MacBreak Weekly 951

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko here, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell the whole gang is assembled. Time to talk Apple. Lots to talk about too, including Apple's plans to replace the Qualcomm modem in all of their devices with their own brand modem, and that even means in the Vision Pro. We'll find out more about that. Apple's first competitor on the iPhone for Apple Pay is arriving in Norway. What does that mean and why? You should be very careful with that QR code you get before you pick up your new laptop, plus a special present under Jason Snell's tree. All of that and more Coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 951. Recorded Tuesday, December 10th 2024. Launder It Through Belkin. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from apple, most of which will be rumors. Today, because it's that time of year. This is getting to look a lot like Christmas. Notice we have decorated the TWiT attic with bottle brush Christmas trees. It's acquired at very little cost from amazon.com. Hello, Andy Ihnatko. Where's the library decorations?

0:01:22 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, actually I stole them all because I thought that my place wasn't looking very festive. So I thought why should the public have?

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
these.

0:01:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it is a lending library they should lend you and I'm gonna bring it right back as soon as, like, the feast of the epiphany is over with by the way not one day later, Andy I think has cornered the market on dr Pepsi Tall Boys.

0:01:44 - Leo Laporte
Is that a tall boy? You're drinking there? Oh well, you got to switch to him or we won't know. There you go. It does look like it's. Oh yeah, 23 ounces.

0:01:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, 16 ounces, a full pint for people in freedom units.

0:01:58 - Leo Laporte
It's a liter of Dr Pepper. Good to see you, Andrew, also here from officehours.global and 090 Media, the one, the only, Alex Lindsay. Hello, Alex, Alex Lindsay, 00,00,00. Hello, hello, good to be here. Am I supposed to say Lindsay?

0:02:14 - Alex Lindsay
 No, no, Lindsay's fine. The EY typically is the English Lindsay's and the AY is the Scottish Lindsay's, Alex Lindsay say, Lindsay, if it doesn't have an A, it's not great, it's crap. You know, we split up and then some of us ended up fighting with. That's interesting, e is.

0:02:32 - Jason Snell
English and A is wearing a kilt.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
Alright, that's good to know. Hi, Alex, also here, mr Jason Snell, six of them colors. Wait a minute, you're in the living room.

0:02:44 - Jason Snell
It's a lie. It's a lie. I just felt like I needed to get in the Christmas spirit because you made me, but it's, I'm just. You know, I'm where, I'm always oh, but I'm always here, I'm always here, but I do have.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes, that's uh, you know we do when we had a burke back in the studio days, we would, uh, really overdo it. I think we would really decorate this. There was one year, a couple of years ago, where I noted probably, I think, was on a Mac break weekly I noted that we had not yet decorated and it was already well into December and Burke threw up on the set. He just brought everything in and threw it in. I don't have a Burke. Well, he's here but here, but he's not here here. So I had to do my own decorating. I kind of like those.

We ordered them live on this Week in Google and they finally arrived. Oh, let's talk about the modem, because that's probably the source of most of the new rumors, including the iPhone Air, which everybody acts as if like oh, that's a given, they're going to definitely do that next year.

0:03:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. I guess it depends on whether you think that they're going to be making it as a separate product and a separate SKU and a separate name with a separate product line, or whether they're just thinking of ways that, gee, because we've got all these hardware changes that no one has even rumored about yet, we are actually going to be able to make them thinner, Because people who get access to this information only has part of the story. They think, ooh, there's something called the iPhone Air that's going to be really, really making a lot of news in 2026, 2027. I like the idea of having a new kind of fashion, for lack of a better word, iPhone, of having a new kind of fashion, for lack of a better word, iPhone because, when you make.

I disdain making things thinner for the sake of it, but the phone is the one area where, if you take one millimeter off of it, it is shocking how much smaller it feels in the hand.

0:04:36 - Leo Laporte
Okay, because we're talking a couple of millimeters at best Right, exactly Two millimeters or something.

0:04:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And the other thing is that if they are interested in making a folding phone, they're going to have to figure out a way to make that phone thinner. So maybe this is just laying the groundwork, for here is the boards and here is the chips we're going to be using if we decide that making a folding phone is ever a good thing.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
Maybe it's not the iPhone Air, maybe it's the iPhone Bend. Is that what you're saying?

0:05:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Ooh, and they get Ben Kinsley to promote it. Interesting.

0:05:05 - Jason Snell
Sir Ben.

0:05:07 - Alex Lindsay
I do know someone who had a folding Samsung. I have one. They now have an iPhone.

0:05:14 - Leo Laporte
I bought the first and second fold. I have the flip, let me go get it.

0:05:17 - Alex Lindsay
They used it every day, and then they didn't.

0:05:22 - Jason Snell
I think Andy is right that the path to building a folding phone, you have to learn how to get everything miniaturized and thinner and all that. And they've got that slot that, with the mini and the plus, has obviously not sold to their satisfaction. So they want to try something else in there and so differentiating based on the fashion feel, making it feel thin, thin and light, and you give up some camera for it, maybe that is more. I you know, I would actually probably guess that it is going to differentiate that phone way more than just saying it is slightly larger or it is slightly smaller they won't say it's the thinnest phone we've ever made.

0:05:59 - Alex Lindsay
It will be actually a separate skew I think it'll actually be impossibly a line, I think.

0:06:03 - Leo Laporte
I think, when we think about this is the flip, and this is exactly what you're talking about, because, by the way I, this is the form factor I prefer to the fold. I don't think apple will do this, because it's just a folding, standard size folding phone, but you see how thick it becomes right.

0:06:18 - Jason Snell
So I gotta get that. They gotta get that dimension as thin as possible, if they're gonna, if they're gonna, fold it over.

0:06:22 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's not not having the wrinkle on that screen which we could see when you opened it. That's the real thing.

0:06:27 - Leo Laporte
That's what they should be thinking about.

0:06:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't really see that I'm like if I get the light right.

0:06:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I think it depends On that style of phone. We're just taking a standard phone and just making it smaller inside your pocket by folding it lengthwise. I think that is a serious thing when it comes to like the idea of I want an iPhone that turns into a de facto iPad mini. I've used those kind of folds before and, yeah, the first like day you can't help but notice it. The second day onward it's you just don't notice it at all. It's like it's sort of like when phones had a big forehead and chin and it's like, oh my God, look at all this screen.

0:07:07 - Leo Laporte
And then it's not an issue like after three or four hours. You know, what I don't get used to is that in order to make these foldable, they have to use a different material for the and maybe this is just a Samsung thing, but this is a little rubbery and I don't like it compared to glass. But now, if you use a screen protector already, maybe you won't feel bad about that.

0:07:21 - Alex Lindsay
won't feel bad about that I don't like screen protectors. A lot of the screen protectors are either glass or glass-like. I mean, I do hope that if they're going towards an air, I'm hoping that the pros go the other direction so they give us thicker, heavier, bigger cameras, bigger stuff. That would be the. It's already sort of happening. Right, it is happening, but I think that creating a thin one gives them more license to go towards a more pro one, One that I put in a backpack like a big phone.

0:07:51 - Andy Ihnatko
And also, I don't think it's a bad idea for Apple to again. They can't go back to the Mac world of 1993 where they had 100 different kinds of Macs and no one knew which one was which. But I think there is room for them having a. Let's have, let's experiment with doing a line of phones that is not necessarily the high performance phone and not the budget phone, but this is like the fashionable, nice looking phone that it doesn't have the greatest camera, doesn't have the greatest specs at all, but it looks really, really good. Because internationally we forget that the iPhone is not marginal, but it's an aspirational product. It's not the phone that necessarily everybody wants. So anything they could do to have an edge, to do things that no Android phone can do, which is usually look like 1,000 million damn bucks, that might get people to save. Maybe, instead of buying this Samsung or this OnePlus or this whatever, whatever, I will buy an apple phone because I just want this thing in my hand this whole conversation began with mark germans, uh and others.

0:08:54 - Leo Laporte
Bloomberg report that apple plans a three-year modem rollout in bid to top qualcomm company. So this is Apple and we know they've wanted to do this forever to replace the third-party modem chips they have in there with their own, some of their own making. It won't necessarily save them a lot of money. I think they probably still have to license at least GSM from Qualcomm.

0:09:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but it would give them a lot more freedom with again developing everything they want.

0:09:23 - Leo Laporte
Making it skinnier is the big one, I guess One of the most interesting things a lot more freedom with again developing everything they want that they're making.

0:09:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, one of the most interesting things from this report was that this is going to be responsible for knocking another millimeter or two off the thickness of the thing.

0:09:32 - Leo Laporte
And, yeah, more than half a decade in the making, apple's in-house modem system, german rights, will debut next spring. So obviously that's not the regular iphone. Next spring is going to be an se that's an se. It starts with the se right, which is low stakes yeah, he says, because it will not be as fast as Qualcomm's modem initially. So putting it in the SE makes kind of sense until they get it to that performance level.

0:09:58 - Jason Snell
And then yeah, and so the idea there is that there are places this can go. But it can go in the SE, it can go in that thin phone. The idea there is these are phones that are not expected to be the highest possible performance, right? It allows Apple to test this out, although apparently, you know, first they send people around and test them. But nothing beats testing in the real world, right?

0:10:16 - Alex Lindsay
So they're going to do that. Millions of gamma testers is really useful.

0:10:20 - Jason Snell
Yeah, so that'll be good. But it'll be again like if remember when they had two different modems in the iPhone and people were like some iPhones are faster than others and you're paying premium for an iPhone and you might not have gotten the fastest data. They don't want that to happen, so you put it in an SE, you put it in a model. That is all about compromise. In order to get it thinner, you try it out. That's a good shakedown cruise for you.

I was struck by in Gurman's report. I didn't quite realize this, but Gurman says Qualcomm receives more than 20% of its revenue from Apple and obviously some of that is going to be patent licenses if Apple makes their own 5G modem, because they have the patents there. But clearly Apple is also an enormous customer of Qualcomm and Qualcomm I mean, we've all been following this right. Qualcomm has been telling its shareholders and warning that a major customer will probably transition away from them eventually for a while now. I mean, the good news is it's taken them five years and they still haven't done it. But once this starts, if Apple can continue and ultimately go through what Gurman says multiple chip generations to get to the point where they're at parity, and then maybe they can even succeed in if not besting Qualcomm getting benefits by integrating the chips. That will be a big hit for Qualcomm, because patents are great and all, but having them buy your chips is better and they're going to lose that potentially.

0:11:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, qualcomm does, however, have a big brand new customer in Microsoft, which is using its Snapdragon Elite chips in their Windows on ARM, and it's not just Microsoft, it's all the other PC makers, but I'm sure that they're hoping that that will.

0:12:00 - Alex Lindsay
It's never going to reach the numbers so that iPhone reaches it. Has anything happened with the ARM lawsuit and cancellation of Qualcomm's license? I mean, has that gone anywhere? Because that's a really you combine what Jason just said and ARM's attack on that could get complicated for Qualcomm.

0:12:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no kidding, because everything they make is an ARM chip, right? I think that's just a negotiation. It's a lawsuit, but I think it's a negotiation ploy to get more money out of Qualcomm. Yeah, no kidding, because everything they make is an ARM chip, right? I think that's just a negotiation. It's a lawsuit, but I think it's a negotiation ploy to get more money out of Qualcomm. Let me just check and see.

0:12:31 - Jason Snell
They are going to court this month. I guess this month, December, it says.

0:12:34 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they're going to court this month. The one that doesn't necessarily fit inside of court is that evidently arm issued a 60 day notice informing qualcomm that arm would cancel its license to use arm.

0:12:50 - Leo Laporte
The arm architecture that was, let's see this. This story came out, uh, in the last month, a month ago exactly. So, uh, that's interesting if, if they really did do that, that means there's one more month, right? So, uh, qualcomm did.

0:13:05 - Alex Lindsay
This is a negotiation tactic, but it's in the contract. Like you're good, that gets really hard to get out of you know.

0:13:10 - Leo Laporte
So I think this is all. I think we can assume.

0:13:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's all negotiation this, all this, all this is all comes back to apple, because this is all over the licensing related to the team that left apple and went to qualcomm. Um, you know qualcomm bot, right, right. So so this is Nuvia. You know this is related to when Nuvia was purchased. Arm said that they had they should renegotiate the contract and Qualcomm said no, no, no, the contract's the same.

0:13:37 - Leo Laporte
Arm said it would be different if it was you than Nuvia you know like and so, and, and I'm sure, in these contracts it says under if there's an acquisition, we have to renegotiate, and that's usually what's the case. So Gurman writes, Apple's modem has been a longtime company Coming. This is the kind of sad saga of it. When the company set out to build the chip, it originally hoped to bring it to market as early as five years ago. To jumpstart the effort, the company invested billions of dollars to set up testing and engineering labs around the world. It spent a billion to acquire. You may remember this intel's modem group. Yeah, millions more hiring engineers from other silicon companies. Setback after setback, the prototypes are too large, ran too hot, weren't it sufficiently power efficient.

0:14:19 - Jason Snell
Um, you know, they've apparently adjusted revenge or is this like they're like? Are we just getting back at qualcomm because we don't like them, or are we benefiting from this? But I think johnny sruji, who heads their chip group, felt like this was important because they could ultimately not only build their own but presumably eventually integrated into the rest of their silicon which imagine if you could put it into the system on a chip, into into the 8.

0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
Exactly.

0:14:45 - Jason Snell
Although it does not speak well. I mean, this has been a rough couple of weeks for Intel, a rough couple of weeks for Intel. But one of the things German reports is that one of the things they did after they bought Intel's business and they worked on it for a while was start hiring people from Qualcomm, right Like the Intel team was not so hot, which I mean we'll just take them at his word.

I'm not surprised that they went, and this is a whole setup, especially in San Diego, where they're just hiring people from right across the street.

0:15:11 - Leo Laporte
I'd love to read the book about this, but after adjusting development practices, reorganizing management and, as you say, hiring scores of new engineers from Qualcomm, Apple is now confident its modem will work.

0:15:26 - Alex Lindsay
So this changes a lot.

0:15:27 - Leo Laporte
This changes everything.

0:15:28 - Alex Lindsay
Go ahead. This is one of the big advantages for companies in California. Both advantage and disadvantage is that there's no non-competes, so you can't you know, you can just freely steal each other's employees.

0:15:40 - Leo Laporte
There were going to be no non-competes nationally, but the courts threw out. President.

0:15:45 - Alex Lindsay
Biden. But here in California it's a pretty big deal. It's been the law for a long time. Yeah, it's huge.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
Actually it's been the law since I remember this. Back when I was making contracts with Tech TV, they tried to insert that in my contract, saying I couldn't go to work for another failing cable company, not enforceable.

0:16:01 - Jason Snell
It wasn't enforceable, I definitely have had friends who couldn't work in the same business for months.

0:16:06 - Alex Lindsay
Right, Because they're in a state that is not as enlightened as California in this case.

0:16:10 - Jason Snell
But I think, look, I think all of us have talked about this a lot and said don't discount Qualcomm and the value of their years of experience all over the world dealing with other carriers and different regulatory regimes and different frequencies and different like. One of the things this chip's not going to do is millimeter wave right, which is a frequency that is used some places but not other places. But the flip side of that is I don't think you should ever bet against Johnny Sruji and Apple's chip team. Right, like, if there is, honestly, if there is a single best part of the last 10 years of Apple, it's the chip team. Like they have killed it and so if they're building this, I mean not saying it's a guarantee that they won't mess it up, but I would not bet against them.

0:16:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah also, it sounds like again, if these rumors are true, it sounds like a really smart play in the way they were to do it, Because A there's going to be a heartbreak period the first time they try to manufacture these things at scale. So no, the last thing they want to do is put it in an iPhone where they sell those numbers there's also going to be. There's no way you can test a brand new modem like that until you get truly millions and millions of people worldwide using it in every single situation. This isn't about the 99. This is about the one percent for whom your new modem fails, and that's not, and you can't just simply wipe that away.

Oh well, that's just an edge case.

No, that's a case of someone who's getting basically dial up modem speeds on on a phone that they spend a lot of money for.

