MacBreak Weekly 934 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, the first show from the new TWiT Attic studio. Jason Snell is here. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay We'll talk about the fascinating rumor that there might be a smaller Mac Mini in our future. Apple AI versus Google AI We'll talk a little bit about what Google announced just minutes ago, plus the Vision Pro segment. Yes, now with rhinoceroses, it's all coming up. Next, on MacBreak Weekly

Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 934. Recorded. Recorded Tuesday, august 13th 2024. Screws, Not Glues. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple. And as I go to our rundown and see a big blank white screen, I'm thinking not a lot of news from apple this week, but thank goodness, Andy Ihnatko is here, WGBH at boston. As for as he has for many months now he has been, he's been populating the the spreadsheet.

0:01:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you, andrew happy to help, happy to prove my worth, and I know, no, there's no, no, uh, no mystery here that there's not much news. Everybody's terrified of the new Pixel announcement from Google.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, did you watch it.

0:01:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't watch it because I was getting ready for this show, but I've been keeping myself updated and interesting. As with Google, unlike Samsung, is a company that can actually get things done and they announced a lot of things that I like and I think that are absolutely the right move, but it depends on actually shipping this thing in a couple of weeks and seeing how well it works. But all I'll say is that because we're probably not going to talk about this in the show that this is almost certainly why Google wanted to do this ahead of the September announcements for Apple, because Apple's going to be spending an hour saying and maybe in the future we'll do this and we're hoping by next year it'll do this, and we've got big plans to integrate this, whereas Google is saying, yeah, here's live demos of it all working.

It's all working right now and we've had some of these features for about a year. We'll get.

0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
We will talk a little bit about it because it is germane, but first let me introduce Alex Lindsay from the beautiful Lindsay studios in somewhere in silicon valley. Alex, of course, from WG- not WGBH, officehours.global. There you go, office hours. Hello, alex. Hello, good to be here. Uh, nice to see you um. 090.media. If you want to find out what Alex does for a living. Nobody really knows, but you know.

0:02:48 - Alex Lindsay
Complex live events. Yes, exactly, yeah, they go somewhere, sometimes theaters, sometimes your phone Just depends.

0:02:57 - Leo Laporte
You just never know what you're going to see. Alex, I'm copying you. As you can tell, I have moved into my attic. It looks great, actually. Yeah'm copying you. As you can tell, I have moved into my attic. It looks great, actually. Yeah, thank you to Anthony Nielsen, Burke McQuinn, our IT guy, Russell Tammany. They came up here and they hung lights and they did all sorts of stuff. We're going to get a lighting guy, a gaffer as they're known in the trade. We're going to get a gaffer to crawl all over the set, but for now, I think it's. It's pretty nice and that is uh. That is an homage to you, Jason Snell. Thank you, your beautiful garage studio. I have a mac in mine as well.

0:03:34 - Jason Snell
Thanks it's good, everybody should everybody should just have a classic mac behind them. Yeah, Alex has got one too you have oh yeah, I didn't see that.

0:03:41 - Alex Lindsay
Did you add that one recently? No, they didn't, but I like to mix it, so I have some elementals here.

0:03:47 - Leo Laporte
It does, it changes. Yeah, oh, finally something to do with my $27,000 elemental. I could put it back here for green light.

0:03:56 - Alex Lindsay
I only have the front pieces to them. I don't have them. I kept the front parts of them because that would have been that was like 150 000 worth of elements. Yeah, sitting there, but but it's just the front plates, because I, I, they, they changed them to orange and they sent me the you know, and uh, I'm keeping the green ones.

0:04:12 - Leo Laporte
So so uh uh, burke, if you're listening in the studios, rip the front off the elementals before you send them back. The elementals a box we use to stream to other bunch of places and and now we just use Restream. Thank you, folks, restream, and so that's why you can now watch the show live on YouTube, Twitch, Kick, Facebook, Linkedin, of course, discord if you're a Club TWiT member, and DDoS willing x.com. So far, no DDoSs.

0:04:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I think we're okay yeah, probably not a ddos so let's, let's, let's not, let's not discount ddos's until we're sure there wasn't some sort of mistake that we're humanly responsible for that. We'd like to fob off on something else.

0:05:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's always good to have in your back pocket. You know that. If perhaps you noticed there was a little bit of a sibilance issue on twit on sunday ddos it was. It was a ddos attack, you know what I will say.

0:05:13 - Alex Lindsay
The only thing I'll say about that because it's not mac break, but it is it's that it probably wasn't ddos, but streaming to that many people is very, very hard, like. So I just want to make sure it's like it's not like someone just forgot to turn something on, or I remember when, like a million people.

0:05:28 - Leo Laporte
The biggest live stream ever was 125,000 people and it was mind boggling, yeah. And now we're talking a million and a half and Musk said he could actually get to 8 million.

0:05:39 - Alex Lindsay
They kind of live fire and tested it and what they're doing, even though it's only audio, is actually the low latency nature of it is really what they're doing is really really hard, and you know I, and so I just want to, you know to be. I don't think he needed to say that it was ddos, I think he could have just said this many people is hard you know, what he should have said is we're getting such an amazing demand, so many people are tuning in.

0:06:03 - Leo Laporte
We can't sustain it. We're working on it, we'll get it that would have sounded better than oh, the hackers are going after.

0:06:09 - Alex Lindsay
The hard part is is that you can't test high volume until you have high volume, because you you try to do it in the cloud like you talked about doing stress tests the night before. Number one is stress tests should be done a month before, not a night before. And number two is it's really hard to reproduce what humans do, because in a live event humans panic. So what they do is they start hitting the button over and over again and they start refreshing the page over and over again.

Oh, I don't know anything about that. Every one of those is a request and they do it in a janky, like they do it in random ways. So it's hard for a computer when you're stress testing a high volume stream. It's hard for a computer when you're stress testing a high volume stream. It's hard for a computer to reproduce the panic that a human will have when they can't get into the live stream that they're trying to get to.

0:06:51 - Leo Laporte
You need that Chinese guy who has 100 iPhones on a bicycle so he can play Pokemon Go. You need him hitting it over and over again.

0:06:59 - Alex Lindsay
But you need a million of them to do that or 100,000 of them to do that, and that's the problem. So it's a really, it's a really uh tricky business. Youtube did it slowly and they they had their growing pains, you know, 12 years ago. So, yeah, it's new for x to have these kind of, these kind of levels, but well, it's not.

0:07:15 - Leo Laporte
You remember ron desantis? Uh, his campaign announcement which had the same exact problem. So, anyway, anyway, we don't. Yes, we're not here to to, to diss on elon or anything like that. We could do that in our spare time. Yeah, we're here to talk and we do, and we do. We're here for sport, for sport.

0:07:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Nonetheless, that's actually a topic on the docket for npr on friday is it really?

0:07:41 - Leo Laporte
yeah, well, it's tech. There's a technical side to it. Yeah, we'll probably talk about it on Twitter, I mean, you know, but there's enough Apple news, I think, to fill the docket for today. I was going to lead with a rumor, but a rumor I like that the next Mac Mini will be about the size of an Apple TV.

0:08:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah, More mini, mac Mini. Yeah, I love that.

0:08:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been saying that for a while. That you take, even if you have to sacrifice features, to say here is a just to making it a great product. A Mac inside a case of a Mac mini, and all the limitations that it incurs, that's an amazing product, particularly if they can beat a certain price point with it. I don't know if this is according to a rumor from Mark Gurman, but it's only in these recent rumors that it sort of occurred to a lot of people, including myself, that the form factor of the current Mac mini was there to accommodate things like replaceable memory, to accommodate like two and a half inch, like notebook style, too much hard drives, none of which are operable anymore. So now you're basically just limited to how big does the power supply have to be, how big does the board have to be, and that's pretty much all there is. So, yeah, a Mac mini. You can just visa mount to the back of anything without having to feel as though you need an extra special support. That is a hell of a product.

0:09:03 - Leo Laporte
When they make the movie, the made-for-TV movie of this, like the Blackberry movie, there'll be some guy who said, hey, wait a minute, you know that system on a chip does everything. We could make it this big. So I hope they do that. I hope it's not just rumor.

0:09:24 - Andy Ihnatko
The first Mac could be fitted nasally yes, I think what I mean this is.

0:09:28 - Jason Snell
The truth is that it's been 15 years since they um updated the mac mini enclosure. In fact, I wrote a column seven years ago saying they should do this, and that's how long they've been sitting on this old design that was designed for an era with optical drives and spinning hard drives. And if you look at the guts of a MacBook Air today, there's nothing in there. Or an iPad Pro, right Like the M4 iPads, there's nothing in there. There's nothing. It's just this teeny, tiny little bit. So the Mac Mini doesn't need much of that, other than maybe some surface area for ports. I would say that they did break the seal on forward ports with the Mac Studio so they can put some ports. If you look at, like the mini uh, nucs from Intel, like there's points on the front and the back, you could do that. Um, especially on the pro model that German says is coming, this is not just an M4, but also an M4 Pro. You can get a bunch of ports in there. It's not necessarily USB here's.

0:10:20 - Leo Laporte
Here's Jason, a younger smoother skinned. Jason.

0:10:26 - Jason Snell
Snell from 2017.

0:10:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Less weary of the world.

0:10:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly right. So innocent Hoping for a small Mac mini revival.

0:10:34 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and we finally looks like we're going to get it.

It took a while With both the base and the pro. I mean it shows you how little low priority it is for them. But Apple TV is a great example. It sounds like, according to Gurman, it's going to be more like the previous generation of Apple TVs that were a little taller but like a very small footprint. And I've heard a lot of criticism from people who say why is Apple obsessed with making it smaller? It doesn't matter, it's just a desktop computer.

But the fact is it's fundamental to what the mac mini is. That it fits in the cracks, right, it is, for whatever it's. Its base use case is, uh, whatever you can think of, right, like that it fills all gaps. It's like the, the, the, the spackle of the mac marker. Like it'll fill, fill any gap you want. And having it be small so you can tuck it in a closet or put it in, you know, tape it under a desk or whatever, it just adds to what it is all along. And again, that big aluminum enclosure is not necessary because there's very little inside of it but air at this point.

0:11:37 - Alex Lindsay
And if you look at this, this is a Melee and I've got three USB-As on one side. I got three USB-As on one side, I've got two HDMIs on the other side, an Ethernet port, another A, a, c and even a locking mechanism on one side. So there's a lot of ports here, the same number of ports that I have in the Mac Mini, in something that's half the size of the Mac Mini.

0:11:57 - Leo Laporte
But what's in the Melee? It's not a giant.

0:12:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, well, it doesn't have to be as small as that. But but imagine, like already there are people who are whose setups are a Mac mini plus an iPad pro for the display. Imagine people just tossing like a hockey puck sized Mac in their bag, because they actually the iPad pro is the best machine for them for a travel device. But when they get to the hotel, when they get to their friend's house or even when they get to a sufficiently lenient Starbucks that doesn't mind people sitting there for four hours, being able to simply use that as an external display for a headless Mac that size.

It really does punch into what particularly Alex, but I think all of us have been saying about the Mac Mini the biggest feature of it is its versatility. It can be your main home desktop machine. That's, bring your own screen, bring your own keyboard. But it can be the thing you put into a server because you don't like the administration software that your server software comes with. So you're just going to use the Mini as something that you use to admin the rest of the stuff or as something to run a Plex or a media server on. It'd be so in line with everything the Mac mini is great at and it really gets me excited.

0:13:09 - Alex Lindsay
And the low power. You know the M4, if that's what they're going to put into, it is going to be screaming fast for the size that it is. It's not going to be something you could be doing. You'd have this little puck and when you think about people doing, when you think about you know hybrid, where people are coming, you know working at, you know partially, remote, partially, they're having that little puck that you put in. You hook it up when you get to the office, hook it up when you get to home and it's all just got all of the stuff there. It's a pretty interesting, you know it's. And my question is and I think that the answer is they'll keep both lines, but it does start to blur the line of like, do you need an Apple TV? Like, do you need an Apple TV or do you make this thing a three 99?

