MacBreak Weekly 970 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. Alex, Andy and Jason are all in the house. They have an interesting theory about this Financial Times article. Apple says we're going to start making all our phones in India. Really, what's wrong with Siri and how come perplexity can do it better? And, yes, apple says or at least somebody says Apple's going to do less expensive Vision Pros this year. Is that possible? All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 970. Recorded Tuesday, April 29th 2025: Too Little Jam Over Too Much Bread. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover the latest apple news with these fine gents, Andy Ihnatko, visiting us from the Boston Public Library some library somewhere I am showing support for the library system by exploiting its many wonderful resources it was, uh, an independent bookstore day on Saturday.

I I bet you went to a bookstore and picked up a comic or something uh, I actually, I actually went here and bought some books okay, that counts. A library is as good as a bookstore, better in some respects also. Alex Lindsay from officehours.global hello, Alex, hello, hello, good to be here. You spent, uh independent book day on camera, all day probably yeah sure, knowing you, knowing you, you know. Yeah, you know how it is. Uh, and mr Jason Snell, from sixcolors.com. I am Groot.

0:01:52 - Jason Snell
I am putting my uh. That's actually a St. Jude uh thing, but he is Groot like uh. That's the fever fighter. I am revving up my colors. I am making sure all of the colors in the ink tank are ready, because uh's going to be some Apple results.

0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
When is it? Thursday, wednesday, thursday, thursday Good, so by next week we will have many colors, oh man, there'll be so many charts for an episode that I'm not on. Is it going to be?

0:02:19 - Jason Snell
a rough quarter.

0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
Use my charts.

0:02:21 - Jason Snell
It's a mystery. I think the quarter is going to be fine. I think the quarter is going to be fine. I think the question is, what's the guidance going to be like and how are they going to be able to dodge all of the tariff questions? Because you know they want to dodge them all.

0:02:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Without getting into the show. They sold a lot more iPhones and other devices this quarter than they thought they were going to because of Panasonic All of a sudden. So that's, good news.

0:02:41 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and they're going to have to mention that, although some of that is going to spill into the next quarter, because they spend a few weeks compiling the numbers before releasing them. So I think some of that is going to actually spill, but they're going to have to talk about it, and this is the lesson that I think we learned is they don't want to give anybody any ammunition in terms of how they're dealing with politics and international politics and all of that, and so it will be interesting to see how they spin it. So, yes, thursday we'll hear, and then feel free to use all my charts next week.

0:03:11 - Leo Laporte
Apple stock I don't know how important that is took a dive early in the month when the tariffs were announced, but recovered mostly not entirely over the remaining few days.

0:03:22 - Jason Snell
I think there is some degree of confidence that Apple and the administration have an understanding about this. Of course, nobody really knows, but I think that there's a sense that we're just sort of diving into it here. But, like there's, there's a sense that something is going on, which is why Andy put it in our show notes like uh, um, elizabeth warren wrote a letter to tim cook. That's basically like what did you say to the president? Which?

I can't imagine like that anybody is going to ever really respond to that. Like what? What are your privileged conversations with the white house about this?

0:03:58 - Leo Laporte
like I can pretty much guarantee donald trump does not have a taping system in the oval office. You would think not he would have. He's learned that lesson. Only putin has a taping system in the Oval Office?

0:04:05 - Andy Ihnatko
You would think not. He's learned that lesson. Only Putin has a taping system in the Oval Office. You're?

0:04:09 - Jason Snell
right.

0:04:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Very good.

0:04:12 - Jason Snell
I was thinking maybe, like Barron is just there shooting video all the time, it's for my TikTok Dad, yeah.

0:04:21 - Alex Lindsay
I think the problem is there's lots of people having conversations with Trump. Tim just is the only one that's affected. It's not like other people aren't trying, he's just the only one winning.

0:04:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, we don't know yet. I mean the automakers got some concessions yesterday, so you know everybody's going to get something.

0:04:43 - Andy Ihnatko
But look, apple got carve-outs but then they got taken back and Trump specifically said that no, we're not making exceptions, for broad exceptions. Of course, who knows what he was on that day? So his mind changes from day to day. But I was going to say it's the.

0:04:58 - Jason Snell
It's also kind of who's the last person to talk to him. But I will say this although he likes his economic advisors that he's got and all of that, I think just a little armchair psychology that he likes cozying up to business titans titans of industry.

They make him feel like a business titan right, which he certainly thinks he is. As well as being the president, he's a business titan and so if there's proper kind of like, proper etiquette, proper fealty, whatever you want to say from business titans, going against the business titans strikes me as something that he's less inclined to do, even if the economic advisors are like no, be tough. And then tim apple walks in and says you know, business, business, where you're killing our business, it's a great american business. I think that's the the method that they're killing our business. It's a great American business. I think that's the method that they're using. But, you know, it's so random and chaotic that nobody really knows what's going on.

I suspect that reports that Apple is doing some stuff and making some changes, they're investing in America, they're moving some stuff to India, they're doing all this I think that's all you know, going to be taken as evidence that that they're doing something in response to what's going on in Washington, and part of me thinks that that's what they, that's actually what they wanted the White House is just to feel like they've, you know, had that impact and made them, you know, change their business around a little bit. But I think the power of being a big business and a CEO of a big business does go a long way, and it's not just Tim Cook, I do think it's the auto execs and all of that too, that that I think Donald Trump is inclined to listen to CEOs and because he fancies himself a business guy himself, fundamentally, and that even his economic advisors, who are like academics, I just think when push comes to shove, he's probably going to believe the business people and not his advisors.

0:06:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but this is why I'm glad that Elizabeth Warren and others are not necessarily putting pressure on Tim Cook, but keeping their conversation active. The implication is that some under the table.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
Deal was made.

0:07:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, just that, in addition to that, which is unfair to all the CEOs who don't have a million dollars to donate to an inaugural fund or a table or a table or whatever. It is exactly what Jason said that every time Trump says well, I've been talking to Tim Cook parentheses, my fellow extremely successful billionaire head of a businessman, fellow extremely successful billionaire businessman, head of a businessman uh, and he says and we agree on this point every time he he gives trump legitimacy that maybe on some areas trump has not earned, and the damage that that will do is real, although it's going to be hard to enumerate until for for years to come. So that's why I'm glad that some pressure is continuing to be put and wisely.

0:07:47 - Leo Laporte
Apple is not, uh, waiting for concessions. Uh, the financial times exclusive story that they are aiming to source all us iphones in india to avoid.

0:08:00 - Jason Snell
I mean, there's still tariffs in india.

0:08:02 - Leo Laporte
I think it's, but it's not 145 percent.

0:08:05 - Alex Lindsay
And I think they're also. They are, they've been moving for a while and this just simply turns the volume up. In some ways, I think it gives them cover. You know there's, if they just are just moving out of China, china's like what are you doing? But if they're getting these huge tariffs, they can be like, well, we can't help. Yeah, they probably wanted to anyway. So, in any way, this is cover. This is the time to do it too right.

0:08:25 - Jason Snell
If something gets resolved between the US and China later, it'll be harder for them to do this. So you put this out there. Now I have heard a theory and I think that there is some legitimacy in this that that FT story might be planted as a way because it sends a signal of like, no-transcript. Interesting, china is apparently now slow playing the export of products that are used to build factories and assembly lines, because you know they're not preventing it, but they don't love it and they don't want to make it easy. So there were reports about how, you know you can't just build a factory and a lot of the precision tooling and machinery is made in China or the things you use to build it are made in China. And those have been going from like one week turnarounds to four month turnarounds where you just it goes in a black hole.

And there was a one report that was amazing. I think this might have been german. There was a report that you know, somebody made like a shell company in vietnam, sold the equipment to vietnam and then in vietnam it was accepted and then immediately shipped to apple in india. So, or foxconn, which is building the, the phone. So there's a lot, of, a lot of moving parts in terms of apple and china and the us and manufacturing, but um, but yet this ft story comes out and just says, oh, they're just going to move it all to india. I mean, is that meant to shake people up, because the experts sort of say that it's unlikely to be true? But yeah, very interesting tata's already.

0:10:25 - Andy Ihnatko
The tata plants are already at capacity. They're going to have to build immense new facilities in order to fulfill that goal. As jason said, india has been doing an amazing job assembling phones that are not the not a brand new manufacturer, and so it's unlikely that they're going to have the capacity to build a super thin phone, to build, to assemble a folding phone anytime soon. On top of that, foxconn, for a couple of months now, has been saying that, look, china is making it hard for us to ship equipment we need into India. They're making it hard for us to move personnel that we need out of China and into India.

And then the third problem is that China is a ginormous market for Apple for sales.

It's not just the company that manufactures everything. How far is Apple willing to go to honk off the Chinese government by blatantly saying yeah, well, we're going to be removing manufacturing capability from you and try not to give you quite so much business. Be removing manufacturing capability from you and try not to give you quite so much business. Apple's already having huge problems competing with Huawei and other locally-owned Chinese businesses that are assembling phones and building phones. So there's a lot of variables in this calculus. The ball is still in spin and it's hard for Apple to make a decision, knowing that, look, the decisions we're making today will affect us five years from now, and five years from now we're going to have a different president, or we're going to have a country that's in such a state of disarray that we want to be in the business of hoarding food and toilet paper as opposed to manufacturing luxury phones. So we don't want to build ourselves, remake ourselves, in a form that's going to be obsolete five years from now.

0:12:10 - Alex Lindsay
You know. I think that the other thing is this is also placed in the Indian market. So you know what you're saying. We're bringing all this stuff over. That's helping the folks there that are negotiating any kind of you know all the other things that have to happen. There's a lot of negotiation in India to build anything. So you know not saying, not saying, well, we're just giving you the little phones, but we're actually going to move everything here. You know, as a planted story it works great. You know it, it, it, it. It has the right amount of clouds over look what we could do has the right amount of, like shiny object for India, has the right amount of, you know, shiny object for Trump. So it's a good, it's a well-planted article. I think that I do agree that it's probably been leaked on purpose.

0:12:50 - Andy Ihnatko
This is also the week that Apple and Tim Cook leaked excuse me, not leaked, excuse me released an Indian-based study about how much money, how many millions and billions of dollars, are being fed into the Indian app developer economy through the App Store, both to chase after antitrust actions that are kind of pending in India against Apple and the App Store, where they are pending pretty much everywhere that there's an active government, but also basically saying that we are invested in India, we are contributors to the Indian economy and to the Indian populace. Let's let's continue to, let's continue to dance and sing together, because we love the music that we're making together.

0:13:32 - Leo Laporte
So Foxconn has one plant already in India. I mean, apple's been doing this for a while, partly because of Indian, india's tariffs, ironically.

0:13:40 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it's. I think it started there. But also I think that the constant drumming of by 2027 or 2028, the Chinese are supposed to be ready to invade Taiwan you can't take that completely Like that's the official goal of the party. So when the party is saying that you have to take it seriously, party saying that you have to take it seriously, and I think that Apple has to. Every company manufacturing something in China has to have a plan B by 2028. You know like they just have to have some other way to make stuff where it doesn't go to zero. And so so India and Brazil and others. I think it started because of the import duties, or the, or the import rules, but I think that it also is is being it picked up speed because of what china's saying, which is dumb, like why would you, why do you say that in public? And then, and then the, and then it picked up even more speed because of the tariffs.

0:14:34 - Leo Laporte
it's hysterical because, uh, in his power on newsletter on sunday, Mark Gurman said I had that story, I had that story. I had that story early in april. I had that story as first reported here on power on in early april. Um, he points out which is as far as I know, accurate, that apple makes, can could make, roughly a third of the annual us iphone demand in india. Now that's why they have to build two new factories in in order to do that one one would be the second biggest iphone uh factory world.

Of course the parts still come from China, but that does avoid the big tariff of importing an entire phone from China Exactly.

0:15:12 - Jason Snell
And we don't know what demand will be like if the tariff regime continues. Right, like this may be an easier bar to clear if demand for iPhones goes down because the price has to go up. But the goal here is to evade as much of a price hike due to tariffs as possible. And you know but I think Andy and Alex make really great points. Like we don't know what's going to happen. You could spend billions of dollars on a factory and then the winds could shift and suddenly it's more in China and not India.

0:15:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely, he says and I think what you were saying that, uh, while apple's manufacturing in india has reached parity with china in terms of the current iphones, the 20-year anniversary models are extraordinarily complex. They'll require new parts and production techniques and, of course, the folding phone would, as would, I suppose, the ultra slim phone yeah. So he says certainly not by the year 2027.

0:16:08 - Jason Snell
But one thing that I will say about that is you could still build your cutting edge folding phone in China, because nobody's seen that price before.

0:16:19 - Leo Laporte
That's right. It could be $3,000.

