MacBreak Weekly 948 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, Alex and Jason they're all here. We'll talk a little bit about Jason's annual Six Colors Graphs. There's actually an interesting tidbit in there which explains a little bit why Apple's pushing hard on Apple TV+. We'll talk about updates to Final Cut Pro, the new sound plugin for Logic Pro that even Peter Gabriel loves, and watch out for porch pirates. They've got a new way of tracking your iPhone. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 948, recorded Tuesday, November 19th 2024: Wicked Hot. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We find out what the heck's going on over there in Cupertino on the Apple campus with the Apple experts and they are expert Andy Ihnatko from GBH in Boston, the man with the hat and the sideburns, which somebody commented last week and I think it's perhaps true. They seem to be growing uh, depends on like it's.

0:01:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not as though there's a seasonal change.

0:01:17 - Leo Laporte
They tend to like I I ever shed for the summer and it depends on like when I get out of bed.

0:01:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I I'm a side sleeper, so like I get out of bed and I go to the bathroom to like brush my teeth and stuff. If it really looks van buren-y because they, because they've been on the pillow, then I know it's time to give them a trim. Sometimes it takes a while, but yes, during the winter hours, the winter years, uh, I have to, I have to be ready for, like this, uh, seasonal times where, if I want, if someone wants to draft me in as Scrooge in a community production, I've got to make sure that the moneymakers are full bloom man.

0:01:48 - Leo Laporte
And we now know why Martin Van Buren had such a fan base. Also here, dressed in his Bumblebee costume, it's Jason Snell.

0:01:59 - Jason Snell
from Six Colors, Only two colors today black and yellow, it's blue and gold baby, it's big game week I am against. Stanford and that is lock up all the people from Stanford. They've committed crimes. But Berkeley is great. Go Bears, so good to be here.

0:02:15 - Leo Laporte
So the axe doesn't belong to any one of the two the winner gets the axe.

0:02:21 - Jason Snell
It is called the Stanford axe, I believe, because it was at one point stolen by Berkeley students after beating them in football, or maybe not just they stole it and now it is handed back and forth to the winner of the Cal Stanford football and you have a replica axe. I have a replica axe behind me. Indeed, it is our axe.

0:02:40 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, if I had stolen the axe, that would be saying that's a replica, Jason's a replica. That's exactly sharp cookie, you don't know how big it is back there, it could be.

0:02:49 - Jason Snell
It could be a very small plastic replica handed out to people who attended a game last year, or it could be real the only way to know for sure is to check for the telltale rust stains from the tears of the stanford team.

0:03:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, come on over also with us, mr. Office hours Alex Lindsay of 090.media. Hello, alex. Hey, good to be here with his, with his fake elemental lights behind him.

0:03:16 - Alex Lindsay
Well, they're not. They're not fake elemental lights, they're just. They're just not a whole server behind them, there's no, no elemental attached I have my this.

0:03:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm sad because you got the original green ones and we traded in the green ones once amazon took over and got the. What is that?

0:03:29 - Alex Lindsay
I do. I do actually have the servers in my. I have the servers, like, just putting them on the shelf, they'll stick way out because they're really long see, I don't have the server anymore.

0:03:39 - Leo Laporte
I just it's like it's kind of like a.

0:03:41 - Alex Lindsay
It's kind of like a gold back dollar. I have the, I have the front pieces, you know, uh, but um, but the rest of it, this is the backing, yeah exactly yeah, adios amigo, oh sorry, I didn't mean to press that button.

0:03:52 - Leo Laporte
I have the uh, I have, oh no, shut up. I'm trying to plug in my elemental. It doesn't. It doesn't quite fit in the usb thing here. That's what. That's how I keep it lit. Somebody must have wired this, or did they sell it like this?

0:04:07 - Alex Lindsay
no, they, well, they, they uh. They sold them wired. Yeah, they, I mean they wired them up, it was I remember yeah, it was wired into the server.

0:04:13 - Leo Laporte
It was a way to know the server was running well.

0:04:15 - Alex Lindsay
It was really just marketing. I talked to someone who did it. They were like you know it was just marketing, so that you it would be different. He said, was it effective? I was like I sold more than $2 million worth of production on those lights.

0:04:25 - Leo Laporte
It was effective because I see the green lights and I know immediately that you have the and, most importantly, when you're at an event.

0:04:30 - Alex Lindsay
Someone sees the green lights and they go. What is that Cause? It sticks out on the whole thing and you go well, let me tell you, kids use software encoding like OBS and blah, blah blah. Professionals use appliances, you know.

0:04:41 - Leo Laporte
So that's a good way to start. But that just shows you that all server-mounted devices should have colorful, interesting panels.

0:04:51 - Alex Lindsay
But not orange. Sorry, this is not a good one. We were very upset when they went from green to orange. Green was so much better.

0:05:00 - Leo Laporte
I guess they had to distinguish the Amazon versions. It was AWS. Hey, thanks to Wes decker in our youtube chat, who's just donated ten dollars. What is that called superfund? There's something.

0:05:10 - Jason Snell
There's a name for it oh, that's for toxic waste, leo. Yeah love.

0:05:14 - Leo Laporte
Canal youtube is a super fun site. Uh, my sincere appreciated the whole mac break, thank you the joe rogan experience on and off screen. Thank you, west. We appreciate that.

0:05:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, let's see here well I love that long, long pause that happens on every show. That's like just a week or two before the big holidays. Yeah, that's the telltale. There's stories here, but nothing like oh my god, I'm bouncing in my seat to talk about this thing yeah well, is anybody bouncing in their seat to talk about anything?

0:05:45 - Leo Laporte
I guess we could talk about german at the end of the day.

0:05:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Last episode yeah, he broke a at the end of the last episode, almost as a teaser to this episode that, uh, he's been writing a lot about apple doing smart displays, mostly writing about, hey, we're there's going to be a home pod with a screen attached or hey, there's going to be a robotic HomePod with the screen on an arm. This time is something that I actually really, really like the idea of. It is a wall-hanging display, not a TV-sized display, more like a big iPad that supposedly, according to his information, is going to be a home hub. It's going to be a media hub. It's going to respond to AI, to Shlomo you can use this to It'll be a FaceTime device, right yeah?

exactly for calls and stuff like that. I like that idea because that's very much in line with what I see Apple thinking is a great idea Having a display that, when it's doing nothing, it's giving you a little corner of useful information and a piece of artwork or family photos. But as soon as you turn and you look at it or you approach it because it has sensors and it has cameras and knows, oh, the display knows. Oh, I have the user's attention. I'll go into more detailed display about what's going on in your inbox and I'll await a command. That seems like something that apple would be really keen on, is something they could do something really interesting with uh.

0:07:12 - Leo Laporte
German says he already has a code number for it, which you know. When you throw that into your, your leak, that gives it some credence j490. Um. He says next year though, right, we're not going to get that this year. I think it's too late to get anything this year. That's very incredible. It's a six inch screen. Looks like a square. Ipad. Square is interesting. Yeah, I would like this. I'll probably buy it right.

0:07:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I love the Nest thermostat because it is like, instead of just giving you what's the number of your temperature, it is actually a smart display that's at a fixed location and you always know where it is, and that really got me thinking about the usefulness of such a thing, where there's something where, anytime I'm getting dressed and I want to know again what do I need to take with me in terms of being warm or being dry. I've got a display that's always at that same spot on the kitchen wall or the same spot on the living room or the bedroom. And given that I've always been such a huge fan of the idea of a voice-only user interface as the ability to simply make things happen just by talking to something, having a display that can not only interpret commands but also give me visual results. In an era where Apple's trying to make a mark for itself in artificial intelligence and chatbots, that seems like, again, an area where Apple can actually do something significant.

There was also this week he mentioned something about oh, the idea of an Apple TV panel is not off the table, is back on the table or whatever. Oh, interesting. I don't know if I ever like that because, again, what could they do with a TV that they can't already do with an Apple TV, and also the amount of competition there is. I mean, I haven't shopped for TVs in a long time. The prices of if you just want a halfway decent 100-inch screen, oh my God, that's what. That's what. The competition there is so cutthroat that I don't think that Apple could bring anything to that. But this idea of a small panel that's just a decorative, beautiful object that helps you out and is sort of the the house house unblinking eye in your kitchen or living room, I like that idea a lot.

0:09:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's, it's good, and there are some other rumors that they're working on some other home stuff which I really like. The TV thing was an aside that I agree with you, andy. It doesn't make sense to me. My theory about that is that what he's hearing is maybe more if Apple wanted to embed some intelligent TV circuitry in their displays going forward, because one of the things that I I reviewed a Samsung equivalent to the studio display last year and one of the things that I noticed about it is it has Samsung smart TV platform in there, which can be annoying. But also if you, you know, are using it, I mean it does feel silly.

Right To have a 27 inch or 30 inch or whatever display you're going to have, and it can only possibly be used to attach a computer to it because you may want to give it. Let it double duty. It's got speakers, it's got a big screen. Maybe it will work for you in a dorm room or in your office or wherever, as a tv as well. Um, and I could see them doing that and saying why don't we make sure that our displays are also tvs?

0:10:16 - Leo Laporte
but but making a regular tv doesn't doesn't really try, but I can see putting it in the kitchen. Some people watch like have the news on while they're having.

0:10:23 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, having a device that's like iPad-sized or this thing which is a little smaller, I get. But like building a big TV that's an Apple thing, like they're never going to be able to compete with the commodity TV manufacturers. But there's other stuff. I love it.

I mean, I think if you look at the charts Sorry, I brought up charts again- and you look at On my Sorry, I brought up charts again and you look at, if you look at Apple's wearables, home and accessories category, what you will see is that, while services keeps going up, the wearables category is like a curve that is kind of like it's flattened out or gone back down a little bit. The wearables, home and accessories and I am getting the feeling that, although they should have done this five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, that somebody inside Apple has basically said hey, why don't we generate more home revenue? And the answer is because we haven't tried. So it sounds like maybe they're going to try and I think that's good. They don't need to play in every category.

I know alex sometimes advocates for sort of uh, them, them, them spreading, but they can pick and choose ones that are going to be profitable and that where there's no real obvious winner, and that they, they can make it simple and still make a big profit margin. And, uh, this might be the start of that, this little, uh, little square screen thing. Here's the uh graph. Yeah, you know somebody at apple's looking at that, at that wearables thing. I don't like that. I like it when they go up going the wrong way, yeah this is the.

0:11:56 - Leo Laporte
This is your uh post for the annual revenue you mentioned. Right, right, I get to do the sum up of the uh, of the annual revenue where you can really see kind of long-term trends.

0:12:03 - Jason Snell
And then for for a few years there, wearables, home and accessories had a long-term uptrend and it doesn't now.

It's been flat to down for a few years. And I mean, look at home, that as a category I mean Apple TV is in there, sure, but if they do this device and then they've got a higher end device with a robotic limb coming later and they do a camera and they, you know, and maybe there are some other categories where they can play I think that's really interesting and I think I I mean people in the Apple ecosystem will pay money for things that are easy and nice and fit into the Apple ecosystem with ease, and they don't need necessarily to be. They need to be competitive in the sense that they can't be twice the price of decent competition. But Gurman's report says that they are, he says, competitive with the other products in the market. My guess means it's still probably 100 or $200 more than those products. But they can afford to do that because a lot of Apple customers are happy to pay for something that's nicer and just works and that is an opening for them in the home.

0:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and on top of everything else I'm sorry, alex, I'll make this quick it's also if they don't make it like a four by three display, if they make it something that looks unique. It is another thing that says I own an Apple product. I don't mean that to denigrate Apple users as oh look, I've got the latest Apple thing. Do you have the latest Apple thing? But Apple users, they like the style, they like having these things out in front in public. There's a reason why the iMac comes in so many colors because it's cool and it looks nice and people will enjoy having it out in front like that. So, not only as a piece of technology that does technological things, but as a piece of style, as a piece of design, just like. Again, people will often choose the make of TV because they like the way that it fits in with the rest of their decor. Again, I just think this is a really, really strong idea for an Apple product.

0:14:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think it also depends on what who they're competing with as well. So if you look at like, for an 85 inch screen TV or a 65 inch screen TV or whatever the number is, you know there are obviously Vizios and, and you know, tcls that are $900, $1,000, but there's also, on the other side of that, there's an LG market that is $4,000 or $5,000. So there's a wide range in what. When we say, you know, and Apple, I think, would look at the LG market before they looked at the $900 TCLs. I think that there are.

You know, as someone who buys a lot of monitors and a lot of TVs, there's a lot of room for improvement. I mean, most of them are not, I mean, other than the LGs. Most of them are not great and so, and all of them are underpowered, you know. So you know we deal with this all the time and there's a lot of interactions where the Apple TV is a little clunky compared to if it was just the TV doing it. That said, I think that the chances of a large TV, apple being a large TV, is very low.

Um, I think something that was somewhere between an iPad and a tv size. You know, that is something you put in your again in your kitchen, um, you're watching while you're doing things. But it has, it's, a touch screen, it's got a nice, you know it's, you know you can, everything works and you can do your cooking with it. You can also watch the news, uh, and it can run all your other home devices that apple will hopefully make. I think could be really, really interesting. Probably more interesting than putting something on a wall.

0:15:29 - Leo Laporte
Gurman says $1,000, which is Apple price typical, and Apple I don't know if this is true hopes that people will buy many of them to put them in every room of their house.

0:15:42 - Alex Lindsay
I think that squarely pegs it at about $1,000 worth of Apple. It can't be $1,000. If it's $1,000, it's no bigger than 16 inches.

0:15:51 - Jason Snell
This feels like a $200, $250 kind of thing. Maybe $300 if we put in the Apple thing and the idea that, yeah, you put one in the kitchen and you have one in the bedroom as a smart home controller or whatever, or on the coffee table or wherever. Like I can, I can see that. But if they, if that's the dream, then they do have to price it more aggressively.

0:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I have a genius system with echoes and google devices and siri devices all over the house in different spots, and it would love it to have some sort of you know, homogenous. You know every room has the same kind of thing in there. Same commands, yeah, and I still think it comes with everything. That would be very nice. That's a good.

0:16:31 - Alex Lindsay
I think that's a reasonable goal for apple and something that would be attractive to buyers I think I think if apple put that screen in the and the five devices I've talked about in the past, a lot of apple users would just go.

0:16:42 - Jason Snell
Well, this is what I'm as they upgrade or move forward, they would just kind of go around the, the wagons would circle even if there's a home kit camera out there, there's some other camera that says it's compatible, and all that if apple's got a dead simple one that's got the perfect integration with this that you can put and you know you can trust it because it's from apple, like it would be, that that's such an easy sale.

0:17:06 - Alex Lindsay
Well, again, it would devastate, I mean, each market they moved into. If apple built locks, for instance, a lot of people would just you know an apple. A lot of apple users would just buy the apple lock if you bought, if you had the outlet. They would just start getting the apple outlets and the switches and the lights and the, because they would just be like well, I pick it up, I put it next to my iPhone and it pairs with the network and then we're off to the races and that's the difference.

0:17:31 - Andy Ihnatko
People who, like the Apple ecosystem, they like to invest in it. It's not like I do. I also like the idea of Apple planning or, excuse me, anticipating people buying more than one of them. It's not like they'd buy a four-pack for a discount of $80, so $3,800 instead of $4,000, like AirTags. But I can definitely see you buy one because it looks nice and you figure oh, that's a nice, that'll be a useful thing to have in one room of the house, and then next year you buy another one and then the next year there's an improved one. So you move that into the one room we use the most, and now the kitchen has one. And that's how, five years from now, they wind up having four or five of these around the house. That's exactly how it happened with Google Smart Displays with me that I bought one just so I could write about it, and then it just became so damn useful that I wound up having like three of them for $100 each.

Let's say let's. Let's be clear. But right, apple people are used to spending more. A thousand dollars, I don't. I don't know what they could deliver to justify a thousand dollars. But iPads, iPad style, uh, uh, pricing I could definitely see like a, like a $500, $400. I could definitely see.

