MacBreak Weekly 975 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, our Sleek Peek, our annual.

It's a week before WWDC. What the heck's Apple going to announce? Show Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell are here. We will talk about all the things Apple might and might not talk about. Apple Design Award winners and finalists and how could you use 20 iPhones to make a movie. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 975. Recorded Tuesday, june 3rd 2025. Sleek Peek. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the annual the week before WWDC. We got nothing to say episode, which means it'll probably be really, really long. Jason Snell is here. From sixcolors.com.

0:00:59 - Jason Snell
Good to be here. Far be it for me to advise a broadcasting professional such as yourself, but starting your show saying we got nothing to talk about doesn't seem like a recipe for success.

0:01:10 - Leo Laporte
It's the new Sleek Peek version of MacBreak Weekly Thinner, lighter and less filling.

0:01:16 - Jason Snell
Well, goodbye everybody. Hello, I must be going you know this is called confidence, Jason.

0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
I know our fabulous audience is going, us is not. Is gonna say, I don't care, you guys talk, just talk for three hours. I gotta commute. Listen, sounds like us. Sounds like us, andy, and I goes also here from the library, hi, andrew I'm excited because that means we have more time to talk about. Really get into the Patti LuPone otter mcdonald beef god, you know, when you get your rap beefs between broadway stars, you know, you know there's something going on in the culture. I'm just saying when, when, when.

0:01:54 - Andy Ihnatko
People are saying, oh my god, she actually apologized for something she said. You know, this person has led kind of a life what a life.

0:02:02 - Leo Laporte
What a life actually. You know, we do have quite a few stories. We're gonna have some fun. This is actually not a lightweight episode by any means. Thank goodness alex lindsey's here from office hours dot global. He's no lightweight, he is also a Sleek Peek hello, something like that, hello what is this, uh? What does this Sleek Peek mean with this thing? Sleek peak, uh, it was tweeted, nobody knows yeah, no one ever knows, we all guess yeah, yeah, the the.

0:02:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's notable for people who like to pick apart such things, because that wasn't what it originally. Said it right, and we said so. Why? And as you, as you let off the show with, we have no, the world has nothing else to talk about it's speculation because it's the quiet week yeah, monday uh it's it, Mikah Sargent and I will do the keynote.

0:02:55 - Leo Laporte
We'll be doing it all day. Yeah, we're bringing our lunch. Literally, Mikah is getting a lunchbox, as am I.

0:03:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I will say, when you, when, when you look at, when you look at the logo, one way to interpret like, because it's like frosted glass and only at the bottom of the Apple logo there's some color and then there's the WWC 25, like rainbow sort of logo type. Now, one way of looking at that is that it's reflecting the light, or like lensing the light from below. Another one is that people inside apple are so shocked at the state of affairs and system software and artificial intelligence that the color has literally drained from like their faces they're pale.

0:03:38 - Leo Laporte
I like how the colors are. All six colors are kind of cycling at the at the bottom. That's very pretty obviously I'm gonna think that they're gonna talk about it seems premature the extra slim iphone that has been rumored for the fall it's, it's gonna be.

0:03:53 - Jason Snell
I mean the design they're gonna oh it's the new glass based solarium design and so that's what it is it's a peek at the new.

0:04:00 - Alex Lindsay
So instead of lickable it's lickable does that mean we're kind of going almost back to the Aqua? It does. It's kind of like we went from Aqua to all these other things and then we're back.

0:04:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Remember iOS 7, the whole point is let's flatten everything. There are no highlights, there are no shadows, there's no skeuomorphism. I mean, can we hope to dare that we'll have the Apple logo back in the middle of the menu bar, where God intended it to be, with OS 10.0?

0:04:29 - Alex Lindsay
That's just crazy.

0:04:31 - Jason Snell
No.

0:04:31 - Alex Lindsay
It's interesting how companies follow.

0:04:34 - Leo Laporte
Apple's design cue, because Google did material design flat, microsoft did Aqua, they did their version of Aqua, they called it.

0:04:43 - Jason Snell
Aero Aero yeah.

0:04:45 - Leo Laporte
So I just I wonder. The clock will be ticking as soon as apple announces sleek. What is that? What's the code name? That german said it was solarium, solarium, so glass, you know, glass and a lot of lighting through the glass?

0:04:58 - Jason Snell
yeah, I think so. I mean I, I think I I always talk to. You know, we're talking about computers and there's always the the. We love our listeners, but there's the. You know we're talking about computers and there's always the the. We love our listeners, but there's the, you know computer nerds who are like it's just fashion, it's just a computer. Why do they do fashion? Why do they change the world? Because of fashion. But you know, I think, as somebody who I mean I'm not going to defend fashion, although I think that that's obviously very it's a real thing that exists in the world. But I'll just say, as somebody who's been through many, many, many redesigns of magazines and websites and stuff like that, that design systems fall apart. Like the moment you create a new design, it starts to fall apart because you designed it to do X and then over the course of time, you add Y and Z and then you're back around to A, b, c, d, e.

F, g, and then you look at what used to be a really clean, nice new design. Six, seven, eight years in it you're. It's just exactly what happened to our website.

It's falling apart and you gotta, you gotta declare bankruptcy and do it from scratch and start over, and so, like I feel like after it's been, you know, a decade since ios 7 and they've refined it, but they've also patched it in so many different ways, so it's like I think it's time to rethink things, and the last time they did a redesign, they didn't do a global redesign, they did an iOS redesign, and now they've got iOS, ipados, macos, watchos, tvos and more and many others, and so maybe it's time to do that and think of all their products and not saying that they'll get it right. They may well get it wrong, there are probably going to be things in there that we all look at and think are head scratchers, but like it seems like it's time to actually do this after a decade.

0:06:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and iOS is a good example. Like it was pretty outrageous when it was released I mean it was. They went way, way too far and just removing quote, clutter, unquote, it was like you took a system where it wasn't just simply that, oh, things are different now and I'm unfamiliar. It's like no, I'm literally looking at this app and I don't know what to push to do the thing that I want where?

0:06:58 - Jason Snell
to touch, to do the thing I want to do.

0:07:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Is that text button and wow, every line was really thin. But a button, and wow it's, and every line was really thin, but they. But they kept the over, the over the next couple of releases. They kept the original intent, but they they basically dialed it back a number of steps. They learned from feedback and they fixed it. So I mean it's.

Jason made a whole bunch of good points. I would add to that is that the world changes around your design. What people are seeing and what people are experiencing changes over the next two, three, four, five, six, seven years, until suddenly people are asking why are you spelling progress with two Fs? Isn't it simply called progress, not progress? This is what Google is doing with Material design expressive, where they weren't really revolutionizing it when they introduced it two or three weeks ago, but they basically made the case that.

Here are some things that we think will make it feel more emotive, more like something that is 2025 rather than 2020, starting with something that was already very good, let's figure out a way to modernize it in a way that doesn't alienate people. I think was it Mac Rumors or Apple Insiders. They published a. I have a note in the show docs, but they did a roundup of what they said.

Oh, here are the new user interface elements of the next iOS, the next macOS, which was completely speculative but it turned out to be a very nice little rundown of. Here are things that were introduced in Vision OS, which lots of people are anticipating are going to be informing this new interpretation of macOS and iOS and everything else, which is very, very interesting. It's not going to make it if if, true, it's not going to make it look like vision os. It's going to make it look a little bit more modern, leveraging a lot of what the graphic capabilities and the processing capabilities are of modern apple silicon well, I think that apple probably is I mean more than anyone else trying to get.

0:09:01 - Alex Lindsay
They have all these different operating systems with all this different, these different legacies, and over time I think they're always trying to pull. They have all these different operating systems with all this different, these different legacies, and over time I think they're always trying to pull them together, like so that that the the visual experience you have on these, as much as it makes sense, is looking more and more like they all kind of fit together at all, that you're not changing one mode of operation, one way of doing things or a look based on the platform that you're on, um and you know, with varying levels of success. But I think that, but I think that that that seems to be a kind of a constant commitment. I'm always amazed that I look at older Apple designs and they were perfectly great when, when I was using them and then they feel very old now, like you know, and you're like, oh, but, but that was the, that was the new newness at the moment, and so they do a pretty good job of moving it forward.

0:09:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah, life moves on and the world moves on and you got to kind of keep pace with it and as well as again hitting reset every now and then.

And so I also, andy, mentioned just how jarring iOS 7 was, and it really was.

I will say I always want a redesign to go a little further and then kind of rein it in, because I feel like if you don't push things too far, you can't find out the places where it was good to push and the places where it was bad to push. But then you've got to be responsive to feedback and then you've got to start to dial it back. And iOS 7 was a good example where, like, they dialed it back and it became a much better design, and that we all kind of lived through the pain. And it'll be an interesting summer, right, because they're going to drop this design on us next week, and then there will be a beta period and you know what do they stick to their guns about and what do they say oh, we thought this was good in Cupertino, but the people out in the world aren't drinking the same water as we are. And, uh, it turns out it was a terrible idea and you know they'll roll some of that stuff back.

0:10:47 - Andy Ihnatko
We'll have to see what that is and what the details are and this is one of those areas where apple's uh vice-like grip, this iron boot hill, on the necks of its users and its developers, is actually a good thing, because it has the ability to I don't want to say the word inflict a change on the entire ecosystem, but basically they can decide that. Look, here's the direction we want to take. This is what it's going to be. You have to live in this world or leave this world your choice. We think that you're going to want to live in this world. On our side, we will realize if people hate things that we're doing and we will respond to feedback.

But you can't do this sort of thing in Android, really. You can't do this sort of thing in Windows, really, because they'll push back or they'll say oh okay, that's cool, but we're just not going to upgrade to this. We'll just stick with an old operating system or even as an OEM, we are not going to burn this into our systems. We're not going to apply these changes, because we're just simply taking the code you give us and we can reinterpret it. Apple, however, they can really move the bar forward, and that's why I agree with Jason that I hope that they go a little bit too far and then dial it back, rather than say what if we change the radius of this button from six pixels to four pixels?

0:12:01 - Leo Laporte
Like, let's A-B test it Like no, make a decision, have a point of view design so one of the reasons apple's spending all this energy on design is because they have so little to say about the most important technology in the world today ai and they got badly burned a year ago. German saying it's not going to be a big wwdc. On monday he says apple needs a comeback, but that probably won't be happening at this year's WWDC. People within the company believe the conference may be a letdown from an AI standpoint. In fact, I think we should have a little betting pool.

I hope it is how much AI is mentioned at all.

0:12:40 - Alex Lindsay
Again. I know I say this every week, but I just don't think it's that important for Apple to have this done right now. Like I think that over time, they have to figure out how to build it into our experience, and there's all kinds of advantages they can take with local LLMs, with the secure LLM that they're working on with. But what I'd love to see more of is how are we going to allow you to get to chat GPT faster or integrate it more into what you're doing, or, claude, or whatever it is? I'm more interested to see Apple talk about integrations than I am talking about what they're going to do, because I'm using AI every hour of every working day, you know for something and and like it's just a constant flow of AI, and I'm doing it on my Mac, I'm doing it on my, on my phone, like I don't need Apple to do. I don't need anything from Apple right now in this area.

0:13:29 - Leo Laporte
So so I think that yeah, but that's like saying I don't need anything from Apple right now and anymore, I've got Android. I mean they, they need to have a play in this. It's not getting them any money. If you use chat GPT, it's taking you out of the ecosystem?

0:13:42 - Alex Lindsay
I don't well. The key is if they integrate it well, it's not necessarily taking them out of the ecosystem. I think that their larger plan of being able to take advantage of the fact that there's a certain level of privacy and there's a certain level of control that they would have and that I would have as a user in the long-term play of what they're doing, but that's going to take a lot of work to get done and it just takes. I just think that there's a lot.

0:14:12 - ???
I don't think anyone's leaving the iOS, the, their, their Macs or their iPhones or anything else, anytime soon the the lock-in is so deep for most people not all people, but for most people that that Apple is not in the.

0:14:17 - Alex Lindsay
They're not in the same rush. For Google, I think it's an existential threat, because Android's cute, but most of their money, like when you do any Google event. Because Android's cute, but most of their money, like when you do any Google event, their money is made on ads.

0:14:29 - Leo Laporte
Let's be clear Android is not a product for them. Android is it.

0:14:32 - Alex Lindsay
Right, so ChatGPT is an existential threat for Google. They have to do what they did at Google IO because they will be dead very fast if they don't. Apple, I don't think, is in the same position. I think that Apple could go two or three years and figure things out and make sure that the integration works, do you?

0:14:49 - Leo Laporte
think Apple's concerned. Where are we going to go Seeing Johnny Ive and Sam Altman hanging out in a bar together creating something that probably is a hardware device?

0:15:01 - Alex Lindsay
that might. I think that a lot of Apple users are kind of over, johnny Ive, I don't think, I don't think any any of us really care, like you know, like and I think he ruined our keyboards and messed up our computers and you know, like without steve, I think that the magic was johnny ive plus steve. I think johnny I by himself. I don't think any of us are like oh, let's see what johnny?

0:15:19 - Leo Laporte
I plus sam also.

0:15:20 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not saying he's a smart guy guy, but without the limitations that Steve put on him, I think that there's. I haven't seen anything else that he's done. That has been compelling.

0:15:28 - Jason Snell
So, leo, I have. I have, I think, three things for us to look for regarding AI at WWDC. Good, and I think what you're what you're talking about is one of them, which is Apple intelligence. Right, so Apple intelligence that's the real open question is do they soft pedal it and they're like, look, yeah, we're still working on it, but they're not. But they're not, or because you know they may have some new models.

What Gurman has said actually is not that Apple is way behind in their own models. Actually, what Gurman has reported is that Apple has not pushed itself ahead of the leaders, but that Apple feels that it's got models running internally that are close to the level of the chat GPT models, and who knows if that's true or not. They certainly somebody talks to Mark Gurman and says that to him, so maybe we'll believe that. But so that is a question I have is like are there new models? Are the new models better? Do you say we've improved our models a lot? Do they show? Hey, image playgrounds doesn't make horrific images anymore. It looks a lot better. Now there are things that they can do, and that's the home-baked stuff that ultimately will be table stakes. You need to have a good model.

