MacBreak Weekly 953 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
Whoa, how are you? Welcome to MacBreak Weekly: Christmas Eve edition. We've given the gang the week off Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay actually two weeks off because they're not going to do a show on New Year's Day either New Year's Eve either. But for Christmas Eve we've got a little special thing for you. Our wonderful staff has put together, as we do every year, a best of so in moments, ladies and gentlemen, the best of 2024 on mac break weekly podcasts you love from people.

you trust this is twit this is mac break weekly, episode 953, for Christmas Eve, 2024. The best of 2024. Hello everybody, Santa Leo here, and while I don't have any gifts to give you, I do have well, it's a gift, I guess the best of Mac Break Weekly for 2024. It's kind of hard to remember, but the year began with a bang. The Vision Pro Remember that we, of course, have a few Vision Pro owners in-house Alex Lindsay has one, Jason Snell has one and our good friend Ray Maxwell, the former host of Maxwell's House. He has one, but he's in Canada and that caused a few little issues Watch. Well, let me start with you, Jason, since you're actually an avatar and probably aren't going to last too long?

0:01:34 - Jason Snell
I don't think so. I don't think so. One segment only, unless I'm visiting my mom, in which case this may be what you get from now on when I'm traveling. I don't know.

0:01:45 - Andy Ihnatko
We'll see. I can't attach my good microphone to it. You sound fine. Also, like Dr Strange, it's hard to maintain your corporal presence on this mortal plane so you could fade out at any moment.

0:01:57 - Jason Snell
One thing you don't know about this that's actually interesting is the camera angle is based on where the window is the zoom window. So if I move the window, it's like there's a cream shot going on, which is pretty wild, Although the background doesn't move, so no to zoom.

You got to work on that one, but you know, it is everything that I expected it to be, which is uncanny and yet also kind of amazing that with a quick capture, you're a character in a 3D like a Grand Theft Auto or something like that. Like, the tech is pretty amazing, but at the same time, it's also a little weird. When you're in a FaceTime with somebody else who's wearing one of these things, the context it's actually it all kind of starts to feel a little bit better because you hear their voice and you're in the context of it. But uh, I mean, there's no doubt I would not call my mom with my digital persona. That would be weird, there's a couple of things.

0:02:53 - Leo Laporte
You look a little bit like bobby hill from king of the hill. You look a little bit like tim cook. You look like a thumb with your face painted on it.

0:03:00 - Jason Snell
That's part of the problem, yeah yeah, there's definitely a depth, a depth problem where I've been saying it's like a, a brick, like there are ears back there, sort of. But really we you know it's a, it's, it's a face shape with your, with your face put on the front of it yeah, also hair.

0:03:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Hair is a problem when you see people who have short hair, they're kind of in there and that's okay. But like I, justine had her like hair down and it's like no, there's just sort of a charcoal smudge that doesn't really rotate correctly. And also I I've heard from a couple people who say had I, I was so excited to get this working, I didn't bother to shave, I didn't bother to fix my hair and now my avatar is stuck looking like I've just been awake all night waiting for the sign for my package.

0:03:40 - Leo Laporte
You could do a new avatar actually to be fair.

0:03:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you, you it's not stuck, In fact that's. I think one of the brilliant things about this is, if you're somebody who whether it's your haircut or getting or primping or putting on makeup or whatever you do your capture, then and then that's your face until you want to recapture it.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
You can't save more than one, but that gives you the ability to sort of like be locked in as whoever you want to be, and then and then don't take a shower before you're on a podcast I uh, I was reading earlier before the show and I'll refer back to it to uh zj kingsley on reddit, who uh said apple has mismarketed the vision pro and reviewers have have, as a result, mistakenly focused, for instance, on this avatar thing.

They said that's. He said this is not what it's all about and I think maybe some people who have it agree he, he says the. You know the killer use for him is lying in bed in a vr environment looking at the stars in crystal clear clarity, a small window open, talking to a friend via messages and just beyond that, mounted in the sky, a 100-foot wide screen which had the social network running in simply the clearest quality I've ever seen outside of 1570 IMAX. You know, I think everybody who has this might have a different killer app, but what is your experience of watching movies? Is it crystal clear? Does it look?

0:05:10 - Alex Lindsay
Oh yeah, it is. Yeah, it's really clear.

0:05:15 - Doc Rock
It's 4K right.

0:05:17 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it is. And we lost power on Sunday and of course I have a UPS for my router, so I still had internet, I just didn't have any lights. And of course I have a UPS for my, my router, so I still had internet, I just didn't have any lights. And um and so my, my, my retreat was to sit on the couch and put Superman, man of Steel up and just watch, you know, watch it until the power came back. How?

0:05:33 - Leo Laporte
big, did you make it?

0:05:33 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, it probably would have been the equivalent of about 150 inches, or maybe 200 inches, like a theater then, like, seeing it in, oh, it's like a theater, it's like it's a hundred percent, like I, like, I would worry if I was a theater looking at this, because the and and I also would say that, um, I would. Over the weekend I got to the point where, if I want to hang out with my family which you know, I, I, we watch a bunch of shows together, and so that's still, that's still. But you know, um, that's the only time we really all sit down around a TV is when we want to watch a show together and we kind of, you know, that's kind of an evening thing to do. You know, obviously I'm going to still do that with them.

0:06:16 - Leo Laporte
But I don't think I would ever again sit down to watch once YouTube TV, which isn't out yet for the headset. Youtube says it's on their roadmap, by the way, which is good news. Youtube TV is not. Oh, not YouTube TV. Youtube TV.

0:06:21 - Alex Lindsay
YouTube is yeah it asks you to put in a number, but there's no like where do I find that number? It says your device will share this number and I'm like I don't know where that would be. So it's not there yet, but as soon as YouTube TV comes on, I don't see myself ever sitting in front of my TV again to just watch a show, unless I was eating Like. If I was eating, I don't think I eat, I was like, but I think that I very quickly was like. This is a much better experience. I do notice that there's a lot of. There's a lot of things that are different on the headset for viewing things, though One one is that you're just constantly reminded that 24 is really framey and that, because everything else around it is not, it actually is more apparent that the framiness of 24P is probably.

0:07:03 - Leo Laporte
this is these headsets maybe may undermine that um you want a higher frame rate if you're watching on these heads.

0:07:09 - Alex Lindsay
The problem is you have an environment right behind it that's moving. So this is. It took me a little while to figure out why it was so much more apparent on the headset than it is on the. When I watch a tv, the wall doesn't move right behind me when I watch and the wall behind it, the environment behind it, is working at 90 frames a second, or 92 frames a second or whatever. So the, the background, is at a high frame rate and because of that, there's something about it that you notice really quickly because there's not a wall there that the frame rate is low and and, and, so the and. So I think that it became much more apparent to me than I had before.

0:07:42 - Leo Laporte
It's I also found it doesn't match your experience, although, honestly, when you're watching a 24 P movie anywhere in real world, you're having a much higher frame rate in the real world, don't you?

0:07:53 - Alex Lindsay
Right, but, but you have, but you do, but you have a frame, but you, you, you have a frozen wall and there are some theaters, like IMAX and um and Max and a couple other ones have, and Apple have their own theaters. The problem with the theaters, ironically, is that the screen in the virtual theater is too small, like it's not as big. Oh, you can't make it as big. Because it says, oh, this is the frame I'm going to put it in, right, and I couldn't get it to go bigger, like it locks into the frame that it Disney.

0:08:16 - Jason Snell
Go ahead.

0:08:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, disney lets you sit in the front row if you choose the Disney Plus Theater, but that's it, yeah, and I haven't been in Disney yet because, of course, disney required a login and I don't know what it is and I was like I'll get around to it eventually.

0:08:32 - Leo Laporte
You don't have Bitwarden or 1Password in there.

0:08:35 - Jason Snell
Well, here's the yeah 1Password for the iPad can be installed on it and it will autofill your passwords with Opt optic ID. It's actually kind of remarkable, it is. This device is an iPad, right, it's like a 3d iPad. But the good news is, if your apps work on the iPad, then, um, you can get them. If they are on the vision pro, you can put them in there and they all interact and they all work. And and I agree with Alex, I was watching, I was using a vision OS exclusive app called Juno, which is a YouTube client because YouTube isn't there yet. Exclusive app called Juno, which is a YouTube client because YouTube isn't there yet, and it is the quality of a standard 2D image. When you're not confused by like, oh, it's 3D or whatever. It's really good. It's remarkably good as just a video viewer.

0:09:17 - Leo Laporte
Here's one of our discorders, Vision Mad, who's watching right now while eating his cereal. But honestly, how is that different than having a TV in your kitchen? I don't.

0:09:27 - Alex Lindsay
Except when you walk around and you can move.

0:09:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you move.

0:09:29 - Alex Lindsay
And the TV follows you, you know like it's the well, and the other thing is you constantly are moving the wind. I found myself constantly moving windows, so I'm constantly oh, I want to put this over here, I want to put this over here, I want to put this over here. And like I was watching that, I had a client that was texting me on Sunday while I was watching the movie and I just simply put my messages up above the screen and so, if I saw them change, I looked up and as I said, oh, I want to say something, the movie got quieter and I said what I needed to say in the text, and then I went back to what I was doing oh, that's weird.

Yeah, and so I just didn't really think much of it.

0:10:00 - Leo Laporte
It was totally in that environment, just natural. Yeah, that's one thing Apple's very good at is kind of making those affordances feel natural, even if you're in a spatial computing environment that you've never experienced before.

0:10:11 - Alex Lindsay
I will admit that I was. I think the thing that frightened me the most about the headset was actually that thing, which was that there was a moment last night and it was probably 10 or 12 or 15 hours into using the headset like 10 or 12 or 15 hours into the into using the headset and, um and not in the one day, just over the, since Friday morning, um, I had been in it and I suddenly was, I was watching YouTube and there was some point where I looked down and I realized, oh, I'm in the headset, like I was. I was just watching YouTube and just kind of like, cause I have a lot of screens anyway, so it doesn't show like I have, you know, I have eight screens around me, I have a lot of screens anyway, so it doesn't show like I have, you know, eight screens around me, so a lot of screens doesn't really show up like like I'm somewhere so different from yours.

It's not so different than my normal life but I suddenly realized, oh, I'm in the, I'm in the headset. And there was some point yesterday afternoon where I looked at something. And I looked at it and I found myself tapping and I was like, oh no, I'm not in the headset. And so so like I'm, like it was like.

0:11:01 - Leo Laporte
I've heard people say that. Yeah, Just like with the iPad, you get used to pinching and zooming and then you start using a Mac. I tap my laptop screen all the time, like I just tap, tap, tap, Like why isn't this working? Ray, what are you? I think my lower brain was getting caught. What's your killer app so far, Ray Maxwell?

0:11:17 - Ray Maxwell
Well, I have bad news, Uh-oh we. I have bad news, uh-oh, we really should start with my experience of buying it from Canada.

Yeah, so this is the first part is I didn't even know you could use it in Canada. Well, you can, and then you cannot. You can't buy anything Exactly. You could. Okay, on the January 19th at 5 am in the morning, I signed on and no sweat. Oh, there's Ray Maxwell. Yes, we'll take your $3,500 plus accessories, $4,800 with taxes, us when I'm all done, and no sweat, yeah, place an order. And then I went down to the Alderwood Mall Apple store in Linwood, washington, walked in.

0:12:09 - Leo Laporte
You're buying in the US then. So you went over the border, yeah, yeah.

0:12:12 - Ray Maxwell
Well, here's the thing Apple has to understand that 90% of the population of Canada lives within 200 miles of the border. Right, it's not unusual. We cross-border shop all the time, right, okay, and they really haven't allowed for that and. But, at any rate, I go in. Oh yeah, we have your order ready for you. They do the demo. But I had a not a good experience there. The poor girl I think she was an extra brought in because there's so many people in the store and, by the way, they were going out like hotcakes the Vipis. At any rate, it took her 20 minutes to get the demo to work. And, by the way, when they fit you out, they do not fit your unit to you. They fit the demo unit to you and check all the settings and everything. Oh, because the demo's on that unit to you. They fit the demo unit to you and check all the settings and everything. Oh, because the demo's on that unit, yeah, yeah. And then they bring you in sealed cartons your unit and you exit with sealed cartons.

Now I said to the manager of the store very nice fellow, very helpful. I said, now I have a Canadian Apple ID. When I get back to Canada and sign on, how's everything going to work? Oh, no sweat. Now I'm going to switch to my view here. This is my view and I'm going to take us us to haka, alia or whatever that is. And, yeah, right. And now, uh, I get home and here's my view, and oh, I'm all excited. I can, uh, oh, my microphone's too close to me. Now, anyway, it, it, uh, it, uh. I can open up saf and here's Safari, and I can bring in 3D models, and, oh, it's all exciting. And then the message from hell. What does it say? Not available, not available.

0:14:20 - Leo Laporte
The App Store isn't available in your country or region. Oh, you can't even get into the App Store at all. Oh no, oh, that's frustrating. So you couldn't add in your country or region. Oh, you can't even get into the App Store at all. Oh no, oh, that's frustrating. So you couldn't add apps to this at all. How are we talking to you right now? Oh, I get it. You're on Zoom on your computer and you're air-playing the View, or you have another device that you're putting the View in and switching over to.

0:14:44 - Ray Maxwell
I have coupled my VP to my iPad Pro and it is plugged in by HDMI to my ATEM Mini.

0:14:53 - Leo Laporte
I see it, yeah. So what can you do? Can you watch a?

0:14:57 - Ray Maxwell
movie, yes, all the movies I bought here in Canada I can watch in 4K.

0:15:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean honestly. They don't say it's available in Canada. So you're an example of an early adopter who was willing to take the chance, but they aren't selling it in Canada. No Okay, by the way, Jason Snell had to give up. He's switching over.

0:15:25 - Andy Ihnatko
He couldn't take it, take it.

0:15:26 - Leo Laporte
that's the face I love so let's see 16 minutes in and uh, he's why. Why are we not seeing?

0:15:32 - Ray Maxwell
him, I see him in the.

0:15:33 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I see him in the. We gotta oh, we gotta reroute. Okay, we're just gonna reroute it, and now we want to hear him too, there, oh, oh, you don't look like Tim Cook anymore. Good morning, hi yeah.

0:15:46 - Jason Snell
Those are those hands. You don't look like Bobby anymore, so what was it wearing on you? The trick is to use an ID from the US. The ones who are gray market importing these things, most of them, the people I know they all have a, even if it's not their primary. They have a US Apple ID that they can use to get access to the store and all those things.

0:16:07 - Ray Maxwell
Right Now. The only trouble with that, Jason, is I am setting up a US ID so I can get to that. The only trouble with it is I lose my eco, my Apple ecosystem. I can't copy and paste to all of my other devices.

0:16:23 - Jason Snell
That's why you're not supposed to do this. You're supposed to wait until it's for sale in Canada later this year.

0:16:27 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, Ray, you will be able to use this in a few months, I'm sure.

0:16:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple has a wonderful plan for your life. Why don't you give yourself to it willingly, Ray? This is counterproductive.

0:16:43 - Ray Maxwell
By the way, have any of you looked at this 3D model of the VP on Safari? The detail is just incredible. I don't know how well it's coming through, but I'm seeing every thread in the fabric.

0:16:56 - Alex Lindsay
I think that one of the things we're going to see is we see a lot of 3D that's in there and a lot of it doesn't look good. But one thing that I will say is that if you look at some of the things that are actually doing the full resolution of the, of the, of it's, it's not the headset that can't do the high quality 3D, it's the fact that the developers, or whoever is building it, just didn't go through that much trouble. It's a lot of trouble, like what Apple did for that one is a lot of trouble to get to that level of quality and people haven't spent that time yet they will.

0:17:29 - Leo Laporte
They will, now that they know that there'll be people looking at it in in that kind of quality. And I should, by the way, just so we don't uh besmirch the vision pro Jason. It wasn't the vision pro that we were tiring of, it was just that zoom was kind of I think I think the zoom app on vision os is.

0:17:42 - Jason Snell
It's kind of iffy. I had some sound problems, I had some lag, I was having some frame skips where you guys would pause and then jump and I'd lose some of it. It is also on a Wi-Fi connection.

0:17:52 - Alex Lindsay
When I use a wired connection, when we're doing the show, so there's a bunch of different stuff going on there. We actually had somebody call.

0:17:57 - Jason Snell
It is a 1.0 OS with a 1.0 app on it.

0:18:00 - Leo Laporte
We had somebody call, somebody call ask the tech guys on Sunday wearing his and the lag was like five or six seconds. It was really laggy. So that's yeah, they'll fix that.

0:18:11 - Andy Ihnatko
And there are a lot of interesting. I thought there were a lot of interesting choices that Apple made, like, on the one hand, it's cool that when you're using your persona wherever you're Jasonason, you mentioned this earlier though wherever you're looking is wherever you're looking relative to the window that owns the camera, like so, the zoom window. That's where it puts your avatar looking. Uh, on the other hand, is there a setting so you can simply say look, I just want make it look as though I'm always looking directly at the camera.

0:18:40 - Alex Lindsay
No, no, what I noticed was it was I was talking to somebody who was like so are, are you doing something else? Because you could see that I was like moving some windows around to talk to them. I'm looking over here so you do get to see that that person is not looking straight at the camera all the time. It's not like turning it off. It was definitely clear.

0:18:57 - Jason Snell
Also, nothing says 1.0 operating system, like is there a setting to take it from the default to do something else? And going no, no, no, they're not. At the part where there are settings I mean there's like iOS settings, but that's when I mean we've all been there Using a 1.0 operating system there's this just like flavor, this smell of it, which is just like it's new car smell. But also you get that moment where you get to the edge and you're like, oh, are there options? And the answer is no. There's a question mark, there's a cloud with a. You know it's a mystery about what that option will eventually be, but it's a 1.0. I get it. I get it.

0:19:34 - Alex Lindsay
Occasionally you get into apps and you're like how do I get out of here? And like I don't, I don't know. I'm like yikes. And the funny thing is is that I was like it was so, so the. But you know, and it's not so much Apple, these are app developers who just aren't putting the hooks where we want them. You know. So they're, they're building these things.

You get into their app and then there's, and you can tap on it and gather, but then you're like how do I actually turn that off? Cause what'll happen is you'll click on it, the apps will come forward. And then you realize that other app that you left to go into the apps it's still out there, it's like it's still opened over there, like doing its thing. And so you, um, you kind of get used to that, the, the um, the app store, by the way, if you, if you download it and you have any trouble downloading apps, the update fixes it. So there was an issue that I was having where, on the 1.0, I couldn't. I just got to a point where it would just look like it was trying to download apps and I just went to app, app, app, and then, when I did the, ran the update to 1.1 or whatever it. It fixed it, but there was a point where I couldn't download anything yesterday to to make that happen, and so but but you see again some rough edges.

But again I, what I was surprised at was how long like I have most of the headsets and I've been using some version of a headset on and off for 30, 25 years, and I was surprised at how long my sessions were. Like I was losing track of time. You know, like I was there and I was like doing things and mostly obviously it's new, so I'm like watching some movies and I'm trying some 3D things out and I'm downloading apps and I'm opening things up and playing with them and everything else. But it was very comfortable to be there, for I mean, I don't think I did any session that was less than like 90 minutes. I mean I put them on every once in a while to set something up, but it was like it was. I was there for a long time and I didn't think about the time while I was there. That was the interesting thing.

0:21:27 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I agree. One of my big open questions with this thing was can you wear it for any amount of time? And I had two different experiences. In June last year, they put a weird thing that is not available as a band, where it was like the soft part but also the head strap, and it hurt my forehead the whole time. And then a couple weeks ago I did a half an hour and they just did the dual band and it felt just fine. And so the mystery was like what is this going to be like? And the answer was I got it.

It comes with the solo loop attached. I put it on my face. I got that exact same headache right in my forehead that I got last June. I detached it, I put on the dual loop and I've worn it for as much as six or seven hours in a day. I'm writing my review. Guys, I have to do this and it was fine and everybody's head is different, but I can say that it's least conceivable that you could wear this for an extended session and it would be fine.

0:22:22 - Alex Lindsay
And I definitely feel like you get used to where to put it and how to put it on and how to pull the strap. I'm using the two strap. I found those single strap to be really not useful and so I do feel like with the MetaQuest, I feel like that hook in the front that goes front to back would definitely improve my experience. I've been thinking about like printing a little thing to grab onto it and just let it pull back because I feel the weight under my, on my cheeks.

0:22:46 - Leo Laporte
All the weight is in that device on your face.

0:22:49 - Alex Lindsay
I don't feel like, but again, as weight on my head. It doesn't bother me as a you know where the weight, how the weight is, you know cantilevered has, you know, and it doesn't bother me, although I will say that, like when I try to, when I notice it is when I'm speaking into messages, because I do that a lot. When I'm in there I'm like, oh, I don't try to type and so I just look up and hit the thing and say it. I can feel it bouncing, like pressing against my cheeks.

0:23:15 - Leo Laporte
Ray, I noticed that you're wearing it bareback. Do you not like to do a loop? You don't need it.

0:23:21 - Ray Maxwell
You know what? I've been wearing this thing for hours yesterday and the day before it looks very natural on you, I should say yeah, it is quite comfortable.

