MacBreak Weekly 904 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 time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, alex and Jason are all here. I'm here back back east in Rhode Island and we're going to talk about, of course, the Vision Pro, more details about the buying experience. Apple wins an Emmy one Emmy, but an Emmy. We'll talk about that and don't buy Applecoin, whatever they tell you. All that coming up in a lot more. Next, on MacBreak Weekly.

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0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Apple, and we are here in the snow burdened mid central New England coast. I don't know what are you calling Andy Ihnatko, just down the road apiece, we had snow overnight.

0:03:05 - Andy Ihnatko
We call it the Boston Providence Worcester National National Complex.

0:03:10 - Leo Laporte
First snow in two years in New York City, which is interesting. In fact, there's not a lot of snow anymore. When I grew up in Providence I'm back here visiting mom there was snow. You get snow in the winter and this is the first snow of the winter, and that may be the only snow of the winter.

0:03:26 - Andy Ihnatko
We're still holding in for February, which is usually like the shiv of winter in New England.

0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of shivs, it's now raining and it's going to freeze, and then we're going to have some fun. Yes, kids, it's going to be a blast 34 degrees in Cranston. Also with this. Hello, andrew from WGBH in Boston. Also with this. Jason, now he's back. I'm at mom's now and he's home.

0:03:52 - Jaosn Snell
That's right, we traded places. Now I am in the North Bay. 55 degrees and rainy here, so you know the usual.

0:03:59 - Leo Laporte
I miss California. When you get out here, you realize that we're spoiled. We really are spoiled is slushy and gray and you have to wear a big, heavy coat. You know.

0:04:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I like that. Whenever else, you might be able to say pro or con about Mac break, our hosts are really good to their moms.

0:04:16 - Leo Laporte
Yes that's true, it's you and I know your mom's past, but you were when you know you moved, you helped her, you moved in with her. I thanked, and you to take care of her. I was her caregiver for like the last year. Yeah, yeah, it's really sweet. Yeah, mom is in a assisted living and she's she doesn't really know where she is. So but hi, mom, I'm. I'm in your house now, also with us. Mr Alex Lindsey, office hoursglobal. Hello, your mom.

0:04:46 - Alex Lindsay
My mom is doing great. So we, we, we. There's a clan that all lives in one area, so everyone kind of takes care of everybody. But my mom's still still doing pretty well. She's doing better than the Steelers, let's put it that way. We didn't have a high expectation there. I mean, we're just glad to be there, Like it was kind of like you know.

I wasn't, I didn't know, I was like let's see how they do, you know, like it wasn't, I wasn't, it wasn't, my my hopes weren't dashed, I was hopeless going into the, into the, into it, just just kind of like, well, let's see if, if, if, if, it's fun to watch, you know, and that that's all, I, it's all.

0:05:19 - Leo Laporte
It was fun to watch. Not for the Steelers fans probably, but it was fun to watch.

0:05:22 - Alex Lindsay
A lot more fun than for the Cowboys. I mean, that was a brutal game, they got spanked and that's.

0:05:28 - Leo Laporte
That means, of course, that Sunday come Sunday, we're going to have a split household because we have a Green Bay Packer fan, oh right In the home, and the Niners, of course, are beloved as well.

0:05:39 - Alex Lindsay
So I don't know what it was about. Yesterday was a bad day for for Pennsylvania teams, eagles and the, and the, all those poor, the.

0:05:47 - Leo Laporte
Steelers took it. We're talking sports ball kids. Don't worry about it, you don't need to know, it's not important.

0:05:53 - Andy Ihnatko
You know it's the end of the Bella check era. We knew it was going to come someday, but still it hurts, Doesn't it?

0:05:58 - Leo Laporte
Our lines are open when I'm driving down route 93 through Foxboro I waved a little salute to Billy. Mr Bella check, I salute you as I drove by and we're at stadium.

0:06:11 - Andy Ihnatko
We're all, we're all. We're all wearing our hoodies at half mass here. The strings are halfway down.

0:06:17 - Leo Laporte
I cut the sleeves off my sweatshirt in his honor.

0:06:20 - Alex Lindsay
Can you imagine him looking back on?

0:06:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he didn't care. I don't care, he doesn't care when we lose Mr Kraft?

0:06:28 - Andy Ihnatko
that's what I want to know. Yeah, no kidding, I'm not going to tell you he thought he's still down in Florida Having getting some, getting some relief down there, you know what I mean.

0:06:38 - Leo Laporte
I still love sports, talk radio here, w E, I, so. So let's talk about something that our audience cares about the vision pro. I can order it Friday, I'll tell you. I tell you I was on the fence, I was on the cusp, as you probably know. I'm glad, jason, you're going to get it and I'm glad, alex, you're going to get it.

And I was like really reluctant with a 3500 bucks. I asked my wife. She said you can get it but you have to return it. I don't know if I can return it. And then Mark Gurman says oh, by the way, you go in, before you go in, you take your iPhone and you scan your face that they're ready with your special knitted band, just your right size, and the face plate, the sweat, the sweat plate, just the right size. And then you're bringing your glasses. I was worried, I was going to have to go in my optometrist and get my prescription, but no, they put it in a special machine and then they make the Zeiss lenses to fit them in only $149 extra, and they do this whole thing. And then you have to sit through a 25 minute tour and I said, oh, that's it, I'm not buying it. That's what I, that was what? That was the little thing that put me over the edge.

0:07:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't mind, I'm totally with you, I can. I can maybe find $3,500, but 20 minutes of small talk, no.

0:07:58 - Jaosn Snell
I don't, so I don't think it's going to be mandatory.

0:08:00 - Leo Laporte
I think these are separate things, but you know I was asking that on Ask the Tech I. Can you just get up and say, no, I'm good?

0:08:05 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, yeah, you can't, you can't. No, this is. This is more of a. It's less of a sales as part of the transaction and more of you coming in and wanting to try it out and see if you want to buy it.

0:08:15 - Leo Laporte
So it's it's that 25 minutes is really for the perspective buyer, not for the new owner.

0:08:20 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, it's a 30 minute slot. So Mark got some of it right, he got some of it wrong. He has retail contacts, just like I do. It's going to be 20 minutes in the headset. I think that's the goal is 20 minutes in the headset, and you can imagine that, turning this around, where you're going to have to scan the face, scan the eyes, you know the glasses prescription pop in, get lenses from the back, pop them in, bring it out. That that's going to take a little bit of time and they want you in and out in 30 minutes. So I think it's about 20 minutes of headset time and in terms of what you will do in that, you'll have a, it's one to one.

So, like everybody who goes through this process will have an Apple employee there guiding them and only them, and they're going to have a little iPad where they can see what you're doing and they'll step you through it. And this is the stuff that they brought people from the stores into Cupertino. Well, this week, last week and I think maybe the week before, and they've been doing training and then sending them back to stores to train everybody else to follow the script and do this, this demo which feels to me, having heard about it and read about it. It's it's basically a cut down version of the demo that all of us who got the, the demo in June, got. It's very similar to that A lot of the same footage, just a little bit shorter, because that was more like half an hour, and they are trying to get the whole process in a 30 minute slot so that they can, you know, put up these reservations every 30 minutes and and move people in and out.

And even so, that's going to be pretty limiting, right, Like how many people are going to be doing demos? How many devices are they going to have? They're not. Those slots are probably going to fill up pretty fast, but I don't think they're mandatory or anything, but they're putting a lot of effort. I mean, now there's a lot of training and flying people to Cupertino and building this entire script in order to get people to experience it. And I think it's because how else you can't just pick it up and look at it, right, it's not like an iPhone or an iPod or anything like that. You really kind of have to wear it in order to understand what it even is. So that's what they're doing.

0:10:13 - Alex Lindsay
And I have to admit, when I buy, when I'm buying stuff, a lot of times I have pretty good relationships with companies and I'll end up with them over Zoom or something else, like looking at their product, going through 30 minutes of them explaining you know well what about this and how do I do this and how do I do you know, and it speeds up, it saves you a lot of time in the future because of a lot of frustration of not knowing that that's what that button actually did.

I think that what I did when I got the Apple or when I got the I'm sorry Google Glass I think it was 15 or 20 minutes, I think it was like a solid it was it was probably you know, it was probably 20 minute visit that I had down in San Francisco, where they do a bunch of the same thing. They show you, they make sure that you're attached to your account, they make sure that you got it on, that you can see it, that you understand how to do the X, y and Z, that you understand how to do all the bits and pieces, and so I don't think that Apple's doing it much longer than what what Glass did, and it's just. It's something that it's very easy to step over something and then be complaining to your friends or online going I bought this stupid thing and it doesn't do the thing, and I think they're trying to avoid the the forehead slaps of you just got to turn the dial.

0:11:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean that's that's not. I wouldn't say it's discouraging, but it's not particularly encouraging that they don't, that they're not. I can see how, how they would definitely want to make sure that the fit is correct, because this is comfort, is going to be like at least 40% of the ballgame here. So they want to make sure that they fit you with exactly the right one, that, if you need optical inserts, that they're getting you the right prescription. I think there's also a requirement that you have to have. You have to have a valid, like recent, prescription. You can't, you can't give the one that you got in college, like 20 years ago or whatever, but you would like to think that, nope, just take it out of the way. Okay, it fits great. Okay, that's good.

We are, we are confident that you will be able to figure this out. We've that, we've given you enough supplemental materials that the onboarding process is as good as it is on any iPhone. I mean, I think part of what, what, what you went through with Google Glass was also making it, making you feel like a glass explorer and a concierge experience, and I remember getting mine set up in New York city and like they're beverage, they're free beverages. There was like a little like yeah, it was nice.

It was a nice experience. So I don't know Again, I'm not. I don't think that's necessarily a bad indication, but it's like for $3,500 that people should expect some personal attention to make sure that you walk out of there having the best experience you can possibly have.

0:12:30 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, for sure, and I have a little detail about the vision stuff because it's kind of confusing. So Apple can't provide you like perfect lenses. You need to buy those from Zeiss and they will be shipped to you separately. You will not be able to walk out of the Apple store with with those limited range of possibilities.

0:12:47 - Leo Laporte
So they got.

0:12:47 - Jaosn Snell
They're going to have a lot in stock for the demo but those aren't for you to take away. My understanding is that they will let you walk out of the store if you are somebody who needs a minor adjustment with what they're basically calling readers. So the idea of like a little basic plus one plus two plus three, like you might get in a pair of swim goggles or reading glasses. But if you have to go beyond that level of adjustment to a prescription, you'll get a demo with as close as they can get to your prescription in the store, but they can't sell you prescription eyewear right.

0:13:21 - Alex Lindsay
That has to come from Zeiss and that's a separate order. And what you're saying is, if your prescription is negative 4.75, you're going to need to have someone send it to you. Asking asking for a friend.

0:13:32 - Jaosn Snell
What I'm saying is you could go into the store and they will probably have something close to that. It might be negative five right yeah, but but you're not going to walk out of the store with something that you can use. You're going to have to make that purchase, which means some people are going to leave the store with a product that they can't use.

0:13:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or you'll have to wear your contacts, although I also heard you wear your contacts.

0:13:51 - Jaosn Snell
I've also heard that you can use it with glasses. It just isn't ideal and it's kind of uncomfortable, but you could do it for like in the short term.

0:13:59 - Alex Lindsay
And you can do that with Oculus, right? You know, oculus, I wear my glasses. It's super annoying, like it's really just storage for your glasses.

0:14:05 - Jaosn Snell
I bought the lenses but I could use it with my glasses. This is going to be a tighter fit than the, than the Oculus Quest, but I think you'll probably be able to do it. We'll see, but anyway. So that's going to be. One of those little quirks is, and I wonder how it's going to work I assume that you'll be able to order this thing on Friday and then Apple will immediately either place your order or kick you to Zeiss to do that order coordinated in some way so that they both come to you either, if not together, then maybe it'll be like an iPhone case where you'll get the inserts. You'll be like, yeah, I got them, and then the thing isn't there for another two weeks. That might happen.

0:14:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I do. I do want to. Has anybody heard anything about how they're going to be handling like demos and these test fittings to make sure that in an age of COVID and also during the height of cold and flu season, that you can put this thing on your face to try it out without any worry that you're going to be coughing and hacking for the next four weeks?

0:14:56 - Jaosn Snell
So they take it into the back and sanitize it between sessions. So what happens is it all gets built. So they scan your face. It's exactly what happened to me in June. They scan your face, they get your glasses, prescription They've got a little prescriptionometer thing that they can drop your glasses in to figure out what it is and get as close as they can in the back. And then there are elves right. I don't know who those people are. There are elves in the back and they have the lot of them that they're presumably charging, or they're swapping out the batteries and charging the other batteries and they're popping in the magnetic inserts and they're resetting it to its demo state and then a runner presumably just kind of brings it out to you. So as part of that process, I imagine, they are presumably thoroughly sanitizing it. But it's all happening behind the scenes, so it is. So, yeah, they will have the opportunity to do a wipe down and whatever else they need to do. It's not going to.

