Alex Lindsey, who's an original. He's been here for many of the 900 episodes. An original Mac break, in fact. You invented Mac break. It's good to be here. Yeah, I've been looking at Mac break one, mac break weekly, number one. So you, we did a video show for a while with you, called Mac break, yeah, and I said, can we?

0:03:37 - Alex Lindsay
do an audio. We did, we did, we did a Mac break weekly for a little while before you, and then, and then, we handed it. Then I had astutely handed it off to you, knowing that it would do better with inside of twit than it would do with me. We're still doing it, which is the biggest thing, You're still doing it. Look at all the other podcasts that I started. There's, there's. They all kind of faded away because I got busy.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
It's the way of the world.

0:03:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, so.

0:04:00 - Leo Laporte
So that's the first episode was David Pogue, Amber MacArthur, Chris Breen and Alex Lindsey. A look at leopard and the new Mac pro in the wake of WWDC. The next one was called so sue me, was hosted by you, Alex.

0:04:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think these were the early ones, so I guess the early ones are the first ones. I think this before you had started.

0:04:24 - Leo Laporte
I'm not even here yet. Yes, scott born is there. He was with us for a long time. Number three, scott born, hosted with Jason Snell. Look at that, jason.

0:04:33 - Jason Snell
Okay, I'm an OG man.

0:04:37 - Leo Laporte
Chris and Merlin man evaluating the Mac pro new lithium ion battery standards. Apple at photo Kenan will we see aperture 2.0? Apple is homeboy. Apple and social networking. Macbook supply 32 gig flash based 2006, august 31st. Yeah, and we started in 2006. Because the first one's right.

0:04:56 - Alex Lindsay
The first video one started the January of that year, right, and before that it was actually Mac break minute.

0:05:04 - Leo Laporte
Mac break minutes. That happened in 2005. I remember those minutes.

0:05:06 - Alex Lindsay
I did a few of those, yeah, yeah. And so then we the big. The first Mac break video was with Amber MacArthur, and, and you and I did not, was I?

0:05:16 - Leo Laporte
and the guy who did in the been a billionaire. Emory Wells yeah, exactly.

0:05:21 - Jason Snell
We did a bunch of those, those Mac break videos. I remember coming over to the studio that was down on South of South of markets, I think, the first batch and then the one DL on Market Street where we would do like it was me and a bunch of other people from Macworld and we just like kept on cycling through and we did like five videos or you guys did.

0:05:40 - Alex Lindsay
You guys were doing I still have that, I still have those videos somewhere, but I, you guys were doing the picks of the the Mac break winners. You guys came and did. You know, like we had a like you would talk about, you know, like the different winners for Mac Macworld I'm sorry, mac Mac break Macworld winners for the Mac Macworld conference.

Oh yeah, yeah, the best show right, that's the show and we had a little graphic and had you guys, I remember that Top of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember doing that, yeah, so we did that, we did that and then and then some like Mac break segments.

0:06:10 - Jason Snell
I remember being like where we like literally just step into a segment which is totally different than that was about the same era where we were doing all the stuff with, or just after we did the stuff with, tech TV. I got into kind of mass production.

0:06:23 - Alex Lindsay
So I was like we would shoot, like I think the very first time we. I think our record was like 36 shows in one day, yeah.

That sounds about right. No, because it was like because we would just get in there, you would have your five minutes, because all of our shows were like five minutes long or eight minutes long. If someone did 20 minutes long, we were like we can't do all of them this way, and so, and you know, we produced a lot of them, but that's. And then we got to the model, started doing it for other people Sal Segoian was a regular.

0:06:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we had some good people. This is episode four. Scott Bourne hosted Kenji Kato, chris Breen, merlin man and Ben Long. Oh, I don't know where we got these people. Finally, on episode five, we kind of settled into our regular panel with Merlin Scott, alex and me. That was. We did that for a long time. Brett Larson oh yeah, he was Macworld right.

0:07:15 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, he was tech.

0:07:17 - Leo Laporte
TV Chris Breen, but yeah, I think the Leo LaPorte Merlin man, scott Bourne, alex Lindsey.

0:07:26 - Jason Snell
That is yeah.

0:07:27 - Leo Laporte
OG panel of Mac.

0:07:29 - Jason Snell
Greg Weekly.

0:07:31 - Leo Laporte
Here's one from September 22nd 2006. Title is the safe word is banana, with a non-shimpy of a non-tech. Then late, where did he go? Intel? And then Apple, apple, apple. Adam Christiansen from tidbits, who's still doing his thing, and Adam Knight.

0:07:49 - Jason Snell
You know Adam Adam actually speaking of the Maccast, which was? It just ended last week, oh no and that that was a show he's going to be on Mac Geekab, I guess over on that, the backbeat network. But, adam, a little salute to. Adam did a podcast about the Mac from before they're not that many of these right from before. It was even in iTunes before Apple got podcasting. So 2004, I want to say maybe for Adam, and he has been doing it since then until last week, and then he shut the Maccast down and it's going to go off.

Just like you said, leo, pod fade is real and I think when people ask me about like how do I get into podcasting or blogging or video or whatever, I say number one is consistency. In the end it's a grind and you got to do it. Like, if you're like you're really excited about it, and then you do like four of them and you're like I'm tired, I'm bored, right, like consistency, showing your audience that you're committed and you're going to be there every week or other week or whatever your frequency is, it's just key.

0:08:48 - Alex Lindsay
I always tell everyone write the title for your first 20 episodes, just write the title for the first one and they're like what, if you can't get to 20, you're going to run out of room.

0:08:59 - Jason Snell
Like you're just going to run out of room.

0:09:00 - Alex Lindsay
You have to know where you're going to go.

0:09:01 - Jason Snell
If you're filled with on, we at number 13 maybe don't do it, right, maybe, maybe don't do it.

0:09:07 - Andy Ihnatko
A lot of people have opinions, have like five opinions, and then, when it comes to the sixth show, okay, Clearly I have at least 900.

0:09:17 - Jason Snell
So, having worked, having worked in magazines back in the prehistoric era, as Andy knows, because Andy did too One of the things that I remember talking to David Pogue about, I remember talking to John Dvorak about it is the you would have your, your monthly columnist.

Andy did this job too Right, and I remember somebody when Dvorak was writing the back page column for PC Magazine and for Mac user, he was our anti editor. He was like just provocative and all of that, but what he did we always commented on like John has five good columns a year, and then he's got four recycled columns a year and then three bad columns a year, and that was just 12 a year is all that was required. I remember talking to Pogue about it because I was his editor for a while, when he was on the back page of Macworld as the same thing as like, oh, 12 a year, it's so hard, and I think about it now because, like when I started writing for Macworldcom after I left Macworld, I was writing 52 of them a year, wow. And what I'm saying, though, is they can't all be gems, but being able to kind of like cycle through and grind and get the content out is part of being a pro, and I think that's sitting.

0:10:26 - Andy Ihnatko
There was a 900 here 900. If anything. Having more at bats like makes it easier because you can take more risks, you can do things that are more fun, whereas it was like I only have their attention for like five minutes once a month. This has to be exceptionally good. And if you're thinking about, wow, that might be a little bit too out there and I'm going to lose them for an entire month, that's when you start thinking maybe I should do something simpler, more conservative more familiar.

So it's nicer to be to have more at bats. So if you strike out once and you get to get it in another half hour anyway, and you can forget about the past.

0:11:02 - Jason Snell
right, it's like be a goldfish, like Ted Lasso says. Right, just, there's the next one. You talked to professional athletes and that's what they say is like, if you're a hitter in baseball, like you just got it, you struck out, you just like you got to let it go, because you're going to have another one in a half an hour.

0:11:16 - Alex Lindsay
You know what? I was surprised that when I did audio, I was an A2 for audio for the NFL for one of the games, and which means I ran memory cards. Like that's what I was. My job is to run memory cards around and it's just. It was just an audio team that only manages when they say blue 25, blue 25. And so, and our job is to make sure that the broadcast doesn't get the huddle right, like somebody's there to make sure that huddle doesn't go to the broadcast, doesn't even go to the trucks, and I thought we were going to hear all this incredible stuff. Nope, like there's just not enough time. They get back there. You think that they're all talking about the last play. They are just calling the next play and getting loaded in. There's no, the only time you hear it is in timeouts.

0:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Like they're like can you believe that, carl? Or when they're on the sideline sitting out at play and then they go. God, there's many.

0:11:58 - Alex Lindsay
But when they're in the huddle it's just like everyone gets back and they say we're going to do a right for you know whatever and that's, and they just move out to work.

0:12:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, yeah, let's go to the thing. So we have 21 Mac casts. Congratulations, adam Christensen. He started his first episode was December 13th 2004. Actually, that was show zero and a couple of days later he did show one, yeah, but still so.

0:12:19 - Jason Snell
That's the earliest days of podcasting.

0:12:21 - Leo Laporte
My first podcast was the radio show in September of 2004. And I think there were, you know, there was the Daily Source Code. There were a handful of podcasts. So this is very, very early. Did Adam say why he's hanging up his spurs?

0:12:37 - Jason Snell
I think I get the sense that they, because he's a backbeat media that they like, moved it around and are putting him on their other show Gag Instead, that there's a consolidation there. But also, I mean, you do it that long, maybe it is time to change it up. Don't say that out loud, I don't want to. I don't know. We're only, we're young here in like 900. I mean, I don't even know what you're talking about. Yeah, the first podcast I think I did was Macworld and it was 2005,. Right, 2005 was the year where, like the first wave of trying podcasts. But the stuff, if you're pre-2005, you are original for sure.

0:13:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Adam Christensen is now doing Mac Geek Gap with Dave Hamilton and Pilot Pete. They're at episode 1114.

0:13:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they've been doing it forever.

0:13:24 - Leo Laporte
They're a little bit ahead of us, but yeah, well, that's okay. It's okay, that's how it goes. But Adam is the greatest Tidbits still lives, I'm sure, right. That's the longest running.

0:13:39 - Jason Snell
Tidbits is a website so long. It's a little bit like I tell people that I started a magazine on the internet before there was a web.

0:13:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm confusing Adam Christensen with Adam Engst. Oh, Adam Engst Tidbits is Adam Engst. All the end bits are blurring.

0:13:52 - Jason Snell
It's so old that their first issues were distributed via hypercard, yeah, and then email, and then the web. Eventually, right, just like my internet magazine was like, there was no website, it wasn't even a gopher, it was literally just Usenet or download a file via FTP, because we didn't have a web back then and a hypercard. That is Wow. We live in large Wow.

0:14:16 - Leo Laporte
Chef's Kiss Wow Love. Hypercard Adam Christensen. We've had Adam Engst on many times. We've had Adam Christensen on the show.

0:14:25 - Jason Snell
I know we've had Adam Engst.

0:14:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so many Adams. I apologize, adam Engst, for confusing you with Adam Christensen, but both long running Mac They've been doing it a long time, yeah, for sure For sure you know I just I've been stalling Got 7.2.1. Now, alex, I remember your rule of thumb is don't get the major version, don't get the revision to the major version, get the revision to the revision. So we are still waiting for 7.2.2. Is that right?

0:14:57 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, well, I'm on the. So the funny thing about me is that for my production machines, my Macs, I stay way behind, like I'm still waiting to update to the newest version. I mean this year, like sometime this year I'll do that, or next year. For my iOS devices, I'm super aggressive and probably not the way I should. I'm on the beta for those things. I just throw them on. I'm like, oh, if it doesn't work, I'll go to another phone or something. But there's things that happen Like it sticks, so I never know what. I'm on 7.3. 17.3 right now, I think. I think it just didn't stall on my machines. So I'm on the beta on this. I'm pretty aggressive about iOS because I want all the new things, especially around the camera and stuff like that, but with my computers, because I do work on them, I'm much more conservative.

