Transcripts

MacBreak Weekly 980 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, alex and Jason are all here. We'll talk about the rock and the hard place that Tim Cook has wedged right in there between. Also, how much more your next Apple Watch or MacBook might cost thanks to tariffs. We'll also talk about the new designs for the next iPhone. That and a lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. For the next iPhone. That and a lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly episode 980, recorded Tuesday, July 8th 2025: I Have Never Ate Tomato Ketchup Onions. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Hello everybody, time to talk about the latest news from Apple with Andy Ihnatko of ihnatko.com.

Alex of officehours.global and the legendary wizard Jason Snell of sixcolors.com. I don't know, are you a Wizard?

0:01:10 - Jason Snell
I'll put up my hood so..

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
There he is, and he's a wizard.

And a blessed prime day to you Lisa asked me this morning okay, what should we get on prime? I said absolutely nothing. I'm kind of an anti-amazon guy these days. I don't know why that is. There's still stuff I have to buy, but increasingly the stuff that I want is no longer sold locally because they've basically put everybody out of business. Our independent bookstore is is not quite closing down, but it's getting rid of 60 of its space and eliminating its used books floor. And I blame amazon, but I also blame myself, because every time I go to the bookstore to look for a book they don't have it. Then I go to amazon and order it for the next day.

0:01:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, our friend um, our friend Glenn Fleishman uh, has a website where you can look up and find used books and stuff and he's just using, you know, a search engine to do it. It's very clever, um, but he said that the used book market went from being like this kind of amazing adventure where you never knew what you were going to find and you might get a good deal, and then the internet came in and there was like this period where used books became like oh, now I can get a used book anywhere and the prices were kind of all over the place, but you could finally find it thanks to the internet. And he says now, 25, 30 years into this, it's reached the point where you can find any book that's ever been published used somewhere for almost nothing. Right, yeah, so it's like it's completely flattened.

0:02:40 - Andy Ihnatko
This library has a really wonderful. Instead of having like a once or twice a year book sale, they, this library, has a really wonderful. Instead of having like a once or twice a year book sale, they have like sort of a section that's just nothing but like donated books and movies and stuff like that that you can buy like really, really cheap. And I never know how to react when I see somebody, like when I see one of those book scanners there where they just have piles and piles of books going beep, beep. Look, just basically trying to clear out all the ones that have any value whatsoever so they can sell them. Because, on the one hand, they're there to be sold. The money benefits the library, that's the whole purpose of them being there. On the other hand, it just seems gauche doesn't it?

0:03:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's like when Anthropic scanned all those books and the judge says it was okay because you destroyed them after you scanned them. So that was fair use. You bought them, scanned them and then destroyed them.

0:03:31 - Alex Lindsay
It's like the ones that they scanned and destroyed, but I think the problem was is what other websites they used to.

0:03:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was the other.

0:03:38 - Alex Lindsay
They have far more volumes in the. It's like look, look good here, like look at what we're doing here while we're like grabbing almost they're still going to try somewhere else.

0:03:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, uh, all right, that's enough of that. That's enough of leo's gripes for the day. Let's uh. You brought up amazon prime day, that's true.

0:03:55 - Jason Snell
Happy prime day to all who celebrate, and I feel so bad for all the bloggers, all the people, even at consumer reports.

0:04:01 - Leo Laporte
Nicholas de leon, who was on on sunday on twitter, said we've got to do all the Prime Day coverage. Did they do that, jason, when you were back at the magazine, or no?

0:04:14 - Jason Snell
We would do that a little bit, because there's affiliate marketing. Basically, you're getting a kickback, You're getting traffic and you're getting a kickback, and so everybody does it. Now we did that a little, but we tried not to do it very much. Um, I do have a friend who works for a tech website and he I was like hey, uh, I want you to be on my podcast. And he was like well, not this week because it's prime day. And.

0:04:39 - Alex Lindsay
I'm like, oh boy, it's not a holiday. I signed up for streaming on amazon, which I've never done, but I signed up as a curiosity and um, uh, and, of course, yeah, last week there was a lot of emails, like you know here are all your incentives.

0:04:52 - Leo Laporte
let's face it, the internet is completely and I I opened our spreadsheet, we do our uh show rundowns and google sheets and of course, google said hey, you want copilot to analyze this? Hey, hey, hey, hey. And even when I, no, it left a little toolbar just floating there just in case I changed my mind. So annoying, what a world we live in, what a world we live in. But there are many other things to complain about. The good news is on iOS 26 Beta 3, apple's dialing back liquid glass.

0:05:24 - Andy Ihnatko
It seems like they've turned off the liquidity and turned into just frosted glass oh, what it's like.

0:05:30 - Jason Snell
I mean the liquid. The liquid also involves it like sort of like having some animations and stuff. We'll see if this is like a permanent retrenchment or if then they dial it back. You know, I feel like they're tuning it in a little bit and and we'll see whether it's it stays this way or if it goes back have you played with the beta 3?

0:05:46 - Leo Laporte
uh, jason, you installed it already I got them on all the stuff is this the indicator you were looking for for the public beta like this once beta 3 comes out?

0:05:52 - Jason Snell
yeah, this is what I said last week, which is they'll probably release a pub, uh developer beta next week and assuming that it doesn't have horrible bugs in it, that can't be, you know then they would go a week and do a public beta. I think that is a likely scenario. But you know, they also have a possibility that it's bugs and they fix them, because they sometimes do that where the public beta is a new build number but it's because they identified like a little problem. But otherwise they think it's fine, but they, they don't want the public beta. Public beta always kind of trails the developer beta. So developer beta is like your sense of danger and public beta they wanted to be like, okay, we spent a week and nobody died, so now it'll be the public beta. So if I had to bet, I would say you know, next, next week, sometime will be the time apple did say by the end of july, didn't they?

0:06:39 - Leo Laporte
for the public they said next month. But yeah, yeah, they said it last month.

0:06:43 - Jason Snell
To me, this I feels like, and like I said last week, the most likely scenario was that there'll be a beta three this week, which there was, and that then that would be the candidate. And Apple will never talk about this, but that's sort of. What goes on behind the scenes is that this is the candidate and if all things are okay, it may be. What you know either is the public beta or forms the public beta with, like some minor updates, and then you know that will proceed throughout the summer. You get the developer betas and then you get a public beta release and when they're comfortable that the developer beta is okay, so we're developer beta 3 for iOS 26, ipad OS 26, and Mac OS 26.

0:07:22 - Leo Laporte
All three came out yesterday. So, okay, we're ready to go then, huh, anything we should watch out for you. I think you're all using the beta developer beta right in some form or fashion yep, I'm. I'm using it on the iPhone yeah, uh, alex, are you playing with it or you're mr production?

0:07:42 - Alex Lindsay
machine. No, no, I, I, I um, I haven't gotten them onto my os's yet um, but uh. But on my iPhone I have it on, there looks nice yeah, okay, I have to say that develop the beta 3.

0:07:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Maybe it's because it looks it's a it's a step forward. It's not a leap forward. So I like it more, uh, but I'm I'm I'm keen to see if they uh dial it forward a little bit more, because even I was surprised at like, whereas the first one was gloopy and glossy and very like 1980s, I thought this version is the Beta 3 is. It's a lot more subtle, it's a lot more readable, it's a lot more usable, but it's also not quite as dramatic. More subtle, it's a lot more readable, it's a lot more usable, but it's also not quite as dramatic.

Uh, and now that I'm kind of used to it, I'm kind of appreciating some of the little touches, like when you slide, when, when you have like tab bars, when you sl and we have uh slider controls, like there's actually the liquid part is that there's some chromatic uh, there's a chromatic dispersion, so you can see a little bit of a rainbow effect, like just on the trailing edge, not so much that it calls attention to itself, but if you're looking for places where Apple decided to flex how powerful the GPU is on Apple Silicon, this is where they decided to waste those duty cycles. It's very nice. I'd like to see them be a little bit now. I'd like to see them be even just a touch more aggressive.

0:09:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this just in tv os came out today, beta 3. So now we're now we're complete, we have the full armor set and all the buffs associated there on, and presumably again next week. Uh, I have not installed any of it.

0:09:22 - Jason Snell
Uh, any caveats for those of us who are holding back to the public beta anything I usually do a whole string of caveats about betas, right like back up your stuff which you should do, of course, and all of that but I will say this it is the uh, most drama-free, stable environment I've seen for a while in terms of these summer betas. There are, as we've talked about, with liquid glass. There are some issues involving how it looks, but I've been able to do my work just fine with, you know, with all of these devices. Again, if you're somebody who ekes every last minute of your you know battery time out of your iPhone, don't install a beta because the battery life is bad, right, like because that's, it's a beta, it's not optimized, it's not ready, but in terms of functionality I have not had that situation where I'm like, oh no, I put it on my Mac and now I regret everything because nothing works right, it's like it's all been fine, at least so far.

You know things happen. You just have to kind of accept that. They're going to be weird things, like I was using the iPad today attached to an external display, and I tried and I was dragging a window around and the shadow of the window was on the iPad, even though the window was on the external display and I was like it's like it had a ghost, it's like it's beta, stuff like that happened and then, and then the Windows server quit and so it all went blank and then it came back and I'm like you know, stuff like that happens in the beta. So if you're not comfortable with that sort of thing, don't do it. But it hasn't been a stopper for me. And sometimes you install these betas historically and they are stoppers and you're like, oh God, I can't do my work on this computer and I haven't experienced that at all with any of them this year. Good.

0:11:07 - Leo Laporte
Very exciting. Apple Watch Ultra is going to be updated. Is the Apple Watch OS? Is it 26? It must be right.

0:11:19 - Jason Snell
It is. They're all 26. I haven't done that one. That's the one that I just have decided. I don't need to cause trouble with my Apple Watch.

0:11:27 - Alex Lindsay
You watch?

0:11:28 - Leo Laporte
I got Dan Moren writing that story.

0:11:30 - Jason Snell
Dan Moren's writing that story for Six Colors, so I don't have to do that one. So I'm just going to hold off for a little while.

0:11:34 - Leo Laporte
He's the one who he was the guinea pig this time around.

0:11:37 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he gets that one.

0:11:38 - Leo Laporte
Tag. Yeah, he also is writing about this vision, os, look at his scary eyes, my apple pr guy.

0:11:46 - Jason Snell
I was like you know, dan dan, uh, dan and leo are both uh, you know, we're actually expressing interest in trying vision pro out a little bit and they're like oh, oh, they said okay, we'll get one of dan, but who's leo?

0:11:56 - Leo Laporte
again, who's?

0:11:57 - Jason Snell
that leo guy? They didn't even, didn't even they didn't even do that, I think I think that, uh, I pointed out to apple's uh vision pro pr person that there is no podcast that covers Vision Pro better.

0:12:11 - Leo Laporte
You don't, please don't, don't injure yourself.

0:12:14 - Jason Snell
I don't True you probably best that they don't know you're associated. I would say the leading Vision Pro, we are the leading.

0:12:22 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro podcast.

0:12:23 - Jason Snell
We have a theme song and everything I mean it is is?

0:12:25 - Alex Lindsay
I think we're. Who else has a theme song? No, we are on the cutting edge of vision pro wow, that's a concept, so yeah, dan got it.

0:12:33 - Jason Snell
No, it's fun because he's you know he's using 26 so he got.

0:12:36 - Leo Laporte
He got a new one good for him.

0:12:37 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's well. I mean, I don't know new.

0:12:38 - Leo Laporte
It was probably a review unit from, so he's got a it's a loner, but um yeah so we'll see how it goes, yeah nice, uh, all right, good, I'm trying to do all the happy stuff before we get to the tariffs. Uh, uh, I might. I might as well, okay, uh, the story begins with china weirdly pulling, uh 300 employees out of Foxconn India. Remember that Apple announced that they were planning, or maybe they didn't announce, maybe it was just a rumor, I don't know what. Apple, yeah, apple said they were going to start moving their iPhone pro production to India, and by 2027, they hope to have at least a quarter of it coming out of India, to which the Chinese Communist Party apparently responded not so fast, timmy, uh, they can.

0:13:29 - Andy Ihnatko
It's maybe just as a demonstration of the fact that they control even those plants in india yeah, very much so, because not just the personnel, it's also the, it's also the equipment, it's also the, the expertise. Like if if china were to shut it down completely, then India would have a very long runway to be able to get back to doing 94 of the assembly of iPhones in the world yeah, um, or is it?

0:13:54 - Leo Laporte
you know what's the problem with the geopolitical situation? We? It also could merely be, uh, you know, a threat to Donald Trump. It could be like oh wait, you know, don't tariff, don't tariff us, bro. Um, it's just unknown. It's just unknown. We can only observe that 300 foxconn employees were told to return to china and well, also, india is a is india is a major manufacturing threat.

0:14:21 - Andy Ihnatko
They've shown how quickly they can mobilize only the taiwanese staff remain.

0:14:25 - Alex Lindsay
Foxconn is a taiwanese company, but uh, all of the all of the chinese nationals were and you know, most likely the chinese nationals are the ones that know how to do it, like the taiwanese are the ones that designed it, that manage it, the, but the chinese are the probably the ones that were actually working in the factory, because a lot of times what you want to do when you're doing any kind of this type of thing is surround a person who knows what they're doing with a bunch of people that are learning and have them guide them. So by pulling those 300 out, they probably pulled all the operational people that were sitting next, shoulder to shoulder with the folks that were, and it just makes it much harder to evolve.

0:15:03 - Leo Laporte
We've learned so much about this whole process from patrick mcgee's excellent apple and china book. Andy, did you get it back from the library?

0:15:12 - Andy Ihnatko
I. There's another person waiting for it, so I did have to return it, but I I have to order my own copy now yeah, I haven't finished it, but it but really the.

0:15:22 - Leo Laporte
The tale is how apple I don't want to say inadvertently, but it was an unintended consequence of apple moving all its production to contract manufacturer and then ultimately to contract manufacturer in china. Terry gao of foxconn was so accommodating and the chinese government, most very importantly, was so accommodating. Sure, we'll build a city here, we'll build iPhone City here. Sure, we will get migrant labor from the hinterlands and bring them in, just for you, apple. But the tit for tat was Apple, you'll teach us how to make iPhones and all the accompanying technologies, and you know the handcuffs are only. Only we can do it now. There's no way to get this done anywhere else again, this is.

