MacBreak Weekly Episode 797 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy, Rene, and Alex are here for our last live show of the year. We have a little bit of news, but a lot of, bit of, lot of friendly conversation coming up. We'll talk about Apple's chip plans in Southern California, rumors about the iPhone 14 and 13, and about new macs. And Rene explains a new MacBook cadence strategy and why we shouldn't be expecting M2s too soon. It's all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

New Speaker (00:00:34):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:47):
This is MacBreak Weekly episode, 797 recorded Tuesday, December 21st, 2021. A Plastic Festoon. This episode of MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by coin base. Cryptocurrency might feel like a secret or exclusive club, but Coinbase believes that everyone everywhere should be able to get in the door. Whether you've been trading for years or just getting started, Coinbase can help for a limited time, new users can get $10 in free Bitcoin.

Leo Laporte (00:01:17):
When you sign up today at coinbase.com/macbreakweekly, and by user way.org user way ensures 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 user way.org/twi for 30% off user weighs AI powered accessibility solution and by cash flying. Give your users the seamless online experience. They want power your site or app with cash flies CDN and be 30% faster than the competition. Learn more at twit.Cachefly.com. It's time for MacBreak Weekly. The last episode of 2021 and good rids <laugh> <laugh> next week, it's gonna be a best of episode. We will reconvene in January and hope that 2022 is better than 2020 <laugh> one that's Rene Ritchie shivering in his, his boots.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:22):
Hello, a Leo. You can't say it like that. You have to, it can't be 2022. You have to like, try to say it in a way like 20, 22, like, like nobody thinks it's a sequel, a trike Tre,

Leo Laporte (00:02:33):
Whatever it is gotta be done with it's. Yeah, it's a, it's a trilogy baby. Get 20, 20, 20, 21 should have been 20, 22. And that's 20, 20 junior, 20, 20 junior, 2023. The, the conjuring, I don't know.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:48):
And it's still a Tuesday in March. COVID somehow, still a Tuesday in March,

Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
Still a Tuesday. SI.

Rene Ritchie (00:02:55):
But we're together. Leo. That's important.

Leo Laporte (00:02:56):
Thank goodness we got. Yes, exactly. There's Andy and that co we have each other w G B H in Bo stone. Hello? Andy safe. Almost. Yeah. Noel. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:09):
Yep. We, we had our dusting of snow, but again, global warming so we can expect some snow in February, but mostly LA last weekend, it was like lit 61, 62 degrees. I was, I was almost resentful because it was like the day before it was like in the forties. I know the next day it was gonna be again in the thirties. And it's like, but I don't wanna go for a nice long bike ride. Oh, come on. You. No, this is the one day we have. Okay, fine. I'll go up for a nice long bike ride. I'll have lunch outside. I'll do some shopping. You're

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
Brave when it's the forties here. I say, I ain't going for a bike ride. That's too cold. I've no, again,

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:43):
It was one day of 61, 62 degree weather. It was like, it was like gorgeous on the edge, like spring weather. It was like, again, you don't wanna waste one of those days. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
And Alex Lindsay from OfficHhours.global. He never rests the last hello office hours of 2021 will be December 31st. No doubt.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:03):
Oh yeah. We, we, we, we did a vote with our, we do an education hour on Saturdays and I, I voted I said, do you guys wanna do it on, on this Saturday? Cause it's the 25th, you know, I did it last week and three, three out three to one. They, you work at Christmas

Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
And

Alex Lindsay (00:04:17):
You could have, you could do. I only think of his work,

Leo Laporte (00:04:19):
What we did the 24 hours of of new year's. You could do that cuz you're gonna be there anyway.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:26):
<Laugh> so we've been talking about it. We've actually been talking about, we did. We just did four hours where we basically last Saturday, we it's up there. It's up on it's up on my site or whatever my page on YouTube, but it, we did. I, we cooked and then we jumped to we, we jumped to Massachusetts and did a live stream of some mu a musician. Then we jumped to Belfast and did another, another set of musicians. Wow. And then we had a, basically a round table. It was jumping from party. Yeah. And all connected to cl into the cloud. And we were like, you know, if we already figured

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
This should do that for new years,

Alex Lindsay (00:04:58):
Will you're talking about it and shave your head? That's the important, I'm not gonna, I'm not ready to shave my head yet. Do not. I've done it. Don't I've done it.

Leo Laporte (00:05:06):
Don't this was a mistake, huge mistake. Even if this record costs

Alex Lindsay (00:05:10):
<Laugh> I have so much, I have, I have so little left that I feel like I should take full advantage of it until it's time for it to go. So it's, you know, I, I, I figure I only got another couple years,

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
By the way, half a wood happy Larry solstice. It's December 21st, first day of believe it or not first day of winter. Oh, that's cold. I'm gonna start with a happy story. I mean, somebody got downer stories lately. NSO is running outta cash.

Alex Lindsay (00:05:40):
Woo. I wonder how that happened.

Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
After the us band, this is from nine to five Mac and apple action, Pegasus spyware maker, NSO running out of cash. Forgive me for being skeptical. But remember they're being sued by Facebook and apple. It was very convenient to run out of cash when you're being sued for millions and millions of dollars. Isn't it?

Alex Lindsay (00:06:05):
I think they're probably running the, I

Leo Laporte (00:06:06):
Mean, think money though, right? I think they really are running. Just shut. Yeah. I mean,

Alex Lindsay (00:06:09):
Yeah. I think that you know, this is one of the things we often talk to people about when they talk about how much they spend on this or whether they should be careful of that. I'm like the most expensive thing in any business is failure. And the problem they had is they, they weren't, they weren't paying attention to what was happening. Like they were interested in the money. They would let anybody check in, they weren't crosschecking what was happening. And I think that they, you know, just got bit by, by being, you know, lazy and greedy. There are

Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
Talks ongoing with several real investment funds about refinancing or an outright sale. You know, they're actually seeking a buyer. All the buyers are saying, oh no, we would just be defensive. It would be a defensive, we changed the business of the company yeah. To defensive. Right. Yeah, sure.

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:55):
Look how easy the black and our black bleaches out to white, you know,

Rene Ritchie (00:07:00):
Emil song in a statement today said he would use it purely as a retaliatory

Leo Laporte (00:07:03):
Technique. Yeah. There you go. Only do to get the bad guys. Okay.

Rene Ritchie (00:07:08):
Yeah. And to get a working version of Disney plus

Leo Laporte (00:07:10):
Installed in <laugh> okay. But that's okay. In case you don't remember NSO and Pegasus were of course in the news all year because they, or making spyware that was breaking into apple phones, used by governments to attack activists and journalists. And the worst partly,

Rene Ritchie (00:07:27):
Oh, the worst part is that Facebook is suing them now, but actively tried to hire them to write codes so that they could break into iPhones earlier after apple closed to view their exploits.

Leo Laporte (00:07:35):
Oh, I didn't realize that that's shocking. Yeah. I'm shocked. There's

Rene Ritchie (00:07:39):
A whole investigation in Facebook trying license NSO code to get data from iOS users that they were getting from

Leo Laporte (00:07:45):
Android users two years ago, management bought the company out, valuing it about a billion dollars. They have 450 million in debt. And according to Bloomberg, the us restrictions have put pressure on the NSO because they can't find ways to, to make that money back alone with the face value of 300 million that NSO issued in 2019 trading at an all time low bit of 70 cents in the dollar now down to 50 cents on Monday. I know, I just think, you know, I wish them <laugh> all the best karma, everything. They deserve, everything. They, everything they deserve and more, yeah, yeah. Karma's a baby. But

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:25):
You wonder where the, where the, where the brain drain is gonna go. I mean, project, I read the report from project zero about how almost in glowing terms about not just Pegasus, but just the hack to get it installed on, on iPhone. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:08:39):
Wasn't that? I see the PDF.

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:41):
Yeah. They, they were, they were writing about how this is, this is, they didn't say this, but it, it gave me the impression of, if you find out that your next door neighbors had launched a mission to the moon and they're taking selfies on the lunar surface, this is not, this is not the sort of technology. This is not the sort of capability that a private company is supposed to be able to develop for themselves. This is the sort of stuff you get with a, with a full support of a nation state behind it. And that was just again, hats off to them because it was the, the, the, the level of, of the exploit they were doing was just impeccable. But the thing is people to develop these and these people are gonna be on LinkedIn in about a couple months time. So where are they gonna do go, what are they gonna do?

Leo Laporte (00:09:20):
So this is and I thank Golia in our discord our discord chat for sending me this from Google project, zero's blog, a deep dive into an NSO zero click iMessage exploit, remote code execution, the citizen lab, the, the Toronto based security researchers shared a sample of the forced entry exploit with them. Yeah. Apple security and engineering architecture group seer collaborated on the technical analysis. You know, and here's an example of the message citizen lab per provided of, of you might get. And if you click this, this was a phishing SMS. This was actually back in 2016. Yeah. If you click that. So it was really interesting. So iMessage has native support for gifts, of course, or jifs depending on it takes no stand on that. The geo silent <laugh> ifs so you can send and receive them in chats.

Leo Laporte (00:10:19):
They show up as you know, in the chat window. Apple wanted to make them loop endlessly rather than play once. So in the iMessage parsing and processing pipeline, iMessage calls a meth message. And this is important outside of blast door. This is how they got around blast door outside of blast door, which is that security that apple applied after they first discovered this happening. And then according to project zero, looking at the selector name, the intention here is probably just to copy the Jiff before editing the loop count field, but the semantic of the method are different under the hood. It uses core graphics API to render the source image of a new gift file at the destination path. And just because the source file name has to end a GI F doesn't mean, yes, you know what, I'm, you know, where I'm going here.

Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
That it's actually a gift file. So you can put an arbitrary file there, get it to be rendered. And instead of rendering a lovely dancing bear well, it's a fake gift, 20 image codex. It's a, it's, it's a fascinating read. I won't, I won't read the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. They also use the fake gift trip to so that, so remember it's, it's gotta, so that's just not by itself, not enough. What they do is make a PDF and that targets a vulnerability in the core graphics, PDF parse, again, still outside the blast door PDFs, the PDF par doesn't seem to interpret JavaScript, but <laugh> apparently it does due to the J big two compression standard, which was created for Xerox work center devices many moons ago in the late nineties. And PDFs produced by those scanners were very small.

Leo Laporte (00:12:14):
And so this technique, this of course, apple has to support every kind of PDF, including J big two. And anyway, it's a really, it's just a fascinating if you wanna understand how this stuff works and I think it's so good. Yeah. Yeah. Just, just it's just, well, and by the way, it wasn't really apple code because the J big two de coder came from X PDF, an open source library. And so, and apple just, yeah, people gotta remember that open source means anybody can look at the code, but it doesn't mean anybody is actually looking at the code. Right. You actually actually look at the code to find the problem. So it's an integer overflow. And we, you know, that those are also overflow is a word you should always listen for when it comes to security. <Laugh> when you get a buffer overflow, you can often get into memory and execute arbitrary code somewhere else in memory. And that's exactly what happens. So really, yeah. Whoever designed this is definitely is Morem. So well done, gonna be, oh, you know, I love project zero. They are they're, that's so smart. And so is by the way. So citizens labs and I'm sure seer at apple does a great job. Citizen labs. Canada loves you back. Let me just put that out

Andy Ihnatko (00:13:25):
There. Can we, yeah. Could we highlight that the reason why NSO is getting so much heat was because human rights organizations, press organizations all ganged up, bond them, but to, to elevate this into the international story that was supposed to be that there is this one private organization that is selling nation state grade technology to other nation states. But basically it was a, it was basically Sur spying as a service, which was something that has never been done by successfully before the scope up with the problem, the intensity of how easily that this tool was being able to infiltrate devices and the types, the, the, the owners of those devices, the high profile owners of those devices. Those were just things that you you'd get. One little bit of story there. One little bit of story there. And so would pop up kind of here in the background of a story, but the fact that there was a correlated effort to make this the international news story of the week. This is what put pressure. This is what this is what cause the Biden administration to basically blacklist the entire service. This is what basically empowered all these other services to somebody say, no, no, no, we gotta shut this thing down. I do wanna,

Leo Laporte (00:14:32):
Again, I do want on the head, the guy would figured this out, even if it wasn't used for the best reasons. So basically, right, right. I'll go to, I'll skip to the end, but basically by taking advantage of this code in J big, the J big compression, this open source code, they were able to carefully craft the decompression so that they could use logical operators and, or Exor. And Exor between memory regions at arbitrary offsets. Now you might say, well, so what you're gonna have a couple of and gates out there in memory. Well, it turns out they were able to build with just those four operations, a touring, complete programming language any computable function <laugh> yeah. So in effect <laugh>, while JB two doesn't have scripting capabilities, but combined with the vulnerability, it has the ability and I'm quoting project zero to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. Basically they built their own computer architecture in memory and scripted that

Alex Lindsay (00:15:46):
It's, this is, this is the equivalent of like that, that, that movie segment, where some guy goes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna beat you with my, my thumb. And then just like, <laugh> just like, just like, that's all I got. That's all I got. That's all I need. All I need it is

Leo Laporte (00:15:58):
It's about that. Right? Four logic, four logic gates. And they were able to create a tour complete system,

Alex Lindsay (00:16:06):
Give me four logic gates, and I can roll the world. Leo

Leo Laporte (00:16:09):
Using over 70,000 segment commands, defining logic bit operations. They define a small computer architecture with features such as registers, a full 64 bit adder and a comparator, which they use to search memory and perform etic operations. It's not as fast as JavaScript. <Laugh> I love this, but need to be fast all, but it's fundamentally computational equivalent. Wow. The built boots Lego outta sticks from his backyard and he's race a Ferrari. It does not need to yeah. The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape, exploiter written to run on this logic circuit, the whole thing runs in this weird, em, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a J big two stream. I mean, whoever this, whoever, I think, think you take one guy. Yeah. Just hand,

Alex Lindsay (00:16:58):
Hand them. I, I think that they could turn a raspberry pie into a supercomputer.

