MacBreak Weekly 971 Transcript

Please be advised that 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.
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for MacBreak Weekly Andy Anacos here. Alex Lindsey filling in for Jason Snell, the bearded tutor, stephen Robles himself. We will talk about the judge yelling I say yelling at Apple for their malicious compliance. And already apps are flooding into the App Store with little buy us buy here buy buttons. We'll also talk about Apple's quarterly results. They were good, but the future may not be so good. We'll talk about that too. Next on MacBreak Weekly Podcasts you love.

00:33 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 971, recorded Tuesday, may 6th 2025. Cook chose poorly. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news, and there is quite a bit of Apple news Just quite a bit. That's all I have to say. Alex Lindsay is here from officehoursglobal. Hello, alex. Hey, good to be here. Good to see you. As always, you've been traveling. Where were you? You were in Israel.

01:10 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Oh, that was a long time ago.

01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it was a long time ago.

01:12 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that was maybe a decade ago.

01:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where were you recently? Anywhere.

01:17 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Your backyard. I have been mostly In the backyard. Yeah, I was in Carpinteria a couple weeks ago.

01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that counts.

01:25 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That was new for me. It's a beautiful city, really really cool. But that's about as far as I've gone.

01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Andy Anotko also here. He's been to the library and back. Hello, Andrew.

01:33 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Hey there, hi there, ho there. I just did my good deed for Libraries and Star Wars Day and it's a short story but I'm very proud. And it's just happened. Somebody took all nine episodes of the feature Star Wars Blu-rays off of the shelf and put them into, like the library book sales section Okay, I think, with an eye towards saying, oh look, a dollar each for the Blu-ray of A New Hope and everything Sucks.

02:00
And I took them right to the desk and said I bet these aren't supposed to be here. But if they're supposed to be here, here's $10. Keep the change, I'll buy them.

02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they were puzzled.

02:09 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
They were hurt. I don't know who did that or why, but thank you so very much. She actually said on behalf of the library thank you very much. And I felt 10 feet tall that day.

02:21 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
On behalf of the state of Massachusetts.

02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually he's in rhode island, which isn't even you know what. When you get rhode island on your side, you got something I don't know what. Uh, and also here mr stephen roble's filling in, as we know, uh, jason snell is off celebrating the birthday of his mama, so stephen has kindly agreed to join us of the primary tech show, the bearded tutor himself.

02:48 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Ladies and gentlemen, pleasure to be here.

02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks for having me again good to see you yes, very good so it was hard for me to decide what to put on the top. Today. We have apple results, we have an apple executive movement, we have Stephen's excellent piece on Siri versus perplexity, but I guess I should really talk about the judge blasting Apple for lying on the stand. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the US District Court in Northern California said Apple violated an injunction the court issued in this epic versus apple case. Uh, the ju. They won the case pretty much, except for that one thing where the judge said apple, you got to let app developers offer methods of making purchases outside of the app store. Yeah, apple did that malicious compliance thing. It does so well.

03:43
She wrote apple, despite knowing its obligations there, under, thwarted the injunctions goals and continued its anti-competitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. Remember the apple decided to oppose a 27 commission yeah, instead of 30 in off-app purchases. And and in her ruling the judge said Alex Roman, who I'm not familiar with, but he's VP Finance quote. This is the judge outright lied under oath. She said that Cook sided with his finance team instead of another Apple executive, phil Schiller, who advocated that Apple comply with the injunction. She wrote Cook chose poorly, yes, the nicest three-word sentence executive, phil Schiller, who advocated that Apple comply with the injection she wrote cook chose poorly. Yes, the nicest three word sentence ever.

04:32 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I mean, like you gotta read this entire ruling because she was very, very esteemed and was not like this is. This was not. This is not a negotiation. This is a ruling which you have to comply with. And like it was it was it felt like every time as a kid when your parents were so angry with you that they were talking calmly and said so because you didn't want to ride the bus. You then thought I know, they're the keys to dad's car. I'll just take the keys and drive myself to the movies, even though I'm 14 years old and don't even have a learner's permit. Following that, it was on and on and on again.

05:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Judge Rogers has referred the situation to the US Attorney's Office in San Francisco for criminal contempt proceedings. Apple, meanwhile, immediately appealed. Apple said no way. However, everybody else jumped. Epic game says fortnight's going back, baby, and amazon has already put a buy, buy it now button on its kindle app. Yeah, so uh, you know, this is I mean absolutely. Uh. Yeah, this is what the judge ordered.

05:45 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
And let's just be super clear. Like this wasn't a oh well gosh, he said something, alex, he said something that was turned out not to be totally true. It's like in the actual testimony. You knew that he was cooked because Epic's lawyer said wait a minute. You're saying that the decision to charge 27% for any transactions that follow from following a link or a button out of the app store, you decided it on this day and not before.

06:12
Like he asked for clarification and so when Epic decided to sue, saying look, you're doing malicious compliance, you're not complying with the order, they got access to a whole bunch of Apple internal communications in which, yeah, it turns out that they've been discussing this for months and months and months, first under Project Michigan and then under Project Wisconsin, and they had decided on that figure, not, as he testified, that well, we hired an outside consultant to decide what that percentage should be, should be like, and that's why we decided to heed the advice of this outside consultants, whereas all of the stuff that got through discovery was yeah, we literally made the decision that we want to make this as painful as possible so that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to encourage a developer to not do in-app purchases. It was like bam bam, bam, bam bam. Every point of this Apple was dead to rights and Judge was not amused.

07:07 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
And I have to say, as a lawyer's son, it is idiotic to have these conversations over email. Yes, like, what are you doing? Like? The dumbest part of this whole thing to me was like, why are you having these conversations in writing? You idiot. Like, why are you having these conversations in writing? You idiot, you know like. You know, like. You know, like. You know, if you're going to have a conversation like this, if he goes to jail or if he has to get fined or whatever he deserves it, just for them being stupid, like it is, this is, this is an unforced error in their entire process of like.

07:39
And you know, this is the reason I joke oftentimes that that a lot of representatives don't use email. One of the big reasons they don't use email is because they don't want to have any any trail, right, you know, like, they just don't want to have written. They're all lawyers and they, and most lawyers know, don't say anything. Every email like the thing that's going to be hilarious when we talk about this five years from now. You know all those little AI transcripts that are working for you.

08:02
Those are actually subpoena. You can be subpoenaed, you know, and like did you have any of those? And submit all of those as well, and so so the thing like that people doing that is also crazy. But the fact that they did they had the they started talking about strategy over email is insane. Like, especially after they have already been sued once. At some point you go, oh, I lost some data on my drive, maybe I should never do that again. And then you just started saving stuff to your driving, like, oh, I'm not going to back that up, I'm just going to throw it on. But it was like they learned nothing from this.

08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope Apple loses on appeal, because this is obviously the way it should be. Here's what, uh this. This is from Jeopardy contestant Dan Morin. Writing in sixcolorscom. I didn't see the show yet, Don't tell me yes tomorrow.

08:47
Yeah, was it tomorrow? I thought it was yesterday. Is it tomorrow? I thought it was the 7th, but I couldn't remember. It's the 7th, maybe. Okay, good, so future Jeopardy. Contestant Dan has the screenshot from the Kindle app. Also have a get book button, but they also include apple. He writes it apple's now prohibited scare screen, yep, uh, which they could get rid of. You know, and probably uh should. So it's only a matter of time before everybody does this. Maybe there's some nervousness that the on appeal that it'll be reversed. I can't't imagine it will. On appeal.

09:24 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
What's wild is this was from a court case in 2021.

09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it took Epic forever yeah.

09:30 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Well, and it's taken Apple forever to actually comply. You know, because they've now had four years to make the changes that the judge ordered and that's why she's so mad, because they took four years to deliberate this and chose the most malicious compliance option possible. And, if listeners and viewers aren't aware, this was strictly just to allow developers to link out for customers to purchase subscriptions outside of an app, outside of Apple's tax, and Apple literally won everything else from that Epic case. You know Epic wanted a game. You know third-party game stores in the app store, like they now have in the EU because of digital markets act, and apple won so much of that case, except for this one thing anti-steering, allow developers to link out to the web.

10:12
And because apple chose to really not comply, now it's on them. And now there's lots of apps even like patreon jumped on this which they were going to redo their entire payment system. But now that they can link out in the Patreon app so people can support creators that way, they're going to redo their whole app and take advantage of this. They don't know how long it'll last, but I don't think that you could put the genie back in the bottle.

10:35 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think that that's what they're trying to do. Everyone's trying to make sure that they provide a bunch of services to show people what they'd be missing out on if they. If this goes back in, because the reality is is that I, while she's very upset, the judge is not totally accurate. So they did what she said. They just didn't do it the way she wanted to. She. If the by the letter of the law. She said you have to give people access. She didn't say how to give them access.

10:59
And while she can talk about malicious content until you prescribe exactly what they need to do, you. There's a lot of there's a lot of openness there about what they can and can't do. So you know there's you know. So the thing is is, they did what was what she told them to do, she. They just didn't do it the way she wanted them to do it, and so she's upset about that and she's going to write a long letter, but it's going to go to the court of appeals and I would give it 50, 50. And and I think that, but I do think that there's a relatively good chance that the court of appeals would um is going to. I think it's probably 70% that the court of appeals will file an injunction that will stop anything from happening until it gets to the Supreme court. But given the past Supreme court rulings, the chances of of Apple succeeding are actually probably not. They'll They'll buy time, but they're not going to.

11:46 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
They, you know, at this point they're probably going to lose this one, you know and so but just quick, quick note they've also they've already Apple already tried to appeal this to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said, no, we're not interested. That's after losing their first appeal, so I don't think preemptively.

12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Both Apple and Epic ran it up the flagpole and were turned down.

12:05 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Two different things, though. The first time that they took it to the Supreme Court, they said we should strike this all down. The second time, this is, we did what we were told to do, we followed it, and now we're being told we have to do more, but we weren't prescribed that explicitly in the first ruling, so the two cases are very different. As they go to the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court looks at just the case that it's in front of them now, the question is did Apple buy the letter of the law? Maybe not the spirit of the law, and spirit doesn't exist, like you know. It's like you know. It's like it doesn't really exist.

12:40
That makes all the letters. So they followed the letter. They allowed apps to link out it. That makes all the letters. So they followed the letter. They allowed apps to link out. It didn't say they couldn't put other things into it or charge them or do it. It didn't that that wasn't prescribed in the initial ruling of what they can and can't do. Now she could rule again and say you can and can't do all these things, but to say that they are in contempt of court for not doing it, I think that is. I think that's a. That's a much weaker case than saying then just going ahead and prescribing like hey, you got to turn all this other stuff off, it's, it's not, it's not a slam dunk.

13:09 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
However, and of course, speaking as an absolute legal expert, no, the, the, the, the, the. I spoke to a couple of attorneys who litigate stuff like this and they said that get after having read the ruling after, and read the original order, he, they, these two individuals felt as though the judge was very, very clear about what the corrective action needed to accomplish and the fact that it wasn't just oh well, we'll charge you 27%. It's also, we're going to put in all kinds of scare screens to make sure the user will be too scared to actually enable this. We're going to make sure that the people, the developers who take advantage of this, will have to not only track usage of that button, purchases that happen through that button, but they're going to have to track it for seven days afterward. Any person who buys something from this external store within seven days after clicking the button is owed. 27% is owed back to Apple. Bam, bam, bam, bam bam.

14:09
And also the internal communications, as you said, is really hard for a judge to ignore that they were actively discussing.

14:19
They stopped just short of saying how can we absolutely screw everybody except for ourselves, saying how can we absolutely screw everybody except for ourselves? How can we choose an option in which the least of what the judge is telling us to do is actually done and that nobody, but nobody no developer and no user will avail themselves of this poisonous tart of turds that we have decided? We have built inside the app store to implement this? So that's why I agree this is not a slam dunk, but my understanding right now is that Apple has an enormous hill to climb to get over this. They have 90 days to comply and so, you're right, they could issue a stay of this.

14:57
It looks as though people are betting that, as you say, let's make sure that people see how good it is to be able to actually buy a book after that's being recommended in the Kindle app and be taken to a link to the Amazon store and buy it from there, and not have to deal with all that hassle and find out that, wow, apple has said that the entire world will come to an end if this is allowed and it turns out the sun still rises and sets.

15:23 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Well I think. I think I think the real problem for apple, though, is that is that the uh, as as it gets more complicated, uh to to buy things, because that's what's gonna this is gonna be more complicated for the user. To buy things. You can decide whether, how, whether that's oh, no, no good or bad, no way to click out of my app to buy something. It's absolutely more complicated for me. I mean, I do that all the time with apps. Right now, wait a minute.