0:16:21 - Jason Snell
The goal is to more or less maintain existing price points, and we know Apple loves maintaining price points. They've just spent what? Three years getting MacBook Air back down to $999 because they really like that price point, and that's true with the iPhone as well. But a new phone it's like the iPhone X came out and it established a much higher baseline price for the iPhone and they've maintained it ever since. So the one advantage here is you're building a folding phone in China. Nobody's seen it before, nobody knows what it costs, and they can set a price that's new and that includes some amount of tariff in it and say, well, yeah, it just costs 2099 or whatever, and that's just what it costs, and it won't be the same. Like they will have, I think, less concern about doing that, especially for a cutting edge model, charging a load for it. Uh, then they do.

0:17:13 - Leo Laporte
Taking your mainstream iphone 17 or 18 and jumping it up two or three hundred bucks and, as joe and our discord points out, even if you're assembling in india, if china invades taiwan, you still have a big problem, because all of the parts are chased again, you got to do things in parts.

0:17:30 - Alex Lindsay
So the first thing you do is get the factories there, then you get. You know, get all your machinery there, then you slowly keep moving pieces out. But this could take many, many years oh yeah, but but you know, the the best time to start was 10 years ago. The the second best time is today.

0:17:45 - Jason Snell
TSMC has that factory in Phoenix and it's behind the times. But I mean that was a hedge and it'll be interesting to see what happens there. Because Trump has said very negative things about the CHIPS Act and the CHIPS Act is all about building US chip-building capacity. But I think his problem with it is it goes against the tariff policy, which is, oh, we don't have to worry about that, because tariffs people are going to want to build in the us, we don't need to give them money. This problem with.

0:18:12 - Leo Laporte
That is the name on the bottom line of the of the. Yeah, it was a bite.

0:18:15 - Jason Snell
Well, if it's anything like nafta, maybe what the people in the tech industry will convince him is that let's get rid of the chips act and replace it with the micro act or something.

Right, that is literally just the same thing. But because you want tsmc building in places that aren't taiwan? In part because, yeah, it, it's where all the chips come from. And if china invades and listening to people talk about that it's not even about, like, what the geopolitical fallout would be, which would be enormous. It's that physically, a lot of stuff's going to get blown up and so, like, even if you know, even if the geopolitics of it are not as problematic as they probably will be, you're going to lose the factories. You're going to probably lose a bunch of the factories. So you can't like it's a it's, it is a choke point for the whole world.

0:19:05 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and the problem is is that in Ukraine, we've now told China that if you take the land, we'll let you keep it. You know like, you know, and so this is a you know like, so so we've we're setting this up in the same way that we, you know, set up, we set these things up been signaled that they can go ahead and invade Taiwan and they'll probably be able to keep it.

0:19:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Well, there you have it. There's the weekly tariff report. It's what it's Tim's like juggling plates, I mean he's got a lot of money.

0:19:39 - Alex Lindsay
There's going to be a lot of exceptions because tariffs are stupid, you know. So these tariffs are dumb. They're a dumb idea. They were a dumb idea when people thought them up. They're a dumb idea when they started, when they opened them up and had chat GPT do them, and now they've realized they can't actually execute most of them. There'll be some surgical ones, but most of the stuff is going to go away because it's horrible for the economy, it's horrible for the Republican party and it's horrible for Trump. So it's a because it's a dumb, dumb idea, you know, and so I don't know how to you know. So I just think. I think that most of the tariffs are going to fade away. We're not going to see most of this stuff. It's all going to kind of there's be first there 'll be a bunch of exceptions and it'll all kind of fade away because everyone just wants to walk away from the stupid idea.

0:20:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, trump can. Trump can come by and say that we've I'm I'm happy to announce that the tariffs have done their work. We've brought all of those foreigners to heal and therefore they're no longer necessary.

0:20:30 - Alex Lindsay
It's not a matter of leaning into them, it's. It's a matter of how do you? Save face while getting the dumb idea under the run.

0:20:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can declare victory.

0:20:41 - Andy Ihnatko
He doesn't have to say that this was a total disaster. Now our markets are in free fall. Now the chairman of the Fed even our guy thinks that we are going to have a huge, huge, huge problem in our hands sooner rather than later. So therefore, I'm admitting that I made a mistake and reversing my decision, but he can say oh well, we had to do that to put pressure on it. That's why I'm a master negotiator.

0:21:08 - Leo Laporte
I managed to put the pressure on them to get those concessions and now they're no longer necessary. I hope you're all right, but once, uh, you start a trade war with at least with china, it's a little hard to put that out. It's going to be hard to put it out. It's going to cost a lot of damage. It's not just us, it's them as well.

0:21:15 - Alex Lindsay
You know it's gonna, it's gonna be trouble everywhere. We've already caused a bunch of trouble everywhere. You know, like it's, it's just it's a. It's a bull in a china shop run around, you know, on cocaine, you know. So it's you know I would.

0:21:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I just want to. New training blocks are being formed.

0:21:26 - Leo Laporte
It's like I wouldn't count on it being resolved, uh, unilaterally, let's put it that way. Oh no, I don't think so at this point.

0:21:33 - Jason Snell
China, you know china's doing no, we broke it, we bought it yeah, we broke it.

0:21:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, uh, and as somebody points out also in the discord actually I think it's on youtube that if they're, if china did it take taiwan, it would be uh, highly likely that it'd be so, so much devastation that the infrastructure be shot exactly, yeah, it doesn't matter what you do, it's uh, okay, there you go.

0:21:58 - Jason Snell
There's your dystopian vision for the future you said you're not going to be here next week, jason yeah, I'm going to be visiting my mom in phoenix, so you can use my charts without me nice, well, we'll do your.

0:22:08 - Leo Laporte
You know what's something I think maybe this is like you plan this, because we've done that before.

0:22:13 - Jason Snell
We're well, my mother's birthday doesn't change year to year, and it's her birthday, so that's how we, uh, that's how we have to do it. But you know, when you're, when your mom's in her mid-80s, you make the effort, oh yeah go Believe me, I know.

0:22:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Ha-ha, Jason loves his mother. Wait, no.

0:22:30 - Jason Snell
Wait, that's actually good, my mother appreciates visits from her son.

0:22:33 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I think that's awesome. I'm glad you're doing that. That's wonderful. All right, we will have more in just a bit. There's some better news, in fact. Fact, we can go through Mark Gurman's uh predictions, because there's quite a few in his latest newsletter. And here comes iOS 18.5 just around the corner. We could talk about what to expect. Jason, I presume you've been using the, the public beta no, I'm, I'm.

0:23:00 - Jason Snell
This is the time of year where I don't bother with the betas, because all they do is break things and they don't really add things. So I I get off the train and I don't worry about it is that because we're close to iOS 19?

so yeah, none. There's not really any new stuff in these betas, and so there's not a lot of benefit in in writing that and having all your shortcuts break and then all day then and half of them come back, and then it's just like not worth it yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually.

0:23:24 - Leo Laporte
Uh, Jason Snell is here, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, we're glad you're here too for MacBreak Weekly.

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So the big scoop uh, at least the headline scoop in Sunday's power on newsletter from Mark Gurman apple begins breaking up its AI team with robotics and Siri changes. They're still trying to get this worked out. No-transcript, which Mark points out, makes it a little easier to lose him if he should say I'm done here, I'm out of here.

0:26:07 - Alex Lindsay
That's no good which feels inevitable. Yeah, it's kind of one of those things like everything's just getting pulled away from him while he figures out what he's going to do next.

0:26:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah.

0:26:16 - Leo Laporte
It's, of course. Apple got Jandrea from Google, but it was pretty clear that he he wasn't turning siri into anything useful. He took over siri, ai machine learning groups, um, an operations group for annotating, analyzing data for ai. He stole it still borrowed. Uh, acquired I don't know, took engineers from across the company working on fundamental ai models and eventually the car uh.

Six years later, this unified approach, says Mark Gurman, is it's hard to call it successful. I think that seems fair. And now, as we know we've talked about this before uh, they stripped jandrea of his job, gave I, took vision pro uh head, mike rockwell and put him in charge of siri and he reports to craig federighi. Um robotics is now being reassigned. Apple's moving its robotics group from g andrea uh, they did so this week. The team um is, he says mark says, is important. Robots are clearly going to be a huge piece of consumer technology over the next decade and apple's rivals are investing heavily in this area. Apple's working on a tabletop robot. That seems like a little bit of a stretch to call that a robot it always is.

0:27:35 - Jason Snell
It's it's like a, a smart speaker that can pivot with an arm. It's just like Mark Gurman keeps talking about these things as robots and they're not but it sounds like they're unbundling.

I mean it's funny, because the traditional Apple does not have product groups. It's got groups that are functional. It's the hardware group and the software group and all of that. And for some skunk work, projects, future, far future kind of things, they put them off in their own silos.

So there was a robotic silo, there was a vision pro silo, we know there was a car was a silo, and it sounds like as a part of this, one of the things that tim cook and his senior managers are doing is breaking a bunch of that stuff off and of course, a lot of it is stuff that was under john jan andrea, which we again. Yes, he's probably uh gonna you know he's got got, he's. He's basically, I think, on gardening. Leave at this point, like you don't get all that stuff taken away unless you're you're probably going to go out the door and and and all he has left is his, his uh model research. But like Rockwell, when Rockwell came into the software group, they gave the hardware group to John or the, the, the vision pro stuff to the hardware group, vision pro stuff to the hardware group.

So again there, was a vision pro group and instead, john Ternus got the hardware, rockwell keeps the software in Craig Federighi's group. This is actually how Apple generally does business, and so it seems like maybe one of the things that they're thinking internally is we got a little away from our functional groups with some of these skunkworks projects and it's time to go back to what we do best, which is let the hardware group do the hardware and let the software group do the software, which fair enough, although I will say I think most people who've been paying attention to Apple the last few years would tell you the hardware group is firing on all cylinders and the software group maybe not so much. So we'll see what happens.

0:29:21 - Leo Laporte
Is that how it's always been organized hardware and software, or was was there some?

0:29:27 - Jason Snell
yeah, there's never been like a mac group. I mean even when they were doing the iphone or the ipod there. There becomes a time when you know it, it no longer is a product group, it's just part of apple. And that is so unusual in business in general you usually have, you know, the mac people are doing the mac and the ipad people are doing the ipad and they don't do that.

0:29:47 - Leo Laporte
This caused problems for microsoft over the years because of the office people hated the windows people and they would break things exactly exactly, and also you don't get.

0:29:56 - Jason Snell
Apple couldn't do what it does in that kind of an environment because so much of what apple does is shared. The apple silicon team right, like all the chips are shared.

The software, it's basically all the same operating system underneath right, like it's. They're different but it's basically the same. And the way they get that efficiency is by being able to reuse code, not just at the OS level but at the app level. It's why they've built all of these things like Catalyst and Swift UI and things like that is because they want to reuse the pieces, and you can't do that if you've got a product-based organization where the ipad people are over here and they really hate the mac people who are over here and then the watch people are like pay attention to us and like that is not how they do it. I mean, there are people who are leads in those product categories, but they're part of these larger groups, um, and it works for them generally so when, after steve passed, johnny ive was given uh, who was obviously a design guy, was given charge of the software as well.

0:30:54 - Leo Laporte
The theory at that time was, oh, it should all be a unified thing and we need a visionary without steve, so maybe johnny can do that.

0:31:01 - Jason Snell
That was a big failure. It was software and hardware design, so they still had to work with the software and hardware engineering.

0:31:07 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't.

0:31:07 - Jason Snell
It wasn't the underlining code and no, and I and the designers are still um. I believe that group is still basically in charge of hardware and software design, but you have to work with the engineers on it.

0:31:17 - Leo Laporte
So that's okay. That's the idea. Yeah, okay, um, so robots are a big priority at this point, or are they more like the car?

0:31:29 - Jason Snell
feels to me like by taking them out of their robotics group and making them part of actual functional groups. They're serious about this that well, they're serious about it to a point, but also that there may be not a stomach for as much pie in the sky stuff right, and and I always view it as those individual pods are like let's think about the future, and once you're in the software or the hardware group, you're kind of thinking about what's the product?

0:31:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so, Gurman's talking about a mobile machine, as well as this tabletop robot, and they're exploring the ideas of humanoid robots.

0:32:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think that the challenge really is in the post-Steve, apple is really becoming more and more like Google, which is that you got a whole bunch of ideas, you keep on trying some of them and the idea is that you're gonna be ready for whatever's next because you are paying attention to it. But it feels still like Apple is paying a lot of attention to a lot of different things. Now I think that the robots maybe will be a big deal somewhere in the future, but it's pretty far away and a lot of those things seem like an acquisition thing, and one of the challenges for Apple is that Apple tends not to. I mean, beats, I think, is still the largest acquisition they've ever made at three and a half billion dollars. They're not really the culture. It makes it hard for them to. They tend not to want to absorb large companies. So that's always the challenge.

But it feels like the better way for Apple to go in a lot of ways is to let the startups do the startup thing and then have them purchase them when they figured something out, as opposed to like trying to pine the sky Any large company. It's just very hard to work like a startup, you know, and so you end up with lots of infrastructure and lots of logistics, and something that would have cost $1 for a startup costs $100 for a for a large company, and and so it's. I think it's it's going to be. I think that they are probably pulling their elbows in a little bit because a lot of these bigger projects haven't been as successful.