Leo Laporte (00:17:01):
Just think what this person could do if they put their mind a good, instead of EV I know <laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (00:17:05):
It's colonizer. I'm sure they thought it was good when they wrote it. Like, you know, like I think that the, the, the, all these things start with good intentions. It just, you know, the, the idea that you could, I you know, that you could break into those things and I'm sure that it started off with, as a, we're gonna do the, the right thing and keep terrorists back and all this other stuff, Alex.

Leo Laporte (00:17:22):
Well, also I have to say, and I, I kinda kind of understand this, that people who can operate at this level often do things cuz they're interesting and don't really think about anything else. It's just, wow. I can do that.

Andy Ihnatko (00:17:34):
There were no bra VA bran VA types from brown types where it's like, I don't care. Who's I don't care. Who's running the checks for this. I don't care. What kind of labor is being used to produce? The thing is I've got, I've got a sponsor to let me build rockets. And then after I build their weapons, I get to build rockets that go to the moon. Yeah. I don't care what I, I'm not thinking that that far ahead. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:53):
So do I, if you're interested in this kind of thing, Google, Google project, zero.blogspot.com. They posted this on the 12th. Wow. And thank you golly, for sharing this with me, cuz it was, oh, I'm sorry. I just closed it. <Laugh> sorry. Sorry to John. John switched to it. And then I went, bye bye. You know, truly here. I'll I'll open it again. This is this is the brilliant,

Rene Ritchie (00:18:18):
Brilliant work

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
I'll by everybody involved. Yeah. Actually December 15th. I should say this, this came out so about six days ago. Wow. So anyway, I'm glad the guys are going outta business, but you gotta think that some of these, some of these coders you can't stay are now free agents. I yeah. 

Rene Ritchie (00:18:37):
Wow. Apple's red team is really good too. Like you mentioned all of the project zero. Yeah. The Sierra team, the red team, they're all operating the top of their game, but there's way many more just random people, not random, but like genius kids sitting in their basements, trying all these exploit outs, then there are, so the best we can look for is that companies react as quickly and best as possible. And they are, which is good for

Alex Lindsay (00:18:56):
Us. And I know some folks, I think I might have mentioned this. I talked to someone who's on a red team and, and I said, so what, you know, they have a freelancer. They just go and people hire them to break into their <laugh> their company. And I, and I asked, I was like, so, so who's been able to keep you out. And he was like, no one, no one keeps me out. He goes, it's just time. You know, like, you know, it's just, you know, and it's time and it's usually some, you know, human error, he goes, but no one, no one keeps you out. They, they just pay you to figure out what that is. And then they close that one and then they, then I do it again and then they close another one and then he goes, it's just, it's just, but it's just, it's just time. And, and usually human error somewhere that allows it to allows you through yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:19:30):
Any can't be secure.

Andy Ihnatko (00:19:33):
Yeah. Part of it's just the down the downside of our reliance on opensource software. It's wonderful in that we're building all of our infrastructure on a code that is shared. That is, that is the code is understood. And that there's a common knowledge base that people can take from company to company to company. However, that means that when we, you find a fault in one open source package, it creates an enormous problem across the entire internet for also because this is not an, these technologies, these code bases, these libraries that were basing the entire internet on are are being supported by 2, 3, 4 people on a volunteer basis. Whereas if you basically, if, if, if there was some sort of a charitable trust that said, congratulations, this method of this, this method of resolving and I resolving an address is so valuable that we're gonna give you a salary of $230,000 a year for life to just do nothing but maintain this code pet code library. That's not happening. So as a result, bugs simply exists. They can't be found until they're exploited. And then once they're exploited, it's a problem for the entire planet.

Andy Ihnatko (00:20:40):
We need to respect these people more. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (00:20:45):
Like the dinosaurs, eating the people in the jus park movie, Leo, we never learned our

Leo Laporte (00:20:48):
Lesson. We never learned our lesson. What would you do? I mean, how do you, what do you do? So there's somebody out there, some person or team out there that, that did this. What do you do as a defensive measure? Do you, do you approach them as the NSA did in Goodwill hunting only to get a long Boston accented screen against your company

Rene Ritchie (00:21:11):
Hired all the deal breakers, right? Like they hired the whole thing, almost a whole, they hired first generat

Leo Laporte (00:21:14):
Deal breakers. What do you, you know, offer a million dollars a year, make it like this best job you ever had. You get your own limo, whatever you want.

Andy Ihnatko (00:21:23):
I'll I'll tell you one thing you don't do. Like if someone reports a, a secure, you don't promise them that you're gonna make the change and then credit them and then basically stiff arm them for, for months and months

Leo Laporte (00:21:33):
And months. That's really true. Yes.

Andy Ihnatko (00:21:35):
Okay. There, there, there's an argument to be made that you can't, you can't have an UN, you can't get into a bidding war to make sure that whatever, some, whenever someone finds a security flaw, you will always be able to pay them more than the dark industries will them to, to, to keep it quiet. However, like you said, a lot of these people who are discovering these bugs, they're not necessarily mercenaries they're there because they say it starts off with, huh? I wonder if that's possible. And then four months later, they own the entire, they own every iPhone on the entire planet and they are willing to simply say, share. They're willing to share this exploit with the good people and make sure that's not put out in the wildest zero day. However, once you say, if you give them like a, a generic online form to fill out and then an online, generic, thank you. We have received your bug report. You've done. Good work, go, go, go forth, go, go forth and do good in this world. That's not enough. You have to, you have to treat them with the respect and the attitude that is commensurate with the scale of the disaster. They just, they just averted for your, for your commercial product.

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
So of course this happened apple did this to a security researcher who was a little miffed. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:42):
<Laugh> yeah, exactly. Resolution should be justifiably. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not making easy for the next person to, to, to come up to you and say, hi, here's, here's a master key for every single device that you, that you're, you've been shipping for the past three years. Like, <laugh> guess what? You're getting a tour of the apple campus. We're giving you a free t-shirt we're taking you out to lunch. You get a picture with you, get a picture with any Steve you want on the campus. You please

Rene Ritchie (00:23:06):
Thank you. And for Josh, he charges for those. Now <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:23:09):
True.

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:10):
Like

Rene Ritchie (00:23:11):
Pay for those break shirt, an infinite amount of there's an infinite amount of reasons why any even large company will fumble what seems like the, the silliest easiest of new things. But those are the things that they should be up at night worrying about fumbling. So it just it's so depressing.

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
Yeah. Ah, well, let's take a little time out, finish with a more great, oh, Noel Noel. Oh. Instead of a, well, oh, Noel, this thing over my shoulder. Yeah. Yeah. Actually it's Leon, but I turned it around. So they would say Noel, <laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:43):
My mom, Leon, the professional great

Leo Laporte (00:23:45):
Movie. I'm glad you're promoting it. Don't have people. That is a good movie. Actually. I love him. It is. It is over. I just like the girl

Rene Ritchie (00:23:53):
Answer to the El sequel where he says like, there's just no way anyone's gonna see him in those tight again. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:23:59):
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Rene Ritchie (00:26:40):
Or 999,000. So they wouldn't lose their 15% Leo. <Laugh> be very careful here.

Leo Laporte (00:26:45):
It's like a new tax break. Yeah. You really wanna get right at cuz I guess apple is right under, yeah, right under more than 900 publishers worldwide. Well, and by this, by the way is includes like a Google store as well as the apple store. That's up 91% over 20 sixteens, total of 475. It has become a great way to to make a little little dough, be an app developer. Now, Alex, I'm sure you're gonna say you'd much rather develop for the apple store than the play store.

Alex Lindsay (00:27:16):
Oh yeah. It makes more money. Yeah. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:27:18):
So like it it's,

Alex Lindsay (00:27:19):
It's more surefire. I mean the, the play store has been more of an ad ad driven platform and the, and the app stores tend to be more of a purchase platform. And you'll see that a little bit. What's what I thought was really interesting in that report was the, that the fact that 80% of the revenue is actually not captured by the app store. So 80% of the revenue that flows through the system and that's like amazon.com. And you know, that, that type of thing is not because it's not a digital good, you know, 80% of the revenue generated by the, by the apps in the app store are not going to, you know, are not apples, not taking a percentage of those cuz they're not being, they're not digital goods. So it's, it's an interesting, you know, and that that's including anything that is, you know, things that you deliver, Uber Amazon, all those things. Don't aren't, Aret applicable.

Leo Laporte (00:28:04):
Yeah. Yeah. Here's the graph from sensor tower. The green is Google play and the blue is app store mobile app publishers with first net million dollar or greater globally. And so this in 2021, it was 325 in the play store and 581 developers in the app store.

Rene Ritchie (00:28:25):
You're also by Marcus share. You're sorting people who are gonna spend 700 to a thousand dollars on a phone and people are gonna spend 200, $500 on a phone. So the entire budget range is different. So like it's always weird. Like they do iPhone versus Android as if like a phone is the same. It's not operating like a lot of these are like, you have to do a lot of normalization to see what the numbers really mean, but it is amazing what opportunities that people can find on mobile marketplaces. Now

Leo Laporte (00:28:47):
This is also a useful graph from sensor tower, mobile game publishers continue to, you know, earn the lions share. But for the beginning of not 2019, the social networking entertainment categories have been in number two and three spots as is you see my Poca coins, Leo 20, 21 local coins, but productivity is also starting to come on strong. That's the, that's the black bar in the 2021 now 6% more than ever before. And actually a little shrinking in health and fitness. I guess we worried more about health and fitness last year. I don't know why <laugh> I do not know why I, it wasn't effective. Yeah. Maybe it didn't work. Communications publishers flourish on Google play. You said it's an ad driven platform. That, that probably is why. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> games though. Do very well still bucket casts. Yeah. Yeah. And the global trends United States has projected a mirror worldwide trends with new million dollar publishers falling year to year.

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
So I don't know. I don't know what that means. Mobile game publishers represents the largest percentage of the first time million dollar earners in the us. It's 60 of them will hit that milestone this year, 60 new mobile game publishers. So what, what do we take away from this there's money to be made in the app stores? And if you're a publisher, maybe you focus on Google. If you're a game developer, maybe focus on apple, I guess arcade didn't really hurt apple. There was some thought that maybe with apple and arcade that independent developers would not put their stuff on the app store. It was meant

Rene Ritchie (00:30:25):
For people who like it was meant for games that apple, it was like a very curated, bespoke, artisanal marketplace where people who just couldn't afford to make the game or, or a studio that couldn't afford to take the risk on a game, they really loved could basically get funding from apple to make it. And that's, that's generally not the games like that use pocos or Simpson dollars or things to begin with. So those aren't revenue, whale based economy.

