MacBreak Weekly 947 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell are here and you know what else is here A brand new baby Mac. We've got a review of the Mac Mini. Some features you may not know about. Apple has a very interesting 2025 plan, including it looks like cameras, plus a new wall-mounted display and the 23rd birthday of an Apple well, probably the most important product Apple ever released. All coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 947. Recorded Tuesday, November 12th 2024: The Mullet of Macs. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple. This is the let me get it over here the new Mac mini version. It's a little bit smaller. Never. Jason Snell is here from sixcolors.com. Hi, Jason.

0:01:13 - Jason Snell
Hi Leo, How's it going?

0:01:14 - Leo Laporte
It's going really good now that I have my little-.

0:01:17 - Jason Snell
Tiny computer, smallest Mac ever.

0:01:19 - Leo Laporte
Smallest Mac.

0:01:20 - Jason Snell
Is it the smallest Mac ever? It's the lightest. It's, I think the lightest it's, I think the lightest mac ever it feels a little.

0:01:24 - Leo Laporte
It's a little big and heavy to me. I don't know. I know, oh, wait a minute, this isn't it, that's the old studio.

0:01:30 - Jason Snell
That's a, that's, that is yeah, that's like it looks swole now compared to you.

0:01:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Imagine people just actually use those things. How did they do it? What about the lapels? So the pillows on them, the wide ties, god?

0:01:42 - Leo Laporte
That's Andrew Ihnatko of ihnatko.com. I'm just assuming it's Andrew, is it? And it could be Andreyevich, I don't know. Is it Andrew?

0:01:50 - Andy Ihnatko
it's always been Andy just Andy, yeah, and there's yep. I will know it might know my, my, my, my, uh. My birth certificate name is Andrew, but it's like I've always always been Andy, maybe because my dad was also Andy. I've sometimes wondered why, how some names are shortened as a default where no one I have a cousin, drew, hello, drew, but I don't. But it's like no one ever considered like calling me Drew, yeah, for which I'm grateful because I yeah. No, I like Andy.

0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
I would have to return a lot of towels at this point. Also with his Alexander Lindsay, alexander towels at this point, and also with this Alexander Lindsay. Alexander, such a long name, Alexander Lindsay, from oh nine, oh media and office hours dot global and you've got the uh, the wolves, the woolens out.

0:02:35 - Alex Lindsay
it's chilly, it's chilly it is chilly, isn't it? Yeah, I love it. It's. It's back to my season, so I get six months of hell and six months of amazing you like it cool wet. Yeah, yeah, that's good, yeah.

0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, here we are gathered together with, uh, very little to talk about, and did anybody? I got my, like I said, come on, this is okay, so I'm just warning everybody.

0:03:00 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be three o'clock in the afternoon today and we'll be finishing out here. Oh, we never had anything he jinxed it.

0:03:06 - Leo Laporte
I did, I jinxed it. Uh, I did get the new mac mini. I haven't gone the through the extensive testing that you which one did you, which one did you get? I got the top of the line, I got the best. The only thing I didn't go crazy on is 10 gigabit ethernet the drive speed, in case you're wondering, is screaming.

0:03:26 - Alex Lindsay
Jason Bashew is a friend of mine. He has the top of the line one. I just asked him. I said can you run a drive speed test?

0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
It's like over six gigs a second yeah here's my black magic speed test results from it it pegged. What's weird I was talking with Jason about this before the show is it's pegged to write at 6.6 gigabytes Gigabytes, not bits gigabytes per second. The read is slower 5.3 gigabytes Now. Normally on an SSD read is faster than write. I think it's IO constrained or something. I mean, it's plenty fast enough 5.4 gigabytes a second read speed, but it should be faster, shouldn't it, than the write speed.

0:04:11 - Alex Lindsay
It usually is, but for whatever reason it's, it's not, but it's, it's still. It's still fast enough it's. It's read speed is faster than my mac studio um and its write speed is much, much faster. So you know, I don't even know what you would use the right speed at that speed. I mean because I will say the read speed typically is more important to us because we've got a bunch of big files. But it also means that when you are, if you're compressing something or writing something, it means that writing to drive will be extremely fast and it makes a difference. Like, if you're writing compressor and you've got a big file, the drive speed is everything and that's really where all the time is spent.

0:04:42 - Andy Ihnatko
So it definitely makes a difference. And also the Ars Technica review had a nice little detail that if you went for the cheapest storage segment 256 gigs that's spread across two modules, and they said that now it's faster than a single module. So there's advantages for going cheap, I guess.

0:04:59 - Leo Laporte
This is a picture of it. I don't have it. It's hooked up. I'm using it, but I did take a picture of it with a Buddha for size, just so you'd put. Underneath is the is the old studio. It is a really cute little do hickey. I'm so adorbs.

0:05:15 - Andy Ihnatko
I really like the idea of, like someone was after the power button gate, let's call it. Someone was saying, well, yeah, but if you've got it mounted, like at the edge of your desk, underneath, like if it's a perfect place, I think they're being serious about it too and actually looking at it, I'm like, okay, well, that's very plausible because there's no, you're not blocking any air vents. You will have, like your ports, like right in front of you, like for the ones that you actually need. It will reduce desktop clutter. I mean, this is, it looks like a hub. Wherever you put it. That's going to be that's. It's going to be so much fun to play with this. Just where all the ways that I've configured my desk over the years to accommodate a cpu and now it's like, oh well, I have a power brick now that is bigger than the cpu. That's going to be the hub of my entire, my entire desktop what I mean.

0:06:02 - Leo Laporte
You could always, somebody said, run it up, turn it upside down, and then the power button's on the top and the cooling would be better and the bluetooth and wi-fi.

0:06:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll have a better access to the air, um, and if you don't mind the aesthetics of it, if you inevitably use it as a coaster, which any flat surface on your desk is and you spill something, then you'll be. You don't have to worry about it. It'll definitely'll definitely do that.

0:06:23 - Jason Snell
I um mounted my Mac studio under my desk when I got the M one Mac studio and it's great cause. It's invisible and um between hubs and Thunderbolt cables. Like I'm running a Thunderbolt cable straight to my monitor, but so that's one cable and then you can attach things to the ports on the back of the monitor. You can also have hubs and things under your desk. I'm a big fan of the idea of like if you can do a setup under your desk, then you can have all these things, all these wires and peripherals and stuff under there and you never see them. And in this scenario it's exactly right that you end up with if it's suspended basically under your desk. The airflow is at the bottom, the power button is accessible, it's all just kind of right there. It's at the bottom. The power button is accessible.

0:07:06 - Leo Laporte
It's all just kind of right there, it's it's a pretty good way to live and this will be even better. I'm waiting for the aftermarket things to do that right first.

0:07:13 - Jason Snell
First they'll be the 3d prints on etsy, then they'll be the companies that can afford to do a run of actual plastic at a factory, and then they'll be the ones who cut the metal uh versions of them. That'll be a little bit nicer, and I watched that all happen because I'm actually. My Mac studio is suspended with a Lucite mount that was meant for the old Mac mini, excuse me and a hard drive that fits, so I used it.

0:07:40 - Alex Lindsay
And I have all my computers set up to restart at power loss. So, as a result, I have hit the button on my Mac Mini. I have four Mac Minis here. I'm putting another one in for something else and they're all stacked up, so having it on the bottom will be inconvenient for me. For the two times that I've done it in the last two years Two years I was trying to remember. I was like I can't even remember when I ever used that power supply, because usually it comes with me. The only time I need the power supply is when I move things around. I've replugged everything in, and when I do that they all come right back up again.

0:08:15 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's pretty much what. Greg Jawswiak and John Ternus were interviewed by a Chinese content creator on Bilibili and pretty much said what was the most logical thing, which is that A we didn't think it was a big deal because people rarely need to power cycle the Mac anyway, and also kind of like what we were indicating, like last week, the week before the button has to go somewhere and especially when you're making something smaller, packaging becomes such an issue that it goes where you can fit the power button and they're certainly not going to re-engineer everything to make it go from the front or the side, especially if they once again think that it's not something you're going to want to access that much anyway. I mean, even on my Intel Mac Mini there's a power button, but it's like so blended into the back corner of it that I almost can't. If I reach around to try to feel it, I almost can't feel it. So power buttons on Macs has never been something that they've been really innovative in or desire to be innovative in.

0:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Jason, is it? The quiet is yours? I haven't heard mine. The fan come on.

0:09:16 - Jason Snell
I uh well, dan Moore reviewed that one, so he's got it and he said he, he and I had the whole, like is there a fan in there? And there absolutely is, yeah, but it is very quiet. And I think they whole like, is there a fan in there? And there absolutely is, yeah, but it is very quiet. And I think they sent him the non-Pro model and if it's anything like we've seen with other systems in Apple Silicon, you really need the Pro model and then you need to kick the GPU and probably the CPU and even then, like, is there much fan noise? And remember, the original Mac Studio had a bit of fan noise but they've quieted it down and I think that it's there but you basically can't hear it. You'd have to work really hard to hear it at all.

0:09:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't get warm, hold it to your ear like it's a shell or something Like that's what you'd have to do.

0:09:59 - Leo Laporte
It gets warm maybe if I'm playing a game, although I haven't noticed that it was a little warm when I was first transferring everything over from the M1 Max studio A little warm, not hot by any means. I think it's pretty. You know, sometimes when you have something that small you have heat problems. But I think this thing is a wizard and I'm sure the studio will be even wizarder.

0:10:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there's another detail from the artist's review on that point where um with the m4 powerbooks, macbooks and also the new mac mini, uh, they've had, they've, they've added high power mode to these models as well, not just like the, the pro models before so that's the model where, if they're saying, well, okay, screw it, we need high performance, well, we don't care about the noise, we'll just keep, we'll do as best as we'll be Scotty in the engine room screaming about okay, it's barely containing it right now, but I've got. You've got 12 seconds before warp or breach.

0:10:56 - Jason Snell
Which is nice. For, yeah, I took the 16-inch MacBook Pro which has the M4 Pro processor and I put it in high power mode. And for those who don't know, high power mode is literally just run the fans as hard as you need to, that's all it is.

It doesn't change the chip, except in the sense that the chip doesn't throttle at the point where it would otherwise. They are willing to do a certain level of throttle to keep the laptop, or in this case the desktop, quiet. But high power mode exists to basically say I don't care how loud it gets, just run it as fast as you can.

0:11:26 - Alex Lindsay
And if you are in a production on site or you're trying to record a voiceover or something, being able to throttle it down. You don't need all the speed, but you need to keep running and not make a lot of fan noise. So it's a good little service to have there.

0:11:41 - Leo Laporte
Although I have to say I think it was was tom's hardware that noted in their benchmarks that the high power mode didn't really make it that much faster.

0:11:49 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, it's fast they're all the problem.

0:11:52 - Jason Snell
So so it's. It's a question of how you measure it, and the people over at tom's guide are very smart, um, but I would say I haven't seen that test. What what happens is to really measure performance. If you, if you take it in high power mode versus not, it's about a lot of heat over a long time because you need to get it to throttle and first off, these systems are really hard to throttle anyway. I mean, in some cases I've found you've really got to kill the GPU and the CPU simultaneously in order to get so much heat in that system that it says I gotta slow down and then you put it in high. So high power mode is intended to just never get there. I would imagine that there is a difference. But again, I mean, high power mode is weird. Like you probably shouldn't use it, right?

Like you probably, but I suppose if you really need to get that like, yeah, I mean, you're right, it should kind of take much more. Captain, to use the Scotty metaphor again, you probably shouldn't use it, but what I like about it? You know they have had various scandals about throttling and all of that and I think that they finally decided look, if you don't like throttling, fine, fine, we will crank up the fan. Yeah, and it will be annoying, but you, we will crank up the fan, and it will be annoying, but you will get that, because I was able to get that fan to be Real out on the MacBook Pro right when I was playing a game and like great like. If you want that, you can choose to have it, but by default it's going to run the fan a little quieter and throttle when it needs to, and that's fine, you get. You get to choose. It's nice that they give you the choice right.

I think that was a problem with their old philosophy a few years ago you, the choice right. I think that was the problem with their old philosophy a few years ago about charging. You know, battery levels, power levels and throttling and all that is that Apple is inclined by its nature to hide those things from the user and they got called out and so they're like all right, we're going to set some defaults, but it's up to you to decide if you want to charge your battery to 100% and if you want the fans to come on or if you want us to throttle, and so it's a funny feature. High power mode right, it's intentionally contrasting with the low power mode when your battery is running out, but it's there. If you want to hear some fan noise, it's great.

0:13:58 - Leo Laporte
It's likely that the benchmarks that people use don't really challenge the high power mode because they're short. Yeah, that's right Actually.

