MacBreak Weekly 952 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly, our last show of 2024. Andy, Alex, Jason are all here. We're going to talk quite a bit about a new camera that Alex just can't wait to get his hands on. Could be the beginning of the turnaround for the Vision Pro, I think it might be. Also lots of rumors about new foldable iPads or is it a Mac? New Apple Watch, ultras, even new AirTags. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 952, recorded Tuesday, December 17th 2024: Everything Smells Like Fresh Paint. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. And hallelujah, hallelujah, there is Apple news. Let's first introduce our esteemed panel, Jason Snell, from six colors. Now that he's got a purple mic could be seven. Hello, Jason, good to see you. It's one of the colors. I forgot to wear my sweater with the magic inscription from the Lord of the Rings speak friend and enter it's a really bad password.

I don't know what it says but that's a bad password.

0:01:28 - Jason Snell
I'm sure you could talk about that let's see what else is on it.

0:01:30 - Leo Laporte
Is there other elvish stuff on it? Oh, there's the fellowship and the whole thing.

0:01:36 - Jason Snell
This is my holiday sweater.

0:01:37 - Leo Laporte
This is our last show of the year. Right, right it is, it is. And as soon as I introduce the rest of the panel, I'm running downstairs to get my holiday sweater on. I forgot that's Andy Ihnatko. ihnatko.com, WGBH in Boston. I can now say ihnatko.com with confidence.

0:01:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's not available to the world yet, but it's available to close personal friends right now who are giving me feedback and telling me, ooh, that person died just like three months ago. You sure you want to say that about him. Oh, dear Again, that's good, I'm joking. Of course, I've also decorated for the holidays. That's why I was a minute and a half late, because I thought, hey, why don't I just put some Christmas lights on a shelf behind, not realizing that I've got like 1,000 watts of lights? Hopefully, when the background gets darker, maybe you'll really see these leds. They hold the place together. They really uh, add a certain well, I mean, there's, there's. You know 2024 is ending, you know, on kind of an expectant note, maybe we shouldn't be too festive. So I'm putting the lights out, I'm not turning them half on. He's half festive. That's good, exactly. I like it. I made the effort. My heart was in the right place.

0:02:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I I added little uh, sparkly Christmas trees. We had a tree lighting last night, yes, uh. And also actually, lisa said I have lots of stuff I could give you. I forgot it was the last show of the year, so I better. Next week we are going to do a uh best of, so you'll hear the best of 2024, uh, and then we have a week off for New Year's Eve and then we'll be back on the 8th. Let's say hello to Alex Lindsay, hello, hello, officehoursglobal and 090.media, and a man who has probably just this morning spent $30,000.

0:03:19 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't spent the $30,000 yet, but I'm pretty excited. Should we play the?

0:03:23 - Jason Snell
Vision Pro jingle, just because this is kind of a vision program. Going straight into it become a vision pro show now getting this show playing the vision pro.

0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
What do you? Know it's time to talk to vision pro and what we're talking about is the final, the pre-order availability of the Blackmagic slash Apple camera. This is very exciting. This is not the software camera you have on your phone. This is a physical $30,000 kind of. Is it specifically for the Vision Pro or it's just it's a spatial camera.

0:04:06 - Alex Lindsay
I mean you can, you could use it for shooting for the MetaQuest as well. It is, it's very high resolution. You know 180 camera. So this is 8K, ursa Cine Immersive, 8k per eye in 90 frames a second, and that the processing required for that much resolution at that frame rate is not trivial Chimney.

0:04:31 - Leo Laporte
So this is really a big computer with two eyes in front.

0:04:36 - Alex Lindsay
You know Blackmagic was getting close because they had a 17K camera that they've been working on, and so you know they're very close to the same resolution for that, and so it was already kind of there're very close to the same resolution for that, and so it was already kind of there was parts of that pipeline that were already built, but it is still a huge undertaking to get this right and there's a lot of, you know, metadata and all kinds of other things that have to be kind of managed inside of that process. So it's a pretty exciting camera and it really solves. The big problem that people have had about why you don't see a lot of this kind of content is because it's hard. It's been very much an art project Every every time we build one. I built a bunch of these rigs. I've um, I've machined parts for these, these types of rigs not personally, but I've had them machined and getting all of this right and consistent is not a trivial problem and it's been something everyone had to build from scratch. And this is the first time we've seen this is the first time someone's going to release a camera at this resolution and at this frame rate. That is really built and it's really built lockstep with what Apple needs for what they wanted. They want for what they're doing.

Now they may still be using their own special sauce on some of their own cameras, but being able to provide this out to the uh, you know, to a lot of production folks. And again, when you see $30,000, some people are going to buy a camera for $30,000. A lot of people are going to rent a camera for about a thousand dollars a day. A camera for $30,000, a lot of people are going to rent a camera for about a thousand dollars a day. So $30,000 will lean into one to $3,000 a day somewhere. Depending on how people schedule it. It's going to be in that range. So when you, when you figure out your shoot, you're not trying to figure out how do I buy a $30,000 camera that's for the rental houses to buy, to buy? So, um, but it's, you know, knowing Blackmagic, this is as little as they could charge for it. They're not. They're not known for high margin production. It's.

It's an incredible lift to build what they're, what they're building there, and they worked with Apple for this. Yes, yeah, yeah, I mean the. I think Apple had already been kind of working with at least parts of some of their cameras to figure stuff out that they were doing. And and I think that there was a, you know, I think Apple saw, saw the need and the opportunity to uh, to get um, the rumors are, anyway that that Apple had, you know, saw the need. They have a need, which is they got to get the. They got to make it easier for people to generate content.

You know, so a lot of us can use our phones, but that's still kind of just cute. Those are cute little tests being able to have a camera that can actually start to take full advantage of the. It's not even as much resolution as the headset can handle, but 8K per eye is a lot further down the path than we have been in the past. So it's a really, really, really exciting camera. I mean, it's probably, in my opinion, one of the most exciting cameras. I'm not saying, you know, like, we've seen lots of great cameras coming out over the last couple of years, but this is probably the most exciting different camera that we've seen in maybe a decade. So it's interesting.

0:07:34 - Leo Laporte
So you're saying the Vision Pro can do better than?

0:07:37 - Alex Lindsay
8K 90 frames. It can support higher resolution than. I don't know if it can do more than 90 frames a second, but I believe that it can process higher than 8K per eye, but it doesn't have screens that could do that right?

0:07:49 - Leo Laporte
I mean, the screens are 8K per eye, aren't they? What are the screens?

0:07:53 - Alex Lindsay
I think they can resolve a little bit higher than that. Really I believe, yeah.

0:07:58 - Leo Laporte
No wonder it's $3,500. That's amazing.

0:08:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but they'll definitely be able to resolve to the 8K per eye at 90 frames a second, and that's kind of the. That's where things get pretty interesting, you know, where you start to really feel like you're there. I mean, a lot of us are hoping that the next, the next higher end version of the Vision Pro will probably go to a little bit higher resolution and probably 120 frames a second is what we're hoping. A lot of us are hoping to see a little bit more frame rate out of it, because there's a kind of a, there's a place, there's a jump from about 96 frames a second where things look a lot different to the human brain, and so that's what we're all hoping we get over that hump sometime soon, but anyway. But I think that it's it's. It's a really, really exciting camera.

0:08:44 - Leo Laporte
So 42.85 Alex, according to John Ashley yeah. I mean it's again. So you wouldn't buy one, unless a client came to you and said hey, we need to do a show in Spatial.

0:08:57 - Alex Lindsay
I have been pitching clients on this camera for the last three months. I got people very close. So if a client buys it for you, that's different, or you rent it Again, you don't have to get someone to buy it. I mean, if you're doing a project, I mean a lot of because you're not going to do more than 30 days of a project right, I mean right, I mean well, I mean you might.

And then that's when you, when you realize over the next year I'm going to do 30 of the 30 days of production, then you start thinking about buying the camera. But but but I think that what? What I look at is you know, I've got a shit like. I have a lot of shoots and the budget might be, you know, 80 grand for the shoot. You know, and and it's if it's that number making it 81, or me just eating a thousand dollars to put the camera in to shoot as test footage. Usually what happens is is that you, a lot of us, will bid on a production, we'll eat some of the margin which you know, and do it, show it to the client, and the client, once they see it, they're like, oh, we would like to have that all the time.

0:09:50 - Leo Laporte
It comes with this lens, but is it interchangeable?

0:09:53 - Alex Lindsay
Could you put it? I don't think it is. I don't think that it's built. I mean, I wouldn't want to interchange it. It might be interchangeable. I uh it. It has the buttons on it that would look like it could be popped on and off. The thing is that the sensitivity of the registration of those lenses is so tight I wouldn't want to mess with it. I would tend to want to leave it the way it is, but it could be something where you could get a slightly less or more field of view so you could have lenses. Lenses can go further than 180 degrees. They're capable of doing, I think, 220, 240, some lenses can get around around you, um, and so there's a potential that, as you're gonna spend this much on the camera, it wouldn't. I think a lot of people would love to see a um, uh, uh, a version that they could do it, but I don't. I think these are going to be all part of the camera. I don't think they're going to be interchangeable.

0:10:46 - Leo Laporte
Black magic says, uh, that they've created a new format for black magic raw for this camera.

0:10:54 - Alex Lindsay
It will shoot in that format natively and, of course, if you're using DaVinci resolve from black magic it will all kind of suck up all the data that's being provided and that being provided, and that that's one of the things that's really, uh, um, pretty exciting about this is that where this gets really interesting is that black magic has resolve, and this is where you see the power of them building the camera and the post-production pipeline at the same time, which nobody else is doing, so no one else building an editing package and color package and effects package. It makes cameras. So, and that was fine. It was somewhat interchangeable when we were talking about just 8K cameras or 12K cameras or 6K cameras and you, oh, we'll just take our ARRI footage and put it into Resolve. But when you start talking about something like this, where there's warping and there's interaxial versus interocular and there's metadata and there's all these other things, having the camera be able to save exactly and knowing what you need to deliver on the other side is a very powerful vertical integration. That really puts Blackmagic in a particular location for this kind of production. So it'll be really interesting to see.

Oddly, final Cut does not support it right, not yet. I mean. I think that we probably assume that Final Cut will be able to handle this in the future. I, you know, it's not. I think that right now, we're saying Final Cut handles it.

0:12:16 - Leo Laporte
You don't use specialized, you don't. Linear editing software is okay for immersive video.

0:12:21 - Alex Lindsay
I would think you'd want something specialized to it well, you have to remember that when you're cutting it, you're just cutting, you know, eyes and and in that in that case you know it's not like we're doing a 360 and trying to pan around, we're just cutting what those eyes look like. Now, one of the things that they've said, I think, in this press release is that resolve will be able to uh, preview this into a vision pro.

So if you have a, if you have a vision pro and resolve and you're working on the footage you'll be able to look at what you're cutting and looking what you're so the director's in the editing room now looking in a vision pro, like seeing how this, how this works, and again, that vertical integration between them is going to be really important and and part of it's also being able to support, uh, the metadata.

The metadata is really important because you have the metadata of the interaxial distance and a lot of the information that's there, that's coming into the camera. But you also have to match that up with the interocular distance, which is different for every person. You put that headset on, you push a little button and it lines up your eyes, so the headset knows what the interocular distance is of every person, who. Who puts on the headset. That's part of the setup. Yeah, they also know if you put a lens in. They know that you put a corrective lens in. You know, and they know what it is, you know, and so so that that data and again, when you're paying 3500, that's part of what this 3500, or you know, uh, um, is part of is all this little, these little bits and pieces that the other headsets don't have is that they're paying attention to all those bits, those, those pieces, and so, um, anyway, it's, it's hard, you know, we don't know how well it will work until it comes out. But, uh, it's pretty exciting.

I think you do a pre-order because you want to see, like, how many of these are we going to have to make in March? You know, by by the end of March? You know cause they're going to want them in the field before they get to NAB, I think. I think they're definitely going to want to show them at NAB, um, but I think that they're going to want to get them into the field as well. So Interesting.

0:14:13 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, it says they'll take orders now, with deliveries to start in early 2025. You think that's more like March than January? Oh yeah.

0:14:30 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, I don't think so. I think it's. I think it's the day before. I think that the day before they got to be shipped, people have to get them the week before, have to have them in their hands at NAB, or I don't think that anybody at black magic likes to stand in the booth anybody but black magic. Black magic has had a history sometimes of things taking longer than a year after they announced it, and they got really good not having that happen, um, for a while.

0:14:45 - Jason Snell
But a long time you know, but we're waiting for.

0:14:47 - Leo Laporte
You know there's 2110 routers we're still waiting for so so the so it says it has um seven terabyte comes with eight terabytes of network storage. Is that like frame io? Or what does that mean? Eight terabytes of high performance network storage built in?

0:15:04 - Alex Lindsay
I think that I, I don't know that's, that's not a if you said high performance storage.

0:15:09 - Leo Laporte
Without the word network I might say, oh, that's a lot of hard drive, but it's network which sounds like it's frame io more than well, they have their own black magic cloud as well.

0:15:18 - Alex Lindsay
So when they say network storage, it could be something that's networkable cloud, it's a storage unit that's there and and it can be easily what that may.

It says you can capture two hours of video in the camera yeah, yeah, that's wild. Well, and you have to capture a lot of it. One of the problems we have, for instance, I have the 12K, I've got a couple of the 12K cameras and one of the problems that we have is that the throughput on the output of you know, I can get a drive that's really fast, but I can only get a gig, a second, out of the camera, and so I can, you know, when I'm doing 8K 120, I have to compress it 12 to 1 to just get it out of the camera. Like there's no way to you know, like there's no way to record it. So the internal storage becomes super important and, like many of the other Blackmagic cameras, it can be accessed from the net. So there's an Ethernet port on the yeah 10 gigabit Ethernet Right. So imagine this being able to be published quickly.

0:16:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm sorry, Four 10 gigabit Ethernet ports Apologies, four, and that's so. You're going to have different workstations connected to it. They envision people doing post-production as you're shooting. Well uh, that's having four, four of them uh that's for the client, the director, the producer and the studio exec you could do that and you could also.

0:16:40 - Alex Lindsay
There's a potential there, um, that you could be pulling all, using all of those to grab frames, because, oh interesting, when you think, when you're talking about that kind of resolution, you're talking about an enormous amount of data. In fact, 40 gigs is not anywhere near what that no, it's 258.7 megapixel sensors right.

so you're talking about um, an output of you know it probably wants something closer to 100 gigs a second uncompressed. So by compressing it, what's coming out of the back of there is going to be a compressed format it does create a proxy file in H.265, I think, or something Right, yeah 264. And people like me. What we're really interested in is what do we uh um? What do we get?