Alex Lindsay (00:30:48):
Yeah. There's no infinite scale to the app. Apple's paying you for that. They're probably not giving you a backend on it. And so you're, you're gonna, you know, but, but you do get the safety that you get to develop it, you know? And, and so you get to develop it. You get, you get money now. You just don't get as much money later. But if you want, if you wanna be a developer that wants the possibility of making millions on, on thousands of dollars of effort, then you then you need to do it yourself.

Leo Laporte (00:31:14):
We talked last week about the fact that the new iOS 15 two has nudity detection in messaging, which parents can use to not spy on their kids, but just to give them a little heads up here comes a nuity and give a three chances to say no to the nudes. They are also, apparently they scrubbed the CSUN detection feature information from their webpage. But when query say, no, no, we're still doing it. We just,

Alex Lindsay (00:31:45):
What face saving <laugh> well,

Rene Ritchie (00:31:47):
I think it's face they weren't doing it like as much as they get slammed. Yeah. So apple is right now because of many choices that they made are caught, right. Between a lot of very powerful, very vocal, parental like organizations and child safety organizations and very vocal, private, the advocates that they nurture. Like they nurtured both these groups through a lot of their own messaging and, and they have very different interests and they have very powerful weapons. Yeah. And it's Apple's right to

Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
Stay really quiet when when queried by the verge, it was I think it was Mac rumors that first noted that the mention about the CS detection had been removed from the webpage between December 10th and December 13th, when queried by the verge apple spokesperson, Shane Bower said the company's position. Hasn't changed quote, based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we've decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features. Actually, they said that in September. That's what they said in September. Yeah. Yeah. Shane just said nothing's changed. Same thing.

Andy Ihnatko (00:32:54):
Yeah. That that's weird. That, that it's only occurs to me. That's the second thing from this year where apple did something that was very non apple ish, where they seem to go forward with something without really, really thinking all the way through what the implications were and what the reaction would be between this and air tags and air tags are really blowing up against them this month. Yeah. It's it seems like it's not it's, it's not as though, like they've done bad things. It's just that they're tackling technologies that are really, really, almost impossibly hard to do in a way that will make privacy people happy for very good reasons. But it doesn't seem as though they really thought well, how are we gonna deal with this? And we, and when people complain about that, how are we gonna respond to this? And have we really thought about this situa in which this would be a disaster for a number of people it's, it's uncharacteristic for apple to get this kind of blow back after they've formally announced a, a, a feature to get so many people saying, no, this is a terrible idea.

Andy Ihnatko (00:33:51):
You shouldn't move forward with this at all,

Leo Laporte (00:33:55):
Eric. Yeah. I think they underestimated the responses to see Sam, but I think the air tags kind of took 'em. Yeah,

Andy Ihnatko (00:34:03):
That was well that

Rene Ritchie (00:34:04):
Surprised. I think sometimes apple gets caught up in the technology and how clever their technological implementation is like CSUN. If you take a like, it's impossible to do, but if you take everything out of it, it is an incredibly clever implementation to achieve as close to zero knowledge while handling reporting. I like requirements as well. And if you look at air tags and you compare them like Samsung tags or tiles, it is an incredibly deep technological implementation to maintain privacy of the owner of the device. While also allows 'em to be discovered by other people, miracles of technology, but it's like nobody steps outside or steps back outside the ring and says, what are the repercusions to each and every one of these decisions? And what is the worst possible abuse that these technologies could, could, could go through? Because any tool is neutral, depends on how the person using them is.

Rene Ritchie (00:34:50):
And you, you follow in a lot of things like, well, you can always surveil people. You could drop an iPhone se in the back of their car and know exactly where they are. That costs $300, like $350. This costs, this costs 35 cents or whatever. And everyone has an iPhone. Not everybody has a tile, not everybody has a snap. It's like, there are all these things that you have to weigh in. So the pure brilliance of the technological implementation super distracting to engineers, and Apple's a very engineering driven culture, but you really have to step back and see what,

Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
How so you're saying the apple air tag engineers are kinda like the guy who figured out how to make a PDF hack somebody's they were blinded by the no, they made

Rene Ritchie (00:35:24):
The PDF, they made the PDF and they were like amazed. They could do all these wonderful things with the PDF and they didn't realize that kid was coming in there using four register to make a whole computer inside their PDF.

Leo Laporte (00:35:35):
We, it it's actually starting to turn negative in the last week. There was a, a tweet storm from somebody who said that a stalker used an air tag to follow her home. The stalker issue has become larger. Of course we talked last week about the York police in Canada saying people are putting air tags in cars. They wanna see you later. It does. I, I mean, it does seem like there's not much you can do with a Bluetooth tracker to prevent this.

Andy Ihnatko (00:36:06):
Yeah,

Rene Ritchie (00:36:06):
No. And a lot of them don't even beep like if you have a Samsung tracker or a tile on you, you have no way of knowing it. But apple, I mean the good and best, like apple gets a lot of advantage to themselves for their marketing, but they also put a giant spotlight on the entire industry.

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
Anytime they do anything well, and apples works better because there's more iPhones out there. And so, and also

Alex Lindsay (00:36:22):
That you're also getting an alert that it's happening. You know, like the thing is, is that that GPS trackers are pretty easy to place. And so, so the 

Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
That's a good point. If you wanted to go and buy a cheap GPS tracker and do the same thing, they're just expensive. That's easy.

Alex Lindsay (00:36:36):
They're yeah, they're expensive, but it, but if you don't find them, the reason that that a lot of people are finding them is because they're telling them, Hey, there's something traveling with you. So you're, you're, you're conscious that it's actually happening, but it, but for, to actually track someone, sure. It's a little less expensive, but that's in the grand scheme of stealing a car and risking jail and all the other things spending a little bit more money on a, on a GPS tracker is also possible of all. It's just that these are now starting to alert you that they're happening. And so, but, but putting trackers on cars have been relatively easy and low profile for a long time.

Andy Ihnatko (00:37:09):
Yeah. But it's the, the, the deal here is that, of course, as often with a lot of apple products, you're well protected. If you're also using apple products, you know, don't get alerted if you're if you're running Android, unless you download an app, you know, this exists and you do a scan specifically to look for something. And you're, and you're absolutely right. That if you go to Ali express, certainly you can find GPS trackers that have a, have a SIM card on them. That the thing is that the SIM card hack they're, they're they're, as Renee says, they're more expensive. They're also not quite so user friendly. And it's a, there's also a cultural component to it. We're finding out that there is a certain kind of shared cultural knowledge amongst the car car thieves that cause them to learn how to here is a technique that we've had success with here.

Andy Ihnatko (00:37:55):
It actually works very well. And placing this tracker tends not to us caught that, that elevates this in the next thing. I mean, I, I think overall the, the, the acknowledgement that the fact that the air tag the, or excuse me, the, the apple find my network is so successful is part of what elevates this into the next thing. The question is whether or not the many things that apple has done to mitigate the risk, it is sufficient given the scale of the disasters that can happen as a result of people abusing the system,

Leo Laporte (00:38:26):
50 bucks on Amazon GPS, tracker conveniently has magnets on it. So you can easily put it up in a wheel. Well, where no one will see it. And it gives you real time, GPS tracking SIM cards about five bucks prepaid. So yeah, for a little bit more, you could do it. Right.

Alex Lindsay (00:38:45):
Just, I think, I think it's more that people are, are just conscious to it. I, I really think that the, I think you're actually right. Yeah. I think, you know, that's been happening for quite some time, you know? I mean, you know, it's, I mean, it's, it's a really common thing in law enforcement. I mean, that is a super common process is to, you know, is to track someone's car. Cause it's, it, it it's way better than picking them up where now too. Well, the air think about it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:09):
There was actually a big, good Supreme court case about 10 years ago over that the United States versus Jones <affirmative> which said that putting a GPS on your car constitutes a search under the fourth amendment. So

Alex Lindsay (00:39:22):
Yeah. You need a subpoena for it, but it's still, it's still, it's still pretty prevalent. <Laugh> like, it's, it's, it's not hard to get a warrant if you've got a history. Yeah. And criminals don't

Leo Laporte (00:39:29):
Need him course.

Alex Lindsay (00:39:31):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
So, and criminals. Yeah. They don't, they don't

Alex Lindsay (00:39:35):
Turns out they can buy 'em on Amazon 50 bucks and they don't need the Supreme court. So, yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't think, I think that a lot of this is, is that we're aware that it's happening, but I don't think that it's, that it's changed the trajectory that much. It's just the people were unconscious to how often people were tracking their cars. It's 

Rene Ritchie (00:39:51):
No, I think also like the awareness went to the criminals too. Like a lot of criminals may not have even thought of this, but now these, the air tag eggs everywhere, it's in the medias in the press. And they're like, like I'm not talking about like the really good criminals I'm talking about the kind we see on home Malone movies where they're just like, oh, Apple's got an air tag. I wonder if I can. And that leads

Alex Lindsay (00:40:05):
To a, a short term. Yeah. But those are those, aren't the ones that, usually those are the ones that usually end up in jail. <Laugh>, you know, like they're, these are not very smart. The ones you have to worry about are the ones that don't end up in jail because they, they, they figure the stuff out. Not using, but they're not using air tags. They're using GPS. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it's it

Andy Ihnatko (00:40:21):
To, to one, one other note is just that it's a lot easier to hide your identity by using creating a, a fake ILO account. So you can use an air tag than it is to create an account that lets you use that SIM because realize that even if you use like the most bargain basement, like a, a network in order to put that SIM on acellular network, they gotta bill you somewhere, which means that they they're gonna want, they're gonna want to know exactly who you're talking to. So it's well,

Alex Lindsay (00:40:46):
That would assume they found it. That would assume they found it like that. You know, the thing is, is that, that I, I think that it's, it's actually it's, it, it, I think just a lot of people just, aren't conscious to how I, I think you

Leo Laporte (00:40:58):
Could do this. That is a good point. I think you could do this pretty anonymously, by the way. I'm not encouraging this, but this is a, here's a SIM that gives you 250 megabytes of data, which is probably enough for GPS for five bucks. It's prepaid. So you could probably walk into a, you know, seven, 11 or a store somewhere and buy it with a prepaid card. I think you could probably, if you wanted to, I wouldn't recommend it. Whereas a tracker, even if it's a fake iCloud account, you know, you, you put, you, you use the NFC on the tracker. You're gonna see exactly whose account it is. Apple, you know, you go to law enforcement, apple can, can give them that information. Don't do it. It's stupid. And don't, I think, and don't panic if you're see in these popups, although, you know, people are doing it.

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
So is traveling with you. I get in the car. It's chirping. Yeah. It's like frustrating, but I I'm willing to pop up with it. I'm not willing to post up know among other examples, a woman, a woman whose ex sent her back, a bunch of her belongings found a tra an air tag in the, in the stuff hidden away in the stuff. But again, how did, how does she find it? Did she, did, did her phone tell her right? That she had it? Well, if you have an iPhone you're, you're co you're. You're cool. If you don't, you're disadvantaged. Right. You gotta get that tracker app, which I never got working by the way. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. So are the smart criminals using the tiles or the Samsung tags? Cuz there is no out there <laugh> I, I don't know. I think smart criminals, if you're, I mean 50 bucks, you can get a GPS tracker and five bucks for the SIM. I think if you want fulltime high quality tracking, you're gonna do that. You're not gonna use it air tag that's that you can get just you Jones to follow them. Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, that,

Andy Ihnatko (00:42:36):
That is a good point. Because part of, part of that Ontario police report was that it's not as though they were using just, you know part-time car thief saw an opportunity slapped and went to an apple store, slapped an air tag on this and then used a bent coat hanger and a, and, and then a a raking tool order to get into the car and start it. Once they got to the car, they had professional level tools to get in. They had the, they, they, they were able to start the car because according to the police, they had a tool that was supposed to be only available to dealers that allowed them to plug into the diagnostic port, create a brand new set of digital keys, then start the car and go up. Oh geez. That's that? So that that's not, that's not a casual thing.

