MacBreak Weekly 926 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 Ihnatko, Jason Snell yes, he's back. Alex Lindsay they're all here. Jason spent two days at the Apple campus getting the demos of all the new AI stuff, so he's going to tell us his experiences there and a few things you might not have seen on stage in Cupertino last week. We'll talk about all the new features. We've also got some rumors on the Apple Watch New features there as well. And what is it those Apple executives are doing with their legs? It's a little weird. We explain all next on MacBreak Weekly.

0:00:42 - VO
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:47 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 926, recorded Tuesday, June 18th 2024. Hey lady! Do a thing! It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell's back from his mystery assignment somewhere deep within the bowels of, I'm guessing, the Apple campus. Hello Jason.

0:01:10 - Jason Snell
I literally sent pictures to the Discord.

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
I know we showed them the member Discord last week. Yeah, we showed them.

0:01:15 - Jason Snell
While I was sitting inside a waiting area inside the ring. So yeah, there was no pressure. I was just, you know, waiting to go into yet another briefing. They didn't intend for us to spend all that time in the ring. I think they expected that. Only, you know the riffraff, the press would not be ever allowed in there. But you know, things changed and we get to go in and there's many trees. It's very impressive. Anyway, it's good to be back in my garage instead of at Apple.

0:01:45 - Leo Laporte
I want all the details, but we'll get to that in a second. First, say hello to Andy Ihnatko, WGBH, Boston. Hello Andrew.

0:01:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Hey there, hi there, oh there, goodness gracious, it's steamy up here in New England, is it? Oh yeah, you're having. You're under a heat dome. Yes, exactly the dome. The domes are rarely a lot of fun, are they? There's Thunderdome. You don't want to be there, and you don't want to be here either today.

0:02:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually it's not the Stephen King dome, but it might as well be, is what you're saying? Yeah, yes, and also from officehours.global and 090.media Alex Lindsay, my personal studio consultant, and the king of 3D, I guess.

0:02:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think I'm pretty low on the totem pole in 3D these days. I was building some 3D models over the weekend and I was like, oh man, I'm really, really rusty. I don't remember where all these buttons are anymore. So I'm trying to come back up to speed.

0:02:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, there is much to talk about besides what Apple announced last week, but before we get to all of that, including a big breaking story, the information has a scoop. But, Jason, give us your thoughts, your feelings, your impressions inside the ring.

0:03:01 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean the facility itself. It's just amazing. I feel like maybe this is Steve Jobs' greatest product. Like it's amazing I. The scale of it is incredible. It's just a huge facility. The trees, I like. I was there the first time they had the press at the Steve Jobs theater. It still smelled like manure everywhere, right, like they're basically planting everything, so it stunk. It smelled real bad. But uh, it has all grown up and is just gorgeous and there are trees everywhere and the way it's built. You really can't even tell that you're in a city. It's like you're on a little space, a space colony with a big building in the middle of it. And we did a briefing over at the at their fitness center, the employee fitness center, which has, like they took over Bad news for everybody doing hot yoga at Apple last week. Your yoga room was instead where we did an iOS briefing Did it have a certain funk to the.

It did not, it did not. I did a podcast last year that was right off of the locker room and that smelled like a locker room, but this was they were lighting candles or whatever they needed to do to get the funk out, and they did. You bring in the funk and then you get the funk out. Did you ride the little bikes?

0:04:14 - Alex Lindsay
Did you ride the bikes or did you just walk?

0:04:16 - Jason Snell
I just walked past the bikes, but the bikes were there. The fitness center is. Yeah, it's amazing. Anyway, it is like they spent so much more money than anyone reasonably would spend on a corporate facility building this thing. And it is beautiful, like right down to the giant panes of glass that have to be made Like that's.

If I had one thing to walk away from being on the Apple campus, it would be. You get the sense that almost anywhere else you go in the world, everything is constructed lovingly at times from commercially available parts. Right, and the apple campus is constructed you get the impression entirely from custom-made parts made only perhaps for this location and occasionally for an apple store somewhere. It's that kind of vibe. So, like the, often the pictures don't make sense because you're like, well, the that paint of glass can't, surely it can't be that tall and continuous. And the answer is yes, it is. It's the probably the tallest continuous piece of glass being used in architecture anywhere in the world. And like it's just one after another.

But uh, it was cool to have them. You know, let us inside, because I don't think. Like I said, I think the plan was Steve Jobs Theater or nothing, but instead I think COVID really kind of changed their plans and they decided to be good hosts. And they were good hosts. It was a you know, and they kept us busy. We were I was there two days and I was basically there all working the whole time. Wow, two days with briefings and stuff.

0:05:42 - Leo Laporte
Wow. So what did you see? Two days Wow.

0:05:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, they had a lot. I mean, look, I know you talked about this last week. It's all about storytelling, it's all about salesmanship and PR and, in this case, I think, trying very hard to one get across that, no, apple is not behind in AI. We were there all along and we're still there and we're going to be there in the future. And don't worry which I think you know there's still skepticism, and I think rightly so, because so much of it was future tense. But I think, if you look at what they wanted to do, which was reassure, say, the stock market, they did right.

0:06:19 - Leo Laporte
I have a little graph here in front of me of the stock market. This was the, the, this plunge. Here was the day of the event and if you look at the, you know you zoom in. It was an up and down, up and down thing, but as soon as the event concluded you could see the climb here and and apple actually had the biggest uh one day in uh in two years and once again uh eclipsed uh microsoft in its market market cap. Um, or was it NVIDIA?

0:06:48 - Jason Snell
anyway, they in the race for three trillion you know they're up in the trillions yeah, three trillions now yeah, so so that was part of their point was right, just just to sell the idea that apple's on it is the way I've been phrasing.

It's like not that everything's going to be there this fall. A lot of it is very much, you know tbd. But like to reassure people, look, we know and we're on it and we've got a plan and and so the market bought it eight, the market bought and doing eight briefings. They're trying to tell us like right, here's how this will. I mean first, there's a standard os, right, it's like I had a great briefing about watch os where they're literally like we got no time in the keynote, let me tell you what's in watch os and there's actually stuff in there, but they like they just didn't have it. But you know watch os, ios and all that. But also like there was a privacy briefing that essentially was talking about the architecture of private cloud compute, because they want to reassure people as well that when they're taking stuff up in in the cloud, it is more private than what people assume other AI stuff is.

0:07:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, and they needed to do this because they were watching Microsoft's fumble stumble with recall. In fact, microsoft's now announced yeah, we're not going to ship it with the new computers after all.

0:08:00 - Jason Snell
And it's funny because there is. I mean, it's something that I heard in passing and I can't find a reference to it now. And it's funny because there is. I mean, it's something that I heard in passing and I can't find a reference to it now. But one of the things they said is there is this semantic index that they build up, which is kind of like a search engine, search index like Spotlight, except it's for AI parsing. And they don't when they send out a job, they don't send out the entire index, right, they actually choose. The engine, chooses what bits are relevant and then passes them on. But my understanding is that that is encrypted and that index and the only binary on the system that can decrypt it is the Apple intelligence processor that, like, they locked it out so that you can't write a program that rips through your semantic index because it won't let you.

And that was a problem with recall, it feels very familiar to what Microsoft is dealing with.

0:08:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, microsoft. Initially, when they shipped recall, researchers said hey, everybody has access to this SQLite database. It's not encrypted once you logged in and that was a big problem. Microsoft did lock it down more. They said okay, now you have to validate, authenticate with a hello before you can look at it.

0:09:08 - Jason Snell
But I think it's interesting, given given the fractious relationship with a lot of security professionals, the fact that Apple is really saying they want the cloud compute stuff to be verified by security professionals.

0:09:19 - Alex Lindsay
They're going to provide.

0:09:21 - Jason Snell
They're going to provide something that you can run in emulation on a mac and actually watch the server and how it works, and that they've taken great pains and and that there's this whole validation system where it won't even send data.

The ai system on your device won't send data to the server unless it can verify, via a signature, that that server itself is in the list of verified builds of the server, and the idea there is that if they invalidate a build because of a security problem, it will not send data to that server.

So like they're really relying you know. Again, we'll see if it works or not, we'll see what the issues are. But I like the fact that, even if there are issues, they're basically saying we're going to lay it down here and let the security community look it over, because Apple's goal is not to glean information, they want to build a secure system because they just want to buttress their own devices with some stuff that needs cloud compute, not build a whole cloud infrastructure, general infrastructure for the masses. So they're motivated to make this work and hopefully it will, because, you know, I, I like, I like the idea of knowing that even if they're using cloud resources that they're, they're not looking, they can't see it, they throw it away when it's done and it's encrypted. That is. That helps a lot.

0:10:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I was impressed. I was reminded that back in 2016, when a lot of AI features started coming to have photos, that they made this whole policy statement about. No, we're not going to be training stuff on your photos. If you want to contribute information, that will be strictly opt-in. But basically we're going to be maintaining privacy while we bring this ability to identify your family members, identify your dog. So that's been pretty consistent for like eight years now, so that's a nice track record to rest on.

0:11:06 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC shipped today and the embargoes were lifted on these new Snapdragon Elite-based laptops, which are basically Qualcomm and Microsoft's attempts to make an Apple MacBook Air M3. The reviews are very positive. Were you know, qualcomm has stumbled before? Last year, they, they promised a lot, delivered little. Uh, apparently, this is this is living up to its, uh, its promise. Uh, this is zach boden writing in windows central.

We had daniel rubito, the editor in chief, on on sunday. He was very cagey. He was very cagey. I said, well, well, how is it? He said, well, you know, because they were all embargoed until today. Um, I think that, uh, there's some real competition out there, which is good for apple. The thing I pointed out, uh, last week, on monday, was that this was an exercise purely in marketing, because none of these products are going to be available in many cases, not even until later, later this year, after iOS 18 comes out. Right, Jason, I mean, this is this is where they. I mean, were they even showing you how stuff works? Were they able to demonstrate it at all?

0:12:14 - Jason Snell
Well, I I think Apple has been moving for a while now to the idea that when they make an announcement in early June at WWDC, what they're saying is here's what we're working on for the next 12 months. Yeah, and they, they don't all. It hasn't. It's for a while now they haven't all been shipping. However, I will say this was another level of that Siri conversation. The Siri segment of the presentation was the most far future, tense kind of Siri will in the future, siri will do this, and that feels very much like you know, they're just calling it that and they also kept saying this is the beginning of a journey, which means we're not gonna be done for a long time and it's gonna take a while. So, yeah, a bunch of features not shipping in the fall with with the dot o release, the dot one release will probably have a bunch of things missing. That will be next year, and then next year means next year. Right, it doesn't necessarily mean january. It may mean march, it may mean may. Right, it may even be like the day before the wwdc 2025 keynote. You never know with this stuff. So, yeah, a lot of it's a work in progress and I think that's the most clear sign, like I've been viewing it, that there are three different things they announced last week. One is stuff that that they were going to announce anyway.

Apple's been doing machine learning stuff for ages. They've had neural engine in their chips forever. A bunch of their stuff was going to be there regardless. I think there were also some things that they would have shipped eventually, but maybe next year. But because it's AI and they want to change the narrative, they push that stuff forward and said, no, we're going to go to the, we're going to sprint, and if we can't get it in this fall, we'll ship it this winter maybe. And then the third thing would be like stuff that they maybe wouldn't have shipped at all but they feel like they need to because AI. So it's a mixture of those things, but you can see the places where they're behind, where they're sort of Like Apple intelligence isn't in the betas now. It will be eventually, but like it's going to be a long, slow rollout for that and Siri and a whole bunch of other things.

0:14:10 - Leo Laporte
So this was, as I suspected, an exercise more in positioning and marketing. I gave them an A plus for it, instead of people saying, oh look how they're just playing catch up to Android and things like that. They showed a clear path forward, but it's important for we Apple users to remember that none of this stuff is available yet. Some of it may not be available for as long as a year. Yeah, so tell us then.

There's a lot of confusion about it, right? Yeah, Well, just so everybody understands. But on the surface it looks great and I think they're doing the right thing, they're going in the right direction. They're going the right direction. They're doing AI right? I said yes. Last week they Sherlocked the term AI. They turned it into Apple intelligence Very smart, Everything they did was smart. But now I want to hear because it sounds like there was some real stuff there that they didn't get on stage because they were so anxious to show that they were up to speed with AI Tell me about the watchOS, for instance.

0:15:05 - Jason Snell
Oh, watchos. Well, you know, again the poor watchOS people are like they didn't talk about us, let me. But there's like, like here's, here's an example and this is actually. There are a lot of examples of this clearly, the same tech being deployed in different ways across different platforms, and I think that's good. Apple, how many OSs does Apple have? Like no company can have that many operating systems unless it's reusing material. There's just no way.

So one of the things that I was impressed by is there's a new version of the photos face on watchOS and I know this is going to seem kind of obvious, but it didn't do it before which is Apple has built a pretty good ML model for subject detection and you see it in things like that feature they added where you can take the subject and drag them out and put them somewhere and make a sticker or whatever. Well, so the watch is going to do subject detection on the photos of the photo face Previously, like if you wanted a photo or a shuffle through photos on your watch face. You know it's got to show the time right and the time would be like on the face of the person that is or on the subject, like oh, look at that beautiful vista completely covered by the time. And in the next version of watchOS, guess what they do? Subject detection. They realize where the subject is and the time is drawn not on the subject.

Likewise, on Apple TV, that same thing. There'll be a screensaver using your photos and the time will be drawn. The data will be drawn not on the subject so that you can see it. It's a little thing, but, like they are putting that to use, they've got a bunch of like you can pause your rings so you can give yourself a rest day, which is amazing that they couldn't do that before, but they can do that now. They've got a whole like workout stress indicator kind of thing where they judge.

0:16:48 - Leo Laporte
I like that how difficult your workout is, and that's important for old men like me, because you youngsters you want to get a hundred. You know you want to get into your aerobic zone at 170 beats per minute. That would kill me. So.

0:17:02 - Jason Snell
So having it know where my ideal training zone is and showing me that is actually really valuable feature and for a lot of workouts it'll actually guess how, based on the workout, like, how stressful was this? Were you pushing hard or were you not? And you can also override that and say no, no, no, this was actually brutal because I'm feeling a little under the weather and it will adjust that. And then it gives you a sense of sort of like are you, are you on track, or are you slacking or whatever, or are you pushing too hard? And that's something that they've tried to build. That is is interesting. So, yeah, there's a bunch of things in the nooks and crannies, like that first hour was basically WWDC and then that second hour was the AI announcements and you can imagine in a usual WWDC, that first hour would have been an hour and a half or an hour and 45. And so a lot of stuff got put into one of those little bento box slides or not even mentioned at all, like RCS. Yeah, exactly, because, again, they have other videos, they have other stuff that they want to push and it is a marketing event, right, and you showed the stock graph.

It did what was intended to do and, I think, refute an assumption a lot of people made, that Apple was so far behind that. When Gurman was talking about them doing a chat GPT deal, I think a lot of people felt like Apple was so far behind. They were going to use chat GPT to drive their AI stuff and so when they saw that chat GPT is almost an afterthought and everything else is built with Apple's own models, I think a lot of people who assumed that Apple was further behind were relieved and that that was the point. So a lot it's like oh, the watch is nice and all, but like that's not about our stock price. Let's not do that. We're going to focus on AI and the rest of the stuff. We'll just we. We're going to focus on AI and the rest of stuff. We'll just, we'll catch up later.

0:18:44 - Leo Laporte
Incidentally, you know the government also said they're continuing to negotiate with Google for the use of the Gemini Gemini I keep saying Gemini because I'm an old man Like a space. Yeah, it was. It was Gemini after, before Apollo and after.

