Transcripts

MacBreak Weekly 978 Transcript

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex and Jason are all here. We're going to talk about Beta 2 of iOS 26 and macOS 26. It's a little toned down from the first Beta. Also a big anniversary the fifth anniversary of Apple's Silicon and the 45th anniversary of the infamous Apple typewriter memo. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 978, recorded Tuesday, june 24th 2025: Half-Baked Bread Is Still Dough. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest apple news with the apple triad, our peerless prognosticators of perpetual pomdom. Mr sixcolors.com himself, Jason Snell, is in the house.

0:01:05 - Jason Snell
Purple leo, purple the purple our peerless purple prognosticator is is purple for my peerless purple pros.

0:01:15 - Leo Laporte
Thank you thank you, jason. And also here, he's not purple, he's black and white, basically red all over green from Pixar, mr Andy and Akko in the library where it is sweltering hot. Don't they have AC in the library?

0:01:31 - Andy Ihnatko
they have really good AC in the library, so much so much so that it's kind of, yeah, it's I, literally it's like a 10 to 15 minute walk and I'm like I could drive. But no, I did the right. I did the right thing and I walked. It was something real special. I am not joking, I am not wearing a single like stitch of natural fibers today. It's like the performance, like anti-humidity shirt and the performance anti-humidity, you know, over shirt that I'm not even wearing. I even got like the nylon pants on that are tailored to look like regular pants but are not fooling anybody.

0:02:09 - Leo Laporte
How nice and and how. How are you? How is the sweat being wicked away from you?

0:02:14 - Andy Ihnatko
well, I'm not feeling it. I mean it's causing a problem for anybody to my life.

0:02:19 - Leo Laporte
Everybody around you know those guys also here in the beautiful powerless no, you have power in the powered marin county of california at the moment.

0:02:30 - Alex Lindsay
At the moment, you're not, we entered the season earlier. Usually it's august where you start prepping for I'm gonna lose power once a week. Um, you know, they call them wind psp use right?

0:02:43 - Jason Snell
I don't know it, it's PS, ps, it's power safety. It's a public safety power shutdown.

0:02:49 - Leo Laporte
Public safety power shutdown.

0:02:52 - Jason Snell
I pronounce it WTF Basically, if you are unlucky enough to be Alex and be in an area where there are some lines on your you know, whatever circuit, whatever part of the grid that are out in wildfire country and it's going to be windy. They now, since many of the fires in California have started because of power lines, they de-energize some of the lines, which sucks, if you like, Alex are also on those lines.

0:03:20 - Alex Lindsay
They put almost all of those underground where I actually live. But we're on the same circuit.

0:03:24 - Jason Snell
Oh really, You're on the same circuit. Oh really, You're on the same circuit as up in the hills.

0:03:28 - Leo Laporte
That's the problem is it's not, yeah, it's at the head end. Hey, this is a big anniversary. This week, five years ago at WWDC, apple made a surprise announcement that they were dumping Intel for Apple Silicon. It would be a few more months before the Apple Silicon computers max came out, but this was a big story. And now we are five years down the road and I have to say I would say amazing success. You agree there? Yeah, absolutely.

0:03:57 - Andy Ihnatko
It's almost as if we're reacting to the news that oh, by the way, the iPhone is now gonna be available in a rose gold. That's a little bit more rose gold next year. It was for something that was so titanic in its scope, it was just oh well, if you have an existing Mac, it's going to work fine for the foreseeable future. If you buy a brand new Mac, it's going to work really, really great immediately, without any pain points. I mean, the transition from PowerPC to Intel wasn't nearly as smooth as this, and it was pretty smooth, Good job.

0:04:30 - Leo Laporte
In fact so smooth that they're phasing out Rosetta 2, the compatibility layer in the next generation of Mac OS.

0:04:39 - Jason Snell
They like to use that and try to clear out the old software that's not being updated anymore. It's a little. I've got to think that there's some sort of overhead or some sort of licensing cost, that the idea that if you've ever tried to run an Intel app on an Apple Silicon Mac, it wants to install Rosetta, which suggests to me that they're keeping track of Rosetta installs and that means that they're probably paying somebody a licensing fee for something that they'd rather not do forever. And so you end up sort of saying, look, this is the end of it, and forcing people to migrate to other apps that are not well, yeah, I mean either the app developer can fix it.

0:05:17 - Leo Laporte
But it's not unusual. I've seen a few apps say, okay, that's good, we're done goodbye.

0:05:22 - Jason Snell
The good news is most of the apps that were going to be in this I mean there are going to be apps that die but the fact is there was a 32-bit transition that happened with Mac OS. Catalina. That's the one that really was the speaking of wildfires. That was like the prescribed burn that burned away all the stuff that was still on ancient APIs and stuff Anything that is running on Intel 64 bit. Today there's a project, there's an Xcode project somewhere with that app in it and so, yeah, there's gonna be some abandoned ware.

But I don't think there will be that much because the Catalina thing that hurt and people like our friend James Thompson was doing DragThing for years and years and years. He does PCALC and that's still around. But DragThing for years and years and years. He does pCalc and that's still around. But DragThing was this great Mac utility but it was 32-bit, it used a lot of old technology and when they announced the Catalina transition he said that's it, it's done, and a lot of apps kind of died at that point and a lot of people thought and we may have even talked about it here a little conspiracy theory is apple did it then so that their apple silicon transition would not be seen as being as cataclysmic, so they they got the cataclysm out of the way a couple years ago.

0:06:32 - Leo Laporte
That makes sense.

0:06:32 - Jason Snell
It was kind of uh, it was a one-two punch yeah, yeah, so they just took the 32-bit stuff away first, I mean the chip, the.

0:06:39 - Alex Lindsay
What they announced five years ago was in in the development for a long time it was already in in the iPhone right In the iPads, so they had Apple Silicon.

0:06:47 - Jason Snell
In fact there were two iPad Pros that came out that were using those what A12X and A12Z, which I think Apple has even said that was their like test bed for what if we did a higher performance version of our iPad and iPhone chips, put it in the iPad Pro, and they were really just kind of revving the engine to get to the point where they did M1. And then I mean we can remember back five years, were there any bad reviews of the Apple Silicon M1 Macs, like they were so superior in every possible way.

0:07:19 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, and it didn't just affect the Mac users, it changed the PC industry because everybody look what's happened to intel in the intervening five years. Everybody looked at this and said this is, we're not getting anywhere near the battery life, the power per watt, uh, they had, of course, mac silicon, apple silicon had npus uh, neural processors, uh, ml processors built in I. This was a big shift in the entire PC industry said whoa, I don't think they expected it. Once these computers came out a few months later, I think everybody in the PC industry said we got to read Intel back to the drawing board. Qualcomm all of a sudden becomes a leader. It took them a few years, but their Snapdragon Elite now is coming a little closer. I don't think it's there, but almost close to Apple Silicon.

0:08:08 - Jason Snell
It's a great example of how sometimes and it doesn't always happen this way, but sometimes Apple because they control more of the inputs into their products than most companies Apple can make a decision with. I don't want to say courage, because I feel like Apple ruined that word for everything, but really, like Apple can say look, we are confident that these ARM processors that we're designing are going to be able to handle Mac workloads. And yeah, there are issues with GPUs and external GPUs and the memory architecture and like there are all those things that they built for iPhone. But they're like we think this is going to make great Macs and they were right. But they also, by demonstrating that a lot of the industry that was never going to make that step looked at them and said, oh okay, it's safe for us to make that step and that's a way that Apple's just because of the way they're set up, they can lead the industry there.

0:09:01 - Alex Lindsay
And doing something that's completely vertical, like that is crazy unless you're Apple. There's really vertical like that is crazy unless you're Apple. Yeah, you know there's really nobody else that should do what Apple's doing. We're just trying to own that entire like. They're only doing it because they got to a certain point where they're at a certain scale, they have enough of. Their market is all set up that way. But it, you know, generally this kind of vertical alignment is, and I don't think that they're done.

You see them looking at the cell, at this, all the different chips that are in there. Then they talk about all the external chips, like as legacy chips. You know like they're, you know that they, they. I think that they envision somewhere in the future there's a piece of Silicon that is your phone, that's just inside the screen, like, like, there's not, there's not a bunch of little chips, there's not many other little things.

I think that it may take them a long time to get there, they may never get there, but I think that that's the North Star, for what Apple wants to do is just build a chip that does the thing and own every piece of that chip, and there's just a chip inside with a couple of things, that external, that tie into the other things, and I think that you'll just see them keep on rolling that up because it just gives them an enormous efficiency. And again, you can only get that if you're at their scale, and if you're making 75 million or something is the only time you can do that kind of thing and almost nobody else is doing that.

0:10:14 - Jason Snell
I just wrote this morning in fact a piece that'll be on Macworld site later this week about this very subject, so I'm glad you brought it up. Leo, I'll point out that it's not just the fifth anniversary of uh of apple announcing their transition off of intel, it's also the 20th anniversary of apple announcing its transition on to intel. Oh wow, that's a good point which was wwc 2005 yeah where they and.

and then it's not quite, because it was 94 when the first power max came out. So this is the third big chip transition the Mac has gone through. In that time I was chuckling. I actually went through the archive. I've got a bunch of old Mac Week story texts from back then and I was looking through it.

And it's funny, the Power PC transition, which, for those who were not around back then, they went from the Motorola processors the 68,000 series that was in the original Macs, and then in the early 90s they went to PowerPC, which was a company. It was basically the Apple, ibm and Motorola alliance. So Apple was doing research into RISC processors and so was IBM and they came together and they brought in Motorola to make this new generation of processors that they felt would compete better with what Intel was doing with 486 and Pentium and things like that. And if you read the stories as I did from like 94, 93, you see that Apple was dissatisfied with the pace of chip transformation, growth and speed increases and was frustrated that they didn't have any control over it and that their entire product was controlled by a single supplier's uh plans, which is Motorola. And I'm like that's literally the story every single time. This has happened, because then, with PowerPC, the story is that, um, ibm was building those G5s and said that they would go to three gigahertz, which they could never reach, and and the G5 couldn't go in a laptop and everybody was very frustrated. And that's the moment that Steve stood on stage and said it's true and unveiled the Intel thing, which got them a lot.

And in those early days of Intel, like Apple erased for people who don't remember that era like Apple erased the whole issue of like but Macs aren't as fast because they were having those issues. Now Macs would always be as fast as a PC because they're using the same chips. It also was just in that early moment where the iPod was big and the iPhone was about to be big and the Intel processor meant that you could run a virtual version of Windows on it at almost full speed, which allowed people who are curious but afraid of losing that important Windows app that they had to use to take the plunge, because it was always there. And I think the truth is most of those people never actually did use that Windows, that Parallels or VMware thing that they installed, but it was there if they needed it and so it was like perfect timing for them.

But forward 15 years and Intel's pace of, you know, intel had kind of lost the lead. Its pace of change really reduced. Tsmc was coming on and the big difference is, of course, apple had spent the past decade working with TSMC. They were designing chips and TSMC was building them. So that transition five years ago was like the biggest no-brainer for Apple because they'd already gone through it. They already knew how they were going to do Rosetta. You know, they controlled their development environment.

Another lesson learned from PowerPC, where MetroWorks Code Warrior was the software used to build PowerPC apps on the Mac and not controlled by Apple Not great.

So they did Xcode and they've got Xcode for everybody. So you know, I wrote a piece about this maybe five years ago and I said you know, I don't, I'd like to believe that there are people at Apple who worked on PowerPC, the PowerPC transition, who are still there and and like I've got this down to a science now this is the third time, but that's a long time. And I heard after I wrote that piece, I heard from somebody who was like oh yeah, there are a bunch of us here who are, who, who were here back then and like it's no, no company. I mean to take a whole platform and move it to a completely different chip architecture is a big deal and they've done it three times and it was fine all three times. And and I think again other to Alex's point about apple, like having the extra difficulty in doing you know more stuff than anybody else, like the fact that Apple just three times has said yeah, there's better chips over there.

0:14:30 - Alex Lindsay
We're going to go over there and has, and has nailed it all three times and at this point, and I think it does get better and better, and I think one of the things that makes it better is that they own the OS. They own the development, you know, as you said, the development platform, and by owning all of those stacks it makes this much more smooth. In a way that makes it very hard, it makes it very easy for them to continue to innovate, especially as they pull more and more chips into the system and more and more of the hardware into the system. It makes it much more. Now they have to stay in front of everybody.

The danger of what Apple's doing is that they can easily, you know, suddenly not be able to produce as fast as their competitors. There's, given verticals, like not being able to keep up with the, you know, a variety of the modem chips or or other things like that. That's going to be. That's. That'll be a challenge when you start doing it all in one. But there's the advantages from, like, just merging the CPU with the, you know, with the GPU, and then having them sitting on the same chip as the RAM. You can make a lot of mistakes and have that work well, because it's just so efficient, because it doesn't have to slow down to the bus.

0:15:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and the other thing that part of the story is we forget that Intel boy, apple, was just not a subject of Intel's intention for a number of years. There where time after time like, why are we getting this new MacBook? Well, because Intel promised Apple they'd be able to deliver this CPU generation by X date and they completely failed to do that. So it wasn't just Apple. It's very true that Apple always wants to control everything wherever they can. They don't like relying on outside anybody for anything, but nonetheless, it was like we are going to die soon if we are at the whim of Intel's ability to execute their roadmap.

0:16:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and they knew at that point they had spent, you know, eight, nine, 10 years designing their own ships and building them with TSMC and had gotten their legs under them. I think you know, if you would ask Johnny Scruci and his team in 2014 or something to build a Mac processor, they'd be like you know, maybe, but by 2020, it was like a done deal, right, and obviously they had been working on it for a couple of years and like so they went in with confidence. So my only question is like is, in 10 or 15 years, is there going to be another chip transition? And the answer would be it would have to be cataclysmic. Something cataclysmic would have to happen. But you know, life comes at you fast. You never know. But apple seems to be right where they want to be. Which?

0:16:56 - Leo Laporte
is building the first time they've made their own right computer in a package.

0:17:00 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean yeah because apple the aim alliance was. You know, Moto was building those chips, and then IBM was building those chips and Apple was involved, but they had to rely on partners. And I mean you could argue that this is similar, but the TSMC is a much better partner than IBM was ultimately for the G5.

0:17:19 - Leo Laporte
It's conceivable that either tariffs or a Chinese retaking Taiwan could put TSMC in jeopardy.

0:17:27 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but even then, I think what you'd see is Apple taking its design and getting a fab, even if it had to go back to an older chip node the legacy nodes out there they could do that and build those chips in the U? S or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Or go to or go to Samsung and have them build them in korea, like there are. There would be options, but that would be in under the line of cataclysmic yeah, and it would be, it'd be cataclysmic.

0:17:52 - Alex Lindsay
But I think that apple, apple could spend 50 billion dollars on making the shift if they had to. You know, like it's, that's a. That's the kind of number that very few companies can just do. You know, flip the switch and and in a year, somewhere else.

0:18:04 - Leo Laporte
It's been a huge success and ironically, you can now run Intel stuff pretty well, in fact Linux stuff pretty well on the new Tahoe because it has a container with Linux on it and, truthfully, even if you're running Windows on ARM on an Apple, it often runs better on Apple Silicon than it does on the options for Windows PCs. Windows on ARM runs great in Fusion on my Mac, on my M3 Macs.

