MacBreak Weekly Episode 796 Transcript

Please be mindful, this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. 

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly, Alex, Andy, Rene, and me. We're all here with lots to talk about, including what some say is the worst security vulnerability in a decade. And yes, it hit apple brand new versions of iOS Mac OS iPad, OS TV OS watch OS home pot OS. There are all out today. We'll talk about what you're gonna get and what you're not gonna get and is the Apple do not track button privacy theater, a brisk discussion will Enue. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

New Speaker (00:00:33):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:46):
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 796 recorded Tuesday, December 14th, 2021. It's not about the Nutella. Macbreak Weekly is brought to you by userway.org. Userway. Sure. As your website is accessible, ADA compliant and helps your business avoid accessibility related lawsuits. The perfect way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's not only the right thing to do. It's also the law go to userway.org/twit for 30% off userway. AI powered accessibility, the solution, and by wealth front to start building your wealth and get your first $5,000 managed free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/macbreak and by at and T active armor, you spent the day staring at your phone, waiting for that one call from job, the hospital or the family, and it finally rings. But guess who it is a robot don't let fraud calls disappoint you at and T makes your security a top priority. Helping block fraud calls with at and T active armor. It's not complicated at and T active armor. 24 7 proactive network security fraud call blocking and spam notifications to help stop threats at no extra charge compatible devices, service required. Visit att.com/active armor for details. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. The show we cover the latest news from Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, here with us from youtube.com. Rene Ritchie, Ritchie, Ritchie. Hello Rene.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:26):
Hello, Leo. I spent the whole night covering myths, busting myths. And now I don't know what's real anymore. So I need you all to bring me back.

Leo Laporte (00:02:32):
Bring you back to reality. Were you watching a myth Buster's marathon?

Rene Ritchie (00:02:37):
I was making a myth Buster, an Apple myth Buster. Oh, but now I believe all the, all the, all the conspiracy theories. They're just, I can't tell fact from fiction anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
You YouTubers stay up late. You're you're always working hard. Cause I know. So my son, he'll say be two in the morning saying I'm just finishing the video now. Gosh. Okay, fine.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:56):
You wanna have it up when the audience is there, Leo, you don't wanna have it up when the audience is going to sleep. So you have to sacrifice your sleep for the audience that's awake.

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
Are you talking about why Apple hates Invidia?

Rene Ritchie (00:03:06):
A whole bunch of stuff like that? Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
Myths, debunked.

Rene Ritchie (00:03:10):
All the conspiracies.

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
By Rene Ritchie Tre bien. Also, with us from WGBH in Boston, Andrew Ihnatko. Hello, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:20):
Hello. Now the thing with, with umbrella man, is that he's wearing a wristwatch it's a Whitenhower that was not even made until 1967. Explained that.

Leo Laporte (00:03:29):
One minute 30 seconds in our first Marvel reference, I believe is that Marvel? I don't know.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:33):
No, no, no. It's Candy Assassination. The famous someone was holding an oh I on the parade route and that's that's. That was a signal to the, the Rosa cruises and whoever that, that was time

Leo Laporte (00:03:45):
I was thinking umbrella academy or something like that.

Rene Ritchie (00:03:49):
No, the bullet stopped in mid-air, Leo. It spun 180 degrees and then went back into Kevin Costner. <Laugh> explain that.

Leo Laporte (00:03:55):
And now, without further ado we got Alex Lindsay from oh nine oh media, the Maven in charge of Office Hours. Hello, Andy. I mean Alex, Alex, Andy. Hello, Andy. Alex. Alex.

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:09):
I'm flattered. You mistake him for me. I'm flat. <Laugh>

Alex Lindsay (00:04:12):
Hello as I, I am. Hello? 

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
Hello. What'd you do this morning?

Alex Lindsay (00:04:18):
What did I do this morning? Oh, we, we talked about audio issues. Oh. So we were just perfect. You're like, what are, what are audio issues and how do we handle them? And so we, that was today's we, our big excitement is, is we have a, a very long day on Saturday. So we've, we're taking a lot of the technologies everyone's been working on all year taking over remote locations, running a lot of the stuff in the cloud, and we're literally gonna have cooking for one hour and then a con and another concert and then a and a, and a round table discussion. Saan all of those. Yeah. So we're, we're kind of putting it all together. We still, we're still pretty excited, but we had Michael crafting on last week. That's up on YouTube. Amazing. Michael's great. He's amazing. Like he's, he's as good the interview as he is to to as good as it. He is an interviewer. He a really good interviewee. Like sometimes that doesn't work's

Leo Laporte (00:05:03):
Well, I think if you're a good interviewer and you've had a lot of interviews and you know how bad it can go, then you become, you become sympathetic. <Laugh> it's like this a little bit every yes, no answer thing. You, you, and also

Alex Lindsay (00:05:16):
He it's like, he answers the, the question completely, but then stops like as an interview, like a, but you know that this is the time that I stop talking sound bite. Yeah. Yeah. It was amazing.

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
We should mention Krasney is probably not known around the world, but he's very well known in the bay area because he had a morning talk show on the public radio station for, I don't know was 20 years long time. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There is some news. First thing first I woke up this morning, and iOS 15.2 was here and Monterey 12.1 was here. Is this what's going on? Why do they, why do they update all at once? Is that the new thing that everything gets updated all at the same time?

Rene Ritchie (00:05:56):
They're co, they're so co-dependent now, like they have so many features that are, they have to intrinsically connected that it's well, it's easier if they do otherwise. You're like why? It says, if I update my notes, like I can't use my notes on my Mac anymore. What am I gonna, ah, man, if it just all works, then it's easier. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:06:10):
I think each, I think each release has more or less than each one of those things, but it does, I think when they look good, I'm gonna fix this one thing in this one place I have to fix, they have to fix all the integrations with it. So the update may be very minor for some of the other platforms for that specific update, but they are yeah. Continually tying closer and closer together.

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:29):
Yeah. Yeah. It, it makes you wonder if Apple really needs to get rid of the regular update schedule, where people are expecting an update at a single at, at, even during a certain quarter of the year. At, at some point they have to say, this will all be ready when it's ready. You will be getting updates throughout the year. You don't have to wait until if we have a great, if we have a great update for notes, we are not gonna necessarily have to wait until October to get it. If we have a great update for the camera app, you're not necessarily gonna have to wait until the next iPhone before we push that, push all that. Because like we're saying, there's so many co-dependencies here that it's almost like a, an episode of the Goldbergs. Really? Anything

Leo Laporte (00:07:05):
I just important to report. I guess I, I gathered when I joined you guys, Andy was a little unhappy about the lack of salting, salty,

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:15):
Little, yeah, little salty, the best well just is. I'm just, I'm not, I'm not mad at you apple. I'm just disappointed. <Laugh> we, we expected more of you. Maybe you should be quick and let know what it's, it's, it's a tough feature. The, the feature uni universal control, that was the feature where if you just have a, an iPad or another apple device within proximity of your, of your desktop Mac or your desktop, whatever, you can basically control all three, you with the same keyboarded mouse, like you're, you, you, you move the mouse pointer off to the Le off to the right side of your of, of your Mac desktop. And because it knows that your iPad is there and it's off to the right, it will all, it will just simply appear on your, on your iPad. And now you're controlling the iPad with that keyboard and with that mouse.

Andy Ihnatko (00:07:55):
And it was just, it was one of the reasons why, well, I didn't need a, I need a, I didn't need a whole lot of reasons to buy a new iPad pro this year with the M1 chip. But that was one of the things that kind of sold it to me that, oh man, I could use it. I could integrate this so well with all the other stuff I'm doing. And so, but it's a really a great demo and the better the demo, the tougher the technology is going to be, and there was supposed to be out this fall. And now there, there was, they didn't really announce being delayed. They just simply listed it on the, on the master OS like product page and Hey, here's this great feature that we're gonna have out sometime in the next year anyway, but here's how great it works.

Leo Laporte (00:08:29):
Yeah. Parker Otayani on 9to5 Mac is saying out loud, the things we're all too polite to say out loud, which is will universal control meet the same. Fate is air hour.

Rene Ritchie (00:08:41):
Really? I mean, I, that, well, I mean, so a couple things like one is, I, I I've said for a long time, I wish apple moved away from the monolithic annual release and just say, this is what we're doing for the next year. It starts this September, but we're gonna be providing features for the whole year. But some people point out that that takes some of the pressure off them. And like, we're already seeing this stuff take three months to come out. And if they said, oh, it'll come out whenever they'll have even less in segment. Like by like saying September means probably by, you know, by March. And if they just didn't set any date ever, it could be by 20, 25. And I, you know, so I conceded that. It's always good to have a deadline, but air power was just physically, it ended up being physically impossible.

Rene Ritchie (00:09:17):
And the people who said they could do it were just constantly lying about it being possible. And, you know, apple even bought other companies that said, oh, we can, no, we can do it for sure. They, they couldn't this is just a, a complicated feature. I, I use sidecar all the time. Like I have I'm editing final cut with a mini E D screen. And then I have a second the L E D screen to just watch the video on. And it's amazing. And this is like an escalation of that. It can do even more than that. Like I mean, within reason, like you can drag and drop between between devices, which is really, really cool. But that sort of technology is just tricky and I'm guessing that they're having bugs with it and they'd rather not ship it and have people complain about it over the holidays, but just keep it and then release it when it's in a better stage.

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:57):
Yeah, it's possible. That's, it's in the, what I would call the Samsung stage of development where it works, but it doesn't work flawlessly. And that, that, that's, that's partly a slam at Samsung, but it's partly, it's an admiration for it. Look, this doesn't work perfectly, but we're not gonna get it to work perfectly until we get people complaining about it and letting us letting us know what's not working. Right. I apple to their credit, they will not release something with, with rare exception. They will not release something until it works. Works, works, works, works. Sometimes. I kind of wish they, if, if there's a, a Rous tolerance of, let's say 4.2%, if it doesn't delete data, if it will work for most people and they will be able to say, oh, by the we're doing a public beta release, so to speak, we will let you use this. But it's not quite ready yet, but we wanted to see how people use it. That might be a positive thing. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, this is a tough one because this was like air power. It was like a big, big push, but I don't, I don't think that it'll go the way of air power. The we're talking air power. They're trying to do something that was really breaking the laws of, there are still

Rene Ritchie (00:11:00):
Rumors that air power is still in process. I mean, well, the brand name, the brand name waiting have the thing. Exactly. <Laugh> OK, well, we'll get something out. It's product made to beta. That was the thing, like to Andy's point, like if this had been in a beta and it was buggy, and then they pulled it from a beta and then it came back, like, that's one thing, but it just, it never made it into beta, which makes you think that did apple make a mistake? Announcing it

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:23):
The in retrospect, absolutely. If they, if they can't ship it and they weren't able to put it into beta, that means that they were really, they had a lot of faith in the system that was not ready to even announce it. I wonder

Alex Lindsay (00:11:33):
How that happens. I think the hard part is, is that you're, you're making announcements about something's gonna be released in October or in June. And, you know, there, it's just what you're, there can be things that just kind of fall through that, that crack, where with a bunch of other updates and a bunch of other things that they've done between now, and then there's a lot of things that can go wrong. And I think that, that this is kind of falling probably into one of those, the handshakes and so on and so forth that are required to make it work. And of course, apple, especially when you're rolling something new out, no one's missing it yet. I mean, we're all like, oh, that'd be great, but it's not like, it's not like our computer doesn't work. You know, like it's, it's like, this is a really cool little thing.

Alex Lindsay (00:12:07):
So what you don't want to do is put out something that's cool, but not necessary. And have it, and then have a, a whole bunch of people go on Twitter. Like this doesn't work. I don't understand. And so, so I think that they there's, they're gonna be careful of making sure that it's, it's really rock solid, so it doesn't create a bunch of complaints on something that, again, somewhere in the future, we may all be very addicted to it and couldn't live without it, but we we're not there yet. Yeah. Like, like we, we don't have, we haven't, we haven't tasted that yet. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:12:33):
To it too. And they had this with home pod where they announced home pod and it looked great. But then internally at apple, they realized that they had neglected core audio and airplay for years, and that they were bugs and technical debt and real, really bad issues with those. And they ended up having to write airplay too, which was nontrivial. And they ended up having to rearchitect core audio, which was non trivial. And that created a nice little two month, you know, product wind down into a six month, like sprint of marathons. And that could have happened again, who

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:02):
Know? Yeah. The, and the, the other way of looking at this is that when you're talking about a feature feature like universal control, it's possible that you might have angered a bunch of people that's that will say, Hey, I bought the for, for me, I bought the iPad pro not because of universal control, but it was something that double sealed the deal for me. But if you, if you had like a large organization said, oh my God, we, our it department has come up with this really, really incredible plan about how we will save money by switching all of everyone over from from laptops to iPad, to iPad 10 inch pads. We were, we, we invested like $10,000, $20,000 into this. And then like, oh, so the thing that you promised us is now is now vaporware. That's the, that's the sort of risk that you take when you play this long game? Like this,

Alex Lindsay (00:13:49):
Go ahead, Alex. Yeah. <Laugh> no, no.

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:52):
I

Alex Lindsay (00:13:52):
Heard the, I was waiting. I was waiting. I was just waiting to see if you're gonna of cut us off and move on or, or whether we're gonna talk about, but, but I think that <laugh> you know, I just, I was trying to be trying to be a better you're you've learned from Michael

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:03):
Krasney obviously. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (00:14:05):
Exactly, exactly. So

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:07):
I can I, can I just say that Alex and I are really, really good for the kind of friends where if there's an issue, we will just like have a quick chat and settle it like very, very quickly. So this is, so I was giving Andy a lot of space.

Alex Lindsay (00:14:20):
Exactly. So anyway, yes. So it's a lot, a lot anyway. So the yeah, you know, and I think that, that one of the things, when it comes, you know, comes down to these, these pieces is that it is super complex, like what they're doing and, and, and even things that are, have been out for a while. If you look at like my, just my headphones, knowing which apple device the problem is, if you really get into apple and you have lots of apple devices, the headphones just can't figure out what they're doing. And so, and that's just audio. <Laugh> like, you know, that's just audio. And I have headphones that like, I I'm like literally the headphones are next to the phone. I, the all phone is the only one open they're in my ears. Like, I'm like, I don't understand why you can't figure out that this is the phone that I wanna listen from. And so, and that is something they've had out for years. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, and it's still a problem. And so the video is just another set of that and understanding where it is and how it works. So I'm, I'm surprised, I'm amazed that it works at all or that it potentially could work at all. And I'm happy for them to just figure it out as best they can, knowing that it's still gonna be messy when they send it up. Microsoft

Leo Laporte (00:15:18):
Has a phrase they use far too often. It's a difficult computer problem. And, and it may be that there, in fact, I'm sure that there are some things and maybe Bluetooth, handoff is one of them that are just, you know, intractable. It's a, they're

Alex Lindsay (00:15:32):
Hard to solve in some, in one company that I've worked with. It's called, it's a non-trivial issue.

Leo Laporte (00:15:38):
Nontrivial. Exactly.

Alex Lindsay (00:15:39):
Non-Trivial

Leo Laporte (00:15:40):
Programmers announcing no matter what, oh, that's trivial until they sit down and do it, and then it's not so flip a Bitly flip a bit is easy. I can do that. Right. Well you know, I mean, I'm not, I guess we're making a bigger deal out of it than it is. No, no, it's just, I mean, share,

Andy Ihnatko (00:15:56):
Play for Mac ship. So we, we got something. Yeah. True. Yeah. Yeah. I think, think the reason why we're talking about is it's so unusual for apple to not ship something that they said was gonna ship even during a vague timeline. So that just, just shows the track record of apple. And also, again, I think the level of quality that they aspire to before they're willing to release something,

Leo Laporte (00:16:14):
You know, it's like when Tom Brady throws an interception, it doesn't happen often. So when it happens, you pay attention to it, but he still looks handsome while doing it. He still looks good. <Laugh> <laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (00:16:26):
That is the weirdest connection.

