MacBreak Weekly 941 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac break weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Mr Jason Snell all here, as am I. We have lots to talk about. There's a big long vision pro segment today. Don't get your hopes up. We say goodbye. It's actually a sad show. We also say goodbye to I more uh and a visit from a stranger from the East. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust.

This is Twit. This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 941, recorded Tuesday, October 1st 2024. Simply unbelievable. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news, of which we are in the interregnum between the big Apple phone announcement and the putative how do you like that word Apple announcement later this month. That's Alex Lindsay from officehours.global. Hello, Alex, good to be here, good to see you. How are you? I'm gonna be. It's gonna be a little toasty for us bay area folk today yeah, I'm looking for a hard day and then a warm pool hard day and a warm tool at the end of the day at the end of the day

0:01:21 - Alex Lindsay
oh okay, when I finish the, the uh the day on a hot day, yeah, usually the, the thing that I do is try to jump, jump into some water and cool down, so do laps. I'm big, I'll be right up or right down. You're welcome to come over it's, it's uh it's going to be, I might.

0:01:38 - Leo Laporte
It's thinking 78 over 100. Yeah, it's weird because you see all the tourists on the golden gate bridge in the summer time. They think, oh summer, it's august in San Francisco. It's weird because you see all the tourists on the Golden Gate Bridge in the summertime. They think, oh summer, it's August in San Francisco, it's gonna be nice and hot and they're freezing their butts off and then they come in October and they go.

Well, I know it's gonna be cold and it's the hottest time of the year in San Francisco and here's the worst part is we're clearing, we're.

0:01:59 - Alex Lindsay
we decided not to go shopping on Sunday and we're clearing out the, the refrigerator because we're ready for our power to be turned off, Like you know. So they've said that they're doing a preemptive strike on a bunch of the, a bunch of the counties. You might be included in that, I'm sure we are, but Marin is not included yet. But we're, you know. But I was like welcome to California, where we can't keep the lights on hey it's better than being in North Carolina.

0:02:22 - Leo Laporte
We'll talk about that in a little bit. I feel so bad for our friends in that area. Let's say before we do that, let's visit the prison and say hello to Andy and Ako. The sound in the cell is quite good, though, I have to say that I am assisting voluntarily with the investigation.

0:02:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I am forwarding all records, any receipts that I was given by the mayor, any conversations that I was told to delete from the mayor. I just want state, county and federal authorities to know that I'm not one of these people who stands principal on like we all stick together. I'm here to rat out anybody to save my hide. Yeah, and that's a promise.

0:03:10 - Leo Laporte
That's fair, and I'm glad that they only handcuffed one hand to the table, because that shows real trust, I believe.

0:03:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually, that's the great thing about these like outs If you go depending on what borough you give yourself up in. I'm actually in just one leg iron, so I both hands. Oh, not bad, oh not bad yeah. It was a negotiation and you know it's it's give and take, it's given take. You don't get justice without some give and some take.

0:03:33 - Leo Laporte
Also with us. He will be sweating soon in his garage. Jason Snell from sixcolors.com. I have no bits here. Hi, leo, I'm in my garage. Well, you're a refugee from the dead tree printing cult and it must be sad for you to see.

0:03:52 - Jason Snell
I killed a lot of trees in my day.

0:03:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it must be sad for you to see the bad news from Imore this week.

0:04:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Not a dead tree organization, right, actually? See, now they've moved on. They right there, they're actually. See, now they've moved on. They killed all the magazines, so now they have to get the websites one by one.

0:04:09 - Leo Laporte
The next thing isn't it? I I guess yeah, so I lost a non-tech we lost, I mean, they're, they're slowly the best ones are going away.

0:04:16 - Jason Snell
This is it's. It's a tough time in web for me was Rene's, Rene's thing.

0:04:21 - Alex Lindsay
So as soon as Rene left, I'm we're kind of stopped existing for me. Yeah, Rene and Serenity, serenity.

0:04:27 - Jason Snell
So Serenity went to iMore for Macworld, actually right after I left Macworld. It was very funny because we had to like tell them, like Serenity's not staying, you might not want to, you don't count on her to stay, she's not going to stay. And she went to ior and she worked with Rene and then, you know, they both went to um. In my blog post about it, I I said they both went to um larger companies, but imor was, especially when Rene was putting all the work in such a good website. It really he poured his heart and soul into that thing. And then, yeah, there were there were some people who did some nice work afterward, but the I feel like that was a site that benefited hugely from Rene's. Just that guy can't be stopped right.

0:05:13 - Alex Lindsay
His energy level is infinite. Passion Rene's the word passion. Yeah, he's just a passionate guy.

0:05:17 - Jason Snell
And Mobile Nations. Kind of let him do that. But they have. He left, Serenity left, they have new owners. They were bought by future right, which owns lots and lots of websites, and it feels like they are just shutting down a bunch of them that they don't find valuable anymore and so you lose. Uh, I think a non was an on tech, a future too, I think maybe it was. But anyway they're, they still have some like tom's guide, uh, which is still out there.

0:05:44 - Leo Laporte
Future anon was future, but tom's Guide's got to be on the chopping block right.

0:05:50 - Jason Snell
Or they're keeping the ones around that are profitable and I know some people who work there and I think that that one is doing pretty well so far. But yeah, it's too bad. But new owners I don't think they ever really felt that strongly about it and it's a tough act to follow with all the work that Renee and then Serenity did.

0:06:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Renee is one of those people, and Ren too. There's some people that, like they, just have this immense, like diesel engine of creativity and productivity inside them, and you know that they just from time to time they will hook up the drive shaft to one lucky thing, in which case I'm more, or Macworld and then they move on and hook up that drive shaft to another thing where it's like their ambitions to do more and achieve more, not just for themselves but for the people who consume their work, is not to be contained by any one entity for very, very long, long.

0:06:45 - Leo Laporte
so it's no, it's no surprise to me that both of them went on to do what they wanted Rene's creator liaison at youtubecom still does his channel on youtube and, of course, serenity caldwell has disappeared into the bowels of apple computer as many, many do. This is a futures, a website.

Meet the brands pushing future forward, and already they've taken down and on tech and and, uh well, tom's guy to PC gamer are the, it looks like really the only two cyber. Well, there's Tech Radar. Okay, so there's three computer titles or tech titles. I imagine they'll boil it down to one and just get all the advertising going through there, unless yeah, now I don't know homes and gardens. Um, it's pretty wild too, because this is a magazine publishing company.

0:07:29 - Jason Snell
They uh in the from the uk. They also published mac addict and mac life in the us uh, but over time you know the media industry keeps changing and it's, it's tough out there, it's it's really tough out there, especially if you're a smaller player. If you're not doing, you know, very focused, member supported stuff, like I am, and that Andy is going to do soon, and or you're doing volume, huge volume. If you fall in between those things, you kind of can't make it right now and that's the tragedy of it.

0:07:58 - Leo Laporte
Here's Serenity's post on Instagram. Poring went out tonight for my old pal iMore, which announced it on Wednesday it would cease a publication. Uh, she's Saturn on. Uh, yeah, these are these old I'm more uh things. Yeah, I think. So there she is.

0:08:14 - Andy Ihnatko
And, of course, one, if you, especially if you, look at your her Instagram like, one thing for me is constant quality content for people who need to train for roller derby like she just yeah, her roller derby stuff is still very active, isn't it, wow?

and she and she and she made, and she made it onto team canada for for the world's uh, this year too. So, yeah, oh, that's exciting. Once again, a drive shaft of just gotta do it, gotta do it, gotta do it, gotta do it. What I want to do, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do that. It's like wow, I feel ashamed of everything I did so lazy, I know, I know.

0:08:48 - Leo Laporte
Here's Rene's uh post uh he also. He says it was never just a bunch of database entries on a server farm that could be frozen in carbonite and forgotten. It was a community that will be remembered uh, and he also posts a bunch of wonderful photos. There's there's tim cook uh of him and the imor team, johnny ive yep, there's. There's a. There's a fun dinner I'd like to have been.

0:09:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah, georgia dow and her husband yeah, yeah, it's a good one anyway.

0:09:18 - Leo Laporte
Um, it's, uh, it's a sad day for apple lovers, it's sad this is.

0:09:23 - Jason Snell
This is a I mean, look I I. I went to journalism school in the early 90s.

0:09:31 - Leo Laporte
You were so on top of it.

0:09:33 - Jason Snell
And I taught there later at that same journalism school, UC Berkeley. I didn't know, that? What did you teach journalism, New media at the journalism?

0:09:42 - Alex Lindsay
school, no kidding.

0:09:42 - Jason Snell
So it was literally like was it was the guys who were the editors of pc world and then, when they left, a couple of us from mac world took it over and did it for a little while and like a part of it was I mean, that part was fun. But like, also there's a question like do you want to be in this? Are you sure you want to be in this business? Because it was very clear even then, like I was publishing things on the internet when I was still an undergraduate, so like it was very clear that the internet was where it was going. Um, but all the jobs were in traditional media and you could see the reckoning coming. And now we're in that second wave of reckoning where it's not the uh, it's not the print uh infrastructure magazines and newspapers it's the, it's the website infrastructure, because of the changing way that advertising works. And there's never been a better time to be a small organization or a solo person and build a media empire. You actually can do it and I have.

0:10:41 - Alex Lindsay
You know it's been my job for 10 years.

0:10:44 - Jason Snell
I could do it, you did it. There are lots of other people.

0:10:47 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for putting it in the past tense. I said start.

0:10:51 - Jason Snell
I said start right, you started it and I started it, you know next Sunday is our 1000th episode of Twit and even even though the you know, podcasting versus video versus YouTube versus TikTok even though the podcasting versus video versus YouTube versus TikTok but like being able to be a creator on the internet, whether you're a huge empire like what Marcus Brownlee has built, for example, or whether it's just me in my garage, the fact is you can do stuff like that. But the trade-off is that the kind of more traditional large organizations where people could kind of learn their trade and come in at an entry level and then build themselves up within a larger group with a support system, that era is fading away and it's unfortunate because that's a great way to train and to learn what there is to do. There are drawbacks, because you are young and you want to strike in new directions and I mean I went to a magazine and said the internet is the future and they're like slow your roll kid. But it was also a place to learn, and learn in a little bit of a safety net where there are other people there to say don't do it that way, and that's now. It's just kind of a free for all. But the trade-off and that's why I'm not the old magazine guy, just my day we just grow it in the dough and put on a magazine once a month.

0:12:07 - Andy Ihnatko
You never applied wax to the back of a stat, have you?

0:12:20 - Jason Snell
Exactly, and podcasts and get ads and build a membership plan and take stuff, take different CMSs and membership systems off the shelf and build a whole business. That's just kind of little old me. So there's incredible opportunity here too. But it is a change. It's a huge change, and seeing a big name like I'm more go away, it's just a reminder that you know not only is like nothing in for is forever, but like media, things that you think are like solid aren't.

0:12:48 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, that's the bottom line and I think that when we look at the, where the market's going, I mean, I think all the articles seem to start to point towards things that a lot of us that have been doing this for a while going hey, you might want to pay attention to youtube, you might want to pay attention to youtube. You might want to pay attention to youtube because the uh, because you pay attention to YouTube, because the uh, because you know you talk about all the streamers and everything else. You know there's a report, I think, that came out that YouTube's, like you know, not 10% of the of the mark of the whole market. Um, and the you know the. The thing that that is the reason that that's so interesting is not because of YouTube itself, but the fact that there's all these creators that don't. You know, when I do a shoot, sometimes it's $25,000 a day, or or one unit of media is a quarter million dollars or a half a million dollars, the you know we have YouTubers that are making. You know they're happy to make 150, 250, $350,000 a year.

You know total, you know from from what they're doing, doing what they love to do on a very vertical market into something very specific. I mean crocheting or doing something else, and they're able to find that, to your point, Jason, they're able to find that market that is generating enough revenue to do what they really love to do and that is a really lethal market to compete with. Of all these individuals digging into this vertical that they happen to be really interested in and making enough money to live, and not trying to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and not trying to find a big investor and not trying to do any of those things. They're just like happy that they're making a living doing that thing, and that is, you know, the and all these tools have made that available. And now, like when someone asked me, like how to go shoot, and I'm like, well, there's a bunch of cameras that I shoot with, but you can do a lot with an iPhone or a Samsung, you know. At the same time, I don't.

0:14:30 - Leo Laporte
I understand what you're saying about YouTube. I think it is unfortunate because YouTube is essentially parasitic. All the money, most of the money, goes to Google, not to creators, and we promote the fact that there are some very wealthy creators out of it, but a lot of people work their ass off on youtube and never make anything at all, and and google is the one making all the money on uh youtube.

0:14:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I mean, I think the, the creators that are doing well, are typically. Youtube is an accelerator. They're not. Yes, you, most of them said something brilliant on sunday.

0:14:58 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we were talking about somebody starting a podcast. He said he better find a way to accelerate it, something that can go viral, some sort of recommendation engine for discovery? And it's really true. That's what youtube and tiktok and instagram have essentially become is discovery engines.

0:15:15 - Jason Snell
But you, but your point is right, Alex, you better have another way of making money yeah, really smart creators that I know have patreons or they have like a member plan or some other thing plus, it's not wise to just put all your eggs in that basket, right? Because? Because they change the rules all the time, they change the algorithm all the time people thought facebook, look at.

0:15:36 - Leo Laporte
In fact, this is one of the things that killed newspapers and and print. Look at. Everybody said, oh, facebook's gonna make us huge, it's a video, yeah and uh.

0:15:44 - Jason Snell
And then facebook said, yeah, we're not gonna do news anymore, just gonna said yeah, we're not going to do news anymore, just going to kill. Yeah, we're going to take all your uh classifying writing on somebody else's platform.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
You're not doing your your own thing, so so pay attention to what you know. Alex really gets credit for starting this. Even before we started twit, you were doing content independently in the early 2000s, yeah, before yeah, I mean, we were, there was nowhere to put it.

0:16:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean it was. You know, almost everything was a really a forum and we would post up. We were using, remember, hot, remember it was, uh, uh, hotwire, is that right? Hot, yeah, hotwire, hotwire, to distribute everything. It's like a peer-to-peer solution. That was mostly used for wares and oh no, limewire.

0:16:22 - Leo Laporte
No, no, it wasn't limewire, it was a publication no, no, hot wire.

0:16:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it was. Uh, there was this.

I can't, I can't even remember what it was, but it was like it was pre pre, it was a precursor to bit, so so anyway, it gives us how old. But we were passing all these big files back and forth and we were building our bpns and everything else and right, you know, at the time when we were doing it it was you know, we were able to charge 50 bucks a month. I mean, it was a hundred thousand dollars. Hotline says Stormwolf, hotline, yeah, hotline, and it was a way that we were able to. That's the only way we could afford to move, you know, gigabytes of information around between them, between the members, and so so it was a really you know.

So a lot of this stuff is, you know, because I always felt like membership was going to be the thing that you always. You know membership and you know selling things specifically or or doing this or accelerating some other business. Most of the most of the stuff I've done over the last, you know, many years, the work that I do, you know, publicly, accelerates a different, completely different business.

0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
Right, you have to have something like that I think.