0:14:07 - Jason Snell
Cinebench is pretty good, because Cinebench I'm sorry we're really in the weeds now in terms of benchmarking tools, but right, like a fast chip is going to run the benchmark fast and therefore it'll peak and then it'll come down, which tells you something about peak performance, but it doesn't necessarily tell you about a sustained job.

So Cinebench is different in that, first off, by default, I mean you can get a Cinebench score with a one pass, but what they want you to do by default is run it for 10 minutes and there's also basically an endless mode where it just keeps going, and that can be really useful, because what you want to see is what happens after 10 minutes of running it, after 10 minutes of high test killing the GPU, where it's presumably heated up a lot and is struggling to cool itself. How fast is it then? Which tells you something different than what it's like after a minute it really does. So geek bench is great, but Cinebench, especially if you extend it out, can tell you more because it will run a long time. That's sometimes like I did this when I was reviewing the MacBook Air versus the MacBook Pro. Right, because the M4 MacBook Pro and the M3 before it. It has a fan and the Air doesn't have a fan, ironically, given the name Air.

Anyway, and you have to run that test. You have to run tests for a long time to see the separation between those two systems, because that's when the fan helps and and then you can see that it's a little faster when it's got a fan so, uh, Andrew cunningham says the best apple's best mac minis ever.

0:15:41 - Leo Laporte
I I mean that's not saying a lot, I mean because it's always the best iphone hopefully it's the next computer, the best computer ever, it's always backwards.

0:15:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the butterfly keys were a step backwards, the touch bar maybe a step backwards, so so maybe not the best but, but I think it is the case that this is more than just the best ever.

0:15:59 - Leo Laporte
This is like it's really.

0:16:00 - Jason Snell
It's a huge I think it appeals to a broader section of the market than ever before a higher end because it reaches yeah, I mean, like apple keeps shaving off.

Like who even needs a mac studio, let alone a mac pro, at this point? Like that, that m4 pro chip is so strong, it has taken such a leap forward in so many ways in terms of performance that, like between that and the MacBook Pro as well, like, do you need more than the pro chip? I mean, if you need lots and lots and lots of GPU cores like you can get twice as many on the Max chip, so that's okay, right. But like I don't know, like you're, we're just slicing it thinner and thinner and thinner where, like it used to be, the Mac mini was kind of underpowered and you're like, yeah, I don't, I could use a Mac.

Well, I'll put it in a closet as a server but, I'm not, not me, I'm not gonna touch it because it's dirty and and consumery and it's like now, if you need a computer on your desk, like and you're even a pro and doing video and stuff, unless you're at a super high level, like, how many people need the power beyond the M4 Pro and the Mac Mini? It's all there for most people now.

0:17:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, cunningham calls it the default desktop Mac and I think that that's it.

0:17:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I agree with that. It really comes down to, if you're running research models, data models, weather models, that you need. It's an obscene amount of memory, system memory. That's when you go for the Pro. Everything else, though, why would you even bother?

0:17:32 - Alex Lindsay
I mean and you have to put it in perspective the new Mac Mini supports up to three monitors, right at all levels, I believe, and you're talking about being able to take a Mac Mini and put three 4K monitors. It's actually two displays up to 6k and one up to 4k or whatever, but three 4k monitors on it. Get a, you know, a Hoanu or whatever arm, and now you have three of these monitors around you with this tiny little computer and that still costs less than a Mac, than an iMac, and so now you have this huge amount of real estate that is one little computer. This is 95% of the market. I mean, just the 599 version that came out, or 499 if you're EDU, is 90%, 95% of the market right there.

0:18:16 - Leo Laporte
Part of it is because Apple has now started at 16 gigs of RAM. Yeah, and that's adequate. Now I will tell you so.

0:18:22 - Alex Lindsay
The entry level is is good. I have, I have, I have, uh, eight of the yeah, I know eight gig m1s and they're working great, you know like, so they're, so they're, you know like. I will say that I mean for an average person there's oh, we can't run, but I've opened photoshop on them. I do lots of things, it's, you know, so I don't. I mean 16 gigs is obviously a huge jump up, but the eight gig for a lot of the stuff that the average person does, and even for me, running, zoom and all kinds of other things, like lots of zoom, like 16 channels of zoom or eight channels of zoom, um has been working on a 8 gig mac mini, so so it's pretty amazing also.

0:19:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean, look the reason you mentioned that is because apple charges kind of an exorbitant premium for both RAM and storage, and so the base model, which is 16 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs of storage, is the low price, but that's probably good enough for most people.

0:19:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'd say 99, 90 to 95 percent of their market is my guess, especially since it has such a high speed external port that you can attach external storage ram.

0:19:28 - Andy Ihnatko
You can't, but it can attach external storage also, I think it is critically important that the minimum buy-in for a mac remains at 599 499 for education. So I'm very much in favor of apple doing whatever they have to do to the minimal skew to make sure that that doesn't change.

0:19:45 - Alex Lindsay
And again, that's the minimum amount of money you can put, you can walk in with to the apple store with and walk out with a working mac, and that's always been one of the most attractive things about the, about the mac mini and I I highly recommend people thinking about I mean, as someone who's had lots of all the different apple products that are out there really think about mac minis, because you know, having a month being able to have your monitor and then when you wanna swap out the computer, you're not paying for another monitor.

When you go to a new iMac, you're paying for a whole nother monitor that you may or may not need With a Mac mini. The reason I have so many of them is I stack them up, I connect them to lots of different monitors and when I buy a new one, I'm not buying all the other things that are required, and it's such a great platform to do that. And I have Mac minis that are 10 years old in my system that are doing something. They're managing keys, they're managing something else, and someone was asking me well, what happens when you need to repair them? I was like I've never had to repair a Mac mini Like ever, like ever.

0:20:42 - Leo Laporte
Let me correct myself, paul McC. It like ever, you know. Let me correct myself paul mccann's telling me the base model is 256 gigs storage.

0:20:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Is that enough?

0:20:50 - Leo Laporte
it depends on your base model that's fine, that's enough.

0:20:51 - Andy Ihnatko
You can install, base a base array of apps on if you're running photoshop, if you're doing uh, if you're doing video editing and you want assets to be as close to the cpu as possible. Maybe not, but that's not everybody. Again, as a, I need to. I really want a mac. I only have x amount of dollars. I've got a thousand dollars to spend on the entire system and I can't afford to spend a thousand dollars just on the mac alone.

0:21:12 - Alex Lindsay
That's perfectly fine and think about this. This gets into thinking about taking your iPhoto library or your photo library and putting it on a uh external, yeah, source, which you should do anyway, yeah, but, but the um, but putting on that external source, because a lot of us have collections that are much larger than uh, than 256 gigs, so so that that might be where you start to those.

0:21:34 - Leo Laporte
It's those storage areas that might be a problem yeah and for internal is always going to be fast, faster than any even with thunderbolt 5 is that right?

0:21:41 - Jason Snell
well, I thought about five was going to get you real close, but it's still not not as fast but real close and you could, but it's more expensive, right. But I think the question is, like Andy said, fast storage is the real important part here. If you need to edit video, right, you want that on the device or you're going to have to pay for very expensive fast storage. That's external but, like a lot of stuff like Alex's photo library, right, like that doesn't need to be super fast, it just needs to be a hang off. You buy a Samsung SSD on Amazon and and you know if it's under your desk, you literally just Velcro it to the back bottom of your desk.

I've got one in there that's just tucked in to the little Lucite thing with my Mac studio and like, and you don't even remember that it's there and that's, and that's a lot cheaper onboard storage. Um, and yeah, my server is a 256 M two base model and, yeah, I've got a raid attached to it and that's that's got like 20 terabytes of data on it. But, like, all I need on the device is enough to like, have some apps and documents and almost everything else has been relocated to external storage and it's fine, right. So it really depends on on what you're doing, but unless it's super fast storage that's what I keep telling people is like I know the storage is expensive, but unless you've got big Final Cut projects or something like that on there, you know that you need the speed of it. You just you know you can get low storage and then buy an SSD and attach it and it's fine.

0:22:59 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, this is a crucial two terabyte X10 Pro. I've got a bunch of these and I think that it is right now $200, $217. And it's two gigs per second. You know, to the Now, if, admittedly, if you're writing for it, once it goes over about 40% of its capacity, it starts to slow down. But I mean when it's when you're writing to it continually, it can do that. But for the most part, like your photo library, all the stuff that you might want to do, this is a little add-on to that. That is easy.

0:23:30 - Leo Laporte
Otherworld Computing has started offering a pre-order for a Thunderbolt 5 dock their stuff's all good and expensive, but good yeah, I have their Thunderbolt 3 dock that looks exactly just like that I have their RAID.

0:23:45 - Jason Snell
That's my RAID on my server.

0:23:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I have an M.2 RAID 4 M.2 RAID array, so that should be pretty fast, although it's not Thunderbolt 5. I guess I'll have to upgrade that too.

0:23:55 - Jason Snell
I've got a Thunderbolt 3 disk array with them and let me tell you it is the drives that are the problem. It is not the connection right, Like the drives are because they're spinning disks still and they're just not like there's more bandwidth than the Thunderbolt needs. So it's, all just that they just aren't fast enough.

0:24:11 - Leo Laporte
Thunderbolt 5 cables will be required, but I know they're only $20 for the short ones, so I'll probably get three of those.

0:24:17 - Jason Snell
Right, the short ones are they don't need chips, right.

0:24:27 - Alex Lindsay
Their short ones are passive cables and the long ones they need to have the chips and they need to relay, and then you go to a meter. It's twice as much. Yeah, the one that I'm waiting for is this one, which is this is the owc, this is the m2 or whatever. I have that yeah yeah, this at those are ssds in there yeah, with, with uh, with mvmes or whatever are. I mean you can go up to 32 terabytes.

0:24:43 - Jason Snell
That, this little box and it's silent. My RAID is like a popcorn popper that is always going in my house and I love it. I love that I've got 20 terabytes or whatever in there. But the day is going to come and it's going to cost, and I don't like how much it's going to cost, which is why I haven't done it yet. But I cannot wait for the day where I can bring my server back into my office with me, because it doesn't sound like a popcorn popper or a percolator. But right now it's in a closet somewhere where I can still hear it, but at least it's sort of quiet. And, yeah, the days of a fast SSD storage everywhere I'm. That's my last spinning hard drives in my life and I hate them and I want them to go away, but they hold too much data for me to kill them yet yeah, the um, the.

0:25:25 - Alex Lindsay
This is the, the owc's guy. This we're not, by the way, owc is not a sponsor.

0:25:30 - Leo Laporte
I wish they were an advertiser. Any money for this? They're on top of this.

0:25:34 - Alex Lindsay
If you're, if you're out there taking my money salescom is their website yeah, just go there, but like they do make stuff that nobody else really makes.

0:25:42 - Jason Snell
That is designed for apple users, which is the thing. Oh, there you go, A Thunderbolt 5 SSD 6 gigs per second, it's going to be cheap, but it's going to be fast. What's the $400?

0:25:55 - Leo Laporte
for 2 terabytes. There you go. So you could get a 256 gig, you could and get that.

0:26:05 - Alex Lindsay
And again, a lot of times when you're buying those I mean when I'm buying them I'm buying them as glue, so they're specific, to do something like. I'm working on a project next year, if it goes through, I'll buy a hundred of these, but I'm only going to buy the very basic ones and stick them in places where they need to work. So they're basically edge compute for me to do a bunch of things all over the US S. But the point is, is that this changes because they are so small and so powerful for the base unit? I think the base unit is the highest value you know and and it's the um, uh, it's got the most uh bang for your buck, and I think that if, if you can keep it in that area, you you really just have an incredible opportunity to to.

You know, I just a lot of things changed for us when that one came out, when we saw the actual specs like what can it actually do? We heard about it, we heard rumors, we know what our current mac minis can do and this one is it's it. It. It's one of those times when the computer jumped a cup what feels like a couple versions forward.

0:26:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, this is. This is a revolution. This wasn't, and by no means incremental. If they just put like they had just put an M4 into the old package and said, bob's your uncle, it would have been nice because the performance is wonderful, the power profile is wonderful, but this really does feel like they took an opportunity to say well, look, we've had the same box for how many years now? What can we do, given how much we know about, again, packaging and optimization? The fact that it's smaller I mean, it's not as though you can feel the extra oxygen in the room that the smaller one displaces but there's something about it that just says this is something I don't know how to put it that well, but there's something that's not okay. No, this is not just a new version of the same box. This is, it feels a little bit more exciting and for even if you're just spending the $600, that should be exciting.

0:27:50 - Leo Laporte
The best Apple devices have personality. Yeah, the Bondi Blue iMac had personality.