0:18:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Wally Schirra.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
Wally Schirra and Gemini. Anyway, gemini, great story. Business Insider, which, uh, great story? Business insider, which said in april, as recently as april, apple was begging google for more tpus, the tensor processing units designed for training artificial intelligence, the alternative to NVIDIA's uh products, apple. Here's the story apple's request created a scramble inside google in april when Googlers became aware of technical issues that could have stopped them from delivering what Apple wants on time. It's called an OMG, internally A Google term for one-off urgent incidents that don't quite warrant a code red. A war room was convened inside Google. So you know, while they didn't mention Google, they talked about OpenAI. They're using. It's interesting, they're using Google. They talked about OpenAI. It's interesting, they're using Google. They may also be using AWS.

0:19:49 - Jason Snell
They're using, yeah, to train their models.

0:19:51 - Leo Laporte
To train, not to run them To train them.

0:19:53 - Jason Snell
To do the training on them. It is. It's really interesting. I think I'm sure you guys talked about this last week. It's been a blur, but like I was struck by how everybody was like, oh, apple's way behind on AI and OpenAI. Is this? Everybody's talking about OpenAI and their deal with Microsoft and all their boardroom shenanigans, but like they have incredible power and value and they're like the big new thing in tech and Apple was like all behind. And yet if you look at that, at that presentation, I was like, oh yeah, we've got OpenAI. It's turned off by default. There's a warning every time you use it and there's a warning label at the bottom with every result. It's like it is the most at arm's length partnership. I think I've.

I mean they did the motorola rocker and steve jobs was like not interested in that phone at all. It's a little like that where they're like we have to have it and it's over there, but and then they were also at pains to say, oh no, and it's not the only one. We'll also have others, including Google Gemini, down the road probably, so don't get too excited about it.

0:20:57 - Leo Laporte
Did you see Sam? Though Sam was at the event, I didn't see him he was there?

0:21:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he was, but like it's the least exciting and exuberant partnership announcement I've seen in a very long time.

0:21:07 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I gotta give credit to hugh langley at business insider.

0:21:10 - Andy Ihnatko
One other little tidbit apple at google has earned the name bigfoot among google cloud employees because of how much google data centers it uses yeah, and that that shows you the difference between when Apple talks about benefiting from AI as a company versus Google and other companies like Amazon talking about benefiting from AI, google is, you could say, definitely ahead of Apple in breadth, because they're not just about making the Google Assistant smarter or adding features to their phone operating system.

They want to be in the business of hey look, any company who wants, or any developer, large scale, small scale, global scale, military, nation state. If you need AI software and services, we have the compute power that you can, you can borrow in order to, in order to get that sort of stuff, whereas Apple can focus on just the stuff they need to do. So you could just say it's six of one, half dozen of the other, and, as cheap as it is to say that one company is ahead of another, you know Apple is ahead in the sense that they can focus and they can just do the things that bring value to the product and bring value to the users, whereas cloud is really what everyone else is about. I mean, a lot of people don't even understand that Microsoft's number one source of revenue now is cloud. Oh yeah, a cloud computer, that's what put them above Apple.

Yeah, yeah, it makes as much money as their next three contributors combined, including Windows, including Office, including Xbox combined, as much money as their next as their next three uh contributors combined, including windows, including windows, including office, including xbox combined it's like 40 billion dollars that's also true for amazon aws is the powerhouse, the secret powerhouse so that's so, that's so.

That's why you can't. It's. It's cheap to say that apple has suddenly caught up in one stroke or gee, apple's still behind because they can't do this. No're businesses that they have a business model that is. This is what we need to do.

0:23:08 - Leo Laporte
And I will give credit to Apple, because what they're known for and I said this last week is productizing, and what they did, instead of saying ooh, ai, smart, agi, they productize it to show. Here's how you're going to use it in very straightforward ways, and I think that's what people wanted from Apple and I think that's what Apple does best, and it's also it was just quickly.

0:23:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It was also a very smart move for them to include open AI in the way they did and mentioned Gemini the way they did, because one of their biggest, biggest fears in an AI future is that the iPhone just becomes an yet another platform that runs the an open AI app, or just yet another platform that runs the an open AI app, or just another platform that runs a Gemini app. This is the exact same stuff that they were talking about, like in all the, all the discovery that came about during a couple of different lawsuits. They can't let the iPhone become just another platform that an app runs on, and so this is probably why they're saying hey, look, yeah. And if there are features that open AI is delivering or Google is delivering that we don't deliver, look, yeah. If there are features that OpenAI is delivering or Google is delivering that we don't deliver, don't worry, we're integrating it so you can still be part of the iPhone family.

0:24:08 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that one of the things is that the chat, gpt and Gemini and everything else, that's a release valve for them that says you can do anything with AI that you want. So they don't. Now it takes that again that pressure to do anything fast, out of their purview. They can sit there and focus on what can we do with the phone, what can we do with our own cloud? And then we have this little release that every time we can't quite get to there right now, we just let you go out into the, into the outer, out of the outside of the walled garden. You can wander out there really quickly, but we'll warn you that you're going through that door but, you can go out, but we're not going to keep you here.

You know we're not limiting to what's in the walled garden. We'll let you go out out there. The. The advantage for them is that they can keep on building so they can keep on adding what the device can do. They can keep on adding what the uh, you know what the cloud can do, so they can keep on backfilling all the things that most people are using ai for.

You know, I'm using huge amounts of revenue and huge amounts of dollars to to train these models with licensed, potentially licensed, and controlled environments, um to make them smarter, um, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting as you look long term and we've talked about in the past is what happens if you're just allowing ai to just kind of wander around.

What happens when ai starts eating a lot of its own own own own output? You know, and and Apple could theoretically build something that isn't doing that. You know that that is that is um, you know that's that's managing it. So I think that there's also it could mean, like we're going to see what happens with the iPhone sales this fall. But of course, the I think it's the 15 pro and the 15 pro max are the only ones they say will work with this. So it could be a bumper crop of sales this fall. If people say, oh, I can't you know, or over the next year, as these AI tools come out and oh, by the way, they're not available on your phone, it might, you know, as Apple continues to do more and more on the device, it gives us something other than the camera to make a decision about whether we should buy a new phone.

0:26:02 - Leo Laporte
Because right now Jason, did they address that in your briefings the fact that none of this stuff's going to run on old hardware.

0:26:08 - Jason Snell
No, I mean. It's pretty clear, though right Were they pressed on that? I mean?

0:26:14 - Leo Laporte
It seems like they've skated. They've basically skated.

0:26:17 - Jason Snell
I mean they have a flat answer. I mean Macs, it's all the way back to M1, and iPads, it's all the way back to M1. And then the problem is the phones, and I think this is one of the truest signs that they are not. You know that this happened fast is that it takes a while to build the iPhone stuff and they have the three nanometer architecture going on and, as a result, iphone 15 non-pro won't work.

0:26:41 - Leo Laporte
That seems to be a RAM issue, I think. I think it is a.

0:26:44 - Jason Snell
RAM issue. I think it is a ram issue but it's tied to they. They can qualify those devices right. So the all the m series on the ipad and the iphone or and the mac and then the iphone 15 pro. I'm sure if they had known this was coming when they locked the specs of the iphone 15, they would have considered doing something different. But they didn't and so it ends up here. But I think this feels real. I think everybody feels like this is a real gating that makes sense.

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
But we'll see. It's not just Alex to make more money. It is something that is required by hardware.

0:27:22 - Jason Snell
I thought they would get more heat from.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
Apple's fans. Oh, my iPhone 14 is not good enough. Huh, uh, I was that may.

0:27:30 - Jason Snell
That may yet happen, but I think that apple's got a pretty good story about why it's this way. It's because of the, the, the needs of ai. One detail that I was surprised by I asked them are your? Because the idea of apple intelligence is there's a thing that decides whether it needs to do it on device, decides whether it needs to do it on device or whether it needs to do it in the, in the secure compute cloud, right? And I asked so if I'm an M1 Mac and I look at something, I go, oh boy, I can't do that, I'm going to put that in the cloud. And if I'm an M2 Ultra Mac or an M3 Mac or an M ipad, do I look at that same thing and say, oh, I'm modern, I can do this myself. I don't need the cloud. And they said absolutely not.

In this first round of ai, of apple intelligence stuff, every device is doing the same things on device and the same things off device. There's no differentiation. Now my assumption is that over time that'll change, right, but right now that's what they're saying. So it may be that down the road there are things that older devices, in order to keep compatibility consistent, will farm out to the cloud and a newer device will just do it faster and do it on-device. But right now I think that with neural engine and RAM and Apple Silicon they've got like some specific gating factors and they're not willing to go further back. Because I'm sure somebody could say, look, I've got a Mac Pro with a Xeon processor and all this RAM and why can't I run this stuff? And the answer is basically you know you don't have Apple Silicon and realistically, apple is not going to go back and write this, an Intel version of all this stuff.

0:29:11 - Alex Lindsay
And the other thing is is that you're not usually selling to the person who bought the 14. I mean, there's a lot of people have 14, about the 15 or 15, but that'll buy the 16. But the big up, you have to remember, there's 100 or hundreds of millions of people who have something older than the 14, or the 13 or the 12. And as you start to sweeten that pot and they start. These are the people who may not, may not, think that the camera is enough to upgrade. For Most people that I know just look at the camera and just wait to see what, what are the new things in the camera and should I, should I get it when? If they start seeing some of their friends doing some of the AI, some of the Genmoji, some of the AI, some of the other things, I mean a lot of people are predicting the kids are going to really want the upgrade so that they have this, the cool new thing. So so I think that it's really going from the 12s and the 11s and the 10s as well. There's a that's a huge reservoir of, you know of, of untapped revenue when it comes to doing those things and as the AI. Finally, it's because right now we're getting to the point where you're not going to do much more with the camera I mean the camera's kind of leveling off as to how many upgrades you can give to it.

You know, if you then start to now have AI starting to pick up, you've got another five or 10 years of neural, you know computes and all kinds of other stuff that's doing more and more on the phone. And again they have their own cloud that can do more and more on the cloud to a point where that that chat gpt still very useful but may only exist in two or three percent of what people want. You know, out of the thing and apple can keep on slowly backfilling that over years without having to and they still have the release that you can go into but they could backfill. It's where they're doing most of it in that private cloud. And then, if that private cloud, if the public cloud, if the chat GPTs and the Gemini's degrade at all because of the online sources, people get become more touchy about privacy. All those things play to Apple's strengths, yeah.

0:30:58 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's another reason why branding this as Apple intelligence was such a smart move. I'm certain that that's going to be part of the branding of all new phones, all new devices. It's not going to be marketed as the iPhone 16. It's going to be the iPhone 16 with Apple intelligence, so that you know which devices that are in the product line can support these new features and which ones are going to make you wish you spent another $500.

0:31:22 - Leo Laporte
By the way, apple is apparently, according to Mark Gurman, not giving OpenAI money for the use of chat GPT. They're just going to. They get paid by just being, you know, nominated or something.

0:31:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I think it gives you something more value than money exposure.

0:31:38 - Alex Lindsay
Well, but the thing is that there are people. I mean, if you're going to use the chat GPT and you're going to use it over and over again and you want the pro version, I have the app For 20 bucks a month. Yeah.

0:31:46 - Leo Laporte
I use the app already.

0:31:47 - Jason Snell
You can pay and link it in and get more features, and presumably Apple will take a percentage of that, but ChatGPT or OpenAI gets to do that and that's all true. It's an interesting move, right, because it is paying for exposure, essentially because it's costing them.

0:32:06 - Leo Laporte
It costs them a lot.

0:32:07 - Jason Snell
It's not a cheap thing. Alignment is important. Their arch rival is Google, and Google's got its own thing and Google owns the other smartphone platform. So OpenAI really wants to be on the iPhone. So I can see why they would want to do that and they're playing a long game. Right, and the long game is presumably that you'll find a way to monetize all the AI queries, at which point it becomes more of a search engine style thing where they actually want to pay Apple to have access to Apple's customers, because Apple's customers are good and they are going to generate a bunch of traffic. But in the short term, I do wonder if this is what's holding up Apple making deals with other AI providers, because this is such a sweet deal for Apple where they don't have to pay.

0:32:48 - Leo Laporte
Gurman says Apple's deal with OpenAI is not exclusive. They are already discussing offering Google's Gemini chatbot as an additional option. That'll happen later this year, and they've been in talks with Anthropic as a potential chatbot partner. This is Gurman's take on it and I think he's right here. Eventually, Apple aims to make money from AI by striking revenue-sharing agreements whereby it gets a cut from AI partners that monetize results in chatbots on Apple platforms. The company believes that AI could chip away at the billions of dollars it gets from its Google search deal because users will favor chatbots and other tools over search engines. I'm already using myself. I'm already using ArcSearch instead of Google on the iPhone. Apple will need to craft new arrangements to make up for the shortfall, says Gurman. I think that's accurate. That's thinking ahead.

0:33:39 - Jason Snell
Right. They also mentioned the idea of specialty chatbots, which isn't something we've talked about a lot, but, like they say, they foresee a possible me to use this third party chatbot that is an expert in that area and do it that way, which is also kind of interesting to like spread it around a little bit.

0:34:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I know that for me, my search patterns I've probably dropped half in half since I had ChatGPT. You know I just I ask a lot of details and a lot of things. That it's not so much that I have less subjects, it's just that I I dig into things a bunch and then I do a little searching, but a lot of contextual stuff I get from chat GPT very quickly and I find it to be and again, a lot of it has to do with how you ask the question, how you structure that question, how do you? You know, the hallucinations become a lot less when you know how to ask, which turns out to be the case in the real world too.

When you know what to ask for, you get better answers, and so the so I think that that is going to be the case, and I think that I've already played with some models that are trained on very specific. You know pieces of work and you know obviously they're a lot more accurate and they can give you also exactly where they found those. They can say you know, you, you know, this is the answer. I ask a real, I ask a natural language question, I get a natural language answer and I get a big bibliography of all the places that if I want to read deeper, it's already there, and so I think those that combination is is a really strong one to when you're trying to learn something.

0:35:17 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break. Andy Ihnatko, alex Lindsay and the return of the wandering Jason Snell, our prodigal son. We will break out the fatted calf and talk some more about this and everything that happened, including a surprise announcement or a breaking news story from the information, plus Margaret Vestager and the EU. She's mad as hell and she's not going to take it anymore, and so is Steven Spielberg. I'll tell you why he threw his Apple Watch to the ground All that coming up on MacBreak Weekly.

But first a word from Wix Studio. They gave me a minute, one minute, only to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do from start to finish in a minute or less on Studio Adapt your designs for every device with responsive AI Wow. Expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with a backend and frontend APIs. Generate code and troubleshoot bugs with built-in AI code assistance. Switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages I'm talking fonts, layouts, colors, all with a click. Add no code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. Start a design library. Package your code and UI in reusable full-stack apps. Oh, and one more big one Deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover.

All right, my time's up, but the list keeps on going. Take a look at Wix Studio. I think you'll be very impressed. See for yourself. Go to wix.com/studio. wix.com/studio. There's also a link on our show notes, if, if you're, if you don't want to do any typing wix.com/studio. We thank them so much for supporting Mac break weekly. Leo, can I? Can I say something about your reads? What is that? You're so good at it? Oh, thank you.

0:37:20 - Alex Lindsay
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts. No, I just noticed it Cause I, so I've been walking a lot more, I'm trying to get back into shape. Noticed it because I, so I've been walking a lot more, I'm trying to get back into shape, and, and so I've been walking an hour, hour and a half a day, so I'm listening to a lot more podcasts than I did in the past. You know, because I don't drive or anything else, and I get into these podcasts, these horrible ads that just jam into the middle of the show it's like you're listening to something.

0:37:37 - Leo Laporte
We do it too.

0:37:38 - Alex Lindsay
Now, unfortunately, we have to do it too but like you have, like you real ads, like like I know we try to.

0:37:45 - Leo Laporte
we try to convince people that that's better, host read ads are better than producer read ads, or so much better, or like it's dramatically.

0:37:54 - Alex Lindsay
But I agree it's dramatically better. Like it's just, and I just, I just noticed that while you were talking I was like, oh, this is so much nicer than listening to ads being dropped into the, into the show, because I oftentimes that's the end of my listening of that podcast ever, like when I, as soon as I get hit with it, I'm like, oh, this is going to be one of those podcasts and I just stop. I have 40 podcasts sitting on my thing.

