MacBreak Weekly 940 Transcript

Andy Ihnatko

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. I'm back. Jason Snell, thank you for filling in. There is something to talk about, even though the iPhone is already out. Jason's got many colors. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about flaws with the iPhone, why it might not be selling as well. Where is Apple AI Plus? What's coming in October? All that coming up and more next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 940, recorded Tuesday, September 24th 2024. NSA Grandmas. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. Hello everybody, I'm back from vacation and I want to thank. First of all, I want to thank Jason Snell for doing such a marvy job last week. Can you knock it off? Please.

0:00:58 - Jason Snell
All right, I'll be more boring. No it is fine, Leo. Things are going great now.

0:01:04 - Leo Laporte
I don't want to be wally-pipped here, okay, Mr. Garrig. Uh, no, thank you. I appreciate you did a great job. Everybody was, uh, commending you and I understand that you mentioned me in the context of Leo.

0:01:15 - Jason Snell
Took the week, the only week there's a lot of apple news two weeks we had two, probably two of the highest news content weeks of the year I'll see you guys later. And Leo, who complains all the whole summer like there's nothing going on. What are we gonna talk about?

0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
bye, I'm out of here, see ya I don't want, I don't actually want apple news. That's the thing, andy, and I could also hear wgbh in boston.

0:01:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello, andrew hello, I hope we didn't break Jason for you, uh no, he broke twit for me.

0:01:46 - Leo Laporte
He made it too good, so knock it off. It's good to see Andy. He was. He was quite wonderful. He was quite wonderful. Alex Lindsay was wonderful Sunday on a twit we had. Alex, and thank you for doing that, and he's back again from office hoursglobal. Of course, jason, I didn't mention it. Six colorscom and he has all six colors I have to.

0:02:07 - Jason Snell
I have to admit something here. Leo, last week, um, just because I am a bad substitute teacher, I did not tell people to get back to work.

0:02:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, I told them, it's over.

0:02:19 - Jason Snell
I told them break time could continue for an entire week and they 9 episodes.

0:02:23 - Leo Laporte
We didn't miss it once.

0:02:27 - Jason Snell
I mean I said the thing, but I just said it in reverse because I'm a bad, bad substitute teacher.

0:02:32 - Andy Ihnatko
That's like the rookie mistake of like a first year teacher. They want to be the popular teacher the one that's the friend to all the kids when they don't understand that what they really want is discipline and predictability.

0:02:43 - Jason Snell
I think what we likened it to is that a member of the class had been asked to be the substitute teacher, and that is dangerous, dangerous material there. Anyway, well, you did a good job.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
No, I thank you, and I'm not sure Apple did a good. I got my new iPhone, as I'm sure many of you did. This is the so-called Desert Titanium. Desert Titanium. I asked lisa, what color is that?

0:03:10 - Jason Snell
she said pink it's not pink, she said well, maybe it's rose gold.

0:03:11 - Leo Laporte
It's not rose gold jason show us all the colors you have a phone with no name, something like that. I don't know you have all the colors in front of you, don't't you? Can you press that button? Let's see if I can do that. There it is.

0:03:26 - Jason Snell
Oh, there it is, hello.

0:03:28 - Leo Laporte
Desert titanium on the left Desert titanium.

0:03:30 - Jason Snell
I don't have all the colors. I have some colors. This is the Pro in desert titanium. This is the Pro in natural titanium, which is you know, gray.

0:03:38 - Alex Lindsay
Silver gray but it's nice.

0:03:39 - Jason Snell
It's silver gray and then the middle I have two beautiful iPhone 16s and I mean, I'm not kidding here I think these are the best colored phones. I really liked the orange coral iPhone XR but, like it's been years since Apple has made phones in colors that are quite this spectacular. Even the blue 15 was a little more muted. These are super bright and apologies for my dimly lit garage, but these are. These are uh, very, uh, just incredibly striking. The pink and the blue incredibly strange. So that's a, a pink plus and a uh and a blue 16, and like they're really. They did a great job with the color on the on the cheaper models they're definitely real colors.

0:04:23 - Andy Ihnatko
They're not like okay, we'll give you a gray, but we tinted it a little bit.

0:04:27 - Leo Laporte
No, in fact, I should have shown Lisa that pink, because that's the pink, that's really pink.

0:04:32 - Andy Ihnatko
What I want to know, Jason, is that like behind me is pink. Yeah, we know, we know, we know how much control Apple likes to have like over like reviews and stuff like that. At this point, do they give you like a custom color lut so that if you are like doing a video to make sure that the colors are absolutely correct, what they want them to be?

0:04:50 - Jason Snell
I think, no, I I think if you were a youtuber and apple's gotten so much better at youtubers and influencers and trying to get them involved in this, you see it. You see it now, like it. I got 10 years of this game but, like a blogger today would not be asked to review these products. Right, but they are really. They know how many people influencers and YouTubers reach and I'll tell you, if they felt like there was a YouTuber who wasn't setting their white balance correctly, there would be a conversation. I do think that that would actually. I think it would be as simple as, like you know, it doesn't really. You know, can that would actually? I think it would be as simple as, like you know, it doesn't really. You know, can we help? Can we send somebody to calibrate your? I think that's what they would probably do, more than anything else. Yeah.

0:05:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Just like it's not quite right. You know, I mean before we get into the actual briefing. You know I was having a chat with with Marcus Brownlee about lighting and my goodness, but before he got the big lighting grid, he says that he just spent $80 on a single light balanced bulb. I think I even happen to remember the name and the Amazon link to that.

0:05:51 - Leo Laporte
Jason, would they do that with you at the magazines? Would they contact you about the colors of the phone pictures?

0:05:59 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, I mean certainly they cared here. I want to show these cases to our video audience. The, the, the. The cases also look really great. They. They did a great job with the case design in general but that brings up one question, Cause the biggest.

0:06:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh, go ahead. Finish the question I asked the previous question.

0:06:19 - Jason Snell
We're going to be inside worlds here. Yeah, yeah, they cared. They care about misrepresentation of their products and how their products look. There is a certain degree and it changes from era to era of PR people, but we definitely had issues where we what do we do? We did a CGI Mac that was kind of like smashed and smoke was coming out of it because it was and it was like prevent the. The headline was like prevent Mac disasters. It was the cover.

I thought it was really clever and they were a little concerned that we were suggesting, I mean, clearly, that Mac had been crushed by something and hit by a meteor or something. But they were like you know, you're taking our product and defacing it and putting it on a magazine cover. I you know. But, Leo, this is the thing. As the editor, I basically I would, I would have listened. I understand your issue, yeah, but I mean, that's it's our, it's it's our speech, although, although I will say, magazine covers are not free speech, they are marketing and therefore the rules are a little bit different than the words you put inside interesting if you so.

0:07:25 - Leo Laporte
If you put the smashed Mac inside, it would be okay.

0:07:27 - Jason Snell
But yeah, well, there's a question. I mean, you can't just say free speech, because are you appropriating something or misappropriating something? In order, to sell magazines.

It's slightly different. It's just more complicated in terms of media law. But we also had one forgive me if I've told this story before where had one I forgive me if I've told this story before where we did a customize your mac issue and we had we, we had a bunch of fanciful max, we had like a matrix guy with a cube this is how long ago this was and we had an imac, one of those g3 imacs and it we put uh, we, we put cow spots on it and had a cowboy roping it and it turned out that was about one month before they introduced the blue Dalmatian iMac, which also had cow spots on it. And we got a call and I'm not quite sure what they thought because we didn't understand what their problem was. And then, like two months later or whatever, an iMac that looked just like it came out and we're like, oh, all right.

0:08:18 - Alex Lindsay
But what are they going to do?

0:08:19 - Jason Snell
Say like no, no, don't put a thing on from the future, like I don't know. Anyway, they care. They know that there's a limit to what they can do, but they do care about how they're perceived and a lot of times you will get a little nudge after the fact saying you know, I didn't, you know, we have some questions. They won't say don't do it, but like they will occasionally do that where they're like yeah, you kind of misrepresented our product there they crushed everything but a Mac in that ad that they did.

Yeah, I will tell you another One of the rules about agreeing to a reviewer guideline and getting review units and this goes back to you know what, when I say it you'll get it is you can't take it apart. Because in the early days, everybody who would get a review unit, they would review it and then they would do a teardown or they'd do a smash test. And Apple has said now, if you want to go out after they come out and buy one and take it apart, we can't stop you.

0:09:16 - Leo Laporte
That's in fact what iFixit does? They go down to Australia to buy it, where they can get it on at midnight and then yeah.

0:09:24 - Jason Snell
so that's just one of the reviewer rules. You can't, don't take these apart. These are the ones we're giving you to review not to smash.

0:09:31 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's totally fair because they are still Apple's property. They're not like, they're not gifts to the reviewers. So, yeah, they have a right to do that and, like you said, if you want to take it apart, fine, just buy one.

0:09:45 - Leo Laporte
And that's a perfectly reasonable like thing to do that. Yeah, so my other question was, uh, getting back to the iphone, the biggest, the fix, it seems to me the only biggest change in the iphone besides colors is this new, uh controls button and how are cases? How are cases handling that capacitive button on the side?

0:10:03 - Jason Snell
well, if you're apple, you knew it was coming and you built a control, uh, a camera control button into your, all your cases that actually carries the touch uh so that's a capacitive button.

It is a capacitive button on the case and if you're a case manufacturer right now, you did a cutout and it's not going to be very good. No, but I imagine that they are, all you know, scrambling to figure out how can they build a capacitive button into their cases and then build that into the next generation that come out. But I will tell you, I think the case experience on one of these Apple cases or the Beats case that have the capacitive buttons is very good, and this is Apple using their advantage. Apple knows exactly what that thing is before it ships and the case manufacturers have to guess and it's going to be costly for them. They're going to have, they're going to, they're going to lose some sales, they're going to get some complaints and then they're going to have to build a new set of cases that will cost more to manufacture because they're going to need that button in it I did this last year too.

0:11:02 - Leo Laporte
I bought the peak design case when it first came out because I don't like Bear Broaddog in my iPhone and it did the same thing. It had a cutout for the action button and then later they updated it with an actual button and I bet you, because I ordered the Peak Design, I'm going to have the same thing happen.

0:11:22 - Jason Snell
Is that the new Peak Design, Alex?

0:11:25 - Leo Laporte
It's got a cutout, it's got to cut out there I can't yeah, get it in focus. I have to say that camera button's nice. I was able to take the camera icon off of my dock. Uh, I don't have a camera icon anywhere on my iphone anymore.

0:11:36 - Jason Snell
It's still a work in progress. They just came out with a either a I think it's a beta that includes the uh, I think it's the push to focus feature. Like they are there. It's just like apple intelligence. There are some features that just aren't there quite yet, but if you look at the base of it, uh, you know, press to bring up the camera and press to shoot. Uh, there's complexity behind it, but, like I love how non-complex it is to take a picture, and then also, if you go into accessibility settings for it, there's a load of them and you can say I don't want to press as hard to do the halfway.

0:12:12 - Leo Laporte
It's the first thing I did. I set it to lighter. Yeah, and you can do lighter or whatever, yeah.

0:12:17 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and that's super smart too. Plus, it works with third-party apps. So like Halide supports it and Obscura is going to support it, and like I think they did a really great job with this feature. I also love the fact that it's a button that moves but also has a haptic at the bottom of the movement, so like when you get to the bottom, it's almost like a little spring goes ping. When you reach it, to just verify, like yeah, you've reached bottom, you bottomed out. It did the thing that you wanted it to do. Like man, apple's hardware design we talk a lot about Apple software being a little bit of a mess. When Apple does good hardware design and has some software infusing around it every now and then you go, oh yeah, they really killed it with that.

0:12:59 - Andy Ihnatko
That was a great design, you realize. Of course this is being released end of summer, start of fall. You forget that that has to be a mechanical button, because in a couple of months people are going to be operating that with gloves, so you can't just have it full capacitance, even though they have both those things in it. Ifixit did their tear down and of course they tore down the button and again they discovered a chip with a force sensor in it as well as the mechanical button. They also, however, found something that we might want to keep an eye on.

So the actual location of this button takes the place of one of the iPhone 15's 2mm wave antennas. So they're saying that now there's only one left by the camera antennas. So they're saying that now there's only one left, one left by the camera, and so I'm sure they wouldn't have done that if they weren't convinced that people would still have the same experience connecting to mobile. But I guess we're just going to have to see. It might be one of those things. It might even be one of those things where if you hold it horizontally now, the way you hold it, maybe that's going to have a weaker signal than if you hold it the way that people normally hold it. I'm not going to make the joke that everyone's thinking I'm going to make, but it's interesting Something to follow up on.

0:14:12 - Jason Snell
You're referencing it wrong, Ben.

0:14:16 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and you know, I think that Apple you know we've talked about this before, but Apple has really doubled down in realizing that. You know, the reason we bought, the reason we buy the new phone, is not because of AI, because of the camera, like it is, like we're looking for the camera features. I, you know, and, uh, I know that I've put off buying it. Right now I've got the case, but I, um, but I it's funny you bought the case but the phone.

0:14:41 - Jason Snell
Thank you for the case. Can you ask them to?

0:14:43 - Leo Laporte
send me the good case when they fix it.

0:14:45 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I bought $60 down the tubes, yeah, so, so the uh, but I'm I'm holding off a little bit on it just because I was like, uh, I got to really see if the camera's really worth it. You know, like I, I do use the 0.5 a lot. So, um, I've gotten into this thing where I take pictures of my kids and I just make sure that they're. What it needs is a guide, but you put your face right in the center so it doesn't get distorted and you get these incredible like shots of them somewhere Right and so, um, so I, I really enjoy that, um, but I I don't know if it's worth upgrading yet, because, and really, for, what I was waiting for was the spatial camera, the spatial video, to go to 4k per eye, which it didn't do. And so when it didn't do that, I was like, well, we'll see if they, if they actually update that API.

0:15:26 - Leo Laporte
So, uh, this is the um, where'd it go? I closed it by accident, I fix it. Spends most of their review on the new uh battery release function which lets you uh would actually releases the battery when you uh electrify the glue. But here's the uh, here's the camera control button. They ask the question is the camera control button actually a button? And as you said, andy, it's an IC laser welded IC. So it's both physical and it has a force sensor, a strain gauge that turns tiny amount of deformation into changes in resistance. So that's how it senses half presses.