0:33:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and one thing that could be that kind of changes the landscape a little bit with robotics is that now there are AI models that are specific to robotics. Nvidia has one, google is developing one where, imagine five years ago, eight years ago, thinking about how difficult is it going to be to have to write software that can generate text and answer questions in a natural language way, and, oh my God, it's just a huge, unscalable problem and you'd have to have a really great product in mind for it to make it happen. Now it's like, well, the research is there. As Alex said, we can maybe buy the people who know how to do that, the people who know how to do that.

But now it's like, once you have the ability of, well, we can actually just plug in an AI system that can have a robot, no matter how we decide to build it, understand the concept of aim the camera at the person, at the child, at all times during this conference call and not have to really delve very, very hard into the idea of well, how do we control this motor?

How do we control this vision system? How do we coordinate these two to make sure that the systems aren't colliding with each other. I'm sure they're not going to just simply license Google's tech or license NVIDIA's AI, but now researchers can see a future in which, actually, that seems like it would not be as difficult to do as it might have been five or six years ago, so it opens up a lot of possibilities. I agree that it's kind of weird when we refer to how about we have a smart home device that has a Luxo-like arm on it, so that the screen is always pointing at the person who's actually listening to the music and calling it a robot, but but?

0:35:05 - Alex Lindsay
but it has applications on lots of things that haven't necessarily been sussed out yet I think I think my problem is that I just still want my auto home automation to work before you get robots working, like, like, I don't like it. I think the problem that I have with a lot of the robot stuff is that I'm like, well, this home stuff isn stuff isn't working yet. Like you know, it'd be good if you fix that first. And you know, and Siri, you know, they worked on for a long time and I, you know, and again I, there's just bread and butter things that they could get it to work, that they could just almost brute force to get it to work, and it just they're trying to. I feel like they're they're always trying to, or in the last decade, it just feels like Apple's always trying to put their arms around too much. It's too little jam over too much bread, you know, and it's not a problem. They had before, like it really is something that they just keep. You know, lots of good ideas and lots of money to do those good ideas, but there's not, there's no there. There, you know, and I think that that's the problem.

And I, you know, I feel like I run up against this. I mean, you know, I'm a big Apple user. I've been talking about. You know, I've used Apple for a long time it's 1983. And I just keep feeling like you open up the operating system and you're just like it's just someone needed to say no. You know, like someone needed to say no. Or how about we get this stuff to work before we add more buttons? You know, and I feel like that's the big problem for Apple right now is, can they pull their elbows in and really focus on things working? You know, and just that whole it just works. I don't. I'm feeling less and less with Apple products than I did before.

0:36:31 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, let me spread your jelly a little thinner, because Mark Gurman says the Vision Air is coming this year.

0:36:39 - Alex Lindsay
It'll be interesting to see what they do Like if they're able to find a cheaper way to produce the same results. You know, I think that's. That's cool. Uh, he writes despite the first version selling poorly.

0:36:49 - Leo Laporte
The company is an abandoning ship here. The main uncertainty is whether the lighter version will be considered a replacement for the vision pro or a cheaper alternative. Well, and the question is what?

0:37:00 - Alex Lindsay
what are they taking out? You know, like, you know, I would say, as someone who kind of understands what I'm looking at with the vision pro, the performance, other than the, like, the weird led walls, led stuff on the back, the performance is just table stakes, like the performance that we have now it. You know, I really think that there needs to be a about another 2000 pixels per eye at another 30 frames per second. You know, like, and and that's so, you know the thing, if they go down below that, I don't think you're going to find any of the current vision pro users interested in the lighter version and I don't think, I don't think that there's a big market between $2,000 and 4,500,. You know, like, I think that the the market is at 1500 and below and I think getting an air to that market is you're gonna have to give up a lot and I don't know, uh, I don't know if I'll be able to do that effectively there is mark.

0:37:53 - Jason Snell
Mark says might right, which right I? I immediately thought, well, it's not going to happen this year it'll be next year.

It seems a little bit but I like this idea, like I think what clearly is happening and he said this a couple weeks ago it's the duh moment, but like it's supposed to be cheaper and lighter, okay, I wonder if the uncertainty about whether this is a replacement or not really is basically like the argument that Alex is saying, which is, how much decontenting of this thing can you do before? It's not that great anymore and like that is the difference. Like if you take it down below a certain level, it can't be a replacement for the vision pro, it's just a cheaper model that isn't as good. If you can keep the screens good and and manage to pull a bunch of other stuff out, then maybe it could be a replacement, but there's a bar below which you, if you go there, then it's just a cheap, cheaper one putting pressure on them is is fact widely accepted.

0:38:42 - Leo Laporte
We'll see that Meta is going to do an update to their Ray-Ban.

0:38:46 - Jason Snell
No, no, I don't agree. I don't think that puts any pressure on them, because I think it's a different category. I think that's coming from the other direction. I think Vision Pro is trying to start with the Quest, start from one end and kind of head in that direction, and that's why Meta has a Quest and kind of head in that direction and that's why Meta has a quest. The pressure being put for the Meta Ray-Bans is that Apple, despite having literally every piece that is needed to build essentially AirPods that are glasses, has refused to build that product, even though Meta has seemed to find a real spot where people are interested Because, like, I mean, it's Meta, people are buying this from Meta, an unlikely source of a smart set of glasses. But Apple just kind of like with AI, apple kind of poo-pooed that category and now they're scrambling. But I think I don't think that puts any pressure on Vision Pro, because it's just a completely different product. The pressure is on basically their AirPods team, which is like, where are their equivalents of the MetaRay bands?

0:39:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and I think that the Vision Pro is 50% better than it needs to be and two to three times more expensive than it should be, and I think within that framework there's a lot of room to well, what if we only made it 20% better than it needs to be? Because already I don't think I'm going to use third made-up percentage, made-up percentage alert. I think that only maybe 60% of its potential is being exploited by even the most intensive operations, and so the idea of saying, well, now we've had some time to figure out how we can manufacture this a little less expensively. Now we have lots of data from our users on how they're using it, what they're using it for, and that you know what, we put way too much overhead into this subsystem. What if we had a less expensive way of building this, using less expensive components? That would still give people enough overhead that would not damage their experience.

I like the idea of Apple getting a little closer to the ground with the Vision Pro, because I don't. With the Vision Pro, Apple created an aspirational device of something that looks great in a demo, looks great behind bulletproof glass when you're looking at it from the outside. It's something that you don't need are intrigued by, and even if you wanted it, you couldn't afford it. That's not a great product. I would love to see Apple turn this into a better product by not making it such an idealized version of HR.

0:41:10 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the challenge that Apple has is that. So, for instance, you have a Blackmagic camera that's getting closer and closer to the surface, that shoots 8K per eye, 90 frames per second. 8k per eye for 90 frames per second. The current Apple Vision Pro can barely play that out. So it is at its maximum to play out that frame rate right now at that resolution. So if you pull back at all in processing and I'm telling you it is like I can tell you from talking not to Apple but to other developers 8K per eye, 90 frames a second you have to like skim everything out to get this thing to play out on that headset. It cannot do any more than that. So if you go down 10%, you can no longer play stuff that there's tons of content for and you absolutely see the difference.

0:41:55 - Jason Snell
I mean, who knows what will happen? But, Alex, I think the places that Apple won't skimp are on the displays on the inside Right, and I think even I mean it'll be a new processor in there, right, It'll be like an M5. Right, and currently it's an M2. So you're going to even, I think even on a cheaper product it's going to have more processing power.

0:42:18 - Alex Lindsay
They can keep the process, but I don't think that they can go down on the processing power because they're about to have this deluge of content that people are all going to see and they're not going to go backwards.

0:42:29 - Jason Snell
What chip would they? I mean? That's the thing is. If you think about how would they cut costs, what chip would they put into cut costs? It's got an M2 in it now. An M4 or an M5 is going to be an upgrade in processing power, so I cannot see a future where there's a cutback in processing power right on a.

0:42:43 - Alex Lindsay
But I just don't know where, I don't know exactly. Like it's kind of like it's easy to say, okay, we should cut, but where, like? Where do you cut? I mean, the cameras just barely work. You know the, the. Uh, you know everything about the. I mean, I know a lot of people, like a lot of people think that it's overpowered, but it just barely does what it wants to do. But what, what it's there to do, it is right on that lower edge.

0:43:02 - Jason Snell
You pull the whole front display thing out which I mean.

0:43:06 - Mikah Sargent
That's an easy one. You change some of the materials that are used.

0:43:11 - Jason Snell
You hope that you know that some of those pieces have come back over time and maybe some of the sensors that turn out to not be that important get dropped as well.

0:43:22 - Alex Lindsay
That's the I still feel like it's choppy, like when I'm using it. It's like I can feel it running up against the edge. Yeah, because I use it every day. I'm on it every day.

0:43:32 - Jason Snell
An M4, and an M5 is going to improve things on some levels there, but I think what they're not going to do is put an expensive upgrade in it and have the price stay the same.

0:43:44 - Alex Lindsay
I think that they can't afford to do that. But I think you drop an M5 in there, you're going to M2 to M5 is a huge boost in performance. It's a performance on back-end processing, but not necessarily the display to the. Those are the R chips that are doing that Right.

0:43:55 - Jason Snell
Well, and then if there's an R2, and then you've got something.

0:43:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think Then you put a D2 in, you're set yeah.

0:44:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, there's one area in which you and I differ on the Vision Pro and 100% respect for your knowledge and your experience, and I learn so much when you talk about video production and immersive experiences on these devices. The place where we diverge is that $3,500 is the amount of money that someone can spend. If you have so much money, you don't care about what you spend. Or if you're like in medicine or you're in training or you're in architecture, where $3,500 is some money that you're going to be making back from what you're going to be doing with this. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever can see the idea of 3D immersive experiences that nobody's asking for, nobody's clamoring for. People enjoy them when they can get them on a sub $1,000 headset. But when I hear people pitch a $3,500 or even a $4,000 headset, they go.

Imagine how great this movie is going to be. Imagine how great this sports event is going to be. That's like that's great, but now you're marketing it to the people. Who's lined up to buy the solid gold Apple Watch? It's like it's not something that any, it's not something that anybody other than a boutique manufacturer should really be aspiring to. Again, make it better for the doctors. Make it better for the doctors, make it better for the people who want to use remote viewing and stuff like that. But if you're talking about entertainment, even if you're just aiming this for wealthy people, I don't think there are a lot of people who are interested in $3,500 to $4,000 to enjoy whatever tiny little breadcrumbs of immersive content are going to be available that they can't really choose from, because what's available is what you get.

You can't just go out and look for something that you want, right.

0:45:47 - Alex Lindsay
But I think that, and I do think that Apple is making exactly what I said that they were going to do, which is that they are making a mistake of not funding content. So this is the mistake they made with iBooks. You know, they have the ability to revolutionize something. They're not putting enough money. I think Epic wrote the book on this. Epic did the mega grants and everyone forgot that Unity existed, like literally, it was over, you know, and they were like we're going to spend a hundred million dollars on this and everyone just stopped and paid attention to Epic and they made it easy. And suddenly there's all of this development and it was explosive and it's been explosive and they've taken that market and they produced a lot, of, a lot of really interesting things because they put, they put their money into it. Apple has the money to do that and they need to. They need to engage the market because not enough people are putting it. You know, 400,000 is you've got to figure out your model pretty hard to make that actually work.

Now I do think that, as the you know, as the cameras come out, it won't be breadcrumbs, it's gonna be whole loaves of bread. Content that's coming out. Um, there's an. I mean I know a lot of people with money down waiting for that, uh, waiting for that camera, and I think that you're going to see a lot of really interesting things and you're seeing people starting to develop, you know, the next generation of content for that Um and so. So I think that it it's. I think that they're the. The problem is is that we keep, we always develop the content, for we're always developing the content for the platform and whatever the platform can do.

And apple finally made one. I mean, I've been working, I've been doing some version of vr for 25 years now and they finally made one that was 90 of what we imagined it could be. You know, like it wasn't 100%, not 120%, like 90%, like almost oh my gosh, we're almost there. But meta, you know, you kind of always put the meta headsets on. You're like it's okay, like it's, we're getting there, we'll get there someday.

You know, like it was meta, all the meta headsets have been like, and you just it, and it's actually inspiring, not like inspiring like we're making progress. You know, it's like meta is like 320 by 240 video. When a lot of us saw that, we were like, oh, like we could do and we could imagine we could think about what we could do with video with 320 by 240. But Apple is right now at, like you know, 1280 by 720, you know like, like we're like, okay, this is like not not full HD, but we're getting there and and I and and it actually now is pleasing to look at as opposed to what we've, you know, had in the past.