0:18:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's the other part. I put that in my Macworld story a little bit too. Is that the funny thing is getting off Intel means you don't have that really convenient full-speed Intel virtual machine. But guess what happened?

0:18:45 - Leo Laporte
Guess who else got off Intel.

0:18:46 - Jason Snell
Now you've got Windows that will run on ARM and you can use their version of Rosetta, which is very good actually at taking Intel Windows apps and running them on ARM, and so here we go, right, like Apple kind of led the way, but in the end you can still do that and it's pretty great yeah.

0:19:08 - Leo Laporte
This isn't the only anniversary. You mentioned the PowerPC transition, but who can forget the infamous Apple typewriter memo which came out 40 years ago? I guess it's not really an anniversary. It says February 1980. So maybe this is an old article, but I do love this. Yeah, it is an old article. It's 45 years ago now. Uh, apple is an end.

Of this is from mike scott then ceo then ceo of apple from february 1977 to march 1981. In february 1980 he decided to write this memo Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let's all use it. By January 81, no typewriters at Apple can get rid of the DEC word processor ASAP. By the way, if you give up your typewriter you'll get the latest Apple II plus Apple 2 writer system and first priority on new apple high performance systems.

0:20:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I wrote a lot of words in apple writer. That was their own word processor that they had for a long time.

0:20:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, was the 80 column card a thing in 1981 yet, or the, where they still be, still stuck with 40 columns. I want to say 80 columns came with the Apple IIe.

0:20:26 - Jason Snell
The IIe could do it.

0:20:28 - Andy Ihnatko
It was built in, but I know you get a card for the II+.

0:20:31 - Jason Snell
For the II+ maybe so, maybe so.

0:20:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Because in an office full of Apple II+ that did not even have upper and lowercase and 40 columns, you have to make sure that everybody has upper and lowercase and the ability to see an entire set.

0:20:46 - Jason Snell
Get that shift key mod in there. You get that yeah.

0:20:49 - Andy Ihnatko
And. I love it right.

0:20:50 - Jason Snell
That's dogfooding though he's like if we believe in this stuff, we got to live it. Good for them.

0:20:55 - Leo Laporte
And, incidentally, apple was developing the Lisa at this time. I know that seems pretty early, but they already had a Lisa team working on a graphic interface and all of that.

0:21:05 - Alex Lindsay
So what's amazing is that I look back on it. I was thinking about when I was in school and when the when I got an Apple IIe, I think, when I was, I think, 13 or 12 or 13. And, and that was the last time I was talking to somebody, a teacher I was like that's the last time I hand, that's the last time I did cursive, the cursive.

I never did cursive again oh yeah, because the teachers didn't care that I was back then. They weren't sensitive Like, oh, people have to learn how to do cursive. It was just like really easy to read.

0:21:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, in eighth grade in 1983, 84,. In eighth grade I talked to my teachers and I said I would like to print.

I bring you a printout of what I wrote on my computer on a dot matrix printer, and they said yes, and in hindsight I look back and think my handwriting is and was so terrible that, as weird as it must have been to get these things printed out on a computer, they were probably relieved that they didn't have to try to decode my chicken scroll that I was doing I can probably top that in that I think I'm probably certainly the first student in my entire school system to submit a paper electronically, Because I had English at like 11 something and it was finished.

0:22:14 - Andy Ihnatko
I wrote it at home but I didn't have time to print it. So I said, hey, I can give it to you after lunch, as I go to the computer lab during lunch and print it out. And Dr Terrence Earles, beloved, beloved English teacher, said I've got an apple 2 at home. Why don't you just give me that disc that has paper written on it sneaker net and fortunately it wasn't a bluff, so he actually had it. That's pretty cool, but that was he, yeah. Yeah, he was very proud he was that he, that would have been, oh god, 83.

maybe make me feel so old.

0:22:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he wrote up he wrote a little bit well out of college before that. I did bring a typewriter in 1973 to college, uh, and I left with the typewriter. I don't think there were computers but I don't think we were submitting papers digitally. But my, I think my college newspaper.

0:23:06 - Jason Snell
My first job in my college newspaper was as a typist and it was literally. People would bring me typewritten manuscripts or things they printed out from their pc or whatever, and then I would retype them into microsoft word on an apple or on a mac se in order to get so we could put it in page maker and lay out the newspaper, and that was every now and then. Somebody come in with a Mac disc and it was like they were a conquering hero returned from afar, where they're like I have a disc with my story on it and we're like oh, it's so good.

Otherwise you got to retype it yourself. That was boy the primitive days of 1989.

0:23:41 - Leo Laporte
The period of time you'd go into the announcer's booth or the sports writer's booth at a Giants game and there'd be a row of TRS-80 Model 100s and they were typing on these little flat. They weren't laptops, they were little flat computers, they were wedges. And then they had a modem port With an acoustic coupler and they would finish the story.

0:24:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they would connect to the coupler with the handset, actually put the handset in this rubber molded thing yeah, and upload it from there.

0:24:14 - Leo Laporte
Um, so we come a long way it's wonderful to trace that history.

0:24:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I I only I I own three typewriters, uh, and one of them is like the laptop version, like the Smith Corona Skyrider from like 1940-something 50-something. They've made it for like 20 years. It was for, like, the traveling salesman or the traveling reporter or something he could like carry from place to place to place easily, and it really is about the size of the chonkiest PowerBook that Apple ever made, maybe just a little bit thicker, but it's like, yeah, at some point the idea of having a mechanical typewriter that was slim, lightweight and portable was actually a very, very attractive product.

0:24:55 - Leo Laporte
Well, as long as we're talking about the end of an era, you can see here my Mickey Mouse glove grabber on my spreadsheet. You know, you forget about the fact that those three lines indicate that that's a glove. Yep, and then when you grab, you grab with a glove. This is it. It's over for the glove. Tahoe has eliminated the three lines and somewhat simplified the glove.

0:25:19 - Andy Ihnatko
So you see they realized that we added us an element of fun and whimsy and we simply can't have that someday, uh, you young people will be looking back.

0:25:29 - Leo Laporte
You'll be doing a show like this with a bunch of oldsters say, remember when the glove had three lines on, remember when we had gloves incredible. It's incredible also, by the way. Firewire may be dead. Um, in mac os 26, that's uh the usb killer got killed by usb wow, how am I going to charge my original uh ipod?

0:25:53 - Andy Ihnatko
exactly, it's like this this is why this is why you you like every time you look back on that huge, huge box of just random ancient cables that you keep meaning to throw out and suddenly, suddenly, you're like, yeah, a couple of them, you gotta get four, a couple 400s couple, 800s, couple.

0:26:08 - Leo Laporte
You know like you gotta have a you probably had cameras right with their ieee 1397 lots of them.

0:26:14 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, this was a huge, the firewire was a huge revolution and you know, apple got all these cameras. What was really interesting is that apple uh, you know firewire was free to use and Apple got all these camera manufacturers to adopt it. Like now, you can just plug the camera in and just digitize directly from the camera to the computer, to iMovie and other people will use it, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Apple got all these camera manufacturers to support it and build it into their system. And then they charge $2 for licensing fee for the computers not for cameras, but for computers. Charge $2 for licensing fee for the computers, not for cameras, but for computers. And what that did? And people said, oh that, that that'll kill, that, That'll kill the format. And that's not. That's not what happened. What happened was is it kept all the PC manufacturers from adding FireWire to their computers and it meant that Apple basically had a free run of fire.

You know if you were doing video, you couldn't use a PC and and I talked to someone that might have been there at the time and and I was like this seems like the dumbest thing I've ever seen. He goes well, no one's gonna be making videos on pcs anytime soon, yeah and uh and so that.

0:27:13 - Andy Ihnatko
But they, but they first had to get the, the camera manufacturers all loaded up and building them, because once you get them building them, nick, you know it's years of, yeah, distribution for years I had this Franken-cable that was plugged into my cable box because when TV went digital, part of the negotiations with Congress was that, hey, but you still have to allow people to record things just like a VCR. So the concession was how about we put a firewire port on the back of cable boxes that if you are an incredibly technically savvy person and know where to find a piece of open source software, then you can actually capture video coming right off of your cable box? Sure that no one could use it. It was like FireWire. I needed FireWire to Thunderbolt, to something else, to actually get it into one of my Macs, and of course it stopped working at some point and I could have sued, but I decided it was too big for that. But yeah, firewire.

The thing is, it's certainly past time to lose whatever baggage FireWire is creating. But even when you decide, oh ha ha, firewire, no one's been using that. Oh God, how am I going to sync up stuff to my original iPod? There are, guarantee you, a significant, non-zero number of people that are like but I have this one thing at my facility that requires FireWire. And so suddenly, at my facility that requires FireWire, and so suddenly, like this Franken cable becomes the most valuable piece of property in the entire chemical plant, because if we lose that, we lose access to this data collection device that is actually essential to keep people in the plant and in the community alive.

0:29:00 - Leo Laporte
FireWire started 400 megabits per second, topped out at 800 megabits. That was the fastest Apple ever offered anyway. And now Thunderbolt 5 tops out 100 times faster at 80 gigabytes. Actually, that's 800 times faster. 800 gigabytes per second, that's a lot faster.

0:29:20 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's 80 gigabits 80 gigabytes, or is it gigabits? Okay, well then it would only be 10 gigabytes. Then it would only be 10 gigabytes, then it would only be 100 times faster.

0:29:28 - Leo Laporte
Sorry, it's too fast. All right, we're going to take a break, come back. There is more to talk about. Lots of rumors, lots of rumors.

But first a word from our sponsor. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay our show today, brought to you by Storyblok.

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I thought this was kind of interesting. Apple executives I use. My favorite AI is a kind of mashup of all the AIs called perplexity. I even use it for web searches. Apple executives apparently, according to Bloomberg, have had internal talks about buying perplexity. I even use it for web searches.

0:33:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple executives apparently, according to Bloomberg, have had internal talks about buying perplexity, which one market analyst said would immediately change their attitude towards Apple from from a bot to hold to a buy yeah, that was Bank of America, but that would be, by the way, that would be a 14 billion dollar buy at their current value valuation, which is about 10 times greater than their biggest. I think uh beats was there was beats like three point something or other.

0:33:54 - Leo Laporte
I think, yeah, it must be nice to be perplexity right now because meta tried to buy them earlier this year.

0:33:59 - Andy Ihnatko
They are hot but that it's, it's interesting and that they would get uh, they would basically get a pre-cooked like marie collander's pot pie, like it's all. It's all set. They've got stuff that's actually working. The big question would be, though, is like, could they integrate a unit, a team like this, into the apple culture, or would they just be there to train the people who are already at apple? They'd keep a few of them, and the rest of them would just be like I'm contracted here for five years, but I am so out of here as soon as we're done. Apple is such a unique culture that I don't know. It would be weird to figure out how they could keep the team that accomplished everything that they've accomplished as their own independent company could continue to function that way, as an integrated workforce inside Apple.

0:34:49 - Jason Snell
So I mean. My issue with perplexity is it's a product company, not an LLM company.

0:34:56 - Leo Laporte
Although they have their own custom, something around.

0:34:58 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but they mostly are using other models.

And so this doesn't get to my mind. If Apple were to buy perplexity for $15 billion or whatever $20 billion whatever they ended up having to offer, I mean, they'd get some good press. That's probably not worth $20 billion. I think they wouldn't get the thing they need the most, which is probably help internally building models, although I don't know the state of their current thing. But fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Like they haven't really shown that they're great at that. So is this an injection of talent to build products that doesn't actually solve their underlying problem? And does it really solve the fact that they, you know, are they struggling to integrate? Because in a lot of ways, apple does a pretty good job of integrating ML features in their operating systems.

The thing that struck me about this is that they have their search product, and if you're in an era where Google search, as the default, may be in trouble based on court rulings, and that AI search seems like the future, I do wonder if Eddie Q looks at perplexity and says, hmm, maybe that's our future. Search engine is something that we could own and uses other technology from other companies too, but that we, you know it would be our AI system on top of it. I think that's interesting, but I'll come back to it again. I don't know if buying perplexity solves what might be the biggest underlying problem, which is that Apple does not seem to have cutting edge people building models and that over the last few years they probably lost anybody who wanted to be a cutting edge person doing models to some other company. So it's a weird fit. Also, we should mention a lot of stories about perplexity being bought came out last week Like there's been an organized plan by somebody to really stir the pot and get people talking about perplexity?

Yeah, yeah, I do wonder about that, but like if I were at a queue I'd be talking to them too, because just on the search part alone it's an interesting possibility.

0:37:03 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I use it for search uh as well as uh for a model. This is I pay 20 bucks a month for perplexity pro. This is the choice of models you get if you uh have the pro version. Perplexity has its own. They say sonar fast model, which is probably somebody else's model. That's been uh, you know adapted. They do offer clod 4, the latest version version of cloud, gpd 4.1, gemini 2.0, so you get access to all of the latest models. You even get uh perplexity's own reasoning model.

In fact, perplexity recently added a research tab. It says if you're willing to wait a few minutes and sometimes it's as long as 10 you can. You can ask it to do a big research task, and it's been. I used it before I went to my doctor and found it very useful. I one of the things that perplexity does well and maybe Apple would be interested in is the fact that it doesn't really often hallucinate. I can pretty much trust the test that the search results because it's using the web as a backup. It's kind of retrieved what they call retrieval augmented generation using the Internet. So it's pretty darn accurate.

0:38:15 - Jason Snell
The general sense is that people think Perplexity has done a good job of building a product, and building it on top of some other models.

Is that what apple wants? I should also say that in the in the the member discord, it pointed out that I I that that aphorism that I learned from scotty and star trek. I said it wrong because it's fool me once. Shame on you. You shouldn't fool me. Fool me twice. Shame on me. I shouldn't be a sucker to believe that you wouldn't fool me again. I feel like that's where I am with apple's ai efforts is you've got to have that added skepticism of. They're not. It's not a first cut at it, it's like they kind of blew it. But now?

0:38:46 - Leo Laporte
are they on the case or not? The top guy from Google, John Gennadrea.

0:38:50 - Jason Snell
I know right.

0:38:51 - Leo Laporte
And everybody, we all said, oh, this is going to be great. And it didn't pan out.

0:38:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, although in the end, they do have a lot of really impressive AI stuff. This is the when we try to simplify what's going on with Apple and AI. Apple has for years had a lot of really good AI stuff and they still do have a lot of good AI stuff. But in that key moment when LLMs were starting to blossom, the people at Apple who were in charge of AI and I think they've kind of turned their nose up at them was like, well, that's just silly nonsense, forget about that. And they missed their moment. And now they got to catch up. And moment. And now they got to catch up and can they? Did they blow it? Did they turn off a lot of people? Do they? Can they hire people? Do they need to acquihire? I think that's. I mean, it's very hard to say this on the outside, but like perplexity to me. On one level, they're doing what apple should also be good at, which is taking, you know, ai stuff and making products out of it, and if they're not good at that, then it's maybe a good purchase and and that's why I mentioned the search stuff Integrating into Apple's OSs, I think, is something that Apple's probably going to be able to do.

