MacBreak Weekly 992 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 Jason are here. Intel, looking for an investment from Apple. Would you buy a piece of intel right now? We'll talk about college football, choosing the iPad over the surface, and Apple's in house AI model that's being tested and maybe will it be released? We'll find out. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. This is MacBreak Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:00:37]:
Episode 992 recorded Tuesday, September 30, 2025: Extreme Maritime Conditions. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple. Hello from Apple. With us, Jason Snell, six colors dot com. Hello, Jason.
Jason Snell [00:00:57]:
Hello, Leo. Remember when all commercials had jingles? I don't think Apple ever really had a jingle, but we could, you know, it would probably be something like that from Apple, right? Like at the end.
Leo Laporte [00:01:08]:
Actually, I could play one. I have one. So I was on a text message thread with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau and a few others, and he meant to say Apple Intelligence and instead he said Apple Submarine. And I thought, you know, okay, we.
Jason Snell [00:01:28]:
All live in an Apple Submarine.
Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
Well, kind of. And I thought, well, maybe Suno could do that. And here's what he came up with. I live in an Apple Submarine. Apple Submarine, I said. Make it sound like a 60s group.
Jason Snell [00:01:44]:
Yeah, it's not infringing at all.
Andy Ihnatko [00:01:56]:
Artificially intelligent.
Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
It's pretty amazing. Also with us, sorry I delayed the.
Jason Snell [00:02:09]:
Introductions to play that double Submarines film before a live studio audience.
Leo Laporte [00:02:14]:
Does sound like that. Also with us, back in the library, it's Andy and. Hello, Andrew.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:21]:
For New Englanders out there. How does Dinger do it?
Leo Laporte [00:02:26]:
Come on and see. Come and see. Come to Dave Dinger.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:31]:
Fold in Braintree.
Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
Braintree.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:37]:
That one kind of slapped though.
Leo Laporte [00:02:40]:
I watched a. On the plane home. I went to my mom's in Providence and. And I'm sorry I didn't see it, Andy. I know we're in the neighborhood.
Andy Ihnatko [00:02:47]:
Nope, nope, nope.
Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
We have a lot of people out there. Rich Siegel's out there. I thought I should bring him my Kitchenaid. Yeah, Lumaresque is out there. A lot of people out there. But you know, I want to spend every minute with my mom. Only had a couple of days, so. Next time, though.
Leo Laporte [00:03:01]:
Next time. Also with us, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Alex Lindsay. Hello, Alex.
Alex Lindsay [00:03:07]:
I don't have a song to sing.
Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
Where's your. I don't have a song. That's sad. He doesn't have a song to sing.
Jason Snell [00:03:12]:
Hi.
Leo Laporte [00:03:13]:
That's very sad.
Andy Ihnatko [00:03:14]:
That sounds like a Bernie Tobin like John song.
Leo Laporte [00:03:17]:
It does.
Jason Snell [00:03:17]:
There's no like Monty Brothers jingle out there somewhere.
Leo Laporte [00:03:21]:
I am going to avoid Pittsburgh jingle. The temptation to write song.
Alex Lindsay [00:03:28]:
This is the MacBreak jingle, the Pittsburgh version.
Jason Snell [00:03:33]:
Well, I mean, we got the Vision Pro jingle, so we're. We're doing okay.
Andy Ihnatko [00:03:36]:
Did you see.
Alex Lindsay [00:03:37]:
I'm sorry, this is not mag break. But as a Steeler fan, I watched a little bit of the. I got the end because it's over one of my shows on Sunday, but I got the end of the Steeler game in Ireland and half the stadium had terrible towels. Like, I was like, welcome to Steeler Nation.
Jason Snell [00:03:52]:
Yeah, terrible towels.
Leo Laporte [00:03:54]:
Did they invent the terrible towel?
Alex Lindsay [00:03:55]:
I believe they did. Myron Cope, I would say 1980, invented. And it raises money for. I can't remember what. But something. Something good profit and nice and AR Steel. Someone asked me, oh, worth steal. I don't have it right.
Alex Lindsay [00:04:10]:
It's not.
Leo Laporte [00:04:10]:
But you have a terrible towel.
Alex Lindsay [00:04:12]:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, I'm from Pittsburgh.
Leo Laporte [00:04:14]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [00:04:14]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:04:16]:
Well, now that we've talked about regional affectations, I did have pancakes and jingles. What did we have? Jason Snell. We had Top of the Hill, Daily City.
Jason Snell [00:04:29]:
Yeah. Save a nickel, save a dime.
Leo Laporte [00:04:33]:
Go see Cal, go see Cal.
Jason Snell [00:04:35]:
Buy a new car for your wife. She will love you all her life. Go see Cal. Go see Cal. Go see Cal. Isn't it Cal Worthington in his dog Spot? No, he was in. He was in Al LA and Sacramento. I got him in Sacramento.
Leo Laporte [00:04:44]:
But.
Jason Snell [00:04:47]:
If you need a better car, it's jingle time.
Alex Lindsay [00:04:53]:
People are listening like, what is she doing here?
Jason Snell [00:04:58]:
That's it.
Leo Laporte [00:04:58]:
That's it.
Jason Snell [00:04:59]:
That's it. Jingles. Yes. Anyway, they don't do jingles anymore.
Leo Laporte [00:05:03]:
No. And that's how this all came up. Because you mentioned that before the show.
Jason Snell [00:05:06]:
Leo, I got a segue. Intel. Give us some cash. Cash.
Leo Laporte [00:05:11]:
Cash. Intel. Would you like some more cash? They're seeking an investment from Apple. So they got the gov. The government to buy in, which may be a little bit socialistic. I don't know. That sounds like socialism, isn't it?
Jason Snell [00:05:25]:
Investment opportunity inside.
Alex Lindsay [00:05:27]:
I think intel is willing to take money from anybody.
Leo Laporte [00:05:30]:
Anybody.
Andy Ihnatko [00:05:31]:
This basically, Apple's like. I remember when we had to have one of the people that we were falling out with invest heavily in us in order to survive. Maybe this will. Maybe we have improved since then.
Leo Laporte [00:05:41]:
Here's the difference.
Andy Ihnatko [00:05:42]:
Now we're the Microsoft.
Leo Laporte [00:05:44]:
At the time, Apple A was very dependent on Microsoft Office. Right, yeah, so that made sense. Right. Also Apple was involved with Microsoft and Microsoft of course needed Apple to avoid the monopoly in this case there's Apple anyway. Involved with Intel. I don't believe so.
Alex Lindsay [00:06:10]:
There were also strong rumors that parts of Windows were lifted directly from Mac from the, from the Apple operating system. And Steve knew where the bodies were.
Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
Yeah, like so, so there was, there.
Alex Lindsay [00:06:21]:
Was, there was a, Didn't Apple sue.
Leo Laporte [00:06:23]:
Over the trash can at one point?
Alex Lindsay [00:06:25]:
No, this was much deeper than that. And this was, this was like, and this was the, from relatively good sources. Steve told Bill Gates that I, we can get into a lawsuit and I will eventually win, but my company may not exist when we win. So, so like, you know, like we can sort this out without doing that.
Leo Laporte [00:06:42]:
The stock market loved this idea. Shares of intel gained almost 8% that actually and then 6.4% the day before when Bloomberg tipped it. So, so the government bought 5%, Nvidia bought 5%.
Alex Lindsay [00:06:58]:
I think now Nvidia is definitely protecting a ant trust. So buying into this made total sense for Nvidia to put money in to just keep the lights on over there.
Leo Laporte [00:07:08]:
I have to point out that Nvidia has been the master of the shell game investment where for instance, they promised $30 billion to Oracle to buy or. But then Oracle was going to buy Nvidia chips with $30 billion and it really is a net, it's a zero net gain, but it looks good on the balance sheets. Well, I wonder if it's similar if Nvidia said okay, we'll give you money as long as you buy our chips.
Alex Lindsay [00:07:36]:
Or something like, I don't know what intel would do. I mean, I really think this is about protecting themselves from, from getting into an antitrust situation. And I think that the, the Nvidia thing that, where they're not making it, I mean they're putting money in and then the money's coming back. That is. But what it does do is it means they, they stay in the middle of every, all this technology all the way. It doesn't matter whether it's a shell game or not, it still keeps everybody else out. And it makes a lot of sense business wise.
Leo Laporte [00:08:02]:
Should Apple buy into.
Jason Snell [00:08:04]:
Well, the only real two arguments are one, it might make the government happy and two, insurance. Right. Like, I think the only way that really makes sense here is sure maybe in the long term you've got a competitor that could, could they maybe catch up to TSMC in 5 or 10 or 15 years maybe. But I think the insurance against something Very bad happening in Taiwan is part of what's, you know, what would, what you want here is. And this is why they're trying to get TSMC to build more factories in the US and they want intel to not fall apart. Because if TSMC ends up being the only company in the world that can make advanced processors, that's really bad. If you're the United States. If China takes over Taiwan or bombs Taiwan to the point where it can't make chips anymore.
Alex Lindsay [00:08:49]:
Yeah. And I think, I think the better, I mean, if you're going to use that money, it feels like the better thing to do would be get a bigger plant in Phoenix. You know, like, you know, that's the, I mean, that's the, you know, getting tsmc, you know, to, you know, somewhere in the United States. It seems like if you're going to spend $100 billion or whatever, I mean.
Jason Snell [00:09:03]:
They are doing that. Right. I think this is, this is putting another chip down on a different, on a different part of the, whatever this metaphor is. Roulette wheel. I don't know.
Alex Lindsay [00:09:12]:
I guess I feel like intel is such a lost boat. Like you're just throwing money into something. Like, I think I feel like they're just like here. I mean, I feel like Nvidia is just patching it up to keep the boat above water. But there's not really. I don't know how, I don't know how intel turns this around without almost a complete management change. Well, and the problem, literally almost every C level needs to go and put somebody else in. Microsoft didn't quite do that, but, but.
Jason Snell [00:09:38]:
It does remind me of Microsoft. It's the whole like Windows, Windows, Windows. And then at some point cloudmer exits and they come in and they go, oh, it's actually Cloud. And they made the change. And intel people have been saying to intel, you know, being more like TSMC and fabbing other people's chips is the future. And yet culturally, it seems like they just don't want do it. And there was talk of splitting them and then they decided not to do that.
Alex Lindsay [00:09:59]:
Well, it's not, they don't want to. They don't know how. Like, you know, like it's, it's, it is a, well, it's culture. It's a culture. It's also just understanding how to deal with everybody's requests. Like you're used to a pipeline and things are, make sense and it's much.
Jason Snell [00:10:12]:
More chaotic when I say it's cultural. I also, for people who have not been in sort of Larger corporations. I'm not tossing it off as culture is not a T shirt people wear. Culture is every single thing that motivates every single employee is pointed in the. A different direction. I won't say the wrong direction because sometimes that they're all rowing in the right direction and it's brilliant. But you get everybody rowing in the right direction. That's amazing.
Jason Snell [00:10:38]:
There's so much power in that. And then you need to change direction. And if you're rowing against the culture, I mean, I did this. I worked for a place that primarily did magazines, right. And I spent 15 years trying to get them to be on the, on the Internet. And everybody would nod in the meetings, right. And then they would go back and continue to do what they always did, because that was a corporate culture issue. And so, like, I understand what Intel's going through here.
Jason Snell [00:11:03]:
And so I agree with you, Alex. I think that's the real problem here is Intel. It's not even like they don't even. Even if they know that's not. Knowing is not enough. Knowing what you have to do is not enough. You have to change so many fundamental things about, like, it's not just like a new initiative. It's like we need to redefine what is a win and what is a loss and what is good behavior and what is bad behavior in ways that are counter to decades of culture.
Jason Snell [00:11:32]:
It's a tough ask, but at the same time, I'm not sure, especially the US Government wants to live in a world where the only company that can make those advanced chips is tsmc. And getting TSMC to be much more involved in the United States helps, but I'm not sure it makes them completely satisfied.
Andy Ihnatko [00:11:50]:
Yeah, and I'm not sure that I'm not a big fan of the steadying hand of the market. But the thing is, like, when a company is in this much trouble, you don't. You don't solve the problem by, hey, we've got an influx of cash. We can probably keep going for a period of time until we find the next influx of cash. At this point, you kind of need a regime change to basically someone who comes in either from within, from the old guard, or completely from the outside to say, here is all the stuff that we passed on that we should now be jumping into, or here's an opportunity that we are now free to pursue because all of our former competitors are now too successful to take the kind of risks that we can make right now. So I don't know how any investment in intel is Anything other than symbolic or in the case of the government, strategic in the sense of okay, well let's have a US landed chip maker in place so that when we continue arm twisting fabrication here we will have a company that's all set to actually start, start to make this stuff and a market for those chips are ready to receive them.
Alex Lindsay [00:12:54]:
I think the other, the other challenge is that Intel's in a physical business, not an online business. So it's one thing to pivot when you're pivoting from, you know, the operating system to the cloud. It's another thing to pivot when you're making chip fabs. You know, like it is, like it's, you know, every, all of these things are five or ten years of, of planning and construction and so whatever, you know, intel definitely doesn't have the ability. I mean they are a physical company, they build physical things and that is an incredibly hard, incredibly hard thing to do in the, you know, and make the changes that they're having. Again, I just don't understand other than the government trying to prop them up and Nvidia trying to prop them up for different reasons, I don't see any upside for Apple to put money into it.
Leo Laporte [00:13:42]:
There's, I think there's an upside.
Jason Snell [00:13:44]:
I mean the government making the government happy.
Alex Lindsay [00:13:46]:
If it, because a quid pro quo from the government to put $100 billion into it or whatever, then it totally makes.
Jason Snell [00:13:54]:
Yes, I think the scenario is in this environment, I think the scenario is the US Government says a lot if, if there are, and I'm sorry everybody, but I'm going to say if, if there are smart people inside the US government, they might say what we need to do is build a policy that has that, that, that makes intel be able to build chip fab capacity at a level beyond the demand for that current capacity. That's the problem, right is Intel's like we want to build new fabs and advance our technology but nobody wants to make us to make their processors for them. So if you're the US government, you're like, all right, here's what we have to do. We have to have at least a portion of intel be capable of this. And maybe it ends up getting spun off or maybe intel transforms in some way, but we need to get a whole bunch of tit the tech industry in on this now so that this thing ends up becoming viable in five years or whatever because of a tactical reason and we're putting in our money and they'll put in some money and it'll make us happy. That may happen. That's the only scenario that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I'm not.
Jason Snell [00:14:58]:
And if you're Apple. Yeah. Like, look, the other thing I'll say is there are, there are chips. It's what Tim Cook always calls legacy nodes. There are chips that Apple uses in various products that are not on the cutting edge that they could, you know, they're like, all right, we could bake that at Intel.
Leo Laporte [00:15:15]:
That would be their modems anymore, right?
Jason Snell [00:15:17]:
No, they bought their modem business. Those modems are. That are out now in the iPhone air, for example. That's formerly Intel's modem business that they bought and took away from them and spent like five plus years getting ready to ship.
Alex Lindsay [00:15:32]:
You know, it's funny is I think Apple will be more prone to just giving money to intel than do anything, buy anything to be nice. You know, like, because they're bread and butter is so driven by the phone and some of the other things. I don't think. I think. I think they want to get to a point where they control all of that and every product that kind of lives in its own world. Again, I think that, as you said, there's a bunch of politics here. The politics with Europe, politics with other things. If Apple can curry favor to get other things out of the system, then that can make.
Alex Lindsay [00:16:06]:
That's probably the most valid reason for Apple to support intel is that there's something else that they could get from that, from the government.
Leo Laporte [00:16:14]:
Yeah, it's the climate. The way the climate is right now. This is a cheap way for Apple to create favor. And it's really important, by the way, because Apple's got a tariff break on the phones that's huge. They're still making stuff in highly tariffed countries.
Alex Lindsay [00:16:29]:
China, well, and they're handing a white paper to the United States government for disassembling the dma. So. Or you know, like.
Leo Laporte [00:16:39]:
That's right.
Alex Lindsay [00:16:40]:
So that, that, that paper is them saying, this is what we want.
Jason Snell [00:16:43]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:16:44]:
So Apple has complained to the EU about the Digital Markets Act. The EU this week said, forget it, Apple, you're nuts. We're going to keep doing this, but the US government has now complained to the EU saying, why are you picking on our companies? That's our job.
Jason Snell [00:16:59]:
My dad's going to talk to the teacher.
Alex Lindsay [00:17:01]:
Well, that paper was not for the eu. That paper was for the United States government. Like, here's the outline for you.
