MacBreak Weekly 944 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's here, Alex is here, Jason's here. Jason has the new iPad mini. We'll get his review. We'll take a look at the problems facing vision pro and the rumor that apple's having an event next week. All that coming up next on mac break weekly podcasts you love from people you trust.

This is twit this is mac break weekly, episode 944, recorded Tuesday, October 22nd, 2024. The taste of citrus, caffeine and skateboards. It's's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news with the Apple intelligentsia. They're all in the house today, Jason Snell from sixcolors.com. Good to see you, Jason.

0:00:58 - Jason Snell
Good to be here.

0:00:59 - Leo Laporte
I'm literally in my garage, so I am in the house in the In the house, in the back, in the truest sense, in the front, right in the front, in the front. Yeah, yeah, modern houses. The garage seems to be a large portion of the overall frontage.

0:01:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I wouldn't call my house modern, it's a 1950s but it's here and I'm here and it's very nice to take this unused space and turn it from like more than a decade now into where I work. It's very nice to take this unused space and turn it from like more than a decade now into where I work.

0:01:27 - Leo Laporte
We can judge how long Jason has been in the garage by the state of the lava lamp, which is yet to start flowing.

0:01:35 - Jason Snell
I only recently turned it on so it is still solidified, Don't worry.

0:01:44 - Leo Laporte
As a tip to the viewer yes, when we get later in the show the bubbles will be bubbling back there, or an Easter egg that chuckling coming from Andy Ihnatko WGBH, Boston. Great to see you, Andy. Glad they allowed you upstairs in the library today.

0:01:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Great to be here. And also, if you happen to be running like a national or international grade set of data center security, you can use Jason's lava lamp as a random number generator. So just make sure that he's actually in the garage, because if it's one of those weeks where he's like at someone else's house and he's actually using a static backdrop, oh yeah, that's a field day for hackers.

0:02:21 - Leo Laporte
The random is not so random, but hey, free is free. Yeah, it's a. It's a very famous that cloud flare has a lava lamp wall for generating its random numbers, which is actually really quite intelligent.

0:02:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think that's it sounds like a made-up thing that would be done in some sort of like bond movie where you say oh yes, well, the lava, oh well, we usually says random number generators to secure the encryption. On the on, on the crowns, on the crown's holdings yes and everybody, everybody, I'll tell you everybody, the audience is like, oh god, yeah, no, you just wanted to have a wall. That makes no sense. What's? Oh wait, you actually got that from life, okay I love that.

0:03:05 - Leo Laporte
Actually, that's really cool also with us.

0:03:08 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, I don't know if he has a lava lamp wall, but I'm guessing he might, because he does have a evil layer I, I had one of those nebula things, you know, the ones you put your hands on, you touch and and the little sparks go toward yeah, a tesla, what do they call that?

0:03:21 - Leo Laporte
tesla plasma. Where do you get those?

0:03:23 - Andy Ihnatko
now that brookstone is out of business, do they call that tesla plasma? Where do you get those?

0:03:25 - Alex Lindsay
now that brookstone is out of business. I got it from brookstone, brookstone.

0:03:34 - Jason Snell
And now what? Yeah, I know exactly.

0:03:34 - Alex Lindsay
Just, I think ali express is probably the answer. Unfortunately. Yeah, but you do. I just learned. If you put metal stuff on the, on the globe itself, it looks like it could be dangerous. Like it, it's.

0:03:41 - Leo Laporte
It's like, oh, it's cute and it's cute when it's in glass and it's your skin and then it can.

0:03:46 - Leo Laporte
It can move a lot more electricity, so I'm sure that's probably why they don't sell them as widely anymore so Mar Gurman says it's next week and uh, Mark Gurman implies there might even be an event. He says creators are going to be invited to an la event wednesday of next week, which would be the 29th.

0:04:06 - Alex Lindsay
They were just trying to figure out where they probably called Justine and Marquez and just were like yeah, when can you come out, when are you guys going to be home? And they're like, oh, we'll be in LA, we'll go to the coast.

0:04:16 - Jason Snell
We'll get together have a few laughs.

Can you scuba dive another day they did something similar they did a creators event last year for their October event in New York. They did remember. It's not really an event, they just played the video, but they had a video sort of like premiere with the creators and then they had a hands-on area where they could shoot their videos with the new products. And it sounds like maybe they're doing some of that in LA. They may also do it in New York. I honestly don't know, but they it's part of a bigger strategy, obviously. He heard from somebody who got invited on Wednesday and, as he said on Twitter, this puts an outside bound on when they're going to announce it. Right, because they'll be doing an event on Wednesday with creators, so they'll announce it by Wednesday, right? We don't know necessarily if it's Monday or Tuesday, but it's coming apple's inviting.

0:05:05 - Leo Laporte
He writes media creators at different appointment times throughout the day on October 30th in my town a little gratuitous, my town of la they seemingly aren't bringing a group together to watch a keynote video, so the announcement is online only, as I've been indicating so they've done it a few different ways in new york, so it'll be interesting to see they do have an outpost in LA now, so this might be a new thing for them to try out.

0:05:29 - Alex Lindsay
Is this one of these, like Batman offices, or is it an actual Apple office?

0:05:35 - Jason Snell
That's a good question In LA, right? Because in New York they own a Stately Wayne mansion of their own Stately Wayne Manor in Tribeca. I don't know about LA and where they're doing it and if they've rented a place or if they're putting them at Apple's building in Santa Monica or whatever.

0:05:50 - Alex Lindsay
Some of them, a lot of the larger companies, have these kind of hidden. Like you're in a warehouse, you open up a warehouse door and it's amazing, microsoft has one in the lower part of San Francisco.

0:06:02 - Jason Snell
It's just gorgeous. I don't know, uh, what what apple might be doing in la, but they definitely have that in in new york they have. Uh, it's two years ago I was just looking at apple insider.

0:06:12 - Leo Laporte
Apple started building a massive tv and movie production facility in culver city. Oh, yeah, yeah, yep, so that's where I do it, right it could be.

0:06:21 - Jason Snell
It depends on on on this I mean, this is just briefings and stuff, um, and the fact that they're getting individual time slots. I think that's smart, right. There are two ways that they can do it. They can get everybody together, but the problem then is you've got a big gang of people together and they all want to shoot B-roll and they all want to shoot stand-ups, and they all want to build their video presentation, stagger them by time and give them a space, which is, if I were a YouTube creator, I would very much prefer that to get my 30 minutes where I could shoot my video in a nice controlled space. And I know the last time I was in the Apple New York location, there was a floor that I didn't go to on the elevator, but the elevator stopped there and it was very clearly a setup where creators could come and shoot some of their their video stuff with the, the new products. So it's really smart.

I think that the question is what's the rollout? And is there a a video drop or or just a bunch of press releases, which it might it might be? I'm I'd be a little surprised if there weren't a hype video of some sort, because, keep in mind, we're going to see the m4 pro and the m4 max, which they love to boast about their chips and their chip performance. But I mean it's really interesting. There was a period of like I don't know five or ten years where it felt like every Apple event was predetermined. You knew exactly what they were going to do and, to the credit of the current regime, they're mixing it up. You can't really guess what Apple is up to. All you can do is listen to Mark Gurman, who will tell you exactly what they're up to.

0:07:55 - Leo Laporte
So it's going to be a busy week because Monday is when 18.1 comes out right for iOS.

0:07:58 - Jason Snell
That's when the first dribbles of Apple intelligence started emerging.

0:07:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they released Final Candidate and also released Notes. So yeah, that's pretty much a dead deal.

0:08:04 - Leo Laporte
They released Final Candidate and also released Notes, so yeah, that's pretty much a dead deal. I'm actually installing the 18.1 beta now because I'm not all that interested in the Apple Intelligence, but this is the debut of the hearing aid feature, which I'm very interested in, and we've started to see some reviews of it on the Virgin elsewhere.

0:08:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but it's by young people who have good hearing. So, leo, I can't wait to hear what you think of it. Hey, sonny, what, what was? That.

And unfortunately I have sad news to report. I actually got a hearing test the other week and I can hear fine, so I'm not going to be a good tester of this thing. It's good news for me, it's bad news for the world. But you, Mr Laporte, who has your hearing aids and a prescription and all those things, so you're going to be able to actually tell us how it goes.

0:08:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, not only do I have moderate not severe, but moderate hearing loss, I also wear hearing aids. I have, for about 10 years, audiologist prescribed hearing aids, so I'll be able to. These are $7 thousand dollars for the pair.

0:09:06 - Alex Lindsay
They're incredibly expensive, um, and I'll be able to compare them to the 250 dollar and I think the biggest thing is like what's the, what's the battery life on the seven thousand dollar version?

0:09:16 - Leo Laporte
oh, it easily lasts all day. I mean, it's not you know these things, but they're. They're really very different instruments. I mean, the airpods are designed for listening to music, right, and so they're very different instruments. The airp, the AirPods, are designed for listening to music, right, and so they're very different instruments. The AirPods do have a microphone on them, as, of course, hearing aids do. In fact, these Oticons are verging on the capabilities of the AirPods, because I can answer the phone, listen to the caller and speak to the caller all through these devices. But listening to music on these is terrible.

0:09:45 - Andy Ihnatko
It's designed for the voice, not for the right and, and not only that, realize that they're making the airpods in the millions, whereas they make hearing aids, and like in the like, the tens of thousands at most.

0:09:55 - Leo Laporte
So there's economies of scale yeah, I mean I think they're gouging price gouging somewhat, but yeah, that you know, and insurance typically does not pay for it. Some do, but Medicare certainly doesn't and my insurance doesn't. So it's out of pocket, which means a lot of people maybe the majority of people who need hearing aids don't wear them. There's a lot of evidence that not wearing a hearing aid can cause cognitive impairment. It certainly isolates you from the world, so this is maybe the most important health and health initiative from Apple ever. Well, and.

I guess, getting people to use these, or at least there'll be a hearing test right on 18.1. Uh, the Chris Welch, who uh reviewed it on the verge, said he's 40. He doesn't have hearing loss. He's not that good.

0:10:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Well done, yeah, well done but he says, uh, he must. He mustn't not like any of the good bands, though yeah, well, that's it.

0:10:50 - Leo Laporte
I lost my hearing from rock and roll. I can blame rock and roll for that, but the real question is how long will it take before people think I'm not listening to them if I'm wearing airpods? You know, with real hearing aids it's very hard to see them. You have to look for them and know where they people get over it, though.

0:11:04 - Jason Snell
I think I mean you can explain yourself and say I know I can hear you.

0:11:08 - Leo Laporte
I I'm using these to hear because remember how we mocked people who wore airpods at first. It looks so dopey to have that little dribble.

0:11:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I've often used the airpods specifically to communicate that I don't want to be talked to. I feel like this is going to ruin everything because I I battery will run out and I still put them back in Because I'm like I'm walking down the street.

0:11:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is going to ruin that for you, and I just don't want to talk to anyone.

0:11:28 - Alex Lindsay
I don't have to do anything else. So this is going to kind of screw up, muddy the water, you know where. People don't know what you're doing and why you're doing it, but I do think it also. I think that there, that I'm clear that they need hearing aids. They will not wear them because of the personal what they consider stigma of having them on and so being able to put an AirPod in and just have one of those ears in there or both, and being able to hear everybody, and you know, and it becoming normal, that everyone's got these in their ears all the time, which I think is a little odd, but it is. The other thing is is that there's what Apple's really doing that I think is interesting is integrating all of these services. You know, I'd kind of gone away from the AirPod Pros and I got them specifically because of the air, the ear protection.

I was just at a concert last week. I was at the Toad to a Sprocket and Bare Naked Ladies concert and you know we sat in kind of halfway back and I looked at it and I was like I'm, you know, I don't like the sound of the protection that I have and it wasn't as loud as some other concerts I've been to and so I didn't do it. But after the show my ears hurt because my ears are kind of fragile and and I was like I'm going to spend up to 300 bucks on something I'm going to make it go away. And when I saw that these are they're actually measuring these as protection I was like you know, I'm going to try this and try to go to some shows with these. On um, it's 25 to 30 db of reduction and that's a pretty good set of you know, that's uh, a lot of them don't promise much more than that. The most you get is maybe 40 db um and that's, and then you can't barely hear anything you can't hear the show and so this is so.

The thing is, is that, like I was like, why do I go to the concert if everything sounds like it's underwater, right? And what this promises and this is what I'm going to try to test is the idea that it's reducing all that but it's then passing you the sound in a relatively good way so you can actually hear the concert, just not as loud as it's being projected. And I think that if that's actually the case, so it's protecting you on one end, it's supporting you on the other end and it's playing music and doing phone calls in the middle and so so the you know. So it does a lot of. I mean, I think there's a lot of features that it's adding to it and it does it at a pretty high quality. For the price especially, you know, apple seems expensive to everything except for hearing aids, so it's really an expensive choice you can buy. You could buy three sets of Apple AirPods to cover you all day and it still wouldn't dent the cost it was going to cost to have the hearing aids. Absolutely.

0:13:52 - Leo Laporte
So Chris Welch does write on the Verge that he says Did you know? There are people who have already been replacing earplugs with the AirPods Pro at concerts. Until this fall, apple never endorsed such a use case or even mentioned it. The company knew that people were doing it, but kept quiet. Now, with 18.1 and the soon-to-be released AirPods firmware update, the AirPods Pro 2 will be offering hearing protection at all times across noise cancellation, transparency and adaptive audio modes. Somebody in our uh in our chat, in our discord chat, says flying comics, says gun range hearing protections, usually 25, 23 to 25 db uh drops. So these you wouldn't wear them to the gun range, but you absolutely could wear them at a concert and I'm presuming here hear the music quite well, right? I?

0:14:43 - Jason Snell
I have. I've used them at a concert and they work pretty well. I'm looking forward to trying them with this new feature. That is expressly for that. But they already had a reduced loud sounds option that made it possible for you to listen in. I think I had it in transparency mode and you know it's so it's passing through whatever it can. How did the music sound? It sounded pretty good.

I also have a pair of little in-ear earplugs that do a pretty good job of reducing the sound. So I compared them and they're just different. But I wonder if software I mean obviously Apple knew that people were using them this way, but like it wasn't, they can't make that claim. Right? It's dangerous to make that claim unless you can back it up. So it sounds like they can back it up now with some more express, uh, hearing protection. But certainly what I would say is, if you have airpods and you're at a concert, you should put them in it's better earplugs, or I mean I always wear animatics concert ear, yeah that's what I'm saying is if you have no other ear protection and you have your earpods with you.

You should put them in.

0:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Especially if they're well sealed right, Because that's key.

0:15:45 - Jason Snell
The pro ones are going to be the best for that. Yeah, absolutely.

0:15:48 - Leo Laporte
I've worn my. You know we have in-ear monitors. You know an audiologist actually makes them old and you go and you get them made. A number of companies do these and I wore them to a concert Umphreys McGee concert. Umphreys McGee used to they don't do it anymore but they used to let you buy a transmitter that was plugged into the soundboard that you could then wear your headphones with. That was the best concert I've ever been to, because the sound was fantastic and you still feel the bass. You know, because you're in the room. You still feel like it's live. You can even hear the crowd sort of in the background. It's pretty, pretty cool.

Apple. Apple says do not try to protect your ears with airpods pro. Uh, over 110 dba and concerts can easily get above that. But I have my apple watch set to 90 db and warning me and most of the time you know. If it's over 90 db I will know, but the watch will tell you. I think this is great. Apple's really getting into this and you know, with the, with us boomers, with this growing market of of old folks, this is a very good market for apple to be in well, and I think it's good on both ends, like I'm, if these work, I'm going to take them to a couple concerts, including my daughter's concert soon.