I think they're good at that. I think that's actually what Apple is generally good at. But the search thing is a great example of like that's just a product that they haven't built and if they're really concerned, it might be worth $15 billion. I mean, how much is the search business worth to them? Google's paying them what? $20 billion a year for that? Like it might be worth it to get boom. You've got your own AI-powered search that you can wire up to every Apple device. Maybe, but like I don't know.

0:40:23 - Leo Laporte
That's a big swing, though you go.

0:40:24 - Andy Ihnatko
go from getting paid 20 billion a year to spending 15 billion or 40 billion for it and because you're, and because you're apple, you're not going to be able to monetize it the way that google has been able that's right monetize it through exactly.

0:40:34 - Jason Snell
You have to do it yourself, instead of having a, an intermediator to make all the money off of all those people who are using your product yeah, and that's why you have to bury your own bodies from now on.

Yeah and my spider sense. The reason my spider sense is tingling about this is mostly because it it on its surface, apple buying an ai company kind of makes sense. If they could get an infusion of talent in an area where they have a deficit, that's great. But the more you look at what perplexity actually does and it does a good job at what it's doing but it feels like the wrong. Like this does, it would be a splash. But like, is this where apple needs the most help?

0:41:10 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not sure it is and I still think that I don't think it's the same. I think that a lot of the press and, and I think that apple last year got into this thing where apple it's an existential threat for apple and I just I still will keep on saying it's not like I'm not. I'm using plenty of ai all over my Apple devices. I don't feel like I'm missing a whole lot. It's not like I don't have a high expectation for Siri to do anything, so it's uh, so it's not really like, but, but it doesn't matter, like I'm, it's. What am I going to do? Go to another operating system? So, so, the, so, the, the, and. Because one thing that Apple keeps on doing is the lock between all of these different services and all the different things that you have is so tight that if you've bought into that, you're not going anywhere, you know. And so, um, not anytime soon. And so I think Apple has a lot more time and I think that this long play, the short play, they're not good at, you know, they're not going to be able to do that, and I think that they it was a mistake for them to say that they, they, they could but the long play of I'm going to put. All you know. They own the operating system, they own the, the development system, they own the hardware. Being able to tie more and more of AI stuff into something that's happening on device that's more secure, that's less expensive. That you know, all those other things is a huge advantage that they have potentially two years from now or three years from now, where they don't have to negotiate with anybody, they don't talk to anyone about it doesn't and as long as they can get the release valve of making it easy to talk to other ai tools. You know, the integration with other ai tools which we're seeing in xcode and we're seeing other places really makes all of that, I think, work really well and I just don't think that I don't think a lot of of a it's not. It's just not the same Like Google.

Google, it's absolutely the same. I barely use Google search now, like you know, like it's just a very rare thing for me to search. In fact, I sometimes search and then I go. What am I doing here?

0:42:56 - Leo Laporte
What do you use?

0:42:58 - Alex Lindsay
instead. So for images, I'm typically using Midjourney, but I'm also using Kling and Leonardo, and then for coding, I'm still kind of in the cloud. But for search, what do you use? Chatgpt? I literally hit a button and I say Janet, from the good place, janet, where is this? And I take pictures. I take pictures. This isn't starting. I don't even tell it what it is.

My problem with replacing Google search is and this is true perplexity. I get a lot of ai stuff. All I want is links. Oh see, I don't want the links, you don't want the links, I just want the data, like, just like I don't care about the links, I don't, I don't care about you're not looking for a site then, you're just looking for information, I will, I, I am, I am generally just I agree if, if I don't, if I want to check the veracity of that chat, gpt is handing me links of what it's based on the whole way through.

0:43:51 - Leo Laporte
Same thing with perplexity, that's why I can go much more trustworthy.

0:43:54 - Alex Lindsay
So I can go. I can go look at it and obviously I'm going to buy something or do something and usually when I'm asking chat GPT for something, I'm going to know it's real or not in about 10 seconds later, because I'm asking how to do something I'm about to do you know like, that's like 90 of my searches I'm like, I'm like it's gonna get, it's gonna get tested by reality really fast, you know. And so um, and I find that how you put out a grease fire exactly.

I don't ask chat dbd for that so, but so it.

0:44:22 - Leo Laporte
While it does feel like this, like these are placed stories, it is the case that when Eddie Q was on the witness stand during the Google trial, he said there's a direct quote from Bloomberg we've been pretty impressed with what Perplexity has done, so we've started some discussions with them about what they're doing, so maybe that was the seed for this Bloomberg story, or maybe Perplexity's been calling around saying, hey, they don't need to buy it right.

0:44:48 - Jason Snell
They could be talking to them about a deal to use their search and incidentally, when perplexity was asked, it made a statement.

0:44:55 - Leo Laporte
We have no knowledge of any current or future M&A discussions involving perplexity. Exactly how you see it. Exactly how you see it, and that's how you should say it, by the way, because who was the company that prematurely announced that apple was gonna buy them and it fell? It fell apart immediately, right, I can't remember who it was, but it was not a good thing to do it's the sort of company that you would forget who they were.

Yes, they're immediately sank below the surface yeah, jason's good piece on uh using uh an ipad for making podcasts.

0:45:27 - Jason Snell
Yeah yeah, I did. I decided not to do like a stunt and secretly do this episode and I'm just using a mac for this, but I could, I mean you could if you wanted to.

0:45:38 - Leo Laporte
You and dan moran did your six colors podcast. Yeah, yeah, the big deal here.

0:45:43 - Jason Snell
I mean for, for those who don't know, is that a lot of podcasts and video shows not this one, um, because we use zoom and it all just sort of is recorded live but a lot of them. You've got people on unreliable connections, um, and when you're doing something like zoom or any other voice over ip, it prioritizes latency over quality. So, like it doesn't if if you sound a little bit bad but you sound immediate, it's better than if you're lagging three seconds behind the conversation but sound immaculate. It just makes sense, right? The problem is for a podcast, you want it to be immaculate, and so those two things are different, like real-time communication versus having a super high quality recording are different.

So a lot of podcasters they do the conversation on a VOIP app and they record locally their full quality audio and video, and you could never do that on the iPad or the iPhone before because of multitasking reasons. And in 26, they built in this feature that it's at a system level that'll let you press record when you're doing a zoom call and your mic and video will be recorded to your device full quality and then you can use, you can email it to somebody or put it on dropbox or whatever, literally anything you want to do with it. And so we did this, we tried it out and I I had some nerdy tech specs. So basically it's an MP4 container but it's FLAC audio inside, so it's compressed, but it's lossless compression, so it's full quality, no compression artifacts, at 48 kilohertz, so it's like full range audio. And then, I don't know, ours was audio only, but like it's going to give you an MP4 video coming right off of whatever your camera is.

0:47:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so you could do video too.

0:47:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, absolutely. It'll, it'll, it'll generate both for you. So, um, it's just another thing that it's like they're checking off the boxes of like reasons why you might not use an iPad and and or iPhone. This, actually, I think one of the most exciting things about this is, if you want to do a podcast with somebody and they're traveling, they can bring a little USB microphone and attach it to their iPhone and do a podcast and give you a full quality file at the end.

0:47:53 - Alex Lindsay
And the problem we've had before is either you had to compress it a lot or you had to and you know you had to compress it a lot to get it out or breaking up all the time with 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever. So all the time with 5G or Wi-Fi or whatever.

0:48:03 - Jason Snell
So yeah, if you hear the dropouts I can. I mean as a podcast editor. I can hear when somebody does something on used to be Skype, now it's Zoom. I can hear those dropouts that back in the day so many people just recorded the Skype call and you could hear the dropouts.

0:48:16 - Leo Laporte
I hear them in my nightmares, I know right.

0:48:17 - Jason Snell
And so this is more work, but it is the highest, highest quality audio that you can get. And the iPad, because the iPad and the iPhone just were not made for multitasking. It just wasn't. It wasn't there. And rather than like doing an API, I mean, the truth is, an app could be written for the iPad that does this, but that's. The problem is that all the apps that that people use don't do this and they're not apparently going to. So instead, apple just put it in the system and let you do, let you take control of your own device. It's a great thing, and it's even better than I thought it would be, because it is like full, uncompressed or losslessly compressed audio in that stream and importing that file into an editor. There's nothing to it. You drag a file in and it just imports it. There's nothing special about it, it's nothing weird about it. It's just an audio file. So it's one less thing to worry about. When you're doing, you know if you're with an iPad or an iPhone and not on a Mac.

0:49:11 - Alex Lindsay
Did you test anything about how to start everybody at the same time, or is that still something that's?

0:49:16 - Jason Snell
It's not like that.

0:49:18 - Leo Laporte
It won't do syncing, it doesn't matter, because when we've done double-enders they drift anyway. And so you still have to re-sync all the time you do.

0:49:26 - Jason Snell
You do have to do that. I've got a tool on my mac that does that and everybody asks for it, and I say the author of it, who shall remain nameless, it's not, it's not me, it's one of my friends, uh, doesn't want to release it publicly, so, okay, I can't share it with you, but is it?

0:49:39 - Leo Laporte
automatic problem. Uh, yeah, it, it, it looks at the waveform and matches them up it matches them up.

0:49:46 - Jason Snell
It's amazing, but I can't. But I can't release it to anybody. I've got a whole automator thing where you click on a file and you say sync it, and it syncs it. And it's amazing, but I can't ever release it such a holdout every year.

I ask him if he'll let me release that somewhere. So anyway, um, the weird quirk about this feature is it and I think it it's a privacy thing which is great is it only works when you have an active VOIP session, so like, if you press record and your Zoom call hasn't started yet, it doesn't record your audio.

Oh, that's interesting, it doesn't record your video, because no app on your system is asking for your microphone, right. Once an app asks for your microphone or your camera, like zoom, when a session starts, then the recording starts. So it's it's very specifically only when some other app is. Um, you can't use it to just like record your thoughts, right, that's not what it's for. You should use an app that does that. This is to ride along with some other app and give you a local recording of just you and it doesn't record the other end. Um, it just records you, but, uh, that that's super that's what you want.

Yeah and so like for podcasters, if you use zoom, you can do a cloud recording.

Um, the quality isn't good, but you've got a backup of everybody that you can refer to later if you want to and tools like riverside fm will do local downloads as you're recording and then upload them, so there are tools that will do this there are tools that will do this, but you have to have an app that is right, that everybody's got that that is specifically written to do this. Yes, that that's the truth of it is. All zoom has to do is upload its local recording. They could do that it makes to their server so you could download it and they would solve this problem. But this is why apple built this tool. Is that a?

0:51:23 - Leo Laporte
lot of these popular video is listening.

0:51:25 - Jason Snell
Be careful I mean a lot of these apps. They just their priorities are elsewhere, and I understand why. But as a podcaster, I just want to press record there's no audio hijack pro equivalent for the ipad you can't do it because there are no apis to control any of the audio stuff in there, so you have to. This is this is what you do. Apple has to do it, um, and so this is apple solution and, uh, I tested it and it works great.

0:51:47 - Leo Laporte
So, like, check it off the list of reasons why you can't travel with an ipad I want to take a break and then I need your help because I don't want to get in trouble. Apple put up a on youtube, a video of a presentation for parents. It's actually for kids to present to your parents to convince them to buy you a Mac. Holy cat, apple has pulled it down. I have it. It really goes back to. It's an old trope in advertising. It goes back to well, remember this guy mom dad.

0:52:17 - Mr. Dell Guy
Hey, it's me, steve this year. To avoid any confusion, I'm putting my wish list on video. All All I want is a computer Now. Hold on, dad, it's just $849 for all of this. Dell computer speakers, monitor one year of. Msn internet access Intel Pentium 3 processor. You got to meet Bill Clinton too.

0:52:40 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think Apple's is a little more sophisticated. We'll talk about it in just a moment, but I want, john Ashley, can you contact our legal department and find out if I can play it?

0:52:50 - Jason Snell
I've done that in advance and they advised me for you not to play it.

0:52:55 - Leo Laporte
Is there any way I could play it just for the club? It'd be your call in the end, ultimately.

0:53:02 - Andy Ihnatko
I can tell you what you shouldn't do what you should do, but you have.

0:53:06 - Leo Laporte
They're so humorless. They're so humorless, uh, all right. Well, uh, if you're in the club, actually, mac pro connecticut already uploaded the tiktok so you can watch it for yourself, uh, and we're just gonna have to leave it to your imagination it's like a ted talk.

0:53:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Would you like to do a professional, professional reenactment of?

0:53:25 - Leo Laporte
the commercial? No, it's a ted talk, I can't. And the guy there's there's special effects. Could I play it without the audio? No, I hate this because we know it's perfectly legal. It's what's something called fair use, but uh, fair use is merely the right to hire an attorney and, yeah, John AShley is not admitted before the bar in the state of California, so we're just not going to play it Our show today, but we have other stuff coming up on MacBreak Weekly. We're so glad you're here and watching our show.

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Darn. I really want to play that video. It's pretty funny. Now, why did apple put up the presentation in the first place and then take it down?

0:56:46 - Alex Lindsay
I, I, uh, if I was a marketing person trying to get to that market, I would put up a video that was pretty rough and then I would take it down immediately. Like that is they, and. And then, if they wanted it off, tiktok right now they take it off tiktok. Like that, you know, like it is on and and then, if they wanted it off, tick tock right now they take it off tick tock like that, you know, like it is on tick tock right they did pull it down from youtube.

0:57:04 - Andy Ihnatko
And they pulled down, they repost. That was that someone else did.

0:57:07 - Alex Lindsay
Well, it's like tick tock with a lot of views. No one's gone after it. I, you know, I I don't know, I don't know if the put up and take down was necessarily an accident. Like I don't, like I mean someone who's worked on these kind of campaigns like that's not, it's not something that's never been done before. Um, you know so because it's seen as the uh, you can decide whether you agree with it or not, but it could be.

0:57:28 - Leo Laporte
It could be a viral attempt to go viral definitely definitely we wouldn't be talking about this ad.

0:57:33 - Alex Lindsay
If it was, I don't think we'd be talking about it.

0:57:35 - Leo Laporte
That if they didn't take it down, we might, because it's kind of interesting, but you're right it's certainly much more interesting. It's lame.

0:57:41 - Andy Ihnatko
No, we wouldn't be talking about it because it's it's pretty, yeah, it's, it's lame and it goes on too long. And it's just, it's, it's real, like 1990s apple marketing which is, yeah, but wait a minute, that's not true. That's kind of true, but you have to be very, but only for certain types of Windows machines. They, they also. And the idea of like like an adult okay, 26 year old, but an adult giving a lecture to a classroom of teenagers, convincing them, talking to them about how to convince their parents to buy a Mac, is, in itself, like maybe not the best way to do that, and also the idea of I'm going to market. It's creepy that Apple would do a campaign like this, complete with PowerPoint, keynote and Google Slides presentations to give to kids, saying, hey, pre-18-year-olds, who are actually controlled by a whole bunch of consumer marketing laws, we want you to harass your parents into buying you a Mac for college. It's not a good look. I yield so much to your expertise and your opinions, Alex. That's a really expensive way to play a really big trick.

0:58:56 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, if only Apple had the money.