0:15:47 - Alex Lindsay
it's not something that's like laying out on the table all day, I guess is the way I would put it, and I'm sure that their building is only relatively custom. I know for us you can wipe him down also. Uv there's a lot of UV systems that you just turn them on and it flips it up and you doesn't take very long. It actually downgrades the surface over time, but they can kill everything on it pretty quickly.

0:16:09 - Leo Laporte
So how, if I didn't want to buy it, but I wanted to try it, they're going to do both right. Make an appointment Okay.

0:16:15 - Jaosn Snell
And then for that 30 minute slot, and then you come in and they do the measuring and all that. Then the runner would come out.

And then you and your helper would sit there and do the 20 minute demo together and they would say just what happened to me in June. They'd be like now we're going to set up the like look at all the dots to do the eye tracking. And now I'm going to. Here's the button that you press to bring up the apps. And now, why don't you click on this one? And here's the gesture to use and like, going through that whole kind of walk in process where they then they show you there's like a, the, the, the spatial photos. There's a little demo of that in the photos app that we also got.

They'll show you a video clip from a movie that's in 3D. We got to have the tar. It sounds like the poor suckers at the Apple store are going to get the Super Mario Brothers movie instead. Sorry, I'm sure it'll be very spectacularly 3D, right, whatever it is. And then you know, and they'll go through that process of the 20 minute demo that you're guided by your, your guide, which, on one level, like, I think, even if you don't want to buy it, it's. I'm interested to see how busy those are going to be, because people are going to want to try it right, like they're going to just be able to talk about it and say, oh, I saw that Apple thing.

0:17:26 - Leo Laporte
You're getting. You're you're getting. You're making an appointment not to buy right. You are, it's great, it's an appointment to try yeah. We'll be at the end now. You know, if you give me your credit card, you can have this.

0:17:35 - Jaosn Snell
I'm sure they'll offer.

0:17:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay.

0:17:37 - Jaosn Snell
But I don't think it's like you're just driving a car.

0:17:40 - Leo Laporte
Apple doesn't do pressure.

0:17:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like test driving a car. Yeah, I think that's part of what the face scan is about to try to see if you look a little bit shifty.

0:17:49 - Leo Laporte
Apple announced today in a press release that they're going to be when the vision pro ships and arrives in your door at February 2nd. You'll have Disney plus available, espn major league baseball, pga tour. You'll have max discovery plus Amazon prime video. These are all apps, paramount, plus peacock, pluto TV, to be Fubo, and movie.

0:18:13 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a lot of syllables. You just said it would be too oh do you know and movie and to be fruity and crunchy roll.

0:18:22 - Leo Laporte
Red Bull TV, I max and tick tock.

0:18:25 - Jaosn Snell
This is uh yeah, but those are, those are not purchased, or those are apps, not Netflix. So those are all video streaming. They're either free or they're with subscription, but not Netflix.

0:18:36 - Leo Laporte
And they say but you can, there will be browsers you could put on it and you could watch Netflix in the browser Right.

0:18:42 - Jaosn Snell
Sure, but it is interesting because I wonder, like, if this is, if this becomes big, netflix is going to want to offer like a tier that has 3D movies in it and stuff like that. But that's not, that's not here at present. Apple says, though, that I think every movie that you own on itunes, if it's got a 3D version, you can watch the 3D version. So that's that's so.

0:19:03 - Leo Laporte
The vision pro does support 2D and a kind of a screen. Are they both in screens or is the 3D more immersive?

0:19:10 - Jaosn Snell
No, I mean for a 3D movie. It's just like in a movie theater. And in fact, what's interesting is the. The apps, like the Apple TV app, will have some very specific environments, like a movie theater that they've, that they've built an immersive environment in. Disney has its own immersive environments, which is really interesting. So, disney, there's a movie theater, but there's also like in Luke's speeder, on Tatooine, at the binary sunset right, it's one of theirs. So they got some bananas like environments you can watch a movie in on a big screen, like you're in the theater it does sound there are.

0:19:44 - Alex Lindsay
there's basically two places that they can put them. They can put them on the, you know, on the, on a pane that's like a screen, that's going to mean 180, or they can put them into the space, which is the 180 experience, and so you can have a 180 experience where you get. You get it's and that can be in stereo as well. Or you can have it on the pane. Obviously, all the movies that, as Jason said, all the movies that have been released already will go into that 16 by nine, or two, two, three at three, five or whatever. But Apple is also, I believe, in the press release they said they're also delivering some things that are going to be in that dual 180 that are there, that are experiences within the Prius, that Prius, the prehistoric show that they did. They're going to have some interactive experiences inside of that.

0:20:25 - Jaosn Snell
Those are their immersive video, which is like a different category, and those are the 180 degree 8k camera thing, where, where you're, that's the one where you're like yeah you're suspended over, over a you know a tightrope over a canyon and stuff like that, but they'll also be on the sizzle reel. Yeah, that's where you're going to have that, that dinosaur documentary and some other content, and I assume that they are going to do more sports stuff there too, cause Alex and I keep saying, yeah, I mean, it's going to happen.

0:20:55 - Alex Lindsay
Seems obvious that they're going to put up some, I think, first VOD and then probably live, but the ability to do that will happen pretty quickly. I will say that, if you're interested in 3D, if you ever liked 3D at all some melodic people don't, but if you did, the 3D on a headset is dramatically better than the 3D that you ever saw in a theater. Yeah, now, it doesn't still get over the fact that most of the time, most of the 3D movies that came out that weren't James Cameron are pretty bad as far as how they do 3D, because all they did was put people on planes.

0:21:24 - Jaosn Snell
They just, yeah, they just basically yeah people out and 3D comics. In the old days there's like five different planes and you're on one of them or the other of them and it's not.

0:21:32 - Leo Laporte
So, you're saying it's going to look like speed racer is what you're saying Well, that's what?

0:21:35 - Jaosn Snell
all of all of those, all of those movies in theaters are generally 3D and some of them are well done and some of them are not. But they're not shot 3D, they're just 3D projections. But there are a lot of them and some of them are yeah, avatar is a good example. I think the best example is Hugo, which is like what if Martin Scorsese made a 3D movie? And the answer is he did. It's called Hugo and it's really good, like really good as a movie, but also as a 3D experience. So there are some great 3D movies out there they look they're all it's.

the experience is so much better than in a movie theater wearing the stupid glasses. It is so if you, alex said if you like 3D, I'd say, if you hate the 3D movie experience, you might like this. You might actually like it.

0:22:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Parenthetically, if you haven't seen Hugo, it's not just that, it's oh, wow, look, it's another 3D movie. Hey look, Martin Scorsese decided to play around with 3D. It's part of the storytelling that it had. That he had. He couldn't get away with not using every single trick that was possible using technology in movie storytelling.

0:22:38 - Leo Laporte
And yet, and yet it's kind of an ode, as I remember, to the movies, right, absolutely, and that's exactly why, yeah, it's like it was it was interesting.

0:22:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I was looking at the Walt Disney Company's press release. It really is like everything that interests you about Disney and everything that discuss you about Disney is in this press release, starting with the title. Disney Plus on Apple Vision Pro ushers in a new era of storytelling, innovation and immersive entertainment, magically transforming user space. Like, okay, you're selling me a cruise for you're selling me like a subscription. It's a good movie, I'm going to enjoy it, but please don't try to like, hit me and don't try to get me drunk on on Disney, heart touching magic. But yeah, it's it. It. It does seem as though they're setting themselves up to be like everybody's going to be heading to Disney Plus to really experience the 3D entertainment aspects of this, including, like, as Jason said, just the idea of, like, I'm working, I'm working on the scare floor floor from Pixar's Monster's Inc. Yeah, monster's Inc. Yeah, I'm working, I'm working in an Avengers, an Avengers towel. It's like, okay, that's that, doesn't. That doesn't give me the whole $3,500 for the value, but that's at least $130 for a lot of people.

0:23:53 - Jaosn Snell
Also mentioned Disney a lot of the current modern 3D animated movies. One of the advantages of them is they are animated in a 3D space and while they have to do a 3D version where they render it with two cameras instead of one and it is it's not easy for them to do it, but those movies are more real 3D in the sense that they were rendered in a 3D space and so when you watch a 3D Pixar movie, it's spectacular. And I'll mention also another. One of my favorites in 3D is the Into the Spider-Verse movies. Those are playing with not only they. Those movies, if you haven't seen them, are playing with everything, like they're playing with comic book half tone, dot patterns and printing systems as part of the film experience, which is bananas. But in addition, the 3D version is playing with depth on top of it. So there are, you know, we. I hate 3D movies. I mean, let me say I hate 3D movies. But there are some 3D movies that are spectacularly good as 3D movies. Just most of them aren't.

0:24:57 - Alex Lindsay
And the ones that are really good. I mean the avatar. Whether you like avatar or not, the avatar movies are just incredible, immaculate, like amazing 3D experiences that are, you know that kind of I just didn't. And the the hardest part was that avatar came out and we all thought, well, this is the future, because it just looked amazing. And then it was just a whole bunch of bad, bad movies and one after the other. That one thing that I haven't seen, that I hope to see now, is the Hobbit, because I think they shot the Hobbit in in stereo, or parts of it at least, in stereo. So it'll be, oh, yeah, yeah.

0:25:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So for those of us not purchasing a Vision Pro, I think this is your opportunity to gird your loins. Prepare yourself for a bombardment of Fumo. In fact, during the football playoffs this weekend there was. I thought was really interesting. Apple had its Vision Pro ads and really what it was was a series of clips from Star Wars and Jordy putting on his visor, a bunch of people putting on visors to show you that you see, you've always wanted Simply in his pilot helmet.

You know, You've always wanted a helmet, a nerd helmet, and now you can get one, and so I think there's gonna be this real feeling of oh, I'm missing out. Oh man, this is the right way to see how it's all.

0:26:11 - Jaosn Snell
That is interesting. It's, first off, it's a reference to the original iPhone ad, which they did during the Academy Awards, and they rolled this thing out during the national championship for college football, and it's so. It's movie clips. So the original iPhone was at the Oscars and it was a bunch of movie clips with people answering the phone, and this one is a bunch of people putting like little headgear on. I think, though, as a piece of marketing, it is exactly what you might expect for a product that most people aren't gonna want to buy yet, or even be able to buy yet, in that it's really they even say it get ready. It's really more like did you know? Cause most people don't even know, most people don't watch.

As sad as it is, mac break weekly they don't even pay attention to the fact that Apple's doing a headset. So these ads are sort of like yes, apple is doing a headset, it's the future, it's gonna be cool, get ready. And I think they are doing that gently because they want people to know it exists. But they also know that most people are gonna say, oh, interesting, $3,500, forget it, right, and that's okay. But they do want there to be awareness that this thing is happening. So it was a light touch, but I think maybe the right touch for this Cause. A hard sell doesn't make sense right now. It just doesn't at all.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
The message is simply the future is here and we're doing it, and you will eventually want one of these you will eventually want one. Exactly yeah.

0:27:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean also, they're pretty safe with an ad like that with the customers they're gonna get in the first year. If this really were a mass market thing like the iPhone, you would have to be saying, please, and you know how awesome 3D works, like in the movies and science fiction you've been thinking about for the past 40, 50 years. This will not be that. This will be, this will. It will be cool, but don't think that you're gonna be like able to walk all the way around your grandchildren as you live video conference with them and that you can push a ball from your side of the sofa to their side of the sofa. No, it's gonna be. You're gonna have a window through which you can watch Star Wars movies and they'll be still very disappointing if they're the new ones, but they'll be in 3D, so they'll be bad.

0:28:17 - Leo Laporte
And if you are, as many of our listeners are, at least 30% not in the US area is good news. You can fear missing out as well. Soon In your country, they're gonna roll out international versions, according to Ming-Chi Kuo, before June, before WWDC. Not sure what countries they'll come out in. Right now it's US only right.

0:28:39 - Jaosn Snell
I think they said UK, canada and then maybe South Korea or Japan. I mean, they're looking at them and it's the ones that you'd sort of expect. I realized when we were, when I was hearing about and getting the info about the Zeiss lenses, that there's a regulatory story here, right, like part of the issue with the rollout is not just limited to content and limited to the number of devices they have to sell. It's that they have to be for the i-stuff. They actually have to be in alignment with the laws of any country they go into where they can offer prescriptions, right, so that there is actually a regulatory reason why it might take them a while to roll it out. But it sounds like they're gonna be real aggressive. They're not gonna hold this for the US for the whole year or something.

0:29:22 - Andy Ihnatko
That's not gonna happen, which makes sense. They're capturing biometric information too.

0:29:25 - Leo Laporte
so, yeah, oh, there's a privacy issue. Yeah, it does make sense, if you want, if this is a developer, a quasi developer edition. I mean, look, they're developers. Some of the best developers are not in the US, so you've gotta make it somehow make it available. Or are there nerd helmets that have prescription lenses? Does Meta offer prescription? I think they do, don't they?

