MacBreak Weekly 982 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 here the whole gang's in town. We're going to talk about the public beta. Where is it? I want to use it. We think it's close. We'll also talk about rumors about a new color for the iPhone 17 and why the foldable might be the thing. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, Episode 982, recorded Tuesday, July 22nd 2025: Everyday I'm Scrobblin'. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest apple news and, yes, we're a little late, but that's so we could cover the latest apple news. Jason snell is installing the developer beta 4 of right now macOS 26

0:00:50 - Jason Snell
Possibly the public beta, we don't know, uh, but I think all signs point to unless there's something catastrophic in here that is going to prevent me from restarting. Yeah, I think so. I think that Give us an alert.

0:01:09 - Leo Laporte
Do you have one of those air horns? You go yeah, yeah, I could do that.

0:01:13 - Jason Snell
I've got a little button that makes that sound.

0:01:15 - Alex Lindsay
So when we're up and running.

0:01:16 - Jason Snell
I'll let you know, but in the meantime, I am using an auxiliary computer to be on the show, so it's good to be here an auxiliary computer yes, apple 2c.

0:01:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, fancy, man has two computers, two, he has more than one. He is at sixcolors.com. Yes, hello also here, Andy Ihnatko from Ihnatko.com. Hello, Andrew. Ah, hey, there, hi there, ho there, all in black. That means it's cooling off in northern New England.

0:01:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, only we have a double it's. It's kind of funny because they overcompensate the library, I don't know what. They have an old like Zone system so like the reference librarians are literally wearing sweaters because the AC in their Zone is so high. So it's weird to come up off the street like wow and then seeing someone who's like ready for polar excursions.

0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
So you look comfortable, that's the main thing. You're comfortable, that's the main thing. And Mr Alexander Lindsay, from officehours.global hello, hello, hello.

0:02:18 - Alex Lindsay
I'm back back from the travels yes, back in the studio.

0:02:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I guess this is the question so this is I mean it's exciting because this may be it.

0:02:42 - Jason Snell
This may be the public beta, as well, all right. Hold your applause, everybody, all right.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
And I believe that was the first question I had is where the hell is the public beta? We got to get it in July and if my calculations are correct, that gives us eight more days.

0:02:58 - Jason Snell
Nine more days, you know, I think I suspect that. Okay, we'll do this. We pretty much know that Apple wants to release a developer beta before the public beta. Oh sorry, thank you.

0:03:12 - Leo Laporte
Lady Airhorn, I apologize.

0:03:13 - Jason Snell
You say it and it happens, because it's best practices, because what you want to do is make sure that there isn't a real showstopper.

0:03:22 - Leo Laporte
So the fact that you're getting a new developer, beta developer. Four.

0:03:27 - Jason Snell
It would suggest to me that maybe there was something in developer beta three that they had a talk about and were like we don't want to go out with that, and who knows whether that was something cosmetic or whether it was something very technical but the fact that we've got another set they only said by July, and so Mark Gurman suggested it might be as early as the 23rd, which is, as we're recording this, tomorrow, and it could be that that's only a day for the early, for the you know data astronauts to try it out and see if it explodes or not. But of course the people inside Apple are also testing these builds. So anyway, we are on the cusp of that and I mean, I realize a lot of our viewership is so technical already that they're probably already running the dev betas. But I think public beta is a milestone because it is Apple basically saying to anyone who's interested you can get the new macOS, ios, ipados, it's going to be okay.

And the dev betas don't say that Dev betas are you're taking your life into your own hands. But public beta this is, you know, this is Apple saying yeah, you go ahead. If you are curious about how this is going, there are going to be some bugs, but like they're opening the floodgates. So I think it is a real. It's not the same milestone as shipping, but it's a big milestone.

0:04:41 - Alex Lindsay
Rest. It's a big milestone Restarting your messages app. That's usually the number one thing I see in the beta is messages gets caught up like stuck somewhere and you're like, oh, I'll just restart it.

0:04:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's often iCloud gets confused.

0:04:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Usually, the dev beta is the first time you find out if that app that you love and rely on, that hasn't been updated in three years, is still going to work or not. That's usually the cost of switching over to the first public beta.

0:05:07 - Leo Laporte
So Dr Du in our Clubtooth Discord has posted his screenshot of iPadOS 26 Beta 4, ready to go. But note its size 1.51 gigs. That's small. Yeah, I mean they do diff betas, so it might not be a big shift from Beta 3s.

0:05:22 - Jason Snell
I guess my cursory. I was looking at iPad earlier, right before we started recording, and it doesn't appear that different, which, as a writer who takes screenshots of this stuff, I love to see. That, Because you take a bunch of screenshots illustrating features of the beta and then they change the UI and you're like, oh, more work for me then and this does not seem like they made any big radical changes. But I don't know, it's early yet. We were only, I think, about an hour as we're recording into these betas being available, so people are still kind of figuring it out.

0:05:53 - Leo Laporte
So would you say, uh, I'm sitting here wondering should I know I haven't done any of the developer betas? Wait till the public beta, which?

0:06:02 - Jason Snell
could be sometime this week I, and if we're talking about like, I am wary but I'm tempted by the public beta, which is a great phrase.

That's me, that's that squeeze song I think I I'm always the guy who's like be careful, careful and back up your stuff and yeah, yeah, yeah. But I will tell you I've been using all of it since dev beta one and it works fine for me. I dread putting betas on my iPad and my Mac because I use those so much. I will say the iPhone betas. It's going to kill your battery life. I mean it is If you really get everything.

0:06:41 - Leo Laporte
That's the last thing they optimize.

0:06:42 - Jason Snell
If you're not carrying around a battery all day, or maybe even if you are like it, it shoots your battery life, that it makes your phone hot and it shoots your battery life. But, like my ipad, experience has been great on the beta. Even with all the changes they made, with all the the windowing and all that, it works great. I haven't had any major issues. Many major yeah. Every now and then I restarted, or it the windows server crashes and you open it back up, you unlock it again and then it's fine again.

Um, I would take entirely usable, and on the mac, not only would I say that it's very usable. You can, we can quibble about, like what the interface looks like, because the interface is a little different and weird, but um, there's so many productivity benefits on the mac with um, the new stuff that's in spotlight and the new stuff in shortcuts and some of the stuff they're doing in the menu bar that I feel like if you're a power user, it's probably worth doing the public beta just because, even if things are a little bit weird, it's usable and it's a great. Tahoe is going to be a great update for longtime Mac users. It really is, because they, they, I mean it's funny like they did all these visual changes that feel more like they belong on iOS than they do on the Mac. On the Mac it's a little awkward, but on the productivity side the Mac comes out way ahead in this cycle.

0:07:54 - Leo Laporte
Nice. Dr Dew says it is a 10 gigabyte update for his iPhone, so a little larger, three gigabytes for Mac OS. I don't know, I mean, we're reading tea leaves at this point, so I'm just going to stop there and say maybe we should wait and see and I will download it. I was hoping to do it by today, you know, because that would seem like, but maybe by next week.

0:08:18 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think so. I mean there's no public beta yet, but assuming it comes out tomorrow, you could take your time see how everybody's reacting. Yeah, always wait report back next week yeah, alex, lindsey's rule.

0:08:28 - Leo Laporte
I like your rule, alex, which is don't update the first, don't download the first update to the release. Download the update.

0:08:35 - Jason Snell
That fixes the first update I thought alex's rule was okay, everybody, it's now safe to download sequoia. That's all I'm gonna say, Alex is the lindsey's rule.

0:08:43 - Alex Lindsay
I was like sometime this summer, I think I'm gonna get this sequoia yeah so I, yeah, like, like it's, it's, I'm getting ready to move forward. Uh, you know so, uh, but now that the the dust is settled, um, on that one. But I I think that on a couple of machines I'm already starting to put the beta on, mostly because I need it for some again. The other side of this is that I have software that only works on the newest stuff, so you have a handful of computers that need to go up. So we're seeing a little bit of both, but I still have a lot of machines on some.

0:09:12 - Leo Laporte
On Monday, apparently, according to Mac rumors, Apple accidentally pushed the Tahoe public beta to some users and then yanked it back.

0:09:21 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and it was weird too, because it was like a certain it like people without um rosetta installed that, got it. I don't know. I think they're, yeah, I think they're loading the chambers here right like I think.

0:09:31 - Leo Laporte
But that doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen. Which could be? It could be russian roulette, you know, you don't. It depends which chambers they load or fly.

0:09:37 - Jason Snell
I've been watching too many submarine movies and like everybody, we're filling the you know filling the torpedo tubes.

Exactly right, but but that doesn't mean that if there isn't a show stopper, they will pull back. Uh, because they will not. If they are not confident in the public beta, they won't release it, and that will go for the rest of this period. Like the public beta trails the developer beta. For a reason, which is people on the developer beta are the ones who are going to get burned if there's a show stopper, and that's that's the price we take for being on that one.

0:10:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, don't be in a hurry. Everything will happen in its time and all in good time.

0:10:09 - Jason Snell
And if you're like Alex, especially like I mean being careful if you've got a second phone around, if you've got another iPad around or one that's a device that's mission critical and one that's not, I mean the prudent thing to do if you've got a desktop that you do all your work on and a laptop that you just mess around on. Install macOS on the laptop, right Like, do that? That's a nice, safe way to approach this, where you get to try it out without risking breaking your stuff.

0:10:38 - Alex Lindsay
And the funny thing is for me I'm super aggressive about my iPad and my phone, like I just do a stuff and just kind of plow through that it's my work computer, that I'm kind of like well, I'll be really bummed if something goes wrong.

0:10:52 - Andy Ihnatko
There's an obvious hierarchy here. I've got like the dev betas on my iPhone, which is a secondary phone. I'm not going to install anything on my iPad until the first public beta. I'm excited, I'm going to jump the gun there because of all the extra features and I'm not installing anything on the MacBook until it's actual Golden Master. So it's like I could do without this for an entire year if I had to. I can do without the iPad or reduce performance for a few weeks maybe, before it become annoying. But no, no, my MacBook is my MacBook weeks maybe, before it become annoying.

0:11:30 - Leo Laporte
But I not, no, no, my MacBook is my MacBook. Um, oh, I'm just. I don't know if I should repeat this, but I, the Discord is telling me that Ozzy Osbourne just passed. I just thought I'd pass that along, I know just did his last performance.

Uh, last week. Uh, last week. Um, of course, uh, suffering from parkinson's um, the man who invented heavy metal. There's a very good documentary on him on youtube which is available for free on youtube. I highly recommend. Uh, all right, we'll move on. Just thought I'd mention that. Um, let's uh talk. Uh. There's so many little tiny stories. For instance, tsmc, which makes Apple Silicon in Taiwan, says US chip production may soon only be three years behind Taiwan. This is something Apple and the president have been pushing really hard for Not just the current president but the previous president with the CHIPS Act. They really want Apple to move its chip production back to the US. Tsmc is working to build two plants in Arizona and they've hit the accelerator pedal. Fab21, which we had thought would be making legacy nodes, will be accelerated by several quarters. Not clear. After completion, tsmc Chairman CC Way said 30% of our two nanometer and more advanced chip capacity will be located in Arizona. That's a big deal.

0:13:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Are they talking about actual production capacity?

0:13:05 - Leo Laporte
Well, 30% of the two nanometer is production level right. 5% or 1% wouldn't be, but 30% is almost a third of their highest end chips. The second Arizona plant, he said, or it was said, was ready for three nanometer by 2028. Ready for three nanometer by 2028?

0:13:30 - Alex Lindsay
but uh, they're, they're accelerating it which makes sense, given the global situation.

Uh, yeah, and these are all great press releases too, I mean well, that's the problem is that you know we can say all this stuff and no one's going to remember that you said it now, like you're going to get to 2026 or 2027, and well, we're still working on it and there's a couple of little things or whatever. So but I think that even if, if they I mean at this point when you look at the cost of the tariffs if there's a way to push the tariffs off or their way to push some of the regular, some of those things off, even if it costs you a billion dollars, literally, it's worth it. Put a billion dollars into the ground for and unsuccessfully, and it would be cheaper than paying for the, for the, uh, the tariffs, and so for all of us. So so I think that. So I that they can try really hard here. It doesn't. I mean, it'd be great if they're at, if they actually succeed. But even if they didn't succeed, it would, it would delay, you know other things that would be more expensive.

0:14:22 - Leo Laporte
It's just a this is just a math, math problem I'm just checking to see where the foxconn plant in wisconsin that was uh gonna be built in 2017 is. Uh have they broken ground maybe?

0:14:37 - Andy Ihnatko
slab yeah, a huge slab yeah it's that's.

I mean, that's that's the problem. Like, this is coming from a story that, uh, that appeared in Nikkei and it's just thin on actual details. That could mean they thought they'd get the land cleared a year after where it is right now. But boy, that land is cleared. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are that much closer to actually getting chips ready. I keep wondering exactly what the long-range strategy is. Is TSMC actually thinking it actually makes perfect financial sense for us to, now that we have this extra like stick and carrot, it makes sense for us to actually do a lot more manufacturing in the United States? Or is it okay? We are betting that these tariffs and these other conditions are going to persist and that there isn't going to be a turnaround that will make us glad that we didn't actually start, we didn't actually irreversibly commit to this before we actually had to?

0:15:39 - Leo Laporte
yeah, so we'll just watch with interest. But I can see why there's a lot of incentive to do it, to get it, to rush it along as fast as they possibly can.

0:15:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, because it's not just tariffs, it's having lots of customers in the. United States and being able to consider continuing to serve their needs.