0:16:59 - Alex Lindsay
Um, yeah and uh, if these work, um, you know, you get into this mode of like, well, I, I'm taking my kids to concerts. I'm probably going to buy them a pair of these to to protect their ears early on. Yeah, that I should have done, and I think it's hard to get. Sometimes it's hard to get someone to put stuff in their ears, but if it's something that you're wearing to listen to stuff, anyway, if a lot of people are using it as this, you know for this product and it produces a high quality transfer of audio, I could definitely see a lot of people using it for this purpose.

0:17:30 - Leo Laporte
Jammer B's saying yeah, I took you to that concert. Thank you, jammer B. He's in the chat room. They generate. They have a sound test. Again, I haven't tried it yet. I am downloading the 18.1 public beta now so I can try it, but I'll have it for next week. But they do do a sound test. There are programs like Mimi that you can run on your iPhone that will do a sound test very similar to the actual audiologist's test. The curve it generates looks very much like the curve I get from my audiologist.

It shows where your normal, which is zero dB, and where you're below Also, I believe you can scan in your audiologist. It shows where your normal is, which is zero db, and where you're below.

0:18:05 - Jason Snell
Also, I believe you can scan in your audiologist results and use those if you want to.

0:18:12 - Leo Laporte
I will actually do that because that's how my hearing aids are are set. So, for best comparison, I'd like to get the earpods. I don't think it'll be better or worse. I think it'll be different, but it's the same. But if it gets people who don't want to spend $7,000, or don't want the stigma of hearing aids to wear, I mean it's also, by the way, I don't mind wearing AirPods all the time because I can listen to music and then exactly, you know, I mean, what's wrong with that?

0:18:39 - Andy Ihnatko
It's, even when they're not hearing aids, their AirPods. So yeah, there's a win. Hearing aids, they're airpods, so yeah, there's a win there's also the issue of tinnitus reduction.

0:18:50 - Leo Laporte
Um, there's some evidence that we're you know.

0:18:52 - Alex Lindsay
That's the ringing in the ears that a large percentage of americans uh, you're never alone. That's what I always say. Someone asked me about how I feel, about to say I'm never alone. It's never that quiet, yeah there's always aliens.

0:19:06 - Leo Laporte
There's a 9K hum all the time. So there's some evidence that having hearing aids will help, in that these Otikons actually have a tinnitus mode, a masking mode, and I have pink noise playing at a very low level, which actually helps amazingly when I wear these. But presumably you could do the same thing with the airpods. Have, uh, you know there are plenty of places to go to get you know, uh, masking sounds, yeah, that you could presumably play at the same time. So that's interesting too. Uh, anyway, I'm very, uh happy to see them do this. I will give you my report, uh, as soon as I can test it. I usually don't like to test beta stuff, but this, the, the beta, is that basically the final at this point? I would imagine. Um, so that's coming monday, so we got possibly mac minis coming next wednesday. What else are we going to see? Home pods, anything else?

0:20:05 - Jason Snell
No, I think it's going to be a Mac event or product drop. It's Mac mini which will be the new, smaller mini, it'll be MacBook Pro M4. And the rumor is the report from Gurman is that probably it's an M4 iMac because, remember, they're trying to get all of the old m3 max off onto m4.

0:20:25 - Leo Laporte
the new, um, better, uh, second generation three nanometer process in front of a very expensive macbook pro m3 that I bought, thinking I was future-proofing myself. Yeah you are, I got the max you are. Uh, now I'm thinking first on m4.

0:20:45 - Jason Snell
I mean, a lot of the M4 benefits are smaller because part of it is just recalibrating from the first three nanometer process to the second. I'm sure there will be benefits, but I got to be honest, leo. I've been talking to people who have M1s and they're like, oh you know, I'm going to have to go up to M4 from M1. I'm like I don't know what do you do? Because for most people, even an M1, if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac, I think you're fine. I have an M1 Max studio and like maybe I'll replace it at some point, but like it doesn't feel slow, it doesn't feel limited, it's incredibly capable and that's that first generation. So if you've got an M3, I think you've got it made. I think that this is for sweeping up the last people on Intel and also it's the people who maybe got a base M1 and they want to go up to something higher. I think those are the kind of people who really, really, really need an M4, because you know, yeah, all the Apple Silicon stuff is great.

0:21:43 - Andy Ihnatko
One of the biggest changes you'll have is opportunity for increased IO. I'm using an M1 MacBook like one of the originals, like for as my daily driver. I agree with you, Jason. It's like I've never been in a situation where I feel like, oh damn, I'm being held back by the limitations of my three or four-year-old MacBook and I'm using like Adobe Photoshop and beta. I'm using like generative AI that's being hosted on the device itself, but the things that I miss is the fact that I only have two ports and I can only have like one external display. So what part of what excites me about getting a Mac mini is having a real good like desktop warrior type of mode, not necessarily being able to run apps I wouldn't have been able to run before.

0:22:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think that it's going to be the physical hardware changes that motivate a lot of updates. Like that's why I got an M2 MacBook Air, is that I really like that new design that they did in the M2 generation. But like I've got an M3 review unit here of the MacBook Air that I got to send back to Apple this month and like I've used it some but like my M2 is fine, like it doesn't, it doesn't make me weep that I have to send it back because I only have an M2. Yeah, it's all good, but it is, yeah, it's a gain of ports. Uh, change in, look, gain in functionality. That's very specific to you. That's the kind of stuff that, uh, that can make a difference and make you will there be a big design change.

No, no, no. This is going to look exactly like the existing MacBook Pros. I would be surprised if there are any material differences to it. That's why that leak the people who had them in Russia, I think that that's why is that they're using the same boxes and they look the same? I mean they're. You know, apple updates the chips way more often than they update the physical design, so I don't think there'll be any major changes on the outside.

0:23:25 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think the big design change we're all waiting for is to see what happens with the mac mini. Yeah, you know and is the mac mini really going to be small and a lot of us are super excited about that.

0:23:34 - Leo Laporte
So the small enough of a improvement, uh, to make you want to upgrade it's going to be faster.

0:23:40 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I'm not looking at upgrading necessarily, but I think that you know, because I have M1, mine are mostly just M1 8 gig Mac minis. I have an M1 studio that's got I don't know 64 gigs or whatever in it, but again, I don't feel like for what I'm asking them to do. They are doing it perfectly and they don't need to have any. You know, and I think that that's the issue is that for 95% of the population, I don't think they're going to see any difference in their day-to-day tasks between an M1 and an M4. But if you're looking to buy new ones, I have to buy.

I potentially have to buy a bunch of Mac minis and so the idea that you know we are definitely waiting to see what happens here For that, if you're going to buy ten or more of these, you know that makes a difference. And it does make a difference when you think about server farms because you know, like a smaller Mac mini means that you can, the density can be much higher inside of. You know, and there's some people that are, you know, Mac Stadium, amazon, others are doing these, and that density makes a little yes and so so, anyway.

So I think that's you know, that's the uh um and and if, if you know, nothing's been rumored, but if, for some reason, the size also corresponds to a change in price, I mean apple will clean that entire market out, and they have in the past gone.

Hey, you know what? We're going to reach down and compete with everyone to make sure that there's no, no room. They've done that with the iPods before, and so you know a smaller Mac mini that came in at $399 or $299, I'm not saying it's going to happen, because there's been no rumors that that's going to happen, but if that happened it would be devastating to that market, like for Apple to have products that were able to do that. And owning the chip and being able to build more efficient systems and so on and so forth does not put it out of the reach of Apple being able to reach down from a price perspective and having a base unit that competes heavily with the B-Links and the Meleys and you know all the other things that are living down there, because it'd be a far superior product for the same price.

0:25:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, a physical redesign gives them an opportunity to switch to like less expensive, more efficient manufacturing, or even the idea of making it smaller, just so they can fit more product into each master case and more master cases into each shipping container, which also pays off in the long run. And also I mean the design people, the design studio at Apple. You got to give them a chance to have some fun. Don't just put them in the same rounded square. Let them have a little bit of fun. Make them triangles, big triangles. There you go again. The pyramids. The pyramids are still around after like 5 000 years. That's a. You want to talk about sustainability? Look for. Look to the pyramid I have a.

0:26:18 - Leo Laporte
Uh, this is the development kit. Oh yeah, qualcomm snapdragon, which does look like a Mac mini, doesn't it? It's very similar in many respects, although it's black plastic, not aluminum. Uh and uh, for reasons no one is quite sure of, they only sent out 200 of these. I was very lucky I got, I was one of the 200, and now they've canceled it and they're refunding all our money. I think I don't I can keep it without having to send it back. But, uh, this is so. That's how how the really the form factor really spread.

0:26:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean this this could be a mac mini almost, except for, well, a number of yeah once you, once you take away, once you take away the need for internal expandability, once you also take away the need for really, really aggressive cpu cooling, a lot of design opportunities really open up, and I think it's nice to see this being reflected in the industrial design. I mean, we've talked before about how cool would it be to have an Apple TV-sized, really inexpensive desktop Mac. I don't know if that's a great business decision for Apple to do. I'd be really interested in it. But now such things are no longer just speculation, something that they could do it if they wanted to. They could just essentially take the MacBook Air main board such as it is, maybe bend it a little bit and make it fit into that same space.

0:27:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, let's take a little pause. As far as we know, that's the docket. Well, there's one big thing coming up a week from tomorrow, or I guess a week from Thursday, which is Apple's quarterly results.

0:27:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Halloween.

0:27:55 - Leo Laporte
Halloween.

0:27:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think it's any accident that they gave a huge, huge, huge interview to Tim Cook to the Wall Street Journal, was it? And he's been appearing. There's been a lot of stuff appearing to sort of prepare the ground for all of the sort of like huge. When you hear our results, please listen to it within the context of the greater story that we're trying to tell here.

0:28:22 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break and then when we come back, we will talk about that. Because he says oh no, don't worry, our huge bets, all that money we're spending and it's gonna pay off, so don't worry Wall Street, We'll talk about that in just a moment. You're watching Mac break weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell.

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Tim Cook, the Wall Street Journal magazine. This weekend, the world, the CEO of the world's most valuable company, led two of the biggest product launches of his tenure this year and believes they will be as life-changing for the rest of us as they are for him, even if they currently make $0. The big bets will pay off. Tim says they will. So it's a profile, so it starts. The first thing Tim Cook does when he wakes up is check his iPhone. It's sitting atop his nightstand in silent mode where the CEO of Apple, the most valuable company in the history of the world, reaches for his device and starts triaging his inbox. He apparently he says every day, every product, including the Vision Pro, which is fair. I mean, you're the CEO of a company that makes a reasonable number of products. You can use every product in one day Desktops, laptops, tablets, headphones, laptops, tablets, headphones.

0:32:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Watches, streaming tv, streaming music, streaming movies to the, to the extent that that any apple product can be named dog food. He eats his own dog food.

0:32:35 - Leo Laporte
Good for him yeah, do you think he watches all the apple tv plus movies though? I don't know. I don't know about that. Napoleon alone would eat up pretty much the entire day. Ain't nobody got time for that, so this is an interesting. Now. They said the interview was this summer, so it's not brand new, but they were obviously planning to have this out. They probably made a deal with the journal to have this out the week before quarterly results and they did have like really, really good access.

0:33:06 - Andy Ihnatko
it wasn't like show up at this, at this hotel suite and for 45 minutes and we will give you like 40 minutes.

0:33:12 - Leo Laporte
He was on campus.

0:33:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah I mean it ends with like uh, the the reporters like scheduling an email.

Thank you very much. Scheduling an email to tim cook with like some wrap-up questions at 5 am and then getting a response 24 minutes later, it's very flattering. It was very interesting. Obviously it's not here to tear the roof off of all of the skeletons in Apple's closets. Yes, it was very positive. It was so very quotable. I actually have a sticky note with all these things that would be like could be t-shirt slogans at the on the apple campus every product every day, not the first, but the best tomorrow is better than today. Uh, we learned. We learned that he likes diet mountain do okay, just like that, but it's not available on the campus.

Yeah, and I haven't had a mountain dew in a long time, but oh you in honor of uh raise a glass.

0:34:13 - Alex Lindsay
Be careful. Be careful of that. What is that? Is that really mountain dew? It is. I thought they were going back to the mountain dew not mtn.

0:34:21 - Leo Laporte
I think that there was a big. Uh, you might have an older can branding debate you know, are you both doing the do mtn? Do you normally do the do?

0:34:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I do.

0:34:27 - Jason Snell
No, this is the first time I've done the do in quite a day but I ate diamond do is also my favorite soda, so I'm there, right there, with tim cook, although what I do is I make sure that I have it around me, whereas apple apparently doesn't stock it and you have to ship it in he should talk to somebody who uh is in a position of authority at Apple to get him Diet Mountain.

0:34:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Dew. That's the sort of abuse of authority that I can absolutely appreciate. Not, hey, we're going to do things just because I want to. Hey, I really like Dr Pepper. Could you, even if you have to, just buy it at Costco and bring it in? Could you have Dr Pepper at the cafeteria?

0:34:58 - Jason Snell
Have his assistant have a little mini fridge outside. It's okay.

0:35:02 - Leo Laporte
He says Apple doesn't stock his favorite soda. What it doesn't say is there's probably more than a mini fridge full of diet mountain dew in. Yeah, I think so.

0:35:10 - Jason Snell
I think so, but it's very this is very tim cook, right like I. I just get the sense some of the details in here. It's very much like oh, I don't want to cause trouble, I don't want to, I don't want to be all they don't want to put them out.

0:35:22 - Leo Laporte
They you know. Honestly, the thing is a health hazard. That's why they don't carry it in the apple cafe.

0:35:27 - Jason Snell
That thing is nuclear what does it taste like? It's not true it's citrus, something it's like.

0:35:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's beautiful taste of citrus and caffeine and skateboards it's, it's definitely, it's definitely one of those drinks where I can say it tastes like mountain dew right you know there's a lot it looked exactly like what we thought of mountain dew, which is when you live in the country.

0:35:45 - Alex Lindsay
It was related to deer, you know, and so the you know what do you mean?

0:35:52 - Jason Snell
I think that canonical Mountain Dew is right. Yeah, I don't know. All hillbillies are limited to shotguns cohen asked.

0:35:57 - Leo Laporte
I asked if he ever thinks about what his childhood in alabama would have been like if it had been filled with apple products that's a weird one yeah it would have opened an emerging world with answers.

0:36:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Doing some whitland, yeah yeah, yeah, uh.

0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
Would he have been the same guy if he had been glued to uh to his phone? I don't know, maybe not. Maybe he would have just been happy with what he had and he would never become the ambitious ceo of the most valuable company in the history of the world.

Yes, according to the wall street journal I don't think that's actually true, by the way, but yeah, well, they keep swapping with microsoft and no, but I mean historically, yeah, I think that they say the uh, the british east india company was okay, yeah, much more valuable but they, but they're. They're a bit more controversial than apple yes, didn't involve slaves, let's put it that way. Uh, so what else have we learned from this?

0:37:02 - Jason Snell
basically, hey, geography, right, okay my favorite thing is the uh is again how basic tim cook can be. That, I think, is just wonderful, is the question was what do you name your uh group chats? Oh, yes his response was what name them? I've never done such a thing I have no idea I shall consider it.

and then he comes back to the writer later and he says oh, oh, oh, I did what you asked. I named one of my group chats. Oh, really, tim, what group chat was it? Well, it's a group chat I have with my old college roommates. Oh, what's it called Roommates, not War Eagle?

0:37:39 - Leo Laporte
It should at least be War Eagle.

0:37:40 - Jason Snell
I know right, tim Buddy. But remember, this is the guy who on his financial call with analysts every quarter the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. Every time he speaks he's like this is Tim. Yeah, we know it's you, tim. We know we can recognize, but he's like he's just going to do it. He's very unassuming in that way. I found that actually kind of heartwarming because that fits perfectly with my vision of who that guy is Exactly. Oh, I did it, roommates.

0:38:10 - Andy Ihnatko
And I bet that part of the reason why he did it was not because he was excited about the idea, but he realized ooh, that's something I've never tried. What if there's a huge defect in this that I was unaware of and he had to?