0:27:56 - Andy Ihnatko
The Mac, the G4, imac, still, I think, the greatest Mac as an object that they've ever created.

0:28:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and this is in that category of something you look at and go oh, I mean, it's not a knock. You know Intel's been making those knocks for a while. This is not a knock. There's something very beautiful about it.

0:28:12 - Alex Lindsay
It's beautiful right, yeah, well, and just again. The raw horsepower for the dollar is just incredible. It is beautiful, but I think that goes with it.

0:28:20 - Leo Laporte
It's part of it is is the performance, it's performance.

0:28:26 - Alex Lindsay
It's not just pretty, you know, it is incredible amount of horsepower in one place, is there okay?

0:28:30 - Leo Laporte
so this has become the new mac mini love fest. I have no, no negatives so far about it. Are there any?

0:28:38 - Alex Lindsay
everyone talks about the power I think everyone had to find something. Who cares?

0:28:42 - Jason Snell
yeah, that's a sign right when the gate is the power button placement that's a sign.

0:28:45 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe the product is pretty good here.

0:28:47 - Jason Snell
I'll give you, I'll take a run at it um ports right.

So yeah, that's why you need the usbc ports, yeah, which is nice but you know yeah, but the and the a's are gone, which is fine, like I think we, I think we're all over that. Um, so what I'll say about that because I think it's worth saying, is hubs and docks and things are out there that are pretty good. And again, if you are attaching this to a display, right, it's gotta have a display. Your display probably has ports on the back, so one thing you could do if you wanna have extra stuff is attach it to your display. Uh, or if this is under your desk or whatever, uh, you know, you can chain a bunch of different hubs down there. So it's, it's a solvable problem in a way that I know apple all of apple's photos are right like it's a perfectly immaculate desk with just this computer and two cables that you can't even see, and all that.

But like realistically, um, you can get as many ports as you want and the and and with thunderbolt and usbc it's very uh, it's very flexible, they can be sort of whatever speed you need them to be. I have a cheap amazon usb, a dock under my desk and like it's. It's crappy, but it like lets me charge some stuff and that's all that I really need it for and and so you can decide how much you want to spend. But there are a lot of cheap docs out there.

And the only other note that I would say is maybe a criticism is that some people have criticized the fact that the headphone jack is on the front, and I just wanted to say, one, headphone jacks still exist. That's actually kind of cool. And two, I think the rationale there was, if you're using this in a scenario where you want to plug in your headphones, having it be right in front of you on the desktop or whatever you want to plug in right there and not reach around back and people say, well, what if I have speakers and I want to plug them in?

It's like, okay, there is a super cheap USB-C to audio dongle that you can buy that will plug into the back and then you plug your speakers into it. And if you want something nicer, there are also really nice headphone amps and speaker amps that are usb, that will plug into the back, and so I think it's a. I think apple made the right compromise, which is ergonomics on the front party, in the back, uh, ergonomics on the front to plug it in. And if you want it on the back, there are super cheap, easy to use usb adapters that will get you out to, uh, an analog audio cable so don't worry, you're saying it's the wallet of, uh yeah, and actually, if you had a bunch of cables coming out the back, it would kind of look like a mullet, wouldn't it?

0:31:13 - Alex Lindsay
see, or you could, or you could do it my way, which is that I I have my, my computers on dante and I have a dante to xlr connector to my speaker and then and then, so all you need is a ether poe, ether to your XL Done, sorted Easy. Handle, no problem. Any computer or any device that you want to come out of that speaker, you just go into the Dante router and just go. I just want this one to go out. Okay, I'm just saying. I'm just saying Okay.

0:31:39 - Jason Snell
The other thing that excites me about this is they don't do case changes very often, especially with the Mac Mini.

It's been 14 years since the last one and I think when you look at that we talked about, can you get the fan to blow in the Mac Mini? I think one of the things that's going on there is that they're not designing this for the M4. They're also designing it for the M5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, right, 910, right, and so they want to build it with the thermal profile that they have confidence that they're going to be able to get the base and pro level chip in there for years to come. And I think that's why that cooling system is the way it is. It's like it's probably got a lot of headroom that they're not even using now because they know that they're not going to change this thing and it's exciting Like it's a new. We don't get new mac designs. I mean this. They they a few of them have changed in the last couple of years but it's learning that lesson.

0:32:31 - Leo Laporte
Remember the mac pro.

0:32:32 - Alex Lindsay
They couldn't upgrade it because the cooling couldn't be exactly well, and I'm glad that they they don't change this one very often because they have trashed all of our enclosures you know, like all like you know, like I have to admit that from a pure you know, I like the fact that it's smaller. Yeah, there's no adapter. I really they give me the same. Yeah, because it's taller and smaller.

0:32:50 - Jason Snell
You can't even like fit a blank around it to get it to fit into your old adapter. It's completely different.

But it'll be like this for a long time. And, leo, to your point, one of the reasons when you're talking about like redesigning that trashcan Mac Pro is Apple's the chip designer. Now, right, apple, apple and this doesn't get said enough Apple designs its chips for specific computers, not as an as a thing to just go out into the market, like Intel did and does, but did for the Mac, and, as a result, like they know what the M5 and M6 and probably M7 look like. So they're not just designing this speculatively, they also know what the next few generations will probably hold and are designing the Mac Mini accordingly, and that's also kind of exciting.

0:33:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, and this also bodes well for future M4 devices. Of course, the laptops macbook pros are already out but there's a lot.

0:33:48 - Alex Lindsay
Of us are like we've had a bunch of discussions in office hours, like we can't even imagine what we're going to see in the studio in the in the pro if we're seeing this in the mac mini.

0:33:56 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's, it's, it's a pretty yeah, there's still a max and an ultra to come or, yeah, you know, the max is out right, the max is out, it's just so you can get it in the macbook pro.

0:34:06 - Jason Snell
I didn't get. I got a pro model of the macbook pro and not a max model. But there are a few people who got cita with it and you know it's more of everything, but especially of gpu and a much higher max gpu, but but still it's. Uh, yeah, they're, it's pretty amazing. And then if they stick two of those together, what does that even look like it?

0:34:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's going to be kind of wild and we may get more. Like, if they get rid of the USB-As on the studio, you might be able to put either two or four more Thunderbolt 5s. I would assume that we're going to get Thunderbolt 5s at least four across the back and probably six to eight across the back of a Mac studio, so it would be pretty interesting.

0:34:43 - Leo Laporte
Are the front and the back Thunderbolt five or the front is not Front's USB-C, it's.

0:34:49 - Alex Lindsay
USB-C. I don't think any of them have. I think they're all USB-C in the front and then it's Thunderbolt Party in the back. Yeah, party in the back.

0:34:57 - Leo Laporte
Where all the stuff? It is the mullet of Macs, and I think we have a show title let's take, let's take a little break and come back, uh, with more. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay.

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Uh, let's talk about the reboot reboot code, because I am confused. I want to understand this. 404 media. Joseph cox broke, broke this story last week. In 18-1 ios 18-1, apple introduced something they call a phone reboot code and law enforcement's miffed. Law enforcement was, according to 404 Media freaking out about mysteriously rebooting iPhones. Experts have looked at the code in 18.1 and they found that this is intentional. It locks the phone after a period of time, but you're gonna have to explain to me why that's a good thing and how that thwarts well, it's, it's very good.

0:39:51 - Andy Ihnatko
404 had a bunch of really good stories on it, starting from when they didn't have the whole story yet, where just there was like traffic on like digital forensics forums saying of again cops were like stymied because, you know, when they collect a phone for evidence or just for whatever reason, they put it in a bag so that it can't be, can't connect to the outside network, can't receive a factory reset or anything like that.

And they were finding that, oh no, these things have been shut down and reset and they were wondering. They were even hypothesizing that these iPhones were talking to each other in the room to give each other like shutdown codes. But actually it's just a new thing in 18.1 where, again, I believe that the time limit is four days.

0:40:34 - Leo Laporte
After four days of disuse, it will just simply do a restart, which means that when you say a restart, it doesn't start turn off and on again, it wipes itself.

0:40:43 - Andy Ihnatko
No, it doesn't wipe itself. All it does is it starts from a state of I don't know who has me. I don't trust anybody who is holding this thing. So, basically, the most thorough state of security you can have. Again, it's not an emergency lockdown mode. It is, by the way, you are going to have to provide a PIN code, you're going to have to provide all the data you're going to have to have.

This is meant to thwart any attempt that a third party might have mostly bad people but cops get involved in that dragnet as well. It's going to make it harder for them to use forensic tools like Celebrite and other things that are meant to exploit things that Apple doesn't know about, to get into a phone without the user's permission. It's such a funny thing. I think it's hilarious, because law enforcement always has a reason to think oh, why are you making our lives harder? We took this off of a crime victim and we're trying to figure out who killed this person. You're making our lives harder because now we can't get into the phone. Your phone is making it harder, but nonetheless it's like are we put it? We didn't do put in this feature. Apple saying apple hasn't said, but like apple is more or less saying we didn't put in this feature to basically stick a finger in the eye of cops. We, we did it because it makes the phone more secure. And if it makes the phone phone more secure against forensics like a law enforcement forensics as well, that's not our problem, because it's not.

We remember that in this country we worry about you know, you're pulled over, uh, pulled over by, uh by by a, by a highway patrolman, patrol person asked to hand over your phone. Or they just get a court order and they say, hey, you gotta hand over your phone and you're worried about the evidence that's going to be on this phone. In other countries it's, oh, by the way, because a government agency basically beat you up, took your phone and now wants to have all the contacts of people they can also bring in and beat up, because there are also journalists who are speaking against the government or not falling in line line. So this is actually a life-saving feature. It's almost. I mean it's it's. I'm not joking when I say that some of these security features should be labeled under apple health, because they keep journalists and dissidents and unpopular people alive well and I think that this is tweeted uh, the code itself.

0:42:59 - Leo Laporte
Uh, in response to the 404 media story, apple indeed added a feature called inactivity reboot in 18-1. It's implemented in key bag D and the Apple CEP key store kernel extension and, and the technical uh term is it takes the phone from an afu statement, a state which is after first unlock, to bfu before first unlock, and so that's making it harder for tools like Celebrite to get in and get your data.

0:43:28 - Alex Lindsay
And I'm very clear that Apple does not like Celebrite. I think, regardless of what you know, they're going to do anything they can do to stop Celebrite and I'm sure that there's a mission in there of like what can. And I think that if we look at Apple's pattern this is four days. I could see them changing to two days or creating a user, you know, like three versions down the road. It could be if my phone gets 15 feet from my watch, turn it off, you know, restart it, you know, like you know, and you know that you know just automatically close it off if I get you know. So those are the kind of things that Apple could be slowly adding If they added it immediately. There's confusion and upset, things that Apple could be slowly adding If they added it immediately. There's confusion and upset. They have to start it out, have everyone see that it's there, then start to. But the pattern is every update that we see to the OS, we'll probably see them tighten this noose, not loosen it, so to make it much, much more secure.

And again, when Apple is, this is not an altruistic thing that Apple's doing. This is a business. Their business is privacy. They are building a relationship with their customers. That is asking for biometrics. It's asking for their blood pressure. It's asking for personal information. It's asking for them to talk to the you know, apple intelligence and it looking at everything that's going on and making decisions. Their entire business model is based around that. It's not like they're going to walk away from it, but it's also not altruistic. It's just. This is the business. Their business is we can do something that no one else can do and we're going to keep driving down that path. But they have to keep on making it more and more secure, because they're asking for more and more personal information.

0:45:03 - Leo Laporte
Our favorite cryptographer, matthew Green, says remember the real. This is from 404 Media also remember the real. Threat here is not police, it's the kind of people who will steal your phone for malign purposes. This feature means if your phone gets stolen, the thieves can't nurse it along for months until they develop the tech to crack it. I would bet that rebooting after a reasonable period of inactivity probably doesn't inconvenience anyone, but it does make the tech to crack it. I would bet that rebooting after a reasonable period of inactivity probably doesn't inconvenience anyone, but it does make your phone a lot more secure.

0:45:31 - Alex Lindsay
I think you're going to get-.

0:45:32 - Jason Snell
That's the whole point here. I just want to make this point clear that just because sometimes law enforcement uses a security hole, it doesn't make it not a security hole.

It's a huge security flaw in iOS that Apple is trying to fix, and they've recognized that there's a difference in security between before first unlock and after first unlock. And this is just enough that things have wedged in there, and so they're saying all right, if our problem is that we are more trusting after there's been an unlock, but people are using that to exploit things for weeks on end afterward, let's set a time limit. I mean, it's pretty straightforward Now. There are probably lots of ways that you can also breach those phones before first unlock. My guess is, but it's probably harder, and so that's why they've done this.

