MacBreak Weekly 965 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are all here. Big shakeup in the executive suite at Apple, all tied to the AI failure. Has Apple lost its luster? That's the question we'll ask. Also, vibe coding it's coming to the world, but it's not coming to Apple. Tim, don't kill my vibe. We'll talk about that and a whole lot more. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 965, recorded Tuesday, March 25th 2025: A Lot Of Goodwill to Squander. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news and, of course, we do it with the best people in the business. Jason Snell is here from sixcolors.com. Hello, Jason, present, present, present and accounted for, sir, present you have lovely blue eyes.

0:01:07 - Jason Snell
I didn't notice that, thank you. Oh yes, that's uh, that's what they tell me. Yeah, my children both had blue eyes too, so oh, isn't that nice, my wife who has brown eyes. Uh was like basically, come on, you got to give me blue eye children and she's accomplished.

0:01:21 - Leo Laporte
Yep, yep, yep. How many apple executives have gotten lost in those eyes during your briefing? Jason? It's been more than they should have.

0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
That's the green eyed Andy Ihnatko. Hello, andrew, hey there, hi there, good to see you also here.

0:01:37 - Leo Laporte / Alex Lindsay
Alex Lindsay from officehours.global, who, like me, has poop brown eyes you don't even have to, you don't you take close-up pictures and there's like no, nothing, like nothing.

0:01:48 - Leo Laporte
Brown brown, brown, brown, boring, old brown eyes. Uh, I don't know why your eyes are bluer than ever, Jason, they really are. There's something going on, it's my doc pop uh microphone cover. That just really brings out my eyes, your eyes are popping.

0:02:04 - Jason Snell
That's a. That is the ultimate podcaster pickup line. Your mic pop, uh, brings out the color of your eyes uh, I don't know where to start here.

0:02:15 - Leo Laporte
There's all sorts of uh stuff going on in the apple world. It's losing a billion dollars a year, according to quartz on apple tv plus and which is actually information broke that story. But oh, the information. Let's give the information credit.

0:02:31 - Alex Lindsay
Okay, yeah, and we have to remember that at the same timeline that, uh, netflix was running, they were losing a lot more. Yeah, so this is a.

0:02:38 - Andy Ihnatko
This is actually apple's actually being fairly uh, it's normal there's like a balance here, like number number one all streaming services are finding it hard to struggle. Number two Apple. Unlike the competition they can absorb that they're not business not relying on it and motivations for that service that go beyond simply having a profitable single streaming service. And third, yeah, but Netflix was like inventing a product category. It's probably significant, but maybe not terribly significant though, that they're spending $5 billion a year, losing a billion dollars a year on a service, but nonetheless, the fact that it has managed to create a prestige streaming service it's not just an also-ran that's pretty significant too. Interesting information, because Apple doesn't give out any data whatsoever unless it's Severance or Ted Lasso which has been renewed, by the way, for another season Super hits. They don season super hits. They don't tell any information. So every time the information or somebody gets information about exactly the streaming numbers, the viewership numbers, the profitability, that's something to talk about for all week long.

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
Tim Cook. Apparently this is all from the information. Great, as usual. Great scoop from Waynene. Ma, who's really good at covering apple, was asked, uh, last year about apple tv plus. It's the only apple service subscription service that is losing money, according to two people to direct knowledge of the matter. Uh, they asked him about argyle. Remember that? That was the one with the spy and the cat. Yeah, bad movie, bad move. I really was ready for it. I thought it's going to be great. I love a cat, but no, 200 million dollars to make hadn't found much of an audience, according to wayne, or generated more subscribers, cook told his colleagues. According to a former apple tv plus employee, uh, subscriptions are 45 million, which ain't bad. I mean, if they're losing money, it's because they're spending money, right yeah, there's some churn going on.

0:04:50 - Jason Snell
I thought I thought so. I I don't think them spending money. It's a big deal. They seem to be losing less money than they used to, which is also a good direction for them to go in. They also seem to be reducing their spend, especially on the movie side, and when you mention a200 million movie, it does not take very many expensive movies to lose a billion dollars. You can do it real quick and they've got the money. It's an accounting error for them. They have so much money. So there are a lot of reasons why I think this is not a big deal.

As Andy said, netflix's situation was different, but the cost of content is still enormous. My understanding is Netflix spends more money on licensing catalog titles from other companies than Apple spends on originals today, like it's just the money involved here is enormous. So you see a billion and you think, oh, my goodness, but it's like it used to be. You know a billion and a half that they were losing and they're spending 5 billion and they're also cutting back on some of their experiments, like movies that have not worked out for them so much the one that I saw. And again, everybody's extrapolating because nobody knows, because Apple won't tell anybody anything is. I saw a number that suggested that the churn rate which is how people kind of come on and then go back off and come on and go back off that Apple's churn rate for TV Plus is a lot higher than most other services and, honestly, given its limited catalog, even though its catalog is a lot better than it used to be, that's not too surprising.

I hear from a lot of people who say, well, yeah, I signed up, I watched Severance and then I dropped off and maybe I watched another couple of things while Severance was on, but then I'm done.

So that's part of their challenge is to reduce the churn rate. And then the other data point that came out of this whole sort of like hubbub about Apple TV Plus data is that some very positive numbers about subscription pickup, since Apple TV Plus has been available as an Amazon video channel where you can buy TV Plus and add it to your Amazon package like many others. That was a new thing that Apple did and it looks like, according to these third party metrics, where they're kind of making guesses is that Apple has actually had quite a bit of success from that in adding to TV Plus's mix. So you know, it is kind of a the very definition of a hobby, which is that it's a thing you want to do but you're not making any money and you're probably losing money on it. But uh, I I don't find it troubling and I I think, interestingly, the the tenor of a lot of these reports in in holly to me to be like please, apple, please don't stop spending money Keep spending money on us.

0:07:13 - Alex Lindsay
Please keep spending money in Hollywood. And I know folks that work on Apple, work on some of the Apple productions and they're like it's the best. In fact it's hard to go back. I bet the catering is excellent. A friend of mine was working on an Apple one and then immediately finished and went to Hulu and he was just like oh, it was just like playing football on pavement, you know compared to like you know, and he said it's not so much that it was like the catering was better.

He said just, everything is organized and there's enough money to do all the things you wanted to do and they're not. You're going to get pens, you know, like all those things are are kind of managed because there's enough money to do it. Um, but the but I think that I do often will look at almost everything that Apple releases. I don't really pay much attention to what the other ones are releasing, um, but I pay a lot of attention to, like, what is Apple going to release next, because I'm going to give it a chance, because the quality is so high, you know, and and it doesn't mean that they're all like. I watched the gorge, which was kind of a yawner, you know like I finally watched it. It took, it took a couple of weeks to come around to it, um, and I think you had to be desperate before.

0:08:14 - Leo Laporte
but who doesn't love Anna Taylor joy, so right.

0:08:18 - Alex Lindsay
I just I it. It looked like an interesting puzzle.

0:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Um so uh the uh, um so uh the uh pitching it they're pitching it with a, with a quote from an some sort of weird unknown internet tv reviewer, as the uh hitman rom-com you've been waiting for you know it was, it was, it was right up there with red notice, like, like you know, like that was not great either, I know.

0:08:41 - Alex Lindsay
No, I'm just saying like red notice, gray man, you know, gray man was a huge money loser for netflix.

0:08:46 - Leo Laporte
That was a $300 million.

0:08:48 - Alex Lindsay
But I'm saying from a creative perspective, it's kind of like it's a formula, it kind of like we'll do these things that are there, and I think that that has not been very successful for Apple and I think it's not been successful for most of the streamers in general. And yet Apple has some great shows. I Ted lasso Severance um slow horses. There's some great stuff on there. Uh, presumed, presumed innocent. I mean, I thought, was really good.

0:09:11 - Jason Snell
I don't know if you saw it, but it was dark matter.

0:09:13 - Andy Ihnatko
That's great it's just like Jason said. It's like I decided to cancel once I realized that I would. I would have like a two-week period in which I was like all in streaming something and then, once I'd watched, the thing I wanted to watch there was I was just not watching it for another couple of months. So, like I'm right now, I'm planning on renewing for as long as it takes to get caught up on this, to get caught up on Severance. Then I'll probably cancel and then renew again for Ted Lasso season four and Severance season three and whatever else seems to be nice, and then cancel again.

It isn't like Max is. The only two streaming services I have that are absolutely rock solid. For me are YouTube, because the quality of the independent content is so good and such a deep catalog, because the ads are so horrible, exactly, and the ads are so horrible. And Max slash HBO. Max, a deep catalog and the ads are so horrible, exactly, and the ads are so horrible. And max slash hbo max because they have so many great movies, not just current movies but old ones, like as I, as I keep diving in, I never run out of things to watch. But hulu, netflix, apple tv, I can kind of take them for a while and then leave them for a while and just with the prices keeping going up, it's like I feel like a dope, for not I, I wonder what percentage of Apple Apple will never tell us this Apple TV Plus users are actually subscribed to Apple One and get it as part of a larger package.

0:10:34 - Leo Laporte
I would not churn, because I'm getting also iCloud.

0:10:38 - Jason Snell
That's why I don't entirely believe the churn numbers and Apple. I've seen some reports about these and I think it's antenna group numbers that suggest that people inside Apple don't think they're entirely accurate because of the way that they're being measured and that you've got things that are in the bundle and there's all sorts of different ways to get it. But it's worth. I mean, the truth is, apple's business doesn't stand or fall on this In that way. They are like Prime Video. It's 1% of their profit. It's a teeny tiny bit. Doesn't stand or fall on this in that way.

They are like uh like prime video, where they've got one percent of their profit it's a teeny, tiny bit and I think the truth is they like being connected to hollywood, they like getting nominated for awards, they like basking in the glow of it and also it serves a purpose. We talked about the last time apple did their quarterly results, that there's all this talk about the services narrative and the truth is Apple's services narrative, which is it keeps growing. It's a huge part of their business. It's more than the Mac and the iPad put together at this point and growing $96 billion. It's an enormous part of their business and actually Apple TV Plus puts a face on that services line, even though it is a tiny portion of it, because the truth is most of the services is app store revenue.

It's Google kickbacks it. You know it's not. It's it's Apple care revenue. It's boring stuff or stuff Apple doesn't want people to talk about it. You know there's a little Apple music in there but like the entertainment stuff kind of launders. Apple's strategy a little bit in making it be like oh yeah, services, I get it ted lasso, and it's like, well, ted lasso is not throwing off you know 20, 30 billion dollars, but uh, that's okay and it doesn't to your point.

0:12:18 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you can almost call it a marketing budget yeah.

0:12:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's in fact ted sarandos, one of the ceos of netflix. Uh said exactly that. He said I don't really understand what they're doing. Last week he did an interview with variety. I don't get what they're doing, but I guess it's good marketing, yeah uh, I understand. He says I don't understand it beyond a marketing play. But they're really smart people may.

0:12:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe they see something we don't yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, go ahead, you're talking.

0:12:41 - Alex Lindsay
All I was going to say is that you're sure, but I think that the last three standing, if there gets down to three, it's going to be Apple, amazon and Netflix, because Netflix is making so much money and Apple and Amazon don't need to make money. The rest of them are all trying to figure out how to actually make a profit with what they have, but those three don't have to, and I think that that is, and I think that you know that is a, you know that's that's why I think that there might be some it could be a little shade coming from netflix, because these are the two predators that are not close yet, but they can probably see the trajectory if they just keep dumping money into it.

0:13:14 - Leo Laporte
You know there is some sense that, uh, none of the services on apple one are quite as good as competing services. Icloud's not as good as dropbox and apple news is not as great as some of the freeze offerings and apple music is. The growth is stalled. It's not, it's no, it's like a third of spotify. Um, you know that in every case. Fitness plus is fine, but there are better standalone fitness applications out there. As a bundle, I think it's. It's good, but apple arcade is not bringing people to the table.

0:13:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I can tell you that the information report also included some news, some information about apple arcade, basically saying it's quote unlikely to be profitable, unquote as a standalone service, um, and also that's. There's a. There's a lot of we're asked. Look, if you compare apple arcade to apple music, apple music, they keep putting lots and lots of new services into it, whereas if you compare Apple Arcade to Apple Music, apple Music, they keep putting lots and lots of new services into it. They keep putting lots and lots of new stuff into Apple Classical.

0:14:12 - Leo Laporte
Classical's been updated and we'll talk about that later because I know you're a fan.

0:14:16 - Andy Ihnatko
They added DJ features to Apple Music, all this sort of stuff. Apple Arcade however, it's like every time that there's a big announcement about, hey, we're adding X, y and Z to this, you look it up, it's like, okay, that's a mobile game that first appeared on iPhone and Android in 2014. There's a really good gaming news site, mobilegamerbiz for biz. It's actually very good. They did a couple of really good reports talking to people who were working inside that ecosystem and basically saying the payouts are like dribbling down to nothing.

Apple is vindictive if they find that your, your studio, is working with amazon or anybody else, uh, and they're just, they've just about had it. But the thing is the as a value add to the iphone. As a parent to say, well, no, I'm not going to give you unfettered access to the app store to buy the games you want. However, I will let you have this walled garden, this protective sphere in which there are no in-app purchases. Everything's been vetted for kids and it's not something that I think I need to keep a close eye on. It helps to sell iPhones. It helps to sell Apple One memberships. We should be talking about whether something could survive on its own or not. It's an interesting discussion but again, when Apple is a $3.4 trillion company, they have the ability to unlike Spotify to keep this thing going just because it helps out with a larger ecosystem. And that's why Netflix not necessarily scared, but they're aware that Netflix faces challenges in the business community that Apple TV Plus absolutely does not.

0:15:55 - Jason Snell
Extensions of the brand is a really great way to look at this. You could almost say that a lot of these services are the online equivalent of you go into an Apple Store to buy an iPhone and you know you could say, no, I don't want a case, I'll go on Amazon or I'll go find a website that recommends a case and I'll buy a case. But you know what? I'm at the Apple Store, give me the Apple case and, and you know that's why. And oh, yeah, the air pods here. Okay, give me the apple case and, and you know that's why. And oh, you have airpods here. Okay, give me the airpods. And like there is real power in just kind of and Alex has talked about this a lot on this show on just sort of like relaxing and falling into the soft embrace of apple and it is easier.

