MacBreak Weekly 974 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Alex, Andy and Jason all in the house. We're going to talk about Apple and Epic making nice, and now the Fortnite is in the iOS store. Tim Cook's no good, very bad week has continued to get worse and worse, and why Apple probably won't be talking about AI in a couple of weeks. All of that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly .

This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 974, recorded Tuesday, May 27th 2025: Lyle, Who? It's time for MacBreak Weekly yes, indeed, the show where we talk about the latest Apple news all up and down this great fruited plane with Mr Jason Snell of sixcolors.com. Hello, Jason.

0:01:02 - Jason Snell
Hello Leo, it's good to be here.

0:01:03 - Leo Laporte
Yes, welcome Also with us, Andy Ihnatko of the library. Hello Jason, Hello Leo, it's good to be here. Yes, welcome Also with us, Andy Ihnatko of the library.

0:01:09 - Andy Ihnatko
That's fine.

0:01:09 - Leo Laporte
I like that Ihnatko of the library, library man Soon to have a website Any minute now, and, of course, from officehours.global. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Alex Lindsay. Hello, hello, hello.

0:01:23 - Alex Lindsay
How are you, sir? I'm doing quite well. I'm doing quite well.

0:01:26 - Leo Laporte
So turns out, Elon tried to blackmail Apple. Wait a minute, what happened to me? I don't know. Am I? Am I in the wind? I'm in the wind. Oh, now you saw my face?

0:01:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't. I thought. I thought that he was on the outs of the administration. I didn't think he still had access to that kind of this is all part of our plan.

0:01:45 - Jason Snell
All part of our plan to take secret plan to take over the show from leo. We're very gradually facing him out.

0:01:50 - Leo Laporte
That was, that was step one so, uh, this from the information, uh, in an exclusive, exclusive story. Uh, before apple decided to go with global star for its SOS satellite network, it had ambitions. According to the information, it had ambitions of becoming an Internet service provider and it was all going to be by launching they are fighting it out in space. It was all going to be by launching satellites, thousands of them, with the help of boeing. That might have been their first mistake, yeah, uh. And then you would have on your phone, you would have apple internet plus. You could put a little doohickey in the window, because of course a phone needs line of sight to satellites a little doohickey in the window and you could have internet from apple too.

Elon got wind of this and apparently came to apple and said here's the pitch see if you would go for this. SpaceX agrees to exclusively provide satellite connectivity to iPhones for 18 months, for a mere five billion dollars up front. After that, after that period of exclusivity 18 months, apple pays a billion dollars a year for Starlink. But apple here's. That was the carrot, here's the shtick. If you don't come to terms with me, I will announce a similar satellite feature on my own that could work with iPhones and I, you, and I think this must have been the thing that cheesed off Tim Cook 72 hours to decide, pew, pew. Tim rejected the offer.

0:03:36 - Alex Lindsay
Elon, but I'm sure it was in a very nice way, Elon. I just don't think we can get our act together in 72 hours.

0:03:43 - Leo Laporte
That's probably it. We're not ready.

0:03:46 - Alex Lindsay
Probably a little bit of a southern draw, yeah I just don't think we can make time that fast Elon this is tim.

0:03:52 - Jason Snell
Well, this is tim this is tim.

0:03:54 - Leo Laporte
Good morning good morning, Elon um, Elon did keep what's true to his word. He did start a competitor with t-mobile, which I can now use on my iPhone. In fact, I was visiting a friend who had no cellular signal in his knife manufacturing and all of a sudden said you want to make a call with Starlink? I'm T-Mobile. You can use Starlink. I didn't, because I think it costs you. I can't remember what the deal was. I had signed up for it, but I forgot what the deal was. So I should have, though, because then I could report back. Anyway, this seems credible. I mean, the information is exclusive. So you know, wayne Ma is very good at getting those inside stories, they say. According to five people with knowledge two people with direct knowledge of the deal the failed deal added tension to Apple's relationship with Musk, who has spent the ensuing years tangling with the iPhone maker on a range of issues. Do you think Elon might have put a little birdie in the presidency here and said you know, apple didn't show up in Saudi Arabia?

0:05:02 - Alex Lindsay
I think that really it just had to do with Apple not showing up in Saudi Arabia. I don't think Elon did anything after.

0:05:06 - Leo Laporte
That's the time story. We don't know. Yeah, probably.

0:05:16 - Alex Lindsay
That's the time story. Elon's evil plans. Yeah, I think Elon was already on his way out and I think that Trump is uh, you know he is. What did you do? For me, not even yesterday or the last 10 seconds and so so I think that that you know he, you know Tim Cook, turned down the opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia from the president and he pays the price immediately. Yeah, like that's, that's the, that's kind of the, the transactional nature of the.

0:05:37 - Leo Laporte
New York times said the reason for the 25%, or threatened 25%, tariff on iPhones not made in the US is that, uh, the president had invited Tim Cook to join him. Jensen Wong and others Elon as well in Saudi Arabia, and Tim pull, we don't know about politely declined. I'm sure it was polite, uh, and I did mention last week that the president said Jensen in Saudi Arabia, jensen Wong is here, tim Cook is not, Yep, so there's a little credibility there. I don't know what more to say about. Have we talked about the 25% on this show? No, not yet. So John Gruber had an excellent take, which is now backed up by everybody, which is it's cheaper to take a 25 tariff and make the phones in india than it would ever be to make them in the united states yeah, ming chi quo said something along those same lines a few days ago it doesn't, it's, it doesn't make mathematical sense.

Yeah, nevertheless, it is a significant you know cost increase on the iphone.

0:06:46 - Andy Ihnatko
It is a significant cost increase on the iPhone. Yeah, and CNBC interviewed a Trump advisor who said that, hey, we're not trying to hurt Apple and in the same interview, said but we expect them to absorb the cost and not pass any of the tariffs onto the consumer.

0:07:00 - Leo Laporte
Could Apple? I mean, their margins are pretty good, not that good, not that good. No, well, they have like 30% or 40% margin, right, they could.

0:07:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Would they settle for 10 or 12% though?

0:07:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, maybe not settle, but the president's putting the screws to them.

0:07:16 - Jason Snell
I don't think it's going to get to that point, and I know that you think, president of the United States, he's got all the leverage. But Apple has leverage here, because if apple raises phone prices, everybody knows who's at fault, right, right, and we know that we saw with inflation like people don't react really well to prices going way up and they blame I mean honestly, they blame the government anyway, regardless of whether it's at fault for what's going on. So I think that that is apple's leverage is, if it's a $2,000 iPhone this fall, who do you think it's? Whose fault is it? It's Trump's. That's the bottom line period. So that's their, that's their side of it.

I think the question is, again, it's always a negotiation. That is, if there's anything we've learned about Donald Trump is everything is a negotiation, everything is a deal that allows him to declare some sort of victory. And so the question is what can Apple do because of reality, right, because of reality that they're not going to be bringing the whole iPhone supply chain to the US, not this year, not in five years?

0:08:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know why, ten years, american women don't have the tiny fingers, the tiny fingers, the tiny fingers of chinese women.

0:08:27 - Jason Snell
Oh boy, there's so much. There's so much here that I don't want to talk about. I should explain this really quickly, otherwise I'm going to get email here's.

0:08:36 - Leo Laporte
Uh, john gruber's really dug in on this one. He was mad at trip mickle's terrible new york times story, which which basically didn't just say, hey, there's no way apple's ever going to make an iphone in the united states, but went to a bunch of analysts who said, well, you could, but it would cost more. No, you couldn't. And then trip said something weird about young chinese women have small fingers and that's the reason you have to make the iphone in china. This, of course, is not only racist, yeah, but pretty appalling. And the new york times has refused, gruber, says. I I didn't really talk too much about it because I thought, oh, they'll take that out of the article pretty quick.

0:09:16 - Jason Snell
No, no, no, and I think I think their defense is this is the way that people involved in chinese manufacturing talk about this, but I have a theory here, which is this is code for child labor.

0:09:28 - Leo Laporte
That that's what this really is it's really is their child labor making iPhones I, I don't know.

0:09:33 - Jason Snell
You tell me there's not supposed to be, but like young women make with small fingers, making iPhones, if that's even a thing. It sounds to me like what they're really saying is eight-year-olds we have very young people.

0:09:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't think apple.

0:09:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't think apple messes around with that yeah, yeah other manufacturers maybe, but apple, apple yeah, apple has definitely tried not to do a lot of every way possible.

0:09:52 - Jason Snell
But there's also the cultural thing here, which is this is probably a way of talking about this that may have been true when there was more child labor in the factory than there is now, and they still talk that. It is bizarre and baffling, and and and. Look, I mean, the real question here is what? What deal do you make with Trump? Because the, the leverage Apple has is, if we don't make a deal, you know iPhones are going to go up and they're going to blame you, right, like bottom line. They're going to blame you and and and. Yeah, I know that that's like declaring war on on the government, but the war has been declared in a way.

So the question is how do we de-escalate that?

0:10:27 - Leo Laporte
if you're allowed child labor in the united states, could we make the iphone here?

0:10:32 - Alex Lindsay
I'm just asking no, no, okay, okay, let's just take this down the amount of infrastructure that it would be required to build to build what it'd take 10 years to build that factory at least a decade, so that you could make it for three times the cost.

You know like there's no part of that math that makes any sense. It is just the dumbest idea. And it's not the dumbest idea that could be said recently, but it's pretty close. I mean, it's someone who doesn't know anything. Everything looks simple to people who don't know anything about it and it is okay. Well, they just move it to the United States. It's just.

0:11:04 - Leo Laporte
I think it's either idiotic or it is Because if they had to import all the parts still from China at that 25% tariff or 30%?

0:11:15 - Alex Lindsay
And even if they didn't, it's just that there's all these little companies, that all even the Indian ones that are there, are getting a huge number of the components from China.

0:11:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, what I'm saying is that they would have to import them from China here, so you'd still get a tariff from. China, whereas if you import the phone from India. You only have that one. 25%.

0:11:34 - Jason Snell
Leo, you have a. You had a good piece in our show notes that is Andrew Ross Sorkin and a New York times deal book writing a piece that was basically like how do they build an on an off ramp to placate Trump? That was the story.

0:11:46 - Leo Laporte
That's the real question.

0:11:47 - Jason Snell
And he, he made it is the real story here. Because what what Trump wants is he wants to keep putting the screws to Apple, to make Apple increasingly commit to doing things in the US, because it makes him look like a victor who changed the behavior of one of the biggest companies in the world. Behavior of one of the biggest companies in the world. And what, what uh, andrew Ross Sorkin did was contact a bunch of supply chain experts who are not people who talk about the size of people's fingers, and instead, uh, have the cause, because this is a good writer at the New York times yeah, I said it. Um, not, not, not a bad writer at the New York times who doesn't know what he's talking about, about almost anything. Anyway, um, have it in for trip mickle.

So, um, what he suggests is you take it in pieces, right, like I mean, there's probably a way to create an assembly plant in the next three years in the us and take and start thinking modularly about the iphone and assembling parts of it outside in various other countries, importing the parts at a lower you know some sort of reduced tariff rate and then assembling. And I mean the joke I made is you make it in two parts. You snap them together and put them in the box in the US and you say, assembled in the US. But it would be more complex than that. But like it's not, something that's logical.

0:13:01 - Leo Laporte
They did that with the Texas plant in the first term.

0:13:05 - Jason Snell
For the Mac Pro yeah, something that's logical in the first. For the mac pro yeah, exactly. So it's not something that's logical. You wouldn't actually want to do it this way, but it would, at a little expense, and allow you to say we're assembling this in the us. And honestly, I know that sounds like an end around around trump, but like I think that that there is some legitimate view in the white house that things like having a packaging plant, having an assembly plant, those are American jobs. So their argument would be yeah, I know it's a little less efficient and I know it's not assembling the whole thing, but it's Apple bringing some factory jobs back to America. It allows them to declare victory and it allows this to deescalate.

0:13:42 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and it could be. I mean, if Apple spends a billion dollars on it, it would be fine. Apple wouldn't make out on that and Trump would get it. You know, they could say we're spending a billion dollars on a factory in Phoenix and we're going to build it. And the thing is is that if they said that they could announce it, they could dedicate, they could be doing.

0:14:09 - Leo Laporte
It'll take two or three years to get the concrete for the floor poured right, to do this right, and then they could just turn it into something else down the road, into a server. Tim tim cook. Thanks to a bite for bite joe in our chat room, he says if you look at the us, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill a room. China, you could fill multiple football fields. It hasn't been that. It's cheap labor for a long time. It's the expertise, the precisions, the advanced tooling. Those are the things not the little fingers.

0:14:33 - Alex Lindsay
The famous story about sourcing a screw when you need one in an hour and a half and the problem is is the only place these engineers exist now is the defense industry, because it has to be made in the united states, and so there are tons there are more, probably, than he's saying are available but they all work for Raytheon and they all work for other companies like that, because that's the only place that needs everything to be built in the United States, and I imagine a fighter jet is more high margin than an iPhone.

0:14:56 - Jason Snell
I think this is leverage for Tim Cook though that quote is a Tim Cook quote, and I think that it is counter to the old argument, which is you can't bring these jobs back to the US, because nobody in the US is going to be able to work there, even at minimum wage, is going to be able to work the way you could afford to pay people in China.

