MacBreak Weekly 983 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 in the house. We have lots to talk about. Some really cool information for you about Apple's new warranty program and why, if you have multiple Apple devices, it might be a good deal. Apple takes its thumb off the scales for developers, at least in some respects. And then we're going to take a look at all the 26s. The public betas are here and we've got an analysis from Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko and Alex Lindsay. And then we're going to take a look at all the 26s. The public betas are here and we've got an analysis from Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko and Alex Lindsay. Macbreak Weekly is next.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 983, recorded Tuesday, July 29th 2025: The Saggy Quarter. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show where we get together and chat about Apple with Jason Snell, who's in the foothills I love. No, I'm not. I'm at home. What are you talking about? I mean, he's at home in the foothills.

0:01:01 - Jason Snell
I'm using the orange mic, not. I'm at home. What are you talking about?

0:01:04 - Leo Laporte
I mean he's at home in the foothills.

0:01:06 - Jason Snell
I'm using the orange mic. The orange mic is a tell that I'm not in my usual spot.

0:01:09 - Leo Laporte
Hey, yeah let's talk about that. Wait a minute.

0:01:12 - Jason Snell
You have color-coded locations. It's Doc Rock, right, doc Rock? He has his little Doc Pops that he sells my uh, my setup in my office, which is a sm7b and it's blue. Yeah, I got a. I got for my mv7 that's usually in the the room in the back of the house that I use in the winter. Uh, I have an orange one and I'm traveling and the fact that my background looks like my office and I've got an orange dock pop on here is a. It's a giveaway.

0:01:39 - Leo Laporte
That it's all why purple is in the garage, blue, blue and blue and orange is in the foot elsewhere, or elsewhere elsewhere on the foothills or just in the garage.

0:01:45 - Jason Snell
Blue Blue in the garage and orange is in the foothills. It's elsewhere, or elsewhere, elsewhere, or Fiona foothills are just in the back of my house, because I'm cold One of those, hi. Okay, let's talk about apples.

0:01:55 - Leo Laporte
Apples and oranges. And not oranges Also here, Andy Ihnatko Ihnatko.com. Hello Andrew.

0:02:02 - Andy Ihnatko
HeHey there. Hi there, ho there, how are you today? Oh goodness, it's, it's, it's. I almost did the show from my home office today because I how exciting? Well, because, like, I have one room with an open window in my house and if it's so hot that I can feel the heat radiating in from that open window, it's like why am I trying to even, like, walk three quarters of a mile to a mile today?

0:02:28 - Leo Laporte
it is really, really nice, the library is like those old movie theaters. They have a big banner outside with letters on bicycles saying it's come on in, it's cold inside.

0:02:37 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean I I packed like the nice, like blacks, black golf shorts so I look professional but I'm like I'm still too hot to wear any layers over the um.

0:02:47 - Leo Laporte
Are you? Are you not wearing pants right now?

0:02:50 - Andy Ihnatko
I am wearing shorts. Okay, I have okay and even even that, like I, I don't, I tried, I I I don't wear shorts unless it's super hot outside, because I'm dumpy, looking enough. I think that I will look like a bum if I don't dress up a little bit. So I have one nice pair of shorts and I'm wearing them today. I'm sorry, it's nice to have you. I do have a pair of shorts. I must say you have a t-shirt with a breast pocket, which is pretty interesting.

This is one of those super. It's basically made out of plastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so interesting.

0:03:25 - Jason Snell
this is one of those like super, like you know it's made out of?

0:03:27 - Andy Ihnatko
it's basically made out of plastic, yeah, yeah, so it's like. So it's like wearing nothing at all, but like you have to wash them three times a day because they really, really trap the you know what.

0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, yes, hi wow, this ended up being a little more sartorial information I just want pity.

0:03:38 - Andy Ihnatko
That's all I'm asking for today.

0:03:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, alex lindsey is here. We are nice and cool in beautiful Northern California, cargo shorts for me and hiking boots.

0:03:50 - Alex Lindsay
Hiking boots A little dorky, I'm taking on walking after every meal.

0:03:56 - Leo Laporte
No, that's a good thing to do. That's what happens when you wear that glucose monitor.

0:03:59 - Alex Lindsay
You're still walking, so I wander off into the woods after each meal just for a 10 or 20 minute like walk, and so I'm usually in hike in hiking shoes do you go for a walk after every? Podcast as well. Uh, nobody usually eat right after the podcast. That means I am going to walk after the podcast.

0:04:16 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, well we have the public betas. They have arrived and, uh, even though I cautioned myself against it, I couldn't help it. I installed it on both my macs, on my I did not do it on my iPhone, actually, but I did do it on both my ipads.

0:04:35 - Alex Lindsay
I'm waiting on the phone. Like I use the phone too much, I don't have a backup phone anymore because I gave it to my son and so I. So I'm kind of like ah, like I'm not ready for things to freeze. You know, like I think I'm.

0:04:44 - Jason Snell
You know, it's not not gonna freeze, it's just gonna kill your battery, that's what it's gonna do okay actually go to the opposite of freeze.

0:04:50 - Leo Laporte
It's gonna burn you.

0:04:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, it runs that's it runs hot and it kills the battery yeah, so I'm working on the ipad too.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
We don't know, but he doesn't have a battery. Um, I was you know at first, uh, this uh ugly new thing. I really pissed me off. I wasn't pleased, but I've gotten used to it now and it's okay. I'm talking about the ipad. Um, I do like the windowing. That actually turned out to be more useful than I thought I'd keep a few little windows open which is great.

0:05:25 - Alex Lindsay
he's very disorienting on the iPad, like I'm getting used to it, but it's just like ah, this feels like it does feel like a Mac. It feels like suddenly I've got like just apps open.

0:05:34 - Andy Ihnatko
It's almost there. I just have to turn off every other windowing aid that they've added, because it's still very confusing that if you're giving me a windowing experience that feels like a Mac, I want to say, oh, add another window, absolutely. So add another window. No, no, I've got a full screen, I've got a new workspace. Like, no, that's not what I wanted. I wanted these two windows side by side. But yeah, it is kind of freaky to wind up being like have.

The one of the things I missed about slide over, like the original version of iPad multitasking, is that the thing is that on an iPad with a smaller screen, it's not necessarily about overlapping windows so much as the two things I want front and center I want to be able to work on. So I like the idea that you'd always have two things side by side and they're tiled, so I don't have to worry about, like, arranging things. I like the fact that they've brought the Mac tiling up into the iPad so I can simply say I want this in the upper left quadrant, I want this in the lower left quadrant, I want this to be entirely in the left side of the screen, so you tile them.

0:06:30 - Leo Laporte
See, I have been using overlapping.

0:06:33 - Andy Ihnatko
Not always, but it's like I've always been a big fan of tiling. If you have a big enough screen. I want a window manager that will let me never have to click something to uncover something else. I think that's very, very possible, and on the iPad there are it's less, whereas on my Mac I might have like 10 windows, 20 windows, open at the same time. On the iPad it tends to be. I'm focused on one task, but I have a PDF that I want to keep. I want to read, to get notes from the side.

0:07:04 - Leo Laporte
Right. So tiling makes sense and it's also not that big a screen. If I tiled on my giant monitor I'd have to be looking like up and to the left and down and to the right. It wouldn't be great, I have to say, though, because all tab works very nicely on the iPad. I'm really using the iPad kind of like my Mac now, yeah.

0:07:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's got to become more important because I'm still using this iPad as like an iPad with a keyboard and a trackpad, the ability to put, like, several external displays on an iPad. This is going to be much, much more important to have workspace management like absolutely on lock. I'm certainly going to give it a try, but it's going to be freaky as hell. I'm certainly going to give it a try, but it's going to be freaky as hell. The idea of having iPad apps that are a true desktop multi-screen environment for me, it's going to take some time getting used to, but I'm really. This is the reason why, like this is the first. I didn't put any of the betas on my MacBook, but I was definitely going to be putting the first public beta on my iPad because of these features, because they're going to be so useful for my workflows and because I don't want to still be annoyed by the differences in September, and this way to do that is to get in on them about a month early.

0:08:19 - Leo Laporte
Jason, you and Dan Morin over at Six Colors seem less than happy with liquid glass, and you also quote Harry McCracken, who's concerned that it's steering the iPad in the wrong direction.

0:08:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I don't agree with Harry, but I get his. He thinks that the, especially the simplicity of split view and slide over, is something that he's used all the time. Harry uses the iPad as his primary computer. Basically, I mean, harry is we all know Harry. He's really smart and I think it's worth listening to somebody so committed to the iPad talk about what he thinks that this has lost. He feels like it was more of a unique experience and now it's just kind of like Mac Lite and like I totally see that. I don't think I agree, but I totally see it. I will say there is an split view. You can do split view. It's not like it was, but you can tile. As Andy said, if you tile left and right, it actually puts the little gap down the middle with the little sliders so that you can choose the split view. It's basically split view in there. Slide over, though. I have heard from a bunch of people who loved slide over and the reason slide over is not a part of this.

0:09:26 - Leo Laporte
Tell us what slide over is.

0:09:28 - Jason Snell
Slide over is a thing that's really easy to get to by accident, which is a problem, but you basically put an app off the side of the screen and then you swipe from the right edge and this little narrow version of an app comes in briefly and you can do something on it, and then you swipe it away and it disappears.

0:09:42 - Leo Laporte
That's one thing I noticed. It do something on it and then you swipe it away and it disappears. That's one thing I noticed. It's a little weird. I had never used that and all of a sudden a lot of my apps are in that little wedge on the screen on the right of the screen, yeah, so so that's something that it's kind of more present now because of these smaller windows right.

0:09:56 - Jason Snell
So slide over was like the easy little basic multitasking that you could do. And I think a lot of people and I'm not one of them, but a lot of people really said, oh, I like this idea if I can just take, take an app and have it available, uh, on demand off the side. And and if I were apple and I were listening to feedback, I would be processing that and saying, oh, we always viewed because I think they did always viewed slide over as a compromise to do something like multitasking on the iPad way back when, and that now that it's, now that they've got this, they don't need anymore.

0:10:29 - Leo Laporte
And I think actually it's not slide over.

0:10:32 - Jason Snell
You can just stick a window off to the side. You can do that but like this idea of a utility drawer with an app in it, like I think, based on what I'm hearing, there is sort of a use case for this and it would be great if the people working on this multitasking feature thought, okay, what you know what's behind that. Again, the goal is not to say, oh, give them back, slide over. The goal is what motivates people to say I really miss, slide over. I think listening to people like Harry talk about what's been lost, when I think that, by all accounts, this new multitasking feature is amazing, it really is very, very, very good. The fact that some people are still kind of like sad for what they lost, like I, I think they killed slide over because it was way too easy for regular users to put an app into slide over and then not understand where the app went and why it was there and how to get rid of it, and that that's a serious usability concern too.

0:11:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I thought we still had slide over, because I still see stuff over it's. Over in the right on the gutter there's a little window corner. That's not. I thought that was, isn't that slide over, that is.

0:11:29 - Jason Snell
But it's gone in. No, it's not. I still have it. No, you in fact. I think you have a window themselves there when you're expose, it's off to off there and off the edge of the screen and you tap to bring it back. But that's, I think that's not the same thing okay so so you know.

I mean I think I think there are some valid points there, because apple did throw, maybe threw the baby out with the bath water. It's possible. This new thing is great but, like I, I I'm open to the idea that of what what harry is saying suggests that there are some unexplored aspects of of iOS or ipad os productivity that maybe this version, as good as it is, has kind of left by the wayside.

0:12:13 - Leo Laporte
I think it's worth listening to those people who who are noting those things a good example of using slide over alex howard, our club member, says he's used it for his password manager for years. So having it always kind of there when you need it is yeah, my guess.

0:12:27 - Jason Snell
My guess is that they've heard this feedback and that the challenge is they've got this, this expose view where you swipe up from the bottom. I wonder if they will create a, a tile format or something, an expose or something that kind of replicates the quick flip it out like I really like. Picture in picture is a great example. You can put picture in picture off the off the screen Right, and it just like pokes out and says I'm here still playing, but you can't see me. You could do that with a window right. You could have the concept of docking a window to the side and having it just kind of like it's still there and there's a little arrow and when you tap it kind of slides out. You could do that. So maybe they will go down that path.

0:13:06 - Leo Laporte
Do a feedback, folks, if you're using the beta and say yeah let them know. Bring that sign over, because I think they just didn't understand that people used this feature.

0:13:14 - Jason Snell
They thought it was a compromise, and it's actually a productivity feature.

0:13:18 - Andy Ihnatko
But when you think about it, I think that it's a bigger challenge. Window a bigger challenge. Window management and task management on the iPad is a bigger challenge than Apple has on any other platform because, again, at the maximum, you're dealing with a device that can have multiple external displays at once, and at the minimum, it's not just the iPad Mini. Now it's going to be the iPhone Fold, which rumor this week is that it's actually going to be much, much smaller than you expect it to be. So the smaller the screen, the more you need things like slide over, the more you you need things like side by side split view and stuff like that. So I I my hat's off. It's a big challenge to set up for myself. I'm surprised that they haven't forked, uh, the platform at all, but they haven't. They haven't decided to call certain ipads oh, now this is the iPhone maximus oh, they don't want to do that.

Oh god, have two different or something like no, not not necessarily, but basically say that we are going to put these tools on these platforms and these tools on these platforms. You will not necessarily, because we don't feel as though this slide over is relevant for a larger screen. However, we know it's essential. On on other things, again, it's it's a wonderful, wonderful challenge. And it. On other things, again, it's it's a wonderful, wonderful challenge and it it bespeaks the, the unity of Apple platforms.

0:14:28 - Leo Laporte
You've been so busy, jason, with your reviews. The also the the Mac OS Tahoe public beta review. How many thousands of words did you write about?

0:14:42 - Jason Snell
Dan Dan Morin and I together dropped uh 15 000 words last thursday so it was. It was a lot, a lot coming um mac os. I mean, the thing is, mac os tahoe is great. It adds a bunch of features that especially power users um people who watch shows like this will, I think, really love spotlight stuff.

0:15:02 - Leo Laporte
Automation in in shortcuts, I have to say I said, oh good, I can turn off Raycast and use Spotlight. I did it for about three seconds and went right back to Raycast. So real power users may not want to.

0:15:14 - Jason Snell
I turned off Lunch Bar, which I've used for 15 years, and I still haven't gone back. Oh interesting, Honestly, but I think there's something to be said. The whole idea this goes back to like the idea of Sherlocking right, which is Apple should create good new features for the Mac.

That should happen, even if there are utilities that used to fill the gap. There should be clipboard history in the Mac. Right, it doesn't what Apple implements. They're implementing it for the middle, 80% or whatever the use cases on the edges Apple is not going to bother with, and that's where third-party utilities can live, and I've heard from a bunch of like superpower user clipboard utility people who are like I'm not going to do this, or launcher people, people who use Raycast, saying this this isn't for me, and I think that's great. It turns out that, um, I don't use launch bar like that. I was mostly using it for some very specific features, all of which have basically been replicated by. You were just launching apps mostly right.