0:18:41 - Leo Laporte
Apple's looking to uh also bolster its uh revenues by licensing stuff from Apple TV plus yeah, movies they, their movie strategy has been kind of broken, right.

0:18:53 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

0:18:54 - Jason Snell
They spent a lot of money on a lot of prestige movies. They won best picture for one, but that wasn't an expensive one, that was a cheap one. Which one was? That that was Coda. Coda okay, which they picked up at a film festival for not a lot of money and it won Best Picture. So go figure, you can't always, you know. But then they spent all that money on Napoleon and they didn't get anything from that.

Wolves, the like, being in deals with stars and famous people and they like the shine of the Oscars and all of that, but if you look at it, it's not a strong strategy, and I think streaming in general struggles with movies. Netflix spends a lot of money on movies, but they are changing their strategy to be a little bit lower budget with a lot of their movies because of how expensive they can be and what the return is in terms of driving people. It's not just about retaining people, it's about getting people to sign up for your service, and so I think Apple has realized that they need to calibrate their movie strategy a little bit differently, spend less money on it, and one of the ways that you make it lose less money is it's got a lifespan. That ends up being, after it's been on Apple TV Plus for a while, it goes somewhere else too and you make some money from that and the exclusive period ends instead of saying, well, no, we paid for it, we want it here forever, and I think that just I think that makes sense.

There are lots of other streaming services that have an audience that your audience doesn't contain, and they might want to see that movie too, and why would you turn down the money on that? They are not talking about doing that with tv that may happen but with this movie strategy, because I think their tv strategy has worked a lot better. But the movie strategy they're losing a lot of money. And I do get the sense. And there are reports that say that eddie q is basically like you can't you can't lose this much money on this is.

0:20:38 - Leo Laporte
I thank andy for actually tipping me to this screen. It's bloomberg's uh screen time newsletter. Now I subscribe. I already pay for bloomberg and get mark's power on, but this is this has a lot of juicy stuff yeah, it says lucas shaw says chief executive officer tim cook and services boss eddie q have pushed the team overseeing apple tv plus to lower costs, improve the financial performance and deliver more hits. Well, I imagine that that's the push.

0:21:02 - Alex Lindsay
It's easy to say right, it's kind of like saying, fast, easy, you got to pick two of those, and I think that that's going to be the challenge for them. I think that the idea of a two and a half hour movie has probably got less than 10 years left, so in any way, shape or form. And the reason for that is that, you know, theatrical is kind of, you know, going in as tanking, um, you know, and the problem is is that, uh, you know the, the things that are really successful for a lot of these, a lot of these, um, are six, six, um, you know, a six episode series, eight episode series. Uh, writers like it better because they can develop the characters a lot further. A lot of people like to.

It's hard to get my family now to be willing to commit to two and a half hours. Everything's an hour or we watch half a film. No one really wants to watch a two and a half hour. So I think the behavior is changing because there's so many series. Series is better for retention. It just doesn't like the molecules of that aren't adding up anymore, and I think that, especially when you see, you know really big films constantly I was just talking to someone at the theater yesterday and the fact that you know you were in a theater.

I was in the theater. I was in theater. Great man Wasn't in the actual theater Underdiverse. I was in a theater complex. So the you just came in for the popcorn. You didn't stay for the popcorn.

Something like that. Um, so, anyway, so the, uh, but you know the, the, the. What we were talking about was really the, the fact that you know all these movies that used to be. Well, we have this actor and we have this kind of film and we're going to do this release with this marketing and none of that math is adding up anymore. You, this marketing, and none of that math is adding up anymore, you know, and so the. The thing is is that the, so the math just isn't, and it's really expensive to have the math not, you know the.

You know Hollywood, or bankers, you know they're not really. I mean, the people who pay for them are bankers, you know, and they and they want that's part of the problem in Hollywood is, well, they want risk, they want to money over there. Let's go over there, you know, and and so, and obviously there's tons of creative people who just want to create their, they want to tell their story, but they still have to get through the bankers to get their story told. And the problem is is that that a lot of the bankability of, of feature films, of the two, two and a half hour, is really dropping like a rock, you know, and so, and so it's just, it's just a very unpredictable environment.

So I think that when you see apple it's, it's, do you think?

0:23:22 - Leo Laporte
it's the movie industry's as we know it is dead.

0:23:26 - Alex Lindsay
It's changing. It's going to change to something else. I mean, it's the. The theater really doesn't. I mean I look at the real, you know I used to.

0:23:31 - Leo Laporte
Every time I'd go to apple tv, look at the new movies to see what I wanted to watch. I don't. I hardly ever do that anymore. I think it's mostly junk I, I, I watch.

0:23:41 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is is we get caught up in the series and we get surprised by some series. Someone in our family watched one of them and says, oh, we got to watch this yeah, I think that's what happens you know and then of that.

So I think that. But I think the real problem is is that if a movie gets any bad reviews now what happens is so much, everyone's got so much content at home, they're just going. Well, I'll just wait until that. I don't need, yeah, I can, I can watch it in streaming. I, I know I make that decision all the time, like I just go, oh, that didn't, that got a medium. You know, if it doesn't get like 85, you know, uh, freshness or whatever, you go. Well, if it doesn't like slam, like like with tenant and oppenheimer, yeah, I was like hey, I really want to see that on a big screen.

You know, like but, but but I know, I know what Nolan's going to do with it, you know, and so and so, but there's like a handful of of of James.

0:24:29 - Leo Laporte
Cameron, christopher Nolan, they're just a handful, yeah, I mean, you know like I want to go.

0:24:33 - Alex Lindsay
I want to see June on a big theater you know, on a big screen, that kind of thing. So so the thing is is that those are, those are, but there's like five directors that are directing films that really get people to go to a, to a, um, and when you have that lack of of supply and because you know, christopher Nolan can only make one of those films every two or three years or whatever, it is right, that um, you, uh, you know, it's just not enough to keep the theater industry going. And again, for all these streamers who are really spending all the money now the film doesn't. I mean, they're not performing, films are not performing for streamers, like 100%, never, none of them are performing. So they're all moving to more and more series. And again, if you talk to writers, they're like oh, I'd much rather have a series, because it's much easier to turnkey another series than it is to turnkey a people.

0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's interesting, alfonso Cuaron, who did the Academy Award-winning Roma, which is an amazing black-and-white film shot on Alexa cameras, decided to make his next thing a series Disclaimer.

0:25:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm surprised that in this report I don't think this Bloomberg report says specifically that they're not thinking about TV series. I'd be surprised if that weren't part of the strategy, because that is the entry point for a lot of people, where if suddenly it's a big leap to sign up for Apple TV just because you've heard that Ted Lasso is a cool series, but if the first couple of seasons, if before they do, there's a lot of, there's stronger rumors now there's going to be like a new season of Ted Lasso coming out. But if, like before they did the fourth season, they actually put it out to bid and had Hulu or Netflix or somebody get the first three seasons and then people get hooked on it and they realize that oh, if I want to see season four I'm going to have to sign up for Apple TV+, I'm surprised if that wouldn't be a great strategy. I mean, I did a big weeding out of my subscription services earlier this year and HBO sorry Max was definitely on the bubble and it's not that Chopped was the one thing that saved it. But I said, oh wow, chopped, I didn't realize they had that.

I haven't seen that in a while and just season one, episode one, and several months later I've binge watched all the way through. Now I'm on season 23. That's the sort of stuff that keeps and holds people and keeps people coming back. I'm thinking of reactivating my Hulu, at least temporarily, just because oh, that's right, I did see the first two seasons of Only Murders in the Building and I really liked it. Now I kind of want to see the next two seasons too, and if I forget to cancel it, that's all win-free Hulu.

0:27:10 - Alex Lindsay
And I have to say that I think it's one thing to take the feature films because again are making any money on the feature films, but if they, if the feature film, if they want to license those, I think if they just start saying we're going to license everything we make to try to offset the cost, they might as well just stop doing it because it's not gonna, it's not gonna, it is though what others do, right netflix does that?

0:27:27 - Leo Laporte
what hbo does that? I don't think netflix does that.

0:27:30 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think you see netflix series somewhere else. Netflix, the thing is, you get to know. The problem is, as a viewer, I barely barely know what I'm. I we have to when I go oh, what, what service? You know, we got really into the devil's hour. My family got really into the devil's hour, which is a great series, by the way and um, uh, but we couldn't, I couldn't remember where it was Like. I was like and you know, I was like where did this go? And and and.

Apple makes it a little easier because it just shows the last thing you watch, so could find it that way. There's amazon, I think, but but it's um, but the uh, I think that apple can afford. I I guess I would say that from a branding perspective, I will say a lot of the new shows that apple's. They've kind of just gotten into the zone where they're starting to produce some really great content. I mean, I thought that when they started apple tv plus, most of the most of the series were kind of jokes, you know, and, and they, and they, you know, and they, they were spent a lot of money on something that was not watchable.

In my opinion. Now they've really gotten it working. It would be unfortunate for it to see them kind of water it down after, and this happens, by the way, in Hollywood. In Hollywood, this is like 80% of Hollywood is you just got it working, but, but someone says, oh, let's pull the plug on that, let's water it down, like it happens all the time, like every, every everything you work on is like, hey, let's, let's not do that anymore. And just as you figured it out and I think apple's just figuring out how to make great content, a lot of their series are really good and, um, be unfortunate for them to start trying to shop around you're right.

0:28:52 - Leo Laporte
I think this netflix follows apple's uh strategy of not selling their stuff on as best as amazon Prime.

0:29:00 - Jason Snell
But this report is about movies, right, and the movie business is a very different business than the TV business. I don't think that there is any substantial report that Apple is considering breaking apart what they're doing in TV. I think they've really got a lot of momentum and they're building up a good catalog. It's this thing of like you want to dabble in movies, you want to get an Oscar, all of that.

0:29:25 - Alex Lindsay
It's like okay, but it needs to make sense and keeping those forever.

0:29:27 - Jason Snell
I think doesn't make sense, so maybe that's a different strategy for what you just said.

0:29:29 - Alex Lindsay
the only reason to make a feature film is to try to get an oscar, like that is the like that to make a feature film and do the release and then and then run it out and then you can sell it off for whatever it wants. That's the like to get the exposure that everyone thinks is important, Although, the movies that cross the billion-dollar revenue mark are not Don't get any.

0:29:48 - Leo Laporte
They're not Oscar bait, things like the Incredibles or Despicable Me.

0:29:54 - Alex Lindsay
They usually get nominated for best visual effects.

0:29:55 - Leo Laporte
You know, like the kind of you know best costumes, so maybe what you're going for is the billion dollar box office I don't think so.

0:30:01 - Alex Lindsay
I I don't think that, but I don't think the box office is like for for them to release it in box apple wants prestige.

0:30:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's not just that cash.

0:30:08 - Alex Lindsay
It's also knowing that the movie exists, one of the big problems that you get it. When you do a traditional movie launch, you're marketing, you're putting marketing out. There's a reason to talk about it. The hard part with streaming in general and the hard part with movies. This is another big problem with movies. I know this weekend it's not this weekend movies, but actually it does a show, so we.

So one of the one of the mechanics that people are dealing with in marketing is that there's a huge number of viewers that aren't seeing any ads ever. You know and they're not. They're not watching. That's why you've got to market on TikTok more. You know and they're not. They're not watching. That's why you gotta mark it on tiktok anymore. But the problem is, is they identify, like someone like me? I see I can see the extra line that says this is a promoted, and I skip it in like a second, like literally, like literally. It's open for a second and then it's gone, and so it's. It's really difficult to get the word that it's not that it can't be done, but it's. It has to be done, with lots of organic marketing and lots of this. You know very, very you know it's very complex. It's not just let's throw a million dollars at billboards anymore. You know, and that's the. You know that's the real challenge for the market right now. People don't even know that the movie's happened and so everybody knows, everybody knows Wicked's happening.

0:31:16 - Leo Laporte
My God, everything's turned. Emerald green.

0:31:19 - Alex Lindsay
And they have spent so much.

0:31:21 - Leo Laporte
That must be a massive budget for marketing.

0:31:25 - Andy Ihnatko
They're not telling anybody. It's a part one of two, though, are they? No, they're not.

0:31:29 - Jason Snell
They're not telling anybody. It's a musical either, but that's okay.

0:31:32 - Leo Laporte
They're avoiding that.

0:31:36 - Jason Snell
Wicked is a good example that actually is relevant to what we're talking about, because they're also investing in that marketing, knowing that they have to get a part one to be big because they also have a part two and they need to sell that too. So there's sort of marketing and there's some some trickle down there.

0:31:46 - Leo Laporte
There's some fun there really is too. It is a two-parter.

0:31:49 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, yeah it's only, it's only act one play wasn't a two-parter.

0:31:52 - Leo Laporte
The play had three acts. Yeah well, I saw all three of them in one evening and this tells you also so my point is that movies on streaming.

0:32:02 - Jason Snell
One of the advantages of doing movies on screen streaming if you've got a theatrical release is that you've got a big theatrical marketing promo and what that does is it creates awareness of that movie and then you put it on streaming and what you're getting is people going oh right, I know that movie. It's a lot harder if you don't do a theatrical release with the marketing. So there is a model there, because Netflix doesn't even want to do a theatrical release. So there is a model there to have some of that benefit of your movie marketing engine is also basically your streaming marketing engine.

0:32:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you've learned something here. First of all, w wicked is two parts and you won't see part two. It's like dune.

0:32:43 - Jason Snell
That's very frustrating, especially if theater goers don't know that going in shot it though right dune, they hadn't shot part two right. Do you have a green light on part two?

0:32:51 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I'm sure this is. This was intentionally two parts. The other thing is it's a musical. Just in case you didn't know, it's a musical. Wow, and they're, so they're hiding. See, I think that's gonna. I think it's a bad idea how does everyone not know?

0:33:06 - Alex Lindsay
it's a musical, though I?

0:33:07 - Leo Laporte
mean it's wicked.

0:33:07 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's like, I mean everybody, I mean I don't know it's based, people don't, people don't know they think people don't go see musicals either, and there's no saying.

0:33:14 - Jason Snell
I mean, obviously they don't think it's a musical because the marketing doesn't show people singing. They're singing.

0:33:25 - Leo Laporte
So that's the clue that they're like aha, we just don't tell them until they get there. That's been a Hollywood tradition for seven years. Let's see how the second week goes. That's always like the first week.

0:33:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think they're tracking for like 65 million for the first week.

0:33:33 - Jason Snell
I think the word of mouth is also pretty good, so we'll see how they do the long lines for the red carpet, it was like.

0:33:38 - Alex Lindsay
Or the premiere, it was like two days of lines in London. It's crazy.

0:33:43 - Leo Laporte
I'm just looking to see if we have any figures there. There are wicked Lego sets, wicked makeup lines. There's a custom wicked Lexus SUV. There are wicked Crocs Starbucks beverages.

0:33:57 - Jason Snell
Starbucks beverages. We went to Target yesterday and there was some weird wicked, like totally inappropriate, like wicked rubber balls you can bounce them, but they're green.

0:34:10 - Leo Laporte
They bought the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and lit it up in emerald green. This is really interesting. I think you know 2023 was a good year for movies because of Barb and Heimer, primarily, barbie made primarily. That was it. Yeah, yeah, I mean one and a half million billion dollars.

0:34:29 - Alex Lindsay
The challenge is, what floats the movie industry is 10 to 12, 10 poles, and there just aren't 10 to 12, 10 poles a year anymore, and that's the and that's the part. Like all the math isn't working anymore, and so I think that that's what everybody's trying to figure out and you know, I mean something's going to happen. I mean, the theaters are very, very valuable real estate. They were given a lot of room during COVID where, yeah, they might not have had to pay the rent every day, every month, because they're such a huge part of the flow of people through a mall that you know they were given a lot of room, the flow of people through a mall, that you know they, they were given a lot of room. It's a very valuable real estate. There's a lot you could do if you get everybody together.