So the first round is going to be a bunch of beta testers.

But to put it into a product where there's going to be lesser expectations is a good play, lower sales also a really good play, and we'll also give them the experience they need to adapt this for all the other pieces of tech that they want to put it into, because another part of that story has been that, look, if Apple is really as Jason says I mean they really are about, let's put everything on the die, let's basically not just have our own chip, but also we can also integrate and package all these components the way we want it to. Has that ever been like one of the biggest stumbling blocks in finally having a Mac that has a built-in modem? All these other things, hopefully, will be opened up once Apple has the ability to not just buy a chip off the shelf and somehow shoo it into whatever the RF profile of this device is, whatever the power and heat profile is of it, but design it exactly for this specific MacBook Air, we could finally get something that I've been wanting for at least eight years now.

0:18:45 - Alex Lindsay
All I was going to say is that I think that, as Apple gets over the hump, the amount of innovation that starts to get added to this, of all kinds of ways that different devices interact with each other over longer distances, over all these other things, allows them to innovate in a way that is going to be very hard for anybody else to do, because they don't own the whole stack, you know, and that the the, the fact that Apple, you know, makes Xcode and has all the opera, has the operating system and all these other things, continues to be something that they're able to leverage. So I think it's going to make a lot of sense. It's probably still going to take a long time, you know it gets back to. You know there's a lot of we do not because they're easy, but because we thought they'd be easy. Apple's gotten its hands into that tar and I think what they come out with will be great, but it'll probably take the next 10 years longer than they expected.

0:19:35 - Leo Laporte
Gurman writes. The modem won't be used in Apple's higher-end products. It's going to come to a mid-tier iPhone codenamed D23, later next year. Far thinner design than current models. The chip will also start rolling out as early as next year in Apple's lower end iPads. Codename Sinope Two possibilities for where that codename comes from. One it is a moon of Jupiter with a retrograde orbit. I don't think it's that. It's probably the Niyad from Greek mythology who was abducted by the god. Apollo granted, offered to grant a wish, apollo. She wished to remain a virgin and apollo honored her request. So she's the, the virgin niad. That's just like a modem, isn't it? I don't know. I don't know why they call it sign up. There might be a better way. Maybe there's an engineer in there. Suruji, parenthetically, we should note, is one of the named candidates for the new ceo at intel. I'd be shocked. I think we mentioned this last week.

0:20:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I'd be shocked if johnny would think about that yeah, I saw coverage throw a lot of money at him. I I saw coverage from from another, from a business, uh publication, that was saying no, that's kind of nuts. I mean they, they would basically have to lay before his feet, see our business in ruins. You, and only you, have the opportunity to start from the bare bones foundation and build an empire that this galaxy has never seen, and we shall rule it hand in hand.

0:20:58 - Leo Laporte
But he's already done that at Apple, so it's kind of not much of an offer, really All right. Kind of not much of an offer, really all right, uh. So, uh, synope, isn't it as advanced as the latest modems from qualcomm, says german, uh, so it will be a downgrade from what you get in the iphone 16 pro. What does that mean? If it's not, is it not as fast?

0:21:19 - Jason Snell
I think it's. Yeah, I think it's missing. Maybe missing support for some band?

0:21:22 - Leo Laporte
oh, it doesn't support millimeter wave, which is that wave, which is that Ryzen 5G that you can't get anywhere but Philadelphia and New York Exactly.

0:21:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It's hugely, hugely, hugely fast, but you have to be within line of sight and within throwing a football distance of the tower in order to get anything.

0:21:38 - Leo Laporte
So big deal. I do remember when remember this Apple had I can't remember which version of the, which iPhone it was, but they had an iphone that had two modems one was from intel, one was from qualcomm, and they actually had to slow down the qualcomm modem so that would match the performance of intel. You remember that.

0:21:53 - Alex Lindsay
Remember that story from back in the day yeah, I, I, I have to admit I have such a low expectation of myself cellular coverage and I don't know whether it's just that we're using county anymore. Yeah Well, no, it's just that. It just. I feel like we have dropped calls all the time that the it's people are like I can't hear you and I have to.

you're the last one still using a phone as a phone, though, If the data is okay the data sometimes is okay, sometimes isn't, you know like, oh, can I stream from my phone from here? And so I see the data a lot and a lot of times it's not particularly impressive. You know, under 10 megs a second in many places that I'm at and so I'm kind of like that Gurman has some pretty good sources.

0:22:34 - Leo Laporte
He says in lab tests the first Apple modem caps out at download speeds of 4 gigabits a second. That seems like sufficient. It's not millimeter wave speed if you're buying an se yeah, but but sure theoretically.

0:22:47 - Alex Lindsay
But the question is is it? How does it interact with the antennas? And then, and then again, I don't know how much you even know, because the the I mean again on a day-to-day basis I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing speeds oftentimes. So there's some places you get to and you're like, wow, I got 80 megs up and down.

0:23:02 - Leo Laporte
But it's pretty few and far between german also says the modem is better, uh, in terms of radiation. Uh, its specific absorption rate, or sar, is a, is, is, is better, is lower uh, I think I think his suggestion there too is that it's talking.

0:23:20 - Jason Snell
Apple has been able to design it to talk to the system and modulate that better because it has complete control over the device and that that helps. By the way, I I can't tell whether they're remember you know they used to do the os was cat names. I can't tell, but grumman's got like all the code names. It's kind of these are all mythological figures. They're all also outer solar system moons. So centipede, ganymede and prometheus, all all figures from mythology, but also um. The first two are I think jupiter.

They named moons after mythology so the the question is yeah, did apple? Say outer solar system moons, or did they say figures from mythology? Uh, or figures from mythology that are named, that have outer system moons named after them? I don't know, but anyway they said centipede is like center, that's how you say it, yeah, yeah it's, it's a starter, it's a starter chip, and then, and then ganymede is supposed to get them sort of caught up with qualcomm, and then prometheus good name for this is the you know, we, we take it over kind of thing, and that's that.

0:24:24 - Andy Ihnatko
That's their three-stage course remember and get tied to a rock.

0:24:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah exactly for me this is. It did not end well, but okay, that eagle can really get you. Um, that kind of smarts modem will work with another new apple component, a radio frequency front end system, or rffe, called carpo is that. Is that? Is that a moon of jupiter, I think? It's one of the first marx brothers, the one, that's what I think before, and uh yeah, the part will also take away business from qualcomm and can eventually affect corvo. That's who?

0:24:56 - Jason Snell
carpo is a satellite of jupiter mythological figure though it is oh yeah, because all the outer solar system moons are, or all the jupiter and saturn moons are mythological figures. There's like what? Like uranus, I think it's like shakespeare characters or something, but like jupiter and saturn, it's all mythological figures.

0:25:15 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, that's, that's what it is it's like the streets in our city they're all named after the daughters of the developers.

0:25:20 - Jason Snell
So there's, you know yeah, yeah, I mean, you can't do butthead astronomer anymore, so you gotta choose we're trees.

0:25:27 - Leo Laporte
They used to be trees, and uh, let's see. Uh, the ganymede is expected to go into iphone 18 as well as upscale ipads. I love the thought and this is one another bloomberg rumor that apple will start putting these chips, since it's making them not only into the ipads, which they're already offering cellular connectivity, but into MacBooks.

0:25:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, Would you like that About time? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big believer in the iPad, cellular iPad. I've bought cellular iPads for the last five or six years?

0:25:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I always do.

0:25:57 - Jason Snell
And I know everybody's like oh, but you can tether. It's like tethering sucks and it drains two batteries at once. And t Sucks and it drains two batteries at once. And like it's tethering is better than nothing, but having a cellular modem in your device is better. Like it's just better.

0:26:10 - Andy Ihnatko
And on top of that, what if you don't live in the United States, where everybody has an iPhone? What if you live in an Android land? Like it can be done, but there's a difference between. Even if you have an iPhone, there's a difference between there is a facility that makes it super, super easy and, no, this is a function of the computer. You don't have to do anything, you just have to like not turn the feature off. Yeah, that's no different.

0:26:34 - Leo Laporte
I would, without question, pay extra for a modem inside a MacBook, you might be waiting until 2027, but okay, that's the third modem, prometheus, which will also have satellite support for the next generation satellite networks. You know T-Mobile has already got the green light from the FCC to use Starlink to enhance its cellular connectivity. I think in the years to come we may see that everywhere.

0:27:00 - Andy Ihnatko
That could be a very big deal, because the incoming head of the FCC is much, much more bullish on satellite connectivity than his predecessors were. That's one area. I know that I said some mean things about him that I thought that are true. But on many areas I think that he's got some good ideas. One of the reasons why that Starlink contract got nixed was for a lot of good reasons, but also because the head of the FCC at that time thought that if our goal is to bring broadband to rural communities and underserved areas, we don't want to give an opportunity to create a new super monopoly in satellite internet. We want to use this to foster building a brand new infrastructure that stays in place for everybody, which is fine. But it's the difference between sending out trucks to lay out all that fiber versus we ship you something, you flip a switch and congratulations, you now have 200 megabits up and down.

0:27:56 - Leo Laporte
Gurman also says that modem might look pretty good in a Vision Pro. Down the road, sure.

0:28:05 - Jason Snell
Assuming we get one of these outside, I think one of the challenges really is that for a lot of the Vision Pro down the road?

0:28:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Sure, assuming we get one of these outside.

0:28:07 - Alex Lindsay
I think one of the challenges really is that for a lot of the Vision Pro content it's so big that you need a lot of cellular. You'd be using up a big part of your cellular to pull the data.

0:28:17 - Leo Laporte
But maybe as an AR device it would be more useful.

0:28:21 - Alex Lindsay
So you'd know where you were, I don't see a lot of people, even myself. I mean, I'm pretty aggressive about using my vision pro. I use it almost every day at some at some point, and I do not put it on outside unless I'm in a plane right.

Like this is the only time I turned it on is if I'm sitting I uh window seat, I close the thing and off I go, you know but but outside of that I don't really use it in public. It would be more for augmented reality and that's actually what Gurman says and, yeah, I think I think future, I think the truth makes a lot of sense when those headsets get smaller or become glasses and you need to be able to design your own cellular capacity.

0:28:58 - Leo Laporte
Imagine a metaray band with a cellular connection. Yeah, actually, the way it does now. It now it connects to your phone, which seems fine. But yeah, well, there you have it. That's the uh entire uh grist for the rumor mill boy. It's gonna be. It's gonna be a tough show. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy and not co Alex lindsey jnell. We'll make up some more rumors.

The Brazilian court has overturned this is a tattered tale the injunction that they had imposed on Apple's App Store. You may remember, Apple was ordered by a Brazilian antitrust regulator to open up the App Store. Apple appealed. Brazilian courts decided last week to overturn the injunction imposed on Apple which would have forced the company to sideload, to allow sideloading within less than three weeks. That was a little quick. The court said yeah, that was disproportionate and unnecessary. They said it in Portuguese, but you get the idea. The judge understood that this is from. 9to5mac. Measures imposed by the regulator change in a sensitive and structural way apple's business operation. Obrigado, um, so uh, now, uh, this is still gonna have to happen. It's just not gonna have to happen right away. I don't know. I don't know. The judge overturned the injunction. The brazilian regulator can still appeal investigations will continue. Apple could still be forced to enable side loaning in brazil. They just have more time to think about it and fight it I think that's.

0:30:37 - Jason Snell
I mean, yeah, they will, and it is a, it is a thing that they can use as an excuse because it's different from what they've been asked to do somewhat in the past. I think, right, like tech companies do need time to make changes and test them and roll the 20 days is a little fast.

I mean like even no matter where you feel about like apple and its regulation and all of that, they do need time. I mean it is it's not unreasonable to say you've got a relative as long as you do it. You can have six months to do it or whatever, because it is hard. They can't just flip a switch Now. If they ask them to do the Europe thing here, maybe they could try to expedite it, but even then give them some time. That's not unreasonable to me.

0:31:22 - Alex Lindsay
Anytime someone gives someone like 20 days to do something, it takes 20 days of meetings to figure out what to do and you, just it. I immediately make a bunch of decisions about how technologically you know salient the person making the decision is. Like should they be even talking about this? Like shouldn't they? Be in this conversation when they, when they say 20 days, you're like you have no idea what you're talking about.

0:31:42 - Jason Snell
Just flip a switch. It's literally the governmental equivalent of users being like I want this new feature, it'll only take you a couple of hours to do right. Where they have no idea about the complexity of the situation. And this is the that would be the government equivalent, which is like oh, just it's. You know it's that it's law enforcement saying oh, you wizards just invent a golden magic key that fixes encryption. You just invent it. It's like it doesn't work that way.

0:32:10 - Alex Lindsay
But people don't know that Everything's easy when you don't know how it works.

0:32:14 - Jason Snell
It is, oh man, that's so true.

0:32:17 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a common denominator in a lot of Australia's very, very consumer forward regulation, but a lot of it is. When you read the law it basically comes down to I don't know you figure it out. We're just ordering you to do it Now it's your problem.

0:32:30 - Leo Laporte
They literally said that in the blocking social media for kids under 16. They'll figure it out. They're smart people.

0:32:37 - Alex Lindsay
It's the equivalent of a guy sitting in the stands telling how he would be quarterback. You know, like you know he would be quarterback. You know, like you know, like I would go back there, of course this reminds me of.

0:32:45 - Jason Snell
There's that onion story from like 20 years ago that somebody should do something about all the problems. That is this exact mindset, right, which is I was reading that the other day and they build a wall across China and a thousand years later I'm still putting up with my neighbor's pine trees dropping cones on my front lawn. I mean, it's like what do you want? Like it doesn't work, like that, it's complicated. Sorry, it's complicated.

0:33:05 - Andy Ihnatko
At the same time, sometimes you do have to push back and say that, yeah, you're telling us that if you allow outside developers to like, tell their users directly about a discount, that it would actually undermine the security and privacy of the entire platform. We're going to guess that maybe you could figure out a way around that. So that's an Apple problem, oh for sure that's not an Apple problem.

0:33:27 - Jason Snell
For sure, and they can use these as stalling tactics, and that's not ideal, but there is. I'm also. I want to say that I also hear people who say, oh, come on, they could do this. And it's like that's not true either. Right, like it is complicated to roll out software changes that change the way the whole thing was conceived, and the EU, which has been very aggressive on this, still basically gave Apple like a year plus to roll this out, and that's not unreasonable. But yes, it can also be used as a rope-a-dope kind of thing where they're like, oh, I don't know, we just don't know what to do, and you're like, come on, come on, just do it.

0:34:04 - Andy Ihnatko
This is why I respect mostly the way that the EU does it.

If we're both talking about the same thing, it wasn't okay.

Now, as soon as they don't do things like a taskmaster challenge, like you have 10 minutes starting now they say here's what. We spent two years or three years proposing this with your input of the industry. Here is the framework that we have developed publicly. We are not going to implement it for another year and a half and in the meantime, we are going to have an open process and board for you coming to us when you see areas that you're going to have a problem complying and you want clarity on exactly what compliance actually consists of, then it becomes really, really. That's the point which I start. I start to turn around where, okay, you're a two trillion dollar company, I think you, I think, having a two-year timeline to do this, as, after having three years before this to think about it, be prepared for it, it's not unreasonable for you to actually have some forward progress on this to meet this law all right, mr debunker, Andy inaco, I got all excited when I saw this nine to five Mac rumor headline OLED MacBook Pro without a notch coming in 2026.

0:35:10 - Leo Laporte
I said, see, I was right not to buy an M four MacBook Pro. I'm holding out for the M six in 2026. And then you said not so fast, bucky.

0:35:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. Okay, it was it, so it was interesting. The story came back from a timeline from a very, very legitimate industry analyst firm that claims to have a timeline of. Here is what the panel display technology is going to be implemented in across most Apple products lines over the next five, six, seven, eight years. But then you dig. Well, okay, did the firm itself release this? No, it comes from a Twitter user who I hadn't heard of, doesn't mean anything, but I haven't heard of him. The account is only two months old, okay, and the avatar looks a little AI generated-ish, so, and he doesn't say exactly where he got this documentation from.