Launching apps and doing some web queries, which I can do, and using it as my clipboard history. You know I use it as a calculator. Spotlight's calculator is a little less reliable, so I may just switch to using, you know, pCalc instead for that stuff, instead of just doing it in Spotlight and Emoji, which I'm using a utility called Rocket now to do that, because Spotlight won't let you find an emoji and insert it, which was a thing that I used LaunchBar for. But in general, like macOS, tahoe has a bunch of great power user features. It's really nice.

Depending on how you feel about Liquid Glass, I mean, I think clearly Liquid Glass has been revealed to be something that the focus has been on implementing it. On iOS and on the Mac it feels kind of half implemented at best, and there are a bunch of things that they did that really frustrate me more. Not from a usability standpoint, because I think people who are afraid of of liquid glass design and I had somebody say, boy, all these complaints about it I guess I just won't update to Tahoe and I'm like no, no's fine, it's completely usable. It's a missed opportunity. What they've done is disappointing. There's a lot of stuff that feels amateurish or half finished well, look at this music app, especially with liquid glass.

0:17:14 - Leo Laporte
I mean, this is from your review, that's to be fair, that is its worst case.

0:17:18 - Jason Snell
If you swipe slightly, if you scroll slightly up, then you can read it. But this is one of those examples where and to be honest, the only places you really see the liquid glass really come into the 4RN cross-platform apps where they've decided to make it like music or photos. They got work to do. I mean, I'm withholding final judgments because the software isn't final, but what I can say is that I think you can be very productive with macOS Tahoe and it adds a bunch of really nice stuff. Um, and the liquid glass stuff, yeah, it's a work in progress and and and they missed you can.

You can tell the liquid glass stuff has been applied to the stuff that's cross-platform but not to the stuff that's unique to the mac, which is the tell that the mac was never really a serious part of the thought process. Because, like the toolbars, the stuff in the toolbars don't get me started, but it's like it's not glass, it's just like a thing that floats on another thing with a drop shadow when they're all gray and it's just not, I don't even know, but again, it's usable. I just don't really. That part makes me sad because I feel like, um, I was. I've been thinking about aqua a lot lately because, you know, a clear aqua is basically liquid glass and I think an implementation of something like that on the Mac a modern version of Aqua that is not blue but is just kind of like clear glass it could look cool and interesting. But you know, depending on how you feel about liquid glass, maybe it's a blessing that the Mac looks pretty generic and in most cases you don't have a lot of liquid glass getting in the way.

0:18:39 - Leo Laporte
I like the transparent menu bar. I like the fact that they they have added a uh the live previews into uh the live what do they call it live action into the menu bar, which is hysterical.

0:18:53 - Jason Snell
Live activity, oh live activities yeah, yeah, from your, from your iPhone so like if you have an iPhone live activity, it just pushes it into.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
I love that although I had to turn off. Yeah, that's like an extension of mirroring live activity, because I never watch the things live, so it's spoiled, the race.

0:19:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you gotta. You don't want to be spoiled for that. Yeah, yeah.

0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
But but I don't care about the giants.

0:19:12 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's good and, and there's a whole. I mean they, they've taken um control center, which, you know, bringing control center to the mac seems kind of pointless. Right, it was like, oh boy, just what we need is control, but like control center in Tahoe on the Mac, they, they have created a toolbar or a menu bar um manager, like bartender, it's. That's what that is going to be.

It is it is, uh, the new controls API. Third-party apps can use it. So third-party apps can write things, they can show up in control center, they can show up in the menu bar and the big tell is you can create multiple it's like multiple pages on iOS. It's multiple icons in the menu bar of Control Center that you can do a custom icon and then you can put whatever you want in there, and so very much. That is the future of the menu bar on the Mac and it's such a great.

This is the stuff that makes me happy is when they do stuff like this, where they took an iOS idea and then they applied it to the Mac and now they're thinking of a Mac like way, like what would be the true implementation of control center on the Mac. And the answer is it's actually menu bar centric and it's a menu bar icon manager, so you can have things in sub menus or on the menu bar if you use the new API. So, like older menu extras that currently exist, don't go in there. But I think that Apple's vision for the long-term future of that, of what goes on in the menu bar especially since we've got a lot of screens with notches and it's hard to fit a bunch of stuff up there. You know, bartender can still do its thing, but like I love that Apple is building a way for you to organize your stuff up in the menu bar. That is a thing it should be doing for the mac I'm also thrilled.

0:20:50 - Leo Laporte
The other thing coming over from iOS is, uh, automation and shortcuts. I I was stunned when I was trying to do that on the mac that I couldn't how do you set a time shortcut?

0:21:00 - Jason Snell
you can do that on an iPhone and on the mac it just hasn't been possible. And and they finally did that Plus they're bringing back essentially the equivalent of what used to be called folder actions in AppleScript, which is the idea that you know if you drop something in a folder, it will run a shortcut that will look at the contents of the folder and you can decide what it does, and that I've set some of those up and that's great.

I've talked to people who've said, yeah, I've got this thing, that at two in the morning it scans this particular folder and you know it's stuff you could automate. But before you were third party or you could use Hazel and it's the same story, right, it's like Hazel is still going to have an audience because Hazel does a lot of different stuff. But to have that center part of like you don't need to go to a third party utility. I think you know that go to a third-party utility. I think that is functionality that should be in the system and it really was back in Tiger, right, but it's been sort of very Automator or Apple script-centric. And now there's this new thing that's all based on shortcuts.

0:21:56 - Leo Laporte
Are you excited, Alex? Are we winning you over? Are you about to do it?

0:22:01 - Alex Lindsay
No, it has less to do with the operating system and more to do with all the uh stuff that won't work. It's just that, all the other apps that have to catch up and all everybody else. So I I think that my delay has less to do with apple and more to do with a bunch of professional apps that are cross-platform, that take time to get to, and and so, again, tahoe is in my future. My, my, my pretty. Uh, I'm gonna probably start upgrading things to that and I'll let this one sit for another year, and I already have a handful of computers on 26 to test some other things that won't run without it. So I've got a couple of things that are already there and it's great, but I'm not putting it on my main computer, probably until sometime next summer. Yeah, I though, uh, it's, but I'm a production. It's entirely different world. If I, if I was oh, I understand if it was consumer and if I was a regular just using my computer, I'd be on it right now.

0:22:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, I understand and you know the fact that, like the focus right didn't work with windows 11 for a long time. You?

0:23:04 - Alex Lindsay
just get in with a lot of things like people. I know somebody just plugged something in in office hours. I can't think of what it wasn't yet like. That doesn't work anymore.

0:23:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah that's not good. Yeah, yeah, but it is. Uh, jason, would you agree? Or Andy, it's. It's been stable on all the devices I've put it on. I haven't had a single problem yeah, yeah, I haven't any.

0:23:22 - Andy Ihnatko
The only problems I've had on on iPad OS is certain apps that haven't been updated yet, Like the YouTube app. Sometimes it competes with the stoplight the stoplight menu for for menu control, because it puts one of the minimize, it puts one of the controls for its own window in the place where that is supposed to go. So sometimes there's competition between.

0:23:44 - Leo Laporte
I actually want to full size this, but unfortunately that's why apple does betas right, so it's okay, google, get it together and also let's let's shame google a little bit.

0:23:54 - Andy Ihnatko
They are.

0:23:55 - Leo Laporte
They are often way, way slow in in adding stuff to their own apps you point out, jason, that the icon creators that haven't updated their icons get shamed.

0:24:06 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, if you, if you, if you make, even if you make the little square with you know rounded rectangle and you you've diverged too much outside of it, they just slam, slap you in jail in this little dark gray jail and, ironically, the apps that have not done any attempt to look like apple's apps like acorn look okay, but the ones that have got a box that they're breaking out of slightly now it's a box inside a box. It looks really bad and I get my, my I'm irate about this because I feel like apple has so many ways to motivate developers like they. They introduced this brand new icon composer app that'll let you build like liquid glass takes on your icons. That it's really smart. There are lots of reasons you want to look like a modern app on the mac to for them to forcibly like deface app icons that don't follow their rules. Uh, I think it's a bad. I think it's just yet another showing of apple not really treating developers well, and I get it for the beta process. But but I asked Apple is this intended to be something that ships? And they said it was, and I think that's a huge mistake because I think it's just disrespecting those app developers and also it shuts down the whole idea of like.

I think it's very clever when there's a round rect and a little part of it sticks out. In fact, I thought it was great when the preview app showed a loop and a picture and the picture was just kind of sticking out of the round rect. Well, the new preview app is just a picture of a loop and it's like, if you don't know what a loop is, is it an upside down shot glass? What is it Like? It's just it. They're losing, kind of like, what the meaning of these apps are and you're losing some creativity in app icons, giving people a little bit of latitude to experiment, because, oh no, what if the user sees an icon that's slightly different from standard? I think that that's not something apple should be legislating, with a shame box that they put around these, these app icons. So it's just dumb. I just it's an unforced error, um, it's. It's bad for developers like use the, use the carrot, don't use the stick. Right now, especially, this is the last kind of thing that Apple should be pulling on app developers.

0:26:13 - Leo Laporte
By the way, I apologize. My Google Pixel tablet is now playing Drake's Get it Together, because I said get it together.

0:26:21 - Jason Snell
It's great. I apologize, it's bad for a YouTube stream, but it's great thematically.

0:26:27 - Leo Laporte
I thought that was pretty weird. Okay, what else do we think is good? Bad ugly, I can't say I'm a fan of liquid glass particularly. I guess I'll get used to it. In fact I did get kind of used to it.

0:26:42 - Andy Ihnatko
I'm not really noticing it and, again, I'm sure that I'll notice it more when more apps are updated to support it, but we're seeing more Apple apps that are supporting it. The thing to understand is that it's not just the standard calls for making buttons have been updated, it's that they've actually updated a whole bunch of UI elements, so that the real benefit is going to be when these app developers start to rethink about how do I want to do a tab group, how do I want an action button to actually influence what's going on, and how do I want to communicate where the user is inside a workflow or inside the app using depth information.

0:27:23 - Leo Laporte
I have to say that that first toothpaste welcome that. You see, when you first install it really turned me off.

0:27:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought, oh crap I don't know it's, it's, it's. It reminded me of the first version of the developer beta, where it's like, oh, this could get very old, very quickly. But but the thing is, I think that it's good to basically go out, enter the stage on a bang and basically announce to people that there are lots of really great things you're going to see.

This is going to be make them understand this is a different thing from the from the get-go. So long as that's not the experience for the entire, the entire productivity, uh feed it does fade.

0:28:02 - Leo Laporte
That is the most foreground part of liquid glass and it does kind of fade away there it's just the occasional place where it's so transparent that you you go. This is not functional. This is not a good uh choice here. Andrew Cunningham said the iPad OS 26 um makes the rare software update that makes most old hardware feel new. Most of the most older iPads will work with it right yep, my M1, my first generation M1 iPad, works absolutely fine.

0:28:31 - Andy Ihnatko
There's nothing. You were worried about that. Yeah, I was. Yeah, I was. Again I've unfortunately I was. It's not just. It's not just that something works, it's like, okay, but is it the sort of thing where, yes, you can install this operating system, but it will not. You will not have access to a certain range of features that are beyond the sort of thing where, yes, you can install this operating system, but you will not have access to a certain range of features that are beyond the capabilities of this hardware. Or, yeah, this feature works, but you're not going to want to use it because it doesn't have enough RAM to support everything that has to go for it. But yeah, there has been nothing but upside to for me for installing the first public beta, and I am a pretty heavy ipad productivity user, so I'm very happy with the page um, speaking of preview, jason, I like having preview in the ipad that makes me happy

0:29:15 - Jason Snell
yeah, they finally brought a bunch of little apps, that journal, yeah. So the ipad for the first time, and preview is one of those things where it used to be like you could quick look something in files, but like now, it's just, you know, use a preview app for pdfs. And I, I did, um, I was writing a story where I had a pdf about um, about what I was writing about in preview, and I had my text editor in two different windows and I was using the magic keyboard. I was sitting out in my backyard writing my, my, uh, my story, and I realized I had basically replicated the way I always put those windows on my Mac, where I don't have to go either find a different PDF viewer or use files, which is not what it's for. So, yeah, it's good and now I'm-.

0:30:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Can you clarify something? Can you clarify?

0:30:15 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Andy.

0:30:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I was hoping Jason can clarify something for me. I was confused as to the behind the scenes role of preview. I understand that. My understanding, which I haven't really researched yet, is that it's also going to be sort of the holding pen for everything, that for all the file types that Quick Look can access, so that if I'm publishing, if I have an app that uses files or documents, if I'm publishing the how to preview or Quick Look my file format I'm actually adding, I'm actually giving it to preview, not necessarily giving it to quick look. Quick look is going to be relying on previews assets in order to be able to quick look more documents.

0:30:55 - Jason Snell
I have not tried using an arbitrary file type in preview to see what happens, so I'm not actually sure what the relationship is there. I've mostly been doing images and PDFs because that's what I always use preview for.

0:31:09 - Leo Laporte
I love it, though, that the file manager is really improved considerably.

0:31:13 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh yes, it used to be confusing as hell. Now what's confusing is all get out, but not even confusing as heck.

0:31:21 - Leo Laporte
It's more like finder light every day, which is a good thing and part of it, I think, is I'm expecting it to be more like a Finder, to be more than Apple maybe intends for it to be. So now many of us, many of us normies, are going to have to decide because Apple has pushed out the last, I guess, update for iOS and, I'm sure, macos and all the OSs, and now I have to sit here iOS and, I'm sure, mac OS and all the OSs and now I have to sit here.

I could download 18.6 on my phone, or could turn on the beta updates and go public.

0:31:52 - Jason Snell
They'll have security updates for a little while longer for those OSs as well, so you don't have to choose. I think. Look, there's a whole spectrum here. I think that the OSs are safe enough in my experience that you could use them, and with the exception of things like the occasional incompatibility or visual glitch or, uh, you know or hot iPhone or a hot iPhone that eats the battery a little bit more than maybe you'd like or like, oh it, the windows server crash and it comes back and it's like a slight but like.

Basically, I've been using these since the mid to late june and I'd say they're all fine.

So if you're really curious, you should just go ahead and it'll be fine.

That said, the spectrum runs all the way from there to alex saying I can't wait for next summer when I install mac os, tahoe and all of that is okay, right, like, because the way it will happen is they'll go final in the fall, maybe you, maybe you force an update then the way apple does it. If you don't force an update those first few weeks, you don't get it, because they're trying to like slowly bring people onto the operating system and then and then in like, maybe october or november you'll actually get the update asking you to install it. But you can still say no and like it's okay, right, like, go at your own speed, you can go now and I think it would be fine. But you know, I also totally understand why people like alex and alex is not the only person I know who's like I have, I have friends, I'm I'm pretty aggressive I have friends, they're on they're on my hobby yeah, like they're like pro tools, so yeah, because 32-bit apps especially yeah, that's a thing and it's okay.

Right, like it's okay, you don't have to be on the latest and greatest, especially if you don't see the benefit. Although I will say again, for iPad and Mac users, more than most recent years, there are direct benefits this year.