0:35:09 - Leo Laporte
It just may not be theatrical releases, or at the same, at the same rate. So, stanley tumblers in wicked colors representing Glinda, I just for me, is it?

0:35:13 - Alex Lindsay
I only I'm not going to say it on the show. Andy might know, but in Boston there's a term for when it rains really hard and it's a wicked it's wicked had yeah, no, it's not, not wicked hot.

0:35:23 - Leo Laporte
Okay target merchandise target launched over 150 wicked inspired products, home decor and apparel. Base luggage introduced chic luggage themed around, wicked with green and pink designs.

0:35:38 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like we're getting a sneak preview of every yard sale in 2027.

0:35:44 - John Ashley
I think yes it's kind of amazing. So we'll see but.

0:35:49 - Alex Lindsay
But the question is not what you know. It looks like they're gonna. All this marketing can bump up. Uh, the first week when we get to work three. The question is did they get three times as much as they spent? That's when you see those those things, and internationally can they do it. But can they get to? They got to get to at least three X to break even three X of the of the cost of the film. So that's, that'll be what we see, All right.

0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
We'll get back to Apple news in a moment. We're going to moment, we're gonna take a break, but I, I would like to plug.

0:36:28 - Jason Snell
Jason, you cover this stuff on a your very own podcast. Yes, I do. Downstream, on relay, I want to give you a plug, dude relay.

0:36:30 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, I just that was like. There was like a on you do like yes I do it's called downstream.

0:36:33 - Jason Snell
It's uh, you can find it where all great podcasts are sold. It's the one with the purple remote control button on it, and it used to be me and julie alexander, but now it's me and a rotating group.

Oh, Julia left because she, she really was kind of Julia got a job, uh, at an undisclosed uh streamer, yeah, uh, but uh, I've. I got Joe Adalian from Vulture and Will Carroll, who's a sports expert who, you, was one of the founders of baseball prospectus and we talk about all the sports streaming stuff, and I'm going to have and Will Carroll, who's a sports expert who was one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus and we talk about all the sports streaming stuff, and I'm going to have Natalie Jarvie, who covered.

0:37:03 - Leo Laporte
I'd love to know what he thinks about the Tyson-Paul fight and what it bodes for Netflix's Christmas Day football.

0:37:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I know I am going to have to talk to Will about that before we get to Christmas and next week I'm having Natalie Jarvie, who used to work at Hollywood Reporter covering digital entertainment and then was at Vanity Fair, and she's going to pop on and we're going to talk about stuff. So it's been kind of fun. It's tough to replace Julia, but I found some really smart people and they know about the business. So, yeah, people should check it out.

0:37:31 - Leo Laporte
Very good.

0:37:32 - Jason Snell
Thank you for the book.

0:37:34 - Leo Laporte
I just wanted you to get some credit because if people are interested in the last half hour, they'd be very interested. Yeah, in that podcast, absolutely. Uh, we'll talk about final cut pro and logic pro. The updates are out and a lot more in just a little bit with Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsey.

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Uh, the updates we have heard about that apple had touted are now out for final cut pro and logic pro, both for the iMac and the subscription version on the iPad. I would thought you guys would probably want to talk about this, am I wrong?

0:40:58 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, they had a big get together, so. So Apple had a, had the, the summit, the FCP summit, yes, uh, last week, and usually that's when they're going to release something Um, not a lot of changes in uh motion, I think they just had some basic stability updates. Uh compressor has some more support for spatial video, um, and then final cut. Um, the big jump obviously was final cut. As far as the updates to the video products, they have a new smart masking, an AI. I think they're calling it AI masking, but it's a, you know, smart masking that's very detailed, and then also transcription, you know so, and that's something that's almost table stakes at this point. If you have an editing package, you kind of have to have it be able to do that.

One thing that's interesting is you're starting to see a divergent from. You know, final Cut was on the iPad and we've seen this with Keynote as well. They're starting to add features to the iPad version that doesn't exist in the Mac version. So some of the draw on stuff that they have, you can just grab your iPad and, oh, I want to draw something that'll get painted out for the show. That kind of thing is easy to do on an iPad, harder to do on a Mac with a pen. So that's the kind of thing that they're starting to kind of move towards in that area. So that's kind of interesting but pretty, you know.

And then a lot of new spatial tools, so the ability to view your spatial work, be able to convert spatial work. One thing that's interesting is we're getting to this point where Resolve and Final Cut feel very complementary in the sense that Resolve has some tools that Final Cut doesn't. So Resolve has some stereo tools that are really cool. Final Cut has better viewability than Resolve. I mean, some of these they might catch up with each other over time, but it was interesting. Interesting to see both of them kind of going towards the same thing but not in the same way. It does look like it's kind of interesting.

You'll be able to view, even with an anaglyph, you know. So just the red blue glasses you'll be able to view stereo in final cut, you know, has a way for you to kind of play that back. So they are and this is the reason I bring this up is that it's a big reason that Apple has Final Cut at this moment. I mean there's a lot of other reasons to do it, but I think that one of the big reasons that none of us think that Final Cut or motion or compressor are going away anytime soon people worry about that sometimes is because Apple needs to have control of that pipeline. If they ever want to do anything with spatial, you know like they have to be able to develop their own tools for that. So so you'll probably, we'll probably see more tools in that area. So those are some of the big, the big updates for it. I logic had some new preview and you know you can, you know, preview some stuff. I didn't see a lot.

Gabriel was really excited about the built-in quantic room simulator plugin yeah, so I I think I think it's mostly that I have a very low opinion of room simulators uh, yeah, so what these do, and so I I think that when I saw it, I was like, really, that's what we got, like that was, that was the like that's, that's all, that's the best you got it was hardware right in the 80s.

0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that, in fact, uh, peter gabriel used a great effect. It was part of his famous sound, right, I think, the drums and so forth. But, um, now it's cool.

0:44:11 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know, you know, there there's a lot of stuff, a lot of the stuff. There's a lot of. It been a lot of room simulators there's. Also there's preview simulators on, you know, and I find, I find that a lot of them just don't ever I could be wrong. I use logic. I haven't had time to really dig into it, to play with it, so I don't want to, I don't want to say anymore until I get like reverb and echo or yeah, it makes the sound a little bit.

it can it can. There's two different types. There's simulators which are gonna let you listen to it as if it was in a room, so that you can simulate a larger room while you're working on it. And then there is the actual simulating what this sound would sound like in a room. And that can be done. It's done in a lot of different ways. One way is an impulse, where they make a loud you know they oftentimes pop a balloon. Pop a balloon, you know, and it and what it does is it tells you what that reverb's like. But mostly they do sweeps, so you sweep from the lowest tones to the highest tones and you're listening to things and and that that kind of sampling can get a lot more complicated. You know it's a or a mixture of those two things to capture how long that reflection lasts, and because the the issue is the reflections, the reason the sweep is important is that the reflection lasts longer in some frequencies than others, depending on the space, and so to really model the space, you have to hear what's happening at many, many frequencies to understand that. So anyway, those are some of the simulators.

Again, I don't know a lot of people that use them heavily, except for Peter Gabriel. I'm sure there's others that do, and he used it in the 80s. I mean yeah. So I think that the but I could be wrong. I mean I'm probably going to get a bunch of, you know, a bunch of people pinging me going. I use it all the time and I mix for film and everything else. So you know, and I think you can use it as to build something up. You're not going to really try to match something that you have there, but you may try to build, use it as part of your build.

0:46:04 - Leo Laporte
so yeah, John Voorhees at Mac Stories had a Peter Gabriel quote which probably was published by Apple. Yeah, it's in the newsroom post. It's in the news report, the.

0:46:14 - John Ashley
Quantech room simulator simulator has been a key element to my sound for many years, appearing on records like Passion and Us. I also used it to build harmonic drones to start my live set, which then evolved into songs like across the river. It's wonderful that Apple's bringing the quantic QRS back to life. That gives you a hint. So what I?

0:46:36 - Jason Snell
like what I get from this is that there's vintage equipment that people like the sound of I mean shocker. There's vintage equipment that people like the sound of I mean shocker. There's vintage equipment that musicians like the sound of and it's not available anymore as hardware. So somebody actually spent some money to make it something that they can now just use as a plugin on their computer and that's great. The people who love it will love it, and I kind of love the idea that this thing that used to be this presumably expensive piece of hardware it's just a logic plug-in now. That's nice. You can get that gaseous cloud effect of like red rain now if you want it.

0:47:08 - Leo Laporte
Red rain. Greg Scott on our YouTube says that is not what Peter Gabriel sounds like at all.

0:47:13 - Jason Snell
It is not at all. He sort of became one of the Beatles there at the end, but it's fine. I don't even know what it is down in bath now and uh, but it's, it's, that was. That was a sound there in the 80s. As a child of the 80s that was definitely. There were a lot of people who wanted that.

Peter gabriel, daniel lanois, gaseous cloud effect, they called it sound and you hear it in various degrees and so and in the joshua tree and in robbie robertson's solo album and like it is a sound of that era especially yeah, okay, it's yeah, but that's the thing.

0:47:45 - Leo Laporte
It's like 8-bit, uh, video games. It's a, it's a nostalgia yeah, although there's a lot.

0:47:50 - Jason Snell
I mean, if you listen to a lot of, uh, contemporary alt rock, it's all 80s and 90s sounds now like the 80s and 90s came back and there are bands that want to be very 80s and, like I'm sure Do, I think the 1975 will use this plug in at some point. Yes, I do, because they have a lot of songs that are aggressively 80s, retro sounding and a lot of times an artist has a set.

0:48:12 - Alex Lindsay
It's not that it simulates a certain room, but it gives them a certain it's a warmth or a sound that they like, and so it's more of an instrument. It's called a room simulator, but it's really just another instrument or a way to to to edge their shape one way. It's just shaping it, and so he happens to like the way that that one sounds.

0:48:28 - Jason Snell
It may even be a literally one setting on the room simulator.

0:48:31 - Alex Lindsay
Right, right, and he's like no, no, we don't touch the.

0:48:35 - Jason Snell
This is how it just gets used like that, and now he can save that as a preset. It's great.

0:48:39 - Leo Laporte
I have turned on my deep cave room simulator. Does that improve the overall sound of the show?

0:48:46 - Alex Lindsay
Makes it sound like you're in a cave. All I can tell you is that we spent so much time.

0:48:49 - Jason Snell
Producers are crying now. The producers are crying.

0:48:54 - Alex Lindsay
There's a lot of work that I do to get rid of that sound from the thing.

0:49:12 - Leo Laporte
So that's part of why I don't like today. Did you know? Maybe you did? Do you have a macbook m4 macbook?

0:49:14 - Jason Snell
pro for review. Jason, I do. Did you note that it has a quantum dot display? I did not, it just looks real good.

0:49:17 - Leo Laporte
That's all I know. I did not run, that's how you know I mean those displays are so good?

0:49:20 - Jason Snell
But apparently, yes, apparently. If you use this UFO test or whatever, you can see that there they've switched from their old coating to a quantum dot coating. The issue with quantum dot and quantum dot, if I mean, I don't know if we've got the time to even talk about it, but the technology is bananas, like the name would suggest, this is not fake. It's using quantum mechanics, essentially to filter the colors that go through the display. But it sounds like Apple wanted to use Quantum Dot, but that it contains some elements that are toxic and they're like that's not fitting with our environmental pledges, so we're not gonna do it. And then it sounds like these macbook pros are using a quantum dot coding that is not using that toxic element.

0:50:06 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, good for them, okay uh, the idea we've talked about it on scott wilkinson's home theater geeks show scott quantum dots uh came out. Uh, samsung had the q led q led tv using quantum dot technology and the idea is a better color. Uh, gamut, I think um ross young.

0:50:27 - Jason Snell
It's filtering the different wavelengths in order to get the very particular color on each dot, which is using actually using the, the light and quantum physics to get them. So it's not a it's, it's, it's wild stuff to get. Uh, you know very, very specific colors filtered through so it's still an ips lcd screen?

0:50:46 - Leo Laporte
yeah, but the quantum dot layer replaces a a different ksf phosphor layer right they put.

0:50:52 - Jason Snell
And no cadmium. Cadmium is the no cadmium. Keep the cadmium out cadmium.

0:50:58 - Leo Laporte
Uh, young says better color gamut and better motion performance, and one commenter said this is from nine to five. Mac pixel response is clearly significantly faster when the test ufo motion tests are seen side by side. Nice, so you can go to the apple store and run test ufo if you want.

0:51:19 - Jason Snell
Uh, okay, so that's like a oh look, nice, I mean they were already the best um displays that apple has ever made. I'm sorry they're even better, like literally trigger warning or something when I showed this test ufo page.

0:51:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it'll make caution, computer explode. Caution could cause seizures. Uh, uh, yeah, okay, so it's just a web-based test. That's kind of kind of cool and you can see how different frame rates make a difference in the progression of a cartoon ufo over the screen so that's.

0:51:54 - Jason Snell
That's kind of neat and punch the monkey while you're there it does look like that, doesn't?

0:51:58 - Leo Laporte
it does a little bit, yeah, flashbacks from that era. That's the flashback a little bit, really a flashback a little hamster dance going on in there too they should have the hamster dance benchmark.

0:52:07 - Jason Snell
That would be a great one. Yeah, let's sign me up for that one that actually, you know, might, might actually work I love the hamster dance. It's great. Yeah, sure, who doesn't in there? Check your quantum dots with the hamster dance?

0:52:20 - Leo Laporte
I love it, yeah uh, apple might have a fairly, uh, big fine from the uk over icloud. Uh, according to tech crunch, uh, apple faces a icow icloud monopoly compensation claim worth 3.8 billion dollars. The claim was filed by a consumer rights group called which, which, uh, under the competition law, it's a class action lawsuit 40 million users of iCloud. They're looking for three billion dollars in compensation damage. Sorry, three billion pounds, which is 3.8 billion dollars in compensation damages. No idea whether this will. It's basically a class action lawsuit.

0:53:04 - Andy Ihnatko
And there's a point to it. They're basically saying that all the good stuff, that, because Apple does all of its core services syncing through iCloud if you want more space for your photos, if you want more space for backups, if you want more space for anything, you have only one vendor. You can go to Apple and they keep raising their prices and you can't do anything about it. So the point of the lawsuit is that why do I have to be tied only to Apple? Why can't I choose the cloud service that I want? So it's not like a government agency.

It's not like an EU trying to apply a fine, but still this isn't just like some fly-by-night lawyer trying to get a loss of it this is something trying to use apple photos with another cloud provider.

0:53:44 - Jason Snell
It's really designed for icloud exactly and well, and, and I think backup is a really great example where, on the mac, you can choose your backup. You know backup system of of choice, but on ios, icloud backup is the only one that will do the job. And so they've got you. You know, they've got it locked down. And again, I don't think any of us would say Apple shouldn't offer those services. I think the idea there is that wouldn't it be nice if there was some competition? But there isn't. Apple just hasn't built it that way. And it can be like again would I choose a different service over Apple for photos? Probably not right, probably not. It's probably very convenient, but I don't have the choice right now.

0:54:26 - Alex Lindsay
Let's have a less secure and clunky version of what Apple does and have it as another option.

0:54:32 - Jason Snell
But would I roll my Backblaze account in? If I could do Backblaze on my iPhone, maybe I would right, so I don't know if I could do backwards on my iPhone, maybe I would right.

0:54:41 - Andy Ihnatko
So I don't know. And similar to like the conversations that we've been having about upgradable storage on the new Mac mini and other machines. It's like why do I have to pay like a four times at least markup for storage? Well, because Apple will not let me put in my own upgradable storage. I would certainly not be choosing Apple's prices for internal storage if I had any option whatsoever, and that's maybe why Apple does not want to let me do that. And it's the same sort of thing. It's like Apple Cloud Storage. It's not a really great value unless you add the intangible value of it's all under Apple and again, the Apple. Privacy is certainly a thing, but I have all my photos being backed up automatically to Google Photos and it costs me barely anything to store these things in Google Photos and you have to launch Google Photos though each oh, because you're on a Pixel, you don't.