0:17:23 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's so absolutely every, every, every creator on YouTube that I really really like that has eventually had to do like two or three videos in a row about hey, I bought a new house, here's a tour. Oh boy, I've got a new tile in my new house. Like it is a channel about crocheting, but for a month it becomes about the new house. Like it is a. It is a, a a channel about crocheting, but for a month it becomes about the new house. Every single channel that has like done that is one that has like, built, like, uh in show sponsorships, like, and now here's a message from blah blah. So, yeah, youtube is not there.

0:17:57 - Alex Lindsay
It's never been about sponsorships or about for me, it's never been about sponsorships or about um it's promoting other business you know, or or or pixel core or like.

All the business we got was all from those things. Right, it was from, you know, directly or indirectly, from being on shows and so on and so forth. And so I think that the folks that understand that model um, I know a lot of folks that aren't you know they're. They're making money selling books. They're making money selling not just patreon but like actual goods. Um is where you know. That's where henry makes it. Yeah, exactly so that's where the revenue comes from.

0:18:29 - Leo Laporte
Let me give him a plug because, uh, so, henry, it's a perfect example, henry, my son, salt hank, who's an internet uh chef and watched all those youtube videos very, I, I think, probably serendipitously, he was lucky started doing what he calls asmr cooking on tick tock and tick tock, just you know. I mean, you can say, well, he carefully cultivated the algorithm, blah, blah, what, for whatever reason, the algorithm promoted him, brought him to millions of fans. He was smart. He then moved to instagram, but in either case, has he ever made money from he's also on youtube, from youtube shorts or youtube or instagram, or tick tock even. But he was smart and he started selling salt because he's salt hank and that's done well. In fact, I should disclaimer, I'm an investor in the salt company. Uh, he's gonna be selling pickles too, by the way. They're just delicious. Uh, saltloversclubcom, if you're interested.

0:19:22 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, this part of this, part of my break brought to you by, it is really in fact he's going to be.

0:19:26 - Leo Laporte
He was on Twitter on Sunday. He's going to be on Twitter, twig on it tomorrow, because he his cookbook comes out today and that is actually exactly what you were saying. It's not he. I think he might have a patreon. I doubt he does.

0:19:40 - Jason Snell
It's really about selling products, but it's yeah, but it's different revenue lines and building a business around it never gave him anything but again to bring us back around traditional media for a second. What I was going to say is that this is what you have to do now is there's no framework, there's no structure. It used to be. You would work and they'd pay you a salary and the business would build a merch.

0:20:02 - Leo Laporte
You know they would sell products in the discord I told Rene we were talking about I'm uh, and and now that's it's all on you, right?

0:20:11 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's sort of like the freedom is it's always you. Uh, the scary part is you have to build whatever your business is going to be, um, whether it's salt hank or it's six colors or whatever it is.

0:20:23 - Leo Laporte
Can we get Rene into the uh, into the conversation, or get hired by YouTube. That's the other thing you could do. Or.

0:20:28 - Alex Lindsay
Apple and again the other side. I mean in the creative world. They don't call it starving artists for nothing.

0:20:37 - Leo Laporte
You know like this is not new to YouTube. Yeah, you play on a subway platform for years.

0:20:40 - Alex Lindsay
Hoping, I mean, like you know. But discovery is the big problem uh. Alex really, but it was always, it's always been, a big problem.

0:20:48 - Leo Laporte
I mean it's always been.

0:20:49 - Alex Lindsay
There was a we used to be AM radio, there used to be cable TV, you know, but there, but even then, even then you have artists. I mean, I, you know, I was a music director for an alternative rock station, no-transcript. You see bands. You know, we would often tell bands you're going to need one person in the music industry that believes in you or you're never going to make it. So it wasn't even an algorithm, it was like, literally, luck of the draw.

You know the there's a great story about Coldplay's um uh PR manager. She's still their, her, their PR manager. But she believed in them. She worked in a business and she spent years promoting them while they were playing in little little bars and little places and no one wanted to sign them and she just kept on working it and working it, working it, until suddenly they, you know, took off and you know, now they're obviously one of the biggest bands. But there was, without her, they probably would have dissolved. You know, like, like, into nothing. You know, like, and that's what you feel like.

A lot of these bands are inevitable, or a lot of artists are inevitable, but they're usually not. You know, like it is. There's many great artists that just never, never get out of the gate because they, because they didn't have that right person to jump onto the you know that to jump onto the bandwagon and the algorithm I think is actually way fairer than the right person. You know like to, to see your, to see the stuff that you have there, and and so. So I think that the you know, I think that as creators, it has been, this has been the challenge for ever, like you know, like it's you know from you know, all the way back to people walking around with the little um, yeah, that's, that's the part of it that's part of advice that I can't give right.

0:22:35 - Jason Snell
They're like how do you do this? And it's like well, you've got no one knows, you got to build an audience.

I mean, I I will say, the only reason that I have my my uh life, that I have now, is because my face was in a picture at the front of a magazine that went to several hundred thousand people for a few years and because I wrote cover stories and things like that. My name was in that magazine for like a decade. Before that Nobody knew who I was, but then my face was on a column and everybody was like oh, it's you. And because it was like a parasocial kind of thing where people wanted to see somebody's face. And this is in the day before. I could have just had like a YouTube thing. And then I did start doing videos and we started doing podcasts and then there was a recognizable voice. But like that was the thing that allowed me to get there.

0:23:17 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's the challenge is now you kind of have to rely on an algorithm or something like that Surviv algorithm or something like that, and just make it work. Survivor's bias is a big deal. You approach somebody who is successful, or at least self-sustaining at this, and say what are your tips, what are your tricks, and they can tell you. Here is the path that I. Here is the sequence of improbable and unpredictable events and the decisions that I made at each one of them. Not you can't follow someone's path through the snow. You're following someone's trying to follow someone's path through water.

0:23:48 - Leo Laporte
It can't close behind them got a bachelor's degree from cu colorado, uh boulder in uh broadcast journalism and I said uh, I don't know if that you know. It's good that you know how to do a b cutting off of beta cam.

0:24:04 - Jason Snell
That's it. Your degree doesn't matter for most of these jobs, so much as it is Did you learn something? I mean, that's one of the true things is did you learn? The learning is the important part.

0:24:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, he learned a hustle. I think that's kind of the thing you really need to learn these.

0:24:17 - Jason Snell
I'm glad I went to journalism school because it taught me like I didn't want to do TV news it TV news Right. It made connections that got me my job at Mac user, which started me down the path to do tech journalism Like it had great value but I already knew how to write news stories and that, and the master's degree doesn't matter at all.

0:24:31 - Rene Ritchie
I mean everyone.

0:24:32 - Alex Lindsay
I need a possible man. We got a very important guest joining us right now.

0:24:35 - Leo Laporte
We're going to take a break. I was going to do that, but we're going to take a very important visitor from the East will join us.

Okay, hang in there, you're watching I recognize, sorry, go ahead, you may recognize him. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. This episode of MacBreak Weekly, brought to you by Experts Exchange. This actually really ties in to what we've been talking about. It's old school humans, not AI, answering your tech questions. Imagine that a network of trustworthy, talented tech professionals with very good will and a real desire to help, giving you industry insights and advice, people who are actually using the products in your stack. You're not paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support, which is often just some goon with a binder. You're not paying for an AI to generate incorrect, specious answers. You're getting human contact. It's a community, a tech community for people tired of the AI sellout Experts Exchange. They are ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence.

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0:28:51 - Rene Ritchie
of course your mic is muted.

0:28:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, of course my mic is muted look at that.

0:28:57 - Leo Laporte
Hey, still simpatico, we're still on the same page, Rene. Yeah, of course you know how it came up. We were talking about the, the end of imor. So, yeah, we showed your Instagram. We showed Serenity's Instagram as well.

0:29:07 - Rene Ritchie
So many amazing people went through there.

0:29:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, georgia, dow who? Else?

0:29:11 - Rene Ritchie
Yeah, lori Gill.

0:29:13 - Leo Laporte
It's funny.

0:29:14 - Rene Ritchie
So many of them ended up at Apple.

0:29:15 - Jason Snell
It's remarkable we're going to lock you in that one Weird.

0:29:18 - Rene Ritchie
Fitness Plus. Ali Kazmouha is on Vision OS, serenity caldwell is the evangelist team and laurie gill is on the uh the apple youtube support channel.

0:29:30 - Leo Laporte
That's amazing. How are you doing these days? We never get to see you because you're so busy being a creator liaison yeah, I've been traveling.

0:29:38 - Rene Ritchie
I've I was joking, but it's not a joke. I've been traveling every two weeks, uh, since may, wow, which is a lot of fun, but a lot what I keep seeing on.

I keep seeing him on Instagram on stages next to awesome people, so it's like, okay, he's doing the do, he's doing the Rene thing, like getting people excited To try to reduce anxiety, because the whole point of a liaison program is that Google has seen this heartless machine and really there's a lot of people and a lot of like things that you can do that give you a lot of control over your destiny, and we wanted to really help people understand how the algorithm works, so I did like a mini world tour, including India, which was a lot of fun.

0:30:19 - Leo Laporte
Wow, that must have been awesome.

0:30:22 - Rene Ritchie
Yeah, there's so many. Like the creator culture is so vibrant in India. It's it's incredible.

0:30:28 - Leo Laporte
So do you still do your thing? I mean, are you are youtubecom slash Renee Ritchie, Are you still doing stuff?

0:30:34 - Rene Ritchie
Theoretically I haven't had much time and also like I am of. I am of the Andy Nako, Jason Snell era of journalism where I think, like, the ethics and church of state are really like important, and Google touches on so many aspects of technology that I don't want to either have an unfair advantage or also be seen as bias, even though, like, my opinions haven't changed. When I started posting the same opinions, people thought that they were biased, so I was very careful at that point.

0:31:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, I can imagine that if you just have the whim to say, oh, I'm just so tired of that brick wall, stone wall in my background, I think I'll go to a backdrop. So many creators can say ooh, the YouTuber creator has switched to a backdrop. He must know something about what gets recommended.

0:31:14 - Leo Laporte
That must be pressure. We're going to get some backdrops.

0:31:17 - Rene Ritchie
Yeah, yeah, no more brick. No, is that pressure.

0:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Do you feel pressure? Uh, be the standard bearer for all this. No, no. There's so many people like Marquez Brownlee and others who are just really setting the standards for, for what YouTube also like quality is.

0:31:33 - Rene Ritchie
Like quality isn't um production value, like I think that's one of the mistakes a lot of people make and they assume like if you're 8k you're better. And there's people like uh, charlie, who's moist critical um, penguin Z on on on youtube. He. He posts three times a day with the original iphone earbud uh on a webcam um, and he gets like millions of views three times a day just for talking to people and people just have a connection with him and that's what quality is. Quality is a feeling so it's who.

0:31:59 - Leo Laporte
It's who you are, isn't it?

0:32:01 - Rene Ritchie
yeah, yeah yeah it's true he does not have the best looking background I've uh, I've ever seen no, but like, if you look, it's like three videos a day and each of them gets. That's amazing news. And yeah, look at this 16 million subscribers.

0:32:16 - Leo Laporte
That's yeah, that's incredible. And what does he do? He just talks he.

0:32:20 - Rene Ritchie
He just talks about whatever's happening. He talks about movies and about drama and about weird things in culture and ludwig does the same thing. Mogul male ludwig's uh non-streaming channel is doing, I think, better than his streaming channel where he just talks to people.

Wow, it's powerful that's like uh radio it's like I think we're seeing like this, like this incredible culture, like there's this, this guy whose wife films him like somewhere in the like, in like the texarkana region, where he just says, like I'm going to explain to you how to be an adult, and it's like a 30 minute video of him sitting in a field telling you how to be an adult, and people are just like Sam Sulek has his microphone on his hat and he drives to the gym for 30 minutes a day and tells you what he's going to do in the gym and hundreds of thousands of people listen to it and it's very lo-fi and very like almost um analog and people love it Rene, I know you're very busy.

0:33:06 - Leo Laporte
I know because we can never get you on the show. I'm so glad you called in. I know you. In fact. You know I was in montreal last week but I got covid so I didn't call you. Yeah, so I flew out like instantly. But uh, next time I'm in town I will definitely get together with you and georgia and you live in a beautiful part of the world I just love much.

0:33:26 - Rene Ritchie
I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, steve Trang, I hope you're feeling better.

0:33:29 - Leo Laporte
Steve Trang, I feel fine. Yeah, I have tested negative since Friday, although I'm still pretty exhausted. So I didn't want to get you sick, but it was so. It's so nice to see you virtually. Thank you for being here.

0:33:41 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you for the work you do.

0:33:42 - Leo Laporte
I think that's an important, really important message. It's not the production value, it's who you are, it's the content. Yeah, I love it.

0:33:51 - Rene Ritchie
Yeah, I think one of the other things that's, I talk to creators all the time and you look like the biggest media company in the world Disney, biggest franchises, marvel and Star Wars and they're having a real hard time getting views and they don't have any algorithm to blame it on. So there is an algorithm, absolutely, but a lot of it, so much of it is just making like what you've done, which is make that connection to the audience, and I think the excellent point.

0:34:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think Rick Beato's most recent video I believe it's the most recent video talking about why David Gilmour is not on his channel and the fact that you showing that an interview with him with Sting had three and a half million views, but when he's on Jimmy Fallon it's 750,000. When it's on somebody else it's lower and it's because he's geeky about it. He knows everything about what he's going to talk about and people who are really into it are going to know to that specific place where they're really going to be able to nerd out, and I think that that's something that's the real to me. That's the real power of YouTube is, um, you know, uh.

The other one that showed up for me that I think that I've been talking about a little bit as Veritasium spent I don't know, is it 20 minutes talking about QR codes, which I am in heaven hour. It was like a half an hour of QR codes, of just how they're designed and how they're built, and and I'm like you can't get this on broadcast, you can't, you can't, you can't get that on broadcast of 30 minutes dedicated to all the geeky, of exactly how QR codes work, explained impeccably with great graphics.

0:35:17 - Leo Laporte
It's very clear that we're seeing the end of the line for broadcast for a cable, for broadcast for uh cable, for streaming channels, for even for the movie industry is struggling like crazy. Um, and yeah, it's all going to YouTube. So, Rene, I want you to get a raise, okay, and? And? I would also like to ask you next time there's no Apple news, like today, would you please come on the show? We'd love to have you.

0:35:43 - Rene Ritchie
I will be on as often as I possibly can.

0:35:45 - Leo Laporte
I know I know you're very, very busy. Great to see you. Renee richie, youtube creator liaison. Youtubecom. Slash Rene and uh, yeah, we're here to kind of say goodbye to I'm more. It's kind of a sad thing. All right, we can't get serenity on. I don't think apple will let her run.

0:36:00 - Jason Snell
Nope, nope especially I can't even get them to let her play d d with me anymore, because, oh man, it's not you sell your soul to be an apple employee, don't you?

0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
you kind of have to.

0:36:14 - Rene Ritchie
You disappear inside the monolith what if you record in spatial video? Would they? Like we did a show.

0:36:20 - Leo Laporte
Did you know we did a vision pro show last show in the studio we did envision pro I heard Alex talking about it extensively. It was magnetic I don't think we got huge numbers or anything but it was good, it was the first, you know it's a fun thing to do.

0:36:35 - Alex Lindsay
It's the first thing to do a lot of times. You know, the very first one of of things, um, doesn't necessarily. I mean. Only a couple people heard Alexander graham bell and you, we're right up there with them, you know, maybe.

0:36:48 - Leo Laporte
Renee, did you buy a vision pro?

0:36:50 - Rene Ritchie
I, I, I have this problem right now, where I'm moving around so much and Apple insists on you being at a certain place to take delivery and having stock in a store or being someplace to take delivery is proven.

0:37:01 - Leo Laporte
I wish.

0:37:01 - Rene Ritchie
I'd known that.

0:37:01 - Leo Laporte
I would have bought one for you and brought it to Montreal oh no, I appreciate that, but the US ones like for some odd reason you wouldn't allow Canadian accounts on the US ones and all my stuff is in the Canadian account.

0:37:11 - Rene Ritchie
And Apple, like they made it really hard to like region liberate like they did.

0:37:17 - Leo Laporte
The home, like the home pod was fine, but um, yeah, rene you're a little grayer than you were when you were on the show on a regular basis. I hope that's not youtube making you get gray.

0:37:27 - Rene Ritchie
I hope that's just uh life well-lived he is, uh, he is absolutely terrific.

0:37:34 - Leo Laporte
On on short form oh, we're so proud of him. Yeah, yeah, today his cookbook comes out, Rene, uh, look for it. Salt hank, a five napkin situation on sale on Amazon.

0:37:44 - Rene Ritchie
I had an amazing experience on YouTube headquarters and they said hey, I have this friend. He's a cooking creator. I wonder if you've ever heard of him. They said it's Salt Hank. I said wait a minute.

0:37:52 - Leo Laporte
I told him to contact you. Did he ever get a hold of you? I don't know. Yeah, I don't think so.

0:38:06 - Rene Ritchie
You probably don't do them.

0:38:07 - Leo Laporte
It's I don't scale, but like I'm always happy to talk to you, yes, all right, Rene, so great to see you, we love you.

0:38:09 - Rene Ritchie
Thank you so much, and we miss you.

0:38:11 - Leo Laporte
You've been a great part of MacBreak Weekly for so many years. Uh, have a great day you too.

0:38:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I appreciate it take care Rene richie everybody hey, that's why I interrupt you before the commercial break. I just heard his, his, his showed up.

0:38:27 - Alex Lindsay
I know he showed up like.

0:38:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I remember that background.

0:38:31 - Jason Snell
I'm serious Endorphins rushed in, I envision him inside like the YouTube machine and then he pops in and it's like, oh, it's Renee's brick wall in.

0:38:40 - Alex Lindsay
Montreal. He's just back where he always has been.

0:38:43 - Jason Snell
I did, I admit I did text him the Zoom link. I just was like here, rene, just come.

0:38:46 - Leo Laporte
We all did. I think he got bombarded with the Zoom link trying to get him in.

0:38:51 - Jason Snell
That's good stuff.

0:38:52 - Leo Laporte
That's good stuff, I'm glad we could get him on. It's too bad. It was a sad occasion but I thought we could get him on.

0:38:58 - Jason Snell
But I mean, I love talking about that stuff with him though, because that is the past and the future.

0:39:02 - Leo Laporte
He's so inspiring.

0:39:03 - Jason Snell
Past and the future of media right there.

0:39:08 - Leo Laporte
Tomorrow, on this Week in Google, we are going to talk about the parasitic nature of Google and YouTube, but we'll save that for tomorrow. Well, with respect to Rene Ritchie.

0:39:18 - Andy Ihnatko
That's classy, that's classy.

0:39:21 - Leo Laporte
We're going to get after the YouTubers then. No, it isn't parasitic, it's an opportunity. I mean, I think that's a really important thing to understand. It's an opportunity. It is not a be-all and end-all. It doesn't you know, I guess for Veritasium it might be.

0:39:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Just like any job, like 9 to 5 job, it's like you have to remember that this job is here to serve you and you need to evaluate what your needs are, where you want to go and what this job can do to get you there. And if you say people who think that I'm going to get onto youtube, I'm going to commit to it, I'm going to invest in it and I'm going to make a lot of money on off of youtube, they're probably going to get their heart broken. But if they have like, here's what I want to achieve, here's how youtube can contribute to that. Even if you fail, you'll create a lot of good stuff and you'll have a lot of fun.

0:40:05 - Alex Lindsay
I mean somebody asked. I think we've talked about this before, but someone asked Marques Brownlee what the secret was, and he goes. Well, just remember that the first 100 videos no one's gonna watch, which is good.

0:40:13 - Leo Laporte
That answers that issue that we were talking about, which is you don't have anywhere to learn.

0:40:18 - Alex Lindsay
You don't have anywhere to be bad well, a lot of it you can take down. You know like a lot of people take. No, he's left almost everything up, so you can go all the way back.

But it's so cute to see him as a kid doing his first reviews they're still up, and it's not by accident that a lot of youtubers are in their early or mid-20s, because they started when they were 10, 12, 14. They didn't have overhead and so they were able to just sit there and play with ideas and work out what they were going to do and bail a lot without a lot of consequence. And I think that's the harder part is to turn it into a business. But I think that it's. I mean, you're always paying a big to the person who has the platform, whatever that is. It's been that way forever, you know, and it's just a matter of whether you can take advantage of it or not, and some people have figured it out. It's just a matter of whether you can take advantage of it or not, and some people have figured it out. I mean, you know there's a lot of these YouTubers have a pretty big staff. You know to do what they're doing. I mean they definitely don't. It's funny because my staff is shrinking.

0:41:14 - Leo Laporte
It's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. You know you can spend a lot of money on staff. Just a word of warning. I know that well the uh. If I added up the millions of dollars, it's probably 10 20 million dollars. We've spent over 20 years on staff, uh, but I don't think there's any way I could have done it without them.

0:41:36 - Jason Snell
So there's you miss your opportunities, so you choose to take them or not, and and that, and you've got collaborate. I've got collaborators and a few people who I paid to do some stuff but, like marquez brownlee, could have stayed much smaller and not had staff, but I think he made a wise decision. How?

0:41:53 - Leo Laporte
many people work for mr beast. I think it's like a thousand or something right?

0:41:56 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, I think it's. It's in the hundreds, between 100 and 200, I think amazing by the way, Rene had can't leave without a final thought.

0:42:06 - Leo Laporte
He posted it in the discord. He said just fyi, if you make consistent, evergreen content, you can do very well with ad sense revenue. Good point, that's a google platform. If you're really good at connecting, you can do very well with fan funding, memberships and patreon, and certainly we do that. If you do a lot of topical content, you can do very well with sponsorships. That's the problem with topical. The stuff we do is not evergreen, right? Nobody's going to go back and watch, except for maybe nostalgia purposes. But not very many people will do that, watch old mac break weeklies. So sponsorships, advertising, are kind of vital for us find what works for you and your audience.

He says uh, I should, by the way, also say a special thought, a shout out to so many of our viewers and listeners who are in Hurricane Harleen victims, many of them in North Carolina. Quippy is watching. He has no power, he is watching, he is there. Uh, he was talking about the mountain towns, like the beautiful ashville, north carolina. But so many mountain towns are disconnected from the world and apparently this story from nbc news uh of, as of monday, 370 of north carolina's cell sites are out because of a lack of power. 10 of or fewer of the cell sites are fully functioning in Avery, mitchell and Yancey counties. So not only do they not have power, many of these people have no connectivity at all.

0:43:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and just and that's tragic, and that's where the satellite messaging from the new iPhones and soon to be, android phones. You know, we I made, I made fun of, like all the videos that apple does about. Oh wow, I was kayaking up in the mountains down a trail on dirt and then I fell off a cliff, but thank God I had SOS services. It's easy to forget that disasters of smaller scale than this wipe out local services. You've got about a day, day and a half, before the battery backups on your cell towers start to degrade, and now you're absolutely stuck, and so this is not a trivial feature. This is one of the most important features that Apple has ever put into a phone.

0:44:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah, a lot of reports out there about people in the Asheville area and other parts of the mountains of North Carolina which were so hard hit that for the first time, they were using those satellite features which, with iOS 18, you can send text messages just straight up, imessages or whatever, not just a kind of an emergency SOS, you can actually send texts, and people were doing that from the scene to let people know what was going on and where they were.

And the more people who get that stuff and the more phones have it, so that you have that ability to connect, even when I mean very different situation. But a few years ago we had the power shutdowns here in northern california and you know, after a few hours the cell towers all died and you could. You know there were like there was wi-fi at the whole outside the whole foods which was running on a generator. But basically it's that idea that, uh, if you out of touch, how do you get back in touch? And having those satellite features in iPhone, what is it? 14, 15, 16, and then now the text message feature that's in iOS 18 gives you access and that's great. These features need to be on as many devices as possible because of moments like this.

0:45:25 - Leo Laporte
Doesn't the new Pixel also have that? I think it does.

0:45:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, Qualcomm started shipping chips that have that feature built in, and I think the new version of Android supports it. Of course, not all hardware supports it yet, but that's going to be. But given that all the flagships are using Qualcomm's best chipset, it'll be par for the course.

0:45:41 - Jason Snell
Probably over the next few years you're going to see a lot of mobile carriers making deals with satellite constellations.

0:45:47 - Leo Laporte
For instance with Starlink.

0:45:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's already starting to happen where you, if you're out of traditional cell tower range, there will be, at least optionally, a way to get data from a satellite, and maybe slow, but at least get data from a satellite when you're out. So this is going to change over time, I think, in a positive way. But terrible things like this are good reminders of why, how vitally important it is for people to stay in contact, and we expect it now, and you know it's for calls for help, for calls for rescue, for people who are, in this case, were, trapped with water all around them and being able to reach somebody and say you know I need help and our tech can help. I also wanted to mention I don't know if you saw this story, but the mountains of North Carolina outside Asheville are actually the best place in the world to mine quartz, which is used in quartz crucibles which are used to make semiconductor chips, which is used in quartz crucibles which are used to make semiconductor chips, and it's actually an incredibly important part of the global semiconductor industry.

We think a lot about how, like Taiwan Semiconductor, they're making all their chips primarily in Taiwan, trying to get some of that in the US, but a US product. This quartz from North Carolina is absolutely vital, a vital link in the creation of semiconductors and they've got certainly a backlog to build these quartz crucibles that are used in the production process. But somebody sent an article out after the hurricane hit that was a few months old. That was about like people, little do people know that there are these two roads to these two places in north carolina out in the woods that if they were disrupted would disrupt the global computer chip supply chain. And they were disrupted by this hurricane. So who knows?

0:47:39 - Leo Laporte
what the next hour in our discord says spruce pine. Yep, tiny, tiny town of just a thousand people has the purest quartz in the world.

0:47:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah I did, I did. I did look at this this morning. Um, after this start, people started to talk about this. It's very, very true, it is like the best source available. Uh, if you're reading articles about, you should buy stuff now. There's going to be constrained stuff in the pipeline soon. No, because there are other sources of it and, as Jason said, there's stockpiles.

But yeah, this is part of a global problem, as internationalization causes industries to really just coalesce around one region of the world and sometimes even one plant. There was even in Apple's decision to try to diversify. There was a big fire in India at one of the plants that's making iPhone 16s, and so now there's some speculation about how much contribution to the global supply chain is that one plant making and is that going to again constrain stuff? But how many times have we had that problem where a storage plant got hit by a hurricane and for six to eight months, if you needed a piece of large storage, you're going to be paying two or three times as much for it because they're not making them Okay, and so we don't have our supply chains diversified enough to be able to withstand a crisis.

Again, before I pant off, I'm sorry, I don't know how to put it, but my heart is kind of broken by a lot of the pictures and a lot of the stories that are coming out, because we're now starting to hear here's the last pictures of a family that they managed to get out, before the house that they were awaiting rescue on top of collapsed and the family drowned. Here is the community that is just completely gone and it's just hard to think of anything else and I hope that as a nation we're just focused on this. There's a vice presidential debate tonight. It's going to be wacky hearing that guy try to think on his feet without being fed what he has to say. I'm sorry for politicizing this, but okay, I'm trying to get my mind off of bad things I've seen. But I mean I hope that we don't lose our focus, that the numbers are just going to go up and up and up as waters recede and we can finally get relief efforts in there.

0:50:10 - Leo Laporte
It is so heartbreaking when you see people posting on social media uh, has anybody heard from his family, and so forth. Here's Tim Cook. Uh, today on Twitter, we're thinking of all those facing the catastrophic aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Apple will be making a donation to help with relief efforts on the ground, and I'm sure Apple will. Uh, they it's. It's actually kind of cool. They're not saying how much. I'm sure it will be a large check. I'm sure it'll be adjusted as it goes, but uh, yeah, you don't need to say how much, just contribute, help out.

Yeah, it is a such a sad tragedy and, of course, you know we have uh people from all over the world on our show, uh in our discord of members of club twit and also watching on twitch and youtube and everywhere around the world, and we have a a listener uh from uh israel. Uh, galia said is something happened in in, uh in asheville, and uh, of course, she's got her own things to think about. Right now, tel Aviv is under a severe attack and there are tragedies all over the world. We just have to remember to protect each other, to help each other and to reach out. Stay in touch and spread love, not hate. Let's try that.

0:51:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Might be an interesting switch one of my favorite quotes ever from kirk vonnegut's son, who's a doctor uh, who was? I think it was a letter or a phone call to his father talking about this a crisis at the hospital he's working at and he just said we're all here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. Yeah, and that's been. I think that's a good motto for how society should organize itself and how people should react in that, in that society, we're all here to help each other with through this thing. We don't know what it is, but we're just here to help each other.

0:52:01 - Leo Laporte
And if it's not one thing, it's always another. There's always something isn't there. Let's, let's see. I think maybe this would be a good time to take a little break, pause and take a breath and then, when we come back, we do have a vision pro segment. It's probably just as depressing as everything we've just been talking about, actually, but we'll get to that in just a little bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey, uh, Jason Snell and very nice to see Rene Ritchie for a brief moment our show today brought to you by 1Password old friends. For a long time, in fact, we used to do ads for another product that 1Password acquired, and they have incorporated that into something brand new and I'm really thrilled about this called 1Password Extended Access Management.

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Weekly. Old friends with a brand new product, and a really good one too the product whose time has come. Uh, let's, uh, let's play the Vision Pro music for the last time ever. I feel bad, but I've got a report, mark german says in his sunday newsletter meta's new headsets. We covered the meta connect keynote last week. It's kind of fun show. Apple has lost its way. Lost its way with the vision pro sheep because?

0:55:52 - Alex Lindsay
because meta is shipping a headset that is way more advanced than than apple's, way lighter and way smaller and way more advanced. Because they're shipping it right now.

0:56:00 - Jason Snell
Right, they're shipping it at a tenth of 20, 20, 29. Oh, you're talking about orion?

0:56:05 - Leo Laporte
yeah, let me show you the picture of uh, I think he's also not just talking about this goofy thing which is in prototype.

0:56:11 - Andy Ihnatko
that, that's Mark Zuckerberg 10 years off and $10,000, yeah.

0:56:15 - Leo Laporte
But I think he's also talking about the one-tenth, the cost MetaQuest 3S right.