0:13:49 - Andy Ihnatko
That's two 99, two, 99.

0:13:52 - Alex Lindsay
And you put it into Apple TV mode. You can flip it to Apple TV mode, it just acts like an Apple TV, or you can flip it and it's a full computer, or you know back and forth.

0:14:01 - Andy Ihnatko
That would be really nice. I mean, I'm also thinking that what if they were also to go for broke and say oh, by the way, it's USB powered, but it also will work off of a power bank, so that you could really have?

0:14:12 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's really important for them to get rid of the to go to USB-C. I agree with you. I think that the power supply is a big piece of what's still inside. There's no reason why USB-C can't deliver the power that especially a smaller Mac Mini would need.

0:14:26 - Jason Snell
There's just no reason to not have it. If it's basically a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, USB-C power should not be an issue, and I mean, remember the power. It's not just M4 we're talking about here. We're also saying, according to Gurman, there's going to be an M4 Pro option, just like there is a Pro option on the existing Mac Mini. So that's a lot of power.

0:14:44 - Alex Lindsay
I wonder whether the pro version still ends up being the same size, you know, and and has more ports or does whatever, and the and the base versions are smaller Cause I it does feel like that would be harder to fit in there, but it's totally possible, yeah.

0:14:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I mean I've. That's a good point that Jason makes because, like off the side here, I've got an Apple. I think it's like a 60 watt power adapter USB. That came with my Mac excuse me that I got with my MacBook and next to it is an Anker one, a Glinium, a gas adapter that I bought like a year ago and also during the sale that is in itself delivers enough power to it's 100 watts so it can power both my MacBook and the MacBook excuse me and the iPad Pro I've got on top of me.

So it would be a damn shame if you couldn't just simply if you couldn't simply power a device like this off of a charger like that, where it's one simple little, tiny little adapter that gives you 100 watts and is driving both this Mac and this iPad that you're using as display, or even this USB-C display that you decided to pick up for just 100 bucks on Amazon. Again, I'm really excited. The only thing I don't know about is if it would ever realistically supplant something like an Apple TV, because we're talking about. You really have to make margin on an Apple TV and the storage that you need minimum on a Mac would probably scotch that pretty badly, and Apple isn't the kind of company that would do sort of a multimodal Mac mini where, yeah, if it detects that you can have like a oh God, what are they called Stage mode?

Right center stage, a center stage mode where you can actually just say just as some other older Macs used to be able to be able to do through the operating system. If, if you activated an infrared remote, it would just simply say OK, I'm an Apple TV now or, excuse me, I'm an entertainment screen now. Lean back, yeah, lean back.

0:16:40 - Alex Lindsay
The only advantage of having to be a real computer that replaces the Apple TV is the ability to do more games. You know, like to. You know, so now you're just doing Mac games can be played on the TV and it just it's just there, and so, and I think that that is because I mean the reality is, the Apple TV app environment is kind of a disaster. Like it, just it's just, it's like it's dead. So so nobody really looks at any of these apps anymore, and so I think that that area has, you know, there's not really anything to protect there. You know, because no one's really building, I don't think anyone's really doing any speakers with apps.

0:17:16 - Leo Laporte
How cheap could you make a Mac Mini M4? Mac Mini.

0:17:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you could bust $400 easy.

0:17:22 - Leo Laporte
I think you could even do $300 if they were interested in it. So it's a premium of a couple hundred bucks over an Apple TV, but you get a Mac.

0:17:32 - Alex Lindsay
And I could see them leaving the Apple TV on the SKU. But having a $299 Mac Mini as the base, it'll probably be $399. I don't think it'll be the same $599. I think it will go down a little bit but I have no idea how much. I think the Apple TVs have a little bit, but I don't, but I have no idea how much I the I think the Apple TVs have have a lot of margin in them.

0:17:49 - Leo Laporte
I think they're very cheap to make and I think there's not a lot of connectors on the back, that's for sure.

0:17:57 - Alex Lindsay
You wouldn't necessarily need to take the chips that run them, even though that they are a high powered chips. You don't have to take them from the center of the wafer. So so the thing is is that you know, because they're not being pushed very hard.

They're probably excess as you're saying, probably the ones that don't test it for everything else, and so they're probably not. It's probably not a very expensive item to do, so I think that that would be if it became a rage for Apple. I think they want to make sure that the margin is there, because they could end up selling a lot of them.

0:18:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I would just hope that it wouldn't take the place of the Mac Mini in my mind, which is, if they decided to make it, oh well, these are going to be tiny little hockey puck devices. They're designed not for power use. They're not for regular use. They're essentially like the netbook of the Mac line, so to speak. I would still want the ability to have a really powerful desktop and the ability to buy something that is large and substantial enough to have the sort of cooling that you would want to have with some beefy multi-core processors. So I would hope that, if this, I really want this to happen, but I wouldn't want it to replace, I wouldn't want it to be the entire Mac mini line, unless I wouldn't be giving up any options when I'm buying a Mac mini no-transcript.

0:19:32 - Jason Snell
So I think that will continue right. Like I, I do wonder about the price. I would imagine that they they will build whatever enclosure they build We'll be able to handle the heat thrown off by a pro chip, not just the base chip, the pro chips a little bit more. And remember they differentiated the pro and the max a little bit more than they used to with m3. They made it it's a, the pro is a, a, more like a super powered base chip and not like an underpowered high-end chip, and so it's into this whole scheme of separating the mac mini and the Mac Studio. So I think that makes sense In terms of price. I think it's a really interesting point.

It's very rare that Apple goes down on price. However, I will say Mac Mini base price used to be $499 the very first time out the door. That was the cheapest Mac ever sold, and the next year they took it up to $599. It would be sweet if it was 499. That would be a really for the base model. I wouldn't put money on it never, never bet on apple lowering prices ever. But that would be pretty sweet if it was kind of an under underpowered, not enough ram, not enough storage. 499, and then you have to go up from there should apple worry about cannibalizing the laptop market?

0:20:46 - Leo Laporte
One of the things people were saying is ooh, this would be fun, I could put it in my pocket and carry it to work and hook it up there.

0:20:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but it's got no screen and I mean, what is it?

It's less than 25% of that Mac market is desktops now, so it's a niche computer, but it's a great nerd toy and it's a great affordable mac for people who've got a monitor and you buy this and you attach it and you've got a mac for for even five or six hundred dollars, it's pretty good mean for the mac studio I, I think the mac studio I mean mark german says that it's going to be getting the m4s next year and um, I think it's this dividing line which is they view the mac studio as a um, you know, basically the replacement for the Mac Pro for most people, and it's going to use the M4 Max and M4 Ultra chips presumably, and be the high-end desktop and then, you know, the Mac Pro will get updated to just presumably be just kind of like the Mac Studio in a bigger case.

0:21:43 - Alex Lindsay
And I love what Apple's done with that, which is that the Mac studio and the Mac pro are essentially the same, except that the Mac pro has more IO. You know, like it's just like the Mac, the Mac pro is just we're just going to give you, we can put cards in it, you have eight channels of of Thunderbolt. You know and there's people like me that probably my next pro computer will probably be the Mac pro, because I need all that IO, you know. And so so I really want to have that IO on a computer and I'm very happy with my studio. But I also have, you know, I have a studio and I have five Mac minis in my kit that are in my, on my desk. You know, oh, you would love it if it's the size of an Apple TV, right? I mean, oh, yeah, if it got smaller and it just get even better. I mean, and, and it would, you know, and and we use them for glue. We just use them for all kinds of things. For instance, our most popular way of using these Mac minis is for scopes. So we take video, we run video into the Mac mini and we have all of the scopes that we used to pay tens of thousands or thousands of dollars for are now done in software. We use them in a program I think I've recommended at some point called Omniscope. And so, omniscope, we just run that signal in and the Mac mini, you know, runs it like I don't know.

The current M1, m1 with eight gigs, I think, runs at like 22%. You know to run that and so, and that's a perfect example of a $500 solution, of something, and that's all, it's just for us, it's just an appliance that does that, um, you know, and and it's it. Uh, we have, because of that, we have lots of them, and so having them be smaller would be even better. Yeah, absolutely, as long as we don't give up IO.

The biggest thing that I worry about, the biggest reason that I tell people oh, you might want to get to the Mac Mini Pro or you might want to get to the Mac Studio, is more monitors, more Thunderbolt, more everything. So my only concern would be if all of the Mac Minis, including the Pro, went down and lost some of the IO. I would love for them to just go ahead and get rid of the A, because they take up a lot of space. The USB-A ports yeah, I'd rather have two more USB-C or Thunderbolt ports on the back and those are going to be more compact and theoretically you could have six of those in the back with a, you know, on a pro you could have six of those in the back with maybe one of them being power, or seven of them with one of them being power, that kind of.

0:23:50 - Leo Laporte
So this is the this is the pro right because it has here. I have to hide my eyes so the camera will focus. Yeah, lean up a little bit.

0:23:56 - Alex Lindsay
So we got some some light hold on there. We go shadows right now it's got.

0:24:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean more light. So, uh, I actually this is funny, this I took this out of the studio. Uh, this is the eight gig ram mac mini that was running zoom iso, what we're doing right now, right, um, that's all it did and it's a full-time zoom iso machine, it. But I have to say it's. You know, if you make it the size of an apple tv and you have to add a dongle the size of an Apple TV, it's not much of a saving. So you got to have the connectivity.

0:24:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but the but, yeah, but the usage of a device like that, it was of a nano Mac Mini. Desi sent a milli micro Nano. Yeah, exactly, nano Mac Mac Nano, uh oh, I like the Mac Nano.

0:24:44 - Leo Laporte
I do like that the Mac Shuffle. It doesn't have any ports.

0:24:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Now you can have socks for it, but yeah, it wouldn't bum me out. Having to dongle-ify a device like that wouldn't bother me as much. So if we had four equivalent Thunderbolt ports on it where any one of them can be power all of them are high speed and it supports at least dual displays I wouldn't be that upset about it, I'm only. I'm only upset about dongles when it's something that is inherently supposed to be a portable device, like the like, again not having a, and where there's, especially when there seems to be enough room to put a headphone jack on an ipad.

0:25:22 - Alex Lindsay
But they did decided not to like that if you add little things, like if you put the HDMI and the Ethernet on the, you know, if you put those two things on in addition to those, a lot of things simplify. And the problem really is is the handshake on the HDMI. If it's a desktop machine, the handshake of only using USB-C is a little complicated on the Mac actually, and so you really want that raw HDMI output if you can. I mean, it really needs one. So I think that you'd end up with an HDMI output, and then I think I'd love to see an Ethernet output, because that's otherwise going to be a dongle I think it's got to be, and then everything else.

0:25:55 - Jason Snell
You can take Thunderbolt.

0:25:57 - Alex Lindsay
And if you really need more ports. You can get a lot out via Thunderbolt and into a hub or something like that, yeah, and again, we see a lot of ports on little boxes that are the same size you know, or the same size as the proposed. It's definitely possible.

0:26:10 - Jason Snell
And the Mac Studio. I mean there's also. Traditionally there was that talk of like oh, apple has design, you know absolute design rules, like no ports on the front, and the Mac Studio broke that seal right. Mac Studio's got ports on the front. I've got a card reader down here, I got two USB-C right and then two Thunderbolts on the back. So they could absolutely and I would encourage them. I hope this is the case that they've got some ports on the front and some ports on the back, because it's I mean, it's going to be a small space geography, but there's room in there to have front and back ports and that's great yeah, someone asked me how often to use that sd.

0:26:46 - Alex Lindsay
Like, you see, that sd card thing, how often to use it. I was like every day, every day I use that sd card.