0:15:56 - Jason Snell
And I mean we talked about this, about Apple in China and trying to redistribute some of its before the Trump administration, to redistribute some of its manufacturing to other countries, and, using the. You know, they used COVID as an excuse, and all of that. This is that double thing, where it's not just because the Trump administration and really before them the Biden administration and Congress, with the CHIPS Act, wanted more chip infrastructure in the US, because the failure of Intel has really kind of hosed the American chip industry Right. So this does, though, also mean that all the eggs aren't in the factories in Taiwan, in case something happens in Taiwan. I mean, that's the bottom line, and nobody wants that to happen, but it is important to spread the chip capacity around the world and not just have it in one little island.

0:16:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, john prosser is being sued by apple.

Uh youtuber and famous apple leaker uh. Earlier this year he shared videos of uh ios. It wasn't even named ios 26 yet, but he showed what it was to look like. Apple says and he denies. I should point out that prosser paid somebody, a guy named michael ramachotti, to when his roommate was away. His roommate worked for apple, ethan lipnick. When his roommate was away, unlock his roommate's phone, I guess, do a FaceTime call with a processor and show him what was running on the Apple-owned iPhone. According to the lawsuit, they planned access to Lipnick's phone, first acquiring his password, then using location tracking to determine when he'd be gone for enough time for them to do this. And, of course, the journalistic sin, if it really happened, would be offering Ramachati money for this. Lipnick was fired. Apple fired him. Uh, lipnick was fired. Apple fired him.

Uh, apple says his phone contained a quote, a significant amount of additional apple trade secret information that has not yet been publicly disclosed. Yeah, apple filed a lawsuit to request an injunction against further disclosure. Prosser says uh, that's not how things went down. On my end, looking forward to being able to speak to apple about it. Well, I think you will be. I think you will be speaking to apple, so we don't know what the truth of it is. Um, but it's a big deal for apple to sue a leaker. On the other hand, if they he prosser did what apple says he did, it is, uh, crossing the journalistic, it's a beyond the pale.

0:18:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, journalists yes, unquestionably yes. There are two things if, if the allegations are true, there are two things he's that you're not supposed to do. One is pay for this kind of information. Two is entice somebody to break rules or break the law in order to give you information, the only if they come in over the transom, you can use it if, if this, if this would be completely clean.

If somebody said, hey, I've got a screen capture of what Apple's next UI is and they just would you like to see it right, that happens all the time and that happens all the time.

then you have the problem of okay, well, why should I trust you? Why should I believe this is authentic ABCD? But the biggest risk is that you're going to look really stupid when it turns out that you fell for something, but that would be completely legal. There are gray areas in between, but no, you don't pay for leaks. And two, you do not entice somebody to do something that is illegal or improper.

0:19:38 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that was in journalism school. We had to take a law class First Amendment law and one of the top ones is inducement to breaking laws is not cool. So the idea that you are paying for sources is not general. I mean, there are other parts of the world where that is more common, but it's the inducement right. It's the idea that I want you to do this for me. It's saying, hey, somebody in government, I will pay you to give me the Pentagon Papers, versus I'm sitting at my desk and the Pentagon Papers come over the transom. Those are. Those are different.

And if you, if you want to boil it down, I don't like to see big tech companies suing people in the media because I think the point of this lawsuit is to scare people at Apple and to scare people who write about Apple. I think that that's why they do this is to remind their employees about hygiene, for carrying alphas of unreleased and unannounced products on their person or at their house and being kind of sloppy about that, and also for people who want to report about secrets of Apple to make them a little more scared. I think that's absolutely why they're doing it. But if you boil it down and I don't love Prosser and I don't like his shtick and I don't like his tone and all that.

But whatever, he has an audience and it's fine and this was a big scoop. But like if the way the story went down is that Prosser said hey, I'll give you money if you break into your friend's phone. I mean the act again. I'm not a lawyer, but like it feels like the friend committed a criminal act. I don't know if John Prosser did or not, it depends on what the law is, but unauthorized access to someone else's device is essentially it's computer hacking. Right, it is a crime, it's got to be a crime of some sort.

0:21:23 - Leo Laporte
In fact, they are suing him with the computer fraud act.

0:21:26 - Jason Snell
Right, uh as uh but I wonder about criminal charges as well, if they I don't see any. This is a civil suit this is a civil suit, but I I also wonder if you you bAndy about the criminal charges in order to get people to respond to your other litigation. But uh, yeah, it's, it's not. That's like Andy said. It's not great, especially if you think about the fact that this was not his phone. It was his friend, roommate, whatever phone and he was enticed.

Was he enticed to break into it in order to reveal secrets?

0:21:55 - Alex Lindsay
it's not good also, if you're trying to protect your friend with all the, your roommate with the information, you'd say well, when he was gone we had somebody else break into his phone, when maybe he just opened his phone that's also possible.

0:22:06 - Jason Snell
So, like you're like well they, they had wasted.

0:22:09 - Leo Laporte
No time firing lipnick yeah uh, they. Lipnick also apparently did not inform them once he realized what had happened yeah, in fact, they were informed by an anonymous email. Here's a so from this. This is my favorite.

0:22:21 - Jason Snell
This is my favorite tidbit in the entire thing, because somebody emailed Apple and said hey, john Prosser showed me a video of your next operating system and I recognized that it's Lipnick's apartment, apartment what. How do they? How, what? Somebody who knows him, who has?

0:22:39 - Andy Ihnatko
been to the apartment, ratted him out.

0:22:42 - Leo Laporte
Probably another Apple employee right.

0:22:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, but why is John Prosser showing? I mean, one possible way is that John Prosser has Apple sources where he's like look, you didn't give this to me, but can you, can you show me that this is legit? And they might say yes or no, but they might also be like oh, that's Lipnick.

0:23:09 - Alex Lindsay
I'm going to get you know. You're now visionable, like and, and you know what's interesting when you, if you know anybody at Apple, they're all, they're kind of willfully not interested in anything they're not working on because they don't want to be, they don't want to have information, they don't want to have random information. That's going to get them in trouble, that isn't helping them move forward.

0:23:25 - Leo Laporte
Prostler's tweet also isn't exactly a denial, it's a kind of an. He says it didn't go down that way. Yeah, I.

0:23:33 - Alex Lindsay
I, you know, I, I think, if, if, if I was looking at this, if I was a prosecutor, I'd be looking at it going. Okay, here's the deal. The guy had his roommate show him the, the, the information, they, they, they, they traded notes, he posted it and then they made up something that said that somebody else broke into something else. I mean, like that's the. That's the simplest line here, not not the.

0:23:51 - Leo Laporte
The complicated thing that when you also go down this way, it probably didn't go down that way apple security interviewed ramachati, yeah, you think, and uh, yeah, and in the interview ramachati admitted what happened, said prosser proposed the scheme and, quote, promised to find out a way for me to get payment. But this is solely the testimony of this other guy. So apple's real interest, I think, is the injunction. They don't want if there is more information they don't want that to to leak out. Apple fears it says in the pla and the pleading that defendants will continue to misuse its trade secret absent judicial information. So that's really, yeah, what the lawsuit, uh, is all about. And they do. They do say, uh, they, you know, defend trade secrets act dtsa and the computer fraud and abuse act cfaa. Um, the court has jurisdiction under these federal laws. So, um, ramachati is a product analyst and video editor at ntftw I don't know who that is. So, um, you know, I I think that the the truth may or may not come out on this one.

0:25:09 - Jason Snell
Uh, it's, it's a pretty ugly thing all around it and and it doesn't matter, because you know, I mean, yeah, they're going to argue for legal reasons that there's potential future harm. That needs to be enjoined here. But, like I said earlier, they did this to scare apple employees, oh, it's clear. And they did this to scare Apple employees, oh it's clear. And they did this to scare people who report leaks about Apple.

0:25:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why they did it.

And job done, I think, I absolutely agree on the first point, because there's never any reason for them to overlook, an excuse to once again drill into these people's heads that we do not take this lightly. We believe this to be a sin against not just our rules but our culture, and so you, you, we will, we investigate, we have people who will figure these things out. Um, I do think it's more less of a warning of journalism, journalists in general. So long, more more of a just to look, more, just to saying look, this is not the wild west, if you cross a, we will jump on you.

There's been lots of leaks over the years that have gone without lawsuits, without legal action. Just again, some very, very public firings and even some comments from Tim Cook to the masses. That has gone leaked out, of course. That has gone, leaked out, of course. But I don't think that they're trying to say look, if you, if so, if you, if you get some aligned to some good information that we haven't published yet. We're not trying to intimidate, they're not trying to intimidate people into not publishing it. They would love it if they didn't. But so long, don't pay people to. Don't pay people to take for the information. Don't entice people to break Apple rules or, worse, the law to do it.

0:26:44 - Leo Laporte
They do say in this suit, as a direct and proximate result of defendant's conduct, apple has suffered, and continues to suffer monetary and non-monetary injury and harm in an amount to be proven at trial. I don't think he's going to get billions from Prosser, but these include Apple's lost profits from the unauthorized disclosure of its trade secret information, its investigation costs, its attorney fees and other costs and expenses.

0:27:08 - Jason Snell
I wish them luck proving that there's actual damage in leaking some information in advance. I think Apple having to prove somehow that surprises have a tangible value about a chilling effect is it serves as a reminder to employees to tighten up their stuff and to people who report about the company to not do stuff like buy you know, induce people to break into phones like these are good reminders that you can do by filing a lawsuit they say they lost at least five thousand dollars.

0:27:40 - Alex Lindsay
That's in this sure but I mean the issue is is that is that if he, especially if there's any chance that he could get into a, you know he has to lawyer up if there's any chance that that he's going to go into a criminal lawsuit? You can't just go into a civil lawsuit without really having the best lawyers, because the advantage of the civil lawsuit is there's no Fifth Amendment, so you can just ask lots of questions. They can't defend themselves and the standards for proof are lower as well, right, and that's all admissible in your criminal case, you know so. So the issue, if, if so, as long as there's not a criminal case hanging over you, there's not there's no way for you to protect yourself. And so the thing is, is that they um, so they can, um, you know, dig into that.

But the bottom line is him just defending himself is going to be 50 to a hundred thousand dollars, like, like, just just. You know, staying out of the hole starts. That's the. So you know they're not going to. And if they somehow get him to pay their legal fees, even if they don't do anything else, if Apple just says you have to pay our legal fees for that as well, he's, he's going to be a half a million dollars in the hole, without any, without any, um, you know, without any damages, you know, and beyond that, and, and I mean as a as a son of a lawyer, you might have a better insight into this than anybody else.

0:28:52 - Andy Ihnatko
But uh, it's certainly not a slap suit. Okay, it's not we're not. We're not. We're not suing him just to basically make him have to spend money to defend it, but even so, even so, defending against this suit has got to cost us a lot of money, do you think? Do you think that Apple is going to simply say at some point say, pay a pay, a certain fine that we think is admit?

rock admit sin no more pay a certain fine that we will. We will will regard as photocopying charges for this and we'll let you off, or is it going to be no? We're going to go for everything.

0:29:32 - Alex Lindsay
Settlements happen a lot Like, hey, if we agree not to do this again, Most of the time and it does, you know, because taking it to court is, you know, it's unpredictable as well. Even, no matter what you do, once you go to court, you don't know what's going to happen. Like you know, like a lot of you know, the best team in the football, the worst team in football, can always beat the best team in football, and so so you know, like, in, in, in, in the right, with the right circumstances, the same thing with a lock, you know, so you don't want to take it to court, so there could be some kind of settlement. That point. They really want their employees to be more careful about what they're you know, whether they gave it to them or talked about it or whatever.

You know, and what happens is, I think, that Apple doesn't want to. They don't want to be seen as the bad person. So if you're in the gray area of, you know you had a loose conversation, you're not. They're gonna go after you because it makes them crazy, like it makes every company crazy. When people are are sharing what they're trying to work on makes apple crazier than anybody, of course because, because they're, they're.

Admittedly, apple oftentimes is way ahead of everybody else and they don't want other people thinking about those things until they've done the thing right but but really, I mean, did they really get harmed by what prosser published?

0:30:49 - Leo Laporte
no, I don't think so.

0:30:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's why it's if, if they do go forward with this, I would love to see assuming the process lawyers are good and are they they're funded enough to actually like fight this. I would love to see the discovery process how, how hey, apple calculate for us and show us documentation of how you value certain bits of information and how you monetize different features. Uh, I don't think that Apple's going to be interested in that part of the of the process at all.

0:31:14 - Leo Laporte
Plus, it sounds like this all hinges on um ramachati's testimony, like that's that's who said Prosser paid me. There's probably unless there's a check unless there's a large payment going into his bank account.

0:31:29 - Jason Snell
I mean it puts the screws to Prosser a little bit more to get him to agree. I mean, the classic example here is the ThinkSecret suit that they did like 15, 20 years ago, where there was a website that Apple sued and basically as part of the settlement, that website shut down and that guy said I will never do this again and he disappeared. Um, and that that will probably be the case here. I will say for people who are wondering, like I talked to people at Apple um, people have rogue, you know future OSs on devices at home all the time.

This is common and it's not like he secreted this thing out of Apple. It's common and there is a device hygiene kind of thing you need to do. And what happened here is it was somebody with access to the guy's house who knew his passcode and that's the reminder to Apple employees is not, you know, don't be a leaker, although I guess that's implied but it's that sort of tighten up your own security that, like you don't show this to your friends, you don't let your friends know your passcode, you use a different passcode on this stuff and if you can't secure it, don't take it home. But they do take it home and that's allowed.

0:32:38 - Andy Ihnatko
They just have to be smart about it. That's why I feel sad about the whole story that if, in one version of this, the Apple employee is completely innocent of just being of anything everything except for just being a little bit careless and we can all be, especially if they've been with the company for a long time, if they've been following procedures for a long time there's that thing where so when you keep breaking rules for so long that, without any consequences, eventually you forget that this is actually a rule that you're breaking and that's how security lapses happen. So it makes me sad that they did something that was a very, very simple mistake to make. However, it was, when you're working for Apple, a fatal mistake for your job.