I just think it's funny that the angle that came out was police, but really it should also be everybody who's stealing phones and shipping them off to some other country where they're forcibly unlocked and then resold or whatever, or your data is scanned. That is undoubtedly the primary use case here, but it also is used by state actors and things like that too. So this is I mean, apple in the end doesn't care right by state actors and things like that too. So this is I mean, apple in the end doesn't care right. Apple wants it to be as secure as possible for you as a user, whoever the user is, and I know that people use this against Apple and talk about law enforcement. But that's that same illusion that we've had before, where there's this sort of like magical well, a backdoor for the good guys. That's not how it works. Backdoors are backdoors, they're bad and they're more exploited by bad people than they are by good people, and Apple's job is not to accept backdoors, it's to close them.

0:47:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they do. Joseph Cox at 404 Media does point out. He quotes Christopher Vance, who works for a company called Magnet Forensics, which law enforcement uses to crack these phones, who says uh, it's imperative you collect the data from your afu devices as soon as you can. Don't wait, okay, because it will go from afu to bfu and that's a big f you anybody trying to get? In there. I see how what I did there. Uh, good, good all right. Thank you for explaining that to me, because I wasn't sure how this helped.

0:47:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I will add something to the comments that I do think that it is part of their business plan to make sure that they are always saying, hey, we're the privacy company, we're the security company. I also do think that that is part of their corporate culture, just on principle, that anytime that they can do something to make it safer, to make it more secure, to make it more private, they're going to do that. And, as it's always important to say, they're free to do all this, because the machine in the middle of the basement that churns out the money is not requisite in any way on compromising privacy or security. So they're free to do that as much as they can. But I also believe that that is a holy thing to them that if we have to, if there is something that we can do to make things more secure, more safe, we're going to do it. I mean, we talked about it earlier today about the problems of like we're not going to let you overrun the fans. We're not going to let you overclock. We're not going to let you run this too hot because we want to make things as good, a good experience for you overclock. We're not going to let you run this too hot, because we want to make things as good, a good experience for you as possible.

There was another story about 18.1, in which they haven't. There was some scary, scary headlines about how Apple had started to ban unsigned apps or unnotarized apps from being able to be launched. All they did was they just made it less easy to do so. There's a shortcut where it would just warn you and you say, well, if you option click on the OK button, it will let you run anyway. Now you really do have to go into system settings, you really have to drill down into security and you really do have to find that button and click it. But that's another example of there is. Here is a way that we can make things more safe and secure by making it more hard or less easy to run apps that we have not ourselves checked out and apps that we don't have the ability to shut down. If it turns out to be full of malware, we're going to do that. It's going to inconvenience some people, but that's what we're going to do because that's our philosophy.

0:49:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, and of course Steve Jobs is a hippie and he probably is a little anti-authoritarian. Well, he should be A little streak of that is still in there.

0:49:53 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean some of us in this conversation, some of us listening to this conversation remember like when I was a teenager and it was like the kids versus the hippies who are on the internet about the web say no, there should not be any encryption or privacy whatsoever. The information wants to be free. Man Like yeah, but I don't want you having access to my banking numbers.

0:50:12 - Jason Snell
Don't commercialize the web, man. No money should ever change hands on the internet. Man, it was a real thing. People did believe that that com was a scourge and should never be commercialized in any way, and we got over it and I do.

0:50:28 - Alex Lindsay
I do very much think that privacy and security and everything else is very much a cultural thing at apple and something that a lot of people believe in. But I think that what's important to understand is when I say it's not altruistic, it's just saying it's not something they could easily say, oh, we don't want to do anymore. Their whole business model is based on it. You know, like so the thing is, if you think you can think, well, that's a culture, that culture could change, but it can't really like it. It would be incredibly difficult. It would be turning, you know, a freight train at 200 miles an hour in a right angle.

0:50:56 - Leo Laporte
You know, like I do, I do have to point out though that tim cook, the ceo, uh, is very, uh diplomatic and has done a. You know, immediately, as with every CEO of every tech company, tweeted on President-elect Trump's victory. You know, congratulations, exclamation mark. We're looking forward to working with you. I wonder, you know there is this kind of tension between not that Tim's a stranger to this. I mean, he was in China when they announced that India was gonna start making iPhones, you know, and then we were there the number one customer for the Taiwanese company TSMC. So he balances opposing forces quite well. But law enforcement is, you know, part of the Trump administration at the same time, right, yeah and yeah.

0:51:42 - Andy Ihnatko
And also to Alex's point, this is also the company that like if. Also the company that like if, whatever government says that, yeah, we don't want you having VPN apps, we don't want you having giving our citizens the ability to well, china, russia, everywhere. They're also the company that like oh, we want you to take down this podcast, which I won't paint that in a black and white good or bad sort of thing. I won't paint that in a black and white, good or bad sort of thing. You have to obey the laws of the country that you operate in. At some point.

If they ask for too much, a company has to basically make a statement of principle, either positively, or a statement of no principles. But yeah, it is a balancing act. Tim Cook, you really have to appreciate the fact that he can walk out of these meetings with his hands clean, because his principle, as he stated in interviews, is that you don't lose anything by talking. You don't lose anything by keeping the channels of communication open. You don't always say yes, but you don't want to simply say I'm not going to talk to you about this anymore. So that's a very positive, very non-Elon Musk thing to do. He's an adult, he's a grown, positive, very non-Elon Musk thing to do. He's a. He's an adult, he's a grownup, which is probably one of the reasons why Apple's a $3 trillion company.

0:52:49 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that I think that he, apple has drawn lines that are very defendable. Um, they're, and they're small. There's a small Citadel that they're like hey, you can't have the phone? Um, they, can you tell us that we can't have some apps? Yes, can you get access to the cloud data? Yes, can you get you know, like they've decided. This is where we can defend, we can create an absolutely defendable thing, and I think that in most cases, if countries wanted to get into that last area, apple would choose to leave the country before they would give up the phone, and so I think that that is a I think but, but they are very flexible and very, you know, follow all the other rules outside of that wall, because otherwise it wouldn't be defendable, you know. And so they figured out where they create that bulwark and then they defend it from there, and I think they've been very consistent globally, in every country, to do that.

0:53:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And again, there's lots of things that they are flexible about, because you can't can't keep on operating if you don't and and also, and also, to be fair, international human rights organizations have spoken and written about this sort of thing and said that, um, although it's not optimal to do things like, uh, turn off vpns in a country, the presence of a company like apple to provide iphones, to provide these services, is a better, is a larger benefit to the people who might be oppressed in that country than the hypocrisy, so to speak, of caving in on privacy and things like that. The position is that you can't necessarily be all or nothing. You can still provide support to the people of an oppressive regime, even if you are, within reason, exceeding to some of that government's demands yeah, I always felt it was better to work within the establishment to try to change the establishment, if you know what I mean.

0:54:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, sharon B in our YouTube says when Apple took on the government, it was at the height of public sympathy for government doing whatever to go after a terrorist. And it wasn't easy and that's a very good point.

0:54:52 - Andy Ihnatko
They did the politically difficult thing to do, and Trump went after him for that. Yep yep, it's very conditional. Yep.

0:54:59 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break when we come back. A very big birthday to be celebrated on Sunday. It was a huge party and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly.

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On Sunday we marked the 23rd anniversary of the launch of this. Whoops, you're holding it wrong. This little guy, the iPod, the original iPod, was launched November 11th 2001. Woo hoo, woo hoo. Actually it was October 23rd. I got it wrong, but anyway, it's close enough.

0:58:31 - Jason Snell
No, so the this is the I can tell you about 2001 timelines, cause it was October 23rd. I got it wrong, but anyway, it's close enough. No, so this is the I can tell you about 2001 timelines, because it was announced in October and shipped in November.

Okay, that's what it was, and here's my little tidbit, which is I know this because in between those two dates, my daughter was born. Oh, wow, and we got review units when they announced it, and so my daughter I've said this before was one of the first babies born with an iPod playing in the background because it wasn't out yet. It wasn't out yet and so, yeah, right in that little interregnum, but yeah, so it's been, since she's a college graduate now.

0:59:08 - Alex Lindsay
Isn't that?

0:59:08 - Leo Laporte
amazing.

0:59:09 - Jason Snell
A little too much perspective. If you ask me, it is uh, yeah yeah, I still have all my.

0:59:16 - Leo Laporte
This is you know it's? Uh, you know it's the original because it got the firewire connection without the flap and no and no flap.

I Sunday I talked, uh, I had young people on the show. Oh no, uh and uh, and they, and one of them said, oh yeah, I don't remember that one, but I did. My first iPod was the shuffle and I thought, oh, you are young, you are young, but we remember this it was. It was only made possible. Tony Fidel was one of the designers. It was only made possible Because Toshiba had made this gigabyte, tiny matchbook size hard drive. They almost stopped making it because there was no customer and apple came along five gigabyte hard drive five gigabytes.

Yeah, yeah, for a thousand songs.

1:00:05 - Jason Snell
That's what it is a thousand songs in your pocket in your pocket at a very low bit rate, but enough for them to claim thousand songs in your pocket.

I was, uh, I was one of the uh, like the handful of people at Macworld at the time who had ripped a bunch of our CDs and were listening to them as MP3s, because I used to bring a wallet of CDs to work so I could listen to music while I worked. And then when MP3s sort of came around, I was like, oh, this is much better. And so when they rolled out the iPod, I was like, oh, I could literally fit my entire ripped MP3 collection onto it with room to spare, which was mind blowing and then take it around with me, which was also mind blowing. It's a great rare example of a new piece of tech unlocking right. A lot of times, new pieces of tech come out and companies are like, oh, we'll put it in a product, like why, well, we don't know, but we'll just stick it in there and see what happens. But in this case, yeah, it inspired Apple to say what we could use this to make a music player. And obviously it didn't take too long before people realized we can't do this with spinning hard drives. But at the time you had to use a spinning hard drive if you were gonna get the storage, because the Rio, which was out before this, which I had. You could basically fit like an hour of music on it, and that was it, because it was a flash-based player, but the storage just wasn't there yet. So it was brilliant and people don't give it enough credit, I think in some ways because it's faded into the history books, but this is the product that really brought Apple back.

The iMac G3 kept them on life support, but the iPod is the product that turned Apple from being a weird brand of non-compatible computers to being a brand that made a product that not only you liked, but it made you want to go into the iPod store, which is what a lot of people call the Apple store.

And then, when you're there, you see their computer and you start to think, oh, I like, I like my iPod. Maybe I should give they make a computer. I should look at that too, and I know that sounds crazy, but like that literally is how Apple got saved and didn't go bankrupt is because the iPod performed massive rehab on a. We think of it now as one of the great brands in the world, but in in the late nineties it was not, and the iPod is the thing that really got people to re-examine the Apple brand and started the brush up that gave them enough revenue uh, both with that and the iPod halo effect, which is what they called it when they sold a lot of Macs after the iPod became successful and gave them enough funding to build the iPhone. And the rest is history. But it all started, you know, the iMac G3 was the stabilizer, but the iPod had to happen for people to ever take Apple seriously again.

1:02:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And it was a canonical Steve Jobs product. I mean, one of his big things that would come up every now and then was about Apple's mandate under, in his view, being at the intersection of engineering and liberal arts. And this is exactly it cutting edge engineering, but it lets you carry around music and have multiple playlists and that sort of thing I mean. And also the Johnny Ive design that is indicative of classic brown radios, that being the reason for the click wheel and the circle that's around it, even the display. It's one of my favorite Steve Jobs stories where this was a crash program.

This wasn't well. We spent three years developing it and we'll release it when it's ready. It's like no. Within the space of months, this thing was greenlit, moved forward and they had to get it done, so much so they basically bought an operating system, a microcontroller operating system, in order to run it. But even with all this crunch, they're showing him pretty much a finished iPod and he just dourly said looked at the display and said no, what do you mean? No, no, no, what do you mean? No, it was LCD with a green backlight, which was every single LCD display with a backlight had a green backlight. He said this is a white display. This is a white device with, like gray controlled labels, and it's a silver back. There is no color on this whatsoever. You're going to have to send this back and you're going to have to find us a source of white backlit displays that can work for us Like okay.

1:04:13 - Alex Lindsay
We of white backlit displays that can work for us, like okay, we got no time left, but okay, and the original one, which I still think is better than the ones that came after it, with the mechanical wheel, um, the spinning wheel. There's just something about it that you just it. It just shows you how powerful and design and interface can be. That there's something intentional about that that that just had you want to use it. You just wanted to roll things around.

It wasn't like click, click, click. Everything before that was like up, arrow, down arrow, up, arrow, down, arrow. And suddenly you had this beautiful interface. That just felt amazing when you used it. And I think that that's something that Apple has done over and over and over again. They draft on everybody, everybody kind of goes down a path, and then Apple kind of figures out well, how do we make this interface really seamless and actually fun to use? And they don't really add a lot of tech to it, they just make it a lot easier and a lot more fun to do.