0:26:50 - Andy Ihnatko
It's so convenient to have that part of the computer and let's not forget that this is the johnny I have. Uh, era is not is now so far behind us that most of the people who were part of his team, who were in senior positions, have now moved on. So so if there was a dogma that said that, yeah, that would be nice, but I don't. It would disturb the lines of the thing, or God. I want to have as few openings in this thing as possible. Maybe the new era of designers are going to say function is absolutely tell us what this thing has to have. We will simply, it's our job to make it look good, and I think there is some pressure for Apple.

0:27:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I know the desktop isn't as important, but you know, when you have people like me who are pretty dyed-in-the-wool Mac users buying PCs because they're smaller and lighter and cheaper, you know there's a missing market there and Apple usually likes to build options for everyone. You know going up and down and I think that this is a growing market because a lot of the PCs, the Raspberry Pis, everything is getting faster and more effective in that sub $500 range and there's a big market there of people wanting to use these for glue and to do other things and I think that I hope that Apple takes advantage of the size and, you know, goes down to you $400 or or even $300 for the base unit would be and it might help the studio, because there's now a bigger differentiation between the mini or the nano and the studio.

0:28:14 - Jason Snell
And so if you feel more substantial and it needs that space in order to do its cooling.

0:28:20 - Leo Laporte
I think so, yeah all right, let's take a little break. Uh, that was the rumor of the week. We'll get to the I don't know if we even have a vision Pro segment, but we will talk about a big controversy that's brewing now around Apple and Patreon. In just a moment you're watching Mac Break Weekly. I am in the new attic studio. I hope you know we're tweaking everything. I think we had some trouble with sound on Sunday. You know we had this great studio and we had very expensive axia, telus, axia processing from a thing called an omnia and we're trying to, we're trying to duplicate that sound and I think we decided we can't duplicate it. Uh, so we're just gonna I, I we're just gonna do it as flat and, uh, if you're watching the streams, if it should sound okay, and then maybe in the, in the post editing, we'll we'll fix the levels, we'll compress it a little bit so everybody is easily heard, even if the audio levels vary a little bit, and I think we're going to leave it at that. So give us your feedback always welcome, of course, especially our club twit members. I, I'm always paying attention, but now that we're streaming in a variety of places, I can see the streams and the chats from YouTube and Twitch and Discord and everywhere twit, twitter to everybody. So, uh, please, uh, feel free to give us the. Yeah, there's all the, there's all the places. So give us the feedback, because I really appreciate it.

Our show today brought to you by 1Password actually, this funny story, funny thing happened on the way to 1Password. You may remember, we did ads for a while about a product called Kolide: K-O-L-I-D-E. Really cool authentication program that took the authentication to the next step to make sure that, yeah, the user's who they say they are, but are their machines secure and safe. And it's a great product. 1Password acquired it a few months ago and we thought, oh, this is really exciting, can't wait to see what they do with it. Well, now we know they've made a really cool unified package called the Extended Access Management from 1Password.

1Password Extended Access Management. Let me give you a hypothetical. Do your end users? Are they always using, you know, the company-owned devices? Here's your laptop, here's your BlackBerry, and are they always using IT-approved apps on those? No, you know they're not. With byod and shadow it, how do you keep your company's data safe? It's on all those unmanaged devices and apps. Well, that's where 1Password extended access management is so cool. It's the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities under your control. 1Password's EAM ensures that every user credential is strong and protected and every device is known and healthy and every app on those devices is visible. It solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM can't come close to touching. They like to.

1Password says imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. You know you've got your nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, the IT-approved apps. It's so pretty, the brick with the IV and all the managed employee identities and everybody's fine as long as they stay on those little brick paths. But the problem is every college campus has them, the paths. People actually use the shortcuts through the grass that are actually the straightest line from point A to P. That's what the users want to use those dirt paths. They're on managed devices, they're shadow IT apps, they're non-employee identities like contractors and most of the time the security tools you use are working fine on those beautiful ivy covered brick houses in the brick pathway, but most of the security problems they're happening on the shortcuts and that's where you need 1Password.

Extended access management security for the way we work today, available now to companies who use octa. But here's the really good news, and this is where 1Password has really been a great partner. It's coming later this year to google workspace and Microsoft Entra, so check it out. 1password.com/macbreak. That's the number 1 P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D.com/macbreak. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly. 1password.com/macbreak. It's a. It's a match made heaven, match made in heaven. So is this fabulous panel. Always a pleasure to have. Andy and Nakko, we can see the books behind you. See, I had to actually buy the books behind me. You've got what does it say? Somebody sells his acres, hawks me. Hawksy sells his acres by Christopher Lafarce.

0:33:28 - Andy Ihnatko
That's very good, leo. That sounds like a fake. Read three line, line number three, and cover your left eye.

0:33:34 - Leo Laporte
Then behind you is John Casey. I can't make out the title. No, it's nice, you're in a library. You should have books. I had to buy my books, I don't know. Can you see? Can you see the shop?

0:33:49 - Andy Ihnatko
behind me. Alex, can you now buy inflatable lines of books just for people who just want to make a good show of their background? You know what they do? Is they actually-? That's a good product.

0:33:56 - Alex Lindsay
You could buy a book by the foot, you know. Yeah, you can do it. And a lot of times what we do for sets is that we cut just the ends off, so it's like the first inch of the book it's a veneer there's a book veneer, you, you want the, you want the geometry of it, but you don't actually want the weight. So we just have just the spines in about an inch and we glue them all together and then they're like little sections and you just put them up and they look great.

0:34:18 - Andy Ihnatko
18 years of a man's life are real books.

0:34:22 - Leo Laporte
those books right there, this, this, uh, foot and a half those are the books I wrote. Then there's the Delphi three super Bible, paul Thorat's book right there. These are all the every all the books on this shelf are books written by people who we have on the shows. Underneath that is programming books, my lisp library, beneath that. These are real books that somebody has read, not me, but somebody somewhere, somewhere I like having uh. I like having a real world uh space for my studio. I think it's pretty cool actually. Um, thank, you.

I like your studio Get the get the setup, uh, you know, uh, dialed in these cameras are great. The uh Sony FX thirties using a road caster duo, which I know Alex would disapprove of, especially since I have a sound devices right there on my desk. Yeah, I think it's good. And you know, I don't think that your sound devices can do things like this, hello everybody. No, it does not. Now, how do I turn that off? Oh, there we go.

0:35:30 - Jason Snell
okay, there's, uh and there's also kill him while he is weak now there you go.

0:35:39 - Leo Laporte
I can bleep that. You know I have the bleep button. I know I love that monster voice. What's this? This is a robot voice. All right, I'm gonna stop that right now. We're going to go back to wow. This is leo do I?

0:35:52 - Jason Snell
I do. I need to come over there and take that you're gonna cut me off from the pad.

0:35:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I won't be able to bring a pizza and two meatball subs apple comes under fire for patreon commission degrading its brand.

0:36:09 - Leo Laporte
This is from nine to five mac. So apple is charging. Talk about rent seeking 30 to subscriptions to patreon creators that you buy on the apple device. Uh, gruber himself at daring fireball said apple's degrading its brand. Mac world says the company's charging for providing negative value. Patreon says all right, we're going to add 30 if you want to subscribe. Uh on apple devices yeah, this is this.

0:36:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I've always said that apple is generally like a very nice company, if it were were a person. It's someone that you enjoy hanging out with. They're nice, they have interesting ideas. The App Store is drunk Apple. It's like okay, I don't want any part of this and this is just so stupid. So, according to Patreon, they had sort of like a handshake agreement Like that okay, well, technically we'll say that your memberships, patreon memberships don't really count for a 30% kickback to Apple, for whatever reason. But recently Apple said no, the app has to switch over to Apple's payment system and has to kick over 30% of all fees and all subscriptions that go back.

0:37:25 - Leo Laporte
My position on this is that there is an exemption if users, if the money the users pay goes 100 to the recipient. But because patreon takes a cut, by the way, I should mention yeah yeah, our club twit is through a patreon company called memberful same thing. So because patreon takes a cut of that money, apple says no, uh, we're gonna have to. Starting in November, we're going to have to. They're going to have to be in-app purchases and Apple will apply a 30% App Store fee to all new memberships.

0:37:58 - Andy Ihnatko
This is just absolutely disgusting behavior. Okay, because I've never, I've never liked this aspect of the App Store billing, even when it was defending, quote unquote, like Amazon and booksellers from saying, well, why do I have to spend 30% more for a book? Like, what did Apple do to justify a 30% cut of a $25 online book purchase? They did nothing, if anything. The presence of the Amazon and the Kindle app on the iPhone platform helps Apple and helps the iPhone, but they've done nothing to justify a 30% cut.

Now, when you get down to, like, a good friend of mine and an artist, danielle Corsetto does amazing stuff on Patreon. She's a cartoonist. She completed a 12-year run on a comic strip called Girls with Sl, with slingshots. She's starting a brand new graphic novel and, for my happy fee, she does weekly like a daily comic, like every weekday, uh, in addition to art lessons, in addition to sneak peeks, all this sort of stuff. And this is, and now the the idea that she will receive 30 less from from people who sign up for Patreon via the app because Apple decides that, no, they're 30% responsible for that artwork, they're 30% responsible for that audience, they did 30% of the work and, by God, they're sick and tired of being cheated Like what a bunch of chiselers. This is really, really disgusting behavior on their part. Okay, I just john gruber writes.

0:39:32 - Leo Laporte
Patreon's messaging on this change seems pitch perfect to me. They're not whining, they're not calling for users to get their pitchforks out, but also they're making crystal, really clear changes and the timeline for implementing them are demanded by apple and that patreon benefits from these changes, not at all well, I think the problem that apple has is that jack conti is probably the coolest ceo in silicon in the world.

0:39:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, he's just such a cool dude, you know, and and I think that it's going to be, it's just really not the guy, because he's not the guy that's going to get into the big crazy fight with you, but he's, he's still going to going to win. You know, like you know, and so the you know, I think that the problem is he's just so nice and he's not going to, he's not epic, he's this is going to be he's not going to get hyperbolic, he's just doing.

He's just saying, hey, this is what we have to do, and this is what it's going to do, which is be upset, you know, and I think that I think it's very odd. I think the hard part is is that, you know, cause Apple's also talking about. You know you can't go around them and everything else, but it's kind of like okay, well, with Kindles, I'm buying stuff from a webpage, you know, like I'm subscribing, you know, and they're not charging. You know, when people subscribe to me, it could be easy enough for people to say, well, if they subscribe on patreon's web page instead of their app, that they get to keep it all, and I think that apple's closing that door on this as well.

0:41:04 - Leo Laporte
I believe, hamish mckenzie, who's the founder of substack, writes, writes on his Substack about this. He's the title of the article the Price of Payments how should in-app purchases work in the age of the sovereign creator? And his point is really well, this is this is a kind of a whole new thing, and Apple's just been caught out by the emergence of the creator economy. And Apple's just been caught out by the emergence of the creator economy. He says it presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for Apple and some delicate questions for Patreon and, yes, for his company, substack. We want creators and subscribers to benefit from the power of Apple's in-app purchases. I mean, that's a very as you've always said, alex a super convenient way of doing this for anybody who's selling. He says, in fact, at Substack, we've been working with Apple to bring in-app purchases into our app. But he asks how much is the ease of in-app purchases worth to creators? That's the salient question.

We found that creators are comfortable sharing 10% of their revenue for Substack's tools, but another 30% on top of top of that. At first blush that price seems high, but we have first-hand experiencing the potential that could be unlocked when the company gets its model and execution right, and we're grateful to our relationship with stripe, for example, for for similar reasons and and to be clear I just want to make sure we're clear about what we're talking about here is that it's not affecting current uh subscribers.

