MacBreak Weekly 928 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are all here. We will talk about Apple saying hey, you know what. We think our products ought to last a little bit longer. Their new longevity report. EU's competition commissioner, says shame on you, apple. You said the quiet part out loud. And we'll talk about Apple TV's prospects in a world where streaming seems to be dying. That and a whole lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.
0:00:30 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.
0:00:40 - Leo Laporte
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 928, recorded Tuesday, July 2nd, 2024: Hey, At Least They're Reading. It's time for MacBreak weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news for show of July 2024. We're getting ready for the fourth of July which, as everybody knows, is a major holiday because the UK is electing a new prime minister. No, Alex Lindsay is here from office hours. Do you do office hours the fourth?
0:01:10 - Alex Lindsay
We do it every day. We haven't missed a single day. Christmas day and all that, wow, Christmas day, new year's day, some of them, they're only an hour, but they're still. We still do them. Yeah, absolutely I get.
0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I have to prepare our international listeners who don't know that there's a special day on the 4th and they're going to call us and say what happened to my show. There was no Tech News Weekly this week. That's Andy Ihnatko calling us, I think from his Turkish prison cell would be my guess.
0:01:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, not my Turkish prison cell. It belongs to the government of Turkey. But we're having some good talks. I'm getting a lot of. My pranas are very, very much aligned.
0:01:50 - Leo Laporte
You moved in after Assange moved out? I think yes.
0:01:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, cause, oh my God, he, the, the, the, the broadband he had installed here. You know, he was a, he was a whiner, but he knew how to get what he wanted. I'm impressed.
0:02:04 - Leo Laporte
Great to see you, Andy from GBH in Boston. Also with us, Jason Snell from sixcolors.com, and it's always a fun game to guess where you are. And now I'm looking at the lava lamp and it's not moving. That means it's real.
0:02:22 - Jason Snell
When it moves, I can interact with objects back there. Don't ask me that every time or I know, I know I know, uh, yes, I am in my house, uh, where it is uh getting warm. Uh, well, I live. I live in a place that is very much close to the bay and and, uh, we're having a heat wave, but it's not gonna.
0:02:40 - Leo Laporte
It's, it's fine, I'm fine we're're not going to have an historic hurricane. I hope Hurricane barrel, but let me just see here Earliest.
Cat 5 in the season ever. Yeah, it's not good, not good, and it looks like a wide swath. But let me just look at our. 94952 is our zip code. It's not working, okay, anyway, it's going to be hot, hot. Look at that. That's the map of the us. It's red. It's red like a, uh, like an elderly man at a madonna concert. It's just not good. Fall colors, fall colors, that's what it is. That's what it is. Andrew 98, it says our 10 day. 98, it's not bad.
I saw, uh, you know, this is where the weather apps vary considerably. My, I saw one weather app that said we're going to be in the hundreds. I see this. One says 94. Weathercom says 98. Uh, this is apple. Oh, no, this is dark sky. I think spinning weather wheel. I'm pretty sure the supreme court just ruled that biden can hire a squad of my elite attack ostriches to eliminate trump. Okay, I don't know what he said, but she said but 91 according to dark sky, to uh, uh, carrot weather. So I don't, I just don't know. I just don't know. We're just gonna watch for the interest.
0:03:59 - Andy Ihnatko
On my, on my android phone, there's the weather widget that's built in. You can't get rid of, because google sometimes doesn't understand design. I've got a, a widget for 4k, which is like a good combination based on effects, yeah, and then and a third one. That's just because I like the design of the widgets and every time I pick it up it's like I'm just going to pick whichever one makes me feel good.
0:04:20 - Leo Laporte
Random. Yeah, yay, 81 degrees. Well, we'll watch. I think it's going to get over 100. We should have a little betting pool, john Ashley, like is it going to get over 100 or not?
0:04:32 - Speaker 2
Probably so it's supposed to be over 100, I think in the East Bay for sure. Yeah, Possibly. I saw 104. Santa Rosa for sure.
0:04:40 - Leo Laporte
My Amazon Echo told me it was going to be 104 today, and that's why it's really interesting there's such a variation. Anyway, we'll see. You want to bet a Runza? Yeah, let's bet a Runza. I think there's at least two left. There's two left, so everybody wins. Marguerite Vestager, who is the former European competition commissioner she's now a regular full-time executive vice president of the EU Commission says Apple's decision not to launch its own artificial intelligence AI in the EU is a stunning declaration, an open declaration. They know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already. We mentioned last week that Apple's response to the EU was to say okay, well, you don't get AI in that case.
0:05:35 - Andy Ihnatko
We're just so terrified because there's absolutely no way we could possibly check to see if any of these AI policies are going to comply.
0:05:43 - Leo Laporte
It's just scary. Ai is just scary.
0:05:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, yeah, especially a quote like that, that you need a little bit of context. It wasn't like this was. She gave a. She gave a talk, uh, a news release, in which she thumped her fist on the table and yelled about apple. This was at the end of like an hour-long talk.
She gave uh to uh to a european body and it was during the q a that he wasA that she was asked directly to the best of your knowledge, how does Apple's walled garden apply to their AI? How do you interpret their decision to not release Apple intelligence features in the EU? So she was basically saying that the obligations they have in Europe is to be open for competition. That's the short version, and I find it very interesting that they say, quote we will not deploy AI where we're excuse me, we will not deploy AI where we're not obliged to enable competition. Unquote. And that's the most stunning. That's where the stunning word comes from. So, basically, she's saying that, well, if you're saying that the only place we're not going to do this is where there's actually something like these rules, she regards that and I'm sure she's stoking the fire here, but exactly that's where that quote comes from. She's that's that.
0:06:51 - Jason Snell
She's basically says that if there's competition, we don't want any part of it.
0:06:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, so again, it's apple like I said, last week apple did the same thing where it's like oh well gosh, we're, oh gosh, we're handcuffed because there's no way we can introduce these features with the digital markets. Act like okay, yeah, yeah.
0:07:03 - Jason Snell
So, yeah, it is. It is rhetoric. Apple threw a punch at the EU by saying, well, we just can't release these features because we don't know if they're compliant, and so we're just going to play it on the safe side. And again, is there truth behind that? There is some. Is there politics behind that? Oh yeah, sure Right. And so I understand that she would want to punch back, sure right, and so I understand that she would want to punch back. It is the way she does. It, though, is like she's basically saying well, this tells you everything you need to know about apple.
If apple withholds field, withholds features in europe, it's because they're planning on destroying competition, and that's the only lens that she is, I think, capable of talking about apple, and I don't think the facts in this case really back it up. But again, it's politics, it's rhetoric, so I'm disappointed by it, because it suggests that high up people in Europe view everything Apple does as being fundamentally anti-competition, even just doing new features. But again, they are fighting with Apple. So and this is more of a counterpunch than a punch. So I get it, but I don't like it, cause I think what she's saying isn't actually true. I think she's saying Apple's telling on itself by withholding a feature that might be against the DMA, as if there's something about like this feature that that they know is bad, when in fact it's more like it hasn't been checked and they don't know it's going to apply.
0:08:27 - Alex Lindsay
So I think it's a little bit silly, but it's rhetoric it's, and I think I think a big part of this is apple's fault, like so. And the thing is is that the problem is apple really stated it wrongly not what they did, but what they said. They really want to push down on this security thing, so they pushed down on it, but I think that the problem was they're being inauthentic about that. What they could have just said is here's the deal we don't understand the rules, we don't understand what the EU wants. We thought we did what they wanted to do. They didn't do it.
Until we figured this out, we're not going to add anything new until we, you know, we just we'll just get it sorted out and then, once we know what the rules are, we'll do it. If they've just been authentic in, we don't if the EU keeps on moving the bar. From our perspective, like we think we followed the letter of the law of what you said we had to do, but now you say that's not right. We need to figure that out before we start adding these features and not make it about security. Not make it about, I think they thought.
Probably thought that was too complex for people to understand and so they just went back to the that knee jerk of them saying oh, it's security, as Andy said, is hyperbolic, and her response is hyperbolic, but it would be very hard for her to argue with. We don't understand what the rules are and so we're going to wait to bring this in. Until we do, then it would have been very hard for her to like we're committed to bring. All Apple had to say is we're committed to bringing AI once we understand what the rules of the game are.
0:09:43 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, and once that's established and they just said that she wouldn't have any ground and even if it took two or three years, yeah, I thought that that was a pretty big like own goal from Apple, because they're saying, oh well, gosh, we can't make this secure and private. And then, oh gosh, well, I've got the, I've got. I happen to have Marshall McClure right here. And what? What? What does the DMA say about privacy and security? Well, it says right here that we will make exceptions if you can say that this technology would compromise privacy and security. How you became a PR spokesperson for Apple, I have no idea.
0:10:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it is an Apple. Apple can't help itself. I mean, really, this is and I don't know this for a fact, but I feel like there are definitely some very pugnacious people within Apple who they just want to fight. They want to yell at the EU, they're mad about it, and they're taking it maybe a little too personal and not thinking tactically, because, yeah, the right way to say this was to say unfortunately, we can't share some of these features. We don't think we can share some of these features with the EU.
By the way, they never said that they weren't coming. They said that they wouldn't be coming this year, so they basically said they delayed them because they're not sure whether they'll be allowed or not. They could have softened that, though, and said you know, we will work with the EU to figure out whether these comply with their restrictions or not. We want to bring them to the EU. It really depends on what we can do. Right, they could have done it that way, but instead, everything is in attack mode with them, and so we can't do it because, they're so mean.
0:11:07 - Andy Ihnatko
We're looking forward to bringing all these features to every market, but of course, we want to comply with all local laws and we want to make sure that we're not in violation of the Digital Markets Act. This will require us to be a little bit. Little bit more conservative in rolling out in certain markets.
0:11:22 - Alex Lindsay
And this is all gamemanship, because they haven't released anything in the United States yet either.
0:11:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and it's US English.
0:11:27 - Alex Lindsay
only they didn't have to say anything right now, like there was no reason for them to say anything. They're saying well, we'll roll it out slowly around the world. I mean they roll. It's not like they released the Apple Vision Pro day and date with the United States. Many products only exist in Japan, not for Apple, but many people make only things in Japan or only in Europe that don't get exported. Not exporting to another region is not something that is that abnormal there's. You know, we don't have Apple Pay in most places, and so all of those things just take time.
But they could have waited on this until I and to Andy's point, they were. And to Jason's point, and to Andy's point, they were. And to Jason's point, they were overplaying their hand and they were playing it early. And they're trying to make, they're trying to push something down the path that they didn't need to, because they could have let this sit for, I mean, until October. Like they could have just not done anything and said well, we're going to roll it out to the rest of the world in a slow manner, we're going to start in the United States, we're going to roll it out to the rest, and then they wouldn't have to say anything specific, probably until late 2025.
0:12:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think they. Basically, what happened was inside Apple. As soon as you talk about regulation, there is I think, jason, you had it on the ball where it's like there are attack dogs that say ooh, ooh, regulation. This is an opportunity for us to prosecute our argument that we should have as little regulation as possible because it makes things unsafe and forces us to not do the features that everybody loves. Great, great, great. And there wasn't the calming influence. Before that message was sent out, I said, yeah, but this is not the right place to make that statement. It'll probably backfire on us.
0:13:08 - Leo Laporte
Well, speaking of which Apple, according to Mark Gur, mark german plans to add a lot of ai to vision pro. Uh, is that a change from how, or is this just?
0:13:16 - Jason Snell
they didn't announce vision os as one of the uh, I've been calling it like the intelligence trinity of products, right, the iPhone, ipad and Mac. It isn't in there and Gurman says they are working on it. And this is sort of what we, I think, assumed at the time, which is they're not sure what they're going to be able to ship in this whole cycle right in the next year with Apple Intelligence, because it's happening, it's coming in hot it's. You know, they're really working furiously to ship this thing at all because it's happened so quickly and so they didn't commit on stage to what they were going to do with Vision OS. And this is obviously Gurman talking to his sources at Apple who are saying, yeah, I mean especially because they're countering.
There was a story that came out, I think, last week that suggested maybe the hardware couldn't support it because the M2 was working too hard on other stuff. And this report suggests, I think maybe purposefully, to Gurman no, no, no, no, no, the plan is to have it there. It's just a question of when and it's not their top priority, because the other three platforms are their top priority. But they're basically saying, yes, apple intelligence features are going to come. They have to work on the interface. It's probably like way behind the other three, but they are working on it.
0:14:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, ok, and you'd expect it to be. And in fact, a lot of us think that the real or most interesting use of headsets and AI is the merger, like on a more augmented reality, of you know, seeing AI interpret what it's seeing. Meta's already put that into their Ray-Bans and other companies are trying to do that. I would imagine that that's a good roadmap for Vision Pro.