1:05:10 - Leo Laporte
John Rubenstein at Apple bought all the entire production of Toshiba's one-inch hard drives for this thing. It's important to note that, even though this is Apple's first consumer breakout consumer product, it wasn't a hit right away because it was Macintosh only.

1:05:21 - Jason Snell
Right, because it used FireWire and that was a limitation for a long time because not even very many PCs had FireWire there, but modern Macs did. And eventually, you know, it evolved and they introduced compatibility with, I think, music, match, jukebox on Windows. But even then it was a little bit of a slow burn because it was limited to PCs that had FireWire or 1394, right, the Sony. They didn't call FireWire, that was an Apple name, but that's what it was. And then, you know, eventually they got over to USB with the dock connector and then things changed. But that first and second generation it was just a big old FireWire 400 port on the top. And you know it's funny because I think there was some envy there. But I think also you're right, we think it was an instant hit and it just couldn't be because it was just. It was more a proof of concept, to be like will Mac users buy this? And the answer was yes. It was a hit among Mac users. And you started to get that movement of like why isn't it on Windows? We need to do it on Windows. And I think there's a legendary story about somebody maybe Phil Schiller coming to Steve Jobs and being like we got to put this on Windows, steve. And he was like we got to put this on windows, steve, and and and and he was like no, no, no, no. And finally it was like fine, whatever, that was a good business to sell, although that's, I think I'd say, quintessential Steve jobs, which is, you know, he had his, his strongly held beliefs that he would then just drop If he needed to, if there was a reason to. And he was like fine, put it on windows, whatever. Yeah, and of course, the rest is history, because it really did save the, save the brand, because they weren't just selling into the people who are already part of the family at that point and and, by the way, I mentioned this, um, a moment ago in in passing, but like the apple retail store is part of this, they, they launched those stores.

Ron johnson and steve jobs put those together in, I think, 2000. I think it preceded the iPod. But the fact that they and they seemed like a folly, right, it seemed almost like a joke. But Apple really felt like, if you saw what they made, you'd like it. But that became the perfect platform for the iPod. Not only did people go in and they wanted to see the iPod. But, like I said, then they looked at the Mac too and created that halo effect. But being in shopping malls with the iPod was I mean it saved Apple? It really did, but you had to have that first couple of years. Was it was? You know, it was Mac only, and we do forget about that until they brought in the dock connector version that would work with PCs using Music Match.

1:07:49 - Andy Ihnatko
And one of the most amazing things is this I think it was one of the last. It probably was the last device where Apple, just in addition to selling it under their own name, they licensed it out to Hewlett Packard, saying okay, if Hewlett Packard wants to sell them, you're going to put your label on it. It's still an iPod, but you can have the Hewlett Packard edition. It was such a crazy, crazy, crazy time. I remember when I got my reviewer's guide for it and okay, loaner, ipod, that's fine. Why is this box so big? It also included a Dell laptop and a collection of CDs that I'm sure was curated by Steve himself, because they didn't want to assume that every reviewer had a digital library or had a computer that was capable of ripping things to to MP3.

1:08:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the um at the event, which was. If people want to go back and look at it nostalgically. I'll just answer your question now. Yes, that is me in the video of that event.

1:08:42 - Alex Lindsay
People like every six months. It's like is this you?

1:08:45 - Jason Snell
Yes, I didn't have as much gray hair then, um, but it was a uh. We walked out of there with a little tote bag that had a pre-release ipod in it, which is what we used. We built a playlist and used it, and in the birth room for my daughter and a cube of cds that were like taped together with like clear tape.

1:09:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh yes, because they had to give you the cds so it wouldn't be piracy. And this is it is.

1:09:09 - Jason Snell
They pre-loaded all those devices with music and they didn't want to send the message because this was at a point where MP3s were just being decried as piracy, and so Apple wanted to tell that story. And the story was you get the discs and the iPod, and this is how you do it, and so I still have in my closet out here some CDs that I absolutely can say Steve Jobs got me those Right Like classic yo-yo. Johnny Cash, Steve Jobs. He brought those to me.

1:09:39 - Alex Lindsay
Thank you, steve. And there are many things that are. All the things have to be there for something to be successful. So Apple put this together, the MP3 put it together, napster had brought the music industry to its knees Like all of these things had had. You know, all of those things had to happen for because the music industry would have never dealt with Apple if they weren't just on their heels trying to figure out which way is up. You know, and Steve was like it's going to be a dollar a song, you know, and they're like no, it's not going to be a dollar a song, you know, and they're like, no, it's not going to be a dollar a song, and that that alex was like three or four years later, that's.

1:10:13 - Jason Snell
The other thing is that the ipod had to be successful enough for them to have the leverage. But but in those early days the only path onto the well, the only paths onto the ipod were ripping cds or downloading cds from napster and putting them on there. They had ads that said rip, mix, burn. Well, that was for.

1:10:30 - Alex Lindsay
That was for CD-Rs, and the idea there was that you'd make mix CDs which was great, but the thought that you do that now, like you would never run ads that say rip, mix, burn today because everyone's so touchy about it.

1:10:41 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean, and the world has just changed so much since then. But you're right, the music industry didn't like the iPod, and Steve Jobs used that to basically say well, how about we make a deal and you sell music for the iPod?

1:10:59 - Andy Ihnatko
and that is where iTunes yeah, remember that I had a Rio player too, and remember that the music industry tried to sue to have it declared a piracy device and have it taken off the market just for that reason, to sue, to have it declared a piracy device and have it taken off the market just for that reason. And I think that, amongst the other cultural things that the iPod and Apple is responsible for, is helping to nail shut the coffin of all of those people in the music industry who are trying to. There was a point in which I think they realized that digital music was not a stoppable thing, so they tried to basically harness it and cage it so that it would work for their purposes, like they would still. Sony had a system where they sent me a player when they're a new digital player, digital Walkmans to try out and install the software.

And the first thing it did when you install because of course you need the software, you couldn't just copy things onto the device off of Windows, you had to use the software to manage the library and to copy things on the first thing it did was go through your entire hard drive, find any music file and encrypt it with their own encryption.

So now you no longer had access to your own music with their own encryption. So now you no longer had access to your own music and then, whenever you copy something onto this Walkman, it is now suddenly checked out of your library and you can't play it on any other device. And if not for the fact that I wasn't this wasn't my main, my main computer was, of course, a Mac. I was like that was one of the times where I was just dumbfounded and I was talking to the engineer and I was talking to the marketing person and saying this is absolutely terrible. And I have to ask you, before I write what I'm going to write, give me an opportunity to defend yourself or tell me that there's a way around this, because that's an act of violence, almost, against their user.

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
I hope that's an act of violence, almost against their user, so it is no longer available. You can't buy an iPod anymore, but a couple of things that the iPod did do that are still around white earbuds. Thank you, steve Jobs, for white earbuds, which at the time everybody thought oh, that's an announcement, you've got more money than cents. Now it's. They're ubiquitous and uh, yeah, as you say, the itunes store, which is current, is still the number one way people buy music.

1:13:21 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, worldwide, uh, totally well, but I also think that it's. It is a I. The itunes store held apple back in the sense that I mean they couldn't on this show for over a decade. I was saying Apple should just do streaming, they should just do a subscription.

1:13:37 - Leo Laporte
They thought people wanted to own music.

1:13:38 - Alex Lindsay
When are we going to do a subscription? And Apple held onto that for too long and Spotify took that space because Apple didn't. It was Apple's behalf.

1:13:47 - Leo Laporte
And to this day, it's probably the number one way to listen to music. Is spotify right?

1:13:52 - Jason Snell
yep, yeah rhapsody preceded spotify, right, but they were too a little too early, oh, yeah, there was a real audio and there was a lot of and and they're the ones who really do.

Yeah, I think that was the first subscription service that I ever heard of I actually think, um, that's the it's funny because I have a bunch of old ipods too that the thing that makes makes them. I think occasionally of like, oh, I can put this somewhere or I could use this, and in the end it's like, yeah, but it doesn't work with Apple Music, right? The fact is that they were other than the ones that ran iOS. They were designed for a world where you bought music, and that is not. Now our music players are all connected devices that can talk to a subscription service and that's I mean.

I know that some people don't do that and they just buy music, but the vast majority of people out there that's not how they interact with music anymore. And that makes the iPod kind of an interesting relic of an era where we went from a la carte because it was the only way CD or tape or record sales to this little moment where it was like you could buy digital music and you can still do it. But again, I feel like the world has moved on, but the iPod is wedged right in that little magic moment.

1:15:01 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why it's somewhere in a drawer, somewhere in your house or in your garage or whatever. There is an iPod that you have not used in 10 years and I'm encouraging you to go to amazon, buy, buy the usb cable you need, because you don't often have a chance to have a snapshot of all of your taste, musical tastes 10 or 15 years ago. And when you light up that thing again and you see, like Andy's awesome party mix 2003 and it and it's like oh wow, you were kind of unfocused and didn't have much taste back then, did you Andy and? And? Or oh my God, love shack. Why do I not play love shack every morning? Awesome.

1:15:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, happy birthday, I guess, to the little iPod. It's kind of a it's funny, the little iPod. It's kind of it's funny. 23 years is a lifetime in technology?

1:15:54 - Jason Snell
It is. It's my daughter's lifetime. Her birthday was last week, so yes, yeah, but she's. You still think of her as young, right, but this is old yeah we had to break it to her that she may not be young anymore now that she's in her mid-twenties now Forever, forever.

1:16:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Young People will stop marketing things to you, my love. Get used to it. It's tough, but it'll happen, it's true.

1:16:17 - Jason Snell
Start complaining about the generation that's younger than you Generation Alpha. What's their problem?

1:16:23 - Andy Ihnatko
All of the music will stink.

1:16:25 - Leo Laporte
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We continue on with a breaking story from Ming Chi Kuo. He says Apple is making its first foray into the smart home IP camera market, with mass production scheduled for 2026. He knows this because he covers the supply chain and apparently he's got a source at Goertek, which received the bid and will be the exclusive supplier for assembly. Surprising.

1:19:16 - Alex Lindsay
A little bit. I don't know. I don't know if I've said anything about Apple getting into home products before.

1:19:23 - Leo Laporte
But really would you start with a camera?

1:19:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess maybe because of privacy you might.

1:19:27 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think the camera is the right one to start with. It's the one that has the least competition. Oh yeah, it's so it's so bad it's.

1:19:36 - Jason Snell
So I have been trying to do cameras in my house and it's the options are terrible. So if they are doing this, it is a really great tactical move for them, because there are uh. First off, most of the competition that's any good is already expensive, so Apple will be able to make expensive cameras and still play in that mode, and the ones that are cheap are generally bad. I have bought a bunch of different kinds. They built this whole HomeKit secure video system, which was supposed to make this easy, because you could use your Apple subscription to get access to live video, and very few cameras support it.

And the ones that do, I've tried several of them. They don't work very well, I can't tell you. I have so many different cameras of different brands that I put on my network and I have a very solid wifi network and some of them come with their own little box too. They fall off the network, they are incompatible or they require a service that I've got to pay $10 or $20 a month for. I feel like there is a real opening for a line of cameras for somebody to do that are at a high quality level, because right now I mean I know that Ubiquiti has- some good cameras.

1:20:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I use Ubiquiti Protect, but the difference between Synology and Ubiquiti's camera systems are they're local, they don't upload to the cloud Exactly exactly.

1:20:53 - Jason Snell
So I don't know about that, because I think Apple will probably want to use HomeKit Secure Video, which does upload. But that's the competition is those guys, and I know that they're more expensive, but Apple's not afraid of playing in that area and Apple's got the credibility and the weight of being the platform owner for so many people. So I think it's a smart place to enter because it is bleak, like at the consumer level for this stuff. It's just, I have tried and tried and I can't rely. The ones that are the most that I can rely on the most, ironically, are the ones that, first off, they don't use HomeKit secure video and second, it's it's the Arlo, which isn't great, but it comes from Netgear. It comes with its own, basically private wifi network that it uses. It has its own little base station.

That one works Okay. It's not even that reliable. The, the, the Yuffie one, isn't reliable. The Logitech one is extremely not reliable, like I. Just, this is the pain of somebody who has tried to get a few cameras up on my, on my house, and it just it's bad people, it's real bad. So, uh, bring it on apple right. Like I, I, I want apple to be more adventurous. We've said it here I know alex has said it a lot apple needs to be more adventurous in the home tech market because there are categories where there are companies that are doing a good job. There are lots of categories where nobody is doing a very good job or it's a very small number of players, like with cameras that are kind of at the high end and that having Apple be there with a brand, a branded version of that, who will pay extra, so that it just works you know, and they just.