I haven't had a problem with it. I was going to try out the dual strap, but I just there's a necessity. Yeah, let me tell you a few of my other impressions of this thing. Number one the things that are missing. I'll give you my gripes and then I'll tell you all my good things. I tried to load a ProRes file in. Now, this thing isn't really made for editing or the high-end uncompressed stuff, but it wouldn't go in. Now, I don't know, it was just that one time, but it doesn't like pro formats as I see it. And the other thing is I thought they had learned their lesson with the iPhone 14 and 15 Pro, that they put USB-C and a high-speed IO to load large files, high-speed IO to load large files. And the good news is I have found out that the developers do indeed have a dongle that will connect into this battery connection and give you USB-C in and out, and it sells for only $299.

0:24:45 - Alex Lindsay
And that's for testing. I mean, it's just there to tie it together. I will say that I did find that it's pretty chunky. If you take a 550-meg USDZ file and try to rotate it around, you give it a couple you know 50 million polygons and it's like it's a little you know. So we were trying to push the outer edge of that.

0:25:06 - Ray Maxwell
Now the app that I'm dying to get my hands on as soon as I could reach the app store. And we're all talking. Everybody's calling Apple support and saying come on, turn on the app store to Canada, you know, be nice. At any rate, the app I'm waiting for is the ForeFlight company, who makes a lot of aviation software, has a 3D app that lets you look at a given airport and see all the air traffic in 3D going in and out of the airport.

0:25:35 - Leo Laporte
It's really cool.

0:25:37 - Alex Lindsay
That's called the Voyager app. You just set it, I download it. You tend to set it over in one corner, like a little below you, because you can decide where you're going to set it and it definitely makes a difference because of where you see the planes. But you kind of set it over and kind of like about chest high somewhere over to the side, and it's just nice because you'll be working and you're like I wonder what's landing in San Francisco.

0:25:58 - Leo Laporte
And you look over and you see all these planes. I should mention, though, it's made by Boeing, so you might want to check the bolts on that before.

0:26:04 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, exactly the engines or the sensors, the sensors on the front. Check the sensors on the front.

0:26:10 - Leo Laporte
That is kind of cool.

0:26:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't set it to goose mode, It'll be very, very intense.

0:26:13 - Ray Maxwell
I promise you. The other thing I found out is NordVPN does not make an app for the Vision Pro yet, because I wanted to try VPN and put myself down in the US.

0:26:25 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, that would be a solution. You could do it at the router level. I mean you could do it.

0:26:29 - Ray Maxwell
Yes, yes, right exactly.

0:26:32 - Alex Lindsay
There you go Just pretend you're in the US.

0:26:35 - Ray Maxwell
Let me give you my overall impression. My overall impression is a lot of people have not. I mean, if you read the technical spec on the Apple site and you only take even the marketing stuff and set your expectations to the literal meaning of everything, I'm not disappointed at all. I'm just wowed by the tech. I'm very much wowed by the resolution and the 3d models and the whole thing. But people have set their own personal expectations way high, you know, and uh, you know, are dreaming about things that nobody's promising and and you know, I I think, uh, they're disappointed. Then you know there's not there aren't.

0:27:24 - Alex Lindsay
There's there's 600 apps that were built for it. There's whatever a million apps that you could theoretically run on it. There's about eight that are worth looking at right now. Like it's any part of the thing is you go through them and you go like I've now people you know you can put it into guest mode and hand it to somebody and say, okay, and they have to, you know, calibrate their eyes and show their hands and that type of thing. And then you go, um, okay, go to the dinosaur. Like you take them to go to the dinosaur demo. That's a good demo and then go to jig space and see jig space, then watch a movie and then you're done Like like you see that I can show you the.

If I show you those three things, you get a sense of what the thing can do. Um, the other stuff gets too hard to explain to someone. The Moog app is unbelievable, you know, but that's a whole nother. So there's a lot of you know. There's definitely apps that are coming out, but there's probably eight or 10 that are like standouts.

The rest of them are like oh, this is a good idea. They're on their way, they're thinking about it.

0:28:18 - Ray Maxwell
I'm looking forward to virtual music apps. There's got to be a visual theremin the Moog, oh it is Okay.

0:28:28 - Alex Lindsay
So there's spatial music. There's one called spatial music. Right, I knew that would happen. So spatial music is like a theremin, like you can sit there and play with it and kind of move around. And then there's the Moog app is crazy. There's a bunch of different instruments and different things that you can play, and the crazy thing is is that you're playing notes with your eyes and tapping when you want it to happen, and it's a really I found it to be really crazy experience, because they're trying to play, because you can't, you have to look at exactly what you want to play next, and and then there's they've they started to kind of experiment with other tools and everything else. And so those are the two that are kind of I felt like gave you a sense of what is coming. You know, like it's not like that we're going to have different kinds of ways of interacting with music, interacting with data, those types of things, but it's not there yet, but it's. Those two are the probably the ones that kind of show you that.

0:29:17 - Ray Maxwell
And, of course, the thing I'm really looking forward to is a I'm hoping X-Plane. X-plane, I think, already works with some VR headsets, but I want to see it on this thing Flight simulator, flight simulator.

0:29:28 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I can't wait. I think we were talking about this in office hours. I think that one of the things that is going to happen is you have, like that, logitech, you know your controllers, and I think what's going to happen is they're going to give you two little trackers, that on the top part of your control deck or whatever, and it will just snap the fuselage in Like. It'll just go like I know where you are and I'm just going to snap that in so that the rest of the fuselage looks like it's going around your, so you can look down. This is where the AR stuff comes. You can look down and grab onto your the physical handles and see them. You're not like in a virtual world.

0:30:02 - Leo Laporte
You, you get you know sky. How about 360 video? Uh, I have a bunch of stuff I shot in rome, uh, on the insta 360. Could I, is there any way to look at that?

0:30:15 - Jason Snell
in the vision pro. I can do it. I haven't quest three, obviously, but you need an app and there are some apps. There's one app that is in the app store. I'm not going to name it because it doesn't really work yet, but, um, I have no doubt that there will be apps to support all of those formats.

Apple doesn't seem to be supporting it, which I'm actually a little disappointed by, because they made that statement to somebody saying, oh, it doesn't meet our standards, blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, uh, if you shoot with one of these 360 cameras or 180 cameras um, it's not going to be 3d, but it still could look really good, I think it'd be great I'd be able to look around and see what I you know, see everything I yeah the panoramas, which are also 2d panoramas, are spectacular.

They look better than panoramas I I understand now why they put that feature in there.

0:30:59 - Leo Laporte
They look so good when you're in our discord is saying I took a pano from my hotel balcony in barcelona a few weeks ago, uh, and I did not disappoint when I opened it in the Vision Pro Super detailed, excellent unwrapping of the geometry to make it look realistic.

0:31:14 - Ray Maxwell
Yes, I have a pano of my living room. What I am impressed with is I can take my iPhone 15 Pro Max and I shot a little 3D video while the gal was demoing the thing to me and playing that back. The resolution and the surround sound of being at the Apple store was incredible.

0:31:39 - Alex Lindsay
I will say that I benefited from the fact that I didn't realize I had taken so many, but I evidently, since whatever I knew that you had, I knew that you had. I have 600 Panos from all over the world. Oh nice, like in the White House and in weird places and they're always a little dissatisfying.

0:31:59 - Leo Laporte
on the phone itself, on the 2D.

0:32:00 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it is. But, this was I finally paid off taking all those Panos. You know, like I was cause I've never like I've taken them and I almost never look at them again. Like I and I take them all the time but I never go back and look at them and I was like, oh, this was amazing. I did that for the last decade.

0:32:15 - Leo Laporte
How does the spatial video you shoot on the iPhone compared to spatial video you shoot on the vision pro?

0:32:22 - Ray Maxwell
Because we've been for a while shooting spatial video. I think the iPhone is better.

0:32:25 - Leo Laporte
You think it's better? It's not.

0:32:28 - Ray Maxwell
You really think so?

0:32:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the iPhone video is lower quality, smaller. It's like a smaller aspect ratio because they're cropping from one to the other. The one on the Vision Pro, the spatial video, is superior.

0:32:42 - Leo Laporte
And a better interocular distance. Right, it's a wider yeah exactly right.

0:32:45 - Jason Snell
So everything is more like your eyes and not like a little camera.

0:32:50 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I found that the quality. I mean again, yeah, I shot some with the phone and I just I haven't shot any with the headset yet, but I shot some with the phone and I was like I don't know if I'll do that. One of the things I did is I shot the same footage with the phone with and without stereo. And if you told me which one would you rather watch, I'd rather watch the higher resolution version that was not stereo than the lower resolution that was stereo. And you know, stereo even in the movies that they have, it has, I thought. I will admit I thought it would be better than it was, which is that it still suffers from idiosyncrasies related to motion blur. So you get feel things that look hard, you know, in 3D, and so I don't feel like I mean you see some of the geometry, but I don't know if it's worth it yet to watch a lot of the things.

0:33:38 - Ray Maxwell
By the way, talking about comparing 3D movies and 3D in this, to me the experience is quite different and I don't know how Apple solved this, but in 3D movies, the actual plane that your eyes are focused on and the binocular verging sometimes doesn't match your binocular eyes. Turning in doesn't match the plane you're focused on Convergence, all right, and I don't know how they're doing it, but I, and that, by the way, makes people nauseated or gives them eye strain and so forth. I don't get that at all in watching 3D things in this.

0:34:19 - Alex Lindsay
I definitely didn't get it at all. I think that the only thing that I was really conscious to was low frame rate and hard edges around things. I felt like the 3D niche of it was good. I just felt like it was like you know. Like now I will say that hidden in Apple Music Apple as this post that we were talking about at first they definitely buried some of the story. So, hidden in music, there is an Alicia Keys video of her doing a concert which it looks like they probably shot with a Canon R5, four of them, so they shot. It's a 180 video experience of Alicia Keys.

It's in the TV app. Is it in the TV app?

0:34:58 - Jason Snell
Oh, I didn't see it in the TV app. It's in their immersive performances list or immersive video list in the TV app with the. Alicia Keys thing, where they? Where they try to mask out where the cameras are, but you can spot them. They're in little white kiosks.

0:35:10 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, and they and they, and she walks around and and I, and I guess I would say that, uh, I thought it was a great example of what might be coming and I, given that Apple bought next VR, I have a feeling we're gonna see a lot more of this, not less. It is much more compelling than a lot of the 3D movies is to see this 180 stereo. It was, and I'll tell you the thing that they. I think that what they missed there and again, I've done a lot of this and so we've kind of gotten into this habit what they really should have done there is take the rest of the band out of there, let her play the piano and have her just play to you and just sing to you.

There's moments where she looks right at the camera and you know it's much, it's very compelling, you know, and and it, and I think that this idea of putting too much around them, you know you end up in a more observer status than a presence status when you start changing the cameras, and I think that that's what, and so I think that there's. I don't think you need a lot of cameras to make this work, and I think that you can build that out and we've done a lot of testing in this area. So I think that that was the only thing. I you know it felt a little over Apple overproduced, you know, I mean the typical like we spent all the money on it.

0:36:19 - Jason Snell
I think it was a. I see what you're saying. There is a real question philosophically about whether you want to be a fly on the wall or whether you want it to feel directed right. Does the camera move? Are there multiple camera angles and all of that. And the Alicia Keys video, while it is spectacular, but it is also a choice, and there's some questions about spatial audio. Right, when you change your location by switching cameras, does the audio shift? Does it stay the same? What? How does it affect the soundscape? But I will say, one of the things that struck me in the alicia keys video and this is about how our brains work is that when she is singing, at the very beginning, she is looking right into that camera and it is like she's singing to me yeah, and that some people in our discord said they didn't like it.

So good I I didn't like it I was like no, alicia keys. I am intruder.

0:37:04 - Alex Lindsay
I don't deserve to be here.

0:37:06 - Jason Snell
Sing to someone else and just let me watch.

0:37:08 - Leo Laporte
And I think that is a brain thing, it's a human brain thing. It's a little creepy, but you will get used to it and soon you will fall in love.

0:37:15 - Jason Snell
It's just different right and different people are going to react differently. A lot of people in the Discord did not like it.

0:37:21 - Leo Laporte
I'm actually amazed how many people in our club have Vision Pros? I think we're going to have to do a lot more Vision.

0:37:26 - Alex Lindsay
Pro coverage. I'm not surprised either. I can admit we talked about Vision Pro on Office Hours this morning. It's the most viewed non-WWDC show we've ever done. Yeah.

0:37:39 - Leo Laporte
It was definitely a blast. We're going to take a break, ray. We can, personas. I want to give you a last. Canada, can you see the Leisure Keys thing, for instance? Can you download that?

0:37:48 - Ray Maxwell
Can you do some of these? Oh, one of the disappointments is I thought when I got home and unpacked my thing, that the whole demo thing that I saw would be available to me.

0:37:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, the demo's not, it isn't.

0:37:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it is, it is so maybe not in Canada, I can't speak to that but if you're in the US and you wonder about that demo, it's hard to find. You have to go open the TV app, you have to go to the search tab and, without searching, it provides a bunch of suggestions and one of them is a bunch of spatial suggestions, and the last one of those is the demo reel, which does include somebody was asking in the Discord are those series? And they are those videos where they're, like you know, performance episode one, and dinosaurs episode one. Those are. And the uh the immersion adventure episode one with the woman in the uh in the at the fjord, those? Um, there are clips from things that we haven't seen yet that are in that demo video and you can watch it.

0:38:41 - Leo Laporte
What do you think fiction TV will do in this? Will there be a Sopranos or a succession for Vision Pro that will transform the way we see television?

0:38:52 - Jason Snell
My guess is webisodes, because it's experimental. Like Alex said. Right, our vision of movies and TV involves a point of view, a director. You know mixage, montage, right, cuts and zooms and all sorts of stuff that you learned about in film school if you went to film school. But that is, is that the best format for immersion? You know, you listen to Alex and he would say you kind of don't want that, you kind of want to let people be in the environment, which is why I feel like, at least at the start, it's going to be more like webisodes. There's a rumor that they did a bunch of behind the scenes stuff for the Godzilla show on Apple TV+. So that's what I think is going to happen first is people are going to like do that, and then maybe the next step is sort of like you know, those Christopher Nolan movies where there are selected scenes in IMAX, where there'll be things like that too. But I feel like we're in experimental mode. Alex, what do you?

0:39:45 - Alex Lindsay
think I agree, I agree and I think that the behind the scenes is going to be very compelling. I think that when I think about what I think will happen versus I have no idea. But the Matrix, the White Rabbit version if anyone remembers the old DVD, there was a White Rabbit. You could turn it on the White Rabbit version of the matrix and as you watch the matrix, little white rabbit would pop up in the DVD and you'd click on it and it would show you a whole behind the scenes of how that shot got built. You know you wouldn't want to watch it the first time, right, and when you want to watch it again you'd watch through it.

And I think that you know they've seen these stereo cameras bouncing around the Apple sets for a while. So we assume that you know. Probably you may see a scene that might be done in 180. You might see a lot of behind the scenes that are done in 180. I don't think we're going to see a lot of 360. Again, 360, the problem with it is that the lift between 180 and 360 is fairly dramatic and the payoff is almost zero.

0:40:36 - Jason Snell
Because you have to stand up and turn around. Yeah, you've got to stand up to use it Well.

0:40:42 - Alex Lindsay
the other thing is that for us to create, the reason that the return is very low is because you have to stand up and look at it. The reason that we don't like to do it is because we A have to now clean up everything.

0:40:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you never. You have to hide. A movie set is a proscenium. You never have the stuff behind the camera visible.

0:40:58 - Jason Snell
Alex, you probably noticed this. I really enjoyed looking at the Alicia Keys video especially, but all those immersive videos are fascinating because you can actually see if you look at where the crop is that 180 immersive? There are moments, like early on in the Alicia Keys video, they want to crop out one of the cameras and so the right side is a little bit narrower before you get to the black space. That's all going on there too, so it's very clear, like it's hard right.

0:41:29 - Alex Lindsay
They wanted to. You can tell that they wanted to. They wanted to sell you on the feeling of it before you. As you watch it, you slowly realize, you slowly identify where all the cameras are when the cameras are, yeah. You know, that's kind of part of the show, but I think that you're right. I was. I saw that at the very beginning, you didn't, so it was. But I do think that you're going to see a lot of experimental, I think, for music, for performance and everything else.

0:41:48 - Leo Laporte
This is going to be A lot of people talking about sports being perfect for sports. I don't, man.

0:41:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we talked about that it looks so good that demo one of the reasons to watch that demo video. It does have a couple of sports clips.

0:42:02 - Leo Laporte
Courtside with the Warriors would be pretty amazing.

0:42:05 - Jason Snell
Wouldn't it, though? So the question is like what are the rights issues, however? Disney is Apple partner, and they have ESPN.

0:42:13 - Leo Laporte
The NBA app is on there on day one. Yeah, I think NBA sees the value.

0:42:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, max is an NBA partner and the Max app is there on day one, so there's lots of options.

0:42:23 - Leo Laporte
Because you're an F1 fan, you'll get this. There is an F1 viewer program for my Mac that lets me see F1 TV. Their own video feed has every driver's view. It has all sorts of data views. It has, of course, the race view, but it also has I mean, it's 20 screens if you open them all. I would love to have that in Watch F1 races, and that would be amazing.

0:42:52 - Alex Lindsay
I definitely think for sports you're going to have the ability to open up a couple windows.

You know, eventually these are fixed windows that you can always open up and you can throw bits over here or multiple games Like I think with MLS we're going to see a lot of the refinement of this where I can have four or multiple games Like I think with MLS we're going to see a lot of the refinement of this where I can have four or five games up and I can look at one and tap my fingers and hear the audio, and look at another one, tap my fingers and hear that audio, and I can.

You know, possibly and I do think that you'll have what we found with 360, at least with soccer, was that you generally wanted to experience a moment in 360, but you didn't want to watch the whole game that way because there's a lot of cut. There's a reason, there's a lot of cameras there, and so you still want to see the cut. But you also want to like it'd be really great to be standing on the pylon or right behind the pylon, right when someone is diving over the goal line or something like that in football. Those are the kind of things but you only want to be happened or right after it happened, not the rest of the game.

0:43:43 - Leo Laporte
Despite Jim James Cameron's uh advocacy and support, 3d did not really happen in movies and it really didn't happen at home on the TV set.

0:43:56 - Alex Lindsay
Is this going to bring 3d back? I think that I think you'll see more 3d production. I mean, I know a lot of people who own the. You know James Cameron did it right and so that everyone loved it and then everyone else did it very badly and so everyone burned out of it really quickly. If you're cutting people out and putting them on cardboard little cardboard planes, then people aren't gonna enjoy it. The reason that Avatar made us see that 3D was a future was because he actually shot it in 3D. So a lot of the movies that are just kind of fake 3D are probably not gonna. That model isn't really gonna work. But I do know that everybody who's got 3D rigs back from the last wave of 3D are all busting them off and trying to make sure that they can run and everything else. These are like $60,000 rigs that need to be turned back on again and they were selling for five like I could have bought three of these like two years ago for five grand each, you know. Like just almost a hunk of metal, you know. And so so there's a. A lot of people are going back into that. I don't know, to be honest, if 16 by nine 3D is really going to be the future, I think. I think that there's a lot that's going to go on with the 180 stereo and, and so I think that that's going to be a really interesting thing.

I also watching on the headset and this won't change the way people make movies. I do find that the wider the screen, the less quality of the experience for me as a viewer. So the IMAX one, four, three or even one to ones um, which is I think you get one to one when you shoot with the headset, um, but that more squarish. You know, when I was and I noticed it because I I put on um, the wizard of Oz, which is a one three, 133, I think, and I put Wizard of Oz on, I was like wow, it looks really really good. And then I put something on that was like 235 and you have to zoom it back so that you can see everything, and so now you just feel like you got a lot less, you know, like in the as an experience, and so, because the headset does have a limited field of view, you notice that limited field of view on a widescreen video more than you see it in a squarish experience.

0:45:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, passapanca on Max looked really great. Actually, one of the nice things is you get out of the box and the movies are just whatever shape they are yeah, the no-letter box, yeah.

0:45:58 - Alex Lindsay
So what was felt less? You felt like you were being pillared. Interesting, yeah. Now you can zoom it up more and it actually feels bigger and better in a lot of ways in that more squarish format.

0:46:09 - Leo Laporte
Ray, we're going to take a break. I want to give you a final thought before we go to the break, because I don't want to keep you here forever. Okay, he's sweating right into that thing. No, I'm very comfortable yeah how many hours have you spent in it so far?

0:46:26 - Ray Maxwell
Oh, I've spent three or four hours in it and you know didn't find it uncomfortable. I sat on FaceTime with my. A friend of mine went down with me, another Canadian and picked up his, and we've been sharing our experience. By the way, lest you feel too sorry for me, everything that's on Apple TV that I had access to before I went down there I have access to in my Vision Pro. So all the TV shows and movies and so forth. I have been viewing those in this and I have to say I think this is the best 3D experience I've had. What do you think, Alex, for viewing?

0:47:05 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, 100% Best viewing best 3D And've had. What do you think, Alex, for viewing? Yeah, 100% Best viewing best 3D. And we always knew that headsets were going to be a better viewing experience. I think that the problem with the Quest was just resolution, and so the resolution has been solved on this one, and so it's definitely the best 3D viewing experience that I've had. I think that again, I think that what we're going to start to see is increased frame rate. You know so, as the frame rate goes up and I, you know I was talking to someone else about it and I didn't really think about it from a gamer's perspective but they said you know, the older folks generating content or the people who've been doing it for a long time, are really into 24p. But the gamers, the next generation, are gamers and they want to see 144. They want to see 120. They want to see 144. They want to see 120. They want to see high frame rate and they don't want to see 24.