0:42:29 - Alex Lindsay
So this is. This is from patreon zone so it starts in november and it only, it's only applied to purchases that happen within the ios environment. So and and I will say I didn't even know I could, I didn't even know I could pay for patreon on the ios like it didn't even occur to me that that was.

0:42:47 - Leo Laporte
I think I am actually so, and this is the convenience that apple offers, plus the ability to unsubscribe very easily, which is a, I think, a big feature, makes me want to pay for everything in the app store it does, but that's the value that apple brings right to the user.

0:43:03 - Alex Lindsay
So the so the thing is. Is that so it is?

0:43:06 - Leo Laporte
but is it worth 30?

0:43:07 - Alex Lindsay
other payment.

0:43:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Other payment systems are exist. They're not that much harder to work with. Well, I I do like the idea of having a central dashboard for all my subscriptions, but this is patreon. I already have a central dashboard for all.

0:43:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's true, and I have to admit, I kind of don't want to know, like when I I subscribe to a bunch of patreons and and I, you know, I have a bunch of people that I, I, that, I, that I, I pay, I have like a $5 or $10 and it's because I believe in them.

I don't really. You know, I'm not here to try to get whatever special value I'm supposed to get. I just think that that's an artist that should be supported, and I just give them the money, and I kind of don't want to see it. Yeah, I kind of want to know that if a lot of people do that, they can keep on doing what they're doing. But I will say so. I just want to make sure we're clear, though.

0:43:59 - Leo Laporte
It's not like we're going back and Apple's suddenly saying you have to pay 30% of everything. That is happening, no, no, no, just for new subscriptions and it's just for new subscriptions that are there and you have to do it on iOS.

0:44:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, go iOS. Yeah, go ahead, alex. What will quickly happen is is that creators will tell people to go. You know what? What will? The result of this will probably be the creators in every one of their streams and everything else you know. Number one is they can set it up so that it's 30% more and they, you know, 30% more on the app store.

0:44:22 - Andy Ihnatko
And number two is that they'll tell people constantly Patreon is saying we've we've added a feature. So if Patreon is saying we've added a feature, so if you want that to happen, click this button and it will be handled for you automatically. They're recommending that people don't do that, but they're trying to make it as easy as possible, right?

0:44:35 - Alex Lindsay
And then, because that's what X did, right, x just says it's 30% more if you subscribe through your phone. Does.

0:44:46 - Leo Laporte
Spotify do that. I think a number of people charge extra.

0:44:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, they keep on charging more it's hard to tell. I'm turning up. I don't know what. We don't know exactly what they're turning it up for. I haven't I stopped paying for spotify jason, do you, are you a patreon?

0:45:01 - Leo Laporte
uh, do you have patreon on I?

0:45:03 - Jason Snell
do memberful, like you do which is the same company, same company, but it's sort of white labeled and not really into the. It's not really crowdfunding. It's a different kind of thing which I prefer.

0:45:13 - Leo Laporte
And I know you guys prefer it too.

0:45:14 - Alex Lindsay
It's good.

0:45:15 - Jason Snell
But I think this does. I agree with everything Andy said, but I and I think this is just Apple at its basest rent seeking behavior, where it believes that if there's anything that happens on the iPhone, they deserve a cut. That's basically what it is, unless it's in a web browser, in which case they probably aren't happy about it, but it's not going to get a cut. But I wanted to say, even with Apple's own terms, it actually shows you a way that Apple is behind the times in understanding how this stuff works, because Apple has based everything that it's tried to do to make, because Apple has based everything that it's tried to do to make them seem not as bad over the last few years, on the idea of look, we're not trying to soak the little guy.

And so they did their whole small business program where they only take 15%, right, and there's this whole idea right, and the problem with that is Patreon is the interface with apple. So as far as apple's concerned even though I saw somebody estimate, it's well over 90 and it may be more like 95 of patreon's people are not. They would qualify for the small business program because they're all rolled into patreon. They just have to pay 30% forever. They don't get 15%.

They don't even get the half off, and we could argue like even the half off, even the 15%, is not so great, but the fact that that isn't even an issue here because Apple has decided no, there's just one thing and it's an app and it's Patreon, and they're the middleman, and therefore we are also now the middleman and there's two middlemen, and therefore we are also now the middleman and there's two middlemen, which you can't do, it doesn't work economically. But Apple's rules, you know. And again I see people argue like well, but these are the rules. It's like Apple makes the rules. Apple could change the rules they choose not to.

0:47:03 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that and I will say that I mean again, I think that eventually, the process of having subscribers paying the full boat is going to end Like Apple. This is not a sustainable. This is, whether it's Epic or Patreon or dating apps or whatever the process of this. It's going to be like publishers are treated slightly differently. You know with how they, what percentages they pay. You know that Apple kind of capitulated to, and I think that this is an area that that, because of some of the stuff I do, we pay a lot of attention to, and so, and you just know that it's not, the 30% is definitely not sustainable, the 15 is probably not sustainable. You know, I think that for subscription services like Patreon, it's probably it's going to probably land somewhere between five and 10%. It's not going to be zero, but it's probably. It's going to probably land somewhere between five and ten percent. It's not going to be zero, sure, but it's not going to be 30.

You know, like you know and it's, and I think that that's going to be, you know, um, yeah this will put pressure on apple.

0:47:55 - Jason Snell
Apple's premise in all of this is that the in-app purchase is so convenient and such a great experience that it's worth a 30 tariff. That's basically what they believe they. They believe it's so great, and the counter argument to that is what will probably happen with Patreon, which is, you know, people will start buying things outside of the app more than they already do. I think all my Patreon subscriptions are from the web anyway.

0:48:22 - Alex Lindsay
Again. I don't even know I could do that. Yeah, I didn't either.

0:48:26 - Jason Snell
And I think what's interesting about that is there. If Apple is more or less wrong here and that people will just use the web, that puts pressure on Apple to compete a little bit. Right, apple, in order to make it that much easier to give you money via your apple credit card, you know, linked thing by in-app purchase, um, and I'm sure there is a number I've talked to developers who actually feel like the 15 for them for apps is pretty good, which and apps are a little bit different, but it's that idea of like, well, yeah, but it's just right there and right there and there's convenience.

But like what is that number? And will we ever see that? Because I do think the Patreon, ultimately, is just going to all those subscriptions, are just going to go to the web because nobody's going to want to pay Apple.

0:49:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and you know, and Apple's argument, of course, is that people are only upset because they want to be able to do this, because it's really convenient, because they built an infrastructure that made that happen. The issue is that it is a huge damper on a potentially massive market. So the subscription market, the marketplaces and I'm not talking about like the second marketplace, I mean, that's why they want to build the second marketplace, and I think that Apple's creating these second marketplaces and they're creating all of this stuff by making it too high for that specific vertical, and I don't think that they have to give up 15% per app to say, if you're doing a subscription service or a sub marketplace inside. We're going to take a smaller percentage to allow that to flourish, because I think potentially on Apple's side, it could make a lot more money.

If everyone's buying and selling but people aren't buying and selling at the rate that they could on iOS and I think, and I would argue, that it is probably 10 times less usage of a marketplace in the app store because of the percentages that Apple takes. If Apple made it 5% or 7% for a marketplace, define it. This is a marketplace. You're selling things and now people will argue well, now they're going to sell all their apps inside of that and then Apple makes less. So it's gotta be, you know. It's gotta be a. You know they can set up a subscription service and it's this and they can. They can put it into a small window, but there is a lot of opportunity there. That is just not. It doesn't exist at 15% and it doesn't exist at 30% and it would flourish at five or seven or something like that.

Right, you know, and for that specific but that for for a specific vertical. I don't think that they have to like unroll the whole thing.

0:50:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they can make a new program with new rules and in fact, given the way this story has gone so far, I would I would not bet against the fact that Apple will at some point announce they're doing a new friendly thing, that is, for certain kinds of content through certain kinds of apps where they change. Somebody's pointed out that if apple took its percentage from patreon's percentage, that wouldn't be a problem and patreon wouldn't like it right but it wouldn't be apple taking candy away from a baby, right, it would be a different story.

It would be like where we had, so that I could see them saying, oh well, we've got this new program for independent creators, that it were, with special partners, starting with patreon and substack, that it's going to work this way, and it because alex is right, you know, I I do believe at this point that they are preventing a whole other class of of transaction from flourishing.

0:51:49 - Alex Lindsay
And I think this is where they get themselves into. Antitrust is by using a marketplace, and when you start to see users completely not able, a market not even occurring because of something that they're doing, they put themselves in a real bind and I think that they're going to have to solve this pretty quickly now.

0:52:10 - Leo Laporte
It's a bad mistake to make for a company that relies on creators.

0:52:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It seems like an unforced error and keeps hopping on itself as being a very human-oriented company and creators may be a little sensitive after the giant press crushed all of their tools for creation into an iPad.

0:52:27 - Leo Laporte
I think creators might at this point. You know, it only takes so long before they start thinking no, you know, maybe Apple isn't the creator company.

0:52:35 - Andy Ihnatko
You know that that, that that ad didn't cost anybody money. That's that's. That's the big difference. It's like to me, it just comes down, and there've been a lot of really good arguments.

No, but it's just, it's a pile on, it's more of the same it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't feel good when there there are there are a lot of huge success stories on patreon. When you, a lot of you can do the math and see, well, if this person according to this, according to the the the bio page they have currently two thousand something, something, something, uh, paid patreon supporters and their minimum support level is like five dollars, you can calculate how much money they're making on patreon. Okay, but there aren't a lot of those success stories. For a lot of people, it's like this is the, this is the ability to make this my.

I need two jobs in order to get by in the world. With patron, I can. My second job can be creating art and selling prints and writing stuff and being a creator instead of, you know, cleaning houses or flipping burgers. And now when Apple, a $2 trillion company, says that oh, you know that $75 beautiful hand-bound book that you sell through Patreon this is Daniel Corsetto. Put her entire comic series, this beautiful two-volume slipcase, like I'm entitled, apple said this $2 trillion company is saying I'm entitled to 30% of that price because we feel as though we've justified 30% cut from that transaction because of all the value that we've created for you.

And when you think about how, on the App Store and again, it used to be a lot less fair for creators over there too, until Apple started to feel the heat and they suddenly decided to start dropping prices and eliminating prices for people who are small creators when you realize that as an app developer if I'm a small app developer, I don't make a whole lot of money off of it. I'm using Apple's App Store to market and sell my app I have to, but, again, that's a value. I'm using Apple's developer tools to build my app, which I have to again, that's value. I'm using apple's apis I have to, but that's a valuable thing.

Apple can say that, well, yeah, they did contribute a lot to my ability to make this great app and even so, I'm making five or six hundred dollars a month. They are taking none of it. But again, apple says that that book that you put that you're selling for 75 bucks, we deserve 30. We deliver so much value for that transaction you owe us. Thank God for us, because otherwise how will you be able to sell this?

0:54:56 - Jason Snell
book. That's where it falls apart.

Right Is that they're not they're no longer making the they were building the APIs and the developer tools and all those things. And this goes back to the, I think, when I said that they're kind of behind the times. I think this is. What it is right Is that they view everything through the lens of app developers owing them money.

And the problem here is that, just as Amazon is not an app developer when it's selling you a book on Kindle, Patreon is not an app developer when it is acting as a conduit so that a whole bunch of people who are never going to build their own apps can reach an audience. It's something different, and that 30% or even 15% makes some sort of sense. We've argued about it, but some sort of sense at least. I'm willing to hear the argument of like oh well, we built the infrastructure and the apps and all that, but for something like this, it really comes down to well, we're providing a payment infrastructure and we helped your app developer build their app, but like, come on, it doesn't scale when you're talking about thousands of creators. Yeah, it's an own goal, it's an unforced error and it's something that they probably will.

Maybe address at some point because it makes them look terrible.