Andy Ihnatko (00:16:28):
Well, he's a very, he's a very handsome man,

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
Actually, that really makes it's analogy. Perfect. Cuz apple looks good while they're throwing an interception. They really do. Right. Right, right, right. So there you go. In fact, genius, speaking of interceptions, <laugh> lot of talk, we did it this Sunday. But you know, I think we should do it now in the presence of actual apple back and touch users. Tech, dirt, apples do not track button as privacy theater, financial times saying snap, Facebook and others have gotten around this do not track button. All it really does is say you can't use the apple ID for advertisers, but there's plenty other ways to fingerprint people, apples, allowing the the exfiltration of quote, anonymized aggregate information. But as the financial times, and Tector pointed out we've seen lots of studies that show you can de anonymize information, given enough data points pretty easily. And apple is still letting things like how much batteries left. <Laugh> how much storage is left. You know, things like that, leak out all of those can be used for fingerprinting. So this is actually the most interesting article and this is more recent from the information. And then I'll let you talk, hold on a second. Yep. Apple's empty threat question. Mark silence over iPhone ad work around so's confusion. Apple has yet to respond. In other words to the financial times, go ahead, Alex,

Alex Lindsay (00:17:57):
This is really good for apple this article. And so because what Apple's doing, what apple needs people to do is not complain about them being heavy handed. They need them to complain about not moving fast enough, because what they're doing is as they're doing, they're doing this slow snare. Like they're just slowly moving around everything. So they're, they're starting to add all these little tools and they're just slowly tightening all these little screws. If you're ever in a high security event with secret service, one of the things they do is they everything's easy to get into. And then it's a little harder than it's a little harder than it's a little harder. Like it just, you just keep, they, you know, and they keep on circling. They, they have a whole plan of how they're gonna tie this all up, but it's, they're gonna take nine square blocks and make them impenetrable. But not at once. <Laugh> like makes sense. There's like,

Leo Laporte (00:18:37):
So it's like this. I mean, it's pretty clear now that turning off IDFA is not, is not SU sufficient, but it's a start is what you're saying. And it's the beginning

Alex Lindsay (00:18:46):
Of, and you're putting these little leverage points in and you're figuring out how they, and you're watching people, their behavior. So you get to watch how they're gonna, how they're gonna manage what you're doing. And you just slowly tighten this. I'm sure apple knows how to make it super secure if they wanted to. Right. But if they did that immediately, we'd have a bunch of lawsuits about how Apple's a monopoly and they're not letting people in and they're not letting them do all these things. And you know, they, they, this is gonna ruin, you know, small businesses and put, you know, Peoria, Illinois out business and you know, all this other stuff, you know, that's gonna happen. And so, so what they do is they put they're, they're putting in the pins, you know, it's kinda like you put the pins in and then you just start pulling really tight, really, really gently in, as you start pulling all those things in.

Alex Lindsay (00:19:23):
And so people are gonna, what they need are articles like this that say apple isn't really doing enough. They could do a lot more because that gives you more leverage to, to just keep pulling harder. And you can just keep, but what they're doing is they're putting all the points of leverage in that they need to tighten this up because apple doesn't have a business model around that data. And so they, I mean, they have their own in app for the iTunes, whatever. But the thing is is that they don't need it, this stuff they can just take don't don't

Leo Laporte (00:19:49):
Don't companies and apps exfiltrate and fingerprinting information or end around right. IDFA they are right now. In fact, this is in the article by Sarah Craft and Jo Josh, Cisco, and the information. They point out that a year ago, Craig Feder said, Hey, if, if if apps don't comply with our privacy policy, we can yank them. And of course they, you know, so we know that snap and Facebook and others end around, but Apple's done nothing,

Alex Lindsay (00:20:16):
But, but apple, well, Apple's done nothing on the surface, right? So what you're seeing is they, they get to see what other people's behaviors are. They get to watch how their, how the companies are managing this and what they're doing to get around it. And, and they get to slowly and, and, and they get to make the next decision, but they don't have to make it all at one time. You know? And so the thing is, is that, and, and, you know, they're gonna go FA slower than comp you know, like this, you know, people are gonna complain about it being toothless and everything else. The, the thing is if apple did everything they were capable of doing number one is they wouldn't see some of the holes that, that, that are there. Number two is they'd have tons of lawsuits and complaints because it's going to change this industry as they keep on pulling this in, but they're doing it nice and slowly so that you don't have to. So they don't get as many complaints and what they want this,

Leo Laporte (00:20:59):
This is we should put complaint theory and we will find out over time if it's true. It is also the case. And no, there's a lot of ample evidence of this that these companies add tracking companies will go to the ends of the earth to find ways to fingerprint you and track you. I mean, and so it's, it's not an easy thing to do to turning off the IDFA may not be much at all, but it's

Alex Lindsay (00:21:23):
A start. I, I don't think apple knew or could just

Leo Laporte (00:21:25):
Be, well, it could also, well, I mean, the, the contrary argument is it's privacy theater and the information article, they say apple made 4 billion in ad revenue last year, which is it's about what snap would be. I don't, but

Alex Lindsay (00:21:40):
I don't think these privacy issues, but I don't think the privacy issues would affect apples ad revenue, cause that's all inside their it's

Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
Well, but that's also some of the hand waving is and Google's doing this in spades, which is no third party tracking, but we're gonna track the hell outta you. Right. so I mean, Facebook, Google, and apple and Microsoft and every all first party information, but I don't Valuable. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Renee know, I

Rene Ritchie (00:22:08):
Was just, I was just gonna assert that it's possible that these articles are also bunk. I mean, a large portion of technology journalism these days seems to go off the premise of, can we do something gotcha. And then fill in back, fill in the facts to make whatever the most sensational headline possible. And I really lament that. I really lament like the prosecution of ideas and starting with a bunch of facts and seeing where they lead you. Because I have to say over

Leo Laporte (00:22:27):
And over again. Okay. That may be true, but the information and the financial I'm gonna back up though, are pretty strong journalistic.

Rene Ritchie (00:22:34):
I disagree. I disagree. I think like Washington post is bunk. New York times is bunk. I think a lot of this stuff is people who don't deeply understand the technologies is one of the problem and that's commonplace. But what apple did was just say exactly what you said, that you can no longer use. The Apple's unique identifier that all this has ever been app tracking. Transparency made no promises beyond. You can only, you can no longer use the app, the unique identifier to track people when they leave your app or your set of apps and go into other apps that use your SDK or go out into the web. And they, as part of the announcement, they're like, people are asking, what about if they track us on the web? And they're like, we can't do anything about that. It's an honor system. If you tell them, we don't want to be tracked, they should honor your request, but we have no authority to police the internet. This is a classic web, anything

Leo Laporte (00:23:18):
Track and browsers, which is completely useless. The browsers have, but it's completely useless because nobody honors it. Yeah. I, I agree.

Rene Ritchie (00:23:26):
It is. I think it's, Alex's correct in that it's oh, sorry. It was well, one last thing I think Alex, correct in that, sorry, go ahead. This also for apple deflates, a lot of what I'm gonna call propaganda about how they're being so mean to advertisers because yeah. Apple is making revenue advertising in news stocks and the app store, which is like the lamest. They're the worst advertising product in the world. It's just that they're so big that they make a lot of money. It's just, it's a scale thing. It's not a quality thing or a, or a reach or a scope thing. Snap makes a fortune in their app. It's just their app. Isn't so big anymore. Cuz the Kardashians left and I apple can't fix that. <Laugh> but I think a lot of this is just like, yes, like it's gonna deflate a lot of regulatory arguments because they, they can easily get around it, but it lets apple make statements saying not on our platform. And I think that's all they ever really wanted

Andy Ihnatko (00:24:09):
Out of this. Yeah. No, I, I, I, I agree with you. I, I, I disagree with the, with the headline privacy theater because I, I don't think apple has been as aggressive in promoting this as they have been about other things that claims that they can make about how the, a company has run its itself, that could be kind of debunked. They they're doing what they can do, which is all we can really expect. Now they but I I'm gonna correct myself that technically speaking, they could probably assign a team, build a team that absolutely locks down the iPhone against pretty much every intrusion that you could imagine. They could make safari the most privacy centric. They could create their own tour network. So to speak, to make sure that and, and create a library of JavaScript exceptions that, okay, this, this browser will run JavaScript, but it will not run these, this when it recognizes this, this code is not gonna recognize it because we know it's being used for fingerprinting and stuff like that.

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:04):
However, what we can ignore is that apple does not have 100% control over their own platform because if they did that, if they made it impossible for services like Facebook services, like Google docs to work the way that they do, guess what all those services will say, well, we're gonna, I guess the showdown is happening. We'll see if people would rather have an iPhone or they would rather have Facebook and Google docs and Twitter and Google search and all these other services. So they have to, they have to walk a very, very fine line there. And I, I'm glad that they're doing what they're doing. They're saying, well, we're not gonna make it easy for you. We're not gonna make, we're not gonna facilitate it. We're gonna create rules. So that I think the most important thing they've done is essentially put in this rule into the app store saying, we have the right to pull your app.

Andy Ihnatko (00:25:49):
If we think that you're doing something that is unfair to our users, it remains to be seen how they're gonna enforce that. But the rule is there so that if someone is really egregious about it, they can simply pull the app. But the thing is they don't have the ability to shut everything down. The, the other, the other point is that, remember that a lot of the technologies that make the web actually that turn the web into an app platform that make it so, so wonderful. Do require a lot of access to hardware. I mean, you, do you need to know what the battery level is. If you're gonna, if you're gonna have a rendering app that says, Ooh, we better not do that because this don't developers catch everything. It, yeah, exactly. You

Rene Ritchie (00:26:24):
Need this stuff. Like these are like, like to your point, Leo, like these are frameworks that are necessary for developers to do a plethora of things that we really want them to do. But unfortunately they're just tools and tools get abused.

Alex Lindsay (00:26:34):
Well, and I, and I think that also again, apple, I think one thing that's worked for them is letting the user choose. And I think we'll probably see more of that where they say, do you not wanna be tracked? And so you say, no, I don't wanna be tracked or whatever like that, because they're not doing it. They're not doing it themselves. They're asking you, do you wanna do that? I think that we could see somewhere in the future where safari said, do you wanna go into safe mode? You know that isn't gonna execute all these things. And the user just decides apple, won't put it on by default. They'll let the user decide. They wanna turn off. And it will devastate the industry. Like, like if they put that in there, it'll just rip because then it's people who wanna keep on having their Google docs and their Facebook and everything else will just leave it open. You know, they'll just say, oh, I don't want to do that. Cuz I want these things, but 80% will turn it off. You know? And, and that, and that's when that's when things get really YouTube stops

Rene Ritchie (00:27:18):
Working.

Andy Ihnatko (00:27:20):
I love, but I, I think one of the most, one of the most effective of things Apple's doing is promoting this name and shame thing, saying that we will give you a report that shows you exactly what sites are tracking you, what apps are tracking you, what they're collecting. Yeah. If then it's up to make an informed decision. If you're okay with all of this, by all means, go ahead. We're not gonna stop it from working, but we're, we will allow the information we will allow. <Laugh> all these other all these other public say, Hey, how come this calculator app is asking me for my date of birth and my in a recent photo. That's not right. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:27:50):
Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:27:51):
I should probably also just clarify that there are a lot of really good reports out there. And I don't wanna paint with too broad a brush because I think that fake news has been like the, just the term fake news is incredibly damaging. But I also think because it's so weaponized and because people are, are attacking the media left and right, it is incumbent on people like us in the media to make sure that we dot our eyes. You know, we, we cripple check everything and we don't, we're not. And I say, this is a YouTuber who needs to,

Leo Laporte (00:28:14):
I don't think there's factual errors in either the information or the financial times piece. They're factually accurate. The assessment making narrative, the assessment. Yeah. The narrative not be, but that's, you know, that happens all the time. That's the, that's the, you know, the subjective part. But the objective part is, is absolutely accurate. And I think it's not unre. There are different interpretations. You guys are apple fans. And so you're gonna, you're interpreting it in a way that's positive to apple. Not the rest of the world is not necessarily that way. And it's not on reasonable to say, Hey, this is not apple is, is resting. Its laurels on how private they are and this one check box. You and I know that, but the rest of the world doesn't know, doesn't make that much of a difference. That's a completely legit narrative. What Apple's future plans are unknown. And I don't, I don't think it's speculate what they're.

Rene Ritchie (00:29:07):
I don't think it's legit though. Like I think you could, you can, like, we often see this with the headlines being taken one or one or more ways like a positive version, a negative version. This just like, I hate to say like my mom will see a BBC report and she'll call me and she'll say they've hacked my iPhone and it's completely not true. Nobody's

Leo Laporte (00:29:21):
Saying that, and this is the same. This is not, I, this is look, I I'm gonna completely disagree with you. Renee apples do not track button as privacy theater is accurate. It's accurate. It does very little for privacy period. No, no, that's a fact you can say, well, Apple's gonna tighten down the bolts or apple never said it was gonna be private or blah, blah, blah. But the fact is Apple's ads all are all over the place saying privacy, privacy, privacy. And the thing that they did, which by the way, Facebook and snap are going, oh my God. Oh my God. In fact does not harm them. So I think that's completely legit. I think that's extremely it's privacy theater. The same way taking off your shoes at the airport is security theater. I think that's a legit headline completely. 

Alex Lindsay (00:30:08):
It is. Well, what I would say I dunno what I would say about the privacy theater anyway. The, the, the issue with the with privacy theater is that it, what it's effectively doing also though, is moving public opinion because as you start to do that, and as you start to have more expect, expect expectations, I think apple may have

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Also up commercial plans that are no I'm saying that's anything speculative. It's completely legitimate at this point to ring the bell and say, you know, that thing apple did seven months ago. It didn't do anything. Right.

Alex Lindsay (00:30:40):
But it's, it, it is. But when you're right, the, but what I, what I'm saying is is that when 80, when, when the number comes out, that's 84, 85 or 86% people are saying they don't want to be tracked. Yeah. Yeah. There's a signal there. Understand theater, is it, it opens up a whole bunch of doors for a whole bunch of new things that didn't occur. And you, and again, this gets into, if apple did everything could do, they'd end up with lawsuits and people upset. And that the same article, the same writer for the same magazine to be writing something completely different about how AM's heavy handed and ruining all these things and making it not fun to be there anymore and all these other things, because they're doing it slowly. It's fine for them, for people to complain. They're not moving fast enough, but I think that we're gonna keep on scene. I, I will be blown way if we don't see apple, just keep on just slowly turning a, a little crank. Yeah. That slowly just that's

Leo Laporte (00:31:28):
A, and by the way, that's a completely legitimate footnote for this show because that's what we talk about. But I don't, I don't think it's fair to castigate the financial times, the information and tech I'm cast Leo. I know you are, but I think they're pointing out something that's, it's objectively true. I agree

Rene Ritchie (00:31:46):
With you. How many of those apps asked us though? Like those popups came up so often and we got to see how many of them were using this feature and if nothing else, it, it just opened the light

Leo Laporte (00:31:55):
On those cockroaches. Well, but yeah, but I think that, and that's part of the problem is that now we go, oh, see, I said, no, I'm not being tracked. Yeah. Well guess what? That was not changed a thing.

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:07):
Yeah. My, my, my big, my, the only thing that really kind of got up my nose was the privacy theater is such an incendiary term. Kind of like fake news, where as soon as you say it, you're, you're inviting in a huge environment of negativity around it. I don't think that it quite merits that, but I agree with your point that if that apple should not say that, Hey, look, we're doing, we care. We care more about privacy than any other. Well, actually that we're about, we didn't wanna lie to you. We're about to say that we care more. No other company cares, but we care and we are protecting you. They're, they're not as aggressive about that as they used to be. When these remember, they used to say, oh, we're the only, we're the only ones where you're not gonna, you don't have to worry about malware.

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:45):
You don't have to worry about viruses. You don't have to worry about any sort of malicious attacks as long as they're not pressing that button that hard, but you're right. That if it's a, it's an easy buzzword that say that, that to to say that, Hey, if you just simply flip this switch on the iPhone, no apps will not be able to track you. We don't want that. We don't want that to be the narrative that people understand. I don't, it is a complicated multi-layered thing and that there is no one switch that can be flipped that will protect you

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
From being tracked analog, analogous to the, do not track button in your browser, which many security experts and loo Steve Gibson event, you know, quickly pointed out. It's, it's an honor system. So good luck with that. And, and I think it's very similar to that. And I think that, I think that the

Alex Lindsay (00:33:29):
Issue that I have is foolish, the issue that I have with any article that's that's, that's sizeably one, one way <laugh> like, this is the it's simple, and this is what's actually happening is that it's always wrong. Like everything's more complicated than it looks, you know? So the thing is anybody who thinks it's black and white, like this is a very black and white article of like, this is just the way it is. And not that oh, apple could be doing these other things, at least as a footnote, we're giving the footnote that should exist in the article of giving people both sides. That's why people call and say that they're being, you know, tracked, you know, because someone's someone is, you know, for someone to work in a somewhat balanced you know, financial times we think is relatively balanced or whatever, for someone to, to have credibility, they have to be able to show you a little bit of both sides of what's actually happening here, as opposed to, and we've gotten into the press where it's all one sided.