0:55:33 - Leo Laporte
Well but on an iPhone you have to launch it.

0:55:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but also I, like you, know it's also something I can launch through any web browser, so it's also something I can launch through any web browser. So it's okay. I mean, it's not as streamlined, but the fact that I'm even using Google Photos to back up like I've got a 32-gig card of a parade that I shot and I just want to empty out the card I'm even using Google Photos to back that up because the storage is so affordable. Yeah, when you buy a Pixel you get free storage. Well, that's not for the Pixel.

I think it only affects what you're actually shooting with the Pixel Things that I upload, sideload stuff, but the data plans that they have are a lot more attractive than what it would cost for me to do the same thing on Apple Storage. So if it gives I don't know the law in the UK, but if it but just like these sort of things have worked out in the past, if it nudges Apple to say we've got a lot of unhappy customers, we could avoid a lot more trouble in the future and make our customers more happy by revisiting our pricing for certain things. That would be a wonderful outcome for this. Yeah.

0:56:38 - Leo Laporte
Is iCloud storage comparable to others? I mean the, the prices of it? I don't know, because I use that it is. I have Apple one. I mean, that's really what they're saying.

0:56:45 - Jason Snell
No, it is you're strongly.

Instead of they have Apple one or something sometimes it trails behind a little bit, but in general, the prices have it used to be that they were more expensive.

But honestly, what happened is Amazon and Google and a bunch of companies made a lot of like cheap or unlimited storage available, and then a few years went by and they're like, yeah, no, that's really expensive and we're going to need to charge you. And so every year when I write a book about the photos app and I check in and like two or three years ago, I realized, oh, this whole sidebar about comparing the prices is irrelevant now because the prices are all pretty much the same. There are some deals and it depends and yeah, if you're an Apple one, you roll it into your bundle and all of that. But in general, it is the rare place where Apple, I feel like, isn't charging twice for the same amount of stuff. And that's because Google kind of set their prices right and Amazon got rid of their tier where you could upload as many photos as you wanted for free, as long as it was below a certain resolution there, because they all realized that's really expensive. And so, yeah, apple actually competes pretty well there.

0:57:51 - Leo Laporte
I've asked my artificial intelligence assistant to make us a table of iCloud, google Drive and OneDrive prices, price comparison and yeah, apple's definitely competitive right in there. Most people, in fact, I've told I think I told my mom or somebody when they got a new phone just get the 99 cent a month iCloud so that you can back up the phone and your photos. That's 50 gigs, $3 a month for 200 gigs and many of us have two terabytes because we have Apple One.

0:58:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and pro tip if you have a loved one who you're worried about them backing them up, you can share it, you can put them on your family plan and then they get access to your pool. And that's what I did with my mom.

0:58:34 - Leo Laporte
I had my mom paying Apple 99 cents a month and at one point I was like I'm just putting you in the family paying Apple 99 cents a month and at one point I was like I'm just putting you in the family, Stop paying them. You're my family now. It's fine. Congratulations, mom.

0:58:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, she can also, I guess, use our apps.

0:58:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. She's not going to do any of that, but her backups are happening. Apple did recently add six terabyte and 12 terabyte tiers, which is wow.

0:58:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you get a lot of photos.

0:58:55 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like I do have to. I feel like I can't do without having both Apple iCloud storage and also paying for Google Cloud storage, and I think I'm still paying for Dropbox for some reason that I'd have to do another investigation to remember.

0:59:11 - Alex Lindsay
It would be nice for you to simply say that.

0:59:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I want to buy one provider and just simply connect it, and that would be wonderful.

0:59:16 - Alex Lindsay
My problem with Dropbox? I pay for Dropbox too. Connect it and that would be wonderful. My problem with dropbox? I pay. I pay for dropbox too, and the problem is is that I have to set up a computer and then set the drive up on the computer and let it sync. Because of the problem. And they've made so much money. Dropbox has made thousands of dollars from me over years.

Yes, because subscriptions they won't let you say, grab the whole folder and download it. You have to like do the sync thing and it's on my list. It's like and it gets higher every day, like every time they send me another, like you paid 75. I'm like, oh my gosh you know and yeah, so but that's but yeah actually you want to really know annoying.

0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, try using windows with microsoft's one drive, or rather, try using windows without microsoft's one drive. They harass you to death and a new install of windows is particularly. I found out because I got one of the new snapdragon development kits.

I just want to see how snapdragon compared with apple's m series. And uh, if you watched windows weekly that week, you saw me struggling because, uh, one drive just decided it was going to index the entire drive and it spent hours, uh, doing it. Finally, paul showed me how to just turn it off permanently. So if you could be more intrusive, I guess is what I'm saying, apple's, not as Apple. Apple has a good excuse. I think that this is Apple's excuse in many cases. It's easier for users. We just don't want to bother them. Just make it simple yeah, sure, and it's money in our pocket and I want them happy to time versus money. You know, like it's kind, sure, and it's money in our pocket and I'm happy to time versus money.

1:00:43 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like it's kind of like there's a lot, a lot of apple users. Just they value their time as the same as, like you know, and they don't want to spend a bunch of time working on this, because that that equates to something yeah for them, and I think that and I think that that's the but I feel like should they have a higher, low, higher free tier?

1:01:00 - Leo Laporte
Is five gigs enough for the free tier? Google offers 15 gigs.

1:01:03 - Jason Snell
Sure, I mean sure. I think it should probably be related to how many devices you've got connected and how much their storage is and I feel like, right, they could probably scale it there.

They're making enough money on the hardware that they could give away a little more for free, and you know cause? Really, if you're going to do your whole photo library, you're going to need to pay them and that's fine. But I think Alex is exactly right. This is what we were talking about.

About the home stuff, too is like and this happens when, when we all talk about this and when I write stories about this, it always comes up where you're like you know Apple selling this thing and it costs whatever $500, and you just plug it in and you configure it and it works with all your stuff and it's great and then somebody comes in, they roll in the door and they're like well, actually, if you get a Docker container on a server that you run in your house and then you take a Raspberry Pi and you attach this camera to it and it only costs $100, so you could save all that money. And the answer is yeah, you could do that and if that is fun for you and I am a nerd too but there are moments where I'm like I just am going to pay for the Apple thing and it's easy and I don't want to bother with all that nonsense.

1:02:12 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, my problem is that anything that I do that I don't like to do, I equate to how much I'm getting paid, what my hourly is.

Like I just literally think about like so. So like I just go, if, if Alex's rate is very high, so I just go, I go, and I learned this from my father. My father was a lawyer and he makes. His rate was much higher than mine is, and uh, but he's, I said like, why don't you wash your own car? And he's like, cause I don't like washing my own car, and if I don't like anything, it's the hour. I think about my hourly and it's cheaper to pay you $20 to wash my car. So so the. So I think about that and I think a lot of Apple users, I mean, I don't maybe not consciously think about it, but I definitely think about like I don't want to do that.

And that means like, what would my hour like if it's gonna take me two hours? It's X number of dollars, that that that I add on to the cost of owning that piece of equipment. Like literally, I just think of it as it's, that plus the, the buildup, the build of it, is the cost of the, you know, cost of ownership, you know, and and I think that, um, and so I, I guess I kind of feel like, when people are suing Apple over this stuff, I'm kind of like well, when you buy you know it's not like Apple suddenly snuck up and did all these things. When you buy an Apple device, you're kind of buying into the, into the experience you know like, and if you don't like it, go buy something else.

1:03:28 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I mean it's, it's I. I do always like the idea of Apple having to having to explain themselves and having to do such thing in a way that's not emotional, that's rational and so and it's to be fair, like sometimes something that is not right can go unchallenged for a long time before all of the elements come together to say I'm going to have to ask you to spend some time with your lawyers to explain to an impartial third party why this behavior is okay. I mean, all of your points are absolutely valid and I don't think that this should go to the point where Apple has to change their patterns here at all. It would be nice if they offered alternatives, but again, that would require so much reengineering of iCloud, disrupted so many developers. Okay.

When it first came out the first time, apple put their foot down and said okay, you have a tic-tac-toe game.

We are not going to allow you to put it on the App Store unless it supports iCloud and the amount of developers that there was so much gnashing of teeth.

Because we have solutions that work great. Icloud does not give us any advantages whatsoever and having to support it now is causing us three to four months of heartache that we would much rather apply towards actually improving our product in ways that our users have been demanding for a long, long time. Imagine having to do that at the low level that would be required to re-engineer iCloud for every single Apple service that uses it. But again, I like the idea of Apple and Microsoft and Google occasionally having to step in front of a court and say here is why we've made this decision, and in doing so, the people inside Apple who might have been arguing all along that maybe it's time to increase the free tier or maybe it's time to revisit our pricing structure. They now have another argument to be to be made when they're in the conference room having this discussion that they might not have had in years before let's take a break.

1:05:27 - Leo Laporte
Come back with more. Our esteemed panel, Jason snell from six colorscom, wgbh, boston's, andy inotko in the library, and uh, and of course, alex lindsey. Uh, do you have an opinion, alex, on the uh stanford versus cal football game coming up this weekend? Go steelers steelers had a great game. Almost the same colors actually. So yes, it was a good game. We have another game on th A towel Terrible towel Steelers outfit.

1:06:05 - Alex Lindsay
What Go ahead? Everyone else tries to do the towel and it doesn't work out. No, there's only one Terrible Tower, the funny thing is the Steelers played with the Commanders and the Commanders tried to make up their own towels to keep up. Still, half of their stadium was full of Steeler fans with Terrible Towers.

1:06:24 - Andy Ihnatko
You can't invent a tradition. I know you couldn't have planned the Terrible Tower. What was that? That sports journalist, myron Cope? Exactly, he just basically he did not think that I'm going to cause a revolution, but he did In Pittsburgh.

1:06:41 - Alex Lindsay
If you can't figure out what to get someone for christmas, it's totally acceptable. Just to get him another towel, like oh, here's a Terrible Tower. And we're like okay, okay.

1:06:47 - Leo Laporte
Here's some blue angel steelers fans. Here's some astronaut steelers fans. I love.

1:06:54 - Andy Ihnatko
I only recently learned that. So he was smart enough to trademark it, but not so that he can shut out anybody else who's trying to do yellow towels. It's a charity thing, so that makes basically not only you buying like a legitimate towel, but also you're benefiting an important charity like wow, that is super, super awesome.

1:07:09 - Alex Lindsay
It's really cool. Yeah, it's fun. It's a fun to watch a stealer game, especially when they're at home, because the whole place is just bonkers, just a bonker place to watch football games uh, all right.

Our show today, not brought to you by the Terrible Tower or by myron cope, but an equally uh useful thing actually Zocdoc.

1:07:31 - Leo Laporte
Now, when you need a doctor, uh, you know what do you do. How do you find a good? You ask a friend, ask a neighbor, go online. You know that's kind of a crap shoot. There's some things it's okay in life that they're a little bit uh iffy. Trying a new type of, uh, non-dairy milk in your coffee, uh, maybe buying something uh on an on an instagram ad in the middle of the night gas station sushi they know me so well. But finding the right doctor, yeah, you don't want to take a chance.

Thankfully, there's Zocdoc. It is such a great way to find a doctor. You've got more options than you know. It's a free app. You go to the website and do it too where you could search and compare high-quality in-network doctors. Choose the right one for your needs. Click to instantly book an appointment.

I mean, I'm talking about in-network appointments with more than 100,000 healthcare providers across every specialty. It's not just MDs, by the way mental health, dental health, eye care, skin care and much more. You could filter for doctors who take your insurance who are located nearby, who are a good fit for whatever your medical need may be. And here's the thing I like the best about Zocdocc you can see actual, verified patient reviews and ratings, and that is so useful, not just for telling you that this is a doctor whose patients love them, a doctor who gets the job done, but also the style of the doctor Friendly office, great bedside manner or maybe very quick and to the point, which I kind of prefer you get to choose. Plus, Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same-day appointments. So stop putting off those doctor appointments. You know you need to go.

zocdoc.com what is this strange mole on my hand? zocdoc.com/macbreak. Search for dermatologist. zocdoc.com/macbreak to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor. Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/macbreak. We thank ZocDoc so much. I I use them, uh, and it's really handy. Uh, you can say look, this is the insurance, this is what I need. Can I get somebody now? zocdoc.com/macbreak. And if you eat gas, discord says, and if you eat that gas station, sushi you may need. You may actually need Zocdoc sooner than you think. Um, let's see what else.

Apple has removed another app from the Russian app store at the request of Russian regulator ross, come nods or another radio free europe app is, uh is gone. They've removed others before. I guess what are you going to say? They've removed VPN apps. Could they do it? Radio Free Europe slash RL was placed on Russia's list of undesirable organizations in February. Rl is the app for Siberiarealities and Northrealities, and this is from Radio Free Europe. You know, I understand Radio Free Europe has always been kind of a thorn in the side with the former Soviet Union and they don't want the apps on there.

1:10:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yep, again, they got to do what they got to do, even though they're not selling iphones in yeah, in russia anymore um, yep, they pull off some podcasts as well, yeah can I say, okay, interject that.

there's also a piece of news that just uh came across. Uh well, after we started recording, apple has just released a flurry of really important security updates for iPhone, mac, iPad, vision OS, everything. There's a Google discovered a zero day. That is in the wild and I've been reading for the past half hour about it. Apparently it has been used in the wild against Intel-based Macs. One of the flaws I'm reading a summary from PCMag here One of the flaws can cause a cross-site scripting attack through Apple's WebKit browser engine, which is used in Safari and web browsers for iOS and iPadOS.

The resulting attack can inject malicious computer code into a legitimate website or app. And there's a second vulnerability that can trigger Apple's JavaScript core software to run malicious computer code without the user's permission. Apple's advisory suggests hackers use both flaws together to target older Intel-based Macs, which the company started transitioning away from in 2020 in favor of using its own ARM-based M chips. But yeah, I have links on the show notes At supportit. There's a support page, supportapplecom. So update to Vision OS 2.1.1, ios 18.1.1, iPad OS 18.1.1, ios 17 has been updated. Mac OS Sequoia 15.1.1 have been released. So obviously it's something that is affecting Safari render of the Safari engine. So it was very, very important, so don't wait on that.

1:12:39 - Leo Laporte
Yep, I see it on my iPhone right now, so 18.1.1. And it sounds like Mac everywhere, right?

1:12:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Everything that does Safari apparently.

1:12:51 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I wonder, if you don't use Safari. Here's the iPhone Important security fixes Update now. By the way, I love this iPhone view on Sequoia, isn't that great?

1:13:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I can pull up my iPhone, I could be scared on two platforms at once.

1:13:09 - Leo Laporte
If I click update now, does it update? Oh, it does. Look at that. That's kind of cool.

1:13:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Remote management for an admin.

1:13:18 - Leo Laporte
And now it's in use and I can't do anything with it. Okay, maybe you can't do the update directly. All right, thank you for that important update. Safari has a problem and it's in the wild. That's what a zero day means. It's currently out there.

1:13:38 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the worst case, not only in the wild. Wild, but also means that they've it's been used by somebody, so yeah uh, I guess my watch doesn't have safari, so I'm probably arcade there yeah, there's no watch of us updating this update. It's sweet uh 18.1.1. 15 hackers are trying to access your watch and change the scholars color scheme to something that doesn't actually match the standard.

1:14:04 - Leo Laporte
Three color zorn palette damn, don't have to worry about your apple monsters. Yeah, you're safe on the apple blue and brown oh my god, I guess vision vision pro you'd have to update vision os.

1:14:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, no, there's a vision. Os is updated to 2.1.1. Wow, wow.