0:17:26 - Jason Snell
live you know, so it's got a 12 with this you think we don't know.

0:17:30 - Alex Lindsay
We don't know what, what the live support is going to look like, but we're, we're taking, you know, we're. A lot of us are tracking it. I think it has two 12 G um. It has an a and B 12 G output, which would be 4k. So some of us are hypothesizing that we're going to get potentially two 4K 60 outputs out of the back of the camera that we could do left, right, right eye on, which would be great for a lot, I mean 4K. If that's the case, that would look great. It wouldn't be as good as what's being recorded on the camera. But if we were able to get that but again, all of us are making this stuff up right now. But if we were able to get that but again, all of us are making this stuff up right now, we don't know until we have the camera that we have a press release and so and we have a lot of us guessing about what those are.

But this is the topic of the day. On office hours We've talked, we talked about over the weekend. Yeah, that was, that was a big, you know, definitely, but it is. It's a one of a kind camera and it is. And again, for the folks that get in early. I mean, all of us who have been doing this kind of immersive work for the last 15 years have been again putting these things together. It's like building your own car, and this is the first time we're like, hey, how about we give you um? You know it's still a model t, probably compared to where we'll be in in 10 years. But it's like here's, here's a whole car all in one place and you don't have to build it yourself, but that's really.

0:18:47 - Leo Laporte
What a bottleneck do you think for vision production?

0:18:50 - Alex Lindsay
well, it's been a huge bottleneck for uh yeah, I don't know what all the bottlenecks are for apple producing more content, but it's been a huge bottleneck for everyone else. Um, uh to, is apple have something like this in-house? Well, I think that what we've seen is Apple building a lot of their own solutions in-house Building a car. If you remember, the person who worked on the Sphere camera works at Apple. Now the next VR folks are at Apple, so there's a lot of people who, engineering-wise, really know, understand cameras and understand this kind of camera.

So there's a lot of. There's an incredible um uh group of people that know what they're doing at Apple and really know this down to the, you know, down to the hard tax, the, the um uh. And then black magic, of course, has been building cameras now for 10 or 15 years, and the thing about black magic is they're usually a little bit more adventurous than everyone else, you know. So they're, you know, like when we do, there's a bunch of shoots that I do, that I use Aries and I use, you know, sony, venice's, but when we're doing testing, I almost always use black magic because the cameras are much more flexible, you know, and I still and I still shoot a lot of black magic cameras when it, when it, when it matters, and so so I'm using a lot of those cameras because the cameras are far more flexible when it comes to frame rate, far more flexible when it comes to integration, and so so they're, they're kind of the perfect camera company to work with Apple to to figure this stuff out, and so it's going to be. But I think that it will unpop. I think there's a couple of things It'll be a lot of different people doing things with the with the cameras.

I think that Apple has made a bunch of decisions on their immersive stuff. That's been, you know, some of us wouldn't agree with. I think that Apple has made a bunch of decisions on their immersive stuff. That's been, you know, some of us wouldn't agree with, and you know with some of the stuff that's come out, and so it's going to allow a lot of us to have our own take on it without having to, you know, necessarily succeed at it. It's why Google built its own camera.

Everyone builds their own cameras because this is a new world that isn't a mass market, and this is the first time that the third party has been. I mean, red was talking to Facebook about building an immersive camera but never actually built it other than the spec. That was at some, you know, one of the conferences, one of the F8 conferences, so this is the first time we're seeing it getting really close to the ground and I think that it really could revolutionize not only I mean not only for Apple, but for the MetaQuest and so on and so forth. I think that there's going to be a lot more great content and a lot more, you know, options. You'll see a lot more people be a lot more experimental, because the other thing is, when you build these art projects, they're very heavy and you can't like just pick them up and move them from, like you know, and so it's it's, it's this kind of yeah, this is this looks pretty this is a camera that we can put on.

We can put this on. I don't know why we put it on a. You can put it on a tripod, you can put it on.

0:21:43 - Andy Ihnatko
You just answered your own question there.

0:21:45 - Alex Lindsay
I was like, well, that would be horrible. We did that. We. We did it with Ozo. We put the Ozo my brother's a steadicam operator. We did put an Ozo on a on a steadicam and it's really funny. What we did is is we went. My brother does this thing when he wants to relax that he turns the thing sideways. He just turns the whole thing because it reduces the weight. And we walked really slowly, then turned it sideways. You could always tell when people got to that part of the demo because they ripped their headset off.

They're like whoa, so we're like, oh, they're done, so anyway. So I think that, again, a lot of us are really excited about this camera and those of us who have worked in this for a long time, because we know how hard it's been to do this. So, if black magic can do what it says, all they have to do is provide what they said in the press release and we're all going to be pretty excited about it and so, and as as owners of vision pro, people should be excited to be huge, right?

0:22:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're going to see concerts. This is maybe what we've been waiting for, which is some way of doing it. I mean, if you look at it, up to now it's been Apple and Apple only, pretty much.

0:22:51 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's just been. There's other people with the capabilities, but it's just been really heavy and it's expensive and it takes a team to show up to run the camera system. And you know, like, like this is something I can throw in the back of my car, go to a concert venue and, like I shot the verb pipe at in mill Valley at Sweetwater, I could take this camera down, just set it down and record and, and you know, and it might be I'm already talked to a couple of venues about. You know, we're thinking about, like, during the soundcheck, once they're all kind of lined up, let's do a couple of songs to um, you know, to an immersive camera.

That'd be amazing yeah, and so that's the, that's the kind of stuff that and then post that that's great for the band and for the location and so on, so forth and so so I think that there's, you know, but that's the kind of thing like I can't do with the kit camera. The kit camera, like, I have to get there for three hours and get it set up and sync it and make everything work. And this is something that I can theoretically with internal. I can set it down on a tripod and be shooting. You know, 10 minutes later you're going to see a lot of great footage, like it's going to be.

It's the, probably the most. This is the most exciting uh, addition to what Apple, the Apple vision pro, um, that affects all of immersive, not just the vision pro, because Apple is basically this wouldn't happen without Apple figuring out what they needed and without Black Magic being willing to move forward For immersive content in general, this is probably the most exciting camera we've, the most exciting, not even just camera, but anything that we've seen in probably the last decade.

0:24:16 - Jason Snell
And it feels like it takes the content creation of this out of. It must be basically an Apple joint right, where Apple's got to be. I think everything we've seen on the Vision Pro up to now has been something that Apple has basically made, even if I mean, on one level or another, apple has held the keys to that and it's great and paid for.

And paid for. For sure. This opens the doors right to other options and other capabilities. And also yeah, like you said, Alex other platforms, so that somebody could create an immersive thing and have it be on Vision Pro and on MetaQuest and other platforms that are forthcoming, like the Google XR platform. Like that's good right. That opens a lot of potential beyond the house-generated material that we've had up to now. That's what excites me as a user, particularly because you need the weirdos.

0:25:13 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the first people you need to call. You need to call the weirdos who are just going to grab a camera like this and screw around with it and create the kind of content that you can't imagine how this story or this experience could have been done in flat 2D streaming. So the more weirdos get their hands on this, the better.

0:25:31 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that one of the challenges has been because the budgets need to be so big. When Apple's doing it and this happens the same thing with Meta and Apple they're like, well, we're spending a lot of money, so we need to bring in a Hollywood director, and that all comes with their old opinions, their old ways of doing everything, like we have to make sure that we direct who you're looking at and everything else in old fashioned ways of thinking. As opposed to. So there's a mixture of, to your point, there's people that we don't even think about right now, that are just going to go out and get ahold of that camera and rent it and shoot crazy things, and we're going to see things that work that we didn't think would work.

And then there's people like myself and there's probably I don't know, it feels like there's like 20 of us in the world that have done, you know, hundreds of hours of immersive, that now can do this on our own budget. You know, just go and rent it for a couple of days and shoot things that we have ideas for, and then we have again big productions, and again there's other things. This isn't just making content that you would do as a movie. This is, um, this camera means that when they're shooting silo or when they're shooting any project, they can take this camera and just set it down and record the recording of that scene, and that content would be better than almost everything else that we've seen so far, as I would love to just see behind the scenes shots of of silo, of slow horses, of any of these things. And and right now, every time we've done that in the past and I've done a lot of that kind of thing it's an art project, like to get high quality, it's a thing you know, and this is going to be something that can be quietly put next to the camera, over to one side and for as as little extras, rather than trying to build narrative content with it.

Just little extras. Um, you know, is is going to be for for, for vision pro users. Um, you know, I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, well, there's only 450,000 vision pro users. I was like, yeah, it's 450,000 people that spent $5,000 on something they didn't need. And you, you know like, you know like, that's good, that's a good market, and how many times have we seen streams for 2,000 people? Almost never.

0:27:28 - Andy Ihnatko
So like a lot of golf coverage, A lot of coverage, High-end yeah.

0:27:33 - Leo Laporte
High-end people.

0:27:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I was just. It brings up something that I hope that we get to, and we may as well get to it here where, like I'm so fascinated by how the fact that now everybody has a really good quality video camera in their pocket at all times and access to non linear editing make has generated such a groundswell of innovative filmmakers, even the people are just making stuff for themselves and sharing it on on streaming. That wouldn't have happened, like in our generation where, yes, we have, even though we had camcorders, we didn't necessarily have the permission from mom and dad to take it out, skateboarding and then even editing it would have been a real problem, and then publishing would have been a real problem. And so this is why getting this sort of technology in more hands and more weirdos is such a good idea.

But there was a rumor that was started off by the information, like a couple of months ago, and kind of was bolstered by a supply chain rumor this week that apple is considering putting like a pixel style camera bar, like on the next iphone or a future iphone. And the thing that a, after thinking well, I wonder why apple would even consider doing that. The only thing that I, after thinking. Well, I wonder why Apple would even consider doing that. The only thing that I thought of was well, if you're trying to continue to work, to continue to use the iPhone, as hey, this is something you can actually shoot 3D image capture image, 3d video with. Having the camera bar on this side would allow you to have wider interocular distance on the cameras. What do you think of that? And again, and also, I realized that you'd also have to be shooting pretty much everything vertical, but does that make any sense?

0:29:15 - Alex Lindsay
I think that it makes all of it. Many of us have been talking about wanting to move, having it even two of these on either side, but definitely the width. If you look at the width here, it gets very much closer. This gets much closer to my inner ocular distance, the distance if you grab those two corners and a lot of us would love to see those two corners being used and I don't care, I mean cause we have so much resolution now you could shoot vertical and get the stereo version. You know, like you could get the, the 4k per eye with two that are on either end, um, and and the and uh.

I think that, uh, we've been drawing that up and sending it to people for a decade, like as soon as the hydrogen came out. You know the hydrogen that you have one and I have one, um, those were. You know, we saw the possibility of what was there with the hydrogen and we were just like we just need to spread those out. You know, we saw the possibility of what was there with the hydrogen and we're just like we just need to spread those out. You know, and the same thing that that's here, and I've actually built rigs with two identical iphones that are ones upside down, so the two of them are um, like, so I have printed rigs that look like that, right and so, and so we can record them and I can record stereo.

The hard part is syncing the two cameras up as a thing, right, so, um, but, but that's that's what you want and you're 100 correct that that that would real, and I think that apple I don't think apple expected as many people to play with spatial as they did, and I think that now it has more attention. But if it's a bar, that bar is probably 2027 at the earliest. If they've decided to to pivot, uh, 2027, 2028 would be the first time we'd probably see it.

0:30:51 - Andy Ihnatko
I'd be surprised if we saw it any faster than that yeah, the only reason why I've been skeptical about uh vr headsets as like for for consumption devices for content created specifically for spatial video is that it's such a rare bird to see something that actually makes me think, wow, this is much better than having like a flat picture. I mean it just seems it's often. Often it feels like, okay, there's an extra dimension to this, but I don't see a change to the storytelling, but the but, the but. The idea of having like the sort of thing where people can start off shooting again with a much better device like an iPhone with a horizontal bar, but then move up to something that's more prosumer. I'm thinking that maybe I'll start to see a lot of people who are again just because they're doing nothing but shooting spatial video all day long, after school and every weekend and basically learning storytelling from the ground up from this. That really could get me interested in this I feel like that.

0:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know I'm I'm the skeptic, of course, on the vision pro, but it feels like when you said the behind the scenes stuff, Alex, that the things that would be most naturally fit the vision pro experience would be something you would want to see in person, like being on the set as they shoot silo or being on a on a court side at a basketball game or at a theater or performance. Those things seem like they lend themselves very well. What doesn't seem like it lends itself well is storytelling is is feature films.

0:32:22 - Alex Lindsay
I think that I think that you, I think that people will will create storytelling that's inside of this, that is, um, you know things like that.

I think that people will create storytelling that's inside of this, that is. I think that there are definitely places where I think it's going to start simple, because it's just we're figuring out the language. We're still kind of crawling down that path of what works and doesn't work. But I definitely think, because I think the problem is we keep on thinking that we're going to use the 180 degree frame, but that's not really not advisable. It's somewhere between a 90 and 120 is about what you and that's really just still kind of a movie frame and you can cut between those things and I don't think the close ups are working very well and big, wide shots don't work as well. But there's a lot there and I think what you'll start to see with this camera coming out is that you'll start to see, uh, people experimenting with short films. I think it'll start off with like three to five minute narratives and eight minute narratives and if and if you, you know, if we don't think that we can tell a story, just watch Apple's ad about the AirPods, or the first 10 minutes of up, or you know like you can do something in a very short amount of time that generates emotion. So I think that you can definitely tell these short little stories with these things. And I think the other thing to get back to what Andy was talking about a little bit is I'm shooting the 3D. I shoot a lot of 3D footage and especially like my daughter's in all these bands that she plays, and I shoot all that in immersive, because I know that AI will make this immersive look completely different 10 years from now. So I'm gathering data that I don't know. You know, like that, having a stereo image, a video image of content that you're interested in, doesn't mean that it always has to be at that resolution or anything else in the future.

I think one of the problems really with the spatial camera on the phone is that Apple's display of it is so bad. In photos, either I have debris on top of it or I have this weird soft thing that is just unusable in my I just hate that view and otherwise, or I can't get rid of the debris and I just want a clean image. That's why I use stream voodoo to watch everything, because I'm kind of like I just want to use I just want to see it just the hard frame and make it as big as I want it to make it. And Apple trying to protect us from ourselves is a good example. This is a good example of us, of them not creating something that's that compelling because they're so afraid we're going to see, uh, um and so. So I think that, uh, so I think that that's limiting the, the usage of it, a little bit, but I it's, I think it's exciting and again, I think that the um, uh, yeah, I think when we start, when this camera comes out, I think they're gonna.