Alex Lindsay (00:34:16):
Like it's just gonna be what it is, you know? And, and they're gonna say the way it is. And I think that's to one of the powers for instance of this show is that we don't always agree. And so, and so you, and so the listener gets to hear both sides of that, and then they make a decision about what they wanna believe. But I think that when you write the article, it's incumbent on you to kind of think about both sides, you know, of, of what that is. And at least tell the reader, there could be reasons for it, rather than just like, this is all a CHAM and you

Rene Ritchie (00:34:40):
Could write the, the same article, like putting on my old hat. You know, you can write the same article going apple fires, first shots in war, over privacy companies, desperate, spinning up new technologies to track us. All of this is just like narrative editorial choices. And I think a lot of times we're skewing towards a more cynical ones and I'm hoping that's, that's, that's in the past. And that we get to a more optimistic future at some point.

Leo Laporte (00:35:02):
I think they're gonna say, oh, you guys are just a bunch of Pollyannas <laugh> and the cynical view is exactly the view that continues to come out. Excuse me.

Andy Ihnatko (00:35:11):
I, I, I prefer, I prefer to be called a Pointdexter. Thank you very

Leo Laporte (00:35:15):
Much. Okay. Well, I think the, the, I mean, honestly, let's really be let's. I mean, let's think about it. The track record of privacy across board in the ad industry is not good. Yes. It's zero. It's less than zero. And, and frankly, the ability of companies, whether it's browser companies or apple to fix that has been minimal, if not zero, partly because these guys are like ants. I mean, they they're gonna find some way to get in no matter what their services. Yeah, but I mean, you know, I think, I think what Carl BDI is arguing and TEC is there needs to be effective governmental privacy laws because no nothing is gonna happen. If all you do is check boxes is say, don't track me 100%. <Affirmative> and that's fair. I think so. Yeah. And that was the, by the way, that was the point of his article is, you know, companies can say, do not track, but until somebody, somebody really cracks the whip, it ain't gonna happen. Well, I mean like, because that companies iation, they want that information, like

Rene Ritchie (00:36:12):
If something is 20% something and 80% something else, I don't think you need to cover it. 50, 50, I in a fake sort of fair imbalanced way. I just think you gotta stick to the facts and part of the facts, and part of the opportunity of journalism is educating people. It's not just saying, do you know this or not know this? It's like, if you don't know this, I'm gonna tell it to you. I'm gonna explain this. I'm gonna leave you smarter than you were when you started it. And I have this very, a SOEs ideal of, of this kind of stuff.

Alex Lindsay (00:36:34):
So I get my, and by, and, and by and large GDPR is theater, privacy theater. Like, like you could write the exact same article about GDPR. We have all these websites that are popping up that have us select all those things. But no, one's really enforcing that yet. Like, you know, and when, if, if, and when the EU starts to tighten that it creates all kinds of problems for everyone, but people are ignoring that a lot. <Laugh>, you know, and so, and, and we have to have the heart conversation. If I have to build a site, I have to explain to people like, you can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do this. We have to have approval. We have to have, like, we're telling them what they have to do because of GDPR. And they're like, but we're not, we didn't do that last week in this other

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
Website. And your point is, the GDPR is not really being enforced.

Alex Lindsay (00:37:13):
It's not being enforced at all in the same way.

Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
It, it has, it has the teeth. It could it be enforced. It does it

Rene Ritchie (00:37:20):
Does. It's also damaging.

Leo Laporte (00:37:22):
Yeah. So,

Alex Lindsay (00:37:23):
Yeah, so, so the some point is, is that it's, it's also theater until it starts to be until somebody forces it. Yeah. And apple and apple has all these teeth that it has in that agreement of what they can do. They're just not enforcing it. And so GDPR and Apple's privacy are kind of on par, you know, right now, now both of them have the ability to be tightened a lot. And I think that we're going to see both GDPR, as well as the California laws, as well as so, but even, but to, to your point though, even though there's government regulation, it's not doing any better right now, or very little other than giving us a lot of annoying little popups that it's ramping

Leo Laporte (00:37:55):
GDP. Isn't that old Italy just fine. Amazon 1.1, three Illian euros, which is,

Alex Lindsay (00:38:01):
I don't think that was against GDPR. I think that was Italy's. It

Leo Laporte (00:38:04):
Was competition, but I'm saying we're starting to see company countries, Italy, Poland coming, coming up with, and that's how GDPR works, by the way. It's, you know, member nations have to enforce it. I suspect we're gonna start to see more and more

Alex Lindsay (00:38:17):
Of that. Well, again, I'm my only argument is that I think that GDPR slowly being tightened and so is apple <laugh>, you know, like, it's just like, we're just seeing these privacy things that about theater. They're both, they're, they're, they're both, both of them are happening about the same time. There's

Leo Laporte (00:38:30):
Interesting. Significant difference, which is that GDPR has the weight of government and massive fines behind it. Apple has commercial weight behind it. That's it mm-hmm <affirmative>, which is

Rene Ritchie (00:38:40):
Not interesting thing too, is like in face of all this regulation, you see apples being chased in some ways they're, they're changing app store regulations. They're allowing, I don't wanna say how

Leo Laporte (00:38:49):
We're not in the right direct, but

Rene Ritchie (00:38:50):
They're doing self repair. Yeah. Google is like, YouTube is going through this, this whole crisis of, of like conscience about how they handle this activity. And yet Facebook is just hiring people that wanna go out and make the world worse. It's like, it's an amazing contradiction in how these things

Leo Laporte (00:39:04):
Are evolved. Facebook is not as notable, I guess. Let's take a little break. And why don't we do some technical adjustments I'd like to tell you about you way.org user way is something I can really resonate with because we do audio programming, my radio show the podcasts I hear from a lot of blind listeners. And one of the number one complaints from all disabled listeners is accessibility. The thing is there is a great system for usability built into every browser it's called the accessibility layer. And if a website gives them the right information, a website could be totally usable. This is something you want, by the way, you don't wanna leave 60 million Americans with disabilities out in the cold. You want to do the right thing. And by the way, you don't wanna be sued by over the Americans with disability.

Leo Laporte (00:39:56):
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Leo Laporte (00:40:53):
You can run it. You can see where you have problems, or if it's fully compliant is Bravo well done user way is something that some of America's biggest companies turn to over a million websites trust user way, including Coca-Cola eBay, Walmart, Disney, UNICEF, FedEx, they all use user way to make their sites accessible, cuz it's good business. And now user way's best in class enterprise level accessibility tools are available to us, small and medium size businesses. And of course, if you should become a giant business user way, is there for you? It's ready user way uses this line of AI to fix all sorts of things, automatically generating image, all tags, for instance, using computer vision. So all the descriptions in there you can modify 'em you can improve them absolutely user way makes that easy, but it gives you the start. It will remediate one of the biggest complaints I hear, which is nav menus.

Leo Laporte (00:41:48):
Actually, everybody has problem with nav menus, nav of menus that are, you know, just unusable. It's a big problem. That user way ensures all popups are accessible, all forms. It fixes vague link violations, any broken links does things that you might not even think about. It makes your brand colors more accessible, not by changing the color itself, but just the, the, the bright and and the saturation user way is completely platform agnostic. By the way, it works with everything. It's easy with WordPress Shopify and w no problem. AEM site, core SharePoint, even a custom built site that if you can add a line of JavaScript, you can add user way. It integrates seamlessly and works perfectly, and it helps your business meet its compliance goals. It improves the experience for all your users. Just listen to Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri, hear what she has to say. Hi,

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Leo Laporte (00:43:02):
User way can make any website fully accessible and ADA compliant so that everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs. It's also a perfect way to showcase your brands can commitment to millions of people with disabilities, go to user way.org/twi 30% off right now, user way's AI powered accessibility solution, user way, making the internet accessible for everyone user way.org/twi. We thank of so much for supporting Mac break weekly. Thank you for supporting us by using the address to user way.org/twi. All right, let's see. What else is new? This isn't strictly speaking apple news, but it's gonna affect everybody. It does affect apple a little bit log for shell. Some people have described it. Sure will be talking about this extensively on security now, but some people have described this as the worst secure vulnerability in a decade. It affects pretty much everybody running Apache, which is the number one server, a technology in the world, Apache struts. It is a bad exploit that gives hackers the ability to run malicious code on the servers. It's affected a lot of servers. I, I think it affected iCloud. I believe

Alex Lindsay (00:44:19):
It's insanely easy to do too. That's the thing. I mean, it's that, I mean, in the login, if you put a, a U a specific thing into, when they say, ask for your email and password, and you put this string into the email where it's asked for your email, it goes into the log and it's immediately executable like it is. That is a crazy, I mean, it is. It's like, there's no wall there. It's too easy

Leo Laporte (00:44:40):
At all. Easy. Yeah, easy. This is a logging system, a Java based logging system log four, J any browser could exploit it easily. It included just steam, Twitter, CloudFlare, Amazon, Tesla, Google, LinkedIn, and Minecraft iCloud also subject. So 

Alex Lindsay (00:44:59):
Now the fix is, from what I understand is relatively simple, but the patches out it's just so

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
Many. Yeah, it's, this is by the way, highlights another very big weakness in the infrastructure of the internet. All these commercial companies are running on an source project, run by volunteers, the guy

Alex Lindsay (00:45:13):
Who fixed it, like does this in a spare time. Yeah. The guy who found it fixed nice. I was like, oh, I do this. And I do this one. I can, you know, these

Leo Laporte (00:45:19):
Companies might want to kick in just a little to some of these projects. That's also infrastructure relies on

Rene Ritchie (00:45:27):
It's also when people say like open source wins, it's, it's an automatic thing. It's not, you've gotta have people looking at all that code all the time.

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
Yeah. And you know, open source, like all code is vulnerable to mistakes and flaws and exploits. And these things happen. The good news is, was fixed very, very quickly, but now you've gotta patch all these servers.

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:50):
Yeah. And that also affects a lot of P people who are like my own home server. Like I was like I had, I turned off my Sonology NA when I, when I heard about this, like late Thursday night, because I'm like, okay, I think I will just turn it off. Just, I, I believe that it's running Apache somewhere. And it took a couple of days for, Sonology say to verify that, Nope, this Sonology NA servers are not, not vulnerable to this, but that part of problem was that as soon as this information started leaking out as a, as a Minecraft bug, immediately, everybody with half an interest in trying to exploit this started saying, gee, I wonder what I could do with this. And that's why it really became a, it ruined everybody's Friday everybody's weekend because it had to be locked down real quick. Because as soon as you find out, as soon as the, as soon as the lights go out all over Manhattan, that's when people start figuring out, Hey, I could get that new TV.

Alex Lindsay (00:46:37):
Well, and, and the issue is, is that, is that it's, it's not just that it, it opens up your server and the big servers can all get handled. But now there's a trust issue between all the servers, because all these people who haven't handled it, the millions of servers that haven't even been touched yet to be fixed because people don't, people don't even know that they're running it probably they're now going to have malicious code that could be talking to other servers. I mean, so it just opens up this incredible can of worms. It's, it's pretty amazingly horrible. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:04):
Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:47:04):
And I, the biggest one of the go ahead just quickly when the biggest security problems in the world is just the simple fact that if something is working, people tend to leave it alone. And so oftentimes it's, it's an operating system. It's a, it's a server. It's something like that. They don't know how it works. The person who set it up no longer, no longer works for the company. All they know is that they're getting their documents sent from one division to another very, very easily. They don't know that they're running like an old unpatched version of Apache

Leo Laporte (00:47:29):
That still has this vulnerability. And that's where trouble starts. Yeah. Patch, patch, patch. But you know, mostly that's fixed, I guess the, the resonance will be felt for, for years and to come throughout all sorts of community. Steve Gibson will, I'm sure in great detail, cover the log for shell vulnerability. Later this afternoon on security. Now, apple, we were talking about how apple, the judge said, you got to implement these app, these new app store rules, apple has appealed and won lay. So once again, you don't have to worry about it. We knew that

Alex Lindsay (00:48:15):
We knew, we knew that we, when I came up, when they were going back to the judge, that's, that is the, as we talked about on the a couple episodes ago, that's what you have to do first is you go back to the judge and ask 'em to reconsider, but that was one step for apple to move it to an appeals court. Yeah. You know, and, and so circuit

Leo Laporte (00:48:30):
Court of appeal has granted the iPhone makers request a delay implementation perhaps for years, cuz this is gonna go on for a while. This is part of the, the one part of the apple epic lawsuit that apple lost. Judge Yvon, Gonzalez Rogers said, you've got implement it by December apple appealed and they won on appeal. Let me see if I can find the by the way. I,

Alex Lindsay (00:48:53):
I, I think part of the problem was that she was so unreasonable about it. If she had said a year out, I don't, I, it might have actually stuck, but saying it was three months out is, was, was not going to ever work for an appeals court <laugh>

Rene Ritchie (00:49:05):
So, because they didn't like the appeal was to not have to implement it while they were appealing. It, which I think was the other part, like if they had, if she had stated, so they wouldn't have to implement it while they were appealing, it, this wouldn't have happened any way, but that's the issue, but they also

Leo Laporte (00:49:17):
Keep getting this on for years. So her point, in fact, she addressed that specifically in her judgment is look, if I, if I allow a state on a pending appeal, this will never happen. So <laugh>, but I think it was a little bit, they keep

Rene Ritchie (00:49:33):
Getting that language put in, which says that they can still charge commission even on external. And that's the most important part to them is to just keep having that state over, over again.

Alex Lindsay (00:49:41):
Well, and, and people don't believe it. And, and, and I think that the issue is, again, it was so shorter runway to, to move anything large. That again, if she had said it, it had to be done by the end of 2022, you know that would've been a different conversation for the appeals court, but, but having something that's, that's this close, I think, and I think it's reasonable for you to figure out whether you can or can't do it before you start making people change their, their infrastructure and their entire business model. It it's reasonable to say, well, why don't we find out if everybody agrees first? I think the big problem for epic is, is that they've now basically lost almost everything that they went for. They've burned up a relationship with. They're one of their largest partners that partner will most likely be promoting unity all of next year. You know, it it's billions of dollars you know, that can be racked up to hubris <laugh> so, so, so it's the real

Leo Laporte (00:50:32):
Five looks so good. Alex, the ninth district kind of set a signal that epic suit is, has very little merit. This is the in granting Apple's appeal. This is the order said apple has demonstrated at minimum that it's hill raises serious questions. And the merits of the district court's determination that epic games failed to show Apple's conduct violated any antitrust laws, but did show that the same conduct violated California's unfair competition law. So effectively the, the, the court is saying, you know what, there's, there's not a whole lot of merit ne case in any respect. Yeah. So that's that, that it's over it's, I'm a little grunt, but that's okay. I would've liked that. That said buy it on the web, but okay. Fine.

Andy Ihnatko (00:51:16):
Same. I'm very, I'm very surprised at the, when this suit was launched, they had a murderers row of, of, of litigators on their backs. Basically people with experience an antit trust, the hammer experience in this kind of case, I thought that apple was gonna be in a lot more trouble than they actually turned out to be. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:51:35):
So yeah. I, I think that they had a, they had an incredible team. There's no case <laugh> which, which, which I will say that I said from the day one, like, like there's no case here. So, so the so there was no, they just have to prove things that are not provable and it's the you know, they, they can't, they have to separate be able to separate the iPhone from all other phones that look at exactly like it and say that it's somehow a different thing. And that just is really, that's a uphill battle for, for, for someone to make ACI that just almost undoable, which I found out is I think your is almost undoable.

