MacBreak Weekly 964 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell are here. John Gruber is sad, he's mad and he's no longer a believer. We'll find out why. We'll also talk about the new iPhone Air and debunk one common myth or rumor about it. And then it's time to do some headbanging Metallica on vision pro. All that coming up. Next. On MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 964, recorded. Recorded Tuesday, March 18th 2025: I'm Just Disappointed. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news, and Apple is feeling really bad today because they were spanked. They've been spanked. Andy Ihnatko is here. Hello, Andrew.

0:01:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Hey there, hi, hi there, ho there, yeah it's. There's very few times that I say, gee, I, I'm glad that I'm not in a high position of authority at apple with the commensurate pay and respect. This is one of those weeks where I'm very happy to just be a commentator, just to come just a lowly just to be able to judge that Jason Snell is also here from sixcolors.com.

0:01:25 - Leo Laporte
Hello.

0:01:25 - Jason Snell
Jason. Hey, leo, you know, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm not mad either, I'm just disappointed. Yes, that's right, I'm just disappointed. The worst thing a father could say I'm just disappointed in you. I expected better. And Alex Lindsay from officehours.global Hello, Alex. So you know who's disappointed: John Gruber.

0:01:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It's hysterical to watch because I mean, I maybe it's because he expected so much more of apple than I did well, also can I also throw in that he also added in, like the clap, the thing that makes it hurt twice as much. But when your dad says I, I just blame myself because I guess I just screwed up and expecting so much.

He actually said in like paragraph in second I trusted you too much I can't, I can't believe that I didn't see this. I there's the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life, like not not pointing out that these they'd never actually shown this thing working and that's like, oh, this is why we love you, john.

0:02:26 - Leo Laporte
So we should probably for those who are not like us, obsessively following the Apple ups and downs.

It's all about Apple intelligence, which, if you've been listening to this show, I think you probably knew long ago was, you know, struggling, not great, having a hard time. Eventually Apple told, gave a, gave a statement to John Gruber's daring fireball saying, yeah, we're, we're probably not going to have Apple intelligence until, uh, next year, which is 2026 in apple, or later this year or whatever. They said, anyway 2026. So, uh, then john apparently went, went back, wrote the story and then and then thought about it, stewed, if, if you will, and put out a piece, yeah he put.

0:03:23 - Jason Snell
He stood on my podcast. I caught him mid. He was on upgrade last week and I caught him mid moment where he was working through his feelings and he used the word bamboozled at one point and I was like oh, oh, he's feeling it hard here.

0:03:37 - Leo Laporte
A lot of feelings going on, wow um, he basically he kind of implied that apple, something's rotten in the state of cupertino, he said, which is not a good, not a felicitous headline, I'm just going to say for a number of reasons, mainly because cupertino is a city, not a state but, anyway.

Okay. Um, he said I should have had my head examined. Uh, how I missed this. Ultimately, he says apple lied to us and apple, oh my god, this was. I couldn't. When I'm reading this, I'm going what the hell see. This is what comes of thinking of apple as something other than a company, a corporation, a corporation, corporation, yeah, uh. This is what comes of thinking apple is your lover. Uh, it isn't your lover, it is a company. It is dedicated to profit. Um, let me, let me find the paragraph. He goes on and on and on um my deeply misguided mental framework for apple intelligence. It gets worse. Apple had its anyway. He basically says apple has fallen off its pedestal. Apple used to be the greatest, most wonderful company in the world, but now, now, they're just so damaged. I'm sorry I'm scrolling through this whole thing. I should have probably he got a lot of feelings out, it's a good read.

So the ride is over. He ends when mediocrity, excuses and bs take root. They take over. A culture of excellence, accountability and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of these things and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three. A plague on your house. Apple, no, he didn't say that part, yeah, but he was really, um, hurt that apple would have lied and you know, is it fair to say they lied about apple intelligence? He, I think really what he kind of implied and I think most people have said is mark, we even said this last week marketing got a little ahead of what the engineering team could do I.

0:05:59 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that this is definitely a fight. This is, this is where we finally get open warfare, so to speak, between engineering and marketing at Apple. I think most of us noticed that when Apple announced all of these Apple IntelliSense features, we didn't see even a scripted, recorded demo. We saw a mock-up video of what this would look like if it were actually working. I don't think that they necessarily lied. They did marketing, and I know that's often a great.

There's a big gulf, hard to tell the difference between those two, but some people I don't think I don't think John was included, but I think some people were free to think that oh, wow, this is a demo.

Of course it's a lab demo, it's not ready to ship yet, but this is what it's going to do. Other people were able to see that this is just again an illustration of here's an IOU for what we hope to do. Compare and contrast with what Google has always done with Gemini, which is they will give you a really lame, highly controlled demo, but it will be like a live demo, so you can say that, wow, this doesn't look like very much right now, but at least they've showed something that was actually working. I think my interpretation of reading Guru's post was that he really felt upset about this, because he felt as though marketing overstepped itself and suggested that apple intelligence was farther along further along than it actually was, where they didn't have anything working whatsoever, that under those circumstances, it was extremely sketchy for them to show a mock-up of this thing actually working.

0:07:40 - Leo Laporte
he writes it's easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing we need to show something that only Apple could do, but it turns out they announced something Apple couldn't do and now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads that not only are they years behind the state of the art in AI, but they don't even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven't shipped but still haven't even been demonstrated, which I for one now presume means they can't be demonstrated. This is italicized because they don't work.

0:08:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean it is, I don't know. I think part of this is that he obviously brought a little more credulity to the demos last year than most of us did, to the demos last year, than most of us did. I mean, I think it's very clear that Apple felt incredible pressure to show that they were in the AI game. We've talked about it before, during and after, and I think it was very clear that they were pushing it hard and potentially lowering their standards. Right, there were some things that were very clearly going to be very hard for them to pull off, clearly not going to happen until 2025. Right, even at the time they made no claims that those things were going to happen soon. And so I mean, john's not wrong in saying that they felt pressure, they lowered their standards and I don't know if I would say that they lied.

Andy is right, it is marketing and I think also there's probably a cultural disconnect, a cultural problem, where somewhere someone said, well, we can probably do this, and in normal circumstances the executives in question would be like that's probably is not good enough, let's just boot it to next year. And they were not going to boot AI features to next year. They really wanted them out, and so they lowered their standards. Now I think that's one issue, which is they clearly someone somewhere misjudged whether they could ship this stuff in the you know, in the account in the uh, in the Apple OS year that we're in right now, the iOS 18 year, so that was a mistake.

The secondary mistake and I think that this is actually a better reason for John to get mad and for all of us to be grumpy is the marketing plan. And I go back to my thing that I've been saying for a while now about how Apple seems to only have one playbook. So they sort of have the way that when you're winning, why change anything? And clearly the marketing department was handed these features as if they were done and said great, we'll make a commercial with Bella Ramsey where we talk about all these things that aren't going to ship, maybe ever, and we'll just advertise it as if it's real happening today. And I think that was a huge disconnect and a major problem, because the whole Apple intelligence campaign started before Apple intelligence shipped any feature.

0:10:22 - Leo Laporte
I would like to point out that I've been saying this. I remember watching the NFL and watching these ads saying Apple's pushing these features that it doesn't have.

0:10:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

0:10:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, this was, I think, obvious. Now, I guess, because it's John Gruber, the the entire chattering class is going crazy over this. Ben Thompson, you know, skeeted right on, and owen, uh, alec, has, has, says, says he writes. You have to read the whole thing. Gruber is a long time follower of apple, close to its high priests and kings. He has a historical understanding of apple like no other.

0:10:58 - Jason Snell
When he criticizes apple, you know, the situation is much worse I mean, is it, is it wrong to say for, for our younger viewers? Maybe they won't remember this, but it's the um.

If we've lost cronkite, we've lost the american people like that isn't it kind of moment in vietnam where it's like when walter cronkite came back from vietnam and he's like people, this is really bad. Um, and? And that's when the people in the government were like, oh, like if uncle walter and middle america is now questioning the war. In the government were like, uh-oh, like if Uncle Walter and Middle America is now questioning the war in Vietnam, things are bad. Well, it's like if John Gruber is thoroughly disgusted with something that Apple's been doing. That's a bad sign.

0:11:37 - Alex Lindsay
I think that Apple has and we've talked about this on the show quite a few times I think they have a no problem which is they're not using it often enough. And I think they have a no problem which is they're not using it often enough, and I think that that's been. We see this at the OS. That's something Steve Jobs was brought to the table. Right, right, he, just, he, just we get you know.

You see this kind of creep of the number of products that are out at one time, this confusing process with the chipsets, the constant changing of the OS in a way that not necessarily is always forward, and oftentimes, if it is forward, it's too far forward, too fast, a lot of things just not being stable, and you just feel like they're just not. They're so aggressively trying to keep up with someone that is imaginary for them, like you know. I don't know who they're trying to keep up with. It's not like Apple users are going to jump ship next week, you know. And so I think that, and again, I think that their belief that they needed Apple intelligence there was much stronger than the actual need and whatever, whether they needed it or not, it's a lot worse to have this happen. I think that I applaud John for, you know, slapping him on the wrist. I think a lot of us have been talking about Apple moving too fast down the path of you know their ideas, rather than really making sure that it makes impact. Um the question really is.

0:12:47 - Leo Laporte
What's going on next, though, also comes from believing that apple was something uh different and special, which I've not believed, I've never believed, and so I wasn't. I'm less surprised. I mean, google did. Google did the same thing with google plus.

0:13:01 - Alex Lindsay
I mean this is not unusual. You know, I would say that apple does tend to move a lot slower and with a lot more intentionality than most of the other companies out there. I mean they really. I mean a lot of the other companies.

0:13:15 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you know, they're a company I can think of plenty of failures in apple's part um I I. What I can't think of and I think grouper's right is I can't think of a time that apple marketing has said they had a feature that they didn't have. But that's very few companies will do that. That's a that's a fumble.

0:13:32 - Jason Snell
I'm just not hurt by it, like I'm not, that's just well and I say screwed up marketing that he's invested some of his own personal you you know worth in his calibration of being able to read what Apple says and trust what they say. And what's the level where you can trust them. And he's not wrong in saying, you know, they lowered the bar, they did not used to over-promise at this level, to promise vaporware at this level. And I think that's the thing that bugs him the most is that Apple has always prided itself on being a company that when you see something, when they announce something, it's either going to ship or it's very close. They have a high degree of confidence. They don't do the fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Here's some vaporware. We'll get to it eventually. It's a CES product that may or may not exist, stuff like that. They've never played that game. And he's not wrong in saying that this Apple intelligence announcement is a new low in terms of Apple not, you know, announcing things that don't exist Like that. Bottom line is is that here we are in March, nine months after WWDC, and that that product you know those things aren't in beta, nobody's seen them and they may never ship.

0:14:41 - Alex Lindsay
And it feels like again for me who I mean, I use AI all day, every day. It's really important to me and I just don't care when Apple gets around to it because I'm plenty full. So I have this whole thing like I don't understand why it had to happen and it feels like just a very unforced error, in the same way that the mag charging that they announced that never came to like who cares, like who cares about that product, and so they got excited. In both cases they got excited and had to tell us something that didn't exist when no one was really waiting for it. Like I just don't. I mean, I get the analysts are really waiting for it, but I don't think that the average Apple user was like oh, my gosh, when is Apple intelligence coming?

0:15:20 - Leo Laporte
So, you know, maybe that's why I'm talking about the average app every when it comes to. They're not alone in this. I mean, google released a video of gemini that I fell for. I thought, wow, this is amazing. And it turned out it was fabricated. Uh, you know, I mean companies have done this for years. I guess if you thought apple was somehow special but I've never. I've always thought apple's a company like any other company and they're gonna make mistakes like this I don't think it's the end of the world. I think you're right, Alex, when you say that's not why people buy iphones. I don't think there's. I don't think the market is the. The apple customers are going to say, oh, I'm not buying any more apple products. They, they lied. I mean Nobody cares.

0:16:04 - Alex Lindsay
What I hope this leads to is Apple lets us just say hey for Siri. I would like you to activate chat GPT. All the time I'm going to say I'm going to give you the approval for it to be just used, and let me just use that, because that's what I do right now is I have to fumble around to get chat GPT to open up and then I just start hitting the button. I sit there and talk to it about what I'm trying to figure out while I'm working and it is seamless, but I have to just get to that first bit and I can't just say, hey, shlomo, ask a question, and I just want to be able to as a user. I'm hoping this failure and the delay means that Apple will stop trying to protect us from ourselves and just let us have the AI that we're already using all the time.

0:16:46 - Jason Snell
I almost I mean here we will never know for sure but my theory is that this decision was made not because and this is one of the reasons it's sort of a sin it was made not because of consumer demand. I think the consumer demand for AI is overstated and also, as Alex points out, a lot of that demand is fulfilled by just using the apps and doing it that way. I think this was about Apple feeling executives feeling like in the pressure cooker of like the sorry, the echo chamber, really of Silicon Valley, that everybody's talking about AI and maybe investors are worried about it and they're worried about their stock price and they're worried about recruiting people or retaining people because of the perception. Hiring is another reason you do stuff like this, but I don't think the Apple's thing that they usually focus on, which is consumer demand and fulfilling the needs of consumers, was a motivator here, and that is part of the problem is that they tried to do a spin on it, and that is part of the problem is that they tried to do a spin on it. A lot of these features when you look at them and when we've talked about them, it doesn't read as Apple sensed a problem and then, is using AI to solve it. All of them are.