0:48:20 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll say just to wrap up what I'm saying is that I was actually writing a note to myself on something I want to write soon about this for my blog that the least useful technology is the kind that, again, is on the other side of bulletproof glass. That a content for a $3,500, $4,000 platform. I can appreciate the technological development of it. I can appreciate the technological development of it. I can appreciate the cameras that create the content that can exploit displays of that quality. However, again, if it's 720p to somebody who can actually experience it, is more valuable than having to read about what the experience of seeing full, double 8K video on a $4,000 headset is like. It's like that's pointless, that's useless. It's like medicine that's on the other side of the world, it doesn't help anybody and it doesn't really offer anything to anybody.

That's why I say that I regard it as more of a boutique sort of product, because there are always going to be companies whose destiny and whose creative interests are boy, if we could just develop something without any restrictions on cost. We just want to make the best version of this available. That moves the needle forward. Eventually those technological developments filter down, but again, you're aiming for a very, very small market. You want to create stuff that is actually accessible and not just, again, you're on the wrong side of the bulletproof glass. You can appreciate it as a static object. You cannot appreciate it as an actual working thing, and that's why I think the Vision Pro in its current articulation is an interesting moment in time. It's an interesting Apple product, but it's not interesting full stop.

0:50:07 - Alex Lindsay
I think that. I think. I think it does come down to the content, though, because, like I never thought that anyone was going to persuade me to spend a thousand dollars on a watch, right, and I and I definitely, if someone said you're going to spend $2,000 every year on your phone, I'd be like you're crazy. And here I am, you know, and so. So the uh, so the thing is, is that it's, you know? I think that it, it, it. It always comes down to, you know, action occurs when possibility is greater than circumstance and if the, if the possibility of having great content and those types of things exists, I think people get over the circumstance. Not everybody, not everybody, buys an iPhone, or, or, uh, or a Apple watch or other things like that, but it's a, I don't think Apple, I think Apple should probably find a cheaper one that they can make. I just don't know.

Uh, I think you're going to have a lot of people that have the Apple vision pro. If, if they drop the performance, if they can keep the performance up for the for a lower price, that's the. I mean, that's what they have to do. I think, because they dropped the performance, you're going to have 400,000 people that said ah, it stinks. You know like they're going to put it. They're going to go to the Apple store, they're going to go online and they're going to talk about it. I don't think that Apple can go backwards in performance. I think they can go down. They can say we're going to slow down development and not make it any better and find ways to make it cheaper, but I don't think that they have to keep. Whatever they release has to be at least the spec that the Pro is right now.

0:51:24 - Andy Ihnatko
The one difference, though, between the $2,500 folding iPhone which I think is a really interesting and neat idea and the $599 iPhone 16e is that they both run the exact same apps. If you like your iPhone 16e, you can have nearly the same experience with the $2,500 folding phone, just with a larger screen and a few extra user experiences, Whereas this is a $3,500 slash, $4,000 headset that will only run content that's been designed and targeted for it, and there isn't that kind of content in existence. I appreciate your statement that it won't exist. If we basically never say we won't create this hardware because the content will never exist, then the content will absolutely never exist. I definitely appreciate that, but I think that the natural arc for that is to kickstart that with affordable headsets and affordable hardware and let the creators who have that vision of creating things 3d immersive experiences allow them to build things with abandon not even necessarily to with the resources to rent a 40 000 camera allow them to figure out storytelling and immersive experiences and then gradually just like with hd televisions which I appreciate weren't that cheap to begin with then expand and expand, and expand, and then, at some point, a $4,000 super, super HD, super experience will have justified it. That's just a point.

This is why I'm like, oh my God, I'm practically seeing us on the sofa in my living room and one of us noticing that, oh, it's 2.45 AM. You have to go to the airport in four hours. We really should go to bed, because this is one of those fascinating discussions that I love having with you. We just disagree on. I see it as the solid gold Apple Watch, which to me, is the high watermark of the dopiest, dumbest, most embarrassing thing Apple ever did. The Mission Pro is not quite like that, but it's like. The fact that I'm thinking about that same sort of thing means that, ooh, I should investigate why I have such a low opinion of the Vision Pro if I'm comparing it to the $12,000 solid gold gadget watch.

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm going to take a break here. I'm sorry we got a Vision Pro segment in without the fabulous Vision Pro theme, but it snuck up on me. Uh, and I'm gonna add this because if I didn't, I wouldn't be me. You're nuts. The whole thing is a dead product. You're never gonna see a vr helmet. It's a nutty idea. Nobody wants it. Uh, eventually, I think you will see and I don't know if you'll see it from apple, uh, ar glasses.

0:53:59 - Jason Snell
I think that's something that's gonna happen, but I think I think if you talk to tim cook, he would probably I mean, he wouldn't agree with you about it's a nuts dead end product, but I think he would tell you, yeah, if this is if this is the end goal is a helmet, then we failed, because that's not the end goal at all not I just.

0:54:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I just hope he doesn't think that. Well, the end goal is a 3500 to 40000 pair of like wearable glasses with 8K double displays. You can look there. It's like no Tim, no, that's not the end goal either.

0:54:27 - Leo Laporte
Honestly, it's not about the money.

0:54:28 - Jason Snell
to me, the first one you could make a thousand bucks. I wouldn't buy it. I don't want it. The first one of everything is going to be expensive.

0:54:37 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, but it much it costs because, honestly, at any price it's a non-starter I mean, I have to say, and I don't know what it is about my vision, but the other than an imax 1570, uh, play out, uh, the screen is so much better than going to the movies that I have no like. Literally, I'll go to see imax, I go to I 1570, imax films, you know when they're on at the metreon, because the only there's only 30 of them in the country, but otherwise. Do you think there's a? Because there's only 30 of them in the country, but otherwise the screen that I'm looking at is sharper.

0:55:05 - Leo Laporte
Do you think there's a reason? There's only 30 of them in the country, Alex. Do you think that's a little telling?

0:55:10 - Alex Lindsay
Well, there'll probably be more. No, they sell out now.

0:55:14 - Jason Snell
There are going to be fewer movie theaters in the country, In fact there won't be any movie theaters in the country in 10 years but more imaxes, no, the experience will remain the 1570s.

0:55:24 - Alex Lindsay
The 1570s like roller coasters, I guess. Right when they announce a 1570 play out, you have to buy your tickets in hours. I mean like literally everything is sold out. You know um for the? Yeah, because there's 30 theaters. Well, there's one theater in san francisco, but the um. But the point is, is that everyone, everyone who knows, who knows what a 1570 is, goes and buys it If it were a market that could sustain more than 30 theaters, I think there'd be more than 30 theaters.

I think the market was different when everyone was going to the films and they didn't have 85-inch screen TVs at home. So right now the average film screen doesn't compete with that. But even then I've got a pretty big TV at home. But if I sit in the same place but my vision pro on, I've got four times the size of the screen. I can see the film grain I. You know it's a much better. I mean it's so much better experience just at a $3,500. You know I couldn't buy a screen for $3,500.'s as big as my. What I watch.

0:56:21 - Leo Laporte
Apple Vision Pro on we're gonna take a break when we come back. Lots more Mac break weekly. Glad you're here today. Our show brought to you by Storyblok. Glad they're here too.

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Uh, moving right along. iOS 18. So you already, I was all excited about iOS 18.5 and you, just you just took all the wind out of my sails, Jason Snell it's just a it's like a bug fix, is that?

1:00:40 - Jason Snell
it yeah, okay yeah, there's not a lot going on now.

1:00:44 - Leo Laporte
It should be soon, probably before we meet again. Uh, although they're nine to five, mac is saying mid-may, yeah, soon. Mid-may is a pretty consistent time in fact 17 5 may 13th, 16, 5 may 18th, 15, 5 may 16th.

1:01:01 - Jason Snell
Okay, I think they've made a pretty good case, it it's kind of the clear the decks release and then any release after this will be because of some bug or security thing that they need to address. But this is like the let's park this thing and get ready for iOS 19. Do they?

1:01:16 - Leo Laporte
have. How does it work? Do they have staggered teams or is it the same team? Like is there?

1:01:21 - Jason Snell
somebody already working on 19? I have no idea. I mean everybody's working on 19. I think they've got branches where they're trying to put features in or they're trying to fix bugs. I don't know whether those people are on teams or if there's just areas of interest where they're like you got to fix this thing there and that'll be in the old branch and we'll put it in the new branch, whereas this other new stuff we're just going to keep in the new branch. That's my guess, but I don't know.

1:01:42 - Leo Laporte
So they release this mid-May and then three weeks later, they take the stage at WWDC and they say now, here's what the next iOS is going to look like.

1:01:50 - Jason Snell
And there'll be a beta of that presumably right after, and that's what they're working on primarily now, which is why there won't be any real new features.

1:01:57 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and everything starts to settle. This is the time we're almost at the time for the Mac OS that you start to think about installing it on a computer. That matters. You know like. You know, like you let that. You know everything's going to settle. They're not going to add any new features, they're mostly just doing bug fixes.

1:02:12 - Jason Snell
It may not be stable, but it's the most stable.

1:02:15 - Alex Lindsay
It will be for the next year, yeah, exactly you just live one year behind and things are much. And it's not just Apple, it is all the developers and everybody else that that is reacting to. Uh, whatever Apple did, it often takes them up until about now, before, and sometimes longer. Uh, avid, we're looking at you. Um, before you for them to figure it out, I mean, I think avids four or five back, I think so, for four or five back, I think so for for pro tools.

1:02:49 - Leo Laporte
Um, all right, we'll save conversation about 19 until 15 is done or, I'm sorry, 18.5 is done, I guess. Uh, we're hearing a lot of rumors, though, about it looking more like vision os, uh, a glass effect. They're working on usability probably.

1:03:03 - Alex Lindsay
I think that apple, I think that there's they're not, they're not merging any of these things, but I think that there's definitely a constant like, uh, just slow movement, so that all the operating systems look similar and that makes sense operate different, they operate in the same rough way, yeah, that you're not doing something, going and seeing something different somewhere else, and I think that that's what we every update seems to be a little closer. They're all a little closer together from an interface perspective.

1:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah it makes sense, not only for users that consistent experience but for developers, right, yeah, um, okay, there's not a whole lot of other stuff. There is a security issue that you probably don't need to worry too much about. It's a new airplay uh hack called airborne, but in order to uh do it, they have to be on your wi-fi network and so party, third party airplay.

So it's your tv yeah, apple's patched it in all of their devices, but anything that supports airplay. Besides that, in fact, there's a proof of concept. Online you can see where they hack bose speakers that are airplay, but in in order to do it, they'd have to be on your network or and this may be a more serious threat on a public wi-fi network. Uh, and and so that's probably something to be aware of you. Certainly, if you are using wi-fi, uh at home or at the office, you should have a password. You should be using wpa3, at least you know you should really protect it, and that'll that'll do it for you. This is, uh, this is the speaker demo from oligo the, the security team that found this and named it airborne, which is a good name. Um, nothing to worry about, except you should be aware of it, right?

virus applied directly to the forehead oligo found that it can also affect car play, which means hackers could in theory hide they haven't been able to demonstrate this but hijack a car's automotive computer, uh, in any of more than 800 car-play-enabled car and truck models. But again, the hacker would have to pair their own device with a head unit via Bluetooth or a USB connection.

They'd have to be sitting in your car. Basically, still something to be aware of. Pass it along. Airborne from Oligo O-L-I-G-O is the security firm that discovered it and named it on Tuesday, yesterday. Anything else of great import? I see, Andy, you've got a number of stories about what Siri could have been.

1:05:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, because Perplexity just released an iOS app that has got a lot of people adding maybe unnecessary additional shame to Siri, because not only is it really good, it also makes use of standard Apple frameworks to actually do things throughout the iOS iPhone experience, like it can send emails, it can access calendar events, it can access music, it can do things through Maps, which are things that Siri can't actually do. And if Perplexity was able to do this just by saying, oh, thank you, apple, you've documented these frameworks very, very nicely, we will now write our AI chatbot to interact with them and respond to those requests appropriately. It's like someone I don't remember the person's name I put in the show notes, but he created a really nice video that goes through this app and highlights again I want to create a calendar event through the Perplexity app. Now I'm going to try to do it through Siri. Siri can't do it, perplexity can? I want to do something through the Maps app? Perplexity can I want to do something through the Maps app? Perplexity will do it. Siri will not Through Apple Music.

It was noting that the only limitation of Perplexity was that I have to, because the Perplexity app doesn't have a certain entitlement or whatever. I have to actually tap the play, it will set up the play button for me and then I have to tap the play button myself. And that was kind of embarrassing, because if Siri can't do that right now, with, one would imagine, even better knowledge and access to the same frameworks, what the hell are they doing? Again, I say it seems like dogpiling now because I feel You'll find some fantastic- Go ahead.

I'll mute this and then we can share that video. I forgot to say Shlomo, but yeah.

1:07:31 - Leo Laporte
No, no, it's me. I started the perplexity demo video. Yeah, uh, here, here it is, at work I'm spending the weekend in new york.