0:16:15 - Alex Lindsay
It sounds like it's a chinese plan, but this has happened in many different places, where it's just, especially when you have a complex process. You know the. You know. You look at the akm fire that happened right before covid. Right at the beginning of covid, the akm fire, basically there was one factory that built all the analog to digital converters oh, the add converters, that's right for everyone, and suddenly the price went from three dollars to two hundred dollars, because there was just nothing, you know and that's part.

0:16:41 - Leo Laporte
That's just because it takes a while to spin up a factory, but those legacy nodes aren't hard to spin up. I mean, you don't?

0:16:47 - Alex Lindsay
need.

EUV manufacturing you don't need, I mean. But I mean that was a simple process and it would take years to do that, because you have to build a new factory. Building a new factory is, you know, it sounds easy, but it's years, years of, you know, just pouring all the concrete and getting it all working and then getting all the little bits and bobs in in place. It's a thing you know, and, and that's something simple, that's an 80 a to d converter. That's not an iPhone, and you know the thought that this is. You know, it's going to take a decade we've talked about this before. It's like a decade for apple to have places and that's, if everything goes well, for them to really have any significant production outside of, uh, uh, let alone the united states, which is so so this puts tim cook between a rock and a hard place.

0:17:27 - Leo Laporte
Uh, trump's trade advisor has accused cook of not moving production out of china fast enough I'm afraid I I don't.

0:17:36 - Alex Lindsay
I don't agree with a lot of what elon musk does, but I will say that navarro is an idiot, yeah, like he's just. He's just an idiot like I don't. He's just. He's just an idiot Like I don't know how to like. It's just hard to listen to his mouth open and shut and just not think what an idiot like every time he talks. He's an idiot, you know.

And so the idea that they should move faster, faster than a decade, because that's as fast as this goes, like if Apple started now, they could produce maybe 2% of their phones to make somebody happy a decade, a decade from now, six to seven years after Trump is no longer there, hopefully, I mean, I don't, I don't know who knows how long Trump will be there, but but the, the, the, the. The issue is is that by the, the problem that the Trump administration has is that the, that they're not going to, they're here for four years. Apple wouldn't even have the factory done in four years. Like to put to build a factory. So why you know there's this huge problem for apple is is that you've got this idiot who thinks that that it would ever happen in the united states, and then you have and he's saying, well, they got to go faster.

0:18:39 - Leo Laporte
Like he says this is the quote.

0:18:41 - Alex Lindsay
He was talking to jim cramer, With all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that it's spoken by someone who has never worked in manufacturing, never done any of these things, barely knows his own job, let alone other people's jobs. I mean, you know, just a complete buffoon. Like a complete buffoon. I usually don't get into this on the show, but wow, is he a stupid person Like you know, know, like it's just, you know so, so it's.

0:19:07 - Leo Laporte
It's ironic because, uh, I don't, you know, we're just, we're talking about apple here. This is tim cook's nightmare he's getting pressure from. Uh. Well, and one thing trump and china agree on I don't want you building in china. President trump said. He told tim cook I don't want you building in china. Well, neither is the Chinese. I mean, they don't want him building in in India. I'm sorry. Trump said I don't want you building in India, to which the Chinese said yes.

0:19:32 - Jason Snell
But unfortunately then Trump said I want you building in America, to which the Chinese said hold my beer yeah, I I think I agree with Alex Navarro is a charlatan and a fraud and a fake, and he's got the ear of the most powerful man in the West, so that's great. But this quote I wanted to read. With all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that, I'm going to make him like a Texas sheriff. It's inconceivable to me that Tim Cook could not produce his iPhones elsewhere around the world and in this country, I think that word means what you think.

It means it is gibberish, it is the closest I can to genuine frontier gibberish.

0:20:11 - Andy Ihnatko
That inconceivable.

0:20:13 - Jason Snell
The closest thing I can liken this to is the dumbest quote ever in the recent era of tech, which is that was it Washington Post article which was like we could fix encryption by having the geniuses invent a secure golden key that is magical and that fixes encryption. And it's like. No, they're like, surely you know you could solve math with being smart? And it's like but it's math. What are you talking about? This is that level of nonsense?

It's like you got the AI and things you can make a phone in Iowa, the AI will do it. It's crazy, it's just, it's nonsense.

0:20:50 - Leo Laporte
It actually makes you worry about their uh grasp of what AI is capable of, because they're putting more and more AI in the government. Now they want the social security administration to run on AI. What could possibly go wrong? Oh Lord, all right. So the tariffs, by the way, aren't not just in China. For instance, max and the Apple Watch, which are manufactured in Thailand, are going to be facing a new 36% tariff in Thailand, so you can't move it to thailand.

0:21:32 - Alex Lindsay
That starts, uh august 1st, uh and again, even if you were going to move to thailand, it would be years, years years well, they're already making.

0:21:39 - Leo Laporte
Uh, apparently they're already making the watch and the max, but they gotta, they gotta bring the watch and the max back to the us from thailand.

0:21:45 - Jason Snell
I guess that's the idea here. I I think what this shows is that if it was a strategy to have a permanent floating crap game where, like you never know where your computer or your other apple devices will come from, it could come from anywhere and and therefore, wherever the terrorists move, we're not there, we're somewhere else, we're, we're dodging, we're like that's not going to work.

0:22:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, I should once again for those who haven't been paying attention, point out the tariffs are not paid by Thailand or India or China. They're paid by us.

0:22:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, I think that one thing I will say that I think Apple could probably do a better job of is they could just say hey, we're opening a whole new factory in Phoenix and we're breaking ground in six months and we're going to spend $100 million on it, or $300 million or whatever number makes people happy, and then they start laying the concrete out for it. By the time the administration is complete, they will have all the concrete and the building will be up, and then the new administration will come in, whoever that is, and they'll go. You know what you know like we don't think the manufacturing really work here and we'll just put servers in. You know, call it a day. You know like the thing is is they could just announce that they're doing some kind of factory and just start pouring concrete. You know they're going to use the building, and I just feel like doing an announcement that makes people happy.

That seems to be all that really matters right now is making announcements that seem useful. So, um, you know. So I think that that would be. Uh, if I was Apple, that's what I would do. Like $100 million to make people happy it's a lot less than tariffs, right, you know, like our $500 million or a billion dollars, uh, of something that you could possibly multipurpose some other time, you know, to something else, you know, like I. Just I just feel like they could go down that path. I think part of it is I don't know if Tim wants to stand next to the president again to talk about- I think he has to.

0:23:34 - Leo Laporte
unfortunately, that's your job, Tim. Sorry, he's pretty good at it.

0:23:37 - Alex Lindsay
You have to kiss up Steve Jobs would never. When we always say what would Steve Jobs do, he would never do any of this.

0:23:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh, he'd give him the middle finger, which would not be the right thing to do, I know.

0:23:47 - Alex Lindsay
People and he'd be doing stuff and it would.

0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
So here's a good one. So Apple also makes AirPods, ipads, the Mac mini in Vietnam. Oh, ok, maybe that? Oh, wait a minute. Now, according to CNBC, trump has announced a new trade deal with Vietnam that will increase Apple's costs. Because the tariffs, by the way, trump continues to say Vietnam will pay. No, apple pays these. You know. There are now two tariffs on goods imported from Vietnam have to pay, or a 40 tariff if, if goods, uh, if goods originate outside vietnam before being shipped from vietnam. So if you manufacture some components in china, send them to vietnam so you can put the mini together and then send it to the united states yeah, that was intended to close a loophole that they didn't like right, so it's at least 20 percent.

Um, it's trump says. It's my great honor to announce I have just made a trade deal with the socialist republic of vietnam, one of two. Uh, he's made anyway. Um, I'm sorry, I'm gonna try to keep it from being salty. But the problem is the other thing that you can't do. We've, you know, amazon has learned, and, uh, car dealers have learned is say this is the, the added cost here, that's the tariff that you're paying. You can't do that either. You have to somehow absorb it. Apple does have record high margins. Could they absorb it?

0:25:23 - Alex Lindsay
to some degree, but at some point, you know it, it doesn't pencil out. I mean, I think that everyone's trying to hold their breath and absorb the tariffs, but at some point what you do is you don't change the number from the number that you've already released, but the next product is more expensive. The next product adjust for it the way you hide all of this. They haven't announced prices, though, for this fall lineup, right.

Right, so the thing is is a new. You know, you price in all of those, all of the stuff, without saying that it's affecting you know, and then you just have general inflation problems, which then means that we have to keep the interest rates high.

0:25:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:26:00 - Alex Lindsay
So, all right, I just thought I'd mention it's math.

0:26:06 - Leo Laporte
That. So all right, I just thought I'd mention it's math that's beyond the current, which might explain why apple wants to do that. A new mac book I I hope they call it the macbook nothing based on the iPhone chip. Maybe they can assemble that in the us I don't know I don't know, I know.

0:26:18 - Alex Lindsay
I just think announcement and concrete is all they need, just announcement and concrete. Yeah just start building start building something it's going to take. It'll take, I don't you know what years, alex.

0:26:28 - Leo Laporte
I don't know if that'll work anymore. I think trump's seen through that.

0:26:31 - Alex Lindsay
I don't I, how can you but? But the thing is, even if they were, even if they were they already said they were going to spend 500. I know, but billion dollars in the in the us building factories and but that hasn't helped if, even if they were earnest, they couldn't move it any faster than four years like you know like it's not but they, but they have to. Yeah, I mean or they could. They could just build something that was building from like literally why don't they use?

ai to do it, or I know, I know I could figure this all out, but but I think that, barring letting ai figure this out, I would say you could build a factory in the united states that was making phones at a loss to make people happy for some period of time, like you could. I mean, like these are all the dumb things that you might have to do to you know, like, okay, we have a factory that's making phones and the phone could be making no money, um, it could be, you know, like putting out you know X number of phones a week, um, and then you know, but it's one percent phones losing money, and being one percent of the output is probably, you know, less than paying tariffs the one of the challenges with this is look, I think what these guys want is a world where companies like apple, like Apple, like you know, like auto manufacturers, can make products or assemble products in the US.

0:27:50 - Jason Snell
That's what they want.

0:27:52 - Alex Lindsay
And there's probably a way, assuming that we could find enough people to make them.

0:27:56 - Jason Snell
Well, yeah, I mean, look, just I mean, this is what they want, it's their ideal, they want that as the end goal.

0:28:01 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it's a laudable plan. It's not that I don't want manufacturing.

0:28:06 - Alex Lindsay
to come back to the US, it's a laudable plan. It's just not. It's just not acclimated to reality. Yeah, so this is.

0:28:11 - Jason Snell
This is what I'm trying to say is is they are. That is their goal is like look it, visualized a country in the United States where there are assembly plants for a great American company's products, like Apple's products. Okay, how do you get there? And this is the truth of it, which is, even if you say, okay, there is a future in which it's a thing that we all want to have those assembly plans in the US, how do you get there? And the answer is it's hard, it's expensive, it's complicated, and these guys aren't interested in any of that. They're just they're like tariffs, make it happen, magical ai, whatever, and that's you know. That's the problem with this is that they, they have a vision and they have no idea how to get there because they're not really. Are they really interested in getting there or they are they just really interested in rattling their sabers?

0:29:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. In a way, though, isn't this karma coming to bite apple and the keister, because they were quite willing to move all the manufacturer offshore electronics company in the united states quite willingly moved, you know dollars of manufacturing.

0:29:21 - Jason Snell
You read that. You read that book. There were so many different factors involving Apple ending up manufacturing so much in China, and a lot of it was the fact that the facilities elsewhere weren't doing a good job, were very expensive. I mean, that's the problem. They tried it in Texas. Reasons including the historic standard of living in other parts of the world versus here and the fact that the US I mean really, if we want to go on a time machine what happened is the United States got really comfortable with the idea that we didn't have to do.

0:29:56 - Leo Laporte
We're a service economy.

0:29:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, we are a service economy. We didn't have to do five dollar an hour factory jobs anymore because other parts of the world would do those for us and we could have better paying jobs that were less backbreaking and that that was how we were going to do this and that was like how the US benefited from globalization. And so when you have people like Navarro saying, well, the good news is, or the or the Treasury secretary saying, well, the good news is, you know, you, in the future, your kids will just work in a factory and their kids will work in the same factory as if that's a good thing, that's you know. Pivoting on, you know 50, 70 years of american economic policy. If, if I'm apple I I realized at some point that would you just they. They will do exactly what um came up earlier, which is they will start announcing new products and apple loves their slots.

they love their 999 macbooks, they love their, you know, the iPhone spread at 7997.99 and $9.99 and $11.99. And the next round will all be more expensive, and that'll just be how it'll be.

0:30:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean. What's hard to do is plan for the future when economic policy changes so dramatically. I mean 180 degrees.

0:31:01 - Alex Lindsay
We can say that this caught up with Apple, but fundamentally Apple wouldn't be here without China, without what they did in China.

0:31:06 - Jason Snell
Not the Apple we know, not the Apple we know.

0:31:08 - Alex Lindsay
So the trillions of dollars that they've made since then is going to pay for. I mean, if you look back on it, it wasn't a mistake to go down this path. You know it was a mistake.

0:31:19 - Leo Laporte
No, they would have had to be clairvoyant, because this was a path Reagan wanted. This was a path Reagan wanted, this was a path everybody was suggesting. This was the future of the country and the world. And we did benefit Globalization. We benefited a lot.

0:31:31 - Andy Ihnatko
And let's not forget that this was also in the 90s. This was also considered a plan of here's how to turn communist China into something closer to a capitalist democracy.

0:31:42 - Alex Lindsay
Right and it worked until the current ruling, and they didn't. That's true, that's a good you know it was. It was.

0:31:47 - Andy Ihnatko
China was an easier and easier place to be until until xi jinping yeah, kind of kind of kind of well meaning, in the sense that the, that the when you read back at, like, what policy was in the 1990s, it was never going to be as successful as they imagined that it was going to be, that there was always going to be a turn where, hey, we've got, we're gonna, we're gonna keep, we're gonna keep communism and socialism like where it is. We're gonna keep all the good and all the bad. We are still gonna be very, very difficult to deal with because we are, in fact, an independent nation with a billion, a couple of billion, people in it. Uh, but thank you for giving us, like, more, thank you for giving us economic security in the future.