Apple had an agenda to push AI into their operating system and found places to stick it, which is not the same thing as solving a problem organically, because the problem existed. It's because they wanted to shove AI features in so they could make those claims. And if this, if I think, the best news of this whole story is, like I said earlier, when you're going great, there's no reason to change anything. And I have to hope that, after lots of behind the scenes grousing about Siri for 10 years and about AI for the last couple of years, that this maybe finally serves as a kind of a punch in the gut to Apple to make them say oh, the way we're structured internally, because I don't think this is a lazy programmer somewhere, I don't think this is one bad Apple in the management camp.

I think this is a cultural, structural problem inside Apple that caused this to go on like this, and maybe it is the punch that they need to say oh, we need to actually rethink things and change things and make things different. And what Alex says is absolutely right being able to rely on third party AI solutions and put it in the APIs for iOS 19, providing APIs for developers to use Apple's models so that they don't have to bake in their own less efficient models when you download an app and try to run it on your iPhone. Like there are lots of things they could do that are more Apple. Like that they didn't do because they had this bad decision and, I think, a broken structure internally that led to this kind of dysfunction and it's like it's easy to just ignore it when you're number one and they've been number one for a long time. Maybe now they've finally gotten the message.

0:19:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I disagree slightly. I agree that it wasn't important to for the purposes of improving the product. It was not important for them to ship Apple intelligence in late, start rolling it out in late 2024 and make serious upgrades in late excuse me, in 2025. Absolutely agree with that. However, we talked about this a little bit last week, about how, at that moment, that moment in June, apple had just come off of two serious one hugely embarrassing development hitch and one slightly embarrassing one where they'd spent a billion dollars a year for 10 years on a car they decided never to ship and they had spent the the product to their credit, they had never said anything about that car right right, no, I'm saying but, but it was well known that this it was.

0:20:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but they never made the announcement, they didn't start running ads about. You're gonna love the car.

0:20:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going somewhere with this. They had shipped, and they shipped the Apple Vision Pro, which Tim had spent the past year or so hyping up in the way in the limited way that Tim can hype up an unannounced product by saying, oh, we think VR is a very big thing and, yes, we're very, very looking forward to we're doing stuff like that. Ok, I think that it was very, very important for them to make a clear statement that we haven't let AI pass us by. We've been working on AI since for the past, since 2016, 2017 or earlier. Here is our roadmap for AI, because you can't just simply as Apple has proven, you can't just announce a roadmap and then start shipping something a year later. That's a 10-year process to get where everybody else is right now.

So it was very important to analysts, to their own culture, to indicate that we're not just thinking that this is something simple that we can knock off. We're not thinking that this is something that we can absolutely ignore. This is potentially something like support for the internet, support for the world wide web, support for wi-fi, and we promise you that if you buy a computer uh, a mac today or an iphone today, that's supposed to last five or six or seven years. It's not going to be functionally obsolete in five or six years because in that time we will have developed our own in-house stuff. So at I can see the pressure, that there was some pressure that was necessary.

However, where they've really screwed up is they could have just simply said this is a long road. We have noticed the missteps of our competitors, the serious missteps of our competitors, in spreading disinformation, in creating deep fakes, and we don't care to repeat those mistakes, so that we will be proceeding carefully and slowly and we have no timetable to announce as yet. However, here is our vision for the future". That would have been absolutely sufficient, but I don't think that Apple had the option of pretending that. Oh well, yeah, I mean, we allowed the OpenAI app and the ChatGPT app into the app store, so we got it. They have to be able to show they got some skin in the game.

0:22:29 - Jason Snell
But there was a spectrum there, right Like the features that didn't ship. They didn't need to announce.

0:22:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think right Like.

0:22:34 - Jason Snell
Genmoji seems like a pretty no-brainer. I don't love image playgrounds, but Genmoji seems okay.

0:22:39 - Leo Laporte
I have actually deleted image.

0:22:40 - Jason Snell
Playgrounds are not good, it's so far behind the state of the art and the writing tool stuff is fine. Again, there's stuff in there. That's fine, Andy's right though they did feel like they're behind the eight ball right. They're like, how do we make a move here? And you know what? They were under pressure and it turns out here's the funny thing. It turns out, yeah, they were way behind, they were caught flat and they made some rash decisions that are coming back to hurt them now.

But the real question is not you know details about why they made this decision. The real question is what do they have? Are those features dead? Are they coming back? And what are they going to announce in June? And are they going to learn from the last year? Because, remember, those were, on Apple terms, rash decisions, right, like Apple doesn't do things in six months a turn like that. That doesn't happen. And they did it this time and we see the result.

So, like, what have they learned in the last year and are they going to change direction? Are they going to stay the course? Are they going to throw features out and put different features in? Are they going to pretend it never happened that and put different features in? Are they going to pretend it ever happened? That's a real good question. June is going to be very interesting and I'll point out that not just John Gruber, but all of us are going to add. No matter what our level of skepticism is about anything Apple says in its marketing, all of us took a step like plus five to skepticism Wherever you started. We're all more skeptical now than we were a year ago. I'm not because I don't you know Amazon?

0:24:08 - Leo Laporte
nobody, nobody, no, john, no, no. John Gruber of Amazon, which doesn't exist, of course, wrote an article saying geez, amazon promised a smart Alexa plus a year ago and they still don't have it. Oh my God. They lied, because nobody expects anything from Amazon or Google.

0:24:24 - Jason Snell
But the real question is Wouldn't you say that that means that people who used to expect something from Apple are now much less inclined to expect something from Apple that they're now more like the rest of them.

0:24:33 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean the thing is is that you know, all of life is a confidence game and when people start losing confidence, things start to fall apart really quickly. You know, there's a lot of things that are held together just because we all stop at stop signs and stop lights because we have the confidence that everyone else is going to do it and everyone has the confidence that we're going to do it. You know, but it's all a game Actually.

0:24:52 - Leo Laporte
If you think everybody's going to stop you, blow it. You run right through it, to be honest. So, but the point is we have-. We stop because we think they're not stopping.

0:25:06 - Alex Lindsay
There's so many things that we do that that all live inside confidence, a trust, a confidence, um, and and the and the reality distortion only works when that reality distortion is followed up with with something that is a result, looks like a result, and if that fades away, then absolutely, and it is.

0:25:18 - Leo Laporte
I do think it's fading away you know, like the only thing that matters. It should matter to anybody. You know, the only thing that matters, it should matter to anybody. The only thing that matters to me is is Gruber right that there's a structural problem at Apple? I'm sorry he got butthurt. I'm sorry people's faith in Apple was destroyed.

0:25:36 - Jason Snell
This is a structural problem and we've seen it because Siri's been so bad for so long and they hired John Giandrea from Google what five years ago longer? And he was going to fix Siri and fix all their machine learning stuff and all of that. And yet they have been. I mean, part of it is a tactical problem, which is they looked, somebody at Apple certainly raised their hand and said, hey, llms are a thing. And senior people at Apple were like, nah, forget it, it's dumb, it's never going to amount to anything, and that was a mistake. But get it, it's dumb, it's never going to amount to anything, and that was a mistake.

But I do think that if you look at this, there seems to be a real I got it, you take it kind of thing going on between craig federighi, who's in charge of software, and john gendrea, who's in charge of ai and whatever you know. In the end we can speculate about what's broken in there, but what ships is what matters? And series of mess. And mark Gurman says they're not going to get new conversational siri until 2027. Like it's not good even if apple hadn't?

0:26:33 - Leo Laporte
I mean, what if apple had never even mentioned ai and just shipped the few things they shipped? Wouldn't they be in the same boat? People would say, oh, apple's missing the bus.

0:26:42 - Jason Snell
Yes, so it doesn't, I think it would be worse. I think that there is a more broad public perception now that apple is on it, even if they're struggling, even if it's messy and and, honestly, those ads, as misleading as we say they are.

0:26:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think if you asked a member of the general public if apple stuff does ai, they'd say yes, yeah yeah, they were, and I think I think one thing that they're missing is I don't think that the leadership right now is the same level of strength that, of course, it had under. Or you know, those types of things where you have somebody who is pointing the ship very rigorously and that person can destroy the ship as well. We're seeing that in other companies right now. But the point is, is that that growth of making decisions and whether that person has good taste or not and in Apple's case, Steve had good taste, but I don't feel like after he left, there hasn't been somebody else with this kind of singular vision of this is what we need to do, or this is what we're all about.

There's a lot of people that are having a lot of meetings, that have a lot of things going on, and it's which is a typical corporation problem, but it's not. It doesn't have that singular vision which has allowed Apple to expand into a lot of other places. But I do think it has taken their eye off of the original ball, whether that's a plus or minus, and I think that makes. I think that that's why we see more features than stability. I think that that's why we see more announcements than products. Those all are things that are absolutely very common with large corporations that are making decisions by committee.

0:28:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also the thing we have to remember about Apple is that my theory of all businesses, particularly tech businesses, is that there is one machine in the basement that is responsible for generating all of the money, or at least so much of the money, that it is really the entire business, and everything has to enhance the operation and the function of this machine. For Apple, it is hardware, hardware, hardware, hardware. Every question has to be at some point filtered through the question how will this help us sell more iPhones? How will this help us sell more Macs, more iPads, more AirPods and, yes, they have services, but I think that that's still one of the biggies, but I think that that's still one of the biggies.

So when you ask them a question like AI is not, whereas Google is in a position where their machine is services. What can we turn into services? Particularly, what can we turn into cloud services? What can we turn to cloud computing services? Ai is an absolute natural fit and also a feature that will help Android users continue to use the phone and continue to feed information into the ecosystem. Uh, apple doesn't have that. So when you ask them internally, when they debate, what should we do with AI, there's no obvious answer to the question how will this help us sell phones, or how will this help us sell services in the short term? And that's, I think, where they can often do things that are hard to predict from the outside.

0:29:46 - Alex Lindsay
I think one of the things that's really hard here is that Siri is the obvious one that if you could fix it it would be a huge deal. Like I get on a drive, I open up ChatGPT and I sit there and talk to ChatGPT all the way through the drive asking questions about something I'm trying to figure out. That's what I want to do with Siri, and the only thing that bugs me about it is that I have to go find the app. I can't just ask, say, hey, shlomo, uh, what is this? And get a reason Like my. My wife asked Siri something, uh, the other day and I was like, what are you doing? And I just opened up like cause Siri came up with some kind of crazy answer.

0:30:31 - Leo Laporte
And I was like why are we asking siri that that's not what she does? She does timers and she does the weather and sunrise, like like that's what she knows how to do. Conversation with lisa, she'll ask siri things and I said I just know that's like you're not going to get an answer, but but it was like it was, it was um, uh it it.

0:30:43 - Alex Lindsay
What's interesting, though, is that I asked we asked, of course, chat gpt, and it gave this very complete answer, and then it gave us some extra stuff that you might want to know. And then we said, well, what about this? And then it gave us a whole bunch of other stuff and it was magical, like it was a magical right.

0:30:54 - Leo Laporte
Um, yeah so this is something om malik actually does say. He has an update to his piece and he says my premise that apple did this, uh, for the market, uh, was disputed by a lot of a number of wall street insiders who said no, if apple cared about the market, they'd focus on the I, their profit maker, and they wouldn't be worried about this kind of stuff. So this isn't, this wasn't really. I mean, I'm he disputes and I maybe don't know if I agree with that that this was done because Apple had to for the market.

0:31:29 - Alex Lindsay
Maybe there was hubris. I think it's absolutely the market, because I think that it is because the market, but the market is not the issue.

0:31:36 - Leo Laporte
Apple's got things they can talk about, though, like Apple, silicon, yeah, and the cameras and the iPhone. There's so many good things they can talk about.

0:31:45 - Alex Lindsay
That are reasons people actually buy technology, but you have a bunch of analysts that are asking you every meeting what are you doing about AI?

0:31:51 - Jason Snell
What are you doing about AI? What are you doing about AI?

0:31:53 - Alex Lindsay
And then you have this little echo chamber of people who say, well, apple doesn't have a solution for this. And then you have the idiots who are the stockbrokers, who don't know really anything about anything. They just kind of listen to the analysts and they sit there and buy and sell and everything else. But the problem is is that you talk to any employee who works at a company with lots of stock options. When the stocks hit, you know, start sliding, there's a huge morale problem and at the minute you know, because that's the cost of it's not the stock, the most important stockholders in a company are the employees, you know, and they are, they have all of this. They've taken lower salaries for higher stock options, which works great as long as it keeps going.

But it's a bit of a pawn, well, I mean, everybody's stock is going down right now.

0:32:40 - Leo Laporte
But Apple's would have been going down earlier. Apple might have been more worried that people would start buying Android phones, because I mean all of the things that they promote in these ads that a Google Pixel 9 can do right.

0:32:54 - Jason Snell
This is, I think, ultimately explained entirely by being a defense against the potential future where AI features are enough to make you not buy an Apple product, right, and I don't even think that, and this may be part of the problem. I don't even think that this is an effort to make sure that Apple is a leader in AI-enabled features. I think it's literally a defensive move to say it kills us. I mean, people switching to AI PCs over Mac Macs, I guess, is a little bit of a problem, although the Mac is so open in terms of software that that it probably doesn't matter.

But on the iPhone, like Apple's got the this is the downside of it being so locked down is there are apps on the iPhone, but if you want it interwoven with your operating system, like that's, that is the existential risk. Maybe not this year, but like if they don't start down the path. Is there a point where random consumer says, well, I need to get a samsung or a or a google phone because apple doesn't do whatever that thing is, that is what I need to do with my phone, and that that could kill I mean kill half of their revenue if they? If so, it's existential, so that's what they're playing defense against they are.

0:34:07 - Leo Laporte
They are protecting their, their chief product. Yeah, john gerard in our club twitter discord says because of the apple ads, my sister and sister-in-law were asking about it and wanting to upgrade their old iphone to take advantage of the ai. Before that all I'd heard was ai stealing my data and I'll never use it. So maybe this, maybe Apple's not completely misguided here. They just got to deliver, and that's ultimately.