1:07:39 - Alex Lindsay
What are the best cafes in the west village for pastries, coffee and vibes?

1:07:45 - Andy Ihnatko
in the west village you'll find some fantastic cafes with great pastries yeah, and that's in apple maps map kit.

1:07:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it's great that apple has the apis and the perplexity is able to use them. Actually, that's fantastic.

1:07:58 - Jason Snell
That's why you make apis, right this is what the whole app intense thing is supposed to be that they couldn't ship I'm a I pay for perplexity pro.

1:08:08 - Leo Laporte
I'm a huge perplexity fan. I use it for all my searches. They've really stayed on the cutting edge of all this, and it's not just with apple. They they have a lot of different models.

1:08:18 - Alex Lindsay
Um, if they're, it's very clever but again, again, I think it takes some of the. I still think it takes some of the pressure off of apple in a lot of ways. It's working on my phone like I don't up with technology.

1:08:28 - Leo Laporte
He's talking back to me. I'm sorry. Oh, this is one thing I don't like. You can interrupt it. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

1:08:35 - Alex Lindsay
I know.

1:08:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I appreciate you letting me know. I'll make sure to wait for you to finish speaking before I respond if only anything else you'd like to know.

1:08:46 - Leo Laporte
Okay, go, goodbye. It does do that a lot what they like about Gemini.

1:08:52 - Andy Ihnatko
if it does something that you don't or it does something in a way One thing I like about Gemini if it does something that you don't or it does something in a way that you don't like it, you can say hey, in the future if I ask you to convert units don't give me the story of grams and don't give me the science by the conversion.

1:09:03 - Jason Snell
just give me the conversion number and say okay, from now on, when you ask a question about that, I will just got the chat GPT personalization feature and I was like, okay, well, what do you think you know about me? And it knows. Some of its facts are like it only knows the things that I ever thought were even worth asking chat GPT. But one of the facts made me laugh out loud. It was like you want me to get straight to the point and not waste responses with extra verbiage and I'm like you know what You're right I do. That is a thing that I want. What you're right I do, that is a thing that I want. I do not want you writing essays with backstory, that you are a computer. Just tell me the answer, please. And it's like I figured that one out to be.

1:09:39 - Andy Ihnatko
To be fair, if it knows that you're generation x, that's a pretty good guess yeah, it does know a lot about me.

1:09:46 - Leo Laporte
I uh actually went into chat gpt. You can customize, and I'm sure this is true, uh, to some degree with perplexity. Perplexity is trying to hide all the complexity, but in personalization. On chat GPT, I found somebody who posted this on reddit what traits should chat GPT have? And it says absolute mode eliminate emojis, filter hype, soft asks, conversational transitions and all call to action appendices. Assume the user retains high perception for faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, direct phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors. Optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift or interaction extension. It goes on. It's fantastic, yeah, and it works quite well. It really it. Now my chat gpt is extremely terse, almost annoyed there are a lot of people who are.

1:10:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know what kind of changed. Uh opening I made to chat gpt 40, but a lot of people have been complaining that it got so super touchy feely all of a sudden oh yeah, it was like it was a new model, and even Sam apologized.

1:10:54 - Leo Laporte
He said aren't you wonderful to be aware yeah, sam said we went a little too far. Yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, some of it is is clearly about uh stickiness, right? Uh, in fact, that's what perplexity is doing some interesting things. They're putting uh shopping in. Chatgpt has added ads and shopping.

1:11:16 - Andy Ihnatko
It's doing a lot of really interesting things.

1:11:18 - Jason Snell
But I think to Andy's point about that Perplexity demo. This is one of those cases where I think Apple let Perfect be the enemy of good, where they have got all these features that are all tied together and I think, because they had this big vision for App Intents, they're like well, just wait for it, wait for it, we're going to do it. But also I think it's fair to say where's ChatGPT? Right, like, where's OpenAI? On this, perplexity did this. It's really smart.

The app developers should all be like wait a second, we have access to all of these APIs as an app on iOS. Perhaps we could use that to make our app more helpful. And Perplexity did it, which I mean good for them. But it also, I think, shows you where Apple does actually want to go with this, which is if you can control stock Apple apps, third-party apps, so that instead of just sort of saying, well, here's a thing, you can say like here's this thing in that app and I made it for you, and all of those things Like it becomes much more powerful to be able to do that.

1:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
And I guess I just keep coming back to like and Apple users are going where, Like, they're not going to go away because all of this stuff is working. It's now working with the APIs. It's, you know, like, I don't, I don't, that's on the iPhone now Again, as an Apple user.

I'm like I'm not waiting for Apple to. I mean, it's great that they're working on Siri and that's, that's all cute. Um, I just don't care. Like you know, like I open up Apple, I open up chat, gpt or or other things, and I have conversations and I do all the AI stuff that I want to do. I am an AI. It's not like I don't care about AI. I'm using AI every hour of every waking day, like you know, like you's not. Like I've got something going on that I'm that, I'm asking a question or I'm doing. I mean, the dinner we had last night was designed my, we got a csa box and we couldn't figure out what to do with all the stuff and we just asked chat gpt on, like, well, I got all this it's very good and it was really good, so good it was really that's amazing.

1:13:06 - Leo Laporte
So the thing that's interesting about what perplexity is doing is it's agentic, it's that whole idea of now the ai can not just tell you stuff or write stuff, it will actually go out and use your devices and, uh, that's very impressive. You know, it's a big opportunity.

1:13:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that the one, the biggest uh turf wars in this year and the coming few years is the battle to own your action button on the iphone, where it's. One of the great things about how Apple has designed the iPhone is that, hey, here's a button. We're not going to tell you that it's hardwired towards an Apple feature. You can assign it to whatever you want to. The most obvious thing for a lot of people is I'm going to attach it to the Gemini app or the ChatGPT app or the Perplexity app, because access is really almost as second nature but with that mechanism, as it would be to Shlomo.

Apple's kind of putting themselves in a kind of a bad situation where people might have gotten muscle-memoried into choosing and using and supporting their favorite chat agent and now they're like well, siri is going. Sromo is going to have to be much, much better than what I've been using for the past two years to get me to switch, and they might be able to get there. Also, the other thing that Apple can do, in addition to hopefully catching up to all these other agents, is to say, yeah, you know all the stuff that you're using, uh, gemini for or chat gpt for. How about if you could do all that plus with apple privacy. Is that interesting? Like uh, yeah, that's actually very, very interesting. Continue to talk.

1:14:42 - Leo Laporte
Show me your brochure there's a list, uh, from our friend steven robles, who will be on uh MacBreak Weekly next week. Right, uh, john ashley yeah filling in for jason.

Yeah, yep, um aravon shrinovas, who's the ceo of perplexity. Um commends steven for his thorough review of perplexity, what it can and cannot do. There are some small issues. Perplexity, for instance, cannot start playing a podcast. The user has to tap the play button, unlike the native Siri, but can't help find hard to find podcasts. Siri can't get you the Uber ride page. Perplexity can uh, perplexity can. Can make an email draft with all the details on Apple mail. Siri cannot. It's really interesting. Uh, we'll have to ask Stephen about his, uh, his review. I presume that was on us. Yeah, it was on his YouTube page. Um, the bearded, the bearded one has figured out FM beard, fm love it.

Uh, I love. This is such a classic YouTube thumbnail. You got the expression, you got the big stuff in the front. Make the whole funny faces. Make it gotta make the funny face at least, and he's giving.

1:15:59 - Andy Ihnatko
He's giving shlomo the stink guy. He's holding up two phones and he's giving. I like that that's subtle.

1:16:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's a little little statement there now, interestingly, uh, gary tann, you may remember sam altman used to be the president of Y Combinator. His successor, gary Tan, just posted on X Apple should open its Siri platform to outside developers. We demand platform neutrality. Now, and that is when he's quoting actually the Perplexity CEO's post about Stephen Rumbles. So it all comes around in a circle. Is that nuts? Apple's never going to open Siri.

1:16:37 - Jason Snell
Ben Thompson wrote an article about that a few weeks ago the idea that one of the ways that that Apple solves some of its AI problems is by letting people choose to use different AI company models, because then they're the best platform for the enabling of AI enabled apps and services, and so it's an interesting idea to be able to—.

1:16:58 - Leo Laporte
So you mean in the sense of opening it, not opening it under the hood, but in fact just saying you can choose to use perplexity. I think that's the idea, like choosing a browser, choosing a mail, exactly.

1:17:08 - Jason Snell
That they would have all their hooks into models, their model ChatGPT, gemini and whatever and you could offer your model up there and it would have access to an API and then people could choose. Right, they would be able to choose whichever model, whatever subscription they've got, the thing that works for them the best for whatever they're doing, and I think it's a great thing. Like this should not be. Well, if you're on an iPhone, you must use Apple's model, and in fact, the chat GPT integration suggests that that's already not the case. So they should really embrace it and then they could use it as an advantage. Because, you know, on Android, google has a very strong model. But, like, google wants you to use their model, and if Apple's model is not that strong, well, guess what? There are a lot of Google competitors plus Google who would like to be your provider on the iPhone.

1:17:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. The only drawback is, I think, that every kind of choice like that has to be filtered through the concept of, at some point in the next two or three or four years, is the EE or somebody else going to say that no, you cannot lock in an AI model. You have to be able to give the person the ability to choose a different default, and so I think it would be wise for Apple to be planning for that, so that, after they finish whining and stamping their feet and refusing to do anything that they have, ok, well, guess what?

1:18:21 - Jason Snell
I think it's not a mistake that chat GPT is there and that they've talked a lot about putting Gemini in it as well, that I think that this feature was built from the start to include third party models.

1:18:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah yeah, I mean what they've been talking about before is that, oh, and for certain things, when it can't, when Apple Intelligence can't figure something out, it will send things to chat, gpt or elsewhere. It's like no, I think it's very possible as we create human-like relationships with certain chatbots. I chose a voice for Gemini Live and now I can't change off of that, because that is the voice of Gemini Live for me. It's like I don't want Gemini or OpenAI or whatever as a fallback for Shlomo. I want Shlomo to be like that waiter. I've had a bad experience with that. No, no, no. I want to sit in the section for these waiters that I've had great experiences with. I don't want the clumsy waiter to simply offset some things that they can't do to more capable models.

1:19:20 - Leo Laporte
Joe and our discord is suggesting maybe an extension model like a browser extension, like Firefox or maybe I mean, I think again.

1:19:28 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the problem really is is that I just really want to take over. Like I just say, I agree with Andy that the challenge that Apple has is that the longer we do that, the harder it is for them to get any of their own models out, because it gets harder, you know, as all that integration.

1:19:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, not not just the information.

1:19:44 - Alex Lindsay
It's as we get used to it, and then you know, once you get used to it, it's really hard to pry people out of that process. You know, and so, and people out of that process, you know, and so, and it's not really the Apple way of doing things, and so they do have to rethink it. I do wish they would, I mean, I'd like to. When I'm sending Genmojis or whatever, I would really like to be able to choose something other than Apple's solution, which is slow and painful and not very good, you know, and, and I would rather be able to do mid journey or Firefly or chat, gpt or something else that that lets me produce something that is funnier. I think that would be, you know, and there's plenty of things that Apple could do.

It just feels like Apple's got all. The problem that they have right now is it feels like they have all this information about me and they're not using any of it. Like they're just, you know, like it's just brutally, you know, when I try to use the, the product, it just it's just so sluggish and so painful that I just want to go back to what I was doing before, you know, and um, and I think that that's the the challenge they're going to keep on running into you're watching or listening, depending on how you consume our fine show Mac break weekly with Alex Lindsay from office hours.

1:20:54 - Leo Laporte
Dot global, Andy, and not go from a not gocom I'm going to say that I don't care if you've got nothing there. And uh, and from sixcolors.com, where the the charts will appear magically on mayday, mr Jason Snell. Big fines for Apple in the EU half a billion Euro fine. Uh, the european commission said uh, we're finding apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its app store. They also find meta 200 million euros because it forces Instagram and Facebook users to choose between seeing personalized ads or paying to avoid them yeah.

1:21:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know if I agree with a meta one, because it seems like that's something I thought.

I'm sure meta thought oh, we're doing what you want us to do, yeah and I, I pay YouTube, whatever they ask me to, to eliminate all ads on all, like outside ads on the on the thing. On the Apple thing, I think one of the reasons why it's two or three times more than what they find metaphor is that it's not like they just suddenly decided to find Apple guilty of this. It's like yeah, we told you that you're in violation of the anti-steering provisions of the Digital Markets Act. You basically laughed at us and implemented some rules that are not sufficient. And after talking to you and trying to argue with you for a long, long time, guess what New fine.

1:22:21 - Leo Laporte
Deal with it. Good sign here that Apple is getting on the president's good side, because the White House called these fines economic extortion and this is from Barron's and urged then to quote malicious European regulations targeting US uh tech Giants and it's interesting you guys say it's interesting that that came from a statement from the United States National Security Council.