0:38:23 - Alex Lindsay
try it just to see, even if the user experience was up to snuff, and I think it is something that helps Apple make some of those decisions that it makes, which is that it it is their executives are. They're geeky, I mean, they obviously know the technology, but they're not obsessed with it Like they're not. They don't feel like they need to know every crevice of every you know, and I think that that definitely drives some of the decisions of like are people really going to use this? And I think they look at it like he had never thought of naming group chats. I I don't know how to name group chats. I.

0:38:51 - Leo Laporte
I I see other people do it to my chat. Thanks, by the way, to uh Alex howard in our discord chat who has sent us this pubmed article uh, the caffeine content of pre-packaged national brand of private label carbonated beverages. You might note that actually diet mountain dew has more caffeine than regular mountain dew and considerably more caffeine than any other product on the market that's why we drink it even mountain lightning has less now we see why he's awake at 5 35 obsessively checking his email oh, my, wow, wow.

Actually there is a, uh, there is a something called iga cola. I don't know where you get that. That's the lowest to vault zero, which is the highest. Vault zero is even 50 percent more than that's like a jolt.

0:39:44 - Jason Snell
That must be the the success I did drink jolt.

0:39:48 - Leo Laporte
I liked you. It was all the caffeine and twice the sugar, or it was twice the sugar and all, all the sugar and twice the caffeine.

0:39:54 - Jason Snell
That was that. That's just shotgun material.

0:39:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I have to. I have to say that one of the one of the changes I made this year in life was to try to get rid of of uh, recreational caffeine in my life and suddenly, wow, now that I'm no longer like having like a two or three glasses of like diet dr pepper a day, I'm actually falling asleep more or less when I intend to huh, go figure yeah, it does affect my sleep too, I can't stop drinking.

Maybe it's just my age or I can't, and in fact, my daily espresso has more caffeine than your Mountain.

0:40:26 - Alex Lindsay
Dew. Yeah, a 16-ounce coffee is like what? 320 milligrams versus 55.

0:40:32 - Jason Snell
So it's still, you know? Yeah, no, I use the Diet Mountain Dew to come down off of the tea that I have in the morning. What are you talking?

0:40:38 - Andy Ihnatko
about. I'm tapering people. Well done, well done. I mean, there's a lot Again. It's very readable, very good. It kind of underscores what we think, or what we like to think, about Tim Cook. There was a thread that was kind of running through it. I don't know if it was necessarily intentional, I don't know if it was suggested or implied by Apple Press Relations Marketing, but there was a lot of. Again, remember that this is just a few days before the analyst call. This is just a week before Apple Intelligence makes its first debut.

A running theme was we don't always absolutely knock it out of the park for the first time, but number one again, tomorrow is better than today. Our goal is not to be the first, but to be the best. They have a quote from Craig Federighi. We'd argue that the innovation isn't having that idea. The innovation was being able to craft the right product that you could deliver in a great way at the time. It doesn't occur overnight. None of these excuse me, this was Tim Cook none of these things, referring to all the successes they've had occurred overnight. None of them did so. I don't know if they're explicitly setting up.

Look, if you're comparing Apple Intelligence next week to Claude or Gemini and saying, wow, it barely does anything. You're right, that's because it's the first thing we're doing. We're not just going to withdraw it after one release, like a certain development platform that Leo has. We're in this for the long haul. We'll get there eventually and when we get there we'll make sure that we're not just putting features out there. We're creating an ensemble of AI features that make the iPhone so much better and so much more useful that you won't know or care that it's AI. Uh, he's. He was asked. He was fed a sort of a softball question of do you think that ai features are going to make the iphone negligibly different, a little different or much more different? And he answered oh, profoundly different.

0:42:31 - Leo Laporte
So he says I think we'll look back and apple intelligence will be one of those air pockets which which is a really weird analogy that happen to get you on a different technology curve. To put it another way, he believes that what's happening to him will happen for everyone. Oh, that's exciting. I'd like to be the CEO of the world's richest company. For some, it will happen very soon. For others it will happen later, but it will happen. He says it will happen for all of us. I think it will happen later, but it will happen. He says it will happen for all of us. I think he's talking about ai.

I don't know what he's talking about yeah, or he's quoting yes, yes, oh, yeah, okay, um, so yeah, I mean, there is a lot to be interested in in this guy who is very, uh, self-effacing and yet runs this incredibly successful company and apparently, to all appearances, runs it very, very well. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's a lot of revelations in here about why he's so successful, do you?

0:43:31 - Andy Ihnatko
no, no, not at all. Again, the, the, the mountain dew quote is probably the most like wow, I didn't know, I didn't, I didn't even figure him for. I figured him as a flavored water like sort of guy. As opposed to national, national brand, whatever.

0:43:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but you know what it's. You know what it is, andy it's like. Oh, my favorite soda is diet mountain dew and I have one every Tuesday yeah, yeah, that's true actually she likes a wild she likes diet coke, but she doesn't drink it hardly ever.

0:43:58 - Leo Laporte
And I know she does because I can hear the belching.

0:44:01 - Andy Ihnatko
It really gets you going there. There was a fun line that I can't figure out. Maybe you guys will have an opinion on this. I don't know whether this was Tim trying too hard or whether he was just answering a simple question directly, but when he was asked about the Vision Pro well, what do you use the Vision Pro for? He said oh, I love laying down on my sofa and watching TV on the ceiling of my place. And he said that it made much more sense or much more relaxing than having to sit up on an old-fashioned old couch and watch it on a TV screen. And I'm like wow, the whole definition of it. If you're looking for something easier than sitting on a couch, maybe you've got the wrong couch sir, get a better couch.

0:44:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually I lie down on my couch and watch TV, and it's just similar, it's very similar this wonderful turning your head technology that saves me $3,500.

I also get the feeling but I get the feeling with most CEOs that there's a PR person sitting right there that may occasionally bend over and lean into and whisper into his ear. For sure, all of this stuff is so carefully cultivated. It's one of the reasons I don't make any effort to interview CEOs. There's only a few who are dangerous enough to be interesting right, it can be fun.

0:45:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, I don't interview CEOs that often. I got some time with Jeff Bezos. I got some time with the CEO of Asus. Oftentimes, it's a way to sort of find the sort of question that will slip underneath the radar and get down into the ventilation shaft of the Death Star. Get down into the ventilation shaft of the Death Star. Actually, when I was interviewing the CEO of Asus, one of the questions after getting the technical stuff, by the way was what did you use to create as a kid? Did you use to make stuff? And suddenly you could see that he clicked off of CEO giving an interview mode and started talking about oh well, yeah, I used to make these models.

You can learn something about the person. Again, the shields are going to be up 100% and you're not going to get. There are very few people that very few outlets that are so important to a company like Apple, where they're going to have to get the interview at some point and they don't have to risk asking the question of wow, that was a pretty big failure that you had with this product and you disappointed a lot of people. What are you doing to address that? And yeah, so you're absolutely right about that.

0:46:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they're going to tell you exactly what they want to tell you and that's going to be what they go in there for. And if the goal is humanize Tim Cook a little bit, then they'll do that too. But I was thinking about this in all of our conversations we've had about like the meta Orion prototype that they showed and how Apple maybe has had that, also came to the same conclusions that meta did, but they didn't tell anybody. And the question of like well, which is better? I was thinking about this interview while I was reading and thinking this is where you have a planned and it could happen on the analyst call next week, who knows? But it's in a situation like this where you just have Tim Cook say, when asked about the Meta Orion, say, oh, we have a prototype very similar to that that we looked at and it solves the whole. Why does Apple not pre-announce or show prototypes? You can solve that problem with a choice.

Ceo quote that says that you've got to if you want to do that disclosure. And that's a lot of times these whole articles. You know, not from the journalist perspective, they just want the access to try and tell an interesting story. But from the other side of it they're like what are we trying to get across here? And there's a little tidbit we want to drop. And I feel that on the analyst calls too, that like they kind of light up when you ask the right question. That lets them say the thing that they just want to get out there in a way that's not a press release and it's not. It's a semi. You know it's like a quasi official pronouncement, but it's nothing more than that. But it allows them to sort of seed that thought out into the coverage and it's all calculated.

0:47:57 - Alex Lindsay
And you can also do things like say well, we saw it, but it was going to cost a lot of money to make them, and the compromises that are required to get it down to a reasonable price. You know even what we would consider reasonable below the 3,500 or whatever would require, and you can list off what the hard things are. A headset like that would require lower resolution cameras, lower resolution displays. You know this the. You know battery limitations, like he can just list off all the problems that Meta is going to have, and what that does is it seeds this like doubt into the press. So every time Meta talks about it, everyone's all thinking about well, what about that? And the first thing they look for is um, when they put the head, the new glasses on is the thing that Apple said will be hard to do. And the only thing you have to be careful of is not saying it's hard to do and then try to do it yourself and have to have those compromises and then you're screwed.

0:48:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I think this might have been the first time that I've seen Tim Cook or anybody that's senior at Apple explicitly say oh well, the Vision Pro is for early adopters, so we weren't really expecting big sales. I think they were happy to be quiet about that expectation. I'm sure that was what they were expecting, but they were very sure to be very quiet about that before they found out. Maybe there is going to be an explosion of really cool third-party apps that use the hardware. I think, just as it happens, was it this week or the week before that an analyst group figured that in September there were only two or ten specific Vision Pro apps released to the App Store, meaning that they are not gaining any ground with developers whatsoever. So this is why it's a good idea to put out the explanation that look again, we feel as though we're at the one end of a runway. We're not in the air yet, but then we weren't necessarily planning on being in the air yet, which is completely reasonable.

But it does like, after the debacle of Project Titan, of the Apple car, which went so far into development, this wasn't like something they were playing with. We heard a few weeks ago that they actually were co-developing a new style of electric e-vehicle battery with a Chinese battery manufacturer. That had never been done before. That's how far along they were in this. They have to be able to explain. Well. Please don't frame the Vision Pro in terms of projects that we have canceled. See it in terms of things like the iPodod, which in itself eventually was very successful once we we got it launched properly, but also it laid the ground for products that came way after the iPod, products that were able to obsolete the iPod in time.

0:50:31 - Leo Laporte
So it's a very smart way to just manage the story uh, although you could probably say the reason the iPod became successful is they put it on Windows, but that's another Again. Initially, there's some things.

0:50:42 - Andy Ihnatko
They didn't the things that were explained very carefully. After the market said yeah, wow, what a great toy for Mac people. Meanwhile, 82% of the desktops in America say that's nice. I think we'll buy something else. Wish I could do that.

0:50:59 - Leo Laporte
Ben Cohen ends his you know it's a puff piece, let's face it, but it's, you know, interesting, good to read. It's not exactly challenging in any way, but I guess you know you don't get to Tim Cook and with challenging questions. But he ends it with a koan which I don't really understand, which is because if you believe that tomorrow is better than today, that also means today is going to be better than yesterday.

0:51:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know what that has to do with anything if you, if you still have access to ai, I want you to put that in. Give it that phrase and ask for an inspirational poster, because I bet there's going to be seagulls and sunsets maybe, maybe, it is maybe maybe cohen is wait.

0:51:39 - Alex Lindsay
Can you put that up again? I don't think I have it right in front of me. What was it?

0:51:42 - Leo Laporte
Because if you believe that tomorrow is better than today, that also means today is going to be better than yesterday. And maybe Ben Cohen is sly and actually saw that on a poster in Tim's office or something, because it's completely non sequitur. Before it he says oh, I sent him an email and he responded in half an hour. The reply was friendly, professional and concise, but it wasn't written by Apple Intelligence, he typed it out himself. And then Tim Cook got on with his day. And then, because if you believe this, tomorrow is better than today, I mean, I guess is that Tim Cook got on with his day. And then, because, if you believe that tomorrow's better than today, I mean, I guess is that Tim Cook's philosophy? I don't know, I don't know why it was in the article.

0:52:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It fits the tone of the piece. I guess it does yeah.

0:52:31 - Leo Laporte
It's hard to end an article like this, isn't it? Except, you know, then Tim Cook got up and walked off into the sunset.

0:52:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, I don't know exactly how you end it, I was reading it, I was, I was looking, I was seeing the structure of the piece where he started off with.

0:52:45 - Leo Laporte
This is how tim cook starts his day he gets up and how it ends and yep, you ended with and then at. That point whatever. Yeah, it's well written. I'm not saying it's not it's, it's.

0:52:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it was hagiography, but it was like you could definitely, you can definitely feel the guard rails like this was bowling, with the bumpers like in the gutters, saying you are not going to go to too far this way or this way.

0:53:04 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, this is the expectation and any well-trained politician or ceo oh yeah, it's a. They're at a whole different level of doing this and the care that they take and how they answer things to what was said before makes them somewhat opaque. You know like it's, yeah, you know like if it. I think that he and you know, as you go into those c level folks I mean a lot of them are very careful about what they say and how they say it. I mean, the only ones that I think are often vary are the ones that were the founders. They kind of feel like they can do whatever they want, right, you know.

0:53:36 - Andy Ihnatko
And then those are the ones that are going to, but the ones that come up through the ranks, by the time they get there they tend to be pretty sleek if, if I had the, if I had the ability, through a even not just cannot simply careless uh expression, but a not completely 100 thought out and calculated expression, caused the valuation of a two trillion dollar company to go down two or three points, I would be that cautious too, exactly and what's.

0:54:08 - Alex Lindsay
What's amazing, though, is that, when they get to that level, how they can sound just totally fluid and they're not telling you anything.

0:54:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'm not saying anything at all, but but still, I mean that this, but still, like the times times that a lot of us have been and Jason might have some thoughts on this too it's like every time I've done an interview with anybody, whether it's an actor on stage at Comic-Con or an executive or, in the rare cases, a CEO I'm always sensing that there is the lane that they are trained to be on and they know the danger of leaving that lane.

But if you give them an opening, that is wow. This is something I wasn't expecting, but it's a completely safe thing for me to talk about. And, finally, I can actually pretend that this is a normal conversation, as opposed to navigate this conversation tree that I've been programmed to go into. Like I was interviewing Wallace Shawn and absolutely threw him for a loop, because when I the format that I'd chosen was I'm going to, obviously everybody was there to ask him about the Princess Bride and stuff like that. Like a couple of thousand people, whatever in the room, I'll ask the first question and have like the first back and forth while people get like, see I would have asked about my dinner with Andre.

0:55:24 - Leo Laporte
That would have been I.

0:55:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I, actually I I asked him the first question about uh, uh, about uh, uncle Vanya which was one of my saying that it was one of my, one of the most incredible openings of a movie I've ever seen. If you've never seen it, it is like the famous Chekhov play Uncle Vanya. But it's like he and just Louis Moll and a couple of friends. They're just like hanging out in the New Amsterdam Theater as it's being renovated before it becomes the Disney Theater and they just like are walking in off the street having a conversation like of my dinner with Andre conversation, walking in off the street, having a conversation, like of my dinner with Andre conversation. And there's a moment where they're suddenly doing Uncle Vanya and it's so hard to figure out what moment are they in character? Because they just like have a cup of coffee and they're walking around and they take a seat and they're sitting talking at this table, that's on the stage, and suddenly there's a line. That is the first line of Uncle Vanya.

And so we actually got a conversation going and then someone asked hey, could you, could you? Could you say inconceivable? So yeah, you can, you can find, if you can find that lane where it's like, oh, thank god it's not something, they're not asking something. That's personal, not something asking something dangerous, but it's something that I feel like I can talk about freely. It it can happen.

0:56:48 - Leo Laporte
I think it's more true with uh, creatives than it is with true CEOs. Um, in any event, uh, now we know just a little bit more about Mr Cook, whose company is currently valued at 3.58 trillion dollars how long it took to get to a trillion and how quickly it just keeps going Like every trillion after that just gets compound interest baby.