0:56:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that and the Ray-Bans. I mean they did.

Yeah, the Ray-Bans are getting to be more and more something. They added a whole bunch of new features. They announced a whole bunch of new features, or announced a whole bunch of new features, including the stuff that we want, which is what is this? That I'm looking at through the camera and explain it to me? A lot of things that basically make it a really, really interesting thing New colorways, new design, ways that people seem to be very interested in, and being able to get a VR headset for 300 bucks three months before Christmas.

And also, by the way, they also announced that it's not as though you'll be able to install Android apps on their platform, but because they use a forked version of Android, they don't use the Google Play Services powered version of Android that would get you access to the Play Store.

But they basically announced to developers that if you have an Android app, a 2D app, you're selling through the Play Store and you want to allow people to run it on our headsets. Essentially all you have to do. You don't have to refactor it, you don't have to build a new version of it. You have to switch a couple of APIs to replace things that aren't available without the Google Play Store. But other than that and now you can now have and excuse me, and if that happens, you will be able to have, just like on the next features of the Vision Pro, running standard phone apps, 2d apps that make sense inside your virtualized environment. So I see a lot of what the headline means, but I'm with Jason I've seen too many commentators talk about the glasses, the Orion, the Orion yeah, I don't think it's about Orion.

Ten years. That's ten years from now. It works, but it's $10,000, the version that he's working, so focus on the other cool stuff that apple should be taking.

0:58:14 - Leo Laporte
Here's what. Here's what german said. With the iphone, uh, apple cut the price while adding support for third-party applications and, by the way, I'm wearing my very, I think, stylish geek glasses. The meta I just took a picture by accident, sorry yeah, the meta ray-bans. He said the Apple Watch didn't catch on until the company focused on fitness tracking. That said, neither product had to be totally overhauled before becoming a big seller. They were on the right track, just needed some tweaks. Even today, the iPhone and Apple Watch are fairly close to the original Vision.

Apple's facing a. This is the from Mark Gurman. This is the killer paragraph. Is the from mark german. This is the killer paragraph. Apple's facing a very different challenge with its vision pro headset. It wants to turn the product into a line of devices with different features and price points, but it's not starting from a rock-solid foundation. If apple ultimately becomes successful in headsets, the product will probably look and feel nothing like the vision pro today. And and this is not to denigrate the vision pros technology I've always thought that the problem the vision pro is the same problemigrate the vision pros technology. I've always thought that the problem the vision pro is the same problem as with the meta quest, which is I don't think people want to strap a heavy computer onto their face. That's the problem.

But this problem, this is not a bad form factor okay.

0:59:24 - Jason Snell
So my problem with mark's analysis is that I I think that it you're he's absolutely right the vision pro is not an iphone or an Watch. I think that the reason that the Vision Pro exists is because Apple, like Meta, believes that there's an end game in the 2030s where there are glasses that are AR, glasses that you wear, that are very light and go on your face and then you know, there's a smartphone in your pocket and maybe a watch on your wrist that connect and they all kind of build this gestalt of a computing environment. And I think the fact is that the reason that Apple spends so much money on the AR stuff and those displays that show your eyes and stuff is that that is actually where Apple is going and you can almost think of the Vision Pro as a virtual AR glasses right, like they're trying to make it like it's AR glasses, even though it's totally not. Also, I think so the problem is, yeah, the thing that really bugs me is people compare a product that doesn't exist, costs $10,000, won't ship for three or four or five years to a product that's shipping, which is not great. And I don't think Apple. I don't think there's enough evidence that Apple has lost its way. I think that they decided that Vision Pro was something they could ship, that could start the process of building this Vision OS platform that they feel one day will run something very much like Orion, and, in fact, mark Gurman reported more than a year and a half ago that Apple had decided that that product wasn't plausibly going to ship anytime soon, and so they ought to ship the Vision Pro instead.

I do think that it's one of the reasons why games are not central to Apple's vision of the Vision Pro, even though VR is great for games, is that Apple is really primarily focused on this future, where there are AI glasses out there. The problem and I think this says something about the way Meta views the world and that Apple doesn't is that Meta just showed a prototype and said this is where we're going, and I think it serves them really well because they get to say look at us, we're building custom stuff, we're on the case, this is our vision, and Apple has this thing that comes from Steve Jobs, although it does predate that too, which is very much never, ever, ever discuss anything that isn't a shipping product, and while Tim Cook has been on the record as saying we think AR is more interesting than VR, and I think that he really does believe and Mark Gurman's reporting says he does believe that glasses are where they really want to go. The truth is, they can't get there right now, and so I think the way to view Vision Pro is not. Apple thought this was going to be the next Apple Watch and they were going to launch it, and it was going to be big, because there's no way that people at Apple thought a $3,500 headset was going to be big. I think they thought of it as the start along a very long path that eventually leads to some other products that are more broadly available, and then they wanted to kind of prime the pump.

Now I think that culturally, we could all ask ourselves is that what they really needed to do? Could they have not said here's the thing we're working on, here's an OS that we're going to release as a developer in a test environment and you know this will be a product in a few years. But culturally, they just they, they, they can't do it. They can ship products, and so they did, and I think you could argue that maybe meta is partially doing them a favor by saying no, no, this is where we're going, because that's totally where Apple is going to.

But Apple culturally seems unable to talk about the future, right? So they're just not gonna and we're left with this. But I don't think Vision Pro was ever really intended to be. Oh yeah, people are going to really wear this heavy thing and spend $3,500 and it's going to be. Oh yeah, people are going to really wear this heavy thing and spend 3500 and it's going to be huge, like it very clearly is. Just, we're going to ship this and see where it goes, and that is unlike any product apple has shipped since the newton maybe, I don't know, a long time apple's coming from the top.

1:03:06 - Leo Laporte
Is it fair to say apple's coming from the top down and meta is coming from the bottom up? You know there's starting with a cheap thing that you can improve. Apple's starting with the expensive thing that you can evolve.

I mean let me read what else Gurman says, because it's not all negative. Apple seems aware. He says that it needs to rethink its approaches to headsets, but there isn't a consensus on how to do that, I'm told. As of now, the Vision Products Group has a few different ways to go status quo route, which is a vision pro more or less the same but less expensive. The smart display route, where they take the computer and battery from the vision pro and shift many of the internal functions over the iphone. Yep, which is an interesting thought. Maybe the headset is now no longer computer in your face, but just a display on your face. The smart glasses route, like the meta ray bands I'm wearing right now which I think is a distraction, because that's more like a wearable right.

1:04:00 - Jason Snell
That's not an ar product at all, it's it's. It's a really interesting product because the speaker's quite good, it's an airpods like thing and it does an interesting thing, I can.

1:04:08 - Leo Laporte
I can say hey, meta, what am I looking at right now? Right, and I'll tell you what it says in a second no, I think it's good.

1:04:15 - Jason Snell
I just think I feel like the discussion of the ray-bans is a distraction because it's a different product category they may converge.

1:04:20 - Leo Laporte
He also points out that it's a good, interesting product that apple should probably be making a version of, that they're not he also says apple is working on a new version of the airpods pro I think this is very interesting that uses external cameras, yeah, and ai to understand the outside world, something that the meta just did, by the way, it told me. I'm looking at something that could probably used for live video streaming, which is pretty astute, you know, pretty accurate. He says the holy grail route, the ultimate goal standalone augmented reality spectacles like the orion that come with high-performing lenses. By the way, the orion is not a heads-up display, they're shooting, they're, it's, uh, they're shooting into your iris. The picture, yeah, which is that's one of the reasons it's five to ten years off a battery system, onboard computer cameras, eye tracking, all while being the size and weight of normal glasses this has long been tim cook's dream.

Yeah, but I don't.

1:05:12 - Jason Snell
I don't know why that's the holy grail I feel like orion actually shows you a very apple-like approach to that. Think about it, though. Right, because did? Did anybody else look at the orion demo and not think, oh, it's glasses tethered to an iphone and an apple watch? It's not right, it's not, but it kind of is. And could we imagine?

that apple would release ar, it's got a computer. Well, it has a computing unit that goes in your pocket and used to have a camera in it. It's basically a phone, but don't call it a phone, right. And can we imagine an apple product being released, like ar glasses? That would require an iphone? Well, I mean, it's exactly the apple watch story, and and you could have, maybe they'll use your apple watch or you could buy a little thing require an iPhone. Well, I mean, it's exactly the Apple Watch story, and you could have. Maybe they'll use your Apple Watch, or you could buy a little thing like what Meta had. That is simpler, in order to do the motion tracking you need for your hand movements to run the interface. I don't know why you would even try to make a standalone version of this at first. I think that it would be very Apple to just assume that you are walking around with an iphone in your pocket that's doing all the computing for this thing and something on your wrist that's the innovators dilemma, isn't it?

1:06:19 - Leo Laporte
they have this vastly successful product that they can't cannibalize, so they're going to be, they're going to have that burden of eventually do something with the iphone but it would cost them so much more to put compute on that thing in the short term.

1:06:33 - Jason Snell
And they don't need to, because everybody's going to have to. Who are we kidding? Anybody who's? Using Apple glasses is going to have an iPhone and I think in the long run, having a very hot, somewhat heavy battery-laden compute object in our pocket is probably not going to go away for a long time. So why not just embrace that and say, look, we all are going to have a smartphone in our pocket that's the brain.

1:06:55 - Leo Laporte
You don't disagree with me that you'd better in your pocket than strapped to your face oh my god, of course not.

1:07:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, or yeah, or yeah. This isn't bad, I don't mind wearing these meta glasses.

1:07:05 - Leo Laporte
Of course, the functionality is not the same at all, but anything bigger than this, I'm gonna you're gonna have to time me.

1:07:11 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think, I think that I still think the the advantage of apple going from the top down and and building something that's really high end is, a lot of times, people it's all about content for a lot of these things, like what are you going to develop for it, whether it's 3d or video or other things and you know most people who are developing. You know the reason that most people develop 1080p's, say, is because most people watch it at 1080p. You know, and most people, if everything was 4k, then people start to start to do that, do things in 4k. By building something that is actually can handle very high resolution and very high frame rates, you're encouraging people to build content for that at that level. And I think that that's a real issue because up until now, a lot of the content that is on the Quest and on other things is buried into what the Quest can handle, you know like and what it can actually look at. And I think that having something that's higher performance is driving will eventually drive more content. We are still waiting for some of the things to come out.

I think Apple I will say that I think the biggest problem is not so much Apple building a $3,500 site. It's that Apple is doing the same thing with the vision pro, that it did with um, with the iBooks, you know, with books, which is that they didn't invest in content. You know they're, they are doing, they're doing, they're doing some shooting. They're not giving people a whole, like they should have a billion. Like meta, meta, um, epic, incredible program of the of their mega grants, which is that, hey, you want to build something for this, we're going to. You know, there it's really easy for you to get 25 000. It's not that hard to get half a million dollars. There's a lot of things that we were willing so that people started developing ideas for it and I think that you know there are things you know when you put on the headset, there are things that give you. You know that there's a bunch of great content out there, the Apple content that they're generating, which will be we can probably get close to with the black magic camera as it comes out sometime later this year. Um, the problem is I don't understand, like, why they're not putting that out in mass. Like they're giving us these little, like we're going to give you a little 10 minute pieces and five minute pieces, like Apple should be, if they're not going to give a bunch of people cameras or whatever. They should be delivering that much faster than they are now.

And you see hints of things from a company like Jigspace. Jigspace is one of the most impressive things that I've seen on the Apple Vision Pro, except that the business model and the workflow and everything else is completely buggered. You know, like you know, and so they, you know, so they don't have, so no one's going to use it because it's not a business model that makes sense for anybody. I mean Apple should look at JigSpace and Sherlock them with Keynote. Just do put into Keynote everything that JigSpace is doing so people can develop, so anybody can just open up Keynote and develop a 3d presentation of their product, of their things.

Now, is that going to sell a lot more headsets? Probably not, but it's going to start showing people what's possible, you know, with those things. And that's what's missing right now is that there aren't people that are really pushing, you know, pushing that envelope and and, and it's hard because there's only three or 400,000 headsets out there. So you have to figure out what that small market is that you can, or a highly vertical market, that that you can, you know, get into that where people are willing to pay. Now you know that those people are willing to pay. But it's also like, how do we actually get out to all those people so that if you have a headset, you know that it's there and those are the things that, but it's the.

It's a content problem, in my opinion, from from Apple's perspective at the moment, is that I don't have a I I watch movies on on my headset and I play with a couple other things and, of course, I'm doing spatial stuff with stream voodoo, so I play with it there, but there's not a lot. There's not a lot of new things that I open and go, ooh boy, I really want to. I really want to play with this in the Apple vision created. It takes time to do all the development to make this work, but I think that Apple's either not giving the guidance, not giving the money, not giving the promotion, not doing the things it needs to do to encourage the content that drives, to make sure the current Apple Vision Pro users are using it, and I think that Apple's not doing a very good job there, maybe on purpose, maybe it's a slow burn that they want, that they want to pick up speed, you know as they go into next spring.

1:11:17 - Leo Laporte
I think it's the difference between a company run by enthusiasts and a company run by business people.

1:11:23 - Alex Lindsay
I think a lot of people working on the business are enthusiasts.

1:11:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but what you're describing is an enthusiast's vision. Describing is an enthusiast's vision and actually I really liked your piece, Jason, uh, in six colors, in which you say apple and meta are playing the same game.

1:11:38 - Jason Snell
They're both going in the same direction, it's just different rules and that's why I I'm bothered by some analysis that says, well, this thing that doesn't exist, that isn't going to ship the cost of fortune, means that meta is ahead. It's like, well, apple is never going to tell you where they are.

1:11:52 - Leo Laporte
They might be ahead or behind they probably have something like orion in the lab.

1:11:55 - Jason Snell
Well, according to german, a year and a half ago. They had it. They decided there's no way we can ship this, which is literally what meta has also said. But they just showed it, but they know they can't ship it and but they're going to the same place. They're. Both these companies know what the dream is. The dream is to get ar specs so that if they replace the smartphone, they're the players.

1:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
That's when you talk about when you talk about a highly personal device like a head, like like these AR glasses. The thing that we still have to go into is there's a lot of trust issues with Facebook. You know there's a lot of trust issues with data in meta and and putting head. You know putting eyeglasses on all the time. You know you know is is is a is a complicated problem for Meta in in a world where, you know, when you took kids under 18, 87% of them have iPhones and none of them use Facebook. Like you know, like my kids. I talked to my kids and they're like they don't. Not only do they not use Facebook, they don't know anybody that uses Facebook. Like it's not even a thing anymore for them. And now Instagram, on the other hand, they're using, but it's a really complicated meta's position and meta is trying. I mean all of their music content, all the other things they're doing, is all aimed at this young demographic and what they're getting is older demographics.

1:13:06 - Jason Snell
I think they're doing a really good job of rebranding. By the way, this is a thing that came up on one of my other podcasts yesterday, which is Google tried to decouple from Google and be alphabet. Meta, I think has been more successful in letting Facebook kind of like fade into the weeds. And these new product categories are meta and I know you can look and if you know, you know, but I think that they've been a little more effective in saying you know what, what, what meta and horizon and reality labs or whatever you want to call it. With the quest and with future products. It's over here and we all know it's actually Facebook, but like it's. I think they've done a much more effective job. And Instagram is thought of as Instagram and not as Facebook, and threads is thought of as threads or Instagram and not Facebook.