And what this quote is saying is well, actually that is becoming less the case, and instead it's about the know-how at mechanized factories that are these assembly plants, and it's all complicated. I think the argument would be that that's something that, although we aren't capable of doing it, that the United States could be capable of doing if you worked at it for a couple of decades, and so I think that that becomes part of his core argument to the White House is let's start down the path of getting that kind of knowledge. Now, the problem is, a lot of that also comes from training, and we live in a world where the administration is kind of at war with the entire concept of higher ed and things like that.

0:15:59 - Alex Lindsay
So it's complicated but they could do it. But I mean, I think the other thing that Apple could do is say, hey, we're building this plant, we're going to spend a billion dollars, do it. But I mean, I think the other thing that Apple could do is say, hey, we're building this plant, we're going to spend a billion dollars on it. We're also committing $100 million to machining education in high schools. You know a VoTech program that buys a bunch of precision machines. We're going to partner with a couple of companies that have these machinists and everything else.

0:16:18 - Jason Snell
And it's a decade-long investment.

0:16:25 - Alex Lindsay
And we're going to spend a billion dollars on this and another billion dollars on that. You get an announcement and it would be really great, by the way, for kids to be able to play with it.

0:16:31 - Leo Laporte
I have to point out one thing All of this makes sense, but you have an autocrat in power who is not predictable.

0:16:37 - Jason Snell
It's true, so it's not predictable.

0:16:40 - Leo Laporte
It's something you should do. Whether it will work is an unknown.

0:16:43 - Jason Snell
Right, not predictable and not based in reality. Right, because he clearly believes that Apple could, just out of the snap of the fingers, assemble them. And so you can try to use logic, but all you can do is try.

0:16:54 - Andy Ihnatko
One of the biggest problems in dealing with Trump is that sometimes he says things because the little bird in his mouth told him to say certain things and the rest of the administration is like he said what? Now what? Do we have to defend now? And so part of the problem of responding to that is that am I going to divert billions of dollars in company resources? To something that he's going to simply retract or walk back on. A week later it's chaos, and chaos always benefits the despot.

0:17:23 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that what Tim Cook is pretty good at is just doing a good CEO on a large company is just doing math. They're like, if I'm going to lose $12 billion by this, but I could spend a billion dollars to get out of it, then I'll just spend a billion dollars. It doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong, they're just like the math is there, right, and so I can see Apple, and it's not going to be the only thing that they're asked of. I think that the big thing, that I think that the line that Tim uh drew there, which is going to be a hard one for Apple to manage, is that he's like I don't want to keep showing up like a puppy dog, like I don't want to, you know, and and I think that that's where he just that was a mistake. Well, it may have been a mistake, but at some point I think it didn't work.

It was a logical choice that it was a choice that he made. I'm sure I think that he probably made it conscious to there was going to be blow back and he's going to have to figure out what that blow back, how to manage that blow back. But I think that at some point Tim was like I'm just not willing to keep standing next, you know, standing next to this, you know, and and I he made a what potentially is a moral choice on his part of I'm just not going to keep on saying this is okay, like it's one thing. It's one thing to go to a Texas factory, it's another thing to go to Saudi Arabia.

You know, with the president, stand there and you know it's also remember, for a CEO. I know the other CEOs went, but but they're all looking at the same thing. This is a very transactional and vindictive president and they and they, you're going to pay a price if you say no. And I think tim I don't think tim made a mistake. I think he consciously said no, knowing that that's going to be the cost um for the decision that he thinks is right, you know, um if you're a shareholder.

That might upset you. It it might, but it's also a branding issue for apple, like at some point. You know that. You know you get into this.

0:19:03 - Leo Laporte
This if the, if the administration is only going to be four years. Can Apple survive four years? Oh yeah, unless Donald Jr, who wants to run now, unless it's a dynasty.

0:19:14 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, so the yeah so that's Tim's nightmare. By the way, he woke up with a cold sweat this morning, I'm sure, yeah, so so I think that, but I think that again, I think that, but I think that again, I think that he made that decision. I think Apple, there's a way to say a bunch of stuff. That and again, I think it'd be great to have more machining training in high schools.

0:19:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Sure, I wish my son had access to it right now. Can I say parenthetically that this is one of the you're talking about abusive relationships when Trump doesn't get what he wants. Just do a Google search on Trump and Harvard relationships.

0:19:45 - Leo Laporte
when when trump doesn't get what he wants? Just do google search on trump and harvard.

0:19:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh and yeah, although I want to point out one of the things that trump did.

0:19:49 - Leo Laporte
Just okay, go ahead is took 100 million dollars from harvard and said I'm giving it to trade schools. That's what I was about to say. Yeah, right.

0:19:57 - Alex Lindsay
So I think apple saying we're going to give 100 million dollars or a billion dollars to trade schools, to not just trade schools but programs that that might be inside of um, you know, programs that could be inside of high schools and other things like that It'd be. I mean, part of the reason that we're in this pickle is because high schools, k through 12, started pushing uh, liberal arts, you know, liberal arts colleges as opposed to trades, you know, and that happened four decades ago, like you know, like it's not, and so we slowly just stopped training. You know, I went when I grew up, I was in metal shop and wood shop and you know, and all these other things. And you know, we all knew how to weld, we all knew how to do all those things. Did you go into welding, alex? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I made a lot of cool things with well, I mean it's little smiles you make.

0:20:41 - Leo Laporte
Is that a career that you would have pursued? Oh no, I have a cousin who did it?

0:20:44 - Jason Snell
I have a cousin who went to apprentice welded and all of that.

0:20:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I have. I have people who went to. But I know I have friends that I grew up with that, that learned how to weld in in high school, got certified right out of high school and they're making six figures. I mean.

0:20:57 - Leo Laporte
You know.

0:20:58 - Jason Snell
None of those jobs, though, are going to be assembling iPhones no but on a factory floor no, but keep in mind that the robots do a lot of the assembly now and so a lot of it is.

0:21:07 - Alex Lindsay
Foxconn is trying to replace almost all of the inexpensive Chinese workers with robots.

0:21:12 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I think Chinese girls have small fingers, those robots.

0:21:15 - Jason Snell
Let me tell you about robots. Let me tell you about robots.

0:21:18 - Alex Lindsay
So you know, the problem is bringing this stuff back isn't is bringing every year, it's bringing less labor back to the United States because even Foxconn is trying to get rid of literally every worker they can get rid of in China. Like you know, with the automation and every year there's a couple spots I was reading an article about this a couple months ago there's a couple spots every year that are gone. You know they just keep on.

0:21:43 - Leo Laporte
We figured out how to do that with a machine you know so well. There we have it, ladies and gentlemen. The state of play in the united states of america it's got to be uh, it's a mess. Yeah, it's a little bit challenging a little bit challenging, by the way.

Somebody in the youtube chat some more on the youtube chat, uh is saying well, you know, those big ivy league schools do have an anti-semitism problem. I just want to tell you, I went to Yale. There's no anti-Semitism problem in higher education in the United States. There may be a lot of students who feel and I think justifiably that Israel's committing genocide in Palestine and Gaza that's not anti-Semitism. That may be anti-Netanyahu, that may be anti-Israeli leadership, but it's no more anti-Semitic to say that than it is to say I'm not a fan of Donald Trump is anti-American. Now, I just wanted to double down so that I get all the emails out of the way at once.

0:22:43 - Jason Snell
Okay, I agree, it's a very sneaky thing to sort of conflate all of Judaism with the government policies of Israel. There are plenty of Jews who are against it too, including half of, you know, including most of my wife's family.

0:23:00 - Leo Laporte
I used to go to a regular Seder.

0:23:02 - Jason Snell
Not anti-Semitic.

0:23:04 - Leo Laporte
I can't remember the name of the, the thing that they read, uh, they said and prayer for our palestinian brothers. I mean, it's not. It's not a universal belief of judaism and it's shameful that this has been conflated. And I'm glad harvard's fighting the good fight. I hope they win. Uh, uh, that's all I can say. Again, you know you're send your emails to me. Don't, don't bother those guys. Uh, I'll be glad to entertain all thoughts, leo at leovillecom, and then I will. I do warn you, read them on the air. Uh, just warn you, I won't name names, I'll just, I'll just mock you on the air. Uh, all right, so is there anything more to say? By the way, trump does say samsung too, by the way. Oh, so it's not just apple. Wouldn't it be amazing if smartphones in america cost twice as much than any other country in the world? That'd be interesting. Would we all get motorola phones?

0:24:05 - Andy Ihnatko
it is a golden age to be sure what would well?

0:24:08 - Alex Lindsay
it just becomes cheaper to fly and go to go to canada.

0:24:11 - Leo Laporte
Buy it, buy a phone and come back.

0:24:13 - Alex Lindsay
That's that's what in fact, that's what people have done for years, I mean start selling bandoliers to help you smuggle phones taped around your waist yeah, I had friends in africa that that would, um, they'd buy iPhones here, fly to Rwanda with 10 of them, you know, and sell them and pay off the flight because other people would buy them because you couldn't even buy them there. It wasn't a tariff, it wasn't, and so you know it's a. You used to do that with Levi's back in the butt.

0:24:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean but, um, apple doesn't have a, doesn't have a phone for less than 600 now, and there are lots of really good android phones for under 500. And so people who are price sensitive, who are like I don't care, even with the, even with the two-year plan, even if, whatever offers I can get, I can't afford a 600 phone, I can't afford an 800 phone. This is the phone. This is the amount of money I have to spend on a phone that has to do xyz. What are other phones other than the iPhone that can do xyz, that have a half decent camera?

0:25:12 - Leo Laporte
there are a lot of them out there yeah, that's that may be the real threat to Tim Cook. Right is opening people's eyes to the alternatives. 51 of their revenue is the iPhone. That's right. And there's no credible uh replacement on the horizon. Maybe in 10 years we'll be talking glasses, but right now that's the yeah, if I see one more headline that says oh the I, oh the phone, the smartphone is doomed.

0:25:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Like is it, is it now?

0:25:39 - Leo Laporte
someday.

0:25:40 - Andy Ihnatko
It will be someday, not today I mean when whatever creature inherits the earth after us has the kind of clause that cannot operate, operate a touch screen, then they're going to start to build something that they can use bespoke, and we've talked about this.

0:25:53 - Leo Laporte
Those meta ray bands require a phone and I would imagine that, at least for a while, any eyewear from apple, meta, google will require a phone as in your pocket.

0:26:07 - Andy Ihnatko
There's a reason why there are a lot of really great smartwatches out there and there are some people that say, hey, now I leave my phone at home some of the time because my smartphone does so much. But none of them are saying, hey, I gave away all my phones, I don't need a phone anymore, because the smartwatch is perfectly fine for watching videos on TikTok and it's perfectly fine for engaging in long message strings on WhatsApp or messages or for taking pictures.

0:26:30 - Jason Snell
It's really bad at taking pictures. Let me tell you.

0:26:33 - Leo Laporte
There is, though, a precedent. I mean, I think younger people don't necessarily feel like they need a laptop anymore. They have their phone, right?

0:26:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, to a certain degree, Although even they're dealing. You know, both of my kids are in their 20s now. Oh, men speaking now, and they have laptops and they use them for laptop things. Right, I mean, they live on their phones, it's absolutely true, but they use their laptops for laptop stuff there's, I mean because it's convenient to have a physical keyboard and a big screen.

I'd say that their laptops are more functional and purpose-built, like everybody's got what their primary device is. Right, and my primary device is probably my iPad. Honestly, my daughter's primary device, and for work it's a Mac. My daughter's primary device is her phone, there's no doubt about it. But she does a lot of stuff on her laptop. She just that's the laptop stuff. So I think it's just a matter of the balance shifting. But you know, I've talked to a lot of people who are, you know, younger people, who they're like yeah, oh, it's all about my phone. And then they get a job or whatever, and they're like well, I got to have a laptop, I got to have a computer for that, because that's not a like their social lives and, being a kid, you could do that on a phone, but it's a lot harder to do the rest of it yeah, I think that it also depends on the kind of level of social media and so on so forth that they're doing about how tied they are to it, like my kids don't.

0:27:58 - Alex Lindsay
At first I didn't let them use social media and then now it's more free, but they don't use it. They missed whatever that adoption time was and as a result, they just don't spend a lot of time on their phones. But my son has, I don't know four or five PCs that are in various forms of being built Like they're sitting in his room, and my daughter mostly has iPad and iPhone. So I think it depends.

0:28:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's funny, my daughter for a long time she's 32 resisted the ipad. In fact she's an android user. But I gave her, I forced her. I gave her an ipad for her birthday and she loves it, but I also gave her a keyboard and a pencil, so she's basically got a laptop. One more uh problem. One more. Many more problems for tim cook. One more is in texas. Problem one more. Many more problems for tim cook. One more is in texas, where a law passed requiring app stores to verify user ages. Tim cook called governor abbott to stop. You know, say please, please, don't sign that hey, abbott, do not sign it.

Um, you know our own, steve gibson, had a really great suggestion. I wish apple would implement this and maybe these laws, because it's not just texas. Maybe these laws will kind of force apple and google to do the same, which is as part of parental controls. Let parents say this is my age, whether you know emotional or physical of my kid on the kid's phones.