0:57:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, I didn't. I didn't realize until I saw the picture in the wall street journal. He's even wearing Nike glasses. I knew he wore Nike's cause.

0:57:11 - Leo Laporte
He's on the board. He's on the part of the stories on the board.

0:57:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't even yeah, the businessider had another story that I don't know if I don't think it was done necessarily with the involvement of Apple, because it didn't seem to have direct quotes but it was talking about how, when the CEO left in 2016, that there's been some shakiness with the new top leadership and it's not as though Tim has been co-running Nike as a board member, but that he's been very involved. He's been very, very helpful. He been like a steadying hand on this, that and the other and like. So that's why I read that so like, oh my god, he's even wearing nike glasses.

0:57:45 - Leo Laporte
that's amazing yeah, it's kind of it's kind of remarkable that uh, he could do that and run apple.

0:57:53 - Andy Ihnatko
To be honest, I know and he's been doing it since 2006, since before he was before the iphone so it's not as though he liked to say oh gee, I was already here, but I'm going to quit. I'm going to quit because I don't have enough time. I mean, you're suspicious of certain CEOs who have seemingly plenty of free time, even if they're running three big companies. I feel as though Tim Cook I mean, he's not running Nike, he's just a board member. But he's.

0:58:16 - Leo Laporte
one of these stories is that he chose that or certainly had a big impact and on who the next CEO of Nike would be. Elliot Hill, who just came out of retirement to be the new CEO, has been struggling, so apparently I mean this Bloomberg story again, I don't know how Gurman's involved, but I don't know how well sourced it is German was involved in that.

0:58:42 - Andy Ihnatko
The writer said it was approaching Apple saying, hi, I'm not German, I don't know German, I've never met German.

0:58:47 - Leo Laporte
My first piece for Business Insider. All right, let's take a little pause. That refreshes. We can do our Vision Pro segment. We have some Vision Pro stories. Apple is celebrating a Pro segment. We have some Vision Pro stories. Apple is celebrating a big anniversary. We'll talk about that and a lot more. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell.

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Uh, all right, let's see 10th anniversary of apple. I can't believe it's been 10 years, I know right?

1:03:01 - Jason Snell
Yep, yeah, I used. I looked up. I found my article from when I first wrote about this on Six Colors which was right after I started the website, because the website's a little over 10 years old now and it was an iPhone 6 that I used to pay because the Apple Watch was announced but not out yet. And, honestly, the moment the Apple Watch came out, I started just using the Apple Watch for Apple Pay. That's what I used, but in that moment, right there, that was the way you used Apple Pay was an iPhone 6. And I wrote a little piece about buying some peanut butter at Whole Foods.

I remember that and having the clerk be like oh.

1:03:40 - Leo Laporte
He said what are you doing? It's magic.

1:03:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and he was really surprised by it. So, yeah, 10 years they've been doing this and I try to explain this to people outside the US who had a lot of sophisticated payment technology way before the US did, for a lot of different reasons, that Apple's entry into this with Apple Pay really did finally give it the kickstart it needed to get contactless payments to be a thing in the US. Yes, and it's a huge thing because obviously the rest of the world's like well, big deal, we had it before. This is what I'm telling you is why didn't we have it? And the answer is lots of reasons, but like nobody had been able to get it over the hump, including, uh, google trying it, and then apple did it and it was, for whatever reason, just enough of a kick that now almost everybody and then and then covet hit and you know it went from being something that a lot of people use to something that everyone uses.

1:04:37 - Alex Lindsay
So now it's to a point where I go to. I go to like the farmer's market and someone wants cash. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty gross.

1:04:44 - Jason Snell
Most of the farmers market people most I mean like at my farmer's market, here they and COVID was the motivator there they all just invested in little square terminals and they don't even want your cash anymore.

1:04:57 - Alex Lindsay
And the funny thing is, is that, like Vallejo is all a square or or something, some kind of Apple pay, San Rafael, like 90% cash Interesting. It's a cultural thing. Well, so I just started mapping all the play, all the all the booths. Of course, that's what I do, is I built a map on my phone of all the booths and which ones take Apple pay. I'm like, well, I'll just buy everything from those ones. But I think that it is amazing how quickly I mean I think during COVID, we really saw it go from probably a large percentage of people using it to everyone using it, because you just don't want to touch the gate.

1:05:28 - Jason Snell
I would say, I mean, covid was six years in to Apple Pay or five plus. But what happened was by laying that groundwork, by putting the infrastructure in place when it came time that the pandemic happened, people were motivated to use it. And it was there and it was available. And there's so many reasons. I don't want to hand wave it, but people are like, oh, you Americans, you're so behind, but the United States is so huge and because of that it's so spread out. There are so many individual places where you can buy things. Of that it's so spread out, there are so many individual places where you can buy things. And it means that there is this enormous, enormous infrastructure of technology that's used to receive payments and to turn it over, to wave a wand and just say, oh, get new ones. Uh, easier said than done in the united states, especially where you've got 50 different states with different laws and, and, like I said, geographically so dispersed.

But uh, we were in a, it was a moment and, like apple picked a really good moment for it and it man, they managed to, over the course of a few years, get everybody to kind of like, upgrade their hardware and light up those terminals to the point where, 10 years later, there are reports just in the last month about how like home depot is starting to finally replace their terminals. Because this is what it takes is you invest in a whole big point of sale terminal for your giant chain of stores at Home Depot and it doesn't do Apple Pay. And then people say, oh, you should support Apple Pay and Home Depot is like we can't. We just spent millions of dollars, so now apparently they're starting to roll that out.

And a bunch of other stores are starting to roll it out. So it's still, even 10 years later. Some of them are still coming along. But apple gave it the push that started it. It really deserves the credit for making it happen I have to admit I'm so.

1:07:08 - Alex Lindsay
it's so unusual and I don't particularly like using the cards, I don't like dealing with anything else. And so I realized that I mean, I used to go to home depot all the time and now I mostly find ace Hardware and other things. I go to Home Depot when I absolutely can't find something. And I realized I had to look back. I was like, why have I? Because I used to go to Home Depot all the time, it was like I was like treasure land, you know of things that adults can build and do. And I realized that every time I got to the, to the, to the cashier, I was like really, really. And then I, and then I and I figure out where my because a lot of times I'm not carrying my credit cards with me anymore, Like I don't carry, I just have my phone and my watch, and so when I go there I go.

I got to go back to the car, I got to go find, figure out what happened to the things. And then I'm just like and when I get into the car after being at Home Depot, I'm like I'm never coming here again and eventually I come back because I need something that can only get at Home Depot and you know, but, but it's, but it is funny that I I realized that it's. I seem to never have my cards with me anymore because I don't need them. You know, like you know, and, and that's the thing that's happened.

1:08:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, we're at the library again, but they have a wonder, they don't. My library doesn't do like an annual or like a quarterly book sale. They just have a just a section of like books for sale. And the number of times where it's like, oh, I don't have $1 with me, I don't even have a dollar in change with me, there are times I have to actually buy. If I'm buying a soda on the way to the library, I will pay in cash, just to make sure I will have singles to pay. But the biggest sign of Apple's victory here is that, at least in the United States, they have managed to band-aid the technology where, like I've had to learn to stop saying, hey, do you do pay by phone, because they'll say, oh, you mean Apple Pay, like, well, okay, I don't want to say this is an Android phone, it uses an NFC standard that is interoperable between banks and pay. Yeah, apple Pay, oh, yes, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely so actually historically, uh, it really wasn't apple that made this happen.

1:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Apple's timing was very good because MasterCard and visa had agreed to introduce emv to the us, a standard that been used worldwide, uh, that year. And so what that meant was that merchants were going to have to upgrade their terminals to support EMV, which sometimes you call it chip and pin, but the idea that you could use a chip. So Apple's release of Apple Pay was timed so that when Apple Pay came out, these merchants were going to upgrade. The hope was merchants would say, well, we might as well upgrade it with touch to pay. And the merchants that didn't like Home depot and was it Walgreens? I can't remember the drugstore that wouldn't do it, didn't want to do it because they didn't. And this is, I think, in the long run, the key to why apple pay succeeded. They didn't get information about the customer, they just got an emv token and so these merchants like home depot.

It wasn't merely that, oh, we don't want to do the technology because they had to do EMV.

1:09:59 - Jason Snell
They just didn't do Apple Pay because they wanted to keep the info about the customer so it's a little more complicated than that, but you're right, apple's timing is part of it. I think it's a combination. There was an attempt in, I think, 2012 to do this um or or maybe it was actually in 2012.

1:10:16 - Leo Laporte
Mastercard and Visa agreed that by October 1st 2015. Right.

1:10:20 - Jason Snell
So in this area they were trying to do it. I, at one point in, I think, 2013, got a card with a chip in it and then, in 2014, they took it away because they're like don't forget it, forget it, forget it. In 2014, they did a pilot where, during the World Series, you could buy, like I bought a hot dog using tap to pay Right, so that series you could buy like I bought a hot dog using tap to pay right. So that was a new thing that they they did google had been trying it and couldn't get it. So it's this. I I really want to say this that I think it's a combination of if apple tried to do this and there was no technology, obviously it wouldn't work, but I but we've also seen the this try to be pushed into society and and, uh, it spun its wheels and it didn't work and what happened is apple, apple it was a coincidence, it was a coinciding event.

1:11:05 - Leo Laporte
Right, it's two things.

1:11:06 - Jason Snell
Right, they had both things happen and they had to both be there. There need to be enough tap to pay terminals available in the world for there to be some apple.

1:11:13 - Leo Laporte
I don't think could have unilaterally exactly mv but what apple?

1:11:17 - Jason Snell
the secret sauce that I believe Apple brought to the equation is it created demand by making a big deal of Apple Pay on the iPhone, and it made people want to see and I have in that story about my first Apple Pay experience, there's a big sign that says now accepting Apple Pay at every single Whole Foods terminal. And so what they did was they used their brand and they created consumer. And so what they did was they used their brand and they created consumer demand, which what it did was they could take advantage of the places where that technology had been installed and they could shame and push the companies that were dragging their feet on it to get on board. And that, I think, is where Apple pushed this thing over the edge is that it had enough loyal users who wanted to use the whizzy thing from apple that they were able to to show interest and push and get it in there.

1:12:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I mean mastercard and visa had a lot of impact on this right and they started remember shipping out cars with with chips in them at that time and and all of that. But I think and there was also, by the way, one of the reasons mastercard and Visa wanted it is because security was so terrible on the mag, on the, on the swipe and sign, that they were losing a lot of money every year to fraud, so they wanted something more secure and I think you know it was a confluence, you know, when the it's an idea whose time had come let's say, I mean a lot of times.

1:12:36 - Alex Lindsay
I mean you look at bands and you know that that happened because all the right people showed up and at the right time and with the right and the right people were interested in Grunge, you know, like you know, and you end up with Nirvana, you know, but there's a.

There's a. There's a hundred places where that didn't happen and the band was really good and never went anywhere right, and I think in the timings, everything the timing, the timing was there. I do think that Apple benefited from people, you know, mac users or Apple users, tending to be a little militant about their stuff. And because I know I remember talking on the show about the fact that I remember I just moved to Pittsburgh and there was like a CVS down the street and I went down there and I bought the. You know, I bought something with Apple Pay and I came back I was like I'm never going to, I'm just not going to shop anywhere more than once that doesn't have Apple pay, you know, and and I here's our show from October 2014 Mac break weekly probably me talking about them.

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we sent Jeff needles out to uh to use Apple pay at a uh at a uh whole foods. And there it is. There's the little Apple pay logo. Um, I, you know I will be fair. Uh, I at the time was very skeptical. I said why is that more convenient than just taking a credit card out of your wallet? I did not kind of buy into the notion that this was much more convenient. What I missed was the watch, because the watch hadn't come out yet, which does make it all because it's on your wrist already mean you did have to take the phone out of your pocket to make that work. I don't know if I've used the phone for Apple Pay more than a handful of times. I also missed customers' desire for privacy and security. Yeah, and I think that people really it took them a little while, it took them a few years but eventually realized this is much more secure and much more private.

1:14:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it doesn't give you the number. You don't have to worry about card skimmers wherever you go. That's a big win for me, exactly, and it's not just that when I pass.

1:14:27 - Alex Lindsay
it took me a little while to realize this, but it was not passing my debit card to the vendor.

1:14:44 - Leo Laporte
It's taking my money and then giving a new number to the, by the way you know. And so in europe, in europe, restaurants, never take your credit card, you swipe it at the table. That is slowly becoming starting to happen.

1:14:49 - Jason Snell
Here's a little bit in the us I I that happens to me more I I'm surprised how often that's happening now because finally they they have those handheld terminals that have tap to pay and they come out with it now and it's getting there.

But again, this is why I think it's a big deal that it's 10 years of Apple Pay, just because everything just moves so slowly in the US. And again, yes, part of it is because our financial system is very conservative and moves very slowly, but part of it is. You can't just wave the magic wand and say let's just upgrade all the terminals. You can't just wave the magic wand and say let's just upgrade all the terminals because you're talking about a number that is, it's like it's more than the terminals in all of Europe, right, let alone one European country that decision was critical to the success of Apple.

1:15:30 - Alex Lindsay
Pay, because otherwise those terminals wouldn't have been.

1:15:33 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, look how long it took before you could use your watch to pay for the Tokyo subway or the New York City subway or the new york city right because it's an infrastructure upgrade.

1:15:41 - Jason Snell
They had to upgrade the turnstiles.

1:15:43 - Leo Laporte
It's so amazing, exactly to walk up to a turnstile. You don't need a token, you don't need a clipper card, you just tap your watch. What do you think my mind was blown? Yeah, it was incredible the um, the uh.

1:15:57 - Alex Lindsay
On the other side of that, when you see, like how you don't get traction, is I was in the uh. I'm trying to think of which airport I was in. Um, uh, it was the dc, I think. Dc airport, the um, ied, I think. Anyway, they amazon has these. Uh, you know, you just walk in right, you just walk into the store and you can walk out.

You don't have to check in, check facing those out, by the way, the they're all there were like four of them that I walked past and all of them are empty because they have a turnstile and you have to give them your credit card before you walk in or your handprint, yeah, or whatever, and both of those, and I even tried my, I even tried my card and it wouldn't work it. And I was like, well, I'm going to go buy it. You know like and the funny.

Thing but this gets into like Amazon doesn't have that kind of you can move too fast, I admit that if Apple had, if that was an Apple store, I probably would have gone through a couple more bumps before I decided I wasn't.

But when I, as soon as I, as soon as I actually tried to use a card and it wouldn't take it, I was like, oh, this is stupid, I'm not going to go somewhere else. And I never considered going back and no one else did either because these stores are all empty. They're sitting at the airport and all the other stores are busy and these are just completely empty. So it was very. I think that it does come down to the brand oftentimes being able to push that forward, and I also think that and I don't know what the difference was between Android but I think one of the things Apple tends to do better is that subtle interface thing, subtle ways that it works and bounces and is easy and doesn't have friction. It's very easy to go, oh, this has too much friction and almost immediately stop using it, and I think Apple users are probably more sensitive to that than others, but I do think that that is another factor. Apple tends to do that better than almost everybody else.

1:17:38 - Leo Laporte
And I think the other side of this is would the Apple Watch have sold as well if it weren't for Apple Pay?

1:17:50 - Alex Lindsay
Oh interesting, I do think so, and I say that only because I never use the Apple Watch.

1:17:53 - Leo Laporte
It sure makes the watch a desirable thing, right? I buy groceries, everything, with my watch. What's?

1:17:57 - Alex Lindsay
funny is I never use the watch for my apple pay. Oh, you know, it was like so I don't, I don't, uh, uh. I think what happened was I had a problem where I had one watch and a new phone and they I had trouble getting them connected to each other.