0:14:56 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's not. Vision Pro has an added advantage in that it doesn't just know well what are the cameras mounted to this thing focused on. It knows exactly where your eyes are, what the actual object is. So if you actually say who is this person, it knows that you're looking at a group picture of 11 people and I'm looking at exactly this face. And that kind of functionality could be expanded in so many different ways with a really really good version of Shlomo. So, yeah, it could be amazing and it would be kind of disappointing if the only thing that Apple did with Apple Intelligence on Vision Pro was that thing that works on the iPhone and works on the Mac. It also works on Vision Pro in almost exactly the same way. That's, if you've got these hardware advantages of the Vision Pro that cost $3,500, absolutely use that opportunity to expand them.
0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, here's other Vision Pro news, as long as we're in the Vision Pro segment according to elect.
0:15:54 - Jason Snell
You say that like Vision, vision. Is that what you want from me? Every time you say that, I know you're looking at me, leo. I know you're thinking about me.
0:16:03 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you for thinking of me. I think of you.
0:16:05 - Jason Snell
Vision Pro segment. Let's get a jingle.
0:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Let's do it like it's time for the Vision Pro segment. Vision Pro.
0:16:11 - Andy Ihnatko
What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk. Bing Vision Pro.
0:16:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we did it. Is there other Vision Pros? Leo, what's going on?
0:16:26 - Leo Laporte
Half of this panel owns vision pros, so we just want.
0:16:27 - Andy Ihnatko
We won't tell you which half but half of this? I'm part of the control group. That's. That's what I've done.
0:16:31 - Leo Laporte
The control group excellent uh, this, uh, I'm reading the english language version from patentlyapplecom. Uh, because it's my korean, isn't it what it used to be. Apple has senta mysterious request for materials, what they call an RFI, which really requests for information to Samsung, nlg for new OLED screens, perhaps for the Vision Pro. The Elec says industry sources have confirmed Apple has sent this RFA. That applies to a product with a color filter, to a white, organic, light-emitting diode. Oled, which screen size, 2.0 to 2.1 inches, got to be VP. Right, it's too big for the watch, too small for anything else. Pixel density of 1, 1700 pixels per inch. That's nice, although about half what the current Vision Pro is Bigger screen, lower pixel density.
0:17:36 - Jason Snell
What do you think? Which means you get back some of those pixels if you've got the optics right, that's one way to save some money is you get a lower resolution screen that's larger and then, using your optics, you have that fill the space.
0:17:50 - Leo Laporte
You shrink it with like a magnifying glass turned on its back.
0:17:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so it's going to be, because there's a lot of complicated optics going on anyway.
0:17:57 - Leo Laporte
So one way you save Very sophisticated scientifically. You have reverse binoculars. It's like Viewmaster.
0:18:07 - Jason Snell
It's a Viewmaster is what it is. Okay, I mean, there's so much weird optics going on in vr headsets anyway, right that I can, I can see them, the, this being one way you save a lot of money on a cheaper vision pro.
0:18:17 - Leo Laporte
Right, because those those sony oled displays are incredibly expensive and there aren't that many of them so this confirms what we'd always expected, which is that a lower cost vision pro is in the works. I mean early, early days. So if it's not even a request for a proposal, it's just tell us can you do this?
0:18:34 - Jason Snell
Gurman said they're trying to do late next year. Wouldn't surprise me if that slips right until it's a thing I learned a long time ago which is late in the year means next year, Right, so let's say maybe early 26, but yeah that they're working on it.
0:18:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and apparently, according to Ming-Chi Kuo, they're working on and this is an interesting rumor, maybe related to the Vision Pro AirPods with cameras.
0:19:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a good. I mean, ming-chi Kuo is a great supply chain analyst right, yeah, because we're talking two years from.
Yeah, yeah, he knows. This is the thing that a lot of us, as users of these products, do not think about, which is, you must procure the parts for them, right, and sometimes it's really exciting stuff, like the screens in the Vision Pro, but, like this is, this is the indication is they want to get some infrared cameras that are very small and put them in AirPods, and so that leaks, because who's making those cameras? It's not Apple, right, and so they have to go to a supplier, and Ming-Chi Kuo knows all those suppliers, and he talks to them and he says aha, apple's doing this Now. Then he adds this whole bizarre thing where he says here's how they're going to be used. They're going to be used with Vision Pro, so that, when you turn your head around, the sound will follow you in a sort of spatial audio, and it's like, uh ming qi quo, that feature already exists, it's true, and it doesn't require a camera. So I don't know what you're talking about, but I think this is the answer. Is he's trying to put based, maybe based on things that apple said to people in the factory who they may be lying to? Uh, he's trying to create a narrative around it.
I I do think, though. Remember when we were talking about, like the humane AI pin, and how the one piece in Apple's constellation of devices that doesn't exist is having a camera that can see. You know, they don't have they don't have Ray-Ban, meta-ray-ban glasses or anything like that Having something that can see your surroundings to help your AI assistant understand where it is and what you're looking at. To help your AI assistant understand where it is and what you're looking at. Well, an infrared camera on AirPods is an interesting idea that this might allow your iPhone to see what is around it even when it's in your pocket, and infrared is interesting because I wonder if that means it could see through, like hair and stuff, and actually see your surroundings in a better way. I don't know. It's interesting, but maybe not for the ways that Ming-Chi Kuo says.
0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Chance Miller at 905 Mac has some suspicions. He says I think there's a lot more to this story than the Vision Pro example Kuo mentions. While integration with Vision Pro makes sense as a feature, I don't expect these new camera-equipped AirPods to be focused entirely on VP. My guess Apple has a lot of other ideas about how these AirPods could work with powerful multimodal voice and image AI systems.
0:21:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also remember that there's been rumors for a little while now about what could you do if you had infrared sensors and actually infrared cameras inside the AirPods for health Like could you now get pulse information and other information from the?
0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
AirPods. So point it in, not out. Yeah, that's interesting. Exactly you do that right.
0:21:34 - Jason Snell
That's the.
0:21:34 - Alex Lindsay
Then you get your temperature thing too, and I was just reading an article about how I mean, like a lot of doctors now are not they're very close to prescribing the apple watches like they're just they're all about. They're just starting to tell their patients that you really should just get these apple watches to make sure that there's other data that you need. It's not as accurate as what we have at the hospital or the thing, but that constant information is really useful to them.
0:22:16 - Leo Laporte
No-transcript we ask our fine audience, our club members and others, to work on their on the version. You know, merlin, I wish I could find that rat hole.
0:22:30 - Speaker 2
If anybody still has a copy of that, I'm gonna have the in the for the intro and the outro that have a really cheesy ms uh paint graphic pop it pop out, yeah, yeah a little bit pixelated. No, no, no, like really cheese, like a five-year-old drew it what do you see?
0:22:45 - Leo Laporte
what do you know? I like andy's lyrics, I think what do?
0:22:48 - Andy Ihnatko
you see what do know. It's time to talk. Bing Vision Pro.
0:22:53 - Leo Laporte
I think we've got it. We just need somebody to make it Orchestrate that. There used to be a lot of people listeners and viewers who did that kind of thing. I don't know where they've all gone to. Oh, anthony Nielsen just found the rat hole. I don't know, is my sound on? Let's try it. Rat hole. Now, that's the short rat hole. I know that was great. There is a longer rat hole that has lyrics and a whole thing that goes on and on and on. I think audible is even mentioned as a matter of fact.
0:23:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just excited that maybe I'm going to be like Robert Altman's son, who wrote the lyrics to the theme for MASH and wound up making millions of dollars from the TV show. If I get 18 cents for every time we do a Viggo Pro segment, wait a minute.
0:23:43 - Leo Laporte
Suicide is Painless was written by Robert Altman's son.
0:23:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I think the story was there was, the music had been written by the composer of the movie. However, when they decided that, oh well, we want to use this in this scene where they're singing this song, dennis is about to pretend, pretend to right, and so, like his son, just like, quickly, just dashed off some lyrics and because he is the lyricist of the theme from MASH, because they used just the music in the TV show, he had to be paid. Gene Roddenberry. This is like. If there are reasons to not like Gene Roddenberry, here is one of them. Someone at Desilu composed a do-do-do-do-do-do-do Okay, great, we'll use it. And then, all of a sudden, like when it came time to register the music, there were lyrics attached to it that didn't exist. Gene Roddenberry wrote lyrics so that he could get a cut of all the licensing for the ripoff.
0:24:43 - Jason Snell
Stole half the money from Alexander Courage by writing lyrics that nobody's ever heard, Although as a kid I learned to play the Star Trek theme on the piano and the sheet music had the stupid Gene Roddenberry lyrics in it.
0:24:50 - Leo Laporte
That's publishing rights. There's your money.
0:24:52 - Jason Snell
Yeah, right there, no his lawyer said write some lyrics, gene. They don't have to be good, no one will ever hear them, but you'll get half the money. Oh, this is a youtube video these are the voyages of the stars.
0:25:05 - Leo Laporte
We've heard all that I want to hear the singing. Let's hear the singing.
0:25:09 - Jason Snell
Oh jeez my love is going against. Okay, that's bad, that's terrible. That's words. We are not using that for our vision pro.
0:25:24 - Alex Lindsay
Now you have to, you have to cut eating goat.
0:25:27 - Leo Laporte
Can you have to cut that out for youtube so we don't get taken. But can you leave Andy singing? Oh, that's easy. Okay, unless Andy decides to copyright strike. No copyright strikes from Andy no.
0:25:38 - Andy Ihnatko
All right. I am a team player, so we get copyright strikes for the strangest Last week, last week.
0:25:47 - Leo Laporte
I played people typing in a typist pool. Yes, and they demonetized her video on YouTube because of it. Yes. So I think we just cut out all non-reviewers, that's not a strike.
0:25:57 - Alex Lindsay
That's not a strike. It was not a strike.
0:25:59 - Leo Laporte
But it could have been. I mean, it's just that they decided oh, we'll demonetize you. The copyright holder gets to decide. You know how painful it is.
0:26:08 - Alex Lindsay
It's ridiculous, it's um, it's ridiculous, it's just absurd, anyway, I guess whoever owned the typist pool video. But but the cool thing is it's not strikes anymore, and if you don't care about the monitor, I don't care about monetization on youtube you don't have any about that it's like a superpower, because you just like run things in there and you just like, you're just like, oh, I just they're like, we got a strike how much was the strike, or was it a demonetization?
0:26:29 - Leo Laporte
You don't get strikes anymore.
0:26:30 - Alex Lindsay
Is that true? It's very you get them from the Eagles we can get strikes. Oh, we've gotten strikes the Eagles will give you a strike, don't mess with the Eagles, so the bands can. Always it's considered copyright holders are coached not to do that because it's considered very anti-user. At this point, thank you. It's just very ugly to do a strike and the Eagles don't care, but everyone else, most of the Apple, does.
0:26:54 - Leo Laporte
We've gotten strikes from it.
0:26:58 - Alex Lindsay
And NFL cares. Is it a strike strike Like like?
0:27:02 - Leo Laporte
yes, he says it is. It was in fact a strike. Now they expire. I think our, I think we're back to zero. We're fine.
0:27:10 - Alex Lindsay
You get three strikes and you're out, and you're out, and I think each strike is like six months.
0:27:18 - Leo Laporte
So you have to, you know, so you just can't get three of them in 18 months. Well, we're much more careful than we used to be Now. Do we care about demonetization? I mean, they still get the ads that I read in there, right?
0:27:26 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, that's, they're still yeah, but they don't get it. You can make four dollars per thousand viewers, so let's think about, we don't make much money on youtube ads.
0:27:35 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a few thousand a month, so I guess it's not. I don't know. I should talk to lisa. She's not only is she in charge of monetization, you can no longer have coffee on monday, I might be. Yeah, I might be sleeping on the couch, I don't know. Um, I saw a live stream get pulled down live, yeah, yeah, apple's pulled down our live stream. We stopped streaming on YouTube when we do the Apple events because they got a lawyer who's watching.
0:28:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yep, no, they don't have a lawyer, they just have a. They have a machine that's watching.
0:28:04 - Leo Laporte
No, Like they just set it to strike. We got an email from a lawyer. Yeah, we got an email from a lawyer. Yeah, we got a person's name on it, a law firm's name on it. It wasn't just like an automated thing. They were pretty serious about it. I don't think they really like me that much. In fact, jason, if I were you, I wouldn't mention my name at any time when you're in the Apple.
0:28:26 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, got it. I know that things got a little out of hand where everyone was restreaming Apple's event and I know that there was some point where they pulled back. You know like they were like, yeah, we're not gonna do that anymore.
0:28:37 - Leo Laporte
Anthony says we're still in limbo, with one strike from Apple from September of last year.