Leo Laporte (00:52:06):
Your point has been proven. I think that that's yeah. That's this is it. And I, I wonder how far epic is gonna pursue this at this point, I suspect to just drop,

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:15):
Drop, but did he, when you read that kind guy really <laugh> like

Rene Ritchie (00:52:20):
Tim epic does not seem like he's easily swayed. I'm sorry. And I don't think we were gonna say the

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:23):
Same thing, but the court doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:52:24):
Seem saying you got nothing here, guy founders aren't

Rene Ritchie (00:52:27):
Rationally. Oh, CEOs, rational founders are not

Andy Ihnatko (00:52:30):
Rational. Yeah, no, I, what I was gonna say is that the, the, the judge, when you read the ruling seemed almost annoyed saying that, look, here's how you could have won this case, but you didn't say that. Okay. Or you could have said this, but you didn't make that case. Or you could have accused them of that, but you didn't do that. So it's almost as if they're saying everybody wants to Sue apple, here's the of pressure. Here's, here's how to, here's how not to waste my time with a lawsuit against apple, please don't waste my time.

Alex Lindsay (00:52:56):
The issue is all of those, all of those things have other problems with them. You know, like all the things that he point out, he said, yeah, those are, those are things that are there. You know, I think that the, the, the fundamental issue is, is the reason that because playing for this is, is not because of Fortnite or, or anything else they are playing for the metaverse. They think that the metaverse is a big deal. They think that they could be, they're already selling lots of assets, you know, into that, into that process. And so it's the, the very nature of the metaverse is, is what they're fighting about is that they don't want to sell games. They wanna sell assets, you know, they wanna sell tons and tons and tons of assets into an ecosystem. And that entire business model doesn't work inside of the apple ecosystem, because you can't have lots of people exchanging assets back and forth for real cash value and, and have that actually turn out.

Alex Lindsay (00:53:42):
And so I think that, you know, I think it's less the current, their current model and about their future business model. And and I think from the future perspective, I think, again, the problem they're really gonna have is that they've really, you know, you, if you pick a fight with a really big person, <laugh>, you need to make sure you're gonna win. You know, like, like, you know, and, and when you don't win, this is, this gets real ugly real quick. And, and I think that, you know, they've, they were already being brought in for the keynotes and they were apple was showing them off and pushing them forward. And they've, and that's worth billions like them being put up on that keynote stage is worth billions. And now they're gonna most likely see, again, we saw Weta being brought up on the keynotes.

Alex Lindsay (00:54:20):
So there's no reason why Weta digital won't be back up on the keynotes as a unit of you, unity start compete, Alex, like, cuz it sounds like at the Wetta like every rendering talent on the planet and the five looks amazing. I will say that without, without Wetta digital. I would, I would've said no. And, and, and this is the crazy thing is almost all of us had written unity off. Like we were just like, well, unity isn't really competitive anymore. There's not really gonna be anything there. We should just all focus on. And we really thought until this lawsuit popped up, we really thought it was all about unreal and unreal five, oh, you know, unreal, five looks amazing. Nite is amazing. It's amazing. A lot of the new tools are, are really amazing. But I don't know if that matters, that matters for games, those high, you know, really, really high poly solutions, but it does doesn't necessarily matter on a day to day AR business model, you know, and, and the way that graphics will be used in the next couple, it makes a big difference in what what'll happen in the next 3, 4, 5 years next 1, 2, 3 years, maybe not as much.

Alex Lindsay (00:55:19):
And the, and what the problem is, is that what it did was it took a nearly clean kill of, of unity. And now Apple's gonna build them up, you know, they're gonna build them up as another, as another solution. And it's you know, because they've already partnered WEA. And so wetas gonna come out as, as a, as a unit of, of unity. And you know, all of those things are gonna, you know, pick up speed again. And, and it was just something that they didn't need to do. And now if they think they're gonna get any help as apple goes, if, if unreal things are gonna get any help at all you know, going into the, what apple thinks is its next big business, you know, they they've given up all of that. They're not gonna, there's no special meetings. There's no inside, you know, connections. There's no like all of that's gone, you know? And, and so they, my email email says Tim, super, super expensive mistake, you know, but still billions.

Andy Ihnatko (00:56:07):
Yeah. But, but still it does point out the importance of this kind of fight and why I don't think this is gonna be the last apple hears of it. Apple is gonna spend a lot of time over the next 4, 5, 6 over the future of the app store, defending the concept of if you sell, if anybody who uses any of the product that is sold through an app on the app store, you, we get 30%, we deserve 30%. We're entitled to 30% when it becomes a point when the monetization of an app becomes that here's, here's a, here's a marketplace where we can make a lot more money off of the stuff people buy through the app than the app itself. That really raises a lot of legit make questions about, well look, how did you help us? We are, we, you're not, you didn't bring you didn't necess all you did was you, did you made the phone, that's fine, but we're also kind of helping you sell the phones by making good products. Why, why are you, how are you giving us 30% value by, by forcing us to every time someone buys a pony, you get 30% of the pony. That's, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not taking a position in one way or another on, on it, but as the value of that level of transaction becomes more and more and more important and it's already hugely important in gaming. I think that Apple's gonna be forced to defend this over and over again, probably with better and better arguments against them. Here's what

Leo Laporte (00:57:18):
You'll be missing on Apple's platform. This is the unreal engines newest demo with the matrix 33,000 simultaneous vehicles in this demo. Let me see if I can skip ahead to some of the video they get to the old can. I can't always tell them apart, like I can't like the older piano you in and out. I, I can't always tell you can't tell which one

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:41):
Is real, the new cans, even cooler and more mellow. That's how you can tell. So,

Leo Laporte (00:57:46):
And the helicopter scenes are unbelievable. This is not the movie, by the way, this is the game. I just wanna point this out. This is not even the game. It's just a demo. Well, it's a demo it's demo, but I think, you know, this is unreal engine, right? So I imagine it will look somewhat like this. Not on, not on an E iOS device. Well again,

Alex Lindsay (00:58:01):
If you, if you look at, but if you want to say, oh, well, unity, do that. Well, look at on oatmeal studios doing stuff on, I think it's on Amazon or whatever, that's all done in unity, right? So it's, it's, Unity's capable of, of, of a vast majority of these things as well. And again, what really is, was the, where the shoe dropped was with when they bought wet a digital, because that's gonna give them immense, you know, technological resources to that's 250 engineers, you know, that are now that are already doing film quality work. It really puts them in an entirely different position. And so, so the, so I think that there's, there's a lot to be said there. And to Andy's point, I think that I've, which I've said in a couple, a couple times is I think Apple's number only predator is antitrust.

Alex Lindsay (00:58:43):
At this point, they don't have any, they don't have any natural peers or predators at this point. They're moving faster than everyone else. It's as if you had a, you know, 800 pound gorilla that could run as fast as a cheetah. Like that's the problem that everybody has is that it's, they're moving really fast and they're really big. And, and that is going to eventually become a problem. I think where antitrust becomes more, has more teeth is that if apple, I think apple has the potential to just lay waste to the AR landscape and the real problem that they're gonna have as they roll that out is becoming a monopoly in that space, you know, and, and not having another group that is going that has 50% or, you know, like right now, Google still the go, some go version of Google still has 75% maybe, but, but you know, the Facebook's trying and they're very excited about it and they change their whole name, but they're, but the so far their, their rollout has been S sputtering compared to what apple appears to be doing, you know? And so, so I think that, you know, I think that there's this huge weight of sometime over next year or the year after we're gonna see this massive rollout. And I think that that's gonna, you know, it's gonna be something that's ma that, that apple could end up owning, but the problem with owning it, the, the big, the best thing that ever happened to apple, even though they're bitter about it was Android. Like it is literally the best thing that happened to apple, apple, ironic platform.

Rene Ritchie (01:00:01):
Apple was the best thing that happened to Microsoft when they were under antitrust scrutiny. Exactly.

Alex Lindsay (01:00:06):
It goes, and Android is way better for Android was way better for apple than apple was for Microsoft. Cuz apple never got broke. 10%. Android has 75% of the world market right now. Right. So it makes it, that's what makes all these antitrust really complicated with the phone? The, what the issue is if apple moves into a new market and suddenly owns it, it becomes this, this ball of wax where they have to worry about it. And I'm sure that they're thinking through those things. And I think that to Andy's point, I don't think that, I think that it's Apple's right in its current state to charge 30% cuz it's its business. I don't think 30% is sustainable. I don't think that it's going to stay that way. I, I would be five years from now if we're paying more than 15 and probably more than 10, I'd be surprised.

Andy Ihnatko (01:00:48):
Hmm. I think it it's gonna be pushback from users once the, once the things start breaking where I'm sick and I, if the people are kind of okay with leaving the Kindle app to buy Kindle book, they're kind of okay with leaving Comicology to buy comics once a week, once a big comes, no, I can't do near or anything. And this app until I log until I tab into a safari browser and make the purchase there, that's when Apple's gonna start to feel pressure. I think, I think that the issue is that

Alex Lindsay (01:01:12):
Came pass.

Rene Ritchie (01:01:14):
<Laugh> like really upset. No, I'm serious upset. I can't like, sorry, Alex,

Alex Lindsay (01:01:19):
Go, go, go, go ahead. Go ahead Renee. Oh, I

Rene Ritchie (01:01:20):
Was just gonna say like there's like, my argument was always, if, if the Google play store was that much better, people would be making apps that just couldn't be possible on the app store. And that'd be the biggest way to change Apple's business. Like if Uber could only work on the, on the Google play store or Instagram could only work on the Google play store, apple would change their business model in a heartbeat. And I could never find anything. It was always like, yeah, antivirus apps. That's the only, the only type of app that apple don't doesn't have on the apps store. But now it's like game streaming services. It's like that in two years, that's gonna be like not having Netflix and Disney plus on your platform. And I still can't wrap my head around. I just, how apple can be that shortsighted.

Alex Lindsay (01:01:53):
I know that games are, are really, you know, that games are a big deal and apple makes a lot of money with games. I just don't think that apple users are as geeky as we make them out to be in that they want the, the ecosystem. A lot of what apple does is it's seamless and it doesn't take a lot of time and they don't have to think about it very much. And I think for most apple users, that's more important than the individual features when fortnight disappeared. There wasn't uprising people weren't that up. They're like, oh, I'll play something else. You know? Like, like, because their, their, their apple ecosystem was far more important than any given game. And I think that it's going to be difficult to, to tear them away because, you know, I think that for real apple users that are really just using apple, they're not kind of partially Android and partially apple and everything else, but like for people who are like me and I will admit, I have Android stuff, I into stuff, but 99% of my world is in an apple ecosystem.

Alex Lindsay (01:02:42):
I view anything that changes that ecosystem as an existential threat. And if something, if there's not a, if there's not an, if the app doesn't work on the Mac, I go, well, I probably won't use that. You know? And so, and I think that, that I don't, I think that I'm pretty representative of people who are solely on the apple platform is that we want it to be easy. And part of our, we don't want it to be a distraction. And there's not that many things that we really care about that outside of that our platform works, you know? And so, so I think that that's the hard part is I don't think you're gonna get, I think you, you may get regulators getting talked to by the companies that want into that platform, but you have an enormous number of people that I think the vast majority of apple users, I would not say all, but probably 80, 90, just don't care. <Laugh> well, that's

Leo Laporte (01:03:21):
Content for it's like saying, you know people who live in Canada, don't miss steak steak and shake, shake and bake because shake, shake. We do miss it. Leo, miss it have no experience, same way that we have, you know, we don't really care about Tim hor. We've tried it. We've tried, don't know airport we're missing. However, I think you're right at this apple point, apples only threat. I mean, they've offended off this threat pretty darn well is from within, I, I don't think anybody's gonna come from outside apple and the, and disrupt

Alex Lindsay (01:03:54):
Your Perfect's. The problem is, is that again? They're in system, they they're in a hockey stick moment. They're in a hockey stick at a 3 billion, 3 trillion. That's crazy. Like, like, just to think about that just for a minute, like the fact they're they are. Yeah. They're but it's not just that they're successful. They're about to become a lot more successful and that's the crazy,

Leo Laporte (01:04:13):
It's no measure. However of quality it's merely a measure of success.

Alex Lindsay (01:04:18):
Well, they're Donald's is pretty

Leo Laporte (01:04:20):
Successful, but it's not the best steak I ever had.

Alex Lindsay (01:04:23):
Mcdonald, you guys

Rene Ritchie (01:04:24):
Have steak at McDonald's

Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
<Laugh> well, it's chopped up into a Patty, but it's, you know, there's beef in we've, we've loaded our expectations. We're gonna call that steak. It's a top cheese. I gotcha. You know, I'm glad you're happy. So happy in the apple ecosystem. I'm, you know, good for you. I just thinkt mean it doesn't doesn't mean is, is above all criticism or is if they didn't don't

Rene Ritchie (01:04:45):
Think it's above Disney plus it'd be a problem. And I think going forward, if they don't have content, like they, they've never been super successful at games. And as we go from the apple TV to VR, that's gonna be a much more key component because it's gonna be about immersive experiences and a super easy way to solve for that is just to have game pass and place to store and Nintendo store. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:05:03):
Now we know we have you lifting from, from the apple epic, the trial that keeps on giving that both Microsoft and Sony at one point were very interested in getting into the app store. Both decided not to Microsoft, you know, said given apples rules, there's no place for us there and created X cloud and safari Sony just said, forget it entirely. Can you imagine Netflix having to put every one of their videos in the iTune store? It's ridiculous.

Alex Lindsay (01:05:30):
Good

Leo Laporte (01:05:30):
Were quite the same rules as the iTunes, but also to Alex's point, you know, apples, sheep will don't care. I think they're saying, gosh, I really wanna people and I care <laugh>

Alex Lindsay (01:05:40):
Well, I, I, I think that the thing is, is that I think that just that apple users, oftentimes I think that the nature of it is they've got a lot of things going on in their life and their technology. Isn't the center of it. Like they just, you know, like they're not, they're not, but they're not like centered around the technology in the next. I'll give you a,

Leo Laporte (01:05:54):
I'll give you an example cuz you, I, I completely agree with you. And I, you know, because I do that radio show. I do, I hear from normal people all the time. Heres a great, here's a perfect example of people who do want it to be simple. And apple took away series ability to send email, to, to, to send traffic directions. A whole bunch of stuff has made no comment about why or whether they're ever gonna bring it back. And as discombobulated, you know, many, many of its users. Now those people are especially accessibility community. Yeah. Especially accessibility, but not just there's elderly people and there's others. There's a lot of reasons people might want you Siri to do these things. They just took that capability away. And that's the downside to a Walt garden. Is you all, you, you're also completely at Apple's mercy. Well, we're always, we like being at Apple's mercy. I understand. But

Alex Lindsay (01:06:46):
We're so we're so no, but, but, but what I would argue I guess is that we're at everybody's mercy. Like everybody, we go to, you know, like I, I threw a tantrum the other day because I, I realize that that I can't get in the I at whole foods because it competes with their own 360 brand. You can't buy Noella at whole foods. They took Noella out and I suddenly realized it was gone. And then I realized other

Leo Laporte (01:07:06):
Terrible for you more than anything else.

Alex Lindsay (01:07:08):
I don't, I don't have that much of it. It's not

Leo Laporte (01:07:11):
Exactly a health

Alex Lindsay (01:07:11):
Food Alex. No, it isn't health food. The point is, is that, but what I realized is why they did it. It wasn't Leo. It wasn't, it, it wasn't for your, okay. It wasn't about the, it's the principle of the thing. So the principle of the thing is, is that, is that, that whole foods just since Amazon took over whole foods, just once I, once I saw that I started paying attention to whole foods. I, I spend a lot of time on whole foods and, and the whole foods

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
Just very much, by the way, like apple. So I'm not surprised. Totally.