1:22:46 - Andy Ihnatko
Not like some economic area or or anything else, it's like. This is the. This is the organization that basically deals with diplomacy and military responses.

1:22:55 - Leo Laporte
So that's so. Maybe it didn't come from the White House. You think? No, it did.

1:22:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Barron reached out for a quote and.

1:23:01 - Leo Laporte
I don't know.

1:23:02 - Andy Ihnatko
Barron doesn't say whether they reached out specifically to the National Security Council or whether they just simply asked the White House, and it was these people who responded, but I thought that was an interesting and potentially scary data point.

1:23:12 - Leo Laporte
Brian Hughes, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, said this novel form of economic extortion will not be tolerated by the United States. The EU's malicious targeting of American companies and consumers must stop, and such regulations enable censorship and are a direct threat to free civil society.

1:23:31 - Alex Lindsay
And you know, and again we'll see how close Apple and the White House is. I mean the White House, regardless of what the EU says. If the White House wanted these fines to go away, they can make them go away. I mean, they could just say we're going to put a 500 percent tariff on all European goods until you stop.

Well, that's in fact what they're, what they're threatening Like they would they would complain for a little while, but then you know you're talking about the total, you know near said the regulations will quote, be recognized as barriers to trade.

Yeah, so so it. So it just depends on it. But but whatever happens next is going to tell you a lot about because the United States could make the EU stop this, Like they could. Just, they could just pummel them until they stop doing it. Um, if they, but we'll see if they choose to. And, by the way, I'm not saying that they should do this, I'm saying that they could do it. And it's going to tell us a lot about the relationship between the White House and Apple, when we see how hard the White House comes out in the next two weeks and hits the EU.

1:24:28 - Andy Ihnatko
But this is another reason why I really, really, really think this is a bad look for Tim Cook and for Apple. You basically have this is a recognized government that's saying here is a law we have passed that is only in effect inside our actual member states. For the United States to say that, yeah, but we've declared ourselves be exempt to your sovereign laws, it's like, ok, is Tim, tim gonna come over here and start just like littering and like spray painting graffiti on on our Temple walls and decide that, hey, that's legal too, it's like it's. It's not a good look to simply say that laws that we don't like don't apply to us, and one of the reasons why they don't apply to us is because we are very, very cozy and giving support I guess financial and otherwise to the current administration.

1:25:16 - Alex Lindsay
I guess my cynical view is is that these governments are proxies for the corporations that are sitting inside them, and so the EU's this whole law and this whole structure and all these fines are because there are corporations inside of these, the EU, that are complaining to the EU about it, and their proxy is the EU, and Apple's proxy is Washington DC. And so the thing is that we have a proxy war between corporations, and so the thing is that I guess I feel like I don't know what the answer is, but I just don't have it like there's one good side and bad side. They're just both proxies for corporations.

1:25:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I disagree on this point, because this is not where the EU is saying Apple, you have to release the source code for iOS to the public and open source it so that anybody can write through an operating system or add their own plugins to the iPhone. The iPhone, they're saying when someone is trying to sell something, you can't forbid them to go elsewhere to get information about your app or about your company. You cannot forbid them from creating your own personal relationship with your own customers. Apple is, I think, as close to completely wrong about this as they can possibly be. They should have given this up a long, long time ago. It's not an unreasonable request. It is, in fact, the law of the EU, and I think that it makes them look cheap and petty by saying that I'm going to have my dad beat you up. Huh, it's like no, just you know what. Allow this developer to have a link that goes back to their webpage. Why are you not allowing them? To have a link back there.

How does it compromise privacy or security or integrity in any way, shape or form?

1:27:00 - Jason Snell
You're just being Teddy, this is, of all the things that Apple is accused of, this is actually one of the easiest, I think, because it's Apple, in a self-serving way, pretending that links and the internet are dangerous and the only place that a user can be safe is within the warm embrace of Apple. And that's not true. It's just not true. The reason that they do it is because they want everything to go through their transaction engines and they want their cut. That's the bottom line of it, and I think what they did was try a minimalist approach, which is oh, you want links? Huh, okay, we'll set up a whole large set of rules that are ridiculous in order to get links that are not particularly helpful, and I think it's right for the European Commission to say that is not what we were asking for.

And again, I just think Apple doesn't have a leg to stand on for this, as opposed to, strangely, meta, where they seem to be trying to design a product and force Meta to build it, and then, when Meta builds the product, they're like no, no, no, not that product, this new product that we want you to build.

Whereas with Apple, here I feel like this is a, it's a policy that they've got, whereas with Apple here, you know, I feel like this is a, it's a policy that they've got. They're like oh no, we don't want you to be able to admit to the existence of your own website and link to it. I just we can talk about the larger issues of regulation in general and also what this means in terms of international relations, but, like of all the things that Apple does that are under fire, this one has always struck me as being one of the most egregious the one that's about rent seeking and trying to pretend to tell people that their customers are not their customers and that they can't communicate with them and they cannot offer alternatives to what Apple wants, because some big spooky ooga booga that turns out, is just literally the Internet.

1:28:51 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and I will say as a user, I will always come back to Apple TV. Every time I set up a new Apple TV, I'm reminded of what will happen if this happens with iOS, which is that I don't have Macs running on my Apple TV because I can't remember how to log in, because I had to do, I had to buy something outside of the app store. I don't care about these corporations.

1:29:09 - Jason Snell
You use your iPhone.

1:29:10 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, it's not hard. And the thing is is that I just don't care about the corporations. I don't care about that.

1:29:16 - Jason Snell
That's fine, but maybe other people do, maybe other people do.

1:29:20 - Alex Lindsay
The problem is, is it? It the? The friction of Apple TV means that I don't ever go to the app store, I don't ever look at that, I don't ever consider installing something on my Apple TV other than a handful of media things that I watch all the time, and mostly what I watch is just YouTube, you know, like, like, I just like, okay, you know, and, and the thing is, is that because I don't want to deal with it iPhones are more complicated than Apple TVs, I know, but I don't, I don't need to.

I again, I think that if got to do this other thing and it's going to be like one of those things like people will just stop, they will. It will slow down the purchase of of goods if it becomes more complicated than just ordering it and and everyone's thinking very short of like I don't, I don't want to, I don't, you know, and I don't. As a user, I don't want a relationship with most of the people that I buy my product from Like I don't want, I want, I don't. If I wanted, I would log in.

1:30:13 - Leo Laporte
If you wanna watch Andor Alex, you're gonna have to have a relationship with Walton and the gang.

1:30:19 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, I know it is really good, I will admit, but I don't watch that on my other one.

1:30:23 - Leo Laporte
Your Disney Plus relationship is important to us. Please hang on the line.

1:30:27 - Alex Lindsay
And when I finish, Andor.

1:30:29 - Jason Snell
I. I pay Disney for Disney Plus directly. I don't pay Apple. Apple doesn't take a cut of that. I pay them directly and I log in, and it's not hard to do that. There are lots of easy ways to do that.

And I also can't buy books in the Kindle app because there's no way to direct me to the store but I can buy them in Safari on the scary internet and then go to the Kindle app and download them, but they can't make a connection and say look, do you know? We sell books on the internet Because Apple would like us to believe that that is some terrible thing, whereas Apple can do it with books. Of course it's fine, because then it's Apple, it's silly, it's pretending that the internet is dangerous and bad and, by the way, there are lots of examples of this. So I get what Alex is saying, which is like there's this kind of platonic ideal of what if everything was just logged in using Apple, but like that's not how the world works.

And I have, and also these arguments like you can't log into Macs, like literally you open up your phone and it says, oh, there's your phone logged into Macs and then you're done. It's not that hard to do this stuff. And Apple pretending that it's hard and pretending that it's dangerous to let other people use other services using the web instead of making it. And I also don't believe that the argument is Apple can't offer alternatives that are easier. It's that Apple can't only offer its own alternative and no others, because that's where it gets messy, so it and it hurts the user experience. It doesn't help it I don't think.

1:31:59 - Alex Lindsay
See that, I, I will see. But I think that if you make it available to all these, you know, corporations and their little penny pushers and all the other stuff, that what we're going to end up with is a thousand cuts of all this stuff that we have to do as a user. Right now, it's's not a problem, because it's not. It doesn't really exist. As soon as it exists in mass, it's going to be a pain in the neck, it's going to be, and I and I will admit that I am very stingy about time Like, I don't want to waste a second on doing, on doing something extra for somebody else, doing that when I don't have to.

You know, like and so, and so the thing is, is that, and it will affect the user? Because when they can make it very hard to buy on on the Apple products, they will like. They will because they want to have all that direct relationship. I don't want to give them that information, I don't want to give them the tracking, I don't want to give them my email, I don't want to give them anything. I just want to buy the product and do the thing you know, and I think that that is as a user. I think people are not going to be very excited about it. If it ever becomes much more widely, I don't think. I think people are going to wish that we hadn't pulled that Pandora out of that box.

1:33:01 - Andy Ihnatko
I do think that that's a dogs and cats living together Armageddon sort of reaction to it as a net point. We just disagree with that.

1:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Well, I just gave disney plus all my money so I could watch without ads, and they'll probably keep me past. Antor, you know what really grinds my gears? I wanted to watch hamilton and the. There is no dvd of it.

1:33:24 - Andy Ihnatko
You have to watch it on disney plus yeah, broadway is one of the areas where, like I, my commitment to oh no, you shouldn't pirate stuff really faltering, because it's like Hamilton is different. But just the other day I was looking for a Broadway performance that has never obviously it was never put on streaming, never released on DVD, vhs or anything like that. But if not for the fact that somebody snuck a camera like an old school video camera in, we would have no idea what this staging was actually like. So it's like how can I be like, oh, I can't believe that you disrespected the stage and the sanctity of the arch, but thank you very much for recording that and posting this.

1:34:13 - Leo Laporte
I paid enough for hamilton tickets on broadway that I think I deserve a pirated copy of hamilton.

1:34:19 - Andy Ihnatko
But no, I'm I wouldn't do that because I think yeah, and I think it's terrible because at some point hamilton, at some point the disney channel's disney plus's recording of hamilton is going to be in the public domain. Yeah, none of us will live to see it.

1:34:32 - Leo Laporte
I'll be dead, but okay sure.

1:34:34 - Andy Ihnatko
But how does that work when it was only ever distributed via DRM-controlled streaming? Yeah, if it was released on Bluetooth or DVD, or even, just like the original Star Wars movies, if they were released on 35mm prints. If someone said, well, guess what, we're not going to give them to you, I thought, well, well, that's great. We just bought a print of this on ebay and now 300 of us are getting together to remaster it in 4k. What happens in 100 years from now, when a lot, so many of these movies never were taken, were never was released outside of the original producer's control? How are we going to actually be able to enjoy our, how our great-grandchildren are going to be able to enjoy hamilton, even though they're in tight? They own it and they're entitled to watch it.

1:35:19 - Leo Laporte
So that's why that's why I'll tell them about it, I'll dandle them in my little knee and I'll say boys, once upon a time your great-grandpappy went to a place called Broadway in the now flooded New York City Zone and saw a show about a founding father in hip-hop. That was the kind of music we liked to listen to back then. Uh, we are going to take a little break. And then, oh, wait a minute. No, I can't, because first I have an announcement to make. Jason Snell is sleeping with his Apple Watch. It's true.

1:35:55 - Jason Snell
It's true, it's like sleeping with the enemy.

1:35:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm sleeping with the Apple. Watch my God man, I thought that headline was a reference to sleeping with the enemy. I didn't want to put that forward.

1:36:06 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you very much, absolutely, this is in honor of its 10th anniversary, you decided to go to bed with it.

1:36:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah. So the thing is, apple wants us to all sleep with the Apple Watch. Now that's what it wants. The Vitals app doesn't work unless you sleep with the Apple Watch. The sleep apnea detection does not work unless you sleep with the Apple Watch. They want you to use it. They've got all these features to tell you when to go to sleep, and then it taps you instead of making a noise when you get your alarm in the morning. That's actually a really nice feature. So I decided to change everything, and my point is that I didn't see much of a benefit from it. Like, the vital zap tells me things that I don't consider actionable. Oh, you're feeling sick. Well, it turns out you also are sick. Great, thank you.

1:36:47 - Leo Laporte
Are you sleepy? Because you didn't sleep well last night.

1:36:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I can look and see how long I was awake in the middle of the night, but I'm not sure that helps If I had a sleep disorder. Sure, I passed the sleep apnea detection.

1:37:00 - Leo Laporte
Me too.

1:37:00 - Jason Snell
Me too, I was very happy about that, I was amused by the fact that, once the pollen starts to kick in, my breathing disturbances are.

1:37:18 - Leo Laporte
The new Aura Ring, and it's basically the same information the Apple Watch gives me. This is what a sleep tracker does. You're not saying it's worse than other sleep trackers.

1:37:28 - Jason Snell
No, I'm literally saying Apple has done all these things except their software update, which still wants you to have it on the charger overnight. But I'm not supposed to do that. What is it with the program Apple?