0:33:18 - Leo Laporte
Peter Moore is saying in our YouTube chat is and I didn't know this the irony is that Prosser wasn't doing any more leaking instead of concentrating on documentaries. Um, but this was too juicy for him to pass up. I think if, if prosser's thinking to get none of the leak business, this might be exactly the impetus he needs.

0:33:34 - Alex Lindsay
Time, yeah, there's so many, though, what? How many movies are there of I'm just getting out? And then there's like okay, one more job. I don't know. I don't know if having to take screen captures of what the future looked like was really worth.

0:33:48 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, yeah, in March, no less. I mean yeah, yeah, okay, and it's all changed anyway. It doesn't look anything like that anymore. So, nice job, all right. Well, I think everybody on this panel will. I don don't you know? I've been several times offered leaks, which I've always said no thanks, because we don't really deal in leaks. I let, I let the pros handle that. You might be in a different situation. Jason, I don't know. Or Andy, no, I mean we I don't.

0:34:22 - Jason Snell
I don't really deal in it either. I sometimes will get like hints about stuff that's going on. It's useful as background information to understand what's going on, but my job is also not to break that stuff and it's not a game I want to be in.

0:34:37 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, to me it's not interesting, because if you get something like that, either it's going to happen in which case you'll know about it anyway, it's not going to change anybody's which case you'll know about it anyway. It's not going to change anybody's perception or anybody's planning in any way or it's not true, either because it's someone who's faking something up or because it's just something that Apple is thinking about doing and they haven't decided yet. And you look kind of silly. Unless you're a news site that does like eight actual pieces of news a day, you can say, oh well, I got this. Don't know if it means anything, but onto the next thing. It's just not what I'm interested in.

And yeah, I bet that I'm kind of like Jason in that you hear things and things kind of float your way, but they're generally not like excuse me, in my case they're not like explosive. Oh, I bet you want to know. I bet you want to know that there's a new banana shaped phone that's coming out at the end of the year. That's well. No, actually I don't. How did you know? How do you know that?

0:35:31 - Leo Laporte
uh, it's hard to vet, it it's yeah it's, it's not necessary to our business. We don't trade in the latest breaking news. It's, it's more like it's I don't have the resources to, most of the time, something like that to.

0:35:44 - Andy Ihnatko
To the extent, like if in I don't have the resources to prosecute something like that to the extent In the famous situation with Gizmodo's iPhone 5, if I had it, it's like I would need to line up a whole bunch of industrial designers and engineers to look at this and tell me what is interesting about this phone other than the shape. And tell me what is interesting about this phone other than the shape, because if all you're doing is is showing people hey, here's what it looks like, is that really worth any of the trouble and any of the risks you're going to? Or the lawyers that you would have had to have hired before you accepted such an offer to begin with? Right, so, and it's. And you can't really win because actually I remember at the time, uh, gizmodo's publisher was like using me as an example oh well, well, Andy Ihnatko wouldn't is like really that's funny yeah.

Well, cause, I think I think I wrote a blog post at the time that basically said, kind of like what I'm saying, that I'm just not interested in that when I get information like that, andy's a good guy.

No, no, actually it was worth it. Well, see that, cause someone like Andy Ihnatko. He doesn't publish stuff like that because he doesn't want to get Apple angry. And I was like, no, because A I'm representing the Chicago Sun-Times and I don't want to get them sued for several million dollars for buying a piece of absolutely stolen property, Especially when, anyway, that example was super funny because there was a way you could have done it that was completely legal. But you're dope and you decided to just say, oh sure, I'll give you a few thousand dollars for obviously stolen iPhone, Not like what I'm going to.

0:37:17 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, it was it was historically funny and it took about five years before Gizmodo got invited back to Apple events again. So it's not not. Yeah, they were in. They were in the time out for a few years. That's all all right. We're going to take a break. We come back more to talk about, uh, lots more, some interesting stuff, including, uh, the apple. Uh, ai saga continues and a victory in the uk. But first a word from our sponsor. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. Great to have you here today.

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So, uh, the uk has backed down. Remember this whole kerfuffle with the snoopers charter where the uk said, apple, you have to give us clear text from messages. Apple said well, in that case we are taking back our advanced protection feature from everybody in the uk. Well, now, with some more pressure, especially tariff pressure, from the administration, sir Keir Starmer's government is seeking a way out of a clash with the Trump administration over the UK's demand that Apple provide it with access to secure customer data. This is from the Financial Times, who quote two senior British officials.

0:41:53 - Alex Lindsay
That's good news. I think we saw that coming like it is. Uh, I guess I mean we knew that apple would withdraw.

0:41:59 - Leo Laporte
But but uh, for the uk to say, okay, never mind.

0:42:03 - Andy Ihnatko
Yes, companies don't usually do that yeah, they have a good quote here. This is something that the vice president is very annoyed about and it needs to be resolved. The whole.

0:42:12 - Leo Laporte
I want to piss off jd vance man.

0:42:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh my god you get into his mariardi like steel trap of a cat and mouse mind. Uh, the home office is basically going to have to back down.

0:42:24 - Leo Laporte
Wow, but imagine being that being done in a in a post-ex I do suspect that the one of the threats, the strongest threat is uh is tariffs right well there's all kinds of things.

0:42:34 - Alex Lindsay
I mean. It's also, you know, how the five eyes interact with each other, how the like. There's so many things that are going on here that we can say well, especially when you're talking about, because of what this is, is security, right of people's um data well, and the Brits wanted to see American uh data as well as UK Right, and that's the and that, and so that's a five eyes problem.

You know, like, and that's like, that's the, that's the NSA saying, hey, how about we just cut you off? Like you know, like you know, like you know, if you're going to, you know, and I'm sure that there were a lot of private conversations when people said, well, we're going to do what we're going to do, and they said, okay, well, how about we do this? And you know, this is still I mean from a, from a scale perspective, the UK is a little smaller, so it's not not a fair fight. So if the United States decides they don't want to play anymore, I don't think it might be terrorists, but I bet you it's intelligence, I bet you there's a, a five eyes conversation going on about you can't take our well, in fact, I remember tulsi gabbard, the director of national intelligence, saying we have an agreement with the uk that they won't do this, so that's yeah, that's problematic.

0:43:39 - Leo Laporte
Um, so nobody told parliament, apparently. Anyway, uh, good news. But meanwhile, canada is now looking at a new bill that would, in fact, do the same thing.

0:43:50 - Alex Lindsay
So, uh, encryption is under attack everywhere, and end-to-end encryption particularly, and we just, I think what's interesting about it is is you have part of it, which is that there's an obvious security problem for americans if, if our, if our, if we're compromised, but at the same time you have the fbi, so you have the, so you have one side of the country going hey, you can't touch that, and the FBI really wants to get into all of that data, and so sometimes when you look at these things, it's really hard to tell who wants what, and it's not always the same people, even in our own government.

0:44:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's tough because now they're trying to backdoor their way into it with age restrictions. Because now they're trying to backdoor their way into it with age restrictions and the EU is actually pilot testing age verification apps, which would basically it would make it doubly difficult, because now you're basically making it easier to identify everybody who is committing traffic to the internet, and that's in itself a problem. It doesn't affect encryption so much, but once again, it's a grinding down of privacy in such a way that there won't be one huge battle. It will be just the slow boring of hard boards.

0:44:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, if you are a Canadian citizen and you want to write your what do they call them? Member of parliament, your representatives in government? It's Bill C-2, canada's Bill C-2, which expands encryption and surveillance powers. It's aimed at enhancing border and national security, but Matthias Pfau, who runs Tutanota, says the Strong Borders Act could quietly empower Canadian authorities with sweeping surveillance capabilities, including breaking end-to-end encryption. So it's currently under consideration. Something to keep in mind. It appears to attack encryption, so something to keep in mind. Let's see what else is going on in the world. Well, the new emoji game is here. Are you excited? It was emoji day last week. We forgot to celebrate you forgot to celebrate.

0:45:57 - Andy Ihnatko
I had an emoji dunking booth.

0:45:59 - Leo Laporte
We had an emoji castle uh, there are new emojis in the uh ios 26 beta you're getting. Uh, well, there's a bigfoot which I've needed in my emojis for some time a trombone just to be clear.

0:46:14 - Jason Snell
Let's not conflate these issues. These are not in the ios 26 beta. In fact, you probably won't see these until like 26.1 or 0.2 oh sorry, you don't, we don't get them yet.

0:46:23 - Leo Laporte
What are they beta testing these? What's the deal?

0:46:26 - Jason Snell
well, these are. They get finalized by the um, the unicode consortium, and then what happens is apple has their artists build new emoji art and they put it in, and they usually wait until the point one or the point two, so that I think it's usually point one, so that, um, it's actually a spur to get people to update their devices to the latest os, because you can't see those emoji until you update. And it has been very successful for them over the last five years to do an emoji update and get everybody who's lingering behind to finally update to the new OS.

0:46:58 - Leo Laporte
So the Unicode consortium has proposed these new emoji. They aren't officially ratified until the fall, until September, which is why you can't put them in the beta exactly exactly. Uh, it has said, though we're gonna, this is, these are gonna happen. Apple core ballet dancers a uh, let's see a bigfoot, a distorted face, a fight cloud as a fight cloud. I don't see that in this drawing a fight cloud, I guess, like in popeye.

Yeah there's a cloud with punching and stuff with punching. Orca, a killer, a killer, whale, is that right, the orca? Yeah, there you go. And uh, treasure chest and trombone. These new emoji have long-standing symbolic meanings. Oh well, I know, I know what treasure chest will be used for, um technically, the bigfoot is called hairy creature, if you go.

0:47:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Hairy creature is the technical and he actually looks like the harry and the henderson's version of he does he really does yeah, it's pretty clearly bigfoot.

0:48:04 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there's the fight cloud.

0:48:06 - Jason Snell
Yeah, let's, uh, there's the fight cloud nice yeah, so, um, and we should say also this is a thing that people don't know about emoji is that nobody owns emoji art. So the Unicode consortium sets these code points, but every platform can make its own art.

0:48:20 - Leo Laporte
There is no and they release both a text description, which we just read, but also a A sample. A sample, but it's not a requirement. A sample, a sample, but it's not a requirement.

0:48:28 - Jason Snell
Exactly so, apple has its own designers, microsoft has its own designers, facebook has its own designers.

0:48:32 - Leo Laporte
So you will see Xcom everybody.

0:48:37 - Jason Snell
So, although that you don't like there to be emoji fragmentation, like when there was like some guns guns were guns and some guns were squirt guns right, that sort of thing, because then if you send, somebody on another platform they might misunderstand what you're saying are you shooting me?

you're squirting me my guess is that they'll all be in the ballpark of this, but, like if somebody didn't want it to look like that particular bigfoot pose because it's a hairy creature, doesn't have to. They can, they could make it look different and have a different kind of hairy creature, and everybody would just have to learn whose hairy creature was whose yeah, and the landslide really looks like a mountain falling apart.

0:49:08 - Leo Laporte
It could be, I don't know.

0:49:09 - Andy Ihnatko
There, I think we could do better than this to be honest these are the emoji uh proposals from the unicode consortium these are always interesting because they often reflect changes in society. Now, I don't think so much this year maybe although maybe cryptid bigfoot, it could be a, could be exception but like there was a year when, uh, the the syringe emoji, I think actually oh yeah, changed because, yeah, yeah, because it used to be used to be like filled with blood, as though you're taking a blood sample, and then it became like an inoculation sort of emoji emoji instead uh, by the way, I love it that the unicode consortium uses uh, basically a generic blogger template.

I thought it was blogspot yeah, isn't that funny.

0:49:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they, they, they don't do that. The place to go is emojipediaorg, which love that it's not run by the unicode consortium, but jim jeremy berg founded that and keith brioni still uh blogs about this, and we've had jeremy on our shows many times.

0:50:10 - Leo Laporte
Exactly talk about these things.

0:50:11 - Jason Snell
That's the place they have a good looking website.

0:50:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this looks nice, it's pretty, it's got lots of emoji.

0:50:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, they should go to hell for focusing on the content instead of the design. Good heavens.

0:50:21 - Leo Laporte
Shame on them. Oh, they have an AI emoji generator.

0:50:24 - Jason Snell
Honestly, if you are a consortium, your website should probably look boring yeah, exactly any consortium.

0:50:31 - Leo Laporte
Of course, we don't want consortium members spending time, yeah, doing things like web design leave that for others yes, consortia, consortia, uh, all right, there you go. Uh, we always have this. This is our yearly tribute to emoji. No, I haven't played the emoji game, which is Apple's tribute to emoji. Have you guys played that? I don't know. You must have it's on the, I think it's on the beta, yeah.

You have to have news plus, so I guess it's not on the beta. It was announced for iOS 26, but they have now pushed it out.

0:51:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think it's like their wordle sort of thing yeah, should I open up news plus, and we can. We could play a game or two it just has a very 70s game show sort of vibe to it yeah, I kind of agree, you still loving the recipes, alex, you still, you still a big fan of that.

0:51:27 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, yeah, okay yeah, I have to admit that I, I I only use them for specific like oh, I really want to do something special, because mostly between that I've learned that I can. I just if you add curry to things that it just tastes good, it's always good number one even chicken salad with curry is better well here's the worst part now I'm I got fresh curry and now it's ruined the powdered curry. Where do you get fresh?

0:51:51 - Leo Laporte
What is fresh curry? I always have curry in the jar with the pepper.

0:51:55 - Alex Lindsay
No, I know it was like. Well, first I learned that.

0:51:57 - Leo Laporte
First of all, there's no spice called curry.

0:51:59 - Alex Lindsay
It's a combination, right, Cumin, there's a lot of things in it. I think there actually is a curry plant, but I'm not 100% sure. So anyway, but there's curry and at first you learn that salt and pepper isn't just enough. You can add curry to things and most things will taste better if you add some curry, you powder, to it. And then you go to the farmer's market and you walk past this guy selling fresh curry every week for months and you finally go. I'll give it a shot.