0:38:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's so many yeah.

0:38:15 - Alex Lindsay
I was like this isn't good Because I just don't. I'm working.

0:38:17 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm wondering if Jason noticed that I I was talking about WIC Studio. I said it's the, the web platform, not the. And of course, you remember the days when KNBR became the.

0:38:32 - Jason Snell
You mean it's?

0:38:33 - Leo Laporte
KNBR 680V. The sports leader and I take credit for the. Instead of the, it really emphasizes the, the one and only right.

0:38:42 - Jason Snell
You really hear the underline?

0:38:44 - Leo Laporte
The sports leader. Yeah, that was me. You can thank me for that. They still do. They don't still do that, though? Yeah, they still do that, they do. I want royalties, uh, so what? Just you know, you were there two days. There must be more that they told you that we would like to hear what else, and I don't know what it is, so I'm going to let you choose.

0:39:06 - Jason Snell
Oh boy, I don't know it is. You know it's a bunch of stuff that again it's like why did it take so long to do things like put the icons wherever you want on the screen?

0:39:20 - Leo Laporte
You know what my favorite feature is? And it's buried in accessibility and iOS 18, you can now rename Shlomo.

0:39:26 - Jason Snell
It's bigger than that. It's bigger than that, so you can rename Ahoy Telephone to be whatever you want it to be right. Yeah, you can do that you can actually make it.

0:39:35 - Leo Laporte
Ahoy Telephone which would be hysterical.

0:39:38 - Jason Snell
You can. But you can also have that like you can have commands that do stuff like run a shortcut and have a custom audio command. Oh, that's so you can say. I was playing around with this yesterday Like I could select text in a document and say make a blog post about this. I could say like, huge, make blog post. And it will. It will hear make a blog post and go and run the shortcut and do it. So you can do custom activation words. The only catch with with having your uh assistant be triggered by it is it has to be triggered, wake up and then wait for your command. So the, the uh, the, the lady's name, it's always listing for that and it and it patches in whatever command follows it. Right.

So you go hey, lady, do a thing, and it'll be like yes, I'm doing the thing another good one for this if you say shlomo, you're gonna have to say, hey, shlomo, and it's gonna go boop, and then you got to give it. Do the thing you guys.

0:40:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, it's a little different, that's fair. You do that with other uh voice assistants. Now you wake them and then you trigger them that's fair, yeah, so that and this is built into accessibility. But the good news is apple often does that with features that it's eventually going to make uh available generally and you know if you're, if you know about it, you can go do it. That's gonna. Is that in the beta yet? Are you using the ios?

0:40:57 - Jason Snell
that is in the beta. It's it's not I don't know if it's really working, great, but it is in there. Yeah, that's one of the things that's actually in there. And then, yeah, like the icons, like I don't know, like it's great. It's this constant thing, which is, do I applaud Apple for doing a thing that they should have done five years ago or 10 years ago? Because, on the one hand, at least they did it. On the other hand, why didn't custom? You could, you could custom orient widgets actually before, but now actual app icons, and then the idea that you can, you can lock specific apps, uh, and that you can, uh, that you can hide apps and people can't see what apps are are in the little hidden apps folder until you authenticate. I think that's all good, that's cool.

0:41:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, um, there's there's a bunch of little quality of life things. Can you see the hidden folder? I mean mean like yeah, no no, the way.

0:41:46 - Jason Snell
oh, you can see there. You can see that there is a hidden folder. I think it may be at all times, or but you can't see what's in it. What happens is you go into the. I think the way it works is you go into the app library and it does an authentication and then you can see what's in that folder. But if it's locked, I don't know if you can see that the folder is there and is locked or if you don't see the folder.

0:42:10 - Alex Lindsay
The reason I ask is because one of the things we talked about last week is the potential of someone being able to have signal, let's say, and they're talking back and forth with folks, but signal is hidden and you don't, and like law enforcement or someone, yes, wouldn't even know there was a hidden folder, wouldn't know the signal was there. That's awesome, you know you'd be able to they, they could look at your phone all they want, but if they don't authenticate and they're not- yeah, they're not gonna.

0:42:31 - Jason Snell
They're not gonna see it. I don't know a lot of the details of that. Did they disappear from settings, do they? I assume that they they're gonna do all of those things. It was just a little unclear from the demo because on in the keynote it just they were blasting through right, so they went right right through it. But that is a a really cool idea. And and per app locking too, to be able to say, like I want a biometric authentication before anybody can open this app. So if I hand this to my friend, they can't go, don't you know? I'm just gonna open your mail right, like you can for any app. You can just lock that out.

0:43:03 - Leo Laporte
That's also great uh, all right, these are. These are all things. Do you? Do you? I'm for any app. You can just lock that out. That's also great. All right, these are all things. Do you? I'm sure do not? Have you had springboard issues? People are saying iOS 18 beta is a little rocky still.

0:43:15 - Jason Snell
I mean it's developer beta one people, yeah, like don't do it.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
No, no no, I'm just kidding. I want you to issue the warning.

0:43:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yes, I will do that. It's developer, developer beta one. People don't do it because it will be rocky, it will be messy. They are revising things and there are weird crashes and things that don't authenticate right and apps will refuse to launch. You may need to restart, like developer beta one. I mean public beta. I would caution against. But like, if you're bold, go for it, but developer beta one, don't. But developer beta one, don't, do it. Like, just don't do it. However, here's a plot twist Vision OS 2 beta one is better than Vision OS 1.whatever, just go ahead. If you've got a Vision Pro, why do you even have a Vision Pro? It's to be on the cutting edge.

Just put it on there. It's so much better. The Bora Bora beach environment is awesome. The uh new gesture to bring up the home screen or to see what time it is, is really great uh, you can reorder the home screen. What was that, alex?

0:44:13 - Alex Lindsay
you can bring everything up by turning it over. You don't have to look up the gesture.

0:44:16 - Jason Snell
They invented is really clever. Yeah, so what you do is you look at your hand. Have you ever really looked at your hand, man?

0:44:22 - Alex Lindsay
uh, you, you hold out your hand and you look at it and and a little circle appears.

0:44:26 - Jason Snell
That's the home button and you basically like just go boop and it'll go home.

But if you look at your hand yeah, and then flip it over like you're gonna check your watch. Yeah, a little thing appears and it's got the time the battery level. If you tap and hold while looking at it, you can adjust the master volume of the system. And if you tap while looking at it, you can adjust the master volume of the system. And if you tap while looking at it, it brings up control center. So just, I mean, it's a little esoteric as a gesture, but once you internalize it, it's great.

So, there's a lot of really nice features in watchOS 2 already.

0:44:56 - Leo Laporte
I feel like you're learning some skills that you may really not be able to use much in the future.

0:45:03 - Jason Snell
No, it's going to be great, leo. What are you talking? About nothing, I don't know what you're talking nothing uh, did they talk to you?

0:45:10 - Alex Lindsay
did they talk to you at all about the black magic camera?

0:45:12 - Jason Snell
they did not. Sorry, we're super excited. They knew I wasn't you, but if I was you they would have talked a lot about it, but they I did not get alex should I start streaming in uh in spatial in 3d.

0:45:24 - Alex Lindsay
It would be hard to do with with zoom inputs, but but I think that, um, we'll definitely. I mean I'll. I'm already doing some spatial streaming and I find it to be like with just the phone. You know, stream. Voodoo now has a phone app that will stream directly to a headset and so I've been starting to test that and it's pretty cool, like it's pretty cool, like it's. It only works in a very invite you, it's not like you're going to shoot football with it. It works at five to 15 feet, like. That's the soft place where it looks great.

0:45:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why I think this podcast would be perfect. We just put one in the middle. There you don't have to come to the studio.

0:45:58 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the hard part is figuring out. What do I look like in 3D? Unless I was able to send you, I could send you a stereo?

0:46:03 - Leo Laporte
No, that's what I'm saying. It could only work if everybody's in studio. I don't think you have avatars.

0:46:09 - Alex Lindsay
Although you could do it with your monitors, so you could have the monitors be there. We can do that, yeah, but would that make it 3D?

0:46:15 - Leo Laporte
I mean, is it your 2D in the monitor?

0:46:18 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think there's, but will feel 3D. It'll feel like you're sitting there. Okay, that'd be kind of fun to test Like you're a live audience. We did that? How many years ago? 15 years?

0:46:27 - Leo Laporte
ago with a Dolby Surround audio.

0:46:30 - Alex Lindsay
I did it with an Ozo. Oh, and we did it with that $30,000 camera that you had there $60,000. Thank you very much, and now I have a little phone that can do it as well, yeah, and to an audience of thousands, which is fantastic. We should do. You know, Daring Fireball did one we should do a twit with, Only if we can do it better.

0:46:54 - Leo Laporte
because you were talking before the show about Daring, you felt like that one didn't get really.

0:46:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think we could do pretty well. Okay, I think we can be competitive. So let's take that. Let's maybe even look at this Sunday or next Sunday. Oh, this Sunday, okay.

0:47:10 - Jason Snell
It would have to be this.

0:47:10 - Alex Lindsay
Talk to Nino. Do you have any guests coming? Talk to Benito Do you have any guests coming?

0:47:13 - Leo Laporte
this Sunday. Oh, you know, what we should do is we should plan it for the next time we're going to have a live studio panel.

0:47:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, when you have have a couple people on the panel. Yeah, it'd be more fun let's, we'll talk to benito he produces I know when that, when that makes sense but but we can do it with the phone, and then what we can do is anybody who has a headset can watch it. You know, like it's like we can just put out a link, it's just you put out a link and you just watch the link.

0:47:34 - Leo Laporte
Special vision pro this week in tech roundtable. Is it what? Does it work with other headsets or is it only vision pro? Right now it just works with the vision pro. Okay, emmerich says he remembers the dolby audio version and really enjoyed this surround.

0:47:47 - Alex Lindsay
You had to have dolby headphone, which nobody fewer people had that than vision pro, for sure although it worked now, like it would work now because it's spatial because, yeah, spatial is, easy, easier I could do spatial I might be able to do it, depending on how far away we might be able to do ambisonic to binaural, that'd be really fun.

0:48:07 - Leo Laporte
You know, somebody actually asked on Ask the Tech Guys and I should have asked you, but he has. He had stuff that's spatial but he doesn't want to listen to it. Did you have to have an Apple thing to listen to spatial? I said, well, it's Dolby Atmos, You're not going to get the head turn stuff that's Apple specific, which is super annoying in my opinion. I don't like the head turn. I won't miss that. Yeah, I don't like that at all, but you would get the surround sound from Dolby Atmos.

If you had a Dolby Atmos capable player, right yeah.

0:48:34 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, do you have to reformat the files? It has to be a format.

0:48:46 - Leo Laporte
It has to be a. They can read it. It's.

0:48:47 - Alex Lindsay
There's a bunch of, I think blc on the iphone does in fact handle uh it might from yeah, but it's like, it's like it, but it is really a very apple-y thing. The streaming streaming to it can be done to stream to android windows, but they made a bunch of choices about what they support that make it really right well, let's talk about the cross-platform RCS.

0:49:06 - Leo Laporte
It was one little tiny thing on the bento box but I think to a lot of people it's a very important move by Apple to support this rich communication system. That is not a Google-specific system although Google did buy one of the big RCS companies but the phone company also has to support it. You know all the platforms have to support it and by Apple, moving to RCS gives them a little bit less of a lock-in with Apple messages. Did you get to see any RCS, Jason, while you were?

0:49:38 - Jason Snell
inside the ring.

0:49:39 - Leo Laporte
No no.

0:49:42 - Jason Snell
They didn't talk about it at all. No, no.

0:49:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, why are you so dismissive? They didn't talk about it because why would they? They're?

0:49:54 - Jason Snell
sort of being forced to do it. They don't want to do it. They don't Absolutely being forced to do it, yeah, and aren't excited about it, yeah.

0:50:02 - Leo Laporte
Okay, yeah, will they undermine it, you think, or will they actually?

0:50:05 - Jason Snell
do it right. Here's your RCS, and it remains to be seen. It sounds like it is sort of available on the first beta, but not like super clear right now, so it's unclear whether it's not fully there yet.

0:50:18 - Leo Laporte
And then encryption has not yet been implemented between platforms. Apple doesn't yet send read receipts for group chats, nor are the read receipts sent by Android visible in groups on the iPhone. The receipts do work in single chats. You do, I think, get the three dots when typing dots. The most important thing from my point of view was that the photos and the video were transmitted at a higher quality we should point out, not full quality. They're not going to be full quality, but they'll be better than than they have been.

0:50:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it's still. It's still a carrier defined communications method, so they can, so they can basically put limits on these things. That's why it was hard to figure out what. What was the highest resolution photo you're going to get from mms is because at&t will limit it to like 1.2 megapixels.

0:51:06 - Leo Laporte
Verizon has a different standard verizon doesn't even support rcs on the iphone yet, yeah, so yeah and yeah.

0:51:13 - Andy Ihnatko
so the, the person, the people who've gotten it running through just a few black magic, re on the on the beta. They say that they've gotten it working with t-mobile and at&t. Uh, I'm surprised that of stuff that's actually working, I was very surprised that a user on Twitter by the name of Dinak G actually says it has screenshots of file transfers working, which I did not realize that these are not things that they've actually enabled for public consumption in the beta. So maybe they were just playing with their implementation and a lot more things will happen. A lot fewer things will happen when it actually gets released.

But the surprising thing is that when you look at the specification for the kind of RCS that Apple's committed to or, excuse me, that Google has said, google said in back in October on a panel that the kind of RCS that they're at least going to committing to the business profile and the profile itself actually doesn't demand a whole lot. It doesn't even demand read receipts or high resolution pictures. So Apple is very, very free to say, oh yeah, fine, we'll support RCS and give us absolutely nothing. However, it looks like they're at least the version that they've made, that they've exposed in the public beta has a lot of stuff no end-to-end encryption, like you said, but Apple has already said that one of their sticking points is that they don't like the end-to-end encryption that Google is laying on top of RCS for the service that they're providing to carriers, and they said at least that they were hoping to collaborate on an end-to-end encryption standard that they do like and that they can support. So they might not support end-to-end encryption standard that they do like and that they can support.

0:52:51 - Leo Laporte
So they might not support end-to-end encryption at first, but maybe we'll get it in a year or two or three or whatever. Well, that malicious compliance has not done Apple any favors in the EU, at least when it comes to the Apple store. The Apple has numerous very serious issues, according to Marggarita Vestager. She talked to CNBC earlier today. Under the Digital Markets Act they are going to it sounds like go after Apple and get them to modify what they've offered. We have a number of Apple issues, says Margarita Vestager I hope I'm saying her name right. I find them very serious.

I was very surprised that we would have such suspicions of Apple being noncompliant. Oh boy, oh boy. Apple are very important because a lot of good business happens to the app store, happens through payment mechanisms. So of course, even though you know I can't say this is not what was expected of such a company, of course we'll enforce exactly with the same top priority as with any other business, and the conclusions of the probe, which is ongoing, will be revealed, hopefully, soon. According to Financial Times, meta is also under the microscope for not complying in the spirit of the dma. There are serious fines, but of course both apple and meta would have a chance to respond to any uh complaint and apple didn't really have a lot of incentive to over deliver, so you under deliver.

0:54:19 - Alex Lindsay
You see you error correct based on what they say you can and can't do. Apple probably knows lots of things they could do more than what the eu knows, and so they were like, well, well, here's the minimum. You tell us what you want and you know the fines of I think it's a billion dollars or something like that the time it takes to adjudicate this entire case, to go from start to end. If it ends up being a billion dollars, if it stays a billion dollars, Apple will make more money in the EU than it costs to delay it for another year. You know so. So I think that it's. You know. I think Apple is doing this about the way you would expect. I'm surprised that she's surprised.