0:36:04 - Leo Laporte
He looks like he brushes his teeth with Pepsodent. That's what he looks like, cyber.

0:36:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Pepsodent.

0:36:13 - Leo Laporte
So even the provenance of this slide is questionable.

0:36:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, it looks like a good slide. It would be risky for him to say, oh, here's where I got it from, but you have to say here's how I got it. You even have to just say a source from inside blank who I'm not identifying because, to protect their anonymity, it's like oh look, here's something I found on the street while I was you know, we should also say that this is neither Apple nor an Apple supplier, but just an analyst.

0:36:40 - Leo Laporte
Om dia, so analysts make up stuff all the time because they're trying to. You know, om dia. So analysts make up stuff all the time because they're trying to help their stock market clients know what to do.

0:36:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, it depends on the firm, because they're not trying to get clicks, they're selling services, they're selling packages of information to people who intend. So they can get away with that for a very short time, but not for a long time. And again, the claim source is legitimate They've been around for a while. If it's true, it says that the Dynamic Island on the MacBook is going to be replaced with just a pole punch for the camera and that's it, which would be nice. I love the Dynamic Island. I think it's amazing.

0:37:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I do too. I don't mind at all. It's funny how we got used to it.

0:37:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, that's again something that seems like a dumb idea. But then, okay, but use it for a couple of days, see if you still feel like it after a few days. I think it's one of the most innovative, creative and functional and practical ways to address what is foundationally a hardware limitation, where we want the screen to get all the way to the edge but we have to put a camera and some sensors in there. How do we do that? The Apple solution got me thinking.

On both the phone and everything else got me thinking, not so much like oh well, this dynamic island is like intruding upon the space of the screen. It's actually my thought is that no, it's giving me extra pixels to the left and the right and just above and below it. It would be just bezel if not, if it were not for that uh. So there are all kinds of voices. So I'm not, I'm not debunking it, I'm just saying that, as root sources go, it's the sort of thing that makes me add the uh brief, the suffix. Interesting if true, as opposed to interesting data point a lot of companies moving to oled displays.

0:38:23 - Leo Laporte
I have some. I've had had some OLED laptops that I really like the screen. They're not battery. I guess they're not real battery friendly, but at least that's what people have told me.

0:38:32 - Andy Ihnatko
They're getting better. And the biggest complaint that I think Apple had internally about OLED when Samsung started rolling them out is that it's like seasoning a McDonald's burger where they put lots of fat and lots of salt and lots of carbs in there, because people like fat and salt and carbs. But if you are more of an aesthetic, it's not super accurate.

0:38:49 - Leo Laporte
You're like exactly.

0:38:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but now that's been. I think the benefits of OLED are hard to argue against when it comes to user interface, when just looking at apps. It's only when you're looking at videos and photos that you might see is this punchier than it should be. But OLED, since the Middle Ages, has become a lot more sophisticated, a lot more sensitive. When it needs to be accurate, it can be accurate, and so now you start to ask yourself why wouldn't I not want those super, super dense blacks on the display that I can get with OLED but I can't get with any?

0:39:20 - Leo Laporte
other. Yeah, I only buy OLED TVs now. I mean, they're just really gorgeous, um, and I'm aware of oled laptops only because my daughter's sensitive to leds and uh and really likes oleds and so I'm always looking for. But she uses chromebooks and, yeah, samsung makes an oled chromebook, so there's no reason to think that apple wouldn't be using oled, regardless of this story at some point in the next couple of years. That seems completely likely, yeah.

0:39:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Getting back to the iPhone SE this year, another part of the rumor package not only was that modem, but also a way upgraded camera, but also OLED display. So that makes you think that Apple is thinking that OLED is basically table stakes for the product line, unless there's a really bad technical reason why they can't do it the.

0:40:04 - Leo Laporte
The iphone pros now have oleds. Is that right? I think they're ips, I think they're still no, all the iphones are all wet. All the iphones are all lit.

0:40:14 - Jason Snell
Okay, sorry, I didn't mean to wake you, jason you guys seem to be having a good time, so I thought I'd just let you go but wait, tim cook wants to save your life.

0:40:25 - Leo Laporte
Stehen levy with an interview in uh wired actually a video interview in wired with the ceo of apple. I don't ever read or watch interviews with ceos because I'm I feel like they're never going to say anything, did they? You know? That's like oh wow, did. Did he say anything? That's oh wow.

0:40:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Not oh wow, but there's a lot. I liked it because A it was kind of a rapid fire interview in which Steve Levy seemed to have control of the interview, as opposed to oh no. I triggered the CEO keyword of oh no, he's going to spend six minutes saying the same stuff about artificial intelligence as anything else. Spend six minutes saying the same stuff about artificial intelligence as anything else. He also gave as much pushback as I think that anybody can against a CEO of that level about talking about things like the recent Apple artificial intelligence, apple intelligence videos, demos of somebody writing off a very, very jokey sounding business email and Apple Intelligence will convert something that's a lot smarter, more professional, basically saying that well, are you basically helping this person dupe a potential employer into thinking that they're actually more sophisticated, actually more grown up than they actually are, which I thought was relevant, given that Apple was a a few months ago talking about how their attitude towards using generative AI and photo editing is that we believe that the photo should represent what was actually there.

So we're being very cautious about features that let you remove something and replace it with more background or something like that. It's like, yeah, but again, are you helping somebody to say here is very, very sketchy language that I'd like you to turn into a very, very long professional piece of email. That's an academic debate, not like a practical one, I should say, but I think that's interesting. If you're going to make the statement we want the reality of photos to represent reality, despite the fact that photos never represent reality whatsoever. Is there a problem with basically giving somebody a tone of voice they don't actually have, so erasing their personality, so to speak?

0:42:32 - Alex Lindsay
I will say the health app. I mean, if you haven't dug into the health app, it is incredible. I mean it is like looking into the sun. I've had to spend more time with it recently on tracking some stuff and it is just. There are so many features and so many pieces of hardware that tie back. You know, I'm starting to buy all this hardware that ties back into the phone and it's really amazing Like it's. You know what Apple's doing there and I still think that the I know it's going to be the hardest thing that they're doing is the glucose levels. If they figure that out, I don't know if they'll crack it, but if they crack it it's going to be massive it's a big deal.

0:43:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Just going onward, though, there were a couple of things. There was a rumor a couple of months ago where Apple had decided was planning on investing in open AI there was going to be a closer relationship, and Steve Levy asked Tim Cook directly about this and said, nope, that was not going to happen. Cook, directly about this, said nope, that was not going to happen. There was a follow-up. He said well, I'm not going to say yes or no that we never considered it, but any idea that this was something that was on deck ready to go is just not true. That's the sort of interview this was Like a lot of asking questions specifically about that.

Tim Cook, knowing that he's talking to Steve Levy and not just somebody that is not going to be taken seriously. No matter how the interview comes out, I'm going to give you some sort of a substantive response. There was a lot of coverage that came about from this because, oh my god, tim Cook acknowledged the existence of smart glasses as opposed to AR VR, because with any other interviewer, if asked about that, he would have absolutely parried off of it or say we won't comment about unannounced products, at least with someone like Steve Levy who's had such a close relationship not just with Tim Cook but also with Steve Jobs before him, so he was kind of grandfathered in. He was part of the club that Tim Cook inherited. He can at least say that yeah, that's definitely a good place to go.

0:44:29 - Leo Laporte
That's definitely on our horizon, but that's not something that we're doing right now, of course. Well good, Thank you for making it so I didn't have to watch it. I agree with the health stuff, Alex. I mean, I think this is the right way to go with the watch, for sure.

0:44:51 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there's so much track. I mean I find myself suddenly using it all the time when I'm doing swimming laps or or doing walks or. But then it's also like blood pressure and weight and and all kinds of and heart rates and everything else and it's all tied. It's all tied together and it's done at apple level kind of. And again I think that the glucose one, I think that's like sell all your stock from adm oh, yeah, I agree.

0:45:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree, that's huge, it will destroy the current food industry, if it comes out.

0:45:09 - Jason Snell
It's a tough grail, though.

0:45:11 - Alex Lindsay
People go oh, you know it's not going to make that big of a difference. I'm like if you have glucose levels on your wrist all the time and you connect the dots between what you're eating and how you're feeling with your phone, I mean with your watch it will make Atkins look like a walk in the park, like for most of the processed food companies. It's just going to be brutal, and so it'll be really interesting to see if Apple is able to and Apple is probably one of the only companies that could probably make it work on the watch, because it's going to be really expensive.

0:45:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I would doubt that, but I agree that it's going to be an important revelation for wearables.

0:45:45 - Leo Laporte
I use an alternative to Apple Health called Gentler Streak, so it is a little gentler, but it also and I don't know if this is valid or not, but it has like extra activities like walking your dog. It makes a distinction between American rules football and Australian rules football. It has blood loss, it makes a distinction between walking your dog and walking a guide dog. You know, I mean, it's a very weird I don't know.

0:46:14 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there's some things that are like like apple will tell you whether you're walking, uh, evenly between your feet yeah, that's the kind of stuff that is.

0:46:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this it's like some crazy analysis that will tell you from your iphone, I love, whether you might have some issues.

0:46:27 - Leo Laporte
And then this is just on top of apple health. So I still get all of that and anything I record in apple health goes into that. But the best thing is it says, oh, you're really killing it. Oh yeah, that that walk was great, you know or sometimes it says you walk, you did too much, you know, take next tomorrow off, which is we're already you.

0:46:45 - Jason Snell
Apple Watch just added the latest watch at West added this whole thing about effort, where you can actually grade your effort after you're done with a workout, which is a good piece of data, because if you had a rough time, it knows that and we're seeing more AI graded features or AI created features, the sleep apnea detection right and some of the other features like that created features, the sleep apnea detection right and some of the other features like that. I think and I do think there's a lot of potential for Apple here, which is why Tim Cook is so excited about it that there's also this frontier, which is AI medicine. Where we see it now, it happens kind of on the larger scale, where there's institutions that are doing analysis of x-rays and analysis of MRIs and things like that. But the other, the bottom-up approach, is using AI algorithms to look at your vitals I mean, apple has the app now but to look at your Apple Health data over time and start to say more holistic things about you where right now, they're not comfortable doing that. So they're like, oh well, here's your oxygen uptake change or here's your sleep total.

But you know, we could potentially get to the point where, through a collection of devices that you wear, an ML model on your phone could say I'm worried about you, right, and it wouldn't be about one item, it would be a little more holistic than that and that's really I mean. Again, apple likes to run in those videos, but this has the potential to affect people's lives where they might not call their doctor or they might not go get checked. But an algorithm that's got access to even a limited set of data might say I think you might have a problem, and it's not just as simple as you might be an AFib because the heart monitor says so, but something more about. I know all of this stuff about you and now I'm worried about you. It's very interesting.

0:48:29 - Alex Lindsay
And I still think that the anonymized data is going to get to a point where that eventually, it's going to be able to see things six months ahead of time that we never thought of. Like I see a pattern and I've seen this pattern a hundred thousand times and this pattern means that you're going to have a heart attack within the next six months. You know like that's going to. You know like it's, and this pattern is something that we can see because we have so many people wearing the watch and delivering that anonymized data is.

0:48:54 - Jason Snell
That's how the sleep apnea thing works, right. So if they can validate based on data for a broad population, which is what the sleep apnea detection study did, and that's the potential and that's why I think Apple's really interested in as many sensors as they can get on the watch or on other devices, as much data as they can get, because there is this feeling. I know I've mentioned it here before, but there's that story about the woman who could smell Parkinson's and it was literally like they found out that there's a molecule that people with Parkinson's have on their skin and dogs can do it and some super smellers can do it, but it's like it's finding data, mining data that you don't even know is there until you see enough of it.

Like Alex said, until you have so much data. And that's what that's a thing that AI is very good at is picking up the patterns and throwing a red flag and you know, maybe it's only right half the time. But, like if you could make a deal that say I'm gonna, I'm gonna alert you if you have a 50 chance of having a heart attack in the next six months and tell you to go see your doctor, well, that's, I mean, that's worth. That's worth going to see your doctor right?

0:49:59 - Leo Laporte
it's interesting there's this. The story came out this week of a long-term study of mammograms that women who paid extra to have their mammograms analyzed by ai had a 20 better result.

0:50:10 - Alex Lindsay
Ai is actually being used now to predict subtle changes over time, to predict a five-year risk well, and there's been situations where the the ai sees something that says this is you know, this person has this it does. They don't even know what it sees it just they don't know it's there, right like it, just it's figured out that there's something there that tells that it's going to be connected, and so it's.

0:50:31 - Andy Ihnatko
It's fascinating and that's why we need progressives who are or tech progressives working in government, because a lot of this is going to have to be policy. The only reason why we have the hearing aid feature uh, on airpods is because because the FDA a while ago decided that we are going to have to have a different lane that technological and software, medical products and consumer products can go through that is practical, safe and relevant. That is not necessarily going to be as strict or as laborious as testing a new drug therapy. That's why they were able to actually get this going. So that's why it's.

It's weird, because ai we, you want to stay way clear of the idea of ever saying, oh well, technology will save us, because it rarely will. It's only human beings who can save us. But at the same time, you have to unders, you have to be in the sort of mode where I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I've spun a little bit here. All I wanted to say was that it's going to take not just the technology, but also the technology, the medical community and regulators working hand-in-hand to make sure that things are not being handcuffed, that this technology can actually help people and not being used as just another way of saying hi. Yeah, you're paying $1,200 a month for health insurance, but we basically screened everything through an AI system that decides that you don't have cancer after all. So we're not going to okay any treatment whatsoever.

And no, there's no transparency here and no, we won't let you see any of the data that we did. We still need regulations to stop that from happening. We still need regulations to stop people from companies from being able to sell a piece of software that will predict alzheimer's, based on ai, based on an app on your phone. We have to stop that. But we also need to make sure that the gate is left open and encouraging for all this stuff when there is the ability to do stuff like that to actually make it happen. Too much caffeine, sorry uh, let's see.

0:52:28 - Leo Laporte
According to tim cook, stevie wonder likes his vision pro, or maybe doesn't. He said it's always great to get feedback. He didn't say what the feedback was. Okay, okay, um, what else? Apple, uh, according to german, is working with sony to improve gaming on a vr this is a vision pro.

0:52:51 - Jason Snell
Are we there? Oh wait, a minute, wait, a minute wait a minute.

0:52:53 - Leo Laporte
I forgot play the jingle.

0:52:56 - Jason Snell
Oh my god, I need some ai help actually it's not, it is sony and apple, according to mark, are working together because, you see, sony has this PSVR 2. Yeah, it hasn't sold very well, so they've got a lot of extra controllers around. Yeah, and Apple is thinking, oh, maybe we should actually build in an API to support hand controllers so that games could be run on the Vision OS platform.

0:53:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, the Vision.

0:53:22 - Jason Snell
OS platform and so they're talking about Sony will actually have to pull them out of packages of PSVRs that are unsold and repackage them as something that can be sold standalone, and then Apple will have to do a Vision OS update that supports it.

But I'm all for it because I mean, I wrote a column about this back in June.

It's like there are a lot of games. Games are good on VR they're pretty good, and the fact that Apple doesn't support hand controllers like it supports regular video game controllers on all its platforms means that there are a bunch of games that just can't come to Vision Pro because the hand tracking isn't precise enough. So it sounds like maybe this is one of those things where it's like we could get these two together and it sounds crazy, but it just might work. Also, I wonder if apple is using this as a pilot program so that they can just have a, an api and support third-party hand controllers of all kinds, because they seem to be in a mode with the vision pro right now where they're very slowly using third-party partners to fix all of the things that were broken when they launched the vision pro, like they had that other other case from Belkin and the new head strap. And now here we go, where we may actually have some actual hand controllers on Vision Pro via Sony, of all people.

0:54:35 - Leo Laporte
Those are the ones with the ping pong balls on the end of them, aren't they? I remember that from the PSVR.

0:54:40 - Jason Snell
The PS Move.

0:54:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the Move.

0:54:42 - Jason Snell
I think that looks like an ice cream cone yeah.