0:52:28 - Leo Laporte
That's the difference between fresh ginger and dried ginger. It is, it is exactly that way.

0:52:34 - Alex Lindsay
It's like it's and it's and, and so I was like, oh, I'll try it, because you can't test it there, because there's nothing to cook with it, it's just like a jar, it's like 12 for this jar of fresh curry, and you take it home and you the first veggies I made with it. I was like, oh, I want some fresh curry, I'll get you some.

0:52:49 - Leo Laporte
It's, it's a I'm just asking ai if there is a curry plant and apparently there is, helichrysum italicum, the curry plant. It's a small perennial herb with silver gray leaves and clusters of huh. I always thought curry was kind of a youam masala.

0:53:06 - Alex Lindsay
This curry that I got, is really like a mixture of a bunch of things, but anyway, yeah, it's a. So between that and there's also a curry tree and between that and chachi piti. I have to admit that I need I look for recipes and it's come to the point where I use a lot of the. I save a lot of recipes Like, oh, that'd be really cool, right, the thing in news is that when you see any recipe now that it looks remotely interesting, you just go save. I'll save that recipe and I love the formatting of it. I think that Apple could, like always. I think Apple sometimes plays with ideas. I mean, everybody does this but they play with ideas and they don't take it to where it could go, like if they started going through the most popular ones that are saved the most often, or something like that, and started taking looking at what Heston did, like Heston made they closed, by the way, the Heston pan. They stopped making them or their end of life in them, which is very sad. Yeah.

0:54:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:54:00 - Alex Lindsay
I got the Heston cues because of you. Here's the funny thing is is that I feel like I always is that I feel like I always when I see something die like that, that is such a cool thing. You're like what happened, and I think it was the interaction. The Bluetooth controller that was in the pan was quirky, like it just didn't always line up and you just stopped playing with it, like you stopped using it that way because you couldn't get it to be reliable, and so you built this. It's just a great lesson in. You spent all this money on technology.

They made all this great content and the one little thing that they didn't that I'm sure they saved money on is is that they didn't quite get this interaction with the phone and the thing to work smoothly. You know, and tell you mostly tell you what, what's what's not working Right, and so it was always like a problem that you couldn't quite get over. And so the the um. But their content of how to cook is the best content ever made, in my opinion, around cooking Like it was step-by-step-by-step. It would tell the pan what to do. It had videos of exactly how to do everything it had. You know, it told you what to look for and it was. It was amazing and I feel like if Apple, you know, if only if Apple had the money, because you know the problem with Apple is they're always like short on cash.

It's so tight, I know, but when you look at their fitness app, if they took the same thing that they're doing with fitness and just said we're going to take a bunch of these recipes or we're going to create all these great recipes of all the stuff that most people make and then make these incredible like tutorials that are very similar to what Heston did, like tutorials that are very similar to what Heston did, I just think it would be. I mean, people would get really excited about that and use it a lot, you know, but they won't because it's you know and it would, and again, they could boil the ocean for $10 million.

0:55:40 - Leo Laporte
Does Heston still?

0:55:41 - Alex Lindsay
make regular pans. They make incredible pans.

0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
Okay, they're still making their regular pans. They're just not making the Bluetooth pans.

0:55:47 - Alex Lindsay
The smart ones and there's other people that got into the market with the smart ones and it's something you want to work.

0:55:53 - Leo Laporte
It's just that the Well you also need a special induction burner.

0:55:58 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the induction, yeah, and there's other people that have come out with those, and so that's also part of the problem is there's competition that costs less money.

I mean, the Heston stove top, which is what you really want, is like 4,500 bucks, and so you're like, okay, well, that's an investment, you know, and um, but I will say that, like when you when it was working when it was working for me, the idea that you could just set something, knew what the pan temperature was right, and that it was able to get the pan to the right temperature immediately and stay there, and it would just keep on staying there and it would just instantly get it to where it needed to go, and so you felt like it was the future.

It just did again the little, one little broken door and it kind of killed, in my opinion, kind of killed that that whole thing. But I think that it would be really. I think that hopefully, what I'm hoping with apple's recipes to go back to apple is is that they look at that and start taking okay, a lot of people are saving things about this kind of food or this kind of food or this kind of food. What if we built a studio like fitness and built a bunch of things that showed you how to do that?

0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
oh, wouldn't that be cool if apple did that?

0:57:09 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, if apple did it. If they literally just just hire the people, that the heston, I would bet more people oh my gosh work out.

0:57:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I'm just saying I think we're all proof of that and so anyway, so the um so uh, so, but I think some of us do both, but most people at least eat yeah, yeah, and the thing is everyone's doing that three times a day.

0:57:30 - Alex Lindsay
You can really make. And again, when you talk about health, the I think the reason people buy things in boxes is someone who's now kind of slowly on this path of not buying anything in boxes. I mean, literally I have a car. I'm one of those people now with the cart at the food at the farmer's market, like like it has your name on it.

No, no, it's just that I, no, I have a. I have a giant cart pops open because I'm grocery shopping Like I'm not, you know, and I've stopped those little old ladies walking home with the trailing, the little car. It's funny, it's very. There's a whole culture there. People are are. They'll ask you okay, what are you, what are you cooking and what are you?

0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
going to do cooking on Saturdays at office hours. You still do that.

0:58:09 - Alex Lindsay
No, you know, my wife didn't like me turning the kitchen into a studio. So that was the big it's like this, the weekend, and so if I ever get my own house, she did marry you. I mean, this is kind of goes with the territory, yeah, but you know, you know there's a there's the there's the saying that is the thing that we all know Happy life. Yes, if you stay inside that, inside that box, man like, yes, I know how that is, I stay.

0:58:34 - Leo Laporte
I stay inside, that's one box I stay inside, all right, okay, fine. Uh, apple is losing ground in the ai talent war. Interesting scoop. Uh, I think it was from the information that apple at least some people at the apple ai researchers wanted to release some of their models to the public as open source models. And craig federighi said net. Uh, ruming pang who has since left apple, by the way, for a high-paying job at Meta where he's rumored to be earning $200 million over four years Not quite quarterback money, but in the ballpark Pang wanted to.

He was the head of the Apple Foundation models team wanted to release his open-source model. Craig Federighi said no, according to too many people with knowledge of the matter. And aaron tilly and way ma writing at the information uh, releasing the models as open source would show how the software underperformed rival models. Craig said he was more concerned. The public would believe apple was making too many compromises to getting the software running on the phones. Pang wanted it to go open weights, open source, so that others could work on it and help them improve it.

Um, I don't know if meta has benefited from that philosophy. In fact there was a rumor I don't know if it's not. Yeah, not confirmed that it met. It was even thinking of pulling back its open source llama models. In any event, uh, last week Pang announced on LinkedIn that he is out of here. He's going to meta for some big money uh, along with uh other team members, including one, tom Gunter, who was going to open AI. But when Pang went to uh meta, he said oh okay, I'm going to meta. Yeah, uh, gunter was one of the first people at the company to explore large language models, of course, according to the information, and was often the face of Pang's team at bigger company-wide events.

1:00:41 - Andy Ihnatko
So a pretty big loss uh for Apple from uh the information scoop it feels like that's one of the big problems when you lose one of the leads, the members of that team are like well, now, what am I doing here, Right? So I mean teams like to stay together.

1:01:00 - Leo Laporte
Yep, Especially when there's $100 million checks involved. That helps too. Certainly helps. Not that Apple under. I'm sure he was well compensated at apple.

1:01:12 - Alex Lindsay
Well, if you don't, again from a lot of teams it's for. People want to be, feel like they're going to be part of something that's going to go somewhere and it also has to do with it may not be money right now, but it's money in the future. If you're, if you're, an also ran team, the value of what you can do down the road is affected dramatically and zuckerberg did say it's not just the money.

1:01:31 - Leo Laporte
He said, uh, these guys want access to compute and we've got more compute than anybody. We've got all those gpus. So they, they want to use the resources.

1:01:40 - Jason Snell
I mean fair, fair enough.

I just want to point out, though, that there there's another read on this, which is apple has identified, probably, a strategic advantage they have, which is privacy and keeping things on device right, and they built the neural engine and they built the gpu power, and they're presumably going to be ramping that up in future devices that they build, and from this report, it sounds to me like this team wants to build stuff in the cloud, and if you're Craig Federighi, I mean, yeah, the open source thing.

It does sound sort of dumb to me if all he's really trying to do is disguise what Apple is doing, and that that may be a cultural fit or a cultural misfit, but if Apple has decided that they really need to lean into making the on-device models as good as they can, because that's where they have a place to shine and differentiate themselves, and this team isn't really interested in that, thinks it's baby LLM and wants to have huge access to giant cloud servers, that's a mismatch of direction, right?

And so I do wonder if some of what's going on here is the people on this team not wanting to go where Apple wants them to go, and I think both of those perspectives might be valid. Right, like, if I'm Apple, I probably would want to lean into making great on-device models, and if I'm an AI researcher, I might be like, well, that's boring, I want to be up in the cloud, where you know we can do these amazing things, and I think those are both valid. And if that's where Apple wants to go, it needs to find researchers who are interested in, and one is not fundamentally better than the other. To make an amazingly good private on-device model is also a big accomplishment, but if you're an AI researcher and that is not how you measure success I could see how that wouldn't work for you.

1:03:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the key being the word researcher, Like they're not necessarily there to enhance their goal in life. When they decided to do all that study and all that work and give up on going to movies and stuff wasn't hey, I'm going to make the next iPhone speech recognition work a lot better. It really was. There's going to be a period I'm going to make a discovery and for a period of time, I will know something that nobody else in the world knows until the paper gets published. And that's the way that I'm going to change the world. And it's not just and making a lot of money now is really, really great, but being 60 years old and being thought of as one of the giants of your field, that's super great and even even that.

1:04:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean sometimes they just want to play like the, the, you know the. The idea is I'm really smart, I'm coming up with a bunch of stuff. I remember talking to a company, to a, to somebody that worked in a group in a large company not not in silicon valley and but they had a lot of money. They had a team of like 30, 30 people and they're working on technologies and they were paid to work on that technology and I said when are you going to put out a product?

And they're like never, never we're going to put out a product Like other. Teams will come and talk to us and we'll tell them cool things that we're doing. We'll tell them how we do it. We'll make it all work, butated about never having a product and I was like why? And he goes as soon as you start making a product, then you stop doing anything. You're like now it's all bugs things and figuring things out, and it's not fun anymore. It wasn't. It wasn't a. No one knows who they are, so there was no whatever.

1:05:00 - Jason Snell
It was just that they were having fun and they and fun would stop as soon as they had to turn it into a product and I think this is a cultural problem with apple is that Apple is a company in general that is very focused on shipping product and doing pure research, and they can spend the money to do pure research. And I do wonder if one of the dynamics going on here is that this group was more of a research group Gianandrea strikes me as being a research guy too and then there's a freakout and Apple is like ah, your research hasn't given us our product, and they're like but we're just doing research. I get that Again. It feels to me like there's just a mismatch here where ML has gone from being kind of like you go do your research and we'll figure out how to productize it, to suddenly it's like oh God, the ML is the product and Apple's priorities don't necessarily match.

There's I'm, you know, I just it's so easy to say, oh, people leave an Apple, that's bad for Apple. But like, I think that there might be some nuance here in terms of what Apple's priorities are and what their priorities are. And I, you know, I actually wish them luck because I think a lot of these companies, the pure research thing isn't going to fly. But, like, if you're in an area where you can do the research you're interested in doing as part of an overall product strategy. That's a better fit for you, and I'm not sure that that is Apple.

1:06:16 - Alex Lindsay
And even if it's not the $100 million, I mean, if someone walks up to you as a programmer and says well, especially in the environment where AI is replacing a lot of programmers and eventually might replace you, and they say you can make $5 million a year for the next four years, or $2 million a year and these aren't the giant numbers that we're talking about now A lot of programmers would be crazy not to like let's get enough money for a farmhouse, you know, like you know, like you know, out of this deal, especially when I think that for most programmers, you know, life is uncertain at the moment. You know.

1:06:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but again, the difference between a programmer, an engineer and a researcher. I remember talking to one freshly minted ex-Apple researcher whose attitude was that the thing is, at least at the time and this is like three or four years out of date the culture of secrecy was completely incompatible with how he saw his career as a researcher going, because he just wasn't allowed to talk about the work that he was doing. At the time, he felt as though he wasn't being allowed to publish papers and so therefore, his standing as a researcher, as an academic, was basically a dead zone of his time at Apple, and one of the reasons why he left was because he wanted to basically make that kind of impact, not as somebody. Somebody who again was would be one of the secret people who, who made speech recognition better on the iphone, he wanted to leave behind when he's 16, 60 or 70 years old.

Here are all the papers that I've published. Here's all the patents that I've been issued. Here's all the stuff that like. Here's all the lectures that I've given. I want, I'm doing, I'm creating a body of work that goes beyond again having six years or ten years at apple, on my, on my linkedin, and, yeah, money is great, but there's they're not. Once they are rich enough that they could do whatever they want. Whatever they want to do is not necessarily again being an anonymous academic inside apple who can't tell anybody who, who can't share his work with the rest of the community well and, interestingly, apple had just published this Apple intelligence Foundation language models tech report with no byline, yeah, which makes you kind of wonder it is.

1:08:23 - Leo Laporte
It's actually really interesting approach and I I think that people will be very um impressed with what apple, the thinking apple, has done. But it's unclear who, who wrote this and whether they're they're losing the people who came up with this or maybe not, but a lot of the work is done so that it will be fast and performant on a small hardware device like an iphone and there is at the, at the.

1:08:48 - Andy Ihnatko
It's a 27 page report. There is a list of contributors at the very end. That goes on for like actually wow four yeah actually goes on for four pages.