The products are good. Some of them have better products out there, some of them don't, but like they're good, they're comfortable, they work really well with all of Apple stuff, they're integrated and if you pay a little bit more for them like if you're willing to pay for that convenience and they're very profitable for Apple. And that goes for these services too. Like I still pay for Dropbox. Icloud's gotten a lot better. There are still things it doesn't do that I need that dropbox does, but, like I rely on I cloud for more stuff than I used to.

I like apple tv plus. Uh, I have people keep telling me that news plus is actually way better than it used to be. I don't know if I believe it, but it's out there. I can re-wall street journal articles on it. That's nice, yeah, um, and it's just. But that's part of the way to look at this is that apple is playing a big picture game with some of these investments, because they just want you to feel good about Apple and Apple stuff and be in the ecosystem and be tied to Apple in every way possible. And they know there's competition and that some of their customers are going to take advantage of the competition and they're fine with that. They just want to be kind of have beer in your life in lots of ways and make it easy for you to give them more money is it analogous to pages numbers?

0:17:49 - Leo Laporte
keynote that they kind of it's the freebie that you get.

0:17:52 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but except those are I mean actually free free I mean other people use them. But I mean there's. There's nothing that says that you're a cog in a large machine like microsoft office.

0:18:01 - Leo Laporte
You know like and so yeah, but I still get everything in DocX format right, everybody's using it.

0:18:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but the thing is is that they're not. I mean, as someone who's used both of them for 20, 25 years, I mean a lot more people use Word, but it's not better, like you know. So it's. And a lot of people use like Excel. If you're going to do huge numbers to calculate something that's near the level of an ERP, then Excel is definitely better than numbers. But if you're organizing budgets, numbers is faster and easier and looks nicer. You know like. And Keynote.

No one in my world starts talking about PowerPoint being better than Keynote. You know like. You know like like no one, no one. Like when people start saying that you just stop listening to them. Like. You know like like no one, no one like when people start saying that you just stop listening to them. Like, you know you're just like I can't hear you anymore because I can tell you when the slides are one or the other you know, and so. So the. So I think that those are a little different in the sense that I think Apple actually produces something that and it allows Apple to control.

I think a lot of this also has to do with Apple controlling its own destiny. So this has been something that has been a problem. You know. It started as early as when, you know Steve jobs was trying to get everything back together. He gets in there, the house is on fire, he keeps on putting one room out after another and they make this deal, some people would say, to keep direct macro media director on on the Mac. They buy final cut they.

You know they wanted to prove that you could build something on top of QuickTime. It was kind of an experiment. And then Avid comes out and says we're going to drop the Mac platform while the whole house is on fire. And there was something about Apple not wanting to ever be accountable to anyone Because, again, they had to do a bunch of stuff to keep Microsoft Office on the Mac until they bought their, built their own office tools. And so there's all this stuff of their survival was external to Apple. And I think that there's always this thing at Apple of wanting to make sure that all the things that their users use on a daily basis is something that they make a version of. It doesn't have to be the best version, it just has to be a version that is a good, solid solution. And you know the I think that the notes is probably my most used Apple piece of software. So you know, because it just it's. It's as Jason said, it's ubiquitous, it's easy.

0:20:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but nobody says, oh, I'm going to buy a Macintosh because I can use notes.

0:20:21 - Alex Lindsay
No, but man, but I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't if I go outside of my Apple ecosystem. This is an example to your point. No one buys it for notes, but as soon as I go outside the Apple ecosystem I don't even know how to live.

0:20:34 - Leo Laporte
It's the total play. It's the overall play, rather than any individual.

0:20:38 - Alex Lindsay
And the thing is is that Apple allows you know, by having all of these things working, like Maps is a good example. I hated Maps. When it came out I wouldn't. I installed Google Maps immediately, but it slowly wore me down because every link that someone sends you on messages or whatever takes you to the Apple Maps right, and then after a while you're just like, well, it's easier. And then, to Apple's credit, it got to a point where if I went back to Google Docs, I felt like I went back a couple of years. I mean Google Maps, I felt like I dropped back three or four years. And because Apple put billions of dollars they don't talk about how much they lost, but I don't know what they spent on Maps, but it was so much money like so much money to make that after they got embarrassed, I'm going to say something controversial, and then maybe I'm wrong.

0:21:22 - Leo Laporte
I feel like Apple's in trouble. I feel like the Apple intelligence thing is the tip of the iceberg. What we just described is a bunch of also rands, not quite the best. If Microsoft had a decent product with Windows, I think it would be real problematic. I'm getting and this is maybe this is just me, so you guys tell me I'm full of it I'm getting a little tired of Tim Cook.

I, I see him and he's I'm starting to think there's no, there's no vision there. There's no artistic creativity there. These here's going to China and saying, yeah, that deep seek's pretty darn good. He's. Uh, he's a company man, he, he's starting to remind me of ackinsey consultant. It doesn't excite me and I think apple's got a problem. You know, uh, google just announced they're going to put gemini into their android auto so that you will have an ai now in your auto. Uh, you know apple's not going to say, hey, good news, you got siri. Uh, I feel like, am I wrong? But I feel like the the shine is coming off the apple a little bit um, I would.

0:22:26 - Andy Ihnatko
I wouldn't agree 100. I agree with some of what you're saying. I I don't think he likes to take, excuse me, from what I've seen apple actually accomplish. I don't know if apple in 2025 loves to take the really big swing. Um, I they love. They love to make moves that make a lot of sense, that fit into a larger business plan. I don't think that they're as in love with disruption, even self-disruption, as they once were. I think that's natural for a company of Apple's size and its age. But the fact they're a $ and a half trillion dollar company means that whatever they're doing, it's making sense from a business point of view.

0:23:09 - Leo Laporte
I do think I almost feel like their success is because the competition is so weak. If Microsoft and Google were producing products that were competitive. But when I look at I'm all Apple right, everywhere I look is Apple. But if I were to look at leaving apple, it's hard to put together anything near the cohesive platform that apple offers, and I think that's a failure of the competition as much as anything else.

0:23:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, apple's winning by default is how I feel yeah, well, I, I this, and this is why I I interrupted uh, Alex, uh, for a moment. There, what I was going to say is that there is a lot of you can define better a whole bunch of different ways, and the thing is, microsoft Office is better than iWork in many ways. Google Workspace is better than iWork in so many ways, and that way is that everybody can come in and play on an equal playing ground. It's not like, oh well, if you don't have a mid-range to expensive desktop machine made by Apple, you can kind of get a web version of this going, as opposed to if you spend a lot of time. If you spend a lot of time learning how to be extremely efficient in Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, no matter what job you're hired to do for the next 10 years, you can plug right in and do it. If you are the master of Apple Sheets, that's nice. Hopefully you can translate that into what the address of the company actually uses and you'll be competing with people who've been using Sheets for the last 10 years. That's a lot of what Apple does 10 years, and that's a lot of what Apple does.

If they have one weakness that I don't like, it's that they've never proven their ability to compete on a global basis on a level playing field with everybody else. Notes is amazing and it also helps. It's a bona fide gift to everybody who owns Apple hardware. It is such a great showcase for the iPad in the way that no third-party Notes app can possibly do, maybe because of the restrictions that Apple puts on other developers. But if Apple had to make a Notes app that says, well, what if it doesn't work on this one platform? What if it doesn't work on the operating system that we created using the APIs that we created on the hardware that we created, how good of a notes app could they create? You wouldn't think that they're the company that quote gets it in terms of user interface.

I think that if there's one thing and this is something that came up in the Six Colors annual report card over and over again I really think that whatever focus they're putting on the quality of their software, they need to add more improvements to that. They need to really, really improve the quality of their releases. They need to improve their vision for where the OS is going. Hopefully we'll see some of that later this year. As rumored, there's going to be a big rewrite of iOS with implications for macOS. Hopefully it won't just be a freshening up or well, we want to make this look like VisionOS.

I don't think that they like doing that and that's one of their big weaknesses. That's one thing that I think that Tim being a logistics guy not that I have a really masterful understanding of what makes him tick I don't think that he is by somebody who is wow, software is great, software is awesome. Yeah, the hardware is wonderful. But the thing is we can't upgrade the hardware more than once a year and users can't upgrade it more than once every three or four years. But we can increase the value of these devices by increasing the value of the software on it. Pixel does that. We get feature drops, even for a three or four-year-old phone. It keeps getting brand new features that take advantage of the whole platform. I think Google gets it, microsoft, to an extent, gets it. I'm not sure that Apple really gets that, or at least that's not their philosophy.

0:26:59 - Alex Lindsay
I mean. I think that I mean like, like, for instance, for Google, google Sheets. I mean, we use Google sheets all the time, but as soon as I want to show it to an external client, I take it out of Google sheets and put it in numbers and make it look pretty. You know, like you know, and, uh, and, and I can tell you that if I know that you're coming in with any other presentation platform and I come in with a keynote document, there's a 50, 50 chance I'm going to win, like you, and, and, and my, my hit ratio is in the nineties, right, and so so the thing is, is that is that I'm, you know. So the thing is it, it, it is.

There are a lot of things there that are, I think, that Apple does really well. I do think, though, that, to your point, I think that there are two kinds of people in a company. Maybe probably more, but I'll just take two, two types of people. There are project people and process people, and there's people who are project people, who make, make, make, make, do things, you know, and they're typically the ones that everyone sighs like oh, that guy, like he's doing all this crazy stuff and everything else, and the process people come in and have to clean everything up and make it all work and everything else, and you need about one project person for every 10 process people and but what you want, in my opinion, as a CEO oftentimes is, if you want to do great things, you need a product project person as the CEO. If you want to grow and build logistics, you have a process CEO and they and they you know, and the problem is is that Tim is a process person who has been able to take Apple to places that Steve Jobs would have never been capable of doing. So now they have a scale that Steve Jobs could not have done, like Tim Cook did what Steve Jobs.

Steve wouldn't have done many things that Apple's done, added many features, made things more complicated, did all those other things. He would have said no, and Apple would be half the size it is today if Steve was running it, in my opinion, and we would have been excited about some product or something else. The biggest thing what I and we would have been excited about some product or something else, the biggest thing that I I feel like the Apple intelligence is is a symptom. I don't think it's the turning point, I think it's a symptom of something bigger, which is that Apple is having a problem with not saying no. Like Apple, what Steve jobs is really good at is just throwing things away and saying, no, we're not going to go down that path, or we spent or I know we spent $500 million on this product and we're not going to release it and Apple still does that. I mean they spent I don't know how many billions on a car that they never released.

But the point is is that what I see constantly in most of the Apple apps, or most of the features, are a bunch of stuff I didn't ask for and they're not fixing the things that I really need done. So you know and I think about the Siri thing, and I posted something on Twitter about this, but I was like I don't really care whether Siri has Apple intelligence, but what I do care about is the fact that I'm on a phone call with my headphones. All I need you to do is not change the source, like, like, like, literally like. I've been on this call for the last five minutes and I just need you to be smart enough to know that when I sit in my car or I walk near another Bluetooth device that I'm not going to jump over to that because I don't want to like, and it is that kind of stuff You're like, go fix that and don't worry about some of the shinier things.

But Apple keeps on adding more features and more things. And let's do all these more, more, more, more, more, because they're trying to keep up and this is what Apple did. I feel like this is what Apple did in the nineties. You know we, they were, you know they, they didn't have Steve jobs there and they went into this whole thing. And now we have these complicated skews with these complicated apps. You know, you know I don't. I'm not in the age of needing to side swipe or whatever. When do I want my to swipe sideways on my phone? Never, ever. The only time I do it is by accident Jason, is this just?

0:30:31 - Leo Laporte
is this just? I mean, it may be that the whole technology sector is going to hell and apple is you know? Uh, just, you know, like everybody else, because there isn't any good competition for apple. I'll acknowledge that, but they really seem to be flailing. They just fired, or reassigned, uh, john gendrea, who was a big acquisition from google to run right, didn't fire him, they, they, he.

0:30:57 - Jason Snell
He's in charge of their ai research, but he's no longer in syria.

0:31:01 - Leo Laporte
They shuffled him, mike rockwell who is one of the fixers is now in charge. Uh, he's reporting to. He's now in charge of siri um, they brought kim horvath on uh like last month apparently that wasn't sufficient.

0:31:13 - Jason Snell
That was like she was like paving the way for rockwell, clearly, because she was working for rockwell before. That was what was going on there, clearly. Here's the thing, leo. It's complicated because apple, I would argue on the hardware engineering side, is at the top peak of its game, apple Silicon is the best.

Apple Silicon, their Mac designs, the iPhone designs, the iPad designs. Their hardware group is at the top right now. They are killing it. Nobody's better, I agree. And yet there is this other side and and forgive me for going back to the locker room, but I'm going to say John Madden classic phrase, which was winning, is the greatest deodorant, and that's part of what this issue is is Apple has had.

For close observers of Apple, there have been issues with Apple's software process that have been visible for years, not even like the last two years, like the last 10 years, where they seem to move people around from project to project. They launch something with a great PR push and then they abandon it and maybe a few years later they go back and they fix it again. There was a podcast I was listening to a couple of weeks ago where an anonymous person wrote in and said oh, by the way, the only way you can get your bug fixed is to get it fixed during the beta process when the feature gets put in. After that, if you find a bug in Apple software, it just gets ignored and it's like well, that's what it looks like from the outside. So I guess that's a confirmation that that's what it is from the inside. And so this is the thing when you're number one, when you're doing great, when you're making all the money and you're having all the success, it is very hard, if not impossible, to say one, I think we've got a problem because there's no feedback, that you have a problem in terms of the things that people are looking at, like customer sat ratings and sales and your stock price and all those things. And then two, it's really hard to tell people who are embedded in this successful company actually you're not being successful because and so a lot of stuff just great deodorant it just sits there and it really stinks but nobody can smell it.