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:14):
Same thing, thing about we were talking earlier about excuse me, I'm sorry. The, I was listening to the show earlier about Toyota's offering now subscriptions for key fob start. And that, that is a very, very sophisticated encrypted signal between the two because car THS had, had basically built commodity almost almost commodity level devices that on the underground they could simply buy and sell. That would intercept these unprotected signals from inside a house and then relay them to, to a car. The, when you see card skimers that are installed on in, in and gas terminals, and on ATMs, we're not talking about some guy knows a guy who puts together these things. There are almost commercial level products that are sold again on this underground market. So it's, it's hard to know. It's, it's hard to say that this is that this, that the air tags were responsible for these kind of thefts, cuz this is it's, it's simply a simpler solution to a problem that this industry already had, which is how do we find a car that we, that we can sell and how do we get to where it's parked? But yeah, it's, it's, it's the scale of the problem. Nevertheless,

Leo Laporte (00:44:20):
It's a PR problem for apple. I mean, absolutely. I mean, the other thing that I, I have to say is that I'm, I've become watching lots of TikTok. I become very jaded. <Laugh> like, so, so when I look

Alex Lindsay (00:44:31):
At someone like, oh my gosh, I found a, I found a thing it's a really good way to get a lot of views. So I'm not saying it's not happening, but I'm also saying that, that, that I look at a lot of these of like, oh my gosh, I found something in my house or I found something under my, whatever, you know, there's an extra room, there's all, all this stuff I kind of go, oh, maybe, you know, like, you know, and, and so, so I don't, I've kind of learned to, especially in individuals putting it on TikTok or Twitter or whatever. I, I, I I'm like, I I'm gonna need a couple references before. I <laugh>. I think that before I think that that's actually useful, you know, so that's, that's the other thing we have to kind of take with a grain of salt is that they're putting it on social media and that's not usually a good source of of scandalous news, cuz it usually is made up most of the time. Well, not all the time.

Andy Ihnatko (00:45:14):
It is a good way to get lots of feedback immediately. Even if you're not trying to get click, you're not trying to get views. If you, if you, if you don't have a, if you don't have a network of nerds around you and say, I don't know what I found, I'm at this, I'm at this Airbnb, I've seen this circuit board with some sort of a wire sticking out of it. That's behind the, the alarm clock. I have no idea what it is. And is it a camera? Am I being snooped upon? And that's how you quickly find out that, oh no, this is actually just part of a part of an alarm circuit that basically figures out how figures out this, if the place is being occupied or not. Okay, I'm fine. The poor woman who, what

Leo Laporte (00:45:47):
Is the collective who tweeted about this has made her account private because she got to, I bet she got 32,000 likes and you know, all of a sudden all these people and then the New York post immediately publishes a giant picture of her with her Twitter. Good with her Twitter handle. And this headline, this beauty Queen's night turned ugly, thanks to one alleged bad apple user <laugh> yeah, that's pretty. Thank you. New York post. Well done. Well done. So yeah, who's the stalker here. Really? I think the post might be worse than, than the, whoever will put the air tag in her drink. So I can't, I can't access this story. Michael, do you have a paid account to Bloomberg law? All I could see is the first few words, but it sounds like apple is suing Erickson in a court federal court in Texas. Yeah. Patent dispute over strong arm tactics in negotiations to renew a 2015 license for 5g mobile networks. Erickson. Of course it's similar to the Qualcom

Rene Ritchie (00:46:50):
Patent from what I can tell where the free, like

Leo Laporte (00:46:53):
They're not you patents

Rene Ritchie (00:46:54):
Toward. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, but like the interpretations of FRAND vary it's it's supposed to be like something for the collective good where you contribute your patents to it. They protect them, but they're so essential to the technology that you agree to license them freely and without any form of prejudice and a lot of companies go sure, but we're gonna charge you a billion dollars. Yeah. It's like, that's not the spirit of the law. Like it's not the

Leo Laporte (00:47:14):
Letter of the law either. This part of the article's fading out as the paywall takes over, but it looks like Erickson had actually sued apple in the same court in October accusing apple of negotiating in bad faith. So it's just one of those laws put in the court. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure the court will resolve

Alex Lindsay (00:47:31):
It. What's funny is, is that with a lot of these they'll get into their, their lawyers will figure that out over there in the court and the rest of 'em are all talk, all the engineers, just keep talking to each other. Like they just keep on working on what they're working on. And the, and it's just like, we'll, we'll figure out what the referees say, but we'll just keep playing. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
In fact, one way Apple's gonna handle this is by building a, according to mark Garman, new team in Southern California to start making their own wireless chips. They'd like to replace components from Broadcom and Skywork solutions they've already, I think, replaced Qualcomms or about to replace. The

Alex Lindsay (00:48:02):
Problem really is with Ericson is its patents. So they need those patents, easy IP to, to do, you know, so they need the IP to, to do the thing. They, they definitely wanna get rid of the chips. They, I think that apple, if, if it left to their own devices will end up with all their own chips for their, for all their components. But, but if they, but they're still gonna need the patents because it's just the one way to do it. Or people only know of one way to do it right now.

Leo Laporte (00:48:23):
Yeah. And I think these patents are unfortunately so broad that even if you came up with a clean room way to do for 5g, the patent covers 5g. So it's

Alex Lindsay (00:48:32):
Hard. The hard part is is that when you, when you start doing something that no one's ever done before you just start, if you're good at patents, you go, well, if I need to do this, then I'll do this then. Okay. Well patent that. And then if I need to do that, I gonna do that. And then I patent that. And so you just keep on and apple does the same thing. I mean, it's like, Apple's patenting, there's 200 patents in the apple phone. Oh, of course. In the camera, you know, just in the phone, you know? So, so they, they do the same thing. If you're out in the front, you'll just see a whole bunch of Greenfield opportunities and you'll just start patenting all of 'em, whether you're gonna use 'em or not. And you can

Leo Laporte (00:49:00):
Bet that this new San Diego team. That's designing in-house chips has a, a lawyer attached who is <laugh> instantly anything. They

Rene Ritchie (00:49:10):
Licensed all of Qualcomms. They were, they, they, as part of their settlement, I think people forget this. They licensed all of Qualcomms patents, like, so it's gonna be very similar, I think, to an arm type deal where they licensed Qualcomms designs for a while. And then we have like the X 55 X, 60 X five modem, and then they're just gonna license their IP and make their own modems.

Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
And RF actually, Qualcomms is San Diego. This this new a department is in nearby Irvine, not relatively nearby. Irvine S you need to be close

Rene Ritchie (00:49:37):
Enough for the employees that

Leo Laporte (00:49:38):
You steal to still have a exactly. That's exactly the point, right? We're not gonna make you come to Cupertino. Look, we've got a nice place in the orange county engineers will work on wireless radios, radio frequency, internet graded circuits, a wireless system on a chip that all so develop semiconductors for connecting to Bluetooth and wifi. All of this to replace Broadcom, Skyworks and Qualcomm chips. Apple wants to make it all. Of course they do. Of course they do. Let's let's see here. Where are we? I think another break is in order we can talk more about new stuff. There's not a lot of stories today. So if you guys have anything you wanna talk about, doesn't have to be timely. <Laugh> <laugh>. If you'd like to talk about opera, Andy, that's coming up. <Laugh> the browser, not, not the music <laugh> I'm on it.

Leo Laporte (00:50:32):
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Andy Ihnatko (00:55:06):
Lot camera news this week, camera

Leo Laporte (00:55:08):
Iphone, iPhone 13 pro beat written out by the pixel five, a according to MKB HD's annual blind camera test.

Rene Ritchie (00:55:15):
The poco phone got screwed. It won the first year. And then ever since the first year, they just buried that poco phone because they know that the over saturated very simplified imaging is exactly what the internet needs and wanted. Yes,

Andy Ihnatko (00:55:26):
That's the a phone. They they've rested on their laurels. Okay. They, they it's like that winery. That one, really one really great thing that they, they, they went on expansion. So the pone is everywhere now, but now the camera's not as good.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
That's the problem. Of course, with these kinds of tests, this is not be done. These are not experts. These it's a objective. It's a bracket subjective bracket. And what is it? Is his viewers that vote on this is that

Rene Ritchie (00:55:49):
Well, so yeah, so originally he did it on Twitter and Instagram because he had access to a beta, a beta Twitter feature that let him put images alongside polls, unlike us normal humans who had to choose one or the other, but Twitter got rid of that feature entirely. So he had to use just Instagram and it really, but like he frames it that way. It's an, it's a social experiment on his part to see what resonates with people. Looking at small on small screens. Yeah. At social networking and

Leo Laporte (00:56:13):
Instagram squashes, those pictures too. Right? You're not seeing the, the original well it's that,

Rene Ritchie (00:56:18):
But it's also he's found trends over the years like Al like previously the brightest photo would always win, right? Like it didn't matter how good it was. If windows were blown out, people just like brighter images, they liked warmer skin tones. So it's these trends. And some phones like Google this year is an exception, but usually Google, apple, even Samsung, they would try to produce normal looking images. And a lot of the cheaper phones would just crush the blacks, boost the sat and people would chew use those because that's a more appealing image, even if it's not technically correct or as easy to edit afterwards as a more neutral image and other people are paying attention. And now, you know, Google's got very crisp, very clean, saturated looks, apple has those new photo modes where you can choose to like make every photo automatically sat, crushed and saturated. So this are learning. It's just, they're not learning as fast as some of those other cameras.

Leo Laporte (00:57:06):
Well, I should also point out that the five a actually beat the pixel six pro it's big brother it's later in the later generation. So it's, you know, okay. Take it with a grain of salt. It's kind of like when you go into the department store to choose a TV and try to compare it to

Rene Ritchie (00:57:22):
Most people, don't edit, they take a photo and they want post it. Well, that's true to bother with having to edit

Leo Laporte (00:57:27):
It. That's true. Right. Hey, I'm really happy about this. And I hope it's not. Somebody's pick pixelate photo is now available on the iPhone. If it's your pick, we won't go any farther. It's straight out. Yeah. I use, I love pixelate photo. Was it only iPad before? I didn't realize that. I think, yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (00:57:44):
Don't think so.

Leo Laporte (00:57:46):
And if you use pixelated pro on the Mac, I think you have all the features Bix made photo. I believe. I'm sorry, Renee. I, I talked over you. What?

Rene Ritchie (00:57:55):
No, no. I was making a joke about how Andy just posted his squirrel photos, but I am curious to know if they do all the machine learning stuff in this, because that was what I miss most like pixelated on the Mac, those, the machine learning they do for a lot of like the super red zoom and for the D noise is fantastic. And it just wasn't there on almost any app previously on the iPhone.

Andy Ihnatko (00:58:13):
Yeah. I, it's a very, it's a very important move too, because the, the level, it I've I've often said that the amount of processing power on the iPhone is high, meaning that there's there, it's it benchmarks amazing that technology on the dye is amazing, but how, how much processing power do you need for your typical iPhone usage? It's good to see apps like this. That're really reaching into stuff that you couldn't be able to do otherwise without this sort of stuff. And also, we're finally seeing a I think the past year or two, we've seen mobile editors, thanks both to local processing power AI based filters and the super quality of the screen as being almost a, almost like a first party editing surface for, for editing photos. I mean, the, one of the factors that went into my buying a brand new I've iPad pro of this year was that it would be the best qual, the highest quality screen I have in the entire office.

Andy Ihnatko (00:59:12):
I, I absolutely can't justify buying a 27 inch like super XDR whatever quality screen, cause I'm just not gonna use it that way. However, the, the idea of having, being able to do photo edits on what I can, what I can think of as this is gonna be the canonical greatest possible way that this, this photo will ever be seen is such a, such a big win. And there are more and more people now that are discovering that editing photos on mobile is more than simply sliding brightness, sliding, whatever, adding a vignette, crossing your, your, your fingers, and then posting Instagram. There's a I've, I've my last trip to New York. I was actually using the iPad as my, again, first quality first first priority editing surface for all the stuff that I would slurp into this device, edit it on device, then post from device. And then when I get back to Photoshop, the, the real desktop quote editor, finding that there's really nothing else I'd like to add or do to this because I was able to do such perfect edits to my eye on the iPad. So this is such a big thing for the iPhone

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Will pixel made photo run on the Mac, if you has anybody tried installing it on the Mac? Cause there are differences. I think you were about to, I think, well this, okay, so I'm getting this from the pixel community. Andrea Andreas who's on the pixelated team said there are differences between pixelated pro, which is the Mac version and pixelated photo on iOS. Photo is the entire workflow is nondestructive pro is he says more of a layer based editor. And while it is nondestructive, for the most part, certain things aren't quite as easy to undo or later adjust once you've made other edits. The image opening experience in photos is oriented around your photos library which is, you know, that's true. So I guess that's a convenience thing. And he also says batch editing is built into pixelate photo and not available in the pro Mac version. You can create batch work workflows and process hundreds of photos right in the app. So in a way, I wonder why they don't include I'm sorry. I keep stepping on you Renee. I wonder. No, that's me. <Laugh> I wonder why they don't include more of those features in pixelate pro. Go ahead.