0:29:45 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, but they have a partner in the US, that's any optical. I don't know about other countries. So that's I spent for $50 instead of 150, of course, cause Apple for my Quest 3 inserts.

0:29:56 - Leo Laporte
And were they true to your prescription, or were they only vaguely true to you?

0:30:00 - Jaosn Snell
No, they were true to my prescription. They nailed the glasses prescription perfectly and they look great and such a relief not to wear glasses inside that thing. Ugh, that's the worst.

0:30:09 - Alex Lindsay
Did you just send them some prescription, or you sent the prescription to them and they sent it back?

0:30:13 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, my provider, my vision provider, lets me download a PDF of my current subscription and I literally attached to that to Zennie, and they sent me the inserts.

0:30:25 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, fridays, the day you get up at 8 am Eastern, 5 am Pacific, and do you? Think it'll be hard, they'll all be gone by 505.

0:30:34 - Alex Lindsay
Do you think that'll be the case?

0:30:36 - Leo Laporte
That'll be like if you don't get up at that hour.

0:30:38 - Jaosn Snell
I don't know, I think it's. I wanna say that Alex is right, but I don't know, I think it might take a few hours.

0:30:45 - Alex Lindsay
I think it will sell out whatever, it's not so much as selling out. It's the first getting them near the February 2nd. It'll just start stretching out Like it'll just run.

0:30:56 - Leo Laporte
The real constraint is half hour. The real constraint is half hour. Appointments in Apple stores.

0:31:00 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, but I don't think they're mandatory. I think those are sales appointments. If you already buy it, then you bought it. You can just get it.

0:31:07 - Leo Laporte
You don't have to go to the store to buy it. I don't think so. No, oh, okay.

0:31:11 - Jaosn Snell
No, you can scan in the Apple Store app. So you can scan your face in the Apple Store app and then order it and then drop in your prescription and get that from Zeiss and my understanding is and then that's it and you get it.

0:31:25 - Leo Laporte
So we also. There was a rumor last year that you would have to go to the store to get it. That's not gonna be the case.

0:31:31 - Jaosn Snell
I don't think that's. That's not what I've heard, but I'm not 100% on that. But I think that they want to use the 20 minutes in the store or the 30 minute appointment in the store as a sales tool, and if you've already bought it, then you, they don't need to do that, take it. We'll take your $3,500, sir.

0:31:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you yeah yeah, and of course, if they sell out, if they sell out next week, that doesn't mean that you've lost your opportunity. Obviously, they're gonna be basically shipping blocks of tens of thousands at a time as they manufacture them and also to try to keep an eye on that sort of stuff.

Also, I think that I wonder what Apple's plans are for all of the returns that are definitely going to be coming by people who just wanted to rock and roll and for a couple of weeks or who are gonna take a flutter on it but then didn't really like it. Are they going to be in a refurb channel? Or are they simply going to remanufacture them and rebox them as new, like replace anything that might have come in contact with the skin, but the unit itself will be restored to brand new condition and basically put right back in the retail channel, I think it'll have to be refurb.

0:32:34 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, if it comes back from someone, I think they have to put it that way. But I think that, and I don't think that they'll necessarily sell out, I think they're just gonna just keep pushing that date out. You know, like that date will just keep on, like you can pick it up in December. You know that kind of thing, Cause they probably understand their sales channel pretty effectively and Apple tends to be fairly conservative Most of the time. When I get something that's been extended out, I often get it somewhere from a couple of days or a couple of weeks earlier than they said. They're under-promising over deliver.

0:33:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, get ready kids and Alex, you're still on the hook. Yeah, I'm right, I'm all saved up.

0:33:13 - Alex Lindsay
I'm all ready to go. All right, you know.

0:33:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm good and Jason have you. Okay, this is their. They weren't canary now, hey, jason are you getting one?

0:33:24 - Jaosn Snell
Hey Leo, I actually I don't know if I'm getting one or not, so I'm still in. I'm still in, I don't. I am hopeful, but I don't. I have not had anybody at Apple say we're gonna give you one.

0:33:36 - Leo Laporte
Have you been a good reviewer, Jason? You're a been a good boy.

0:33:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's always the call that hi. Will you be available for a call, for a Zoom call, like on Wednesday at XX State? Is that what they do?

0:33:49 - Jaosn Snell
You get a like a often cryptic message you get an email saying that they'll call you because nobody can trace the call. All right yeah.

0:33:57 - Leo Laporte
It's coming from inside the house.

0:34:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Here is a tour. Here's an onion link to click down for the press release.

0:34:05 - Leo Laporte
All right, that's all right. You were gonna. You might as well get used to it for the next six months. That's our vision pro segment for the week, and it will be a while, though it won't be next week that you'll get one. This is unusual. Right, with the iPhone, you can order on Friday and then get it the next Friday, but then we have to. You're gonna have to wait.

0:34:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I will say that I am going to be watching a lot of specific tech channels on YouTube for just hey. And here's a. Here's something we first talked about at CES. Here's the new. Here's the new rabbit AI device. But they're gonna be looking to see if they're like red marks, like above the bridge of their nose on the side to say that they were. They were playing with their. They're playing with their NDA unit. They had to take it off to film a video and now they're putting it back on again afterward.

0:34:52 - Alex Lindsay
I'm pinching my nose. Right now I am interested in going to a conference where I'm going through the expo, like we've covered the expo and just like just shoot it off with 3D yeah 3D. I'm gonna do it with my phone. I'm gonna do it here next week, is it?

0:35:06 - Leo Laporte
better if you do it with a headset.

0:35:07 - Alex Lindsay
The headset will be. I think the headset will have a better inner, wider distance, it's wider the inner and the inner ocular, so it'll be closer to your inner ocular, the inner axial between it. So it'll be less simulated and probably look more 3D. But I'm gonna test it with the phone next week at NAM and then and then we'll get the NAB I'll probably shoot a bunch of stuff.

0:35:26 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of NAM, one of the spatial video demos is of Alicia Keys in her studio recording songs. So if you're an Alicia Keys fan, that will be one of the demos and it should look really good.

0:35:38 - Alex Lindsay
If it's the same studio that I've seen before. It's a really nice small studio that will look good in 3D, like she's got this little place in New York and in Chelsea.

0:35:48 - Leo Laporte
Nice, all right. One thing you won't get, according to 9 to 5 Mac according to rumors and it's really not as much of a rumor, because it seems like they've actually taken it off the website is the open sky environment where you can lie in your back and look at the stars in your Vision Pro. That is, for some reason, they've taken off the Vision Pro webpage. The phrase magically replace your ceiling with a clear, open sky has been replaced by turn your room into a personal movie theater with a cinema environment. So I don't know.

0:36:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Probably that's coming in the way of your day. That's probably good news, that if that was the only thing that anybody can spot that they probably haven't delivered. And it's not as though that was like a selling point. Other thing it was cool. I'm sure that it had its champions inside of Apple, but that was one of those things where we need bandwidth for actually making the damn thing work. So yeah.

0:36:42 - Leo Laporte
So two weeks from Friday is February 2nd, People will start getting them Again. Gurg yourself for FOMO, because you know there'll be that feeling. You'll have, I'll have, we'll all have Gosh. I wish I'd ordered one, but I think I'd encourage.

0:36:58 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part is that you have to make. You do have time, but you may have a lot of time. I think the reason that I'm so focused on it at 5 am is because I'm afraid that if I get any kind of FOMO and wish I jumped in, it'll be 69 months away. Like you know, that's the because it's just not that many that are going to be available. Yeah, yeah.

0:37:15 - Andy Ihnatko
No, please, and everybody should definitely have like proper expectations that there are going to be some features that work really really well as well as you had hoped. There are going to be some features that you're like okay, 1.0.

0:37:27 - Leo Laporte
Let's, let's let's, let's, let's keep the faith. What's the over and under on YouTubers who are thrilled with it and are gravely disappointed with it?

0:37:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I think it'll be cooler to do videos about what a travesty this is, and I think that that's what a lot of the lesser if I think that. I think that anybody who has a proper perspective will have a balance between this is a real product that Apple is really selling in their stores and they're charging a real amount of money for it. So we have to evaluate it as, not as though, this is an experiment or a demo or something that you have to go into a, into a suite at CES in order to take a look. So they have to review it seriously, while at the same time, acknowledging that this is the one point of the thing.

So I think, if you, if you, if you rewind back to the, to the iPhone, there are a lot of people who very correctly said that there are a lot of features that I really miss off my BlackBerry, that I really miss off my windows phone. I really think this is too. This is really too slow. I can't get XYZ, I can't tether. However, that said, here are the things I really it's a brand new thing and here are the things that it's doing that no one else can possibly do, but there are for that they're also going to be the people that either don't get it or they're in such curmudgeon mode as a brand that they can't possibly say that this was, this was a very, very interesting product. I don't think I'm not going to encourage anybody to spend $3,500 for expecting anything more than an interesting version 1.0 experience, but it's an interesting experience.

0:38:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, boy, and that argues for us getting one, just because I think we could do a good job of being fair and balanced about it. That's part of the problem with is you can't buy it and share it so much right.

0:39:14 - Jaosn Snell
It's people around the studio said oh, get it Leo.

0:39:16 - Leo Laporte
And then we could try it. Well, no cause it won't fit you, or whatever.

0:39:19 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, there's a guest mode and I think you might be able to buy I mean, you could buy other inserts and swap them and maybe change the light seal, and I think there might be ways to do it but it is meant to be a one person. I think the guest mode will be good enough for people to sort of try it out at your house, but I think if you had two people who wanted to use it regularly, it might be a challenge. It's going to be logged into one, like Apple ID and things like that, so you could do it, but it's not made to be a two person device.

0:39:49 - Andy Ihnatko
And the same, and the same is true of the iPad.

0:39:51 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, that's okay, yeah that's a positive and a negative. Like Michael's always borrowing my Oculus pro because he can right and it's, I'm always finding it in his room and I have to put it back in the charger. But you see, he wouldn't be able to with the Vision Pro. So that's a positive, but it's also a negative because it's a $3,500 device that only you can wear. So, yeah, all right. Well, more to come, but we're going to move on. Let's take a little time out here and just say hello to our fabulous panel Jason Snell from sixcolorscom, from officehoursglobal, the wonderful Alex Lindsay. This is a real challenge for you. John Ashley, our producer. I should pause a little bit, and now we go to Andy and Nodco WGB. Nice dissolve.

0:40:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, did I just ruin it by moving, Sorry. Yeah, no moving please.

0:40:47 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's see what else. Oh, apple got a victory, no, a loss. Oh, I can't figure this out. The Supreme Court is declined to rule on the. Apple and Epic Both appealed to the Supreme Court, both unhappy with the result of their lawsuit. The lower court ruling stands. The Supreme Court has decided yeah, you guys, you just fight it out. Which means that Apple is now going to have to allow companies like Amazon I was just trying to buy an Amazon book the other day in the Kindle app, can't. Amazon will now say to buy this book? You can go to Amazoncom. Shall I click a link for you, because the court said that Apple has to do that. That is not exactly like the worst thing that ever happened to Apple, but the Supreme Court has upheld the ruling by not ruling. So the real wink wink, nudge, nudge.

0:41:42 - Jaosn Snell
That was like, oh, you must go be somewhere else that we can't tell you about. And now it'll be like, well, yeah, you can go here if you want, which is not, I mean, Apple has built this. It is as limited in scope as possible, not that useful, but better than nothing.

0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
It is the smallest possible loss for Apple.

0:42:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they had won, I think, nine out of the 10 terms, and so the thing that Tim Sweeney's upset about, of course, is that there isn't. They didn't also didn't go back and look at the idea of forcing a second store, which is what he wanted in the United States. Of course, that's moving forward in Europe.

0:42:17 - Jaosn Snell
They're going to get it in Europe, so they're probably going to get in.

0:42:19 - Alex Lindsay
Europe. The question is whether Apple will just fork Europe, and not necessarily. If they fork Europe in Europe, it'll make it really complicated for larger developers to do both.

0:42:28 - Leo Laporte
So Gurman saying at Bloomberg that Apple is going to split in the coming weeks Apple is going to split the App Store into. He says Apple's gearing up to make changes to the App Store in the EU to comply with the digital markets app. Apparently, his sources say Apple's planning to roll out adjustments splitting off the App Store in the EU. Oh, I see, so there'd be an EU App Store. That's the fourth. I don't think they're going to do a version.

0:42:55 - Alex Lindsay
in the rest of the world version. They're not going to have the EU drive what they're doing with the rest of the world, so they're just going to say, well, you guys get your own. And what that does is it really makes it painful for developers because it means that they're not developing the store makes developing your own store much higher risk in that area because it's a much smaller market.

0:43:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But the people who are really upset about this, the people who are making, who are forking over an enormous amount of money, they're going to say you know what? It'll cost us X hundreds of thousands of dollars to retool for a secondary App Store, specifically in the EU. But here's how much we can make back by not having to fork over that money.