0:28:43 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the big thing is what Apple really wants you to do is watch the one that's the highest quality. This is a typical, of course. They want you to watch the one, because if you watch the one on the website there is, I mean, it looks pretty good on YouTube, but if you watch the one that Apple puts on their website, it is two or three times better than YouTube's. It's HDR and it's surround and it's super high resolution and they don't have to work, they don't construct it too much.
0:29:10 - Leo Laporte
I understand that super high resolution and they don't have to work. They don't, they don't. You know, they don't constrict too much. I don't blame them. That's fine if we could think of a way you guys do it we do it by not, but you don't stream their thing. You just talk about and assume other people are going to watch.
0:29:22 - Alex Lindsay
People are going to watch it on another screen that's exactly and we you know, and it works pretty well for us I mean, so you know.
So what you do is just you just talk and so you just open up. You know you listen to us and we just assume you're listening. You're not looking at anything. We're watching the stream together in Zoom, so we watch that. We're watching it in Zoom, so we're not getting the full quality that Apple wants, but we're watching it in Zoom, in Zoom ISO. We just don't take that audio out, so we out, so we hear the audio in zoom, but the audio that goes to the stream is um, without the the show should we, and so I wonder if that would, let me ask, uh, our audience, would you, would that be okay with you?
0:29:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean, we, what we do is worked, which is we just don't run it on youtube, where they're apparently watching, but there are other places they aren't uh, I just feel like it's better.
0:30:07 - Alex Lindsay
I I guess it. I did it because I thought it was the experience that I wanted.
0:30:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, your people care about video quality, so they're watching the Apple stream on the Apple.
0:30:14 - Alex Lindsay
Like I want to sit, I want to hear someone talk about it, I want to hear you talk about it or us talk about it, or whatever, but I don't. I want to watch it on my big screen or I want to watch it on my computer.
0:30:31 - Leo Laporte
And so the idea was I can just listen to people talking about it while I'm watching the full screen. Yeah, anthony Elson has a very good point. He says most of our viewers don't watch it live. They download it and watch it later. So if we don't have a reference point, it's just us talking.
0:30:41 - Alex Lindsay
There's not a lot of views on ours afterwards.
0:30:43 - Leo Laporte
This is like a very popular event and then it's like and then we're done. Yeah, see, we're the opposite.
0:31:00 - Jason Snell
Fun fact by the way, the monetization we were ineligible for last week was under the copyright. Owners of Fremantle International.
0:31:04 - Leo Laporte
On behalf of Thames TV. Thames TV, that's a British. Oh Thames Thames, it's a river in England.
0:31:07 - Jason Snell
It's not that sounds like it's a that's a reality. Do we have content from like a reality show? Because that's what that would be.
0:31:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think I made a mistake, because I ran one kind of old typist's video and then I ran another one, and I think the second one was in fact owned by the by Thames TV, but I don't know. Who knows, who knows. Anyway, it doesn't, it doesn't matter, we're never doing it again. Leo, don't play YouTube videos. We just play Star Trek, which is about the worst thing you can do. I mean, only Star Wars would be worse, but Paramount, I'm sure, is coming after us now we're in deep trouble.
0:31:41 - Andy Ihnatko
They need the money Like they can afford lawyers now.
0:31:45 - Leo Laporte
They got a carpool to work. Hey, let's talk streaming when we come back. We got lots more to talk about and why CocoaPods are suddenly not for breakfast anymore or something.
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What are CocoaPods when they're at home? Apparently not good. Critical flaws in CocoaPods, which is a dependency manager for Swift and Objective-C Cocoa projects it's a supply chain attack which means somebody got something bad into CocoaPods. A trio of security flaws An Israeli application security firm, reef Spectre, discovered. It said the three issues have been patched by CocoaPods as of last October. However, there were some. Really nasty one. With a CVSS of 9.3, made it possible for an attacker to abuse the claim your pods process and take control of the package effectively, allowing them to tamper with source code, introduce malicious changes without your knowledge. Uh, anyway, uh nasty is this? How many people use coco pods? Is that a widely used tool?
0:36:04 - Jason Snell
Teah, there are a lot of developers who use it. I don't think anybody actually exploited this, though, right, I think? I mean they said we don't really know for sure, but it seems like maybe not. And then the big. This is really a story for developers who use CocoaPods because they need to inspect, and there was a very clear like step-by-step on the report about what you do as a developer if you use CocoaPods to update step by step on the report about what you do as a developer if you use coco pods to update. But the good news is, you never know. There may be something in the background that that nobody was aware of. We've learned the lesson right that sometimes they play the long game, but I think in the short term, what we know is that these are researchers who found a big security hole that apparently nobody exploited, so far as we know so well.
0:36:51 - Leo Laporte
But the point is it was there for 10 years, years, yeah, so it's hard to know. You know three million ios and mac os apps use coco at the same time.
0:37:03 - Jason Snell
a bug, a security hole being open that long without anybody noticing it also probably means nobody. I think if something had happened eight years ago, somebody probably would have caught on and that never happened, so it seems more theoretical. But, like they said, if you're a developer, you got to be aware. And and bottom line is I know a lot of developers and using other people's code is already like they're like Ooh, I really you got to be careful with it, you don't want to be slapdash about it. And this is a case where, like, you got to follow the rules now and see, you know, make sure that the code you're using is the right code.
0:37:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the researchers said that they found this not because of reports of anything, but because they were actually actively red teaming on a contract, and that's when they found this possibility. So, yeah, and I kind of thought the same thing that if it had been exploited before, we probably would have found some evidence of where this had happened. Of course, this story only became public, I think, on Sunday night, I think, so maybe this is going to take a few weeks for people to start. Oh, we found something in our code log that we did not expect to be there, but it's still. There's no, no reason for worry.
0:38:12 - Leo Laporte
If you're a developer, though, yeah, that's why you keep on top of where you're checking out your books from yeah, and maybe you shouldn't use coco pods but swift packages, which is a more recent and probably more reliable um, okay, so no reason to panic, but but if you are a developer who uses CocoaPods, there might be a reason to read the story and fix it. Evasecio E-V-A-S-E-Cio has the story Also in the news via Mark Gurman's power on newsletter. Apple may want to monetize advanced Apple intelligence features in the future. May wanna, doesn't scare me. You can't scare me.
0:38:59 - Jason Snell
It's very much a theory. I mean this is in the hundred portion of Mark's newsletter where he's not really breaking news. May want to. Is Apple like services revenue? Yeah, they do. Is Apple intelligence expensive? Yeah, it is. Are other AI companies charging for premium access? Yeah, they do. Is Apple intelligence expensive? Yeah, it is. Are other AI companies charging for premium access? Yeah, they are.
And I it would not be a surprise at all if there was a tier of things in the long run that for you to do them would require an Apple one subscription or something like that, or a subscription to a service. I think that the challenge and this is all theoretical. I mean Apple's just paddling as hard as they can just to launch this thing in the next year. So it's going to be a while. But yeah, I think they're going to have to always ask yourself like are we breaking our operating system? Are we breaking our features by paywalling some of it?
And I think that's always the danger. Like they've got some things that are iCloud plus only right. Like the private some of the private security browsing features are like only if you're a paying customer, but there's the actual hardware behind that that does cost money. So I think that's I always pause at the are we going to charge for features inside our operating systems? But at the same time, it's not unreasonable to think that they'll get there eventually. But like, I don't think it's not unreasonable to think that they'll get there eventually, but I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.
0:40:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, this is really like Jason said this is really expensive stuff. It costs serious money. This is one of the reasons why even companies like Facebook and Google are like oh well, we're really concerned about privacy and we want to make sure we do as much on device as possible. That's because you get to pay for the compute power, you get to pay for the electricity.
One of the things that kind of hasn't been mentioned in this report that's kind of on my mind is that Apple is very, very and justifiably proud of their green initiatives and what is a pivot a strong pivot towards AI going to do, towards their ability to maintain their emissions goals that they committed to several years ago. Before, ai was a huge priority. As it happens, google released their usual emissions report today and it's all just bad news that emissions are way up, energy use is way up, all because they have to fire up all of these server farms to handle all this AI. So maybe we're going to see that affected in how Apple handles their promises towards becoming a completely self-reliant, completely green, completely no impact service.
0:41:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I just think. I think that you want people eventually to charge for things that they're giving you, because then it gets better. There's definitely things that I've learned, that I'm or things that I feel very static about, like, for instance, I haven't subscribed to Logic or Final Cut Pro on my iPad because I'm just tired of subscriptions. But for something that I know that it is, I know that there's a cost to it. I know that this is a service on the web. I know that there's. Every time I touch it it's costing them something. In that sense, I kind of want to pay for that because I don't want to become a hole where it becomes a cost center instead of a profit center, because you want it to be a profit center at some level so that the investment is proper. We used to.
I mean, one of the things that ILM learned how to do early on was charge for processing.
Every time they rendered a frame they would charge the movie company for it. They got the reputation of ILM stands for. I love money, which really came from that, because people got really frustrated. But it also meant that their render cloud, the internal rendering system they had, was the best in the world because they were able to reinvest. It had money earmarked to it, it wasn't a cost center, it was a profit center and, as a result, they were able to reinvest into that all the time and it made it just state of the art, and so I think that that's the upside of charging for things. So I think that if it keeps on getting better and I think Apple is going to continue to expand that private cloud I think that chat, gpt and Gemini are all just insurance policies as they continue to build that internal network that they're training and they keep on making it to the point where 90, 95% of what you're asking is doesn't ever get out to the outside world.
0:43:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Apple is also releasing. It's well. They have released it's massively modal masked modeling ai model, the cleverly called 4m uh, which was released uh seven months ago. But now you can try it on hugging face in the hugging face spaces platform in collaboration with the swiss federal institute of technology in lausanne um, that's kind of.
0:43:31 - Andy Ihnatko
That is kind of a big deal, because when's the last time Apple basically said hi, here is basic technology that we've yet to actually roll into a shipping product, Not. Here's a webpage on applecom that makes you interested in it. No, here is the actual models. We've got GitHub. We've got it. On GitHub.
There's one model that's online for demonstrating its ability to take, to analyze pictures and find facets, do depth perception, that sort of thing. But if you go to the GitHub page, if you want to use it to generate images, to parse text, it's all there and it gives you all the hooks you need in order to experiment with it. It's not user-friendly by any means whatsoever. It really is just there to share their work with other researchers and also build, which is a positive thing in and of itself, but also to make sure they're building their credibility, as we're not just adding nifty consumer-facing features to our phones. We are actually punching the same weight as Claude, as as OpenAI, as on Gemini, where we're building fundamental foundation models that we are actually cultivating ourselves for our own purposes, and we are not going to be simply for all the heavy lifting stuff always be dependent upon the work of Google or OpenAI or Facebook or Amazon.
0:44:49 - Leo Laporte
So if you go now to HuggingFaceco, you can find in this space is the 4M model a framework for training any to any multimodal foundational models? Okay, and you can drop I don't know what it's doing. You can drop an image into it. Here's some meatballs, let's see what it does. Or is that arancini? Oh no, it's almond cookies. And then you can see depth. You can see I don't know what's going on. Semantic segmentation. They say it's donuts on a dining table in a bowl. Okay, donut, donut, donut, donut, donut. Maybe it is donuts. It looks like there's a pecan next to it, I don't know Donuts cocoa pods.
0:45:26 - Andy Ihnatko
You're killing me. I'm hungry.
0:45:29 - Leo Laporte
What does it say here? It says there's a ceiling, there's a curtain.
0:45:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It sees all this, there's a door, stuff whatever that is, and it's not just image parsing either. Again, this is just the demo that you can interact with as a bonehead like me.
0:45:44 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that one of the things that's interesting is they talked about being able to manipulate 3D scenes using natural language, which is the.
0:45:52 - Leo Laporte
that is the beginning of world building, you know so being able to make huge progress in that area, aren't we? It's kind of interesting yeah.
0:46:00 - Alex Lindsay
But that's, that's a you know like world building and whether that's used and whether that's used for, you know, an actual, like virtual world that you could live in. But it's also I want to show you a scene or I want to show you an object. I can just say, put a radio and put a twenties radio in front of me, rotate it into this position and being able to, if it eventually is able to export that out as something as well. You can be building things and putting them into your keynotes, into your you know, other files, and so there's a lot of things that um 3D is kind of one of those things that's on the front. It's actually more complicated than music or some of the other stuff and so, but we're seeing pieces of that starting to occur.
0:46:37 - Leo Laporte
Current machine models for vision are often highly specialized, limited to a single modality and task. We take a step in the direction of recent large language models with a wide variety of capabilities. This is called 4M massively multimodal masked modeling, and you can read all about it on the Lausanne website, the PFL website. Interesting I think that's why it's mostly of interest is that Apple rarely does this kind of thing right. This is a new world Apple's living in.