0:54:45 - Andy Ihnatko
We talked about the ones that are more like the gauntlet of a fencing sword.

I think PSVR 2 has ones that are more like the Quest ones Exactly, I'm sorry, the Quest ones, that's the ones we see elsewhere. Yeah, it does show where we thought the Vision Pro would be versus where it is, where it's like. No, we're not going to develop a brand new game for Vision Pro, because that would be a waste of money. No, and we're not going to even try to convert our old game, because it relies on controllers, which is what people are expecting and what makes the game experience so great. So sorry, we can't think of a way to do this. I don't care how much you want to encourage us to do it, and this is a good part of the process, I will say.

0:55:24 - Jason Snell
Gurman just calls it out too, which I'm not sure it's one of the first times I've seen it where they basically say yeah, Johnny, Ivan, a bunch of designers had this vision for what this thing was going to be, and one of the things was like no hand controllers, no games.

0:55:36 - Leo Laporte
Just like no styluses.

0:55:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly, and that's another thing that Gurman mentions, and he has reported this before that they also talked about doing something like the Apple Pencil as a precision thing. That's got, because hand tracking is all based on vision, it's cameras, and the problem is that if you can put physics actual accelerometers on the hands, you could be way more precise and you don't necessarily have to actually see the hand and if there's occlusion, you don't have to deal with it because it's. It's okay that you've got some occlusion, because I know what's going on with those hands, because they're in the, in the controllers or they're holding an apple pencil or whatever. So it sounds like, yeah, they're, they're this. Look anybody who's used like fruit ninja on the vision pro and has used similar games or their, their um knockoff of beat saber on the vision pro, like, not close, like a $300 Quest is so much better at those games because of the precision of the hand controllers.

So it sounds like this is another one of these things where Apple has belly flopped enough with this product that the sacred cows that were put there by Johnny and company have finally kind of been put out to pasture.

0:56:39 - Alex Lindsay
Huh, sacred cows out to pasture it does get there you go.

0:56:49 - Jason Snell
Anyway and it's good because it's all of these things are things that everybody, even people who love the vision pro, would agree. We're kind of missing pieces, and I think at this point, why would you not experiment with the idea that what if they could bring a bunch of good vr games to the vision pro? And if nothing else, if it doesn't sell a lot of vision pros, maybe it lets them be primed for a more affordable one down the road and get their act together in the meantime?

0:57:09 - Leo Laporte
those sacred cows are outstanding I'm so lost you know, in india they can't.

0:57:14 - Alex Lindsay
This is the uh. This is what.

0:57:16 - Andy Ihnatko
This is what they look like, by the way I was wrong that was the move controller put them out to pasture

0:57:20 - Alex Lindsay
they do. They literally take them and just leave them on the mountain, and then they'll do the best they can. They're like they're not going to be here anymore. Good luck cows. Good luck cows.

0:57:27 - Andy Ihnatko
See you later. Domestication was fun, wasn't it? Now you're on your own.

0:57:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's some grass here. We're going to leave you out in the spring.

0:57:33 - Andy Ihnatko
You'll figure it out. We have every confidence in you. I'm sure you'll. But just a reminder that this is not like a come-to-Jesus moment for Apple or the design team. You can be sure that there were long and very, very thorough arguments about should there be hand controllers, should there be not, and this is just the evidence that got that back and said, yeah, maybe we should now do this.

0:57:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's ridiculous.

0:57:58 - Andy Ihnatko
But support for third-party controllers is fine.

0:57:59 - Leo Laporte
That's all you need to do, that's what it is.

0:58:02 - Jason Snell
That's what you need. Besides, they can just launder it through Belkin if they want to have it designed and put it out there. Yeah, exactly.

0:58:08 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think it's also important, when you release a product, to not necessarily put in, you know, take the past and put it into the future immediately. So by saying we're not going to have any of these controllers at the beginning, it allows people to see where they're going to go with it and what they're going to do with it. Otherwise they'd be immediately on those controllers and they wouldn't expand past that. You know, they wouldn't be interested in the other things, and so I think that there's an argument for delaying that a little bit. And then again, this is we really are part of the R&D portion of the Vision Pro. So this is these are R&D headsets that have just been made available to a lot of people and so Very a lot of people.

0:58:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Very famously, the first Macintoshes did not have cursor control keys. They didn't have anything that you could use as an alternative to the mouse, because they knew that if they did that, people would not learn to use the mouse Again. I don't know if it's exactly the same thing with the Vision Pro. Only because you know what's out there and you're not creating something brand new that has never existed before, which arguably they tried to do with a Mac. They are trying to take an existing market and make it their own and build upon it. I could see where both arguments went on not having hand controllers, but the difference between playing games or even just using creative stuff, like doing digital sculpting, versus no, look, I'm, I'm waving my hands in the air and I'm just imagining that I'm touching things. I'm just imagining that I'm clicking a button, that I'm activating this, versus I don't have to look at my hands or think about my hands, that there's a button right here that I press in order to remove content. Remove stuff from the sculpture as opposed to add stuff from sculpture.

0:59:40 - Alex Lindsay
So there was a lot of things that you. There are a lot of things you can do with your hands, though. I mean, SGI had a solution for VR in the 90s that you could have gloves on and go. I want a sphere this big and it would just appear, and then you'd grab onto it and just stretch it and you were able to do that with your hands and now they were gloves. But that was 25 years ago, more than 25 years ago.

1:00:07 - Jason Snell
Apple has a long history of arrogance in product development, and I don't say that negatively. I think that arrogance in product development is important to a certain extent, but it also can meet reality in ways that are difficult as a product designer to accept. And my example is going to be the original Mac, which did not ship with arrow keys because Steve Jobs was like no, they need to use the mouse, was he right? Kind of yeah, but can you imagine not having arrow keys? And they put arrow keys on the keyboard eventually, because, although the impulse was good and the idea at the moment was like we want people to accept that you can click around on the UI, in the end arrow keys were very, very useful, especially for editing text and not having to take your hand off the mouse. And honestly, I feel like the same thing happened here, where they said look, hand tracking is so great and we can do such a great job, and it sucks and it does to put on one of those headsets and then have to put the. Find your hand controllers. Are they charged? Do I need new batteries in them? Get them paired. All right, now I'm ready to go versus just popping it on and just using your hands that you use since you, since you're a baby, right, and all of that is true, but there are limits and I think that's what this is, a real arrow key moment, right, which is I.

I do think apple needed to boast about how great their hand tracking is. It's great in vision pro. It really is very good. But then you play fruit ninja and you're like, oh no, no, no, it's just not for that thing. For very precise where you need timing and you need exact hand position, which games usually do? Certain games, it's not even all games, certain games. You need that, and so I get why they did it. But I think in the long run, the right solution is probably to support third-party hand controllers, make them available in the Apple Store, probably not build your own, because they don't do that with video game controllers on their platform. They just support them all and then let people who want that precision buy the controllers. I think that's the right decision. I understand how we got to here and I don't think it's like a fundamental failing, because it is like those arrow keys. I think they had to go through that process, but I think that having hand controllers is as inevitable as having arrow keys on a keyboard.

1:02:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought that was a great point you made about arrogance, not necessarily as a bad thing, but the arrogance of Apple design saying we are in this entirely elaborate, academic, theoretical mindset of what this environment, what this world should be like and the reasons why we don't want hand controllers. And then sometimes they release that and they realize that now you're in the world of the actual user who says this is terrible, I don't like using this. This is uncomfortable.

1:02:53 - Jason Snell
Or we want to prime them because, like we need, we need them to learn that the new thing is good by taking away the old thing, even though the old thing is also good.

1:03:01 - Andy Ihnatko
right, like you're like, but sometimes, like, what you made me think of immediately is like right in front of me I've got like the last generation of the pre design, the touch bar design MacBook where when they first came out with it it's like oh well, the escape key, oh well, that's part of the touch bar the virtual, because people don't really need an escape bar. It'll look ugly if we put an escape key, a physical key, to the left of it. And then everyone said this sucks.

1:03:27 - Leo Laporte
And then they talked to the Emacs users.

1:03:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I did not know how often I used the escape key until I finally had to take apart the little dancing dolphins to make it appear. And well, what do you know? The next generation decided hey, why don't we just put an escape?

1:03:43 - Leo Laporte
key right there to the left. That's not so ugly after all, is it? I'm just going to hold out thinking it was vim and and escape and emacs users that changed the tide on that one so you don't want richard stallman coming up, coming to your house?

1:03:53 - Andy Ihnatko
you have to complain about anything like that uh.

1:03:55 - Leo Laporte
To go back to the stevie wonder story, this is part of the steven levy interview with Tim Cook. Levy had heard the rumor he said I'd heard but I hadn't confirmed. Apple gave a demo of its Vision Pro 2. Stevie Wonder and Cook confirmed it, partly for accessibility reasons. Now obviously Stevie Wonder's not seeing the video, but I guess for accessibility reasons they wanted to get input from somebody Tim Cook called a friend of Apple. It's great to get Tim said it's great to get input from uh, somebody tim cook called a friend of apple. It's great to get tim said it's great to get feedback from stevie uh. Accessibility is important from us always designing uh, from designing all of our products so you don't mold accessibility on at the end.

It's embedded in the design process.

1:04:38 - Jason Snell
Sighted people might look at this and be baffled and think it's a non-sequitur.

But if you turn on accessibility and you use the Vision Pro, what do you get For its sensors?

Right, the idea here is that it's a head mounted set of sensors that can detect what is around you, and I think really I mean the point that this is a developer unit is absolutely right. This is one of those examples where, in the long run, you know you're wearing those sensors on something that doesn't cover your eyes, but it still can see around you and it can read what you know. There's a door in front of you and you know now your finger's over the two, which you can do on your iPhone some of that now too. So I think that that's the idea there is. You put in accessibility modes, uh, and you get. You know, stevie wonder's not looking at the screen, but he is probably hearing a lot of stuff that's marked up and then, in the long run, that's what the dream is is that you've got something on your body or on your head that's got displays and has some ml training where it can give you information about what you're seeing around you, and that's the relevance here.

1:05:45 - Leo Laporte
Cook was asked about Vision Pro sales. There was an article I don't know how accurate from WCCF Tech saying that Vision Pro has recorded less than half a million units in sales. That's not surprising. That's about what Apple wanted to sell. When they released it, everyone was saying well, they can't make more than 400,000 this year, so sony didn't have this capacity for the screens, so that's not a surprise, uh, but there is uh an interesting second point internal data revealing reduced usage among buyers who kept the headset.

1:06:16 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that comes down again.

It comes down to apps and reasons to use it you know, you know what apps are there that are really taking full advantage of the process. I mean a lot. There's some good apps, but a lot of the apps feel like someone threw something against the wall. You know like it's just, you know like it's, you know like, okay, I get it, but it's not something I'm going to keep coming back to. Um the uh. The killer app, of course, which has been the killer app for every headset, is that uh, watching movies on it is great and it's better than any of the other headsets. So so it's a. So that's what gets you to come back. If you, if you, if you spent the last 15 years or 10 or 15 years buying apple uh movies, then it's a. It's a great headset. If you didn't, then it's probably not as useful. You know I have 600 plus movies on my in my account, so I, so it's really nice for me tim cook says I don't know if you're using it very much, but I'm sure.

1:07:09 - Leo Laporte
But I'm there all the time. I see new apps all the time I play with new apps.

1:07:13 - Alex Lindsay
I go, oh, look at this, let's open it up and play with it. I don't know there's not a lot of new apps that I go, oh. I go, oh, they're getting there like they've. That was kind of an interesting idea, but that's usually my response to most of them so far, yeah.

1:07:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Steve Levy asked. Reports are that it hasn't sold at the level you folk expected. What happened? And Tim could just say it's an early adopter product. That's it. Yeah, for people who want tomorrow's technology today, those people are buying it and the ecosystem is flourishing. That was one of the few places in the interview that I thought okay, I'm going to start. I'm going to keep a straight face, because I was lucky to get this interview with you, tim, and I don't want you to throw me out.

1:07:53 - Jason Snell
I think Apple only has one gear which is full-on product launch. And I think we all I think even before they announced it we were talking about how, at $2,000, it was a developer kit right and an early product. At $2,000, it was a developer kit right and an early product, and then when we got more detail, it was like nobody, this is not going to be a hit at $3,500, nor should any reasonable person have expected that. But Apple's hype and marketing and PR and all that, I just don't think they're capable of marketing anything as anything but the next greatest hit ever.

And you see it even in his responses where he's like not quite sure what to say because, first off, they very rarely have anything that would even be considered a flop, and I'm not even sure I'd call the vision pro a flop. It's just sort of a weird thing that they put out using their normal conveyor belt o products when it really probably should have been sold out the back door at the, in a corrugated car, you know, rolled up aluminum loading dock right, like that's probably where it should have been. But they don't have that. They just have the, the, the tube that's silver and made of the finest aerospace-grade titanium that blasts it out to the whole world, and I mean seriously.

I just don't think they've got another gear and so when this weirdo thing came out and they're like, well, let's try it. They're like right on it, chief, we're going to blast this thing out there, and I just don't think there's anybody even capable of saying no, no, no, no, no. Let there's anybody even capable of saying no, no, no, no, no. Let's be subtle, because this product doesn't have broad appeal, because, like, when's the last time apple made a product like that?

1:09:26 - Alex Lindsay
ever, yeah, but I think there's also a chicken or egg thing where if you don't have at least a half a million people with with the product, um, it gets hard to get people to even think about developing something for it because it's not, you know so. So I think that there is, like, if there were 10 000 people, it's it's then a science project, like it's not going to be, you know so, at 400, 500,000 people. It's a function of figuring out how to let them know that it's there. But there are plenty of good business models in that number of users, because those are users that spent a lot of money on something that isn't absolutely necessary. That's a really valuable market. So it's just a function of figuring out how to serve that market effectively.

1:10:04 - Jason Snell
And on the developer side, I think that their attitude going in was similarly like that. They were only, they only have one speed and it's the app stores a hit, so developers will come and not the oh, this is a platform that's kind of weird and doesn't really, isn't really going to have a lot of sales for a while, so they do that, but I think that also there's again, I think that there are some developers, so they didn't get that very often, especially with an Apple platform.

1:10:46 - Alex Lindsay
The other thing is that a lot of us are watching very closely, watching the Blackmagic camera. I can't understate how important that camera is to Apple's headset, because you know Apple, how many times have you said we're working directly with this company to build a piece of hardware from Apple? Like that doesn't I don't know if they've ever said that before Like we're building hardware with, through somebody else or or with somebody else, um, and that is really important, because that camera and resolves integration and everything else means that suddenly there could potentially be a lot of very, very good content, um, that's made available to folks. That isn't just Apple making it. I mean the Apple stuff has. You know, it's been an interesting experiment.

I mean I think that this is the same problem that we talked about earlier, where Apple doesn't pay attention to when they're building a product. They don't pay attention to anything else that's there, and it feels like when they made the content, they didn't pay attention to any other VR content that's been made. In what we've learned over the last 10 years, there's just a lot of like really basic mistakes that were made from a design perspective and I think that giving VR there's a handful of us that have done a lot of VR and when we get ahold of that camera and I think that there's going to be a lot of new content that's out there that will give Vision Pro folks. It's not going to make, it's not going to sell a lot more headsets, it's just going to make the folks that own them a lot happier with what they have.

1:12:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, if you own a headset, you're going to be invited to Porsche's media events. No, maybe they're going to provide one. Probably they'll provide one for the auto press. Anything to get cut through the noise in the auto press, auto press porsche says they're going to be giving vision pros with pass-through and a display system with 4k resolution for each eye to the press so they can peel back the outer layers of the uh, I wonder if they're using.

1:12:35 - Alex Lindsay
When I saw this, I wondered whether they're using jig space, you know, because this looks so much like they. Either they either looked at jig space and said can we do that?

1:12:44 - Leo Laporte
or they are doing it inside of jig space, but it's the one that came with the demos on the vision pro that you could take apart the race car that thing yeah yeah, yeah. So this is the same, because it does look like that, doesn't it looks?