0:54:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I think we all expected that this is a brand new, very, very sweeping set of laws. It's going to take time for people to figure out what's what's workable, what's not workable. And, of course, apple you're right, they don't. There's no chance that they were going to like accidentally over comply. They were going to basically, they're going to test the electric fence, find out which which ones have give you less of a jolt and then see if you can break it there. Um, but was interesting that? So this is based on a financial times uh report from last week, and their sources basically say that the center of the EU's complaint is that it's all about steering obligations, like the ability for developers to reach out to customers of its apps and offer them special deals and special incentives outside of Apple, which doesn't seem like a really technical thing for Apple to comply with. So hopefully this is something where they're like okay, fine, we'll put this new boilerplate into the old boilerplate.

But it seems like an easy thing for them to comply with and give up on.

0:55:58 - Leo Laporte
In a related report today, the Financial Times says Apple and the EU have probably come to terms on the tap and go payments probe.

So this is a kind of an example of what, down the road, you might expect from Apple. Apple says has offered and the EU apparently is about to accept providing developers with free access to the NFC on technology and iOS devices without having to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet. That was the bone of contention. Brussels officials, the Financial Times says, have been testing these measures, which Apple has offered to keep in place for a decade. Settlement likely in the next few weeks, said three people with knowledge of the matters, probably the same three people they talked to last week. I would guess this would avoid sanctions for Apple. So it looks like Apple has in fact settled with the EU over one of the things he was complaining about, which is the use of the NSC chip in the iPhone, which is good. You know I don't have high expectations, but it'd be nice if Apple extended these concessions to the world, the entire world, instead of just the EU.

0:57:03 - Alex Lindsay
But I guess each government's going to have to force them I mean, I think we can go back like if someone told me something to do, something that I didn't want to do, I would do the absolute minimum.

0:57:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, they have, you know, like they have, I mean like is it a good look though? I mean all approach, though I guess I understand that.

0:57:17 - Alex Lindsay
But I mean, if you ask me to do something that I think is dumb and stupid and I don't want to do it, whether it it is or not. But the complaint was if we open NFC, it's going to be a security nightmare.

0:57:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, they're now doing it in the EU. Let's see if it's a security nightmare. I mean, I think that the reasons for not doing it are BS, and this is just going to show it up as BS, and they're still going to not do anything about it.

0:57:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, on that subject, why do you suppose that, if they were facing regulatory pressure to support RCS in China and elsewhere, why not just support it in China? Why not just support it in whatever country that's requiring it? I imagine that this has been a long, long argument inside Apple for years and years and years, and this was finally the straw that allowed the one side to say you know what, it's time, let's just. Let's just give people good quality.

0:58:09 - Leo Laporte
It also may just really be complicated because you have people messaging across borders. So if I'm messaging somebody in China, they have our CSI. I don't.

0:58:19 - Jason Snell
That's not going to work.

0:58:20 - Leo Laporte
Whereas payments they're either in.

0:58:22 - Alex Lindsay
you're either in Brussels or you're not, so I think it's easier to geographically restrict that, and also US regulators use RCS as one of the things that they're talking about. So, getting ahead of it and saying, hey, we're doing it and look at what we're doing and everything else, while you see them continue to race forward on tools for messages that aren't going to work in RCS, I mean, what you're probably going to see is an explosion of extra tools and cool little things. That because again, this, I mean we should not understate how important 87% of kids under 18, you know, if they get, if they, if they can hold that for a couple more years, that's a devastating impact for decades because they're not going to leave the platform.

0:59:02 - Leo Laporte
It's also a little bit split personality. So the Steve Jobs side of Apple says screw you. I'm going to do as little as I possibly can and I'm going to try to get around this. Tim Cook is much more of a diplomat. In fact. The rumor is, according to Apple Insider, that he snuck out of WWDC early on Thursday to meet with Donald Trump. That wasn't just him alone. There were 60 other business executives in that meeting. But Cook's very much aware that if Trump gets elected in the fall that he's going to have to deal with a Trump administration, and so that's something they want to get ahead of. I don't even think it's have to deal with?

0:59:39 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I mean, like I think that the problem that Tim Cook has is that politically I think he's probably much leaning much more towards Biden, but from Apple's perspective, Trump would probably be better than everything that Biden has put out as far as FTC, SEC, all those things.

0:59:54 - Leo Laporte
All the billionaires love the Donald because they love the Donald more than they love democracy, but they love the Donald.

1:00:01 - Alex Lindsay
But I think that Tim, you know, I think he probably leans more towards almost every policy that other than policies, towards Apple, almost every policy the Biden administration stands for. But but I think that he is shrewd in the sense that if oh yeah, I'm saying he's playing, trump, winning is probably good for most of these things, because most of these things will all disappear.

1:00:21 - Jason Snell
For four years he's come to that Mac Pro factory right Like it's politics. It's politics and Tim Cook has to be a politician.

1:00:27 - Andy Ihnatko
besides that, Apple is for sure it was and I think, if Tim Cook were to like, even saying I'm sorry, I am literally scheduled to give a talk for the future of my company that hour. Mr Trump, I cannot be at this meeting. He would see that as an immense slight.

1:00:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you can't do that to the job. No, no.

1:00:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:00:48 - Andy Ihnatko
And it wasn't. It wasn't, remember. It wasn't just the that that he that Tim Cook allowed allowed the factory to be used like as a, as a PR thing for, for, for, for a Trump appearance. It was also at the other, I think, the first couple of months in office, when he had like, hey, look at me meeting with all these tech CEOs, just like another business titan Guess, who was sitting literally at the right hand of Donald Tim Cook. Yeah, and I mean last year he did. I mean it is, it is his philosophy. Last year he gave an interview with GQ and he was asked questions about that kind of thing with GQ and he was asked questions about that kind of thing and he said, like quote, I actually think it's more important to engage when there's disagreement than when there's agreement, which is a very, very smart thing to do, particularly if you're a CEO, and definitely not something that Elon Musk agrees with, even partially he's been.

1:01:37 - Leo Laporte
you know he's been toasting Xi Jinping as well. I mean, this is what you do if you're the CEO of a mega corporation. As distasteful as it might be. Here's the I've been teasing it all day, the exclusive. From the information this came out this morning, apple suspends work on Next Vision Pro, focused on releasing cheaper models in late 2025. They've told, apparently, at least one supplier this is from wayne ma and chaner lu that it has suspended work on its next high-end vision headset. An employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the vision pro said now this is a pretty flimsy story, but yeah yeah, the supply chain.

1:02:18 - Jason Snell
I mean that is a flimsy, even for a supply chain rumor. That's flimsy because we don't really know, like oh they told you that. Did they like, they're like like it's not you, it's me.

They told them and then they went. But I will say I I mean, is there anybody who doesn't think the right approach for apple going forward is to try to get a vision os device down in price from 3500 instead of making another high spec model that's maybe even more expensive than that? No-transcript. Like there are going to be things that are going to be intriguing and then people are going to see the price tag and they're going to blanch. And if you can get that, even if it got it down to a thousand or fifteen hundred, even it would be a better argument to make than thirty five hundred. So if they could do it right, because the big cost is those displays, but if they could cut the cost and make it cheaper, I feel like that's absolutely what their priority one should be.

1:03:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I think the biggest warning sign has been Vision Pro has been in the hands of any developer who wants one for months now and we've yet to see anything. I don't even want to call it a killer app, but an app that emphatically says wow, I'm so glad I bought this. I can't do this with any. I can't do this with any other device on any other platform, certainly can't do this on my iPad, certainly can't do this on my, on my Mac book. I it's, it looks like it's.

It's a very, very, very slow process of having the developer community and users figure out what is this for, apart from hey cool, I've got a huge virtual display, which is a very useful feature. Hey, cool, I've got 3D gaming and 3D experiences Again, very, very cool, very, very interesting. But Apple has yet to really make the argument for yes, but why does this have to be a $3,500 device? Why can I not do the same things with a device that costs half as much, a third of a much, a sixth as much? A lot of people are? I mean, I have used the Meta and I've used the Vision Pro, and I mean just for a half hour to an hour, but I can appreciate that this is that the Vision Pro is much, much better, but it's not the reason why I would spend an extra $2,000, $2,500 on the Vision Pro. I would go home with this other device and $2,000 in my pocket.

1:04:53 - Leo Laporte
Interesting. Maybe a more interesting tidbit from this Wei Ma story and the information is that in November, shortly after Apple announced the Vision Pro, meta began work on a high-end headset internally codenamed La Jolla. Yeah, I have the MetaQuest, or I had, I gave it away. Does somebody take that, john? Do you know? In our Leo's Garage sale Did anybody get the MetaQuest? Did you get it? No, you don't know who got it. Anyway, I used it a couple of times. My son used it a lot more. He played that football game. But I asked him when we were cleaning out. I said, hey, do you want me to keep this MetaQuest Pro? And he said no, $1,500. But apparently Meta's been building another, more expensive one.

1:05:49 - Jason Snell
They had killed the Quest Pro, so maybe Apple is driving a market of some kind.

1:05:55 - Leo Laporte
There is one more piece I'll add before I get to you, Andy. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision Pro before the end of 2025. A person involved in its supply chain and a person involved in the manufacturing of the headset said so. Now they have two sources on that one. Apple had originally planned to divide it into, as you know, two high end line and a low cost line, and now at least we know for sure that the low cost line is is is still planned, with fewer features, before the end of 2025. Andy.

1:06:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I just want to quickly say that there's it's an unusual market and that there just seems to be two, uh two ends to it and no middle.

Uh, you can see it, yeah that's true, I mean the market has said that if you, if you give me a good $500 general gaming and VR and virtual display device, you'll sell it. If you've got a good $3,500, $4,000 high-end device, you'll be able to sell that to industry. You'll be able to sell it for training. You'll be able to sell it to the medical industry. You'll be able to sell it to, again, high-end volume users that need it for custom operations. But there's no place in the middle for an expensive device that is targeted towards consumers. It doesn't seem to be there just yet.

I would be surprised if Apple got out of the high-end market entirely, because that's a great thing about the companies that need to buy 1,000 or something to cut their training costs. They will spend $3,500 a copy if they can justify the savings and training expenses, because training expenses are killer to those industries. But again, they're not getting the sort of thing where you go to Apple Park there's a big event where everybody's there for keynote and you see lots and lots of people wearing Vision Pros in the audience. I didn't see any. I don't think I saw any. We're asked this the first Google IO after Google Glass was out. You saw plenty of people wearing Google Glass. I don't know if that's particularly significant, but I thought that's interesting.

1:07:53 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that I find the headset actually easier to wear than the Google Glass. For some reason I wore the Google Glass a lot and the problem was it always felt like it was pulling down on one side of my head and it just made me a little crazy over time. But I think that the challenge that Meta's had, the challenge that Apple's still having, is ecosystem, and so the issue is is how do you develop content for a headset, and it has still not been that easy to do. I think that we see hints at what's possible. So I think that part of that ecosystem I think you know Apple is not the first company to ask Blackmagic to make stereo cameras or 360 cameras or other cameras. Apple was just able to get that over the hump. You know of them doing that and that's able to get that over the hump. You know of of them doing that, and that's going to be a big piece of it, because seeing video I know that most people haven't seen that yet, but seeing video at 90 frames, a second, 8k per eye, is going to look way different than what people are used to in this 30 and 60 frame per second, 4k per eye, and it will be something that people that that will be hard to do, almost impossible to do at a lower price, because it's it requires the processing to to see it, and for many people it won't make sense to do that. But for there'll be. I think there's going to be a large enough market for that that there will be enough to make the headset the.

The other side of that is, you see, hints like so, for instance, I still think that JigSpace is a perfect hint to what is possible when it comes to education and training and so on and so forth. The problem is, jigspace is way too expensive to develop for and it is. It is difficult and it requires, like talking to them. I mean they should be building that kind of functionality into Keynote. That kind of functionality into Keynote, like you know, and so you know, keynote now takes USDZ, you know, and Pages now takes a lot of, you know, usdz, being able to do a simple explode operation, which means that I click on a button and a device opens up in pieces or breaks or, you know, goes to another configuration.

This stuff is the kind of thing that becomes really interesting when you can walk around, when you can talk to other people when you can. If you look at, if you look at the JigSpace stuff there, the, and it works, and it is one of the most impressive apps on the Vision Pro in my opinion, which is that you can turn some things on, some things off, make them partially transparent, blow them up. You can draw in 3D around the objects and they're working on. You know collaboration with that as well, but it is, um, you know, for when it comes to education, when it comes to understanding how to do something, when it comes to those kinds of things. These are the things there, but right now, the problem is is that it's expensive and painful to make the content for that operation. If it's something that anybody could throw together in keynote, it would change.

1:10:32 - Leo Laporte
I think it would change how people look at those about what that, what that looks like I did the uh I did, borrowed uh Micah's vision pro and did the uh race car, uh jig space it was. It was very cool.

1:10:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean it's cool, like you know but see my, but my, my, my issue is that. My question is that is Apple just barking up the wrong tree? To begin with, that's I mean wired, wired, had another, had presented yet another one of these articles I've seen by people who are using the meta way band rayfarers, wayfarers and praising them to high heavens. Not being and it's not a vr thing, it's just simply a pair of glasses with with cameras in them and really, really good uh audio embedded into the side. Pieces cost 300 bucks. It looks like a pair of Roy Arbison Wayfarers.

It doesn't look like particularly weird, but the pieces that I've been seeing, I've been reading about, have got me kind of excited about maybe getting a pair to try them out, because the the the intelligence of just being able to say hey, hey, moishe, I think. I think it's a. It's a different trigger world. But hey, moishe, what am I looking at right now? Or what kind of car is this I'm looking at? And being able to give you an answer, just simply. As I've been saying for a long time, talking to a smart assistant through audio is a big deal, and adding a camera to that is a bigger deal, and you talk about something that you can wear. You don't feel like an idiot doing it. It provides a very, very useful function, even just as an audio device that you're wearing while it's looking, listen to podcasts or whatever while you're walking or working out. That's a very, very I really like the way. Yeah, yeah, and add just a little tiny little embedded screen, kind of like what Google glass had, so it can simply give me answers that I don't necessarily have to listen to. Give me visual answers, like here forward and to the left. Here's some directions for you.

That is a great product and that's I'm not saying that's a waste of time to think about. Oh, but when the greater content comes from Vision Pro, everyone's going to love that. And then the higher frame rates and the higher resolution is going to be really, really great, and the higher responsibility. I don't doubt any of that. But the question comes back. I'm just not convinced that Apple has even figured out the right way to go with this kind of technology. I think they're not developing anything that anybody is going to want to put on their face for any real amount of time, whereas this is something that, just like you see people wearing their AirPods without even worrying about what they look like with AirPods everywhere. This is the sort of technology that could take that to the next level, and I really wish that Apple were looking at that instead, because it seems like a much more.

1:13:10 - Jason Snell
Why, instead of those products are not even remotely alike. One of them is a computing product, it's basically a VR product that's converging one way, and the other is essentially AirPods with a camera that you wear on your face. I don't think it's an. Instead, I think both of those things are converging at the same place, which is your face, from different directions, but they're completely different product categories, of course, completely different product categories, of course, I do think once Apple gets their story sorry, I said her name the Shlomo story.

1:13:41 - Leo Laporte
in order with their new stuff, all of our assistants have to have names from Fiddler on the Roof.

1:13:44 - Jason Snell
I'm just saying it's just a rule. It does unlock for you a lot. When they get that story in place. It unlocks a lot of wearable stuff that they're not currently doing. Airpods has been a place where apple's actually really been ahead. I think I I would actually be surprised if apple weren't trying out the idea of something like the meta ray bands, because they could use their audio pods are halfway there yeah, and then you get a camera because there are reports about like oh, they're trying to put cameras on airp.

It's like how many people have hair or facial hair or actual hair that just cover, like the place?

1:14:20 - Alex Lindsay
to do. It is up here, right.