0:16:06 - Jason Snell
The clicks are haptic, right or or maybe not it, it is so you move the button and it bottoms out, but so there is at the bottom there, yes, but at the bottom there is a haptic that fires, so you get that it's a hybrid thing feel it's very satisfying when it happens. It's very cool, but if you turn it off, completely and you press the button, you can feel it. It's still a button real button.

0:16:31 - Leo Laporte
iFixit gave it very high repair scores, the highest in a long time because of this easy remove battery.

0:16:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so they gave it 7 out of 10, whereas the previous model got 4 out of 10. And most of it was about how easy it is to on the iPhone 16, not the iPhone 16 Pro. The iPhone 16 Pro uses the same pull-out adhesive as last year's iPhone 15 Pro, but the iPhone 16 uses this new type of adhesive that de-sticks when you basically put 9 volts across it, and you would think that, oh well, apple has a special sophisticated tool. No, you basically get a 9-volt battery and basically short the contacts across it. The downside, though, is that it's not like magic where, okay, I've got the new battery in and now I just reverse the process.

No, apple also released a repair guide for this sort of thing, and they mentioned that when you get the replacement battery, you peel this thing off the back of it. So, obviously, they're talking about having its own, using Apple certified batteries. It's encased in metal, which is another thing that they're saying will help with heat. It's encased in metal, which is another thing that they're saying will help with heat, and they also took a look at a thing that we I think we talked about it a little bit a couple of weeks ago about the repair assistant as a way of getting one of the things that I think that has always been quite correctly kind of on Apple's back about and other people's back about is the idea of having repair parts sort of like tied and coded down to the user.

So if you were to swap out a camera module or a battery and it's not an Apple approved part, yeah, you can swap it in, but suddenly it won't work anymore because there's a systems check that says, hey, this isn't an authorized battery, I'm not doing anything. So they did so in iOS 18, they have now a repair assistant that pops up if it detects that there is like a new swapped in thing. And they tested it out and they, they found that. They tested out last week before they had their iphone 16 that they bought, and they found it buggy with the iphone 15. When they tried it on their absolute plain vanilla iphone 16 and I'm talking about like swapping pretty much everything in and out they said it worked flawlessly and for that reason that reason, they actually explicitly said that okay, we're not necessarily cool with it, but most of what we were complaining about has been mitigated because of how well it worked on iPhone 16. So, yeah, they're very, very happy about it.

0:18:56 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be really interesting to see what happens, based on what happened last week in Lebanon.

It'll be really interesting to see how the fix-it stuff goes, because I think that a lot of companies are going to start backtracking to wanting to register all the components because they're going to at least want to have something. When you open up, the operating system tells you if anything's ever been open, touched, done with this phone. It's going to give you an alert every time as soon as you bring it out of reset um, saying hey, and I'll bring it up every. You know it'll bother you that something's changed, because you know that change, what happened in Lebanon last week, changed everything about how people look at electronic components. You know, and so you know having proof that all of these components are produced by the manufacturer. For that is going to become a bigger deal. I think it won't happen this year or next year, but I think, as you look at three to five years down the road, the chain's going to change because people want to have those. All those people are going to worry about security.

0:19:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, it's not something that would affect Apple necessarily in that way, because there's no way they're getting into the supply chain for there. However, if it is like, hey, we've, if it is a way of we're going to intercept a shipment of iPhones and then do some stuff to it, reseal it, then the continued shipping on the way over there, or just hey, if we can get a hands on this person's phone for exactly two hours, we can introduce something in here.

0:20:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's a good point. I just think it's going to blunt a lot of lawmakers from doing anything about this, Like Apple may continue to go down that path, but they're going to have to argue against this problem. I mean, I think that what happened last week changes the narrative and it'll be very hard for them to argue that Apple or other companies should have to loosen that even further, because it's just going to be brought up every time.

0:20:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know if they'll be able to trade on that.

0:20:37 - Jason Snell
This has come up a little bit with all the stuff that Right to Repair people have been advocating, that right to repair people have been advocating, and I think that the distinction is and somebody in our members Discord actually said this Rob bought an alert is fine, but don't lock me out of my device.

I think that what we absolutely should have, and that Apple should continue down the path of, is verifying that the components in your phone or other device are components that it knows about and understands and that are valid, and that, if anything changes or anything is out of what Apple considers to be a blessed piece of work, that Apple warn you about it, right?

I think that's legitimate, even if you boot a phone and it says look, this Face ID sensor is not one we know about, because then yeah, whether it's an explosive or just spy, spy hardware or whatever it might be, we can't even conceive of some of the ideas there. I think being forewarned is forearmed, um. There is a point at which, though, if you're, if it's apple saying yeah, and also we control all of the hardware, and you can't uh, you, you replace the part without going through this, that leads to a lot of things, including, like huge amounts of e-waste and scrap where you've got computers, that part of it broke but the other parts could be used as parts and yet they can't because of a block. So it's just walking that line where customers are safe, right and are warned if something weird is going on with their hardware, but not making it impossible for people to get their things replaced or to reuse Apple parts and other Apple systems and have them get verified.

0:22:11 - Leo Laporte
It could be as simple as you know secure boot on a Windows PC where everything is signed and on boot the device, the operating system says OK, everything's signed, it's OK, doesn't prevent you from changing it out. But you're not going to get that secure boot next time, yeah.

0:22:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, it's not. It's it's not going to be as flat out because of the. The right to repair conversation is becoming a little bit more sophisticated and acknowledging that. Okay, yes, being able to replace a broken screen or broken camera module, that's really, really nice and it's nice to have an option to be able to do that outside of the manufacturer. But the modern discussion is saying that well, but the battery is something different. The battery is an actual consumable. The fact that you have to replace it every two or three years, as opposed to every, you know, 10 hours with a flashlight, is almost immaterial in the discussion. That's why the EU has specific laws about saying here is how you have to design your phones. You have to make sure that they actually have two levels. That, depending on how the EU regards your device, that either it has to be on the broadest level, it has to be able to be replaced by a layman using common tools On something like an iPhone, I think, is what the law actually applies to. It's not as liberal as that, but it basically says that a reasonably skilled person with tools that can be accessible has to be able to get it.

There's been some discussion about whether or not this battery change has to do with complying with the EU. Ifixit actually talks about this a little bit in their teardown and they who knows? But they don't think it was necessarily done for that reason. But I wouldn't be surprised if we're seeing uh, it's, it's really, it's really cool.

Come to that because and when you open in this teardown, there is so much evidence of things that have to do with things that are not necessarily what apple has always had to do. They have a I fix. It has a whole examination of the, of the, the heat sink, the cooling system, uh, in this phone, and mentioning that, like this is something brand new that they've never seen before, and because this thing is going to be when apple intelligence hits, this thing's going to be driven really, really hard and they're going to need a really really good, good, much improved way to get heat off the, off the die, if we're, if they're, going to keep this thing working. So this is, there's a. There's a lot of stories being told with the, with this teardown.

0:24:32 - Leo Laporte
They're already saying I don't know if it's accurate that sales of the iPhone 16 pro are lower than the iPhone 16. Nothing and G quo says that. A few others have been saying it as well. I wonder if that's because people are waiting for apple intelligence. You know, I was watching this. I mentioned this like sunday. I was watching the football game and apple's advertising intelligence as if it exists, yeah, I I still think that I just really think it's the camera.

0:24:57 - Alex Lindsay
The camera was an incremental update. It wasn't. It wasn't dramatic in the, in the protein. Yeah yeah, in the pro, the 15. As a 15 owner. I didn't look at this going. Oh, I have to jump on the next one as a 14 owner. I was like I have to buy the 15 like it was. You know it was.

0:25:13 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of what Apple wants.

0:25:14 - Jason Snell
So I would say as a 15 pro owner, I absolutely want the 16 pro because it really is a huge update, because not only is that wide camera 48, not only is there the button, the 5x zoom isn't on the 15 pro, it's only on the 16 pro. You got to be pro max to get it on the previous generation, so for me that does that. All does accumulate. But who knows, like I don't even know anymore.

So the 5x is on the pro max in the 15 yes, but not the pro, and it gets the 16, gets it right, the 16 pro gets it okay right, that's that same. So if you wanted that five that optical five.

There is an improvement there, and if you're a pro level user and you're on the 14 or 13 or whatever, then still now this year, you've got the ability to go to the pro and not the pro max and to get that 5x update that you couldn't get last year. But who knows why, why some years also, also some of this data ends up not being true yeah, we don't know, so we don't know.

I think that there um is a lot of positivity here, but again, there's not a, there's not a major new feature, one, uh, in the, in the same sense as there is when there's a design change. Right, it looks a lot like the iphone 12 on. We're in this five, five year span. But Apple intelligence may also just be a slow burn where it's just going to take time and Apple knows that and they're starting now, but it's just going to take time for them to get those features out.

0:26:35 - Alex Lindsay
I think the Apple intelligence marketing has more to do with stock. The stock has to do with the consumers. I think that it does make sense. We're here, we're doing stuff with intelligence. We're still part of it.

I don't think that, again, I don't think the average user, I think three years from now, we'll be using Apple intelligence all day. Every day We'll have an incurred, but I don't think anyone's banging on the door for that. But I do think that again, I think that the USB-C update last year, the camera updates last year, I think were dramatic and I think that it made a huge. It just changes the way the phone operates, made a lot of other things possible. I think this year is less dramatic. I think, again, it's a great excuse if you've got a 14 or earlier, but as a 15 Pro Max user, I probably will end up getting it. But I didn't feel like I had to. I kind of wanted to wait and let them get through the manufacturing. There's some tap issues potentially, and so on and so forth. Let them get through some of that stuff before I jump on.

0:27:31 - Andy Ihnatko
It didn't feel like I had to have it first day. I felt like it wasn't a case of again assuming that Michi Kuo's report is accurate. It wasn't so much a case of people are not interested in the Pro so much as Apple did such a good, automatically gone for the Pro or would have talked themselves into going to the Pro have said, well, gosh, all this really cool stuff like the camera control button, I get that. I get all this other stuff, I get Apple intelligence. Maybe I can save $200 or $300. Or put that $200 or $300 into extra $200 or $300, not into the Pro, but into more storage on the iPhone. This does this stuff really does matter because, uh, the the day after Minchi Minchi Quo's report hit, uh, apple's stock like took a dot, not dive, but went down like four points and most analysts were like attributing it to exactly this report and of course, it bounced back up again. But these things do matter, even even if you'd not necessarily believe that they're true even if you'd not necessarily believe that they're true.

0:28:37 - Leo Laporte
What about defects Are there? So you mentioned the tap button issue In some reports.

0:28:40 - Alex Lindsay
we don't know if it's really true or not. But you know, anytime you have a new piece of hardware, there's new things that could go wrong.

0:28:47 - Jason Snell
You know, like you know, and so it is Gates got to find some gates, yeah.

0:28:56 - Alex Lindsay
I don't, you know, I don't't know, but I mean I it would be. It doesn't mean it's not something you can't like. If it actually turns out, you take it back and they'll give you another one. You know the apple's right liberal about that, so it's not that big of a deal, but I think that it for me it was worth enough, just like, hey, let's just see how this settles in before I need to update yeah, there are some people who have reported on social media and on Reddit that it's not their screen at some point just stops responding to taps.

0:29:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Some others are reporting that, yeah, I can reproduce the steps that caused this to happen. So it's as usual. The fact that even if a dozen people are talking about this on social media that's definitely an outlier it doesn't mean that it's not a problem. It doesn't mean that Apple doesn't need to fix it, but it doesn't mean it's different from when the report goes out. Oh my God, if you've got an iPad M4, do not update to iOS 18 because it's bricking some hardware. The reports we're seeing so far basically say that, whatever it is, it comes and goes, which indicates that it's not a hardware problem. It's something that Apple will figure out what's interacting with that software, fix it and introduce a patch that fixes the whole thing.

0:30:10 - Leo Laporte
Anybody getting a Blackwatch?

0:30:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, baby. Oh, look at that. This is the series 10, not the black. That doesn't count, no I'm sorry.

0:30:19 - Leo Laporte
No, what are you?

0:30:20 - Jason Snell
doing black. This is the first shiny aluminum I did.

0:30:24 - Leo Laporte
You know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the batman watch.

0:30:27 - Jason Snell
Let me tell you, the ultra 2 in black is stunning, with the orange highlights especially, it's gorgeous. Yeah, but in matt remember, there were rumors. I've got two of these questions now because mark german is generally a pretty good rumor guy and every now and then he gets something where he's like, oh, this didn't happen, you know like, was the rumor wrong? And it's almost never that it's that they took something off the plan for some reason. And so what? Number one is there was supposed to be a an actual or like a capacitive action button last year. That didn't happen, and I wonder if the camera control is actually just a new version of that that they've built having learned the lessons of the one that didn't work.

But two is there was supposed to be a black ultra two last year, at least in some reports and they obviously pulled it and they said no, no. And then here a year later, they kind of push it out there, no, no. And then here a year later, they, they, they kind of push it out there and I, I it's gorgeous, but you know it's, it's going to be, it's going to be like original ultra buyers who go to it or people who've been ultra curious all along that are going to go there because you know there's nothing new in the ultra except the color. But it's gorgeous, it is a beautiful, beautiful piece of hardware.

Also the jet black 10 Black 10 is really nice because they haven't done a polished aluminum before and I think there's a good chance that this polished aluminum business might be a preview of them on the iPhone in the future as well.

0:31:44 - Leo Laporte
A polished aluminum iPhone, a shiny aluminum. Johnny would have loved that. Johnny's busy, though you saw that he's got his own blog in San Francisco.

0:31:53 - Jason Snell
San Francisco real estate's not cheap you gotta work hard, that's.

0:31:57 - Andy Ihnatko
But yeah, we're talking about this really good like interview that the New York Times had and oh my God, what a Steve Jobs and he were absolutely cut from the same cloth because the the story talks about how he bought.