1:12:55 - Alex Lindsay
exactly like it. Yeah, and it's, it is. I mean, I can say that jig space is still probably as a as if you. If I was going to pick one app outside of movies that, um, I show to everyone first, that is the one.

1:13:07 - Leo Laporte
Like it is, it's, it's, uh, it's really impressive and this is actually despite the fact it's obviously just, you know, kind of come on, press, you want to do this. Uh, it actually is probably a pretty good use of of this technology to show what's going on in the engine on their turbo. Right.

1:13:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, you can. I mean plus, it's Porsche so.

1:13:28 - Leo Laporte
I mean 300, 500 bucks, no big well, again, that's the market.

1:13:32 - Alex Lindsay
That's the market that bought the headset, or is, is, is very lined, aligned with Porsche and Ferrari and Range Rover, and you know all those things.

1:13:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and all those things, yeah, and there's always something that if Apple had failed to do this, well then the only way that I think this would have been a failure as a product that there were going to be lots of people who are willing to spend $10,000, $20,000 to have these in a lab or in a demo area and then to create specific experiences for high-end customers or people they really, really want to get a message to in a very, very direct way. Because it really is the idea of we're going to take apart this car and you can actually anything you want to know about, like where does this? I don't know enough about cars to say, if you want to get the flow of the stone, I want to see exactly where the flow of the stone connects. Is it directly to the manifold or is it obliquely to the manifold? Yes, we're going to let you actually do that without actually having to take the car apart.

All kinds of industries in which you need to train people, which you need to inform people, in which you have an assembly task or an education task you need to do again, or a design task, if you fail to allow a huge architecture firm to allow your client to have a walkthrough of their latest $200 million development project, make changes, make notes, make design changes and have that come across as a wonderful experience. That would have been a failure, and they're absolutely not failing on that basis.

1:14:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, what I will say is that I don't think Apple is moving fast enough and this is the same problem they had with iBooks, and I'll keep on coming back to that is that the tools to develop the content is still too hard, you know, and it is, you know, the JigSpace is a great example.

I love showing JigSpace, but it's really expensive and I don't even know how the development works. And that is something if Apple, you know, really should be, if they were going to spend money on something is get this into Keynote, get this into something else, get by, you know, like Moto, I think, is getting end of life or whatever, and and there's people from the Moto team that are at Apple they should just, you know, just just buy the app, you know, and make a 3D development tool or something. But the idea is, is that, is that the that I think Apple has to figure out? How do we make creating a lot of this content much, much easier? And that was the problem with iBooks is that it wasn't developed well, it wasn't supported very well, and then the platform itself didn't do very well, and I think that Apple has another opportunity to do this and it feels like they're doing all the same things again. So that's the challenge.

1:16:00 - Leo Laporte
And that's the Vision Pro segment.

1:16:04 - Jason Snell
Now you see, now you know we're done talking the.

1:16:07 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro. You might have noticed during that segment the disappearance of Jason Snell. Santa Cook has come early. Let's find out what's under the Snell Christmas tree.

1:16:19 - Jason Snell
Jason, I hear the UPS guy came a little early today what you got there, jason, which one mine all mine m4 max oh, that's not a review unit, that's one you purchased no, I wrote about this at macworld last week, got a lot of weird responses from people who are very angry. I don't know why. I mean it's the internet I guess, but like well, they're angry that I, that I'm not that I. I wrote that I. I made a personal decision to buy a laptop instead of a desktop to replace my back and forth on mac studio versus mac mini.

So in the yeah, in mac mini I decided that the m4 pro chip was not a big enough leap from the m1 max that I have in my mac studio. And then I had that moment where I realized you know, I have two different desks in my house, plus I travel and I have two different computers that I use in those and it's a pain to switch between the computers. And you know they make a laptop that has the Mac's chip in it and I can dock it at two different desks and have my screen and be very happy and it's literally the same computer. So I used to be a laptop user where I would dock it and then when the Retina iMac came out I was like, all right, well, that screen is too good, I'm going to do it. But I'm back to the laptop life now, getting the M4 Max and I'll just use that everywhere, mostly docked, mostly docked to a studio display and an external keyboard.

1:17:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so it is a desktop. It's just a desktop that you could take with you.

1:17:47 - Jason Snell
But if I visit my mom in Arizona, I will bring it with me and it'll be my computer. And you know, it's just every time you switch between Macs, all of our documents sync now. But like, then I set this thing, or I download an app, or I update an app, or update an app, and then I go back to the other computer. I'm like, why isn't it doing this thing? Oh right, that was happening on the other computer, not on this computer. Now I have to do it here and I'm looking forward to not only having a much faster computer but also having the same computer everywhere I might have gotten some of the hate by the headline why I'm finally ditching my desktop mac for something better suffice it to say I didn't write the headline and I I wrote to the editors afterward and said could you change the headline?

they said no, I actually think that that's a lighter headline than it was, like we're getting rid of the mac or whatever.

1:18:30 - Leo Laporte
My, my here's a it's all about. It's all about clicks my mac world columns.

1:18:34 - Jason Snell
You don't do, uh, I post links to them on six colors and you can see my headline there. Which is what's better? One mac or two? Yeah much better headline, but I don't need the link.

1:18:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, not as good for clicks.

1:18:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well, those people were baited and angered and I hope they're happy or angry or whatever state they prefer, and I did.

1:18:53 - Leo Laporte
By the way, the other thing, I I actually did buy the max mac mini to replace my mac studio, very happy with it. Um, it would partly was decided by the fact that I had done the same thing as you did by buying an m3 max last year, uh, to make a portable desktop. It's ended up basically running the shows now, so, um, it's, it's kind of tethered that's not bad.

1:19:17 - Jason Snell
I'm gonna wait for that oled m6.

That's what I'm waiting for it's not for everybody, right, and I I I'm very clear in my piece that, like I have this weird setup where, because my garage in the winter, the only way to get it to be even close to usable heat wise is by plugging in an oil heater electric oil heater and it uses a lot of electricity and it's still never really that warm and I could just work in the house. So. So I set up a second desk, except then I'm using my MacBook Air, which isn't very fast and is also out of sync with my desktop system, and so for me this unifies everything and so it's very convenient. But I also wanted again missed by the people who are just angered by the headline I also wanted to use it as a moment to reflect on the fact that, in the 10 years since I abandoned being a MacBook Air first person, apple's game when it comes to hardware and macOS is so much better than it used to be for laptops, right, like we've been in a period for 20 years, 30 years maybe even that the percentage of Macs sold, that are laptops, just keeps going up and up and up and up and up, and Apple has noticed, and, like in the Intel and even PowerPC era, when I would have these laptops that I would dock to a external display, like the experience was bad, like it would lose track of what monitor was, where Everything would move around.

All the windows would move around, all the windows would move, all the icons would move. It got really confused.

That was one of the reasons I stopped doing it yes, sometimes it would not go to sleep when you unplugged it. So I'd get home and I'd take my laptop out of my backpack and my backpack was like super hot because the laptop had just been running in the backpack like and my point is Apple Silicon era. None of that stuff happens anymore. It's not perfect, but it's almost perfect Because I would wager now that probably there are more people who use a Mac laptop attached to an external display than use a desktop Mac. I actually think that that's probably the case Because laptops are so popular. Now it's more than three quarters of all macs sold are laptops. So the the story is they've gotten a lot better. They work a lot better. Uh, docking stations with thunderbolt especially, the dock story is a whole lot better than it used to be.

1:21:35 - Leo Laporte
I ordered that new other world computing thunder. What is it?

1:21:38 - Jason Snell
thunderbolt 4 yeah, and it hasn't come yet, but and I've got a cal digit dock here, so you can literally make it that it's a single cable to your laptop that does all of your data through the hub and it will power it. Yeah, and, and that's the dream. So, like that was part of my point is that, as somebody who didn't do the primary laptop thing for a while, I have gotten to see 10 years of advancement. I mean, yeah, I see a little of it in my, my MacBook Air in the back of the house, but it's enough to make me commit because it's not a sort of second-class lifestyle.

1:22:09 - Leo Laporte
No, that's your fastest computer.

1:22:12 - Jason Snell
Back in 2013,. Even then, not even 2008, 2005, 2013,. You still were not. You're not using the laptop the way that they intended it really to be a desktop Like the kinda, just didn't put in the effort and boy, they have put in the effort and the engineering on the hardware side and on the software side. So I'm, I'm so here.

It is my new computer that I will take everywhere with me. I'm looking forward to it. Specs please? Uh, it's a base. I actually almost bought it on Amazon last week. Um, because it's a base. I actually almost bought it on amazon last week.

Um, because it's a base model of the max, right, uh, except for storage, because I wanted to go. I wanted to have two terabytes, because I did not want, yeah, my, my current max max studio has two terabytes and it's using 1.5 and, like I, I never want to go back to that, like I never want to play that game where I'm put with the one terabyte iMac I had. I was constantly shuttling things off and on in order to do video projects. So two terabytes is good for me. So instead I, I did a configure to order model, but everything else, it's the base Ram, but the base Ram is like 36 or 48. I forget it's. It's enormous, uh, and it's the base model so you can build more CPUs and GPUs, but it's still a lot because it's a max. It's the high-end stock configuration plus a little more storage and space black and no nanotexture, because I don't care. So, yeah, that's it. How much? Oh, I don't actually even know. I think all in with taxes, it was about three grand.

But I also got an Apple Friends and family from a friend and family, so I got a little bit of a discount that way too, which was nice.

1:23:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wish I could afford it. I'd love to do that, but since I did buy this M3 Max just a year ago, I can't really justify it.

1:23:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you just did it, don't buy a laptop every year. Don't do it. No, I'm gonna wait.

1:24:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm telling you the oled with the m6 coming out in 2026. That's the one I'm holding up for in a myth mark. If you steered me wrong, I'm gonna be pissed. Or omdia, or whoever it was, or that or that two month old account on x, I'm gonna be pissed. Um no, I think that even if even if they don't know what they're talking about, I think that's, that's gonna happen. So do you what? What do you think?

1:24:28 - Jason Snell
every other year a new laptop uh, I mean, it depends on what you want to do.

1:24:33 - Leo Laporte
If you if you are finances, I guess.

1:24:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it absolutely does. I think you could go years without getting a new laptop.

1:24:40 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, I think I'm using the m people could book air day in, day out and I'd be very happy with it.

1:24:45 - Jason Snell
It's it's good trade also, for it depends on what kind of work you're doing. And then you know I do know people who sell or trade in their old laptop and that allows them to increase that cycle a little bit.

1:24:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I do that with phones.

1:24:58 - Jason Snell
Yes, that's good too. So like it really depends. But I I decided that I wanted the max chip because I do have enough stuff between video and some uh, podcast transcripts where I'm using whisper and a bunch of stuff like that. Like I'm I, it's my job. This is going to be my sole computer. I'm going to take that extra speed.

But the fact is, for most people I think we've talked about it here you just get a Mac book air and you'll be fine for years in fact I I had somebody ask me about like a friend of mine was like my kid is just going back to college and he needs a system that'll, like he can use it as a computer, but mostly it'll just be like do python scripts and all of that. And I said, well, for that you should just get the 649 macbook air m1 at walmart, right, like, yeah, even that computer is more than most people need and that's an old macbook air but it's still great because the m1 is still great yeah, david shop says they do now have m4s in the apple refurb store.

1:25:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking, I don't see any, but uh, they're all mushed together. I guess I could do a a fine I I shouldn't show it to you so I'm not gonna um I got the sweet discount. I'm doing fine you got the sweet discount. That's good. How much is that discount?

1:26:11 - Jason Snell
I don't even know, I just too bad I don't have friends at apple that's the real problem. My credit card and said nobody at apple knows me or at least if they do they don't admit to it, didn't I?

1:26:24 - Alex Lindsay
You know, before the internet days you know I used to work for Sony and Sony. If you went to the Sony store in New York you could buy everything for 60% off, like it was just as an employee and I said can I buy this for people that I, my friends and family?

And they were like sure, yeah, you can do that. And I was like really. And I was like really. And I was like they were like yeah, I said just don't sell it. They said, you know, don't sell it to people you don't know. And I said can I get it for people that I that I, you know I was a marketing person Can I get it for music? Can I use it to help them buy stuff?

1:26:56 - Jason Snell
for their like, uh for um, um, as a music director, you.

1:26:58 - Alex Lindsay
No, they said, oh no, sure, In fact that's what we want you to do. And I was like, why do you want us to do that? It's because everyone wants to know a Sony employee. So it was an influence peddling thing. I'm sure it ended when the internet came, because you would scale too quickly, but in the pre-internet days you always wanted to know somebody there so that you could get your next stereo system for 60% off.

1:27:23 - Jason Snell
Well, pro tip is the Apple friends and family discounts reset at the end of the year. So if you have a friend or family member who works, at Apple now is a good time to see if they have an extra that they haven't used because then they reset at the end of the year. So that's a thing you could just tap your little personal network and you might be able to get I don't know 15%. Maybe is what it is, something like that.

1:27:49 - Leo Laporte
That's good. The educational discount's like 10%, right, right, that's pretty good. Well, congratulations on the new member of your family.

1:27:58 - Jason Snell
I'm excited. Big move. Haven't bought a new computer in a while. So what's the first?

1:28:04 - Leo Laporte
thing you're going to do after the show migrate my old computer to it. Okay do you do a full migration just like a regular everyday creation assistant via thunderbolt cable yeah, that's what I do.

Yeah, that's what I did anyway to the mini. My only problem with that, and I've been doing that for a while and I've realized now I use as I mentioned you should take a look at it sync thing to sync them all up and if you do, that sync thing thinks it's the new computer, is the old computer. It doesn't reset itself. So I have to remember now from now on oh yeah, delete the certificate files and it'll reset itself. So there's probably a few apps like that where, uh, you're taking along the old if.

1:28:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess, if you're decommissioning the old computer, it's not too bad, but if you're continuing to use it, it could be confusing for something you need to find it a new home here's the next question which may be for the panel and I hope listeners will evaluate on their own when you bought, when it arrives, how long before you stop washing your hands before you use it. Because when I bought, when I bought this one, it was like it's going to be on the desk and it's going to stay on the desk. I'm going to be carrying it carefully. And then it took me like four months before it was like yeah, I'll just take it into bed and like I'll be eating a peanut butter jelly sandwich with crumbs.

1:29:16 - Leo Laporte
I admit it, there's crumbs in my M2 air.

Yeah, there's definitely, but uh air yeah, there's definitely, but there is a time where you're like no, no, this is going to be the nice one, it's going to be nope, nope, nope. I'm going to be wearing a tie while I use it because I want to look good. Because I just cleaned my macbook air, I had purchased new microfiber cloths which, by the way, there is a certain process to cleaning these that I didn't know about. I was just throwing them in the laundry. Don't do that. Go to reddit and look up microfiber cloths, how to clean them. Apparently there's a thing. And then I found I don't know what this is. It's called apple juice, it's for screen cleaning, screen device cleaner, and I realize the only it's probably just water, because it smells like apples is the whole point of it well, definitely don't.

1:30:01 - Alex Lindsay
Don't use actual apple juice. We just want to make sure we tell everyone you know we said that's like apples it will get sticky. That's all we're saying we.

1:30:09 - Leo Laporte
We used to have a a couple of screen cleaners I really liked and they're they're all. I think they went out of business so that we can't get them anymore.

1:30:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But and, by the way, these things are shockingly cheap, like you can get like a thousand micro 20 for 20 cents.

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
You're the king of microfiber.

1:30:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, well, because this is, this is what I wrapped my camera, my, my web camera, in, like for transport to the library and back, because it'll be soft and also I can clean the lens.

1:30:33 - Leo Laporte
I always have, like one of these, like in my laptop bag, not so only don't throw them in the laundry with your other clothes you have to wash them on the cool and dry them cool, because you don't, you can't get them past, I think, 67 degrees centigrade, because it'll melt the fibers they're very much plastic they're not.