1:18:09 - Leo Laporte
It's way better on the watch because, because it's strapped to your wrist, it's already authenticated so you don't have to do face id yeah I should, I should do it more, I just don't yeah remember when, in the early days of apple pay, you had to give them a pin. What was it? A pin and there was like this and you had to show them the card.

1:18:25 - Jason Snell
It really took a while before it became, did become actually convenient and I think, yeah, they changed a lot of the policies where they're like they wanted you to sign and you're like, yeah, remember that, dude, I do not need to sign an apple pay transaction. Those those are gradually again. 10 years later they're still changing, but we're in a much better place than we were.

1:18:44 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, for me, my watch is primarily my fitness and timers. I have lots and lots and lots of timers.

1:18:54 - Leo Laporte
You love timers. It's clearly the main thing you use everything for.

1:18:58 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, I do I like to manage time. Here's the thing, main thing you use everything for Alex, I do I like to manage time. Look, here's the thing is that I like taking little naps. I can't sleep if I don't have an alarm. So I can't go to sleep if I don't know when I'm going to wake up. I just can't go to sleep, and so I always have. I'm very attached to timers and then I have a horrible habit of um forgetting my wash. I oftentimes wash my clothes two or three times because I forget to wash.

And they sat, they sit down there, so so timers for that, oh and then these are all horrible things, um, but the primary thing for me now is the fitness. The steps laps, um, you know all the different, you know trajectories. I think that that's that's the thing. That's really kind of why I use the watch. But but it's funny, cause I don't think Apple pay is that for me, doesn't have any impact on it.

1:19:44 - Andy Ihnatko
You just, you just give me a thought, like the only I mean I. I stopped wearing a smart watches as my daily driver like at the start of the summer. The only thing that I miss is that really trivial like again, I'm just stopping in on my way to wherever to buy a drink, just like the trivial tap to pay. And if, if apple or google or somebody came out with like a simple, like nondescript fitness band that all it did was like do google wallet or apple pay, I would absolutely buy it and that would be on my right wrist. Not just for the reasons because you're missing out, well, not only for that, but because the when I, when I do go to New York, that's one of the times where I do definitely like where, but every time I go through a turnstile, I turn this way and tap because that's true style is like on the is on the right and I'm a lefty and I have a fitness band just go bump I would actually do that.

They should have a little Apple pay band that you could wear. Why not, right? I have a friend who had an RFID implant like put into her wrist, and so she was using it for those as her way of protesting the new security systems at work that required her to card in pretty much everywhere, and so that was her form of protest, and so she had this thing in her hand, in her wrist, for like seven years.

1:20:58 - Leo Laporte
Well, so the whole thing reason I bring this up that I think it's very interesting that technology both simultaneously takes a long time and is faster than you imagine. So it took 10 years before apple pay really became the juggernaut. It is today and yet it happened overnight. In a way, right, it feels like wow, we're now. It's like ATMs, we you know when. I remember you probably all too young to remember this, but we used to have to go into a bank to get money.

1:21:27 - Andy Ihnatko
And the ATM transformed that experience.

No, I had. But my very first trip I was like 19 years old, maybe 18 years old for Macworld in San Francisco. It's like all I knew was that I knew that there was a Wells Fargo ATM like three blocks away from where I was staying and that it would accept my ATM card. And that's when, like that was one of the dividing lines between my generation and my dad's generation, where it's like, well, you mean that you don't have to, aren't you going to like take out a whole bunch? No, I'm just going to withdraw and I'm going to take with me enough money to like to get like for for a couple of days, but I'll be able to just withdraw money, saying how?

1:22:02 - Leo Laporte
I go to europe without getting, without going to the exchange booth at the airport because I know I could just take euro. I can get euros, yeah, no problem at an atm. Yeah, lisa's mom doesn't trust atms and refuses to have an atm card. There is is a whole generation, you know.

1:22:19 - Andy Ihnatko
No, this is how long was it before I trust there was a? It took me a while before I could trust depositing a check via paper, check via ATM instead of going up to the counter. And then there was a while before I could trust depositing a check via phone instead of going to the ATM. And now that's completely moot, because now I actually trust the direct deposit for most of my clients, or electronic payments. So it does take a while to get used to the idea that this is new. You don't have to be one of the first people to help the industry figure out that there's an easy way to drain a bank account, but at some point the water is warm enough that you can figure out that. Okay, I'm going to trust it.

1:22:59 - Leo Laporte
I think convenience ultimately wins it over. By the way, I was in Canada a month ago and I said do you do Apple Pay? I can't remember because Canada unfortunately gets screwed all the time by Apple. Yes, 78 markets now do Apple Pay 11,000 banks and network partners, hundreds of millions of customers. It is very, very widely used it is a success.

1:23:23 - Alex Lindsay
What when you're talking about atms too? I realized that I almost never go to an atm now because I don't use cash. Yeah, yeah, you know it's. Occasionally I have cash, a couple dollars, stashed around here and there I find them in the wash or something like that, but I don't like I don't. It's so rare for me to have cash at all.

1:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Although Peter Todd, the creator of Bitcoin, thinks you're crazy for not using cash because it's not, you know you're not anonymous. Your privacy is violated by every other form of payment except Bitcoin and cash. Try to be boring.

1:23:56 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's my key.

1:23:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Again. If it weren't for taking walks on Saturday mornings and discovering a yard sale, I would probably not have cash in my wallet. I always have like a hundred bucks, a couple hundred bucks, just in case there's a yard sale. It's like, wow, you're actually selling this like $300. Wacom tablet for $40?. It's like, unfortunately, all I have is 78 cents. Can you like not sell it for the next while I try to find an ATM in the neighborhood?

1:24:23 - Leo Laporte
Every time Lisa and I are walking downtown I say let's go to the bank, I want to get some money. Go to the ATM and get some money. She said what do you use cash for? You know what I use cash for Tipping. I believe, uh, that service person, service people, should be tipped in cash that's my thing, that I, I, uh, I.

1:24:42 - Alex Lindsay
The only time I have cash is when I travel and I'm gonna stay at a hotel and I'm gonna I have to go get you know forty dollars and then I break it all into ones. Yeah, yeah, you gotta tip the the bellhop, you gotta tip the room.

1:24:53 - Leo Laporte
I always leave a. Actually now I leave a 20 on the on the bed for the maid. I just feel like you should.

1:25:00 - Andy Ihnatko
You know it's a hard enough life. Now it's when you tip in cash. You know that they get the cash. You know they get it.

1:25:07 - Leo Laporte
They don't keep it yep, and they can pretend they didn't get it and they don't have to pay the irs, but I didn't say that. All right, somebody in this room has a new iPad mini and I am very curious to find out who it is. We'll all, oh, we're shocked, spoiled, spoiled. That was going to be the teaser.

1:25:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I was going to do a commercial and then say Also, one of the people in this conversation is a murderer.

1:25:34 - Leo Laporte
Is a murderer. You may wonder why I've brought you all here today.

1:25:40 - Jason Snell
Too much, too much diet. Mountain Dew, sorry Can.

1:25:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I say it's not necessarily the one person using the Android phone. Okay.

1:25:49 - Leo Laporte
That's only on.

1:25:49 - Andy Ihnatko
TV and movies.

1:25:51 - Leo Laporte
You guys are so cute. We will come back and talk to Jason Snell about his iPad mini. Mine comes tomorrow Cause I did a bto. I I wanted to max out the storage and so I know a lot of you have received your iPad minis. They started arriving last uh, friday, right um?

1:26:10 - Jason Snell
no, no, no, no, no. Am I wrong yeah when do they? Arrive. I don't know, is it mine comes tomorrow, friday, tomorrow, maybe it's tomorrow.

1:26:20 - Leo Laporte
I just got a notification. Good news Items in order. Well, W6497333.

1:26:26 - Andy Ihnatko
This is sweet embargo the company will be stealing your iPad mini at 834 pm tomorrow.

1:26:31 - Jason Snell
I got 24 more hours where I can lord this over the world. I have a tiny iPad.

1:26:36 - Leo Laporte
I thought I was getting it later, oh, I have a tiny iPad. I thought I was getting it later, oh, that's the normal. Okay, well, that's good to know I'm getting it on time. And, by the way, another person that I treat very well is my ups driver, tony. Yes, because I I want him to make. In fact, he says you know when apple stuff comes, you want me to drop it off in the morning. I said yes, please we leave. Lisa is such a nice person. She has a refrigerator out at the front with soda pops and water and stuff in it and says take some. Tony appreciates that and, as a result, I shall get my iPad.

I've never thought of that that's awesome, isn't that nice? I don't know. She says she saw somebody do it and she said, oh, this is great. Let me tell you, those poor amazon delivery guys really appreciate it.

1:27:20 - Andy Ihnatko
On those hot days we had last month they're not very grateful either, so yeah, yeah, kindness to an amazon delivery driver is especially well, we've always tipped our delivery drivers because, as as probably you guys also get a lot of packages. We get, it's true, we get many, many, many I want, once I actually fixed my ups, my ups driver's phone, like while like signing for my new phone, because he, because he knows that, oh, it comes from, this is from from there you go from.

Apple must be it there you go you know, how do you know if it has that new blah blah, blah? So well, your phone has it. Like really, how do I do that? So I'm sorry for whoever was late with their package. After that, I was trying to be nice to my user, yeah that's it.

1:28:00 - Leo Laporte
Actually, you're right and I told Tony you don't have to bring it first, it's okay, but if it's on your way, go ahead. If it says AI on the front, I wouldn't say no, wouldn't say no.

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Uh, so I was: I thought the iPad mini would come out the friday after they made it available for delivery, but, but I guess it's coming out. People are going to start getting it tomorrow.

1:31:22 - Jason Snell
Tomorrow Wednesday.

1:31:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's when Mike comes. I thought it was because it was BTO. Oh good, so I mean, look, it looks kind of the same, right? Can I use the iPad mini's cover?

1:31:34 - Jason Snell
You should be able to. The dimensions are identical to the old mini. Okay, you should be able to it. The dimensions are identical to the, uh, to the old mini. Okay, it is. It is the old mini in almost every way, except the color is less saturated, which is super boring. No, the buttons. I. I was told. I was told that that the volume buttons moved the last time. So the volume buttons are still up here where they were before, up at the top okay, um, yeah all the buttons are at the top.

1:31:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so that that leaves the side free for the for Apple pencil which is now pencil.

1:32:03 - Jason Snell
It now supports pencil pro as well as the.

USB-C pencil. So Apple's slowly getting that. Remember we talked about this idea that the pencil was kind of a mess, but they were sort of slowly resolving it as they released new models, and so this one now supports pencil pro as well as the USB-C pencilC pencil, and you can magnetically charge on the side with the Pencil Pro if you want to. And yeah, it's identical to the other one in almost every way. They changed the display controller a little bit. That may have fixed the jelly scrolling problem that people complained about.

1:32:33 - Leo Laporte
I never saw the jelly scrolling.

1:32:35 - Jason Snell
I struggled to see it too. I didn't see it on this one. My colleague Federico Vittici at MacStory says that he didn't see it, but I think David Pierce at the Verge said he did, so I don't know.

1:32:46 - Leo Laporte
I don't know whether there's jelly. Maybe David has jelly eyeballs. I leave it to the jelly scrolling experts to tell us.

1:32:51 - Jason Snell
So, really, why is this? And it's what we said last week, which is this is to put the a17 pro chip from last year's iphone 15 in it, because that supports apple intelligence and it allows apple to check. They're checking the boxes off of all the new products they sell to make sure that probably it within a few months they will all support apple intelligence. And does it have more ram? Uh, I think we don't know, but I assume it does. I assume that it's got 8 gigs of RAM and that's all part of the same deal to get Apple Intelligence on here.

1:33:25 - Leo Laporte
Okay.

1:33:26 - Jason Snell
So I really didn't need to buy.

1:33:28 - Leo Laporte
Not only did I not need to buy a new one, I didn't need to buy the new Smart Folio cover either.

1:33:33 - Jason Snell
I don't think you did, unless your old one's beat up.

1:33:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, it is, but this says specifically it's for the a17, it's possible they move the magnets or something, but I don't know if I would.

1:33:44 - Jason Snell
I mean, yeah, I can't test that, but it seems pretty much identical to me.

1:33:48 - Leo Laporte
I will test it tomorrow and I will report back thank you because, but it was. This is all somebody said. I could put it in the dishwasher, but I had a white cover. It's just beat the hell I just use.

1:33:58 - Jason Snell
I used some dish, some little dish soap and hand wash scrubbing, and then you hang it to dry and it dries out I got the mr clean scrubbers. I'll put use that on that I probably don't need to scrub it, just a little. Just soap, just soap and water.

1:34:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Don had don. Dishwashing liquid is usually the recommended go-to for cleaning, like all kinds of stuff, but also like oils, yeah but. But yeah, well, that's. They just actually put that on the label, they all.

But they added a new thing which is sort of like a foaming, like spray yeah, I have that, that's and that's what I use for again, like things that like the covers of, of of phones, covers of oh yeah do you let it sit for a little bit, for a little bit, and then you just wash it off and it's like wow, I can't believe that I lived with that for so long because I was intimidated that it was going to take so long to work.

1:34:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh good, I have some of that. They keep coming up with different form factors for Dawn.

1:34:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't understand Well again the cleaning subreddit, like every third response, involves either Dawn dishwashing liquid or the sprayer, or barkeeper's friend, if you have I have I.

1:35:00 - Leo Laporte
That's why I have barkeeper's friend.

1:35:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and I'll and I'll be damned if they aren't right, every single damn time it's like oh I gotta, I didn't know that there was a cleaning subreddit. I am now following the cleanings it's the reason why a whole bunch of things that, like I, keep meaning to get to once I can figure out, how do you? If it doesn't come off with windex, I don't know what to do about it or gooby gone, right gooby gone, or, if it's surface.

I don't want to use steel wool on. It's like I have no clue. But then you go to the cleaning separate. It's like oh, we'll just put this, this and this, mix them together into a paste, spread it on that, leave it for like a good, like hour or so and then just spray it off like oh do you think oxy clean is as good as bartender's friend?

1:35:40 - Alex Lindsay
alex, I've never used bartender's blend but I can, friend. But I can tell you oxy, clean, cleans about everything. It just scares me because it's so good at it, like you put it on here. What the hell's in this can't be healthy like if I clean something with oxy clean and then I put it in the washer like I need you to rinse this off. Yeah, I don't know what happened here, but it clears everything out.

1:35:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so it's, it's you know, somebody's recommending simple green, which is which is good too. That's good too. Yeah, dollar stores have amazing cleaning products and they're all a dollar. Yeah, and it's not like this. It's just amazing. Like something will cost you eight dollars and doesn't work. But go to this one thing you find in a subreddit oh, it's a dollar 25. I'm like, wow, that's awesome.

1:36:18 - Leo Laporte
I feel smarter and less like of dope now yeah, I did not say booby gone, I said goo, because this is called goo gone, right, or goo gone. Maybe there's no b, it's just goo gone, which is, I think, some sort of orange oil or something like that.

Yeah, anyway, citrus, citrus citrus, yeah some sort of there oil or something like that. Yeah, anyway, citrus Citrus Citrus, yeah, some sort of there. It's probably like some monster chemical. They just make smell like oranges. But anyway, speaking of cleaning, the FCC is going to require all hearing aids and phones to work together, and Apple in order to make these AirPods which, by the way, the iPhone is done forever. I've always had no problem pairing my iphone to my hearing aids. Apple is now required to have make these cleanable because apparently that's another requirement from the fda, that hearing aids have to have a cleaning. So there's a whole page on cleaning your air pods. Um, seven years on, iowa's apple data center this we're at the dregs. Now we're at the oh, I gotta do the vision pro. We're at the bottom of the barrel. Seven years later, apple data center in iowa finally opens in walkie, iowa. There it is walkie 29.95. That's not the cost, that's just the number. You could paint your car for 29.95.

1:37:42 - Jason Snell
Earl Scheib reference.