0:47:54 - Leo Laporte
And so there's a pretty strong push, I think, for you know there's rumors that a lot of production requests are 8K, 120. I wonder why Apple didn't make this just a screen and have, since you're already tethered to a battery. Why not just put the whole computing device separately? You could make a much more powerful computing device.

0:48:08 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. I think that was the problem with the Oculus. I mean, the Oculus did that.

0:48:12 - Leo Laporte
It had its tether to a computer.

0:48:15 - Alex Lindsay
And I think the problem is that it's very convenient and I've worked with ones where they have huge cables coming down from the ceiling that hook into your head and so on and so forth, and it's cool and some of them had a lot of performance. They had Onyxes running them and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it was my first experience and that was in the early 90s. Yeah, exactly, but I think that again, for me to be able to walk over to my living room, sit down and watch something, so mobility is important, it is.

0:48:43 - Ray Maxwell
To be able to lie that. If I want to go all day, I have power. That's a big battery. You know, I have this for my Blackmagic 6K Pro. I can plug it in and go all day. I have to put this on my belt.

0:48:58 - Leo Laporte
It has a belt clip as long as you have power delivery. I think the wattage that the adapter that comes with it is, I think, 30. So anything that you deliver, which PD absolutely can do, so anything that could deliver full power to it, and it doesn't even need to be full power, because you're powering the battery, you're just trickling it up.

0:49:16 - Alex Lindsay
So even if you had 10 watts, the battery would just slow the. It would last for five hours instead of two, or whatever.

0:49:24 - Ray Maxwell
Anyway, I am not disappointed. I am wowed by it. I'm having a lot of fun playing with it, playing with my friend who got one and thank you for having me on today, leo, and the rest of the team here, and I am enjoying it Stay in touch Always.

0:49:42 - Leo Laporte
Love having you on Ray. You're the greatest. You never have anything to plug. You still doing photography. Are you going to change how you do photography with this in mind?

0:49:55 - Ray Maxwell
Oh yeah, well, I can't wait until summer comes, that I can take this to the glider and the airport. Oh yeah, I'm still flying. Okay, yeah, and I think I can have a lot of fun with this, especially doing 3D of the cockpit.

0:50:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or just a loop to loop, because I'm not going up there, but I'd love to watch. I'd love to experience it in the safety of my own home. Thank goodness Jason did not continue to join us with his vision pro avatar because that was a little creepy. The avatars did get better later in the year, you might remember, but the vision pro still, even to this day, is looking for that killer app. You know we'll continue to cover the story. As long as there is vision pro news, we will bring it to you on mac break weekly speaking of bringing it to you mac. We will bring it to you on MacBreak Weekly, speaking of bringing it to you:

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Moving on, another big event early in the year Kind of a shocker Apple decided to cancel the Apple car. Jason Snell has breaking news.

0:54:05 - Jason Snell
Leo, this just in this, just in. Yes, I hope you were not planning your financial future around buying an Apple car. What? Because Mark Bloomberg, as we like to call him, mark Gurman at Bloomberg, shortened to Mark Bloomberg. Maybe he's been put in the will, I don't know. Bloomberg Maybe he's been put in the will, I don't know has reported that Apple today canceled their car project after spending more than a billion dollars several billion dollars on it and for more than a decade, they have finally thrown in the towel and said you know what?

We could probably use these resources better on places that are relevant to our core products and where we're behind, maybe like generative AI, and they do have a bunch of people working on machine learning stuff, because they were trying to build automated self-driving cars that they then started backing off of and, as Gurman reported, I think a month ago, they really were at a point where they were trying to basically make a break. Is this going to be a product? And let's run the numbers and when can we release a product and what can we make? And it sounds like their analysis was I got to be honest here what all of our analysis has been for the last five years, which is that it doesn't really make sense and they shouldn't do it, so they have killed that project.

0:55:19 - Leo Laporte
Mark says Apple made the disclosure internally today. It didn't take long for him to get the memo. Just surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project Said the people who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn't public at the time, the decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, kevin Lynch, vice President in charge of the effort, they're going to wind it down. As you said, employees may move to the AI division. There are 2,000 people, several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. I don't know if they'll. I mean Elon is probably hiring across town. Maybe that's where they'll end up. They often seem to end up over there at Tesla. I'm disappointed.

0:56:01 - Jason Snell
A lot of them end up at the traditional automakers traditional automakers too because they want that talent.

0:56:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, not only that, away from like major car makers, not Apple people who had gone into cars but hey, why don't you leave the stable job at this real, at one of the best motorworks known to mankind, and come to work for a company that has not even officially committed to making a car? And it always made me thought that, whatever that pitch deck was, it must have been something incredible. So I wonder what those executives are thinking about right now. I mean again, if anything, their foray into Apple probably made them more valuable because they can now. I'm sure they signed lots of stuff, but you can't make them forget discussions that they were having with Apple about, like, what a platform needs to be. So now they can bring all that expertise from the consumer electronics and back into BMW, back into GM, back into God forbid Tesla. Oh, actually they could use it.

0:57:18 - Alex Lindsay
When you do the math on that 2000, by the way, that's like, conservatively, three to five hundred million dollars a year, like think about how much they've been spending on this. And that's just the staff and that's not the. You know everything else. So you're probably talking about at least a billion a year that they were spending on. Trying to figure this out, and I'm excited yeah, German.

0:57:37 - Andy Ihnatko
at the end of this piece mentions that the board was also concerned about continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a project that may never see light of day.

0:57:53 - Jason Snell
So I mean we said I think here we've talked about this quite a bit and I think what's happened is, as time has gone on, I've gotten less and less enthusiastic about this idea, because it feels like they had a moment right. There was a moment where the car, the major automakers were not really getting it and Tesla was on the move and it felt like Tesla was doing it right and nobody else got it and there was a place for another technology company like Apple to come in and insert itself. But boy, it feels like that time passed like five years ago and everybody else has sort of gotten on board with more electronics and with moving toward electric and and and other companies like Rivian have kind of come up in the meantime too, and like now you think, what could Apple contribute to the auto industry in 2030? And I just I don't. It would just be another car, and like that's the last thing Apple should waste its money on.

0:58:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also remember that when, even when this story first broke I think it was the wall street journal that broke it in 2014, something like that. At least, that's when we first started talking about it I think, uh, Johnny Ive was in his ultimate ascendancy. He was maybe. I imagine that his voice was also saying here is something. We are a design company that works in electronics and consumer goods. The car is the ultimate design statement, the ultimate consumer good. Here is a place where we can make an amazing statement. I mean, again, this is the same shop that came up with the 2018 MacBook Pro, so maybe that was another force that was at least causing this to get a good launch to orbit initially. Get a good launch to launch to orbit initially.

0:59:27 - Jason Snell
A lot of alarm bells went off when there were those reports about how they were only going to launch it without a steering wheel and with complete autonomous driving, and it was one of those moments of like what are they, you know? What are they smoking inside there? Because it is not. It was never going to be like it was. That's like a worse delusion than Elon Musk. Elon Musk has these delusions of full self-driving that he keeps saying is just around the corner, just around the corner, and it has never come.

But at least he builds cars with steering wheels right, like he's got at least a little bit of realism that this needs to be a real product, and Apple I don't think. I think that Apple, in the early days of the car project, was a victim of some people on the inside thinking big dreams like they could magic it into existence and not being real about what needed to be done to make the product happen, and I think that that's why they missed their moment.

1:00:12 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that when you take away the steering wheel, it forces you to solve the last mile and that is just the most brutal last mile. I think that most of us would be really happy if you just solve the highway. Like if you just said this is always going to work on a highway, I I would be all in, but there's so many vagarities once you get off the highway of all these weird intersections and things and people's driveways and all these other things, that it it becomes very difficult, and so taking the taking away all uh ability to make that adjustment makes a really, really high cliff for to go over. I think that's the challenge there.

1:00:48 - Jason Snell
Don't go over a cliff. Don't do it.

1:00:49 - Shelly Brisbin
You know it's a bad car experience I think tesla has a patent on that technology they're.

1:00:55 - Alex Lindsay
They're pretty litigious about that when I was in rwanda this is the problem is the maps think that there's things that I was in rwanda just blindly following google maps and came up to a cliff, you know like, and the water had washed away the road in between. But you know it was, and it was at night and I almost went over it, you know, and that was. That's a human following that, not a, not a machine doing it in in uh, in kind of an unparalleled experience.

1:01:40 - Andy Ihnatko
And so I do think that we're in. We're in, like in chatbot AI and generative AI, where we might have been in 2013, 2014, with self-driving cars, where it was early enough in the game that nobody, I think. As it turned out, nasa had a very linear path to landing people on the moon, but they had. When they committed in 1959, 1960, they weren't sure. Could we make these engines work? In theory, it could work. We don't know. Can people live and work in space? Can they spend two weeks in microgravity? And, as they went on, oh great, no, it turns out. This is easy. Turns out, this is solvable. Turns out, it was very linear.

I think that in 2013, because so much investment and so much talk and research went into this, they were at that stage where we don't know if this is a linear set of problems that we can simply throw enough money and experience at and solve them, or whether we are going to at some point hit a brick wall that is insurmountable, and I think that there was a time when everyone realized that no, level two is a perfection zone. We might make it to level three, but self-driving is a fantasy that requires a breakthrough that is unpredictable and unforeseeable, and I think that AI is in the same level right here as we're seeing with, I mean, gemini is getting all the punchlines right now, but it's true of every single large-scale project to create a very functional and useful AI. They're still struggling to figure out how do we make this thing so it's stable and doesn't wind up spitting out 2,000 words about how it is a god and you must bow down before it and honor no God. Before chat GPT.

1:03:04 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that also there's pre-COVID and post-COVID in the sense that when city, you know, a big argument for self-driving is the commute, and when cities are 30%, you know, with a 30% vacancy in downtown, it's not clear that that commute is going to return at the same level again, or if it will remain Like, over time, more and and more people. You saw this kind of it jumped obviously during covid. Then it backed up people coming back to the office. But I talked to people who were.

If they're being forced to go into the office, their linkedin is fresh and moving, like they're looking for rope, they're looking for remote, they're not quitting, but they're looking for the next, next place that they go. And these are people that love their job, they love the people they work with and they love the company they work for and they're still for the next place that they go. And these are people that love their job, they love the people they work with and they love the company they work for and they're still looking at moving because they don't want to drive. And so I think that the other thing is, and the next generation, I mean my kids, are in no rush to get a license. It's hard to get. You know, like the next generation just isn't interested in cars, you know, and so I think that that's the other thing is, if you're not going to get this done, in 10 years the market for the cars may be a lot smaller than it was, you know, when you started doing the development.

1:04:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's just a different world too no-transcript lots going on, and you really need a charging infrastructure that is for everybody, which has not happened yet, but I do think all the major automakers are like they're on it now. They all have sophisticated computer systems that they're building that let you do late guidance and, if not, full self-driving, some level of autonomy and all of the Silicon Valley secret sauce that was there is everywhere. Now it's spread out everywhere. And it's true also that this is a real, not invented here moment, because Apple could have.

I believe at one point Elon Musk wanted Apple to buy Tesla from him. Rivian was a startup that probably could have gotten sniped. There are some other, like Lucid is a company out there that is very Apple-like but is an electric car company that they could have probably gotten at some point, like, if they wanted, if they believed in this, they could have bought somebody. But I really think that in the end, they had this dream that they were going to make the car that nobody else could make, and then they hit reality, and so you know, at that point you just walk away, I guess.

1:05:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it just, it just never made sense to me at all. I could, I could, I could if Apple was the kind of company that, uh, at CES or at some flashy show would say, hey, we made a concept car like Sony has made concept cars of. Here is a Sony badge, sony design, sony interior, sony electronics project and, of course, they build it on a chassis that someone else provides. It would have been a very interesting design project, wished into existence, an Apple car that was a functional, practical, wonderful car that hit all the buttons.

You'd still wind up with, okay, apple, but you're going to have to put in, someone's going to have to service these things and someone's going to have to sell these things. It's not going to be the mall in Lemonster. You're going to have to have a dealership. You're going to have people who know how to sell these things. And again, how much money do you think you can make off of every single copy of this car that you can get a hold of, all the real estate you're going to have to acquire just to make this happen? And it's just something that this is why I always settle into the phrase. I don't understand this decision, because as soon as you say oh, this is stupid and it's going to be a big mistake and they're going to rescind this. That's when, oh well, it turns out that Apple knows something that I don't which is a lot of things, but, nonetheless, when things don't make any sense, you hope that Apple comes up and say no, we figured something out. But it turns out that they didn't.

1:06:58 - Alex Lindsay
How soon before we see the same memo on Vision Pro no, 15 years. No, I'm not serious. It took them 10 years to do this with the car right?

1:07:07 - Jason Snell
They won't really, but they will this is a you mean the product of shit.

1:07:12 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but once Apple ships product, I mean, apple's notorious If you talk to people that used to work at Apple of spending hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars on products that never get out the gate. They just go. Eh, and it's just that Titan was so big that they had to do it on the street so people could see it. But there's those buildings in there that are top secret and you know all the other things they're building all kinds of, you know products. I've never been in one of those buildings but I've heard about them. I've heard that they exist and that they're super secret is because that stuff may never leave the building, you know. But they go through the full you know production process and figure things out and and everything else, and that's what we I think we've heard stories about that happening with the vision. You know the vision pro, but a vision pro is is uh, there's at least three or four versions they're going to release before they even think about whether it's successful or not.

And I gotta say, uh, as a user, um, I think that the only thing that worries me about the vision pro right now is how much time I spend in it at a time and I just forget that I'm in there for so long and I'm like, oh, I was just in there hanging out and then I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I lost four hours, you know, like you know, and, and so that's the thing that I'm having. You know, I watch movies in it all the time now and um and I, I uh. Thing that I'm having you know, cause I watch movies in it all the time now, and um and I, I uh. Anyway, I just find it to be, it's a, it's a fascinating.

I I'm more concerned about my health of keeping it on for so long, but it's a very comfortable experience and I think. I think that they're on a pretty good path, that they're probably going to keep on expanding, so but they're not going to change course for 10 years. Like, there's no way they're changing course for 10 years. We're 10 years into a 20-year curve and there's no way they're going to stop.

1:08:48 - Jason Snell
In fact there was another report I forget who made it that they may be working backward to this as well. But there's some talk that they're also experimenting with other wearables that would be more like glasses, but glasses to give a perch for cameras, so that you could have, if you imagine, like a camera plus air pod or cameras on the air pods. But that's tougher because of where your ears are, and I don't think there are any big human ear upgrades coming like where they're going to move to a better location, so they may have to do something else, so they may start working the other way too, if you can imagine putting a computer interface that can you know, can see and can hear and can talk to you and maybe even can notice your gestures and respond to them. That's not vision pro, that's a very different thing, without screens essentially, but it's still like an AR product of a sort, and I think that they're pretty committed to the idea of finding ways to get computing into, you know, these other spatial environments by you know.

1:09:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, I've said it before, but I think that every company is missing a trick by the idea of one Bluetooth earbud that is a really, really good assistant that can simply talk to you, be a fully immersive excuse me, be a fully reactive interface to software to do simple things that you might want to do in the real world, with an optional like sort of like tie clip size button camera, with an optional like sort of like tie clip size button as a camera, so that if you want to give the assistant the added advantage of being able to see your environment and being able to ask hey, where is, where is my lunch date? And so the? And so the earpiece didn't tell you oh well, it's the, it's the, look for the red building. There's a door to the left. That's number 12, that's the restaurant you're trying to meet at, and when you need privacy, take it off, take the camera off and put it in your pocket where people can't see it.

I mean, the ironic thing is that I do think that the more, the more I read about again, I still don't have a vision pro, but the more I talk to people who have it, the more I read about experience, about it, the more I think that Google glass had roughly the right idea, not the right time, not the right technology, certainly not the right understanding of how such a device would be perceived by the general public, but the idea of a very lightweight device with, as you said, it had a camera, it had bone conductive audio, it had a microphone and, in terms of giving you a layer into reality, it was just a tiny, tiny little like three by five card at your peripheral vision. That would simply put information that you were asking for. That might be helpful at that moment. I think that once we can get that technology into a pair of eyeglass, inobtrusive eyeglass frames, that is a product that a lot of people are going to be very, very interested in, especially matched with a really good AI.

1:11:43 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, you guys are crazy, but all right if you think so. I mean, you know there's a lot of. We'll see what happens at NAB, but between NAB and WWC we expect to also see a lot more support, hardware and so on and so forth of shooting stuff for it, which is interesting because the market is so much smaller than Meta's and people weren't necessarily building a lot of tools for that, but I think that might've been also Meta building its own cameras and stuff like that. But I think that we do see a fair bit of excitement related to you know, how do we generate content for it? So so it'll be interesting to see. And you know they dribble new things out. We got a one of the I don't know Jason, did you see the? Um, uh, the the new dinosaur, the new thing from their you know their dinosaur documentary? There's like a now five. There was the one where it walks over and looks at you, but now there's like a five minutes of an interaction, really good fascinating.

1:12:30 - Leo Laporte
Can't wait, wow apple will never ship another vision pro. This is the only one, so enjoy it as long as all right okay all right, I'll put my money on it mark that clip for future use yeah, yeah, please, let's never yeah, that'll be a great button on on the on the super cut of all of your vision pro negativity.

1:12:51 - Jason Snell
That'll be a great last shot and then it'll dissolve to a future where everybody's wearing them on their heads and they're like shaking their heads.

1:12:59 - Leo Laporte
If that's the future, I don't want to live there.

1:13:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, really don't oh, that's an even better button right there actually let's put that in the clip.

1:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Put that in the supercut well, you could teach my uh bituary, you know.

1:13:09 - Jason Snell
And then he died it's gonna be in a hologram hovering over your tombstone but only if you have the headset on to to be fairly like.

1:13:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I, I 100 agree that the hype of last year, the product did not match that halfway. This is apple deliver again. We were all speculating. So this, a lot of this, is on us, but what apple delivered turned out to be a very simple and obvious device whose only real distinction at this point seems to be that the components they put into their version of this version of this thing are way better than the components that existing hat products already had. But they didn't like, they didn't fault, they didn't solve any problems. They didn't like they didn't fall, they didn't solve any problems, they didn't figure anything out. They just said what can we, what can we do? That's really, really great. If money were realistically almost no object whatsoever. I mean, there there was, I was.

I was always hoping that the great demos would not be hey look, there's a dinosaur in your room or hey look, you've got floating virtual screens in front of you. I've always hoped that it would have been. We figure out a way to make augmented reality, virtual reality, more relevant than simply education, training and entertainment, and I don't think they've demonstrated that yet. Maybe in a couple of years, maybe in three years, I don't. I'm not writing it off yet they could. This is this is an Apple TV trajectory where it's a very simple, boring box that simply gets progressively better and keeps making enough money or being interesting enough to Apple that they keep making it. It's not the next iPhone. It's not the next Apple Watch. I don't think it's the next AirPods either.

1:14:45 - Leo Laporte
I think it's the next Apple Hi-Fi.

1:14:49 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's the next 80-inch monitor. I don't think Apple's doing any monitors at this point. I think that they are building toward again. When I want to watch with my family, I take it off and I watch a big screen and we all have fun watching some rerun of something that was made 20 years ago, um and uh. But when I'm actually watching movies, I just put this on because I can see. I can. I'm getting to the point where I can tell what kind of film it was shot on, because I see it so much sharper in the Apple TV than I see on my TV, you know, and I think that that's the thing that I'm getting used to and it's kind of burning up my. I'm now shopping for a bigger screen for the family because the screen I have now is not keeping up with the Apple TV's movies.

1:15:28 - Leo Laporte
So Apple has added quantum safe crypto to its iMessage, even though there is and there's another thing, by the way, that will never ship is a quantum computer. But okay, now you're safe.

1:15:44 - Jason Snell
You almost said crypto, and I love it Crypto. Let's call it crypto from now on. It's quantum crypto.

1:15:49 - Andy Ihnatko
The whole stack of chips into the center of the table. I'm going all in.

1:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Well, okay, honestly, it's more likely.

1:15:56 - Jason Snell
This is going to be great for the editors because they don't need to consult through hundreds of episodes of MacBreak Weekly.

1:16:01 - Alex Lindsay
We're just going to get this one.

1:16:03 - Jason Snell
And it's got all of Leo's pronouncements in it. It's great, perfect.

1:16:18 - Leo Laporte
So, of course, as most of you know by now, thursday morning, the Department of Justice and was it? 18 state attorneys general from blue and red plus DC? Yeah, 15 in DC, new York, new Jersey, california, you know it was a nice mix, I thought. Attorneys general sued Apple for violations of the Sherman Sherman Antitrust Act violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The venue will be New Jersey unless Apple convinces a judge not to make it New Jersey, the thinking being that's a positive place for the DOJ to go after antitrust. It's a court, a circuit that's very antitrust focused. The DOJ wrote a very nice 88 page, well-written, I thought, a complaint that read more like a novel than it did, a legal pleading. But, and I will say, before we get to your opinions on the whole thing, that there is and I think Steven Sanofsky kind of nailed it Now he's an interesting person to write about this, since he was the genius behind Windows 8.

Monopolist comments on monopolies was what I was thinking.

1:17:24 - Jason Snell
But he did point out. He's against the action of the DOG. You'll be shocked to discover the guy from Microsoft back in the day is against it, but he had some history with the whole thing, and so he had some interesting things to say.