And I think with the Apple intelligence thing, because of the added pressure of time that they felt they needed to do Apple intelligence to get back out in front of AI, because they were caught flat footed on LLMs, that added a little more pressure to their already kind of problematic, rickety culture of software organization or I don't know what. It is something about their culture and it broke it visibly publicly where executives were making claims about what they were going to do and they couldn't do it and it looks really bad for them and they've had to do some reorgs. So my question is was this bad enough? Did this stink enough for Apple to say I know we're riding high, but not like we used to be, and we've got problems and we need to fix them, and is moving Rockwell in there to be in charge of Siri and working with Craig Federighi? Is that enough to change the culture? Or are they rearranging deck chairs?

I don't think Apple is doomed, but Apple for a while now has been a company, that is, that has been let down by its software organization, even though its hardware organization is great, and I don't think anybody would debate how great Apple's hardware is.

But I remember back when Apple software was great and their hardware was kind of not that great. And they have come all the way around because they felt hardware was a huge problem and they needed to focus on it and they needed to fix it. And they did fix it. But they've let the software side coast and it's not. I mean there's something wrong there. So maybe my hope is that this whole thing will be enough of a shock to the system that they will make substantive changes. My fear is that they're all still too afraid of going against the doctrine that was put in by steve jobs in the corporate culture in the early 2000s. That got them where they are, and so the argument's always going to be no, no, we can't change, because this is why we got here, even though the world has totally changed and they're not who they used to be.

0:35:20 - Leo Laporte
So that's the that's so here's the real question is tim cook the guy to fix this?

0:35:27 - Jason Snell
I mean, he's an, he's an operation. I think he could, but as somebody who's been a ceo for whatever 10 or 15 years and has been in this position, he's the guy, he's not a change agent right, he's the guy who put them there if you

0:35:38 - Alex Lindsay
ask me yeah, yeah, yeah, and I you know, I think that the issue again is that is that I think that Apple is got caught up in what it's so tempting, because it's so visual that it's like let's create new features. This has got this many new features and what they're forgetting is, like part of what made like the iPad, the original iPod magical was that wheel. I don't know how long they spent making that wheel work, but man, when you, when you, when you grabbed onto it, you felt like you were dealing with something different. And what Apple used to be good at is I'm going to make every little feature just work perfectly, as opposed to I'm going to add a bunch of new things. And I just feel like they keep on adding a bunch of things, they keep on reshuffling things and again, for me, what goes through my head is hey, if I wanted an Android, I'd buy one. I'm not looking for all the features Like I want. I just want it to be. I just to get back to the, my notes work and things connect and my earphones connect, like if all of those things.

As an Apple user and I think Apple users are different than Android users or Windows users I'm not looking for every feature. What I'm looking for is everything to work well together and for it to all be smooth and everything else. I don't really care about every little thing, um, doing the, the heightened, whatever, because I want it to be in the background, like I have other things I want to do in my life. I just want this part not to be complicated, and when it gets complicated, you're just like, oh, like, like, why, why did you add all these things that I don't, that I don't need? You know and, and, and and. It would be great if they all worked well, but they don't. You know like they're.

I feel like constantly, on every platform I'm on, things are quirky. You know like they're. Just they're not quite working correctly. But you see Apple kind of lean into it Like I don't know whether. Is it part of the beta that the recipe? Have you seen the recipes in news? You probably don't use news. This is the thing that I've seen that.

0:37:31 - Jason Snell
I haven't seen them yet, but they they have added recipes into they. When did they add it? Was it a long time ago? No, no, no. I think it's part of this beta process that they're doing. Now they're putting the recipes in.

0:37:34 - Alex Lindsay
I was like everybody's in trouble, like like you're, like you know, like it's really smooth, like you see a bunch of new recipes and you're just but that's the. I think that's what apple does well is that you start to see things like oh, I'm going to give you you can easily tag recipes and I'm going to put it in a pretty interface and I'm going to break it all down and they're just going to slow roll into that industry. And I think that that's where they do well is to make things that all work well together.

0:38:02 - Leo Laporte
See, I disagree. I think news is irreparably hampered by the fact that you cannot share a link to anybody except other news users. That's absurd and that's a very common problem at apple. Is this whole thing? Oh you got to stay in the ecosystem, uh I'm. I think apple is only surviving because nobody else has provided any. I agree that competition you know, I think it's a sad reflection on the state of the technology industry.

0:38:30 - Alex Lindsay
I think that people make a lot of decisions that are very difficult to get over. Like Google really wants everything to happen in the browser and there's a whole bunch of limitations to that.

0:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're all tampered by their business model. Right.

0:38:40 - Alex Lindsay
And so the thing is, is Google wants to do that, and Microsoft is really about how do we sell to corporations? It's not. How do we sell to individuals. You know, and so these are, you know, those.

0:38:50 - Leo Laporte
But I have to say software in both companies sucks. Microsoft is fixing multiple zero days every month in its.

0:38:59 - Alex Lindsay
When I open up I don't use Teams the app on my phone. I'm on Teams meetings a couple times a day, use teams, the, the app on my phone. I'm on teams meetings a couple times a day and, uh, I'm always joining from the browser because when I open up the, the, the app on the mac, it opens up a big white screen that covers everything else up. That doesn't do anything, but it's been there for years. Yeah, like you know, and and microsoft doesn't bother to fix it. Okay, you just, you know, you're just like, okay, you know.

0:39:22 - Leo Laporte
So that's an interesting situation. Um, I don't, I just I notice, you know, because I I ingest many, many articles and I'm starting to notice, even among the apple faithful, this kind of a little bit of a turn to unhappiness.

0:39:38 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, and I just, I just wonder what's, what's going on the money and they've got the right people to make the turn to come back they got the money.

0:39:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if they have the right people. I think that's the real problem is the executive team.

0:39:49 - Jason Snell
It may be because, again, I think it goes back to the whole great deodorant issue, which is they've been there so long, they've made so much money and they've been successful doing it the way we see this, with their approach to regulation in places like Europe, too, where I think that there's an argument to be made that they could have been more defensive in making policy changes that would have gotten them off the hook from a lot of regulation, but they were going to do it by their playbook and they were probably a little more combative than they should have been because that was the way that they did it.

And you know, again, you've got a bunch of people who've been in those positions of authority for a lot of a lot of years and they've made a lot of money, and so it's a real question about whether they're going to be interested in not capable, necessarily, but interested in change. I will say this, though, leo, which is, yes. We are having a moment now where there is a real question about an aspect of what Apple is doing. I'll just point out in the mid to late 2010s, the Mac was completely adrift.

They messed up all the ports and the keyboards on all their laptops, which are three quarters of the macs they sell. So like I don't want to go and say, apple, oh, it's all downhill from here because apple messed something up. And this is the beginning of it, because apple's hardware group, which, which we just said, is on all cylinders right now. There was a time not very long ago.

0:41:09 - Leo Laporte
Is that who we give credit to for that?

0:41:11 - Jason Snell
No, because it's also the hardware engineers right.

0:41:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're really good and the people they hired.

0:41:15 - Jason Snell
And maybe whoever told Johnny I that it was time to leave. But I mean, john Ternus is one of the key people in hardware and there's been a discussion of him potentially being the next ceo, which would be a different set of uh, of core capabilities at the top if that were to happen down the road. So I don't know, I'm just saying these things happen. What apple did in the late 2010s is fix it, and the question now is we can't tell from the outside especially, but without the benefit of time, whether making these moves and some other invisible moves beneath the surface is them fixing it or rearranging the deck chairs. We just can't tell. Remember Mike Rockwell quit? Yeah, he sounds like a really interesting guy and he shipped the Vision Pro, which, say what you will about the Vision Pro, I actually think it's a great product.

0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
He got it out the door. He got it out the door and it's good.

0:42:03 - Jason Snell
It's too expensive and it's got lots of weird design decisions on it, but it's good and the os, which he's still in charge of, is good and, by the way, they wanted to use siri to control it.

0:42:11 - Leo Laporte
And he had the good sense to say no, no, it's worse than.

0:42:15 - Jason Snell
It's worse than that, leo. He wanted to use siri to control it and he and he was like we need to make siri better and was sort of told no. And he was like, well, fine, then we won't use siri. So he's the apparently the biggest critic of siri within apple and they handed it to him and said, here it's your problem now.

But I, yeah, I get the sense that he's almost like what bob mansfield was for hardware back in the day, which is a fixer, someone who knows how to ship products, and they need somebody like that over there for a lot of the stuff right now because they have been struggling.

I should also say there are a lot of really good, talented people who work on software at apple and they got they got handed a bit of a, an unpleasant sandwich. I'm not going to say what's in that sandwich, but spinal tap knows when they were told you've got six months to implement a whole ai strategy out of the blue. Because that was they were, that was a, an executive decision to not go down that path, and then an oh no, go down that path fast. And like they're not built. We could argue that maybe they should be built better to do stuff like that, that they should be more nimble. But um, they were put in a really rough situation by the managers and that's why that's the question here is is there going to be a change in attitude and approach by management? Because the rank and file will will march where they lead.

0:43:27 - Leo Laporte
And I would say because we have listeners who work at Google and Microsoft it's the same everywhere. The people on the ground are often very good, but they're often not led by the best people.

0:43:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess you could say that about governments, as well, right, and the other big advantage of Apple don't? The kind of infighting that's become very public about how google runs internally and how microsoft runs internally hasn't come out in apple, which means that either a they have a better way of a better culture of saying, okay, we're going to argue until we make a decision and then we make a decision, we're all pulling together, or they're much better at intimidating people, not to talk to outside people. But Google has had a bunch of reports over the past year about how their Google Assistant group basically was upset that the Pixel group was introducing a voice assistant feature to the Pixel, and so they had to fight and Daddy had to step in and say, okay, guess what, you don't get to have that on the Pixel. And so they had to fight and Daddy had to step in and say, okay, guess what, you don't get to have that on the Pixel. You shouldn't have done that. The group should have done it.

And then they had to basically turn it to an entirely different product. That's not the sort of thing that you're who knows if that thing is happening inside Apple, but the thing is I wouldn't expect that to happen inside Apple. So I think the management structure is really, really good, but again, I still think that there's some bits of culture and dogma that could bear some adjusting.

0:44:55 - Leo Laporte
We're going to take a break. There is a lot of Apple news, including a date for WWDC. We'll get to that in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay I'm Leo Laporte

Our show today, brought to you by ZocDoc, a product I have used and can absolutely recommend.

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WWDC!

0:47:55 - Jason Snell
It'll be interesting to see how Apple responds to all of this at WWDC oh man, it's exactly when you'd expect it, which those of us in the Bay Area know. It's always the week of the last week of school, so if you're a parent, you've got your kids then. So sorry to all those Apple employees who are going to miss their kids' final recitals or whatever, because it's June 9th through the 13th and it will be so. The keynote will be on the 9th. They are going to invite you know, they're going to invite developers. I think it'll be interesting that it might be a little less worldwide this year, given the various travel to the US is difficult, but it is going to be entirely online, says Apple.

As always, right, difficult, but it is going to be entirely online, says apple. As always, right, it's, they'll invite some people to apple park. But the truth is, anybody who talks about this as if it was an in-person event in 99.9 of it is an online event. They do, uh, they do a little uh in-person thing, but it's not what the event is. It's. It's mostly for the people on the outside and it's going to be, for my money, the most interesting WWDC maybe I've ever seen, because all we know is everything we've talked about. And then there are big announcements last year about Apple intelligence. So, like, what went wrong? What did they learn? And what we don't know is are they going to lean deeper into Apple intelligence? Are they going to back off? Are they going to apologize? Are they going to do something totally different? Are they going to change their strategy to integrate more third party stuff? What do you?

0:49:19 - Leo Laporte
want to hear.

0:49:21 - Jason Snell
What I want to hear from them is I would like them to say we learned a lot in the last year. We're going to try to give more tools to you, the developers, so that you can leverage our models or other models on our devices, because our devices are great for running AI models. We're going to do more in our private cloud compute. We are going to improve the AI features that we've already introduced and ship the ones that we promised you. You know, that's kind of what I'd like to see is, I'd like to see them back off a little bit on rolling out a whole bunch of new AI features and say we're going to fulfill our promises and we're going to empower developers, because that's the thing that we talked about it at the time.

But just to remind you, like for a developer conference, they announced almost nothing that developers could actually use to build their own apps.

It was all just OS stuff and developers.

It would unlock the potential of iOS apps and Mac apps so much, especially iOS apps where there are a lot of real resource issues.

If Apple said hey, you know those image generation and textual models that we have running for our stuff on our device, you can. Now here's an API and you can now write around those with your apps and you can use the power of machine learning on our devices more easily without having to build and bundle your own model, like the more kind of extolling the virtues for developers of how having this powerful device with all of this great machine learning at their beck and call could be really powerful for them, could be really powerful for them. So I think bottom line would be an acceptance that they've learned a lot in the last year and that here is where they're headed in terms of being kind of more careful and also, I would say, integrating with partners. I think that I would like to see them say yes, gemini is also going to be integrated, and Claude is also going to be integrated, and you can choose which model you want to use, et cetera. I think that would go a long way.

0:51:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, 100%, I think. Last year, for reasons that we've discussed for the past couple of weeks, they had to lay out what they intend to do about AI. This year, for obvious reasons, I think they need to underscore how they're going to do it. That's going to be more important. Here is our plan, here is the resources that we have. As brilliantly what you said like, here's what we have learned and here's how we're not going to just continue to hammer at the same rock face we're going to look for. We're not going to. We're not going to try to walk through a wall anymore. We're going to try to find the door and then walk through that.

I hope that they make it clear that this isn't all about voice assistants, because if we don't, we don't want the iPhone to be the one machine that doesn't run Microsoft Office, for instance. Okay, if this is what people want to actually use, if people are getting into the habit of using this tool, we want to make sure that we're not artificially making it too hard for these people to use those, those, those assistants. But in addition to ai, they also we've had we've had stories from mark german about, again, the rewrite of ios and mac os. It will be cool to see if they decide to say, okay, we're going to have to show you how this os works so that you can be ready to go as soon as we release it in September. That's going to be really, really vital to see. We're going to have to see. We're going to hear a lot about the cloud and servers.