Andy Ihnatko [00:17:06]:
Yeah, there was. To give some context, the EU is preparing basically a report or an analysis of the first year of the Digital Markets act and they opened up a period of invitation for, hey, if you, if you have a stake in this comment. And they, they filed a 25, Apple filed a 25 page document explaining how unhappy they are with the, with Digital Markets Act. That's why if you look at the news items, some of them are quoting from the Apple Newsroom piece that they posted which is very, oh, gosh, we just want what's best for the users and we don't feel so we can do what's best for the users. Whereas all the really, really savage quotes come up this document saying, we kind of insist that you rescind this completely until you guys get your act together. You're giving benefits to Samsung. You're not giving to us, you're, you're treating us really, really badly. And the EU on the other hand is basically saying, yeah, we've heard all of these complaints before.
Andy Ihnatko [00:17:59]:
Here are all the different ways in which we have tried to work with Apple. And Apple just simply shut us down and simply came back with we can't comply with the Act. And so your only option is to basically not enforce it against us. Or at least that's what they're saying. So that's why they're saying the other money quote from their spokespeople was the Digital Markets act is not voluntary, it is mandatory.
Leo Laporte [00:18:22]:
What do you think is going to be the outcome here?
Alex Lindsay [00:18:25]:
I mean, the EU talks a tough thing, but if, if Trump decides, he says, I want to tariff all EU products 100% until the DMA goes away. It would go away. Like it would, you know, like it would.
Leo Laporte [00:18:35]:
He has, we have, they say you.
Alex Lindsay [00:18:37]:
Can'T push us around, but he could push them around like that would be the end of that. The other thing is, is that Apple, I think Apple is slowly laying pieces in place. There's a nuclear option here which is to pull out of Europe. And it wouldn't necessarily mean that Apple would give up 14% of their sales, which is about what Europe provides right now. It would mean that they'd probably give away maybe 4 to 5% of their sales because what they're, what they've been doing in their o is putting in features where Apple itself doesn't even know where you are. You know, and so like when you log in to buy things from your phone or from other things like this. And so the thing is, is that, is that Apple I think is building the infrastructure to, if they had to, I don't think they're going to say we're going to do that anytime soon unless some operating system just opens up and goes, hey, we now no longer know. But, but I.
Alex Lindsay [00:19:22]:
They're not. But that's, I think that they have. I mean as this continues to drag on, I think that's the nuclear option. As Apple says, we're going to pull out. People will buy their hardware from neighboring countries.
Jason Snell [00:19:32]:
They'll never pull out.
Leo Laporte [00:19:34]:
That's not going to. But what they're doing, which is pull out of China.
Jason Snell [00:19:37]:
They're not going to pull out of.
Alex Lindsay [00:19:38]:
They're not going to pull out.
Leo Laporte [00:19:39]:
Yeah, exactly. They pulled out of Russia. That's the one place they pulled out. And that was a small percentage of their sales. Here's what they're doing, which I think is really putting pressure on the eu. I mean they got pressure from the Trump administration. I think that's what's going to win it. But they also are delaying features considerable number.
Leo Laporte [00:19:54]:
This is from the Apple press release. They said unfortunately, well, these are actually.
Alex Lindsay [00:19:59]:
Things that are putting data into, they're handing data to companies that are less, they're less concerned about your privacy than I.
Leo Laporte [00:20:06]:
The DMA requires.
Andy Ihnatko [00:20:07]:
That's an oversimplification that Apple is really relying on. It's a complex case I think in which Apple is making very, very good arguments. One of the major ones is that the dma, they still don't know exactly how to enforce it and it's really, really hard to, to follow rules that are a little bit vague. But Apple's, when Apple's saying oh well, they're trying to force us to give your personal and private information to hand over your messages to third parties. And basically when you look at, when you dig down into it saying well, basically what they're saying is that we would like to be able to use Apple intelligence feature. Like if I have to talk to your chatbot, I don't have to have AirPods to do so. If I'm going to get notifications on a smartwatch, I should be able to do that and not have to own an Apple Watch in order to do so. I should be able to use any of the hundred different third party smartwatches that every other phone is just simply sending notifications for.
Andy Ihnatko [00:20:59]:
This is the sort of thing that kind of gets me annoyed about Apple because it is absolutely folderol start to finish. When you talk about the idea of if you don't want to give the users the option to say hey, it would be very, very convenient for me to have my Bluetooth G Shock Watch be able to receive notifications. I'm totally willing to do that. I trust Casio. I trust the intermediate app that will pushed that stuff from my iPhone to the thing. And Apple's saying, no, no, you poor stupid summer fool. You don't understand how bad that is. We can't allow that to happen.
Andy Ihnatko [00:21:31]:
And we're not just doing that to hope to get you to throw away that watch that you like and buy an Apple watch instead. No, it's because we just want what's best for you.
Alex Lindsay [00:21:41]:
And obviously Apple's response is going to be to continue to innovate and not put them in the European Union and not add them to it. I mean, that's what EU users are going to get. And again, what I think it starts to drive them towards is finding ways to, whether it's VPN or other things, to be somewhere else when they're buying their stuff so that they don't have to deal with the rules.
Jason Snell [00:22:03]:
Yeah. Also I think what you're going to see is, I don't think it's a pretense when they say we're working on it. I do think that they will continue to bring these features, but they'll bring them late. And one of the reasons is they're struggling to ship new features and get them out. And if there are additional requirements for compliance in the eu, I think, I mean, there are things I roll my eyes at in that story, like their app store somehow, like allowing other app stores reduces choice, which is a very weird argument for them to make, but they made it. But this one, like, I totally think it's legit and I think that they still do want to ship those features, but if they need to do another set of, of of engineering jobs in order to make them EU compliant after they've crossed the finish line of shipping the O in the fall, I can totally see and I think it's completely reasonable for them to say, well, we're going to cross the finish line and ship it in our, our major markets and then we'll do some compliance work and the EU can get it next spring or whatever. And they, they've done that on features already and I expect that to continue. And so it's not, we're not, we're taking our ball and going home.
Jason Snell [00:23:09]:
It's, you guys made extra laws and so you're going to have to get the ball later.
Leo Laporte [00:23:13]:
And I think we've seen Apple users in the United States or in, outside the United States complain about a lot of features. Tap to pay and so forth not being available. So users are aware of this. The EU doesn't get live translation, doesn't get iPhone mirroring. They've had to delay visited places, which is funny.
Alex Lindsay [00:23:32]:
The live translation would make more sense in the EU than the United States.
Leo Laporte [00:23:35]:
Right. They need it. Right. So I think this is, you know, you're giving Apple, I think a lot of slack on this. Yeah, okay, maybe they have to do more engineering, but really this is to get EU citizens to complain to the eu.
Jason Snell [00:23:50]:
The statement is that. But I also think that there's truth in the fact that some of the extra features that are only required by the EU that I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to say, look, we're going to ship it and then we'll keep worry. I don't think what they're saying, what I'm, what I'm trying to get at here is I don't think they're saying fine, you don't get that feature. They're like, look, you need that feature plus all these other things on top of it because of your regulations and we'll get there. But you're not going to get a day one because we're not going to. But we're not going to prioritize you over shipping that feature for everyone else.
Leo Laporte [00:24:19]:
So far they say companies have submitted requests for some of the most sensitive data on a user's iPhone. This is from the Apple press release. The most concerning include the complete content of a user's notifications, the full history of a wi fi networks a user has joined. They don't say which companies have asked for this.
Alex Lindsay [00:24:36]:
I don't know if they're allowed to.
Leo Laporte [00:24:37]:
Large companies continue to submit new requests to collect even more data, putting our EU users at risk. Well, that's legitimate, right? And then they start hitting at the dma. Has it achieved its goals? No, it's not good. And it is true that DMA sort of comes from people like Spotify who compete with Apple who are trying to get.
Alex Lindsay [00:24:57]:
Again, this is, it's still a rich, rich man's game. This is the count of this. Once the king to do something to the other count. These are all the companies pushing this are wealthy companies the users don't care about.
Andy Ihnatko [00:25:11]:
I don't want that. Again, as usual, I disagree with that. But my usual point is that if you frame this in the terms of a foreign legislative body has decided that the user should have certain rights of control over their devices and rights of choice and they are trying to give those People those rights that a $3 trillion company has decided is not in the company's best interest to do so, or in other cases believe that it would actually ruin the platform. We don't want to do it that way. But also because it's in our best interest for us to deny a certain freedom of choice to our users. And then when a $3 trillion company says we insist that this independent legislative body get rid of a law that we don't like and we are going to actually bring the full force of the Trump administration of the United States government economically and perhaps even militarily against your organization to make you get rid of a law that protects your citizens that we don't like. The United States has a really, really bad history with basically trying to tell a sovereign nation, we don't tell us how we should treat your citizens, we will treat your citizens the way that we want to treat them. This is a very bad look for African Americans.
Leo Laporte [00:26:23]:
Is this a culture clash between American capitalism and European, for want of a better word, socialism? Is it kind of a culture clash like American companies just want to. We just want to be free man.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:36]:
No, free capitalism, basically.
Leo Laporte [00:26:40]:
Free to be capitalism, basically.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:41]:
Again, that's why I say I don't like the term the steadying hand of the market. Because that's usually the excuse of, hey, look, if it's making money and if it's creating this market leader, then the market will. If Apple is doing something that's wrong or Exxon is doing something that's wrong, the market will straighten it out. We don't need to regulate it.
Leo Laporte [00:26:58]:
That's not how the EU feels.
Andy Ihnatko [00:26:59]:
That's what, that's why I think that I do like to err on the side of a sovereign governing body wants to feels as though these laws are in the best interests of not only the economic forces that within that district, but also the people in that district. I don't think that Apple has fully. Apple has a lot of legitimate complaints about it. What Jason said was absolutely correct. It's not a trivial thing to simply say we have to prepare this exception to our software to conform to a local regulation that we don't want to apply worldwide. That's not an easy thing either.
Leo Laporte [00:27:34]:
But AI has done the same thing. They've said we can't do some features.
Andy Ihnatko [00:27:39]:
My point is that when Apple posts something that's kind of two faced here where the public facing one is oh, we just want what's best for the users. We don't think it's fair and then 24 pages of BAM, bam, bam, bam, bam, say no, no. We're a $3 trillion company and we are incorporated in one of the most powerful military and diplomatic and economic forces in the entire world. We don't have to do anything that we don't want to do. We'll work with you for a little bit, but now we've stopped working for you. We just want you to, we're just insisting that you strike down this law. And in that 24 page document, that's where they say that they're threatening to actually pull out of the EU market. That's not where they, that's not where they say it in the nice sweet public facing thing.
Andy Ihnatko [00:28:19]:
I just think that Apple could, it's an ongoing problem. The EU needs to fix this. The EU actually built in. I'm optimistic, maybe foolishly so, because the EU has actually built into the process that this is why we're going to continue to monitor, we're going to continue to investigate it, we're going to produce reports and get feedback from people to see how it's not working and how perhaps we can address those problems. And I don't think that Apple has justification to play the part of the victim and the people's champion here.
Alex Lindsay [00:28:48]:
I think the challenge is, is that, and I could be wrong, but I think if you ask the average Apple user, not average European, but the average app Apple user in Europe, if they would like to have features day and date or have whatever these protections are from the eu, they'd pick the features and they'd be like, I don't care about the other stuff for, you know, the vast majority would just.
Leo Laporte [00:29:09]:
That's true in the US too, people. I'd rather privacy. I think they could be convinced otherwise.
Alex Lindsay [00:29:13]:
No, but this is, they're caring about, I mean the Apple product. They do care about privacy. They care about it not being hard to do it. They care about not thinking about it. They don't, you know, the vast majority of Apple users just want it to work. They just want to know that it's, it's, it's more secure. They don't want to think about it and they don't care about all this stuff that the D and D iPhones.
Leo Laporte [00:29:31]:
Don'T sell as well in the EU as they do in the US. Dr.
Alex Lindsay [00:29:34]:
Right. No. So I'm not saying, I'm saying, I'm not saying the average, average EU user, I'm saying the Apple, the average EU person that's using an Apple product just wants it to work they don't give a crap about all this other stuff. And then the other thing is that.
Leo Laporte [00:29:49]:
This kind of thing is that we only have stuff in the America that's made by Americans. They only have stuff in the EU that's made by the eu. Well, the problem is the end came here.
Alex Lindsay [00:29:58]:
The EU desperately wants to figure out why they're not competitive with the United States. And that is an entire structural problem across their entire their communities, their governments, their structure, everything else they know.
Leo Laporte [00:30:09]:
Everybody I've talked to, I remember going to Le Web and LOIC and all the people there saying, we don't have a venture capital industry here because we're afraid of the risk. This is how we work.
Alex Lindsay [00:30:21]:
But they have everything. I have a friend that moved to Belgium and is immediately forced, rather than being able to invest and build something, is immediately forced to get into the workforce because of course, there's all these social systems that he has to pay into. And the thing is that he can't do the things, he can't invest in the things that he wants to do because they're requiring him to do all this stuff. And so it makes entire infrastructure. It made. It kind of opened my eyes to the entire infrastructure is against innovation there. And so then they can't figure it out. And then you have the big companies like Spotify that say, well, if you only protected us, we would be able to be more competitive with the United States.
Alex Lindsay [00:30:55]:
And with. The reality is, is that Europe cannot be competitive with the United States because they are structurally flawed in that area. People are happier, they're having a good time. But, and, and you should. They should be happy with that. Like people are.
Leo Laporte [00:31:07]:
This is kind of also my problem.
Alex Lindsay [00:31:08]:
But they're not, they're not going to be competitive with the United States is what this.
Leo Laporte [00:31:11]:
The tariffs are intended to strong arm countries into going along with our way of seeing things. But in the long run, I feel like it shuts down what was a free and open world economy and makes it a national.
Alex Lindsay [00:31:23]:
Tariffs are horrible.
Leo Laporte [00:31:24]:
Yeah, everything is just national and we get what we get in the US they get what they get in the EU and there's very little crossover. And that does not seem to be, in the long run, the great way to go. We're going to take a break, come back. We have lots more to talk about, including a massive spike in fraudulent apps powered by AI. What a surprise. What a surprise. Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell, you listen to MacBreak Weekly.
Leo Laporte [00:31:54]:
Our show today, brought to you by ThreatLocker. Love these Guys, and I love what they're doing, you know, ransomware. Do you see now that the folks at Jaguar have to go are going to the UK government saying, please give us a billion dollar loan because we can't pay anybody. We're going because of ransomware. They've been shut down for a month. A month. Their entire production, production line shut down for a month because of ransomware. Ransomware's killing businesses worldwide. But there's something, Jaguar, you know, we were talking about this last Sunday, they had a flat network where once you penetrated their perimeter defenses, you could do, you could go anywhere.
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Leo Laporte [00:35:41]:
That's threatlocker.com/twit you need this. You need this. threatlocker.com/twit we thank them so much for their support. From 9to5 Mac a new study shows a massive spike in fraudulent apps powered by AI. One of the things Apple asserts is, you know, our App Store protects people. Protects people. There has been this year alone a 300% increase in fraudulent apps on iOS. Of course it's 600% on Android.
Leo Laporte [00:36:11]:
This comes from DV Fraud Lab. Fraudulent apps target both users and advertisers. This is what we were just talking about on that threadlocker ad. Fake versions of popular apps like Facebook attempt to get users to log in and therefore expose their username and password. The firm says AI is being used to create convincing sounding language for the app descriptions which help them pass app review. So much for the protection of the App Store. They also target advertisers. I mean we kind of knew this.
Andy Ihnatko [00:36:44]:
Yeah, it's, it's fine. Some, some shots are going to get past the goalie into the Net. That shouldn't be something that Apple should be be really faulted about. Is, and this is the reason why Apple has like pumped the brakes a lot in the past, like five or ten years about how, oh well, nothing bad can happen to you while you're using the Macs, unlike Android and unlike everything else. So bad people are bad.
Jason Snell [00:37:04]:
Yeah, I've got a solution to this. This is going to solve it. Now we need Apple to construct an AI to detect the AI submissions and we can let them fight it out.
Leo Laporte [00:37:13]:
Yeah. Let them fight it out.
Jason Snell [00:37:14]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [00:37:15]:
I mean, yeah, there's always a balance between developers complaining that takes too long and then People complaining that they're getting counterfeits. So there's a balance that Apple has to probably try to manage in that area. I mean, I do find that it is really hard if you get into a kind of a more basic app. It's really hard to find the right one that will actually work, that is, you know. So I think that that's the challenge, you know, with any of these things.
Leo Laporte [00:37:42]:
Let's talk about more interesting things. How about that? Some new features. Apple has released iOS 2601. Did you get it? This isn't developer. This is for every.
Jason Snell [00:37:57]:
No, this is a bug fix release for everybody.
Leo Laporte [00:38:00]:
Okay. So we were thinking 2601 would be imminent. It fixes a bug that could cause the LED blackout in the cameras with the iPhone, Air and 17 Pro models, ongoing cellular and Wi Fi issues. IPhone 17 owners have been dealing with a bug in tinted icons. There's a whole bunch of little fixes here. There's a voiceover issue. Could become disabled after updating, which is, you know, voiceover is primarily used for accessibility. So that's kind of a problem.