That is a foundational model, mostly because of number two, which is, how do app developers get access to Apple's models or other models? And I think that that for a WWDC, which is supposed to be a developer conference, I think that's actually really important. And if you talk to developers, they're like, yeah, it'd be really nice if I could use Apple's LLM to summarize content in my app or generate an image or do stuff, and currently that stuff is not a developer story. It's all basically just for Apple. And so this year they could say we're improving our models and our app developers can use our models now for free on device or maybe even private cloud compute, but starting on device. That's a great message and that's AI message.

Number two and number three is what Alex wants, which I think is something to definitely watch, which is are there new partnerships? Because one quick way that Apple can diffuse a lot of the tension about Apple's AI strategy is to say not only are we building our own models, but it already works with chat, gpt. That integration is deeper. We're also adding Gemini, we're also adding maybe some other partners as well. You can choose the one you like. You log in, you know you use your, you know, your subscription or credits or whatever, and the job is done. And so, like those are the three parts, and that means I think that there's a substantial AI portion of the keynote, but, you know, it's in those different areas and some of it, I think, needs to be Apple saying it's not, don't put this all on us.

0:17:57 - Alex Lindsay
We're also going to be a really good partner for those guys over there, whoever they might be, and you, you know, if they said in a developer's conference here is clod totally, uh, integrated into xcode, um and and we've trained it all we've. There's a specific model that we've trained against all of our documentation, against all of our you know, like we've very specifically worked on making sure that clod has all the information you need. They put that in the state of the union, though. They put that in the afternoon, they may, but I'm just saying that as w, it may not be the keynote, but the point is they mention it though they might mention it. Yeah, that'd be a big mention, but but having that completely built into it so that people can, uh, you know, build quick you think sam altman, sundar pichai and uh, uh.

0:18:39 - Leo Laporte
And sachi nadela will walk on the stage.

0:18:42 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, with I just think. I think that that they could be tracking Contrasting colored polo shirts with the Apple logo on them.

0:18:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think Google is you know it was interesting because at the Microsoft event they did have Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

0:18:54 - Jason Snell
Remember this is all pre-taped, but Sam was there last year when they announced.

0:18:58 - Leo Laporte
I mean physically at the event. He wasn't, I think, in the video.

0:19:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, was absolutely like they're walking around at the end of the enemy now.

0:19:06 - Leo Laporte
I mean they you know you saw those court documents. They want to make a an assistant, to basically replace Siri.

0:19:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I mean, but, but I mean, uh, I, I like to piggyback on what Alex uh, keep saying, because I think that it's a contrasting sort of model where, yeah, google needs to find, google needs to find a way to replace the more than half the money that it makes on advertising. Apple needs to make sure they protect the more than the half the money that they make on hardware sales, so it doesn't really matter so much to them if they win the crown of hey, wow, we've got, we've got this great foundation model that is wonderful and the privacy is better than anything else you're going to see everywhere else and and it runs great and there's no ethical issues and there's no environmental issues. All they care about is will it help us sell more phones? Yes, great, let's do it. So they're very, very much on board with.

If OpenAI wants to create essentially a replacement for Shlomo, something that's so good that you just forget that there's an onboard Apple assistant at all, that's not a problem for apple. Okay. If they want to welcome, if they want to make sure that developers who are all in on gemini can make their apps that are that incorporate gemini, that's not a that's not a problem for them. So long as it helps them continue to sell hardware, they're going to be good with that they.

0:20:23 - Leo Laporte
So pride doesn't come into this. They're mean. I feel like culturally they hate the idea of saying oh yeah, we're just a platform.

0:20:31 - Jason Snell
Well, I think I mean, like I mentioned the table stakes before, I think that they are not at the point where they're going to say, well, we give up.

I think that Apple believes that there always needs to be a foundational model that they own, but I think that they also realize that, especially as long as they're not number one or a leader or so good, you don't need to use anybody else.

That making deals with these other leading AI companies and giving people choice, it may not be, you know. Again, it's like this classic thing yeah, they'd love to have complete control and lock everybody else out, but that really happens when you invent it, and they didn't invent this, they're behind. So instead, you make deals to make the iPhone the best place to have all of those things happening on a smartphone, and the advantage that they've got is that the alternate platform is owned by Google, who is the arch competitor of every other AI company and is coming for them. So Apple's got a lot of advantages there and I think that that's. I mean yeah, again, I think there's some tension, but right now, the expediency and wanting to win and wanting to protect the iPhone probably comes way ahead of wanting to be the only model on their platform.

0:21:38 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that.

But I do think that where this, if Apple plays this well and doesn't keep zigzagging and doesn't worry about today and thinks about tomorrow and next year and so on and so forth, three years from now we're going to be on the show having people want to figure out how the how they can get the EU to crack open Apple's AI.

You know, because it's so tightly wound with the hardware, you know, and so and it's working really well and it and it has all this privacy things and Apple's not going to want to let anybody else have it.

So, so the you know like and it's, and I think that that's.

But but I think that because that longer thing that they talked about last year of being able to use the hardware, and especially when you're developing, when you're designing the chips and you're designing the operating system and then you're designing the AI, and you're designing the AI, there is a huge advantage that does not happen overnight, but does happen over years. That becomes very hard to compete with, and I think that Apple just has to stay focused on on what that looks like, because having being able to handle 80, like not how to, you know, I don't know figure out how to take over the world, might be it, but but be me being able to just constant have my phone constantly grabbing information, information that I might not be comfortable handing to anyone other than Apple, um, having it constantly looking at that information and constantly finding things for me in a way that, uh, I don't feel like all the data is going to be sold to somebody else. I think that that's a um, that is a compelling argument for them, for their, that, their type of user.

0:23:07 - Leo Laporte
The question is can you do that you? You know I mean. So that's the real question and I think it's one of the reasons apple's behind we're going to find out. I says my theory is all this hand waving about a new look and feel and a new way of naming it is as a good way to distract people from the.

0:23:22 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a thing but they culturally feel like it's a crisis I agree, it's not a crisis.

0:23:27 - Leo Laporte
But culturally, they don't want to be a platform for other people, they want to be. That's why they pushed, that's why they made apple maps. They don't, they want to do it all well they don't.

We're going to take a break we'll have more in just a bit. There is another big announcement we're going to hear on monday and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching mac break weekly with andy and ako jason. We're going to hear on Monday and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay.

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Actually, MacBbreak Weekly brought to you today by the number 26. So this is a Mark Gurman scoop. Maybe I should call it a scoop. Let apple says, or apple plans. He says, to rebrand ios to ios 26, give it the year, mac os 26. Do you think that's credible and why?

0:27:39 - Andy Ihnatko
it makes sense logistically, doesn't it? I mean to get everything in sync, given if they are reunifying everything under a new uh, I'll give you the cautionary tale.

0:27:49 - Leo Laporte
Microsoft did this. Remember windows 95. Remember windows 98. The problem was in the year 2000. People were using windows 98.

0:27:57 - Jason Snell
Yes and then went hey is this old? But now it's 75 years before. Anybody has to, has to care, and we don't care, so go for it knock yourself out.

0:28:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple has traditionally what 80 something percent adoption rate. Every single update, anything, anything that can run this os will be updating this OS, and I have to admit that sometimes I get confused about. Are we on 15? Are?

0:28:21 - Leo Laporte
we on 16? Oh wait, no, is that Android? It's hard to remember the numbers. Yeah.

0:28:24 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, if they're going to be doing a major update every single year like clockwork anyway, it just makes sense.

0:28:29 - Leo Laporte
It's also confusing. You've got iOS 18, watchos 12, macos 15, visionos 2, os too. I mean they don't. So this they'll all be for the year, right, they'll all be 26. Is that right? Like new car models. It'll be in the fall.

0:28:44 - Alex Lindsay
You get the new model yeah, I mean, I think it totally like it and I never know what I'm supposed to be trying to figure it out. And then you have names of is it sonoma or is it this? And we'll still have those.

0:28:53 - Jason Snell
I think they're still going to do sonoma right yeah, i's what is that, but people don't call it 26 tahoe 26 tahoe yeah, yeah, you got to get a new one gm and go off road. Yeah, that's another thing I can never.

0:29:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I can never remember I, I'm always, I always have to like, do a search for okay, well, I know it's. Is it the now? Now, is it like frozen tahoe? Is it mountain tahoe? Because this, because this is the next version, but it's only a .5.

0:29:20 - Leo Laporte
Well, very important, it's California Tahoe, not Nevada Tahoe. This lake spans two states and it's very important that it be California Tahoe.

0:29:31 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not the side where Fredo Corleone got shot, it's the other side, it's the front of the sun.

0:29:43 - Jason Snell
Actually, technically, andy, that was at the cal neva resort, which is right on the state line. So it depends on, like, where that boat was.

0:29:46 - Andy Ihnatko
It really depends on who's investigating where the body settled.

0:29:50 - Leo Laporte
I think there's a think piece about this, thank you uh, okay, I, you know, I guess I mean it doesn't matter, right, it really doesn't matter. Uh, I feel like, to some degree, apple's doing a lot of stuff to distract, to make it look like they're moving forward.

0:30:10 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know if I'd use the word distraction. I think there are a lot of good reasons to do something. Why not? It's the thing is, any company does lots of tiny things and then lots of big things trying to get ai going. That's a big thing, but you get. You have to be sure that, if this is true again, we're assuming that this is true, but a lot of people are falling behind this that it's probably something that was discussed as a low ranking sort of that would be a good idea, but maybe this is not the year for it, maybe next year, and then you get more and more converts on the side of you know what. Let's just do it. Let's just pull the plug. Next time we have the next time we have a big redesign coming. Let's just underscore it by calling it hey, by the way, we're also reunifying everything under a number for the year.

0:30:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, now they're committed.

0:30:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Now they got to update every year, right what's the last time they they failed to update, they got to update every year, right ah, but they've been doing it what's the last time they they failed to update?

0:31:02 - Alex Lindsay
yeah right, they are already already wwdc kind of drives that like what are you doing?

0:31:05 - Leo Laporte
it may not be a lot, but it's happening, yeah, yeah all right, I'm just thinking about downsize. Uh, microsoft's experience probably isn't, because they didn't update every year I mean it's, it's embarrassing.

0:31:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Last night on uh last week's John Oliver show on HBO, they made the point that, oh, some of these air traffic control computers are still using Windows 95. And it's like geez.

0:31:29 - Jason Snell
That sounds pretty old, doesn't?

0:31:30 - Andy Ihnatko
it and that's not a problem that, like Apple users, apple community has again.

0:31:36 - Leo Laporte
No, though they do not use. Use max for air traffic control floppy discs no uh, there is also from german the rumor or the story that shortcuts will get ai features. That actually could be cool.

0:31:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this was rumored a long time ago and he said he says this. So there's a category of his stuff where he knows people are working on it, but he doesn't think they'll actually announce it. Because one of the things that Apple has learned from getting burned last year is, if they can't ship it by the end of this year, if they can't ship it by what they would probably call sometime this fall, that they're just not going to announce it.

0:32:12 - Leo Laporte
He says they were planning to, but delays could see it appear in 2026 I think they're do.

0:32:19 - Jason Snell
Every feature is now getting a gut check, which is yeah, can we actually ship?

this how confident are we? Because there's nothing stopping them from announcing more features in stream over the course of the year. They don't need to announce every single feature they're going to work on over the next year. Right now they can hold some stuff and that saves them from being embarrassed about promising something it can't deliver.

But the idea he reported about this a while ago and it seemed kind of weird. It was like you can use AI to write an app for you and write a shortcut for you. But if you think about it, this is actually shortcuts are driven by app intents, which are little bits of code in apps that let you control parts of apps and app intents. And using AI to control app intents and therefore run your apps for you is a part of those things that they announced and haven't quite shipped yet. Well, an interim step could be to make the shortcuts which is supposed to be.

You know, shortcuts are supposed to be less than programming and they are less than programming, but they're still more complicated than most people are ever going to want to use. So if you could use AI to say, can you build me a shortcut that does this thing? And it said, oh yeah, you know, you've got these apps and I can do this and this and this, and let's try it and see how it works. That would be pretty awesome, because the whole point of user scripting is not the noodling. The noodling is fun and all, but the point is to get something done. And if you could, if you could, you could use that shortcut system to get something done and save a little icon or have something that you can just speak into your phone, that just does a thing for you that would otherwise have required three steps. That's great. You should. That's awesome. That's a great idea. Is anybody uh?

0:33:51 - Leo Laporte
is uh anybody doing vibe coding with shortcuts at this point? I mean I, I guess you could.

0:33:58 - Jason Snell
You can't. I mean, it's very hard. There are some people who have tried to make shortcuts a little more codey, but the problem is it's a lockdown format. You can ask an LLM about building a shortcut and it will try to help you, but then you're going to have to go through the steps. A lot of what vibe coding happens is shortcuts can run Apple scripts and they can run Python and command line commands and all sorts of things like that. So you end up vibe coding, kind of like the command to put in a shortcut. I actually have vibe coded a little bit using Apple script, which is hilarious because that's an ancient format.

0:34:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it knows it, the older the better.

0:34:36 - Jason Snell
There's so much data of AppleScript on the internet that it will write decent AppleScripts.

0:34:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Claude does a great job with.

0:34:41 - Jason Snell
Common Lisp.

0:34:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah right, Because it's old.

0:34:44 - Jason Snell
It's old and it's well-documented, exactly so, yeah, the idea that you could vibe code shortcuts down the road is awesome, and I think it's a good idea, because it's hard to do that, because it's a very specific format that you can't really get into and so it can't give you something to copy and paste in to shortcuts. That's a complete shortcut. It can't.