1:08:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so let's see. The first name is on.

1:09:00 - Alex Lindsay
Wow, please hold your please hold your applause until that makes it harder to pick, pick it oh, it's in random order.

1:09:09 - Leo Laporte
There you go. Yeah, so that's uh intentional, they put it in random order. Um, still, they're doing some very interesting work. I'm not uh enough of an expert in ai to know, but it sounds like uh, they're they're doing some stuff that is very targeted at the uses they want to put apple intelligence to yeah, and as much as we can, as much as we can find fault like, legitimately or otherwise, this is still early days for Apple.

1:09:35 - Andy Ihnatko
They're still a year away from actually publish, releasing anything concrete, probably a couple years away from doing something that is objectively impressive because, again, they're still getting these wheels spun up on this new mandate that they have. So it's okay for them to be where they are right now. There's a reason why Google and Meta and OpenAI are getting all the attentions because they have the resources and they have the 10 years or 15 years of hard work on this, that they are feeling the fruits of these early research labors, whereas apple is has just put the metal pedal of the metal, like fairly recently, two or three years ago and one of the things that, uh, apple did say in this report is that they respect robotstxt, which not all ai scrapers do, so applebot will not, you know, scrape your site if you explicitly say don't.

1:10:25 - Leo Laporte
So Applebot will not scrape your site if you explicitly say don't. They also say they use publicly available web data and they license some data, unclear how much they're paying or with whom they're licensing it. But this is Apple trying to be a responsible user of AI.

1:10:50 - Andy Ihnatko
They've said it before, but the one qualification for that is that when they say they use public data, I think they're still referring to a public data set. That is was in itself a whole bunch of scrape data, so I don't know if they carve out an exception there.

1:11:00 - Leo Laporte
I admit, apple applied layers of filtering to remove low quality, unsafe or irrelevant content, including spammy pages, shallow or templated text and broken formatting. But everybody does that. That's part of the training process, that's normal. Um, yeah, they're. They're. I guess they're saying we're trying to be responsible. This is a very good piece, by the way. Nine to five, mac Marcus Mendez, analyzing if, if the actual tech report is too much for you, which it was for me. Analyzing some of the innovative stuff they're doing, and I think it's it's quite interesting and again, apple has the unique opportunity.

1:11:33 - Alex Lindsay
as Jason's pointed out a little bit too is Apple has a bunch of unique opportunities and unique leverage that no one else has. Everyone else has kind of gone a software layer trying to figure this all out. Or they're buying, you know, or they have the hardware layer. They don't have both, and figuring that out is a pretty interesting opportunity for Apple, especially with the number of users that potentially could have that in their pocket.

1:11:57 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, we'll have to see All the models that are out there. They do have a mobile component to it Because, remember, this is one of the few areas which it is actually in, like Google's best interest to put as much compute on the device as possible so that they don't have to spend the money for compute power. They have to spend the money for energy, all that other sort of stuff. So I acknowledge that that's an advantage that Apple has. I don't know how big an advantage it's going to be.

1:12:23 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's a very small advantage today. I think it's potentially a very large advantage five years from now, when you're building all that hardware and you're building all the chips and you're building like the design, as those designs mold, you know, come together, I think they can do something organically. That is very difficult to do with lots of other companies, and so that's you know they can. They can have lots of discussions, but having discussions between companies and being the company that does all of the things is a is a much different experience, and I think that's where Apple I think Apple, that's what they're going to at least try to leverage. That's where they're at.

1:12:53 - Andy Ihnatko
For that point, Google's also designing their own mobile Tensor chips. They've had them since the Pixel 6 and they now have two or three years of worth of experience. And you can't and although it's great, I think it's optimal to have all that in one shop, as Apple does. That doesn't mean that these other companies are buying chips off the shelf. They have the cloud to basically co-design a chip or have a chip company design something to their specifications. So all I'm saying is that it's unknown how big this advantage is going to be, even five years from now. Agreed?

1:13:25 - Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. You're listening to MacBreak Weekly Andy Ihnatko, jason Snell, Alex Lindsey Glad you're here.

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Okay, by the way, I ordered, I decided I was really thinking about this.

You know, next year we're gonna, we're starting to see a lot of rumors and next year, of course, we're gonna see. We think the folding iphone and I thought I should really try the state of the art. So I did order this new samsung galaxy fold, the ultra thin, which comes out friday, I think, yeah, the 25th. Uh, just, I know they're expensive. I'm trading in the flip, get a little bit off of that but I thought I really ought to see because they have made it very thin. The reviews are very positive. Yeah, I think this is what Apple's competing against right and Samsung. This is their seventh fold.

1:17:08 - Andy Ihnatko
They have a lot of experience behind this yeah, that's, and I think, I think it did take at least six years for them to certainly to get over their really really bad first impression that the first version, the product made.

1:17:20 - Leo Laporte
But I had the first three and I never ordered another one for that reason.

1:17:24 - Andy Ihnatko
They were clunky yeah, exactly, no, it was. It wasn't until like actually probably the six that I started thinking that, geez, I could use a phone like this and the new version they and the new version. They now know how to manufacture these screens. They now know how to make them as durable as a folding display can be, and now they're in the refinement stage of things where now you don't have to have that cover screen that is of this really really weird shape or has this really really weird bezels. That makes you feel like I'm not supposed to be using the phone this way. I'm supposed to be using it unfolded, uh, as well as adding all kinds of user interface enhancements to take advantage of it does apple get the benefit, though, of that?

1:18:01 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they're going to buy their screens from samsung, right? Yeah, that's the rumor.

1:18:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah it feels to me like this is apple's been. You know, apple hasn't been sitting on the sideline doing nothing. I think apple's's been looking at all of these, all of the stuff that Samsung is building, all of the foldables that are out there. Mark Gurman's report is that Apple is, you know, going to tweak some things about the hinge or whatever. But like this, not only does this newest Samsung phone feel like the moment, to me it feels like the moment where Apple looks at it and goes all right, like it's time. And so like the moment where apple looks at it and goes all right, like it's time, and so next year we'll get there, and that that, that thin phone this year will also be the. How do we make the iphone thin enough that we can, you know, do a little ice cream sandwich of two of them in a foldable the following year? So they've been lining this up.

But, yeah, samsung display is an apple partner and I think apple has been probably pushing them to be better and they want to be better, and with this latest Samsung phone it is better. The reviews are good and I would imagine that next year's iteration will be the moment that you know Samsung will have that, but Apple will also sort of step on the treadmill at that point. And what you said about the first three models being disappointing, like not only is apple really good at waiting for the moment where they think that you know wherever they've set their bar and sometimes they wait a little too long, but I think that they do a pretty good job but keep in mind also the scale that apple works at. Uh, you got to get it right and you got to be able to ship it in huge volumes. Even for an expensive two thousand dollar phone, it being an iphone, it will sell well so I would guess this samsung sell almost as many phones, if not more, more yeah but of the fold maybe not right, yeah yeah, they have, no, not.

And then they have so much, so many different models and apple's very concentrated I. I guess what I'm saying is I feel like samsung has always been able to afford to throw out wacky models because they got other phones that you can buy that are just fine, and Apple has been a lot slower to do that. And Apple isn't comfortable just throwing out a wacky model that isn't very good and that isn't going to sell very well. So they do try to wait because and now there's probably pent up demand for a folding iPhone on top of it, so like they want to get it right, probably pent up demand for a folding iPhone on top of it, so like they want to get it right. But I mean that and and in all, looking at all the coverage of that new Samsung phone, I just really got the vibes Like we finally have reached that point where it's not for everybody, but like this is a caliber of of product that it no longer feels like a curiosity but like a real option.

1:20:30 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and Apple has two huge advantages that Samsung never had, because the minute that Apple does a folding iPhone even if they did it three years ago if you unfold it and it turns into an iPad, you have an immensely useful piece of hardware, exactly Whereas for years, google itself has been just absolutely terrible in scaling Android above the size of a phone screen.

So that's why Samsung had to build a whole bunch of extra stuff just to make it into a practical experience. When you make it into a larger display, instead of just stretching a phone app to fill the thing or just let's have one app on this left side, another app on the right side. And Google has gotten on the stick for the past three years about that, and that's exactly one of the biggest uh features that they're touting about the, the new android this year, next year. But the thing is as the minute that you unfold an iphone and it turns into an ipad, that justifies at least 500 to the expense. And the second advantage is that apple users are very, very comfortable, comfortable in spending $2,000 on something that they think is worth it. So and this is going to be if it's less than $2,000, that will be a very, very happy surprise, I think Apple might that's what the flip the fold seven is.

1:21:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly.

1:21:46 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the last seven years has been-.

1:21:48 - Andy Ihnatko
And that went up $100 since last year too.

1:21:51 - Jason Snell
I mean just to reinforce something Andy said hundred dollars since last year too. So I mean just to reinforce something Andy said the last seven years has been apple sort of starting to explore how much could we charge for an iphone and people still buy it. Started with the iphone 10 and has continued, and we see it with the pro max now and the answer is they still don't know, because there are people.

1:22:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Much money exists in the world exactly there's.

1:22:12 - Alex Lindsay
There's a ceiling there, somewhere where you just can't find it.

1:22:14 - Jason Snell
You don't know where it is, though.

1:22:16 - Andy Ihnatko
But Jason's absolutely right For Apple to do it it had to wait for. How do we make it so that when you fold it up it's about as thick as a regular phone? How do we make it so that you can get the regular battery life and just making batteries that thin're?

1:22:28 - Alex Lindsay
not going to have an immense amount of returns inside warranty experience.

1:22:36 - Jason Snell
The Samsung review thing. The detail with the Samsung review that I like the most that I noticed is the reviewer saying that they use it closed and it feels like a phone. That's a huge shift. That is a huge threshold to get over, that you're not holding an ice cream sandwich.

1:22:50 - Leo Laporte
We had a brar all heady from CNET on twitter on sunday and that's exactly what she said and that's what put me over the top is oh well, if I could keep it closed and it isn't much thicker than a regular phone and I have a full-size screen on the front, that's a phone. And then if I want more screen real estate I've got it inside and you know that sounds pretty good. That sounds like a good combination right and apple's experience.

1:23:12 - Jason Snell
I this is one of those things we talk about the Vision Pro being like maybe in 10 years there'll be a relevant product here and we'll be ready for it. That is, and Andy's right, google has done a lot, has worked. They have really worked to make the tablet app experience better on Android, because it lagged for so long. But like for so long, but like that's. This is one of those cases where we've had the iPad for like 15 years now and and that that is a real advantage that there are iPad apps, that there there are iPad APIs that, like this thing is just going to open up and be an iPad mini basically, and that is a again Apple users get what that is.

As Andy said, it's like $500 off right there, cause now it's your iPad 2. There's a lot going for it. It's not going to be for everybody. We're going to get a lot of people who are going to be like, oh, it's so stupid, I don't want to buy a $2,000 iPhone. I was like, don't buy it then, but there will be an audience for it.

1:24:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, the thing that just occurred to me right now is that I'm not predicting this, but but I wonder if there's a temptation for Apple to say what kind of a physical keyboard could we sell alongside this? We maybe can't do a magic keyboard, but maybe we can. No-transcript.

1:24:43 - Jason Snell
Andy, it's that old Palm keyboard that came with its own easel attached to it. Basically it's that kind of thing, unfold it, plop it in.

1:24:50 - Andy Ihnatko
You joke, but I've been, I've, I've. One of the results of cleaning out my entire office is that I now have a box of like pocketable, foldable keyboards. When I was writing about them and trying to find the right one, and I took that out the one that worked with a palm and I'm like this feels nice.

1:25:06 - Jason Snell
It's pretty good. I used to have one of those three-fold keyboard. Is that the one? I bought one that you recommended, andy?

1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
that was like a thin one that would then opened up like that. It was a nice one. I can't remember.

1:25:18 - Andy Ihnatko
There are a couple that I like. The two solutions that I love are the kind where they do a magical like three-way hinge so that you still get like the same sort of like interlocking sort of keys, sort of keys. And the second one is like, like Jason said, there was one where you got this beautiful like metal cigarette box that you unfold it and then you slide the sides of it together, forming like a full size laptop keyboard.

1:25:45 - Jason Snell
Oh, it was so good.

1:25:47 - Andy Ihnatko
And and the thing is like, even as I'm going through these and admiring them, I'm recalling the fact that, okay, but Andy, your solution is not necessarily the solution you seek is not to carry it all in one pocket, but to make it keep take as little space in your laptop bag as possible. Why not just get like a mini keyboard, like like not, yeah, again the, the, uh, I forget I've. I really need to do a look at these, because now I've seen on video and in pictures the search for a good mobile keyboard has led to keyboards that are they're trying to. Is it like 62% normal size, like the size of the original, like Newton message pad keyboard, which I regard, I remember, as okay? I don't, I'm okay with this, but I don't want it to be much smaller than this.

1:26:41 - Jason Snell
Right, yeah, there's a threshold there. I just I got for the people watching on video. This is my palm three and I did.

1:26:47 - Alex Lindsay
I took a trip.

1:26:48 - Jason Snell
I took a trip. It's the clear one. Yeah, it's the clear one. Yeah, I took a trip, uh, into the uk and I brought that little folding keyboard that Andy talked about in this and, yeah, it did you literally attach to the serial pin. So it was this thing. You fold it out and slit it together and then you pop this in a dock at the top and then you could type. And it was just this incredibly small thing, you, that you, you could type on and take it away. And these days, obviously, things are different. But I love the idea of having a like a little tiny thing that you could unfold or roll out or whatever, and suddenly you've got your whole office with you and it was previously just your phone in your pocket. I love it.

1:27:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I got to say I'm looking through Flickr as, as I speak, the one year at the uh uh Congressional World Affairs at the University of Colorado, I was speaking for an entire week. My computer was like a Palm Pilot and the nice fold-out keyboard. And every time like every talk was like a panel of four people and when I take my seat and my notes are on, I would deploy this thing. I felt like it was such a power move.