0:15:47 - Leo Laporte
So if you're if reliability is job one, you don't update right away, I would suggest getting at least 17.2. I was reading Reddit last week and somebody came on and said I don't know how this happened I was at a Christmas party and two-thirds of the iPhones at the Christmas party died all at the same time. What could be going on? Oh, that's interesting. Well, it is interesting and it's been fixed at 17.2. So this was a case of the Flipper Zero, which I had and I gave it to, rather Robert. But there was a third-party firmware update to the Flipper Zero, which is really just a device with all kinds of radios that you can use for pen testing or hacking, and somebody with a Flipper Zero, I'm going to guess. I don't know if we ever got to the bottom of that one, but I'm pretty sure there was somebody with a Flipper Zero who went into the party and, using a Bluetooth LE exploit that Apple has since fixed, crashed everything.

0:16:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it just goes to show that the Flipper Zero is getting a lot of really super, like angsty mainstream press attention, which is like what is this?

This Amazon is selling this device that allows hackers to mess with your phones and devices and parking garage fences and things like that. But this sort of thing kind of shows why the value of having these kind of pen devices like in random people's hands can be a good thing. That was a vulnerability that Apple was unaware of or was not in a mood to patch, and yet now here we have a patch that says who knows how this could have been interfered with in a less of a puckish way, as was. It was just people messing around and people, oh wow, hey, look, I was able to turn off people, I was able to basically lock up people's iPhones without them knowing that I was doing it. But yeah, once you have people twisting door knobs I mean there's always that question of like I hate the fact that I have a set of lock picks from lock picking lawyers store and once you test, like all the locks you have in your house, you realize that, ah, damn it, look how weak every single one of these locks are.

Yeah, and I don't like the idea of some knucklehead just buying something for ten bucks and then being able to let themselves into pretty much anything. On the other hand, I think this is a good opportunity for people to take their lock down to their locksmith and say, hi, this tool can open this lock very easily. I would like you to fix this lock so that cannot happen, and now I have locks that you can't do that with. So more knowledge is usually a better solution than less.

0:18:25 - Leo Laporte
I think I've read the Reddit post from four days ago. I was at a holiday party in the loop of Chicago last night around 10 pm and estimated 20 to 30 other iPhones in mind shut down unexpectedly. It didn't happen at the same time, but within 10 to 15 minutes all of our phones were down. I couldn't gain access to my phone for around 30 minutes. I could start it but not open the phone. Later in the evening the phone worked this morning and others phone said in an air pod had been connected last night around 10 pm, the Cross Street, the Hubbard and Dearborn. Well, pretty quickly on Reddit somebody said yeah, that's a known flipper zero attack and this is the reason I bring it up. This is why you should be getting 17.2. And if you waited to 17.2.1, it's out today. I'm not sure what is it fixed? 17.2.1. Do we know? I?

0:19:16 - Jason Snell
don't know About bug fixes and improvements, probably.

0:19:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there you go yeah.

0:19:22 - Jason Snell
That flippers. It reminds me of the TV begun. Do you remember that I just sell it.

0:19:27 - Alex Lindsay
You can use the flippers.

0:19:28 - Jason Snell
It's a universal remote to turn off TVs. So if you're in a restaurant or an airport or whatever, you can sort of zap it and some loud TV, or in a actually it's where I eat breakfast at like a hotel or something and they've got like some news show on at full volume and you can just be like, oh, put it on your key chain and you just go and it turns it off because it's a universal remote or just the power off button.

0:19:53 - Alex Lindsay
Hilarious, there was some, yeah, and journaling also comes in 17.2. The journal as well as the camera special.

0:20:00 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, and 17.2. I don't know about what's in point one 17.2,. Yeah, has the journal app and the special video and the special video capture, yeah, which we talked about. Don't do it. I mean do it, but also take better videos than that.

0:20:15 - Alex Lindsay
It looks like it's just security fixes for 17.1.2. Yeah, that's all ways.

0:20:21 - Leo Laporte
Somebody in the discord said gee, that people at the party had to talk to each other. Wow, that must have been hard. You know it's funny.

0:20:32 - Alex Lindsay
I do not use my phone when I'm with other people. It's a funny thing that I You're alone. I have to say no, I just you know. When I'm also like one of those people, people will ask me like why didn't you respond to my messages? I'm like I was in a meeting and they're like well, why does that matter? I'm like because I don't look down. Like when I'm in a meeting I look up and I just sit there in the meeting. Good for you. Well, it's just a better meeting when people are doing that. Of course, life is better. I pay attention and more of my ideas go through when I'm present, so, anyway. So I think that it's. But I have found that over time and I wasn't always this way, but I really got into this habit of like when I'm talking to people I won't. My phone is always on Do Not Disturb like 100% of the time. Unless I turn it off for I'm expecting a call, it'll be off.

0:21:18 - Leo Laporte
That's actually problematic for people calling me. I don't. My phone is always off and always in. Do Not Disturb, I don't want calls.

0:21:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I don't want notifications. Like I have my notifications open from 9.59 to 10 o'clock at night and it's like my Mac is like there's so many things I have to tell you. It's like it almost goes down the side. You know, go away. I'm like no, I don't need to know.

0:21:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Still, let's be a bummer, like be at a party and oh, I don't have a camera anymore. Okay, oh well.

0:21:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I do miss the camera and when I did my digital detox that was the one thing I did want to take pictures. I didn't miss anything else. I know it was really slow to turn the phone back on because I knew that I was going to get flooded with stuff. Here is a wonderful picture, jason, that was just found from 2006.

0:21:57 - Jason Snell
Andy found it. Oh, Andy found it. I'm just passing it on. Thank you. Yeah, I'm photo bombing you guys. I actually remember that. It looks scary. I was just like I'm just going to stick myself in there in between them and be like eee.

0:22:08 - Leo Laporte
There it is. That's pretty good Little. Did you know?

0:22:11 - Jason Snell
that was the reason you're going to be embedded in the show man. Three quarters of the panel Right there. Yeah, that's awesome. Alex is probably taking the picture.

0:22:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Who is the sparky young upstart I want to know. I will follow his career with him, so real interest.

0:22:25 - Leo Laporte
So get your 17.1.2, even if you don't know, I'm sorry, 0.2.1. I guess I've been saying it wrong. You should certainly have 17.2. For that reason, I wonder what? Does Apple have? A security note or anything like that? No, this update provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all users. Well, there you go, let's see.

Yeah, do it iPhone XS or later. No published CVE entries. It doesn't mean there are no flaws that it's fixing, it's just that they're not published there, internal to Apple, I guess. Okay, just a thought. You might want to do it. Yes, go ahead and go to any holiday parties and if you are, you might want to bring along your flip or zero. It's about $129, available at Finding Stories, that's $169.

0:23:21 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, is it really? Yeah, it's on At $129, I was going to buy one. It's $100.

0:23:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, right they went up a little bit. I bought one last year, or is it earlier, maybe earlier this year did a little review of it. We broke into the studio with it. I was going to start my car and then Russell, who's our IT guy, said you may not want to do that, because a lot of times with those rotated whatever those you know revolving codes if they detect an out of cycle code they just stop working because they think somebody's trying to hack it. That's no fun. Which is what's happening, well. Well, yes, but it's my own car. Can you hack your own car? Yes, you can. And they add the fun thing about the flipper zero and the reason they call it the flipper zero besides the fact that it has a little dolphin Pow on it is it has some games on it, so it's got plausible deniability when they pull you over at the customs and say what is this? It's not for anything, I just like to play some games Always run An unleashed version of Tetris.

Yeah, it was a Bluetooth le exploit, but it's not. It's funny, it wasn't built in the flipper zero, it's got open firmware and somebody wrote some firmware with additional features. Additional features, it's very cool. In fact, father Robert has mine and he says he's put some additional features on it. So I don't know. I don't have no idea what he's talking about. Apple watches you can't get one after Thursday. What there's.

0:25:02 - Alex Lindsay
Christmas gift right now, at the time. Yeah.

0:25:06 - Jason Snell
In online Thursday in Apple stores on basically after Christmas and as long as supplies last, you will be able to buy them. This is all in the US At other stores, but not Apple. Apple's not allowed to sell it, and this is all because of a ruling from a US government patent body that has basically said and said six months ago.

0:25:29 - Speaker 4
unless the Biden administration feels like there's a game of chicken going on here.

0:25:33 - Jason Snell
They had 60 days in order to have this go into effect. The Biden administration can veto it if they want to. And also they're playing chicken here about like are they going to pay them off? What are they going to do? But like, this is an order for Apple to stop selling any iPhones with blood oxygen sensors, and that means the current iPhone or sorry, Apple Watches Apple.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
Watches Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Series 9.

0:25:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so the SE will still be there. Yay, but otherwise. Yeah, this is again. It feels like a game of chicken to me, but it's entirely possible that host Christmas Apple will not be selling the Apple Watch in the US for a little while, yeah, at least those newer Apple.

0:26:10 - Leo Laporte
Watches yeah.

0:26:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Those Apple Watches also, Apple can't import anymore into the country after the 25th. So Apple is designed to be proactive while it tries to again play that game of chicken. But that means that anything that's already in the retail channel, that if Best Buy already has like a month-long supply of these watches by the 20th 20 months.

0:26:32 - Leo Laporte
Like you know, like whoever Right.

0:26:35 - Andy Ihnatko
The point is that, like, if someone, if someone, tries to sell you a watch for like eight times face value three days after Christmas, maybe hold off. And also, maybe Apple will suddenly just get out of this checkbook and, as has been noted, they had a whole bunch of options to make this go away, one of which is to again hope that Biden will veto it. If he hasn't vetoed it by now, maybe this was designed to basically give him one, give the administration one hell of a nudge nudge to say, hey, we're serious about taking the economy going into Santa Brandon.

0:27:09 - Leo Laporte
You could sign that on Christmas Eve, santa Brandon, and make everybody happy. Yes, or is it Brandon Claus? I can never remember. Yeah. And of course the other option is Apple could just turn off the blood oxygen monitor. This comes from a lawsuit by Massimo, which is a company that makes a lot of these devices. They make a scale, they make a, but they say that the blood oxygen sensor. They have the patent to that and Apple never licensed it from them.

Yeah, and so they sued and they lost in court, but the the ITC nevertheless put the ban up, and so up to either the ITC or the president or to take it down or Apple to take that capability out. They could do that.

0:27:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Or they could just say okay, guess what we're going to give you. I'm sure that Massimo has offered them a licensing agreement and Apple has said we're going to wait until every other option has been removed. That's what it looks like, including yeah, and and and. It also bears bears mentioning that Massimo is not a patent troll. They are like a legitimate, like founder of this kind of technology.

0:28:09 - Alex Lindsay
Sure.

0:28:10 - Andy Ihnatko
They had they had. The one of the sources of this lawsuit was that they said that they were having talks with Apple about licensed proper licensing this technology or whatever what kind of partnership they wanted to have, and that their claim is that Apple not only took, took their technology, but they also hired away a lot of their key executives there, including, like they're basically, top medical tech person, and so there's a lot powered behind this, if I'm.

0:28:34 - Alex Lindsay
If I'm correct, it actually is worse than that. It's that Apple sued them first. So so I think that the issue I mean there's a whole bunch of, there's a series of unfortunate I mean a series of unforced errors on Apple's side that they got to this, this we shouldn't feel too bad for Apple, that they made a lot of mistakes here. So so they, you know, like, so the I mean I usually I'm on the Apple defense side, but this one was just not not a good idea. Like on their end and and and the. So the first thing is is that it appears that they had the. They had the meeting in 2013. Apple liked the technology but really didn't feel like Massimo is a consumer form faced company. It wasn't worth buying the whole thing and getting a hold of all the other things that they do. So buying the company didn't make sense for Apple. But then they did exactly what Andy said hired a bunch of people. Like you know, like we can in California, we can do that all the time Like we just hire each other, hire other people. The problem is that what what that brings is the potential of crossing over these patents, but it doesn't appear that, at least what I've read so far, it appears that what opened this can of worms was that Massimo created a watch and the watch you know, and so they just watch, and Apple sued them for infringement, which then they sued Apple for infringement, and then, and then the whole thing you know came apart. So so, anyway, so I think that I think that that that was the issue. So there's the watch that they created and it looked a lot like the Apple watch, and so Apple sued them and opened up this can of worms, I believe in 2018 or 19, and and then now Apple's paying the price for it. So it's a lot of like, not, you know, apple doesn't lose these very often and with a live core, they lost, apple ended up losing, but they had invalidated the patents by the time they lost. Like the patents were gone by the time they got there and they just they, they.