0:58:58 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just well, no things cost money. It's, it's and it's. It seems like a lot to go through for a video that they're hoping will go viral and people will. I mean it's we'll take it down enough to make it look like it's viral, but they certainly scared me from playing it, right it weren't that part worked with, with, uh, with creative.

0:59:21 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that that would be more than $600,000 or $700,000, which I've been paid for. Oh my God, Like I don't think, like I don't think, but in the grand scheme of things, I've been paid that much money to do 10 seconds like of stuff, you know. So it's like, not a, and so I don't know if, like it's not, it's not a big number. I mean it's a number but it's not a big number for a company that big.

0:59:41 - Andy Ihnatko
I'll also say, to be fair, the SNL comedian who did the video, martin Hurley, it's still on his social media. It's still a one-minute clip. I think it's a seven-minute video and a minute of it is on his TikTok and I think it's also on his Instagram, whereas the precedent to this was when apple has a apple has a series of international videos about, like a small business team that uses apple products and they travel a lot. And there was one where I think that the the team went to india or something. I I might be wrong, but they went to some country and then had to pull that ad like very quickly because the government of that country said hey, you're basically calling us like a dirt, jerk, water like place that causes nothing but problems for business people. We don't like that and that really did, I think.

1:00:32 - Alex Lindsay
Apple's definitely done some stuff that's tone deaf. I mean, obviously there was the question of the instruments. So I think that Apple, you know, does make mistakes. I'm just saying that when you put something up like that, one doesn't look like it's so bad that they put it up and took it down. Um, but maybe.

1:00:47 - Andy Ihnatko
I will accept this. I will accept it as a, as a credible, credible theory.

1:00:51 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not sure if I I just don't know if it's any different to me than than the Samsung ads about Apple phones and stuff like that. I mean, it's kind of in the same to me. It's in the same, like what? I don't think, by the way. I don't think it's a great ad. I don't think it's a great video. I don't think it's, you know. I think it's like okay, you know. I also think, though, that any teenager that gets a PC should have to build it. They should probably just use a mac like, not like they're going to get. You know, coming from a virus perspective and paying attention to things and everything else, I do think that I, so I agree with the overall tenor of that. I don't think that kids shouldn't have pcs. I think they should just build them. That should be the the. This is how you have earned your way into buying, owning a pc as a kid, where you're going to go to all these crazy websites and everything else is. You should actually know how it works they're saying it was done in powerpoint.

1:01:38 - Leo Laporte
It can't have been. There must be a keynote, right or no? Uh, is it a powerpoint?

1:01:43 - Alex Lindsay
presentation. That would be pretty funny. That would have been part of the joke, I'm sure.

1:01:47 - Leo Laporte
But yeah yeah well, maybe apple just knew that andy would pan it and, uh, they just thought they didn't want to exactly avoid the embarrassment of having they fear, they fear and loathe me, thompson of apple, they read your mean tweets. That's what happened, uh, from engadget apple. Read your mean tweets about liquid glass and finder jason. Have you installed the second developer beta? Because apparently they've? They've kind of tuned, toned down the uh apple glass yeah, I mean they're working on.

1:02:15 - Jason Snell
The mac was the most un, uh, finished of all of them, uh, and they're working on the Mac was the most unfinished of all of them, and they're working on. I mean it's a work in progress. They're still like there is what Apple wants it to be, what was implemented for developer beta one, what feedback Apple is getting. There's a lot going on here and it's going to shift over time, which doesn't mean that it's not worthy of being discussed and and uh and criticized, but also it's it's a moving target and a and a work in progress, and I would. I would say if this was a, a student's paper, I would say it's a draft right, they, they really do in a lot of ways, get some I, I, some people are really angry. They're like how dare you say it's a beta? They shipped it to people and we should criticize it.

So you can criticize it, but I feel like you need to understand it's not the public beta, and even the public beta is not like I'm. I will write a, a story that is review, like in july, about the public betas, but it won't be called a review because, like, it's still a work in progress, the final is what they ship as, uh, I guess, 26.0 of everything. Now that's weird, uh, and and so we'll have to see, but it's making progress. I've been running. I think all the betas are actually surprisingly stable and, uh, the mac, one parts of it are weird, but other parts of it are really nice already and and on the iphone, that that you can see what they're trying to go for with the liquid glass thing, because it makes the most sense in a way on the iphone oh, this, just in apple does offer a powerpoint, keynote or google workspace version of that presentation that you can download on the website.

1:03:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I put a link to. They pulled it from the from the apple website but of course, because it's google sheets, like it can get shared everywhere, so oh that's hysterical.

1:03:58 - Leo Laporte
So it's not on the website anymore, but it was for a while but I have a link in the show notes that's hysterical it's and it's all, has all this guidance.

1:04:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, right, here uh make sure you type in your major and over here, uh change it to this that it's like okay it's.

1:04:14 - Leo Laporte
So this, uh, this is um, uh. There are changes in ios. This, for instance, is the beta. This from nine to five mac on the left is the first beta. The second beta is on the right and there is less translucence.

1:04:25 - Jason Snell
It's yeah, they're tweaking the settings, it's much more legible what they want and and, and that is all going to continue.

There's a big thing in beta 2. Um, so the mac menu bar by default has nothing behind it, um, and obviously everybody was going to complain about that, because of course they are. So there is a setting in beta two that lets you put you know, basically a translucent strip behind it. So it looks like the menu bar again, which I actually don't.

I don't have any legibility problems with that invisible menu bar now, but it's very weird, because I have a window at the top of the screen and then there's space above it where I can see my desktop picture and I feel like I want to move my window up there, but there is still an invisible force field. They should have a little like like it's a star trek brig or a star wars force field or something like that, because it's just the. It kind of breaks the metaphor, um, and I kind of feel like what they really want you to do is set it to auto hide, which I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever do. But if you set it to auto hide, you can put the window all the way at the top and they don't care, but anyway, so now you have my menu bar set to auto hide on the on the current mac os.

1:05:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, I, I don't.

1:05:34 - Jason Snell
I like it disappearing, that's.

1:05:35 - Leo Laporte
But that's partly because I also show the screens on the air and I don't want any cruft it's, it's, it's fine.

1:05:41 - Jason Snell
I just I, as a long-time mac user, I I like my menu bar scene. Uh, not heard but seen. So, uh, anyway, you can. So they're tweaking it. So they added a setting where you can just put the stripe up there, which is, I think that's good, because of course, there's going to be like a utility there are already a couple utilities that do it it and I'm like it really should just be a setting. You can have it off by default, but it should just be a setting, because some people are going to want the menu bar to be not invisible and you can do that. And that's beta 2. I would say those are changes that were probably in the works before they even dropped beta 1, right Before we even saw it.

1:06:16 - Andy Ihnatko
They were probably already working on it that, yeah, before we even saw it, they were probably already working on it. Yeah, the thing about the first developer release is like, I always think of it as the monkey house release where, like, they've been developing this inside in quiet, in silence and isolation they don't know again. They've been, they've been working inside the monkey house for so long they they've got useless to the smell by now, and it's only when, okay, we're going to put it out, and you and you absolutely should expect that, only when, okay, we're going to put it out, and you and you absolutely should expect that there's going to be a wave of rollbacks or minor changes almost immediately. As, okay, now that it's outside the monkey house people. Oh my god, why, why does? Why is it so hard to see, like, beyond this layer of frosted glass? Oh my god, do you do? Why do you? Why does the? Why does the macOS logo look like that guy who got arrested for selling human body parts out of Harvard University, who has half of his face tattooed blue, all these little things. And so it's fun, when the second release comes out, to see all the things that were rolled back or adjusted, and that's absolutely going to be expected.

And, as Jason said, we're talking a lot about this. As it happens, the Dev one release is quite useful. I don't know if I'd call it stable, but it's quite useful. I've had it on like my own, like research phone, like for the past week, and I haven't had any real problems with it. But yeah, it's not even the first public beta. It's the. It's the first public beta where you start to we're going to start to think that, okay, this is the the jello has set. This is pretty much what apple intends to ship now.

1:07:43 - Alex Lindsay
It's just a matter of looking for edge cases and bugs to get rid of and there there used to be an nda connected to this, like the apple what?

1:07:53 - Andy Ihnatko
sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I mean, you can only get it by being like an actual paying hundred dollar a year.

1:07:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and there was an NDA. Like you can't talk about it. This is a work in progress and the Apple's loosened that up a little bit. Now they have all these people throwing tantrums and going on social media, but it gets them. You know. A lot of people are talking about it, that's you know. Any press is good press to some degree and they'll see the progress. I think that's the idea. I bet you that we're also in the middle of some of this stuff is there in the middle of an argument between two different teams, and they go hey, you know what, let's just go. We have two different versions of it. Who goes first? You know, and we'll put the one out that we're not sure will go. Well, see what people think. And then we have another idea, because developing a whole bunch of new things from version one to version two, that quickly no, that happens over months and months and months of time.

1:08:38 - Jason Snell
I've said for a long time that you know, when we all talk about this or write about it and we say, oh, apple should do this and Apple should do that, it's not like an executive hears our words and is like, oh, you've changed my heart, andy. Now I'm going to do things in a different way. The truth is there are people inside Apple who have real disagreements. Yeah, and they hear us talking about it or there's an article that comes out that they can point to and say, see, and it helps people win arguments. A lot of what we do ends up just being kind of fodder for people on the inside to say I told you that wasn't true, why didn't you listen to me? And that does lead to change.

It's funny. They are paying attention to what people say about it and they do use it. But that's sort of how it works is that you know, apple wants to portray itself as monolithic and like there's only one opinion and this is it. But the truth is, if you have a disagreement with something Apple is doing, somebody inside Apple has also disagreed about that, but they don't have the clout to make it to win the argument, and maybe public reaction, press reaction, gives them more clout to do that.

1:09:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I've talked to folks inside not necessarily Apple, but inside of other companies that I felt bad. I was like I'm sorry, I really. I said I really went off on your product. No, no, that was a huge thing. We clipped it out of Mac break and put and sent it to watch people.

1:09:57 - Andy Ihnatko
You know, like you know, I'm sure we all have those stories and it's actually and it's actually the thing that makes it actually feel quite pleasant is that okay, I lost that argument, but someone out there gets, or excuse me, it felt good, the message being that it felt good personally that I'm not just an insane one insane person inside Apple who feels this way, that this is a good product that we need to keep nurturing. There are other people outside of Apple that also have seen the work that we're doing and thinks it's really great and that they want to see it endure, and that is a very, very reassuring thing a very pleasant thing.

1:10:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, there are other things we've learned from the new beta 2 of the developer release. For instance, it looks like there will be a seven. Uh, iphone 17.

1:10:47 - Jason Snell
That's slim, extra thin yeah, these, these uh little things left in the code or left in the resources used to be a bigger deal before Mark Gurman already knew about them and told us about them.

1:10:59 - Leo Laporte
Well, did Mark Gurman know about the new ringtone? It's from David Price at Macworld. This is called Reflection and I guess it's the default. It's pretty nice. You'll be hearing it on Apple TV shows for the next five yeah, exactly that's the good news, exactly, keep it fresh it's a marimba-ish, yes, yes, marimba-esque, marimba-esque.

Um four new camera features, according to nine to five mac, coming to the iphone 17 pro and upgraded. Now this is rumor, but we're getting to the point now where these rumors are pretty well founded because they're probably making them right. They're starting to make them now. You think, yeah, you think, an upgraded 48 megapixel telephoto, uh, upgrading it, uh, so they uh introduced 48 megapixels in wide right in the 14, and then the ultra wide went to 48 and now they're saying 48 megapixels for the telephoto. You know, for years we said 12 megapixels, enough is enough. Why 48 is that? So we can bin and really still have 12.

1:12:19 - Alex Lindsay
It is a multiple right if you have good light, like if you're taking something. So if you say, take something, that's low light probably doesn't help that much you you've been you can do your own processing to it. So if you capture 48 megapixels, you take it into something like topaz or something like that and you might choose with more time and all the other things that you can do you have more control to clean it up and then take it down to something or leave it at 48 megapixels, because something like Topaz will take Topaz AI, will take that 48 megapixels and clean it up a lot, and so you end up with that 48 megapixel image. So it's not just binned, it's 48 megapixels in it. But you gave it all this detail, even though there's a lot of grain and schmutz on it and so on, so forth.

But the other thing is is that when you take the 48 megapixel and you've got a lot of light, it's a big picture that looks great, right, you know, and it's a huge photo, um, and I use it for photogrammetry, so I I switch over to 48 megapixel when I'm okay, I'm going to take, I'm going to build a 3d model from this and I want all the data I can get and it's really effective at that, and so you want more of that. They're small pixels, though, because it's still a small sensor.

1:13:27 - Leo Laporte
It is.

1:13:27 - Alex Lindsay
That's why you can't shoot it in a bar, but if you're outside at a park, and that's why everyone's using these little screens that we talked about earlier.

Which mine comes today, apparently, I ordered it, but they want to use that. They want to use that lens to capture their selfies, not the other one, and if you want to crop into it, it's all all useful. Again, not good and low light, but and, but not necessarily but not bad when it's when you, when you're out and about, it's, there's a lot of light out there and by default, what apple's doing is they're taking that 48 megapixel data and they're they're running it.

1:13:55 - Jason Snell
Sometimes they've been it. Um, they're taking multiple uh images and doing some processing on it and what they, I think by default, what they end up generating is a 24 megapixel image. So they're finding right because it, because it's not as huge, and uh, and they're they're doing all of that processing in their pipeline to make it be a really, really good image. So they're using those pixels, but it's not one-to-one, unless you're Alex, and then you flip over to the full-on 48. And I think that's the rationale. Right is they can do more with 48 megapixels than they can do with 24 or 16, even if what they get out of it is not necessarily a 48 megapixel image.

1:14:42 - Alex Lindsay
And the thing is is that by getting that 48 megapixel, even the low light I think part of why the low light looks so good is because it's being sourced at 48 megapixels and then they're able to A do some cleanup before they scale down and then, when they scale down, that bicubic mapping of averaging out all those pixels is how you get rid of a lot of the stuff that's there, Because I take stuff at night or dark areas not even night, just dark areas and you're out on a street corner and you take a photo of something and it looks so good.

1:15:14 - Andy Ihnatko
So much of this stuff is getting where. The quality of the phone camera is not necessarily academic, but I'm aware of. There are two groups of people that are using good camera phones. One of them are always going to be just the people who this is the family camera. I want to push a button and get a picture Absolutely reliability and I want it to be good enough or better than good enough, but I don't have a high ceiling for what I'm expecting. And then there are people like me who are hobbyist photographers or at least when they're not taking a snapshot at a nephew's birthday party, they're like oh wow, I happen to be here at the Golden Gate Bridge near sunset.

This is a really great picture.

I'm going to take this picture and whereas at one point we would have to sort of hope that the camera did a really good job of capturing this image I mean, I use topaz too and its ability to take a somewhat sketchy uh image and simply get rid of in a very, very naturalistic way all of the grain that was a problem, correct some of the details that got missing, again in a very, very naturalistic way, and to to take even just to go back to pictures I took with a 10-year-old phone camera and say, well, actually I didn't like the fact that it was low resolution and super grainy.