Rene Ritchie (01:01:19):
Oh, I was just gonna say Micah said that they do have the ML stuff, which is amazing because that stuff is just so transform, like this ability to restore bad internet photos that you might get or need to use or not just bad old, like the resolution was so bad in the early days of the internet. We have all these photos taken with like older iPhones and things which looked great at the time, but they're noisy, especially in low light or they're just not there. And a lot of the modern machine learning stuff is, I don't wanna say miraculous. I don't wanna oversell it, but being able to get rid of JPEG compression artifacts, noise, being able to do zoom without it being so destructive. Like a lot of the ML based zoom may have machine learning based color correction, not perfect, but it can get you so close so fast that you're not spending, you know, five minutes dialing all the basic knobs. And I think that's like the best part of machine learning is to do the grunt work for you. The artist still has to tune it, but it, it I've been using that more than Photoshop for a lot of the P stuff because they are so good at it. And Photoshop is just, you know, now making those filters available. So I'm, I love that that's on the iPhone. Don't have to go running back to

Leo Laporte (01:02:16):
My Mac or Alia also on the pixelated team says both apps are based on the same machine learning algorithm. So the images they create should be pretty much the same quality wise. However, while pixelate photo calculates the amount of scaling automatically based on the size and bit depth of an image in pixel made pro you can choose to scale images to a specific size. That's the difference there? Machine learning is so

Andy Ihnatko (01:02:37):
Fast. Yeah. Can I just add to what Renee was saying that I, I have to say that one of the biggest blessings of surviving into 2021 is when you go back, it's, it's great to be able to take pictures with your new thousand dollars phone, add these tweaks and make them even better than they were. But the real blessing is when you go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep back, like 2000, 2003, 2004, these pictures that you took, maybe that I took maybe with like one of the first, like I, I have APIC, my, one of my favorite, most valuable pictures is a selfie that I took with my dad in like 2003, 2004, whatever it was, whatever Nikon's first like cool picks camera was the first one that really worked because he was an engine near, he was a nerd. I couldn't wait to go to his house and like, show him this new camera.

Andy Ihnatko (01:03:23):
Cause I knew he'd be excited about it. And so just to show him like, no, no, see, you don't have to wait. See the picture like is actually right there on the screen after we take the picture quickly, took a selfie with him. Yes. Before, before selfie cameras. And it's just a natural spontaneous, just my, my dad's smiling really. I'm smiling really naturally. And, but, but it's a 2004, 2005 picture and the ability to go back to that and it's, it's great for, for reasons that are not technical, but now to upscale the upscale, the resolution. So it looks great at an as an eight by 10 print to fix the colors. So it looks beautiful that way to be able to maybe get some distractions outta the background, it's it really is like renewing your contact with these pictures that maybe you might have even not kept because they were so marginal like, oh God, the, the sky is blown out or, oh, well there's a, there's the, there's a person like picking his nose in the background.

Andy Ihnatko (01:04:13):
So I can't use that. The fact that you kept these means that now you have this treasure trove of new, beautiful art that you can then restore without having to spend a week or two with advanced Photoshop techniques. This is, I, I don't use the word blessing lightly, sometimes recovering these memories and making them restoring their, for their proper position into the history, your memory book, your, your, your, your story of what your family was like, what your friends were like, what your life was like, that's, it's paving over these gaps that, that didn't have to exist, but now don't exist anymore. That's the, that's, that's one of the best things ever.

Leo Laporte (01:04:48):
Doug M in our chat room says that he tried, I don't know if he just tried on my request to install pixelated photo on his M one mini and it did not seem like they're allowing it, which is too bad. Is it, is that the developer, I guess the developer says you can't. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We don't wanna, canalize their more expensive Mac apps most of the time. Yeah. And since pro does pretty much everything I would like photo, I, you know, we live in a pretty remarkable time. There's so many good photo apps for both the Mac and the iPad. It's just a, it's just remarkable. You probably saw this Alex ProRes export speed on the M one max MacBook pro even beats a 2019 Mac pro by like a lot

Alex Lindsay (01:05:36):
To turns out if you have dedicated hardware, it helps, you know, like, yeah, I, you put a chip in there that, that is built for that. And everything gets modernized. I think that for editors, you know, I've been kind of putting it off because I, I still work in a lot of black magic raw, so I don't, it doesn't affect me quite the same way, but the, in a ProRes world, I think that it's almost impossible to ignore the max, you know, laptop. And, and I'm hoping that we see those dedicated processors in a Mac mini, you know, in the spring, because it's just incredible.

Leo Laporte (01:06:07):
Even a 2019 Mac pro with afterburner is half as fast as the M one max MacBook pro.

Alex Lindsay (01:06:14):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I think that what this also, we have to remember, this is the M one, when we expect to get some kind of M one max or M two max or whatever, by the time we get to the pro. So when the, when the new pro comes out, I think it's gonna be screaming. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:31):
Well, a lot

Rene Ritchie (01:06:31):
Of that is just like the afterburner chips are the same, but now they're on die with access to universe, memory, no climbing back and forth. And with that, everything else that, so it's just, it's an, it's an accelerated afterburner.

Alex Lindsay (01:06:41):
Well, and I think that it puts a lot of pressure on a, a lot of camera manufacturers, video camera manufacturers to include ProRes, because there's gonna be a point, you know, where it's really. And unless someone really comes up with something new, if all the apple high end tools are suddenly rendering all of this, that much faster, and it's one thing for it to render HD. But when we start talking about six K and eight K, and, and we start talking about high frame rate, those chips are gonna be, you have to have them, like, you have to have it in apple pro rice, and you have to have those chips to do the production to, to at a remotely reasonable speed. Because I can tell you from experience, you start eight K one 20, you know, into a computer it's slow process <laugh>. So it takes, it takes a while to

Leo Laporte (01:07:25):
Process to reiterate what you've said before Renee, all of the existing M one chips are a 14 based. Yes. A 15, which is now in the iPhone. 13 will be the base for the next generation ships, which sounds to me like anything apple releases next year. And, you know, next year is a week off, will will be on M will be an M two or something will be based on the 15. Is that right?

Rene Ritchie (01:07:55):
Anything sec? Yeah. So anything, well, it's depend. So there was a report yesterday that said that apple might use an 18 month schedule for the full level Silicon, which is not UN, like that's not unheard of because there was an, a 10 X and a 12 X and Z and an a 14 X, which was the M one, but there was no a 11 X, there was no a 13 X. So they skipped generations for the more powerful versions, because they were more about massive multi, multi threaded operations, not as dependent on single core performance. So if we see an M two in first half of 20, 22, like with the MacBook air, it'll almost certainly be based on, on a 15 IP generation. If it goes into the fall, it'll almost, it'll get closer to being, you know, a 16, which is nice because that's like the, you know, the four, four to three to four nanometer process node, all of those advances.

Rene Ritchie (01:08:43):
But then it's unclear if there'll be like a M two pro or M two max, anytime soon, that might wait until the next year and then be based on M three instead. So it's just the there's, it's so funny, cuz apple still has limited bandwidth. That's why we don't get every Mac renewed. Every year. They have small teams, they work very focused approach. They can only push out so much product. So it wouldn't surprise me at all. If we see like pros one year ultra low power the next year, and then they just keep tick talking like that.

Leo Laporte (01:09:11):
The rumor is at least according to times that the new 27 inch iMac with mini L E D display is on track for a launch in the first half of 2022. Yeah.

Rene Ritchie (01:09:26):
That be M one pro and M one max.

Leo Laporte (01:09:29):
So you, you think that's what itll have, it'll have the M one pro and max in it

Rene Ritchie (01:09:32):
And a deal M one max option and then the MacPro will have up to a and one max option still within the thermal envelope of just a single overclocked Intel amazingly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:45):
They was

Rene Ritchie (01:09:45):
Also a really good rumor.

Leo Laporte (01:09:47):
Go ahead. Sorry. No, no rumors rumor on. And they're all just rumors, no rumors better than any other rumor. They're

Rene Ritchie (01:09:52):
All made up a couple people now, mark Iman, and a few others have said that, and we've heard this for a while that apple might reenter the consumer display space. And there was a rumor from di bill and DKT D D D K. Who's been very accurate so far, especially when it comes to display technology that LG is testing a 24 inch display, very similar to the iMac, a 27 inch display, very similar to the MacBook pro, which is, you know, mini L E D 120. He Hertz and also a second generation pro display XDR, which didn't quite make it into mini L E D it's regular L E D. So it doesn't have as many display zones as a, at local dimming zones as a mini L E D panel, a second generation version of that, all of them powered with new apple display chips, like the latest apple display chips.

Rene Ritchie (01:10:36):
And that's something I've want, I don't wanna have to pay six K for a six K display Leo. I will happily play one K for a 4k or five K display. It doesn't have to have all the features of a reference monitor and it, I would, would be so cause, and I don't, I don't mean to just keep re litigating this, but it is so hard to find a good display for many reasons. Like a lot of companies don't care. A lot of them put really had Matt coatings on them that make everything look blurry no matter what the resolution of display, a lot of 'em don't bother to color calibrate them at the factory algae ultra fine is okay, but algae's containers are crap. Like their first generation didn't have any shielding. So they interfered with wifi monitors, second generations to down the middle. They don't put the same kind of fit and finish that apple does with those exact same panels. So if apple would just release the same iMac and iMac pro displays as standalone panels, I think us nerds would be super happy for the, for the next year. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:29):
They famously stopped making displays. Then they came out with the X ER, which was, as you point out prohibitively expensive for most of us, six K for six K it's

Alex Lindsay (01:11:39):
It's prohibitively expensive, but in the world that it lives in, it's a pretty, it's pretty useful. It's not expensive. I'm compare it,

Leo Laporte (01:11:46):
Tom not, but they just don't have a, a product line for anybody else then to serve the rest of the market high end pros. Yeah. I

Alex Lindsay (01:11:53):
Think it's just hard because there's like, where is the no, you know, the no man's land of, of, of, you know, a lot of people want 2000 or below, and once you go over 2000, then it's, then it gets into a really weird place. And so I think that apple doesn't know how to fit a large monitor into $2,000. <Laugh> I think that, I think that that that's a real problem for them. And so, so I think that they just, the way they work, just they don't, their methodology doesn't fit into that box. And it seems like the real, the real pinch is there's a ton of stuff that is competitive under $2,000. And once you go over $2,000, it gets, it gets it's. How much is the ultra it's like four, 4,700

Rene Ritchie (01:12:34):
For the 4k

Alex Lindsay (01:12:36):
900. Oh, the new one, the new one. I thought the LG ultra

Leo Laporte (01:12:39):
Fine. The, the, the 5k that they were selling until

Rene Ritchie (01:12:41):
They had the X. Yeah. That was around 900, but it might have gone down since. So

Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
That was pretty inexpensive. Two of them apple probably didn't wanna make a $900 one, but they could have made a tooth or a $1,500 one with a better case. They were just

Rene Ritchie (01:12:55):
Super competitive. Like they wanted to lower the amount of stuff they were making. That's why they got rid of routers. They got rid of monitors. They needed to pair

Leo Laporte (01:13:01):
Things back a bit. So why would they get back into the monitor business?

Andy Ihnatko (01:13:05):
Well, because next year they're coming out with M two M three, whatever Mac minis and maybe Mac pros. So they're gonna want to have really nice monitors to sell alongside them. They selling those to professionals.