0:35:04 - Leo Laporte
It can't, you couldn't do that.

0:35:06 - Jason Snell
No, no, I mean, there are like workarounds, so there's this thing called.

0:35:10 - Leo Laporte
Jellycuts, because you have to drag and drop actions and stuff like that.

0:35:13 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, exactly, and it's not a standard file format. There is an app called Jellycuts that actually tries to turn shortcuts into a programming language, but even there you've got to install an app that runs and a block that runs inside the shortcut. It's complicated.

0:35:28 - Leo Laporte
You could always use the AppleScript tool in shortcuts to run an AppleScript. That's the trick.

0:35:34 - Jason Snell
That's how you do it. I have vibe coded absolutely some stuff using Python, and the Python is is wrapped inside a shortcut that does things like grab information and then put it on the clipboard and all of that, and in the middle of that it runs a Python script to do something and that works great.

0:35:50 - Leo Laporte
But shortcuts has better access to app intents than uh Apple script does, or no?

0:35:56 - Jason Snell
no, this is the this is the sad state of affairs is that you can still do more with AppleScript than you can do with shortcuts, because that's what App Intents is trying to eventually solve is if you get into the nitty gritty of like saying, hey, look at this window in mail and tell me what messages are there, and then, in this one particular message that matches, tell me who it's from and like, that level of granularity is not something shortcuts can do in basically any app, uh, and and so that that's why, when they say shortcuts is the future of automation on the mac, there's a big missing piece, which is well, what do you do with the level of detail that apple script offers? App intense is the start of an attempt to get there where there's more granularity inside apps uh, this article from nine to five mac by michael burkhart.

0:36:45 - Leo Laporte
Google gemini integration in syria might be a bigger deal than we initially thought. There have been rumors that there will be gemini support in apple intelligence alongside chat GPT, but Google at Google IO made a big point of the fact that the reason Google intelligence is good is because we know everything about you. We have something we call and I'm quoting them personal context, With your permission. Google Gemini models can use relevant personal contact across your google apps in a way that's private, transparent and fully under control.

0:37:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I doubt apple would allow that right well, I mean, it's the thing is we hand so much excuse me, many of us from. I think even most of us hand over a lot of information to google, kind of willingly, because it's like, if you're, if you're gonna, it's, it's the, it's the devil that you know as opposed to the devil. You hand over a lot of information to Google willingly. It's the devil that you know as opposed to the devil you don't know. This has always been something that I thought that Apple, when they were announcing Apple Intelligence. Yeah, there's no company that I would trust more than Apple. Yes, absolutely have access to all my contacts, all my mail, all my messages. I'll let you peek at my screen if you want to.

However, that's not an exclusive club, and as soon as Google says, oh well, I mean, we've already spent 20 years collecting information about you with your either knowing consent or unknowing consent, we can also leverage all that information for you as well, and that's something that they've consistently demonstrated to be an advantage, or at least a benefit not an advantage, but, let's say, a benefit to spying on you. The thing is that Google services have always been a lot more useful than most of the concurrent Apple services, because Apple doesn't want to know much about you, whereas Google can say oh well, actually we can tailor these maps results, we can these, these uh, messaging results. We can tell, tailor everything because we know what, what you consider to be important, because we watch you use our apps and we kind of take take control of that. So it's, it's uh. It's another thing that makes it. Just because apple says, hey, look, we're gonna make, we're gonna personalize our apple intelligence experience based on what, who you are and what we know about you, that's nice, but it's not really exclusive.

0:39:03 - Leo Laporte
They have to do it as well as google can do it, or better, they can do it one person you probably won't see on the stage on monday is tim sweeney of epic games touting the arrival of fortnight on ios, but you might see apple talk about its own dedicated games app. That's another rumor.

0:39:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, replacing game center yeah, the by the description, it's sort of like what apple music is for music that here is an app that has like all of your games in it and all in a store for all your games and it basically kind of like, kind of like an xbox live this is what epic wanted to do by the way yeah, and microsoft or other people or steam, or something like that yeah, I think that could be great.

There's there's been a lot of interesting gaming news. They're buying their for the first time. They're buying a game studio, a two-person studio, but but not a, not a small one. And the thing is like, uh, I this has been in front of us for the whole time and maybe I feel a little bit foolish, for, like, I won't be calling it like a revelation. But, boy, if you look at the Apple TV with fresh eyes after like five years, it's a hell of a gaming console. If you have no interest in the Apple TV just as a streaming box, if you say, well, here is a gaming console that costs $100, let's call it $150 by the time you buy a couple of controllers with it, then add on to it an Apple Arcade subscription. Now, here's something you can keep in your living room that you know that your kids are not going to get into a whole lot of trouble with it. They're not going to charge a lot of money with it, there's not going to be in-app purchases.

It's going to be family friendly Again if you forget that it's a streaming box that costs a lot more money than a TV streaming box really has to.

0:40:48 - Alex Lindsay
It's a hell of a game console it is. The problem is the games. I have arcade. I have an Apple TV. When do I play games on my Apple TV?

0:40:59 - Leo Laporte
Never.

0:41:00 - Alex Lindsay
I wonder what percentage of Apple tv owners do play games on it well, and I think that again, I think part of the problem is just the games, aren't the controllers, are the casual controllers that? But it's, it's casual and it you kind of play it for a little while and you're like okay, and and then you go back to what you're doing apple bought the sneaky satchquatch guys.

0:41:17 - Leo Laporte
That's a perfect example of a cute little arcade game. But um you know is, how long are you going to play that?

0:41:27 - Andy Ihnatko
right, right, yeah and, I think, someone to buy for your kids. I, I yeah it's just that we didn't.

0:41:32 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, you know we played, uh, something like what was it cricket through the ages or something like that. That became a thing for like all week.

0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, that's the thing I played sneaky sketch, sasquatch. I can't say it, but I played it for a couple of days, maybe right, but it's not that compelling, yeah, and so I don't.

0:41:50 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think apple could, I think people could build some really interesting games. That would be that could go across all the different apple platforms, have them all tied together. There's a lot of things that Apple could do with it, but right now there just hasn't been, I think, enough. I think they. They know that they need to get into games, but I don't think they've kind of cracked the code of what that's going to actually take to do it.

0:42:10 - Leo Laporte
Do you think it'll be aimed at kids as, as I mean, they're as sneaky Sasquatch is?

0:42:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean almost all. Almost everybody that has had success in this area at some point has built a first person shooter that was developed by the owner of the platform. You know, whether it was PlayStation or Xbox or Fortnite or whatever. It's a, it's a. It's a first person shooter. That I mean. That's how you turn games on in your platform is, um, first person shooters Right? You, you know, and you can do a lot of other things. I mean even even if you look at the meta.

0:42:41 - Leo Laporte
Never do a first person shooter well, maybe not with people unless it's william tell shooting an apple off.

0:42:46 - Alex Lindsay
But the but the. But I think that the, the, even when you look at, the most compelling game still on the quest, in my opinion, is robo recall. You know like it's, you know like it was the best game built by Epic, by the way but those are the ones that are compelling, that get people to really come back and spend lots of time there.

0:43:07 - Leo Laporte
Taking a break, come back with more. I guess when we come back, I'll give you guys some time to think what your predictions will be for Monday. What kind of WWDC keynote will we see? Micah and I will be covering it and, sad to say, only for club members. You know just, we don't want to get banned on YouTube and Apple's threatened to do so on YouTube and on Twitch, so we will be there 10 am Monday, streaming into the Club Twit Discord. You can join us on the stage. The advantage of this is, if you are a club member, you can participate. It won't just be me and Mike, it'll be all of the club members, and then, as I said, we're bringing our lunchboxes. We're going to stick around. We'll do, for the first time ever, the State of the Union, which will probably have a lot more AI and vibe coding in it, I would imagine. 1 pm Pacific, so 10 am Pacific, 1 pm Pacific, and again, you must be in the club. If you're not a member, it's not too late to join. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get special events like these in the club. You can also tweet Discord. Of course. You get access to the Discord too. So this is a good time to join the club. This is a good time to join the club and we will see you, club members, on Monday. Your predictions next, gentlemen.

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So will there be any surprises? Jason Snell on Monday.

0:46:34 - Jason Snell
Probably not.

0:46:35 - Leo Laporte
No one more thing.

0:46:37 - Jason Snell
There was one piece this week that speculated that that HomePod with a screen that has its new this Home OS that they're doing is floating out there as something that, although the reports were, it relies on some features that didn't ship and therefore it got delayed. The fact that it's a product that doesn't currently exist in any form suggests they could show it, say it's coming and talk about the OS that runs it, but it would be for the fall, you think.

It would be presumably for some time in the fall. So that's, I think maybe the only hope for a hardware thing is that, unless they want to do a real surprise reveal about the Mac Pro and what's going on with that, that's another possibility, although I don't think I would say that.

0:47:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, whatever happened to the Mac Pro, I forgot about that.

0:47:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and supposedly there's AirPods Pro 3 coming at some point, but again that feels more like an iPhone event.

0:47:37 - Leo Laporte
Any announcements about M5?

0:47:41 - Jason Snell
Only when they get the hardware right there, and that's not expected until the fall okay, andy, what do you think?

0:47:47 - Leo Laporte
any surprises?

0:47:48 - Andy Ihnatko
no, um, I think that if there's any, I? Um the idea of showing off a home pod. If they've got something to show, sure they're gonna, it's, it's. It'll cause a lot of happy jollies to start to prime the pump for. Hey, here's something that you're going to want to spend 30 more than market rate for uh in september when we ship this uh in time for holiday holidays buying season.

There are a bunch of rumors over the past month that uh, particularly from german, saying that they really want to ship it this year, so much so that they're willing to basically trim back features to make a, to make a holiday ship date and then, just like with the apple watch, they they know that if they get the hardware right, they can always add on features like next year or next season, it doesn't matter uh, and that it'd be a nice way to if, if they've got a thin bill of sale for uh for the rundown, it's a be a nice way to pad things out. Also, you want it's nice to have video of something cool to put into the electronic press kit and for people to put into their youtube videos. That would also be nice, I think. I do think that it's just going to be. It's going to be a very subdued, very low-key sort of thing. I wouldn't be shocked if they did a tease for some upcoming silicon, because that gives them a way to basically leverage all the work that they're doing as really great engineers and they could use some of that content. If they're trying to tell a complete story over the course of 48 minutes, that's part of the story they want to tell.

I think we'll see a lot of demos of this new user interface. As usual, we're going to see some very, very selective demos of macOS 26. That's something that we can count on every single year that hey, look, here's a small thing that we added to mail this year and it will hopefully hint at something that's going to be much bigger coming up in January. I don't think it's going to be much bigger coming up in in january. I don't think it's going to be terribly exciting.

I if, if there was a year that we could ever like put onto the wager board a musical guest. I think this might be it, because it's not as though they're going to have a really big story that they're going to want to try to tell. Last year they had to tell the story of artificial intelligence. That didn't work out quite so well. I think this is just going to be the annual first day of WWDC State of the Union. Here's who we are. Here's our green initiatives. Hey, look at our really great new landmark stores that we've got opening in some exotic locale. I don't think it's going to be terribly, terribly exciting. All right, exotic locale.

0:50:17 - Leo Laporte
I don't think it's going to be terribly, terribly exciting. All right, your your chance to tell us, alex lindsey, how exciting monday's gonna be, uh, flax to gold with your iphone.

0:50:27 - Alex Lindsay
That's the rumor that I've been hearing. I think that you know there's certain threads that I think we're probably going to see probably some new initiatives related to um, animoj and all the other fun stuff that the kids like with the new operating system is going to be like how do we do cooler things? For instance, maybe you can have your Apple intelligence, make a character and then actually make it talk, that kind of thing. They're not that far away when you look at how they're generating that geometry. I think that you'll probably see some updates for Vision, the Vision Pro where you know there's. I think that obviously, the Vision Pro now is out. We talked about how to build for it. I think generating content for it and figuring out how more people build something that people want to play with it I think is going to be very important. So I think I would expect to see you know things that are around guidance in that area. So you know, I think that we'll probably see the black magic camera on stage.

0:51:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh that would be cool.

0:51:26 - Alex Lindsay
I'd be surprised if we don't. It's. It's getting pretty close to the. I mean, the rumors are it's getting pretty close to the surface, so so it at least one.

0:51:34 - Leo Laporte
There was one at nab, so there's no reason they show it off, or would it just be there taking pictures?

0:51:39 - Alex Lindsay
um, I think that. No, no, I think it. I think that they'll, uh, I think they'll show it on stage. They might show some of the footage, you know.

0:51:46 - Leo Laporte
Talk about what that means how much time will apple spend?

0:51:48 - Alex Lindsay
on vision pro. Oh, I bet you 15, 20 minutes, really like I bet you, there's stuff there's still, there's still all in there's. Oh yeah, I don't think that they're not going anywhere. So, because I think that the real issue and we'll see where they go with it is the content, whether it's video content or 3D content or entertainment content. It's really the platforms. There it's just a matter of giving people the tools and we can say, well, developers just aren't developing for it.

Well, developing some of this stuff is pretty hard, and so if Apple builds better libraries and better guidance and so on and so forth, there's a lot of things that could be done. There's been rumors that Apple has been working on AI to 3D and that would be really interesting for users, you know, for Apple Vision Pro users and other users there. So it would be interesting to see what that looks like. Anything to do with cameras is always going to be interesting to people. And then the big thing is, I think that there is going to be a big play for the integration between something very tight there's already some integration with ChatGPT, but very tight integration with a third party to Xcode.

That's a WWC announcement. Good point, that is a that is going to be. That's the thing that I'm waiting for, and if I don't see that, that's the only thing I really care about, you know, is all the other stuff is like yeah, whatever you want to announce, it's all cute, like I'm not, there's nothing I'm waiting for for them to release. But what I do want as a mostly a vibe coder, I have to admit, these days what I mostly want to see is the ability to build more apps and better apps without writing any lines of code.