0:32:28 - Alex Lindsay
And not to turn this into a. Sunday morning show as opposed to Mac break. But the thing we also have to look at is, with all the China stuff, is that China's population bomb is exploding Like they are upside down inside out and they are on fire, like their hair is on fire, and so anybody who thinks that China is like calmly managing all of this, what Trump is doing is poking them in the eye while they're being eaten by an alligator.

So they're not going to respond. Well, because they can't afford to lose anything right now, because they are in so much trouble.

0:32:56 - Jason Snell
Dan Rather joining us here with homespun aphorisms everywhere.

0:33:01 - Alex Lindsay
I made that up right on the.

0:33:02 - Jason Snell
That was really good. I thought that was kind of funny. I watched a lot of Dan Rather. Yep, that's right.

0:33:11 - Leo Laporte
My favorite.

0:33:12 - Jason Snell
Dan Ratherism was they say that if Texas is not the whole electoral enchilada, it's at least a very large taco. Okay?

0:33:22 - Leo Laporte
Did he say that really that's a good line?

0:33:24 - Alex Lindsay
92 election.

0:33:25 - Jason Snell
I think 96 election, If it's not the whole enchil.

0:33:26 - Alex Lindsay
That's a good line. 92 election, I think, 96 election yeah, if it's not the whole enchilada, it's a big taco Great.

0:33:30 - Jason Snell
Okay, it's good stuff. I love it. Hums, fun Aphorisms.

It's very good. Yeah, no, you're right, this is. It's fascinating. I have, you know, especially Samsung, that are outside the United States that could benefit by having the American government punish an American company, and that's why I keep thinking like I'm not sure how deeply committed they are to this and they talk a good game and I agree, putting some concrete and getting a shovel and saying we're breaking ground and showing, you know, some product that was assembled at great expense but will never ship in high volume. I think they know that's fake.

0:34:25 - Leo Laporte
They have to give them some face saving too right, right, right right.

0:34:28 - Jason Snell
I think they know that's fake, but I think that they ultimately, if it gets them the visuals that they want and the narrative that they want, they may go around. You know, because it hurts them, it hurts the administration if everybody's iPhones and Macs get more expensive. It hurts the administration If everybody's iPhones and Macs get more expensive. It hurts If Apple is seem to be suffering and that Samsung is advantaged due to moves by the American government. All of these things are actually bad for them. Now, you know they do lots of things that we look at and say that bad, but they still do them. But I, I just I keep thinking like, ultimately, apple may get off a little lighter here in the long run, but in the short run it feels like if I was at apple, I would just be prepared for I mean not prepared for war, but like prepared for eating all the tariffs and you know, and raising all the prices and dealing with all of the follow that comes from that, uh, politically and and in terms of sales, because that's that's where they are.

0:35:30 - Leo Laporte
They don't have a choice. They don't uh. And it may not even just be apple and the trump administration. These may be global uh title shifts that are happening anyway, and who knows?

0:35:43 - Jason Snell
you know there's it's hard to resist the tide sure, there's a lot, and the government you know government can do bad things to your industry, right, like it's. It's very we've seen it now the um with the new bill passing, uh, so I guess it's a big beautiful law now, um, it is. It's completely devastating for anybody who sells electric cars, right, because they've got it in for electric cars for some reason, and so by doing all of that and having tariff barriers like Chinese, evs are going to take over the world and the only place where you won't have a lot of EVs is going to be in the United States, where we'll still be driving big gas cars made in America by American companies and some other companies too. But that industry just got smacked and that's it. I mean, that can't happen. It seems weird to pick a fight with Apple, but yeah, that's where we are.

0:36:40 - Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a break. That's where we are, Because in this great capitalist nation of ours, we still need to pay the bills. Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, alex lindsey it's great to have you, great to have all of you as well. Mac break weekly continues. We'll, we'll get. We'll get to more pleasant topics in just a moment, including a new ai model from apple for coders.

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Could apple be considering launching a public cloud? What does that even mean? A public cloud? Um, this is the story here, right here, as soon as I can click it, uh, from the information, which you know often has good, uh, inside information. This is Erin Tilly writing. The service would run on Apple's chips could potentially handle certain workloads. Oh, to compete with, I get it to compete with. Aws could potentially handle certain workloads more efficiently than the major cloud players. Apple sees its cloud as potentially useful for tasks like artificial intelligence inference, the process of using pre-trained AI models to interpret new information. What do you think? Apple competing with Amazon and Google and Oracle and the rest?

0:41:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Certainly not the same scale.

0:41:17 - Leo Laporte
They'd have to offer some secret sauce that the others can't.

0:41:20 - Alex Lindsay
I think it would be as a service towards things that are more Mac related. I don't think it's like a general purpose cloud solution. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing apple would do, so I think it's more of a you know, backing up other things that are related to it what's what's?

0:41:34 - Leo Laporte
maybe one of the things they would offer is this weird new coding language model. Uh, you know apple's kind of laggard, as we've talked about many times before in in ai. Uh, but they have their own models and one of the hottest areas of AI right now is vibe coding, using AI to code with, whether it's Claude code or, you know, chat. Gpt has something. All of the all of the companies do it. Apple has put a new AI model on hugging face, but it's not a, it's not a me too, it's not just like the other ones, it's using something new that allows it to break up the answers into multiple pieces. So normally LLM's code kind of linearly, when you ask them something this is a very good write-up, by the way, from marcus mendez at uh nine to five mac when you ask them something, they process your question, predict the first token of the answer, then we go through the question with this first token, predict the second token, and so on. So in other words, you know in a linear fashion. Llms also have a temperature setting that controls how random the output could be. That's that's so that they don't say the same thing each and every time. A lower temperature means is more likely to choose the most probable token. You get high, then you're gonna have more fuzziness and more randomness.

An alternative to this system is something called a diffusion model, in fact stable diffusion long time image generation favorite, now replaced by some others. And you've seen it happen. With stable diffusion it starts with a noisy image, removes the noise and steers it towards an actual image. So apple's now doing this with diff you code 7b, cp grpo with DiffuCode 7B-CPGRPO. Apple has a paper called DiffuCode, or Understanding, improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation. By allowing the temperature to increase to increase the randomness, it becomes more flexible in the order of its token generation so it's no longer a linear model and apparently can generate higher code in the order of its token generation. So it's no longer a linear model and apparently can generate higher code, quality code with fewer passes.

This is not something you think of Apple being good at. Now it, the base model, is not an Apple model, it's q1, the Alibaba model from China, which is also kind of interesting. Qn has its own uh coder. Do you say quen or qn? I say qn, but uh, if you say quen, then I'll. I'll believe you. Uh, diff you coder actually scores pretty well. Not as well maybe as the best coders out there, but it's in the, it's in the ballpark. So good on you, apple I was.

0:44:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I was struggling. I I was and still am struggling to understand exactly all the technical stuff about this. But I was reading about, I was people who are like actually in this business, who were talking about it on reddit and other public forums, were saying that, uh, it's, they're doing that. They're saying they're doing things that are similar to what you see in Gemini, but they did say that this is something fresh and this is an interesting new.

0:44:52 - Leo Laporte
This is where you got deep seek. When, when companies can't compete head to head, uh, they try often different things, and sometimes it's a good thing. Yeah, apple this from the uh article 95 has been laying the groundwork for its generative a efforts, with some pretty interesting and novel ideas, and this is one of them yeah, and it's.

0:45:14 - Andy Ihnatko
It's what's? How many weeks in a row have we seen the apple intelligence research group release an interesting paper that has that doesn't simply say, oh, here's what our version of something is, but hey, we've got this paper that basically says that deep learning models don't actually work when you apply puzzles to them. Week after week after week, we've been seeing these kind of papers that are easy to turn into a headline. I'm not saying that their research isn't genuine, that their research isn't genuine. I'm just saying it's interesting that now they're. I believe that I wonder if apple has some sort of a little like internal, internal, uh motivation to say we have to. We're not going to be able to release anything to the public for a while yet. Let's make sure that we're keeping ourselves in the headlines. As an actual participant in this race to create really interesting and really useful AI, we are actually doing the foundational work towards all these features that we're trying to build.

0:46:14 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I think the hard part for that for Apple is is that they're not ready to start paying $15 million a year for some of their researchers. They're not seen as leaders in AI. They're not, you know, and so the hard part is is just the brain drain of you know.

0:46:29 - Leo Laporte
They lost one of their top folks yeah, we'll talk about that in a second yeah and so, and I just don't think that.

0:46:36 - Alex Lindsay
So I think that they have to do something, to kind of it's not so much that they need to do something right now, but you know, how do you, how do you keep moving forward if you keep losing most of your best talent? What?

0:46:48 - Leo Laporte
was it the? The slogan for avis when hertz was the number one rental car? We're number two, we try harder. Yeah, if you're number 12, you might try even harder. Diff you. Coder is available on hugging face. Hugging face is great because you can try all these different uh models on their, on their servers. It's not a giant model, it's a 7b model, 7 billion parameters, so it's not a very powerful model. So it's an interesting thing if they can use, you know, some novel techniques to get great performance. Now let's talk about the departure, because this is an example of how it's really hard when you've got somebody like mark zuckerberg. It's really hard when you've got somebody like mark zuckerberg writing giant checks. Uh, it can be very challenging to keep up. Uh, zuck has stolen an apple researcher. Uh, by writing a a really big, really big check, tens of millions of dollars a year. We'd heard this. I mean, if you're a researcher.

0:47:47 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, this is your, why not? This is your moment. And how did how? Did apple get them?

0:47:51 - Leo Laporte
they stole them they stole them from google by doing the same thing. Right, just not as big. Yeah room, uh roaming pang, who manages apple's foundation models team. That's pretty important. He's going to meta. He was in charge of a team of 100 employees that work on Apple's large language models. According to Bloomberg, Meta lured Pang with a deal worth tens of millions of dollars per year which they've also been doing to OpenAI much to Sam Altman's chagrin. Anthropic and ScaleAI ScaleAI they basically bought the company have been doing to open ai much to sam altman's chagrin. Anthropic and scale ai scale ai they basically bought the company and there's some question about whether uh mark got what he paid for when he actually met. It bought the company, but mark got what he paid for when he bought I mean the meta is willing to do this.

0:48:41 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the the hard part is is that the inflation across an entire company. If you start, if you can't just go and start talking to everyone that's in your AI and say, hey, how about we increase your pay by 10X or 100X or whatever or what it was before, without having what about all the other people coding all the other things all over the company, start to feel like suddenly that you know there's a morale issue, there's a, you know there's a whole process there that I think is super difficult for most of these companies to kind of process, to like manage inside of that. That conversation meta's decided, you know they're going to go for it, but, um, I'm not sure if they got it apple distinguished engineer, which is, you know, a pretty high level.

0:49:21 - Leo Laporte
Uh, guy, um bloomberg says the takeaway from mark german pang's departure could be the start of a string of exits from the afm group, with several engineers telling colleagues they're planning to leave in the near future to go to meta or elsewhere. It's hard to turn down all that money. It does app. Can apple say okay, okay, we'll, we'll meet that I just mean they can.

0:49:43 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think they can, because I think I mean they can and you can do anything once, but I think that the problem that they have is again it opens up all these cans of worms all across the company of all these people working on, quote unquote, important projects and how much I mean.

0:49:58 - Andy Ihnatko
They're all getting paid pretty well, but they're going to want a lot more if you start paying people tens of millions of dollars a year tens of millions of dollars a year, and also remember that the benefits to Apple of this kind of investment aren't nearly as great as they would be to Meta or OpenAI or to anyone who is trying to do AI as a service or basically running cloud compute AI for endless lines of customers. Apple's really their majority of the focus is always going to be on-device AI. Let's make sure we can sell more iPhones, sell more iPads. If it also means that, if these discussions about having some sort of a cloud AI cloud compute service come to fruition, that's nice too. I mean, they have all these wonderful in-house AI chips that they can put into play, but it's always going to be the priority is going to be on device AI.

They're not going to be the company that comes up with the most amazing image generator. They're not going to be the company that creates the next. The next great movie is going to be made using Apple video, a video generative AI, that's not what. So they're not going to get that kind of payback from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on personnel. So unfortunately, that means that they can't really keep these people In a seller's market for labor. You just got to let people go.

0:51:21 - Jason Snell
Also, I mean, I don't know because they're a black box. I don't know what's going on inside of Apple and I don't know because they're a black box. I don't know what's going on inside of Apple and I don't know who these people are. But I find it disingenuous when there are reports about how Apple is behind and how Apple's models aren't good enough, and then there are also reports about oh no, apple is losing senior executives who have been in charge of building its models and that's a brain drain for Apple, because one of those is probably not true, right, like this is the thing. Is this a loss? Is this person wonderful? And the reason that apple's models aren't up to snuff is because they've been beaten down by the man and haven't executed. Or is it that apple looks at somebody like because here's the thing is, you could, you might not want to meet the goal of, you know, the offer of somebody like meta, but I can put it the way, which is, if it's somebody who you don't think is worth it, you don't try to match their offer, you let them walk. And I just again, I don't know whether this person is brilliant or not, but I can say this If one of Apple's issues is that their models haven't been that great. Paying lots of money to keep the people who have been building the not great models doesn't make sense.

And I think Andy makes a very good point, which is you want a team at Apple who is devoted to building great AI models using Apple's priorities and I think that's an important way to view this, which is Apple is going to prioritize on-device models and they're going to prioritize, maybe models tuned for developers right, like tuned for developers and their developers and to work with Xcode, but like number one is running on an iPhone.

That's their number one goal. And if you know, if that doesn't appeal to you and you'd rather be dealing with a giant cloud model, then maybe you shouldn't be at Apple. Apple needs talented people to build models for them, but I don't think it's existential necessarily. If Apple ends up being a company that builds really good, efficient models that run on its devices and then it partners with companies that have big open cloud models to do big open world knowledge cloud jobs, I think that is okay. So we can't. My point is, we can't really know, but I think it's very weird to be in a position where we're lamenting Apple being behind on models and also lamenting that they lost somebody who is key in developing their models, like I don't know what. The truth is there, but. But sometimes you let them go because you don't want to pay to keep them.