Another news item that just broke today or yesterday is that they're making a billion-dollar-a-year investment in NVIDIA and other AI hardware and other cloud hardware. So to basically make the bet that, yeah, whatever apps you choose to write that leverage Apple technologies, we're going to be able to host them. We're going to be able to run them in our secure enclaves. It's going to work just great. They have a lot to do this time and it's going to be hard to fit it all into an hour, hour and a half.

And the last thing they sure as hell have to start showing some live on stage live okay, it's not on stage anymore, but live demos in which they captioned saying that here is an alpha or a prototype code of this Apple intelligence feature actually working, as opposed to yeah, look how wonderful we are at Final Cut to make this thing actually look like it's working. They have a lot of they put it this way this is the first year in a long time that I think that Apple is entering WWDC on the back foot. They have a lot to reassure people and to show people, as opposed to showing them that yeah, we're on a great road. I'll wind up by saying I'm not sure if this will be a keynote which we hear. Our customers love this product and we're making it even better in the next iOS. It's going to be a thing, man.

0:54:29 - Alex Lindsay
I'll be interested to see whether they do much with Apple intelligence or AI or multiple models. As it relates to being directly tied into Xcode. You know, because I think that that has become such a you know a thing. You know and you know I've developed more apps on my own. I've I've managed lots of teams to build apps over the last two decades. But me sitting down on a Saturday afternoon and deciding I want to build something and having it working by that later that afternoon, and that's without the integration. That's me sitting there in cloud or in chat GBT, doing exactly what I do with teams and just defining. This is what I want you to do and this is how I want you to do it. Now I want you to move this over here and move that over there and move this over here and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and before you know it, I've got this thing working and I can go show it to someone and say you know and or play with it or have it be some service on my computer. But the point is is that I think that you know one of the things.

I had this conversation with a developer they're coming out with something new and they're writing the manual for the AI, for AI. So the manual is being the way it's being structured, is they're writing one manual for humans and one manual for machines so that you can use that manual as reference, so you can drop that into your, into your AI and and it will give it better information in the way that it expects it, so that it can write better code for what they're doing. It was then I was just like, oh, that's how that, you know. And so Apple starting to think about how they define documentation, how they, you know, work with AI, how they tie that into Xcode. You know, could, you know, greatly change If you start, when you start seeing developers start to look and think that way, you know, I think that that could be an explosion of you know, app development as well.

Now, people being able to. There's a. There are millions and millions of apps out there that are an idea in someone's head and they just don't know how to make it. You know, like they don't know how to make it and they don't know who to ask, and being able to at least throw something together that like kind of does what they want it to do. It's taking a working prototype and handing it to a that you're 80% happy with and handing it to a that you're 80 happy with and handing that to um, a developer, saying I don't expect you to use any of this code or any of these other things.

0:56:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I just this is what I wanted to do, or this is roughly what I'm trying to get it done would revolutionize, um, you know, software development that's and that's a really interesting thing I hadn't thought of before like this is, uh, the keynote itself, as we've, as we know, for years and years and years it's been to a broad audience Developers, yes, but also analysts, reporters, news people and also regular civilians. But as a developer conference, it must be interesting how they are going to tread the line between how AI is empowering developers to develop their best apps more quickly and make sure the creative stuff, make sure developers spend most of their time on the creative part of it, as as opposed to just the slog laying bricks of coding versus the other audience for AI coding, which is people like you and me and people who are not even necessarily tech people, people who want to have a conversation with a chatbot and say I want an app that can basically log events. I just need a button that starts a clock. I need three buttons one that adds to the log this kind of event, the second kind of event, the third kind of event. I want this to be saved as a spreadsheet and be able to pop out that app without doing a whole lot of coding.

Will Apple decide that we don't want Xcode to be that user-friendly, not only because it'll compete with actual live human developers, but also because it might not be a good experience for the consumers. Will they want to put that kind of stuff in shortcuts or the other consumer-grade automation tools that they do? Or are they going to go whole hog and simply say we've created our own version of Copilot? That is an expert not on programming in general, but on specifically Xcode, specifically our APIs. It is the easiest, fastest way to turn an idea into a functioning app and we are going to turn millions and millions of people, from people with good ideas for apps to people who conceivably might have successful commercial apps on the App Store. There must be a lot of conversation about where they want that butter zone to be.

0:58:54 - Alex Lindsay
MARK MIRCHANDANI, and it could be something between shortcuts and Xcode, because, like the stuff that I'm building right now in AI, I never expect to release because it's too Right me too it is, but it's kind of it's an Andy app, it's an Alex app, it's not a general app right.

It's what I used to use scripts for, right, what I used to do other things like it just it does the thing that I needed to do. It's like having your own 3d printer. You're not I'm not selling the things that I'm printing, right, I am. I need to fix some little thing or I need to put some little, I need to add something to my rig or whatever, and I can print that out, and that's kind of what I need software to do. And but the problem is is that shortcuts is too simple and xcode is oftentimes just too laborious for me to do what I'm trying to do.

So, using AI or something like it, and Apple could easily be structuring the documentation not easily, I don't want to say easy. Apple could structure the documentation for AI and then develop it either with their own AI or with some other service. Allow people to be writing code and have it tied directly into Xcode where it can see it. It does it. You're simply asking questions and having it produce that. And, again, I don't ever need to release that software. It's me gluing things together. When you see this and this sensor, I'm going to get the sensor, whatever it is, put it out there. When I see that sensor do this thing, I want you to do this thing, I want you to do this thing, I want you to do this thing. It's the same as automator or shortcuts, but it could do a lot more complex things and I don't have to figure out how that flow works.

I just which I've never found. I love nodal compositing, love nodal things I've never found. I never. I use automator. I've never found Automator or, and I love Sal. I mean, the only reason I know any part about Automator is because of Sal, but it was never. Both it and shortcuts has never worked the way my brain works, and so I fiddle with them and I build shortcuts and I build stuff with them, but it's always like oh, how do I, you know? And I just wish I had a nodal programming.

1:00:56 - Leo Laporte
You've all seen this article by tim, uh, steve iris, right, this is, I'm sorry, brian iris. Uh, he's a software developer, works at stripe. He, um, he worked on the tumblr ios app and so forth. Tim, don't kill my vibe. What he's talking about is is this so-called vibe? Uh, I'm coding, coding which?

I'm a little skeptical of, but the idea is, instead of writing code, you write a prompt, you give the ai the vibe of what you're going to write and then it'll write it for you. But yeah, his point, which I think is good, it's great is that, despite the fact uh, you know, whatever you think about vibe coding, apple just has not developed the tools, aside from this one xcode plug-in, like cursor or replit or v0, to do this. And this is what people want, and you know you're going to lose a generation of developers. That's, yes, right, and it's.

1:01:48 - Jason Snell
It's. It's more than that too. It's also that these things, these walls that apple has erected, that they did in the days of the early days of the app store and when it was not, when they weren't walls I mean honestly, when those walls were just assumed.

It's like, well, you need x code and then you're going to need to submit, we've come up with a process and all of that, and in in that era, those things were not insurmountable barriers right, but this is and this is a, I think, a great point, which is, when you go by the old rules and you just assume they're fine, you miss changes like this, which is what what his blog post said to me was a lot of young developers view this development as like quick iteration and they're using, you know, cgi or cgi? Yeah, they are. It's all a c. Don't believe it. It's all green screen.

No, they're using LLMs, they're using other AI co-completion tech to build software really rapidly and then turn it around and they want to run it and see how it runs. And a lot of those normal classic systems that Apple built that were not meant to be an impediment to the next generation but, since they haven't really been revised, are now an enormous impediment to the next generation. And his point is kind of like Apple needs to see the writing on the wall here and they don't need to tear all the walls down, but they need to find a pathway so that this generation of people who want to build things doesn't feel like they just can't build them on apple platforms.

1:03:13 - Leo Laporte
And I think it's a great point. Here's the x post from uh theo of uh, some weird chat platform, but but a legit post, he says. I legit think apple's risking it all now. Creating apps has never been easier. Releasing the app is harder than making it. If they don't reduce the friction, they will lose yeah, it's really interesting.

1:03:34 - Jason Snell
I mean, we could talk about App Store policy and like do you want to get approval, and all of that. But this is like it's just very hard to go through layers and layers of what is now essentially Apple bureaucracy. And if you are somebody who is a veteran developer, you know about the code signing and where you need to go in Xcode and all of that. But there's another generation of people who are like, if you're going to make me do that, I'm just not going to bother. And so how do you reach them and how do you change your approach in order to make it less friction? And again, I've also heard that it's not just about getting it in the app store, it's like getting it on devices to play with. That is even complicated.

1:04:14 - Leo Laporte
I recently built a small iOS app for myself. I can install it on my iPhone directly from Xcode, but it expires after seven days because I'm using a free Apple developer account. I'm not trying to avoid paying Apple, but there's enough friction involved in switching to a paid account. I simply haven't been bothered and I used to wrangle provisioning profiles for a living. I can't imagine that I'm alone here, that others with less tribal iOS development knowledge remember he wrote the Tumblr app for iOS are going to have a higher tolerance for this. A friend asked me to send the app to them, but that would involve creating a test flight group, submitting a build to Apple, waiting for them to approve it and so on. Compare this to simply pushing a Cloudflare or Netlify and automatically having a URL you could send to a friend to share via Twitter or using codes like V0 or Replit, where hosting distribution are already baked in. There is a new world of development. It's very different from the old way of Apple development.

1:05:07 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and if you don't know the right incantations, it can be extremely difficult to get into this. And also, let's be clear, there are also a lot of people out there who don't have Macs, who want to develop for Apple's platforms for the iPhone. And the only way you can't I mean basically you can't. And I would say I talked a while ago to a developer of an extremely popular Chrome extension, when Apple did their big thing where they said we're going to support this new standard for extensions, browser extensions that will make it much easier for people to bring Chrome and Firefox extensions to Safari.

And I talked to this developer and I said what do you think? And he said well, running in Safari would be really great, but to do this, it's not just a matter of making my code compliant with this API, which is fine. He said I have to buy a Mac, I have to get a developer account, I have to learn how to submit a browser extension using Apple systems, and he said it's not worth it to me. I'm doing this on my own time, for fun, and I'm not going to invest all of that. And you know what? Safari is poorer because that developer and a lot of people like him, aren't going to be bothered for a browser extension, and it's a really good example that what seemed like traditional developers would say are not barriers have become barriers.

1:06:23 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think that what's interesting is that the coding part was 90% of the work, and then there was all this other weird stuff that you had to do. Now the coding part suddenly got squished into a small amount and the other ones look really big because they were really small before, because you were spending all this time coding. You know writing this code, but again I'll sit down and write hunt, you know the last one. I built thousands of lines of code, uh, to do something, um, that I didn't realize I had built so so much um and uh, and I did it in like two or three hours that that would have taken me a month to write, you know, like you know, and um to figure out, and, and. So that's been compressed.

And now you're right. What I've learned a lot more about, because I didn't have to do it by myself before, was all the signing and all the other bits and pieces, because it was always someone else developing it, because I couldn't do the code part, so I didn't get to the signing part, and so so I think that that is um, I do think that it's a little bit of an impediment, but I will say I know more about app development than I did before because I was the, the coding part was taking so long I wasn't really bothering with the other the other parts and so and I was always just hiring a team to do it, and so I give credit to frederico vitticci, who brought this article to my attention at max stories.

1:07:32 - Leo Laporte
Uh, he says um that it reminds him a little bit of the early days of blogging. If you wanted to do a blog 30 years ago, you had to know a little bit about hosting, and I know, because I've done it in HTML. Then Blogger came along and allowed anyone, regardless of their skill level, to be read. What if the same happened to mobile software? Should Apple and Google be ready for this possibility within the next few years? Apple never will, because of security right. They're going to say no, no, we don't want to make this too easy.

1:08:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, also, the quality of apps that are created by people who only know how to use coding assistance is not going to be as good as what can be created by people who use it as an assistant and not as a replacement for a developer, and this is why I think that if Apple were to create its own bespoke AI for coding for coding Mac apps that would be really really very interesting.

1:08:24 - Alex Lindsay
I think the interesting puzzle is that we see that story, what you just said. We see that happen over and over and over again, which is when I started learning Photoshop, I was getting paid $3.75 an hour and I was competing with guys that had Scitex and they went to school and they had an apprenticeship and everything else, and I was some kid who worked in promotions, right. And so the thing is that and I made horrible mistakes I once printed a square of black because I didn't understand what dot gain was in a newspaper in New Mexico, because I just didn't know what dot gain was. Um, you know, newspaper in New Mexico, you know, because I just didn't know what I was doing. And and the thing is, is that but?

And then we had that era of Ray gun and we have all this. Like, ray gun wasn't for those of you that aren't old enough to remember Ray gun, it was a magazine that looked really cool, that you couldn't read, but it was, but you could buy it at Barnes and Noble, you know. So the thing is is we went through that and when you look at YouTube, a lot of us that do production, we're like, wow, it's a bunch of kids who don't know what they're doing and there's all this bad, bad content. But what comes on the other end of all that holds that that does better work. To be honest, I mean, I still think that most of the guys that I work with do cleaner and better video work than the YouTubers that that I work with. You know we understand the pixels and the things and everything else, but I'll I watch what Justine Ezrick does with her iPhone and it's very adventurous and tells a great story and gets past whatever that was.

And then, of course, what happens is they build all this up and then you end up in this whole other place where they're now bigger cameras and better quality and more interesting than what we had in the old days of broadcast. I mean, I feel like I mean we were talking about streaming before the. What you mentioned, Andy, that, that, Andy, that and I think we've all mentioned at some point is that you know like I would say, 80% of my viewing right now is YouTube. You know like 80% of what I watch every day is on YouTube. It's not on traditional broadcast or even the streamers I'm watching because there's this incredibly rich and then, in addition to that incredibly rich content, there is this ecosystem.