1:13:53 - Leo Laporte
I think they've done a good job there, better than Google. Never said Facebook in the keynote at all. He never used the word Facebook at all.

1:13:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Nobody talk about Facebook, yeah but, I, really do think that I've heard a lot of things, both in this conversation and other conversations, that have a lot of truth to them and have a lot of sense to them this conversation and other conversations that have a lot of truth to them and have a lot of sense to them. I really do think, though, that with the Vision Pro, this is a case, clearly, of Apple, as they have often been praised for in the past skating to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is, and then getting there and the puck never arrives because they guessed wrong where it was going to be. It's all in the context of how Apple presents and presented the Vision Pro. If they presented it as this is early going, this is not where this is early going. We think this is. This is going to be a really important place where we can do our work for software, I, operating systems and human and human engineering, but we are going to make this available to developers for $3,000, $3,500, knowing that they can't even manufacture more than a few hundred thousand anyway.

If they were selling it to say that this is an early device, this is mostly for people who are early adopters, early investment holders. That would be one thing, but this is something that you can go into the Apple store and buy and on that basis, it's hard for me not to declare this as a failure of a product. It doesn't suit any purpose. It doesn't scratch any itch. It's great Again. People have found that it's nice to have in certain cases like again if you're on a train or if you're on an airplane virtual displays in which you can watch 2D content and interact with 2D apps. Some of the 3D experiences are very, very nice, but this is not what anybody is really. This is not where anything is in 2024. I would like to give Meta a lot of credit, because they, on the other hand, realize that, well, we're not capable of giving somebody a revolution in spatial computing. What we can give them is a really cool 3D game platform.

1:16:05 - Jason Snell
For 300 bucks.

1:16:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that we can then extend, for we can't give them a heads-up display through natural glasses. What we can give them is really good audio through Bluetooth, without having earbuds, in decent cameras that can get stuff done, and AI systems that can make the cameras and the audio very, very useful in a day-to-day thing, and they can do all of those things in such a way that it is practical and affordable and actually quite useful. What I would like to compare it to is that it is practical and affordable and actually quite useful. Um, I it's, but like. What I would like to compare it to is that it's.

It's a little bit baffling what apple has done, because apple never does this. They never, uh, as, as german said again, and it's. I think we've gone over this in discussion. The apple watch, the yeah, it did take a year or two for apple to find its feet to define it not as a mobile, a wearable computing device, but as a fitness device, as a health device. But the thing is they got the hardware on lock immediately. We're still using the exact same design pretty much and the same layout of controls.

It's very, very weird for them to introduce something where this is not going to be useful going forward, except for as a test bed for development stuff. I'll close by just saying that, like if I'm not coming through on what I'm thinking here, it's like Apple could have done the same thing with a foldable iPad or a foldable phone today and we would be saying, well, there's this crease in the middle of the screen that I don't like and it's not as durable, and wow, it's really a lot more expensive than like a conventional phone or conventional iPad, without bringing us more power. And would we be saying that it's? We would be surprised that Apple had shipped something that is not consistent with an Apple consumer device, something that is interesting for people who are interested in the next thing and have the money to spend for it. But that's exactly, I think, what they did with the Vision Pro. It's a misstep.

1:17:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean when, again, going back to January of last year when Mark Gurman first reported that it was going to be $3,000 or more, I remember saying somewhere, some podcast somewhere that I didn't believe it and would they pitch it as a developer console? Basically it's a developer unit. Really it's just a tech preview, because one day we want to get there. And I think the truth is Apple isn't wired like that. Like Apple can't do it, they can only launch products, and so we get the Vision Pro. You know what I'm saying. Like they don't do it, they can only launch products, and so we get the Vision Pro. You know what I'm saying? Like they don't do vague, they don't do tech preview, so they just launched it as a product and said here's the future. And I think that it doesn't serve them well for a product like this because it is a tech preview. I mean, when I got it, I thought who would I recommend this to? And the answer right now and it continues to be nobody. Now, if there were more content, there might be some niches, but that's the funny thing when Alex talks about the content, yes, that would be great.

I'm not entirely convinced that Apple cares that much, because they're not looking at now. They're really looking at the future and they are seeing this as a long game. But it is weird, right? Like because every other product Apple ships they intend to be bought in volume and adopted by people and loved by people, and Vision Pro is more like it's weird and expensive and not for almost anybody, but it's the future, it's just like. This is why I mentioned Meta, showing a tech preview of a product that doesn't exist, versus Apple keeping quiet. I know that that's Apple's culture. I do think it is at least worth considering the possibility that that cultural taboo at Apple needs to get broken.

1:19:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's fine.

I think the thing is is if they just took, you know again a tenth of what they spent on the headset itself and spend it on content.

You know, in in bolding con, you know building out content like everybody else does. Apple just has this thing where they don't. They just they make some stuff themselves and they do invest in some things, but they don't do it the way many of these other platforms do it, which is we're going to spend a ton of money on you know, hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on content, so people understand how the product works. You know, and I think that that is what Apple Apple could have changed the nature of the way we think of you know, books and things and everything else 15 years ago, and they didn't. You know, they didn't because they went to old people, old companies and had them do old things in on their platform and barely put any effort into it and thought that people will. I think Apple's real problem is they always they're so used to, they're like the, you know, the cute person in school that everything works for all the time and they don't understand. Like that. It might actually take some work to to to do something.

1:20:40 - Jason Snell
You know like. You know, like they're just, they're just used to like hey, everyone's going to want to play with me.

1:20:45 - Alex Lindsay
And suddenly you know, like I'm just going to produce this product and everyone's going to want to play and everything else without saying hey.

1:20:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I got to actually work. She's too much for Apple is too much Veronica. They should be acting more like Betty. I think that's what you're saying, I'm just saying that.

1:20:58 - Alex Lindsay
it's just that there are some people that it always works for and for Apple generally. I release a pro, we release a product. It might be a little slow for the first couple of months and then after that we take over.

1:21:06 - Leo Laporte
But, Alex, if they released and this is a good point from snoop mikey in our discord if they released a ton of new, content for the apple vision pro.

1:21:18 - Alex Lindsay
Would suddenly people go out and buy it? No, but it would change the narrative. People would understand why. You know where it is, where, where its position is in the future. So right, you know.

1:21:23 - Leo Laporte
And here's the problem and this might be the problem, and this is from ming chi quo this week, apple's going to focus on spatial computing as the next big thing for the m5 powered vision pro, which he says will be out in the second half of next year, not content spatial computing well that that is an effect of apple going where they've got stuff right.

1:21:46 - Jason Snell
I mean, why? Why is? Why is spatial computing the thing apple has talked about from the beginning? It's because they know that their library of apps that are available to be put on the platform are mostly productivity apps from the iPad and the iPhone, and so there you go, with what you got. I don't believe it's a fundamental like ah yes, the future is iPad apps in your vision, other than that far future. I think that's why they haven't focused on games is because they would actually have to make an effort to get lots of immersive games on their platforms. Their platforms have games, but not VR games, and so they would have to make an effort. I think the reverse is true too, where Meta started with like well, we're going to do games.

1:22:24 - Leo Laporte
Games is where we're going to start.

1:22:25 - Jason Snell
Actually, Meta wanted to do social more than anything, well, anything and well, yeah, and the metaverse, socially. But but games as well. But now you see them with what andy described earlier. Is that well, you could also run android apps on here, where they're kind of going the other way, I so I I think in part any declaration of that kind of strategy is there's a a real, a real politic to it, in a way which is well, what do we? What do we have? And the answer is we can fairly readily take ipad apps and turn them into Vision OS.

1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
What changes? Minji Kuo says the reason they're putting in the M5, they're not going to change much in the Vision Pro is because they want to put more AI into the Vision Pro.

1:23:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that's smart. I think that's smart. I don't think that Alex is wrong, I just disagree. We will never know why iBooks never took off, but one of the reasons could be not because Apple didn't invest and didn't offer opportunities and incentives for book publishers to create that kind of content. It's possible that nobody cared. It's possible that they saw okay, it's nice that this gem can pop out of the page and I can rotate it as a 3D thing. It's nice that I can have a quiz that's built right into it and it can influence what the next thing is going to be. It's possible that nobody cared.

Vr I think we can be facing the same thing. We can have a lot more 3D content, a lot more 3D immersive experiences. It's possible that the bulk of people are thinking that's a great demo. I would much rather watch it on a typical screen, so it's possible that people just don't care. My thinking, as I keep looking at this and thinking about this, is that we mentioned the Newton Message Pad before, which was wonderful, and I loved it, because I'm a nerd and I've got whatever defect you need to have in order to dress like this and spend all my time thinking about the stuff that I think about, but it was missing a lot of stuff that Apple couldn't control to make it into a relevant device. Smartphones did not become important necessarily because of multi-touch. Smartphones became what they are today because they were always missing mobile broadband and unlimited data. That's when it really started to take off. That was the missing ingredient that no manufacturer could 100% control.

I'm leaning towards the thought that AI is the same thing for VR and AR. Yes, we're going to be waiting for again more display technologies that are affordable, that can actually produce something like the Ray-Bans, with a lot more not immersive content, but, again, augmented content. But I think that the big deal is going to be what's going to make people want to put on a pair of sunglasses, switch their regular sunglasses for augmented reality sunglasses or wear clear frames, even though they don't actually need a prescription. I think it's going to be this sort of thing where all I have to do is look at a receipt and it's automatically added to my accounting. The idea that I can look at a bird passing by and ask what kind of bird is that? And that's what it is. Or meet somebody, and all the sort of stuff that AI can enhance with by making it part of your incidental use, not an app that you have to bring up on a phone.

1:25:31 - Leo Laporte
I think I'm gonna throw a little more chum in the water. Hold on, more chum in the water and then. I'll let you talk for half an hour. Uh, microsoft has announced and I think this is related to spatial computing it's discontinuing HoloLens 2, with no replacement it's out of the business and that's it yeah placement.

1:25:54 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's out of the business and that's it. Yeah, now go ahead, talk.

Well, and I'll say the, the if we decide that now that microsoft's out of that gig and google's largely dropped out of it and it's really right now, microsoft focused on productivity, right, I mean they, that was what like verticals, yeah and I will admit, some of the hollow and stuff was pretty amazing, like it was, you know, like in some of the, uh you know, but again very vertical and very hard to develop for you know, and I think that, um, you know, I think that Apple has an advantage, if they use it, of a lot of the tools, whether it's pages and keynote or motion and and final cut, of being able to build tools to augment this. I think Apple, really, if you want to build a lot of these things, they should just buy Maxon, just embed all that stuff into the, into what they're doing, or make it a development. You know development. Or you know, buy Luxology, or Luxology already bought, but but buy those kinds of things? The, the, the issue is, is going to keep on coming back to content, but I think that one of the things that Apple has that Meta doesn't have is, I think that Apple is, they keep on spending resources on privacy and trust, and I think that that foils Meta in a way that Meta can't really turn the corner on, which is that you're talking about.

The reason the portal didn't really work for Meta was because it was Meta, like you know, like you know, and, and I think that that's people you know, you don't, you know, like you know, and and I think that that's people you know, you don't, you know like that, that you feel like all that information's being used against you. You know, and I think that that's going to be a really meta can keep on rebranding, but they're still making money on people's data, you know and, and that is and that's going to be, you know, if Apple continues to stay very, very focused on privacy, and I think that's why Apple has to spend. I don't, you know. Again, I don't think it's altruistic that Apple is spending money on privacy. I think that it is a that is a hardened business model of we're putting things on your wrist, we're putting things on your face, we're putting things in your pocket. You know, we want you to interact with those with trust and we will protect that to almost any degree, because that is the that's the business model.

The business model is that I can, is that that you can put these things on and not feel like we're, you know, reselling, which is why I don't think Apple should be in the advertising business, like I don't think they should. You know, they should get out of that because they don't want. They shouldn't have anyone ever feel like that's what's driving that. Their primary income comes from acquiring your data and so, and so you're going to always feel, when you put these headsets on, whether it's true or not.

If you put the headset on and you walk into an ice cream parlor and then it starts sending you ads about ice cream, that's going to bother people Like. You know, like, and whether it's a coincidence or not, it's still going to have people like oh, I can't use this headset. You know, and I think that that's the, I think that's the challenge that both of them have. You know, that's the challenge that Meta has as it competes with Apple is it's building a highly personal device that is potentially showing a lot of our lives. And you know, and it's it's who do you want to have that data?

1:28:53 - Andy Ihnatko
And, and we're, and we're leaving Google out of this conversation and they have. I don't think they have as bad a problem as Facebook, as Facebook slash meta, but they certainly have that same. Well, they're going to be.

1:29:03 - Jason Snell
I mean or they're, or rather they're going to.

1:29:04 - Andy Ihnatko
They gave up. They did Okay, but I, I let's, let's acknowledge that in 2014, 2015, they built what the Ray-Ban is and everybody gave them crap for it and for a lot of good reasons.

1:29:20 - Alex Lindsay
There are many things about glass that are still better than all the headsets that are out there. You know, the heads-up video display.

1:29:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the idea of, just for me, just the idea of and again, if you've ever most people have never used glass like this heads-up display was just hold up your your phone, like at arm's length, at the corner of your eye. That's where this little display was, so it could simply confirm to you when you're, when I'm, when you're walking again, when you're getting walking directions like oh, by the way, heading up, like go take this left onto this street or look for this building, that's where the building you're looking for. That was a side issue, but I think that Google needs to get credit for that. But they don't seem to be focusing on making their own hardware so much as creating a reference platform and making the software and making the AI that powers it. But one thing that we've seen is that Notebook LM has gotten a lot of positive discussion in the past week or so because they've just when they added the conversations feature.

1:30:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

1:30:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I was using it and enjoying it well before that, but the idea of people actually now using it and not they, got way over the fact that should I be creeped out, that these are natural sounding voices got like all of this material that I need to get through.

Um, I would just love it would. I would love, like during my drive home, like to be able to play back through my car stereo, uh, uh, an overview of what's in there in the form of a podcast about just the stuff that I've given it and that's really, really good, and people are not thinking about some of the other, like of the other uncanny valley aspects of it. So I don't think that people will be dismissive of the privacy problems, but once you give people something that solves a problem or creates an opportunity for them, they will be aware of it, but they will maybe decide that, okay, it's a good trade. I will give you personal data if it means that these 500 pages worth of stuff I'm supposed to get through this weekend, I've got through in just two hours and I made a much, much better version, much, much better trip through it than I would have if I were just painstakingly like going through every single one of these pdfs all right, that's the Vision Pro segment.

1:31:50 - Leo Laporte
Woo-hoo.

1:31:52 - Jason Snell
What do you?

1:31:52 - Leo Laporte
see, what do you know?

1:31:54 - Jason Snell
We've done the Vision Pro.

1:31:58 - Leo Laporte
We'll be back. I think you just, I think you just did the longest vision pro segment in history. So that's good, well done, bravo well, we've repurposed the vision pro segment and made it more about the future of ar technology in general.