0:47:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and they did that a few months ago. I can't remember the name of the model, but it was a learning model that could analyze a screenshot and bug out the names of the user interface elements and how these elements are working. I think it's the same model. Yeah, it might be part of the same model, but in that case it was a research paper. But once again, I really really love what Apple's been doing this year.
Like I did not that I had like doubts that, oh my God, apple is so far behind in AI because they haven't done, they haven't, they haven't, they haven't been part of a, they haven't been part of a ridiculous scandal about how terrible their AI model is. Scandal about how terrible their AI model is. But, my goodness, they've done such a good job of essentially making sure they're putting out the entire message that, once again, if all they're going to do is say, well, well, our iPhone, the iPhone 16, is going to have a whole bunch of AI features built into it, well, congratulations. Every other phone that runs Android has AI features right now. We've got to do something better than that. But they're making a really, really good argument that, no, no, no, we have been building a pyramid for a long, long time. We are accelerating that now, but it's not as though we wrote an entire new operating system for running secure and private models like on a server overnight. No, this is something that we've been building and now we are basically accelerating it. We don't, it's not so. We we've been training a brand new uh, brand new system for language and image processing in 3d overnight. No, this is something that we've been developing, but again, now we are accelerating that. So they really are putting together a very complete picture of a company that in two or three years time, could be like.
It would be ridiculous if, if this, if this is a good trend that continues, let's say. Let's also remember that it's no accident that all this information is coming out right when it needs to come up for Apple's benefit. But this really does give you the impression that in two or three years' time, we will forget all about that. Apple wasn't one of the foundational companies that were promoting AI. Google certainly gets credit for seeing the revolution coming and preparing for it and preparing a lot of the ground with research that everybody else was relying on. But that doesn't matter if in three or four years time, if everyone else is doing something as good as that and actually building on that work. You get a plaque on the wall, but that doesn't mean that your company stays in business. So Apple's doing great here.
0:49:31 - Jason Snell
It's an interesting idea too if you think about where Apple is with AI research right now, when, until 18 months ago I mean, they hired John G and Andrea from Google. You know there's definitely like moves suggesting Apple cared about AI. But if you're an AI person and you're looking at Apple, you're like, do they really get it? They're not really shipping. They got some older stuff that they're shipping. Do I want to be there? Does that burnish my career? It's not. I mean, they've got the money, they'll pay you, but like, is it something that you want to evolve your career on? And an interesting thing about what has happened to Apple in the last 18 months, and certainly now that it's public, is anybody who's in AI, who's a star, and wants to go somewhere where there's organizational alignment for AI. Apple is now on that list and they were not on that list two years ago, so that's a big thing for Apple.
0:50:23 - Leo Laporte
I wonder, I mean, if I were an AI scientist today? I wonder yeah, Mike, I don't know if I'd want to go to google at this point, or meta um microsoft and open ai maybe I'm sure the money's equal everywhere. It's millions, if you're good. Uh, yeah, I think apple might be, and then you have some thought that apple might have higher integrity in what it's doing and be more concerned about safety and privacy and skin in the game now and now.
0:50:50 - Alex Lindsay
skin in the game now and now skin in the game when you have a company that has, you know all the money they you know when you go from, when you look at that private. I just think that we want to keep on watching that private cloud that they're building and understanding that they're going to keep growing that and it's going to be much more. It's not going to be perfect, but its chances of hallucination will continue to get probably less and less and less, while some of the other ones may hallucinate more and more and more because of just the nature of data, and so I think that that's going to be a really interesting puzzle that Apple is sitting on a pretty it doesn't. We don't know how they're going to actually execute this, but if they, if they do do it in that area, it could mean that the data being delivered by that private cloud could be much more reliable for many of the answers than what you're getting from other AI solutions over time. Right now it's really limited, but imagine this little seed of information that they have in it growing to 90, 95% of the data.
The stuff that I do now on I mean the stuff I do in ChatGPT now and now I'm starting to play with Claude is so complex as far as how to think about things, like just how to, and if that data is anywhere close to I don't care.
If it's like for me, it's like I'm looking not for the actual data I'm not going to use it but I'm looking for how to think about things and as you start to open up, well, tell me about this and interrelate this data with this data, with this data with this data, and give me an output and it shows me all the calculations and why it's doing what it's doing. And and the thing is is that I think that that's going to be really powerful and if that data starts to be tied back down to what Apple's working on, uh, you end up with something more reliable, something more dependable. Um, you know, and you could end up with people down the road. Apple has a 10 percent chance of like. Well, that's the reliable place to you know that AI is the reliable place to get most of your information.
0:52:38 - Andy Ihnatko
But the missing piece which I don't know if Apple wants to get into this or if they even have the capability of getting into this is that remember that Microsoft and Google and Amazon they don't just care about consumer and user facing features. They want to run the hardware and have the, have the resources that if you are writing software for anybody, and particularly if you're writing software that involves AI, you will use our, you will, you will, you will pay us for compute because we've got this, we've got the, the infrastructure, we've got the capacity and we've got the capacity and we've got the most modern tools. And Apple is paying a fortune to Google for a lot of what they need, not just with AI, but for everything that's cloud behind in the back end.
0:53:22 - Alex Lindsay
So I wonder how that evens out. By the way, they're paying Google a lot, but Google's paying them a lot. I wonder if they go hey, we spent this much, but minus this, you get to buy one, get one.
0:53:32 - Andy Ihnatko
you know the like, like, like roommates sharing a fridge, like, okay, well, you took the ice cream, but you took my corn dog, so let's just say it's okay, yeah, but but what I'm getting is that is apple. Is we? Historically, apple has always found. What is it that we are, uh, subservient to another company for likes, bluetooth stacks, that sort of stuff, and how can we basically cut them out? They have such a hard belief in this that they tried to build their own modems, their own cellular modems which is just insane which the most powerful companies have run screaming on the verge of madness to try to do it.
So I'm wondering if they're going to be happy to always be okay. Well, we're going to be renting, we're going to be buying our capacity for this important part of our business from Google. A maybe we should make sure that we build our own server farm so we can actually rely on ourselves. And B maybe sometime in the future, we would like to be the company that, again, because services are so important, we would like to, for maybe our developers give you a cloud compute that we can sell.
0:54:40 - Alex Lindsay
And so we get a piece of everything, or the main thing is that Apple continues to with their developers. If you have the consumers paying for the compute, you know, for consumer level products, the developers are kind of getting this for free. You know, for consumer level products, the developers are kind of getting this for free. You know. So that the idea is that developers can, you know, be able to be given really nice libraries and really good SDKs for them to like, just add AI to their. So any Apple developer in the same way, like there's a lot of things when you talk to some of the developers who develop only on the Mac, and even if they develop on PC, like you look at some of the liminal apps, for instance, it's because of the way the libraries work, it's because of the way the poor video works. That makes it way more efficient and way better to just use that.
If Apple does that for AI where you have, it's just really easy to add.
It's just like I can add this hook, this button is adding AI to my product, you know, or maybe a little more complex than that, but it's not like I don't have to reinvent the wheel to put AI into what I'm doing.
Apple's going to do that for me. All I got to do is hook into that solution and I think that's going to be, and I think that there's going to be a free level of that. And then I don't know if the apps I mean the app they're already paying they're paying into that and being able to add value to that is really interesting. And I think, as you look at, like when they release all this to GitHub and they start talking about it openly, you know, I think Apple is on the extreme end of commoditize anything that is a cost center and control anything that's a profit center, and so I think that what you're seeing here is you can always tell what they think is valuable and what is costing the money versus what is they're making money on, because they'll release everything for free, that that that is connected to a cost center, and they want to control the things that are connected to a profit center.
0:56:19 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if Apple or anybody would ever put in a button that says no AI, disable all AI. I think there'd be a market for it. I'm just saying the, the big stop button.
0:56:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's going to become more difficult. I mean, there's some rumors I think Android Police had a source inside Google which means that this could be like an official leak from Google, talking about some features that are going to be part of the next Pixel phone announced next month as part of what they're going to get this. Now they're calling these features Google Intelligence. I hope they stole this from Apple Intelligence.
0:56:59 - Jason Snell
But, gi, I'm sorry, I'm not a retrain hero.
0:57:03 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not Google Intelligence, I'm sorry. It's Google AI or whatever.
0:57:05 - Speaker 2
But anyway, it's not GI Joe, but it's still a good idea to AI no-transcript.
0:57:26 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a boyfriend that is no longer part of the picture. I want to just remove the boyfriend and squish everybody back together to fill up that hole so it looks like that person was never there to begin with, as if we can erase them from our memories. If only we could do so. Now they've this other feature that they're that's been, uh, teased is the idea of well, here's a group picture, but someone wasn't in the picture because they were off getting the drinks for everybody else. Could you put Shelly into this picture now?
0:57:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't mind that kind of AI. It's highly integrated. But what I see is a future, and you just kind of gave me this thought, alex, because of you know they just be AI kit of every damn app, that, whether they need AI or not. I have a. I have a electronic door lock called from a company, chinese Shenzhen company, called Aqara, and they have a little AI thing that pops up when you open the app and then it lurks in the corner. There it is right there. See that it's like clippy.
It's lurking in the corner and you tap it and now it's oh, aqara, co-pilot. Well, let's talk. No, no, it's a door lock. I don't need ai for the door lock.
0:58:34 - Alex Lindsay
Well, yeah, that may not be very good, but I like it.
0:58:37 - Leo Laporte
I think that one of the things I'm just saying as soon as it's everywhere, every app's gonna have that, and I want a big button that says no just like.
0:58:46 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think I'd like a big button that says no siri please.
0:58:48 - Leo Laporte
But that's not I think.
0:58:50 - Alex Lindsay
I think that, though being able, I think that what's possible at some point that looks like a very bad implementation of it, is the ability to go make natural questions. I was doing this kind of complex pipeline out of this is just an example I was doing a complex pipeline out of Resolve over the weekend or the last Friday, friday, and I needed to figure out how to play out multiple, like eight tracks out of resolve through Dante to a thing, to put it into a better, to put it into a live view, to, to, to transmit it. I didn't know how to do any of these things and so I. So I got up there and opened up resolve and I said how do I add more buses to to resolve? Oh, how do I? I want to put eight channels out of resolve. I said, well, you need more buses.
And I'm sitting there with ChatGPT open asking it questions, and I said how do I create more buses? And it's step-by-step in Resolve. It just tells me go to this menu, go down to here, go do this. Sure enough, I got more buses. Now how do I attach those to Dante? And it just tells me, and I probably could have figured that out, you know, in another half an hour or hour. I did it in like two minutes what I would have done in an hour of just like. I don't think I don't have to figure this out, I'm just going to figure it out for me and then and then. But on the other side of that you get in. I got into my Scorpio this is a sound device a Scorpio and it said I said how do I get AES out of this? And he said go to this menu. And I was like that menu doesn't exist, we'll go. So it didn't have enough information. So it was like so you, you fall off those areas. But the idea of being able to use natural language to to ask questions and just say I just need you to do this or I need to figure this out and I'm noticing how much I process it.
Like I went, I was at Golden Gate Bridge yesterday with my dad and my dad was visiting over the weekend and and um, I took a picture with that fence in Golden Gate with all the locks on it or whatever. It's on the upper area that looks down. The lock thing kind of annoys me, because it's a really great location that's screwed up with all these locks and, um, uh, I get that it's important to somebody. It's just, it's not, it's an eyesore. But I took the picture of my dad knowing that I'm going to go back to photoshop and just select that and just say get rid of that, and it's just going to put something else in there and it'll look great, you know like. And so what? I literally framed it, knowing what I'm getting rid of in this photo later. Um, and I just like I went from a year ago of not knowing it existed to taking pictures with the assumptions of what's going to happen next.
1:01:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yeah, yeah, no, and I I won't get us into a rat hole about how much I'm enjoying uh adobe photoshop's ai features, just the ability that I cry. I this picture I was taking pictures of the Pride Parade a couple of weeks ago, and one of the best ones. My Zoom was just a little bit too tight and I needed more space around this person. I said, oh well, I can just say, please add more stuff to the left and the right. But I think you know there's always going to be an importance to have a core set of features. That is like the cut, copy and paste of AI that everybody sort of expects and that stuff is run on device and you don't really know how it works. You don't need to care how it works. I have kind of a vision where I kind of hope that we are always intimately understanding which AI we're bringing to the task, what their strengths and their weaknesses are. I find myself that I use Claude, chatgpt and Gemini the same way that I have Safari, chrome, tor and Brave browsers, because there's certain tasks that I want the friendliest, least overhead, least power-consuming experience. So I want to go Safari. I want the most ecumenical works with every single website, syncs with every device I have. I go with Chrome. I want to go Safari. I want the most ecumenical works with every single website. Syncs with every device I have. I go with Chrome. I want a little bit of privacy. That's better than Safari. I'll go with Brave when I want to.