I don't think they're gonna. I think they'll sell as many as they can make and I don't think it'll be very many. It's a a hard, it's a very hard camera to make and I think it's going to. It's going to come out slowly, but there'll probably be. It'll come out of the gate at 50 or a hundred of them and you're going to start to see. You know, within by the summer, you're going to start to see some great content If we're able to get a hold of one for the, for the show. So I mean, a lot of us are, are pretty, are pretty excited.

0:35:26 - Leo Laporte
That's a good example of somewhere you'd like to have that.

0:35:29 - Alex Lindsay
Oh my gosh, you know what we've been what we've been perfecting is ambisonic, converted to five, one or or back to binaural, and so we've been working on this pipeline to allow us to re-embed that. So what we're being, I think what we're going to be able to do is deliver back eventually with this camera, or another camera like it, be able to deliver back to you this feeling that you're there because you can hear everything around you, along with this more spherical view and the stereo view, and I think that expos are a great example of something that people would want to do.

0:36:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah Well, we live in interesting times.

0:36:04 - Alex Lindsay
uh, good on apple, they took a big chance with vision pro um and it seems like, uh, things are starting to move along, and I think that what you're seeing is a, you know, a certain level of will and funding that's that's required to make this work is they're creating the environment. They're not, you know, they're creating the future. They're not waiting for. They put out this piece. This piece and this camera is exactly what needed to happen for them to start generating much more content. I think that there's more to do, especially around the interactive stuff.

We've talked about in the past being able to make something like JigSpace more cost-effective on the graphics side. But you can also see why it's important for them to own their own editing software and everything else is because they're going to be able to implement things at the speed that they want to. But they're also working hand-in-hand with Blackmagic to do a lot, and that's going to help push the industry forward, because no one wants to fall too far behind. That's. The thing is that Blackmagic and Final Cut using it and Apple using it forces Adobe, and at least Adobe, to think about it. I don't know if it forces Avid to do anything. They kind of have the market they have and they're not getting any bigger or smaller.

0:37:10 - Leo Laporte
But I think that Adobe has to think about it. Well, you see Google releasing, as Jason said, the new Google XR. There's definitely more believers in the industry than there might have been before Apple, and this shows you, because Meta, of course, has had this out for ages. But without putting all the wood in those arrows, as apple has done, you don't make much progress.

0:37:29 - Andy Ihnatko
so I'm sorry, go ahead go ahead and it really is like I've uh. Competition is what fuels perfection and innovation, or at least as close to perfection as you can get. Because first, first set that had some success was the metas, which were very, very limited in what they can do. It turned out to be mostly a gaming experience. Then the next one to make a big splash was Apple's Vision Pro, which is like, oh my God, this is like the best, the highest quality components you could possibly make one of these things out of, but it feels like it's super, super overkill. There's still no reason for it.

And this headset that seems like it's, seems like it's react in some ways, reacting to a lot of what they've seen out there, which is that's not. No, we're no, we're not going to give you the magic, magic, fake eyes in the front. Maybe the specs are not going to be as good as what you see on on the vision pro, but maybe it'll be more affordable and more accessible and it'll be available on like a open excuse me a more widely available platform. He said far, very much aware that this was more of a teaser announcement than uh. Then here's this, here's the date, here all the specs, here's the price, this is roughly equivalent to meta's announcement of their orion glasses.

0:38:47 - Leo Laporte
Right, I mean it's.

0:38:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, we're still a few years, at least a few years off well, well, they're saying well, well, no, actually that's not it On both the glasses and the Samsung headsets. I think that both companies were saying 2025, assuming late 2025. And again, go guess what the price is going to be or whether it's actually going to be any good. But I thought it was a good pair of announcements.

0:39:10 - Leo Laporte
It's 10 years after Gear VR and the Daydream.

0:39:14 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and the trick part is, it's a great idea. I mean, they've been doing this for a long time right.

0:39:17 - Andy Ihnatko
And it does mean that Google has a lot of 3D content already on YouTube that most of it's like 8 to 10 years old, like behind the scenes of a TV show that got canceled like 11 years ago, but still they haven't been thinking about it for a while.

0:39:36 - Alex Lindsay
And the still they've been, they haven't think about for a while, and and the the the tricky part is is that apple has raised the bar, so it's kind of like if everyone wants to play by by creating this expensive headset, regardless of it's expensive or not.

If you, if anybody, if you walk into an apple store and you put that headset on and you watch it for a while and then you go back to another headset, you're going to know the difference. You know and and it makes it much harder it doesn't mean that people won't buy the other ones, but they'll know that they're buying a Honda and not a BMW. Very clearly, you know, and, and they, and, and I think that that that Apple, I think, wanted to do that, because it just makes everybody have to play a lot harder to. You know, it's every everything's more expensive and everything's harder to do to try to get anywhere near what Apple's doing. It doesn't matter whether the price is there or not, it's just the effect of you know of where it goes. And I think that content creators are going to want to, especially folks out of LA. You know what they want to see is their stuff in a Vision Pro.

0:40:23 - Leo Laporte
You know, I think that you know and I think that, yeah, but Google has YouTube and if you're a content creator, you're very aware of the fact that the channel, all the channels, are shrinking down to youtube and if you can do something for youtube, it could work. You know, as a content creator, I'd be much more interested than that, right, maybe saying, well, you got to buy a 3500 headset and again there's a.

0:40:48 - Alex Lindsay
There's a market there. You know there's a the folks that spent money on it. It's not a bad market For me. There's a lot of content that I look at that. If I can find 10,000 people with a Vision Pro, I just have to be able to get a hold of them. That's the hardest part is being able to have a mailing list that just says hey, we're doing a concert with Toad the Wet Sprocket or the Verve Pipe or Billie Eilish, and it's 20 bucks a person to sit there. There's a lot.

A big chunk of the people who spent $5,000 on a Vision Pro would tune into a band that they barely know just to see the content. What the content looked like, you know, and that's, that's a. I mean again, not the people who don't have it, but the people who do have it. You know, are desperate for, for content. I think that's going to be the opportunity this camera is that there's going to be a bunch of content coming out and it may cost a little bit of money to do it, so that people can pay for the productions, and I think that there's um the people are going to. I know I would pay for experiments because I spent a lot of money on this and I want to see something you know, I want to see the new thing you know, and so, and again, I don't think it's for everybody, but there's 450 000 people that bought something they didn't need.

0:41:55 - Leo Laporte
What google does will be mcdonald's compared to your, you know, high-end dining experience, uh, but mcdonald's will sell a lot more hamburgers. Well, if, you can.

0:42:04 - Jason Snell
If you can build content and vend it on samsung and vend it on Meta and vet it on Apple, you're going from half a million potential viewers to a few million potential viewers and that makes a difference. I mean, it makes a big difference. I saw an ad the other day for X Stadium, which is like live immersive sports on MetaQuest and I haven't tried it. I'm going to try it out, but I thought, well, that's interesting, but again, it's a platform play where it's only on that platform, and that's great when we're in this experimental phase where that's going to happen.

But one of the things that I think will make, if anybody's going to invest time and money into this, if you can reach 5 million you know headsets instead of half a million boy, that makes that makes a big difference. It might not make it a great business deal, but it certainly would be worth the investment If you knew you could roll it out across multiple platforms, even if the Apple platform is better in some ways. Just to just to say, yeah, but we'll also be there on all the quests that are out there and whatever google is doing. I think that right, that the problem is doing things just for vision pro at this point is a a tough sell for a lot of people who aren't getting back by apple money and again, I look at it as you know, as someone who does like for some concerts is, you know, I look at multipliers.

0:43:28 - Alex Lindsay
If I put one dollar in, how much more than one dollar can get back, and if I can figure out how to make that work, it makes it work. So if I spend, you know, $20,000 on a on a on a concert, now if I have a, if I decide that it's a single camera, I build a set that's going to stay the same. It's going to be kind of like a tiny desk, tiny desk. By the way, it would be incredible. On the vision pro, yeah, um, I Just popping my head. When I said that, I was like why is not Apple not talking to the tiny desk? You know, like that would be huge anyway. Tiny desk, tiny audience.

0:43:56 - Leo Laporte
But go ahead.

0:43:58 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but I'm just saying that you know, I agree with you. I think I would love it, I would.

0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Like I said, any performance, anything where you would want to be sitting there looking around is a natural.

0:44:13 - Alex Lindsay
But specifically the reason that again, I've just I'm now riffing because I've just thought of tiny desk. I haven't thought of it before this is that the, the, the action area that you want to live in for immersive, is 5 to 20 feet. Right, that's what tiny desk is, if you can put a camera in there to do that.

0:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Um for people who don't know, it's an nprPR music thing Started by Bob Boylan who, by the way, was a longtime listener. He's retired, but Tiny Desk goes on and they have new and established artists performing in front of a tiny desk.

0:44:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

0:44:45 - Leo Laporte
It would make an excellent place for that. I think you're right.

0:44:48 - Alex Lindsay
If I built a space that's really built around the Vision Pro and I figured out how to get 10,000 people to pay $5 or $10 to watch a show and have these kind of intimate experiences with artists, it doesn't matter that I only can get 10,000. All that matters is the 10,000 that pay.

0:45:06 - Leo Laporte
Here's the tiny desk, by the way.

0:45:07 - Alex Lindsay
The potential audience is not as important as the actual one.

0:45:09 - Leo Laporte
What they don't show is there's actually an audience on the other side of that desk.

0:45:12 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah it. The potential audience is not as important as the actual one.

0:45:14 - Leo Laporte
What they don't show is there's actually an audience on the other side of that desk. Oh yeah, it's a huge room, it's like 100 people there, but it started behind Bob's desk and now it's kind of expanded. It's a big old desk now, big old desk now. But it's exactly what you're talking about, Alex A constrained environment.

0:45:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Just right. But the one thing I wanted to jump in on that is that I don't doubt that you're right that there's an audience for that. But that means that if your market is a small audience of people who all spent $3,500 on a device without an obvious use case, who basically had enough money, that I want to be an early adopter, hey, I want to try this out. Hey, this might be fun to have. It doesn't matter if I kind of eat it for $3,500. The group of people who are going to be spending $20 to watch a band it's probably not going to be Rage Against the Machine, it's probably not going to be anti-capitalist eat the rich, sort of band, I don't know, I think a lot of my friends would watch.

All I'm getting is that, like the content, if you're designing content for that kind of market, you're kind of limited to. Okay, we can't, really we can't have the Pete Seeger singing about justice and about.

0:46:26 - Alex Lindsay
I think you're making a pretty big generalization, given the fact that.

0:46:29 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I'm just saying that I foresee a lot of golf, a lot of yachting I don't, I don't know if that's the case.

0:46:35 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, for the people that I know that have the vision pro, I mean I'd be the first in line to buy a ticket to see reggie against the machine in front of a vision pro. Uh, you know, and so um, it'd be the bunch of times I've seen him already. So, so, anyway, so the um, so the uh, but uh, um, I I don't, I don't know if that's the case. And I think that number one is that I think the problem that Meta has is that Meta is constantly trying to and Apple's doing this a little bit at the same time as well they're constantly creating content for the target market of what they want from acquisition. So Meta sold all these headsets to people who are 25 to 50, and they make all their content for people who are 18 or 16 to 22,. You know, and so and so they.

So there's all these hip, hip people and the people who bought the meta quest is not those people, and they keep on not serving them with any content that they want to see. You know, like they, you know like and so like. I've talked to people who have and I've. I look at like who's coming out and I'm like I don't even know who that is Like for the most part, you know, like I don't, I don't know who the band is and I'm not, I'm not interested in even going for free to them, to the MetaQuest ones, because it's just like okay, whatever. And so I do think that there's an opportunity and I don't think it has to be. Uh, um, you know, again, I, of what rich people do is a little bit, I retract.

0:47:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I retract a course concept and we'll substitute it with. You have to make content that is for the community of Apple pro users, as opposed to hey. We just want to do. It doesn't matter who the audience is, we're going to just make. We have a great idea for a movie and we're going to do it, or short or or whatever.

0:48:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think that you, you know, when you look at theaters, now people don't really make, uh, you know, rom-coms for theater anymore, like, or they don't make very many, like, if you, that's a really hard sell in Hollywood now and that's because the medium doesn't support that anymore. You know, and so know and so and so that's, you know. I say, every medium has its own limitations, so okay, we're in the middle of a big transition.

0:48:35 - Leo Laporte
We have been for decades, but this is an even bigger one, and I think it's. I mean, look, feature films seem to be suffering as well. So the good news is?

0:48:43 - Alex Lindsay
is we get to find out in three months?

0:48:47 - Leo Laporte
well, yeah, I hope I live long enough to see. You know, it's only. It's only a matter of time, maybe another decade, before you have the same capabilities in the iPhone that you have in the Blackmagic camera. I mean, this stuff It'll take a while. That's a hard one. It's a lot of hardware.

0:49:02 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is that it's hard to replace sensor size and it's hard to replace the subsystems and the specialties and everything else, I think that the camera may become less expensive. I mean, blackmagic is notoriously aggressive about pricing, so $30,000 is what they can do.

0:49:15 - Leo Laporte
How long before you put that kind of capability into the headset? Wouldn't that be the ideal way? Then everybody's a content creator.

0:49:22 - Alex Lindsay
Again it's to get well, again you can capture something in the headset. Right now I don't particularly find it that compelling. I cap the headset capture to be very. I've used it once and went man, I'm not gonna use this anymore, right? So, um, so, but I the iphone's better than the headset. It's so, yes and no, um, the high the iphone is is a higher resolution. The headset, the interaxial distance is much better in the headset, so the 3d feel feels way better in the headset than it does in the iphone. Um, the iphone's more comfortable to watch, right? But if you've got an iPhone.

0:49:55 - Jason Snell
with the quality of the camera that's in the Vision Pro, you'd be really upset because it's very clearly a low-quality camera. But the 3D effect is much more natural. Right, and that's, yeah, that's just where we are.

I don't know. I mean we talk about like, oh, this is all going to be in a phone or this is all going to be in the headset. I feel like you know this is why we have a standalone camera, that standalone cameras just evolve to do all the things that don't make sense in a little compact thing. And you know, still, 2d, still photos are getting better and better and better in a phone. But it's not the end of the world if we just get a cheaper and more portable and more capable immersive standalone camera. That's know, it's like the black magic, but it's 10 years on and that thing is whatever a thousand dollars, and you can just carry it around with you and I mean

0:50:42 - Leo Laporte
your kids basketball game is most content these days on youtube. Is it created in a camera?

0:50:48 - Alex Lindsay
uh, yeah, I mean the stuff. So the progression always seems that people start with their phones, you know, and then they progress to a Sony camera Like they like Sony Sony just owns that world.