0:43:33 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be interesting yeah, it'll be interesting research. Obviously, if it's a huge success, then we'll know, and if it's not, apple will let us know.

0:43:43 - Andy Ihnatko
And I'm sure part of Apple's thinking was that this is not, this was not a whole bunch of like drunken jerks who have it in for Apple, who were doing this just to be mean, and no other government anywhere in the world is ever going to put this kind of restriction on us. I think that they were partially acknowledging that we're probably going to see some form of this in the US. We're probably going to see some form of this in Australia and Japan. We are just going to have to make sure that we have our. We were going to change our architecture, change our infrastructure, change our business structure so that we can roll out different versions of the App Store with restrictions as needed by local laws.

0:44:23 - Leo Laporte
So I wonder, though, if doing this in the EU opens the door for it to happen in other markets, to opens the door for the FTC, then to say, oh look, you can do this, maybe you should do it here.

0:44:36 - Jaosn Snell
As soon as Apple does this and opens up side loading and all those things, after saying that they're going to destroy everything assuming they don't destroy everything and ruin everybody's lives it makes it so much easier for literally every other organization who's regulating countries around the world to say we want that, do that. And like there's no defense at that point from Apple saying they can't do it because they already did it, and you may see a whole cascade of laws and regulations altered to basically model after the EU to force Apple to open that. You know, flip that switch for them too, I feel like the floodgates will open here.

0:45:14 - Leo Laporte
It's the camels. Nose up your kimono as they say Well yeah, I don't think anyone says that I don't think anyone says that, but I don't even know.

0:45:22 - Alex Lindsay
We should have said that.

0:45:25 - Andy Ihnatko
But it's always fun when like regulations like these come into effect. We get to see that, ok, apple, you said the world would come to an end if they opened up the app store. We are going to go to the mountaintop with our tunics and our Bibles and we're going to wait for the world to end at 1241 AM, greenish Meantime, because you're saying the world is going to end. And then when the world doesn't end and they can see that? Well, no, there were really. There was no really detectable or traceable increase in hardship to users, nor did it really confuse people to have multiple app stores. That's going to basically put Apple in a company on a different kind of footing.

0:46:06 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part is is it going to be exactly the way the Google app split has happened, which is that nobody uses it, like it's just that nobody bothers? And I think that that's the biggest risk for a second app store is just that no one's actually going to use it. The second risk is, well, you may be right that nothing happens and everything else In the next two years. If there's any kind of security breach or anything that someone takes advantage of in the second app, I guarantee they'll be, and then Apple will make sure we all know about it.

So you know, sorry, there'll be an incredible amount of.

0:46:34 - Jaosn Snell
I told you so, Apple warns European users about malware found in rogue side loaded app. Don't let it happen to you. Turn off that feature that we warned you Because, first off to turn it on, you'll go through that screen that says if you allow this, you may die and that may kill you. And then they'll put out the press release and saying we told you turn it off before you die. And yeah, they will absolutely do that if they have the opportunity, because their goal is to minimize this as much as possible. Yeah, yeah.

0:47:05 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that also, I think that there's going to be over the next couple of years. I wouldn't be surprised if there's another class of developer that Apple develops, that Apple rolls out, that is, you know, the developers that are developing exclusively for the Apple store as opposed to developing for the, for the things, and it's just a matter of when you get it and whether they Pick up the phone. You know that kind of thing. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of things like that that may, may happen as well.

0:47:33 - Leo Laporte
All right, we'll watch with interest to see if the world ends or not, or if the camel's nose gets any farther.

0:47:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Good luck with that metaphor. I mean, this is why we don't allow people in the studio to record, because your Netflix special Live where we're gonna find out.

0:48:04 - Leo Laporte
There is good news and bad news in this IDC report. Apple for the. For those since 2010 the last time a company not named Samsung was number one in smartphone sales was 2010. For 2023 it is.

0:48:19 - Alex Lindsay
Apple and I believe that before 2010 it was, it was not a very no key, I know, black is never very high, but I think it was no key, I was remember it's global right.

0:48:29 - Leo Laporte
So no, key, it was huge all over the world. So you'd see, yeah yeah, but there's bad news too, which is the overall. According IDC, the overall smartphone market has dropped last year 3.2%. They only they sold a mere 1.17 billion units. There's seven and a half billion people in the world and they sold 1.17 billion units. Seems like a good market share.

0:48:56 - Jaosn Snell
It's, it's, it's okay, it's okay Apparently, though let's keep in mind the this car, I mean. This is an amazing statistic, because Apple doesn't play in a large section of the market. Apple, in the $600 and up smartphone market, has 71% share, right like Apple dominates at premium smartphones. It's kind of amazing to see that, even when you roll in all of the, all of the, especially the places around the world that Expensive smartphones are not popular because people can't afford them, that Apple has still got the. You know, I'm a long-time Mac user. It's never about the market share, but it is kind of amazing to see this.

I also think, though you said it, leo the smartphone market is amazing, right. This is anything I keep coming back to is everybody's looking for the next smartphone. It's like, how will there? It will probably be quite a while before there is a product so universal and available across such a price range that everybody in the world wants it and buys one. Everybody buys one, and apparently Everybody on the world buys a new one at least every seven years. If one seventh of the world population bought a smartphone last year.

0:50:07 - Leo Laporte
Apple's market share Went up point seven percent year over year from 24 percent to 24 per seven point seven percent. But that's Samsung, which is number two is sixteen percent. So Apple has a Significantly larger market share, almost a quarter of the world market. Their growth year over year 11.6 percent. Meanwhile Samsung's growth negative, 10.9 percent.

Tomorrow Samsung is gonna have their live Unplugged event in fact, we're going to cover it 10 am. Pacific micro sergeant and I will be in studio doing that and Apple and of course Samsung's gonna announce an S24 and you know that everybody kind of knows what they're gonna announce. In fact, they've been offering pre-orders for months, but there will also be pushing their AI capabilities and so forth, but they're playing. I guess at this point, catch up shall me. Showed good growth 22% growth year over year. They may end up being dominant next year because they're the big Chinese company and a company called I've never heard of, called transian tran an, has 68.6 percent growth year over year. So there are two new companies coming and that's the low end, that's the cheap phone. That's a market that Apple doesn't even compete in.

0:51:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Really, yeah, and there's also that piece in the Wall Street Journal, I think, today or yesterday, about Apple taking the rather odd step of offering really big discounts on the latest iPhones in China. This is ahead of the lunar new year, excuse me, is a couple stay that they singles.

You. There's a, there's a. I might be getting the holiday wrong, but there's a big holiday in early February. That's a gift, that's a gift giving holiday in China, and that they're offering like $70 or $80 or $90 discounts on handsets. They had that a they hadn't done before, and also they're also not offering them in other Asian countries that celebrate the same holiday. So this is the Wall Street Journal is basically couching this, as this is what this is how they're. They're feeling some heat from Samsung. They're seeing feeling some heat from from Huawei, and that efforts to Try to make Apple sound as though they're an untrustworthy foreign company as Might be starting to pay off, because their people are. It's some, some of the glow is starting to slip off of, off of iPhone, and that they're. They're seeing it in terms of like much, much, much less sales numbers. Hence the need to start discounting stuff and try to go more aggressively. I think you're right.

0:52:36 - Leo Laporte
I think it's lunar new year. Singles day is easy to remember because it's 11, 11, lots of ones. Singles day, yeah, or bachelor's day, but that is. That is kind of their prime day in China in November, lunar new year. Am I in a bathrobe? No, I'm not shave. This is a. This is known as a sweater. You know he's usually see me wear these very often, but it's cold here, knowing when.

0:53:02 - Alex Lindsay
I look like it's a bed.

0:53:03 - Leo Laporte
Does it look like it's a bathroom? It's a cardigan.

0:53:05 - Alex Lindsay
It does look old, that one specifically looks a little like it's a shawl.

0:53:09 - Leo Laporte
It's a shawl collar.

0:53:10 - Andy Ihnatko
It's weird. It's weird that we have to explain to some people that they're parts of the country, if not the world, in which it gets so cold that, no, you know what? We're not gonna try to make this shirt sleeve warm in here. We are just, as your parents used to say, just gonna put on a sweater because otherwise, sweater.

0:53:26 - Leo Laporte
It's 68 degrees on the thermostat.

0:53:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't afford wearing flannel pajamas underneath my pants and I'm wearing like three layers on top here.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I found. You know I'm. I'm going through my closet, mike, looking for a coat I can wear out here, because I'm I don't know, and I guess the last time I came out in the winter I have a LL bean coat that goes down to my below my knees. It looks like. Lisa said you look like a pimp. I said no, no, this is a warm winter cozy, warm cozy and it is flannel on the inside. So I don't know what pimp she's thinking, but yeah, I had to wear it. I'm gonna leave that here.

0:54:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm gonna thank you once again for the twit Staff Christmas present of like what was it five, six, seven years ago? That is one thick, warm hoodie. It becomes. It becomes like my office and at home, you know, for like from December to March this year.

0:54:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm sporting salt Hank hoodies. He has. He has a whole series of hoodies and I'm we're actually that's what I brought out. I'm wearing those. No, this is not a. No, I'm not wearing a bathrobe, this is a cashmere sweater. Some executive changes at Apple the. I did not know this. The mandatory retirement age for Apple directors is 75. I, al Gore, is now 75, as is James Bell, so they're retiring from the Apple board of directors mandatory with an asterisk right, because there are.

0:54:55 - Jaosn Snell
There was another board member who's 75, who's still there, and their chairman is gonna be 75 next year. But I I think what's happening here is that they realize they had a whole bunch of people turning 75 in a short amount of time, yeah, and they want to cycle the boards more slowly than that, and I think that's smart.

I think that's smart on their part to to say we realize we need to turn over the board, but I don't want to kick out five, four or five board members in a year. So they're gonna make it. But, like Levinson is the is the chairman and he he's there from jobs era and he turned 75 next year. So I mean, clearly they're going to have Board turnover in the next few years and it will be interesting to see who the new board members are. Apple is is Unlike some tech companies. Apple has an independent board. That is not Tim Cook and his cronies. It's this independently Appointed board and it'll be interesting to see how they change that. So they they appointed one new board member and they have board members leaving and and this is not the end of the story, because they will they will certainly lose another couple board members Soon, probably next year, I would think.

0:56:04 - Leo Laporte
Tim. Tim Cook has a board seat, though right? I Don't think so.

0:56:08 - Andy Ihnatko
No, is he does. He's on the board. He's not the chairman.

0:56:10 - Jaosn Snell
He's just on the board chairman. Yeah, that's it.

0:56:13 - Leo Laporte
The new, the new board member, james Bell. By the way. You may not know the name, but he was the corporate president of the Boeing company, so good time for him to retire as well, yeah.

0:56:24 - Andy Ihnatko
There are nine.

0:56:24 - Leo Laporte
There are nine people on the board, of whom three are women, so that another woman on there, you make that oh she's increased all kinds of diversity there former president, ceo of the Aero space corporation, dr Wanda Austin, joins the board of directors.

0:56:40 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, so so Gore and Bell are going off the board. Sugar is their age and is not going off the board, and Levinson is about to be 75 and and is the chairman of the board and has been. So I just I wonder, if they've they, maybe they just sort of said, look, we're gonna, we'll replace two board members a year, but no more, because it's it's too much, and I think that's right. You want for a company like Apple, you want stability. I mean not that the board is like super involved, but it is important to have proper Governance on the board. And, yeah, tim is the only Apple employee on the board. It's, it's like. Yeah, like sugar is Northrop Grumman. I mean these are titans of industry in a way right, which is great.

0:57:25 - Leo Laporte
I mean, yeah, look, johnston and Johnston Steve Jobs, if you didn't have an independent board, now that that was the best move ever. But but that's the whole point of having and, as you point out, there are a lot of companies that do not have independent boards in tech, austin is the first woman and the first African-American To. Well, she's not the first one on the board, she was. If she was, it says she was the first woman at first African-American hold the position, I guess, at the aerospace corporation. She's also been a leading advocate for STEM education, so good person.

0:57:57 - Jaosn Snell
She'll be the board. Yeah, she'll be the fourth woman on the board now.

0:58:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so yeah, yeah, yeah. And poor Tim Cook, by the way, his pay, big pay cut For Tim. I kind of feel bad for me. Only made 63 point two million dollars last year, but that's down from almost a hundred million. So Actually he asked to be. He said you can come, I pay 33%, it's okay.

0:58:24 - Jaosn Snell
It's okay, Because you know I think if you got Tim Cook alone, he would admit that CEO Compensation is ridiculous, yeah, around the industry. I think he would also Maybe point out how much value has been added to Apple since he's been CEO. If all you're looking at is the money, he's probably underpaid. If you look at it in terms of how everybody else who works at Apple is paid, he's overpaid because he's the CEO and that's how we do it in corporate America. But, like he has added, like for the money, people like Tim Cook is just a I mean he made it rain, right. I mean that's, that's, that's kind of his biggest legacy is he grew Apple and made it incredibly profitable. So, yeah, and nobody who's getting 60 million dollars a year is hurting right.