0:54:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, go because you don't want to pay to keep them. Yeah, german's uh presumption is that that morale is sinking. Uh, at apple's uh foundation model team because of this, you know, oh, we're going to look over at anthropic and chat, there's a lot of possibilities.

0:54:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean, morale is low when you, when you lost, right, I mean morale is low when you lost, and if the perception is that they have to go to an external vendor to get a model because your model is not good enough, I mean either.

I mean I have to say that's probably because your model is not good enough, otherwise they would use it and, and that I understand, morale could be low.

But, like that's not Craig Federighi's and and you know, and the rest of the people in that team, it's not their job to hurt Apple's products in order to promote their own fundamentally weak set of models if they believe that they're weak. So, like this is again, you don't want an exodus of AI talent, but if the AI talent you've got is not doing the job and it's not because of bad management, then you need to recast and there are ways to do that. There are ways to motivate the people in that team and say, look, we are only going to use an external model for Siri in the short term because our model's not up to speed. But that's your challenge is get it up to speed, because we'd rather use this is Apple. We want to use our own model, but right now, for the next year or two. It's not going to be your model and that's your goal, and if that demotivates people, then I think so be it.

0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
But I think that's how they have to play it. Yeah, it's an interesting. Tim has to fight on many fronts these days.

0:55:43 - Jason Snell
I mean, I don't. It's an unpleasant thing to say, but one way to read this situation is that the people building Apple's AI models have failed.

0:55:51 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah.

0:55:52 - Jason Snell
And that an exodus and a rebuilding of that team with a new alignment and new management is maybe what they have to do. So so be it. But again, it also could be the opposite. It could be that the leadership at the high level john g and andrea perhaps, or or even above him to tim maybe they've been horribly mismanaged and they've had enough and they're going to leave, and that's also a possible scenario here. But when you get stuff being ripped out of one group and placed in another group with new management because things have gone badly, this stuff's gonna happen this stuff's gonna happen yeah I didn't you know.

Insert your own word there for stuff, stuff's gonna happen, stuff happens as a bumper sticker, as they say let's take a little break.

0:56:38 - Leo Laporte
We will have more in just a little bit with a very smart panel Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, Alex lindsey. It's their expertise we count on to break down what is really happening, because there's a lot happening. It's a very interesting world as we live in. Uh, more to come in just a bit.

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Let's start talking about, uh, iPhone 17, because we're probably there manufacturing them right now at a secret location somewhere in asia.

0:59:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, what do you think about?

0:59:29 - Leo Laporte
sky blue phones. Are they gonna be sky blue? We're getting all these. That was, that was all these rumors.

0:59:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Now that was one of the rumors about the uh, about the iPhone 17 air.

0:59:39 - Leo Laporte
That's a fantastic new color that we've, that we haven't seen like okay, so I'm tempted by the air I mean I don't feel the need for a new iPhone, but I guess I, you know I gotta get one. One of the things about the air that makes it interesting is it is different. It's thinner. Poorer battery life as a result, probably poor battery life, probably, probably let's.

0:59:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Let's hope that they, whatever work they've been doing in developing the folding iPhone, they've figured out how to make thin hardware that's not going to break in your pocket. The camera system is not going to be as good. Uh, it's probably not going to be any bargain you can imagine. It'll be as, at least as expensive as a regular iPhone without quite the same features build quality, camera.

1:00:23 - Leo Laporte
So here's a nice ai picture of what at least the pro is going to look like, with a different location for a little lower location. I mean it's silly that this is the what we're talking about for the uh, for the magsafe charging and a new camera bump that is even more aggressive. That's why the magsafe is a little lower.

1:00:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm pretty excited about the the bigger camera bump give I've. I've always been like give me an extra three millimeters if it will make the cameras that much better, if the optics will be that much clearer, that much better. Whatever you can do to improve the camera, it's fine. By the time I've I mean almost everybody puts it in a case. Maybe I shouldn't say almost everybody, but the thing is it's. The great thing about camera bumps is that, like when you put it in a case it's uh, the great thing about camera bumps is that, like when you put in a case in a case, it's no longer a bump and by the time you spend that much money for for a phone, I'm putting it well, this, with this, with this slim iPhone 17, have a, it will it also have a bump?

1:01:19 - Leo Laporte
so it'll be slim so below, it'll still be stacked up top. Is that what it's according?

1:01:23 - Andy Ihnatko
to the renders yeah, it'll have a horizontal, horizontal bar, just like the pixel.

1:01:28 - Alex Lindsay
It's like it's oh, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, I feel like, with the pro version of whatever they decide to call it, uh, I just feel like they could just get rid of the bump and just give us more battery and storage. You know, like, like this is the pro model, like, you know that, like that, you have all you'd have to make the whole thing thicker, you're saying, make the whole.

Thing just make the whole, just give me more battery and and, like, have it last. You know, because right now it's it's generally my phone lasts a day, um, you know, from the from, uh, when I get up to when I go to bed, uh, if I decide to do any production with it you know, actually shooting real footage it lasts a couple hours, like it's it. It It'll chew that right up. So, as a pro phone speaking as someone who uses it in a pro environment every once in a while it'd be really great if they just gave us a different phone that was heavier, bigger we don't care and it would move Apple a lot further forward with all of this production stuff that they want to do.

1:02:26 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it's's occurred to me the other day that, like Apple never got into the, into the edition phones that never got into, like hey, here's, here's the super deluxe ceramic edition. Just like, like the way they dabbled with that with the, with the Apple watch, where we're going to make some, some lines and better finishes, better materials, better luxury, and I'm perfectly fine with Apple. Apple does design so well and their customers are not unwilling to part with a dollar, and so if there is a company that can do things like a slim phone or a folding phone and say you know what, this costs a little bit more, but the styling on it is something that we think is really really nice. Just like 100 years ago people would spend money on a Tiffany cigarette case because it's part of what they put in their pockets every single day and they want something beautiful and distinctive that reflects their tastes.

1:03:26 - Leo Laporte
I love to see Apple kind of go in that direction rumor from um instant digital on ybo uh today, confirming something that wayne ma on. The information set in november of last year is that the titanium is going to give way on the 17 pro to aluminum, with glass on the back, for a part aluminum, part glass. For the magsafe charging and I guess for antennas as well, aluminum lighter and cheaper than titanium, so you know this might be. Another response to tariffs is maybe we cut costs in some areas. There is a rumor uh from another source that it will be a. The 17 air will have a mix of titanium. I don't know what that means, so I like titanium. It's pretty light.

1:04:15 - Andy Ihnatko
It seems like it's a little tougher than aluminum anything that helps make safe, it's going to be good yeah, new dynamic island.

1:04:25 - Leo Laporte
Uh, according to a digital post from digital chat station, another rumor mill yesterday, although you know, these are, I think are fairly, I mean, this is what we'd expect as the supply chain starts to get their hands on these things. Just try to make them uh, the uh, the new dynamic island. Well, we don't know. The account said it didn't say specific details about the changes, just that there would be changes, maybe smaller, I don't know, maybe bigger Could be. Yeah, what is a change? I don't know. I just hope they keep it. I love the dynamic.

You know it's funny. They made a virtue out of a necessity with that hole punch I will honestly say I was.

1:05:06 - Andy Ihnatko
I was just thinking today that, like if I had to come up with a list with of the 10 most just design genius moves that apple has made, where it's not just hey, isn't it convenient, isn't it nice that they managed to fit this into this chassis, but solving a problem in a way that is profound and elegant, and again it takes a perceived negative and turns it into an actual feature. I can't think of something that would dislodge that from the top five list. And so we've seen so many in the Android space, so many display manufacturers trying to say, oh look, we've got now, we've got like the finger, we've got the, the cameras now completely underneath the display, so you don't have any, any holes or any notches or anything like that. Apple has completely negated that whole problem by saying well, again, we're going to make this into part of the user interface so that it actually looks like something magical is happening with something that would be otherwise perceived as wasted space.

1:06:04 - Leo Laporte
What other rumors do we have? This is an interesting uh rumor. Apple pauses work. This is from digitimes on the foldable iPhone. No, no foldable ipad because they're so.

1:06:20 - Jason Snell
They're so happy about their foldable iPhone yeah, probably iPhone looks like maybe is gonna happen, happen next year. The iPad thing. Now, here's the thing. This is the product that nobody can make any sense of, cause it's like is it an iPad, is it a Mac book?

1:06:35 - Leo Laporte
Is it.

1:06:35 - Jason Snell
It's like it's huge, so it's like it folds, then it's like a laptop, but it's running iPadOS. What does that mean? It's, it's, uh. I'm not surprised that they're like yeah, yeah, let's hold off on that one and focus on this iPhone.

1:06:49 - Leo Laporte
That makes sense and that will probably sell a bunch of it we're pretty sure they're going to do a foldable something because they're buying those full.

1:06:55 - Jason Snell
The screens from samsung, no the foldable iPhone, it sounds like, is kind of a done deal and it's going to be, uh, an iPhone that can fold open into something that's more like an ipad mini, which I mean again, again that's a good thing.

One of the great things about this is that they have that existing stack of of, uh, an operating system that can run apps, uh, in multiple you know multiple windows or in split screen, and also, uh, take up the extra space and, like they, they they've got that part of it. So if they can make a, a, a pleasing foldable phone interface, I think that that makes sense. This larger object it was really unclear, kind of like what it even is supposed to be. So it wouldn't surprise me that they're like you know, that's years out, let's not worry about it.

1:07:36 - Andy Ihnatko
The Digital Times report had two bits in it, one of which that they're putting the foldable iPad aside for all of those smart reasons, partly that there hasn't been any demonstration in the marketplace that anybody really, really wants this. I'm a big fan of foldables. I think the idea of being able to transport a 14-inch tablet in the space of a paperback book is very, very appealing to me. But that might be just an Andy feature. But the other part of the story was that the foldable iPhone has gone into P1. So they got first prototype status and which is the next step along towards actually producing like a manufacturable product. And again, this is. This is exactly the sort of thing that I think that Apple should be doing. This is Samsung is.

Their big event is this week that's actually, I think, is tomorrow in New York City and one of the things that they seem to be working on is not just the next generation of their own folding phone, which has made leaps and bounds. It's now become very, very practical for people who can afford it. It's a very, very practical and usable thing Not quite durable, I would say, compared to a regular phone, but durable enough that, if you take care of your toys, you don't necessarily have to be afraid of it. But now they're making tri-fold ones, so that it is a somewhat chonky pocket phone that unfolds into something the size of like a 10-inch iPad, and that is very, very much in line with my interests. I don't know that if I would have $2,500 to spend on such a thing, but there are people who would be willing to spend $2,500 on such a thing.

1:09:13 - Leo Laporte
Why are you looking at me like that? That's not nice.

1:09:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I want you to buy it and tell me about it. But yeah, but I'm. So. Apple, the stacks rumors stacking up about the foldable iPhone include things like they wanted to solve the problem of we don't want to have that ditch in the middle of the screen where the hinge is, which I don't think is a huge, it's not a deal breaker. But leave it to Apple to say, well, no, that's an, that's definitely an aesthetic down downgrade and we don't want to do that.

I'm sure there were also had problems with durability. Earlier models had had problems where you, you, you can't make the surface of the screen as durable as as a normal smartphone, as normal as a normal flagship phone. Those are probably things that they're they're also waiting to address. But once again, apple is a company that it's not going to be a cheap phone. It's going to be at least a 2 000 phone guaranteed, because these panels are really super expensive. But there are people in in the Apple ecosphere specifically that are very much willing to spend money on something like that, and I'm the sort of person who would the number of times where I've said I could get away with an iPad mini and a phone for this entire weekend If I have the kind of scratch where I could say, what if my iPhone were an iPad mini, what it could be that, what if I have that, then you know.

1:10:32 - Leo Laporte
I wondered that way back in the day, like if I could put software on there that could take phone calls. Couldn't an iPad mini be a phone if you had cellular?

1:10:42 - Jason Snell
sure, except they don't, yeah, they don't do it that way. They you could have zoom on there or something and give that you could, but back in the day when I had a, a phone number from skype, I could have done it. I don't know if there's I'm with Andy, though, about this, like it's not for everybody. But is there a use case where you say, oh, you know, I kind of like my ipad, but I also have to have an iPhone, right, and then suddenly you're like wait a second.

1:11:07 - Leo Laporte
What if it's one thing?

1:11:10 - Jason Snell
If it fits your needs to be able to have your phone, and then you unfold it wherever you're going and you've got a little iPad. It's really, I mean, it'll be super expensive, right, more expensive probably than buying a phone and an iPad mini, but you have it, but it's just people buy the samsung fold and it's like two thousand yeah, exactly, and there there would be a benefit to it.

1:11:35 - Alex Lindsay
It'd be pricey, but there would definitely be a benefit to it outside of I guess I'll still say that outside of press that have to cover this and people that are really you know, I just don't know anybody that bought a folding phone twice. How many of?

1:11:48 - Leo Laporte
you, I have had, uh, a number of samsung folding phones. I have the flip right now and I like that because it's small, not because it's big, but uh, I've also had the bigger fold and so forth, and I'm I'm sorry, but that fold still bothers me the grease.

1:12:02 - Alex Lindsay
Every time I see it, someone will show it to me. Hey, look at it, they open it up and I'm like there's a thing in the center that, yeah, I would not feel it and it's, you see it.

1:12:11 - Leo Laporte
It also, in order to make that work, the screen has to feel rubbery. It doesn't, it's not, doesn't feel it's not glass because it's got to have a coating, a screen protector, on it. So I feel like I like glass screens.

1:12:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I cannot lie yeah, it's, it would be bad if that were the entire ecosystem, but again as part of a product line yeah, it makes sense for people that want it.

1:12:34 - Leo Laporte
I mean, and I do.

1:12:35 - Andy Ihnatko
I do know the thing is it's it's not a general audience, sort of thing. I do know people who have replaced, who were early adopters, who, uh, then replaced it with another folding phone, uh, and who lust after, after some of the stuff that's coming out of Huawei that they can't buy. So there are people for whom this is a solution to a problem and they are very, very glad to be able to get the money for it.