Leo Laporte [00:38:35]:
And we've seen weird keyboard artifacts. Apple says it addresses a bug that could cause the floating keyboard to change positions unexpectedly.
Jason Snell [00:38:45]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
I've seen it dancing around.
Alex Lindsay [00:38:48]:
We like to call it catch me if you can.
Leo Laporte [00:38:49]:
Yeah. All right. This is to be expected. That's normal. Alex, you still say wait for 26.
Alex Lindsay [00:38:56]:
Oh, not on my phone. On my phone, I'm. I. I am, like, bleeding edge. Yeah.
Jason Snell [00:39:01]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [00:39:01]:
Which I probably shouldn't be, but I've got a couple phones, so one phone stays a little behind the other one, so I, you know, so my. But my main phone is usually as. As. As new. I have all kinds of things breaking all the time. I've learned not to complain because I'm on some beta that's some, you know, like, it's. I'm fine with it. It's my work computer that I'm more touchy about.
Leo Laporte [00:39:17]:
Yeah. Well, then you might not want 2601 Tahoe, which came out yesterday. It's the first update to the new operating system. This fixes a bug that was preventing Mac Studio machines with the M3 Ultra for being upgraded.
Alex Lindsay [00:39:33]:
That was affecting me.
Andy Ihnatko [00:39:33]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [00:39:35]:
Whoops.
Alex Lindsay [00:39:35]:
So I have an M3 Ultra, and.
Jason Snell [00:39:37]:
It was, you know, just like in the eu, some features take a little longer to ship and you have to wait until they're available. Like if you've got an M3 Ultra Mac.
Alex Lindsay [00:39:47]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
So you should be able to install Tahoe now on your M3 Ultra, it's safe now. Well, it'll do it. It's possible now, yeah. Mark Gurman says Apple's working on a new. Well, we had this story before, didn't we? Operating system for the home.
Jason Snell [00:40:06]:
Yeah, that's not really new.
Andy Ihnatko [00:40:10]:
It's not really new. He has a story this week that's basically. Jason usually puts it well about how Garmin is really, really good, but he likes to piece together things into a story. But the newsletter this week was kind of interesting where he's basically positing that perhaps Apple is going to position the place where they're staking their claim in AI is not going to be in a chatbot because they've already lost that battle. It's not going to be in some of these other tools like Notebook LM that Google has done. But they're going to say we've got this amazing smart speaker with a screen and that's where we're going to put. That's where we're going to stake our claim as we're doing great, great, great AI that we're going to have this proactive AI assistant that lives inside the smart speaker that will and will do more than just set timers and pick music for you.
Leo Laporte [00:40:56]:
So are we going to see that this year is.
Jason Snell [00:40:58]:
That sounds like it's going to be next year because they got to get the app intent stuff working right. This is the whole new series with app intent. So it's probably a spring product, but it's a hardware has apparently been done for a year and they can't release it because they need the Apple intelligence stuff to work better. We should also say that contextually we're recording this the day that Amazon just rolled out a whole bunch of new based products. And I mean they are, they're trying real hard. I mean, you know, I'm going to withhold judgment. I've been really skeptical of Amazon's work in this area. But they are trying really hard and they do have a lot of resources to put against it if they want to.
Jason Snell [00:41:33]:
But you know, that's, that's where Apple is entering and quite frankly I find that category so disappointing, frankly right now. And I've had them all and they're not very good that if Apple could come in there and create a product like that, that kind of like hang around in your home and has a screen and can listen to you and actually understand and do helpful things, I think it's got an opportunity.
Andy Ihnatko [00:41:54]:
Yeah, absolutely. They can fix. When I list all the problems that I have with my Google Nest smart speakers and that I've had testing out Amazon smart speakers. These are things that Apple can correct really, really well. Amazon smart speakers are terrible because it's all about the advertising, always about the advertising. They don't care about hiding that. It's all about pushing ads to you. Whereas Google, they mean well, they've got the best chatbots, they've got Gemini, which is really, really great.
Andy Ihnatko [00:42:21]:
They're making a big push for that in the next month. But it is really, really hard for them to control that ecosystem between all the devices you have from all different makers. Even when you have, even when I have an Android phone made by Google and it's trying to talk to a house full of smart speakers that are all made by Google and running Google software, there's always that. I never get into that state of bliss where I know that whatever I ask it to do is going to actually do it. So Apple could really, really turn things around by providing the sort of thing where you'd want to spend $300 for it instead of $180 for a comparable smart speaker from another maker. Because it's private, it's not going to push ads on you. And because of the closed ecosystem, you can basically say things into your watch that will be reflecting in all the speakers inside your house and that would actually be count on to work.
Leo Laporte [00:43:09]:
I'm probably not alone. I've just given up on all of the other smart speakers and I'm just hoping someday Apple will release something I can use.
Jason Snell [00:43:16]:
Yeah, I still have a Google home in my kitchen. I just don't use it very much. I even for timers, honestly, I'm using my Apple watch for timers now and I've mostly given up because the, the Google one is okay, but it's super slow and they haven't done anything to make the hardware better. And the Amazon one I put in a box and, and donated, you know, or recycled or whatever. Because, because as Andy said, and this is the true of the Fire TV look, Amazon is a weird company and they're going to be what they're going to be. And now they got Panos Pen A out there. That guy knows how to sell stuff. He, he's going to try to convince you.
Jason Snell [00:43:52]:
I'm not a believer. I think he I, I'm not a fan. I I I I His sales technique doesn't work on me, but I know it does work.
Leo Laporte [00:43:59]:
You're not pumped by Panos.
Jason Snell [00:44:01]:
I'm not pumped by Panos I never have been. And he changed companies and it hasn't helped at all. But I will, I'll say the fundamental problem with Amazon. We talked. I did a little rant about culture earlier. Amazon, in the end, no matter what it is they do, in the end they want you to buy something at their store. That is what their culture is. And all of their technology products inevitably are just trying to advertise things to you.
Jason Snell [00:44:26]:
And so Alexa advertises things to you. The Fire TV advertises things to you. And like Fire TV has a bunch of really good features and I can't stand to look at it because it is so focused on selling me stuff. And like I buy stuff from Amazon. Like you don't need to try so hard. But they just as, as far as they're concerned, everything is a means to an end. And the end is a cardboard box at your front door. That's it.
Leo Laporte [00:44:51]:
You've heard of the Retina display? Amazon has announced new home security. Ring doorbells with retinal vision.
Jason Snell [00:44:59]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:45:00]:
Which is a camera with basically a Retina.
Jason Snell [00:45:04]:
All vision is retinal vision. When you.
Leo Laporte [00:45:05]:
Yeah. What are you talking about? Yeah, they have a new capability called Search Party to help unite people in the Ring app to look for lost pets. No, thank you. I don't care. The Blink security cameras now have 180°. You know, because they have two side by side. There's a new color Kindle. The big one.
Leo Laporte [00:45:29]:
The scribe. Yeah, I have a scribe I might consider. I don't know, I like. It's too big. I think new Fire TV. TVs.
Alex Lindsay [00:45:38]:
You have a TV that throws you a bunch.
Leo Laporte [00:45:40]:
TV with lots of ads. So forth. Vega OS, the slim Kindle Scribe with new note taking capabilities. You know, a lot of stuff.
Alex Lindsay [00:45:51]:
I have to admit that I had one experience with buying a Kindle tablet and just realizing how crippled it was and how many ads there were. I basically just wrote off every Amazon product. Like, you know, it was just like, oh, this is, this is. I get, I get it, I get it. Like, you know, and so, and so I, and I, and I think that the problem that Amazon has, we talk about culture again is they're just transactional. They're a transactional company. They're transactional with their customers, they're transactional with their employees. They're transactional.
Alex Lindsay [00:46:18]:
It's a transactional company. It is. You know, the machine is going to build the thing and they haven't been necessarily wrong. But, but I think that at every level they're transactional And I think nobody.
Leo Laporte [00:46:30]:
Wants an ad billboard in their house. And that's the problem with all.
Alex Lindsay [00:46:33]:
I mean, you look at like, how, how like as a, as an AWS customer, how I get a new rep every couple years because they have this policy of rotating all their reps all the time, which means that now I get, I get to train up somebody else on what I do. And I got to a point where I just stopped. I was like, okay, I'm not the person in the company to deal with AWS because I was just tired of dealing with some new person all the time, you know? And, and, and, and it's just, it's a culture of just this constant, like no connection matters, no relationship matters. It's all just transactional. And across the entire company, from the top to the bottom, Apple will have.
Leo Laporte [00:47:05]:
New products this year. In fact, we're starting to see there was a video leaked of the MacBook of the M5 Air iPad, not Air iPad Pro by the same guy who leaked the MacBook Pro last year. Right. So this is somewhat. I don't know.
Jason Snell [00:47:21]:
Yeah, it's a Russian. And so I think it's something that has been spirited away from a Chinese factory and then taken away to Russia for those.
Leo Laporte [00:47:28]:
There's a black market for Apple stuff in Russia. So they get.
Jason Snell [00:47:31]:
And I think that maybe because they pre. Make these things, right? And they're on pallets because they gotta. They build them in advance so that they've got enough to ship out. And I think, I think some of them fall off a truck or fall off a pallet and this is what happens.
Leo Laporte [00:47:44]:
I gotta say, this Russian guy though, has really got. Got the YouTube aesthetic down.
Jason Snell [00:47:48]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:48]:
Don't you think? I'm impressed. He's. He may be. He may be Russian, but he's. I can't play this, I guess, but you can look at it there. Should I. Oh, he speaks English. Oh, no, this is the translation.
Leo Laporte [00:48:02]:
Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if that's the automatic YouTube translation. So he apparently got one of these. We're also seeing benchmarks on geekbench from them. What's the performance look like? I have an M4. I don't think I need an M5.
Jason Snell [00:48:17]:
Nobody with an M4 needs an M5, but they keep. This would be our first vision of an M5. Right. And it sounds like, you know, the multiprocessor score is. Is good. It's like up 13% or something like that, which is standard. I did a piece last week on six colors looking at the A series. And it's the same thing.
Jason Snell [00:48:34]:
Like Apple changes the components of their chips every year and some of them get a big update and some don't. This is going to be a small cycle for everybody. In terms of the CPU scores going up, they're only up a little tiny bit. The GPU scores are way up. So this was a good GPU year and they did new neural. I don't have scores for it, but the neural engine cores are different. So like it's. And the stuff that's in the M5 is the same stuff basically that's in the A19.
Jason Snell [00:48:58]:
So it's this generation of Apple silicon. So it'll be great. It'll be the fastest computer Apple makes for a little while.
Leo Laporte [00:49:06]:
The graph on the. On six colors shows how linear the progress is is for these chips. It's very consistent.
Jason Snell [00:49:12]:
They just crank it. And you know, there are years where it, like, this is not a great CPU year, but the GPU year, it's really good. But basically they just, it's not exponential. They just keep cranking. And the laziest, simplest way to say it is Apple's chips get better by about 10% every year, which is not bad.
Leo Laporte [00:49:30]:
Here's the GPU graph for the A19 Pro. And it is significantly, much higher than that.
Jason Snell [00:49:35]:
It's a big boost. And that's per. Per core. I do that per core. So if they add GPU cores, it doesn't go the sc and. And it's a big boost this year. So they did. And they talk about how they did a bunch of AI acceleration for their GPU cores.
Jason Snell [00:49:49]:
They did it with their CPU cores last year, they did it with the GPU cores this year. And all of that, I assume, will also be true on iPads and Macs with the M series. And, and so that'll be. It'll be interesting. If it's just an iPad announcement, not a Mac announcement, it would be once again the M4. They did it this way too. You're announcing the new chip generation with a new. With an iPad instead of a Mac.
Jason Snell [00:50:10]:
But, you know, essentially the performance is the same like a chip is a chip. We learned this with the first generation with the M1, and it's been true ever since, which is like an M1 is an M1. No matter where you put it, the performance is the same. So yeah, it looks like iPad Pro M5 is going to be the debut and maybe it'll be a Mac with it too. We don't know. German says that they're you know, Gurman's story is basically like, there might be some stuff this fall and some stuff next spring. And here it all is. And he doesn't really pick out which is going, when is the air going? Because he said the Pro might go next year instead of this year for the MacBook Pro.
Jason Snell [00:50:45]:
Does the MacBook Air go? We already had that in March or February. So are they going to push that two in one year or is that going to be next spring as well? That's kind of unfair.
Leo Laporte [00:50:55]:
He doesn't know, right?
Jason Snell [00:50:57]:
Yes, exactly. He doesn't have a. His vision into what Apple's plans are doesn't extend to. He knows where those products are in the pipeline, but he doesn't know when they're going to pop out.
Leo Laporte [00:51:07]:
His big scoop this Sunday in his newsletter, the Power on newsletter, which I pay for so that you don't have to. It's the funniest thing because as soon as his newsletter comes out, then all The Apple Blogs, 9to5 and Apple Inside Everybody just basically summarizes what Mark said, which is pretty funny. He does say that Apple has been testing in house an AI chatbot. They've been testing it with Apple employees, which is kind of interesting. This is actually the other story. I thought that was kind of. Kind of interesting.
Jason Snell [00:51:40]:
Yeah. And it's a little bit of a. He does a little punch I don't know about. I mean, the internal tool, like, okay, but I don't disagree on the idea that people are used to talking to, typing to things now. Right. And they have this type to Siri feature. I don't think it's unreasonable to. To say you should be able to type to Siri whenever you want, which you can now.
Jason Snell [00:52:02]:
And it should remain. It should understand your context and it should probably have an interface that lets you create new chats and go back to your old chats, at which point it's basically like all of the other AI apps, except it's typed to Siri. And I think that's perfectly reasonable to do that. And if they want to do some Siri filtering on it. So it's not always the same chat bot or it's using a different protocol, like whatever, but like it. It's not unreasonable, I think at this point to ask that we be able to type to whatever system Apple is cooking up for next spring.
Leo Laporte [00:52:33]:
The actual product we'll see in March, as early as March, according to Mark, is a Project Linwood, which sounds a lot like Perplexity, combines it overhauls series infrastructure, combining an internal model, he says, likely Google's Gemini with Apple's own foundation models group known as afm. In other words, it would have web search. It sounds like, kind of like perplexed. This is probably the most popular category right now is the idea of combining current web information with LLM so that you can ask questions and get up to date information of the LLM. He also says it'll enable full iPhone navigation through voice control. And this is what they've built, an internal chatbot app called named Veritas, submitting queries without the need for voice interaction. So employees can type requests, receive information and hold back and forth conversations as they would with ChatGPT. This is of course typical.
Leo Laporte [00:53:30]:
Everyone does this, tests it internally. First you have to. Dog food. Yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [00:53:35]:
Also scaling the scale is one of the biggest killers when it comes to a language model like this because number one, it's all. I imagine that's all being done on device, but I imagine also there has be to be some stuff that has to be done on a server for certain types of tasks. So you don't want to let the dogs loose until you know that you can actually handle it and scale. But more than that, you got 100,000 very, very polite and well behaved users out there who are by definition have passed a whole bunch of tests to establish that they're not terribly wild people before they were hired at Apple. And then if they were to say, if they were to release this to the public without an immense amount of testing. Now you've got in the hands of people who are maybe clinically depressed and they're going to be using this as a therapist even though it's definitely not set up to do that. And you don't know exactly what's going to happen with that. You know what's going to happen when they've been talking to this chatbot for six to eight months and this.
Andy Ihnatko [00:54:33]:
And chatbots tend to lose their minds in a conversation thread the longer and longer it goes because they just simply run out of context. They have to start inventing context to fill in the gaps. So yeah, it seems like a very, very simple, very nice system that they're dogfooding. It seems like they're making a lot of progress on the foundations that they're going to need to create the new Shlomo for next year. I don't know, not having seen this actually actual tool, if it's in any way ready to be put in front of.
Leo Laporte [00:55:02]:
What's interesting is according to German, he says, I'm told Apple doesn't currently plan to offer the chatbot to consumers. It's just testing how well the new Siri will work. And I should make clear Andy's not saying the Apple employees are depressed. The Apple employees are well behaved and then it will be released to the public where depressed people.
Andy Ihnatko [00:55:21]:
Exactly, Exactly. If you were to give it to like now suddenly 10 million people are using it. That's whatever fraction of a percentage are going to be hurt by a chatbot that has not been tested properly. That's going to be tens of thousands of people or even hundreds of thousands of people. Whereas the people who are testing it right now under Apple are again well behaved. They're going to know not to do bad stuff with it.
Alex Lindsay [00:55:42]:
And Apple is notorious about like spending years doing testing before they release machine.
Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
They don't have time to this time.
Alex Lindsay [00:55:49]:
I don't think they. I think they do. Like, I don't think that. I don't think there's any rush. I mean I really don't. I am an AI a huge part of my day and not have it.
Leo Laporte [00:56:01]:
I think people are developing loyalty now. Alex. I disagree. I think people are saying, oh no, I'm going to use Claude, I'm going to use Chat GPT. I'm a Chat GPT guy. I mean I think look what happened when the, when Chatgpt pulled back on 4. 0, there was a revolt of people who were so devoted to four. Zero that they didn't want five.
Leo Laporte [00:56:19]:
I think that people are, this is now is when people are doing brand loyalty. I agree. It was fungible for a long time. I don't think it's fungible anymore.
Alex Lindsay [00:56:26]:
I don't know. I mean, I think that, I mean I use ChatGPT for some things, I use Claude for other things. I use Mid Journey for other things I use.
Leo Laporte [00:56:32]:
That's you.
Alex Lindsay [00:56:32]:
But I, but I don't know. I mean there's a. I don't, I don't think that. I still don't think that there's that much. I think if it was easy to use in the os, people would just start using it. I mean Apple, Google Maps owned the. Owned the world and Apple. Apple made Apple Maps and crashed.
Alex Lindsay [00:56:52]:
They literally screwed the whole thing up. And now 60% of Apple users use Apple Maps, including me.
Leo Laporte [00:56:58]:
Besides new MacBook Pros, new MacBook Airs, two new Mac monitors are in the pipeline again. Mark says this year, next year, who knows.
Jason Snell [00:57:09]:
Interesting. It's unclear if the Pro Display XDR may just never be replaced or whatever because it could be that this is the XDR and the studio display replacements. But I've also seen some reports that suggest it might be two studio display, like a high end studio display and a lower end studio display.
Leo Laporte [00:57:28]:
And think the studio display would be a success at that price. I think it is a success.
Jason Snell [00:57:31]:
I think it's good enough for Apple and Apple doesn't need to compete below that. I mean, I bought another one, right? I have two now.
Leo Laporte [00:57:37]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [00:57:37]:
Because I didn't, you know, and they'll never buy that.
Leo Laporte [00:57:40]:
It's too expensive.
Jason Snell [00:57:40]:
There are others out there that are cheaper, they're not as nice. And so, you know, it's like buying an Apple case for your iPhone. It's sort of like it's more expensive than you can get online, but it's right there and it's nice so you get it. So I do wonder if maybe they're going to spread out and make a lower end model of the studio display that's a little bit cheaper and like tricked out, one that's got high frame rate and all sorts of other fancy features that's more expensive and whether that is sort of the replacement for the studio display, xdr, also the sizes, It's a question, you know, do they go beyond 27? The XDR was 33 or something like that.
Leo Laporte [00:58:15]:
It's huge.
Jason Snell [00:58:16]:
So we'll have to see. But I was at, I was at the event where they, the executives were walking around, it was a town hall, so it was back at Infinite Loop and they literally were going around and saying, we're out of the monitor business now. We're not going to do another monitor. And like then they waited and the crickets chirped for three years and they're like, oh, there are no good Mac monitors now. And then they made the studio display and funny thing about that, they made the studio display and suddenly there were a bunch of Mac compatible monitors again. Which I think goes to the point that like, not only does the studio display okay for Apple, it does okay for Apple and it kind of creates like a little seed where then a bunch of other monitors appear that are undercutting Apple. And I think that's good for Apple and Mac users too. So I love the idea that two new Mac monitors are coming.
Jason Snell [00:59:03]:
Like, let's, let's see. Can't wait. Let's see.
Leo Laporte [00:59:09]:
All right, let's take a break. How about that? More to come. You're watching MacBreak Weekly with Alex Lindsey, Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell. Our show brought to you by the same company that brings you our website, actually, kind of coincidentally, Pantheon. You know, website. Your website is your front door, right? It's your number one revenue channel. So if it's slow or it's down or it's stuck in a bottleneck, man, that becomes your number one liability. People are impatient.
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You know that? If they go to your site, it doesn't come up in a second, they're gone. That's why we use Pantheon. Pantheon keeps your site fast, secure, very important too, and always on. That means better SEO, more conversions, and no lost sales from downtime. It's not just a business win, it's a developer win, too. Just ask our web engineer, Patrick Delahanty. He loves Pantheon because your team gets automated workflows, isolated test environments. Yeah, we push it to test before we deploy it, which is great.
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Zero downtime deployments. There are no late night fire drills. No, it works on my machine. Headaches. Just pure innovation. We trust it so much, we actually run our entire backend on Pantheon. The editors use it every single day to publish our shows, to promote them. I mean, everything runs through Pantheon.
Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
Marketing can launch a landing page without waiting for a release cycle. Developers can push features with total confidence. And your customers, they just see a site that works 24. 7, Pantheon Powers, Drupal and WordPress. Sites that reach over a billion unique monthly visitors. Visit pantheon.io and make your website your unfair advantage. Pantheon, where the web just works. And we will testify to that.
Leo Laporte [01:01:07]:
It was funny because I think an agency approached us, said, would you do ads for Pantheon? I said, do ads for Pantheon. This is our host. We use them like crazy. We love them. We've been using them for years. pantheon.io. So if there are Geekbench numbers for the M5 and the iPad, can you reasonably. You've done this work, Jason, Project what it would be like in a MacBook Pro?
Jason Snell [01:01:38]:
Yeah, they're pretty close. I mean, the MacBook Pro. So if we get Geekbench numbers for an M5, you can project what the M5 is like. You can't predict what the M5 Pro or the M5 Max are like the base model. So it'd be the base model and the air would be the same. And that. That is. Look, they.
Jason Snell [01:01:55]:
They don't vary. I mean, the chip counts are varied or the processor counts are varied or. Sorry, it's the cores from A to M. But M doesn't really vary that much. They vary between M and Pro and Max. So an M is an M is an M. Like that. We learned this with the M1 base model, you know, so excited to get the M1 Max.
Jason Snell [01:02:18]:
And then the M1 iPad. And every single test I ran on them, it was all the same. Right. Like I still remember with 1700 was the Geekbench 5 processor score for the M1. And it was for. It didn't matter what kind of computer it was in a laptop, a desktop, an iPad. It was 1700 because it was the same chip and that. So it is remarkably consistent.
Leo Laporte [01:02:39]:
This is a nine core processor. Six and three, which I'm assuming is what, six efficiency, 3.3 performance cores or is it vice versa? Three efficiency performance. Okay. 128 kilobytes of L1 instruction cache, 64K of L1 data. L2 is six megabytes. And the score, you said 1700 for the M1.
Jason Snell [01:03:07]:
Yeah. Geekbench 5, it's a different score now.
Leo Laporte [01:03:10]:
It's a different one. It's an old. This is the new Geekbench 6. Okay. Single core performance, multi core performance looks good, but as you say, it's all of a kind of linear growth pattern. It's not jumping out, jumping ahead.
Alex Lindsay [01:03:23]:
Right, right.
Leo Laporte [01:03:24]:
So the M4, I'm holding that for the M6 because I want that OLED display.
Jason Snell [01:03:27]:
The M4 was 4 performance and 6 efficiency. So it'll be interesting to see what the 3.
Leo Laporte [01:03:35]:
This is 3 and 6 of something. We don't know what. Interesting, interesting.
Jason Snell [01:03:41]:
It was 3. Oh, actually I'm looking now. The base model M4 iPad Pro has a 9 core CPU and it's 3 performance and 6 efficiency.
Alex Lindsay [01:03:50]:
Okay.
Jason Snell [01:03:51]:
And then the 1 and 2 terabyte models and the Max got that extra performance score. So they're binned. They binned the cores. So that'll be the. I mean it basically is the slowest M5 you'll ever see is that one.
Leo Laporte [01:04:05]:
Okay, let's see what else here. Simple Fold. A lightweight AI for protein folding. Apple is very is always at great pains to say, hey, just because we haven't released Siri AI doesn't mean we aren't working hard in the labs. Apple researchers have released a paper on Simple Fold, which is a lightweight AI for protein folding prediction.
Jason Snell [01:04:32]:
This is.
Leo Laporte [01:04:32]:
Remember we used to do folding at home where you would get everybody's machine working on these things to create new proteins. Well now the AI is very good at this actually. Whoops.
Alex Lindsay [01:04:43]:
I'm just wondering where they're going to add kneading. Kneading the proteins.
Leo Laporte [01:04:47]:
Is the kneading them?
Alex Lindsay [01:04:48]:
Kneading? You know, like really? I mean it's one thing to fold.
Leo Laporte [01:04:51]:
Folding them, but you got to knead them and then slap them.
Alex Lindsay [01:04:54]:
Wow, I don't need that.
Leo Laporte [01:04:57]:
We're not making bread here. This is something else. It's a mess.
Andy Ihnatko [01:05:01]:
It's really interesting. Not that I understood the paper, but the basic idea is that they basically took the king of this category is Google's AlphaFold, won the Nobel Prize. Google AI research. So basically their idea was kind of similar to that paper. They did a few recently, which they said, hey, things don't need to be as complicated as other systems seem to make you think they are. They're saying, well, what we did is instead of doing it the way that AlphaFold and a couple other similar AIs do it, we basically treated it like a machine learning problem. So we took all of the folding systems that were generated by AlphaFold and documented in the literature, trained a machine language unit to recognize this, and now we've created this system that can run, oddly enough, on Apple Silicon. So you don't need all the to consume this immense amount of compute resources.
Andy Ihnatko [01:06:00]:
You can actually run it on something as simple as an M2 max with 64 gigabytes of memory. I was reading some forums for people who actually understand this stuff and they're saying, hey, it's pretty interesting. It's unproven as to how well this thing does. It might turn out that it's only good for stuff that we might have been able to figure out anyway, but all of them think that it's a very, very promising technology. But once again, it's nice to see that Apple continues to at least publish the research that they're doing and basically give their AI team at least a presence other than in bad news stories and nine to five Mac and Mac rumors. And once again, following the tack of hey, yeah, we don't have the server structure of Microsoft or Amazon or Google, but hey, we don't need one. All we need is this podcast powerful Apple silicon chip and we can run these powerful models like right on a desktop. Just walk into the Apple store, walk out with the ability to do protein folding.
Andy Ihnatko [01:06:56]:
It's awesome.
Leo Laporte [01:06:58]:
Two episodes of a new show were supposed to premiere this Friday. Jessica Chastain, the star of the Savant. The show was about an investigator who infiltrates online hate groups. And Apple apparently decided it was a little too close to the bone and have delayed it, I hope. Well, I don't, I don't know if they're gonna cancel it or just delay it. Chastain was not.
Jason Snell [01:07:21]:
They said it's Just delayed.
Leo Laporte [01:07:23]:
Yeah, yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [01:07:24]:
And. And to be fair, and to be fair, remember, they did the exact same thing with the, with the Charlie Brown and Snoopy, like, musical special they did. And it was supposed to, it was supposed to release in July. It's about the, the Peanuts gang going to summer camp. And then that horrible, horrible flood went through and killed those, those kids who were at summer camp. So they, they, they postponed it. They didn't announce a new date, but they just simply postponed it. So I'm willing to believe that this is just because, okay, really, really bad timing to talk about this sort of stuff in the wake of a really, really horrible assassination.
Andy Ihnatko [01:07:55]:
I will say, however, that did get me. The thing is, I hate the fact that now I'm at least, I don't believe that they did it to make MAGA people happy or to make the administration happy. I hate the fact that if I were to draw a pie chart of all the possible reasons why they did this a year ago, that sort of thing would have been a tiny, tiny sliver. Because, okay, you know what? We're going to be. Have an open mind and saying, is it possible that they were trying to. There was a benefit to them for doing that. They chose, okay, sure, fine, we'll put a little bit of sliver in there. And now it is a small piece of pie, but enough of a piece of pie that you could actually serve it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:08:31]:
And it's a notable season.
Leo Laporte [01:08:33]:
I've worked in this business long enough. I mean, when there was an airplane crash, we would immediately pull all airplane ads. There's no point in.
Jason Snell [01:08:47]:
I immediately thought there was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode about a kid who has a shotgun and goes up in. Or a rifle and goes up in a tower. A school. It implies that he's going to be a school shooter. That's actually not the story, but it implies that. And guess, guess what? That episode was going to air about a week after Columbine happened and it didn't air until September and was going to air in May. And similarly, because again, don't set your show at a high school where there's violence. I guess they also, the, you know, the final episode of that season was very much an action sequence set at a high school during graduation and they delayed that for a month too.
Jason Snell [01:09:24]:
So this is not anything new. I would say I am interested in the fact that. That they went ahead with the Slow Horses premiere, which also features a. It features a right wing shooter doing a seemingly random, possibly targeted shooting, mass shooting in the opening of that I'm saving it.
Alex Lindsay [01:09:44]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:09:45]:
I think what I would say is a show that's already been on for five seasons and is high profile and everybody knows what it is, maybe launches a little differently than a show that is a miniseries that is brand new that you're wanting people to sample and that they decided, like, if I had to guess, I'd say, look, if we launch it now, the whole conversation is going to be in this context, and we would rather this thing came out in a different context. So let's wait a month or two for maybe. Maybe a better moment to do it. Whereas chest horses. Everybody knows what it is.
Leo Laporte [01:10:17]:
It's a star. Posted on Instagram that she's not aligned with Apple decision. She says the savant is about the heroes who work every day to stop violence before it happens, and honoring their courage feels more urgent than ever. While I respect Apple's decision to pause the release for now, I remain hopeful the show will reach audiences soon.
Jason Snell [01:10:36]:
The gentlest of protests.
Leo Laporte [01:10:38]:
Yeah, I'm not aligned.
Jason Snell [01:10:40]:
A classy and gentle.
Leo Laporte [01:10:41]:
She says Apple's been incredible collaborators. I deeply respect their team. That said, I wanted to reach out and let you know that we're not aligned on the decision to pause the release of the savant.
Andy Ihnatko [01:10:52]:
I think Jason will agree with me. We've seen recently two different interpretations of how an actor will respond to a controversy, depending on whether they're pretty sure they might have a future with this relationship or if they know that they have no future with this relationship. So Jessica Chastain might have said something to her agent or her friends, but when she made the public statement, she said, oh, I'm just not aligned with it. Whereas the actress who. Who played she Hulk was free to say when Jimmy Kimmel, like, was. Was taken off the air was real. Say, oh, you stop using Disney. Don't you send any more Disney or jerks like, okay, I guess she got it confirmed a year ago that she Hulk is definitely not coming back.
Leo Laporte [01:11:31]:
And I also understand her point of view. She says she's been working on this for five years. So this is obviously her.
Jason Snell [01:11:36]:
Yeah, she. Yeah, she's one of the producers of it. So it's not just as a. As an actress, it's as a producer as well.
Leo Laporte [01:11:42]:
Yeah, all right. I think that's sensitive of Apple. I don't.
Andy Ihnatko [01:11:47]:
I don't have a problem also, if anybody. I mean, I'm probably the most. One of the most cynical people like, on this planet on this panel. I'd say on the, on the, on this Panel, but probably on the planet, too. But even. Even I'm like, okay, I want to acknowledge that. Okay. At least.
Andy Ihnatko [01:12:01]:
I hate the fact that I had to think about that sort of stuff. But if there was any concern in my mind that this was politically motivated. Yeah. Then Apple tv, The Apple tv, the Apple music halftime show, they chose Bad Bunny, who's not a. Not a favorite of the administration.
Alex Lindsay [01:12:16]:
I don't think Apple necessarily shows that, but it's.
Jason Snell [01:12:18]:
I'm sure Apple had a voice in it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:12:21]:
They could have negative. They had to.
Alex Lindsay [01:12:23]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:12:23]:
I'm sure everybody has to say yes before they do that. And I'm sure Apple. Look, Apple. Apple supports all sorts of artists on Apple Music, including Bad Bunny. They're not gonna have any problem with that. Yeah. It was definitely not a no. No.
Jason Snell [01:12:36]:
It must be a no. No conservative artists. I don't think they would.
Alex Lindsay [01:12:39]:
They would have done that. Not at all. And I think Bad Bunny is. I mean, I did an event with Bad Bunny, you know, remotely, and. And it, like, the amount of energy that he has with his audiences, and.
Leo Laporte [01:12:52]:
I don't think kid made a great halftime show.
Jason Snell [01:12:56]:
It is interesting that they. They tend to go for the. The younger artists these days.
Alex Lindsay [01:13:01]:
Well, it's also how to pull in a new audience.
Jason Snell [01:13:04]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [01:13:04]:
You know, like, it's for sure. It's not about audience.