0:34:34 - Jason Snell
You know, john could get mad about the marketing and all those things, but I think what he's really mad about, and I think that we all need to look at, is Apple has failed to deliver.

That's what's going on here. Is they failed to deliver AI things when other people were and they're behind? Their image model isn't very good. They promised some features that were going to differentiate them and they can't ship them, and that's, I think, the most troubling thing. The good news is and I'm going to be Mr Optimistic here for a moment the good news is, I think the events of the last six months suggest that AI models are more of a commodity and that, you know, it's not. It's highly unlikely that somebody like Google invents an AI thing that blows everybody away. That is not replicable by literally every other company if they've got enough time and money. And if that's the case, that's an advantage for Apple, because it doesn't really matter that they're behind, because it's not something that's going to be the crown jewels that AI is going to be much more of a commodity that's easy to generate.

0:35:33 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that it feels like they blinked. You know like you feel like in a lot of ways you feel like Apple is this giant ship that doesn't really pay attention to anybody else and just kind of plow, whether they do or not. It just feels like they're just always just they're just making great products and people are. They're just happy that people are showing up that kind of thing and in this case it just feels desperate to say a bunch of things that aren't, that aren't there, like you just had to do it and you're just not where. I think that John and most of us are not used to seeing Apple look desperate.

0:36:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's but a little bit buzzed and they're a little bit silly. It's like you're used to thinking wait a minute, they never laugh and just dance in the middle of the kitchen and have an egg fight in the middle of the room. What is going on here? So, the first time that Apple announces something and clearly can't deliver it, not only that, but it's you start to think about what in Apple's corporate culture, what in their management system, allowed them to screw up this badly, to be able to say, okay, if there are conversations internally saying what can we promise, and not even a fixed deadline, but vaguely, when can we promise it? And so, okay, we feel as though we can have this feature ready by a lot of this stuff could be ready in 2025, let's say what failure happened so that, no, they're not even close to it.

There is a uh I I think it was a Gurman's column this week. Was it where they, someone or somebody mentioned that there was sort of a let's all feel good, let's all feel better about the horrible week we had meeting all hands, meeting at siri, in which one of the one of the heads of the project base was showing off here's some stuff that's actually working, so that at least the team can see we haven't just been sort of like raiding the vending machine here. We actually have some work done and there is something we can build upon. That's pretty shocking that that's where they are right now, and so I think that's why that's causing a lot of people to rethink a lot of these things, a lot of their impressions of Apple that were not Apple's responsibility. As I often say, people think of Apple as, hey, they're two hippies in a garage and hey, wow, they care about humanity. And no, they are a $3.5 trillion company. They are as dysfunctional as any other huge tech company. They are as selfish as any other huge tech company.

0:38:01 - Leo Laporte
Do you think they've learned a lesson not to preannounce stuff?

0:38:09 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, that was always their tradition is don't pre-announce.

0:38:11 - Leo Laporte
Maybe they felt like they had to. They have they were already. Besides putting out the press release and the statement to John Gruber, they also had to modify the apple page about siri. They've added some fine print to the big paragraph that says with all new, with all new superpowers, siri can assist you like never before. This is still on the apple page. Awareness of your personal context enables siri to help you in ways that are unique to you. Need to check when your mom's flight is arriving? Yeah, siri, this is exactly, by the way, what was in that bella ramsey ad. Siri can help you find what you're looking for without compromising your privacy. And then in the fine fine print series, personal context understanding, onscreen awareness and in-app applications are in development and will be available with a future software update. So I mean that's not exactly saying mea culpa. Maybe they should take that whole paragraph out.

0:38:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I think what this is sometimes, or I sometimes think that one of the things I've often said about Apple is that, wow, unlike Google, unlike Microsoft, unlike a lot of other companies where I'm sure very intense arguments inside Cupertino about marketing, engineering, the C-suite basically and in this case the people with the right argument lost that argument In a good, healthy environment, which I think Apple is. That means that the next time that person or that group or that junta makes that argument, they basically might be listened to a little bit harder. So hopefully we won't see another embarrassment like this.

0:39:51 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a break that it's not really the big story of the week, but I I couldn't. I couldn't resist. Yeah, I just thought it was fascinating. There is tea, we must. There was tea, we have to spill it. Uh, Andy and notco. Alex lindsey, Jason Snell MacBreak Weekly continues in a moment.

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Here's some good news apple executives believe you will love the upcoming ios overhaul what a relief I they're still living down the last time where they said that nobody wants this and nobody's gonna like our stuff and it's a weird marketing choice. So I'm glad they're back on the uh, on the on the train now on the wagon uh, you may remember we talked last week. Mark Gurman reported ios 19 is going to be quote one of the most dramatic software overhauls in its history. Um, and now bloomberg reports apple executives are confident. Do you think it was a phone call where they called up and said I just want you to know, mark, we're confident, you're gonna love it.

0:45:33 - Jason Snell
Now.

0:45:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Users will love the record no attribution on deep background. We think this is good they.

0:45:40 - Leo Laporte
We have learned from vision os that people love round icons. They love them. The redesign will span across Apple's biggest platforms. It will, according to Gurman, look a little bit like Vision OS. They'll adopt the design principles introduced in Vision OS. By the way, are we going to get Gurman on next week? Is that, is that true, working on it? We can ask him, mark, how do you know? Apple executives believe users will love the upcoming overhaul. It's interesting that obviously Apple planted that. It's interesting that Apple felt the need to plant that.

0:46:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, who knows, but we talked a little bit about this last week, about how iOS 7 was the last huge overhaul of at least the mobile OS, and they really had to walk a lot of that direction back and make it a little bit more productive. One thing that I've been thinking of the last week, though, is the rumors about folding phones. Folding MacBook, folding iPad are starting to accelerate. What if, as part of this overhaul, they're trying to give macOS a redesign to make a little bit more sense if it had a touch interface, like if they were to create a foldable MacBook that, when unfolded, it could be just a 16 inch tablet that could be used in and of itself?

0:47:08 - Jason Snell
yeah, it is. If you think about their stories about uh chips, right that every m chip that gets generated is they know what all the systems are that are going to use that chip, like that's part of their integrated model. There is no way you would build a next generation uh cross operating system design language without anticipating your next few years of products on the roadmap, like if there's a touchscreen MacBook, like maybe because we've heard those rumors and it's like well, of course, that would be one of the challenges that they would want to address in doing a new design like this, a new design like this.

0:47:43 - Leo Laporte
Gurman also talks in his Sunday Power On newsletter, which has become a staple of this program four new iPhones, including an iPhone 17 Air. Well, now, that's not this year, is it? Or is it? No, that would be next year, next year, next year. But he says this year there is going to 17.

0:48:01 - Jason Snell
Air is this year, this fall. Oh, it is this year, oh yeah, 17.

0:48:05 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, there is gonna 17 years this year, this fall. Oh, it is this year. Oh yeah, 17. That's what? I'm sorry, I can't count. We have 16 now, right, okay, thank you. Uh, the company will roll out one entry-level phone well, I think they already did that, the 16e right. Two high-end models.

He means 17 the base model 17 17, 17 pro 17 pro max and then a 17 Air. Okay, that all makes sense, right? Yeah, it will be thinner than the rest. There is some chatter that it might not have ports. This might be the one everybody's been talking about.

0:48:35 - Jason Snell
No, gurman says no. Gurman says that they thought about it. He says it will have ports. In something that I looked in our notes, Andy and I both twigged to where he's like they're afraid that the eu will be angry at them for eliminating usbc, which is stupid, and I'm sure that that is not that. Maybe maybe Gurman's source said that, but there's no way because there's a specific call carve out if you have no ports, the eu doesn't care that, that you don't have usbc it's only if you have.

0:49:00 - Andy Ihnatko
They have a separate document. It's an explainer q a. But what does this mean? And and, as Jason said, it is explicit that says that if your device, that if, if your phone does not have any ports whatsoever such as and it charges only by wireless charge, it is not affected by this.

0:49:15 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, so I don't know where he was going there uh, so this report did not come from mark Gurman, the a port, the port free rumor. Uh, I don't know where it came from. Let me see, I'm trying to find it. Sonny Dixon yeah, sonny Dixon actually shared some. Uh, he's a long time and usually pretty reliable, especially when it comes to things like the supply chain. He showed the slugs, the dummies, of the first iPhone 17. Here's the four different models.

0:49:45 - Andy Ihnatko
It has buttons so these are supposedly basically what the case manufacturers are betting on.

The phone looks like but it really but, but really apple as well, they who know it's it's unsourced but it is. Uh, this is. These are products that are that are commissioned by case manufacturers to have a physical object that they can put inside purported case. But but it does mean that you have these large companies that are putting lots and lots of money on tooling. They would not be speculating on what it looks like. They're based on designs that they think are pretty good, or at least good enough to get a head start on. And, unlike the renders and unlike the CAD files we've been seeing beforehand, it is kind of fun to see them as actual physical objects, particularly stacked up next to each other. I think that the camera bump is probably going to be controversial for some people because it is such a non, it is such a such a such a detour for Apple's phone design language, but it does open up a lot of possibilities, I think, for case design and for camera design.

0:50:50 - Leo Laporte
The new air will, according to a German, have the C1 modem that was in the iPhone 16 E. Better battery life we're seeing that right More responsive data and congested conditions. But the new M3 Air iPad does not have it. Nor does the regular iPad nothing, nor the MacBook Air.

0:51:17 - Jason Snell
So, although maybe this is a chance to do a cellular Mac once they get the internal modem working, I think the one that surprised me was ProMotion, because that is a thing that we've talked about here how the table stakes for phones are getting to the point where Apple's lower refresh models look a little bad and Gurman says that this Air, which is not a pro phone, will still have ProMotion. It will, yeah, that's good. That's what he says, and I wonder, and honestly I wonder, if some of it is actually power savings, which seems weird because a higher refresh rate would seem like it might be a problem, but I believe those phones, also those screens, have the ability to ramp down the frame rate when they're not in use, and if that's, if that's a power saver.

It sounds like a lot of decisions were made because this is going to be a thinner phone, which means the overall battery volume is less, and they're trying to keep he says they will keep the battery level basically the same as in other models, and that means that they're finding every way they can possibly save on power yeah, um, then there's this foldable phone.

0:52:25 - Leo Laporte
That wouldn't be this year, it'd be next year.

0:52:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, next year or the year after he says, yeah, that's interesting.

0:52:32 - Leo Laporte
And then next year or the year after.

0:52:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Ming-Chi Kuo had a piece last week that was basically adding a couple of details, but also rounding up all of the information he thinks he's put together with the past year, and so one of the highlights of his report in this new report is that it is going to be a premium phone. It's going to cost like $2,000, $2,500, which makes sense. I mean, that's what a folding phone costs. These panels aren't just not cheap. And also this is we talked about how Apple's machine is a machine that makes profits based on selling high end hardware with a good markup. This is absolute catnip for the iPhone product line.

0:53:08 - Alex Lindsay
I guess. I mean, I have like negative interest, not even zero interest, in a foldable phone. Every person I know who's bought a foldable phone didn't buy a second one so far, Like it. Just their next upgrade to the foldable phone was like a moment that they had, and then it became so problematic that it was that they. I just don't, it just seems, it seems.

0:53:31 - Jason Snell
But this is the moment where Apple says now it's worth doing right.

And that's the question, is it's easy to say, oh, you know, when he wants an iPod with a video right, like it is maybe this is the moment I mean Gurman's report says've basically gotten the, the wrinkle, out of the center of the screen, and while I I share your skepticism about this as a use case, I don't know. Apple has the good tablet, yeah, and and the os supports tablet apps really well, and, by all accounts, this seems to be a nice iphone that unfolds into an ipad and that is an interesting use case to me.

0:54:05 - Andy Ihnatko
That's super hot, particularly if it's thin, particularly when it's folded it's thin and we've seen, like Oppo I think Oppo has a new phone out that is it is when you fold it it's only marginally thicker than an iPhone 16. And the only cost that app that iPhone fold users might pay is they might not get that really great array of cameras they would get with a top-of-the-line iPhone 17 Pro.

0:54:29 - Jason Snell
It'd be more like the Air.

0:54:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, I feel like the iPhone that turns into an iPad is I don't have. Let me make it clear I don't have $2,000, let alone $2,500, to spend on a phone, but if I were at another, higher level of money, that would be very much in line with my name. So I do. I do know some people who are. I think Alex is right that it's not a mainstream product, partially partly because of the price, but the progress has been made. Since samsung made their first fold, which was a semi-disaster, the ditch is no longer really noticeable. They're now really flat. They're a lot more reliable. They're a lot more durable. They'll never be as durable as a standard slab foam, but they're a lot more durable. And I do know a lot of people that have replaced their first foldable foldable with another foldable do you see a lot of photo balls out in the wild?

0:55:16 - Leo Laporte
interesting in my, in my group. Yeah, I don't?

0:55:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't. I have to say that I have never seen someone uh on public transportation or even just like out in the boss on boston common using one, but that doesn't mean there's a reason why all these every major manufacturer has a club or the polo matches and there are a lot of people with them.

0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
I find, yeah, actually I have the. Uh, I like the flip, but see, that's not for me. This is the other going the other direction. This is to make a smaller form factor that then folds out to a normal size phone.

0:55:48 - Andy Ihnatko
There are a lot of really cool. This why I love foldable displays that there are so many ways to change up the paradigm that we've been stuck with for now like 10, 15 years with phones and for 20 or 30 years with laptops. I love the idea that designers, who only have stuff in their sketchbooks that gosh, wouldn't it be nice to be able to do this sometime can now actually realize that there's an Android manufacturer that I can't remember the name but they. This is why, like Android and Windows, this is one of the one of the things that are singularly wonderful about them.