And so they, they progress to a Sony camera and then, and then you know, I mean I think Justine and and Marquez are using, uh, reds, you know, or they have them, you know, and so so they, you know, they go right back to the same level of production that you see in, you know, when you get to, you know, five to 10 million followers, you're back to Hollywood. Specs are higher than Hollywood specs in a lot of cases. So so the I mean Marquez Brownlee, I think he's doing 4k 60 for everything that he does, you know, or many of the things that he does, but he still grabs a phone and does it. But I think that, um, I am interested in seeing 28 years later, because I haven't gotten a chance to that's shot to look at it yet, but that was all shot on an iphone. Um, it was funny. I watched the trailer. I was like what is weird about this? And I couldn't figure it out.

0:51:41 - Leo Laporte
And then I was like, and then I read the thing, I was like, oh, it's right, it's shot on my phone I just want to point out that apple, which only recently broke the two trillion dollar company mark, scooter x just posted its market cap is now 3.828 trillion. Yeah, it's approaching 4 trillion dollars, and they were up this year 31.5 percent, so regardless of yeah, right, regardless of what uh we say, uh, apple on a, at least from the stock market's point of view a roll.

0:52:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that if you, as you again, as you look at the headset, you just have to realize you're in year 10 of a 20-year plan and you know this is, and it's going to be, a 10 more years. Like it isn't, they're not going to. This is Apple. This isn't like Google timelines. This is Apple timelines and this is going to grind for quite some time.

0:52:31 - Jason Snell
I got a question on one of my other podcasts the other week that we didn't have time to answer. That was is the Vision Pro the Newton? And I said okay here, yes, in a way it is because the Newton was too early. The difference is the Apple that did no money was going out of business. Yeah, I had no money. Yeah, today's apple can afford to make the newton and then just keep spending on it until it becomes the palm pilot and then it becomes the iphone.

Right, like that's the whole strategy here is a big difference there is nobody inside apple who thought we're going to release a 3500 headset and it's going to be a hit and we're going to win, and that that's the end of time, you know, and then and then I smell you.

Later I'm going to cash in my stock that like the only explanation for this product is that it is a long term play, because they think it may be that something like this is the computing of the future and so they can afford it now. Right, I mean they may get pushed back, just like Mark Zuckerberg did for spending a lot of money on a product that doesn't seem to be there yet, but Apple and Mark Zuckerberg actually agree that it's worth spending money on this. Because if, in 2030 or 2040 or 2050, all the things we rely on our smartphones to do now are things we just wear on our faces as a pair of glasses, or stick in our ear or whatever it is, or are in a drone that is beaming images into our eyes, whatever it is and you're a billionaire with a giant tech company, you would be remiss not to be investing in making that future happen so that you could be a part of the tech cabal that runs that platform, whatever it is.

And so I think that's it is, yeah, it's year 10 of a 20 or 30 year plan.

0:54:14 - Andy Ihnatko
You're absolutely right, and a lot of these companies are definitely going to be guessing wrong.

So it's and that's not, and that's not a problem either. Again, zuckerberg earlier on was saying hey look, everybody's going to live as an avatar, saying maybe not, I want legs, I need legs and I need legs. And Apple was really again, even though I absolutely agree with you that there was no smelly later, thanks for the runaway success. I also think that they thought that, boy the developers, as soon as they get their hands on this, they're going to embrace spatial computing.

0:54:42 - Jason Snell
They're going to do this.

0:54:43 - Andy Ihnatko
And everyone said wow, I really love the virtual screens. I can't get enough of virtual screens, like really, that's all you're doing Well and I think that that's been the problem.

That's why we're going to see iterations, but I think you're all absolutely right in that it's worth Apple putting the investment into learning about how these devices work, learning how to write APIs that developers can take advantage of, so that by the time the ball stops spinning in the top of the funnel and actually drops down into a successful product, they have everything that they need in order to take advantage of that successful product, and the only way to find that is to do it.

0:55:17 - Alex Lindsay
And so the thing is is, like you know, like for the watch, like everyone had opinions about what the watch was going to do, but it turns out health and timers is what makes the watch, the watch, right, you know. So it's like you know, that's an Apple's double and tripling down, and Apple's double and tripling down. I don't think that's what Apple had planned for when they made the watch.

0:55:34 - Andy Ihnatko
You don't hear wearable computing a lot in the ads in the market.

0:55:37 - Jason Snell
No well it's this truism that Apple doesn't listen to focus groups, but it's also true that Apple does listen to customers and pays attention to how customers use their products. And, andy, yeah, I agree. I think one of the other untold stories of the Vision Pro launch is Apple assuming that it had enough cred as a platform launcher that developers would rush in to Vision Pro, and a few did. But a lot of the people that Apple has cultivated as developers are there because iOS is so huge and they can make a lot of money. And that's not true with Vision Pro. And that goes back to what I said last week about how I think Apple's just not wired to launch a developer kit, and so they launched this thing as if it was the greatest new platform and they can't think any other way. But it's not. This is much more invest. If you want to build software or make content for this platform now, do it because you want to be one of the people who understands it when it gets big in five or 10 years.

0:56:36 - Alex Lindsay
And you gotta, that's a scary investment because, like andy said, y'all might be wrong, but that's what you need to do and I have to admit, my my previous company made millions of dollars on me fiddling with something for years, and so I had all the pieces laying there and suddenly someone looked for somebody that knew how to do it and I was like, oh, I know how to do that, and suddenly we're in production and that was for for the last push in 3d, or the first push in 3d and the odds, and then the next push in 3d and spatial and you know the 2015 range. In both cases, I had been fiddling with something for a couple of years and working on it, and then it suddenly it was a, it was a product, and then it wasn't like it was like it was there there's a whole bunch of business and then it went away, and so I think the mistake people make is going well, this is not going to be here in 10 years. Who cares? It's here right now. Is there production to be done? Absolutely. I mean, you know, there's still even though meta is, we don't talk about the quest very much there's still millions of dollars of production being done for the quest right now.

There's still people doing projects for a lot of these things, and so I think that, um, you know, and I do think that there is some kind of wearable that's going to make sense 30 years from now, when everything is in quantum computing and all the chips are you know one 10th or 100th the size they are now. But but you don't understand the behave, people's behaviors until you've interacted with it for years, and I think the only way. I think Apple knew more than anything else that they will not be able to catch up with meta if they don't get in right now and have people interacting with something that they built Best foot forward. Don't worry about the price, Figure out what people do with it and then keep moving forward from there. So I think it's a valid and that concludes your vision pro hour.

0:58:15 - Jason Snell
Now, you see now you know we're done talking the vision pro an hour exactly let's go back for Christmas.

0:58:27 - Leo Laporte
We'll come back with more in just a little bit.

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Tim Cook earned his $63 million a year. Last week, on Thursday, he was visiting with King Charles King Charles III at Apple's UK headquarters. There they are walking down the reception line.

1:01:53 - Andy Ihnatko
That's even more impressive. He made him come to his turf. He doesn't have time to go to Buckingham Palace or anything like that. Come on, he's the CEO.

1:02:01 - Leo Laporte
No come to the Battersea. This was the Battersea power station Apple store we were talking about, which is, I think, actually pretty cool. Well, it's not just.

1:02:08 - Jason Snell
Apple store. That's where Apple's UK headquarters is, all their offices are there.

1:02:12 - Leo Laporte
It's quite beautiful. It's this historic building that used to be a power station, so I think that's probably why the prince he met with the prime minister the day before too. He met with Trump the next day at Mar-a-Lago.

1:02:22 - Jason Snell
Well, he's flying home. It's on the way. It's on the way.

1:02:25 - Leo Laporte
I'll stop off in Florida on stake. He's going from right to left. Yeah, that's true. Who do you think was the better conversationalist? I'm gonna. I'm gonna guess the president-elect, but who knows? You know they also gave king charles a plaque made out of andy say it for me aluminium it looks like the I I had, it was.

1:02:47 - Andy Ihnatko
It's beautiful, it's impressive, it's like. It's like this, almost like a manhole cover, like of disc, of of aluminium, and I just, I just want to imagine, like in the royal, like gallery of like 300 years of royal gifts, all this rococo stuff, all of these like detailed, and then like 2000, 2024, oh, it's like a round minimalist disc with his name on it.

1:03:11 - Leo Laporte
That's the funniest thing. It's like to look at it at an angle to see the engraving I mean, if he forgets his name, he can go down in the basement and find the plaque it is the year 10 000 archaeologists unearthed the only trace that is known for this strange era of history.

1:03:27 - Jason Snell
We know nothing about this man, but his name. He was king charles. I, I, I, I, I, I I I the weirdest part of it you can't see in that picture, but there's actually.

1:03:33 - Andy Ihnatko
We know nothing about this man, but his name. He was King Charles. Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye. The weirdest part of it you can't see it in that picture, but there's actually like a little loop so you can wear it on a chain. I think that's improbable.

1:03:41 - Leo Laporte
I doubt it. By the way, look how sartorially perfect His Royal Highness is with his double-breasted frock coat or whatever that is, and then Tim's wearing what looks like kind of a pea coat. I don't know what he's wearing. I guess it was cold at the Battersea Power.

1:04:01 - Jason Snell
Station. It's a long way from Alabama, wow yeah.

1:04:06 - Andy Ihnatko
But also you're always going to look like crap.

1:04:09 - Leo Laporte
You've got to look rumpled next to the king. You can't help it.

1:04:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not even joking. When I was looking at these pictures like, I couldn't help but notice like my god, the tailoring on charles's suit is perfect. So nobody gets a suit that's tailored so perfectly as them like head the hythe to saville row, my friend.

1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Yes, you can get war eagle embroidered on the inside, that's okay. But um, wow, yeah, even in this uh shot, tim's suit looks just a little more rumpled than the king's.

1:04:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah of course the king also knows how to hold his arm at the perfect angle yes, that's never my favorite uh saying.

1:04:50 - Leo Laporte
Uh, somebody said that it's interesting being the queen. Everywhere you go, it smells like fresh paint.

1:04:56 - Jason Snell
Yes.

1:04:58 - Leo Laporte
I think that's probably the case, right? Yeah, I don't know why the entire world smells like Sherwin Williams, but it does.

1:05:05 - Alex Lindsay
Anyway, that is kind of interesting, like you're impressed.

1:05:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's true, it's very clean, it's always clean and freshly painted, probably not bad smells.

1:05:12 - Leo Laporte
Impressive world. It's true. It's very clean. It's always clean and freshly painted, probably not bad smells I'm thinking mar-a-lago probably didn't smell like fresh paint, but I I could be wrong probably felt like it's expired frying medium.

That kitchen needs an inspection, I'm guessing uh, by the way, when he was, while he was there, mr Cook, did Mr Cook give him the envelope of money? I don't remember. The envelope has arrived from Mr Zuckerberg, mr Pichai, mr Bezos. All have donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund, so has so many other companies. But you know what?

1:05:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It doesn't look like it works there yeah I mean that that is distressingly traditional, no matter who the new.

1:05:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I know you always do that and it's the inaugural, so it's like you're giving it to america.

1:06:03 - Andy Ihnatko
A there's. A there's. There are no limits on how much you can contribute. B you know that this person won, so there's no.

1:06:09 - Leo Laporte
There's no better yeah that's right, it's not a bet. Yeah, it's a sure thing this horse has won this race and and especially with this one.

1:06:17 - Alex Lindsay
This horse is particularly feisty if yes, don't.

1:06:21 - Leo Laporte
Yes, hey, you want to calm down? Apparently, according to phone arena, tim cook showed king charles a specific, so Tim Cook was overheard talking to Charles about Apple intelligence. The feature that really got the King's attention was Image Wand, which you can turn a rough sketch into an image. Oh God, it's not fair. Really Fantastic, said King Charles. According to the standard, it's fantastic. How did you do that?

1:07:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Show me again, timmy, show me again there was a video of fortunately it seemed like almost like raw video of him doing what he does when he visits a store like this, which is all the employees lining up dressed, looking fancy but as fancy as they can dress without looking like they're dressed fancy and having the 30-second conversations in which you really really have sympathy for people on both sides, where King Charles has to give these people their moment, because if he gives the slightest withering twitch that's going to devastate that person for the rest of their lives. And so they're, so they're they were. Meanwhile, the store manager was trying to have the conversation. Oh, and we were playing so many people and he act, they, he. She tried to try to explain swift playgrounds. I think in the context of own, we're teaching people how to code using oh, that's cool with.

Playgrounds. Yeah, yeah and so, and he did seem his practice at being at something he's very good at that, he did seem engaged. He did seem like a very friendly chat, fascinating yes, how do we like 182?

1:08:05 - Leo Laporte
182 came out this week. How do we like the image Playground this week?

1:08:11 - Alex Lindsay
how do we like the image playground? It almost never does what I want it to. It's terrible, let's face it. So I mean, sometimes you get a cartoon version that's kind of like what you asked for.

1:08:28 - Leo Laporte
But I mean, I like the idea of I'm going to give you three different like it's got these little circular things of this plus this plus this. Yeah, the interface is actually pretty good.

1:08:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think the interface is good. I think it's creative compared to all the other AI things that I've used and it lets you kind of iteratively build things. Yeah, but it just doesn't produce the things that I want, which I think is a. The funny thing is the interface is really hard and Apple can backfill like how much better it is.

1:08:47 - Leo Laporte
over time it can make it smarter.

1:08:49 - Alex Lindsay
So I have a lot of faith that this will get better. Time right, it can make it. So I have a lot of, you know, I have a lot of faith that this will get better. I love where they went as far as the creative process.

1:08:56 - Leo Laporte
It's just not painting anything that I want yet, but but it's not, you know so this is, uh, it's, this is my, this is what it thinks I look like, which I disagree heartily. Um, this is what it thinks paul thurott looks like. That actually does look more like paul thurott as a superman. And then this is a jammer b because, uh, we were talking about pink floyd's the wall. So I said, give me jammer b in front of a wall and it did. It did a pretty good and actually you could recognize it's john me do you think that looks like me.

1:09:25 - Alex Lindsay
Really, I think no one thinks any of these look like themselves like you know, you, you, you know, I don't think that that looks that much like you. I think that that has been one of the things like I it's on device.

1:09:35 - Leo Laporte
Is that the problem?

1:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, I mean the. The issue is, I wish you would actually dumb it down more than it does. If it, if it took me and made me look like a memoji, you know, like, really like that simple, I think less of us would go. This doesn't look like like my meme is trying it's doing too good a job. You're saying it's actually too, it's it, it it. Since it can't really hit us, just go back, simplify it more, right? Yep, because all I want to do is have me doing something funny, but I want the memoji version of me.

You know, I don't want more cartoony, exactly, exactly by the way there.