1:12:55 - Leo Laporte
What they're saying Apple would do is not what this Flip is, which is a regular size phone that folds up into a tiny phone, but it would be a regular size fold that unfolds into a larger phone like the fold yes, exactly.

1:13:10 - Jason Snell
So you've got a.

1:13:11 - Andy Ihnatko
You've got a, an iPhone, most of the time, and then, when you get to your destination, or you're in your seat on the plane, or whatever you unfold it, and now you've got an ipad mini, basically and, and interestingly, one of the sessions in wwdc was essentially a message to developers that we are no longer going to help you out if you make apps that cannot simply resize themselves to fit in any arbitrary display they've been painted into. We are no longer going to help you out and make your dumb app look good in the middle of this display. Here's what you're going to have to do in order to fix all this stuff.

1:13:50 - Jason Snell
I mean a big part of that. I know what you're going to say, which certainly works for this rumor, but it also has a direct, immediate impact, which is in iPadOS 26. In multi-window mode, it no longer is doing resizing stops. You can resize to any point along the way, and if an app is bad at that shape too bad you better make it work.

1:14:16 - Leo Laporte
This is something that Microsoft struggled with when they had that two-screen fold, that Google struggled with when they've made the first Android tablets. It is, you know, kind of non-trivial right.

1:14:25 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but I think Apple's OS has an advantage here in that they've had iPad apps for so long and this is rumored to be 4x3, and that they also have the existing ability. It used to be in the current OSs it's side-by-side, but in the new OS, in the multi-window view, you can just, you know, flip and get a two-up which, if you've got a folding screen, is going to be one on one side and one on the other plus arbitrary window. And I would imagine that all of that stuff would get picked up on a folding phone from Apple is that they would pick up. Essentially, ipados would be what would be running when you unfold the phone.

1:14:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, I don't think I'm going to buy it. Sorry, Andy, okay.

1:15:10 - Jason Snell
I'll tell you, I always travel with an iPad and you've got to have a phone with you right? So if I was traveling a lot, lot, I would seriously consider a product like this because it would get me. You know, my iPad would be with me in my pocket at all the time, and right now that's not the case. It's a you know, like Andy said, it's not for everybody, but the beauty of there was that moment where they, which was coming up 11 years ago, where Apple did the iPhone 6 and they did the 6 in two sizes, and not only was that big, because it was the first big iPhone, but then they did the bigger iPhone on top of it.

And one of the things that has really happened in the last five, six, seven years is Apple has really embraced that of it's a product line and, like we're not making now, they're up to four different models a year and with the e-phone, probably five models a year, one in the spring and they may spread that out even further, but the rest of them are in the fall right now. And, like, once you've got five iPhones, it's like what Samsung learned Once you've got five, six models, you can afford to do a model that is going to be really expensive. You're going to make a lot of money on each one you sell, but the volume is not going to be huge. It's okay when there are five or six models.

1:16:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah. I also finally have to say that I do think that the iPhone 17 Air. I have to believe that if and when it comes out that that's part of the research that went into, yeah, and went into the folding phone because they had to figure out how to pay. How do we put this on a slab that is super, super thin, because we can't make this twice the thickness of it, they get it's brilliant it's a brilliant movie.

1:16:42 - Jason Snell
When the when the air rumor started happening that was my initial thought was this is how they get to. A folding phone is first off, do an entire cycle devoted to making things as thin as possible, and then the next cycle. You've got a two plane thing that unfolds, and then you've got your then you've got your clue. It's a the air the air is like step one, you know, and then step two is folding phone and and then step two is folding phone and that.

Air again the same thing. That Air is going to be one of four iPhones this fall and it's not going to be for everybody and your priorities have to be very specific to get it, but I think it's going to be cool and interesting and is going to be great for some people and for everybody else. All the other iPhones are still available. Yeah.

1:17:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And in the past I've kind of made fun of like oh hey, still available. Yeah, and you know I've in the past I've kind of made fun of like oh hey, thank goodness Now my Mac book pro is two millimeters thinner, now I can take. I used to have to leave six pages of a comic book behind because I couldn't fit it into my laptop, but now I've got room for eight comic book pages. Uh, but the thing is when, when you've got something that you hold in your hand all the time, it's amazing how much lighter a thinner device just feels. Yeah, and it's not a trivial thing. So I'm not making fun of that at all.

1:17:53 - Jason Snell
It's how I feel.

I mean, we talked about this a lot when the new iPad Pros came out and they were Apple's thinnest iPads ever and it's like, did we need that?

I'll tell you, I have the 13 inch, I have the big one and I use it in a case and then sometimes I put it in the magic keyboard. But then there's a lot of times when I'm kind of going in between and I just have it and there's no case on it and it's just so great to hold and and it's like I know it's 13 inches, it's huge this way, but it's so thin and therefore it feels so light, even because it's spreading that weight across all of that. It's kind of again, it's a thing that can make your product feel great. It isn't necessarily a thing that should override other important aspects of the product, but having that in the back of your mind of like we could make it really thin, like I'm not opposed to that, that can, that can work that's the tagline for this show jason has the big one and it's so great to hold I got the big one jason snell, Andy and ako alexander lindsay.

1:19:00 - Leo Laporte
I know I have the big one too. I like the big one a lot. Uh, I use it for my abs. It's like my obs obsidian entry thing and I read all my news articles on it. Yeah, it's a really nice little tool.

1:19:11 - Andy Ihnatko
David Wright, I would hold up my mind to the camera, but it is what I'm using for this zoom call.

1:19:15 - Leo Laporte
Don't hold on. No, no, no.

1:19:17 - Andy Ihnatko
As an external display. Yes, yes.

1:19:21 - Leo Laporte
David Wright, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. You might be sorry at this point, but you are. The vision, vision Pro segment is coming up. Prepare yourself what? And a little tip If you are not yet a member of the club, what are you waiting for?

Club Twit is such a great thing. When we started Club Twit four years ago, really we kind of needed to. We were in the middle of Covid, advertising was drifting away and we thought well, you know what, let's have the audience fund the show. That seems like the best way to go. Anyway, it was what I always wanted to do. Well, fast forward four years.

25% of our operating costs come from the club. The club makes it possible for us to do so much. We've got this great Discord where you can hang out and have fun and talk with other like-minded geeks, which is always great. You can watch the shows in the club and chat with us there too, which is which is kind of nice. That's what they're doing right now. We also started putting together so many great events for the club.

Our AI user group and our photo show are coming up. This Friday, Chris Marquardt will be reviewing pictures of quirky of quirky, that's our word of the of the month and talking about the latest photo news. He's always a lot of fun. And then our ai user group immediately afterward, uh, and I'm not sure we're going to talk about, but it's always a great way to learn about how others are using ai. Uh, I want to talk about local models because I'm getting more and more interested in running my own AI in the house, so that may be one of the topics.

Mikah's Crafting Corner is the following Wednesday a great chance to kind of chill and make something. Micah's working on Lego. I've done it with cooking and coding and knitting and crocheting. The Book of the Month is, I think, really interesting. I just finished it. This is how you lose the time war. It's our Stacey's book club pick for august 8th. Join the discussion. It's not a long book. It'll be easy for you to read in plenty of time for a month from now, august 8th. This is how you lose the time war. I listen to the audible version, which I recommend because it's two different. It's, uh, it's an epistol or epistolary narrative.

1:21:32 - Jason Snell
It's a great book. Oh, you know it, yeah, writing. Yeah, we covered that in the incomparable a while ago beautifully written, just a beautifully written book, and both of those writers, uh, are excellent the readers.

1:21:43 - Leo Laporte
yes, their voices are a little too close. It took me a while to realize there were two different women going back and forth. But it's one of those books where it's letters back and forth but in a very interesting sci-fi environment and at first I thought I don't like it. But it really grows on you and by the end it's like oh, don't end.

1:22:01 - Jason Snell
No, and it is Amal El-Multar and Max Gladstone who are both really great writers on their own. Oh, two writers.

1:22:08 - Leo Laporte
I see what you're saying, yeah.

1:22:10 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's two writers. So it's two characters, it's two readers, it's two writers and it's beautiful.

1:22:16 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the most beautiful books I've read in the last 15. I wonder if they split the letters. Yeah, it's so beautiful, I would imagine that.

1:22:21 - Jason Snell
And then you know, cross-worked on the other person's work.

1:22:26 - Leo Laporte
There's a lot of wordplay in it, a lot of cultural references, yeah, and it really is beautiful prose. It's good. I'm glad you liked it. Great book. I'll extend the invitation again If you want to join the book club.

1:22:37 - Jason Snell
It's going to.

1:22:38 - Leo Laporte
You're welcome to.

1:22:39 - Jason Snell
I did that for Service Model. I know you did. If I'm around, please, we would love to have you and, of course, all of you we'd love to have you.

1:22:50 - Leo Laporte
But there's a thing you have to do first. Jason's already done it you have to join the Club twit.tv/clubtwit. There's a two-week free trial if you want to do that. There's, of course, a single person's plan, but also family plans and enterprise plans. Please join the Club. twit.tv/clubtwit. We just, we just want to have you in there. And now, ladies and gentlemen, it's time for the vision pro segment.

What other podcast do you see this?

1:23:23 - Jason Snell
that's right. It's time once again, ladies and gentlemen, for the number one vision pro segment on the number one vision pro podcast in the world. And now your host. You know him, you love him. He doesn't like the vision pro.

1:23:34 - Leo Laporte
It's leo laporte I didn't say I don't like it. I don't have one. Dan MOren has one. That's story number one not that he's bitter, his I, I, I could have turned it one. Yeah, we bought one for Mikah and I tried it and then we sent it back. We didn't see any real need.

1:23:50 - Jason Snell
You're not unusual in that.

1:23:52 - Leo Laporte
I think more and more I might be coming around on the Vision Pro there's. You know, maybe, maybe not, that's cool.

1:24:02 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's for nerds like us. Look, I'll just say it one more time, because I always say this. It reminds me of the early days of personal computers, where it's like it costs what and it does nothing, but it's the future. I'm like okay, I like. That's what the vision pro feels like. Every time I I'm constantly searching for reasons to wear it, but once I put it on, you're happy I don't want to take it off I want to find more things to do and my frustration is there isn't more to do.

1:24:28 - Alex Lindsay
And that's what I think that some developers miss is that you know they're like well, the market's really small and you're like okay, but there's a bunch of us that just keep wanting to buy something Like we're like we spent a bunch of money and we're willing to pay for things, but tens of people are willing to buy Well tens maybe dozens here.

1:24:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, tens, maybe dozens.

1:24:44 - Alex Lindsay
Here's what I think is the hard part is it's hard to know how to get to those folks. You know, like, so there's there's a 400 000 people, but how do you aggregate them so that you can actually let them know that? Because if someone told me, the problem is you go to the app store and you know there's a lot of stuff there that I already have. I mean, I have, like usually in the app store almost everything says open because I bought or bought all of it there are a lot of vision pros on ebay.

1:25:08 - Leo Laporte
Um, I wonder you know, and it's you know, a thousand bucks less if you buy it, uh, on ebay.

1:25:15 - Jason Snell
Um, do you think a used one? I should probably get it from apple no, I I mean I wouldn't pay full price for it. I mean, yeah, I I think that probably 21.99 on ebay are, is my guess they're lightly used.

1:25:28 - Leo Laporte
There's a little dust, a little layer of dust.

1:25:31 - Jason Snell
One of the rumors is that they're going to refresh it at some point, maybe the end of the year, beginning of next year, with the M5. I'm not sure it'll make much difference because it doesn't feel slow in any way at all. It may just be that literally they don't want to use the M2 anymore. They're going to stick an M5 in it. But like I find it interesting and I think it's a really good operating system and it's just in a product that costs too much and there's not enough software for it yet. So it's like every time look, every time I put on the Vision Pro, I have a good time. My problem is getting a reason to put it on.

1:26:06 - Leo Laporte
Right, I understand that. Yeah, I really do shame. Uh, apple, did we maybe now know how apple improved the avatars in the vision pro? It turns out in january they bought a 3d avatar company called true meeting. You think this is the source of the improved avatars Could be.

1:26:28 - Alex Lindsay
It could be. It could be. It probably isn't their technology. It was probably the people that they brought you know, oftentimes, I don't know.

1:26:35 - Leo Laporte
It's an Israeli company. They did obtain their 3D avatar tech stack and hired a number of its employees, so it could well have been both. I don't know it's.

1:26:49 - Jason Snell
It is remarkable I mean, this is the story of the vision pro is that they didn't just ship it and forget it. Like, remember, those initial personas were, um, creepy and not good and like dead-eyed dolls. And the new one in 26, it's so good, it's, it's, it's amazing, like the only thing creepy about it is how they do that. Uh, but it's not, it's like coming out of the uncanny valley. So, um, if they, if they did buy that company to do that, then kudos to them. But because the the output in in vision os 26 is it's just night and day better, it's, so, it's so much better.

1:27:25 - Leo Laporte
How many different angles did Dan Morin's wife have to try to get the spooky eyes looking so good?

1:27:33 - Jason Snell
It's pretty good, right. I think that's the best spooky eye shot I've seen of all.

1:27:37 - Leo Laporte
Those are his eyes. It looks like you're seeing through the visor.

1:27:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah right. It's hard to do. I've never seen what mine look like never, good to dance.

1:27:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Don't creep yourself out, yeah no, he says so.

1:27:54 - Leo Laporte
This past week I've spent some time mixing it up in a bunch of different places the beach, the lake, even the desert, the beach, the lake, even the desert, the beach are getting it. These are three locations, it's just one. One Nice callback, dan. Yeah, so he loves it.

1:28:13 - Jason Snell
Yeah, he's having fun playing with it. He's never used it outside of a 30-minute demo, so he's it's a really it's going to be an interesting test case because it's somebody who's been plopped down with Vision OS 26, who's never used the Vision Pro before, essentially, and sort of I'm enjoying his reactions. He texted me today. He's like Dropbox still doesn't have an app for the Vision Pro.