1:37:38 - Leo Laporte
It is a pain to wear it all night, because then you have to charge it like you charge it when you take a shower. But that's not enough and I don't.

1:37:45 - Jason Snell
I don't like the idea that I don't have a normal charging time anymore because I'm wearing it, because it used to be, I would take it off and go to bed, and now I have to wear it.

so, um, you know my my point with the calm was basically like, okay, I tried this and I personally don't see why I would bother. It's interesting data, but it's empty data. And I guess that goes to a larger story with a lot of the Apple health data, which is, we're compiling lots and lots of data but very little of it seems to be relevant or actionable, and maybe you just wait around until that moment where something happens and then you say, aha, let's look at the data. But for me, like the, the only real benefit of the whole thing was that I really love the silent alarms. I think that's such a good feature that it taps you on the wrist instead of making a noise.

That's that's great, but all the other things where they're like you really need to do this. You know, wear it overnight. You know, my report is it? You know, I, I don't see that I'm getting much benefit from this disruption. And then I have the additional mental overhead of when am I going to charge this thing? Now it does, to be fair, it does actually tap you at the end of the night and says you need to charge me before you go to go to sleep, which is nice um and and uh. And my colleague, shelly brisbane, wrote a piece about how she has a bunch of sleep issues and sleep apnea and she finds it she finds that data to be useful and that's great.

I wasn't saying nobody. I was saying I went through the process of Apple finally breaking me down and saying, all right, I will change everything about how I wear my Apple watch because I, because you get the vitals app and the sleep apnea detection and all of those things. What did it get me over the last nine months? And the answer is kind of nothing other than knowing that I passed the sleep apnea test. So that's where we are. I decided after all this time I never really reviewed the Series 10 short review. I like it, it's great. I mean, it's thinner and it's nice and that's great. But the sleep thing I was like, okay, what did it get me? And I'm the sleep thing. I was like, okay, um, what did it get me? And and I'm not sure apple has provided enough actionable information to justify me changing my habits about how I wear it.

1:39:54 - Leo Laporte
So I wanted to get that down I think that's true of all sleep trackers, though I mean unless you got, unless you have a sleep issue.

1:40:00 - Jason Snell
If you have a sleep issue and you're trying to figure out why you have bad nights and good nights and all that, it's totally great. But as just a pure routine kind of thing, it didn't really do it for me.

1:40:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think that's going to be a lot different when Apple really does get its AI together and you can do things like, say, like ask, ask, slow-mo. I don't know why, but I would. I just completely crashed at three or four in the afternoon today and that was. Can you think of any reasons why I might have like just needed to go take a two-hour nap and then, based on all the data, including the sleep data, it can say not just, oh well, because you're up until 6 30 am streaming something and then you had to be up an hour later. But in addition, but in addition, well, here's your activity levels for the for the days before that. Here is like, if you have a food diary, a food calendar, uh, here is all the data that we collected. Yeah, there's something going on there.

1:40:51 - Leo Laporte
It's not just, you weren't just imagining it, and no, it wasn't just about the amount of sleep you got the night before it's always fun for me to fire up my iphone and pair with my aura ring and see what a crappy night's sleep I got and how I should probably just take it easy today.

1:41:11 - Alex Lindsay
It depends on you know.

1:41:12 - Leo Laporte
This is the same stuff as you get the watch though, right, jason? Total sleep, efficiency, restfulness, how much REM, how much deep sleep? I got a lot of deep sleep. That's good. Uh, latency, which means how long it took you to fall asleep. God, I got. It. Took me two and a half hours the other night to go to sleep. That is not good.

1:41:32 - Alex Lindsay
Two and a half hours go to sleep.

Yeah, yeah, I know well, I wouldn't have known that, except that I have it recorded right here, two hours and eight minutes, and I and I admit that, like I guess I've been doing this for as long as it's been there and paying attention to it and pay attention to when I have caffeine and when I eat and when I exercise and when I do all these other things, and at this point I mean if I, if I'm awake, more than five minutes of laying down, I know it's what's going on like.

1:42:02 - Leo Laporte
What's going on like like what happened here like and because this was stress.

1:42:05 - Alex Lindsay
I process my temperature. I mean like the temperature of the room. I process everything yeah, I have all that information, but I love it that the ring said, hey, it's gonna be all right but I will say that my but watching the data, my sleeping has, as I got focused on it has has gotten much better.

1:42:23 - Leo Laporte
There's some evidence that it makes people anxious about their sleeping and they're not, and that's not good. So I guess it really as you said Jason, it depends. Some people it's good, some people it's not good.

1:42:35 - Andy Ihnatko
When you gamify something, people get determined to win the game and that's not a good.

1:42:40 - Alex Lindsay
I did find that there's no way for me to sleep. As long as the thing is like, you will sleep. But I was like I can sleep six hours, like I cannot sleep longer than that, it said you should have more yeah it just says you'll wake up without an alarm at at uh.

If you go to bed at like nine, you'll go, you'll wake up at at uh five or whatever, and I'm like I will wake up at three, like you know, like so the the only the really good thing about the aura is it tells me that my physiological age is four years younger than my chronological age, so I'll take it.

1:43:13 - Leo Laporte
I'm really only you can still drink you're good, I can still, but I you know what most people know hey, if I have coffee at four in the afternoon, I'm not gonna have a good night's sleep. And then when you wake up the next day I didn't have a good night's sleep. You don't need a watch to tell you that, but I guess if you wanted to know more, I think for me.

1:43:30 - Alex Lindsay
I found out exactly when, which is two o'clock like.

1:43:33 - Leo Laporte
It's not like. Oh, you know what time you can.

1:43:35 - Alex Lindsay
You have to stop yeah, last coffee has to be before two o'clock and I'll have at right after the show, because it's my last coffee for the day, and then that's yeah that's it.

1:43:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, I think, jason, I agree with you, it just depends on some people. I, yeah, yeah, I find uh the watch useful to remind, to kind of gamify my exercise, like I really want to exercise every day, so stuff like that's everybody's, everybody's different.

1:43:59 - Jason Snell
I just, I was struck by apple going seemingly all in on the idea that the apple watch should be worn around the clock other than when charging. Yeah, and so I. You know, this is the business that we're in, right, so I'm like, all right, let's try it. I like I can't. I, I need to try it, and so I did. And while I find value in other things the Apple watch provides, you know, I think, unless you are concerned about sleep apnea, unless you and you've got a model that supports that, or are dealing with a sleep issue, whether it's constant or or kind of random, I, I, I question whether you need to really adapt to this. And Apple, you know I get that Apple benefits from sampling you when your body is kind of like at rest and yeah, I can do all of those things.

But again, and if and this is my other point is if I got a bunch of things on my, on my phone that said we've learned things about you like there are rumors about where they're going to do more processing of this data where I learned some important things about my sleep and how it changes based on other aspects of my life, like how much I exercise or how much I drink or whatever. I would find that interesting. But collecting months of you know you woke up at 2 am for 10 minutes does nothing for me.

1:45:20 - Leo Laporte
It just nothing for me I have to say apple did gain something out of this.

So because I went out and got a special forever chemicals band so that I would sleep with this on comfortably nice, that's okay, because my doctor said that I have a micro plastic deficiency, so that actually I need more micro plastics in my sleep, um, and it actually is a very comfortable band, but the problem is, I also have an ultra, which is it really problematic if you reach out and clonk your wife on the head with? So, by accident, by accident, honey, by accident, watch did not record that, although it did say did you just take a fall? Uh, all right, I'm glad you're sleeping with your watch. You're not anymore, though. Right, you stopped sleeping, your when did you stop sleeping?

1:46:04 - Alex Lindsay
I did last night, but we'll see how long that continues I, I find I have a, since I have a show every morning. I just that's, that's my time to like. It sits right next to here, so I just like take my watch off.

1:46:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you don't need to watch during the show. Yeah that makes sense yeah, yeah, let's put that. Are you wearing it?

1:46:19 - Alex Lindsay
now, though, you're wearing it now I have a show every morning at seven o'clock oh, you charge it in the early. I just started during during uh well, during office hours like that's my, that's my charge time and the watch does charge pretty quick.

1:46:32 - Leo Laporte
An hour of charge is usually enough to get through the day it's phil.

1:46:35 - Alex Lindsay
It tops it off because it's it's our it's.

1:46:37 - Leo Laporte
I can go two days on my watch without uh charging, right uh, we're gonna take a break and come back with your picks of the week. Uh, folks, so get those ready. And uh, while we're pausing, I do want to mention Club TWiT to our dear friends. Uh, this is a very important part of how we stay alive. Two ads on the show, that's great. We love our advertisers. They really help, but they don't they only.

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1:50:37 - Jason Snell
hey, I, uh, I am a an e-reader fan and I write about it a lot and I have a big stack of e-readers. I buy them, I try them, I review them, I do all of that. And there was some news, there was a software update a couple months ago. I thought I would just do a really quick e-reader pick. If you're looking for an e-reader Now, my e-reader of choice is the Kobo Libbra color, which is previously a uh, a leo pick. I love it. It's really good. Um, kobo, good platform. Uh, it's not amazon. Uh, that's one of the things I like about it.

The stylus too, the color screen is not as good as the black and white screen is. It's a little bit less contrasty, but the processor so I mean I, I ended up switching to this from the leaper 2 because it's so much more responsive, like in the ui, it just is. They. They've upgraded the processor on it and so you know whether it's turning pages or going to the menu. Everything just is not as sluggish, and so that's enough for me to switch. Really good, um, and yes, it does color for highlights and all that. I I kind of don't care about the color, but some people do and it does have pen support. 229. However, I have been down on Amazon's e-readers for a while because they have gotten rid of all of their e-readers with buttons, and I love the physical button because I really love being able to just hold my e-reader with my finger on the button, my thumb on the button, and then all I do is squeeze that button every time I want to turn the page button. And then all I do is squeeze that button every time I want to turn the page, whereas with a pure touch screen you have to re, you have to change your grip and move a finger over, and now it's covering the text, so you can't leave it there and then you tap and then you move it back and I just, I think it's not as nice. I think it's not as nice. Well, good news. So I'm going to also recommend if you want to be in the kindle lifestyle but you agree with me about buttons For $199, not the cheapest Kindle.

This is the Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition, and there are a couple of important things I need to mention about the Signature Edition. Signature Edition it doesn't have ads on it Like the one. The cheaper one has ads and then you can pay $30 to get the ads to disappear. This version there's no ads on it and it's got hardware in it that is not in the regular non-signature edition, like a light meter, so you can set it to auto adjust the brightness based on how bright the room is that you're in.

And it has an accelerometer, and one of the great things about that accelerometer is a new feature, unlocked by a software update, like a month ago, which is this If you hold this thing, it has no buttons, except for the power button on the bottom, but if you hold this thing and you double tap it on the side of the back, it changes the page. It changes the page so you can actually hold this thing and not change your grip and go and it changes the page, like on the side with that's on the back with your finger, and it will turn the page. Does it go backward and forward?

1:53:23 - Leo Laporte
no, it only goes forward if you want to go backward.

1:53:26 - Jason Snell
You got it, you got it but you but I was. I was actually on a podcast a couple weeks ago. We were saying why couldn't you just use your accelerometer and and sense? A tap and somebody said Amazon literally did that. Like two weeks ago they did a software update that enables this feature. So if you want to stay in the Kindle ecosystem, you're looking for a new e-reader. Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition is what I recommend.

1:53:46 - Leo Laporte
It is a really good screen, right.

1:53:48 - Jason Snell
I think it's probably the best screen out there, yeah because this is the black and white screen and so it is high contrast, high resolution. It's really nice. Amazon's improved their software a lot. I switched to Kobo primarily because the Kindle software was so bad and then they have since made it a lot nicer and there are good things about it and there are good things about the Kobo. I like them both. I prefer the Kobo still. I like that it's got a little wide spot where you can hold onto it. That's grippy, and I love that it's got buttons. But if you want to stay in the Kindle ecosystem, you can do that too. And I think the Signature Edition is actually the sweet spot. I know it's 200 bucks, but you get the light sensor, you get the accelerometer, which means you get the double tap to forward and no ads. It's a nice and a great screen. So those are my recommendations.

1:54:33 - Leo Laporte
And admittedly, the Kobo comes from Rakuten, which is probably as bad as Amazon.

1:54:39 - Jason Snell
I mean, yeah, maybe. So I mean, the people at kobo are very nice Canadians who I love readers, and that's all the other thing it supports libraries.

1:54:49 - Leo Laporte
So uh, I don't know if amazon does that. I suspect they do.

1:54:53 - Jason Snell
They okay it does in a weird. So amazon, if you check out a book from the library, you basically click through to amazon.com and then say send it to my kindle, whereas with uh you you actually log in with a kobo to your library using overdrive and when you check out a book it just shows up on your kobo. So it's sort of like you know it's. It's either do you want it to all be natively on your kobo or do you want to just use amazon.com's web interface to send you a book. They're very similar, used to be much more complex, but now it's it.