There are so many manufacturers that there's room to try out really weird things and see if they fly. So there's one Android phone designer not a major one that's decided to do a slab-style folding phone so it folds out into a regular-sized phone, but make it fold twice so that it folds into like a box of Tic Tacs sort of thing, and I don't know if there's a market for that, but I'm glad that someone is trying to make it and see if for the 1,000 people in the world who are like, oh my God, finally something that I can put into a compact purse or now have like a smartphone. They can put into a car. I love to. Failures are just as illustrative as successes, because here's what we've done.

0:57:01 - Leo Laporte
We tried it, people, but here's what people the people who liked it liked this part of it. We will carry this over into the next design and try again. I watched last night. I was uh, just because I wanted to catch up on 2013's vision of ai. I watched her again and, uh, he has a little, really little phone that opens up, that unfolds, that he carries around in his pocket that's not see.

0:57:24 - Andy Ihnatko
That's an idea that I wish that people hadn't given up on. I love the idea of two screens separated by a mechanical hinge, because damn, I mean it's obviously if people have a problem with a ditch, they're not going to like a gap. That's an actual hinge. But the idea of so many different applications where you're reading or consuming media, where left page and right page are absolutely a working paradigm, so many use cases where I want to have my email app open on the left page, I want to have a notes taking app or calendar app open in the right page, or even just the ability to use it like a traditional laptop that has a 180 degree or 360 degree screen. I want to be able to fold it back up back for itself and basically have it as an easel so I can be watching videos while I'm having lunch. I really wish they hadn't given up on that quite so quickly, because that's one of my favorite form factors.

0:58:15 - Leo Laporte
I thought there's a lot of potential there another thing Gurman points out is this week the apple 100 off-site is happening. All the top 100 executives this is something steve jobs, uh, pioneered go off site. Now I, gruber, said that the steve remember, brought the mobile me group together in the auditorium and said you guys are, you're ruining our reputation etc. I just wonder if maybe when they all go to and they're sitting at the giant teacups or something at disneyland, if they, if they don't have a little, if tim cook just doesn't say something to him.

Um, Gurman doesn't think so, because there's enough responsibility for the ai failure to go around. He says the company's marketing heads, jaws and bob borchers, are ultimately responsible. But then there's tor myron's marketing communications team which made the tv ads. They earlier this year made the squish ad. Craig federighi, that couldn't integrate the features in a compelling fashion. Of course john gen andrea, who gets all the key because he's leading the ai group, the product managers and of course cook. So he says, given the nature of the collective failure, you're all fired we're gonna start over and put somebody else in charge anyway.

I wonder where they're going. Do you know where they're going anybody? Uh, just be fun to see 100 apple executives all at the at disney world that I don't know no, I get, I.

0:59:42 - Andy Ihnatko
Could I get to sit in the front seat of the millennium falcon?

0:59:44 - Alex Lindsay
no I get to sit in the front seat of millennium falcon and slappy, slappy, slappy I think this one. I think this one might be more like esalen.

0:59:50 - Leo Laporte
You know they need to yeah, uh-huh, they're gonna really need to think here. Yeah, a lot of whiteboard activity and beanbags involved. What shall we do?

0:59:59 - Andy Ihnatko
about the working class. I tire of their petty, petty claims for compensation for the work that they.

1:00:06 - Leo Laporte
If you're gonna do that, you got to go up to the redwoods of the mohemian grove if you really want to plan to take over the world. Actually, uh, next, uh, intelligent machines tomorrow. Uh, we have, uh, the executive of the future of humans institute, who is a very respected physicist at UCSC, an AI expert. This was the group that put out that letter to pause AI for six months. They're really concerned about superintelligence, like they think it's an extinction event for humans. So this should be interesting tomorrow. You may be happy that Apple AI is just making little emojis and doesn't really want to take over the world or anything. So I'm I'm actually really looking forward to hearing what. What's the worst that could happen? Uh, and the good news iPhone owners won't even know what's happening. All right, we're gonna take a little break. Future of life Institute. Thank you, f-o-l-i. Folly, and they probably don't use that acronym. Um, should be fine. Anthony aguirre will be joining us tomorrow on intelligent machines. Thank you, anthony.

Uh, our show today brought to you. We'll have more with MacBreak Weekly in just a bit, including a fabulous vision pro segment. We're gonna rock out, rock out and turn vision pro. Goats shall be eggs and night. Uh, this episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security, did I ever tell you? James Hatfield said I have a very nice voice. There's a. There's a story there, but we'll save that for later.

Enterprises have spent billions of dollars on firewalls and VPNs. How's that working out for y'all? Well, breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks $75 million record payout last year. So I guess those perimeter defenses really aren't aren't working as you'd hoped. Traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface. With public facing ips. That's something that bad guys can hang their hat on, and more easily than ever with ai tools. They're really getting clever if you listen to security. Now they have some. It's amazing what they're doing. And they struck. We had a story. It was fascinating.

Uh, last week steve was talking about a hacker gang that got in through a vpn, you know, and they browsed around and, uh, they couldn't. They couldn't set off their ransomware bombs. So they found a camera, a, a security camera that was running linux, and they were able to hack that and they actually ran the ransom. They ran the whole thing from the software in the camera and all of this is because ai makes this easier, right, and then, of course, once the this is, this was the problem.

Once people get in, they get through those primitive fences most security just assumes well, anybody inside the network is good, they're an employee. So what do bad guys do? They can, they can go anywhere inside the network. They look for things like those cameras to attack. They look for where you back stuff out up and they also start exfiltrating embarrassing information, customer information, emails, that kind of thing. And of course, your, your perimeter defenses struggle to inspect that encrypted traffic at scale. So it's there's, it's easy for them to leak that out.

Here's the bottom line. Hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it with AI to outpace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. Do not let bad actors win. They're innovating, they're explopace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. Do not let bad actors win. They're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses.

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Let's do the vision pro segment. You've been watching that Metallica vision pro a vision pro uh sorry um, I've seen good things about that.

1:05:40 - Alex Lindsay
The band is very happy with the uh. The vision pro um sits on the front edge of a lot of this stuff. I mean, if you say there's a new technology, Metallica where do we?

1:05:45 - Leo Laporte
sign up, yeah, which is great that way forever.

1:05:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, so you've watched it. Anybody, yeah, watched it a couple times, and how long is it?

1:05:52 - Leo Laporte
it's long, right, it's three songs for an apple immersive, it's long I thought it was the whole concert, three songs okay but for an apple immersive it's longer.

1:06:00 - Jason Snell
I think it's like 20 minutes, half an hour. I mean it's it's like and it's a dock. It's not just the performances. It has the performances, but it has the thing where they're like. Also, you see them behind the scenes and you hear them talking between the songs and before the songs, and um, and that's, that's good it. I'm, as always, super curious what, what Alex thinks about this, but I'll just say it simultaneously reinforced in me just how amazing this technology is and that apple is still trying to overproduce it. It I felt like I don't want to sound like an old man here and I know ben thompson, mr tecker was like they should just have one camera angle for the whole concert, which no, no, no, no, no, no.

But I if I had to capture the band's full performance there's a tempo that you you want, where it's like cut, cut, cut and the tempo is, I'd say, twice as fast as it should be. It just there are too many times where I'm getting in the scene and I'm looking over there and then, uh, there's a cut and I'm looking at nothing and I have to go find the person again, and that happens in immersive. But the solution is you got to cut less. It doesn't mean you can't cut. It doesn't mean you can't use other cameras. It's really effective.

There are some amazing moments. The highlight of the whole show is when they come down to the front of the stage and are singing with the fans in the front row and as he walks away, as Hetfield walks away, it's the camera stays on the fans, who completely lose it and start crying and are hugging each other because they can't believe the moment they've just had. And you get to witness it and you couldn't do that. Plus, they're on a giant stage where they're often there are like 50 yards apart from each other. So you really couldn't do it as a single camera. But I do think and it really is amazing, but I think they are still producing it too much. I think that there. There need to be fewer cuts. It needs to feel like you're immersed in a way that you can't if it's cutting every five seconds filmed in mexico city during the sold-out second year finale of their m72 world tour.

1:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Apple built a custom stage layout featuring 14 apple immersive video cameras you can see them stabilized cameras, cable suspended cameras, remote control, camera dolly systems, and you see them in the video I guess how could you not see?

1:08:13 - Jason Snell
them right, if you have that many yeah, um what do you think, Alex?

1:08:18 - Leo Laporte
did they cut too rapidly?

1:08:20 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, I mean one of the things I thought about watching it. I watched it a couple times just to kind of get it. You have to kind of watch it the first time. You get the experience, then watch the time, start analyzing things, and and I've I've streamed Metallica and I've also and I also went to see Metallica's Fathom event, which was on in theaters Um, so I've seen a lot of different versions of of this specific band and, uh, I think that one of the things I really realized there's this collision going on with the current products that are going out is is the Apple Vision Pro a new film medium or is it an experience platform? And I think you got to decide, when you make something, whether you're trying to give someone an experience of being there or whether you're giving them 180 degree film. That's Ben Thompson's complaint. He said at no point did I feel like I was at the concert, someone an experience of being there, or whether you're giving them 180 degree film.

1:09:05 - Leo Laporte
That's ben thompson's complaint. He said at no point did I feel like I was at the concert yeah and and but, but there were parts of it that you know.

1:09:11 - Alex Lindsay
So there were. It was a documentary and what I will say is it's some of the best uh concert experience that I've and I do a lot of this, the best I've I've ever seen. Like, like it is really even at its you. You know rough edges, I mean, and, and many of the other Apple releases in 180 degrees I have been very negative about like I just felt like they shouldn't even release them. You know, the art, the concert for one, the weekend, the like all those I just thought were horrible. Um, but uh, this is the first one. I was like, wow, this is really good. Now there's a bunch of things I don't like, but this one's really, this one was like, really enjoyable and really impressive.

There's moments, there's a whole bunch of moments that I wouldn't do and I still wouldn't do. And then there were some moments that I wouldn't do that I was like, oh, that was pretty good idea, like, so there's a. There's a trucking shot at the beginning behind James as it, as he goes under the stage, and moving a camera like that in 180 degrees is not something we normally do and it works so well, like it is just magical, like you know, and I, I was like, I'm writing that down. We're going to do that more often. Um, the almost every crowd shot could have been cut out.

As far as I'm concerned, I hated the crowd shots. Um, the one that James, that Jason was talking about, is an exception to that, because he was there and then he walks away. But these random, like cut to the crowd, many of them were way too close and most of them were superfluous in my opinion. The wide shots? Sure, maybe one, but they did it too often because who cares? And then the shot with Lars by his drum set was just two feet too too close. I know why they did it. They needed to put the camera on the same close on the riser rig. But the problem was, is it just wasn't quite right? There's nobody wants to be that close to Lars Ulrich.

1:10:54 - Jason Snell
Any drummer.

1:10:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, there's a couple of shots that they force you to look up and the and the, the convergence doesn't work when you look up. So when you so, when you look up, it makes your eyes cross just a little bit because it's not quite. Um, you don't want to, you don't want to put a 180 degree lens there, um and so, uh, you always want people to kind of have this circle there. They did these black and whites that are not 180 degrees, they're 3d, that were kind of faked into 180 degrees and, as a result, they're really big in front of you and it was too close, too close, the black and white ones of each person. But one thing that they did there that I thought was really cool is they had a much softer mat on the edges that kind of just faded, and I'm going to use that all the time. Like I realized that there was something that, instead of having this hard mat, that's like a three or four, maybe five degree mat that sits on the edge and you look over and you see this black line where the 180 ends, I kind of like this idea of an Iris that has this slow, you know, fade out. You know that I didn't, hadn't seen before. I've never done it and haven't seen it before and I was like I love that. Love because you don't know when to stop looking over to the side, because it just kind of disappears to the side. Beautiful presentation there.

The shots where James is like singing to the or some of the other ones are singing to the audience and the audience is reaching out towards them. It's a great 3D moment you get. You get this, really get the geometry. But it also felt the wide shots all feel soft. Most of them felt a little soft. I didn't really feel like I was looking at 8K per eye. I don't think I was. I think it was more like 4K per eye, maybe 6K per eye, but it wasn't the full resolution that that I think that the headset's capable of. But overall, I guess I would say it was a pretty exciting experience that, as someone who owns the headset, you just feel like, oh, I can see this isn't you know? This is the. It literally is the best concert experience I've had that when I wasn't there, you know and so it's a great step forward.

There's still a ton of room to grow for everyone. I cannot wait for the new camera to come out and people to experiment, everyone. I cannot wait for the new camera to come out and people to experiment, cause I I will say to. To back to what was what was mentioned about, it should be a single camera. You know the stage that we used to use in 3210, which was the old ILM stage. Metallica actually rehearsed there, you know, for their tours, and I was like man if you took them and put them in the old stage they rehearsed in, lit it up and put a camera in there. Uh, you know, with some, you know, some mild effects and so on and so forth, I may enjoy that more, you know, like you know, to feel like they're doing a concert for me, uh, there, rather than bouncing around the stage. Well, it's it's what.

1:13:36 - Jason Snell
What is the concert? Right? This concert is a stadium concert, right? So you, you wouldn't shoot a stadium concert the same way you'd shoot a concert at a at Right. So you wouldn't shoot a stadium concert the same way, you'd shoot a concert at a different kind of venue. And it was additionally challenging. I agree with you about the, about the fan shots there were. It's just one of those. I actually wonder how much of this was Metallica and how much of it was Apple, because I wonder if Metallica wanted it to feel a little more like a concert film. But there were way, and I praised that moment where they sing with the fans and all of that. But, like, there are way too many moments where I am really, really getting into the fact that the, the musicians are playing and performing and suddenly I got to spend 10 seconds watching a bunch of people bounce around in the front row.

And I don't care, and I see them from the back in the in the crane shots. I don't need to right Like weird decisions.