0:29:27 - Jason Snell
Apple's doing that. So Apple announced a feature that's going to have an API that lets you because Apple knows the parents can put in the actual birth date of the child. So Apple knows that age and what Apple wants everybody to do. And this is why I think there's probably an argument here for a federal regulation about this, because a lot of states are doing this and it's getting really complicated. What Apple wants to do is use this API where an app developer can say hey, what's the age range of the person using this app? And you can pass that on. And Apple says that that's more private than passing a birthday or having you put all of your documents in somewhere. And that way it can say well, this, you know whatever range of ages that this child is, and that can get passed on. And that's Apple sort of saying we built a system that's more private than what you're asking us to do. Please don't make it so that we have to start collecting and passing along all this personal data. Let's find another you know another system that solves this problem.

Apple's not saying don't solve the problem. Apple's saying we have a patchwork of laws. That is, there are more and more patches and a lot of them have unintended consequences that are bad for the privacy of children on the Internet, like the last thing you want to do is disclose more personal data about children on the internet, but that these laws often inadvertently do that in the name of protecting them. So you know the problem is again. You know you've got states, states that want to do this, and um, and the tech companies can wave their arms but, like, if the states want to do it, they're just going to do it abbott has not signed it, but uh, as the wall street journal points out, the law was passed with a veto proof.

0:31:07 - Leo Laporte
Majority right utah has such a law. Now nine other states are considering such a law. It would be so. First of all, the government. Taking this out of the hands of the parents is wrong. It's up to the parents. Apple giving parents that capability and an API so that apps could then check seems like such a nice, simple solution. Yep, that. Does it require a federal law? I guess it does, to override these state laws.

0:31:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's the thing that ends up happening in a lot of these cases, for good and for ill, is you end up with states passing all these right more restrictive, less restrictive and finally there's some company that's like we. It is so much overhead to police this in 50 different states just in the us, help us. And that often will lead to federal legislation that is invariably stricter than some states and much looser than others, and that's just sort of how it works, but at least it's uniform there's also an advantage to the companies because now they only have to Lobby one legislative body instead of 50.

0:32:09 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's, that's another reason why there are positive reasons why companies would love to have a federal law. They they really do legitimately want clarity. They also would like to like only have to work one ref.

0:32:20 - Leo Laporte
I think the uh tech CEOs, though, did miss a bet. If they just all bought enough trump coin, they could have just swarmed him at the event and uh and said please, mr president don't don't kill.

0:32:33 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know, see I, I don't know. I think they would. They would have been just so logy and tired after that lush, rich, expansive banquet of a meal that they were provided for their 500 000, whatever it was oh my God, all right.

0:32:49 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we've annoyed enough people now. Uh, actually, I doubt any of them are still listening. Uh, we're gonna take a little break. Come back with more it is Andy and not go in the library in an unnamed location. Sure, go right ahead, avoid responsibility it is always will office hours dot global. Uh, Alex Lindsay, he's in his studio where well, somewhere in northern california, and uh, right, probably right next door to Jason Snell, who was down the street 
Down the street. I don't think alex is on my block, but yeah, down the street.

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Right on to the non-political portion. I hope apple uh, last time we talked apple was getting spanked uh by judge yvonne, uh gonzalez rogers. She uh said hey, if you, you guys, you work this out, apple and epic, put fortnight in the store or whatever, but work it out, because if not, you're going to come back in court and you're going to give me a name. In fact, today, I think, would be the day, yes, that Apple would have had to. I don't know whose name they would give see her after class, yeah see her after class or Lyle, it only for Lyle.

Lyle who was our cover child last week?

0:37:39 - Jason Snell
they can't find him. That's what happened. Lyle is gone they don't know where he is.

0:37:43 - Andy Ihnatko
He ran he was. He was put into the wicker man yep, problem solved the bees apple.

0:37:48 - Leo Laporte
Literally within a day of that, uh writ said okay, fine, and and fortnight is back in the uh the store and running as expected. Uh, in fact, I talked to a parent who said yes, my 13-year-old immediately said I want Fortnite on my iPhone and I want it now. Okay, so that's solved.

0:38:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's just going to get harder and harder for Apple to walk this back. I mean, they're going to continue to fight this. But Spotify filed an amicus brief for the court, claiming on their end that, hey look, as soon as we were able to not work with these restrictions, our subscriptions went way up. And there's going to be more and more pressure from all fronts, particularly from users with his, her or its finger, and bless Apple right in the middle of the smack dab in the center of that spaceship campus and grant them a victory. Would they be able to tell all their customers, all their users of iPhones, good news? We're making it more complicated now to subscribe to Spotify and to buy books on Kindle and all kinds of other things. You're welcome.

0:38:58 - Leo Laporte
Wait crickets, and I'm sure Apple is pleased to hear that. David Hanna-Meyer Hansen is happy. Dhh, the creator with 37 signals of hay, said he posted it last week. Hay is finally for sale on the iPhone. You may remember their kerfuffle, the battle with Apple over, as he says, their gangster attempt to extort 30 of our hay revenues. He said it wasn't even just the revenue, really. We wanted to have a relationship with our customers. Hey is an email calendar system from 37 signals and he said we just wanted to be able to respond directly to customers instead of having to do it uh, you know through apple it's just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don't tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer okay.

0:39:52 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, like, like, what people want is they? They want the leads, like, they want all the, they want everybody's contact information when they're, when they're buying stuff. Like, if they want, if I want to give him that information, I I can, he can ask for that in the, in the app, but I didn't give it to him because I don't want to.

0:40:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, actually he's got your email. It's an it's alexatheycom.

0:40:09 - Alex Lindsay
I mean he knows that. I understand, like the thing, but the thing is is that what most people want is they. They want to make sure that at every transaction they get that information, as opposed to only the people who want to provide it. And that's the part that I think we'll see how it goes. I mean there's been some. Obviously, spotify is doing great. Other folks that have been posting their experiences of some of the tests have seen 25% to 45% drops on the number of conversions they're getting when they say you got to go outside the app store. So it'll be. I think the jury's still out as to for smaller big brands are going to make out on this Small brands.

0:40:49 - Leo Laporte
It'll be interesting to see how they do, because I think that they may lose more than they can. What a journey and what a needless torching of the developer relationship from Apple's side. We've always been happy to pay Apple for hosting our application on the App Store, as all developers have always needed to do by the $99 a year developer fee, but being forced to hand over 30% of the business, as well as the direct customer relationship, was always an unacceptable overreach. He writes now that that's been arrested by Judge Rogers, they're going to be able to offer it directly on iOS.

0:41:21 - Jason Snell
I think this whole thing actually kind of proves and disproves Alex's points simultaneously, which is kind of fun. Right, because on the one hand, we are seeing apps that didn't previously do commerce inside apps do that now. Right, like that is almost everything that's been changed in the US App Store has been people who basically said we're not going to play, we can't play, we refuse to do this, including 37signals. But so that's the kind of like see Alex, look, there is change happening that is probably good for the user. However, I also have to say see Alex, nobody else seems to be rushing into this except the ones who refused and stayed on the outside, and I think that's a really interesting dynamic that the companies that were like either like Amazon with the Kindle app, where they're like we can't, we just can't do it, it doesn't make any sense that it would eat all of the book transaction that we take would just go to Apple, so we're not going to do it.

Or it's somebody like DHH saying we're just going to abstain. You're going to have to go and sign up on our website because we want to own the customer relationship and not give 30% away, and both of those are important. But what I haven't seen is a huge rush by everybody else, and I think that speaks to the strength of Apple's in-app purchase system and how easy it is to use, and my argument is always that Apple's got plenty to compete on here. They don't have to outlaw outside stuff because I think that a lot of developers will be like, well, no, I'm not going to. I get value out of being in the app with Apple, so it's interesting. Obviously, this will change and it's us only, so that probably factors into it as well, but I think it's an interesting dynamic on both sides.

0:43:08 - Leo Laporte
dhh actually writes I'm sure many small developers will continue to consider iap to avoid having to worry about international taxes or even direct customer service. No one is taking that away from apple or those developers, but the court has ordered them to make it optional to have an alternative and I think that's fair.

0:43:27 - Jason Snell
The worst person in the world says something you agree with, I know. I know he didn't mean you.

0:43:33 - Leo Laporte
Alex. He meant DHH. I agree. He's not the worst person in the world, no, but he's not great, he's not great.

0:43:40 - Jason Snell
I don't like that guy, but I don't really like the Epic guy that much either.

0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
Tim Sweeney either I agree, but you know and I'm not a hate customer.

0:43:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but I mean this goes and Alex has made this point a lot, hi, alex that Apple does provide a lot of things that make it convenient for developers and for users, and I think that that is, you know, whether it's whether they deserve to be 100 percent exclusive. Nobody else can even compete is the argument that we have. But, like, I think that you got to cite the fact that it's really convenient for the user and the developer to use Apple system, that that is undeniable and, again, I think that it also depends on the kind of purchase.

0:44:18 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that for me, like, I will not subscribe outside of the Apple store because I, you know, at this point I've got a handful of subscriptions that are, that are like Netflix, right, and even that my family, my, my daughter's arguing for me to keep Netflix so cause I don't watch it, um and uh, uh. So there's a handful of things that are out there. I've decided no more. Like you know, if you want to do a subscription with me, it's got to be somewhere. I can see it Like, I just I can't, I don't want to go through my credit card figuring out what, what have I forgotten that I subscribed to? I'm not going to do that, you know, like, and so I think that, as a user, I've just decided, if you give me a subscription, that I'm going to have to leave the store. I think one of Apple's reactions and as a user I'd prefer it is to allow me to, at the preference level, sort by payment type Subscription, one-time purchase, in-app purchase, external store and I can just flip it off. So I don't see any of those and I think Apple can put those four in there. They can't put one in there, they can't say inside store and outside store. But if they put the four different ones in there, I'm not interested in cause.

I'm not that interested in subscriptions either anymore. I've just, I'm done Like I just too many subscriptions too many, like little death by a thousand cuts. And so and I looked back on it and I realized to go looking for apps to just buy, like, oh, I'm going to buy that app. But now I look at every app by the yearly cost of whatever that they're asking for in that subscription and go I'm not paying whatever. I'm paying $42 or $98 for it. Is this app really worth that? And the answer is often no. And so then, as a result, I just don't explore as much as I used to, because everything and that's Apple's fault Apple pushed everybody to subscription, like this is a great cause, it's good for their model, um and uh, but I, I'm you know, but I definitely don't want to subscribe outside of it because it's just I don't know, I just I find that I'm paying $5 a month, like six months six years later and I'm not willing to do that anymore.

0:46:25 - Leo Laporte
I loved your piece, jason Snell. Sam and Johnny and skepticism. We've all been commenting on this weird engagement video from Johnny Ive and Sam Altman.

0:46:30 - Jason Snell
It's just two billionaires having coffee in an empty cafe.

0:46:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Where they registered.

0:46:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So Sam Altman, of course, founder of OpenAI, went to Johnny Ive and said you know, because Johnny said we're working on, my development team is working on an AI device. That's all he said. Sam said you know, I like your idea so much, I want to give you $6.5 billion in stock for it, which, incidentally, as Mike Elgin pointed out on Sunday, dilutes Open AI stock, which makes it easier to convert to a nonprofit. But never mind that, johnny, what do you got? And so they made this kind of creepy, weird video and website. What does Johnny have?

0:47:16 - Alex Lindsay
Anything, I don't. It'll be really interesting to see. I mean, obviously, I think that the thought is it's going to be something that is connected to your, that walks around with you with a camera. The question is is that if Apple puts cameras into the AirPods, you know, and it's more personal, and does aane AI Pen or the AI Pendant which I've ordered?

0:47:43 - Leo Laporte
But they're embarrassed to be associated with those products, so they're going to wait a little longer to let the stink clear.

0:47:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, to let the stink waft away a little bit, Johnny, I've even said to Mark Gurman in Bloomberg, because clearly Gurman had this story and they told him to hold it and they'd give him some first person quotes, I think.

I suspected that's what went on there, but he said he referred to the AI pen especially as a you know bad product. Right, like you, you know that they hate the fact that there are a bunch of companies that have tried this to make AI accessories and they've been crappy and they've kind of stunk up the public perception of that category and now they're kind of waiting for the stink to clear. I think that that's what's going on. I have a hard time believing this isn't something that looks a lot like that humane pin or the pendant and they may dress it up or change it or have a spin on it. But, like again, unless they see something that, with all my racking of my brain and looking at this category, I can't see, I have a hard time seeing what this product is. That isn't something that we've already seen. A different take on Doesn't mean it couldn't succeed, but it faces all the same problems, including the fact that probably the most logical place to run this stuff from is the thing with the battery and the high-speed connection and the powerful processor that you have in your pocket, which is your smartphone. And what Humane ran into is that you had to have a separate cellular plan and it had a lot of battery problems and all of these issues. But if you're making what essentially is a phone accessory, then it makes you ask the question how is this better than using my smartwatch, using my smartphone, using my airpods, using my metaray bands? How, how, how does this piece of hardware differ in a way that that makes it something that is more, and I just I think it's a tough nut to crack.