1:14:22 - Jason Snell
And so, but that's a wearables, home and accessories category that I think makes sense for them to add, expand beyond the AirPods. I think that is a direction that they probably are experimenting with internally. It's just, you know, they're coming. There's the lightweight accessory device you wear on your body and then there's the computing device that ideally gets lighter and lighter and lighter and eventually is something you can carry around. They seem very they're coming at it from very different things. So I don't think it's an either or, but I do agree Apple should be really interested in getting a camera into the loop, because audio is nice. But if your AI assistant can see what you're looking at, that unlocks a lot of potential. Whether there's a screen in that thing or not, I feel like there's huge potential there once it can see as well as hear.

1:15:12 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that for me and I don't know how Jason's experience is related, but a lot of people that I know and have an experience similar to don't know how much Jason's experience is related, but a lot of people that I know and have an experience similar to mine is that when I put the Vision Pro on, there's one thing it doesn't do. That I think is interesting that is now in the new version. That might be a little bit easier to get to is show you what time it is. And the reason that I think that that's important is that man, do I lose a lot of time, like I, I have to be careful of putting it on because I I I'll throw the, the vision pro on and, like four hours later, realized that I've been in this thing for four hours. I watched pieces of some movies, I played with some, a bunch of things I did, and because I'm able to sit there and text people and I'm not leaving that, that environment, I'm texting, I'm doing other things, like that it is.

I do think that they they have something there, but I do think that they need more content and content does drive things.

If you want to talk to people about when do you want your new televisions to come out?

It's right before the Super Bowl, you know, like that's when you want the fastest, you know, and VHS won because of content Like we won't get into what content that was.

But the point is is that these, you know, content drives hardware sales and I think that the problem right now is generating that content is particularly difficult for both. I mean, I think it's in some cases easier for the Vision Pro, but I think that they have to accelerate and I think they're doing a great job with what they're doing with Blackmagic's camera, but I think that there's going to be more where they have to. You know, being able to generate 3D, you know pieces, being able to put those things together and not have it require a programmer, but be able to just throw these things together and keynote and so on and so forth, or some kind of development platform, is really important, and I think that that's also why books became what it was. I keep on coming back to that. But I think books could have been, they could have redefined the platform and instead they just ended up with nothing because they didn't produce the content that got people excited about it.

1:17:00 - Leo Laporte
All right. Well, I am going to get my legs in the ready position because I'm about to pivot and, as everyone knows, that ready position is key to being mobile. I'm talking about the fact that Shiro V, writing the Washington Post, observed that during the Apple showcase, that Chiro V, writing in the Washington Post, observed that during the Apple showcase, all the presenters had their feet placed shoulder-width apart, ready to leap into action, and apparently it was called the Apple stance by a group talking about it on Twitter. But apparently it's known as the ready position and is widely taught. Nobody taught me, but it was widely taught to public speakers because they can. Your balance body is balanced and can pivot easily to address different parts of the audience. And we talked about this on Sunday and I hadn't really noticed it. But if you look, every single percent, every single presenter on stage is in the ready position.

Obviously, they brought in some training position.

1:17:56 - Alex Lindsay
Obviously they brought in some training and, uh, I, I, I think that the problem right now with all of Apple's uh, you know, movies, and I think it's been a problem for the even the stage stuff is that a lot of their executives look like they're trained, but they didn't get trained through to the level of mastery. So what they got trained to is to the level of understanding what the tools are. If you look at anybody who does this, when you go into that training you're much worse, and then you get even worse and stilted, and then you and then it drives into your lower brain and then at some point you come out the other end and you are. That takes a long time for it, but that takes time of practice and there's an uncanny Valley in the.

1:18:35 - Jason Snell
You could almost, alex, I'm sure you could do it too. You could almost assign a score to every one of the people on the apple presentation about where they were in their journey, because I had that same thing. In fact, I made people. I wasn't trying to make people laugh, but I made people laugh. We were watching uh part of the I think it was the, the second thing though the platform state of the union, and there was a very robotic presenter and at one point this presenter, uh, was finishing a sentence and I said pause, smile, okay, continue, as she did that and everybody laughed and I'm like I said I feel bad for her because she has not been trained enough and she is still trying to put it together and it's hard, right, but like it gets when it can get really stilted and it can get really samey, which is the other problem.

1:19:20 - Alex Lindsay
If everybody sounds like the same, even if they're like effective, it starts to be like pod people and and they talk about this, even if you think about a pitcher or you look at a pitcher or a golfer or a quarterback, and they say they're changing their mechanics. And that is like like all day, every day, for a year, right To change their mechanics of how they throw, and it doesn't work well, at first yeah.

And it's horrible and it's and it feels very stilted, it's not effective and the only company that I know of that does these presentations gets through that is Salesforce and Salesforce you know. But that is an enormous amount of work it's and it takes someone that it takes a close relationship with people who do like top level presentations, like Tony Robbins and everything else, to get to a point where you're going to actually be able to to project that, that process, and it's not that they, it's just that that takes. I mean, it's two or three hours a week for years to get to that point, not not like, oh, we're going to prep for the thing, and that's the problem is Apple. I feel like they're in this uncanny valley in the middle of. They're all trained and told what to do and they're doing what they were told what to do. The unfortunate thing is is that because they're recording, they could easily work through this. I mean, half of their problem is they're not cutting fast enough. So they're kind of halfway between old school video and YouTube and what they need to do is go full YouTube, which is start to cut faster because you don't.

You should cut around every pause, like they should never show them sit through a teleprompter. If you watch carefully, you'll watch them sit through the page. The page is not moving, I don't. They're sitting through something there's, but in a teleprompter this is a really common thing for people to do is they'll sit there and they'll read one section and then they're waiting for the next section and should just keep going smoothly and if they're trained they'll just keep going. I mean, a good teleprompter reader will read it as if they were saying, as if it came from their soul. But when you're starting there's always these pauses, every paragraph, and it feels like Apple pauses every sentence. And the way to get around that when someone does that is to cut cut to a closeup, cut to a wide cut to? That's what YouTubers do all day is you cut to. You cut much faster than what Apple's doing and it would feel I think it would feel better if they just cut a little, a little faster.

1:21:31 - Leo Laporte
I think it'd feel better if they stopped training entirely. I this is a I I think it'd feel better if they stopped training entirely. I have a real pet peeve on this one Teleprompter training speaking training. It always looks bad, it always looks mechanical. You can always tell. If somebody's been to MAGIT Tech TV, brought in a trainer and I said I don't have to do this, do I? Do I have to do this? And she said no, you don't have to do this.

1:21:50 - Jason Snell
I said good and in you should be training anybody else. This is terrible there are people who are really bad at it and you want to show them on camera and so you need to train them a little bit. I get it, but there is this sort of unification and monolith unnatural and and it becomes.

It becomes very weird, but I also think that you, like, craig federighi is actually really good and when he first appeared on stage, he was a disaster and training helped him. But you're right, it does get samey know. The other thing I know we talked about this last year. I want to mention it again. The other thing that they're doing Alex, you might have a comment here is they are so aggressively processing the audio of their presentation of their dialogue. It's really noticeable that everybody seems like they're dubbed.

Everybody like there are no natural sounds emanating from those people's bodies it's just clear.

1:22:38 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not clear that they aren't dubbed like so. We had a discussion about it and we're not. You think they're adr-ing this, the audio so so, Jason, you've been in that top, you've been where craig was sitting in the top of sjt right, sure you know so. So you have been there uh, be real echoey, yeah, little echoey, because it's all curved glass.

1:22:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

1:22:56 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, there's no way he recorded his audio there, you know, like you know, and but the easiest way to do that it would be to let him go ahead and do it there, drop that piece in or do it in green screen and loop everything. And loop everything in. And you, because it looked, I'll be honest, it looks looped it feels, super artificial. Yeah, there's some sync issues, there's some other things there that I feel like it's being looped, the whole thing's being looped, and I think my guess is Go back to live.

Please go back to live Please. Oh, I don't know about that. I do know. Now you're going too far Trust me, I know, trust me.

1:23:32 - Jason Snell
I understand why you're saying that, though, because it is unnatural and artificial in a way that I feel like distancing, it is, it is distancing. I think you could still do it, not live and still have more of that flavor, but they are just like completely mashing it down Everything.

1:23:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's what happens. That's why I'm against it from day one. This is always what happens.

1:23:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think the problem is that they're being taught that these are the rules, like here is how you stand, here's what you do with your hands. Here is I'm going to. Here's a metronome. I want you to talk based on this metronome, as opposed to saying that don't really don't try not to shift from your weight from one place to another, because that makes it look kind of indecisive. Don't of indecisive, don't like wander from place to place and it's you get so focused on.

Here is one way of doing things that, yeah, it does look robotic, it does look something that you could do with a badly trained AI, and that's not something that Apple kind of wants. I absolutely miss the idea of getting some idea of the personalities of these people when they come up to the stage. And, yeah, you're not going to put someone in front of an audience like that, giving information as important as that to the future of the company, without making sure that they've had some rehearsals and they've had at least somebody running through with them saying that, okay, at this point you look like you kind of got you got lost in the in the text. Here's a way you can cover that.

But again, there's a way of saying that we manufacture robots that give presentations that you kind of want to avoid.

1:24:58 - Alex Lindsay
It's. I just need to say someone who's done a lot of not these, but a lot of these. The hard part is is that you can't let someone just kind of run off. I mean, they just you can't make a show out of that and so you give them. You give them some, either talking, the best case is you, the better case is to give them talking points and you put a talking points on the screen and they just talked to. They just just let them remember what they were going to say and then they just say it and that's a. I think that's a much more you know. And then what some companies do is again the ones that are at the very highest end. They memorize the whole thing, like they walk around, they do it all. It's all memorized. They're going to say it the way. They're going to say it's like an actor on stage doing, you know, a stage play, you know, and they will do those, do their monologues, and they'll figure those things out and it feels very good.

The hard part is is that, uh, c-suite are not actors and they are not good at this and they are not. And and when you watch, I mean I would say again, the salesforce, salesforce crew Jensen, everybody else Like there's like, after that it just kind of falls off really fast and it feels square and it feels, and whether they're standing on stage live or whether they're in record, it I don't know. I mean, as someone who watch it, who's watched a lot of that and watched a lot of plays and everything else Pretty pretty far, far drop off. And the problem is, is that your viewing audience, uh, they are. We are fed high quality, well presented content on Apple TV, youtube, everything else that we watch, and so that and cause that's the, that's the what's successful. And so the problem is these, these C-suite, are being put into positions that you know are very, very difficult for them to do well, requires enormous amounts of training that would be very expensive for them to actually get through the other end, and so, and I don't know if they're that interested in it I think that Craig does it better than anyone else on that group, but he's still it's kind of mediocre, like from an actor perspective In the actor world. He's still kind of in the middle. He wouldn't, he'd have a hard time getting through casting, you know. And so the thing is, is that, is that? I think that that's the challenge, uh for c-suite, but he's definitely the top of everything. That what apple's doing and it's really fun.

I enjoy, I have to admit, I enjoy the over the top. I loved the jump in the at the beginning. I thought it was so funny. It's corny and goofy and it was fun, like I I thought it was. I thought it was really fun to uh take deadpool and make an apple, so the um, uh, so the uh, so I. I think that it was. I think that I'm having fun watching them. I have to admit, everything that's on stage is way too slow for me, like I can't watch stage well, and I agree that the Google IO event was God awful.

1:27:38 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it's certainly possible to do terrible live events as well.

1:27:41 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, no, it's not. It's not possible to do terrible live events. It's almost impossible to do great events when you do it on stage.

1:27:47 - Leo Laporte
When Steve did it it was great. And he did it live.

1:27:51 - Alex Lindsay
But Steve was Steve and you know we can't base.

1:27:55 - Leo Laporte
No, I understand, these guys are not Steve.

1:27:58 - Jason Snell
But I feel like it's just distancing.

1:28:00 - Leo Laporte
It becomes corporate, mechanical, and that's not. But you know that's. You know me, I'm not. We do these shows live. We don't edit out stuff, you know. I mean, that's just.

1:28:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like I just remembered something I said to a good friend talking about this a few days ago, that it's like there are going to be clicks, pops and buzzes in any audio. The question is, if you remove all of them, it sounds completely artificial. So it's okay to have some problems, because that makes it feel a lot natural and I just feel as though Apple's presenters are trying to get let's get every single click, pop and buzz when we started tech tv.

1:28:35 - Leo Laporte
The standard in computer television not that there was very much of it was to have everything work perfectly. And if it, if something crashed, you stopped. And I was very clear with tech tv we're no, no, everything's gonna be live. And if it crashes, it crashes because it misrepresents the actual experience to users. And users suddenly wonder why was everything breaking for me? But when they see it happen, it would happen all the time. That's you know.

1:29:01 - Andy Ihnatko
That's genuinely authenticity and I'm a fan missing up flipping an omelet and saying, okay, it's something, it's not always going to work, great and great. And you're. You're alone in the kitchen. No one sees you. You can just pick it up and fold it with your hands.

1:29:12 - Leo Laporte
It's great we're going to take break. Come back with more in just a bit. Hold on a sec. Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell, andy Anotko, and, yes, we'll talk about Spielberg and other stories. There's a lot to talk about. I was kind of unfortunate there was so much Apple news today. We could easily have just spent the whole time talking about their event, but we will get to it in just a second.

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Okay, it's just a silly story, but I love it.

Steven Spielberg is presenting. This happened on Saturday. He is at the Tribeca Film Festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of a movie I loved. But Spielberg joked. Many of you are going to see this. You'll be the first audience to see this in 50 years Sugarland Express. We made it before Jaws Goldie Hawn was in it. Has anybody seen it? It's a wonderful movie. It's a really sweet movie. Anyway, he's there, he's talking about it. His apple watch interrupts him with a message saying it looks like you've taken a hard fall. Spielberg said I'm not going to press the SOS button before throwing it on the ground. I'll pick it up later. But he had to retrieve it a few minutes later because it started issuing a distress signal. So I've had that happen to me. Sometimes when I'm talking I'll slap the table and the watch says, hey, are you all right? Now? I've yet to have a call 911, but if you ignore that for a while, it will right.

1:33:31 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, I've had it. I've had it. When I'm watching Steeler games, tell me, yeah, you're your heart rate is very high. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:33:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I wonder if I wonder if that's going to rate like a reenactment when they release the next watch.

1:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Would that be great.

1:33:45 - Andy Ihnatko
A little video, but that is giving a presentation as one of the most honored and respected filmmakers in front of a thousand people. When my Apple watch went off for no damn reason, I had to stop what I was doing. I got so frustrated that I threw it.

1:34:02 - Leo Laporte
You are. I am very proud of Lena Kahn and the Federal Trade Commission. Despite a lot of negative publicity about her and her choices in the Wall Street Journal and from maybe some of our panelists, they have been very aggressive. Now they are suing Adobe, the FTC and the DOJ suing Adobe for deceiving subscriptions that are too hard to cancel, hiding termination fees, making cancellation difficult Right on, Go get them. The complaint filed yesterday says Adobe has harmed users by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms. Now I have to say I don't understand what they're talking about, but okay.

1:34:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think the issue is that and this is not just Adobe, this is many other companies will by default, they'll tell you it's this much on a yearly subscription, and so it's like the fine print underneath it's $30 a month, it says on a yearly subscription. So you sign up for that, and if you do a lot of subscriptions, you get pretty sensitive to that and you go, oh, no, no, I only want monthly. Or oh, I'm going to use this all the time. It's dark patterns, it. I'm going to use this all the time. It's dark patterns. It is and it is. And so I think that what they're talking about is that Adobe is going to, by default, put you in the yearly, which means you're going to have a. You're going to not be. You know you're paying per year. You're charged 400 bucks instead of 30 bucks, but you're saving $10 a month by doing it that way, but you're stuck with it for the year, and I think that that I mean the Adobe subscriptions are pretty frustrating.