I don't want anybody to know like why I'm, why I'm here, what I'm looking for at any profile. That's when I go for a tour. I would love it if the end point of when this becomes like sort of table stakes for everybody. It really is like I am in editing mode and the app doesn't really care that I'm sending. I'm having one language model work with this because I wanted to do a good summary versus another language model. Because I want you to actually expand upon this and I know that Claude is a better writer, or at least a better writing partner. Because I think that it is terrible if we don't know where the AI tools are being used and how it's influencing us.
Just to wrap it up, as it happens so you might have read that Meta had to sort of not walk back its AI warnings on Instagram, but at least reword it, which is a very, very simple move. It used to be that, if there were, they had a tag called made with AI, attached to certain like Instagram posts if the photo was determined to have been made with some sort of AI involvement. But then they got a lot of pushback from people like me who say, well, no, this wasn't an AI generated picture. I just added a little street scene to the left so that it wouldn't seem so so crowded, or I use some AI to remove, like the dog that's, you know, taken a wee against the tree in the background. This isn't an AI generated picture. So they changed the wording to say I think it says AI tools were involved in this sort of thing.
We have to make sure we understand what the level of involvement at every single turn, or else you know we're, we don't we have. We have to know what goes into the stuff that we eat, or else we can get very, very sick and we're never going to know why you know I was.
1:03:58 - Leo Laporte
I. I saw that story about meta re recasting this because it actually affected us. You know, micah sergeant posted a picture of him proposing to his partner a couple of weeks ago. By by the way, congratulations, congratulations. That was wonderful, yeah, and it was labeled made by AI on Instagram, which it wasn't, and so I think that that was a much needed modification. But, speaking of AI, ai is everywhere, in fact. I was just looking at tech meme and every story in the top 10 is an AI story. Figma disables its recently launched generative ai app design tool, make design, after a user showed it copied apple's weather when asked to design a weather app. Well, why the hell wouldn't it? That's a good weather app. Copy that one. Google plans ai features for the pixel 9 under the google ai brand. That's what you were just talking about. Um. Generative ai music service. Suno launches the ios app in the us. We've used that to. Actually, I am going to try suno to make a vision pro theme. How about that, let's?
1:05:00 - Jason Snell
see, I've already done a couple oh you did.
1:05:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're ahead of me how ukraine is using ai to weaponize consumer tech and build low weapons. We've talked about that. Generative AI this is all on today's front page on tech meme. Generative AI video startup runway is in charge. It talks to raise $450 million at a $4 billion valuation. Okay, that's it. That's the AI rundown. Jeez Louise, did you? Can you want to play one of those soon? Oh, it's for us.
1:05:29 - Andy Ihnatko
You got a good one, jeez Louise can you want to play one of those Sunos for us? You got a good one Too much snake oil. And also there are so many AIs where you think that you're interacting with an AI, so maybe you will use it. For I'm interested in, and a little bit scared of, people who are using AI for therapy because there is a chatbot that you can talk to and you feel as though well, this isn't a real human being. I can say whatever I want, I can open myself up, but they don't realize that for a lot of these chatbots, the AI is not really good, and so they're actually sending it to workers gig workers like overseas, who are being paid pennies per interaction to take a look at what the AI wants to say and maybe fine tuning things so that makes more sense. So their quote-unquote private things that they're saying to an algorithm is actually being seen by a total stranger that maybe you don't want that stuff to get out. More stuff that we need to know about.
1:06:21 - Leo Laporte
What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk. Vision Pro I'm going to see if it can do that like a radio station jingle. Oh man pro I'm gonna see if it can do that like a radio station jingle.
1:06:37 - Jason Snell
Oh man, you think you think it'll work?
1:06:38 - Leo Laporte
let's see let's do it carter b smith, knbr 68 yeah, I, I love carter. What a great guy he was, I. Uh, they always said if you get jingle jingle package made for you, that's, that's like it in the cover sports illustrated it's a jigs you made, it, you're gonna you made it.
1:06:51 - Jason Snell
Oh, you're gonna go, you're gonna go out, yeah here, let's let's see what this sounds like here oh, human league.
1:07:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm putting on my deep mask eyeliner right now and staring directly at the camera.
1:07:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it kind of misunderstood the instructions.
1:07:24 - Alex Lindsay
I'm trying to find it, I just can't find it. My window closed and I literally Listen to the chorus.
1:07:32 - Leo Laporte
Listen to the chorus. Listen to the chorus.
1:07:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm seeing the end credits of a mid-80s comedy with a kind of science fiction commercial computer.
1:07:48 - Leo Laporte
It always gives you two choices. Let's see what this one sounds like. It's kind of similar. Huh, how do I jump to the chorus? That's what I want to do, oh yeah.
1:08:14 - Andy Ihnatko
This is so classic generative AI 2024. It is super. It's not what you asked for, not what you want, but oh my God, is it impressive.
1:08:20 - Leo Laporte
It's still impressive, isn't it? It's a wrong thing.
1:08:22 - Andy Ihnatko
It's impressively wrong.
1:08:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, impressively wrong. That's basically AI. The ones I did were pretty impressive.
1:08:29 - Alex Lindsay
They weren't as bad as those ones. What's funny is Google Chrome closed the window. It still it was playing and I cannot find it like. I'm sure it has to do with spaces somewhere, like it says. Chrome says that it's there and when I click on it, nothing shows up. I can't.
1:08:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I lost the page yeah, it's not that's going to be able to do this. There's like I'm on a lot of stable diffusion forums and a lot of stuff that I didn't think was really possible, because I'm just using it from the point of view of giving it prompts and trying to do infills. The people who understand how these generative AI models work can do things like okay, that's the design of this character. I want you to keep this design, this character design, consistent across the next seven pages of comic. And these are the people that are scary, because they're not generating pictures of people with six thumbs and where the eyes are like doll eyes. They don't work. Those are the people who know how to. They're not spending one second on this piece of art. They're spending maybe half the amount of time and they are getting the results that you would hope to get if you're paying someone to do this kind of work for you remember.
1:09:30 - Leo Laporte
Remember it didn't take here. Turn on my sound again. It didn't take much time for us to generate this. Wake up in the morning. Turn the vision pro. Wake up in the morning.
1:09:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know why I can't see the music video for this.
1:09:52 - Leo Laporte
Why, why, why You're right. It's impressively bad, impressively wrong. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, not AI Generated, and that's when we're wrong. We do it the hard way, the honest way. That's Jason Snell, who is always right at sixcolors.com. Sure yeah.
1:10:10 - Jason Snell
Sure WGBI I. Andy Anotko, sure yeah, sure WGBH I count on you, man.
1:10:14 - Leo Laporte
If I ask you a question and you tell me the answer, I believe you, andy Anotko, gbh in Boston, and from OfficeHours Global, alex Lindsay, continuing on. Here's another thing you didn't ever expect Apple to do Promote how long it's stuff's gonna last. Uh, apple published a white paper this week, called longevity by design, to explain the company's principles for designing for longevity a careful balance between product durability and repairability. That's not, I guess. You know. I always apple stuff-made, but you always feel like you know it's not really designed to last forever.
1:10:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but the paper does a really good job they're trying to. We talked earlier in the show about how they're trying to resist regulation in the EU and being heavy-handed, not presenting a really accurate presentation, not presenting a really accurate presentation. Here they're very quietly trying to address hey, if people are complaining that a lot of our products are really really hard to repair, we would like to at least add to the conversation by saying our products products are designed according to the white paper from the ground up so that you don't have to repair them quite so often, that they're more durable, you won't have to replace the screen because they're not going to crack, that you're not going to get water ingress, that the batteries are designed so that we're cycling them so that they don't need to be replaced as oftentimes, and backing this up with figures that, of course, we need to double check on, but basically saying that, hey, look, over time, our phones are lasting five to six years, 40 to something percent longer than Android phones. Our resale value is way, way up there again, compared to Android phones, and that we, third party we only repair about 37, 38 percent of our own phones. Most of the stuff is being done by third parties. So it should be labeled as propaganda.
But that propaganda is a neutral term. It's not necessarily positive or negative, but I think it's very, very effective at least putting it out there that if someone is recklessly saying that, oh well, apple wants us to, wants phones to break, wants them to be obsolete in two years, they don't want people to be able to repair their own phones because they want people to simply buy brand new ones instead, they're at least putting out a counter argument that is very, very credible and it underscores things I think all of us have known for a long, long time that I mean iPhones can be handed down twice, three times in a family before they become undesirable, let alone obsolete. Before they become undesirable, let alone obsolete, and they do tend to absolutely stand up. My iPhones have been like I tend to carry them around as much as I almost as much as I carry my Android phones, and they look much, much nicer and they're much more resaleable than my Android phones are.
1:13:01 - Leo Laporte
Everybody has just clammed up on that one.
1:13:04 - Jason Snell
Well, fortunately, I can say something there which is yeah, I think that the truth is that apple works at such a scale that it's sometimes a challenge for them to balance, uh, their products lasting a long time, their products not breaking their products, like the battery, is a problem. Right, because batteries go bad. Although there's the in the early days of smartphones, especially the, the thought was the smartphone will be obsolete before the battery goes bad because the smartphones are moving so quickly. But now it's different and so I think they changed the game, but they have so much volume that that's a challenge. And then sometimes what we're looking for is not necessarily what they're looking for, so, like they don't, a lot of people are focused on battery, but don't talk about their focus on reducing scratch and shatter on glass screens and reducing water ingress, where how many people crack their screen? How many people drop their phone in the toilet and have to get a new phone? And if Apple makes serious inroads on those first off, it's the time you don't I mean, nobody keeps track of the times that you didn't need to get a new phone, but it would substantially reduce the number of new phones that are being sold, but it's a little bit if your focus is on something like a removable battery or an easily removable battery, which is an issue, but you might be missing some of the places where they really have made progress.
I think in the last five years, apple's design of iPhones especially has shown that they realize it's a mature product where they could probably make it more repairable and that that would be better for everyone.
They've also you know, they've got their trade-in programs. There's a lot they have done, but I think that there's a question of like where do they draw the line and say no, we're not going to do this? And I do think batteries is a thing that everybody should keep asking Apple about, because the fact is, sometimes you've got a product that the only reason it's dead is because the battery is dead. It's true for iPhones, it's especially true of things like AirPods, and we've seen that some other manufacturers have found other ways of approaching this. But we also know that if Apple cracks the code of making batteries more replaceable, the rest of the industry will follow them, because that's what happens, right? They're like, oh well, if Apple did it, we got to do it too, and so you know, I think that there's more for them to do there, but it's not nothing that they've done things to keep their devices in service and not need repair, because the iPhone is way more resilient now than it was even five years ago and certainly 10 years ago.
1:15:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And, to their credit, for the past couple of generations of iPads and iPhonesones, they have been making steps to make things less absurd, so to speak, like in the report. They again this is propaganda in the sense of they're making their case and saying, saying things like yeah, we use a lot of adhesives, since that are kind of hard to take apart, but it's the adhesives that that's make it safe against water ingress, that make it last last a a lot longer, but nonetheless, like the last year's iPhone, they made a big change that made, that made batteries easy to replace. The last generation of iPads. They changed the way that was designed so that you no longer have to tunnel through tunnel three. You don't. You no longer have to like change somebody's contact lens by drilling in through the bottoms of their feet. You know they can. You can actually just take off the screen and then there's the, there's the battery.
Um, but I wonder if what was promoting all this? Again, I'm glad they're making this statement because it is very, very valid, but I remembered that just three weeks ago, uh, they gave marquez, marquez brownlee like an exclusive look at with a video. I visited Apple's secret iPhone testing labs. So clearly it's somewhere they've decided that. Ok. We feel as though we are addressing the problem at its root, and here is why we believe that way.
1:17:16 - Jason Snell
It's funny, it feels a little bit like a PR stunt, I agree, andy.
1:17:20 - Leo Laporte
Here is yeah, and this is a great graphic Starting from the first iPhone in 2007,. What modules are repairable in the iPhone? The first one, the SIM tray, by 2013,. Sim tray, battery, haptics, rear camera, main logic board display, bottom speaker, top speaker enclosure, true depth camera, back glass main microphone I mean it's good PR, you know absolutely. Or a back glass main microphone I mean it's good PR, you know absolutely. Apple has to recognize, I think, they have a lot of devices, so they have a high responsibility with a billion phones, that's, a billion phones that are going to be in the landfill sooner or later. They talk a lot about the used phone market. They also use this opportunity to say don't buy third-party batteries. 88% of third-party batteries tested by United Underwriters Labs caught fire, exploded at least one test. And then there's a picture of I don't know what could be moon material, but I think it's actually this. I think it's also third party battery after an abusive overcharge test.