1:10:09 - Jason Snell
There is in the upper left corner, uh, the little picking interface. You can choose an appearance. It's called, which is. I missed this feature entirely. Show me where it's not obvious. So if you tap on the like to pick a person.

1:10:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:10:26 - Jason Snell
Choose upper left. It says appearance. Ah, that is a generic person, so you can get out of the game of trying to trying to be generating a human that you know, and you can just get a generic person.

You pick a skin tone you pick a G from one of three sort of gender buckets and then it'll generate using generic people, which is I didn't know it was there. But that's nice Cause, I agree, it is not fun to play the game of let's try to generate something that looks like somebody, I know, because it doesn't do a great job most of the time and so you can kind of get out of that. But I want to agree with Alex they can maybe fix their generator to be better. But what they have done, which I really love, is build this UI, because I am so sick of AI companies trying to sell me on the idea that the command line is the future of user interfaces. They're like oh, you just talk to a bot and tell it what you want.

Well, we did that already. Then the Mac happened and we realized it was dumb to do it that way. So I love this interface. Not only are you picking kind of tokens, and then you've got an interface for people here. I love this interface. Not only are you picking kind of tokens, and then you've got an interface for people. Here I am in a space disco.

1:11:37 - Leo Laporte
Sure, I mean, it goes without saying.

1:11:39 - Jason Snell
But the other thing that I think is brilliant about it is it brings you to a generator screen where the whole implication is look at all of these things we're generating and find one that's good, Unlike some UIs that are like oh, I did your picture for you and now I'm done, and you're like well, this picture sucks, Do it again. Apple knows that some of those pictures are going to suck.

The UI is fantastic, and so you just keep swiping and there are more of them and you can swipe back and forth, and when you close out or when you add a token and then remove it, it remembers the images it generated in the previous set so you don't lose them like the whole ui. This is apple, really at its best is the ui here.

1:12:24 - Leo Laporte
The problem is, yeah, that the images it generates aren't very good. Yeah, well, ui, though spectacular, so they can always make that better, right? I mean?

1:12:29 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, the ui is the hardest thing to come up with in my opinion, and then the ai stuff will will follow behind it, but I think that it, it's definitely it. You can see where it's going to go and I love where it's going to go.

1:12:40 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just not there yet yeah, and they, when they did a very smart thing by calling it the image playground, implying that you're not going to, it's not going to stick in around stick and coin get a picture's. No, you're going to play with this and get the stuff that you want.

1:12:53 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that because everything is so solid, you know, and some of the things that pop out are so kind of cartoony and very object oriented, I kind of feel like there's some point where we start being able to generate 3D objects faster than in other places because it's really knows a lot about that or it's really building that into the process and so saying, like giving me a cupcake, it, the cupcake looks very, very like solid, you know, and so the the idea that it gives me a 3d model of a cupcake probably isn't super far behind.

1:13:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's what. That's why it's so hard to even even take telling back to what we're talking earlier about, uh, about spatial video, like, by the way everybody's dog looks like that.

1:13:32 - Leo Laporte
There's one. There's one dog image in there for some reason.

1:13:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know why, but um, I was just gonna say that, yes, yeah, um, yeah, so it's hard. It's hard to know how ai is going to transform everything, like the idea of like. Adobe already has a feature where, hey, here is a like 2 drawing of a cupcake. Please turn this into 3D, because I want the camera to be a bit above and behind it. I don't want that full-on thing. So a lot of what we're doing is not just simply again press the button, get a feed pellet. It's going to be interactive and iterative.

And whereas artists' tools right now are who can manipulate, who can hold the brush better, who can operate the pen, nib, who can mix colors better, I think the next generation of artists are going to be people who know exactly how these models work and how to describe what they want to get. So it's not going to be so much about. Almost anything you can describe can become a 3D object. Almost any 3D object can become an element in like an actual video, and then god knows what happens after that where do you do the uh the, the thing?

1:14:38 - Jason Snell
the king liked this sketchpad that is in uh when you're in the pencil kit, so like you could do it in notes or whatever, but you have to activate pencil kit and then you draw something and then you select the image wand tool and circle around the thing you drew and give it a prompt and basically, um yeah, I wrote about this a little bit last week um, it basically uses your prompt and the thing you drew as input to try to build a model, um, which is nice, so, like, if you drew, like I drew a, a spaceship that I've been doodling since I was a, a kid in elementary school, and it kind of looks like a pyramid. But I drew a spaceship that I've been doodling since I was a kid in elementary school and it kind of looks like a pyramid, but it's a spaceship. I assure you, as a 10-year-old artist, I assure you it's a spaceship. Anyway, I drew that and circled it and said this is a spaceship with rocket engines at the bottom and a capsule at the top, and some of those were pretty good. But it knew the shape was going to be that shape.

Or I drew a frog sitting on a lily pad and then I I gave it the prompt a frog is sitting on a little sitting on a lily pad made of a computer motherboard, and it took a couple of generations but it got it, but the frog was sitting in the exact orientation that I had sketched a very, very bad sketch of a frog so that's the idea is, that is that you, you, you draw a sketch that's kind of what you want it to be, and then you circle it with the, with the image wand, and then give it a prompt.

Still, it's still using, uh, text generation, but it's using your what you drew as the other input, so you'll get something closer to what you were trying to draw is this on six colors?

1:16:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking through here. I see a lot about apple. This is in notes.

1:16:16 - Jason Snell
It's in our uh on six colors. It's in our review of of the 18.2 features you can see. You can see my uh, my frog and my spaceship I want to see if I'm looking.

1:16:25 - Leo Laporte
I'm dying to see your frog also a tim cook.

1:16:28 - Jason Snell
tim cook, uh, as scrooge mcduck too, oh so it's in notes and you draw something.

1:16:33 - Alex Lindsay
I'm trying to draw something. Anything that uses pencil kit.

1:16:35 - Leo Laporte
But, you have to turn on the pencil kit Anything?

1:16:37 - Jason Snell
yeah, so you make a new note and then you tap the thing in the toolbar. That's the pencil I did that. Then you're in drawing mode, right, and so do you see the palette of tools at the bottom of the screen.

1:16:48 - Alex Lindsay
Yes.

1:16:49 - Jason Snell
Yes, okay, so select a drawing, implement and draw something, and then you select the magic wand, which?

1:16:55 - Alex Lindsay
is image wand. Well, I don't know.

1:16:59 - Jason Snell
Are you on me?

1:16:59 - Leo Laporte
So this is the sketch that you did, which is terrible, you're right.

1:17:02 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a really awful frog.

1:17:03 - Leo Laporte
And then you said computer motherboard and a frog sitting on a lily pad and that's pretty good.

1:17:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and my spaceship again, it does sort of look like a pyramid, but it sort of looks like a spaceship, and what it didn't do is turn it like okay, here's the story. When I was turning 10, I asked my best friend's mom or my mom asked my best friend's mom to make me a birthday cake. She was like doing custom cakes and I gave the drawing and specified my little pyramid guy.

And what I got back was like an Apollo capsule because she didn't follow my drawing at all and I was struck by the fact that this AI system was like. I know that looks like a pyramid, but I tell you it's a spaceship and it's like okay, boss whatever you say, ship now but yeah, like that, that lousy frog is faced the right way, with its legs in the right way because that's how I drew it. That's the idea that's pretty cool.

1:17:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah so, yeah. So this looks like Image Playground inside of Notes. I mean it has the same kind of UI.

1:17:55 - Jason Snell
It looks like it very much is, with the one difference being that you can use a sketch as input. As input, yeah Right, so I think Apple's smart.

1:18:06 - Leo Laporte
So this is going to be the kind of general image generation UI for all of its stuff, and I think this is a really well done UI. So that's good, but currently always limited to on device. Is that right? Is that your Scrooge, mcduck? We?

1:18:21 - Jason Snell
don't know. I was trying to do a Tim Cook as Scrooge McDuck and all I really got was Tim Cook wearing a blue top hat in a cave with money, which is not quite what I was going for, but okay, fine, it's close enough.

1:18:34 - Leo Laporte
It's close enough, it's close enough. He's not swimming in it or anything, but that's close enough and that's an animation style you used uh, that one is animation style, yeah, yeah uh, good, this is all at sixcolorscom. If you want to read the review, this is the other features genmoji, which I was trying to do desperately before the show, and unfortunately it looks like iphone mirror does not do as well as if you're actually using the phone. I think that's where the issue was, I think genmoji is really good.

1:19:02 - Jason Snell
I think it's the best of these features because it's using a very limited training set, which is apple's emoji. I do wonder it's funny because apple commissions an artist to build their emoji. Right, there is no. People don't understand this. There's no emoji factory where all the emojis emit from. Unicode Consortium approves what the emojis are, but all they're approving is the code points and the descriptions. They're not doing it either. And so Apple and Microsoft and Google and lots of other companies build, they hire artists to build these emoji, so they're training Genmoji on Apple's emoji that are in there, and I wonder if maybe even other commissions that they've done of emoji that don't exist in order to feed more into the engine.

It's certainly an interesting idea that they could do that, but as a result, it's super constrained. It really is constrained to make it look like an apple emoji but and then you can choose a person or again an emoji which you can choose it to look like somebody you know. Or you can choose in that same upper left corner, you can choose male, female or neutral emoji person and then you can say you know, I did. What did I do last week? Chicken riding a motorcycle and it's like boom, it's a chicken riding a motorcycle emoji, like it just is.

It was perfect the first time and it's giving you that same interface where you can, if you are not pleased by option one, you swipe to option two and maybe you refine it and add some features in and they're a lot of fun. They're not. It's not the same as hiring an artist to as somebody who actually has hired an artist to do an emoji-like piece of art, which takes time and it's beautiful because it's got more interpretation in it, because it's done by a human. But this is really easy and fun and sort of disposable, although you can also save them and then use them later. So, yeah, I think it's a really good feature.

1:20:56 - Leo Laporte
I like Dan Morin in front of all those microphones. It's good, it's very good.

1:21:02 - Jason Snell
That's good, I think these are pretty cool.

1:21:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nice, all right, so I can expect now a lot of weird hybrid emojis in my text messages, I guess, Probably Good news is, if you like them, I think you tap and hold on them and you can actually save them to your sticker.

1:21:19 - Jason Snell
And all the stickers are also emojis, which means you can use them to tap back as well as in text. So you can do tap backs of emoji, of Genmoji stickers. So it just kind of keeps on going.

1:21:32 - Leo Laporte
Lisa asked me a weird question. Uh, she said how do you like the uh summarize features? And I said, well, they're okay. I like the notification summaries. Those are kind of cool now that we've had them for a while. What do we think of the uh, of the text stuff, the summarized stuff.

1:21:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It's generally okay it doesn't blow my mind.

1:21:56 - Leo Laporte
This is exactly what I sounded like answering Lisa.

1:22:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, yeah it's okay. It's what I expect from every feature like this I've seen over the past couple of years and, as usual, when it's wrong, it's very wrong. And as usual, like when it's wrong, it's very wrong, like when it screws with and other features, like when it screws something up, it screws something up really, really bad. There's another story about about the BBC complained that.

1:22:22 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, they were really upset. Yeah to they.

1:22:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Bbc had a news story that Apple's intelligence misrepresented yeah it, it the the shooting uh of the executive last week. Basically the summary. The ai summary said that the shooter had shot himself. Uh, that's like that didn't happen. Ai powered summary falsely made it appear bbc news had, and it wasn't just like the apple saying oh oh, here is an Apple-generated summary from Apple News on an Apple thing. It was a notification from BBC News that said Luigi Mangione shoots himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like yeah, that's not what we said at all.

1:23:03 - Leo Laporte
They're not suing, they're just complaining.

1:23:06 - Andy Ihnatko
They're just saying, hey, we are the BBC, we can make Apple look really, really dumb and make their keynote feature look like it's absolutely worthless. And meanwhile, other people are having the same complaints that were emerging during the beta. Which is that great. You're supposed to be prioritizing emails and notifications, but the more dramatic a piece of spam subject line is, the more likely it is that you're going to select that to make sure that I see it at the very, very of the list. So that's not something that we weren't expecting. That obviously you're going to have to be fine-tuning things as you go.

1:23:40 - Leo Laporte
It just shows the BBC in their article found a whole bunch of other examples just to show. For instance, here the New York Times, three different articles summarized as Netanyahu arrested. Of course it was not yeah, so it's yeah. I think these are problematic. I probably wouldn't trust news summaries.

1:24:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the question is, if you're Apple, what do you do next? Do you try to create some sort of heuristic that says, take it easy, be less aggressive on new summaries, or do you start sort of quietly turning off this feature for certain apps because you're uncomfortable with the output? We'll see what they do. Right now they have remained silent, which is also really interesting, since the BBC was so public about it. I mean, anybody who's used these summaries knows that they do invent things like this because they misunderstand what the you. You know it's also a small. If the bbc sent the text of these articles and asked it to summarize them, I think it would do a vastly better job. But it's already a headline that's then being crammed into space with three other headlines or two other headlines that's a good point and, and so there's very little data for it to even infer what's going on here, and a lot of surface area.

So of course you've got this going on, so it's kind of unfortunate. I do think the writing tools are pretty good. They added some features to those. So there are places where you can summarize or do things with text in a writing context that I think are actually pretty good. So, aside from the summaries, the summaries of notifications or in email are a little bit different, but there are those writing tools like for people who are uncomfortable writing things or eliminating drudgery.

My friend, Federico Viticci, for Mac Stories, has a story about how he was working on a document and somebody he knew who's collaborating with had written this whole thing out and he was like I just want the headers so that I can make the same thing for my article with the same headers. And he would normally, what would you do? You would copy it and paste it and then go through and delete what the one person wrote so that you could write your thing in there, that I do that stuff all the time. So he selected it and then he went into writing tools and he said and he pasted it and selected it and said remove all of the content that was written here and just leave the structure with it and press the button and it did it and I thought, okay, that's right.

It's, eliminating drudgery is the best thing that user automation can do, and I think it'll be interesting thing that user automation can do and I think it'll be interesting Go ahead.

1:26:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy, just very quickly, just adding to what Jason said. That's one of the things I use Gemini for a lot. I will just simply say I'll cut something out of a transcript and it's got all kinds of time codes and names on it and I'll just paste it into Gemini and say please remove all the line breaks and time codes from this and format this as just a regular RTF paragraph and boom, great Again, eliminating drudgery. That's how you make me a fan.

1:26:38 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I do stuff in ChatGPT where I'm saying, you know, like a lot of times I'll have spreadsheets and I'll go.

Well, I need the spreadsheet, I need you to take this data and make it this data, and I need to take this from this spreadsheet and and and concatenate it with this one and I want you to put all of this data in against these things and I can pretty complicated solution and it just Nope.