1:10:35 - Andy Ihnatko
If you look at what DGI and all these other folks are who are listening to the show, understand that there is nothing more powerful than when your reaction to having done something for the first time is wow, that was terrible, I can't wait to do it again. That means that it really has triggered you into. I don't care how long it's going to take me to learn how to do this. I'm engaged. I'm involved in this. You clearly heard me play the piano, but what I'm getting at is that one of the reasons why YouTube has become such a great incubator for great storytellers is because there's no barrier to entry. Basically, you can put it up because you decided you wanted to put this, this up, and as you keep going and going and going and get getting better and better and better, that becomes evident. People don't have to see the first terrible 100 videos you put in there. You're learning along the way and you're so excited that you really, really want to keep doing this and learning more and trying to get better. Now imagine if there were like an app store sort of interface to that, where first I can't just simply click a button and it transcodes and it's available. I have to submit it and there's a bureaucracy for having done so and I have to make sure it's in the certain. Certain incantations have been done and then a panel has to decide whether it is worthy of inclusion. Is it unique? Does it? Is it a high quality thing, or am I going to reject it? I'm not going to try to submit a second or a third video that way, and this is something that I think is going to affect app development, when there's a difference between the ability to simply say, yes, there's an app store, but there's also a sideloader. First of all, on the Playdate, my favorite gaming platform, if you want to go through the Panic Playdate store, you can do so, or you can just sell it directly as a sideloadable app and the sideloading is very, very easy to do.

Imagine that a game platform where every single thing has to be vetted and has to be discussed and has to be gone through. Here's the 10-point quality plan that has to go through. That's how you make it. You have to tap into people who are very, very self-motivated to try to make your platform awesome, just because they think it's awesome and they want to keep nurturing it. So when we get, what I'm getting at is that a lot of these co-pilot systems are going to give people that ability to create great Python, to create great individual apps. But if there, but if they hit a brick wall of letting other people see those apps because it has to go through an app store versus well, or I can just simply have asked the AI can you convert this to a Rust app and I'll just post it as a web app? That is going to affect the quality of apps that are available both to the Apple store and to the Google store.

1:13:33 - Leo Laporte
It is the way of technology isn't, isn't it? I mean, you could say youtube is to video, what blogger was to the written word, and next, uh, is coding vibe coding, if you will. Um, I'm very interested in what. What's going to happen? I don't think apple's well positioned in this at all. I think they could be, though.

1:13:51 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I think that there's maybe with web apps.

1:13:53 - Leo Laporte
You know, maybe that's what Apple's thinking as well we're going to support web apps.

1:13:56 - Alex Lindsay
Right, I mean, I still think that it's. I mean, I it, it is uh. For me to publish something that someone else could use on my phone meant I had to spend an extra three hours sitting there with chat GPT asking questions about okay, how do I do this? It was three hours and I was. It was a little frustrating, but once I was done I was like, okay, I know how to do it now. I now have that in my quiver of I know how to do that and it wasn't that big of a deal. I guess I would say that that the um.

I do think that the web is available for us right now to do things that if you want to do them and they don't require the performance of a, the big thing is, do they require a performance of the phone or not? Like, you can build a lot of things that just work on the web. I mean, I build a lot of things that are just really good web experiences, but as soon as I want them to use audio and video or 3D and be performant, then I immediately go well, I have to build something to the hardware. Go, well, I have to build something to the hardware. And I think that, again, thinking about talking to this developer, about developing manuals for the AI, I think Apple really going down this path of we're going to build a whole bunch of documentation for everything that we do that's designed so that AI can use Xcode more effectively, I think would be a huge jump. That being able to and having a package that you can download as a developer and just load it into cloud and just go. We're going to give you this thing, that's all done. Then you can just load it into something, whether it's our own stuff or whatever, and then we're going to help you code those things out.

I think that would be at W this year WWC that's not doesn't cook the whole Turkey, but at this WWC it would be a lot. That would be a huge explosion of of giving people an opportunity to, um, you know, be, uh, uh, be part of that. You know like to, to be part of developing things. And again, I, I I'm mostly just working on ideas, or clumping something together to fix something else, to to make it, to make it work, or experimenting with an idea before I talked to the programmer about it, or experimenting with an idea before I talk to the programmer about it. So before I ask a programmer to spend three weeks working on something, I'll sit there and play with the idea and go well, does that actually work and does that interface? Because what I don't want to do is ask for something and then have them code out a bunch of stuff that's stable and powerful and then go ah, it's not really what I want.

1:16:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, the two most important things that I've coded, despite going to school for computer science, were just audiences of one. Before WordPress, I wrote my own CMS and it was basically every feature I wanted I put into it, and every time the technology changes I change the code to make it work. By the time WordPress came along, it was really very sophisticated. Also, an app for a friend of mine who, after surgery, lost his voice and wanted a bespoke app for his own personal needs, to be able to still speak to friends but also to give public appearances. And I think there's a lot of people who are in that sort of situation where I don't necessarily want to be a professional developer, but there's this one app that I can't find, the. I can't find something that does this. There should be something that does this. I want there to be something that does this and I'm willing to create this just for myself.

1:17:03 - Leo Laporte
You're very humble, Andy. You're very humble If you're. If the one audience of one for your app is Roger Ebert, that's pretty damn cool. Oh yeah, I didn't know you did that. That's really awesome.

1:17:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, he was, yeah, it was, it was. Yeah, it was. It was a way to help out. And also, he was he. He was such a great tech guy that, like he could always explain. Well, I really want to. Could you do a shortcut button for this? And I also want to be able to listen. And so it was great, like every, every day, like in addition to our regular emails, it would be, and I'd be able to post back to him okay, here's a new, here's an alpha.1.44 one or whatever.

1:17:37 - Leo Laporte
Uh, and so that was fun but, like I said I ever came was was writing a dial-a song, uh, where they might be giants, but that's you know, that's pretty good.

1:17:46 - Jason Snell
You beat that one, that's good you beat that one.

1:17:50 - Leo Laporte
Um, if you code old school, you look at this, I do a scans and go that's not coding.

1:17:56 - Alex Lindsay
But um, it's just tight again, if you're a scitex operator, you looked at photoshop and said yeah, exactly, exactly, and if you were a video producer when youtube came out and you would look at that and go. That's not like, that's disgusting and each one of the podcasting is not radio, you know like you know so. So all these things are the. To me, it just feels like it's the it's same thing.

1:18:16 - Leo Laporte
We're going to have on. Of course, it's one of the things we cover at Intelligent Machines our new show on Wednesdays replacing this week in Google Well, it is this week in Google, but we just changed the name. But we do a lot more AI. One of our guests coming up in the next couple of weeks is Harper Reed. You may know who's a coder who wrote a very, I thought, a fascinating blog post about how he does partner coding with AI, and I think that's I'm not. I'm fan of the idea of oh, I don't know anything about code, I'm just going to write a prompt and let the AI code it. I think that that, at least for now, is not ideal. But partner coding, a lot of people are doing and that's what Cursor AI does, does, and I think that's probably, you know, something apple has got to support. You've used the xcode ai plug-in, right, Alex? Is it?

1:19:03 - Alex Lindsay
I haven't actually, no, I just, I just do it straight out of either clot or check, is it?

1:19:07 - Leo Laporte
just auto complete. I mean, we've had a telesense for ages and ages. Emacs does it for crying out loud. I'd be very curious what Apple has planned for.

1:19:17 - Alex Lindsay
AI and coding, but I think that's the thing. But making that a lot easier just opens up the door. Because, again, I think that I think you, I think as a if you're actually developing software that you want to release to the app store, you're going to hit a wall at about 80% of the development, 90% of the development that, hey, if you really want this to work and not get a bunch of one stars, you're going to need to really understand the code or you're going to need to hire someone to understand the code.

1:19:38 - Leo Laporte
that's the problem, if you do vibe coding, is you don't know where the bugs are. You don't you know, you can't, you can't fix it.

1:19:44 - Jason Snell
As amazing as AI is for coding it, you hit walls, there are asking and it just keeps rearranging those deck chairs again, but it doesn't actually solve the problem because you've you've reached the end and sometimes you have to go back and revert, or sometimes you start again and I, I love it. I've used it for all sorts of things, but like it is not a one and done, your problem is solved. There's a, there's work you have to put in to get it to work.

1:20:11 - Leo Laporte
Right change over the years.

1:20:13 - Alex Lindsay
But again, it's also an iterative process. I mean the way I do it anyway All coding is iterative right I ask it to do something very simple.

I know where I want to get to, but I don't write a prompt that gets me there. I write I need you to do this Now. I need you to add this button Now. I need you to add this Now, I need you to add this. And I go and I build it all up.

Now, again, there are a hundred dead ends that I would have plowed a coder into the ground with, of like, oh, that button doesn't work there, or this isn't working, or I needed to do this quite. And I can go, do all of that really, really fast, so that when I hand it to somebody, I'm like this is 80% of what I would like. This is what's missing, this is what's broken. That is 10 times faster for an advanced coder to just look at what I did. They don't have to look at any of the code, they don't have to look at anything, they just look at the result of it. It's like a very advanced Figma. In fact, what I'd love to do is be able to take Figma and just import it into AI, spit something out. That was close.

Again, I still think that you need someone to come in and clean it up and may not clean it up, maybe rewrite it from scratch, but, man, the amount of meetings that I have, you know, to build a piece of software to try to explain what I wanted, when I could just sit down for a Saturday afternoon and build what I wanted and then be able to say, okay, this is what it should look like or this is how I want it to feel, and these are all the things that are missing. I mean, it's just night and day on how long it will take an advanced coder. The real danger is, is the intermediate coder? Like, where do they fit in? You have the beginners who can just vibe their way towards something that's there. You have the advanced people who can write, you know, bulletproof code, but how do you get to become an advanced coder if you don't do that intermediate?

1:21:49 - Leo Laporte
well, that was the question broadcasters asked when we saw all these youtubers uh, pop it up, it's like.

1:21:54 - Alex Lindsay
Well, they're never gonna learn the real thing and they never did like what's funny is that they never did, I mean they've gotten a lot better and in some ways they've done a lot of things that I think they've invented a new language. It's different and and it's you know, for instance uh my son used to.

1:22:09 - Leo Laporte
He took broadcast journalism at cu boulder. That was his, and he used to mock these old teachers who were teaching him AB cutting. He said I'm never going to do that.

1:22:21 - Alex Lindsay
And like they, you know, the thing is is that there's like a culture on YouTube of you know, in this show, all of us are sitting in front of microphones talking into the mics. You don't see that on broadcast television. And let's, let's face it, labs stink, they're just horrible devices that that we, that we use because we don't want to look bad, or whatever. But the culture has become. I'm going to show you the mic, I'm going to put the mic where it needs to be, to be the best, highest quality, and that's an entirely different paradigm than what we had, you know, in broadcast. That was holding back quality, if anything. Yeah.

1:22:52 - Andy Ihnatko
It's always the. You don't see this quite as much as you used to, but you could always tell the difference between someone who just came to YouTube from television or movies or because they heard that YouTube is a great place to do video, but you don't need a network, you don't need a broadcaster, and the people who came to it naturally, who basically learned how to create YouTube videos. You would see these shows, Alex. I'm sure you can come up with lots of examples. I'm thinking of one specifically, whom I won't name, but it's like wow, you built an entire set that you don't need and you created all of these host and guest segments that get in the way and you over-scripted everything that makes it seem stilted in this little window, versus all you needed to do was clean your office or your living room and talk into the camera and know how to tell a story.

And this is why old people are terrified of young people, because, like, learning YouTube is oh, I'm going to add this to my bag of tricks and basically you can't start from scratch and understand what makes it. You can't natively understand what makes this unique and why it's great. Like Photoshop is something that, oh, I've been in, I've been doing photography, I'm doing image pre-press and whatever for years and years and years. Now I suppose I'll add this to my bag of tricks. As opposed to someone who grew up, the first time they edited photos was in Photoshop, and they're 14 years old they're using a pirated copy and as soon as they come home from school, every single day, all they want to do is spend six hours learning more Photoshop, Whereas you took a weekend seminar and still don't think it's very good.

This is why you're going to get your butt handed to you by that 14 or 15 year old kid.

1:24:39 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and you know, it's never been easier for all of these tools. I mean, my son is learning Resolve right now and I actually don't know how to do something. There's something in After Effects that I do that for time lapse that I don't know anybody else I don't know if I'm the only one that does it, but I add motion blur back from video and there's this whole process to it and it's a little tricky to do it, like it's not something that would be obvious, but it's using plugins from like when After Effects was COSA Sure, you know, and no one else uses that plugin. So I show my son how to do it, I show him how to build the source document in motion and then how to bring it into into After Effects and then everything else, and and that took me a long time to figure out and within um three hours he was doing it better than I was Like he was just.

He was like it was just.

It was like one of those like when you wake up, like when you're not caught up in all the other stuff that you have to do.

He just sat there and played with it and and and I realized that that fluidness of not knowing what it can and can't do, because I had a bunch of rules about how you'd have to do that mathematically to make that work, and he didn't have that limitation and and, and I came in and I looked at it and I was like I don't even understand how you did that and and but.

But I think that that's what opens up when we are vibe coding is people who have ideas who are going to just start, and the same thing we saw with blogging, the same thing we saw with podcasting things and we saw our Photoshop people with ideas.

There's so many ideas out there that aren't being brought to the world because of the infrastructure, and so I think that that we're going to see a lot, a lot more of that. And I think that you know, and I think that Apple needs to pay attention to WWDC we have to see something about how AI is going to make it easier for us to publish, you know, or at least even build stuff for our house, like a CG or a coding version of a 3D printer. I just need to be able to publish stuff for me and my friends easily and I need to be able to just vibe my way to where that is so that it just does the little funky thing that I'm trying to do with my home system, know, and that's, I think that will have to show that they're going to do that.

1:26:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, we're going to take a little break. Uh, we have gotten to two stories so far and I think we should probably do about 80 more. So a speed round coming up. You're watching mac break or listening. You know you can do that too. MacBreak Weekly with Andy and nako. I h n a t kocom coming soon. Bless you, sir. You don't have to write your own CMS every time, do you no? But you do have to pick one. Yeah, it's not easy, is it? Yeah, I know.

1:27:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I realized I'd have. I can stop fighting with WordPress, which was not working. So, oh, wait a minute, I can leave WordPress forever, Like oh.

1:27:17 - Leo Laporte
I am such a fan I know I've plugged it before of microblog, uh, and it's just doing exactly what I want cross posts to all the socials. It does short posts.