I think that they thought they could do the same thing again and they didn't, you know, and and so it is a you know, but it's a solid company, definitely not. This is a company that thought of this a long time ago, that's been working on it, that works on a lot of other products. This is definitely not one of those cases of of someone just going after Apple and Apple, I believe, if I, if I remember what I read there, struck first. You know, like they're the ones that that, if they had left things well alone, I think, massimo, it sounds like most happy to just build the watch, but Apple, you know, picked the fight, and so so, anyway, which Apple does? I mean, apple defends what it considers its patents, and so so, anyway. So I think that you know, and Apple just won't. Massimo, I think, has said a couple of times that they're willing to do a deal, like they're not. Oh, so they see that was.

0:31:01 - Leo Laporte
that was one question I had is are they willing to license it? Yeah, yeah.

0:31:04 - Alex Lindsay
They've said that they're willing to license it.

0:31:06 - Leo Laporte
So this is just Apple being curmudgeonly?

0:31:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean they, you know they're. The problem with Apple is, if you open up this door, how many other doors open connected to these similar things. So, Apple, you know they're going to make sure that everyone knows it's really painful and you got to be really sure you want to do this with a big company and, and so I think that that's part of their, that's part of the the calculation here. The other thing is that we're at the downside of the rush for the watch. They're probably going to flush the market so they can't sell them.

But of course, by announcing this a couple of days before Christmas, even I, like I was thinking about getting one from my daughter. Hopefully doesn't listen to the show. Now I'm like, oh, I gotta get one really quickly here. You know, like, so the yeah, but she's a kid, you can get her an SE, you don't have to get her the phone. Right, right, exactly, so the so, but anyway, the point is, it had me thinking about it. And so, in the same way, the Apple will probably get a rush of orders they weren't going to get anyway. They'll flush the entire market, the Best Buy, walmart market or whatever, so that they have three months supply or six months supply or whatever, and they're probably not going to lose that much from it. So they probably have a couple months, probably three to six months, of buffer to continue to fiddle with this until they have to capitulate, and I don't know if they will.

0:32:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Also paying them. Paying mass mall off means that basically taking a couple points off of the profitability of every single watch that they make into the horizon.

0:32:31 - Alex Lindsay
So, yeah, I'm sure they're making the calculation like this is how hard they could have. They knew that this deadline was coming. I'm sure the Biden administration told them in the first week whether they were gonna, you know, do something about it or they have, you know, and so the thing is, and but it is interesting that Tim Cook wasn't able to cast his spell that he has, that he has to cast effectively many, many times.

0:32:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they won this a while ago because one of the few things that Samsung won against Apple in their suit was a similar ruling and the Obama administration stepped in and said, okay, we're gonna veto this, largely because of, I think, apple made an effect on the economy, sort of argument that hey, if we stop making, here's how much money this puts into the economy with app stores and everything else, and that was kind of an easy thing to go. But this is an accessory. This is not like it was. I think you're right, like either they're gonna veto this very quickly or it was just never gonna happen.

0:33:29 - Jason Snell
I think this is really consistent with Apple's behavior and all sorts of different legal and regulatory challenges that they've had in the last few years, right when we all talk about it and we say, oh, they should be preemptive and they should negotiate, and all that, and you know what? They are very consistent. They don't. They don't. They wait till the last minute. They take it as far as they can in court and we see it here too, where they like and it may come back to hurt them, right, but it seems like they are very confident and they're willing to sweat out anybody else. And I'm still not convinced that when we're back for our next live episode, that this isn't all resolved. Right, like it feels like a poker game is going on, a game of chicken perhaps, but I don't know. It is also like this is super consistent with Apple, like they will push it to the limit. They don't care how it makes them look, they just don't care, because they think they can get the best result by doing that.

0:34:24 - Alex Lindsay
But it's also. It's not the best result for this one, it's the best result for all of them, for every small company or smaller company looking at doing a fight. Know that we're going to take it all. I'm sure that the message to all of them is know that we're gonna take this all the way to the end, like we're not gonna, you know, like we're not gonna somewhere. I mean, sometimes they and Apple does settle on other things. They'll settle if they've decided that there's nothing to be gained there. But they have to be careful because, you know, every little company that has a meeting with Apple, you know, like you know, is, you know could come back and say, well, you did something like and this is why companies, by the way, if you send your script into Hollywood, they'll send it right back to you, if you know it's an agent.

Yeah, this is yeah. Like they don't want you to like, and a lot of companies don't want you to tell them your ideas or give them any data because they're afraid you're gonna sue them, say well, we had a meeting.

0:35:10 - Leo Laporte
I have a. I've stand at Boilard Play and I send out to people who suggest ideas for podcasts, because I don't want to hear your idea for podcasts In case I'm already planning it Exactly. Bloomberg says. Mark Gurman says Apple's racing to tweak the software and plan to submit a workaround of the customs agency to the ITC. Maybe get the ITC to overturn their ban. Engineers he's writing, engineers at the company are racing and I'll tell you what. A week before Christmas, that's a big deal. Racing to make changes to algorithms when the device that measure a user's blood oxygen level a feature Massimo has argued infringes its patents. They're adjusting so they're not gonna take it out. They're adjusting how the technology determines oxygen saturation and presents the data to customers. They're hoping that the ITC will say oh yeah, that's no longer infringing. It's a high stakes engineering effort unlike any Apple has undertaken before.

0:36:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, because it's a tightrope, tightrope walk. They can't. It's just as bad to just introduce a patch that simply turns off those features until this has been resolved, because how many people have bought these watches for that reason? Here's a feature that's included. That's an instant class action suit. But there are ways that it's not, as though there's a thumbs up, thumbs down to patent infringement. It's like here is exactly what is. The idea of measuring blood oxygen saturation levels is not necessarily patentable in and of itself. It's even not just by shining light under the skin. This patentable it's the specific method that they've used. So if Apple said that, you know what? What if we change the wavelength to this? What if we change the sample rate to this?

0:36:52 - Leo Laporte
Masimo says the hardware needs to change. They say a software fix will be an insufficient remedy.

0:37:02 - Alex Lindsay
And this is the same fight that Apple's gonna have with Glucose, because there's a lot of they're working on it. I mean, they're trying to figure out a noninvasive way no one's figured that, I mean but they have all these companies that are measuring Glucose right now, and so the question is does anyone have those patents as well? And because Glucose will be much bigger than oxygen levels is one thing. Glucose will change how people eat, like it will literally be a night and day change. It'll do as much damage to the food business as the Atkins did, like you know. So because suddenly they'll see real time data, and so I think Apple's definitely working down that path, but they're gonna have the same problems because a lot of people are trying to crack the same code, and that usually means there's a lot of patents laying around related to that.

0:37:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, a lot of patent rolls, probably patenting periphery.

0:37:49 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's not just that. So I've worked in a couple companies that are consulted for a couple of companies, and what you're instructed to do a lot of times in these big companies is hey, if you're standing in a field, you don't see anyone around you, you should call our lawyers. Like, if you're working on something and it's really like, hey, I can't find anything on the internet about what you're working on or I can't do this, you should call them. You should call them, you know. So you should at least have an interview with somebody about what you're doing, and then we'll decide whether it's, and you'll say I don't think it's patentable. They're like, yeah, it is, that's patentable.

0:38:21 - Leo Laporte
It's so interesting to see how people's attitude towards this or toward Beeper Mini. If you're an Apple fan, it's the other guys at fault If you. And then there's a whole bunch of people on Reddit who hate Apple you know unreasonably and who you know are going get them Beeper Mini or probably get them Massimo.

0:38:41 - Alex Lindsay
It's really interesting how it breaks down. As you know, I usually defend Apple on these things. This was not necessary. Like they, I think they made a whole series of errors.

0:38:50 - Leo Laporte
But you make it, but you make a good point that they have to be really protective, because they don't, this could get into a it opens up can of worms. It opens up oh exactly.

0:38:59 - Alex Lindsay
I understand the thought process, but there's a lot of places there are three or four key places here that they could have done something different and it didn't have to be this way. But I'm sure that this is well within the calculation that they're making.

0:39:11 - Leo Laporte
All right coming up why everyone should have a clipboard manager, according to Jason Snell. But first yeah, yeah, baby. First, a word from our sponsor, Discourse, and I happen to have a soft spot in my heart for Discourse because we have been using Discourse for years to run our forums the twitcommunity forums and I love Discourse. I've actually have run forums many times in the past. I've used a variety of forum software. Discourse is definitely the king of the hill and what's interesting is they don't even call it a forum software anymore because it does so much more. For over a decade, discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities, including your community. Discourse is open source. That was important to me Trusted by more than get this 20,000 online communities, including some of the largest companies in the world, and you know, I don't know why, but for some reason, the other forum software I've used has always been a security nightmare. Never had a problem with Discourse and I let them host it. I have them host it, which means I'm always running the most up to date version. It's always secure by harnessing the power of discussion real time chat yeah, they've got chat in there now and Discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime, anywhere, and you know, even one or two people can manage a pretty large community. It's me and Paul Holder. The two of us managed the entire TWIT community by ourselves. It's easy.

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0:42:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean this is a piece that was spun off of a piece I wrote the other week about how Apple's really gotten good with the defaults on macOS, like back in the 2000s when OS X was new. A lot of stuff was not there, and so I started adding utilities and other apps in order to solve the problem and I realized that actually the defaults are pretty great and people should probably start with the defaults. But the one thing that I kept thinking about was a Clipboard Manager, and I discovered in writing about this that lots of people don't even know what it is or don't think about it, don't think they need one, and that struck me as like it's so useful. I need to spread the word about this so a lot of people out there will know it and they'll just nod along. But like a concept, clipboard's weird, right. Like. The Clipboard from the very beginning in the original macOS is like this invisible space. You can't see the Clipboard. It's just kind of like out there. There's like a Clipboard window in the Finder you can show, which is also weird. But it's one thing, right Like you can have one item. It could be a giant image, it could be like one letter of text but it lives on the Clipboard and the next time you copy something to the Clipboard it's gone.

Clipboard's super important when you're moving data around on the Mac. From the very beginning it still is. We all get copy-paste. They all make sense. But it's like you know, in like 1990, when I used Photoshop, there was this thing where, like once the little dots went away, you couldn't edit anymore. We didn't have multiple undo, we had a single level of undo. This is like 1980s technology that we still have today, which is if you copy something on top of something important on your Clipboard, it's gone and you can't get it back. You can't undo it, it's just gone. Also, it leads to lots of inefficiencies where you've got like two windows and you've got like stuff over here and you need to paste it in the specific places over here and you go click select copy, click select copy and you go back and forth on that. All of these things go away.

First off, you save yourself from the disaster of copying over an important thing on the Clipboard and then having to go get it assuming that you haven't lost it forever by having a history of items. Think of it like a browser history, a history of items in your Clipboard, because then you're like, oh, where was that thing? And this happens to me all the time when was that thing? That I needed like eight Clipboards to go? And instead of going and finding it, you just go to the list of your Clipboard history and you say there it is and you grab it and you use it. But once you start knowing that it's there, you can also start copying with impunity, because you know you've got a big stack and it changes your behavior. And one of the great ways is if you have to go from A to B, you can go to A and go copy, copy, copy, copy and then go to B and go paste, paste, paste, paste. It's way more efficient. So just for your safety of not having things blasted off the Clipboard, I think Clipboard managers are good.

I also don't think that they're super nerdy. I know it sounds super nerdy, but the truth is that Apple built this in a Mac OS. They could just put it in the edit menu. You know, like we already got copy paste. A little history that's like a browser history would not be that hard to do.

Most of the utilities that enable this let you have a little shortcut, little keyboard shortcut that brings up a floating window or a little drawer on the bottom that lets you select an item from the past and bring it forth. It's just, you know, and like. The most popular one of these, I think, is Pastebot, from Tapbots and it's like 13 bucks and like for my money. If there's a single utility that does a fundamental thing that is great for the Mac that Apple doesn't provide, it's probably Pastebot, because for $13, if you copy something and then copy something over it, you can do a keyboard shortcut or go to the menu bar and find your previous thing and paste it in. Just super useful.