The hard part is is that there's nobody, and this is where Adobe has you know, it's not a monopoly, but it's near monopolistic impact, which is that I have been trying to not use Photoshop for years, you know, since the, since the subscription started, I've been like oh, I got to find a Photoshop. Oh, I got to find a Photoshop, and for many day-to-day operations I think someone could use Pixelmator or Affinity Photo or many of the other ones. On day-to-day I need to do a couple things with my images. The problem is that if you're a high-end professional, there are definitely things that you still need to go back to the Adobe products to do. And the new thing now is I mean, the genitor fill is so transformative in Photoshop that someone asked like, could you ever leave Photoshop? I'm like no. And they're like why not genitor fill? Like I use that every single day. Like it's just like oh, I need to make this image a little wider. I need to do this over here. I need to take the text out of here. I need to take this book out of here. Used to spend hours in clone tool world. The ability to just rebuild the image and fix an image is so profound that I couldn't. I mean, that's the most profound feature that I've had.

So the problem we get into is is that again, if you're, if you're not that then you get into it. You say, oh, I don't want to use this anymore and I hate the way that adobe has their subscription setup of like they want to package all these apps we don't care about so that we can, so that we can have after effects, like we want after effects. I just want to pay 20 bucks a month for after effects, but you can't do that. They want to have you pay 50 bucks a month so they can package all these other apps in that you're never going to use. You know and and that's that I, I will admit it's. I don't. I'm never sure whether the government should start micromanaging this, but as a you, as an adobe, I find it pretty frustrating.

1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
They also went on. Ftc went after Amazon last year for this pretty much the same thing, saying Amazon knowingly complicated the ability of customers of its prime service to cancel their subscriptions.

1:37:24 - Jason Snell
It is a universal problem.

1:37:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a universal problem.

1:37:27 - Andy Ihnatko
People. Docpad is one of the things that the regulators are targeting really, really hard because it is a problem. I did an audit of all my subscription services and the number of times where there was one very, very popular news site where it was oh so, wow, why am I being billed for this? And it was like a news conglomerate and I'm like well, I need to know what website or what service this actually is. And I literally spent 45 minutes going through all of these pages trying to figure out what it was and it couldn't. Then, well, maybe I'll contact customer service, and there's no place to talk to somebody.

I can't remember exactly how I found like some sort of a feedback form. It might have been on some deeply nested corporate page and, of course, as soon as I said, hey, here's my, here's my, here's the ID that I used to uh, that that was charged to, can you tell me what it is? And within that it was, it was deleted within like two hours. But you really have to be very, very determined to get that $6, 95 cents back a month in order to get these things gone. And there you know this. It might be the point at which regulation is required, because so long as there's no penalty for doing that, except for keeping people on the hook for months and months and months, they're never going to do it.

1:38:42 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and one of my my I mean this is one of the things lock-ins that I have with Apple, with iOS specifically not so much with Apple TV, because Apple TV lets you do outside subscriptions, but with in iOS. I sign up for something and I almost I wait a day usually and then I just end the subscription because it's easy and it is. It is a huge reason that I, that I get so particular about apps going outside of the app store is because what I love and what a lot of app developers want to get around is that I can't just say, okay, end that, and then what happens is that it puts it on an expiration. If I get to the end of the end of, I get a little alert that says it's going to go away. If I haven't been using it, I just let it die.

You know and and and the thing is is so easy and I have saved. When people say, oh, apple's cost more money, I have saved thousands of dollars that just with that one feature of being able to turn subscriptions off, um, ahead of time, immediately, without any friction, I've definitely saved thousands of dollars as an Apple user, just not being able to turn subscriptions off easily because you don't forget about them. There's one place to find them, there's a. It's easy to turn them off, and that has been. You know, it's one of the big reasons that I get locked in and I don't want to buy things outside of iOS.

1:39:58 - Leo Laporte
Apple is just. We had I had misgivings when they announced they were going to do buy now, pay later. Uh, it didn't last very long. They're canceling it. Uh, this has always been a problem because of people buying more than they can afford and I was surprised that apple wanted to get in that business. Uh, now they're getting out of it. They. They launched it last year. Existing users with open Apple Pay Later loans will be able to manage them via the Wallet app. They're going to focus on other features, including the ability to access installment loan offerings from companies like Affirm or Credit Cards. They don't want to be in this business. They floated the loans.

1:40:31 - Jason Snell
They actually created their own financial services company in order to do that, and they, they and that was just a little over a year ago, it was like last march and so they are clearly out of that now, although, again, you'll they're using partners that'll still be able to do the the this buy now, pay later thing that is apparently popular, but they don't need to be the ones doing those high you know, high interest loans. They can let other people deal with it instead, and I think this is one of those cases. I was thinking about this today. I think this is a great example of how occasionally, apple, as a giant corporation, thinks they can do anything, and they discovered that there are certain areas where their reach exceeds their grasp, and financial services is one of them.

Keep in mind also, the Apple card has almost been out for five years. It's us only, and goldman is trying, or and goldman's trying to get out of it. Right, they, apple, apple cash is us only. Um, apple pay is out there. So like there's the one success, but all of the other financial items that they've uh, been trying to do. Where mark german reported a couple years ago, they had big plans for financial services, and this was an area they're going to go. I think what they've discovered is that Apple pay aside the financial services industry and the regulation that's connected to it. Like it's easier Basically, it's easier to have all the money than to be the bank is what they've learned, because they've got all the money, but they are not a bank. They're just not.

1:41:59 - Andy Ihnatko
And the pay on terms of service. It was one of a bunch of different things that Apple does that made me kind of wonder, like, how much money do they think is in this for them to get themselves associated with something that is a little I don't even want to say shifty, but it's shifty, adjacent, let's say Like it could really backfire on them very, very badly or puts their name with a business that is not really very well thought of. Again, like, what is it about this part of the business that is so alluring that it's worth that kind of risk, business that is so alluring that it's worth that kind of risk? So that's it. The fact that they're dropping it after a year while still allowing the infrastructure to allow an outside company to do that. That allows them to keep their hands clean and that makes a lot more sense.

1:42:50 - Leo Laporte
Let's see you. Actually, I really liked your piece. I thought it was very thoughtful Jason and six scholars about apple intelligence and the pros and cons and you. You pointed out one thing which I thought was very interesting, which is that there are only a couple of areas where apple is stretching to do something that is well out of their wheelhouse. Uh, features apple would never have done. You you divide the ai into three categories features apple would have done anyway. Features apple would have done eventually. But there are a couple of things you talk about that apple probably wouldn't have done. The obvious one is the chat gpt chat bot. But the other one you say is image playgrounds, and this is basically mid-journey or stable diffusion in an app for iOS, or rather all of Apple right Mac OS as well.

1:43:42 - Jason Snell
It felt a little bit like a reach to me. There was something like the Genmoji thing where they're generating emoji based on a really limited emoji set. Yeah, big deal Actually sounds like them, right. But the image playground surprised me because it is super constrained, right. It is very limited. They put some ui on it.

That I think is really interesting, right, because I think, fundamentally, if you think the future of image generation is trying to figure out exactly the right words I know alex is really good at this now but like the exact right words to put into a command line prompt to get the image you want. Like we already had the 1984 called the graphic interfaces here. Right, we want something that is not a command line, and so they've tried to build this like token interface where, even if you type in something, it turns it into tokens and they give you a bunch of selections, obviously tuned to what they built the model on and the styles that they built into the model. All of that is very Apple-like, but I just kept thinking making AI art, even if it is just clip art for you to stick in a iMessage or on your keynote slide or whatever. I think the generative stuff Apple is really more wary of, and that one for me also. I don't particularly like AI art, and when I saw their AI art examples which keep in mind marketing those are the best ones they could generate I was like I wasn't very enthusiastic about it, but I feel like they had to do it, just like the GPT integration.

It's like they had to do it because they need to say, hey, we're here, we're with it, we're paying attention. And so they did it and they put their own spin on it. We're here, we're with it, we're paying attention. And so they did it and they put their own spin on it. I'm not convinced that if they were not under enormous pressure if Image Playgrounds would have been in that keynote right, I'm not sure they would have gone down that path. It feels like it's a little bit far for them. But you know what they had goals to really convince people that they were paying attention to AI. It seems to have worked, and so image playgrounds.

1:45:38 - Alex Lindsay
It feels like they, it's like the image playground feels like. As someone who spends a lot of time mid-journey, it feels like someone described to you what mid-journey does and then you wrote something that was kind of like it, but you had a whole bunch of better ideas of how to make it more contained, but you never actually used mid-journeys. You didn't actually know what that was, you know, so you didn't understand. Like what you, what you wanted it's. I mean, it's just dorky, you know like. The images that come out of it are like mid journey 1.0 I think intentionally dorky, honestly, but it is.

1:46:08 - Jason Snell
It reminded me of remember when they said like you can send your heartbeat with, uh, the apple watch. There is a strain inside Apple. That's like come on, it's fun and zany, we're doing fun, zany things with our friends on our phones and that's what it feels like.

1:46:20 - Alex Lindsay
It's just like when I use it. I use Midjourney a lot for my presentations and so you think about these things going. Hey, I really want it to be funny, to have some kind of funny little thing that I want to say or something like that. And but the most common thing that I do is over a plain white background, you know, with the padding of 20 percent, you know full, you know full body or not body or whatever it is. And now I get these little objects and I get, you know, a character and I say in the style of Pixar, over a black, over a white background or whatever, and I get a goofy character that I can, I can very quickly remove the background, stick it in my keynote and I'm off to the races.

And it's funny and people get a little laugh out of it. It cools things down a little bit. I look at the Apple ones. I'm like I would never use those like because they're they got a little weird square around them. I mean that's like totally like I will only give you training wheels, and so I felt like it was a real like. I mean, for people who've never used any image generation, be like, oh, that's kind of cool, but for anybody that's ever done it, they're going to be like oh, this is dorky.

1:47:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I think we talked about last week about how I think part of it is about. They want to make sure they don't get caught up in any deepfake scandal so they're more happy doing cartoony sort of stuff that's easily identifiable, always has a box around it. I think that they are very, very aware that they are not the only providers of generative AI in the world and that if people do want something with a whole, much more muscle and customization behind it, they're going to go outside to people who've been. Companies have been doing this for years and years and years. But I was kind of surprised. So they released more information about their foundation model. There is a page on support about the model training and they mentioned how they trained the image model about the Applebot, which is an Apple spider. They have going out on the web Adobe had done by saying we've got an image generator, but we have licensed all the content from it A so that our hands are clean, but also so that you can use this stuff and not worry about someone coming after you a couple of years later saying that the figure that's on your packaging actually originated from someplace else.

But it does say that Apple uses Applebot, a web crawler to crawl information that's publicly available on the Internet. Apple uses information that's licensed from third parties, publicly available on the Internet and created synthetically. So from this it seems as though at least part of the image generation of the image playground model is generated with, just again, as usual, stuff that just people put up on the Internet. There is a form, of course, you can click to fill out, to say please don't use my information that way, and they do of course exclude, like your personal, private information, so it's not as though your Apple photos are going into it. It does say specifically publicly available stuff, so people, things that a bot or a spider on the web could have found.

But I don't necessarily think this is bad or wrong. But it surprises me because, again, given how simple this image generator is, it doesn't seem like something they absolutely had to do, although I mean and I also need to say I'm making an assumption that Image Playground, the model that they're using, was fed partially with publicly accessible information. It's possible that this thing that they have put out already, the thing they intend to put out in the next version of the OS, has actually only been trained with stuff that they've licensed. But it's right there in the support document, and I think it's something that I'm going to want to know more about as time goes by.

1:49:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean Apple could afford to just buy Getty Images. We're going to buy all of these and then just make them all you know and then just train on them. You know like it's it is. I mean, getty Images market cap today is one point four, seven billion. You know that would be, you know, kind of a little bit of a rounding error for Apple to just buy them and then have that, have that, that entire library, and so I think that you're right that I don't see any reason that I don't see any reason.

I think that doing it on publicly available documents, as opposed to all documents that we paid for for a company like Apple, feels like an unforced error. You know, like they could, you could totally train, especially when you're doing I have a limited, limited number of things I can make. It's not an open field. I could totally train, like I could buy you know a million pictures of horses and if you ask for a horse you're going to get one in all the different ways that it could possibly. You know, and I think that those are office items or whatever the things that they think people are going to be excited about.

1:50:46 - Jason Snell
Um, I think that there's a apple could do that without having to go out into the public yeah, that's why I I categorized this entire thing as being a force that this, this feels like they're pushing it too far and, alex, to your point too, like I think they don't want to do what Midjourney does, or at least not yet, and they wanted to have it be like a training wheels feature. I think the only place I'm not sure their heart was in it, I think the only place their heart was actually in it, was building UI around it, and I think that's instructive right, because I really do believe it's better if you create an ai generator ai for any kind of generative content with a ui, that is helpful instead of having to do the incantation on uh in a text field. I think that's great.

1:51:27 - Alex Lindsay
I just I feel like it could have a certain style, like I don't. I'm not complaining about the style, it's the square around it and the fact that it feels like the original apple logo. It feels like everything is like we looked at the original Apple logo back in the 70s and we want everything to look like that, you know, and that's the style that you're getting for all of those things, and I just feel like it's a really tired style. You know, and I do think that if we only gave you four styles or five styles and they don't have to be in the style of Pixar and the style of HR Geeker and the style of Ivan Durrell, it can be whatever you want to be those that they could decide their four styles and they take that little frame around them around it and not make it look so old and tired, I think it would go along. I think people would actually use it. You know, and I do think that there's an opportunity. When you look at usdz, you know apple could get ahead of things by.

1:52:20 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they're already starting to experiment with this in blender, where you're using generative ai to generate 3d models this comes from corporate fear and they're right, yes of hallucinations and of the kind of problems google got into with its woke image generation in Gemini. They don't want the black marks on their escutcheon, but this is a problem because, in order to do a, this is concomitant with AI. This is what AI is, this hallucination machine, and so Apple's got a real conundrum, which is how do we do this look like we're hip and with it without risking the problems that google and microsoft have had with their yeah, what's your?

1:53:07 - Jason Snell
theory, which is okay. So one, uh, you build a bunch of things that are like baby features with guardrails, right? What image playgrounds is and it and it gives you that level of apple control of like look, we know what this is going to be and we know it's not going to satisfy alex and we don't even want it to. We just want it to be for people who are like oh, this is fun, I made a thing great and alex is going to do it and somebody in the discord says it's photo booth yeah, so, so, and we're going to do llMs and it's all going to be arm's length warning labels over there.

It's not us, it's ChatGPT. If it says something horrible, it's ChatGPT, it's not us. We put a warning label on it that says that this may be wrong and causes cancer and whatever, and like it's over there. But what's the long game here? Well, they're probably working on upgrading their model. All of these other tech companies are working on it.

I feel like one of two things is going to happen either the models and the, the whole industry is going to figure out ways to reduce the hallucination problem, either with guardrails or with, like, cross-checking or something like that, and at which point apple could be like great, there's no, there's no problem with it. Or the hallucination problem that's going to be unsolvable and we're going to realize that this stuff is not going to be suitable for a lot of those tasks, in which case Apple will say great, anything that might be hallucinated we're not going to do, we're just going to let. We're like so I think they're just, I think they're hedging, I think they're doing what they can right now and thinking like if this gets solved in the future, we'll deal with it then. But for the present we can say, look, we got that stuff and and be kind of like on on the edge without having to own it. I think. I think it's absolutely what's going on.

1:54:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think you're right and we're going to take a break on that. We still have quite a bit of show to go. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Jason Snell, andy Anaco, our good friend Alex Lindsay, and you know, one of the reasons this show exists is because of you. You, club Twit members, have kept Twit alive for the last two years while advertising dwindled, costs went up, revenue went down. If it weren't for Club Twit, I don't know if we'd have the lights on today. But we still need more members because, frankly, the decline continues. So many podcast networks and podcasts have gone off the air some great ones like rocket because the ad support just isn't there. Uh, every time I talk to a podcaster Brian McCullough, I talked to him the other day he said, yeah, it's tough out there. You see, uh, WNYC, um struggling, WGBH struggling, and I just saw a story that iHeart is suffering and may have to go chapter 22. They went chapter 11 two years ago, but ad revenue has declined for them as well.