0:53:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, there was a good rumor I think it was originated from Gurman that one of the things that they're going to be doing is at least giving developers access to Apple's foundation models so that, yeah, apple intelligence will not exist as a feature on the side of the box. But to cite a really great example that Jason gave a couple of weeks ago, that if a developer of a podcast catching app wanted to introduce a feature where it automatically creates transcriptions and then sends that up to a server so that everyone can get transcriptions, they could simply add that to the feature without having to and keep it all in the Apple family. I'm sure that Apple developers sense that Apple's going to get this, get AI right at some point. Best to be on board early so that they know what these tools are and how they can use them to enhance their apps.

0:54:12 - Alex Lindsay
And I think that what is a developer changes too. I mean. So a friend of mine, cj Covell, and I we have this complaint that we can't have our own reflection maps inside of Motion because Motion has its own environment maps and we use Motion a lot and we can't do it. We want to have different reflection maps. So we figured out a way to take.

If I take a theta image and I make an EXR of it, we mostly CJ vibe coded this one where it it basically you throw it onto the app and it builds all of the reflection maps that motion requires. And then you hit a button and this is the kind of thing you can't I can't sell it this way because you hit a button and it actually opens the motion package and says so that you can. So that you can, so you can take woods or whatever and replace it with your own reflection maps. Right and so. But that is a non-trivial set of math and everything else to do all the things that Apple was doing to build those reflection maps. And now it's drag and drop, you know, to do that for us Now.

But the reason I bring that up is that it is a. That is an example of the kind of apps that a bunch of us are building, where we just go I need something for something quirky, that I need to solve a problem and I want to, and I can sit there and just talk to ChatGPT or Claude and get it out the other end and I think if Apple builds that tighter, you end up with a whole new generation. And I find that my understanding of app development has changed dramatically, because I can vibe code in the sense that because I'm not worried about we talked about this last week because I'm not worried about commas, I'm worried about packages and signing it and doing all the other things and putting all the all the bits and pieces together to do it. And again, I haven't built anything I would release. But but I, but I, I, it's, it's solved, I can, I'm solving problems all the time, whether it's on my iPhone or on my Mac, with lots of little helper apps.

0:56:02 - Leo Laporte
I apologize because I think we've been using the term vibe coding and assuming everybody knows what it is, but it's a relatively new AI term for writing code, using the AI to do it, but with prompts, not with actual computer code, and I'm hoping that's going to be the subject of our AI users group this Friday. I want it to be. It'll be premature if Apple does announce something with Xcode, but I want to show a Claude code and I know we have a number of vibe coders in our club.

0:56:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I think Darren's going to stop by, so that'll be interesting to see, darren GOLDBERG, the things that could do to enhance Xcode if all it did was add Apple's own AI or let OpenAI do it or let Gemini do it basically an integrated tool that's. Hey, I'm going to look at the logs of Xcode so that you can just simply say what the hell just happened. It would say oh okay, it failed because this API needs this permission and you didn't enable it. Just go into the settings of your project and click on this button and it should recompile and should run.

0:57:10 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and there's some point where it does it on its own, like right now that's what happens when I'm vibe coding with ChatGPT or Cloud. I throw something, it tells me everything I need to do in xcode. So I just follow along, put it in the xcode. It sends it out. I get an error, I tell it what the error is. It goes okay, do this. And then you put it in and there's, like this extra step.

0:57:28 - Leo Laporte
There's some point where it just goes back and forth with xcode until it's done well, that's what's cool about you know, you don't, you't you know it, just does it. You don't have to put it in anything.

0:57:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I started getting so much further with Xcode. Just the ability to again turn to Gemini and say what the hell just happened, what happened there, and part of it's vibe code and part of it's just. Oh okay, I would have figured that out, but it would have taken me eight hours because I'm a noob at this.

0:57:57 - Alex Lindsay
And as someone who's been I, when I, when I say I develop apps, I I guide teams that build apps for the last 15 years. So for me this is a really comfortable because it's exactly the same conversation I was having before, where I'm defining what I need in the app and then someone's building that that for me in pieces.

0:58:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the old school way of doing it Just have an intern or somebody.

0:58:18 - Alex Lindsay
Well, not an intern. I'm talking like I work with worldwide technologies or whatever. I'll be sitting there working with one of their teams and we sit there for hours defining what the app's going to be, and they build it better than I would even imagine building it. But the point is that I'm used to working. That's how I've been building apps for guess. That's more like 25 years of that.

0:58:38 - Leo Laporte
I'm not the one coding it, I'm just the one complaining about it and you know, and I remember seeing colleen uh at our old, uh at the cottage, standing looming over a young woman who's writing some code and college was telling her what to do. It was great. I mean, that's the old, that's the original vibe coding, yeah. But now you have a, an ai do it for you with, let's admit, mixed results.

0:59:02 - Alex Lindsay
But if you know what you're doing, you can get some very good results. Exactly, it gets back to how you're asking for things or what you're looking for, and if you try to, the mistake most people make when they start is that they try to tell it everything they want the app to do at first. That's right. I'm like I need you to do one thing, like do this part, okay, now, do this part, now add this to it. Now add this to it, and that it does. Well, and you learn that from, like mid-journey, like don't take one little image and then say make all the whole image, like just do the part that you want and slowly build out. And if you do that, you can do it. It's not. It is much faster, um, and, in small amounts, oftentimes more accurate to do it with the vibe coding, but as soon as you get to anything complex, it falls apart. Let me know, for me and I haven't been- able to.

0:59:42 - Leo Laporte
Let me just show people what it looks like three missions and you're done this is um, I just launched claude code in a code uh folder and, uh, you initialize it. It's all command line based. It works on it. Uh, you do get charged for this, but it's like a couple of bucks for thousands of lines of code. And then it it will ask you you can turn this off, but it will ask you, do you want me to save what I did? And you can say, uh, okay, now look at what I've written and can you tell me what's wrong with it? You could say write tests. You could say, okay, what I'd like to do is add a feature, and this thing is is kind of amazing. What's wrong with it? You could say write tests. You could say, okay, what I'd like to do is add a feature. And this thing is kind of amazing. Let's see. Is it waiting? Oh, okay, it also has very good verbs. It's smooshing right now.

1:00:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the way I put it is that if you understand what an elephant is and how it works, it will help you build an elephant. If you try to describe an elephant without understanding what an elephant is, it will give you something with a hose, it will give you some legs, it might give you some pointy stuff, but it will not give you an elephant. So if you've been spending a long time I don't know in, let's say, an app development fandom, so to speak, that you understand that here are tools, here are frameworks for building tools on the web, here are interface apis, here's xyz uh, it will. Oh, I know what. That is great. I know the. I know the language that you're, I know the verbiage that you're using. I can, and that will help me, steer you towards the right code that you were trying to make so I asked it to look at my code and see if I did anything wrong.

1:01:15 - Leo Laporte
it said well, your solution is well structured to perform it, but here are some suggestions for improvement and this is the edits it's suggesting. By the way, this file's in Emacs, using an ancient programming language called Econom and Lisp, but it does just fine. It does just fine. And then it says do you want me to make that edit? Yeah, go ahead and edit it.

1:01:39 - Jason Snell
And so it's going to work through my code and improve it, make it prettier, run some tests For those people out there who are doing the Sam the Eagle and they're like no, it's nothing sacred, no right, like I'd say.

This is essentially consuming the old cycles that you spent going to Stack Overflow and going to Reddit and finding an obscure documentation somewhere and finding that there are three different ways to do it what you want but none of them is exactly right and so you try to merge the code together and it doesn't work.

And you go back and you figure it out and all of that and like so much coding that I did, and even back to when I was learning how to build web pages in the nineties is you look at the source of somebody else's work and then you try to figure out how to adapt it for what your needs are and what the LLMs I would say what LLMs are literally best at period is consuming all that stuff and then just giving you code based on your specs and it's awesome and I feel like my cycle is. Actually it's not perfect, but it's better than what I used to do, which is delving into Stack Overflow and Reddit and places like that, to try to find code snippets. Or Apple for ages old AppleScript code and things like that. The LLMs know it.

1:02:48 - Andy Ihnatko
They know it.

Just ask the LLMs, can I say that it's also very, very validating and reassuring, especially when you're doing AppleScript. Both Jason and I are absolute battle. You're doing AppleScript. Both Jason and I are absolute battle-scarred from AppleScript. I still remember when I wrote something for Mac user.

That was a really cool AppleScript but then stopped working when Apple updated it. Updated AppleScript slightly and all of a sudden, the fact that we spent days ultimately figuring out that, oh, the fact that you had the word the in here that's normally like an ignored word in this new update suddenly causes everything to crash. It was very validating when I was trying to do an Apple script in Gemini just last month and I just had to write something to a file at a certain step and like okay, then go back to Gemini. Okay, that doesn't work. Okay, well, what happened? Okay, well, here's what happened. Like, okay, then go back to Gemini. Okay, that doesn't work.

Okay, well, what happened? Okay, well, here's what happened. Okay, well, how about? Oh, okay, why don't we try this? Okay, no, that didn't work. And then, after the fourth time, gemini was getting as frustrated as I was saying okay. It basically said okay, to hell with this. Instead of using Apple's like file IO. Let's just do a shell script to write the file and like, oh great, that worked. It even bent the brain of Gemini and said, okay, screw this, let's forget this entirely and just do it as a shell script, like, okay great.

1:04:10 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break, then it'll be time. I just want to prepare John Ashley with a vision pro segment. Okay, don't play it yet it's coming up. You're watching Mac break weekly Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell.

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Let's see... Do rub some dirt on it. There. It is right. There that's. I learned that in. Uh, in baseball you know you get a little boo-boo. Just rub some dirt on it. This, by the way, we do not recommend. Go to sock doc. Please, I beg of you, all right, play the Vision Pro jingle, because it's time. Oh, we can't, we have to wait. Oh my god, I forgot that. I turned it off.

1:07:18 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sitting right here. I just I forget to turn it back on you have a button.

1:07:21 - Jason Snell
I love that oh, vision pro vision pro, please don't go vision pro.

1:07:38 - Leo Laporte
Hello, vision pro segment. Hey, are you cool, or what baby? You are so cool, andy and I go. So, uh, this is actually an on-demand Vision Pro segment because I am told that Jason has seen something very exciting on Vision Pro that isn't out yet.

1:07:57 - Jason Snell
No, it is out, they're both out.

1:07:59 - Leo Laporte
Oh, never mind I thought you had a scoop for us.

1:08:03 - Jason Snell
There's two new. Well, I mean, I saw them both before they came out, but I think they're both out now. So there's two new things. First is the, the immersive version of stories of surrender, which is the bono's uh yeah, that's really I've seen that everywhere on my apple tv of his uh of his memoir. How is that? Uh, I liked it. I I don't know. Alex, have you seen that one?

1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
uh, I saw part of it. Yeah, I can't bring myself to watch it. I'll be honest, I'm a youtube.

1:08:27 - Jason Snell
I'm a youtube fan, so I I'm happy to watch it for you and say that, uh, I liked it. I do think I was very excited about the idea that there was the first feature-length immersive project that apple has released, but of course, it's only a few parts of it that are immersive. Other parts of it aren't I think that was the.

1:08:44 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not going to watch this whole thing. I I'm I've seen you two a couple times a big fan, uh, but I I think I was just frustrated by the, by the immersive version, because it I you open it up and there's no like, you just feel like, okay, we're not how much immersive is there?

1:09:02 - Jason Snell
it's not all immersive I'd say there's about 20 minutes of immersive content and it's there. So when?

he sings when, yeah, when he sings, those are usually uh shot in immersive, so you content and it's there. So when he sings, when, yeah, when he sings, those are usually uh shot in immersive, so you're suddenly it's like switching to. If you're ever in a movie theater that's got partial scenes in imax, it's that kind of thing where suddenly it goes from being kind of the 16 by 9 to being this immersive thing and it's you're in the theater with him and he's performing and then the other thing they then they were cutting back.

It wasn't all immersive it wasn't all immersive, although mostly but the thing that I actually like the most about it is that there's this conceit in it which is these hand-drawn things drawn by Bono in his handwriting lyrics, and also drawings of sketches of people, but little line drawings of like sketches of people, but little line line drawings, and they're animated in the in the 16 by nine flat version, but in the in the immersive version they're animated and they are in front of the 16 by nine shot and they expand beyond the frame.

So you end up with this kind of thing where there's it's being annotated in a in a larger space than just on the movie frame itself, which I thought was very clever and interesting and I enjoyed the whole thing. But again, I end up saying what I really would like to see is an actual full-length immersive movie, not a, a full-length movie with portions that are immersive, which is I thought this was the first one, but it's not, so I guess, if I'm still seeking that, I guess you could say I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

1:10:36 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and, and, and I, and, and, um, uh, I'm so tempted to just get.

1:10:43 - Jason Snell
Well, and it wasn't the sweetest thing you know, we may be waiting till the end of the world but but there we'll say octoon baby, so anyway, so the um, so the uh, the uh.

1:10:56 - Alex Lindsay
I think that I looked at it and I think if you're trying to sell filmmakers on, hey, you don't have to shoot the whole thing in immersive and you can have some of your 16 by 9 stuff in here as a test case. I guess that's okay. But I looked at it and I thought, well, for the budget that I'm sure they spent on this, I could have built an immersive stage, like literally a dedicated immersive stage, and done a concert every week, not with YouTube necessarily, but I could have done a concert every week. Would Apple Vision Pros love to have a brand new immersive concert?

1:11:27 - Leo Laporte
They could do like an Austin.

1:11:29 - Alex Lindsay
City Limits for Vision Pro. And for the budget of this one show I could have given them, or a tiny desk, just something, but I could have given them that every single week, with a set that was only built for that in LA or New York or whatever.

1:11:42 - Leo Laporte
Do you think? I mean they could go to the tiny desk and make a deal with NPR and say, hey, we want to just do a vision 3D vision. I think you could just add it Now that the URSS is out.