1:14:25 - Alex Lindsay
And some of those are practical decisions that they don't have a shot.

1:14:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they got to cover it.

1:14:30 - Alex Lindsay
They're covering, they're papering over something. The biggest paper over of the whole thing was during Enter the Sandman. They never went to Kirk. Kirk is doing a solo and they never go to him and you could tell it was the balls. I watched it. They have these bouncing balls that they dropped.

1:14:48 - Jason Snell
It was covering the other.

1:14:49 - Alex Lindsay
They were covering the ball was yeah, yeah. So they went to the cable cam and it was pulled back from the drummer and it was yeah, you could, you could see it, but it's good.

1:14:58 - Jason Snell
I mean, I agree, a hundred percent great, it is one of the best things that they've done. And yet I had that moment where I'm like, yeah, you're getting there, but this is not the end product, like it's just not. It's just a little like they're finding their way and I agree in a different space where they're not. I mean, literally, at one point they're all like 50 yards apart from each other on this giant stage. Uh, and what? What do you do with that? Where you can't see the band. They're playing to the giant stadium audience and that's great, but, like you, for for this it's it's actually kind of the wrong experience for that.

1:15:33 - Alex Lindsay
So, but it's great it's meta has meta, has um run up against these rocks for years with um, with uh. The quest and their streaming concerts is that, you know, you, you go to a stadium because it's really hard to get a band to put all the energy and time and effort and money into something that is only going to be played. It's really expensive because you got to pay them for what they would have made. That stadium generated $8 million or $10 million for the band. Does Apple really want to pay them $8 million to play like in a warehouse? You know, and so so the, so the uh. So it's hard to get bands to. You know, if you want all the effects, it's hard to get the bands to do that.

1:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Is there a time in the future, though, when this becomes less expensive and these headsets become more ubiquitous, where bands will do this instead of touring, or that concert goers will do this instead of spending a lot of money and time? Well, I think.

1:16:24 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, obviously, I mean I'm working on a project for that, so yeah, but into theaters. So so the oh yeah, you want to move them to theaters, though not headsets. The advantage of that is mostly that they're around each other. They're around 300 other people singing, not by themselves on their headsets. You know cause I think that? But but I will say that that I do think that there is a, there's some future where we build, someone's going to build a studio that's designed for the headset, you know, and it's going to be kind of the Austin city limits.

Tiny desk, WEC um, that would be smart, you know, like WXP, is that right the one out of what? Sorry, KXP, KXP, YeahP, yeah, in Seattle, like they all have these sets where the bands come in. You're not changing the set every time you're not on tour. Um, like, for instance, I, I think that I would, uh, I would be super excited to see Tiny Desk put a 180 degree camera, like that would be an incredible experience, you know to to see that. So those are the kind of things that those little spaces, I think we could. We'll see more of that. Like Tiny Desk doing that would cost almost nothing because they already got the banner.

1:17:33 - Jason Snell
And this you know, in the chat room we're talking about this too Like concerts are special, going to them is special. They're also one time only and maybe not in your town, and very expensive. And we can say well, the Vision Pro is very expensive. Yes, it is, although maybe in the long run these kinds of devices will be less expensive. But it doesn't matter if you've got the money, even if they don't come to your town and you can't afford to travel. Whether it's money or because your family or whatever.

Like there are lots of reasons where you miss a great concert. And then I would say, even for the artists a little like live theater, which we've also talked about in terms of the Vision Pro like they are ephemeral. Once the experience is over, it's over forever, and I think there's. If I was an artist, I'd think, well, wait a second, I'm gonna still do all my dates. But I also want a product that I can sell after the fact to all the people who couldn't come because they all the seats were full or cause we weren't in their town, or because we had to cancel or whatever the reason they couldn't make it, and I can sell them that experience that gives me another product to sell. That's not the same as a live product, but it's something that's better than you know. Our other ancillary, like just the audio or just a a a concert film on prime video or something like that.

1:18:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean the, I mean Taylor Swift, obviously, and Beyonce blew that door right wide open where people are, you know, it doesn't? Uh, I I talked to a friend whose whose wife and daughter went to see the film. Uh, went to see the film of it a week before they went to see it live. It didn't matter to them, like they had tickets. They want tickets to all the things right and connected to those. And so I think that those different experiences are going to be, and I do think that theatrical experiences will be interesting, but again that they have the same challenge. Fathom has had the same challenge that Apple has, which is that you're shooting like concert films, like people there's thousands of people and that subtly tells you you're not there because there's. You know, the advantage of building a set without seeing a lot of other people is it feels like this is a concert for you, you know. And so I think that that's going to be the interesting thing that I think Apple is going to be able to take advantage of. We're already talking to venues, like I'm just waiting for that camera to drop, like so of which venues do we put the camera into and using like the sound checks at first just to capture two or three songs that you know for people to experience. So I think that a lot of us are, you know, super excited to see. And what's great about it is is that, again, for the first time ever, we're months away, two or three months away, from having a camera. That isn't a science project. This has been.

This whole system has been um, junked up by either low resolution, low frame rate or really complicated. Those are the, those and they've been huge bottlenecks and um, regardless of, I mean, people think that 30, you know, $30,000, is a lot for a camera, but the reality is is that that from a production camera perspective, it's a thousand dollars, $1,500 a day to rent. Um, it becomes something that you can, you know, you can go out and shoot with often, and I think we're going to see an explosion of experiments that a lot of them won't work, but I think a lot of them will. And again, I don't think that they exist without the headset. When we talk about the expense of the headset and AK per eye, 90 frame per second headset is what drives AK per eye, 90, 90 frame per second footage, you know, and I think that that's the thing, that, that, um, we're, we're. It's gonna be really interesting.

1:20:48 - Leo Laporte
it's gonna be interesting summer yeah, Metallica's uh new bassist, robert trujillo, new for the last we knew new 2003.

1:20:56 - Alex Lindsay
I think of him as the new bassist too.

1:20:58 - Leo Laporte
I still think of him as the bassist, although I love him. Uh, he, uh. Hollywood porter had an interview with him. He uh said when the band first saw it, he said it was it's a very, it was very real james. He said was was like playing the drums as he's watching himself singing. Uh, trujillo says I found myself riffing and playing air guitar too. It's almost impulsive. That's what I think the reaction will be.

For anybody who watches it, even people who have never seen mataka or aren't familiar, it's hard not to get pulled into the performance. He says it's a very physical experience in a lot of ways. I would have loved to have this when I was a kid in the 70s, enamored with bands like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Imagine seeing Jimi Hendrix playing guitar and having him right in front of you. So I think he's probably right. This might be a new way to experience music that isn't a concert. That is is a performance, but something, something else. He also snuck up behind a couple who were getting a demo at the apple store in hollywood. Uh, of the and the we're watching the concert. They took off the headset and there he is in person, which must have been kind of scary, I hope I could almost smell the bassist I smell, I smell him, yeah uh.

1:22:12 - Andy Ihnatko
So I think pretty cool I mean, I've been totally with you, Alex. It's like I'm I'm gonna get a lot more excited about these kind of experiences once it makes that leap of like what did for video, where everybody has a video camera, everybody has nonlinear editing, everybody can shoot whatever they want to and develop their own style and basically serve whatever niche they want. Because, as we're talking about concert footage, I'm also thinking about the way that the Metropolitan Opera does their Met in HD broadcasts, yeah, and the way that the number of times I've been in the orchestra seats at the Met and I usually have binoculars with me because that's a way if you can't afford the $400 seats, you can basically upgrade your cheap back of the house seats with binoculars Because there are times where I want to zoom in, I want to focus on what this character is singing right now, or even I want to see what the choristers are doing in the background right now. And the ability to, if these kind of events, be it plays, be they concerts, be they opera, were recorded in this fashion where I'm just seated in the orchestra. There isn't like 100 camera angles, they're not switching angles and switching shots like on the director's whim, but I have the ability to essentially keep looking around. I can change the focal length of what I'm looking at so that if I do want to see like there's some business going on in the background, that I won't go into a long story.

But one of my favorite moments of the Met was there's a scene in Agrippina where this action is happening at the front of the stage but it's happening in a bar In the back of the stage. They're called supernumeraries or actors. They're people who have non-singing parts. They got to hold this scene for 15, 20 minutes and they had almost this entire. You could tell during rehearsals they'd worked out this entire storyline of okay, this guy is drunk off his butt, this other woman is trying to thinks it's amazing that he got drunk so early. They're taking selfies with him. He doesn't know, and it's like I'm so glad that Met in HD, of course, was focusing on the expensive tenor and the expensive soprano who were singing at the front of the stage, but I was so loving this action happening in the back and the ability to simply focus on what catches your attention and what you really want to look at. That, I think, is going to be transformative and that's going to really increase my level of interest in this kind of presentation.

1:24:38 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that we, you know, we did some tests with the Ozos a long time ago. That could have been done in 180, which was, I think I've talked about before. We we took a stage play and an off Broadway play and we just put you where the best place to sit is for that scene and so you just get, and but the every scene we would change where that was and so you would just sit in the. You know, we would kind of this is the place, the best place to be to watch this unfold, and we maybe moved it a little bit and it was the best play experience I've ever had, like just like I was, like I can do this all the time. You know, like cause it's still live. It has this feel like you're looking around, you're watching everybody. It's not a camera shot, but it's still happening. It feels like it's happening right in front of you. And that was at a much lower resolution and a lower frame rate, so I'm excited People are going to figure things out.

1:25:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm thinking about that incredible shot in Rosemary's Baby where the main character can't quite see around a door because someone who's kind of doing something suspicious is making a phone call, but the door to the room is kind of half open and if you see this in the movie theater, like when this scene happens, the entire audience goes.

1:25:51 - Alex Lindsay
They're trying to see around the door.

1:25:53 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the sort of stuff that I think is going to be pretty incredible once this stuff lands.

1:25:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, absolutely, and I think that one of the great things is is that Apple is spending the kind of money it takes to do some of these shows so that we learn a lot, like I've. I've learned stuff watching every Apple event, every Apple release. These cost millions of dollars. Like I don't know what I would have budgeted for that Metallica shoot. My budget would have been somewhere between two and $3 million for that. I don't know what Apple spent, but for that many cameras and what it takes to do those and the sky cams and the prep and the post and everything else, it would have been at least that much money. And so for Apple to take those chances and do those allow us to look at a bunch of things that some of us agree that they worked or didn't work, but it doesn't matter. We, we, we never had the budget to do that kind of thing. So so Apple doing, you know, taking you know, uh, some of the hits here and and and being part, you know, showing us that stuff. And again, there's in every Apple thing so far, every Apple release.

I've seen a ton of things that I wouldn't do, but I've seen a couple of things that I've never thought would be possible that I go. Oh, I'm definitely gonna, you know. So I think that that is exciting because they're they are investing in things that we wouldn't um, we wouldn't invest in other. You know that we wouldn't invest in other ones, that we wouldn't have the money to do without somebody, because, again, the market is small right now. But I think that it's going to be so. I think it's going to be really interesting to see. Again, I think it's really one of the most exciting video releases Apple has put out so far, and hoping to see another one soon. Nice, more please.

1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's your Vision. Pro segment everybody.

1:27:23 - Jason Snell
Now you see, now you know we're done talking the Vision Pro.

1:27:30 - Leo Laporte
Whiplash won and entered Sandman. That's three good classic songs.

1:27:37 - Jason Snell
Crowd pleaser Sleep with one eye open, crowd pleasers.

1:27:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, let's take a break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly, get it we didn't notice when we played it, we didn't even have ads, but but it turns out we have to take breaks. Uh, Andy and ako, Alex lindsey and Jason Snell great to have all three of you here. Explain to me what is the theory behind apple dropping its 23 million dollar lawsuit against the recycler accused of stealing iphones?

1:28:15 - Andy Ihnatko
the theory. So what? This was the, the kerfuffle that happened a few years ago, or when their recycles was found to be sort of holding on to uh, certain recycled uh, apple watches, and, and a lot of these devices were fighting up in china, canada.

1:28:30 - Leo Laporte
They were supposed to take them apart, right, exactly supposed to destroy them. About a hundred thousand devices did not get destroyed, they sold them on instead yeah, and so so there was a.

1:28:40 - Andy Ihnatko
There was a lot of stuff going on. So this week, uh, they so they sued. Apple sued this disassembler about one day before the court was going to dismiss the suit. Anyway, for lack of progress, apple decided to withdraw it. Uh, and there's the. The theories that I've been seeing are that number one. The discovery process on this would have been not not very productive for apple, because they would have to have had to talk about, like, what they do to phones, including the ones that they just simply destroy, that could be, uh, recycled and sold on or given away, or that's, that's ah, they don't want to reveal that they're not in fact recycling them.

Yeah, and also doing it properly yes, and also um someone who's I'm. I'm afraid I don't have their name, but by the way that is just.

1:29:22 - Leo Laporte
That is just a speculation, that's just pure speculation.

1:29:25 - Andy Ihnatko
We don't and another speculation from someone who is in that in the industry of recycling basically said that the purpose of that lawsuit wasn't necessarily to win the lawsuit or to punish this company, but to put the fear of god into all the other companies that apple does business with. Yeah, yeah, we, if you screw up, we will find out and we will make we will. We will end a very harmonious uh relationship in much the same way that multiple characters found out because auditors went to the facility.

1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
They found apple watches being stored in a section that didn't have any security cameras. Geep actually admitted the accusations that said, but it was a rogue employee and it then sued the rogue employee. So you know what these kinds of things is complicated. I can see why. It might not be anything suspicious. It might just be.

1:30:13 - Andy Ihnatko
This is a remember that every time we get something juicy about what goes on inside apple, it's because they decided to fight a lawsuit. So yeah, that's right.

1:30:21 - Leo Laporte
This is sad news for all of us, but probably the right thing for apple.