1:32:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, that helps we're broadening. We're broadening the vert, broadening it.

1:32:18 - Leo Laporte
We added hollow ends, we made it more horizontal let's take a little break. We have lots more to talk about with andy and ako, Alex lindsey, Jason Snell, and somebody said it's the growing vision pro the vision grow segment. It's a rebuilding year.

1:32:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, 2024.

1:32:37 - Leo Laporte
Just like the white socks, it's a rebuilding oh, my god, don't tell me about talking about other tragedy. Holy cow whoo. This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Veeam. Now this is the good news. This is the news you need to know. If you run a business and if you have data, you've got data. What business doesn't have data? And without your data, your customers trust turns to digital dust. That's why Veeam's music to Veeam's data protection and ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens.

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I don't think there's anything more to say about it, though, so we'll move on.

1:34:59 - Jason Snell
I sure hope not.

1:35:03 - Leo Laporte
Talking about AI, did you see? James Cameron is on now. The board of stability, AI talk about a big get. These are the folks that do stable diffusion, but they also do video. Ai generated video and here you have one of the best known, most successful filmmakers of all time on your board is kind of a. I don't know, Alex, is that a?

1:35:24 - Alex Lindsay
seal of approval. I wonder what's going on. Like you kind of a lot of us kind of forgot about stability, AI and they have a lot of drama. Yeah, you use their competitors more, right, yeah, I mean yeah, and so I mean I use Midjourney a lot. So the but yeah, it's stability and Runway is the big video, one Video, Runway, yeah, and there's a lot of them out there. But I think a lot of us had kind of forgotten about stability and then suddenly james cameron shows up on it, you feel like hmm, what do they?

have there that we don't know about.

1:35:54 - Leo Laporte
So I think that that's the that that's what a lot of us are kind of interested in I didn't know this, but the ceo of stability ai, prem akaraju, is the c was the ceo of weta digital, which is the big special effects company in new zealand. So, and sean parker is also on the on the four on the board as a executive chairman. Of course, he was the founder of napster, who put all that money into facebook. Uh, he's the guy who said a million's, not a lot of billions, a lot, at least in the movie. I don't know what he said in real life. Uh, so that's a pretty good board. They got to go in there. It's at stability ai.

1:36:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know if that's because the world is slow and doesn't realize that these guys who were number one a year ago, or I mean, they've never, never won they just I think that they, you know, they, they do have a different model of being able to run locally, and a lot of other, without some restrictions, that's true, and they're not just video or images, because they can run.

1:36:54 - Leo Laporte
That's where you go to Hugging Face to get the AI models. So they really have become kind of the switching station, the locus for a lot of even local AI. Lionsgate made a deal with runway this month. Lionsgate films. Runway is the other very well-known video generator and I did not see this but apparently during the olympics, nbc created an ai generated al michael michaels.

1:37:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah yeah, that was just for the. That was the recaps, right? Yeah, yeah, it was doing like uh, auto-generated recaps of sports that you cared about, and it would use him, the ai, al michaels, to narrate it, which seems unnecessary, but it was fine. People liked it, yeah, and he gave his approval and got paid. You know, yeah, it was.

1:37:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it was, it was fine that was another part of the meta announcement that was, I thought, very interesting is that they they have paid a lot of millions to dame judy, dench aquafina, uh john cena to use their voices in the uh meta ai, yeah, um it gets interesting when, like, you can do that yourself, like with with appropriate permissions, with appropriate licensing, whatever but like there was a piece that I've read a few weeks ago where somebody trained an AI to duplicate his late father's handwriting.

1:38:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, and I thought that was super, super sweet, because one of the things that I, one of my favorite relics from like mom and my late parents' house, is things that my dad has. My dad had nice handwriting and things that he actually wrote on and so if that helps you through the morning process to, I'm going to get my notes app is going to use my dad's handwriting. I'm going to get to see this a lot. My, it's this. I'm gonna get to see this like a lot. And then you imagine, like, if you have lots of samples of somebody's voice and saying that if it will help me get through the grieving process, it will.

1:38:54 - Leo Laporte
I will enjoy hearing these emails being spoken in my late spouse's voice or in my mom's, all of my wealth and fortune to my dearest, long lost podcast friend, andy Nako.

1:39:10 - Jason Snell
Yes, you know I say this and people don't believe me, but I'm going to say it again. That is literally the plot of an episode of Max Headroom. They're so far ahead of their time.

1:39:21 - Leo Laporte
They were ahead of their time you take.

1:39:22 - Jason Snell
AI to generate a loved one who had passed away.

1:39:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's also Black Mirror, right. Oh yes total black mirror episode oh yeah, the with hayley atwell.

1:39:31 - Jason Snell
That's an amazing black mirror episode about, about this, and it's all. I mean all those it's coming, those things are going to happen just around the corner, yep, you know I realized that was right.

1:39:39 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna. I have an age I'll be 68 in a month where I might or might not see all this. It's going to be right at the end. It's all going to happen. It might be my handwriting that's giving all my stuff to Andy and not go. I don't know. All right, we'll put those in work on that.

1:39:57 - Jason Snell
Leo, you'll be in the home in your bed and we'll put those AR glasses on you and you'll be like God, those guys weren't right after.

1:40:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Leo, thank you, thank you very, very much for saying that for real, and we're having videos, you're saying it for real.

1:40:11 - Leo Laporte
Now you can ask my work is done. You want my handwriting too?

1:40:15 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, take a, take a care of any like really good 8k cameras you might own. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Don't keep them in cases.

1:40:21 - Leo Laporte
I'll buy some, some good bikes uh, the epic Apple lawsuit, the gift that just keeps on giving, still alive. A second judge has now implied that Apple lied to the court. The original judge kind of said the same thing that Apple had not told the truth about the reason for its new App Store policy. A second judge this is from 9to5Mac, tasked with overseeing Apple's disclosure of decision-making documents in in the antitrust case said the court filing made by the company was quote simply not believable.

1:40:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah it's simply unbelievable.

1:40:56 - Leo Laporte
It sounds like a uh robert palmer unbelievable it's simply unbelievable.

1:41:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so, yeah. So they were ordered back in like late May to turn over 1.3 million documents and then Apple decided four days before they were due on Monday, said oh gosh, it's going to take us a while. We thought this would take two weeks and so we started just two weeks ago, but it's going to take us a lot longer.

1:41:22 - Leo Laporte
And the judge basically said yeah, this is bad behavior and I'm not bad behavior is the phrase, so they basically say you have to, you have to deliver these.

1:41:33 - Andy Ihnatko
They, they said look one of my, one of my favorite phrases, which is you are a two trillion dollar company, you have the resources to do whatever it is you want to do, and now you're ordered to get this done.

1:41:45 - Leo Laporte
Your honor. There's 1.3 million documents. It's going to take longer than Tuesday. Judge Hickson rejected the request, saying that Apple's claim that it only had just discovered the additional 650. They thought half as many documents 650,000 matched and just discovered it's twice as many. They said that's simply not believable. You really do need a song.

1:42:14 - Jason Snell
They're so bad there's no telling where the email went.

1:42:18 - Andy Ihnatko
If I get more direct lighting, you can imagine me wearing a lot of foundation, yeah yeah, it'd be good and a see-through top me wearing a lot of foundation.

1:42:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it'd be good and a see-through top. Uh, apple has asked the judge to toss the app store injunction. Uh, this was september 30th, which that yesterday, right? Yeah, uh, apple asked a us judge to throw out the decision. Uh, governing its app store, saying new legal developments there are new legal developments the youthtes tell me uh, anyway, they made the request of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Uh, yesterday. Uh, you remember epic suit Apple?

you may remember epic suit Apple five years ago and they won one little tiny piece of it, which which is the App Store thing. Apple said new decisions by California state courts and the United States Supreme Court in two unrelated cases bolster the company's legal arguments against the injunction. Reading from Reuters yeah, I read that.

1:43:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I read the filing. I don't understand the legal stuff. I don't understand the legal stuff. What I was able to glean from is that they're citing two cases, one of which is that there was another case in which a California court decided that Apple's App Store does not violate the anti-steering provisions of that law. And that's just the simple idea of if I'm selling an app on the App Store, I should not be forbidden to mention that.

Mention that, oh, by the way, money can be exchanged for goods and services in places other than the app store. So if you sign up for a subscription on my website, maybe you want to do that instead. That's all. That's all they're being ordered to do, uh. And the second part was that they're, uh, they're essentially saying that, uh, this injunction should not order them to do any to satisfy anyone but Epic, meaning that that's not something that they shouldn't be forced to remove this, to change this for the whole App Store and for all developers. It should not be because of this other precedent that came up after the original ruling. Apple should only have to do that for Epic, if they have to do it at all. They should not have to do that for the entire App Store to do that for epic.

1:44:26 - Leo Laporte
If they have to do it at all, they should not have to do that for the entire app store. Halide put out its yearly review of the iphone 16 pro camera. Sebastian dewitt does this every year. He says for the first desert titanium iphone, we took over a thousand photos and videos in the desert. One thing he doesn't like about the new uh lenses uh, they've gone back to the stacked lens. Uh array of the iphone 10 which dewitt says I, I really like the old uh, the old horizontal uh stack. I don't know what any of this means, by the way, so if I'm saying it wrong, just uh, just uh, correct me. But uh, he is a little disappointed by that. Otherwise, of course, it's lovely. There's a good example of the macro feature, which I I didn't realize, but many of my pictures are macro pictures.

1:45:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah he was praising that the white, the super wide lens, now also has a 48 megapixel megapixel sensor. So, instead of so, basically now, like, when you, you get them, they get that macro not by like going that close, but by taking, getting into the shot and then like zooming in, like in the picture. So they're basically. He's basically praising that now, like you get all you get, you get a full 12 megapixel crop from that instead of just a subset. Uh, so big win for the for the super wide he was. He was later on he was saying that the, the telephoto he's sorry that it's still stuck at, I think, 12 megapixels that he also would love to see that as an upgrade. But yeah, I think it only appeared this morning and so I've just been skimming it.

1:45:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean the TLDR, because it's very detailed and it's for pros, obviously, right.

1:46:06 - Andy Ihnatko
And also, as they say at the very beginning, this isn't about the software. This is testing it as a camera, but he's praising the handling of it, praising the pipeline, some of the shortcuts you can do, styles. He singles out something that Jason was talking about a couple of weeks ago. Yeah, if you really want to know how it handles as a regular camera, which is not out of line at all In the hands of a accomplished photographer as well, when I test cameras, I maybe go to the Boston Public Library and shoot the murals.

I maybe go to the park and shoot squirrels. This guy goes to like the desert and like knows when sunup and sundown are, and some of these pictures really show off what this thing can do he does praise the uh, the improved USB transfer speeds, uh, the wi-fi speed improvement in theory, because of the move to the new wi-fi uh standard.

1:47:02 - Leo Laporte
He does, says, say the modem has given his best, given him his best cellular down load speeds in more places, which is nice if you're out in the mojave uh desert, uh. So, yeah, as as always, I always look for this review and uh, and sebastian dewitt does not disappoint. Uh, yeah, is there a summary? It's, it's good, it's a good camera, it's a good camera. A few things they took out. He misses a few things they didn't do he wishes they would have, but he, uh, you know, in in balance it's good and I have to say his images are amazing. Look at that.

1:47:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, that's, that's ansel adams quality, that's amazing yeah, again, nothing if, if you following, if you're following the rules of composition and knowing that, hey, what if I keep the? Hey, what if I keep the sun behind me? And what if I shoot like an hour before sunset? But he had one of the nice quotes from the end is like here's the thing that won't change, review after review An iPhone is just better at being a computer than a camera. That's the reality of it. If you have a large camera with a big lens and a big sensor, you can gather a lot more light. That's just physics. If you have a large camera with a big lens and a big sensor, you can gather a lot more light. That's just physics. All this computational magic that it does gives great dynamic range, it lets it take them and basically it's a great computer as a camera too.

1:48:16 - Leo Laporte
That's a very good way to phrase it. I think it's a computer more than a camera.

1:48:28 - Andy Ihnatko
But because it's taking pictures it's a camera with some smarts, but I would say it's becoming more and more of a camera.

1:48:32 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah apple has definitely leaned into. They understand that. A big reason that people are buying that, the next phone, the reason you upgrade, is because the camera is better, like there's. We talk about a lot of the other things, but it's the camera. And Apple's adding. They're obviously double down, doubling down on the lenses, on an extra button, on the, you know, the software. All of those things are all focused on the fact that that is almost every poll that they make. People make decisions about the camera. You know, decide. Oh, I don't want to keep on taking pictures of my family with a lower end camera. I mean, that's really what it comes down to.

1:49:07 - Andy Ihnatko
But he does make that really good point that again, as wonderful as Apple's breakthroughs are in computational photography year after year, it can't change the fact that this is a tiny, tiny little sensor.

It doesn't let a whole lot of light in and it has to do a lot of processing to make it look good. He's in his wish list, he doesn't. I don't think he actually has a wish list section, but at the end he's saying one of the things he wished for is that just come up with a better noise reduction system, because and here he has a shot of like red rocks, like at sunset, where it's like it's just so smoothed out with AI. There's no, none of the detail that you would expect to see, and not even necessarily like detail from the rocks, but you would expect to see like a little bit of film noise, a little bit of grain, a little bit of something, but it's been like watercolored out because of overenthusiastic and I can see like the resulting image just looks odd. If there's one theme to the iPhone, yeah, exactly, Start to accept that highly processed images are here to stay, to stay.

1:50:13 - Leo Laporte
John Greenewald, and I've heard some some of our listeners, like Joe, our street photographer from New York, say that you know it's hard to get something with dark shadows, because it's just yeah you have to really work at, absolutely, because the camera says, you know, the computer says, oh no, you want to see everything, don't you?

1:50:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Sure, this is this is why so many like we hear a recurring story, like in the tech news every once in a while, about younger users trying to find a way to get away from the over processed nature of phone pictures. There was a while where a lot of people had a hot take about oh wow, the latest hot trend is not to take selfies, not with the shutter button but with the screenshot image because it won't super process it. When people try to figure out, why are Generation Z and younger buying old, old 6 megapixel Canon and Nikon pocket cameras? One of the reasons given with the people they talked to is that it just doesn't look as over-processed as what I get out of a phone.

1:51:11 - Leo Laporte
I like the image that he was talking about. He says it looks just a little weird because it's so processed yeah.

1:51:20 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's, and that's true of everything. But I have so many great pictures that I took like, again I'm getting home from wherever and it's again a half hour before sunset and I'm like, wow, the shadows of that streetlight on that sandstone wall, that's brilliant. I take the picture and then I get home it's like, oh, instead of those really stark shadows, it's a beige thing, because my Android phone, my iPhone, whatever, did not want to like hide the detail of the wall, so it lightened it up, so in a way that doesn't look real at all this is why the new photographic styles thing is so important is that you know you can you can sort of do that on.

1:51:58 - Jason Snell
You can undo it later because it's capturing more data than is being displayed. So not only can you shoot with more contrast if you want to, and you can actually adjust it, but if you shoot and, like Andy said, are disappointed if you're shooting with a 16, you can actually go into photographic styles and change the processing of the processing pipeline and get something better out, which is, I think, really great. Right, because it's also processed. It matters being able to post-process. It matters more because it's so processed, because you're not going to necessarily get what you saw. You might need to go back later and say, no, no, no, that's not what I was going for, and it's cool that they have now inflated their files by 25%, but that data can rebuild that photo into what you want it to be.