1:14:24 - Leo Laporte
Okie dokie. Weirdly, people are starting to get refunds for AppleCare Plus many years after an Apple trade-in. This is 9to5Mac reporting. Dear customer, I would love to get this. Our records indicate you're eligible for a refund associated with your AppleCare Plus agreement for your iPhone 12 Pro Max. You return to trade it in and this person got a $200 refund. So check it's in some cases more than it would be for your unused portion of AppleCare. So I guess if you traded in your phone and you had apple care plus and it was still running, apple didn't automatically refund you at the time. But now they're. They're getting around to it. Somebody did an audit it's.

1:15:10 - Andy Ihnatko
It's nice that this didn't come from any sort of a lawsuit or any sort of responding to nine to five mac or mac rumors discovered something it's like no, that's, someone was doing their job. Someone realized that, oh, we owe a whole bunch of people money. We should get on that. That's good. That's good for apple nice.

1:15:27 - Leo Laporte
Uh, let's see what else apple. This is from the indian express. I don't usually do stories from the indian express, but they had a. I guess they had an interview with tom boger, vice president of mac product marketing, uh saying, uh, we don't leave any money on the table and we're wait a minute, we are not a merchant silicon company trying to leave nothing on the table. In other words, we're not going to sell. We do not build chips and sell them to other people. We do not make money that way. Folks who do make money that way have the burden of adding margin on top of whatever they buy.

1:16:06 - Jason Snell
He's obviously talking about amd, intel, nvidia and, uh, qualcomm it also goes to how they uh their philosophy of building chips, which is that they they build the chip for specific Apple products to use that chip, whereas you know, if you're making a product that you sell, you need to build it with certain specs that you maybe have idealized, and then you put it out on the market and people buy it, or maybe you work with some partners to make sure you meet their specs. Apple, you know, when they designed the M4, they're like all right, this is going to go in the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air and the low-end MacBook Pro and the iMac. Like, they know exactly what computers are going to use the chips that they design. They're basically planned together and that gives them some power and flexibility that other companies don't have because they have to, even if they've got a tight, like.

Apple used to have a tight relationship with Intel in the early days and they they designed the chip that went in the first MacBook air together. But even then Intel was like, yeah, but we got to sell this to everybody else too. So what are we going to make our design decisions about? And Apple just doesn't have to do that.

1:17:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, in fact, specifically, it doesn't have to do that. Yeah, in fact, specifically. They said our secret weapon is our ability to co-design these amazing chips with the system teams and the product designers, as they are imagining possibilities, which is one of the reasons they are, I mean, here. They are four years in and they have already considerably exceeded the performance of the first edition.

1:17:36 - Jason Snell
If you're a chip designer, isn't that a great feeling to know exactly where your chip is going to be used? I would assume, instead of having to be like oh, the marketing people say that the partners say and all of this and it's like no.

1:17:47 - Alex Lindsay
Once they get alignment on it inside Apple, that's it well, and what's funny is the only other competition to them in the arm area was from people that came out of apple.

1:17:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if they hadn't, if they hadn't uh lost, lost those, those, those guys, uh, then no one would be anywhere, you know, but that proves the point because, yeah, okay, these same guys went to nuvia, which was then acquired by qualcomm, and qualcomm has released this new snapdragon elite uh, with that technology. But that's old technology, right no, it's not.

There's a hand and it's still a general purpose chip for a variety of machines, so it doesn't have that built-in ability to design specifically for the hardware. Yeah, and I think you can see that in the in the snapdragon elite. It's good. It just doesn't keep apples already ahead of it with the. They compare it to the M three because they can't compare it to the M four.

1:18:38 - Alex Lindsay
And you've and Tim Tim's said things like you know, well, the phone still has a lot of legacy components. Like, eventually, I think Apple wants to make the whole thing. Like you know, it's just like you open up the, you, I think at some point, if Apple's vision is you open it up and there's a display, there's a chip, there's a battery, you know and there's, and it does all the things that it, it needs to do there, and so I think that that's the um, they, they want to internalize that because it allows them to innovate. I mean, apple is not good at integrating with other people. Uh, what they're really good at is vertical integration, you know, and that's and they, and this is a huge advantage. And as all these components keep on getting smaller and need to be faster and with less power, it's very, very hard to take components and you know, kind of Swiss Army, knife them together and try to have them compete. Someone asked about, someone was asking about the. An office hour was asking about the Aura. Remember the, or is it Aura?

1:19:33 - Leo Laporte
Aura Ring. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no the, the aurora, the, the um.

1:19:37 - Alex Lindsay
It was. Aura was our, or ara, or area, was it project ara? All right, yeah, that was from google. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're like why didn't that work? And I was like that was because really phone design it's really exciting, except that all those pieces are not going to work together forever. You know, it's just like and was. It was just too complicated.

1:19:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Or ever. I don't think they ever got like a straight up. I don't think they did. Their system never posted. It was a great idea.

1:20:01 - Leo Laporte
It was. It came out of Motorola when Google acquired them.

1:20:04 - Andy Ihnatko
I have a list of ideas that I love, even though I know that they're not great ideas and nobody wants them, and modular phones is definitely one of them.

1:20:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, I love the idea. The footsteps is the framework and the framework laptop is a success. That is roughly the same idea.

1:20:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it doesn't have to be waterproof. And also it's not a single package that has to be as compact as possible. And also, people are more uh, they're, they're, they're more attracted to the idea of why do I have to get rid of this entire laptop, when really all I want is I want to switch from Intel to AMD. Okay, that's very, that's a very, that's a huge, that's a huge change.

1:20:44 - Leo Laporte
But it's amazing because you can do that with a framework. You can take an Intel framework and put an AMD chip in it, which is really the idea.

1:20:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the idea that you upgrade. You can have bought a laptop three years ago and now your needs change and now you really need something that's more heavy-duty, more powerful, and it's not just adding more memory, adding more storage, changing out the wanting an HDMI port built in or wanting an Ethernet port built in, so now you can basically take the entire daughterboard, swap it out. But then they're also willing to say well, gee, you still have this three-year-old Intel chip. That's still perfectly fine for a lot of stuff. We will let you put it in a case and use it as a thin desktop. It's like, honestly, I have not been tempted to get a Windows laptop since Apple got its act, together with a MacBook. But if I got one, oh my goodness would I love to have one of their laptops, because it's just such a great idea.

1:21:41 - Leo Laporte
I had a 13 for a long time and ran Linux on it. I gave it away. I don't know who got it and it was part of Leo's garage sale at one point. Somebody has it and I hope they've treated it well and upgraded it to AMD and all of that. Yeah, somebody has it and I hope they've treated it well and upgraded it to AMD and all of that. Yeah, yeah, so it's possible. I mean, modular is possible. There was a lot of thinking after framework came out that maybe others other manufacturers would do this. But no, they all see the same advantage Apple does with a with a single kind of highly compact device it's you can make it better, cheaper, faster yeah, I mean we can put things together with glue instead of screws.

1:22:15 - Andy Ihnatko
That's much, much cheaper. Yeah, and if, to be frank, if the public were 100 clamoring and at the castle walls for upgradable storage, upgradable uh ram on every laptop, no company would even think about not doing it. Uh, you can see, even on windows. You only see that because you can. There's a Windows laptop for every market out there and a lot of the market is people who are buying them by the hundreds and they need to be able to. They can't just like can an entire laptop because it needs to be deployed to a department that needs more storage. So I don't think that's it's an evildoers sort of perspective. But I like the idea that if anybody has ever said, oh, but it's impossible to do that, to do upgradable storage, upgradable RAM in a modern laptop, that you would hate the trade-offs Like OK, here is a framework laptop, show me what trade-offs.

I'm giving up for this.

1:23:10 - Leo Laporte
It's not unified memory. I mean, let's face it, so it's a little slower, it's off on the memory bus instead of in the in the die apple has some advantages there yeah, it's, it's well, it's interesting.

1:23:21 - Andy Ihnatko
There's I don't know if I put it in like last week's show notes or the week after there is a master mac hacker that uh has a shop, where uh that has a shop where they will modify a motherboard, uh, on an on the old Intel platform. So if you want to have modular storage, it will have modular storage, and he released a video just a couple of weeks ago in which he actually created an upgrade platform for storage on Apple Silicon Macs. So it's not as though it can suddenly take. It's not something you can do yourself. You would have to ship, you would have to send the laptop to his shop to have this thing surgically grafted in, but they don't have to cut anything. He found room for it inside the case. I don't know what it does for heating or what it does for ventilation inside the thing, but at that point you can buy memory modules that he creates and upgrade it whenever you want, up to two terabytes, and he released some casual benchmarks that said that well, it's not as though, yeah, it's slower than unified memory, but it's not as though, like you will really notice it unless you are doing some pretty intensive stuff. Um, so I don't know.

It's the only thing that I would use that as an example of is again to oppose the idea of oh well, it's impossible to do it what apple is doing, like without having replaceable storage. I think that they've simply decided that. Here's the complexity we would have to add to our own engineering to make this work. Here's the complexity we would have to add in order to support people actually doing it outside of apple. And here's the numbers of how many more macs we would sell macbooks we would sell because we have this feature, and that last number was just not high enough to justify any of the other trouble that's going to have to go through speaking of trouble, uh, there was some trouble in indonesia.

1:25:04 - Leo Laporte
The government indonesia was was going to ban the iphone 16. It wasn't even clear if they meant new iphone fix 16s coming in for sale in the country or tourists carrying iPhone 16s. There was some concern over that.

1:25:22 - Andy Ihnatko
The government minister that's in charge of this. I saw the headlines and I thought well, let's take a look at the actual statement in the Indonesian press. And he actually said I don't have the quote in front of me, but it was like and also, not only is it not lawful to sell it in Indonesia, also, it's not licensed. It's not licensed to work on our networks. And he's actually said if you see somebody using an iPhone 16, you should report it to the police. Jeez.

Which makes me wonder if you're just a tourist who came in.

1:25:51 - Leo Laporte
There are a lot of tourists in the bali and other where other places carrying iphones uh, yeah. So apple, which obviously I didn't like this, initially offered them 10 million dollars.

1:26:03 - Andy Ihnatko
They are now proposing to invest almost 100 million dollars in indonesia over two years uh, the original kerfuffle was that they had made a there was some sort of agreement of some billions of dollars that they were going to invest they've. Indonesia felt that they fell short by like a small amount and they basically lost their wig over it and they said oh no, you're cheaters, you're liars. No, we're not going to allow you to operate here. And given that, like Indonesia is what, like the fourth, fifth most populous nation, it is a huge market Like Apple is very well motivated to make sure that people can still spend their money on Apple things in Indonesia.

1:26:40 - Leo Laporte
They say the iPhone hasn't met a 40% domestic content requirement and that means I mean, that's pretty hard for the iPhone to do that. I don't know what country you could do that in, except China, but I guess apple's gonna or india, yeah, because they're building them now. Well, they're assembling them in india, but are they indian parts, is the question.

1:27:04 - Alex Lindsay
I have to double check that, yeah, yeah it's a little all over the place, I mean yeah most of these things are get assembled and, yeah, I don't think they're making everything from scratch. I think you can assemble it.

1:27:12 - Leo Laporte
Assemble it in brazil or india or indonesia, but I don't think they're making everything from scratch. I think you can assemble it. Assemble it in brazil or india or indonesia, but you gotta have somebody who can make all those little, little fiddly bits, yeah well in taiwan is obviously taiwan makes the chips yeah, or the uh, the main cpu anyway, that's that is super significant.

1:27:26 - Andy Ihnatko
like 20 to 25 percent of the next year or so, I think 25 of all iphones sold everywhere are going to have, are going to have, indian origin and that's up from like just 12% the year before. So Apple is clearly moving things up, like the largest, like the Samsung of India just bought a huge iPhone manufacturer. So basically, now there's sorry thank you very much. So now there's competition between Foxconn and this other company to again ramp up, ramp up a supply, ramp up manufacturing. So yeah, that's a pretty big deal.

1:27:59 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and there's, there's obviously a concern of tariffs.

1:28:02 - Leo Laporte
Yes, so, like you know, like that's a the baron barons, and I saw an article in barons that says it could add 240 to the cost of an iphone and, uh, president-elect trump could actually make that happen on january 20th with this, the signature of a pen, because, uh, he has emergency powers when it comes to china and tariffs.

1:28:23 - Alex Lindsay
So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how you change that. So far, uh, apple's been pretty good at avoiding these. Oh you know tim.

1:28:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Tim talked their way out of it the last time, I'm sure. Sure that they still pay a tariff, but it was way, way lower. Also, he's talking about 60% tariffs on all China experts from China, but it doesn't affect, like it's not 60% of the retail purchase price of an iPhone. It doesn't involve like cost of marketing overheads, a whole bunch of other stuff like that, so it's a smaller percentage. Doesn't involve like cost of marketing overheads, a whole bunch of other stuff like that, so it's a smaller percentage.

So the $240 is, if they were forced to pay a full 60% per unit of phones that land in the United States, I suspect that that would be a lot lower because of, again, tim's diplomacy and also being able to land a bunch of phones from India. Who knows what their capacity is going to be like by the times. The tariffs become a really big deal Because I think that this I was reading about that new acquisition and they're manufacturing something to six to 10 million iPhones per beat and how I'm not sure how if any one supplier in India could provide, could keep up with iPhone demand in the United States. So Apple certainly wouldn't go for two-tier Congratulations. You happened to get one in the lottery that was shipped from India, so you get here's another $800 back. It's going to be a big mess.

1:29:49 - Leo Laporte
Adam Levine, writing in Barron, says 45 to 50% of the cost of an iPhone is imported content. 60% of that would come to a tax of 216 to $240 per iPhone 16. So it is not on the total price, you're right, but it is. But there's enough of it. Yeah, it's all up in the air. No one knows what's gonna happen.

1:30:13 - Andy Ihnatko
You know the tech. The tactic that Tim supposedly took last time was that, hey look, if you make it harder for us to sell iPhones in the United States, given how much market share that we have in the United States, you're basically handing a gift to Samsung. And you don't want to hand a gift to Samsung, do you? President? Exactly, and that was the chisel that he used to try to get some. Get some leeway there.

1:30:40 - Jason Snell
So yeah, yeah, it's politics and deal-making. Tim Cook has did it four years ago.

1:30:44 - Alex Lindsay
We'll do it again. I think that that I?

1:30:48 - Jason Snell
I mean that's when people say oh, how dare Tim cook congratulate Donald Trump? It's like congratulate donald trump is like it's politics man and it's their business and this is how they have to do it. Is you gotta figure out a way? And that's why he was, you know, at that austin factory where they assembled mac pros and like since 2013, but all that stuff, yeah it's okay, yeah, from 100 chinese components, yeah right.

1:31:08 - Leo Laporte
uh. Mark german writing in bloomberg, says cook will be able to town. A large number of iphones now made in india and of course, india is run by Narendra Modi, a Trump ally. He also can continue to argue taxing the iPhone will only help non-American rivals, as you mentioned. Of course, the new Mac Pro launches presumably in 2025. I imagine we'll see another little tour of the factory and you know that's good PR for both parties and probably an important concession.

There's also a new Arizona plant for building chips for the legacy nodes. This is part of the Chips Act, the Chips and Science Act, but of course Trump can claim it for himself if he goes and visits the plant. There's a new campus in North Carolina. Gurman points out that's been on and off again Slow down the work on the development this year, but says it still plans to open the office. Another way to show Apple's commitment to the US would be to finish that. Yeah, he's done all this. He's done all this and Tim Apple is well-liked, I think, in the White House. Mark points out there was reason for Apple not to like the Biden administration, including Biden not stepping in in the Massimo debacle.

1:32:28 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and also, I mean I think the math with Europe will change when Trump's in, and Trump may use that as a, as a wedge, you know like he may want to use it as like a telling Europeans to back off. You know, it's a fun way for him to swing a swing a stick.

1:32:45 - Leo Laporte
So Apple is currently being sued by the justice department for antitrust.