Yeah, they can be bad. Sono's I don't this is really not an apple story, but I guess it's kind of peripheral to apple has decided not to do the pinewood streaming video player. This was going to be something to compete directly with. Apple tv was going to launch this year and it was going to do something that even apple tv hasn't managed to do, which is kind of unify all the different streaming platforms into one easy to use interface. But sonos probably wisely decided that maybe they should get their app working first I don't.

1:30:54 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I don't even know what shows on what channel shows are on. Now I just like hit the little thing on my on my apple tv controller and say this show.

1:31:05 - Leo Laporte
That's why you never see any netflix shows, because it doesn't search netflix. Yeah, that's, we talked about that.

1:31:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is a kind of move you do as a company when there are no other worlds to conquer. You finally control the entire premium audio digital space. Really, People want your hardware, they're paying a premium. You make huge profits. What could we do next? Let's do a video player too Right. What could we do next? Let's do a video player, too right.

I know so many people who use Sonos speakers with other video players or with their televisions directly that it makes sense in that scenario. But, as we all know, a year ago Sonos took a header, stepped in a thousand rakes and is still reeling from that. They lost their executives as a part of it and like. So this move is great to me because it was a. It was a move from another era and the people who made that decision are gone because they blew it when it comes to their core product category. And you got to get right by your existing customers if you possibly can before you try to step out. To step out, but but like I don't think this is necessarily an illogical move if sonos was at the top, but they fell apart.

1:32:21 - Alex Lindsay
So I mean now and it's someone who has, who has 14 semi-working amps from sonos. Uh, that I, I I just don't know how they get back on Like the idea of. I mean, I just see the logo when I get upset.

1:32:35 - Leo Laporte
I know me too.

1:32:37 - Alex Lindsay
And so that's the hard part. I think that's the challenge for them. Is they really torch this one, you know, like that's the shame, yeah.

1:32:45 - Andy Ihnatko
There's some other news I thought was positive for Apple TV. So apparently Roku is testing a new thing where whenever you go back to the home screen, it will autoplay an ad first. Just some people on Reddit have reported hey, we saw this Reach out for comment. Roku said oh, we're testing lots of things to aid in discovery products and partnerships and blah blah. Discovery products and partnerships and blah blah. And it just that's the first time.

It really occurred to me that, wow, apple TV will never do that to you, never will do that to you, and although I do complain that, oh gosh, I wish they had like a $30, something to compare with. Like a Chromecast with Google TV, which is a really nice 4k streamer, a dongle that costs like 30, $40. I don't know Google doesn't do that, but streamer dongle that costs like $30, $40. I don't know Google doesn't do that, but I don't know that they will never do that. But whereas it would be worth spending lots of extra dollars on an Apple TV box, it doesn't necessarily do a whole lot more than Google TV or Roku. If I knew that I will never be forced to see a pre-roll ad just because I was stupid enough to pick up my remote and try to launch netflix there is a rumor that there will be a new apple tv this year.

1:33:56 - Leo Laporte
Is that credible? You think I would buy it. I mean I, I'll upgrade, I don't. I know it's expensive, but it is our sole way of watching tv now because we are, we're all over.

1:34:07 - Alex Lindsay
It's my own interface, so that I just have an apple tv connected to the tv and the tv is just a monitor like all this.

1:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, I wish it was a smart tv with all that crap on it I have a smart.

1:34:17 - Alex Lindsay
The tv is capable of more, but I just treat it like a monitor.

1:34:19 - Leo Laporte
It's not allowed to touch the I wish samsung would let you take all that stuff off, but it pops up anyway. Um so anybody, have you heard Jason? A new apple tv. Is that credible?

1:34:31 - Jason Snell
I don't. I mean anything's possible that's on a long cycle. I don't feel like there's any need in terms of the hardware. The only reason they might do it is if there's a particular video spec, a high-end spec, that they want to support. Or I think the most likely is if the chips that are currently in the model they're making are, you know, being put to the end of their life and they need to do a chip refresh just to get on a more modern process. But like it is, I I haven't written my story yet, but I bought a bunch of streamer boxes the other month after mark Gurman talked about the apple tv being a laggard and um, you know, there's no, it's, there's no competition. There are some other streamer boxes that are that feel roughly as fast as the apple tv roughly um, but there's nothing. I mean there's no competition. There are some other streamer boxes that are that feel roughly as fast as the apple tv roughly um, but there's nothing. I mean there's lots of software work they need to do but it's not perfect, it's fine.

1:35:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's closer to perfect than anything else. And I have an nvidia shield, which is probably the closest competition, and I like it, but it's apple tv is always the winner.

1:35:30 - Alex Lindsay
I mean the, the, where apple could. I mean. I think that technically, the current apple tv would do this as well, um, or is capable of. It is um, technically, the spec for the hdmi will support 4k 120 frames per second, which really makes a difference for lives like sports. That would be um.

Now the problem is is that the pipeline to deliver 4k 120 is really hard. So it's, it's a, you know. Ask me how I know. So, so anyway, um, so 120 frames, 4k 120 is is a is a difficult thing to deliver, but that's the kind of thing Apple could take on, because they have, like, let's say, mls. If Apple, a year from now, or or two, or you know this year, next year, suddenly started dumping MLS, um at as a test, uh, at 120 frames per second, or other, or MLB or whatever, it puts an incredible amount of pressure on everybody else because it's really hard. This is what Apple's good at. It's really hard to do. You need control of the entire pipeline, and that's what they have, you know, and they could force everybody into a briar patch. That would be very, very difficult for everyone else to manage.

1:36:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I just wish that they would do something like you. Like Leo, you mentioned the, the Nvidia Shield, which is my streaming box, and one of my favorite features of it is the simple fact that when I'm I don't have like gigabit internet at my house and I'm not sure if I would pay extra to a streaming service to have 4K streaming, but I can. I can get a 1080 stream and it will automatically upscale it to 4k it has built-in upscaling it's cool and it's really really good.

Yeah, and those. That's the sort of stuff that makes me think, okay, there's a reason why I didn't buy the 30 or 40, or there's a reason why the 40 dongle is on the bedroom tv and the 150 thing is on the nice, nice living room tv, and that's the sort of stuff I want to see from from Apple the Google TV interface.

1:37:13 - Leo Laporte
Not great, or Android? Is it Android or Google? I can't remember. Android TV. It's Android. It's not great. Uh, it's better than fire TV, which talk about ads.

1:37:21 - Jason Snell
It's unusable it's terrible and the and then the Roku is just the most generic like totally generic it's fine, but it's super generic. It's very clearly. Uh, even though you can buy a Roku box, their whole strategy really is let's be as generic as possible so we can be put in TVs.

1:37:36 - Andy Ihnatko
And it is super generic Amazon.

1:37:38 - Jason Snell
I actually the Fire TV functionally, in terms of its feature set, is actually pretty great.

But you can't use it because it's just an ad delivery medium and I literally set mine up. I don't know if I told you the story, but I set mine up to test it and the first thing I did, I got to the home screen literally the home screen and it sat there for about 10 seconds and it began playing an, a commercial not even a promo for something on the box literally a commercial for a business in my area. And I thought what are we even doing here? Like, why? Like? I just wanted to rip it off my TV immediately because, like, that's Amazon. Amazon just wants to sell you stuff, even if you buy their high-end streamer box, doesn't matter, you're just going to get ads everywhere and, like, if you don't care. I guess that's great, but it's a shame because it's actually not a bad interface otherwise and it has some things that it does that Apple doesn't do.

1:38:32 - Alex Lindsay
But oh well, it's, it's a really interesting. I find advertising to be interesting because, like, my family is completely shielded from it at this point, like I don't like and I realized how little and it's a problem for like theatrical releases and all kinds of other things is that there's a there's a big chunk of the population now that is basically opting out. You know where? I just don't see. You know I pay for YouTube premium and I have a bunch of streaming services that don't have the ads in them and and I just don't know what movies are coming out. I don't know what the new thing is because I just don't see the that on repeat, repeat all the time, and my kids have kind of grown up without it ever, so they don't know. Like they.

I think when premium dropped off cause my credit card changed or whatever to a new card or whatever the, uh, I think they were like who lives? Like like my, my, my kids had never like, they were like 14 years old and never seen you know, more than a couple ads against each other ever, and and I think so I think it's really interesting to see, like what pockets of the of the viewing public are completely just cutting out of being able to see, cause now we don't. We don't get magazines, we don't get. You know like we listened to audio books, we listened to. You know like there's so many places where we subscription has replaced, you know, um, all of the content and it's just a, it's a I. I don't know how that impacts all of these things, but it is interesting that I I cause I can't go back. I can't go watching ads and like interruptions that are ads. If, like, youtube TV stopped allowing me to fast forward through the ads, I'd probably just quit.

1:40:01 - Leo Laporte
We can't talk about it. We don't know what's going on, but the? But the Brits are having a secret court hearing on iCloud encryption. Everybody and their brother, all the media, are saying you can't, you shouldn't be, it should be public. But of course this is kind of like our secret FISA courts. The BBC is asked that they make it available. Reuters, financial Times, the Guardian, even members of Congress who don't have a lot of cloud anymore in the UK government. But Ron Wyden and Andy Biggs and Alex Padilla and Warren Davidson and Zoloft have all asked the UK to let us know what's going on in this trial. But the UK says no, so and and Apple's not allowed to talk about it. In fact, apple was very clever because they never did admit that they were. The UK government demanded that they break iCloud encryption. They just stopped allowing UK citizens to install ADP. That was a sufficient Canary to let us know um that they, uh, they weren't going to go along. Now they may be ordered in some way.

1:41:11 - Andy Ihnatko
We don't know what this court hearing is all about, but uh, maybe they'll find a way to let us know secretly I've seen no reality in which apple is forced to, at least temporarily, allow backdoor access to every iCloud customer in the entire world without in some way informing the entire world that do not trust encryption or we have to turn it off for everybody. We can't say why. There's no downside to them. I also believe that they are virulently offended to the idea of breaking down security and privacy for those who want that extra layer of privacy.

1:41:46 - Leo Laporte
There is good news, though, if you are in other countries. Apple has rolled out tap to pay in Bulgaria, finland, hungary, liechtenstein Am I saying that right? Liechtenstein, poland, portugal, slovakia, slovenia oh, they're different countries. Okay, switzerland I'm being silly, sorry Now are all offering tap to pay. That is the feature where you can use your iPhone as a payment terminal. You don't have to buy a fancy square terminal or anything, you just tap the iPhones together and they may have a little baby.

1:42:22 - Alex Lindsay
I work, so I use it. I go to, I go to the I I I'm often at the San Rafael farmer's market on Sunday. It's perfect for farmer's markets and they and they the where I get this breakfast burrito. It's kind of like my little uh, you know um thing to get there and and the woman that's there, she's all. She has an iphone, she just reaches out and it's like so cool and it's just like it's magic.

It does that little uh thing on the screen and the money, money flows, and then you go to the next stall and it's like cash only and you're like, oh, god, I don't got no cash.

1:42:55 - Leo Laporte
Man. What do you want cash for exactly? Uh, apple's working on multiple versions of a second generation studio display. It's funny we mocked the studio display because it was so expensive for what you get, and yet I bought one for lisa I bought two. Everybody's got them because it just works. It's got a camera in it, it's got it just, it's just easy. Uh, I hope they find a way to make it less expensive. That would be nice. It's pretty good for what it does it's a pretty good.

1:43:23 - Alex Lindsay
It's a pretty good deal like compared to the. There's not a lot of other things. The reason that apple's selling them and reason people buy them is for what it does. There's not a lot of other. They had to make it because in that price point you don't see a lot of other there are.

1:43:34 - Jason Snell
There are now multiple screens that are in that are a lot like the same, like samsung makes one and it's not as good, but it's been discounted to the point now where it is appreciably less than this but it took a while.

Hundred dollars right for the studio and you know apple doesn't cut their prices over time, so it's just sitting there until they update it. It would be great, right, like they could do a higher frame rate version or, you know, better screen refresh, pro motion. They could improve that camera, which you know they've upgraded the cameras and all of the products they've shipped in the last year so that there's probably something they could do there. You know it could, they could do. It would be a good time to do one. But yeah, again, the studio display, even though it's expensive and it now has more competition.

There's that other part of it which is. You know, I feel the same way, presumably Alex would, about that samsung display is. I got one, I tried it out and if I could save, you know, seven hundred dollars or something, then yeah, let's talk, but it's gonna be a worse experience. It just is cheap and it's got all of the samsung apps loaded on it. So it kind of wants to be a tv and you have to sort of tell it no, stop trying to be a tv and like it's not as nice. And so you know apple having a monitor that's more expensive than others, but it's nice, that's where Apple wants to be.

1:44:54 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of encryption, Apple has said we are soon going to add support for end-to-end encryption in RCS messaging. That is when you are messaging somebody on an Android device. Right now, Android users have encryption end-to-end if they're talking to each other. Well, I think.

1:45:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple's following the spec right yeah exactly, the GSM, basically upgraded Now after many years of work, have upgraded their spec to include a specification for end-to-end encryption. This is what Apple has always said that they don't want to put in all the work to support Google's end-to-end encryption spec. They would much rather wait for the GSM to approve an end-to-end encryption spec. They would much rather wait for the GSM to approve an end-to-end encryption spec and then support that. So that's what they're doing and both Apple and Google have said that yeah, we're going to be supporting this end-to-end encryption spec all the way.

1:45:41 - Leo Laporte
No specific timeline, but maybe in the next version of iOS or maybe even in an 18-point release. They're busy.

1:45:48 - Andy Ihnatko
They're busy, yeah. The question is, are they going to hang on to the green bubbles? Because, remember, they were always saying, oh, we want to warn people that part of their chat is not being encrypted, so okay, great, it's now encrypted. Are you going to stop shaming people?