15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's ridiculous, Alex. I have a Kindle app on my phone. I want to buy a book? No, no, no, I'm not talking about which is more complicated Clicking a buy now button in the app or exiting the app, going to the website buying the app, buying the book and then going back to the app to open the book that give me your email.

15:57 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Like I'm like, oh my gosh, you idiots, you know, like you know, and so like that.

16:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like all I want to do is click, buy, show my face and go back to what I was doing and the judge is very clear that apple is permanently I'm reading the text restraining and joined from prohibiting developers from including in their apps and their metadata buttons, external links or other calls to action. She didn't say anything about what the concept like, but you can't charge 27, but she did refer to california's uh anti-competitive law, which and said specifically you can't do something that's non-competitive, that's anti-competitive right.

16:37 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So so the the what I'm saying, though, is that is that what's going to the reason, what's at stake for apple is not just losing the revenue from those reason. What's at stake for Apple is not just losing the revenue from those apps. What's at stake for Apple is, as thing it is, when you're buying apps, having to do anything other than show your face is a higher friction experience, and as you increase that friction, it's not that people will just not. You know, apple doesn't just get that revenue, they just. The app store becomes less interesting.

17:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know like and I pay revenue. They just the app store becomes less, uh, less interesting.

17:09 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know like, and I pay 15 to 30 percent less on my, will you like, because we have we, we pay outside for hbo and they just keep increasing the price, like the idea that we're paying less. They're just gonna, we're gonna go outside, and then we'll just get paid.

17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're quite a few developers charge you a premium to buy.

17:22 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
They do, and they're gonna keep on increasing the price and evening it out. It's not, we're not really saving that much money. But the main thing is is that, as users and it doesn't matter whether the user's saving money or not, like, for instance, I I started looking after this ruling. I started looking at the apps that I've bought in the last whatever, and the, and the app purchase or my app download has dropped probably 80, 90% since subscriptions became a big deal. Because I'm just like man, I don't want to subscribe to anything. I definitely don't want to give you my email because I don't want to. If I'm really interested in your app, I'll give you my email because I want to know what's happening next. Buying it is not the part of the is not the time that I want to give you the ability to send me another email. And so the thing is is that, is that?

18:02
I think that what Apple, you know the, a lot of times, a lot of things that make something special, is a lot of ingredients. You know, like, if you take yeast out of out of a bread recipe, it's still bread, but it's really hard to make sandwiches with, you know, and the thing is is that, is that the um, and so the thing is is that when you increase the friction for people to purchase it, it's not just that they're going to. They may, they'll go to the app store less overall as you increase friction is. I spend a lot of time studying friction because it is a huge part of my business, and when you increase the friction, like when we start, when we ask someone for one more thing, we lose 20,. Every question is 25% throughput. Like you know, it is an incredible.

18:46
You know, friction is an incredibly powerful tool to slow people down from from adoption, and so it's really complicated and what I would say is that, you know, so Apple has a lot. Now I think that Apple may respond by allowing users which I'm hoping for to just simply, in our preferences for the store, just say these are the payment options I want to see. You know, like I just want to see and it may be five or six of them I want to see only free ones, only subscriptions, only in-app and only third party. It's not, it'll be, it won't be just third party, but it'll include third party, and you just flip that off and then you don't see any of those apps again.

19:19 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
So I just want to say this. So, going back to 27%, that Apple was charging for those outside payments. Apple argued in this case that it was because they provided value as the platform maker and like what you're saying, alex, is they believe they have value to developers for maybe increasing conversion or lowering friction. Well, I experienced that personally from the podcast side, because we offer a podcast subscription directly in Apple Podcasts and we offer it through Memberful, offer a podcast subscription directly in Apple Podcasts and we offer it through Memberful, and in the podcast app we have listeners that can very well click a link to Memberful, sign up with their email and credit card and support us that way, or use their Apple ID and payment system, and both in my current show and previous show, 2x, we have two times more people that sign up through Apple Podcasts directly because it's less friction, uses their card and they can manage it with the rest of their subscriptions, which, as a user, I would prefer. That too. I want all my subscriptions in one place, manage it all under one Apple ID, so when I get a new device, it's all there. I don't have to log into 50 different apps or 50 different accounts. So Apple does provide value.

20:23
I think they might have just miscalculated how much value they provide and that 27% was really just a number they picked out of thin air, like in a lot of the internal court documents. But the bottom line is I think Apple could compete. I've heard from a lot of independent developers that because of the international payments and just the ease of distributing via the app store, they would choose that anyway, even given the 15 or 30%. So if Apple really feels they provide the value, then actually compete and allow these links, not just because of court order, but allow someone to sign up outside or in the app and make that app store experience with your Apple ID and subscriptions so good that people prefer to do that rather than jump out.

20:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and meanwhile, the short I'm sorry we got to move on, okay. Meanwhile the short I'm sorry we got to move on, meanwhile. The short story is those buttons, those links are in and will remain in until the Ninth Circuit. Apple has appealed, the Ninth Circuit overturns it. Or the Supreme Court overturns it or they don't, and that will remain in and that's, I think it's. You know we can argue about the merits of it, but I think it's the right thing to do and that's, I think it's. You know we can argue about the merits of it, but I think it's the right thing to do. Let's take a break and when we come back we will have the Apple quarterly results. The quarterly results are good, but is the future very bright? We don't know yet. You're watching Mac break weekly, steven Robles filling it, is it, robles? How do you like me to say it, robles?

21:42 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You can say Robles.

21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Robles. You can say Robles Robles, stephen Robles of the Primary Tech Show Beardfm. You catch him on YouTube and his podcasts. It's great to have you Fill in for Jason Snell, but we will have Jason's colors. Six colors will be here, just not Jason himself Andy Anako, alex Lindsay and you so glad you're here. This episode of MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by ZocDoc.

22:06
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23:45
Back to the show. Let's talk about the quarterly results. I have Jason's pictures here, but I can give you the top line numbers 90 services revenue an all-time high and revenue of ninety four point ninety five point four billion. That's up five percent year over year. Uh, strong quarterly results, double digit growth and services. Tim cook said, quote we are happy to welcome iphone 16e to our lineup and to introduce powerful new macs and ipads that take advantage of the extraordinary capabilities of apple silicon. And we're proud to announce we've cut our carbon emissions by 60 over the past decade. Uh you want to look at, you want to look at pitch colors first before we, uh, we uh, weigh in chats, chats. It's always nice to have chats, the there.

24:39
You know apple's very spiky a quarterly revenue actually in every respect because of iphone sales. So this is uh q2, which means the iphone sales are, you know, kind of almost all happened in the previous quarter, so you're going to see a little bit of a drop all around profit. Not bad though. For three months, 24.8 billion dollars, that's, you know that's a good couple of billion a week. I'd take it. I'd take it. Uh, year over year revenue is that? Did I do my math right? Let's see there's 12 weeks, yeah, 2 billion a week. Year over year revenue up five percent. As I mentioned, iphone, not quite half of the total revenue. Look at that chunk of that purple chunk of services, though, holy cow, that's becoming more and more important to apple. Um, ipad revenue, you know, 6.4 billion. That's down from the previous quarter, but that's because there was well, there were some new ipads in this quarter, weren't there?

25:37 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
yeah, I think they mentioned the ipad pro 3, I think, with with each with each segment yeah, they. They also mentioned how, for instance, wearables. Those numbers are kind of weird because, yes, they're way down, but remember that this quarter last year we introduced the Vision Pro, so that's going to offset all this sort of stuff. You mentioned the spikiness of iPhone sales. There was a rumor this year via Minchi Kuo, in the information that Apple is going to cease Spread it out.

26:10
In the spring they'll introduce the iPhone, the mainstream iPhone plus the iPhone E model. In the fall they'll release the Pro models. And you've got to wonder if that's a desire or two. Let's make sure we keep that income kind of, rather than a count on, a big payday in September and October.

26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The one thing that's not spiky services, which is a very steady line of growth. A lot of that. So the cup. This is, by the way, why Apple's fighting for 27% in the app store. A lot of that comes from the app store, a lot of it comes from the app store.

26:50 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
A lot of it comes from Google. That $20 billion a year doesn't hurt, which that's at risk too. I mean Google's in revenues right now and that could stop. But there's a pie graph in Jason's Six Colors article that shows revenue by category. Iphone's still half, 49%. Service is 28%, but growing. But Apple would like for you to believe it's Apple TV Plus or maybe even iCloud Plus, but it's the App Store. You know it's games.

27:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the App Store plus Google, you know, but a quarter of it is Google. So I mean it is. It's not to be dismissed and they well may well lose that where the judge right now is pondering what remedies in the DOJ versus Google trial, which Google lost and the remedies are extreme, I don't. It's going to be a challenge for Google, whatever happens.

27:30 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
We should be reminded, too, that there's an open case that the Department of Justice has against Apple that's not even entered trial yet. That's about, you know, exclusivity with the Apple Watch, third-party digital wallets, like all of that, is also coming, and so, whatever Apple decides to do with the app store in this case, and what happens with Google, I mean, we can have a very different outlook.

27:51 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It was really. It was a really interesting the Q and A. I think that was the first time that someone, an analyst, offered a question about, like the quote, very ongoing, very high profile legal cases that touch on Apple, and that was one of those areas where Tim just had to waffle.

28:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, did they ask him about Siri.

28:10 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, they did. They asked him about Apple intelligence difficulty. I have a quote here. I'd like to go back to my question from the last call and ask what are some of the learnings you had from those delays and whether you attribute them to organizational factors, meaning your management stinks, to your legacy software stack, meaning that Siri stinks I'm adding notes here or is it a matter of R&D spending? And once again, tim Waffelt basically saying repeated what he said during his opening comments, which is that look, yeah, we shipped a bunch of stuff that worked and we expanded it to other new countries.

28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but he starts off by saying, if you step back from what we said at WWDC and that was the whole core of the problem was they promised something and didn't deliver it, right, yeah, yeah, forget what we said at WWDC. That it's not so bad?

28:57 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
yeah, they were. They were also asked about does, basically, given that you spend I think I'm quoting from memory here like you spend $3 billion on, like, your large language models and other research and the people that you're competing with are spending many factors of that, is that a problem? They reiterated, both him and Kevin both said the same thing that, one, we're investing for the long term. B, we do not underinvest historically in things that we think are going to be important for our future. And third, they pointed out that, look, we have a hybrid model for this. Yes, we have our own LLM, but we also are going to be using other people's models, like, especially to train and build our own internal models. So, yes, we're not spending quite so much, but it's not quite as desperate as we hope that you're not. Going.

29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To conclude, We've spent a lot of airtime on it over the past month or so, yeah, but I think what tim says does this make it okay. He said we just need more time to complete the work so that it meets our high quality bar. That's. There's not a lot of other reasons for it. It's just taking a bit longer than we thought, but we're making progress and we're excited about it. That's. I think that's the right thing to say. It's probably the true. You know, if you smooth over the details of managements and so forth, it's probably the accurate thing to say. And is it going to hurt them? That's going to take a little longer than they thought. In the long run, probably not. In fact, there are there's a credible argument. It could help them that they won't suffer the slings and arrows that these other AI companies are.

30:25 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, and plus, I think think they they were also asked a question, but he was also asked a question about do you have any more information? In the last call he mentioned that he thinks that there are indicators that people are that the ai features partially drove purchases of the iphone 16. He didn't have much more to say about that, but that's okay, because the interpretation of that would be that we don't need ai to sell our phones in the near future. So, yeah, I mean, it's fair, it's going to take a long time. That's fine, and they seem to be at least admitting that. Yeah, we had a game plan. And then we went to the locker room and counted our broken bones and bloody limbs and said, yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's decide that our game plan needs a little bit of modification jason snell got got me laughing when he quoted the verges, uh, deputy editor todd hazleton, who said I'm not saying apple's dead in the water here.

31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jason said well, that's good, todd, probably not a thing. You should said the water is many things it's choppy, it's chilly, there may be blood in it, there might even be sharks swarming. You pick the water metaphors you want, but apple certainly is not dead in the water. 24 billion in profit?

31:31 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
oh no oh no, they're worth slightly less than three trillion dollars now. They're only the second most viable.

31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, but there are headwinds. I mean nobody denies that, not you know. There's tariffs. Apple's already saying you know, even though we shipped a lot of stuff out of India at the last minute to try to feed the supply chain, we're still going to have to struggle with tariffs. They said they did admit to losing almost a billion dollars to tariffs already.

31:56 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Right, I think they said that they don't feel as though this quarter was affected by tariffs because they were able to preload their supply chain, both in parts and in products. But they said that they and they're they're actively anticipating that it's gonna the tariffs gonna cost us 900 million dollars in the upcoming quarter, and they stressed, I think, two or three times, that that's all just based on the idea that the situation doesn't change a huge amount from what it is right now. It could be far worse. It could be far better. We're playing it by ear right now.

32:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it was interesting. Cook said we didn't see a lot of uh uh kind of pre-planning sales of iPhones. Uh people worried about tariffs and buying ahead. He called it pull forward in demand due to tariffs.

32:38 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think part of the problem is that when you get to the second half of the year, anybody who knows about their way phone is waiting. You don't want to buy now. I do want to go back, though and mention.

32:48 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You know you don't need Apple intelligence or AI to sell iPhones, but they did really push Apple intelligence that entire season. I mean I can't tell you the amount of times I heard Snoop Dogg say the words Apple intelligence in podcasts and Super Bowl ads. And they created the videos with Bella Ramsey varying. I mean they weren't great, but they did advertise features like the semantic index in those videos. That is still not out yet and so-.

33:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder though I mean you and I, we pay attention to this. We know it was kind of a flop. My son just bought and he's not an unsophisticated user just bought a new iPhone 16 Pro pro max. He was on a 15 because he wanted apple intelligence, so a he wasn't paying attention to the sales cycle. And b? He thought apple intelligence was already there. He might even be happy with what he got I mean leo, leo, you have genmoji, it's probably faster. He might be happy with that than the 15, maybe yeah.

33:45
I don't know, maybe he wants the email completion. There's some writing summaries. I don't know.

33:50 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
My son's 16, and he actually just got a 16 Pro as well. But when it comes to Apple intelligence, he also uses ChatGPT all the time, right, and I think for teenagers and younger there is a clear delineation with what ChatGPT is capable of and what quote unquote Apple intelligence is capable of. So, while it might not affect iPhone sales, I do think it's coloring people's idea of what an assistant from Apple looks like and what it could look like from these other companies.

34:16 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think the question is are they buying any less Apple products because they have to use ChatGPT, use chat.

34:20 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
GPT Cause you can get the chat GPT app on iPhone. Yeah, and and and exactly.

34:24 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I mean, I have a shortcut and that takes me straight to chat GPT and I'm sitting there talking to it To the point of your videos.

34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steven, I actually have the action buttons set to load perplexity right away Instead of Siri. I don't ever use Siri, I just use perplexity all the time and it talks to me and I talk to it and hi, hi, perplexity. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up. Go back to sleep.

34:45 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You talk so slow though it's rough, we need to be able to speed up that voice, because it's bad.

34:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They should have better choices. What was your conclusion? I think you thought perplexity was a better.

34:57 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Oh well, here's the thing I mean. I feel like it's actually gotten. Oh sorry, I shouldn't say it out loud, but the dingus on iPhone has gotten worse, I feel like, just by itself.

35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We all agree the dingus is worse.

35:08 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Yeah, because even six months ago, like I was 17, I used to be able to ask it how many days has it been since January 1st?

35:15
A simple question, and now it can't answer it. It'll fall back to ChatGPT or give me like a web result and so I'm not sure what is going on behind the scenes, just with the device that the assistant is on my phone right now. But what Perplexity did who doesn't have direct access to the phone plugged into hooks that Apple already offers, like to Apple Music, to like podcasts, and you can ask Perplexity, a lot of things to do directly on your iPhone, and it's so much better. Even just at something like composing an email, I was able to speak for like a minute saying I think the subject should be this and not really any clear communication to the assistant, and it was able to parse a subject line that was coherent and made sense, parsed an email, and if you ask the assistant, the dingus on iPhone, to do the same thing, it just cannot. It put everything I said in the subject line of an email and said, hey, do you want to send this?

36:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's like no no, if jason were here he's a san francisco giants fan as I am he would might mention that when you this season, when the opposing team strikes out to a giants pitcher, the stadium pa plays a sound that goes oh, and that's kind of what I get every time when I'd use Siri. It's like, so disappointed.

36:28 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Now I did have a lot of people on my video, though talk about they have concerns about privacy and security when it comes to perplexity, and perplexity CEO has come out and be like we believe tracking everything is a great idea and we're going to serve ads, you know. And so it's clear, like Apple Apple again, just like in the app store here with their assistant, has the ability to differentiate. They talk about privacy and security. I think people still trust that with Apple, they can still offer an assistant that does amazing things, like these AIs, but with privacy and security built in. But they actually have to do it Like it has to be there, yeah.

36:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
And I just don't think they're in a rush. I don't think they should have been in a rush. I don't think they needed to be in a rush. I think they could have. I think that they needed. I guess they felt like they needed to say something, but as a user, like again, my family is almost completely shielded from advertising. So I realized that when I asked my wife, like do you know anything about Apple intelligence? She's like I don't even know what that is. I think there's some smart people that work there. You know like doesn't have any any interaction with that, and my kids are, you know, using chat, gpt all the time. They don't really, and so no one really feels like there's any draw to it. But again, none of us are seeing any of the ads, because we don't see ads. But but the but. I think that that's the.

37:38
I think that Apple just got. I feel like it just was. There's a group of people in there that said we got to do something. No-transcript, that. Um, that's the. The challenge for them is to slow down and just kind of keep putting. I do agree with you, steve, and I think that the end game for Apple five years from now, if they can figure it out, uh, is way better than everybody else's solution. The problem that I have with that is that they have been spending billions of dollars on Siri for a decade and they have not had been very successful at this, and I think it comes down to them being so safe. There's this incredible, incredible paper that I I don't know why, I mean I didn't read it. I wasn't reading papers back then.

38:40
In 1995, harvard Business Review talked about disruptive technologies and they did a whole thing about disruptive technologies and it was called Riding the Wave and it was pre-Steve, which is important, because everything that talks about disruption after Steve Jobs talks about Steve Jobs. Right, like you know, like that's what that's all they talk about. So this is 1995. And they just showed how all these companies before Steve Jobs was at Apple were disrupted by others because they couldn't get past their own business model.

39:10
In fact, protecting where they were stopped them from going to where they needed to be. And they talked about Seagate wanting to stay on 5.25 drives because their customers measured the value of the drive by the cost per megabyte and they couldn't get that density. They couldn't get the same cost per megabyte to 3.5-inch drives and they got their butt handed to them because they didn't, because other people came up really quickly and suddenly took over, and so the thing is is they were trying to protect a $300 million value and lost a $6 billion market, and so I think that the problem that Apple has is they're trying to hang on to this brand of always being safe and always being right and always being whatever, and they just can't get out of that box to get to the next thing, and I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for them, and I don't know how they fix that problem specifically.

39:59 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's the classic book the Innovator's Dilemma. It talks about stuff like that. But I got to say that there's one aspect of Apple's plan that I really do like I don't think they're being really explicit about this, but basically saying that, yeah, we have Apple intelligence. Yeah, we have our own stuff that's very privacy forward. Yeah, we even built our own server operating system that is AI, privacy forward, that runs on dedicated servers. That was again designed for the ground up. That we can't even this server OS can't even store data. It can only basically run these LLMs. But, yeah, we're doing that. But you know what, if you want to run ChatGPT, we'll help you run ChatGPT.

40:37
Sundar Pichai in his court testimony last week on his own very, very bad day, was saying that, hey, we expect to close a deal with Apple very, very soon to get Gemini on, basically on OpenAI's level, on Apple intelligence, meaning that if you want your keyboard editing, if you want your text editing summaries to be powered by Gemini, great, just select it and it'll just work. That's the sort of thing that I think works great. Apple's job we often forget is to sell phones. Great, they love services. Yep, they're going to talk about their technology, but their job is to sell iPhones, and, just like they don't need to have their own Instagram, they just need to build a phone that takes the best photos for Instagram ever.

41:20 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That's the priority and I think that I mean to to take that one step further what they're, what the rumors are with them, uh, partnering with Anthropic uh, and to put Claude Claude in Xcode, I, my mind just twists inside out, like you know. Like you know, I feel like the. I feel like the uh, uh, the, the, the. When anybody looks at the ring and the Lord of the rings, like what I will do if they put clot, because I'm using clod right now from outside of xcode and it's really powerful. I was like clod inside of this code.

41:49
Yeah, I'm just like oh, I can't, I can't, I'll with this power I could, you know, like you know, and so, and, and, uh, it is, and I think that apple, uh, I don't think that they're going to have their own version of that anytime soon, but but being able to, were they intending to with swift assist, were they so this is another example, less known, of apple punting basically yeah, but I mean it's a punt into the company that it's a good, well, yeah great they pass the ball.

42:15 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
The person who could run the ball?

42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it's not a punt, it's actually a pass.

42:21 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
yeah, lateral pass yeah, yeah, lateral pass yeah. So I think if they actually do that, the explosion of development will be pretty minor.

42:31 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I just want to quickly say it's timely because just last week I have a web app that I built for basically timing, that I run during podcasts to make edit notes so that when, oh, someone coughed, I'll just make an edit note and I'll timestamp the event and that sort of thing and we're exploiting it as a web app. But I said how difficult could it be to basically put this inside a web wrapper and just have it as a standalone Mac app so I can use all the windowing features? And it turned out to be a little more complicated than I thought. But the difference between this time trying to build something in Xcode and my previous times building something in Xcode is having Gemini in a different window and saying, hi, xcode just vomited all of these errors and I don't think I did anything wrong. Could you explain what happened? And then for Gemini to say, oh, I can see.

43:20
Ok, I know that your web view doesn't actually access the network. It only opens an HTML file that's bound into the app bundle, but the sandbox still demands that you give it network permissions or else it won't run. I'm like I would never have guessed that. Thank you for telling me this. Oh, just go into this box and click this box and it'll work. The idea of just feeling as though you're on equal footing against this foe known as Xcode and App'll work. The idea of just feeling as though you're on equal footing against this foe known as, like Xcode and App Store guidelines and APIs it's just such a powerful thing. So if Apple were to put that and built in and not be fussy about we don't want to tell people that this is a stupid way for Xcode to do things we're going to say that you were wrong, like that's going to be a great thing.

44:05 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
And for me. You know, I was building this app and it is drawing app that I wanted to build, and I've been building drawing apps since I was 10 years old, like, so. So you know, like it's like my little thing that I do and and and so the, the, the ability to tell chat, gpt. I want to write the. I want to write this application in Swift. I need you to give me not only the code, but tell me exactly how to do this and how to execute the whole thing in Xcode and it. Just here's the cut. Cut this out, open this up. Click on this button. Click on this button. Click on this button Now paste this. Now. Click on this button. Click on this button. Now do this. And it's just step by step by step.

44:41
Now all those steps could be removed if it's inside of the app and again, more importantly is if it is actually bound to the.

44:49
You know, not just inside the app, but tied into the app itself, you know, so it's able to control everything that's in there. One of the things that we're seeing, you know, there's a new graphics app, that Zoom, liminal. You know, andy Carluccio and liminal, the liminal team, put out that um is, is uh, they're the zoom graphics and um and it's in, you know, and one of the things about it is they're writing an app for the human and writing an app for the AI so that you can, and basically, the way it's all built is so that you can vibe, code your graphics, you know, and and it's, but they're designing it so that you can train, that you can give the AI what it needs and then just ask for what, what you want, and then put it in and cut and paste it into the app, and it's built for the next generation, and so I think this, this kind of integration, is going to be really interesting.

45:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just while you guys were talking, solved the advent of code problem from day eight using cloud code, which is a command line uh based um version of anthropics cloud. I have an empty emacs file and I just said we'll switch to day eight and see what you could do. I said, well, let's see. Oh, first thing I have to do is download the input. Let me do that. Is that okay? And then it just wrote yeah, it just wrote the solution while you were talking. It wrote the solution, yeah and uh, yeah, we're pretty much. Do you want to make this edit? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, you might as well do that since you seem to have solved it.

46:18 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Uh, it's pretty incredible, it's pretty incredible chat gpt to help me build shortcuts, and that's a great place where I would love more integration, Because if my app would just say like, oh yeah, use this action for what you're trying to do, but I'll use it all the time for like regex and matching text, like if I'm pulling HTML and it even helped me build some API shortcuts, like for the movie database, National Weather Service I can point ChatGPT and just say just ingest all this documentation about the API and then let me ask you questions about it. And it'll say use the get contents of URL action, use this dictionary value to pull this information. And I created like a custom shortcuts GPT that I share with my private community and I use that all the time and I love that in the shortcuts app, you know, feel like Apple could do that.

47:02 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, imagine having a console like that for the user, that kind of like. Kind of like how shortcuts is a user oriented, easy way to build, like automation. But imagine like a version of slow mo that is the nerd slow mo which is like yeah, here's something that I have to do every single week. I have to take this on the outliner outline and I have to turn it into a spreadsheet, but it has to be reformatted this way and it will ask you some questions and walk you through. Ok, is this right? Like what's wrong with it? Oh well, this column should be here. Ok, how about this? Like that's perfect, great, Would you like me to automatically do that to every file that you needed to be better at? That is such a huge, powerful, enabling thing. But I'm almost can't wait for Apple or somebody else to really crack that.

47:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna take a little break. Uh and uh. It does kind of take some of the fun out of the FNF code challenge next December. I don't know People are like having the teacher's guide, isn't it? Yeah, it's like answers written. We don't uh, okay.

48:11 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I don't want to look in the margin, but I'm looking at the red text in the margin and it says that oh, that's how we do that, Okay.

48:16 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You know, I think the way. The way I think of it, though, is I've learned more about building apps in Xcode than I, than I, you know, than any anything I would have learned just trying to write everything by hand, and I think I think of it kind of like when you learn how to play a guitar and you start with tabs. You know, you're just like where do I put my fingers and where you know, what am I doing. Eventually, you get into theory, you know, like you know, eventually there's like you're going to go, but you're going to go, but you go backwards. First you get to something that sounds good and that you understand how to do it, but then the next thing is is that for some people, they're going to want to actually understand why it works.

48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and that's one thing that's kind of cool. You can at least in this particular case say well, explain to me that bit of code there. What did that do and why did you do it? That way you can actually learn from it. I mean, you probably don't learn as much as if you did it by yourself that's just quickly.

49:07 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That's gemini's default, like it doesn't do your homework for you. It's right, okay, well, here's how here's how to do this in this and like or here's the chain, here, here's a completed script that will actually work. But here's what I did every step of the way and along the way I'm like oh, so the way that I've been writing text files in Apple script has been the wrong way all along, or the hard way. Now I know I'll just pass that to a command line. Okay, thank you very much, gemini yeah, there's.

49:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just no question in my mind that this is, this is a breakthrough and something's happening here. Um, and Apple doesn't need to be right up front with the Apple intelligence. I think there's time. Yeah, uh, let's take a little break here, andy and Anako. Jason's now being replaced by the wonderful Steven Robles and, of course, alex Lindsay.

49:52
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51:55
At onepasswordcom slash mac break. All lowercase, that's one p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d dot com slash mac break. We thank one password for their support the mac break weekly. Uh, you referred to it. Uh, andy, but we can go a little deeper into it. This comes from ming chi kuo and so it's a rumor. The information also had the story and from other sources, but apparently Apple is going to move away from releasing all the phones in September. They've been doing that since the 4S came out in 2011. According to both the information and Quo, apple's moving to launch its cheaper phones the budget iPhones in the first half of the year and the fancier phones in the fall. It's kind of how Google does it too they release a Pixel 9 Pro in the fall and then in the spring the Pixel 9a, that kind of thing.

52:52 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
And also, significantly, samsung generally releases its flagships early in the year, so maybe they're. I don't think they're having a lot of problem getting getting people to like stick with iPhone and not switch to Samsung, but that might be a factor too. Again, the first thing I thought was that they don't like that big spike every October and they would much rather have a smooth, consistent income. Again, given that we saw that chart, that God, they cannot get that iPhone part of the pie any smaller than half, given how big a contributor it is, that's probably will make a less bumpy road for all their financials, I'm guessing.

53:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and the information also says well, and it's tough, the marketing has to do everything all at once, especially if you're going to do a very different high-end iPhone in 2027, a folding iPhone, which everybody seems to agree they're going to it it. It makes sense to spread the resources, uh marketing resources and so forth out throughout, uh, the year actually, you know what that makes.

53:52 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That makes me think about something that the the folding iphone is is predicted to be costing like 2500 like, absolutely like the most expensive iphone ever. Maybe that's another way of trying to. They'll still have a big spike, but now they need. They have to. You have to deal with the fact that there's going to be a high fashion iphone air. According to rumor, there's going to be a folding phone that's going to be super expensive. That maybe that says we need a more consistent stream of income from iphone instead of now this incredible everest style spike that will come after we introduce these two new models yeah, that, by the way, that's what samsung charges for it's, uh, samsung fold.

54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's 2500. Is it going? Is the going rate I let me correct myself next year for the photo phone is what uh, wayne ma is saying in the information. I think others are saying as well uh, including bloomberg's berman blurg, blurg, blurg, mark german of bloomberg. Um, yeah, he so, wayne mott, including Bloomberg's Berman Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. Yeah, so Wayne Mott, writing in the information, says the level of consumer demand for the thin iPhone is so uncertain that Apple's manufacturing partners are dedicating only about 10% of their production capacity to the new model, most of the capacities for the iphone 17, pro, max and pro which. I didn't realize this that even though these are the most expensive iphones, currently they are the best sellers. 40 percent of the iphones are pro max is, 25 percent are pros. Uh, at least that's what the production is going to be.

55:22 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
And here's what that set with that 17a, or I mean being super thin. It'll differentiate by looks, but like battery life how?

55:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that? Well, they already say the bat. Yeah, they're already saying battery life will suffer would it?

55:34 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
would any of you be attracted to a thin iphone like? Is that something that people want? Well?

55:39 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
somebody doesn't travel, maybe if they are often near a charger yeah, I, just I, I would go thicker with more battery or more power, or more, but you're not a fashion plate, alex.

55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excuse me for saying that.

55:53 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
No, no, I would be curious. It'll be interesting to see when they put it out whether people go for more power or more. I'd rather have you know again. I just want. All I care about, as I've said before, is the camera Like just make the camera bigger, faster, you know, like that's the thing that matters, and so I don't want to give up anything.

56:13 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Well, you don't have. As long as people have a choice. Like I, like the idea of Apple yeah, given how great they are at design making something that you just want to own. Like, yeah, if you, if you're willing to give up a few hours of battery life, that's great by the, by the fashion phone, if you want something that will definitely give you all day supply, then you don't have to take the hit so ma also says in the information way.

56:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ma also says that the the way the produ manufacturing works. There's the ramp up in the summer, they cr, you know, they crank them out in the fall and then things slow down in january, making it difficult for apple's manufacturing partners to keep the same amount of workers and equipment operating year round. So, uh, that's one way to kind of keep year-round manufacturing happening I wonder if the globalization is having some sort of effect too.

57:01 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
One of the most more interesting things that came out of the call was that, moving forward, apple wants to have all US-bound hardware and iPhones manufactured in India and Vietnam. All rest of the world's phones and devices will be manufactured by China. So I wonder if there's a factor of how do we balance this new capacity and the workforce that is unique to those countries, when they're expecting people to actually be able to crank out at max capacity, versus there's a month-long holiday in which we're probably not going to be able to get much done.

57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so if there is a schedule change, it won't happen until the iPhone 18. So it won't happen. Base iphone 18 launched in 2027, spring 2027, the, and then the pro models six months earlier, in the fall of 2026, which kind of makes sense, apple loses a big court case in the uk to what some have called a patent troll. London court of appeals rules that apple pays optus a 502 million dollar lump sum. Uh, the patent is uh essential, they say, to certain technological standards like 4g.

58:15 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
So, um, this is a significant amount of money, I even for a company as loaded as apple that's the classic company that buys up a whole bunch of mobile patents and right and goes, goes fighting so apple says we're disappointed by this decision and we plan to appeal.

58:33 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Optus makes no products their sole business is I do think that I mean again, this gets back into the letter of the law. This is just the way we use patents today is not the way they were designed to be used. You know, and I think that we really need to think about people needing to take action on a patent over a certain period of time, or it invalidates the patent. Like you can't just, you can't just come up with an idea. You actually have to prove that. You know you should be protected to come up with that idea, but you should have three years or four years to show action, to move to market, and it can be anything. You can be doing things with it. Because right now what this company does, and what a lot of companies do, is they just buy these all up and let them sit on the rack and figure out who they can sue. That's not taking action. You need to have a lab that's doing something, that's putting it together, other that cost you money.

59:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, you know, before, I just think that the idea that you can just come up with an idea and then then sit on it just is crazy. Yeah, it really. Uh, it degrades our ability to innovate. Yes, I think we, I think we all agree. Uh, what is this thing? That apple is launching the?

59:39 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
uh, celebrity snapshot this website is one of the most insufferable only because, like I would almost like it. Basically, what you can do is go to this website, click one of these faces and it will tell you what apple music is available by them, what apple tv shows they're in, even what apple podcast they've been in, which is kind of cool, it's just their connection to apple like, yeah, if you click one you'll just see all the apple stuff, but you can't search.

01:00:06
There's no, just like straight text list of people's names. So if you like miss, uh, messy or whatever you have to like wait till he slowly comes around, he scrolls back but it is kind of cool like a sushi restaurant on conveyor belt yeah, it's conveyor belt sushi, but if you go to the bottom. There's like you know what podcast interviews they've been and you can go to that episode. It's called snapshotapplecom.

01:00:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's just, you're right, it's this, it's this. So I can't, like I have to wait. Yeah, you can't drag.

01:00:33 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You can't scroll, you just have to wait till it slowly rolls. Who thought this was a good idea well, the Apple podcast, I mean I like the like. If I want to see an interview with messy or cape planchette, like yeah, that's cool, I'd be curious what you know, so if they curate that stuff. But but it's moving and there's no way I can.

01:00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I just have to sit here and watch, gonna wait.

01:00:54 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
This is a marketing thing, not a, not a tool and if you don't like Seth Rogen, you got to spend 18 seconds thinking about how much you don't like seth rogan and why are they putting drake in that jacket?

01:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's the meme. The meme, oh god, I didn't think about that. That's a little weird. Is that the best you could? Some people are in little dots, some people are full, full tile. It's just.

01:01:19 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
This is whoever designed this my guess is is that with some of those they they didn't have an image that they felt like was good enough to do something outside, they put it in the dot when they didn't have.

01:01:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean someone who's had to do lots of this poor jennifer aniston is only in a dot because beyonce gets a full tile with a horse, probably because they had done.

01:01:40 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
She's the queen leo probably had a different photo, a better photo or whatever they could do.

01:01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not even a good photo of Jennifer Aniston, I might add.

01:01:48 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, I'm sure which haircut. Very strange.

01:01:51 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
It doesn't look like they pulled that off Google Images or something. That's kind of weird.

01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, they had rights to it, obviously.

01:01:56 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Obviously, you reach out to the artist management and they send you something, and then, and then now what will happen is the artist management will ping apple and go, hey, what's the deal? And apple will send me a better photo, and then they will, and then it'll look. This is how this works. I'm just telling you watch, watch all I am calling for brie larson.

01:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm with brie larson's team and that is the worst picture ever apple, apple will go back and go.

01:02:22 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Oh, we're really sorry. We're happy to have her come into one of our studios. We'll do a photo shoot with her and we'll put up something nicer and they'll go. Oh, that's so great, and let's Apple chit-chat with them and talk to them.

01:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's worth sitting here to watch this incredibly slow scroll just to see that Bad Bunny is full screen, where Ariana Grande is not even a dot. What the hell's going on there?

01:02:45 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Just a, where ariana grande is not even a dot. What the hell's going on there? Just a light. That photo was at least two noses old. You need to update it, man?

01:02:49 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
yeah, really, it's probably the image again that they had from their, from their management, and would you know?

01:02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that roger federer was a tennis player from the picture of him in his suit and tie. I don't know, hi elton, that was a few years ago I've never even gotten this far. I've never if there's an end poor lady guys having a bad hair day cheese they.

01:03:12 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
So they have way more than you can just see. That's why I just put a full list, just do an alphabetical.

01:03:15 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah there's no fast-forward, there's only a pause button like oh, it's moving too fast, crazy it was a crazy idea like why can't you just jump to the next window, you know, or just swim, you know? Just yeah, it's nutty, it's a nutty design.

01:03:29 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
You think this is a way to basically get people more engaged in all their services? Like, maybe people are using Apple TV+ but they're not using Apple Podcasts, so let's try to engage them this way? And if so, how would that be an answer? But I'm with you, steven. It's like I'm trying to figure out what I don't think it's. I don't think it's stupid, I'm just saying it's well done for what it is. I just don't know why it exists. Could?

01:03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you go any slower.

01:03:51 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I don't know where you would find that page either, cause it's not like linked on the homepage.

01:03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Snapshotapplecom for those who wish to enjoy. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't seem like they're publishing it, like promoting it really yet. But it's not an alphabetical order, it so that's another thing. I mean, I don't know what the order is, it's just random, I don't know. Can we just?

01:04:13 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
sit here and watch for a while. I just I'm, I'm way too invested.

01:04:14 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
We have a little, a little, asmr mesmerized. Who's going to be?

01:04:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at the end of this, or what's going to happen at the end? Is it going to wrap around or you might be at the end, leo?

01:04:23 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
maybe just going to stop. It's morgan freeman's there. They put morgan freeman so far into this scroll.

01:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He show is ever getting there, if you make it to the end.