Jason Snell [01:13:07]:
I mean, they only wanted to come anyway. They only wanted to pay Taylor Swift in exposure, which she doesn't need so much for that a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:13:14]:
You know, I have been struggling lately with my career, and it would be great to get a little promotion. They not pay people for the halftime show. They must give them money to produce it. It's expensive.
Alex Lindsay [01:13:25]:
They do all the production for them.
Leo Laporte [01:13:28]:
Oh, so, okay, so they do produce it, but they don't give them a fee.
Jason Snell [01:13:31]:
No, no.
Alex Lindsay [01:13:32]:
But the amount of money spent for an artist, the amount of money spent on that is in the stratosphere.
Leo Laporte [01:13:37]:
Like, it's hard, right? I mean, it's saying you're America's artist.
Jason Snell [01:13:41]:
You would have to be huge for it not to be worth it.
Leo Laporte [01:13:45]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:13:46]:
And Taylor Swift is that huge.
Leo Laporte [01:13:47]:
Honestly, that big.
Alex Lindsay [01:13:48]:
But she's one of the few. I mean, it's 100 million people watching.
Leo Laporte [01:13:52]:
I still think it. You know, if I were her management, I'd say, do it, Taylor. What?
Alex Lindsay [01:13:56]:
Well, the complicated thing for her, I think, is doing it before Kelsey. Kelsey has a better than average chance.
Leo Laporte [01:14:01]:
Of staying in the Super Bowl.
Alex Lindsay [01:14:03]:
It gets really complicated. I think that she couldn't say yes until Kelsey retired.
Leo Laporte [01:14:06]:
Oh, that Makes sense.
Alex Lindsay [01:14:07]:
Year or two.
Jason Snell [01:14:08]:
I think that's also a good point.
Leo Laporte [01:14:09]:
Maybe that's. I think that.
Andy Ihnatko [01:14:10]:
Wasn't there also a story that kind of broke a few years ago about an entertainer who broke silence and said that, yeah, not only were they not going to pay me, but the NFL or whoever is organizing it, the contract said that I had to hand over, like, 10% of my tour takings for the next year on the basis that, oh, well, we're going to be promoting you, so you have so much promotion. We deserve, like, a cut of whatever money you're making for the next year or two. And like, oh, I have no idea if the business works that way, but I have no problem thinking that the NFL would absolutely do that.
Leo Laporte [01:14:42]:
It's interesting, the New York Times reviewer who had reviewed the Savant and said, now instead of publishing my review, Mike Hale, I'm going to have to publish the explanation of why Apple pulled it. He said, there's nothing in it that anybody would find offensive. There's no specific politics in. Does depict white supremacists. But surely nobody supports white supremacy.
Alex Lindsay [01:15:10]:
Surely.
Jason Snell [01:15:11]:
I think they just felt like this was way too heated a moment to say, we're asking questions about this sort of thing and that, and we've got another show launching. And I mean, honestly, this is the kind of thing that if it's. I know it's a chicken and egg kind of thing, but it's a kind of thing where, like, if there hadn't been the assassination and Jimmy Kimmel. The Jimmy Kimmel thing, this would not have been noticed. It would have been a. Oh, Apple just decided to delay it by a month or something.
Alex Lindsay [01:15:38]:
Right.
Jason Snell [01:15:38]:
But because it's tied into current events, it's become a bigger story, more attention. Yeah, thank you.
Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
Then.
Jason Snell [01:15:42]:
Then it is. Yeah, I, I think that's true. And. And if you're a reviewer and you're. You. You watched it and thought it was kind of middling and are like, huh, yeah, probably so. I think Apple's just trying to go out. You know, they just, they just were like, it's not worth it right now.
Jason Snell [01:15:56]:
Too many people are talking about too many other things that are close enough to this that why don't we just wait a month? I think is probably with everything.
Alex Lindsay [01:16:02]:
Apple's not a big drama company.
Jason Snell [01:16:05]:
Like, you don't have to, like, stop it. Who. I mean, who knew it was coming? TV critics and the producers and actors. But, like, for most people, you could punt something for three or four weeks.
Alex Lindsay [01:16:17]:
If you float horses, that'd be a whole nother thing.
Leo Laporte [01:16:18]:
He says what's more noticeable about the Savant and more incongruous in the light of Apple's reluctance to show it, is how quaint it feels because this woman. It's taken from a Cosmo article by K. About a woman who is trying to track down violent rhetoric before it becomes violence. And he says the resolve and competence of the federal agents who use Jodi's information to thwart aspiring terrorists suddenly does not feel like something that can be taken for granted in this day and age. Maybe someone at Apple noticed this, too. He does say it's not reassuring that a series as anodyne as the Savant makes one of the world's richest corporations nervous. How many phones do you have to sell to stand by your TV shows? Oh, ouch.
Jason Snell [01:17:05]:
I. Yeah, but again, I'll say that's a. That's an easy shot to take. It is a shot, but do we.
Leo Laporte [01:17:11]:
It's a cheap shot.
Jason Snell [01:17:11]:
And Sandy said the. The recent events make you wonder about it more. But programming decisions are not always about being nervous. They're about saying, maybe now is not the best time for us to have the most eyes on this show. Right. Like. And. And in this case, I think that's the case.
Leo Laporte [01:17:32]:
And I think that the show is that good.
Jason Snell [01:17:33]:
Is the New York Times.
Leo Laporte [01:17:34]:
It's just.
Jason Snell [01:17:35]:
Well, no, I mean, I think I will look. It's. The reviewers who've seen it say that it's mid okay, which is fine, whatever. But I don't think Apple's nervous about releasing it in the sense of, oh, no, this will become a political issue. I think they looked at it and said, wait a second, could we let. Could we let this sit for a month and have it not be part of a larger conversation that we do not want to be a part of?
Leo Laporte [01:18:00]:
On the other hand, that would. Wouldn't that drive an audience?
Alex Lindsay [01:18:03]:
But the question is, are they really going to get more subscribers or less subscribers? I mean, that's the math, right?
Leo Laporte [01:18:07]:
That's all they care about.
Jason Snell [01:18:08]:
Yeah, there's a lot going on right now.
Alex Lindsay [01:18:10]:
If you. If you release something, you make people upset, you're more likely to lose subscribers than you are to gain them. You're not gonna. This is not like. This is not the kind of show that you're gonna gain a bunch of subscribers from. You know, it's not a Mandalorian, you know, like, you're not gonna have a bunch of people that sign up just to watch the savant. So. So the.
Alex Lindsay [01:18:28]:
So. But you could have a bunch of people that wrote Apple off if they got upset. And. And so. And it becomes all this controversy and people are like. And all Apple has to do is delay it for a month or two. You know, that's, that's. It seems like a pretty easy decision.
Alex Lindsay [01:18:44]:
And the slight shot is run. Is of course, said by someone who's never, probably never employed somebody and never run a company and never had to be responsible for a whole bunch of things. Like, I love it when people do this. Like, I just can't believe they did that. And I. I'm like, okay, okay. All right.
Leo Laporte [01:18:57]:
Well, I think not everybody has to run a company to have a point of view.
Alex Lindsay [01:19:01]:
Yeah. People having a really heavy opinion about things that they've never done. It's like the person sitting watching tv talking about how the court rack should have done this and that and the other thing, and you're just like, okay, buddy, like, whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:19:15]:
Right?
Alex Lindsay [01:19:16]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:19:17]:
Well, anyway, if I were a TV critic and I put in all that time to watch that show and then it wasn't on, I'd be mad, too.
Leo Laporte [01:19:24]:
I had to watch it.
Alex Lindsay [01:19:25]:
Probably mad because they had a deadline and they had nothing to write about it.
Jason Snell [01:19:28]:
What do you do now?
Leo Laporte [01:19:29]:
Yeah. And it's boring. Let's take a break. You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. We're glad you're here. We're especially thankful to our club members. Club Twit is one of the things that's keeping this network afloat.
Leo Laporte [01:19:44]:
A big part of it. One quarter of our operating costs are now paid by club members. Thank you. Club members really appreciate it. We try to make it worth your while. You get a lot of Benefits for your $10 a month. Access, of course, to the Club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out with some really smart and interesting people. Not just during the shows, of course.
Leo Laporte [01:20:03]:
There's conversations around the shows, but all the time. And we do special events in the club, too, which I think make it fun as well. We've got some big ones coming up. Our AI user. Excuse me. Our AI user group is Friday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. This is a lot of fun. Anthony Nielsen helps put this together and he's really into AI.
Leo Laporte [01:20:26]:
We've got a lot of club members who use AI and often contribute to this. So that's a lot of fun. We're going to talk about our photo assignment solid on October 9th. That's with Chris Marquardt. He does that every Month. Mike is crafting corn. We had a great one, one made a great one. Now we're having another one coming up October 15th, every third Wednesday, a chill.
Leo Laporte [01:20:49]:
He's the Bob Ross of crafting and it's any craft you want. Mikah's been putting together Lego, but you can bring knitting, crochet, painting, etc. Our book club is coming up October 17th. I just finished the book. It's great. A memory called Empire by Arkady Martin. Very Jason. You loved it.
Leo Laporte [01:21:10]:
A very interesting sci fi now very different. It's kind of a mystery. It's got some interesting ideas. A diplomat in a great galactic empire trying to protect her her people. There's murder, there's mystery, there's mayhem. It's fun. There's a revolt, rebellion, surprise, surprise.
Jason Snell [01:21:29]:
Surgeries that you don't expect coming.
Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
Neurosurgery. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this book. It's worth reading. A memory called Empire and you can discuss it with us as a club member. October 17th. There's home theater geeks. Mikah is still working on his D&D one shot.
Leo Laporte [01:21:45]:
He had a fun D&D this week to benefit St. Jude's and raised I think almost $6,000. They raised more than their goal, so that was a lot of fun. I watched that and we're going to do another one for the club members. Anyway, I'm just telling you kind of some of the benefits, ad free versions of all the shows, special programming we don't put anywhere else, all the keynotes, by the way, if Apple does another keynote this year, all of those are streamed in the club only. So that's another reason to join the club. But mostly you do it because you like what you see on TWIT and you want to keep us going and we really do need that twit.tv/clubtwit. Thank you in advance.
Leo Laporte [01:22:24]:
Please join the club. Back to the show. I guess we are now in a special time for Major League Baseball. The last games of the series at Fenway park, the Tigers and the Red Sox featured game footage shot on an iPhone.
Jason Snell [01:22:44]:
Yes, they did. They did. They. It's funny, they did a little media call and they had us come on. They're like about a thing we're doing on Friday night and then they said, surprise. We actually did it last Friday first because they did at the Giants Dodgers game and then they followed it up with the game, the Tigers Red Sox game at Fenway Park. So they had four iPhone 17 Pros that were on. They were using the Blackmagic Pro breakout box.
Leo Laporte [01:23:08]:
I see it right there. That's the $300 breakout box.
Jason Snell [01:23:12]:
That's it.
Leo Laporte [01:23:12]:
Timecode, but no time.
Alex Lindsay [01:23:15]:
No timecode or genlock applies.
Jason Snell [01:23:17]:
No, just HDMI out and 1080 P60, which the phone is. The Apple was very clear to tell me and everybody else it was involved who had listened. The iPhone is capable of shooting much higher quality than this. But this is what the people in the truck and interesting. They use the blackmagic camera app and then they had iPads back in the truck that were. That you could use to then control the white balance and all the other features of the, you know, settings of the camera. So it's a. It's a stunt.
Jason Snell [01:23:51]:
But I feel like they've done enough. I think those broadcasts are actually pretty nice that I think. Feel like they've earned it. And they put a little bug up. That's a shot on iPhone. But it was real subtle. It was. It was semi transparent.
Jason Snell [01:24:02]:
It was in the corner of those shots. They had them in the dugout. What they say is, you know, they're showing off that the iPhone cameras are nice, but they're also saying that a smartphone camera can fit in places where you might not fit a big broadcast camera. So they could mount them in the dugout or they put one in the Green Monster, the scoreboard in left field and Fenway Park. That's pretty cool. And they had a roving one on a. On a wireless rig where their argument is a little iPhone rig, even if it's an iPhone rig, is less obtrusive to the people in the stands.
Leo Laporte [01:24:35]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:24:35]:
Than a giant broadcast camera. And that they're going to have more fun doing kind of like candid shots in the stands because people are used to looking at a phone camera in a way that they're not at a big broadcast camera. So it's kind of an experiment for them. But I, I wouldn't be surprised if in the long run when Apple does sports stuff, they're going to use. Try to use iPhones as, as one of the pieces like they mentioned. And I didn't know this. I think the Friday night baseball is the first time that MLB has allowed a drone over the field during a game. Not while game is in play, but like if there's an out or it's the end of the inning.
Jason Snell [01:25:11]:
They were able to fly their drone, you know, out because you don't want the ball hitting it.
Leo Laporte [01:25:15]:
That would be.
Jason Snell [01:25:16]:
Exactly.
Andy Ihnatko [01:25:17]:
You win a free stack.
Jason Snell [01:25:20]:
And if they can add some iPhones to it in a bunch of different Places to make the broadcast look that much more because they're mostly using MLB's production facilities here, the MLB Network truck and announcers and camera people and all of that. But they can add. If they can add a little more Apple seasoning to the mix in the future, then that's good.
Alex Lindsay [01:25:38]:
And we should not understate. Like, how big of a deal is it to have a drone over a stadium? MLBs like drone. I've had to deal with stadiums that are part of the MLB process and they don't want any drone anywhere near it ever. The contract is you can't use the drone around it even when they're not there. Like, they don't want to ever have an accident with a drone anywhere near a stadium that has MLB because they consider it an impact on their entire brand.
Jason Snell [01:26:06]:
So broadcasts now have drones. The San Francisco Giants broadcast this year have had. Have had drone footage, but it's all like, again, outside the stadium, right? It's shot shots of the stadium.
Alex Lindsay [01:26:18]:
A lot of times what we do is we shoot them. If we shoot a stadium, that's mlb. And a lot of times we should try to find stadiums that aren't MLB because it's so problematic. But we shoot with long lenses that are outside, sometimes over the river or over something else over the bay. But you get up and high with a long shot, it looks like you're right over top of it, but you're.
Jason Snell [01:26:35]:
Yeah, so they do that for. And it's mostly. What they've been doing is mostly scene setting. So it's like, look at this beautiful stadium. It's like instead of a helicopter or a blimp, you can use a drone. Now.
Leo Laporte [01:26:46]:
We.
Jason Snell [01:26:46]:
But Apple obviously work with MLB to say, well, you know, how about when. When the third out is recorded, we slide that thing in and we follow the, you know, players in and all that because nobody's done that. And. And that's a thing that they've tried. And they tried some other stuff, you know, ump cams and, you know, catcher cams and all sorts of other stuff that. That also postseason broadcast will experiment with. But. But so you throw iPhones in the mix and like, again, I think of course Apple's going to try it, but I think Apple's been a pretty decent steward of that broadcast slot that they.
Jason Snell [01:27:19]:
It looks really good. I don't know how they've tweaked the settings. Maybe it's just a higher look.
Leo Laporte [01:27:23]:
Better.
Jason Snell [01:27:24]:
It really looks good. They've done a good job with it. And it sounds the Last report I saw is even though there are lots of Major League Baseball TV changes coming, that it sounds like Apple's going to continue doing the Friday night slot.
Alex Lindsay [01:27:36]:
Well, and I think Apple likes the fact. I mean the reason it looks better probably is because it's more money in.
Andy Ihnatko [01:27:40]:
It or the higher.
Jason Snell [01:27:42]:
I mean it's the same cameras.
Alex Lindsay [01:27:43]:
But maybe it is.
Jason Snell [01:27:45]:
It is. It's the same cameras at these various stadiums because they're the, the cameras that are there. But I think they do, I think they add cameras and they add other stuff and I do wonder if there is even right down to like the, the white balance and the, you know, the color grading of it if they make some decisions. And I think the stream is higher bit rate. I do think the graphics is higher bit rate than anything you'll find on another streaming service.
Alex Lindsay [01:28:08]:
I will say the one luxury that Apple has and part of why you do MLS and you do do this is because having a place to play with your technology is a real luxury. Having real content. As a content creator, you're always looking for like who can I shoot that's interesting to look at while I'm doing, you know, while I'm doing what I'm doing. And they have a lot of opportunities.
Jason Snell [01:28:26]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [01:28:26]:
I will say it, it doesn't underline like the. I will say I've been testing the 17 and wow. Like this is. I'll show you an example. Hold on. This is my daughter playing. I put this on X so you can, if someone wants to actually listen to it. But she's playing in a parade and I'm walking and you'll see me jump from 8x to 4x to 2x while I'm walking tracking her.
Alex Lindsay [01:28:51]:
And I turned on the action filter and so if you look at this, this is. Oops. Let's see here. Let me go back to this and hit play. Okay, so there's four.