1:55:21 - Leo Laporte
Both of them work pretty well yeah, that's nice and this is the color. It's not. As you can see, it's not very saturated. Uh, it's kind of um. Let me go the other way yeah, I mean it's fine, buttons it's. I wouldn't buy it just for the color. Let's put it that way.

1:55:37 - Jason Snell
The other thing oh, there you go there's no, but it is state-of-the-art and the processor's fast and it's fast you can see the page refreshes and if you're a, highlighter.

1:55:44 - Leo Laporte
You do get multiple highlight colors, which is kind of fun, yeah so you see, I keep my pen attached because I, I do, I, I make, take notes and so forth. I have to say I went out and I got the uh, the first kindle scribe, which is this giant, ginormous, uh, huge kindle and for big it's good, and it also has a pen so you could take notes and stuff. Uh, they say they've got the. The new scribe is even, uh, even better, but I don't know, I uh, I like a little thing I can hold. This is, this is kind of hard to hold in your hand. One-handed reading it's good, one-handed is the thing.

1:56:20 - Leo Laporte & Alex Lindsay
Thank you, Jason, thank, thank you, Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week I keep on thinking I'm going to take notes, but I can't read my own writing anymore. I look down, just talk to perplexity and tell it I wrote down something I wrote the other day and I was like I don't know what I just wrote there. I just got to go back to typing it's scribble. I'm a little obsessed with food supply, I will admit, just because I think it's. I grew up on a farm.

1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
And you know, what, like you, I eat every day, now, every day.

1:56:55 - Alex Lindsay
Every day. I haven't moved that far. I haven't gone that far. You know, I'm working on air most days and then I break down every couple of days and go and go. Well, I'll go back a little bit, um, but there's a. There's a great uh thing on amazon prime actually uh called uh common ground and it is. They collected a bunch of actors and a bunch of scientists and a bunch of folks and shot a really uh good video on just understanding a little bit more about how things are grown and where we're so out of touch with our food supply, aren't we?

1:57:23 - Leo Laporte
you grew up on a farm, so I think you understand it. But yeah, most of us.

1:57:27 - Alex Lindsay
It just shows up in packages at the grocery store and we don't you know, I think that when you're spreading growing up, when you're spreading things that have skull and crossbones on it, on your, on the food, you know like you go, but you started. I started thinking about it back then. And so this is really talking about regenerative farming and and not having to. We might not need all the inputs that they tell us we need, so and those, those inputs might be showing up everywhere. You know, glyphosate is a really big deal.

1:57:57 - Leo Laporte
I know I see my neighbors using Roundup and I go.

1:58:01 - Alex Lindsay
I won't be. It's like. I mean it's worse than smoking, Like it's. You know glyphosate is a big, you know it's banned everywhere but the U?

1:58:10 - Leo Laporte
S. So that's a. You know, you're lucky, you can still use it here.

1:58:13 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so so the the um, so anyway. So I think that understanding what those things are and understanding you know where our food supply comes from. I think everyone should always pay attention and then just decide what they want to do after that.

1:58:25 - Leo Laporte
Common Ground. It's on Amazon Prime and it's free if you have a Prime account For people who eat and, mr Andy Anako, you're our last pick of the week. What you got, Andy?

1:58:40 - Andy Ihnatko
It is the first Saturday of May, may coming up this week, and that means it is free comic book day. Yay, this is like an annual event where not just comic book shops but also a lot of libraries will have like free comics so you can just come in and pick up. Uh, most of the major publishers the publishers, the star wars, marvel comics, a bunch of others actually produce special comics that these shops can buy for like 20 cents, 30 cents each, for the purpose of bringing new people into the fold of comics and because they kind of see it as kind of a big deal. It's not just oh well, there's the table that has the free comics. There's a limit of three per person. Whatever, you can't use the bathroom.

Oftentimes they'll make it a big event where they will have all kinds of other stock that's on deep sale. If there's a comic book artist that's kind of local or a writer who's local, they might come in and do a signing and do sketches and stuff like that. And once again, although it does cost money for the shops to operate, so that's a hint that maybe if you want to browse and run their store and pick up a couple of things and actually buy things in addition to the free comics. That would be swell. It's quite a thing, it's quite a deal, and so if you go to freecomicbookday.com, it will show you some of the three dozen titles that are being offered this year, this year, as well as a location finder. You can find the shop or library or whatever nearest to you that's actually holding the event.

Like I said, it's a it's a pretty fun day, uh, and looks like the weather might be pretty okay anyway. So if you have any excuse to get out on a Saturday and again pick up some star wars comics, that's pretty good. The other point of this is that a lot of the publishers understand that the people coming in for free comic book day are likely to be people who have never stepped into a comic book shop in their lives or maybe never read a comic. So most of the stuff it's not like tuning in to 18 years into a soap opera. They put out a lot of comics that are designed to be one and done like easy onboarding stories that give you a good, satisfying experience. So go to free comic book daycom and find out with if there's a hootenanny happening nearly pick up a copy of Post Malone's Big Rig.

2:00:59 - Leo Laporte
I guess he's got a comic. Okay, that's great. Free comic book day this. Do you get to choose the comic?

2:01:07 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, uh, not not all comic book shops will have like all of these 36 uh, and sometimes they try to marshal out uh them to make sure that, like they actually last throughout the day. Once again, this just because it's free to the customers does not mean that the comic book shops don't have to pay for them. Again, it's not a lot of money, it's like $0.20, $0.30 a copy, but still most shops will pay like $80 or $90 or $100 to participate.

So, they have a good reason to make sure that if there's someone like me who just wants to take everything and just take them home maybe I'm not the sort of person that free comic book day was designed to to to reach out to so they might say, yeah, if you, if, if you, if, if. If you use a hand, if you use the handrail when you go up and down stairs, you're not allowed to take more than two comics.

2:02:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the amazing Spider-Man will be, uh, participating incursion. The new ultimate universe's first ever event series ultimate uh, lots of great stuff. Comic book day free. Comic book day is it free? Comic book daycom free comic book daycom it's.

2:02:18 - Andy Ihnatko
it has a. It's been going around for about 20 years, as a matter of fact. It I think when the first Spider-Man movie came out ages ago, when Fox put out the first Spider-Man movie because it was going to be a big weekend for comic books, they said oh you know what, what if we use that as a way for people who just went out to see the film on the opening weekend, maybe they're interested in comics. They'd be interested in coming in and reading more about the old friendly neighborhood when web Slinger and they'd be doing every year since Nice.

2:02:46 - Leo Laporte
I did not realize that the comic book stores pay for the comics. I feel kind of bad now about I'm going to pay them back. Thank, you Andy. Thank you All of you. We appreciate your presence on this show. Every Tuesday next week, steven Robles fills in for, uh, mr Jason Snell. Happy birthday to mom Jason. Yeah, jason Snell is at sixcolors.com as podcasts, or at sixcolors.com slash Jason and uh. And now Mike Hurley is back on upgrade. How exciting, it's very nice, exciting, uh, that's, that's, that's uh, that's your, uh, your tech show with.

2:03:23 - Jason Snell
That's the big, that's the big tech show. And then, uh, just for people who care, last week's episode of the incomparable my pop culture show we hacked into the net. In that we went back to 30 years ago, uh, 1995, and watched hackers. Oh, and the net two movies in which computers are proven to be dangerous for society, but only one has robert redford.

So you, you choose neither of them has robert redford. That's sneakers and actually good movie. Oh, you're right, that's the only good one. Okay, yeah, the hackers. I you know I had never seen hackers before and I've seen the net, because Mac world expo is in the net and there's a Mac user magazine bag in it.

2:04:07 - Leo Laporte
And it's amazing. And I was at that event. So it's like that's the Sandra Bullock one. Yeah.

2:04:12 - Jason Snell
The name of the company's on it. That's not a good movie, but it's. For Angelina Jolie, Johnny Lee Miller, it is delightful. It knows how ridiculous it is, whereas the net does not know how ridiculous it is. So if you're a fan of those, you can listen to us talk about those silly movies from 30 years ago.

2:04:32 - Leo Laporte
I will have to watch them both and then listen.

2:04:35 - Jason Snell
The Incomparable Mothership, yeah 1995 was a real banner year for crazy movies about the internet. And we're actually going to do what are we going to do? Strange Days next, oh wow, that's a good movie about the internet from 1995. In 1995, Hollywood realized the internet it's scary and new and let's do a thing about it. So they did many things about it.

2:04:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Hackers has one of my favorite nerd but really bad nerd lines from someone who does not know technology where they show someone's showing off their new laptop to Angelina Jolie say, oh, and it has more r a, m, r a m, yeah, okay Michael Stipe is in there.

2:05:15 - Jason Snell
Uh also I would say, uh, lots of macs. Both these movies are just full. This is from the period where apple was falling apart and about to go out of business, but they spent so much money getting Macs into places where they did not belong in movies, like movies about computer hackers, where they all use Macs. So that is delightful. So much beige, so much light gray, mid-90s Apple Macs, yeah, anyway, so we did the Incomparable Mothership double feature. Hackers in the Net.

2:05:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, now I want to see it, maybe tonight the Hackers, hackers, hackers. Tonight it's ridiculous.

2:05:52 - Jason Snell
I had a lot of fun watching Hackers. It's just ludicrous and fun.

2:05:56 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, jason. Thank you, Andy. Nothing to report here on Ihnatko.com at this point, but you can follow him at Blue Sky and he will let you know.

2:06:06 - Jason Snell
He's doing it. He's doing it in secret.

2:06:09 - Leo Laporte
He's doing it. I'm getting emails. I'm filling it with content Closer to the surface.

2:06:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it's happening.

2:06:15 - Andy Ihnatko
The super secret, super tight alpha group is about to expand into the slightly broader beta group Nice. Nice, nice, nice nice, we're getting there.

2:06:25 - Leo Laporte
I-H-N-A-T-K-O.

2:06:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I want to make sure there's stuff for people to see when I open the doors.

2:06:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know it's completely legit. I understand that. And, of course, Mr Alex Lindsay, officehours.global, you're always there every morning Every morning and I was on.

2:06:38 - Alex Lindsay
I got interviewed over the weekend. Some folks from Office Hours have their own show called the Last Angry DJ, and so we talked about radio. So radio and process and what it was like in the music business in the late 80s and early 90s when I was in radio, and so it was a fun conversation. So if you want to listen to me tell stories, I probably shouldn't have told Last Angry DJ. I told a couple stories. I almost went back and said, hey, I think we should cut this, this and this, and I decided Good, good.

Let it all hang out. Alex, let some of it hang out. I was a crazy time, that's all I got to say. Music director, as a 21-year-old, you do a lot of crazy things.

2:07:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you were a kid.

2:07:25 - Alex Lindsay
You're not responsible. You can't be held responsible. You turn 21, and then you never have to pay for a drink. That's all I got to say. If you're a music director, if you're a music director for an R&R Parallel, I'm just saying that you don't have to pay for drinks.

2:07:38 - Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay's on the last Angry DJ, episode 61 on YouTube. There you are. There, you are All right. Thank you, gentlemen. Thanks to everybody who joins us. We do MacBreak Weekly Tuesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm. Eastern Time, 1800 UTC. You can watch us.

We're back on TikTok. It worked right, we got TikTok. I have a little machine over here in the corner that's running TikTok all by itself, an entire Dell PowerEdge server and all it's doing is running TikTok Just so we can stream that. It's on Discord for the club members YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. You can watch us live if you wish. If you do watch live, you can at least chat with us live, and I pay attention to the chat room during the show, so it's great to see all of you in there.

After the fact, download shows audio or video from our website, twit.tv/mbw. When you're there, you'll see a link to a Youtube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly great way to share clips with friends and family and turn them all into things. And, of course, the best way to get it is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You could choose from audio or video or both, and then you'll have it ready to listen to whenever you're in the mood for a little MacBreak Weekly. Should I buy or rent Hackers? It's $15 to buy, only $4 to rent.

2:09:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Less money, the better. If you can, if you, if you can just sort of like get somebody to watch it for you and then just like FaceTime their screen, there you go.

2:09:16 - Leo Laporte
There you go. That in other words, worth pirating, or not In theory.

2:09:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I should say, let's put it this way Worth going on eBay to find it for like $1.25.

2:09:29 - Leo Laporte
There you go. I can go down to the old video store down here. They're selling VHS cassettes for cheap. Maybe they'll have it.

2:09:35 - Andy Ihnatko
There you go.

2:09:37 - Leo Laporte
It's right about that era. Thank you everybody for being here, Thanks to our club members for making it all possible, and we will see you next time. But now I am sorry to say it's my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work, because break time is over, bye-bye.

2:09:51 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, focus up. That is what I said to Hands-On Tech when we looked at the relaunch. It is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question. I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club TWiT, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad-free, of course, listen to the audio version ad-free. If you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean, listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you got to tune in to Hands-On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to, and from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort. You gotta check out Hands-On Tech and I can't wait to get your question.