Alex Lindsay (01:07:39):
Well, like Amazon here's what happened was really here's here's what happened was is I, I had a, I, we were doing this video with someone who makes food and, and they'd, they, we were talking about the fact that they made, they were asked by Costco to come in to make, sell their food, no, to sell food into Costco, but Costco wanted them to change all their ingredients and add more whole bunch of things that would, that, you know, basically are a whole bunch of preservatives. Right, right. Into their stuff. And they just chose not to work with Costco. Yeah. That conversation basically meant I'll never go to Costco. <Laugh> like, like, you know, cuz cause what it meant was that the brand that you see in Costco is not the same food that you buy anywhere else. And as soon as I realized that I couldn't, I

Leo Laporte (01:08:16):
Couldnt eat it. You sell six pound buckets of Nella. However, yeah, exactly.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:21):
I don't care. It's not about the Nella. It's not about the NA I mean, you really need, it's not about the NA

Rene Ritchie (01:08:29):
You need NAELA.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:30):
The point is the point is, is that, is that I have to in everything, what we live in, what city we live in. Yeah. We're at

Leo Laporte (01:08:38):
Agree.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:38):
You're you, you know, you're making, they have made decisions that I've DEC you know, that's why we

Leo Laporte (01:08:43):
Fight for freedom as hard as we can. Sure.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:47):
Joe is there and we can fight for that. And, and, and we get on the show, we complain about people can complain about it. But the point is, is that, is that everything is that way. You know, everything around us is someone made a bunch of decisions and I don't agree with all of them, but I've decided this is the best they can be from said

Leo Laporte (01:09:03):
That the secret to life is realizing that those decisions were made by people who are stupider than you. And you can change that.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:09):
Yes. And, and Alex foods is gonna be, and people and people who, who care about it as, as, as you know, if, if they really care about it, they throw, they throw a tantrum. And I think that, for instance, I will be surprised if that accessibility issues don't come back in because accessibility is super important to apple. And so for no good business reason other than they, they care about it, you know, like, like it's, it is not a big enough model for them, but they really care about accessibility. And so I, I think the, that if there's a solid accessibility argument that this was taken away, I think that I, I feel like something just went wrong there. Like, I don't know. I don't know if there's the problem decision explainable,

Rene Ritchie (01:09:45):
But there's no excuse for not communicating about it because especially I agree with the community is so fr, like, I don't wanna say fragile, but like, they always think that they're on the edge of being canceled. That if there's ever any pressure, there's be the first people thrown off the boat. And so they go to every update, petrified. That's something that they depend on for literally life and limb is gonna be taken away from them. And when it happens, you, you can't be silent about it. You've gotta say we're rearchitect. And I know they don't want to, but they gotta say, we're rearchitecting this part of Siri. It destroyed all this stuff. Unintentionally we're working really hard to, even if you do it, like with accessibility, community reporters, just

Leo Laporte (01:10:15):
Knowledge it help. Yeah. Yeah. It's inable to me agree. Yeah. But you know, I agree, you know, like apple not only is apple in the hockey stick the, but it's, it's impressive as hell with what it's doing. And you did a piece deep. Now I wanna know what you said. I haven't watched yet. Renee M1 pro versus max. You did a piece on that, on your, yes. Tell me what your, your thinking is. Cause I, well, I shouldn't tell you what I decided, but I, well, I will. Okay. I got the M one pro because I don't think I need the GPU in the max. And I feel like I'm really happy with how fast it is.

Rene Ritchie (01:10:56):
Yeah. So like my bottom line for it is if you want battery life, get the M one pro in the 16 inch MacBook pro because it has the biggest battery and the lowest draw. And it's gonna last you as long as is inhumanly possible. If you really care about speed, you wanna get the M one max in the 16 inch because it has double the rendering engines, double the GPU. You can get much more Ram. And because of the thermal envelope is bigger. Not only will it sustain longer, but you can put it in high power mode, which just kicks on those fans, kicks on those CPUs and you can get stuff done really, really fast. Now, if you do need something more portable, you can go for the 14 inch versions of either of those, you just know you're gonna get a slightly smaller physical battery and a slightly smaller thermal envelope. But you know, if you're carrying it around all day, that might be a very small price to pay, to get all of that, you know, all of that power in a very small computer. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:44):
So I think I made the right choice. Actually. I got the 14 of the 16, but

Rene Ritchie (01:11:47):
You'll know if you need them max. Like, you'll like, I got it because I, I render every day and when prices fast and render told Henry he's like Alex says

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
For his TikTok. Yeah. Get the, get the max cuz it's it's time is money. And if you're up at one 40 in the morning, rendering your TikTok video, you need a max basically. Yeah. So you can, and

Rene Ritchie (01:12:05):
Every little step in between, it's just so much faster. And then you can do stuff like, again, it's so fast. I can make my thumbnail while I'm rendering the video. And I couldnt do that on Intel. It would just be slow sluggish. It would be like, like it'd be a worth frame rate than I am right now. Oh, that's it.

Leo Laporte (01:12:18):
That's actually interesting. So you, you can multitask cuz the machine is so powerful. You can let it do its rendering and continue to do your thumbnails and stuff. Cause the rendering

Rene Ritchie (01:12:27):
Is really cool. Prores used to be CPU bound. And so it would really hit, be hard and got it. But in do anything else and now it's not touch the CPU or GPU at all. So I have like a second computer that I can keep using while it's rendering. It's amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Let's take a little second little break, come back with some tidbits little bit and this and that. I don't know if we've missed anything big. I guess we, we didn't go into what's new in Monterey 12 one and iOS 15 two. We'll talk a little bit about that out to when we come back. Renee Richie, youtube.com/renee Richie, Andy NACO from naco.com and w GB H Boston, Alex Lindsay from office hours.global, our show today brought to you by wealth front. I have this conversation with my kids all the time, but also with anybody you young people, especially because you can benefit from this. Most of all you know, my kids say, oh, I should, should I buy this this I this AMC stock, this should I, should I get into doze coin? And I say, look, it's fine to play and understand that you're playing.

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Leo Laporte (01:15:27):
Let Wealthfront do the work for you to start building your wealth to first $5,000 managed for free for life. Go to wealthfront.com/mac break, w E a L T H F R O N T. Wealthfront.Com/Mac breaks. Start building your portfolio today. The, the price is right. The technology's amazing Wealthfront dot coms slash Mac break. Thank you Wealthfront for supporting Mac break weekly. Thank you, dear listener and viewer for supporting us by using that address. Wealthfront.Com/Mac break apple is launching support for keys in apple wallet, six Hyatt hotels, the first to support it. I like the idea of just using my watch to unlock the door. It'll be at the Hyat Hawaii, the and as Maui and Yala Hyat centric key west Hyat house, Chicago Hyat house, Dallas Hyat house, Fremont, and in Silicon valley and Hyat house long beach. So now Alex, you never have to leave your apple bathtub. You don't even have to carry a card key. <Laugh> just see.

Rene Ritchie (01:16:40):
No, sir. Bubble C <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
Apple hot. No, it's first. This is a great example of actually yeah, they announced this a while

Rene Ritchie (01:16:47):
Ago and, and it's just it was kind of years ago. I mean, they, they said this

Leo Laporte (01:16:51):
It's taken a while. It took a long time. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:16:53):
So you always every, yeah, go ahead. Well, I gonna say the original implementation was really different than this because they didn't have the same technologies with the original I apple watch. So like aloft implemented it, but you had to be within Bluetooth proximity and then to prevent other doors from opening, you had to put the watch close enough to disrupt the magnetic field around the lock. And only when those two things were true and it actually unlocked that that was an implementation almost no hotel. I was interested in

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
<Laugh> I wish I would love to have my driver's license in my wallet as well. I mean, I have my COVID card in there, which is great Washington DC just voted to use Apple's wallet it for their digital driver's licenses and IDs. I think that's great. Did they, did

Andy Ihnatko (01:17:35):
They vote on apples? I didn't. I just saw that they were doing digital ones. Mostly. They just, they amended their digital, they amended their ID laws to say that a digital version of of a, of a digital digital version of an idea is acceptable with the definition of what that digital idea is gonna be that remaining to be defined. I'm gonna guess, but that's but that's a big deal. It ain't be on

Leo Laporte (01:17:56):
Android. Maybe it will. I don't know. <Laugh> it be on Android or a Samsung like yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, I guess, and I guess these, the 20 states that are now doing this along with DC, I guess they could have, have their own state app, you know, the Maryland driver's license app and so forth that would work on that, right?

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:15):
I think D DHS has I've I believe it's DHS, but federal agency has issued guidelines as to what they believe a digital ID should support and should Enue before it should be before a state should approve it. However, this is all due to the state. So this is gonna be state by state, by state district by excuse me, state by state before this comes true. We, we need a really good solid standard that everybody can fall behind, cuz no, nobody wants to, nobody wants to have to update a million different locks, a million different POS terminals before they know what is actually gonna be required. Hardware wise to make this sort of stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
I have to say, I am pleased that apple is making a brand new Android app. <Laugh> yay.

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:58):
Messenger, messenger messages.

Leo Laporte (01:18:59):
No, no, no. Air tags and find my detector app for Android. And really this is not because they want you to use air tags necessarily. I don't think it'll even do that. But what it will do is identify nearby air tags. And this is a privacy concern. You know, if you have an iPhone, it says there's somebody got an air tag near you. That's not yours. You might wanna check that out. But, but the complaining about that was, well, you have to have an iPhone for that. So tracker detect will help anybody who doesn't is not in the warm of the apple ecosystem to identify unexpected air tags. <Laugh> I like that phrase. Yeah, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (01:19:40):
Surprise, surprise, air tags,

Leo Laporte (01:19:42):
Surprise air tags. We all like surprises. You gotta surprise air tag. <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:19:47):
We're we're talking about that story in Ontario about a, a car theft run was basically sticking air tags on cars. Yeah. I I'm, I'm kind of surprised apple. Didn't think of this to begin with the idea that, oh, and don't worry, we will protect the safety and security of all the apple people, Android users buy an iPhone and you'll be safe. It's like, oh dear. That seems like supposed to

Rene Ritchie (01:20:07):
For it, for like, for, for non, for non, for not. Cause also some people still use flip phones. I know it's impossible to believe it doesn't seem supposed to chirp doesn. It does for me, every time I get in my car, it chirps and it's so annoying and I don't know why it does it, but I'll get in my car probably. Cause I don't drive enough anymore. It's like three days have pass and it's not a

Leo Laporte (01:20:23):
Chirp now. It's unpredictable. That's the biggest problem. Yeah, sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it annoys the hell outta you. When I was in Mexico, every time I left my my, I put a air tag in my luggage. Every time I left my hotel room. Yeah. Hey, you know, you left your luggage behind. Yes, I know. Thank you. <Laugh> you left your car in the

Rene Ritchie (01:20:44):
Driveway. Really?

Leo Laporte (01:20:45):
Really? Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:20:46):
I, I always think I have so many devices that I'm leaving behind. It. I'm always what I think funny is it always picks one. Oh, by the way, your other phone, I was like, okay, what about the iPad? And the, all the other things that were the, all the headsets and then, but it'll pick a different one all the time. Like, by the way you, you left your headset back there, but not the phone that I left the first time. So I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:21:05):
It's the thought is nice, right? You, you don't wanna leave here. It's NICE's not the cast. Here's the, I'm running this on the pixel six. You have, it's hard to find. I have to say that that's Android's search in the app store, but if you search, actually, what I would do is search for apple apps and you'll find it there. So tracker detect looks for tracker items that are separated from their owner in a compatible with apples. Find my network. If you think someone's using air tag or another device to track your location, you could scan and try to find it. Let's press the scan button. See what see what comes up. Did I allow it? Oh, scanning, scanning. There's at least one tracker next to me. It's it's on my keys. Okay. Well this is only a couple hour show, so we'll get back to scanning. <Laugh> a little later in the show scanning. Oh my God. It

Rene Ritchie (01:22:06):
Was an episode of minus tech tips with one of his employees, put an apple tag in him to track him and he found it in his pocket and he just put it down. Didn't even think about it. Just assumed his kids found it on a desk somewhere and stuck it in his pants while he wasn't wearing them. And it just, so it just shows that nobody's really that

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
Security conscious <laugh> nobody cares. <Laugh> let's talk about the new iOS 15.2. Of course. Whenever I think most apple people are this way. Whenever there's an update, I do it. I just jump into it fearlessly. Perhaps that's not the best attitude, but so far it's worked. What's new in iOS 15.2, we got the music voice plan. Yep. Which is a cheap way to use apple music. Right. With, you know? Yeah. It's.

Rene Ritchie (01:22:51):
Yeah. Especially if you're not all in, like if you,

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:53):
Sorry, go ahead. It's you don't get the, you don't get the app. You don't get the, you only get through the voice interface. So it's great for you bought one of those cheap home pods after they discontinue them. But <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:23:04):
Okay. The whole, no, the big pods were discontinued. The little ones are sorry for the big,

Rene Ritchie (01:23:09):
The minis are still out, right? Yep. Oh God. And they're colors now.

Leo Laporte (01:23:13):
Leo. Sorry. Oh yeah, that's right there in colors. Just ask serious just music based on your listening. History likes or dislikes. Play it again. Lets you access your list of recently in music. What is it? Five bucks. Oh, by the way,

Rene Ritchie (01:23:28):
You can see where apples put their effort in this too. Because if you say like play the opera by Andy NACO and it's not in your library, it'll say, oh the opera by Andy NACO is not in your library. Would you like to have a free trial of apple music plan? And then like you immediately get you your apple, your Andy NACO opera, you got your free trial. And like it's the smoothest conversion thing I have

Leo Laporte (01:23:47):
Ever seen. So by the way it found no trackers, even though there's one right here, right here, right here. It even says Leo on it. Okay. So, you know, if somebody were, you know,

Rene Ritchie (01:24:04):
If Lisa was tracking you right now,

Leo Laporte (01:24:06):
Somebody were stalking me. I'll keep scanning. We'll see privacy Apple's privacy report now is in settings, which I think is a good thing to do to see how often apps this is. This is maybe the, the ting down you were talking about. Alex. If apps have, how often they've accessed locations, camera, microphone, contacts, and monitoring the last seven days that I think that's very, very valuable, very

Alex Lindsay (01:24:28):
Useful. And you can see some of that also. I think as a developer, I think some of us got updates of the terms of service then there's definitely, you can just see all these little screws getting turned. Yep. So, so you know the app again? I think it's just, you don't tighten 'em all at one time. You just keep tightening. You just slowly moving

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
Around, boil the frog baby frog. Yep. Yep. Messages will now if you turn, if you're a parent and you turn it on, let you know that your kids are looking at nudies,

Rene Ritchie (01:24:54):
It won't let you know anymore, but it'll, it'll give the kid three chances to do what's right. Oh, it doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:24:59):
Tell the parent

Rene Ritchie (01:25:00):
No, they turned off the title feature. Cuz they were afraid that it would out people in conditions where they had abusive parents.

Leo Laporte (01:25:04):
Oh yeah. But it does give parents the ability to enable warnings for children. Yes. So the parents have to turn it on and then the kids get no now Johnny,

Rene Ritchie (01:25:14):
It won't title tail

Leo Laporte (01:25:15):
Anymore. You don't really wanna see naked butts, do you? But that, but that's but that's valuable. Sometimes people, sometimes maybe their friends aren't gonna send them something that they don't know what's coming and yeah. So that's that's

Alex Lindsay (01:25:25):
Well, it's also, it can be, it can be a bull thing as well. You could send it to somebody else who doesn't want to get that kind of yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:25:32):
I don't want, there was legitimately a bunch of a bunch of people, predominantly women on Twitter when this feature was announcing, why can't we adults have it? You have no idea what we go through. Oh yeah. On a daily basis across all of our

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
Messages. You know what? That's actually a very good point. All they need is a hot dog or not hot dog detector. Yes. If you know what I mean? And that would be very useful for everybody.

Rene Ritchie (01:25:55):
I don't wanna get too deep into this, but there's a brilliant video by Atlanta Pierce. It was a really used to be a really well known game journalist. Now she works for Santa Monica studios where she got so upset that she would just keep a directory of the images and then always send back one that was slightly larger <laugh> cause that would, that would, that would aggravate people so much. They'd never send message again. <Laugh> I saw the bigger, hot dog. There's always whatever

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
You sent her, something I've learned in my life. There's always a bigger hot dog. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:26:18):
And she said like, they just couldn't handle that. And she's opened a moment of redemption. No, but like it'd be way better if it just filtered that

Leo Laporte (01:26:24):
Out. There is in my favorite TV show succession, a wonderful incident around that, that I will, it's just very, very funny. If you if you aren't watching that TV show, you really ought to. It's very good. Okay. So the we'll call it the hot dog, not hot dog app sir, search expanded guidance and sir spotlight and safari search to help children and parents stay safe online and get help with unsafe situations. How does it do that? We dunno.