Now, maybe johnny and I mean he clearly got the band back together. It's a lot of his crack. Now maybe Johnny and I mean he clearly got the band back together. It's a lot of his favorite people. Evan Hanke is on the team, right. Evans Evans Hanke is there. There are a lot of people, mostly designers, that were mentioned by name, which I think is a problem, because designers aren't engineers and designers aren't product people. They aren't, they're designers. They are part of the product process but they work with other people to craft a product vision. I would argue that Johnny Ives best work by far in his career came when he had Steve Jobs to tell him no, and after Steve Jobs was gone.

Nobody could tell him no anymore, and I think that Apple suffered because nobody was there. Who is going to tell Sir Johnny Ive no about anything? And he is running the show here with his lieutenants and I was surprised at how many people were like oh, here we go. This is going to change everything.

It's that tech hype cycle that we're so used to and I couldn't help but look at it and think, oh my God, it's two of the most overhyped things in the last decade Johnny Ive and Sam Altman and OpenAI and I look at them together and it's like and I'm not an AI skeptic in the sense that I think that there's useful stuff in AI as well as it being horribly overhyped I think both of those things are true, but the hype was so thick here, with nothing tangible, and they're playing around with a category that we've already looked at. All of us have talked about these categories, this category of an AI accessory, and like it's really a tough nut to crack, and they're like rolling in and saying, yeah, no, look, geniuses, we're going to do it, and I just I it feels I don't know, it's BS.

0:51:21 - Andy Ihnatko
That's basically what I came down on. It's really thick with BS here, absolutely, and that video was also very calculated. It was basically like an.

Oprah Network sort of interview, sort of thing where, cozy and familiar and not intimidating the way that AI sometimes is really intimidating. He said the partnership is not being I'm reading from a New York Times article being led not by a fiscal imperative but from a place of building products that quote, benefit humanity. And okay, that's always. A very, very alarm bell should go off, because that either means that someone is lying their butt off about the reason why they're doing something, or they don't know what they're talking about, or that they're being a very, very genuine about what they want to do. But the thing is, uh, it's kind of like talking to an artist who says I want to create art that makes people feel that's not how you make great art, that's how you make really, really cringy sort of like teenage art that you don't want to put in a place where people can see.

0:52:24 - Leo Laporte
Is it fair to say that you all?

0:52:26 - Andy Ihnatko
The thing is, it can be a very, very simple thing. It doesn't have to be this revolutionary thing. I mean, we've been talking about this for a long, long time. If all they did was have a pendant with, or something that you can even just stick in your pocket, like a pen that had a camera, so that an AI can see a microphone that's very, very tuned to your voice, that can isolate and shut out all the other information that's coming at it, except for things that you're actually saying to it, and that was just a very high-speed conduit between this device and your phone. Have a small amount of AI on board, just so that it can discern from stuff that it needs to communicate to your phone and stuff that doesn't need to communicate to your phone. That's all this really has to be to be an interesting product. Whether it's a revolutionary product or not is something that we will know no sooner than 14 months after it's released.

0:53:13 - Leo Laporte
Is it fair to say that none of you agree with Mark Gurman's headline, johnny Ives? Open AI deal puts pressure on Apple to find the next big thing. No more than usual.

0:53:24 - Jason Snell
Such a tired narrative. I mean he's just running the same stuff out there. I really respect Mark Gurman as a reporter, but as an analyst his analysis tends to be come on, do something and like I mean I get it, but is there pressure? I guess there's pressure because it's like your ex is now dating somebody new and you're like, oh boy.

0:53:43 - Leo Laporte
But I mean I don't know, I think Apple was kind of happy to get rid of Johnny.

0:53:47 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, I mean clearly. And they did the whole thing where like, oh, we'll work with him on future projects, and then walked right away Like, come on, it was very clear and not to say that, johnny, he's how important he is to our company.

0:54:01 - Alex Lindsay
I think that he saw Steve Jobs as an equal or plus or minus. He did not see other people at Apple as equals and, as a result, that created a dynamic that just was unworkable at Apple.

0:54:18 - Jason Snell
He's legendary, he's Sir Johnny Ive and Apple. Honestly, in that era era apple wasn't willing to anger him or say, I mean, they were desperate to keep him and put him out in the front because, remember, the narrative back then was, without steve jobs, apple is probably doomed, and so apple did. I think the prudent thing, which is we allow johnny, give him more power and just say, look, look, the magic is still here. But the truth is he no longer had anybody who, as you said, alex, was a true partner, who could push back, who could say no.

And I've been. You know, I've worked with lots of designers over the years. I love them. Designers are amazing. The best products come out of a real back and forth and some real challenging. And I don't believe that after Steve was gone, that there was anybody at Apple who was capable of or willing or had the power to challenge Johnny. And I think Johnny was also a little bit bored, because now he was just iterating on the stuff that he had done in the 2000s and at some point he was kind of like looking for other stuff to do. And, you know, maybe he's got it now. He's got it back, he's got partners who are going to tell him no, but it sounds like he's surrounded him with his people.

0:55:32 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it doesn't even sound like he gave up. He still has his other at his other thing and, like you know, six and a half billion of of uh reason to pay attention to them. You know, like that's what it feels like because he still has another company, like it's not like he's working for them full-time. How can I get six and a half billion dollars and keep my and keep my day?

0:55:50 - Jason Snell
you gotta, you gotta, you gotta design the ipod you gotta, you gotta, yeah, you gotta be johnny I am right and that's it does feel.

I mean I said apple carted him out to give them credibility after Steve died. I mean there's a real vibe of that from this too is, how does Sam Altman, sort of like, create a glow around, open AI a little bit? Well, one way you do it is you spend a lot of money on Johnny Ive and wheel him out and say, look at these amazing people that we've got working here. But again, are they in a configuration that will lead to success? And I'm not saying that they won't, I'm saying I'm really dubious of it. For, like, look, you mentioned my piece at the top of this segment.

Leo, I spent two days before I wrote that because I didn't want to do the knee jerk thing. After I watched that video would say, wow, this is a load of crap. And so I thought about it and I thought about it, I tried to think about it from all these different angles. It's fine to each their own about it. And I thought about it and I tried to think about it from all these different angles. It's fine to each their own. And after two days I was like I still feel the same way. I have a long list of reasons why this is just kind of a smoke screen, and then I'm really dubious. No matter how many talented people are at IO working with OpenAI on this product, I just I'm really dubious that this is anything that shouldn't be viewed with like the highest level of skepticism up until the moment when they ship it and then we see what it is.

0:57:09 - Alex Lindsay
And it also really felt like, just as a person who produces videos almost exactly like that one not I didn't, obviously didn't work on that one, but but but but produce ones that are very similar to this it really felt like we're going to spend six and a half billion dollars. We got to sell this hard. Yeah, we got to sell this connection, whatever it takes, whatever like I love, by the way, if you ever have those kinds of things, I'm really good at those. So, yeah, just letting you know, like I don't I don't usually pub my work here Deflection video, davis, guggenheim to direct this right High quality, high quality production. Sky is the limit on the budget. We're going to take over a bar. We're going to put a bunch of extras in there. We're going to, you know like we're going to do it all.

0:57:56 - Leo Laporte
By the way, apparently the video shooting on the streets said everybody was extras.

0:57:57 - Jason Snell
So yes, sf Standard did, which is a great up and coming website covering San Francisco news, has a piece where they deconstructed it and you know they show all of those like very casual things about Johnny and Sam walking down streets in San Francisco where you can see all the different extras, like he's over here and now he's over there, and now he's walking this way and now he's walking that way because it looks like a documentary, but it's it's a phony documentary and the problem is, is that doing this without actors?

0:58:21 - Alex Lindsay
these guys are great, they're brilliant people, they're very good at what they do, but they're not actors, and what it does is when you do that, it feels very gooey.

0:58:30 - Leo Laporte
It's just like ugh.

0:58:31 - Alex Lindsay
You know, because actors sell something. They sell something that a regular person doesn't sell, without a lot of practice and without figuring out how to really create that. Where am I coming from? There's no context to this, there's no backstory, there's no like, and so the thing is is that they're just given a script and they kind of go through it?

0:58:49 - Jason Snell
it's like oh hi, johnny feels it always feels.

0:58:51 - Alex Lindsay
It always feels so gooey when you do this, and and so it's so I'm ruining my chance of ever getting anyone listening to the show davis guggenheim really directed davis.

0:58:59 - Jason Snell
Guggenheim apparently directed it um, and I would say director of an inconvenient truth he's a documentarian yep, and and alex certainly noticed this I noticed this that one of the weird things about this is their conversation at the at the bar bar having their espresso. Like at several points it feels like there is an invisible interviewer there who's been cut out of the whole video, so like you have them say things where it's very clear they're like responding to something, but the the something isn't there anymore. It gets really uncanny and really strange, which, again, you know it's easy to pick apart the video, but I feel like it says a lot that they made a bespoke web page that does all sorts of effects when you scroll and they embedded this video and you know, pardon me for saying so, but it feels very johnny ive and I would say in the worst way possible modern johnny ive, where everything's a little extra, like they're trying too hard.

0:59:56 - Leo Laporte
It did look I mean, look at this, it looks like a wedding announcement. I mean it's. It's really kind of weird.

1:00:03 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, it's a birth announcement. It's the baby announcement for Rio. It's like these are two incredibly rich, incredibly powerful people, but no, they're just Joni and Sam hanging out at the Starbucks you got to admire the fact that they have quotes down at the bottom with little share links so you can get those quickly.

1:00:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, share that so I can put that up on social social get that hit.

1:00:23 - Jason Snell
Hit the socials with that. Actually, you want to it's scary.

1:00:26 - Andy Ihnatko
So you gotta you gotta counter that If you got, if you got six, point, if you got six plus billion dollars to spend on this, they were like we got to change the narrative Someone said that somewhere Like we're going to have to change the narrative about AI and about this thing.

1:00:51 - Alex Lindsay
And.

1:00:51 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure that came up somewhere. By the way, kudos to y'all for watching the video. I couldn't, I didn't watch the whole thing.

1:01:05 - Alex Lindsay
I will admit, I watched the, the first.

1:01:06 - Leo Laporte
I watched the first like two minutes and I was like, oh, I got it. And then I skipped through it and I looked at it. I watched just the. Yeah, like thanos, somebody said johnny walked through the crowd like santa thanos going for the uh, the infinity stone there's a lot of strut going on there.

1:01:16 - Alex Lindsay
That was a.

1:01:16 - Leo Laporte
That was a lot of like um so credit to you, jason, for watching the video and waiting two days before coming to the same conclusion we all came to. Yeah, I liked Mike Elgin's theory though. I thought that was really interesting. I think that this is really more about diluting OpenAI stock that you know it's six billion in imaginary money. It's, it's Monopoly money, that's Monopoly money, right? So, uh, that there may have been a motive that this was all misdirection.

1:01:46 - Alex Lindsay
You would build a video like this to really sell the idea that there's actually some there. Otherwise someone would say this might be fraud, Like you just did it. If they just ran a press release that said we're giving Johnny Ives six and a half billion dollars, there'd be some stockholder issues.

1:02:02 - Jason Snell
This is all what's coming together truly what it is is they decided to speculatively work together with a, with a new company, to work on this hardware product, and after it had been going on for like a year this isn't new, right, it was reported. They were working on this they decided to bring it in-house, and so what they did is they made a transaction involving open ai stock. So essentially it is it is not money. It is basically like you are now getting a piece of open ai in exchange for having, you know, laid the foundation for our hardware product, whatever it might be. And you know what, if it all goes south, then there's nothing there. It all kind of starts to evaporate. But it is, it's funny money and it does.

1:02:42 - Alex Lindsay
It does it to evaporate, but it is what it's funny money. And it does, it does it's funny money, but it does dilute. Everybody like everybody.

1:02:47 - Jason Snell
No, that's the whole point.

1:02:48 - Alex Lindsay
But opening up everybody in opening I must be like, really like who put?

1:02:51 - Andy Ihnatko
money into it like sorry money johnny needs his money johnny needs money, particularly if you were working on working your butt off at opening I for years and years and years, it's like okay that's who the video maybe really was for was the actual shareholders.

1:03:02 - Jason Snell
I think the video was for Apple. You want to hear my theory here? Ah, I like that Arch enemy of OpenAI is Google. Google runs Android. Google and Samsung are tight. It basically tried to get into Android. I know it's open and all that, but like the home field advantage is true, google is all in on Gemini.

You're open AI and you're like, well, there's Apple, right, apple's over here and they already have a little bit of it. And if you notice in that video I don't know if you saw this before, you noped out of it, leo, but like Sam says stuff like we're not. I love my MacBook Pro, I'm not gonna, you're gonna still have your MacBook Pro Pro, and they're like they're almost trying to say we're building a third device that is not your phone or your laptop, it's another thing. They all work together and part of me thinks this is actually them sort of saying don't worry, apple, we're not here to destroy you, we're your buddy, which, if I'm Apple, I feel a little threatened.