1:37:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, you had a die hard reference earlier that I missed, but the chat room caught it, so get together we'll have a few laughs okay, let's do the vision pro play the thing. There's quite a few turning into eugene scott here oh play, the thing play it, play it. I want that chair, and then the hats. I have the hats. I have the gene scott hats, I just need the uh play when the saints go marching in.

1:38:17 - Jason Snell
Play, play it again. Play it again. Now we're really, really done.

1:38:21 - Andy Ihnatko
So we know, established that the vision, any news about the vision pro is under the bottom of the barrel. It's like the grimy thing under the. Okay, there we go.

1:38:30 - Leo Laporte
That's just, yeah, just cause I'm look, Dr Eugene Scott was just an ordinary ordinary television preacher who was obsessed with horse training and the pyramid of evil.

1:38:42 - Jason Snell
Those are the things he was really wanting to talk about. That was a classic.

1:38:44 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the name of his show was dr gene scott on hebrews yep, which I. I don't know if that would go these days, I don't know that's the book of the bible.

1:38:54 - Jason Snell
Is what he was talking about?

1:38:54 - Leo Laporte
probably was it? I don't know. I don't always have a bible he was incomprehensible.

1:38:58 - Jason Snell
We did when I was in high school we would. We would uh watch his show just because it was baffling, and we're like oh, I love what I'm seeing, and when you're high, it's enjoyable well and he and he was like literally he would.

He would just declare at points that he wanted the video, like leo very occasionally will be like, yeah, play that play. The vision pro thing is why I said it. He would just do that to his people. He'd be like play when the Saints go marching in. And they had a video of him training his horses while the Saints go marching in. It was a thing, folks, you missed it.

1:39:28 - Leo Laporte
He was basically a radio DJ type, but preacher, and then he would do Hours of time in the middle of the night. There he is. There's gene scott doc. Dr gene. Uh-huh, yeah, it was kind of incomprehensible.

1:39:45 - Jason Snell
But look at the whiteboard.

1:39:46 - Leo Laporte
It's like it's like uh, conspiracy theory 101 that's crazy.

1:39:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it was wild stuff. It's like it's just look, yeah, because you see satan, when he connects to the pyramid of evil, is ground coupled to the crop formation of the peas, and this was an earlier, simpler time this is. We didn't have the internet, we didn't have youtube we could.

1:40:12 - Alex Lindsay
We could lie to everyone all at one time, rather than this is.

1:40:16 - Leo Laporte
By the way, there's quite a bit of gene scott on youtube if you want to.

1:40:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah you know, we don't need no algorithm back in the 1980s and he would wear hats a lot of times.

1:40:26 - Leo Laporte
A cowboy hat, um oh, back to the vision pro. You can tell, I am I am probably a little vision pro hostile. I think at this point maybe it's fair to say apple headset stalls. Wait a minute, maybe it's not just me. This is the wall street journal. Struggles to attract killer apps in first year. Virtual reality software developers have not embraced vision pro, which has lower than expected sales in its first year. There's two people wearing it in beijing. I thought they weren't selling it in china. Two people wearing it in beijing.

1:41:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought they weren't selling it in china. I guess they are. Well, that's right. Tim is in china right now and it's one of the see he had. He did a walk around with a famed photographer, whatever and of course she's interviewing him while wearing the headset, so oh, oh and.

1:41:11 - Leo Laporte
And jimmy fallon wore the vision pro, so that's two people. Um, now that the quest 3s is out, we're starting to see teardowns of that.

1:41:24 - Jason Snell
It's a lot cheaper it's a quest 2, it turns out.

1:41:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's exactly the same um why surgeons are wearing the vision pro in operating rooms. This is from time the vision pro and operating rooms.

1:41:40 - Andy Ihnatko
This is from Time magazine. Yeah, so that's yeah. They say talk to a surgeon, a surgeon who actually like, got early access to it.

And while you get your head around this, while using the pre release version of the vision pro and whatever software was running on it, he performed a parasophical hernia operation please don't which is like where it says when, like, there's a rupture in the diaphragm and so he had to, like, put somebody's stomach back through it and sew it all, sew it all up while wearing a vision pro that was not running. Final software.

1:42:11 - Leo Laporte
But this makes me so nervous. Can you imagine waking up and seeing the nurse and the doctor wearing goggles like that? Do they have the? Did they turn off the the eyes?

1:42:19 - Andy Ihnatko
because that would really creep me out I'd be more creeped out by people with knives about to plunge into me and yeah, well, that's what I'm saying, but they are, I'm not actually under yet please keep giving me anesthesia, don't start.

1:42:31 - Alex Lindsay
They are I don't think they should. I mean, I think that was a little crazy, but there are a lot of operations now that are happening where they're putting you know they're very comfortable with a stereoscopic. Yeah, I mean you see the like when you actually see I was watching streaming something that that had this and it just looks normal, until you realize that they're stitching something that's like a millimeter right, you know like you have a doctor sitting there looking at the goggles and they've got these little joysticks and they're just kind of like.

They are like these little hand things and they're. They're kind of doing that, doing their thing, and it takes years of training to get to that point, yeah, but they're doing things that they could never do before. So I think that I understand where they're coming from. I don't know if I would have used beta, so I don't know if I would have agreed to do beta. They probably walked up to the person, said, hey, we're gonna do this apple they did 20 minimally invasive operations at the university of California, San Diego.

1:43:18 - Andy Ihnatko
From the context of this time interview or this time story, I don't. It's not as though he was running a custom app for running surgery, right, it's. He seemed to see seeing me talking as though, just like using these minimal, minimally invasive, like laparoscopic surgery surgery tools, you have a big screen that you're looking at while you're doing, while you have the controls. It was basically now that the big screen is actually being projected by this thing and he said that the screens that they have to get in usually cost like $40,000 or $50,000, $3,500 for a screen. That is much for his needs. As good, if not better, makes this a lot more palatable, a lot more interesting.

1:43:54 - Leo Laporte
But he tried Google Glass and the Microsoft HoloLens, said it wasn't high resolution enough. Yeah, obviously, but when he saw the Vision Pro, he said this is exactly what I've been looking for. We were all blown away. It was better than we even expected. He said yeah, so that's. I mean, that's cool, different product yeah, that's very cool.

1:44:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Both of those are mostly meant for, like if you're doing a repair on a military jet, here is a way to have the checklist of things you're supposed to be doing accessible to your field of vision. I have an entire virtual display that I'm looking at instead of what I'm actually looking at. Like we were saying all the times we were trying to talk about the Vision Pro before it was released and we knew anything about it that the one slam dunk market for this is always going to be medical training, vertical markets, and there seems to be already a market for $3,000 or $4,000 headsets like this. In a couple of years, when they come out with something that is more MetaQuest-like, that's when we'll hopefully see things really turn up. It was surprising that we talked about we mentioned this a little bit before earlier in the show that there really is.

Developers seem to be really keen on taking an iPad app and clicking the button to say, yes, make this work on vision pro. They seem to be keen on basically doing a cake decorating job on an iPad app where, okay, we will make this a native vision pro app, but it is essentially an iPad app, a 2D iPad app with more UI dinguses on it that are specific to the Vision Pro. We haven't been seeing developers that are making amazing like creative apps with it. I mean, my favorite app still for the Vision Pro is just the one where that will play a video player that will let you choose what kind of a vintage or modern screen you want to watch it on. So if you want to watch it on an I Love Lucy on a period appropriate TV, you can have that TV in your office and watch it. That's interesting and that's cool. Television right by a sandwich. Yep, sorry, thank you, good one.

1:45:56 - Alex Lindsay
I think that for me, my number one use is still just watching movies with it, and which I do a lot of, you know, just because, for whatever reason, as I said before, my vision it's sharper on the Apple TV than anywhere else in the world, and so I so I can see it much more clearly. So I think that that is still the killer use case. I do think that the problem with a lot of the apps I download a lot of the apps and play with them, and I usually play with them for a couple minutes and then go, okay, and it feels like the developers don't get it or don't you know, just are still trying to learn the language, like it's just a different language and a different way of doing things Like there's pieces of it that really work.

I still I keep on coming back to JigSpace. When I show someone how the Vision Pro works, I always take them like, okay, open up JigSpace. And the problem is the authoring tools of JigSpace are either really expensive or hard to get to. I mean, it's not like anybody can just build that out. If Apple put those tools into something like Keynote, it would be a lot, it would be, it'd be pretty interesting. But I think that I haven't seen very many apps that you play with them and you just like, oh, I want to use this all the time and I and I feel like, and a lot of them are, there was a big rush to get into the store and a lot of them are just kind of dorky. I mean, and I think that's the problem is, is that it's there's not that many people developing? And the reality is, is that most of the apps on the app store are kind of dorky, you know, and so, um, that's true, actually.

So there's just like there's just millions of them, so there's just so many that statistically you get a couple good ones, um and but, but 99% of the apps on the App Store are not usable in my opinion. You know, and so you know, and so that, but the 1% is still so many. So, there's good. There's just a math thing there.

1:47:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Sorry, Well there's. There's still like, even when there weren't that many iPhone apps out there, there were still some real standouts. That many iPhone apps out there, there were still some real standouts. What I've always been looking forward to and I'm still convinced it's going to happen is that Apple developers they are the most creative, perceptive think outside the box. I've got a great idea and I'm going to pursue it. Whether there's a market for this or not, I just think it's a great idea. Those are some of the greatest minds in development that I've ever seen, and I'm kind of disappointed. There isn't like.

So someone got the iPhone and thought, ooh, you know what would be great Use the accelerometer to make this the ultimate dice shaker.

And there's an awesome dice shaker for it and you love it and you actually use it and it doesn't justify the entire expense of the iPhone.

But you feel like, yes, this is something that I couldn't have had on any other device before this came along, and I just don't think that the same thing has been true for any of the apps that have come up for the Vision Pro. Yet Maybe that'll change once more developers get a hold of it, once there is a larger market for it. I think that's probably the biggest stumbling block that the best developers their time is literally translated into money, and if they've got X hours in the week, even X hours of the week, to do something purely for fun, are they going to do it for something that maybe a few hundred people are going to be able to even see, let alone pay for? Or are they going to make another interesting twist for a web app and an interesting twist for the iPad or the iPhone? It's going to be for the bigger audience. So again, the long runway for the early days would have been great if apple had shown off something that really seemed to move the needle.

1:49:18 - Leo Laporte
They didn't, that's fine, they'll stick with it if, as rumored, they ship a less expensive vision pro next year, that that will juice the market once.

1:49:29 - Andy Ihnatko
they're going to learn a hell of a lot from the launch of the of the vision pro, I think. I think one of the most important things they learned is that they sold a hell of a lot from the launch of the Vision Pro. I think one of the most important things they learned is that they sold a hell of a lot the first month and then dropped down like a rock after that. So there are people who are interested in this thing, but none of them were good. None of them were such happy customers that they convinced other people to see them, to get a Vision Pro, and a lot of these things were actually returned. They're going to stick with the idea of we want to make the best of anything.

That's another thing from that Wall Street Journal. Another quote from the Wall Street Journal article they're committed to doing the best of whatever they do. They're still committed to that. They're going to learn from that. They're going to learn from continuing to look at what Meta is doing and they're going to figure out okay, there is a happy medium here between creating a $3,500 fanciful this is the pinnacle, this is an aspirational product and making something that is actually relevant to what people want to do with VR in this way.

1:50:24 - Leo Laporte
That's true. They have a lot more input on what people are doing with it and what they want to do with it. For instance if lying on the couch watching the movie on the ceiling is the number one thing people do, you could make a vision pro. That's just a big screen, right. It doesn't have a lot of the other features I also.

1:50:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I also happen to think that in five or ten years time we'll look back at the vision pro and we'll see it as a platform that apple used to develop augmented reality like like the actual glasses.

1:50:54 - Leo Laporte
But that's not spatial computing, and they seem all in on this idea.

1:50:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but they've had ample evidence right now that people don't want this in their lives so far. Okay, if all you're doing is creating a 2D app that you can put virtual displays anywhere, people want to do that on a screen. They would much rather do that if they want to do that on a screen. They would much rather do that if they want to do that on a $100,000 device or a $500 device. That will work. I think that what will really crack it for people is when people are wearing what seems to be a style of eyeglasses that, nonetheless, can give them interesting observations, interesting help guided by AI.

Just the ability of the killer demo for augmented reality is not virtual reality, it's augmented reality. The ability to be looking at a screen, even if I'm just reading something on the web and saying I don't understand what's going on in that third illustration, the one that has the red lines on it. What does this mean? And it will explain the economic terms that it's trying to illustrate. Mean. And it will explain, like the economic terms that it's trying to illustrate and say, well, who created this?

And the ability not just the ability to be walking down the street and have a highlight oh, that's the building you're supposed to be meeting somebody at. But the idea of having to have footnotes, being able to have footnotes on pretty much anything you're looking at that's going to be a killer thing. Once you have it on a pair of glasses, that might look like a very distinctive pair of glasses, just like the Apple's AirPods pro are very distinctive looking. They know that it's a technical device, but they don't know. They don't think that you're wearing a big pair of ski goggles or something obnoxious on your face. That's the big deal, and I think that the biggest value of the vision pro as it is right now is feeding into this next generation of stuff.

1:52:37 - Alex Lindsay
Jason go ahead. Alex, all I can say is I really do think I still feel like it's a content thing, and I don't know whether it's not just content but the type of apps and so on and so forth. I don't see a lot of apps that I'm drawn to like, oh, I have to jump in and use that. When I touch on there are things like again, I come back to JigSpace. When I touch on that, I'm like, oh my gosh, I can see how this could be used all over the place all the time, and, and the problem is is that there's no pipeline to generate the content into that. Like, if Apple again, if Apple looked at JigSpace and Sherlocked them with Keynote, there'd be a lot of people using their iPads, their you know, so on and so forth, and Apple's like two inches away from that because they have USDZ. They have a lot of. You know the problem with USDZ it doesn't really understand 3D space for objects, and so it can display something. It just doesn't do it very well, and so the main thing is is that, as, when you see that kind of thing of Apple, I think Apple has to make some of the content solutions easier, and I think you can see Apple doing that with the Blackmagic camera, which is probably the piece of technology that, as someone who's been doing 180 or 360 for 15 years in 3D, the Blackmagic camera, if it can live up to anywhere near what Apple talked about at WWDC, is the most exciting thing that a lot of us have seen for a very long time, because the ability to generate content with the software built in, with the hardware there, you know, that's been something that has been missing forever, like it is an art project to build 180 degree stereo spatial image, right, and so that's a solve.

But apple's got to solve other problems in that area, and part of it's educating the developers. Part of it is building the tools that. If the, if the developers aren't going to make it easy and relatively inexpensive to generate the content, apple needs to start, like, building the tools that allow them to do that, because I think that you could, you know, um, get you know a kia, for instance, like I've? You're kind of like, when are we gonna have something that shows us I can put the goggles on and put my furniture together without swearing so much? You know, that'd be great. Um, you know, and and the, the headset is capable of that. We just don't see it because the tools aren't there.

And I think that this is gets back into the same problem that you know, that I keep on coming back to the same problem with books. You know, with. You know, as Apple built a cool platform, didn't fully finish it and didn't get the right people building content for it. You know, and I think that it you know, I think Apple's used to being, you know, the cute person in class that always gets what they want, you know, and they're not used to actually working at anything. You know, and I think that they're not very to actually working at anything, and I think that they're not very good at working at things. They're good at designing their own products really well, but they're not good at yeah, they design an amazing product, but once it gets on the field, they're not good at working it.

Like you know, in my opinion, they expect others to do that work Exactly, and so I think that that's the challenge.

1:55:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, one of the great quotes again for that Wall Street Journal article is Tim Cook talking about the Vision Pro. It's not that people are wrong and we're right. He says we have enough faith that if we love the product, there will be enough other people out there that love it too.

1:55:45 - Leo Laporte
Jason, are we going to hear on the 31st on the quarterly results? We're going to hear anything about Vision Pro?