0:56:02 - Alex Lindsay
The reality is it looks really, really bad for Apple. It probably will not affect the creators that much because they're going to focus everybody on buying stuff from the web. Their current subscribers are not going to be affected. So there's not going to be like you know there's. You know it's probably not going to have an actual impact on that many creators.

0:56:20 - Leo Laporte
You know that is probably not going to have an actual impact on that many creators you know, in a main it it it's very unlikely but it's a really downplay the impact these days of the youtube. You know influencer. No, no, I'm saying, if you start to get a campaign on youtube. Oh, no, no apple is evil.

0:56:36 - Alex Lindsay
Right, it could actually impact you. What I'm saying is I don't think. I don't think it's going to financially actually impact the creators. That much.

Oh, I understand, but don't piss off creators no, and and and I was going to say well, in reality I was going to say it's not going to affect them financially that much, it's not going to make as a result, it's not going to make apple very much money, it's just going to put apple in a big white hot place. You know, like you know, and and there's like there's no, there's no upside to this for apple other than you know, and there's all downside it, just it. I don't think it. I think that they're going to have to find a middle way pretty quickly, because they're going to keep burning until they get their hands off the plate the macalope writing in mac world to your point.

0:57:15 - Leo Laporte
Andy said apple's forcing creators into funding models that work for apple. Andy said Apple's forcing creators into funding models that work for Apple but not necessarily for them. A lot of creators create things when they have the time to create them, not on some predefined schedule.

0:57:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's obsession with subscription-based revenue is something that lets it level out its quarterly results, but it's now having a knock-on effect on other platforms. I wonder if they're going to change with. If they do wind up losing that 22 million dollar billion dollars a year from google, uh for uh, google search placement on devices, I wonder if they're going to be encouraging themselves to find a way to make up for that shortfall in services wherever they can. So I hope that this isn't the start of something really, really bad yeah, well or worse, we'll see what the backlash is.

0:58:02 - Leo Laporte
It's, it ain't gonna be good. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. Uh, andy and naco WGBH in boston, where you're going to be on gbh next uh, thursday, uh 12 45. You'll listen to it live or later on WGBH newsorg and you'll be talking about the incredible DDoS attack that took Twitter down.

0:58:23 - Andy Ihnatko
That Trump and that Elon Musk. They just can't catch a break. You know, I just feel so sorry for them. I feel so bad for them, the bigger sad sack you'll never find Jason Snell.

0:58:33 - Leo Laporte
Jason is at Mac. I'm sorry it's sixcolorscom. Slash Jason.

0:58:38 - Jason Snell
I chose a domain 10 years ago. When I bought that domain, it's almost exactly 10 years ago I decided not to have Mac in the title because I spent 10 years at Macworld with everybody saying well, you're writing about the iPhone, it's not a Mac, your name is Macworld. I'm like okay, no Mac in the name.

0:58:54 - Leo Laporte
Then why didn't you call me and tell me I would have named the show something else?

0:58:59 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, but I think you were already up and running right.

Like that's the thing, is that the so I went with the more generic six colors, uh, apple reference instead, which has served me pretty well. And uh was a bargain. I had to use a domain broker. It costs like three grand or something for that domain. Totally worth it. I really sweated it 10 years ago and now I'm like are you kidding? Oh, yeah, pay a lot more for that. Dot dot, it's your brand here. Dot com for the brand with words that people understand yeah, baby, I'm very happy to have it. So, yeah, six colors, dot com you want to stick a u in there.

If you're a commonwealth type person, it redirects.

0:59:33 - Leo Laporte
I gotcha also with us. Mr alex lind. Six Colors, Not Six Colors. See, I'm one behind it rolls off the tongue.

0:59:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a beautiful name.

0:59:43 - Leo Laporte
It's a beautiful name WGBH, officehoursglobal and 090.media. Thank you all for being here.

0:59:53 - Alex Lindsay
I think, if we haven't published it already, we will publish the Twit session that we did in Spatial with new audio. So we're going to put that up to make sure we will publish the twit session that we did in in spatial new audio. So we're going to put that up to make sure people can download that. And our next I'm just putting it out there for people to know is that our next spatial uh event, uh, will most likely be August 27th.

Um, where we are, we think we got it all sorted out, but we think we're going to um, do a, we're going to be able to do a concert out of the, out of the record plant, um, uh, with, uh, how cool friends of mine. So, so, anyway, so, uh, so we'll, we'll, we'll, uh, it'll be. There'll be a mixture of a live stream as well as a spatial stream, so I would recommend people still go up and get on the beta um, the. The band it turns out the band uh playing the next night is a band called the Birth Pipe. So, anyway, they have a little single called Freshman, if you haven't heard it.

1:00:43 - Jason Snell
All the life of me I cannot remember. I'm not going to do the whole thing. We'll get taken down by somebody.

1:00:52 - Alex Lindsay
We're talking to the Birth Pipe about it and so we'll be able to confirm it next Tuesday, but I think it's close enough. I was trying to work out all the stuff before the show so I can talk about it, but I think we're in our final lap there. We'll be streaming that both on YouTube as well as spatially. Stay tuned for that and make sure that we know that you're there. It should be a fun one.

1:01:13 - Leo Laporte
The beta is StreamVoodoo, the Voodoo spatial app that you need for your vision pro, and it is in beta right now, but there's a little link that says join beta and you can get that, get that, and then we'll also use that your sign up there to tell you that the concert's starting.

1:01:28 - Alex Lindsay
So perfect yeah, so so, uh, so definitely, um, and that'll be, if you have a headset. Um, I think that the show went pretty well and we're excited to do the next step, so where can they get?

1:01:42 - Leo Laporte
where would they go to get the spatial version of Twitter? Are we going to do that posted, or I?

1:01:47 - Alex Lindsay
think stream. Buddha will do it. So we'll we'll have a link, we'll have it by next week, if not earlier, and I'll probably tweet it out and then we'll make sure that you have it and you can you can retweet it or whatever, and we'll get it there, we'll get ty, our marketing guy, all over it.

1:01:59 - Leo Laporte
That's great. Thank you, alex, uh. Thank you andy. Thank you, jason, it's great to have all three of you, our show, of course, today brought to you by you, you, the people, the, the people there in the club. Yes, we love you guys and we're so grateful to your for your support, and we'd like to have more people in the club. The more people in the club, the better the job we can do. Uh, it is, you know, less expensive not having a big studio. We've saved at least five thousand dollars in electric costs alone, but that's a month, by the way. But we, uh, we, we would like to do more and, with your help, we can.

I mentioned, uh, that we're going to do a little coffee show. I've always wanted to do a show about coffee, but I didn't feel like there was enough material for a weekly. So now, with the help of the club, we don't have to do advertised, sponsored shows. We can do shows that the club supports. So Mark Prince, the coffee geek, and I will be getting together on Friday, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC, to talk about the making, the drinking, the buying of coffee and coffee gear, our first ad hoc from the attic special. So thank you, club members, and if you're not a member of the club, I would love to get you in it. You're not a member of the club, I would love to get you in it.

It is a wonderful group of people who are smart, interested in technology a huge variety of types. It's a great community and our Discord is, of course, where we all meet. You can get into the club to a Discord, get ad-free versions of all the shows, join in on the various special programming we do just for the Club. The Club gets video for programming that we put out as audio only, and on and on and on. But the real benefit is you're supporting us to keep doing what we really want to do. I think what we do well, and with your help we will be able to continue to do it. So twit.tv/clubtwit. Don't worry, I'm not going to turn this into a pledge fest every week, but it would be nice if you would join. We'd love to have you. twit.tv/clubtwit.

1:04:05 - Jason Snell
You should see the tote bags. Oh man, if you donate now, that tote bag could be yours.

1:04:11 - Leo Laporte
I wish there were a tote bag.

1:04:13 - Jason Snell
I think, I also have a.

1:04:14 - Andy Ihnatko
DVD of Are you being Served. We can throw in as a bonus, just to keep that vibe going.

1:04:21 - Leo Laporte
No, we can throw in as a bonus just to keep that vibe going. Uh, no, not gonna do that, I'm afraid not gonna do that. So, mac os sequoia. We are getting closer, we are. I can't believe. Summer's almost over. We're getting closer to the release of a new iphone. We don't know when that'll be, but I think probably four weeks. Four weeks from today, it's my guess. Yeah, yeah, not necessarily the day after Labor Day, so the week following.

1:04:43 - Jason Snell
Right, it's three weeks to the day after Labor Day, but four weeks to where I bet they will have the event that makes sense. And then they ship the next week yeah.

1:04:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so wow, can't believe that. And, of course, when that comes out, we'll get iOS 18. Yeah, we will also. Uh, will we?

1:05:03 - Jason Snell
get sequoia around about. Then you think or uh, I mean, sometimes it's in, it's a little bit later, sometimes they sync it up. I actually prefer when they sync it up, because otherwise you end up with like a really awkward few weeks where the mac doesn't do things that everybody else does. Like you know, they're going to put in those new emoji, tap backs and stuff and just like get, let everybody have that. So hopefully it'll all happen in mid-september and sequoia will be in there with ios and ipad os and watch os and tv os and they'll push them all out at the same time.

1:05:29 - Leo Laporte
But that's my hope you are, of course, as, uh, many of our listeners are using betas. The public betas are out for all of this stuff. I actually went to the public betas. I might, I might. I'm using it on this machine right now. I'm maybe recording that I'm on sequoia beta right now too. Yeah, uh, you did complain uh on six colors about apple's permissions.

1:05:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, features yeah, I mean this has been a problem since catalina, where you know apps that you install yourself have to get your explicit approval to, like look on the desktop or look in documents or all sorts of things, and and they've had some issues where, like, you migrate to a new computer and, uh, then every app on your system asks for 10 different permissions all at once and you get like this cascade of like 60 different permissions requests. The new story is that Apple has introduced some new warnings and it seems like it's all around screen sharing and their concern seems to be that apps could be used to spy on you, which I mean we all have talked about, in fact, how Microsoft's feature that takes screenshots and then saves them, like it's a huge potential privacy issue, right? So what Apple? And also like the bartender story, where that venerable Mac utility got sold to a new owner and it has screen sharing permission and people are like, well, wait a second, who are they and what are they doing with screen sharing? Now, bartender, a lot of utilities just use screen sharing for these innocuous reasons. Bartender, a lot of utilities just use screen sharing for these innocuous reasons they need to snap something to see whether the menu bar is up or default folder, uses it to cover an ugly uh graphics glitch. That happens when they're doing their thing, so that you don't see it like it's, it's like innocuous, but it does mean they have access to your whole screen if they want it.

So Apple has done a few things. They have deprecated their old. It's very much like what they've done with photos access and context access, where what they want to do is be the middleman and say, all right, instead of letting an app see everything, we're going to have the app request from the system that they want to grab a window or a screen and then we'll deliver it to them so we know what they're doing with it, and that is a more secure system. So they built a new API for this and they want developers to adopt it. The problem is that, first off, a lot of developers are unclear about what's going on. I've heard from developers who say that they've adopted it, adopted what they think apple wants them to do, and they're still getting this dialogue box. And the dialogue box has changed in the new beta. Great news, everybody. It used to say approve for one week, which basically says to the user, I've seen that it's you want to use this app.