0:33:41 - Alex Lindsay
And usually what happens is that you end up with a situation where usually what moves me forward on at least one of the computers or a couple, will be that there's some app or some feature that I absolutely need for work and that's what pushes me forward. Oftentimes in Keynote, Capital tends to go hey, Keynote, this new version of Keynote isn't going to run. Not going to run on the last one and I push.

Keynote pretty hard. So I'm usually like, okay, so I always have a computer that can Grumble, grumble. Yeah, it's usually because it's something stretching things yeah.

0:34:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, those are the good and the ugly features. Now we're going to go to the bad. Well, let's do it after the break. It's out of order. You're supposed to go good, bad ugly, but you know, um, we don't have a theme song, so it's okay. Uh, you're watching mac break weekly. Uh, we're taking a look at the new public betas with Alex Lindsey, who is a refrainer, represents the refraining beta never, beta never. Group. Uh, of course, Jason and uh Andy, who are all gung-ho beta ever, beta ever mostly I'm, I'm, gung-ha, no, no no macbook, no macbook and me. I'm in the middle, torn between the devil on my right shoulder and the angel on my left. But uh, you know what I decided? Oh heck, just do it, leo. So I am, in fact, installing iOS 26 beta on the iPhone. We may regret this, we'll find out.

This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Helix Sleep. That's something I do not regret.

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All right, there is one complaint, uh, which to me seems like a positive. In uh iOS 26, the gop says it could cost political campaigns millions of dollars. How? Why would that? Because it allows you to create groups and filter out texts from unknown senders.

0:39:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, they made a change. The messages has always allowed you to say hey, if there's, if something's coming from an unknown sender, don't display it, just put it to one side. It's not necessarily marked as spam or junk, it just basically says I'm not going to, I'm not going to alert you to that, I'm going to let you have to go and check that out With iOS 26,. That's now on by default and basically the Senate Republican Organization basically published a memo or a note or a letter basically saying that this could destroy us because that means that our political, our robotexts are not going to be like displayed immediately yeah, and ends with the ominous thing that we have.

We have only two months to do something about this. That's like, oh dear, what are you gonna do?

0:40:37 - Alex Lindsay
I can't so pathetic to talk about that in public like they're gonna filter out our space. Oh, it's so crass. Like you know, sending people texts randomly is such a crass thing to do, oh, I will turn this on immediately.

0:40:54 - Leo Laporte
Nobody texts me that I don't know, and if they do, it's either offering me a bogus job well, I immediately like report as junk and block. Yeah, like, I'm just like you know and this might be the gip might have gotten wind of this, but I, if I type stop and I don't immediately get a message back saying, okay, well, no more, I block and junk that too.

0:41:15 - Alex Lindsay
Well, here's the problem is if you, if you type, stop, it means they know it's an active number so you won't get reached by that person, but your number gets shared. Maybe that's why I get so many of these.

0:41:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you have to, you can't, you won't get reached by that person, but your number gets shared.

0:41:25 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, maybe that's why I get so many of these. Yeah, so you can't show any sign of life?

0:41:29 - Leo Laporte
No, sign of life. So this will be good. I won't have to worry about it. I'll just put it in the unknown folder.

0:41:34 - Alex Lindsay
If you report a spam and block, your phone blocks it and it also tells Apple that that number is suspect, and so it doesn't take very many people before it shows up as spam and it automatically well, it'll automatically come in and say this is spam.

0:41:49 - Jason Snell
I think it tells your carrier too, yeah. That's what I thought I thought the blocking was actually through the carrier If it's a text and not iMessage, I think it tells your carrier.

0:42:02 - Alex Lindsay
But you want to do report and block, but no sign of life, that's the key that's why you never want to answer a robocall is because you're a sign of life. That means that number is good. So whether they get a hold of you or not, they now know you're fresh, You're ready to go. That's why my phone if you're not in my phone, you can't get a hold of me.

0:42:21 - Leo Laporte
Well, you just gave me a reason to upgrade my iPhone.

0:42:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Now I'm really happy, or just turn on that feature or just do what I do which is that I have.

0:42:28 - Alex Lindsay
I have focus mode during the day from nine to six, and that means only a handful of people can actually reach me in real time. Then I have do not disturb after six and the only thing that can reach me is my washing machine. What?

0:42:43 - Leo Laporte
oh, I guess that makes a notification dryer notifications, otherwise no, I forget.

0:42:47 - Alex Lindsay
I forget about my wash and I'll wash it like three or four times in a row, because I can't. I, if I don't flip it in 15 minutes, I'll rewash it. Yeah, you're right, and so the um, uh, and so the uh. So anyway, so my washer and dryer can talk to my phone, but that's the only thing that's allowed to talk to my, you are a modern guy.

0:43:05 - Leo Laporte
The only thing that can reach me during working hours is my washing machine non-working hours.

0:43:10 - Alex Lindsay
In in working hours I've got a. You know, there's like 30 people that can get a hold of me, oh okay oh, you mean after hours.

0:43:19 - Leo Laporte
It's even more restrictive. Oh, after hours. So you do it. The most people restrict during no, I don't.

0:43:25 - Alex Lindsay
I have all the people that I you know, all the people that I have to be able to respond to for business. For business during the week, during the day, as soon as it gets out of that.

0:43:32 - Leo Laporte
No, no, I'm not not it's the single best thing you could do to your phone is turn off notifications.

0:43:39 - Alex Lindsay
Uh for everything.

Notifications are the death of of deep productivity yep yeah you know, like they just you know I have I don't turn. Literally it's my wash and that's it. That's the only thing that notify me ever. And it is like when, and every once in a while, when I turn it off, like oh, I don't know if that person's going to call and I'll turn off my focus, and I start getting notifications for a little while, I'm like how do people live this way? Like this would make me totally.

I think it just slowly makes everybody totally insane, but it's. It is a having all those you know and your mac won't let you turn them off all the way. You have to have a minute. So at 959, my, if I'm still up at 959, my mac goes oh my god, all these things I gotta tell you, and it's like this long thing comes stringing down the side of my screen there are all these things I didn't tell you today and I need to tell you I that's some of the best technology that goes into any phone or any phone operating system, like on my Android phone.

0:44:29 - Andy Ihnatko
I just like the fact that the controls for making sure that no app can disrupt you that way ever again is embedded inside the notification, so like after I've set up a new phone, like I'll be under threat for a couple of weeks, but every time I say no, do never, never, ever, ever, show me that kind of notification ever again. Okay, I'm sorry, I won't do that. Okay, you can skip notifications from this app, but not this type of notification. And right now, so right now, really, I don't get any notifications that I don't, that aren't relevant to my life.

0:45:08 - Alex Lindsay
I and I don't, I don't think any of them relevant to my life, but but the, but, the, uh, the, you know, the thing is, I think, that people don't realize how much control and don't take advantage of that. You know, like I still, you know, I'm still on X cause, that's my, where I have the largest following, and and I and I, um, keep trying, but I am brutal Like I. My ex is different than everybody else's because I have so many, I have two, over 200 words that if you put into your tweet I won't see it, Like, it just filters out, and so there's like 200 blocked words in my security. And then if I see anything that I don't like an ex, I'm just like, block, like, and I'm just like brutal, like block, block, block, block, block, block, block. You know, um, uh, and, and so I, I think that, um, I think that people don't take advantage of the kind of things.

And again, on my phone and on my computers, everything is turned down and then I go look for it. I mean, I'm checking my texts all the time, I'm checking my email, like when I, when I'm going to, but if I get into a deep thought or I'm in a conversation I don't even want to look at. If I'm talking to someone, I don't want to look at my watch or my phone. You know, I feel I find that to be I am old fashioned and I think that's disrespectful. To be at a dinner with somebody and something pops up on my phone, I don't, I'm not going to look at it.

0:46:20 - Andy Ihnatko
Do you think you're changing?

0:46:21 - Leo Laporte
though mores a little bit. First of all, you can't go to a restaurant and notice noticing everybody's looking at their phone. Yeah, but like and looking at your watch no longer means what time is it? I'm getting antsy.

0:46:32 - Alex Lindsay
It often means there's other stuff going on exactly and but. But you know, I and I think that it it is, but I think my family is all the same, like my kids are, the same way you know so they good for them.

They're not looking at their phone while we're like we've trained them. Well, no, you know, I think what happened was they didn't have a phone until they were. I think they didn't have phones until they were 14, I think, and so they didn't. They just didn't really buy into that. It was mostly so we knew when to pick them up from high school let's see how long it lasts they're still, they still like let's see how long they leave their phones behind all the time, I'm surprised.

I mean they still use them, but they just are more analog, for whatever reason let's talk when they come back from college. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it could definitely change, although I think they view it as their friends are kind of crazy Because their friends are constantly in all this social media.

Yeah, and they just think that that's kind of a nutty place to be. So I don't know if they'll. I mean, I think that if you got into it now, social media would look a lot crazier to you than if you've been in it forever. You know, it's that I was watching this thing talking about electric cars. They were like if you brought out a gas car, if all there was electric cars and you brought out a gas car, oh yeah, people say what?

doing they're like they're like. Well, it has to, you know it. It doesn't run as well, it doesn't? You know it has to have little explosions all the time you have to have 150 moving parts instead of seven.

You have to fill. You can't fill it up at home, you can't. You know, it's like all these things, they're like no one would ever buy one, and and so um. In the same way, I think that when you look at social media, I think that if you're new to it, especially if you've seen other people and how crazy it makes them I don't know if people are as into newbies or as into it as the, the folks that have gotten the where the, the, the.

0:48:11 - Leo Laporte
John actually remind me eight years from that. Ask Alex.

0:48:16 - Alex Lindsay
My son. My son wants to build a log cabin in the middle of nowhere Like he's just like yeah, they're all like that.

0:48:22 - Leo Laporte
I got him land influence over land.

0:48:24 - Alex Lindsay
He's got's got five acres. He bought land. I didn't buy it. My, my family has land, so he's oh nice. Well, we carved out the five acres that he can have if he wants to happen.

0:48:32 - Leo Laporte
So just steven in our club. Twit discord says I'm not holding out hope. This new feature will be useful. My mom has dementia. My mom too, and she responds to these text messages. My mom too. I want them to go away, not just be hidden in an unknown filter. The problem now is apple keeps switching back to all messages. I can't keep it in known centers. Only is that that's new in in 26, though it will be 26.

0:48:58 - Jason Snell
The unified view takes all of those things from unknowns and puts them behind like a menu where you have to go see them and triage them, which I think again, maybe not exactly what gallifrey rebel is asking for here, but it's closer. I mean, I feel like it's gone from I need to do maintenance star wars name.

0:49:21 - Leo Laporte
So I just I use just steven, okay, I mean that's a doctor who name and a star wars name. I'm sorry, together it's a double a double.

0:49:31 - Jason Snell
You know I love it. Let's shout out to the discord they're in there. So, um, this one, like right now, it's sort of like you can triage it and it's really inconvenient and all that. And this new version, it's like not so much triage as it is like the stuff you care about and then everything else is kind of over here in a place you can just forget about it if you want to. And depending on how you live your life, you know that.

I think for me the onboarding has been a little harder because when you first do it, you have to go over there and be like the mark is known. Mark is known. Mark is known right for things that you actually use. But the nice thing is you mark them is known. Mark is known right For things that you actually use. But the nice thing is you mark them as known. You don't have to add them to your contacts list. Once they're marked as known, they show up in your regular list, but otherwise they're just kind of buried and I think that's where they belong, frankly, and I get why any political group, any fundraising group, would be upset about this, in the same way that facebook was upset about do not track which is it's apple taking a thing that they rely on and putting it off to the side, and just because it's the republicans, don't worry, act.

Blue will feel we'll freak out about this oh, everybody will, everybody will, and good, good we don't owe them our attention right, we don't owe them anything no, and adults will figure out what to do next, like what is the next thing?

0:50:48 - Alex Lindsay
like they're gonna like figure out what the next thing is. They're not gonna complain about what it was well, they're gonna come knocking on your door.

0:50:54 - Leo Laporte
That's what they're gonna do and say here's my hat, put some money in it but because you can.

0:50:59 - Andy Ihnatko
But you can see how they're gonna do the same tricks that, like the, the spammers do, which is use a phone number.

Well, not just that, but the way to get around this. This feature of Apple is it's for numbers that you've never interacted with. So they'll probably do something like hey, your social, this is from the Republican party and we're concerned about your social security benefits. Make sure, make sure you, make sure you click on this link to do that which connects you to the social security administration, as long as they get them to interact with it.

0:51:27 - Alex Lindsay
Once they get they, they get past the red for the red velvet rope and, again, it's easy to, it's easy to line up something if it, when it happens there are tools now and apple keeps on making better and better tools and google's making good tools as well just block those numbers. Like, just be aggressive, you know, like you know it's. You know, be aggressive about you don't know what. If I don't, if I see a phone number that I don't know, uh, generally my phone doesn't ring, so and it definitely doesn't ring at any time. If I don't know who the number is, um, and so I don't really I'm not even notified that the number's coming in. If I look at it later, then it's not something that I knew. I actively block it like.

0:52:02 - Jason Snell
I'm just like no, you know, and so in 26, like and it's not like a little, a little colored text like it is in current os's there are two buttons below something that comes in over the transom, that is from an unknown entity, and they are mark as known, which means that they will now be not filtered and block and it reports it as junk and it blocks it and you're done. And I like what that says too, because it says look, this is one of two things right, this is something that you know, or it's bad and should go away. So you choose. I mean, you could choose not to choose and they will just continue to go into this purgatory, but like, I really like that because like my I don't know the tire store come text me and says your, your tire rotation is done, come pick up your car. It's like marcus known I, I need I mean, I actually have them as a contact in my contacts, but you get that thing where it's like it's a transactional thing, like, oh well, yeah, this is, this is the restaurant.

0:53:04 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, mark is known like I, I don't uh sure, so there might be a period of time, but otherwise no, yeah, kind of adjusting it a little bit, and I think it's important to be.

0:53:13 - Alex Lindsay
I think it's important for it to be simple too, because the problem is like with with gd, gdpr, you, you end up with this like every website is like you know most, you know not everyone. The good websites are give you the option to do what we all do, which is reject, all Right, and so, um, the bad websites are like uh, except uh, or we're going to explain a whole bunch of things to you and take a bunch of your time for you to try to figure out where the thing is to turn off, you know, and so uh, which I think is actually against the GDPR, but that's a whole nother thing. But they want to put you in some kind of hole, or they try to trick you where the buttons are the wrong way and everything else, and I think Apple is coming from it of well, we're just going to make it go away, you know. So I think it's good.

0:53:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, when they ring, maybe it'll sound like this Little reverb. We played it before, but intense, play it again. That's the new marimba. It's called alt one. No, is it reflection? Oh, I see, reflection has two, two different sounds. One is default and one is alt one.

0:54:18 - Jason Snell
It's called reflection reflection I like reflection sounds. It sounds like the score for Marimba, the motion picture to me it's a very exciting, quirky moment it's going to make you laugh, it's going to make you cry, it's going to make you answer your phone.

