MacBreak Weekly 991 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.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Alex, and the return of Jason Snell. Lots to talk about, of course. Jason's got all the iPhones. We'll talk about the iPhone air. It's surprisingly repairable. The latest rumors about MacBooks both this fall and next year. And a little bit about the new tech woven cases and how durable they are or aren't.

Leo Laporte [00:00:25]:
All that coming up next. So get your crossbody strap on and get ready. MacBreak Weekly is next. This is MacBreak Weekly. Episode 991, recorded Tuesday, September 23rd, 2025. The Naughty List.

Leo Laporte [00:00:54]:
It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we cover. The latest news from Apple, welcoming him back from his tour with the National Guard In Memphis, Tennessee, Mr. Jason Snell of SixColors. Com. Hello, Jason.

Jason Snell [00:01:07]:
Hello, sir. Good to be back, sir.

Leo Laporte [00:01:09]:
You raised a ton of money.

Jason Snell [00:01:11]:
Yep, we're still doing it. stjudge.org/relay People should go give St. Jude.

Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
You did the overnight thing, the marathon.

Jason Snell [00:01:18]:
It's not overnight. It's noon to midnight Eastern. Oh, that's kind of to pop out 12 hours. Hours. Yeah. I mean, no, we don't do it like midnight to noon. It's noon to midnight. Yes, it is the biggest cop out a 12 hour long telethon on YouTube could possibly be going, it's my bedtime.

Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
But more than 100.

Jason Snell [00:01:39]:
More than $100,000. So. Well, that's. I think what we've decided is that asking them to produce. Because the people in St. Jude produce this show in. And it's in their studio and asking them to work. We're already pushing and asking them to.

Leo Laporte [00:01:51]:
Work for 12 hours. That's why we stopped doing the 24 hours of New Year's. We did two years in a row and Lisa said more. You're killing the, you're killing the stats.

Jason Snell [00:01:59]:
No, no. Yeah, Exactly. I mean, 12 seems like we, we reached this. We started I think it was four and then it was eight, and now it's 12. And we're not gonna. 12 is. It's plenty. To demonstrate that we're working on commitment.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
I liked the 24. I enjoyed it. But apparently I was the only one. Everybody else was like, never.

Alex Lindsay [00:02:17]:
I've done a couple of those. A couple of 48s and 72s and.

Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Oof. 72. That's a lot.

Jason Snell [00:02:24]:
A lot. You go through a, with any lengthy performance thing like that, you go through a series of ups and downs. Yeah. Of moods and I mean Having done this three times, I'll say, yeah, there's the. You look at your watch and you're only two hours in and you think, oh my God, we're going to be here forever. And then you look at your watch at four hours in and you think, I'm completely exhausted.

Leo Laporte [00:02:45]:
Right.

Jason Snell [00:02:46]:
And then you look at your watch and it's six hours and you're like, I could do this all day. And I am. And then, and then the last hour or so you were just completely loopy. So that's how it works for me.

Leo Laporte [00:02:56]:
We enjoyed it. And the last time, like running a marathon, I suppose. Bald and with a tattoo. So it was an adventure, that's for sure. Andy inaco also here. Mr. Inacco in. In his weekly quarters, his conjugal visit quarters.

Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
I believe these are designed.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:15]:
No, you know, America, the threat. The threat to midnight clock on American democracy and freedom just ticked another one. So I'm. I'm not taking any chances. I'm.

Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
Are you in Jimmy Kimmel jail? Is that where you are?

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:27]:
No, no, no. I'm in a place where I can be private. It's secluded. There's only one defensible avenue in front of me so that if, you know, people rush in, I can just pull this lever behind me and then the trap door and I'm on my way to Istanbul.

Leo Laporte [00:03:45]:
Nice try not to be smart in your pre Turkish prison. And Also joining us, Mr. Alex Lindsay of Officehours Global. Hello, Alex.

Alex Lindsay [00:03:55]:
Formerly Constantinople, it was. Why didn't Constant Opal get the nobody's.

Leo Laporte [00:04:01]:
Business but nobody's business but the Turks? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think we can all agree there's.

Alex Lindsay [00:04:06]:
Some people there that have no idea what we just said.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:08]:
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why they change it, I can't say. I guess people just liked it better that way.

Leo Laporte [00:04:14]:
I went orange and I'm not looking back. This is the peak design orange case to compliment the fabulous.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:22]:
Now.

Leo Laporte [00:04:26]:
I am not going to try to scratch this, but there have been a number of reports that this anodized aluminum finish on the pros is scratchable, especially the dark.

Alex Lindsay [00:04:35]:
I've done a fair number. I have the blue one and I've done a fair number of things that should scratch it and haven't scratched it Good. So I don't know if that's.

Andy Ihnatko [00:04:43]:
People notice at Apple stores that the display models are indisproportionately scratched up for how long they've been on display. And that's kind of getting some people worried about what Will my phone look like in a month's time or two months time or three months time? It is. I mean it is a display unit. It's being handled a lot. But nonetheless you are going to be handling your phone a lot. So remember, that's how, that's how we found out about the woven, the problems with the woven case from two years.

Leo Laporte [00:05:06]:
It feels like people go into the Apple store with the intent to scratch.

Andy Ihnatko [00:05:09]:
No, no, no, I don't think so.

Leo Laporte [00:05:11]:
No.

Andy Ihnatko [00:05:12]:
The level of wear that's on the photos that are being posted is not like hey look, someone decided to take their keys and see how rough, how durable the ceramic shield is. It's like, no, there's like where the magsafe connects, you see like a little patch corners and basically where it's being handled and being picked up and put down. The level of wear that you would expect to see on a device that's being naturally handled or as they say on Antiques Roadshow, good honest wear that makes you think that okay, this was an actual actually used ceremonial mask. This is not something that they made just for tourist export. But it may not mean anything.

Leo Laporte [00:05:44]:
But the thing is Jerryrig everything as usual took X acto knives to it and was able to scratch it. But you know, if you take exacto knives.

Andy Ihnatko [00:05:56]:
Well, I like his test because he doesn't just simply say hey, well I've got a 55 calendar Deathbringer bullet that's.

Leo Laporte [00:06:03]:
Even resist the bullet from 80 yards. Yeah, it's.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:06]:
No, he takes a set of like scratch testers and what on standardized hardness tests and tries to figure out if this, if the display scratched on level on number six last year. Now it's scratching only on number six or number seven or number eight. Which is demonstrates that yes, it is more durable. He also did a durability test that impressed me.

Leo Laporte [00:06:23]:
He did the bend test on the, on the air, right?

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:26]:
Yeah, he tried really hard to bend it with his hands. He couldn't. It would flex but then it would flex back. And then he, then he decided to do the silly test but still substantive test of taking it to the garage use mechanical force. And he put a force strain on it and it did not, it did not break until 200 pounds of force were placed at it. And it's not like you sit on. That means if you sit on it with a 200 pound butt, it's going to break. It means that if you put like a rope around the middle of it and put 250, 200 pounds of force on the Middle.

Andy Ihnatko [00:06:55]:
Yes. It will bend and break. He himself was very, very impressed with the durability with the thing.

Leo Laporte [00:06:58]:
They obviously reinforced it with steel girders or some sort of thing.

Jason Snell [00:07:02]:
It's a titanium. Titanium has a really remarkable amount of tensile strength.

Andy Ihnatko [00:07:07]:
It bends, but it bends back, unlike the aluminum of the iPhone 6.

Leo Laporte [00:07:11]:
Yeah, look, if you bet it hard enough, Apple news pops up. That's good. That's good to know. So also interestingly, the iPhone air is very repairable, according to ifixit, which I think is very interesting. Maybe that's because almost the entire guts of the phone are in the camera bump.

Alex Lindsay [00:07:30]:
It's as if they were trying to figure out, how do we get all this into a small area that we could put in glasses.

Jason Snell [00:07:36]:
The simplification often will help repairability. Right. What's going on here?

Andy Ihnatko [00:07:41]:
Also, don't forget that they have to fix these things too. So to make it so that there's multiple, multiple steps involved. But it is pleasing that it wasn't just, oh, well, the repair for this is you basically get a new one. We have a toilet paper roll of iPhone airs. We just tear you off a new.

Leo Laporte [00:07:57]:
One and give you one when it's open. You see that this almost entirely the thin part is just battery behind the screen.

Jason Snell [00:08:05]:
That's all that's there.

Leo Laporte [00:08:06]:
And then all the other stuff is up here in the camera bump.

Jason Snell [00:08:09]:
It's like the lifecycle of smartphones is. First off, the priority was sticking features in however we do it. I can't believe this is so miniaturized. We'll just stick them wherever and. And then, you know, there comes that second phase where Apple's like, of course we would rather. Because remember, most phones that break go to Apple. Right. Of course we would rather they be more repairable.

Jason Snell [00:08:30]:
In the early days, they were not repairable, not because of some conspiracy, which is the thing that always made me roll my eyes, but because they were prioritizing their functionality over repairability. Because in the end, they're trying to sell iPhones and push the. The market forward. But in the long run, as that settles down, you, you know, you are the one fixing your phones, so you're going to want to make it as easy to do that. And also they're trying to simplify with approaches like putting the whole computer in the bump. And that makes it that much easier because all you've got is battery. And so ifixit, I'm not surprised. But, you know, iFixit is a.

Jason Snell [00:09:03]:
I think you can. IFixit isn't going to treat Apple with kid gloves. Right. IFixit's going to give it to them if they want to. And that they. They responded so positively to. This is really interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:09:13]:
Yeah. 7 out of 10 provisional repairability score contingent, I think, on Apple providing parts. And of course, Apple will also, as you know, provide tools to open the device. Yeah. I mean, usually you think, oh, man, it's so thin. This is true with laptops. It's probably not repairable, but that's good. Apple's standing by its commitment to repairability.

Leo Laporte [00:09:40]:
Well done. Well done. Now you have. What do you have, Jason? You. We should update you. Jason's been missing because of that fact.

Jason Snell [00:09:47]:
You couldn't find me anywhere.

Leo Laporte [00:09:48]:
Fundraiser missing. To us, not to anybody else.

Jason Snell [00:09:52]:
I mean, I've got. What. What do you want to talk about? I've got. I've got it all. I mean, I've got a. Like Alex, I got a. I've got a blue Pro here, I've got an Air here and I've even got a. Over here.

Jason Snell [00:10:02]:
I've got a. I've got a. It's still in box.

Leo Laporte [00:10:05]:
Oh, you got a regular Pro. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:10:07]:
This is a seven.

Leo Laporte [00:10:07]:
I mean, nothing. Yes.

Jason Snell [00:10:09]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:10:09]:
That's what it's not. And then I bought the. Silly me, the Ultra 3, which I'm quite liking. And I bought the AirPods Pro 3, which I'm quite liking. Of course, it turned out that.

Jason Snell [00:10:23]:
I.

Leo Laporte [00:10:23]:
Didn'T need to because the Ultra 2 and the AirPods Pro 2, which I had, have all the features of the new ones pretty much almost. I mean, it does fit a little more snugly.

Jason Snell [00:10:33]:
Yeah. The AirPods Pro 3 is a much more substantial update than the Ultra 3. The Ultra 3 adds, like, satellite communication, but that's about it. But the AirPods Pro 3, they made a bunch of big change there. I've got those here too, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:10:46]:
In all three respects, battery life much improved. Well, everywhere except the Air, I guess. But. But on The Pro, the 17 Pro and the new watch, the Ultra 3 watch and the AirPods Pro 3, very much improved battery life.

Jason Snell [00:10:59]:
I really enjoy that, actually. I think the AirPods Pro 3 case has less battery than it used to.

Leo Laporte [00:11:04]:
Oh.

Jason Snell [00:11:04]:
But the AirPods have more battery. So the net result of how long you can go out with just your AirPods in your case has gone up. But it feels to me like it.

Leo Laporte [00:11:13]:
Went down a little bit more battery because I don't want to put them in the case. I want to listen.

Jason Snell [00:11:17]:
You're on a transatlantic flight. I mean, yeah, they charge so fast that you could. You could charge them real fast while you're, like, eating dinner or whatever. But, like, yeah, you can. You can now go that much longer without having to put them in the case to charge.

Leo Laporte [00:11:28]:
Nice. Well, I most am interested in what you think of the Air. I mean, I feel like the. The Air is. Is getting a mixed response. Some. Some like it because just aesthetically, they really like it. But I think there's.

Leo Laporte [00:11:41]:
Of course, there was durability concerns. Those are no longer valid. But then there's also just this battery life is pathetic, right?

Jason Snell [00:11:50]:
No, I mean, I haven't spent enough time with it to talk about the battery life. And I would argue that most of the people out there talking about it have not spent enough time with it to talk about the battery life yet. It's hard to measure battery life. But look, the air. It's a funny thing. Every iPhone does not have to be things, all things to all people anymore. Apple sells five distinct new iPhones now, right? With these four, plus the 16e that's still around. They've got some distinct slots they need to fill.

Jason Snell [00:12:21]:
And you could even argue that if you. If you want power and all of those things, like, the Pro is there for you, and if you want some of the stuff that used to be Pro features, the 17 is there for you. The Air is not for everybody. And you are going to make those compromises. It only has one camera. It has less battery life. These things are all true. I will also say you hold this thing in your hands and it's unbelievable, right? Like, it's.

Jason Snell [00:12:50]:
It's not believable how light it is. It's not just how thin it is, but also how light it is. But, like, the most important thing is when it's between, you know, a couple of fingers in your hand and you're looking at it and it feels futuristic.

Leo Laporte [00:13:03]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:13:04]:
I think it also feels. I've seen people say, you know, they didn't get the MacBook Air right the first time out the door. And I mean that I had that product that was a disaster. This is a much better product than that. But even with that bad laptop, you could see where it was going. And I feel like that's what's going on here is like Apple is pushing this technology to show where they're going to be able to go in the future with phones by prioritizing the battery and the display being as thin as possible and then having a place for the compute basically to live. And, like, it's not going to be for everybody. But I would argue we've reached the point now where most people don't need those pro features like the battery life and the camera are the reasons that you'd opt for the Pro.

Jason Snell [00:13:47]:
And I think that that's perfectly reasonable and I think that'll be the most popular model. But having this for people who don't care about that stuff and really love how cool and new and interesting this is, I think that's smart. I also think like we said about the 16E and even the 17 is probably like this. This is the kind of phone that is not going to appeal to people who rush out week one, week two and buy an iPhone. This is the kind of phone where you see one and you go, what's that? Or it's time for you to, you know, get a new phone and you go into the Apple store and you, and you think, whoa, wait, what? And if you're coming from an iPhone 14 or whatever, the feature sacrifices are a lot less. So I think, I think this is going to be probably a successful product, if not the number one. And then in the long run, I think this is where it's going. No, I think the Pro is their bestseller.

Jason Snell [00:14:37]:
Right. I think that'll remain. I'd be, I mean Apple would love it. But even, you know, I think it will sell better over time than it did week two, you know, because I think that the, there's a lot of pent up demand from kind of power buyers who want the latest and greatest.

Leo Laporte [00:14:51]:
And some of us automatically buy the Pro Max without even.

Jason Snell [00:14:56]:
Yeah, just you don't even think about it. And I think that I would, I would bet that people who buy the first two weeks are not the same people who's, who buy the other 50 weeks of the year. Right. I would bet the mix is different. I mean, I don't think, I don't think it's maybe dramatically different, but I would bet that the mix is different. Because if you're so in tune to iPhone releases that you're buying at week one or two, I think that there's a vast mass of people out there who just don't buy phones like that. And, and they'll see this and go, whoa, wait a second, what is that? And there's a market, we've talked about it before. Some portion of the iPhone market just wants something that looks different.

Jason Snell [00:15:32]:
Now I think the Pro also looks different. So you get your choice here. But if, like this does feel kind of like the future, and I think that's interesting even if you don't want it. Personally today, I think this shows you Apple flexing its skills in ways that are going be interesting over the next few years.

Andy Ihnatko [00:15:47]:
I think you're right about the pre orders and the first week buyers are not necessarily indicative of what the entire iPhone market is interested in. The information had reports saying that Apple had basically put out a directive to its manufacturers to increase output at the base level. 17, sorry the 17 nothing by 40% because they got more pre orders and more orders for that than they were expecting. That shows you something about what demand is. I suspect that there's a lot of pent up demand or people who, who didn't. The 16 was not enough to get someone to upgrade. Maybe the 15 even had not been enough for to get somebody to somebody to upgrade. But the 17 looks like a good enough and as much of a different package to say, yep, I'm doing it this year.

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:27]:
This is the year that we upgrade. And these are not the people who are going to be spending $1,200 or $2,000 on a 2 terabyte iPhone 17 Pro or take a risk on something that's stylish, that has one speaker, one lens, less battery, that kind of stuff. So pent up demand.