Leo Laporte [01:29:04]:
Oh, that's cool. So it does that nicely and smoothly. And it doesn't look, it doesn't look like.
Alex Lindsay [01:29:10]:
But the tracking, it is not bouncing around.
Andy Ihnatko [01:29:14]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [01:29:14]:
Are you walking? Are you walking?
Alex Lindsay [01:29:16]:
I'm walking. And look at that. And now that's 2x.
Leo Laporte [01:29:21]:
That's amazing.
Alex Lindsay [01:29:22]:
Yeah, but it is, it. It's kind of insane like. It is. You know, I shot that. I shot some late night stuff because her band was playing later next later in the weekend and shot some other stuff with another band on Saturday morning. And the 17s are a big.
Leo Laporte [01:29:41]:
I like the selfie cam I visited was visiting my mom.
Alex Lindsay [01:29:44]:
I haven't used the selfie cam at all. I have no intention.
Leo Laporte [01:29:45]:
And I have used it now several times with my mom and various others at the assisted living facility. And it really works great.
Jason Snell [01:29:53]:
It's really good.
Leo Laporte [01:29:54]:
Yeah, I really like it.
Jason Snell [01:29:55]:
It's really good.
Leo Laporte [01:29:56]:
Let me ask Alex, what is this lens that they have on the camera? This is an iPhone 17 Pro.
Alex Lindsay [01:30:02]:
I don't know for sure. I think that that is a B script. I mean, B script.
Andy Ihnatko [01:30:06]:
So what would it be doing?
Leo Laporte [01:30:07]:
It looks more like a filter.
Jason Snell [01:30:08]:
Yeah, it looks like a filter.
Alex Lindsay [01:30:10]:
It could be an ND filter that they're applying to it. So it's just to stop it down. So the smaller lenses oftentimes though, that you're putting ND filter on, you might be putting a polarizer on. That could be a polarizing filter, could be another one to get rid of some of the reflections of work. So those are the two big ones that you would put on. And a lot of these moment and B Script and even smallrig all have. And tilta all have little attachments for those smaller lenses. And then I think they were showing some other ones where they have big lenses on them and they have lens adapters for that as well.
Alex Lindsay [01:30:42]:
So there's a variety of different ways of putting potentially very large lenses on. I will say that I really do like the quality that I get, especially on a reasonably exposed environment. The iPhones do a pretty good job.
Leo Laporte [01:30:55]:
Do you think this would be good for documentarians? It feels like this might be an ideal documentary camera.
Alex Lindsay [01:31:00]:
The challenge you get into is that with document, if you're doing it, if you're really doing it, you want the short depth of field and you want that, you know, have more control. You're still gonna. I mean, yes, you have cinematic mode, but it's not like depth of field. So. So that short depth of field you're going to get from a real camera, that is a little harder to do with an iPhone. But there is a lot of places you can take an iPhone that you can't take a documentary crew and camera. So I think that there's a lot of advantages to being able to build videos and lots of things with the iPhone. So it keeps on getting better.
Alex Lindsay [01:31:35]:
I think from a creator perspective, there's not a lot of competition right now. I mean, you can take great photos with Android phones, but you can't shoot in formats that matter. And that's the problem.
Andy Ihnatko [01:31:44]:
I do like the fact that oftentimes we've seen this kind of stunt before a lot. Oh, do you realize that this short film is. And it was shot entirely with iPhone. And you see a picture of production still where it's like where is the iPhone? In that refrigerator sized tangle of wires and boxes and frames and lights. This does look like hey, we got an iPhone. We put like a snap on lens which you can actually go out and buy which a lot of people have. And of course it's not as though we just connected USB C into the 800 yards long into the truck. We of course had to plug it into a box to get the signal to where it needed to go.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:20]:
But it does look like what people would recognize as a phone.
Alex Lindsay [01:32:23]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:32:24]:
And they wanted, they said specifically they wanted to be lightweight. So in this context a non filmmaking contest, they wanted to have it be lightweight. So it's just, it does have that black magic box and a mount, you know, but it's not a giant rig with an iPhone hiding in the center.
Andy Ihnatko [01:32:37]:
It was funny though.
Alex Lindsay [01:32:38]:
The first time we see the Prodoc in the world it's not using any of the, the things that the product does. The HDMI out. You could literally there's a dongle, there's a dongle for that. There's nothing to it. So I thought it was interesting they weren't using these timecode in general. You wouldn't need it for this. That's the reason they didn't use it is because you don't need it and you want to keep it light and that'd be a whole bunch of other signal that had to go in. I get why they didn't do it but it was just a funny thing to like here's the dock and we're not making it do anything special.
Jason Snell [01:33:09]:
That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:33:10]:
The NFL's had a deal with Microsoft for some years now to use surfaces on the sidelines. Announcers for a long time kept calling them iPads. Now college football has decided screw the Surface, we're going to use the iPad. And actually now four conferences have decided to use iPads on the sidelines. And I think they're probably going to be a little bit better off. Although I imagine Microsoft did some customers.
Jason Snell [01:33:34]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:33:35]:
Software.
Jason Snell [01:33:35]:
So the Mac, the Mac just joined which is a, is a, a smaller Mid American conference. Yeah, that's your, your, your Akron, your, your Kent State. The. I can't, I don't think I can name all the, all the schools in the Mac. Although if you conferences, Toledo's in there. Oh, who else? Miami of Ohio in there maybe get an education. Yeah man, I, I Just I feel bad now. I've let down all my college football friends by not being able to name all the schools on the Mac.
Leo Laporte [01:34:06]:
Conferences are all screwed up now.
Jason Snell [01:34:07]:
It is. Well, the Mac is pretty much what the Mac has always been. They play on like Wednesday nights in the Midwest and it's great. And they get some money from the sec.
Leo Laporte [01:34:15]:
So the sec, the ACC and Big Ten.
Jason Snell [01:34:17]:
Yeah, that's right. And they did a big version of this story last year and they showed this and they did a whole thing where they showed. They actually had pictures from Cal. From my team.
Leo Laporte [01:34:26]:
Are you. No, you're sec.
Jason Snell [01:34:29]:
Cal is acc.
Alex Lindsay [01:34:31]:
Yeah.
Jason Snell [01:34:32]:
The Pac 12. Rip to the Pac 12. Yeah, it's the All Coast Conference now. But anyway. Yeah, so the. So the surface in the NFL and iPads in college, I guess.
Leo Laporte [01:34:41]:
Apparently 12 is still using Surface.
Jason Snell [01:34:44]:
Yeah, well, they're like that.
Leo Laporte [01:34:46]:
Yeah, they are.
Andy Ihnatko [01:34:48]:
Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [01:34:48]:
I mean there was a lot of pressure. I mean, Microsoft spent a lot of money to use the Surface.
Leo Laporte [01:34:54]:
Oh yeah.
Jason Snell [01:34:55]:
A lot of money for. For Aaron Rodgers to spike a Surface.
Andy Ihnatko [01:34:59]:
I was about to.
Alex Lindsay [01:35:00]:
Does not a great experience.
Andy Ihnatko [01:35:01]:
Does Apple have some sort of. I don't know if you'd call it an agreement or something saying that. Look, you don't get to show any video of. No matter how angry and frustrated this. This coach is, you don't get to show him beating up our product.
Jason Snell [01:35:15]:
I don't know what is going on there. But what I've seen, and this is true with Major League Baseball too, because they have iPads in the dugout for Major League Baseball. I feel like there are so many of them and they. And they've been around so long now that they're kind of just ubiquitous. I never see people chucking them anymore. I just see people looking at them like they used to look at like Polaroids that were shipped down from the upper deck on a string. Seriously, that's what they used to do in order to get a view of the defensive formation. So I think they've just become boring tools that are.
Jason Snell [01:35:49]:
And.
Leo Laporte [01:35:51]:
They're looking at film. Is that what they're doing?
Jason Snell [01:35:53]:
Yeah, basically.
Andy Ihnatko [01:35:55]:
Well, and not just that. It has nothing do with.
Leo Laporte [01:35:56]:
To.
Andy Ihnatko [01:35:57]:
To do with whether the thing is functioning or not. I'm sure this is all functional. It's just.
Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
Oh, no, no, he's.
Andy Ihnatko [01:36:00]:
Temperate temperatures get very, very hot. And like. And an iPad. It's not an iPad. It's not an iPhone. Air. You could fold it in half. Billy Martin if you wanted to.
Leo Laporte [01:36:09]:
When the Yankees lost a game once assaulted a toilet with a baseball bat and broke.
Jason Snell [01:36:13]:
You know, I took a tour of the Diamondback Stadium in Phoenix and you go into the Diamondbacks dugout and right down the, the walkway from the dugout there's a toilet and it's made of stainless steel. And they said, well, the reason this is stainless steel is because of Randy Johnson, because he had a bad inning, folks.
Leo Laporte [01:36:32]:
The ceramic ones just smash so nicely. It's just a, it's a satisfaction.
Jason Snell [01:36:37]:
They made a beautiful sound when they changed. It's the tinkling of ceramic and the flush of water.
Leo Laporte [01:36:43]:
Yes.
Jason Snell [01:36:44]:
All together. It's beautiful. So enjoy.
Andy Ihnatko [01:36:47]:
Enjoy your new prison toilet. It. You got Randy to thank for it.
Leo Laporte [01:36:53]:
Adobe premiere on iPhone. It's here. Are we excited?
Alex Lindsay [01:36:59]:
Indifferent.
Leo Laporte [01:37:01]:
Do we care?
Alex Lindsay [01:37:01]:
I mean that, you know, Adobe tried to do Rush and it didn't, it didn't necessarily succeed. They're gonna, they're, it's, it's hard to figure out whether, you know, the problem is once you get onto the phone, they're. The people who are building content on it are pretty specific about what they're doing. I think that if they can take some of the cues from Apple with how they're using the Final Cut camera and so on and so forth, that might be something that's useful for people who use Premiere. But the, you know, it'll be interesting to see they, they have not made any, they have not had any success in this area up to.
Leo Laporte [01:37:31]:
It's interesting that they're highlighting Adobe's highlighting a YouTube creator because they're not seeing this really as something pros would use. They're seeing this something as, as Instagrammers and YouTubers and the like, which.
Alex Lindsay [01:37:45]:
That's how Apple looks at it. That's how blackmagic looks at it. Like all these iPad and everything else. I mean, everybody's going towards the creator market because it's so fat. It's a big market.
Jason Snell [01:37:54]:
I mean, it's the classics. All of us podcasters learned this lesson, right, which is when we got started doing podcasting, everything was a high end professional microphone. But the growth of podcasting meant all of the makers of that equipment were like, oh, wow, we could do like, we can sell masses of equipment instead of little teeny tiny amounts. And this is the same thing which is like, oh, video production is a very niche. Nope, not anymore. Now it's actually all over the place. I wanted to mention, because Apple is doing this too. I used Final Cut camera and Final Cut Pro for iPad last week.
Jason Snell [01:38:30]:
Shooting, Shooting Upgrade and it was so great. And That's a great example of, like, you forget, all of these companies did their first generation, which was we made an app with a cute name that does video stuff. It's clips, it's fun. And then they realized, oh, actually our phones are super important and treating them like jokes is a mistake. They're like, now Final Cut is available. And you know, it was a great experience for me to use those tools on an iPad, on an iPhone. But like, this is the same story, which is like, oh, Rush, it's fun. Zoom videos are zooming around on your phone.
Jason Snell [01:39:08]:
And then they're like, no, okay, it's Premiere now. Premiere is on your phone now. Because Pro. Yeah, yeah, because it's serious, serious, serious business. Let's get down to it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:39:17]:
When I scroll through the apps on my iPad or on my phone, I see so many Adobe things I installed to try once and then they kind of forgot about it three minutes later. Because. Because they're never really clear on the messaging. Like with Adobe, Adobe Lightroom for mobile, it's really, really clear what this is. It's really, really clear what they're trying to do. It's really, really clear what they're trying to tell you you can do with this app. But it's like, okay, now I've. Now you've got three different video apps, one of which seems to be for doing like 30 second selfies with all kinds of weird stuff on it.
Andy Ihnatko [01:39:44]:
Another one which is like for clips, and another one, you seem to want me to think that it's Photoshop for video, but I don't understand how that works. It's like, okay, I'm glad you're keeping busy.
Alex Lindsay [01:39:57]:
And it's hard. The features are so vertical. Like, you know, especially with things like Capcut, it is like there are so many things that people use. I mean, I hesitate to put Capcut on a phone that I care about because of the. What it wants to grab onto on your phone, but in the fact that it's a Chinese company. But there's so many people that have dug into those features and so many things that they use on a daily basis for social media that it becomes really hard for these companies to, you know, they can get. I think right now even Apple and Adobe can kind of get into the more adultish kind of creator market. I think getting into the kids market is, you know, or, you know, the younger market is going to be a very steep hill.
Jason Snell [01:40:38]:
Also for all you comedy heads out there, was I totally just riffing on George Carlin's baseball Versus football. Yes, I was. That's what that was.
Leo Laporte [01:40:46]:
Wow. Impressed.
Jason Snell [01:40:47]:
That was.
Alex Lindsay [01:40:47]:
Was.
Jason Snell [01:40:47]:
That was what it was. I just realized in the middle of the voice, I'm like, am I doing George Carlin? In baseball, you go home, I'm going home. In football, you move, you matriculate the ball down the field using a series of faints in order to reach your destination ground. Right. Like, it's that. It's that kind of bit. Anyway.
Alex Lindsay [01:41:04]:
You wear a helmet.
Jason Snell [01:41:05]:
All credit to George.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:06]:
You wear a cat.
Jason Snell [01:41:07]:
Yeah. Good bit. If you haven't heard it, I'm sure it's on YouTube somewhere. Whatever.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:12]:
He did get a. Arrested for that one, by golly.
Leo Laporte [01:41:14]:
No.
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:14]:
That was universal.
Alex Lindsay [01:41:15]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:41:17]:
FCC is accidentally leaked and now it's gone. IPhone16E schematics. Do we care?
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:25]:
It's. Oh, boy, what a. They're not supposed to do that. And a lot of people are gonna take a look at that stuff for, like, the day.
Jason Snell [01:41:32]:
Who's in charge over there?
Andy Ihnatko [01:41:33]:
Yeah. It's not like you can go to, like the digi. The digi key category and place a really big order and then solder together your own version of the 16E. But I'm sure that there's a whole bunch of information that a lot of people in the industry would like to have had confirmed Apple.
Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
There is a letter, cover letter, which is distributed with the schematics containing Apple's request for the confidential treatment of the documents. Whoopsie. Anyway, they're gone now, but I imagine the people who care have already downloaded this.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:03]:
I'm sure that if you keep looking on Scribdy and keep refreshing the page for the search, it'll keep popping up and coming and taking down and copying.
Leo Laporte [01:42:09]:
Up and coming down as usual. Yeah. The most likely reason, according to Apple Insider for the release, is an incorrect setting in the FCC database. More likely to be an accident than an intentional FCC act against Apple. But, you know, nowadays you never know. You never know. Apple has responded to the statements that the iPhone 17 Pro was scratched. Scratch prone.
Leo Laporte [01:42:39]:
They say you're.
Jason Snell [01:42:41]:
You're.
Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
It's. It's because the store wasn't cleaning it properly.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:45]:
Yeah, they're saying that. They're saying that the MagSafe connector that's in the stores was like. Basically some of the surface of that MagSafe connector was rubbing off on the phones.
Leo Laporte [01:42:55]:
So they're not scratches. It's.
Andy Ihnatko [01:42:57]:
That's what they're saying. And that's a good, plausible.
Leo Laporte [01:43:01]:
They kind of look like scratches. I don't know.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:03]:
It's the thing is it's such an easy thing if they're lying about it. It's such an easy thing to verify that no you're lying about it. And the thing is in three or four months time, if these colors ways are specific are particularly like look, look bad when not resistant to scratching and look awful. We'll all gonna know about that in three months anyway.
Leo Laporte [01:43:21]:
They have provided new cleaning materials to the Apple stores to clean those magsafe adapters so that you don't see those scuffs.
Andy Ihnatko [01:43:30]:
It really was bad press. It's not as though people were trying to make them out now of a Mohill people. If you go to the Apple store, the people on Reddit and elsewhere were looking at the taking pictures of these phones that for all intents and purposes look like they'd been thrown out of a truck, bounced along the highway, then run over a couple of times. Well, it's like a three day old like display phone.
Jason Snell [01:43:49]:
So those people weren't trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. But then it goes into the ecosystem of we're trying to get engagement by creating another gate for iPhones that happens every single year. And I have some friends who've said their theory is the iPhone air didn't bend so they had to find something else. And this is, this is what they came up with. I do think that it started got to be something but I mean, but it's true. I mean like it's a, it's a gaping hole and they want to fill it with content that is going to create some sort of a controversy and a scandal. It literally happens every year. This was not, you know, the strongest one.