So it just I wanted to spread the word because it turns out some people do not know this and it really is weird when you think about the fact that Apple has left this untouched, essentially other than the continuity Clipboard thing which lets you paste like two different devices. It's basically conceptually untouched since 1984, or really since 1980 when it was invented the Lisa. It has been untouched and I just I'm always loath to suggest that Apple changed stuff that is so fundamental to the operating system, but in this case I don't think it would add complexity because the Clipboard is already invisible, and if you never know about the history, you never need to use it. But the idea that you could, in the edit menu, nestle in there a little bit of a Clipboard history, I think it would be a huge win. But the good news is if you're a Mac user and they should do it on iOS, by the way but if you're a Mac user and you're not using a Clipboard manager, now you should.

And the other thing I wanted to mention is yeah, there's Pastebot, which is great. There are a bunch of other utilities out there too. If you've got Setapp, there's an app called Paste that you get as part of Setapp. I will also say if you've got a launcher like Alfred or LaunchBar or Raycast, they already have Clipboard managers in them. If you have Keyboard by a stroke, it already has. Like it's a feature in all sorts of other utilities too. But like I couldn't live without it, it completely changed how I used my Mac, and that there are people out there who don't know that this is an idea. It's like I gotta spread the word. So I'm gonna be a little Johnny. Clipboard seed Good for you.

0:47:41 - Leo Laporte
I have a. My Emacs has a kill ring which I use all the time, so I support that. Now there's a security issue you should be aware of, because most people use their password manager to put passwords on the Clipboard.

0:47:56 - Jason Snell
So Clipboard utilities almost all of them, if not all of them, have a limit applications field that will not store information from particular apps. And I checked in LaunchBar, which I use, and the password stuff is off by default, I think, because I've checked and I don't think I've ever set that setting and it's already off by default. So if you don't wanna store your passwords and things or any other kind of app that you were like no, not that one you can actually set it to go. But otherwise, I mean so there are security and privacy issues that generally all these apps that do this know that and they empower you to make that choice.

0:48:36 - Leo Laporte
Bitwarden also has a setting to take it off the Clipboard, but I bet it's not paste bottleware, so you wanna make sure it's pasted, right.

0:48:45 - Jason Snell
If it's stashing it away, right exactly. But you can do that Good.

0:48:51 - Leo Laporte
I hope that wasn't your pick.

0:48:53 - Jason Snell
It's not my pick. Oh man, it could have been.

0:48:55 - Leo Laporte
I don't actually know what my pick's gonna be now Could have been. I stole your pick. I'm so sorry.

0:48:59 - Jason Snell
But yeah well.

0:49:01 - Leo Laporte
I saw that and I thought you know brilliant.

0:49:02 - Jason Snell
Tell a friend Also all the nerds out there who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, jason, I know already about it. Whatever it's like, okay, holidays hanging out with somebody. Yeah, I don't know. Tell a friend, spread the word. Spread the word. Clipboard seat, clipboard manager yeah, yeah, thank you, johnny. Change your life.

0:49:22 - Leo Laporte
OK, I am in the market for a new car. I can tell you without a doubt that there's two models I will not buy. One is Tesla, because it doesn't support car play, and the other now is GM, because they're not going to support car play either.

0:49:41 - Jason Snell
So we talked about this this summer, but this is like they doubled it. They doubled down and then backed off. It's a hilarious thing where the guy at GM who's in charge of the infotainment stuff basically came out and said well, oh, we're doing this to protect you, because what we found is that AirPlay and Android Auto are unreliable and it makes the user pick up their phone because it doesn't work reliably as car play or Android Auto, and then they're holding their phone. It's just very unsafe and we think when they're just using the touchscreen in the car with our app, it'll be fine. Which?

is the most cockamamie excuse to not do whatever, because they're trying to do it so that they can upsell you on some subscription service or whatever.

And the hilarious data is worse than that they want to spy on you and they want all your metrics, and so this appears in car and driver and, hilariously, the next day, a person or motor trend. Thank you, andy. A PR person contacts the reporter and says that they were misrepresented. We just hilarious, because it's your executive folks, it's your record. They're like no, no, no, no, no, we, we, we have good relationships with Apple and Google and and and we take it back because they're throwing car, playing Android Auto on us there. Yeah, just, or the car or whatever that you throw something under, I don't know. Anyway, it's just so as it's also nonsense.

Great responses. Ford's guy immediately comes out and says once again, we love them. We love car play and Android Auto.

0:51:14 - Leo Laporte
I love them. It works so nicely in my Mocky. I love it and I would not consider a vehicle that didn't offer it frankly so dumb, yeah, motor. So it's Tim Babbitt, who's GM's head of product for infotainment, who said who said you're more likely to pick up your phone with those which is you know what? If you've ever used an auto company's infotainment system, you know it's exactly the opposite. Those are terrible systems, terrible. Gm then told motor trend this is from nine to five Mac. We wanted to reach out to clarify comments about GM's position on phone projection were misrepresented and to read oh, that's interesting, maybe they they're saying we, they got. He got misquoted. And to reinforce our valued partnerships with Apple and Google and each company's commitment to driver safety. Gm's embedded in infotainment strategy is driven by the benefits of having a system which allows for greater integration with a larger GM ecosystem and vehicles. I really like our Chevy Bolt. I would not consider buying one without car play Never.

0:52:21 - Andy Ihnatko
At least motor trend. Challenge them on this we got like, if you look at the piece itself, quote Babbus thesis is that if drivers were to do everything, that the vehicle's building system less, less likely to pick up their phones, and therefore the last tratter. However, he admits, though, gm hasn't tested this thesis in the lab or real world but believes it has potential if customers go for it.

0:52:42 - Alex Lindsay
The follow up question the two challenges is a number. One is there. You know all these manufacturers are trying to figure out how do we get you into more monthly payments to us. That's not to not to your lease, but to an actual like. This is a service that we can add and we can charge you $20 a year and we're making money. Yeah, w was going to charge for car play.

They dropped that after people screamed yeah, and so I think that they're looking for more ways to add those services. I think the other problem that they have is that Apple, like car play, is getting. I think they I think a lot of them saw how advanced it was getting and if people get used to the more advanced features of car play, the chances of them ever getting back like they're kind of like there's some point where they just have to give up which they should have done a while ago because they're interfaces. They're not very good, but the distance between their built-in interface and car play is just slowly stretching. And Android Android is doing a good job as well. The point is is that they don't know how to. Car companies don't know how to interfaces like, like, like that people are interacting with are good at the what you're using when they spend billions on what you see when you're driving, but the actual how a human interacts with a screen is not their area of strength.

0:53:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also the data is so valuable from those from all the systems, and so the yeah. And so if car so basically car play and Android auto are saying that no, apple wants the data and they'll protect you, they'll protect you from getting access to it, and that's like no, we want to know, like when you are accelerating, what song we're listening to and how can I help sell you a special kind of Candidium based on your figure Androids doing the same thing, right?

0:54:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, no, of course. But is Apple or not? They say not right? They've actually addressed this. Yeah, it's more.

0:54:28 - Andy Ihnatko
it's more like again, Apple is more liable to be very, very private about user data, and so that's not. So the Apple, gm and Ford and everybody they would love to have as much access to data as possible. They're already collecting information on driver habits position, everything you can possibly get, your seat position, everything is going to be transmitted back, and the idea of being locked out of also consumer behavior, like what media you're listening to at what time, is too valuable for for a forward thinking profit making company like GM to want to simply say maybe there is a way that we could get access to the entire fire hose, not just 91% of it.

0:55:06 - Leo Laporte
You probably all know about the story we didn't cover it at the time but that, in fact, cars systems are even checking out when you're having sex. These are the car brands that are this is from Mozilla, mozilla report that are collecting data on your sex life. Of course, the Tesla is the worst, according to Mozilla, but Hyundai 84% of the car brands actually share, according to Mozilla, the personal data with third parties, including data brokers.

0:55:47 - Alex Lindsay
Well, everybody's sharing them. There's so much money in data brokering and it's and it's and it's how you know, I still find it amazing. I, you know, I had taken Instagram my phone for years and I put it back on because they just, you know, they started supporting RTMP in just, so I'm gonna start testing live streaming to Instagram. So I haven't had, and you know, because they they had their their head in a dark place for a couple you know decade, and and the, the, so they, they just started doing that last week. So I was like, oh, I'm gonna, I need to test this. So I put my Instagram back on my phone and immediately got ads based on things that I had done over the last two days. It's definitely not Instagram search, they're not. It's not that Instagram was watching me, it's that Facebook is buying all this extra data and immediately knew exactly what to what to serve me up as ads. And I was kind of I found that that to be amazing.

0:56:43 - Leo Laporte
According to Mozilla research, popular global brands, including BMW, ford, toyota, tesla, kia and Subaru, can collect deeply personal data such as sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health and genetic information and, of course, where you drive data gathered by sensors, microphones, cameras and phones, devices that are connected to their cars, as well as by car apps, company websites, dealerships and vehicle telematics. And then they sell it on.

0:57:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there's, there's. There's one car company that a company that owns car companies that has actually said that we were trying to. We're trying to get as much as $20 billion a year from customer data. That's like one of our that's the shareholders.

0:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Nissan's privacy policy actually says they, they, they collect sexual activity. Doesn't say how I'm, I'm, I'm, I don't know. Accelerometers In the seats.

0:57:42 - Alex Lindsay
No, just in the car. The car you know, but, but. But accelerometers in the car will tell you. You'd be surprised, like I can. I was talking to someone who does sensors and they were talking about the fact that if you're walking around, we don't, we can actually guess your heartbeat just by your walking. You know how you're walking, but also we can tell who you are. So from your accelerometer we can, we can look at your face and confirm it. But just by how you hold your phone and how you walk around, we know that you have the phone. You have the same. You're the owner of that phone or not. You know, like you know, and and all the the aggregation of all that data. But the accelerometers are incredibly powerful.

0:58:21 - Leo Laporte
Um, when, when they're, when they're, uh, looked at over a very long period of time you guess sometimes you look at a car and you you just can kind of tell something's going on inside there. Yeah, something, I don't know Something's happened?

0:58:37 - Alex Lindsay
Um, let's stick with my 2014 Dodge caravan. I think there's a lot of sensors, is this?

0:58:43 - Leo Laporte
caravan be rocking. Uh, apple podcasts are launching, or have launched, in Tesla vehicles. That's good for us, yeah, yeah.

0:58:51 - Jason Snell
Isn't that funny that that. So the you know. Car playing, no, but Apple music and now Apple podcasts.

In the last few months have come to Tesla. They have a new web based platform that they're moving a lot of their media apps to their Spotify implementation, which I think used to be more an app and is now also in that same kind of using a web based player that they have built in and then so it. Then they just modify it for the various different media companies. It seems to be a an easier way for them to build it because they have their own platform and although there's some rumors that they want to do an app store I mean, who knows, but like who would do anyway. So if you're an Apple ecosystem person, you don't get car playing or Tesla, but you will get now Apple podcasts and Apple music. Apple music was a few months ago and so I assume I mean the advantage here is this ecosystem play, like if you listen to your podcasts on Apple podcast, uh, it is frustrating to get into a Tesla because you have to control it on your phone and, as GM has told us, that's very dangerous.

So now, now it will, it will sync and play that stuff directly in the Tesla using another, uh, another app. So I mean, good, I guess right, and with Spotify support, that means the two biggest podcast platforms are now on Tesla. But it does just make you ask the question why not just do car play and call it a day? And they just they're too proud of their own homegrown thing, which, like I get it. But but, as with GM, it's sort of like, and I don't use Apple podcasts, I use overcasts. So, like, no car maker is going to support overcast. You know what supports overcast is is iOS, which is running on my phone in my pocket, and so car play supports it, and every and Libby and Audible and every other thing that is not supported by these bespoke car operating systems. But still, if you're an Apple podcast user, it's great news because your podcasts are now just going to be on your screen and your Tesla. It is a win in that sense.