01:04:32 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It should be morgan freeman.

01:04:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He should say and what is the billy eilish creation? In reality, that's nothing. There's not a picture, there's a black thing.

01:04:40 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
You can't go back, there is only forward, and this is the end. I'm sorry to be the one to break, oh we're repeating finally.

01:04:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh there you go back to austin butler and sabrina carpenter the morgan was the end.

01:04:52 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Two stars I was just joking, but that's good, morgan freeman and billy eilish.

01:04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At the end it's hilarious well, I'm sure we enjoyed that trip down snapshot lane everybody somebody worked hard on it.

01:05:04 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
They did a good job for what they were told to do. They did a really good job, but we're not making fun of you. I think they vibe coded it.

01:05:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To be honest, they weren't paying much attention.

01:05:12 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
A lot of people just been let go from the AI part, apple intelligence. Maybe they just need look, I need to hold on to my, my office and my camaraderie space. Give me something, anything to do.

01:05:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let us take a break and return with the victory lap for Mark Zuckerberg. He was mad about Apple, hopping mad about Apple in the interview Mark did with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. We'll talk about that and a lot more in just a bit. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa. Happy birthday, melissa, celebrating 40 years. I thought when we celebrated our 20th that was big deal. 40 years as the trusted data quality expert.

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01:07:45
Get started today with 1,000 records cleaned for free at melissacom slash twit. That's melissacom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting MacBreak Weekly. Melissacom slash twit. Uh, some more leadership changes. Boy. Apple's just um, almost feels like reorganizing everywhere. Uh, apple music and the global affairs divisions are the latest uh to have changes. Um music, which uh now is co-managed by longtime executive rachel newman, and they brought in a TikToker, former TikTok music veteran, ole Oberman. Global Affairs Reorg adjusts how government relations teams across Europe, asia and China are managed. So I think the music thing is the most interesting bringing in the former global head of music business development at TikTok from 2019 to 2025. During his tenure at TikTok, oberman was instrumental in driving the platform's music strategy and negotiated significant licensing agreements, including the reinstatement of. Remember this when UMG said we're going to pull out of TikTok the big fight, he brought him back. Former chief digital officer at Warner Music Group. He had strategic positions at Sony Music as well, so he's a music guy. Don't know what this means.

01:09:16 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Do you think it's his management or just his contacts? Either one could be valuable enough, yeah.

01:09:21 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Maybe they want to bring back Ping.

01:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And his co-manager, rachel Newman, has been at Apple for 16 years, so she was at iTunes. She joined the company in 2009 as iTunes Australia New Zealand manager for music, so she's a company person and I think bringing in somebody like Ole is saying, yeah, we want to try something new, we want to make maybe more deals with record companies. What do you think, alex? You have some.

01:09:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think that obviously he proved to me making a deal with the record company is hard. The fact that he got UMG back in the fold To get them to come back and do something reasonable. I think was there. I think that also the knowledge of how TikTok approaches that market I think is really interesting to. Of how TikTok approaches that market I think is really interesting. To Stephen's point the problem for Apple is ping Like I think that there's so much scar tissue there.

01:10:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you have to say the P word? I know.

01:10:14 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Don't say it a third time please.

01:10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hard for them, you may invoke it.

01:10:18 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
God knows what will happen.

01:10:20 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So I think that that's. The challenge is that it's very, very hard to start a new social network, so it's not probably not something there. But how do you liven up music in a way that makes it more, you know, more interesting for the artists?

01:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love what they're doing with apple classical, andy, you've probably noticed this. They have, not only do they have like the entire liner notes and everything, but in some pieces, when you're listening to it, they will have a movement by movement text description. Yeah, instead of, instead of you know the lyrics in a song, describing what you're listening to in the movement. I think that's fantastic very education.

01:10:53 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It shows that they didn't just buy it for the content libraries and the license deals. They've actually been putting money into this and developing it. So that shows you how much they, how much of their future they, they, want to put into services yeah, yeah it's interesting.

01:11:06 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
It could also be a play to try and reach the tic tac generation, because spotify still has a hold on, like the playlist curation, and you'll see a lot of people say the only reason I'm still spotify is playlist and so maybe it's having more of a finger on the pulse of what people want from those playlists, especially younger audiences. And if you look at apple events recently, you see a lot, lot more like TikTok influencers and short form video creators and they might want to do something with Apple music and that genre of content to try and get Apple music in front of more people using those avenues, feels like Apple might be having some ambitions in the social direction it could be.

01:11:45 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
but this gets back into where Apple's really blind spot is, which is uncurated content is not their jam, and so they always, anytime you talk to someone at Apple, they're always like, well, it's curated and we're going to make sure that it's great and safe and all the other things. And so it becomes very hard, like. One of the things that I think is really interesting in TikTok right now is there's this growing popularity of DJs that were oftentimes they were. First they were just radio jocks. So you saw this like the radio jocks would just take a phone and set it open while they're in their studio doing the morning show, right, and so you just kind of see them doing whatever they're doing.

01:12:21
But now people are former radio jocks and people who wish they were radio jocks. You can see the difference really quickly. By the way, a former radio jock, you know the. The level of, of of understanding how to do this is so much higher for someone who's done you know 2000 shows than someone like I'm going to. I can do the same thing he can do, and they go on and it's very uncomfortable to watch. You know like you know to to to make it work there's there is a certain muscle memory to it, but you're seeing these radio jocks from album oriented rock and so on and so forth just throwing up the.

01:12:50
I'm just doing the show that I used to do on radio on Tik TOK and I think they're taking advantage of the fact that Tik TOK doesn't uh, um, doesn't seem to really enforce anything related to songs as long as it's live. So they're not, you know. So people are just playing whatever they want to play inside of that live stream. They're doing like a whole show, like a two hour show, live on TikTok, and it just sounds like radio. I think Apple could, definitely.

01:13:14
I think that there's a real opportunity there to build a live show. I don't think you need to play the songs live. I think you could, you know, but I think that there is a place where people just want a curator to talk to them about the music and have the radio experience without ads, like if you gave someone someone talking. You know when I, when I was growing up and then when I was in radio, we had rock over London, you know, and rock over London, you know, hello, this is Graham Dean, and you're listening to rock over London, you know and know and they would play us all the cool songs that were coming out of Manchester and everything else, and Sunday night we would listen to that, but it was interviews and it was talking about the bands.

01:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you ever listen to Radio Caroline, the pirate radio ship? You didn't.

01:13:59 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
No, but did you listen to Rock Over?

01:14:00 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
London no it was an 80s thing Was it 80s.

01:14:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was 80s.

01:14:06 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It was gone. I don't know when it was gone. I do know that if you take the rock over london cds that come to the radio station and you melt them over a hot, a hot flame and put them between two shot glasses.

01:14:14
You can make these rock over london shot glasses. Everyone's like how did you get that? You know, and so not not that I've ever did that, you know. So, um, anyway, so, um, no idea. Um, anyway, so, uh, but but the it. But it was really funny to spend your childhood listening to Rock Over London and then end up at a radio station where you were playing Rock Over London, anyway. So, but I think that that kind of experience of this, curated and people have cobbled them together. You know there's some people who are doing playlists, but I think that that tightness is still something that would be an opportunity to tie people in.

01:14:46
I will say that I don't know what Apple's doing with the recommendation engine, but I'm getting to the point where I was listening to something. My daughter and I listen to music. We trade music back and forth when we're driving and I was like, did you pick all these songs? And she's like, no, no, I just let it run, and it has gotten so good where it just sounds like you, you know, it's starting to really tune in and I I think that, uh, my, even my daughter is starting to say that the spotify and apple play. Like you know, the suggestions are starting to get pretty close, you know, and and that's the thing that's really interesting- are there people on tiktok playing recorded music for hours at a time, like djs?

01:15:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, oh yeah, that's really interesting.

01:15:26 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I'm really tempted to do it like I have to admit yeah, bring back your heyday, your glory, go back and just just go like saturday night and just do a show or something like that.

01:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be fun so you could sit on it and just listen yeah, you could just turn it on and just listen to the that's a new model for these guys.

01:15:40 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That's very interesting, it's and, by the way, like it's like, oh my gosh maybe you didn't notice, this extended the deadline that he's already extended.

01:15:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is.

01:15:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Tiktok is not going away I think he's just hoping we forget about the whole thing. Yeah, like it's not going away he's gonna keep extending it, and then we're all gonna just forget about congress.

01:15:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah yeah, he loves it because he it was. It helped him get elected, and jeff yass, who's a big republican contributor, screwed millions to trump. Uh is a 35 owner of tick tock, so I think tick tock's here to stay.

01:16:15 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I think that's very interesting they're doing really radio, basically, yeah, I mean apple's got to be.

01:16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, I figure ole oberman probably left tick, tock, oh it's over. Now he's saying wait a minute, it's not over. What could Apple do that would?

01:16:33 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
be pretty hard to make those kinds of deals.

01:16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TikTok backed into that.

01:16:37 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
No, I think that, yeah, but figuring out how you again, I don't know how you do it, because TikTok did it by breaking a bunch of rules and just making aggressive moves and just letting people do stuff, and that's just really not Apple's jam. So I think that the problem is that Apple doesn't really. They're too tight-laced to do that process. But I do think that the artists are still hungry to figure out how they can make more money. Like you know, how do I engage fans more? How do I, you know, do those things? No-transcript used to make mixtapes. I used to make mixtapes as a DJ and so I would mix everything together. I would actually, you know, like mix the thing. I would go and oftentimes do it in pro tools, Cause I was one of the only people in Pittsburgh that had pro tools.

01:17:42
And so I would sit there and build my mixtapes with Pro Tools and I could build custom. You know, this song goes with this song, but only at this pace, you know, and it doesn't take very much. It's a little B-spline. You know that all you got to do is pull that, but you got to have a little bit of control over how fast it gets from one place to the other. You put that into your playlist and no one's ever going to leave ever. Because once that, once you go through the trouble of mixing all your songs just the way you want them, you can't just take the list and move it to spotify. You can't like it's, it's like the lock-in is concrete, you know, and so people start going through the trouble of doing that. So I think that those are that kind of thing giving people a way to do live, you know again, live djing, where maybe they just put in their own two cents and then they play songs that are still coming out of the library and so that they get the, you know they get something out of it. The artist gets some, you know, gets tracking, you know. Um, you know. So there's a lot of things that that could be done there. That would be really interesting. Um, that they haven't done yet. So I don't think.

01:18:39
I do think Apple has fallen way behind in podcasting. Like, I think that that's kind of you know, YouTube, and YouTube has kind of exploded there. I know that we're, uh, you know, um, substack is, you know, picking up speed really quickly, you know, in the area of supporting a lot of creators in a lot of different ways, and so I think that that's but the between those two and Spotify, of course, um, I think that Apple, the, the problem that Apple has is they're just not putting out features fast enough. Like, hey, I want to do video as a special feature. Oh, we can't do that, you know, like you're, and then you're just kind of like, okay, so like, and so you know, and they haven't been able to do that for years now Like, and it's clear that you know and and I think that you this is going to shock Leo, but people are saying that video is the next. The next thing in podcasting is video, and I so I was.

01:19:34 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I was just at podcast movement last month and, yes, that's what everyone's saying is video. And to the Apple podcast point.

01:19:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad I wasn't there. I would have probably burst up socket.

01:19:48 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Whenever I talk about Apple needing to add things like video, a lot of people ask like well, do we just expect them to pay for hosting or whatever? And it's like Spotify is doing this right now for free. So if you're a creator, I can create a Spotify for creators account totally for free, host my audio and upload my full video, and Spotify just handles it all. And now?

01:20:05 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
so they so, and they're inserting ads into it, right, or they're putting it before after around you can choose to.

01:20:09 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You can choose to monetize what they're getting, but mine don't is something Apple probably is.

01:20:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe Apple would want it. They're getting information because eventually they do want to put ads they want. Look there's. There's two ways Spotify makes money by inserting ads or by getting a paid subscription out of you and uh giving this stuff away is smart. I mean, they bought anchor fm, that turned into an audio podcast platform and, and now they're doing video too and they're getting, I'm sure, enough information, although remember, steven, that they fired everybody in the podcast division most.

01:20:41 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Most creators are too small to get like sponsors, and so monetizing through spotify does a lot of creators for the entry level. But for someone like me, I want to be able to host my podcast somewhere else. Have that RSS feed and Spotify lets me do that. I can host with.

01:20:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Transistor. That's what we do as well, yeah.

01:20:59 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Yeah, give it to Spotify and then, once that episode hits the RSS feed, spotify lets me upload the video, and that's all I really want for Apple Podcasts to do. Let me attach a video to the episode once it hits in Podcast Connect. But they still do things like strip the chapters out of my subscriber audio, and so it's little things like that that hopefully they can accelerate those features a little more. So creators want to be on the platform.

01:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am no expert on what's going on in the podcast industry I don't even go to the conventions anymore but it does seem to me that there's a stratification now in podcasts. There are the very high-end joe rogan's and emma chamberlain's and call her daddies of the world, uh who of course can get a million dollars for an ad and have real, you know, interstitial ads, and then there's almost all the rest of us. I think direct ad insertion, which spotify is doing, libsyn's doing, um probably, is how 99 of podcasts will monetize well, and not you and I are right on the cusp right, we're not, we're not the joe rogans of the world, but we're not quite, you know.

01:22:00
But we're, we're looking more and more at dai being, dai plus membership being well.

01:22:05 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
But yeah, and membership is a big deal. And I think and I talk about this on the Riverside YouTube channel if you want to monetize your show and you're just starting or have a small audience, do the direct membership and just provide amazing benefits for people that want to pay you directly and you do have to sell them on it. But we offer ad-free episodes, we offer bonus episodes. You can offer private community access like a Discord, and you can make that membership really appealing. So you can do it with membership. You can do it with the DAI if you want to do the dynamic ad insertion.

01:22:32
But I think there's still room. And the reason why video is pushed so much is because it is harder to grow that audio side than it is video. And so if you do video, you can be on YouTube, you can monetize with AdSense. There Might not be a lot of money, but it also is appealing then to sponsors because you could say your ad is not only going to be in the audio version that gets this many downloads, but it's also going to be in the video and we might get that many views. So that's why there's such a big push towards video.

01:22:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I feel like that's a good idea. Maybe we should start a club ourselves. I think that's a clever way.

01:23:03 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
People always say Apple Podcasts does video, and they mention MacBreak Weekly and they mention Twit and I was like I know they've been doing the dual RSS feed for many years.

01:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, my thought was always get our shows to everywhere we possibly can so that people can watch it any way they want. But we're always reluctant to let companies host the feed because then we don't get metrics. But that's why Spotify wants, wants to do it. They want all the metrics. They want to know who you are when you listened, how much you listened, and all that stuff. Um, hey, you know what we haven't done? The vision pro segment what do you see? What do?

01:23:38
you know it's time to talk to vision pro it's not the longest segment, but since we didn't do it last week, uh, apple has now released a tv plus trailer with the first ever full-length immersive film.

01:23:57 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
How long can you the trailer for?

01:23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think it's out until june no, yeah, this is the bono uh stories of surrender, concert-style documentary event. It'll be the first feature, so you'll have to wear the helmet. How long for this thing?

01:24:11 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Also, you won't be able to delete it from your account Just like that.

01:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube ad back in the day. It's just going to be given to you.

01:24:17 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Honey, what's the edge doing in our kitchen?

01:24:19 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
What's funny is what's interesting is to see the pattern of bands that have been out for a while, that have been very good at always jumping on the next new thing, you know. So U2 and Metallica are two examples of bands that are constantly looking at how they you know how they evolve their brand Right and how do they keep on doing it. And so first you saw Metallica, Then now you see nice YouTube.

01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You liked how the.

01:24:44 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Metallica video was done right.

01:24:46
I like parts of it. Um, you know, I think that parts of it were great. I mean, when you look at anybody's work, but especially Apple's right now, and especially on something that no one's ever done before, you look at a bunch of things and you go, I don't, I'll never do that, you know, like that's a bad idea. But then you look at things that you wouldn't have done, that you absolutely would take and do again, like the, the uh, james walking onto the, onto the uh. You know he walks through this piece and onto this opening. I would have never done that.

01:25:13
Moving a camera like that is against all the rules that I've grew up. You know that I've been doing for the last 10 years doing immersive, but it worked, totally worked, and I don't, you know, and now I have to admit it does feel like you can feel your stomach pulling in. If they went any faster you'd be like, oh, that's too much. The audience shots, the wide shots maybe a wide shot once, but too many wide shots. The audience shots are worthless. There's a bunch of shots. The drums are too close, but there's a handful of shots. There's one shot with James is also like looking, you know, playing in the band, people are reaching up towards them and playing in the band, people are reaching up towards them and the dimensionality of that really, really works. And so and they were, and, and they ran into lots of challenges, like they didn't get the guitar for enter the sandman, and I'm pretty sure it's because they had all those bouncing balls I was like why didn't they get the solo?

01:25:58
because you can hear the solo going on. You're like why?

01:26:00 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
are they? That's what you're showing it.

01:26:02 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, and and and I was like, oh it's, it's the balls.

01:26:04 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I really enjoyed watching that Metallica concert in Apple Vision Pro and that's one of the things whenever there's new immersive content, I charge it up and I put it on. The beach ball's super stressful, like the whole time. I was just feeling for all the security people but all those wide shots I was looking for the immersive cameras. That's what I was doing Whenever it showed the most compelling thing that I think Apple Vision Pro can do and I watch every adventure episode. There was that one that just came out and I think just experimenting, seeing what can happen.

01:26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This will be interesting because they're going to release it as a 2D film on Apple TV Plus on May 30th and, at the same time, as an immersive video for Vision Pro users.

01:26:44 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It'll be interesting to see how they handle the framing and how they do I mean a lot of it as far as the time goes. I mean, my biggest problem with apple vision pro is I get in and I start fiddling. Next thing I know I've been there for three hours and so it doesn't really you don't like.

01:26:54 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
You know like I don't.

01:26:55 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I don't think that the, the head, you know the, that the time is really an issue for me. I will be interested to see you know how they, how they do that. I think one of the things I was thinking about watching part of the Google sphere I don't know if you saw the, the, their whole thing in the sphere. They took the wizard of Oz and they extended it for the sphere, so they used AI to make those scenes bigger and fit them in. And I suddenly realized, oh wow, you could make every movie immersive. You know, like without well, no, no, not without paying anything. You would, well, you would, it would.

01:27:25
It'd be expensive, like you'd have people doing the, some part of it by hand, part of it by AI. It would still cost millions of dollars per unit to do it. It's not like it's going to be free. But if you started producing, like if you built a because, if you think about it, if you start creating um, you can, if you start letting AI recreate the entire scene based on the camera angle, so as the camera angles move, it figures out whatever everything's there and then puts it back into the, into the scene, and makes the whole, that whole scene bigger, um it, uh that in a way that you could sit there and watch it. I realized that they could do that with a lot of films and it would be really interesting to see how that, how that looks, but it'll be. What I'm really fascinated by is what will the Apple TV version feel like and look like, compared to what the immersive version looks like and feels like?

01:28:12 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That's an interesting proposition, but wouldn't that be anti-creator? Because the shot was composed that way, because that's what the director wanted you to see at that moment. Also, the set or the scene that the shot takes place in, the art director decided to place objects where they need to go. If you have an AI that's filling in, I decided that there's a bedroom behind you and here's what the bedroom is decorated like. Is that going to be consistent? Secondly, if the director said look, I don't want you looking at this photo that's on the nightstand, generated by AI, you're supposed to be looking at these two people arguing?

01:28:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Well, I think that the number one is that they're doing the Wizard of Oz one with the copyright holders and with the people who own it and everything else. And also the question is are the people, if the directors were here today, the ones that worked on it, would they use the latest technology? And they probably, many of them probably would. But the ones that worked on it, would they use the latest technology? And they probably many of them probably would. But you'll have to go back to the copyright holders and look at it and it's not going to be something that you just hit a button and it goes. This would.

01:29:17
I'm sure that, while Google talked about it being, you know, ai, it's not like it's AI like mid-journey, it's AI like very complex, working with the license holders and putting that stuff together. And I think that you know it could be really interesting and it won't. You know there'll be some license holders that go, no, you can't change that movie, can't do that, you can't move that through, but a lot of them are, you know, taking older films, for instance, and making them 3D and they look bad, you know, in 3D, but they did it anyway.

01:29:51 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
You know, and they didn't ask. They asked you know it's whoever owns the rights to the film or the. Is the yeah, I mean at some point that becomes the artistic intent is the and so yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's. It can get iffy, it's, it's really, it's a. It's always a clean thing if the original creators are there and they can either sign off saying do what you want, I don't care, or can be involved in it.

01:29:59
It's a problem when you're suddenly deciding that we're going to redo cost, we're going to redo casablanca, and I don't care that the company that made Casablanca was bought by this company. That was bought by this company that has given approval for the marketing to create this as an immersive experience. I mean, of all the sins that one can create in one lifetime, that's not really high on the list, but it's worth discussing. The only opposition I would have is if we just simply say, oh, of course, push that button. There's no consequences, there's no reason to even think about this. But I agree with you that, like, the bad stuff will be found out really quickly and nobody cares. Just like original colorization, like the bad version of colorization, like died very quickly because it was horrible and nobody wanted it. Horrible and nobody wanted it. However, if you have a modern situation where people are not going to watch this simply because it is black and white, but they might watch it if they, if it looks like 1940s color.

01:30:54 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That's also well, and I and I do. I do think that I mean, the wizard of oz is still making whatever money it's making for the, for the copyright holders. But if you had an immersive version that was in 3d, that was totally mean. A lot of people would buy that. You know, like every Vision, every Apple Vision Pro user that knew that it existed would buy it. Because it's at 10 bucks or 20 bucks or 30 bucks, I don't think it would matter. Just because they would, because it is a. You know, that would be an amazing experience to see and I think that that's the. I do think that what Apple's kind of moving towards. I don't think that's. I think Apple's mostly looking at. This is an original film and as the new Blackmagic camera comes out, you're going to see more original films getting produced.

01:31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will it be dual release like this one where you'll see a 2D?

01:31:45 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
and a 3D version. I think this is part of it, but I think that a lot of it's going to be too complicated to do that and I think that, for the most part, you're going to start seeing short films.

01:31:56
Every time you start to compromise between two mediums, you end up just getting the lowest common denominator. And so I think that, taking advantage of that, I think you're going to see first short films and you know, other little experiments and little mini concerts and so on and so forth. But as the camera starts to roll out, I think you're going to start to see some pretty impressive, impressive videos. But I think that what I didn't think about is the fact that you could go into the whole old library and start and I don't think Apple at first would do a whole movie, but I can imagine them taking a scene from Wizard of Oz or a scene from some movie and just extending. Because what's funny is the old movies are actually easier to do this with because the camera doesn't move very much. So taking an old film that's locked off and extending it out is actually a much easier puzzle than doing it again.

01:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Go ahead. No, we're going to wrap up.

01:32:49 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I was going to say and, to be fair, I'm fascinated by these topics because it keeps coming up decade after decade. And I remember the first time that, fred Astaire they took a scene from Fred Astaire in the Barclays of Broadway where he's dancing down a flight of stairs with a cane and decided, hey, what if we change that to a stick vacuum cleaner and it becomes a vacuum cleaner ad and people are absolutely aghast oh, it's a sin, ignoring the fact that Fred had very, very good legal representation and state representation and he had explicitly put it to his will that, hey, look, if you want to reuse and readapt my old stuff to advertise stuff and generate money, go ahead and do it. I find it an interesting academic discussion about how do you preserve the original intent and respect the original intent, even if you think that, wow, it'll be great if we upscale this, it would be great if we, instead of having subtitles for this, this, we were able to regenerate the lip movements to match this new language that it has to go in. At the same time, sometimes, the reason why the creators want to do these new technologies, such as I want to colorize this, such as I want to license this music for out for, uh, commercial purposes.

01:34:03
And commercials is that? Look, right now this is on the shelf and nobody's watching it because it's in black and white. Or no one's listening to this track because it's a 40 or 50-year-old piece of music. If we allow it to be in a Nike ad, people will listen to this John Lennon track that they had not been able to listen to before, they wouldn't have listened to before. If this movie is in color, maybe they will watch it. It, whereas instead of just dismissing it as oh, here's an old movie that I don't care about, so it's a complicated thing, I just find the academic discussion really interesting uh and that, oh.

01:34:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, no truth is rumor that siri is going to be renamed bono, that that's a something tim wanted, but it's not going to happen. That's your vision.

01:34:42
Pro segment now you know we're done talking the vision pro I do want to mention that that thing that you invented in your brain there, uh, steven rubles. The. The idea of a club with is is something we've been doing for four years now and it's worked out so well for us. It's now 25 of our, and thank goodness, because if it weren't for Club Twit, I don't know if we'd be able to keep doing the shows that we do with the people we have, the team that we have. You've kept everybody employed. Thank you, club members. If you're not yet a club member, here's the pitch $7 a month. $84 a year Gets you ad-free versions of all of our shows. Gets you access to that Discord, that social group that Stephen was talking about. We also do special programming.