But at the same time, there is an argument to be made that every other AI company ought to be cozying up to Apple, because the smartphone is going to be at the center of this. Let's be clear For the foreseeable future, the smartphone is going to be at the center. It's got power, it's got a connection to the internet. There's so many reasons that the smartphone is going to be at the heart of this. Well, if that's true, and you've got two choices and one of them is a company that's all in on its own ai model and the other is a company that is struggling to build its ai model who's your buddy?

1:04:29 - Leo Laporte
well, apple's your buddy. So sam altman did this with microsoft, didn't he? In fact, it's like the meme sam altman's got his arm around the microsoft girl, but he's looking over his shoulder at the apple girl because he's he's kind of done with microsoft, yeah, microsoft's kind of done with him.

1:04:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, they're kind of doing their own thing too, so yeah, I think, I think the whole. I think that microsoft, there was that whole, like the chaos with sam altman last year, and they were like, hey, let's get it all back together. But then there, then there's got to be some meetings internally like we gotta, we need another plan. Oh yeah, this is microsoft's backup, absolutely, absolutely.

1:05:02 - Leo Laporte
Hey, you mentioned how nice a website it is. This is completely off track. I just want to mention rick rubin, who's kind of a wild fella has done with anthropic, a website called the way of code, the timeless art of vibe coding. It's the dow to jing, it's beautiful javascript site, it's the dao de jing, uh for vibe coding, and if you haven't seen it, it's wild. I mean, it's just a wild site, so I just thought I'd pass that there.

1:05:33 - Alex Lindsay
I think that they're that they're also fighting off claude in the in the center or anthropic. Because you know, yeah, right now chat gpt is tied in pretty tightly with Xcode, but there's a rumor that Anthropic is being used internally at Apple.

1:05:49 - Leo Laporte
It's the best coding platform by far, by far, right now.

1:05:54 - Alex Lindsay
And who knows what will happen in a week and a half or two weeks or whatever.

1:05:58 - Leo Laporte
So there was some good stuff in the Mark Gurman newsletter on Sunday. We'll talk about Solarium in just a moment. 're watching mac break weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and the wonderful Jason Snell. Real quick, I know, alex, you don't like subscriptions, but maybe this would be one subscription you'd consider seven bucks a month to join Club Twit. You get a lot of benefit at a Club Twit. Of course, the seven bucks a month supports us. It's about 25% of our operating expenses right now, which is really great. It means we can continue on with the shows. We're doing like this, do new stuff in the club. You get not only ad-free versions of all those shows, you get the stuff that's going on in the Club Twit Discord Right now. Now a fist fight between those three. But, uh, if you want to join us, join the club twit discord. Look, you can get your very own Pokémon go card, uh, or no, what is that? Magic, the gathering? I don't know. Anyway, we are doing a bunch of events. Uh, our ai user group is, uh, is friday of next week. That's a fun thing we do every month. I mentioned before and I'll mention it again. If you want to see our keynote coverage, mike and I will be doing the WWDC keynote but because of takedown threats from Apple, we are going to do it in the club only, so you need to be a club member to watch that. You can either watch it live we'll stream it live or after the fact on the twit plus feed, but you got to be a club member. There's also the camera. Uh show is coming up with Chris Marquart next week and Mikah's crafting corner in a couple of weeks and Stacey's-

RECORDING IN PROGRESS.

-and what hello, and the recording in progress.

All of that for a mere seven bucks a month. I think you're getting a good deal right there. Look at that. That's a. That's, that's great. Thank you, pretty fly uh. Find out more at twit.tv/clubtwit and we thank you in advance. Is uh? Is uh alex back? Not yet. We're gonna wait for alex, he was.

1:08:00 - Alex Lindsay
He is back. I just dropped out for a second. I'm I'm prepping for my pick of the week and I'm sorry for the recording in progress. It's part of the I don't mind.

1:08:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't mind. Um, so what is solarium? This is a mark, german uh, rumor. It is, uh, the company's apple's new software interface named after glass rooms that allow in sunlight. According to mark, is this this?

1:08:30 - Jason Snell
we've heard about this, for a while this new vision pro redesign.

1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
We just now have a name.

1:08:34 - Jason Snell
Yes, yeah, and his piece. The big things that he's advancing here are that it will come in some degree to apple tv and Vision OS and Watch OS the ones where it's less of a huge deal, but it will still come there. I think it's very clear that what Apple is doing with Solarium is it's a design system meant to roll out across all of their OSs and I think, again, fundamentally I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that the problem with a lot of OSs has been they've again, fundamentally, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that the problem with a lot of OSs has been they've all been sort of like split off of one another and developed separately and then Apple tries to jam designs and features and functionality from one in the other and you end up with a bad fit. So having a system that knows and it doesn't necessarily mean that the Mac's going to look like an iPhone, it means you design one system for all your devices, knowing what all your devices are that could be a really good thing. It's all down to the execution.

But what he's saying here is yeah, it would seem like Vision Pro. You know, the Vision OS was already kind of inspired by what they were working on, you'd think that there wouldn't be changes, but obviously it's evolved since then. So there will be some changes and there will be some things that, even though the watch just got redesigned, there will be some changes there. I don't think they're going to be huge. I think that's why Mark Gurman didn't know about them until this week, but I think that they'll still happen and that this is obviously going to be a big talking point at WWDC. Is whatever this new look?

1:09:57 - Leo Laporte
and feel is Well, that's one other thing Mark says. He says there probably won't be much earth-shattering ai news, which is a little bit surprising, uh I think they want to stay.

1:10:08 - Alex Lindsay
They want to stay away from that hot potato. I mean I'm sure they'll talk about it. If they talk about it, it'll probably be integration with other folks. I think that they may, unless they have something really impressive they don't have much to say.

1:10:17 - Leo Laporte
That's the problem, isn't it? Uh, yeah that's the.

1:10:19 - Alex Lindsay
That's the challenge.

1:10:21 - Leo Laporte
They got nothing. They got that image thing, image playground, that's about it.

1:10:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Genmoji yeah, they got to mention something. I mean, I think they need.

1:10:34 - Alex Lindsay
I think what a lot of us want to see is integration. Like we're not when you see people on Twitter.

1:10:38 - Leo Laporte
With other AIs.

1:10:39 - Alex Lindsay
you mean, yeah, like I want to see you know Claude inside of Xcode and I want to see you know Claude inside of Xcode. And I want to see you know ChatGPT easier to use in different places and I want to like. I'm much more interested in that than anything that Apple has to say about what they're going to do themselves. I'm fine with them saying that we'll do something in 2026 or 2027. But right now, what I the inside the apps that I use?

1:11:03 - Leo Laporte
yeah, um, it's funny because both microsoft and google had their uh keynotes, their developer conferences, last week and it was all ai. All the time it was about agentic ai a2a.

1:11:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It feels almost like apple's getting lapped yeah, I I don't think that's a wrong observation. Especially gemini's keynote keynote at Google IO last week was so. It was such a nicely tailored story, start to finish. It was cohesive, there weren't any digressions into. Here is some isolated research of something that might or might not ever appear in any product, sometime between a month from now and never, and any product sometime between a month from now and never. It was really the story about.

We spent all this time building Gemini and now here is how Gemini, either explicitly or implicitly. Here is how Gemini is part of the root of pretty much everything that we're showing off today. They showed off stuff that was ready today. When they showed off stuff that was not going to be ready until the future, they gave a good time frame for when people could expect it. There was really only one or two things in which they'd had that sort of open-ended thing, but they really were hammering the point of. Here is something that is available. Here's things that we shipped in AI this year. Here's things that we're shipping today. Here's things that we're going to be shipping by the end of the summer. They have products to ship and they are definitely taking care of business right now.

Apple isn't, as we've been discussing for the past couple of months. Apple's not necessarily in a situation where they're not like Google. They're not in the business of providing services. So the more that Google can present that hey, we've got all these services that we're providing, that will get people engaged with us as users, and also developers will want to pay money for our services.

As developers and as producers, apple's in a position where we just have to make sure that we don't turn the iPhone into a nicely designed jewel piece of Tiffany hardware that is not as good at running software as all the other stuff that's out there. And, as Alex said, so long as they can promise integration with whatever it is that Google is doing, whatever it is that OpenAI is doing, whatever it is that the other companies are doing, they'll probably work out to be okay. But they can't just basically spend Google IO basically saying that AI doesn't matter, doesn't matter that we don't do anything natively on device, doesn't matter that there's nothing. All this stuff that we said last year doesn't matter because we can take another year, we can take another five years for it. They at least have to say that we are aware that there is a difficulty and we are addressing it.

1:13:47 - Leo Laporte
We've adjusted our timetable we've adjusted our plan, but we still have a timetable and we still have a plan, even though if we're not going to share it in as much detail as we did last year, because we really wish we hadn't. The big story of google, io and microsoft uh, build was agentic. Yeah, ai ai that goes out and then talks to other ais or other websites, brings stuff in, maybe makes appointments for you is what are the odds that apple will have anything along that lines? Nothing, zero.

1:14:05 - Jason Snell
Well, I mean the unless they partner the stuff that they didn't ship was some was, you could argue, a gentic in a way right, the idea that they were going to have a system that could look at your context and look at and and basically look at the intents that allow you to control your apps and move through steps to allow you to perform things. But they didn't ship it and are they going to even mention it. We'll see, we'll see.

1:14:31 - Leo Laporte
Here's a crazy thought. What if Apple thinks, you know, maybe this whole AI thing is hype? Why don't we be the anti-AI company? Any chance of that?

1:14:40 - Jason Snell
I think more likely they'll do the. You know, one way to hedge is to partner with AI companies, right, and say, well, we're going to really open it up and you can do whatever you want with any of these things, good luck, right, and then like they could do that, they could do that, but I don't know. I think we're still in the. You better be hedging your bets about AI, and I still think people not let people turn it off.

1:15:01 - Alex Lindsay
I still think that there is a long-term advantage that Apple has by building the hardware and building the operating system and having a privacy-first kind of process, that what they've outlined in the last WWDC is still a very valid way to go in the long term. In the short term they have to figure out, you know, how do we people just use the AI that exists right now a little bit more easily. That pressure valve has to be opened a lot more than it has been. But I think in the long term it's hard to compete with a company if they're able to get their wits about them and they don't keep on chasing, you know today, and they look down the path.

Having a company that is going to offset a lot of that work, a lot of the work off to the individual device, which is easier when you design the chip. So so it's, you know. So there's a lot that they can do over many years. That is harder to do with a couple of companies cobbling together that aren't as interested in privacy that aren't, you know, doesn't? They don't have the same lock on their users. So I think that Apple still has time and they still could do stuff that would be that could be very hard to compete with in the future. But I don't think it's going to be tomorrow or next week or July.

1:16:09 - Andy Ihnatko
They do have to make sure they don't lose, like the younger generation of users.

If the younger generation is used to not necessarily not even using AI to cheat at school, but things like notebook, notebook LM is the, the.

The is the things that I keep reading from students about how they use it, again, not to do their homework for them, but to help them study and to organize the stuff that they're trying to assimilate. The great thing about Notebook LM is that Google doesn't care if you use it on an iPad or an iPhone or on an Android device or on whatever an Android device or on whatever. But Apple has to make sure that they tell this generation of kids who are growing up with AI tools the way that Gen X grew up with word processing and later on with the internet, and then the next generation grew up with mobile devices. They have to make sure that Apple's communicating to them that we are not a second-class citizen when it comes to delivering AI. We will be. Whatever it is that you want to do with your device that you've expected after spelling, spending so much of your developmental years using ais, you will be able to definitely use it with us. Don't be tempted by by android devices again.

1:17:17 - Alex Lindsay
The thing is is that, for the most part at least, the way my kids are using it. I don't know if they're that anything that google's doing would change the way that kids are using it. I don't know if anything that Google's doing would change the way that they're operating. I mean, they're still using these tools on their phone or on their computer and so it's not like they. I think you'd be 100% right if suddenly we weren't able to use any AI on our Mac or on our laptop, but we're using Google. The problem for Google is that if we get excited about chat, gpt, we just stop using Google search. That's an existential threat. I don't think that that existential threat exists in the same way for Apple, where I have, you know, people are pretty locked in to where they are. You know they're not. I think an average Apple user is not very. It would take a lot to get them to pry them out of the Apple ecosystem because they've got so much invested in right now.

1:18:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean for people our age and people the previous generation or two. But when you have people who are 11 and 12 years old, who are using the phones that were given to them by their parents, it's very, very I think it's possible. I don't I'm not saying that this is the death knell for Apple. I'm saying that it's possible for them to have a different point of view before they've got that brand loyalty locked in, before they've got the mindset of it's going to cost me so much money and so much effort to switch away from this platform. I think that they are an open book and, like I said, google wins no matter what device you happen to use. Their platforms are because they're selling services to developers. They're selling services to video creators and to filmmakers and everybody. So that kind of blunts.

The thing, the netherworld in between are the features that only work really, really well when they're on-device features, when they're things that have full access to an operating system, that have full access to system APIs.

When we're talking about agentic sort of things, things that can't necessarily always all be done by going out to the web and seeking tools there. When we're talking about things like hey, I want you to make sure that you turn off my Wi-Fi hotspot every time that I leave the house, but turn it back on again if I'm in any one of these three locations and then have an AI, just come back with. Okay, I've done all that for you. If you ever want to turn this off, go here and flip the switch and this little routine will be turned off for you. Once that becomes something that people expect and hope for, that's when Apple has to make sure they deliver. But, as you say, and as we all pretty much agree, apple has a few years before that becomes completely relevant, as opposed to a nice thing to have that some people will notice if it's missing well, we'll find out.