I'm like I know, I know, it's so frustrating and it's good to get a sense, because I've been sort of taking the slow path, like Alex, where we've been using it since it came out, and it's really fascinating to have somebody who really is up on the tech but hasn't used this particular product. It would be the same as if you, leo, or you, Andy, or you know, my friend John Syracusa or somebody like that, suddenly got handed a Vision Pro and said here, use this and tell me what you think it's like. It would be really interesting to find out what a brain that has not been, you know, injected with things in their eyes for 18 months and just as fresh, could look at Vision OS 26 and go oh, you know, here are the things they noticed that we all nod our heads at, and here are the things they noticed. We're like oh, I hadn't really thought about it.

1:29:24 - Alex Lindsay
And there's always the hey, you don't have to reach out, like when everyone starts up.

1:29:28 - Jason Snell
you're like you just keep it subtle, keep it down here. Yeah, you don't have to. Although there's no cameras pointing backward, I find that I'm trying to do gestures back here.

1:29:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Sometimes I'm like oh, that's fine, they can't see me back here.

1:29:41 - Jason Snell
I got to come back up here. But yeah, it's, it's uh, I'm glad he did that. That was, uh, that's a totally random thing. So he'll be writing those for a little while in six colors, a little diary of his uh things that he's noticed as he, as he uses it, which is kind of fun to see a fresh, a fresh take on it I am.

1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna admit that I'm not hiding this, but I I don't. I have, uh, I don't have, uh, stereo vision, so it's probably never going to be something I like. I did have a meta quest. In fact, I had all the oculus's right up through the meta quest pro and I'm able to use them. I mean, I'm able to to do it, but it's it's not completely comfortable for me because I only use normally, I only use one eye right right.

1:30:19 - Jason Snell
So alex was about to say something that that I think uh is relevant here. Which is one reason you would choose to use this is because if you are watching like a movie or a tv show alone, yeah, it's great. I watched, I did a um, we did a podcast last week it's coming out in a couple weeks about uh uh das boat, the classic german submarine movie three hours of submarines, and my wife and I could not coordinate the time to watch that together, so I just watched it myself in vision pro on a giant screen and like it. It looks so good like it does not rain yeah, it doesn't, you know, it's it's not pixely or anything, it's like you're watching on a giant movie screen.

1:31:01 - Alex Lindsay
It is like, again, if you're somebody who watches a lot of movies by yourself yeah, I mean this is is an easy one if you're, if you're really into movies. It lot of movies by yourself. Yeah, I mean this is is an easy one If you're, if you're really into movies. It's really easy to do this because there's nothing at home and very few things unless you're going to a top of the line a Dolby cinema or an IMAX or an Amazon or an AMC prime. That's about the only thing that is remotely competitive with watching the. You know, watching it on a vision pro.

If you're by yourself, you know, like you know, and and and you learn like this is another thing you learn after a while is you know how to eat popcorn and you know how to drink things without it going hey, what do you want me to do there? So, so those are things that you kind of you. You you slowly learn to do. But I think that it is. It's so enjoyable and I I think the difference for me with the, the quest, is still that I put the quest on and I go do something on supernatural or something like that and I go to do something with the quest on the vision pro. When I put it on, I'm like, oh, it's been two hours. Like I better go do something else. Like I lost. I lost more time than I expected because I'll go watch something or I'll go watch something else.

1:32:02 - Leo Laporte
So, like Jason, you lose track of time.

1:32:04 - Alex Lindsay
You do lose track of time in there pretty quickly and I think the hard part is when someone gets a new, when they tell me they have a new headset, I send them, like you know, get JigSpace, get this, get this, get the Prima app, get this app, get you know, immersive Bliss, get you know. Like I'm making this like a list of things that they should like, what the headset can do, kind of thing. Um, the one that usually is the one that pops out for people is jig, is jig space. You know, it's the one that like, when they see it, they see the possibility of what the product can do. Yeah, um, from a 3d environment perspective and that's your vision.

1:32:43 - Leo Laporte
Pro segment oh I, what? Stop, stop, pause, we're not done. Apparently, this entire segment is out of order I know we threw the whole thing.

1:32:52 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sorry I I it came up so quickly. The one thing that I I think that, um, uh, people should pay attention to that relates to the headset.

I really wanted to end it, but I tried all I want to say is it's not so much just with the headset, but it's related to the headset is the Apple. Spatial Audio format is something we should start tracking, like it is a really. Like I started, I've been watching the videos from WWDC Is that USDZ or is that something else? No, this is so Apple is kind of I don't know all of it and not all the data is there. So it's one of those things that you see, like you saw USDZ pop up in 2015 or 2016, and it's the beginning of something, and then you see it keep on growing Inside of that.

When you see Apple like release something and start talking about it, you kind of want to pay attention to, uh, what it's doing. The spatial format basically is it's a content, a container that is ambisonic based, but big, a container that can fit atmos inside of it. So, so atmos what? Yeah, so think about it's a. You know atmos can fit inside, but it can do a lot more than atmos. So that's the. That's the issue, and what, um, you know starting to see is is that Apple is starting to think about. You know they don't have the only place they deal with speakers is the Apple TV. Really, you know, like you know, everything else is all your headset and your and, uh, everything else, and so an ambisonic, especially when you do higher order. So there's first and second ambisonic mics, but you can compose in third order, fourth order, fifth order of ambisonics and start to have a lot of resolution of where things are. And if you weren't trying to build beds and just objects and so on and so forth, you could do a lot more. And if you didn't have to worry about being compatible with everybody else, you could do a lot more. You know. And so the thing is is that that it, it?

It appears that Apple is thinking pretty hard, and when I said I spent a lot of time looking through some of the videos in WWC, it's definitely one of those things that I think it's worth starting to track. Like, it's not, it's not there yet, but I could see artists starting to release stuff in that. You know it won't be the. That's the core format, how it's delivered. As another format, um and um. But what's the name of it? It's, it's, I believe it's apple spatial audio format, asaf, um, a s a f asaf.

1:35:24 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so we'll look for that, and what you're saying is within you, get dolby atmos in the headset so that stuff's above you and below you, behind you it can fit it in.

1:35:35 - Alex Lindsay
Just think of it as a container that's that could fit. It'll do everything that atmos can do, but it can do more. It's bigger. It's bigger, it's more detailed, it has a lot more to it and it's not constrained by. I mean, atmos right now is arguably one of the best formats to to put something in in a spatial environment. But imagine a container that is bigger than that environment, that can do more than that environment, um, uh, that, but can still do Atmos, um, kind of.

If you talk to people that work on Atmos, they're like well, the up speakers aren't quite right, but the the now it gets converted. That's their format. It gets converted into the Apple positional audio codec, which is another thing, which is what you have to publish to, to go to the Apple vision pro and so. But you can tell as they start to work through this, these two formats are or these codecs and these. The format and the codecs are new. There's the tools are, you know, apple licensed right now and only, I think, working in Logic and Resolve right now, if you can get a hold of them. But I think that I think that this is going to be a really when you start to dig into it, it gives you a lot more resolution than what we get with, potentially a lot more resolution than what we get with the At, lot more resolution than what we get with the Atmos format.

The Atmos format gives you compatibility with all of these devices all over the world, and that's not something that Apple cares about. You know like it's like like if we build something that's got two or three times the resolution and all these other things that you can do, and it only works on the Apple platform, apple's like no, you know it's. You know they'd prefer to have something that they I don't know, I don't know. I haven't talked to Apple about it, but I think they'd be, they'd prefer to have it that way, um and so, but I I think that it kind of snuck under the radar at WWDC, that I didn't pay attention to it until the last couple of weeks. And it's worth. If you're a developer, if you have access to those videos, it's worth watching. It's interesting. Now I'm done. Is that all? That's, all I have to say?

1:37:41 - Jason Snell
Can we stop it? The end.

1:37:46 - Leo Laporte
Faded out rapidly. Congratulations to drumroll, please, Mr Ed Sheeran, the most streamed artist of the last 10 years of Apple Music.

1:38:02 - Alex Lindsay
And YouTube.

1:38:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh, YouTube, he went on YouTube too.

1:38:05 - Alex Lindsay
If you look at the YouTube, if you look at the most streamed tracks on YouTube, shape of you is right up there. There's so many. It's not that he has one, that's the most, because I think the most is like a kid's thing with dinosaurs or something.

1:38:19 - Leo Laporte
I think it's Baby Shark probably. Yeah, baby Shark, yeah, that's what it is.

1:38:22 - Alex Lindsay
So the sharks are dinosaurs. They're just still alive anyway. So um the uh, um the, the anyway, but he's got like 10 in the top 20 or something like that. It does eddie little eddie sharon. He's done well for himself, that's all I gotta say well for himself.

1:38:39 - Leo Laporte
Okay, we all. We never thought he amount to anything because he only had four chords. Number one shape of you. Number eight is perfect, is number eight on the list, uh, and then I have to keep going down to find more anyway. Number two is the weekend okay. Number three is drake god's plan uh, are these good songs? Post malone's, uh, sunflower number. Post Malone's, sunflower no 5. Post Malone's Rockstar no 5. Sorry, sunflower's, no 4. One Dance featuring Wicked and Kyla by Drake, no 6. This seems to me just a list of kind of I don't know. I won't say anything bad. You used to be a music director. What would you say, alex?

1:39:25 - Alex Lindsay
Lindsay, it's all pop. I mean, that's what happens. Everyone's listening to pop. It's the most popular. You know these are.

1:39:34 - Leo Laporte
These are popular songs, a lot of people listen to them, they, they follow the pop charts, so to speak.

1:39:36 - Alex Lindsay
Um and the pop, the pop formula, one, one might say yeah, but you know, I, I, um, there's a lot of people that talk about oh, there's no good music. And I, I asked my, my daughter, who's much more of an expert on this than I am at this point, and she said it's never been better, like there's never been more. Yeah, well, if you dig in, if you are paying attention to you know, and you're looking, because artists can make anybody can make an album. Now, anybody can do a recording. You know Billie Eilish is doing stuff out of her bedroom, you know.

1:40:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's pretty amazing, because these tools have become so accessible.

1:40:10 - Alex Lindsay
There is so much music and so much variety. It's just that we see all these big ones.

We only see these guys, but you're not going to see the ones at the at the top. You know, podcasts, yeah, I mean, it's there's, there's, there's. You know, there's things too for the record companies. You know, I remember having I was, um, talking to, uh, a lead singer named Mike Edwards, who's the lead singer for a band called Jesus Jones, back in the day, and I asked him when he thought of vanilla ice cause, you know, they're on the same label, you know like.

So I said, what do you think of vanilla ice? And he's like, oh, I love vanilla ice. Yeah, Like, he was just like, you know, like, I'm here because Vanilla Ice pays the bills, you know, and so they're not making any money on Jesus Jones, and so, um, uh, so I think that you know, all of this stuff kind of pays for that, but there is a huge, and then there's just all these independent folks that are, um, that are out there, and you have to you a playlist that keeps me up to date. But I think that if you look for it, and I will agree, there's just an incredible amount of good music out there. It's just not streaming a billion streams, you know.

1:41:21 - Leo Laporte
He started singing in a local church choir at the age of four. Learned to play the guitar at 11. Began writing songs in high school. A school report described him as a natural performer and his classmates voted him most likely to be famous number one on our hit parade ed sheeran I swear to god, I thought you're doing like the old-timey prospector.

1:41:45 - Andy Ihnatko
Narrator I don't do that.

1:41:48 - Leo Laporte
I don't do the best you know, prospector ed sheeran number one, f1 is apple's highest grossing theatrical film ever. Uh, 293 million dollars at the global box office, beating napoleon which you know is not easy to do, as the british learned, but somebody had to do it. F1 has generated 60 million from imax theaters alone. That's 20 of the total gross because it's a big.

1:42:23 - Alex Lindsay
It's a big screen film like.

1:42:24 - Leo Laporte
That's why people are going to want to see it at the imax, if you can look how big that screen is right there. That's a big screen looks like the people are real, but the cars are fake in this picture. I don't know, maybe it's just me.

1:42:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know. Also, they were smart enough to release it ahead of Superman and Fantastic Four. Yes, I'm not. I think it might have gotten lost if it were like third in that in that release calendar calendar.

1:42:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, they learned. They learned from, uh, I can't even remember there was that astronaut movie. There was the one where they're looking down a cliff. They learned, they learned from the uh, the various other movies. There was the one with the cat in the backpack, you know that one. Uh, none of them did did so that so well, so they.

1:43:05 - Alex Lindsay
But f1 did good and they didn't need to make. I mean it's great, they made money. The big thing is they got a lot of people. Everybody knows that f1 is out. You know, and, and so they'll be. How could you not know? It was in your damn wallet, everywhere, everywhere. It'll be really interesting for us to look at what happens in you know, as these contract negotiations go through, and whether that turns into any any, whether this leads into much more f1 coverage on on apple, because I think that that feels like it's the bigger game than just um doing a movie.

1:43:34 - Leo Laporte
So cnbc says, while the film is nearing 300 million in global ticket sales, it still has a few more laps to go get it in order to be profitable for apple, the movie costs between 200 and 300 million to make and 100 million to market.

1:43:49 - Alex Lindsay
So again, they don't they don't need to make money on it. Like the hard part with this. Everyone does this old math like, oh my gosh, they're gonna lose money on it. Like these streamers are, quote-unquote, losing money on everything they put on the stream instead of putting in the theatrical theatrical just takes the edge off. You know, like it's not. It's.

It's a much different business model and I I always think that when people say oh, they're going to have to, they're not going to make their money back, well, that's a bigger. It's a bigger game than than, than uh, than just trying to make box office. I think it doing well in the box office was important. I think to to make a splash, but I don't think that you know there's many more people are going to watch it on streaming later. I do think that what the streamers really give up is there's so much content being created. You see a little of this in the Apple Vision Pro. There's a little lap that they put on the Apple Vision Pro, but I always feel like the streamers are giving up. They make these movies, they own the movies, they have a place to just throw lots of content and I cannot believe they don't put more behind the scenes and making ofs, and they do a little, yeah, there'd be so much they could do with this.