1:32:49 - Alex Lindsay
Uh although it does look like the, the folks that they're bringing in aren't much different than Lena Khan, and, which is really interesting, because a lot of folks in silicon valley thought that that. I mean, one of the big reasons they want to get rid of the biden administration is they want to get rid of lena khan and it and uh, it doesn't sound like the incoming, uh uh fcc appointee is going to be that much different, so they may not have gotten what the fcc is a heart the fcc had.

1:33:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Do you mean the FTC? You mean the FTC? I'm sorry.

1:33:14 - Alex Lindsay
FTC, sorry the.

1:33:15 - Andy Ihnatko
FCC has a horror show.

1:33:17 - Alex Lindsay
But yeah, in all of the cases around this you know going after and I apologize, yeah, not FCC but FTC. But in all of those areas where Apple and some of the other tech companies were under pressure, it doesn't look like that pressure is going to let up that much in the new administration. The other tech companies were under pressure. It doesn't look like that pressure is going to let up that much in the new administration. It seems that the people they're bringing in are going to be as not maybe as aggressive, but close to it. So I don't think Apple got a lot of space there.

1:33:48 - Leo Laporte
Reuters reported that the ads for iPhone workers for Fox india were were a little bit discriminatory. Um, apparently those ads ended after the reuters report. Apple has no comment. The uh ads for iphone workers in india said that women must be on applying for the positions with foxconn, must be unmarried, age 18 to 32, which obviously you couldn't do that in the us uh, but that's very specific it's kind of totally specific, yeah, uh, anyway, that apple put the kibosh on that, I think pretty quickly.

Um, although, as reuters points out, uh, it's not clear if the ads ended or the discriminatory hiring ended. Ended or the discriminatory hiring ended. Yes, maybe the ads didn't continue, but the uh, the rules did. We don't know. Um, uh, let's see apple is starting to sell ads in apple news.

1:34:45 - Andy Ihnatko
That's interesting they used to have the third party do it, but now they're doing it all in-house. That's interesting. It means that they're definitely muscling in. They're definitely trying to make uh, uh advertising a bigger part of the wedge on uh, on a future, uh, six colors chart this is a story, uh, from Sarah Fisher in Axios.

1:35:04 - Leo Laporte
This is the first time they've sold directly into Apple News. Um, it's not the first time they've had ads in Apple News, it's just somebody else was was selling them.

1:35:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I realized that Apple does have an ad platform. It's just that somebody else was selling them, yeah, and realize that Apple does have an ad platform. It's just that we don't see it in the terms of punch the monkey ads. We see it in the terms of why am I being recommended this app and not this other one? You know things like that.

1:35:26 - Leo Laporte
Interestingly, if an ad is put on your content as a publisher, you'll get 70% of the ad revenue. Apple will keep 30. So that's kind of. I haven't done Apple News in a while. The only reason I don't use Apple News and I don't know why they persist with this is you can't link out. You can only send a link to Apple News, not to the publication. It made it absolutely useless to me.

Yeah, I can't use it Because every time I'm reading news I want to save a link so that we can talk about it, but I'm not going to put a whole bunch of links to Apple News in our rundown. Nbc Universal used to sell those ads, but that relationship ends at the end of this year and, as we mentioned before, apple is going to work with Taboola.

1:36:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's a really good look, isn't it Not so good?

1:36:18 - Leo Laporte
Not sarcastically. Yeah, such a good look. But anyway, all right, let's take a little break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly Andy Yonako, alex Lindsay, Jason Snell let's see what time it is. I think we're going to. I think should we go to the picks of the week? John Ashley, producer man, or is it too early? A touch early. A touch A touch early. All right, we'll come back and we'll go to the picks in a bit, but there are some more stories we could talk about in just a bit. I don't like this story. I'm not going to do this story, but anyway I will because we need them. Apple shares the most popular podcasts of 2024. Boo, hiss, I don't know how they know what the most popular podcasts are, I guess.

1:37:07 - Jason Snell
Everybody uses the podcast app. They know you have to use the podcast app.

1:37:10 - Leo Laporte
So it's really the most popular podcast on Apple's podcast app. On Apple's podcast app, let's make that clear. Uh, number one, the daily new york times, michael barbaro crime junkie. It's always the same for the joe rogan experience dateline smartless huberman lab. This american life used to be, uh, really dominated. This american life, it's good they.

1:37:33 - Alex Lindsay
They used to just be number one for like two decades.

1:37:37 - Leo Laporte
And, of course, the newcomers Jason and Travis Kelsey doing very well with their podcast. I've seen Spotify, I think, say that it was number three on the Spotify list. Then NPR's Up First, another news podcast and Morbid. So death news, health and politics, plus a little football. Yeah. Top news shows Tucker. Carlson show number one Three Mortal Sin, drowning Creek. The Rise and Fall of Ruby Frank, top series.

1:38:06 - Alex Lindsay
Serial still up there. What I thought was interesting was that the only one that I actually listened to is this American Life. I feel like I'm out of whack because everything I listen to is more vertical than that. You know, that's not not any of those number one episode.

1:38:22 - Leo Laporte
You would have thought it would be joe rogan's interview with donald trump. That was number two. Uh, number one is crime junkie, serial killer, the alphabet murders, part one. Interestingly, part two isn't even on the list, so I don't know never mind yeah, never.

Well, it seemed like a good idea. Uh, most shared shows. Like people sent it out as links. The hooberman labanda I don't even know what's Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The Daily the Bible in a Year. You need to read this, you need to hear this. The Bible in a Year the Bible Recap Very popular. Who Killed JFK is in there. Most Shared Episodes Anyway, a lot of stats.

1:39:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But just stats, but just a reminder. This is uh, we're not on there because, uh, I don't know why we're not on. We've never, we've never decided to dig into the tragedy of somebody being murdered and sensationalized it for ah, there we go.

1:39:24 - Leo Laporte
You know, I did. I did at one point this was mostly when we were trying to sell the company uh, didn't work. I thought, you know, maybe Twitch should do a a true crime show. We could do that. Um, I just lost my audio. What did I do? I unplugged. Oh, there we go. Uh, I thought we could do that and I was looking for a true crime and I thought, uh, the strange death of adrian lamo might make a good. I'll give this to anybody who wants a true crime series. Because we're not going to do it. Uh, because, while Adrian it said that, uh, he killed himself, I don't think he did because he had some. He had stuff taped to his thigh. There was some weird stuff going on. I thought it'd be a very good true crime. Should we do that? Alex? You need a true crime podcast.

1:40:14 - Alex Lindsay
I can do. I can do a really interesting true crime one, but I I do a really interesting true crime one, but I'd have to get some permission, but I have a lot of data on one, so you know some true crimes. I know one really well From your dad.

Yeah, yeah His father's a prosecutor Might be too hot. It's a really hot one. Oh, it's recent. It's not recent recent, but it comes up every once in a while, yeah, so so we'd have to. It's a. It's a, really. Yeah, I don't know if I could get into it on the show, but but it's. But it would be a good true true crime podcast. Have you ever thought about doing a true crime.

No, I have not. I'm so busy doing stuff. I got so many shows I'm like I looked at. I mean it's interesting. But the problem is, if you get one that's really interesting, there's going to be a lot of energy around it and then people are going to threaten me on Twitter. I was just like I don't have the energy.

1:41:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, I really have a problem with true crime podcasts and Dateline, Unless they're talking about a story where every family member who knew the person is long gone. I can't imagine anything worse than not just true crime podcasts, but so many of these are being done by people who aren't journalists. They haven't been trained in sensitivity. They don't understand the import of what they're doing by but it sells baby.

1:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think the ones that I'm interested in, if they're going to do it sells baby. I think there's. I think there's a if, if I think the ones that I'm interested in, if they're going to do them are ones that are about somebody who probably didn't do it, and this is what, and we're uncovering a bunch of things, yeah, using, using, journalism, yeah, uh, using journalism to to get someone who was wrong.

Because the problem is that once you get accused in a court of law, your, um, your, your chances of of winning uh are, uh, once you is that, once you get accused in a court of law, your, um, your, your chances of of winning uh are, uh, once you're charged, once it wants to go to court in a criminal, your chances of winning about five percent, you know, and it's just everything stacked up against you unless you have really good lawyers, and and so, and, and that's so. I think that even evening out that weight, um, that's interesting.

1:42:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, I know why. Uh, john ashley wouldn't let us go to the picks. We've not yet done the vision pro segment where's the music?

1:42:33 - Jason Snell
no, no. So I was trying to look through the dock and I wasn't in splash shop to be able to get ready in it. I scrambled. He's a very good scrambler.

1:42:42 - Leo Laporte
I have these visions. I don't see him. I can't see him. These visions of of him kind of off looking at a book or something and running back to the console hitting the button. Uh, let's see. See, well, the weekend is here, so to speak. I know it's only tuesday, but the weekend's vision, ladies and gentlemen.

1:43:03 - Alex Lindsay
The weekend I only saw pieces of it um I. I was traveling in my bandwidth. I was bandwidth impaired for the last couple days so I haven't been able to see it, what did you what? What'd you think?

1:43:15 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's a music video, so it's all about the visuals. It's not about the narrative. But what I liked about it and what I took away from it is I'm sure that submerged had VFX right, but it was meant to be naturalistic. This is not meant to be naturalistic. So you can see the VFX throughout and they look really good and I thought that was a really great example of what do you do with a VFX heavy immersive, how does that work? And it was beautiful. There was some very mind bending, kind of like you look over there and through a window and over here and you see different things and it's very clearly special effects. But I think I mean that's really what it was. It was all about the visuals and you know his music playing.

Well, I don't know what the story is. I didn't really make any sense. He's in an ambulance and then he's, like you know, on a bus or what I like. It doesn't matter, but I thought it. It's really just a pure. Here's the kind of imagery we can do in an immersive space. So that's why I took away from it is to see something that's very visual effects forward and that I mean that was the goal, I'm sure, of doing it.

1:44:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it'll be. You know, unfortunately, because we had all this spherical stuff years ago. You know, nuke and a bunch of other tools already have a lot of the spherical stereo compositing all built in. So doing those effects are are something that is a known quantity, you know. In fact, 180 is a little bit easier than than the 360 that a lot of us were doing, so so that's really useful is that the that those tools have been around. Obviously, apple's magic sauce makes it just a little bit better, but it it's yeah.

So I saw pieces of it again. I saw little sections of it, cause I was having bandwidth issues in the hotel, so but but they have another one coming out, I think this week or next week as well, and this one, I think, is more. It's interesting because it's more of a solo artist playing for you or at least that's how it's being sold which I think is actually going to make way more sense for the Vision Pro than a lot of other things, kind of like an Alicia Keys video that they released with the Vision Pro, a little little video that they released with the a little little you know.

It'll be interesting to see how many camera angles they use. I mean, I think that a lot of times what I want to see is just one, you know, one really like.

1:45:21 - Jason Snell
I just want to sit. I don't need them looking right in my eyes, right? I want them to just sort of like I want to be a fly on the wall and not somebody that they're singing to, because that made me very uncomfortable with it oh interesting yeah my favorite part is concert for one.

1:45:33 - Leo Laporte
It features a british artist named ray.

1:45:36 - Andy Ihnatko
It's coming friday, uh, in a global release not out yet, yeah, um I do like these points where they don't work very hard to make it an immersive experience, where it's just we put, we put a bubble camera in the audience and you are free to look wherever you want someone performing in front of a band, because sometimes you kind of want to see John N whistle, you know, as all the pyrotechnics are going on between like three, three other band members who are trying to be the front man.

At the same time sometimes you want to say, hey, what's that happening? That's kind of behind that other riser over there and you're seeing somebody who's prepping uh, prepping hardware for, uh, for for a guitar change or something like that. That is really immersive, because there are very few experiences that you can really absolutely nail in vr. One of them is standing still in one spot and not having not being able to walk forward, backward, left or right, but being able to turn your head and listen to something and watch something, and so being an audience member is definitely one of those things. It sounds boring, but I've never felt more immersed than those times when people were doing these presentations from studio audiences, tv tapings, audiences at concerts, things like that. I would love to see a turnkey solution for something like that.

1:46:54 - Leo Laporte
So Ray is more like a big band experience. They recorded the set at Air Studios in London, a 20-piece band. She does R&B, jazz and pop and they say from the best seat in the house. So that implies, well, we don't know what that means.

1:47:09 - Alex Lindsay
No, I think it could be. It could be one of those things. The hard part is, with 20 people, it's hard to fit that into a 180 in a way that works. But but we'll see. We'll see what they look like, because what the problem is again is that the that what makes sense is 10 to 20 feet, and you know, some people are in more than 10 to 20 feet maybe, but it'll be. What I love is that Apple keeps experimenting. So there we. We get one thing, we're going to get another thing.

1:47:39 - Leo Laporte
They're going to keep on, you know, showing us different looks and feels of what, of where they're going. Um, so I think that that's. You know, that's interesting, so it's good. Do you think that? Uh, the weekend is trying out and his management team and his label, the idea of releasing music videos in immersive, I think Apple said hey, we've got this great idea.

1:47:52 - Alex Lindsay
We'd love to do this with you. Um, they had a bunch of meetings with his management. Then he came in and said, hey, that sounds great. How much like that'll be a million dollars.

And they were like sure they pulled a dial up. I don't know anything by, by the way of this, but I'm saying I've been. I've been in these kinds of meetings. So it's a big brand comes up and says we, we have a vision for what this could be, that it could be in spatial, and then what would you like to do if we did that? And then he brings in a director and they do the thing, and they, and there's a bunch of guidance of, well, this will work in the camera and this won't work in the camera, and this is da, da, da, da. And everyone goes back and forth and he gets a big check and then they get something that has the weekend in it. And so I think that that's a pretty good idea of how that worked, but it's. I mean, I think that that's what Apple can do that no one else can do. Well, not no one. I mean, meta's done some of that as well. They've done, you know, worked with artists, you know, and paid, you know, to have artists do stuff inside of the MetaQuest and so on and so forth. But I think Apple can continue to go down that path.

I will say that I finally uh, I have a lot of screens. So when there was a virtual screen on the vision pro, I was not that interested because I was like, ah, whatever, I, it's not enough screens, I don't go away. I was on a plane this morning. I actually woke up this morning in New York, wow and um and uh, rushing home to do this. This is one, there's only one flight that gets home before the show. So, anyway, so, so, anyway, so, and it does require getting up very early, um, anyway, so, um, the uh, but I was on a plane and I, you know, I, I bought the, had to get the ticket at the last minute, um, and so I ended up in like this, like the back row, like the, you know, and in the back row you can't open the, you can't open your laptop.

So I was like like I'm going to try this and I and I, I took the, you know, I hadn't even tried to connect them, you know, or anything else and I opened my laptop, just enough, so I get my fingers over the keyboard, cause that's all I could open it up for the, for the thing. And then I opened up the screen and I got this giant, you know, like a, you know, 55 inch screen, t you know thing, and I was like typing away notes and and I opened up final cut. I did a whole bunch of stuff on the laptop and it totally worked. I have to admit I've approved it, but it totally worked selling point for the vision pro perfect for the economy seat.

It's been 45 $4,500 on a headset. You can save money on the seat.

1:50:19 - Leo Laporte
How did you type, though, so you left the laptop kind of open a little bit, it was open.

1:50:22 - Alex Lindsay
It was kind of like, yeah, cracked open and I could sit there and just type away and everything. It just felt like it was a big giant. I mean it was pretty nice. Now I understand People have been saying that this is incredible and it was pretty nice, like now I understand like people have been saying that this is incredible and I was like, yeah, as good as the nine monitors that I have on my desk? I don't think so, and it but on a in an environment like that, cause I have a little laptop too. I don't even have a 16. I mean I don't travel a lot while I'm going to now, but I haven't for a long time, and so I've got like a little 14 inch Intel air like macbook, uh, pro or whatever. So it's like a tiny little thing that I just haven't bothered to upgrade because I don't get out of the house to for work very often and um, uh anyway. So I I thought it was and yeah, old computer, uh, headset using sequoia or whatever, and uh, nice how about that?