1:17:37 - Leo Laporte
But the point that I wanted to extract from his blog piece was there really are kind of he said, two parties. I'd say there's a spectrum going all the way from people who say big tech is evil and big tech needs to be regulated and or broken up, and anything the government does in that regard is a good thing. And then there are, of course, on the absolute other end of the spectrum, there are the cult of he called them the cult of oh no, cory doctorow called them the cult of mac ists cory cory likened them to a religious cult. He said. Of course he did. Yeah, he said the foundational tenet of the cult of mac is that buying products from a three trillion dollar company makes you members of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. So that's the other side of the scale.

1:18:27 - Andy Ihnatko
There's, yeah, well to be, to be fair, apple, like most major religions, doesn't pay taxes. So right, I mean no, no one of one half dozen of the other.

1:18:38 - Leo Laporte
So there are the cult of Maccas, they're the government regulationists, and I suspect all of us are probably somewhere in between the opposites of that spectrum. I've already expressed my opinion on Twit on Sunday, so I'll hold back while I let you. I thought, Jason, you wrote a very good piece at Six Col colors about this, thank you my thursday morning I woke.

1:18:58 - Jason Snell
I woke up to a push notification, read the 80 pages of legalese and then sat at my mother's uh kitchen table and wrote two thousand words about it.

1:19:08 - Leo Laporte
As you know, I was in mexico and, uh, lisa pointed a camera at me. She said, said, do a TikTok on what you think. I said no, I am holding back my opinion until I hear from Andy, Alex and Jason was my reaction. So, Jason, you said, while I am not a lawyer, by the way, I-N-A-L applies to this entire panel we did have an attorney on on Sunday. Kathy Gellis was here. Uh he. You said I've read all 88 pages. Good for you. Uh, and you said some of this is absurd. Apple is, for instance, not a monopoly.

1:19:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think this is the challenge is for a lot of us and this is why I'm so disappointed in somebody. I mean, I kind of expect it from Corey Doctorow, but it's disappointing because it's such a lazy take to say, oh, they're occultists. There are those people out there who say Apple can do no wrong, but it's a straw man argument. There are a lot of people I think one of the fundamental problems with this entire suit at least the document as written coming from a place of people who had this sort of fantasy that that that really is very familiar to anybody who's been using Apple products for a long time, which is this fantasy that people who use Apple products are dupes of marketing and that and that they are the eye sheep and that they only do this because they're, they're conned into it and then they're trapped by lock-in and they can never escape. When the truth is the iPhone people love the iPhone, the customer end and they can never escape. When the truth is the iPhone, people love the iPhone, the customer satisfaction is off the charts. The fact, the fact is, people I think politically that's the hardest sell for this is that they're trying to uh attack a product, uh, for trapping people, and it's actually a very popular product that people like and therefore, what exactly is this? Is this a win for them? But you know it is. It is, I think.

Leaving that aside for the moment, I have some frustration about this, because I feel like there are many behaviors that we all, as keen observers of Apple, might call out as being anti-competitive in some way, and so many of them are just not in here at all, and part of that is because they're deeply constrained by the laws in the US. We talk about Europe and the DMA, but that's specific legislation targeting big tech gatekeepers like Apple In the US. We have failed to pass any such legislation. Even though we have, theoretically, a function in Congress. They don't function, and so we're left with the Sherman Antitrust Act, which is about you know it's railroad barons and oil barons. It's from more than 100 years ago. It's almost 150 years ago, and that's the challenge is that they have to come in and say Apple's a monopoly, and that is again. I'm not a lawyer. And the reason they chose New Jersey is that there is at least one case in New Jersey where they found a company with 60% market share and said that they were still exerting monopoly power.

But the fact is they need to prove that Apple fits under Sherman and the challenge is to do this. You can see them contorting themselves to one redefine monopoly as being based on revenue share and not market share. And then, two, they have to specify that it's because it's US market share, it's not worldwide, it's just revenue share. And then they say, well, it's the smartphone market, but if that's not good enough, we're going to make a new category called the performance smartphone market in order to get it to be an even larger number. And then, honestly, I think their weakest moment in this monopoly argument is they want to have the big number. Right, they want to have the big scary number.

In court they're probably going to say that Apple is functionally a monopoly, but for the general public they want a big, scary number in their document. So they finally get to 90 and 95%, which is whoa, that's a monopoly if it's in the 90s. And their example is, for example, apple, samsung and Google. Sorry, let me say that again, apple, samsung and Google have 95% of the performance smartphone market. It's like, well, but that's irrelevant because that's a made-up market. Sherman is not about duopolies or triopolies, it's about monopolies smelly, so they're gonna have they're struggling with that one.

1:23:05 - Leo Laporte
I think I had that same impression. But smelly thief in our discord name checks out uh says it isn't exactly about monopoly. Let me let me tell you what the sherman act says. Every contract combination, in the form of trust or otherwise, trust is a monopoly or conspiracy and restraint of trade or commerce. The act prohibits monopolization or attempts at monopolizing any aspect of interstate sure trade or commerce and makes the act a felony. So you don't technically have to be.

Yeah right and Microsoft was 90% of the desktop market when the DOJ went after them.

1:23:42 - Jason Snell
But it is still a factor, right, because you have to show that something is either a monopoly or is attempting, like I said, attempting to exert monopoly power. And it's not, I will say it's also not illegal to try to be successful in your market. That's not enough either. You have to show that you're exerting it. I'm not saying that they can't. That's why they chose New Jersey is that in New Jersey they made that ruling that said that the denture accessory manufacturer, or whatever was 65% of the market, was controlling the market because it was such a big fish in a small pond that it was able to do that.

1:24:14 - Leo Laporte
There's monopsony as well as monopoly and I'm just saying that Apple might have a monopsonistic position in the app store.

1:24:21 - Jason Snell
Right, and again, not a lawyer, but I just want to say that the challenge here is that they have to use Sherman Like they have to.

1:24:28 - Ray Maxwell
They have to use.

1:24:29 - Jason Snell
Sherman and all the law around it because? And so when all of us reacted, they're like well, what about this and what about this bad thing that apple does? And what about this thing? And the answer is they didn't think that they could use that in the framing of sherman, because they have no 21st century legislation to use. They only have 19th century legislation and the case law that's built up around it, and it's going to be a challenge for them. I'm not saying they can't do it, I'm just saying that there's going to be a challenge for them. I'm not saying they can't do it, I'm just saying that there's going to be a real argument that this is actually a brutally competitive market worldwide and that carving it into the US and then rev share and then performance smartphones in order to try and prove that Apple has this kind of power, there's a strong counter argument that they may the court may buy it or they may not buy it, but like it's, it's a case that they, even in this document, I would say, are you can see them sweating to make it.

1:25:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I would also. So it's good we should clarify what Sherman says, and we know we have a Congress that passed 27 laws so in the last year, so they're not exactly an activist Congress in this regard, despite the fact that I think both Lena Connick, the FTC and others have said please give us some tools. Yeah, like the DMA in Europe, kathy Gellis on Sunday, who is again an attorney, made the point. Maybe this is a good point. I don't know what you think, Andy, that it really is an attempt to attack the notion of a walled garden, that it's not necessarily about a monopoly but about the fact that Apple wants to create a lock-in with its ecosystem.

1:26:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that was definitely one of the consistent themes that they were making throughout that whole complaint. I mean, they're also smart enough to put like one of the money quotes right in the preamble where they they quote, uh, an internal, uh apple communication where they're talking about, uh, why they have to keep people locked into apple and how they have to. I'll read this if you want this is.

1:26:24 - Leo Laporte
This is actually the first paragraph. It's very good. In 2010. It reads like you know, a magazine article you know, like this is from the new yorker. In 2010, a top apple executive emailed apple's then ceo, steve Jobs, about an ad for the new Kindle e-reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app, and then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs. One quote message that can't be missed is that it is easy to switch from an iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch, jeez, you really shouldn't put that in writing. Jobs was clear in his response. By the way, this is 2010. This is 14 years ago.

1:27:10 - Jason Snell
When they had 15% market share.

1:27:12 - Leo Laporte
Jobs was clear in his response Apple would force developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform, which, by the way, is completely okay when you have 15% of the market.

1:27:26 - Ray Maxwell
Yeah. It's very different.

1:27:27 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is that you know, like you can't, if they said that after they had assuming that they get to a point where we say they're monopoly, they have to start doing those things after they became a monopoly, not before.

1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, we do have to point out that the DOJ has the benefit of the Apple Epic lawsuit and many other lawsuits before Google and Samsung, so that there is a lot of documentary evidence, a lot of emails, some much more recent. Go ahead, Andy. You brought up the paragraph.

1:27:52 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I'd say that was one of the two of them. The other one was imagine buying a expletive Android for 25 bucks at a garage sale and it works fine and you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are. That's an Apple manager in an email. That's an Apple manager, right? There are a bunch of larger themes that they're making here.

One of them is that Apple feels as though, as part of their strategy, they have to make sure that not only is that there's a reason for people to buy super, super powerful smartphones, which is one of the reasons why, as we've been saying, they created this category of premium smartphones to say this is the market that they're trying to defend, but it's more than that there. To be sure, there are some real. When I, when I broke it down, I basically had to take the case down and really label certain things as like, get real plausible. They got them dead to rights and they had stuff like oh well, we're, we're a department of justice basically saying we're very, very curious as to why. How come HTC has withdrawn from the smartphone market? How come lg has withdrawn from the smartphone market? And I'm, and I'm here, and I'm there in the back of the room saying because samsung spends a whole lot more money marketing and the most the most obvious boner there was saying even amazon's fire phone couldn't make it.

Oh my god, that was a boner. There are a lot of reasons for that. Another boner, by the way, I have to throw this in.

1:29:19 - Leo Laporte
They gave themselves credit for Apple's success. It says Apple's fortunes changed around the iPod in 2001. A path-clearing antitrust enforcement case brought by the United States against Microsoft opened the market, and it's thanks to us that Apple was able to offer iTunes on Windows PCs.

1:29:39 - Alex Lindsay
Otherwise known as the last time we won. The last time we won, this was great, look I appreciate them.

1:29:45 - Jason Snell
Extending the DOJ extended universe from past cases.

1:29:51 - Alex Lindsay
Other than the last time we won. It was great and oh, by the way, microsoft is still, like some days, the biggest company in the world. I think you can make a strong case.

1:30:01 - Leo Laporte
Mike and I covered this back in the 90s that Microsoft's I mean the lawsuit with the DOJ was beneficial. It didn't break up Microsoft. I think that was their initial goal. They ended up saying you know, you're going to have a consent decree, we're going to have an ombudsman inside Microsoft and we're going to stop some of this anti-competitive behavior. I think it's fair to say Google, for instance, the side that says no government regulation ever. The antitrust regulation is a very necessary component of a free market. Without competition, free markets fail yeah.

1:30:44 - Andy Ihnatko
They have to again. This is an opportunity for Apple to actually defend in court a lot of their decisions, and some of the things in this complaint are actually actually have some teeth in it when they talk about I mean, we've been talking about iMessage for the past year. Now they really have to explain why were you not including feeds? They keep the DOJ complaint keeps making references to you are intentionally nerfing your own products to make sure that they still maintain a competitive edge. So Apple has to explain. Here is why we decided that no, we don't want iPhone users to have secure messaging. No, we don't want those beautiful iPhone photos they've been taking when they send them to their grandmother. We don't want them to look as good as they would on an iPhone. They also have to talk. They also had a big section on Apple Pay about saying the EU has made a big point of well, how come you're not allowing outsiders to have access to the NFC chip? And a lot of the reason could be we just don't like the security opening that that creates. But they're also applying that correctly by saying well, that means that why do I, if I want to do, tap to pay through an iPhone? Why do I have to do it through Apple Pay? Why can't I just allow my bank to directly do that transaction itself? Why are you taking 0.15 of a cent, I think, off of every transaction? They have to really defend a lot of these things. So there's a lot of things that are really really silly. We won't go into every one of them, but there are some of them that will probably contribute to some sort of a settlement.

Remember that it wasn't necessarily when the DOJ talks about the victory of the Microsoft Internet Explorer case. It wasn't that they found a conclusion and Microsoft was sent to the dock. It ended the way that most of these things end with some sort of a negotiation. As the trial goes on, the government figures out the arguments that they're making that aren't really landing. The defendant figures out some arguments that, ooh, we are really having trouble figuring this out.

I think we can negotiate a better out of this than we're going to get if we let this go all the way to the very, very end. So I do think that this is going to end in probably a better environment for users. But in any event, one of my maxims is that I think that antitrust actions like this are very, very valuable because they at least force a company like Apple to stop saying, well, because we told you so or well, because we know what's best. No one else knows what's best for our users, so that's fine. You should be able to prove it, and you should not have 80 gigabytes worth of internal emails contradicting what you're saying in public.

1:33:19 - Jason Snell
Antitrust is a blunt instrument, though, and I think that what bugs me about this is that there are things that we all could point to that I think are not illegal and that probably should be, but and in Europe, they actually tried to pass some legislation to talk about some of those issues that are more appropriate, and so they. I agree with you, Andy, in the sense that antitrust is all they got, and barring an act of Congress, and so you know, you could say they're being activist and that they're doing this for political reasons. You could say that this is the only line of defense in the entire US to a company as big and powerful as Apple. I can see the merits in both of those arguments, but I think the challenge, I mean the risks for Apple are high, because some of what I think people inside the DOJ I mentioned the iSheeple kind of attitude. I think there are some people inside the DOJ who really don't get it about why Apple has. I mean they say I mean it's amazing. They're like Apple has always made overpriced products that are for the high end and it started with and the iPod was like. That's not true, that's a historical. There's a lot of stuff that's wrong. But what Apple always has done is tried to integrate hardware and software, and there was a thread running through this, this document, that suggests that what they want is competition with smartphones. But the danger is that they define it ultimately being there should be no cost to switch, which, it read a certain way, is the iPhone hardware should be functionally. You know the is to build in your special sauce. That's the extreme argument, but I'm saying like. So what we have to do is kind of find some sort of middle ground, and Apple has done itself no favors.

I think the Apple Pay argument is a great one, because I would argue that Apple built Apple Pay the way it did because it needed in order for it to get it to be successful. It wanted complete control so it could launch that product in a market that had resisted contactless payment for ages, and they didn't want to go out with a bunch of bank partners that they have to beg to write into an NFC API in different ways from different apps and have it be all scattered, different ways from different apps and have it be all scattered. So I think their strategy was we're just going to put it in the wallet app and we're going to let you put in your credit card number and connect it, and that's Apple pay. I think that that's why Apple pay succeeded. The problem is that they they never, ever, ever, ever opened it up to third parties to compete with Apple in other ways and, and, like if you're at the DOJ, you might argue it's an original sin. They never intended it. By the time, like with iMessage, by the time there were other secure communications mechanisms, everybody was already using messages, because it's where the SMSs were always and that's where they put iMessage.

But there's a counter argument to be made that Apple you know Apple might not have even succeeded with Apple Pay if they weren't able to do it the way they did it. And it's not an original sin, it's an. It's a later, cardinal sin of very typical of Apple basically keeping its ball and saying no, no, no, why? Because I feel like a lot of their attitude is not we can't compete, which I think comes through in the in the document. It's like they're afraid of competition. I'm not sure how afraid they are of competition. It's more like this imperious why compete if we don't have to?

We own the real estate. So we're not going to bother, and I think that's where they get in trouble.

1:36:48 - Leo Laporte
We'll see. I mean, it's going to be five years before we find out what happens with this antitrust lawsuit, so we'll continue. We'll probably be covering that all the way up to 2030. That's my guess. You're watching MacBreak Weekly's year-end best of Well, I hope you're enjoying this best of.

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1:38:41 - Doc Rock
I got up and I really thought like maybe it was going to be like two hours for some reason. I was like man, they're going pretty fast, and it was about 48 minutes or whatever. So it could have been a TV show, but first time I watched it on apple tv instead of youtube, just out of curiosity and it's glorious, and it was when you open the apple tv app. It was like the, you know the giant hero and it looked really good.

1:39:06 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, don't tell the antitrust people yeah it.

1:39:11 - Andy Ihnatko
I think there's the first one that really felt like an infomercial. I was almost expecting like a Chiron with an 800 number on it, like it was just like okay, well, if there's. If you're only going to do is post like a highly produced video with sales points, marketing points, okay I'll, I'll definitely like bookmark that for watching later, but it's like it takes the eventness out of it.

1:39:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I commented on the same thing to micah early on is that it really felt like an advert, not a uh, an event, and I guess that's what happens. If Alex were here, we'd say no, no, this is the way, because in 48 minutes they got everything that was supposed to be 25 minutes. I guess german got that wrong well it was supposed to be?

1:39:51 - Mikah Sargent
no, it was rumored to be, not necessarily well, I know I.

1:39:55 - Andy Ihnatko
I actually, of course, I used our one of our favorite apps, downy, to download, like the, the actual video, and so it's 41 minutes 40 seconds, minus probably the three minutes it took to to launch that for the countdown. So, yeah, this, this was pretty short, this is pretty brisk yeah, and the countdown was very smooth transition.

1:40:13 - Doc Rock
But the one thing that I thought was funny I don't know if you noticed is when tim was doing the talk. Tim had this bounce and he would like every syllable. He was doing like a kata okay, ball bounce. Every couple syllables he would like pop, pop and I was waiting for him to just tim is always a little pressured in his speech.

1:40:35 - Leo Laporte
A little good morning, but he seemed more so. Uh, I don't know why, but he did see more, so there was something going on.

1:40:42 - Andy Ihnatko
He was, I noticed. I noticed that too. He was a little bit of. He was a little bit Italian in his gestures. Yeah, maybe that's one of the other reasons why I got the infomercial sort of vibe off of this. Tim didn't stay very long.

1:40:52 - Leo Laporte
He uh uh he just stayed long enough to say the good news is the vision pro selling exactly as we intended.

1:41:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah and all the superlatives that we thought we would miss out on, like all the irrelevant superlatives that we thought we miss out on by not having a live event. So the third, the new the new macbook airs are best-selling notebooks in the entire world. That's nice. We didn't get a walkthrough of a new architectural maven Apple store flagship store, but it'll do. It'll do.

1:41:24 - Leo Laporte
No mention of the big product that Apple sells half of their revenue, which is the iPhone. But this was really iPad Day and Pencil Day. I'm on the Apple store, which was closed this time. They got up right after the event. They wanted to give you a chance to buy and everything we're going to talk about you can order right now for delivery. Well, it was next week, I don't know if they're getting sold out. So there's an iPad Pro in 11 and 13 inches they're not saying 12.9 anymore. There's a new iPad Air in 13 and 11 inches they're not saying 12.9 anymore. There's a new iPad Air in 13 and 11 inches which looks interestingly a lot like the old iPad Pro. It even has an M2 chip in it. They dropped the price of the 10th generation iPad. That's now the base model at $349, which is a great price really, I mean, for an iPad that will do everything these other guys will do. And there, off to the right, it says new, new, new. And the iPad mini, where there was absolutely nothing.

1:42:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's a bummer. That was the thing I was really looking forward to and also it's they really seem to have cluttered like the top end. Now it's. I was amazed that we'll talk about. I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but it just seemed weird that, okay, so now you have the iPad air, which has most of the functionality that would attract someone to the iPad pro. If they're assuming that they don't, they're not made of money, they don't want to necessarily spend top dollar on the, on the top amount on the top device, but it's no longer the thinnest. Well, the iPad air is not the thinnest. The iPad Air is not the thinnest one. It's like the easiest one to hold is still going to be the iPad Pro, and so it bums me out that they missed an opportunity to really differentiate the iPad by bumping up the iPad Mini, which, again, it's such a great device.

1:43:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm curious what you all thought. My takeaway from this and I guess, coming at it from a Mac user, a Macintosh user is that Apple is now doubling down on this notion of what's a PC. This is the post-PC computer and it really is looking more and more and priced more and more like a full-fledged laptop and priced more and more like a full-fledged laptop. I really feel like people like me who are worried oh, what's going to happen to Mac and Mac OS? I think the alarm bells are going off again. I was lulled to sleep for a while, but I think they're going off again.

1:43:50 - Andy Ihnatko
My take was still that, gee, it's impressive. These are great leaps in performance. They made great hay about what Final Cut could do on an iPad with AI features and selecting things and selecting foreground objects from background objects with just a touch of a button, blah, blah, blah. All I could think of, however, was, wow, that's really, really impressive. Imagine how impressive an achievement they could have made if five or 10 years ago, they had not decided that touchscreens do not belong on Macs. This could be a Macintosh, this could be a next evolution of a hybrid desktop tablet sort of OS, sort of interface.

And now, as I so ably demonstrated last week, you can't really sub an iPad for a laptop's work To this day. The same thing is true today, as it was the first day. An ipad is great, so long as you can really predict exactly what you're going to need it to do and everything works fine. It's the moment when you have to call an audible in the middle on the day and on the, in the moment that it really starts to let you down. So I again kudos to making a really wonderful, really wonderful tablet. I've got an iPad pro.

1:45:01 - Doc Rock
I love it, but what I would love this iPad pro to be is just no iPad at all and just a Mac that is that flexible. Yeah, I think it's coming. I think the emergence is getting closer and strangely, the Rosetta Stone of this, if you will, is the Apple Vision Pro, because that is the first computer that's not a computer, but it is a computer and it shows that you can put computer as appliance. So I think we're three to four years out, but I believe your wish comes true sooner than you think I'm not wishing for this.