1:00:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they want they don't want you to become to be an Apple car play customer. They want you to always feel as though you're being a Tesla customer all the way. And this is kind of interesting with a piece of news that got that came across today that apparently the Disney plus app is being deleted from Tesla's entertainment centers systems Apparently. Apparently, if you haven't used it in a while, it's being automatically deleted. A lot of people, like in the Hollywood press, are wondering is this part of like Elon Musk's vendetta against Disney for pulling advertising? Yes, but it turns out it's actually not even true.

1:01:25 - Jason Snell
They're hiding it but not deleting it. And if you go into the browser and type in Disney pluscom, it just goes full screen and the app gets re-added to Tesla theater, according to not a Tesla app, which is a site that covers the Tesla software. So this is literally. It is her formative anti-Disney ness by Tesla and Elon. But the truth is that if you, if you've used Disney plus, it doesn't disappear and if you go to the browser and type Disney pluscom, it just brings it back because it's still there.

1:01:58 - Leo Laporte
It's actually still there Another. I don't want to buy a car company car from a company run by a peevish man boy. That's not right. That's a no way to run a car company, come on.

1:02:10 - Jason Snell
The good news is he's so. He's leveraged so much of his Tesla Tesla ownership for all of his other loans that you do have to wonder in the long run if he's going to be able to keep control of that company. But you may run into the ground.

1:02:21 - Alex Lindsay
And the hard part is is that is that you know Tesla was way out in front, but I don't know, Like now, when we think about electric cars, I mean, as we go through the next decade, you know, by 2035, almost all the cars will be electric at that point and and so there won't be. You know, the question is is really, can Tesla stay different for that long? And I'm not not certain they're winning right now by being the least expensive.

1:02:44 - Leo Laporte
I mean I you know, alex is in Marin, I'm up here in Sonoma County there's nothing but Tesla's. It feels like everybody's driving Tesla.

1:02:51 - Jason Snell
Well, you know, the Model Y is the best selling car in America. Certainly, it has been in California for a while now. It is, though, like so. Byd, the Chinese automaker has, is expected, is caught up and is expected to become the biggest seller of electric vehicles in the world.

1:03:06 - Leo Laporte
But in.

1:03:06 - Jason Snell
China it is. It is China and Europe and other parts of the world, but not in America. But like this is right, I agree with Alex that the channels with Tesla is it is great that they have been out on the forefront and they make good cars. But the problem is part of their differentiation has been that they have been out on the forefront and when they're not out on the forefront anymore. And I wonder, elon is distracted and when we see him using his powers inside Tesla, it's for stuff like the Cybertruck, which I think is going to be kind of a flop, even though technically it's very impressive. It looks dumb and I don't think people want to buy it. How, what happens? How do you redefine who you are as Tesla when every other car maker is trying to take your lunch, that's true.

1:03:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's when panel gaps start to matter. That's when your, your relationships with labor start to matter. This is when the fact that the major car makers have been making cars out of much larger scale than Tesla for generations that starts to matter. Yeah.

1:04:06 - Alex Lindsay
I do think, though I do think that when we look back, I mean Elon Musk will have all those things that worked and didn't work about Elon Musk, but I think that they, when it comes to who and who impacted the environment more than anybody else, as far in a positive way, it may come back to like him goading. We've had to know how we, how we, think about batteries, but from a from a using fossil fuels perspective. When you look at the roof, the batteries, the Tesla's my neighbor has a Tesla roof, a Tesla batteries. We did too, yeah, and and there's, you know they're not, they're kind of off the grid. I mean they're not, you know, and and you know it's, it is, it's not just Tesla, it's that I don't know if we probably still have all gas cars if Tesla hadn't come out.

1:04:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean like, like you know the we have to do this too. I mean maybe not by now, but they certainly maybe started the industry.

1:04:56 - Jason Snell
Well, I see it's like success, the fact that the Model Y has done so well, like if they hadn't already gotten the message there is that nothing says it more than, oh geez, who is selling lots of cars, right, yeah, why isn't that us? Right, it's a big deal.

1:05:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, well, and the fact that I mean they, there was the insight and everything else. I mean there have been other cars that have been all electric for a long time and they got buried, like, literally, the car companies just buried those cars. So it wasn't like Tesla was first, they were just the ones that proved that they could do it. And so I think, you know, for you know, I think that's going to be an interesting part of that, that process, but of course, I think he is burning everything up and yeah, yeah.

Yeah so bad, Just like beeper we can give you our weekly beeper update.

1:05:43 - Leo Laporte
The weekly beep. It's the weekly beep, the weekly beep.

1:05:47 - Alex Lindsay
We need, we need, we need, we need as a stinger Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. I have this thing go like oh yeah, coming in the weekly.

1:05:53 - Leo Laporte
I have it on my pixelate and it works a little bit. Working a little bit is not what you're looking for in a messaging app. Half the messages aren't coming in, half aren't going out, but some are going out, some are coming in. That's not really a good look. They apparently they think they're gonna be able to get it fixed. I think this just prompts Apple to move a little bit quicker, getting RCS working, and then Beeper will go away. Fade away into the background, yeah.

1:06:26 - Andy Ihnatko
I agree, it's so. The thing is, the feature of a messaging app is always consistency, and as soon as it starts dropping any messages for any reason, that's when you start, especially if it's a brand new app you've just started using. That's when you basically put that in the back of the app drawer and never use it again.

1:06:42 - Leo Laporte
They're making it free, but big deal, right? Even, you know, even free, it's not worth the price. So, all right, let's take a little break Now that we've done our Beeper segment of the week.

1:06:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Keep our liquor license. Yes, we have to do that. It's a regulatory thing.

1:07:00 - Leo Laporte
It's a regulatory thing although I have a feeling there won't be another Beeper update for a while, if ever, maybe not, maybe not Our show today brought to you by our friends at IT Pro TV, those great folks at ACI Learning. Yes, aci Learning is now IT Pro TV, ITProTV is now ACI Learning. They got together and in fact that's made them a powerhouse in training of all kinds, for audit, for cybersecurity, for IT. I know you know the name IT Pro TV from our network and all year long ACI Learning has been our studio sponsor. So I'm thinking you probably know the name ACI Learning now and you probably know that IT Pro TV has brought in their incredible studios and skillset to ACI Learning.

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Apple has decided to up the ante when it comes to metadata, in particular, push notification data. This started when Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon, wrote a letter to Apple and Google. Actually, I guess he wrote a letter. Who did he write the letter to? Anyway, he revealed that federal officials were requesting data from Apple and Google about notifications, push notifications and that data can be very useful. The metadata can be very useful. Wyden said the practice gave Apple and Google unique insight into traffic flowing from apps on their phones to users, putting them quote in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance about users are using particular apps. So Apple has decided to update its guidelines so that you will have to go to a judge to get that data. They never issued an official statement. Google said in a statement it had always required judicial approval to hand over that kind of information. Wyden said in a statement Apple's doing the right thing by matching Google and requiring a court order to hand over push notification related data. Why is push data so valuable? So?

1:11:51 - Jason Snell
important, oh man, it is the heartbeat of your phone's connection and the apps on your phone's connection to the world. At least it can be. And if you've ever been on an airplane, it does free texting using iMessage. If you turn that on, you'll discover you get all your push notifications. It's not just iMessage, they're all using Apple's push notification service. So all the messages, including ones that you never see. So, like Flighty, the flight tracking app, has a mode where it updates your status. If you're logged into iMessage on your airplane's Wi-Fi and not paying for full internet, just iMessage. Flighty keeps updating its status and the way it does that is there are silent, invisible push notifications coming from Apple's servers being accepted by Flighty and it's using it to update its status.

So there's a lot of data going back and forth. It's not encrypted I don't think right so and there's meta. It's metadata about your phone. So if there's a push notification with the contents of a message, there's the contents of the message. You can see that you're getting them at certain times, and so it is. It's interesting because this is what happens when some levels of security are locked down is that they move to other places that are less secure.

And push notifications. I imagine what we're gonna see is that push notification data is going to get more obscured and oblique as a result of this, but if you're sending pushes, you're still. That data is still there. Apple knows that you got push notifications or you sent push notifications at a particular time, so there's a level of disclosure that it's like a log. It's like a little bit of a log and a trace of your behavior, and if they don't get your actual data, it gives them a clue, like cell phone records basically, of what your behavior might be. So yeah, there's a lot going on and you may not. It's not just the pushes you see.

1:13:42 - Leo Laporte
You're not aware of it. It's not just your data, because apps yeah.

1:13:45 - Jason Snell
Like podcast apps do this, where they are sending updates saying hey, this episode got updated, and you may not get a push notification that says hey, it got updated. It may just know to go download it in the background so that it's there when you launch it later. That's, there's a whole infrastructure behind the scenes that is used. That is using the push notification method as the way they do it. It's a back channel communication system.

1:14:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and there's so much data going over it. It really is a privacy problem. I mean you can use just the flight information alone. If I'm in a plane, they know exactly where I am and when I'm landing, and all that. Wow, yeah, wow. Well, I'm a little surprised Apple hasn't been asking for a subpoena to give that and Jason does it if you turn off.

1:14:31 - Alex Lindsay
do you know, if you turn off notifications, does it still get to you?

1:14:37 - Jason Snell
I think most notifications are in notification center, right? So I think what you would have to do is turn off background app, refresh or put it in low power mode or something like that. Then I think that an app. But if you register if you register for notifications then there's a remote server that's trying to send you notifications, right? Even your email is pushing. Those are gonna go through.

1:15:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, think about it. There's two ways to get data. There's pull and push. Pull is you go out on the internet, you download a site because you typed it in and it's of some use. But really push is really valuable, Like your email can say hey, we got new mail. Your podcast Can say hey, we got new podcasts, and so a lot of apps use push. Yeah, Wow.

1:15:25 - Jason Snell
Right, and then it saves power and it saves data and all those things, that things are happening on the server and then it sends you a little bit of a ping and for me, I mean the reason I use the airplane example is that's that example where you can see someone. You're on Southwest Airlines, you sign up for free texting, you don't get the full internet and some surprising things come through because all they are doing is gating that one Apple push notification service, because that's how all iMessages come in and a surprising amount of other information can come in, and that is the stuff that they're looking at. I wonder if Apple didn't have this term because they had been. It's the thing that Ron Whiten kind of like unlocked for them, which is they had been told they needed to provide this information and couldn't talk about it, and once that was the case, they may have been felt like that's exactly right legally that they were trapped.

1:16:14 - Leo Laporte
They couldn't say anything Until they got unlocked by Ron Whiten. Then Whiten, by making it public, eliminated their need to stay quiet, and that's yeah, wow, right. So I just realized that the misral in your Dwarvish on your sweater is starting to shine. Is there a dork nearby?

1:16:30 - Jason Snell
I mean it's, it's. I'm full. This is my Lord of the Rings ugly sweater, because I'm. It is the season right.

1:16:36 - Leo Laporte
So what is it? Does it have the fellowship of the ring on there? What is? What is that group on your? Oh yeah, there they go. There's Boromir with his horse and oh wow, Interesting oh yeah, I'm full and that's celebrating.

1:16:50 - Jason Snell
Not only is that the green lovely, but of course, if you're, if you're like me, you celebrate Hobbit Hanukkah, which is six nights of watching the extended editions. God Half each.

1:16:59 - Speaker 4
When you're all six nights. And it's a miracle Because at the end they, it's, it's.

1:17:03 - Jason Snell
I love that movie, I love those movies. Do you know who ever runs that? Not the Hobbit, not the Hobbit. Lord of the Rings, extended editions Okay. You watch half of it every night for six nights. This is a family tradition. It's great.

1:17:15 - Leo Laporte
I can't wait to do it again.

1:17:15 - Jason Snell
Now that I've been, now that I've been to New Zealand and seen the, the like sets and stuff, I would love to do that again, so we'll do that.

1:17:22 - Leo Laporte
How much more is in the extended edition? Is it much longer? Oh, it's a lot more.

1:17:25 - Jason Snell
It's a lot more. They're very, very long, but it's good, it's great stuff.

1:17:28 - Speaker 4
That's the way to do it, and you have a DVD and you have a mini series.

1:17:31 - Alex Lindsay
It's just like a six part mini series and the extras are amazing. In the box in the for the extended versions, if you bought the extras, they have like tons of, tons of movies about bigotures and and the, the, the Balrog and the you know like a lot of things. It's really good.