Here's your new Excel file that does all those things Right and and I think and that would take me days, like there's been a couple of them that I've been dealing with that are like 4,000 items that I have to move around and I'm just kind of like, oh my gosh, like I couldn't do this, you know, like I couldn't, and um, and so it has been a kind of you know, uh, that kind of thing, but that doesn't exist yet in numbers where I can start to tell it like I want this, what I.

It's fine for them to add things that will fill out things for me in numbers of words, but what I really want is to grab onto a cell and say I need you to go and grab this, this, this and this and create a calculation and then do this and explain the calculation, rather than me trying to figure out how I want to. You know, build a pivot table. So you know, like that's the kind of stuff that's going to get pretty, and you know that it's a year or two away, like you're just going to be able to say this is what I want, and it's going to build it and it's pretty exciting.

1:27:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, federico said that he was already doing a thing where he had, like different currencies and they were ordered in different ways and he was able to select them using writing tools just the Apple stuff and say can you format this in a table with the currencies and make sure the currencies are in the same format in all you know because they were on various formats and just do that and then, right in place in his writing app, it goes boop and it's all formatted properly and like hmm, chef's kiss, that's beautiful.

1:28:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, this is definitely an area where Apple can absolutely score ahead of Google, like as impressive as the Google's announcements of Gemini 2.0 were last week and it was super, super impressive. One of the most impressive things that an AI and a chatbot can do is just be an assistant that is sitting by your side and can see what you see. Imagine the ability to look at that document and simply say, hey, I want you to take the text that's in that window and do this to it, and then it just simply flicks and does that change for you automatically. I don't as much as I am impressed by what Google is doing in AI. They are really amazing.

I don't know if I would allow Google to have, like screen access just as an ongoing basis, no matter how good this extra automation would be, whereas Apple I don't trust any huge company, any huge tech company, but I would more likely trust Apple to say say, yeah, you can take a look at be watching my entire screen at this as everything I do. Uh, on screen, yes, absolutely take a look at it, because that way I can say, uh, hey, uh, this, I've got this omni, this omni outliner document. I want you to turn it into a spreadsheet. But I want you to add two columns in front of this. I don't want you to have all the headers here and I want you to. The second indent should be actually the first item and then suddenly watch a Google doc like be created, whereas this morning creating like the show doc for us today it's like two, three regular expressions and an export to CSV.

1:29:46 - Jason Snell
It's like yeah, and pro computer users can do it, but the idea that this is what user automation is always supposed to be. But there's always been that hump that you have to get over, where you learn how to use Apple Script or shortcuts or Perl or Python or whatever, or Kotlin, you name it, and then the next step is remember that. Right, that's. The next step is hey, it's a month later. You say remember the thing I did last month? I need you to do it again.

And then you've got reusable automation and that's the best right. So I'm very and this is things you know again, some of the stuff that AI is being applied to, I think it's not very good at and that we're going to go through a period where weizes it and you know, there'll be stuff we discard or practices that will change. But there's also going to be some stuff and I think this is one of them where it will be revolutionary because it knows how to use. It's a computer that knows how to use our computers and can save us time, because, you know, a lot of computer work is drudgery and computers save us from drudgery but they also make drudgery and it needs to stop Right, and I think that these tools will let us do less of that kind of garbage stuff and instead spend time doing what human brains should be doing.

1:31:03 - Leo Laporte
I should point out that Lou MM, who for a long time hosted Twiet, works on Microsoft on Excel, and he's, in fact, in charge of Excel with Python, and there's a lot of stuff going on in Excel with AI and the Python coding language. A lot of stuff you can do, and I suspect that some of these features that you wish you had in Pages you might already have, but you have to use Excel on Windows, probably, and you may also have to use Microsoft's recall, which would remember what you did a couple of weeks ago, maybe not, maybe you wish it hadn't. Apple did put all of those features, the Apple intelligence features into Pages, numbers and Keynotes last week, for both Mac and iOS. Right.

1:31:45 - Jason Snell
And there's a writing tools API. So a bunch of writing tool stuff is now in sort of lots and lots of different apps.

1:31:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. So Obsidian or you know, yeah, BBEdit's got it, BBEdit really yeah.

1:31:59 - Jason Snell
It was already in anything that used standard text controls, but there's an API so anybody can build it in on iOS or macOS. And then, yeah, they added one of their demos. Initially, right was like oh, I'm giving a keynote presentation and I need an image here, and it's one of their use cases. So, yeah, image playgrounds, basically, is also something that is tied into the iWork apps.

1:32:20 - Andy Ihnatko
And that's going to be another big use case when Gemini is available for developers. And so there was a Mac developer that had basically wired it up so that it could watch him as he codes and doing things like copilot stuff. So I need a function here that does X. And then, great, here's a function. Great, Now it's inside the code saying actually I try to execute this code, it doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? And because Gemini was watching. Okay, here's a new version of the code. That's the sort of thing that makes you think, ooh, the next five years are going to be super interesting.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
the ability to sound like a scene from another godzilla movie, but apple's giant ipad is on the horizon. Here it comes. We'll talk about that in just a moment. You're watching MacBreak Weekly, andy inaco, Alex Lindsay and Jason snell. I do want to ask, uh for help. I wish we could do this automatically. We could automate this. What is that in my hat? There's something in my hat. There it goes. Now it's in my hand.

We are doing our survey a little earlier than usual this year, so we'd like to invite you to tell us a little bit about yourself. This is what we do Instead of spying on you, instead of putting bugs and things in the software or the hardware or the web pages or whatever, we just do a survey. Seems like an easy thing. Twittv slash survey. I'm going to guess it's 2025. Let me see if that's right. Survey 2025. Nope, do you know what it is, john Ashley? What's the URL? I believe it's just survey 25. Oh, 25. I added a 20. Okay, survey 25.

1:34:03 - Jason Snell
If you go there, Just twittv slash survey as well, but that works too.

1:34:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that works too. Okay, Twittv slash survey. You will be sent over to SurveyMonkey and we ask a few questions. We'd like to know you a little bit better because our advertisers want to know you a little bit better. So it's very helpful to us. Answer the questions you can. I think you can skip the questions you don't want to answer. These look like you have to answer them, Is that true? I'll try this. Let me just see.

We have added some other choices. I am not an employee or staff. I am owner, president and C-level and this kind of thing. And the reason this is important is advertisers want to know what they don't say. Hey, tell me more about you, about this particular person. They say how many of your listeners are a C-level executives? How many of them? Actually, one of the biggest things, they want to know how many of them make it decisions? Are they it DMs, decision makers? So that's the kind of thing that's very helpful for us to know so that we could say well, in fact, it is a very high number. Something like 70% of our audience are IT decision makers. That's great. That's one of the reasons you hear so many IT focused ads on the shows. That's the kind of thing that will help us going into 2025. I know we ask for your help a lot by joining the club. This is one more thing you can do to help twittv slash survey. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes and it's very helpful. We do this every year, once a year and we start a little bit earlier this year. So if you would twittv slash survey More with MacBreak Weekly in just a moment. Twittv slash survey Okay. Slash survey okay. All right.

Now let's talk about the giant iPad on the horizon. This actually comes from Mark Gurman. As usual, he's got you know on Sunday. He comes out every Sunday with bold visions. He says Apple wants to do a giant foldable iPad. We're not talking about something like the Galaxy Fold. We're talking an iPad that is effectively two iPads together, without a crease. We're not expecting to see this for a few years, right? He does say the company's been honing the product for a couple of years now is aiming to bring something to market around 2028. They don't want to. I don't know how you do this without a crease. So far, nobody has been able to samsung, google, nobody's been able to. Prototypes of this new product within apple's industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease. He writes but it's too early to tell if apple can get rid of it all together. Would you want a 20-inch foldable iPad, and is it really more a computer at that point?

1:36:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, if I were an artist, I'd want one.

1:37:00 - Jason Snell
I want to. Yeah, the big question for me is there is a totally bizarre paragraph in this story where he talks about, where Gurman talks about this, and one of the challenges is it's he doesn't know. He doesn't know. He says it's unclear. He calls it an iPad, okay, but then he says it's unclear what operating system it will run, which is sort of like what does that mean? So, yeah, it's not yet clear what operating system the Apple computer will run, but my guess is that it will be an, will be an, will be ipad os or a variant of it, whatever that means. I don't believe it will be a true ipad mac hybrid, okay, but the device will have elements of both. Okay, that's kind of sounds like a hybrid mark, but okay, the key is guess, but wait by the time 2028 rolls around, ipad os should be advanced enough.

You took it off the screen. I was reading it off the screen.

1:37:52 - Leo Laporte
Show it on the screen, should be advanced enough to run macOS apps what?

1:37:57 - Jason Snell
But also makes sense to support iPad accessories like the Apple Pencil? Okay, so is he, like I really have questions about, should be advanced enough to run macOS apps on iOS iPadOS, because that is not something that's been reported before and is very intriguing to me, right, like, wait a second. And then he says, well, it might not be a hybrid, but it might have elements of both. Which also? What does that mean? So I think he phrases this as an iPad, but there was another supply chain rumor a little while ago that said that they were making a foldable device that was a laptop, and I think it's the same device.

And so the truth is, whatever vision mark german has and his sources are great, but like his sources don't know or can't say some of these answers and maybe nobody knows. Nobody knows, but calling it an iPad alone is like not sure. It's a iPad-like foldable device that might be Mac-like. If it's not a Mac, it might be iPad-like, but not an iPad, which is really interesting. And maybe it is a hybrid-ish device that is like kind of like an iPad but also could run macOS stuff. I don't know. It's really weird.

1:39:13 - Leo Laporte
He does point out that there are windows devices already today that do something like that, including yoga.

1:39:19 - Jason Snell
Sure, but Apple doesn't. I mean this is the question is like what does Apple want to do here? Cause Apple's got everything right. They've got an OS that is a tablet. They've got an OS that is, uh, is a desktop computer that could be used in a laptop. They haven't really like. The thing is is this a hybrid? Is it a hybrid convertible? And what is Apple's vision of a hybrid convertible? Is it also is a Mac, is it an iPad? But it can run Mac software? Is it a Mac that can run iPad stuff and have more touch? We, like they haven't committed to anything like that and it sounds like this product will force them to commit to something because it sounds like it is a hybrid product.

1:39:58 - Andy Ihnatko
It's weird because Apple seems to have one of its most ingrained dogmas is that there are Macs and there are touch devices, and Mac is not a multi-touch device. So if you're talking about multi-touch devices, and with a big screen, you're talking about the ipad, and I agree with you. There's a lot of weird stuff, and if it weren't mark german talking about this, maybe I would file this to the back of the drawer. With mark german talking about this, though, you know that he has part of this story and I'm wondering like what parts he's trying to fill in or what types he's speculating about. The idea of, if you have the information, hypothetically, that Apple is developing a device that is a foldable touchscreen that is the size of two iPads or the size of a 13-inch screen. Let's say that, fold in half to create one thing, okay. So what is Apple building this? Are they trying to make a laptop? Well, no, because that would mean that the keyboard, half of it, would be a virtual keyboard, and ain't nobody's going to be trying to sell something that you tap just strictly on glass. Are you talking about this? Is a 20 inch iMac that is as portable as a MacBook? Maybe not, because you can't use the multi-touch. You can't use touch with the Mac unless Apple is planning on adding touch for that reason.

So the logical thing to say is that this is going to be something like an iPad, and, if your information is that this is not something they're planning in 2024, 2025, you see none of the industry stuff that says that Apple's trying to put out vendors who can create a special screen for them at least to test with.

You're saying that this could be long enough in the future, that, yes, this could represent a next generation sort of device. In and of itself, though, I don't think the idea of having a large screen iPad that folds to make it portable is a bad idea at all. That's the true hybrid between having something that's very, very portable but gives you the desktop sort of experience, and, as I was saying that, I realized that I'm speaking to you in front of a 13-inch MacBook with a 12.9-inch iPad as a second display above that thing. So, basically, I'm obviously very, very primed to think that this is a good thing to have. You're already there, yeah, and again, I'm sure that anyone who is using the iPad for art of which there are many, many people, a lot of cartoonists the idea of having like a 19 inch, 20 inch, like work tablets, canvas right would be a very, very big deal that. But that's the area in which, like you know, the the ditch in the middle would be a very, very big problem.

1:42:43 - Leo Laporte
For other people it wouldn't be that much of a problem, but for that person yeah notably the two images that they include in this bloomberg article have hinges the courier Microsoft Courier and the Lenovo Yoga 9i both have hinges, so it's not a continuous screen. I think the most important caveat here is it's Mark, with his sources saying they've been working on something for years, but it's very important to point out they work on all sorts of things and there's no reason to think they're going to release this.

1:43:11 - Jason Snell
This this sounds like there's a higher degree again. We're reverse engineering.

I do a lot of that with mark german's reports like what what information could he have received that would make him write it this way?

And it feels to me like he's saying they're probably they're making this thing right, like that the the hardware is kicking into gear in terms of getting ready to design and build this thing, that it seems to be that it's a go, but that he doesn't know all the details and that's and, like I said, that's a lot of my re-engineering of that.

How weird that paragraph is is there's a lot of uncertainty there, where probably his source is like, yeah, either uncomfortable, saying like they draw a line, what they leaked to mark german, or has not been allowed in the room, like probably. So let's say it's probably a hardware source. The hardware source either doesn't know or knows that they've tried a bunch of stuff and doesn't know what they've settled on, if they've settled on anything, and so they can say, yeah, we're building this thing, it's probably an ipad, but I don't know, might have some Mac-like things in it, and then he has to run with that. But it does sound like this is a piece of hardware that Apple is going to build, even though we are talking about several years out now.

1:44:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and we don't know what operating system or what it would look like. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say you could run mac os apps on an ipad. You can run ipad apps on a mac. It would be a lot more overhead in ipad os.

1:44:34 - Jason Snell
But you could do it and you could even use a virtual machine to do it and have a virtual mac that's running in the background, sort of like old classic mode on mac os. When they went from 9 to 10 where you actually have like a. There was a little in classic mode. When they went to mac os 10 there was a virtualized Mac OS 9 that just ran in the background and apps appeared and you could totally do that if you wanted to do that. Apple could do that today if they wanted to. Sure, yeah.

1:45:01 - Leo Laporte
They call it coherence mode, when you're running Windows on a Mac.