Rene Ritchie (01:26:55):
Yeah. It pops up like if you do a search for a term that, you know, it's problematic term, basically like, oh, something that involves abusive search it'll pop up in and say, okay. Yeah. Would you, would you like to be explained this? Would you like information on this? Would you like to contact somebody? Yeah. Hear resources that you can, you can go to. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:12):
They've turned on digital legacy, which is really, really good for people my age. Lets you designate somebody as a legacy contact so they can access your iCloud account and information in the event of the, of your untimely passing because all passings are untimely. That's a good thing. Not your

Rene Ritchie (01:27:32):
Itunes library though. No, no one gets

Leo Laporte (01:27:34):
Your iTunes library and I presume if you had I books, you probably wouldn't get to pass those long or iTunes. No, cuz cuz

Alex Lindsay (01:27:41):
Remember you, you spent, you spent $23 on a movie that you don't have actually own. You just

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
Bought a license, you licensed it just licensed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But your personal stuff, which exactly photos, contexts financial that's good. The docs. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:27:54):
Just presented proof of death has to be presented, but

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
Yeah, absolutely. The switch that we talked about the marque Brownly switch, they're calling it that lets you turn off my macro mode if you don't, if you don't like that. Annoying switch. Yeah. Just

Alex Lindsay (01:28:12):
Stop me through. Does that mean, does that mean if you does that mean that you can now manually choose which macro mode during

Rene Ritchie (01:28:19):
Yes. You have a little, you have a little, no, you have a little flower icon that you press to put into macro mode. Now it doesn't do it automatically on proximity anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:28:25):
It was switching lenses and it was bugging people.

Alex Lindsay (01:28:30):
I admit I had a, I got a, this nasty little splinter in my foot and I literally used the macro mode. Perfect. I know I did. I, I did a macro mode and then I wired it to my big, my big TV. So I had this super, the bottom of my foot he's I put it on tripod and I set this whole thing up big lights and everything else. Cause I, I had to get it out. Like it was, it was, it was really so

Leo Laporte (01:28:54):
Were doing micro. You were doing microsurgery kind of. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:28:58):
I was totally doing microsurgery with my, I had, I had like a little, I had this little needle and I had a,

Leo Laporte (01:29:03):
I can't believe you didn't have fitting freezer of this. I

Alex Lindsay (01:29:05):
Wish I would, should see that. I should have, I don't know if anyone, I don't know if anyone else wants to see that office hours was focus, focus on Alex's feet. I was like, I was like, all I could say is a, a, it worked really, really well. Like it, it totally, you know, cause I was like are looking at like one centimeter of my, of my foot while I was working on it. And so number one is it worked really well. And number two is I really need to exfoliate more <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:29:30):
So a lot of next stage, but you maybe you could do a little brain surgery on yourself. Something like that. I

Alex Lindsay (01:29:35):
Think I could. I think now that I understand how the macro works at brain surgery is next, you know, it's absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:29:40):
And you really don't while you're doing brain surgery, wanted to flip back and forth between the wide and,

Alex Lindsay (01:29:45):
And, and by the way, I didn't have to wire it, all I had to do was share it. You know, I shared it, you know, I just shared it. That's pretty awesome screen. Yeah. So I just had it share my phone to airplay to the screen and then I just had this and I got into macro, but I will say the one problem was I kept on changing the macro mode. And so you had to kind of and just place that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:30:03):
That's

Alex Lindsay (01:30:03):
That was

Rene Ritchie (01:30:04):
My one problem. You can use the magnifi and accessibility. It does a really good job too, but I, I was originally against this cause I loved how automatic it was. And then Ray Wong pointed out that. Yes, but I wanna take a photo where the object in front is blurred out is right, right. And the object in back is in focus and you can't do that anymore. And I was like, oh yeah, waste smarter than me.

Leo Laporte (01:30:20):
It's good to have. It's good to have stuff that got switches. It's good. It's good. Yeah. The TV app has changed the store tablets, you browse by and rent movies and TV shows all in one place. Okay. <laugh> my I

Rene Ritchie (01:30:38):
Mean, some people were complaining that there was eight tabs for the store essentially before, like you had basically like what was of, and then eight versions of the store tab. Yeah. And now there's, they simplified it because it really is just the store and it's it's and the what's new and the the search tab. So it's

Leo Laporte (01:30:52):
Simpler. I have to say I was asking a friend of mine, if his he's got five kids, if they're into the Charlie brown Christmas and he said, I can't find anymore. Or where'd it go? And I had to tell him <laugh> it's in, it's in the apple. Its gone to Cupertino, it's gone to Cupertino Santa. Yes. Has moved Charlie in the company, moved to Cupertino.

Alex Lindsay (01:31:15):
You see that big, that big bag, Santa holding it's bag of cash <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:31:20):
They did mean to their credit. If you, if see, I don't think anybody can figure out how to watch broadcast TV anymore, but if you know what day and time it is on public television, you can watch it. I

Alex Lindsay (01:31:31):
Would never know when that is, but how would you know, like all I know is that I, yeah. Yeah. I, I don't, I don't even know like I, I, in YouTube TV I kind of go in and, and for most things I just select all, everything. I have so many things selected that there's just so much con I, I guess, and, and I think that this is a, I don't know if this is a problem for everybody. But for me I'm so far behind in content all the time. Like there are so many things I wanna watch that the, I, if, if something that isn't like right down in front of you, I agree. I'm not, well, no, but, but, but also, or exactly what I want. Like I just, I, I feel like there's a thousand other things for me to be watching, you know, that, that I have on my playlist, like my YouTube playlist right now and just YouTube, not YouTube TV, my YouTube playlist is like 30 hours deep, you know? Like, and, and I, you know, I just finally made it through what it was, the sound, the sound cinematic sound or whatever. Yeah. Last night, but that took me a

Leo Laporte (01:32:22):
Week. <Laugh> so as a public service to all the people who love Charlie brown, Christmas <laugh> December nine, 19th, 7:30 PM. On PBS. That's your one shot. Of course you could, you could set up a trial on apple TV and and watch it you know, set up, you get a seven day trial,

Alex Lindsay (01:32:42):
Charlie brown, otherwise known as crier, enthusiasm for kids. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:32:47):
Yes. You know, I was watching it cuz I love it. I love the, you know, what I really love is the vial music is so good, but I was watching, I realized, I don't know why I never thought of this when I was a kid, I guess I just thought, oh, it's Charlie brown, but it's really just a bunch of static comic strips turned in, rendered into animation. So there's set up punchline, set up, punchline, set up punchline all the way through and then Lucy goes or Charlie goes and then the next one. So it's really kind of it it's a little bit dated. I have to say. Well,

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:20):
So good. I, I would, I would say classic I'm classic. I'm glad that I'm I'm glad that it's it's it's contemplative. It's meditative. It's thoughtful. As opposed to like we got, we gotta have three action sequences and Tony stark has to be responsible. Two of them. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:33:33):
You're right. You're right. It's it is a much more leisurely case. There's a lot of pauses and at air by the way, I'm reading this expectations. I'm reading this on, got bird expectations. Now I'm reading this on mass live.com and it says locally, Massachusetts, its viewers can tune in on GBH to catch PBS specials. So there you go. That's for you, Andrew. Nice.

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:56):
Thank you for your donation. <Laugh> your support we bring to you. We bring you the Charlie brown. My view

Leo Laporte (01:34:01):
Is like you

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:03):
<Laugh> you'll you'll you'll have to bring your own Dolly Madison snack case. Oh man.

Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
That's the one thing missing from the apple TV version. Yeah. And I presume, although

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:12):
Version I hostess bought apparently Dolly Madison and they, so they make, they make Dolly. They, they make zingers now. And so only like in my life was I able to do live out the fantasy that I had as a child say, oh, well, gee, we can't why they keep saying Dolly Madison zingers. I I've never seen a zinger. Have you ever seen a zinger? No. We don't have a zinger. Thanks to the hostess hostess antitrust case. We now can have Dolly Madison zingers. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:34:39):
You know, sometimes the good guys do way in. Yes. Let me let me just play a little of this for those of you've got Charlie brown who won't be seeing it in your Charlie brown.

Speaker 6 (01:34:50):
I've got a treat. That's heavenly like me, Dolly Madison cupcakes. They're more like me because they're devilishly delicious devils cake <laugh> but it has dreamy cream fillings. That's goodness like me look at this tempting chocolate ice, but it has angel riding on it. See? Right. They're more like you, but I have more of them. You devil you do Madison come.

Leo Laporte (01:35:18):
I think that was probably showed on the it's the great pumpkin.

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:21):
Oh God. Rather than that, that that kid went places. I want know what happened to him. He, he made a meal out of that Mo that, that role. And he did a great job <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
He really did. He probably, I wonder if he went on the great things you can, you can actually watch the YouTube also has the one with the peanuts gang in it. Here we go.

Speaker 6 (01:35:43):
The zinger zapper is someone in this room. Find the culprit. I'll put zingers on this plate. This

Leo Laporte (01:35:48):
Is, this is when zingers came along.

Speaker 6 (01:35:50):
Chocolate icing gold

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:52):
With dreamy used to have a strip of coconut

Leo Laporte (01:35:55):
<Laugh> they look just like cupcakes and, and Twinkies, I guess it's excuse me.

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:05):
There are no raspberry coconut Twinkies and the world is the poorer for it. <Laugh> see. It's it's the competitions that led to innovation within the snack cake industry. There

Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
Are improvements even in CarPlay enhanced city map. I actually really like this with road details, like turn lanes, medians, bike lanes. Thank you, crosswalks. But it's only insubordinate cities. It's not yet in Petaluma. The details gotten really

Rene Ritchie (01:36:31):
Good. Like I was just looking around my neighborhood and it was like, I felt almost bad about it. Cause I could see way too much detail, like the, the surface of the pool and where the cars were placed. I'm just like, that's a little too intimate

Leo Laporte (01:36:42):
At this point. Bunch of other little minor things. I, and I imagine there there besides feature editions, there are bug fixes and security fixes. I'll, I'll leave it to you to to do the research. Even the TV OS was updated. Everything's 15, got the watch update all of that. So the new the new stuff is here. Adobe has launched a version of its creative cloud. That's free creative cloud express, which really mostly looks like a bunch of templates. There are paid templates and pre templates. Yeah. It's

Andy Ihnatko (01:37:20):
It looks, it looks like a thing for creating memes for creating Instagram posts for it's nice. I mean, we, we, as a kid, I had print shop. Yeah. In which we had our own like printout, we print on a Panasonic 10 80 I printer, but okay. Yeah. It's, it's not, it's just

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
Not great quickly and easily makes stand out content from thousands of beautiful 10 templates. I guess. That's what people want though. Right? They just want templates. Get the thing. I don't get it done. Just, just get it done. Web it's also available on mobile. I mean, web as well as on mobile. And I think it's also available on Microsoft app store. So pretty much everywhere you can get your apps.

Alex Lindsay (01:37:58):
It's a big improvement over people trying to hand write their signs or do them horribly in something like, what about it? You know, at first when I saw it, I was like, really like, I was same thing that Andy had. I was like, really? But then I, I watched my, my wife put together our Christmas cards with some template from Walgreens, you know, like, like just, you know, she, she threw it together. She doesn't wanna spend a lot of time on it. I wasn't willing to spend any time on it. And so, so the so it went out and it looks fine. You know, like it's not, it's not, no, no one's gonna win any awards, but it's better than her trying to better than

Leo Laporte (01:38:27):
Made or is it

Alex Lindsay (01:38:29):
Well, it's better than it's better than doing something digital. That's kind of janky that doesn't really work. Mean handmade, handmade, like crafted is, would be better. But yeah, but as far as something, nobody got time

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
For that. Like when Kevin Smith goes and protests his own movies, you gotta make sparkles almost

Alex Lindsay (01:38:45):
Like exactly. Well, I it's like, it's like, like a cooked bread is great, but sometimes the, the best thing someone can do is get a bread maker <laugh> like, or just buy a loaf of bread. Yeah. So, you know, so it's, they may not be able to make it it's

Leo Laporte (01:38:58):
Better than nothing yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:39:01):
Or bad

Andy Ihnatko (01:39:02):
They should, but they should definitely release a companion app just for, because, because Adobe products serve the creative community, a companion app is a phone app. You scan this thing that you just paid somebody $180 to, to design for you say, Hey, wait a minute, you, you made this with a template with that free Photoshop app. You didn't hire a, a real design professional for this.

Alex Lindsay (01:39:22):
Well, how many of us have, have watched? I mean, I don't know if you, I, I know the apple music library really well, you know, all the loops <laugh> and so I can tell, like, I can immediately hear it in a commercial, like, oh, they're using the apple loop, you know, that's an apple loop, that's an apple loop.

Leo Laporte (01:39:37):
People don't know that. Right. Right. Exactly. These are actually not, these are not bad. These templates, there's a, you know, you can easily you know, they look, they look, they're professionally designed, right. Meal delivery free, you know, and it's for it's for small businesses and people like

Alex Lindsay (01:39:54):
That. So cyber stuff can totally work. Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:39:57):
Yeah. I'm, I'm just, I'm just always a little bit disappointed when I get, when I get my pizza box and it says our NA your neighborhood pizza place made this hot and fresh for you. Oh. And what would the name of that place be your lo thanks for buying local. Like it's of course they, I know they buy, they buy these in BPAs. Like I'm much sure. Have just a blank. I'm not sure they have like the generic, you know, chef stereotypical Italian chefs, kiss guy, rather than try to try to make me think that this is a custom printed thing. This

Leo Laporte (01:40:24):
Is, this is cool. They have animated ones too, for your Instagram. So here's a study tip. I can modify that and

Alex Lindsay (01:40:31):
Make it. And when you look at this, a lot of these, a lot of these are the kind of thing with TikTok that people are using the, the filters or they're using some kind of over yeah. You,

Leo Laporte (01:40:38):
I recognize a lot of the TikTok stuff now this is at least giving you a whole bunch of new things. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:40:45):
A lot of the

Leo Laporte (01:40:45):
IMO and final cut stuff too. Absolutely. People use templates cuz they're easy. Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Ihnatko (01:40:49):
Yeah. And this is, and this is how this it's not just presentation. It really is communication at this point where so when you have private reels, it's like, this is how you talk to your, your two dozen friends that are close enough, that you're gonna share like eight different moments during the day. And you want to, even, even there, if you want to present like a really cool, like here's exactly what I'm trying to tell you as opposed to, oh no, this is not worth, this is not worth finding my stylist for, I'm just gonna tap something into a template. And, and it's, and I mean

Rene Ritchie (01:41:13):
The government does illegal stuff and comic songs and a PowerPoint template. I mean, that's always the best. Like you get us, see a military document that gets leaked NSA something and it's in comic songs and it's,

Andy Ihnatko (01:41:20):
It was meant to be ironic. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:41:23):
Ironic. Nothing, nothing better than the use of ironic comic sense. Well, I, you know, the,

Alex Lindsay (01:41:28):
The funny thing go is that you think on like templates, but there's like eight gifts that I use probably at least once a week, you know? Like, and they're not, I don't, I don't go out and shoot my own video to do, to do the meme. I just really like that meme. I just made,

Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
Look, I just made this while you were talking. I made my new Mac break weekly. It's not just about the Nuella. How about that?

Alex Lindsay (01:41:49):
You like that? It's not about the, it's not about,

Leo Laporte (01:41:52):
It's not at all.

Alex Lindsay (01:41:55):
It's not about, it's not just, it's not about the Nella. It's

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
The, or not hot dog. <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:42:03):
Nutella. That would not be a good

Leo Laporte (01:42:06):
Just saying if, if I have a vote,

Alex Lindsay (01:42:10):
That one, how about not, we get into this. People are listening. Just going, what is going on? They've all. No, they're

Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
Not. They know anyway, that's I think this is nice. And I just, that was completely free. I didn't pay for it. Creative cloud express. These people didn't ruin

Rene Ritchie (01:42:24):
Emojis. We have these innocent little emojis and humanity keeps ruining them.