There is one hope that I have for going forward, and that's we have a great community here. I think we have a large number of people. We average about 75,000 unique listeners every month. Who did? I say 75, 750, sorry who? Almost a million people, let's put it that way every month listen to our shows. They love the shows we do and I really think that our community is what makes us different from so many of these other places. But the only way that that can work is if the community chips in. I would love it if everybody who loves our shows joins the club. It's only seven bucks a month.

I know many of you won't or can't or just don't want another subscription, but if you can, if you can see your way clear to going to twit.tv/clubtwit, we've put together something I think has good benefits. It's ad-free versions of all the shows, video and shows that we only do in audio, special programming. That is inside the club. Of course, the great club twit discord every place to hang. But really it's not for those reasons. It's because you want to support what we're doing and you want it to continue and frankly, it's not going to be ad supported in the years to come. It just can't. It's got to be you supported. So if you would twit.tv/clubtwit, if you like what we do and you want us to keep doing it, that's how you cast the vote. Seven bucks a month. twit.tv/clubtwit to it and, and my deepest thanks to all the people who've done that up to now. It's really a remarkable showing. It's 12,000 members now, 12,000 paying members, but that's still not even 2% of the total. So I think there's a little room for growth. Let's do it. It's an experiment. Can this kind of programming succeed with the support only the support of its listeners? twit.tv/clubtwit. Thank you. Sorry to have to interrupt with that, but you need to know, you deserve to know. I'm going to give a little plug, even though none of you probably appreciate this, to.

This was a blog post from Charles Choi, an accidental login feature of the Apple ecosystem. I'm sure you were puzzled by why I put this in Apple in all of its native apps like Notes and on the command line support, emacs, key bindings. Now, I know that for most of you that's well, that's dumb, but believe me, it is lock in for me because when I'm on Windows and I press control A and it doesn't do what I think it's going to do, I just I don't know what to do. Apple has strong support, probably because it goes back to next. That's Charles.

Theory is that it started with Next OS in 1988. They used Emax, which is, by the way, for those who don't know what that is, the original text editor written by Richard Stallman at MIT, one of the original hackers. It's written in Lisp and it's an amazing work of art. And he says whenever they typed in the text widgets of the Next Step UI, they naturally wanted Emacs bindings. It was unlikely this was ever an executive level requirement. The developers wanted it, so they made it happen. But what's amazing is here we are, 50 years later. They're still doing it, thank you.

And it's in Swift. The text system in the Swift UI framework uses Emacs key bindings. So I just wanted to thank Charles Choi for pointing that out. I've known it because I always use it and I'm always grateful. When I'm sitting in a terminal, I hit Command-A and it goes to the beginning of the line, or Command-E and it goes to the end of the line. But it even supports the very unusual cut, copy and paste things control Y to yank text that you killed with control K, things like that. So thank you, apple.

That's just for me, that's just for me.

1:59:58 - Andy Ihnatko
No, no, I get it. I love features like that that are everywhere, that somewhere within the giant org chart of what's in this piece of software, what's in this operating system. It never made it because it was just something where some developer working in-house was sick and tired of doing the same stupid thing. I'm going to put in this feature just for me. I'm not going to log it, I'm not going to do anything about it. And it's still there 12 years later. And now oftentimes it's like how can we remove this? We can't. It's too deeply embedded into the framework of the entire system. We cannot take this out anymore.

2:00:35 - Leo Laporte
It must stay. I love when things look that way and I fancy that there's somebody at Apple, the Apple campus, who's still using Emacs somewhere. I am yes, in fact. Really, if I ever even considered going to Windows, I wouldn't because EVEX doesn't run well there. Apple is a Unix operating system. It runs beautifully there. I live in it all the time. Oh, what was I was going to ask about? You know I've forgotten. Oh, the rumor. See, I don't, I'm not crazy about rumors, but you know the rumor is we had somebody call the Ask the Tech guys asking about well, should I get an Apple Watch? And I said you know, as far as I can tell, there's not going to be a big update with the Ultra. Anyway, if you're interested in that, there is going to be a Series 10, and Ming-Chi Kuo has some interesting rumors that it will come in larger screen sizes. Rumors that it will come in larger screen sizes. I mean much larger, 45 and 49 millimeters Thinner cases.

2:01:38 - Alex Lindsay
The Ultra will not change much he says In the world of when we expect it to come out. In the fall right, I mean, it usually is released in September. I always feel like, once you get within three months of when you expect something to come out, you should just wait, like you know, like when I was talking to someone do you have an Apple? We were trying to test something. I said do you have a 15? And they said no, should I get one? I said no, like just wait.

2:02:07 - Leo Laporte
Like you know, don't buy an old phone at this point. Right, you really want to make sure you have the latest phone.

2:02:13 - Alex Lindsay
And in general, I mean, unless you broke your phone and you need one now, you can wait three more months and just wait until wait it out and get the new one in September or October or whatever, whenever it ships. It doesn't make any sense to buy it faster than that, in my opinion.

2:02:27 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't make any sense to buy it faster than that, in my opinion. And again, the wall is coming down between an AI phone and a not AI phone, an AI laptop and a not AI laptop, so you definitely want to wait as long as you can to make sure you get one that is going to have five years of life in it, as opposed to the one that's going to be the Fisher-Price edition for three years and then that's it.

2:02:50 - Leo Laporte
Three years and then that's it. And if you are a love, you love the Apple chess game built in a Mac OS. I'm a serious chess player and I I I even forget that it's there. I've never used it. There's so many better chess programs, but it's still there and it's coming to Sequoia. There's some good news and there's some bad news. The grass type board is gone uh, they only have now only three. There's wood, metal and marble uh, but there's a better gradient and the board is a little bit.

2:03:18 - Alex Lindsay
This is the old one on the left, the new one on the right according to realize there's probably somebody there, there's probably someone at apple that just works on this one there.

2:03:25 - Leo Laporte
It's somebody's job like this is their job, right, I do what do you do?

2:03:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I do the chess board, I do it, but they don't do their job well because there are great opens, they're not given the resources needed to bring this out to its destiny.

2:03:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think there's a lot of indecision here. There's a lot of arguments and it's just hard to move forward, but they nudge through it. Remember they have to do updates every single time. They get it for every OS. They have to update that chessboard. I think it is probably I don't know if it's a full-time position but it's probably at least a quarter.

2:03:59 - Leo Laporte
It's another job that dates back to Next Step, because it came with Next Step. The last time they updated the game was in 2012,. So it's been a while, so maybe that guy was on sabbatical.

2:04:07 - Alex Lindsay
No the know, but no, the last time they changed the features it was 2012. Not the last time they updated.

2:04:11 - Jason Snell
That's right.

2:04:11 - Alex Lindsay
You got to build all, you got to support all the new OS stuff. So it's got to be updated every time. So it's all work.

2:04:18 - Leo Laporte
All I'll say is there are great open source chess engines now that could beat the best players in the world and you could put that into Apple chess and maybe somebody would actually, I am definitely not close to the best you can beat it, that's a feature, you know I I played chess on my vision pro on a plane.

2:04:38 - Alex Lindsay
That was a solid two hours of remembering houses.

2:04:42 - Leo Laporte
Is it the same chess or is it a special version?

2:04:45 - Alex Lindsay
for the vision pro 3D chess like I don't know. I've never played the one on the mac it's 3D as well.

I have to admit that it was like, oh, I don't feel like watching a movie, what else is here? And I opened up the chess board and it actually turned out to be really fun. I'm sitting there, my the person sitting next to me is like what are you doing? Like after, when we were walking out, he was like what were you doing? Because you're going like this the whole time and I couldn't figure out what was going on and I was like, oh, playing chess. He's like it all makes sense.

2:05:09 - Leo Laporte
As bad as rumors gossip, but sometimes you just got to share the gossip. According to Fortune, Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO, says Steve Jobs screamed in his face telling him to fire the entire Starbucks leadership team, and Schultz says he was right.

2:05:31 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's the problem with a lot of your lab is that they're like Steve Jobs screamed about this and then and then it comes back and they're like he had some points.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
This was on the acquired podcast that came out last week. Schultz told the story of the first time he met Steve Jobs. There was a future meeting scheduled for Starbucks and Apple around mobile order and pay and other things. You remember, famously, with the iPhone, one of the very first things Steve Jobs did was order coffee for everybody. Right, he called the Starbucks down at the Urba Buena Center. I met Steve on a phone call, had never met him, was talking to him on the phone. I'm telling him what's going on.

Jobs invited Schultz, whose business was in, of course, washington State, to Cupertino to discuss the matter in person. They had a famous courtyard and Jobs would always go for a walk with these guys. Remember he famously convinced Don Scully to join Apple by going on a walk with the then CEO of Pepsi pepsi. Um, apparently tim cook does the same thing around apple park. Jobs had a whole thing about walking. Schultz says he would go out, would walk around the building, so I went down there. Basically we took a walk. I told him all my problems at starbucks. Everything was going on. He stopped me and said this is what you need to do you go back to seattle. You fire everyone in your leadership team.

I thought he was joking. Schultz said he pushed back. I said what are you talking about? Fire everybody. He said I told you effing, fire all those people. He was like screaming at me in my face Fire all those people. That's what I would do. I said Steve, I can't fire all these people. Who's going to do the work? He said I promise you, in six, in six months, maybe nine, they'll all be gone. He was right. Schultz says except for one, the general counsel. They were all gone. I've talked to him since then. We were on stage together in an event. I told him they're all gone. He said well, you're six months, nine months late, but think about all the things you could have done if you just listen to me.

2:07:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but I I will say firing everybody at the same time or slowly getting rid of them over nine months is very different, two very different worlds yeah you know you do want to move at a pace where you don't burn out the first new hires, because the, the, because the sludging through the uh, through the mud is, is too hard. But but you, but replacing everybody at one time would have been a thing you don't want to be associated as it's very, caligula, it's very, it's not.

2:07:56 - Andy Ihnatko
You know my horse is now in charge.

2:07:58 - Leo Laporte
Goodbye.

2:08:01 - Andy Ihnatko
All the senators with the letter E in their name step forward. Centurions loose your arrows, you displease me.

2:08:10 - Leo Laporte
Apple will not notarize emulators in the EU. This is your story in Six Colors. I don't know what's the story there, Jason.

2:08:21 - Jason Snell
So the story here is funny. It's just a really quick link post. I missed this. It happened the weekend before WWDC and I heard about it on the Accidental Tech Podcast. Actually they they talked about it, so hat tip to them, and my link post from this morning is on tech meme now. So go figure, wow, it happens when you least expect it. I work on a story for days and nothing but a link post that I did in five minutes tech meme, great. Anyway, here's the story.

Uh, their makers of emulators, uh, have gotten rejections from apple about their emulators. Not too surprising. I think this answers the question of what a pc emulator? Would a computer emulator be approved if, uh, if it was even primarily meant to play games, because it's not a console, which is what apple has said, and the answer seems to be no. The answer seems to be that they will be rejected.

So the utm emulator and the idos emulator were both rejected, but by far more troubling is the fact that they were rejected from notarization or being used in the eu marketplace, which is deeply troubling. It's exactly what they're not supposed to do, right? Exactly, it suggests that Apple's policies are now extending to allowing apps not to be notarized. They're using the notarization step, which is supposed to be a security step, to refuse apps into alternative marketplaces in the EU. Now, I'm sure that they've got some explanation for why, but when they told these developers, they basically said well, it's against our rules about running code inside apps, which, if that's the case, is completely contrary to the DMA, because Apple doesn't get to arbitrarily list things like that and say we've just decided to not make it available in third-party marketplaces. The notarization step is supposed to be very limited into what they reject or accept. So I guess it's in the EU's court or the European Commission's court about how they judge this.

This will probably get resolved with somebody calling Apple and saying you can't do this. You can't do this because, honestly, if Apple can just say no, we decided emulators are bad and and inconsistently right Because there are other emulators that are not bad, that that that use the same rule, that violate the same rule but are allowed like Delta, because that also is running arbitrary code, then what are we even doing here? So I guess I guess I would put this on the watch list of it's the thing that we were waiting to see if it would happen, which is, would Apple use notarization to do a de facto rejection of apps, even outside the App Store? And the answer seems to be yes, we'll see. They haven't explained themselves to anybody, but we will see what they say. But that is.

I find that troubling. And then also I'll throw in here Riley Tested, who does Alt Store, has said that many of the apps that they've tried to get into their store in the European Union are being held up in app review for notarization, and in fact, the UTM emulator people said that this Apple held their notarization request for two months before finally rejecting it. So they're dragging their feet, they're delaying and then they're making rejections that, on the face, don't really make sense, which is what everybody was worried about it's a backdoor.

2:11:42 - Leo Laporte
It's a way to reject, rejecting exactly.

2:11:44 - Jason Snell
So the only response is going to be will the regulators say to apple you've got to allow this? We've seen that happen in the last few months, where Apple has come out with a declaration and then, like a week later, they've been like oh, not that Right, we didn't mean that and then allow it. So we'll see what happens here. Something to keep an eye on. But this is one of those cases where there's like a fairly arbitrary Apple rule that they enforce in their store that they are not supposed to enforce more broadly, but they seem to be using the notarization as a method of rejecting apps outside of its purview.

2:12:16 - Leo Laporte
Well, and don't downgrade yourself, Jeff Jason, because, sure, this story broke a while ago, but by your bringing it to everyone's attention now, you have raised because it's you, you've raised the attention and now everybody's going wait a minute, what?

2:12:34 - Jason Snell
it goes from atp to me to tech meme.

2:12:36 - Leo Laporte
That's how it happens with a little.

2:12:38 - Jason Snell
I mean, really, I, I would. I I just posted it right before the show, so I don't even know. I hope, I would hope that somebody at apple will at some point respond to this. Um, they probably won't respond unless they've got something to say about it. My guess is that they're going to say oh no, no, this isn't about it being an emulator. This is about a very specific security concern. However, that goes directly against the experience of the two emulator designers, developers. So I'm, I'm really skeptical of this. This sounds, I mean, maybe it's also a structural thing, but the fact that it took two months suggests that Apple, like, had conversations about whether they were going to do this or not and then finally decided to do it. So I'm, I'm, you know, we'll see. All the facts are not out yet, but it I don't like the smell of this, this. This stinks to me.

2:13:25 - Leo Laporte
By the way, you could have called it Apple intelligence, or you could have called it Andy Anotko, because he is also AI. I realize I'm looking at our show and there's a bunch of AI stories in here and I thought, well, I'm not going to do AI. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah.

2:13:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I wanted to make a joke on the new tech blog that I'm doing that I soon of us. So, underneath the mask said like all content generated 100% by AI. Then I thought that I don't want that to be inside any algorithm, that, oh well, let's downgrade the hell out of this.

2:13:59 - Leo Laporte
All right, I will save your AI-generated stories for later because we're running low on time. Maybe next week we can talk about. I saw this Micromac. I thought it was very interesting. We'll talk about the $7 Macintosh. I paid $2,500 for my 128K Mac. Now I can get it for $7. That tells you something, doesn't it? In a nutshell, right Tells you something. Are you using Micromac, john? No, he's using a floppy disk emulator for his 128k. That the floppy had died, but he was able to use a floppy emulator. All right, we're going to take a little break. When we come back, it's time for your picks of the week. So, boys, saddle up and prepare. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Jason Snell, andy Ihnatko, alex Lindsay.

2:14:44 - Alex Lindsay
We always end with Alex's pick of the week because it's the most expensive but let's start with it today, alex Lindsay, your pick of the week, because it's the most expensive. But let's start with it today, alex lindsey, your pick of the week. Yeah, so, um, you know I hate a lot of us use atems uh, these are black magic atems, uh and black magic, uh, switchers, um and uh, there is one tool that makes them completely a different piece of hardware this I want to know about because I'm going to be switching to atems pretty soon I recommend thinking about this.

This is MixEffect Pro, and what MixEffect Pro does and it's new it now has a way that you can actually go from your switcher into your iPad so you can actually see your multi-view in your iPad while you're working. But the main thing about this is whether it's on your phone or whether it's on your iPad. What it does is it allows you to, it gives you the opportunity to run your switcher and it is the switcher Like it does all the things, all the controls that your switcher does, and so. So, for instance, I and I can do things with it, and this is why it's important to super sources. It does a bunch of other things that are really good, but one of the big things is a lot of us want to use super sources.