Jason Snell [01:44:28]:
We did find out that some of the anodization is weaker than others for lots of physics reasons. I think it's a big nothing. And your phone either put it in a case or don't take it outside or don't use it or don't even look at it. It mustn't be played. But otherwise it's gonna wear and scrape and that's fine.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:46]:
By the way, I'll send you your receipt for the Spinal Tap references.
Jason Snell [01:44:49]:
Thank you. I'm full of them today.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:51]:
It was so natural too.
Jason Snell [01:44:52]:
I just bounced around.
Andy Ihnatko [01:44:53]:
I was about to say, no, don't point at it.
Jason Snell [01:44:56]:
No, it mustn't be played. Don't even look at it ever.
Alex Lindsay [01:45:00]:
You know, as someone who doesn't even take it out of the box until I have a case and a screen cover, you know, I'm, you know, it's.
Leo Laporte [01:45:08]:
Oh, you got your peak design case, I see.
Alex Lindsay [01:45:11]:
Yeah. Yes. And so. Yeah. So. But I don't really think about scratches because it's the first thing I do. I will say I almost wondered whether this should be closed up and on the peak design case just because the camera bump. Yeah, you know the camera bump seems kind of exposed.
Alex Lindsay [01:45:28]:
It seems more of it's exposed than. Than I would, you know, based on the stuff. But. But overall it's, you know, that's how I keep all my cameras. And so when I hand them to my. To my son or my daughter or my wife, they. They get a mint condition phone that doesn't. You pull the screen off, put a new screen on.
Leo Laporte [01:45:46]:
I got 700 for my iPhone 16 Pro Max because it was in very good condition when I sent it to back to Apple and that made the new one a lot less painful.
Alex Lindsay [01:45:55]:
I keep on trying to send back old ones but then I'm like, oh I need one.
Leo Laporte [01:45:58]:
Or I decided not to give anybody I care about a new phone. The heck with you.
Alex Lindsay [01:46:06]:
It's like what the funny thing is then it moves up. Like my wife, I had a whole bunch of shots like what I showed from that parade of capturing all this stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:46:14]:
Then they want the new one.
Alex Lindsay [01:46:15]:
Well, my wife was just like, she's like. Carlita was just like I don't need to shoot anymore today. You can just shoot the rest of it. It like she didn't want to. She didn't want to play anymore. And she has a. She has a 14. Like it's not like it's.
Leo Laporte [01:46:26]:
That's a long time ago.
Alex Lindsay [01:46:27]:
I know, I know, I know. It's. You may more pressure now. So. But, but, but it is. I mean that. I guess that I didn't think. I didn't know if there was going to be a killer feature on the phone until I started playing with the action version.
Alex Lindsay [01:46:37]:
I wouldn't leave it on all the time. It's a little softer. But if I. I got an idea.
Leo Laporte [01:46:41]:
I got an idea. So the gold anniversary is the 50th or the 60th. And what's the sailing lamp anniversary? You could give her a jony. I've sailing lamp for a mere $5,000. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. This.
Alex Lindsay [01:46:58]:
I think all she cares about is the camera.
Leo Laporte [01:47:01]:
She doesn't want this.
Alex Lindsay [01:47:01]:
She's not a.
Leo Laporte [01:47:02]:
It's from. It's from Johnny. I've. It's from love from.
Andy Ihnatko [01:47:05]:
Or she might say I'll take half of that in cash.
Alex Lindsay [01:47:08]:
And then I'll go buy a phone. Like.
Leo Laporte [01:47:11]:
This is the sailing lantern. It a portable lighting object.
Andy Ihnatko [01:47:17]:
You know, that's not going to run.
Alex Lindsay [01:47:18]:
You under anything under 5,000.
Leo Laporte [01:47:22]:
It's beautiful. Look at the brass.
Alex Lindsay [01:47:24]:
This is the thing to light up your $100,000 cat.
Leo Laporte [01:47:27]:
Yeah. You know, it's encased in a precision machined stainless steel frame, polished texture glass module that conceals an LED center. The shine on materials and precisions with which they made make the 1.5 kilogram object look like a piece of jewelry. If you hold feels just right and with the movement on a boat, it feels so alive. Oh, it's for your 17 million dollar yacht. So there you go. There you go.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:00]:
Yeah, this, this article and I read the product page. It took me on such a ride because immediately I thought, okay, this is just design that we see so much about. And then like, okay, I appreciate the fact that there are people who really want to hear the story of materials and really that want to create an object that is sort of masterful in its way. And Jony, I've is someone who has actually engaged with that. Okay, fine. And there are a couple things, but I kind of enjoyed. It has this like flower petal like on and intensity knob that has a little hole drilled in it so you can see like how it's registered. That's nice.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:34]:
There's a couple of paragraphs about how, how it's not just a, it's an LED lantern, but it means that we know that when in life, when the, when light is very, very low, it's very, very warm and when it gets more intense, it gets colder. And so that's how the light adjusts itself as you make it more intense. And then I thought, oh, okay, well, but you know what, you know, it's, I see the price. It's like 500 bucks.
Leo Laporte [01:48:56]:
$5,000.
Andy Ihnatko [01:48:58]:
I was saying, okay, because I did the math wrong in my head and the, the $5,000, it's like, who's gonna use, who's gonna use this for its purpose? Like for $5,000. And I'm sorry, but I got, I gotta button this up like. So on the product page, what does it come with? Like, like I bet that they, they're not gonna just simply like, you know, it must come with like a bespoke precision like matching sort of charge cable. Like no, you don't get, you don't even get a charge cable for $5,000.
Leo Laporte [01:49:27]:
You don't get a charge cable box.
Andy Ihnatko [01:49:28]:
Yeah, it's like, what, how bad does this look, with my like 8$, like Amazon pack of 5 USB C cable on the side of this, I imagine you have to undo the plug. And so, but it's like, oh, my.
Alex Lindsay [01:49:41]:
God, you have to tell the story because they have to be able to tell the story. Every someone, every time someone walks into their office or their house and goes, that's amazing. You don't tell them the price. You just go, well, it has all this stuff in a book.
Andy Ihnatko [01:49:53]:
What happened? I'll tell you. I'll tell you what happened, happens. Like it's the most beautiful thing and one of the most wonderful thing you own. And at parties you tell people all about it and then it goes missing and you don't know what happened to it. And then to your horror, the plumber who's working on the toilet downstairs, oh, look, here's just an 18 Coleman lantern. I'll just borrow this for a couple hours and it's all dinged up and hanging someplace. I'm sure I'll pay for it. What's it, like, 30 bucks?
Leo Laporte [01:50:17]:
Johnny does say it can survive extreme maritime conditions, so there's that. I'm not sure.
Jason Snell [01:50:23]:
I thought you were going to say that. It disappears and then to your horror, it turns out that it was used in a murder.
Andy Ihnatko [01:50:30]:
Oh, no.
Leo Laporte [01:50:32]:
Now we're going to put this show off for a couple of months.
Andy Ihnatko [01:50:35]:
Now it's haunted.
Jason Snell [01:50:36]:
That was a plot twist.
Andy Ihnatko [01:50:37]:
Plot twist for a haunted magic nautical lantern.
Leo Laporte [01:50:41]:
Ford's CEO says, I don't love CarPlay Ultra. I don't love it. Jim Farley says he doesn't like the execution in round one.
Jason Snell [01:50:50]:
Right. But didn't say, wouldn't do it eventually. But obviously disagrees with some of Apple's decisions. And I thought he made. This is a good interview. I thought he made some really good points about.
Leo Laporte [01:51:00]:
This is from inside EVs.
Jason Snell [01:51:02]:
Yeah. If you're a carmaker, you're looking at this and thinking, you know what, what do we have? And what does Apple have? And do the customers want the Apple experience for this or do they want ours? Or what is the choice there? And they're, they're full supporters of CarPlay and they'll let you put CarPlay really big across their screens and all of that. But I think it was a little bit of insight into sort of the push and pull between what Apple wants and what carmakers want when it comes to going beyond what CarPlay offers to what CarPlay Ultra does. And it's not a no. I think it's really interesting where he's Like, I think that Ford understands the appeal of CarPlay and even the appeal of CarPlay Ultra, but that they, the way Apple built this first iteration doesn't really work for them. So they're, they're. I mean, he basically says, we'll see where it goes, but it doesn't make us comfortable today, which is not news in a way, because it doesn't seem to make almost anybody comfortable. There's almost no automakers that are.
Jason Snell [01:51:58]:
That are implementing it.
Leo Laporte [01:51:59]:
Actually. Let me clarify. This was interview on the Verge. The Verge is a podcast. Joanna Stern was filling in for Neelai Patel. So credit where credit's due. This is from.
Jason Snell [01:52:11]:
We're looking at an article about the podcast.
Leo Laporte [01:52:13]:
About the podcast. I often get fooled by that these days, because every original piece of journalism always gets repeated.
Jason Snell [01:52:19]:
Begins in a podcast.
Andy Ihnatko [01:52:21]:
Yeah, I put this particular article in because it had the good quotes in it, whereas I think on the Verge, you have to listen to all of this. Basically, it was a tease for the article, but yet there's so many good quotes in there that, that really illustrate, like, how subtle some of the problems is. Like, there's a. He's saying, how are you going to. I think we hit you on this earlier. Are you going to allow the OEMs to control the vehicles? How far do you want the Apple brand to go? Do you want the Apple brand to start the car? Do you want the Apple brand to limit the speed? If you have a feature saying that, hey, my kid. If my kid's driving the car, he can't go over 45? Like, do you go with an. Does Apple, like, control that part? Do you want Apple brand to limit access? And those are a lot like, is Apple going to want to do that? If Apple wants to do that, I think we're going to have a tough time because then the digital experience gets really, really messy.
Andy Ihnatko [01:53:06]:
So it's not a binary thing of, oh, God, this sucks, we don't want it. It's like, okay, it's interesting. Apple can deliver a lot, but we don't know, like, we don't know where the lanes are in this application of engineering and who gets assigned to what lane in the car.
Jason Snell [01:53:21]:
It's a thoughtful response. I mean, this is not somebody who. I mean, I mean, GM's response contrast with GM's thoughts about CarPlay. Like, this is a thoughtful response that I think is legitimately concerned with the consumer experience, whereas the GM response is more like, we don't care. Our customers are going to use our software whether they like it. Or not. This is a. I couldn't be more impressed, honestly.
Jason Snell [01:53:45]:
Even though, you know, he's saying no to Apple, he's saying no to Apple for, By bringing up lots of really great points. Yeah, Yeah.
Alex Lindsay [01:53:52]:
I think that the issue is that would the Apple, the people who use Apple products want to have all those features as part of the Apple brand? Absolutely. The car companies are horrible at this. Because the problem is car companies get caught up in all of these other things that they need to do. They want to try to make money in six different ways and they want to have this and they've got three teams that want these other things and it's all defeated. The focus is so diffused away from the user experience that you end up in every car that you get into. It's a death by committee. And so every interface is the function of. They don't have a interface that I think, I don't think if they do, they're not very good at it.
Alex Lindsay [01:54:35]:
They don't have an interface. Basically the interface czar that just says, we don't care. We'll tell you guys what we want to do with the car. And the rest of the car company needs to sort it out. Like, if they had that, they could probably build good interfaces, but they don't have that. Yeah, they have a whole bunch of different groups that have their own thing that they want. And what the user wants is when I get into the car, I want my experience to come with me with my phone and I want to just have it sit in there. And I wanted everything to happen with my phone, you know, like, and I, and I don't want to, I don't, I don't want to talk about, like, the only thing I use my wife's Ellie, my Hero LCD screen for is as a suction cup for my phone.
Alex Lindsay [01:55:15]:
Like, like, you know, like, I don't, like, there's like, it's a Honda, it's expensive. Like, I just put the suction cup right on there and I just, you know, because the, because the vent is too close for the peak little hooks to work. Right. And so, so, but that's all I, you know, that's all I care about. And, and I, I find, you know, it's, it's tedious to deal with the, the other parts of the car. And I think that, I think what Apple's looking for, they're going to fish this out. It's going to take a long time. They're going to find a company, a car company that wants to make A move.
Alex Lindsay [01:55:42]:
This is how, this is how AT and T. Well, they already have Aston Martin, right?
Leo Laporte [01:55:46]:
They already have a few.
Alex Lindsay [01:55:46]:
So they got a high end one.
Jason Snell [01:55:47]:
Maybe Hyundai and Kia. We haven't heard more about that, but it might be them.
Alex Lindsay [01:55:51]:
And if they get Hyundai and Kia, you know, the thing is, is they're going to, you know how many Apple users are going to buy a Hyundai or a Kia based on the. And if you start seeing movement there, then the pressure starts to change and everything. Like when Apple started, Verizon laughed them out. When the iPhone started, they laughed them out of the office and AT and T ate their lunch and dinner and part of their breakfast as a result. And so I'm sure Apple's telling that story as they talk to car companies of who is going to be part of this ecosystem and get the glow of that, but also just having Apple users that are not as connected to the cheapest car in the world and they just want it to work.
Jason Snell [01:56:29]:
So what Jim Farley says I think shows that he's thinking about all these issues. That's what makes me encouraged about Ford here is he's, I don't know Alex, whether it's Ford's structure or whether it's just that they haven't talked or whether it's Apple having kind of a first cut at this. The, given the delay for CarPlay Ultra, it feels like very much Apple had like their first idea and that when they went out with that and everybody was like no and they had to go back to the drawing board. But I think the challenge is if you're a carmaker, you've got a lot of, of regulatory issues, you've got a lot of specific car model features and there's a question of like what can you let Apple do? Or are there things that you basically have to do. But, but I agree with you. I think what he's saying here is basically we need to talk to Apple, keep the lines of communication open and think through all the issues. Because I will bet you there are issues that Ford is concerned about that are maybe issues that Apple has, hasn't considered in the level of detail that Ford has. And you know, by not saying no here he's really kind of saying let's consider what the perfect balance is between what the car hardware is required to do and what the, the software overlay from the phone is trying to do.
Jason Snell [01:57:46]:
So like I think this is good, but I think it also shows the real complexity of getting two totally different tech stacks, including the regulatory issues and product Line issues and you know, different models with different features issues all working together is super complex. But like the contrast between him and the GM CEO who's just like, forget it, we own it, go away. It's remarkable. And like that's what I got out of this is like he actually sees the value in CarPlay and is trying to figure out how they can work with Apple and what the right level is.
Andy Ihnatko [01:58:24]:
And I like that something because it's relevant. Another really good, really good thing that made me impressed with the CEO. He's saying exactly that. Hey, look, Ford does not have the right, in our opinion to disrupt someone's digital life when they get in their car. We don't want it to be a hassle. We don't think we can design an experience that's going to displace your phone. And then also that Ford should not restrict customers from using systems like CarPlay and, and Android Auto and that the company shouldn't be making money off of customers who, by making that like a subscription feature, access to these things. So all these great stuff that makes me think, okay, let me, let's make it Ford.
Alex Lindsay [01:58:59]:
And I think, I think his handlers probably gave him some coaching based on the gm. Sure. You know, because as an Apple user, when GM said, when the GM CEO said what he's going to say, what went through my head is, well, I'm never going to own another GM car. Like, like it just literally just was. And it wasn't like I was angry, it was like they have no commitment to my, you know, and the problem that all these car companies have is that I look at the next generation, my kids, they are less interested in the cars, more interested in the phones, like the, the car. I think the car companies are also fighting this, this losing battle of becoming the pipes. Like they're just wheels that get you from one place to the other and no one really cares about a lot of the other. You know, when I grew up, everybody and they cared about what kind of car they drove and it was all important and it was all part of their personality and everything else.
Alex Lindsay [01:59:47]:
And I don't see that in the next generation of kids that I don't see them caring about cars like they did 30 years ago. It's just a completely different market. And I think that car companies have to adjust into the sense that they care more about how it intertwines with their social media and their electronic devices than they care what it looks like on the outside or how fast it goes.
Jason Snell [02:00:08]:
And just to be clear, Here, because I want to. Because we got this a little bit wrong. The person at GM who's been talking all about how CarPlay is bad is a guy who is the SVP of software.
Alex Lindsay [02:00:19]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Snell [02:00:20]:
GM CEO is, is Mary Barra. And, and she's, she sort of let him.
Alex Lindsay [02:00:24]:
Right.
Jason Snell [02:00:25]:
Talk about this issue and she's just sort of stayed away. So that's who Alex. We blamed her, but that's who Alex is talking about. But, but, but Barris is the guy.
Alex Lindsay [02:00:33]:
Who, but when he said it, I.
Jason Snell [02:00:35]:
Swing in the axe.
Alex Lindsay [02:00:36]:
When he swung the ax, I was like, well, there goes that. Like, it just means that I don't have to go to that when I'm looking for a new car. I don't have to go, look, we.