Alex Lindsay [00:16:43]:
I talked to three different people that got the air, thought that it was an amazing camera and then either took it back or gave it to somebody else because they wanted the Pro.

Andy Ihnatko [00:16:53]:
They got it, they thought, oh, I.

Alex Lindsay [00:16:54]:
Can do it with the air. And then they open up the camera and they just realized how much different the camera systems are on the Pro and the air and they were like, it's really small.

Jason Snell [00:17:04]:
It was a huge good camera, but it's only one. Right. And I think that there are some people, this is actually a bunch of people who, who got the 16 last year because the 16 had those beautiful colors and they're like I can make it work. And then they use it for a week or two and they're like I can't make it work. And they went to the Pro because. And that's fine. Like again, the beauty of this is it used to be back in the day There was only one iPhone and they really needed to thread that needle and like they just don't need to thread that needle anymore. It's a product line now and you know, all of them can serve other purposes.

Jason Snell [00:17:35]:
There literally are, in the last year five new iPhone models have come out that are still available for sale. And like they don't, they're all hit like we don't judge the 16E the same way we judge the 17 Pro Max. Right. Like they're super different phones and that's okay as long as they find an audience that makes it worth Apple's time. And I feel like the air will probably get there, but who knows? I mean, I don't know what the composition of it is. I feel like a lot of people will look at that camera because it's a 48 megapixel camera, which means it'll also shoot at 24, you know, just in the center. It's a good camera, but it is only the one and we'll see how people react to that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:14]:
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting that now that everybody's on the bandwagon of, oh, this is just a dry run for the foldable iPhone because now basically put a hinge between the two and I put a folding screen between them. And now you've got two of these together and you got it. And if that's going to be an eighteen hundred dollar or two thousand dollar phone, is that consumer going to be happy with sacrificing photography on it? Because it's not just a question of, oh well, gosh, you can't do Genlock. It can't do. Alex would insert a whole bunch of acronyms that I can't remember or can't understand. But it's all that sort of stuff. Most people are just like, oh well, gee, I can't fit. On my old phone I could fit everybody at the restaurant table together because I had that ultra wide.

Andy Ihnatko [00:18:52]:
This one I don't like. Oh gosh, when I was taking pictures of like my kid playing, playing softball, I could kind of zoom right in on this one. I can't kind of really do that. And for $2,000 I think, I wonder if that's a long part of the discussion of how good does the. Can they get away with having a basic camera set up or do they have to at least deliver equity with a mid range iPhone?

Leo Laporte [00:19:13]:
Jason, when is your review? When do your reviews start? I presume you're reviewing them.

Jason Snell [00:19:18]:
I'll review them. But once you're not in the reviews that drop under embargo, there's no like no urgency. There's no urgency because I want to spend time with them and I'm not breaking any news. Like those first reviews are like breaking opinions from the first people who are allowed to tell you what they think of it. And that moment passed, you know, last week, basically a week ago Wednesday for the iPhones. So I'm Going to spend time with it and that's, you know, and think about the product. And I think that that, that ends up. I've spent a few years now trying to think about, like, how do you do an iPhone review two, three weeks later? And I think the answer is, do you have some interesting thoughts about, I mean, some of the stuff we just talked about, about why the air exists and where it fits and who might want it and who might not.

Jason Snell [00:20:05]:
So we'll get there, but I don't anticipate having a review in the next week or two.

Leo Laporte [00:20:08]:
I think that's, that's. See, sometimes it's better to wait and think. Lisa, we got our phones on Saturday and Lisa said, why don't you do an unboxing? I said, because by now nobody wants. There's some point in.

Jason Snell [00:20:21]:
All boxes are open.

Leo Laporte [00:20:22]:
All boxes are now open. We did decide to go to the store and I was kind of surprised. Here we are 18 years in and there was still a long line of people with appointments to pick up their phones at the store.

Alex Lindsay [00:20:37]:
Friday morning on my porch.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:39]:
I think that if there's less excitement about the phone.

Leo Laporte [00:20:42]:
Alex I didn't wake up at 5am I didn't know. I woke up at 6:30am and I went, oh, crap.

Alex Lindsay [00:20:48]:
I couldn't decide what to get. And I ordered it on Wednesday and had it Friday morning.

Leo Laporte [00:20:53]:
What?

Alex Lindsay [00:20:53]:
Yeah, like it was the Pro from Verizon. So I had.

Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
Ah, yes. Okay. So that was the secret. My neighbor did the same thing. He's. I said, we have to, we have to. We couldn't get it till October 15th. That's because you got it from the carrier.

Leo Laporte [00:21:06]:
The carrier has.

Alex Lindsay [00:21:07]:
I have one AT&T phone and one Verizon. And we realized that my Verizon was ready to be upgraded for very little. So it cost almost nothing to get it. And so it was.

Leo Laporte [00:21:15]:
Yeah. A little note on those. The subsidies are back. But those are three year subsidies. And if you want a new phone in those three years, you're going to pay it off.

Alex Lindsay [00:21:25]:
I don't use that phone very much. So it's at like a minimum. You know, it's like a. And. But the. But, yeah. So I got two of them because I figured if you're going to test Genlock, you should probably get two.

Leo Laporte [00:21:34]:
Oh, you need two for Genlock.

Andy Ihnatko [00:21:35]:
But on top of everything else, like, I almost think it's foolish to have it shipped to you because there's been so many reports over the past couple of years of, of delivery companies being an Inside job that there are people inside the depots, at the delivery companies that are just breaking into the boxes.

Leo Laporte [00:21:53]:
Stealing them, putting the return address doesn't say Apple, but AI. Yeah. Oh, that'll fool them.

Jason Snell [00:22:01]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:22:04]:
IPhone shaped box.

Alex Lindsay [00:22:06]:
I mentioned it last week. My loyal trauma trying to find my, my Mac studio. And it's very clear that everyone at UPS knows exactly what all the Apple boxes look like. They were able to scan the wall and just go, no, it's not here. We know it.

Leo Laporte [00:22:20]:
We're good friends with our UPS driver, Tony. We love him and we've known him for years. And so I pretty much. In fact, he even says to me, he says, hey, you know, I have these in the morning. You want me to make them drop you off first? And I said, yeah, that'd be nice.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:36]:
My FedEx guy used to like be like, like he would like. I don't know if, I don't know if he ever made like, if he saved up some time so you could talk to me for 15 minutes about, oh, I bet this, I bet this is the new iPhone. Like, what do you think about the new process? Should I get the 256 gigabyte model or can I get the base level and.

Leo Laporte [00:22:53]:
Okay, no, you're the local expert.

Andy Ihnatko [00:22:55]:
In exchange for not stealing it from me. Yes, I will give you 15 minutes of.

Leo Laporte [00:22:59]:
It's kind of fun to go to the store and wait in line. There's still a little bit of that kind of nice feeling. We have a mall, Apple store up in Santa Rosa and it was fun. You know, we have to walk through the Spirit store and the old Sears to get there. And so that was spooky.

Alex Lindsay [00:23:16]:
The Spirit store is the Halloween of some company or some store that gave up the spirit, right?

Leo Laporte [00:23:26]:
Oh, yeah.

Alex Lindsay [00:23:26]:
The Spirit store always takes over.

Leo Laporte [00:23:27]:
So it's in a dead store. Yeah, I bet a lot of Sears locations over around the country have Spirit stores in them. What else, what else can we say about these phones? It hasn't been said. It's too much.

Alex Lindsay [00:23:42]:
I took it out. I took the 17 out shooting. My daughter was playing at the. There's this porch fest in San Rafael where they have like, I mean, it's like 20 bands playing at the same time all through, you know, this one little section of San Rafael. And so her band was playing.

Leo Laporte [00:23:56]:
Oh, fun.

Alex Lindsay [00:23:57]:
And I. So I took it. You know, my son had one camera I had. Well, I had an immersive camera for the beginning of it. And then I used.

Leo Laporte [00:24:03]:
Oh, you had the Ursa.

Alex Lindsay [00:24:05]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:24:06]:
There's a guy on fourth street, he's got an Ursa. Yeah, yeah.

Alex Lindsay [00:24:10]:
No, I don't think anyone noticed. Although I did bowl right into the front because I was like, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:24:15]:
I gotta be up. I gotta be up front.

Alex Lindsay [00:24:16]:
And so I. But after I took only the first couple songs with the Ursa, and then I. And then I moved over to the phones and I gotta say that the 17 is just a great camera to shoot on. I've really become addicted to Cinematic Mode.

Leo Laporte [00:24:29]:
Yeah, you mentioned that that's 24 frame, right?

Alex Lindsay [00:24:32]:
Well, I think it has a couple different frame rates that are available on it. It's not just 24. But what's interesting is that you have to get over the it. You don't have to refocus it while you're shooting. You just shoot the whole thing. The way you just shoot everything and frame it and let it do whatever it's going to do, and then knowing that you're going to go back into Final Cut and just start tapping on things and refocusing everything. It's a weird approach because I realized about halfway through shooting these a couple shows ago was that, oh, I don't have to tap on the screen. Like, I was worried about tapping on the screen all the time.

Alex Lindsay [00:25:00]:
I was like, this is very stressful. I don't want to shoot. I don't want to shoot cinematic. And then I realized, no, I can actually just shoot whatever I want and then I'll deal with the focus later.

Leo Laporte [00:25:09]:
So what is cinematic? It's like portrait mode for video.

Alex Lindsay [00:25:12]:
It's like portrait mode for video, but it has, you know, basically it's capturing all that depth data. And so instead of burning in, it keeps the metadata so it has the. Everything in focus. You know, that that's. That's there and then it is.

Leo Laporte [00:25:25]:
So you choose the focus. Later you can.

Alex Lindsay [00:25:27]:
And later you can go into Final Cut and you see all the focus areas. If you turn on Cinematic mode in Final Cut, you'll see all the little squares. And it's the primary reason I use where I use Final Cut, because I kind of go back and forth between Final Cut and Resolve. But the primary time I'm using Final Cut is for the Cinematic mode. And you can. Can tap on people's faces. You'll see everything. It can autofocus, too.

Leo Laporte [00:25:47]:
That's kind of neat.

Alex Lindsay [00:25:47]:
And you just tap on it and you can refocus everything as you go through it. It's.

Leo Laporte [00:25:52]:
It's pretty slick.

Alex Lindsay [00:25:53]:
You know, it is limited to 1080p. Because it's kind of doing this thing that's inside.

Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
Mine says on the new phone 4K30 is the max it can do for the cinematic mode. Yeah, maybe I was doing something.

Alex Lindsay [00:26:02]:
It might have been what I was using. I was. You know what, what happened was I was using 2x on it because I wanted to be. I wanted to jump in. If you go to 2x, I think it'll.

Leo Laporte [00:26:09]:
Oh, it's the lens. Yeah, I was on. On 1x. I see. I can get 4k. 4k 30 on 1x.

Alex Lindsay [00:26:14]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:26:15]:
And then 2x. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Now the best it can do. No, it still can do 4k30.

Alex Lindsay [00:26:22]:
I was in the middle of production as I have a bad habit of like just going and shooting stuff.

Leo Laporte [00:26:27]:
So that's all I could do. I don't know what else is there. I don't have time to figure it out.

Alex Lindsay [00:26:30]:
No, it's usually because it's right when it's happening. Like I'm just like, well I gotta. They're playing so I better get going.

Leo Laporte [00:26:35]:
How about the front camera? What do we think about this new square sensor? Sensor is. It's on all of them, right?

Jason Snell [00:26:41]:
Yeah, it's on every single one. I think it's a game changer. I mean we'll have to. I need to spend time with it but like the idea that they built a new bespoke selfie camera that requires you to not reorient your phone and it's going to detect who's in the frame and decide how it wants to frame that and then it can auto center you when you're doing a FaceTime and like this is basically their center stage camera mark two where they've really kind of thought it through and tried to get the quality up and tried to use their face detection. The idea that. The idea that in the future you'll be able like to take selfies, I mean starting today, but as these phones roll out that the reflexive sort of selfie taking behavior will change around the world because your phone is now smart enough to know what you're trying to do when you hold your phone out to take a selfie and do the right thing.

Leo Laporte [00:27:34]:
I mean I played with it a little bit the day we got it. We went out to eat afterward and I played with it a little bit with the waiter in the background and put squares on all the faces it can see and we'll automatically adjust given the faces that are visible. I guess that's the Apple intelligence at work.

Jason Snell [00:27:50]:
Yeah, it's image processing stuff that they've been doing for a long time. And it's smart. I mean, we'll see how people. The challenge is going to be how are people going to change their behavior with selfies. But if people learn the functionality of this thing, I think the idea is that, is that it could be a real improvement for people. And I think that that's, I think that's pretty cool. I'll also say it's an example of Apple being extra in a delightful way where like, they didn't need to do this. I mean, they didn't, they didn't need to say, let's reinvent the entire.

Jason Snell [00:28:22]:
Like everybody just accepts that selfies are taken in a certain way. There's a sensor, you have to, if you want to. A landscape, you got to turn it sideways. Like everybody knows how you take a selfie and somebody at Apple is like, like, we could do better. And like, they didn't have to do this. But I love that they, they did it. I love that they did the hardware. And again, it's that Apple thing, right, where it's.

Jason Snell [00:28:41]:
They did the hardware and their machine learning software and kind of laid it all in together. And I mean, in the grand scheme of things, when we think about the stuff that they've done recently, like camera control button and all of that, like this feels like it's got way more opportunity to be a, a huge actual adopted thing than some of the other esoteric hardware that they've done.

Andy Ihnatko [00:29:03]:
We've talked before, but the best thing that any company can add to a phone is to make people who don't own that phone think, why doesn't my phone do that? And that is such a simple key thing that. Wait a minute, you don't have to. No, I don't. If it needs to be portrait, it'll be upright. If it'll be upright, if it needs to be horizontal, it'll be horizontal. I don't know how it works, but it works. And wow, why doesn't my phone do that?

Alex Lindsay [00:29:25]:
And you have again, the primary users of this, I think are the sub 18 version users of it. That where all of these tools become. I mean, it's amazing to watch one of my kids pick up the phone and what they know how to do with an iPhone is pretty dramatic. Like they just very quickly those things become something that was special and then it becomes something that is just what everybody's doing so.

Leo Laporte [00:29:48]:
Well, they also. Yeah, that's the cool thing about kids. They share it. They share the information Yeah, I always thought that was genius of Snapchat to have a completely impenetrable ui because they knew that teenagers would then say, hey, did you know you could do this? And they would be in effect advocating. They'd be vangelizing Snapchat because it was so hard to use. They'd say, I figured it out. Look, I thought that was a genius idea. Let's pause and come back with lots more to talk about.

Leo Laporte [00:30:18]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. The return of Jason Snell, the imprisonment of Andy Ihnatko, and the cinematic and soon to be fully immersive, Alex Linsey. Our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker. Love ThreatLocker. And you're going to love ThreatLocker too, when they're protecting your business. Ransomware is rampant. Did you see? Now Jaguar has suspended production for three weeks. The lines were shut down because they weren't protecting themselves and they got bit by ransomware.

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Jason Snell [00:33:45]:
That's right. Number one.

Alex Lindsay [00:33:48]:
It'S time to talk to Vision Pro.

Leo Laporte [00:33:54]:
New Immersive Environments I see it on 6colors.com Immersive films Environments Films Films. Apple announces a new set of films.

Jason Snell [00:34:07]:
This is like their fall lineup of what immersive content they've got coming, including a half hour film that this is. We mentioned this when they announced it in June. It's this film that they made that canal plus in France made with MotoGP. And it's a little 30 minute doc about a French motorcycle racer named Johann Zarko who was competing in Le Mans trying to be the first Frenchman to win in this class in Le mans in like 70 years. He does. That's the, it reminded me of that, that bull riding thing that Apple did where it's like you learn about the bull rider and you learn about his family and his likes and his loves, and then in one second he's thrown off the bull and that's the end of the movie. And you're like, what?

Leo Laporte [00:34:50]:
Wrong guy?

Jason Snell [00:34:50]:
This one, it's so it's fast motorcycle zipping past you. And it was also the first, first project shot, they say, with the blackmagic cameras that Alex is so excited about. So it's a, it's. And there are several of them. So I, one of the things I noticed in watching it was it felt like a lot of the Apple stuff, especially early on, it was like we got the one camera and we'll put it here and then we'll put it over there. And that the, this MotoGP thing felt like they had two or three at least so that you could get like different coverage of the same perspective or the same moment from a different perspective. Very interesting. So that came out yesterday, and then they also announced a bunch of stuff that's forthcoming.