He bought a building in San Francisco to for his uh, for his uh, for his business, and then he saw, wow, I'd really love to have. There's a parking lot behind the building that I'd love to turn into an Apple Park sort of little garden, and if I will, actually it doesn't belong to your building, it belongs to this other building. So he said, okay, I'll buy the other building then, just so that he could have the little parkway sort of thing and to smooth things over with the neighbors that are like, oh my god, this is like a runaway, like a super rich guy that's just buying up everything. He said, oh, no, no, no, no, I'll, I'll, I'll do the design for you for your building front and I'll design this for you. We'll do that and it's like my goodness, but he's a, he knows how to be a rich guy. He's not a crazy rich guy, he's a very, very fun rich guy so nice if you're going to buy a block.

Jackson square is a nice, a nice block to buy maybe not before covid causes all property values to plummet, but still, if you got, I'm sure I'm sure you can still afford guacamole on the burrito.

0:33:03 - Leo Laporte
That's oh, it's not guacamole. That's right near chinatown. You're getting some fine wonton soup there. Uh, let's take a little break. When we come back, we have lots more to talk about besides the iphone, including. When we come back, we have lots more to talk about besides the iphone, including why I still don't have ios 18 on my m4 iPad. Uh, sequoia is out. And the guy you said uh, oh, it'll be fun to see how the button works with Halide. Well, not so fast, Halide said they won't.

0:33:29 - Jason Snell
They're gonna ask for permission.

0:33:30 - Andy Ihnatko
They did. They did break the unwritten rule, that's, they have no one to blame but themselves. We'll get into it, but we'll get into it, it's, it's still to come. I have no pity for these kind of cavalier people, please come on, if you're gonna do it, do it right.

0:33:45 - Leo Laporte
Uh, Andy Ihnatko GBH Boston, jason snell, six colorscom and from office hoursglobal, it's alex lindsey. You're watching mac break weekly, our episode this week brought to you by ZocDoc. Uh, I gotta tell you there are some things in life it's okay to you know, be a total crap shoot, like uh trying a new type of milk in your coffee, although I frankly think that that's going a bridge too far. Maybe that cheap Instagram ad impulse buy I do that once in a while or gas station sushi they know me so well. But finding the right doctor should not be a total crapshoot, and with ZocDoc it's not because you've got more options than you know.

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Uh, okay. So what did happen with Halide? Are they still?

0:36:23 - Jason Snell
they got turned down for an update because they wanted to use the camera, yeah, exactly they wanted to use the camera and a random reviewer, as they put it, uh, said you, you need to change your description of asking for camera permissions, and it was like we need this to use the camera because it's literally a camera, however, however, I want to say their response was amazing, which is they submitted and had accepted, although they're not going to ship with it. Uh, they rewrote the whole thing in iambic pentameter. So now it says to access what the lens alone can see, a camera app must ask for leave from thee. It seeks permission, clear and full, to claim to capture light and frame the world by name. Without this grant, it cannot work. Its art, for privacy and safety play a part. To safeguard all that's seen within its gaze, the law requires consent in rightful ways. Thus, thus, with permission, pictures can unfold, but first your trust is sought before control. Who could say no?

0:37:22 - Leo Laporte
to that I mean, who is a DM in?

0:37:25 - Andy Ihnatko
their D&D group, because that sounds like. And now the bod you must come across. It actually sounds like something an ai could do to be yeah, probably so if they wasted, you're gonna see a lot more of that time on it anyway. Yeah, so, so the they used to the. The permission text used to be the the camera will be used to take photographs. They left off the duh, uh, and what makes?

what makes it, what makes it like quadruply galling, is that this is exactly the same thing that the Apple the App Store process is famous for. It was the exact same thing for seven years and suddenly it got up somebody's nose at Apple in the review process and all of a sudden now they can't update, which is not like an annoyance because, especially an app like Halide, you actually are timing things out to make sure that they might have chosen this day, because this is the day we're prepared to give support for a lot more people who are going to be installing a brand new version of it, who are going to be asking questions about how the camera button works. It's like it is not just a petty annoyance, it is like great. So now you've basically screwed up our timing. It's better that at least it's.

Heylight is already like a classic iPhone app. What if you're a brand new app? That hey? I decided to quit my job and put myself in debt and go for six months to a year to build this business and now, finally, income is going to start to come back and thank God because I planned this out so that really I can't go for another month without any sort of income and seeing and suddenly oh, by the way, we're going to tie you up for six weeks because a simple piece of text that is absolutely innocuous you're going to have to keep playing charades to figure out before Apple actually gives you permission to actually upload it. That way it's just so, it's unnecessary and it's a problem that I think Apple should be trying harder to fix.

0:39:23 - Jason Snell
Yeah, misaligned priorities too, where it's like there are so many things happening on the app store that need more attention, making developers jump through ridiculous hoops is not one of them, and just to, just as inside, Halide is like a darling of apple, like they.

0:39:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Halide was actually, I think, mentioned or even promoted, uh during, uh, during the rollout and so so. So if you think that this is just because this like independent developers who, like, aren't very experienced and don't know how to play the game, if, if Halide is running into this problem, nobody is safe from this and that's shocking.

0:39:58 - Jason Snell
Well is it still off the store? I mean, it's never been off. It's just you know an update was rejected, and then, I think, the iambic pentameter, and there was one that was a limerick, that one got approved, which they're not going to release. They're actually going to have good, you know, clear, more new, rewritten, whatever, but it's just so dumb, just so dumb, unnecessary.

0:40:22 - Leo Laporte
There are other issues I've been seeing. According to one Redditor, Firefox doesn't work after you upgrade to a Sequoia. I haven't tried that. Is that true or no?

0:40:33 - Jason Snell
Let's find somebody who uses Firefox.

0:40:36 - Alex Lindsay
I was going to say all 10 people are up and running.

0:40:40 - Leo Laporte
Come on, let's not knock Firefox.

0:40:42 - Alex Lindsay
It's great to have Firefox there and Firefox is a great browser. I think that it is not as popular now. As you know, chrome, unfortunately. I don't know why. You know because I used to have. I used to use all of them fairly equally and I I didn't. When I saw that article, I was thinking when was the last time I opened firefox?

0:41:01 - Jason Snell
and I just realized it's been a long time so it looks like it's a it's if you've got firewall turned on it was.

0:41:07 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, it was filtering firefox traffic and you can tell it to not do that or turn it off well, and I think that you, that you're going to keep on seeing Apple continually Every update is going to be a slightly tighter security level every year for all the OSs. You'll just keep seeing Apple. Just slowly keep on turning that crank.

0:41:30 - Leo Laporte
Besides Halide, what other camera apps use the camera control button?

0:41:36 - Jason Snell
I mean any app that is, a camera app can use it. It's just a matter of getting the update so Obscura is one.

0:41:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Have you seen how others are using it? I don't know if there's an update yet.

0:41:45 - Jason Snell
Well, in the event, they showed Snapchat using it right, and that's an example of an app that uses the camera, do they?

0:41:52 - Leo Laporte
all use it the same, though I know you can set it so that it will open a different app.

0:41:59 - Jason Snell
Right. The click has to be taking a picture and then you can do custom. They can do custom controls. So they showed in the video that Snap could let you choose who you were sending the photo to using those controls.

0:42:12 - Leo Laporte
So that's where the API is connected. Yeah, that's neat.

0:42:15 - Andy Ihnatko
api is uh connected yeah, that's neat, yeah, okay, yeah, it's a great idea. Also, there are also people reporting that sequoia is breaking a lot of cyber security tools. Um, like, uh, I'm scrolling down here, it's a crowd strike, sentinel one, microsoft, oh yeah, yeah, so, um, don't know what. So so essentially another reason like not to update day one until you're sure that the software that you absolutely rely on absolutely works. But yeah, a lot of it's like I guess CrowdStrike must be pleased to be able to blame something on someone else. For a change, a little distraction.

0:42:43 - Leo Laporte
Well, what seems likely is that Apple put in something that makes CrowdStrike safer. Maybe that broke CrowdStrike? Whoops, no kernel access. How are we going to do our jobs? Come on, man. Uh, let's see what else. Is there any? Uh, so we we got ios 18. Why did I not get it on my m4 iPad? Why am I still on 17?

0:43:08 - Jason Snell
yeah, we mentioned we mentioned that briefly last time. It was a. It was bricking some, but not most, but some, and enough that they basically said we're going to stop the rollout on uh, m4 iPad pro, just in case this is an issue, and uh, and and that they can do that. Right, they can just literally stop the rollout and say no updates for you yet.

0:43:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and apparently was so bad like that, if, if your iPad has been affected by this that it only happens during installation. So if you've already updated and your iPad is working, fine, you have nothing to worry about. It's just a problem that happens during updating the OS. But apparently, if this bug strikes during the update, some people who have been affected by this when they went to the Genius Bar, like no, we have to send this to cupertino to have them wow, I assume use special cupertino ninja tools to basically open the patient and physically re-rom, re-rom very low-level stuff that can't be done outside of the outside of the the spaceship campus so they haven't fixed it, though I still, I still, they're still working on it, mac rumors, I think, broke the story like.

I think it broke like an hour before we ended the show last week, which is why we just had to talk about it a bit at the end.

0:44:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm sitting here. Here's my m2, still on 17.7 um and no updates available to it not that I, I mean, I guess I don't really care, but that seems like they should have fixed it.

0:44:36 - Andy Ihnatko
They should fix it by october, by 18.1 for sure all right, let's talk about october.

0:44:42 - Leo Laporte
We're done with the okay. So you got a new iphone big deal. New watches, big deal, what's between, what's? What's pretty much what you've done for me lately quick.

0:44:50 - Andy Ihnatko
We mentioned one cool thing that 9to5Mac turned up Apparently now like an iPhone, a bad iPhone that needs like a new firmware. Now it can actually get it wirelessly from a nearby iPad or iPhone, so it can basically give the kiss of life to another device. So normally before this you had to dock it to a Mac or PC to make that happen, but now it will wirelessly wire. Apparently there's they. It's something they found, not something they were able to trigger, but apparently now, like you can reach, if you have another device within wireless proximity to it, it can actually copy like the firmware files it needs from that device and hopefully get you back going again without having to climb down off of yosemite and find an apple store. That's actually really, really cool. That's a pretty cool idea.

0:45:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what do you call it? The breath of life?

0:45:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It seems well again. You don't have to put them together like they're kissing or like they're giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but you know if you want to.

0:45:49 - Leo Laporte
If it makes you feel better. Yeah, yeah, let's see. See what are we going to see next month. Are we going to see new iPads? Are we going to see new macs m4 max.

0:46:03 - Alex Lindsay
We sure hope we're seeing mac minis little mac apple tv size, mac minis yeah macbook pro.

0:46:10 - Jason Snell
Well, I think what we're going to get is the m4 will come in more varieties, right, so it'll be the first4 Max, but there'll also be at least an M4 Pro and maybe an M4 Max, and so you'll get MacBook Pro update plus. That Mac Mini update Sounds like MacBook Air is not going to come until next year because they just did the M3 model and then, yeah, iPad. That's the question. Ipad Mini is kicking out there year because they just did the m3 model and then, yeah, iPad that's the question. Ipad mini is is kicking out there. Um, so there's, there's some stuff. I mean whether there will be a video event or whether it will be one of these.

Uh, I mean, last year they, they did a video event that they're spooky halloween event, if you remember that maybe they, maybe they would do that again, it sort of depends on how much there is and how big a deal they want to make of it. But MacBook Pros, you know, make them a lot of money. So I think that would be the big thing and I am, like Alex, very excited about that potential smaller.

0:47:07 - Alex Lindsay
Can't have too many Mac minis.

0:47:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, big fan.

0:47:10 - Leo Laporte
You know I was thinking. I thought, oh, that's great, it's a chance to replace for thousands of dollars all the Mac minis that are running this studio.

0:47:16 - Jason Snell
And then I thought, no, I don't really need to, I've got an 8 gigabyte 8 gigabytes of RAM and an M1 Mac.

0:47:21 - Leo Laporte
that's running part of it. The other one's 16 gigs on an M1 Mac. It's fine, I don't need a new one.

0:47:29 - Alex Lindsay
Yep, I mean, that's one of the hard things for both the iPads and the Mac minis is that they don't get the same upgrade speed because they're so good when they come out. Especially the big jump for the Mac minis was when the M1 hit. I mean, most of the Mac minis that sit here are just M1s doing what they need to do. We're still. We were just using them. Yesterday I was running doing an event and we were running a bunch of Mac minis but running scopes, audio scopes and video scopes and they all run perfectly, you know, on an eight gig. You know M1, you know, and they and they're perfectly smooth and everything works. And and I think that that's the real challenge is that they're in the same thing with iPads. I mean, my kids just stopped using the iPad pros. That were the original iPad pros, you know. You know, and now I'm looking at getting new ones, but it was. It lasted I don't know how many years eight years, something like that.

0:48:18 - Leo Laporte
Well, we do have 12 Macs added to the vintage and obsolete products list Not that this matters, but maybe it's a way of nudging you a little bit. The MacBook Air Retina from 2018. 2018. That 2018, 2018 that's hardly old at all. Macbook Pro 13 from 17 and 18.

0:48:38 - Andy Ihnatko
they're vintage, obsolete, even something as recent as the 2016 MacBook 12 inch yeah, I mean it's a problem not getting security updates, because you never know what could come around the bend, but it's still. It's still plenty useful, and I I have a couple of older machines that are running things that don't necessarily have to be run directly. I've got a media server running on one of them. I've got one acting as a file server for other things, so there's still plenty useful. And hey, sometimes it's just time to learn Linux.

0:49:11 - Leo Laporte
MARK.

0:49:12 - Jason Snell
MANDELMANN.

0:49:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, MARK MIRCHANDANI, If want a modern modern desktop and some frustrations, and whether they got the wi-fi problems almost completely sorted out after 20, 30 years.

0:49:20 - Leo Laporte
Don't worry about that these are all uh, we should point out intel's. So yeah, they should have probably been considered vintage earlier than this. Vintage means five years have passed since the company stopped distributing it for sale. You can still get repairs for another two years, as long as apple has parts available. Obsolete means more than seven years have passed and you typically can't get those replaced or repaired. Rather, you might be able to get battery replacements, but that's about it time to think about something new. Yeah, that retina 5k iMac 27 inch, that was a nice piece of gear. Yeah, hasn't been replaced by anything else nice to use as a display.