01:35:32
Just like Stephen said, micah's Crafting Corner coming up next week, wednesday 6 pm Pacific. That's where you get together with Micah and work on your own craft. He's working on Lego succulents, but you could do crocheting, painting, whatever you're coding, whatever you're in the mood for. Stacy's Book Club is also on the 16th. Really good book. I really enjoyed Ursula K Le Guin's the Word for World is Forest. It's short, it's a novella, so there's still time to read it for next week and I would encourage that we also will be covering keynotes.

01:36:04
In fact, that's part of the news is, all of our keynote coverage will now be club only. It'll only be inside the ClubTwit Discord, and that's just to avoid the takedowns that we've been getting from Apple. So the first chance to do that be microsoft build on may 19th at 9 am, pacific. Then the next day, google io at 10 am, pacific. I'm getting together with the giz whiz for a special hangout dick d bartolo, lots of stories, anecdotes and even some old jingles. May 23rd, 1 pm, pacific. And then we are going to do our AI users group. We do that every first Friday of every month, monthly on the first Friday. Okay, so we did it, we just did it. The next one will be June 6th and WWDC shortly thereafter.

01:36:49
June 9th, micah and I will do our coverage of the Worldwide Developers Conference, again in the ClubTwit Discord. You're going to have to be a member if you want to watch our traditional, you know coverage, where we stream the keynote and then talk about it. And because we're doing it in the club, we're going to have, I think, not only the morning keynote but we'll do the state of the union keynote and just take up the whole day. Mike and I'll just hang out with you and because it's in the club, you'll get to be a part of the conversation now as a club member. Seven bucks a month Promise that you will be grandfathered in if we raise the price. We're looking at that right now as costs go up and ad revenue goes down, so it could go up in the next few months, but if it does, you're guaranteed to stay at that seven bucks a month if you join now. Twittv slash club twit, we'd love to have you in the club.

01:37:41
Our picks of the week are coming up next on mac break weekly steven robles filling in for jason snell's. Been great having the bearded tutor in our in our studios with us, along with alex lindsey and andy inaco, and, of course, great to have you as well. Our show today brought to you by Storyblock. I think if you've ever worked in enterprise, if you've ever done marketing or created a website of any kind, you've known the pain of legacy content management systems, cmss. They promise enterprise-grade features, but what do they give you? Delivering slow, clunky systems that often need developer support for even the smallest update, and when you're trying to move fast, that's no good. Storyblock changes that, unlike those monolithic CMSs, storyblock is headless. This is such a good idea. It's what we did for our website and backend. It really works. Decouple your backend end from your front end so developers can build in any framework they like react, astro view, whatever while marketers can use an intuitive a really nice cms visual editor to create and update content without filling out dev tickets.

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01:40:32
Try it today at storyblockcom. Slash twittv-25 and use the code twitt25. Tw listeners will get 20 off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblockcom slash twit tv dash 25. The offer code twit 25 for 20 off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S-t-o-r-y-b-l-o-k. Dot com. Slash t-w-O-R-Y-B-L-O-K. Dot com. Slash TWITTV dash 25. And don't forget that offer code TWIT25 for 20% off for three months on Growth and Growth Plus plans. Thank you, storyblock. We appreciate the support. All right, oh nice. All right, oh nice. Dr Do gives Storyblock his endorsement. Thank you, dr Do. Good sponsor, he says he apparently has used them. Nice Time for our picks of the week and, of course, as our guest Stephen Robles, I think you should go first.

01:41:32 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Well, thank you very much, I'll do two quick ones, if I could. I'm obsessed with MagSafe batteries. This is a portion of my collection.

01:41:41 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
One, two, three, four, five, six.

01:41:43 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
And there's one actually I'm testing right now on my iPhone. So there's a seventh and then I have about 10 more in the closet. Anyway, I actually saw. The last time I was on I made a MagSafe recommendation.

01:41:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does Apple still make theirs?

01:41:59 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
No, and many people bemoan it because if they were to update this with USB-C, it would be a good deal.

01:42:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I still have mine.

01:42:05 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
So what do you?

01:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
recommend Because I just bought the Anker. It's big and heavy and thick but it is type C.

01:42:12 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Which Anker is the question?

01:42:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a big heavy. I think it's a newer one, because it's a it's so 10 000, I think.

01:42:18 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Last time I recommended this anchor, which is oh, that's bigger than that. This one, yeah, this one's a big one, but the one I would recommend now and it might be the one you have this is anchors ultra slim yeah, that's the one I have.

01:42:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just got it, yeah it's.

01:42:30 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
It is the best one. I just did some tests yay I did the right thing what's the best, best one.

01:42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the best one? Ooh, ooh, ooh.

01:42:38 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I was testing multiple yesterday and most battery packs. Even if they say 15 watts fast charging wirelessly, it's not true.

01:42:46 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Oh interesting.

01:42:46 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
They'll charge at maybe 5 or 7.5 watts and you can just look at the charging graphs, like in your settings, to know like, oh, this is not fast. I actually have one from another creator that I tested and the iPhone will actually tell you if it's a slow charger. If you go to settings battery it'll say this is a slow charger. You might want to reconsider. So this Anker One, it's Qi 2, which means it doesn't get as hot. It actually charges faster. It'll bring your iPhone from 1% battery I just did this yesterday 1% battery to 90% in about two plus hours. So really fast charging for a wireless battery, and I've had this one for a while. So would highly recommend this one. It's 60 something bucks on Amazon and, uh, don't fall for all the other ones, just get this anchor when it's.

01:43:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bought the black one. That's why it says purchase.

01:43:31 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I just got it, april 27th look at that it is the best one. Yeah, I'm very happy with it.

01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's heavy, I mean, there's no doubt about it, but, boy, if you want to keep your phone going, I went to a baseball game and it was almost dead by the end of the day, and so I thought I need this. Yeah, it is helpful.

01:43:48 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
And real quick. This one you can't get it yet, but this one. Moft sent me their new dynamic folio for ipad and this thing is like an origami case and so you can. It has a bunch of magnets in it and you can do this. So you can stand it up and I've done this a lot just to like watch something with it or whatever.

01:44:07
But then you can do like more stuff, like I can fold this over, and now it's more of like kind of a, that's cool I might do my podcast editing on my ipad with ferrite on here or drawing, and then it's got a bunch of other like configurations and so you can do this and like put your iphone here and while you're working on your desk. And this one it's on kickstarter right now. I'm not sure when it's releasing, but it should be soon. They send me this and it is uh, it is really cool m-o-f-t yeah, mofft, so I've been using.

01:44:38
They sponsored a video a couple months ago, but I've I've been using it now every day and I really love it, so I recommend, once it comes out, it should be out, they say.

01:44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're saying next month so, or maybe this month, may 2025.

01:44:49 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
So oh, there you go.

01:44:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's pretty cool, it's pretty cool nice and not not expensive 34 bucks if you go through the yeah yeah, that's not bad at all.

01:44:58 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Yeah, and it's nice, it's durable.

01:45:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The only thing I have a Kobo with an origami case, and I feel like an idiot trying to fold it.

01:45:07 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Well, here's the thing. Here's what I like about it. So they put little icons on the blue part.

01:45:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, very smart.

01:45:13 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
And they say if you forget how to fold it just match the icons with each other. Oh, very smart. And they say if you forget how to fold, it, just match the icons with each other. And it really helps, like I need that To remember how to fold it.

01:45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need that cause I'm so yeah, I usually don't like I don't want my case to make me feel like a moron.

01:45:26 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
This one doesn't do that. This one helps you out, so I appreciate that.

01:45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna throw one time and I don't want to be late, but now there is a way with my iPhone to not be late. It's lately 2.0 for people with ADHD or just people like me who have a hard time being on time. It will remind you to leave and then say and no, really leave, no leave, no leave, now leave. It knows where you're going. This is such a clever uh little uh app. I think it's a very good idea. Lately, the version 2.0 just came out. Of course I'll still be late, but but now I have no excuse. It gives you a countdown showing how much time you have left. So you and you see the little progress bar, so you can just see it whittling away. So you and you see the little progress bar, so you can just see it whittling away as you get later and later and later. I think this is a brilliant idea. Solves a problem, certainly that I uh. I have lately uh 2.0 and I can't remember if it cost me anything or not. I think it wasn't.

01:46:32 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
Let's see, I need a way to send that anonymously to family members yeah, you know, it's like exactly if you're on a family plan and an app like this suddenly appears on your phone.

01:46:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one step closer to divorce, man. Yeah, maybe that's a sign, that's a frank discussion that needs to happen immediately. I am that guy. I am often late. I got it for myself. Mr Andy Anako. How about your pick of the week?

01:46:59 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Mine is a free notes app. I've been for a few years now. I've been making a conscious effort to every time I get an idea for something I'd like to write or just a note I thought that is worth jotting down. Capture an emote note Okay, that's easy, everybody does that. I've been using Google keep for that and I've realized that that's become an unwieldy way to make to dip into this inventory of ideas, particularly when it's like articles and blog posts and things I'd like to write. I was trying to do that in Ulysses, which I'm sure there's a really great way to do it, but I also found that okay. So now I've got it's a lot of work to keep the things that are just notes separate and distinct from the things that are actual things that are in progress. So I decided that I need to keep the factory floor Ulysses being the factory floor clean that only has projects that are actually in progress. So I've been looking for a dedicated notes app that will be just for capturing again these ideas, and I seem to have settled on Joplin. It's an open source notes app that will be just for capturing again these ideas. And I said I seem to have settled on joplin, it's an open source notes app, and here are the reasons why I settled on it. One it's free, it is open source and it's free. It's multi-platform. Apple notes, for instance, would be an absolute non-starter, because I can't be locked on to just ios and mac os. Uh, it's a. It doesn't try to be like evernote, which is your all-in-one personal information, project information and calendaring app. No, I just need the quickest possible pipeline between oh, that's a good idea, I should write this down before I forget it. And boom, it's a note that's synced between every single one of my devices and the cloud. It is free. You can pay them for cloud syncing service or it's open source. You can just simply say hi, here's my Dropbox, please put everything on a folder here and it will automatically sync through. It's worked pretty well. I think it has just enough features to do the thing that I want it to do. Your notes can be marked down. You can add PDFs. You can add PDFs, you can add images. That's not pretty much what I want to do with it, but at least it has that sort of stuff. It is open source. But every time I try out something that's open source, my biggest worry is how open source-y is it? Does it look like a Unix terminal app from a Sun Microsystems device in 1997? Or does it actually look like a modern Mac slash, android slash desktop app? It's only a little bit open source. It works just fine.

01:49:26
And again, as an idea of having a dedicated place that lets me organize, capture and organize notes where this is not the factory floor, when I need to think, okay, I need to put something on the editorial calendar for two weeks from now, let's see what I got to fill in my Thursday slot. Oh, actually that's a good idea, let's put that in there. Just enough features to make it useful. But the features that go beyond just simply capturing and organizing notes are one step behind the surface, so they don't screw you up. And again, it's free. Go to joplinapporg. It's in the App Store, it's in the Google Play Store, you can get it as a Mac app, whatever, and at least give it a try.

01:50:06
And like I put all like 400 something of my Google notes, google Keep docs that were tagged as ideas. I imported them all in there. Actually, this is why I was so excited to talk to Alex about ChatGPT and Gemini for stuff like that, because that was a point where I used to know how to write to a text file from AppleScript, but it's giving me errors no matter what I do. And that's when Gemini said yeah, I don't know why that's not working either. Hi, let's brainstorm other ideas. What if you just actually had a command? Send it as a command line to. Oh, now it's actually working. Thank you, gemini. So I've got all 400 of my notes in there. It's actually. It's been working fine for the past couple of weeks, so I, I use joplin for a long time.

01:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I I have a bad habit of going from note taker to note taker city and log seek and joplin and ram and on and on and on. I really like Joplin. I forgot why I stopped using it. Maybe I should take a look at it.

01:51:00 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, and I checked out Obsidian, but it's super powerful, but I think you have to be part of the cult to get it to do exactly what you want to do. It's definitely a cult. Yeah, simple Note from Automatic is free, but it's not powerful. It's just short of powerful enough for what I want to do with it. And, as I mean you and I are in the same boat, it's like every time there's a brand new notes app, I at least got to check it out just to see. And that's the big thing. That means that, no, you're not actually being, you're not actually becoming more productive by investigating new productivity apps, because you are now eating most of your time by looking at new productivity apps. No, stick with the one that brought you and get the actual work done.

01:51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do like it that Joplin has a nodes-based command line interface as well, so you really can use it everywhere. That's really that's-.

01:51:52 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Yeah, and that's part of the open sourceness I like, because, like, oh God, how am I going to get these 400 notes in there? Well, it will just. You can just point it to a folder full of text files and it'll import each one of these text files as a separate note, saying oh, and Google Keep allows me to create, turn all of those into a Google Doc, which I can then save as a text file which I can then parse into separate files. I bet using an Apple script, open source stuff lets you do that as opposed to that script. Open source stuff lets you do that as opposed to. That's great. You should definitely add it to our features list on our membership blog and we'll get to it sometime.