It's like a drop of stuff and people who are really into it you know someone who's really into F1, who watched the movie, got really excited about it might watch hours of that If it kept on coming out. You know of how to do that and I'm always amazed that they don't put more into it. I don't know it has to do with contracts, with the, but you're already paying the actors a lot of money. You can pay them a little bit more to have access to that usage.

1:45:14 - Leo Laporte
Brad Pitt's not cheap. No, two years in Apple is officially on threads. Good for them, good, good for them.

1:45:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, what do we have them back Huh?

1:45:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, why not?

1:45:27 - Andy Ihnatko
them. Yeah, why not? Yeah, I mean, it is an Instagram.

1:45:29 - Leo Laporte
The meta, the real question is why are they still on X? Uh, the thing is anyone's still on X?

1:45:38 - Andy Ihnatko
it's still. It's still the platform of the greatest reach it's still like it's. Tim Cook was using. Tim Cook posted just this week about, uh, the flooding in Texas, about how apple is going to be like, helping just monetarily support relief efforts down there and if you want that to reach the greatest audience, it's not going to be blue sky no, that's true.

1:45:59 - Leo Laporte
Apple's fifth avenue store was spray painted that beautiful glass structure on fifth avenue. Uh, an extinction rebellion protester was arrested after spray painting. Tim plus trump equals toxic and boycott on the glass. Now the good thing is, glass is really easy to clean, so yeah I think just you know, a little razor blade and some elbow grease, new york city.

1:46:24 - Andy Ihnatko
That glass was treated to resist worse than the spray paint that's a good point.

1:46:34 - Leo Laporte
That's a good point, by the way. This is the. This is the post from extinction rebellion. Oh, they didn't do it on uh, on x. No, they did it on blue sky.

1:46:38 - Andy Ihnatko
So there, true, that's the hippie, that's the hippie platform can I say that for for freehand, that is very, very good, like it's a good spell and manship when they hired somebody went to protest, uh uh paint oh, look, here come the employees.

1:46:52 - Leo Laporte
When is the? When are the apple police uh arrive? Do they have?

1:46:56 - Alex Lindsay
uh they're letting them do it most, most, most. I think most apple employees are kind of instructed not to do anything yeah, just why don't get involved.

1:47:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Just don't you know, we'll take it off in a minute especially, like you know, wait, wait for them to get to the part of the performance where they're waiting to be arrested, because tackling them to the ground and kicking it and kicking the spray there they go, here they come gotcha isn't that, it isn't. It isn't a good visual, no. So so they were upset about, uh, tim Cook cozying up to trump and trump being so anti-environmentalist, and so that's where is that the weekend?

1:47:31 - Leo Laporte
no, that's not the weekend, I'm sorry. Okay, it's not ed sharon either. Just want you to know, don't don't get confused by our stuff.

1:47:38 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought they threw soup.

1:47:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, they throw soup at artworks. That makes me mad because that's harder to clean up. Yeah, don't throw soup at the moina, lisa, I know it's behind glass, it's okay. Um, this is my favorite story of the week. You can use sous vide. I know Andy put this in. You can use sous vide to help your iPhone repairs. This is from a reddit post. Uh, not on the apple subreddit, but on these r slash sous vide subreddit. Oh no, zister said 180 degree fahrenheit for the iPhone is the sv sous vide sweet spot? He, apparently I don't. What is he trying to do? He's trying to loosen the glue.

1:48:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah he, he broke a screen and he didn't have the right tools to loosen the glue. Yeah he, he broke his screen and he didn't have the right tools to like soften the adhesive. So he decided well, look, the water bath is like the whole it's the right temperature is that it's a digitally controlled, perfectly held temperature. What if I were to, like you know, put it in a sous vide bag, vacuum, seal it so it can't get any water, and then, precisely, control, put it?

1:48:47 - Jason Snell
so he put it into like a terrible.

1:48:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, he set it for like 212 and he decided to pull it no, that's boiling. Don't do that, yeah, yeah yeah, whatever, he pulled it earlier than than you wanted, but he said that yeah, that came right off no damage, my sous vide hAndy um.

1:49:04 - Leo Laporte
He clearly, though, had a seal of meal or some sort of professional vacuum sealer vacuum sealer. I have one that's suitable for packing an entire deer. I got like an industrial. If you ever need, if you ever need a little vacuum packing, just come on over. I'll put your iPhone in that thing and it nobody gonna get into that. Uh, that's important because you don't want the water to get into the iPhone yeah, that's right.

1:49:30 - Jason Snell
Don't do it just in a ziploc bag and hope that the water doesn't get in, because you might be in trouble then. You want something a little bit more than that sous vide, though I I don't know if I'd endorse this use, but it's great for decrystallizing honey. It's great for thawing. Put it on um on the lowest setting, where there's no heat, and you just put water in it and you can thaw frozen stuff in no time.

1:49:49 - Leo Laporte
Lots of great uses for it. You don't really need a sous vide. If you're not going to heat it, you can just put it in a bucket.

1:49:54 - Jason Snell
No, no, no, Cause the um the act of circulating it so the pro tip is the way you do. It is you put it in a bowl under the sink, with the sink running very slightly, because you need to have the circulation, otherwise the cold stays right next to it and it takes forever to thaw. By circulating the water, it thaws really fast which is really great.

Oh, and then you can take it out and marinate it or do whatever, and and cook it, or you can throw it on the grill or whatever you can. You can do any of those things, but very nice, uh. So yeah, I'm sure this works do it right.

1:50:27 - Leo Laporte
If you're going to do it, probably I love it that he posted this on r slash sous vide. Yeah and uh won the award for most unusual sous vide cook of the week it's a versatile appliance, you know, don't?

1:50:43 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't, don't. Don't use it if you're on chopped because it's not going to cook long enough, for you got only 30 minutes for the for the entree round, but every other, every other application, it's, it's worth a shirt.

1:50:53 - Leo Laporte
All right, get ready your picks of the week coming up. Next you're watching mac break weekly with Andy and ako. Does the site up, Andy, is it up?

1:51:02 - Andy Ihnatko
three more things to write and it's up.

1:51:06 - Leo Laporte
I love it. All right, three more things and you will be able to go to I H, n, a T K Ocom. We need a better mnemonic for this than I have no idea how to spell it. What, what could I have no absolute Kelvin to?

1:51:27 - Jason Snell
kill over. I have no answer to knowing tomorrow's obituaries. Yeah, I have no answer to know tomorrow's obituariescom.

1:51:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I have to be honest with be honest I know some of them.

1:52:02 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, good luck, congratulations, that's great office hours dot global.

1:52:04 - Alex Lindsay
Mr alex lindsay, what you got coming up, um, what do I have coming up? Uh, we are, I'm questions and answers, we do question and answers and then, when we're done doing the question and answers, we we do more question answers. You will see some. We're testing more and more concerts, so, um. So, stay tuned for for more of that. But those, those are our, our big things, you know ed sheeran might need somebody to bring people his amazing music.

I'll let you know, I'll let you. We'll have our people talk to his people. Have your people talk to his people.

1:52:32 - Leo Laporte
officehours.global, and on YouTube it's YouTubecom. Slash OfficeHoursGlobal and JasonSellsixcolors.com, and, of course, many a podcast as well at Jasonsixcolors.com slash Jason. Yes, indeed, what's your plug? Anything?

1:52:50 - Jason Snell
sixcollarscom slash jason. Yes, indeed, what's your plug? Anything. I decided to move the plugs up in the what's my plug this time. Uh geez, I had a good one too well, the? Um. Last friday we began the summer of submarines. On the incomparable, we are gonna watch submarine movies das buddha's coming up fun crimson tide.

1:53:05 - Leo Laporte
We already did. We already did hunt for red october.

1:53:07 - Jason Snell
So many great submarines it's in there, run silent, run deep, and we're compiling a list and uh and so yeah, submarines, we're going to do a bunch of submarine movies, it's fun here from.

1:53:15 - Leo Laporte
Scooter x is an acronym and mnemonic for an anaco. In harmony, nature always takes kind order. I bet perplexity could do this.

1:53:30 - Jason Snell
Give me. I think it's too many letters. I think that's the problem.

1:53:32 - Leo Laporte
It's just too many letters for remembering the spelling of Ihnatko. I wonder this is just a little way to stall before we get to our picks of the week. Ladies and gentlemen, I have never ate tomato ketchup onions. That's a good one, okay.

I have never ate tomato ketchup onions uh, I'm gonna start my pick of the week because you got, you guys, made me think what if I could make that iPad mini be everything I ever wanted in life? So I I bought, for 40 bucks, this architect keyboard case to take this tiny little lightweight iPad mini and turn it into a clunking behemoth that weighs you know two pounds, but I gotta say it's the cutest little keyboard. It's completely functional. If you got you know little fingers, I decided I'm probably not going to use this day-to-day, because one of the virtues of the mini is it's so light. You can just you just hold it and it, you know, it's easy, uh. But on the other hand, for traveling, maybe this keyboard case will be the right thing. I will let you know. It also has a very nice place to put your pencil, as you can see. So you ba, you know, and it's a good hard shell case. It is there since there is no, uh, you know uh special adapter for the keyboard on the mini. It does have to use bluetooth, but, uh, you charge it once and it lasts for a long, long time.

So I will, uh, I will give credit to a r, t, e, c, k and, yes, you'd probably have to buy this one on amazon because I don't think it's um something that Artec is selling directly. That's where I ended up getting it. Thank you for a kind of a. I think I read this on a review of this on something, maybe on Wired, and I thought, oh, I should give it a try. It's got all the right holes, you know, and it's just kind of cute. Put it in your back pocket. You probably could fit it in your back pocket. Put it in your. You probably could fit it in your cargo shorts.

1:55:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Andy and I co-pick of the week uh, first of all gemini came up with interesting. Humans never, always, take kind opinions. I'm gonna have to clip and say there's some really good ones here.

1:56:02 - Leo Laporte
There's there's some really good ones here. I think we have plenty of them excellent, uh.

1:56:07 - Andy Ihnatko
so, uh, we talked about, uh, prime week. Okay, let's talk, let's not get into consumerism, but however I've, historically I've, I've historic well, things anchor, uh, anchor uses is, uh, is amazon's like drop shipper or whatever it uses amazon for drop shipping. So it's a good chance to like your power bricks, upgrade your cables, things like that. This year I got something that I kind of had my eye on. It's a really big power bank. It's the Anker 548 power bank, 192 watt hours, wow, and it's about the size of a loaf of bread. I didn't bring it in. It's about the size of a loaf of bread, but the idea is that it can charge.

1:56:49 - Leo Laporte
How much does it weigh?

1:56:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It weighs about like 15, 16 pounds.

1:56:54 - Leo Laporte
It's got to be pretty heavy. It gets a lot of lithium in there.

1:56:56 - Andy Ihnatko
It's pretty hefty yeah exactly, but it does have a big carrying handle, it's easy to. It's very, very haulable.

1:57:02 - Leo Laporte
For all of those watts. It's pretty compact. I mean I'm surprised at how small it is.

1:57:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and given that it's according to the stats, it can charge a MacBook Air 2.9 times, charge an iPad Pro more than three times. Iphone can charge more than seven times. It has a built-in like LED lamp and it could keep that going for about 40 hours. I charged it up and it takes only about three or four hours on a 60 watt charger to charge it up fully. It's not like the big, like cooler sized charger power banks that you sometimes see. Where it has actual like power inverters you can plug actual AC appliances into it and that's kind of overkill. For what I'm kind of thinking of the problem is that it is like where I live there are hurricanes or snow storms if we can lose power for a day, sometimes even two days, when it's really, really bad, and it's nice to be able to have, instead of having, like my normal like 20 000 milliamp hour like phone chargers or another, I have another one that can charge my MacBook almost once. It's nice to know that if I am caught in that situation, I don't even have to really care about conserving my batteries, I can just simply, if I have to do a live stream, I can go off my phone, I can go off my iPad or my MacBook and just go on yellow it and it'll be perfectly fine.

It's a nice happy medium and also the reason why I decided to get it is because it is a really, really good deal. Right now. It's nearly it's normally $150, and it's close to 50% off this week. I think that if there's like an auto, if you go to anchor off this week, I think there's like an auto if you go to anchorcom and order it directly, there's like a $66 auto-applied coupon code. It's good for the next three days, so until like the end of this week. Also, as it happened, I had one of those recalled Anchor batteries so I had a $30 30 like anchor store gift card so I got it for like did you send it back to them, or did they tell you how to dispose of it, or what?

uh, all they require is that you write on it. Hey, this has been recalled. Don't use it. Take a picture of it and include it in the like web app.

1:59:25 - Leo Laporte
That the web form I probably have a few of them. I should look around.

1:59:29 - Andy Ihnatko
They were exploding, I guess well, yeah, when you charge them up, they weren't exploding in and of them themselves. But, yeah, as it happened, I'd cleaned out my office just like two or three months earlier and I had this like box of chargers that were you know they're. They're like like 10 000 million hours, 5 000 milliamp hours, where it's like they were fine back when you know, when phones were still using Motorola processors. But now they're like I could actually now take five pictures with my phone after charging it up with this little thing. So I was happy. Oh, wow, that thing that I was trying to figure out how to throw away is actually going to net me 30 bucks awesome thank you, I have never attempted to kill once.

2:00:12 - Leo Laporte
Yes, thank you, I've never awakened technically knocked out. Thank you, I help newbies avoid technical knowledge overload. Nice, those are all very appropriate. Maybe put one of those on a rotating banner. Put them all on a rotating banner on your new website, merch. No, no merch ids. Each one is going on a rotating banner. Put them all on a rotating banner on your new website, merch no, no, merch ids. Each one is going on a throw pillow.

2:00:33 - Andy Ihnatko
The problem is, you need to know how to spell it to get.

2:00:37 - Jason Snell
I recommend that inicocom also have some redirects from domains that are miss similar yes, yes, I do, I do own something I hope nothing is true yeah, I have six colorscom with a u in it for the people who spell color with colors.

2:00:52 - Leo Laporte
just in case, colors six colors, the anchor 548 power bank and. Uh, do look when you go. I think anchor will have them listed on its site. Uh, look and see if you have any of the two anchor devices that are being recalled. I like it. You just put your do not use on it yeah, thanks there's.