1:11:51 - Alex Lindsay
Right, I think you could add it. You know the URSS is not out yet, but I think that they could add that at some point where you add it right next to the middle camera.

1:11:59 - Leo Laporte
If I were Eddie Q, I'd be working on that deal right now.

1:12:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, right, because then you have a weekly drop a new thing every week. Yeah, and again, the Tiny Desk works pretty well, I think, because it's got so much geometry, so there's so many things that are happening close to you and far away. The reason that you may want to build your it's Apple. Apple could just build their own stage and invite people over.

Yeah, they easily do their own Tiny Desk so they could build it over. And the key is that there are things you want to do that would be hard in tiny desk, which is that what we call frame violations, which is that along those edges and a lot of those things, you want to design that so that it just feels like it falls off, and Apple hasn't been very good at taking advantage of that. Anyway, Like the concert, for one to me was kind of like a car crash, Like it was just. It was just the literally almost everything that we tell people not to do was in it. So, so, the, so, the um, so I think, throw off.

Did you rip the vision pro from your head? Throw it across the room. I watched the whole thing, cause it was shorter and so, but I was like it was pretty painful, Um and so, uh, and, and I think that what? And that's why a lot of us are really excited about the camera getting out and the workflow getting out and handing it off to a lot of people that are going to do a lot of different things with it.

1:13:13 - Leo Laporte
Might do a better job.

1:13:13 - Alex Lindsay
Because I think that you know, I think that you know Apple's got a way of doing it. The hard part is always that what's happened with every company this isn't Apple, just Apple is that the brand has, like, this is a big launch, and so now we're going to have to bring in important directors that are going to, you know, that have done, have a lot of history, that that bring a lot to it, and those directors ruin it, like you know. They, they just they just because they don't know anything about immersive and they think up all these stupid ideas that don't work. And and they, you know, and and they cause they're excited, they think of all the things that we have that have worked in immersive. It's the same stuff that we thought in the first six months, like you know, like it's all the, it's all the same. And so they just they're making all of the early mistakes that you make doing immersive. Um, again, you know, and you feel like, well, if you just hired the immersive guys, that would don't be, this would shorten the pipe here. But, um, but we're so we're still in that kind of experimental stage where nothing really works that well.

But I think that there's a, there's a bunch of us that have put money down on the camera and are waiting to get it, and so it's like, I think, that pretty much the list of all the people that I think should be shooting with this. I think almost all of us know. You know, we all know that we've all kind of made deals where if one person gets it, the other people are gonna put money into that one so that we can very quickly get shooting with that thing and wait for the other cameras to come out. So we're all excited about actually going out and shooting some footage with it, because I think it, I think the camera, I think the platform is amazing.

I think that the content that we've seen so far there've been moments. There's moments of Metallica that are brilliant. Um, I didn't see a lot of moments in the the bono one that were brilliant. There are, you know, I I have to go back and and look at it a little bit, and then the? Um, you know, there's again. There's moments of things that I go oh, that's something I wouldn't have done so to their advantage. Uh, that are the, and I did see some of the writing that jason showed and I thought that was a really great use of the of the space, and so there's a still of it.

I mean now this doesn't do it justice, but but it takes that and it wraps it all around you and right, and I thought that that was really interesting. I think if they did that, I don't know. I felt like, if they did that, I guess, when I, when I saw immersive, I just really wanted to go see an immersive, something that was really designed as an immersive movie. You just don't sell it that way if you're not going to make it really truly immersive. It just felt like they're working too hard.

1:15:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah I, I really enjoyed the show, but you know, the problem is I enjoyed the show as a fan of you too and as, uh, you know, but as a vision pro immersive video kind of thing, yeah it. Just I ended up walking away with like, oh, this wasn't a 90 minute immersive version of that movie, this is a 90 minute version of that movie with a few reshot immersive elements and like that's okay, I think those elements are good, but again, we're looking for you know, something that is more, and this, this is I. I thought this was the answer of like finally they did it, and the answer is no, they still haven't done it. Although actually this is a very funny thing that happened to me and I mentioned this in my article about it which is about nine or 10 minutes in the opening credit start, cause there's like a sort of a pre-credit thing and he does a vertigo and he does all that, and then, and then the kind of like opening credit start and I had a moment I have watched so that's snackable that the opening credit started and I thought, oh, no, that's it, it's over, because after 10 minutes of any Vision Pro thing it's usually over.

And then I was like no, no, settle down. Those are the opening credits, but it just it was so telling that I'm so used to these things being snackable. So it's a step.

1:16:43 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you know it's another step, but it's not the step I thought it was, I feel like I, just I, one of the things that we've that we found working in immersive for a long time is that you don't have to do as much as Apple keeps doing, which is that you can just put the set, the camera down and let things evolve. You know, just go to places and let things happen. You, you know, you're not, it's just not the same as filmmaking the way it was before and and it's just, it's just one of those things that it just felt like there was so much work being done as opposed to just letting you know. I would, I would love to sit in the edge. I mean, if you look at the I don't know. I'm sure, jason, you've seen the it will be loud. You know the, the, the documentary have you seen that with? I haven't, oh, my gosh, that. So what I was thinking?

1:17:37 - Jason Snell
about when I was watching this one was if they had done, it will be loud, which is this documentary with Jimmy Page, and oh, it might get loud.

1:17:41 - Alex Lindsay
Right, I haven't seen it. That's David David Skogarheim again. Yeah, okay, that like, if you just watch that documentary and think of that as immersive, mind blowing, like it just would have been, that would have been exactly what I wanted. And I realized I think I went into it because I had seen, because it was the edge was in that movie. I think I went into it with this mind of it's going to be like that, except it's going to be immersive. And it was definitely not that. And that one, if you look at that one that was built for it, like that movie was built for immersive, except before immersive existed. You know, and I think that that would have been a, because they're in a studio, like just, you know, three of the greatest guitar players in the last 50 years are sitting in a studio with amps just playing you know, just talking and jamming Does it get?

loud. I'm just curious. It did get pretty loud actually it might. You know, my volume is loud up too. It might get loud.

1:18:31 - Leo Laporte
There's kind of a world of difference between it will get loud and it might get loud, but there's a shot. There's a shot of Like Visit Pro it will succeed, it might succeed.

1:18:42 - Alex Lindsay
There's a big difference you know, but there's home and and, and.

1:18:47 - ???
You're just like oh, that would be amazing to see amazing.

1:18:50 - Alex Lindsay
Well, just stacks of the processors and everything else that he's playing with and I just think, if you think but if you watch it might get loud and think about that in a vision pro shot with 180 degree camera. To me that's dream on, alex.

1:19:04 - Leo Laporte
Why is that? I don't plan to dream on so slow to do this.

1:19:07 - Alex Lindsay
I don't understand Because it's hard. So it is what Apple has done. It's been more than a year and they had no camera existed to do this.

1:19:18 - Leo Laporte
It still doesn't technically right. Well, it exists.

1:19:21 - Alex Lindsay
There's not many of them, but the thing is that nothing was shooting at that resolution, at that frame rate that was available to the general public, right. And so Apple, by all rumors, just was tearing Blackmagic cameras apart and putting them back together in a camera that allows everybody to do this is always hard because there's a whole bunch of metadata there that has to realign the interaxial distance between the lenses with the interocular distance. When you push the little button on the Apple vision pro and you see a little thing pull in, that's because it's it now knows what your interocular distance is and it's correcting that footage for your, the footage from that camera for your eyes, not just everybody's eyes, and that's what the other ones don't do. And doing that at 8K at um, you know, 90 frames a second is. It's the only platform that's available to the public that does that. And so getting a camera built for that is not a minor, it's it, you know it's. It's a year of engineering and being able to and then being able to mass produce it right and being able to have it. A factory in Singapore pumping these, able to pump these cameras out um is takes a year, like that's just hardware, like you know, when we look at the iPhone, I mean they were working on that for two or three years, right and so. So, take, getting a new camera that does something that nothing, nothing, that's never happened before. Um takes time and we're about to see.

You know, I I'm going to guess that they're going to talk about it at WWDC, because I think that, you know, we, we see, we saw versions of them, uh, at NEB. So there's no reason why they can't show, at least show it like here it is. But the other side of it is like how do you make the? You know, all the stuff that Apple's been doing on the backend to make these shows has been proprietary. So how do you get that all into resolve, which is where you know where it's going, and so all of those things are. It's a huge lift to make that happen. But once it comes out, I think that, um, you'll see a lot of people. You'll see suddenly a lot, of, a lot more content. It'll take time, but by the end of the year I think we're going to see a lot of content coming out for the vision pro.

1:21:24 - Leo Laporte
Jason's review stories of surrender is spectacular and somewhat immersive somewhat immersed is up on the six colorscom. Now. That's not the only one, though, that there's a new time magazine, world war ii document yeah, yeah.

1:21:38 - Jason Snell
So time studios and targo did this thing and it's interesting because it's an app, it's five dollars, um, and it's called d-day the camera soldier, and it is.

So this is another way you could approach this, which is it's not a purely video format, it's an interactive form, documentary essentially, and it's. It's about a guy who was a. He literally was on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day with a camera instead of a gun, and we have it's the story of people who are historians and documentarians who were trying to find information about this guy, who actually ended up finding his daughter, who had a lot of the information about it and she was interested in learning more about what her father had done, cause when she was little she didn't really understand and he was, I think, probably suffering from PTSD and didn't want to talk about it and all of those things that happened with so many people who came back from World War Two that made it harder to understand what happened there. But they have, so they have his film, they have his footage and they have his stills, because he also had a still camera and they. So there's a documentarian. They go with the daughter to Omaha Beach, they're at the cemetery, they're down on the beach in the moment before you.

You go on D-Day.

And there are a few different kind of like locations like that. Also, there are a bunch of sort of scanned 3d objects so you can pick up the photographs and you can pick up different objects and his dog tags and things like that. So it is it's interesting. It is very much an interactive documentary. It's not an immersive video but it does have an immersive quality to it as well. I thought it was really interesting. So if you're interested in and we are we are in sort of D-Day anniversary season right now, in fact I would say if you're thinking about this if?

you're thinking about this and you've got a Vision Pro. I thought this was a really interesting approach to this format, where it is using and I've seen a lot of stuff like this that's not purely immersive and instead what they're trying to do is combine app-based interactivity, almost like the old school CD-ROM kind of idea, right when it's multimedia, there's 3D content, there's an immersive location, there's video, it's all kind of like accumulating to tell this story. A really interesting idea to do a doc this way. So I liked it. I thought it was really smart.

1:24:17 - Leo Laporte
I like the innovation D-Day the camera soldier. $5 for the Vision Pro only.

1:24:23 - Jason Snell
Really good. Very smart, very good very smart, very good, and that's your vision process. Now you see, now you know we're done talking. The vision pro andy.

1:24:36 - Leo Laporte
Why'd you take your glasses off?

1:24:37 - Andy Ihnatko
oh, just for the vision pro segment because you had vision pro uh, vision pro theme a, which is the cool people cool hipster version of it. And then you have the the happy, happy fun yeah, you gotta take that off all I can do is put these on one, two, three let me see the world these, these are, these are creative choices, leo, it's not just random yeah, okay, whatever you say I have a process we.

1:25:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh it, they just woke up. Sorry, I'm now have I'm now in met in the metaverse. Oh well, the show today. We're going to get to more of your thoughts and prayers in just a little bit.

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All right, let's see what else. What else? Oh, there's actually quite. Now we're going to get in a little bit of the court stuff. The eu is appealing or rather, apple is appealing the eu law, as they should. That requires it to share sensitive user data with others. Part of the digital markets act is this interoperability requirement. Now I think maybe this is a way you might spin it, if you're apple, to say well, that means we have to share personal information with other people. The interoperability requirements say data like notification content and wi-fi networks should be available to third parties just as it is to apple um I mean this is let's go ahead.

Yeah well, apple says well, we can't see it, why should anybody else see it?

1:28:12 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is a nuanced one where I see both sides here. That is a biased way of putting it that, oh, Apple is being ordered to share your personal information. Apple is being ordered to share your personal information Technically, yes. One of the things that this EU requirement is trying to address is, like you are building an Apple Watch that can't be competed with in any positive way by any third party, because or these Meta glasses.

1:28:43 - Leo Laporte
I can't get an Apple notification on these Meta glasses because Apple won't allow it, and so that's in fact, it's. Meta is one of the companies that wants access to this note, this information.

1:28:54 - Andy Ihnatko
And and so and. But there are parts of it that are like the thing is, if you're building the entire ecosystem, there are things you can trust to yourself that you legitimately shouldn't trust to an outsider, like the certain biometric information that maybe you don't necessarily want to share with outsiders. It's, it's a little bit complicated. It's not as simple as usual. It's not as simple as apple saying, oh, we're trying to protect people. But it's also not as simple as saying apple wants to protect its monopoly on the apple watch and some of its other provides. One of the big, one of the big things.

That that makes this complicated is like okay, but what do you do about AirDrop? Airdrop is wonderful, anybody. It's one of the few things where it's like, every single time I have to move a file between my phone and my MacBook or my iPad, I'm like if I had AirDrop, this would be done in about one half of one second, instead of my having to basically save it to a Google Keep note and then go on this other device and download it from Google Keep or whatever. But the thing is like how can apple comply with this directive without essentially creating an open version of airdrop? And there's no international consortium that wants to do like an open version of airdrop that apple could then sign a board, that's that.

That's an example of this where it would be very difficult for apple to comply, but things like the apple watch, I mean, I do think that Apple should be should have a better argument in defense of what they're doing than oh well gosh, we just don't want. We don't want Samsung or a third-party glasses maker to be able to see your notifications. Yes, but I bought this so I could see notifications on this device. I'm cool with it. Give me a checkbox to click to say I'm cool with it, apple, and we'll be good.