1:45:39 - Leo Laporte
believe me, the Vision Pro is an iPad internally, right? I mean, it's basically the iPad. Yeah, yeah, I wonder. You know, I don't think Apple stopped making the Mac, but it really feels like they want. This is the computer they want people, even pros, to buy. Here's the, just so people know what we're talking about. The comparison on the left is the new 13 inch M4. That's very important based iPad pro. This is a M2 based iPad pro, the last generation, and the new iPad Air, also M2. Price-wise, I don't know why they don't have the. Maybe they did they stop selling the iPad Pro sixth generation. They don't have a price for it.

Screen now 13 inches instead of 12.9. You can see that Ultra Retina XDR on the new iPad Pro pro, liquid retina xdr on the old ipad pro and liquid retina no dr on the air. You don't get promotion either, but all three are p3, all three are true tone, all three have been any reflective coating and they introduced a nano texture display on the one and two terabyte models of the new iPad Pro. Now that's the same nano texture. I think that's on the monitor, right On the XDR monitor, which is, I think, pretty sensitive. Micah, you stopped me from ordering the nano texture display.

1:47:08 - Mikah Sargent
Please don't get it, because you said it's dimmer. That was the thing that I didn't hear people complaining about any sort of sensitivity or that it would chip or something. It was just that by having that on there, you're reducing. They felt that the brightness was reduced.

1:47:26 - Leo Laporte
But remember when the XDR display came out with the nano texture, they said don't touch it. And they sold a $19 cup polishing cloth with it. Maybe they've got a more durable.

1:47:38 - Mikah Sargent
Hopefully this is. Yeah, this is a different kind. I mean don't touch, it doesn't work for an iPad, exactly, you've got to touch it.

1:47:45 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of a problem.

1:47:46 - Mikah Sargent
Only with the Apple Pencil.

1:47:48 - Leo Laporte
The M4 chip is now out. I'm not sure we're going to have to really dive deep into that and we will in a bit. 10 core cpu up to. They didn't talk about the 10 cores, they talked about the six and four 10 core gpu, 16 core neural engine. That's the same 16 core neural engine. It looks like in the m2 versions of the ipad. In fact it's very similar to the m2, so we'll be interested to see um camera wise, they're still going with that 12 megapixel I? I. Even though they promoted the idea that you might want to shoot video with your ipad, please don't yes, but you'll notice that they lost a lens.

1:48:26 - Mikah Sargent
We only have one camera lens on the new ipad pros, whereas the previous model has both the wide and ultra wide. It was an interesting choice to get rid of a lens, but I think one that suggests, hey, maybe the iPad's not the best place to be taking the photos of the videos.

1:48:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, even though they showed it, but they did also release-.

1:48:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, but they showed it specifically for files. You know they were really Scanning was a thing. Yeah, yes, document scanning or if you need to.

1:48:53 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, they also released a Final Cut camera app which is designed for multi-camera shoots using Final Cut on the iPad. So I think they want you to use your iPhone. I don't know, it's confusing. They did. Thank God they moved the camera. Always been a problem for me on the iPad Pro was the camera was on the left-hand side if you held it in landscape mode. In fact, they even show it here in portrait mode as if. Oh, of course, that's how you're supposed to hold an iPad, but the new one they put it on top, like they did with the Air. So that's good. It does have the true depth camera system. It'll move around with you on center stage camera system. You know it'll move. You move around with you on center stage connectors yep, thunderbolt, usb4, just like the previous version, face id. Here's one you're going to be interested in, though apple pencil pro is not supported on your old ipad pro yeah, it requires an m2 or an m4, excuse me.

1:49:49 - Andy Ihnatko
A new, new, new air or a new, uh new.

1:49:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because this is 12th generation. I mean 12.9-inch 6th generation iPad is on M2. So it's not the M2. They just declined to support the Pencil Pro on the older iPad Pro. Maybe a little nudge to get you in there.

1:50:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, so that means that now they have three pencils they have to keep. I checked to make sure Even the first generation pencil is still on the on the books, which is, I suppose, is fair, because they want to make sure it's compatible all the way down. But wow, that's. I'm sure that's a non optimal roadmap that they were trying to avoid.

1:50:28 - Leo Laporte
They have bumped the minimum memory storage, which is a good thing. Frankly, that was a little low at 128, but it's now 256 gigs. Let's do a little shopping, shall we? So, micah, you like the 11-inch, eh? Mm-hmm and black, or?

1:50:47 - Mikah Sargent
silver, space, black, of course, gotta love that right Up to two terabytes.

1:50:58 - Leo Laporte
Notice, though, two terabytes is $1,000 more than the 256 gigabytes.

1:51:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, wow, it's not just storage, I'm thinking you get a better processor?

1:51:06 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what. Do you get Something more?

1:51:08 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know People have not yet pulled that apart, but I think that is in the works of trying to figure out exactly Because we have seen in the past that the terabyte models have more RAM or have other features that the non-terabyte models have, I think that's what it is.

1:51:29 - Doc Rock
My current one is two terabytes and I mainly got it because I just was going to be using it to dump a lot of photo and footage when I'm traveling. I use it to edit and at this point in time, like I would say, one would have been fine, but I always overdo it, yeah.

1:51:45 - Leo Laporte
Cause you can't add it right.

1:51:47 - Doc Rock
Yeah, you can't really add it later, but it is super hAndy being able to, like you know, take pictures with my cameras, or take footage with my camera or the Osmo pocket 3 now, which is my favorite camera, dump it straight to the ipad, get the chopping and then you know I'll put stuff on the fly. So it's, it's helpful, but I don't really notice anything other than the space. If you go up, it's go ahead, it's, it's, it's.

1:52:08 - Andy Ihnatko
It might sound a little bit weird, given how cheap you can buy a terabyte of storage like as a as a thunderbolt device, but there it's possible. It's likely that it's. It's not just the amount, it's the kind of ram that they want to put in there. Um, I thought was it's still kind of weird that on the ipad air this you can still get the minimum of 128 gigs, which is like really seriously. But I I think that's a that might be equally a reflection of here's how much Apple spends on RAM and here's how much it would affect the really really comfortable buy-in price of the iPad Air if they made the minimum just 256 gigs.

1:52:46 - Mikah Sargent
That reminds me too. You were talking about the nanotexture glass. Speaking of storage size impacting nanotexture glass is only available on the one terabyte and two terabyte models. That's right. So they you can't even get that nano on the smaller.

1:53:00 - Doc Rock
And that's probably because they're doing something with the image in order to make it work properly with the new nanotexture, especially with the new sandwich displays, so it might need that extra space in order to do something.

1:53:13 - Leo Laporte
You're very generous, Doc Rock. It could also be, because they just want you'd have to get more, spend more money.

1:53:20 - Doc Rock
I never take that approach because that is the easiest way to ruin a business and this business has not ruined itself for all of this time. But everyone always goes through oh, they're just doing this to make money. I'll tell you how I run my business. I do things to make money.

1:53:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're pushing you, they're giving you reasons to buy more. There is also thanks to a James B who's looking at the tech specs. The one and two terabyte models have one more performance core. They have twice the Ram 16 gigs. The lower storage units 16 gigs. The lower storage units 256 and 512, have three cores and performance cores and eight gigs of RAM. So that's what the bump is you're getting, but it sounds like you really want to at least get a terabyte. If you want the nanotexture or more RAM, I think 16 gigs of RAM seems like a good idea personally.

1:54:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, especially with the investment in AI, now that they're really going both shoulders ahead with that.

1:54:30 - Alex Lindsay
At least on other platforms.

1:54:30 - Andy Ihnatko
We've seen that these models, if you're trying to run them on device and that seems to be what Apple wants to do you really do need as much RAM as possible to get them to work efficiently. And that was after people were already complaining that eight gigs seemed a little bit chintzy at least not for under advice that might not have the option of getting more RAM than that or a really, really big price jump for getting more RAM than that. So I mean they did. I think a lot of us were kind of paying close attention to what do they say about artificial intelligence, because they're going to part of the messaging.

Going forward for apple is going to be yes, but we acknowledge that we live in an ai ai driven tech world. Believe me, all of our hardware and software and our operating systems are going to reflect that. So we're going to spend, even on a 41 minute or 40 minute presentation. We're going to spend at least three or four or five minutes explaining exactly how powerful uh the m4 is for, uh, for exactly how powerful the M4 is, for how powerful the new neural engine is. I think they actually even said that with a lot of fudge factor in it.

The iPad Pro has the most powerful onboard AI of any desktop computer. They're basically saying that all the intel stuff has not come out yet it is. It is faster than all the stuff that is currently existing. It probably won't be as fast as what's going to happen in six months for now, but at least for now we can say that we have the most powerful uh ai hardware support in the cpu on any mobile or desktop computer if, uh, numbers are your thing, you can remember the number 38, 38 tops uh, which is what they're claiming for their ai engine.

1:56:03 - Leo Laporte
You can compare that when qualcomm stuff comes out, which is any minute now. Um yeah, I don't know if intel is going to even be in the game, but qualcomm is claiming, of course, to be to outperform the M2s. Nanotexture glass costs you $100 more. Wi-fi, I mean plus cellular, rather Cellular costs you $200 more. That's kind of a bump. It used to be $129.

1:56:26 - Mikah Sargent
It's now $200 more, and some people were caught off guard, I guess, by the fact that the cellular models no longer have a physical SIM drawer. It's only eSIM. It's only eSIM, yeah. So if that's a thing that bugs, you be aware of that.

1:56:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I imagine that will be more of an issue outside the US, but here in the US I think every carrier does eSIM. Now let's see what else. Apple Pencil Pro is $129. Apple regular pencil non-pro is 79. They are not offering the less expensive pencil apple pencil dilettante edition like two weeks ago, because I left one in the airplane.

1:57:10 - Doc Rock
I just bought a new pencil two weeks ago and it's funny now a pencil can be found with find my and I was like oh, we're getting to the pencil, I'm going to tear apart my whole house looking for the thing.

1:57:21 - Leo Laporte
They packed a lot of stuff into that pencil. I don't know if they have UWB in there or what, but it's pretty impressive. So let's see here Magic to add the magic keyboard, something I would never buy again. By the way, really, you like the uh, third party?

1:57:38 - Doc Rock
ones. I know I love my magic keyboard, but here, without traveling, it has happened so many times. When you're set up on the the tray table right and I have, I have a 12.9 inch pro it's bent back like that. Everything is glorious. I'm in my movie and the person in front decides to throw the chair back and then it bites the top of that little clicky thing, and the iPad either hits the tank or yeah, and I'm like you know what, I'm not even going to bother anymore.

I'm like you know what, I'm not even going to bother anymore, I'm just going to get a regular folio and some portable keyboard and just be happy Because, yeah, it's nice to type on. It does make it way heavier too, and so now that most of my life is in an airplane or an airport, I'm like, yeah, I'm not buying one of those ever again, and I actually like it.

1:58:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, well, that's going to be true of any laptop, of course I do. I do love my magic keyboard. I generally keep it. That's generally where the iPad lives. I find, though, that I think, for the reason like for reasons that you were mentioning, I also tend to keep the like, the standard, just like keyboard, excuse me, the standard cover like in the bag as well, because if I'm going to be out for like a day, even overnight, it's kind of nice to have that option of being able to actually fold it as flat as I want it to go. The only thing I don't like about the magic keyboard is it bends only to a certain extent and no further, and oftentimes, that extra like 15, 20 degrees is the difference between perfect comfort, perfect viewing angle, and okay, I guess that'll do, yes exactly, and I, you know, here's a.

1:59:15 - Doc Rock
So this is so crazy, Andy, I often forget to take it out, like because it lives there so much that in my brain it's just part of the deal. So oftentimes I'm sitting, I'm holding it uncomfortably, I'm holding the magic keyboard uncomfortably and my brain never says, hey, dummy, just pull it apart. Oh, look, you can just carry this, you know. And so, yeah, I agree with you magic keyboard is 300 dollars.

1:59:39 - Leo Laporte
It's cheaper, it was 350. Oh, all right, that's a. That's a blessing. It does have a function row. It's a win, a win 300 bucks.

1:59:49 - Andy Ihnatko
But that it does. It does make it a challenging proposition. Because now again, I love the iPad pro, but by the time, if Apple is positioning it as something that is competitive with a laptop, by the time you add in a comfortable keyboard case like that, you are not just, you are almost in the arena of like a performance grade uh windows notebook with with a touch screen and with uh with a with a pen that was probably not as good as the pencil but as good as most people are going to want. So it's an interesting proposition to suddenly say, once you, you look it's. I mean I, I cheaped out about it.

I did get the iPad pro I wanted. I did not get the keyboard case until like eight to 10 months later, when the previous generation model was on sale and I found out that you can actually use them in the new, in the new models too. So I was able to cheap out and at least spread it out a little bit. But if I had $1,500, $1,600 worth of iPad in my basket at once, I would need to take a good 48-hour breather to figure out what can I buy for $1,600 that might do as good a job as this iPad Pro combination, and can I do even better than that for the same amount or as good?

2:01:05 - Leo Laporte
for $400, $500 less If you are a mini fan. By the way, german is saying that there will be a seventh generation mini at some point relatively soon. So um, we will see. You know, I, I don't.

2:01:20 - Andy Ihnatko
And a new pencil to go with it maybe, maybe I like the exactly yeah, I've had many.

2:01:26 - Leo Laporte
I use the mini uh, far more than I use any other iPad. But okay, let's see, have we covered all of the? Oh, I forgot to tell you your price, Micah. With a terabyte $1899. It is, it's a laptop. It's an expensive Windows laptop and that's the 11-inch model. You put in the 13-inch model. It's, it's an expensive windows laptop and that's the. That's the 11 inch model. He put in the 13 inch model. It kind of goes up a little bit more as well 21 99, 21 niner niner yeah.

2:01:57 - Doc Rock
I just put it in the chat. I paid 25 99 for my last one.

2:02:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, I should probably keep track of prices and stuff. This is, I think, the same price. Yes, should probably keep track of prices and stuff. This is, I think, the same price. Yes, as the old one was pretty close, it feels like it's the same, roughly the same price.

2:02:16 - Doc Rock
Um so, micah, I have a question. Sorry, leo, I know you're in boss, but I had to ask a question because you mentioned earlier you guys said that not to get the nano, you think that the regular screen and paper-like or something of that nature is better?

2:02:29 - Mikah Sargent
So the reason why I was suggesting Leo, not get the nanotexture display, is because… he knows me, that's why he knows.

2:02:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know.

2:02:38 - Mikah Sargent
Leo.

2:02:38 - Doc Rock
He knows, that's what it is.

2:02:42 - Mikah Sargent
And B. The complaints that I've heard is that you do see a drop in brightness by doing that, and so for some people that's annoying, even if it means that there's less reflect. You know, reflection, um, but I can't speak to the textural differences.

2:02:59 - Doc Rock
Uh, that now with the double, with the see the thing that got me this morning and again, my eyes were still halfway focusing when they talked about the stacked oleds. Yeah, this time we're getting oled. That's a difference. It should be brighter. Um, it's a were still halfway focusing when they talked about the stacked OLEDs. Yeah, this time we're getting OLED. That's a difference. It should be brighter. It's a thousand nits, or stop that Stupid reactions. And then it also has. So you have the double panel. So that just has me intrigued, and normally I would just be triggering now, but now I think I have to go in and see for myself. Yeah, how does it how bright it is? Cause you're right, as you, as you get. What's the word we say? Now, leo, vintage, brightness is important. Brightness is the difference between being able to see clearly or not.

2:03:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, right Vintage people need light.

2:03:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I also. Yeah, I had the liquid paper on mine because Alex told me to and it gives it a nice texture with the pencil. I took it off because I just I want the glass. I like the smooth glass. Now, we'll see with the new pencil, we'll see. So, you, you'd like a little texture on your, on your screen, doc well, only because, uh, you know, they show.

2:04:07 - Doc Rock
One of the first things is like people take an actual notice when it comes to writing. Yeah, it's glorious. For everything else, it's irritating and I wish I could just clip it on. Like you know, the old grandpa shades clip on the texture right and then take it back off well, that is the advantage of the screen right now.

2:04:25 - Leo Laporte
The screen cover is you. You can at least remove it if you decide you don't like it when you buy the nano screen.

2:04:29 - Mikah Sargent
You got it, it's yours, yeah I can't remember who it is, but, uh, somebody has figured out how they. The outside is a magnet and so, or something like that, I'll have to send you. I'll find it and I'll tell you the whole way around, the whole perimeter. Yeah, they basically make the outside the sticky part, but it's, I'll tell you the whole way around the whole perimeter. Yeah, they basically make the outside the sticky part, but it's not sticky, so you can pop it out, have a magnetic screen and then, yeah, pull it off afterwards because you remember the old school crt 3ms.

2:04:58 - Doc Rock
They were just clip on right when you wanted the privacy screen or the anti-glare.

2:05:02 - Andy Ihnatko
It was just a little frame, you yeah we need more velcro and a 50 to 2 000, that's it thank you, uh to mike in the chat.

2:05:11 - Mikah Sargent
Um, it's from astropad and it's called rock paper pencil. Oh and yeah, it just goes on. The outside is where it connects and then you can just take it off. It's nano cling, it's not magnets.

2:05:24 - Leo Laporte
Um well, nano cling is even better than I want to get from that new from saran wrap nano cling. Uh, okay, so it is just a cling. I don't that seems like that's I have one you do.

2:05:38 - Mikah Sargent
I haven't installed it, though, so I can't talk about that. It's just sitting in a box for like a month now, because I bought it. I was like, oh, this is so cool, but um, yeah, I'll have to try it and let you know, huh oh, nano clean sounds like something that is uh sponsored by the mill trimming products.

2:05:55 - Leo Laporte
That's on all the podcasts I was thinking it was sponsored by charmin oh god, you guys, uh, you mean uh, okay, so six, it uses static. It's stronger than magnets, according to Astropad. Huh, huh. And they also have their own rock paper pencil tip which looks like a ballpoint pen. That comes with the kit.

2:06:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah yeah, you can get that with the kit if you'd like, but the problem is I have to. This is so stupid, but I have to clean the iPad screen first and I just am lazy, so I haven't done it.

2:06:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:06:30 - Mikah Sargent
You want it perfect, don't you?

2:06:31 - Doc Rock
Why don't we recommend you a bottle of swoosh?

2:06:35 - Mikah Sargent
I have swoosh. I've got all the stuff I need, except for the desire to make it happen. That's the one thing I like.

2:06:42 - Leo Laporte
Isn't it funny how geeks converge on a product. It's just odd. Like the um, the Eli Patel said, the printer, everybody has that nobody talks about. Um, uh, which is what is that?

2:06:52 - Mikah Sargent
It's that, brother brother HL two, something, something, yeah.

2:06:55 - Leo Laporte
And then go ahead. You can bring me the swoosh and then apparently we have without it's like we all uh, we all our have synchronized it. We all have the same cleaners. Oh wait, but this is not a swoosh.

2:07:09 - Doc Rock
This is whoosh. You know, he meant whoosh, I meant whoosh, oh good.

2:07:16 - Leo Laporte
What a relief. What a relief. I wouldn't want to be in the outcraft we were going to have to find a new product called swoosh right. I never heard of whoosh, but apparently our team does.

2:07:24 - Doc Rock
Oh man, it tastes really good with a single malt.

2:07:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm joking do not drink your whoosh all right, let's take a little break. We have lots more to talk about and we'll go to the 11 inch. We'll talk about the new pro pencil uh you take the break.

2:07:38 - Mikah Sargent
I'll clean my ipad screen and put this. That's nano cling on it.

2:07:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Put your put your whoosh, something you should do spontaneously and in a rush? Yeah, absolutely.

2:07:48 - Alex Lindsay
Absolutely so what was the feeling of the office hours crew. I think a lot of people enjoyed it. I think that there's definitely. I think overall there was a little bit of a yeah, they caught up to some degree, you know, with things that were already out there. But also I think that Apple's their approach to it I think is is definitely unique and very uniquely Apple, you know, in the sense that they basically created what we kind of thought of as three layers. You know they have the.

You're going to ask, you're going to do some things on your device, some things on the cloud, some things into the, into the private cloud, and then for all the other things you still have access to right now chat, gpt and eventually Gemini and other things. But I do think that number one is that I think that Apple always looks at what will 90% of the population, 90% of their users, do 90% of the time, and I think if you look at what is being produced by the device and the private cloud, it's probably between 70-90% of what the average person wants to do with their phone or with their device. And then they still have this kind of release valve and they have the freedom to keep on expanding what people are doing on their devices and on their private cloud, while still never having it, not be able to scale up. I think that the other thing is they're giving most of these tools, or almost all these tools, back to the developers, and so developers are going to be able to add this.

You know, I think before they had to kind of figure out what it was going to do and how much it was going to cost, and all those other things, and a lot of those things now are getting tied in to the, you know being made available to the developers to add to it. So I think that I think we definitely saw a very, you know, fairly unique way of approaching the problem. That is something only Apple can do. Doesn't necessarily make it better or worse, just makes it an Apple version of AI, and so I think that that's, but I think a lot of folks are pretty excited about it. Andy, what'd you think?

2:09:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought it was really really great. The when you Andy, what'd you think? I thought it was really really great. It's great that we're talking about this a day later as opposed to the day of, because this is true of pretty much all Apple keynotes, but I think, especially this one. After a day when your first enthusiasm wears off, that's when you start looking at exactly what was shown off and you realize that, okay, they didn't show off a lot that was really new or really fresh.