0:54:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Those are the things it'll do it hit me more like that scene in a sort of a spy movie, in which the protagonist is now on a train and sort of looking out the window and he doesn't know like who to trust um, okey, dokey, let's take a little time out and then we have more news.

0:55:03 - Leo Laporte
You're watching mac break weekly with Andy inaco, a Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. We're so glad you're here. We do the show Tuesdays. You probably know that, but if you wanted to watch live, we actually could. If you're in the club, of course, you get to. I like to think of it as, behind the velvet rope, special access, you're up in the balcony, you know, and you can watch the show in the club to a discord. Ironically, it's not the best audio and video. Oh, yeah, despite the fact that you are in a privileged position, you may still want to check it out on YouTube, which is open to all twitch tech, twitch xcom, linkedin, facebook, kick, tick, tock. We stream on eight different platforms. Uh, we do that every tuesday, 11 am. Pacific, 2 pm eastern, 1800 utc. Of course, you don't have to watch live. The only reason you might want to watch live is so that you can, uh, you know, chat while we're doing the show and I see the chats and all the different platforms. So, uh, you know, we love that, but you know, please be my guest, watch, uh, at your leisure.

You can download a copy of the show. There's audio and video from our website, twittv, uh. There's also uh podcast clients you can use. There's even a youtube channel which is a great way to subscribe or share rather little clips. There's even a youtube channel which is a great way to subscribe or share rather little clips from uh, from our shows. So please enjoy it as you feel. Just don't put us in the unknown folder. Okay, that's all I ask. Jp morgan nears a deal to take over apple's credit card program. Goldman's been trying to get out of this practically since day one. Uh, I have a chase credit card, uh, so it would be just like that, right?

0:56:52 - Andy Ihnatko
I guess. I wonder. I wonder what terms if? If the new partner has to accept, like apple's existing terms for that card, like you have to sell it, send out all your bills on the exact same day, even though that's one of the problems that caused that's one of the reasons Goldman Sachs hated it.

0:57:08 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of times, though, what happens is you build a system and you suddenly realize something's really hard.

0:57:13 - Leo Laporte
Someone else comes in and they'll do the same thing you were doing, but being able to look at it years, you know five years in, or ten years in or whatever, you're able to see where we could make efficiencies based on that process, and goldman managed to lose money on a, on a card that had 20 billion dollars in balances. That's that's, uh, you know what?

0:57:35 - Andy Ihnatko
that's impressive that you could lose money on that, to be honest well, and the thing is we don't know all the terms that apple was imposing, uh, on the, on the deal. I hope that. I think that, given that this is a product that Apple wants to succeed wildly and it's obviously not succeeding wildly yet I hope that this, in addition to the bank looking at the past five years of transactions and figuring out what went wrong, it's also Apple saying, ok, maybe that was too ambitious and maybe we can lean back on that a little bit.

0:58:01 - Leo Laporte
My chase card is a Visa was too ambitious and maybe we can call we can, we can, we can lean back on that a little bit. Uh it I, my chase card is a visa. I don't know if this means it would become, because it's a master card right now. It might become a visa. I don't know if that's a big deal. I mean, they're basically the same right. Apparently, visa offered apple 100 million dollars, according to Bloomberg. I'm sorry, the Wall Street Journal to uh to take over the network. Um, I don't, you know, I can't think of any reason this would really affect Apple card holders no, I mean in an.

0:58:34 - Andy Ihnatko
I've been reading about how you have to have a bank that has the chops to operate internationally so they can keep expanding it to different territories. But for the people who already have Apple card it's I'm sure it's not going to change much at all yeah, um earnings are coming.

0:58:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes jason, thursday yeah you got the colored ink ready arm up the charts yeah farm up.

0:59:00 - Jason Snell
Sure, we'll see this is going to be. I mean, it's the, it's the. It's not a very interesting quarter, but they often find interesting things to say. We're in the saggy uh quarters before the iPhone comes out.

0:59:13 - Alex Lindsay
It's just kind of like, because it's like holiday quarter, and then it's like this isn't the the most saggy court, the next one is the most saggy quarter. Right, it can't be the summer, the summer is because next one is the most saggy quarter.

0:59:23 - Jason Snell
It can be.

0:59:25 - Alex Lindsay
The summer is because we all know the iPhone's coming. No one's buying.

0:59:28 - Jason Snell
The difference is that in the next quarter they'll at least be able to talk about or characterize how iPhone sales are going, because the iPhone will be on sale then. This one is just kind of in the long days of summer.

0:59:40 - Alex Lindsay
What was that? Is there much of a school bump?

0:59:45 - Jason Snell
I been days of summer. What was that? Is there much of a school bump? You know that I think there there is. There is a a school bump of a kind, but it's like I I think the school buying is so spread out now and such a small percentage part of apple's business than it used to be that it's probably invisible we'll get to see how effective that uh that convince your parents to buy you a mac for school campaign paid off.

1:00:11 - Andy Ihnatko
That's gonna be. That's looking forward to that. But yeah, it's uh. There's a I forget which uh. Cnbc or some other site basically did a roundup of what analysts are expecting and, like, out of 12 analysts, nine are still expecting it to be a buy. I think two are expecting it to be a hold and the only one is expecting it to be a sell. They're expecting good news.

Canalys actually released their second quarter I'm sorry, was it the second quarter or just last month's iPhone sales? And it wasn't good news? Iphone sales were down 11% year over year for that same period. So that wouldn't affect, I think, their uh, their uh call their call for for Thursday Cause I don't think that's part of the second quarter. But they're going to have a lot to talk about. I think they, they, uh, uh are certainly going to. It's going to be interesting to see what they highlight in Tim's prepared comments. That's that's always what I look at. That's always really interesting because, as I keep as I keep saying, it's the one public statement that any company makes where you cannot lie or misdirect in any way, shape or form, or else shareholders might hold you to. You might wind up having to pay a half a billion dollar settlement to your shareholders, as Tim did.

1:01:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and the SEC might have a problem with it too, right?

1:01:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Right, exactly.

1:01:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you're absolutely right, it's not necessarily what they say, but it's what they choose to say and what they choose not to talk about and how they choose to spin what they spin. And you know it's become less and less interactive over time. The analyst call that happens, you know, is now mostly prepared statement and then there are a bunch of prepared questions from prepared analysts and they get prepared answers and it's. But still it is the one place where they have to make some decisions about how they're going to talk about their business and they can't lie. So it is still. We can still learn from it?

1:01:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Do we actually know that they get the questions ahead of time? I know that obviously. Obviously they line up who's going to, who's going to get to ask the questions. But I.

1:01:57 - Jason Snell
I think they line up who's going to ask the questions. I think the people who are asking the questions are asking questions that they think Apple is going to like, but I don't think it's all fixed. Like I said, I don't think Apple prepares the questions, but I think the questions are prepared and I think Apple only responds in things written down and they don't necessarily know the question, but they know the kind of question and they're never off their game. Now they're reading from prepared, if not prepared answers, sentences that they've prepared that they then thread together. So it's, it's all. It just feels more and more artificial every quarter.

1:02:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Cause that cause. That's the other fun part of it is that this is the one place where someone can ask them a question. They have not specifically vetted in advance and off the cuff, they have to come up with an answer. That, once again, is going to be like Google's call was.

Last week, sundar Pichai wound up saying some very interesting things in the Q&A that aren't mind-blowing revelations, but added some clarity to a lot of the stuff that they've been doing in the past, for instance, mentioning that, okay, yes, we're getting into glasses, but we don't think that, we think that the, the phone's place as the center of people's ecosystem is secure for for many years in the, at the very least, I don't think he's actually said that before. So that's that's why, like these things can be, I I I'm not pretending that I understand like the filings or the numbers or stuff like that. I'm more interested in saying, in instance, in hearing, what do they want people to think? What? What gets, what gets a highlighted spot in the prepared comments? And did they get? Are they going to let something? Are they going to acknowledge something during the q? A that they probably would not certainly have put right into a news release or into a prepared keynote for the iPhone or whatever the danger is, I think, if you're one of those analysts, is you like being on that call?

1:03:44 - Jason Snell
And if you really commit a faux pas, they will not pick you again, right?

Oh, interesting but that said, I think I think that's always implied, right, but but that said I mean last quarter I called out in a piece I wrote I called out a guy named Richard Kramer, uh, who's an analyst at Arete Research, who like literally there were like nine questions about tariffs and then he said I'm not going to ask about tariffs, what about the problems with Apple intelligence? And I'm like, oh bravo. And I called him out. I was like this guy is the MVP of this call because he asked about that and his follow-up was about court cases that might affect Apple's business. And he literally sent me an email not to tell tales out of school, but he sent me an email afterwards saying thank you for noticing that I'm the only one who asks them any questions. Keep on doing it, dude.

1:04:36 - Leo Laporte
You know who else noticed? Tim Cook noticed. We'll see if.

1:04:39 - Jason Snell
Richard Kramer is there this time. But gold star for him I mean good job.

1:04:45 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that what's interesting is when folks can answer those hard questions effectively. They just look so much better Like I think that's the mistake that a lot of people make is, we all want softballs and the softballs. Well, everyone knows what you're going to answer with the softballs and you know some of the folks that we that we, you know worked with in the past. You know the like, I think that, um, you know well, barack Obama is very good at it. Like you know, you can. You can throw anything at him and he will just come back, like, no matter how hard it is, he's just going to hit it back to you, jfk was like that too.

He used to it and then he would just come back to you with an answer. And it was just, you know, and it was spot on. It was more inspiring than the softballs that he was getting and the, but I don't think that Apple executives or any executive is that way. Well, no, but but one I agree with that, I think.

I think one company that's really was really good at it was John Legere and T-Mobile. So, john, he did his quarterlies, you know, he'd let a lot of people say, ask him a lot of things, and he just shot from the hip and just said the way it was going to be and, and I think that was part of the swashbuckler kind of feel that T-Mobile had at the moment, at that moment that he gave them because he was willing to answer. Now he had a ton of information in front of him that was kind of constantly being, you know, coming up to him so he can, you know, respond with a lot of detail, like what you don't see in those, those calls, depending on what. I don't know what Apple's looks like, but in a lot of those calls there are like eight huge monitors on a wall that are in front of them with the social stuff that's being said while they're doing it the data, data points for that specific question, like everyone knows what the questions are going to be right?

1:06:28 - Jason Snell
I mean, they know there's like a universe of questions that could be asked. Is they know what those are?

1:06:32 - Alex Lindsay
you've got a team that's sitting there going, firing them up into a monitor in front of them so that they have all of the pertinent data, because they can't say the data wrong I always pictured them like sliding a piece of paper in front of Tim Cook.

1:06:43 - Jason Snell
but you're right, it's probably on a big screen.

1:06:45 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. Again, I have no idea what Apple might be getting paper. I don't know. Is he wearing a?

1:06:50 - Andy Ihnatko
Vision Pro. Let me tell you Nobody cares about this but me.

1:06:55 - Alex Lindsay
but I care, how is Apple not doing them in Vision Pro you?

1:06:57 - Jason Snell
can hear the rustling of paper in the apple thing. You can hear it. You can hear them like where they're pulling things out and tim's looking it up and saying, oh, these numbers here, because they again they at tAndy's point. They don't want to be wrong, they don't want to be seen as like fibbing, because yeah it's a legal requirement here.

So so they don't. They don't want to do that at all. I, I agree, I think that, um, uh, I think it's better if you answer these questions. That's that. That's the thing I liked about richard kramer's question is like, come on, like I think everybody's thinking apple. If everybody's thinking about apple intelligence, I and here's the thing. They have a question ready to go. They have an answer. They know what their official take is on where they are with apple intelligence. That might be really boring. It might not be.

1:07:39 - Alex Lindsay
Usually it's boring with a little hint of something interesting, but like, if you don't ask the question, you're never going to know I think, what the standard apple response is they would prefer to do an interview because they can be more flowery, right which they do right.

1:07:51 - Jason Snell
There's always a cnbc person who does a pre-interview that then they run right after the results they don't want cnbc, they want.

1:07:57 - Leo Laporte
I just, they have control, they want, they want something a little easier for them.

1:08:02 - Jason Snell
Oh Leo, trust me, the CNBC interview is not hard-hitting in any way, because they get the exclusive See. That's the thing. They get the embargoed pre-release exclusive with Tim, and I'm not saying that that person isn't a journalist. I'm just saying that it is a platform conducive for Apple to get its best thoughts out to the investment community, and that is it is what it is so one of the things that will probably be a bright light, of course, will be services.

1:08:34 - Leo Laporte
Uh, apple has expanded apple care one to include a new uh multi uh device. Uh warranty care one yeah, it's uh.

1:08:45 - Jason Snell
Apple care is a even more of a service yeah, interesting what do we?

1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
think is this a good idea?

1:08:51 - Jason Snell
depends on what the products are. If, if, depending on your product set uh, you can save money with this um and it provides it's really for people who have multiple devices.

Yes, and it provides coverage for some devices that currently you might not be able to get coverage on because you didn't opt for AppleCare, and then you can actually AppleCare Plus and you can add it in even for some older devices you got to do some. I mean, unfortunately, it's not as transparent as it should be in terms of, like, doing your shopping and seeing what the prices are, because there are definitely some where adding it to an AppleCare One is more than just paying the AppleCare Plus on its own and you shouldn't do that.

1:09:32 - Leo Laporte
But there are other cases where you can save money on this. So for three devices it's an additional 20 bucks a month.

1:09:37 - Jason Snell
It depends on what the devices are. You know, macs versus iPads versus like AirPods but you can add those devices in and you can potentially save some money If you're a regular user of AppleCare Plus for all your devices. It is absolutely worth looking into this to see if it will save you money. Obviously, from Apple's perspective, they're hoping that in net, what it's going to do is increase the number of devices covered by AppleCare+, which means they're increasing their revenue. And I'll just point out, since we were talking about Apple financials, that we never talk about this.

But one of the I'd say, decent lines of revenue for services is AppleCare+. That is services revenue. It's old school services revenue, but it is a way that Apple makes money. Is selling you AppleCare Plus and, again, it's insurance right. It is calibrated so that what they pay out in replacement is less than what they bring in in fees, and so, but still, if you want to be protected and I know people who love it and I know people who never ever use it but if you are a regular AppleCare person, you know you got to look at this because it will probably save you money.

1:10:47 - Leo Laporte
So you can see a comparison on Apple's website with AppleCare Plus and AppleCare One 20 bucks a month up to three products. It looks like it's any three products, as long as it's, you know, in the coverage.

1:11:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, as long as they're on your, as long as they're associated with your Apple account, which means like if you've got a kid with their own Apple ID, their iPhone is not on your account, but if you've got a kid with a Mac, you could log in a separate user with your account and then accounts. I mean, there's some, there's some weird hinky things in here, but like that's why. That's why, unfortunately, the best advice is that everybody needs to explore this to see if it's right for them, because some people will save money and in some circumstances with some products, and you kind of just got to try it out, but you know they're. Also I applaud the idea of a one-stop shop. That you know. I would rather have one subscription to this than five. Right, really.

1:11:42 - Leo Laporte
I should talk to Lisaisa. I mean we could easily. I've got three products on my own. She's got at least three, so we you know, but still I never buy apple care, so I don't. I don't know if it's a good deal see, I buy apple care.