2:01:12 - Andy Ihnatko
It's right at the top of the page. There's a product recall link in the top right corner. Yeah, and it's actually. They actually expanded it. There were like four more that they had oh dear give it a check well, good on, good on them.

2:01:22 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that's. You know, I'm proud of them for doing that. They, they, they're not hiding it it was easy, you didn't.

2:01:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I didn't have to mail anything. Uh, just a week later I got in the. In the mail I got a here. Okay, here's this. Here's your 30 coupon code uh, the anchor power banks.

2:01:38 - Leo Laporte
There's several models the anchor power core 10 000 oh, I have one of those it sounds like we were talking about this um on another podcast the other day.

2:01:45 - Jason Snell
These companies must have, like product recall insurance or something, Cause it is cause. I bought an air conditioner that was the wire cutter pick for a window air conditioner a couple of years ago and it got recalled and they said we'll send you a new one if you want, which I didn't. I've kind of replaced it. They're like or you can cut the power cord, take a picture of it and we'll send you money. I'm like I don't like the waste of that, but I do kind of like getting my money so for a thing that has apparently generates horrible mold and so you can't use it. It's like all right, I'll take it to the dump and I'll take everybody likes money, that's why they call it money that's why they call it money reference acknowledged thank you

2:02:26 - Leo Laporte
I'm good, this is an anchor prime, this one's okay.

2:02:29 - Jason Snell
I've never attempted to kill once.

2:02:32 - Leo Laporte
Or if you want to joke about the website, which is also kind of appropriate, it has never appeared to kick off.

2:02:43 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a good one for hurtfulness. Yes, I'm not sure if I want to go in that direction, I'm not sure why our. If I want to go in that direction, I'm not sure why does he? Why our listeners?

2:02:52 - Jason Snell
want to go. What I find funny is we're talking about a website that I've been reading for the last nine months.

2:02:57 - Leo Laporte
It's just nobody else can see it yeah, just us, it's just our, just us, just us as kids. It exists, folks, it exists. Oh yeah, it's the real deal. I'd show it to you, but then Andy would have to it's good, in fact, one of one of the features.

2:03:09 - Jason Snell
can I pre-announce this? One of the things Andy does an enormous amount of work in advance of MacBreak Weekly in terms of compiling a whole bunch of really good juicy Apple-related links for the week, and I said to him back in the midst of time. I said you know that would be a good thing to post on your website and they're awesome, so you will be rewarded when Inicocom launches.

2:03:30 - Leo Laporte
I should also mention actually this is a good opportunity to mention that after every show for the last couple of weeks, you've been doing a recap.

2:03:41 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I got all the lights set up and I actually did it one week because I just wanted to test my lights and set up my camera just to shoot some video, and I wound up recapping the show and then I realized that, hey, I kind of enjoy using Final Cut Pro. I haven't done that in 10 years and Gemini can now teach me all the stuff I didn't want to do, uh. So, yeah, there's. Uh, I've edited the third one. I don't know. The thing is usually what I. The reason why I can do it is because usually there's no one who wants to use this room like after I'm done. Right now there's somebody who's got it like literally like as soon as I'm done here. So I might have time to record one this week. I might not.

2:04:17 - Leo Laporte
Let's wrap up quickly and that way we can get you into your and then you put those on YouTube. But I imagine you'll at some point put them on the I have Never Attempted to Kill Once website.

2:04:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you, jason, because that was a good idea and also it solved a problem in that I don't like doing those posts where here's an entire story that someone else very well read and wrote and I'm going to write two or three paragraphs. That sort of horks it. It's very, very nice to say I can add a comment to it and but but simply direct you to there and send you to the site.

2:04:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and you'll find Andy, after the site launches that you'll. You'll become as ex as expert as I am in turning over every cushion to find potential things you can post on your website. So content, I was happy to see that in you.

2:05:05 - Leo Laporte
It doesn doesn't come from nowhere, kids.

2:05:07 - Andy Ihnatko
I have so many links in my blue sky, not blue sky in my raindrop account. That is basically exactly for this purpose.

2:05:17 - Leo Laporte
Every blue sky, a little raindrop must fall.

2:05:19 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, so two or three weeks times a week I harvest like, okay, oh, no, that's just for me. Okay, no, that's a good one. No, no, no, oh no that's just for me.

2:05:26 - Leo Laporte
Okay, no, that's a good one. No, no, no, no. Jason Snell. Pick of the week.

2:05:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's a game that's been kicking around. It's on Apple Arcade. My friend, mike Hurley, recommended it on his blog that he started and I said to my wife oh, you might like this game, and the fact is we're both playing it all the time now. It's the Watermelon game, suica Game Plus, and this is an example where Apple has taken a game that's in the App Store and it's on a bunch of other platforms too, and they built a version of it that is basically completely covered. You don't have to spend a dime and it is a great game. It is. This is a game.

Tetris is one of my favorite games of all time. This has strong Tetris vibes, as well as matching three-in-a-row vibes like CAndy Crushes, and also games like Threes, where you have the escalating numbers and you're trying to build them and get them together. All of those things have kind of been mixed together and it's all in the context of smiling Japanese fruits. That's what it is and you want to get up to the watermelon. You start with the cherry, you end up with the watermelon. It's complicated. It's got weird physics because they're all round. So, unlike Tetris where they all just kind of drop and they go where they do these things land on a thing and then slowly roll off and fall down and it changes the dynamics. If you haven't played it, it's worth a go, especially if you have Apple Arcade. I really like the gameplay of it. The fact that it reminds me of some of my favorite games speaks really well of it.

2:06:55 - Leo Laporte
No, it's cool because a game like this, like CAndy Crush, would be so full of in-app purchases and little and to have an arcade so you could just play it fantastic.

2:07:05 - Jason Snell
For people who don't know, apple has taken a bunch of games that are in the App Store with in-app purchases and stuff like that, and they have this line of games that are in Apple Arcade, that are the plus versions, and what that means is it's the same game but there's no in-app purchase. Everything is covered because you're an Apple Arcade subscriber. And so I haven't played. I don know what's in the regular game because I've only played the, uh, the apple arcade version, but it's really good much and it's on switch and a bunch of other platforms too, so you can go to suika gamecom and see all of them. But, uh, I really it's worth a look if, if games like tetris or cAndy crush or threes uh tickle your fancy, because it is kind of a mash-up of all three of those and it's really good and cute.

2:07:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna play it right now.

2:07:46 - Jason Snell
This is so exciting good, uh, good, very excited good iPhone game good on a commute, you know all of those kind of things. It's that, it's that sort of thing. It has a completely bizarre, inscrutable user interface, but you just play it and you're dropping fruits and you figure it out.

2:08:01 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and oh and I should say.

2:08:02 - Jason Snell
The way it works is you drop the fruit, fruits they merge together and when the fruits go to the top of the box, you die.

2:08:08 - Leo Laporte
That's the end of it. Oh well, no, you don't want to do that, so this is a little tetrisy. Oh, look, it turned into a giant tomato.

2:08:14 - Jason Snell
Okay, it's a tomato we we debate what the fruits actually are, because it could be an apple. That could be an apple yeah, it looks like a tomato to me too, even though I think it's an apple I think your wife said it was an apple and that's why you're questioning my authority.

2:08:27 - Leo Laporte
Oh look, if I could get those two oranges to meet up.

2:08:29 - Jason Snell
You got it. She did say it was an apple. Well, I knew it, I could tell.

2:08:33 - Leo Laporte
That's the kind of thing you know adults usually fight about.

2:08:36 - Jason Snell
I think it goes cherry to grape, no, cherry to oh. Where does it go? These are grapes.

2:08:42 - Leo Laporte
These little ones are grapes.

2:08:44 - Jason Snell
It grapes, great it's, it's, it's cherry to strawberry to grape, oh, tangelo to orange. Now, what do I?

2:08:51 - Leo Laporte
do, and then you're in the melon. You could roll them together.

2:08:53 - Jason Snell
Yellow melon, the pink melon, the green melon and then finally the watermelon at the top okay forever I'll be doing this for a while.

2:09:02 - Leo Laporte
I'll let you, uh, just continue on. Thank you, suika. So we game plus it's in arcade. Don't buy it, yeah, just play it in the arcade if you've got apple arcade, just get it down for you? And if you don't, why don't you have apple arcade?

2:09:15 - Alex Lindsay
that's crazy, uh, mr alex lindsey's next so so I I'll talk about the first product that got us into this. This company called turtle av um, but we've had them on the show last night for extra hours and our evening show, because the morning show isn't enough, and so we had these guys on because they had one product that I hadn't seen before that I definitely needed was and it's not shipping yet, but I'll explain it it's called Downtown, it's by Turtle AV and what it does is it actually lets you this is kind of geeky, but it lets you take. You can take HDMI and push it in, and what it'll do is it'll take, it'll convert it to nine channels in Dante.

2:09:55 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's a.

2:09:56 - Alex Lindsay
Dante device, of course, or push out you see these little or push out analog out of the side here. Oh, so, if you need to get, if you need to turn your and this is if you're doing a this is really designed around AV installs. So if you're trying to figure out how do I get to all the speakers, and I need an easy way to have HDMI, not just channels embedded, but stuff that's coming in over Atmos, so like your Apple TV, and it'll loop through here, but then, once it's in there, it can distribute those out via Dante or via analog. And as we started to get into it, you know, we realized that they're doing a lot of other things, and so if you look at you know, you know, if we go back to you know what the other things that they have here, we suddenly realized they've got lots of Dante adapters and other ways to control Dante and it's just a really like.

It was a company that I didn't know existed a couple of weeks ago and I'm just, and so I'm only bringing it up for the now you're their best customer, the geeky viewer that, um, uh, and we, we spent an hour with them last night and, um, and it was just out of just curiosity, because it's like, how does a company and I guess they've only been out, they've only, they really have only been a company for about, I think, six months or something like that, so they've produced a lot of products, um, or maybe they've been a company longer, but the products have become public I think their branding is good because they've got like tiffany blue boxes.

They're very yeah, it's it's uh, it's very green or whatever that. I think that's a teal or maybe tiffany blue.

2:11:24 - Leo Laporte
it looks like a tiffany's box with a lot of ports on it. Yeah, and so so it's. I wish I needed Dante, cause I, I would just like to everything to be Dante. It makes life much easier, yeah.

2:11:41 - Alex Lindsay
Well, if I had more than one microphone in the entire house going between my computers on my office, like you know, like it's really, yeah, yeah, it's, it's uh. I use it to basically anything I want to connect via audio. You know, I'll have, like I have a speaker over here and I just have Audinate and also Turtle make these little things that are just XLR outs from an Ethernet. So anytime I want to add something, I just put the XLRs, these little adapters, I just stick it into whatever I need to stick it into and then I plug in PoE Ethernet into it and now I'm sending. I can now route audio from anywhere to that speaker.

2:12:10 - Leo Laporte
So when you get used to Dante. Why do they call it downtown?

2:12:15 - Alex Lindsay
Is that a common? I don't know. We should have asked.

2:12:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're moving your sound downtown, man you know.

2:12:24 - Alex Lindsay
I think it may be sitting on what's called the Brooklyn chip, which is the Dante chip that's used. Maybe that is related, maybe because the lights are much brighter.

2:12:32 - Leo Laporte
There you can forget all your couple troubles and forget all your cares.

2:12:36 - Alex Lindsay
It's possible yeah, but anyway, so for the, for the geeky folks, that we have a lot of people listening and some people are in av and if I feel like I do a show every day talking about av, if I didn't know that this company existed until two weeks ago, it was worth, it was worth recommending so that people know that, hey, there's a company building really cool pieces of hardware that it is cool, like, yeah, it's very cool, yeah, it's cool turtle turtle avcom.

2:13:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, go downtown, man. Well, I think that wraps it up. Maybe we'll have when one of the next guys have to get into the library room. Do you have time to do your?

2:13:12 - Andy Ihnatko
time to do my show, my after show your mini show. Yeah, Andy's mini match break just like on e-online, we'll have, we'll have the guests back on, we'll have the lounge with drinks and they'll throw rosé at each other, just like like Andy cohen. There you go, yeah, yeah. The other hand, the other hAndy.

2:13:31 - Leo Laporte
Thank you so much, andrew. Uh, stay tuned he is. He has yet to kill once. I have something like that anyway. Thank you so much, andrew. Uh, all the best, we appreciate it. Alex lindsay uh, are you still on hiatus with the great matter show or have you?

2:13:51 - Alex Lindsay
started coming back um, um, right at the end of august, and so it'll be. We're going to come back up on substack as krasny conversations, um, and so we'll give people more information and um, and so that, yeah, we're relaunching in substack. Uh, I think the first and of course I think the first interview, I believe, is with richard haas, formerly of foreign affairs and so, uh, talking about stuff. So it's we're going to jump right into the, into the deep end, um, but I think that's good for you.

2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
I remember going to the uh, get to an airport with you, get on a flight and you buying a stack of stuff, including foreign affairs and the economist, and I thought, man, this guy's smart I've been reading for it since I was 15 years old.

2:14:28 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know, I don't know how I got into that because it's, but yeah, so, anyway. So he's. So that'll be starting up, I think. I think our first live record we're going to start streaming to Substack. That's what I'm starting to test right now on my channel.

2:14:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, substack just added video as well.

2:14:44 - Alex Lindsay
We've been thinking about ourselves well, we've been thinking about ourselves. Yeah, so do you have?

2:14:51 - Leo Laporte
to be invited for the live. I think you need to get something flipped, yeah, back end.

2:14:53 - Alex Lindsay
So we're thinking of adding it to our live. Uh, I'm sure that they would accommodate, leo, if you, I, I can have your people talk to their people, if you have my people wanted to do it.

2:15:03 - Leo Laporte
I, I think we got stymied because we thought we had to get invited. So, uh, I, yeah, we'll talk. I'm very humble. I'm a humble person. I have not yet killed once. I have not. Whatever that is, now we're gonna make it really hard to remember how to spell Andy's name, I'm sorry. Andrew. Jason Snell. I mentioned sixcolors/com. Gotta go there, gotta do it. Listen to his shows, the Incomparable Upgrade, all the rest. Thank you guys. Thanks to all of you who watch and listen every week.

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