1:18:22 - Alex Lindsay
And it's also a preemptive, like when the next person has their their, their phone catch fire, right? No, it's people like people told you start putting us, they're like well, no, it's just that they people won't assume. If you put this stuff out and you start talking through it, people won't assume that, oh, apple put out a bad battery. If you put out enough pr and and someone says well, my phone caught fire, they'll be like I bet you that it wasn't theirs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, third party battery.
1:18:46 - Leo Laporte
So what do we say? What do we think about Apple's access to repair? I mean, they fought for a long time the right to repair. Some say they still fight it, but they certainly have added capability for self-repair in some cases. Do we think they're really committed to that, or is it more lip service due to regulation?
1:19:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I think Jason had it right. They have a lot of priorities. I think repairability is one of them, because remember that they also repair phones. So the quicker they can do a turnaround on a phone, the better for them. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to make sure that they're going to make the most. They're not going to make a framework style iPhone where all you need is one screwdriver and you can have this entire thing completely apart in five minutes.
It's not important, it's overkill. And I do think that this is another case where, because there is outside pressure to make things more repairable or at least less ridiculous to fewer what seem to be artificial obstacles towards repair, I do think that that is entering into the pipeline a lot quicker. And I don't necessarily think that it should be easy to replace a camera module, because if you did something that broke a camera module, that is that's not normal wear and tear, that's something that just super bad luck. Or don't, don't try to get a selfie in front of a hot springs and try to keep keep your hands on your phone there's a table labeled expanding access to repair services, service and repair options for apple devices.
1:20:17 - Leo Laporte
You know, I mean they're increasing it. One of the things I thought was interesting um, I don't know if they've talked about this you're going to be able to use used Apple parts and get support for calibration. They currently don't do true tone and stuff like that. Yeah, they don't really don't do that. Apple tools for rental, apple tools for purchase, third party tools. So, talking about support here, all the way from Apple itself to self-service repair and yeah, they're making progress there they don't support third party parts. Yeah, they're making progress there.
1:20:49 - Andy Ihnatko
They don't support third-party parts, but they're making progress there. It's just obnoxious things like parts pairing, which is not in itself a problem so long as a third-party repair shop can get access to the tool they need to actually make this repair work. As long as they don't do the ridiculous things, I'm good.
1:21:03 - Leo Laporte
They do have in their FAQ. This fascinating question Is designing. I'm good they do. They do have in their faq.
1:21:11 - Jason Snell
This fascinating question is designing for repairability. Better for the environment, by the way I mean, yes, it turns, it turns out, it turns out. No, it is it, it is. Yeah, they're. They're trying a lot of different things here. I think there was even a story in our in our notes for this episode, from the information about how they are exploring this technology, that basically, you apply an electrical charge.
I thought that was really cool, yeah and it just turns off and it's not an adhesive anymore and that like, look, apple's goal, I think, ultimately, is not to make products that are repairable by you at home by sliding a thing out and right, like their goal is, the product should be able to go to somebody who has tools and that they can repair your product or replace a part, and that doesn't have to be apple although apple, you know, has its system but it doesn't have to be apple. I don't think ultimately, apple views this it repair itself as a, as a profit center. Nor do I think apple philosophically believes that whenever anything breaks on an iphone, you should throw it away and buy a new iPhone. I do think Apple has actually built a business around what Andy said, which is taking in old iPhones and, if they're, if they're refurbishable or resellable or the parts can come apart and be reused or recycled. Like that there's a whole chain of use for them, from just recycling all the way up to taking it and selling it at a much lower price in a market where maybe the brand new phones aren't affordable, and like they built this whole structure around it.
I think that part of them battles with their control freak side, which is like oh, we only want the best LCD panels in you know, the best OLED panel in our phone, and these didn't weren't up to snuff and so we don't like them. I don't think it's like, aha, we will sell them the expensive display and make money on the repair. I think it's much more the oh, not that bad one, don't give them that bad display. Or, in the case of the battery, that battery is not up to our standards and it's got a bigger chance of being bad, so don't use that. But I think that I think it's more their control over, like the perception of the quality of their product, that if you get it repaired and with a lousy part, that then your iPhone experience is bad, but it's, you know, it's a push and pull right between them wanting to be environmental and them wanting to make money and them wanting to have control over the parts and their products. And like I think it's.
I think they're conflicted is what I'd say. I think they're conflicted is what I'd say, but I do think that they are getting better because and this is going to be true with AI too, which is in the early days of a product category where things are barely even being put together. You know, the SIM tray is repairable, right? Because they're like look, it's amazing, this thing exists at all. Of course, it's one block and there's nothing else in it, right? But over time, as the product matures, you get to the point where you're like yes, nobody repairs more phones than Apple, right? So there's nobody more invested in making them more repairable than Apple, because Apple's the one who their repairers, have to repair so many of these phones. So they're getting there, but it's taken them time.
1:24:02 - Alex Lindsay
And the thing is, every time this conversation comes up, I have repaired my own apple devices. I have taken them to unauthorized, taking them to authorized, taking them to apple, and at this point I would never take a device to a non-authorized or apple and the only two that I would do it. Other than those I would never go to unauthorized or try to do it myself because it's never going to be the same. These are built at such a high, high level of the tolerances are so small that the chances of you actually being able to fix your phone or have an unauthorized repair shop fix your phone and have it ever be the same again is very low, you know. So you just have to know that when you get it back it's probably never going to quite be the same. Maybe you can't afford to do it and you decide that's the cost you're going to pay. But you're paying. That cost is that that phone is never going to be the same. It's just without people who are properly trained to do that with the proper tools, it's just not the same. And it's just because we're not.
You know I tore apart laptops, I mean within the first week of my Apple IIe. I had my head in it. I was rewiring something. It's just come to a point where the tolerances are no longer. The boards no longer look like the inside of an Apple IIe. They are, of course, extremely tight. The ICs aren't socketed anymore. Yeah.
1:25:38 - Andy Ihnatko
And the last thing that we haven't talked about that's also kind of pertinent is that there are going to be a lot of people that if Apple doesn't make these things easy to repair authorized repair service anything that's easy to get access to if you've got a broken screen Motorola makes some awesome $200 phones, samsung makes some awesome $200 to $300 phones, and I don't mean that. Oh my God, I'm suffering. Oh my God, I can't believe I'm using this Fisher Price shoe phone. It's like no, it's really really very, very good, and the person who's trying to get a six year old phone working again is not going to notice anything but improvements if they decide well, it's going to cost 500. I can't get this repaired for less than three or $400. It's going to cost $500. I can't get this repaired for less than $300 or $400. It's going to cost me $500 to $600.
For the iPhone, what's the latest one? They have the 11th, the 12th, whatever, whatever the oldest one they keep in the line as the budget phone. If they walk into a store with $200 to spend or just to get a contract phone, they might be diverted away to an Android phone because that's where the cheap stuff is going to be so. Apple is very, very much if they can walk in somewhere with a broken screen or a bad battery, walk out with a $180 repair bill and an iPhone 6, iphone 7 that's still working. Great. That is definitely in Apple's best interest.
1:26:40 - Leo Laporte
Apple does answer the musical question why is parts pairing the practice of using software to identify component parts through a unique identifier important? Parts pairing is critical to ensuring our customer security and privacy. It accomplishes this in numerous ways, including deterring bad actors from cloning parts to bypass security protections and access customer data, which is not a theoretical threat, by the way, it's not theoretical threat. By the way, it's not. In a 2023 study, security researchers were able to bypass the biometric protections of three popular PC fingerprint sensors using external hardware and, I think, hot dogs.
Calibration is another important part of the repair process, ensuring that Apple devices operate to their full potential. If a third-party part is used in a repair, calibration will not be supported, and then the Apple device will attempt to activate the part and allow it to operate to its best possible performance, which, by the way, is not much. It's important to note today that Apple does not disable third-party parts except in the context of biometrics. While parts pairing does add a step to the repair process, it's a key element of our strategy to ensure that our wallets are fat and our customers data is secure. No, I'm just being facetious here, but you know, that's what you'd expect them to say.
Security buddy I am.
1:28:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I am very happy because the usual, their get out of jail free card for any crisis is oh well, we would, we would do that, but we don't want to compromise the security and privacy. And well, what are the details? You don't need any details.
1:28:13 - Alex Lindsay
Don't worry your head about that.
1:28:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Stop, yeah. So again, this is why a document like I think that a company like Apple looks like that they're realizing that they can't just simply be the ivory tower that no information ever flows out from. If you're going to make a statement that here is why we're going to inconvenience the hell out of a lot of people, explain why, and don't just pat us on the head, give us a brownie and send us back into the playground. Give us a document like this that at least we can take a look at and say make your case, so that we can either believe you or not believe you, and at least it means that they're taking it seriously either from a consumer level or from a regulatory level, and I like that.
1:28:55 - Leo Laporte
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko likes it. I can put that in my little blurb at the bottom of the poster Mr Alex Lindsay, officehoursglobal, and from sixcolors.com, jason Snell. It is, by the way, repair Independence Day. Happy Repair Independence Day. A little earlier than the 4th of July, today is the day, july 1st, that the bills for right to repair in California and Minnesota go into effect. Coverage in New York is already in effect. So that means, according to iFixit and Liz Chamberlain, 20% of the US has the right to repair electronics. Congratulations, very patriotic. Repair. White and blue is how they're phrasing it. It has been a hard fight. Apple says it supports right to repair, but they fought pretty hard against it. But I think we're making progress, and thanks to iFixit. By the way, they're the ones behind repairorg and the website and I think they've lobbied hard to get this done all over the country 20% anyway.
1:30:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, and then it becomes inevitable. Okay, we'll figure out a way to do this.
1:30:14 - Leo Laporte
It's Repair. Independence Day. Wear your wrench proudly, I guess. All right, I got another Suno radio jingle. Joe said you didn't do the custom button.
1:30:26 - Alex Lindsay
Let's see okay, let's try it. I have been I'm gonna point out, I've been to a lot of corporate events that the music would sound just like that.
1:30:47 - Leo Laporte
It is exactly this doesn't put real musicians Benito, Don't worry out of work. This puts, you know, music makers out of work. Why is it all?
1:30:57 - Andy Ihnatko
eighties.
1:30:58 - Leo Laporte
I don't know.
1:31:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah for the drop, yeah it goes. What do you see? I'm sorry. I get so many complaints with AI it's a cliche, so you know exactly what's coming, but still it was great to hear that moment ago. There's going to be a big drop yeah, it's great these generators.
1:31:39 - Andy Ihnatko
They got mediocrity locked down. If you want something mediocre, it can serve it's the.
1:31:43 - Alex Lindsay
It's the average of everyone. So you know, like all, all of AI's the average of everyone. So you know, like all, all of ai is the average of everyone and so it's the ultimate cliche my daughter sent me.
1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
she was so excited. An article from neuroscience news, ai, unveils evolutionary patterns predicted by darwin and wallace. I did not send her the obvious snarky comment yeah, that's because it's red Darwin and Wallace and it's just regurgitating stuff, darwin, it's not like they thought it up before Darwin and Wallace. Now that would be impressive. A novel AI-powered study explores evolutionary differences between male and female birdwing butterflies, shedding new light on a historical debate between Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Okay, they used machine learning to analyze 16,000 butterfly specimens.
1:32:33 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, this is where machine learning becomes really interesting in AI is the ability to interrogate massive amounts of information that a human being would just take a long time, and it was going to be something that was very manual. It's no longer very manual to go through, dig through all this data and look for patterns. I mean, I still go back to the stuff that I think we talked about on this show, where the AI could see that someone was going to get cancer for six months from now, doesn't know why, the doctors don't know why, nobody knows why, but it sees a pattern like hey, this connects to this, and it sees it in a way that you could never find by hand. You know, like that's the, that's the thing and that's why, again, like a lot of doctors are telling people to put these apple watches on right. And you know, have that data, because lots of data, data, yeah, that that it can't, that it's going to make correlations that you wouldn't be able to do if you were just trying to look at it piece by piece.
1:33:24 - Leo Laporte
So this is actually now that I read the article. It's pretty interesting. Apparently, charles Darwin thought that males had more variation because the evolution was determined by sexual selection, and so males would have these variants and the females would then choose mates based on male appearance. And Wallace thought natural selection across sexes was the biggest factor in differences. It turns out they were. You're both right. They analyzed these butterfly wings and while there were more males showed more variation, there were subtle variations in females. So you're both right, thank you.
Let us pause to remind everybody to vote. No, what am I reminding everybody? Oh, to join the club. Very important. If you're not yet a member of club twit, you could celebrate right to repair right now, because we have nothing against you repairing us nothing. Uh, by joining the club you can fix our pocketbook. Fix it, yeah, that's what we need fixed right now is our pocketbook.