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
<Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> well, I can egg play. Just be an

Rene Ritchie (01:42:32):
Eggplant. I know. Oh, I don't even know what the kids do anymore. Like the kids are way too advanced for me. I find out like once in a while, there's an article about what these emoji really mean and I'm flabbergasted. Like I did not use it with that intent

Leo Laporte (01:42:45):
Macs, Moray 12.1 share. As you mentioned, share play just in time for the holidays. We can watch Charlie brown together

Rene Ritchie (01:42:53):
Is share play now is like a little bit like it's a little bit, much like to go through all that to like I'm, it's, it's fun and it's great. And it would've been great during the pandemic, but I can't wait until that's part of Apple's VR helmet. And like, we can just be sitting there and going Alex, you wanna watch the new iron man fly with me? Yeah, sure. We press,

Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
You know what? That is a trope in a lot of science fiction. And I think I can give credit to Amy Webb, our futurist for coming up with that. You see this now in a lot of shows where they say, let me just throw you that data or throw you that video. And then SQUI, like with a wound and it squirts. And it comes in on your on your regular everyday spectacles. I think that will be the future. I think you're right. Gonna

Rene Ritchie (01:43:28):
Splatter you a movie, Alex pan on a spotter. Your

Alex Lindsay (01:43:31):
<Laugh>. I just think a scale, you know, like I was just like 32 is cute up to 32 is cute, but I was a like, what if you could, you know, basically build on virtual theater for a lot of people to watch it. That's an interesting, I'm just like, I, I immediately like sure tools using Netflix party. Yeah. No, there is not, no, 32

Rene Ritchie (01:43:48):
Is a 10th of a, of a, of an office hours. Leo.

Alex Lindsay (01:43:52):
Yeah. Yeah. The, the, we did, we did we used Netflix party to do about 90 and the, the problem with Netflix party is that it, it it's too chatty. So it, it, it, and so it needs to be a different kind of architecture to make that work. But, you know, I was thinking, you know, what, if you had 2000 people watching together and then being able to text back and forth and discuss things, it wouldn't be the first time you watch the movie, but it might be like, oh, we've all watched it now let's watch it together and talk about it.

Rene Ritchie (01:44:20):
I think about share plays that it ducks the movie, if somebody talks and like, that is a huge problem, kind of what your family and friends, but like the kids now put on subtitles because they can't stand the adults talking over the show all the time.

Alex Lindsay (01:44:31):
See, I just put subtitles, you be quiet. I just put the subtitles on because I like Christopher Nolan movies. And I'd really like to know what was actually happening. Yes. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:39):
Yes. Not that I'm bitter. No, but, but, but it you're right. It is a lot there's, there is a lot of possibility there. Roger Ebert used to do like multiple times a year, but always at the conference zone, world affairs and university of Colorado what do you call cinema interruptus where he would put on like citizen cane or whatever the movie was chosen for for the year, the first night, like a thousand people in that auditorium would just watch it. And then over the next four nights, they would play it again. But anytime somebody had a question or comment, they just shout out, stop and then make that comment or question. And then it, everybody in the room would discuss it and Roger would discuss it. And it was, it was a great, that

Leo Laporte (01:45:16):
Would experience, especially with Roger Ebert. That would be an amazing,

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:20):
It was amazing. The, the only problem with that became like around day three, when everybody's really loosened up and it would be like, stop Roger. I once took a film studies class, 18 years to go. Yeah. And I would like to demonstrate that in front of my favorite movie critic hate, hate

Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
That. Yeah. It was like, no that's,

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:39):
But he was always very, he was always very, very kind when I was in college

Leo Laporte (01:45:44):
The film society filmmakers would come pretty big filmmakers would come with their film and then answer questions. I always loved that. That was really cool.

Alex Lindsay (01:45:53):
Yeah. That was,

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:54):
You could do that. These choices. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:45:56):
You could do that, you know, with that. Yeah. Is that you wouldn't be breaking any copyright laws or we've been trying literally. So the first time we actually did this was with pixel core 20 years ago with a DVD, but you broke literally. Yeah, no, no, we didn't. We didn't copyright laws. We said start your DVD to

Leo Laporte (01:46:15):
Star wars side of the moon at the same time

Alex Lindsay (01:46:20):
Together. Yeah. I, I, I had, it was like, I was gonna, I just walked everybody through star wars and so that you, the one that I worked on, so I was just like, start

Leo Laporte (01:46:26):
Play. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:46:27):
Yeah, yeah. And then every, and then, and then we talk, but the key is, is that, is that you could do it so much bigger. And the, and the company to do it

Leo Laporte (01:46:34):
Is the problem cuz you could, you could, but you, everybody have to

Alex Lindsay (01:46:37):
Start at the same time. No, no, no, no, no. But that's why, that's why. And that's why the Netflix party slash whatever would be better. Yeah. Is to be able to scale this up. And, and the thing that apple could do that no one else can do is build it into the player, architecture for anybody building an app for apple so that anybody could do not just apple TV, that any that's like Netflix

Rene Ritchie (01:46:58):
Or whatever with it is TikTok to a bunch of them. Yeah. TikTok new YouTube hasn't said anything yet, but TikTok launch with it in a bunch of other apps. Now what would be really smart is if you could independently pause it and, and it would slowly increase the speed when you unpause it to catch you up with everybody, <laugh> it would be like imperceptively faster until

Leo Laporte (01:47:15):
Were Renee Richie's audio today. It'd be great. <Laugh> I'm so sorry. No, no, I'm teasing it. There is, this is completely potential, but you mentioned Christopher Nolan and and, and using subtitles as more and more of us these days. And I thought it's just, cuz I'm getting old, but slash film had a great article. Thanks Ben Pearson. Here's why movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to understand. And then he has three proposals, but it's a lot of different things. One it's a there's there's Mr. Nolan himself. And it's a purpose purposeful choice in his part. You know who this is Robert Altman with Nashville and yeah. CA and Mrs. Miller, this, he said, this is not people don't you can't hear everybody. You gotta overlap. Mash. Remember mash all that overlapping guy. That's why I go to movies though. I know. I wanna, well, he also says, Pearson says, it's the acting. You gotta, you know, Christopher Nolan saying, well, baes wear a mask so you can't understand him. But actors are also mumbling more. And he says, partly this, that BAE is

Rene Ritchie (01:48:18):
Not realistic to begin with Leo. So just like do that for me, make him tell

Leo Laporte (01:48:23):
British Freaker in his mask. They also say somewhat of it is the problem that the, the recordist either doesn't have enough status to say, I didn't get that stop. Could, you know, stop mumbling or that the recordist just isn't respected on the set and is ignored. Just don't care. Yeah. Yeah. They don't care. We're moving on. Moving on. Well, we'll fix it.

Alex Lindsay (01:48:48):
That's pretty, that's pretty simplistic view of it. I mean, mean I, I, the, the record is to, if, if you don't record it on site and you can't understand that you use ADR and ADR is like for most movies, not, not all movies, but for most movies, ADR is like percent 60%.

Leo Laporte (01:49:03):
I had a sound guy call the radio show and I was talking about this, that he does ADR. It's exactly what he says. That's where you go back, get the accuracy and you rerecord the obviously that costs money and it's, you know, it's not. Yeah, but, but for a big film,

Alex Lindsay (01:49:15):
When we're talking about big films, you're gonna do it anyway. It's, it's not a, it's a lot of money. It's not a big percentage of money, like compared to what, everything that, that they do, the volume, those things it's like

Rene Ritchie (01:49:27):
So loud at is

Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
So, and that's another thing Ben Pearson brings up by the way, if it's simplistic it's cuz I have simplified his arguments. He, he goes into many more words about all this. He says part is also technology. He quotes, he interviewed a lot of sound people. Some of them who wanted to be anonymous, one high profile sound professional who wishes to remain anonymous points to the evolution of technology as an ingredient. The reason people don't remember having these same audio issues with older films is that we have more tracks to play with more options, therefore more expected and asked from the sound editors. He says, if you listen to four weddings in a funeral, you'll hear every word cuz the sound was cut on film back then.

Alex Lindsay (01:50:05):
Well, and also there's a lot of mixers that are the, a lot of them are, are experimenting with how they're, where they put voices in the channels. Yeah. And so if you don't put it in the center channel, if you don't drop it. So the problem is is that a lot of us now have surround that we have soundbar or we have some version of five, one or seven one or whatever, or if could even be that folded into stereo. And the problem is they start doing things like, oh, we wanna put it in the left and right channel rather than down the center. And that creates a really muddy track. You know? And what's interesting about it is, is that now there are some, some movies, like we, we thought about seeing James Bond in the theater, but there was a bunch of comments about not being able to understand what people we're like, oh we'll just wait until it's at home. Cause we can turn like channel.

Leo Laporte (01:50:50):
Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:50:50):
No, no, no, no. So we can turn on the captions. I just turn the caption. So yeah. So I was like, you know, so like we were like, if, if, if, so now if, if there's any review that says, this is hard to understand. Yeah. That means watch it at home. Yeah. You know, for a lot of people now. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
And that's another thing he says is that, you know, sometimes they're mixed on a sound stage, but then you get it to the multiplex and it sounds like crap maybe your home theater is better. That's true. Yeah. There's a lot. This is a really, really very good article talking about all of the things. Cause I've just basically said, you know, the shorthand is well, they're mixing for seven one and you know, if, if you don't have a good sounds system, you're gonna miss some of it, turn up your center, you're missing the one. And it's the dialogue you're missing. The, the one. So turn up the, turn up the center channel. If you, the dialogue for you, no dialogue. And I have to say more and more people are watching the close captions, which is gonna hurt the movie theaters cuz you don't have 'em there. Right?

Rene Ritchie (01:51:44):
They actually I've heard that people like it for the same reason that people like text on YouTube, but that it forces a level of attention. That's always otherwise hand it over. So like you might be, if you're listening to it, you might be moving around doing a bunch of things, looking at your phone, but the minute you can't hear something or you see text on screen, you stop and you start reading it and that locks you into that experience. And so they're super happy about

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
It. Yeah. Yeah. There's, it's a, it was a really good I thought piece and that doesn't have any to do with apple or max. But I know you guys are interested in this kind of stuff, especially Alex, Ben Pearson, some of

Rene Ritchie (01:52:14):
That Paul greengras stuff, we need the script of audio as well. Cause I can't tell what's happening in those fight scenes anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:52:18):
<Laugh> those fights are very so mud edited.

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:22):
That's a, that's a, that's my, that's my problem. That's one of my problem with Marvel movies. It's just like, oh guys, this gonna be, there's a, there's a corner of the screen that doesn't have some crap in it for six puts more CGI crap in there. Right. It's like, okay, whatever right.

Leo Laporte (01:52:36):
X code 13, two also came out now this is my, this is always my gripe that it's relatively quick to get, you know, the latest OS 10 or Wells 11, but then you gotta, then it's so long to update X code and yes, there's a new X code. And according to nine to five Mac Felipe Esposito hints at upcoming swift playgrounds for release, we've been talking about that and very excited about playgrounds for it's not in there yet, but I guess there's features in the X code, the apps release notes, say it adds compatibility with products, projects created with Swift's playgrounds for so it must mean we're getting close. Yeah,

Rene Ritchie (01:53:18):
I hope. Well it doesn't say spring on the website, so that's a good sign. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:53:23):
It'll all be here in spring. Just be

Rene Ritchie (01:53:25):
I went and looked. No, I, as soon as that happened, I went and looked through the rest of the features just to make sure that word spring wasn't literally sprinkled

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
Around, not coming in the spring. Everything's in the spring. Spring is coming. Spring is coming game of

Rene Ritchie (01:53:37):
Thrones. The sequel spring is coming spring is

Leo Laporte (01:53:39):
That would be a much lighter game of Thrones.

Rene Ritchie (01:53:42):
Yeah. The tars, I think the, the, the spinoff is the tars. Right. Which is not gonna be any, any lighter or more music. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:53:49):
God. Yeah. That's the dragon folk, right? Yeah. All right, let's take one more break. And then your picks of the week, if you would prepare them, tune them up, Polish them up, but first a word from our sponsor at and T active armor. Now I, I know how it is. You spent the day staring at your phone, waiting for that one call. You're waiting to hear about the job, right? Or I hope it's not the hospital. Maybe the family saying we're coming or not. And it finally rings. And what is it? Your car war is about to run out. I got one the other day that said you've been approved for financial aid. <Laugh> well, that's good. I must be going back to school. Look, <laugh> the last thing you want when you're waiting for an important call or just want to, you know, play words with friends on your phone is a, is a spam call. Don't let fraud disappoint you at and T makes your security a top priority. Helping block fraud calls with at, and T's active armor. It's not complicated at and T active armor, 24 7 proactive network security fraud call blocking and spam notifications to help stop threats at no extra for charge compatible device and service required. Visit att.com/active armor for details. And now Renee Richie with his

Rene Ritchie (01:55:18):
Per of the week. So I, you know, I've made it a habit on, on this show of picking what I think are really interesting creator driven projects. And this might be the most interesting one ever because Justine, Eric, I Justine has now got her own light saber oh Lord. Which is just the most fantastic thing. <Laugh> well, so she's been training. Brazilian jujitsu looks so good. Been training Filipino with screamer. Look at hers. Oh man. Dick fighting. She's knife fighting. And now she's weaponized her talents into merchandise. And what I love is that she didn't just make a light saber light saber. She thought about the practicality of using it for things

Leo Laporte (01:55:52):
Like it's combat brave light Saer Hey guys,

Rene Ritchie (01:55:55):
It's got like, it's got, it's got like a, ITSs got like, she used to protect your hands. Like it it's made from a person who understands the basics of weapon craft too. Which to me is like, again, endlessly fascinating. And she is really good with this stuff. It turns out like those boxes, those next unboxings, they have no chance. They used to have like a one in 10 chant that could get away from her. She's just gonna murder it. Those boxes from now on.

Leo Laporte (01:56:18):
So I mean, these aren't an expensive 400 to $500. It standard combat grade 36 inch blade and saber sport bag. Now the blade is not a sword blade. It's is, is it a glass tube? Because I wouldn't want to hit anybody. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:56:35):
Well it's got, it's got a light thing, but like it's not, it's not like a laser sword. You're not gonna merge. Like you're not gonna kill people. You can bludgeon them. Pretty good. I imagine it's more for

Leo Laporte (01:56:44):
Show a glass winter or two. The options can also come. She says with a celebration, exclusive Imperial ripper blade. That's also black and silver. That's when you get to $522. Yeah. That's wow. These are beautiful. I think you're gonna put 'em on the wall though, right? You're not gonna go after you watch the, you might wanna go. Yeah. You can wanna

Rene Ritchie (01:57:07):
Go out there and spin 'em and yeah. I mean, like she put up a video too, like what she's actually using them. And they look like so much fun. Wow. I, I got a, when I used to do Woohoo a long, long time ago, I did like a spear and double blades and it, once you get into it, like, of course, like, no one's really using for comedy anymore, but they're just really good exercise, really fun. A lot of coordination, a lot of cardio

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
And yeah, you could use this for practice, right? You bought your fantasies. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:57:35):
It doesn't wanna be a Jeti

Leo Laporte (01:57:37):
And all pixels in pixel blades come with a one year warranty. I bet. Darth mall. Couldn't say that

Rene Ritchie (01:57:44):
<Laugh> no, a Molly wouldn't wouldn't

Leo Laporte (01:57:46):
Live long enough. Excuse it.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:47):
<Laugh> I just, you know, the the funny thing was is that I, I wanted to go get one. I'm gonna go back and order one. But I, I, I, I wanted to go get one, but she took the whole site down. Like she, she, it was, it crashed, she put it up and the whole thing was like, just gone, you know, like it was, it was, you know, you

Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
Forget, I wish I could say we just took the site down, but it's pretty easy to get in too. So on in,

Rene Ritchie (01:58:07):
Well, I think give us time, Leo mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:58:09):
Exactly. We mm-hmm <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
Yeah. Yeah. There's VIP access to the IJ army base camp community. If you wanna become a cadet,

Rene Ritchie (01:58:19):
<Laugh> a Padawan,

Leo Laporte (01:58:21):
A Padawan learner. Wow. This is cool. Very nice. They act, she make other stuff too, but now they have an IJ version, so that's gotta be better. Now.

Rene Ritchie (01:58:31):
She has a light Saer look at her, look at

Leo Laporte (01:58:33):
Her. <Laugh> that's a start. She's so happy. Now I have a light picture front ho I love that right at the top.