1:19:49 - Leo Laporte
A week from monday, june 9th, dub, dub. What about uh german saying that there will be a new home pod at the end of the year? Is that credible?

1:20:00 - Jason Snell
if it's from german, I think it's credible. I think that makes. If he says there's new stuff coming, I believe him because that's his best that's his thing best thing, that's his thing.

1:20:08 - Leo Laporte
Are we excited about that? Um?

1:20:11 - Jason Snell
is this?

1:20:11 - Mikah Sargent
the one with the arm? It's unclear to me what this is I like.

1:20:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it's. It wasn't. It wasn't a big hunk of his newsletter. I did like what he was based that what he was basically saying, excuse me that his information seemed to line up with reality, which is that Apple has decided that this square screened home center device that works with HomeKit and stuff like that it's enough of a priority that they're perfectly fine to cut features from it.

If these features, like Apple Intelligence and other things, and maybe the robot arm, are preventing it from shipping this year shipping in time for the holidays buying season this year, that makes perfect sense. That's something that you totally imagine Apple doing, saying that look, people don't know that we were planning on having this device do that. We can basically add that via software update, just like with the Apple Watch, just like with so many other devices. As long as we get the hardware working to the standard that we want, as long as the hardware that we release in 2025 is capable of a software update that we want in 2026 and 2027, why delay it another year if we think that the moment is right now? So who knows?

1:21:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I would like to replace my HomePods because they're really kind of funky and I don't like them with something that works?

1:21:29 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, am I unique in that I wouldn't mind replacing my google nest speakers, because they're like they?

1:21:33 - Leo Laporte
had a nest max I still use it I do too, they're great.

1:21:36 - Andy Ihnatko
They're great speakers, but just a you know, a couple months ago I was really like doing some household inventory and looking at, like, what my network was like. And periodically you really need to take a look at what your home and office infrastructure is and decide, hey, is this no longer doing the job that I want it to do? And I realized that you know what, if I just bought $80 Bluetooth speakers, they would probably do 2024, 2025 era Bluetooth speakers would probably do like 2024, 2025 era Bluetooth speakers would probably do for what I want. I want these like smart speakers to do. They would probably do as good a job or better, because now they all communicate with each other. You can set groups so that you can get like multi room working just fine. They work via Bluetooth, so they're easy as hell to connect to and disconnect from.

And this isn't a Google podcast but, oh my God, the obvious things that you should be able to do with these speakers that you can't do. Like gee, I've got a Google TV dongle and it's running the Google TV operating system and it's running the YouTube app and it's connecting as a speaker output to these Google Nest speakers. Why can't I have a stereo pair working connecting to this? Why am I limited to just one speaker at a time? So yeah, I mean I'd be very, very open to if Apple came out with something that was useful and wasn't like piggy about, oh, spotify. Good news we just released a tool that will help you transfer all of your spotify playlist to apple music, which you'll be much happier with, particularly with the speaker, particularly because we don't really spot support spotify at all, not really. Well, I mean, hey, you'll be happier this way I should.

1:23:13 - Leo Laporte
I should have mentioned this in the we were talking about judge rogers, because I think this uh press release from apple was aimed at uh judge ro. Apple has the App Store has stopped more than $9 billion in fraud in the last five years, so there.

1:23:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Judge Rogers, I suppose you would rather have all that fraud happening.

1:23:33 - Jason Snell
What an interesting point of view as a point that our pal Craig Hockenberry from the Icon Factory made. He did several posts about this on Mastodon and one of them was just now do Stripe, because those volumes Stripe has saved so much more of. They can make those claims too about how much fraud that they've saved, but Apple doesn't want to talk about that. Apple only wants to talk about how much that if you use the App Store, you're safe from these transactions. But there's fraud on the App Store. There's fraud on the app store. There's fraud and stripe. They all work against it. I don't know what they're proving here, but you're right, I think that this is them reinforcing their their narrative about how safe they are and how seriously.

1:24:12 - Leo Laporte
Last year, apple terminated more than 146 000 developer accounts over fraud concerns. Several hundred of them were all on the same day and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments. They rejected 711 million customer account creations. Wow, that's interesting.

1:24:32 - Andy Ihnatko
So basically, they want credit for doing their job. Yeah, okay.

1:24:36 - Leo Laporte
Deactivated 129 million customer accounts last year. So what is the criterion for rejecting your account creation?

1:24:47 - Andy Ihnatko
oh, you look suspicious okay, she signed your email, kind of shifty like, shifty like they got ways, they got ways.

1:24:56 - Jason Snell
I guess they do that's interesting that they have.

1:24:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean 711 million last year. Uh, apple works to protect risky software distributed by pirate storefronts. You wouldn't want pirate storefronts, well, why do those exist?

from reaching users. 10 10 000 illegitimate apps on pirate storefronts detected and blocked. Uh, last month, apple stopped 4.6 million attempts to install or launch apps distributed illicitly outside the app store or approved third money marketplaces which you have to approve in the eu, so we can't say anything about that? Uh, all right, well, you know, it's true. I guess you're right. That's a good point, though, though, or Craig Hockenberry's points Well taken that that's the job.

1:25:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, everybody does. I'm sure Visa and MasterCard have done the same. Right savings instead of seven billion right like because of volume, it's not. I mean again, this is just apple doing something that that helps them serve their needs, by pointing out that they are doing what is essentially due diligence and that they're not. You know that part. This could be underlined. This is what you pay us for right, yeah, that's fair.

1:26:18 - Leo Laporte
Uh, tap to pay is now rolling out. You can attempt fraud in eight new countries. Uh, all of a sudden, right now we're talking belgium, croatia. Oh, these are all. Interestingly, these are using other payment platforms because they're in the eu, aren't they? Uh, cyprus, denmark, greece my pos probably doesn't mean the same thing in greece that it does everywhere else Iceland, luxembourg and Malta. Many of the payment solutions are the same in these countries. You know Viva's everywhere, that kind of thing, but still, that's good. That's good. Tap to pay is the thing where you don't need a stripe dongle or a special iPad app. You could just tap your two phones together and over money. All right, I haven't used it yet. Are you seeing that? More and more do you go to a lot of farmers markets, that kind of thing sure I mean.

The pandemic pushed a lot of people out of cash and into well, I do tap to pay on the, you know, in the terminals, the stripe terminals and so forth, but this is phone to phone, yeah, yeah, no, some of the, some of the people at my yeah, I mean some of the people in my farmer's market.

1:27:26 - Jason Snell
This is what they use now. They basically sure they hold out their phone, I mean.

1:27:30 - Alex Lindsay
So it's still a business transaction, but yes, for sure, yeah I, I think, probably at the like the san rafael farmer's market which I was just at over the weekend. Probably half we're using. Oh, interesting, half of the half we're using the, the phone, and the other half were using some kind of square, and then there that was half of the ones that were using it, and then there's like three or four that are cast away when it's it's shipped.

1:27:52 - Leo Laporte
That little dongle that he had made in a maker space yeah, that plugged into the headphone. This is how long ago it was the headphone jack of the iphone and you could swipe the card through it. That felt like a revolution. It's come so far since then.

1:28:07 - Andy Ihnatko
And realize the reason why he did it that way was to get around the made for iPhone approvals. That's like they got around an app store or an Apple bureaucracy thing and that basically launched off a pretty serious revolution. But it also goes to show it's sometimes hard to as good and as superior as like tap to tap, phone to phone. Tap to pay would be God, like in my charming seaside New England colonial village that gets all tourists. We have a food truck night, like once a month in the nice weather. Ooh, that sounds like fun. And the number of times where the food trucks are like they're not using any type of a tap to pay. It is literally launch this app, scan this barcode, use this really, really cumbersome. I mean it's a common app but it's not like tap validate good, it's like okay. I mean I try to convince. I have to talk to these people who are trying to sell me a beautiful cupcake. I swear to God, I talk about technology on the radio and on TV and stuff. I know this stuff. Okay, what do I do here?

Sometimes it's hard to convince organizations that we have a system that seems to work. We seem to get paid, we seem to sell all of our cupcakes but nonetheless, like, even though there's a, there's an upgrade that they can do there's too much friction. As far as they're concerned, I don't blame them. If they're selling them all, then you know exactly Nothing. The tip is you got you absolutely don't. Dessert comes last, but buy the cupcakes first. The truck, they have these. Really I can't even talk.

1:29:45 - Leo Laporte
Do they have clam cakes?

1:29:46 - Andy Ihnatko
there, there's usually there's a. The barbecue truck is usually the best. You get your Dells. There's a truck that does Dells Lemonade. Yay, there's a truck that does a really good hearty seafood chowder. There's no, they're technically not clam cakes, but we ate at the restaurant that had really good hearty seafood chowder. There's no, they're technically not clam cakes, but we ate at the restaurant that had really good clam cakes. So if you want clam cakes, get some cake from that place.

1:30:08 - Leo Laporte
They were fabulous.

1:30:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Also, right next time there's a clam shack, like at the very end near the pier oh, I like clam shacks. That's really if you're not buying, if you're not eating your seafood out of a styrofoam container on a picnic table behind the place where you bought it from. It's not the it's, oh it could be okay seafood, but it's probably not going to be great uh I am a clam check connoisseur, I must say, and uh nothing like a you gotta go up north like a big container of fried whole clam bellies.

It's like ah there you go.

1:30:37 - Leo Laporte
Gotta go up north. Go to dune brothers there and they're fantastic.

1:30:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Highly recommend them next time beware the red tide, but as long as there's also no red tide, you're good uh, I think they come from Portugal the dunes, the dune brothers.

1:30:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's really good because they go to Portugal every summer, every winter. Rather, because you can't sell clams clams in the summer, I'm in the winter. You have to sell them in the summer. Global wearable band market is up 13 percent according to canalis, but xiaomi is the number one global band. We're talking watch bands know what?

1:31:13 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, smartwatches. There was a canalis had a new report that basically saying that the market for smart watches is up by 12 or 13 percent. But they, la apple, lost the number one position to 13, but they lot.

1:31:27 - Leo Laporte
Apple lost the number one position to uh to do that. So they're calling the watches bands because they, you wear them. Yeah, exactly okay. But top wearable band vendors q1 2025 xiaomi up 44. Apple up five percent, while way up 36, samsung, which has a pretty incredible watch.

1:31:41 - Andy Ihnatko
You wear the samsung watch 74 percent garment as we've said before, I just can't get to the smart watch.

1:31:48 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right, you're mr cassio, aren't you? Yes?

1:31:51 - Andy Ihnatko
but. But it's to be fair. I mean, it's not unexpected. Apple hasn't had the sort, hasn't had the sort of update to the apple watch in the past couple years that compelled people to swap out.

1:32:02 - Leo Laporte
Aren't they better? I mean, they're just better than any other smartwatch.

1:32:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, it depends. I mean, you can't beat Apple Watch's integration with your iPhone. You have to have an iPhone though. Yeah, I mean, google's been doing a lot of work with Wear OS to make it more universal, but you can't beat the idea of we're building a phone specifically to work great with the operating systems of both of these devices. I have to say that the updates to Wear OS that they showed off a couple of weeks ago the pre-keynote to the keynote at Google IO make it look pretty damn hot.

I do prefer a circular smartwatch face to the square one, and they've made some changes to the user interface language. That've made some changes to the uh, to the user interface language. That really shows it off nicely, but that's supposedly, according to german, like another thing that apple's going to be rolling out sometime soon. Anyway, a new again, not necessarily a revamp or rewrite of the uh, of the user interface, but user experience, but at least an updating of it. I do think that it feels the Apple Watch. It looks great, but it really does look like the typical problem of hey, I've got a square screen, let's fill it with crap, as opposed to the elegance of we only have a small piece of real estate. Let's only communicate the most minimal useful atom molecule of information that we can in this that's appropriate to the circumstance.

1:33:25 - Jason Snell
The beauty of the Apple watch is you can make it as minimal or as non-minimal as you want. Both people can be satisfied with that. You can, I don't. I don't use the, the, whatever. That is the modular. That's got all the different things in it. And this is the thing we get. What we can choose, we can all choose. I will say the one thing about this story is this is a misleading story, because this canalis has has lumped all fitness bands in with all smart watches and come on.

1:33:56 - Leo Laporte
So show me has an incredibly popular fitness band.

1:33:57 - Mikah Sargent
Oh it's a fitness band and I'm sure that and that's all in here.

1:33:59 - Jason Snell
So so if you want to say that smart watches are wearable bands, then it's sort of interesting that xiaomi is now ahead of apple worldwide, but like that's also not a market that apple is in now, should they be in it, I guess we could argue that point, but apple's decided not to be in it, and so I, you know, I think that it's not the smart watch market here. This is the wearable band market, which includes some very different products from each other. But yeah, anyway, anyway, that's just for what it's worth.

1:34:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And also shows you how much, how valuable the Chinese market is. I mean, Xiaomi is pretty much the state electronics provider that if you have a big success there, you can make it anywhere. Yeah, and it's unit share Beijing, Beijing.