1:17:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, my God. So the fellowship of the ring ring theatrical runtime was two hours 58 minutes long enough. The extended runtime is three and a half hours and worth every minute.

1:17:58 - Jason Snell
That's the stuff.

1:18:00 - Leo Laporte
That's the good stuff, the two towers is 44 minutes longer the return of the King is almost an hour longer.

1:18:06 - Jason Snell
If you're going to watch these movies, can I watch these movies? Can I give them an iTunes? Can I like a readers digest condensed version of Lord of the Rings? No, get the whole.

1:18:14 - Alex Lindsay
get the DVD set, get the UHD Return of the King and like half of it is saying goodbye, like there's, like yeah, it's a long good life of the end is now like an hour long, so yeah, so you're saying I should, I should buy the.

1:18:27 - Leo Laporte
I don't have a DVD player.

1:18:30 - Jason Snell
Well, you can get the. Yeah, you can get those on, you know, whatever. It's not even iTunes anymore, right, it's like in the TV app or on Amazon or whatever. You can get the digital versions and the extended, is that okay?

1:18:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think they extended the version. I give you permission. I think it has a lot of the extra. I mean, the one thing I will say is the extras on at least. I mean that's why I buy, to buy a UHD player. They're really cheap. Now, the blue rays are they the blue right? Yeah, they're like $90 or something.

1:18:58 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I picked up the UHD discs because I wanted to get that full 4k action. Why not? Why not? I love those movies, they're great. Anyway, this was. I needed an ugly sweater and I went Lord of the Rings.

1:19:11 - Leo Laporte
I think that's the best ugly sweater. Great, do you have a preference? For which they aren't that cheap 158 bucks for the Sony Ultra HD Home of Theors streaming that's a lot. Don't do that, don't buy that one. But they're all kind of in that price range.

1:19:29 - Jason Snell
Well, if you don't have the discs, you don't need to bother. If you don't have a UHD Blu-ray player, you should just buy the digital on iTunes or whatever Apple TV app.

1:19:41 - Leo Laporte
Hmm, hmm, I don't, I don't want them to take it away from me. Yeah, the New York Times fired its sports department and bought the athletic. And now that's the sports department. And now the New York Times is putting the athletic on Apple News Plus. It's a Christmas miracle. You're a sport buff. Yeah, does it.

1:20:07 - Jason Snell
Athletics good, I like it. This is interesting to see Apple rolling some things into the News Plus bundle, adding some value there, and the athletics interesting too, because it's got a lot of local coverage. The original premise was that they had local sports writers, so it's not in every market but, like the Bay Area, has very good Giants 49ers coverage.

1:20:27 - Leo Laporte
I need my Niners coverage.

1:20:27 - Jason Snell
It's really they do a good. They got multiple writers on all those topics and then they've got some national writers who are very good as well, and they're going to add Wirecutter as well. And for people who don't know, like there's also a bunch of stuff like Wirecutter makes you think of Consumer Reports, which is sort of the old school version of what Wirecutter's trying to be. I think Consumer Reports is in there too, because they've got all those magazines that they have their previous deals with. But like adding more news content that is behind a paywall and putting it in for, for you know, as part of your News Plus subscription. Apple needs to do more of that to make News Plus that much more relevant.

I mostly go there for the Wall Street Journal articles. At this point right, because that's something that's in there is a limited set of Wall Street Journal articles, but if they can come up with a nice, curated, a little bit better, nice curated news bundle of premium stuff, then it starts to be a much more interesting service. So Athletic is a great example where there are a lot of people who are like, if you're a fan of your local sports teams and you've thought about the Athletic and you're like I don't. I just don't want to pay for articles about my local baseball team. You know, if you're in News Plus, if you've got the Apple One bundle or whatever, you'll just get that content. That's a cool idea.

1:21:41 - Alex Lindsay
I do have it. I do have it. I get all the Steeler news. I need an Apple news. There's a Steeler section and I get tons and tons of Right Now, all that athletic content will be poured into the Steeler section and it's good.

1:21:54 - Jason Snell
I mean, I don't know if the Steeler's content on the Athletic is good or not, but let's assume that it is and you'll get that now. And that's actually that's one of the clever things about the way they're doing. This is, if you're a fan of a team and you've got them in Apple news as one of your interest areas, all the athletic content about that team will just go in there and it immediately increases the quality of the favorite team that you're following on Apple News Plus.

1:22:18 - Alex Lindsay
I think the thing that has been hard to crack and I think I've mentioned it before is that when all those magazines ended up in Apple news, I really was like I'm not going to get the paper ones anymore, but I'm finding I'm not converting to the digital ones and I don't think it's completely connected.

But I will say that I hate reading Sarah Fonts. I know that they're built so that you can read them, but I'm so used to San Sarah that when I see Sarah Fonts, I actually find them more difficult to read and annoying and so I will not, I will not read. Like as soon as I open something up, like from the New Yorker, I think I'm like, oh, I start reading about like two paragraphs in. I'm like, oh, I can't read. This is very, this is very tiring. I find I actually find Sarah Fonts to be tiring to read on my phone, and so that's become a huge issue because all these magazines want to use their old Sarah Fonts and I find myself not. I literally, when you get used to reading San Sarah, I know it. I thought it was crazy, but I suddenly realized that I'm really avoiding Sarah Fonts. Like I just I see them and I won't read them.

1:23:20 - Leo Laporte
I can read little things.

1:23:23 - Alex Lindsay
Of all the things. But I realized I was like what bothers me so much about this magazine? And I and I saw an article by popular mechanics or no, somebody. I saw one, and I saw it on one webpage with Sarah and one without, and it was like somebody had read and I realized I was reading the article, fine. And then I went to read it in the in its native format, and it was Sarah, and I suddenly stopped about three, three, three paragraphs in and didn't want to read it anymore and I was like, and then the only thing different was not the content, it was the actual spot Old fashioned, it doesn't. It's not even old fashioned though it's like, literally just doesn't. Like I don't like. I think it's white on black that I don't like reading it on. Like you know, it's in that thing. So I will admit, I have dyslexia. I have a version of dyslexia that has a problem with blank space, which was diagnosed when I was in college. So what do you?

1:24:15 - Leo Laporte
mean a problem, Like you look at it and it makes you angry.

1:24:18 - Alex Lindsay
So no, no, no. I was diagnosed with an issue of reading when I was about 19, that my brain doesn't make the foreground or the background, doesn't make the background a background. It treats both of them equally. Oh, that's bad, yeah. And so it makes me actually pretty good. It made it really good when I was doing, when I do print layout for magazines and ads, because you see the white space. The white space means as much to me as the black, as all the images and everything. In fact, the white space actually means more to me than so. It turned out to be useful for what I do, but it made it. It's why I listened to a lot of audio books. They gave me ways to fix it, so I could read, and I was like, how about I just go to audio books? Never went back, yeah.

1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm never reading the New York Times again. You've spoiled it for me.

1:25:13 - Alex Lindsay
Sorry, that was what we call a red pill conversation. Oh, I've been red-pilled in my trouble you can't unsee it.

1:25:19 - Leo Laporte
Everything's got. I mean, our site is Serif, isn't it?

1:25:23 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe not, no, I guess it's not, it's all San Serif. I mean, the whole internet is San Serif, except for these old magazines, the old stuff, like. I mean there's like old designers will put in some Serif stuff.

1:25:33 - Leo Laporte
They'll do Serif on the headlines, but it's not the headlines you're caring about, it's the article.

1:25:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the headlines don't bother me at all, Like I don't care. I mean, that's fine as a script, but almost everything you see on the internet is San Serif.

1:25:46 - Leo Laporte
Margaret Vestager has another trophy for her wall. The Adobe Figma deal is up is over, remember? Adobe, really kind of panicking, said Figma's gonna eat our lunch. Offer them $20 billion probably more than they're worth to acquire them. But the regulatory climate in the EU and the UK pretty much put the kibosh on it. And Adobe says, yeah, never mind, we're gonna give you a billion dollar break up fee and move going our way.

1:26:21 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's gonna be worse than that, though, for Figma. I mean, the thing is is that Adobe went. The cheapest route was to was to buy Figma, and that was the easiest one to just solve it, but Adobe needs that product. So the thing is, is that you know Figma, you think that it's Figma, you know, and the reason I'm sure Figma wants to sell was because Adobe coming knocking on your door, going, hey, we'd like to buy your product, means if you, we don't buy your product, there's gonna be this. And the problem is is that you know, you know Figma is. I mean, it's a standard, you know, so a lot of people are developing on it.

The problem is, is the integration the EU? I don't know exactly who the regulatory folks thought they were protecting, but the users of Figma would have benefited dramatically from the integration with all the Adobe products you know like so, and Adobe's tools will benefit as they build their own products to go down this path. But I don't think that this wasn't going to be something that hurt the user as much as benefited them. I mean, you may not agree on how much they, you know, now there's these different subscription costs and everything else, but, but having being tied into the rest of the Adobe ecosystem would have been very advantageous. For I know, and I know a lot of designers that had Figma like, oh, adobe's going to ruin it, but they haven't really ruined a lot of things that they bought. You know they're not. You know they.

They leave a lot of these companies like, if you look at frameio, they didn't ruin frame, they didn't ruin substance. They made substance way better than it was. It was already an amazing app. But they you know the integration with all the tools and then all the janitor of AI stuff that's happening. You know, it would be great to be able to sit there and do a lot of those things or build interfaces and be able to ask for things and everything else in Figma, and Figma will have a hard time competing with Adobe if Adobe really starts leaning into their market. And so it was. I don't. I think that was kind of another, another version of a bunch of regulatory folks that don't really know what they're looking at. You know they're, these are. You know, you know, I think that they're, they're making decisions. Of course, it's easy for the Europeans to make decisions because none of these, none of these companies are theirs.

1:28:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it's got to be frustrating for the Figma founders who are looking at a paycheck that was 50 times its annual revenue, double its last private funding round. The proposed remedies from the CMA in November either demanding the vestiture of overlapping operations. So you know, either get rid of Figma design or get rid of Illustrator and Photoshop. Though that's Adobe said well, what that's makes no. So they just said you know, look, we can't work with these guys and that's that. Now I'm surprised they didn't contest it in some other way, but I guess they just didn't want to drag on.

1:29:07 - Jason Snell
I just, I mean, I don't know. You've got a big company that dominates its market and you've got a competitor who's an upstart, who's coming in and kind of eating the lunch of the big, of the big company and taking its customers and doing new things with them. It kind of feels like it's deeply anti competitive to let them just use their money to buy them out right, like they should probably. So like I hear what Alex is saying, but I don't know, it just seems wrong that any big company with deep pockets can find a competitor that's built something, that finds a weakness in their corporate structure and just decides to take them out or take them in, in this case I don't know.

1:29:56 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, maybe the question is, who are they hurting, like I just so. Is it the founders? Because the founders are about to map it, just gave up on a huge customer.

1:30:05 - Jason Snell
It would be for the customers, because, because it's going to get sucked, there's not going to be competition and instead Adobe is just going to suck Figma in and make different decisions, because Adobe is Adobe and they've got existing products, whereas Figma didn't care if they overlapped some of Adobe's products because they were trying to get new customers.

1:30:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but the question is I mean, ken, if Adobe focuses the Adobe eye on what Figma is doing, like really focus on it does Figma start to lose? You know, ken, figma compete with that because there's all this integration of all these other apps that that Adobe is going to bring to bear. I'm just not sure that down the road, that Figma benefits from it. I don't think. I think that the users would have benefited from the integration with all the Adobe products, like that's the thing. That that is, you know, and I think that you know Figma is, you know it's doing.

Well, I think that I think Adobe honestly wanted to buy them before somebody else does anything, because for a lot of these companies, that's their exit strategy is getting bought. They're not, they don't want to go public. I mean nobody, I mean most people don't want to go public anymore because it's too complicated and so so getting bought is was probably the model that that the EU just took away. And again, I think that we really need to rethink whether company country should be able to regulate companies that don't exist in their country.

Like you know, like is it, the whole Europe, europe, the EU can make all these things because none of these companies are European companies.