1:11:55 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, I've stopped buying it for my mac minis and stuff like that because they just don't ever get hurt, but my laptops and my ipads and my phones. For a long time we never came up short on our apple coverage and being able to just bring it in and hand it to somebody and get something back it was. It's pretty addicting yeah.

1:12:16 - Leo Laporte
So, for instance, if you have a vision pro, oh, it's time for a Vision Pro segment. It's going to be really short. What do you see? What?

1:12:26 - Jason Snell
do you know it's time to talk to Vision Pro.

1:12:33 - Leo Laporte
This is literally one item. If you have a Vision Pro, apple Care Plus is $25 a month. Apple Care One with the same coverage, right, is 20 bucks a month boom, you save five dollars on your 3500 helmet we're also right there. Anyway, it's probably worth going to the uh the, the apple care support page, and yeah, yeah, you got it.

1:12:58 - Jason Snell
You got to just step through it with your own devices and see whether it's going to save you money or not. But if you're.

1:13:04 - Leo Laporte
It's not going to save me money because I never buy AppleCare.

1:13:06 - Jason Snell
I never buy AppleCare either AppleCare Plus extended warranties but there are some people for whom it makes sense, honestly, we all know those people. We all know those people. We all have friends who have the negative energy field around them. That sort of like chaos, energy that exists and exudes in every way and software crashes and computers fall off stands and phones shatter into a million pieces and those people should have apple care plus for sure fx guide has a first look at immersive test footage from the ursa cine immersive hold on first off.

1:13:38 - Alex Lindsay
Well, we're still in the vision pro segment, so this is the sub segment, which is the alert alert alex camera segment I haven't had time to go through this yet, um so, but but I do have an enormous amount of respect for mike seymour he's we've been friends for a long time, so I'm excited to um dig into it. It just came out, I think just today, or maybe yesterday it's brand new. Yeah, and um like 24 okay, so a few days ago.

1:14:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's gonna be a uh, I'm sure it's brand new.

1:14:02 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, july 24th okay, so a few days ago. Yeah, it's going to be. I'm sure that it's going to be great and you're going to see more of this.

1:14:08 - Leo Laporte
So this isn't really anything like entertainment.

1:14:12 - Alex Lindsay
This is just so you can see what it would look like yeah, fx Guide and FX PhD are these are the. I mean, they dig deep into how these you know how the cameras work and how the systems work and everything else, and so this is probably going to be um, uh, you know some good content to work with, so I lied there's two vision pros yeah, thanks leo, there there even could be a third, if you want to say, uh, sundar pichai also agrees with tim cook that uh, the phone is still going to matter for a little while.

He. I think it's going to take time. I mean, all of these technologies take a while.

1:14:45 - Leo Laporte
Actually, you already said this, didn't you?

1:14:48 - Andy Ihnatko
I slid into it. But yeah, I'm glad that someone, I'm glad that I'm just surprised he said two or three years, because I'm thinking at least five.

1:14:57 - Leo Laporte
Two or three is not that long, is it?

1:14:59 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, but it's just that I have such a problem figuring out but all the stuff that you rely on for your phone, which is not just mobile. I'm hey, I'm having fun outside, living my lifestyle of the push button world of the future, I'm talking about like I need to do my banking, I need to do this. I need to do that like actual, like desktops, what would have been a desktop task like just, uh, 10 years ago, and I can't imagine that being like a really good application running on a pair of glasses. So I can't imagine it not being the center of the experience until there's a real churn in how society deals with computing.

1:15:34 - Alex Lindsay
I think that the other thing, though, when we think about this, you have to think about AI in parallel to it, in agentic AI, specifically, in the sense that I find myself now you know, I've been playing with it and I can see I'm not doing it yet, but I'm I'm playing with. I could see telling my AI agent to go do something for me. And I don't think about any like go buy me, here's the deal. I need you to buy Southwest, I need some Southwest tickets for whatever. Go, look for these, go tell me what the options are, and um, and then, when it gives me the options, I say just buy the one on Saturday or whatever. And it just does all that Like, like I.

So I think that there's a lot of explicit things that we think of doing with computing that I'm starting to realize is going to go away. You know, like that we're going to not you know, we're not going to explicitly have to go typing into a webpage to do something. We're going to ask an agent to go do some research for us or do this thing for us, or bring us back the you know whatever that is, and then ask them to just go execute it like you would have an assistant, you know, and I was, you know, I was talking to a programmer who, you know, is a very senior programmer that has left, you know, left their company and started playing with AI. And they're like, basically I have a team of 15 people. Like I just have 15 agents that are all you know and I'm having them all work on different parts of people. You say people, but they're not people there. He's like no, he's like I got 15 AI units that are all doing different things.

They're a team and they're and they're all they're all figuring out and they, you know they're all we're figuring out how to do it, but that's someone who knows what they're doing. We're going to get to a point where people who don't I mean for me, still I have what we call Janet. You know, janet is constantly talking to Janet and we don't even talk about chat GPT anymore. I'm just like my wife and I will have some conversation. I'll go well, just ask Janet later and we'll find out what's what there. You call chat gbt, janet, just to be clear, from the good place you know from. So janet, chat gbt has just become janet, um, and so we just we, just because both, all of us use it in our shortcuts and um, uh, anyway, but the, uh, the.

But I think that we're gonna. That's where a lot of this stuff makes more sense, because when you're just dealing with audio or just deal and I, I didn't think I'd get there, but now I'm doing most things where I'm, when I'm responding to people in text, I am dictating more and more of it, because the audio, because the voice to text has gotten so good, it's easier for me to just say it than it is for me to try to type it, you know, at this point, and so so I think that that's that's where a lot of this, but I think it's still five years away.

1:18:04 - Jason Snell
Minimum I think Sundar is is trying to not demotivate his people who are working on this stuff and they're true believers, but I think it's. I think we're talking about way further out there and the reason I think so.

1:18:15 - Leo Laporte
Two to three years seems very short.

1:18:18 - Jason Snell
First off, I am a little more skeptical about AI than Alex is. But secondly, I think the bottom line is you are going to want to have somebody or something on your person that has a fast internet connection, probably has some pretty good compute, and maybe optionally a display, in case you want to see a picture or check that text to make sure that it reflects what you're saying what you're describing sounds similar to a smartphone.

Well, this is what I'm saying is like, even if you add in lots of AI agents and you add in glasses or you add in smart headphones, or you add in whatever it is. I feel like you could, if those other products are going to get weighed down by adding compute and adding battery and adding sensors, and then they don't solve the screen part.

You just described the vision pro so this is what I'm saying is like in the long run, I feel like the smartphone survives because, first off, everybody's got it and, second, it is a much better beachhead from which to add accessories that talk to it, that use its power. I agree to do stuff and and, and that's why I just kind of feel like keeping something on it, like like we, like you, carry around a wallet or something. It's just a bundle of net connectivity, battery and compute power, and then the world unfolds around you when you might have glasses, then you can wear your ear pods or your glasses.

So I feel like that's going to be harder to replace because the miniaturization and efficiency in terms of battery tech and telecom tech.

1:19:42 - Alex Lindsay
It's going to be a lot harder to replace because the miniaturization and efficiency in terms of battery tech and it's gonna be a lot harder to replace that and I think, I think, I think you're right five years from now, I think ten years from now, when I've got my you know, my four solar-powered robots doing most of the farm work for me. You know I, you know I live in the middle of nowhere check those moisture harvest know before you take out the red barchetta, before the motor law came into effect.

1:20:07 - Jason Snell
Is that what's going on now exactly? I wasn't expecting to make a rush reference, but there it is by the way, I do wear.

1:20:15 - Leo Laporte
I was wearing this ai device that was collecting everything that happened around me audio wise, sending it to the phone, admittedly for ai processing. Then amazon bought them. This is the b computer, so I just got my limitless pin, which does basically the same thing, but again it needs a phone. The nice thing is it's a microphone you hang around your neck so it's picking up everything.

1:20:36 - Jason Snell
Look, uh, if you have a choice of making a really burdened heavy thing like like the humane pin that's got cellular in it and it's got struggles with battery problems and all of that, or guess what an accessory to the device that you have in everybody's pocket. I know what I'm choosing. The problem with that? Here's the problem with that, and the humane pin is a great example of this. The problem with that is who gates your entire experience? Then apple and google, and that is a problem because it means that if you're chat, if you're opening AI with chat, gpt, if you're Johnny, I developing something, you're like Hmm, like I don't. I don't really want to put a battery in a five G modem in this thing, but I also don't really want to go through Apple or Google. Uh, what do you do? And it's just, it's going to be a challenge, but I just I think the smartphone is too good. I think the smartphone is too good. I think the smartphone is such a great product that it will be very hard to get it more likely to build accessories on top of it than to kick it to the curb for a decade at least, if not more we got to give credit to Neil pert for red barchetta as long as as long as you're

1:21:34 - Leo Laporte
gonna as long as you mentioned that sure it's hysterical it's. It's taken from a 1973 Road and Track short story describing a future in which increasingly stringent safety regulations have forced cars to evolve into something called massive modern safety vehicles capable of withstanding a 50 mile an hour impact of that injury consequences.

1:22:05 - Jason Snell
Drivers of msvs have become less safety conscious and more aggressive and intentionally bounce older, smaller cars off the road in the in the song red barchetta, it's basically like they've outlawed gas cars and maybe sports cars and this uncle lives out on a farm and he eludes the eyes because it's definitely a panopticon like police state and they and they and they drive uh, this, this rev this old fashioned gas car around in the fields and the roads and whatever, and then go back and hide it again because it's not legal to drive.

1:22:32 - Leo Laporte
It's a brilliant red from a better vanished yeah, that's right, it's uh, I don't know.

1:22:38 - Jason Snell
You know God bless Neil Pe pert rush is one of those bands that was like right and they were writing sci-fi stories as rock songs.

1:22:44 - Leo Laporte
I love it raised the quality of lyrics for rock and roll music.

1:22:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah yeah, rip, uh, he was, he was, he was a special one.

1:22:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah and that's your vision pro segment.

1:22:56 - Jason Snell
I love it more rush in the vision process.

1:22:59 - Alex Lindsay
I think we need that people say they need more cowbell, but generally you always need more rush, always need more rush.

1:23:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Have you seen Neil Peart's drum setup? He has more cowbell on that thing than has on cow.

1:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
So I saw in the 80s. I saw Rush three times, wow, jealous. And by the third time that they came to the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, I had figured out that you don't buy expensive tickets, you buy limited view tickets, and so the limited view tickets would be like $12. And the reason is because they were behind the drum set. So if you got the limited view ones, you just got to sit right behind and it was really close to the stage, and so you got to sit right behind Neil Peart and watch him play.

And that's the other side of them. So I just sat there and just watch. And it is if you've ever, if you ever like when I was growing up. I don't know what it's like now, but Tom Sawyer was what every drummer needed to know how to do. Like you know, like like you. If you, no one took you serious, like you're not a real drummer until you could do Tom Sawyer, you know, and the whole solo perfectly, you know, and, and so, um, but but what's amazing if you haven't seen, by the way, the documentary on Rush. It is Happy birthday.

1:24:15 - Leo Laporte
Geddy Lee.

1:24:16 - Jason Snell
Today is his birthday, so that's my, uh, my college roommates who got me into rush, and Geddy Lee, a huge sports fan, huge Toronto Blue Jays fan, and recently there were some great stories about how he's auctioning off all of his collection because I think his wife would like to move to a house that doesn't have that much, so many baseballs.

1:24:36 - Leo Laporte
To be honest, having seen the Blue Jays in Toronto, you'd have to be a big fan to be a Blue. Jays fan.

1:24:44 - Andy Ihnatko
I do have to encourage everybody to go on YouTube. Neil Peart was on the Letterman Show when they had drum solo week, where two or three times for an entire week, every night, they'd have a different drummer doing a drum solo with a band, and Neil Peart brought his entire kit 360 degrees of everything you could hit with a stick. Wow, and it was the most amazing performance ever.

1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
It is a big drum kit. Look at that. Did Dave walk up to him afterward?

1:25:13 - Jason Snell
and say is this a rental? Because that's a thing that he always did.

1:25:18 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I think he said no. After the show, come on stage, neil will give everybody a ride in his spaceship.

1:25:24 - Alex Lindsay
By the way, when they remastered Chronicles, they redid Tom Sawyer in Atmos, and it is so I get to for what I do for work. I Is it good, do you like it? I preview Atmos stuff in a big theater, like a full-size theater, about once a week in a big theater, like a full-size theater, about once a week, and how I set my palette every time I do it is. The first song on my playlist that I'm testing is Tom Sawyer and it just lights up an entire theater, like you know, like it's just, it's so good, you know, it makes me want to do Lasarium too.

1:25:57 - Andy Ihnatko
And I'm not ashamed to say that I first learned about Geddy Lee and Rush because of the Bob and Doug McK mckenzie album, because getty lee soloed on the hit single part of the album I'd never heard of him before I said oh, that's right, it's very canadian fees.

1:26:11 - Jason Snell
Yeah, to get getty lee in there, yeah, I don't know. We there isn't an award every week to the person who derails the show the most.

1:26:19 - Alex Lindsay
But if there was, I think I just want it. So yeah, man, I'd like to thank the academy podcast on.

1:26:25 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not about the awards jason, it's about the satisfaction of having made an impact I, uh, I have to say I owe the game my appreciation, uh for rush to believe it or not.

1:26:36 - Leo Laporte
adam sandler, uh, who uh played uh tom sawyer in one of his, forced his friend to play it with him and I thought that's a pretty good song. I should listen to more of that.

1:26:48 - Alex Lindsay
I think mine was mostly. There's only one station that half of Pittsburgh would listen to when I was growing up, which is WDBE, and so that was like literally 50% cube Nice, so it was. So then there's a lot. It's AOR um album oriented rock. So yeah, led Zeppelin and Leonard Skinner and Rush.

1:27:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, there's our uh rat hole for the. I love it.

1:27:14 - Alex Lindsay
I know it's great.

1:27:15 - Leo Laporte
This show is traditionally thank you, I've been a rat hole, love it, uh. What would we do without the rat hole? You, I've been a rat hole, love it, uh. What would we do without the rat hole? You're watching mac break weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason. And a special thank you to our club members who make this show possible. They make all our shows possible. Now, at least, it told me the other day I was blown away that 25 of our operating costs come from club memberships. That means if we didn't have you, if we didn't have the club, uh, we'd have to cut 25 of our shows, 25 of our staff. Um, and believe me, cutting 25 of Alex Lindsay would just be so hard I don't know which quarter of him we would cut. So, thank you, club members.