1:22:40 - Alex Lindsay
Apple has this other, otherworldly market, which is that we're not looking at. We're not all looking at the price, we're looking at, you know. I think Apple users really value their time, and how long is it going to take me to set up? When I open this up, I expect to have it touch my phone next to it and it goes okay, you're done, you know, and then I'm going to put it somewhere and it's going to start working. And no, it's just very hard to do that with a heterogeneous, you know, protocols, and so if Apple builds this out, this is step one to this, but I think this is worth again, a cute.

It's a cute little business for Apple that all five or six of these home products could still be 10 or $20 billion a year of as they extend the brand connection that they have to their audience. As long as they do them well, and I think they will, I think that it's not hard. You know, you don't have to be faster than the bear, you only have to be faster than the one next to you, and the one next to them, when it comes to products, is way back there, like you know, like all these automation products are. I would say that the cameras are the worst, but as someone who's fiddled with this on and off for 15 years, they're all just trash. I don't know the actual numbers.

1:23:48 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure, though, that the ring cameras, uh, amazon's ring, are the number one in the market, sure, but there's all kinds of trust issues.

I mean I won't put a ring Well, I think a lot of people don't want that. Yeah, I, tissues. I mean I won't put a ring well, I think a lot of people don't want that. Yeah, I'm I. You know, ubiquity cameras started 129 bucks. They're not outrageously expensive because you have to have a multi-thousand dollar ubiquity network system to use them, so maybe in hard drives and so forth, um, but I love I have eight ubiquity cameras all around the house and I know everything that's going on and uh, yeah, I'm very happy with that. But again, it doesn't upload and one of the reasons I didn't want it to upload I didn't want something like Ring is because my bandwidth is scarce and I want to use every megabyte I can, megabit I can, for shows.

1:24:32 - Jason Snell
I mean, I don't mind the idea of having an option to have certain things put up in the cloud, but yeah, I really like the idea of being able to save something. I wonder if apple would consider doing something like that, where that would be a reason to buy an apple tv with more storage in it. Wouldn't it to be able to have something like an apple tv? That's a hub, also store your last x number of hours of data locally, and then the highlights get, get put in I have a network video recorder which will save three months worth of uh.

1:25:02 - Leo Laporte
It's got a big hard drive in it.

1:25:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I was gonna say and you can see, it over the network.

1:25:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean I can log into it and see it.

1:25:08 - Andy Ihnatko
But yeah, I was. I mean, I was going to say exactly that that this is. This was always the reason why I wish that apple never stopped making wi-fi routers. That um number one it's it's not a solved problem yet of making these things work really, really well. I mean, it's easy to get a signal in your house and you connect to the internet through it, but so difficult once you start to want to use some of these services that are most useful once you try to access your house from outside the house Like again back to my Mac that works all the way across the internet, so that I could have an iPad but still be running apps off my Mac Mini or whatever, or getting files off of any other device I've got inside my office.

And if they had a Wi-Fi router that could also do double duty as a HomeKit base station as a way of sending that video off to someplace that is secure, someplace that Apple would charge me for storage for and would therefore be getting more money in their services department. That would be very, very nice for them, I'm sure, because sometimes you want to take a peek into your house. Sometimes, when there's a disaster happening, you want to have that reassurance and if something bad has happened, sometimes that bad thing that happens will also destroy the video record that was stored inside that house along with it. So you want to have that thing outside, but you don't want to necessarily trust that that's going to be kept securely. I mean, it's a terrible, terrible situation and the only way to do it is to either A be a master of networking and security yourself or a poison. Pick who you're going to trust.

I've decided to trust google because having a door, having a video doorbell, is very, very useful to me, and also I've already, so I've already. They already have to see so much of my stuff anyway that, again, I'd much rather have all my poison in one container than spread it out. And also they don't have a lot of economic incentive to go out of business and suddenly have to fire, sale all my data to everybody else, like 23andMe or whatever. But yeah, if Apple decided to get into this, not only would it be a really great solution, not only would it be pull out of the box, plug it in and it works, but I would absolutely trust it and use it to the fullness of its capabilities.

1:27:19 - Leo Laporte
One other story I thought would be interesting to cover. You might remember a guy named Dennis Crowley. He created a company called Dodgeball which he sold to Google, made a little bit of money and then left Google and created Foursquare, which was all the rage at South by Southwest some years ago. Foursquare was replaced with Swarm and he's kind of out of the foursquare world now. Oh, malik had an interview with him, uh on his blog this week, in which he talked about dennis crowley's next effort, which I really like. It is to take your airpods and turn them into kind of a tour guide augmented reality using audio. I've signed up for they. They aren't yet ready to put out the beta, but, uh, they've signed up for the company's called hopscotch labs and I'll tell you what, with dennis crowley involved, I have a feeling, uh, there's going to be something pretty exciting. He calls it it BeeBot B-E-E-B-O-T.

Once it's installed, every time you put on your AirPods actually it could be any other headphones and it's activated as you walk around, it will not only tell you things about landmarks, you know, kind of be a tour guide. It also may say hey, you were here two days ago and you met up with your buddy Andy and had lunch, or as you walk by that diner, Andy's inside You'd want to join him. Now, this was back in the day of Foursquare. This was one of the benefits of Foursquare. Although I remember Robert Scoble finding me and I said, how'd you find me while I was eating lunch, he said, well, foursquare, you checked in. I went oh, I'm very excited. I think this is a really interesting use of AirPods. I wonder if Apple is considering something similar, but I think Dens could do something very interesting with this.

1:29:13 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that it could get really interesting if you start using things like ultra-wideband, which the phones have and a lot of the apple trackers have, um, and use that, start using that technology. That technology has been out now for a couple years and it's not being used very heavily and it. Can you remember beacons? You were supposed to be able to walk into a store and well, those were low energy, bluetooth, and one of the problems with them is that they weren't accurate enough, so so they were plus or minus really in working, plus or minus a foot and a half to three feet, which is good, but low energy Bluetooth was not quite enough. Ultra wideband, I believe, is six to 10 centimeters, so it's a much, much smaller ball that it knows where that transmitter is and that means it can really identify where you're standing.

And if you think about those things, both on a GPS level and an ultra wide band level and all the other things connected in between, you can have incredible tours where you could, for instance, you could be having, using a variety of AI, imagine being able to walk through a civil war battlefield or a castle or anchor watt or something else, and have it be able to just talk to you Like as if you know, if you look over to your right, you're, this is where that used to be, or this is what happened over here. Um, you know, for, for just for tours, I you know there's a lot of just stuff of of like you looking for a Starbucks and it telling you where it is, but there's also these tour opportunities that a lot of us have talked about for decades. Then, just you know, thinking that the technology would get there faster than it has.

1:30:40 - Leo Laporte
There are apps. I had one when we were in Hawaii, for instance. You could put on your iPhone. It uses the GPS and, as you're driving around, it's like having a know-it-all uncle in the backseat. He said, hey, this is absolutely the best slushy place. What do they call it in Hawaii? They have those shaved ice. This is the best shaved ice place in the whole island. Man, and you pull over and it would literally say, okay, pull over here or take a right up at that. Sign up here as you're driving around. It was the greatest. I had one in Rome I used as we were walking around See and Rome is a perfect place for this, because every round, every corner is a bit of history. I would love this idea and if it's incorporating also your own personal history, I think this could be very interesting and also with AI it can be much more.

1:31:29 - Alex Lindsay
the dexterity of it can be much different, because you don't have to pre-record everything anymore so you don't have to figure out what you're going to say in Rome. Everywhere it goes, it looks at it and looks at contextually what you're interested in and what you've been interested in in the past. You know, I saw a turkey fight yesterday which I hadn't expected, right in front of my house. Two turkeys were going at it. I mean wrapping their head around each other.

1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's two males looking, because there's only one. I know a lot about turkeys. We have wild turkeys. Only one male gets to be with their brood. Well, no, these are the ones that are kicked out. They're the young males. There are three of them, that's right, yeah.

1:32:05 - Alex Lindsay
And so I spent. I had to go to FedEx, and on the way down to FedEx I learned all about it. I learned about what pecking order is no-transcript and yeah, yeah, why was that important and why does it look like? Yeah, why is there a pit here? Yeah, yeah and and. But you know, so you're just literally talking to someone as you're walking through a city or or a tourist area. I think it's an incredible opportunity.

1:33:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah well, we'll watch with interest. I signed up immediately for the uh test flight and he hasn't released it yet, but I think this this is what I always thought augmented reality could be is something in the airpods knowing where you are?

1:33:17 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, and yeah, this is. This is why google has such a leg up on a lot of this stuff, because for the past 10, 15 years they've been developing Google Maps, which is not just a way to get you from here to there, it's also literally what is everything that is close to you at this moment, and it's the one best channel for filtering those questions. I think they had an announcement last week where they said they've just opened Google Maps to a grounding service for other AIs. So if another AI wants to double-check its information to say okay, well, when does the FedEx that's closed by here close? That's close by here close? They can check it against Google Maps through an API and it will basically ground their double check their AI before they send somebody into a ravine with a package.

1:34:13 - Leo Laporte
I've been watching, as has Adam Angst of Tidbits, the latest round of Apple intelligence ads. He calls them misguided because in almost every case they show stupid people getting away with murder, thanks to Apple Intelligence. The employee who's a goof off who surprises his boss with a well-written email thanks to Apple Intelligence. My favorite one is the guy at the board meeting who's asked to summarize the document that he obviously didn't read. He slides slides his chair out the door, asks apple to summarize it and slides back in and says uh, let me, let's go over this. Uh, the one where the wife, uh has forgotten, of course, to give a gift to her husband for his birthday and she creates in seconds a memories movie that she gives to him and everybody goes oh, you're so good. Um, adam doesn't like these so much. He says they're humiliating the humans and they're just like the, the, the crush, ipad pro ads. Um, you agree or not? I kind of think they're funny.

1:35:15 - Alex Lindsay
I think the crush ipad uh ad was at a different level.

1:35:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah you know, like.

1:35:19 - Alex Lindsay
I think that saying they're just like it, I think, makes them worse than they are. I do think that for a lot of us that use a lot of AI, they're not the kind of thing we use AI for very often. So I think you kind of look at it like huh, I guess it's kind of funny, but I don't know if you try to use it that way, I think you'd have a hard time. It never works out as well as you think it will.

1:35:39 - Leo Laporte
His point is Apple's promoting Apple intelligence is something that can bail you out from being a crappy employee or a lousy spouse.

1:35:46 - Jason Snell
This is my good friend and Tom's guide. Speaking of them, writer Philip Michaels always called these ads the our users are jerks, Our users. He didn't use the word jerks, he used another word I'm not going to say, but I think that's the problem with it, right? Is that it's basically saying our users are jerks, Our users are dumb, Our users are inconsiderate of their family's celebration and rather than I mean Apple, a company.

I don't want to get too worked up on this because this is a silly ad, but where it relates to the crush ad is that Apple is about a company empowering people to be creative, and the Apple intelligence ads feel like, oh, screw that, let's just dash something together with AI and walk away. And you got away with it. And I think that they're miscalibrated. At least you know. Maybe that's who they want to reach are their users, who are jerks. But it seems like it should feel a little more empowering in a positive way and not like you got away with murder, like you said, Leo. I think that that's the problem I have with it, In addition to the fact that remember, a lot of these Apple intelligence ads started before they'd shipped anything and they're still sort of promising some things that that aren't quite there yet, but either way, I think that it comes back to that which is it. It leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth to have it be. Our users are inconsiderate boobs and they got away with murder because they used Apple intelligence.

1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
Like maybe not, let's face it, at least it was a longstanding tradition that advertisements featured boobs. I'm not that well, you know fools classic.

1:37:26 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean again the word I can't say, and you never identified with them.

1:37:29 - Leo Laporte
It was always. You know the. Please don't squeeze the Charmin guy.

1:37:33 - Jason Snell
There are a lot of ads ad campaigns that have work or have run, and I don't think they work where it's sort of like the main person in this ad is a dummy and they use our product and it's like why why would I want to use your product? If the person who uses it is a dummy, who's out there going? I too am an inconsiderate dummy.

1:37:55 - Leo Laporte
I would like to use your product. It's a a longstanding tradition in television advertising. I'm only saying.

1:38:02 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like with the, why did you use my stuff in the refrigerator, or something like that. You do know, we all know people in the office that are like that about things and you think maybe this would be good for them.

1:38:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. But it's not me, I'm not a dummy, but you know, this is cool, we're trying to fire that guy.