0:59:09 - Alex Lindsay
And I will say that, as someone who's worked with a lot of CEOs, they really are like we talk about football players getting paid a lot or soccer players getting paid a lot or other people getting paid A lot because of the demand.

And I will say, as someone who's worked with a lot of C-suite Folks, they are like those pro athletes, like we think that they're like everybody else, but when it comes to interacting with other people, making plans, dealing with all the complexities of a large corporation, it's not like anybody can get up there and just do that, you know, and and I think that we just need to understand that that is, it's a, it is a rarefied skill set and it's easy for us to say that they're the same, but it's the same as the what we're paying all these big athletes To do.

That there's, you know, there's a big drop-off between a 40 million dollar a year quarterback and a 25 million Oftentimes, except for, except for in San Francisco, where a one million dollar QB is better than most of them, but it's, but that won't last very long and and so, but they, they're bringing, they bring a lot of value to it and they are not easily replaceable and it's really complicated like I think that people underestimate how complicated doing what they do and what they have to know Is. When you see those big numbers, it's just there's not many of them out there that can do what they're doing.

1:00:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's why in well run companies like Apple, that's why it is actually significant when you see that, oh wow, he gave a 45 minute interview to this person for this outlet, because every 10 minute block of a CEO's time is immensely valuable for someone to. For some, for the company to put 40 minutes on a CEO schedule means something significant that you can debate later. But it's not. He didn't just do it because, hey, I got an hour, I got an hour between, like, I have to make my flight to Des Moines to talk to the salesperson. I can just, I can just slip on a Zoom call. No, that's not how it works $3 million base salary.

1:01:01 - Leo Laporte
There you go. A petens, yes, a $47 million stock award. $10.7 million from non equity compensation I think that means the keys to the corporate jet, I don't know what that means and $2.5 million and other compensation, mostly in the form of security costs. They count that as his salary that he has such tight security.

1:01:22 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah you should when you look at, when you look at someone traveling and you actually calculate the security. It isn't really like people talk about. Oh, I mean, when I saw when they said Mark Zuckerberg security is like $8 million a year, I'm like how do they do it for $8 million a year? Like how do they get into that budget? Because you know there's a group of people in there and they you have to fly them everywhere and you put them up and you go to the rock Johnson is not cheap.

1:01:45 - Leo Laporte
He does not come cheap. If you wanted to walk behind you everywhere you go, you got to pay something for that, yeah.

1:01:51 - Alex Lindsay
But it's like a small entourage.

1:01:54 - Leo Laporte
I love it when you see the guy and they're talking to their sleeves and they got the earpieces and they're going. Yeah, I'm sure that. I'm sure that Tim Cook's security detail is much less obvious right.

1:02:06 - Alex Lindsay
There's always portions of all their security that are not obvious at all. Like that's the only you don't even know they're there.

1:02:12 - Leo Laporte
There's a guy in a bathrobe.

1:02:14 - Alex Lindsay
There's usually there's five or six of them, and two or three are very obvious and two or three are very not obvious. That's kind of how that works, yeah.

1:02:23 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like Alex knows.

1:02:24 - Jaosn Snell
Just don't use any lasers near them. No lasers, every, every. You know a secret service.

1:02:29 - Alex Lindsay
Secret service doesn't know, it doesn't like the, doesn't like the lasers, so you know and you're right, you know every, every CEO at a certain level.

1:02:36 - Andy Ihnatko
They've got a crosshairs guy whose job is to picture their crosshairs on somebody. Somebody looks a little bit sketch, Yikes.

1:02:44 - Alex Lindsay
Yikes. So the funny thing is when, when people come up to the White House and you'll see these two guys come out and they've got these really long soft cases and they and they over their shoulder and they walk out to there's a building across the from the White House and those guys walk out and then heads of state come into the, into the West Wing, so they'll go in and there's just one sealed entrance that people know about it. It's not like I'm making it and telling any secrets, but it's always funny Like you see the two guys walking out and then you go oh someone, there's a head of state.

1:03:09 - Leo Laporte
Those aren't cool kids.

1:03:10 - Alex Lindsay
I'm thinking they're not, they're not they're not going out to play pool. Those are.

1:03:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Those are the guys that sit on the oh, three-four-pan show, that must be a really big meeting.

1:03:20 - Leo Laporte
Somebody's going to have to fill me in. What's the latest on the Apple Watch? Is it okay? Is it not okay?

1:03:25 - Jaosn Snell
It's okay-ish, Some of this stuff has been sustained. That Mossimo. Like some of Apple's appeals. They've said no and there's other things going on, but it sounds like Apple's big solution to the problem to keep it on sale is that they will use software to just disable that sensor on new sales. So, like I'm not, I think they're just going to turn it off until they can come to a resolution for newly sold Massimo series nine or ultra twos Massimo says you can't just fix it in software.

1:04:03 - Leo Laporte
Dudes, that's our hardware. You're stealing Well, but I think that what they're saying is oh, I'm sorry.

1:04:11 - Alex Lindsay
I interrupted you. I think that the what they I think Massimo, what Massimo was saying was that you can't, they, apple said we can work around their patents with software and Massimo says, no, you can't. And now Apple saying, well, we can just disable it, so it doesn't actually do anything. I don't think that that was what Massimo was saying. They couldn't do. Maybe it is I mean, I'm sure they don't want to do that but I think that what Massimo was saying is you can't work around our patent and actually have that functionality. There's no way to write software that would get around that functionality.

1:04:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Right. I think I think you're correct. Massimo specifically said that it's not. It's not a software thing, it is a hardware thing and there's no way you can write new software that would. That would be in compliance with our patents.

Customs has already said that we feel we feel this is to remove the feature entirely is a correct and acceptable way to get to allow Apple to continue to import watches into this thing. It's obviously not going to be a long-term solution. Apple's going to have to. It's going to be a lot of work that you that are.

That's very invisible because, for one thing, they're going to have to erase every hint from every piece of marketing materials that such a feature exists. This was going to be a problem because before, because if they just simply, oh well, we'll just like issue an OS release, that's an OS update, somebody turns it off, well, you still have on the website and still have on the box and still have everyone saying that this is a, that blood oxygen sensing is part of this feature, people who, so long as they don't turn off that feature for people who have already purchased it, they're not in trouble with those purchasers. However, the first time someone buys this watch thinking that Apple has told them that this can sense blood oxygen levels, but it cannot. That's when a class action suit is going to happen.

1:05:49 - Leo Laporte
So this is the CNBC from yesterday. It might have changed already. Redesigned Apple Watches not subject to import band, says US Customs. Now remember it was the internet, the ITC, the US International Trade Commission, that banned them. But I guess customs has to enforce that ban. So if customs says no, no, we're not going to stop it. That's good news. And then the courts. So Apple said yesterday it's going to take as long as a year for this appeal to win its way through the courts, so it expects a decision on its request to keep the ban paused during that time. As early as today, I don't haven't heard yet. That's because the federal circuit is still talking, thinking about whether to continue the pause or reinstate the ban. So it looks like Apple.

According to CNBC, Apple argues it's likely to win the appeal and then allowing the ban to stay in effect would cause significant harm to the company. Massimo has said maintaining the pause would hurt its business and reputation and demoralize scientists and engineers. You wouldn't want to demoralize those poor scientists and engineers. It also said yesterday that the customs decision undermines Apple's argument that reinstating the ban would cause the giant, irreparable harm. It's a complicated story which I have not been able to parse, but I think it means you can buy one. I don't know what it means, but it won't have a blood oximeter app on it.

1:07:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly. It will still have the hardware, because they can't redesign the hardware. However, it will not have any software whatsoever that can activate that and, like I said, massimo's position has always been that it's a hardware issue. Apple was making noises earlier and said, oh well, we'll adjust our algorithm so that the software reads it in a different way. They're saying, no, you've got hardware on this device that violates our patents.

Until you rip out that hardware, your hardware is in violation of our patents and, as I said, it's going to take about a year for the legal stuff to wind down and if Apple still loses after that, they're just going to have to bend the whole thing All right, or basically corrupt with brand new hardware that doesn't infringe, or negotiate and sign a deal with Massimo to continue to use whatever base hardware they have. It's going to be interesting to see what the 2024 line of Apple watches have in terms of actual hardware. Are they going to continue to have the same hardware platform under the hopes that they will be able to reactivate it with a software update in January or February of 2025? Are they going to try to, at this late stage, develop brand new hardware that they've properly licensed that doesn't infringe or are they going to it's?

1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
anything could happen between now and October and, if you want confusing, follow the beeper saga. I actually unfollowed the beeper sud reddit because it was just like what's going on and I took beeper off my Android. This is the device that was supposed to let you be a blue bubble, even on an Android device. Initially, you know, beeper was selling or a subscription that allowed you to use a Mac mini in the cloud. Then they found some teenager who had figured out a way around Apple's authentication and so they switched over to authenticating on a Linux server in the cloud or you just yourself putting beeper on your phone, but then Apple said no, no, and Apple blocked it. It's now apparently according to the subreddit and again, I don't I haven't been able to verify this Some beeper mini users are saying because now beeper mini requires you register with a Mac, they're saying that that that Apple's banning their Mac, saying no, so and this is also from a boy genius report, although BGR says the beeper mini has been removed from the store, at least temporarily. Yeah, it's very confusing.

1:09:47 - Andy Ihnatko
It comes from the increasingly desperate ways in which beeper tried to keep this, this app, functioning.

The last ditch effort was to say their first failure point was that they were using a library of valid device IDs to basically tell iMessageServices. So at the first iteration of this app, when you could just give them a phone number and would validate, they were basically drawing from a pool of known valid IDs. Then Apple simply de-authorized all of those valid IDs. Then at the last iteration was okay, tell you what? If you have a Mac, you can basically clone the ID off of that device and use that to authenticate beeper mini on your Android phone. And then now Apple seems to be saying that okay, guess what? Any ID that was used to fraudulently register a non-Apple piece of hardware with iMessage to encourage the, to make sure that the entire network remains safe and secure, we're going to invalidate all those IDs so that ID you used on your working iMessage on your Mac no longer works, because it's been invalidated and now beeper's saying oh, we're just a messaging app, Forget the blue bubble.

1:11:03 - Leo Laporte
That was fun. That was a fun holiday season, wasn't it?

1:11:08 - Leo Laporte
We're just a not very good messaging app. How about that? How about that? Kids, can you use that? So yeah, I'm actually glad I took beeper mini off my Android. I was getting a little nervous I might get locked.

1:11:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I never installed it to begin with because I think I was curious to see how this would resolve itself, but I felt as though this was going to be, this was going to be quite a ride until it resolved itself, and not that I was predicting that something exactly like this would happen that, oh, suddenly I can't use iMessage on my actual, for real Mac. However, it was like, I mean, I think I think what I said at the beginning was that now that Apple has said that RCS is coming, is coming as a supported protocol in 2024, why do I want to have this and to just have a? Just have a blue, a blue bubble for four, five, six, seven months? And also not knowing what happens when I deinstall this app, even if it, even if it keeps working fine. What happens if I deinstall this app is is iMessage going to get confused as to where iMessages should go or even just basic text messages should go? So it was. It was an easy decision on my end.

1:12:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, I guess that's. We knew it wouldn't last. I guess that's kind of over. I hope RCS just becomes really. What RCS could do is replace SMS, and it could replace SMS and Apple's messages, replace it on all these other apps and then we would have a nice encrypted cross platform solution. But I have to point out, these companies really don't want to be cross plat. Nobody wants to be cross platform, apple included and as and as Alex.

1:12:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sorry, I think I might. I think I might have been about to say this thing you were about to say. Given that most of the world has switched to WhatsApp for this sort of function functionality, there's also a question as to how necessary is this? I'm I'm glad that. I'm glad that bog standard phones will have a really much, much, much better from a security and media and experience point of view protocol available to them, but it's not super, super critical. That's why Apple was able to talk the EU into saying yeah, you know what? We are not gatekeepers of messaging. We wish we were. We wish in our fondest dreams we were gatekeepers of messaging in the EU. We are just simply an also ran.

1:13:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that the biggest, the biggest concern for for Android is really the US market, where you have a huge number of of kids under 18 that are on iPhone because of the blue bubble and green bubble, which isn't going to change with RCS, and but I think that you know, anytime you look at companies you look at, they want to commoditize your control commoditize anything that doesn't apply, you know that creates a cost for them, and control anything that creates a revenue for them. So those are, you know you can always tell where they think those things are by what they're trying to control and what they're trying to commoditize by open sourcing or anything else.

1:14:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let's see. Did you see this poster, the Apple Pascal poster? Of course, nicholas Svart, who created Pascal, passed away on New Year's Day and there's been a lot of memorials to him, but this one is a very cool one from Nano Raptor.

1:14:22 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah.