0:50:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, oh, there's. There's one thing that I couldn't wait for, like Alex, to see like there was a bunch of updates to iWork and, okay, I don't know who's really using iWork still, except for Keynote. However, most of the and most of the updates that they made are basically hey, we've got a new Apple Pencil, so we'll have the double tap feature. You squeeze the Apple Pencil switch tools. Alex, if you have the Apple Watch now, the new version of Keynote will take the double tap gesture on your wrist and use it as a next slide control.

0:50:32 - Jason Snell
Really yeah, just double tap your fingers together and it will it as a next slide control.

0:50:34 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't have to yeah, yeah, just double tap with it. We'll double tap your fingers together and it will go to the next slide.

0:50:39 - Leo Laporte
If you do it just right, it could look like a chef's kiss.

0:50:43 - Alex Lindsay
I'll check it out. I, you know, I, I, I. All I did is I, I looked for it and I was, you know, and I was like, well, I don't know when I need HDR. I was like I don't know. I love HDR, I do a lot of stuff with it. A presentation in HDR I was like if I was only going to get one new big feature out of keynote.

0:51:07 - Jason Snell
Hdr was not if you do a lot of video or photo embeds where you want those to be in HDR, I think that would be the example right where you're presenting in keynoteino, but most projectors aren't going to be in HDR anyway right.

0:51:18 - Alex Lindsay
That's the hard part. Is that? What are you showing it on that would be able to do that, you know. So you're handing it to a bunch of stuff that you know most projectors aren't going to be able to do it, most TVs in conference rooms aren't going to, and they're opening it up. It might be impressive if they're all Apple users. I think it's something that, like in in Cupertino, I'm sure it's really popular because everybody's got monitors and things that that all look, that that all pops out for. But I was, it was. It was an interesting, interesting update there.

I will say I use all of the iWork products pretty heavily. So I, you know, so I use, I, I prefer numbers, I do all my bids and numbers, um, they look nicer. They just look nicer than everybody else's bids, you know, and I can make them. I mean, like someone asked me I sent them a bid one time and they asked me what app I use to do the. I mean like, like, what tool do you use to do these bids? And I was like numbers, because I can have white space and I can put things on it, I can have little graphs and I can have. You know, it just looks way better than Excel. So, um, so, so I can make things look. I don't I'm not trying to do massive calculations um, you know in it that you might want to use Excel for If you're doing anything less than really heavy finance work, like like I'm bordering on ERP, um, then I think numbers looks nicer, works fast. It's way faster than Excel or or or or sheets.

Now, a lot of times I build things in numbers and then I put them in sheets so other people can interact with them. But I um, but I uh, but it's so much easier and faster. And the problem is you get used to white space on numbers and you don't want to go back. And you know pages is just such a nice way to make everything. I mean, I do all my if, I, if I have to write a report, it looks so much nicer in pages. I just grab, I grab some template, I throw it in. It's like kind of like Canva. I just go into, I go grab a template and I update it and it immediately looks like I designed it. It doesn't look like a stupid word doc. You know like. You know that I just kind of cobbled together. So so I think that a lot of the tools are are still pretty pretty and and they're free apps.

0:53:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I wasn't denigrating them, it's just that they went from. They're really, really old apps. They were started as part of iLife, I think, or iWork sorry, the iWork suite and they started so long ago that part of the purpose for it was that, okay, we don't have work and education apps that show off why a Mac is better than a Windows product and why macOS is better than Windows. So let's create our own that really shows off what this thing can do and makes people happy that they bought themselves an iMac or that their schools upgraded to iMacs, and a lot of the reason for it to exist is now different now. But no, you're absolutely right, they really are. The reason for it to exist is now different now. But no, you're absolutely right, they really are.

I use Keynote as my presentation app because I'm totally with you, it's such a fun app to present stuff in and I use Pages whenever I just need to. I have two apps that I use whenever I need to do a one-page sign or something like that, and one of them is Graphic, is an actual, like Mac draw type app, but I'm surprised at how many times I will just use pages because it's not like I have to like set margins, set center. It's like no, please put this thing here on the page. It's like okay, and I'll put this thing right here on the page next to it. Okay, I don't care that it's not in line with anything else, that's fine.

0:54:32 - Alex Lindsay
You know when you do, when you do the thing that I really I mean when you do, um, uh, live streams. A lot of times we've got a bunch of slates. You know we'll be right back If something goes wrong, starting soon. Uh, thank you for watching. These are all you know, for single use or whatever. And one client years ago, maybe a decade ago sent it to me and I realized they had. They just sent me the keynote document. I realized they're building all those slides and I've been building them in Photoshop and everything else and I and they were building all these slides in in keynote and I'm ever since then all of my slides are built there. And what's interesting is is that because because we had another client that saw me do that, and then they started sending me stuff on PowerPoint and I kept on looking at going, hmm, it's not right, I don't understand. And now PowerPoint's gotten better. So in there, in the last two versions they've improved this. But it was a weird thing in keynote that the kerning, the letter spacing between the letters and the anti-aliasing in keynote was dramatically better than PowerPoint and it just it was like this weird, like you can't see it until you see, I would take the same, exactly the same slide and look at it. And the keynote one looked better, you know, and it was just kind of one of those things that that you know it was. But that's the kind of weird Apple stuff that Apple does, you know, and they're paying attention to some stuff that people aren't paying attention to. And so I do think that if I was in all Mac environment, I would probably use a lot more of pages, specifically in the sense that I'd use more video, I'd use more 3d models.

I do. You know, like we, I send, like I like, when I do site surveys, if you're, if you're on an iPhone and I know you're on an iPhone and I do a site survey, I take polycam out and I go like this, and I go around and I capture those space and then I just text you, the I like I, just just a couple of days ago, I texted a friend like here's the space I'm looking at, take a look at it. And I send them a scan of that space. That I did, I took me five minutes to create it and I send it to them. They open it up on their iPhone and boom, and I can take that and throw it into, um, you know, into something like you know.

The problem really is that what I was hoping to see were two things. I mean, I put it, you know, you put the little feedback thing in and then you hope that somehow the lottery is going to get it. But I was like I really need a countdown clock. I just need to be able to design countdown clocks. I keep on asking every team like every, every feedback thing is like someone, give me a countdown clock because I make them from scratch.

And the other thing is, is the 3d tools inside of all the Apple tools that they have USDZ, but the 3d tools inside of keynote, it's exciting that I can do it. It's not exciting that they're not very good. It's as a 3d artist, you're like really quirky, you know, like you know and and uh, it doesn't really have a sense of space, you know of, of, of a volume, of a sense of volume where all the all the 3d objects live in their own space and don't live in each other's space. And so you're like I can build something much, you know, as someone who does 3D, I'm sure for someone who doesn't do 3D, it works great. As someone who does 3D. You're kind of like, oh, you're so close, you're so close to doing something amazing and maybe they'll get there. But I was hoping to see more updates in that area.

0:57:26 - Jason Snell
I mean iWork. Updates happen when they happen. There's small teams working on them. They do keep advancing them. The big change was when they brought them to iOS and iPad especially, and that code kind of went back to the Mac over time, so that they're pretty much in sync now. But I want to praise them as well. I think that while they were originally a little more of a competitive move, as Andy said, I think that today the purpose they serve is that if you buy a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone, out of the box there's an Office suite there.

0:58:00 - Alex Lindsay
And it's a really nice one.

0:58:02 - Jason Snell
And it's good. It's got a lot of advantages, but you don't have to buy anything extra. You can go to Google if you want. You can go to Microsoft if you want. That's fine. But if somebody sends you this was always a problem back in the old days with the Mac Somebody sends you a file, you can just open it, right. If it's an Excel file, it'll open in Numbers and you can use it. Or you're like I need a spreadsheet. You don't have to go buy one, they're there and they're all good. I like Numbers. I think it's really good. I always loved Keynote and preferred it to PowerPoint. But there are these small teams at Apple and they're kind of like out of sync with the rest of the OS people. They're just off doing their own thing but they keep updating them and and uh, those are good little apps.

0:58:41 - Alex Lindsay
And, to be fair, I have not. I have not had word on my main computer for two decades.

0:58:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Same, you know like you know like I, you know like that long, not since I stopped writing books, have I, I have I had like a word on my I mean I use.

0:58:55 - Alex Lindsay
So when I say that I wanted to see something, I wanted to see something really, you know, really esoteric, I would say for me, um and but I, you know, there there are so many, um, amazing things that I mean just little things like we. I was talking to someone they're trying to figure out how to lower thirds and I was like you know, you can save out of Keynote, you can save an Apple ProRes 444 file. You can literally do an animation in Keynote and just render it out and load it into your playout system and it's going to do a perfect lower third. And that was kind of dumbfounding. And when I talk to people about like teachers, when I talk to teachers about like, they're like well, I don't know how to get into video.

I was doing a talk a couple of weeks ago about this and I was like just keynote, that's all you need. You just need keynote. Like you can make all the. You know I've done things where I've laid out in keynote this is the what I'm going to do for your animation. Like I had someone like a three minute thing put it all together in keynote and I'm like no, no, no, no. That was the presentation.

We're still going to use motion and actually make a whole thing you know, and he's like this is great, I don't think he was just like well, how much do I pay for that Cause? That's all I wanted.

1:00:04 - Leo Laporte
This is really a testament to the maturity of the industry and of software in general. It used to be you'd get a computer and then you'd get VisiCalc, because you had to have a spreadsheet, and you'd get Office or Word or something because you had to have a word processor, and everybody kind of agreed on the same handful of tools. It's really fragmented now. It's a mature industry and what's scary, I think, for some people is hearing what you just said, alex, saying wait a minute, I might have a tool on my Mac right now that I could do something I've been trying to figure out how to do for years and I just didn't know it. There's so much diverse, so much diversity, so much power now in the software available to us. It's hard to know everything that's out there.

1:00:46 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that I think that Apple, you know, could where I would, where I would grow. Keynote, for instance, is looking at Canva, you know, because my wife uses Canva and I was like why do you use Canva?

1:00:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the thing. A lot of people what you just described, a lot of people just do on the web word processing. They use a CMS or Google.

1:01:03 - Alex Lindsay
Docs, spreadsheets they use.

1:01:05 - Leo Laporte
Google Sheets. I mean, the people are doing everything on the web. Now it is.

1:01:08 - Alex Lindsay
It's just that you, it's not as good, it's not as good, like the thing is. Is that, uh, you know, for the kind of stuff that I'm, good enough for a lot of people I'm asking

1:01:15 - Leo Laporte
for a lot of money.

1:01:16 - Alex Lindsay
And so, um you know like you know my most pro.

1:01:23 - Leo Laporte
That's the difference between me a hammer and a hook that I can hang a painting on the wall, and a professional contractor.

1:01:27 - Alex Lindsay
Well, but I think that I think that people underestimate that too, you know. So people will put together like a. They'll put together like I do. Bids are very competitive because what I sell is about $50,000 a unit, and so. So the thing is is that it's very competitive, and I'm always amazed at people who will throw something together in Excel sheet or do some kind of basic whatever, and that's their bid.

And in Keynote, you feel like you have like a superpower when we have this great tool that you can sit there and throw together illustrations of exactly you know, and especially when you start to the thing that I've really gotten into as I save, I have lots and lots of my own shapes, and so you can bring in EPSs, but the big thing is being able to convert the SVGs, which is a little quirky in keynote, but being able to convert SVGs into shapes means that they're just there all the time they can.

You can fill them with their own colors, you can do all the things that you need to do, and I'm I, I don't know um, um, the you know, bringing those in and having those all available means that you can throw together presentations that are very specific to what you do, um, you know, whether it's in documents and pages or whatever, and it's super, uh, super powerful. You know, and, and it's just the tools make it easy to look good. That's the big thing, yeah, is that you look professional without having to know a lot about how to be professional at it you know?

1:02:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean it's. What I loved about Keynote is that this simple things are trivial to do and difficult things are accessible to do, and it's like I never had a standard template for any of the talks that I do, because every time I do something brand new it's like I'm looking at what I'm setting up and say, what if we had a horizontal line that as part of every slide transition it moves from one place to another, depending on whether there's a headline, that will be underscoring the headline. If there is no headline, it'll just be like sort of waiting at the bottom and overscoring, like my email address, and that's not the sort of thing that I would have like spent a day doing. But if I can just simply put as you say just put that line there, go to the next slide, move the line to where you want it to go and say hi, please do this transition for me, and just automatically happens, sure, definitely do that.

1:03:33 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and and, by the way, if, if you're an educator, and even if you're not an educator and you call yourself an educator, get into the education Apple education page. They do these seminars about how to use these tools that are next level, and I've gotten into a couple of them. Every single time I go, there's something they learned, Like there was one time with it. Oh, if you open up your iPad and grab onto the object with your pencil, you can just animate it on the screen. And I was like what?

1:03:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, that's the miraculous thing about the iWork suite.

I mean even. I mean God, google, they don't have a bunch of dummies working there, but the difference between using any of their workspace apps in a browser window on a laptop or on a desktop and any of their workspace apps in a browser window on a laptop or on a desktop and any of their mobile apps is stark. It can give you a sort of yeah, you can sort of edit something, maybe you can jot down a few ideas, but you don't get the full experience, the idea that, god, I can do the number of times I happen to have had an iPhone in my pocket and I'm waiting for my bags to appear and I can go through my slides and not just like, do I reorder slides, but actually I want a new slide here and I want to create this trend that it's almost feature parity between the, the phone, the tablet and the desktop. That's just remarkable. I don't I don't know of any other office suite or productivity suite like that. That is, that no compromises will give you the same experience, no matter what device you're using.

1:04:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, microsoft's getting there, but we don't talk enough about how awful google's um ios apps are. They're so bad. I mean, and I'm a big google sheets fan and I do a lot of stuff in google docs, and then I'm on my iPad and I'm like oh, it's bad on the iPad don't make me do it, it's so bad I find I will say I use Sheets very heavily, but I use Sheets heavily because I have to.

1:05:20 - Alex Lindsay
we're going to put up something that everyone's got to edit and you know, I don't think that the iWork stuff has ever really gotten that to work as well as I like it to work. If you're used to Google Docs, that shared environment still works better than what Apple does by a lot.

1:05:36 - Jason Snell
For sure, that is an important feature, or Microsoft.