Every week you will press a button to use this app until you give up and stop using this app, or the developer gives up and does what we want. And, as I've said, a lot of developers like we don't know what you want, it's not clear in documentation, it's not clear what the policy is, we don't know what to do and and that's on apple for not educating them well enough about this. Good news, though in the latest sequoia beta it says says approve for a month. But this goes to my complaint, which is first off, it's abusive of the user. I get the idea that if somebody is surreptitiously installing screen monitoring software on your computer, if they could approve it forever, just then, and you never see it, that's probably bad, but I do think that. And then giving the user a chance to say you know, I do want to use zoom to share my screen, stop asking me. And this approach doesn't let you say stop, it will just kick the can down the road a little bit. I think that's super insulting to the user and it's, like I said in my story, out of balance. Like I want them to protect people's security and privacy, but they need to worry about the user experience and not degrading it, because not only does it annoy users who just want to say yes, but eventually everybody will just say yes because and that creates a huge security problem because if you have 20 different dialogues, you just get fatigued and you just agree to everything because you know if you disagree it'll break some software somewhere and then you're going to be on hold with support. So you just say yes, at which point you've completely foiled the idea of being an informed consumer who is approving permissions in computers, so what? And then one final point about this, which is I know it's a developer beta, so theoretically, or a public beta, it's a beta. It's early yet.

But I also really don't like the fact that Apple is trying to drive a wedge between users and software that Apple doesn't like or doesn't approve of. And this is not just with the gatekeeper stuff, where they make you go through all these hoops to run apps that they haven't notarized, where they use scare language to say, basically, apps that they haven't notarized, where they use scare language to say, basically apps that Apple hasn't seen are malware, which is unacceptable and inflammatory. But with something like this, I also think it's super insulting to the user, because what the dialogue box they put up says oh, this app that you rely on isn't doing things the way Apple would like and therefore you have to approve it every week or month or whatever. And fundamentally, what you're doing is you're punishing the user, hoping that they will then punish the developer so that the developer changes their tune. And that's not how you do this. You got to go to the developer.

I would almost rather Apple say hey, zoom, if you don't do this by our new version, in the fall it'll just break. I'd rather them break old APIs than foist this allow for a week or a month on the users, because it's first off, it's my Mac. If I want to say yes at some point, I need to just say yes and not be pestered anymore. And two, I really don't like the idea that I'm being used so that I get bugged and then bug Zoom, because Apple's like it's not us, it's zoom. They're not doing what we want when it is them like they they. So. So there's just a. There is a disconnected apple. It started with catalina, it continues, which is apple rightly wants to protect its users and protect us from doing stupid things. Okay, but at some point if the user thinks they know what they're doing, they need to be allowed to do it. And Apple, when they say for one week or one month and not eventually, let you just say stop asking me. That is the ultimate insult to a user. Yeah.

1:11:56 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that there's a way to talk to. I mean like to have certified developers and so on and so forth as well. I mean, zoom is probably the perfect example, that of someone who basically builds everything exactly the way Apple asks for it to be built. There's like no, there's no like stepping over a line. So if you see Zoom asking for something that's as good as it gets, you know like that is. They're following every API, every security protocol, every. You know they're doing everything by the book with Apple and so if they're, if you're seeing a request there, that's that's the least amount of intrusion you're going to get.

1:12:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I just I don't love the idea that they're. They're exhorting the user, you know, to essentially to shame the developer, like that's not the way they do. Now, my understanding is Apple did reach out to a lot of developers top developers about this API change and all that. But, like on Mastodon, I have a nice cross section of indie developers who are like what? And then when they look at it, they're like I don't understand what's going on. And that's on Apple's developer relations team to do better documentation and add more clarity here, because some of these developers are pretty wired in and they don't even know what to do. That's not great on top of what they're doing to the user.

1:13:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, one of the things I've always liked about the division between iOS, ipados, all the iOS stuff and macOS is that it allows Apple to have things both ways, that it allows Apple to have things both ways where the ideal thing to keep the system up and running and to make sure that the user has a positive experience is to take the iPad approach, where everything is super locked down and if it means that a lot of things are less convenient or impossible, the point is to keep this thing secure and safe and make sure that it's always running, whereas on the Mac side, the idea is to make it more like a traditional operating system, where it is my computer. If I want to take risks, I can take risks If I basically do the calculus and decide that this app I know it has not been signed by a signed developer, I know it's not part of the App Store, but it is exactly the tool that I need at this moment. I am willing and I've done my homework to make sure that it's not being talked about as a Trojan horse for anything I can click on this and actually run it. That's really the right balance. I don't like it when iOS stuff, ios dogmas and philosophies start to creep into macOS and Jason I love that piece because it was completely right into macOS. And Jason, I love that piece because it was completely right. It's punitive and it's basically turning the users into the people who are going to try to hopefully manipulate developers on Apple's behalf. It crosses the line from previous editions where it's no longer trying to keep people safe.

Remember that previous editions of the OS with unsigned apps did what I thought was very, very, something very, very smart, which is it would throw up a dialogue saying this is unsigned, I'm not going to let you run this. Go to settings if you want to run it, and then you'd be presented with immediately. Well, you came right here from that dialogue. I assume you want to run this app. We don't think that's a wonderful idea, but we will let you do it just by clicking this button. That's a great compromise between safety and giving the user power.

But to make now, to make a change where it really is warning you that this thing is going to blow up if you click this button. We're not going to let you option click your way through this. We're not going to make this any easier. We're going to make this such a pain in the butt to use this app that, for unfathomable reasons, why do they don't they realize that we at Apple, we have a beautiful plan for their life? Come to us willingly and let us give you the grace of our, of our experience, and let us accept your gratitude for us existing. It's like, oh God, you, you, you done. Captain Kurtz has gone up river. Just pull back a little bit, apple, pull back.

1:15:36 - Jason Snell
I just think you know again, there was a WWDC 2019,. I want to say where somebody stood up on stage. It was when they introduced notarization and they said look, we know this sounds scary, we are never. They said this is an Apple person. We are never going to prevent you from running software you want to run on your Mac, but we're worried about some of it, and so we want to introduce a middle way, a middle path that is not the Mac App Store, but that we can do some basic cryptographic signing, which means that if it gets tampered with later it won't run, and scanning, basically for really bad stuff, bad malware. And if it gets notarized by us, then you're safer than you would have been and they can kill it um, although they can kill anything on the system if they really want to. I appreciated them standing up and saying like, look, we're gonna let you run whatever. We just want to create a safer path for a lot of software and the fact is, most outside the mac app store, software is notarized. Um, there are some programs that aren't, for various reasons, and I think that's okay as long as we get to run them.

But it gets back to that larger point, which is why does the Mac exist? The Mac exists to be a computer, in a way that the iPad and the iPhone are not. We might wish them to be more open Some of us might not, because there are benefits in them being closed, but the mac is different, and the the? You know I? I realized a long time ago that, like I'm, I'm never not using a mac in my life. If you know, like that's never not going to happen, I will stop. I'll buy a bunch of old macs and just keep them around if I need to, but like I'm never going to switch to windows or linux, I'm just never going to do it. I will say, though, once they, they stop letting you run the software you want. I feel like that's when you just sort of say I'm never updating my system again because that's why we use computers.

So I think that it's a. I think it's admirable that Apple wants to protect users. My podcast pal, mike Hurley, said yesterday it is that what you have to fight against is the one user problem, which is but one user might do something stupid and wipe their hard drive or agree to malware, and it's like, yes, one user might, but you can't ruin it for everybody Because of one user. You can make it safer for that one user, but if they really want to do it, you have to let them, because the alternative is something so locked down that the Mac that I bought, that I run, that I personalized to be mine, doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to Apple and I'm just paying a subscription every month where I click the button to allow my screen sharing utility to continue working.

1:18:13 - Andy Ihnatko
The philosophy is screws, not glues. If you want to put security screws on something to make it difficult for me to take apart a computer that I own, that's perfectly fine. Don't glue it together to make it impossible, because it's still my machine, and that applies to software and user interface.

1:18:26 - Jason Snell
Right, it's my machine and I can ruin it if I want, and if that means that it's ruinable by a person who gets talked into it, by somebody on the phone who's doing a social engineering scam or something like, again mitigate it, ask again in a certain number of days when they're not on the phone with that person and have them realize, oh, what did I do?

1:18:44 - Leo Laporte
but you can't just wipe it away entirely and make it impossible I think the good news is this is something that can easily be fixed you had a little timer and you say, the third time they click it, give them the option to say forever more right, and then it does the job, and so it is a beta. Let's hope, apple, are you listening?

1:19:02 - Jason Snell
yeah, and talk to your develop like, communicate better with your developers. Clearly they the number of developers I talked to who are baffled like that's not good. Right, but that's not good. Even if they did personally go to a bunch of the high profile ones like craig hockenberry at the icon factory should not be completely baffled about what the rules are here.

He is a pretty wired-in developer and he's like I don't even know, is there an entitlement? Do we switch to the API? Does that API ask now Like that's not great. So some more clarity, better communication with developers, would help here too.

1:19:34 - Leo Laporte
I know that if you're using the beta, you have that little app added that you can report errors and stuff. Do developers have a special, even a better channel?

1:19:43 - Jason Snell
Nope, no, no, I mean they do have developer relations, people that they can talk to. There are human beings that they can talk to. Filing feedback is kind of the number one way to do it, but there is also a behind the scenes, like if you have a contact within developer relations that you can talk to about this. And you know, I just I was surprised because there's a piece of shareware that I've been using since the nineties I mean when it was shareware called default folder and it's really great and it and I use it to this day, and this is where I first saw this thing. And, yes, people are like well, why is a folder default? You know open and save dialogue. Why is it grabbing a screenshot? Default, you know open and save dialogue. Why is it grabbing a screenshot? And, like I said, the reason is because, in order to do what it does, it manipulates the open and save dialogue box for you in a way that throws up a bunch of weird junk in the UI, and so they take a screenshot and cover it.

1:20:33 - Leo Laporte
So you don't see the weird junk. Oh, that's interesting.

1:20:35 - Jason Snell
He's just trying to make, honestly it's a Mac developer trying to make his app nicer, which is what we want Mac developers to do, and then Apple's like oh, but should default folder be, acquired by somebody who then downloads every screenshot, you might have a problem.

Which is a thing that Apple doesn't seem to have thought about right. It's a little misplaced that. I would like more warning if the app changes hands or something like that. But anyway, there is a new API. I think what is going to happen here is that there's going to be more clarity about what's going on. Developers are going to understand it a little bit better.

I suspect that there will be OS updates to make this a little less onerous for users as well, but I hope somebody inside Apple learns a lesson from this whole conversation that a lot of people have been having this summer, which is, every time you make an incremental security privacy permissions change, you have to think about the user experience, about the user experience, and I gotta be honest, in the last five years, it feels like for every hundred hours they put in on security and privacy in Mac OS, they put in like one hour on the UX, and you can't do it that way. You can't. It's a price that every the cost of the alerts has to be paid for by improved user experience, and they're shirking on that side of it you're watching MacBreak Weekly.

1:22:03 - Leo Laporte
We're not shirkers. We're working every tuesday, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern. Uh, that would be 1800 utc and you could tell because I have a, a nixie clock behind me that has the universal coordinated time on it. Wow, how fancy is that?

1:22:22 - Jason Snell
huh I've got the blinking lights back there too. I love that. I feel like, if you keep those blinking light computers there, I'm gonna like I keep waiting for captain kirk to come in and try to um, create a like a logic loop that makes it explode. Right, it's, it's very doing.

1:22:35 - Leo Laporte
They're actually doing, they're running programs. There's a both of this one's a pdp 11 or something it's a pi.

It's called the pi dp 11 because it's running a raspberry pi pdp 11 emulator, and then underneath it that's an emulator for the mits altair 8800, which is the first personal computer, the one that got bill gates out of bed and into albuquerque uh, so it's fun to have those, and the blinking lights are cool, but they're actually. It's actually it's doing work. I don't know if it's useful work, but I know every once in a while it solves. You know, maybe it's a Bitcoin hash, I don't know. But then I have to. I have to reprogram it with the switches on the front of the Altair Nice.

Yeah, it's kind, kind of, kind of cool then you know we come back into the 80s and I have a um a mech 128k, thanks to jammer b john slanina, who donated that to the, the museum because he said I don't want any more crap all, right on, we go with the show.