1:30:29 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point. The only person who's asking for those notifications is the person who they're intended for, not I don't know. Anyway, apple appealed. It'll be a few months before the EU response to the appeal If the order stays in place.

1:30:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple would have to do this as part of iOS 19 by the end of the year. Or I mean, the thing is Apple had provided a statement to the press that everybody who asks gets the same statement back and it has the same kind of boilerplate we've seen Apple do with other problems like this. Basically say that, not saying that, not necessarily just saying that oh well, if we complied with this, then we would have to compromise user, user, uh privacy, but also, if we were to comply with this, we might have to limit the functionality of our products in the eu. Basically hinting that, oh well, the way we would reply we would comply with this order is basically by making airdrop not work at all in the eu, which is stuff that they've done before. Basically say, if we, if the only way that we can avoid the half a billion dollar fine every eight months is to simply turn off this feature, we're just going to turn off the feature yeah, and if the eu gets too aggressive?

1:31:38 - Alex Lindsay
I mean there is some point. I mean apple makes like 14 billion dollars gross and you know, in the eu, I believe, a year. If they keep on pushing, pressing down on it, there is there is some point where Apple may not make sense anymore.

1:31:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, they don't need to withdraw from the market.

1:31:51 - Alex Lindsay
but they just say, well, we're going to turn those features off or something, and this gets into that whole like when we talked about, you know, tim Cook, the choices that Tim Cook makes when he doesn't go to Saudi Arabia with Trump, because, you know, trump could make a lot of this go away. The EU has a big talk, but if Trump just said, hey, if you keep on doing this, we're going to increase all your tariffs to 80 for 80 percent, the EU would probably just give up. And but they can't get Sorry. So, anyway, if he actually did it but the point is is that he's not going to, but he's not going to do that now, because he's now he's talking about now he doesn't like apple.

So maybe he's saying yeah, yeah, have you?

1:32:27 - Leo Laporte
uh, I've been reading apple in china, patrick mckee's new book boy is that a fascinating read, highly recommended. Uh, the the gist of it, at least so far, uh, is that apple, in its desire to make the iphone, first the ipod and then later the iphone, uh success. Basically built this manufacturing capability in china. There was nowhere else they could do it with chinese suppliers like terry gao of foxconn, who had, you know, connections with the chinese government. The government loved this, right, they gave him tax breaks, they gave him free land, they bought his equipment for him.

1:33:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah apple.

1:33:06 - Leo Laporte
But well, that's the other thing. Apple bought all this test equipment for these. They really turned the notion of outsourcing manufacture on its head and by doing so created an incredible. This is what Tim Cook's achievement was a supply chain for first the iPod and then the iPhone. No one else can duplicate it. No one else can come even close. But McGee's point is, it also means that Apple is very much stuck in China that no one else can.

1:33:35 - Jason Snell
You can't do it in India or Vietnam or anywhere else, because you're gonna have to do the same thing you did in China over a period of a decade idea that if you believe that entering a country and then getting it to scale up to do what you need, if you believe that that is you taking advantage of the country, you need to understand that it is also the country taking advantage of you, because if you build that capacity and knowledge, they have it now and they can use it for whatever they want, and and so it is. There is a quid pro quo there of you know, you're not just taking advantage of the of of being in china, you're teaching china how to make things in that they didn't make before, at a level they didn't have before, and now they've got it.

1:34:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Right now, now that all those skills are transferred and part of it was arrogance, too, where the state department was, arrogance, too, where the State Department was. But basically the government at the time was like oh no, great, absolutely do that. Because China is opening up that, hopefully we want to see it transform into a Western-style maybe not necessarily. Maybe a Western-style democracy was way too much to hope for but they're hoping that they could sort of inflict a capitalist culture upon them without understanding that, yeah, china's been through that with the West way too many times and they've learned some bad lessons from this and they're not going to really let that happen again so this is part of this is arrogance basically coming to bite the uh?

1:35:06 - Jason Snell
bite capitalism in the ass also it is I mean the personalities matter, like the rise of of uh Xi Jinping, matters like he. It could change someone else with a different approach.

1:35:19 - Leo Laporte
They were headed towards capitalism and she decided to put the screws they went.

1:35:24 - Jason Snell
they went from a bunch of sort of faceless leaders to a guy who basically wants to be the you know, the dictator for life and has a much more bellicose attitude toward the West and is much more authoritarian and is pushing a lot harder and like. I think that a lot of these bets were made when, when they did not anticipate that happening and they also that's right.

1:35:45 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think they anticipated the iPhone to be as big as I mean, like you know they didn't know, yeah, of course. So. So the thing is is when they were doing all of this in the aughts, you know they're much smaller.

1:35:54 - Leo Laporte
It seemed like a good idea at the time.

1:35:56 - Alex Lindsay
Well, this happens all the time. You start building something and the next thing you know it's racing forward and you're building it all up and you've got these foundational pins, but that's why it was in China, because they could scale.

1:36:08 - Leo Laporte
That's what Terry Gao brought to the table is he could build and scale up a factory in a month with 100,000 people, right, and you?

1:36:16 - Jason Snell
can't do that anywhere else.

1:36:17 - Leo Laporte
That's one of the reasons they did it there.

1:36:19 - Jason Snell
Nobody starts at zero and expects the scale of the iPhone is the thing, and so what happens is you start and then the demand hits.

1:36:26 - Leo Laporte
They had some idea because of the iPod. They saw the iPod explode after they opened it up to.

1:36:33 - Jason Snell
Windows.

1:36:33 - Alex Lindsay
The numbers of, but not numbers of the eye not like the iphone, right?

1:36:35 - Jason Snell
so so this like I'm sure they anticipated numbers, but not the numbers that they ended up getting. This is how foxconn one foxconn actually really pitched apple that we can do this my point is once you're in, once you're in it, all you can do is try to fulfill demand, and it totally changes the game. Right and it's not. If not, if you went to Apple, you know, in a time machine and said, here's what your iPhone volume is going to be in 2020, they would make different decisions. They would, but that's not how it works.

That's not how it works, so instead you'd make expedient decisions and then you wake up and you look around and you realize that you've got this enormous business that's entirely dependent on China.

1:37:21 - Leo Laporte
It's a great book as well, because it's one of those great books that come around from time to time about the computer industry. That has the personalities, the stories, many of which you didn't know. It's pretty clear. Tony Fidel was probably one of the biggest sources of information, which may make some of it, you know, a little, uh, questionable, uh, but he did interview 200 people and it is a great story about tony blevins, who I really didn't know the blevinator all that well, but he was apple's vp of procurement who made these draconian agreements, uh, with companies like foxconn.

He would arrive in China with a bunch of uh, uh, you know employees and one of the tricks he would do to teach him because he's he learned his chops selling used cars in high school and he, so he learned how to negotiate and, uh, he would give the employees you know a hundred bucks and say, okay, whoever get brings back the most silk ties with this hundred dollars wins they. They learned absolutely rapacious negotiation techniques. He eventually was, uh, was fired uh, over a viral tiktok, um, but which actually is completely fitting, but it's, but there's stories galore in this and it really is. It's a great read. I highly recommend it. Yeah, um, and very informative. But uh, you know I haven't got to the end yet, but the, uh, many of the articles and reviews of it say that the the bottom line is that apple has, or china has, apple by the short hairs, that at any point China could put the squeeze on Apple yeah, and also, as we've said, as we've said before in this episode, we've Apple makes more than half of its money off iPhone sales.

1:39:04 - Andy Ihnatko
They cannot afford to not put an iPhone in the hands of somebody who is coming at them with money to spend on an iPhone. So it's not not like they can take a 10 hit in shipments by totally change, or 20 or 30 hit in shipments by changing how they source their hardware.

1:39:20 - Leo Laporte
I'm at the point of the book where Apple's opening its first store in China and they had no idea. They just put somebody on a plane and said figure it out, they didn't have licenses, they didn't have any idea. So China was a non-existent market for apple, uh until the iphone, and all of a sudden it became a very important market, giving china even more leverage over over apple. I would not want to be tim cook at this point, with the problems he's having with the us government, with the threats, uh, in taiwan, but we we knew this I mean five years ago we were talking about this decade was all going to be about dealing with governments.

1:39:56 - Alex Lindsay
For Apple they're not. They're so far in many places, they're so far past their competitors that that it's really just about dealing with governments, with antitrust, with all the other things that are going on, but it wasn't going to be about competition with, you know, with other software or hardware companies.

1:40:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, and if you're interested in how apple got ahead of the competitors, this really tells that story. It's, it's really uh. I mean, we've been covering apple this entire time and I knew many of these stories, but there's some detail in here I did not know he's a good storyteller too.

1:40:26 - Andy Ihnatko
This isn't a dry business book read this is you could make a movie. You could make a, an hbo series out of this, oh yeah yeah, maybe they will.

1:40:33 - Leo Laporte
I would like to see that um tv plus that's for sure uh, oh, I loved this and I bet you, uh, alex, will have a few things to say about it. Danny boyle, we knew, was filming his sequel to his 28 day series 28 days later. Uh, with iphones, but I didn't. I don't know if I knew exactly what he was doing with those iphones. I thought it was, maybe. Oh, it's just a gimmick. Oh, no, look at this rig. Yeah, yeah, how much. That is a bunch of iphones. Yeah, in a, in a semi-circle around the actor. Uh, alex, what's he doing?

1:41:15 - Alex Lindsay
what is the point of this? Well, I I actually don't know what he's doing on that one specifically, but what it looks like is bullet time, you know.

1:41:21 - Leo Laporte
So the ability he said he could choose the shot and the frame he wanted. The framing that he wanted. It also could be made more immersive. Yeah, we used a very wide screen format, he told IG, and we thought we'd benefit from the unease that the. It's about zombies, fast zombies, the enemies. The first film created about the speed and velocity, the visceral aspect of the way the infected were depicted. If you're in a wide screen format, they could be anywhere. You have to keep scanning and looking around for them and and that's why he used all those iPhonesiphones.

1:41:55 - Alex Lindsay
But he in the in the past he has he's been very experimental as far as what he, what he likes to use, and so he was the perfect director for apple to go where and he probably went to apple going, hey, I got this film, I want to shoot it. I don't even know if apple probably approached him. He was just like I got a cool idea, I want to do something that's you know, that's that's out there and the reality is you really can't.

1:42:14 - Leo Laporte
So they're shooting this at 2.76 to 1. Is that unusual?

1:42:17 - Alex Lindsay
Super wide, and the problem with that wide of a format is that the screen isn't really big. It's actually it's like a look at a mail slot.

Yeah, it's pretty. It's pretty, it's pretty wide, you know so, unless you're on a really big screen. But that's the his. I get his idea there. The interesting thing is that aspect ratio will do exactly what he's talking about when it, when you go to the vision pro, because it'll be super wide and you'll be looking around with your you know because, um, because it will be as large as you want, relatively as large as you want to make it. But I think that it it was. It's really interesting. They really pushed the outer envelope. If you look at some of the kit that they put on them, you know the lensing. I think that they're using the Beast connection. Beast Grip, I think, is the company that made the ones that are being used here. But they're putting full-size lenses on them. They're putting you know they're, they're looking at them. This isn't like just picking up your iPhone and shooting a movie.

1:43:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is from the IGN story. Several production techniques were used in an attempt to achieve that immersive feeling, including attaching cameras to actors, special sensors, designing rigs, town house multiple cameras, drones, and working with a wide variety of camera types and lenses. They had three special rigs for the iphone sequences, so the whole thing wasn't shot on iphone, but there was an eight camera rig which danny says could be carried easily by one person. Okay, there was a 10 camera rig?

yeah, and there was a 20 camera rig right, explains the director. I never say this, but there's an incredible shot in the second half of the film where we use the 20-rig camera. You'll know it when you see it. It's quite graphic, but it's a wonderful shot that uses that technique and in a startling way that kind of kicks you into a new world, which sounds like bullet time a little bit.

1:44:11 - Alex Lindsay
It can be bullet time, but it could also be something very chaotic where it's bouncing around between 20 cameras. You know it could be, there's a that's all happening at the same time in a way that would be in any camera other than something as small as the iphone.

Would be very difficult right and so 20 imax cameras he says you could do it with like sony. Sony has these really tiny little cameras. Maybe I guess they have a little these little, these tiny little like smaller than than a GoPro camera, that you could potentially use. But the reality is that the iPhone sensor and lens is actually it's still more expensive than the Sony, but it is actually a better image at this point.

1:44:48 - Leo Laporte
He says it gives you 180-degree vision of an action and in editing you can select any choice from it either a conventional one camera perspective or make this is the bullet time, make your way instantly around reality, time slicing the subject, jumping forward or backward for emphasis. Oh yeah, it sounds like it's going to be terrifying. He says for the same reason, I love jumping the line. What is jumping the line, alex?

1:45:14 - Alex Lindsay
so jumping the line is when you, when you're actually um, uh, most of the time when we make film, you think of a line and there's like two people talking, you know, to each other, here all the cameras are on one side of the line and usually we say crossing the line, but so all your cameras, your wide shot over the shoulders, here are all going, they are are. All. The people are always talking. We're never over here, right, we don't jump over that line, because that way it what happens is is that and you do it in horror films and some action- films.

1:45:43 - Leo Laporte
It makes viewers queasy.

1:45:45 - Alex Lindsay
They lose, they, they lose track of where they are Right. So so we're used to this, this is what we live in. And then you suddenly jump the line. Now, usually when you want to cross the what we live in right, then you suddenly jump the line. Now, usually, when you want to cross the what we do, crossing the line, we uh, you know you swing the camera across the line during the shot so you can. Now, you know, you've moved. I move from this side of the other. If you're constantly jumping back and forth, then they don't know where you're going or what what's happening. There's a scene in the brutalist.

1:46:08 - Leo Laporte
They're uh, they're at a table, sitting at a dining room table, and they cross the line suddenly in a jump cut and I thought I don't, I must be. They didn't have the footage to not jump the line uh, they no, these are all designed.