1:55:52 - Jason Snell
They were real quiet about it last time. I think that if you hear anything about it, it won't be anything tangible in terms of sales. It'll be an anecdote, like a surgeon using it in a surgery or how they're. One of the things that really gets the analysts really excited is when they talk about things like oh, we have a deal with a fortune 200 company that's deploying vision pros in their corporate environment to do training about something Like they will tell a story about it. The absence of those stories is telling too, though right.

Yes, I mean well, yeah, because I know what they want is some amazing killer app that they can mention, and that story that kicked off this conversation is not wrong that there isn't one. And I don't think it's surprising that there aren't very many apps being developed right now because it's such a small platform. And I think what you notice in that Wall Street Journal article with Tim Cook is he acknowledges that the Vision Pro is a first step. That's not for regular people and is for early adopters and is just like their first step in the process and like that's the truth of it. It is not like any other Apple product. It's not meant for the masses.

I, you know, I keep saying on this show like there's nobody right now. I would recommend a vision pro to write Like it doesn't make sense for anybody. Now I would love for Apple or one of Apple's developer partners to find a reason, but they haven't yet, and that's okay, because, again, but how long is it going to take for that to come to fruition? Because if they could do a Broadway series of Immersive that you had to subscribe to or an NBA thing that you could subscribe, to yeah, if they did Broadway, I would buy a Vision Pro for that.

Then I would say and somebody in the Discord was saying, yeah, but is $2,000 really more affordable? Well, it's more affordable than $3,500 for sure, but not low enough. And if you've got a huge NBA fan and you've got an NBA product or a Broadway product, it's a lot easier to convince somebody to buy a $2,000 headset than a $3,500 headset. It's not ideal, but it's a little bit better.

1:58:12 - Leo Laporte
But we're waiting for that thing. I just feel bad for people who spent $3,500 on it, thinking it was a finished real product. I mean I spent more than that on the Mac the first Mac, but it was a real, I mean, and there were problems with it, yeah, but it was something.

1:58:30 - Andy Ihnatko
And more than that. Even with the first Mac, the first iPhone, a whole bunch of these firsts, there were things you could do with that. There were apps you could realize on that platform that you could not realize on any other platform at the time.

1:58:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it came with MacWrite, macpaint, macdraw. Yeah, and they were amazing.

1:58:45 - Andy Ihnatko
And so I'm sorry, just to wrap up the thought.

1:58:47 - Leo Laporte
And flying toasters?

1:58:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, of course, but the disappointment with the Vision Pro is that all people are creating are 2D apps that can easily be done on any other platform. You basically have a virtual screen connected to a pointy device and a keyboard.

1:59:04 - Alex Lindsay
So that's why it's just not getting there yet. Yeah, I do think to your point that understanding the 3D space and really understanding what to do with it and how you can interact with it, I think is that a lot of developers don't know and don't aren't thinking that way. You know, and I think that, uh, I do think to Apple's credit, you know the the fact that they collaborated with black magic to get a camera that can generate content that is at the spec. That is, a spec that's higher than the quest. I mean, that's what Apple needed was a camera that can generate content that you can't watch on the quest at the same level as you can watch it there. And if that actually happens, I think it changes Cause I think, looking at submerged, there was a lot of things about submerged that I didn't particularly like Um, but there was an enormous chunk of it that was like if I start seeing a whole bunch of movies like this, the 2d screen is going to start looking old really fast, like it was like if they start putting out real shows.

And even I think the place that Apple could be doing this and you know, is something like silo feels like the perfect place to do this, tightly enclosed, you know. And if you just did scenes, just one scene in one of the apartments or one scene somewhere else where you just get to go watch the silo scenes there to see what this might look like reimagined in that environment, you know, I think that you'd end up with a lot of people being interested. I don't know if it'll sell more headsets yet, but it starts to have people really get the possibility of what's there, and it does feel like Apple's got a ton of powder still dry. You know, like you know, they're showing us all these little snippets of things. I mean, obviously they shot a lot more to get to those snippets and the question is was a lot of it just not work? Did it not work, or or did they? Um, are they saving it for something? We don't know exactly what they're saving it for?

2:00:41 - Leo Laporte
and that's your vision. Pro segment, play the outro now, you see, now you know we're done talking the vision pro uh, john, actually, if you want to send me those cuts, I can put them on my Steam Deck, stream Deck and then you won't have to listen to this segment.

2:01:02 - John Ashley
No, I like listening to this segment. Oh, okay, just when you roll right into it quickly, it's like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

2:01:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, give me the open, Then that way I'll know, I know where I'm going. And, incidentally, I didn't give you a plug, Jason Snell, but Jason's review of the Mac Mini is available now at sixcolors.com.

2:01:20 - Jason Snell
I'm sorry iPad, God I keep saying that, check it out. I know that's why they didn't announce them the same day. Right, it's confusing.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
It's confusing. A familiar friend gets an AI refresh. Yeah, that's my nice way of saying, there's nothing new except apple intelligence support, and, and we can see you're reading the nova incident.

2:01:38 - Jason Snell
Are you enjoying it? That's, I've already read it, actually, but I was looking at, like, what books do I have on ibooks that are synced to icloud that I can just open for this photo there?

2:01:44 - Leo Laporte
was the one I'll plug dan moran's novel.

2:01:47 - Jason Snell
Why not?

2:01:49 - Leo Laporte
good old Dan Moran available on apple books. It is uh, let's take a little time out and your picks of the week, if you will coming up next as you're listening and watching the mac break weekly. A special thank you to our club twit members who made this show possible, uh, made all of our shows possible, made the move to the attic possible. You know we're tightening the belt as best we can. Uh, as you know, you see so many podcasts going out of business, podcast networks. How much did Spotify pay for Gimlet? Hundreds of $100 million, I think, and they just shut it down because it's getting harder and harder to do a podcast out here. But we have a secret recipe at Twit, we have a secret savior, and that's you, our community. I think we have the best darn community out there and you've shown it with your support. Club Twit members. Now I'd like to invite more of you to join.

Now let me explain what you get. It's seven bucks a month. Mostly, you get the good feeling that you're supporting what we do, because that really does help us pay the bills. It doesn't go into my pocket, it goes to pay the good feeling that you're supporting what we do, because that really does help us pay the bills. It doesn't go into my pocket, it goes to pay the bills. But you also get ad-free versions of all the shows. We don't need to show you ads, you're paying for the ad-free version.

You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hang, a wonderful place to be, full of animated GIFs and smart people and just a good time. You also get special events that we don't put out in public. For instance, if you missed our coffee clutch with mark prince, the coffee geek, and sarah dooley, the queen of beans uh, that was last Friday. We do have it on the twit plus feed. This Friday we're going to do Stacy's book club with Stacey Higginbotham. The book will be Adrian Tchaikovsky's service model, which Jason says he really liked it favorite book of the year.

Yeah, 100 yeah, uh, we'll be talking about. You should join us, Jason. We'll be talking about it friday 2 pm. Uh, that'll be streamed everywhere. We, thanks to club twit, we were able to stream to Youtube. Thanks to Club Twit, we were able to stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick, TikTok, x.com and, of course, to Discord Eight different places. But that's only when we're live, and then, after the fact, it gets behind the paywall and goes to the TWIiT+ feed. So if you miss it, you know you got to go there. So please join the club. It's a great party, it's a great time and it supports what we do. And, uh, you know those, those flying toasters, those, those don't come free man keep them flying, keep them flying.

Keep our toasters flying. There's our slogan twit.tv/clubtwit. Sscan the QR code in the upper left of your screen and we thank you all so much for supporting our shows. By the way, Anthony Nielsen says who owns a vision pro? If the TikTok live stream count, is any indication of vision pro interest? The room cleared out as soon as we started talking vision pro. You get the feedback right away from the t tock algorithm. It, it doesn't. It is not shy, it lets you know. Andy Ihnatko, pick of the week.

2:04:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, I mentioned earlier that I kind of stopped using wearing, uh, smart watches at the start of the summer. Part of it was that, oh, wow, here's, I can buy a like cheap plastic 20 Casio. It's red and it's cheerful and and you always know where the tide is oh no.

Well, this is the basic 20 like. Oh, okay. So, and believe and believe me, like all summer long I've been looking at other cheap Casio's. I decided, okay, change of seasons, time for a new watch, something a little bit like less festive. So I got the uh, the Casio tide graph, the 1700, this is so cute.

2:05:31 - Leo Laporte
I saw your post on this.

2:05:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I love it and it's so 10 year battery kids for like a 10 year battery b waterproof to like 50 meters or something like that. But I was so curious to see it says that. Oh, it also has an indicator here for like what what's the current phase of the moon and what is the tide right now. I'm like how the hell does a 3030 smartwatch figure that out? And I'll be damned. It's hard to set up, but once you set it up, it's absolutely accurate. The answer to the question is that it is simple math, but it needs a whole bunch of data. For your location that would come out of an almanac. You need to know your latitude and your longitude. For your location that would come out of an almanac. You need to know your latitude and your longitude. You need to calculate the lunitidal interval, which also means you need to know the moon transit what time is?

the next high tide. It's not that hard, it's just that it took me like three or four tries you can still buy the watch, but where do you get old, poor Falmer's almanac?

2:06:31 - Leo Laporte
Where do you get that?

2:06:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, well, the manual. And again, we're talking about the manual. That's the size of a book of matches and has four languages in it, has rough tables you can consult, but there's actually an online calculator for Lunar Tidal Interview. Oh nice. And after screwing it up a couple of times because I didn't really read the instructions very, very well, I've again you just a couple. Google is your friend. After a couple of Google searches, you will get the data you need. I have to admit, though, that it wasn't until the recent full moon, a couple of days ago, that I was absolutely certain that after two weeks.

2:07:03 - Jason Snell
Yes, this is absolutely correct.

2:07:04 - Andy Ihnatko
It's full. It's a hell of a thing. It's fun to know. I do live near the ocean, so high tide is kind of an object of interest. Sometimes I like to take pictures, so it's nice to know just curiously know what phase of the moon is going on. But mostly it's for the reason why every watch including apple watches, but mostly mechanical watches have lots of complications. It's just fun to look at your watch and get the time but also see all kinds of other stuff on it, like what's the tide right now?

2:07:31 - Leo Laporte
where are? Are we right?

2:07:32 - Andy Ihnatko
now. Tide is coming in. High tide will be soon. It's like a dial with six segments to it. So when the black bar is at the top, it's high tide, when the black bar is at the bottom, it's low tide, and in between you can see if the tide is coming in or coming out.

2:07:48 - Leo Laporte
You know what's cool? It's 1,100 is the cost of a Vision Pro could buy a hundred of them, and or is it a thousand of them, and you can go swimming with it.

2:07:56 - Andy Ihnatko
A thousand of them, more than once. Yeah, I'm, I'm all. I mean. I've become like a super fan. My amazon wish list has like at least 10 different like casio watches from 15 to like 50 on it, and I'm sure that it's it's the rule of threes. Once I do this the third time, once I decide, oh, it's winter, I need to buy a new casio watch. That's going to have to of threes. Once I do this the third time, once I decide, oh, it's winter, I need to buy a new casio watch. That's going to have to be a tradition that I buy a new cheap plastic screws actually.

2:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Are they actually screws, or is it just uh? No, they're no they're just molded in that's the only part of it.

2:08:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't like it. It's it's styled like a g-shock watch. It's not a g-shock, but it's styled like one. But the great thing about Casio making the same styles this is, by the way, a brand new model. They just came out with this in 2024.

However, because they make these in the millions and kajillions, they are really hip on trying to make things really efficient. So if I were to unscrew the back of this and take out the module, I could put the same module, the Moontide module, into a whole bunch of other different casio watches. So if I wanted this to be more less of a like fake screws, something more streamlined, I could buy a 22 other model watch in this vague line and just switch the modules, or I could, or I could go to aliexpress, pay 23 and get a stainless steel case that this module will fit in and all the buttons will work and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's quite a thing, it's a lot of fun. But it's also fun knowing that, even if I'm not buying a really expensive smartwatch for $250, I can buy a 10 to 15 of these watches, uh, and just have one for every mood, every day, every sense of life.

2:09:41 - Leo Laporte
I'm so glad they still make these.

2:09:43 - Andy Ihnatko
They're just so cool, they're so good, even, even as and, by the way, it's not a retro thing either, it's not like, hey, we've got this, remember the 80s, now we bring the 80s back with it. No, it's just, they just never stop making them. As a matter of fact, the, the cheap, the cheapest Casio watch is like 14, 15, you'll recognize it if you see it. Apparently like there's, uh, if you wear one, the TSA, there's a really heightened chance we'll pull you over for special inspection, because it is known as like the favorite watch of, like terrorists, because it's so cheap. They can hand them out. Oh my god. But the but the other positive thing, and I keep, I'm probably that's really a selling point.

2:10:18 - Leo Laporte
The terrorist's favorite watch but I'll keep.

2:10:21 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll give you another selling point. I haven't bought this yet but I'm trying to. I'm trying to like think about spending 60 or 70 dollars for just a toy, interesting thing to play with. There is a. There is an engineer who has built an alternative board for that $16 watch. That actually makes it into a smartwatch. You can actually program it, you can have a step counter, it'll have a temperature sensor, it'll have a whole bunch of other stuff and of course it uses the same LCD display. So it's kind of funky that way. But I love the idea of having what looks like a cheap, throwaway claw machine $16 watch. That is actually a very, very capable weird thing.

2:11:04 - Leo Laporte
It's like having a 007 watch that can shoot laser beams, but only just like tell you the temperature the Casio Tidecraft WS1700H $35 at your local Casio dealer or Amazon, as the case may be. Alex Lindsay pick of the week.

2:11:19 - Alex Lindsay
So I was, I was traveling and talking to CJ Covell is is a is someone on our one of our hosts on on office hours and talking about the fact that you know, I was watching a middle of horizon or whatever, watching it on the plane and my, my Apple vision died and I was like I'm going to have a battery because all the batteries I have are kind of worn out, died. And I was like I'm gonna have a battery because all the batteries I have are kind of worn out. And so he suggested and I am uh hooked on these anchor uh, power bank, um, and this is what the 2700 mah um, uh, so this is, uh, this is what it looks like here.

2:11:47 - Leo Laporte
Hold on to me, I actually this is funny because this is the one you got asked this question on uh, ask the tech guys and I, uh, and I looked around, I searched around because somebody wanted to battery to power their vision pro and I found the same thing. Look at that. Look, that is. It is the coolest thing ever, it is. So I have yet to use it to charge anything. All right, yeah so, but I have it, I have it and I've charged a couple things without charging right now.

I was just testing it shows you, to show this what's going.

2:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
It shows you what each port is doing. It shows you how much time, if you're drawing, how much is going to be left when you're charging. It shows you how much time it's going to take for it to charge, how many watts it's pulling through. Here it's capable of putting out a fair amount of power. So if you want to do something with your computer or apple vision pro or or anything else that you you might be powering your phone, it's gonna, it's gonna be able to handle it.

Uh, it's a lot of, it's a lot of battery. Um, that's there. Um, it's got like a little charger that I didn't, I didn't buy the whole kit. You can have the little thing that you can set this down on and it'll automatically charge. Um, and I didn't didn't go down that far. So, uh, but, but this is I mean, this is going to be the new thing that goes into my um, you know, into my backpack, so that I can um, uh, you know that that I that I carry is kind of my standard. It's not too heavy, it's a little big, but it's not too hard. I mean, I'm already it's. It's a 99, you know watt.

You know wherever the 99 watt hour limit it's, it's at the top it's a rate at the limit, yeah, yeah, what you can put on the plane, and so it can't get any bigger than that, and so I'm used to weight on my backpack and I really did need one. I don't know. I felt like I needed one. As I look like I'm going to be doing more flying over the fall, I'm pretty excited about having something that I can continue to watch my Apple Vision Pro. It's perfect for Vision Pro.