A lot of the most interesting stuff, like the intelligence in Siri. They were really vague about exactly how this is going to work and when it's going to be released. So this was all like a lot of hypothetical stuff. But when you compare it to Google IOS AI keynote last month, it's pretty much the same thing. Actually almost lasted exactly the same amount of time. I was surprised it lasted nearly two hours.

But whereas Google was extremely hyped about talking about the basic technology and talking about the core research and talking about the core research and talking about the layers that they were putting into, this Apple really wanted just to focus on, here are some actual things that here are some demos of actual things our intelligence are going to do built into our actual products right now, and it doesn't really matter that they can't really that. They that maybe it's not quite so ambitious as far as what they can announce right now. It gives people a sense of comfort that, yeah, apple does have a strategy. Yeah, it looks like they're not going to make the same mistakes that OpenAI and Google made, which are myriad and legendary, and it looks like they've bought enough time to actually make these things happen. So I'm really really very pleased with it.

2:11:27 - Alex Lindsay
They bought enough time to actually make these things happen. So I'm really really very pleased with it, and one of the things is that, while the keynote was very cursatory I definitely encourage people to look at the state of the union was much deeper than what Apple was doing. Yeah, me too. So it was a much deeper, deep dive. It's not like, oh, we just kind of added. I think that there was this little bit of like the kind of uninformed press was saying well, they've incorporated chat, gpt, and it was kind of like Exactly, yeah, I mean, it's a little deeper than that. You know, like they're doing an enormous amount of work on the device, an enormous amount of work in the private cloud, and then they're basically a release valve is oh yeah, you can have all these other things on the periphery if you want to be able to add them. And, by the way, if you're a developer, you don't have to do anything other than open it up. If you're already using Apple's tools, it's very easy to add.

2:12:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, the State of the Union had a lot of. Really. It really did bring home the idea that, no, they didn't just say, okay, well, we entered into a desperation agreement with OpenAI to get basic text summaries and basic rewrites somewhere on our device. Now, when you look at things like the private cloud compute which I'm sure we'll talk about in more depth later on that's what they're talking about. How not only surprised me that it's going to be running on Apple's own silicon in the cloud, but also that it was only about 10 or 15 minutes of the State of the Union. It was only about 10 or 15 minutes of the State of the Union, but they're mentioning that.

Well, basically, we started with, like iOS slash X for the operating system that these servers are running, and we removed everything that we don't need, and not just to make it faster, more performative, but saying we even removed from the operating system persistent storage, because this is supposed to not actually keep any people's data.

So we've removed everything that could actually make that happen storage, because this is not. This is supposed to not actually keep any any people's data. So we've removed everything that could actually make that happen. So this is it's. It's great because if, uh, in the next year, uh, some naysayers are saying, oh well, gosh, look at, look at chat, gpt 12. Hey, look at gemini 81, look at what it can do. Apple really is has a long, a long-term plan. They're making a statement, they have a point of view about how they want to go about this and so long as they stay focused on delivering actual appreciative tools that are better or as good as what we can actually see through a third-party app on Gemini or OpenAI, they got time. They got time, micah, you're nodding.

2:13:46 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, what was the last part there? I think, uh, simply the the most important aspect for me yesterday and we talked about this a lot during, uh, our coverage of the event, um was the very clear and thoroughly thought out method by which Apple is introducing Apple intelligence and kind of setting the not just the groundwork for it, but also kind of how its approach looks and how it differs, I think, from other approaches, and the way that it was so clearly explained and we talk about the capabilities that it has. We talk about the architecture and then we talk about the most important aspect for consumers, which is what can you actually do with it, and I just felt it was very considered and I really appreciated that aspect of it. A lot of my colleagues who feel a type of way about generative AI and for the most part I've existed outside of that I understand the able to do with it and so, seeing a more considered approach from a company that I cover quite a bit, I liked that.

I was happy that there was that consideration that went into it and that it was clear that the company said we're not just going to give you this blank canvas. I think it was actually it was either Tim Cook or it was Federighi who, in an interview, talked about not just giving the teenager the keys to the car. That isn't what Apple wanted to do with generative AI Some very specific use cases and some very specific demos showing how it can be used in day-to-day life. I think that's good.

2:15:48 - Leo Laporte
Let me show some outside opinions. During the event, you and I were watching Apple's stock go down, then up, down then up. It was down quite a bit. Well, since then, it's gone up quite a bit. It is now $12 up. It was as low as $191 yesterday. It's up to $205 today. The market says yay, this is a good thing.

Elon Musk says if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned in my companies. This is an unacceptable security violation and visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door while they be stored in a Faraday cage. He's sounding nuts. I think it's only a matter of time before he starts talking about sharks. It's patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security and privacy. Apple has no clue what's actually going on. Once they hand your data over to, openai will protect your security and privacy. Apple has no clue what's actually going on. Once they hand your data over to OpenAI, they're selling you down the river.

I should point out, elon has been in a feud with OpenAI. He funded it initially, but pulled out when he decided they weren't going in the right direction and they wouldn't let him run the show. Sam Allman was at the Apple event signaling at least some support from OpenAI. And then there's this from Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic the iPhone is now an AI Trojan horse. Now that's not all bad. He says generative AI has become truly inescapable. I think that my takeaway I mean, look, I kind of like AI. I don't think generative AI you know AI chatbots is all that interesting. I was really glad Apple didn't show that, but there is a lot of things you can do with AI. That's really cool. In fact, it's my opinion, apple Sherlocked AI, because AI now stands for Apple intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

And I think, from a marketing point of view alone, Apple did exactly the right thing. They said this is AI for, as you guys have said, for the real people, for the masses, doing stuff that real people really want to do.

2:17:58 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that we have to remember that we were talking about this this morning in office hours that most people have not used any AI. So you know we talk about it and it feels like something like everybody's using it all the time. I have chat GPT open all the time. I'm using mid journey at least once a day, Like it. It seems like it's all around us.

But if you look at the average person using their iPhone, they're they're not using chat GPT, they're not using any of those things.

So as you look at all the features that Apple's bringing to the device into the private cloud, by itself, that's going to, that's going to become ubiquitous with using your computer, you know, and then you are going to very easily be able to jump over and get some, get more, if you want to, from chat GPT.

So it really is, for the Apple consumer is going to introduce a lot of people to AI and so and a lot of their stuff that they do day to day is going to probably exist on their people to AI and a lot of their stuff that they do day-to-day is going to probably exist on their device or on the private cloud the Genmojis, the little images, the fun stuff that they're going to do, filling something in, doing some correction. All of that stuff is going to be stuff that is done very seamlessly for them. That's going to be their introduction and again, because it's everywhere for developers, it has kind of commoditized the service. You know, in a sense, that a lot of people could say they were doing AI. Now most Apple developers could just add it.

2:19:21 - Leo Laporte
I'm not sure you're right that most people haven't tried it. Chatgpt had 100 million monthly users at its peak, so somebody's using it. I think certainly the public is very aware of AI. It's been widely reported. I think probably most people have just tried it just to see what would happen. Remember, microsoft has it built into Windows, the biggest operating system in the world, and you know it's kind of hard to get away from it, frankly, in Windows. So I think more people have tried it than you think, Alex, but I do think Apple is being fairly judicious. Tim Cook, in an interview with the Washington Post, admitted that AI is going to hallucinate. Let me see if I can find the quote. What's your confidence?

2:20:06 - Mikah Sargent
That might be where they talk about giving the team the keys.

2:20:09 - Leo Laporte
This is Josh Tyrangiel, who's an opinion columnist, writes about AI in the Washington Post. He says what's your confidence that Apple intelligence will not hallucinate? Tim Cook says it's not 100%, but I think we've done everything that we know to do, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we're using it in. So I'm confident it will be very high quality, but I'd say in all honesty, that's short of 100%. I would never claim it's 100%. So he's hedging a little bit, saying yeah, yeah, you might get something weird. I think the biggest risk for they're smart because they're not just kind of giving AI an open field that everybody can just try. You know, try stuff. But they didn't introduce a brand new app, image playground, which is, you know. You know this is where Google has gotten in trouble Stable diffusion mid journey. Even Microsoft designer have gotten in trouble because their AI image generators have been used to generate images. You know people say, oh, that's problematic.

2:21:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's got an image generator. Well, but you notice that it's not none of the demos that they gave showed it, showing anything that was nearly photorealistic. It's all like just these playful images and only three styles animation, illustration style or sketch. Animation, illustration style or sketch. So yeah, I think right now they're putting such strict guardrails on what this is used for and what they're willing to endorse sending out in the world that was generated by Image Playgrounds that's mostly. Hey, make a Pixar cartoon version of your mom riding a horse.

2:21:42 - Leo Laporte
That solves one of the problems, which is people taking AI-generated deepfakes and passing them off as real because it's not going to be real To have it right there, but it doesn't solve the problem Google had, where people said show me some Supreme Court justices, and they were all black.

or show me some founding fathers, and they were all black. Now, I personally don't think that's a problem, but there are plenty of people who did, and Google had to step back and really retreat on its image generation. How, how long before iOS 18 comes out? Now, by the way, this will not come out with iOS 18, right?

2:22:14 - Mikah Sargent
We're going to have to wait. It's not out with the betas yet at all, and when it does come out, I think based on the words that have been used, it seems like it will be in beta even when it's in public, even after the iPhone comes out.

2:22:26 - Leo Laporte
Probably I it's going to be later much later this year, but how long it'll be seconds after it comes out before somebody types in? Show me some supreme court justices, right?

2:22:36 - Mikah Sargent
or show me some founding fathers I'm curious to see how they walk things out. Yeah, are there how much safety I can't type in. Yeah, how much safety.

2:22:43 - Leo Laporte
And we know that safety does not work because all of these companies, not so much up in AI but certainly Anthropic and Google, have tried to be safe.

2:22:52 - Mikah Sargent
And there's always quote, unquote, jailbreaking.

2:22:53 - Andy Ihnatko
There's jailbreaking, yeah, so you know, I'm sure Apple, apple red team, the hell out of this before they let it go. And this is one of those things that if you, if you listen really closely, you would, you would maybe assume that this is coming in iOS 18 when it's first released. But the only only timeframe they ever gave for a lot of this stuff was sometime in the next year, so they're not even done probably red teaming it.

Yeah, exactly, I mean, it's a good demo, but they're not. Yeah, there's so much of that. Again, the things they learned from Google and OpenAI is that the more ambitious that you get, the more powerful a tool you want to give to people. The more ambitious that you get, the more powerful a thing you tool you want to give to people, the more dangerous it's going to be in the hands of people who don't understand what it is, or people who understand exactly what it is. I want to use it to perform acts of extreme mischief. And they're again, they got time, so they're very, very willing to simply say OK, we've got a great image generator. It really is just for making cartoons and illustrations. It's going to be for things like in Notes. If you just draw like a rough sketch, you can have our image generator turn into something that's a little bit more refined. Really, the Notes app has so much I think we should spend some time on the Notes app.

That was really a killer app, my goodness. It reminded me of the Newton in a good way, not in an egg freckles way, but in a good way. Go ahead. I'm sorry, I'm just not to jump what we're going to be talking about, but I think it was pretty amazing how very quietly they slipped in. Oh, and if you want to like, you don't have to just do handwriting to text, you can just do handwriting to handwriting, because we will figure out what your handwriting looks like.

So we'll do spell check and we will correct the spelling in your handwriting. If you want to use our generative AI to like tighten something up, it will tighten it up in your handwriting because we will build a facsimile of your handwriting. And if this were being done by Gemini, it would be a wonderful tech demo. It would be an amazing white paper. But, oh my God, the internet would be absolutely choked to death with congratulations. Now Google knows how to fake your signature everywhere. Apple really set up the stage very, very well by saying that. Here is what they talked about privacy and basically guardrails, before they talked about anything else. And again they're doing very, very simple things. They're showing exactly what this is being used for. Not now you can make a font out of your handwriting. It's no. Here's a way that we can now have your natural handwriting be editable, cut and pasteable and more natural to work with if you like to work with handwriting.

2:25:23 - Leo Laporte
We will. We're still seeing Apple intelligence. Just the other day we got the update to 18.2. So Apple is getting more and more intelligent all the time. Right, and we will continue to cover it on MacBreak Weekly. You're watching our special year-end best of episode. Glad you're here. I do want to ask a little tiny favor from all of you, not just Club Twit members. Every year, you may remember, we do a survey of our audience. We want to get to know you a little bit better. It helps us with sales because we can say you know as we often do, 70 of our audience.

Are it decision makers? That kind of thing? Uh, it's a very quick survey, shouldn't only take you a couple of minutes. Twittv survey. This is the new 2024-2025 survey. We're starting a little bit earlier this year than we usually do. It just helps us and it would be doing us all a favor if you did it. So in between shows, maybe. Twittv slash survey. Thank you so much. As time went by and we realized that the amount of news about the Vision Pro was shrinking, we decided maybe we should just carve out a little niche in MacBreak Weekly. In order to do that, we introduced the Vision Pro jingle. All right, we apparently John Ashley, our talented producer and technical director, has created for us, but you don't have it.

2:26:52 - Mikah Sargent
No, no see, this is where, when you do the thing now, it's going to just show up magically in post-production All right.

2:26:59 - Leo Laporte
so even though you don't have it and people watching live won't see it, A premiere for everybody, except for the people who are actually doing it.

2:27:06 - Doc Rock
Exactly, it's time we're so lucky.

2:27:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Email us on Discord and tell us how you like it.

2:27:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah tell us how you liked it. Does it say anything, John Ashley, or is it just like a trumpet?

2:27:18 - Mikah Sargent
No, it's actually based off of what Andy did last week his little jingle, you made the song no what do you see?

2:27:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what do you know?

2:27:29 - Mikah Sargent
I didn. What do you see? What do you know? It's time for Vision Pro. It was BeMore236. Thank you.

2:27:32 - Leo Laporte
BeMore236.

2:27:34 - Mikah Sargent
And I used it. Yay, which is happening right here.

2:27:37 - Leo Laporte
So right now, I will say, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to talk. Vision Pro.

2:27:42 - Jason Snell
Andy, that's your cue Go.

2:27:43 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you have to do Andy's. What do you see?

2:27:45 - Andy Ihnatko
What do you know? It's time to talk bing vision pro that was for the live audience.

2:27:50 - Leo Laporte
That's just the. You know the sketch version. What do you see?

2:27:54 - Doc Rock
what do you know? It's time to talk to vision pro wow, what a great theme song.

2:28:05 - Jason Snell
that was everybody Amazing. If only there were some.

2:28:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm writing my congressman that's our new national anthem. If we have any pride in this country at all, If only there were some Vision Pro News.

2:28:18 - Leo Laporte
Alas Tim Cook in an interview says he wears it regularly to watch videos.

2:28:26 - Jason Snell
Yay, yeah, to an Australian journalist, I believe, who had to fly to Cupertino to interview Tim Cook. I thought that was also a flex, right. Oh yeah, it's launching in Australia. We've got an availability for you to talk to Tim Cook. Oh, amazing, is he coming to Sydney?

2:28:44 - Leo Laporte
No, but you are coming to.

2:28:47 - Jason Snell
Cupertino. Fly on over. That's a long flight. It really puts my 70-minute drive to Apple Park in perspective when I meet people who flew in from Australia or the UK to go to an Apple event here for Patrick.

2:29:02 - Leo Laporte
Delahanty is the quintessential Vision. Pro user waiting for more content. That is one of my favorite memes. It's from Narcos, that is what's his name. Yeah, bad guy. Canada. This Friday, ray Maxwell's very excited because he bought a Vision Pro Australia. Yes, and he bought a Vision Pro from America that he couldn't use some things with. So I guess, ray, now you'll be able to be legit.

2:29:36 - Jason Snell
You can come out of the closet and tell the world my friends in the UK are excited because, first off, if it breaks they could take it to a store instead of flying to New York and second, it means that they can also buy some other accessories and stuff and they can use their own Apple ID and it's like there's lots of good things for all of those people out there. And it'll be interesting to see new markets. There will be an influx of new users to a certain extent and we'll see what happens with that. The betas are great. I've been enjoying the Vision Pro betas because, again, they're actually adding. Why are you even on the Vision Pro if you're not using the beta? What are you even doing?

2:30:13 - Leo Laporte
if you're going to be cutting edge be cutting edge so what do you use to? Dust your Vision Pro.

2:30:22 - Jason Snell
I keep it in a case.

2:30:23 - Leo Laporte
I keep it in a case and every day you take it out.

2:30:27 - Jason Snell
Of that case, I do not use it every day, but I do do use it, I would say, two or three times a week, nice. And whenever I get in there then I'm like I don't want to leave.

2:30:35 - Leo Laporte
Really you still, oh yeah, so see, that's good, that's a good sign.

2:30:57 - Jason Snell
So you go as good, this is better. Um and and yeah, there's. I did a special persona meeting where we use share play, like do you do that a lot? They're doing some stuff, stuff. And Apple Intelligence, as we said, I think last week. Mark Gurman said it is coming to Vision Pro, it'll be next year, like everything else, but it's not, like it's not going to show up there. So it's progressing. They need to do more content. That's the bottom line. They need to do more content.

2:31:24 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see if Apple like where they go. It's partially needing more content and partially building the tools to develop that content, and so it'll be really interesting to see if Apple does more work on both of those things. I mean, I think that one of the things that a lot of us think is going to happen is, when the Blackmagic camera comes out, we think a lot, there'll be a lot of 180 degree spatial that comes out. Oh good, every time you do 180 degree spatial that comes out, because every time you do 180 degree spatial it's like a art project, like it is like nothing, everything is difficult, like everything is hard and so and this is, this is a big piece of like when we were talking about the nineties, like a bunch of stuff came out and then nothing happened. And you know a bunch of stuff. You can build all that technology, but if things aren't able to generate the content for that, it will die off by itself. And so I think that you know, um, the black magic having resolve and obviously final cut, will have some of the tools as well of being able to effectively generate the 180 degree content, because I think a lot of people when they see the 180 degree content, there's a pretty, you know, a high, high number of people think it's really great.

The problem is is that it's really hard to make right now, and so, um, I think that having a camera that can shoot 90 frames a second, 8k per eye, you know nothing that's never existed before, like to have a single camera that does that well, um, has never existed in the wild before for what will probably be $25,000. And you don't want to say, like $25,000 is a lot of money, but that's not what it rents for. It rents for, it'll rent for, you know, $1,000, $1,500 a day, which means people can go out and shoot a concert or shoot something else with it. So I think it's going to be really interesting. I also still think that there's incredible opportunities for things like JigSpace if their business model was more effective. You know like, jigspace is a really cool product that is just really expensive to develop for.

2:33:13 - Leo Laporte
And that's your Vision. Pro segment.

2:33:24 - Alex Lindsay
I'm going to use the Vision Pro, every Vision Pro segment, to remind people they should go and they should sign up for the StreamVoodoo special. Oh yeah, when is that StreamVoodoocom? Well, we're working on getting it updated so that we can come up to Twit and stream it. So we want to stream Twit on a Sunday. So we're a week or two away. We think, oh exciting. So we're working on that right now. Don't wait too long, it's so we're working on that right now.

2:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Don't wait too long. By the way, it's not my product. We're shutting down the studio.

2:33:48 - Alex Lindsay
I know you don't want to have to do that in the attic.

2:33:51 - Leo Laporte
It just won't be the same.

2:33:52 - Alex Lindsay
I've been using that as a. It would be actually pretty cool anyway, but I'd rather do it in the studio there, so I'm using that as a hey. We don't have all day, so we're good. It's not like I own the company or part of it. I'm just working with StreamVoodoo and they're doing great, great work on it and we're really excited because I want to do that before. You're not using the studio there.

2:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Where will you? Is it one camera or is it separate? One camera, and where will you?

2:34:18 - Alex Lindsay
put it Like right in front of me. I'm going to try to put it right in the middle. I mean, we're going to play with it a little in the middle, so we'll put it over.

2:34:24 - Leo Laporte
Do you get surround sound as well, like uh?

2:34:28 - Alex Lindsay
we can't, we think we can. That's what. That's what I'm working on right now. So basically, I have. Do you want me to try?

2:34:33 - Leo Laporte
to get all live people for that episode, would that be?

2:34:36 - Alex Lindsay
great, let me, let me see. Yeah, I, that would be great. You know, it will look as soon as you have a date?

2:34:42 - Leo Laporte
let us know and I'll get benito on that. We can, you know, get people who can come up to be here yeah.

2:34:48 - Alex Lindsay
So we're going to try to do and we will try to. I mean, with everyone sitting in front. I don't know how much it's going to make a difference to have like surround audio, but we are going to try it. So basically we'll have uh ambisonic folded down into vinyl Jason. Could you want to come up for that?

2:35:02 - Jason Snell
uh, okay, I mean depends on we don't know the date yet right, uh and, uh and.

2:35:08 - Leo Laporte
And Alex is in the area, so that's to get Kathy Gellis to come up. Ian Thompson's in the area. They're quite a few people, so we'll try to do an all live twit for that one. That would be much better, I think. Yeah.

2:35:20 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. So, so, anyway, so, but you just go to stream voodoocom, slash spatial and make sure you have the app. It won't be hard to figure out what to do because we'll tell you it's going live. And then what we're building into it is that I can just turn on the phone and you turn on the app and you see it, so you don't have to figure it out. So we're working on that. So this is what they specialize in, and just sign up for it. I think they're still rolling it out. It's a beta. Yeah, it says join beta. It's a beta, yeah, but you should sign up for it. It's cool.