1:27:26 - Andy Ihnatko
It does long posts where this is kind of loose, I'm sorry. Well, I'll be quick about this, but this loops back to what Alex was saying earlier. Like all, if wordpress did what I wanted it to do 15 years ago, I'd still be using wordpress. I want something that will let me run a blog with a couple of features on it.

1:27:43 - Leo Laporte
I don't want a complete, like web publishing and web app development yeah, well, I don't know, I shouldn't give you any more ideas I've already, I've already, I've already picked up from this hallelujah um, also uh Alex Lindsay, here office hours dot global, where they are constantly uh chewing over these exact issues today is our fifth anniversary.

1:28:06 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, happy birthday. That's fantastic. We're gonna have a little special one at six o'clock tonight, where we talk about a little bit, but this is we have not missed a single day since March 25th 2020.

1:28:18 - Leo Laporte
So no that's remarkable Sundays no, so this was your COVID project that just never ended.

1:28:22 - Alex Lindsay
It just never ended. Well, once you've done it like you do it, you started in COVID and you're like well, this will end when COVID ends. But once you've done it straight for a year and a half, can't break it now.

1:28:35 - Leo Laporte
Well, congratulations, happy birthday, that's amazing Five years.

1:28:38 - Alex Lindsay
Every single day. Every single day Not me every single day, most days but somebody's been there, a group of people have been there every day.

1:28:46 - Leo Laporte
And Jason Snell SixColorscom. When did you make this switch to doing your own thing?

1:28:52 - Jason Snell
How long ago was that I was doing my own thing? Uh, it was a little more than 10 years ago. It was 10 years ago last fall, nice, and uh, and a good thing, right, it's, it's all good. I, we didn't know at the time and I it's. It hasn't gone exactly the way I expected because, you know, podcasts really grew beyond what I expected to be part of my job. But, um, and I wouldn't give up writing, even though I the more I write these long articles and then nobody says anything. And then I'm on a podcast and I talk about them, and then suddenly I get all this feedback and I realize, oh yeah, people are listening more than the reading, but it's part of my, it's all part of. Some people read, some people listen.

1:29:29 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to do it. I'll content to both Exactly.

1:29:37 - Jason Snell
It's the Snell. Trans content to both, exactly right now. Transmedia empire, my friends, as long as, as long as I can, you know pay my mortgage. I'm I'm happy with it so, yeah, it's been great, and I'm also much less stressed out than I was when I worked at a corporate job yeah, I, I honestly.

1:29:48 - Leo Laporte
I know it's courageous, uh, it's risky, but the more people I see doing this now it's, I think, a little bit less courageous because you see so many people succeeding. Jessica lesson just got featured in the New York times for starting the information 10 years ago and having the boldness and now she's done so well. She's investing in other startup blogs to help other journalists have a voice that they own of their own, and I think that, uh, we're living in in interesting times.

1:30:19 - Jason Snell
Yes, for sure and sometimes that's not a bad thing exactly not all bad yeah sometimes that's not a euphemism you talked about blogger earlier like I had to build my own site myself and build it with a membership plan myself and figure out all that stuff. And today all that stuff is like out there, various products will let you do it and you plug into it, and I know that Andy is working on one in particular and like it's, it's good. It's really good Cause I have helped over the last 10 years a bunch of non-technical people to you know, steer them toward a place where they can make money uh, making content, cause that's what they're good at. They're not good at the computer stuff and it's great that you can do that. You know there are lots of people who do that now. It's awesome.

1:31:04 - Leo Laporte
We're in a content explosion right now because it is something everybody can have a voice and everybody should. It's your opportunity. Um, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. We're glad you're here and we also encourage you if you want to watch live, because then I can see your wonderful chatting. A lot of people in the Club Twit Discord watching us live, including Patrick Delahanty, who has posted a lovely meme just for you. Alex 2020, it was five years ago.

The Discord is part of the many benefits that you get as a member of club to it. I guess the chief benefit, some would say, is the ad-free versions of our shows, certainly the access to a great group of interesting, smart people talking about everything under the sun, not just our shows. You also get, uh special events that we put on in the club. We've got stacy's book club. Uh, micah just did his crafting corner, friday, march 28th. Our ai user group uh, that's a lot of fun. Uh, anthony nielsen, one of our uh guys, did that and uh, it's where people are getting together showing how they're using ai, whether it's vibe coding or or something else. We've scheduled a new photo. Uh time with chris marquart. The word of the week of the month is brilliant. Take your brilliant photos. Then join us april 3rd at 1 pm. Uh, and I guess now we should say we will stream the apple wwdc live. Uh, coming in june june 9th, that's a monday. Oh yeah, we've also scheduled a coffee time with mark prince on april 18th.

So these are just little fun club get-togethers. Uh, not full shows, just just a lot of fun. Uh, one of the many things we like to do. Uh, the club makes it possible and it's just seven dollars a month we're really trying hard to keep this affordable makes a big difference to our bottom line covers. That you know five to ten percent. That advertising doesn't allows us to not lay off people and cancel shows, allows us to grow and do more interesting things. Uh, and it really is also a little vote of confidence that everybody here takes to heart. So if you'd like to help twittv slash club, twit twin, we would love to have you in the club. All right, I think we're gonna have to do a speed round. Uh, apple classical gets three new features. I think the most interesting one is this discovery uh feature. Where you're, there are channels of discovery music and then there's text associated with it. Have you played with this yet, Andy?

1:33:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I know you're an apple classical fan uh, yeah, actually, I've resubscribed a few weeks ago just to test out some new features. It's pretty good. Uh, I, I might keep this subscription for for a little while. Uh, classical music is its own sort of monster in that you really do, you really do need to, you really do benefit from I've I enjoyed this piece of hondel and now, because I enjoyed hondel, it's going to lead me more to baroque composers and because I'm into broke composers, it'll lead me to performers like joyce de donato, who are really good at the baroque. So stuff like this is a really, really big add-on.

They've also added something that is shows you why we need a specific bespoke classical app. On every other music app you can see. Oh, you want to know about the Love and Spoonful? Well, here's some paragraphs about the history of the Love and Spoonful, and that's fine. But on classical, you want to learn about Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and you need to have notes that keep rolling as the music is rolling to tell you okay, now listen, for this. We're going to see a recap of this particular motif. So, yeah, they're putting a lot more money into this and they're adding a lot more features to it. I like it a lot.

1:34:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the listening guide is. I haven't been able to get it to work, but you get a playlist. In this case this is classical music essentials and then, as you're playing the the music, I guess you're going to get synced to the music textual information, so, which is nice because it doesn't interfere with the music you get to. You know, listen to it unadulterated, nobody's talking, but you can read notes, and a lot of us like to do that. If, jeffrey you probably all, you are probably too young to remember buying an album rushing home lying on the floor putting your costs 440a 18 pound headphones, putting your feet in the air and reading the album notes while you listened um.

Now you can do that I can still.

1:35:28 - Alex Lindsay
I can still picture sitting in my bed listening to dream blue turtles, yeah, and staying going through, yeah, going through the going through the uh, the liner notes while I was listening to it but first they have very complete pamphlets now on apple music classical, which is really a great thing, I think yeah, you don't understand an opera until you get to read the story.

1:35:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Really, yeah, yeah I agree.

1:35:49 - Leo Laporte
I agree, uh, construction has finally begun on the apple tv la studios in culver city. I hope that's not what the building looks like. That is just like every other building in Culver city. I hope that's not what the building looks like. That is just like every other building in Culver city. That's ridiculous.

1:36:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh well, it is kind of rooftop garden, okay, okay, and because it's an Apple building, there is like a lovely place in the middle of it that nobody can get to because it's a wall Okay. It's still a walled garden, so definitely an Apple vibe, vibe they bought the land in october of 2021.

1:36:22 - Leo Laporte
Um and uh, it's took them till 2023 to get planning permission and now they finally broken ground on the site at 888 venice boulevard. I'm not sure what is this gonna. Are they studios for youtubers? I don't know what they're doing with it, I guess no, I think it's for their own production. You have a big operation there.

1:36:42 - Alex Lindsay
Um well, they shoot stuff there.

1:36:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:36:45 - Alex Lindsay
No, that's cool.

1:36:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, two new production studios Okay.

1:36:49 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think that that it is, um, I mean oftentimes your talent. They prefer you to be somewhere near them, they don't have to go somewhere else. But also, you know, if you're trying to keep things secret, it's way easier to control your own destiny there. And also, if you're booking other things, you don't have as much control over it. You don't have access to it. Someone else booked it out. I mean, although right now it's an odd time to build studios in LA, because you know, everybody that I've talked to is like 80 of those, 80 of the stages are empty. We're moving to vancouver, baby. Well, no, it's just. It's just, they're just not. Yeah, they're not, they're not necessarily.

1:37:26 - Leo Laporte
I doubt they're actually doing much in vancouver. Is there a tariff on television?

1:37:30 - Jason Snell
production it's, I mean it's it's offices in production space. So I don't think it's like it's a not a universal studio, it's not a campus.

1:37:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly, um. Mac os 15.4 on the way to, uh, what will probably be a big update in the fall. Four new features coming redesign for apple mail and upgrades we've seen this in the beta. I think we've even talked about it already A verification code timer and Apple passwords. I think it's nice that you get the verification codes. It makes it very easy to paste them in and then it deletes them, which is even better, so you don't fill up your text messages with those. Easy device setup with Quick Start. You've seen this on the iPhone and the iPad. It's now coming to the Macintosh. You can scan that little puff cloud and automatically transfer settings over. Uh, you know these are minor, right. And new languages for Apple intelligence. Apple intelligence wouldn't speak French, german, italian, portuguese, spanish, japanese, korean and Chinese Italian, portuguese, spanish, japanese, korean and Chinese. And that's 15.4 coming soon.

1:38:48 - Jason Snell
Actually, weren't they finalizing the betas for iOS 18.4 as well? Yeah, I think the release candidates just came out today.

So, we'll probably be seeing these maybe released to the public next week. Of course, this was the cycle that was supposed to bring all those AI features that they kicked into the future. So instead, I mean, it makes it easier to release it now because they don't have those features in there to worry about. So, yeah, it looks like and this will probably be the last major update and it's not even that major before the cycle ends there. There will probably be one more late in, maybe may, right before wwc. But you know the the the work is being driven toward the next os wave now instead of to maintaining this one and tell me this I didn't fall for an early april fool's joke.

1:39:36 - Leo Laporte
Apple has updated the homepod mini with a box yeah, I was reading that.

1:39:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Wow, I hope we get to dig under the significance of yeah they just snuck it out.

1:39:49 - Leo Laporte
They, I don't even with their press release, can't innovate, my ass. Yeah, look at that.

1:39:54 - Jason Snell
And now there's a new box my guess is that this has something to do with the packaging and the sourcing of the packaging as they try to get carbon neutral. That's my guess Is that. This is why would you do this otherwise? But if there's a reason that they're going, either they have a change in suppliers or they're trying to get more plastic out of their packaging to do something like this. It's a pretty box.

1:40:14 - Leo Laporte
That's my guess. No more white box the box. Pretty box, that's my guess.

1:40:20 - Jason Snell
No more white box, the box will match the color of your home pod. I have to confess, I misread this.

1:40:22 - Leo Laporte
I thought they were going to release a box home pod, but I guess that was my mistake.

1:40:27 - Jason Snell
It's just a new packaging so that, yeah, I think, I think actually the colored boxes are no more oh, those are. The old boxes are white boxes with the big colored home pod on the front so you can see what color it is. You can see how I've been paying attention. Doesn't really matter, no this might matter.

1:40:46 - Leo Laporte
Uh, two nanometer in all the iphone 18 models. This is uh ming chi kuo's scoop. Um, the current iphone 16 uses a 3 nanometer node, but Ming-Chi Kuo says, reiterating my prediction from six months ago, the 2H26, second half of 26 new phones, iphone 18. Oh, that's not next year, that's a year from now. Yes, that's not this year. We'll be powered by 2 nanometer chips. A littler is better, right?

1:41:21 - Alex Lindsay
I love when they just say well, well, the success rate is 60 to 70 percent. That means that 30 to 40 percent fail. Yeah, that's an incredible. I mean when people apple used to have a deal with tsmc that they would eat the rejects.

1:41:33 - Jason Snell
I don't know if that deal still holds I think that was for the first generation three nanometer process, which they all want to get off of.

1:41:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, that is but yeah, do we know anything about the two nanometer node? Is it a big deal or is it just? One one silly nanometer smaller. What's the?

1:41:51 - Jason Snell
you know it's the usual like faster and more power, efficient but, on their, on their new node, but it's just gonna be on the pro chip, I think, is the idea there.

1:42:03 - Leo Laporte
I don't know it's, it's a he says all eight iphone, 18 models all iphone 18 models so, but that would be a year and a half away.

1:42:12 - Jason Snell
This is the a20 um would be on that first generation two nanometer process. Yeah, so it's. I mean it's, the wheel keeps on turning at tsmc wheel in the tsmc keeps on turning.

1:42:24 - Leo Laporte
This is one of the most sophisticated phishing attacks ever made against mac users. The funny thing is they've moved to macintosh because windows has locked it down. Uh, for the past few months, layerx has been monitoring a sophisticated phishing campaign, initially targeting Windows users by masquerading as Microsoft security alerts You've probably seen those, your family members have. The campaign's goal to steal user credentials by employing deceptive tactics that made victims believe their computers were compromised. And they used a little trick in the browser that froze the browser, which kind of added to the credibility of it. However, new security features rolled out by all the browser makers Microsoft, google Chrome and Firefox have blocked this attack, so they've shipped their focus to Safari and Mac users. It freezes the web page and and pops of a thing. I guess it doesn't say Microsoft anymore.

I must say this is Apple security. You got a problem. Don't fall for it, okay. Um, you know, I don't know how what the fix is. Is it forced? Quit the browser, probably, but don't, don't fall for it, it's, it's a phishing attack. Apple is not coming into your home suggesting a fix. Um, netflix is going to start. I don't know if this is meaningful, but, Alex, you're going to explain it to me. Streaming shows at hdr 10 plus if your device supports it.