Jason Snell [00:35:29]:
But I wanted to. I mean, I thought. I thought it was pretty impressive. Although there is a moment in it, Alex, I don't know if you watched it there. I. I liked it. There is. There is a moment where they're trying to do the.

Jason Snell [00:35:41]:
They do some camera movements, but they just do the slow push through because they don't want to make people sick. And there's one shot where somebody bumps the camera. I'm like, whoa. And I can't believe they put that shot in there, because it's like the moment where it bumps. And I felt like I was gonna fall out of my chair there.

Alex Lindsay [00:35:56]:
It's a funny thing. And sometimes you leave that in there to remind people that they're in the headset. So you're like, hey, this does actually matter. And so we've done that in the past. My brother would do this thing. We were doing this test with a Steadicam, not with a Vision, with an older 360. And he would just turn it a little bit at the very end. And we would always guess how long it was going to take before someone took the headset off.

Alex Lindsay [00:36:18]:
But I think sometimes you want to remind people that their. That they're in a headset, you know, and that. And that sometimes that feeling is there. It may have been. I don't think they did it on purpose, but I think that they left it in because they saw that, oh, someone will feel something when it gets hit. It's kind of a kinetic experience. And so I think that that might be why it got left in. But, yeah, you play with that a lot.

Alex Lindsay [00:36:41]:
It's a very interesting thing to have a medium that actually has your body react to it, not, like, emotionally, but, like, physically. Your body will do something if. If it goes a certain direction.

Jason Snell [00:36:51]:
So what did you think of the. Of the piece? It was entirely with the Black Magic cameras.

Alex Lindsay [00:36:54]:
Yeah, I don't know if it was entirely with the Black Magic cameras, but it. But it definitely. I thought, you know, there's this mixture right now because there isn't a lot of them around where people are using a little bit of red, a little bit of canon, a little bit of Black magic. I'm not sure if it was 100% black magic, but I will say that the Black Magic pipeline just makes everything so much easier. We are going to see a lot more content just because everything else has been an art project. And the Black Magic stuff is pretty straightforward as far as shooting. It's so much fun to shoot because before it's always been like, oh my gosh, I got to figure all this stuff out now. Especially with a, with a.

Alex Lindsay [00:37:28]:
I know this is not crazy. With a battery. With the battery on the, on the back of the camera you set down and you're, you're running minutes after you set the camera down. You got to make sure it's level and then after that you're shooting. You know, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. So I think we're going to see a lot more. I think this, I think a lot of these, I don't know, a lot of them probably given their, their release dates may have come before the blackmagic was available to shoot all of it that way.

Jason Snell [00:37:51]:
Ye.

Alex Lindsay [00:37:52]:
But I think that they'll. But I think that you're going to see more and more coming out now that the camera is rolling out.

Leo Laporte [00:37:56]:
So these are, this is According to PetaPixel, among the first shot releases of First Shot on the Black Magic.

Andy Ihnatko [00:38:05]:
And we know that.

Alex Lindsay [00:38:05]:
I think that they had them as early as May or June, you know, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:38:08]:
Yeah, they would have them before anybody, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason Snell [00:38:12]:
So the, the, the rest of this though, I think is interesting because I like that Apple did this and they announced. Because so much of our criticism is they don't do enough of this stuff. But I will say the dam has not burst open. Apple announced this movie that was released yesterday. They there in October they announced a rainforest documentary that's based on something that I think was at least partially available on Meta Quest and another episode of their Elevated series, which is basically like helicopter Views. That's October. They announced three things for fall. Whatever fall means we're in it now.

Jason Snell [00:38:51]:
It could be anytime in the next three months. And that's Night of the BBC Proms, where you're going to be able to be real up close to somebody playing the piano on stage, which I think is going to be pretty cool. Experience Paris, which is like a Paris overview. And this thing that's a K pop band thing that's like, okay, cool, all right. And then December they have a new show that's the World of Red Bull, which is not about people drinking Red Bull, it's about extreme sports. But okay, whatever about backcountry skiing. That's it for this year. And then they announced a couple other things.

Jason Snell [00:39:21]:
A. A nature documentary and another Red bull episode for 2026. And, and that was what struck me about this. Beyond the fact that the 30 minute long MotoGP thing was pretty cool. Is all Apple could announce for the rest of calendar 25 is what is it? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 things. So like that's two a month basically.

Alex Lindsay [00:39:43]:
Yeah. And I think that they're hoping that, you know, you're going to see more stuff coming out with a. With more people getting the cameras. There's not a ton of cameras out there right now, but that's. That production process is going to start picking up.

Leo Laporte [00:39:53]:
There's no.

Alex Lindsay [00:39:54]:
We're hoping to.

Leo Laporte [00:39:55]:
How would you. If you shot it as an independent and Apple's not releasing it, how would you get it on the Vision Pro? Is there. Are there ways to do that or do you have to.

Alex Lindsay [00:40:01]:
Well, you'd have to go through the app. The app. The. You would go through the video store to release it on a major one. But then there's Prima, there's Front Row, there's a couple other companies that are all coming up to speed there. Some of them are. Are nascent.

Leo Laporte [00:40:14]:
So you'd have to find distributor.

Alex Lindsay [00:40:16]:
Yeah, I mean right now I'm having trouble just, just figuring out where to put stuff, you know, to just as little examples. Like I don't want to put it out on a platform. So the.

Leo Laporte [00:40:24]:
You can't put it on YouTube. I mean you have that immersive channel.

Alex Lindsay [00:40:27]:
No, no. Yeah, yeah. And so. And we did a live stream with two other people shooting with Immersive last night. So we did a. So on. On what software do they use for that? We're all. I mean, oh no, we didn't do it immersively.

Alex Lindsay [00:40:39]:
We just talked about. We did it on YouTube talking about immersive production. But you know, so one of the. Brenton Henry is actually is the founder of Front Row. So he's got one of the apps that's going out to make this possible. But then there's the Prima app and then there's other ones and everyone's trying to kind of figure out that process. We're still very, very early on where it's not comfortable to do it. I do think that Apple, the lowest hanging fruit and why a lot of us are all shooting music is because we feel like music production is something that it's a low hanging fruit of something that'd be great.

Alex Lindsay [00:41:13]:
You kind of feel like you're in the audience and everything else. I think if Apple just built a stage or somebody built a stage and just shot something every week. People would pay for that. I know I would pay a subscription just to see any band like once a week in the headset. And there's no reason why you couldn't produce a lot of content. But even now, one of the problems that we have is that I think one of the reasons some of this is coming out a little bit longer is the headset is the 8K per eye. 90 frames a second pushes the headset pretty hard. And so a lot of the stuff we're producing right now isn't right at that resolution.

Alex Lindsay [00:41:45]:
So we're trying to.

Leo Laporte [00:41:47]:
Patapixel says Canal Please. Shot the event. Canal, Please. I gotta get it right. I always. I corrected you the first time and I was wrong. Canal please. Shot the event using four Ursa Cine immersive cameras and used Ambisonic microphones.

Jason Snell [00:42:03]:
I said it was more than one.

Leo Laporte [00:42:04]:
Yeah. Enable the Apple Spatial audio. You've talked about those Ambisonic microphones.

Alex Lindsay [00:42:10]:
Almost everyone's using the Voyage. So those voyages. Either the Dante or the usb.

Leo Laporte [00:42:14]:
And then the team reviewed their footage instantly at the racetrack using mobile Mac workstations and presumably DaVinci resolve. Right?

Jason Snell [00:42:22]:
Yes.

Alex Lindsay [00:42:22]:
Yeah. The workflow for that, it's actually really pretty easy. So the camera's network, so you can put it on a network on an Ethernet and if you have it on a 10 gig backplane, it will pull off pretty quickly. And what you do a lot of times when you're testing it, you're not trying to shoot the whole shot. You don't look at the whole shot. You're like, is my camera in the right position? And you'll shoot 10 seconds or 15 seconds, you'll pull that off real quickly, drop it into resolve. Technically you can look at it in resolve, although it's a little bit quirky. But a lot of times what I end up doing is just rendering it out and putting in Apple Immersive Video Utility.

Alex Lindsay [00:42:57]:
It's like a little app that you can download from the App Store immediately. Just lets you throw a pre rendered version into your headset and watch it there. And it's super easy. I mean that. I know it sounds like a bunch of steps, but if I take a 20 second test clip, I'm watching it less than five minutes from the time I shot it. That's pretty good. So it's a pretty easy way to review it right now compared to when we first started.

Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
When you first started doing HD video production, it took, oh my gosh, it was months.

Jason Snell [00:43:28]:
Like we couldn't get it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:29]:
Couldn't get it to work, you know.

Alex Lindsay [00:43:30]:
And it was so like, trying to get all the compositing and everything else working. It. It was just brutal.

Leo Laporte [00:43:34]:
So early Mac break episodes, ladies and gentlemen, going back in time.

Alex Lindsay [00:43:38]:
I mean, I had to. The. If anyone, The Road to 1080p was a video that I did scribbling on top of. Of pictures because Leo was like, you got to release something. And it had been a month, and I was just like, oh, my gosh.

Jason Snell [00:43:49]:
I'm still.

Alex Lindsay [00:43:49]:
I can't quite figure out how to.

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:51]:
Process all of this. And so.

Alex Lindsay [00:43:53]:
So anyway, so it's it. It is now. I do have a. When I say it's quick and easy, I did end up with an Ultra M3 Ultra to do it, you know, like, it's not like I'm doing it on a Mac Mini, you know, to. And it uses up all of the computer. Like, when you turn it on, it's like you look at the little network, you know, the utility, and it's using everything it can grab onto.

Leo Laporte [00:44:16]:
We have the rode 1080p. I'm sure you can see it on YouTube. But we also have it on the Twit website from. Get ready for this. February 16, 2006.

Alex Lindsay [00:44:25]:
So we had shot in January, the first week of January, we had shot at Mac Break, and we had released episode one was Leo and Emery Wells and Amber Mack. Amber Mack. Amber MacArthur.

Leo Laporte [00:44:39]:
Amber MacArthur. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay [00:44:41]:
And so we had gone out and shot. The four of us had shot a coverage of Macworld. And then we went into a studio right the next day, I think, and shot all day and shot like 20 episodes in front of Green Screen. It was Sal Segoyne and all these other people.

Jason Snell [00:44:55]:
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay [00:44:56]:
And then the compositing. I had made some. You know, I'd done some crazy things, and so the compositing was brutal. And so so. And. But it was a month later, and Leo was like, you got to release something. You just got to put something out.

Leo Laporte [00:45:06]:
I was like, okay, you know what I'm proud of? We still use the same damn music.

Alex Lindsay [00:45:11]:
That was, you know. Yeah, it's.

Leo Laporte [00:45:16]:
Look at. Look at Alex. You look so young there. There's Emory Wells, now billionaire.

Jason Snell [00:45:21]:
Was that the Green Screen Studio? That was like a Potrero Hill or something. I remember we went there and we did some stuff with you like Mackerel people did.

Alex Lindsay [00:45:29]:
When we did it with you. I think we actually did it in. Maybe we did it there the second year. The first year we did it in our office. I think when we did the awards. Yeah. And I had so much black hair.

Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
Look at you.

Jason Snell [00:45:41]:
Yeah, we all did back then.

Leo Laporte [00:45:42]:
Look at you. Not me. I was great even then. Oh, even then. And Emory, of course, now is a unicorn, so he has a. We don't care what color is. Is he doing robots now?

Alex Lindsay [00:45:56]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [00:45:57]:
He sold his company to Adobe and.

Alex Lindsay [00:45:59]:
Stayed there for two years.

Leo Laporte [00:46:00]:
And then Raymo. Now he's on robots. Yeah. And Amber is still in Canada. Lucky, lucky girl. Wow. That's fun. Look at this.

Leo Laporte [00:46:09]:
When there used to be a Mac World, Xbox.

Jason Snell [00:46:12]:
Good times.

Leo Laporte [00:46:14]:
Is this Brent by on the camera? Who is this shaky cam man? Sit still, Brent.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:19]:
That's very.

Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
Was he trying to do mtv?

Alex Lindsay [00:46:21]:
No, I think he was just trying to make it less.

Leo Laporte [00:46:23]:
He was just Roger Chang holding the reflector.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:26]:
He's just making it. He was making a little. A little more active camera, which we. We liked at the time.

Leo Laporte [00:46:31]:
At the time, it was hip. It was whipping. It just felt like.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:34]:
It felt more online. It. The problem is when you, like, freeze it, it gets boring.

Leo Laporte [00:46:40]:
So they all ran off. We don't know what's going on because I don't have the sound up. It's better without it to be.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:46]:
I think we were going to go cover. We were going to go cover the event and so we were saying we're going to go find some stuff. And then it was like one little clip after.

Leo Laporte [00:46:54]:
Yeah, I'm all alone.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:55]:
And then you walked in.

Leo Laporte [00:46:57]:
Oh, yeah. Followed me.

Alex Lindsay [00:46:59]:
The shot right there, by the way, is really hard. What Brent did there was. He had to. He had to. There was no one controlling it.

Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
What's he.

Alex Lindsay [00:47:06]:
No, no, no. He's just handheld and he's. But the crazy thing is he had to change all his aperture and do all the stuff while he's walking and everything else. And it was.

Leo Laporte [00:47:13]:
He's good.

Alex Lindsay [00:47:14]:
He's very good.

Leo Laporte [00:47:15]:
Very good. Now in Hollywood, I still work with him.

Alex Lindsay [00:47:18]:
I was just working with him a couple weeks ago.

Leo Laporte [00:47:20]:
Oh, nice. Give him my regards.

Alex Lindsay [00:47:21]:
He's great. He's one of my ringers. And like, oh, I know things will be okay because Brent's there.

Leo Laporte [00:47:29]:
This poor woman. I'm harassing her while she's pretending to run. Well, she's not pretending. She's actually running on a treadmill. Treadmill. Showing off the new ipod and how you can strap it to your. This is when Macworld Expo basically became an ipod accessory show. Look at all the accessories before the phone came out.

Leo Laporte [00:47:49]:
It's all about accessories.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:52]:
Pavilion at one point, didn't it?

Leo Laporte [00:47:54]:
Yeah, well, they did at first. They put it out in a pavilion and pretty much it just metastasized. Oh, look, here's some flight attendants. I don't know, maybe I was a little bit too interested in the young women in the manning the booths. I don't know.

Alex Lindsay [00:48:12]:
Well, there was a lot of them back then.

Leo Laporte [00:48:14]:
Like I said, it was a very, very different time. This wow. I think this is what killed Macworld Expo is it became basically an accessory. She.

Alex Lindsay [00:48:26]:
It wasn't just, I think Apple stopped not going.

Leo Laporte [00:48:30]:
Yeah, look, he's got an ipod shuffle hanging around his neck. Oh, don't break it, Leo. That's the nano, not the shuffle. Right. Name is lost in infamy.

Jason Snell [00:48:42]:
Mini or Nano.

Leo Laporte [00:48:44]:
Mini or nano. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay [00:48:46]:
A different age.

Leo Laporte [00:48:48]:
Wow. I'm sorry, I keep watching. We're in the Vision Pro segment. We're not in the ipod Nano segment segment. I'm actually this one in Antarctica looks kind of cool. I'm not really an extreme sports fan and I especially not excited about extreme sports and immersive because it seems that's going to be sick making. But I like the idea of going to see penguins. Petapixel says it's with the CNN climate guy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:49:17]:
Yes.

Jason Snell [00:49:17]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:49:18]:
He goes down in search of emperor penguins. Bill, we.

Alex Lindsay [00:49:22]:
I mean, I think that the challenge really is that you got to find things that you can produce lots of content. And right now there's so much work being done on each piece of content that it becomes challenging to, you know. But I think that they're also figuring this stuff out. I think we're just going to keep on seeing it pick up pace.

Leo Laporte [00:49:35]:
Well, look what happened with Mac Break weekly. Yeah, right. First it took you months. Now we basically do it in an hour or two. Most of the time spent just sitting around gassing Apple was apparently at the iPhone 17 launch with some Ursas at the LA store. Apple's filming the iPhone 17 launch an immersive spatial vision video.

Alex Lindsay [00:50:00]:
And this is the big difference that this camera makes is that you can just go, oh, let's go shoot something at the store. Who knows if we're going to use it or not. But it's no longer an art project. It's no longer we got to take 10 people. Like I can literally pull it out of the case and have it recording solid content in less than five minutes. And that's the thing is that. And so I think you're going to see Apple using it more often. That way you're to going see other people using it.

Alex Lindsay [00:50:23]:
I went and shot My daughter's band playing, you know, for a little bit of it. Because it wasn't, it wasn't this huge lift and that's, that's the thing that's making a difference.