1:31:24 - Jason Snell
So what you're saying is that the problem here is that Figma built a whole audience of people who did want to do things differently from Adobe, but since Figma wanted to just sell them back to Adobe, we should let them do that. I just I don't know. Like, legal things aside, it just seems striking. I mean, it's fundamentally anti competitive. It is a Adobe competitor with a competitive product that scared Adobe and so Adobe wanted to buy them and take them off the market. And I do not have any sympathy for the founders and investors in Figma. That is not where my sympathy lies. I have very little sympathy for anybody whose entire strategy is we'll build up a thing and then sell it off to the highest bidder instead of trying to build a company. And you know, I don't think it's an argument that, like Adobe bought them because they were afraid that somebody else would buy them. Like, would that be a competitor? Would they build a competitive product that would force Adobe to work harder and have competition in the market? I'm for that.

1:32:17 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's a better idea, but I guess, as a user, though, the user is going to not benefit from the integration. That is, that is great. Adobe will do some integration, but they're not going to give up a lot of their, a lot of what they would have done when they. There's a lot of technology that Adobe has, and that's what they're looking at with Figma that they're going, that they would have infused into the, into the thing, and it would have made it a much better app. You know, for probably about the same price. You know, and, and so you know, I guess. I mean, I just I think sometimes we can look at anti competitiveness from a from a theoretical perspective, but I feel like we really need to decide, like, who is getting hurt by?

1:32:52 - Jason Snell
your statement that it's a much better app I think assumes a lot right, Because I think there's a lot of stuff that wasn't invented at Adobe that they're going to, that they would have pulled out of Figma. No no no, we'll do it our way instead, and the customers who preferred Figma will not benefit from having done the Adobe way. But you know we'll never. We'll never know now.

1:33:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I do think it's more of a case of it's.

I appreciate the argument that you ask who doesn't hurt, but sometimes, when you talk about entire markets, you're talking about raising the temperature of the environment by one quarter of one degree.

That by degrees, the more that companies that are huge and have a lot of power get to consolidate power, the closer they get to a place where they don't have to take any answers or any guff from anybody.

And it's not. It's and we're seeing this in the in the communication space, like a long time ago, where deregulation didn't create an open, more free market of speech. It basically meant that now, at the, at the point where now companies could own radio stations, tv stations, newspapers and multiple markets, now you have single corporations that own most of the media in the entire country and can therefore steer communications to exactly where they want to go. And each one of those individual sales was probably good for the shareholders of whatever individual newspaper or media group sold out to the larger conglomerate. But again, quarter of a degree at a time, quarter of a degree at a time. And now these companies are in such a strong position where they really can't be told anything. And it does take the regulatory smackdown to get them to not just do whatever is in strictly their own immediate best interests.

1:34:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, speaking of regulatory smackdowns, Google has now agreed this. Remember they lost in court, but there was also an action going on against them in the United States by a group of states attorneys general. Google has settled. They've agreed to pay $700 million in the Play Store settlement and they're going to make some changes to their app store. Developers will be able to use an alternative billing system in Google Play's billing option. Alphabet will simplify the process of downloading apps from the website side loading and they won't put that ugly, scary message on as much anymore. So this isn't what Epic exactly wanted. They wanted, of course. I think they want to have their own store. Alphabet is challenging that Epic verdict, but they have had to settle with the 36 states and the DC and District of Columbia. So that's a big deal and I mentioned it I know it's an Apple show because Apple is kind of under the same scrutiny. It looks like they're going to have to do something in the EU as early as this summer.

1:35:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And it also ties in with another announcement where Apple decided that, hey, developers, we're going to offer you a new way in the app store that you can start to bundle your subscriptions together or, excuse me, or at least, if you have multiple subscription based apps, if you can allow people to, hey, if you already subscribed to one of our apps, we'll give you a discount on our on a contingent pricing. Contingent pricing and making it clear that, hey, we'll handle all the back end. You really don't have to do much of anything to take advantage of this. You can advertise this on your own sites, etc. Etc.

And this is not something that I think Apple would have done on its own if not for the fact that there is this thing coming where they don't know whether they're going to have to have to deal. They're going to have to deal with the possibility of competing app stores. Now, I don't think that having having an equivalent app store experience where you go to either go to the official app store Apple app store for all my apps or there's another one, just like there's a target versus Walmart, where you can get the exact same apps in a different configuration I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. But now Apple's realizing that for some businesses, it's going to definitely make sense for them to say, hey, just just download the Adobe app or just download the Fortnite, the Epic Games app and handle all of our, all the purchases through their their, from their own. And now they're in a position where they have to say we have to make sure that we're making our app store experience as attractive as profitable. We have to be responsive to developers.

Things that they've been asking for for a long, long time, like having more open lines, developers having more open lines of communications with their with their customers, the ability to again turn Apple's app store customers into their software customers, not just Apple iPhone customers All this sort of stuff is now on the table because Apple now feels that they're going to have to start competing for business instead of simply saying there's the only place you can sell If you're an Apple, if you're an iPhone developer, this is the only place you can sell this. You sell your stuff. We run the store, so we make the rules. If you don't like it, go see how much fun you have writing at writing apps for the Black Berry, because there's no alternative.

1:37:47 - Leo Laporte
If you have wondered, as I have, what happens to family sharing when many, many subscription apps cannot be shared. Apparently, apple was sued over this in 2019, saying they misrepresented the ability to use family sharing to share subscriptions, and they have now agreed to settle the class action lawsuit, paying out $25 million, almost all of which will undoubtedly go to the attorneys, and denying all allegations of wrongdoing. But I have to say it is. You know, you think, oh, I can share all my apps and really there's a very limited number of apps you can share that way. Anybody who, any US resident who was in a family sharing group with at least one other person between June 2015 and January 2019 and purchased a subscription to an app from the App Store, may be eligible for a payment You'll be getting if you're in the class you'll be getting an email this week as much as $30. The payment will not exceed $50 for each class member and, yes, 10 million of the settlement will go to the attorneys. Well, it's not quite half.

1:38:59 - Alex Lindsay
Those are always the biggest winners. The attorneys on class action suits are always the big winners. Everybody else gets $10 or $5 or 50 cents. Or here's a candy kid Bag of pop chips.

1:39:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, these are all, and Peter Russell Clark, who was one of the last senior industrial designers from the Johnny Iveyra, has stepped down to spend more time with his money After 20 years at the company. He was a hardware designer and he worked on the headquarters and retail stores.

1:39:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Now it's going to be designing space hotels. Oh yeah, vast.

1:39:31 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting. It's a space hotel company, wow.

1:39:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they're. If you go to their website, they're trying they're basically designing a commercial space stations, basically for tourism, with artificial gravity of some sort, through, you know, through spinning the thing around. And so they hired him to start up an industrial design division within that company, because that's, you got people who are going to be, who are going to be vomiting, they've got people who are going to deal with like good news.

1:40:02 - Leo Laporte
I can reserve my stay already. Well, this looks a lot like the SpaceX rocket.

1:40:12 - Andy Ihnatko
They're using. They're using SpaceX Falcon for transport over there. Sorry, dragons Up to Haven.

1:40:17 - Leo Laporte
One for 30 days above Amore, the world's first private space station, scheduled to launch no earlier than August 2025. Huh, so they're going to give you a ride in the SpaceX dragon up to their Haven One space hotel. Well, that's interesting. I can't imagine they're going to make money on this. How much? How much does it cost? I want to reserve my stay. How much? How much is it going to cost me? How much is it going to say, oh, you just have to email them for details and pricing information? That's one way of saying, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Leo, yeah, oh well.

1:41:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh well, that's funny. That must be a fun challenge for a natural designer, sure.

1:41:07 - Leo Laporte
Especially if you have more money than God and you don't have to really work for a living. You can draw pictures of space stations.

1:41:14 - Andy Ihnatko
How do you design a bracket for a hairdryer or toothbrush holder in the hotel bathroom if the hotel is in space? That's something that he never got to really figure out at Apple.

1:41:22 - Leo Laporte
You know, we're so used to the idea of, you know, like in 2001, rotating space stations that have artificial gravity through centrifugal force, that we've never built one of those. You know it's hard, it's hard, I guess.

1:41:41 - Alex Lindsay
It might be just fun to float around.

1:41:43 - Leo Laporte
Maybe you just want to float around.

1:41:44 - Alex Lindsay
There's some problems. Have SpaceX.

1:41:46 - Leo Laporte
Sure.

1:41:46 - Alex Lindsay
There's some problems for your bones, yeah, don't stay there too long.

1:41:49 - Leo Laporte
Your eyes are going to distend.

1:41:51 - Alex Lindsay
But hanging out there for a little while.

1:41:53 - Leo Laporte
I wouldn't mind being fun.

1:41:54 - Alex Lindsay
That's fun for a week or two or a month.

1:41:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'll have them. Email you, jeff, about that. I'm good to go. Alex is ready to go. We're going to take a break and your final picks of 2023. So make them good. Jason Snell, alex, Lindsey, andy and Arco, make them good. Our show today, brought to you by SecureMyEmail.

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1:46:04 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I'm going to do a website pick, but it is from somebody in the Apple community, zach Gage, who has developed some incredible iOS games Kind of a genius really bad chess, spell tower, type shift not words, many others. He was part of a startup that created a website called Puzmo that sold to Hearst Newspapers. Actually, it is a great website. You don't have to read a Hearst newspaper to get that. But the idea here is Hearst wants a little bit of that what the New York Times puzzles have. So Puzmo is a new page. You can play some games for free. You can also become a subscriber. If you're a subscriber to the San Francisco Chronicle or the Houston Chronicle, the Hearst Newspapers, you can get a discount on it. But they're games to play for free as well.

It's all web-based and it includes several Zach Gage games like spell tower, really bad chess and type shift, along with some new stuff, including a really nice crossword that is, I think, that a lot of people would like, because it's not quite as hard as some of the really tough crosswords that are out there in various newspapers. It's just really beautifully done. It all happens inside your web browser and I just Zach is great at what he does, and this whole team has built what they are viewing as sort of like the newspaper puzzle page of the internet, and they got Hearst to be involved as an investor and puzzles Turns out, people like to do puzzles on the internet. The New York Times has made a lot of money doing that, and now here's an alternative that you can sign up for, called Puzmo, and it's really good. It's really well done.

1:47:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm doing terrible at it so far.

1:47:49 - Jason Snell
But those who haven't played the Zach Gage games. They're so clever, really bad. Chess is brilliant, it's literally just chess. But you're given a random assortment of pieces and you have to play with them. Like, oh, you've got three queens and a bishop, and that's it, and a king and a pawn, and so does the other side, and you have to try to beat them using this weird assortment of pieces. And there are a lot of word games that he does. His apps are great. A lot of them are in Apple Arcade. Actually, if you're in there, you can get a lot of Zach's games for free. But now Puzmo is here with daily puzzles. It's a really well done.

1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
I couldn't recommend it more. Nice, I'm having fun. Okay, I'm still wrong, but I'm having fun. All right, puzmo, puzmo, mr Andy Naco.

1:48:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is an easy holiday pick. Ella wishes you a swinging Christmas. Not all of us celebrate Christmas, but we should all be celebrating Ella Fitzgerald and this is my favorite Christmas album of all time. Most of them are Christmas songs, but most of them, but the rest of them are just January and December sort of songs. Who knew?

1:48:57 - Leo Laporte
that you could make Jingle Bells a great song, that's. You know it swings, man, it's swinging the title. It does what it says on the label Jingle, Jingle, Jingle. Yeah, it's awesome Swinging. I love this. You've given us some very good recommendations, not just for the holidays, but this is a good one.

1:49:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I can you know the number of the amount of feedback I get every year about oh, I'm not listening to so and so because, and for and I'm not going to recommend it to me, like two or three years ago, like oh great, I'm still glad you can mention the Christmas Carol again.

1:49:27 - Leo Laporte
That's a perennial favorite, yep.

1:49:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I think I think I did that like the very first, very first show after Thanksgiving the Patrick Stewart Christmas Carol on Audible by pretty much anywhere else. Yeah, it's, I've owned that for so long. I bought it on cassette Back when he was still John Luke Picard I think, wow, it's awesome. It's the first time he was John Luke Picard, very nice.