Now I feel as though I've got a DNG file that is good enough that I can actually start working with it. So I'm wondering if we're entering into a phase where the wars of the cameras are going to sort of start to wind down. It's going to be more about hey, don't spend a thousand dollars on a brand new camera phone. Spend 200 for a license on this really, really great tool that will take any potato and potato phone camera picture and turn it into something that is essentially like a full frame mirrorless.

1:16:58 - Leo Laporte
We don't want to. We don't want to scoop your pick for later on, but there is something Andy will be talking about later in the show.

1:17:06 - Alex Lindsay
But I will say that, that I think that the, even my, my wife, who has a 13, and I have a a third, a 15 when we're out about to shoot, she's like oh, shoot it with your camera, so people tell the can tell the difference of like, oh, even just that, jump from the 13 to the 15,. You know she'd rather have me take the photo than her take the photo of the family. You know, if we're out, just because she knows that the camera will be better. You know, and I think that's what's happening, I think there's still a lot of room to grow for these cameras. I don't think we're settling in at all. I mean, I think that there can be bigger sensors, there can be better calculation for the longer lenses, shorter depth of field. That is more effective. The hair detail gets better every single time. These higher res photos make it easier to get that hair detail back out.

I was kind of disappointed. I'm not disappointed yet because I don't know what's going to happen, but when you look at the longer, the larger island on the back of the new phones, I'm really hoping for lenses that are almost the interocular distance apart, so that those of us who are shooting that stuff can just pick up the phone and shoot an image that is in stereo at a better. You know that has a little bit more depth to it than the current spatial cameras. Yeah, I know that has a little bit more depth to it than the current spatial cameras.

1:18:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I just try to be a little bit practical. From my own experience that I can be really really persnickety about quality, and it's just that some of my point of view is shifting a little bit in the past two or three years as I'm realizing that I've gone from. I mean, if you go into my Flickr account, which I've kind of abandoned, I basically now pay for just for storage of 10 years worth of photos that I took before Google Photos and Apple Photos came along. But you could see, like the camera tests I would take, like in like the in the 2010s, where every time there's a new camera, every time there's a new phone, I would have to. I really felt as though I had to go to the Boston Public Library and take the same suite of photos with five or six different cameras all over again to see which one can finally pull out the detail in that John Singer Sgt mural, which one of them can get a really good picture of a fast-moving squirrel, and over time, realized that all of them are now really, really good. And the next part that got me was realizing that now I now that everything gets dumped into Google Photos, including the stuff from my really really nice mirrorless camera with a really really nice lens on it. It annoys me that if I took a picture that came out pretty good on my phone and then I spent just five minutes in Lightroom Mobile just adjusting the tone curve to where I wanted it, adjusting the color balance to exactly where I wanted it all that sort of stuff I have to look at the info on the picture to figure out which one of these was taken with a phone and which was taken with this amazing mirrorless camera that I absolutely adore.

So, yeah, there'll always be room for improvement in hardware again, particularly with there are wonderful advancements being made in synthetic digital zooms, but nothing will ever beat. No, you have an actual 10x optical zoom and that's where you start from own expectations that, wow, uh, what, what? What are people actually using these camera features for? And how important is it to be pixel peeping for myself time and time and time again to see well, this is the iphone 617, but let's compare it to the, to the, to the pixel 10. Let's compare it next to this, because it's like on some point you can say that, yeah, that this. Because it's like on some point you can say that, yeah, that looks better, but it's subjective and also, if you don't like it, don't even subscribe to the Lightroom mobile.

1:20:45 - Alex Lindsay
Just tap edit. Yeah to your point. I think that I don't think that people, I don't think either Google or Apple have to keep up with each other other than staying in the same lap. Sure, you know, they just can't get lapped, you know like know, they just can't get lapped.

You know like exactly like you know, they're in the same. If they're somewhere, if they're thinking they can be, you know, five or six lengths behind they can, you know, and it goes back and forth or whatever, because they both, there's a certain amount of lock-in with both hardware pieces but they just can't get lapped. You know, and I think that they both and I think it's great for us, I think we're benefiting from that. But I, you know, I I have this wide mixture mixture mostly of my family of pictures that are taken that were taken mostly in the early days.

You can tell, in the early days were taken with an SLR and then taken with the iPhone, has been 90% of the newer stuff and the SLR stuff is still nicer, it's still better. Let's not oversell the camera. But the difference between that SLR and my phone camera is where I think Apple and Google can continue to grow towards, because someday it will get to a point where the SL, the, the, the, the camera on my phone is as good as the, the SLR camera. But I don't. I think we still got maybe five to 10 years before that happens.

1:21:53 - Leo Laporte
You remember when filmic pro came out and promised the ability to use the front and back camera at the same time? Apparently this is a feature coming to iphone 17 pro and pro max the ability to do multi-cam recording not just with the front and back lenses, but also with other uh camera phones. Yeah isn't somebody doing this.

1:22:16 - Alex Lindsay
I know film yeah yeah, there's a couple companies um.

1:22:19 - Leo Laporte
I want to say um it would take the high-end hardware I would imagine there's like an api to do this, but apple hasn't done it directly.

1:22:32 - Jason Snell
Okay, so that's the. That's. The difference here is being able to use multiple cameras and have the bandwidth in there, because it used to be, yeah, you could do, because that was the thing you could do, like an interview where the back camera was shooting you and the front camera was shooting your subject and you could record both of those streams and use them later. And and uh, yeah, so putting that in the system software, feeling comfortable enough to just put it in the camera app, that's cool for use for later.

Yeah, it's another little thing like that podcasting thing I mentioned earlier. It's a little thing that's a very specific kind of professional media creator use case that like it's really nice to do it and to not have a third-party app that you have to use in order to do it is great yeah uh also.

1:23:12 - Leo Laporte
Uh, they're going to improve the selfie camera a 24 megapixel true depth front camera uh, that'll be welcome, right? I mean, that's what a lot of people use that selfie camera more than they use the other camera yeah, well, and that's again why the screens that we were talking about get are getting popular.

1:23:30 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it went from I didn't hear about them to you. Go to amazon, do a search for that kind of screen. They're all over now there's 20 of them, and I'm sure that there was part of. It was probably at ces. There was a chinese company that said, hey, we've got this screen yeah, you can have white labeling, and yeah, everybody they're all slightly different.

There are little buttons over here, a little buttons over there, but it's all the same screen so I have to check my, uh, my amazon delivery guy, see how, how close he is.

1:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Uh, he took a while, but I think that was because they were, um, they were like doing it in shipments. Right they were, they were they sold out, which, I believe? Which? Which one did you order? The one you told me to order? What else? I don't know which one.

1:24:07 - Alex Lindsay
I told you there's like three of them, yeah, but you said don't get that one, get this one and I got this one, not that one, yeah yeah, exactly, and I think they sold out pretty quickly when I did.

1:24:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think they do it in batches. At this point, a lot of people are doing that. Uh, you're watching MacBreak Weekly with andy and ako, who will have a pick of the week about photography. That's exciting. Uh, Jason Snell from mac world. And uh, mac world and six colors. I should say excuse me emeritus for mac world.

1:24:34 - Jason Snell
That's still right there.

1:24:35 - Leo Laporte
You're still right this week yeah, you're in there right now, sure do they? They don't send out a paper magazine anymore they.

1:24:42 - Jason Snell
No, that was actually I. My farewell column in that was coded was a farewell to the print magazine, which was going away, and the secret was that it was also a farewell to me because I was also going away. So it's been almost 11 years now that they've been digital only.

1:24:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah I still get. You know, I the atlantic, I get an atlantic magazine in the mail. I don't, I don't want it. I I recycle it immediately. But it's just kind of, sometimes when you get these digital subscriptions, they insist you get the paper.

1:25:13 - Jason Snell
Well, you know why they do that because they want to make their number of their guaranteed circ for that, and so they'll'll, they'll, force you. That happened my local newspaper, the Marin independent journal. We started getting Sunday paper from them and it turns out that they had just opted all their digital subscribers into the Sunday paper because they wanted to make their. So I mean now, now that I've worked in that industry, I know I know why you do stuff like that and you deliver.

I, once you know you cancel a magazine and they keep giving it to you and you're like, but I canceled and the answer is yeah, but we need to make our number Because they guarantee to an advertiser that they're going to distribute 300,000. Exactly, and if they don't deliver, then the advertisers are going to ask for their money back. So you end up with these. You're trying to make your circ. So Macworld is still in, like if you're in Apple News Plus, it's still in there, along with PC World, because they still do a digital magazine, but they don't do paper anymore.

1:26:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't need the paper, it's cool.

1:26:11 - Jason Snell
Every now and then I look in there and I'm like, oh, I wrote a feature story, but it's actually, you know, a couple of my columns that they put in and they got some art and they put it a thing in the magazine.

1:26:20 - Leo Laporte
it's dc's doing that with mad magazine now. It's sad, poor dick. D bartolo doesn't even get paid extra when they rerun his you know his work from 50 years ago, I mean mac world, mac world and pc world.

1:26:30 - Jason Snell
Their digital magazines are basically like curated best of the website, which was I mean, that's what we tried to do back when I worked there. It's like not everybody, you know, wants to read about Apple stuff every day. I know it's hard to believe listeners of MacBreak Weekly, but not everybody does. And so what what you know Mac world is trying to still do and PC world is, is say, well, we, we've taken the best of the stuff we wrote over the last month and we put it in this nice little bundle that you can go and read and it's not a bad idea, like. I mean, mean, it's kind of like a newsletter almost. I mean you could even argue that the the right thing to do might even be to do a weekly um, kind of like it's a matter of how much you care.

This is a long-standing theory I've got, which is the internet so often magnifies everything. To be like you must be intensely interested in this right, right, and so you end up with like a flood of like. Whatever you're into, suddenly you've got 15 articles a day about it and it's very hard in that environment to say, you know, I'm mildly interested in this, I only read one article.

I'll read a few articles about it once a month or once a week, but I don't want 10 things a day about it. And the Internet, you know, and, and the business of the Internet has pushed everything to be like no, no, no, you must have everything now. And that was the nice thing about things. Now it's old man time, uh like a monthly magazine is like sometimes, I know sometimes you only care about something a little bit.

1:27:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:27:51 - Jason Snell
And and the internet does like is not interested in that. They want you to care about it.

1:27:56 - Leo Laporte
A hundred percent you can't skim the internet. You can skim a newspaper you can like. Yeah, I mean watch how people read newspapers.

1:28:03 - Jason Snell
They don't usually focus in an article but if you're in a special interest area, the special interest area wants you to be 100 committed to them. You're right. That's versus like saying you know I care about apple stuff, but I only really want to read about five articles a month about it, and it's like sorry so we stopped doing daily podcasts.

1:28:22 - Leo Laporte
I know that you know there's some of the biggest podcasts are daily, like the daily and up first. But uh, when we did daily podcasts the numbers went way down. People don't want we had. We did the gizmo's every day. People don't want it every day, once a week, that's plenty.

1:28:38 - Jason Snell
You know, I actually got my first uh six colors cancellation. We used to do a monthly newsletter, uh, that was hand delivered, and then when, and we changed that to a weekly newsletter that is for members only and it's all the stuff we posted that week essentially and I decided in this era of substack I I changed it to be if it's a day where we posted a full story, you get a newsletter that day.

So it's not necessarily seven days a week or even five days a week, but it's more like it. And I got somebody who said it's too much content, I'm going to cancel. And it's interesting because it's literally the same amount of content they got once a week but now they're getting it on three days a week and they feel like they're being pummeled and like I get it on one level, are being pummeled and like I get it on one level. It's that classic new yorker problem where yeah people?

cancel the new yorkers they feel like they're not reading it enough, I felt guilty.

Yeah and so and you can, and that's what we felt with um, the doing the digital magazine and mac world back in the day is like we we generated enough to do like a 400 page magazine every month on the web, but people don't want that right like. They want it to be curated and slimmed down and be and be a smaller thing. You could overwhelm people with that stuff, but that's that's part of the challenge is, if your business model is to pound out those stories and get them out there, you're kind of turning off people who are like interested but not that interested.

1:29:52 - Leo Laporte
It's a real interesting challenge I just want to let everybody know you don't have to listen to every one of these shows, that's right. Listen when you feel like it, amen. Listen for as long as you like, yeah. I don't want anybody.

1:30:03 - Andy Ihnatko
We no longer have any way of telling.

1:30:05 - Leo Laporte
I know people cancel subscriptions because they're piling up. That's fine, it's okay.

1:30:08 - Jason Snell
You can let it go and still be. We still like you. Yeah, so one of my podcasts, Jason, I like the Incomparable, but I can't listen to every episode because I'm not really interested in that kind of TV show or that kind of movie and I'm like, literally the only person who cares about every episode of the Incomparable is me because I'm the host.

I don't expect anyone else to do it. And if I were to build that product today as a as a media professional, I would. I would have to have more focus because it is all over the place, but like, it's okay, it's like. Hey, I'm glad you subscribe. Yes, listen to the episodes that please you and don't listen to the episodes that don't feel guilty if you don't listen, it's okay, it's okay well, okay, I think it's funny.

1:31:02 - Alex Lindsay
I'm very so. I'm so live oriented that I listen to the like for twit. I listen to the shows live or I don't like. For me that's how I listen yeah I love people. Do we have those?

yeah, like and for me it's just not overwhelming, like if on sunday, sunday's a day that I'm often organizing my office or whatever, and Twit's the perfect thing to turn on so I can listen to it and everything else. But I found myself not listening to as many podcasts. I think Twit and this American Life are probably the two that I have podcasts that I listen to a lot.

1:31:32 - Leo Laporte
Thank, you 20,000 Hertz. That's a pretty good company.

1:31:34 - Alex Lindsay
you've got us in yeah, yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, but other than that I it falls off pretty quickly and then I I have the same problem like oh, oh, I forgot that that podcast existed. That's, my problem is that they don't they don't.

1:31:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I have hundreds some effects I was just talking in the discord about. You know, the number one category of uh disk storage is podcasts and they periodically just go through it and download it or delete it, rather because it, you know, it just takes up so much space.

1:32:01 - Alex Lindsay
I, I, I think I'm. I have the same problem that I had with books, that I have with audio books, that I have with podcasts, is there's a lot of aspirational listening. You know, like I, I aspirationally subscribed to lots of things. Same with YouTube channels. I'm like, oh, that's great, I'll subscribe to that.

1:32:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Absolutely Nothing provokes a a long, long session of weekend house cleaning. Like realizing how far behind I am on podcasts that I love.

1:32:25 - Alex Lindsay
It's like well that's six hours.

1:32:26 - Andy Ihnatko
That's enough time to like move all the furniture out of the living room, roll up the carpet, wash the floor, I think I'll paint the house.

1:32:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, uh, I recently I don't know if I mentioned on this show um, I missed an email from audible that said we're going to cancel your membership because you have, uh, an old membership we don't want to offer anymore. And, uh, if you, if you respond to this email by may 31st, uh, we'll give you a free year to make up for it, which I I missed. The email was in my spam bucket. So on june 16th I got an email saying, yeah, we've canceled your subscription. Bye. I said I've been a subscriber for 25 years, right, two books a month for 25 years. I have 750 books. And then I thought you know what, this is a blessing, because I haven't listened to about half of them, right, I'm just so now you work your way through I was just getting you know.