1:46:03 - Jason Snell
with Android phones. They won't be blue because they're not iMessage, but I do think they need to signify that they're encrypted, right. So is it a new icon? Is it a new color or something like that? But I would say they're not going to be blue because they're not iMessage.

1:46:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also again one of those tidbits we found out because of a lawsuit. But they really do believe that they don't want to give people an excuse to give their kids cheaper Android phones, and that's. They're disincentivized, uh, from basically making the interoperability as seamless as possible.

1:46:36 - Jason Snell
So kicking and screaming, I think, will be the modus except I mean honestly at this point the difference will be color, because if you're an encrypted rcs connection I don't know if you've noticed this, Andy, but um, the interplay between ios and android for messaging in the last year has gotten a lot better. Like the tap backs and like all that stuff is sort of working fine now in a way that it wasn't before, so the pain is a lot less. If you're in a heterogeneous set of communicators, it's okay, and then adding in the encryption will just make it even less of an issue.

1:47:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and remember that we don't know why Apple suddenly decided to start supporting RCS, but the rumor is that they were forced to do so to comply with rules in China. So I don't think that regulation and the government control of technology is always a great thing, but it is a good thing to sometimes have a government say, yeah, no, you're doing it this way because this is the best way for all of our citizens.

1:47:30 - Leo Laporte
Actor Pedrocal is super hot right now after his success with last of us. He's a great actor and I don't know how much apple paid for a five minute spike jones directed commercial for airpods 4, but I do know he's not acting when he says those airpods just make him feel so much better. Here he is walking sadly down the. You can show this. They're not going to ding us for this.

1:47:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not going to play this sound and this isn't a cameo. This is a shot of him for the entire five-minute video. He's the star.

1:48:02 - Leo Laporte
He's walking down the street very disconsolate because I gather his girlfriend doesn't like him anymore.

1:48:11 - Andy Ihnatko
The opening shot is him looking mournfully at a woman sitting at a table who looks back at him. We don't know what he's basically walking through the 1984 video.

1:48:21 - Leo Laporte
It's grim, it's great and everybody's sad. But he's got his AirPods in and they're dancing.

1:48:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Then he turns on the noise kit. Basically, I want to be inside my own head and everything turns colorful and bright and oh look across the street, there's another version of him that's meeting friends and making dinner plans and happy, and he can start dancing in a palette of oranges and reds it's a great it's a great one, like you were talking about her, like it was, despite that, is this going to be cut down into a 30 and a 60 for tv?

or is it? Just yeah I don't know. I mean, there's no messaging, there's no like thanks to. Well, thanks to the noise cancellation, I can stop listening to this person who's asking for me directions and enjoy life. It's like.

1:49:06 - Leo Laporte
No, it's actually a very nice, lovely little five minute film it is yeah spike jones directed, so this must have cost him yeah millions and millions real short movie.

1:49:15 - Andy Ihnatko
This could a real movie.

1:49:17 - Leo Laporte
It's not a promo doesn't say shot on iphone, but I bet it was.

1:49:21 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, I'd be shocked and if it was, there's a whole bunch of behind the scenes, there's a whole bunch of, you know, like there will be.

1:49:26 - Leo Laporte
There'll be more right, yeah, it could be. Yeah, and there's santa claus as a construction worker. That's cool. It's really cool. It's really nicely done. I, yeah, maybe, maybe pedro was inspired by the artistic vision and said I'll do it for free.

1:49:40 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, that's why he hires spike jones. It's like, oh, wow, so we're really making a little movie, we're not just doing a commercial. That's like, in that case, I will, you, you, you, yeah. You hire directors, because directors attract actors, and sometimes vice versa, and this is beautiful stuff.

1:49:58 - Alex Lindsay
Then it's, you know, it's, it's, and it's an interesting four by three uh format. So it's, um, so that that's an interesting uh choice in in, uh, in building that out too, which would look good on an imaxX screen. But it is an interesting whole bunch of set of choices. But yeah, for directors and actors, a lot of times these corporate things especially when they're given a lot of creative control like hey, we'll give you a bunch of money and then we'll give you a huge budget and you can just go out and play what do you want to do? That sounds great. You can often get somebody to show up and do something when you do that.

1:50:34 - Leo Laporte
Probably bought him another house in Beverly Hills. Last story before we get to our picks of the week Eric Medjikovsky writing on his Pebble blog, Not too happy with Apple, as you know. I think today the new Pebble watch comes out Soon anyway, two models Pre-orders start now.

1:50:53 - Andy Ihnatko
First version ships in July. Second version, the one that's basically a redo of the last Pebble watch, ships in July, with a polycarbonate case and the monochrome display. There's a color one with additional heart rate monitor with a metal case and a larger screen. That ships in December.

1:51:10 - Leo Laporte
I suspect there's some iPhone users who would like to use it, but eric says apple restricts pebble from being awesome with iphones. Yep, should get him some noise canceling airpods. Uh, we all. We will build a good app for ios, but be prepared, there's no way for us to support all the functionality apple watch has access to, not because they couldn't, but because apple apple won't let them he says it's impossible for a third-party smart watch to send text messages or perform actions on notifications like dismissing, muting, replying and many, many other things it's security, don't you know?

1:51:43 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, they protect you. They just want to make sure that their customers have the best thought. Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's like this is another after, after they're after they've run out of things to sue apple for for the app store. I think that the next thing that they're going to do is about. It really is kind of lame that they're not allowing functionality, uh, between iphones and third-party watches. That does seem like we don't want to encourage people to buy a third-party watch.

1:52:10 - Leo Laporte
We want to lock them further into the ecosystem by the way, the pebble, uh, the repebble website is just fantastic. Yeah, eight years later, you still can't beat a pebble. And there's a gravestone 2012 to 2016 and then a hand pops out of the grave like a sierra online game yeah it's eight bit the blog.

1:52:28 - Andy Ihnatko
The blog post is mono space text. I love it like it looks like a markdown editor back in the time.

1:52:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm tempted, I must say I'm I'm really tempted.

1:52:36 - Andy Ihnatko
I really am too, because I mean, like I think I mentioned before that like I stopped wearing like both my my pixel watch and my apple watch because I just I wasn't getting enough use out of like the super, super features and it wasn't enough to justify having to remember to charge it each and every night yeah, 30 days 30 day because it's a e-ink screen.

1:52:56 - Leo Laporte
30 day 30 days and also that's.

1:52:59 - Andy Ihnatko
That's the thing that they're making a big point of, that. This is not necessarily that people might be surprised like wow, but the last pebble watch was nearly 10 years ago. Why they're essentially remaking the old one, saying, because we didn't feel like anything was wrong with the old one, there's a, there's a space for something that is not quite a 25 Casio watch but is not necessarily a 400 smart watch either. Does it work?

1:53:22 - Leo Laporte
better with Android than it does with an iPhone. It must right it must.

1:53:26 - Andy Ihnatko
It must. Yeah, I'm sure that you you can.

1:53:28 - Leo Laporte
On third-party Android phones you can like react to notifications okay, there's two things you can do on your pixel that you can't do on an iphone artificial intelligence and a pebble watch yeah, but yeah, 30, 30 days, using the 30-day charge on this is enough to make me think I have 250 dollars.

1:53:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm going to make another 250 dollars.

1:53:49 - Leo Laporte
This is better than an android wear watch would be, or?

1:53:52 - Andy Ihnatko
um, I don't know of any Android Wear watch. That again. If my problem is, I don't want to have to remember to recharge it every day or every two days.

1:54:01 - Leo Laporte
And it still has a heart rate monitor. It has a compass the $250.

1:54:05 - Andy Ihnatko
One has the addition of a heart rate monitor, but they both have step counters, because that is, I mean, the thing is, the value add for every Apple Watch is, of course, all the health features. It's like it's not as though Android Wear watches, especially at the top tier, aren't good, this is definitely for the Casio crowd.

1:54:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean, let's be honest, I agree.

1:54:27 - Andy Ihnatko
He's also saying all 10,000 existing Pebble OS apps are going to continue to work with it. That's amazing. It's probably going to spur development. I I'm imagining it like, if you're familiar with, like the, the, the notes app, obsidian the difference between like obsidian and ulysses, that's the difference between this watch and like an apple watch, where obsidian is objectively more open, has immense amount of plugins. You can customize it exactly the way you want. But it is kind of a fiddler's text editor, whereas you see ulysses, out of the box it does what you want to do. An apple watch, I think a pebble, a pebble watch, the stuff that you're going to really you, the stuff that you like about it, will come out of the box. If it's like what I remember pebble being, the stuff that you love about it will be after you do a bunch of fiddling. But, that said, I am also very jazzed about push buttons to scroll through the interface, because sometimes you just don't have access to bare skin and it doesn't need it for what it wants to do.

1:55:22 - Jason Snell
So I wore a Pebble for a couple of years before the Apple Watch came out and I liked a lot of things about it. If you are somebody who doesn't use a smartwatch for fitness or anything and all you really want is time and notifications, people would always ask me like, ah, how do you like that pebble? My response was always tells the time right, it's a watch. And then also it put my notifications from my phone on my wrist so I could see them there and I thought that was cool and you know there is something to be said for that. Like, not everybody needs a fitness watch.

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
They don't well, my watch says it's time to take a break and get ready for your picks of the week. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy, Alex and Jason. I know it's a something I look forward to every Tuesday. I hope you do too. We stream it live so you can watch it, get the first edition. If you're in the club. You can watch it in our club Twitter Discord, but you can also watch on YouTube and Twitch and Xx.com and TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook and Kick. It's nice to watch live, but our club members get a little something extra. They also get to chat live. Well, actually, you all get to do that too. Club members get ad-free versions of all the shows. How about that? You also get access to the Club TWiT discord, where the chatting happens all the time, which is a lot of fun.

We're gonna I uh, mark prince contacted me. We're gonna do a really fun coffee, uh clutch soon. We'd like to talk about coffee. Micah's creative corners coming up in the club. We have Stacey's book club. Uh, let's see Mikah's crafting corners tomorrow 6 pm pacific, every third Wednesday of the month, so you can craft along with Mikah. He's building some tiny little thing.

I forgot the user group again, but oh no, I didn't, I didn't. It's coming up March 28th. It's the fourth Friday. I missed the first AI user group, but I'm very excited about this. We get together, we show each other how we're using AI. This is a lot of fun. Chris Marquardt's photo time April 3rd Brilliant is the word, and more to come.

I want to have some more events in the club. So there's a lot of benefits. And guess what? All of this? Seven smackers a month, seven bucks a month. That's a very affordable club for all the shows, ad-free versions, the behind-the-scenes stuff, twit.tv/clubtwit. But the real reason I want to encourage you to do it. It makes a big difference to us. It doesn't go into my pocket, but it keeps the shows on the air. It goes into our hosts pockets, our employees pockets, it goes into the electric companies pockets. It keeps things going and it means it's possible to do more and that really means a lot to us. We have I love our club members. I'm so grateful to you. In fact, I want to encourage everybody.

Our 20th anniversary TWIT is coming up on April 13th less than a month away, and we want to get everybody involved. Last time when we did the thousandth episode we got all the old guys who were on the first episode together for TWIT. But this time I really want to honor the community. If you've been watching for a long time, I'd love to get a video from you. I got an email from a prisoner saying how he was very grateful because he can listen to it in prison. They allow it through because it's safe content and he said it's kind of keeping him sane in there. I'd love to hear from everybody who's listening. It's nice for us to know. If you want to send us a video showing us how you watch or listen and when you first discovered Twit, that kind of thing, just email it to me, leo@leoville.com, or put it on the socials and make sure at Twit is in there and we will start playing them.

ScooterX says but wait, it's, it's during Coachella. I won't be. You're going to Coachella instead of being here for our 20th anniversary scooter x people. People were saying, uh, people were saying that scooter x should be featured. He's been with us for so long as a chat mod for many years and now as a club member. Anyway, we'd love to get that for April 13th. Record something for us and you can be part of the 20th anniversary show. Uh, all right, let's get our pics of the week going here. Jason snow, what do you got?

1:59:44 - Jason Snell
all right. Uh, I am going in my endless quest to find a good outdoor home kit capable security camera. I have come to the Aqara G5 Pro, which costs 180 bucks. It's available all over the place. It comes in a Wi-Fi version. For a little bit more you can get a power over ethernet version. It is rugged, it is sturdy.

2:00:06 - Leo Laporte
It looks pretty good.

2:00:07 - Jason Snell
It's got a spotlight. It is very high video quality. I'm very impressed with it. If you use the Aqara app instead of using it through HomeKit, you get a whole bunch of other kind of machine learning features about identifying people who are lingering around your door or whatever. There are things or you can just use it with HomeKit.

It works with HomeKit Secure Video. It's very hard to find a good camera that works with HomeKit Secure Video and it's got a bunch of other nerdy features that are kind of amazing. It is a ZigBee hub, it is a thread hub, it is a matter controller. It works with not just HomeKit, but, of course, Alexa, google Home Home Assistant you name it because it's a hub as well as a camera, and it's got internal storage that it can save to. Also, right out of the box, it can write video to a uh, a nas or any other like smb share on your network. So I was able to just put in my server and it will stream video to the server in addition to home kit. Like there are lots and lots of features. It is really they threw everything at this thing. It is chunky, it's a chunky boy, but I'm very impressed with it so far. I'm going to permanently be mounting it, in fact, because I think it is thus far the winner of the sweepstakes of can I get an outdoor camera that actually works so?

2:01:30 - Leo Laporte
with HomeKit, you know I like there are a lot of choices and some of them, like the ring cameras, upload to the cloud and because I am broadcasting streaming from here, we can't use upstream bandwidth. So we I, those are the kinds of cameras I'm we use ubiquity cameras but, uh, that's a really important consideration. It's going to use up your internet bandwidth if you're uploading.