They're plastic and they suck up lint. So if you put them in with other stuff, you're actually filling the fibers. The idea is, you've got to empty out the fibers, so they'll continue to. They'll restore them to their pristine state. Apparently I I stop reading reddit. I gotta stop reading reddit. It's just, it's a bad habit I have. Uh, now I'm an expert on all sorts of useless things. Um, I guess we can go to the entertainment segment in just a moment, and Andy has kindly divided up all his stories into segments.

1:31:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I did, can we? Before we move on, though, there's something. One last thing from that Steve Levy interview that I wanted to talk about only because I wanted to get like Alex's take on it. Because they took, so they of course. It takes place in the Apple campus, and he's asking hey, you mentioned the Steve Jobs Theater, which was designed with product keynotes in mind. Now you launch products with pretend videos. Will you ever go back to live?

1:31:48 - Leo Laporte
presentation. Oh good, I'm glad he asked that yeah.

1:31:51 - Andy Ihnatko
And then he basically gives you the logical one. Well, you know, during COVID we learned the audience is primarily online. Very few people can fit into the theater and we want to have more people engaged. And so you got you got more productivity on tape than you can live because of live transitions on stage and as both. But then this is this is why he's such a great interviewer. So steve, then steve falls over, but don't you miss the vibe of a live keynote? And then tim says I do miss it oh, I do miss it oh, that's sure interesting.

1:32:21 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, it's just so it's. It's really hard to have that many speakers be good on stage and I don't think apple ever really hit that mark. I mean, steve jobs is really good at it. He was exceptional at doing this. I think that, um, it it takes so much effort. It's not when you record something, you got to get it right once out of x number of tries. When you do it live, you have to get it right every time. And like when you go out there and there's a whole bunch of moving parts and you got to get them all right and they got to sort them out, there's so much rehearsal. It is it's not just that it's a more efficient or better for people to watch, it is it's just a huge tax on an enormous number of executives, um, to actually get them to be ready to actually look good. And you know, about half the time you miss the mark and then it's not as good as what it was when it was recorded.

1:33:09 - Andy Ihnatko
So I get that he misses it, but I'm just kind of like but I do, but I do enjoy the thought that even the CEO of this company is like he doesn't. This is not what was said, but this is what I'm inferring was like it was kind of nice to have this really really exciting day when everyone was like cheering and you'd meet all these people and it's good, it was going to be wonderful.

1:33:28 - Leo Laporte
They still do that a little bit. You just show the video and then you have the demo room afterwards.

1:33:31 - Alex Lindsay
True, but it's not like it's not the same going up good morning and having people I think we should also take all those comments with a with a little bit of of salt. You know, a lot of bands talk about how much they love going back on tour. Yeah, until they do. And there was, I mean, the most telling one was there was an interview with Eddie Vedder on Sunday morning and they said you know, do you still enjoy touring? And this is a band that tours all. You know, pearl Jam tours all the time.

And Eddie looked at Radom and just said wrong question. Like you know, like he was, he wasn't gonna, he wasn't gonna sugarcoat it. And I think that a lot of times bands talk about how much they love, uh, seeing their fans and being with their fans and everything else, and most of it they just need the money. You know, and I think that the, I think that the uh, a lot of times people will say a bunch of things because it probably sounds good. I don't know if they really miss stage. Being on stage is a really nerve-wracking thing that most executives don't particularly look forward to Even performers.

1:34:34 - Leo Laporte
Laurence Olivier had paralyzing stage fright for his entire career, but I think he probably still loved going out on stage. It was scary. What's fun about it is the adrenaline you get, but I think he probably still loved going out on stage. He just it was scary. That's part of the. That's part of it's. What's fun about it is the is the adrenaline you get, the rush you get. Yeah.

1:34:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't sound as good. I mean, his answer is a little disingenuous, right Cause what? What he what he's really saying is well, had to pre-record instead of using a live stage, and we discovered that that was better because we could control everything. And like, they didn't suddenly discover that more people watched online than were at the theater, right, which is what he said, like, come on, but that's okay. What they decided was the pre-record gave them complete control and it let them do multiple takes and it let them, you know, mix and match how they did their editing and they added fun, like little video flourishes as Easter eggs and like, and it's, and it's more effective for something that was always a video presentation for 99.99% of the people who watched it but at the same time.

1:35:40 - Andy Ihnatko
But at the same time they had a lot of decision points while designing the Apple campus to say, how much money do we put into an enormous live theater, fed to the gills with the greatest AV and the greatest everything? And they still decided that it's going to be worthwhile to be able to get a couple thousand people on campus to do something live in front of them.

1:36:00 - Jason Snell
But that's absolutely always seen, but but that's not what he said. What he said was oh, in code, we realized most people watch online, which is like duh. Of course that was the case. What what they were doing was saying we're really good at live, we invented tech presentations as live theater, steve did it, we're going to continue his legacy, we're going to build a theater. And then they were forced by covet to do a completely controlled thing, and and we're like oh, actually, this works better for us, let's just do this. But that's not a pithy response to Stephen Levy's question? So instead he says this thing, that's, you know, it's just not true, which is that we realized most people are, are online.

Come on like no, it's just that they have better control and production over over something that they build as a film.

1:36:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm just gonna add a show to possible show title. Jason snell says tim cook is a lying liar. Who's lying about this?

1:36:46 - Leo Laporte
with lies. There you get the comments on that one episode 951.

1:36:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, good, mac, world headline good job good job.

1:36:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, lots of clicks on that man you know I'm done.

1:36:56 - Jason Snell
I'm done with desktops people, and so I've had. People who use desktops are stupid right let's just get that out there now I'll bring in the hate mail. That a thing I didn't actually. Let's get them all all right, bring it in, bring it in we're gonna take a little break.

1:37:10 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy and ako, jason snell, Alex lindsey and yours truly. More to come. We actually have a bunch of stuff still to talk about. Let's do entertainment news. What do you say? I always like doing a little bit of this. Lisa saw the trailer. She came running into the room and said Severance is coming back. I said, yes, that's exciting, that's very exciting. That'll be sometime early next year, right January, I think. Yeah.

1:37:37 - Jason Snell
January.

1:37:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, golden Globes are in and Apple, as usual, does pretty well in the Golden Globes. Apple Golden Globe nominations led by the show I love Slow Horses. We all agree.

1:37:49 - Alex Lindsay
I think we all agree.

1:37:50 - Leo Laporte
Amazing Disclaimer I watched. I had I don't know I had some misgivings, but Alfonso Cuaron, who is a very famous director, decided he would rather do a miniseries out of this book on Apple TV than bring it to the movie theaters. So it got nominated for Best Female Performance in a Limited Series Cate Blanchett, which actually she does deserve. Kevin Kline, who is the horrific old man, best TV Male Performance, but he's going to be competing gary oldman from slow horses, who should win every time. Yep, so horses also. Best tv drama. Uh, jack loudon I'm not sure which one he is in the in slow horses he got best supporting jason siegel. And shrinking uh got a nomination for male performance. And harrison ford and shrinking got a nomination for male performance. And harrison ford in shrinking got a nomination for male uh supporting male. Oh, this is in comedy, comedy yeah, good show yeah, I hear it's a good show.

I've I've tried to watch it several times. Um, that's kind of the story of my life with apple tv. I've tried to watch it and I, for some reason, I just I get disappointed.

1:38:58 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know why I think I'm watching more series from apple tv than any other uh platform, so I gotta watch uh black doves on netflix just came out.

1:39:08 - Leo Laporte
That's a good one. That's a slow horses quality uh entertainment I got, I got hooked on.

1:39:15 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, what was it paramount, I would not watch it.

1:39:17 - Leo Laporte
I was like this is not yellowstone, good yellowstone no, lioness, lioness, I heard lioness is incredible, it's really good.

1:39:24 - Alex Lindsay
I was like I'm not gonna watch that, that can't be, you know. And then I, and then I, you know, got through the first one. I was like it's okay. And the second one. Then I go now, you're, is it about a lion? No, it's about it's by, uh, women that are in cia, and I love, but they're brutally good at what they do. Let's just say and they just coincidentally, are gorgeous, right? Yeah, you know.

1:39:50 - Leo Laporte
Like Charlie's Angels.

1:39:52 - Jason Snell
They were chosen for that. It's like.

1:39:54 - Alex Lindsay
Charlie's Angels, you know, with a lot more weaponry and more swearing.

1:39:59 - Leo Laporte
At least I'll love that. I'll definitely love that. It's Charlie's Angels with, you know, with a lot more weaponry and more swearing. At least I'll love that, I'll definitely love that.

1:40:02 - Alex Lindsay
It's Charlie's Angels with a hard edge.

1:40:03 - Leo Laporte
It is Taylor.

1:40:04 - Alex Lindsay
Sheridan, the same guy who did Yellowstone. Yeah, yeah. So I put it off for a long time. I was like I'm not going to watch it. That can't be any good, and I was wrong.

1:40:13 - Leo Laporte
And as Andy always, in fact, I don't want to steal a pick from you, Andy, but he always does like to mention. You can watch Charlie Brown.

1:40:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I have an alternative. I'm glad to talk about this in the main show.

1:40:24 - Leo Laporte
I did watch the Thanksgiving one. That was a great pumpkin. Charlie Brown is a classic and you're right, you can see. It's in high quality, so you can see the. It's like you're watching a drawing come to life. It's really amazing.

1:40:41 - Andy Ihnatko
And you can tell when there's like three or four cells, like in the stack Stack, and you can tell that, oh, the Charlie Brown cell must be the top because there's a shadow line off to the right of it Isn't that amazing? And it's like again. This is one of the many trivial things that, like the youngest generations, don't understand that we were never meant to see it like this we were over 400 lines SD, a standard definition with snow ghosting and yeah, so it's just see it so clearly is

to see the brushstrokes in the back.

1:41:14 - Leo Laporte
Yep yeah, it's like you could think, oh, they did that one with a crayon. I mean, it's really, it's, I love it, it's great, you're really seeing into it and it's really fun. So, charlie brown, Christmas, that's the one with the little tree, that's, you know, funky like mine. Um will be on apple t again.

1:41:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple bought these, but they're going to make it available for free this weekend yes, so if you have the app, if you have to have the Apple TV app installed, but it will be for free on Saturday and Sunday this week.

1:41:45 - Leo Laporte
December 14th and 15th, which is a perfect time to watch a Charlie Brown. I'm sorry.

1:41:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, I'm sorry. You can also go to tvapplecom and keep forgetting that they.

1:41:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they stream it on the web.

1:41:56 - Andy Ihnatko
Nice, very nice stream it on the web. Nice, very nice. He's doing an icon, a cloud account. That's all um also data in the show biz.

1:42:05 - Leo Laporte
Uh you uh. Quote the major league soccer commissioner, don garber, in an interview with cnbc uh subs for the apple, uh mls subscription are higher than be expected, although he did not say any specific numbers. Is that right, yeah?

1:42:23 - Andy Ihnatko
it was. It wasn't because we haven't. Obviously, apple doesn't talk about like any specific numbers, but it's interesting to now to know that. No, we had, sir, we and apple had expectations.

They were exceeded of expectations. This was an interview all about mls, but it was like a couple different things. Also Also interesting and tantalizing that he was basically saying that we'll have more. We'll be a little bit less opaque about that in the future. I don't know what that meant. He's going to release viewing numbers, but apparently he has decided that MLS could benefit by people knowing exactly how popular this service is, as opposed to just allowing the Apple TV aura to lift it up as high as it possibly can.

1:43:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I'm not surprised apple promotes it like crazy. You cannot I mean you can't get through the apple tv app without being offered soccer games over and over and over again. Uh, the cup streams free, uh, this saturday, if you are following it.

1:43:18 - Alex Lindsay
You know I was. I was watching. I haven't paid any attention to Hard Knocks because it wasn't the Steelers. Now it's the Steelers.

1:43:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, Hard Knocks is a great show yeah.

1:43:27 - Alex Lindsay
And I really when I was watching it. By the way, if you're a Steeler fan, you have to watch Hard Knocks because it makes Tomlin look so good.

1:43:34 - Leo Laporte
He is good.

1:43:44 - Alex Lindsay
He is really good, but it really shows it. We know Mike very well, but I was really thinking about Apple Vision Pro and the ability to do something that's kind of like what Hard Knocks does with MLS, where you're following teams around and getting locker room experiences or on the side of the field. I think that that might be actually more interesting sometimes than trying to watch the game in immersive. And they've shown little bits and pieces of that. They show like little slices, but I think longer samples of that could be really interesting.

1:44:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. Lisa watched the Dallas Cowboys one I think and it gave. She always called them the cowgirls, but it gave her a new respect for the cowgirls.

1:44:20 - Alex Lindsay
They have them, the cowgirls, but gave her a new respect for the cowgirls. So a really nice facility. That's that they show much they do they really, really. You know the pants are green because that they look silver on tv. Yeah, it's like a weird color, it's a weird.

1:44:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, of course apple tv would get that color right. Yeah, yeah, uh, the major league soccer cup streams free on mls season pass this saturday, but I think you would know that if you could last.

1:44:42 - Jason Snell
That was last saturday, oh, it was okay a day that will live in infamy.

1:44:47 - Leo Laporte
Uh, okay, I won't tell you who won. It's no premier league. Is that what you're saying? Jason, who cares?

1:44:58 - Jason Snell
I didn't say that. You said that, that that's like a Macworld headline. Come on.

1:45:05 - Leo Laporte
I did notice that after the F1 race in Abu Dhabi, Brad Pitt posed with one of the drivers and his co-star, and there's Tim Cook in the paddock, as they say in the Formula One season, ender. So I guess they were still shooting this Brad Pitt story. So it's almost, it's in the can. Now it's down, they're taking it over to Lucas Sound to polish it up. It's coming out sometime next year, probably later next year. I don't think you want to come out too early.

1:45:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it's in June or July. I think that an article that I read.

1:45:45 - Leo Laporte
June 27th, thank you. 2025.

1:45:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think that I was reading a sports business article that was saying that, because this is like, the next F1 season doesn't start until like two months before the release date, so this would have been their last opportunity to get any actual footage of F1. And also, the article, though, made this little, not a rumor or anything like that, but made the notation that, yeah, you know, espn's exclusivity on F1 ends in 2025. Maybe there's a reason why Tim Cook has been so buddy-buddy with F1 for the past like year or two, which would be tantalizing, particularly like how we've been discussing about how cool, uh, like apple cover.

1:46:24 - Leo Laporte
I would watch f1 on apple tv and I would pay for it. I pay for f1 tv. I would definitely pay for that. I would be excited about that. Uh, let's see. All right, wow, we got through all the entertainment. You have put in a ton of hardware stuff, which is kind of interesting. Here is a flat Mac.

1:46:44 - Jason Snell
Yes.

1:46:47 - Leo Laporte
So this is from Kevin Nokey, who he says he saw an iPad concept from 1980, and this came out from Frog Design design and he decided he was going to make it himself yeah, this is from.

1:47:04 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a famous, really wonderful book by harvard essiger esslinger, who basically published this art book about. Here are all the designs that we came up with. They're just concepts and he's like a legendary designer. He came up with the design language of max and apple for throughout the 80s, and one and one of them is this tantalizing looking kind of a fusion between a Macintosh and an Apple 2C with an integrated screen and an integrated handle. And he decided this guy who's well-known amongst circles about, hey, I like to basically build Macs from scratch, meaning I will even design the case and build it got in touch with Harmon Esslinger saying, hey, is it okay if I actually build one of these for real? And he actually gave them, not like blueprints, but here are the dimensions of the mock-up that we made and the keys are all custom, everything you start and it's not like oh well, we've got an emulator. Technically, at the heart of it, emulation is running on a Raspberry Pi. But don't think this is just. Hey, look, I 3D printed a box and it boots up into Linux and then you can do it. No, it's like you turn it on. You hear the system chime.

In the 40-minute video he explains that to get the startup chime when you power it on, he needed a special controller that just does that. Wow, and it wouldn't be a Mac if the three and a half inch drive probably didn't auto eject. And you can't get those drives anymore. So we basically built a mechanism for a modern drive that would have it eject and wrote all the code so that the eject function would actually eject the thing. He created code in a custom microcontroller so it works with ADB.