1:27:51 - Jason Snell
Like oh wow.

1:27:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, you have a pencil and a notepad. Oh, that's click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click well, I'd be very curious to see if apple does that.

1:28:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't feel like they will, but you never know, you never know.

1:28:05 - Jason Snell
They'll use a trusted partner. Yeah, they'll use a trust belkin or logitech or something we'll do.

1:28:10 - Leo Laporte
That's what they do there are lots of rumors about what apple is going to be doing. German says they are going to benefit from, you know, samsung's seven years of experience. Yeah, they say apple's. He says apple's first foldable won't break any technological barriers or redefine the category. Samsung's already taken care of much of the heavy lifting. Yeah, although they are starting. He does say that ios 27 will have a lot of features specifically for that folding screen, which is interesting, sure yeah, that is an.

1:28:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know if you call it an advantage, but that's an interesting thing about samsung they're not afraid to make the first thing kind of stink. Right.

1:28:48 - Alex Lindsay
Well, they've got a lot of different ones. I mean, the thing is, apple has so many, so few skews, right, exactly so. So samsung's got all these skews and they're like, oh, this is just one experiment.

1:28:57 - Andy Ihnatko
But not only that, but like oftentimes they're half-baked, like the hey, wow, we're the first one to do facial recognition unlock. Yeah, but it kind of stinks. Yeah, but the next year will be better. But this also pays off when remember that they were the first, when the the first uh uh, samsung galaxy note came out and like, oh my god, look at it, it must be six inches large what kind of crazy person like that, like they sold how many?

1:29:22 - Leo Laporte
oh yeah, I bought every one of them, every one of them. I loved them and I loved the pen.

1:29:26 - Andy Ihnatko
I was sad that they've abandoned the s pen, but that's what they had, yeah that's such a weird decision for, like one of the nice nice things about having a folder, whole foldable phone is that let's treat it like a tablet. Why not make it pen? Have a?

1:29:37 - Leo Laporte
pen. Have a pen anyway. Uh, more rumors. We'll get to those in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with andy, Alex and jason and you I'm glad you're here. Um, more rumors from Mark Gurman. Uh, the iPad Pro for M5, which will come out later this year, will have cameras on the side and the top, so you can. That's an interesting, I guess that makes sense.

1:30:05 - Jason Snell
I mean, I do a FaceTime with my mom on my iPad every week and and she uses her phone, and so I have to hold it vertically, which, by the way, there's no reason for that. Apple should just auto crop it to the right aspect ratio. What? What is going on here? Why is that the case? But it is the case, and so I do that. And now that they moved it to the, to the side or you know, on on that orientation, uh, it's, it's. I like it in every other way, but that's the one time I use my iPad there. This is not going to cost them a lot of money. I don't think they're replicating face ID on both. It's not going to be the whole sensor stack, it's just going to be a camera, and if there's ever an iPad that could afford that extra tiny piece of technology, it's the iPad Pro, which already costs so much money that adding a second camera is just not a big deal.

1:30:46 - Alex Lindsay
It's fine. I will also say that, as the geek in me will say, if they take full advantage of two front-facing cameras, it means that the 3D models they can build with that much parallax is impressive.

1:31:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Like you know, if you put, if you get structured light, so you have the LiDAR system, and then you've got two cameras that are far apart like that, that would be huge Like huge and I'm asking this literally like but could they correct it with software, or do you have to shoot it like on the diagonal, like this, so that both of the cameras no, no, no, not not, not spatial, so.

1:31:21 - Alex Lindsay
So I'm not talking about spatial. What I'm talking about is if you have an object, if I have an object, that is, you know, a box here and I'm looking at it, one from the side and one above going down, I have two very different angles. Right now you can't really do that with the spatial cameras that are in the phone. It can do it a little bit, but they're too close together. So what happens is is that what you're looking at is think about the way GPS or photogrammetry works, is building triangles, and the wider that triangle is between the two cameras, without where they're still overlapping, but the further apart they get and still overlap in a meaningful way, the easier it is to grab onto that 3d data and understand what what they're looking at. And so if Apple doesn't do it, I feel like developers will be able to grab onto that.

But if you get a point where I can grab onto an iPad and pointed at something, and man, I don't know if they'll do this, but if I had the LIDAR sensor that I have on the back of a camera and then I had those two things my ability to build 3D models I mean it would be magical, because structured light from the LiDAR means that I know exactly how big that object is, and two cameras really far apart from each other means that I can gather a lot of detail and texture and lighting and all kinds of other things from two different angles. It could potentially allow them to very fast turn, uh, real real world objects into 3d objects for vr. So beyond, beyond, just being convenient. I don't know if they'll do that, I just made that up right now, but but I think that it, but I think that it's potentially really exciting that's, that's great.

1:32:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I hadn't even thought about that. Now you've got me thinking like what could you do if? Uh, could you take advantage of the fact that? Okay, fine, the one that's at the top of the screen, depending on your orientation, is going to be like your conference camera, but if someone enters the frame, it can use the second one as a, so it's going to zoom in on you with a primary camera, but then if it senses that, oh, someone's entering into the frame, I'm going to cut to a wide angle using the second camera or have a different set of settings for the second camera.

1:33:20 - Alex Lindsay
I mean it could be delivering both of those cameras. I mean, I think Apple's already proven that they're willing to deliver from multiple cameras at one time. So being able to grab onto things from a, I think I'm mostly thinking about it right now from a 3d perspective of you know Apple, you know part of the, the overall ecosystem that Apple's trying to build with USDZ and with VR and with everything else, is you got to make it easy to take an object and turn it into a 3d model, and this, you know, beyond just being able to do orientation fixes, it could be explosive in that area. Cause it just because the other thing you know, here's the thing you know how. You know perfectly, because you manufacture a million of these. You know exactly how the distance between those two, and so that's a calibration that you don't have to make. You know what the lenses are, you know what the distance is, you know what the angles are, and that that gives you, um, an incredible amount of uh structure, which makes the math a lot easier, and so it's exciting.

1:34:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Now you've got me super excited. And I agree with you. That's the sort of thing where a third-party developer would immediately see the potential and would start hacking that as soon as they get the hardware, just to see if it'll work. That's got me even more excited, like the folks hacking the old Xbox controller.

1:34:35 - Alex Lindsay
That was a little LiDAR controller, right, and they used it to scan things and everything else. This is like turning that dial, the Kinect, the Kinect. So those were only 80 millimeters apart and on the same line. You put them on a corner that you know for sure, and then you have higher resolution and more frame rate and everything else, and then you add a LiDAR to it I don't know if Apple. Again, this is like me dreaming what happens.

They have to put LiDAR on both cameras, right or would just one sensor do Just one, if one of them had it, and they're already using that for facial ID to some degree, but there's a higher, I don't it's a higher res one on the other side. So if they use and and a lot of the cost of that lidar has gone way down, you know, because they've used it in so many things. And so putting that lidar on that front facing camera, and then giving you another camera, that that's far, that's far away and to the side, oh boy, that would be interesting, I don't get excited about that, a hardware like that.

1:35:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Very often I'm like I'll tell you what I'm excited me, so happy, about having a, an m1 ipad that can probably serve to be replaced, sometimes exactly my position next.

1:35:42 - Alex Lindsay
I don't, I don't know if they're gonna do it or not, but my, my pocket is on fire I know I know my wallet just smoldering. There's like flames coming out, like when just I gotta start m4, the. The screens you're using are so good it's hard for me to use anything else and the funny thing is is that, like it's been really a hard press for me to get, I have an m1.

Uh, I have two m1s and do it for the screen yeah, I'm just kind of like I'm very utilitarian about my ipads and I'm kind of like, you know, because I I think part of it is, if I want to watch a movie, I want to watch something, I put my headset on. So I'm not right, I'm not that, and so, um, I uh. So it's hard to get me to buy up ipads because I don't find a lot of the apps that I use need it. This would be the thing that would have me immediately like oh I gotta, I have to buy it, I have to get it.

1:36:28 - Leo Laporte
I have it. So anyway. So new rumors about colors for the iphone 17 pro. Now mac world uh said that there was going to be a steel gray option, but my jinbu said orange, white, black and dark blue and asked about the gray color on x, he said the answer may be more complex than expected, which tie that into another leaker, setsuna Digital, who has had some success saying the iPhone 17 will have a special color scheme related to the liquid glass design of iOS 26. It will be white, but with different effects under different light. That would be nice kind of a pretty kind of I don't know, iridescent like an abalone shell that's.

1:37:19 - Andy Ihnatko
That's interesting, because if there is a glass cover on the back which is something that we've been, we've been here this is going to be a glass sandwich. You could have the layer, the metal layer, underneath, it, could have a scheme that would interact with the layer on the top of it. That could give that kind of like a beetle wing sort of effect. I'd love to see, I'd love to see him go crazy. As I've said before, I'm a big fan of having one crazy option that almost you think that almost nobody will pick, but it's just going to be. Let's try to do this weirdest color yellow ever. Let's do a marble effect.

1:37:54 - Jason Snell
Let's do a blueberry muffin effect september 9th, the orange one I want. I I'm excited. It might be bright, but it looks to me the papaya one.

It looks to me like with the metallic finish. It in the mock-up it looks like you're. It's basically going to be like copper, right, it's going to be just kind of orangey but also very metallic and that's not necessarily the most exciting, but more exciting than they've done in the high-end phones in a while. And I love the idea that there might be a concept color that is just like it's whatever color you think it might be, whoa.

1:38:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Great, let's do it Whatever was rejected for the uh, for for the original imax, because I I love how, like in the later years of the imax, they said what if we have sort of a ponte vecchi effect, glass, glass flowers in this plastic said go for it sure flower power let's try it, whatever floats your boat.

1:38:50 - Leo Laporte
Uh, there are pictures floating around of uh juno temple, brennan, halt hunt. Tanya reynolds fey, marseille, sitting around eating, having a nice dinner at denny's or somewhere it's at a barbecue place in kansas city.

1:39:05 - Jason Snell
This is the the first released shot from uh ted lasso season four.

1:39:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yes they've said they've signed everybody finally to their last contracts and there weren't holdouts, it was just timing for everybody. Uh, they're doing shooting kansas city before they go to london and there's some details about like broadly with the new season and what will ham wanting him doing kc.

1:39:25 - Jason Snell
I think there'll be some humorous things that will happen.

1:39:28 - Leo Laporte
There's kind of a mismatch there, yeah spread joy is what?

1:39:32 - Jason Snell
yes, ted lasso, basically a show that is essentially, you know, not even set foot in america. Uh, so to get a bunch of the characters to come to kansas city to find ted and bring him back to london, I love, I love the potential for some fun there with those characters nice.

1:39:52 - Leo Laporte
Um, you know, normally at this time of the evening we would be playing the vision pro theme, because we are, in fact, the number one vision pro podcast in the entire world. Fight us. There's no vision pro news. You guys want to make some up?

1:40:07 - Andy Ihnatko
uh, and I really looked too it's like I got the when I'm finishing, like what my contribution to the show doc? Like if I don't have, I actually like look hard, thank you, and I couldn't find a damn thing.

1:40:18 - Leo Laporte
This is professional rundown for the show which I really appreciate it.

1:40:21 - Jason Snell
You'll be able to see it soon at Andy's website, when he launches it. Do you think, andy?

1:40:25 - Leo Laporte
I should just stop doing bookmarking articles and let you take over. Uh, maybe I should. I'm going to be doing it it every week, whether you want to do it or whether you okay or not. I'll put you in charge of the rundowns from now on. All right, there's a lot of duplication. Uh, I, sometimes I have some oddball stories like this one apple warns iranians of iphone spyware attacks ahead of israelis, the israeli conflict. Uh, israel is, of course, the home of pegasus, which is a zero-click attack used by nation states against folks. And, uh, maybe they were warning. Apples in the past put up notifications for people saying a nation state is compromised, your phone, yeah. So, uh, maybe they're doing that, um, or we're doing that in iran before shows us work, shows us working.

1:41:17 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's also a good canary that nobody has ordered them to shut down that service yet. That yeah, I wonder how. I wonder how long it's going to take before some service says that you're not allowed to blow our operations in any way, shape or form, and if there will be any blowback from Apple to say no, no, we were surveilling those people for a reason because they are against our government. And what are you doing? What are you trying to do to fighting our government?

1:41:40 - Leo Laporte
Steve Gibson uh, took special note of Apple's term for this kind of uh spyware. They call it mercenary spyware, which is, uh, I think, kind of a loaded term. Like these are companies that are getting paid to break into your phone. Apple's recommendation if you get this threat notification, uh, to turn on advanced data protection and I think that that just shows that apple's not taking sides.

1:42:09 - Alex Lindsay
If they have to get you know, if they set up a set of rules that say, hey, if you're doing this and we see, and we see that what's happening, we're going to tell you. They're going to tell everybody, you know that that's actually what's happening there.

1:42:19 - Jason Snell
Apple is opposed to having its software subverted, yeah, and turned into right and and owned, right like they're. They're against that. Doesn't matter who it is. It's like if you're, if you're a user of an apple product and you got, uh, broken into and that their OS got busted, you know they're not happy about it. It doesn't matter who the breaker in or is, and this is the you know. That's why the NSA doesn't report bugs to Apple, right Like because Apple's interest is in closing those loopholes, right.

1:42:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, no matter who it is, and that's a good point because it's a key distinction. They have no problem with making apps from the App Store in a certain country because, no, the government doesn't want people to have the ability to connect their iPhone to services through encryption. However, if you try to compromise the phone itself, then you have a problem with Apple, and that's where Apple, hopefully, will continue to not let people cross that line.

1:43:14 - Leo Laporte
Yes, this has nothing to do with apple, but I thought it was interesting. Today is the second shortest day in history because the planet is rotating faster and faster. Don't worry, it's not that much faster today.