2:13:36 - Leo Laporte
You get across the ocean with that yeah, the ability to not.

2:13:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I recently bought like the first power bank that is capable of like charging and powering my macbook like as I go, and the ability to no longer have to care necessarily about the charge state of my macbook when I leave for the day uh, for going out, that's worth 100 bucks to me.

2:13:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, yeah, p powered uh, power delivery pd 3.1, so uh at 250 watts, that's amazing. Yeah, um, that's really really.

2:14:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean that that means being able to charge your your macbook and your iphone at the same time at high speed yeah, yeah, and, and I like it because there's a little dock to charge at home.

2:14:18 - Leo Laporte
So you just put a little as a little pogo pins, you just put it on the dock and it'll just charge and stay ready, ready to go also bluetooth capable.

2:14:26 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, and, and I think that the the to me being able to know what everything's drawing and how much time I have left, and all those other things, having all that data on the front is very useful.

2:14:36 - Leo Laporte
So it's good it also has temperature.

2:14:39 - Alex Lindsay
For some reason it's 75 degrees right now they were like hey, do you want temperature gauge on this? And you're like, yeah, yeah, sure.

2:14:46 - Jason Snell
No, it's like the chip we're using has a temperature sensor. Should we put that? And it's like well, yeah, I mean, if we buy the chip, why not More stuff?

2:14:53 - Andy Ihnatko
on the screen. More stuff on the screen always.

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
We can't have buttons and switches and sliders.

2:14:57 - Andy Ihnatko
More stuff on the screen please.

2:15:00 - Leo Laporte
Jason Snell, your pick of the week, my friend.

2:15:02 - Jason Snell
It's kind of a twofer. I realized with a shock that we haven't recommended DaVinci Resolve since Rene recommended it and Andy in 2020. Wow, and so I'm going to mention so. Davinci Resolve is from Blackmagic and they have a pro version that you can pay for, but they have a free version and this is a nonlinear video editing software and color correction and a whole bunch of other things. It is free. It's also works on the iPad and is free, so if you end up in a.

So here's the story. We do a video version of my other podcast Upgrade with Mike Hurley, and my good friend Chip Sutterth is our video editor, and apparently our show yesterday was so great that it blew out the logic board on his MacBook Pro, oh boy. And so I needed to do a version of the show today. I didn't need to. I wanted to not have the show just disappear for a week on YouTube, and I used a plugin that I'm going to mention in a minute to do this and that Chip uses too, and I thought, oh, do I really want to get a Premiere trial or something, because this plugin doesn't work with Final Cut, which is what I prefer. I hope that they will add that. And then I thought, oh, but I can also.

Just, they have a beta version that works with DaVinci Resolve and it's, it's free. Again I say to you it is free. So if you want to do some video editing and would like something that is up from iMovie and you aren't going to pay for Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro, probably maybe, if you don't know about it try DaVVinci Resolve, because again, I can't say this enough it's free. Okay, it's real legitimate professional video editing software for free. So that's part.

2:16:45 - Leo Laporte
I will also say that, even though he can afford to use any solution in the world, salt Hank uses DaVinci for all of his videos.

2:16:55 - Alex Lindsay
The other thing about it is is that Blackmagic has so many engineers, like Resolve is evolving much faster than everything else around it, like it's not there's like they I mean it's multiples of everybody else's engineers. So, you know, this is something that Blackmagic is. It's not like a side project or something that we're kind of keeping in the you know or you know, we'll just keep it moving forward. There are just incredible amounts of new features every single round, and it's a core piece of the technology that they're building. And so I think that that is, you know, a real. I use resolve about half the time. So if I'm in a rush, I open up Final Cut because I can just knock it out blah, blah, blah, blah, blah brush. I open up Final Cut because I can just knock it out blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and but if I, if I need to do, you know, precision, edit, you know precision, color, precision, audio, those types of things, I quickly, I don't consider doing anything other than Resolve, you know, for those things. And and so the fact that it's the high end solution and oh, by the way, there is a free version, it's pretty impressive, you know, and the and the studio version, by the way, comes with every black magic camera.

You can buy the editing thing that makes it faster, and it comes with the full version. So you buy it. You buy the controller for $300 and the software comes with it. And so, and they and unlike you, know, they like, well, like Apple, uh, they don't you. When you, if you buy the studio version, if you decide that the extra tools are necessary, um, you, uh, you'll, they've never charged for an upgrade, so it's just like oh, now you have the studio version and you can have that for all, and every time we upgrade it, you'll be able to use that as well. And so it, I, I, I feel like it's very hard to compete with that level of. We're going to spend way more money than everyone else developing the software. We're going to give away a free version and we're going to you know, and, um, and never charge you for an upgrade.

2:18:39 - Leo Laporte
It's it, it feels like pretty amazing, isn't it?

2:18:42 - Alex Lindsay
It's a, it's a really amazing piece of software and I you know so I just second and third and fourth.

2:18:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so that's part of the first part, so part of the second is this amazing plugin that I found originally just for premiere, which is not my first choice of video editing software, but you know you can, and if you love it, great. I just I don't love it, but I know how to use it, it's fine. And now they have a beta version that works with DaVinci. Resolve Again, please. I hope they will eventually do a Final Cut version, because I would really love that. It's very clever. It's called Aut autopod. I may have mentioned it here before, but just to say it again, it's a subscription plug-in and here's what it does.

For the upgrade podcast, for example, we don't have a director who's directing the show live. We don't even see each other's video, but we do record video. And then in your non-linear editor I pop my video, mike's video, my audio, mike's audio, and go into autopod and say, okay, track one is mike's video, track two is my video. Track three is okay. Track one is Mike's video, track two is my video. Track three is my audio. Track four is Mike's audio.

Go and then it uses an AI algorithm to determine based on when we're talking, but not like if one of us blurts out it briefly cuts to the other one. It builds a series of shots and if you've got a third shot that's both of you it will actually build a one shot and then another. It'll switch between the one shots and then it'll go to the two shot and back to the one shot, and it allows me to generate a from source video, a version of the show that is basically keyed off of our voices but is directed essentially to cut back and forth in minutes, in a minute or two, and I can export that to youtube. And it's the difference between us being able to do a youtube version of our podcast and not doing it, and so and that's why they built it autopod it's literally, could you make a video version of a podcast without having, without taking, like the zoom feed, or having, like we do here, an actual human being directing it?

And for a lot of podcasts those aren't options. So autopod is kind of mind blowing and if you use premiere or now DaVinci resolve, uh, really, uh, worth checking out if you're in that situation or, or you wish to be, or you thought, as we did, that we were never going to be able to do it, cause there's no way we were going to be able to pay somebody to sit down for hours to go through and and cut the show. So yeah, I highly recommend both of them and glad that Alex has given eight extra thumbs up to davinci result don't worry, john ashley, I have absolutely no intention of replacing you.

2:21:14 - Leo Laporte
So how much does autopod cost? No, no, don't worry, john.

2:21:20 - Jason Snell
What you can't, what you don't get is, you know the lower thirds and you couldn't get the vision pro thing hitting, you know, yeah, it's not positive energy like that, but but it is. It's a pretty good simulation If you cannot afford to have another human brain running your your video board while you're recording your podcast, which a lot of people can't.

2:21:40 - Leo Laporte
No, and John does a whole lot more than just sit there and push buttons, I believe, I think. I'm not sure, probably In all likelihood.

2:21:48 - Andy Ihnatko
We love you man.

2:21:50 - Leo Laporte
I like 50s John Ashley, our producer, our technical director.

2:21:55 - Jason Snell
They wrote a whole software package to try to emulate one tiny part of what John does. And it doesn't really. It just does a good enough job, but not like having, so that's my other pick. My third pick is John Ashley.

2:22:06 - Leo Laporte
John Ashley. I picked John, you know he's been putting up little clips. I'm good at being picked on, thank you. Yeah, I know, poor John, I pick on him mercilessly. He is good at doing the TikTok clips and we've actually been getting some traction on some of our TikTok clips. I think the Mac mini clip that you put up on TikTok it got like 30,000, 40,000 likes or something, is that? Right, something like that, I think.

The one that got the most likes more than 100,000, was the thing we did about getting certs in Microsoft Windows. So I don't know what's going on with TikTok. I don't know. I don't understand. There's a lot of verticals.

2:22:46 - Alex Lindsay
You think that it's all like people dancing, and then you get into the once the algorithm gets a hold of you, it starts to go.

Well, there's a whole and there's just a whole communities that don't like. Every time I I start with a new account in tick tock, like if I grab a new phone, I don't want to use my old account. You're like, how could anyone watch this? This is the most horrible thing I've ever seen. And then within like an hour it's like locked into whatever you're yeah it, it's algorithm is really quite brilliant.

2:23:12 - Leo Laporte
Um, I'm just looking. This is our uh tick tock. It's twit talk. Get it clever. T-w-i-t-t-o. Okay, very clever, and if I, I can sort this by the top right the most viewed 50 000, for that's from twit. Uh is, is this from twit?

2:23:30 - John Ashley
click on the twit talk at the very top. I think you have to click on us first oh, I have.

2:23:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is somebody else. No wonder she got so many views. Okay, something went wrong. This always happens, I don't know why. And then how do I sort it by the uh. Here let's see the popular. These are the most popular ones. There's Richard Campbell 230,000. Are those likes or views? 230,000 on the certs. And then this is the mini one 33,000. What's this one? Oh, that's just the. That's us, that's this right now. That's us, live on twit talk. So, yeah, you know, that's pretty good 230 000. It's not solve hank numbers, but I'll take it. I'll take it, uh. And so, john ashley, you, you help do those right.

2:24:16 - John Ashley
You do the um so we actually use um ai opus. Oh, you use opus yeah yeah, opus is the key.

2:24:25 - Leo Laporte
It just you throw it in and it comes back with 40 options and you're like, and ranks them and you go well you kind of tell it's opus, because it does the, the, uh, the captions right and then I also actually take the time to kind of go through it because it doesn't always do a perfect job.

2:24:39 - John Ashley
So I always have to try to actually take time and polish it Like oh, why is it talking about this? I take that out. Then I actually put another section in.

2:24:46 - Leo Laporte
But I have noticed that when I wear funny hats we get a little bit more traction. So I'm just testing that out right now just to see if that works on tick tock. Thank you, john ashley. Thank you, Jason snell. Thank you, andy inako. Thank you, Alex lindsay. You'll find Alex at officehoursglobal every day of the week talking about production and all sorts of stuff I did, um, uh, I did do the because.

2:25:13 - Alex Lindsay
I mean because if you believe that the tomorrow is better than today, then also mean oh, you got a video, you got a picture that goes I got a couple. Well, you know.

2:25:21 - Leo Laporte
So we had. She said this is the Wall Street Journal we had. We had a little train, good with someone you know standing.

2:25:27 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, what's going on is better than today. And then we have let's see here. Hold on, I got a couple of them here, so we have uh another train I had another train that just made up there.

2:25:39 - Leo Laporte
I have um did you say something about trains in your prompt?

2:25:44 - Alex Lindsay
no, I just thought it's pulling it looks like it's pulling a building.

2:25:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I like that um, that's there.

2:25:51 - Alex Lindsay
I think that one's a pretty good one.

2:25:52 - Leo Laporte
And then it comes up with you must be using what are you using, because pikachu is a trademark of the Nintendo Corporation, which is notoriously litigious.

2:25:58 - Alex Lindsay
I just put the quote in and gave it, but I've set it to like 100%. Like go crazy, don't think about guardrails at all. Yeah, don't worry about anything. So you got a Pikachu there. Then I got this.

2:26:16 - Leo Laporte
I was like, okay today, but today was better than yesterday it might be the last day, um so anyways, I thought that was fun.

2:26:20 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, then we have you know, oh, the little angel, yeah, look at that and then and then okay, by the way, on that one, this one's starting low like tomorrow might be better today, is you?

2:26:29 - Leo Laporte
know, come out tomorrow, but not, couldn't get.

2:26:33 - Alex Lindsay
Those are those are your, your little uh choices. And a quick reminder, by the way, is uh, we did, we did do the uh um the sonic sunshine benefit uhcom. How did that go? It went really well. You know, just such a great to watch it folks. But you can see it right. Yeah, sonic sunshine um. If you go to sonic sunshine benefitcom, please uh, donate to the uh, to the, to the fine folks that are there. You can watch the um to the to the fine folks that are there. You can watch the um, you can watch the stream there. There's there's some live performances. There's a lot of people who who um, literally phoned it in, like recorded it with their phone, and some great performances there, um, but there's also some live performances, uh, including uh, bare naked ladies and uh, as well as uh, toad the wet Wet Sprocket, and so they're live from Columbia University of Southern California, university of South Carolina.

South Carolina and and it was a the other USC, the, what they say is the original USC. So anyway, so, anyway. So check that out. We had, we had a great time and just a great, great bunch of artists to work with.

2:27:38 - Leo Laporte
You know, it was really fun very nice, really cool, sonic sunshine benefit dot com to donate. They need the money and you get a great concert. And Alex lindsay, you're the best office hours dot global.

2:27:52 - Alex Lindsay
And don't forget the show he does with Michael Krasny gray matter dot dot global and don't forget the show he does with Michael Krasny gray matter dot show. We got ron elving on to talk about the election this friday.

2:28:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh boy, I don't know. I I am so anxious that I don't think I can take any more input I'm just going it's gonna be interesting wake me in two weeks. Everybody should vote, though I voted. Look at that, I already voted. I voted, I got the. That's nice. They give you the badge so you can. I'm gonna save it and put it on later, just to remind people. On two, on the fifth, um Andy Ihnatko GBH is calling thursday 12 30 eastern time.

2:28:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later very nice.

2:28:35 - Leo Laporte
It's great to have you in your beautiful library. It looks like a nice day. Go outside and enjoy the tide. It is quite lovely.

2:28:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's unseasonably warm, but not so warm as to make you not want to be outside.

2:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Perfecto, that's what you're looking for. Mr Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com. Read his review of the iPad mini there and all sorts of other great stuff. He also does a million podcasts. They're all listed at sixcolors.com. Slash Jason. Yes, indeed, plug something.

2:29:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah, go read my iPad mini review. I've managed to get like 2000 words about a product that basically didn't change Marvel at it.

2:29:10 - Leo Laporte
Had I read it, I wouldn't have bought a brand new case for $70. So, right there, you could have saved me. There you go, big bucks news you can use. Well, anyway, that's you know. Apple gets most of my income. That's the way this. Thank you for joining us.

We do mac break weekly every Tuesday, 11 am. Pacific 2 pm eastern time, 1800 UT. You can watch us live on those eight count of eight channels now, including TikTok, Youtube Twitch. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show are available at our website, twittv slash mbw. When you get there, you'll also see a link to the YouTube channel that's dedicated to MacBreak Weekly. That's a good way to share clips if you saw something that you wanted to tell a friend about, or whatever, and it helps us promote it.

By the way, another way you can help promote what we do and we really appreciate it if you're a club member, you can get a free month when you entice somebody else to join the club. The referral program is there at twit.tv/clubtwit, you know what. You refer 12 friends. You don't pay for a year. I think that's a pretty good deal. We also have, of course, because we're a podcast, we have a feed, which means you can use any podcast player of your choice and subscribe either to the audio or the video versions of mac break, weekly available shortly after the show concludes on a Tuesday. John Ashley, we're starting to put together the best ofs for the end of the year. I can't believe we're already doing that.

2:30:31 - John Ashley
End of the year is here oh wait, yeah, we've been working on it yeah, twit.tv/bestof.

2:30:38 - Leo Laporte
If there's a moment for mac break weekly 2024 that you thought really. You know hit home, uh nominated, twit.tv/bestof it. Helps John Ashley and the rest of the producers get this the best ofs together for the holiday season this year. Thank you, everybody for joining us Now. I'm sad to say it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.