Yes, because it's based off of Raspberry Pi. You also get HDMI out, you also get USB, you also get other things. But again, it wouldn't be a 1984, 1985 Mac unless you could plug in an Apple desktop bus like mouse and keyboard. The keyboard is exactly the same kind of weird frog design keyboard. It is completely functional. The display that he sourced does have a touch screen. So he thought, okay, why not just actually have that work as well? But it's not as though this is again. For all intents and purposes, this is a perfectly functional mac that looks identical to this.

1:49:14 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it looks like it's running system seven. What is the? It's an older system.

1:49:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, it's running system seven and again, it's so accurate that it's running System 7. What is the? It's an older system. Yeah, yeah, it's running System 7. And again, it's so accurate that it's not as though he created an SD card and put it on the internal like Raspberry Pi. He installed System 7 on this thing from floppy disks.

1:49:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, he also I know took a picture of it with a Sony Mavica that uses a floppy disk and then he pops it into the Mac copy disk and then he pops it into the, the Mac he decided to Kevin noki, you win, that's, you just won the internet, wow.

1:49:45 - Andy Ihnatko
And of course, it runs off of an internal battery. And again, it's, it's. It's worth. It's a 40 minute video. It's worth watching because he doesn't he doesn't like teach you how to do this, but he walks you through everything he did, step by step by step by step, where there were no shortcuts taken whatsoever. If Apple had were, if, if this were something that he were hired to prototype, this is exactly the way that it would have been done, step-by-step by step-by-step, and the last you can show this to Steve Jobs and Steve would say yeah okay, it's like oh, my God, thank you.

1:50:13 - Leo Laporte
It was a delight to watch. It's really cool, really neat, so he does this. It's really cool, really neat, so he does this. This is what he does. He does a lot of stuff like this.

1:50:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think I mentioned a video of his several months ago. He decided to make an entire Macintosh out of nothing but brand new components, which started off with OK, so I need to come up with a 3D model of the actual original case so that I can 3D print it. And everything again, internal was nothing. It's not like he cut down a MacLC motherboard to do it. No, this is all like modern off-the-shelf components. But once again it's like well, I don't want to switch this on. And then you see the Raspberry Pi load up screen and then you see all these lines of text that it boots into.

1:50:56 - Leo Laporte
I have his Raspberry Pi case, the one that looks like a Mac.

1:50:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, yes, yes, I think he sent me and you the case.

1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
He sent those to me yeah.

1:51:03 - Andy Ihnatko
And a mouse Based on the frog design and a mouse, yeah. Oh, Kevin he is so freaking talented.

1:51:09 - Leo Laporte
Now I know who you are. He's German. He is also on Insta as K-E-V-I-N-N-O-K-I. Thank you for the mouse and the 2F, the Raspberry Pi case. I forgot all about that. The.

1:51:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Raspberry Pi case was. He's not having these made in China, he's basically 3D printing them. So he occasionally does low run productions of some of these things. So he's a good follow, because you'll see something which he will not say it, but it it will be implied that yeah, I'm making like maybe a dozen of these. So if you want one, buy it right now and don't even think twice about it, because you're not gonna get another chance.

Very cool and yes, that is still my raspberry pi case on my desktop right now I still have them.

1:51:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's very nice. Uh, a french company says they figured out a way to do upgrades for the Mac studio, third-party upgrades for the Mac studio. The company polysoft has reverse engineered the storage modules they're proprietary and plans to offer oh upgrades, pretty nice, pretty sweet. Um, maybe you should throw out that old M1 Mac studio just yet, Jason Snell sell it and say it's upgradable yeah this is.

This is the new one, the one that can be upgraded they have something they call rairop r-i-r-o-p, which is rossman is right over voltage protection. Uh, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. I don't, you know, we're not recommending it. It's brand new. Um, what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? I'm going to, I'm going to leave my Mac studio sealed shut, but still something to know about. If you have one, um, let's see you. You refer to a fast company interview with the designers of the mac mini. Mac apple's m4. Mac mini is a tiny miracle inside the drastic redesign. Michael grothaus, uh story. Uh, it's behind a paywall so I can't see it, nor can yeah, as usual.

1:53:15 - Andy Ihnatko
The other, like apple sites like grabbed it. But basically it's interesting. It wasn wasn't as in-depth as a regular engineer interview might have been, but it does address things like this was exactly as small as we could make it and not more small than this. I'm saying we probably could have been even more aggressive with a smaller size of the Mac Mini if we decided to only design for M4 before adding that it was important, only design for M4 before adding that it was important to design for pro consumers as well. So it's like, yeah, we can't have a different one for the M4 Pros.

1:53:47 - Jason Snell
And keep in mind. They know what the profile of the M5 and M6 and M7 probably are and they know that this case has to support all of those.

1:53:54 - Leo Laporte
It's small enough. It's so cute on my desk. I love it, it's so cute, yeah.

1:54:00 - Andy Ihnatko
And also, contrary to what we were saying before about like certain like again, arrogance locate lowercase a arrogance where there was discussion of. Like, do we want to put ports on the front of this? And again, according to the the the interview, they basically said that yeah, I mean this is people love this on the Mac studio. Let's let's basically vote in favor of customers having the convenience that they want, as opposed to but there are holes cut into our beautiful facade. But whatever, shall we do.

1:54:29 - Leo Laporte
Apple pays first competitor has arrived in Norway. Don't get your hopes up. Ever since Apple opened up NFC, it's been theoretically possible. Vips is a mobile payment app, the IPPS, first third-party app to offer tap-to-pay on iOS. A story from the Verge. Actually, it was Mac Rumors who had the scoop.

1:54:56 - Andy Ihnatko
As usual, we'll be standing by with bated breath to see if the world comes to an end because a third party had access to shocking to the nfc chip on the iphone.

1:55:04 - Leo Laporte
Probably no yeah, if anybody's in norway, let us know, tell us, tell us how it's working. And uh, you know, this story kind of bugs me. Um, I don't know what to say about it. You remember Apple proposed a system that would scan for child sexual abuse material on its uh uh devices, and hue and cry caused them to stop doing that. They are now being sued by victims of abuse seeking more than 1.2 billion dollars in damages, saying they shouldn't have abandoned that, that it made it possible for them to be abused I think that this is sympathetic to their story, but I don't know if apple's responsible this is the heat initiative too.

1:55:58 - Jason Snell
This is basically that same group, and then they're the ones who organize the?

1:56:01 - Alex Lindsay
protests outside they go and look for people they can use to yeah okay and and you know, I think this is what apple's trying to head off at some point when they first started it and then there was so much pressure to not do it that that it became, you know, because of the you know all the other things that are connected to it.

1:56:18 - Leo Laporte
So I think that that yeah, there is one thing that confuses me, because it is my understanding that they do scan for CSAM on iCloud, but that is, the lawsuit says that they are not.

1:56:33 - Jason Snell
No, because the stuff that is in your iCloud is encrypted.

1:56:38 - Leo Laporte
Ah, they can't scan your stuff.

1:56:39 - Jason Snell
They don't have the key, and if they don't have, Ah, they can't scan your stuff. They don't have the key and if they don't have the key they can't scan it. So the story is that they built a system that basically sat on your device and compared images only when you were going to upload them to iCloud. Before they uploaded to iCloud, they would compare them to the database using a fingerprinting method and basically refuse or throw a warning or something if it was detected, which is a really weird system in a way. Right, Because they wanted to not be able to decrypt it on their end, because they believe strongly that they shouldn't have access to your stuff, but the fact that they you know, they also didn't want to have it be actively scanning every image on your system, so they made it part of the upload process and I, you know, I think that there is a philosophical disconnect here where it's a little bit like our conversation earlier about oh, the wizards will come up with a magical technology to do this.

And basically the people behind this lawsuit say child sexual abuse material is evil, which it this. And basically the people behind this lawsuit say um, child sexual abuse material is evil, which it is, and therefore you should do everything in your power to find it, including if you have to build it so you can peek on on the cloud and create a backdoor. We want you to do that. If you're going to create a cop that sort of scans all files on every iPhone in existence, you could do that, and if you don't do those things, you're responsible for what happens next. And I think that's where the disconnect is, that Apple's like well, but no. There are lots of other reasons why we don't do those other things that preclude us from doing it in this case. But it's more complicated than just this one issue.

1:58:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're not doing it to promote CSAM by any means.

1:58:18 - Andy Ihnatko
No, exactly the center of this according to I've got the PDF in front of me that they're basically the center of the four allegations they're making is failure to act. The fact that they came up with this idea and they did not implement it meant that they knew that this is a problem and they willfully decided not to do anything. Again, according to the language of the lawsuit. And I don't, I don't, I obviously I don't know how that will play out in court, and there are a couple other allegations that are more subtle, but that's the smoking gun that they want to sort of leap upon. So, yeah, it's, it's difficult, I mean there's it's so difficult to walk that line. As always, it's so difficult to walk that line.

As always, we have to find that balance between keeping people safe and being able to get at the people who want to hurt other people and being able to maintain privacy, and so sometimes we don't throw people in jail without a trial and without the state having to prove that they committed a crime. Obviously, this means a lot of people who are guilty go into jail because going to get go free instead of going getting taken off the streets, but it also means that people who are innocent don't have to have as big of a problems they would have. This is the decision that we decided to make. We could have made a different decision 500 years ago. Four, three, two, one, whatever. Uh, this is what we're doing, so I I think that's where we are.

1:59:40 - Leo Laporte
A scam you might want to watch out for. This is from the Los Angeles Daily News. Scammers are going into Apple stores and pretending to be you and picking up Apple products that you had ordered before you could get in there to get them yourselves. Now you may say well, how could that possibly happen? The QR code don't they need the qr code from your order?

2:00:04 - Alex Lindsay
um, it sounded like that someone might be getting a hold of their email. Yeah, and then and then. Um, then getting that uh qr code, and that qr code probably shouldn't be the only way if you have a four thousand dollar device. It might not be the only way that apple should check your id.

2:00:20 - Leo Laporte
Apple's denying responsibility, saying they didn't steal it from us, they stole it from you, even though they picked it up at their store yeah, that's weird.

2:00:29 - Andy Ihnatko
This was, this was also uh, in the orange county register who had a more, had a longer piece about it. This is not just ice. It seems to be isolated to southern california, mostly around la, but it's not like just this one or two oddball thing. There are a bunch of people who have reported this, uh, the, the orange county register reporting isn't 100 clear on whether or not the apple store was absolutely checking ids. There are some some some of the incidents in which the the claimant said that, oh, apple check the, I check. The persons that said they checked the ID and that's why they did everything that they could. There are some in which they didn't say that. They just said, oh well, we saw the QR code and we just handed it over. But they are consistent in that. Apple's position is that no, they didn't steal anything from us, they stole it from you, so you're going to have to call the police and good luck with that, but get out of our store because our transaction has concluded and I would love to see this tested.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
I think that's not the case, because you could say well, they had a higher responsibility to make sure that I was the person.

2:01:32 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why I hope this gets looked into. I made some cursory checks that I couldn't get anywhere in the last couple of days about it, but that's really interesting where it's been paid for. But they have control of it. What is their legal responsibility to not release it to the wrong person? It seems to me as though especially if they can demonstrate that this person was that the person at the Apple store was supposed to check an ID but did not, and that's why this person was able to walk out.

2:01:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, if your car gets stolen from a valet station at the local restaurant, it's not your problem, it's the valet's problem. It seems to me similar, but anyway.

2:02:07 - Andy Ihnatko
But there's also, like I said, there's also the big question of how did the criminals get a hold of the QR code to begin with? That implies that they're just people.

2:02:16 - Leo Laporte
Maybe they SIM swapped them.

2:02:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, but again it's. It's complicated, like I was like how would they know that this person had bought an Apple device? Or are they just simply? They just simply have thousands and thousands of compromised accounts they're using. They're using basically malware as a service. So they can basically ask the company they're getting malware as a service from. Please alert us to if any of our compromised accounts have an email from the Apple store with a purchase confirmation so that we can then go in, grab that QR code, send a mule out to go pick it up. It's worrisome to think about how this could have happened. At least one of the people who are cited in the story says no, I don't get any weird phishing emails. I don't think I've been compromised. Of course, how would you know? But it's not as though this is grandma who said hey, look, free USB drive land on the street. I'm going to take it and plug it into my Mac.

2:03:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm trying to remember I've only done this once and it was a couple of iPhones ago. They send you a text or do they send it via email? They send you a text. I remember how I proved I was me. It seemed like a pretty painless process, very quick, painless process, yeah I just have been showing a qr code.

2:03:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. One of the people said that they found only found out that had been stolen because they got a confirmation, either text or email, from the apple store saying hey, congratulations, someone, enjoy your new mac.

2:03:37 - Leo Laporte
Someone picked it up, wasn't me okay, one last story before we take our final uh break. The fbi says yeah, because hackers are in the phone network. The salt typhoon chinese hacking exploit, uh, and we really can't get rid of them. They're like cockroaches. So you should stop using unencrypted apps. You should use encrypted apps to message, like apple's own system, or perhaps signal. And then it turned out they they actually said responsibly managed encryption, which means that we have a backdoor into which, uh, honestly, I don't know what that would be. So what they're admitting is a salt typhoon hackers used the backdoor we gave law enforcement 20 years ago with kalia to get in our system. We can't get rid of them. Now we want you to use a new system with a new backdoor. Thank you you very much.

2:04:39 - Jason Snell
Maybe I won't. It's called cognitive dissonance. You're trying to hold two differing opinions in your brain at the same time, which is that back doors are good, but oh, also our enemies have exploited our back doors.

2:04:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's a problem when you read all these. I guess the FBI and CISA and others basically had a conference conference call and from the I haven't seen the transcript, but from the father reporter it seems like they said wait a bit, wait, wait. We didn't just say use encrypted, encrypted messaging, did we?

2:05:08 - Leo Laporte
no, because now we're going dark, so there's encrypted messaging that we could subpoena for the clear text, yeah, which I don't think there is any, uh, not with end to end anyway. Oh, there is one exception Do not, you do not use RCS on your iPhone to message an Android user, because that is not encrypted.

2:05:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they did say that explicitly, didn't they? Yeah, and like I.

2:05:31 - Leo Laporte
That's how this is happening. I don't know.

2:05:34 - Andy Ihnatko
No, but but part of that I guess they it was. There was one way in which they were saying nice things about the iPhone. Basically, one person who was in on the call said that he said we only use a phone that has timely security updates and updates them automatically, and he seemed, according to the person who was on the call, he seemed to be trying to say iPhone without saying iPhone. But yeah, rcs, apple could have Google generally supports and encryption through their RCS, through RCS by having their own service that does that. There's a proposal through the committee to make that part of the open standard. While they debate that, google has basically put it into their own RCS support platform that carriers can actually support.

2:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Excuse, me subscribe here. If you're Android, chances are that rcs is end encrypted, yeah and so.

2:06:23 - Andy Ihnatko
But apple basically not not necessarily incorrectly said that we don't want to have to implement a third-party security protocol. We would much rather work with the government governing agency to develop an end encryption project, basically help help them to build the protocol that will become part of the free thing, kind of like how they were contributing to usbc uh along the development of the thing, and basically their suggestions made its way into the final specification.

2:06:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the irony. All right, let's take a little final break and then your picks of the week. Gentlemen, thank you for helping me fill out this show with as much stories as we could, and really thank you to Andy, who's been really great about filling out the rundown. Thank you, Andy. Most of those stories were Andy's.

I only contributed a handful. You're watching MacBreak Weekly on the Twit Network I hope you know that and many of you watching live right now 1100, sorry, 1,11 1114 people. That's really great 1114 people watching us live on our eight streams. There's a Discord stream for the Club TWiT members YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook in fact I was chatting with some Facebooker's, uh, which is nice. Nice to have you, uh, Kick. Linkedin eight different platforms. You can watch us live on every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific.

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Stacey's Book Club. There's lots of other stuff We've been doing some Advent of Code specials, some live coding. I even did some live coding, which was a lot of fun. All of this benefits the club. You can get those shows in the TWiT+ feed if you don't watch live. I just want to encourage you to consider joining the club, not for all of those benefits, but because it makes a big difference in what we can do in the next year, in 2025. It's going to be a little bit tight in 2025. Thank you in advance. I appreciate it. twit.tv/clubtwit. Time for the picks of the week. What do you got?