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People did say well, I'd like to give you more, and I just like to say you can. Seven's a minimum, not a maximum. You may if you wish, but not necessary, not necessary. So Chocolate Milk. Mini Sips says here's a new lyric to try with Suno Blast us forward, yank us back. This new Apple product is more addictive than crack. No, I don't think so. All right, let's talk. Should we talk? Streaming? Apple TV Plus has done very, done, very, very well. It is now bigger than paramount plus.
1:35:51 - Jason Snell
Okay, okay, all right, low bar, low, low bar. But apple, apple, yeah. I mean there are two narratives, there are some measurements. This is with with, uh, I think, just watch. Yeah, so it's, you know, I it's probably the services that have been added to Just Watch users' accounts and it's people who are using apps to track. So it's probably not necessarily the best demographic match, but it is an interesting barometer because I keep seeing in stories about streaming that some people say nobody's watching Apple TV Plus.
If you look at some of the ratings and then you also look at some of these other reports and it's like actually it's doing okay, given everything. And I think when you talk to experts, what they end up saying is there's going to be a real consolidation of streamers over time, but Apple's going to be there, right, because Apple's playing a different game. Amazon and Apple are going to be there, netflix and Disney are going to be there and the question is, will anybody else be there or will that be it in the long run? But, like Apple, I mean it's been a long time that they've been doing TV Plus now and they get their moments. They've got their Ted Lasso moments here and there. I mean they've built a catalog that's pretty good. And originals I gotta say it like I they they do a good job.
1:37:09 - Alex Lindsay
There are a lot of really good shows, especially on tv plus, so I think they've done a pretty good job I think that I'm watching more series now on apple plus and I made fun of them for a long time because the first two years I thought were a complete disaster, like there was nothing that I was had any interest in at all and I thought they were dumb. And now I find you know sugar I thought was really good, love sugar.
It was weird it looked like a noir detective story, until it wasn't and then, and then the and then presumed innocent, which I admit that I started watching because my brother was the a camera on it, but but the? Um presumed innocent, it's really good.
1:37:43 - Leo Laporte
I I don't know if you guys have watched it, like it's just not yet yeah, yeah, it's really.
1:37:47 - Alex Lindsay
It's very uncomfortable. There's a lot of very like uncomfortable. Let's all let's watch it.
1:37:53 - Leo Laporte
It's just like, like like the whole time, you know like there's a lot of uncomfortable situation, horrific murder upends the chicago prosecuting attorney's office when one of its own is suspected of the crime, leaving the accused fighting to keep his family together.
1:38:09 - Jason Snell
This is the Scott Turow book right.
1:38:11 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, is it? Oh, okay, it was Harrison Ford in the 90s oh it was a movie.
1:38:16 - Leo Laporte
That's right. So this is Jake Gyllenhaal as the protagonist, and it's so much better than the Harrison Ford one was good.
1:38:22 - Alex Lindsay
I liked the movie, but this one is, but it's nice when you have five or six hours to really delve into something you know and it's the big thing with apple, with apple products, is if the, if the story is remotely good, the production quality is just oozing with quality, like just oozing with quality.
1:38:40 - Jason Snell
I hear the camera work on that one is really good too, yeah that camera's amazing it's excellent. We're not. I was gonna praise dark matter, which we're in the middle of right now which is also based on a novel and it is, you know, it's, I think it's.
I would call it sci-fi. For people who are not comfortable with sci-fi, it's sort of pitched that way. But um, it is, I mean, like one of my all-time favorites and it's not as good as counterpart. One of my all-time favorites and it's not as good as counterpart. One of my all-time favorites. A great, great show about parallel universes and what that says about our identity and the road not taken, and et cetera, et cetera. Uh, dark matters, a little like that too, a little more aggressive, a little more violent in a lot of ways than counterpart, but very good and it looks amazing. And again, with all these Apple loves, having, you know, having shows that look good and that have well-known people in their cast, and so they spend the money on that stuff and and, uh, and it does it does feel like that when you watch an apple thing, it's like they didn't.
1:39:35 - Alex Lindsay
They got whoever they wanted in that phase, you know, like they weren't. They weren't at loss to have some great actors in there. You know, and you know, I thought silo was really good as well, and and so, yeah, apple's hitting on all cylinders.
1:39:47 - Leo Laporte
And Severance is coming back. I was very excited, severance is coming back. Shrinking is really great. How long has it been? I'm going to have to rewatch all of Severance just to remember.
1:39:55 - Jason Snell
It's the writer's strike. Is the problem right Like? A lot of this stuff got delayed because of the writer's strike.
1:40:08 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just waiting for Ted. And another great thing about apple they're unlikely to take down a series for a tax write-off like paramount plus indeed, yeah, it's like every once in a place. So once they get them, they stay.
1:40:13 - Jason Snell
Got well and they're also doing a thing that a lot of people maybe not don't notice, but, um, they have started doing, even though they're basically building their catalog themselves, um, by licensing and, you know, commissioning stuff.
But they've also been licensing older content, especially movies, and they kind of cycle it through. So if you think about, like the old days of cable with, like HBO or Showtime, where you know the same 20 movies would just air and continually for an entire month and then disappear, apple TV Plus actually is doing that too. They're trying to strike themes maybe that are connected to some of the stuff that's on the service at any given time. But they've got, like you know, they will drop 30 or 40 different movies for a month and you know you get into the interface there and you're like, oh, I was going to watch, I was going to rent this movie or find it on another streaming service, and here it is on TV+. So they're experimenting with other content that's relevant to their audience and relevant to their shows that they're commissioning, that are from the catalog. So they're trying. There's other stuff on TV Plus now too.
1:41:12 - Andy Ihnatko
And maybe this is my age talking but I need that kind of deadline. I need the idea that, okay, this movie is going to cycle out in two months. I've got stuff on my Netflix queue that probably carried over from like DVD not Blu-ray, but DVD where, okay, well, I've watched that sometime, but if it's always there, there's like.
1:41:30 - Leo Laporte
I like it. It's something that your discord is saying. This I like, uh, matt, matt Mavs guy. Congratulations, mavs guy, on almost making it all the way. I like it that they're releasing some things on Blu-ray, which I guess is a testament to Apple's belief that, hey, we got the quality. You really ought to see this in UHD. They have the complete Ted Lasso yeah, all three seasons for 80 bucks.
1:41:54 - Jason Snell
Those are actually done by other studios and Apple licenses them for streaming. And there's a window in there where, after a certain amount of time, oh, so it's not Apple releasing it. It's their contract with Warner Brothers.
1:42:05 - Leo Laporte
I want to say and that does come with a believe sign. So if you want to put that over your locker room door, you can.
1:42:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah yeah, well, there's more money to be made with fans buying discs or people who've never seen it, because it's on streaming libraries. My wife works at a library. They still have a lot of library traffic. That's people who want discs. They don't have good internet, they don't have streaming services, and so it's great that all of these streaming well, not all many of the streaming shows do end up making it to disc, because that is a another ancillary market, but it's usually like, separate from the streaming rights, they're allowed to go and take it out to disc after a while it really is a damn shame when you have a movie or tv series that is epic and it and it's a cultural mover and you can't get it unless you've got a subscription to.
1:42:51 - Andy Ihnatko
There's still episodes of Reno 911, one of my favorite favorite series ever. I haven't seen it and I will never see it, because they were on like QB, and now QB is gone, whereas it used to be that if you're willing to wait, you can buy something on disc and you'll own it forever. And I just I wonder what's going to happen to a whole bunch of series when a streamer suddenly decides they're not interested in it anymore. They don't think there's a market to actually put it on sale in the iTunes store or Google Play or any of the other digital download stores. And then that's when it's like OK, how does Usenet piracy work? Can I find a copy of this Knives Out movie? I mean, if Knives Out were not available on Blu-ray, it'd be like I don't know that I can allow myself to not own this. I don't want to have to keep. I don't have to keep spending nine9 a month forever just so that I can watch this wonderful movie anytime I want to.
1:43:48 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that you also look at you know what, like the railroads, all of these things, there's this mad rush towards you know getting uh, or, or the internet or anything else. There's always a mad rush. And then you start to have the whittling away at things. So others is whittling away to zero, it's is whittling away to zero, it's at three percent, paramount's probably going to die, um, or be absorbed or something like that. And so you've got there's 12 that are that's floating around for somebody, but you have to prove that you're. When someone gets off of that and they go. I got a little money to spend on another, on a different subscription. I mean, you know, prime has some good stuff. Their interface is almost unusable and the and you saw that, you saw. I mean they're the being able to scrub in Prime is like sandpaper, like is that so bad? It makes me so angry.
1:44:31 - Jason Snell
Some good news for Andy, I just wanted to mention this. So Quibi got bought by Roku and they had it for a while. But Reno 911 is a show that actually I think is owned by I guess it's Paramount now, because it was Comedy Central. So it's not streaming anywhere now, but it is undoubtedly going to stream, it will surface right somewhere. Will it be Paramount, will it be Tubi, who knows where? But that stuff does come around eventually because, again, it's actually this great reason which is Quibi. Remember Quibi? Quibi died real fast, yep. Remember Quibi? Quibi died real fast, yep. But you know, these streamers don't generally they're not the studio that makes the thing, they just license it. So eventually it goes back to Sony or Warner Brothers or Paramount or whoever, and then they can sell it to somebody else. That's the silver lining in the dark cloud.
1:45:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess True, you're reminding me that Lieutenant Dangle did meet Captain Picard. So we have, we have that in the, in the. It's all connected I'm pretty excited.
1:45:31 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, scooter x, for passing this story from nine to five mac along. If you're using the beta of ios 18 or if you update to tv os 18, which now I'm going to do when I get home tonight, the mute button will now turn on subtitles automatically.
1:45:45 - Jason Snell
Yes, and if you skip back? If you skip back, if you press the skip back button on your remote, you will also get subtitles on briefly oh well, they've had that feature.
1:45:55 - Leo Laporte
I used to do that all the time I'd press the siri button, say what did he just say, yeah, it would go back 30 seconds and put subtitles on for 30 seconds.
1:46:02 - Jason Snell
Yes, but now it will work with the skip back button automatically instead of saying use siri at all. What did he just say, which I like doing.
1:46:09 - Leo Laporte
I always enjoy doing that.
1:46:12 - Alex Lindsay
I'm in a family that has the captions on like all the time. I turn them off and then everyone gets upset with me because I just want to watch the film. But I have to admit, tenet doesn't make any sense without captions. It's a random swash of scenes without the captions and and you know it's I think it's a key factor. I think that you know, I've been really thinking about a lot of this with with theaters, and theaters are trying to figure out why aren't people coming back to the theater as well. It's because you know, so you can't turn the captions on in the theater, and that's a real problem for a bunch of people in my family. They won't go because they're like oh, I won't understand what they're saying, and that has to do with creative decisions.
1:46:51 - Leo Laporte
Are your children losing their hearing, or are they just?
1:46:54 - Alex Lindsay
No, they're just, they're just no, it's, they've changed the mix.
1:46:58 - Jason Snell
These kids today, kids love captions my kids watch everything with captions too.
1:47:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, at least they're reading. But but the films? Yeah, exactly you know what they say. Learn to read so that you can read to learn. That's right. So the um, uh, the uh. But what's happened is, in a lot of these, the sound design has pushed the, the um, all of the uh, all the voices into the, into the sound design they wanted to make be more environmental yeah and a lot of people are having trouble pulling out exactly, and they want to know everything.
It's not that you can't hear what they're saying. You can't hear every word and you can't see everything. And when you get used to that with captions, then they don't want to give that up. They want to see every single word. That was said, right, yeah.
1:47:42 - Jason Snell
So, speaking of tvOS, that's also a new-ish feature of tvOS. They currently use some machine learning to do a dialogue enhance to make the dialogue clearer for like HomePods, I think, used with Apple TV. But the next tvOS version will extend that to other audio devices like receivers and other speakers and stuff and that's the feature of like. I can't hear a word. These people are saying you can turn on dialogue enhance and it will pull.
1:48:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's actually doing analysis of voice frequencies and pulling the voice forward and trying to undo what the mix is doing well, the secret is is that, is that the if you, if you get a surround mix, so if you're, if they're delivering an atmos? All, almost all, almost all the voices are coming down the center channel In the center channel. Yeah, so, like for instance in mine, I don't have that enhanced yet. So in my receiver, my pouch is about 10 feet.
1:48:36 - Jason Snell
Turn up the center channel. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:48:38 - Alex Lindsay
No, I'm about 10 feet away. I tell it, the center channel is 30 feet away. So, what I do is I just turn off the thing, and so everything comes much louder down the center channel than it was originally designed, and it works very smart.
1:48:49 - Leo Laporte
Here's a final chance for Suno to make us happy. This is a Kev Brewers jingle for the MacBreak weekly show.
1:48:59 - Speaker 2
Let's let's hear it. Time to break, time to break. It's time for Mac break.
1:49:05 - Jason Snell
weekly on the twit Five cars network.