1:23:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's do the vision pro.

1:24:00 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking forward to hearing from quincy jones, but uh, anyway, uh, there isn't that much vision pro to talk about. Uh, here is an article from gizmodo. It took apple's 3500 vision pro to make me appreciate nintendo's virtual boy.

1:24:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I love this, yeah, I mean, you remember Virtual Boy was 1995 Nintendo system. That was like an enormous pair of like goggles that was on a tripod you had to put your face into and was such a failure that's mostly famous for like being discounted to like 49 bucks at toys r us everywhere, uh, and so actual 3d, but like red led like uh, well, grains and graphics now you can experience it for a mere 3 500.

1:24:47 - Leo Laporte
Yes, holy cow, this is an app, uh, the virtual friend app, uh, and apparently it has the games and everything. Oh yeah, there it is, yeah I mean there's some.

1:25:00 - Andy Ihnatko
There was. It didn't last long enough to get like a whole bunch of unique games, but there were some titles, including, I think, a Mario title that was exclusive to the Virtual Boy. So the only way to actually experience it is through emulation this way, and I just love the fact that I mean emulation on this device just seems really great. It just just the emulation on this device just seems really great, just by virtue of being able to change the kind of screen that you think that you're looking at or even the room that you're in. There's something about the original NES that says I should not be seeing this in 4K dual-screen HD. I should be at this on like a 19-inch Sears color TV, sitting cross-legged on like a woven carpet with a two-liter Mountain Dew next to me.

So, yeah, I very much approve of this use of the Vision Pro Very cool.

1:25:53 - Jason Snell
Very cool and, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, apple is continuing to work on smart glasses and a less expensive apple vision for 2025 I feel like the big news here is that they are paying attention to what meta is doing with their meta ray bands and thinking of. I mean, this is a natural right. It is not that far off from airpods and from other stuff they're doing with Beats and you get Siri in there and you connect it to your phone and it's a pair of glasses Like these are. Gurman described them as being glasses without displays. Right, like he wanted to be clear. They're not working on glasses with displays yet, but I feel like this is a logical step that those meta ray bands sound really, really cool. I have friends who really love them I do, I love mine.

They sound great you work on vision pro on one end and you work start there on the other end yeah and and then maybe at some point that technology comes together down the road, but you, in the meantime, I I think the existence of the vision pro shouldn't prevent them from doing something like a pair of smart sunglasses that don't have a display. I think they're both reasonable products.

1:27:03 - Andy Ihnatko
And I love the idea that they're pursuing this, even though it's not like. The Vision Pro is like the of such a traditional Apple product where it's expensive, it's fashionable, it's at the cutting edge of what's possible, the best materials, the best manufacturing. But the idea of just having just have glasses that don't even have a display? They just have good speakers in the, in the, in the temple pieces, they have good audio pickup for your voice and they have a camera, the ability to not just take pictures where you go, but just the ability to be at an electronic store and say the, the orange cable, third from the top left. Is that going to work? Is that going to be able to charge my mac pro, my macbook pro, and for it grabs the video, it identifies the product, looks up the skew and says, yep, that will work with your macbook pro. That sort of stuff is game changing and we don't need really expensive hardware to make that happen and that's your vision pro segment for this week.

1:27:59 - Jason Snell
Oh I, oh, you had some ones I got one real quick, one real quick. Yeah, vision pro elephants to go with the rhinos.

1:28:07 - Alex Lindsay
They're oh nice so some of the immersive stuff yeah, the rhinos are just amazing. It's the. It's some of the best immersive stuff I've seen shot um, and so yeah, and and I I have to say I was watching, I had the opportunity, I was working, doing some work with a company called Radiant Imaging or Images Radiant Images, yes, last week, and they have they do stereo cameras and I can tell you that truly shot 3D footage on the Pro is amazing, on the Apple Vision Pro. It's just amazing to look at, and so I think that it'll be really interesting to see where that market goes, and we were able to look at a bunch of really cool images that we were testing. It was awesome.

1:28:48 - Jason Snell
And, leo, here's what I would say, if you can hear me, which is I think we should do this as part of the Vision Pro update. Every time there's new content, until it seems ridiculous to talk about new content. Look at the list of animals in 3D I feel like there might be some value in doing this kind of drip, drip, drip, because everybody who's used it and I feel this way. I know Alex feels this way. The content is so amazing and there's almost none of it. So let's talk about that.

1:29:19 - Alex Lindsay
Last week I also did an informal test of when will they tell you to take the Apple Vision Pro off when you're on a plane, and the answer is when the plane is mostly empty and you need to leave.

1:29:29 - Leo Laporte
I was in some movie and I just lost track of everything and I was like Did the flight attendant gently tap you on the shoulder and say, mr Lindsay, I got tapped and I pulled my headset?

1:29:38 - Alex Lindsay
up and half of the plane was gone and I was like, oh, I better get you've arrived, Mr Lindsay. Yeah, so I uh, they don't, they don't bother you too much with it and um, uh, I gotta it's not worth $4,500 to fly with, but wow Does it, make it amazing, like it is.

just, you know, as soon as we take off, I, I, I zip out the rest of the environment, I sit down and I start watching movies and doing stuff. It's just, it's really amazing to do that. If I was still flying the way I used to, I would definitely think it was worth $4,500 just for that.

1:30:09 - Leo Laporte
Nice, okay.

1:30:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, jason, I agree, every time there's a new little tiny bit of content, we will do a Vision Pro segment, just for you Because, on top of everything else, if there literally is nothing to be found or talked about and we just have to stammer for three to five minutes, that in itself will be an update and a commentary on the Vision Pro.

1:30:33 - Leo Laporte
We can use the music.

1:30:34 - Jason Snell
There's nothing to know. Jingles in a podcast are really good, is what I'm saying? Jingles are great.

1:31:13 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro oh Skilly, wow, to know, jingles in a podcast are really good. That's what I'm saying. Jingles are great. Hey, if you want to know what was going on in the European Apple stores during the 2010s, apparently a time capsule router that contained hard drives with all of the information was leaked and is now online for sale A trove of Apple corporate data, a Mac mini from the Foxcom assembly line, an iPhone 14 prototype and more. How?

1:31:26 - Andy Ihnatko
exciting. Yeah, this was cool. This is a presentation at DEF CON this week where a security researcher wanted to look into what are the security, how much of an attack, threat or security problem is it? Or security problem is it the fact that corporate-owned devices sometimes get lost track of and get sold on the open market, even by people who don't know what they are? So he got into a habit of just buying up lots of these things and he just bought this $40 time capsule. It wasn't even advertised as, oh my God, this used to belong to Apple. Oh my God, what secrets does it have? But he bought it. Everything had been deleted from it, but he was able to restore all of it and it contained a complete backup of all the data.

1:32:10 - Leo Laporte
There was a hint, because the label, the photograph in the listing, had a label on the bottom of the device that was clearly visible saying property of apple computer expensed equipment. I'd have bought that right away, right, he did that, notify apple about, uh, the findings and apparently apple asked him to give it back. Can we have that back?

1:32:35 - Alex Lindsay
that's property of apple computer there's gonna be a bunch of conversations. There's gonna be a bunch of new policies, a lot of meetings.

1:32:41 - Leo Laporte
I think this happens all the time.

1:32:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I guarantee you, if anybody wants to know the inner workings of twit, that many of our old hard drives will be available on the secondary market soon yeah, I mean, I had a little bit of a scare with my macbook the other day, uh, where for a good 45 minutes while I was running a treatment procedure on it, it was like, okay, either this will work and everything's just fine, or I got to figure out what. I haven't backed up on this device yet, because if I lose this drive, I won't be able to recover anything from it. And as bad as that would be, I had also remember that, but it also whereas a generation ago I could just attach it in disk mode and just mount it as a FireWire hard drive and still access all my data. Maybe it's not a bad thing that if this thing is stolen, you still need passcodes, you still need to get through the encryption to get at the data. But, yeah, this is going to be still like a very, very big deal.

1:33:43 - Leo Laporte
We probably should mention we started a little late today because of Google's made by Google 2024 keynote. They did about an hour and a half talking about the new Pixel phones. They did actually do a side-by-side comparison comparison. I don't think they've ever done this before a photo on a pixel 9 and a photo on an iPhone 15 pro max. Google, uh, did it a little earlier this year. I think they're trying to get a get a little jump on Apple's iPhone announcement. Um, and, of course, when you show a picture from Apple's iPhone, it's it's the current one, but it's not the new one.

1:34:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's it's so hard to really accept these.

1:34:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's fair, yeah yeah, because I mean it was a night shot. It was very dark.

1:34:27 - Andy Ihnatko
The apple thing looked pretty dark, it was of the grand titans, but I mean both any, any phone of that of that caliber, any, any, any, uh, any. Any phone that's on that's one of those top tier phones is, I think, roughly on the same level. And all of them still have the problems of every mobile phone that we'll always have, which is that there's always going to be a circumstance where it just didn't get the right balance or a circumstance where it got outfoxed by the focus or by the exposure, and it's hard to say that. Well, they picked six photos that look really, really good and that really shows you the difference between these two. When, when you, when you add the ability to, I think all phones are pretty much the same if you add 10 seconds of pushing sliders around in the in the stock photos app that comes with the phone.

1:35:13 - Leo Laporte
Put it on a tripod absolutely could look it's, it's most, it's most useful when they I wish they'd do more of.

1:35:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Here is this generation's iPhone. Here is compared to last generation's iPhone and the iPhone from three years ago as a way of convincing people who are maybe thinking about well gosh, my iPhone 12 is still working fine, no broken screen. It still does what I want it to do Showing them the differences between what the modern camera can do versus a three or four-year-old camera. That's what will get people to say yeah, you know what I got a 800 to a thousand dollars. Maybe it's worth me upgrading. That's significant, not the apples to oranges uh.

1:35:50 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, uh, burke McQuinn uh is yelling at me right now. He says we, you would know, there are no twit drives on the secondary market. We wipe the drives and we give them to Russell, who either degouses them or crushinators them. Okay, okay, all right, I stand corrected. Sorry, burke, I don't think there's anything really on those drives that anybody cares about, but I'm glad you wipe them. That's a good thing. All right, let's wrap things up and get your picks of the week. Uh, gentlemen, prepare your picks as they say at the Indy 500. No, they don't say that actually. Uh, you're watching Mac break weekly Jason Snell, andy and Akko the great Alex Lindsay. Alex looks prepared. Are you prepared to give us your pick of the week?

1:36:41 - Alex Lindsay
I am. You want it right now? Yes, I usually have something in between.

1:36:46 - Leo Laporte
No, you know, here's the problem when you don't have any ads, there's nothing to separate the content. A wag once said that the articles in a newspaper were there to separate the ads, and sometimes I feel that way about podcasts. We're just here to separate the ads, but in this case, no ads to separate us from our wonderful audience I realized that I the thing I was going to offer was in the system.

1:37:14 - Alex Lindsay
So if you're wondering whether I'm using what I'm recommending, oh wow, it was in the system a second ago.

1:37:18 - Leo Laporte
That's a risky thing to do you just unplugged it.

1:37:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's fine, it was just for my, my monitor. So, um, this is a, uh, don't. This is really cool what audinate does with this. This is a dante, um, obvio, and this is two-channel to analog. Now there's lots of these and I think a couple years ago I might have recommended the bluetooth version of this. But what this does is, if you're using Dante and Dante is a, it's a um, a protocol that we use that for a lot of our productions, that allow us to seamlessly pass audio from all kinds of hardware to another. So you can sit there and route. If I've got 32 channels of of of something from a mixer, I can route some of those over to my computer. I have, and I've in the past recommended Dante virtual sound card, which means all my computers have DBS on them, and so by putting this I was trying to figure out.