1:14:22 - Leo Laporte
Dana Sabera. Yeah, oh, you know who he is. Okay, they took the Apple Pascal poster and and and turn it into a SVG vector image so you can now get a copy of it and print it and put it on your wall and it's kind of a cool poster. Just shows how cool Pascal was, because the whole language and its syntax is is encapsulated in this one poster.

1:14:47 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, Dana is a great, a great artist and kind of prankster. She posts things to her Massedon account that are like Max, that never were like, that are Photoshop and renders of like bizarre. Just a great follow, if. If you want not a wrap following her right now, but then she built this poster as a PDF and it's the in honor of the Apple Pascal.

1:15:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's a PDF. Okay, nice, very nice.

1:15:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I hate nostalgia in all its forms, but only and I had so many great memories of Apple Pascal that was, like my, the first time I felt like a real program. Okay, maybe the first time I felt like a real program was when I went from from basic to assembler. But when I started using, oh, there's this thing called Apple Pascal, what is it? Oh, my God, this is so, this is. This is like I could be cool by not using basic but not have to want to, like, throw myself into a cold river by using assembler, every single, for every single tiny thing. So, yeah, this is. I'm glad the parts of this history are being preserved and sort of promoted this way, because it needs to be preserved and they need, they need to be, the stories need to be need to be told.

1:15:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and as I remember, this was before objective C, before a swift. This was the language, the high level language, you used in the earliest days. You know system seven days to program your and it was definitely.

1:16:09 - Alex Lindsay
It definitely felt like I don't know whether Andy, my, my journey was starting in basic, then Pascal, then assembly. It was kind of the the step one step to the next. I think I went in that way I'll be.

1:16:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll be honest with you. I was able to get an illegal version of a pirated version of the Merlin assembler before I was able to get my hands on a pirated version of a Pascal. There you go.

1:16:35 - Leo Laporte
Hey, a little note to our fans and friends that this survey is up but only runs through the end of the month and we really want to get every people will listen to every show to respond to the TWiT survey. We do this once a year. The idea is we can't spy on you, because that's not how podcasts work. So we we gather information about you once a year through the survey just take a couple of minutes so that we can not only provide you with content you want but also tell advertisers oh, you know the demographics or whatever in a very general way. We don't take any information about you individually. So, if you would. twit.tv/survey24. I want to make sure MacBreak listeners and viewers get their opinions heard as well. twit.tv/survey24. And I thank you in advance for taking the annual survey. I think I've run out of stories, prematurely run out of coach. Could it be an hour and a half Mac break weekly? No, that would be crazy talk Anything. I missed that.

I'm looking through the OLED iPad production is apparently now underway. According to the supply chain, samsung and LG are both making OLEDs for for the 13 inch iPad pro and the 11 inch. Wasn't there going to be a big, even bigger iPad pro, or was that just a bogus room, just a fantasy? I think a fantasy. So the fact that production is this is from the Alec, which is a Korean, south Korean supply chain rumor site or just news site, but this is kind of a rumor. Lg display recently started production, according to the lack of the 13 inch model, is also planning to start production of the 11 inch model, and Samsung is going into production of the Apple iPad OLED.

It'll be a nice OLED. They're using this is from nine to five Mac, a hybrid glass polyamide film with two stack tandem OLED. So how much would you pay? Two layers of pixels, a set of one, which increases brightness, reduces burn in. Sounds like it'll be a nice display. So if you haven't bought an iPad yet, hang on for those OLED iPads which will. If they're making them now, probably in the spring, you think, maybe it's the room.

1:19:04 - Andy Ihnatko
We talked about last week week before how this was like.

2023 is the first year that Apple didn't update the iPads at all, so this could be and I don't think, I think I think Jason Jason made the point that it was this wasn't anything like pretentious about it, poor tensions about it Simply that, just that's just simply how things got clumped together. But I think that does mean that 2024 is going to be a really fun year for iPads, particularly if I I I really don't know if they're, if Apple's thinking about doing like a larger than 12.9 inch iPad, but oh my goodness, if they did like a 14.5, if they, if they made that, even just not even not not like a, not like a, not like a prison lunch tray sized iPad, but something that was materially bigger, so big that an artist could have like a really good working area plus a really good tool area. I think that would help to redefine what the iPad is, and bring it to the next step.

1:19:58 - Leo Laporte
How big is that prison lunch trays Is it? Is it a yay big? I don't. I don't have much familiarity with the county, county or federal.

1:20:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Ah, that's the difference. Well, I was awaiting trial.

1:20:10 - Leo Laporte
There's smaller in the county, I would say yeah. Also, there is no Applecoin and don't go invest in it. Apparently, there've been a lot of posts on Twitter about a fake Applecoin so simple, so convenient, crypto, secure. Looks a little bit like an air tag. There's an actual coin. This is not the first time. Nine to five Mac points out that fake Apple ads and it's easy to make an ad look like it's an Apple ad have have scammed people. In fact, I didn't know this, but in 2022, scammers created an Apple crypto event video stream on YouTube which got 70,000 viewers. It was titled Apple event live. Ceo of Apple, tim Cook, apple and metaverse in 2022. It was actually just a ripped interview from CNN four years earlier. They covered over the CNN logo, they added logos for Bitcoin and Ethereum and, more importantly, had links to some scammy cryptocurrency websites where you could buy Bitcoin and Ethereum. So this is not the first time, do not? There is no Applecoin as far as I know.

1:21:25 - Andy Ihnatko
So if you see that on Twitter, no, don't also Mr Beast is not giving away one million iPads.

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
Actually he might. I wouldn't don't put it past Mr Beast the beast could do all sorts of things You'd have to do something really debasing to get them, though, and what are you going to do with a million iPads?

1:21:42 - Andy Ihnatko
One person, come on.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
I had a struggle whether to watch a football game or the Emmys on Sunday. I flipped back and forth between them, kept waiting for Apple TV to get its its Emmy the only one one, although sir Elton John did become an EGOT, which is pretty darn good for for EJ. But Blackbird got one Emmy award and and actually it Blackbird, which is worth watching, I think is pretty good the character Paul Walter Hauser, who played the serial killer and really I. Either he is a complete creep or he's a very good actor because he was very believable. Outstanding supporting actor in a limited or anthology series or movie for Blackbird, One of three nominations for the show. It was Ray Leata's last production. He passed actually, I think, in the middle of the producing for the show. So sorry Apple TV plus, Sorry John Hamm, but actually John Hamm is very good in Fargo this year. He will get an award next year, I think, for his creepy role in Fargo.

1:22:52 - Alex Lindsay
John Hamm is pretty good. He's pretty good Did we talk about the did any? Did you cover the changes that Apple has in the podcasting world?

1:23:06 - Leo Laporte
You know, I don't know if this is so inside baseball that I shouldn't. It's been. I've we've known about it for a long time. So Apple and actually I kind of think Apple's Don't tell anybody, but I think Apple's kind of doing the right thing, I agree, yeah. Yeah.

1:23:22 - Jaosn Snell
Basically. Basically it's, it's sensing when you're not listening, right.

1:23:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's really bad for podcasts.

1:23:27 - Jaosn Snell
Over download and then so if you're counting downloads numbers and you've, I mean, but it's that thing. It's like it's bad for podcasts but at the same time it's really bad for advertisers If you're claiming listeners who are not actually listening to your podcast.

1:23:40 - Leo Laporte
So normally what happens when you subscribe in a podcast application? You know we like podcast, although apparently we don't like it that much because it doesn't work great for the club members of something about cashing, so don't use podcast. If you're in the club twit, use Apple podcasts. But for people who don't listen to club twit, you subscribe in a in a podcast client like pocket cast or Apple podcasts and say download every episode. Pocket casts will just keep doing that forever. Even if you stop listening to a show, it'll keep downloading it. Apple, after you stop listening, if you miss five shows, it will say, oh well, I obviously not listening to this anymore and it'll stop downloading it, which actually seems like the right behavior. But remember podcasts like ours, we charge the advertiser by number of downloads. We can't tell whether you've listened, and so if your podcast client keeps downloading it forever, we say well, that's a good thing.

You may want to listen to that someday.

1:24:40 - Alex Lindsay
Well, but I think also that it's, I think, the hardest part is trying to figure out a way out of the whole, like measuring impact as opposed to the number of downloads, Like I think that the I think where we've caught up for the last I don't know decades, that's the right way to do it. But most agencies he's an advertising Two to one.

1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they don't. They're not saying, well, we got good return on investment. They're saying what was the cost per thousand, please, and how many people actually heard it? So the story it comes from semaphore the incredible shrinking podcast industry is that a lot of podcasts have noticed big drops in numbers when Apple did this, which, as I think you're saying, Jason means people weren't listening. Yeah.

1:25:21 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and it's like you know, if you look at YouTube, like if so, if you post a video we were just talking about this on another forum if you post a video to Twitter Twitter and Facebook are kind of like reach, you know they just say everybody saw your video. You're like all these people saw the video. Youtube is like well, they have to watch for 30 seconds and if you embed that video and set it to autoplay, we're not going to count that at all. Right, like, that doesn't count, and that means that they can go back to their. Their numbers aren't as impressive, that doesn't look as good when you look at them, but when they talk to advertisers, they're saying these are real numbers. Like this is, this is a, this is something you can actually count on.

1:25:54 - Leo Laporte
So the New York Times, the daily which, along with Dateline, publicly tatted, reaching over a billion total downloads numbers went down suddenly because people subscribe but weren't listening to every show. And as soon as you stop listening, the Apple stops downloading. And in one pot, the semifour quotes one podcast industry insider nearly every podcast that regularly publishes got an enormous haircut. We have, I mean, we notice for sure I don't know. I mean I think there are a lot of reasons why downloads are trending down. I mean there's a lot more shows. There's a lot of reasons why there might be a drop in downloads.

We've had a kind of continuous drop in downloads the earliest days. Our biggest show this week in tech was getting a quarter of a million downloads every week and it's now down to about half that and I guess you know there's a small percentage drop off. That's kind of, but I expect that it's kind of normal, especially with older shows, because older shows don't have the buzz. They're not Apple doesn't, you know they're not getting a lot of new subscribers, so Apple doesn't put them at the top of the you know the lists those are, those are, you know, based on new subscriptions. So I'm not you know it doesn't.

I kind of think this is normal and I do think that saying well, you know you should continue to download me if you don't listen to them is a little shady. But people who work on audio at the New York times, npr and other major publishers told semifour they were surprised by the September change, which had been years in the making but came with no advanced warning from Apple. So I mean, jason, you're a massive podcaster, are you going to? You're you kind of think Apple did the right thing too?

1:27:34 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, I first off most of my podcasts, because they're listened to by nerds, are listening in overcast or profit cast and not Apple podcasts. But Apple podcasts is still a player. Spotify is a player. It's our number one download. Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot, most podcasts it is number one or number one and two with Spotify.

I think the truth is like, if you don't listen, what a waste of bandwidth, what a waste of internet and the measure is wrong. I mean, the fact is, I would argue, the best advertisers are advertising because the results they get and they, you know, I've had that Matters. Yeah, I've had that case where I've had a podcast with fewer downloads but have more, had the same results as one with more downloads. And as far as the advertiser is concerned, they're the same. Right, they're the same because it's so if you, if you, if you're shedding 5, 10, 15% of your audience that wasn't listening and you're worried about it to your effect on advertising, I mean, fundamentally, the advertisers don't want those people. They're not listening and they're not going to impact how effective your ad is.

Plus, it seems super wasteful. So it's one of those things where, like as podcasters, we have benefited greatly from the idea that the downloads happen and it's not like a YouTube where there's telemetry on everything that you're doing all the time. This is the other side of it, which is, you know, having an app developer say we're not going to waste the bandwidth for all of our customers on a podcast you're not listening to. I think it's fair play. I think we benefited from the fact that everything gets auto downloaded, whether they listen or not. And this is the other side, which is, if they completely abandon you, yeah, you should probably not download until they express an interest in listening again.

1:29:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's one of the reasons the Times launched its own app right.

1:29:19 - Jaosn Snell
Use our app. They'll get that telemetry that right. Bbc did that, yeah, spotify.

1:29:24 - Alex Lindsay
The hardest part is getting people to download the app. Like whenever, anytime a new vertical tries to create their own app, the hardest part is actually getting people to download it and continue to use it. A lot of people will download it for a little while. If they find that content anywhere else, they just stopped using it because it's just doesn't, it's not part of their overall pattern. And so for individual brands, those generally been a failure, like you know, like to you know, because they just people want to go somewhere they can get all their content or a bunch of their content. Not, they get only that one vertical. They just don't have enough content to fill it so that it's worth opening the app, and that's been the problem that individual apps have had generally.