1:34:35 - Jason Snell
You know it's unit share, so it's cheaper products are going to do better because it's unit share and not a revenue share or a profit share. So it's just. It is what it is, but like I mean I love my info.

1:34:48 - Leo Laporte
Watch. Look at all the complications I could put on that thing. That thing is full, full of complications. It's the most complicated.

1:34:57 - Jason Snell
Watch I got it all in here. Look at that. That's a face with hands. I'm saying there's, there's the ones where you don't even have hands. It's just, oh, no, yeah, I like hands all of those things on there too, if you want a full-on computer watch and I can press this button and talk to my wife instantly.

1:35:13 - Leo Laporte
I can, uh, I mean all that stuff.

1:35:15 - Jason Snell
Look, it's counting my steps I mean I've got complications too, but I also choose a watch face with hands and not the one that's got like all the data readouts in it.

1:35:24 - Leo Laporte
I've got eight complications and hands and you know what happens. When you tap the red ring, you get your longitude and your latitude. Oh, boy.

1:35:31 - Jason Snell
Well, how about that? Different strokes for different folks? What? What watch face do you wear? Mostly it's California, because it lets me do the kind of classic Swiss army kind of look with some look with some things around the edges and I like it.

I like it. I think Andy brings up a good point, which is Apple Watch hasn't changed in a decade and they've maintained band compatibility and the shape is there. I love that. It does feel almost like this is what the Apple Watch looks like now, and I'm not sure whether they can change it because they've invested so much brand identity and what the apple watch looks like.

So to the point where there are pictures of the pope and people are like look, it's an apple watch, because we all know what an apple watch looks like yeah but you know that there is an argument, that you know they could try some other styles, while other watches are shaped differently and although, yes, a round watch is very different and has lots of issues, I think the people at Apple are smart enough to figure out how to deal with those issues if they want to do that. But the issue is now like we know what an Apple Watch looks like yeah, there's so much design.

1:36:35 - Alex Lindsay
Would you change it if you could? Right, yeah, there's so much design changes for all the app. Anybody made an app for it and everything else, all the workflows. It's. It's a.

1:36:43 - Jason Snell
It would be apple when does apple stop from breaking things for developers and making them updated if they feel that there's value in it? But I agree, it's like I think it comes down to the fact that everybody knows exactly what an apple watch is when they look at it well, I think also a circular watch is a legacy idea, like it's just, you know, like it's not a, you know the screens don't work.

1:37:00 - Alex Lindsay
I, we, the reason we want a round watch is because we had round watches, you know, like that exists in the world, in the old world, and so I don't. I guess I have. I, I've looked at round watches and it just seems so impractical when it comes to what I'm using the watch for. It feels like I would lose a lot by losing the corners.

1:37:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I, I, uh, I disagree, but it really is just an objective, subjective style thing. The thing is, when I see the square Apple Watch, yeah, you can remove all the complications from it, but it's still a circular, unless you're using digital a circular thing inside a square thing, it doesn't really work.

And also I think that the apps are also very conventional in their design.

Where it's another, basically, let's basically fill a square with user interface, which is fine.

It's just that, having used both styles, I just think that there's something about a really well-designed user interface and a circular screen on your wrist that is familiar and reassuring and timeless and beautiful. That goes beyond just simply expecting to see a round thing on your wrist when you go to check the time. I like the idea of user interface designers and app designers trying to solve the problems of how do we design a user interface for a screen that doesn't have corners on it, and I think that a lot of those interface solutions are beautiful and elegant and surprising. And it's just the same reason why we buy a watch, because you know there's something about it that we like, that we instinctively like and is tuned into our personality and our style and that sort of thing. And for me, even a digital watch on a round face is just more. A Pixel watch is just more attractive to me than an Apple watch, and that's pretty much just all. It's the only argument I have to make.

1:38:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, that brings us to the Vision Pro segment. What do you see?

1:39:01 - Jason Snell
What do you know?

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
It's time to talk to Vision Pro is there anything in the vision pro segment today? You Andy put in an article by marcus mendez at nine to five mac, saying apple absolutely cannot miss its smart glasses swing.

1:39:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, only I put that in mostly, so I could say really it ain't got a thing if it misses that swing.

Yeah, I mean for Apple to make smart glasses or AI glasses. It seems like the easiest thing in the world for them to do, and do successfully. One of the things that you never question about an Apple product is is it going to look beautiful? Is it going to be beautifully designed? Is the manufacturer, when you hold it? Is it going to feel like a premium quality product?

We talk about the phone being built as though it's a piece of jewelry.

We talk about the Apple Watch being designed as much as a style, jewelry and fashion item, as much as a piece of technology.

They can design a piece of a pair of eyeglasses that, even if it has no smart features whatsoever that people would want to buy, they can definitely design it so that it works amazingly well with iPhone and they're not like the Apple Watch. They're not going to care if it works well with other platforms because they don't have to, and they have a whole worldwide community of people who just love Apple's whole vibe and they're not going to blink twice at spending money on this thing Apple's whole vibe and they're not going to blink twice at spending money on this thing. And thirdly, as Alex has been saying for a long time now they don't have to do smart glasses in order to succeed. They've got a long runway before they figure out what needs to come after the iPhone, or even if anything important has to come after the iPhone. It's concerning that half of their money is still coming from this one product category, but it's not as though they've been unsuccessful at it and it's not as though they've been having problems finding people to buy these things.

1:40:55 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that one of the things that Apple has done a lot of is they draft off a lot of other people. We think of Apple as an innovator, but a lot of times they let a lot of other people. They're kind of going down the path. They had to do. I think they had to do the Vision Pro because they had to be ahead of, they had to be thinking about it. They had developers thinking about it. They have to develop technologies around it. There's a bunch of as an R&D unit. I think that it makes a lot of sense for them to build, but they're working on something that's bigger and further down and lighter and all the other things that are there.

And I think the problem that I have, when everyone keeps on saying that Apple has to have AI or Apple has to have this thing and there's a sense of urgency and we just have to remember that there was a point where Microsoft was. You know they were done. They were going to get broken up. There was going to be all this stuff that's going to happen. There's all this competition. They. They were going to get broken up. There was going to be all this stuff that's going to happen. There's all this competition. They missed the boat, they, you know, and all those things.

And right and today they are worth 3.4, 3.414 trillion dollars. They are the largest company in the world. So saying you know, and that was, I would argue, I mean they dumped a whole operating system that didn't work, you know. So the thing is is that when we say that the people have to, you know, these kinds of things move very slowly, especially when you have hardware, and so I think that Apple I don't think Apple has to do anything. I think that they are definitely working on glasses. I think that they've talked about that, they've hinted to that for quite some time. I don't think that's almost a given. Do they have to have it out this year? Probably not.

1:42:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, that was the Vision Pro segment.

1:42:29 - Jason Snell
I hope you all enjoyed it. Now you know we're done talking the Vision Pro At all right, it wasn't even the Vision Pro, I just wanted to hear the song again.

1:42:39 - Leo Laporte
Can you improve this?

1:42:40 - Jason Snell
Come on, help me. Stories of Surrender comes out on Friday for Vision Pro. It's the Bono one-man show.

1:42:49 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I forgot about that.

1:42:49 - Jason Snell
Reflecting on his life. It is a 90-ish minute long movie, so it's the longest piece of, and there's going to be a standard version of it, there's a version of it that's immersive and it's going to be the longest piece of immersive content Apple has released. Comes out Friday. Um, I've seen it and can't talk about it other than to say that it is impressive. It's not a hundred percent immersive, it kind of goes back and forth, but, like, I think it's very interesting and I think I look forward to talking about it next week because, um, there's a lot, so people who have vision pros should watch for that. I think Friday is when it comes out.

1:43:27 - Leo Laporte
Thursday, friday and, yeah, friday. And you can also watch a 2D version if you have an Apple TV subscription.

1:43:33 - Jason Snell
Right.

1:43:34 - Leo Laporte
Yes, I wonder, how that is.

1:43:36 - Jason Snell
Well, it's again. I can't go into the details. Is it the same content? I'm under embargo, but it's basically the same. There are probably some variations. I can only intuit. I've only seen the immersive version, um, but uh, it's. That itself is interesting, right? Why? How do you do an immersive version and a non-immersive version of something in order to reach a broader audience? And what does that do to the immersive product we'll talk about next week? But just a heads up for people yes, and that there is stuff, and I watched another kind of immersive thing that I'm not actually sure if it's out yet, so I'll save that for next week too. I spent some good time in the nerd helmet this week watching stuff.

1:44:10 - Leo Laporte
So this week's vision pro segment loss is next week's vision pro segment.

1:44:15 - Jason Snell
I think so. It's a net gain next week. Okay, Thank you.

1:44:18 - Leo Laporte
Jason, you're watching Mac break weekly, our picks of the week coming up next, andy, and not co. Alex lindsey from office hours, dot global, Jason Snell, of course you gotta. You gotta read six colors dot com, now with more glenn fleishman, which is which is really great. In fact, I had somebody ask me a question about the uh iphone and I said send an email to glenn fleishman at six colors because, uh, he needs content. It was a really tough question. I didn't it was, I forgot what it was, but it wasn't easily solvable. I thought this is for Glenn, this is for Glenn for sure. So we're all glad you're here. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it.

We do the show every Tuesday, 11 am, pacific 2 pm Eastern Time, 1800 UTC, and we stream it on eight different platforms. Of course, the Club Twit members can watch it Discord but everybody can watch us on YouTube. Hiya, youtube, I see you there. Twitch I see you there too. All three of you. Xcom, tiktok we struggled to get TikTok up today, but we got it going right, guys, we did it. Uh, facebook linkedin and kick, and I see the kick person too. So thank you all of you for watching uh, the live stream. But of course, live stream is not the main point of the show.

We do make a podcast available at our website, twittertv slash mbw. There is a dedicated YouTube channel for this show, as there is all of our shows, which make it very easy to share clips. If you see something you know, you have a Vision Pro friend and you want to send them the clip about the Bono thing coming out Friday Very easy to do that on the YouTube channel. Best way, though, is to subscribe. There's audio or video feeds. They're free to all. Yeah, just pick your favorite podcast client and subscribe. Do me a favor, though if you subscribe, please leave us a five-star review. Let the world know about mac break weekly time for the picks of the week. Jason snell, why don't you kick it?

1:46:16 - Jason Snell
off. All right, I am gonna give you a rerun from 2019, because this product is still out there and it's still great and I I used it recently. Andy recommended it back then again, I'm going to cite mbwpixcom, the uh semi-definitive solution, and that person noticed that we were talking about them and posted about it on mbwpix. So it's 18 years of doing that site amazing that is dedication.

1:46:42 - Leo Laporte
Good, whoever you are. What's his name does? Do we know?

1:46:45 - Jason Snell
oh, I don't even know. I'll go look and see while you talk about all mason, paul mason, that's right, yeah, thank you paul. Thank you, paul. Uh, but if you post that we talked about you again, the site's gonna fold in on itself. It's gonna be weird. So, um, but I looked this up and it hasn't been picked in a while, so so I'll pick it. It's called total mount. Um. You can get them on Amazon. It's an Apple.

TV mount. I recently mounted a couple of Apple TVs on walls behind TVs, making them basically invisible. You can stick it to a wall, you can stick it to the TV, but basically you you mount this thing and then slide the Apple TV right in and you can create that hotel room like experience where you cannot see the box that is controlling your TV. And I also bought a little power cable and a little HDMI cable that I measured out exactly what the length would be at its maximum that was required. So I don't have a big cable hanging down like I did for way too many years but now I don't. So it is a part the uh process of simplifying to get it so that you don't see that box, that or the cable that's running to the box.

I had a k, a power cable and an hdmi cable running out of my tv just kind of like into the closet. It was really ugly and I was thinking how am I going to do this? Do I have to like get a hole like through my walls, all that? And I realized all I have to do is get my electrician like get a hole like through my wall to all that. And I realize all I have to do is get my electrician to put a power plug behind the tv, yeah, and then I can do all this stuff and get the total mount up there, and it works great. So if you're, if you want to hide your tv, your apple tv, away, please do you know it's funny because I bought this for the opposite reason.

1:48:19 - Leo Laporte
We had the apple tv strapped tight to the back of the TV and the remote just really wouldn't work. Interesting. So I got this mount and put it under the TV so it's visible. The remote works better. Okay, so do it behind the TV or not, it's up to you. But yeah, I vouch for it. It's cheap. They have a version that comes with a cable and one without. Yeah, probably just get the one without.

1:48:44 - Jason Snell
Everybody's got HDMI cables. Yeah, and also, be sure it depends on, you know, it depends on where you mount it versus your tv, and if your tv pulls away from the wall and tilts a little bit, you might need a little more slack on it. But you know, what you can do is use a big HDMI cable and extend it all the ways you you can think of, and then you know, find out the the furthest distance and add a couple of inches and then order a cable or just use the apple tv for everything I mean I do yeah but, you do need to attach it to a tv, so yeah, well, it's next to the tv just goes right in.

1:49:12 - Leo Laporte
Right, that's it. That's all I need. I don't do it. Speakers I need nothing. Do it no receivers. Uh, good, pick, very good, I'm gonna.