Alex Lindsay (01:13:16):
Yeah. It's, it's a confusing market. If you buy a Mac mini, like I, I buy cheap monitors from my Mac minis cause I just need 'em to do the thing that they're doing, but it's, it's confusing to try to find one that really works with the Mac mini well and has a fit and finish as, as Renee said, that is what you want. So I think that, that, I think they see that also. I think that there is a potential for AR to blend seamlessly with your TV experience. And and if you get into, if you start thinking about that, having AC having control of the TV might make it more useful, like having the TV know what it's doing in relationship to an AR device so that you can have something expand off of it. Not having control all that TV may prove to be problematic. You know, it, it, it doesn't mean that you couldn't do it. It just means you couldn't do it as well. So if someone wonder, really wants the full experience of what they're doing, they may want to have the TV and the AR AR whether it's a phone or, or anything else be able to inter interact with each

Leo Laporte (01:14:13):
Other. So you're saying apple wants to get back into the display business for future products for,

Alex Lindsay (01:14:18):
Well, it's gonna take them a long time to warm up, you know? So, you know, if you wanted a, a, a display really selling and really part of the ecosystem two years from now, you'd have to start selling it probably sometime next year. There's

Leo Laporte (01:14:28):
One other kind, add a left fee yield thing. Scott Wilkinson has been telling me he can't talk about it. He's under nondisclosure, but there will be a new television technology announced at CES. This next what's this next week or the week after January 5th. That it, no one's talked about before now. We're not talking micro E D or, but there's something brand new. And he, I asked him, I said, okay, I know you can't tell me, but is this changed the playing field? He said, yes. And it may well be apple knows about this and is looking at monitors in this technology who knows. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, these are supposed to be mini L E D, but people are talking about micro L E D. But as far as I know, that's not hasn't gone any, it exists. It's a out there. I mean Samsung showed it well, micro L E D, but micro ed is, is, I don't know what micro micro L E what is micro OED, smaller, smaller OED, pixels, micro L led of higher, very attractive, but very expensive right now.

Leo Laporte (01:15:26):
And, and also the manufacturing issues. So, but anyway, I don't know what it is that he's talking. Maybe it is micro Ola. That would be whatever that is. I don't know. That'd be very interesting. I can't believe LG is advertising their roll up TV on, on, on football games. They don't mention this. It's like $80,000. I don't understand the, so there's something going on anyway. We'll find out, we'll find out just a couple weeks Scott promises. He will tell me on the first tech guy after CES, which is January 8th. So you might wanna that

Andy Ihnatko (01:16:03):
It's, it's useful to make, it's just useful to make the brand of LG roll up displays in general, more valuable so that when you come out with a no, one's gonna be buying a roll up, why it ring TV, but when they're in a phone store a year from now, and they say, oh, well, he uses a LG roll up panel for this phone, like, Ooh, LG. I understand that they're doing it. Yeah. I under, I understand from football commentators that it's doing wonderful things in this technology. It's funny.

Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
Even if you go to the LG site, it says there's a button. It doesn't say the price. It just says inquire to buy. Yeah, exactly. If you want it we should, we should have a talk. <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:16:39):
I'm, I'm flat. I'm flattered that with, with, with device fingerprinting that if I hit this, this show that this site it's actually gonna even show me something like that. No, he's not gonna be able to buy this. He's just a leaky.

Leo Laporte (01:16:50):
You probably, we should talk. <Laugh> let's see your it contact your representative. It says <laugh> yeah, you can advertise it on football games. It doesn't mean anybody watching could buy it. All right. Other we didn't finish the rumor on the 27 inch iMac. Apparently it's going to look like the 20 fours. It'll be colors, promotion display. These are all different rumor mongers. This is from Dylan DK DT, D K T powered by the same M one pro NM one. Max, I got the feeling Renee that you don't think they'll be an M two this year in 2022 next year. Oh, well

Rene Ritchie (01:17:31):
I think there will be, I think it'll, it'll em, two is gonna be for the ultra low power machine. So that's gonna be for the new MacBook air, the new two port MacBook pro oh, it's not like place

Leo Laporte (01:17:41):
The low end. The Superfest. M one. Yeah. So if you want a Mac, for instance, the next Mac pro will be E core M one max.

Rene Ritchie (01:17:51):
Yes. Yes. And then eventually there might be an M two pro and an M two, but that might be a year, but, and a three pro and three max. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So like apple scales, both generationally, but also in terms of the number of cores. So that's the number of cores is what makes the pro

Leo Laporte (01:18:05):
Machine that's something to remember, just cuz it's the M two doesn't mean it's, it's supersedes all the ones. In fact it doesn't. Yeah, it's super easy. The original

Rene Ritchie (01:18:13):
For while apple sold the a 12 X in the iPad pro and the a 13 and the iPhone and the single core and the a 13 iPhone was great, but it couldn't match the multicore in the massively multicore, you know, a 12

Leo Laporte (01:18:25):
It's confusing. And as long as we're in the wild rumor area, Ming Chi quote says the iPhone 14 will have a 48 megapixel camera and the iPhone 15 will have a Periscope lens. Yep. Yep. <Laugh> I don't know what to say

Andy Ihnatko (01:18:45):
About that. 48 megapixels meaning pixel Benning. So the, a higher, a higher resolution a, a higher quality 12 megapixel picture that is basically now a two by two pixel sensor, as opposed to a tiny, tiny, tiny one by one pixel sensor. It's similar to it's it's similar to the components that are basically becoming commodified on the Android side of things. And so the, but the, the, the secret sauce there is when you take a much higher sophistication component like that, and then add apples signal processing and AI to it. That could be quite interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
Interesting. And then the piece, there's

Rene Ritchie (01:19:20):
A couple of the pieces too, that made it, oh, sorry. Oh, no. I was just gonna say like one of the problems with pixel binning is that sometimes people take a sensor, just chop it up into more pieces and call it a bigger sensor, but you actually lose light because the, the pixels themselves end up being smaller, where in this case, Apple's supposedly gonna increase the size of the micro pixel. So it'll go from 1.9 microns to like 2.3, 2.4 microns once they've been bin, but also you can't do eight K on a 12 megapixel sensor. There's just not enough resolution for it. So if you wanna go to, to AK, you've gotta go to 48 to, to 48 megapixels and you can bend them or not bend them. And then computationally, you can also layer non non pixels on top of bin pixels. If your processor is fast enough, and then you can sort of start to better win that battle between detail and noise, cuz you can get the detail from the non bin picture, reduce the noise to the bin picture, then sort of pick and choose on a pixel by pixel basis. So it's gonna get really exciting.

Andy Ihnatko (01:20:17):
Yeah. For, for first four terabytes storage iPhone, cause imagine shooting eight K onto a local device to solve that the first, the first, first one with an external cooler on it with Meg safe it's that will be, that would be stunning

Rene Ritchie (01:20:33):
24 gigabytes per minute, 24 gigabytes per minute. Please don't have a lightning cable. Please take, please, please don't have a USB two oh cable.

Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
Explain to me what a Periscope lens is.

Andy Ihnatko (01:20:44):
It's just a, it's a normally with a telephoto lens. That's why they look longer optically to get that kind of magnification. You need to basically have a lens that's that's farther away from the sensor. The thing you're aiming in at, with a zoo that you can't do that, but a phone cuz the phone is just this thick Periscope lens means that they basically basically have a Periscope that's facing the, the lens element. So that's actually firing sideways so you can actually get that extra length. So that means that instead of getting sort of a very fakey, very, very low quality like four X or 10 X zoom, you can actually get a legitimate 10 X zoom. And again, this is, this is now it's been around for enough years that all the problems have been shaken out of it. And the, it does some really fantastic stuff.

Andy Ihnatko (01:21:27):
The have the, I have a Periscope lens on my pixel, six pro and the first time I went into my, my usual test places, even in low light taking the, a mural that's on the ceiling of a, of a dark dark hallway was just amazingly sharp, amazing detail. And it basically justified upgrading my phone that year. So again, putting that into an iPhone is not it's. There are a lot of like really, really cheap phones that say, Hey, we're the first to have this, the folding lens. We're the first to have this new 48 megapixel sensor. But again, you take really, really crappy high resolution fixtures pictures. You're taking really, really crappy telephoto pictures. Putting that into the hands of iPhone engineers is gonna be something special if that happens.

Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
Yeah. See, I'm an idiot. I thought it actually had a Paris that would come up outta them. Cause

Rene Ritchie (01:22:11):
Well, I mean, it's like a Periscope it's just sideways flat.

Leo Laporte (01:22:15):
You gotta admit that would be really cool. It would be cool to made one. I take a picture over the wall. Yeah. OnePlus had a selfie cam that would going right. But I didn't realize. So this Periscope technology is in the pixel six pro. Yep. Yeah. See, I didn't even, I have a pixel. Is that why I went to shake it? It rattles a little bit. I'm breaking the Periscope. Is that what's going on there? <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:37):
No, it's the, the, the little submarine commanders are shaking his fist. Thank God.

Leo Laporte (01:22:43):
Dive, dive. So,

Rene Ritchie (01:22:45):
No, but it's a really clever way to it's solve for X index. Like you basically, instead of having to project all the way out, you flat mid sideways and then mirror it back up it,

Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
I have to say the zoom on the pixel six pro is really remarkable. So that's why, yeah. It's a Periscope.

Andy Ihnatko (01:22:56):
Yes. And, and also again, same thing when you take good hardware and then match it with really smart technology. Like the pixel cameras doing stuff like when you manually zoom, you're not just giving a number to the to, to the camera app saying, oh, by the way, I want you to make it look this way while you're, while it's zooming the fact that you're kind of jiggling a little bit, you can't help, but it's actually collecting information during the zoom. So you can figure out how to fill in the fill in data between the pixels. So you can get an even better zoom. This is probably one of the reasons why the five a does so well in tests because the, when you take the fake ways you have of expanding dynamic range, adding detail adding zoom, and then you basically add those fake details, fake technologies to actual real optics. It's gonna be pretty cool. I can't wait to see it if it happens. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:42):
Is there any, you said there was a lot of camera news. Did we get, have, did we cover it all Andy?

Andy Ihnatko (01:23:47):
I think we did.

Leo Laporte (01:23:48):
Okay. I wanna make sure you were satisfied. I am sighted.

Andy Ihnatko (01:23:52):
I, I could use, I could go for another piece of pumpkin pie in about an hour and a half, but for now <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
It's, it's sideways Periscope. It's a sideways. It's going inside. It's sideways, right? It's a zoom lens inside the camera. Is that an in, not an Audi Periscope. Leo, it's an in,

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:11):
It's an in it's inside the camera. Not outside the

Leo Laporte (01:24:12):
Camera. I'm just so confused.

Andy Ihnatko (01:24:17):
It's not it's, it's not a mechanical zoom. It is another telephoto lens. But of course it acts as a zoom when you interplay between like the lower re the, the, the, the lower focal lens on the higher one. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:24:29):
TSA will be rolling out support for apple wallet IDs starting in February of next year. That mean it, but of course, you'd have to be in a state where the ID is supported. The mobile driver's license is supported there. Now according to or technology Alliance, at least 30 us states are ready, are getting ready to, to do that. Mobile driver license SFO not use TSA final famously. They have TSA, don't they at SFO, I find SFO their they've somebody scary. Oh yeah. They might use their own rental TSA. <Laugh> now this is, is necessarily Apple's mobile driver's license that I learned last episode is that others are doing mobile driver's licenses that aren't based on the apple wallet. TSA is preparing its phased rollout with MDL mobile driver's licenses with apple wallet integration as its first step, which will allow select security checkpoints and participate airports. In other words, not mine to be the first locations people can use their MDL in the wallet app. So two state locations starting February of next year, two additional states around March. Yeah, be so nice. The trap travelers will simply tap an NFC reader or use a QR scanner to initiate the data exchange instead of the TSA examining your physical ID card, you know, holding it up, saying lower your mask. Oh yeah. You look like that guy. The, and, and the ticket and all that, the machine will do it all. You just tap the NFC reader. I like this. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:13):
Real ID especially gets people through faster

Leo Laporte (01:26:15):
Real ID act will be updated to a comp a company. The regulatory changes necess it enable us to happen, I guess is, I don't know if all mobile driver's licenses are real ID. I know in the state of California, you can get a driver's license is not a real ID. You have your choice. Hmm. So I don't know how that's gonna work. Well, it happened again, poor Maria, an NCO <laugh> he bought an apple watch. I don't know why we have this here. It's from a it's in Portuguese. So I don't understand it. He bought an apple watch. I'm I'm guessing an apple watch series six, cuz I guess he's not a, when I looked at the

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:57):
Picture, I thought I was like, and then he got a frog. He

Leo Laporte (01:26:59):
Got, he got a rock. He got a rock. As, as I think if my Portuguese is, is correct, you got a rock and not a frog. I don't know why this is even a news story. Don't I, you know, careful where you buy your apple watch, I guess.

Andy Ihnatko (01:27:15):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there, there are a lot of stuff like that. I I've, I've read a story of again, on social media. So as, as, as Alex said, it's a story on social media about how there's some apple stores that are letting you basically use Uber as a delivery service for two hours. And they were saying that. Yeah, well basically I use this service and the Uber driver basically logged it as delivered and I never saw it. And I was an argument about, I actually did that. They

Rene Ritchie (01:27:43):
Do that here too. Like you can order from the apple store same day. And sometimes they just send it over like Uber or over Lyft or something else. And I ordered one of each home pod color because of course I did. And only two of the guy came with two of them and I said, I ordered five. And he goes, I've only got two. And I said, I ordered five. And he said, I've only got two. And he's like, well, you're gonna take, 'em like, no, cause I ordered five. And if I take 'em, I I'm saying that you delivered the but I managed to call apple and they were very apologetic and the next, the, all of them, they said, you need the other three. I'm like, no, I need all five. They arrived two days later over, over delivery.

Leo Laporte (01:28:16):
It is very ugly rock too. But <laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:28:20):
Yeah, he should have, sented like a rock that he, that he thought, wow, maybe I'll

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Keep it. Cuz it's so pretty. Yeah. I love my rock, but can I, I

Andy Ihnatko (01:28:25):
Have a watch. Not, not to be fair. It's a rock that was once owned by a very famous footballer. So <laugh> on eBay. Maybe you can actually make money on this thing. Exactly. It's all about the story.

Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
Yes. Prominence. <Laugh> I, I cannot find anything else to talk about. Is there anything else on your docket Renee Richie that you would like to bring up?

Rene Ritchie (01:28:49):
Oh wow.

Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
Leo, how about the tar grade survive being placed in a strange quantum state? I dunno why I just like this story and I just like pictures of tar grades. So <laugh>

Rene Ritchie (01:29:00):
I was watching wire's explanation of quantum gravity and that was enough for Emilio. I don't, I we're a two dimensional information surface. That's being protected into 3d.

Leo Laporte (01:29:08):
I, nothing is real anymore. We're a seventh level simulation. We are some aliens video game inside an aliens video game. You just can't handle the quantum mechanics. My friend, I can't,

Rene Ritchie (01:29:18):
We live in a world with walls son. Who's gonna guard those walls. You, you

Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
Lieutenant has any <laugh>. Has anybody watched the Claymation Ted lasso holiday special yet?

Andy Ihnatko (01:29:27):
I'm saving it. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
For what? For Christmas? A missing Christmas mustache.

Rene Ritchie (01:29:33):
It's gonna be like the community one. It's gonna be so beautiful.

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
You know, we,

Alex Lindsay (01:29:37):
We started with my daughter wanted to watch a, a or a Christmas movie every night, this week and we walked El last night, such a weird film. It's really good. But it's just,

Leo Laporte (01:29:48):
You were just, there was huge parts of especially sitting at the table, the giant El sitting at the anyway. Yes. It's very weird. No, the, the funny thing

Alex Lindsay (01:29:55):
Is he is interacted with the, you know, it's a with, you know, the, the, the stop motion. Oh yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:30:01):
Yeah, yeah. But

Alex Lindsay (01:30:02):
Like they, they, which evidently I watched behind the scenes, evidently that was a big deal. Like they got here's the here's

Leo Laporte (01:30:07):
The and understand the, the trailer that apple sent up for this <laugh> I guess, I don't know the MIS I guess it's Ted, I guess they couldn't get Jason Sudeikis to shave his mustache. So they got, they had to do it in Claymation so that they could simulate Ted lasso without a mustache, I guess.

Andy Ihnatko (01:30:26):
Got they. They got, they got, they got Henry CA's technology there. They could just like reboot that thing where they took off as mustache for the Superman reshoots. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
Is that what they did? Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is one of the lines. Hey guys. Sorry. I was being such a straight white cisgender male version of the Grinch earlier. All right. I'm gonna pass. I'm just gonna say this is not Christmas to me, but okay. You know what? Okay. It's making up for the lack of those traditional Christmas things, the frosty, the snowman, and what was the Claymation one that they did? I miss all of those California Christmas

Andy Ihnatko (01:30:59):
For the California. Well, the thing, the thing,

Leo Laporte (01:31:02):
Not miss that

Andy Ihnatko (01:31:04):
We create, we, we create brand new traditions. It's like this year I, I should almost put it together a playlist because there are like online videos on YouTube that I seem to play every single year on Christmas. And I, I kind save it for one is darling, love singing Christmas, baby. Please come home. That's a great one show. That's a great one. Another one is have you ever, have you ever seen the tri channel? It's like a bunch of like Irish YouTubers who basically try things like experience things for the first time, like food drink, things like that. And so like, so two years ago they decided to have like three different groups get one of those ad alcohol, advent calendars. So it's the, it's basically an hour and a half of like the com compressed together video of the day that like each of these two, two person teams spent working their way through an entire, like a beer advent calendar, an entire whiskey advent calendar

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
That special.

Andy Ihnatko (01:31:57):
And they're, and they're funny and they're not like they're, they're funny and they're charming. And it's like, I kind of wanna watch this every single year. So yeah, maybe we don't get a brand new brand new, like Claymation specials that as charming, as charming as like what we have when we were kids. But then again, there's still, you know, there's, there's thi there there's things that we look forward to without knowing that we really were looking forward

Leo Laporte (01:32:16):
To them. No nester, the long-eared Christmas donkey for you this year. But, but I do miss bur lives and the Rudolph red noses reindeer, and all of that. And

Andy Ihnatko (01:32:25):
I, and, and the NOCO the NOCO shaver shaver stop. No Elco.

Leo Laporte (01:32:30):
Yes, no, no Elco. Oh, wow. I bet there. I bet you can wa let me see if I can find that on the, oh, it's there too. The coach shaver ad here it is from 1970s. We're old here. We're old holiday ad classics. And this is, this is the I am, and I just have to skip ahead. I don't know why they're playing long intro music. They can, here we go. There. He ISCO has the quality. There he goes, Santa Santa on electric shaver. Give her

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:04):
New ways as a little kid. I really appreciated that the shaver sled was actually making tracks in the snow. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:33:10):
You noticed even you noticed the little details. Yeah. You really care. How many of these appliances do you have? No Elco. There he goes. Yeah. Okay. Is nare still around?

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:23):
I don't know. It's probably, it's probably own probably now like a Chinese trademark. They bought the IP and now they put it on like really weird L E D lights and stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:33:32):
All right. We're gonna take a break. Come back. Your picks are just around the corner. As we continue the last Mac break weekly of the year. Now you may say, but the year Leo, the year's not over. What about the 28th? Well, next week is our best of, and actually for this show, the best of is full of great stuff, because there were lots of fun moments in the year, 2021. So that'll be next week and that's so we can give everybody the, the, the week off we try, everybody's gonna go home. The studio will be dark for next week, and then we will be back with Mac break weekly on the first Wednesday in January, January, or sorry, Tuesday, Tuesday, didn't move it Tuesday in January, January 4th, we will all be here, gathered together for you. What are you doing? Are you doing anything special for Christmas? Renee? Are you gonna get together with a Georgia dad, kids, or

Rene Ritchie (01:34:23):
We've been, we've been like shut down again. So they're, they, they took their previous holiday limits, which was, I think, 20 people from three households. And now it's like seven people from one and a half households, some ridiculous number. So we're gonna, I think chill as much as we can. And I'll play up doing a bunch of zoom stuff again.

Leo Laporte (01:34:40):
Yeah. I think at Lisa's family is coming over for primary upon Christmas day, but it'll be a relatively small gathering. How about you, Alex? You got a big, big my, my, my wife's family, my wife's parents are coming up. Oh, nice. From Southern California. And and then that's pretty much it. Good, good. And you prob, and as I said you know, office hours continues.

Alex Lindsay (01:35:01):
I'll take this mistake. We don't take any time off time off. No, no, no. We, we, we've gone 600 and I don't know, 650 straight days. So there's no reason to not unbelievable. Slow it down now. Stop

Leo Laporte (01:35:12):
Now. Oh, so this is not your first office hours Christmas.

Alex Lindsay (01:35:15):
No, we did it last year too. Oh, okay. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, so, and, and Easter and all the other things. Yeah, we don't, we don't, we, we not stop stop for no

Leo Laporte (01:35:25):
Man. Exactly.

Alex Lindsay (01:35:27):
Usually, usually those days are actually more, more popular cuz there's a whole bunch of people that home, but what's interesting is, is that there's a whole bunch of people. Also, you have to that I can't kind of stay conscious to that. Don't have a family coming over. Don't have anybody else they're they, especially last year was lockdown. So they there by themselves. And so that morning was actually more important to a group of people. Some, some folks, because that was their someone to hang out with. Well, you know, and thanks to OCN,

Leo Laporte (01:35:50):
It might be the same this year. <Laugh> we'll see. How about you, Andy? Are you so feeding the Christmas Turkey or

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:58):
Don't know yet. I mean, <inaudible>, I have, I have not received my booster yet, so I'm like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna reel it in. Although, although I, I, I will tell you that I, I do have an appointment. I scheduled like the last week, the first available appointment for the nearest place. And it turned out to be new year's Eve. Oh, so I'm gonna be I'm I'm gonna, so it's fine. I'll I'll I can make you the excuse that if I feel, if I feel and look like trash over the next couple days, I can say, oh no, no, I got the booster shot. It's not because I decided to open and drink every single alcoholic present I received over Christmas this year. And last year

Leo Laporte (01:36:31):
I have been, I have, I got the booster on Thursday and I've been a little bit, I've not been sick, but it's just weird. So

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:38):
I know, I know a few people that even if they wrote out, I, I had a, I had no problems with the original two injections. I do know some people that, for whatever reason, they said, well, well, I, I had, I wrote out the first two with no problem with a booster, kick my. Yeah. But that's, but that's fine. It's, it's more important that you get it than have one day in which you feel like even if they take the risk of feeling like trash and it's just a, could feeling like trash for like a day, absolutely than deal with what, what happens when you're not boosted. We failed

Rene Ritchie (01:37:04):
With our booster program in Quebec. Like we we're hoping to get it back on track. We totally failed. But I ended up getting three shots because the us didn't accept my first shot AstraZeneca. And it would, it sounded like things were gonna start opening again. So I had to get a third, a second Moderna shot as well. So I went Astra, MENA and Astra knocked me out for 24 hours. Literally asleep, woke up feeling like Superman MENA knocked me out for 48 hours. Oh, fell asleep, woke up feeling like Superman nurse joked. Oh, this will, this will knock you out for 72 hours. But I was really just kind of tired for 24 hours. I was still

Leo Laporte (01:37:34):
Functional. That's basically what happened to me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking I'll get a shot every month from now on I'm on my, like the flu shot. Right. It's what it's gonna end up being. I don't know what it's gonna end up. You know what, no one knows what it's gonna end up like being, and that's the hard part. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. It's just the

Rene Ritchie (01:37:53):
Theory I saw was that it's gonna burn down. It won't be novel anymore. Like we just had no historic immunity to it and it'll be similar to the flu where you get mildly, like you get like, there's a good negative results. Go away. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:04):
Mostly go away. That's a good theory. Unless you know very omega is fatal. Yes. And then, you know, then that there, no,

Rene Ritchie (01:38:15):
See, fatals not bad. That's the whole thing. Fatal burn and things. Yeah. Well the fatal burns out fat. Like if it's like Ebola, it kills people so fast. It can't spread that far. Right. It's when it's like, just in lethal enough, slightly

Leo Laporte (01:38:27):
Fatal spreads. Just slightly fatal. Yeah. That's the worst. All right. Get your picks. Ready? Boy. What Alex? You say something? I say anything. Nope, no. Our show today brought to you by cash fly. Quite literally. It's our CDN our content delivery network. Cash's been in the biz since 1999. We've been using them practically since we began almost 15 years ago. Cash fly now is offering something very cool. Ultra low latency streaming, and I'm not talking the web RTC solution. That's led us all down in the past stream delays with cash, U L L S less than one second, but there's more, you've got a great HTML five player with an SDK, which means you can put your player anywhere. Website's applic mobile, any other platform. That's nice with global delivery cash, the fastest CDN for throughput globally over 50 points of presence all over the world.