1:44:00 - Alex Lindsay
And Dolby Vision. Yeah so, yeah. So the only, I think the only two services that were really I believe that we're doing this was Disney and Apple, but the so being able to do a higher, being able to do Apple HDR. Netflix hasn't been doing HDR, so it has been a standard.

1:44:18 - Leo Laporte
They haven't done it at all. Well, they didn't even do.

1:44:20 - Alex Lindsay
HDR10? I don't think so. I think that was. You know it's bigger, it takes more work. Yeah, netflix tends to not spend money on I'm assuming this is just for their 4K.

Yeah, you got to be on the $25 a month plan to even get HDR support. Yeah, because it's more expensive to deliver and Netflix tends to be very conscious to that because of how many subscribers they have, so they don't get paid more for you to be on there, so you have to pay for the higher group there. But it's going to look a lot nicer. It depends on how many bits they throw at it.

Netflix has been traditionally very stingy about how many bits they use for um, you know, for delivery, and so, as a result, the quality of the video is not usually as high as Apple or Disney. Um, it's not. It's about kind of the same with everybody else, cause everyone's kind of stingy about it. That um outside of that group, um, but the uh uh prime has gotten better over time as well, but, uh, so it depends on what the bit rate is that that they're using to do those streams. But if they follow the quality of that HDR10 and Dolby Vision with enough bits to show it, it will look a lot nicer on a TV that can handle it, and almost every TV that ships right now can do HDR10, hdr10 Plus or Dolby Vision.

1:45:42 - Leo Laporte
That's pretty much table stakes for anything over about $500 at this point. So so it's nice. It is nice, yeah, apple. Are you disappointed to hear that apple uh is having trouble with its plastic apple?

1:45:49 - Alex Lindsay
watch. Se I can't imagine, why?

1:45:54 - Leo Laporte
according to mark german, there are issues with both the look and the cost, so the team had run into some cost and quality challenges. He says this in his Power On newsletter. Gurman says the plastic Apple Watch SE is now in serious jeopardy.

1:46:11 - Jason Snell
Well, isn't this how it's supposed to work? They're like well, can we make a plastic watch that would look okay and be cheaper and save some money and make that our low-end watch. And they did the work and they said actually no, we don't like how it looks and it's not really cheaper. So let's, and apple's. So good at aluminum now and also, by the way, this company is trying to be eco-friendly and carbon neutral. Making a product out of plastic as opposed to a recyclable, reusable resource like aluminum doesn't really make sense.

1:46:36 - Andy Ihnatko
So I mean, this is the system working, I think, which is people tried to investigate this and said, nah, nah, yeah but I'm sure that apple's still working on the the possibility of making an apple adding an adding a product to the apple watch lineup that could be so cheap that parents would want to buy them for their kids, particularly their kids where they don't want to buy them Apple iPhones or don't want to can't afford to buy them iPhones. I think if they could create even a cut feature version that's 149 that wouldn't necessarily be attractive to people who are just looking for a fitness watch adults.

1:47:10 - Leo Laporte
That's definitely something they're interested in chasing down he's also saying that Apple is considering putting cameras into their watches, the idea being that, you know, he points out and I didn't even know this that if you long press the camera button, you'll go into an interface which allows you to send the image to chat GPT for analysis. Okay, yeah, you can ask or search.

1:47:39 - Andy Ihnatko
I did it, I just don't get that at all, the idea of putting a camera. The rumor is that it's on the Apple Watch and would be like on the side, like near the, so you could do the same thing with it On the side for the Ultra, on the front for the non-Ultra.

1:47:54 - Jason Snell
I think the idea is think of it as scanning and not as FaceTimeetime because they were trying to talk about facetime and facetime.

you're like just looking up your nose and like who wants that. But the idea is that they seem to be really high on this visual intelligence thing, even though the current iteration of it is not very good. But I think what they're thinking is look, the more we know about your surroundings, the more we can identify stuff around you, the more we can feed that into various AI models and we can be helpful. So if you're out and about instead of having to take your phone out, or if you even don't have your phone and you want to translate something you're seeing or whatever it is, you can just point your watch at it and go ba-doop and it would say, oh, that's what this is, or let me add that to your catalog, or whatever it would do, which is great. It suggests that the hardware people have been told visual intelligence is going to be a thing, and this is part of that disconnect, which is is it going to be a thing?

1:48:45 - Leo Laporte
Because, right, now it's not much of a thing. You really want to put a camera in the watch or the AirPods.

1:48:50 - Jason Snell
But I like the impulse, the idea that I mean especially if you think about something like meta-ray bands, the idea that that your device, if your device can see things around you, it can help you better than if it can't. Yeah, like, yeah, sure, and our phones? The truth is they're in our pockets a lot of the time so they can't see around us and see what we're doing. So I like the idea, but the problem is the execution, because currently visual intelligence is kind of nothing.

1:49:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just not that interesting yeah, yeah, but the reason why I don't understand it is that it seems as though when you get to an instinct of, okay, I want to use Apple visual intelligence to help me in this situation, the idea of I'm going to raise up my watch and get it pointed at probably might be an awkward angle to aim it at the thing that I want to identify for me. I don't see that as something that is necessarily easier than simply taking your phone out of your pocket, assuming you have it with you. Also, unless you're just talking about a version of Shlomo that is extremely good at conversational help, you're going to want some sort of an interface that is going to also kind of indicate that this is a good time to take out a phone. What I would love is if Apple decided to just basically make like a little stick cam about the size of a, basically make an AirPod camera. That is not like audio, it's just something you can clip to your body or magnetically put onto your lapel so that when you do ask Shlomo or any Apple visual intelligence that hey, which way do I which one of these restaurants in front of me has like a good, like lunch deal? It could just simply activate the camera, look through your peephole there and then actually give you an answer there.

I don't like the idea. I don't negatively understand the idea of doing it through the Apple Watch or doing it through AirPods. I think that this is exactly what you want a little bespoke, thumb-size, finger-size camera for because the ability to have it. You're absolutely right, Jason. The most interesting things coming in AI for me are just the ability to simply ask out loud a question that is based on something that you're looking at, and to have an AI basically be able to get hip to your jive. Google is rolling out in the Gemini app their visual intelligence features like this week not widespread, they're starting slow, but that's the sort of thing that I'm really keen to take. Start taking a look at, because this is this will help me out to be able to look at something and say, why can't I get, why can't, why won't this connector fit into this receptacle? And for it to say, oh well, that's USB-C and you want a USB-A or whatever. That's all kinds of stuff.

1:51:38 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, let's by of stuff. Uh, by the way, if you're wondering, like, who listens to our show, I can't mention who it is, but I was corrected on my on the. Uh, the netflix thing, uh, dolby vision's been around for a while. Htr 10 is the new thing, right?

1:51:50 - Leo Laporte
they had hdr and double vision. They had, they had. They did it with marco polo in 2016. I know you all remember that.

1:51:56 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah hdr10 is, uh, the.

1:51:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to pay for royalties samsung I also want to say that, belatedly, I, as soon as I said rust, I realized that oh well, wait, that's not a web development platform, that's actually just a modern program thing rust can be used for anything, anything.

1:52:14 - Leo Laporte
You notice, I'm wearing my lovely apple airpod pro maxes which I spent upwards of 500 some bucks for uh, and they have now announced that if you have the new version, which I don't I have the lightning version. If you have the type c version, they're going to sell you a cable well, if you want it, if you want it, this is you don't have to it, you don't have to have it.

1:52:38 - Jason Snell
So the announcement is that they are going to sell you a cable that goes to analog also, that you can just do a USB-C to USB-C with the included cord, and either way you will now also be able to support. So it means that if you plug it into analog and you've got a lossless source, it'll be lossless. If you plug it in by USB-C, you can do lossless digital audio. So yay, hooray.

1:53:03 - Leo Laporte
And low latency and ultra low latency Good for DJs, which is good for DJs.

1:53:07 - Jason Snell
It's good for anybody who's doing podcasting and video editing, anything to just get the sync to be as low latency as possible. All great, low latency as possible, all great. My question is why did it take them six months to ship a thing that should have shipped when the product shipped in september? Yeah, because when they announced it, they're like and it's got this. And we said, great, where's the uh usbc to analog plug that you made for the lightning? Where's the usbc? They're like, it doesn't have it. Like well, will it Maybe? Why not now? And there's no answer. Apparently, the answer is something like they weren't ready, the firmware wasn't ready, they weren't ready to manufacture it, but it just. We'll put it in the list of head scratchers of like. Why did they ship that product? Why do they feel they had to ship the very slight change with a USB-C port in different colors, airpods Max in September, but they couldn't ship the cord until March. It's so weird.

1:54:11 - Alex Lindsay
And this gets back into, I think, the process getting in front of the project, in the sense that it's not like we were sitting around waiting for when am I getting the next headset, like you could have just waited until everything was in one place and then just released it together. Uh, you know, I don't think anyone would have been banging up. No one was banging on the door.

1:54:29 - Jason Snell
Uh for, and saying, oh my gosh, the headsets people wanted new airpods max, but they wanted them to actually be new, with lots of new features and address some of the shortcomings of the first version. But all they got was a different port and some different colors. So, if you know, nobody was yeah right, exactly, so they could have shipped it today and it wouldn't have mattered.

1:54:51 - Alex Lindsay
This gets back into Apple, like getting into worrying about keeping up with things or worrying about talking about these things rather than just doing the right thing and having it take as long as it's going to take to get it done so that it comes out in a nice clean package and everything just works. And I think that everything just works is something that Apple is not seeing clearly right now and hopefully that'll tighten up a little bit.

1:55:10 - Leo Laporte
I think, just as companies age, like humans, they get sclerotic, they get a little arthritis and little hardening of the arteries and just things things don't work as good again, process takes over.

1:55:21 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, when you start everybody's project, people right, they're all like you know. You start a startup and every person is that way. But eventually you start adding more people to manage the process and before you know it, it's 90 process and yeah which yeah, not much else yeah the porch pirate criminal network I just like the name stole thousands of iphones.

1:55:42 - Leo Laporte
In the us department of justice recently cracked down on an international crime ring, international porch pirate criminal network. Yeah, they actually. They were pretty clever. They scraped the fedex websites. They would bribe at and t staff by doing so they'd get delivery data so they would know before you did when your iphone's going to arrive on the front stoop and you know, snag it before you did, that's what a lot of people have been saying for months and months that there's yeah, there's something.

1:56:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Very it's not just hey, it's not just someone cruising the streets looking for interesting looking packages.

1:56:19 - Leo Laporte
No, they know where they're going.

1:56:21 - Andy Ihnatko
We have a five minute window in which we can grab this. This is why I'm starting to think that the next time I buy any Apple hardware, I'm not even going to consider having it shipped. I want to go right to the store. Maybe I'm not even going to pre-order it, because there's also been some scams about people intercepting the pre-order and getting picking up the the order uh with uh, with a qr code that couldn't have come come to their phone. It's like maybe I should just walk in there, place the order, buy it right there. That's the only way to guarantee that I'm actually going to get the thing that I paid for.

1:56:52 - Leo Laporte
It's terrible uh, let's see, you're watching MacBreak Weekly and inaco Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay me. I'm Leo Laporte. Apple is getting sued for false advertising. You knew this would happen. On the Apple intelligence uh, I don't think we're saying much about that. It's just another class action.

1:57:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Just another class action lawsuit we should mention the EU's action against iOS notifications. Hefty little fine. Yeah, we talked last week about the Pebble smartwatch and how this creator was saying hey, apple will not let the Pebble smartwatch be as awesome as it could be, because it reserves certain types of interactions between the phone and the watch to the Apple watch, and so if you're a third party, you can't have a persistent connection, you can't get access to notifications, and so the EU basically gave them an order that's saying OK, you can't do that anymore. You have to allow third party, third party apps to have third party apps and hardware to have essentially the same level of access as a privileged Apple piece of hardware would. So it's not only the Apple watch, it also affects AirPlay and it also affects airshare. Uh, apple insists that this will make it less secure and will harm innovation, though.

1:58:11 - Leo Laporte
so, but we'll see how that happens severance uh, concluded its second season a lot of attention on Reddit and elsewhere, leaving, I guess, ben Stiller up in the air. He on X posted. So some fans are asking for season three of Severance. What do you say, tim Cook? To which Tim C responds season three of Severance is available upon request, which I guess is a Severance line.

1:58:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes.

1:58:40 - Leo Laporte
They confirmed it on the newsroom too. So yeah, yeah, he also wants to do five seasons.

1:58:43 - Jason Snell
Let me tell you this renewals are now just marketing, because there was a whole piece about what was going on with severance last year, like a year ago, that talked about all the problems they had had and how they were struggling with the back half of season two, which, having seen all of season two now, I will say, yeah, I can sort of see them falling apart in the second half and trying to fix it.

And they hired Bo Willimon, who is a well-known TV showrunner, to run season three. So they were already hiring people for season three. Everybody knew there was going to be a season three, but they actually had Bo willimon go back and he did the house of cards. Well, yeah, go back and work with them on the season two back half to try and point the direction towards season three. So this is a really funny example where everybody has known that there was going to be a season three of severance for like a year and apple was happy to still again make the announcement yeah, because it's, yeah, it's your post. Season two marketing, feel good, marketing, saying stay tuned for season three.

It's like iron man will return. It's that kind of thing, yeah right.

1:59:52 - Leo Laporte
I have a theory, because the production company is called fifth season, that there may in fact be five seasons.

1:59:58 - Jason Snell
It's just a theory, I'm just saying yeah I wonder why they, they, they gave it that name. Fifth season was previously endeavor, or like media endeavor, content or media rights capital I forget who.

2:00:09 - Leo Laporte
It was season two, so and and so now it's fifth it's called this season. Clue they've they've.

2:00:13 - Jason Snell
No, maybe they're just big nk jemisin fans. We don't know, oh could be robert ludlam's estate is taking meetings.

2:00:22 - Leo Laporte
The creator of Jason bourne, uh, is shopping the rights it's universal has let them go. They're talking to apple, among others, as well as netflix and skydance. I don't think it's going to be matt damon, but, um, I always liked the Jason bourne stuff. The movies were good.