1:52:46 - Leo Laporte
And as do it says, and maybe the most important point is that you now have a very competent camera with you at all times. Yeah, and maybe there are better cameras out there. You know I really love shooting with my luck and manual focus and and all that, but you know you, you've always got a camera with you. That's pretty darn good. Yeah, from the andy and ako files, charlie brown will be streaming the big three hollywood charlie brown specials halloween, thanksgiving and christmas will be available to all. I mean everybody owns them.

1:53:24 - Jason Snell
Apple's got the rights but they'll be.

1:53:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there will be select dates with free viewing on apple or on tv on apple, on apple, on apple yeah, yeah, that's.

1:53:35 - Andy Ihnatko
That's still a problem, because we can't ignore that there are a lot of households that don't have broadband right and a lot maybe they don't even have a streaming device. We think that that's immensely rare, poor.

1:53:46 - Leo Laporte
Asheville, there will be no Halloween. Charlie Brown yeah, I mean the great thing about.

1:53:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I really wish that there was a way that they could do what they did the first year, which is come up with a deal with PBS. They put it on PBS yeah.

Yeah, I mean, for all we know, they tried to do that and PBS just couldn't clear a time slot for it. Do that and PBS just couldn't clear a time slot for it. I'm not going to blame Apple for it. I'm glad that they're at least making it available for free, but it is still heartbreaking that, even if you want to buy a copy of it on the Google Play Store, on the Amazon store, it's just not available. You can buy it on Blu-ray and DVD, but the only place you can get it is Apple, and that's unfortunate.

I will say, though, they've been doing great stuff with the Peanuts characters. They do a lot of new animation, a lot of new shows that are wonderful. The new one with Franklin is really nice. But you know, I am the person who buys a single package of Dolly Madison snack cakes so I can have Dolly Madison snack cakes, even though when I was growing up, like the Dolly Madison snack cakes was the ads that were like attached to the, to the specials. They weren't available in new England, and I always wondered what are?

what are Dolly Madison?

1:54:56 - Leo Laporte
They sound wonderful.

1:54:57 - Andy Ihnatko
They must be amazing If they're sponsoring but nonetheless, that's all right.

1:55:02 - Leo Laporte
I still use a sunbeam razor, thanks to Burl Ives, norelco, Norelco, whatever it is. You know what, andy? This is another thing. As an old man, you start to realize things change and they're never going to go back the way they were.

1:55:18 - Andy Ihnatko
The.

1:55:19 - Leo Laporte
Wizard of Oz will not be on every Thanksgiving, so you can be amazed at its shift from black and white to color. It's a great pumpkin. Charlie Brown will not be on in Halloween.

1:55:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't necessarily want things to be exactly the way they were when I was a kid.

1:55:36 - Leo Laporte
No, that new synthetic turkey is pretty darn good, I got to tell you.

1:55:40 - Andy Ihnatko
What a great marketing plan that was. I just think that it's one thing when you say that it's the only place you're going to stream it, okay, I get it. It's 2024. It's when no, we won't even let you buy it digitally anywhere else. No, you're going to keep that DVD player running. You're going to have to make sure you buy like 10 copies of that Blu-ray because you're going to have to deal with disk rot, because I know that you're going to have to deal with disk rot, because I know that you're too honest to actually rip it into a video file and put it on your home media server. You're not going to do that because that would be dishonest and breaking the law. We don't do that. I hope somebody does that, but it's a bummer that the only way to do it is to run an Apple app. That chafes me a little bit.

1:56:18 - Leo Laporte
Probably there is an OpenPlex server somewhere. You can find it if you work really hard.

1:56:24 - Jason Snell
You can, I think, use your web browser and watch it in a browser too. Probably Not legally, no, no, I think you can go to Apple TV's, the Apple TV website, and watch it that way too, I think. I think that they have a web app as well. I just want to warn people, as I do every year, it's a tradition. I want to warn people away from the thanksgiving one, because that one's really bad and you shouldn't watch it just because it's. I mean, I love thanksgiving. It's great. I don't. I love charlie brown and peanuts. I think they're great. The charlie brown peanuts thanksgiving. Look, my kids watch that over and over again. I've had ample opportunity to think about it critically. It's terrible. Don't watch it. I'll I'll repeat this message as we get closer to thanksgiving, but just I'm waving you off like don't do it, can I, can I?

1:57:11 - Andy Ihnatko
is there like a fair time thing where I get to spend the same amount of time saying how much the first two avengers movies stink anytime you, you, you've been I know the comparable episode about that, andy we did two episodes about it in which I was.

1:57:26 - Jason Snell
I was like thrown out, like yes, you were deposed to the corner I was like cassandra the only one who's speaking the truth of disaster.

1:57:35 - Andy Ihnatko
But no one will believe me.

1:57:36 - Alex Lindsay
Oh well, that's my burden I just, I just still think that peanuts is curb your enthusiasm for kids yes, that's a very apt description, or maybe curb your enthusiasm.

1:57:46 - Leo Laporte
Just as peanuts for grown-ups how about that?

1:57:50 - Alex Lindsay
but there is no curb your enthusiasm halloween episode is there I am, I, I am binge.

1:57:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I am in the middle of binge reading the complete peanuts. I'm, I'm, I'm halfway through it right now and I I will not necessarily disagree with that. That's, I gave away my. The depth of the comments, that the depth of the comments, that the depth of the commentary about the human condition that comes through when charles schultz started to hit his stride is amazing I gave away my complete calvin and hobbes to a young person who I felt should read this.

1:58:20 - Leo Laporte
Uh, maybe I should just go out and get another one. You're a good egg. Yeah, I hope that they were inspired and their life was changed, as mine was. Uh, before we go to our picks because we're going to do that in a minute I do want to mention that it's probable that this month, October, we'll have another apple event.

1:58:38 - Jason Snell
Yes, of some sort, of some sort, yeah will it be scary fast.

I mean, that's the thing last year, what they did. They just released a video On Halloween and then the press actually were briefed beforehand. I remember that was one where we actually were told the news under embargo and so we saw it all and then went home, basically, and then they did the video. So we'll see what they do this time. From a press standpoint, I would imagine there are only really two options from a public standpoint one is you have a snazzy video and the other is they just do press releases and it depends on what they want to do here what are we going to see?

1:59:15 - Leo Laporte
we're going to see new uh, I hope we're going to see very exciting new minis, right mini macbook pro.

1:59:21 - Jason Snell
Uh, maybe some ipads like the ipad mini. And then I think the big story also is M4 processors beyond the base M4, right.

1:59:29 - Alex Lindsay
An M4 Pro and an M4 Max.

1:59:32 - Jason Snell
And that's, you know, because that's going to take that story a little bit further which they may want to do storytelling about. But again, I think it's always that question like, is there enough there to merit telling everybody, oh, come in a week and watch our promotional video? Or telling everybody, oh, come in a week and watch our promotional video? Or is it more one of those things where they update their website, they put videos on the different product pages, they have a bunch of press releases and then they just kind of go from there? And I'm not convinced that what I've heard is in the works from you know, reading reports from people like Mark Gurman, that there is enough there. But you know, apple may have more story to tell.

2:00:09 - Leo Laporte
I have to say, even if they do do a video, I think we've just been bit too much uh by the copyright uh, evil copyright lawyers, and we'll probably not have to stop streaming live events. The last thing we did was the metaconnect event last week, and mike and I just talked, did what you do on office hours, Alex. We just talked to a screen but didn't show it because we're so terrified by the chilling effect. I don't do it. I don't do it because I'm, I'm.

2:00:33 - Alex Lindsay
I don't do it because I'm scared. I do it because I think it's a better experience for the viewer because then they can watch the full resolution uh presentation and listen to.

2:00:42 - Jason Snell
So me my, my, my suggestion if you want to try it sometime is to do a postgame show is to literally start streaming the moment that it's done, with your quick reaction. So, essentially to know, you know we have the shows.

2:00:54 - Leo Laporte
I mean, if you can wait till Tuesday, we'll have Mac break weekly and we'll have you guys wait.

2:00:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Alex. Alex, I have a suggestion for you that just came to mind. There was a hack project that someone came up with a 3D printed handheld camera that runs off of a Raspberry Pi, but it does have a Raspberry Pi camera in it, but when you click the shutter it doesn't like just oh, here's the picture. It sends the picture to one AI that generates a text description of what that picture is, then sends that description to another AI that generates a text description of what that picture is and then sends that description to another AI that generates a picture and that's what appears on your screen. What if you were to do the same thing where, as it's going on, you describe a man with white hair and glasses and a fancy watch is standing in front of a video screen in a wooded campus, and then you just keep updating the picture with, like singularity generated images of like what is going on, like as interpreted by AI, or you can. You can crowdsource it over over over your group over over office hours.

2:01:58 - Leo Laporte
I bet you can do it. I was thinking we could do it. We could reenact it with puppets. What do you think of that Puppet cast? I love it. Puppet cast. What do you think of that puppet cast? I love it cast. Nice good morning. Wait, wait a minute. We have exciting things to announce today. No, the host here, and I think you the apple event for October.

2:02:20 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be I do think it's interesting whether they decide to do a live. I think that they should do a live rather than just put it up on youtube or put it up some video, because I will say that we spend a lot less time paying attention to it If it's. If it's just a video on YouTube, you know like it is something that we stop and pay attention to. If it's, if it's a lot, even if it's a movie being played out live, it just means that we're all looking at the same time.

2:02:51 - Leo Laporte
Because I'm a little, I have to say, I'm a little bitter and I'm just not going to play this game with apple anymore and, frankly, we're probably just not going to play the game with any of these companies. We're just going to do shows in our regular schedule and talk about whatever apple announced, because I just, you know it's stupid of them because that's uh, that's coverage, but they don't, I guess they don't care. Uh, all, all right, well, we'll find out. Uh, I would love an M four based mini, uh, ipad mini. Uh, I would be very interested in a Apple TV sized puck.

2:03:16 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, um but I don't think the iPad mini is getting the M four. I think the iPad will be on like an, a something but the. Yeah, but that, that, yeah, I imagine that I'm just keep imagining the m4 mac mini like the m4 pro version of that little tiny kind of big apple tv size with all that power in it.

2:03:37 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a really good, good, good selection of ports, yeah, yeah, sweet well, we'll.

2:03:43 - Leo Laporte
we'll probably do it, uh, somehow with my little friend here. Actually, this guy was headed to the dumpster. I just pulled him out of the trash. Can, oh you can? You're a creep, you know. Maybe I'll save it for Twit1000, because Patrick Norton's joining us, robert Aaron and I have puppets for all of them.

2:03:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't throw it out, because it might help me when I'm trying to get more of your estate. I'm trying to get more of your estate. Can you have the puppet? Can you sign like a sign, a document that basically gives some control to the puppet? That would help me out too.

2:04:12 - Leo Laporte
I give Andy and I'll call everything. Oh you've got a big heart puppet but get ready your picks of the week coming up next, andy, and I'll callako Alex Lindsay and the wonderful Jason Snell on the show today. You know the camera doesn't think it's human, so it's focusing on on on somebody else's eyes. Look at that. See it goes. Oh, now it does. Now it's staying focused. Okay, let's get your picks of the week, kids. Mr Alex lindsey, why don't you kick things off?

2:04:53 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, so. So one of the things that that I didn't sorry, I didn't mean to throw you no. No, I was trying to set something up for the thing oh, okay, you want me to start with somebody else.

No, no, no, I'm good, I'm set up ready, so, um, so one of the things that uh, uh that when you're dealing with doing multicam setups is that you have to have a tally, and tallies turn out to be expensive and painful and you just wish that if someone could just use their phone as a tally, that'd be great. Well, there's this thing called Tally ATEM. So if you have an ATEM switcher, a Blackmagic ATEM switcher, these switchers all sit on the network, and so if you have it on the network and you can get on the same network with your phone, this app all it does is looks at it, looks at your ATEM and if you're ready to go so like, for instance, I have this is it's green right now, and if I switch away from it it turns gray. That just that's just telling me that I am, that's in preview, right, and so it is simply. Every time I cut away from it, it just turns on the preview. Now if I cut to it, you'll see that it turned red. Now I'm sharing my phone there, so it's turned red there.

I had to figure out how to show it to you there, but you can see that it turns away from that. So all it is is I can take a phone and I can put it next to my camera if I've got three or four camera operators, and all you have to do is say I'm camera three or I'm like in the app, I'm camera two, I'm camera three, I'm camera four, and it simply turns green and red. It may seem like a simple problem, but it's a big problem for us when we're trying to figure out, like how to do this cheaply. And the other options oftentimes are much more expensive or much more painful, because the operators have to know when they're live. And so if you're looking for a quick, cheap, easy way to run that it's called Tally ATEM.

2:06:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, I do need a Tally ATEM because I have no idea which camera I'm on. See, See, there you go. Actually, I only have well, I have three, but you never show my other cameras. John Ashley, you should show the other cameras so that people can enjoy the beauty of my studio from other angles.

Can you show it now? Is it on now? I mean, I would if you would actually change it. So look at this. We finally lit the corner a little bit. It's very pretty. There's the chair, yeah. And then when I want to do something really serious, I go right up into the camera, like this, and say I want to do something really serious. I go right up into the camera, like this, and say I need to talk to you about diarrhea, and then, and then you can be terrified. So if I had tally lights I could do that. I don't. There you go. I have no idea where the camera is at any given time.

2:07:24 - Rene Ritchie
Uh, mr, uh, Jason Snell your pick of the. Yeah, make sure to hit the other button to switch back.

2:07:28 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, don't worry Jason Snell your pick of the week yeah, there's a brand new app that just came out. Uh, a lot of us have to cross post across many social since the basically the dissolution of the community that was on twitter uh into fragmented social media, including mastodon I've got people there. Threads there are a lot of people there. Blue Sky there are a bunch of people there. It's a real pain to post, especially if you've got self-promo stuff like there's a new episode of TwitOut that you should watch, things like that I don't want to go to four different services, so Ben Rice, mccarthy and Aaron vey just released a brand new app today.

2:08:09 - Leo Laporte
it's called croissant, because it's cross posting cross simultaneous cross posts yeah, and it look for the one with the croissant as the icon yes, it is.

2:08:21 - Jason Snell
It is a simultaneous cross posting on blue sky, mastodon and threads. I think that they're. I mean it is they wanted to ship it. Uh, I've already told them. I know nobody wants to be on twitter, but a lot of us still have to promote our stuff on twitter. That's and, and one of the interesting effects of using croissant is it's right only so if you need to be present on social media just to promote things, you can do it from that app and you have to feel guilty if you want to read social media, you go to another app to do that.

This is just for posting. It's a cross-posting tool. It's very useful. I was able to log into all of my personal accounts and all of my like, brand accounts, my show accounts, and that way I can do sort of like oh, post this as me and the incomparable. Or post this as me on threads and me on mastodon and me on blue sky perfect and, and it works so I just purchased a lifetime subscription.

It's a 1.0 they're going to add a lot to it.

Um, they're still working with threads is.