1:51:11 - Leo Laporte
have you? Has anybody tried that widescreen? Uh yet, or is that not out? How about that? Has anybody tried that widescreen?

1:51:15 - Alex Lindsay
yet, or is that not out? It's in the developer beta and I haven't been adventurous enough to put the development beta on, but Jason has, I have what do you?

1:51:24 - Jason Snell
think Looks really good. I'm not sure if I'm willing to go to Mark Gurman's level and say it is the killer app, but it's a very good reason to get a Vision Pro if you are a very certain kind of person, because if you travel a lot, because the wide, ultra wide is a little extreme, although it's kind of amazing, it's just like it wraps all the way around you. But even just a wide view gives you a lot more space. And I find it very clear I know some people don't, but I thought I found it pretty clear and very usable and there's distortion at all. No, no, no, it's. It's designed to basically be kind of a magic uh curved screen so that you're just wherever you look, it's sort of right in front of you. But no, it's, it's. It's a very well done and um and the quality is very good. And you know, with a ultra wide you basically got two giant monitors but there's no seams, it's just all wrapping around.

And what I find useful sometimes in vision pro in general is taking an app that I'm only using occasionally and just kind of putting it off to the side and I can.

I can look way over there and adjust it if I need to, but mostly it's out of sight and you can do that on the Mac now, where you are sitting there working, maybe in the center, but if you're in ultra wide mode, you can put a you know, drag slack or discord or whatever, and like put it off in the corner where you're not going to see it all the time, or your calendar even, but then you can go like this and and it's there. Plus, there's some apps like Final Cut is a good example where having a very, very wide window is actually pretty great, because you've got a bunch of ancillary stuff on the sides that you might need to look at or drag something from, but most of the work is happening in the center. That it's pretty powerful for. So I think it's a great feature. I don't know if it's gonna sell more Vision Pros, but I'd say that it is one of the best things going on Vision Pro, being able to have a giant Mac display with you.

1:53:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think with the new content and with the updates it doesn't sell more, it just makes the current owners more confident, feel better about themselves yes, and their bad decisions, yes, for sure. Yeah, like it's just like okay, this is cool, this is something fun.

1:53:28 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's your Vision. Pro segment.

1:53:36 - John Ashley
This is audio. Vision Pro. Vision Pro. Right there, it's like you sit right next to me. Vision Pro. I was ready this time, leo, yeah.

1:54:00 - Leo Laporte
Porch Pirates appear to be. This is from 9 to five. Mac ben lovejoy writing. Accessing at&t data to track iphone deliveries. Oh, that's our worst nightmare, yeah apparently so.

1:54:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Apparently, people inside have are basically teaming up with selling the information about and a thousand dollar iphone is going to be delivered to this address at this time and they can, and because they have the tracking information, they can track the delivery and basically within a minute of it being dropped off at how do they get the track?

1:54:26 - Leo Laporte
how do they?

1:54:26 - Andy Ihnatko
you have to be an att insider somehow someone's breaking the law inside att and selling this information.

1:54:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah wow this. By the way, I should give credit to CNET. This is Tyler LaCombeau got the scoop on this, Wow.

1:54:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Apparently this is a big deal everywhere, where again there are people inside the shipping companies, for instance, who are pairing up with burglary rings, crime rings, to again tip people off that this expensive thing is going to be left out in the open at this place. Sometimes drivers are also involved again, not just with Apple products, but all expensive phones and electronics, where the driver is in on it and they're going to deliver it to an address that is kind of nearby, but not at the actual address where someone might be waiting for it, and so someone is right behind the truck to grab it as soon as they can log in that, oh yes, this was absolutely delivered to the correct address. And because most of these delivery places they don't act, even though you might check off require a signature for delivery. Even people who are not criminals, it's like they. Oh well, we're just going to drop it off without a signature and that's fine. And then you're really out of luck because Apple, google, whoever and the shipping company are going to trade off on whose responsibility it is. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down on when you can basically ask for a chargeback. It's really terrible.

There was also frequently it comes up on Reddit and other forums where people who are ordering stuff from the Apple Store using the Apple app and asking for same-day delivery. It just never shows up because the same-day delivery route that last leap of it, is basically it's an Uber driver who comes to the store, picks it up and drops off at your house, and apparently it's not uncommon for the Uber driver to simply steal it. And then whose word is it that they take, or how long is it going to take for it to unwrap? It's like it seems like if you have to have an expensive piece of electronics shipped to you, you just got to be ready for it to be stolen.

And the amount of trouble that I will now go through to avoid having something simply dropped off that I paid for. I will drive 20 miles to a depot to pick it up at a depot, I will drive 40 miles, I'll drive 60 miles to the one Google store that's nearby to buy a Google phone at the store and pick it up. Because, again, it's not as though every single thing gets stolen, but once it gets stolen, none of these sellers Apple isn't alone, it's everybody None of them are really proactive and saying oh my God, that's terrible. We're going to make this good, we're going to cancel the billing. We're going to ship out a new one. It's like, oh well, we've opened a ticket. Check back in a few days.

1:57:09 - Leo Laporte
I imagine that's because there are also people who say I didn't get it when they did get it. Yeah.

1:57:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, that doesn't help you. And also, again, the number of people who the driver isn't in on it hasn't been stolen, but somebody at the depot broke into it, took out the phone, put in like a bag of rice, sealed it back up and sent it on its way. It just seems like how can you possibly win, right?

1:57:38 - Leo Laporte
Courage part two apple is phasing out the lightning to headphone jack adapter. At one point I bought a dozen or a half dozen of these because I just kept. You know, I kept, couldn't find them, and I probably still have a bunch of them. But uh, if you didn't, I don't know why you would need one anymore, since lightning doesn't exist anymore on new phones and headphone jacks. Well, you probably don't have any wired headphones anymore. Apple's adapter sold out on the online store in the US and most other countries, but you could still go to France, denmark, finland, norway or Sweden if you really need one. You may remember these came in the box with the when they first phased out the headphone jack, but uh, pretty quickly, I I still have type C to wired. Uh, apple doesn't sell it. Maybe they do sell those, I don't know oh, yeah, I have, I have.

Yeah, I've got a couple in my exactly, yeah, yeah so, uh, you know, 2016, they phase out the headphone jack. 2024, they phase out the adapter. First they came for the headphone jack and I said nothing.

1:58:45 - Alex Lindsay
Then they came for the adapter and I said nothing because I wasn't using that phone anymore I have to admit, like when the first years, when they started with usbc, I was was like oh, I really like my lightning and I got all this stuff with lightning. Now, like the handful of things that still have a lightning connector, you're like oh, I went on my trip this last weekend and I forgot I didn't take a lightning cable, and so then I'm trying to figure out how to charge my headset.

1:59:10 - Leo Laporte
I literally bought another pair of AirPod Pros just so I wouldn't have to use the lightning adapter. Yeah, yep, isn't that sad 250 bucks so I could have a type c connection. Well, no, it's even sadder.

1:59:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I still, every time I, every time I connect to, like my sony earbuds or my my pixel earbuds, I see the, the, the, the, the, the, the guilt, the guilt creating ghost, still says Andy's iPods, airpods, the AirPods that I lost like four years ago and is still somewhere in the house. I'm sure I still have the case for it, but it's gone to the land of ghosts and winds. But I can't bring myself to have it. Forget this item because otherwise I lose one of the friends I made along the way all.

1:59:58 - Leo Laporte
Right now we can take a break and get ready for your picks of the week coming up next. You are watching mac break weekly and of course, we thank our great contributors Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. But we also thank another kind of contributor, our great Club Twit members. Thank you, thank you, thank you, who make all of this possible. We've been looking at ad sales for 2025, and it's a pretty grim picture. I thought maybe after the election people were just waiting to see what happened. I don't know. It has not exactly opened up, and so it's really becoming more and more vital that we get the club going and get people to support us through the club.

Seven bucks a month is not a lot. You get all the shows we do. You get access to the discord and you get ad free versions, by the way, of all the shows. You get video for shows that we only do audio in public, like hands-on windows and hands-on Macintosh. You would get special events. We've got John Ashley just told me he's going to do a little special event of him upgrading his computer. I think that'll be fun.

Mikah's Crafting Corner we do a coffee thing every once in a while. I think we've got a tasting coming up, Stacy's Book Club. In other words, there's a lot of stuff going on and the club is really full of wonderful, interesting people, the people who support what we do and who like to talk about tech. So I think you would like being in there. So if you would consider twit.tv/clubtwit seven bucks a month. First, two weeks are free. You get a trial. If you're not convinced, try it for free for two weeks. And we now have a referral program. So when you sign up you'll get a special link. Anybody uses that link to sign up gets you a free month. So you know, if you've got a lot of friends who aren't yet members of the club, you could probably pay for your club membership for some time to come.

twit.tv/clubtwit. I really, really appreciate your support. It is going forward more and more important, to be honest, if we want to keep doing what we're doing. We've done everything we can. We've shrunk as small as we can get, got rid of the studio cut shows Unfortunately, had to lay off people. We're pretty much down to the bone now. So twit.tv/clubtwit and thank you so much for your support. I appreciate it. Pick of the week time let's spend some in Alex Lindsey's money, Alex.

2:02:24 - Alex Lindsay
so so I've been building these little phone rigs. I've talked about this, these little interactive phone rigs, iphone rig, and one of the big things that you get into is how do you get all the usb stuff to get connected like so, how do I connect usb? Because you've got hard drive, you've got maybe an external monitor, you want to plug that all into your iPhone. You maybe have a MixPre or something else. That's there and it's been cobbled together. You find a clamp and then you attach it to the rig and it's all painful. Well, condor Blue just came out with this and this is a USB. Let me get my face out of it.

This is a mountable and it's a dock for the iPhone. Well, it's not a dock, it is a. What this is is this attaches to a rig that you A camera rig that you would have, except that it has quarter 20s. See, it's got like quarter 20s on the bottom. It's got a cold mount. Got like quarter 20s on the bottom. It's got a cold mount, a cold shoot, cold shoe mount. The problem my sony is it wants to focus on my. I got it right here, you got it there, so, yeah, so it's got. It's got all the it's basically has the same connections that you would get with um. You know another little piece that you'd clamp on, except that it can screw straight into a. You know your, your rig that you might have for your iphone, um and it. You know this has been a big that you might have for your iPhone, um and it. You know this has been a big pain point for a lot of us that are building these rigs is how do you attach? Uh, how do you show?

2:03:44 - Leo Laporte
us what it looks like attached to your iPhone.

2:03:46 - Alex Lindsay
I don't have. I'm afraid I got back here right before the show. I was going to try to attach it to something, but I'll. I'll show it in a few, but a lot of times what I'm using is a lot. You know, you can get a rig that you put your phone into and they don't. The funny is a lot of people that are talking about it don't actually. There you go, you can see I'm attaching it. It's a very simple rig, but you get the idea.

That's really cool Getting these hubs. It's just like a media hub like you would get from many other companies, except that it's made out of metal and it screws straight into the phone rig that you're building. Um, I'm building kind of a. I have this really complex rig that I'm building with a sony camera, but I'm trying to build a simplified version as well with with an iphone that you can do two-way communication with people on in the field and, um, and this is a big this was a big piece of that puzzle, because you're always trying to figure out where to put the clamp and then how to find one that has all the things going out the right direction, and so this is anyway, it's and it's I mean it's expensive for a hub. It's not a very expensive item overall. It's about I think it's about $80 or something like that $89.

2:04:49 - Leo Laporte
That's not bad, yeah, and you get. It comes in space gray or raven black.

2:04:53 - Alex Lindsay
Black, yet it comes in space gray or raven black, black and the only problem with the black one is I. I lose it all the time, every time I set it in the shadows like I. Right before I did this, I was like I, where did I just put that? I was like looking at it.

It's like uh, stealth, it's just like it's like stealth it just it doesn't look like anything descript, so it just kind of blends into everything. But I'll I'll show the rig in more detail, maybe next week actually, and this uh this company, the condor blue, is a good.

2:05:16 - Leo Laporte
It's a good tip in general. They sell a lot of interesting they they sell really high end.

2:05:20 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, this is like this is not just for phones, this is, uh, condor blue is there's kind of like a, there's an. Actually, you know like there's small rig. I have a lot of small rig stuff, mostly because I got into it because of the rigs that I have, so I got. So I got into small rig and then there's Tilta and then you go up to Condor Blue and then after that you start talking about like wooden camera and a bunch of specialty companies. You know like we all know what they all are.

Everybody's got a rig and you look at it and there's like this you know what it is. Immediately you measure everybody up. So I have the cheapest rig. Mostly, you know is the I mean there's newer is below in the pecking order. The newer rigs are below the small rigs, which is what I have. And then Tilto is a little higher and then again Condor Blue. So they're American made, they're out of LA and they're really it's a good brand overall. So if you look at it, there's lots of cam rigs they build and then again after that you go up to more expensive ones that are, you know, and it jumps. The prices seem to double every time you go from one to the next condor blue with a k.

2:06:28 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, what a good tip. This looks kind of cool.

2:06:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't need it, but I want it when you see the rest of the rig I'll I'll show you the classic Alex Lindsay thing, I have another I have it, but I want it. No, it's a mix. I have some more pieces of the rig arriving, uh, this week when I get the new rig put together a little bit more. It's absurd because it, of course, streams in binaural surround from a phone in HDR, as you do in spatial. So it's a cool rig, so we'll show more of it when we get a little closer.

2:07:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy and Ico pick of the week. Two picks of the week. One is a reminder that Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is still within the evil clutches of a $2 trillion super company. But you can watch it for free on Apple TV this Thursday and Friday, the 23rd and 24th. You do not have to subscribe to Apple TV to get it there and if you haven't seen it in a while, please try to see it on streaming there, because it is such a trip to see. You can actually see the shadows from the layers of cells that are there. It is almost disconcerting to see it look that perfectly. It is quite wonderful. But my other pick of the week is Feedbin.

Every once in a while I try to make a point of if there's a tool or service that I rely on. I try to take a moment every year or so every once in a while to check out others, to see if other services can do it better. I've been using Feedly for quite a while, chiefly because it's aader. For quite a while, because it was pretty much what I was using, I switched to the new, updated, revolutionary version of Reader, which has it's still in, it's not, it's in beta. It's not quite finished yet, it's not feature complete yet, and I kind of needed something kind of better than that, and so I actually spent some time switching everything over to Feedbin.

Feedbin's been around for over 10 years. A lot of people that I know and respect use it a lot. I just never happened to click into it, or maybe it's because at the times when I was looking at it years ago it wasn't quite what it was. Right now, I like it a lot because it gives me everything that I'm looking for, primarily the idea that it doesn't matter what screen I'm looking at and what operating system it runs and who made it. I can still get access to my feeds.

So it's web-based yeah, it's web-based. It has a page on the product site on actual dedicated apps that are compatible with it and it's like all iOS, all Mac, all iPad and like one or two lonely Android apps. But I discovered that you really don't need it because the phone interface, no matter what device you're using it on whether you're using it on a desktop or using it on a phone is so clean and so easy and so simple that it's exactly what I would be looking for and it has so many really great features to organize everything so that when I'm preparing for Mac break, I can just focus in on just the stuff that's Apple news you can have within feeds. You can create other feeds that are just like anything that's on the baronscom site that references Apple or references the iPhone. Make that into a separate feed if they don't have like a special specific, like Apple feed alerts. It integrates really well with third party services. One of my previous picks of the week was raindropo, which is what I still use, and love for bookmark organizers.

2:09:59 - Leo Laporte
You convinced me, boy.