1:05:40 - Alex Lindsay
But I think it's the nature of the shared environment that makes it harder for them to be good at some of these things. And also, to your point, with the iOS stuff, it doesn't feel like they take the touchscreen seriously. You know, like it's just, you know, and so it's just, and so it is very hard to use. But I, you know. So you think about everything in stages, like I'm gonna, if I really want to look good, I'm gonna use keynote. If I really want it to, if I want to be collaborative, I use google docs, and it's just, you get, there's not any one solution.

1:06:04 - Jason Snell
The truth is that part of google views the world through a browser window.

1:06:08 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, which is fine they're really good at it. I feel like google and I feel like Google views the world.

1:06:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we could argue that the entire, all of Google, other than maybe some parts of Android, really just views the world as a web browser window. Right, and that is fine. Right, like Google, those are great apps in a web browser. They're amazing.

1:06:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but on the web browser on an iPad or an iPhone. They're not as good as they make it really easy. They just it's just. It's hard to make it good, you know, or great, I mean. You can make it good in the same way if you look at, like you know, google Meet. Google Meet is very serviceable, but it's not Zoom. Like Zoom is a native app written natively. They're not using any of that React native iNSAnity that you know. That's where, like, dreams go to die and so the so, the so, they, you know, they write. Zoom is writing custom code for every platform and that's why it runs. That's why it runs so smoothly and it can be feature rich. You can make it run smoothly. Like Meet runs smoothly. It's just that it's very limited because it's stuck in a browser, you know, and it has a very limited way of touching the world.

1:07:22 - Andy Ihnatko
To be fair, google was. I'm sorry. There's been a great conversation. I'll wrap it up quick 45 minutes on.

Iwork is good, Exactly. Anyone's talked about iWork in a long, long time Before we leave the topic. It's not necessarily that Google Workspace is bad. It's just that they're maximizing a different set of variables than Apple is. What Google is trying to do is making sure that one document is going to be the same no matter where you go and no matter what device you're using it on whether you're using it on a $5,000 workstation or a $100 phone, on a $5,000 workstation or a $100 phone. When I prepare my notes and my briefing papers and whatever for Boston Public Radio, the thing that I have in front of me during radio is a Google Doc, because I absolutely have to make sure that whatever it is I'm creating for myself at home or on the train is exactly what's going to be there on my iPad when we start talking about it, because I can't have one of those things where, oh, why aren't you synced? Why is there? Do I have to hit a sync function? No, that always works and it's always perfect. So just maximizing different variables.

1:08:28 - Alex Lindsay
People ask why does Leo interrupt us Like? Why?

1:08:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Like, I get everyone on Twitter. This is why.

1:08:33 - Alex Lindsay
Leo interrupts us, because if you don't interrupt us, we are capable of talking about exactly. Um, I work for an hour or two hours or possibly the entire show, but when you're, when you're wondering, like why if you work, if you work on I work at apple we love you.

1:08:45 - Andy Ihnatko
You do a great product. I think we love you very much.

1:08:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, people don't say that there you go, Leo. This is your chance. We took a pause there for a second and then quick, while Pepper leap in.

1:08:58 - Leo Laporte
How did you handle that last week, jason? Did you just interrupt, or what did you do?

1:09:03 - Jason Snell
I mean I did a lot of attempts when it was like, oh, it's been 30 minutes and you should see Andy and I at dinner. What people don't?

1:09:10 - Leo Laporte
know, if you're not in the club, you're missing a fun thing that happens in the Club TWiT discord, which is when we get onto a topic like this, then sometimes the other hosts well, jason stells had a fairly long conversation about, uh, a samsung monitor. That he yeah, yeah, oh yeah, we're doing a whole other show. There's a whole other show.

1:09:30 - Jason Snell
This is why you should be a member, because we are doing several other shows, simultaneously with this one, twice the content I'll tell you, though, leah, when, when this happens, if there's two things and you know this better than anyone if they're going off, you're like well, I don't even need to do, just wind them up and watch them go, and that's great when you need to do an ad break, though that's when I start. There's now that, now that we've got our, our zoom setup we use now, you can always see.

1:09:56 - Leo Laporte
I should do this right. I should point to this.

1:09:57 - Jason Snell
So you give them the sign You're like we need to stop.

1:10:01 - Andy Ihnatko
We're nine minutes late for the ad break. Can I say, Jason, that your technique of getting one of those little party guns that shoots off like Dolly Bills into the camera wasn't on the microphone, but we could definitely see it.

1:10:19 - Leo Laporte
We knew that we could probably take only another five or ten minutes to wind things up. That's right. You're watching. The truth is I don't have any ads, so it's okay. You're watching mac break weekly, jason snell, andy and otko, alex lindsay and, uh, some guy. By the way, I'm gonna have to work on my shot now. I'm thinking alex, because my head is smaller than all of your heads.

1:10:36 - Jason Snell
Look at that. Look, I look like a little tiny pinhead.

1:10:38 - Leo Laporte
Would you do that please? Thank you, jason. Everybody back up just a little. Either that or I'll have to get closer. I have a longer lens. I might have to put in a longer lens.

1:10:53 - Jason Snell
Next time we talk about iWork, let's tell me We'll be back here. Let's talk about I work, let's uh tell me, okay, I'll be back here let's talk about I work.

1:10:56 - Leo Laporte
Apple's new ios upgrade doesn't fix the green bubble problem. Jeffrey fowler, sure ov writing in the washington post oh brother, well what it?

1:11:07 - Jason Snell
sounds like you have strong feelings. This is the smallest share that with us I didn't read this story, I'm just saying is the green bubble problem that the bubbles are green because they're worried about security actually they're saying better rcs.

1:11:22 - Leo Laporte
Uh, does it. So you might think, oh, everything is encrypted, but it's not if you're talking to android I mean what?

1:11:29 - Jason Snell
why? Why would you think that? When the bubbles are green, right, that's. The whole point is that the bubbles are green and it's very subtle. Apple, when they announced that they were going to support RCS, said that they were going to work with the RCS organization that controls the standard to work on an encrypted system, and I think there was some news about that in the last few weeks that they're still talking about they're going to do it.

Yeah, they're going to do it. So it will be encrypted at some point and when that happens I would imagine Apple will put some sort of symbol somewhere to indicate the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted communications. But you know, it's a green bubble. It wasn't secure before and it's still not so from an Apple perspective, unless you're looking at that little tiny gray text in an empty text field that says text message RCS. You're not. I mean, the world kind of hasn't changed on that level.

1:12:19 - Andy Ihnatko
But it's still an improvement. As early as December, the fellow at Google on the Android team who's responsible for this area was speaking at a conference that said no, they're already actively working with Apple to develop a way to get into an encryption between iMessage RCS on an iPhone and RCS on Android. Google had already standardized an RCS a long time ago across Android. The thing that Apple could have done but okay, for perfectly reasonable reasons decided not to do is that if, if you use, if a carrier uses google's own rcs service, they have their own and encryption scheme. Apple simply decided that, no, we don't want to support that. They could have done it right out of the gate if they had.

I don't think that's a scandal, but I do believe, uh, apple and google and the, the GSMA when they say that they're working together to enhance RCS Universal to include end-to-end encryption.

Rcs Universal always had that capability. The specification has always said if you want to extend it this way, it allows extensions that way. Again, that's how Google does end-to-end encryption over RCS. But it means that we're going to get a much better RCS for everybody just by the fact that all these groups are going to work together. So, again, I'm glad that I no longer have to dog Apple for what I still think was just petty, petulant, tacky opposition to RCS, just because, hey, we want to keep. We're going to nerf iMessage and the Messages app just to spite, just to make sure we don't make Android messaging look good. And in the meantime, every grandma on an Android phone that received a beautiful picture of the grandkids got it at low resolution looking kind of terrible, but they could have gotten something that was worthy of the sofa table behind behind the in the living room. And that's, that's all on on on apple.

1:14:19 - Leo Laporte
At least now, grandma, grandma now gets a good copy of that photo from yeah, but grandma should not assume that she's encrypted if she's going from apple to an android device careful with those state secrets, grandma uh. But yeah, I might be working for the NSA, I don't.

1:14:35 - Jason Snell
I'm sure there are some NSA grandmas yeah, well, you know, we heard that she got run over by a reindeer, but that was just a cover it was she faked her own death undercover and that's it.

I had a text thread with a friend of mine who uses android and uh, and I I did an. I did like a, a tap back reaction, because I thought you know what? Yeah, we're in a new world, now I can just send him a tap back reaction, because I thought you know what, we're in a new world, now I can just send him a tap back reaction. He's going to get it. It's pretty cool.

1:14:58 - Andy Ihnatko
We have a family etiquette question that I'd like to bounce off of you guys. How long should I wait and still see in the family group chat like MMS message, before it's okay to say okay, ladies, you have to update to iOS 18. You have to update for a lot of reasons that are going to be good for you, but I've been waiting for this for a long, long time and I think the number of times I helped you people move, the number of times that I fixed your bathrooms with dad coming over your terrible early apartments, I deserve it.

1:15:32 - Leo Laporte
I'll trying to work on our communication issues exactly, but things have really changed between us, uh-huh.

1:15:40 - Alex Lindsay
I finally switched to RCS this is a uh made by Google.

1:15:46 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why you're not showing this. Is it me? Oh, it's me.

1:15:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Now I'm showing it so much that this is a made by Google uh, now we can send each other high quality iPhone and a pixel phone on it All the cat memes what we're trying to say is it's a terrible, terrible ad.

1:16:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I like it.

1:16:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I like they have. Have you seen? It's part of their. They have a sequence of ads called Best Phones Forever. That, yes, it's there to make sure people know that Android phones are really good and that in some cases they can do things that Google feels is better than the iPhone, but it really is not. Oh, wow, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC, aren't you horrible? Oh, I'm cool, I'm wonderful.

Yeah, at least it's not that it's more like hey, we're friends, the iPhone 15 and the Pixel 9, I think during the Olympics just like cautiously, like walking together to the end of like the high diving platform, and then just like looking over together and then turning each other's head Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope and then back together. Just like looking over together and then turning each other's at nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, and then back together. Yeah, because that's not. That's not promoting the android, so much as like promoting the relation, the pleasant relationship between these two phones. And it's like, if these two pieces of overly hyped, overly marketed commercial hardware can get together, can all the nations of the world join hands and have a coke the?

1:17:15 - Leo Laporte
uh actually, where os watches may have a a leg up over the apple watch, because massano massimo, the company that was uh that is suing apple over uh blood oxymeter uh has partnered with google to create where os reference hardware, which means that probably they're licensing their blood oximeter technology to the pixel watch. Yeah, I still have it in my Apple watch, though, right, it's just you can't get a new one with it If you bought it in the U S right If you sold, if they sold you, an Apple watch with that feature, they're not going to take it and take it out.

1:17:48 - Andy Ihnatko
But and but, from now on, any new watch sold inside inside the United States, as Jason said, the international excuse me, the United States as Jason said, the United States import board basically agreed with Massimo that the blood oximeter component in Apple Watches infringes on Massimo's patents and so you cannot import Apple Watches into the United States until this is settled or until the patent expires or whatever. And, yeah, massimo's very proud of this. On a Monday they announced this partnership with Google. The next day they announced that this partnership also includes Qualcomm, so they're going to be this company that's been around since, I think, the 1980s. They started off creating medical sensor technology, non-invasive medical technology for use in hospitals, and they've been around for like 20 years now.

I don't know if they're still going to be producing their own smartwatch, but them bringing all these healthcare sensors with Qualcomm, bringing what they hope to be finally mobile sensors with Google that is trying to. That now seems to have gotten their act together in terms of the hardware, I mean with the state of Wear OS and the state of Wear OS watches. Hopefully they can start to reach parity with the Apple Watch. I don't know if they'll be able to exceed it, but the idea of them having access to this blood oximeter technology that Apple is now locked out of that could be significant, but it's going to be a couple of years until we see this actually translate into a real product.

1:19:21 - Leo Laporte
Which brings us to the vision pro segment, which brings us to seamless. I could actually get that on one of my buttons here and probably save you some trouble, john Ashley.

1:19:42 - Andy Ihnatko
But thank you Put it on a cart.

1:19:48 - Leo Laporte
Is there anything? I know what the Big Vision Pro story is. Tomorrow, meta is going to have its Meta Connect keynote. We're going to cover that live, 10 am Pacific, uh, and I believe meta will announce, uh, some interesting products, none of which will be available, by the way, but you know they might. They got some AR glasses, supposedly, um, that they're going to be showing off. Whether they actually will ever be available as another matter entirely.

1:20:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's a huge, successful product. They also had an interesting development where the I can't remember the name of the company it's a French-Italian international conglomerate that owns every single eyeglass brand in the entire world, including Ray-Ban, Luxottica, but now there's another company integration in front of it. So the reason why that Facebook Ray-Ban metaspecs are so popular is that they look like Ray-Bans, because they are actual Ray-Bans. So I think last week the week before they announced a long-term partnership with Luxottica. So one of the biggest problems to solve in these kind of wearables is make something that doesn't make you look like a dork, Make something that looks like something that people would actually be walking around the street and they'd be happy to be seen in. And so the fact that they have the ability, they have the connection to all this manufacturing and all this design and all these existing popular brands like Oakley's that might have meta technology built into it, that, I think, is a really big leap up for this type of product and it's going to be interesting to see the developments tomorrow.

For a couple of years, before the Vision Pro came out, we'd all been talking about what kind of effect is this going to have on the market. It's probably going to jumpstart a new interest in VR and AR and people who don't want an Apple. There'll be new people coming into the pond and, as of now, the big effect that they've had is to convince or reassure Meta that they don't have to make a $3,000 pair of VR goggles. They can, because Apple made one and the only people who cared were Apple fans and enthusiasts. They can still. They can basically make really good thousand dollar goggles or really good $800 goggles and proceed on that path and still work well.

And once again, the biggest, the biggest success it probably crossed the board in terms of getting this integrated into regular people are those Ray-Ban specs, where all it is is really good, really good ear hook, mounted transducer, speakers, decent cameras, the ability to speak to an AI that's on your phone and get input inputs from the cameras and your in a microphone. That's in 2024. You can do that really really well and that's going to be the enhanced experience. So it's gonna be exciting to see what they do and how accessible the stuff is going to be. We'll. So it's going to be exciting to see what they do and how accessible the stuff is going to be.

1:22:38 - Leo Laporte
We'll be watching tomorrow morning, 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern, 1700 UTC. Right before Windows Weekly. Mikah Sargent and I will live stream that Facebook Connect keynote. Just to see what they're up to, just to see Security issue was resolved. Apple's Visions Pro eye tracking is so good. It exposed what people are typing. Uh, researchers used eye tracking to work out the passwords and pins people were typing with their avatars. Apple has six since fixed this, but, uh, in a way this is little, uh, like a little humble brag. Right, look what we could do. The exploit is called gaze-ploit, or is it gaz-a-ploit, I don't know yeah.

1:23:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean the fact that they could do it through your avatar was pretty, that is. I mean you're right, that is a pretty good, just a compliment to how good the eye-tracking technology is it's? Pretty accurate. You can steal passwords from your fake cartoon self.

1:23:40 - Jason Snell
Yes, the idea is while you were typing a password using your eyes while you were on a call where they're using your avatar, your persona I guess they call it digital persona they were able to from that back out what you were typing. I mean, that's a very particular thing. So many of these security stories are like they're the ones that are very serious and the ones that are more like science projects. This is a little more on the science project side of it. You know, you got a little cardboard thing and sheets are up and it's, but it's cool, it's an interesting idea and you're right, Leo, it is a little bit like our personas are so good that it leaks security. Uh, maybe, yeah, so it's good that apple tim.

1:24:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I got good news. I got bad news about the vision pro. Let's start off with the good news first.

1:24:24 - Jason Snell
Let's try to focus on the good I assume that apple what apple's doing here actually is not animating the eyes when you're typing passwords, right like, just isn't doing that and then this goes away.

1:24:37 - Leo Laporte
So it's good that it's fixed, but that's uh, that's amazing, uh, and and that, speaking of amazing, is your vision pro, unless somebody has something else to uh, vision I.

1:24:46 - Jason Snell
I let me slide this in here. There's now a vision pro. Vision os 2.1 beta just came out, so they're on a on a data track. What's in it? I don't know, probably not a lot, but uh, there they continue to develop Vision Pro and you know that's the thing.

1:25:01 - Andy Ihnatko
If I can add on to that, it's possible that this new update also bricks Vision Pros. We won't know about it because no one's still using it.

1:25:09 - Alex Lindsay
But as soon as I take it out of the room, hey, oh, yes, I'm jealous because I'm the only person in this panel. I don't have one.

1:25:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, you had, one, you had.

1:25:19 - Leo Laporte
Or the uh, briefly, we had one. Yes, we bought it, we set it back.

1:25:24 - Alex Lindsay
Apple is um promoting. In the ios they're promoting some of the 3d cameras that are available, spatial phi, but also the voodoo stream streaming app now is out for the camera the camera version is out as well as the player inside of vision pro and, uh, pretty cool, I would. You can get it, I think, for I think you can do it for half an hour for 10 people for free, so you can do little sessions if you want to figure out if it works. So, um, it's a pretty slick little little camera app.

1:25:47 - Leo Laporte
I would check that out as well uh, I should mention that jimmy fallon looks pretty darn good in his well, he can make anything shirt and his vision pros. I guess he and Tim Cook went on a walk, did he? I didn't. I didn't watch. I did.

1:26:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I did watch it this morning.

1:26:05 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, it's did he take it off or did he keep it on? He took it off.

1:26:08 - Andy Ihnatko
It was like it was you know it was a gag it was a gag.

Hey, I'm first here, he had, he had the vision Pro on, he had the, the iPhone, on a selfie stick. Like, hey, I'm here at the fifth avenue apple store, I'm first in line to get a, to get the new iphone, woo. And like, oh, wow, look, with the vision pro, it actually looks like tim cook is here actually handling handing me my new phone. Uh, and why? Silly jimmy, I am tim cook, what the? And he takes it off, but not before he puts his hands all over tim cook's face.

Oh, cook's face and it's like wow, the promotional opportunity here.

1:26:43 - Leo Laporte
He was a very, very good sport about that the things tim cook has to put up with, or should I call him tim apple? Yep uh, representing the company.

1:26:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not. It's not as lame as like people. I'm not a huge fan of jimmy fallon. He's fine, he just doesn't make a product that I can use, but like. So they and they take a walk from the fifth avenue store to the soho store like his tim's next stop on the goodwill goodwill tour and they have a nice little conversation, uh, with very, not a whole lot of goofy stuff happening.

He does, jimmy fallon does purchase from a sidewalk vendor to uh, or two silly looking New York city caps, uh, paying with Apple pay, and so for a good 30 seconds Tim Cook and he are wearing silly caps. Uh, but it's interesting conversation. Well, actually, some questions that, like, I've always kind of wanted people to ask Tim Cook when they get 10 minutes with them, which is like, what were you like as a kid? Did you make stuff? Like a tech person? You know how does? How does it make you feel when you walk past like the Apple store on a day like this and people are cheering and he had a very, very cool response. Well, I know they're not cheering for me, they're cheering for Apple, but it's always interesting, it's always fun Like, oh, that's nice.

1:27:48 - Leo Laporte
That actually was a really good line, because you know Fallon says do you feel like a rock star as people are screaming for you? No, it's Apple they love. You're watching MacBreak Weekly? I know, it's not us, it's Apple you love, with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell.

1:28:03 - Andy Ihnatko
That's okay, we'll accept the contact high. That's fine.

1:28:05 - Jason Snell
Leo.

1:28:06 - Andy Ihnatko
We'll take the leftovers.

1:28:07 - Leo Laporte
John Ashley. Yes, we need to play it out. Conclude, it's time to conclude the Vision Pro segment. Now you segment, now you see, now you know we're done.

1:28:19 - Jason Snell
Talking the vision pro, that's good. We don't. We don't want to leave people hanging there, right, that would have been.

1:28:24 - Leo Laporte
Well would have been bad just a little inside baseball. If we don't do that, then the cart starts with the end the next time we play the card and and it'll be very confusing if next week's vision pro segment starts with the ending. So we have to at some point, because we only have one cart with both the opening and the closing on it.

1:28:41 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and that's really hard. I will tell you Two 30-second carts.

1:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, saves money.

1:28:47 - Jason Snell
And I'm all about selling money and tape.

1:28:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, I have the other cart ready to go with this.

1:28:54 - Jason Snell
The cool Vision Pro. Yeah, vision Pro. The uh cool, yeah, oh, now do we have to now?

1:29:04 - Leo Laporte
you have to play it again. You have to play that twice also. That's only one card with two cuts.

1:29:09 - Jason Snell
It's very frustrating, I know I'm now I'm feeling bad that I told people that didn't tell people the break time was over last week.

1:29:15 - Alex Lindsay
Because are they still on break now, and then we just opened a new break all week they're like double broken right now.

1:29:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It's your fault, you double. They're starting to question their role in the capitalist machine. Jason, we can't have that that's how people get guillotine, jason, can't we we are we try to be frugal with your money.

1:29:34 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we know that seven bucks comes hard and you work hard for it, but boy, we sure appreciate it. For those of you who are Club TWiT members, $7 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. You get Access to special content that's only available for Club members, like video from Hands on Windows, Mikah Sargent's Hands on Mac and many other wonderful shows. But, most importantly, you're doing God's work, keeping TWiT on the air as we slowly contract to a small little point on your screen. God is a member of Club TWiT, why aren't you? Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that, but we don't like to you know we don't like that.

1:30:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually, that's great because we get $21, because both the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost they have separate you're going straight to hell, andy.

1:30:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, wait a minute. In your orthodox religion you can't go to hell, right?

1:30:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I hedge my bets. I was raised catholic. I know that. I know what all the outs are. I know, I know that there's, I know that there's. There's a real chill. Uh, parish, that will kind of, if you get him on a Wednesday in the confession box, he'll let you slide there's no uh pir, uh Peroshki in.

1:30:38 - Leo Laporte
Uh in hell, I'm just. I just want to warn you. Uh, join the club twit.tv/clubtwit, and we thank you so much.

1:30:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Also I want to note uh, we just put up a Mikah going to copyright school to take the copyright strike off of Twitch.

1:30:52 - Leo Laporte
So we did the Apple event. I wasn't here for it. Thank you, Mikah and Rosemary, for doing a great job. We don't put it up on YouTube because there is an Apple attorney who sits there looking and will literally send you a cease and desist. So we don't do it on Apple, I mean on YouTube, but we do do it. We did do it on Twitch and X and Facebook and what else. Linkedin, kik and we got a takedown copyright strike from Twitch and poor Mikah had to go to copyright school, which he passed almost with flying colors. He missed one question, which I think was a trick question. Frankly, the answer was wrong. Anyway, watch the video. You can watch it if you're a ClubTuit member.

1:31:35 - Jason Snell
By the way, I want to say this right now, because we should get this in all of this is is absolutely fair use, common commenting on live streams of, especially, commercial announcements, and the only reason any of this stuff comes. I feel like people now think that oh well, what did you expect? You know, of course youtube took you down. The truth is, youtube's algorithms aren't smart enough. Twitch's algorithms aren't smart enough to understand what fair use is, and they don't really want to. They got tired of getting sued, so they just preemptively take down all sorts of things.

It's a huge problem for people who do video essays, commenting, you know, film criticism, all sorts of things where it's absolutely something that people are allowed to do. But this whole concept of fair use, the concept that you can comment on other things while quoting them, has run headlong into algorithms that are created. I'm not saying that the algorithms are created in a lazy way. I'm saying that those companies aren't really motivated to do them right, because actually doing them right would cause them more heartache, so they just do them wrong and the entire concept of being able to comment on other things fades into the background, not because it's illegal, but because it's inconvenient and now Twitch has joined that club and they do the same thing.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
That's a club we don't want you to join, please don't. And it join, please don't. And it has a real chilling effect on everything we do on all of our shows.

This is the notice I haven't played a number of clips that I would like to play. Here's my doing very well at copyright school, I might add. He's an a student. Uh, actually he should have gotten a perfect score. The question he got wrong was does fair use protect you if you play something, uh, copyrighted? And he said, no, fair use does not, it's a defense, doesn't protect you. And they said, oh yeah, no, it does protect you, yeah, yeah, except on twitch and youtube. Uh, thanks very much. Anyway, I want to defend him he got a 100% perfect score.

1:33:37 - Jason Snell
Good job, Mikah.

1:33:38 - Alex Lindsay
You try to take those. I mean try to, because they'll give you a strike and then you can yeah that's what he did.

1:33:45 - Leo Laporte
He got a strike.

1:33:46 - Alex Lindsay
He had to go to copyright school, but on YouTube you can say no, that's fair use.

1:33:51 - Leo Laporte
And then we appeal it every single time, doesn't matter. And we have. How many strikes do we have now, John Ashley, that we have not gotten? Are there strikes, not flags?

1:34:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Ooh, I have to double check. I think we have two strikes.

1:34:02 - Leo Laporte
We only get three.

1:34:04 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you can't go to three. We were off Twitch for a week. I don't know about Twitch, but on YouTube I haven't gotten a strike. We'll know about Twitch, Alex you will learn about Twitch.

1:34:14 - Leo Laporte
Trust me, I'm not going to learn about Twitch.

1:34:16 - Alex Lindsay
So you know, if you're not doing games, I don't think there's any market there. So but on YouTube, I wantonly ignore the rules and almost never have a problem.

1:34:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah well, we don't, we do I don't know why?

1:34:34 - Alex Lindsay
Because you're doing Apple stuff.

1:34:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, there's an apple attorney who spends his time looking for you to do that. Um, do you stream when you do uh office hours? Uh, you don't stream the apple stuff, do you?

1:34:46 - Alex Lindsay
um no, because we do second year. Right, that's that's. I mean, that's how we, that's what we're gonna have to do from now on.

1:34:51 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry because I but that's. You know it's a chilling effect and that's the way it is.

1:34:56 - Alex Lindsay
What can you do, cause I get lots of flags? I get flags almost every day.

1:34:59 - Leo Laporte
Like we're talking strikes Okay.

1:35:01 - Andy Ihnatko
You're a maverick, You're, you're a rogue. You're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're you're.

1:35:12 - Alex Lindsay
You're be able to stream if you don't stop it right and if I got, if I got strikes I'd probably be more, you know like. But you know, I think youtube is, you know, 99 of its flags now, except for companies like apple and the eagles. Like, we definitely don't play any eagles, it's like no, yes, those guys have no sense of humor.

1:35:34 - Leo Laporte
Ah, why am I in a little window and everyone else is full screen? My question exactly.

1:35:40 - Jason Snell
Thank you charisma charisma.

1:35:43 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's. That's time. Since we just did this, let's do it. It's a time for our entertainment segment. Oprah says no hurry for hollywood. There's no business like oprah buys back her apple tv documentary and locks it away. She didn't remember a billion phones in your pockets, y'all, or whatever she said on that apple event. Well, maybe she doesn't feel so good about it anymore. She had a deal with apple, but it ended in 2022. And is the documentary? Does anybody seen it? No, we don't know why she bought back the rights. Apparently she and the filmmaker clashed on the final product because kevin mcdonald, the filmmaker, would not make requested edits. According to engadget, spokesperson for oprah says, as the apple tv deal was coming to an end, ms winfrey bought back the rights to her docu-series and since has decided to put the duck on hold.

1:36:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Hmm, I wonder what? What stuff was in there? So does she own tigers or monkeys?

1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
either one will get you in trouble. She could get on netflix, though, with tigers or monkeys she was?

1:36:52 - Alex Lindsay
was it a document about her?

1:36:54 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, it was by a bio doc that she was an authorized bio doc as part of like a large, like package of deals that does the stuff she was creating for apple I mean, her life was pretty complicated early on, so I can see why she'd be want to have a lot of control over that and not be willing to do that if you can write a check and take it back, why she's a multi-billionaire.

1:37:13 - Leo Laporte
She's very, very wealthy. Oh wait a minute. I just got a note from Apple One Recruiting. They currently have a remote work job for me.

1:37:22 - Alex Lindsay
There you go, don't worry, they'll hire you for remote and then they'll tell you you have to go back.

1:37:25 - Andy Ihnatko
They're asking you to go away. Go far, far, far away. This is the new thing, by the way with pig butchering is offering me jobs.

1:37:34 - Leo Laporte
They got the wrong guy excellent Tootsie reference.

1:37:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you very much.

1:37:37 - Alex Lindsay
I appreciate that report?

1:37:38 - Andy Ihnatko
wait, who's?

1:37:39 - Alex Lindsay
sending you the job offers. Huh, who sent? Who sent you the job butchers? These aren't.

1:37:44 - Leo Laporte
This is not a real person oh God, this is a scam. I'm supposed to. I'm going to respond and Angela or Amelia from the Apple one recruiting and staffing company is going to say, oh, have you invested in crypto lately? So I am going to do what everyone should do delete and report junk sometimes I I feel like I want to pretend, but I don't where I'm like oh yeah, they're like hey yeah, I haven't been in town in a while.

1:38:04 - Jason Snell
You want to get drinks and I I so often want to be like, yeah, let's do it. How about?

1:38:09 - Andy Ihnatko
tonight. I mean, I I'm just disappointed that you're you're using up some of our podcast time for this. I I got a message saying that I've got a ups package that can't be delivered oh, get on out, go ahead andy I'm literally gonna side run home, you know, get your ups delivery.

1:38:26 - Leo Laporte
No, clearly I have a jingle for actually, for that I'll play sometime. Uh, danny boyle. I interviewed danny boyle when he did the ste Jobs movie and I never got to talk to him again, maybe because I was a little bit critical of it. I don't know. That was the one where it was backstage with Steve at a variety of events. The Aaron Sorkin one yeah, the Aaron.

1:38:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Sorkin one.

1:38:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it really was not good, but I love Danny Boyle. Yeah, slumdog millionaire, he's done so many Train spotting, train spotting. He was making the new train spotting when I talked to him.

1:39:01 - Jason Snell
Millions, millions is an underappreciated Danny Boyle Great movie.

1:39:05 - Leo Laporte
Great director. He also did 28 Days Later, which was probably, in my opinion, the best zombie flick. Yeah, he's got a new one which shot on an iphone 15. Now you might say well, when they shoot an ad on iphone 15, that's a gimmick, right, but to shoot a whole major motion picture on iphone 15, he must really like it I think he did 28 days.

1:39:27 - Alex Lindsay
I think he did that with a canon xl1, that's right that's right so. So this is probably significantly better than what he had before.

1:39:35 - Andy Ihnatko
You know like no I was looking forward to like your take on this, because this is based on like a paparazzi photo and because nerds are nerds. They noticed like one of the camera rigs off to the extreme right side of this photo was appeared to be what could be an iPhone, bolted to an $80 million like cinema camera in a huge, huge rig, and later on somebody was able to confirm it with people who are working on the set that he's shooting this with like iPhone 15s.

1:40:03 - Alex Lindsay
And I couldn't make it out.

1:40:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I couldn't even make out the rig.

1:40:06 - Alex Lindsay
I know.

1:40:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I know.

1:40:08 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think someone in our group had picked it out it's, and I can't think of one now. I can't think of it, right now.

1:40:15 - Andy Ihnatko
But what's the point of having like if you're going for it for a specific look? Like doesn't having a, doesn't having that big cinema lens, like actually like undo, like all this iPhone looking sort of video that you get from there. I don't think he's trying to make an iPhone looking.

1:40:34 - Alex Lindsay
I think he's trying to like you know he he's like Steven Soderbergh in the sense of no one's done this before, so I'm going to be the first one to do it. I can get the budget to do it. He knows that storytelling is more important than the camera, so he knows that all I got you know that's what he did with 28,. So he knows that he can do that. And he's interested in the new tech and the only way to get the new tech to be better is to use it. For instance, when Final Cut, the big jump for Final Cut I think it was three or four was because Walter Murch cut it, cut Final Cut, cut Cold Mountain on Final Cut, and they and Apple dedicated engineers to that for years, you know, to make sure that he got what he needed.

The best way for them to, you know, for for him to move the industry forward is to use the phone and then he probably sends he probably sent a steady stream of of requests back to Apple going this is missing. This is missing. This is missing. I really wish I had this. I really wish that I had that Um B script. By the way, b script, I think, is the is the company that made the case that, that that he's using here's the, here's the zoom in on whatever when.

1:41:45 - Leo Laporte
where's the phone?

1:41:47 - Alex Lindsay
behind that lens. It's like hidden in there. This is the.

1:41:50 - Leo Laporte
This is which end is the lens. It's like a cannon. Oh, there's the there. That would be the camera right here, that plane right there.

1:41:57 - Alex Lindsay
I think so right about yeah, and and it's you know, the, um, uh, again the. You know, a lot of us have tried to push the envelope of all, of a lot of these things, and we've.

1:42:06 - Leo Laporte
I put lenses on the front of iphones before and and if he had an airy alexa on this thing, it wouldn't be that much bigger right, it'd just be like maybe that much more expensive, like he's doing it because he wants to do it on an iPhone and we're all talking about this movie. I mean, you know filmmakers are having a hard time getting people to talk about it. He doesn't need to do that to get publicity. Yeah, I mean that's.

1:42:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think he If he's not going to be able to get the footage he wanted with an XL, with an or the Canon XL one, which is significantly lower resolution, significantly less power, significantly like it was a fraction of what this is capable of. And so so I think that you know, he knows that you can tell the story and you can get the I'm sure that there was a lot of testing to make sure that he could get the shots that he wanted to get. You know the um, so I think that that's the. I mean, I think that's his big advantage and I think that, um, you know, he knows what he can get out of that camera and that he can tell the story again, especially when you know that your story, if you feel strong enough about your story that it's going to tell its own, uh, you know it's, it's going to work because it's a great story and that it flows. You know, and you're willing to play with the technology, which he has been willing to do almost since day one. You know he's playing with this stuff to push the envelope.

Um, you know, and I think there's certain filmmakers like him, like Steven Soderbergh, like others that are that want to say I was the first one to do this thing that a lot of other people are going to do and and you know he's past like having to prove anything to anyone. He just wants to, but I think he likes to be the. The one that is probably is probably a race between him and steven soderberg. Who's going to use the icon? Okay, yeah, I mean, I wanted to shoot a film with it.

1:43:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I just didn't have the time and money. Yeah, I mean the when the he was the canon xl1 on, uh, 28 days later, part of it was because he was shooting in the middle. Yeah, he was. He was shooting in the middle of london that was supposed to have like no people in it and the permits that he got for it or whatever were that.

You can do it, but you're gonna have to do it like in a sneaky way with lots of like little tiny shots, and it was almost a, it wasn't, it wasn't. Uh, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we tried to press, try, try to stretch the envelope? Uh, this is going to be, this is going to be like the way that we will get the shots that we need to get. So I'm just and I am absolutely being explicit about my ignorance here. I mean because it just seems like a huge amount of trouble compared to. Well, if we're going to use consumer hardware, why don't we use, like a Sony A-series? So I'm really looking forward to when this is released and he does the interviews and talks about it, because it would be cool if it really were like you saw one shot too.

1:44:44 - Alex Lindsay
He may be stealing shots.

1:44:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, grabbing shots. You know, the thing is, you can take that phone off. I mean you look at like Is he going to steal it with that huge rig? No, I'm saying Well no.

1:44:51 - Alex Lindsay
Sorry no-transcript.

1:45:05 - Jason Snell
Is this the? It's this setup and it's a very traditionally shot film, or are there some shots where he wants to keep it consistent, so he's using the iPhone throughout?

1:45:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there are different setups and different parts.

That's what I was, that's what I was going to, that's throughout. But there are different setups and different parts. That's what I was. That's what I was gonna. That's what I was gonna ask with. That was is that something a filmmaker would do? If they want to make just like? They don't want to switch film stock from scene to scene, they want to make sure that they're. It's normally being shot with something more like an iphone, with just a simple rig on it, and just for these shots where they actually can't get around having to if you think about it, he's the one who created the fast-moving zombies right, which I always thought if zombies are so slow, what's the big deal?

you just walk away, but that's the fast moving scary. That's what's scary scary that, like you think you're away from them, they will. They will not stop, they don't tire, they don't get bored, they will always be, and they're really fast, yeah, and and so it might be that's the unique zombie kind of angle.

1:45:55 - Leo Laporte
Who knows what, what he's doing with it, although it looks like it's on a dolly, I mean in this case, andy recommended a great book many moons ago that I really love.

That taught me how the camera has changed, how movies are made. Mark harris's pictures at a revolution, uh, and these are the movies in the 60s that finally could go out in the field because they didn't need these giant cameras that had to be, uh, you know, surrounded by, uh, sound proofing because they were so noisy, shot on a sound stage, because they were so big. Suddenly, you know, with bonnie and clyde and movies like it, they could filmmakers could sit in the car and get these amazing shots.

1:46:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Saturday night fever was a big deal. They were able to. They were simply, I think, one of the things that they were talking about in that book or another, uh, historian was talking about that. This is, this is when you finally start to see ceilings uh, in right, because there were no ceilings.

You need to have right, like you had to do in studio, and also you started to see stolen shots. Like I don't, I don't get up, I didn't get a permit to shoot here in the port authority bus terminal, I just shot footage. Or I just sent a b crew just to walk around the city capturing snippets of things.

1:47:05 - Alex Lindsay
So so boyle may be doing this as a gimmick or a publicity stunt, but it is the case that a different camera and a smaller rig can get you stuff that you couldn't get before and you know again, it is also using it as how you push that forward.

1:47:18 - Andy Ihnatko
You know and and you know it.

1:47:19 - Alex Lindsay
It now supports ACEs, which is, um, you know, the Academy color encoding system. That, uh, that allows me. Apple is definitely building this so that people can make films with it. Now, it doesn't. You know, they're definitely. I mean, Apple is all in on understanding that this. The phone is a not a phone, it is a camera. You know it is, it is a camera and they're pushing down that path their. Their target market, like everyone else, is not the big filmmakers, but having someone like Danny Boyle do it, it justifies it for lots of YouTubers and lots of other people that are influencers and everything else going well. If he can shoot a whole film with it, I can shoot x, y and z with this um, and so I think that there's a. There's a wider market, just like kodak, you know they. They love to have people, filmmakers, talking about the fact that they're using kodak, but they're really selling to lots of people that are much wider market because that filmmaker is not actually producing that much film.

1:48:11 - Leo Laporte
You're using that much film. A shock to me to see that apple got a failing grade from glad for lgbtq representation. Um boy, I thought apple was doing a pretty good job, uh, but glad says not, uh. The family plan flora and son and ghosted the only studio of the 10 named in the GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index to receive a failing grade.

1:48:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, saying that 17% of its studio releases featured LGBTQ characters. I don't know if there are other metrics there, but they mentioned that Warner Brothers Discovery got a poor rating. A24, Lionsgate, paramount, sony, walt Disney received simply insufficient. When you're behind Netflix, nbc Universal and Netflix saying fair, amazon was the only studio to receive a good rating. Maybe. Maybe that has something to do with like how much they can actually produce, how much they can actually bankroll Apple year T. Maybe that would go up and down year to year because they can't produce as many things year to year.

1:49:16 - Leo Laporte
Uh, as I feel like apple is the wokest of all the studios and for it to not get a passing grade, it seems surprising they did get a bunch of emmys. Uh, the first emmy for one of the best shows on apple tv plus slow horses, yeah finally I I put it off for a long time.

1:49:33 - Alex Lindsay
I was waiting to see how many seasons are going to show up. I finally jumped into it with my son and I'm so. Don't tell me anything, but I'm in season two now and it is so good.

1:49:41 - Leo Laporte
It is just so good so good and and uh, primarily because of uh, of the star of the show, um, whose name escapes me. I always want to say gary oldman.

1:49:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I always want to say gary sinise determinism he's hard to get his name right, because he is such a freaking chameleon you never see him in any role.

1:50:02 - Leo Laporte
Exactly, exactly, boy. He's good in this as the flatulent older director of the Slough House, which is where all the spies who got in trouble at MI6 end up, and they call them the slow horses, but they always solve the case, don't they? You're on that season two. Yeah, that's a good one that's a good one yeah morning show got a uh emmy for billy crudup as a outstanding supporter acting a sporting actor in a drama series uh, it's the second of those yes character.

Primetime winning shows, palm royale, lessons in chemistry, which people said was quite good, I didn't see it. Masters of the air, which was the you know the brothers, uh band of brothers.

1:50:47 - Jason Snell
That was good.

1:50:47 - Leo Laporte
I liked that one a lot yeah uh the air war and girls state uh and they and they got one for that.

1:50:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Remember that fuzzy feelings like a holiday commercial from last season where the the woman who like does those like felt stop motion puppets got a me for outstanding commercial. That was an excellent commercial it was it was.

1:51:07 - Leo Laporte
They had a great look. Slow horses got. Outstanding writing for a drama series um, yeah, some of these are kind of weak. Outstanding music composition for a limited or anthology series for lessons in chemistry, sound mixing for masters of the air and an outstanding commercial for fuzzy feelings, cause they were all made out of felt Well, uh, I think that's the entire entertainment segment right there for you. Are you entertained? I hope so. David has pumpkins. Has pumpkins? Uh, it is that time a year again, isn't it once? Once more, um, apple music, classical 2.0. Are we happy, andrew?

1:51:49 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, they. They added uh, now they have like a huge, huge, huge amounts of like the light, the booklets that often come with like classical love those yes yeah, I mean oftentimes, like you, you'll buy like a two CD set and it'll be like twice as wide as two CDs because it has like an actual book on. Here is here's the Opera. Here are like eight different translations of it. Here's the story of this recording. Here's the history of whatever you need that with classical music.

1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
I think it's a really good bonus. I'd love to see.

1:52:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I'd love to see, on every single album that's out there, if there's like, if it was produced in the during the album days where there's like actual good liner notes, it would be reproducing all the liner notes. But that is something that a lot of people are going to really appreciate for classical and if they're, if they are trying to sell this as a separate thing, something that's not just like spotify or apple music with one classical department, they're doing a good job of making sure they keep adding enhancements that make sense for classical music listeners.

1:52:48 - Leo Laporte
It's good stuff. Ah, I, I enjoy apple classical I do, and I guess in some quarters that would also be considered entertainment. So I hope you've enjoyed the entertainment segment you're watching. Mac break weekly get ready boys. Picks of the week coming up next.