Two books a month, two books a month, make sure you use the credits, and uh. So now I said, fine, thank you, audible, you did me a favor. And uh, and I've downloaded. Of course, the first thing I did is download them all from audible site and take out the drm so I can listen to them in some other player, in case audible decides, with very little warning, that I should no longer be able to listen to them either. Uh, and now I've got 750 books and you know what, by the time I get to the end of that, it'll be like the Golden Gate Bridge. I'll just start over at the beginning. I'll never know.

I'm looking forward to being in the home and just having an audiobook player running all the time, and I won't care what it is. It can pick random chapters. I should write that. A random chapter audiobook player, so you don't even know what you're listening to. A random chapter audiobook player, so you don't even know what you're listening to. It's just going. We're going to take a little break. I know you don't know what you're listening to. We're just going and going and going. You're listening to mac. Very quickly, I'll tell you that right now that's Jason Snell, who does even more podcasts than I do at six colors dot com slash. Jason andy inako, whose website will be out any day now giving you even more to read, but it will all be beautiful, beautiful pros. And, uh, Alex Lindsay, who for some reason decided I should do a show every morning.

I mean covet it makes sense when we started every morning I should do a show, but it's live damn it. Yeah, uh, it's great to have all three of you. It's great to have you listening to a reminder, though one of the things that makes this possible is your club twit membership. I do hope you're a member. If you're not, I hope you'll consider it. 10 bucks a month, 120 a year. There are corporate and family plans that have a discount. Uh, what do you get? Well, first of all, the fuzzy feeling, warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing you're supporting the programming you presumably like. Enough to support it. It really does make a difference.

To us is 25 of our operating income. Without the club, we would have to let people go, we would have to cut back on shows. With the club, we can do more. In fact, a lot of what we do is in our club to a discord. Discord is a place that club members get together. You don't have to do that, but if, but a lot, of, a lot of them maybe 65, 75 of them go in the discord, so it's a great place to hang out. I go in there all the time. I get inspiration, I get ideas, I get brick bats and bouquets. We also do shows in there. In fact, I want to remind you that tomorrow scott wilkinson is doing his q, a special of home theater geeks, 5, 15, pacific, 8, 15 eastern right after intelligent machines, and he wants questions from the discord. So get in there. If you're not a club member, join right now. You'll be able to participate.

We are doing something very fun on friday. Uh, we're going to talk about music with my old friend, norman Maslow, who runs a YouTube channel about vinyl called Mazzy's Music. He's a vinyl king, but we're also going to talk with the author of a book about MP3s and digital music. So we're going to do it a little bit backwards. So we'll talk digital first, then we'll talk vinyl. We'll go back in time. That's this Friday. So we'll talk digital first, then we'll talk vinyl. We'll go back in time. That's this Friday. We'll start at noon. Go through one or two. I hope you'll join us.

Our AI users group is July 11th. If you're interested in AI. This is a real hands-on thing. Anthony Nielsen started. We've had a lot of fun playing with tools. We have the photo workshop coming up with the monthly show we do with chris marquardt. Our word of the month is quirky. Take a picture. Join us. We'll talk about, uh, some of chris's picks. Micah's crafting corners fun, it's just a cozy chill. It's like bob ross, but you pick the painting, whatever it is. Micah's doing. Lego, you could crochet, you could knit. A lot of cook. It's a lot of fun. That's just some of the things happening in the club and of course I mentioned it's like a blanket made out of pure love. I did mention that we do our keynotes now there to keep them out of the evil eyes of Apple attorneys. So all of that for $10 a month. I think that's a good deal. Twittv slash club twit thank you in advance.

I appreciate it. Uh, let's see. Nfc release 15 has been announced. I think this is of interest to apple folks. Um, promote grady's power page. Nfc release 15 announces next-gen devices will get quadruple the range. That could be interesting. I have an NFC door lock, for instance.

1:37:47 - Alex Lindsay
The quadruple. The range is from 0.5 millimeters to 2 millimeters.

1:37:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, it's a little farther, To a dime, to two dimes.

1:37:56 - Alex Lindsay
That's the jump.

1:37:57 - Leo Laporte
It's up, it doesn't say four times what. Yeah, from half a centimeter to two centimeters. Half a centimeter, I'm sorry, not a millimeter, not a millimeter.

1:38:04 - Alex Lindsay
Half a centimeter to two centimeters, Five dimes to 20 dimes. So that's the math. It does mean it's like you don't have to do. Is it at the top of the thing or at the bottom?

1:38:14 - Leo Laporte
It's not so precise. Yeah, that Precise. Yeah, that's the problem with my NFC key lock. It often doesn't work because I have to position the phone just right, you don't want this to be too much, right.

1:38:29 - Jason Snell
That's. The thing is that the solution here isn't ultimately you can NFC from six feet away, because the whole point is it needs to be extremely proximate to whatever you're doing so that it can't be hijacked. It can't be. Somebody can't brush past you and do something like it's meant to be. This is just like taking it a little bit further than it was where you don't. You don't have to, yeah, hold it, hold your watch right up to it and bang into it and, before it finally gets, to do your apple pay or whatever yeah, if you use tap to pay, uh, you're using nfc, so your watch or your phone, so that's good, and I presume apple is on the board so apple will probably support this when it comes out I have an nfc door lock and and yeah, I'm kind of banging my watch against it to get to unlock the door and

it might be nice if, if that was a little more smooth, of a kind of like wave it in front of the door and and it opens. Although that, yeah, all that stuff is getting better too. So it'll because they're. They're also doing uwb in a lot, of, a lot of this stuff now ultra wideband, and I know it's another three-letter acronym, but uh, uwb. The advantage there is it knows exactly where you are in three dimensions related to whatever object you're talking to. This is they use it in, find my um, but that allows, will allow smart door locks to do things like know that you're at the front door and unlock it for you. But if somebody knocks on your door and you're on the inside and you come over to the door, it knows you're behind the door, so it doesn't unlock it for that person.

1:39:50 - Alex Lindsay
In some cases, the UWV stuff is going to be a better use than NFC. I feel like ultra-wideband has been really underdeveloped since it was announced. It doesn't feel like it's wide.

1:40:00 - Leo Laporte
I think some of that's because of beacons and people were very paranoid about. You know privacy and so forth.

1:40:06 - Jason Snell
It's also just a matter of time of rolling out the tech. So the phones have had it for a little while but, like the first, uwb door locks for your house are coming out this year. So they are starting to come out, but it lags a little bit, and I think there are now cars that are shipping that have UWB support for locks as well. So it's starting to happen and it's just. I think the issue is first you got to get it in the phones and then you got to get it in all the accessories. But I'm excited I will absolutely upgrade to a UWB door lock at some point in the next couple of years, because it'll be, because then, rather than having to wait for my watch to be jammed in its face, it will literally know I'm walking toward the front door and unlock it, which is how it should be.

1:40:51 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like I want something like an air, you know, an apple tracker or something in everything I find myself. I think part of my brain is starting to die related to where my keys are, because I don't think I lost them nearly as often as I do now because I'm just constantly opening up my phone and just going, oh, where are the keys? Maybe it's just I don't look anymore, I don't bother to look anymore because I know that I'll find them really quickly. But I put them in every bag that I travel with. If I'm getting on a plane, every bag has an air tag in it and I'm surprised that the bags don't. They haven't started building ones that you could just snap the air tags into, Like somewhere hidden in the whatever I can just snap one in, because it really takes a lot of the stress out of or adds the stress, Because there was my last flight. I landed in LA and I could see my air tag in Utah.

1:41:43 - Andy Ihnatko
And now, like so many, I think another I forget which one it was but another airline announced that their baggage debugging process is now going to start supporting air tags as well. But this is exactly the sort of thing that you look back and you wonder gee, how come everything, how come so many things got so much better? I don't know what, I don't know how it happened. And it is because, like this, technology that you don't really interact with directly or think about went to the next level. Same reason why battery chemistry developments in the past 10, 15 years is like oh, that's why phones don't stink anymore, that's why laptops don't stink anymore, that's why I have a flashlight, that I don't have to charge it like every three days anymore. And it's all because of some chemists came up with a way of putting more density per cell, per unit, and you never had to know that this revolution actually happened. So yeah, neat news?

1:42:37 - Alex Lindsay
I think that there's. I was reading about some technology supposed to double our battery and be less flammable in the next, you know, three to five years or so so less flammable was a good thing.

1:42:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I would love to be able to charge my bike like inside, instead of like having. I don't have a garage anymore, so I literally like I. I live on like the upper floor of a really great old building, but I literally have to go onto the fire escape and put it like on the fire escape because ain't no, it's, it's a nice bike. It's not like a cheap, like temu sort of thing, but nonetheless I don't care how good this company is.

1:43:08 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not putting a big battery pack inside and my first drone my first drones, the batteries all came with a bag, like don't only charge them in this fireproof bag, and I was like I think I'm gonna put it in the bag. And then in my garage, around concrete, surrounded three feet of nothing, you know like I kind of built this little.

1:43:27 - Leo Laporte
There's like this little area that I charged all those batteries you know I uh I stopped buying air tags and I started buying these chipolo uh trackers. I'm really happy, uh, within, they work kind of just like air tags, uh, except they have a little hole in them so it's easier to put on your keychain and they come in colors and they support find my uh, and I was able to you know, watch for sales. I think I got four of them for like 35 bucks or something, uh, and they work with find my and I get a notification when I leave my hat behind. They're small enough I could put them in my hat and so forth.

1:43:58 - Andy Ihnatko
So you know what I'd love to see. I think that the, the, we there's a lot of people who are talking about like what's the next air tag going to be the next iteration? Like I think the greatest feature that apple could add is that costs may cost about the same or maybe like a dollar or more, but you get it and there's like an air tag and then there's also just an inner decoy air tag that you put someplace. That is like kind of visible. Someone who's looking for an air tag to remove it is going to find it, like on the underside of my bike seat, and then once they find it, they'll stop looking, but they will never find like the real air tag that I put on my bike. I think that that's someone who comes up with that product.

1:44:36 - Leo Laporte
They would get in a lot of trouble there of e-bikes that had built-in fine my I remember right it was probably a van move for something really expensive. But it was a van move. Yeah, they went out of business. Rip yeah, do you have a VanMoof? No, I'm so jealous if you do. I always wanted one. It was a Dutch company. They were very pretty.

1:44:56 - Jason Snell
No, there was a. The San Francisco Chronicle, peter Hartlaub, did a little story about Dave Fleming, who's one of the Giants broadcasters and he lives in the Richmond district and rides his bike to and from the ballpark every day, which is pretty awesome and uh. And I looked at the picture and I was like I mean, peter's story says it's a nice e-bike. But I looked at, I looked up what it was and I realized I have it's not a van move, but because this company's still in business.

But I just, I have an e-bike and I think dave's bike costs about 10 times what mine costs. You can spend a lot yeah yeah, you can buy a really nice e-bike if you want to.

1:45:30 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yep, uh, let's see what else. Oh my god, woody harrelson and matthew mcconaughey's apple tv show has been put on hold because of a creative clash. Maybe the hacky sack they were playing got lost, I don't know. I don't know. He's over, their father, I don't know. Cast and crew were sent home mid-month after the departure of the showrunner, david reed west. The show, uh, eight of the ten episodes have already been shot, which is interesting to pause. After that they're talking with lee eisenberg, who worked on lessons in chemistry. The story is about a heartful, heartfelt, odd couple love story revolving around the strange and beautiful bond between matthew mcconaughey and woody harrelson. The bond, however, is tested as the pair's combined families attempt to live together on a ranch in Texas.

1:46:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Is it possible that they just got so stoned that they forgot where the studio was? They could get lost on the way.

1:46:38 - Jason Snell
Maybe they weren't like protesting they just literally weren't there because they couldn't find it. I mean, this is the most tenuous of Apple stories because it's just a television industry story. I think the first season of the new Daredevil show on Disney Similarly. They shot most of the episodes and then the studio didn't like where it was going and they fired the showrunner and brought in a new showrunner. They shot a couple new episodes, inserted a new episode one and then did a bunch of reshoots for other points in the season and I haven't watched that show yet and apparently people liked it okay, but like clearly um trouble they decided to break, to break it, and you only do this when you think it could be fixed and if they've already shot so many episodes.

Eight episodes either either they think it can needs to be fixed or they're hoping that this will go multiple seasons and they just didn't like, they didn't want to spend all this money and then have it be broken. So you know, it's not uncommon. And and what the story doesn't say is that tim cook sent them a memo right, this is whoever they're working with at apple. Yeah, uh said uh, it's not working and this is pretty routine.

1:47:49 - Alex Lindsay
Well, and often it's the showrunner and then they disagree with the director. The director, you know like there's a bunch of people that are creatives that are involved. It's probably not as heavy handed from Apple as it may seem in the article. It's probably a bunch of creative people internally in that project arguing about it.

1:48:05 - Leo Laporte
I haven't seen F1 yet. Has anybody seen it yet? Apparently, the very first thing you see is an apple ipad, ipods, yeah, or, I'm sorry, the headphones, the airpod maxes. Uh, it's a one big apple ad from front to back. I bet it's still. They spent the money. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be good and it's an x1 ad too.

1:48:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Except for who the bad guy is, that's all. They're the ones who's using the samsung beds, right?

1:48:32 - Leo Laporte
right. Apple did win a big appeal, a 300 million dollar us patent verdict that they had lost. They appealed. The appeals court threw it out. This is with a uh reuters euphemistically calls it an ip management company Optus wireless technology. Uh, of course, the where's the trial in Texas? Uh jury instructions were flawed in the previous trial, so it's not over yet. It is the second time that that nine figure uh verdict has been overturned. However, optus says we are highly confident the court will establish fair compensation for the critical optus patents that enable high speed connectivity for millions of devices in 2020. The jury said apple owed half a billion dollars for infringing the patents. It got cut back to 300 million.

1:49:28 - Alex Lindsay
I just feel like there's such a manipulation of the patent laws and I think that there should be some threshold of you have to at least attempt to make 10% of the patents that you own, or 20% or whatever that number is, or you can't enforce them, like you can't just have ideas and write them down and patent them Like that's not what it was built for. It was built so that you would have, you would share with everyone what you did, and then it would protect you to make it for the next X number of years. And this is a complete perversion of the patent law, and just coming up with an idea and locking it down is not. I think that you should have a certain amount of time to actually execute something, and it can be seven years or whatever, or you have to do something with a certain percentage of your patents, but this is just bs you know the the same, uh roughly the same award was uh given in the uk.

1:50:24 - Leo Laporte
The uk court of appeals in may uh increased the word to 502 million dollars uh for a fran licensed with optus for apple. So apple is looking at could be a billion dollar uh fines uh for all of this. Um, there is some question whether optus is uh this is. These aren't 4g patents, by the way. There's some question whether optus's demands are fran'd fair. Uh, what is it fran stands for? Fair and reasonable, I think so. We'll watch with interest. I'm sure apple's got the checkbook out. Feds wise up and say hey, maybe you shouldn't use whats WhatsApp if you're communicating. The federal government says the US House of Representatives staff must no longer use WhatsApp and switch to more secure services like Apple Messages.