2:10:01 - Andy Ihnatko
We use that like crazy Boy that was one of the greatest switches I ever made, because it makes so many things so much easier and it supports it, so I can quickly send something to my bookmark manager to check it out later, send it out to other apps. It doesn't have a built-in integration into Blue Sky yet, so we're hoping to wait for that, but I'm sure that's going to be an in-demand feature and let's assume you can't simply roll it by yourself. Essentially, what I'm getting at is that it doesn't try to be super, super flashy. It attempts to be really, really attentive to the needs of people who need to keep on top of dozens, if not hundreds, of news sources and drill right down to I need to check to see what's going on right now. Again, that alert about the zero day that happened that was came out about an hour or two ago. It was because it was so easy for me to have a feed, a feed bin window open and check clicks specifically on just a topic site. That would only give me things that are breaking news. That made that so efficient. So it's all and on top of all, that 30 day free trial it's, and after that's five bucks a month.

I hesitate to be this enthusiastic after only two days, but I can't find a single fault with it. It is exactly everything that I want and I'm definitely be signing up for five bucks a month after initial giddy, irrational exuberance boils down. But I can't recommend it highly enough for again, for somebody who needs to have a long, curated list of feeds that they need to keep adding to and keep adding stuff to. I know Jason's been recommending it because it has a bunch of other features for newsletters and Jason's word is actually Jason, having having mentioned that, uh, last week on blue sky was, oh yeah, feed bin. I haven't checked that out in a few years. I wonder what that's like. And he didn't lie. So it's a great.

2:11:53 - Leo Laporte
It's a great service I'm going to definitely look at it because I right now I use a web-based service called sumi news sumi, but I doM-I, but I do. I mean, that's my daily. I do that more than anything else is look at feeds and select stuff for the show, and if it has direct integration to Raindrop, that will be a very nice feature.

2:12:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and just to button something off, it's like a lot of RSS services and apps that I've used, including again the app that I was using for the past couple of months. I've recommended it. The new version of Reader is like oh, but we're doing more than just RSS feeds. You can also have your subreddits and you can have your YouTube videos and comic strips from Comics Kingdom and the other subscription services, and that's nice. But I'm very, very much. It's more than what I want and it complicates the experience. But this other service is like it will. Also, it gives you just enough. Yes, it will allow you to subscribe to feeds of your podcast. Again, they are RSS feeds after all, but it also made it.

I'm not certain that it will become like a replacement for Pocket Casts on my phone, but the ability to very, very quickly see something. I want to check to see if there's a new episode of the Bugle Dropped. If so, I want to download it here and now and actually play it, as opposed to, oh, let me check your 100 and 300 different podcast feeds and then show you what's new. It's like no, just let me check to see if there's a new Office Ladies podcast and if so let me download it and play it. So it's really nicely done. The last thing is that if you have newsletters, it can also give you a custom email address. So if you sign up for newsletters, it will automatically grab your newsletters and turn those into feeds as well. So it really is one window where I give anytime. I want to find out what's going on right now in any of a thousand different topics. Very, very great single dashboard.

2:13:49 - Leo Laporte
And again I am looking for something because the news reader I used and recommended in the past omnivore got purchased and shutting down at the end of the month. So I am looking for something that can do that. It was the same idea. I would use a custom address and then that was a kind of a because I mailing mailing lists. I don't know how why they're so successful. I they just it's more spam from my point of view. So yeah, something they can read the newsletters.

2:14:13 - Andy Ihnatko
It's great, no it's great they're, they're they are a little bit rough and uh and the.

Then you're also hitting the nail on the head of one of the problems that I was having, where it seems like every time I change to a different RSS service or RSS app, most of them have some sort of an export command.

But keeping the truth, as you call the central truth, consistent between experiences was so hard, especially with. Again, I don't want to be denigrating the new version of Reader, but one of the things is it's not quite complete yet, so it can't export your feeds yet, and so I finally bit the bullet yesterday and said I'm going to spend 20 minutes seeing if there's a hack or a script I can do to automate the process After 20 minutes. If I fail, I'm just going to put on a couple of movies and spend two hours manually exporting all of the all of my specific reader feeds into into this new thing, because I don't want to ever have to do that again. And it seems like this is a good service, for if you want to use a different app for front end, it will let you do that, but your central truth will always be uh for this, this feed app, and again great stuff, nice.

2:15:20 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for the recommendation.

2:15:22 - Jason Snell
I should have listened to Jason, but yeah now you got two of us going on, now it's two.

2:15:28 - Leo Laporte
I think once it's two out of three. I have to go. I just got my.

2:15:30 - Alex Lindsay
I just got the 30 day, so I'm gonna yeah, I did all right, it'll probably be three. Yeah, thank you yeah, yeah, this is how this works.

2:15:38 - Leo Laporte
This is how yeah yeah, we help each other. That's right, then money we do.

2:15:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Do I want to count the things that are in front of me right now? That came from what I bought, like during a pick of the week, I know.

2:15:48 - Alex Lindsay
Expensive friends.

2:15:49 - Jason Snell
Literally. My webcam is from a pick of the week, your pick.

2:15:51 - Leo Laporte
Jason, though, is another thing.

2:15:54 - Jason Snell
So I'm glad Andy got into Feedbin. It is great. The newsletter thing is the thing that really started me down the path of using it all the time, because then I had not only some favorite news sources that have RSS, but all the newsletters I subscribe to also pour in there and they just show up in the morning and that's my morning reading is that list, which is great. It has an excellent web interface, but there are also lots and lots and lots of clients, especially on iOS, that support Feedbin and they can add their own nice UI on top of it.

2:16:27 - Leo Laporte
So this is in addition to Feedbin.

2:16:29 - Jason Snell
Yes, this is I use, so ReadKit is my choice. It is an excellent iOS app. I use it on the iPad. That is my RSS reader of choice. It works with Feedbin. You log into Feedbin and then it will use the Feedbin source, one of the things I really like about it. It's interface really works for me. It has three different reader modes, so it will show you the text that's in the RSS enclosure, or it will show you, uh, the HTML rendered in a certain way that's in the RSS enclosure or it will load the content of the webpage it links to and display that instead.

It's got a bunch of different ways of doing that and you can set it per source, which is great, because you might get one that looks great using type A and then type B. It's really bad. So, like I've got some where I'm a New York Times subscriber, if I tap on a New York Times link, it just loads the New York Times page and I make sure I'm logged in there. I generally don't want that, though. Right, I kind of want a reader version of you get. Well, it depends on what you want I done in and the style you can choose, and you can choose it. Choose a per source, so I really like reader. It's really nice. I also want to mention another good iOS RSS reader that also, I believe, works with feed, which is called Unread. Unread is a very simple RSS reader, but it's really well designed. It's just very basic and I think that's its appeal, but they just added a feature that Federico Fatici wrote about at Mac Stories today, which is very clever and every RSS reader on iOS should do this which is a shortcuts integration where you can literally say I want to add this shortcut that I've got in the shortcuts app to unread, and and then when you're on an item, you can just one of the commands that you can attach to that item is now that shortcut which

means that now you've got, now you're sort of super powered in terms of taking those items and putting them in a bookmark or adding them to a spreadsheet or doing or quoting them in a markdown of a blog post or whatever it is. And I love that and I want to see more of that kind of automation support, because the idea that you just sort of like take a shortcut that you wrote and now here it is as a command inside an app like oh, give me more of that I really like. No, it's not just you could share it and then choose a shortcut and all that. It's like literally it's in the ui of the app now, because you designated it as a shortcut. So there are a lot of really great rss readers out there. If you want to go beyond the basics of like the feed bin interface, read kit is my favorite, though rss is live, and well yeah especially if you throw in newsletters, that that helps a lot.

2:19:02 - Leo Laporte
If I'm using Readbin, do I need Reader Feedbin Feedbin is like Google Reader.

2:19:11 - Jason Snell
It's like the place where you subscribe to all of your things and it's got a web interface, and then there are a long number of clients that will also work with it, if you would rather use a specific client.

2:19:22 - Andy Ihnatko
For me it serves two functions One, to be the central truth of all of my RSS feeds, no matter how I access it, and two, I happen to like the web client for the phone and desktop really, really well, so I also use it for now as my regular RSS reader and newsreader.

But if you just want to use it as the central truth, meaning every time that you find a new website, say, oh wow, those are three great articles, I want to start following this. Every single day you open up Feedbincom, add it, or use the keyboard, use the bookmarklet, to add it to that. And then if you have a third-party app with a nice Mac interface to actually do the reading, if you want to use that, that's fine. But your truth of subscriptions is not going to be locked up within this third-party app. It will be Feedbin. So if you decide that, oh wow, this other RSS app works so much better, or this RSS app I like isn't available for Android, what can I do on Android? That doesn't matter, they'll be both giving you the same access to that same database of feeds.

2:20:23 - Leo Laporte
I'm paralyzed by too many choices.

2:20:27 - Jason Snell
Get Feedbin, pay money Just start with Feedbin and the web interface, and then see, if you want to add an app on top of it.

2:20:32 - Leo Laporte
Okay, there's still the Newswire and I have InnoReader which I've been paying for for years, and most of them work with Feedbin.

2:20:41 - Jason Snell
What do I need?

2:20:42 - Leo Laporte
Feedbin for Well, Feedbin is one of the work with Feedbin.

2:20:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah. What do I need Feedbin for? They don't.

2:20:45 - Jason Snell
Well, feedbin is one of the advantages of having it's like Google Reader. It's the idea that there's a central thing that contains all your subscriptions and it knows what you've read and what you've not, and it'll sync it. And it's the one who's polling so that when you open the app, it doesn't sit there and poll 80 different RSS feeds one at a time. It's doing it in the background, on the server, in the cloud, and so it's just convenient. You don't need Feedbin to read RSS. It, just as Andy said, it gives you a central repository. They're the ones doing the querying.

2:21:25 - Alex Lindsay
And the best again for those who remember Google Reader. It's basically that idea. It is its own service that does that in the background, in the cloud, and none of them are reading out loud.

2:21:29 - Leo Laporte
Yet, like I feel like there's a, I feel like that's what omnivore was bought by 11 labs, because that's what's going to happen is.

2:21:33 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like we're on the cusp of just saying just read these articles like just like while I'm because I'm 11 reader yeah totally, totally yeah, because maybe that'll integrate with feed bin it probably will.

2:21:44 - Jason Snell
I mean, that's the beauty, but what?

2:21:45 - Leo Laporte
about this unread? Should I not even look at that, because I like the shortcuts idea well, I just, I mean you, you can.

2:21:51 - Jason Snell
It's an app, so you can try it for free and it will sync with feed bin so you could give it although I think it syncs with feed bin.

2:21:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they mostly do so everything I would start with it does. Yeah, everything syn. Everything syncs with Feedbin. You know it sounds like Feedbin is the central repository for all of this.

2:22:09 - Jason Snell
It's a good central repository. I think the way to think of it is just like the idea of having an email client Like you choose a client that works for you. Email is email. This is sort of like that where you choose RSS client that works for you and if you want to use Feedbin as the central repository, it's nice yeah.

2:22:26 - Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm so confused. And newsletters.

2:22:29 - Jason Snell
Pipe your newsletters in there.

2:22:30 - Leo Laporte
It's beautiful. That's the main thing I want to do yeah. Yeah, yeah, it would be nice to have one central place where all this stuff lived 100%.

And then you had all the and I and I like the idea of shortcuts, so I have you know, I could send it to my micro blog, I could send it to my tweet storm or whatever, and then that would be kind of nice too. Okay, one of these days I wish I had some free time. I could just sit down and set this stuff up. Thank you, Jason Snell. Sixcolorscom is the place to go. Sixcolorscom, slash Jason will give you all of his wonderful podcasts.

2:23:05 - Jason Snell
And go sixcolorscom, slash Jason will give you all of his wonderful podcasts and uh go, flu roll on you bears go, bears go, bears go bears.

2:23:11 - Leo Laporte
Bring back the axe again bring we have the axe to be clear we have the axe let's not be confused on that issue. The axe is ours. How many years has the axe been yours?

2:23:23 - Jason Snell
three years in a row, maybe nice one.

2:23:25 - Leo Laporte
It's good. It's about time, yeah, it's about time you get to keep the axe. Thank you, Jason, andy and akka. When are you going to be on gbh?

2:23:35 - Andy Ihnatko
next uh thursday uh thursday, at 12 30 eastern time. Go to wgbhnewsorg to stream it live or later Nice.

2:23:43 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sir and Mr Alex Lindsey. Do you have an RSS reader recommendation? I do not.

2:23:52 - Alex Lindsay
I'm following. I've been trying to find one. You know, I think I feel like I've been in the wilderness trying to figure it out. So I've just downloaded all of these to like play with them. Because I do think that I mean I have to downloaded all of these to like play with them, because I do think that I mean, I have to admit, most of my news is Apple News and Flipboard. I still have Flipboard after all these years.

Right, but they started, they changed. It's funny how something changed, like Flipboard changed something with the way they managed ads and I completely stopped using it. Like that's the thing that always scares me about changing products is that it was like something I used for 10 years and then I like, within a month, I was not using it anymore, you know. And so now I'm kind of like well, I got to find somewhere else to get news because I'm not using that anymore. So, um, and it was just something like you know, too many ads, or the ads were. They were here's what they were is they were scrolling down from the top. I was like I'm browsing, and so if a website does that or anything does that, I stop using it. So, anyway, so I'm interested in what Jason and Andy have to say.

Yes, so I've downloaded those going to play with them. I just want something that'll read them to me, because I don't you know like I love being able to work on other things while I listen to all the articles 11 Labs has Laurence Olivier's voice.

2:25:05 - Leo Laporte
You have Larry reading you?

2:25:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I'm going to try that. I'm going to try it.

2:25:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, we've all learned something today. I thank you so much for being here.

2:25:13 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I forgot to ask you, officehoursglobal, what you got coming up Got to give you a plug, all you're going to see is us right now. What's happening is is that we, of course we have, you know, we got bored so we made more shows, so so we have, you know. So on monday nights we have extra hours, which is a much slower uh, you know, discussion, uh, so we only deal with a couple subjects in two over two hours and then we have, uh, the rundown, which is on thursday, and that is again slightly different play on the format, and then um, uh and then otherwise during. We're not doing as many second hours right now because we're doing all this R&D around the quality of our streams. So we've moved to 4K. That's working fine.

We're now adding HDR, which is still a little hit and miss. We're figuring out some esoteric ways of getting to YouTube, so we're working on that right now. We're going to expand the number of play. You're already ahead of us where you're streaming to lots of platforms. We're going to start doing that over the over December. Um, and then um, you know, we're adding some frame rate. Again, a lot of this has to do with we want to cover a bunch of shows next year and we want the whole thing to be in, you know, 4k and 5.1 and HDR and when we're on site, but we need to build our entire platform to support that. So every day you're going to see things, you know so if you want to watch the thing generally, we're answering lots of questions, you know so, while we figure that out, so it's good Awesome.

2:26:38 - Leo Laporte
Thank you very much, Andy, Alex, Jason, thanks to all of you, special thanks to our club members for making this all possible. We do stream remarkably amazingly, thanks to Restream restream.io on eight different platforms. Club members get to watch in the Club Twit Discord. A lot of them choose YouTube anyway because YouTube quality is very good youtube.com.twit/live, twitch.tv/twit. There's also x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick and TikTok. So pick your favorite platform.

You can watch us stream, as we do the show for most of our shows, but in this case, every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. After the stream is over, we then polish it up. John Ashley adds his special little je ne sais quoi and we put a copy of it up on the website twit.tv/mbw audio or video you choose. There's also a YouTube channel. You'll see at the website the link. That is the entire show video.

That's useful for sharing little clips, like if you have a friend who's saying you know, I wonder what RSS reader I should use, just confuse the hell out of him and send him that clip and that way maybe he'll be turned on to MacBreak Weekly and certainly he will come up with some good ideas for how to do RSS. There's also. The best way to subscribe is in a podcast client of your choice Pocket Casts or Overcast, or Apple's Podcast, whatever it is that you use. Just look for MacBreak Weekly, subscribe to the audio or video and that way you'll have it the minute we're done fixing it up so you can listen to it whenever you're in the mood. I would do all of the above. That way you get it all. Join us in the club twit.tv/clubtwit, and join us next week for another Mac Break Weekly. Now it is my sad duty to tell you, you must get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye.