MacBreak Weekly 984 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. Jason, Andy and Alex are all here coming up. Of course, we're going to break down Apple's quarterly results. It was a surprisingly good quarter. Tim Cook explains why. We'll share that with you. We'll also talk about a man who is controlling his iPad with only his mind, and David Pogue's new book covers Apple the first 50 years. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

This is MacBreak Weekly, with Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. Episode 984, recorded on Tuesday, August 5th 2025: Wessonality. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we get together and talk about the latest news from apple. It's going to be a colorful one this week. Alex Lindsay is here from officehours.global hello. Hello, Andy Ihnatko. Good to see you at the library.

0:01:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Good to be here. I'm in a good mood because when I was signing in to use the conference room, someone else was signing out at the same time and I made a joking reference to those Warner Brothers cartoons where the wolf and the sheepdog are punching in at the sheep meadow and I thought that I was halfway through it. I thought that I bet they don't get this and they totally got the reference and that has made my entire day. Morning Sam, morning Ralph. I'm serious. I'm so happy I've check it out.

0:01:39 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the funniest series that Chuck Jones ever did and, of course, the man bringing the colors this week from sixcolors.com, mr Jason Snell. Morning jason. Did you uh? Who transcribed the uh analyst call?

0:01:56 - Jason Snell
audio hijack beautiful, so I, I, uh, I open audio hijack, which is a nice, just probably recommended here 90 times. Audio utility for the Mac.

And it has a feature that they added a year or two ago. That is a transcription block that is using basically it's using Whisper from OpenAI, the open source transcription engine, and it outputs everything it captures to a text file. So I leave that text file open and then I have another text file open, and then I have another text file open that starts blank, and what happens is another audio hijack feature is you can? It's like a little DVR for whatever you're capturing, so you can pause it and back it up as you're listening. Um, and so I.

My process is basically I start the call with the first block of the transcript and I just keep copying what the transcript is giving me out, pasting it in and then playing, and I just I just watch as I'm listening to the call, I just watch what the transcript is and I fix it when I need to, and so it. You know it's not perfect and that's why you do need a human involved who understands what all of these concepts are of financial reports. But I can get it. I used to have to type it myself, right, like 10 years ago. I taught, I typed up myself and now all I have to do is correct when, um, you get to the analyst questions and and they mumble and the whisper is like I don't know what this guy is saying and I'm like I can do it. I can do it can probably figure it out, so as a human being who is used to mumblers anyway. So, yeah, that's a huge improvement to use text speech to text in my workflow. Totally.

0:03:32 - Leo Laporte
It used to be poor. Serenity Caldwell had to type it in.

0:03:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, she and I she and I used to tag team where where we would like get in a shared Google doc and I would, you know, we would listen to the first 10 minutes of the call and she'd be transcribed or like, and then she'd start transcribing at, like, minute 10. And I would go back to minute one and start there and we would basically just kind of like move through it, uh, separately, in order to you know, half the time if you've got two typists.

0:04:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh God, you're giving me. You're giving me flashbacks to sitting. You're giving me flashbacks to sitting during an Apple keynote and furiously having to type what's being said, because it was the time when you just have to write something 10 minutes after it's finished.

0:04:15 - Jason Snell
Yeah, you have to quote them.

0:04:16 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly.

0:04:19 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I mean again. This is one of the reasons that I am neither wholly against nor wholly for AI. Is that, I, boy, AI tools are, can be, can be really good. You just got to use them wisely.

0:04:33 - Andy Ihnatko
It's not. It's nice to be able to as a as a journalist, it's nice to be able to focus on the conversation and not focus on taking notes and being in the conversation. It's yeah for sure.

0:04:41 - Jason Snell
Oh yeah, I mean interview transcripts are also revolutionary that you used to have to be thinking on your feet. As Andy said, you're thinking on your feet while you're transcribing on with your hand, you know, holding a pen on paper and that's not when you're in a briefing and you have you only.

0:04:59 - Andy Ihnatko
You only have 20 minutes for the briefing and you have to ask the right questions, but you've written someone's. Then one of the engineers said something that is like three acronyms in a row, and now you've totally lost your mental place and you've forgotten the question you were about to ask and everybody's just sitting there silently as you scribble, not great well, let's take a look.

0:05:18 - Leo Laporte
Thursday apple announced its q3 results. Normally, uh, as we said last week, kind of a mezzo, mezzo mezzo, kind of a this is one of those boring quarters.

Right, leo, it's a boring quarter and not this year and to which you can perhaps credit two things one, the tariffs yeah, uh, because people rushed to the store before the tariffs took place. And, and actually even maybe more significant, a subsidy from the chinese government, yep, which brought chinese customers back to the iphone. That was interesting, they gave a lot of details and actually even maybe more significant, a subsidy from the chinese government, yep, which brought chinese customers back to the iphone.

0:05:48 - Andy Ihnatko
That was interesting. They gave a lot of details. There it turns out that of of the what was the 13 percent uh increase in sales in max, or they basically attributed one percent of the increase in sales to people buying forward to get ahead of the tariffs yeah, in the united states yeah so, uh, iphone reverend quarterly revenue by category dropped a little bit.

0:06:10 - Leo Laporte
It used to be more than half, now it's less than half because why we had a big quarter for the mac mac revenue up 15 percent. Services up 13 percent. Home and wearables down nine percent. Ipad revenue down eight percent. Why were they down?

0:06:32 - Jason Snell
well, apple will tell you, uh that the ipad revenue. I think this is fair. The ipad revenue is down, uh, versus the year ago quarter because the year ago quarter they introduced some new ipads, they had some nice including those ipad pros, yeah, so that's always going to be tough, as they say.

They call it a tough compare, which is a weird bit of jargon, uh, but you, you get used to the weird bit of jargon. So, ipad down for that. Uh. Wearables, home and accessories uh, funny story when you, you don't really think of it this way, but like, they attributed that to the iPad to compare and you're thinking, well, why what? Huh, it's not the iPad category. But guess what, when people buy iPads, they buy keyboards and cases and Apple pencils, and all of that's in the iPad. It's not in the iPad category, it's in this accessories, part of wearable, home and accessories. But yeah, those two categories are down.

Services continues to march up, but really good quarter for the Mac, some of which is definitely pulling ahead purchasers. Because, again, remember back to April and May where people were convinced, like with tariffs, the prices might go up anytime. And it's a little like back in the pandemic where you had that moment where you think, well, I kind of need a new Mac or I kind of need a new iPhone, but I haven't, you know, felt the impetus to go do it. I know I'll buy one eventually, and then you get that the tariff day. That happens and everybody says, oh, maybe now, maybe I should just go ahead and do it now, which is great. But you're you know, theoretically you're pulling sales that might have been spread over the next year into a single quarter, and Cook and Kevin Parrick, the CFO, definitely said that some portion of their iPhone and Mac sales in the US was lifted by that.

0:08:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and there was a lot of good news in China too. They called out a couple of very interesting bits about how MacBook Air is the number one selling laptop in China, mac Mini number one desktop in China. Given that there's been a lot of bad news coming out from China, that was all really really good news, including the results with the iPhone, and that was reflected with. I think we talked about this a month or two ago the government offered a consumer product program where people would get money back for purchasing certain types of electronics. Apple, for some reason, was hanging back for the first part of that, but then they jumped back in and clearly that was the bright move.

0:08:49 - Jason Snell
There was a price cap, I think is what it was and they lowered the price of certain models to get under the price cap, which allowed the Chinese reimbursement thing to happen, and then dramatically reduce the cost of get certain iPhone models, and that seemed to be very successful. Yeah, it is a an interesting combination of things and and, leo, I mean to your point, I think you called it right which is this is one of those quarters that we consider kind of in the doldrums and it's just kind of like we're waiting for there were no major announcements and it's not the holiday quarter and, um, when, when these announcements came out, um, Dan Morin, who works with me on Six Colors, we did a little live YouTube stream afterward to just kind of talk through the charts and he made, I thought, a really great observation, which is, when you can have a routine, boring quarter, generate $94 billion in revenue, we are on the precipice of Apple regularly throwing off $100 billion revenue quarters that are dull, uninteresting quarters, which is wild. But when you think about it, when they're this big I mean the way I described it in a piece I wrote last week is like it's like a ratchet, it's like when they're this big. It just kind of keeps ratcheting up.

And Andy mentioning the MacBook Air in China, like that's actually a great example where there are always way more iPhone users than there are Mac users. Right, we know that, but like every, what's the upside for the Mac in China? It's like almost nobody has one. Even though they have a market share, almost nobody has one. But all these people have iPhones.

Every single one of those people is a potential new to Mac customer and they said they got a lot of new to Mac customers. They said and then this is worldwide. If you think about the iPhone and the Apple Watch as an iPhone accessory, there's so many more iPhones out there than there are Apple Watches that even though we think of the Apple Watch as this 10 year old product, that's just sort of like it's around and it's fine, but, like from Apple's perspective, every one of those iPhone users is a potential Apple Watch buyer. And they said half of the Apple Watch purchases last quarter were from people who had never bought an Apple Watch before. So that kind of like just creeping, oozing, kind of like you know you have one and eventually you'll buy another or maybe a third Apple product. That is how you get to $100 billion a quarter and a boarding court.

0:11:02 - Alex Lindsay
And also I think that the, the, the Mac mini, is such a incredible Trojan horse for for Apple, in the sense that I mean it was a cute before the M series. It was a cute computer, you know, and you could do little things with it. But you know, I was over the weekend, I was not working on a project and you know we needed a little bit more horsepower. I just grabbed the M4 Mac Mini and threw it in my backpack and I had a $100 screen that I connected it to with a cheap keyboard on a foldable table and I was doing a lot of work with it. And for most people's use, a little $600 Mac Mini is way more than they need. Especially if they've already got their PC monitors around and you know other things like that. It's not much for them to switch over. So I think it's a great switchover computer.

0:11:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Can I say something honest that I'm evaluating it's end of 2025, beginning of 2026. I'm going to have to update my MacBook, I'm going to have to update my Mac Mini and I'm actually thinking about offsetting it and saying, well, what if I get a Mac Mini and if I need it in a mobile situation like again, like coming here to podcast I'll just use my iPad as an external display and basically make that my mobile powerhouse, rather than because it's easier, it's easier to go with like eight hundred dollars to a nicely, nicely kitted out mac mini. Before I spent two thousand dollars on a macbook with pro, with the stuff that I needed to do, and at two thousand dollars I don't know is amazing.

0:12:39 - Alex Lindsay
I don't think that at two thousand dollars it's as useful. A laptop is as useful as the. I carry a laptop laptop around.

0:12:45 - Andy Ihnatko
For me it is, oh no, for you it is.

0:12:47 - Alex Lindsay
Like for me, I like I carry the laptop around, but it's, you know, to me I don't, I'm not willing to invest in a laptop at this point. I either need way more power or way less power. And you look at, I mean, even like, I have all these little M1s and you go, you can go out and buy these for an m2 mac mini for uh, 385 dollars, you know, and it's gonna, it's gonna. You know, I have little m1s just stacked up here that do all kinds of work for me and they're remarkably fast, and so I think that that it's such a great market for apple since the m series. Before the m series, it was like glue, you know, you do little things with it, but since the m series came out, it's, it's been really a magical little device.

0:13:25 - Andy Ihnatko
But going back to what uh, what Jason was saying, one of the very, very positive and remarkable things is that the retention is not just the growth of the market and the retention is also happening worldwide. Um, there, serp had a uh. Uh had a report. I think it was released just this week. Talking about uh, we might talk about the actual report later on today. But uh, talking about we might talk about the actual report later on today.

But amongst the things that are since we're in earnings call, speak tailwinds for Apple is the fact that there seems to be a trend in consumers to go for the premium stuff now and Apple's benefiting from it. And the data is showing that. When, despite all the competition in china from having essentially a national phone brand, huawei, that's making some amazing phones. Me, that's also making some amazing phones. Not only are they growing iphones, but people are replacing their old iphones with new iphones and they're with new apple accessories. So apple is really starting to win uh win a cult, so to speak, inside of china, which was a year or two ago. We might've thought that maybe Apple was not going to be in such a good place in three or four years there.

0:14:33 - Leo Laporte
Maybe if they had better AI story they'd make as much money as Microsoft did in the quarter. But oh well, you know, microsoft actually became a $4 trillion business after its quarterly results. Same day they made a little more money to $24 billion, but $23 billion in 12 weeks, ain't you know anything to sneeze at?

0:14:54 - Jason Snell
It's okay. I mean it's fine, they did fine. Their margin was, you know, 46.5% total margin, which is bananas, 46.5% total margin, which is bananas. And I think that I wanted to throw in last year, during this quarter, where they had kind of like a fairly low product quarter and services kept on chugging along. I realized, and we talked about it a year ago that one of these days there's going to be a quarter where Apple makes more profit on its services than it does on its products, which can be overstated. Right, because the services revenue firmly comes from people who bought their products. It's not freestanding, it's based on, it's built on, primarily the iPhone. But that said, this quarter they didn't quite get there, but they got really close Because again you've got the product margins, which are not bad, but uh, the services margins are like in the 90 they're pure profit.

0:15:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, there was a caution from the CFO, kevin parake how do you say that? I said parak who said as we move into the September quarter, I'd like to review our Outlook, which includes types of forward-looking information. Uh, the color we're providing assumes that global tariff rates, policies and applications remain in effect as of this call indeed, and the next morning they were different.

So and they did at the time at during the call say about 800 million dollar loss uh to tariffs this quarter, but it's going to be much more next quarter. But they also point out the current revenue share agreement with google is in jeopardy. This month we expect the judge, judge alsop, to announce what uh he's going to tell google to do. It, among other things, it could be cut off that 20 billion dollar a year payment to apple and that goes right to services yeah, that was something that they.

0:16:41 - Jason Snell
They have not really mentioned that before Judge Mehta. No, I'm sorry, and you know. They're listing the usual threats, like the tariffs and the macroeconomic conditions globally, and then they're like oh yeah, and also if we lose all that Google revenue, which?

I don't think they've done that in a call before and like it's a. It's a because that's all services revenue and that's services revenue total. I overshot earlier. It's about 75% last quarter. But you know the Google stuff is. I don't know how they account for it. It's probably not 100% profit. They probably put some degree of Safari engineering against it and claim that it's, you know, paying for Safari or something like that. But I think we could all agree that it's probably like a 95 margin amount of money 20 billion would be about 20 of the total.

0:17:31 - Leo Laporte
So uh it's. That's a 20 drop potentially.

0:17:36 - Alex Lindsay
I'm not sure if judge meta will do that to be well and also it depends on whether they they can, whether they're going to continue to operate in an appeal.

0:17:44 - Leo Laporte
You know so oh yeah, that's right, because right, and if they have a, because we still have a long job.

0:17:48 - Jason Snell
And if they have a backup plan. But the great mystery of that case is everybody keeps circling around the idea that most of the punishment for Google would not harm Google, but would harm everybody who Google is paying money.

0:18:02 - Leo Laporte
It would harm Mozilla. It would harm Apple.

0:18:04 - Jason Snell
It would harm everybody. Google would just walk away not being able to write checks for $20 billion a year. What a punishment that would be for them. Also, it's unclear. It may be that they end up in a browser choice situation where they can't be the default and they have to be chosen by people, but that they're still allowed to pay for the ones who. Who knows how they're going to going to do it, but it's an appreciable issue for Apple.

0:18:28 - Alex Lindsay
In fact, I think, a bigger risk for them than tariffs, because Apple seems to have a few different ways to deal with tariffs and I think that I think you know if, if they're able to continue to pay, if people are using their product, the the impact to Apple will be much lower. Because, I mean, Google is so far ahead. If you're using a search engine other than Google, you're decided you want to play on gravel. It's not close. I go up every once in a while and try other ones out and I'm just like, uh, okay, like I'm gonna go back to the normal one because it's it is so dominant it not in just the market size, but in the quality of the result that I just don't understand you sound like you're coming to us from three years ago.

0:19:16 - Leo Laporte
I completely don't know.

0:19:17 - Alex Lindsay
I mean I don't when I go. I don't agree either I what I will say.

0:19:20 - Andy Ihnatko
That's not true at all alex google's's gone way down here.

0:19:25 - Leo Laporte
I don't know.

0:19:26 - Alex Lindsay
Try Kagi, try DuckDuckGo, try something other than I tried DuckDuckGo last week and I was like I'm never going to use this again. It's trash.

0:19:34 - Andy Ihnatko
For me, the other search engines are good for if you want different types of results, but I never get results as good and as focused to what I'm looking for, what my interests are, than I do with Google. And also the thing is, I guess as much as they, as analysts, are predicting problems with AI based search from competitors, they're still. Google search, believe it or not, is still growing like 10 to 12 percent a quarter, so it's it's hard to beat the service that actually has the pays 20 billion dollars a year to apple so that they continue to make that the default uh, yeah but eternity with people if you?

if you, I mean if you gave people the option of kagi, would they sw? Would they if they gave? If you gave them a clean choice, meaning you, their default engine is not set you. At this point in the installation you are going to pick the default search engine. How many people are going to pick that?

0:20:33 - Alex Lindsay
They probably don't know how to go back and change it later. If you showed it to me, I'm like I don't even know where to find that, so I'm just going to hit Google. I'm not going to try to figure it out. And the reason I have such a strong opinion is that I saw an ad for DuckDuckGo and said, oh, I haven't tried DuckDuckGo. And I decided for the whole afternoon I'm going to use DuckDuckGo for searching. And by the end I was like never again.

0:20:51 - Jason Snell
To what Leo said that sounds exactly how I felt a year or two ago, but I don't feel that way now and I think that part of it is that Google I mean I do use Kagi now People aren't going to use Kagi because you have to pay for it and you know. So that's fair. And the argument is not what are people going to choose? The argue is are there better choices? The argument is there and I would say that your mileage may vary and there are certainly certain things where I go back to Google search because I's used Google since day one as my primary that the introduction of AI summaries at the top of Google searches has so poisoned my relationship with Google that I don't use it for search anymore.

Because, the top half of it is garbage, that is lies and is wrong and is completely false and I don't want to waste my time on it anymore and that I think that's Google so headlong rushing into AI because it sees it as its future, perhaps correctly that it's destroying its product in the present.

0:21:55 - Alex Lindsay
And I admit that, like, if I'm looking for information now, I just go to chat GPT. If I'm looking for a specific thing, if I look for a specific thing, I am, I am then going to, uh, for a thing I go to Google. So I don't, like, if I'm looking for general information, cause it has links. I mean I asked Chachi to give me a bunch of things and then it gives me links that I can go refer back to whatever. Like did it really get this right? Or where does it coming from, and so on and so forth. Um, and I, I, I don't know, I don't find that Ch gpt is less accurate than most of those stuff written on the internet. I mean, I look at the stuff. You know, when people write articles about anything I know, I'm always like, okay, that's cute.

0:22:31 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, just old school, alex, I understand. It's okay, we'll, we'll. We'll see you in the future uh, again, again.

0:22:39 - Alex Lindsay
I would say, 80 of my time now that would have gone to a google search is now chat gpt. So it's a small, it's. It's also a much smaller part of my well there you go.

0:22:46 - Leo Laporte
That's perhaps a shift, yeah yeah, me too.

0:22:49 - Andy Ihnatko
When I, when I need, when I need to know like does is the title of a broadway musical italicized or in quotes, I go to gemini I don't necessarily because I'll get question answer.

0:23:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah I'm not, I don't want to just the fact really just the fact that people can question Google's hegemony is a big shift. You know five years ago, we would all be in agreement here.

0:23:15 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, the challenge with searching now is that you go, okay, I want to see the top 10 printers or the top 10 whatever, and if I do a search I'm going to get ad-laden garbage. From every website that I go to, that's a top 10 list of that stuff. Unless I go to Consumer Reports or Six Colors, you know like I'm going to get Bar cutter, yeah.

0:23:36 - Jason Snell
Basically, you have to not trust the search there. You can't trust the search at all, Exactly because it's all been gamed.

0:23:41 - Alex Lindsay
But I asked Jack GPT and it just gives me a bunch of them and I go research them and I'm like, oh, that looks great.

0:23:46 - Leo Laporte
We're actually going to have the CEO, the founder of Kagi, on intelligent machines tomorrow. Oh nice, if you're interested.

0:24:08 - Jason Snell
Alex, you made a really great point there, which is one of the areas where the chatbots are actually better than Google is that all the SEO garbage on the internet targets Google. It's meant to game google and, as a result, google is fooled by it. Because, as much as they try, they're trying to fool google, and the chatbots, I think generally, are better at saying, uh, what are the reliable sources here? Let's, let's link to those and and so you'll find. Often and that for me, that's it's all about finding reliable sources and not junk and the chatbots, because they're not the ones yet being as gamed as google is by seo people on the internet. Uh, the results end up being better there, but that's that's. You know, google being a victim of its own success, essentially, search differently to.

0:24:40 - Leo Laporte
It isn't so much that you're looking for the link, the link right, which is what Google was very good at. Now you're looking for different kinds of things.

0:24:49 - Alex Lindsay
And I'm having a conversation like if I was trying to find a POE router, a POE switch that is powered by battery, and I'm sitting there like what are the issues and what can I, what are the options? And I'm sitting there going back and forth with chat, GPT, I don't know. In 15 minutes I figured out what I needed and it would have taken me, you know, half a day to just try to search through and read articles about to try to figure out the same thing.

0:25:12 - Leo Laporte
Back to Apple's results. Anything else, Jason, that kind of stuck out to you as being of interest.

0:25:20 - Jason Snell
I mean, we've covered the big stuff.

0:25:22 - Leo Laporte
The highlights yeah.

0:25:25 - Jason Snell
I mean the fact that it's so huge, the fact that they I mean, let's talk about AI just in the sense of mergers and acquisitions, because that was the thing that kept on coming up. Yeah, they kept saying are you going to buy? Perplexity. So he said look, they're increasing their investment. They did so current quarter, doing so next quarter. Um, reallocating people on staff, trying to send the message that we're on it, we are spending more in r&d, our, we're taking our current staff and reallocating them toward ai. We do believe in it. There was a, a meeting which we'll probably get to in a little bit, an all staff meeting, basically, where Tim Cook really did evangelizing the importance of ai to the company.

And then you know again, these analysts are just like but really, uh, buying anything.

0:26:11 - Leo Laporte
And Tim Cook sounded almost offended because he's like look we, we buy a company every few weeks we've already bought seven companies this year, and that's companies from all walks of life, not all ai oriented, so we're doing one think of it as one every several weeks.

0:26:27 - Jason Snell
We're busy. I'm working here right.

Like we're on it, but he does say it could be big, it could be small, but this is, I think, the key insight here, which is not new it is the way Apple approaches this, and so sometimes you get people from the outside who are like oh, apple doesn't know what it's going to do with AI, so it'll buy an AI company and figure it out.

And that is not what he said no-transcript up over the across the room or something. But but this is the point is, apple buys companies because they help apple get where it wants to go, not because apple doesn't know where to go. And so what he's really saying here is we have a strategy, we have a lot of thoughts about what we want to do in ai, and if there are companies that we could buy that will help us get there, we will buy them and and like and we can, and they don't have to be big. They don't have to be big, they don't have to be small, we can do whatever we want, and I think this is the most he will ever say. But he's not saying they're not interested in investing in AI or potentially buying companies that help them get where they need to go. I don't think this is a statement that they're about to buy a bunch of AI companies, but it would not surprise me at all. It does feel like he's saying we may very well be doing that.

0:27:49 - Leo Laporte
This is Ben Thompson's analysis in Stratechery. He says to be clear that's a pretty bog standard Apple answer. But I think it's notable that Cook sees no need to change that answer. Apple buys companies to tuck into its roadmap. It doesn't change the entire map and there was certainly no signal the company plans on changing that approach.

0:28:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly right. I mean, this is how Apple plays its game and we can disagree with it, right? You can say Apple doesn't get it, but I think Apple does get it, but it's trying to get it in their own particular way and their own particular direction, which you know, as Ben goes into in that piece. Apple has some advantages in that it's AI is not necessarily a threat to its core business and, in fact, the fact that it makes as we've talked about here makes phones, and that AI stuff runs on phones, and that Apple can continue to have a device business, that they've got a little more room to maybe approach this from a different direction than Meta or Google, doesn't absolve them. Right, there are still lots of hard issues out there, but that they seem to be having a strategy. That is what we would expect Apple to have for something like this, and the strategy is still sell more iPhones, sell more iPads, sell more Macs.

0:29:05 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought it was kind of interesting that in Tim's prepared comments it was practically a WWDC, like first 10 minutes of the keynote. It was hey, here's what we're doing with iPadOS. Ipados is going to make the iPad a lot more productive and a lot more useful. Hey, here's what we got this new liquid glass. Well, hey, here's what we got, this new liquid glass. It was like I've, as I'm sort of listening to it, live like just sentence by sentence. I'm wondering to myself what analyst is thinking oh, thank God, they've got a new version of the OS coming up this this year. But when you think about it, just as as in total, he's basically making the case that here is this, here is the strategy that has made us into a $3 trillion company, that has given us this kind of growth. We are not going to simply say, well, now we're in the business of making salad dressing because lots of other companies are making salad dressing. Now, this is our core business. We know what we're doing and we've got a good roadmap and we're sticking to it.

0:30:03 - Leo Laporte
Actually, thompson makes the point, talking about CapEx capital expenditures, that Apple is extraordinarily conservative. They're doing about $4 billion a year, which is a fraction of what, for instance, google is doing.

0:30:17 - Jason Snell
Right, and they're not buying enormous amounts of GPUs. They're instead talking about making investments in private cloud compute, and we know that they're based on Mark Gurman's reports that they're talking about doing a custom chip for their future private cloud compute. That's still based on Apple Silicon, but it's a different kind of profile. Right now they're stuffing like M2 Pros or whatever, into their cloud infrastructure, but they're like. The investments they're making are very Apple-y investments and that seems to be. Again, it's not a guarantee of it being the right strategy, but it is very much them doing their thing.

0:30:50 - Leo Laporte
Being careful, being somewhat conservative. They historically have spent less on research and development than anybody else.

0:30:58 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and it's interesting I don't know if I saw this on one of Jason's charts or somebody else's, but their increase in spending on R&D is actually outstripping their increase in spending on capital expenditures.

And they got one direct question, I think, during the Q&A, about it, and Tim pretty much reiterated what he was saying before that A yes, you can expect us to accelerate our capital expenditures as we continue to have to build out more compute for our for our Apple intelligence private compute sector. But he was very, very strong to restrict, to remind people that we have a hybrid strategy that we are not going to simply, if we need more compute, that's not the special Apple private compute we can just we're just going to continue to buy it from Google. Let them like buy the land, let them ruin the, ruin the environment. We'll just like write the checks and not have to basically take on all this extra debt. So, yeah, it's not like Google's calls where every single quarter, it's like how much did you spend on capital expenditures this time and how much more are you spending than you promised you told us you were going to be spending last quarter?

0:32:04 - Jason Snell
I think also Apple's not as shotgun related, like so.

0:32:07 - Alex Lindsay
A lot of other people have a lot of r&d, but they're experimenting with so many different things all at one time and most of them are failing. Apple tends to pick a handful of things, and and so I think it's a it's a much more focused approach. I think apple might be able to make more money if they were doing more things, but they could also become kind of a fugitue.

0:32:25 - Leo Laporte
You've seen Google's Pixel 10 ad, but the Pixel 10 is coming out later this week. This ad basically casts I'll turn on the audio. I guess I can do that. It's an ad. Right, it's Google. They're not going to take me down. They're not that uptight, Are they? I don't know. You can upload photos, so this is a 30-second ad to show you how AI. So you could upload a picture of a table and say can you create an image of this table? I don't know what I'm doing here. Hold on, there we go.

0:32:53 - Andy Ihnatko
It was just a voiceover, yeah.

0:32:54 - Leo Laporte
There we go, here we go. This is Google's Pixel 10 ad, which isn't playing now.

0:33:00 - Alex Lindsay
Oh, there it is, if you buy a new phone because of a feature that's coming soon, but it's been coming soon for a full year. Apple, you could change your definition of soon or you could just change your phone.

0:33:17 - Leo Laporte
Oh wow, that is kind of gutsy from a company that is famous for announcing and killing things.

0:33:25 - Jason Snell
yeah, it all comes it'll come back to you again, just like it did for Samsung. It'll all come back to you again gutsy but weird.

0:33:31 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean they, they, they have to go after apple because they can't go after Samsung, because they're, they're their partners yeah uh, and that's.

This is the sort of claim that you can only make like this. This is the last year which you can say anything like that, because what's the saying? That if it's good, people will always remember. If the thing you ship was terrible, they will forget. If the thing was, if it's good, they'll forget the thing was late. As soon as Apple delivers really good phone-based AI services, the fact that the Pixel phones had them like five years earlier almost becomes irrelevant, and it's rather optimistic to think that any iPhone user is going to think oh gosh, I'm sick and tired of waiting another six months for a voice assistant that works great. I'm going to switch all of my apps and all of my accessories and all of my platforms to something that I haven't used ever.

0:34:26 - Alex Lindsay
And especially when, uh, you know again, for an Apple user it is effortless, it is. I literally hold down a button and say Janet, and I immediately have chat GPT and I ask it whatever I want, it doesn't, I mean, it's I don't, I guess, I just don't. I don't feel any pressure for Apple to go any further with it.

0:34:44 - Leo Laporte
I did buy another phone, but I wish it were an iPhone. This is a Samsung phone. I was the new fold. I was very interested in you know what this form factor is going to look like next year when Apple does something similar, and I love the form factor. I love it that I can open it up and get you know an ipad size screen out of it and all that, but I don't love it that, it's just it's just well, it's just.

0:35:12 - Alex Lindsay
The problem for me is that I I there was somebody that just bought one, uh, where I was working, and he showed it to me and I opened it up and the first thing I did was I put my finger across that center, that centerpiece oh, you can still feel it it's better than it was.

0:35:24 - Leo Laporte
I mean, it's gonna. Well, what if apple has that?

0:35:26 - Alex Lindsay
because they're gonna buy it next year. No interest in the.

0:35:29 - Jason Snell
I suspect apples will be one year better than that right because it'll be next year still gonna be Samsung display and and then I mean I look, the apple folding phone is gonna be uh self-sorting, like some people are gonna love it and other people are gonna go nope and guess what? There are many other iPhones for you to buy.

0:35:48 - Leo Laporte
I couldn't help but think, though, if this were an iPhone, I would, because you've got a full-size, basically phone, yeah, on the front, and if not, any thicker than a regular phone, and then you have this opportunity. I will say the person that showed it to me.

0:36:01 - Alex Lindsay
Just loved it. Like just yeah, love the people who love it will love it, yeah, yeah yeah and if, but and I would love it more.

0:36:06 - Leo Laporte
I'm just not. The Samsung cruft is hard to get used to and I think it'll be nice when it's an iphone, let's just put it that way. Uh, all right, let's take a little break, come back. We have much more to talk about. Those were the uh results a good quarter for Apple.

0:36:25 - Andy Ihnatko
I think three bit also.

0:36:26 - Leo Laporte
Three billionth iPhone sold, he said oh yeah, total of all time out after almost 10 years.

0:36:33 - Jason Snell
They picked that one off the line, but that's a. You know, if you look at how many years it took to get to 1 billion and 2 billion and 3 billion, you can see the kind of shocking growth in iphone shipments of the market, steve jobs.

0:36:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I'd be very, very happy with it it's only two percent.

0:36:49 - Leo Laporte
It's about eighty percent of the profit no, I'm sorry.

0:36:52 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I remember when, when the when the iphone was was first announced, we were happy to get two percent of the market like yeah, you gotta eat a little bit.

0:37:00 - Leo Laporte
It's almost 50 in the united states, but I know it's probably not more than 20 or 30 percent of the market globally, right?

0:37:06 - Jason Snell
I don't know what it is, I don't know, I think it's high teens, I think yeah, and that goes to what I was saying about growth opportunity for apple right like, like they're not. They don't have a lot of markets where there's no potential for them to sell more product except that they refuse to do a cheap one, and, and that's what the bulk of that was, and that was another thing about that, about one of those reports where the report was not just about like sales but also revenue.

0:37:33 - Andy Ihnatko
And yeah, apple is behind Samsung and Samsung in actual unit shift. They are at the very, very top of the thing 42 43 percent revenue versus like 8, 12 to 14 percent from Samsung.

0:37:51 - Alex Lindsay
yeah, it's like there's such a profit and and yeah, that's, and I think the issue is that they don't sell very well like they. They've made ones that are cheaper and you look at the sales and the sales on the on the expensive ones are doing just way better. I mean, it's more volume and more margin. Like, why would you do the smaller ones?

0:38:08 - Andy Ihnatko
We might be getting ahead of ourselves. But there was another report about the 16E another research group that had access to the first full quarter that they were tracking iPhone sales. They're saying the 16E is doing exceptionally well where it sells much, much better than iPhone SE in a comparable market. That is being people are choosing them instead of legacy phones that are in the line. They were saying specifically that it's doing gangbusters in Japan for some reason. So I agree that I don't think there's a place for Apple to make a $300 phone or a good $200 phone. Samsung and Motorola can make exceptionally good 200 and 300 phones, but that's not why people want an apple iphone. They want something that has that that, that has that Wessonality. You know that, that, that that meatiness, you know that savoriness when you hold it. You use it.

0:39:01 - Leo Laporte
So is that what they call that Wessonality?

0:39:05 - Andy Ihnatko
your chicken we're gonna take a break florence, anderson, you're still alive in our hearts Wessonality.

0:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Uh, that's Andy Ihnatko, with a callback to the good old days of television advertising. He is uh always fun with that kind of retro stuff. Just ask him how many classic imacs he has, mac, mac macintoshes how many do you? They still have? You said you had I had dozens.

0:39:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I had yeah, I had dozens. Now I had to get. I felt as though like I'm spending too much money to store them, so I kept like maybe the sixth best, that's all, and gave the rest away that's all you need.

0:39:40 - Leo Laporte
Six, six mac classics. That's all you need. Jason snell's here he's got one and a load runner. Everybody's saying what's that in the background on his 2ci?

0:39:48 - Jason Snell
it's a load runner yeah, apple 2c running off of a usb-c cable through an adapter which is hilarious and a vga, uh and hdmi output and it's running championship, championship load runner, booted off of an sd card on floppy uh, using floppy, emu was that one of the first color.

Apple twos, no, the, the two E actually the two plus supported color through composite out. It's just the challenge these days is getting old computers to do something other than composite, because analog TVs are are gone, uh. But there are lots of adapters to do HDMI, or in this case that's a VGA flat panel that's running behind me. I just like to prove occasionally that all the computers behind me do work, they all do work.

0:40:30 - Leo Laporte
Yes, you might take some work to get them to work, but they work.

0:40:33 - Jason Snell
Yeah, even there's one up there that you haven't noticed yet. That we'll talk about later.

0:40:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh, now everybody's going to be looking carefully. Also, Alex Lindsay from officehours.global and 090.media.

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Uh, all right, enough of the uh, enough of the earnings.

0:43:21 - Jason Snell
Uh, let's see what else is uh going on. We've got lots of. Can we segue into tim's? Uh, uh, yeah, yeah, so yeah he hasn't.

0:43:26 - Leo Laporte
When is the last time they did an all hands at apple?

0:43:28 - Jason Snell
it's been a couple of years, I think yeah, I don't know, but it's a while like they actually literally got people into, I think, the steve jobs theater and then I think they're nervous about uh leaks because in past, yeah, that's been a big problem and, of course, immediately you might. You might, though, use it as a way to leak a message seriously you take it.

0:43:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh he. This is when he says all hands, it was everybody yeah.

0:43:56 - Jason Snell
I think all employees were supposed to like either be there or tune in. Yeah, watch it Wow what did he say?

0:44:02 - Leo Laporte
how long was it? What's? What are the? What are the leaks say?

0:44:06 - Jason Snell
I will. I will start with a tidbit that I got, which is that that three billionth iPhone. They intercepted it off the line and he had it at the event and said what should we do with it? Which is like funny but it belongs in a museum. Okay, that's how that works, but uh, but then you know he pumped him up about ai right, which he should do yeah, that was the.

0:44:26 - Leo Laporte
Was that the point was to be be reassured?

0:44:30 - Andy Ihnatko
we're working on it yeah, and tim, but there are a lot of. I agree with j, with Jason, that it's not as though they wanted this as a press release for everybody, but they knew that certain quotes would make it out and so, like Tim was saying that, hey look, we've rarely been first Like we weren't first with the desktop computer, we weren't first with the phone, we weren't first with the iPad, but we think we did the best. We've transformed it. We think we're going to do the same thing with AI. Frederiki was talking about Shlomo and saying that our start-to-finish, top-to-bottom rewrite it's exceeding our expectations. Yeah, yeah, which is new, right?

0:45:07 - Jason Snell
Because at WWDC they weren't going to over-promise and under-deliver, but in a thing heard through sources from an event where the head of software says Mark Gurman had the whole damn thing.

So that's a good venue to say, oh, not only are we going to ship what we did, but it's working and better than we thought, which is not something that we've heard before. That's how you get that stuff out there Plus it serves, I think, out there, plus it serves, I think, a super important purpose, which is to try to evangelize to the people who are working at Apple. One yes, ai is important. Two, you should be using it, because this is one of those things that I know people who don't like AI are creeped out by that, but it's like to understand what AI is good and bad at. You need to actually use it.

And so he's saying, yes, you need to use this, we're not trying to put our head in the sand. You to actually use it. And so he's saying, yes, you need to use this. We're not trying to put our head in the sand. You need to be using this stuff every day, understanding what it's good for. And then also, I think he's sending the message to people who might be wavering about, like, do I want to be at Apple working on AI stuff, to say, no, we do take it seriously. This is a company commitment. So I mean, it's exactly what you would expect him to do to kind of whip up the troops and say I'm not kidding here, this is super important. This is how you change or at least direct corporate culture is with stuff like this and knowing that that message is going to get out via Mark Gurman and others to the rest of the world.

0:46:25 - Leo Laporte
It felt like almost reassurance. Right, he says. According to Gurman, the AI revolution is as big or bigger as the internet, smartphones and cloud computing or apps. Yeah, and this is the pull quote apple must do this, apple will do this, this. We will beat them on the beaches, we will be. This is sort of ours to grab right, that's a great pep talk, though right, because he's not.

0:46:49 - Jason Snell
He's not saying reassurance. He's saying if you think that ai is going to blow over and we don't need to worry about it, you're wrong.

0:46:55 - Leo Laporte
It's important to apple and we need to be there, and that's exactly the right message, the investment to do it so, Churchillian Churchillian, our strategy is not to simply, uh be, allow people to use chat gpt in our phones.

0:47:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Our strategy is not to buy another company and rebrand the product that this is. It's not as ambitious a statement as what Sundar Pichai said like 10 years ago, when he basically said we are re-pivoting the company towards AI, just as we re-pivoted toward mobile and just as we found it on search. But it is like no, this is not just going to be a flavor enhancer that we're going to add to our products. We are going to be. A part of our portfolio of skills will be AI. Not because it's a trendy thing, not because analysts are expecting it, but because the guy at the very, very top knows that this is the next wave. We have an opportunity here and we are going to seize the hell out of it.

0:47:49 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I'm glad you're here here and we are going to seize the hell out of it. So yeah, the apologia that people often use with Apple, which is we've rarely been first, there was a PC before the Mac, he said. There was a smartphone before the iPhone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before iPod, but Apple invented the modern versions of those product categories, and this is how I feel about AI.

0:48:11 - Jason Snell
I mean there is an argument to be made that that could still be true. Right? The argument is what Apple's good at historically is creating products, full-on products, that people want to use, and so from that worldview, you could say a bare LLM may, in hindsight, not be a full-on product, but a feature that needs to be used to build a full-on product. That would be the argument. Right Is that those earlier devices were improved because Apple kind of and this was Steve Jobs' superpower right Is the sort of like trying to see the bigger picture of, like what is a full-on product that someone would want? That's why he kept saying the computer for the rest of us, and so that would be the argument.

The counter argument would be that this isn't like that, because Apple poo-pooed the LLM and the LLM is the thing, and it's unlikely that they're ever going to revolutionize it and be at the forefront. But I think it says something about what Apple views its strategy, as is that bare AI is not a product, it's a feature, and that Apple's really good at making products that people want to use, and so if they can crack all the right ways to fit AI into the products they sell, that will make people delighted, then they will have done their job, and I think that also, when you look at device-based AI, other people can do that.

0:49:32 - Alex Lindsay
It's not like Apple's the only one that can do that, but Apple could potentially put an awful lot of development into that build. They have control over the hardware, so they can build the hardware so that it's really defined around that and then they provide it to the developers at theoretically no cost.

0:49:48 - Leo Laporte
I would argue that that's the stage we're kind of at right now with ai. I'm wearing two different ai wearables that are recording everything. You know, for a long time I wore the one, that from b, that got bought by amazon. I've got a, a third on the way. This is the omi, this is the, the rewind I'm sorry, limitless. They changed their name and I've got the fieldy coming and they all record everything and then analyze it and give you synopsis of your day meeting notes, that kind of thing. I think that the wearable is the product, right, of course. Now, yeah, apple may not think that it's something like this. Uh, it may be glasses.

0:50:26 - Jason Snell
Uh, effective, effective glasses or airpods or apple watch or something that is then powered by an iphone.

0:50:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and tim was. Tim was asked this question during the Q&A of the report earnings call and basically said the same thing that Sundar Pichai said as an answer was saying well, but do you think that this is essentially, do you think that this is going to be, a threat to iPhone sales? Is it going to whatever the next thing is? Is it going to replace the iPhone? He said no, I think it's going to be something you use alongside a phone, which is something that I was glad to hear him say, because if he said differently, I would think what do I not understand? Because it seems so natural to me that a device that replaces an iPhone or a smartphone, a smartphone just does such a wide range of things. I can't imagine a simple AI device that can handle the load of all those different tasks at once tim said, I've never felt so much excitement and so much energy before as right now this is.

0:51:25 - Leo Laporte
It is kind of a cheerleader talk, right?

0:51:27 - Jason Snell
yeah, it's a well it's a chair, I mean I I would say pep talk more than cheerleader, because I I don't think this is. I would not read this as, yay, we're doing great. I would read this as if you're not taking this seriously, if you don't think this is part of what our strategy is, if you can kind of like get along ignoring it, you must stop because it's central to what we're doing. We're investing in this. We want you to do it. He said we're investing in this, we want you to do it. He said everybody needs to be using this stuff and understanding it. And he said this is the future. This is just as revolutionary as the smartphone or the internet, right, like he said that, and I think that that is, you know, honestly, depending.

I think there are some people at Apple who are will take it more cheerleader. You're like yeah, yeah, right. I think other people will see it kind of as a rebuke because they were people who were more skeptical and holding back, and I think what we've seen in the management changes this year is that some of the people who were kind of like holding back and being more kind of skeptical or academic about it are, like the people who were running the Siri team lost those jobs, got transferred elsewhere, because this is you know they are. They are serious and the eye of Sauron is now on all of them for this stuff and I'm like so, yeah, it's how you read it, but I would say much more about making it clear that this is important rather than saying, uh, that everything is good status quo. I don't think he was saying that.

0:52:56 - Andy Ihnatko
This. This isn't a special project. This is part of where we are. It made me think a little bit about. Was it Mark Mark in the early 80s who sent that memo saying hey look, I mean if we're telling people that our Apple II could be as a good word processor?

0:53:07 - Alex Lindsay
why do we still have typewriters around?

0:53:09 - Andy Ihnatko
the office. If you make a requisition for a typewriter, you're not going to get it. You're going to get a printer.

0:53:14 - Leo Laporte
Tim said, the product pipeline which I can't talk about. It's amazing guys. It's amazing Some of it.

0:53:20 - Jason Snell
You'll see. You'll tell Mark Gurman, you already are. It's amazing, I can't tell you.

0:53:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Some of it you'll see soon he said, I have never felt so much excitement, t-e-m-e-n-t and so much energy.

0:53:34 - Jason Snell
Don't mention the thing, don't mention the thing, don't mention the thing.

0:53:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, in fact, we're probably only about a month out. September 9th, you said, Jason Snell, and now there seems to be some convergence. In fact, there was even a leak from stores in Europe that this— Best guess yeah, september 9th. Yeah, september 9th, and it does make sense. They don't want to do it. September 11th, they don't.

0:53:55 - Jason Snell
you know it makes like a Tuesday. They like a Tuesday and that and that first Tuesday cause it's a labor day is on the first of September this year. Right, I think that they don't like that. I think that's too early for them.

0:54:07 - Alex Lindsay
So September 9th you don't have a huge crew getting ready for a live event. But usually Mondays aren't good If you want to move press around or anything else. You don't want to move them around on the weekends.

0:54:15 - Jason Snell
And so.

0:54:15 - Alex Lindsay
Tuesday. Tuesday's what the day almost everybody uses, because you have the most amount of week for the press, because the press resets every week. So it's not Monday, which means no one has to prep on Sunday. It also means that all of Apple's PR people and everything else don't have to have their last meetings on Sunday.

0:54:33 - Jason Snell
It is a live event. It's not a. It's not an. It'll be a prerecorded video event, but they will have to get all of the people there to move media around in Cupertino at the Steve Jobs Theater, because they do that now and and that is beyond habit. That is also another reason to put it on a on a Tuesday, although I think they did it the day after labor day one time, but like even even a couple years ago, but even then it's not ideal.

There there are better choices, so that's why I think it'll be after labor day with a live show and uh, maybe five years ago or something like that two years ago, though, I, I, or three years ago I I was like I was out in the desert and I drove home and I was like am I really going to be at Cupertino tomorrow? And I was, and it was very weird, but generally, yeah. So I think it's the ninth. So yeah, it's right around the corner. We're, we're, we're going to get there real fast New iPhone stuff.

0:55:22 - Leo Laporte
So no wonder Tim is just so excited. As many as 15 new products next month or in the next couple of months.

0:55:28 - Jason Snell
Yeah, next couple of months. Yeah, well, they'll stagger right, they'll do a, they'll do a september event and they usually then follow it up with a. Either they'll do press releases or they'll do a, an october event, uh, somewhere. Uh, sometimes they've done that in new york for influencers and press, and other times they've just done it as pr. But they'll, they'll. This is their turning over their lineup as best they can before the holidays. So that's, that's what's coming next.

0:55:50 - Leo Laporte
They also, according to Gurman, have an AKI team.

0:55:56 - Jason Snell
Speaking of Robbie Walker, the guy who got kicked off of Siri.

0:55:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's the new head of that. Answering to John Giandrea World knowledge Is this the team you don't want to be on?

0:56:08 - Jason Snell
I mean maybe, but it sounds like what they've done is they've said basically, you guys always felt like you were more academically inclined and kind of thinking, big picture stuff, knowledge engine that is going to be able to be tapped into by our users, instead of relying on ChatGPT to do it for those big picture questions, searching all knowledge in the world in order to give you an answer, and that's something that the rest of Apple, I think it's very clear, is focused on on-device and in private cloud compute models that are going to be less capable of that kind of thing.

And so they put this group off on the side and said you work on and again, this is actually something we've talked about here before the idea that, like, chatgpt is there and maybe Gemini and maybe Claude, maybe other things will be there, now integrated with iOS. But, like, in the long run, you probably would like to have the default be an Apple model and then let you choose other models. So that's what this is it's like once you guys are good enough with your model, we'll put it in our OS as the default, but until then, just you know work over there.

0:57:24 - Alex Lindsay
Chatgpt did hand off. You know, sam Altman did hand off. One of the reasons you may want to use Apple at some point in the future is like we might have to hand all your searches over to the government if they subpoena them. He just flat out said that, and so this is the. You know. I mean, I think Apple, apple has the potential. They are behind, they've been behind before, and they have the potential to build something that is far more private and potentially more powerful than a lot of the other ones over time.

0:57:56 - Andy Ihnatko
So you know, but they've been the slow horse in almost every product line that they've been in. Yeah, and I think as never before, they have the benefit of all this research that has been worked on for 10 or 15 years by people who saw this coming early. But hey, you got people to copy off of or to learn from, so they're not necessarily starting from zero.

0:58:13 - Alex Lindsay
They have a highly. The biggest advantage that Apple has is a highly invested client base that has all their hardware, has all you know, hundreds of movies or tens of movies in their Apple thing. Like, moving an Apple user is so hard because the ecosystem is so wound so tightly that they have a lot of time. People are still using AOL and they had a lot less, a lot less time. Apple's got a decade to figure it out before I mean it might look bad on their stock, you know, on their quarterlies, but they've got a lot of time before it was a real emergency.

0:58:49 - Andy Ihnatko
I also got to wonder. It's been known for a long time that Apple has had its own spider out there on the web. Like what kind of data has that spider been collecting, and will that help them to build this Answerbot, or are they gonna have to basically write something brand new for it?

0:59:06 - Leo Laporte
That's what it stands for, by the way I think I didn't mention it is Answers, knowledge and Information. It sounds a little bit like a chat GPT or maybe even more like a perplexity, which is more focused on that kind of thing. They see it as a service, part of their in-house AI services that would then support something like a smart Siri and so forth.

0:59:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, an answer engine capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions how do you?

0:59:36 - Leo Laporte
it feels to me, especially given this robbie walker and john jandrea that maybe this is, uh, the equivalent of silicon valley tv shows putting somebody on the roof.

0:59:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, or I was I was thinking about that kid in second grade who stayed behind to help the teacher yeah, instead. Of going to third grade. It's a little little bit like that but again.

If this is a bigger, longer term project and this is the stuff that they were always advocating you know where the because a lot of this, I think, has come down to. We need to ship something that works, and that they were unable to do it, and in this case it's more like this is long term. You're not going to be pressured to ship this next year, um, so get the work going in a more, you know, r&d kind of role, really uh, all right, well, I'm just glad robbie's got something to do besides eat lunch.

1:00:35 - Leo Laporte
Um yeah, in fact, if it makes sense that apple, would you know, try a number of different avenues. Do you think the buying perplexity is still on the table?

1:00:45 - Andy Ihnatko
unknown.

1:00:46 - Jason Snell
There was that yeah, it's that rumor about what a mistraw of a french uh llM is a stronger, I think, rumor. That makes more sense right, because that would come with its own technology and be something that would probably fit into Apple pretty well.

1:01:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Cloudflare might have tanked Perplexity's chances with there, Although Perplexity responded pretty well, I thought to the Cloudflare blog post. We'll probably talk about that tomorrow on Intelligent Machine.

1:01:13 - Andy Ihnatko
I think Perplexity was also getting some bad press this week about how they've been like ignoring.

1:01:17 - Leo Laporte
That's what I'm talking about that came out of Cloudflare? Yeah, we'll see. Probably, given Apple's caution about taking on anything controversial at all, that might've put the kibosh on it. All right, right, little break, we're gonna have some more in just a bit. You're watching MacBreak Weekly Andy, Alex and Jason in the house.

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Wild Tim Cook has now been CEO for longer than Steve Jobs. That's kind of amazing. We still we can't forget Steve. That's the problem, you know he's his.

1:04:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a very, very long shadow, isn't?

1:04:44 - Leo Laporte
it. It really is so. Uh, steve was Apple CEO. Steve was Apple's CEO from 97 to 2,841 days, official CEO from 2000 until his resignation in 2011. A total of 4,249 days. Obviously, macrumors needed a little bit of something to write an article about.

1:05:11 - Alex Lindsay
Tim Cook has now been the CEO for 5,090 days. I mean, you know, I think that for Apple wouldn't probably exist without Steve jobs and definitely wouldn't be in the should the hadn't hadn't been pointed in the direction that is, without Steve jobs, but it wouldn't have gotten to the scale without Tim cook. Completely agree.

1:05:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's, it's. It's interesting to to sort of think about how a personality like steve jobs would have confronted some of the very, very specific and unique challenges that apple faced in the past 10 years, particularly in the last like four years. It's like uh, I'm good, you're kind of happy you have a someone who's a bit more, a lot more diplomatic in that scene uh in the in the 21st century.

1:05:51 - Jason Snell
I love Steve but, boy, if people told him that his business was, I mean, like the whole mindset of we're going to control it, we're going to take every last penny off the table. All that came from him because he was trying to bring Apple back from death. And if some government regulator told him that they had to change their policies, I mean it would have been like I mean, thoughts on Flash was stern, but it would have been much more stern than that and I think it would have gotten them in trouble because he was not that kind of guy. That said, by now, even if Steve had had a clean bill of health and was still with us, he would have long since been just like on the board or or or off, I think. At this point I don't think he would have stuck around in that job for that long regardless, but yeah he would not have been the most politic of people.

1:06:43 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, going to a uh factory with donald trump and for all yeah, no, yeah.

1:06:48 - Jason Snell
I mean for all of his, I think for all of his good things that are unique and that should be applauded. There are also a bunch of things that he was probably really bad at. He was the right guy at the right time.

1:07:02 - Leo Laporte
He saved Apple. Not only did he create Apple, he saved it by coming back when they were almost out of money, getting an investment from Microsoft. But you know both of, but both of them deserve credit Absolutely. We have a new candidate for the Apple card. As you know, goldman Sachs wants to get out of it. We talked last week about JPMorgan Chase being interested. Now Visa, according to the Wall Street Journal, has said hey, we would do it. They've offered Apple $100 million. Come on, guys, that's chump change to apple. That's nothing to take over the credit card from a master card. It is currently a master card, um, and it doesn't matter to me. I do have an apple card. I use it kind of like all the time what would?

1:07:48 - Jason Snell
is this just like a inducement to get whoever, whatever bank takes it over, to rebrand it as a visa instead of a master card? Because, like, visa is not a bank?

1:07:58 - Leo Laporte
no, no, this is exactly right. That's what the journal says. Apple is expected to select a network for the card before it picks the bank to replace goldman sachs.

1:08:09 - Jason Snell
So you pick the plumbing before you build the house, right because right now it's a master card and so I could see visa saying we really want that traffic.

1:08:15 - Alex Lindsay
That would that would be really good for us, so let's get in there they don't have to deal with all the idiosyncrasies that apple has, they just want the traffic you know, the bank has to put up with the apple right a lot of those banks and, again, partners of both, so they're like we'll make it work, worth your while to to have it be a Visa card instead of a MasterCard.

Yeah, and I think that, again, it may not have worked in the current structure, but another bank being able to start over again looking at what the requirements are and looking at what the challenges are.

they can now talk to Apple and go well not only do they know what the deal is, but they can restructure how they build their setup so that it you know you're able to. When you're stuck in it, once the once the train is left and the wheels are going, it's very hard to change where the tracks are. But you can say, okay, I'm going to build a different style of tracks and make it more efficient so that, when it comes in, we can still do what Apple wants to do. Or they'll tell Apple to you know that they can't, but I have a feeling what the what Apple's going to keep holding out for because they've got their current partner on the hook for a while. So so they have time to think about it and work through it. But I think what Apple's going to want is someone to restructure how they do what they do so that they can still provide the services that Apple's expecting.

1:09:26 - Jason Snell
And having a network that is motivated, like Visa might be, would be helpful, as, as a part of that, for sure I have one of my cards is a Chase Visa, and so I mean I could see that this may be a dovetail of those two stories, right when it's going to become a Chase Visa instead of being Goldman MasterCard.

1:09:44 - Leo Laporte
MasterCard's not giving up easily. They're fighting, and Amex wants to get in there too. So everybody wants the Apple business.

1:09:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, except Goldman Sachs. Yeah, except Goldman. There too, so everybody wants the apple business, that's yeah except goldman sachs yeah except gold. No, they accept that and again we remember that gold.

1:09:56 - Alex Lindsay
This was goldman sachs getting themselves into uh a retail business.

1:09:59 - Leo Laporte
They didn't know, so yeah, when you say that they don't.

1:10:02 - Alex Lindsay
They kind of didn't know what they were doing, so they're the only ones willing to put up with it because they didn't know what they were doing. And now what apple's? Uh, what they've proven is they don't know what they're doing and that the other companies are able to with a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience. If they say they can do it, they understand how deep that water is and and they have a much better infrastructure to probably support it.

1:10:23 - Leo Laporte
They did the same thing. Actually, visa did the same thing to MasterCard at Costco and and came after Costco with a big and you can't use your MasterCard at Costco, which is weird. There aren't a lot of retailers.

1:10:36 - Alex Lindsay
I've been to where you can't. I have almost no MasterCards. Like it's interesting, I just thought of that. I was like I don't know if I have any MasterCard. Well, you have an Apple Card. Also, if I have a Visa, I don't have an Apple Card. What oh?

1:10:48 - Jason Snell
I do it's beautiful.

1:10:50 - Leo Laporte
It's made out of metal yeah, it's the only. I use my apple pay all the time, and so, yeah, if I'm somewhere where they don't take apple pay but they take a credit card, it works fine too.

1:11:00 - Jason Snell
So right, and that's I mean. For me, that's the number one reason to get a, uh, an apple card still only available in the united states, by the way is, uh, they give you big discounts, uh, extra discounts, on purchases made via apple pay. So, like you're really, you've got an incentive to use it as the default when you do tap to pay out in the world, because you get I forget what is four percent off instead of three, or three instead of two, something like between that and uh, that you get discounts on everything you buy from apple.

1:11:32 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it can be worth it for somebody who's got a lot of money on Apple stuff. I got $6.96 this week in Apple cash.

1:11:41 - Jason Snell
Yeah, they keep feeding that cash to you. It adds up.

1:11:45 - Leo Laporte
I actually paid for the iPad for my daughter with Apple cash. You know the little leftover crumbs for my daughter, uh, with apple cash. You know the the little leftover crumbs, uh. Mac os 26 tahoe beta 5 is out for all. The beta fives are out. Beta 5 for everything is the public beta updated no, it's.

1:12:05 - Jason Snell
This is developer beta, so presumably this will then lead to a public beta.

1:12:09 - Leo Laporte
Okay I haven't found any. By the way, I even moved my iphone. Finally I gave up and, uh, it's been very reliable all around, in every respect. Uh, one of the things that's happening in the new beta on tahoe is the hard drive no longer looks like a spinning hard drive. They've replaced that icon. Nice job nine to five mac. They've put it into a translucent trash can and the new icon, oh wow, it's kind of like an ssd. It's a little more generic yeah, I wish they should.

1:12:43 - Andy Ihnatko
They should have put, like the, the compact fluorescent light bulb and the incandescent light bulb in there too.

1:12:48 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing how this stuff lives on.

1:12:51 - Jason Snell
This skeuomorphic crap lives on well, they did do that right with an energy saver. Uh setting not a light bulb anymore originally a light bulb, then it was a compact fluorescent and now it's an led.

Yeah, huh wow you're paying attention yeah, I wrote a whole article about that back at mac world when they went to the compact fluorescent light bulb instead, but they've since even changed it further because time marches on. Yeah, I mean, this is a little like the floppy disk icon for save, right. It's sort of like a metal hard drive that you would put in a Mac Pro. Basically, at this point is probably not the best image to represent a mounted disk, which will probably be something you would attach, you know, via USB.

1:13:31 - Leo Laporte
It's probably an SSDd, although you can't, yeah, yeah undoubtedly, undoubtedly undoubtedly.

1:13:38 - Jason Snell
Why would they update that and have it not be an ssd?

1:13:42 - Leo Laporte
um, japan has mandated that apple must allow third-party app stores and payment systems, so the dominoes continue to fall. Uh, I imagine this is just going to be this way globally in in a year or two, right?

1:13:57 - Alex Lindsay
and we should see how many people actually use it, you know, so they can give it to them. And then the question is I mean, google's had other stores for a long time and right yeah, but this, but it's.

1:14:08 - Andy Ihnatko
it goes beyond that. This is a they. This week, they released a draft edition of the of the guidance on what Apple and Google are going to have to do for a law that I think goes into effect in December, and so it is like alternative app stores, but it's also third-party. Developers need to have access to biometrics if they want to use the hardware on the phone. If Apple is harvesting data from its users to improve its own products internally, then they have to be able to share that data with developers as well. It's 130 pages long. I downloaded it but I haven't read it yet.

But the impression I get is not that developers should be able to see everything that Apple sees, but if Apple uses certain data and metrics as developers who are building a chat app, developers who are building a mail app, developers who are building a browser, then they can't use that as a unique advantage over third-party apps that do that sort of thing.

It's a long, long list of things and, yeah, it's going to be a mess. I mean, at this point, you kind of imagine that they're going to have to basically re-engineer their entire workflow and their entire structure for building operating systems and building these features to make sure that they can cut out a version that complies with each each regulatory set of limitations that are in each part of the country, the world in which they operate. A lot of these things are the same, but they're certainly not going to want to just simply make a blanket change to the worldwide edition of iOS or the worldwide edition of the app store. They're still going to want to make sure that, in each market, they only have to do the bare minimum of what they are being ordered to do, and so I'm fascinated by how this affects their ability to continue to develop and update and manage all these different products internationally.

1:16:05 - Alex Lindsay
And it just may mean that releasing of the OS takes longer and what the result may be is that if you're in the US, you get the release at a certain date and then the dates in other countries are six months behind or whatever, as they kind of work through whatever those things are, and then they'll just tell people that that's why it's taking so long.

1:16:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, no, it's probably going to be two or three. I imagine there's going to be a couple of different tiers, one tier being okay, this is actually something that we can just basically roll into the main OS. That's not a big problem. There's going to be stuff where, okay, we will roll a special version of this for the specific market, because we're definitely not going to extend that to the world, and then, on certain very spicy situations, it will be okay. Guess what? You don't get cut copy and paste in Thailand. Oh well, we don't get cut copy and paste in Thailand. Oh well, before we get, we don't. We don't want to comply with this law. We think it's stupid. So you can't cut copy and paste on on iOS anymore. Do you complain?

1:17:00 - Leo Laporte
complain to your, to your local government about it didn't they uh throw some shade I can't I don't remember if it was in the analyst call or it was in the all hands meeting about how, uh, these countries were compromising apple's product quality and security with these kinds of orders.

1:17:18 - Andy Ihnatko
I can't remember where I saw them that might have been in, uh, their resp, their first official response to the doj's antitrust suit.

Oh well, that too, yeah, they fight, they finally exhausted their last attempt to get this to miss dismissed, so they issued a formal, like response to the doj and and it was basically the entire playbook that you would have imagined. Yeah, that like this is overreach, this is unnecessary, this is again and it's stifling us. We're, we have the, we have the some of the most contented and uh, loyal, uh, loyal users and customers in the entire industry. It's not because we abuse them or abuse the market, so right, right, sandy, competitive, well, all right.

1:18:01 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, I mean it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

1:18:07 - Alex Lindsay
I mean, it all depends on the judges, it depends on how it goes. I mean a lot of what you can't. You can't go into a court case going well, sure, they're right. So all of these are making the points that you're going to make. You have to make those points before, but usually you can't bring up new points unless there's new evidence in the appeals You're not even playing for. I mean, apple, in this case, is not even playing for the first ruling. They're playing against.

You know, the Supreme Court hasn't ruled anything. They've just chosen not to look at some cases and every time this goes up, the Supreme Court may decide oh well, this is the one we'd like to take on, and so, and if they and you know the DOJ is using you know some creative licensing on, like how you know, okay, we're going to go by profit, not by, because Apple doesn't clearly doesn't have a monopoly on phones, right, they have 56, 57% of the United States market, less than 20% of the world market. They're not, you know, like they're not a traditional monopolist, and so so they made something else up. But when you start making stuff up, you're kind of putting your building, your house, on sand, and so so at any point in time, if you make something up, you get the wrong judge. If you're standing on bedrock, you don't care what judge it is, you don't care how it goes through. But if you build your house on sand, you got to get the right judge, you got to get the right appeal and you got to make sure that the Supreme Court is in the right mood to win that.

And I think that that's the. You know like that and it's all you know like that. No, but it's all you know. Someone grew up watching it. It's. You know they're. You know they're the DOJ. I mean, people are winning this, but the DOJ is still. It's a creative way of looking at monopolies, and so if you get creative about looking at things, then you have to get everything right, and so so Apple's just poking holes at a, at a relatively weak case that they'll, that they still could lose.

1:19:51 - Andy Ihnatko
So yeah, I mean, there are parts of it that I, that I, are where the doj is playing, playing the classic hits, and I always enjoy, you know, the hey jude of the doj, antitrust stuff I I love and I'll chant along with and do the na na na, but they, there is, there is some stupid stuff about. Oh, oh, you're creating, you're stifling the creation of super apps. Like, what is a super app? Oh well, we defined it thusly.

1:20:19 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I mean, they're making up a lot of stuff.

1:20:20 - Andy Ihnatko
We defined it as something that you're not allowing to happen in the app marketplace. Like okay.

1:20:26 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, we defined a straw man and then we burned it down. You know like and so, and that's you know and the, and you know like and so, so like and that's you know and the, and you know they and so it it, but it, you know any case that goes to court you can lose or win, and so so I think that you know Apple has probably you know they both have lots of money. Apple probably has better lawyers than what's in the DOJ, especially currently, and so so it puts the DOJ at a little bit of a disadvantage, but their track record is I mean, a lot of other people's track record has been good, so it looks like they might have a good chance of that, but it'll still take years to work its way through the system, and the more Apple puts up what they're doing, the longer it will take.

1:21:05 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I didn't mention that. Tim also said that the Tahoe beta is the most popular developer beta in Apple's history. I don't know how they I mean, I don't know what that even means, but I think people are more and more used to downloading the beta.

1:21:22 - Alex Lindsay
I think just it's just that more people have said, okay, I'm willing to take on a beta. They're get used to it. They get used to the automatic, you know. I think people have gotten more comfortable with public betas.

1:21:31 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, that is an interesting data point. Like I was saying before, I thought it was interesting that he spent so much time talking about the new iOS again, as though that was going to be like a major revenue driver, a signature moment for Apple, as opposed to a very, very ambitious update. But that does show that there are people who are responding so well to the pitch that was being that was made at wwdc that they're like. Even people that are not necessarily people who would sign up for, uh, for public beta, are like I. I want my ipad to do this right now. I don't want to wait for it, so I'm going to download it.

1:22:09 - Leo Laporte
That augers very, very well for the platform that's going to exist in september yeah, uh, interesting story of about a man using an ipad controlling it with his mind. This is a from a company called synchron. It's a embedded chip. Man has alsS. He's using his iPad without touching it, without eye tracking, without voice. He's just thinking. It's a fascinating movie you can. You can watch here. And it's because Apple built in the switch control feature, which is fantastic. So it's interfacing to the switch control feature, which is fantastic. So it's interfacing to the switch control. The iPad even sends back screen context to the BCI decoder to make everything run more smoothly and accurately. It's pretty wild. I recommend the video. Yeah, from Synchron S-Y-N-C-H-R-O-N.

1:23:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, from Synchron S-Y-N-C-H-R-O-N. Yeah, this is why Apple's investment in accessibility has just been above and beyond what any other company has really even considered to be feasible, let alone what they've actually done. And this is not just this is because 15 years ago they decided that accessibility is a right, not a nice thing to do, not charity. What's the saying? I forget the sign, but there's a saying that goes along those lines. That, like this is we do this because we need to have this work with everybody who wants to use it, not because, oh well, we'll find these edge cases in which we can actually make this thing work with this other device. So it's a philosophy, it's a corporate culture, and we're seeing exactly what's possible when a company is on board to that degree.

1:24:06 - Leo Laporte
Synchron's brain-computer interface. Its BCI chip actually doesn't have to be surgically implanted, it's implanted through the blood vessels. And they say, uh, this is, this is an existing system that we are planning to roll out soon. They're planning wider access, so very interesting. Apple supports the interface across iPad, iphone and even Vision Pro supports the interface across iPad, iphone and even Vision Pro.

1:24:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Well done, nice partnership. Yeah, it's a very big deal especially because it doesn't involve like actual implant into the brain, because there's been a lot of really good progress being made on these kind of neural implants, but the problem is, at some point these wires have to come out. How do you put? What is the long-term viability of this device? How much maintenance is it going to use? So that's. It's a very, very exciting as a non-expert in accessibility, health. The Synchron technology looks really, really nice.

1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
Apple TV Plus has introduced a podcast, an Apple original, called unicorn girl. Meet Candace. She's a mother of two, a nurse and CEO and founder of multiple million dollar companies. How about that? Huh, candace is the kind of person who seems like she can have everything she ever wanted. She could save the world and look good doing it. Okay, fine, but I guess there's probably a secret in her life. Huh, so there's, uh, I guess. Uh, is it audio? Is it I guess? Or is it video? I don't know. The sound seems like it might be audio.

1:25:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's audio only that does sound like the first three sentences of a lifetime christmas movie pitch feels a little bit like that. But then her perfect life gets all twisted around when her little sister arrives from tulsa, oklahoma I don't, I can't tell if it's a true story or a fiction.

1:26:18 - Leo Laporte
Uh, it's from the creator of scamanda. Scamanda, an award-winning journalist. Charlie webster investigates candace's rise and fall, which sounds like it's real. But I but it's. It doesn't.

1:26:23 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't know does anybody get murdered? I understand that in podcasts of the scale someone gets murdered very helpful if somebody can get murdered.

1:26:30 - Leo Laporte
I believe that is a big part of it. There will be a new apple tv this year. Yes, no, we don't know, but the rumors are strong. In fact, I saw one one uh blogger say you know, this could make apple be more important to gaming than playstation or xbox put together it is like I said a month ago it's a hell of a gaming console.

1:26:56 - Andy Ihnatko
I mean, if you just consider it that way, even if you already have a streaming box that can automatically transcode, upscale things from HD to 4K a million different features, having this as a $100 game console is not a stupid thing. Code, upscale things from HD to 4K million different features. Having this as a game, as a $100 game console, is not a stupid thing, especially with a subscription to Apple Arcade. It's something you can leave in the living room and you know your kids are not going to get into too much trouble with it.

1:27:24 - Alex Lindsay
I think that Apple still needs to I don't know whether it's Apple Arcade or something else fund something that really pushes the envelope of what the devices can do Like, a lot of the games in apple arcade are kind of they're fun, but they're not like pushing anything graphically. That is difficult, and I think apple has the opportunity to prove that they can do those kinds of things and even drive hardware sales. I mean the, the ipad, the, the that could be great on a mac mini from m4. Mac mini could be a really great gaming uh device.

1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's would be the interesting thing what if you put an m1 or m2 in an, an apple tv I mean? Right now it's got an a15, bionic and usually three years old.

1:28:01 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, usually it's. Whenever they release it, it's it's a version or two older of what the phone had or something they got a lot of extra parts, or or ones that aren't quite as fast as they may for the devices yeah, you take ones that are on the outside of the wafer and, you know, no one's going to notice it on Apple TV Because it's so much, it's so overpowered compared to what every other set-top box is not. I mean, it's like four or five times more powerful than the next one.

1:28:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Which is why it's like for people who just want a streaming box, it's two or three times needlessly expensive want a streaming box.

1:28:34 - Alex Lindsay
it's two or three times needlessly expensive. I keep coming back to I don't think the chip affects the price very much.

1:28:38 - Andy Ihnatko
Cool, but okay, well, at least it's still more expensive than the $20 or $30 streaming tabs. That again for people who just need to get Hulu, netflix, youtube and a couple other things. As long as they have enough storage space, people are going to be happy with that. But the reason why I keep coming back to Apple Arcade is that whatever chip they put into the model that comes out this year by the way, this story comes from a source that spoke to MacRumors about it that they're saying yeah, apple's still on track to release a new Apple TV Whatever chip they put into a 2025 Apple TV is going to be powerful enough to run AAA games, for sure.

But my question is that are the people who want to run a AAA game? Are they going to be thinking I don't want to have an Xbox, I don't want to have a PlayStation, I want to have an Xbox. I don't want to have a PlayStation, I want to have an Apple TV box. So I mean, apple's working very, very hard to make sure that, to accommodate developers, game developers, to make sure they can put their apps on Mac, but I don't know if the market is interested in a streaming box for that platform. If it can run Steam. That's great and that's pretty much all they want to do.

But again, it's hard for me to figure out the appeal of that. I would more be interested if and when this thing comes out. I want to hear your teardown, alex, because it seems to me as though the big opportunity is not necessarily games, but as a host organism for Apple TV+, that, whatever features they want to put into their streaming service, be it quality, be it HDR, be it speed or be it just hey, there are things we can have multiple points of view, multiple camera angles, multiple feeds of information that you could only get when something is streaming through Apple TV Plus on an Apple TV.

1:30:33 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I feel like Apple could. You know again, I feel like they could change the game a little bit if they started to support 120 frames per second at 4K. You know they, technically, the current, the newest Apple TV can do that. It just doesn't do it Like it doesn't give you the tool to get to it. But it, the hdmi out and the horsepower built into it, are absolutely capable of going 120 frames per second at 4k.

And why would you do that? Because I have a bunch of I have my phone and tons of other things that can capture 120 frames per second, and so the the thing that apple could do, I don't think they're going to. But um, and I think this has more to do with culturally, I think there's a lot of people that make content for Apple that are really, you know, attached to legacy formats like 2398. So they're really attached. They don't see why you would want to do that. But if and the problem that they have is that if people started shooting 120 frames per second with their phone and they started putting it on there and watching it on their com, on their uh as someone who works with 120 frame a lot if you start watching it 24.

You start seeing the frames like you, you know, like, like 24, it's like feels, hungry it feels very flickery when you get used to 120 frames per second and so people start taking their home movies that they could shoot with their phone and just sharing it over to the apple tv and seeing 120 frames per second, it looks like a window, it is. It is really compelling and they're going to start being you know, but apple then would have this whole opportunity to you know, as you see all this production with the phone and everything else existing uh apple tv do that?

No, it won't let you. It can. So, hardware-wise, yes, it can. Software-wise, no, it doesn't give you anything higher than 60.

1:32:21 - Leo Laporte
And there are a lot of TVs out now that can do 120 or even 240. Almost all.

1:32:25 - Alex Lindsay
Almost every TV you buy can do up to 240 frames a second. I mean the cheaper ones may be only 120. Computer monitors are all over the place, but when you buy a TV, remember it's got all that extra stuff where it turns your 24 into 120, you know, like a smooth motion or whatever, that they call it Interpolation Interpolate what people hate, and for good reason.

1:32:45 - Jason Snell
I mean, it's just making things up.

1:32:46 - Alex Lindsay
You know, at that point, mistake of is there's a difference between converting 2398 or 24 frames, a second to 120 and actually shooting 120, you know, and right now.

1:32:57 - Leo Laporte
Really impressive, even a dvd, even the uhd dvd players, I don't think can do 120.

1:33:02 - Alex Lindsay
Well, they anything that's got. I think it's hdmi 2. It's either 2.2 or 2.4 I don't what sources are there? Are there any? No, there's very few sources so apple would really could own this market well, if they had a and they, if they did their, use their phone. Their phone now, can you know, easily, does 120 frames a second.

Yeah and so now you could be pushing this whole market towards a push, the. I'm pushing the rest of the market in a place that apple can do almost automatically and nobody else can you know like, and that that's apple's specialty is that you'd have to put the hdmi 24 cable in the box you'd have, I think, most people's cables are probably uh, but you could tell them what that is.

I mean, you can tell them what to go get and and their, their, their tv, if those bought in the last five years will do it their apple tv already can do it. They release a new one, definitely, and then their and their phones last what five or six years have been able to to capture that. And so Apple has a lot of stuff that's already built in. You know the Apple like, for instance, the Mac mini I connect Mac minis to projectors that and the Mac minis do 120 frames a second. It looks amazing, so so it is. So those are.

That's the kind of stuff that Apple could theoretically do that forces the market to play a game that only they can win, and it seems like it's such a really. And then what it would do is then drive other companies because these cameras can capture 120 frames a second. So you can capture on a Blackmagic camera and some of the other cameras Blackmagic, you can turn it up to 120 at 4K, even at 8K Blackmagic. You can turn it up to 120 at 4K, even at 8K, and so you can turn that up right now in a lot of the larger Blackmagic cameras to go ahead and capture 120 frames a second. So the industry would then have to respond to, or would have the opportunity to respond, and the only platform that would support it would be Apple TV+, so't.

I think that it's very unlikely Apple will do that, but that's what they could do. It would put and again, if you started watching lots of shows at 120 frames per second or, more importantly, mls. So if MLS was running at 120 frames a second all the time, your other sports channels would look really bad, like it's one thing to talk about film being 2398, but sports channels live sports loves frames like frame rate. I mean a lot of sports channels do 720 because they want 60 frames a second, you know, and in the same transport uh window, and so you know, being able to do 4k, 120 of mls would, or f1 or other things like that, would be incredible. You'd'd need.

1:35:31 - Leo Laporte
HDMI 2.1 to do the 4K 120. Yeah, although there is a newer standard now. 2.2 came out early this year. It has 96 gigabit.

1:35:43 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think it's 8K 120. 96 gigabit, I think is 8K 120. Wow, wow.

1:35:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay. Well, I don't even need it and I'm just such an Apple TV fan that I would just buy it anyway. If they do come out later this year, sometime in between September and the end of the year probably not at the iPhone.

1:36:03 - Alex Lindsay
You know, the best thing I think I talked about a couple weeks ago, the best thing is with old Apple TVs. You throw them in your suitcase and then you just get to the. You just get to the wherever you're going and now you, even if you're just sharing to it, you just take over whatever tv you run into just yellow, so you don't leave it behind the pico little black box the size of a hockey puck.

1:36:24 - Jason Snell
Yeah, that's gonna be overlooked exactly the pico mac nano which I think you talked about last week andy recommended it, and we all bought one.

1:36:35 - Leo Laporte
You're lucky because they're not selling the pre-assembled ones anymore. I thought I saw that. I thought I saw that behind you there, uh it was mine, it was actually.

1:36:46 - Andy Ihnatko
I thought it was just really, really, really, really, really, really far away in the back.

1:36:51 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this is a it's like a two inch high mac with a one inch diagonal screen. It's got uh. You can uh boot things.

1:37:00 - Leo Laporte
It's like original mac um so what are you running on it?

1:37:04 - Jason Snell
because it looked like you had a I had like mac right open, but you can take any disk image and you put it on an sd card. It'll boot off of that instead. So I've got to experiment a little more and get a better disk image with it. My frustration with it is the disk image that comes on. It has mac paint, but when you try to launch it it says it needs more memory, which isn't how that's supposed to work anyway. But the point is, it's this super cool tiny thing where the guy who developed this, nick gillard. Um, he built his own circuit board in order to get it to fit inside this little tiny enclosure. Um, that's running. Uh, you know an emulator. Uh, it really just like amazing kind of work that he did. But apple contacted him and said you know especially the, especially your replica of our box.

You're using all of our kind of stuff but I think he said, look, they were very nice. And they said they just said don't sell the pre-assembled ones so you can still get all the parts at At his website, which is 1bitrainbowcom.

You can still get all the parts and make it yourself, assemble it yourself and have fun with it. It is I mean, it's the original Mac, so its ability to run software is limited. There's a lot of stuff that worked on the later Macs that won't run on this thing because it is meant to be that original Mac, but I just love the idea of it and it really you know it works. I literally have to take my glasses off and hold it right next to my face in order to see what's going on, because it's a one-inch diagonal screen.

But I was able to plug in a mouse Because the way it works is that there's just USB on the back, but it comes with an adapter, or I guess if you're buying the parts, you'd buy the adapter, that's power and a USB port. And then I plugged in a mouse, a USB mouse to it, and you can click around and I mean, like it's, it's real, it's like something that looks like you're looking into a kaleidoscope or something, or a Viewmaster, and it's like it's a perfect model, except it works. It runs software, it doesn't do sound. I mean, there's lots of limitations to it, but the fact that he was able to get the hardware and fit it into this little 3D printed original Mac case that's two inches high and that, like, the screen turns on and you can move a mouse around, what a great idea. So thank you, andy, for suggesting it, especially since we got in right under the wire, when now you have to assemble it yourself now I'm sad I'm gonna have to buy the parts myself.

1:39:27 - Andy Ihnatko
I, I and how many of us like think highly enough of apple to think that like an email message went out on campus saying, okay, uh, now we're gonna tell them to stop like taking pre-orders and stop selling it on three day, in three days time. So if you want one of these, make sure you put in your order right now. Did they? I? No, I don't know I'm guessing. No, I'm guessing that there are.

1:39:51 - Jason Snell
There are some of these all over the apple campus probably they were very generous with them and gave them, gave him a warning and basically he had like three days to take off the pre-orders and he sent out a message saying I'm gonna take the pre-orders down three days, so you might want to order it now because everybody who did order before then will get one yeah, he'll get one, you'll get one and you can still order the parts.

And they didn't say take that down, you must not. They really just were the idea of productizing this completely. I think that ticked over a little legal line for them, but the one that I got here. So not only is it a replica of the original mac box, but it's literally for people watching on the video version, it's literally a replica of the whole thing, including, like the top insert and what's in the box, and the Mac is in the box and the little container containing the documentation is in the box.

1:40:38 - Alex Lindsay
And that's where the adapter?

1:40:39 - Jason Snell
went, and in fact he even includes a little hex tool, and he made this because the original Macs could be taken apart with a hex tool. So he has it where you can heat, set in these little tiny hex screws in the same place and take the two pieces of the enclosure apart using the same technique. Just, I mean breathtaking. And the fact again, a fully functional well, fully, a mostly functional two inch high original Mac. What an amazing thing. So you could still make this a little handy project if you want to have fun, just by ordering the parts from One Bit Rainbow.

1:41:17 - Andy Ihnatko
I have to pull my nerd card. It's not a hex screw, it was a T15 Torx. Oh, you're right.

1:41:22 - Jason Snell
It was a Torx. Well, this one is like an ikea hex screw, but it's the, it's the thought that counts, it's the topic.

1:41:28 - Andy Ihnatko
I just love that. It's like I've seen a lot of hey look, we made a tiny, tiny little mac and it's. It's great. You love to see that kind of initiative and creativity, but something's off about it. Or they say oh, we can only buy this kind of a panel from aliexpress, so we made it adapt to this. This is like. Again, you would not. It looks like a classic Mac that is far, far away, but it is in front of you on your desktop.

1:41:52 - Jason Snell
A finder. It's open to the finder right there.

1:41:56 - Leo Laporte
So David Pogue said you may be wondering what happened to me for the last few years.

1:42:02 - Jason Snell
I mean, he's been doing his Sunday morning CBS stuff.

1:42:07 - Alex Lindsay
He has the best job he has, makes up whatever he wants and does and puts it on cbs sunday morning, yeah, and has eight emmys to show for it.

1:42:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, he has a new book, uh that will be out for apple's 50th anniversary. It's called apple the first 50 years 50. For the hardcover uh version you have to pre-order because it won't be out till next year, march of next year, but it is available now for a pre-order.

1:42:31 - Jason Snell
Uh, and it is big, it's like a copy 600 pages, 300 plus color photos um and interviews, new interviews that he did with waz and others.

Yeah so not just a rehash. David was always so. I was one of David's many editors at Macworld because he was a Macworld columnist before he was a New York Times columnist, and so what people you know. He's great at this because not only is he good at interviewing and good at talking to people, but I have a hard time thinking of somebody more qualified to write a high level overview. He has the Apple cred from Macworld. He has the tech journalism cred from the New York Times and all of David's pieces, even when he was writing about super nerdy topics like he wrote a whole feature for me about the Palm Pilot right for mac world.

He, he, he is always thinking about it on a very high level, uh, of like regular people. We talk about steve jobs, being concerned about like regular people using stuff. David pogue is a lot like that. He, he. This is going to be readable and, uh, accessible to a large audience, which is why I think his publisher is probably really happy that he put this together and that it's going to have a lot of pictures, color pictures, on top of it. This is not going to be a dense, nerdy book about Apple history. This is going to be, I would imagine a really fun romp illustrated through Apple history, which for the 50th anniversary which is coming up next year.

1:44:01 - Leo Laporte
That's April 1st, right Beautiful.

1:44:06 - Andy Ihnatko
At his point of view, it was amazing. He was one of the people who had I don't want to call it the blessing but I don't know if I'd call it a curse, but definitely not a blessing of getting phone calls from Steve Jobs at 2 AM taking you to task about something you said or something you wrote or bought. It's like, okay, that's a hard thing to go to voicemail so I'm really excited. But I am in the book because he called me a few weeks ago to fact check something. So I'm trying to convert that into a free copy. But if I don't get a free copy, I'm definitely buying one.

1:44:41 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and he's so good at taking a bunch of complex stuff and a whole bunch of stuff and just isolating it down to the stuff that matters. Yeah, and, by the way, if you're not, if you don't see, he's really fun. He does really great segments on CBS Sunday mornings.

All of them are available on YouTube. Just search David Pogue CBS Sunday morning and you'll see them all, and so you don't have to find a time to go watch it, they're all on. They cut them all up and put them on youtube and there he always finds great topics and digs into them and makes them interesting.

1:45:08 - Leo Laporte
apple first five zero apple f-i-r-s-t. Five zero dot com and it's available for pre-order pretty much everywhere right now. Simon and Schuster will be publishing it and it's a big, thick, 600 page book with 150 new interviews. So he really put you know he could have done, you know, just historic stuff, but he put a lot of work into this. Yeah, it's great, I think only only somebody like David.

1:45:36 - Jason Snell
At this point, given that especially walt mossberg is retired, there are very few journalists who would even be able to attempt to get this level of like like. I mean, let's be honest, have I thought about writing a book about apple with lots of pictures in it? I have, but I'm not sure I could get. I could crack the level of of people to make it worthwhile. David Pogue has a name that opens doors. I think he's the perfect choice for this.

1:46:03 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely, we'll look forward to it.

1:46:07 - Jason Snell
We love.

1:46:07 - Leo Laporte
David.

1:46:07 - Jason Snell
He was. He was a P I, he I edited his column in the back page and all the features that he did for a little while before he left us for the New York times and like he's always great to work with and we we went on a bunch of those Mac cruises together, Leo some of those with us too.

Yeah, David, great, great guy, um, a lot of fun. That's going to be a fun. This is, I guarantee it. It will be a fun book to read, because David doesn't write, not fun yeah, great writer, very talented, nice guy and a hell of a piano player.

1:46:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, well, he was you know he was Steven Broadway yeah, personal tech guru for Stephen Sondheim like when Stephen Sondheim had a problem with his Mac.

1:46:45 - Jason Snell
He called David Pogue and David would come over and help him out. What a oh man, the stories. And of course, there's that famous story about how high level Apple people came over to his house with the original iPhone because he was one of the early reviewers and they literally, like, came to his house and had dinner and gave him the iPhone. Like what a he's got a bunch of good stories.

1:47:05 - Andy Ihnatko
He's one of maybe three different tech journalists, although he's gone beyond that right now that if he were just to write a memoir I would write. I would buy the hell out of that memoir.

1:47:13 - Leo Laporte
He's got so many stories uh and used to be on our shows quite a bit, but uh got way too famous for that cbs now maybe yeah, yeah, uh, let's take a little break and when we come back we will get your picks of the week. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy, Alex and Jason.

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All right, let's get some pics. I'm going to start because I was very pleased to see that the ad blocker that I've used forever on everything is finally now available for safari. Now it's not an easy thing to do because safari has some real restrictions on ad blockers, much like Google's chrome does. Raymond Hill Gorhill, the guy who does u-block origin, made an u-block origin light for the new version of chrome and apparently I think that stimulated his production of the same thing for safari. I'm running it on the iPad, it runs on the iPhone, runs on the mac uh, it is hard to find because apple search sucks, but search for uBlock Origin Light and you want the one by raymond hill, except no substitutes.

This is a fantastic ad blocker that even lets you turn filters on and off and do all the things that the traditional ad blocks, uh blockers do, uh all their filter lists. Are not all of them. Many of them are there, as are easy list, easy privacy and peter's lows ad and tracking server list, both of which are very helpful for turning off those annoyances like cookie, cookie blockers, cookie the announcements free in all the app stores, just so. As you know, Andy and I co pick of the Uh we're talking about vintage max.

1:52:05 - Andy Ihnatko
How about vintage Lisa? Uh, this is a really, really cool project by a developer by the name of Andrew Yaros. It's called Lisa G G U I. It's not necessarily an emulator of the Lisa, it is a uh. He's reproducing the entire Lisa graphic user interface and experience using just Java and basic web techniques. So you can just go to lisagui.com and it will just simply. You'll get the boot sequence for the Lisa. It will warn you that again, it's not an emulator, it's. Apple can't really strike it down because he's not reusing Lisa's source code. You can either install it inside your browser as native code or you can just click the try button and it will still run. You just can't save documents, but you get the full like Lisa interface and there is an actual working Lisa in in boss in a computer stores repair shop slash museum in Boston for which I provided the Twiggy drives. It's like they they were my Twiggy drives. I've I've had as an ornament in my office for like 20 years and he needed them to restore it to full condition.

1:53:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this one's a lot faster than.

1:53:25 - Andy Ihnatko
Alisa, yeah, and it freaks you out because it's like, oh well, okay, well, I want to close that window. Well, no, that's not a close box, it's a disk icon.

1:53:35 - Alex Lindsay
You have to close a window.

1:53:37 - Andy Ihnatko
You have to go to the housekeeping menu and then, oh sorry, you have to go to file and select, put away or set aside the scroll bars don't necessarily do things.

It looks like the Mac but not anything works the way that you want it to. If you want a word process, you have to basically create a copy of a sheet of paper and then like type on that sheet of paper. Again, it is trippy as hell. I also like the fact that in the menu bar it says how many frames per second you're running at. I'm running at 60 frames per second. It's only in alpha. It's in alpha right now. So basically, what you would think of as the finder works fine. The puzzle and desk utilities work.

Lisa type paper works in a couple of demos, but he tends to do lisa calc, lisa draw, like the entire thing. Uh, and again, it is such a trip for someone who is. I'm so sorry that people don't get to experience, uh, some of these old technologies like the way they were actually run. Lisa emulation is very, very hard because the ROMs you need are hard to find. It's not as easy as emulating the Mac because of the lack of support. There's some projects, but you can't just like open a URL and 20 minutes later be actually using these apps. And this is a chance to actually go back to 1983 before an easier time when this poor, poor, innocent Lisa did not know that it was about to be crushed by an arrow in the back shot by one of its own executives.

1:55:19 - Leo Laporte
Very cool, very cool, lisa Gooey, there you go.

1:55:24 - Andy Ihnatko
If you've never seen it, you'll be amazed you've got the shade of color in the in the screen, right it's anyway it's pretty, it is pretty amazing.

1:55:33 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, andy. Uh, that is l-i-s-a-g-u-i dot com, Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

1:55:42 - Jason Snell
All right. First, before we do that for the people watching on video, let's see if I can give a little.

1:55:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, look at that. Oh, it's so little. It is a Mac it is.

1:55:52 - Jason Snell
You can actually see it's going on and look there's a cursor Wow, it's just kind of incredible that all those things are possible.

1:56:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Did you park the heads of the drive before you picked up?

1:56:03 - Jason Snell
the machine? Unfortunately no, so I've crashed the hard drive. Damn. It's a cry in shame uh we were talking as the show was getting started, we were talking about all the things you can do with a sous vide machine. It's been a few years since. Uh, seemingly everybody recommended sous vide stuff on this show, so I thought I would mention I recently had to replace my original. Uh, I actually actually ended up with another anova. Uh, precision cooker 3.0. Uh, I think it's aces. I think it's really great.

It's got like wi-fi or bluetooth or whatever, it doesn't matter uh, the original, yeah, I never used mine finally kind of died, um, and there are other ones that are that look cool but they don't have what you really want is the controls need to be on it. Some some cookers are like you just use our app. It's like you know what to set the temperature of a thing in my kitchen. Opening an app is not the way. Like you can have an app, but to require an app, no go, it's not going to happen. So this thing, it's got a little, you know, touch screen on it. You can set it to be what you want. It's obviously its primary purpose is to cook stuff. Right, the idea that you can take, uh, take a steak and and cook it to exactly medium rare and then it will just reach it and sit there and then so it's perfectly done. Every time you can see it on the outside. It's like really easy to do.

But I had two other tips.

One of them was the one I gave to Leo a couple of weeks ago, which is you can also just put cold water in a pot or in a plastic tub or whatever you want to use, and stuff that's frozen in a waterproof container like a Ziploc bag, and you circulate it at no temperature at lowest temperature, and the act of circulation is a speed thaw, so you can thaw frozen stuff way faster in a sous vide machine turned down all the way.

And the latest thing is a couple of weeks ago. Somebody asked me why my uh, there was no action in the lava lamp that is behind me and in fact it got in a weird state and I then I agitated it a little bit and there were little blobs everywhere and, uh, I thought you know what would be. The solution here is to use the sous vide bath and put the little glass thing of the lava lamp in it to get everything so warm that all of the wax, kind of like, melts and then goes where it needs to go and returns it to its clear state. Here, um, a lesson that I learned from decrystallizing honey, which is another thing you can do in a sous vide for that too, yeah like once you get this thing that circulates water and holds it at a given temperature.

there is so much science you can do, and some of it even tastes good, so check it out.

1:58:30 - Alex Lindsay
It will ruin a lot of things for you. Like chicken, and what I mean by that is you get used to cooking chicken at 145 degrees because if you leave it in a sous vide you don't have to go to 165. You can go to 145.

1:58:45 - Jason Snell
In fact, you can go to about 137, but it gets red and people. Yeah, the temperature that we all have been trained for is the temperature at which, instantaneously, everything is killed. But you can go at a lower temperature if you hold it there for 15 minutes or half an hour and you and then it's perfect and you can't overcook it.

1:58:59 - Alex Lindsay
The problem is you get used to 145 and, no matter what you do to it at 165 you're like this is taste, this is like not as good, it's just not as good, it's not as good for me so and and and so it's just it and it.

I use it all the time for chicken and then when you're entertaining people be, and a lot of times I have two or three of these out, and because I've got chicken at one temperature and I've got steak at another temperature and and you get a couple couple, you get a couple of tri-tips or or ribeyes or whatever in there and they're just sitting there waiting for people to show up and you've got your grill up full tilt and, uh, so you're just sitting there. When they get there, you put in your grill for a minute on each side at nine, 800 degrees, 900 degrees, if you've got a big green egg and and you, um, and you cut it off and it's the best steak they've ever had for me.

1:59:43 - Andy Ihnatko
For me it was pork, because like it's it's like when I was growing up like no, you're used to, okay, this is just to. To cook it to a safe temperature renders it dry and leathery, and so I just did. But with the sous vide it's like, oh, it's actually kind of pink inside, but it's perfectly safe. It was like as tender as chicken. The other thing that I'd like to evangelize about it is that it's not like cooking in an oven where, once it's done, you have to pull it out of the oven or else it'll overcook. Basically, once it's cooked, there's an amount of time after which, ok, great, the chicken is cooked, whatever it is, it's cooked, it's safe to eat. But then you get about a two-hour window in which it will just simply hold, not cook anymore. The texture might change if you go three hours, but it will hold.

And this is the reason why, for instance, like every time I've cooked Thanksgiving dinner, it's like, no, I'm doing the turkey, I'm an okay cook. But the biggest Achilles heel is if you have to serve dinner and all the turkey and all the sides have to be ready and done and tabled at the same time, how do you get all that stuff to synchronize. You don't have to to. It's like I just know that we're going to eat some time around one, and so if I, if the turkey is ready at around 12, maybe a little after that, I will, it does, it doesn't matter, it will not be overdone. I can simply okay what time the mashed potato is done, what time of the bean, green beans done, great, now I'll. Now I'll pull the turkey, sear it to give it a. That's the one thing it doesn't do.