Jason Snell [00:50:31]:
Well, and, and if you ask yourself where might they put it? One of the things that's in all the EnvisionOS 26 is Safari and Vision OS 26 supports all sorts of immersive HTML extensions essentially. And so you can put immersive, you know, 3D and immersive video and, and 3D video and you know, like there are lots of spatial options that are in 26. So I, I would not be surprised if what you see is portions of Apple's website. Sort of experiment with. If you go there on a Vision Pro, you can just pop right in to an immersive scene or an immersive clip and then you won't need, again, you won't need to go to the TV app and watch it. They could just do a little clip of the iPhone launch and put it on their website and then you could kind of tap in and see it there. So there's a bunch of new stuff in 26 to enable web experiences to be more spatial.

Alex Lindsay [00:51:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it is. That's where the immersive is. I think in many ways going to take off is as segments. Not necessarily trying to take over the whole thing with video, but as. And I'm going to give you this moment. Like one of the things that we did with Golf in 360 was we put cameras on the greens and the rest of it was all 16x9. But we had split out.

Alex Lindsay [00:51:53]:
The graphics were all on one side of you. There was a clean shot in the center. You could see socials on the right side of you or the other way around. But when someone got to the green, you could hit a button and it would just take you into the space and then you're there for that moment and then you go back to a produced. And we found that was a lot easier than trying to manage doing 360 the whole time. And I think that Apple figured is playing with that a little with Bono. I don't know if I was totally sold on that solution, but I think that there is going to be this mixture between and I think spatial video. I wish the phone did better.

Alex Lindsay [00:52:29]:
I was kind of disappointed that we didn't see more from the 17 phone, the camera system, that we weren't getting 4K60 spatially, which would be a game changer for a lot of folks that have headsets. When you talk about that content coming out, 4k60 at a high quality out of the phone, a lot of people will just be shooting stuff and sending it back and forth to each other. The 1080p is just a little. I mean, it's cool, but a little small, you know, for. For experience.

Leo Laporte [00:52:56]:
Just. If you would, for those of our audience members who are engaged in the drinking game, would you just say 8k per eye, please?

Alex Lindsay [00:53:05]:
8K per eye.

Leo Laporte [00:53:07]:
Thanks.

Jason Snell [00:53:07]:
That's what we work on all the time.

Alex Lindsay [00:53:09]:
8K per eye. That's what, you know, that's again. And hopefully if we see with the Vision Pro coming, the next one, a lot of US are hoping M5S will bring us 8k per I. 120 frames a second. Here's your other drink.

Leo Laporte [00:53:22]:
Oh, man, that's two shots in a row right there. It's a little early for that. And that is your Vision Pro segment for the week.

Jason Snell [00:53:31]:
Now, you know, we're done talking.

Leo Laporte [00:53:33]:
The Vision Pro.

Jason Snell [00:53:36]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:53:38]:
From the premier Vision Pro podcast in the world, MacBreak Weekly. Lisa's been begging me to change the name of the show, and I said 20 years. I'm not changing the name of the show. This is brand recognition. But she's right. We don't just talk about Macs. So I don't know.

Jason Snell [00:53:57]:
I mean, you've got the brand recognition. I think that's the thing. Mac World, we struggle with that. Obviously people are like, why are you writing about the ipod?

Alex Lindsay [00:54:05]:
I mean, it's been a long time since Apple sold apples. Like, let's just say, you know, it's, you know, they. They moved. They moved past that.

Leo Laporte [00:54:11]:
I. If I could think of a better name, I. I guess I'd consider it, but I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:15]:
Also, also, you know, some we get. We've re. We've reached that rarefied air moment where the title of the show means what the title of what the show is. It's like 3M used to me. Used to 3M.

Leo Laporte [00:54:29]:
Not many mining and manufacture anymore.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:31]:
Now it just. Just means three M Exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:54:33]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they sold all the M. Kfc. There's no fried chicken at kfc.

Jason Snell [00:54:38]:
What?

Leo Laporte [00:54:38]:
Wait a minute. I think there is actually. Anyway, we could call it the premier Vision Pro podcast.

Jason Snell [00:54:45]:
I don't. Let's not do that. No.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:46]:
The brightest star.

Leo Laporte [00:54:47]:
I feel that might be hitching. Hitching our. Hitching our wagon to the wrong kitchen post. But anyway, do not. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Andy and Ako Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. We're glad, glad you're here. Very fun article in iFixit. Arthur Shee, apparently his wife, his poor wife had a fine woven case that she bought secondhand.

Leo Laporte [00:55:13]:
And he has pictures of it after a year and a half. And it doesn't look, doesn't look good. I like it that they did the little slider thing so you can see.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:25]:
It looks nasty enough that you start to wonder maybe it's okay for certain areas, animals to die if this doesn't happen to my.

Leo Laporte [00:55:31]:
I feel like something's growing on it.

Jason Snell [00:55:33]:
I.

Leo Laporte [00:55:34]:
Anyway, we've replaced it with tech woven. Did Apple send you a tech woven case, Mr. Snell?

Jason Snell [00:55:41]:
Yes, there is a tech woven case here and it. Okay, here's. Here, let me, let me paint you a picture. As a veteran journalist. It feels like the material you'd find on a soft side suitcase, right? Rugged. Yeah, yeah. Textured.

Leo Laporte [00:56:05]:
We used to call it rip stop nylon woven. Yeah.

Jason Snell [00:56:09]:
And so what is it? Does it feel like, I mean, it feels more industrial to me than fine woven. Not in a bad way, but more like in a way of we realize that the fine woven is going to be destroyed and we need to put something on top of it to make it less. Less destroyable. So I would say rugged might be one way we'll see if it actually is rugged. But I would say it kind of feels rugged. But like if you've ever owned a piece or touched a piece of soft sided luggage, that's what it reminded me of is it felt like, you know, this is a textile designed to face violence and, and we'll see how it responds. But that's. That was.

Jason Snell [00:56:48]:
It didn't feel like leather at all. Like leather's in the rear view for Apple, which I think is a little bit bizarre. And it's. Anybody out there making third party iPhone cases in leather, like love it because they are selling a lot of those. But I think as an option that is a little more smooth than, you know, your, your silicone case that's gonna snag on your pocket and stuff like that. You know, it could work. I mean, I think I just hesitate to endorse it because fine woven, I mean, we all kind of got the heebie jeebies. But like, we were proven right.

Jason Snell [00:57:19]:
Like my wife's fine woven case six months in, four months in was a disaster. And we got leather case that still looks good and the fine woven case was a disaster after four months. So I think they. Given my parallel of suitcase material, I think that's what they're going for is they want it to survive.

Leo Laporte [00:57:39]:
Yeah, I ordered a Nomad old Dublin horween leather case. In fact, they had to send me an email saying how to care for my old Dublin leather. Leather and warning me, you know, they all look different and it might have blemishes and. But you know what? That's leather for you.

Jason Snell [00:57:59]:
That's leather.

Leo Laporte [00:57:59]:
And I apologize to the poor steer who's. Whose skin I am now going to be putting on my phone. I apologize. But look, I eat hamburgers too, so I'm not.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:09]:
Well, that, that's, that's why some of the better retailers, they will actually send you like a card so you can actually see that, that specific cow. Social, social media postings you see. Wow. Wow. That was a very even, even for a cow of its time, of that era, that would have been considered inappropriate. So I have no problems with this.

Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
I feel bad, I really do. But there's something about leather. I just like, I like, I wear leather shoes too.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:35]:
I'm, I mean it's, it's about, I mean I'm, I'm, I'm with you. Like my, my wallet, like I bought this like 15 years ago and I'm not gonna be buying it.

Leo Laporte [00:58:43]:
Look how that's worn. Isn't that beautiful?

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:45]:
It looks, it looks beautiful. It's a nice sad wallet.

Leo Laporte [00:58:47]:
Right, right there. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:48]:
Well, it's just, it's polished, finely polished.

Leo Laporte [00:58:51]:
By Andy's buttocks over many years.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:55]:
I do not butt pocket my wallet, thank you very much. Front pockets.

Leo Laporte [00:58:59]:
Okay. By your hips. By your fine hips. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:02]:
But the thing, the trade off with leather is that. Yeah, it is and I absolutely respect people who want cruelty free products. But the thing, my thinking is that, well, I'm buying this, I buy leather belts because, because they last for 10 or 15 or 20 years. I'm not like buying another one like every two or three years. I think it's kind of okay. But aren't we kind of surprised that Apple went back to that well of fine woven, given how bad an experience they had like their first attempt to do something that was a leather substitute. The Ifixit article is. It's more lighthearted than scholarly, which is how they do most of their teardowns.

Andy Ihnatko [00:59:38]:
But it still has valuable information. Like there seems to be like a coating on the top of it. It that does a good job of resisting stains, of resisting like resisting liquid ingress. And they're starting, oh, actually we can clean it. We actually, we put sushi on it. We put, we dropped like sauce on it, but we're able to like clean it up with isopropyl alcohol. Look great. But then they say, well, what if we put like a scratch on it? And then once that surface coating is compromised now it becomes like absorbent.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:05]:
It like will pull like the liquid into the weave and that's. You're not coming back from that.

Leo Laporte [01:00:10]:
Well, and good on it's rash.

Andy Ihnatko [01:00:12]:
It looks like, it looks like it's got a skin condition.

Leo Laporte [01:00:14]:
Good on. Arthur Shee at Ifixit for really putting the fine woven. He has microscope photos and there's some sushi and wasabi on the fine woven case. I'm sorry, the tech, sorry, tech woven case. And it's. Apparently the coating is pretty good. He put coffee on it and was able to clean it off. He said the coffee smell's still there, but, but the case is as good as new.

Leo Laporte [01:00:40]:
So if you are looking for a durable non leather case, I guess, I mean, yeah, it does kind of look like luggage. Briggs and Riley luggage, but okay. I like Arthur's test module. He really put it through the paces here and it came out pretty well. I think there are some marks on it. After the Jerry Rigg style cutting. The coating is only surface layer. So once the ingress coating is breached, liquids do soak in.

Leo Laporte [01:01:17]:
And so do not take your X acto knife to it before you dip it in coffee, I guess is the advice. And the inside is not coated, interestingly, just the outside. All right, probably Apple's cases are at a premium, but Apple, really. I think the whole point for Apple is that when you're in the store buying the phone, you're going to buy a case.

Jason Snell [01:01:39]:
That's it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:01:40]:
It's easy. It's like money literally on the table. They don't want to just simply leave it on the table. Everyone's like, gee, I'm already like $1000 into this. May as well round it up to 1100. Like $1022. Okay, give me a woven case.

Alex Lindsay [01:01:55]:
I don't even, I mean, I don't take the screen protector off until I have the screen protector. I'm going to put on it. Like I, I pull it off and just immediately put something on it. I put it in a case, but I don't take. I use the phones for me, when they arrive in the mail, they sit on my desk until I have the case. You know, like I'm not. Because I've done a couple where I was like, oh, I'll just walk around with it for two days and nick it. And then you're just like, I can't believe I did that.

Alex Lindsay [01:02:18]:
I could have just waited two more days.

Andy Ihnatko [01:02:19]:
Good on a swear. Good on a swear.

Alex Lindsay [01:02:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:02:22]:
Micah Sargent's review will appear on Hands on Tech of both the iPhone and he got the crossbody strap. So did you get a crossbody strap, Jason?

Jason Snell [01:02:31]:
I think I got two of them.

Leo Laporte [01:02:33]:
They went all out. Wow. Are you carrying bandoloons?

Jason Snell [01:02:37]:
I haven't unboxed that yet. But I do have this vision of going out with just two iPhones on cross body straps just dangling down. Just do hole. Dual. Dual wield. Dual wield, as they say.

Leo Laporte [01:02:48]:
Dual wheel, draw pod.

Jason Snell [01:02:50]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:02:51]:
Yeah. I wonder though, do you take the left phone with your right hand and the right phone with your left hand? Like that's a good question at Eastwood or are you.

Jason Snell [01:03:00]:
More like a really great question, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Well, we'll find out in the extended version of the sixcolors. Com review. Coming soon to a browser named, but.

Jason Snell [01:03:10]:
Not that soon.

Leo Laporte [01:03:13]:
Apparently the iPhone 17, according to Reuters, is for sale in Moskva and pre orders jump.

Alex Lindsay [01:03:23]:
It's really interesting when you travel around to countries where the iPhone is not sold directly, how much people are willing to pay for the iPhone. Like a lot of folks will pay 50 to 100% more than what we pay. And people are buying them 10 at a time or whatever in the United States and then hoping that no one bothers or figures out a way to get them into the country. And they make, you know, make it. But that's why it costs so much more as they're figuring out how to get in there.

Jason Snell [01:03:48]:
I would think that a lot of these phones are coming from China too, because that China doesn't really care about those being imported to Moscow. And we know from, I mean, that great Apple in China book details how there are these people who just roll up to the Apple store and say, give me 100.

Alex Lindsay [01:04:06]:
Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:04:07]:
And, you know, and they've got cash and, and you. And there will be trouble if you don't give them 100. And that's just how it works. And that's the creation of the gray market. So I would imagine that's happening maybe in parts of Europe, but I would be surprised if it isn't primarily happening in China and they are taking those phones and then reselling them in Reuters.

Leo Laporte [01:04:28]:
Russia, Ludmila Semosina, she's PR director for the tech retail Restore, a reseller. This year we have 66% more preorder others than last year. She Says Boris, there is a huge fan base that will never exchange iPhone for anything else. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:04:47]:
The article is also saying that's about to Alex's point. It's about a 50% markup. It's a. They're selling like a base iPhone 17 for 1,000. The equivalent of $1,437 on the online 119,992 rubles.

Leo Laporte [01:05:01]:
Yeah. And that's a base model 17.

Alex Lindsay [01:05:05]:
It's a status symbol for.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:06]:
Exactly. It's a look, it's a luxury brand and particularly when it's Unobtainium. It's like oh, we can't you just let just like there are people here to like. Wow, that is that. I've never seen that model of Walkman before. Oh yeah, it's only available in Japan. It's a very high end model. Solid gold APIs.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:23]:
It's like oh wow, you must be very special. You must be walking on diamonds, sir. That I am.

Leo Laporte [01:05:28]:
I am rich kept list and I can afford iPhone. I'm.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:33]:
I'm staying, I'm staying far away from Windows though. Would not be smart for me to stay near.

Leo Laporte [01:05:39]:
Yes. Our sponsor 1Password has a very nice feature in their 1Password travel mode. If you're worried about your phone being searched on your way to Moskva, Travel Mode acts as if the data never existed in the first place. Hi. That's clever. That's very clever. Yeah. It's a plausible deniability.

Leo Laporte [01:06:02]:
I think they're more worried about about the US entering the US than they are about entering Russia, to be honest with you. Wow.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:11]:
I wonder though if that sort of thing will like alert will will put you aside for second searching.

Leo Laporte [01:06:16]:
Gotta think they know about it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:18]:
Oh no. Well, just saying. Wow. So you have a password manager that doesn't have any passwords stored in it. I smell a big, big. Well, all I know is I can get two and a half hours with overtime if I take you into the back room. So you're going to the back room. It's.

Leo Laporte [01:06:32]:
Yeah. They can't deny you entry, but they can make. Make it difficult.

Andy Ihnatko [01:06:37]:
They can wear you down to say fine, here are my passwords, I just need to get home.

Leo Laporte [01:06:42]:
We should say they can't deny entry to U.S. citizens or green card holders. If you have an H1 visa, they may ask you for $100,000. H1B visa, they may ask you for 100,000 dollars at the border. Tap to Pay is coming to more European countries. This is nice. I love Tap to Pay. I love it with a watch.

Leo Laporte [01:07:01]:
This is actually where you could go phone to phone tap to pay. As Alex noted, it's very popular in the farmers markets here in the US now you can do it in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Monaco and Norway. So good news. And because of European regulations, it accepts American Express, Visa, MasterCard, and in Norway works with surfboard. There was a lot of surfing in Norway.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:35]:
A lot of great glaciers are melting now.

Leo Laporte [01:07:37]:
So, oh yeah, it's gotten easier once.

Andy Ihnatko [01:07:39]:
You get the alert that a big sheaf of ice just broken off is causing a good curl off of Oslo. Don't surf.

Leo Laporte [01:07:50]:
Did anybody experience the camera glitch? I mean, it came and went. Apparently if you aim at LED lights, a CNN host discovered it when taking photos at a concert. And here's the picture. You get a. Where the LED light is, you get a black blop. But Apple acknowledged it right away and said that they pushed out an update. I haven't seen it ever. Actually, they haven't pushed out the update, so I'm not sure when that'll come out.

Leo Laporte [01:08:23]:
We haven't gotten an update yet, have we? I did. As soon as I got my iPhone out of the box, I had to update it, but I don't know if that was what that was for.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:31]:
Yeah, so I'll say there are a couple of like first day problems, including that. Also some wi fi problems that are being addressed in a 0.01 update that's coming out very, very shortly.

Leo Laporte [01:08:42]:
Yeah, I have 26.0, but maybe I'll tell you, it's 23A345 and it did have an update the minute I took it out of the box. So yeah, I don't know what that means. Also not taking pictures of LED lights at concerts.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:00]:
Yeah, that's kind of the definition of an edge case scenario. It's a problem. They need to fix it, but it's not the sort of thing they. Maybe they're going to add something to the test suite from now on.

Leo Laporte [01:09:09]:
Apple said it happens in very rare cases when an LED light display is extremely bright and shining directly into the camera. And they do have a fix, which is for the camera to close its eyes at concerts. Don't look at the light. What else did you see? The pictures from Engadget inside the Apple Audio Lab. Apple loves giving these tours. Look at this. This is where they test the Fantasia Lab, their audio. Aren't you glad? Aren't you sad, Jason? You didn't get to go see the.

Leo Laporte [01:09:47]:
Jason, the Fantasia Lab.

Jason Snell [01:09:51]:
Sure.

Leo Laporte [01:09:52]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:09:52]:
But you didn't get to go to the audio lab and see the stereo that Steve Jobs gave to the lab for their work.

Leo Laporte [01:09:59]:
Is it really, Is it Steve Jobs X?

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:10:03]:
He said, now that I have the iPod, hi Fi, I don't need my high end stereo.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:07]:
I didn't even think about that.

Leo Laporte [01:10:08]:
So I'm giving it to the lab, man.

Andy Ihnatko [01:10:11]:
Yeah. A couple of different sites got the audio tour and the audio an echoic chamber tour. And they both started with a few. As you enter, you see a vintage hi Fi that was donated to the lab by Steve Jobs personally as a token of gratitude.

Leo Laporte [01:10:28]:
It's like, who had that picture? Because in Gadget, Billy Steele did not capture that one. I wish he had. That would be very cool. The studios are all named after famous recording studios. So there's an Abbey Road studio. There's an Abbey Road studio. I don't know what the other ones are called, but Billy says they all have names after famous recording studios. Okay, fine.

Leo Laporte [01:10:57]:
I don't know. That's kind of fun. Field trip.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:00]:
It's nice.

Leo Laporte [01:11:02]:
You get to ride around in a golf cart.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:04]:
Exactly. Well, it's a 5050 thing of. Okay, well, it's an experience that not a whole people get to experience. It's nice to convey exactly how things are tested. It is marketing. Ish. I mean, there's. It is the sort of.

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:16]:
It is the sort of thing where if you basically publish this on Apple's own website, you wouldn't notice any real difference in the tone of it. But nonetheless, it's fun and it's an interesting thing to share to consumers.

Leo Laporte [01:11:28]:
Here's Lance ulanoff's pictures from TechRadar of a bunch of nerds playing around in the anechoic chamber. Victoria's song from the Verge was on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and was at the event. Said there were a lot of influencers taking selfies or doing videos on the stairwell. She said there was one influencer who was dancing to a tune only heard in her head. The tune that she knew she would lay in later to her video as she went down the stairs. She said it made it for a little bit of a traffic jam.

Jason Snell [01:12:02]:
This is why. I mean, this is Apple's vision for this event, Right?

Leo Laporte [01:12:07]:
Sure.

Jason Snell [01:12:07]:
Lots of influencers who are passing on whatever marketing Apple wants them to pass on. That's just part of what it is and it can be effective marketing, I think. I haven't been in an Apple anechoic chamber since Antennagate.

Leo Laporte [01:12:26]:
Oh, wow. You didn't even go for the HomePods.

Jason Snell [01:12:29]:
You didn't get invited in to the HomePods. I don't think I got an anechoic visit, but I did for Antennagate and that was very much on the see, we did do testing of things and this is, I mean look, this is effective marketing in the sense that it's, it's showing your work a little bit and saying don't just accept that what Apple does is easy. It's actually extremely hard and we spend a lot of money on a lot of this stuff that that's the message they're trying to get across.

Alex Lindsay [01:12:56]:
And it is hard. I mean I haven't worked on any of the Apple stuff, but I've worked on other things that are like product development. And I don't think anybody has any idea what a commercial product from one of these large companies, the amount of money work that it takes that they go through to make it work when it doesn't work perfectly. And you think, oh, that no one thought of that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:12]:
Yeah, they did.

Alex Lindsay [01:13:13]:
They thought about it and they worked on it. They just didn't quite get to the end. And so I think Apple, I think every once in a while showing people what those tools look like is useful.

Leo Laporte [01:13:23]:
Here is Lance's picture of the Steve Jobs Martin Logan Monolith three speakers that he donated.

Jason Snell [01:13:31]:
Yeah, those are the speakers that he got rid of when he just used the ipod hi Fi instead.

Leo Laporte [01:13:35]:
So much better. Who needs six foot tall speakers?

Andy Ihnatko [01:13:38]:
I think that those are the same speakers that are in that famous picture of him at that mansion that he tore down or like sitting on the floor. Sitting on the floor with that one Tiffany lamp and these two like big like Stonehenge style speakers on the side.

Leo Laporte [01:13:52]:
Yeah, the Monolith 3 speakers. Wow.

Jason Snell [01:13:56]:
You don't need them, just get an ipod hi Fi. That's pretty sad.

Leo Laporte [01:14:02]:
You think Steve instantly regretted though, donating these? It's like, ah, I want my.

Andy Ihnatko [01:14:08]:
Now I gotta buy a second house where I have nothing, no stereos in it. So we might bring people over.

Jason Snell [01:14:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:14:16]:
Here'S one from cnet. I went to Apple's labs to see how Apple watch connectivity is tested. So it's not just sound anymore. Vanessa Hand Oriana Orellana.

Jason Snell [01:14:27]:
Well, that's what the anechoic chambers were always for. Is for wireless testing.

Leo Laporte [01:14:32]:
Oh, they're not for sound sound. Oh, it's a radio anechoic chamber, not an audio anechoic.

Jason Snell [01:14:37]:
Yeah, that's what they were using for antenna gate and all of that. Right, that's, that's why you got invited because they do lots and lots and lots of radio testing.

Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
Yes. Yeah.

Jason Snell [01:14:46]:
Well, if you've ever been in one, you walk into it and it's like somebody stuffed cotton in your ears because you don't realize how we don't think of ourselves. We're not like, you know, bats who use radar and stuff. But the fact is we use echoes and reflections as part of a. It's like a spatial sense that our brain uses and. And then you step into that chamber and it's gone and it's real weird.

Leo Laporte [01:15:14]:
What does happen after these Apple events is that the people on the Nice list, as Andy puts it, get interviews with Apple executives. I know that none of us got those interviews.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:27]:
And I should say. I don't mean that as a disparity judgment. I'm saying it's because whether you're on the Naughty List or the Nice List has nothing to do with your own performance. It has what to do with, like, what Apple has chosen for this particular event.

Leo Laporte [01:15:38]:
So I just fully there. But it's a prerogative to do also.

Jason Snell [01:15:42]:
I would say the Naughty List and the Nice List implies there isn't another. There aren't people who aren't on either list, but that's the vast majority of people are just not on it. There are the people who are like, we're not helping you. And they're the people who get the invitations. And then there's the vast bulk of us who don't get either, neither. I refuse to be on the Naughty List. I'm not on the Naughty List. I'm just not on the Nice list.

Leo Laporte [01:16:05]:
I think I might have been on the Naughty list.

Jason Snell [01:16:08]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:16:10]:
Do you know anything that you want to share with me?

Jason Snell [01:16:12]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:16:13]:
Renee Richie once said, I, I, I, I know, but I can't tell you. Which makes me think I might be on an audience list.

Jason Snell [01:16:24]:
Could be.

Leo Laporte [01:16:26]:
Which is fine with me. It's actually a point of pride. I think I want to be on the Naughty list. It's a little bit of a slow week. Let's take a little break. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Inacco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. So they sent you a crossbody strap, too? Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
Two of them?

Jason Snell [01:16:46]:
Two of them. One for each phone? Well, no, they sent me three phones. One for. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:16:52]:
Do you have.

Jason Snell [01:16:52]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [01:16:53]:
Here's a question everybody wants to know. Do you. Is there a special case you need to use? The crossbody strap?

Jason Snell [01:17:00]:
You have. Well, you have to use a case. The crossbody strap at the Ends has little fine. Little fine threads that you basically have to run, run around and then thread through in order to anchor it.

Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
So any Apple's case.

Jason Snell [01:17:14]:
Apple's cases have that, but any case that has those, and I imagine there will be some would use it. But you can't. Just a random case.

Alex Lindsay [01:17:25]:
It has to have some eyelet.

Jason Snell [01:17:26]:
No. Yeah, it's gotta. It's gotta have that.

Leo Laporte [01:17:28]:
So the holes in the bottom of this case for the speaker, that doesn't count?

Jason Snell [01:17:32]:
No, no. Because they're not reinforced and it might pull out and break your phone in your case and everything.

Leo Laporte [01:17:39]:
Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you gotta get a case that's compatible, but.

Jason Snell [01:17:43]:
Yeah. And you know, Apple and that case.

Leo Laporte [01:17:46]:
Are all the Apple cases compatible or not?

Jason Snell [01:17:48]:
No, I think so.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:50]:
Okay, can you put more. Can you put those two straps together and like, have it dangling by your knee? If one. So if you so were to. So choose.

Jason Snell [01:18:00]:
I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:02]:
Okay, I look forward to that.

Leo Laporte [01:18:03]:
On President.

Jason Snell [01:18:04]:
Interesting idea.

Leo Laporte [01:18:05]:
The extra long.

Jason Snell [01:18:06]:
Well, the problem. So the problem I see with this is you, when you do the cross body strap, you're kind of committing to it as a lifestyle, which it is. And that's fine. But. But like Micah was showing this actually. He was like, oh, look at this. And, and when you take the crossbody strap off, but you know, you could. You've still got the case still has the little stuff you thread through the corners.

Jason Snell [01:18:29]:
And so it's like your phone has two little, like little legs dangling. It's ugly, I think. And so really, I feel like when you set it up for the crossbody strap, then your phone is either in the case or it's not in the case. Because when you disconnect the big part of the strap from those little loops, it is dumb. So you're kind of all in or.

Andy Ihnatko [01:18:52]:
All out with the crossbody strap, I guess. I know I've been probably making fun of this for the past couple of weeks, but there have been times when, like, I'm at an event or having fun someplace and because I already have a crossbody strap for like my nice camera, sometimes I will take that strap and I will attach it to a really, really good, like, metal cage style, like, case for my phone so that you can't escape it. Because when you're. When you're at like a. When you're at a fair, when you're at like a chowder fest or something like that, where you're constantly like, you want to pick up your phone, take a picture and then free up your hand so you can have more chowder. It's kind of nice to be able to let go of the phone and know that, okay, it's still going to be, like, there for me the next time I need it. So as much as I make fun of it, I do understand the concept.

Jason Snell [01:19:35]:
Yeah. The danger there is you get used to doing that and then it's not in the case and you go, and gravity appears. So.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:42]:
I have never, ever done that. Not even once. Not with my $2,000 camera.

Jason Snell [01:19:45]:
Not with a camera.

Leo Laporte [01:19:48]:
I am. I am Andy. Flying out to Providence. Flying to Logan first and then driving to Providence on Thursday. And I hope the chowder fest is this weekend. I'm looking forward to. Actually. I'm going to go to the Dune Brothers Shack.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:03]:
Oh, nice.

Leo Laporte [01:20:03]:
And get my mom a lobster roll and myself some clam cakes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:07]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [01:20:08]:
And I think they have very good fish chowder there. As I remember, it was quite good, quite rich.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:15]:
If you're looking for a fish or seafood item, like any place New England, we could probably help you with that. We can lay your hands on a clam for you.

Jason Snell [01:20:22]:
Don't worry.

Leo Laporte [01:20:23]:
It's definitely. There's something like, I think I was dropped on my head because as a child. Because I love clam cakes. But if you think about it, they're just fried dough with pieces of clam embedded in them.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:35]:
It's a clam donut. It's a clam begnay. It's wonderful.

Leo Laporte [01:20:39]:
They are wonderful. Well, they're wonderful fresh from the fryer. They don't keep all that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:45]:
Which is why when you order the six, you just got to chunk them all down.

Leo Laporte [01:20:49]:
Eat them all at once. Eat them all at once. Benchmarks are starting to come out. Is it just so Lisa and I are looking at our phones less night, and I said, you know, I feel like it's faster. She said, yeah, me too. Now, is that just the new phone effect or is it.

Jason Snell [01:21:05]:
Yeah, yeah. You probably can't detect the 10% increase in the CPU core speed, but you get the snappy right. Just because everything is kind of cleaned up and all that.

Leo Laporte [01:21:14]:
Maybe it's brand new. Yeah, it's brand new. It's mostly WCCF Tech has some benchmarks and it benchmarks pretty, pretty well. But benchmarks don't tell the story of real use.

Andy Ihnatko [01:21:30]:
Most of the benchmark pieces I've read have basically said that the CPU increases are okay, but it's the GPU increases that they're at least in graphing and testing. Looks really really phenomenal.

Leo Laporte [01:21:40]:
I was a little surprised at the event. Apple did not bring any gaming companies on stage as they have in the past, to tout the gaming performance. I guess they just didn't want.

Alex Lindsay [01:21:50]:
I don't think that they really cracked the code on anything that, you know, changed. I think that there's. Don't they really want it to be.

Leo Laporte [01:21:58]:
Like a gaming platform? They do have that new app.

Jason Snell [01:22:00]:
What they want to do is boast about how their chip has improved, and they use that boast time for AI stuff. This time more than anything else. They mentioned gaming in passing, and they're like, oh, and great for gaming and good for gaming, and they do that and they show stuff. But I think going drilling down is not something that they've wanted to do the last couple of years because they wanted to talk about GPU performance for AI or CPU performance for AI. AI instead.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:23]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:24]:
Ms. Chowder Fest. It was last week. Oh, Lou. At the. At the India Point Park.

Jason Snell [01:22:30]:
It's wicked sad.

Andy Ihnatko [01:22:33]:
The thing is, you got to pick a good one because some. Some of the Chowder festival for people who are actually interested in chowder. The other ones are just for people like, I. Honey, I'm sick of looking at you. I have nothing more to say this weekend. Why don't we have an event or someplace to go so that we can talk about something other than how poorly this relationship is working out? Those are the ones you kind of get stuck in because the people with People with the strollers, and they just. They'll pick up a table and they're getting you the way when you're just trying to make your tour of 31 different chowders for 20 bucks.

Leo Laporte [01:23:03]:
I do. I love a good chowder. Okay, so my theory, which I told Lisa last night maybe is BS is they are. They feel faster because of the aluminum unibody body and the new vapor cooling system. The processor, even though it's maybe only 10% faster, is not gated as much as the old titanium says.

Jason Snell [01:23:28]:
Right? Better thermals. Anybody who's focused on the computer side will know this same story, right? Which is a fanless computer will not run as well at stress points as a fanned computer. A computer with a fan, because it will not throttle. And this new iPhone Pro design is designed to reduce the times that they need to throttle. And the air, I will tell you, you know, it gets hot real easy. And so it's gonna. Even though it's got a pro chip, it's gonna throttle in a way that the pro is not Yeah, I do.

Leo Laporte [01:24:00]:
Remember on my 16 Pro Max when I was using that new Adobe PI camera, I can only take three or four photos before the camera itself would say, I can't go on, it's too hot. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:10]:
And that is something.

Leo Laporte [01:24:11]:
That's a problem with this.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:12]:
That is something. A lot of these performance reviews are saying good things about how sustained performance on the Pro is pretty respectable.

Leo Laporte [01:24:20]:
So good.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:21]:
Good, exactly. Say it's not just about. Okay, well, it ran this test suite and here's the numbers you got from the test suite you want to look for. How many pictures in a row can I take before it starts, before the shutter starts to slow down? How much video can I take before it says, yeah, why don't you just drop me in a, you know, I am IP68 resistance. How about a bucket of ice? Just drop me in a bucket of ice for a good eight minutes and then maybe I can shoot some more video for you.

Leo Laporte [01:24:51]:
Oh, Indigo is not yet supported on this device. Currently support. Oh, well. So thank you Adobe. They haven't updated Project indigo for the S17 Prestige crushed. Coming soon.

Alex Lindsay [01:25:04]:
How could they do that to us?

Leo Laporte [01:25:06]:
Coming soon. So I will let you know if it overheats, but in theory it should do better, right? Here's some graphs.

Alex Lindsay [01:25:16]:
I just rarely feel like my phone is ever like slowing down.