1:51:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, According to the Financial Times, the chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives has banned whatsapp starting at the end of the month. Yeah, it's, it's nice to see them.

1:51:40 - Leo Laporte
They're trying to make people follow rules in there. I'm not sure that's the, but I don't know if whatsapp is more secure or less secure than apple messages. In both cases, what's app uses the signal protocol yeah um, I'm not sure really what they're saying here.

To be honest. This might be a mistake. Yeah, me neither. It might be a really a shot by the trump administration at mark zuckerberg, who is he's not a fan of. Apparently, whatsapp messages are end-to-end encrypted by default, said the spokesperson for meta. The app should remain on the approved list. Uh, in fact, you know. Apple messages are ended and encrypted in some cases, but not all. The house recommends apple messages and facetime, but they also approve teams signal and wicker, which is, as a apple insider says, amazon's's messaging app. That's so secure You've never heard of it, okay, okay.

1:52:38 - Alex Lindsay
Right up there with chime, chime chime.

1:52:43 - Leo Laporte
What else Right to repair is now the law of the. What do you call it? The law of the continent, in the EU, yeah?

1:52:56 - Andy Ihnatko
It's kind of cool. The bigger thing that's associated with that is that part of the EU's new laws that just came into effect is that when you're selling devices, you have to have kind of like a nutrition labels about repairability, about features, about, about about a whole bunch of different things. And now those are, those are finally becoming into effect, and so I haven't seen it yet, but apparently that's Apple's now forced to sort of disclose and be willing to stand behind certain claims about like battery life on devices, because they have to now basically make this public information yeah, they have what we have.

1:53:33 - Leo Laporte
We have now eliminated the united states those energy star labels apparently those are gone. But uh, eu is starting to do that now for smartphones, which is, I think, a good thing is is did I read that article correctly that it said in 2027 it has to have a removable battery? Uh yes, the battery, let's see the scale, let's see the energy, battery endurance.

1:53:55 - Alex Lindsay
But I think, further down it said that it was that it needed to be, uh, that by 2027 it was going to require all phones to have a removable battery, and I'm smart phones and many other devices sold in the EU will have to feature easily removable batteries by 2027.

1:54:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah right.

1:54:14 - Andy Ihnatko
The text that I read. It might have changed since then, but the text I read basically says that no, you can still. You can still have like an iPhone. You just can't like create it so that you have to destroy the phone, to get out the battery and swap it out.

1:54:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, easily removable. By whom? I guess would be the question swap it out?

1:54:30 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, easily removable by whom? I guess would be the question, right meaning that, yeah, and apple. Apple has already done a whole bunch of work, particularly in the most recent redesigns, where you don't have to disassemble everything to get at the battery. You don't, it's not the, it's not the bottom of a stack of things anymore, uh. So, yeah, don't worry about that. That, that would be.

1:54:43 - Alex Lindsay
That would be. That'd be kind of a crazy thing. I was like I think we'll just get eu phones for that, Like Apple, like we're just going to make something for you guys.

1:54:50 - Andy Ihnatko
But but I did think moisture, moisture and dust resistance.

1:54:53 - Alex Lindsay
Well, but I think that one of the things I thought was interesting, though, as I started to think like how could they do that? And one thing is, as you see them getting thinner and with MagSafe you could theoretically build a phone that had very little battery not no battery, but almost no battery, that you slid into a larger sled. You can decide how thick you want your battery, your phone to be. You know, because for many of us man, I would love to have a thicker phone that had more battery, like I was. Just you know, especially when you start shooting video, if you start shooting like pro res on your phone and it's not, doesn't have external power, it's a really short trip about about 12 years ago.

1:55:27 - Andy Ihnatko
One of the reasons why wasn't the reason why I switched from iphone to a galaxy s3, galaxy 3s or whatever it was one of them, was that you could just simply pop off the back, swap out just like you know john wicks swipping cartridges and suddenly be good for another three or four hours. And that, and boy was that great when you're at like a three-day conference yeah, um in our vision pro segment for today if you, what do you know?

1:55:55 - Leo Laporte
it's time to talk to vision pro if you've always wanted to take a hot lap with a famous movie star pretending to be a race car driver, you're in luck yeah, baby first.

1:56:07 - Alex Lindsay
That's the first time that I got close to feeling sick like it was. It wasn't quite, but it was the first time I was like whoa, I can feel that one a lot.

1:56:15 - Leo Laporte
Is Brad Pitt actually driving? Yeah, yeah, they trained him.

1:56:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah. So there's a Vision Pro on the TV app. It's a hot lap of Brad Pitt somewhere in the Middle East. It's called F1, the movie hot lap, yeah, and and it's just a lot. I mean, it really is like just a one camera on the car. You can watch him, you watch the road, um, and I it didn't have any effect on on me, but, um, it was very entertaining. Like you're, you're on the race car, you're, you know, mounted to the side of the race car as you do a lap on an F1 track, and that was pretty cool.

1:56:54 - Alex Lindsay
I thought it was cool. I mean, I don't want to say I didn't think it was cool, it was just that like that's a pretty aggressive thing to do with a camera and it was. Do you think it was an Ursa?

1:57:05 - Jason Snell
The nice thing is that the camera was mounted on the, it didn't move on the car, right. So the world moves around you, but the car and brad pitt and all that stays pretty static, which for me that helped, helped a lot yeah yeah, I read it.

1:57:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Okay, I'm sorry, I was gonna say I read. I read something that was interesting because I I don't know a lot about f1. I know a little bit enough to know that, wow, even just getting an actual f1 car to move without it locking up and basically saving you, saving the engine from you destroying it is an incredible thing. So I'm amazed that any of these actors actually learned how to operate an f1 car. Turns out that, as though, as though this is, this is hugely less impressive. The actors were driving f2, formula two cars that were re-bodied to look like F1s but that's still a pretty good thing.

1:57:54 - Leo Laporte
I remember Paul Newman was a pretty accomplished race car driver.

1:57:57 - Alex Lindsay
There have been movie stars who changed cars he was really driving those damn things yeah and I think Brad Pitt I think I read somewhere spent months in training to be able to drive the car.

1:58:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Now that we're back on F1, there was a story that came out while we were recording about how Apple Wallet users are getting push notifications like advertising F1.

1:58:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I saw that, Gosh. I hope that's not true.

1:58:28 - Andy Ihnatko
You'd think they would have learned from the YouTube thing. I haven't seen it myself.

1:58:34 - Jason Snell
I put the show notes under show people I know have gotten it it's. It's definitely so it's in your wallet and it says buy tickets from fandango yeah, it's in your wallet and you get a user code with apple pay to save. I can't remember the last time. Do you have to?

1:58:48 - Leo Laporte
have a Fandango card in your wallet? I don't think so. I don't know.

1:58:55 - Andy Ihnatko
Just basically dropping a coupon in your wallet.

1:58:58 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I don't see one Interesting. I do see a card for the Petaluma Cheese Shop. Ooh, a Wensley tale. Okay, I don't know. I'm hoping and now you can fly around the Haven 1 space station, which has not yet been built, but it is a proposed commercial enterprise from VAST, the first commercial space station in low-Earth orbit. In order to get people excited about it, they've got a vr fly through. It's also available on meta, but you can get it on if you want. On the vision pro, I have you tried that one, guys I haven't.

1:59:39 - Alex Lindsay
I thought I think I was looking for it in the content area, but I think it sounds like it's an app. It's an app. I haven't downloaded the app, that's vr fly through.

1:59:47 - Leo Laporte
it's just a 3d rendering of what the Haven one will look like, which is still cool.

1:59:52 - Alex Lindsay
The biggest problem with a lot of the 3D renderings that have happened so far is that they're not done very well. There's an enormous amount of texturing and everything else that can be done for the Vision Pro and for Meta, and especially if they built it for both the Vision Pro and the Quest, the quality of the textures and everything else will be much lower than what they could be. So it'd be interesting to see if they pushed uh, push that up just from a pure processing perspective of how many polygons and how how big the texture maps can be. But I think that overall, I think that that's. Yeah, I think we've only seen a handful of places where people are actually pushing the quality to what the headset is capable of actually doing. So I haven't taken a look at it yet, but I you know, and the problem is that people keep on well, it's good enough for right now, or we're just going to see if people like it or not.

But that's like you know, half baked bread is still dough, and so you keep on like if you get halfway there, you're still. You're like oh, it's handout, handout dough, and they're like well, they don't like the dough, and they're like well, it's not finished yet and I think Apple half of Apple's business plan is just finishing the bread Like it's, you know, it's just, it's just like oh, everybody put out all this dough that's half baked and let me, let's just, let's just, I've seen is that there's just a lot of half-baked bread. You know, like they're, they want to test the waters, but they're not testing the waters with something you can actually eat, you know, and so it'll be interesting. I'll take a look at I mean, I'm not saying about this, but my general experience you're feeding ducks when you test the waters with the bread.

2:01:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I think I'm trying to get. I'm trying to bring it together.

2:01:27 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, I'm trying to get so many metaphors, to get metaphors or laws together.

2:01:31 - Jason Snell
I had a little vision pro item, which is just that. Um, they released the final recorded version of sandwich video, released the final recorded speaking of half-baked bread, yes, of the talk show, oh, um, which they captured, uh, in in 3d not immersive, but in 3d for their theater app, and they released that and I got to use it. Um, and what's fun about it is they did three different. So the the grand argument that we all have is what's the ideal way to record a live event? Is it a single camera in a single position, or is it like what apple does with a lot of these? You're cutting every four seconds and you kind of, in my opinion, become unmoored, and I feel like there's probably a happy medium in there somewhere, but it's not either of those.

Anyway, what they did this time is they framed it really brilliantly, because you're in their virtual theater, but it looks very much like the theater. It's on a screen, but the way it's lit and the way it's framed, it's like they're on the stage in front of you and it's it's just people sitting at couches talking, right, but it is, it's 3d, it looks really good, it's really well shot. And then they did they also shot it from the left and the right and if you swipe left or right it moves you to that part of their theater and that camera, that's cool. And so then you're at this different angle and it keeps you to that part of their theater and that camera, that's cool. And so then you're at this different angle and it keeps the illusion that you're kind of looking at a stage and you can watch sort of over John Gruber's shoulder or over Neelay Patel's shoulder or you can watch it straight on.

And so, again, just an experiment they're recording a podcast on a stage, but last year there were a lot of technical glitches and this year it it looks rock solid and I really love that. They're experimenting with the idea of doing multicam so you can choose a perspective and just switch between those perspectives and there's a little bit of a. When you swipe it sort of goes black and then it comes up in another location. It's not instantaneous, but like it's. It's just a cool way that they're exploring what this sort of thing could do for an event like that.

2:03:35 - Leo Laporte
Excellent, yeah so cool to see, that's great and that's your Vision Pro segment.

2:03:47 - Jason Snell
Those of you who are waiting for the Vision Pro segment are now free to leave.

2:03:51 - Leo Laporte
But don't leave right away, because our Picks of the Week are coming up. Next You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Jason Snell, andy Anaco and Alex Lindsey. Let's kick off the Picks of the Week. We've been very good keeping mum about Andy's picks, so now, andy, go for it.

2:04:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is a really, really great thing. So the computational photography brain trust, formerly on the Pixel team at Google, moved over to Adobe.

2:04:23 - Leo Laporte
Chiefly Mark Lavoie, who was so impressive at Google.

2:04:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Amazing, and before that, like, the first computational photography app that I ever used was an app called SynthCam that was available for iOS. When he was a researcher and a professor at Stanford, I think, and I still have in deep, deep, deep of my camera roll like, oh my God, look, it's in Boston Public Garden and you can see there's blurry stuff behind the George Washington statue, but the George Washington statue is completely sharp. So they released a technology preview from Adobe. It's a new camera app that's called Project Indigo and, my goodness, it is the stuff from start to finish. There's a long, long, not so technical paper that they published, basically announcing it. That really outlines the philosophy and the thinking and the research that goes behind it, where their idea is to create something that's more of an SLR sort of look to computational photography Like, whereas the traditional camera app tends to over-denoise things, over-saturate colors, over-sharpen things, just over-process things, to begin with, this one uses the very, very latest technology and the very, very latest AI to combine not just a handful of intermediate frames to denoise, but like 30 frames to denoise at the very, very top. It does everything very, very thoughtfully. It's again tries to be more like, and I think they say this explicitly in the doc. It's more like we're building a conventional mirrorless camera. But imagine this mirrorless camera has computational AI and computational photography features built into it.

I've been shooting with it for the past week. This is one of the reasons why. Yes, it's nice that I have the excuse of I've got the new developer beta one to test out, but I've been carrying my iPhone alongside my Pixel because I just want to keep playing with this camera app and, I will say, taking the same pictures with the stock iPhone app and this app. It's still experimental. It's not as though it's hands down kicks the butt of the stock iPhone camera. But the times there's many, many times where you can see where the iPhone just got things wrong. The color was just not right, the sky is just yeah, it's a nice sunny day, but the sky was not that incredibly intense blue, everything when there are noticeable differences.

This camera is a lot more naturalized, a lot more natural than the iPhone camera and, on top of all of that, I don't think I've seen an attempt to make you get.

The interface is still hey, press a button, take a picture, and if that's all you want to do, that's all you have to do.

But I've never seen an advanced camera app that tries to introduce pro photography modes and done it in such a simple, elegant way where, if you want to give it some extra instruction about saying, hey, I want you to boost up the shadows a little bit, or hey, I want, or I want to have some awareness of what the histogram is like, or I want to see where highlights are being clipped out it is so easy to do all of that stuff without feeling as though the interface is just so damn cluttered that you just want some relief from all of the overstimulation from the UI.

It is really, I think one of the simplest things I can say about how much I'm enjoying it is that it has basically taken the place of the camera app in the launcher of my iPhone. Now it's the Project Indigo app is in the space where I would normally go to tap on the camera button. Now there are some things to know about. This is an experimental app, which means it hasn't crashed or messed anything up as far as I've been using it for the past week or so.

2:08:34 - Leo Laporte
However, it is super computationally intensive. Did you notice? Your phone gets really hot when you're using it.

2:08:38 - Andy Ihnatko
It's the only camera app I've used that without taking like 8K video. It says, hey, the camera is overheating, please, yeah, immediately. Well, on mine it'll happen like this is an iPhone 14 Pro. The doc actually says that we kind of recommend the iPhone 15 because it has more computation.

2:08:55 - Leo Laporte
I have the latest iPhone Pro Max and it said almost immediately oh, your camera's too hot.

2:09:02 - Andy Ihnatko
And the other thing you'll notice is that when you take the picture it's completely responsive. It's completely responsive, but however you'll see in the upper lower left-hand corner, the little preview, there might be a little countdown timer. It says it's taking us like four seconds to do the computation and actually write this. And during that time because, as we discussed before, we talked about the iPad iOS doesn't do anything in the background.

If you by nature like then sleep the phone and put it back in your pocket, it might still have some stuff to do by the time you get there. But it's amazing, it has some Labs features, like some things it's stealing from, like other Adobe Raw products. If you tap on the Labs button and say Hi, can you just automatically I took a picture of this thing through a window Could you remove the reflections automatically? Sure, I can do that, no problem. If you've got Adobe Lightroom, it integrates really really nicely with Adobe Lightroom, sending its DNG and its raw data.