1:45:04 - Jason Snell
Exactly Same idea. Right, it's a different OS, but it basically kind of layers in and it isn't too weird. It's a little weird, but it basically kind of layers in and it isn't too weird. It's a little weird, but it's better than nothing. And honestly, I think this is one of the existential questions about the iPad is, if you're pushing touchscreens into places like this thing, do you want to invest in taking iPadOS that much further, maybe? Or, since you've already developed MacOS, do you say why don't we just let these things be mac like in mac, like context, even if they don't say it, dual boots or something like that, even if it's sort of like halfway in between? That would be. That's why I'm interested in this story. So much is that is that we don't know what apple thinks the right thing to do is for a product that is really right between mac and ipad how much pressure is them, on them, to do it anyway?

1:45:49 - Leo Laporte
I mean, don't they? I've seen some people cynically say well, they sell twice as many products. I think it was Mark Gurman who said Tim Cook likes it that most people who have Macs also have iPads. There can't be that much pressure to combine.

1:46:02 - Jason Snell
I don't know about pressure, although I do feel like. Another thing I love about this story is I like the idea that Apple might be exploring a different kind of shape for a device. Because the iPad's been here for almost 15 years, MacBooks have not changed at all, they're pretty much perfect though.

Right, Well, but again, if you're Apple, maybe you say are there some other devices we could make? It's a little like how they've experimented with different sizes of iPad and different sizes of iPhone. Like, are there other kinds of Macs? Right, All the competitors are making these convertibles. So I like that they're trying it right. I like that they're exploring it. I'm not sure that, whether there's a market for this product or not, but I like that they're giving it a go anyway.

1:46:43 - Leo Laporte
People have pointed out for 15 years. Mark says that Apple's mouse design is less than perfect, as grip wasn't ergonomic or comfortable and, of course, the charging port on the bottom is a source of endless jokes. He says there's good news there's a new magic mouse in the works. Don't get your hopes up. It's a few years off also. But he said I wouldn't expect anything in the next 12 to 18 months. But they are working on something he doesn't know what.

1:47:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but they are working on something he doesn't know what. Yeah, but I love the. Sometimes these, these things are really great, like signal flares to see, like how interested is everybody in the, in this idea. Let's see how far, let's say, let's see how widely this, this story goes. And my God, my goodness, it was like all over all of my feeds. Oh, my God, apple's finally fixing the mouse. Oh my God, they're probably taking the port off the bottom. I don't know what Apple could do to make a mouse competitive with the Logitech 720 or anything that Logitech is doing.

1:47:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, which has a charging port in the back so you can use the dang mouse while it's charging. Just a minor detail.

1:47:54 - Andy Ihnatko
It also has two other innovative features. One it's shaped like a human hand would be operating it.

1:48:01 - Leo Laporte
Look at that. Secondly, it's in the palm of your hand kids.

1:48:04 - Andy Ihnatko
There you go. It's not designed to look pretty when you're not touching it, it's designed to feel good when you're using it and also it has mechanical buttons on it that you actually click and I can actually pick up, like I have a magic mouse, but I don't know the buttons. The multi-touch surface again, it looks nice as a static object. I'm not being sarcastic. It's a gorgeous object but I can't get through a task as quickly. I wouldn't say no, not even as quickly. I can't get through a task with a Magic Mouse. That's not at least a little bit frustrating. And that includes dumb things like I'm moving the mouse from one place to another on the desk. Oh no, now I'm looking at another desktop. That's not what I meant to do. Magic Mouse.

The only way to make it work is to go into settings and turn off all the multi-touch settings features yeah please don't, please don't be anything but a mouse that responds to left click, right click and scroll, and if I am like scrolling down and stopping to look at something and I happen to shift my finger a little bit. No, that's not a, that's not an intentional thing, that's just a human hand that sometimes the fingertip moves a little bit. Please don't move me to another place.

1:49:19 - Leo Laporte
It's it's just they are pretty bad thing. I have to wonder how many people by the way, this is the one that came with the mac pro nice and black. How pretty is that? How many people are like me have drawers full of these things that came with max that they don't use because they uh, they replace them with a microsoft mouse logistic mouse.

1:49:37 - Jason Snell
I would imagine that the bulk of people never even think about it and they just use this mouse apple mouse and if they choose it, and that's why they have to make one is because they people want them, because they want their computer to come with all the things.

1:49:51 - Leo Laporte
It does have to come with a mouse, I agree.

1:49:54 - Jason Snell
But I will say my prediction here is that they're going to give us the same spiel that they've done for the last couple of AirPods revisions, which is, they're going to come out with a new mouse in a couple of years and they're going to say oh well, we did a lot of ergonomic analysis, they changed the shape of the AirPods AirPods and I bet they will claim that it's going to be ergonomically better and it won't look like a polished pebble found in a stream by Johnny Ive.

And it will be a little more utilitarian, while not satisfying Andy, I think is probably the most likely scenario, but that it'll be better, right, it feels like modern Apple is much more in the we're going to. The AirPods look weird but they fit better kind of mode and I feel like that's what a mouse would be from them. Now is not for everybody, but for a wider swath of people. It would be a more comfortable device to use.

1:50:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also I'm sure Apple knows that you can get. You can get a mouse that's conventional and really, really good, well-made, well-lasting, for $30 or less. So this is their opportunity to make something that's stylish, that fits into the design language. The thing that I always think about is that imagine a very, very fancy business that has lots of clients coming in. Every desk in the office in the back has like a Logitech mouse. The fancy iMac at the front desk, with all the glass and the chrome, has a Magic Mouse because it looks classy. It matches with the design aesthetic of the iMac. It makes a good impression.

1:51:24 - Leo Laporte
It's hell on the temp that has to actually push it around the desk all day long, but again, that's the price of fame uh, the other thing I thought was interesting and then, by the way, this is going to be the new home of my magic mouse is right there. It fits perfectly onto the microphone.

It adds just a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole arrangement. The uh air tags are going to be updated with long time coming, with uwb built in. He says he's already reported this a couple of times, but he says Apple is preparing a new AirTag for next year. We've been hearing this one for a couple of years. Uwb will make finding better right.

1:52:03 - Alex Lindsay
I would like it just to support more than 32, because I'm at the limit. How?

1:52:07 - Leo Laporte
many do you have? Chase Louise, you are the outlier, I must say.

1:52:13 - Alex Lindsay
I have four of them that I can't even add because they're sitting there like I was like oh, I was going to put that on some more things. I put them on every and we put them in all of our cases. So when I ship, when we, you know, like if we do an event, I might have to take 10 cases and put them in luggage or ship them or whatever, and so having those air tags in there makes it a lot easier for us to know where those bags are.

1:52:34 - Leo Laporte
I put them in I guess built in four bit identifiers and that's why they can only do 32.

1:52:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, the, the I have. I put them in my bag and my travel bags and my backpack and my, my kids' backpacks and my cars. I even have gotten into the habit now of I'm starting to, when I fed x something to someone, I'm putting them in self-ex, self-addressed stamped envelopes, of I just throw it into the bag and I fed, exited the person and all I all I got to do is just take that and put it back in the mail and send it back to me, just that way I know if something's lost.

I know exactly where it is you know.

1:53:09 - Leo Laporte
I know when it's going to get there, yeah, yeah so. Also Ultra 3 smartwatch, which Gurman says will have the satellite feature that's on the iPhones, so you don't have to be on a cell phone network to make an emergency call. He says he doesn't anticipate that it will be coming to non-Ultra models. It'll be a perk used to justify the ultra price and maybe even hypertension detection, which I think is very cool. Um, right now you have to use it a sphygmometer. I'm just looking for reasons to say a sphygmometer to measure your, your bp?

uh, isn't that funny. I'm willing to say a sphygmometer, but I shorten blood pressure, I don't yeah, well, is it?

1:53:53 - Alex Lindsay
is that just a blood pressure armband? Is that with the cuff? Is it a?

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
sphygmometer. Yeah, okay, how many times have I said that in the show now? I know you've got it down, you've got. I got a sphygmometer down. Uh, of course I'm gonna email saying actually leo that's not the name of the device, that's just the name of the cuff. The actual device?

1:54:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know I don't think the monster either.

1:54:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah uh, I think having blood pressure. It wouldn't probably tell you what your blood pressure is, but, like the afib feature, it might warn you if there's something odd going on. I would guess, um, and then you use the cuff to get the actual blood pressure. That's what Kerman guesses as well. So that's ahead. That's the look ahead, thanks to Mark.

1:54:39 - Alex Lindsay
I was just imagining your watch just getting tighter really quickly and then letting go.

1:54:47 - Leo Laporte
That is such an unpleasant feeling. I don't like that at all. He also says there's a new Apple TV and HomePod Mini on track for next year. Good news there was a lot of protein in this week's newsletter.

1:55:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I think he wanted to take the next couple of weeks off.

1:55:05 - Jason Snell
Also, they're moving it behind a paywall next year. You used to be able to get it for free, but they're going to move it to a. The weekly will be a paywalled to Bloomberg subscribers. They're also launching a new product that is just like I thought you were talking about an Apple thing.

1:55:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you mean the newsletter.

1:55:22 - Jason Snell
No, no, gurman's newsletter is going to be paywalled, which it, and they introduced a new product Like if you just want the tech news, you don't have to pay the full price for Bloomberg.

1:55:32 - Leo Laporte
But as a result.

1:55:33 - Jason Snell
I think also they're bulking up the content to make because they're giving every. All the free subscribers are getting like a free preview for a month or something. So I think there's some marketing going on here as well.

1:55:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. Once again, analyst Jason Snell has the inside story. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Jason snell, Andy Ihnatko Alex. I think we gotta, we gotta, wrap it up. I we haven't gotten to anywhere near the rumors. We we wanted to like the thinner, foldable phones and all of that, but we'll, we'll save that for another week. Um, our picks of the week coming up in just a bit.

If you are not yet a club member, I have a pick for you Club Twit. This would make an excellent gift for the Twit listener in your family. twit.tv/clubtwit. It's $7 a month. Yes, it's still $7 a month. We thought about raising the fee but I don't want to make it impossible for people who are on a tight budget. I feel like seven bucks, a couple of cups of coffee, it's a reasonable amount to ask for all the programming we give you. You do get ad-free versions of all of our shows. You get access to the club, to a discord, which is no mean feature. This is this is my social network. I love hanging out in here. Smart people, interesting people. We are going to extend our opportunity to try it free for two weeks and we still have the referral program, which means you can get a referral link when you sign up and share that to all your friends and get a free month for every one of them that signs up.

But the most important part of Club Twit is it is what is making it possible for us to continue. Uh, we do uh, you know have advertising, but advertising dollars have dwindled. I just saw a stat that said uh, only that 50 of all the advertising, uh, in podcasting, goes to the top 10 shows. 10 shows get half of all the advertising dollars. We are not in the top 10. So we don't get that. We don't get as many advertising dollars as we used to or as Joe Rogan's getting. That means we want to come to you and there's all the Club Twit members in the Discord Say hi everybody and ask you to help us out.

I would I mean, ideally, I would love to just run on the club and nothing else. That's kind of a pipe dream, though right now we have fewer than two percent of our audience is a member of the club. If we could get to five percent, maybe I will tell you this. Uh, 2025 looks pretty. The cupboard is kind of bare. I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the business community. I'm not sure what's going on, but I think people are just waiting. They're hesitant to buy ads, so that means we are at a shortfall for even the first quarter of next year. You can make the difference. $7 a month really does make a difference. Keep these shows going. Keep our team employed. None of it goes to me. It all goes to John Ashley and Benito Gonzalez and Kevin King and Anthony Nielsen and all the people you see in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. That's who we want to keep going. twit.tv/clubtwit. Please, I beg of you, if you've got $7 to spare, send it our way.

We really, really appreciate it. Thank you everybody. All right time for the picks of the week. Let's start off with you, Mr. Jason Snell.

1:58:58 - Jason Snell
All right, I uh have a second recording set up in the back of my house and I do podcasts back there, especially in the winter, because it's heated. Something in this garage is not, and uh, but here in the garage I have a wonderful mute switch by a company called rolls and it's a physical mute switch that you push a button down and then you can hear me, and that you push it again and you can't hear me. And on the in the back I have a USB microphone. It doesn't have a physical mute switch. There's a little button on it, but you got to kind of like reach around to get it. It's not ideal.

So there have been apps that do this. They tend not to work the way I want. A lot of them are push to talk. They're really meant for like Zoom meetings, so that you can do that. I found an app that is my favorite kind of app. It is a Mac app made with care that has lots of features. It's a version 2.0, so they definitely listen to their customers and followed up their 1.0 with a version 2.0. And it's Mic Drop. So Mic Drop, it is a floating menu. It can be in your dock. It will show a status, if you want, when things are muted or unmuted.

2:00:09 - Leo Laporte
I like the on-air light in your menu. That's cool, you can set different.

2:00:12 - Jason Snell
There are different choices for what goes in your menu bar, including one that just is on-air and it's off-air when it's muted.

2:00:17 - Leo Laporte
I love that.

2:00:18 - Jason Snell
Super smart, lots of feedback. It'll give sounds if you want, it'll not play sounds if you don't want. You can pick which microphones you want to. And it supports hotkeys. And I'm like, okay, well, I can write a keyboard maestro macro that presses the hotkeys. And then I read on it was like, no, no, also, they support AppleScript. And I'm like, oh, okay, great, so I can write a little one-line AppleScript that says tell app mic drop to toggle. And then I read and it said, oh, you can also get the mute status from mic drop via AppleScript. And I'm like, oh, my god, because now I can. So I have a little keyboard maestro macro, um, on my stream deck and it it actually shows when it's muted and not based on the icon changes. And that's all, because the macro can ask mic drop, what's the status? And then do the right thing and also paint the right image on the stream deck. It's like again, are there workarounds? Sure, are there ways to do this in other ways? Yeah Right, I could have worked around this in 10 different ways, but the beauty is they've already thought about all those things and they put it in here. It's free to try and for some basic functionality. And it's five bucks, five damn dollars, to unlock this thing with the pro feature the super pro, as they call it features for $5. That's it, $5. It's in the Mac App Store. It's really good. They've got a website. It's actively being maintained because they just did a 2.0 update earlier this year.

I didn't know anything about this app before. I looked for it because I needed it. If you have a mic that you want to have control over with a hotkey or something that is not clicking in the little mute thing on zoom, I really recommend it. It's very good. It's, it's, it has, uh, it's in my stream deck now, like that is how I'm going to control all my podcast recording, uh, from here on. So mic drop really good, love it. I love everything about it. Love that it. They thought of everything and it's all in there, and then there are settings to let you turn it all on or off and it's, and then it's five bucks on top of that, like that's great there. I wish there were more mac apps this simple, this clear in this clear and this well-built.

2:02:28 - Leo Laporte
Nice and you said you've tied it into your Stream Deck. Does that Stream Deck push trigger?