Leo Laporte [01:25:20]:
I feel like it gets hot. The 16 would get hot frequently. And it's true that the thermals of the titanium glass case are not as good as the the aluminum unibody.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:31]:
And a lot of it really is hocus pocus really. Like the first time you use a phone that can sustain like 120Hz frame refresh rate, it's running just as fast or just as slow as a 60Hz phone, but it just feels you're scrolling faster. And with such a graphical interface, basically things open and close and move around so much faster. It just feels like a fast phone. And given that you're not necessarily trying to to crunch a 10,000 cell spreadsheet on device, a device that feels faster can be just as beneficial to the user as something that actually is faster.

Leo Laporte [01:26:08]:
I will say something about the A19 that is pretty important. And Steve Gibson spent a long time last Wednesday talking about it. Apple's new memory integrity enforcement on the A19, Steve Felt is a game changer. If you listen to Security now or you follow Security News, you know that one of the big issues, one of the reasons many of our devices are insecure is because of memory issues. Memory safety in particular, buffer Overflows writing to areas of memory that you're not supposed to write to or overrunning an area of memory that you've reserved. And these often give bad guys an access into the phone. It's one of the things that often happens with zero click attacks on the iPhone. Apple took ARM's existing memory tagging extension and greatly enhanced it.

Leo Laporte [01:27:01]:
And again, this is a little beyond me but Steve covered it in great detail. He was very impressed with memory integrity enforcement. So much so he devoted much of the show to it and said it is a game changer. Microsoft and Google said this is from privacy guides. 70% of all security vulnerabilities in their PRIV products come from memory safety issues. They're not using memory safety memory safe languages. Programmers make mistakes that often leads to vulnerabilities like heartbleed. Remember this, there have been many, many examples of this.

Leo Laporte [01:27:41]:
MTE effectively eliminates these. So if you're looking for the most secure phone, this is a massive step forward. All ARM devices have the memory tagging extensions. But again Steve says what Apple has done goes well beyond that.

Alex Lindsay [01:28:00]:
And again this is, this is part of Apple's marketing. You know, I mean not in a bad way, just they are, this is part of their business model is that they're going to keep on every version of the iPhone is going to be more secure than the last version in there.

Leo Laporte [01:28:12]:
Well and I think it's also a point of pride because Apple, you know, Pegasus.

Alex Lindsay [01:28:18]:
Yeah, I don't want to say this just marketing. I'm saying like it is part of the ethos of that this is one of the things that sets their stuff apart is going to be continually adding more and more security to the phone and taking more and more ways of for themselves to actually get into it. Like the idea is to kind of break off all the branches and just be like this is, you know, this is your phone, you know, so they haven't been worried about, about stuff that you have online or in the cloud. But the kind of the line that Apple's drawn is continually to make the phone more and more impenetrable.

Leo Laporte [01:28:49]:
If you're interested, it is the most recent Security Now Show Episode 1043 Memory Integrity Enforcement. He does a deep dive on it and why it's such a big deal. He really thinks this is the biggest step forward in computer security, not just phone security but chip level computer security in history. I mean this is gonna eliminate a huge category of flaws and this is exactly what Apple wants to do. They don't like it that there are these zero click attacks that nation states can perpetrate on. People use the iPhone. They hate having to tell you, but they do. You know, your phone's been hacked by, you know, a nation and you should be aware of that and do something about it.

Leo Laporte [01:29:34]:
They don't want to do that. So good on Apple. I think that's great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:38]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:29:39]:
Here we are two weeks into the liquid glass era. Apple Insider says liquid glass is causing disorienting optical illusions for some users. I have not seen this. I have seen weirdness and maybe even bugs where, you know, some of the transparencies are not working well, but not so much that I've turned it off yet. Yet. Anybody? What, what do you think? Liquid glass good, bad, indifferent?

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:11]:
I think it's fine. I'm not. Now that I'm finally using it on Mac os it's like I'm, I'm glad that it's not. They're not using it a whole lot more right now. I think that it's. A lot of it is way too. A lot of some things that they've swapped out are kind of subtle. Like now there are times when if I make a change to the brightness of the screen or they, or volume adjustment now there's a little like liquid glass pill in the corner that actually reflects that change.

Andy Ihnatko [01:30:34]:
And I kind of like to have a more reassuring given how many times I'm wearing Bluetooth headphones and the Bluetooth headphones will not respond or disconnect, it's nice to have a better, better indication than that. I don't think we're going to really understand or appreciate it until, for the next, another two or three months until most of the apps that you use, the third party apps are upgraded to it. As a matter of fact I got a newsletter from the makers of Ulysses, which is my, my current favorite word processor, explaining about how much they have to do in order to get the Ulysses app running under Liquid Glass. Because as the, the, the hidden story behind most third party app design is that oftentimes Apple does not provide them with the APIs. They need to get the, the user interface that they actually want that's required for this specific, specific application. So they wind up not using Apple's built in like windowing tiling systems. They have to write their own tiling system. In the newsletter they're saying, well look, we need, there's a time where we needed four tiles and they can only give us three.

Andy Ihnatko [01:31:33]:
And now we also want to make these individual tiles more dynamic and put controls in them that the Apple's own system does not let us do. So we had to basically write our own windowing and our own tiling system from scratch. Now we have the option of either rewriting all of that to work fine with Liquid Glass, or to switch to abandon our own designs, or, excuse me, our own code and try to figure out how to make our UI work within this other UI language. So I don't think that there's going to be, that there's so much pushback from developers, so much as it's not a trivial thing to do. And the thing is like you kind of, you're, you're, all your users are asking you, hey, I've, I really, I really wish that Markdown could work with this brand new blogging platform. Can you do that for us? That's what they're asking for. They're not asking, asking for, hey, could you make the user interface more liquid, glassy? And so when you have to basically tolerate a regime change, so to speak, at Apple UI design, you kind of feel a little bit resentful that you're not putting that amount of time in and actually giving your users the features they've been asking for for the past couple years.

Leo Laporte [01:32:36]:
I'm not, I have to say, I'm not a fan, but again, not such a, not such a hater that I've turned it off. But just like the translucent folders, I can understand why people may. It makes you a little, to me, it makes you a little queasy when, when the folder backgrounds are kind of.

Jason Snell [01:32:53]:
Yeah, the folder thing is a bit much and it was throughout the summer and it's a bit much. I don't know. This, like redesigns happen and then they get tweaked over time and this has all happened before and this will all happen again. I think I agree with Andy Gratuitous.

Leo Laporte [01:33:06]:
I don't know why they needed to do this.

Jason Snell [01:33:08]:
They needed to do it because they felt like their design system was at the end and it's time for a refresh. And I think that that's fashion and I think that that's a real thing. And I think that the people who are complaining about it from a style standpoint are like, well, it was fine. Why don't we, you know, why don't we leave it the same? I think the answer is that then you feel like you're getting stale and you want it to look cool again and then everybody goes through the wringer where Apple will spend multiple revisions trying to tweak things about it and develop are the ones we really need to feel for because it is an enormous amount of new work that developers have to do in order to get this stuff to look right, especially on iOS on macros. Andy is absolutely right. It's a light touch and I can be offended as a Mac user that they sort of didn't put the effort in, but I'm also kind of relieved as a Mac user that they didn't put the effort in because it's completely usable and it just looks a little different some things. It's just, you know, it's been a long time that the volume could control. The heads up has been in the center of the screen and now it's up where the volume controls are.

Jason Snell [01:34:07]:
There are some usability reasons it's up there because that's where you can click and change the volume yourself. But also it's something that, you know, we're used to it being somewhere else. So I would say give it a little time. And then also I'm sure there will be a third party app that will put a giant volume flasher right in your vision if you want it.

Leo Laporte [01:34:28]:
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:29]:
There's also the idea that realize that Apple doesn't have to speculate about what the hardware is going to be like four or five years in the future or next year. They. They have no playbook. So this so liquid. So Liquid Glass could reflect. Let's. The Minchi quote is basically doubling down on the idea of Apple doing a touchscreen Mac sometime next year, the year after that. I will believe that when I see really good evidence of it.

Andy Ihnatko [01:34:55]:
Because I think that. Think they missed that bus. That bus is on the other side of the hemisphere right now. But I have to admit that if I am hypothetically willing to accept that this is something they're working on and trying to release in the next couple of years. Liquid Glass is possibly a more appropriate language to basically put touch points into the Mac interface.

Leo Laporte [01:35:20]:
Theory.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:20]:
Yeah. Especially if they keep evolving it. I don't think it's as blatant as when Google first released Material Design, which to me was an absolutely brilliant way to do. Hey look, if you've got a touchscreen, it works as a touchscreen interface. If you've got a keyboard and a mouse connected to the screen, it works just as well. Only the controls are small enough to look like a desktop, but also big enough and active enough to work on a small size phone. But I have to look ahead and think that, yeah, maybe there's something coming up the Next two or three years where. Okay, Liquid Glass on macOS.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:55]:
Kind of like now. Makes sense.

Leo Laporte [01:35:57]:
I already started saving money for the touchscreen M6 MacBook Pro with the OLED. You think that's not going to happen? I think. I hope that's going to happen next year.

Andy Ihnatko [01:36:06]:
I don't know. I'm just so adamant that Apple absolutely missed the bus. Like, they didn't miss it. They watched it drive away and they waved with a little smug expression. Oh, those people don't know what they're doing.

Leo Laporte [01:36:19]:
They changed their mind. Mind.

Andy Ihnatko [01:36:20]:
They don't understand user. Yeah, they could, but it's not as simple as creating a portable ui. It really has to be something where it doesn't matter. The moment that I'm using a touchscreen Mac without the keyboard attached. And I think, ah, damn it, where's my keyboard? Because I got to do this one thing. They absolutely lose. So it's. I think.

Leo Laporte [01:36:42]:
You think we're not going to see a touchscreen Mac next year?

Jason Snell [01:36:44]:
I think it's going to happen. It's going to. To happen, you know, probably next fall. I think that it's. I mean, it's funny to say they missed the bus because then they floated, then they took their limo. Like, they haven't. I'm not sure they've. They've suffered for not having it.

Leo Laporte [01:36:58]:
Apple doesn't take buses.

Jason Snell [01:37:00]:
They don't. They can't. For the. Yeah, they take a bespoke WI Fi flying carpet.

Leo Laporte [01:37:06]:
Anyway, we had somebody from Consumer Reports on, on Sunday, Nicholas De Leon, who actually, he's the senior technology editor there, he said, of all the laptops, the Windows laptops, we have, fewer than half have touch, so there's still a long way to go.

Jason Snell [01:37:25]:
Well, there's cheaper laptops in the Windows market. That's why it becomes an issue. But I'll say that I think that the touchscreen. I actually agree with Andy. I think touchscreens are useful because here's the thing, everything else has a touchscreen. Everything else. And as a result, all of us have built up muscle memory. When I'm using my iPad with the keyboard and the trackpad, I still reach up and touch the display sometimes mostly just to scroll or to tap on something.

Jason Snell [01:37:52]:
And then I find myself occasionally doing that on my MacBook Pro, and I'm like, oh, oh, oh, no, no, don't do it. That bears out what happened 10 years ago when I had a Chromebook. I forget what it was, what model. It was one of the nice Chromebooks with a touchscreen. And I never used the touchscreen except occasionally I would scroll something or tap something. And mostly it was because your brain has been trained to touc touch the screen. So let it. And I think that that's what it's going to be.

Jason Snell [01:38:18]:
I don't think this is going to be some sort of like dramatic, cataclysmic. You know, Apple said a lot of things about, oh, you don't want to do that, you don't want to mix and match. But I think they're already making a product that does this. It's the iPad in, in the, in the case and it's fine. And the world did not end because people aren't reaching out with the zombie arms to do Photoshop with their fingers. Right. They're just, they're just doing really quick touch interactions that we're, that we're all trained to do by our phones now. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay [01:38:44]:
And I think that the thing is that I think as we watch the OS change and the interface change and how it interacts, I think we're seeing Apple getting ready to do this type of thing. And so I think that as they get the macOS, I think the Mac OS three years ago or four years ago, I mean, I've had touch screens, USB touch screens that you are touching to use a Mac and you realize how limited that is when the operating system isn't built for touch. And so it's not just like we can make the screen touchable, you have to make the interface touchable as well. And I think that's what Apple's been slowly moving towards. I feel like we should call a date. So I'm going to say November 10, 26.

Leo Laporte [01:39:22]:
I like it.

Alex Lindsay [01:39:23]:
If it doesn't happen, no one's going to remember. But if they do, I'm going to say, hey, I told you so. So it's a November 10, 2026 Apple release of touchscreen.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:31]:
Now I'll give you the offer. Would you like this? I mean, I don't have to rush out of here too quickly. Do you want to spend the next five minutes just saying? I'm saying November 11th.

Alex Lindsay [01:39:40]:
I'm saying November 12th.

Leo Laporte [01:39:42]:
I got a good feeling about October 15th, I think.

Alex Lindsay [01:39:45]:
Okay, you're doing October 15th.

Leo Laporte [01:39:47]:
I'm going to go with October.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:50]:
I'm not saying I don't want to see it happen because I have. One of the best computing experience I've ever had was with my Pixel book because it had the yoga style screen where there are times where I'm on the sofa and I Actually do want to make this work a little bit like a tablet as well. Like a tablet or I'm at a diner and I've got it tented so that I've just basically have this touchscreen in front of me. And there are times where I'm just. Even when it's just a laptop, I'm just sitting there with my hands to the sides of the hinge and I am just, as Jason said, it's using my thumbs to scroll. It's nice to have all those different options. It's nice to be using an art app where I can actually touch the screen and manipulate what I'm creating manually. So these are all great things.

Andy Ihnatko [01:40:30]:
I'm having a hard time figuring out how Apple can pull off a revolution like that without basically having a huge conversation with the users about now. We basically are creating this new blob called Apple Software. And sometimes it articulates itself on an iPad, sometimes it articulates itself on a small screen phone, sometimes it articulates itself on a conventional notebook. And we're trying not to confuse the hell out of you about which one you want for each one of these tasks. If we are big, basically creating the big sticky ball of Apple user interface that articulates itself on different devices in different ways. If Apple didn't have an iPad already, it would seem a lot easier than what they're doing right now. As is, how do you talk somebody into spending $1,000 on a nice premium iPad Pro, particularly another $300 with a keyboard, and not something that will feel very, very similar, particularly after another year or two of creating liquid glass homogeneity between all these platforms. How do you basically distinguish devices from another device? So there's going to be a lot of evangelism that Apple's going to have to perform to make sure that they've got their story straight by the time they put these first devices on the market?

Leo Laporte [01:41:44]:
Meanwhile, it's 2025. And Ming Chi Kuo also says that mass production is about to begin on the cheap MacBook, the one based on an iPhone processor. That might be 600 to 700 bucks.

Alex Lindsay [01:41:58]:
That's probably the most exciting.

Andy Ihnatko [01:41:59]:
5Ch.

Leo Laporte [01:42:00]:
Yeah.

Alex Lindsay [01:42:00]:
Yeah. I think that's one of the more exciting things this year.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:03]:
Yeah, he's saying manufacturing this year. So you think spring, which would make sense.

Leo Laporte [01:42:08]:
Late 2025 or early 26. He says mass production in the fourth quarter, which is of course starting October.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:16]:
It would make sense as something they would sell for, like to make sure that it's in Stock when people are buying stuff to go back to school with. And also for companies who. Companies and outfits and educational institutions that might buy 100, 200 of them. And those buying patterns, unless they've changed since the last time I checked, tend to happen in March, April and May.

Alex Lindsay [01:42:35]:
I just can't remember that last time. I can't remember the last time that Apple released a laptop in the spring. Like, I don't. That's. It might have been a very. I mean, usually November is the time to do that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:46]:
That's fair.

Alex Lindsay [01:42:47]:
But it means that you have a handful of people buying them, thinking about it, and then you're in the sale season.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:52]:
But again, when. Who are you selling these to? You're not selling these to people who. You're selling these to people who are largely going to be taking them to school or buying them for large bulk purchases. And also. That is a good observation, but up until a year ago you could have. Oh, God, I can't imagine. When was the last time Apple released a phone in the spring? Well, they decided to start releasing phones in the spring and they might do that even more. I've talked about this a couple of times about how Apple seems to be on the spot march of progress in marketing, of saying that whether than.

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:27]:
Rather than limit our influx of sales into these big spikes that happen at predictable times, what if we can spread out our earnings or the money that we take in over the course of the year? And to have a laptop event that happens in the spring would certainly help to smooth that out, if that is one of their goals.

Alex Lindsay [01:43:46]:
I think it's going to be exciting either way. I think that's probably one of the most exciting Macs. I mean, the, the. I think the M4 is really exciting. I think everything else is good. Like they're solid, like all the other stuff that's going out.