1:46:21 - Alex Lindsay
If they do it, typically, they do it on purpose, like it's not watch the brutalist.

1:46:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and, and let me know, you'll know, you'll see it immediately, because I mean, I saw it. It was like wow, he just crossed the line yeah, usually that's a, that's a.

1:46:33 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it's a conscious decision. I mean most in most films there's a lot of talk about every shot and they're shot. They're not shot as coverage. Most films aren't. Coverage, like danny boyle's here, is kind of halfway between design shots and coverage. When you're shooting with 20 cameras it's kind of a coverage shot, right, um, but most of the time they're they're designing those, those shots, and so if they jumped over the line, it's pretty rare that they did it by accident, um, it's because it's kind of a big deal I I said to lisa.

1:46:58 - Leo Laporte
I said I think I think that was a mistake.

1:47:02 - Jason Snell
There may have been a reason they wanted to do it I mean, maybe they wanted to do it.

1:47:06 - Alex Lindsay
Usually they don't have any cameras on the other side, like they don't even have cameras on that right they would have.

1:47:10 - Leo Laporte
That's what I thought. Why would they shoot? You got a different angles and then intercut yeah, you got it.

1:47:15 - Alex Lindsay
Then you got to dress the other side of the set there's, you know, because a lot of times right outside, like a pixel outside the about, outside your frame, oh yeah, it's a big light and there's a and there's a mic hanging down and there's. So usually there it's designed and and it it's rarely, rarely by accident in the entertainment segment.

1:47:34 - Leo Laporte
lots of rumors about Apple and I know you're, jason, a big baseball fan buying Sunday Night Baseball to add to their Friday Night Baseball for Apple TV+.

1:47:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it looks like baseball is. I mean, espn may come back to the table. They're the ones who currently have it and that deal is expiring and they kind of walked away and there was a little acrimony and it's unclear about what's going on there. They kind of walked away and there was a little acrimony and it's unclear about what's going on there. They may come back to this and and that would be useful since they're launching their own streaming service this fall but I would say called, you know, called ESPN, which is their over the top like get everything that's on cable that currently is not available on streaming. It's a big deal, but it looks like what Major League Baseball is doing is weighing two major offers here. One from Apple is more money and it's probably better reach in terms of international, but you're going to get a much smaller audience in the US because you've got to be an Apple TV Plus subscriber to watch it presumably, and there aren't that many of those, so you're going to have a much smaller audience than you currently reach with this showcase game and this is the showcase game, sunday Night Baseball, it's like only available on ESPN right now, sort of the end of the week.

It's a you. You know you can tune in and see a marquee matchup, and so they go to Apple. They're taking the money, but they're probably downgrading what that is. Or they could go to NBC, which also is in the bidding for this, and NBC it's interesting because they have Sunday night football and they're going to have Sunday night primetime basketball next season as well, and so this would give NBC essentially a Sunday night sports franchise all year round, but they're not going to pay as much as Apple. So Major League Baseball, it sounds like, is going to have to weigh these options and see where it's going to go. But it is interesting that Apple is in the mix. Ironically, one of the reasons Apple is in the mix is that ESPN complained that Major League Baseball was trying to charge them too much for Sunday night baseball and pointed to what they charge Apple for.

1:49:32 - Leo Laporte
Friday night baseball. Apple pays $85 million a year for Friday night. Espn pays $550 million a year almost more than half a billion a year for Sunday night.

1:49:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and some other stuff too, including the Home.

Run Derby, which they may uncouple from this entirely. It sounds like Fox kind of wants to buy the Home Run Derby for All-Star Week, but we'll see how it goes. But Apple is a player still. I think what we've learned with Apple and sports rights is that Apple is willing to talk and they're willing to spend, but they're not willing to get in a bidding war, and we saw that. You know that they'll pay a price that they think is worth paying to give something a shot. But what they're not?

They don't seem to be willing to go kind of like all in and pay more Like some of these other companies. They've got other businesses going on and they're like OK, we'll pay a little bit more because there's ancillary reasons why having this sport is good and Apple doesn't seem to be doing that. So this would be an interesting pickup for Apple. But you know, honestly, if I were major league baseball, I would. I would do the deal with NBC, because I think with a showcase like a Sunday night baseball, what you really want is domestic viewership. You want eyeballs, you want the power of the broadcast networks, the broad power of a broadcast network to promote your sport.

1:50:46 - Leo Laporte
And if it's just on Apple TV+, I feel like nobody's going to watch it. I wonder you know who else is running out on ESPN this year is Formula One Racing, and Apple, of course, has a big f1 movie premiering later this month. Uh, and apparently, liberty. Liberty, which owns the rights uh, you know, actually owns it all. Um, is having a hard time finding a us buyer because all the formula races happen in the middle of the night in the middle of the night, very early morning and maybe apple would be a good person to good not not not necessarily a bad partner.

1:51:16 - Jason Snell
Um, other than all those issues, the problem is the problem is that, uh, they, they make a lot of money selling their rights to f1, obviously in the rest of the world right, and what a lot of the streamers want is international, is world rights right, and there may be a time and this major league baseball story is for three years of rights and what they're trying to do is sync up all their rights deals so they can go out and and all of them expire at once right.

So f1, I don't know. I mean, I would imagine that what liberty media is trying to do is sync up all their rights so that they could potentially sign a worldwide deal with somebody down the road, but right now it's just us rights and yeah, that's. The big challenge is this stuff happens in the middle of the night in most cases, and so the value isn't isn't quite there, but but it is perfect for streaming though, because people don't watch it live right into the us.

Yeah you could and you could put. I mean, we know you could, you could tie it in. You know apple could work on some software stuff that would you know, give you live readouts while you're watching and like, and and the vision pro with a with a, you know, virtual race.

1:52:17 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if it's dependent on how well the movie does. If the movie does well, then there's a market. Wouldn't hurt, wouldn't hurt. Finally, before we take our last break and get our picks of the week the 2025 Apple design award winners for innovation, ingenuity and technical achievement, and app and game designs. Is this, uh, really the? Are we talking the best of the best, or is? Is there is more political? You think?

1:52:45 - Andy Ihnatko
no, I think they select these largely based on what message are, as apple, trying to get out about the, the capabilities of their yeah? That's kind of what I mean they do select for really good stuff. But the thing is, if you're going to have another Bluetooth music app, it doesn't matter how good let's say, another Markdown text editor, it really doesn't matter how good it is, right, it's not going to be considered as strongly as something.

1:53:16 - Leo Laporte
The musical looks pretty good. Yeah, a lot of these are are real, you're I think you nailed it. Chris bellatro's in there. Uh, cap words is the winner. Uh, a chinese language learning app, lumi from india. That's interesting, isn't it? Uh, photographer, this is kind of um, uh, photographer's ephemera, uh, which has been around for quite a while, but maybe it's a prettier version of of that denim, which is a playlist cover maker from india. Bellatro was a going to be a clear winner in games everybody loves. Uh, absolutely, I'm glad to see.

Thank goodness, you're here made it goodness you're here panics, fantastic little silly british puzzle northern english game. Yeah, yeah, prince of persia. These are runners up uh for inclusivity. Speechify one in apps hundreds of voices, 50 available languages. Turns. Any written text into audio. Um art of fauna from austria, a puzzle game. Oh, that was kind of cool it. That really looked kind of. It looked, uh, like you're rearranging pictures of animals and things. It looked pretty cool uh puffies, which uh mike a sergeant picked as his pick of the week a couple of weeks ago on mac break weekly.

1:54:33 - Jason Snell
That's kind of fun gears and goo, by the way, which did, which is a runner-up in two different categories. I've played that a little. That's a vision os. Tower defense game oh, and I gotta say, uh, tower defense games are fun, but tower defense game where, where the tower defense is happening on on your table, it's pretty good, it really sounds cool what is that one?

that's gears and gears and goo from sweden yeah, a fresh take on tower defense yeah, and for vision os yeah, it's fun that would be little animated guys that are running around blowing things up and, yep, it's good oh and I and just just as I said, I mean a distraction.

1:55:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Free text editor is exactly the sort of thing that they would honor in this.

1:55:18 - Leo Laporte
I'm so, I'm glad to see.

1:55:19 - Andy Ihnatko
IA writer. Well, so did. Did I writer get an award? Uh, it got an honorable mention. I'm sorry.

1:55:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and apps was the winner. Uh, 3d design elements for vision pro. But I write a good good on my points. They, they try, stands, they try, they try.

1:55:39 - Alex Lindsay
I think they try to send a message about what the platform can do and uh and jason's favorite recipe man, yeah, great, great, great little app, yeah, and uh, I think that feather got, so I think that was a pick, I think at some point. Um yeah, which is uh incredible oh, watch duty that.

1:55:51 - Leo Laporte
We need that here in northern california that keeps an eye on wildfires, we all have it. Ground news, which I like quite a bit, is a kind of balanced news app. Neva for the Mac Emotional effects of environmental decline Okay, not my kind of game. There's that art of fauna, again, feather. This is the one you like.

1:56:14 - Alex Lindsay
It's a 3D drawing, is so cool you're, you're sketching in 3d, so you define a surface and then you draw on it. You define another surface and draw on it and it is uh, it's a. Yeah, I think it was. I think I picked it maybe a year ago or something. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, but it, it is and it just keeps getting better. Um, it does take a little bit to figure out, get your head around what you're doing, but you can build some really complex things. But if you're an artist who wants to have 3D, it's like a drawing artist that wants to have 3D capability. It's pretty amazing.

1:56:45 - Leo Laporte
This is iPad only.

1:56:47 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

1:56:48 - Leo Laporte
Feather Draw in 3D $15, not bad. Anyway, some good. You know what.

1:56:55 - Andy Ihnatko
This is a good uh thing to look at if you're looking for a new app to install the apple design award winners at uh developerapplecom in all the different categories one other thing that it's like worth pointing out that at the editorial committee at the app App Store has so much power and so much influence and such a great responsibility, because Apple is not doing a really good job of helping you to simply on your own, navigate the App Store and find stuff on your own. It really is the responsibility of the editors who are working at the App Store to surface really good apps for again, sometimes for political reasons, but sometimes simply because we think this is a great app, this off the platform, it's really useful, we love it and we want more people to find out about it true for podcasts too, man, that that such dependence on the podcast app and the podcast team, because there's millions of podcasts.

1:57:50 - Leo Laporte
How else is anybody gonna find you? And, by the way, the wwdc 25 hello playlist has just dropped so you can get sleek or whatever it is. Uh, if, if you wanna, if you wanna listen, it's out, man. Uh, let's see. Should I start playing all those wonderful tunes Benson Boone, charlie XCX, lorde, ed Sheeran and a bunch of people I never heard of. So that'll be fun. Of course, that's just me. All right, one last break, and then your picks of the week. My friends, you're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy, alex and Jason. They're so well known, they're so famous. I only need the first names andy, alex and jason. I know who. That is right up there with barbara and cher. Pick of the week. Let's start with you andrew and otko.

1:58:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I love, uh, gallery apps. I love, like, image preview apps. Uh, there's so many times where I just have, I'll put in a thumb drive or I'll mount a hard drive, haven't done it in a while and oh look, it's a pictures folder, like, oh God, thank you past, andy, for not organizing any of this. I just want an app so I can just drag the folder onto an app and just show me everything that's in there and give me a really simple and clean interface for figuring out which one of these are worth keeping copying onto Google Photos or whatever. Right now my favorite app is Phoenix Slides, because it really is just direct and clean. It's open source and, as I often say when I recommend an open source thing, it's how open source-y is it? It's not as open source-y as you would fear. It's not the cleanest looking Mac app. It's not as open source-y as you would fear. It's not the cleanest looking Mac app, but it's not quirky or weird. It gives you a really good field of thumbnails that you can scale up and down. At the top deck of the window you can navigate the folder structure of what you're doing. But the thing is it makes it really easy to just click on something. Click the space bar and you're seeing it. Just by having to scale it up or down, it's going to fill up. This entire screen Makes it really easy to discover which ones of these.

Oh, I've got three pictures that seem to be about the same. Ok, but this one is high resolution. This one is screen resolution. Great, I'll save this one and then just simply drag it into the Finder or drag it onto something else. It's open source, so it's free, free, free, and you can't beat that. Also, I was looking for different apps like this about a month ago. Apollo 1 is also a. If you want something that's a lot cleaner, that looks a lot more like an Mac app, apollo 1 is worth looking at, very fast, very easy, very pretty looking. It is that they want money for it because they put a lot of effort into it. So if you're looking for something that's not that, if you're not afraid to pay a small subscription fee, by all means take a look at Apollo one. But, but Phoenix slides despite the word that must, it must be a really old app. If there's oh, it's, it's slides, it's for doing slides. It really is just a. It really is just an easy, easy preview and organizer app.

2:00:56 - Leo Laporte
I like it. Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, it's very straightforward, very simple.

2:01:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's almost as if they took the Finder's built-in gallery view and just said this is 30% of the solution. Let's write the other 70%.

2:01:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I like it quite a bit. All right, and it's free. Phoenix slides from gold mountain software. Mr Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week.

2:01:22 - Alex Lindsay
So it all started when I lost the controller for my, my air conditioner. So I have an air conditioner in my room. My, my wife likes the tropics and so the rest of the house is kind of very warm all the time.

But I like my, I like you know you do uh 65 degrees yeah, and so so I like it to be cold and uh and so anyway. But I have this little air conditioner that's in mind, that cools, cools just my one room, and I lost the controller, and so I was trying to figure out how to manage that and I finally, for nine dollars or whatever, got a universal controller. That figured out what it was, because of course I bought a cheap one that doesn't you know anyway. But I was like, if I'm going to do all this trouble, I really want to be able to control it with my phone, like I don't want to keep on, like, having any kind of controller.

So I got this little Sensibo. So Sensibo, basically, you set somewhere in the vicinity of what you're trying to control, your AC unit can control a lot of different things and you have an app and now I can if I buy into a subscription, which I haven't I can turn it on and off right now really easily. If I want to have a whole bunch of features I mean, there's schedules, you can put sensors, you can have it.