1:43:28 - Alex Lindsay
What was the shortest day in history?

1:43:29 - Leo Laporte
the shortest day was july 20th day in history, the shortest day was july 20th. So it's continuing. It's gonna it's continuing to get shorter and shorter by a millisecond. I mean you're not gonna notice it, but they say you know, pretty soon we're gonna have to do a leap second backwards. I'm sorry. The shortest day ever measured was july 5th, 2024. Last year at this time it was 1.66 milliseconds shorter because the earth's rotation had sped up by that much. Uh, looking ahead to this year, scientists predicted july 9th, july 22nd and august 5th could be the shortest day of the year. July 10th took the lead as the shortest day so far in 2025. Today, it is expected that we will have the shortest day, second shortest day in recorded history yes, but who?

1:44:24 - Andy Ihnatko
who gets it? So if it's shorter, that time had to go somewhere. Where does?

1:44:28 - Jason Snell
it go? I don't want to know, where does it go?

1:44:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Who has the extra 14 seconds?

1:44:35 - Leo Laporte
You can blame the moon for this, by the way, because the moon Someone should do something about that.

1:44:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That moon needs to be taken down a peg, if you ask me.

1:44:45 - Leo Laporte
If you want more details, space.com has the full story. I am not an astronomer, but the primary culprit, they say, say, has been tidal friction from the moon, which has caused the moon to gradually move farther away from the earth. As it moves away, the moon saps, saps, I tell you, the earth's rotational energy, causing the rotation to slow and the days to lengthen. However, why the sudden reverse? Well, I don't know, some reason they're not lengthening, uh. But you know, the good news is, maybe they'll, uh, maybe they'll lengthen and we'll get our millisecond back. Who knows? It's all a great mystery. Nature is amazing. Uh, I think that is everything I have here, and since you guys couldn't come up with a Vision Pro story, we won't play the Vision Pro jingle, making this no longer.

1:45:44 - Alex Lindsay
No, I have the cameras. The cameras are starting to roll off.

1:45:48 - Jason Snell
Play the jingle.

1:45:58 - Leo Laporte
I am starting to get hate mail from people who say don't play that crappy jingle.

1:46:00 - Alex Lindsay
I love it, it's fun, yeah, so so the cameras are starting to hit the wild.

1:46:02 - Jason Snell
There's some unboxings that I don't have one yet. Yeah, the new black magic, ursus I don't have one yet.

1:46:07 - Alex Lindsay
Not that I'm bitter um, but are you on the list?

1:46:10 - Jason Snell
I don't know.

1:46:11 - Alex Lindsay
I have a strong suspicion that Alex is on the list I'm on the list man look check check the list, super excited about whenever that that occurs. But but the the new, not not the cine there.

1:46:26 - Leo Laporte
That's a different one it's this one on the right cine immersive.

1:46:30 - Alex Lindsay
So we're starting to see unboxings there, um, and Hugh Howe, who is kind of known for a lot of the stuff, has done some stuff. He went to the Santa Monica Pier. There's some stuff that I can't download on my headset for somebody who's not working, and this is what we're going to see. People are going to make stuff up, they're going to put it up there for people to download, and then it's going to be broken.

1:46:49 - Leo Laporte
It looks so cute. It looks like it's got a little face. You should put googly eyes on the lenses. It's so cute, exactly.

1:46:56 - Alex Lindsay
So we should start to see. I guess what I would say is that the news is that this is we've talked about like when is it going to get released? Well, it's starting to come out of the factory. Typically, the way it works with Blackmagic is that things come out very slowly at the very beginning and then, once everything's tooled and the machine's going, they can produce as many as they need to, and so I think that we're going to see, you know, more and more of these cameras, more and more test shoots. So it, you know, it's not going to be immediate, it's not like September is going to be a great month for immersive, but I think that as we go towards the end of the year, you know, or December, january, february, we're going to start to see some really interesting new uses for the camera, new uses for the headset that we haven't seen before and new content, which would be really good. Lots and lots of new content. And again, apple, I think, is working very closely with Blackmagic.

The other thing to keep tracking is also Apple's paying some of the stuff that they showed at WWDC about the Apple Spatial Audio. You know the some of the stuff that they showed at WWDC about the Apple spatial audio format, the Apple positional audio codec. These are things that these are. These are game changers. You know they're they're thinking about very high ambisonic orders. So, you know, fifth, fifth ambisonic order, that type of thing where you have lots and lots of of uh detail, you know, in these surround um uh spheres and so. So it's going to be really interesting to see, both in the audio area as well as the video area, where some of these start to come together. But we're going to see. I think it's going to start speeding up. You know we've been watching this kind of go very slowly and wonder when it's going to happen. But the next six months should be pretty interesting when it comes to content for the headset.

1:48:30 - Leo Laporte
Du, who has been updating all the devices as the show goes on, has been updating his vision pro with beta 4. He says it's booting now. My god, this is a long boot, not the usual 37 seconds 37 seconds.

1:48:46 - Alex Lindsay
I never know what it is.

1:48:46 - Leo Laporte
I well, I'll tell you why he knows. Apparently he's got a meeting and he's going to do it in the vision pro. So you why he knows apparently he's got a meeting and he's going to do it in the vision pro so there we go. He's heard a new beta. Have you installed the? Uh? Have you installed the beta anybody?

1:49:00 - Alex Lindsay
uh, just traveling so I haven't been able to get back and get it installed.

1:49:02 - Jason Snell
But I was too busy with the mac and the ipad.

1:49:05 - Leo Laporte
I've got the iphone just to just finish updating I am blown away by the no, I don't know anything. I'm waiting for public, I want public. New persona update screen again says the doctor, the good doctor. All right, that's your Vision Pro segment. We have maintained our reputation as the world-leading Vision Pro podcast.

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Today, stacy's Book Club's coming up on the 8th. This is how you lose the time, or read that book. By the way, jason agrees it's really an excellent book. You know what I read, Jason. I've just finished. They mention in how you Lose the Time War a children's book called Travel Light and I thought, well, I should read this. They really seem to like it. Both red and blue really seem to like it, and it's a great book. It came out in the 50s. I wish I'd known about it. I would have read it to my kids. Anyway. We'll talk about that. August 8th, 1 pm. Pacific. Right after that, photo time with Chris Marquardt, the made by Google pixel 10. Announcements are August 20th. We'll stream that as we, as we always do in the club, only Micah's Crafting Corner. Anyway, these are all reasons to join the club. Please visit twit.tv/clubtwit and do us a solid Support the programming you love. Now, if you hate our programming, don't join the club, that's fine.

1:52:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Or join the club just to spite us.

1:52:13 - Leo Laporte
That'll teach us a lesson yes, and here is the president of club twit flying in on on string. Thank you. Thank you from uh for uh for that. Adolfo muñoz, or is that pretty fly for a cisco? Is that your real name? Have I just outed you twit.tv/clubtwit. Thanks in advance. Time for our picks of the week. Andy Ihnatko, why don't you kick things off.

1:52:44 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is kind of esoteric. It's something I have absolutely no intention of buying, but I love the fact that it exists. I don't have it in my picks. I do have it in the showbiz section of the doc. There's a Kickstarter to manufacture the keyboards from Severance.

1:53:06 - Leo Laporte
Are you going to buy an MDR keyboard? Oh my, God?

1:53:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, no, because I'll wait to explain how much they cost. That's probably the reason why I'm not going to get it. But, oh my God, are they doing it? It seems like they're doing this right. It seems to be like a 100% accurate reproduction of the keyboard. It's not like, hey, we 3D printed some stuff and we did. No, it's made out of like heavy aluminum. It is a murder weapon grade, like construction. It is accurate to the key layout of the show, which means it has no escape, no control, no option. So that does have it.

1:53:48 - Leo Laporte
You don't need those. You need the trackball, though, right.

1:53:51 - Andy Ihnatko
But does have a two button trackball. But the other cool thing about it is that there are extra layouts that you can use, so you can choose a layout, that is, they call it the. There's the Any layout, which is the 100% reproduction. There is the Audi layout, which is a standard compact keyboard which has all the function keys so you can actually use it as a keyboard. And tickling my nerve endings the Dasher layout. Remember that this terminal was based on a Data General Dasher D2 terminal. So if you want the keyboard of the original Dasher D2, you can get that as well. My understanding of it is that these are actually magnetically swappable, so it's not as though you have to pick one and go.

Oh, okay $10 will get you on the list. I don't think they've actually launched yet, but the Kickstarter page is open If you're an early adopter. If you're an early adopter, get on the ground floor $599. Then that will go up $50, then another $50 for people who come in late to $699 for the tier two.

1:54:59 - Leo Laporte
That makes my Hall Effect Wu-Ting HE60 seem cheap, and it was not cheap, $899 retail, they're saying. Oh yeah.

1:55:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Again, it's a choice for people who have that kind of money.

1:55:14 - Leo Laporte
Who really love the show yeah?

1:55:16 - Andy Ihnatko
And again, if that's, that's the sort of thing where if I saw that, if I saw a dash or keyboard at the MIT flea market, I would not care that I can't use it with anything, I would just want to own it because it looks like a million dollars, it does have the, it does have like the custom key caps for the any key, any keyboard. So I just appreciate the fact that, okay, the price is really out there, but I appreciate the fact that they didn't decide to go just halfway with it, where they said well, we got to know we contacted a factory in China that could give us like colored key caps and could do us a round of rounded keyboards. It's like, no, it's either the real thing or it's not. And Jason's holding up that beautiful custom keyboard with that same color scheme.

1:55:55 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you can get on and the Commodore logo.

1:55:58 - Leo Laporte
No, that's the six colors. Oh no, six colors. Oh six colors, six colors logo. Oh, I'm sorry.

1:56:02 - Jason Snell
This is, yeah, you can get Dasher style keys at dropcom, which is what I did, and I put it on this key crown q1 nice, and it's close enough for me, but it is definitely I got it because these are the, the, the severance keys.

1:56:18 - Leo Laporte
It's really nice. I actually replaced my key crown q because, uh, I wasn't very accurate with it for some reason. Uh, that's when I got the wu ting adhe, which is not cheap, but uh, it's got hall effect switches and really nice keyboards or keyboards or like shoes.

1:56:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Personal sneakers no, you should put money into them because you are working with this all day long and you have no idea what it's costing you to have making you do with something that's cheap and hurting your hands or making you miss key.

1:56:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, I just, yeah, that's the. What was the issue is? I was inaccurate with the and I thought the door great. I loved how it felt.

1:56:54 - Alex Lindsay
The worst part is it's such a hole that you just keep digging yourself into.

1:56:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it doesn't get better.

1:56:59 - Alex Lindsay
I started getting into new feet boards and so then I got the new feet boards. But then I started I had the red switches on one of them and then I bought one with and I was like I'll try the moss switches and I like the red switch as much as the MOS switch.

1:57:16 - Andy Ihnatko
I still have my code keyboard. I'm pleased to say that the backlighting on the D key keeps flickering on and off. That means I've been working very, very hard. I want you'll want the beat up cigarette stain, food crumbs everywhere. That shows that whoever has to clean out your house after you die knows.

1:57:32 - Leo Laporte
Okay, this guy this guy worked for a living exactly. He was a big working-class man with working-class hands, calloused from lots of typing this, uh, this wu ting is, uh, I got the zinc body so it's really heavy, oh man, but it is a very, very I'm with hall effect switches. It's really nice, they're really. It's a nice keyboard, uh, and it's not as clickety clackety as the keychron was, but again, everybody's got their own you know, I'm always trying to find the quietest one that I can find, and I just have a hard time.

1:58:02 - Alex Lindsay
I want to be silent the hall effects aren't too loud there. Yeah, I don't want it to be like, I just want to be, and I would buy glass if I could. But the glass ones are a very hard to find and be really expensive.

1:58:12 - Leo Laporte
They're like 300 well, and then I also I also use uh here. Because we're on the air, I have to use a super quiet keyboard. That's the logitech uh keyboard, and actually this is a nice little keyboard and it's pretty much silent um even though it's quiet yeah, yeah, I like it and I use it with the mx mouse and everything this. And which one is that logitech? Yeah, it's the logitech mx keys mini. And one of the advantages it supports three different bluetooth connections, so you can have three computers.

1:58:45 - Jason Snell
I I think I have an earlier I think I have an earlier version of that.

1:58:47 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they also last really nicely yeah, it's a.

1:58:50 - Leo Laporte
It's a. It's a nice keyboard, it's battery powered, but I keep it plugged in because you know I don't want it to die in the middle of the show.

1:58:57 - Alex Lindsay
Uh, all right, your turn, Alex lindsay, I'm going back to an old one that I did many years ago that I'm still using and I just realized I saw like I got my dad on it years and years ago and I saw my you know vacation with my family last week and he pulled out his, his iPad and went into Flipboard and started reading the news and I realized he's still doing that and I'm still like I still it's like one of the news apps that I use and the reason I'm doing and I think I talked about it before is that I just find it so pleasurable and it seems like it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter that I just scroll up or whatever. There is something about the Flip experience and when they took it away for a while, flipboard had a whole bunch of articles on every page, like when you first get into it, and I stopped using it for years, years and so, and I came back to it like, oh, am I going to get rid of this or not? And I popped it back up and they had somehow gotten to their senses, because it's the flip that makes it work and I don't know what it is, but I enjoy the flip board. There's things I don't like. I think they run too many ads, I think they do a bunch of other things that are there.

But I think as a UI person, like thinking about UI and if you're looking at it, I think it's worth getting Flipboard because there's something that draws it to me that I don't find as pleasurable in any of the other news apps that I use. There's something about the flip function that shouldn't matter. It's very, you know, old-fashioned and I don't like the page curl, like I just want to make sure it's clear, like it's the whatever they did to get the flip function to do the flip thing exactly the way the flip board does, it I really enjoy and I don't like almost anybody else's solution and I've just realized that. So I'm more of like a cause.