Jason Snell [02:00:42]:
Have, we have the last Chevy bolt since and then they stopped making and they're going to start making it again, but they're going to make it on the new platform. And I was like, yes, let's get this car now. Because it's the last, it's like the last CarPlay Chevy that will exist.
Alex Lindsay [02:00:54]:
And for a lot for me, I'm still just waiting for the slate. So, so I just want nothing. Like, you know, like it's, it's, you know, and be able to add whatever I'm going to add to it. Not. And I think that that'll be the more interesting thing for me.
Leo Laporte [02:01:06]:
You're watching MacBreak Weekly. Alex Lindsey, Andy Anako, Jason Snell, we're glad you're here. Thanks for watching. Time for our picks of the week. Let me start with Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week, sir.
Alex Lindsay [02:01:19]:
So I'm picking this one. I just got it and it's mostly that I didn't really know how it worked, and so I bought one because I needed it. I'm building a phone rig for something and I and we're printing them. And the problem when you print them is how do you attach, how do you put a quarter 20 into it? I got to hook my phone rig. I have to be able to attach it to a tripod or to something. And so I need a metal quarter 20 that goes into my printed device. And I'm not saying this is that special. And I don't know if this is the perfect brand or not.
Alex Lindsay [02:01:52]:
It's the one I bought. But what it is is it's called a heat set insert tool. And so what this does is it if you print it with a little bit of a hole that's a little smaller than the knurled quarter 20 and then you put this under and it's just a little soldering iron, but it keeps. The reason that the tool is important is that it keeps it vertical and pushes straight down. I mean, you can do this by hand with your, you know, with your.
Leo Laporte [02:02:15]:
With whatever cigarette lighter and a.
Alex Lindsay [02:02:17]:
Whatever it is. But the point is if you want to keep it going straight and you know, we've been experimenting with this to figure it out because you have to change the way the hatching works inside the model and everything else. But. But it then will allow you to print your own. Print whatever you're trying to print and then insert a metal quarter 20 into it relatively seamlessly. And I brought it up because I didn't know what did. I knew that something did that. I didn't know what it was.
Alex Lindsay [02:02:40]:
I now have it and I'm using it and it's great.
Jason Snell [02:02:43]:
I tried to do this freehand, this. And it's so hard to hold the. Because you got to have like a little clamp on the hot. Soon to be hot metal screw in set and then you've got the. The soldering iron and you're heating up this metal inset and then you got to push it into the plastic. Yeah. And so you need an extra mount there because it is kind of brilliant. Like how do you get a really good kind of screw mount on a 3D printed object? This is how this is.
Alex Lindsay [02:03:07]:
And it has a little piece that goes onto the end of essentially a soldering iron so that it pushes flush against it. And when you push it so it'll heat up and then you put it on top and it heats the knurl up and it pushes it into the. Into the plastic and anyway melts the.
Leo Laporte [02:03:20]:
Plastic around it and then it fuses.
Alex Lindsay [02:03:23]:
So it becomes part of the. It becomes part of the printed piece.
Leo Laporte [02:03:26]:
And it's in there pretty good.
Alex Lindsay [02:03:28]:
Oh yeah. It's not coming out. I mean, I'll break. I'd have to break the. I mean, you could break it, but it's not gonna. You're not gonna pull it out. It's gonna break the printed model before it comes out.
Leo Laporte [02:03:41]:
Very nice. The vertical heat set insert tool pressing machine with 90 watt soldering iron heat set tips M2 through M8, 30 pieces. Brass nuts. Threaded insert for 3D printed part from the Mintion store.
Alex Lindsay [02:03:54]:
I didn't find any that were particularly like American there. It was some version of a Chinese word that was there. So I'm not. I don't know if this is the right one. I think it's more interesting that understanding what a vertical heat set insert tool does.
Leo Laporte [02:04:07]:
That's. That's the thing.
Alex Lindsay [02:04:08]:
That's the thing that's more interesting. I, I it's only 45 bucks. This wasn't that expensive. If anything, I'd probably want one that goes up.
Leo Laporte [02:04:14]:
You don't want the one without the vertical, though. See, that's the thing.
Alex Lindsay [02:04:17]:
And the only thing that I would probably change here is I might find one that goes up, has a little bit more clearance, based on my current.
Leo Laporte [02:04:25]:
Yeah, maybe you want the 55.99 version. Looks a little, little higher.
Alex Lindsay [02:04:30]:
Yeah, exactly. That might be that. Yeah, exactly. I'll have a whole collection.
Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
Okay. That's a, that's a specialty item, I guess. Yeah. Jason Snell, Pick of the week.
Jason Snell [02:04:41]:
I'm gonna go the other way. I'm gonna ask you to spend money on something very important that is not a product, which is. This is the last day of September. My pals at the Relay Podcast Network have been raising money for St. Jude. We did a podcastathon. We're almost at our goal as we record this of $700,000 for the month. It's st.jude.org relay.
Jason Snell [02:05:03]:
I got to be there last week. The thing to know about this is St. Jude is fighting childhood cancer in almost every way imaginable. They have a hospital. They are treating kids inpatient and outpatient. The families do not pay for that. If the families need to stay somewhere and travel to get to Memphis to St. Jude, they do not pay.
Jason Snell [02:05:25]:
We got to see one of the new apartment complexes that they built on campus where families can live while their kids are undergoing cancer treatment for free. And they have one, two, and three bedroom apartments. They've got a bunch of these buildings. They've got common areas and cafeterias for them and open areas for them to go outside and play and for the parents to get a moment alone to do a zoom call or whatever. Nobody pays for that because St. Jude wants the. These families have enough going on with their kids having cancer and being treated. The other part of it that blows me away is the research.
Jason Snell [02:05:58]:
There are also these big buildings on the St. Jude campus where there are researchers, and all they're doing is researching new ways to fight childhood diseases, not just cancer. There's some other stuff. Sickle cell. They've got a whole sickle cell initiative of the goal is to give more time to kids. And actually, one of the doctors told me that, you know, the fight has gone so well in so many cases that it's not Just about curing kids. It's about curing them in ways that they can enjoy their whole lives. As he told me, I don't want to just have this kid survive into their adulthood.
Jason Snell [02:06:31]:
I want them coming back and saying, I graduated from college and like. So they're also researching ways that you can treat cancer, cancer effectively without it being kind of like having those long term debilitating health effects that sometimes you won the war, but at what cost? They want to extend the quality of, of the life of these kids with cancer. So it's just an amazing organization. Bottom line is that the way it works is that the families don't pay. And so how does it happen is they take donations. So this month we ask our audience to give to St. Jude. We're trying to raise $700,000 this September.
Leo Laporte [02:07:04]:
You're really close.
Jason Snell [02:07:05]:
Wake me up when September, September ends. But before that, St. Jude.org relay don't.
Leo Laporte [02:07:12]:
Go to sleep yet. Go over there and donate and it'll.
Jason Snell [02:07:16]:
Be open till the 6th. So if you're listening to this podcast and it's not September 30th, it's okay. It's open until October 6th.
Leo Laporte [02:07:21]:
So close to the goal. So let's put them over the top.
Jason Snell [02:07:24]:
Push us over the top.
Leo Laporte [02:07:25]:
Yes. Mikah did that great Dungeons and Dragons stream and he contributed his part. And I know you did the marathon, the 12 hours show, and that's so great. It looks like all the relay hosts throw in and that's really cool. Relay for St. Jude. It's a good cause. Mr.
Leo Laporte [02:07:44]:
Andy Natko, your pick of the week.
Andy Ihnatko [02:07:46]:
My pick is really, really basic for reasons, for reasons I've started to use like my phone, not as something I take out of my pocket and just basically don't use because I got my laptop in front of me. I've been kind of using it as a third screen, if you will. And sometimes I've been, there's. For some writing projects I've been sort of experimenting with, gee, could this be like a really good, like focus intended device where there is. It's so difficult to manipulate the interface on a tiny phone screen that I'm not going to. I'm just going to get my head down and just burst through. Markdown of a thousand words, two thousand words to get things done. It's been a fun experiment and it basically meant that I've been going through every single phone stand I've had had like in my office, like I've got a box full of them and they all fail for one reason.
Andy Ihnatko [02:08:30]:
Or another. And so I kind of set out like a few days ago to just like find one that hits all the points. And I wound, I landed on the Ugreen for there's like a SKU for that. It's not the Ugreen Wonder stand. It's like made by U, G R E E N and it's only 15 bucks. And here's why it hits the marks for me. Number one, it's very, very sturdy. It's got a silica, it's made out of solid metal, aluminium all the way.
Andy Ihnatko [02:08:55]:
It's got like a silicon base on the bottom of it. Which means that yes, it'll on a large phone it'll hold it just fine. On my iPad mini it'll hold that just fine. A regular size iPad, I probably wouldn't want to risk actually like tapping the buttons on an iPad, but it will at least hold it up. It has a deep enough like sort of like lip on the bottom of it that it doesn't matter that my phone is inside a thick case, it'll still grip it. It's adjustable so I can get things at the exact angle that I want. Also that it will fold relatively flat so that if I do want to. I've been in a bunch of modes where I'm taking a walk and I feel as though, you know what, I'll throw like a little travel keyboard in my pocket and if I feel like working on something I'll just take, I'll create like a little tiny pocket sized workstation and do that.
Andy Ihnatko [02:09:43]:
So again it's not the most portable thing in the world because it is like metal and it is heavy and if I have this in my laptop bag I'm probably going to put it in a sock or something because it's definitely going to scratch one of the more Johnny. I don't want it to scratch my Johnny. I've rechargeable Lantern. But I'm glad it was a good experience because you know how it is. You do a search on Amazon and there are like 200 that seems seem almost identical to each other and a lot of them are identical to each other. It's hard to find like the one that is okay, this has none of the faults that I was trying to avoid. Everything I'm looking for and gosh, I had to spend a whole extra $6 for it. So above like the cheap $8 ones.
Andy Ihnatko [02:10:23]:
So that's, that's what, that's what I got. It's, it's, it's, it solves a problem in my life, and it was the one that I was kind of looking for.
Leo Laporte [02:10:30]:
I think ugreen actually is. Is. I don't know if they're a Belkin style relabeler, but I. I have a number of ugreen things. I think they do some pretty good stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Andy Ihnatko [02:10:39]:
I've got. I've got a couple of ugreen batteries and cables. It is. That's one of the reasons why I caught my eye. Because, okay, I recognize that brand. They. It's not one of those. The thing is, when you have a brand, sometimes it's worth protecting.
Andy Ihnatko [02:10:51]:
So it's like, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna. It's not as though we're never gonna have some cheap stuff in the product line, but we can't put absolute garbage in the product line because that will come back to bite us.
Leo Laporte [02:11:02]:
I have. That's one of the reasons I buy Nomad cases. I just got the Nomad wallet folio. This is kind of expensive. I mentioned it last week. It's the Horween leather. It was 119 bucks, but I love it as a magnetic clasp. I spent a little extra for the bulletproof wrist lanyard.
Leo Laporte [02:11:20]:
It's made of Kevlar, so if you're going to shoot at me, shoot the lanyard.
Andy Ihnatko [02:11:25]:
I shave a Bible app on it.
Leo Laporte [02:11:27]:
Just so that you get the perspective. And I like wallet cases because I can keep my credit card. I keep everything I need in this one thing, and I'm not going to forget my phone. So I was very. I've been very happy with Nomad stuff. I also have their titanium watch band and so forth. So that would be my pick. The Horween leather modern leather folio.
Leo Laporte [02:11:49]:
If you don't want to get the tech woven, if you want to kill a cow, this is probably the best way to do it.
Alex Lindsay [02:11:56]:
I have to admit that the genius of the peak design is the whole ecosystem, you know, is that I've got all these attachments everywhere.
Leo Laporte [02:12:03]:
So I have the peak case as well. And what's nice, a lot of these, The Folio cases don't work with magnetic charging, but this does. So it works with the. A lot of the. Like, this is the peak charger. Works just fine with it.
Alex Lindsay [02:12:16]:
It's the.
Leo Laporte [02:12:16]:
So I have my cape, my peak case for when I go bicycling or.
Alex Lindsay [02:12:20]:
Whatever, is the little charger. Tripod. It's the tripod mount.
Leo Laporte [02:12:23]:
I know, I know. But I have the little tripod. It works. That's magnetic. So some of the peak stuff does work and I have the full peak, as you know, I have the full peak kit thanks to you. And I have a peak case if I really need, you know, the action stuff. But sometimes just having a wallet is kind of what I need. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this thrilling, gripping edition of MacBreak Weekly.
Leo Laporte [02:12:44]:
I know we had no Vision Pro news. I apologize. Next week we will return as the it's inevitable.
Andy Ihnatko [02:12:51]:
Sometimes I did look hard, but even the low bar that I usually said I couldn't clear it this week. You know what? It's okay to not have it.
Leo Laporte [02:13:02]:
We are still the premier Vision Pro podcast.
Jason Snell [02:13:04]:
Sometimes there's no news, it's fine.
Leo Laporte [02:13:06]:
Sometimes there's nothing to say. That's all there is to it.
Jason Snell [02:13:07]:
Fortunately, we have like iPhone stuff to make up for it.
Leo Laporte [02:13:10]:
Oh yeah, thank goodness.
Jason Snell [02:13:11]:
That's right.
Andy Ihnatko [02:13:12]:
Just a few.
Jason Snell [02:13:13]:
IPhone is on filler. IPhone is our filler for when there's.
Leo Laporte [02:13:16]:
Not Vision Pro for the real Vision Pro news. Yes, exactly. Jason. You can find him@sixcolors.com so many great things. I'm really enjoying Glenn Fleischman's articles. Dan Moran is hysterical. You just, you got a great team now that you've kind of put together.
Jason Snell [02:13:32]:
Fun.
Leo Laporte [02:13:32]:
I love it.
Jason Snell [02:13:33]:
Not bad for a little Apple block.
Leo Laporte [02:13:34]:
John Moltz. Yep, yep. And of course his podcasts are at sixcolors. Com. Jason including his upgrade podcast that he does with with Mike Hurley at Relay fm.
Jason Snell [02:13:46]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:13:47]:
Thank you, Jason. Alex, Lindsay, what's going on at officehours.global?
Alex Lindsay [02:13:51]:
We had a great, I talked about Bitrig a couple weeks ago. I was really excited about it. And then the founder, I guess a lot of people, I guess when he was talking to people who downloaded Bit Rig, they said half of them were MacBreak and said, well I heard about it on MacBreak.
Leo Laporte [02:14:10]:
Not surprising.
Alex Lindsay [02:14:11]:
Yeah, so we had him on on Friday and it was just such a great like 30, 40 minute discussion about how Bit Rig works. And so if you look at our Friday session of office hours, we thought it'd be 15 minutes but there were so many questions. And what Bit Rig does, of course, is that it lets you build iPhone apps on your iPhone, submit them to test flights, submit them to the App Store. It's ex Apple employees that have figured out how to make it all work for you so you can do everything with AI. Just say your this is the app that I want. Work with it, develop it and submit it. And so anyways, we had a great conversation so I'd check that out on.
Leo Laporte [02:14:47]:
Friday night office hours global. You can join in, ask questions. There's also a YouTube channel for the videos. Thank you Alex, Andy Ihnatko, appreciate your contribution. You can find Andy I'm sorry, is it Andrew? Is it? Sure for Andrew. Yeah you can find Andrew on Bluesky at Ihnatko. Thank you Andy.
Alex Lindsay [02:15:10]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:15:11]:
Thank you all of you for joining us. We do Mac break Weekly on Tuesdays 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club of course in the Club Twit Discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, x.com and Kick. Plenty of other places you can watch after the fact. On demand versions of the show audio or video are available at our website twit.tv/mbw. There's a video version of the show on YouTube. A great place to share clips from.
Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
And of course you can subscribe to the audio or video for free. Just pick a podcast client subscribe. But do leave us a good review if you would because that would help spread the word about the number one Vision Pro podcast in the world. Thank you everybody with and iPhone too. Thank you everybody for joining us. I hope we'll see you next Tuesday. But now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work cause break time is over. We'll see you next time. Buh-bye
Leo Laporte [02:16:05]:
Get Tech News at your pace with twit.tv's perfect pair of shows for quick, focused insights. Tech News Weekly brings you essential interviews with the journalists breaking today's biggest stories. But maybe you need more. That's why I'm here. Dive deep with me on This Week in Tech. Your first podcast of the week and the last word in tech. In industry, insiders dissect everything from AI to privacy to cybersecurity in tech's most influential and longest running roundtable discussion.
Leo Laporte [02:16:36]:
Short or long, streamlined or comprehensive, Twit TV keeps you well informed. Subscribe to both shows wherever you get your podcasts and head over to our website twit.tv for even more independent tech journalism.