Rene Ritchie (01:58:38):
And you wonder what Jen is doing. She's going Justine put down the light. Saer <laugh> <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:58:41):
We have Lego to finish little. Did you know Alex Lindsay, when you ran into Justina Zurich at a was it a WordPress camp in Pittsburgh was an

Alex Lindsay (01:58:52):
UN, it was an UN what was it called? UN camp or something like that? Yeah. UN conference. That's what it was conference. It was the podcast UN conference in Pittsburgh. <Affirmative> and

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
She, what was she doing? She was just there saying, yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:59:02):
She was, she was there asking a lot of questions. It was funny. Yeah. I, I, I was teaching, I was talking about podcasting. I was also talking about green screen and the person with all the questions were was, was Justine. I mean, she just had, and it wasn't like, she was peppering me with useless. She was questions. It was all like, she was really think em called Leo. And I was like, okay. We found someone <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:59:21):
I remember you. Like, I was like, this is,

Alex Lindsay (01:59:25):
Yeah. From the first moment I was like, she's gonna go, she's gonna go big. You know? And we, we got her, she was in early Mac bricks. Yeah. That was like,

Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
What was 15, 20 years. Almost 20 years

Alex Lindsay (01:59:33):
Ago. Yeah. Like 15 years ago. And she still looks

Leo Laporte (01:59:35):
Like she's 28. I don't understand how she's doing. She doesn't changed a lot for the rest

Alex Lindsay (01:59:38):
Of us. That we're

Leo Laporte (01:59:39):
The paintings in the attic, Imperial saber.com/product/ij, Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week,

Alex Lindsay (01:59:50):
You've got two, two quick ones. One is that that we were just because we were talking about audio making waves, which is about cinematic sound. I think it comes with the YouTube subscription. I never know what's free and what is free, but, but there's a, it's free for, for me anyways, but it's about cinematic sound, a great walkthrough of the history of cinematic sound as well as perfect as well as really telling you all the things that happen and how it gets put together in like an hour, you know, an hour and a half or whatever. Really, really great. It's Scott, Ben Burt, and Walter merch and oh wow. A lot of other folks that are, that are talking about it, lot of the best, some of the top Gary rides, Fromm, a lot of the top folks talking about how they got into it, what it looked like and what happened.

Alex Lindsay (02:00:28):
And, and then it breaks down like how each part there's, there's basically seven components to a sound design for a, a modern movie. And it kind of breaks you breaks down what those are for you. So you really understand who there, cuz there's often times different people working on each section of that. And so it's really good. And then the other thing that I, I, I chose also ZBrush, which is just got bought by Maxon today. So it's mostly that wow, incredible application it's been around for a long time. A lot of us have used it for it's one of the

Leo Laporte (02:00:59):
Models, one of the oldest tools, right? For this stuff, one of

Alex Lindsay (02:01:02):
The, for, well, definitely for, for what it does, which is painting in 3d. So basically what it lets you do is paint models in 3d, like make models from 3d or, or take your existing models and paint them. And literally when I say paint them, I don't mean paint textures onto them. You can do that, but really create new models and merge them and blur them and push them around and everything else in three, it's the most powerful app in that area. And it just got bought by Maxon, which has been kind of, they picked up Redshift and, and and red giant. And there's a lot of they're, they're picking up a lot of stuff. They're, they're be, you know, picking up speed I think. And but a really, really great complimentary thing to what Maxons already doing. And it's so it's exciting to see, it'll be exciting to see what happens, but it wasn't something that's really as Mac breaky, but, but I think it's important for people to know that it's happening. It's for, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:01:50):
Our industry it's zebras around for since 1997. I mean, this is, this is one of the venerable tools in your

Alex Lindsay (02:01:57):
Toolkits. Yeah. And, and I'm hoping that, you know, some of it comes to, you know, the fact that they're owned by Maxon will the, the interface was always built for a different kind of artist, like when it started. And so it has this roots of a very odd way of approaching modeling, which is takes a long time to get your head around. But they so it'll be interesting to see if they, they make that a little bit more standard, leave it probably the way it is, but takes some of that technology and put it into cinema 40. It'd be really

Leo Laporte (02:02:22):
Interesting. I, I think you did some zebra demos back and call for help days. I believe I did.

Alex Lindsay (02:02:27):
Yeah, I did. It's really, really powerful. Yeah. I mean it was, yeah, we definitely talked about it because there's just one, there there's been a lot of other apps that are kind of in the forger and, and we, and, and there's you know, lots of other little apps that have done that, but this one is the, has always been the most popular one to do it in

Leo Laporte (02:02:46):
Dwindle. In our IRC says he's a Ze brush artist. He will miss. And I, I don't know if they're going away, but he says the free lifetime free upgrades will be missed. I don't know if that means Maxon will, will be killing those or no idea. We don't know yet, but <affirmative> yeah. Things like that do go away. It's not unusual. Yeah, exactly. Lifetime is might be why something? Yeah. Right. <Laugh> so you don't have something to do with that. You know, they're like, like, Ooh, maybe

Alex Lindsay (02:03:10):
That didn't turn out so

Leo Laporte (02:03:10):
Well. So and this book, this documentary you're talking about 90 minute documentary making waves, the art of cinematic sound is I'm getting it for free cuz I'm a YouTube premium subscribers.

Alex Lindsay (02:03:21):
So I think so am I, so that's why I couldn't remember whether it was, I think that's right.

Leo Laporte (02:03:24):
It's a YouTube movies and shows. So I guess if you're not a subscriber, you might have to

Alex Lindsay (02:03:28):
Pay for it, but, and it's just an incredible collect watch tonight.

Leo Laporte (02:03:32):
I can't wait.

Alex Lindsay (02:03:33):
Yeah. It's really good. And I will admit I'm a Fe for this kind of, that kind of movie. It's like 80% of what

Leo Laporte (02:03:38):
I watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How stuff is done, cuz that's what you're into man doing stuff. I like that. Me, I just wanna sit back and watch. I like to watch Andy and ACO your pick of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:03:54):
Actually mine is the 20, 21 app of the year, according to the app store. It's an interesting note slash idea processor slash word processor called <laugh> oops, sorry. Craft. Thank you very much. I, I, I accidentally tapped out of the,

Leo Laporte (02:04:12):
To go too, is the website. We did talk about this last week. So you, did you play with it after we talked about it last week or

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:19):
Yes. I'm. I'm sorry. I totally forgot about that. Yeah. I, I start started playing with it last week and I just wanted to add some of my own notes to it. I thought I thought that it's a nice hybrid between two different like project writing management kind of apps. I like, I'm still using Scrivener for like my work work work I've been using for like 10 years, whatever, cuz it's just a, it is just a powerhouse for organizing a book for starting out with notes and developing it, adding research research research. One of my, one of my Scrivener docs is truly gigabytes in size because it incorporates PDFs, incorporates a million pictures and stuff like that. It's like a 10 year world research project. The other one that I, the other app that I tend to use is lices for the opposite reason, it really is just a structured sort of like text editor where you can have like folders with text docs inside them.

Andy Ihnatko (02:05:09):
Use that to sort of organize your thoughts and basically take down a big project chunk by chunk, by chunk. It's not as powerful S Scrivener, but unlike Scrivener, it's a very, very simple file structure. So it's very, very easy to sync data across different devices. What I'm liking about what I'm liking about craft is that it's, it incorporates some of the stuff I like about notion, which is that it kind of breaks free of the whole idea of docs. As, as a fundamental construct, you can just basically have a canvas that you're just basically dropping blocks onto. I think that's very useful. It makes it very, very easy to share individual parts of your project with other people. If you, if other people need to see them, approve them, give, give their notes on it without having to basically show them export the entire document and see all the works that you've got on things you have, you barely even it's because it's, it's using its own it's using its own cloud storage to make that happen.

Andy Ihnatko (02:06:05):
Scrivener gets a lot of flack for making it really difficult to sync between projects, excuse me, sync between devices. But that's because again, you, how do you sync three gigabytes worth of files and making sure that all of them have been touched properly? So and of, I'm not sure it's, I'm not sure it's quite for me, but it's definitely worth promoting. It's definitely worth telling people that this thing exists. And please take a look at it. If, if you're finding yourself being falling short by Google docs, Microsoft office, or any of the any of the apps that I've been, I've been mentioning it's also kind of on, on the launchpads still cuz there's still buildings stuff they're building out. Something that I've really, really is attracting to me, the, the ability to edit stuff via via web client, not just a Mac or, or iOS client.

Andy Ihnatko (02:06:47):
That's one of the, that's been one of the big things that's been missing from Scrivener. For me, I stick with it despite the fact that I can't use it on my Chromebook or I can't use it on random device that has a web browser. I would love if that had that feature, but it, it seems to tick a lot of boxes that I would love to have seen like in, in ulyses and Scrivener for that reason, definitely with taking a look at also there's a free tier very, very useful. If you, if you're paying nothing for it for 40 to five bucks a year, you get like the more muscular version of this

Leo Laporte (02:07:17):
Craft.Do. And it is beautiful. I played with a little bit and as I mentioned last week, the only reason I stopped using it is because it's not cross platform because I think it's fantastic. I really was impressed by. Yep. But I'm web editor. Some people I don't live on Macintosh's all the time. <Laugh> actually more and more because of the Mac M one pro I'm really see how they suck you in. They really, I have to say I was, you know, all about my framework laptop until I got the the new Mac pro and it's like, wow, this thing is kind of fast, kind of fast

Andy Ihnatko (02:07:50):
You're acumenical you embrace all faith.

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
I, yes, I like what's good to be applauded. I also noticed that I'm very faddish, you know, I'll go through periods of really, you know, deep interest in this and then it moves on and now it's that. And that's just me. Hey guys, you know what? You did a good job and we're now done. Mac break weekly is almost through, but first a plug for Renee Richie, youtube.com/renee Richie. You just finished your myth busting episode. Are you gonna take a, a nap and and hold off before? No, I wanna talk about the iPhone, the iPhone 14 camera. That's big news. The iPhone 14 camera. Holy big sensor pixel Binn it might be fun. Do we know though? I mean, this is rumor, right? Yeah. It's rumors, but like, it makes sense, especially if you wanna get towards AK, you gotta get more pixels in that camera. See, now the only reason I ask is I'm feeling guilty that I didn't bring it up next week. You'll well, yeah, you'll you'll know all about it. You'll have lots to say <laugh> you can watch the video in the meantime, youtube.com/renee Richie, Andy Naka. When are you on GBH in Boston next?

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:00):
On Friday as usual 1230 in the afternoon. Eastern time, you can stream it live@wgbtwgbnews.org, or you can stream it later. They usually put 'em up later in the night. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:09:12):
How's the project, you know what I mean? The project how's that coming? It's

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:17):
Moving, it's moving forward. I'm still up to my personal deadlines on getting it done. My only bottleneck is as usual the design stuff, which is like I, I, I have to, I have to remind myself that it just, the content is what's important. It's not the masted. It's not the site design. We're not trying to, we're not trying to steer people to a store. We don't need a track, their eye movements and figure out where they're clicking. Just even if you just go over the basic WordPress template, that'll be fine, Andy. So

Leo Laporte (02:09:45):
I look forward to it. Just know the world awaits.

Andy Ihnatko (02:09:50):
I will, I will, I will announce because I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm interested to see if any of this is a good idea. I've been working on this for several months and, but I, I still a good idea inside my head, but yeah, exactly. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
I wonder if this is a good idea. Office hours.global, the 24 hour and global phenomenon continues on there. How's your studio coming along, Alex, it's coming well

Alex Lindsay (02:10:14):
On Mondays. We talk about it. So if you watch the Monday sessions, you'll see us talking through to it. So we've made a bunch of decisions, cuz what happens is I show everybody, okay, this is where I'm at. And then everyone goes, oh, I wouldn't do this. And you've thought about, have you thought about this? And what's funny is we started using maker pipe, you know, is a thing that we, that I've been using to kind of, I'm planning to build a bunch of this with and the, the founder of maker pipe David Sliter is, was on on our show last week, this week he was on, on Monday. He's like putting in questions, like, how are you gonna connect this? You know, like he's like the like person who owns maker pipe is like looking at, wow, that's so funny.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:49):
Of course you're using maker maker, pipe to design this studio. So yeah, I yeah, exactly. Building it with it. And so, and so the anyway, so which I did before, I even knew before he came on or before I knew anything about them directly, we just started buying it, you know? And so, so anyway, the so, but we've decided, oh, we don't need shelves here. And we have to think about this, this weight distribution, we're trying to build my new desk. If it, if it happens, you'll see us build it, this, this coming Monday or not build it, but we'll, the design will come out more. Is that it's a five 14 Toby desk that literally has wheels and will move around in the room so I can move it. Like, you know, it's not just turning like you have a TWI, but like moving like on wheels, but it's got five, four and a teleprompter in camera and the lights are all in like one thing that sits on wheels.

Alex Lindsay (02:11:36):
That's cool because what I wanna be able to do is have my background be different. Like I wanna say, oh, I really want this kind of background or that kind of background. We even talked about putting it on a big one of those big turntables. So it's slowly turning so that, so that like over an hour, it's just like, you just see different parts of the, of the set, but we're gonna, we're gonna not do that first. So, so anyway, but the Alex, can we just matching volumes? Can we just talk to each other and build volume sets for both of us? Exactly, exactly. It'd be so much fun. So, so, but, but if you're interested in sets, there's a lot of discussion about weight distribution and lights and, and routing and process. Cause I've got one area that's kind of my work bench area, one area, that's my synthesizer area.

Alex Lindsay (02:12:16):
One area that's the, you know, Shelby and the fireplace, you know? And so, so there's a whole bunch of things that are all in a little 15 by 20 foot cube that we're figuring out together. And so that's on Mondays and they, and again, I, the, the, one of our best sessions, I mean, I think that some of our best sessions so far have been with you, Leo and Anne D and, and Renee are some of the best sessions we've had in our second hours. And Michael Krasney was right up there with it last week. Nice. So people should go up to, you know, if you check out last Thursday and then, then we're streaming, I learned how to make pierogies on Sunday. Yeah. That was pretty fun. And all of these things are, you know, it's, it's just a fascinating puzzle, but what you're gonna see on Saturday that we run from 11 until like four o'clock in the afternoon, it is gonna look a lot like a broadcast, but it's not, it's all over zoom.

Alex Lindsay (02:13:05):
And you're just gonna see us piecing together all these technologies that are part of it's being done in the web. I mean, part of it's being done in the cloud part of it's controlling, like literally remote controlling our switchers from there's four switcher being controlled automatically from someone else like someone in Germany, actually, <laugh>, we'll be sitting there switching our, our switchers at home while we're doing the cooking. And then all of, all of our signals are being cut in the cloud. And so, and you can actually in office hours, listen to the comms and watch the behind the scenes. You don't, you can either watch the show on YouTube, but you can also just listen to us and, and ask questions and talk about it while we're doing the show. So it's a, it's a funny, it's a fun way to learn how to do this kind of stuff. So anyway, that's

Leo Laporte (02:13:45):
Coming up office hours.global. And if you want to employ Alex in your next stream, a oh nine, oh, do media. We do a lot of crazy things. Mac break weekly on Tuesdays 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM Eastern 1900 UTC. I mentioned in the lifetime because you can watch us do it live. I mean, I think most people listen on demand cuz it is a podcast. But if you'd like to be part of the live audience just go to live of twit.tv, there's audio and video streams there and chat with us live at irc.twittv. Club TWiT members can also chat with us in our private Discord, which is a great place to hang 24/7 lots of fun going on in there. You can also get the shows after the fact on the website, twit.tv for this show with twit.tv/mbw, but all the shows are there. There's a YouTube channel for every show as well, including this show, youtube.com/macbreakweekly, or go to youtube.com/twit for links to all of the show, YouTube streams.

Leo Laporte (02:14:46):
And then finally, of course, the most common and best way to subscribe is use a podcast application. We're in every one of 'em just search for it, subscribe and you'll get it automatically. The minute it's available. If your podcast application supports reviews, please leave us a five star review. Let the world know. You listen to, I think what is now the longest running Mac tech show, anywhere Mac break weekly. Thank you Alex. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Rene. Thank you all for listening. Now. Get back to work. Cause break time is over. Bye. Bye.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:19):
Do you have an iPhone, an apple watch an iPad or any number of Apple devices? Well, you have got to check out iOS today with me, Mikah Sargent, and Rosemary Orchard. We cover all things iOS and help you get the most out of your devices.