01:52:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All it takes is a pull request. Andy, that's all it takes. You are so close to being helpful.

01:52:25 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I want to encourage you, but you're so close to being helpful.

01:52:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, Andy and Ako. I agree, Joplin, really a great, great choice. I think it's really cool. Alex Lindsay, that leaves you. What's your pick of the week?

01:52:37 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It does show you how, how sticky things are. Like I, I've been using notes for so long that a big chunk of like I could never use another platform.

01:52:43 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's a great it's a great app is that it's so good, and the problem is that there's so much in it that I'm like, every time I leave, every time I go to a PC, I noticed how much I was dependent on Apple Notes and I said, but what if there's a better app out there but I won't be able to switch to it because I'm so stuck in Apple Notes? And that's when I weaned myself off of it and also made it easy to switch to.

01:53:10 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Android. I experimented at it, but I was like I can't find anything that I like better.

01:53:13 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
It's a great app. There's nothing wrong with it.

01:53:15 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
It's a great app.

01:53:17 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So my pick is Midjourney 7 and specifically OmniReference. So what OmniReference does is it allows you to. I'll show you an example here. I can use Leo as an example. Now I'm in trouble. He likes to take an image, so I just grabbed this image.

01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, Show Alex's, he looks so happy before you're going to do whatever you're going to do. I thought it would be better if he was a pilot it even took the smile away because I'm a dead serious jet airplane fighter pilot there you are in the cockpit.

01:53:47 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You're just being nice here you're a little more serious. They're not all perfect it's looking less like me that's not too bad, but in a group of other ones.

01:53:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was all from that one picture.

01:54:01 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, this is all from the one picture.

01:54:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it's getting different angles and stuff.

01:54:04 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
That's pretty good. Yeah, no, no, that one's a little odd there. But there you are with casting a spell. I thought that would be useful. I don't know what you're playing playing I guess playing a game here.

01:54:15
Um, you know, another casting spell here's. I like the monk leo. I think that's good. So I turned up the um, they'll make sure you can turn the scale up like how hard. And because you had kind of a smile, it gave you kind of this crazy look monk smirk. That was kind of like yeah, another, another one with the pilot there. I was playing with kind of a different weight there. I just did this. I literally did these while we were talking.

01:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know like it was you know like all of that happened Mid-journey is so amazing. I mean, we've come a long way from. How many fingers does it have? They've really, they've really.

01:54:47 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It still has some finger problems Does it.

01:54:53
Yeah, it's not completely you. This new Omni reference is out of control, like you can just sit there and and it it'll get all kinds of different uh, you know versions of it. So it's, it's, it's pretty slick. So, um, you know, I, um, I think I have, I was. I took an older photo of my. Let's see if I can pull it up here. I don't know if I can. You know, this was me playing around a little bit. Sorry, I'm just going to take a second here. One of the things I wanted to do was, I think, for education, being able to visualize things would be really interesting. So I gave it pictures of Vietnam and asked it to use that as the style, but then I prompted it to give me the Civil War. So then you end up with images like that.

01:55:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like Confusing the hell out of people. Yes, but, but, but it's.

01:55:42 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I like the new uniform style yeah exactly so many of them still working on that so many of those are reenactors, that's yeah, yeah that's, but here's, here's the uh, but here's the photo I grabbed from you know that I had laying around, and then you know you have all these different and it's really getting different views of the whole you know thing and it and it's kind of an amazing thing that it's, it's it's rebuilding all that geometry, you know like it's not, and then, of course, you can do selfies with the president, which is, you know, important.

01:56:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, um, but you look like matthew. Uh, what's his name? The daguerreotype guy. Can we do it? Matthew brady, can we do a selfie? Mr president, before I shoot your.

01:56:22 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
You look like Matthew what's his name? The daguerreotype guy, can we do it? Matthew Brady, can we do a selfie, mr President, before I shoot your portrait? Yeah, yeah, so anyway, yeah, but it's come a long way and it's just an amazing demo app. I don't find I use a lot of it for anything final but to brainstorm and to think about what things look like, and I think, for pitches, but also for education, for other things. I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

01:56:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just realized I've been paying for a mid journey subscription for the last two years.

01:56:48 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I would. I would recommend it. I don't the only one that I have, the one that's. You know. I pay per year and it's like 50 bucks a month, so it's like a lot at one time, but it just means that I just have a lot of hours there. I have 30 hours that I can use every every uh, uh month and uh, I use them all up there. Sometime in the last couple of days I go oh, I'm out, like I now have to go back to slow.

01:57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're so good with. You are a mid journey whiz. I mean you really do a great job.

01:57:15 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
It just takes, it's just practice, I mean, and learning what it learning what it likes to do and what it doesn't. And I, I look, I do a lot of things where I just go through the explore. The great thing about mid journeys that shows you. You know, there's a, a section in it where you just go explore and then it just shows you what everybody else is doing and it shows you all their prompts. So you sit there and go oh, I, I see what they did there and I see how they got that, that imagery.

01:57:35 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
That's evil. I admire that. I would like to replicate it.

01:57:42 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, like a lot of times people achieve some look like a sketch look or a cartoony look or like this other look, and you then dig into their prompts to figure out what they. What did you say to do that?

01:57:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice.

01:57:53 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Mid journey dot. It's mid journey seven and, specifically, the thing that I would recommend playing with is OmniReference, if you have access to it, but what's? The website.

01:58:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you can do it in Discord.

01:58:04 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Midjourneycom. You know it's funny. I don't use the Discord version anymore. I thought it was great, but then now the web version has so many extra tools and things and everything else that it's really hard to got all the interface stuff that you would need.

01:58:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, very cool, pretty amazing. In fact, a little easier perhaps to use than the discord. You don't have much for all those prompts much easier and there's a.

01:58:23 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
There's some editing tools now in in the web that I'm not talking about right here, but you can now bring in layers, you can uh, you know, grab on, you know change certain sections. There's a lot of the editing tools now are also pretty intense I.

01:58:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to set up the personalization first.

01:58:39 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
I don't, I don't use.

01:58:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
V7. Is that the one you want?

01:58:42 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, I use V7, but I I don't use it.

01:58:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You haven't personalized it.

01:58:47 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
No, you teach it what you like. Yeah, I tell it. This is what I want. This is the reference. I don't want it to look at like I'm giving you some style, I'm going to give you some references and I want you to do those things. I don't want you to think about other things that I may have wanted in the past. You could do a mood board.

01:59:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I want something brand new.

01:59:04
Yeah, yeah, so you know, but, like you know, for instance, we were playing around with storyboards this morning I took a picture from my youth of my mom and dad, when they were young, and I said update this to be 90-year-olds. Oh no, and it did. They don't look like my mom and dad, but Right, looks like somebody's mom and dad, right, this is the yeah, somebody's mom and dad. This is the original Right. Quite a bit later. That's fun, though, that you could do stuff like that. I think this is really cool. Yeah, and you have choices, obviously.

01:59:41 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Wow, and this is so much improved over the last time and if you click on it, if you click on one of those, you'll get a full-size view. And then you see there's edit tools yeah and now you get strong

01:59:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
upscale.

01:59:50 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Yeah, you get edit yeah you'll start to see all the extra tools that are available to you and, yeah, apparently my dad looks like kevin spacey now.

01:59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's good. Yeah, this is interesting. Yeah, very nice. Midjourneycom it's, I would say, would you say it's still the best image, ai, I mean, there are a lot of good so it depends.

02:00:13 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
So I I use a lot of different ones. So if I'm trying to do something specific, then I'm I'd go to chat GPT, because I can sit there and say something. It's much more accurate like do what I ask you to do, and I can say change this, change this, change this, I don't like this, I don't like that. It's it's, it's a it's not quite as talented. Journey is kind of like your nutty uncle, like you're like hey, do this, and he goes well, how about this? And you're like that's great, we'll do another one.

02:00:38
Okay, something completely different, you know, and so so, um, uh, but but the chat GPT is a little bit more uh focused, it won't produce the same quality image. In my opinion, leonardoai does better about like logo design and more graphics design and so on and so forth. And then you have, when you start to, you know, when you start to, you have wonder dynamics and and cling and lemon and a couple other ones that for animation you know, wonder dynamics from Autodesk as well, where you can start to put those animations together based on the content that you're creating. But oftentimes as an image resource, uh, mid journeys, kind of the still my favorite as far as producing a really beautiful image.

02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean horses for courses. We're not yet at the point where you could say this is the one, no, and then you try them all really.

02:01:32 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
Well, and you figure out as you start to play with them, you start to figure out which ones are strengths and which ones are stronger and and you figure out as you start to play with them, you start to figure out which ones are the strengths and weaknesses, which ones are stronger, and you know, like, for instance, chatgpt is my daily, like all day. It's opened, all the time. I'm asking it questions, but if I'm programming I've kind of moved to Cloud for most of that, and so you know, chatgpt does a great job, but Cloud is more accurate. So you just kind of keep evolving with, with all of these. I don't know where the answer is going to end up thank you, alex.

02:01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Office hours dot global is the place to find alex lindsey. What's going on in the uh, in the old office hours, these days?

02:02:03 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
you know or you know where we? We do this thing every morning. We meet and we talk and we answer questions, and then we, and then off we go, that's pretty much that's pretty much what we're, you know, like, there's, it's, uh, it's a pretty straightforward process, but, yeah, a lot of Q and a um and uh. That's what we, that's what we've been doing for cooking music on Saturdays and just all sorts of stuff.

02:02:24
You know it's, it's it. The Saturdays have calmed down, um and uh once we got out, you know. So it's just, it's still that that that first hour, the, the about uh, office hours, what they don't like about office hours, philosophical questions about the industry, and so we, we kind of have, so it's a much more freewheeling thing. That's. That's the Sunday, uh, sunday sessions.

02:02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you join?

02:02:52 - Alex Lindsay (Host)
uh, as in the past, by going to officehoursglobal and you just go officehoursglobal join and you can sign up and then you'll start getting emails and they'll have links to our discord. We've got about 2200 people in discord and then we have um and uh. So our discord, um are, and then you'll get links to where to go see the show, all those things very nice officehoursglobal.

02:03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
thank you, alex, and, of course, if you want to hire Alex 090.media, there is nobody better at this kind of thing, andy and Akko. Anything you would like to plug?

02:03:25 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
Akkocom is proceeding. Wwdc is next month. It seems like it'd be a good time to-. Would you like to join us for?

02:03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
our keynote coverage, I think I would Okay, well, come on in. As I mentioned, we're going to try doing the State of the Union as well, which means a marathon, but you can come and go as you wish.

02:03:46 - Andy Ihnatko (Host)
I'm a Zephyr, I'm the wind baby.

02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Floating in and out. Thank you, andrew and Stephen. Thank you, it's so great to see you. Stephen Roble is the bearded tutor. He does the primary tech show. Where's the best place to find that, steven?

02:03:59 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
yeah, you can go to primary techfm or search primary technology anywhere or on youtube. Apple podcast, spotify all of that and beardfm has my links to everything I do if you want to visit that he's all fm all the time.

02:04:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's it. I used to have leoam, but uh, I gave it up for fm higher fidelity, very nice. Anything else you want to mention, I definitely recommend your uh youtube uh episode on siri versus perplexity. Really some good tips there. I think we're all getting more comfortable with and getting better at using ai now and there's some great opportunities out there.

02:04:38 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
For sure, I also did a recent video on Bear Notes we were just talking about.

02:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bear oh, I love Bear Notes yeah.

02:04:43 - Stephen Robles (Guest)
I did a comparison to Apple Notes. So yeah, that's up on the channel too.

02:04:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, very good. Yeah, we've recommended Bear in the past. It's very good. Good markdown. Editor. Thank you, stephen. Great to see you. Jason Snell will be back back next week. I hope you will as well.

02:04:57
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02:05:30
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02:06:07
All of our shows have a dedicated youtube channel. Uh, join the club, if you're not already. Remember. Twittertv club. Twit to our club, to members. Thank you so much for making all of this possible. We will be back next week. I hope you will be too, but now it is my sad and solemn duty to have to say get back to work because break time is over. Bye-bye. No matter how much spare time you have, twittv has the perfect tech news format for your schedule. Stay up to date with everything happening in tech and get tech news your way with twittv. Start your week with this Week in Tech for an in-depth, comprehensive dive into the top stories every week and for a midweek boost. Tech News Weekly brings you concise, quick updates with the journalists breaking the news. Whether you need just the nuts and bolts or want the full analysis, stay informed with TWITTV's perfect pairing of tech news programs.