2:35:49 - Leo Laporte
I would imagine if you have a Vision Pro, you're pretty much in.

2:35:54 - Alex Lindsay
Like it's not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, totally, and I think that, again, you know, I think that there's a lot of opportunity. I just want to promote the idea that people start to realize how cool it will be to see 3d. So and we saw a little bit of that, uh, at uh, wwc with Darren fireball, and I think that, uh, I think we're going to do it better, we know that.

2:36:16 - Leo Laporte
but now does this mean I have to buy a vision pro? I guess I do, uh you don't I have one.

2:36:25 - Alex Lindsay
I take the lenses out and you'll have to reset it and you'll be able to see it.

2:36:31 - Leo Laporte
See, mine would be just getting dusty. In fact, I got rid of the MetaQuest Pro. I gave it away. Who took it? Do we know John? No, we don't know the. Htc Vive has been sitting in the giveaway room for a long time. I think Supernatural is the best VR exercise tool so far. Has been sitting in the giveaway room for a long time as far as I know, nobody was the supernatural.

2:36:49 - Alex Lindsay
I think supernatural is is the best vr exercise tool so far. Like I play with that a fair bit. Burke got it burke got it.

2:36:56 - Leo Laporte
Congratulations, burke. You're a winner for the htc, htc, the vibe. No, he took the other thing. What was the meta? The meta quest, that's you know what. That's not bad. I mean, it was $1,400 when I bought it, but it was fun. I don't want to strap a computer on my face, it doesn't feel good Again, I think the Quest especially.

2:37:21 - Alex Lindsay
I think there's a lot that I enjoy just on the little $250 Quest. Yeah, it's pretty good.

2:37:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, joy on the. Just on the little $250 quest, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, for people who are interested, who don't want to spend 3 500 bucks, the quest 3 is a very good choice. Apple is now sending out money. If you had a butterfly keyboard and if you uh responded to the class action suit in 2022, apple agreed to pay 50 million dollars for macbook owners from 2015 to 2019. I was one of them, but I, you know, I didn't, you know, fill out the form in the claims process back then. Settlement got final approval last may. Apple is now sending out up to 395 dollars according to 95 mac.

2:38:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I got a wow. A friend of mine got a check for $395. That's sweet.

2:38:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's better than you usually get in a class actions lawsuit. It's better than a bag of pop chips. You have to have two of the keyboards to get $395. One keyboard $125. And if you had to replace keycaps $50. You could only claim the settlement if you lived in california, florida, illinois, michigan, new jersey, new york or washington. So if you weren't in those states, you weren't even eligible. That's how the 50 million gets divided up so nicely. Look at that. This is uh. Who is this? Is this? Is this? Michael Burkhardt at 9to5Mac Got two $395 checks.

2:38:52 - Jason Snell
Wow.

2:38:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:38:54 - Andy Ihnatko
There could be a really great 90-minute documentary that will not air on Apple TV+ all about that model of.

MacBook. I remember getting it for review and having to get into the mindset of has Apple lost their minds? Every step, component after component after component, decision after decision, was just not just the wrong decision, but the sort of thing that we, like Mac users, make fun of, like Dell and Lenovo and the windows world, for I it's I can't think of. I can't think of another Mac that's ever been sold that was just such a Titanic sticky rice ball of failure than that machine, and the keyboard was just the most glaring part of it. I would love to, I would love to see a documentary in which, in which we walk you will get walked through every level of every one of those decisions that went into that thing on this day, august 6 1997.

2:39:52 - Leo Laporte
What is that? 37 years ago, steve jobs took the stage at mac world, boston and uh was joined by a giant bill gates, who said I'm gonna pump 150 million into apple. We didn't know at the time, but apple was on a very short runway to running out of money like literally months from running out of money. So uh, bill gates, saved apple on this day in 1997.

2:40:25 - Andy Ihnatko
And it wasn't. I don't, I don't know, I have to refresh my memory about the financials, but it was just as big that at the same event he announced that, oh, by the way, we will be committing to several years of updates to Microsoft Office for Mac, and that also gave a lot of confidence to Apple, to observers of Apple, at the time when Apple really needed someone to say, yeah, we don't think that you're going away. I mean I, I remember the, the. The only time I ever sent like a letter, an email, to one of my colleagues, kind of calling them out for not doing a good job, was a reviewer for a news for a newspaper reviewed the uh when the latest uh power books.

I think it was one of the power book titaniums and it was a typical review, like I don't know like 600 to 800 words, but every like second or third paragraph was, of course it doesn't really matter how good the screen is, because Apple's going to be going out of business in about two months. Anyway, I got a good six to eight hours worth of power for one charge. I mean, it's who cares, because Apple is going to be going out of business in a couple of months anyway, and I'm like that has nothing to do. Review the thing in front of you, not reviewing the company.

2:41:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, Apple didn't go out of business. Gosh darn it, Thank goodness.

2:41:41 - Alex Lindsay
And if you look at the volume of the stock, the stock was on the uh about uh 16 times more than it was on the fifth.

2:41:53 - Leo Laporte
You know, on that day like it, it definitely like everybody understood how important it went up about about 25 that day and it's probably because microsoft felt like we need a competitor because we're on, you know, the next year the doj was going to sue them it's a couple things.

2:42:08 - Jason Snell
Um, it is true, boy. That was the low point, I would say, and it started turning around. Macworld expo, august 97, for me was the absolute low point, and it was jobs coming back. He killed the clones. The clones, you know, clone makers were there at that event and it was like it was clear that they were gonna bulldoze them like they just had them thrown into, like the head of power pc, had had the zippered case and famously held over his head that this contains a 60, what 68030, 68040 based laptop.

2:42:39 - Andy Ihnatko
But we are not allowed to release it to you and you know you could hear the ritz crackers crunching inside the case, who knows, but still yeah, so the so it was.

2:42:48 - Jason Snell
It was a bad time and although my understanding and this is a funny thing I know a lot of people talk now about how what Microsoft was primarily doing is making sure it had a competitor that it could point to so that it wasn't an even bigger monopoly than it already was, and I'm sure that that was part of the aspect of it. My understanding, from talking to people at Microsoft and in the Mac unit at Microsoft back then in the years surrounding 97, is that Apple or that Microsoft made more money when a Mac was sold than when a PC was sold, because everybody who bought a Mac bought Microsoft Office, and that Microsoft made money on the Mac. They made a lot of money on the Mac and they didn't want the Mac to go away. But the OS X transition was looming and Apple was almost going out of business and I think there was a real fear that Microsoft was just going to say forget it, at which point the Mac is not viable. Right, I know it seems weird now, but at that point, like now, we would say like if, as long as you've got a web browser, you're actually doing pretty good, but back then if office didn't exist on the Mac. No one would be able to buy a Mac. You couldn't justify it. Page maker and Photoshop would not be enough. You would not be able to do it. So it was a real lifeline.

And they made the investment in Apple as well, and they clearly were just like. Steve obviously talked to Bill Gates and said um, need your help, need your commitment, keep this going. We got a turnaround plan. You can make an investment. You're going to make that money back, you're going to make a big profit. And so they did it. But, like that was the moment where the Think Different campaign had just been unveiled. It was unveiled at that event, I believe, but that was it. All Steve Jobs had for taking over was marketing. They didn't have the iMac yet. They didn't have the iPod, they didn't have OS X yet, although it was clear that it was coming because they bought Next. So it was bad. People were talking. That event got on the cover of Time and Newsweek Like it was a huge deal for Apple, at a moment where everybody else was thinking that Apple was about. I mean, I got the questions Was like, was Apple going to go out of business? And I know this is a little insidery, but those who lived through it.

Back then, the two big Mac magazines were Macworld and Macuser. They were I worked at Macuser at the time. They were pitted against each other. We were arch rivals. And it was so bad that the arch rival owners of those two companies IDG and Ziff Davis they got together and decided that they could cut their losses by merging Macworld and Macuser into a single magazine. Macworld and Macuser into a single magazine. The hope for Apple was so low that they decided it would be better to get into bed with their arch enemy and make a 50-50 joint venture rather than throw money against the wall doing a Mac magazine. Now, you know, did they regret that? Almost instantly they did.

That merger was announced the week before Macworld Expo in Boston, where Bill Gates went on the big screen above Steve Jobs, two businesses who are at each other's throats across many markets. Pc world, pc magazine, you name it gave up. They're like forget it, let's, let's, let's cut our losses, let's cut our costs. And it was binding. They couldn't get out of it afterward and eventually IDG bought zip Davis out, um, and zip Davis was contractually precluded from doing an Apple magazine after that too, which is like huge regrets, right, but like so people who don't remember that era, it was real bad. And when we say Bill Gates appearing on that screen was kind of all that stood between Apple and the abyss, it's kind of true.

2:46:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they talk about lows. The number is still etched in my mind 12 and seven eighths was how low the stock price of Apple went, and I remember leaning back in my chair and thinking ethically it's wrong for me to invest in Apple.

2:46:55 - Leo Laporte
Moreover.

2:46:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I have inside information into Apple that would make it illegal I cannot buy Apple stock, and so I was telling people that this is, this is, if there is. I was trying to get people to buy, not because I wanted Apple to live, but because I wanted somebody to benefit from my supposition that this is. Apple is in danger, but I don't think they're doomed with a capital D and this is a very, very low price for what could be a very, very valuable company, and I know when they're designing our YouTube chat says I bought Apple at 16.

2:47:27 - Leo Laporte
Very very low price for what could be a very, very valuable company. And you know design in our uh youtube chat says I bought apple at 16. And I think he's I think he's joining us from his mansion in the sky.

2:47:35 - Alex Lindsay
I had a person that I was, that I knew that it was at the time and I didn't have any money like I was not making any money, so it was no, there was no, I had nothing to invest. But he said what should I do? Apple's going down and he had some stock already and I like buy more, buy a lot more, buy a lot more. And and I said that and he, he, no longer works.

2:47:53 - Leo Laporte
He dumped a bunch of money into it and over you know, over a good time, he bought a winery or something according to Mr Macintosh on xcom, neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates was happy with the looming Bill Gates nor Bill Gates was happy with the looming Bill Gates. Steve Jobs said that was my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It was bad because it made me look small and Apple looks small. Well, as compared to Bill Gates, that's for sure. But Bill Gates said I didn't know my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions.

2:48:26 - Alex Lindsay
Shown here relative market size. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know it's funny. You know we do these. One of the businesses that I do on a pretty regular basis is take someone from their office and put them into events like this, and when I look at this one, I'm always like that's why we tell people they should do this. Like if you're an executive, you're better off. You know, coming in over the screen because you're going to be really big. You know, coming in over the screen because you're going to be really big, it's a whole wizard of oz, you know kind of thing, especially when you tune it.

2:48:52 - Jason Snell
Uh it, it usually comes out pretty well but if you ever wonder why, why was it that eric schmidt came on stage at the iphone?

2:48:58 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, why was it that the guy from singular came on stage yeah, at the event, why?

2:49:03 - Jason Snell
it's like they never did that again. They never made that mistake again.

2:49:06 - Andy Ihnatko
That was clearly lodged in steve's mind dancing in dancing clean room outfits on the stage at mac. Yeah, that's not. Don't do that again, steve I love this.

2:49:17 - Leo Laporte
All of our chat folk are now telling us what level they bought apple stock at and then when they sold it and I feel bad. Somebody bought it at $12 and then sold it at $14.

2:49:31 - Jason Snell
Big mistake. This is why you need to support the club, for Twit is that. We're not allowed to do that you know we can't make these tech investments.

2:49:40 - Leo Laporte
Wish we could, but we could hint about that.

2:49:42 - Jason Snell
Although, to Alex's point, like in the summer of 1997, when my magazine just got folded and I didn't know if I was going to have a job, I was not going to put more of my life and career and money into Apple at that point, like throw more bad money into the pot. But it turned out, it worked out. It worked out.

2:50:02 - Leo Laporte
Hey, that's it. Speaking of Sherlocking, that's it for the last MacBreak Weekly To come to you from the Eastside Studios. This copper bar behind me, gone Gone. The giant gear no, I kept half of it. This half is gone, but I have half in my attic.

2:50:23 - Jason Snell
The desk. Unclear what will happen, Unclear who's going to get this big old desk.

2:50:29 - Leo Laporte
Somebody's going to get it and they're going to be happy. I have in my attic a Mac just like yours, Jason, so I hope you won't think I'm copying. I promise not to do the lava lamp thing, because that's your trademark. Great, I will have a Nixie clock. How about that?

okay, I'll counter with a little that's how you'll be able to tell the difference, uh, and I hope I'll have internet because, as I mentioned, the internet went out, uh during the show today. Uh, I was in the studio but lisa was not and she said we're there's no internet, uh, which caused me to, during the show, order a starlink. So I'll let you know. Let you know how that works out. Tomorrow. We'll do windows weekly and this weekend google, and that'll be that. We'll say a fond farewell to our cherished studio manager, john slonina, who will wrap up his duties at the same time. That was one of the sad things that happened in 2024. That was hard to leave the studio. I love it here in my new attic studio. It's very Christmassy right now, but I do miss hanging out with all the people at the studio. You're watching our go with the best of more apple intelligence ios 18 um, next monday, september 16th, big day.

2:51:58 - Jason Snell
All the os's are shipping ios 18, ipad os 18, watch os 18 is that 18? Now tv os update is coming out. Vision os up two is coming out next monday. So basically monday about 10. Pacific is usually when they flip the switch, unless something goes horribly wrong. Everybody's uh updates are going, even if you're not on a beta. You're just going to get the update and say, hey, here, new os versions are coming right at you, mac os, sequoia included, so get ready. And then we also got a little bit of detail ios 18.1, which contains apple intelligence. Apple has now said will ship in october. I love.

Let me give you a little sense of the layer cake, of what a beta might be to apple. There's the developer beta. Developer beta is the thing you have to especially install and it's supposed to be scary because it's like oh no, only developers can use it. It's scary, anybody can actually use it, but only developers should use it because it's super scary. Then there's the public beta. How does the public beta differ from the developer beta? Well, I mean, usually it's like they let the developers use the developer beta for a week and if nobody's computers explode, then it's the public beta, all right, and you get that for the summer. But what's going to happen now? So 18.0 is going to ship on monday great, that. Is that a beta? No, it's a final. It's a final, but it has no apple intelligence in it.

18.1 is going to ship in october they said that on monday great, what's going to be? Is it a beta? No, it will be 18.1. It will be final. What will be 18.1. It will be final. What will be in 18.1 final is Apple intelligence beta. So it's going to ship, good luck. But they're going to call it beta.

And then you know, silicon Valley has a long tradition of this. I believe Gmail was in beta for like more than a decade. Well, more than a decade. I keep saying there ought to be a rule, like after a while, if you're still in beta, you have to start saying you're in gamma. Okay, you gotta, we're gonna, we're gonna step you through every letter of the greek alphabet if you have to, but anyway, so it will be out. It will be in beta, but it will go to everybody who's got an apple intelligence compatible device and they will be able to enable Apple intelligence. So sometime in October, if you buy a shiny new iPhone. They're going to. All this stuff's going to ship or be picked up in store on the 20th, but before that, that's a Friday next week. On the Monday the OS updates will push out to everybody else, not with Apple intelligence. It'll come later in a final OS as a beta, just to make things perfectly clear, perfect, did I clear it up. Is everybody clear now, so clear?

2:54:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Remember that when you see the beta in this context, have you ever played chess with somebody who moves the piece but keeps their finger on it and say I haven't?

2:54:49 - Alex Lindsay
gone yet Wait a minute, I haven't gone yet I can take that back.

2:54:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's pretty much what we're talking about, but I'm not going to kid Apple too much about this, because I think every AI feature, once it leaves the corporate campus, it's not done being tested until you have millions and millions and millions of monkeys hammering on it. And that's when you find out that, oh, every time you ask for a picture of a chocolate cake, you get pornography. We didn't see that one coming. Okay, let's roll that back. We're going to roll that back.

Yeah, Adjust our parameters a little bit. So, yeah, it's going to be a ride over the next several months and it's so long as people know that there is. They see that big beta slug on there saying that don't really rely on this when you take out the camera and you take a picture. Rely on that happening. We got that on lock. When it comes down to a generative AI edit to remove something in the background, maybe it'll remove the garbage can. Maybe it will put a picture of Paul Lind in its place. You might like Paul Lind instead of the garbage can. We really don't know what we're doing.

2:56:01 - Shelly Brisbin
It's the secret square, it's the center square, at the very least.

2:56:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, absolutely Saying something saucy, no doubt.

2:56:07 - Jason Snell
I think calling it beta, yes, the beta. The beta says we're still figuring this out. Which? They very clearly are, as are we all at this point, really really yeah. So okay, in next month. If you want to try out apple intelligence and you've been afraid of the betas um, I mean of those betas, the developer betas it's okay. There will be a beta living in your phone that you can turn on and try it out in October.

2:56:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh God, it's alive in my phone. The beta was coming from inside the phone.

2:56:36 - Shelly Brisbin
Honestly, I think that's going to be the scariest part, because all this time we've been waiting around as I say, the market watchers and the pundits have been waiting around for Apple intelligence and tutting about how behind Apple is, have been waiting around for Apple intelligence and tutting about how behind Apple is. But once Apple intelligence is out on people's phones and they have a chance to break things with it, I think that's when the fires are really going to be going on in Cupertino. Yeah.

2:56:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it'll be a lot of like. It's always fun, as, like industry observers who happen to also be Apple fans, to see, like all of the hand-wringing and all of the hot takes about oh, look at that big camera bump on this Samsung phone and this Pixel phone. Apple would never do it. They have taste until Apple does the camera bump, in which case, oh no, they did it right. They did it the right way, and so I think we're going to see a lot of people hoping that you didn't see the blog post or the social media post a year and a half ago about, you know, google releasing artificial intelligence when it's just not ready.

It just goes to show the irresponsibility of this company not caring about the user experience when it's really about look, we have to put it out at some point. If it's going to actually be have to put it out at some point, we have to. If it's going to actually be built into useful things, we need to get people using it. That's why we're calling it a Google Labs feature and not actually rolling it out into anything. Yet Apple's going to have to eat the same cold cream of mushroom soup for a few months or a couple of years until they get it right, but they will get it right so today this morning, 8 am, pacific uh, apple announced the new mac mini were there any surprises.

2:58:12 - Leo Laporte
The one thing people seem to be noticing is that the power button's on the bottom that's fun, I mean it's got to be somewhere. I mean it's got to be somewhere, says Andy. No, it's got to be somewhere.

2:58:23 - Alex Lindsay
Someone, someone has a stack of mac minis. It is a little bit inconvenient. Yeah, you know, like it's that's, that's not. I mean, I don't really care. I know that people Somewhere. If someone has a stack of Mac minis, it is a little bit inconvenient.

2:58:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know like that's not.

2:58:33 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't really care. I know that people were talking about the charger at the bottom of the mouse or whatever. I was kind of like. You know, I don't think about that ever. Like you know, like you put it in for lunch and walk away and come back Two months later you'll have to do this again. But the power on the bottom is a little bit of a bummer because I've got four of them stacked up and it's kind of like okay, now I'm going to have to like if I want to restart them. It's not as trivial, that's true.

2:58:54 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it's the same roughly the same shape as the. It's like a short Mac Studio, is that right?

2:59:02 - Jason Snell
Okay, so it's two inches high and five by five, so it is half the size of the old Mac mini in terms of volume and quite a bit larger than the Apple TV. People who are like oh is it like an Apple TV?

2:59:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's like no, not really. It's not that small. It's probably not quite half. Like it's 70, it's 80 versus 50. It's a little bit more than half. I mean it gets taller. It's like five by seven.

2:59:25 - Jason Snell
Oh, I think it's 100 square inches down to 50 square inches, I think it's actually about exactly half the volume of the Mac mini. We can check. Volume is weird, right, because you're using a lot in two of the dimensions.

2:59:39 - Alex Lindsay
I did the calculation. I think it's 80 versus 50, but it might not be, so it's not quite half. Again, it feels like, oh, it's half the size. And then I actually typed, I actually did the math to figure out like, is it really half the size? And I was like, well, and the reason I bring it up is that a lot of us are looking at it like, hey, this would be great if we're going to have a higher density solution for our servers. And no, it completely doesn't make any sense anymore. Like it's you know. So, like they completely just they definitely don't care about people using Mac minis in a server environment. Like that was definitely not one of the things that they thought through in this process, because Mac Stadium uses a lot of them, right.

Yeah, we think that you could turn them sideways and stack eight of them sideways across a 3U, so the density would be marginally higher, but not a lot higher. And it's like one of those things like if it was a little shorter or a little smaller, like you know, if it was just a little less on one dimension or another, we would get much higher density. But right now we're not and it is 85 versus 50.

3:00:39 - Jason Snell
So there you go, Alex. So not quite half volume-wise, but there, because it's slightly taller. Good math, good mathing, well done A gold star to you, Mr Lindsay. I know how to use a calculator.

3:00:50 - Alex Lindsay
I did math.

3:00:51 - Jason Snell
You know, the problem I had is that I did not know how high the old one was and it is a little taller, right, but it's much narrower now and it's really interesting. So surprises, surprises, that they did leave Ethernet on all of them, that it's got full HDMI, that it's got a headphone jack, although it's on the front.

So depending on how you use your headphone jack, that could be more or less convenient. But I think it's great. It's five ports, including two on the front, which it was always like in these Johnny I Daves.