1:53:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, let us kick off our picks of the week with mr andrew inotko well, uh, of course, the tradition of people like calling in sick on the day that their iphone is supposed to be delivered so that they can a, they're going to say because they want to make sure that's not stolen by porch pirates, but actually they just want to have it as soon as they possibly can. So I learned this. I don't know how long this has been happening, but I just learned about it this year. Flightawarecom, which is the website that will let you track flights that are actually in the air they actually have a live service, flightawarecom slash live slash iPhone. So if you have the UPS tracking data, it will actually help you figure out what plane it's actually on.

1:53:46 - Leo Laporte
These are all planes with iPhones on them.

1:53:48 - Andy Ihnatko
These are UPS transports.

I don't know what the metric is. It really is just this one page, but it was so funny to watch it on the first shipping day. It was just this like one page, but it was so funny to watch it like on the first shipping day. It was just this constellation of airplanes like descending into tennessee and, uh, and it gives you a little guide of like here's how to interpret it, to figure out, like, what flight it's actually on. Like, oh, here's ups 77, the, a boeing 748s in shenzhen Bowen International Airport, destination Anchorage, and yeah, it should be arriving there at 1.19 Alaska time. It's like I could see myself actually doing that, because it doesn't help me know that, hey, you got to be home sometime between 8 am and like 4 pm, but it's like, if you're going to like make this a holiday, make this a true celebration, just like the Santa tracker for your kids.

1:54:40 - Leo Laporte
This is going to be the iPhone Santa tracker. It's the iPhone Santa tracker. So the FlightAware folks say when you look at your receipt you'll have a time that the departure scan happened. That's the departure time for the flight. So then you match it up to the flight here. Notice how many go to muhammad ali international airport? Of course that's memphis, yeah uh no, that's uh louisville.

1:55:03 - Jason Snell
Louisville. I mean sorry, of course.

1:55:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, fedex to memphis right, uh, ups to louisville, which is, of course, the home of muhammad ali. So I should have gotten that right in the first place.

1:55:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think san francisco giantsants baseball announcer.

1:55:18 - Leo Laporte
check it, Check it.

1:55:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you only really have a problem if you sign up for the premium plan just so that you can get a text message when your plane lands. That's when you might have a problem.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
Yes, thank you for that Fun pick, mr Alex Lindsay. Pick of the week.

1:55:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so I was talking about making icons before shapes, and one of the things that came up in office hours Jason Bache had had recommended was the noun project, and if you haven't seen the noun project, this is whoops. I hit the wrong button there. There we go. That's an empty chair.

1:55:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you have in your still store an empty chair.

1:55:59 - Alex Lindsay
So you know. So this is, this is there's a subscription here. It's not particularly expensive, it's uh, I think it's. I think I paid the yearly subscription or I think I did. Yeah, it's like there's a, there's a subscription. If you need icons, though, like, let's say, these are all royalty free icons and so you can go, oh, I would like a camera, oh, um, and what it's going to do is show me these are lots and lots of icons. Can you use those? Yeah, you can use them, and, um, and so you can, you, and, and they have svg and things. So what I do? Um, it's a royalty free license here, um, but what I? What I do with these? I download the svgs. I then take them into um keynote I do break apart so that so the keynote can see them and then I save them as shapes. So then I just have shapes in my as I'm converting these to shapes all the time, um, and for there's just so many and I used I like this artificial intelligence icon.

This guy's handcuffed his iphone to his wrist, yeah so I mean, there's just you know there's millions of icons in there, and when you're trying to put together a presentation, you want to throw something together a lot of times. It just you know you may go back and do something on your own someday in the future, but you can find almost anything that you need, um for an illustration, uh in here, um, and it's uh relatively inexpensive if you do this kind of thing.

1:57:19 - Leo Laporte
So nice, oh, you do. You do have to subscribe so that you get the real free versions. Okay, yeah, that's not expensive ten, three dollars a month. Paid yearly for icons only. If you want icons and photos, ten dollars a month yeah, very nice.

1:57:36 - Alex Lindsay
All I use is the icons. I don't really use the photos, but but the um but for icons it's pretty, pretty awesome.

1:57:42 - Leo Laporte
The noun project dot com. Jason snell.

1:57:48 - Jason Snell
Pick of the week all right, uh, this is uh. It's going to take a couple steps to get there. I've been traveling. For the last week I went to memphis, not louisville, okay is that the? Elvis presley international that is that it is not.

I forget who it's named for, but it's not anybody you've ever heard of. But I went there. I was not in a fedex box, um, it's a very large airport with a very small portion devoted to human beings and the rest of it is for boxes. Anyway, I went there because that's where saint jude children's research hospital is. It is child cancer, childhood cancer awareness month, um, and my pals at relay and I do a fundraiser every September uh, saint judeorg slash relay, and we did a podcastathon, we did a telethon so you can go on youtube and you can watch all 12 hours of us being live on the internet. That we did last friday. Uh, there's some fun games in there. I I was one of the five hosts who held it together, sort of for 12 hours.

Anyway, I've been doing enough travel that I realized all of us really savvy tech people have figured out a usbc is the future and we're there and it's great. And then you travel and you realize, oh, I would like to charge my iPhone while I'm sitting in the airplane seat and what is it there to charge? It's a USB-A port. Or I'm on a train in the UK, like I was this summer. What is there to charge A USB-A port? I'm in a hotel room. They've got USB ports by by the bed. What are they? They're usb a ports, is what they are everywhere.

So my pick of the week is super dumb. But I bought these cheap things on amazon. Uh, this is. You know you can get whatever these are. Base sailor usb to usbc adapter two pack. But the point is they're relatively cheap. They come in a little Ziploc bag. They are teeny, tiny things. But what they do is they let you take your USB-C plug that you take with you. That is perfectly reasonable that a normal human being would bring with them and quickly adapt it to USB-A just for the purpose of charging. I think it does data, I don't care.

2:00:02 - Leo Laporte
I only really use it for charging on airplanes or in hotel rooms. What?

2:00:04 - Jason Snell
one hopes is, it does not. It does not pass data. You don't even want it exactly, all you want is the power anyway. The nice thing is these things are tiny and you can put them in a little bag, maybe even the bag they come in, slip them in your travel bag and then, when you're sitting on the airplane, thinking, oh, I'm at 40% battery and I'm going to land in two hours, and then I got to get a taxi and all like, just charge, but you need to have these in order to do it. So find yourself, you may have them laying around. If so, get your own little Ziploc bag and put it somewhere in your backpack or whatever. But I just bought these on Amazon and I'm even using their little bag and it's very convenient to have it. So while I was traveling to and from Memphis, I had a big flight delay. On the way home, I was able to keep my phone functional because I had my little adapter into American Airlines seat back USB-A charger.

2:00:55 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's all. Can I add a recommendation here? That those of you who are listening to this right now who think that's a good idea, order them right now also. They're really, really cheap. So order them, like in multiples and the number of times where my I've saved my own butt by simply, at some point that I long forgot, realized that, okay, I've got a backpack that I often carry. I've got like a laptop bag I often carry. Uh, I've got a car. I've got a backpack that I often carry. I've got like a laptop bag I often carry. I've got a car I've got and basically say, okay, so I'll need six copies of this and I will just basically put one in each one of these and I will only remember it's there when I realized, ah, damn it, I wish I hadn't. Hey, I do. Thank you, andy, from 2022. Yeah, do it right now.

2:01:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can buy. I mean I bought a two-pack, you can buy like a four-pack. I just I do recommend if you can just slip them into that little utility pocket of various things. So there's always like get a pen in there, get a little adapter in there, but like USB-A. I think we've reached the point now where tech people assume that it's gone because we've gotten it out of our lives. But boy charging on the road, it's all still USB-A. So get some little tiny adapters, put them in your travel stuff.

2:02:03 - Leo Laporte
And if I can channel Steve Gibson, who will be on this broadcast momentarily get the version that does not pass data, Because you just want to charge. You just want the charge and it's always risky to plug your your uh usb device into a strange usb port.

2:02:21 - Alex Lindsay
Here's one from amazon same price.

2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
Js aux usbc data blocker. It's a to c, that works, same thing, same price.

2:02:30 - Jason Snell
Get it, but it it doesn't pass data, so that's because you don't, you don't, you're not using this for anything other than charging at this point it's usba, unfortunately, is still kind of a universal device charging port.

So get an adapter, be happy, put it, put it with your stuff. We know, we know you are eradicating usba from your lives, right, we know it. We know it. It's the world hotels and airplanes, but so, as a result, I don't keep. I used to keep these around my office. Right now it's just put them in bags so that I've got them when I travel.

2:02:59 - Leo Laporte
That's the only time I need them I did this with uh reading glasses, pens and box cutters. I just buy so many that I saturate the environment so that I never lack for one. And I think I'm gonna do the same thing with these, so that you're just there's always one somewhere in your pocket, in your in your purse and your carry all. There's always one lying around somewhere. But get the, get the ones that uh don't pass data, you get a.

2:03:27 - Jason Snell
You can get a four pack of those for 10 bucks on amazon, like and they're red so that you know that they don't.

2:03:33 - Leo Laporte
because you might accidentally say oh, I should use this for a data connection. You don't want to. That's not going to work. Good tip and boy. Thank you for raising more than $800,000 for St Jude.

2:03:47 - Jason Snell
That is remarkable. It's perilously close to a million. The podcast is fun. I mean it's 12 hours, but I recommend if people are kind of curious.

2:03:54 - Leo Laporte
It's on YouTube, you can watch it.

2:03:56 - Jason Snell
You can scrub through it and find we played a bunch of different games.

2:04:03 - Leo Laporte
We did a version of Hungry Hungry Hippos with human beings. I'm going to get taken down now. Mike Hurley is going to make me go to copyright school.

2:04:09 - Jason Snell
But were we on the air for 12 hours? Yes, friends, we were noon to midnight and we talked to John Syracuse about what whether things were robots or not. We did that for a while. It's just lots of nonsense.

2:04:20 - Leo Laporte
We had a good time, it was great jason and uh, if you ever want to see jason in a hard hat, oh, oh, yeah.

2:04:25 - Jason Snell
Well, Leo, this, you'll love this. We used a sledgehammer to smash a pc and then, when that one was smashed to death, we got another pc out and smashed that one.

2:04:33 - Leo Laporte
Why not? Why not on?

2:04:35 - Jason Snell
brand for us, we're apple people.

2:04:37 - Leo Laporte
So we like hurley, steven hackett, kathy campbell, casey listen, of course, our very own yeah, sledgehammer that thing. Yeah, we had fun it reminds me of, uh the the fun we used to have on our uh annual new year's eve it's kind of like that yeah it's kind of like that yeah, let me tell you that kind of money that's amazing hour 11 of being on live on the internet.

2:04:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Everybody gets a little bit punchy but it's fun you start to understand why jerry lewis relied on the percadam. That's you know you get. There are times when just just undoing your bow tie is not going to do it. You're gonna have a true story jason snell, six colors dot com.

2:05:15 - Leo Laporte
That's the place to go if you want to see all the different shows he's on, including Relay FM, just go to sixcolors.com. Slash Jason. Yes, sir, thank you, we'll give you a nice sharp snappy salute Good to be home.

2:05:27 - Jason Snell
Good to be home, yes.

2:05:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's good to have you back, and thank you again for filling in for me. I really appreciate it possible for me to travel as well. Uh, although instead of raising eighty thousand dollars, I spent eighty thousand dollars, so it's not quite as quite the same. No, I didn't. That's andy and ako from gbh. When does boston call again?

2:05:46 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, thursday at 12 30 eastern time.

2:05:48 - Leo Laporte
Go to wgbhnews.org to stream it live or later yeah, in fact, somebody put a link up to all of your previous episodes, I guess, or something like that. Yeah, so you they're all on the air if you want to, on the on the Internet if you want to listen, mr Alex Lindsay's at office hours dot global. What's coming up at office hours?

2:06:12 - Alex Lindsay
generations. I could use some help. I could use some help, yeah yeah, answering questions there, so that that should be a lot of fun. We just uh, today we had, um, uh, we had the, the founder of Isadora, which is, uh, some, uh, the tool that we actually use to run our entire show. So, uh, Mark Caliglio Caliglio, um, uh, came on and he, uh you know we're talking about, basically, Isadora now has a way to pass not only camera but also data from one place to another. You can actually send DMX controls to lights and so on and so forth, thousands of miles away, all using the new Zoom Well, not the new Zoom, but the year old Zoom API now to make that all work. And so he was kind of outlining that for us today. Andy, not Ihnatko, but Andy Carluccio was on last Thursday talking about the new.

2:06:59 - Leo Laporte
He's been so helpful.

2:07:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and he was talking about some of the new releases that Zoom has had. So we're really excited to see it. If you know, andy could not confirm or deny how it was used. But if you really want to see Zoom at its height and I wasn't working on this, by the way I think is the, and we talked a little bit about it over over last week the, the, the Harris Oprah session was probably the state of the art when it comes to hybrid events. You know, using Zoom, what looks to be Zoom, we can't confirm or deny, so we talked a lot about that. On Monday we kind of broke down that show on office hours or just broke it down at the very beginning of the Q&A. We just spent 10 or 15 minutes kind of digging into okay, this looks like something that looks like tiles, but it isn't quite tiles, and this looks like ISO, but it's not quite ISO, and so we think that that's there, there's something new coming, yeah so we we kind of tore it apart.

It was pretty now.

2:07:57 - Leo Laporte
Now burke is all excited because you said with his adora he could send dmx commands over the internet which are all running off a dmx board.

2:08:06 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I'm in trouble now yeah, exactly well, and you know, one of the possibilities is the potential of, instead of us joining over zoom, you could theoretically join over this, and the advantage there would be potentially that you could control lights. You can pan and tilt cameras. Probably not something you need for the show, but if you're doing a cooking show or a how-to show, having your remote producers being able to take over everything in the studio while you're working would be yeah I'm sure that that's exactly what john ashley and anthony nielsen would love to do.

2:08:32 - Leo Laporte
Right, love to do that for you. Let's zoom in, Leo, don't touch the mixer, whatever you do. Yeah, thank you, alex, thank you andy, thank you jason. Thanks to all of you, especially to our club members, for joining us as you do every week. I'm sorry. It's been a very long break that you've been on since the last time, since jason, but for now I can tell you officially it's time to get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next Tuesday. Bye-bye.