Again. There's things about it that make me a little crazy. You know, the amount of ads, the way the ads get put in, anything other than one article per page, drives me a little nutty, like I don't want to see. I like the, I like the experience and if someone can't, if flipboard had a version that I could pay for, that never had any ads, that only had one article per page, I'd pay for that. You know, because it's just there's something about it that I really enjoy going through it and being able to, you know, subscribe to different feeds and so on, so forth, but anyway, 100, there 100%.

2:01:13 - Andy Ihnatko
There's something about the way that you go from, you move from one article to the other in Flipboard that I don't think any other app like it has really matched, and it opened my eyes to how important that simple feature actually is. It's a pleasure to actually flip through it.

2:01:27 - Alex Lindsay
It's an amazing thing we talked about that a little with Heston. You know, one little problem and it's amazing how you can build a product and it doesn't take very much to have people just stop using it. You know, like Flipboard is a good example they they experimented with. You know, everybody else was doing like many articles on one page and so they experimented with that and I literally years went by before I went back to them.

2:01:45 - Leo Laporte
So we had the creator of Flipboard, mike McHugh, on Intelligent Machines not so long ago. He has a new product you should probably look at called surf, which is a it's I. You know I it's kind of. The idea is it's like flipboard, but you get it from. Remember, flipboard's original premise was it was all twitter right and it's it's gone way beyond that yeah yeah, but but so surf is still kind of that idea. Blue sky masks on threads flipboard is on at youtube.

2:02:13 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, the funny thing about flipboard is what? What I'm mostly reading are things that are functionally I are. What I want is rss, yeah, but I want that flip, that very specific flip function, and I, if I could just have a pure flip function that flipboard has with just rss, I don't really need to see people's tweets, I mean you can put rss in this too and you can use it as an RSS reader exclusively.

2:02:32 - Leo Laporte
You get control of it. Just try it. It's free. I'm going to try it. Yeah, surfsocial, surfsocial, and you know I think it's kind of look, mike is really smart and you know he's done some really interesting stuff. I think Flipboard is a really good example of this I think he thinks of this as his next thing.

He was on Intelligent Machines about a month ago. I'll see May 7th on Intelligent Machines 818. We talked to him. I really like Mike, but I like Flipboard. I think you're right, flipboard. It's funny how it's persisted after all this time, jason.

2:03:10 - Jason Snell
Snell, your pick of the week. Yeah, really quick one. Uh, there's a great app that's been out for a few years on ios and uh, ipad os, called long play, which is an album player instead of a music shuffler. It is aggressively about playing albums. You can also do playlists. Mac version just came out. Um, it's pretty great. You can play music, um and uh, albums and playlists and queue them up and so you're playing it through apple music, but it's making it an album.

2:03:38 - Leo Laporte
Is that the idea?

2:03:39 - Jason Snell
it was so. The idea here is that it'll read your apple music library, but it's its own standalone app and it has a an interface where it shows you album covers and you can click on them. But everything is done atomically per album. So you listen to an album straight through. You don't shuffle it. You can skip tracks, unless you put it hysterical in hard mode, in which case you can't. If you queue up another album, you queue up the next album. Uh, and on the mac, this version, uh, it supports apple script, it supports shortcuts and it supports mcp, so you can actually launch claude on the mac and say I'd like to listen. This is what I did. The first thing I did is I said I'd like to listen. This is what I did. The first thing I did is I said I'd like to listen to a classic album from a duo or group from the eighties, that's do a pop album, and it was like great, I'm playing purple rain.

Here are some other albums that meet your criteria, that are in your collection. Would you like me to play anything else? And I was like sure, cue up song from the big chair by tears for fears afterward and it's like great, I'll do that. And because MCP is basically the scripting language exposed for LLMs to use, you can actually have an LLM use the power of an LLM and knowledge of your library and control of this app to do things like recommend or create a collection for you or whatever. So it's very automatable and it's kind of fun.

There are moments when I just want to listen to an album straight through and I don't want to shuffle through a radio station or a playlist and Longplay. It's a really nice player. It's really well designed. You got the controls and a piece of album art and I think I said this a few years ago and it's quoted on their website now. But I say with great authority that Steve Jobs would love this app, because Steve Jobs loved album art and that is sort of the center of the UI of this. So if you like listening to albums straight through or even playlists that you've made straight through, this is what will do that long play and some really innovative automation stuff that I think points the way to the future of a lot of desktop apps.

2:05:30 - Leo Laporte
This would be a good day to listen to Black Sabbath from beginning to end. How about that?

2:05:37 - Jason Snell
Pick a classic album, or pick Ozzy Osbourne's solo album, the first one that has Crazy Train on it, which is yeah, you know it's funny.

2:05:44 - Leo Laporte
He really as great as he was in Sabbath, he was even better as a solo artist.

2:05:50 - Jason Snell
It was kind of amazing, and then you play it straight through. It really takes me back to, I mean, I realized that you know, as a I'm of a certain age where actually the CD era really means a lot to me, and that was literally you press, play and then the whole thing unfolds till the end and yeah, you could skip and stuff, but uh, and there are albums that are built that way. Not everybody listens to music like this, and I don't even listen to music like this exclusively, but it is fun to say. You know, I'm going to just sit here and I'm going to play that one start to finish.

2:06:20 - Leo Laporte
So if you don't own the whole album though, like if you didn't buy it, it supports.

2:06:23 - Jason Snell
Apple Music. If it's in your library, it will play it for you. It supports Apple Music.

2:06:28 - Leo Laporte
In your library.

2:06:33 - Jason Snell
but I mean I, I mean, I didn't I never bought blizzard of oz but it but I could get it on apple music you just added an apple music and then it's a long.

2:06:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, then it counts. Yep, I have to do that tonight, and it does some other stuff.

2:06:41 - Jason Snell
It scrabbles to last fm and stuff like that. It's got a bunch of people still scrabble people do. They're scrabbling.

2:06:46 - Leo Laporte
They're out there every day, they're scrabbling leo I, I follow you, of course, uh, so I don't need to scrabble you $5.99 for the app.

2:06:59 - Jason Snell
And $25 straight up. No subscription for the Mac app.

2:07:02 - Leo Laporte
I might do that, because just get it on the Mac.

2:07:04 - Jason Snell
I listen to most of my music on the Mac.

2:07:07 - Leo Laporte
Vision Pro version. Oh yeah sure.

2:07:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, the Mac one, adrian, who wrote this, has done a lot of work and it's taken him a few years and there's still some bugs that, like there's one bug that he's been fighting that is finally fixed in Tahoe. That allows him to do something he couldn't do up to now. But uh, it's great that it's out. And uh, I was just using it earlier today to listen to IO by Peter Gabriel.

2:07:26 - Leo Laporte
So oh, I know, and it has to be listened to as an album. I agree with you.

2:07:32 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a journey you can take and not always in that mood, but if you're in that mood, a lot great. And also really nice to see a good new Mac app and it feels like a Mac app. And the fact that he had to find the gray heads of the Apple community to tell him how to do AppleScript because he wanted to have it be integrated with Alfred, I think, and so Apple script he had to do and then he did shortcuts. So it's past present, and then with MCP, to be able to have an LLM control it.

2:08:01 - Leo Laporte
That's the future.

2:08:02 - Jason Snell
So yeah, really interesting stuff.

2:08:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, norman Maslow loves it. You're right, you love it, maslow, don't you? He said what a concept listening to the whole album. He's our vinyl expert. That's all he ever listens to, I know it's good, it feels like that.

2:08:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it feels, you know, and the album art stays up and it's really nice.

2:08:20 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to have an OzFest in my house tonight in August. Yeah, thank you so much. Jason Snell is at sixcolors.com. Read all his good stuff.

2:08:35 - Jason Snell
His podcast, or sixcolors.com.

2:08:35 - Leo Laporte
slash jason hope to have thousands of words about the public beta out whenever that happens, he's uh, you started it, didn't you just pretending that this beta that you have now is the public beta and you're starting it I, I've been writing about the about for the public beta release for like three weeks now.

2:08:49 - Jason Snell
I would really like it to be done right, I've got. I've got them ready to go. Honestly, I just have to check them against the latest beta vance and I discord.

2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
Wants to know dark side mix or the bright side mix?

2:09:00 - Jason Snell
listen to the bright side mix today, because I'm in that mood, leo.

2:09:03 - Leo Laporte
I don't know yeah, I like the bright side mix. It's nice you get your choice. Yeah, yeah, they're pretty close. Uh, peter gabriel's amazing. I wish he would tour on this. He was gonna, but I don't, I, I don't think he did. Uh, mr alexander lindsey is the man so many things at office hours dot global.

2:09:25 - Alex Lindsay
We're answering questions. We got up this morning.

2:09:28 - Leo Laporte
We answered more questions there is a never-ending supply, isn't it?

2:09:32 - Alex Lindsay
just keep hammering at that coal seam day in day out, we've gone over we're well over 55 000 questions and we keep thinking that someday we're going to come and there's not going to be any questions and we're like we got to the end, there's no more. Everybody knows all the things and just hasn't happened yet. So every morning 7 am, we get up again, start digging, seeing if we can find the core. I haven't found it yet.

2:09:55 - Leo Laporte
Officehoursglobal on the web. Officehoursglobal on YouTube. You can also join in if you want. It's a giant Zoom call every morning.

2:10:04 - Alex Lindsay
You know it's so much fun. The panelists are like their own little group of folks that are willing to get up and answer questions, and one of the things is it's the easiest place to look good because you only have to. We, we very carefully know how to. Who gets to answer what. So it's a big panel, you know. I think we had eight or 10 people on today and and people just raise their hand on the ones that they can answer.

2:10:24 - Leo Laporte
So they don't, you only have to never look dumb, you never look dumb you me on my radio show where it was just me making that's hard like, and I get to choose the questions, just like. Um, I don't know. Yeah, exactly that's it. I didn't even have ai in the day back in the day to help me. Yeah, thank god I had google. That's all I can say. Office hours, not global, Andy inaco.

2:10:51 - Andy Ihnatko
Well uh, I'm just. The thing is, now that I'm, now that I'm this close, I keep finding things that like need to be fixed. Like I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to be putting something in the, in the, in the discord. So the last thing was I discovered that the cover picture that I was using because it's my favorite picture of myself ever, I can't use it anymore because it's a picture of myself at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and I look outstanding. But I really, really shouldn't.

2:11:24 - Leo Laporte
Now, me and the White House it has a connotation you perhaps don't want to perpetuate.

2:11:31 - Andy Ihnatko
So it's not starting all over again by any means. It's just like okay, so now that I've taken that down, I'll put something else in its place. I'm sorry that I keep saying it's very, very close. It's just that again, we're now at the point where like, okay, so I just got to do this, and then I can open up, ooh, right, but that's going to fail, like, ah, damn it, okay, so we'll do that. Damn it, okay, so we'll do that. And unfortunately it's like it's juggling other things too that have to be done as well. And I always feel like if I have a deadline, if I have a deadline to other people to deliver stuff that has to take priority, and then I'm like but what time is? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I this is not a scam, I am actually working. I'm actually going to be opening this site very, very soon, but we're fortunately now at the point where it's like little things like this, not big things that need to be solved.

2:12:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I just launched Longplay. I like this. This is showing all my album covers, yeah it's really nice.

2:12:24 - Jason Snell
That's pretty cool and you can sort them. You can have like your favorites bigger or recents bigger, and you can sort them by different ways.

2:12:31 - Leo Laporte
I love that.

2:12:34 - Jason Snell
Recent or neglected or color or like it's pretty wild.

2:12:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's good stuff yeah, you know, if you're going to listen to frampton comes alive. You got to start at the beginning you'll lose track otherwise.

2:12:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's very confusing. It's not much of a live, a live show if it's shuffled yeah, don't shuffle live shows, good lord man.

2:12:52 - Leo Laporte
Uh. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you especially to our wonderful panelists who join us every Tuesday. You guys rock Jason Snell, sixcolors.com, Andy Ihnatko at I Have No Idea How To Spell Ihnatko, no I-H-N-A-T-K-O, and officehours.global's Alex Lindsey. We do the show every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC.

If you would like to join us, we'd love to have you. All you got to do is go to YouTube or Twitch or x.com or Facebook or LinkedIn or Kik or TikTok. We stream on all those platforms. And, of course, if you're in the club, you got that special behind the velvet rope access in the club twit discord. After the fact, you could still watch the show. Just, you know, not interactively. You listen on demand, as they say. Uh, there's a copy of the show, audio or video, at twit.tv/mbw. There's a Youtube channel dedicated to the video. There's also a um, uh, you know a subscription you could for free, in your favorite podcast player Pocketcast, Overcast, Apple Ppodcast, whatever you like, subscribe, you'll get it automatically. Then the minute it's done, please leave us a nice review, if you will. It helps us spread the word about the best darn vision pro show in the whole wide world. You know what I like about this long play. I'm discovering albums. Because I see the album, I go oh, I forgot about I love that.

2:14:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, one of the one of the modes that you can sort by is called neglect, and it puts albums of yours you haven't played in a while up toward the top. Uh, it's really smart. Yeah, there's a bunch of great stuff in it. Check it out.

2:14:33 - Andy Ihnatko
This is good it's amazing when you go away from playlists or individual tracks and you start saying, no, I'm going to listen to this entire album, from track one to track, and it's a big difference, like wow, I had no idea that this was more than just two of the songs I like.

2:14:46 - Leo Laporte
This is actually a good album, yeah yeah, yeah, wow, um, thank you to our club members. You guys rock twit.tv/clubtwit. Keep your membership up to date. It makes a big difference to us. Thanks to everybody for being here. We'll see you next week, but I am sorry to say it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you it's time to get back to work because break time is over. Bye, bye-bye.