I had a speaker here that was plugged in to one of my computers and I was like it'd be really nice if I just anything I want to come out of that speaker, I could just pass it to there, and so so what? This? That's what this does, and so and I realized I could just go buy it. We have lots of these at the office and I was like, oh, I should just get one for my, for my home office. So what this has is Ethernet. You can cover it, cover my eyes. It has Ethernet on one side and that's PoE, so it might be PoE plus, but it's PoE and and so it's powered by the Ethernet cable that goes into it. And then it's got two XLR outputs and it can be. You can buy another one that has XLR inputs, you can buy one. You know there's lots of different options.

So what I did is I just plugged this into my speaker and now I have an ethernet that goes into my speaker and anything that I have that has Dante that I want to send to that speaker, I can simply send it over. You know, and that's not just my computers, it's my mixer, it's other, you know like I can do all kinds of things. And so by having, by having one of these just makes it, and in the office we use it because we oftentimes want to. We might have want to have five, one, or we might want to have different programs going to things, and by, instead of having to run all those audio cables, we just run one Ethernet to it and then I can route whatever I need to in and out of that system. So, um, and I just thought it was. You know, I had it in the system. I just recently put it in and, um, and I thought, oh, that's a, it's a really handy little tool. So, anyway, that's, that's my pick.

1:39:30 - Leo Laporte
When we designed, uh, the attic, I really wanted to dante all the things but I'm a big dante guy the idea is, instead of analog wires, you you connect audio devices with Ethernet.

1:39:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I do as much as I can. If something has Dante, I generally am going to use it, and it is it's expensive though right, I mean it's more expensive than speaker wires.

Well, kind of, except for the thing that it's a really cheap to run these little ethernet cables over to my to my thing. And the problem is, is that trying to like what I realized was trying to figure out how so I was going to route it to that speaker. Now I route everything to that speaker. In fact I have one of these on. You know, just any device that I have that supports dante, I can route to that speaker and and and uh or speakers Like.

So, for instance, I'm, I have another uh set of these and I'm going to, I'm in the process of putting I didn't have it in my in my office office I have a five, five, one, four system for work. Um, but at home I didn't have that and I'm going to drop some five, a five one system in my house or my in my office, and to connect it all rather than trying to figure out, you know, audio cables and everything else. It's just these automates. Yeah, once you do it, everything is easy. Exactly once you do it every time you add on to something, it's just like anything goes in, anything goes out and you can route it is there like a primary locus where the, the main, dante?

no, they all talk to each other. There's a controller, that the controller controls the routing. But they are all talking to each. The only thing that's important is that you do have some piece of hardware like this in the network somewhere so that the so that it can the clocking works. If you, if you connect DBSs to DBSs. There's no, if it's all software, you may have problems. But if you have, if you have one piece of hardware and I have, I already have a Studio Technologies device here and I have a bunch of other things that are already there. So it's not hard to only one device and then you're set. But they all talk to each other. But they're controlled by a controller. That's a big software that you can open up. It's really super useful.

1:41:32 - Leo Laporte
Dante Avio or A-V-I-O analog adapters. And where is it?

1:41:41 - Alex Lindsay
Getdantecom that's where you should go to find out everything about. You can go there to find out more about it. Um, I, uh, um. I bought this on amazon but it's a proprietary.

I mean it's like there's a company, they provide a chip, and you know there's other way. There's other protocols that people use a lot. All the mixers have some other protocol, which is the. I don't want to pay for the d chip, you know protocol. That's how we look at, like you know, hdr, hdr 10 plus is I don't want to pay for Dolby, right, you know, and so I'm too cheap for Dolby, and so the other ones are that way. There's there are a couple other ones that are, you know, really good for a lot of scale. So, but but the but.

1:42:24 - Leo Laporte
This one is so simple and so easy to use that if it supports Dante, it's a lot easier. Thank you, Alex, Andy and Akko. Pick of the week.

1:42:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Afterward. There's so many, so much discussion over the past month or so about Apple finally lifting restrictions against game emulators on iOS. It kind of reminded me that there are a lot of games from like the 80s and 90s that I kind of want to revisit, so I started taking another look back at. It kind of reminded me that there are a lot of games from like the 80s and 90s that I kind of want to revisit, so I started taking another look back at like emulators for Mac of all things. And so a couple of recommendations of there are two that are really good, but they've got individual problems.

The first one, retroarch, is kind of like the gold standard. It's open source. It's there are no like permissions issues with it. Like in terms of like, is this going to be okay running on my running on my system? Uh, it's compatible with everything. Uh, it's really whatever platform you want to emulate, it'll work. It's great, but, oh my god, the interface is so bad. It's not just bad in terms of it's, yeah, but realize that it's like there are times where we all wore like wooden shoes with nails through the heels. That's retro, but we've moved forward.

Like, just like, cause it it can run like a game. I've got a Game Boy ROM. They want to run on it, and just the idea of pointing it at, like the folder where the Game Boy ROM is, you can't like. There's no. Like, oh, there's a file picker. No, there's like an Android-style screen and you have to use the arrow keys to navigate list items. Oh my God. And you're not sure you've done anything. Once you get it working, it works. But, oh my God, is it terrible. But the the yin to that yang is another project called Open EMU.

Emu and its user interface. Wise, it is the opposite of that. It's beautiful, it's almost like Plex for games. It'll get metadata from the Internet Once it recognizes the ROM, organize your library. It's beautifully to work with.

But the one problem with it is when you start it up. It says that, oh, the Mac OS pops up and says, oh, this app is asking for permission to observe all keyboard activity across all apps. Do you want this to happen? And that's where I nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I'm suddenly like backing all the way up until I can do enough research to make sure that there is nothing nefarious, or even potentially nefarious about this app. I did get it working with a game controller over USB and it works fine for that.

But it's like, why are you asking for? Like? I understand that with a lot of people they don't want to just revisit old games, they want to be like Mr Hacksaw Ninja as they were in 1991 in middle school and they want the zero delay and they want to make sure that they can strike like a serpent, and maybe that's why it's asking for special permission, so that it can basically be as responsive as possible, so that it can basically be as responsive as possible. But that's one thing that, like you don't like eat gum off the sidewalk and you don't run apps that ask to see all keyboard activity across all apps, and so I'm not recommending it. I'm naming it so that if you want to spend time that I've not invested yet doing searches everywhere to find out what horrible things have happened, if any, by running OpenEMU, go ahead and do it, because again, it looks good. It's exactly.

I wish that it was retro, it was just the interface to RetroArch. But two things to look at. Go to archiveorg, the internet archive. You can find ROMs for pretty much any Mac game, apple game, game Boy game. I've got a whole bunch of like 80s Apple games. I'm sort of lined up that haven't played in like 15 years the last time that got into emulation. But both of these are free because they're open source projects and just enjoy the adventure because it's going to be an adventure.

1:46:13 - Leo Laporte
Zidane Rick in our YouTube chat says OpenEMU is great. It just needs more regular updates. He also recommends you check out EmulatorJS. So something more to check out for you, jason, go ahead.

1:46:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, and, by the way, tying into our conversation with Jason earlier, openemu is unsigned, so it's an unsigned app, so you're going to enjoy, if you're running the beta, a full demonstration of exactly how excited Apple is about helping you to run unsigned apps.

1:46:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh boy, the fun and games just getting started. And now, jason Snell, your pick of the week, sir.

1:46:49 - Jason Snell
Hey, I am going to pick a brand new iOS and iPhone OS app called or iPad and iPhone app, shareshot. Shareshot is, if you are, I mean I use it because I write about software and stuff, but if you're in documentation or IT and you need to provide screenshots of things happening on Apple devices, share. My friend, federico Vatici, wrote a very complicated shortcut that does this. Well, now there's an app that does it and it adds a bunch of things like beautiful backgrounds. So you take a screenshot, you select a screenshot from your photo library and then it will frame it with the device image. So it is not a I like an out of context image it

will frame it with a device. You can often pick, like what color apple watch, what color iphone do you want it to be? And then a whole bunch of options for the background, from transparent to gradient. You can choose the aspect ratio of the image. You can choose like a, a drop shadow or for there not to be a drop shadow. Just a huge amount of options.

There are things that are missing. You can't frame, for example, two or three images in a single uh, which they need to add. That's a, that's a must uh, for a lot of what I do is because the ip iPhone is very vertical and I often have images in very horizontal spaces. So I want to put three iPhones in there with three examples. But it's really well done. It has a very specific purpose. I was very impressed with all of the options that you get gradients, solid colors, transparency and all of those device frames which it's loading. It looks like dynamically. So when you load a particular screenshot, it can go and get it and then it holds onto that image and they look beautiful and you get to choose how big they display and like it's all in there.

So if you find yourself taking screenshots and sharing them and want them to look better. Shareshot is a great way to do that and it just came out, so they're running a special where they're. It's a subscription app, so there's a special lower price for the first year. Um, and I bought the first year and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes, because they definitely need to add some more options and add the ability to do multiples. But, um it, I'll tell you, sharing a screenshot of of an iPhone app where it's in an iPhone just looks way better. It's way better to see it in context and, like Apple Watch, ipad, you name it, it looks better this way. So ShareShot, brand new on the App Store From the Montana Floss Company. Indeed, the Montana Floss Company.

1:49:17 - Leo Laporte
Though we know what Frank Zappa did when he moved to Montana. The Montana Floss Company. Though we know what Frank Zappa did when he moved to Montana, they also have Captionista and Hobson, an insult generator for the iPhone.

1:49:26 - Jason Snell
Captionista is a really great video captioning app for sharing videos on social media. Yep Cool.

1:49:33 - Leo Laporte
See, you can move to Montana and you don't have to raise dental floss. Thank you, jason Snell. sixcolors.com/jason All the different shows he does, the upgrade show that he does with Mike Hurley. Made an interesting discovery thanks to one of your listeners. Yes, and I encourage you to listen, to Upgrade, to find out what it is.

1:49:56 - Jason Snell
Especially if you're in the EU and you're a Mac user, you may get apple intelligence after all, because the mac is not a covered platform, it's not a gatekeeper platform. So yeah, we broke some news we didn't even know. One of our listeners broke some news for us isn't that nice.

1:50:13 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, jason andy and I co WGBH this thursday. It's great to see you in the library there and the library in Boston.

1:50:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, thank you for public support.

1:50:24 - Jason Snell
Yes.

1:50:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, that's not just for working for an NPRP public broadcasting station, but also again working in a public library. Thank you everybody. Yes, thank you, property owners.

1:50:35 - Leo Laporte
It's all about the public. Yes, and thank you to Alex Lindsay officehours.global if you want to check out what they're up to every day. Something exciting and new Human. What is this? Human AI?

1:50:49 - Alex Lindsay
created humans. Oh, we were talking humanoids. We had a discussion yesterday about just AI and what the impact will be on mechanical humans, and we've talked a lot about robots, but as ai starts to get to apply to them we started having a discussion about that.

1:51:06 - Leo Laporte
So it's good not to be confused with robocop, who is a cyborg, as I learned yesterday. Yes, chagrin, yes and uh and should really be called Cybocop.

Yeah yeah, exactly, it's not my fault. Thank you, Jason, Andy, Alex, thank you all for being here. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am pacific, when google doesn't interrupt with their thing. 2 pm eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us everywhere there is streaming video or download a show from twit.tv/mbw or watch on the YouTube channel. There's a link at twit.tv/mbw. But the best way to watch or listen because we have audio and video is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way, you'll get it automatically as soon as John Ashley puts the finishing touches on it later today.

If you're not a member of the club, we'd love to have you twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks, John Ashley, for this is our first MacBreak Weekly from the attic, not our last, and uh, I know there's always a little bit of you know a new way of doing things a little bit tricky. But, john, you did a great job, thanks to Anthony Nielsen, who was working overtime to get all this together, and thanks to all of you for watching and listening. Now, even though I am in the attic, it is still my sad duty to tell you you got to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.