10 bucks a month, what do you get? Ad? Free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit discord, which is a great place. Even when there aren't shows on, we talk all the time in the club twit discord. You also get access to special events and shows we don't do anywhere else. Our ai user group is friday. That's been a really exciting thing. You know we do an AI show on Wednesday intelligent machines. But the user group is really hands-on and there are a lot of people in the club who are using ai for vibe coding and and image design and stuff, so it's a really. In fact, alex, you should come by and show us how you use mid journey. Uh, I'd love to just are you?

ever available on a friday at 2 pm. Uh, yeah, I think I can make that work. This Friday I'd love to see you because you do stuff with Midjourney no one else can do. We are going to do the following Friday, august 8th, stacy's book club. Jason agrees this is an incredible book. This is how you lose the time war, and it's short. It's really a novella, so you could read it now and be ready for august 8th. Uh, highly recommended. It really is a wonderful, wonderful book. I listened to the audiobook version, which is a wonderful, wonderful book. I listened to the audio book version, which is fantastic.

Right after the book club, Chris Marquardt, his monthly photo segment. These are all club-only events. We also make video available for a number of shows that are audio only in public, like hands on apple, hands on windows, uh, the Scott Wilkinson's incredible home theater geeks this week in space. So you get video as well. We also do keynotes in the club only because we've been taken down once too many uh times. Uh, so, for instance, the google made by google event coming up august 20th, where they're going to announce the by google event coming up august 20th, where they're going to announce the highly pre-announced pixel 10. We will. We will see if the? Uh, the pre-announcements are correct which they were, because they came from google. Anyway, we'll. We'll do that event, uh, on Wednesday, august 20th, Mikah's crafting corner.

I think I might do my button sewing in crafting corner. In fact, I've promised the club Mikah does this once a month. It's a very chill, relaxed place. He has lately been doing Lego, lego plants, but you could do any kind of craft coating, sewing, knitting, whatever you like to do. A number people do cooking, I'm gonna do buttoning, I'm gonna. I am gonna get a rag. I have ordered now a button sewing kit and the staple gun from singer that staples buttons on it. We'll do a live, chill comparison in Mikah's crafting corner that's coming up august 20th.

All of this by way of saying please join the club. There are lots of benefits for you and it's a huge benefit for us. Find out more at twit.tv/clubtwit. There's a two week free trial if you want to see what it's like. Uh, there's uh corporate memberships. There's family plans too. twit.tv/clubtwit. Thank you for your support. On we go with the show. Um, let's see. Developers can now try their apple's kind of loosened up, and I think this is because of the eu the rules for developers. They can now try special offers to persuade subscribers to stay. This benefits us right and benefits developers. That's a good thing.

1:31:17 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's the thing where, if you try to cancel, say, what if we cut your monthly thing in half or made it free for three months? Or what if we just simply put a pause in your subscription for six months and then re-enabled it? Yeah, these are good things, I think.

1:31:38 - Leo Laporte
UK is ready to join the pile on Apple and Google. The British Antitrust Agency is looking at new European-style controls for both Google and Apple in the UK, including EU-style curbs on app stores. Apple said the new rules could hamper our ability to innovate and force us to give away our technology for free to foreigners. So there yeah, they.

1:32:10 - Andy Ihnatko
They basically declared, uh, google and Apple together to be a co-monopoly and therefore subject to like rules on real home behavior.

1:32:19 - Leo Laporte
Okay that is a little stretch. I mean usually a monopoly means you own 80 or 90 of the market. Uh, if two companies own 80 or 90 of the market, they're a co-monopoly, unless they're colluding no, I, I don't know they're, they're.

1:32:33 - Andy Ihnatko
They're basically coming to the point where it doesn't matter that one platform has fewer and fewer desk excuse me has fewer customers in the UK than others. It's not final, final yet. It doesn't go into effect until, excuse me, apple has until October to file a protest or again complain or make a very, very cogent argument about how this will harm the security and the privacy and the features that are offered to UK customers. But yeah, it's the next step towards what Apple would consider Armageddon.

1:33:03 - Leo Laporte
UK doesn't have the best record in confrontations with Apple. They've now backed down on the request to Apple to provide unencrypted text from messaging, even for people outside the UK. Apple, remember, withdrew its advanced protection from the UK and now the UK says I'm sorry yeah, after, after protests from the US government.

1:33:29 - Andy Ihnatko
So that was like no, we're not going to let you spy on United States citizens, or necessarily, right?

1:33:34 - Leo Laporte
it's government people yeah, actually, the director of National Intelligence said we have deals with the uk. This is not. This is not cool. Is what she said? No, she didn't say that, but she thought it. Blender is coming to the ipad. This might be very interesting. I've always found blender difficult to use. Alex, it's a pretty good tool, though. Right for 3d design for free.

1:33:58 - Alex Lindsay
Free, it's great. So you know it's a good app. I mean it's a solid app. People can build with it. It doesn't cost anything to use it. They've gotten large donations from companies like Unreal as well as Apple. Apple has given to the Blenderorg Good, because if you're trying to make sure that everyone can build geometry for your virtual world, having them not have to pay for it upfront is useful. So Blender has become kind of the. You know they're getting funded by a lot of companies that want to see more geometry being generated. So so that's great and I think that you know. Obviously I don't think Apple gave them any directives, but obviously the money that they got probably made it easier to port.

1:34:38 - Leo Laporte
We should be clear. I mean, blender has always been available on the Mac, but this puts it on the but in general for a long time, for a long time.

1:34:46 - Alex Lindsay
And and, so the and and it. It's a good app. It's gotten much better. I mean, I think in the early days a lot of us looked at it kind of like okay, well, it's free. It's kind of likeIMP.

1:34:55 - Leo Laporte
You know it was GIMP 4. Yeah, it was hard to use 3D and weird it's still a little weird, but not.

1:35:01 - Alex Lindsay
But it's definitely gotten much better and much more mainstream. As far as its tools, it's not going to replace something like if you're using Cinema 4D for broadcast, it's not going to replace it. You know, most people are still using things like Maya and Houdini and so on and so forth film work, um. But if you're like I, I'm using blender for my 3d printing, because I'm mostly because I'm trying to learn it, you know, and uh, so I'm trying to learn blender, and so when I'm, I force myself to model things in blender, which is I'm getting better at it, and uh, and I think it's harder to have used other platforms in the standard platforms because it's kind of non-standard right it's.

It's got a lot of standard stuff in it. I mean, if you're doing subdivision, you know it doesn't do NURBS, which I grew up working with.

1:35:44 - Leo Laporte
So I'm kind of used to non-uniform rational B-splines is where it's all at.

1:35:47 - Alex Lindsay
And so I'm used to having a little bit more control over what I'm doing than what I have there, but overall it does that and again, it's always just like learning the interface, like what are the quick keys and what are the fat? You know how do I get to this over here? And I have to admit, the thing that's working for me really well is again ChatGPT. I sit there and go how do I do this, how do I do this, how do I do this, how do I do this? And it just says a script that builds the object so it's the blender.

1:36:28 - Leo Laporte
Folks say you know, we wanted to offer a touch interface. So we're looking not just at the ipad but the surface and the mate pad and the wacom, uh, moving pad, uh, so that people can use uh, it makes sense touch devices to do this 3D design.

1:36:39 - Andy Ihnatko
And it'll extend to more people. I mean, one of the nicest things about Blender is that there's a huge community behind it, so if you do want to start learning it, there's no shortage of tutorials on how to do it. I mean, the standard thing is there's a donut tutorial that's kind of famous, gets updated every single year. This one Blender user that just takes you to okay, here's how you make a donut, and then it's okay, let's add sprinkles to the donut. Now you understand. Like particles, like okay, now let's change the lighting on the donut. Now let's give frosting onto the donut and we'll decide to make a crossing.

1:37:10 - Leo Laporte
Can we call it a toroid? I'm hungry, the donut thing is.

1:37:15 - Jason Snell
Toroids. Just a fact about blender that's fun is that this year's uh, best animated feature um, which is called flow in the at the oscars was made entirely in blender.

1:37:27 - Leo Laporte
That is pretty impressive that's very cool. Yeah, uh made on blender. Uh, blender guru, according to nightscape in our club, is the youtube channel to watch if you want to learn how to use Blender. Wow, they made Flow all in Blender.

1:37:44 - Alex Lindsay
It's pretty beautiful. You can do a lot with it. I mean, it is a very powerful, powerful app. Again, if you talk to someone who uses Maya or Houdini, they'll be like well. Or Cinema 4D for certain things, they'll be like well, there's like a lot of things missing in those areas. But overall, can you tell a great story, can you build a lot of stuff for free. Yeah, yeah, it's very functional.

1:38:07 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, very, very functional. I love it. Just because you think back to when you were like a teenager, when you were in junior high and high school, the amount of free time you had to be absolutely obsessed with something, that you were fascinated by the number. So the number of the generation of kids that is are basically learning, uh, 3d modeling and animation and filmmaking with these kinds of tools. They're gonna, it's just going to be phenomenal what they do when they become an adult and now they're making. Now they have access to the big boy tools because they didn't just simply have to start learning at 23, 24. It's like no, they think, in terms of how to animate this way and how to populate a scene this way, and it's going to be fascinating.

1:38:45 - Alex Lindsay
And Blender's gotten more aggressive about you know how they're going to work with AI. Because it's so scriptable, the AI ties into it fairly effectively. As far as building, geometry and so on and so forth and geometric, there's you know there's a lot of scenarioai. I think scenarioai is really going pretty far with being able to generate really articulated 3D models from AI, and so as you start to see that happen, that's really going to change a lot of things. So being able to just say I want a pizza or I want a house or a car and not get some kind of like weird piley thing of polygons but actual wheels and things that you could animate and everything else, and then what's going to happen, of course, is that you'll be able to, you know, mix your animation with, you know, with AI, adding things like.

The interesting thing about motion capture, for instance, is it's really easy to capture someone doing a fight scene, you know, like doing big moves. It's really hard to animate them standing waiting for a bus, like so. So like that's the hard thing to animate because there's so much, these subconscious little things we're doing to maintain our balance, to uh that, that, that our our personality. You know, if anyone's ever. If you've ever looked at someone way off in the distance, you know it's them. Your eyes don't know that yet, but just by the way they're walking, you understand who they are. You don't know why that is, but you'll know that that's them and that's the kind of stuff that you know, these subtleties, that a, that AI will eventually be able to add something that's a certain character to um that you don't.

1:40:12 - Leo Laporte
that an animator can worry about the bigger picture um, and be able to have it fill in a lot of the other bits and pieces, and to contradict what I said about it being hard to learn, the Flow team of young animators learned how to use Blender in a week, so that's pretty good. Blender's grease pencil was also used in effects for Spider-Man, so I guess it's being used more and more in some. This is the across-the-universe version of Spider-Man, so I guess it's being used more and more in some. This is the across the universe version of Spider-Man. It's being used in more and more interesting ways In something that's more animated.

1:40:46 - Alex Lindsay
like that it makes sense. It was when you start doing like visual effects that it is a little.

1:40:52 - Leo Laporte
I like Blender plus AI, though that sounds kind of interesting.

1:40:55 - Alex Lindsay
I think we get a lot of 3D plus AI pretty soon, but Blender plus ai because it's so scriptable at the right in its core.

1:41:05 - Leo Laporte
Um, there's a lot of opportunity in blender. That might be harder in other other apps. Yeah, uh, the flow website has their uh workflow, if you will. Um uh on how they used uh blender, so that sounds kind of cool. Um, all right, what else? What else is hot and exciting? Adobe has added some new generative ai features for photoshop oh, they started charging for it too.

1:41:33 - Alex Lindsay
Oh that. So, like they, they definitely added some features. I I haven't been, I hadn't been doing a bunch of stuff, I'm just used to having Photoshop do all this stuff for me. And I have to admit, it started saying you're now using these credits. And I have to say, as someone who's used Photoshop for a long time, you know like to me, my subscription that I pay I don't know how much a month for to me was like I get to use it, it should cover it.

And now that they're now they're that they're giving me credits, if I run out of credits, it's probably a month or two before I stop using photoshop, like you know, like it's. You know like it's I haven't run into that yet, it's still generating. But it suddenly created this level of stress for me that I didn't have before and I was just like, well, this might be the end after you know, 25 or actually almost 35 years. Uh, this might be the end of my photoshop usage, if it does, because the only reason I'm still there is because of the gen I, gen, ai. I mean I can do everything else in other apps I paid I.

1:42:30 - Leo Laporte
I found a light room for iOS subscription for 60 bucks a year that seems. I thought that was worth it on my ipad so I did pay for that and you get five credits, I think in the generation of ai thing on photos lightroom on mobile is just amazing.

1:42:47 - Andy Ihnatko
It's it's the difference between the picture and I'm talking about any. Any phone, no matter how good it is, it will not probably not take a picture the way that you imagined it is, and lightroom will lightroom mobile. It makes it so easy to turn it into the thing that you thought it turn it into the reason why you took that picture, and so, for me, like just that is worth the money, and I just think that we're starting to see a lot of companies realizing exactly how much compute that all these AI generative features are costing them and trying to figure out is there a way that we can take the features that we can give away as part of the subscription and separate out the ones that are so expensive that we really do have to at least encourage people to use them for things that they actually value and not actually screw around with?

1:43:38 - Leo Laporte
There's a little mismatch in the market, because open AI has raised so many billions of dollars that they can continue to give away stuff, whereas Adobe hasn't, and they're using their own models Firefly and so it's really costing them and they don't have that deep pool of money that some of these other companies, these startups, have.

1:43:56 - Jason Snell
Yeah, well and that's why I can see why they charge.

1:43:59 - Leo Laporte
I mean, they don't have they have a deep pool of money for people charging you know, 90 a month I gotta tell you

1:44:06 - Andy Ihnatko
well, it depends. It depends on what you're. I'm paying something like less than twenty dollars for this this is a stealth.

1:44:14 - Jason Snell
Uh, everybody slack is doing this too, like everybody. Everybody is using ai as an excuse to just raise prices. Right, and some of them there is ai cost, right, but like I'll just, you know, adobe gives me because I'm on the photoshop plan, they give me cloud storage that I do not want. Yeah, they keep shoving it at me.

Yeah I don't want it either I don't want that too, but like it's a thing that they can put on a checklist. And now, with this ai thing's a thing that they can put on a checklist, and now, with this AI thing, it's another thing they can put on a checklist. The weird thing about this, too that I think is really unfortunate, is there is apparently a plan level that is a different price, that doesn't have the AI stuff in it, but regular customers don't get it, only existing customers. New customers won't be able to see it. And to Alex's point, adobe has done a good job with a bunch of generative stuff, but like the idea that that it's all going to be this credit based barter system when you're already paying, uh, a large amount of money every month or year for your adobe products, I don't know I mean it's an excuse to upcharge everybody and make more profit I can see that if someone was using it more than me, then you know, like if they were using it every hour of every day and they're pushing it.

1:45:22 - Alex Lindsay
they may want to be so if the stop abuse.

I haven't figured out where the where the ceiling is yet. But if the ceiling is somewhere you know, like if the ceiling is high enough, it might not bother me. But if I start hitting the ceiling with my regular opportunity which I'm not a huge, I'm not. I used to spend all day in photoshop. I don't spend all day in a photoshop anymore, so it's usually an hour or two on average a day that I might be in there doing something um the uh. But if that starts to become something that's impacted, I can definitely see myself going well, I can. There's lots of janitor phil that I can do somewhere else. It's not as convenient as photoshop, but I could. You know, um, there's lots of places that can do it. I mean these days, you know, yeah, I mean what you can do.