Api is changing pretty rapidly, and so logging to threads can be a little bit tricky, but, um, they're good developers and a good idea, and I just the choice is waste time posting the same thing, and, and you know, you can copy and paste, but then the, not the image. So if you're posting an image, you got to go get that again and then make the alt text again, and this just takes care of all of that. So, just really convenient if you're somebody not everybody's like this, but if you're somebody who finds herself going oh geez, I posted that to threads, but I should probably post that to Blue Sky and Mastodon. Now you can use Croissant, and it's easy. No X on here, though, which is interesting. They are aware of that desire, and I actually think it goes to the whole idea that this is a posting tool and not a reading tool that, if they can do it I think they probably will, because I think there are a lot of us who don't really want to go there to read stuff, but we still have followers.

2:10:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm afraid of what I'll see if I go there.

2:10:18 - Jason Snell
I don't want about the only thing that I post to everyone on Twitter X anymore is self-promotion, like here's a new episode of a podcast and like I, I saw followers there. Some of them presumably still are on twitter and that's fine, but I don't really want to read it anymore, except for my you know sports list that I. I check in on everything else, uh, no, but if I had a posting tool that just sent it to x, fine, great, um, happy to do that.

2:10:46 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I've just added my blue sky and my mastodon twitsocial. I'm going to add threads, yeah, and then I. I haven't posted any of them because I've. You know, it's tough, I'm stymied.

2:10:59 - Jason Snell
It's too much, so much I used to not be for cross-posting, but now I kind of feel like for some stuff to, for especially the self-promo stuff. You really need to put it everywhere, and so I'm so glad this app exists. We use this, uh at the uh. A couple weeks ago when I was in memphis, uh for the relay, uh, saint jude fundraiser, all of mike and steven's fundraising updates were through a beta of croissant and I was like, guys, how are you posting to all these? And they're like, oh, are you not on the beta? Uh, you should talk to ben and uh. So, yeah, it's, it's very useful for situations like that good, good plug.

2:11:35 - Leo Laporte
I've just installed all through, added all three of my accounts. It's nice. I would like to add x. Yeah, I hope they do that. I hope they figure out maybe there may be a elon may not like it, so it may be that I don't know. Depends on what the api rules are yeah, uh, good, I bought a lifetime subscription because I wanted to keep it up and all of that sir ben and aaron, thank you yes, see, and, and it says what's not happening, which I like even better.

What? What's not happening? Okay, mr Andy Anaco, he's happening, that's for sure. He's simply irresistible, andy.

2:12:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Geller. Thank you very much. So my work life has gotten a lot more complicated as a certain project that I keep mentioning, even for stalling, keeps getting closer and closer to Bethlehem as it shrugs to be born. And the problem that I've had for years is that my work schedule and my projects, they're too complicated for a simple to-do list app. They are not complicated enough for a full-fledged project manager app. And every time I've tried a new project manager app it's always like I felt like I'm a freshman in college that's sitting in a junior level class and like, oh so what is a Kandan board? Like, okay, so why do I have to have a context to decide that I need to Did you get a real job, andy? No, no, well, I've no, no, as my dad said, the one, the last, the very last time years ago that I was considering taking a job offer, he said I was asking him for his advice. He said, son, I'm not even sure you're even housebroken for office work anymore.

2:13:21 - Leo Laporte
Wait a minute. You wait a minute. You've never worked in an office.

2:13:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Wait a minute. You've never worked in an office. No, I did. I started working for myself when I was 24, 25.

And before then I had a whole bunch of job jobs that people in their early 20s have, but yeah. But what I'm getting at is that I've been looking for something that's sort of in the middle, where I know that I need to write an episode of the Material podcast this week. I would like to get it done on this day. I absolutely have to get it done by this time. I don't necessarily need to put it on a calendar and have a reminder about it, I just need to be able to plan things out. So I'm giving enough time to all the things I need to get done at the end of the week. And a few weeks ago I came across Sunsama.

That's been around for a while and it seems to be, for now, that nice happy medium. As a matter of fact, the onboarding process it's kind of like talking to somebody who's it's not. Like first we need a link to your Google account and now, if you're on Outlook, we need to get permissions for x, y and z. It's like okay, um, what do you want to get done this week? Like, okay, when do you want to get something done? And like what are your larger goals? And it's not. It's not in a coaching manner, but it's just that's pretty much the way that it kind of wants to be interacted with.

Where it's not like I'm going to actually actionized a priority task that's been assigned to whoever it's, again, it prioritizes your starting the week by here's what I want to get done this week Roughly, here's when I'd like to get it done At the end of the week, basically having a recap of okay, what did I get done, what did I not get done. I can put things on today and that I want to get something done after I'm finished doing MacWeek. However, it's not going to pester me about it, it's just like a tile that I can drag from one column to another. It's like, actually, let's put this off until Thursday.

2:15:14 - Leo Laporte
This is nice. I like the calendar interface without it being calendaring. It's kind of cool.

2:15:20 - Andy Ihnatko
If you want to put something on a calendar, you can. You can drag it into and it'll sync with whatever you're using as a calendar app. But the thing that I've really really liked, so yesterday I had, here's the number of when you have a task that you add. It's like you don't schedule it for a certain time period but you say I think I want to spend three hours on this, and then, as you go through your day, the task that you do, you simply click on this thing and this little floating window is now on my Mac with a play button and a pause button.

2:15:48 - Leo Laporte
So, okay, you want to spend three hours on this Great Click, play and a timer goes and then when you're kind of like tomato, a little bit kind of kind of like that, and the great thing is that when you, when I'm done, like I click stop, great, that's done.

2:16:01 - Andy Ihnatko
So not only does it, not only does it check that off my to do list, but it also like loads up what's the next thing you wanted to do. And so here's now a timer for one hour of doing whatever, and at the end of the week it'll actually give you a really good idea of well, you thought you're going to need three hours on that. You actually only needed two hours and 20 something minutes on that. And so now you've got you can also tell it I don't want to schedule myself for more than six hours of work, scheduled work like per day. And when you try to overload yourself, it'll say you're going to overtime there. Do you want to put this someplace else? If I don't check something off my to-do list, it doesn't like this is overdue by two days. Now it's overdue by four days. Now it's red and flashing because it's overdue by five days. It just simply moves on to the next day, or I can just simply look at this and drag it. I'm not going to get that tomorrow. I'll have to do that on Friday. What I'm getting at is that it's a very, very analog style of breaking down what you need to get done, what you want to get done, and also being able to get metrics on what actually got done, how long it took and how far you're progressing on certain goals. Very, very simple, very, very straightforward.

The only negative about this is that it is pricey. You can sign up for two weeks for free. You don't have to drop a credit card number or anything, so it's not so you have to remember to unsubscribe. But after two weeks it becomes 20 bucks a month, which is not a small amount of money for something if you don't know you're going to use it or not. I've only been using it for a few weeks. What I'm telling you now is that it's definitely worthwhile for me to give it another full month to see if my work habits lock into this over the long run. So I'm not going to buy. You do get a discount if you purchase an entire year. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go month by month before I figure out if this works, but for now, it gave me a lot of awareness over what I'm getting done what I'm not getting done and how long things actually take to get done.

For somebody with ADD, that's a very big thing. Sometimes it's like, oh my God, this is going to take like six hours. Well, no, it only took you two. Why you like wait until you had an entire afternoon to do this? Or like, oh, this is great, I can write this in just 90 minutes. Actually, andy, that took you four hours the last time you did that. Don't. Maybe you should block more time for that. So, very, very useful thing. That's sunsamacom. It's been around for a while, uh, so it's not like it's something that just came up last week or something like that. There's a community. It's integrated into a lot of different stuff, as usual for this kind of thing. There's a web app, there's a desktop app, there's mobile apps for iOS and for Android, so wherever you are, you can keep on top of these things.

2:18:38 - Leo Laporte
Lovely Andy and I hope that whatever job you have gets done. My solution, by the way, to ADD is just not do anything ever I go to bed.

2:18:48 - Andy Ihnatko
I tried that for a while and it actually worked for a good part of my life, but then it stopped working. I had to find other ways to get things done.

2:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, your work furlough is over. You got to get back in the cell, so thank you for being here, andy Ihnatko, who will soon, I'm sure, announce something exciting. Yes, Wow. That's great. I look forward to it.

2:19:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Internet organizations are going to be informed on a certain day that a certain address has to be linked to something else, and then, once that's rock solid, I think we'll have we'll have a launch date.

2:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, very nice. Wgbh is calling. When will you be on next?

2:19:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I was supposed to be on last week. I bumped for pressing breaking news happened. Yeah, so my next slide is in two weeks. So so I think a week from Thursday at wgbhnewsorg to stream it live or later.

2:19:35 - Leo Laporte
I was so proud of my son who was on the Today Show with Hoda and Jenna on Thursday yeah, cooking up a lamb's burger and I told him my Today Show story. Where I went out to do the Today Show, it was today weekend, so it wasn't even the Today Show, but today weekend went out to do it. Uh, and I'm sitting in the green room and I said, well, there's some breaking news, there's some breaking news. And they pushed me right off the show because of the breaking news. And then and this was actually insult to injury they said, well, let's record it anyway, maybe we'll use it someday. So after the show's over, they recorded a fake segment, which way they never used. And I, I I told henry that after he appeared on jenna and hoda and it actually worked and he was on and I was so impressed well, at least you didn't rent that chicken suit for nothing.

2:20:20 - Andy Ihnatko
You got some.

2:20:21 - Leo Laporte
You got some use I flew all the way to new york to do the today show. Couldn't believe it anyway, that's you know these things happen. Uh, thank you, andy. Look forward to gbh in a couple of weeks, mr Alex lindsay there, by the way, there's the link to the today show. Todaycom, sol hank shows us how to make his viral lamb burger recipe. I don't think you really want to describe a recipe as viral, just thinking it doesn't sound that good. Office hours dot global. What you got coming up on, uh, on your fabulous we had a great yesterday.

2:20:52 - Alex Lindsay
um, we had a bunch of our members came on and talked about media innovation in the courtroom and this was a judge and some lawyers and you know it was. You know it's really shows I mean for me, the power of office hours and start playing that that you have members that said, hey, I want to talk about something in a second hour. And we were like sure, and they, it was just such a great hour talking about how media innovations, working in courtroom and everything else and something that we didn't expect and it was. It just turned out to be a really, really good hour and that was from yesterday, so you can, you can find it on.

2:21:21 - Leo Laporte
Wednesday's your voiceover panel. I should really learn how to do that. I might watch see if I get make a second career in voiceover q a.

2:21:31 - Alex Lindsay
You know some when we one thing we started to do is go, hey, on the second hours. If we have a great second hour, we're going to put a second hour and otherwise we're going to do an hour of q a like we, like we did originally, and so uh, so we have more q a days I'm taking a little easier, so yeah, I like those q a days, I days, I.

That's well. The funny thing that most people don't know is that we talk about these shows, like many the courtroom or voice voiceover panels or whatever. But every day for the first hour is just whatever people are trying to figure out with their media. So you know, whether it's audio, video, how to put it together, how to cut it, how to do whatever it's.

2:22:03 - Leo Laporte
There's an hour of that every single day, seven days a week and I know this because whenever anybody would call the radio show or the any of our shows saying I need help doing this, I said just go to officehours.global and ask them, because they're the, the real experts. Lots of great stuff. What an amazing channel you've got going there. You can join in and listen in on youtube or at their page. Officehoursglobal and Michael Krasny show gray matter. You got something big coming up there.

2:22:28 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we do. Well, we have uh, we had David Kennedy on from the uh, from the uh lane center, and talking about the America West. Actually, on this last one it just just released today and you know it's really fascinating. I mean, just there's so many you know odd details about. You know how all of this stuff came together, that that he really knows a lot about. And, uh, we are, we're excited. In a couple weeks we have Malcolm Gladwell coming on so, oh, how fun, oh that'll be fascinating.

Get your questions ready, um and uh, we'll, uh, we'll, put some more announcements out.

2:22:58 - Leo Laporte
Jason Snell writes regularly at sixcolors.com. That's his official publication. He also does about 8,000 podcasts at sixcolors.com. Slash Jason. Yes, and was there ever a podcast made of the RelayFM fundraiser? Can you watch that?

2:23:16 - Jason Snell
Actually you can. You can go on YouTube to the RelayFM YouTube channel and the podcast-a-thon for 2024 is all there, all 11 hours and 45 minutes of it, or something, because if you go over 12 hours, youtube won't archive your stream. So you're just under and there's a podcast version at relayfm slash departures if you want to download a 12 hour long podcast, uh, but the video version is fun, uh. So that's what I would recommend is, if you want to watch some goofy stuff over almost 12 hour period, thanks YouTube. That's where you can go is the relay FM YouTube channel.

2:23:53 - Leo Laporte
And I noticed that a million dollars for the month which is amazing.

2:23:57 - Jason Snell
Micah's D and D and donations stream is also on the relay. I was. I was going to mention that, yeah.

2:24:02 - Leo Laporte
Did he do that through incomparable Cause? He does that, you're it was. It's inspired by incomparable, but this time they took it direct into the relay channel, which is cool, so we didn't have to be the middleman there, which is a million bucks is, yeah, this month, unbelievable in september. Yeah, amazing, great, amazing and of course, sixcolors.com, a must read. And Jason's so smart, and there's his croissant cross post on his own.

2:24:25 - Jason Snell
Oh, that's Dan Moren that's Dan Moren, he's crossing he's cross posting on the cross post.

2:24:30 - Leo Laporte
Yep, yeah, uh, lots of great stuff on here. sixcolors.com

We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am pacific 2 pm eastern 1800, UTC. If you want to tune in and watch, we would love to have you. Um, all you have to do is there's seven different places to watch it. If you're a member of the Club, which is the best way seven bucks a month you get ad-free versions of the shows for download. You can also watch the live stream in Discord and chat with us in Discord, plus a lot of other benefits. We're going to do another coffee show October 18th. Stacey's Book Club is coming up. I know Micah's going to do his crafting corner Lots of things we do in the club because it's a fun place to gather with a great community and it supports us going forward. We really need the support.

It's a tough time right now for old school media and nowadays podcasting is old school media. Go to twit.tv/clubtwit. You don't have to be a clubmember to watch live, though. We have people watching live right now on YouTube youtube.com/twit/live. I think it's that. Yeah, youtube.com/twit/live. twitch.tv/twit for Twitch Kick, Facebook, Linkedin, x.com. Am I missing it Anywhere? Anywhere you want to go, it's going to be there, so make sure you check that out, uh, during the show broadcast time on Tuesdays. After the fact, of course, you can download the show, because it's this thing called a podcast. They're going to be big someday, kids, trust me. Uh, if you go to twit.tv/mbw, that's the website, all the shows, all. What is it? 993. What episode are we on now? 941 all 941 shows.

Wow, we'll get to. We'll get to a thousand in a year or so. Uh, we'll be there on the website twit.tv/mbw. There's a link there to our Youtube channel all the videos since we started doing video back in the day, uh, and of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way, you get it automatically as soon as we publish it. Uh, there's audio or video, so choose the format you want and watch. We don't care how you watch, we just want to make sure you do watch. Now, I'm sad to say, I have to tell you to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye, guys.