This is a weird pick because I saw it on an ad on sixcolors.com, uh, but I really like it. I have been suffering with a lousy sonos app forever. Uh, you have an advertiser called click c-l-i-c for sonos. I love it. I've put it, uh, on my mac, on my iPhone, on my iPad, on my apple watch and I guess there's even an apple vision version. It replaces the lousy sonos software with good sonos software. That's all it does. It's pretty straightforward, um, and they are a, I'm sure, very welcome. Got this five, six colors.

The iPhone app crashed my phone. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sure very welcome. Got this via Six Colors. The iPhone app crashed my phone. I don't know what you're talking about. Didn't crash my phone, works great. Don't read those reviews. Read my review. It works great. Click, thank you. And I have one other pick, as long as Leo's doing picks. Believe it or not, there is still no Instagram for iPad, but there is WhatsApp for iPad. They finally launched it. Don't know why you'd want it, but for those of you living in other countries. Now you can do it on your iPad, alex Lindsay.

1:50:36 - Alex Lindsay
By the way, the WhatsApp on there is. You know, if you have a team that you're working with, a lot of times you're on your phone and then people are WhatsAppping you having it on other devices. It's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. Yeah, so my pick tiles for Zoom is becoming more. It's been out in beta for a while, but there's been a closed beta and now it's much more open and what it's really designed for is to make the galleries very flexible. So a lot of times we've been kind of. You know, when we started using Zoom for these events, we would, you know, you figure out a way to put something over top of the Zoom gallery, right, you know? And you're like how do I make something look pretty? Let me show you what this looks like here. So this is, you know, what I have now and I have this ability to design it. So, instead of trying to figure out what I have over it, it's actually building that gallery for me, so I can sit there and go, oh, I want it to look like this, I want it to look like that, and before we'd have to build actual processes to make this actually work, I can figure out oh, I'd like to space it, put less spacing between everybody or more spacing between everybody. In addition to that, I have, you know, I can start to play with their corner radiuses. So how rounded do I want to meet? Now, you'll notice, down below here there's actually, it's actually changing because this is the live view. Right, this is us, this is what you heard earlier, what I said. So I'm in zoom and there's a little bit of a double. You see me there, but I'm in zoom right now and if I start making these changes to this gallery, you can see the gallery changing, you know, in real time, and I can make the border thicker or thinner, and so if you're building something out, that's a gallery.

Now, this is not really designed as much for broadcast as it is, for, hey, I'm doing a hybrid event and I want everyone to look nice. I don't want them to just look like every other, uh, every other. Um, you know, zoom gallery. I want this to to actually, um, you know, have some style to it. Uh, this is where it goes and if I can go, oh, I want some overlays. I can turn the, I can turn our overlays on. So we've got our little, uh, name tags on it, um, there as well. So, and and and again, all of this is being driven by.

The big thing is is that this is all being driven by the data inside of Zoom. So, when you think of all those little tags on all those little windows, those are not you know. Those are driven by the names that we put into Zoom, you know. So if you have a whole bunch of again, if you have a whole bunch of participants, if you look at something like Tony Robbins, who might have hundreds of participants, this is designed not just to design something for three or four of us, but what if I want to design a look and feel for 200 people or 400 people and put them all on screens that are on LED walls or all across different monitors?

That's the kind of thing that you can do with Zoom tiles, and when you adjust it, instead of going through there and trying to build some graphic that sits, that sits over top of it, you just say, oh, this is what I want it to look like and, um, and so I can. Um, you change all of those things. It's really cool, it's it's mac only, actually, it's taking full advantage. The only thing about zoom's team is that they and we all know andy, because he's, he's, he's helped a lot here is that they really write everything to the best platform that makes sense and they take full advantage of the hardware. So it really is built for the M-series Macs and so it takes full advantage of that. So all of the stuff you're seeing is happening in real time while it's actually streaming live video. So it's pretty amazing, nice.

So, I'm excited that it's… Andy Carluccio, by the way, not Andy Inako. Yeah, Andy Carluccio. By the way, not Andy Inaco. Yeah, Andy Carluccio yeah. Andy has been working hard on tiles.

1:54:06 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, no, no, no. Thank goodness for Andy, because his Zoom ISO is what makes it possible to do this.

1:54:12 - Alex Lindsay
Right, right. And what's cool about this? I'm working on a project coming up where we have lots and lots of participants coming in and we're using both Zoom tiles and Zoom ISO, and we're using both Zoom tiles and Zoom ISO Zoom tiles to show all the participants and then Zoom ISO to grab the ones we want to put into the production, and so you know you can kind of use both of these, as they just jump in as participants and you're off to the races.

1:54:38 - Leo Laporte
This just in. It looks like Governor Abbott has signed the bill, so now Apple is going to have to somehow do age restriction in the App Store, which means in Texas anyway, which means I don't know what You're going to have to prove you are who you say you are In Texas. Thank you, alex, and, by the way, I just wanted to show the click interface so that I could play this really, really, really loud here in the studio. I could actually play it throughout the house, but I probably won't do that. See what a clean interface this is.

1:55:17 - Alex Lindsay
I really like it anyway, downloaded it while you were talking. Yeah, no, I'm very happy, discovered everything right away.

1:55:23 - Leo Laporte
It uh, uses my Apple music. It's great, uh, and I think it was 27.99 for a lifetime. And I know you don't like subscriptions. They have a month a yearly, but go for the lifetime. Yep, andy, in a hot coat. What's your pick of the week, sir?

1:55:38 - Andy Ihnatko
um, if your problem with the original Mac Classic or Mac 512 was that it was just too darn big and you couldn't use it as a Christmas tree ornament, have I got a solution for you? A hacker by the name of Nick Gallard has combined a bunch of open source Mac emulators with a whole bunch of ingenuity and engineering and he's produced the Pico Mac Nano, which is a perfect simulation of the Mac's physical form in a running Mac in a 2.5-inch size scale, and it has a Raspberry Pi Nano inside booting off of an SD card and it runs System 3. Not System 6.02, but System 3. But it's legitimately running Mac software. It's hysterical. It's got an LCD screen backlit. The form is perfect.

If you looked at the pictures on the 1BitRainbowcom site, you would be hard-pressed to guess what the scale of this thing is. It's 3D printed but very, very nicely finished. The only compromise that was made was that it doesn't have sound. It does make a startup sound through a hack, but it doesn't have actual system sound. Also, it's worth taking a look at nick allard's blog post about it, because they go through like what they went through to get this thing working. One of the things was to find a screen that would give you the full 512 pixels wide experience. They couldn't make that work, uh, for a bunch of reasons that he explains, so he basically hacked the emulator so that it's a 4 480 pixel wide display so we can use a 480 by 640 display on its in portrait mode. Uh, stuck inside the thing, but I would think that that's a pretty I if you think that that's going to reduce the usability of mac right?

I'm not buying it now, man, I'm not buying it I mean, if you've got stewart little inside your house that's going to be complaining that this is so cool and I hate to ask can you buy it? You can buy it 60 day. Wait, uh 6, 70 it's in converting from you. From pounds it is 65, 75 dollars and 62 cents.

I imagine there would be shipping expensive yeah yeah, and I'm guessing that if you really want one and you don't want to make it yourself and follow the instructions and the stl files that he's provided, you should probably get on this quick, because I think that it's backordered already.

Also, when I bookmarked it yesterday it was backordered 30 days and right now it's backordered 60 days. But for a little extra money you can even buy a version of this that's packed in the original scaled down version of the original Macintosh Picasso case with all the foam inserts inside it that he had custom printed at a print shop factory on a corrugated cardboard in India. I think Jason and I have spoken about this before that there is something so compelling about something very, very silly that's done at an extremely high level of execution, and this seems to be both of those things. It's so awesome, it's just such a pretty pretty thing. Unfortunately it's not, but it doesn't. You would hope that it runs on battery. It doesn't.

He says in the blog post that's one thing he's you would love to do for the next version of it. He's got some ideas for now you have to plug it into a USB-C, but the good news there is, number one the USB-C port is exactly in line with where the accessory ports would have been on the back of the original Mac, and also it's not just an ornament like oh look, hey look, it's telling me the time. You can actually hook up a mouse and a keyboard to it via USB-C and actually just run apps and play games on it within the system. Three limitations of it, but, my goodness, you love to see someone who just has a vision of something extremely silly but awesome and just has to pursue it until it has been done perfectly.

1:59:36 - Leo Laporte
And it looks like it's been done perfectly Hystericals. Even the website is in Mac style.

1:59:41 - Jason Snell
Classic Mac OS style yeah.

1:59:43 - Leo Laporte
I mean, he's really done it right. Uh, very nice.

1:59:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm already a level of execution you gotta commit to the bit.

1:59:50 - Leo Laporte
I, I really want one, really bad yeah.

1:59:52 - Jason Snell
I bought one just while we were sitting here. Yeah, thanks very cool, wow, uh.

1:59:58 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andrew, for a fun uh pick of the week. Thank you all of you for a fun show of the week. Thank you all of you for a fun show. Andy Ihnatko is working on the website. He's going to have it in that little 480 by 5.

2:00:10 - Jason Snell
He's posting all the time 640 by 480.

2:00:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I finally solved the problems with the payment processor, so now the payment processor is all hooked up and when I open it it will be ready to accept, hopefully, your membership fees, if you don't want to just simply look at the free stuff. So it's ready, it's done Almost over. Now the only big thing left to do is to basically transfer an outgocom over to this new thing and then just give it a top to bottom of what did I– when you're walking through a new house saying, oh, it looks finished, oh right, none of the light switches have been screwed in yet. A new house saying, oh, it looks finished. Oh right, none of the light switches are having screwed in yet. Oh, that's right, we need to. We need to paint that trim that was hasn't been painted yet. But yeah, it's all. That was the. That was the last thing. That was driving me mad, trying to figure out what needed to be done to hook it up to this payment processor, and now I've been told by the payment process that it is actually working so good.

2:01:00 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, Very nice. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Alex Lindsay. What's coming up on officehours.global?

2:01:07 - Alex Lindsay
We are answering questions. We've decided that maybe we should answer questions about media production and then, when we finish those, we were going to answer some more questions. Well, nothing wrong with that, yeah, so we answer about 25 questions a day and they range from very basic stuff that people are. You know, a lot of times people are asking you know, how do I get my webcam to work? But it's all the way up to that too. We had someone that was replacing their analog mixer with their new digital mixer and they're trying to figure out is it an Alan Heath or a or a Behringer, or? And that was just wow, that's kind of the range. So, whatever you're doing in production, um, uh, uh, oftentimes, you know, we have some pretty good experts on the on the uh, on the panel. Uh, usually it's somewhere between four and 10 people on the panel that are answering questions every morning, and, of course, uh, the wonderful Michael Krasny podcast, graymatter.show.

Yes and um, we, uh, we were talking about Israel over the. We had a oh, I bet yeah. So, um, Janine Zakaria was on on Friday and I think that that's either coming out today or I think it came out today or be out tomorrow and she's really talking. She covered um, um, she's been covering Israel and the god and the god, the Gaza strip for decades, so we had a great conversation with her as well.

2:02:24 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, Jason Snell, speak slowly so I have time to order this little baby. Thanks, Leo, no, no, I finished, you were order number 600. What were you 601?

2:02:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, something like that 611. And you're 612. I'm 612. We got in we're buddies, we're buddies, order buddies.

2:02:46 - Leo Laporte
Right next door Nice Order buddies.

2:02:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah 6collarscom.

2:02:52 - Jason Snell
Check out my stuff there. Mike Hurley and I had a good conversation on Upgrade this week about he's a little more enthusiastic about the return of Johnny Ive, but it sounds like we disagree. And then by the time we got to the end he's basically like look, I don't know if it's going to be any good or not, but I think it's going to be fun to watch and see what happens. And I said I agree it actually is going to be fun to watch and see what happens. I just kind of don't believe it. But, um, you know good conversation that we had where we there's a lot of give and take and that's why people can check that out on the upgrade podcast Jason Snell six colors dot com and check it out sixcolors.com/jason, for an immediate link.

2:03:26 - Leo Laporte
So many podcasts, so many podcasts. Thank you everybody. We really appreciate all of your support for the show. As you know, mac break weekly is ad supported, but club members put in at least 25 percent in this particular episode, more than that. So thank you, club members. We really appreciate it and we will see you back here next tuesday, 11 am pacific if you want to watch live, or on the website at twit.tv/mbw if you want to download a copy or subscribe. By the way, I should mention we have a newsletter. Sometimes people say, well, I'm in the club, but I don't want to go to the discord to find out what's coming up. Is there a way to do that? Yes, subscribe to the newsletter. It's free and it talks about what's coming this week and the upcoming week on all of the shows. So, twit.tv/newsletter If you subscribe, you will not be in the dark, you will be in the light. Thanks for being here, everybody. Thanks to our wonderful panelists.

2:04:36 - Mikah Sargent
We'll see you next time and now, as it has been and so it shall always be, it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work, because when we looked at the relaunch, it is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question.

I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club Twit, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad-free, of course, listen to the audio version ad-free. If you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you got to tune in to Hands-On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to, and from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort. You gotta check out Hands-On Tech and I can't wait to get your question.