1:38:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Imagine a different version of that where it's like, wow, I'm going home at 5 pm. I'm actually having dinner with my kids because all of this crap work that idiots above me have been putting on me through the last round of layoffs because of this economy, that I now have to do the work of eight people. Now I've got a tool that lets me do the work of 10 people. It's not fair, but at least this will let me get home and see my kids once in a while.

1:38:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and there is 18.2 is coming out. Gurman says December 5th, I think first week of December. Jason, you're playing, probably with the betas. Yes, yeah, yeah. Good Something to look forward to. I'm looking forward to Genmoji-ing my life away the genmoji is good.

1:38:58 - Jason Snell
I think image playgrounds are bad. Um, I think they're fundamentally just not very good and kind of weird, and that apple is shipping them because they think they're good enough, and I I would argue that not only do they make does their reliance on the idea that you're going to use somebody from your photos library as a model for the image generation, which means you're using your friends images without their, their consent, which I think is gross. But, as Alex would point out, apple's image generation is also so far behind the competition that it's doubly embarrassing, I think. But Genmoji is a great example of it being super targeted. It's trained on Apple's emoji set and it's presumably Memoji designs as well, but it's like a very specific style. And then generating emoji from as well, but it's like a very specific style. And then generating emoji from that.

Yeah, it's harmless, I think, and fun in a way that the image playgrounds I just like. First off, it's not good. I've used it with pictures of my friends and like it's not good. And I've seen all the stuff that Alex generates. And like Apple, it's like I don't know why they're shipping this, cause it's, it's, it's, they're behind and people are going to be happy with it.

1:40:03 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I'm making a lot of stuff, but I'm also spending $500 a year on mid journey in a way that I'm using it. In a way I mean, uh, you know, I probably do five or 6,000 images a week. So you know, so it's. It's an entirely different uh world than what I expect. I don't have a little graphics. I think Apple I'm hoping to see them in image playground look at certain things, and I think they have, to some degree, things that work inside of my um. There are things that that mid journey, for instance, doesn't do consistently Like. I like to do a lot of. I like to add fun things to my, my keynote presentations. I just need it to be over a plain white background. I just want that to be a checkbox and have it not show me an image that isn't in front of a plain white background, with you know that isn't going off the frame. So I have this little object I can throw onto it.

1:40:47 - Jason Snell
An alpha channel. Imagine if AI image generators could do alpha channels, but they can't.

1:40:52 - Alex Lindsay
Exactly. I mean, you know. So the thing is is that those are all things that, even if it didn't have an alpha channel, you know. Obviously Apple's remove is so good, but I think that there are places where Apple could turn the dial to make it a little bit more specific. That would outdo mid journey If they you know they don't want to. You don't have to go after mid journey. There are a bunch of things from a keynote perspective or educator perspective, corporate perspective, a home perspective, that'd be really fun to to for them to do, and I hope that they kind of take advantage of again what they can be different at. So far they haven't.

1:41:22 - Andy Ihnatko
This might not be a thing that they kind of want to get involved with. There's so many third rails involved here amongst them. If your audience is a lot of creative people, do you want to be a company that's seen as? Hey, we're going to help you not sell that stock image. We're going to help you not get that contract to create this logo, because we're going to give people AIs that have been trained on your imagery so they can do it themselves.

I think everything they've shown us so far made me think that emojis are safe. They're cheap, they don't have to be all that good. It doesn't get them into the trap of thinking that we are creating an image that doesn't exist. We are modifying people's understanding of reality. I think that they're going to be very, very happy to allow Midjourney and others and Imogen3 and all these other image generators to do the work for them. They'll put all the hooks that they want to into it so that people can an app, can call out to a third party system to do that, but I don't think that they want to into it so that people can an app, can call out to a third party system to do that, but I don't think that they want to have that label on them.

1:42:24 - Leo Laporte
They don't want to have that responsibility let us take a break and continue this discussion in moments when we get our picks of the week with Andy and not go. When are you gonna be on GBH in Boston?

1:42:37 - Andy Ihnatko
next week, next week, next Thursday, 1230 pm.

1:42:41 - Leo Laporte
Go to WGBHNewsorg as usual, Jason Snell SixColorscom, you got three whole months till you have to make color graphs again.

1:42:47 - Jason Snell
Apple. Just I mean their results were their end of their fiscal year. So I've got another charts-a-palooza coming with the annuals. How exciting, because that's a way to make more content on the internet without doing anything to make more content on the internet without doing anything.

1:43:03 - Leo Laporte
No, actually wait a minute, no, no, no, it's good, because we don't know how apple's doing, not in a quarter by quarterly, but like a whole year, it's one of my favorite posts of the year, honestly, and nobody seems to do it.

1:43:10 - Jason Snell
So, yeah, check, that'll be out.

1:43:11 - Leo Laporte
No, I think it's important yeah, I'm looking forward to that, uh, sixcolors.com. And, of course, Alex Lindsay, who every morning gets up bright and early. After he milks the cows he goes into the studio and does office hours.

1:43:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and you'll. You'll see a lot of changes. We, um, we got to 4k. You know I said wow, so you're going to see. So now we're doing 4k and we're finally. Remember, alex, when you did the first hd podcasts.

1:43:38 - Leo Laporte
It Mac break.

1:43:39 - Alex Lindsay
The funniest part of that was that the most viewed Mac break video, or second most viewed Mac break video, was we did the the first Mac break the road to 10, 80 P. Well, yeah, the first one was us going to Mac world and just wandering around with Emery Wells and Amber and yourself and I and and then I and so we. That was number one. Number two was the road to 1080p and it was because we had recorded 25 episodes at Macworld, like in a studio near it, and Leo was emailing me almost every day like, hey, when are you going to release this? Like you've got to get this out. And we couldn't. The data was so big, we couldn't get it to work.

1:44:17 - Leo Laporte
So we're sitting there.

1:44:17 - Alex Lindsay
So I big, we couldn't get it to work. So I had to put something out and I put it out and it got. It was it was very successful, but but it was you know. So it wasn't 1080p, no, it was 720, no, it was 1080. I never oh okay, I never did any of that 720 stuff. So the um, yeah, the uh, uh, you know, peasant uh, now you're 4k.

1:44:35 - Leo Laporte
My friend and it was a lot easier moving to 4k 4.

1:44:37 - Alex Lindsay
Well, 4k live. So we're doing 4K live. Last night for extra hours, because we do one in the evening. Now too, we have two. We have extra hours on Mondays and the rundown on Thursdays, which is another one crazy. But in extra hours two of the guys figured out how to do NDI Bridge to bring back 4K as a delivery from their cameras, and so now we're taking it there. But we're also this weekend we'll start doing HDR tests and we hope to be on high dynamic range for the show, oh my God.

And then the next thing is to go to 60 frames a second and the next thing to go is the 5.1 audio. Again, we're doing it not so much because you need to have a bunch of talking heads at that level. We're doing it not so much because you need to have a bunch of talking heads at that level. We're doing it because we really want to do a lot of coverage next week, next year, of conferences and, you know, expos and so on and so forth, and we do think it makes a difference there, but we want to get to a point where it's not a lift. You know, like we're doing it every day. All we got to do is just add this camera, and so we're not doing a lot of second hours or specials. You're just going to see for two months us just, uh, evolving very quickly, um, and taking chances. The color may not look very good next week because if it's even close, we're going to leave it on so that we can tune it.

1:45:48 - Leo Laporte
So that's there you go now. Uh, chocolate milk. Mini sip in our discord is saying and you might prod alex, some more about the 3d immersive version of the show that was supposed to go out on other platforms. It's discussed. It's discussed.

1:46:04 - Alex Lindsay
I don't care.

1:46:05 - Leo Laporte
Personally, I don't care.

1:46:07 - Alex Lindsay
We already did a whole one where all of us were in the Apple Vision Pro. The capturing right now, capturing the spatial live, is potentially possible, but we're still. There's still some little hiccups in the transport. So we're we're working on it office hours dot global.

1:46:26 - Leo Laporte
If you want to join the fun, everybody's invited. Yeah, all right time for our picks of the week. I'm gonna start. I'm gonna start because I don't, I don't. I'm usually too lazy to do a pick of the week, I'll be honest. But I saw this and I thought, oh, this is kind of cool.

You know me, I like the terminal, I like the command line, and I found a website SS64, that has an alphabetic glossary of macOS Bash commands. It's kind of amazing how much Apple, for instance you don't need to download an app to prevent the system from sleeping. There's a command called caffeinate. There's a command called cal that will display a calendar, uh, I can go on and on and on. It's a really powerful system. This is all in the terminal. But if you're if you, I think this is personally I like just browsing through it and trying things. It's a really good way to get under the hood of your Mac and see what's going on inside. So I just thought I'd mention that the website. Actually, I don't even know what the website, I'll put it in the show notes it's ss64.com slash Mac. That it's, uh, ss64.com mac. That's it. Ss64.com mac. Jason, I'm excited about your pick of the week. Tell us about that yeah, it's bellatro.

1:47:49 - Jason Snell
I can't believe I didn't pick this before. So bellatro has been out on pc and in steam and there's a mac version on steam too for a while now, but it is uh, last last month, or actually in September, it came to Apple Arcade as well, as you can just buy. You know, you can use it the normal way in the app store and buy it, pay money, but it's also an Apple Arcade as Bellatro Plus and it's on the Mac as well in Apple Arcade.

1:48:12 - Leo Laporte
It looks like this is a port, because it looks kind of 8-bit, 8-bitty a little bit.

1:48:17 - Jason Snell
It's got a style. It's actually you got settings you can do like CPU lines but you can turn them off and smoothing it. It's meant to be a little retro.

It's a roguelike poker game, but it's, of course, more than that.

There's a lot more going on, because you modify the scoring of the game with jokers that you buy in the store and they completely change your strategy for playing the game. There's also a very nice onboarding screen, which is what you're doing now, or explains how the game works. So, for example, over time, as you go through these different hands, you get modifiers like increasing the number of cards in your hand or reducing the number of cards you have to play to get a certain thing. You can also upgrade how much money you make or how many points you make for certain hands. So, if you get a joker that makes you able to do straights with four cards instead of five, and another one that awards you for having a four card hand, and another one that allows you to, you know, doubles the amount that that is there. If it's a straight, uh, you, you start to build straights because it's a lot easier or I actually had one that was you can build straights or flush or straights out of numbers that are one apart from each other. So you know, ten, nine, seven, five is a is a straight, which is also kind of bananas. It is really replayable. It is easy to pick up that you know moment to learn, a lifetime to master that classic line. It is super addictive and if you've got Apple Arcade, you've got it for Mac or iOS. A lot of fun.

But just remember that the point is the upgrades. It's not a poker game. It's using poker as a mechanic to deal with the jokers and other upgrade cards that you do between rounds with the money you earned, and that changes the game dynamic. And then, once you win, you win by going through 27 hands, basically up to level nine, um, but if you are, or yeah, something like that, maybe it's up to level eight. Uh, you, you have more challenges, different ways to start, different modifiers. It all just kind of like keeps on unfolding and again, it's a roguelike in the. So basically, one of the things I like about roguelike games is you don't end up with having to grind to get resources. Instead, every time it's new and you start from zero and you have to build again. And I like that in a game, because I don't like grinding to manage my resources. I want to just play and then be done.

And it's fantastic On the iPhone. It's got haptics, it's got great music and sound effects that you can turn on or off as you like. I think it's a great iPad game. Anyway, highly recommended, super addictive fun. Bellatro. And again, if you've got arcade, you got it on all those Apple platforms.

1:50:56 - Leo Laporte
That's nice. Yeah, bellatro, what does that?

1:50:59 - Jason Snell
mean.

1:51:00 - Leo Laporte
Anything.

1:51:01 - Jason Snell
Oh Joker, I think it's Joker.

1:51:03 - Leo Laporte
Joker. In Spanish, the Joker is I think that's what it means.

1:51:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, cool, I don't know. I don't speak Italian.

1:51:08 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Jason, Andy and Akko.

1:51:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Pick of the week, uh, and a daylight savings time, which means that, like my laptop bag has to have like this stuff.

1:51:20 - Leo Laporte
I love this. And also this because I'm walking Lisa gave me this for Christmas a couple of years ago. It's incredibly useful. What is this?

1:51:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It really is so this is just reflective stuff so I don't get killed walking away to home, but this is one of the best things I ever bought in my life. This is a headlamp, but a really good one. It's made by Black Diamond. This is the Spot 400. There's also the Storm 450. This is like $40. The next one up is like $60. But this is nothing like the cheap stuff you get for like $5 at the drugstore, because it's IP67 rated, so rain is not a problem.