2:00:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, I'd be very interested to see what they thought they've got a lot of goodwill to squander. Whoever book buys those?

2:00:44 - Leo Laporte
yes, yes well, a lot of goodwill to squad, a lot of opportunities going wherever it's going, oh, yeah, bond, the broccolis have moved on. Broccoli's have moved on let's see, I think anything. So the EU fined them right? I mean that was a significant fine, I think. Am I wrong?

2:01:13 - Jason Snell
No they dropped a fine on the browser choice screen because they said that Apple made the necessary changes. There is rumored to be another fine coming and also a big fine for Meta, but it's unclear what that will be right uh about. So it's kind of uh, you know, we don't know. We don't know what it's going to be, but I think apples is about some other other dma related things that they're not satisfied with. But this is an interesting data point that on the browser screen, browser choice thing, the eu went back and said we think you're in violation and Apple made adjustments and now the EU has said we're not going to fine you because you lived into us and we worked it out.

2:01:45 - Andy Ihnatko
They were just concerned about how all browsers the only browsers they would allow, would be the ones that use Apple's own browser engine. They were concerned that it was a default, and basically they made two changes, basically saying, at setup, you can choose whatever browser. And not only that, but safari is not even number one, the list is just randomly inserted. And number two if you want to use your uh, create your own browser with your uh with a non-apple engine, that's fine too, and that's eu only, though.

2:02:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they worked it out which was firefox's complaint is we're not going to develop another browser just for iOS in the eu. That would be a lot of money. Uh, apple Music is opening its catalog to DJs, integrating popular DJ software like algorithms, dj Pro and Alpha Theta. Okay, that's all we have to say about that. I think we should get ready for the pics of the week on MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay and me. let's kick things off on our pick of the weeks with Jason snell.

2:02:51 - Jason Snell
All right, I am, uh, we, we. We did this pick relatively recently. Alex picked it and I liked it. I liked his pitch, so I bought one and I liked it so much actually, actually, I just bought another one.

2:02:59 - Leo Laporte
Move out of the screen, just briefly, so we can see what you're talking about. Slide over. Oh, you disconnected it. Oh well, never mind.

2:03:06 - Jason Snell
Here it is. It is the Insta360 Link, the first generation. They made a second generation, as Alex pointed out. First generation kind of better in a lot of ways but cheaper, and currently they're doing a spring sale, so it's 150 bucks instead of 179. It's a 4k webcam, that is, a full PTZ camera, so it physically moves when you pan it or, you know, tilt it. And I bought a second one because I can use it in another room but I also can like hang it above my desk and and then can zoom in on whatever part of the overhead shot I want, cause it's all controllable via software, via USB-C. It's got a little flip, flip down thing so it will perch on the back of your monitor, but it's also got on the bottom standard thread for any tripod head and it is. It's also just really cool that it just moves around on its own, that it's not like a like a center stage camera where your you're kind of cutting into a sensor's uh pixels in order to fake a zoom or a pan.

2:04:09 - Leo Laporte
Do you have that enabled on the camera you're using now? Can you move around and show us? Yeah, baby, sure, I mean, oh, I can, I can do. You're steering it now, but you, but it also follows you, right, you can set. It also follows you, right, you can set it to follow you.

2:04:20 - Jason Snell
If you are making a video and you want to follow it, it'll do that. It'll do it automatically. It'll read hand gestures and stuff. I don't use any of those features. You can actually control it so you could be like in the kitchen making a cooking video. This is why they made this product and you can actually use the hand signals to control, like, when it zooms and when it tracks and when it stops tracking and all of that. I just don't use those features, but also you can use it in software Just to set all of those settings. It's really reliable. It works really well.

I've been so happy, like I said, that I bought another one last week because I want to use this and also some really good integrations out there. I use Ecamm Live to do a lot of live streaming. They're sometimes a sponsor and I will say you know, in Ecamm Live, these cameras all have their own UI so that I can control the camera angles and stuff in that app. So that's I mean it's because it's from Insta360 and it's very smart. So if you're looking for a really nice 4K webcam that's got some extra features like moving around, panning and zooming and the like. Thank you, Alex, for recommending it. I love it, it's really good.

2:05:28 - Alex Lindsay
I'm glad you like it, and I think I bought mine at $250. I have four of them and I bought them at $250 and the $152 is their. It's a good deal. I mean, 250 was a great deal. I was happy with the purchase then.

These are the best little webcams that you can get, because it's version one and there's a version two out there. I don't know how long version one will last. In my opinion, it's a superior camera than the version two. I think that's the miss that Insta360 did. There's a little leveling feature right now.

One of the cool things about it is, if you don't get your level quite right, it just goes Ooh, I'll, I'll figure that out for you. And when you're setting up fast, like I set them up, um, I can do a three camera shoot with these all feeding into a Mac studio with, uh, you know um, and you can have presets for them so they can go wide, close up all these other things that you can just hit buttons to make them go there and feed them all into something like Nemo Live or Ecamm or other things like that, and you can cut a whole show with you know, two, three, four of these cameras, and so it's been super useful, but I would go get them now because I don't know, I don't know, and there's not another equivalent. You know, obsbot makes some that are a little bit more expensive, but the problem is the software is really quirky, like on the Mac at least. It's just not very stable, and so the Insta360 kind of hit the right moment for those.

2:06:42 - Leo Laporte
And one thing it doesn't say in the ad copy, but it really makes your blue eyes pop.

2:06:46 - Jason Snell
It does. That's what I hear.

2:06:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, look at that, just gorgeous. Andy and Akko pick of the week.

2:06:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine's kind of an odd one. It's on something that doesn't exist yet but will be shipping soon, and not for a reason that makes sense for the thing that is being shipped. Okay, so Adafruit is a great store that does microcontrollers, arduino, raspberry Pi, all kinds of stuff for hacking and making. They've decided to make their own single board credit card computer, kind of like the Raspberry Pi, based on the RP2350, which is like their Raspberry Pi's 80 cent microcontroller. It's not designed to be a CPU that hosts like a desktop operating system, but they're building a board that it'll have all the cool stuff that you like to play with, where it has a display port, has USB, has onboard storage, has SD. They're building that board themselves. It just uses the RP-2350 chip on it.

Okay, but Lady Ada genius Lady Ada she just like she decided that she wants like this. So they're making this board. They're calling it the Fruit Jam. There's a pre-order page for it. Don't know when it's going to ship. They have working versions of it. They've shown off on their YouTube channel. Probably not going to be terribly expensive. You can be reminded when it actually starts to ship, but anyway.

So as she's building this board and now testing out these sample boards. She wants to basically because she was a big fan of her old Mac 512, is basically putting so much effort into making it a really great Mac emulation board. There is a third party put on GitHub an open source emulator called PycoMac, which is a Mac emulator that runs on the 2350. Instead of just saying, oh well, I suppose it'd be nice if this would be compatible, she's actually just sort of like adding to the PycoMac project to make it work incredibly well on this future fruit jam board. And she keeps publishing on the Adafruit channel, every week, it seems, another one-minute or two-minute video saying, oh, now I've broken through the 128K barrier, now I can actually emulate a full Mac Plus with four megabytes of RAM. Oh, I got the mouse working. Oh, now I've got audio working. Here's now I got it working. I got hypercard working on this and the last video she was showing hey, I've got dark castle gaming working, along with, uh, along with crystal quest, with video, with audio, with everything. And it's gotten me so excited about this little board.

I'm a sucker for a controller with microcomputer boards, things like this, and it's like, if this is a moderate amount of money, a small amount of money, I don't see how I can not own this just to make a dedicated Mac emulation device, because I do have a few vintage Macs dating back to, you know, the Mac SE, mac plus, whatever. I'm not a collector anymore really of the old stuff and I'm not really interested in running old Mac software on old Mac hardware. It's fun to do Mac draw, mac paint, mac write nicest writer, old versions of BB edit. I'm fine with emulation and this seems like a really, really fun tool for just doing Mac emulation. For now, the only limitation that's and this is constantly evolving because she keeps like recoding and adding stuff to PycoMac the only limitation is that she seems to have she seems to have been hitting some problems in compatibility above system 6.02, which is essentially the mac plus, and below version of mac os.

Uh, so system 7, system 8, system 9 might not be something that's coming to this and it's might be too ambitious for this. But yeah, that's something I want to tinker with and maybe build like a tiny, tiny, tiny little macintosh that I can occasionally run mac right on and just write little things on and save things to an sd card and then just like put it onto my regular map. That would be a fun thing to play with. I'm I'm very much in support of this also. God dang it, lady. Ada and ada fruit. They're just. That's impressive, isn't it? Eight pounds are awesome in a three pound bag each and every month, yeah support them.

2:10:57 - Leo Laporte
They do great stuff. Adafruitcom. I can run. I can run dark castle on my uh 128k mac back here, but I I won't, I won't torture you with it. It's a lot of fun, it's. It was my favorite game for a long time. Alex Lindsay wraps up the picks of the week.

2:11:13 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, yeah, so I posted something on twitter because I wear x or whatever. It is, um, that I was confused. I was like how did this happen with Apple Music, where it opened up Spotify playlists that I could just easily input into Apple Music at and I had I had bought our playlisty? Um, playlisty is an app that you will look at your Spotify uh playlists on your computer as well as Apple music and you can easily you just open them up as if they were playlists on your Spotify playlist, as if they were Apple music playlists, and it goes oh, by the way, would you like to just move these to Apple music? And you're like, sure, so I can move them over.

This has been kind of a if you, it's been a hacky thing to do is to try to get playlists from Spotify to Apple Music. I have to admit that, as a kind of a, I can hear the difference between Spotify and Apple Music, so if I'm going to listen to something that I care about, I tend to want to have it in Apple Music, and so, just from the quality perspective. So I just wanted to replace the. I'm not trying to move files, I just need to take the playlist, give me the Apple Music version of them and I can listen to it there. And so Playlisty is this I don't know whether it's an addition or just a separate app, but it opens up and it looks just like you're I mean, you think you're in Apple music. It's so and what it is. It's like your plot, your Spotify playlist and any any of those playlists that you want to finally bring over, ones that you collected over whatever amount of time you had before that. You can do that.

2:12:52 - Leo Laporte
I have used it and I vouch for it. There are quite a few tools that do this. That doesn't just do spotify, though. It also does youtube, because I have youtube music and that's very hAndy and deezer if you're one of the three, you'll have deezer.

2:13:05 - Jason Snell
Germans have deezer very much. He loves the deezer.

2:13:09 - Alex Lindsay
There's other features that that I mean. There's other ones that I've used in the past, unfortunately, because they're all like mashed up in my apple music that that never really quite got brought over Right and playlist. He seems to do it very very seamlessly.

2:13:24 - Leo Laporte
I somebody made me a playlist and I really wanted it and that's what I used to get it. Good recommendation Playlist. You'll find it on the app store. Do you know how much it is? Yeah, cause both of us bought this so long ago, we have completely I don't think it's a one-time unlock for three bucks. That's a deal yeah, that sounds like that's worth it. Yeah, thank you very much, mr Alex Lindsay. Office hours dot global celebrate five years daily. That's amazing.

2:14:00 - Alex Lindsay
So much fun. I mean, you know, and we're having, we're still having a great time. That's the best part, and so I'm doing it every, every single morning. We will be doing it tonight at six. You just go to YouTube, on our on our YouTube channel. You'll see it there and I'll you know we're going to talk about some. You'll get to see some footage from day one.

You know, every once in a while we go through the Zoom records and find those of me trying to figure out how to use Zoom, because it was really me that was half the reason I started. It was like I had people asking me to do Zoom productions and I was like, you know, this is two weeks into COVID and I was like, well, I better figure this out. The best way to do that is do it every day and then I'll get really good at this. And blah, blah, blah and um, while I'm doing it, I'll teach a bunch of other people. And then a bunch of people that were smarter than me showed up and, before you knew it, we had a conversation. So, um, anyway, it's a lot of fun. We'll talk a little bit about it tonight.

2:14:51 - Leo Laporte
five years of office hours. Time to celebrate. The youtube channel channel is OfficeHoursGlobal and, of course, the website is officehours.global. Jason Snell still working without Mike Hurley. Is he back yet?

2:15:06 - Jason Snell
No, no, he's still on leave. Good for him I had Stephen Hackett from Relay on. I got Dan Morin coming on next week. We'll just keep on motoring on. It's all dads. I've revealed the secret is, all my guest stars are dads who are offering fatherly advice to mike. Um, so people can check out the upgrade podcast for my cavalcade of guest dads, uh, which will just keep rolling until mike comes back.

2:15:30 - Leo Laporte
I love it sixcolors.com and the podcaster at sixcolors.com slash, Jason, yep and of course, relayfm or upgrade. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you, Andy and not co. Uh, anything to announce, anything to report not yet, but hopefully very, very soon.

2:15:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I have a little bit more, more time and a little bit more okay. This seems like a good time to make sure that stop stop thinking and start solving the.

2:15:58 - Leo Laporte
It's fun, I'm having fun good, great to have all of you, and thanks to all of you who listen, especially our club twit members. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am, pacific, 2 pm eastern time. Uh, that's 1800 utc. I know our uk listeners will be changing the clocks this weekend, so make a note of that. We'll be starting uh at a different time for you, I don't know how earlier. I don't know you can figure it out uh, but just just if you're watching live, we stream on ask somebody, ask, ask, CatGPT, it'll be sure to screw it up.

Uh, we are live on Youtube, x.com, Facebook, Linkedin, Kick, of course, discord for our club, twit members and twitch. Did I mention twitch? Uh, so watch live if you want, but you don't have to on-demand versions of the show available because it's a podcast. On our website, twit.tv/mbw, there's audio and video. We were prescient, we started doing video years ago and now, all of a sudden, everybody's saying you know what? The next big thing in podcasting is video. It's like, oh, really, uh, you also can really. No, yeah, I'm not sure I'd agree, but okay, um, you can also, uh, subscribe to your favorite in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically the minute it's available. There's even a youtube channel, which a great way to share little clips, thanks to our producer, John Ashley. Thanks to all of you for being here. We will see you next week, but now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over, bye-bye.

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