1:49:09 - Leo Laporte
Wow, she's really working it. I like this one. He said Radio Jingle's 1950s, earlier than that.
1:49:24 - Alex Lindsay
Now, can this be Andrew's sister's style? Let me know if this plays through. Let me see if this plays through. I'm not sure I have some rewiring to do here. No, you don't hear that. Do you Hold on, hold on.
1:49:35 - Leo Laporte
Huh, no, this is something. Who did this one? Suno or some other AI? Wait, do you hear that? Nope, no, I'll figure it out.
1:49:45 - Jason Snell
It's's not even quiet.
1:49:46 - Leo Laporte
I like that about that jingle.
1:49:47 - Alex Lindsay
It's a quiet jingle yeah, no, no, it was I.
1:49:50 - Leo Laporte
I had to contemplate you're watching mac break weekly, with or without a jingle. Uh, jason snell, andy and not go and with our pick of the week, mr alex lindsey I blew.
1:50:07 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sorry. I was rerouting something. I got lost. Can you hear me okay?
1:50:10 - Leo Laporte
yeah, you can't hear me now.
1:50:11 - Alex Lindsay
You're not lost I hear you, can you hear us? Yeah, I can hear you now, okay, so, uh, so, my uh sorry I was playing my is central control. Um, so we had uh joe to max on on friday on office hours and it's just really impressive. This is what central control lets you do, is it lets you build a? This is we use it in production. So this is it lets you build interconnections between lots and lots of hardware and software at one time so that we can tie things together. We can build remote control.
So this is a little bit like people use companion and this is kind of a higher, a more stable version of companion. And so what this does is it says oh, I want to have, I want to create control surfaces, or I want to have different apps able to control different, you know, interconnect the apps, all their IO and all that. It basically builds a layer in between so that you can and we're building complex. When we're building complex things Like I want to push a button on my, on my, on something, and have my lights turn on, and I want to push something else and have this, this turn on, I want to switch to another thing on my switcher, and you can, but you want to have your own control surfaces to do that and you want to have your own uh, and possibly even have things that are happening when this happens in this app, I want this to do this, and so when we're doing it in production, this is a pretty important piece of the puzzle of being able to build interfaces.
You can build them in iPads, you can build them on your screen, where you can click on it, and a series of actions will happen all at one time. This is the first time that Core has been mostly a PC thing until recently. So Core is available on the Mac and the PC. But really, when it comes to running shows you know, complex shows almost everybody's using something like either Central Control or Companion to run those, to tie those together. So that's the but that's my pick.
1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
I should pay more attention to this kind of stuff. Since we're going have, I'm gonna have to be doing this. No, no, this is you're you're exactly where.
1:52:09 - Alex Lindsay
so you imagine having a stream deck up and you can tie to the buttons in the stream deck I want to turn my lights on, I want to turn this off, I want to turn my mic on, I want to. You know, whatever those things are, you can push all of them to your stream deck. And so now all the things that you need to do on a regular basis whether it's cutting your, you know, editing the show to turning lights on and off, mics on and off, bringing new people in All of those things are automatable to tie that in. It's really powerful and core is like 40 bucks or something, and that's not 40 bucks a month or a year, that's just 40 bucks. They have a. I think they have some kind of subscription service if that's what you want, but you can also just buy it out as well. Nice.
1:52:47 - Leo Laporte
Okay, thank you, alex. I'm making a note of that.
1:52:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy and I co-pick of the week. One of the features that's coming in Sonoma at the end of the year is window tiling, window management, window snapping. Apple's done so much work to make complicated things, like stage manager, but they've never done something as simple as I just want to be able to put my windows into grids so they don't overlap with each other, like when I'm recording a podcast. Like I don't want overlapping windows. I want to see the recording deck, I want to see the chat, I want to see the record this, that and the other, and I would just keep wishing that I could do something as simple as I can do in the iPad. So okay, so some of these features might be coming in Soma I think they're in the first beta but they don't seem to work really well, so we don't really know how they're going to work yet. In the meantime, maybe you want to check out my favorite window management tool. It's called Swish Costs. It costs $16. You can get it at a free trial. What I like about it is that it doesn't impose its own belief system of what you would logically like to do with your Windows. It doesn't like set. Oh well, of course you want one app to be most of the screen and then another app to be one quarter of the screen to the left. It really is like okay, here's a 4x4 grid, you can optionally set it to like a 3x2 or even a 3x3 grid, and there are really really good shortcuts, both with multi-touch on the trackpad and keyboard shortcuts and dock commands, so that you can easily say I want this to be a quarter of the screen, I want it to be right over here, I want this to be one-third of the screen over here and I don't want it to overlap and encourage on this. And it works really really well with multiple monitors as well, so there's a really good chance. Of course, this will get Sherlocked when Sonoma comes out. However, that's conditional on the idea that Sonoma is actually good at this and it's possible that it will be better, but it won't be as ambitious a thing as Swish is.
Again, I don't just want to have two apps side by side like on my iPad. I love how my iPad does multiple windows, has side by side apps and how easy it is to arrange. However, again, when I have a big, big screen at home, I want to be able to make use of that and I want a tiled interface. I don't necessarily want overlapping windows, and Swish makes it very, very easy to just without even really thinking about about it. I want this to be there, and in this size, and suddenly I've got a grid where nothing overlaps and everything's you know lining up exactly correctly.
So, again, not cheap 16 bucks but you can get a free trial and see if you actually like it. Definitely keep at the minimum. Keep this in the back of your mind when you install sonoma at the end of this year, because just because it's better doesn't mean it's as good as what it could be. And Swish is one of those enhancements that absolutely changed how I use my desktops with a big screen as opposed to the smaller screens I've got when I'm on mobile.
1:55:37 - Leo Laporte
Excuse me. There are a lot of choices in this category. This is your favorite.
1:55:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, because that's always a testament to how bad a company has messed up a basic feature on an operating system.
1:55:47 - Leo Laporte
It's rectangle. Yeah, exactly, there's tons of them. Yeah, but do you think this is the best of the bunch?
1:55:53 - Andy Ihnatko
It's my favorite because it doesn't make a meal out of it Again. I can just simply mouse into the title bar and then do a gesture and suddenly it's exactly where I want it to be.
Some of the others again, you might maybe try others. They have different methodologies of how you interact with it, how you make your intentions known. I like Swish because, again, it doesn't get in the way of my intentions. It just simply does what I, what I want it to do. And it doesn't stop me from doing something by saying why on earth would you want it in thirds? You don't, you don't buy it. No, no, I'll give you quarters. You're lucky to have quarters. Why would you want two thirds? No, no, no, no, no.
1:56:30 - Leo Laporte
Swish, and you can find swish at highly opinionatedco. Yeah, yeah, thank you, this is also a good time. Like if there's an app that might get Sherlocked at the end of the year, if you got the scratch, maybe just buy a whole bunch of these apps so that they can have a nice Christmas at least Kind of give an app a toy kind of a thing. Yeah, mr Jason Snell, you're the remaining pick of the week.
1:57:01 - Jason Snell
It's down to me. Yes, this is a free app that actually came out during the butterfly keyboard crisis, but I discovered the other day that I was frustrated by my keyboard, which I love. Every now and then it doubles a space or it doubles another character. There's like a little bounce going on there and I love the keyboard but I hate, you know, typing a word that I know how to spell and there's an extra letter in there and I know I didn't press it twice and that's called a bounce. And there is software that will detect if a key is pressed quickly in succession and you can remove it.
And this was written during when the butterfly keyboard had this problem. But it still works. It's called Unshaky, it's free, it's open source, it's on GitHub, you can fork it, you can do whatever you want with it, or you can just download it and install it and that and it debounces. It will remove one of those key presses so that it doesn't get passed on. So your word, that was going to have two Ds in it, when there's only one, because you only pressed it once, will only have one. It's super simple. And after I recognized that I was having this problem a couple of weeks ago I said wasn't there a butterfly keyboard thing about this? I mean, the menu bar item is actually the picture of a butterfly with a line through it, but it still works for me. So I'm recommending it. If you get frustrated by a keyboard that you love but that is giving you double characters from time to time, maybe try Unshaky. Very nice, thank you, my friend.
1:58:43 - Leo Laporte
Maybe try Unshaky, very nice. Thank you, my friend. Thanks to all of you, because that pretty much wraps it up for this week of Mac Break Weekly. Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com. He uses all six in his beautiful graphs every time.
1:58:58 - Alex Lindsay
Apple does quarterly All six.
1:59:00 - Leo Laporte
I think we must be due for a quarterly report. All the colors are next month. Next month? Okay, because we have wrapped up a quarter at the end of june, I believe. January, february, march, april, may, june, yes, uh. So get your, get your color finger going, anything else?
1:59:13 - Jason Snell
you going on at six colors gotta load the full toner on it. You know writing about stuff. I've got a piece coming out tomorrow. Uh, in mac world that's talking about how apple's going to handle the Siri fragmentation that's inevitable now, where we're going to have some devices that have smart Siri and other devices that have dumb Siri. I have some ideas about existing features that they've got that they might be able to apply to make it less awful for everybody at some point. And yeah, check out maybe the Upgrade podcast on Real AFM that I do with Mike Hurley every week.
1:59:42 - Leo Laporte
You can find that if you go to sixcolors.com, slash Jason, that's where all of his fine podcasts are stored. Thank you, jason, great to see you stay cool. We have not yet broken 100 degrees, but I think we're at 97 now I think it's 94 here now but, inside it's cool.
2:00:01 - Jason Snell
Inside it's in the low 70s.
2:00:02 - Leo Laporte
There's a runza in the running here we're kind of in the hanging in the low 70s. There's a Runza in the running here. We're kind of hanging in the balance. I can't remember. Did you say I said it would go above 100. You said it wouldn't. Is that what we're?
2:00:12 - Speaker 2
I think it's supposed to go above 100. I don't know. You know what? There's two Runzas left.
2:00:20 - Leo Laporte
Let's just each have one. Mr Andy Anaka, when are you going to be on?
2:00:22 - Andy Ihnatko
GBH next. I'm off this week, but if you come to the Boston Public Library next Friday at 1230, you can watch me live at the GBH studio at the Boston Public Library. Get yourself a cup of coffee and a cookie, both of which you will have to pay for. If you can't be there at the Boston Public Library to watch me live, go to wgbhnewsorg and stream it live or later or listen to any of my previous tech news roundups. Thank, and stream it live or later or listen to any of my previous tech news roundups.
2:00:46 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sir. It's great to see you.
2:00:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Where are you? I am at Site B. Is that a case of?
2:00:56 - Leo Laporte
nuclear war. Is it a little fallout shelter down the road?
2:01:01 - Andy Ihnatko
No, when I decide to go remote, it's like an amazing race sort of thing. You have multiple options, each with its own pros and cons.
2:01:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, the audio was good here. We didn't have any breakups.
2:01:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Good bandwidth. Yes, I will tell you off camera that I've discovered a secret.
2:01:20 - Leo Laporte
Ah, a magic, magic secret.
2:01:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Great to see you. This one has a nice diner nearby so I can go out If I want to have like a really nice diner lunch right before the show, I can have lunch and then go next door. So jealous.
2:01:34 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Alex Lindsay. officehours.global Very busy this week. Tell us what's coming up.
2:01:43 - Alex Lindsay
Well, we were talking about today. This morning, of course, we were talking about StreamVoodoo's new spatial camera. We talked about that last week here. So we're going to be doing more tests. We're hoping to come up in sometime this month to try to shoot a Twit.
2:01:53 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'd love to stream a Vision Pro Twit yeah from the phone.
2:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
So we talked a little bit about that today, Tomorrow, we're talking about Llama Audio, which is a. We're going to use it for cloud mixing, but it's a software mixer, so we're going to be talking about that having them on. Oddly enough, on Thursday we thought maybe we'd talk about capturing night displays.
2:02:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I wonder why Like fireworks?
2:02:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so we thought that would be seasonal. And then we're talking about WIP on Friday, which is WebRTC for broadcasting and live streaming, so it should be fun.
2:02:22 - Leo Laporte
You'll be glad to know that we probably are not going to be using WebRTC. After all, you convinced us. I think we're going to do an Ecamm plus Zoom ISO.
2:02:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think is what we're going to be doing. That makes a lot of sense.
2:02:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason. Thanks to all of you for being here. We do MacBreak Weekly on a Tuesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm eastern time, 1800 utc. The live stream right now is on Youtube. We're going to expand that soon, but right now youtube.com/twit/live after the fact, on demand versions of the show available on the website twit.tv/clubw. There's a Youtube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly video or you can subscribe to the audio or the video versions of the show in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically. A very special thanks to our Club Twit members who made this show possible. Today you are the paying folks. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit, we'd love to have you twit.tv/clubtwit. Now it is my solemn and sad duty to tell you to get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next week.