It has a lot of adjustability in the brightness of the light. So if you're having it super, super bright at its maximum, three AAA batteries or the rechargeable battery pack will last for two hours. But if you have it at a more sensible thing, just so that you're not stumbling around, you can easily lower it and then you get 160, 170 hours to it. And it has multiple modes, so you have a side light for super intense, you have a red, green and blue light. So if you don't want to compromise your night vision and so now, obviously I talked about it it's just well built. Also, there's a battery status indicator, three or four lights over there, and you can actually lock it so when it's in your pocket if you hold down both buttons simultaneously, the buttons will start flashing, and that means that you can put it in your pocket. You won't accidentally turn it on and run down the battery wall like during the daylight hours.

Now I bought it. The first time I bought one of these was for my bike, because it's nice to have a headlamp on your bike, but it only points to where you're directed when sometimes you actually want to look to see where you don't want to crash. So you need to have a headlamp, and a good one. But my goodness, the amount of time, the amount of things that I use this for all the time. So, for instance, if I'm fixing something whether I'm underneath the sink, or whether I'm just fixing something, fixing my camera, like on a desktop having the super, super bright light that's aimed exactly at where you're looking is killer. Having it when there's a power outage, I don't have to illuminate the entire place, I don't have to have lanterns, I can. Just all I want to do is see where I'm going. And so I've got this going for me. The fact that it works on AAAs or a rechargeable battery pack means that even if the power outage lasts three or four days, it's not like I'll kill the rechargeable battery and then I'm out. I even use it a lot when I just need to get up in the middle of the night. It's like if I need to go downstairs for something, how many lights do I have to turn on, versus just take this off the nightstand drawer, put it on and I'm absolutely good. On and on, and on and on.

The point is, if you have this in your collection of stuff, there are so many times when you're not taking a bike ride or not walking in the dark when you will realize that, oh, this is the perfect thing for the situation I'm in right now.

Oh, this is the perfect thing for the situation I'm in right now. And once again, I don't, I can't, I can't overestimate, overstate the difference between yeah, it's 40, 50 bucks if you buy an even nicer one, 60 or 70 bucks the difference between this and the five or ten dollar little led with batteries in it. This is so much better and so much more useful, uh, that I actually actually bought an upgrade just so I can have two. So I have one in my laptop bag at all times, but also like one, like near the bed, so that, again, if I have to get up in the middle of the night because the power's out. I need to quickly go into the office and shut down my server. You know I don't have to worry about stumbling over things. I get highest recommendation, it's just it's just expensive.

1:54:57 - Leo Laporte
It's $60 for a headlamp, but it's worth what you're seeing.

1:55:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Like I said, that's the difference between something that will last, that doesn't matter if it gets wet, if you're walking around in the dark. That has the features where, again, sometimes you need super, super intense light on a job that you're doing. Sometimes you just want a little bit of illumination so that you can see where you're going little bit of illumination so that you can see where you're going. And and the the fact that, like I, the batteries are always good because I always have them turned down low, because I rarely need that super intense stuff.

And again, the times where, like against, oh, wow, how silly, I've got a blue, I can make that other led, either blue, red or green. But then, like, how about the times where, like you really do like don't want to destroy your, the times where, like you really do like don't want to destroy your, the times where I'm out at night, like doing astrophotography in the middle of the woods, where I don't want to destroy my night vision, but I do need to check to see where this knob is set. That's when, oh, thank goodness, this thing has a red or a blue light setting.

1:55:54 - Leo Laporte
You should get the camo version, Andy, so no one will see you coming, and then that way.

1:56:06 - Andy Ihnatko
People tend to see me coming that's, that's how I've been exploited so much in my in my life. But but yeah, but it's also available. So I I only wish that, like, uh, so I've got. Of course you have to get everything in, like dark, gray or black. I wish I'd gotten like the really bright, bright red one, because that's the one I'm ordering for lisa that's easy to find in the dark or in the bottom of the bag exactly.

1:56:23 - Leo Laporte
Yep, I love it.

1:56:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I also say that it's also like? It's also useful for, like I'm taking a walk, I'm taking a picture like gosh, I wish I had some. Oh wait, I do have. I do have a super intense fill light that I can add to this. To try to this one spot again, it is a floating solution to a number of problems and the headband works even better.

1:56:43 - Leo Laporte
Do you prefer the Storm 450 or the Spot 400? What's your?

1:56:48 - Andy Ihnatko
overall preference. I've got the Spot 400. The Storm 450, which I don't own but I've been reading about it, has some user interface improvements. It's got some things like that. It's nothing that is super, super important to me, not more important to me than 20 bucks. If it's on Black Friday sale I can get it for cheaper. Of course I'll get that one. But the nice thing about both of them is that you don't have to pay for the rechargeable battery pack if you don't want to. Again, normally it just takes like three uh, three double a's, uh, and if you want to spend 20 bucks or 30 bucks for a battery pack that charges off of usb and just fits in the same space oh, it doesn't come at 60 bucks.

1:57:29 - Leo Laporte
They don't include the battery pack I think I think they have.

1:57:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I think they have different packages, some include the battery some don't.

1:57:34 - Leo Laporte
okay, that's from uh, that is your storm headlamp from Black Diamond Headlamps. No, I'm sorry, blackdiamondequipmentcom. I imagine there's other stuff you can get there, like cargo pants and buck knives.

1:57:48 - Andy Ihnatko
They also have skis. They also have stuff for people who are in much better shape than I am, but this doesn't care what shape you're in.

1:57:54 - Leo Laporte
Somebody in the Discord is saying where do you get those audio tours? Very nice, Andy, I like the lighting big improvement. Where do you get those audio tours you were talking about? Uh, there are a lot of them if you look for audio tours, but the ones we were using the funny one in hawaii with the shave ice is shaka guide, because of course it started in hawaii but now it's all over the world shaka guide. Let us wrap things up with Jason. No, we did Jason, we did Andy. Oh, I must be Alex Lindsay's pick of the week, alex.

1:58:25 - Alex Lindsay
Yesterday, blackmagic released Resolve 19.1, and it is a huge upgrade. It's a huge upgrade Most notably is that it now supports the MVHEVC format. So this is Apple's or not Apple's, but it's an MPEG format that Apple is using for the Apple Vision Pro. It's probably the first application. There's a big Final Cut conference going on starting tomorrow, or I think tomorrow, no Thursday so we expect in the next day or two to see some updates to Final Cut, but right now, at least for the next couple of days, the only thing that really easily manages MVHEVC is Resolve, and so Resolve has released those tools, along with many, many other tools including things like breaking your songs out into tracks and separating voices from their ambient versus the echo versus everything else to new tools in replay and fusion, and it's this and it's free it's free.

1:59:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean there's a version. Why is it a?

1:59:25 - Alex Lindsay
version because you know, this is what I think black magic gets is that you have this is a heavy app and you got to learn how to use it. You know, and, and so the thing is, is that, allowing people to have most of the features, they do save some of those for the 300 version, which ships, by the way, by the way, with every Blackmagic camera. So if you buy a Blackmagic, I have a bunch of Blackmagic cameras. I have a bunch of copies of Resolve, so you know of the studio version, but really you can do an enormous amount of work in just the free version of Resolve, which is why it's becoming more and more popular. And you have all the Fairlight tools. There's new Fairlight tools that are related, and it now fully supports Ambisonic. A lot of the Surround is all supported, as well as just a growing number of tools that are within Fairlight, and this thing is moving. The amount of features that they put into it in every 1 release is usually the number of new features that you see in a whole release from most other applications. They just have so many engineers working on it, and so it's a free version If you're looking for something that and I spend about half my time in Final Cut and about half my time in Resolve when I'm editing.

So if I need to do something really fast and I don't need a lot of control, I tend to do it in Final Cut, because I've been using Final Cut since 0.9. And I just seamlessly moved over to the new one when it started. So I am very comfortable in Final Cut. When I know that I'm going to have to do precision work, when I'm going to do surround work, when I'm going to do precision color work, when I need to have a lot of control, then I move to resolve and now I have all the tools that I would need to put something together and so, um. So for me it's it's a little bit of both Um, but the uh.

This update is stunningly huge. I haven't gotten a chance to play with it very much, but, but generally you know it's they've been very good at releasing this in a stable way. So, um, I'm pretty excited. I'm going to start throwing some MV, hevc stuff into it after the show and start to see what I can do with it, but I'm pretty excited. A lot of us were trying to figure out well, what do we do, how do we edit, how do we export, how do we do all those other things? And I think that this is also building up towards Blackmagic releasing a camera that will probably need to work with 19.2 or 3 or 4, where it's really giving you all the tools you need to edit spherical or 180-degree stereo, which is probably coming before NAB next year.

2:01:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what any of that means, but I know it's important and I probably should find out.

2:01:51 - Alex Lindsay
It means that you can develop for your favorite device, Leo, the Apple Vision Pro.

2:01:56 - Leo Laporte
This will be the app that you use for the Apple Vision Pro. This will be the app that you use for the Apple Vision Pro.

2:02:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, so it's a so but I think that it's a lot of us have known that the hard part over the last 20 years of working in Spherical has been the tools, and so seeing tools that are readily available, not super expensive, easy to use, that can let you edit these things is is going I think is going to make a big difference in this market.

2:02:23 - Leo Laporte
so we'll see drat that Mark Gurman came out with a big story just minutes ago. Apple's next device is an ai wall tablet for home control, siri and video calls that will tap into cameras, doorbellss and run Apple's apps. There's something coming up next year that's going to be very interesting.

2:02:43 - Jason Snell
He says as soon as March, and what's really interesting about it is he calls it a wall tablet in the headline, but it sounds like it's going to be modular, because one of the questions was like, well, is this a tablet you hang on the wall, or is this more like a thing that you put in your kitchen with a speaker on it and he says there'll be a speaker attachment so, like you can put it on? You can choose modularly to make it a big, bigger speaker in your kitchen or hang it on a wall and use it to control your home and have access to actually Leo, the other thought I had is have access to your security cameras.

2:03:14 - Alex Lindsay
That Apple is remembered to be building and then put those of course store the video on this.

2:03:19 - Jason Snell
This device Sounds like a modified what Gurman said before modified version of tvOS, basically this thing that they may ultimately call Home OS. And he says no App Store, which is interesting because that would be an advantage, would be you could use like the Apple TV App Store, but it sounds like they didn't want that in the first generation product. But really interesting that we might get another talking about Apple in the home, a compelling product where Apple's got a lot of the pieces here. They just need to put it together and it sounds like maybe they're going to do that early next year. That's awesome.

2:03:51 - Leo Laporte
They finally got the memo from Alex Lindsay.

2:03:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Thanks for sending the memo, Alex.

2:03:57 - Alex Lindsay
You know we say it over and over again every week for a couple of years.

2:04:00 - Jason Snell
You know Alex is nailing his memos to the doors of Apple park and finally they're like get out of here, you, the old paper airplanes over.

2:04:09 - Alex Lindsay
The thing I just want. I just want a light switch. I just want a light switch.

2:04:13 - Leo Laporte
Years to come, he will be the Martin Luther of Apple. We'll know. Wow, martin Luther of Apple. We'll know. Well, that's good. We'll talk a lot more about that next week. We do MacBreak Weekly on Tuesdays and Apple usually tries to get those press releases out after we're done, but this time Mark Gurman scooped them. Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm, eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch us live. We have nine streams now. There are there are 1283 people watching on those nine streams. Of course, some of them are club members watching in our club twit discord. youtube.com/twit/live. twitch.tv/twit. We're also on kick x.com, LinkedIn, Facebook and TikTok yes, TikTok, because I'm with the kids, hip and with it gotta enjoy it while it lasts yeah, who knows what's the future of TikTok?

I, I think that one. You know, I don't want to get in that one. I like TikTok. I want TikTok to survive. Uh, thank you all for being here.

You can also. You know, you don't have to watch live, you can also watch after the fact, which is how the vast majority of people do it, but we keep copies of the show uh audio or video, your choice on our website, twit.tv/mbw. Uh, if you go there, you'll also see a link to a YouTube channel with all the video from every show. Because it's a good way to share a little clip with somebody. If you want to, you know, say, hey, I'm excited, look what Apple's about to do that kind of thing. Or here's a cool tip If you like poker and Uno, whatever it is, you can share that from the YouTube channel.

Easiest way, though and I think that most people listen this way is to subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Put it on your ipod, sync it up via firewire, and then you can listen wherever you are. Uh, the links to the rss feed and a number of links to a number of different podcast players also available at twit.tv/mbw thanks to our producer, technical director and editor, John Ashley. We appreciate the work you do, John, wherever you are. We don't know, he's just he's in space somewhere. We also thank, of course, our wonderful hosts Andy Ihnatko, WGBH Boston, Alex Lindsay from officehours.global and Jason Snell, sixcolors.com. Thanks for being here Now. It is my solemn duty to tell you get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.