1:46:02 - Andy Ihnatko
All I can say, all I want to say, is that I'm not ready yet to ascribe this to Adobe, just looking for ways to upcharge.

I need to know a little bit more about how much they're spending for whatever they're.

I don't know who they're using for compute whether it's Google or Amazon or Azure or whatever like that but I can definitely see with a lot of the stuff that they're trying to do here, that I don't know any generative AI tool that doesn't either put a cap on how many things you can generate or charges extra for extra access. Uh, like I've I've been using vo3 on on my, my google paid account, and there's still a cap on how many clips you can you're allowed to do within a certain with a certain time frame before you have to start paying extra. And I don't maybe it's because I'm in on the ground floor and I'm getting I've I started off with this understanding of how these things, how you pay for these things uh, instead of like my bucking and simply saying, oh well, these should be free or these should be part of like a 20 plan. But I do associate the high level of expense in generating this stuff with not something that I should be getting necessarily for free not something that I should be getting necessarily for free.

1:47:22 - Leo Laporte
Hey, I'm excited. My iPhone is now iOS 26 and my mom is speaking in tongues, which is pretty, pretty cool. Uh, that is the weird. It just looks like gum or something. Uh, all right. Anyway, hi, mom, she speaks so many languages now. It's pretty cool. Look at that. Look at that. Anyway, I'm excited. Now I'm gonna put all of the texts asking for money and offering me a job into that unknown I never heard of you folder. Go away, put it in the hole. Put it in the hole. The text hole. Mom, you really really reached a. Oh, she's going the other way now. Right to left, right to left. Look at that. Wow, chinese uh does.

1:48:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Does the liquid flow from right to left, even in english?

1:48:09 - Leo Laporte
if it's, you're in australia oh yeah, my coats down there must be that must be a developer dog, I don't know mom is in a golden cloud, I don't know what, what continent?

hola? Hey, I don't. I want to just kind of leave this. I like it. Mom's saying hi to everybody. Um, let's see what else before we go. Are you excited about pluribus? That is the weirdest trailer, but I love it. Uh, that, uh, ria is in it. Vince gilligan's new science fiction drama, rhea seahorn, who was wonderful and better called sol stars in a uh well, I don't know. All I saw was her licking toroids.

1:48:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, there's a weird. There's a weird premise. I mean, I think the rumor is that the premise is like the the there's a happiness plague that is spreading and the one unhappy person in the world has to try and stop it, which is hilarious. If you're, if you're wondering why the breaking bad guy is making a sci-fi series for apple tv, I'll just point out that he is one of the uh people who came out of the x-files, so he's got a, he's got a background in this kind of weird sci-fi stuff.

I didn't realize that yeah, yeah, yeah, vince gilligan was one of the producers on the x-files, um and uh, and so I think this is a genre that he's very comfortable with and I'm looking forward to that, and also the fact that apple seems to be really leaning into the fact that you can make some really great, um, dramatic, high quality, modern sci-fi on TV, and I don't know if there's a better source for great sci-fi shows on TV right now than Apple TV+. Honestly, they have a really great catalog, a bunch of great stuff that they're doing. Yeah, it's pretty nice yeah.

1:49:53 - Andy Ihnatko
Pretty weird though that like this isn't like part of the Breaking Bad universe, but it does take place in Albuquerque.

1:50:00 - Leo Laporte
That was. I mean, is there an Aztec in it?

1:50:03 - Andy Ihnatko
I know it must be that you know he knows the infrastructure, he trusts the infrastructure, he knows how to shoot in that town.

1:50:08 - Jason Snell
Crew and uh, and sets and all of that. I mean a lot of stuff. This is the thing that doesn't get talked about enough but, like, a lot of creative decisions are made because you know the people or you know the facilities, like this is the famous like why did Magnum PI exist? It's because Hawaii five oh went off the air and they wanted to use the sets and stuff in Hawaii. And then, when Magnum PI went off, why did Jake and the fat man move?

to Hawaii for season two? And the answer is because they wanted to use that infrastructure when lost went off the air. Why? Because they wanted to use that infrastructure when lost went off the air. Uh, why did they do a new Hawaii five, oh, and Magnum PI? And the answer is because they had this whole infrastructure they'd built for lost shooting on a Wahoo and so, and that happens now, that happens in Atlanta, that happens in in Albuquerque, that's happening in in in, uh, parts of England, in the doctor who phenomenon um, is why they shoot shows in Cardiff in Wales. Now, like, once you get a cluster of professionals and studio space and all of that, you kind of are like why would I not use those people and go back to that place, especially if it was your show that set it up to be, your two shows that set it up to begin.

1:51:17 - Leo Laporte
There's still that pizza up on the roof that you know has been sitting there for years that poor homeowner, new mexico people come to that house right and they threw and they try to throw pizzas up on the roof. This was a scene from breaking bad uh, where brian cranston gets upset and it's the biggest pizza I ever saw and sails it up onto the roof where it sits and apparently people go to that house thing to do.

1:51:41 - Alex Lindsay
I'm sure that adds a lot of value to the house. Yeah, I mean, you know New Mexico was one of the first tax cut, tax credit.

Oh now we know Now we know, and so they were able to build. That's why you see a lot of stuff out of Albuquerque or this, or designed around the desert Right or designed around the desert, because they have a lot of they have and so they're one of the first ones out there. They built up a lot of infrastructure. Netflix has massive stages there as well as other. There's a lot of general stages.

Same thing that, as Jason said, atlanta, louisiana those are the big, probably the big three states. There's other folks that try. California tries to keep up. They're trying to build their own. They have their own tax credit system. The limit was too low, so the ceiling was too low. They're bringing that, that ceiling, up.

The problem is is that there are so many rules about how to do things. In LA now as well, there's a lot of in the movie industry. There's a lot of discussion about the rules and, and because of that, the way the rules are set up in combination with california tax law on top of the breaks. It's actually someone will say someone said I wrote it's cheaper to shoot in london than it is in la, like when you fly your entire la crew to london to shoot, to shoot um than it is in in la. So all that's why a lot of this work is going to, uh, other other states right now. Um, because you know so, it's, it's a, and new mexico is a huge benefactor of that process. But that's why a lot of stuff happens in albuquerque or arizona, or wyoming, like. All of those are albuquerque, you know, they're all, you know, they're all there shot in the desert did?

1:53:15 - Leo Laporte
uh, did brian cranston know that the pizza was going to stay on the roof, or do you think? Or here's the, here's the. I'm going to show a little clip I have to show. Just show that. I don't have your computer screen, leo. Oh, that's right. All right, there we go. Now. You do well, forget it. Just a little, a little clip of the pizza. Pizza, that's got to be the most. You can't plan that.

1:53:41 - Jason Snell
In fact, that was actually not planned, that just happened.

1:53:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because otherwise you'd have to do a thousand takes.

1:53:48 - Andy Ihnatko
Because I imagine, like them just putting it like 24, 30 pizzas, like all standing by and the crew saying please get on the third.

1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
Take Please throw more pizzas. Yeah, yeah, we don't mind a little gravel in our pizza. Bruce said please get on a third take, please throw more pizzas.

1:54:01 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they did many takes, but that was the winner because of what happens to the pizza there. If I own that house I would probably have a you know, a fake pizza there, just to shut everybody up, so people wouldn't do it.

1:54:10 - Leo Laporte
That's probably a good idea.

1:54:11 - Jason Snell
No, she actually had to get a fence up because two people were visiting and she was getting harassed. Yeah, you hear those stories about anybody it's true of like the Full House house in San Francisco.

1:54:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, that's on Alamo Square.

1:54:24 - Jason Snell
I mean anybody who's had like anything. What was it?

1:54:27 - Andy Ihnatko
We drove by the In Boulder, the Mork and Mindy house, yeah, yeah, and like that's 40 years ago, 50 years ago, almost the owners of Carrie, carrie's brown brown house and uh, sex in the city got actual permission to install like wrought iron gates yes, which is? Not, which is not normally associated with, because too many people were.

1:54:48 - Jason Snell
Oh, I gotta get a picture on carrie's steps and they're like I gotta, I gotta, baby, I gotta get in my house now get out of my way.

1:54:56 - Leo Laporte
One more story before we go to our pics of the week. But I I just got to ask you this iPhone 17 spotted in the wild, is this bs or is this?

1:55:06 - Jason Snell
no, that's totally true they have those in wraps in, in that they take them out and they and they do testing and they're in big cases. So you can't see anything about the design, although I think there's a mistake here where they got the shot of the cameras and the uh and the sensors and that's sort of the giveaway that that's an iPhone.

1:55:22 - Andy Ihnatko
But that's the it's. It's easier to spot because the camera, the camera bar, is now so prominent and so different. Yeah, I think the, I think the person, the person who reported it, was also saying there was also a guy who was kind of hovering around trying to like give that guy body man, the body man, yep it is.

1:55:40 - Jason Snell
That's a big, thick case yeah, yeah, they're covering up because they want to cover up. It's just like wrapping a car or something like they want to cover up, so you don't know what the silhouette is and you don't know what the color is, and all that. Now, why he's out there, I don't know. But they do go out, they. They definitely do go out, but they're all kind of like covered up, so and like as he he's.

1:55:59 - Alex Lindsay
I assume he's not at apple like, but then how does he get?

1:56:02 - Leo Laporte
no, he's an apple employee. He's got to be an apple employee.

1:56:04 - Alex Lindsay
Well, you know, they, you know, they say that you can do anything you want at apple on your last day yep all right, all right, there we go good luck to that guy yeah, good luck, good luck.

1:56:15 - Leo Laporte
That's gonna be a really short trip you think really Really no, he had to go out. Oh man, he said look, go out and do QC, you got to go do testing.

1:56:25 - Jason Snell
If he was ordered to do it and he got ambushed, then he's fine. It's not his fault. You know, if he was like I'm going to sneak out with the phone, no, I don't think. But you know, I I do think that they know that there's going to be. This is not the first time this has happened. Like they're, if you're out in the wild, if if somebody was granted the permission to take an iPhone out in public, you do risk this like yeah it's part of it.

1:56:51 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't careless yeah yeah, uh, this broke this morning from Mark Gurman. Apple has lost yet another AI researcher to Meta's super intelligence team. Bowen Zhang, who was really great on Saturday Night Live, has now apparently is an AI engineer. No, I'm just joking. He works in the multimodal AI division at Apple. Set to join Meta. Total AI division at Apple set to join Meta. He is following his former boss, roaming Pang, and also Tom Gunter and Mark Lee. We've talked about that.

1:57:35 - Jason Snell
Pang was rumored to get more than $200 million to jump ship. I congratulate whatever Meta.

1:57:42 - Leo Laporte
HR person is a good friend of Mark kerman.

1:57:43 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, I'm gonna get this every job like everybody who moves out of apple's ai group apparently gets a mark kerman story now although, although you know I, I think he's getting it from linkedin sometimes.

1:57:54 - Leo Laporte
Right, the people posted on linkedin could be.

1:57:57 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I've got a new job I'm hundreds of millions of dollars in that organization who are telling him that those people are leaving, and he's probably got people in the new organization who are saying that person is coming and yeah, he's wired, he's got it who in the bay area has just bought a solid gold hat, does this?

1:58:17 - Andy Ihnatko
does he work for apple?

1:58:18 - Leo Laporte
okay, just so we have a good thumbnail, I'm going to put this hat on and, uh, john ashley, just turn that into gold, will you all right? He got the shot, uh we're going to take a break. I made it black so it's really easy to replace all the black use a photoshop credit on that, make it.

1:58:36 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I'm putting it on twit's time yeah, it's on our dime.

1:58:42 - Leo Laporte
Uh, we have. Don't we have like a complete creative cloud subscription for you, john? No, we do. I was yeah, that's what I thought I spent a lot of money. I think we have multiple, like six or seven full creative cloud licenses for the uh, well, it's going up in price, but you might want to look at that how do you feel about affinity photo? We'll be back in just a moment. It's time for the picks of the week. You're watching mac break weekly with Andy, alex and jason.

1:59:13 - Jason Snell
Let's start our picks of the week with uh, jason snell I'm gonna harken back to an app that was Renee's pick about 400 episodes ago. Hasn't been apparently mentioned since, and I mentioned it earlier today. So in switching from launch bar to spotlight, one of the things that I miss is being able to insert an emoji by naming it. You know command space and naming it and a great utility If you would like Slack style or Discord style, press colon and you can set it to something else. But that whole idea of like colon and then the name of the emoji and it auto-suggests and then you hit return and the emoji gets put in there.

1:59:49 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it does animated GIFs as well, though.

1:59:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah, so Rocket is the name of this. It's free. There's a $10 upgrade for all the pro features to unlock. It's been around like long enough for Renee to have uh recommended in an episode 500 and something, but like it's, it's very good. You can say what apps you don't want it to appear in, because sometimes you are typing colons and it gets in your way and you have to say stop, rocket, don't do that. But um, but it's a really great I. I really like the way that Slack implemented the kind of like type colon and then an emoji to insert it, rather than having to bring up the emoji picker and do a search and then click or whatever. Uh, and this does that. Uh, it just runs in the background.

2:00:28 - Leo Laporte
Change the colon to some other character. The reason I ask is that is in in common list. That is the property. Yeah, I would be typing that every time. I literally have that uh turned off in bb. Edit. That is the property yeah.

2:00:39 - Jason Snell
I would be typing that every time. I literally have that turned off in BBEdit for that reason, because I'm typing stuff and it's like, would you like an emoji here? And I'm like, no, no, no, yes, you can choose the trigger key and you can choose a double key trigger if you want. Where you have to double it, it's like double colon.

In order to get it out of your way. But but, and then you can. You can zap the apps you don't want to ever see it in and you can also like it's got a fuzzy search so it makes it easier to find emoji, even if you didn't quite get the name right. A lot of detail, like as an app that's been out for a while. It's got a lot of preferences that you can you can set so you can get it out of your way. But it's there when you need it, and that that is one of those things that I just I I used to use launch bar. They poured that in there at some point. I was like, great, this is how I'm going to use emoji and I miss it.

2:01:25 - Leo Laporte
So rocket is the answer I, uh, that's good, because I I like I in obsidian, I like to put emojis everywhere wherever I can.

2:01:33 - Jason Snell
So this is so you could say it's a double colon or some other. I mean, really it's just a keystroke that you're otherwise not using Back tick or whatever it is and then you can double it and at that point it's very unlikely to come up, and that's the whole point of it, so you just use it as a shortcut.

2:01:50 - Leo Laporte
Nice, I just downloaded it and installed it as you were speaking. It's just that simple. The system works.

The system works. One of the things I have been playing with uh, I am, as you know, a big perplexity user and perplexity has added the ability to add a mcp to it and you can. The one I turned on, uh, lets it execute arbitrary apple script. Yeah, so I can now ask perplexity to do things like add an entry to fantastical, and it will open fantastical because it understands Apple script well enough, I guess, to do that and add the entry. That is a very nice feature yeah, you can use.