1:29:58 - Leo Laporte
You know, 10 years ago it was clear that the way people were getting their podcasts had changed. It used to be iTunes and you know, hook up your iPod and stuff, and it became clear to me that even the website that really the best way to do it 10 years ago was have an app and of course we tried and failed being spent a lot of money on an app. That was terrible. So we've never really had an app. And then, of course, times changed again and having an app is not an advantage. It's just a way to spy on your listeners. And I still believe in RSS. And you know, honestly, put completely anecdotally, a good podcast with a host that's trusted like ours but like yours, to Jason and many others, and like yours, alec does very well for its advertisers in terms of response, much better often than a YouTube video, which might have higher numbers.

1:30:47 - Alex Lindsay
And again, a smarter, a smarter advertiser is going to understand.

1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
I learned a lot. The problem is, most advertisers don't, and that's a problem.

1:30:55 - Alex Lindsay
I learned a lot from Scott Bourne, because when we were starting, like this week, in photography, scott would have no conversations about numbers. He didn't care Like he was like yeah give us this much money. I'm going to tell him how much they're going to pay us and then they're going to pay us. I wish that still worked. I wish it's the wrong business.

1:31:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't anymore. A lot of it, a lot of buys are done by agencies now and I mean it's just not. It doesn't work. But, and so it's one of the reasons, and so I'm. You know, I wasn't going to bring this up because it is very inside baseball, but it is one of the reasons we are, one of many reasons we are going to our audience and saying, hey, if you want us to keep doing what we do, you got to support us, because we can't count on the ad industry and agencies to support us anymore. That's just not. It's just not the way it used to be.

So this is my plug for joining club to it it's seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get our discord channel, which is a really a lot of fun, just without the shows. It's just a great place to hang out with other like-minded people, people into tech. You also get special shows we don't put out on the regular feed, like that's where we moved iOS today, trying to give it a shot inside the club. Same thing with hands on Macintosh, micah does that. Hands on windows with Paul Therra. We have the untitled Linux show the home theater geeks. We have a lot of stuff that is inside the club. We really want to make it worth your seven dollars.

But the real reason you and you have ad free versions of all the shows, but the real reason you do it, I would hope, is to support what we do and to keep the shows like this going. I don't want to be dependent on the ad market. Frankly, we are somewhat. That's why we've got to lay people off and cancel shows, but ideally it would be direct feedback from our audience. This is what we like. This is what we don't like. Twittertv slash club Twitter. If you're not a member, we would appreciate it. So I think what is next is our picks of the week. My friends, as you continue to listen to Mac break weekly, we're glad you hear this week. Let's kick off the picks of the week with you, jason Snell.

1:32:53 - Jaosn Snell
I, um, I'm going to steal Andy's pick, so, andy, join me, here we're going to do this together.

1:32:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm happy to. I almost said me third and I was like I I.

1:33:02 - Jaosn Snell
I scroll down to put it in, and Andy had already done it.

1:33:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, jason, I'm sure that the very first thing I did as soon as I got to my desk, but I'm glad we're both doing this. Let's, let's go ahead, yeah.

1:33:14 - Jaosn Snell
BB edit 15 came out. Lead developer BB edits in Rhode Island. Like some other people on this, show.

1:33:21 - Leo Laporte
I can see Glyn, his parents. Ladies and gentlemen, that's right.

1:33:24 - Jaosn Snell
So new version of BB edit. I love it. It is not I. There's a lot of confusion about it. It's literally a 30 year old app. It's more than 30 years old now, but it's it always moves at the times. This is a new, major version, the first in a few years. There's no subscription, you just pay for the upgrades, and there's a two more than 200 new features. I think they said in this version, a lot of feature updates.

What I always describe it as is as a text utility. I write in it. I also added Python scripts in it. I know people use it for web development, they use it for editing, they use it for software development and and, like I said, I also use it as a text utility in order to like, like I was.

I was doing a thing this weekend where I needed to take a bunch of data off of a webpage and then parse it in a certain way so I could get it in a spreadsheet and I pasted it into BB edit and I use their you know, remove duplicates thing, and then I used a, a grep pattern, massaging search and like. All that stuff is in there. It's just so useful in so many different ways. It's not an IDE it's not meant to be but it has all of these completely nerdy things for writers and and computer users and developers. I used it today, in fact, with one of the new features of BB edit 15, which is, believe it or not, gpt support.

Ai is here. I know it sounds weird, but like they had this feature called shell worksheets, where you're in a text editor view and you type a shell command and press like enter or function return or control return you can set that up to whatever and it does that as if you entered it in the terminal and puts the output in this same worksheet which, I'll tell you again, is also a text editor window, which is kind of wild.

1:35:06 - Leo Laporte
So they adapted this was a beloved feature in Mac programmers workshop. Yeah, exactly Players, and years ago, and then Rich brought it to BB edit and I was so glad he brought it to BB edit because it was one of the best features. It's powerful.

1:35:18 - Jaosn Snell
Because your terminal is also your text editor at the same time. So the GPT worksheets work in the same premise, which is you can put input into a GPT. You got to put in your API key, so you got to pay for chat GPT. You can select which version and then you can ask it things and it will give you the output.

So this morning I realized one of my scripts was failing when a when it was trying to set a ping to a web hook for one of my automations and I got an error back and I'm like oh, I need to add air handling to that.

I wonder how I did that? And I literally took my Python script from BB edit, pasted it into a GPT worksheet, appended a thing at the top that said hey, this script needs error handling so that when it gets a 502 error it doesn't add this item to the list of things that it's done, because it didn't do it and it should wait and do it again later. And then selected the whole thing, including the script, send it to GPT for and in about a minute it returned a slightly only slightly rewritten version of my script with the error handling inserted at a block that said here's what I did in order to do this, and then I did the responsible thing, which is carefully transfer the lines that changed and you can even compare them if you want to do using BB edit, and you know what it did it. It works. It makes sense, I understand what it did?

1:36:37 - Leo Laporte
Perfect, use frankly. That's how you go. Yeah, exactly.

1:36:40 - Jaosn Snell
And if it didn't work, they also keep the context, the individual shell worksheets. You can save them out and use them in context. So I could have asked it another question and said actually I want you to do it like this and it would have known from the context what the script was and what my previous request has, like GPTs can do in remembering the conversation, so that I used it today. It's a great feature. I know people roll their eyes Some people at GPT but like, when used for the right purpose, it can be incredibly powerful. And by putting it off in the worksheet, I think that bare bones is doing the right thing to sort of like dip their toe in and say we know you want this, because I was about to open a browser window and I was like, wait a second, I don't need to do that, and so that's pretty great, Andy. What else can we say?

1:37:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, basically, basically tag team picks no.

I mean we're both huge, huge, huge, huge fans of BB edit and the fact that, like we've been using Max for roughly the same amount of time and we've been using BB edit for roughly the same amount of time, it really is a testimony to rich and the entire team of developers who work on BB edit how committed they are to making sure that the role of BB edit is to make your life easier. If you have to manipulate text for a living and that could include people who are writers, like Jason and I, it can be programmers, it can be diagnostic people. Really, every time there's a feature that seems to be relevant for anybody who is in that sort of role, it shows up in BB edit and it shows up in a way that doesn't make it more complicated, doesn't make it lose its focus. I mean, one of the first interactions I had with rich was, hey, how come I wouldn't be, when I really wish there were like some sort of a whizzy wig mode, even if I could just see both face and italics, and like, no, there's just no reason for I mean it'd be nice, but that's not what BB edit is about. But every single feature that they put into version 15, and there are a lot of new features. You can really see how many people are going to be able to look at one, two or three of these and say, wow, my life just got so much easier because of this feature.

Like, my first thing was, I do use BB edit for a lot of my writing not all of it, but a lot of it. But a lot of what I do with it is that where I need to take something that I might have written in Ulysses and make it more portable, for to paste it into an email or to do something else with it and to do a transformation on it. That is very, very simple and routine and they just made it much, much easier for me to like apply one of these texts recipes. They've added a simple feature called cheat sheet, called cheat sheets, so that if there's stuff that you just either a need to refer to or like a markdown system that you keep having to cut and paste in, it makes it much easier to keep those things listed and handy. Again, the GPT features are amazing because, like Jason, like it sounds as though we use it for the same thing, for development. It's not that high.

I don't know anything about rust. Could you give Big Me a? Make me like a video game. That's like Donkey Kong that works inside of it. It's more like oh, I need to add this feature and I can either hash this out on my own and take 14 hours to do it, or I can have this friend who really knows Python show me like an example of code that would make this work and that I might have to modify it a little bit. But oh, I see exactly how that works now, thank you. And I'm often running in 20 minutes. And the fact that why that BB edit, the bare bones software thing? Well, why are we making people go out to a web browser and cut and paste that in Wouldn't make sense if they're using it to develop code, that we allow them to get that code and generate that code and modify that code within this app. And that is the nexus of every single decision made for BB edit over the past. What 30 years now? I think 31.

1:40:34 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah 31.

1:40:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so, yeah, it's a 60 bucks. You buy it. No, no ads, no pestering, no, nothing. If there's a free version of it that has most of the features, just not the ones, that will save you an immense amount of time, money and frustration. And, as always, like if, if you bought it recently, the update is free. If you have the previous version, but you didn't buy it recently, you get a big. You get a big discount. If you bought two versions of three versions ago, you will get a discount of some kind. This is why they're people who are just keep sending bare bones software money, because not only great app, not only great support, but they treat you right.

1:41:13 - Leo Laporte
And that's your tag team pick of the week, Andy and Jason.

1:41:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Good job we are the ultimate warriors of.

1:41:23 - Jaosn Snell
I'm B and he is B.

1:41:27 - Leo Laporte
Rich is a regular on the show. He's been on many times, thanks to Andy. We love him, and BB Edit is great. Mr Alex Lindsey, I guess that leaves you. I was going to do an Emacs recommendation, but I'm not crazy so I think we'll do your pick.

1:41:45 - Alex Lindsay
So my pick. I think Oliver Brydenbach has been waiting for this for a long time, which is oh, love Oliver Olivier.

Oliver has been waiting for like 10 years. It's been like a serious green eggs and ham with me, like he's just like would you like it with a goat or with a thing you know, like trying to figure out how to get me to use Mimo, and it was just a different interface and I started to do the gray mattershow with Michael Krasny in Mimo. So basically, what I'm doing Really, yeah, yeah. So I do it in Mimo and we're starting to expand it, we're going to start doing some other workshops in it, and so this is what, if you look at it here, let's see this is just a real quick.

You know, it's just these little transitions that are we had Jocopin on this week, so you're adding video to this show, which was audio early for a long time you were experimenting with it and all of these little animations and going back and forth and you know the opened and all these other things, and to get this, this is all being done in Mimo and we're feeding Zoom via Siphon and Zoom ISO, but we're going to start moving it just so you can do Zoom directly in Mimo Live now and this is what this show looks like. So this is, as you can see, the open here and then all I'm not actually dealing with any of these, I just have these little things down here. So I go okay, well, michael's going to be a solo, well, that's me, that's the switcher that you're seeing right now. But the but, oh, I want a two up, and so it just slides over. I want a guest, the guest to be a little bit bigger and I can kind of play with it there, and so I'm starting to kind of play with a lot of these things. And after I got, you know, you're building all these layers up to figure out what you want, and it's actually become To do the show with graphics and a bunch of different behaviors. It's become really easy, you know, like it's just really I sit there and I set up and I think about it.

On Wednesday night, usually for a couple hours, I go. I'm going to change this, I'm going to move this over here and I'm actually doing the show. It's like five buttons. I just keep pushing these five buttons. And the cool thing again is that Memo Live now will allow you to. Right now, I've been using Zoom. I used it just because I know it will. But where I'm going next is actually Memo can join a Zoom session like this one and grab onto. I can just say well, I want to get Andy and Jason and Leo and each one of you becomes an input in Memo directly. So there's not any. So I can just join as a user from Memo and be able to pull all those in they are supporting the SDK Does it do ISO audio tracks too.

So I think it can. You can embed those into it because of my, because I'm used to it, you don't bother. Well, again, it can do it and you can pull all those ISOs here. You can say I want to record. So if I click back over here, I can add things here, which is that I want to grab the audio there. I can grab, I can record every person.

So one of the things that we're doing for some of these shows we want to start delivering some shorts and use Opus to do it. But we have all this graphics going on. So what I'm going to do is have the set. It's set up so it's grabbing the ISOs, both ISOs of the subjects, and so that I can just deliver that to Opus and have it build some shorts for me. You know there are little one-minute sections that it thinks are cool. That's pretty awesome, and so it is. But you can grab all the. You can grab all the ISO. So what I do to grab the ISO is a little different, because I'm using Zoom ISO, I use Loopback and I use Audio Hijack and I grab onto that, because it's you know, and record them. But I'm going to be moving more and more towards using Mimo to put those things together. I'm actually doing a session at 6 o'clock on Thursday with Colleen Henry, just to ask me anything kind of oh wow, colleen, that'll be a must-listen.