2:02:36 - Jason Snell
AppleScript. That's what it does. The Keyboard Maestro macro is run by the Stream Deck because there's a plug-in for the amazing macro utility that I plugged here before Keyboard Maestro. And then, yeah, there's a one-liner. It's literally tell app Mic Drop to mute. Tell app Mic Drop to unmute.

2:02:57 - Leo Laporte
And is there any latency? How quickly does?

2:02:59 - Jason Snell
it drop, it's instant.

2:03:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's the thing, that's good.

2:03:02 - Jason Snell
The question I had was well, if I use AppleScript, does it take longer than it? Does to do command option shift M.

2:03:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Right which Command-Option-Shift-M right?

2:03:09 - Jason Snell
Which I could have told Mic Drop, use a keyboard shortcut, and then I'll just have Keyboard Maestro fake that Right. But it would be better because sometimes you know emulated keystrokes in automation don't work or you have to put in a pause. But the AppleScript was also instantaneous. That's good to know. It's beautiful and that's one of my favorite things about. By the way I I know I've mentioned this before, but a little side note is, if you like the stream deck, you really should use keyboard maestro, because keyboard maestro has a plugin that lets you set a button on the stream deck to be anything you want it to be as an as an action, and it allows you to create like great interactivity where you press the button and it changes to something else and then you press it.

I've got one that's a three state toggle where I I press it once and it's streaming music to my, my podcast live stream. I press again and then it's recording and it shows me the icon changes and I press it on another time and it stops the recording and it's all through keyboard, my history, a really great tool to use with the stream deck. Stream deck software is not great.

2:04:15 - Leo Laporte
Keyboard through keyboard maestro a really great tool to use with the stream deck. Um, stream deck software is not great, keyboard maestro is great. And then, yeah, mic drop just slid right on in there. Super easy to use, nice, thank you, Jason. Sixcolorscom yes, sir, and sixcolorscom slash Jason for his podcast. Indeed, Alex lindsay, your pick of the week.

2:04:27 - Alex Lindsay
So previously I talked a little bit about shocks. Shocks makes these headsets that I use. Actually I have two of them because yeah, they used to be a sponsor.

2:04:34 - Leo Laporte
In fact, I got the open com one because you recommended it. I love it. Yeah, two of them because I use them all day.

2:04:39 - Alex Lindsay
So I got to make sure that one stays charged. It's got a little, uh little microphone on it so you can use it for calls and the audio yeah, the boom makes a huge difference in quality and, most importantly, you can do the dishes while on calls and no one notices, and so and they can still talk to you because they're not in your ears.

2:04:56 - Leo Laporte
Exactly which?

2:04:57 - Alex Lindsay
makes your wife love the headset because you're doing dishes while you're on a call, so so anyway. So these are great. The boom makes a huge difference and the open ear. I use them a lot when we're using them as comms for our shows, because I can put other things in my ears or listen to them and still be able to talk on comms. But I started to swim a lot and I swim every day now and I needed something that was a little bit more waterproof, and so it turns out Shox makes open swim, and so these are the same as the other ones. They don't have the arm in them. That would be not as fun if you were swimming.

2:05:32 - Jason Snell
But they will very safely go underwater.

2:05:35 - Alex Lindsay
I've not taken them more than probably four or five feet underwater, but they seem to work great. I use them every day. So, and they have a Bluetooth mode, which is great. Does not work well in water. In case you're wondering, bluetooth does not carry through water very well. They have an MP3 mode, so what you do is you plug them in. This has got instead of the same power, it's got like a little communicator. So if you've got the right USB, you plug it into your computer. It shows up as a hard drive. You drop the songs on. How much storage, as much as I've put on, I don't know how much it is you filled it up.

I've got way more than I need on any, given there's not really a lot of playlist stuff. You just kind of turn it on, it goes MP3 mode and it starts playing. So usually I just get I graduated from my pool to a gym, you know 25 meter pool. So as I'm walking out I kind of just turn it on and set it to MP3 mode and and then I'm uh, um, in, in, ready to go. Um, they come with little, uh, you know uh earplugs, which is great, and uh, uh, and again I'm, it's definitely well-tested, you know, at this point for me, um and uh, and they make swimming a lot more uh fun.

2:06:52 - Leo Laporte
You know, like I I don't know if I could, I think if, if my, if my watch or my headset doesn't work that day, it's really hard to get um a lot of swimming done like the what 32 gigs of mp3 storage, which is more than enough for a couple of laps yeah, yeah, so I, I that's.

2:07:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I need it for about a yeah, half an hour.

2:07:04 - Leo Laporte
So it's also on sale right now for Christmas, so this is a good time to get some good time.

2:07:09 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, what were you gonna say, andy?

2:07:12 - Andy Ihnatko
no, I was just gonna say that I was on the swim team in high school and I swam like the distance races and so for every single practice, while all the other kids who were doing the sprints were like having fun, and I had to do like lap after lap after lap in an era where there wasn't yeah, it's like basically me and my thoughts for like an hour and, oh my god, so much thoughts. That was a challenge, it's so nice.

2:07:35 - Alex Lindsay
It's just like you know, and and I have the playlist doesn't change very much. So I'm kind of in a mode of the playlist. You know, like I just get like this is my yeah, yeah songs and, and I, this is my swim songs, and I and I just kind of uh, uh, yeah, and it is I. I get bored really easily, so it's it is hard for me to uh otherwise, um, do anything that's the same over and over and over again. Uh, although I'm still avoiding. I mean, I've been doing this now for a couple months and I'm still avoiding drowning sometimes. But uh, you know, like I, you know, get um, but I'm getting better they?

2:08:05 - Leo Laporte
uh, yeah they. They used to be a sponsor after shocks, or they're not just called shocks, you know it was.

2:08:11 - Alex Lindsay
You know, one of the work, jj, who used to work with me. He just got a better job than what we had. He's the one that kind of got me thinking about it. And then someone else in office hours John, got me thinking about it, you know kept on talking about all this and I had never used bone induction except for, like, the Google Glass or whatever, and I really love it. You know, I love the fact that I'm Looks fine, like. A lot of times I wear these also, like if I'm shopping or I'm wandering around and I still need to be able to hear people, but I kind of want to listen to, you know, news over audio or some music or whatever. It's not the same quality, obviously, of putting something in your ear, but it is really nice to be able to continue to have situational awareness and be able to still listen to something else.

2:08:55 - Leo Laporte
It's really good for audio books or podcasts, because voice is more than adequate for voice.

2:09:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, 100%.

2:09:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, thank you Alex. The Shox Underwater Headphones His pick. They call them the open swim pro andy inatko has a holiday, a festive holiday pick for us yes, now there's endless, endless debates on who's what your favorite, uh Christmas album is.

2:09:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think that there's much room for debate on which one is objectively the best one, and that is, of course, the 1960. Uh, ella Wishes you A Swinging Christmas. This is the Ella Fitzgerald Christmas album. It has like the problem with with that I have, with like modern Christmas albums, is that there'll be something where, like, maybe they'll do Jingle Bells, but then they'll be like, and then when we saw by the clock tower, what does this have to do with ho, ho, ho and jing? And you know, and so that's fine that you're being creative, but it's like I don't want to hear the story of the poor little match girl who's selling her shoes or whatever. Okay, again, when I have my friends over, when I'm decorating the house, I want to hear santa claus come to town. I want to hear have yourself a merry little Christmas. And while I'm drinking whiskey and have a little bit of a cry, I want to sing the Christmas song and basically, you know, uh, let it snow.

2:10:18 - Leo Laporte
Jingo bells is a.

2:10:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, it's amazing what you can do with such a simple song is an amazing version of jingle bells frosty the snowman and Christmas island, but the leon redbone, I think the classic version of Christmas Island, but still she does a very good job. But yeah, this is what people think of when they think of a holiday album. So if you want to put on some holiday music, this is the one that probably will make the most people extremely happy, and you'll know what I mean.

2:10:48 - Leo Laporte
At least for 51 minutes.

2:10:49 - Andy Ihnatko
At least for 51 minutes. There's an expanded edition also on Apple Music that gives you alternate takes of a few of the songs. Oh, that's fun, but yeah, it's great stuff. I cannot put it more simply than that that when people are thinking I want to play a Christmas album, this is almost certainly the one that you're thinking of, even if you've never heard of it. This is the one that you're thinking of even if you've never heard of it.

2:11:10 - Leo Laporte
This is the one that you. I would agree with you. I would agree, there is no question. Ella wishes you a swinging Christmas is definitely. It's 1960. She recorded that. Wow, this is our last episode of the year. Uh, we will be back next week, but it'll be a best of some of the highlights of the 2024 Mac break weekly year. Then the following Tuesday is New Year's Eve and I'm didn't have the heart to make you guys come in for that, so we'll take that week off and we will be back. What is that? January 7th for the?

2:11:45 - Jason Snell
next.

2:11:45 - Leo Laporte
Mac break weekly? It's not right. Yeah, january 7th, everybody. Have a wonderful holiday. We're so glad you joined us during the year. We are especially thankful to our Club Twit members and to our wonderful panel. Alex Lindsay is at officehoursglobal. You'll also hear his podcasts that he does with Michael Krasny at graymattershow An excellent show to subscribe to Always interesting conversations there.

2:12:21 - Alex Lindsay
Anything you want to plug, no-transcript. So this is just a great time to listen and we're just having great conversations. So every morning, 7 am, pacific Standard Time, we get up and answer those questions and it's just. We kind of took a hiatus from the second hour so that we could really focus on the quality of the first hours and they're getting just better and better and better. So definitely ask you, if you have questions around media production, that's the time to do it. I will say, not promoting my thing, but I just will say I almost put it as a pick Nate Bargatze's got a Nashville Christmas on Thursday. Nate Bargatze is currently my favorite comedian, so we can't wait to see what that looks like.

2:13:05 - Leo Laporte
But you have no involvement with that. You weren't there shooting in 3D or anything like that.

2:13:10 - Alex Lindsay
No, I'm just excited. I will say that there's. You may have seen an announcement about AMC and Rockletts and Tata getting together. What's that all about? Live transmission to theaters so they'll be able to take concerts from.

2:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Rockletts In VR.

2:13:31 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, just the theaters. You know just lots of them.

2:13:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, like what Andy does when he goes to see the opera at his local multiplex.

2:13:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but probably more so, something that's similar to that, but probably at a different scale, and so something that I'm pretty excited about and I might be tangentially connected to.

2:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Maybe just in a little tiny, teeny way. Yeah, very cool. Happy holidays, Alex. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and spend time with your beautiful family, and we'll see you in January. Sounds good. Thank you, andy and Akko, do you do GBH during the holiday weeks?

2:14:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Nope, because there's reruns and all kinds of other stuff. I've wrapped for the season, but you'll be seeing me, I think, the first or second week in January. I'm concentrating on eggnog.

2:14:23 - Leo Laporte
Eggnog is God's gift to mankind, I must say.

2:14:26 - Andy Ihnatko
If you don't like it, it more nog for the rest of us.

2:14:28 - Leo Laporte
That's right and lisa doesn't like it, which is fine with me.

2:14:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Um, and some come someday soon, a, uh, a website, maybe a newsletter in your future we are, it's coming where the live fire exercise has begun, and I'm receiving feedback and I hope to have something to announce very, very shortly. It's now now I Now I'm only handicapped by oh, I need to fill out paperwork. That is really, really, really, really, really not looking forward to doing.

2:14:58 - Leo Laporte
What about Russian Orthodox Christmas? Are you celebrating that this year?

2:15:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Actually I usually do, because in my household we would have what many households think of as big Christmas or little Christmas. The littlemas was more like a really nice, simple family meal of like ham and like ham and stuff like that.

2:15:18 - Leo Laporte
No presents, just looking forward to such a great idea.

2:15:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Big Christmas and little Christmas yeah, I love that and it was like this sort of like the official and it was also the good sign that, okay, so now we'll think about taking down the tree. Now we'll think about right, like the beginning of the end yeah, because you know, if you get, I do think that, like, if you turn it all off, like on december 26th, it's like oh, it seems like we just put that up three weeks ago. But little Christmas, it's like okay, that's not, that's it well we're.

2:15:47 - Leo Laporte
It turns out little Christmas. Uh is the same uh time we're coming back.

2:15:51 - Andy Ihnatko
So January 7th. There you go, the Three Kings.

2:15:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so the Three Kings will join us on January 7th to celebrate. Maybe bring some ham, yes, leftovers. Have a great holiday, andy, you too. Thanks, guys, real pleasure working with you All year long. And of course, Jason Snell SixColorscom One of the colors bright red for his festive hat yes, Special times Are you going anywhere for the holidays or are you staying home?

2:16:19 - Jason Snell
Whole family's coming here Nice, so I'll do some cooking and we'll all be together and that'll be nice.

2:16:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we're doing a Christmas Eve dinner for the family. The turkey that we didn't get for Thanksgiving we're going to have, so I'm responsible for that. That'll be a lot of fun. Well, Jason, have a wonderful holiday.

2:16:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy.

2:16:41 - Leo Laporte
Alex, it's been a real joy working with you this year and I look forward to a wonderful and interesting 2025.

2:16:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Every Tuesday is a joy for me. Thank you very much, everybody.

2:16:51 - Leo Laporte
It was a great time. Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly, as Andy mentioned, tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. There are eight different streams you can watch. If you're a club member, you'll get the Behind the Velvet Rope stream in our Discord, but there's also youtube.com/twit/live, twitch.tv/twit, there's x.com, there's Kick, there's Ffacebook Linkedin and Tiktok.

Now I'm not sure if we'll be on TikTok much longer. I don't. I have a. I have a bad feeling about this, in which case we'll find another place, but we are on TikTok. Maybe, with any luck, we'll still be on TikTok into the new year. So you can watch us live on those eight different channels. Or if it's not convenient or you just want a copy, you can always download a copy of the show. We have audio and video available at twit.tv/mbw. When you're there, you'll see a link to a YouTube channel Great way to share little clips with friends and family and help spread the word about MacBreak Weekly.

And, of course, the best way to listen is to subscribe. You can get audio or video in any podcast client. Just search for MacBreak Weekly and you'll have it the minute we're done fixing it up. Thanks to John Ashley, our producer, who worked hard and put together a best of, so his work for next week is done and, john, we'll be back here January 7th. No, I won't be. Oh, you're going to Japan. You're on vacation. I'm going to be in Japan then, nice, very good, who's filling in for you, Anthony?

2:18:28 - John Ashley
Most likely Anthony. Yeah.

2:18:29 - Leo Laporte
Okay, Well, Anthony Nielsen's our creative director and he does all the jobs. When no one's here, he is the one who jumps in. So happy holidays to all of you. Thank you so much for being here for MacBreak Weekly. We'll see you in the new year. Meanwhile, it's my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Bye-bye, Happy New Year.