2:10:45 - Alex Lindsay
Alex Lindsay, so it doesn't have to be chat GPT, but I will recommend I want to recommend using something like chat to be chat GPT or Claude or others, and try programming with Xcode with those. Oh interesting, so this is a new feature of Xcode that it actually try programming with Xcode with those.

2:10:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. So this is a new feature of Xcode that it actually does it in Xcode. I wasn't even doing it inside of Xcode, I just did it.

2:11:09 - Alex Lindsay
Saturday I decided I'm going to try to write an app. I have to admit that I've never really gotten into the whole, like I wrote a lot of code when I was a kid and the whole like X code or IDE process just never really resound, you know, and I tried a couple of things, but then I get bored because, not, you know the the. I have to write something. That's boring, so that I can learn how to do the thing that I want to do.

Um, I, what I found was on Saturday I was like I'm just going to try to do something that I want to do and I'm not. I can't talk about the app right now, but but what I'm going to do is I'm going to write an app, I'm just going to prompt the code and then, and then I just sit there and ask chat GPT, and chat GPT will just create the code and say hit, copy, open up. And literally it's open Xcode, select this app, select this thing, paste this into this. This is how you publish it. You know, this is how you and anything you don't know you just go well, how do I do that and where is this? And how do I do this and how do? I do this, and I learned more about Xcode in three hours than I had learned in years.

You know not because the part that what was happening was this gets into the equation that I use. A lot of times action equals, possibilities greater than circumstance. Suddenly, my circumstance was way down and my possibilities I can actually have an app I can play with. And I was literally playing with it. Like you know, within 15 minutes I had something that I was playing with and I was like, oh okay, but I don't want this. And then I tell it what I don't want, and then I put these things out and then now I want to publish it to a different computer. Now I got to go through all of that process, but the point is is that I suddenly was just bouncing around asking questions and if you haven't coded, it's really, really interesting, because I very quickly also ran up against the limits. Like I'm going to have to learn how to code to fix this problem, like you know, like this is not going to be. This is not fixing everything, it's not building the whole app, or I'm going to. I'm now going to partner with a programmer. Hand them. This is what I wanted to do. These are the things that aren't working. Look at what what this created and but I'm able to the the ability to prototype very, very quickly is astounding, and if you haven't played with it, you need to play with, like, if you're, if you have an idea. That's been sitting around now I've got all these like app ideas that I've had for years and I'm just going to start making prototypes, you know, and play with them and and and and kind of work on them.

But I just think that it's a really fascinating process because I learned a lot about the mechanics of Xcode almost by accident. You know things that were stopping me before and I'm starting to understand the whole structure and where I put everything and how I make it all work. And so it doesn't have to be, and Xcode, as you said, can be, chatgpd can integrate with it, I think now, and Claude can do some of those things and I think that. But I was just doing it straight out of the app and just cutting and pasting in part of that is kind of I wanted to do that first because it actually forces me to know a bunch of things that I wouldn't know otherwise and um, uh, but I I think that it's, it's, it's, you know, and I talked to some folks that uh, and one of the things you can do is you can take the URLs for documentation for libraries that ChatGPT hasn't seen and give it those Like here are the libraries Now program this for the, especially when you're talking about Vision Pro and other things like that. You can hand it the information it doesn't have and let it use that as a guide to build the code that you want to do that.

And again, I don't know if I would ever build an app that I would end up releasing from this. Maybe, but I doubt it. I think that what I'd end up doing is being able to hand a very competent prototype to a real programmer to analyze and build something cleaner and better and ready to actually be released. Yeah, 100%.

2:14:54 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a Jason's seen, for when I do my Google podcast, we hand to the editor an edit log. Anytime there's something that, okay, we need to stop and restart here, or here's the act break, here's the commercial break. And I used to basically make these notes by hand. And so I finally said, okay, you know what, technically, you went to RPI for computer science. You are a programmer, you should be able to script release, automate this. Rpi for computer science. You are a programmer, you should be able to script release, automate this. And as soon as I.

The thing is, the difficulty is when it's the thing that you do regularly is enough of a pain in the butt that you think it wouldn't be great to have an app for this. But it is such a pain in the butt to actually automate it or write an app for it that it's like maybe doing it by hand isn't so bad, but just starting off with okay, well, what if, instead of typing this stuff into the spreadsheet myself, I used Google Docs, google Sheets, scripting, and it won't give you I find that it's not good at giving you the entire code, but it will give you a good first cut at it and if you are already at least basically familiar with programming, you can look at the code and say, okay, I understand exactly what's happening here. It's calling out to this function here. And then, oh, this is how you basically put data into a spreadsheet. Okay, I get it, I get this, I get this, I get that. You might have to tweak it, but it will actually work. And now it's like an actual web app, because it's like as soon as you and the great thing is, the more you learn it helps you to learn what you need to know. And then, when you know a little bit more, you can be a little bit more specific, saying that I want you to write this completely in CSS and JavaScript. I don't want you to use any external frameworks. I want the result to be an HTML file that runs completely on device Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And just like you say, I want you to use this framework, I want you to use this external stack".

And you can even do things like because these models are multimodal, you can actually just go into any drawing app and draw a picture of the app that you want and then say this green button here should start the clock. This is the table. So on the left side. You should have a note. The right side should have the actual time.

I want this button to do this and it's shocking, and almost like belittling, how close it will give you to a complete app just by doing what you might do with a developer, which is here's a picture of what I want. Here's what I want it to do. Can you build this for me and to be? I wish to say, it's not going to be as good, but again, especially for something like I, have this task that is repetitive and is boring and I want to pull my hair out, but I but it's not worth my I can't find a third party app that does it and it's not worth my learning to program and it's not worth paying a developer what they, what they should be getting for writing an app like that. But you can make something that is functional a lot more easily than you think you can, just with these. It's wonderful.

2:17:40 - Leo Laporte
Alex, where I mean mean, where is the assistant?

2:17:43 - Alex Lindsay
in. It's an xcode right the I'm just opening up.

2:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're not even doing that you just open a chat, ggpt, and say how do I?

2:17:48 - Alex Lindsay
do this. The reason I did it that way specifically, is I didn't want to do certain things for me in xcode. I wanted, I wanted to learn xcode, and so my whole thing is is that I want to force it to tell me, like, go to put it here, and put it here, and put it here and do this. I didn't.

2:18:03 - Leo Laporte
So it's writing a little manual for you, in effect.

2:18:06 - Alex Lindsay
It says yeah, because what it?

2:18:07 - Leo Laporte
does.

2:18:07 - Alex Lindsay
Specific to your question. It's generating the code and it says copy this and put it into the content, you know, folder, but the. So it's also. You're also using its code. Oh no, I the. Uh, so it's also. You're also using its code. Oh no, I use the code, yeah, to write it. I mean, I don't not, I'm not writing any code.

Is it swift code? It's swift, I'm asking, I asked for swift, you know, and so you have to tell it what language and what right, yeah, and so, and I may be limited, and I'm also learning that like it's, like there's no swift, doesn't you know? Like it was like swift ui doesn't support this right now, like you know. You know it's something that I wanted to do, and so so I but, but what it's, what it does do, is then gives me very explicit instructions on how to set up the app, how to put, and that's the kind of thing like taking the code and just sticking it in, and I, and I realized that, like coding, I think one of the problems with coding is that it's kind of like expecting a child to understand college level English to get started. You know, and I've always thought that there needed to be something in between shortcuts and Xcode, that is, you know, it's like no, I was always thinking nodal interfaces, which I still think would be a great idea, but this was like, oh, I can, you know, I can really.

I built something that was very good at what it did. There was little, lots of little bugs that if I'm making it for myself it wouldn't bother me. I'd be like, oh, I just jiggle the handle, kind of thing. But if I was going to publish it, I would probably send it to someone again to go through it and clean it up. But but I think that, just thinking about ideas, I think a lot of times I'm very responsive. I need to see something to make a decision about whether I like it or not, and so I want to be able to throw something together, play with it, go, oh yeah, that button doesn't belong there, or this doesn't work this way, or I should have thought of that and be able to go through that process without driving a programmer into the ground, of asking them to hand write a bunch of new things, and by the time I hand it to them, I've got a pretty good sense of what it looks like and it's just yeah, it's really amazing.

2:20:08 - Leo Laporte
We'll actually be talking a little bit about this. Next, on Security Now using chat GPTs. I was somewhat surprised, Andy and Akko your pick of the week, Andy and Iko your pick of the week.

2:20:20 - Andy Ihnatko
My pick of the week is a beloved holiday traditions for God must be 20 years since, since Star Trek the next generation was still on the air, patrick Stewart's one man show rendition of A Christmas Carol. I don't be don't be misguided into getting the Hallmark Channel movie version that he did of A Christmas Carol. So even before he got the job of being Captain Picard, he had this one-man show of A Christmas Carol that he did. That he'd been doing off and on for years and years and years and they recorded it for an audio book. And it is just amazing. He's just doing all the voices, all the characters, all the situations and, yes, but he does Tiny Titton. He speaks in this voice only, probably with a Cockney accent, and it's just amazing. I think it's like 90 minutes long.

And the first time I got this it was on cassette at Billy 19 in an insurance salvage store like that used to exist in the Boston area, and when those tapes wore out I got them on CD. Then I ripped the CDs to audio files. Now it's available in a lot of other places. I think, for instance, if you have a Spotify Premium subscription, it's part of your Spotify Premium library access. If you want to buy it as an audio book, it's only less than $10. But you might actually already have access to it, depending. If you want to buy it as an audiobook, it's only like less than 10 bucks but you might actually already have access to it, depending on what you subscribe to.

And it's weird how these Christmas traditions or holiday traditions don't happen because you try to make it happen. They happen because you realize that it's like the second or third week in December and you're wondering, like what feels off? And then I realized that, oh, that's right, I have not listened to Patrick Stewart during his one-man show of A Christmas Carol yet, and it's not. I can't navigate December as highly as I possibly can without hearing Patrick Stewart doing his one-man show of A Christmas Carol. Super, super high recommendation.

2:22:17 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andy Anako. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we'll wrap it up with Jason Snell and another holiday pick.

2:22:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, in the early days of the Mac there were a lot of silly things on the Mac that people wrote like the talking moose, and there was the thing, the one.

2:22:31 - Leo Laporte
I remember Tiny Buddha. Yes, yeah.

2:22:33 - Jason Snell
I remember, yeah, and the Oscar, the Grouch and the trash can, and in the trash can and there was, there was even a, a program called underwear, which basically was like after dark, a screensaver, but it ran on your desktop so it would animate on your desktop.

2:22:46 - Leo Laporte
oh what a waste of cpus it was amazing.

2:22:49 - Jason Snell
And so, speaking of that, speaking of wasting cpus and gpus, uh, simon stovering, who is the developer of some excellent software, including Runestone, the text editor that is across Apple's platforms, and Scriptable, which is an amazing, amazing piece of software that lets you write stuff in JavaScript and deploy it as widgets on your iPhone and stuff like that, he got inhabited by the holiday spirit and created an app called Festivitas. It costs whatever you want, pay what you think it's worth. I think four euros is the suggestion. And what does it do? It hangs Christmas lights or holiday lights that you can choose the colors and you can choose the thickness of the cables and how far they droop, and it'll hang from your menu bar and it hangs off of your dock and that's all it does. It is wasting cpu and gpu cycles to draw. You can animate them, you can have them not animate sort of amazing the options that he's got here.

2:23:47 - Leo Laporte
But he has done the work. Plenty of cpu, extra cpu, but you know what?

2:23:50 - Jason Snell
I, I installed this and, uh, it brightens my little mac screen to have little Christmas lights hanging on, it's adorable so I highly recommend, if you're feeling inhabited by the holiday spirit, to uh, just uh don't be like my neighbors and leave the lights up all year round.

2:24:07 - Leo Laporte
Okay, you gotta, you know january 1st, take them down although it's customizable.

2:24:12 - Jason Snell
So if you want to put like easter colors and have them go, do that you can do that too.

2:24:17 - Leo Laporte
It's fine, you're talking it's's fine, Very nice.

2:24:20 - Jason Snell
That's it Festivitas Brand new but reminiscent of a lot of old classic, fun silly Mac apps.

2:24:29 - Leo Laporte
Festivitasapp. Bring the silly back to your Mac, that's right. And Jason Snell wants to bring some joy into your life with his wonderful website sixcolorscom. Put some of those colors in your life.

2:24:44 - Jason Snell
I immediately programmed Festivitas to have the six colors of the Apple rainbow as my colors.

2:24:51 - Leo Laporte
Good, jason does a bunch of podcasts, including Upgrade, where he and Mike Hurley will talk about Jason's new laptop.

2:24:59 - Jason Snell
Undoubtedly, undoubtedly, undoubtedly.

2:25:01 - Leo Laporte
Yes, sixcolorscom. Slash Jason to see all the different shows he does. Thank you, jason. Thank you very much. Thanks, leo, great to have you, as always. Mr Andy Anotko GBH is calling.

2:25:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Hello Andy. Yes, thursday, 1230, excuse me. 1245 at WGBHNewsorg. 1230, excuse me. 1245 at WGBHnewsorg. Unless I get bumped, there's some news that they are covering this week that might that the mayor might want some time, so as always, I'm thinking okay, that's fine, Do you know what you'll talk about yet?

I'm doing actually I'm doing the rundown tonight and a lot of it, unfortunately, is going to be like okay, I know that the FBI. You is going to be like okay, I know that the FBI, you're being told that the FBI said don't text anybody under any circumstances. But here's what's actually happening and maybe it's okay to say happy Christmas to your grandmother this season. It's okay.

2:25:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, mr Alex Lindsay, officehours.global and graymattershow, what's up?

2:25:56 - Alex Lindsay
We had Cory Doctorow on last Friday.

2:25:59 - Jason Snell
I think the episode might have just come out that I've got to listen to. That's on Grey Matter, yeah yeah yeah, on Grey Matter, Corey's amazing.

2:26:04 - Alex Lindsay
He was great as always, so very articulate fellow to listen to. So a great, great conversation.

2:26:12 - Leo Laporte
Did Michael get a word in edgewise he?

2:26:15 - Alex Lindsay
did. It was a good conversation. I mean you know, what Michael makes great is that he's able to kind of keep that conversation rolling, and so he covered a lot of ground, obviously with Corey.

2:26:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not out yet. I'm just looking at graymatter.show. It's going to be out.

2:26:27 - Alex Lindsay
I think tomorrow.

2:26:28 - Leo Laporte
I think it's coming out tomorrow. I look forward to that.

2:26:30 - Alex Lindsay
So, that's coming out. And then're you know, we're focused really right now on moving our tech forward, our tech stack forward. So you're going to see little. We're working with a variety of engineering teams across many pieces of software and hardware to maximize what we can do, and so we're. You know, we're running right now at 4K HDR. We're getting ready to add a higher frame rate and 5.1 and all kinds of other things and then start to stream out to a lot of other platforms and so so right now it's it's one hour a day, but it's uh, some great experts every morning getting up and answering questions and it's still. We haven't missed one since march 25th 2020 office hours dot global thank you Alex, thanks to all of you.

2:27:16 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the happiest of holidays, glad you're watching, glad, glad you're listening, and keep up the good work. Don't forget to subscribe to Club TWiTt. It makes a great gift for the holidays too, by the way. Two weeks free. Plus, there's a referral code which you can share everywhere and get yourself a free month. twit.tv/clubtwit.

We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. Watch live, as I mentioned, on eight different platforms, or get it after the fact Usually that's more convenient at our website, twit.tv/mbw. You could also watch it on YouTube. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Nice thing about that great way to share clips, little pieces. If you want to share something you saw on the show with a friend or a family member, that's a great way to do it and a great way to promote our show. Thank you in advance. And, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Just look for MacBreak Weekly audio or video version. Get it every single week. Thank you for that as well. Uh, now, though, it is my sad duty to tell you get back to work, because break time is over bye.