Yeah, that's going to be. We're going to stream it to YouTube on Office Hours Global, and, and so we're going to stream it. But what you'll see me doing is bringing Colleen in over Zoom ISO and putting it into Mimo, and the two of us will just sit there and talk, but I'll be running the show and cutting back and forth and and Colleen will be answering, I guess, questions about whatever people ask Colleen about, which is mostly streaming in the internet, and they'll get answers that will pop their head out. So the but it's a. Really so far I've been doing it with Michael as a person sitting next to him, like I'm over on a desk in my room, but I'm looking at. Can I do this by myself? Can I just do? And then the goal is we're going to do up to about six people in that process. You know that we can kind of how much is it?

1:46:10 - Leo Laporte
It's Mimo Live MI ML L IDE 70 bucks a month. It's a subscription.

1:46:16 - Alex Lindsay
There are different educational costs and different ones for nonprofits. So for the standard one it's a little bit more expensive, but it's a lot of features. I mean there's a lot to it and I think the more I dig into it again. It took Oliver a long time to get me to go down this path.

1:46:31 - Leo Laporte
Oliver Brownback, who's been on the show before he's been on the show he used to come out every year to visit during Macworld Expo.

1:46:37 - Jaosn Snell
These Blinks.

1:46:38 - Leo Laporte
BOINX software. Yeah, they do PhotoMagico and yeah, he's great developer, he's been.

1:46:45 - Alex Lindsay
And there's different versions. I think I'm using the broadcast version, I believe, and so there's different versions and different costs that you can look at there, but it is it's probably the most full feature, the other one that people use on the Mac is Is Ecam live?

1:46:59 - Leo Laporte
Is it?

1:47:00 - Alex Lindsay
This has got more features than there's a lot more to it than Ecam I haven't used. I've only used Ecam a little bit, so I will admit that I can't give you an apples to apples conversion between the two, because I've been using Mostly I've been using hardware. So this is kind of a step for me towards using software to do all this stuff, because I'm usually using Blackmagic ATEMs and a room full of hardware and so I wanted something a little bit lighter at my house that I can kind of A little A boat with a little bit more dexterity that I can go out and work with. I mean, office Hours still runs on a lot of hardware and there's a lot of bits and pieces, but we're experimenting a lot more this year with software and also in the cloud. But this has been part of that experimentation and it's working really well.

1:47:52 - Leo Laporte
What's really interesting is you've gotten a situation where you could do it in software a lot of what you would do in hardware now with programs like this, and it's really cool. We should mention Ecam Live is a sponsor. We're big fans with Doc.

1:48:05 - Alex Lindsay
Rock and everybody. People have been really successful with Ecam and so it is a really I think these are the two big ones that MIMO Live and Ecam are the two big ones on the Mac. So those are the ones for you to kind of look back.

1:48:17 - Leo Laporte
And it's just amazing how much production you could do, yeah, how much you could do in production. Is MIMO Live silicon native? Do you know?

1:48:27 - Alex Lindsay
It is. It is. Yeah, there's been some. I have to look back on it. There have been a couple like virtual camera limitations with Sonoma. I think that's all been solved. But there was a little bit of a don't upgrade if you're using it as a virtual camera. That means if you want to pass it, like a lot of people use MIMO Live or Ecam to go back into Zoom through it, and I don't do that, I just grab everything and have it be on the outside. So it hasn't been a big deal for me.

1:48:49 - Leo Laporte
Excellent pick and we can get Oliver Get him his long-deserved plug. We mentioned iStop Motion, which is an awesome program that they do, it works so hard. I know, I know we work so hard and it really is.

1:49:02 - Alex Lindsay
I'm like I really do like green eggs in here. You know, like he's like the rich seagull of Germany.

1:49:09 - Leo Laporte
or is he French, I can't remember. He's German. He's a rich seagull of Germany. I guess he's probably the closest in elegy. He's been doing that this a long time. He used to see him at Macworld Expo back in the day, oh yeah.

1:49:21 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, he's been doing this forever.

1:49:23 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Alex Lindsey. What's going on in office hours these days? Anything exciting.

1:49:31 - Alex Lindsay
No, we're having a good time. Question yeah, we just had some I mean a lot of the sessions we're Today. We were talking about actually how we made the logo like for office hours, and so it was an illustrator.

Colling did do that with her soldering iron no I did that with what welding torch, I did that with the journey, but it was. But I talk, that's an interesting still for that. But what we did is we talked about we're talking about how we built the logo. What does it take to build a geometric logo inside of illustrator, like at the level that you can use it for print and everything else? And so we talked about that today. Tomorrow, we're doing a mic off. We've got a bunch of mics that I've accumulated.

1:50:14 - Leo Laporte
I always like the mic off.

1:50:16 - Alex Lindsay
There's ones that are $70, and there's ones that are $100 and $300. And we're going to put a bunch of them together and compare them to the mic that I have now and let people think about what, and we'll talk about what we like and don't like on Thursday.

1:50:28 - Leo Laporte
I want to enter this one because I'm not using the. What are you using? I didn't want to carry the PR40 around with me. This is a smaller audio-technica drum mic, but it really I think it's the same large dynamic coil that the PR40 is and I think it's pretty similar. I mean, I have the PR40 as an amazing microphone but that's what everybody else is using, but I think except you, alex. I don't know You're using a.

1:50:52 - Alex Lindsay
I'm using a Stellar X2. But you have to treat the entire room with the large diaphragm.

1:50:57 - Jaosn Snell
No, this is an anointment.

1:50:57 - Alex Lindsay
This is a $200 mic. We actually compared it to the anointment. This is a good example. We compared it to the anointment and decided that we like the Stellar better than the anointment. The anointment was $650. That's the one I use for voiceovers and so we moved to that one. But so we'll do a mic off on Wednesday. On Thursday we have John Ross, who's one of the top surround mixers in the world, so he's going to come in and talk about how they approach mixing for film. So lots of fun.

1:51:25 - Leo Laporte
OfficeHoursglobal. And, of course, one of the beauty parts of this is you can actually participate directly, because it's a Zoom call in the morning. You could also watch it passively on YouTube.

1:51:36 - Alex Lindsay
But if you go to OfficeHoursglobal.

1:51:38 - Leo Laporte
You'll see all the info.

1:51:39 - Alex Lindsay
We have a little microsite. If you just go to askofficehoursglobal, and if you go to that, it'll just you can put your name and your question in any time of the day and then we see them show up. We see them just show up in the morning and we go, oh, let's bring those in, and everyone then gets to vote on them in there so people can actually just ask questions there. So you don't have to log in or do anything else, you can just ask your question there.

1:52:00 - Leo Laporte
That's really cool, a lot of fun. Oh, that's neat. Does that ties into that software?

1:52:05 - Alex Lindsay
you guys did it, does it, does it, ties in. So it feeds back into Makana, which is the software that we have that we Inside of Makana you can vote the questions up and down and chat with other people during the show. But if you don't want to do all those things, you can just ask questions and then we'll put them in. You'd have to listen later to find out when we got to them, but we generally get to all the questions eventually and if you're thinking gosh, I really would like to get this madman working on my project.

1:52:30 - Leo Laporte
You can 090.media. That's his job.

1:52:34 - Alex Lindsay
And I do exactly what we do in office hours and in Twitter. I just do it. We just do it for 090. So we solve those problems. So if that's what you're trying to figure out, then let us know. If you ever need to measure the e-strom, this is your man. I know exactly how to. I have a 3D model.

1:52:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Mr Andy and Ackco GBH coming up Yep, I'm not on this week, but next week, next Thursday at 1245, go to WGBHnewsorg to watch it. Live or labor. Excuse me, listen to it live or later. It is not a labor unless it's a labor of love, and then it's-. You know, when you're doing something that takes 36 hours from late, late nights and lots of research and self-doubt, and then putting yourself in front of hundreds of thousands of people wondering if you're making any sense whatsoever, it's actually quite stressful. Wow, I mean, it's not like work at all. No, no.

1:53:24 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andy and Jason Snell, sixcolorscom of course. In his podcast at sixcolorscom says slash adjacent anything exciting coming up.

1:53:34 - Jaosn Snell
I just feel like we're gonna be doing a lot of vision pro stuff. My upper report card is gonna happen at the end of the month too.

1:53:40 - Leo Laporte
I mean, just stay tuned to fix colors. Thank you for asking me finally, after 30 years, to participate in your report card.

1:53:46 - Jaosn Snell
Well, we haven't been doing it that long, but you were welcome to have you filled it out yet. Yeah, you didn't get my answers. I haven't looked at the list yet.

1:53:54 - Andy Ihnatko
I gotta do it this week, so there's still time. I kind of forgot.

1:53:57 - Jaosn Snell
There's still time, Andy.

1:53:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, I'll do that today.

1:54:00 - Leo Laporte
Right away. I was so honored. I've never been asked before my opinion, so I was so honored I filled it out right away.

1:54:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I did that stupid thing where it's like, oh, wow, I really wanna put some thought into this, so I'm not gonna do this right away. When I'm kind of all frazzled at 2.10 in the afternoon and then it like Well, the reminder email will be coming out in a few days, so you'll get it.

1:54:21 - Jaosn Snell
So anyway, that'll be a fun thing to do later in the month and, yeah, I anticipate lots of Vision Pro madness as well. So check it out. Good conversation about the Vision Pro on upgrade with Mike Hurley this week, that's a nice thing people could check out if they want.

1:54:34 - Leo Laporte
So were you invited? I think you said there were very few Apple bloggers got invited to those days.

1:54:40 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, cooper was there and got a demo. They're just getting the demo. It feels like from July, though, or right from June.

1:54:45 - Leo Laporte
Just the same one again. It's just a little bit more Apple's trying to get some price.

1:54:49 - Jaosn Snell
Yeah, they're just refreshing it. So I haven't had that demo and I did not get invited to New York. But who knows, hopefully I'll get something out here on the West Coast.

1:55:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm actually on the East Coast and I didn't get invited, so there, apple doesn't clearly doesn't like me, but that's okay because I like them and unrequited love is the best, don't you think?

1:55:14 - Jaosn Snell
Oh yeah, that's what they all say. All the poets say that.

1:55:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, my heart is breaking for you, apple, but it's okay.

1:55:21 - Andy Ihnatko
We love you.

1:55:21 - Leo Laporte
Leo, I am just not sufficiently reverent apparently. Also, I'm wearing a bathrobe which, probably Apple's, puts Apple off. I would think we do this show every Tuesday, whether I am in the studio or not. 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. Father Robert said that I could live with him in the Vatican and do the show from his podcast studio on the roof overlooking St Peter's Square, and I am very tempted. There you go, I'm very tempted.

1:55:52 - Andy Ihnatko
You're in solid with the Pope, forever in safe. I'm halfway to the Pope. I'm halfway there.

1:55:57 - Leo Laporte
I got the lights. I don't even need the lights, he's got the lights. I could just show up. And then apparently they have some nice rooms in the Jesuit house. I have to think they're kind of Spartan spare, but I don't know. I don't know. We'll see.

1:56:14 - Andy Ihnatko
In Harvard Square there is a charter house where it's not necessarily an Airbnb. It is specifically for that's part of their charter, the Jesuits and no. So it's not like a cruise ship cabin, it is like bare, but it's more simple than anything else.

1:56:31 - Leo Laporte
I think simple's fine. I mean honestly.

1:56:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually, we want to be quiet and read, or read Contemplative.

1:56:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Yale clubs like that too. It's a very monastic.

1:56:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I had a friend who was working on a novel and decided to like. He knew the Jesuit community very well, so he decided to basically cross the country, staying at chapter houses.

1:56:53 - Leo Laporte
I asked him. I said, well, how long can I stay? He said, well, we had a guy move in during COVID and he never left, so fairly quite a while. I don't know. I'll have to wait till the next epidemic, which may not be too long.

Thank you Jason, thank you Andy, thank you my friend Alex, thanks to all of you who watch, as I said, every Tuesday 11 am Pacific. That means you can watch us live. We open up the stream on YouTube for the shows as we're doing them youtubecom slash twit and, of course, club twit members can watch the live stream. They'll see me get up or cup of coffee before security, now all that stuff. So join the club. Right, that's boy? That's a turn on.

You can get shows after the fact, download them from the website twit.tv/mbw. There's also a YouTube channel with all the video of each show youtube.com/Macbreakweekly. There's probably the best way to subscribe in your favorite podcast client and it's fine with me if you use Apple Podcasts, whatever works for you just search for MacBreak Weekly and subscribe, and as long as you keep listening they'll keep downloading. But you know you want to listen to every show at your leisure. That's probably the best way to do it. Don't forget the survey. twit.tv/survey24. Just take a couple of minutes. Don't forget to join Club Twit. twit.tv/clubtwit. And I am Leo Laporte. I will see you next week. Be back in the studio for that. I think the good Lord willing and the cricks don't rise. Although there is some snow on the ground, there has been some flooding.

1:58:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't pull the tires. Tail, leo, you're leaving. I have to stay here, the Patuxet.

1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
River is overflowing its banks, ladies and gentlemen, even as we speak, but I will see you next week. Meanwhile, get back to work. Break time's over. Bye, bye.

1:58:42 - 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.