2:02:34 - Jason Snell
You should be able now to use the long play app. That was my pick maybe last week or two weeks ago. It has an mcp server, so you could also use. I was using it with claude, but perplexity will let you do it too, I think, because it's using mcp to say basically like hey, have long play, find an album in my library that you know meets whatever criteria, and it will. You know, this is the great thing about mcp is it will let you do scripting, basically where the ai is able to ask your app for information and then tell it what to do.

2:03:03 - Leo Laporte
It's pretty so it basically the way it works is because the ai already speaks those languages. You, the, the mcp becomes a connector to other things and the language, in this case the one I use, that with apple script and that's the one they use in the example.

2:03:21 - Jason Snell
Actually, um right, right and then makes it possible to operate anything that uses the apple script yeah, it's clever and I mean they're like, uh, with long play.

Basically there's like a little dictionary, it's very much like apple script and and mcp lets you just sort of say here's what I can do, and then the, the, the, the agent, the AI bot can say, oh great, well then I know like a lot of things about music and I also know what's in your library and I can do a search and I can get a result and then I can, I can perform an action and add that to your you know a collection, or I can start playing it or whatever. And I feel like there's this is definitely a future direction for lots of automation on devices, because this is how you get you know. To have your agent be able to control your computer and do stuff is a is a really exciting potential future phenomenal very, very exciting.

2:04:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Uh, Andy and I'll go pick of the week let our love be a flame, not not an ember. Say it's me that you want to dismember. Blacken my eyes, set fire to my tie as we dance through the masochism tango.

2:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Stop it.

2:04:29 - Andy Ihnatko
You're violating Tom Lehrer's copyrights, andrew no because Tom Lehrer, who unfortunately we lost this week at the age of 96, not unexpected, but oh well, he actually released all of his songs into the public domain some years ago, yes, and so you can get his entire catalog at tomlehrsongscom T-O-M-L-E-H-R-E-R-S-O-N-G-Scom. They have raw files of each of his albums. They also have additional downloads for like if you want to mix. Some of the master tapes also wound up on top there. It's amazing.

It's like he and this was not something that he just said oh what after I die? No, this is part of his amazingly interesting relationship to his career as a musician that when he went out, he just basically decided I'm out, I'm not interested in this anymore, I'm just a math teacher and a music teacher in Santa Cruz and at Harvard and MIT. He just like sort of spontaneously while talking to a friend, saying oh no, I'll. I wrote this paragraph by paragraph in all forms and all ways. If you want to create new music for the lyrics, go ahead. If you want to create new lyrics for the music, go ahead. If you want to remix it, this is no longer my property. God bless him.

This belongs to everybody.

2:05:49 - Leo Laporte
What an amazing guy.

2:05:52 - Andy Ihnatko
BuzzFeed wrote an amazing biography of him in 2014 that also, if you're interested in him, that tries to go into why he made these decisions that he did. I mean, he was so thorough that even the master tapes for his recording they were just in a box in his basement and I don't know whether it was a friend or a fan or a friend fan was just helping him go through old boxes and he said, oh, if you'd like, I'd be happy to archive things and help you organize it. So, oh, take it. Like what do you mean? Take it? No, you're the master tape.

2:06:22 - Alex Lindsay
Go, take, do whatever you want with them they're yours exactly so it's.

2:06:26 - Leo Laporte
It's really quite amazing, but the music is still super fantastic, yeah, I uh, we eulogized him on sunday on twit and I played the elements song, which I love, in which he set to the I am the model of a modern major General sings every element and we got taken down on YouTube. Huh, and it's like dudes. Yeah, this is this is not not creative, this is public domain.

2:06:54 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is so this is why.

2:06:56 - Leo Laporte
I hate content ID. It doesn't care, and the trouble is that in order. That's the problem yeah, some ass claimed it and uh, and now, uh, to defend myself I'd have to do all this stuff. So we got demonetized on youtube for twit this is very.

2:07:14 - Jason Snell
This is a there is a whole scam industry where people upload content they don't own as the copyright owner and then shake people down to drop their claims.

2:07:26 - Alex Lindsay
I will admit, with Office Hours I decided specifically I'm not going to make any money on ads and so I feel invincible because I just put stuff up whenever I want and I get these little flags that say you're going to be demonetized Okay, but demonetizing isn't the only option.

2:07:40 - Leo Laporte
that's the least, no, no draconian option they can give you a strike if they want.

2:07:44 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I haven't. I haven't gotten a strike yet, so so I don't play the eagles. So you're like, that's the.

2:07:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, and the truth is this scammer whoever you know took it uh, does want the money. So all they're going to do is they're going to. They're going to say we're going to take that money that you'd earn on twit and we're going to put it in my pocket, yeah, uh, but there's no good defense to this.

2:08:03 - Andy Ihnatko
It's just a pain in the ass yeah, but that's why a lot of these, a lot of these laws that that are in effect on basically giving uh, giving companies like Google and Facebook and Apple responsibility for taking down illegal content. The thing is like they are going to create a system by which the law, the gravity of the of the operations, is going to be to favor taking things down, not favor making sure that they're not taking things down.

2:08:31 - Leo Laporte
That's the take it down act we see the safest easiest and least expensive things.

2:08:36 - Andy Ihnatko
If someone makes a complaint, it's gone, and we'll make it extremely difficult for the person to say hey, wait a minute. This is actually someone who sampled one of my own YouTube videos and now they're copyright and claim the original video.

2:08:49 - Leo Laporte
So a little pro tip for those of you who hear Andy say it's public domain it is public domain, but don't play it on your podcast.

2:08:56 - Alex Lindsay
And on the other side of that, I know obviously a lot of YouTubers, and on the other side of that, on the other, I know you know obviously a lot of youtubers and on the other side of that you have people who are constantly taking youtubers videos down and putting them back up as their own.

You know, oh, it happens to us all the time so there's this, so the other we don't, do, we don't yeah, but the issue is is that that you know it's just a mess? It's very, very difficult to to um police. That's the problem.

2:09:18 - Leo Laporte
Alex, your pick of the week. I know you don't pick that.

2:09:22 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, no. So I keep my phone pretty carefully in a case with a screen protector and occasionally I drop my phone often enough where it's cracked enough that I have to go replace it, and I go through a lot of different screen protectors to figure out which one. But I've kind of settled down. And I go through a lot of different screen protectors to figure out which one, but I've kind of settled down and this is the screen protector that I use for these. Now, the best one, the one that was the easiest one, was when I used to buy them and you go to Apple and Apple has some kind of crazy tool that they use to put them on. This is as close to that as you can get and it's from Magic John. I don't know why it's magic john, hey magic john.

So many his son is good at basketball. Yeah, exactly, yeah, john, anyway. So so this one here's. The deal is, this one's got an applicator. That's not like you trying to figure out how to line it up. Um, it is very, very clear. And when you open it up, it gives you a um. And it's just on the top of my mind because I just bought one. I just bought this the other day from mine and realized it's got the little kit. It comes with two of them, so if you screw one up, you don't have to do it again. It comes with a little scraper thing that you need and then it comes.

Here's the best part, the best part of the whole thing. It comes with a QR code code and you take the qr code and it's a slightly funny but very effective video to tell you exactly how not and how not to, how, how to and how not to. Um, uh, put the out and it'll tell you. Do not put your fingers here. Put your fingers here, do not. And he's a little eastern european with, like some pop music in the background. There's something about it that's very super cheesy and fun. But he's got like the big bracelets and everything else like um, there's something about it that's very super cheesy and fun. But he's got like the big bracelets and everything else, like there's something about it. That's really that's fun, you know, and and and it's gotten like a million views.

So I imagine a bunch of us have bought the screen protector on cause it's on YouTube, you know, like it's a link that just guess what I would say for people who make the products everyone has there are. You go to Amazon and there are a thousand different companies that make screen protectors. You know, like that's a. What makes the difference with this one is the interface of how the taking the stress out of putting this.

I've been putting screen protectors on my phone since pretty much the first one, and it's for a long time. It was like, oh, if you don't get it quite right, you got to peel it up again, and now you're going to get something underneath it and and they figured out how to do that, and a lot of other companies have figured it out. But the applicator that makes it easy for you to put it on, and then the clear video is why I'm buying it, cause they're all 15 bucks. Like it's all 15 bucks for two of them. Like they're not none of expensive like this is. This is a commoditized market, um, but what they? I think that companies always need to pay attention to the video support. The easiest way to make add value to your product is a video clearly showing how to use it.

You know what so well, especially with these, because you can do a bad job of putting these on well, it just gets frustrating, it's stressful and it's like, oh, you know, and at apple they have a special tool. Right, you go to the apple store and they've got the shunk shunk tool that this is as close to the shunk shunk tool as uh, uh, as you get, you put it down and you pull this, this thing out that pulls. You know that, oh, that's cool to cling to it and everything else it's, it's a, it's like a real tool that you put. It's as close to the apple tool that I've seen like sent to me and again it and, and, uh, um, and yeah, that's.

That's why they call him magic john, I mean the only bummer is that every time I buy a new phone it's a different size. I buy another one because I always have these, the second one because I've gotten so good at using it that I don't need the second one. So yeah, but anyway, it's it's, but it's the. It's the video and the applicator. There he is.

2:12:57 - Leo Laporte
This is a funny guy he looks magic, he looks magic it has like a little um I hope I don't get taken down by john for this. We're hopefully not jeez I hope that's john.

2:13:07 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, see, yeah, but see that one. It's very clear. But. But the thing is, when he, when he starts putting the applicator on, he's very clear like do not put your fingers here, put your fingers onto the side, do not put your fingers here, put your fingers to the side side, do not put your fingers here, put your fingers to the side, and it's all things. And what's funny is is that immediately when I do it, I want to put my fingers exactly where he told me Don't do that I'm like no, no, no, I can't do it that way, and so John has become the king.

2:13:33 - Leo Laporte
He's got the rings, the bracelets.

2:13:34 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, look at that anyway, I just they only had to make the video once and it see. Then here's the thing. This is clever, see, and you pull that, you put that thing in.

2:13:43 - Leo Laporte
Remember, he sees a grab on either side, don't press on it, don't press the middle, don't press your whole hand.

2:13:48 - Alex Lindsay
No, all things you would do otherwise just hold it where it says with two fingers and and uh, and then you're gonna, you're gonna pull that out, and then look at that and then there's a, then you're going to pull that out, and then you kind of run your finger and it starts to seal. I don't know what they had to do to figure that out, but there's a lot of little bits and pieces and I can't believe you get it for so cheap it's 15 bucks for two of them, and it's now, I never use a screen protector.

You're crazy why should I? I've had mine for almost a year. If I take the screen protector, you're crazy. Why should I? I mean, okay, I've had mine almost for almost a year. If I take the screen protector off and take it out of its case, it is in mint condition, like if I ever wanted to trade it back or give it to somebody else or whatever. I'm going to do with it. Well, I, I usually give them this one I'm going to keep because I've my everybody's got what they need for my family. So, um, uh, like, they usually just go to my kids or my wife, and so, right, no hand-me-downs this year, kids. Yeah, well, I gave my son the 14, which I use as my backup. I always have a backup camera so I can take pictures behind the scenes of me using the phone. I need one, one extra camera, and so, anyway, so I'm I'm short of camera right now, so I'll keep that one, but but I just you know, again I've dropped too many.

I mean, I don't know why I dropped the phone so often, but I'm using them everywhere and, yes, I dropped magic johncom.

2:15:08 - Leo Laporte
Don't go to magic jackcom. That's not the same, that's an entire we. It's a good product but not the same. Not the same magic john j-o-h-n. Don't go to magic j-o-ncom. I don't know what you'd get, but it's not the same magic john. So you're saying I should get a screen? Does it feel different than the glass, though it feels exactly the same to me, feels the same it feels the same, it does the same.

2:15:24 - Alex Lindsay
It's just as responsive. I have not had any. I don't feel anything different from the screen to the to the screen.

2:15:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, there's no point buying it now, because when I crack it, I go oh right, I can just peel it off and put another one on.

2:15:36 - Alex Lindsay
You know, like it's?

2:15:37 - Leo Laporte
yeah, it's oh it cracks, not the screen. Yeah, I've cracked it. Is it a glass? So it's glass. Yeah, cool. So I should wait until the iPhone 17 and then I should order. It depends on how you, I mean, I don't know. Oh look, magic john sells other things too I don't.

2:15:55 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not that excited about any of the other things that magic john sells, like I looked at him. I looked at book.

2:15:59 - Leo Laporte
The handheld fan was superconducting tech. How could you not all the other stuff? I looked at.

2:16:04 - Alex Lindsay
I was like I think they make most of their money on the screen protectors.

2:16:09 - Leo Laporte
I was like what do you think? Did he start in the screen protector biz?

2:16:12 - Alex Lindsay
I think they did screen protectors. Now they're trying to kind of like expand past this. I mean mean, it's a million, there's a million views on youtube for just the iPhone 15 pro and they make lots of different ones. Nice. So I think that they're selling a couple of these screen protectors.

2:16:26 - Andy Ihnatko
So with a name like magic john. I think he got to start selling pot.

2:16:30 - Alex Lindsay
I'm just gonna, I'm thinking, or, or better, I'm thinking, you're right now we are gonna get demonetized for showing that.

2:16:38 - Leo Laporte
Thanks a lot, Andy alex lindsey office hours dot global questions and answers every morning, particularly about media and production.

2:16:47 - Alex Lindsay
He's the king of that we're going to be getting ready for I think next week we'll be doing some. I we're hoping to do a lot another concert live stream, like we did in the past. Uh, august 9th I think we're hoping to do it. So we're we're trying to get all the cameras together, possibly some cool cameras to shoot it with, and so stay tuned for that, and we'll show behind the scenes if we have them all in place.

2:17:06 - Leo Laporte
Very nice. Thank you, Alex. Andy Ihnatko, always a pleasure to see you in your beautiful air-conditioned library.

2:17:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'm going to see if I can just hide under the table, turn off the lights and spend the night here, because I don't, I'm not going back out in that, that's just, that's no, no no, even without pants, it's really too hot.

2:17:27 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, Andrew appreciate it, and, of course, Jason Snell. sixcolors.com get ready, the colors emerge on Friday that's right. Thursday Thursday, maybe even maybe you'll get them done right away we'll have some fun things to talk about about. Whatever the heck it is that apple is doing, we will find out, uh yeah, is there something you'll be looking for, some like surprise that you'll be looking for, or anything?

2:17:52 - Jason Snell
I mean, I think everybody's still wondering about pricing and tariffs and how they view the future of that business. Given the tariff environment, I think that's still going to be number one.

2:18:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, okay, his podcasts are at sixcolors.com/jason, of course. All the great articles about 26 are at sixcolors.com.

2:18:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, check it out.

2:18:16 - Leo Laporte
Thank you Jason, thank you Andrew, thank you Alex, thank you club members for joining us and keeping the lights on. Here at the Twit Attic we do MacBreak Weekly, as I mentioned, every Tuesday 11 am Pacific. I hope you'll watch live or download a copy of the show, but I do hope you'll come back next Tuesday and every Tuesday. Unfortunately, now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you you got to get back to work because you know what Break time's over. Baby, see you next week.

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