2:01:20 - Jason Snell
It doesn't give you that, that mellard yeah, I I'm recommending a product called the Precision Cooker, but the Precision is for the temperature. One of the things that it gives you is it doesn't require you to be precise with time. It's very hard to screw this up. You can do it. Alex once went on a trip and left meat sous vide Not in the current one, but it's hard to do it makes a lot of noise.

2:01:41 - Alex Lindsay
And you see it, not a lot of noise, but it makes noise. I had an original one. This was a different product, sous vide supreme or something, and it didn't make any noise and so it was closed and it wasn't clear If it was closed, you just had no sense that it was on. And I put I used to take the little steaks at Safeway that were already pre-packaged and they've got like they're packaged in Burgundy or something like that, and throw them in for an hour and a half and it's like a great steak coming right out. You don't do anything. You literally take the bag and just put it in. People tell you not to do it, but I used to do it all the time, anyway, so and but then I put one in and then, you know, busy packing and forgotten, went to Europe.

So outside of that, it's very, very hard. You do have to get a either resealable I mean, you can do it with freezable, freezer quality ziploc bags. If you do it, put it in slowly, um, but I have a. You know, the other thing you get is a food saver and you, you ziploc, and you get pretty good at it, and the trick for me is umemary. If you just take your chicken or steak and you get some flaky salt on both sides, you get I put a little tab of butter in there and then I put a sprig of rosemary which I have a bush over outside. So I just go grab some and put them in and the rosemary, for some reason, for the chicken especially, and for the steak, it takes it to another level pretty quickly and and you don't have to do any, there's no work so buy one also.

2:03:08 - Jason Snell
You can fix your lava lamp and you don't need to buy the uh bucket that it goes in.

2:03:13 - Leo Laporte
Really you're just buying that, that the stick that goes going in any kind of I have.

2:03:18 - Jason Snell
I have a clear plastic uh bucket now that I use because, uh, it has some advantages, but for the first like four years that I did this, yeah, I just used one of our pots.

2:03:29 - Leo Laporte
Use a pot, it's fine they want a hundred bucks for their plastic. Oh, don't get their bucket and you don't need their.

2:03:34 - Jason Snell
No, there's amazon has ones that are the exact same shape that are way cheaper than that. Let me tell you they have yeah, they have great.

2:03:40 - Alex Lindsay
Amazon has great ones that are built for this. We just sous vide and it be like 15 dollars and then you get I get there's a little sleeve that you can go on it. That makes it more efficient because it doesn't evaporate, it doesn't let the heat out it's like a little lead lid with with a cutout for the cooker.

There's a topper, yeah, and then there's a, a thing you can flip up and put the meat in, and it's like, yeah, this is easy to easy, it's an easy nerdy thing, and you can start out with nothing but the cooker and just use your pods and then grow from there and the anova's start at like 30 bucks, like they're, like the, there's 300 ones, there's an 80 ones or 65 ones, that you just it's like whether you have wi-fi and how precise it is and how powerful it is and how this is the uh hinged lid, collapsible 10 I got that one.

2:04:20 - Jason Snell
I got that one that's all you need, yeah the most important thing is yeah, you and you don't need wi-fi or bluetooth or anything like that you really don't.

2:04:27 - Alex Lindsay
I just turn the dial up and do the thing I'm not gonna get gravy all over my phone just because I need to turn to turn off amen, no thanks, yeah, yeah very nice.

2:04:39 - Leo Laporte
We'll come back to our pics of the week in just a moment. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with andy, alex and jason. Uh, I think it's your turn, alex. So I spent the week.

2:04:46 - Alex Lindsay
In just a moment you're watching MacBreak Weekly with andy, alex and jason uh, I think it's your turn, alex, so I spent the weekend in golden gate park, the polo fields. Oh, did you go see the grateful dead tribute, dead dead in company? Yeah, I was, uh, with john mayer and I I was, I was working there so anyway, so were you sorry, yeah yeah, yeah, I maxed out in um 30 theaters and so uh, cool so anyway.

So I was there all weekend and I I had to go out and like so I've never been to a dead show. I mean, the dead have been around for 60 years. I've been around for 55 years and and I've avoided it until now and I'm like I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't get it. Oh man, I spent an hour, uh, in the middle of the they. What they do, is they about a 75 minute? Uh, they did it three nights in a row, so they and it's all different every time. And that's that's what I realized about the, the dead is that no show?

is anywhere and no show is anything like. I was like why do people keep on recording the show Like I don't understand? And then you go to it and you're like oh, I got it, you know and and, um, you know, like to be uh pharmaceutically enhanced as well. I probably should have done more of that. So, anyway, so the um uh, but the, you were working, you really could work and I could, you know so. So I, so I um uh, but and and this is what the you know.

2:05:59 - Leo Laporte
This is what the stage looked like um really early on. So people are coming.

2:06:01 - Alex Lindsay
They were always big on the sound system. Oh, it is out of control. So here now this is also being used for outside lands, but you can see, you know this is I'm kind of in the middle area there. You can see, kind of, let's see if I got there's some where they start turning the light stuff on and then look at, I mean, this is at night and it's just, it's really insane. And then, mickey, you'd think you'd have better seats, though, alex, given your fact. So here's the funny thing about that.

I talked to a bunch of people who go to these all the time. It turns out a lot of people go to the dead, all the dead shows ever. And they said you can't experience it in the VIP section and you can't experience it in those tents. They said what you want to do is get as close to the front of house mixer as possible, because that's who's mixing the show. So they said get close to that and be in the middle, but not in the back, but in the middle.

They. You know, these people do it all the time. Especially when you talk to tech people who do it all the time. They were like this is where you stand and so. So that. So where I am is right, I'm pretty close to where as close as you can get comfortably to the um, you know, to the uh front of house mixer and um, uh, it's. It's a little further over, but not much and anyway. But this isn't. This was incredible. They had so Mickey Hart does this thing where he plays all these drums and I guess it used to go on forever and I'm I'm pretty sure it works better if you're on a lot of pharmaceuticals yeah, you really don't notice how long it's taking.

2:07:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I don't think. And all these, did he stop these particles?

2:07:29 - Alex Lindsay
all these particles are coming. They have this, this program called notch, and it's responding to his body and so there's particle effects coming off of it and he's using this big thing called the beam which is like it looks like a giant bass. You know, uh, that's flat and he plays it like a bass, like with a big thing. It was here's all I got to say. That was made for him at a Lucas sound. It was made by Sean house at, at, uh, I know Sean, and Sean used to show, everybody showed me that.

2:07:55 - Jason Snell
Thing.

2:07:55 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, that's the beam. Yeah, so Sean, Sean house made the beam. He made about six or seven of them for Mickey and, and so um and uh, and so sean would show it to us and he goes, but you have to see it in the show. You have to see it in the show.

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
So is this your first time seeing it in action?

2:08:08 - Alex Lindsay
that's the first time I ever saw it in action and the first time I ever saw anything that was related to the dead, and and I have to say I was like, okay, I get it, I get I wouldn't. I went from I have no idea what this is about to I would go to every show. Like I would go to every show, like I would go to every show. And man do, they make a lot of money on merch. That's all I got to say. Like, they have that down pat, and they have foil posters and all kinds of, and everyone feels like they have to buy everything.

If you want to see any of the show, if you want to see the show from the last weekend and I would recommend Saturday or Sunday, I don't know if they're sold differently or not they're streamed all through Nugs, nugs.net, and so Nugs is there. They kind of grew up with the dead, and so they stream a lot of things. It's a subscription. You can watch lots and lots of live shows. I think that what they started with is streaming lots of fish and dead shows.

The one you're looking for, though, is somewhere in the middle of the Saturday set, a guy named Sturgill Simpson comes out and does morning dew, and he crushed it Like and I mean I was just sitting there I got chills listening to it and I was like it was just so good and and he, um, anyway. So I didn't get it before. I obviously I do get it now. Um and uh, and it was uh, it's, it's. I would highly recommend seeing them. But if you want to see concerts and you want to see that concert, I think you can buy it still on and I think they did it in 4K from Nugsnet.

2:09:35 - Leo Laporte
And the sound is probably very, very good.

2:09:37 - Alex Lindsay
They really focus on sound quality. It's incredible. The other thing is Meyers, which is the. They're the ones that do the sound for the dead, which is the. You know, um, they're the ones that do the sound for the dead. But they grew up I didn't really. We consider them the highest. They're out of Berkeley and we consider Meyer audio to Myers audio to be the the highest quality audio you can get, and um, and so we, uh, um, uh, I. What I didn't know is that they built that system, the original systems, for the grateful dead, because it was so important to have great audio.

The audio and the lighting and the show itself and a lot of it has been pared down for the stage from the sphere, because they were doing something in the sphere, and so it was also the parts of the sphere kit, which are these $250,000 camera systems on the front of the stage, which is part of what makes it. If you look at it, you'll go how are they getting that shot? It's a riser. It's this camera riser that has what's called a Trinity rig on the top of it, and that Trinity rig by itself is $200,000. That's what my brother has, and so, um, and so it's a very expensive. It's usually used on a steady cam and it's on these risers and it's it's a uh, incredible setup. It was probably one of the best shows I've seen in a decade, so it was really, really good. So I was glad I didn't. Saturday was a little off not completely off and so I was able to go out for about an hour hour and a half and get the best part of the show. So it was good, good music.

2:10:57 - Leo Laporte
Yep Nugs, is it nugs.com, nugs.net?

2:11:08 - Andy Ihnatko
Dot net com. Uh, nugs.net. Yeah, nice, you can watch it live and lots of other shows too. Yeah, is it? Is it too much to ask that whoever has nugs.com is like a really really uptight financial services company, like really the man, is it really 10? No, I'm saying that'd be funny.

2:11:18 - Alex Lindsay
That'd be funny. Uh, let me just check.

2:11:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, no, it's the premium domain available for purchase.

2:11:25 - Alex Lindsay
And they're probably asking nugs.net for like $100,000 or $50,000.

2:11:31 - Leo Laporte
I just want it to be like an ultra-conservative think tank or something I like it that if I bought nugs.com, it would establish instant trust and credibility with my customers. Yeah, yeah, sure.

2:11:44 - Alex Lindsay
What you need to do is what you should do, is do nugs.com and sell weed Like that's what?

2:11:48 - Leo Laporte
Of course, it's obvious what it stands for.

2:11:51 - Alex Lindsay
Yes, Instant credibility with my customers. But all the people going to nugs.net would accidentally go to you.

2:11:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's it, that's right, you'd be set. You'd sell the merch. Yeah, yeah, ladies, gentlemen this concludes the I'm sad to say, vision pro this version of the best vision pro podcast.

2:12:09 - Alex Lindsay
We'll get there in the world. Next time we'll have more talk.

2:12:11 - Jason Snell
I looked for some stories and I, I couldn't, can't have vision pro segment every week. That gives them what they want. You got to leave them wanting more sorry, I'm sorry.

2:12:22 - Leo Laporte
Uh, you are watching, though, the, the best darn Mac podcast in the Apple podcasts in the world. We do Mac break weekly every Tuesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, that's 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in a variety of places. Now if you're in the club, that's. You know, that's the behind the velvet rope access. You can watch us in the Club Twit Discord, otherwise the unwashed. Oh, let's do a plug for Club twit. Why not? 10 bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows. Access to the club twit discord, which is a great hang. In fact, we've got some fun stuff coming up.

Stacey's book club is Friday. Uh, a wonderful sci-fi book, Jason again. Again you're invited. I know you really like this Is how you Win the Time War Good one, really good book. We'll also be doing Chris Marquardt's photo segment immediately after.

So we do a lot of content in the club only. Including all of the keynotes and so forth are now in the club only. So that's another reason to join the club. But mostly you do it because you want to support the content we make here at twit. 25 of our operating costs are supported by club members. Without you we'd have to cut back, I don't know what we'd do. So thank you to our club members. I'd love to have you in the club to twit.tv/club twit. Consider it. There's a two-week free trial. There are, in fact, family plans and corporate plans as well. Um, there's an annual plan too, which doesn't save you any money, but at least you don't get those monthly pings.

twit.tv/club twit. Thanks in advance, uh for that. Uh, if you're not in the club, you can watch on Youtube TikTok, Facebook Linkedin, x.com and uh, kick.com, and I think I must have left something out. But anyway, twitch. I mentioned Twitch twitch.tv as well, which means you can get the freshest version the day we record. But you don't have to, because we do record it. It's a miracle of modern technology and you can watch it after the fact. We put a copy up on our website, of course.

twit.tv/mbw. There's a link there to the Youtube channel. Now, that's a good thing to know about. If you want to share clips of any part of the show with friends and family, do that please, because it helps us promote the show. It really helps us grow the show. Uh, also, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. There's audio and video. We do both and it's free to subscribe, of course, but there is a toll. If you would give us a nice review, that would make me very happy. Most podcast clients will let you do that. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you to Andy Ihnatko Great to see you in the library. Thank you to Jason Snell co. Great to see you in the library. Thank you to Jason Snell, sixcolors.com. His podcast at sixcolors.com/jason. And of course, that kind of immediately after the quarterly results, call uh. Youtube videos. Also on the front page of his website, sixcolors.com, you can watch Dan Moren and Jason Snell break down, all down yeah, break down the charts, man uh.

And of course, Alex Lindsay, officehours.global. And if you want to do as Nugs did and hire the man, 090.media. Nugs didn't hire me, someone else did oh, someone else hired.

2:15:39 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, but I worked with them.

2:15:40 - Leo Laporte
They're great, great, great folks thank you all three of you. Thanks to everybody who's watching, but now it is my sad and solemn duty to say get back to work, because break time is over. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.

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