2:01:54 - Jason Snell
So something like this a car that doesn't uh you can still look at it on your phone and stuff well, and it works with the home kit secure video, so it will upload to the cloud if you wanted to, but you can also just have it store locally or on your network, and it'll do that too. It really is sort of like an all uh purpose device. Whatever your uh home platform of choice is, uh, it'll work with it, which is great. Now, cara, you know their, their app is not very good. Uh, it's, it's very clearly. You know they pay more attention to industrial design of their hardware than they do to their app design. But again, if you're living in the home kit ecosystem, it doesn't matter, because you just pair it and you're done.

And again for the nerdy people out there, there is a power over Ethernet version too. So then you've got Ethernet attached, so it doesn't have to sit on your Wi-Fi and you have to deal with reliability issues with Wi-Fi. And it is also going to be that ZigBee Thread Matter hub as well.

2:02:54 - Leo Laporte
So a lot of cool things about it. For the ubiquity, I actually have a hard drive array of you know massive hard drive array to record. How could you do that with home kit? Could you have a local hard drive array that you record to?

2:03:03 - Jason Snell
or home home kit. Secure video is a cloud thing, it uses apple surfers, so you just need a camera that will record. So in this case, I literally put in my smb credentials and it will stream video right to my local. My raid on my network.

2:03:16 - Leo Laporte
Good, because that's what I need. I don't I don't mind putting it in the land, but I don't want to have to upload to the cloud because it's killer and it's got I should say it's got six gigs of internal storage so it will write that stuff internally as well, until it runs out, and then it'll just keep deleting the reason I don't want to leave it internal is because if somebody comes along and wants to rob me, he's gonna kill the camera and take it with him and then he's maybe.

So yeah, I like having it recording somewhere else, just in case I hear you. You know what I'm saying. I'm not that. I'm not paranoid. I never really wanted to have cameras all over the house, but here we are. It is useful. I just saw the UPS guy deliver. So you know, Andy and Iko pick of the week.

2:03:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't mean to kick Apple when they're down regarding AI, but I have been having so much fun with the new version of Google Gemini Flash 2.0. For $20 a month you get extra AI features, but you also get access to the experimental versions. Like that's not ready yet, but there's ready yet for a developer to start messing around with it and so and so. So you took this image, so I took this. I basically, during the show, I took just a selfie of myself and my webcam.

2:04:28 - Leo Laporte
This Red Sox Jersey.

2:04:30 - Andy Ihnatko
So I just dragged into the chat window that picture of myself as you're seeing me right now Just a stock photo of a Red Sox jersey from a store shop, stock photo of, like a Red Sox hat from a store shelf and simply said put the Red Sox shirt and hat on the man.

2:04:47 - Leo Laporte
You look a lot like the babe actually.

2:04:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you, without the womanizing but I do a lot of the same drinking and staying up all night and just the ability to simply describe what you want done with this, like I don't, I want the background, I want, I want the the person in the foreground to take off the headphones or remove the microphone.

Uh, it can also do stories like. You can even do things like uh, not only make up a here's, I want you to make up a story about the magic pebble watch that's being abused by the ogre apple into like not being able to speak and help the townspeople. So generate a 400 word children's story and I want you to illustrate it in this, in the, in the, in the style of like a watercolor children's book illustrator, and it will like illustrate the story as it goes, and if it doesn't do terribly well, you can simply say, ok, try that again. But I want the color palette to be a little more blues and greens instead of blacks and oranges. And again, this is experimental. If you were to zoom in on that picture, you see that's very, very fuzzy Because, again, I'm not paying like a TPU units for it to like create like a super high resolution version.

But you could um again, it's, it's. You could pay it. I don't know if you can do that with experimental, but when it gets released, like like we were talking about earlier, google's whole point is not only to create features for phones, so a future version of the the google photos app will let you describe what you want to change.

2:06:15 - Leo Laporte
It'll change it it is recognizably you, though that's it is, it didn't change the face.

2:06:20 - Andy Ihnatko
oh, and another. Another thing like uh, I, I did. I did one test where I had a create like a, a stand-up routine about paper airplanes. It's the first thing in my head and I want you to show me. Like, imagine, imagine that's being shot on video and the stand-up comedian is on stage at a small comedy club telling the story and give me frame grabs as he's telling the story and it generates all these images and the character is the person is the same person, picture after picture after picture. And when I say things like I want you to have him get increasingly angry as he tells a story and end the joke by tearing up. They decided the image generator decided he should be holding a paper airplane. So okay, so I want you to end the joke with him tearing up the paper airplane and throwing it on the floor and it regenerated it and it was the exact same character.

So that in itself is something that is not an automatic thing in image generation, where it's like don't change the person, make sure it's the same person as you make these changes that I'm talking about.

It's a lot of fun. It really is a good peek into, like, what photo editing and what a lot of creation is going to be like in the hopefully not too distant future. And this sort of and does give you a peer into this and does give you a peer into this when I'm talking about Apple doesn't necessarily have to have amazing AI features on every phone immediately, but in a couple of years' time, when you have the ability to say, not just use hand editing on your photo editor, when you simply say I want the third person on the left to be at the very, very end and I want the second person to the right to be gone completely and move the together so you can't see that someone's been removed, and just like, say that to a personal system and it just happens. That is going to be one of those moments I keep talking about of why can't my phone do that, because it's very, very applicable to what a lot of people do, so it's not fun to play with I got my uh, my pixel line over here.

2:08:11 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna have to start uh messing with it. Very interesting, yeah, thank you uh. Andrew Andy by the way, we don't mention it enough hosts a, uh, a show about android called material with florence ion. Yep, all about google.

2:08:27 - Andy Ihnatko
So so you think you think that we talk a lot about lawsuits and antitrust on this show oh boy. I have to oftentimes say okay. Of the last three weeks, have we actually not stopped talking about them being sued into oblivion by the Department of Justice or somebody else? So it's fun. It's Google. Google infests and impresses all of our lives in every way, which means that there's a lot of scary things to talk about, a lot of great things to talk about. It's a lot of fun. It's on the Relay Network.

2:08:58 - Leo Laporte
Relayfm. All right, I might actually buy this. It's only a tenth of an Alex.

2:09:06 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, I see your pick of the week, a friend of mine, chris Fenwick, sent me a picture of this and within a minute I owned it.

2:09:12 - Leo Laporte
Like it was on the play, I was like I would just so this is it. Look at it, look at this little guy. It's a Mac mini case Into a case.

2:09:22 - Alex Lindsay
Everything plugs back in Turns it into a cheese grater and I fill up all these ports, and so I.

2:09:27 - Leo Laporte
It works with all the ports and everything.

2:09:36 - Alex Lindsay
It works with all the ports it's got it's actually build quality. Now I there's about three or four of these. I will admit this is probably the more expensive one at 75 bucks, um, but the build quality is good. It's got a nice little it. The power button now is again on the side because it's it sits up like this um and it's it's good build quality as far as that goes. Um and it uh, yeah it, it fits quite nicely. It looks very nice on a desk. Uh, my son has been using this to uh do some da vinci resolve work and so um, so he cute, he, uh, it's like this little power um machine on on the side of it. I, it's completely absurd, completely not needed and so much fun you know, you know why I'm thinking of getting it?

2:10:10 - Leo Laporte
because I get, when my speakers are too close to my mac mini, I get a little buzz. And I'm thinking of getting it Because when my speakers are too close to my Mac Mini, I get a little buzz and I'm thinking this might shield it a little bit better. You think it could? It's aluminum, right.

2:10:22 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so it's heavy. This is not like a little plastic thing, this is machined.

2:10:28 - Jason Snell
I want it Again.

2:10:29 - Alex Lindsay
there's some other ones that are a little lighter weight than this one. This one, really, you feel like you. You bought something that is going to protect it. I guess I don't know if it needs protecting, but but anyway, it was just. It was just too much fun not to not forget it so I really, really hope I would not blame them.

2:10:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I would encourage them to create an optional set of wheels that cost like 180 dollars for a set. That would be great.

2:10:55 - Leo Laporte
Uh, all right, it's it's, it's on amazon. So uh, tiga, I mean I'm sure, some chap, it's some chinese company, chinese company that yeah, but but it's uh, they um. But it's a fun, it's a super fun little um we'll put a link in the show notes so you can go right to it or you can search for Aluminum chassis stand for 2024. Mac Mini M4 M4 Pro. Mac Mini M4 stand. Mac Mini M4 case Optimized heat distribution accessories for Mac Mini M4. Mac Mini M4 mount. Mac Mini M4 holder. Brand Tiga.

2:11:25 - Alex Lindsay
Very SEO oriented, All of it.

2:11:28 - Leo Laporte
You know this is something new, though. I never saw this before on Amazon Shorter shipping distance. This item tips ships from a warehouse that's closer than average to you, so it would emit less carbon if I bought it. So I'm going to buy it. I mean, oh, there you go, it's good for the environment it's coming straight to you from what american valley or what?

2:11:46 - Alex Lindsay
what is the american? Uh, that's where the big one they probably bought.

2:11:48 - Leo Laporte
When they saw Alex bought it one, they probably bought 10 more and put them in the warehouse.

2:11:53 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we're going to get some more American Canyon. That's the one that's like American Canyon. Yeah, that's the big warehouse.

2:11:57 - Leo Laporte
Is that nearby? That's kind of far. It's in Napa. Oh it is, it's in Napa. That's the big one that you get. It's by Vacaville amazon warehouse in every town at this point there what's interesting?

2:12:12 - Alex Lindsay
I, I, there's a I don't remember who had it. There was something that was maybe it was an npr thing where they talked about where they find like places like lancaster. Pennsylvania is a great place to put a warehouse because it has lots of highways that go to new york and philadelphia and uh, and so there's there's these hubs where all these highways happen to interact with each other and they can do the math, they figure out where that math is and then they just put these massive warehouses. But the math is there are odd places in the United States that they put them because it fulfills a very odd set of algorithms.

2:12:47 - Leo Laporte
Logistics is a fascinating subject. If I were a young person, I might study that.

2:12:57 - Alex Lindsay
It's certainly a well maybe something I could do better, but you know they, you know what omar bradley said it's. You know amateurs talk about strategy and professionals talk about logistics.

2:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Right, and army Marches on its stomach, which sounds painful. But Alex lindsay office hoursglobal 090.media. If you want hire him. What's coming up on your many multifarious platforms?

2:13:17 - Alex Lindsay
We're getting ready for NAB, so so we're. You know I'm doing lots of tests, so you may see, I may try to test out a GDC this week. The new kit, We've got a, we've got a 5.1 mic that I think I might've talked about earlier. Yeah, you talked about that, yes, and so we're testing that right now and so we're going to try a 5.1 4K, 60 HDR streamed at YouTube from. It'll just be on Sunday of NAB. I'll just be there. I have another job that came up so, but yeah, so that's coming up soon. We had Jeremy Balanson from Stanford on Gray Matter graymattershow. He is I mean, he's the kind of like before Facebook bought Oculus. Mark Zuckerberg goes and hangs out with him in Stanford to talk about VR for a while. So he was on Gray Matter on last week and that episode just came out today.

2:14:12 - Leo Laporte
So it's definitely worth checking out. Episode 121 at gray matter dot show looks. That looks really interesting. I have to listen to that good, smart guy you get great people.

2:14:24 - Alex Lindsay
Michael krasny, it turns out, has a very deep rolodex. Amazing, though, yeah uh.

2:14:32 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, sir. It's a pleasure. Mr Andy, and not co? Uh, no longer on gbh on a regular basis, but he is on the on the socials at I h n a t k o. How do I remember that? I have no idea how to spell it. I h n a t k? O get it, thank you, I have no. And then otco, everybody can do otco.

2:14:57 - Andy Ihnatko
You told me that once and I never forgot it it was a tip that was given to me by the clerk at the at a video store that went out of business, and she said I kind of I, I said I love coming here because you're the only because the back when, like your id, like your account number was like your name or whatever, and uh, and you always uh, and so I go you always put my.

The only people who can spell my last name cause oh, I remember it, as I have no idea how to spell this person's name and I said, oh, I'm going to miss you twice as hard.

2:15:22 - Leo Laporte
That's really great Mnemonic. Thank you, Andrew. Good to see you, my friend, and also, of course, Jason Snell. Jason Snell, he's at six colors dot com.

2:15:30 - Jason Snell
many, many podcasts at six colors dot com many, many podcasts including upgrade with your rotating hosts yeah, I had john syracusa this week, stephen hackett next week you know everybody you know. You know this, leo. You hang around long enough and you end up knowing a lot of people.

2:15:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah it's awesome, but the difference is that you you anger and cheese off a very small percentage of the people that you work with, unlike me.

2:15:58 - Jason Snell
That's right, unlike me I try not to cheese the people off. Sometimes the cheese just happens, but you try not to so so yeah, people can check that out.

2:16:07 - Alex Lindsay
My curly's on paternity leave so.

2:16:09 - Jason Snell
So it's a good time to get all the guest stars get through that rolodex. Make sure that I got the all, the all the stars and and, uh, and, yeah, so you got gruber, as he was going from simmer to boil I know that's pretty good. I know, right in the middle of his emotional crisis, it was good.

2:16:26 - Leo Laporte
Two and a half hours of that thank you Jason, thank you Andy, thank you Alex. We do this show Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. As I said, you can watch it live on all those different streams, but you can also get a copy of the show after the fact. If you want to know where that is, you can search for it or go to twit.tv/mbw there's a link there or subscribe on your favorite podcast client and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And, of course, club members get that special version ad free. So if you're not a member of the club, please join the club. We'd love to have you. Thank you, Alex, Thank you Andy, thank you Jason, thanks to all of you for listening, and now it is my sad but solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Bye-bye.

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