1:49:49 - Leo Laporte
Happy holidays. I didn't say Jason, but happy holidays to you both. Alex, your pick of the week. How much money am I going to be sitting? A lot, A lot.

1:49:58 - Alex Lindsay
Like a lot like this one, this one's not. Yeah, this is a lot. So I, I, I don't think I, I look through the Mac break picks and I don't think I've, I don't think I've recommended this in the past and I think it's because it costs a lot.

Yeah, I'm sorry for being expensive, but this is expensive and it's amazing. So I realized I've been using this for a couple of years like two or three years and I think I've hesitated on recommending this one because it's expensive. It's a thousand dollars. You can get cheaper ones, so there's other ones. What this is is it's a pretty high tech mic mute, and so it has you know thousand dollar mic mute kids.

So there's a couple of things about it. Number one is is it so you can get ones by? You know a variety of folks that have little clickers that will actively, you know, pull it mechanically, but the problem is is that when it's sitting next to your mic you can hear me clicking.

1:50:44 - Jason Snell
Yes.

1:50:45 - Alex Lindsay
You click, you click, you click, or when you cut it, you hear the cut. You know you hear the electronic cut Right. Never hear it. So studio technologies is pretty much any major studio that you walk into, you know. You see these all over the place. You know, and this is they've lots of different versions, they have a interpreter version, they have smaller versions, bigger versions, but this one is the one that I use.

This is what sits on my desk and I again use. I use it every day, all day, because I'm constantly muting my mic. I don't want to figure out where the software thing is for my zoom. I'm not trying to figure out, okay, what, what? Whether it zooms in front or back, I just have a hardware mute. And this one, one of the things that's distinct is the two little buttons that you see next to it. Those are talk backs and so if I'm in comms, if I have comms on my computer like Unity or Clear comms Agent IC, I push that button. So I'm going to push one of those buttons I just disappeared because what it does is it allows me to talk back to into my comms without actual. It automatically mutes me from the main feedback to the to what I'm doing, and so for radio and TV and so on and so forth.

And again, I've owned studio technology stuff for many, many years. They're part of the what I consider the Wisconsin audio mafia. There's so many companies out of out of Madison that do audio. It's very odd, but but it's. You know. Sound devices, studio technologies, audio implements, all these are all in one place Anyway. So anyway, it's a good. It's a good thing.

I've been using it for years. The big thing is I my hand sits on top of it all the time I want to like, instead of instead of you hearing me do this or something like that. It's mute and it's and it doesn't make any noise. And again, it's got Dante. I can do a lot. There's like a little app to run it, you know. So there's there's a lot to it. So it's not for everybody, but it is a and it's, you know, again, it's. It does both analog in and out, but also Dante in and out. So that's what makes it so expensive. The Dante license is expensive to put into into these, these little things. They make analog versions of these as well, but but anyway, this is the one that that I've been using for years and I realized that I probably should go ahead, and I can go ahead and recommend it If I were to set up a home studio.

1:52:54 - Leo Laporte
Should I do Dante everywhere? Is that really more for a bigger studio?

1:52:58 - Alex Lindsay
I use it in mine. I mean I have, so I have this inside of Dante. I have my computers are all on Dante virtual. They're a Dante virtual sound card, so if I want to send audio from, because I've got, and is it over your regular home network or do you have a dedicated?

network. No, I just have it on my regular one. I mean, I'm not when I build, when I do productions. At least its own VLIN, oftentimes its own copper, you can get if you're going to do Dante networks, I can have a VLIN.

1:53:26 - Leo Laporte
I have a ubiquity, I can send up a Dante.

1:53:27 - Alex Lindsay
VLIN. And if you really the easiest way to do Dante and NDI and other things like that is net, net gear makes a thing called a 4250, which is a. It's a 4250 line and it's got. It automatically builds all the things you need to manage your Dante and NDI networks. It's a media switch, right. So so that's if you're really I'm thinking about getting one of those, but I just right now it's working, but on my I have about six computers on my, on my desk and they're all intertwined audio wise via Dante and Loopback. So Loopback is serving those things up to people and then Dante is passing it between the computers and you have a Dante controller and you kind of click through all that stuff, so anyway. So so I buy a lot of stuff wanting it to work on Dante.

1:54:08 - Leo Laporte
So because it's, because I yeah, I think, if I were going to set up a studio at home, which I won't forget, and if you want to deliver the great thing, is you want to deliver audio to your from anything to your speakers, there's these little analog things that go in with an Ethernet cable.

1:54:22 - Alex Lindsay
So Audinate makes these little tails so you throw those in. Like, if I want to do like in my office when I had surround in the last office that I was, that I was doing reviews in, I have all of those speakers are getting Ethernet all the way to the last six inches and they go into these little tails that go in that become analog. But now I can send any audio from any device into the to any of those speakers and, just you know, configure them as needed. So yeah, that's a whole other thing somewhere, but anyway, but the studio technology.

1:54:50 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to have you come to my house is what I'm going to do, and I'll give you eggnog and then you'll tell me everything. Happy to do it.

1:54:57 - Alex Lindsay
I work for eggnog.

1:55:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's good to know. We actually have. I have a similar thing for our Axios system. It costs $1,100. So yeah, this is a deal.

1:55:15 - Alex Lindsay
It's a, and this one works with all kinds of things. And again it's it's. I use the analog side of it because I'm taking this and going into a mixed pre, so I use the analog side to go to for my main mic, but my talkback mics, if I choose to use them, are over Dante's.

1:55:27 - Leo Laporte
So if I press the TB talkback button, john, will it go to John Ashley and it'll mute you and it'll mute me. It's the same thing, okay, and now it's unmuted me. You're talking to me, but they don't hear.

1:55:43 - Alex Lindsay
See look at that, the power homes.

1:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, but I can't hear myself when you're talking. Can they hear me when you're talking? So they can't hear you, but can they hear me when you're talking, because it mutes me in my headphones. Okay, and when? What is this button do?

1:56:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:56:05 - Leo Laporte
I wish you could see it, because there's a clock in it with a thing and a face and a timer.

1:56:10 - Jason Snell
Leo, you've been told don't push that button and there's a button that says Uber one and over two.

1:56:15 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what that's for. And well, user one and users both.

1:56:19 - Alex Lindsay
The proper, the proper thing to say is I am Groot, I am Groot, I am Groot, I am Groot.

1:56:24 - Leo Laporte
That's the button that'll kill everyone and what's really disappointing is it has headphone. A headphone, no, I've been even shows the DB and everything, but it's not connected anything. So 1100 bucks, get the. Do yourself a favor. Get the studio technologies moderate. 205 that Alex near 995. See, it's saved me a hundred bucks. Alex Lindsay is at office hours dot global. What are you doing for the holidays at office hours? More, more stuff.

1:56:55 - Alex Lindsay
So the week between the end of the year, a lot of times. So it's a little bit of a retrospective. So we'll look back at the shows that we liked, like what worked well, and then we'll look forward like what would we like to see more Of? Who would we like to bring on, who would we? So the all next week is kind of a little bit of a of a retrospective as well as I'll kind of a look forward, as I plan to to go through. Yeah, so we had a and we're, you know, we've been playing around. We did Monday, we had, we did a thing on Presentations and keynote. We talked a little bit about some of the tips and tricks of what we do. And today, alex Golner another I think we talked about in last week. We've been having this little like every week, talking a little bit about Apple motion and oh yeah, and it's a mind-blowing things in Apple motion. Today, like I, I've been using Apple motion since the first version and there was a whole bunch of things that I didn't know. It come amazing.

1:57:39 - Leo Laporte
Easy, that's good. Office hours, that global. It's open to all. You can even join the zoom call early In the am here on the west coast or watch on YouTube, but it all starts with the website office hours dot global. Of course, alex also produces a show for Michael Krasny Called gray matter, and Jason was on it last week. Do you have a big guest this week as well?

1:58:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we, we've. You know, I've got guests every week.

1:58:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, how do you gracefully this?

1:58:07 - Alex Lindsay
one's for me. Yeah, this, so it's interesting. Ken Dyke wall we had on last last Friday and live and he's we just released this one. You know, you, you look at this, this is like this American life. You look at the subject and you go, I don't know if I really need to watch that. Wow, what a great interview. Yeah, like he. Just he's been really he's been thinking about this for the last 30, 40 years and the things he's, you know, talking about and how it affects the economy and how and how we have to think about how to integrate things and how we think about these things.

It's, it's actually it turned out to be again, it was, it was. It wasn't something that I expected. I expected to be good, because every person we brought on has been really good, but, but I, it was much more thought-provoking than I expected and even you know, I just not something. Aging isn't something, probably something I should be thinking about, but I don't, you will soon enough, don't worry. Really, it just had me thinking about, like, how you build communities around that, because there's a huge percentage of people that are. You know, there's a we're kind of top-heavy in the United States, where there's a huge percent of people going into these. You know how do you build. Yeah, what do they call it? Age, age aware cities and Housing, and everything else is really interesting.

1:59:20 - Leo Laporte
I will be absolutely listening this one, as well as the one featuring Andy and the one featuring Jason, and I won't list one featuring me because I was there. That's a great matter, that show. And, of course, if you want to hire Alex 090 Dot media, andy and I co, you're gonna do GBH between now and Christmas or you're gonna take a couple weeks off.

1:59:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yep, I'm on Thursday at 12 35 pm Eastern Time. Go to WGBH newsorg, listen to it live or later. Then I've got next week off, awesome as do all of us.

1:59:53 - Leo Laporte
Next week's Mac break weekly will be a best of Episode, but we'll reconvene January 2nd. Jason snow, you're going to Phoenix in between now and then to be with the folks in a raise oh. Get some sun. You won't be able to wear your mithril sweater there, unfortunately.

2:00:10 - Jason Snell
That's okay, it'll be too hot.

2:00:13 - Leo Laporte
Jason is at six colors dot-com where he files. He'll even be filing from Arizona, I have a feeling, probably files all the time. He also does many podcasts which you can find out about at six colors comm slash. Jason, do you have holiday episodes of your shows?

2:00:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I have spent the last few days banking lots of holiday episodes of various Podcasts, of upgrading the incomparable and the rest, and they're all gonna come out while I'm all I'm gone and that's nice.

2:00:44 - Leo Laporte
Nice and you had your upgrade ease last week. On the upgrade.

2:00:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we you know our awards that we just make up. I mean, it's not much of a process. We just we just choose who the winners are, and that's it like it's not that hard. There's just two of us, so better than the dundee's the upgrade ease.

2:01:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you, jason. Happy holidays, merry Christmas Holidays to you and you get to celebrate Christmas twice.

2:01:12 - Andy Ihnatko
You lucky guy, hope you have a really second time probe's and cold.

2:01:19 - Leo Laporte
We'll have a wonderful holiday and we'll see you January 2nd. You too, alex, you're gonna spend time with the kids. You're going somewhere, yeah not going anywhere.

2:01:27 - Alex Lindsay
No, I'm not. Yeah right, mine might not even make it to the garage, yeah.

2:01:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, just watch a lot of movies on DVD. Where's the DVD player, honey? It's in the attic where you put it five years ago. Oh, I Hope you all have a wonderful holiday season. A Festivus is coming up in just a couple of days. Get your aluminum pole ready for the airing of grievances and the feats of Strength. Then there'll be Christmas Eve, sunday night we have a very special best of twit. It's not a best of on Sunday night, it's kind of the old farts twit Featuring the older denizens. None of you guys, you're all too young, you have to be over 60 be in this one. But it was a lot of fun.

I was joined with Steve by Steve Gibson, doc Searle's, jeff Jarvis, rod Pyle. We talked, we gave, we contextualized the year behind us and what is coming up. Chaos, I think, was the word of the show, but you'll find out more when you listen on that Christmas Eve and then we'll be back January 2nd. New Year's Eve, for a twit will be a best of show. We have best ofs, as I said, all week long next week, from all of our shows, or most of our shows, including this one. So have a happy holiday everybody. Thank you for joining us. An episode, 900 Onward to a thousand, but now I'm sorry to say it's time to get back to work because break time is over. I'm sorry, goodbye.

2:02:53 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of club twit, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home theater geekatude.