3:01:20 - Andy Ihnatko
It was heresy to put ports on the front, but they did it with a Mac Studio so we knew it was, and it's also a great way to separate that some of them are usbc, some of them are thunderbolt so they know that the ones in the back are the other, the tabasco ones.

3:01:34 - Alex Lindsay
One of the front is for your, you know, for your keyboard. Yeah, I do, in a nod to american made. Uh, they are an even five by five by two and some random amount of millimeters, you know it's like a two by four. It's not really two by four but somebody, but somebody definitely decided that it had to be like, even like. It's really easy to remember what they are. Because they are like, because the last one was 1.41 high and this one is two it's five by five by two.

3:01:57 - Jason Snell
It's like a little teeny tiny. If it was, we can make it. If it's black, we can make it like a 2001 mini monolith. It takes you halfway to the end of time. Uh, anyway it's. It's interesting because I mean it's a base model M4, but there's also the M4 Pro, which means this is the first time that we've seen that chip. The M4 Pro chip is you know, it's got more cores, I think, it's got eight performance and four.

3:02:22 - Alex Lindsay
The memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second.

3:02:27 - Andy Ihnatko
This is the most, I would would say, the most surprising single four performance, six efficiency cores on the bottom line, uh eight performance and four efficiency cores on the pro chip right, eight, eight, four, uh, and, and the idea there is that's, that's the, the 12 core is the probably the full extent of the pro chip.

3:02:44 - Jason Snell
Right, they'll, they have the bin versions, but that's the full extent of it with um and a bunch of cpus too. But the the memory bandwidth, I think, is the is the real story here. With the m3 generation, when they did rolled that out, we talked about it, that it was curious that the pro was sort of like a took a little step forward and then the max took a big step forward. And of course we don't know anything about the max chip yet, because maybe tomorrow right, like is it?

what day is it? It's tuesday. Well then, I don't know about other chips, but uh, this one, like 75 percent generational improvement in memory bandwidth is huge, like that is a big step forward. So there was a small step forward for the pro chip last time, but a huge step forward this time.

3:03:24 - Andy Ihnatko
It's more than twice as much I mean 120 gigabits per second on the M4, 273 gigabits per second on the M4 Pro. They're clearly not as as much as they're making this, this cute little, like tiny little computer. They are clearly not marketing this as oh, here's the meet, meet Maxie, your family, your cute little, tiny little pocketable Mac. It is this.

3:03:46 - Leo Laporte
This is some serious crap and serious stuff here, and it's presumed that a studio will then be with the m4 max yeah, 400 gigs, and the ultra is already 800 gigs, so so these are already.

3:04:00 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, these are the m2s that are there. So if we see any kind of proportional increase in their speeds, oh wow what does this?

memory bandwidth give you, Alex, if you're moving a lot of data back and forth between things, you have to hold that data. It can be a huge stopper, especially with huge amounts of texture maps or massive amounts of video or massive amounts of scientific data or massive amounts of 3D data doing a variety of photogrammetry. All of these things kind of max out these systems as they start, you know, and it really becomes a churn. So again this gets back into what I was talking about. If I'm doing a bunch of effects on something in Resolve and I've got a bunch of 6K or 8K footage, that bandwidth gets saturated pretty quickly, you know. And so those are the kinds of things that it will. It will do.

Well, you know, I think that again, it's not going to be. I mean, when you see these specs, you can't wait to see what the studio and the pro look like. You know like, you know like so, so, but but these it's a really powerful machine. It's still not probably as powerful as you know it's not. I don't think the top of the line here is competitive with the Studio, you know M Ultra or Max's, but I do think that it is extremely fast. I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck for power of any computer made right now.

3:05:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I hope that it keeps the same role that it had historically, where there's always. Historically there's always been. If you are a power user, but not necessarily someone who needs a Mac Pro, you can have the choice between buy a lower spec Mac Mini but then do a built-to-order and give it all the RAM you want, give it all the storage you want, give it all the extra you want, get the best processor you want, or go for a low-level, pro-level machine. I hope that's still going to be kind of a distinction between the Mac Studio and the Mac mini where, yeah, there's going to be a very clear jump to get to a Mac Studio including, I don't know, five displays instead of three maybe a better fan, I'm assuming this Mac Mini has a fan Looking at the side of it.

It has vent holes. Okay, in the bottom, great. That was one small fear of mine that they would say well, we're going to have this throttled by heat performance so to make it fit in that tight little space, we're going to have it all naturally cooled. But it would have been weird to have the same sort of features into a MacBook Pro. That is absolutely going to have to have a fan. But yeah, I think this is.

I'll speak for myself, I won't speak for you guys. It's the Mac mini I definitely want and it's the one that can. Basically, I can speak for myself, I won't speak for you guys. So it's the Mac mini I definitely want and it's the one that can. Basically I can kit out exactly how I want because I don't again, I don't need to spend $5,000 on the top of the line anything but I have certain needs and if I can suit them better with a $599 base model machine that I can then spec up to fifteen hundred dollars than I can with, say, a fifteen hundred dollar like pro level machine, I think they've got that it could support three displays, um, which is nice.

3:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Also, support for DisplayPort over USB C the pro uh. Well, actually it looks like the m4 and m4 Pro have the same video uh support. Yes, maybe a little bit higher resolution. Uh, on the uh m4 pro um DisplayPort 2.1 over USB-C. Hdmi 68 up to 8K resolution over HDMI at 60 Hertz, 4k at 240 mega, 240 Hertz wow it's not just the displays, it's the fact that they these are multiple of really good displays. Yeah, that's pretty high, yeah, yeah and thunderbolt 5.

3:07:53 - Jason Snell
I mean that's the other thing is it's it's thunderbolt 5.

3:07:56 - Mikah Sargent
So what is thunderbolt 5?

3:07:59 - Jason Snell
thunderbolt 5 on the on the pro chip faster speed times faster than thunder speeds more power and um, and then you combine that with the, the, the video out is different. Um, because there are more gpus so you can do 6k at 60, uh, or you know so. So there's a little bit more than 8k at 60 and and it says 8k, yeah, the the uh and you can

3:08:24 - Alex Lindsay
do one of each, One, two, yeah, yeah. And the you it's 120, I think it's up to 120 gig pipeline. 80 is the base for it and so it's. So you're talking about being able to move 10 gigabytes theoretically. 10 gigabytes a second, which is twice as fast as the, as my studio does internally, a second, which is twice as fast as my studio does internally. This gets into again if you're editing or you're trying to get in and out of things.

Being able to have something that has that kind of bandwidth is pretty exciting. And where this makes a difference for a Mac Mini is if you want to build a distributed rendering platform. So I want to have 10 of these able to do a bunch of distributed processing. The speed at which you can deliver that content to the thing that oftentimes is the biggest bottleneck that we get into is actually sending the frame. So let's say you want 10 of these to run compressor or you want 10 of these to run a 3D render. How fast can you get that data to the machine is a big deal, and being able to have this kind of speeds is pretty exciting.

And again, if you're editing something really heavy, a Mac mini of this size with 64 gigs of RAM can absolutely do all the big editing that I was just talking about with six channels of 6k, but it's the drive speed that kills you. And so being able to have the new, you know, I imagine OWC, within a couple months, will be delivering things that can do eight, you know, eight gigs or 10 gigabytes a second, and now you can stack up a lot of these things inside of whether it's resolve or final cut or others, Um, you can have a lot of really uncompressed data that you're working with. You don't have to do any kind of um. Uh, you know, you don't have to burn anything in. Everything can be sitting there floating as you're working with it. So it's really, it's exciting. It's an exciting box, yeah.

3:10:13 - Leo Laporte
But obviously, if it can do that, then you might want to wait and see what the studio will do. Will the studio be this week or no? It'll be next year.

3:10:21 - Jason Snell
Next year Mark Gurman says mid-next year that it actually slipped a little bit but it's really four computers right. You've really got based on the four different chip models. You've got two Mac minis and two Mac studios, and I was thinking about this that I've got a Mac studio, now the base model, which has got the M1 Max chip, and then there's also the Ultra and let's assume that they're going to do an Ultra this generation for this. And then you've got the M4 and the M4 Pro. Like, where do you fall if you want a desktop system, and there will be, you know, maybe some crossover, but not in terms of the specs. You could spec up a Mac Mini Pro chip with a bunch of RAM and a bunch of storage and get it to be over what the starting price of the studio probably will be, but not with the specs that you want.

3:11:05 - Leo Laporte
I think $2799 when I did that.

3:11:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean I priced price went for 25 or something like that. But the question is, who needs the higher end one like I? I'm not sure I need anything more than the, than the m4 pro max you need more than the m1 max.

Let's be honest well, it's true, it's true. Actually, that's the truth of it. I, if I did, I would have ordered a pro mini today, and the the fact is my M1 Max studio is still great, honestly, and so probably I'll just wait and see what the studio holds, but it's nice that they offer these things.

Because M4 base model is super powerful and I know that it's got a little bit less storage than people would like and a little bit less RAM, although it's got 16 now. So that's good, but it's still an incredible value. And then with the pro chip you have got a very powerful system. I have a friend of mine who works from home and is a professional creative professional in the film industry and he texted me today and he was like bought a mac mini because he was. He had an old intel imac that was on its last legs and this is a serious professional person. So like it's a, it's a, it's an impressive product on both fronts so you can up.

3:12:16 - Leo Laporte
So let's see, let's start with the highest end mac mini, upgrade it to the m4 pro with 14 core cpu, 20 core gpu, 64 gigs of memory. That was 600 bucks. That's the Apple premium right there, uh, and you can go up to eight terabytes of storage. But I think I'm gonna do two. Yeah, now we've got this is the 27.99. I don't need 10 gigabit ethernet. Nice, though, Alex, do you have 10 gigabit ethernet?

3:12:44 - Alex Lindsay
no, uh, I don't, but I'm probably gonna, as someday. Well, the bandwidth now coming into into my house, I'm trying to get it all upgraded to two and a half gigs, right? So so you would want you start to think about one gig, might? It starts to feel a little compressed now. Um, you know so. And a reminder, by the way if you're, if you're an educational, if you're in education, all those numbers go down a little bit. So the if you're a student, uh, the m4 is the base starts at 499.

3:13:12 - Leo Laporte
Wow, yeah, exactly that's a great price for a very competitive my kids are going to be so happy at christmas when you start.

3:13:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's you would prefer this than a laptop for your kids yeah, because I mean the thing is is they do a lot of stuff at their house that they don't really spend a lot of time somewhere. If they do do it, I mean they both have monitors. The problem is is that I really like the problem with IMAX is dealing with the monitor and the machine. Like my daughter wants to make music, it's easier for me to give her a Mac mini with a monitor. She can kind of place wherever she wants and have the Mac mini where it needs to be to get all the instruments in and everything else.

I find it very and again, as someone who has a lot of monitors I've got like nine monitors up here I have a hard time understanding, like where would I put it? I look at the iMac and I'm like where would I put that? Like I don't like all of my monitors hang on arms so that I can move them around and get them to where I want, and so when you get used to that lifestyle, it's really hard to go back, and so having a computer that's contained and sitting on your desk seems like a really hard thing. And again, I think, unless you really are going to be on the road, having a laptop doesn't necessarily. If you're using it at home all the time, doesn't necessarily make sense.

You're getting so much more bang for your buck from these Mac minis with a monitor. You can go out and buy a. I mean, of course you can get a nice monitor and then you're paying about the same amount. But I have one nice monitor that I can do color correction on. The rest of them are these cheap, you know? $150 1080p, 24-inch. They work great.

3:14:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Not only that, but we're forgetting. There's almost a community of people that are like iPad Pro or even iPad Mini users, that essentially travel with a Mac Mini as a headless Mac and they use their iPad as a display for that.

Oh, that's interesting, so that's going to make this even better. And the fact that the power supply is completely integrated. That's good news and bad news. It's obviously good news because it's just one simple cable that you can replace for like $10 if you lose it or if you want multiples of them. When we were talking about this a while ago, like oh, it would be great if they made like an Apple TV-sized Mac mini, my fantasy would be that it would be powered by, like power delivery over USB, so that in certain scenarios I could just like power it with a power brick and just have that completely. But it's going to make all those people really, really happy too.

3:15:29 - Alex Lindsay
I really wanted it to be that way, because in our school in Africa the number one thing that dies is the power supply. So we ended up with a bunch of PCs because it was too hard to fix them. Imax Like we started off with 40 IMAX and over 10 years ended up with a bunch of PCs, because it was just as the the iMacs died one after the other. With the PCs we just replaced the power supply. So I was hoping to see it go to a USB-C the same way you had it, because A you could also power theoretically with some of these bricks you could power two or three of these iMacs or Mac minis at one time, but also if it blows out the power supply, but also if it blows out the power supply, you just buy another one.

3:16:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Even so, though, it must have gotten really close. The power on the specs page consumes less than 150 watts. That's amazing. When I look at even compact Windows PCs, they start at 300 watts. And stuff with this kind of power, if you don't limit yourself to like tiny, tiny, little nut sized devices like 500 watts is like almost the minimum that they consider to be a decent power supply for anything of any power. So this is an amazing accomplishment to get it to work in under those circumstances and I bet it very rarely gets to 155, sure that's.

I'm sorry, that's maximum.

3:16:48 - Leo Laporte
It's probably operating at half of that or less. Uh, very quiet too. They say five DBA at idle, which is basically silent, even though it doesn't.

3:16:57 - Andy Ihnatko
And they're saying. They're saying the first carbon for completely carbon-free Mac. I think they're saying yeah, first carbon neutral carbon neutral.

3:17:04 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, uh, that means they're buying credits, though, right no, it's a combination um.

3:17:09 - Jason Snell
They changed the way they manufactured it and they remember their power is all um, not credits. Their power is all green and they're using it's 50 recycled materials in there good job, and it's there's a lot less aluminum, because they say they're using a new process that uses much less aluminum than old processes did. So yeah, it's, it's just all part of the story. This is, I mean, literally 14 years since they redesigned the enclosure of the Mac Mini the last time, so it's about time for this.

3:17:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, we're all now very aware that when you make it smaller all the great reasons that we like things that are smaller, including being able to Velcro it to the back of a display, but also that means that you can get more mac minis per master case, more master cases per shipping container and now fewer shipping containers, so cost less to ship yeah, what about?

3:17:54 - Leo Laporte
I mean, one reason people do buy pcs is for discrete graphics cards. What about graphics performance, Alex? Do you have an opinion? Are they keeping up? Are they catching? Not keeping up? Catching up for?

3:18:06 - Alex Lindsay
the vast majority of the audience. Absolutely, you know the, the graph, the integrated graphics. When you start looking at that memory, the, the memory bandwidth is is really high compared to bus bandwidth, um, as well as uh, you know, being integrated with the cpu. So it's. It's a different problem because you can cut these things if you're building it for the computer. The way that you use the cpus and gpus is very different than the way you would use a discrete GPU.

Now, for some of the stuff that I do, we still need NVIDIA and AMD cards. You know so. These are you know. So. It is like I have things that we do that we need three or four of them in one computer. I can't do that with, you know. Obviously, we can't do that right now with any of the Macs. So you know there is a world that needs more than what the Macs can do.

When you're talking about a Mac mini or you're talking about these things, I think that the performance is very, very good for 99% of the market, you know, and I think that there is a 1% of markets that's going to still keep on buying Linux or PCs because they need more dedicated and specific hardware. Yeah, but I think that has to more. By the way, I think it has more to do with how the apps are written than how the what the computer can do. So when we talk to app developers who write from the ground up and they write to the metal literally so when they're writing to metal, they're taking full advantage of all of Apple's APIs. The performance is outrageous on these machines. It's where people don't want to commit that much and they just want to port code, do what they did before, use the old ways of doing things that you need a lot more horsepower. So it just depends on how much they dedicate their code to what Apple is proposing and the infrastructure that Apple is providing.

3:19:55 - Leo Laporte
Metal's good. Metal's good, but you need to write to it.

3:19:59 - Alex Lindsay
Right, you need to. I mean again, with any operating system. The more you abstract from what the operating system wants, whether that's Windows or Linux or Apple, the less performance you're going to get out of that hardware. You're going to just need to, because a lot of people are essentially lazy. And I mean lazy, I don't mean lazy like they're laying around, it's just that they don't want to.

3:20:19 - Leo Laporte
You've got a lot of those things.

3:20:20 - Alex Lindsay
They're just lying around but they don't want to do that. If when you talk to Like you know. A good example is like Zoom dedicate. They have dedicated apps for every single platform, right, you know, and it's written to take full advantage of every platform that they're interacting with and it feels it's why Zoom runs so much smoother than all the other video conferencing apps is because because they're writing something and they're not trying to abstract anything. You know they're. They're taking full advantage of each platform and so so that's a good example. You see that anywhere in app and that's why a lot of times, we like to work with Mac-only apps, because we know that that developer is developing for the platform that I'm using, not trying to figure out how we get the same code to work on three different platforms and that's you know, because that's never going to be as good as writing it straight to the, you know, straight to the OS's full-capitalist.

3:21:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Native. Yeah, You're watching MacBreak Weekly. The big Apple week continues. Jason Snell is here Thursday. He'll be covering the Apple quarterly results at sixcolorscom, his blog with his world-famous patented colored charts. Are you going to do one for Halloween like an orange?

3:21:31 - Jason Snell
and black chart, you know, oh, it's an interesting idea, but uh, probably not thank you, uh, Alex Lindsay is also here.

3:21:39 - Leo Laporte
Office hoursglobal. Do you do a Halloween show for office hours?

3:21:43 - Alex Lindsay
no, no, you don't dress in costume and not a really a different, a different thing kind of guy like you know I I know you're very consistent so I, yeah, I don't have a lot of uh so so I don't really shift, shift, although I do know you've added an imac to your display behind you is that a keeping up with the jones's thing? This one, not an imac a mcintyre, an old macintosh.

3:22:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you got a bondi blue.

3:22:07 - Alex Lindsay
I'm at, I got a bondi, but this is a. This is a 24p bondi, blue it's not, it's not, it's a it was like hand built for movies. Um, this one here is the old one, the old mac classic. Um, I've got an some elemental, just the plates I have the elemental plates.

3:22:22 - Leo Laporte
After you said that, we said we apparently russell had scavenged the plates. Women the orange ones, though, which is oh is that good or bad?

3:22:33 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, a lot of us were a little upset about the whole orange plate thing.

3:22:36 - Leo Laporte
Um you know we were like come on, this, kids, was a 25 000 machine.

3:22:41 - Alex Lindsay
I just want to point out I not to show off, but each one of those plates was 130 000 oh my god, and we've effectively replaced it with in software in the cloud.

3:22:53 - Leo Laporte
Basically, right the ones that we're. We used to need this to stream to though a variety of platforms.

3:23:01 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, the ones, the ones that I had were still pretty competitive. You know like, even though they're at you, they don't even make them anymore. But 16, 16 inputs with 32 uh individual streams is still pretty powerful. But the um, but they, uh, but yeah. So that's what those were. I got a little.

3:23:17 - Leo Laporte
I got the cube up here oh, so yeah, oh, you got some good.

3:23:22 - Alex Lindsay
I like to you know it's my, it's my wall of depreciation.

3:23:24 - Leo Laporte
Everything here used to be worth a lot of money. The problem with the new mac minis they'll be too small to even notice up there you wouldn't even receive. They're out of focus. They'd be like yeah, we got flying toasters running on our uh, on our mac classic john my mac classic doesn't work.

3:23:39 - Alex Lindsay
I have to go.

3:23:39 - Leo Laporte
I have like 20 this is actually a 128k mac. This is the original, and it didn't work. The floppy didn't work, so we uh, john bought a device that you can plug into the floppy port that emulates a hard drive.

3:23:52 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I want to just put an I. I keep on looking at. I should just put an ipad in there, like just put an ipad, yeah, an ipad, and stick it back there.

3:23:58 - Leo Laporte
I think I was going to cut out a piece of what? Because I couldn't get the scan right. Right, I was gonna cut out a piece of white paper and just put flying toasters on. No, we got the scan work and everything. That's awesome. I love it. I did buy one of those Mac minis. Boy, do I like it. I have to say I'm very excited about what Apple has coming up hardware-wise, especially with Macintosh and Apple Intelligence.

2025 is going to be a very interesting year and you can bet we will be here Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell and myself to cover it. We thank you so much for your support all year long of MacBreak Weekly, with special thanks to our club Twit members. I know this has been a little bit of a rocky year, but I'm very excited about what 2025 is going to bring, not just for Twit but for Apple and for all of us. Have a wonderful holiday. I hope you're enjoying it and I will see you, and all of us will see you in the new year on MacBreak Weekly. Bye-bye, thank you Alex, thank you Andy, thank you Jason, thanks to all of you, especially our Club Twit members, for joining us.

We do MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube youtubecom slash twit slash live when the show's on, all of our shows, when they're on, when we're recording them. You can watch us record them live on YouTube. After the fact, on-demand episodes are available at the website twittv slash mbw. There is also a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly's video. We have video and audio, or you can subscribe to the video or audio in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically as soon as it's available. That way, listen at your leisure. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Now it is my solemn duty to tell you:

You're having trouble with your screen. It's great. It's great, it fell off.

3:25:52 - Jason Snell
I'm gone, I'm gone, I'm not here.

3:25:55 - Leo Laporte
Never mind, never mind Back to work. Break time it's over... Did it pop? Is that what happened you?