These are two ups or four ups or other things like that. We want to build a show around and we want to do it with our hardware switcher, and doing that, let alone animating between the different windows, is very difficult. So if I click on this right now, you'll see me. I think, oh, I got to switch to super source, so you'll see this kind of swing into two I can go to. Let's see, I want to go to this or I want to go to a two up here like this.

I want to go to four and have these pop up, and this on a software switcher is relatively easy, on an ATEM is hard. Atems are very stable. They do a lot of things that are really great. They give you a lot of IO, but doing super sources can be a little bit difficult, and so this allows you to do that much, much easier, and I'll see if I can pop this up real quick here in a second um the uh, let's see if I can show you the interface of what I'm hitting here and if I um, so this is, let's see here.

2:16:42 - Jason Snell
Um sorry, there we go um this is what it looks like a little telestrator dot right there on the screen below your microphone.

2:16:53 - Leo Laporte
It's been bugging people all through the show. I finally figured out what it was. There it is.

2:16:57 - Alex Lindsay
Telestrator dot. There we go. I got a little something on me. I got a little telestrator on me, um so, uh, so anyway, but if I, uh, if I go to this, this is what the interface looks like. So what I was doing here and here I'm hitting these and simply, you know, as I click through them, you know and I can see, and so I have done pretty big events just with this interface.

Of course you have control over, you know, your HyperDecks. I don't have any hooked up right now. You have super sources. You can just look at a switcher and it's incredible, incredible. And this goes a little bit further. Here's all the, the different you know out, and these are my outputs. If I want to do a stream, you know. So all the controls that I would expect to have inside of my switcher are all here, and so I think that it, you know for me, it when someone gets it, they said, oh, I'm getting an ATEM. Like, okay, you gotta, okay, you got to buy this piece of software. Like it just changes, it literally quadruples the value of your switcher the moment you download it onto your iPad. So if you have an iPad and you're using a Blackmagic switcher, this is a must-have app. I mean, almost all of us that do any production on it have it because it's so much faster.

Building these multi-window super sources is really painful on a Blackmagic switcher. Everything else about it is very good, like. There's a lot of things we really like about it. We like that it's hardware, we like that it's stable, we like that it does all those things. But this fixes the one thing that's there and you can't get this on any, I think, any other app or all the tools on it.

Because what adam did to do this is he literally watched the communication of the, of the, of the app and the and the switcher, um, to figure out what was actually being, you know, command. So he had to reverse engineer the signals, reverse engineered this all not it's or a lot of it, and so a lot of the tools. You really have, every tool that you would need inside of a switcher, inside of the atom switcher, uh, there, and then again, you know, set it up and so it's. He just updated it again. I realized I don't, I'm not set up to.

I thought I was going to show the new feature, but I'm not really set up for that. But what the new feature is that he that he released to is the ability, if you've got a little HDMI, if you want to go out from the USB-C, from your ATEM, extreme or whatever, straight into your iPad. You can actually see your multi-view in the iPad view while you're doing the edit, and so it's cool. So, anyway, it's a great app and it's about 50 bucks and, given what it does for something that we might spend a lot more on, it's a pretty good deal. Yeah, amazing.

2:19:29 - Leo Laporte
Mac, iphone and iPad, so you can have it on whatever size screen suits.

2:19:35 - Alex Lindsay
And it takes. One thing that's funny about Adam is he loves shortcuts. So, by the way, it has a very extensive shortcut library. That's nice. So you have a very extensive shortcut library. It also has. It supports OSC, which is open sound control, which means that the way we use it for office hours is this is our ATEM whisperer, and so basically it talks to the ATEM. We, through OSC, tell Mix Effect Pro what we want the ATEM to do, and it tells the ATEM to do it. So we're using it as a converter for it. But there's a very extensive shortcut library that's also built into this, and so it you can do many, many, many things with shortcuts nice job.

2:20:13 - Leo Laporte
Adam tau mix effect pro. He calls it the paid upfront version. Yeah, I like that. You pay once and that's it. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, alex lindsey. Good pick the way. Thanks to John Ashley, who spotted that. Actually, we all spotted the green dot, but he's the one who says I bet it's the telestrator. It's the telestrator. John knew John was right. Now is there a green dot on my head? Wait a minute, andy and Hako pick of the week Back in my home office.

2:20:46 - Andy Ihnatko
what I really, really love is having two screens, one on top of the other, and after a long time of using my Mac this way, I'm kind of like my creative brain is programmed that the lower screen is whatever it is I'm writing or creating or editing. The screen above is reference stuff or Slack or other stuff, and so now that we're in pleasant weather in which my lack of air conditioning at home becomes an issue and I'm doing more time at the library, I was missing that a lot because I don't have that available, although I do have my iPad Pro and I use that as a second screen. That's great. I accidentally discovered that, but I already have the perfect solution to this.

There's one of my one of my iPad stands. When my phone stands just in my office happens to be the exact right height to when you put, when I put it on the on on the desktop, hovering above my MacBook screen. I actually took a picture of the setup of uh, I think, last week. Uh, if you have that picture, uh, and it is absolutely wonderful and gracious. It's like having it's. It's like a, a, a, a custom made dual screen.

2:22:02 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it was made to do this.

2:22:04 - Andy Ihnatko
It's so cool, exactly, and and this thing, this thing happens to be, I mean, that is like, oh my God, that's just so wonderful to work with, and this thing happens to be adjustable, but, as it happens, like at its lowest point, it just happens to be perfect. But you might be asking like well, gosh, that's not going to be easy to put, like in a bag. Another thing that made me seem made it seem as though this was divine ordinance. This is not like pop, riveted or welded, it's actually just a screw and so really you can just simply twist it off.

2:22:38 - Leo Laporte
Look at that.

2:22:41 - Jason Snell
Those Otisola guys really know their business.

2:22:45 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just that simple.

2:22:47 - Leo Laporte
I'm ordering it right now, andy, and it will fold completely flat.

2:22:51 - Andy Ihnatko
I love this, and you just, and I just put the screw like back into the hole so it doesn't get lost. I'm looking around for like nylon bags around my house that might be perfect for like actually just holding this in one bag, so it's one entity, um, and oh my god, it is just. I cannot overstress, at least how happy this makes me, it's, I guess. I guess I'm so much more productive when I'm $30.

2:23:16 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing, and you're doing is this that's a 12 inch or 11?

2:23:19 - Andy Ihnatko
that's a 12 inch that's the, that's the ipad pro yes, 12 inch pro.

2:23:23 - Leo Laporte
so it's like, really is like you've got two screens with your MacBook and then Pro, and then your 12-inch iPad. That's brilliant, brilliant.

2:23:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Now the only caution I will say is that this holds it perfectly. It holds it at a slight angle and there's a big, big curve here, so that, unless you knock it off, it's not falling off. However, if you do knock it off carelessly, yeah, it is going to fall off, and this is like, and it might fall off on top of your macbook. So either a either a, be reasonable or responsible or b I'm actually looking at like putting a magnet or something here that might be able to click into it.

Yeah, exactly, I don't, I can't afford to have. Like, maybe when I upgrade to like the next, the, the M4 iPad, maybe I'll just like actually just like 3M on this yeah, make it permanent.

2:24:15 - Leo Laporte
There you go, yeah.

2:24:17 - Jason Snell
Yeah, very cool so that's my pick.

2:24:18 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the Odosola O-D-O-S-O-L-A, the name you can trust. Tablet stand 30 bucks from Amazon.

2:24:33 - Leo Laporte
I already bought a second one in case this one gets. Actually the full name says I know people will be searching for this is tablet stand height angle, adjustable eye level. Desktop ipad stands. Hot table tablet holder for home office. Cradle dock for ipad pro 12, 9, air 4, kindle e-reader. Nexus iphone 4 to 13 inches, silver. You know for it by name. This would actually be uh good for um my uh setup at my mom's where I want the iphone, because I'm using the, the continuity cam, yeah, right above the screen, so I could do that and again it's sure oh and, and it is like very, very extensible.

2:25:02 - Andy Ihnatko
So, basically, if you really do want this to be camera height, you can definitely make this camera height. It's very, very perfect, beautiful.

2:25:10 - Leo Laporte
I already ordered it. It's coming. It's coming thursday, lovely, thank you, andy, and not go. Okay, I'm down 30 bucks actually 50 and 50 bucks for the, the, the mix effect pro and 30 bucks for you. Let's see if Jason snell can get me to spend any more money $300,. Leo.

2:25:33 - Jason Snell
Yes, but what does it do? This is the Zoom H6 Essentials Sold. It is a compact flash audio recorder with four XLR cable plugs for microphones and an expansion slot.

2:25:46 - Leo Laporte
It's a podcast studio to box.

2:25:47 - Jason Snell
It comes with a stereo microphone so you can do field recording, but also you can add a forthcoming it's not out yet a little add-on that uh adds two xlr's on it so you can record six at once. Um, this is an update to the old h6n which I had, which uh has gotten to the point now where the plastic on it is all degraded, so it's like picking up a sticky wet candy every time you pick it up. Uh and I wanted a new one and and the other great things about this. So usbc, so I don't have to carry around that weird usb micro cable in order to do it. Uh, much better interface and I think uh it's got accessibility, by the way. So if uh it'll do audio driven menus, if you're somebody who is not going to be able to navigate the little uh menu and 32 bit float recording which is the most important thing because it means that you don't have to adjust the levels literally at all at all.

You just press record and it won't be over modulated, it won't be under modulated, you will get good audio. You just adjust it after the fact to whatever level pleases you, which is so much better than the old way. So I've been using this now for a couple of months and my old one was really a workhorse. A lot of remote podcast stuff with four or five, six people sitting around a table, set up the microphones, use the Zoom recorder just very handy. And then, yeah, if you are out in the field, you can either just hold a microphone or get their little stereo microphone on here to capture our audio. So anybody who's capturing audio. This is my essentially my field travel recorder. I actually use this with the ipad too, because I can.

I can use a microphone that's got usb and xlr right and I can do my zoom over the ipad and record the audio using the Zoom recorder Two different companies, by the way. Zoom Audio and Zoom Video Conferencing Not related, but anyway. $300. H6 Essential.

2:27:39 - Leo Laporte
I have the Zoom field recorder. The F3, which is also 32-bit, works great, but adding the XY microphones just gives you a little bit more you can do. Are they pretty good? Do they sound all right?

2:27:52 - Jason Snell
they sound pretty good. And then I didn't even mention um. It also will work as a usb audio interface. So if you have, yes, that's what I use my f3 yes you can plug in an xlr microphone xlr microphone and plug this into your mac or pc or whatever, and it will become a multi-track audio interface that will work with any of your recording or video conferencing apps that's what I use at my mom's is.

I'm using my zoom f3 um and that's 32 bits fantastic you can also put a shotgun little case put a shotgun capsule on here yeah, they got a lot of other um things that are coming out. Oh, and it's got a. It's got a bluetooth adapter that's optional and if you that not only will that sync time code if you're a filmmaker, but it means you can use an iPad or an iPhone app and control it all remotely and not even have to worry about using the on-screen controls.

2:28:38 - Leo Laporte
If we were to do a podcast, for instance, like this one with a live audience, we could have the XY microphones, record ambient sound on a separate track and then have your four voices. Wow, you know, it's a good time to be a podcaster, all except for the money thing.

2:28:54 - Jason Snell
But in every yeah you know, you know, leo, when we started, I mean you kind of came from the other direction from tv and so you've got a little more complicated setup. I will tell you, as a originally a hobbyist podcaster, those early days were rough it was everything was either really cheap and awful or incredibly expensive and made for professional musicians. It's a lot better now I bought.

2:29:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I bought a mini disc recorder so I could do my first podcast, because it was the. It was the best option for recording really high quality audio that I could then edit I uh have, if we think we still have them in the back room.

2:29:27 - Leo Laporte
uh, recorders. You hung over your shoulder the old radio style. They were designed to look like cassette decks but they were actually recording to SSD or compact flash or something. But I had like eight of those and then the SM58 mics to go out in the field to record with. It's gotten a lot better and this Zoom stuff is fantastic. This is very impressive, very, very impressive, and I can get it by tomorrow if I order within 25 minutes amazing the pressure, I'm tempted to get the shotgun.

2:29:59 - Jason Snell
I don't know why three hundred dollars and, yeah, the accessories are not. I think most of the accessories aren't out yet, but they're coming out later this summer. Zoom says yeah, yeah, because I'll be buying the xlr thing so I can do a six-person podcast with just this little thing and it's, and it's, it'll do uh, usb power or it's also, and this is like a beautiful feature, because when you're out in the field it's just uh, four double a's and they last a long time, so you can do it that way if you need to oh look, burke found one of my old recorders.

2:30:28 - Leo Laporte
He's going to model it for you now. If you could just figure out where the camera is.

2:30:32 - Jason Snell
There it is oh man, we had one of those. We had one of those at macworld. That was our first podcast recorder and the best thing about it I just mentioned four double a's. I think that thing took six double a's or maybe eight double a's or c's maybe or something, and they would, and they would only last an hour. It would only last an hour. You would burn those batteries off.

2:30:52 - Leo Laporte
Marantz With a name like Marantz, the quality goes in.

2:30:57 - Jason Snell
Again built for radio journalists.

2:30:59 - Leo Laporte
Essentially, that's what this was, In fact, in the old days this was a cassette player, so they really just took the same design.

2:31:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they put a compact flash card in it.

2:31:06 - Leo Laporte
They put a compact flash card in it. I put a compact flash card in it, but it burned battery.

2:31:09 - Jason Snell
Wow, did it kill the batteries? Oh yeah.

2:31:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's even got my phone number still on it. That's interesting Hope you all caught that. Look away, wow, that is memories. Two mics, by the way, two. Count them, nice, yeah, look at that. Imagine and boy too, like. Count them, nice, yeah, look at that. Imagine and boy the levels you had to get those right. There was no 32-bit float on that sucker.

2:31:34 - Jason Snell
No well, I just ordered.

2:31:34 - Leo Laporte
This is a hat trick. I ordered all three of your products, yes, as we were doing the show, so congratulations. I'm only at 380 dollars. Don't worry, it's not coming from the club twitch fund. That slush fund does not go to me, that goes to her. And I won the.

2:31:50 - Jason Snell
Alex Award for the most expensive thing.

2:31:52 - Leo Laporte
You won the award.

2:31:53 - Jason Snell
Congratulations. The last person who goes is the most expensive?

2:31:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah exactly, We'll just look at the prices.

2:31:59 - Leo Laporte
Folks, we do this show and spend Leo's money every Tuesday, 11 am to 2 pm. It's kind of a fun game we play here. The home version. Uh, if you want to watch us live, you can on YouTube, youtube.com/twit/live. After the fact, on demand versions of the show are available on the website, twit.tv/mbw. Uh, you can also. Uh, hi, lily, that's my lunch. Yes, thank you. Uh, she's sniffing around my lunch hey, show title.

2:32:27 - Jason Snell
Hey, stop sniffing around my lunch.

2:32:28 - Leo Laporte
Hey, hey, show title. Hey, stop sniffing around my lunch. I got my lunch pail right here. You know, we got to economize. We got to economize. I brought the sandwich.

You can also watch our YouTube channel video only. Well, there's audio in the video, so it's also video and audio for MacBreak Weekly Dedicated to it. Best thing to do is subscribe. Now, there you do get the choice. You can get the audio only version or the one with video and audio, uh, in your favorite podcast player, and that way you can listen automatically the minute we are done. Deepest Thanks to our club twit members for making this show possible and every show you see on the air here, security now is coming up If you tuned in and you're saying see you on the air here. Security Now is coming up. If you tuned in and you're saying wait a minute, it's Security Now time. Yes, you're right, it's coming up in just a little bit, but it is time to say goodbye to our esteemed panel and remind you that you got to get back to work because break time is over. Bye