Leo Laporte [01:43:58]:
But is it the price that gives you.

Alex Lindsay [01:44:00]:
Oh, man. Like, yeah, I'd love. I mean, I. The lower they can make that price and the more accessible they make that price, the more they cause havoc. You know, like we. Someone. Someone just asked, you know, how to do encoding or whatever, what's the most powerful computer I can get under $1,000 right now. And I was like, well, an M4 Mac mini, super disruptive, like that little box, you know, for $600 for what it can do.

Alex Lindsay [01:44:22]:
And I think Apple doing that more often is really disruptive to the entire industry.

Leo Laporte [01:44:27]:
I'd also like to point out that on October 15, Windows 10 will hit end of life and Microsoft will stop offering free security updates for Windows 10, hoping to push everybody to Windows 11. But a great many, at least half it's estimated according to Consumer Reports of Windows of PC users are still running Windows 10. And many of them cannot upgrade to Windows 11 without buying new hardware. October 15th might be an important date from Apple's point of view. That's the time when people are going to be starting to say maybe it's time to get out of this Windows thing and look somewhere else.

Alex Lindsay [01:45:05]:
Yeah. And the reality is that if the specs turn out to be what they are, huge number of people that have inexpensive PC laptops would be totally fine using this. And you know, so I think that that's an, that's another piece of that puzzle.

Jason Snell [01:45:21]:
I, again I, Andy has frequently on this podcast made a point that I think it's really important to make, which is understanding the large market that Apple has largely avoided by not selling more affordable computers and that those people exist and that they want. And I know Apple's operation aspirational as a brand, but also it's, it's important to keep in mind there are, there are price points that are. That Apple has refused historically to serve that are an opportunity should they choose to go down there. And I think this, you know, the rumored laptop, like, I think all their experimentation with the Walmart M1 MacBook Air and all that, that, like the opportunity to reach people who have never really seriously considered an Apple or they, they get one used or whatever because they just, they start too high. 999, it's too high. It's too much. If they could get in with a processor that's still really good. And honestly, if it's at all like a MacBook Air, like a fit and finish, that's really nice because I think if any of us have put your hands on, on a cheap laptop, they work.

Jason Snell [01:46:34]:
They feel crappy, but they work. You know, they, they don't. I think Apple has an opportunity. You get that Apple design in somebody's hands for that price and they're going to feel like really good about it, that there's a real value to that because Apple does have some standards below which they won't go. And yeah, then you pick up a PC laptop, sometimes a cheap PC laptop especially, and you're like, what? Like, I can't believe they're still making them like this. But of course they are because they're charging $300 for them. That's why they, that's why they feel cheap. And so you get your Hands on something that even remotely approaches a MacBook Air.

Jason Snell [01:47:09]:
And I think I'm excited about the possibility of that. I think it's, I think it's amazing that Apple Silicon has led Apple to this point.

Andy Ihnatko [01:47:16]:
Can I say the, the extra excitement is that this, that Mingxi Kuo is mentioning 5G on these devices which would make them the first, the first MacBooks that have actually actual onboard mobile broadband which is so long in coming and in retrospect now that they're making their own WI Fi chips and they're making their own modem chips, maybe this was something that they were working towards. They said well okay, maybe there are prototypes that they made which were not suitable. And they say, well look, why don't we create this new project for this new version of Apple Silicon based modem chips that integrate wi Fi that will work with the performance structure and the power curve that we actually want this to work with. Because to me that is one of the most beautiful pieces of luxury to have an iPad or a MacBook or a laptop that has 5G built in where I spend extra for that data plan where there's a cap on hotspot usage but direct usage is absolutely unlimited and no speed caps. And it's like the ability to simply open up this laptop wherever I am and have Internet connectivity and be able to use it like a laptop without having to do things like gee, I've got to do a Mac break weekly in a half hour and there's no Internet. Where can I go in the next half hour where I can get like a good broadband connection?

Jason Snell [01:48:36]:
Yeah, really?

Andy Ihnatko [01:48:37]:
But, but I'm joking. But that, that is, that is when you don't even have to think about how you're going to connect to the Internet even you don't even have to think about, oh, isn't to it going great that we have this tech, they have this system that allows it to find this phone and connect to it as a hotspot automatically? No, it doesn't matter. Just open the lid and if there is broadband over 5G it will find it and you will be on the information superhighway.

Jason Snell [01:48:58]:
Yeah, once the cellular comes to one Mac laptop, it will come to all of them immediately. Right. That's going to happen and it's going to happen fast. And I hope it happens real soon because I think everything you said Andy, you got it exactly right. And, and there are people who somehow want to refuse to believe there's an aspect of Apple fandom that's like if Apple isn't doing it, it must mean that it's impossible and there can't. There's no reason otherwise they would have already done it already.

Andy Ihnatko [01:49:25]:
Other people got there first, but they're not doing it right. They rushed to market. It's so very wise.

Jason Snell [01:49:30]:
Yeah, it's so weird. Especially since the iPads right there, the cellular iPads have been for sale since day one of the iPad. And, and you know, if you don't have a use for it, that's fine. But like, like they've made the cellular SKU available on the iPad forever. People obviously buy it or they wouldn't do that. I have a cellular iPad. It's great because tethering has lots of issues. So to not have those issues on your laptop.

Jason Snell [01:49:56]:
Yeah, I hope that's real too. I hope that happens.

Leo Laporte [01:49:59]:
Apple has had no trouble kowtowing to the United States government, but in the eu, they're fighting back. On Friday, the EU rejected Apple's request to have it scrap its order requiring Apple to make its phone work with other devices. Greg Joswiak says that the European regulators are creating, quote, a worse experience for their citizens, our users. They're undermining innovation, they're infringing our intellectual property. They're damaging privacy and security. Apple has withheld the AirPods translation feature from the EU claim, claiming that EU regulations, privacy regulations make that impossible. I'm not sure if that's the case. They're at war with the eu, in great contrast to their appeasement strategy.

Alex Lindsay [01:50:51]:
EU is asking for different things than the United States is asking for.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:54]:
Yeah, well, yeah. And some of them, I will say that as much as I think that it's okay to, it's okay for 3 trillion dollar companies to be regulated by, by governments who believe that they're acting in the interests of their citizens. There are some areas where, like where Apple does have a point. One of the other features that they mentioned that, hey, we're not doing iPhone mirroring because we don't know that the EU regulation is vague enough that we don't know if we would be required to allow people to mirror their Android phones onto macOS as well. And so it's simpler for us to simply not even just buy bother with that at all. There is a point to that. But Apple's gonna have to figure out how to actually play nice with the EU because they're not going away and they got their big brother with a $600 billion payoff saying, by the way, we would like to not have to pay any of These half a billion dollar fines that were being assessed for not complying with EU safety, privacy and security laws. And we would like to make this a diplomatic matter that that could involve like battleships and satellites and things like that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:52:02]:
That's when things get very, very itchy. I wish I understood why Apple fights some of these things so hard to the absolute point of almost dishonoring and embarrassing themselves in certain specific cases. Whereas in so many other cases they're willing to simply say, oh yeah, sure, fine, whatever, we'll take that off the App Store. Absolutely no problem. We'll do that.

Leo Laporte [01:52:24]:
Apple will be impacted by the H1B visa rules, although those rules seem to be a moving target. It was going to be a yearly $100,000 fee for H1B applicants and now apparently it's just a one time fee. It's not clear Amazon has the most H1B employees. 10,000, but Apple's fifth with 4,202. H1B. I think there's really two uses of the H1B. One of them, and I think the administration's right to try to crack down on this, is to bring in low cost foreign workers to replace American workers. But the other is to bring in high value workers, often researchers in AI and other fields.

Leo Laporte [01:53:13]:
And having to spend $100,000 for each of them might be prohibited. Bit of not so much for Apple or Amazon. It's actually more for startups.

Alex Lindsay [01:53:21]:
This is actually really good for the larger companies because the large companies can afford to just say we'll pay $100,000 for this person or they'll send it back or what, you know, whatever. But it's, but it's what it's really, it, what it does is it reduces competition for the top 10. The, you know, the, you know, Fortune 10. They're all sitting in that room with, with Trump. They probably were told about it, weren't complaining because it just, it's a, it's a buffer between them.

Leo Laporte [01:53:43]:
And there were some complaints because the initial announcement.

Andy Ihnatko [01:53:47]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:53:47]:
Changed significantly.

Alex Lindsay [01:53:48]:
Well, Netflix, but, but like over a period of 24 hours, Netflix came out, said, oh, we think this is a great idea because it's a great idea for them. So, so it's, you know, so I think that large, you know, large companies do really well when you create, you know, more speed bumps to bring people in. I think it's a great deal for a lot of foreign countries because it just means that there's going to be a lot more infrastructure built outside people leave.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:13]:
Yeah, 100% of that 4200. That, that's 4200 H1B workers total. So that, so not all of them would be. Apple won't have to write for 4,200 checks for $100,000. It would only be like for new ones. And Apple, in the space of the last year, they only added on about 300, 320 new workers. And that wouldn't even necessarily be 320 times 100,000. Because it's possible that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:54:40]:
It's possible the way that the government reports these numbers, it's possible that they just simply brought in H1B workers that were already here for other employment and they brought them in. But you see how difficult it's going to be for any company, any company not the size of Apple to compete with that. And that has the double effect of making sure that power of emerging technologies like AI continue to be consolidated in the hands of companies that have these trillion dollar value valuations. And also, as you said, LEO workers that are just simply would be exported to the United States and become part of the United States asset team of technology innovators are now going to be remain part of the Indian technology innovators team, which is great for India.

Leo Laporte [01:55:23]:
Well, we'll watch with interest. It seems to have changed significantly from Friday when Howard Lutnick said it's going to be an annual fee four times. And then on Saturday. No, no, it's just, just a one, one time.

Andy Ihnatko [01:55:35]:
They'd also say they're going to be stepping up enforcement too, which would scare Apple or all these companies just as much though.

Leo Laporte [01:55:40]:
Right? Right. All right, let's take a final break here and get your picks of the week ready. My friends. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell, you're watching MacBreak Weekly. And while we're on the subject, I would like to very much thank our Club members for making this show possible. Club Twit provides 25% of our operating expense. And as time goes by, I really would love to see that number go up 50, maybe even 100% of our costs because I think it's the right way to do it. We always will offer our programming for free.

Leo Laporte [01:56:14]:
We do. You can watch it on YouTube, you can watch it as we do it, you could download it from our site, you can subscribe to it for free. But if you pay 10 bucks a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get video with shows. We only put out in audio. You get access to special events in the club. We've just scheduled Stacy's book club that's going to be a lot of fun in October.

Leo Laporte [01:56:36]:
The book is fantastic. I'm really enjoying it. A Memory Called Empire Tomorrow, Micah's crafting corner, 6pm it's the fourth Wednesday of every month. We also have our AI user group coming up first Friday, so that'll be October 3rd. We also have the photo segment with Chris Marquardt, the book club with Stacy, and a whole lot more. These are fun events in our club. Twit Discord. The Discord is a great hangout for geeks of all stripes.

Leo Laporte [01:57:06]:
We love having you in there, so I think we give you a lot of benefits. But the main benefit, from my point of view, is it keeps our programming on the air. And I think nowadays it's really important that there be a source of independent information. The club's saying, hello, independent information not owned by a big corporation without fear or favor, not in the pocket of anybody. Not regulated by government regulation. We think it's pretty important that we keep doing what we're doing. And thanks to the club, we're able to do that. So if you'd like to help out, please.

Leo Laporte [01:57:44]:
twit.tv/clubtwit. You too could be on the Naughty list. I guess we've decided that that's the Naughty list, right? Twit tv. It's a nice list from my point of view. Club Twit. Thanks in advance. Jason Snell. You've been gone for a few weeks.

Leo Laporte [01:58:04]:
I bet you've collected some picks in your mind.

Jason Snell [01:58:07]:
You know, when I said I would do this show, the one thing I didn't count on was having to make 50 picks a year. That's a lot. It is. I'm going to highlight a product that just got updated and it was basically announced last spring of 24. Or was it fall of 23? Anyway, a while ago now, Final Cut Camera 2.0 came out. It's got a bunch of things that only Alex knows about on this panel. But that's cool, right? It's got ProRes Raw and stuff like that. But the reason I wanted to talk about about it is that I was just in Memphis and Mike Hurley and I did upgrade in person.

Jason Snell [01:58:45]:
And we usually have this whole workflow for us being in our separate offices to record the show. And I was thinking, how are we going to do our video version in a hotel room? And what we ended up doing was using Final Cut camera and Final Cut Pro on the iPad. To do it, we set up two iPhones on tripods and an iPad that Was basically you can set up these up to four cameras remote streaming to an iPad that's recording. It sends over a proxy video and then when you're done recording, they automatically send the full quality video. So you can get like you have a multi camera rig that is literally a couple of phones and an iPad and shoot 4K HDR if you want to. So we did that. The latest episode of Upgrade was shot with an iPhone, what, 16 Pro, an iPhone Air and a an M4 iPad Pro. And then edited in the Memphis airport by me on the iPad pro, which couldn't be easier because it's a multi cam clip.

Jason Snell [01:59:50]:
So you shoot all those cameras and they're all stacked and synced in final cut and you can literally just tap to change the camera angle. And I was very quickly able to do the whole thing. So pretty cool.

Leo Laporte [02:00:01]:
I thought this was an audio podcast.

Jason Snell [02:00:03]:
Where do I see the video on YouTube? There's a YouTube link in our show notes if you want to pull it up there. Because we do a YouTube version every week. And that led to the problem of when you do it live, you don't have your system. So how do you do it? So that's how we did it was we set up a full. It's really unreal. I mean Alex can jump in here, but to literally just take stuff out of your pocket and have a multi cam, like we're just in a hotel room. But we had a full on three camera setup that I was able to build the show out of in no time, like in like less than an hour. Because I could actually look at the waveforms and see who was talking and very quickly jump to when it was a back and forth or when it was a monologue and switch the cameras around.

Jason Snell [02:00:50]:
And you know, I just, I was amazed by it. I knew about it and had like messed around with it. But in a moment where I needed to solve a problem, I realized the problem could be solved by using our existing iPhones and making a studio using final kit camera. And it worked. It was great.

Leo Laporte [02:01:10]:
That's nice. Makes me wonder why we didn't go to sleep.

Jason Snell [02:01:15]:
Well, streaming live is different, right? Streaming live is different.

Leo Laporte [02:01:18]:
That's a good point.

Jason Snell [02:01:19]:
But in this case we weren't streaming the video live, but we needed a video output that we could export. And the idea, I mean when I was in high school we used to have like cameras and a switcher and a preview monitor and it took us like an hour to set it up with all these cables that you had to tape down. And now it uses. Because the hotel had terrible WI fi. I should say that too. But it's using the same pathway as things like Airdrop does. It's all ad hoc WI fi. So it's device to device WI fi.

Jason Snell [02:01:49]:
There's no networking infrastructure. The devices are talking amongst themselves. And I don't know if you know this, but WI fi is pretty fast now, especially on modern hardware. And as a result you don't need any infrastructure at all. You just like turn on the phones and turn on the iPad and boom.

Alex Lindsay [02:02:08]:
You'Ve got a multi camera double ending to those cameras. Right? I mean each phone is recording its own thing. And then.

Andy Ihnatko [02:02:14]:
So.

Alex Lindsay [02:02:14]:
So even if the WI fi is a little choppy here and there, it doesn't matter because yeah, it's streaming at.

Jason Snell [02:02:19]:
Upload, it's streaming a proxy. So you can make sure that it looks okay on the iPad, but. But it's recording locally. And then when the recording is done, the full quality stuff is then blasted over to the iPad, which just stores it all as a multicam clip in Final Cut.

Leo Laporte [02:02:34]:
And you edited it in Final Cut for the iPad.

Jason Snell [02:02:37]:
And I edited it on my iPad in the Memphis hotel room or in the Memphis airport before boarding my flight. And it. I got almost all the way through it before I even got on the flight. So.

Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
So this is Final Cut camera and Studio, or Pro rather were updated across the board at the same time as they released the new products.

Jason Snell [02:02:59]:
Yeah, actually not true. So they introduced this all with the M4 iPad Pro.

Leo Laporte [02:03:04]:
Oh, okay.

Jason Snell [02:03:04]:
Final cut camera 2.0, which a bunch of those fancy features got updated. But there's the thing that I discovered. Final Cut Pro for iPad has not yet been updated. So when I did did my file export at the end, I had the little dialogue box that says please don't leave here. And that is now supported in iOS 26. And final cut is supposed to be one of the apps that supports it, but that update hasn't come out yet. So you can't just kick it into a background process. You have to sit there and watch the progress as it exports.

Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
That's got to be imminent, I would expect.

Jason Snell [02:03:38]:
It's got to be.

Alex Lindsay [02:03:39]:
And do you have to. And you need an M4 iPad to do that Central control.

Jason Snell [02:03:44]:
I don't. You need an iPad to do it. It doesn't weirdly doesn't work with the Mac. So you need an iPad as the central control area. One of the funny things. So we tried in the third, we had a third phone and it wouldn't connect. Like they saw each other. And it was very frustrating.

Jason Snell [02:04:01]:
And it wouldn't connect. So what we ended up doing is shooting the third camera was the iPad. I literally put the iPad on top of my suitcase, on top of the bed in the hotel room and shut. Because that iPad pro that's got a 4K video capability on it too.

Alex Lindsay [02:04:17]:
Were you feeding audio into it?

Jason Snell [02:04:19]:
No. So we recorded the audio separately from our two microphones and then Mike just airdropped me those audio files and I put them in the back.

Alex Lindsay [02:04:26]:
If you had an audio interface, it would probably record.

Jason Snell [02:04:29]:
Yeah, I think if we had been going to a USB interface and it was going into the iPad, we would. Would have been able to pick it up that way. And that would have been. That was beyond the scope of what we wanted to do here. But again, I just want to say we did a three camera shoot in a hotel room for basically. I mean, other than the setup, basically zero effort, which is the limit of the effort we wanted to put into it. And I think that's kind of amazing. Like you could do that for.

Jason Snell [02:04:53]:
You could do that for anything. And it would be like. And since it's all streaming to the iPad and editable after the fact, you don't even need to direct it in the moment. You just need to capture it and then you can build your output later.

Leo Laporte [02:05:06]:
Should point out, by the way, you cannot tell the difference between the iPad camera and the iPhone camera. They match perfectly well.

Jason Snell [02:05:13]:
There's no. Yeah, I think the iPhones I set to record at 1080 and the iPad was natively capturing at 4k and that let me zoom because I had to, I had to zoom in a little bit. The iPad was a little too far away, but like, it looks good. I mean, I mean, for a zero budget, zero. All we did is.

Alex Lindsay [02:05:29]:
And you could theoretically on those phones use the longer lenses now. So you could have like a. Yeah.

Jason Snell [02:05:34]:
One of my favorite features of this is that preview is live and it's got remote control on it. So like you can, you know, you can see exactly what's going on and you can switch. You can use any of the lens types that they've got on modern iPhones in order to get the shot the way you want it. And then you can look on the iPad and see that it's actually the shot. You get that preview window and you see that the shots are all coming in and they look good. It's. It's very. Again, it's kind of nichy, but like, literally this is it's in some ways, this is the super Alex type pick.

Jason Snell [02:06:07]:
In some ways, it's the super anti Alex type pick because it's all hardware you already probably have in your pocket or in your bag that you can break out. And I bought a. I mean, I bought a cheap version of something I picked before a cheap, like, $25 iPhone tripod on Amazon had shipped to the host.

Alex Lindsay [02:06:25]:
Yep.

Jason Snell [02:06:26]:
And, you know, it did the job. I couldn't be more impressed with it.

Alex Lindsay [02:06:30]:
That's all. That's cool.

Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
Very nice. Upgraded Final Cut Pro camera. And soon to be upgraded, I presume. I hope so for the iPad. Yeah. Very nice, Alex. Lindsay, your pick of the week.

Alex Lindsay [02:06:45]:
So I have this idea of being able to take a lot of the stuff I'm working on, working on and make USDZs out of them. But the problem really is taking lots of pictures of an object is different than actually building a 3D model of it, especially when the object gets kind of complicated. And so I've been circling this device for a while and finally decided to pull the trigger. And this is a revo point. This is the scanner. This is a 3D scanner. Now, I just want to put in perspective when I started doing 3D scanning, it was 1990.

Leo Laporte [02:07:13]:
I know because you drew dots on my face.

Alex Lindsay [02:07:15]:
Yeah. That was photogrammed. That was photogrammetry. And this is scanning. Scanning. And so. So the first ones were 1999, and it was a $400,000 cyberware scanner. And we would send it away for a day at ILM and someone would come back and give us a model that was kind of.

Alex Lindsay [02:07:31]:
Okay. So what this does is this. You can go by hand, just go around something and just. Just kind of, you know. And again, these were a couple years ago. These were $15,000. Like, you know, like. So we're talking about, you know, even recently.

Alex Lindsay [02:07:44]:
This one's about. With all the kit. It's got a bunch of little reflectors and stuff that you use. It's about twelve hundred dollars. And it is a. It is a little scanner. And to give you a sense of the detail that you can get, I. This is the first test that I did.

Alex Lindsay [02:07:55]:
I mean, I did a couple little tests, but the first one that I did that had any detail was, of course, this camera. So I had the camera there.

Jason Snell [02:08:01]:
Wow.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:02]:
So that is a 3D model. That is 3D points. It's a lot. I mean, you can see the details in the knobs. Like the little, you know, like, it's.

Andy Ihnatko [02:08:12]:
This is.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:13]:
The accuracy is 0.2 millimeters. So.

Leo Laporte [02:08:17]:
So it is.02 millimeters, my friends.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:21]:
Sorry. Point. Well, the way I have it set was 0.2.

Leo Laporte [02:08:24]:
Okay. According to.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:26]:
It slows down, you get to 0.02.

Leo Laporte [02:08:28]:
And it starts Metrology grade accuracy.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:30]:
I don't know is. But now what we're going to do is take this and then build a re. Build a lighter 3D model. This is 6 million polygons right now. But. But the point is, is that it is, you know, its ability to kind of grab onto everything. And this took about. Took me about 30 minutes to slowly kind of work my way around it.

Alex Lindsay [02:08:49]:
But now, I mean I can take lots of photos. And the photo. I tried photogrammetry with the phone and I tried photogrammetry with a couple other things and it just was missing a lot of detail and I was like, okay, enough. So I. So I scanned it and it's. It's pretty amazing. But if you're. Obviously people do a lot of use for reverse engineering and I need to build things onto things and so being able to have the exact scan of something is useful and I'm trying to use it for education around this camera and around other things.

Alex Lindsay [02:09:20]:
Where I want to be able to have the big thing now is that we have these USDZ support inside of motion keynote and other things you can. With the scan you could scan the object. And now there's a little bit of more, more work to do to make it a 3D model that's light and easy to use. But this cuts a lot of the guesswork down dramatically. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, go ahead.

Andy Ihnatko [02:09:43]:
I was going to ask. I saw you post about this on Instagram and I just needed to ask like is it a self contained unit or do you need to have it tethered to a laptop or something?

Alex Lindsay [02:09:51]:
It's tethered. So this one they make a self. So the company Revopoint makes one that's self contained that you can just. It's actually, actually less expensive than this one, but not quite as accurate. This one I bought specifically because it handles black metal. Because I'm going to do cameras, black magic cameras specifically. I was like I need something that does black metal. So it has a different.

Alex Lindsay [02:10:10]:
It shifts gears when you say I got a shiny object. And so this does mount. But you can mount it to a laptop or to. I have it mounted to my other computer. And so it is tethered. But they do make another one that is not tethered. You can use one, walk around, put it in your backpack. For 800 bucks or whatever and wander around and scan things.

Alex Lindsay [02:10:29]:
And so it's, it's. Again, the technology is not new really, and I know it sounds expensive, but compared to where this has been pretty recently, like a couple years ago and I got into it, a friend of mine, Nick justice, who runs the media lab at Drexel University, he was like.

Andy Ihnatko [02:10:48]:
You got to see this thing.

Alex Lindsay [02:10:49]:
Look at what I'm scanning. And he had a different version of this. And as I researched that, I. It's what I've been wanting for.

Andy Ihnatko [02:10:56]:
Yeah, I want, I want something like that. Even better if it's self contained. One of my favorite hobbies whenever I'm in a museum is to do what I call an art heist, which is, wow, that's a really great sculpture. I think I'll steal it. I think, I think I'll capture data so I can turn into a 3D model and maybe let some later date turn into like a 3D print. And I'm so of terms of luxury tech where I cannot justify it. $1,000 for a really good three. Where it's not, it's not about the photogrammetry.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:26]:
As I say, it really is like, no, you don't, you, you don't have to look that suspicious. You're just sort of like, oh, look, I'm not coming that close to it. I'm just sort of going around one.

Alex Lindsay [02:11:34]:
Of the things people would notice if you use this one because it's got a bunch of little lasers that come out of it and stuff like that. In fact, you'll notice that I put the.

Leo Laporte [02:11:41]:
You look like Tom Cruise in Mission.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:42]:
Impossible is what you said.

Alex Lindsay [02:11:43]:
I kept the cap off. Put the cap on because of, I left it on because of Marques Brownlee's video about what the car lidar did to his truck phone. And I was like, I think I'm going to not have. So I did that and I, you know, I covered the lenses. I was like, I don't know if I want to hit the sensors with this.

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:58]:
So.

Alex Lindsay [02:11:59]:
So the. So. But, you know, it is something that I think figuring out ways to get 3D into the, you know, into the ecosystem I think is going to be really interesting again from an education perspective. I'm kind of surprised it's taking this long for us to start really using these tools to, you know, because what happens is once you have usdz, if you get a really realistic looking model that's relatively light, it means that you can build all the training in keyNote without any 3D packages like you don't need Cinema 4D or Blender or anything else. You know, once you have that there, you can just kind of throw it in there and animate it and put little highlights in it and talk about it. And that's kind of the direction I'm working on going.

Andy Ihnatko [02:12:41]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [02:12:42]:
Metro X3D scanner 999 pretty good deal.

Alex Lindsay [02:12:48]:
Just, just a little over an Alex. It's not bad.

Leo Laporte [02:12:51]:
Yeah, that's nothing.

Andy Ihnatko [02:12:53]:
Next, next time you come to visit, you are breaking that and you're going. And we're. And we're going to the Boston Public Library with big open.

Leo Laporte [02:13:00]:
It's not me, officer. It's him. It's him.

Andy Ihnatko [02:13:02]:
Exactly.

Alex Lindsay [02:13:02]:
I know Andy will do something crazy on one side of the and pull.

Leo Laporte [02:13:07]:
Everyone bring the smoke box and I will secretly scan the sculpture revo point for more information. Andy and Akko pick of the week. Well, don't make it your sculpture garden. Okay.

Andy Ihnatko [02:13:20]:
No, no, no.

Leo Laporte [02:13:20]:
Well, okay.

Andy Ihnatko [02:13:22]:
I'm just. As a Gen Xer, sometimes you just gotta sit down and write a two page single space report on the solar system or the Louisiana Purchase just to see if you still got it from middle school. And the last step of that. Well, you're not gonna print that out on a laser printer or on a linkjet printer. You want to take it into the school's computer lab where a pristine, beautiful Putty colored Epson MX80 or FX80 dot matrix printer is printing, is sitting and waiting for your connection. And for that you can go get a set of fonts made by Michael Walden and just released last month, a reproduction of the Epson MX8 80 printer fonts. Now there are a lot of like font databases and font collections, especially free font collections that have, oh well, look, it's a dot matrix printer. And those of you and people who were born after 1980 will say, oh wow, look, it's so cool and it's so retro.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:20]:
Or after, maybe after the 90s. And those will say that is, that is a font made out of dots that does not look like a dot matrix printer. You see, those pins were often offset and irregular and they had. Some of them were extra wide and too wide and. No, no, no, no, no. But this is nearly the real thing and it's a free font. The other nice thing about this, the link will be like in the, in the show notes for people. But the other great thing about it, the other great thing about it is that at the bottom he does have links to other Epson FX80 and MX80 free fonts that he thought were not quite right.

Andy Ihnatko [02:14:55]:
The only thing that I don't like about his collection is that it's only like the ult, the wide version of the fonts. The great thing about the FX80 and the MX80 is that you could basically send codes to the printer in your print job so that you can manipulate the width and manipulate whether there's going to be overstrike so that you kind of get higher resolution by basically tearing through the ribbon. But it's not your printer, it belongs to the school, so you don't care. And so between this and a couple of those other fonts, I do have those standing by for again, when I want to relive the those old glories of a gold star on the paper from young Andy and outgo one of only two people in the entire school who actually enjoyed writing and could actually write so well enough that would regularly be accused of basically going to the library and stealing from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Leo Laporte [02:15:44]:
And incidentally, you'll be glad to know the website is HTML 4.0 transitional compatible. So IE 6 will work fine. It's very nice to know. Look at that. That is a memory. I can't say a pleasant memory, but it is a memory.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:01]:
I'm not the biggest fan of Superweb.

Jason Snell [02:16:03]:
But.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:06]:
Before desktop publishing, before laser printing, the people who knew how to rock that character set.

Alex Lindsay [02:16:11]:
Because.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:14]:
There was a moment where I wonder if I'm part of the last generation, where the teachers would say, okay, you can have one page of notes, but only one pa, figuring that, okay, well, not only can I print this on the FX80, but I know how to make the characters basically one eighth of their normal size. So I can basically put 24 pages on one sheet of paper. Again, it will destroy the ribbon, but once again, it's not my ribbon. It was a fun. It was a fun time, wasn't it?

Leo Laporte [02:16:41]:
MW Rat BZ is the website.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:46]:
Michael Walden W A L D E.

Leo Laporte [02:16:48]:
N. There go you. You go. I think you could probably search for MX80 fonts and there are a lot of hits.

Andy Ihnatko [02:16:54]:
Again, some of them are good, some of them are bad, but it's a good one URL that has a good collection of them.

Leo Laporte [02:16:59]:
Very nice. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you all for being here. Andy Inatko is now released from his short time in the cell.

Andy Ihnatko [02:17:10]:
I'm safe. I'm in my private bunker. I won't say what southwestern state I am in.

Leo Laporte [02:17:17]:
Thank you, Andy, for being here. Alex, Lindsay, office out. You're working on anything Interesting.

Alex Lindsay [02:17:22]:
These days we just had our first live, as I said earlier, for the immersive camera. So we're going to hopefully do more of those. So that's my second video on that page. And we're going to be posting some more this week. So that is. But there's a live discussion on oh, global dash immersive in YouTube. And we're talking, a couple of us, Chris Petracco and, and Brenton Henry and I discussed, along with Grant Whitehead, discuss our early days with the immersive camera and what we're learning. So if you're interested in that, that's what we're doing.

Leo Laporte [02:17:59]:
Very nice. Very nice. And those videos are again available on YouTube. HGlobal Immersive. Thank you, Andrew. And of course, if you, I mean, sorry, Alex. And of course, if you want to to join office hours every Morning, go to OfficeHours Global. And if you want to hire Alex090Media, he's the guy for your next event, Mr.

Leo Laporte [02:18:25]:
Jason Snell. Great to have you back 6colors.com. I hope you get a little rest and relaxation after your marathon adventures. Back next.

Jason Snell [02:18:34]:
Just got to review some iPhones now, I guess.

Leo Laporte [02:18:36]:
Yeah, a few. Huh? Wow. Well, have fun doing that.

Jason Snell [02:18:40]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:18:41]:
Anything else you want to mention? Just watch that upgrade episode.

Jason Snell [02:18:44]:
Yeah, sure. Just keep your eyes on 6colors.com. Do that for whatever I put there.

Leo Laporte [02:18:52]:
Thank you everybody for being here. We do Mac break weekly on Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in eight different places. Of course, Club Twit members get to watch the behind the Velvet Rope version in the Club Twit Discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, tikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. But you don't have to watch live. I mean that's kind of. That's.

Leo Laporte [02:19:14]:
That's the extra credit version. You can always watch it after the fact. We have on demand versions of the show audio and video at our website, Twitter TV MBW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share little clips with friends and family. If you saw something you thought they'd be interested in, do that. That helps us spread the word. And of course, if you're a regular, you should probably subscribe in your favorite podcast player.

Leo Laporte [02:19:39]:
That way you'll get it automatically. Automatically. It's free audio or video. Just pick your favorite podcast player. Leave us a nice review if you will. That would help us spread the word as well. Thank you for being here, everybody. But now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you as I have lo these many years, it's time to get back to work because break time is over.

Leo Laporte [02:19:59]:
I'll see you next week. Bye Bye. No matter how much spare time you have, twit.tv has the perfect perfect tech news format for your schedule. Stay up to date with everything happening in tech and get tech news your way with twit.tv. Start your week with This Week in Tech for an in depth, comprehensive dive into the top stories every week. And for a mid week boost, Tech News Weekly brings you concise quick updates with the journalists breaking the news. Whether you need just the nuts and bolts or want the full analysis, stay informed with twit.tv's perfect pairing of tech news programs.