2:09:57 - Leo Laporte
I felt like you had to subscribe to the iPhone Lightroom to use it. You don't have to pay anything to use it. You have to have an Adobe account.

2:10:06 - Andy Ihnatko
For now it's 100% free. It's available through the App app store. The only thing is that again in the doc, they say that, yeah, maybe we're not going to keep this free forever, but we're, this is an experimental thing that we want to do. But adobe they're saying that adobe really is very, very much culturally invested in the idea of not not having the camera and the processing and the editing all as part of one app, one part the idea is it replaces the lightroom camera.

2:10:33 - Leo Laporte
In fact, there's a switch to do that. Oh also and I know you don't have the the camera button on your iphone, but it does work. You can't assign the camera button to it.

2:10:41 - Andy Ihnatko
So, yeah, you know, you can actually press the camera button and yeah, it's I mean, I haven't, I've only like, I haven't even tried like long exposures and like real nighttime mode with it. Yeah, again that, that, the paper, that that was published with it is not really a technical, technical, technical paper, but it will impress you as to how much work went into this and how much thought went into this and how ambitious this could be in the future. And hopefully, one of the new features coming up is an Android version, because for now it's iOS only.

2:11:15 - Leo Laporte
Mark Le, the new features coming up is an android version, because, for now, it's ios only well, because it's mark lavoy I think it's. That was the thing that really got me.

2:11:18 - Andy Ihnatko
He was the wizard of computational photography and, uh, google and adobe hired him away from google. I've I've heard him speak multiple times, like in person, about about his work. I I had one conversation with him at a, at a google event that like, oh my god, it was like I was fan, if it's possible, to fanboy with a computational photography like researcher engineer. I did exactly that thing, uh, but have you played with it?

2:11:39 - Alex Lindsay
Alex, I just opened it up and started playing with it. Okay, so I don't have a lot of opinions. Yeah, yeah, I had it.

2:11:44 - Leo Laporte
No, I had it yesterday, I think it came up and I took it to the county fair hoping for an opportunity. But the phone kept complaining it was too hot.

2:11:50 - Andy Ihnatko
So I, I haven't had that much problems, but yeah, I definitely have been seeing that.

2:11:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah I was keeping it in a pocket. So you know, maybe you want to I don't know wave it around while you're in between shots or something. Yeah, let's do it. That. I mean, what that tells you is it's doing a lot of work. It's doing a lot of work.

2:12:09 - Alex Lindsay
It's using all the phone, using all the phone, Alex lindsay, your pick of the week. Uh, so so I was fortunate enough to see f1 last week. Um, oh, you did see it. Yeah, I did, yeah. So I saw it at skywalker sound and oh so I admit I may be a little, a little bit heavy-handed, given that I saw it in probably one of the nicest theaters in the world, certainly the best-sounding theater in the world.

In some cases, when the cars flew over, you can feel it in your feet, and so it is an incredible place to see one. But I will say it's an incredible movie. I'm probably going to go back and see it. I want to go see it and want to to see what the the big theaters do do with this. So, um, for me, seeing it in dolby uh, you know, in a dolby theater, and also I really want to see it in imax theater, because the base is so heavy but the surround is so good. You know, it is um, incredible, an incredible movie. And have you ever seen an f1 race in person? Uh, no, I've not.

2:13:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because it is very, very.

2:13:11 - Alex Lindsay
The tv doesn't reproduce the sound at all, so I would actually be very curious to hear what it sounds like at the theater, because the reason I wanted to recommend it is that I don't know how well this is going to translate to a smaller screen like it is.

There are so many shots that are big screen shots and it's interesting that apple went down this path of a, something that we know is going to come out. You know we're all going to get as part of Apple TV plus or whatever, but if you get the opportunity to see it in a, in a big like at an IMAX, I would highly recommend taking the advantage of it, cause it's wow, it was, I was, I was truly I. You know I went, you know I was, I was interested in the movie, apple's pushing it so hard.

2:13:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Now I understand why, like it's a, it's a really good movie you know, once he says that that's impressive good, can't wait to see it here's the interesting thing about the visual effects is that they were seamless, like you.

2:14:01 - Alex Lindsay
just, you know there's so much that they did physically because they were, you know they were shooting this at the, at the races, you know, and uh, I think that they even had like a pod, you know, on the track and so on, so forth for some of the shooting, and so they had a lot of um, a lot of this was very physically done.

But, uh, even with the digital effects, it just doesn't feel it's not one of those ones where the physics isn't right or the textures aren't right or the, you know, everything just kind of seamlessly, you know, comes together, uh, and it's a, it was, and as a, from a pure sound and visual perspective. And and I and I will say I'll be interested to see what people think I'm again, I'm, even though I got a little bit of tight on that last VR thing. I'm pretty heavy, you know I don't. It doesn't bother me to see a lot of big screen movement, but there's a lot of it. I mean, they put that those cameras are on those cars and you really feel like the, the energy that that you would have. I don't know what the energy would be like I've been in Indy We've. We've done some stuff at Indy cars. I've never been in there, it's probably very similar.

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we went to the Vegas F1 last year and, yeah, that's an amazing experience it's no more raceways like a five minutes from my house are powerful.

2:15:07 - Alex Lindsay
I think it'll be really interesting. I can see how this is. Apple's big experiment in this area is that I really didn't have a lot of interest in F1. And then I saw the movie and I was like, oh, I really want to see the next F1. Because you feel like you know it, like there's some drama there and you feel like there's all these, you understand it. It's like when you understand it better, about what's happening or what it takes to do it, then you're more interested in actually seeing it, and so I I can understand where, where Apple is coming from there. So it'll be interesting to see if other people feel that way, but it it is, I would recommend, if you can see it in a theater, see it in the theater.

I don't say that very often. I see maybe you know three or four. I used to see a movie every week and now I see a movie, you know, every quarter maybe. Um, and this is definitely, if I had to choose over the summer season, this is definitely one of the ones that I would think about.

2:15:54 - Leo Laporte
Very nice. Now I really want to see it. Me too. I'm sad that my connection to LucasSound is no longer at Lucas. I would have loved to have seen it in that theater. An amazing theater. Jason Snell pick of the week now pick of the week.

2:16:14 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I'm gonna cheat and just pick a feature that's in mac os 26 in beta, which is shortcuts that use ai. I did this, uh, today and yesterday the idea that you can build a shortcut. In my case, I wanted to build a shortcut as part of my blogging workflow that will generate an alt text description of the image that I'm uploading. I already have an automatic uploader and resizer and all of that, but the alt text space is blank and I thought, well, this would be easy and interesting, and so you can use private cloud compute, which will accept an image input. It is funny dealing with AI, right? Because AI doesn't follow your instructions. It's like a kind of a questionable assistant. It'll do stuff for you, but not maybe exactly. So I'm like don't use double quotes, have it be only one sentence. And then it gives me responses back that are like four sentences with double quotes. I'm like, what are you even doing? But you know it's shortcuts, and so I actually ended up with a prompt that works pretty well, and then, when it's done with that prompt, it counts how many characters are in the response. I changed it from a sentence to just like make it 300 characters or less, something like that. And then if it's too many characters, it actually submits that caption again and says here's, here's some alt text I got. Can you make this shorter under this number? And then at that point it actually does a pretty good job. But you like have to, you gotta double, double bag it, you gotta double filter it and then at the end there's a step where it takes double quotes and make some single quotes because you can tell it not to use double quotes because that'll break the alt tag. But uh, it still will sometimes. So you got to protect against that.

And it really gave me a sense of like the power and also the just bizarre nature of ai that, like it can look at an image and generate alt text in it's incredible. And. And for screenshots, I specifically say like, if it's got a screenshot, include the text of the screenshot. That's going to be very helpful. Thank you very much. And it does it. It's really amazing.

And then from run to run it just behaves bizarrely. And that is not because it's Apple's model, it's because it's an LLM and it does that. But what I love about it is my automation to upload images to my website now has all text baked into it and you know what it's good. It's really good and I couldn't do it before and I know you could have done this with third party stuff before. But the beauty of this for me is that this is just going to be stock on people's devices this fall and, like I know Alex is out there and Alex is an LLM and image generation astronaut Like, and I know I have other friends who are like that, where they're like, oh, you could have wired this up to the command line and done this and all that. It's like it's all true, but there is something that is next level about saying here is a shortcut that you can run on any device that is running 26 when it comes out and it does all these AI things, and you didn't have to install anything or register for anything.

2:19:23 - Alex Lindsay
It just does it. Yeah, I think it's going to be amazing. I think you're right that the utility AI that just does these little things and you can use natural language to create it is going to be life-changing for a lot of people.

2:19:30 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's just the fact that you can pop any kind of request into a shortcut Like this is not the only way to do user automation, it's just a one little aspect of it. But there are so many things that those of us who've been doing Apple scripts or shell scripts or Python scripts or shortcuts for a while where there are moments that are just kind of like not able to be done because it requires something that we we can't program, and to have the ability to just hand an image to an Oracle and say, describe this for me and and let it sit in the middle of an existing workflow that you built, which is what I did here. It's like I've got a whole thing that it, like it resizes and optimizes my images for the right size, it builds the HTML code, it puts it on the clipboard or inserts it into BBA, like all of that is there. All I did is insert one step where it goes, run the alt text shortcut and now I've got alt text in all of my image tags that will describe it for people. It's pretty awesome. So I'm very excited.

I'm excited about a lot of stuff that's coming in 26,. Having used the betas for a couple of weeks now. But this one just is the one that blew me away, where I had the moment where I'm like, oh my God, I have stuff that I can fix with AI and again, I could have done it before, but it would have been well, install this and run this and all that. And I love that. This I can literally pass to a friend who's running 26 and say, run it and that's it, that's all because it's stock and it's really great to be on the cutting edge. But there is so much power in having features that are part of the stock build of an operating system, because a lot of people are just never going to install whatever or pay extra for whatever and we can all do that. But like this is just there for anybody, that's pretty awesome.

2:21:22 - Leo Laporte
Nice, so shortcuts, I'm looking forward to it.

2:21:25 - Jason Snell
I can't wait in 26.

2:21:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's it for the show. On that note, no ai in our show, though, I'm proud to say, in fact, as ai continues to flood our lives, and of course, we do a show about ai called intelligent machines, because I think it is really interesting. It's nice to know there's a place you can go where there's just humans sitting around talking uh, and that's what we do right here. If you're into uh, the apple macintosh ecosystem or the iphone ecosystem, or the ipad, or the apple tv or the apple watch, this is the place. Every tuesday, 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. You can watch live if you're in the club on the discord. But there's also youtube for everybody, open to all uh. Twitch, tiktok, xcom, linkedin, facebook and kick watch where you like. Chat with us in all of those places. We can see your chats and we welcome them.

But of course, uh, even if it's going to build up and you're going to have guilt, you should still subscribe to the podcast. Just because I don't think we monetize the patrick, do we monetize the live viewers? I don't think we're able to, uh, and it's only a small fraction of the audience. So download the show if you would go to your favorite podcast player and if you really want to help us leave us a five-star review, help spread the word. You can also get it from our website twitter, twittv, slash, mbw that counts or watch on YouTube. There's a YouTube video feed and that's a good way to share clips of the show and so forth. However you get it, I hope you will. I hope you'll join us every Tuesday for MacBreak Weekly.

2:23:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy Ihnatko is at ihnatko.com Soon to be open to the public Yep DNS drops in a few days, I think in a few days the dns, unless there's something I don't know about. There's the dns switch over nice, exciting. Well, by the next week we'll have something to talk about hopefully again, I have to, I have to, I have to backfill a few things, but this within anyway, step by step by step. We're very, very close. It's slouching very close to Bethlehem at this point.

2:23:32 - Leo Laporte
Yes, Well, great to have you, Andy. Thank you so much. Stay cool on a very, very hot day in most of America. Alex Lindsay is at officehours.global answering questions every morning.

2:23:46 - Alex Lindsay
And anything particularly you want to plug. We did a concert on saturday.

2:23:51 - Leo Laporte
I'm not gonna oh yeah, how'd that go? It went well, that was with your daughter my daughter's band uh joystick failure um is what a good name.

2:23:59 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, oh, my god that's a good name, and so they, uh, they, um, they played at a, at a studio, uh, airship laboratories over in richmond and, and so it's not really a concert it's more of of. You get to listen to them record right, because they played the song a couple of times and they play another song a couple of times and they you get to just kind of watch them live, kind of figuring stuff out. Um, and it's the first time we had gone over there without, and so, um, is that your daughter in the front? Uh, no, that's that's, uh, that's the. That's the lead singer of Story Story. Oh, there she is.

2:24:31 - Leo Laporte
I see her in the back there, if you scan for her.

2:24:33 - Alex Lindsay
you'll probably see her. She'll be over. She's probably just out of frame at the moment. I think she's working on an amp at the moment. This is in between songs, but you can see my daughter there with the guitar there.

2:24:42 - Leo Laporte
Very nice. Oh, isn't this exciting.

2:24:49 - Alex Lindsay
So it was just the first time we had gone in there. We're it's kind of, we're going to put up some stuff that's cleaned up and, um, everything else in the next little bit of time. But it's very talented band, so um, are they?

all high school kids. They're all high school. There's some of the one of the reasons we wanted to capture it was because about half of them are graduating. So this is the last time this band is. So my daughter and Story are still in the band, but I think everybody else is graduating. So it'll still be the band, but it'll be a different band next year. So, anyway, it's fun. How fun is that that's so awesome.

Yeah, so we'll leave this raw one up until the end of the week, and then we're going to take it down and put up the actual songs that we ended up saving.

2:25:28 - Leo Laporte
It's on the uh.

2:25:29 - Alex Lindsay
It's on the office hours uh, it's on our website, on our youtube channel.

2:25:32 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah yeah, very, very nice. officehours.global is the website. youtube.com/@officehoursglobal is the youtube channel. Greetings. There's lots of video, lots of information every day, constant barrage, a stream of everything you'd ever want to know about everything in the world. Thank you, Alex. Jason snell is at sixcolors.com/jason for his podcasts. Anything particular you'd like to mention?

2:26:06 - Jason Snell
um, monday's episode of upgrade with mike hurley on relay.fm uh, we, we dove deep into discussions about what apple should or shouldn't acquire. Um, including perplexity, but also way beyond that. I, we both made some sort of uh wild suggestions about things that apple should actually consider acquiring. So if you'd like to hear us spend Apple's money, the upgrade program is there for you, very nice.

2:26:37 - Leo Laporte
Very nice, sixcolors.com. Thank you everybody for joining us. We will see you next time. And, as it had been my long and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over, bye-bye.

Get your tech news exactly how you want it with twit.tv. Tech News Weekly, with Mikah Sargent, delivers quick hit coverage and exclusive journalist interviews, giving you the inside scoop on breaking tech stories in under an hour. Now for deeper dives. I hope you'll join me, Leo Laporte and a great panel of tech industry experts. That's every Sunday with this Week in Tech. We'll break down everything from AI breakthroughs to privacy concerns to cybersecurity alerts in the tech world's longest running and most trusted tech news roundtable. So efficient or in-depth, the choice is yours. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts, and head on over to our website, twit.tv, for even more independent tech journalism. 

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