2:02:30 - Leo Laporte
How does it?

2:02:31 - Alex Lindsay
control the AC, how does it know? So you literally take your controller and you point it at the sensible and the sensible goes oh, you train it. Like as soon as you point at the controller at it, it just sees it, it reads it, it goes like I understand what I'm talking to, and then it immediately starts talking to you, to whatever it was so it's a universal remote for appliances that goes back, that is uh, that can take, that you can put into shortcuts.

2:02:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh.

2:02:54 - Alex Lindsay
I like it. So it's basically it can talk to whatever you're pointing it towards, but it can also you can now you know you have tons of you can start building all kinds of other things. It can also tell you how long it was on and when it was on, and you can set up sensors that come back to it and it uses those. You can even talk to it. Yeah, you could. Just I can. Now I haven't quite set it up yet, but I can. I will be able to say, hey, turn on the air conditioner or I can or have it pay attention to.

When I came back home it turns it on, or when I leave, it turns it off. Those all, all those things are there's, there's, you know, geo fencing and so on and so forth, so it can decide, you know, when it's gonna turn my air conditioner back on or when it's gonna turn it off, like, oh, he's gone for the day, let's turn it off, let's not pay for that. So, um, so, anyway, it's a really again, not something that I had expected to find, but have found quite useful.

2:03:46 - Leo Laporte
The sensible and it's on sale right now for 139 for one unit. Yeah, although they have kits for your whole household, take over yeah take over, and it is it is.

2:03:55 - Alex Lindsay
One of the requirements was is that it's apple? You know home kit? Yeah, yeah, yeah nice, compatible.

2:04:01 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, alex. I guess that leaves you, mr jason snell. What's your pick of the week?

2:04:06 - Jason Snell
all right, I'm going to pick the theater app by sandwich lonely sandwich. It is a vision pro app and this is relevant. So, first off, it's a really nice app. It gives you a bunch of virtual theaters, you can watch your own video. But uh, it's got a catalog you can rent or buy a bunch of different stuff. They've got a bunch of 3d movies. They've got a or 3d like documentaries. They're like nature stuff. Um, they've got a bunch of planetarium shows.

2:04:32 - Leo Laporte
They've got a they call them full dome shows. Yeah, they've got a virtual planet planetarium shows they call them full dome shows.

2:04:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they've got a virtual planetarium you sit in and then they've licensed all this video that plays in various planetariums and you can just watch it with the Vision Pro, which is actually pretty awesome.

2:04:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't even have to look up, do you?

2:04:46 - Jason Snell
I mean, you can just lean back and look up if you want to, and of course, they're going to be streaming. It looks like the talk show live from wwdc on tuesday night, uh, and they've got that in there and I think, I think, uh, you, I think maybe it's free in 2d and you pay for 3d or something like that. I don't know what they're doing with that. I just saw that this morning when I was trying it out. But, um, it's a great. It's a great little app. It will play your own videos or it'll. It'll play stuff that's in the store and, again, fun catalog.

They seem to have unearthed a bunch of interesting 3D content and the Planetarium content and applied to Division Pro, which I think is a really smart idea as well. So it's a free app and then there's a bunch of previews of content, so you can just sort of check out the previews and see how it's like to sit and watch that Planetarium show. And then they're also doing, apparently, the like to sit and watch that planetarium show, and then they're also doing, apparently, the talk show live on Tuesday, like they did last year. I think they premiered this with that event.

2:05:40 - Leo Laporte
So it's back.

2:05:43 - Alex Lindsay
This is the new version 3.0. I love planetariums so I'm pretty excited about the planetarium content yeah that's a great idea.

2:05:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, talk about a way to get content.

2:05:58 - Jason Snell
That's stuff that doesn't go anywhere right like other than being at the planetariums like who can ever see that?

2:06:00 - Leo Laporte
and so they seem to have licensed a bunch of planetarium stuff so you can make your own planetarium at home. Nice, that's adam lissagor still at it. Good for him. Yep, yep, lonely sandwich. Yep, uh, now just sandwich. Yeah, sandwich, dot vision, no longer lonely he's just a sandwich. Yes, exactly it's called theater, theater. Do you know who uh John's gonna have on uh the stage?

2:06:19 - Jason Snell
I do not. I do the Apple executives turn him down? Yeah, I do not, though I will be. I'll be there, um, but I don't know what he'll have. That's interesting. I will not be on stage unless he calls me up.

2:06:31 - Leo Laporte
I bet Adam will. I'm just thinking this might be a chance for Adam to jump in there, maybe. So, uh, do you think he's getting punished by apple for losing faith in cupertino?

2:06:40 - Jason Snell
I, I don't know, I mean nobody. Look, you can never take access with apple for granted. It comes, it goes.

You just gotta kind of get over it and you know, I know that, you know that, I know that, um, it just it happens. I think that it, you know, I think it's, I think that's a pretty good stage for them to be on, um, that I think that if, if all they're doing is doing it out of spite, then they're probably shooting themselves in the foot. Yeah, I also think maybe, with things the way they are and the negativity around apple intelligence, the negativity around some of the court cases, I think maybe there's a larger kind of let's just lay low and control everything, and so I wouldn't be surprised if there's really no availability of executives and just the videos and they leave it really limited and certainly no live on stage in front of an audience that is not chosen by Apple. They're probably like, even if they're unhappy with John for what he wrote about them, I don't think they'd do that honestly, they're more strategic?

2:07:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I wouldn't leap to that yeah.

2:07:46 - Jason Snell
If they did, it's a mistake, I think, but there are plenty of other reasons for Apple to try to avoid public scrutiny right now.

2:07:53 - Alex Lindsay
There's not going to be a lot of impressive things to to release tomorrow that would be a wide angle, you know or next week exactly. There's no reason that they just wouldn't want to be in that, where there's going to be a bunch of hard questions that they have to dance around. I think, that's the most likely solution. Yeah.

2:08:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's good. It added something else to pay attention to the yearly scorecard that I think we all do, whether it's official or unofficial. It's like okay, now which seven or eight YouTubers are going to get the 20 to 30 minutes with a C-suite or high VP level like Apple Executive. It's always been fun because they've always done such a great balance between okay, marques Brownlee gets one. Okay, almost certainly, but also wow, this is a YouTuber with like fewer than like 8,000 views per video.

That's great that they're getting that kind of exposure, but it's, you're right, it's going to be interesting to see if, like, oh, they didn't actually talk to anybody this year and that's not suspicious, it's. I think that that's a really good point. They just don't have that marquee thing that they need to talk about, that they want to message out there. Last year, they absolutely wanted to talk about AI, so they had lots of time to make available to people to talk about it. Let's see if Wall Street Journal gets anything. Let's see if the New York Times get anything. Let's see if somebody gets a sit-down interview for uh let's be honest, let's see what I justine gets right.

2:09:16 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that's what really counts. Right is marquez brownlee going to be on the stage or just next to it. That's what matters. That's what really matters. Andy and I go website.

2:09:28 - Andy Ihnatko
There is a numerical countdown in my office right now yay, we won't say what the number is.

2:09:33 - Leo Laporte
Starts at 1000. I hope it's not like the ticket machine at the deli counter in our local grocery store where there's the number on the sign says 12 and the number I pulled is 26. I hope it's not that no, it's, it's.

2:09:45 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like. It's like the start of the barclay marathons, where the race organizers have picked a date. Nobody the part, no participant, no, excuse me, knows what, what, what time the start, the the race will start. Nobody who is actually marshalled at the start line knows what hour between midnight and midnight it's going to be. But it's.

2:10:03 - Leo Laporte
That's my kind of marathon. I like it check it out. I will.

2:10:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I will say check out the berkeley marathons if you haven't heard about it.

2:10:08 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing I will b-a-r-k-l-e-y or b-e-r-k-L-E-Y or.

2:10:12 - Andy Ihnatko
B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y B-A-R-K-L-E-Y. There's an amazing documentary about it, but even if you just read about the most amazing road race ever devised, it is a work of art the way this race has been devised. You're talking about someone who has no interest whatsoever in road racing whatsoever.

2:10:35 - Jason Snell
And it's like whoever did this should be.

2:10:36 - Leo Laporte
It's an ultra marathon. Only 15 people have ever completed it.

2:10:39 - Andy Ihnatko
All I will say to prevent like a half hour discussion of this amazing thing. The whole point of it is, when you talk to the person who designed this, it's like the whole point of something being a challenge is that there has to be an anticipation of failure. If you go into this thinking that there's a good chance that you're going to succeed, you're not really challenging yourself and everything is just designed to basically give you an amazing experience.

2:11:02 - Leo Laporte
Now that would be a good Vision Pro movie. I'd go see that there was a documentary in 2014, the Barkley Marathons the Race that Eats Its Young.

2:11:14 - Andy Ihnatko
It takes place in a state park and they're only even allowed to have 40 people running this race, and so, basically, people apply. There's no website, no phone number. The idea is that if you have any business running this race, you will figure out how to apply. If you're accepted, you get a letter saying we regret to inform you. You have been accepted as a racer in this year's Berkeley Marathon.

2:11:37 - Leo Laporte
So sorry you're going to die.

2:11:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Please seek this out. It's amazing. It's a very positive thing. It's not like alpha male oh, I'm going to hit myself with a hammer every third step. It's like, no, it's like Yoda in Power Strikes Back telling Luke Skywalker what's in the cave?

2:11:56 - Leo Laporte
only what you bring with you, just patiently sitting and just like playing with a stick uh, great trick for the couch potato and all of us.

2:12:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's watch somebody else suffer this time to watch, not fun, yeah yeah, fun.

2:12:08 - Leo Laporte
Fun to watch, not fun to do. Alex Lindsay is at officehours.global. What's coming up on office hours um?

2:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
we thought that this week we were just going to answer questions so.

2:12:19 - Leo Laporte
So we were like I'm gonna stop asking you, I'm sorry, no, no no.

2:12:22 - Alex Lindsay
so so we're we are excited about uh. We will have uh extra hours on monday night. We're going to bring a couple programmers oliver uh, breidenbach uh from oh I love olive, and adam tau from uh, that does mix of actions. We're going to bring them on with a couple other folks and talk about it that evening. Of course we're going to do some. We're not going to do the whole day, we're not as committed as you are, so we'll do something during the actual keynote and then we'll, of course, talk about it on Tuesday. So you know, our first half of the week will be very focused on it, nice week we'll be very focused on on it as well.

2:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Very cool officehours.global and, of course, Michael Krasny show, which alex produces at graymatter.show. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Jason Snell, who produces more content than any living human at sixcolors.com uh, sixcolors.com/jason, for all those shows. Anything you want to particularly mention?

2:13:14 - Jason Snell
Uh, I mean I uh, we just did our, our WWDC draft on upgrade.

2:13:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I love that. Yes, that's right yes.

2:13:21 - Jason Snell
And uh, and then we'll be doing upgrade next week, hopefully live from Apple park on Monday afternoon, so we'll see how that goes. Nice, uh, so yeah, nice, so yeah, just keep it tuned to whatever thing you use to tune things for more next week, which will be a wild week.

2:13:38 - Leo Laporte
Relay.fm/upgrade. Yes, sir, very nice. Yeah, I always like to listen to the draft ahead of time to know what I'm looking for. Do you make a bingo card or anything like that?

2:13:48 - Jason Snell
I mean the draft is my bingo card. I mean we picked 14 each, so there's lots of random things in there this year which should make for a really nice random selection of who wins and who loses.

2:13:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Did anyone pick the line which I didn't think of until Alex started talking about what he was expecting for WBC, the line people love, the Apple Vision Pro? I think that's I want that to happen.

2:14:18 - Jason Snell
Not that, but there are some stagecraft picks in there. So we'll see. You know, we'll see whether I made a mention to you know, like an Apple, is there an Apple TV or F1, like reference somewhere in the regular presentation or not? You know stuff like that. Are they going to actually mention that there's something that they failed to do last year that they're doing this year, or are they going to just glide on by? We made some picks, we'll see.

2:14:44 - Leo Laporte
They're all there at Upgrade.cards you can get your draft picks.

2:14:49 - Jason Snell
Score at home.

2:14:50 - Leo Laporte
Score at home for fun. Maybe we'll do that, maybe we'll do that?

2:14:54 - Jason Snell
uh, we'll, uh, we'll do that. You know, give a running update about about who's doing hurley's winning, hurley's running oh no, he's, yeah, he's on a streak now, so uh, thank you all.

2:15:05 - Leo Laporte
We do mac break weekly, which is also fun to watch and, believe it or not, fun to do every Tuesday, 11 am pacific. Uh, that would be 2 pm Eastern time, that would be 1800 UTC. I mentioned that because you can watch this live. Of course, if you're in the club, you get behind the velvet rope access in the club to a discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, Linkedin, x.com and  Kick seven other places.

You can watch live at that time, but you don't have to because we actually record it on reel-to-reel tapes and then put it up on our website at twit.tv. And actually there's video as well as the audio. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video great way to share clips with friends and family. And, of course, you can always subscribe in your favorite podcast application. Despite attempts to destroy RSS, it lives on and, thank goodness, we're very happy to be distributed that way. If you have a favorite public podcast application, I hope you will give your favorite podcast five stars. That will help us out. A lot thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next week and, as I have said for so many years, we're coming close to our thousandth episode. You know 20, only a half a year away.

2:16:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Definitely a nice cake for that. Yeah, a nice cake.

2:16:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, get back to work, because break time is over. Bye.

2:16:24 - Mikah Sargent
Hey, focus up. That is what I said to Hands On Tech when we looked at the relaunch. It is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question. I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club Twit, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad-free, of course, listen to the audio version ad-free. If you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads, or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean, listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you got to tune in to Hands On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to, and from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort. You gotta check out Hands-On Tech and I can't wait to get your question.