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So that means your videos will be streaming quickly anywhere you have viewers, regardless of what continent they're on. And man is its scale more than a million users concurrently, as well as ingesting thousands of synchronous streams, they can adjust RTMP RTMP S RT and more to deliver ultra low latency S SLDP and HLS streams. At the same time, their platforms designed for trans mucking, thousands of streams simultaneously with live failover and the best thing about cash. You'll get a custom and solution built for your unique needs. All on top of their reliable, robust global network with ingest and delivery, wherever you are, or your customers are 24 7, 365 day a year customer support. It's fantastic. They're always there when you need them priority support, and have to say cash has always been a wonderful partner. We really love working with them. Their infrastructure can support more than a million concurrent streams today, right now, five times faster than other CDNs as the world's most reliable CDN backed by a 100% S L a just for TWI listeners. Cash's given away a cut complimentary detail analysis of your current CDN bill and usage trends. You may be overpaying. Find out, bring your bill, your usage trends to twi.cash.com, no hard sales, just information, twi.cash.com. Thank you, cash for all you do for us. It's been a great year with cash fly this year picks of the week time, let's start with Lindsay.

Alex Lindsay (01:41:06):
So this is a kind of a fun one. <Laugh> yay. We, we, we have a, a, someone who joined into our office hours and, and he he does a virtual Santa over zoom <laugh> and it is amazing. Oh, that's amazing. Oh, look at

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
It. Wow. It is

Alex Lindsay (01:41:27):
It. We, we, we just kept on like our he, he came on and he was asking some questions about a couple things, and he's trying to figure a couple things out. But he's got these 3d, you know, he's, he's all there and he's got, he's got these, you know, you can, he's interacting

Leo Laporte (01:41:40):
With these virtual characters, like with

Alex Lindsay (01:41:42):
The virtual character and he's got, and he's got but he's got a, he's got a whole bunch of different scenes that he goes into and he, and he works, you know, and we've seen him interact. We had someone's like daughter come on on and hang out with him. And he did, like, he really walked her through it. She's been talking about it for days. Like, like, it was just, it was just like this incredible experience, but it's amazing that he does it over zoom and, and, you know, so he is, got this little service that he does over zoom and he works on it all year. Like he does is not like, this is, this is like his thing. Yeah. And, and it's a really, really fascinating it just, we're starting to see these new things that are gonna be happening over zoom and, or, or some kind of online experience. And I just, it was just a new thing. Like it was like, I did not see that coming. And so and it's not only that it, that I was surprised by it, but I was really amazed at how much he's really thought it out and been, you know, a lot of creative,

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Creative work, so better be sitting in some drunk strangers lap. So <laugh>,

Alex Lindsay (01:42:41):
You know, it is, you know, and it's but it's, it's Santa it's Santa Cringle with a K and Santa

Leo Laporte (01:42:47):
Kringle, llc.com yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:42:51):
Hundred

Leo Laporte (01:42:52):
25, 28 minutes. You can get a virtual visit on Christmas Eve for 200 and a, and given the fact that he's, these are onesy two Z. I can, you know, he's actually this pretty reasonable, how many, how many visits can he do on a Christmas Eve? And then there's special events as well. So, wow. That's really cool. Look at this. Cool. Amazing. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:43:12):
Yeah, yeah. If you watch the video, you'll just see this. I mean, if you're just looking for, so something completely different and I, I have some, some other folks in office hours saw it and they were like, they already, they already bought a, a slot. Like they were like, okay, we're doing this. I think this

Leo Laporte (01:43:25):
Is a great idea. He's very clever to do it this way. I think, I think it's really smart.

Alex Lindsay (01:43:30):
It's really, really good. Yeah. Is the

Leo Laporte (01:43:31):
Stove real? I'm trying to figure out <laugh> some of it is, I

Alex Lindsay (01:43:36):
Obviously he's got little noms in there. He is got elves

Leo Laporte (01:43:38):
And way not noms. You're not noms. Don't make a mistake. Noms are for

Alex Lindsay (01:43:41):
The long moms drink. They drink too much. I hear <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:43:44):
That's really cute. That's so cute. And you know what? Totally credible that's really good. Really good. Yeah. Santa Cringle dot LLC with a K. Yeah. Thank you, Alex. That was a very festive pick. Yeah. A lot of fun. Very nice. Andy, your pick of the week, you got two. Oh, you're

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:07):
Muted Christmas. Pres my, oh, sorry. Am I? Yeah, now you're

Leo Laporte (01:44:09):
Okay. Maybe that was us. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:12):
I was, I was shuffling things around, so they probably mod me out of safety. Yeah. So my, my, this is my big Christmas present to myself this year. I've last year, around this time, I decided to, for some reason I got a bug in my head around like December 28th, 29th to finally like start buying like high resolution audio files and CEO was, can really take, can I really hear the difference? So this year I decided that, okay, well, you know what, I'm not gonna just do that. I'm like this is, this is my time that I'm gonna buy, like my first, like, I don't know if you'd call it higher end. It's not audio file. Like cheap cheaps, skate, audio, Ohio audio file headphones and an actual like external deck so that I could start, oh, that's the hip

Leo Laporte (01:44:52):
Deck. I, I love

Andy Ihnatko (01:44:53):
My to hear. Yeah. So this is, this is, this is the combination I, I, I came up with cause I had a budget of like 500 bucks. And so this is the, what I'm wearing here are the high fi man Sonara headphones. I love

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
High fi man headphones. Those are great. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:06):
They're, they're, they're really, really good. I, I bought these because they were almost universally praised as like the Gentry level. Like if you, if you want an upgrade from whatever you're wearing right now, but you don't wanna spend a huge amount of money they were

Leo Laporte (01:45:20):
Let's it this way, they're less than the AirPods max. And they sound up a times better. <Laugh> they're like

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:26):
353 $50. Yeah. And so, and universally, like I'm talking about the nerd audio file 

Leo Laporte (01:45:32):
Have high five mans as well. I think I have a little bit higher end, but they're, they're remarkable. They sound so open and clear and I just love them. Yeah. They, they

Andy Ihnatko (01:45:41):
Really, they really are excellent. Cause I, I had two variables here. Like a, my, my normal, like listening headphones were either like these standard, like Sony, like old warrior, like $80 XDR headphones, or I did buy the latest version of like Sony's noise, canceling headphones, the version model four, whatever this year. And yeah, no, they're, they're much, much clearer. They're much, much nicer. Then you have, then you add the, then you add the deck, which is instead of using the onboard digital audio, digital analog converter. Now it's got this whole process for this doing nothing but converting like the signal. This one is the, I actually bought it based on the recommendation that both you and Alex, I think had months, months ago, this is the second version, the, the updated 20, 21 version of that because mine's blue,

Leo Laporte (01:46:27):
You get a red one.

Andy Ihnatko (01:46:28):
Mm yeah. Yeah. They, they made, they, it looks identical. They add, they added some, they improved some of the internals. It nice. Not something that I'm qualified to say how much better it sounds. Cuz like obviously I haven't tried both of 'em. But the idea here is that this will it's it's battery powered. So it'll be, so it'll work on your phones. It'll work on your laptops. It'll work on the desktops. The only disadvantage of this is that for audio file reasons, I am told the built in you can't charge it while it's actually plugged in because they keep the power charging circuitry and the audio processing circuitry separate. So as a result, the battery lasts, they say up to eight hours, I'm getting about six hours. So even when it's plugged into my desktop, as it, usually I will have to keep recharging it. I saw that by

Leo Laporte (01:47:11):
Buying two, Andy <laugh> you rotate them

Andy Ihnatko (01:47:15):
A day and a swap a Bandier of decks. Yeah. So, but I mean, so I, I, to sort of wind it up kind of quickly what I was kind of curious about. This is one of the reasons why I wanted to buy this stuff on Amazon is that I didn't know whether I would really notice because, and so, because you buy stuff on Amazon in early December, now you can return it through January, the end of January. So I'd have a lot of time to play with it. I can definitely say that. Yeah. I can definitely tell the difference, not on everything, but on many, many pieces of audio that were well engineered, I'm seeing a lot more detail. It's it's the difference between like listening to on a really, really good para Bluetooth headphones what you hear is a piano then, but there's a difference between I'm hearing not just a piano, but I'm pair this piano and with a setup, I'm hearing this piano in that room.

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:02):
Yeah. That's amazing. So it really feels really, really good. The only draw, the only drawback just before I, I wind it up completely is that it's still listening to high definition, audio know high resolution. Audio is still a big, big mess. One of the, I, I found that one of the most valuable features of this or any other deck is that there's actually an L E D around the volume control in the middle there that tells you what it's actually decoding. And so if, if normally it's green, which means that yes, you're getting CD quality lossless audio, but you don't get into the other color. It's like, no, you're now you're getting high resolution to audio. Now you're getting DS, whatever. Until you've got, making sure that you're running, you're running the right app, the app is decoding it properly that you've got on the device. The phone that is you've got this right switch is flipped to say, no, please pass through high definition audio. And then you might find that as is the case on my on my pixel six, that there's a bug in their audio subsystem. That's not passing across the audio correctly. So I'm, I'm enjoying it on my iPad. I'm enjoying it on my on my MacBook, but I'm not yet enjoying it on my phone. So boomy <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
Do have you tried any MQA audio? Cause this is one of the features that's added in this new one that I don't have in the original hip tech in the that's a master quality recording. Yeah. It's a new standard. It has a file that comes with it. It's a new kind of high res I have never heard of it and never tried it, but I'm wondering.

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:20):
Yeah, it's I I'm I'm I think I did buy a couple. I buy my high res audio on HD tracks.com. Me too. Yeah. If, if I'm, if yeah. If I'm buying any right. And I bought a couple of, of tracks in that format, I'm trying to figure out whether I'm actually hearing a difference or whether I'm telling myself I'm hearing a difference because once you get above yeah. I know like a certain bit rate. Yeah. I mean, I can, I can, I've I've proven to myself that I don't, I'm not faking my my enthusiasm for this, because again, I've done lots of side by side tests and I'm tell I I'm, I I'm, I don't believe I'm, bamb boozing myself into thinking that it's a higher quality experience. However, there comes a point where what you're list. I, I feel as though there's comes a point, which what you're listening to is the histogram.

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:01):
You're not listening to the actual music. So I think that's a problem. It might, it might more interesting when so title, I think, yeah. Title MQA either. Yeah, they do MQA and you'll need a specialty coder to get all that. But the thing is MQ title for to get that level of quality. That's like two bumps over. Yeah. It's, there's a free tier. Great. And then there's like the regular quality tier. Great. There's the high, high quality, which is like CD UN compressed. And then like for 20 bucks a month, or actually when I signed up, it was like 25, 26. It's like, I can't, I'm not gonna spend $26 a month just to, for should you should try it

Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
Because right now it's two bucks a month for, for a month, for three months for their

Andy Ihnatko (01:50:43):
Special be worth try. I, I, I try, I signed up for title for the first time. Like just like last weekend, just to start trying this stuff. It, it comes down to style. I, I find that I find that I'm using Spotify because it has the, for me, it has the largest, most valuable catalog. And I use that to sample. And then once I find, if I find something that I absolutely love, I will buy it. And if I can buy it in high quality, I will buy it in high quality. Right. So it's, it wouldn't be a good value proposition for me to spend 20 some thing dollars a month once the, once the free offer resides. But yeah, I mean, Spotify still, hasn't done high resolution audio officially. I'm listening mostly to apple music because they are really, really all in on this. It doesn't cost a lot of money. And they're also very, very clear on what con what features their con a specific piece of content has. Not everything is gonna be high resolution, not everything's gonna be lost. So, but again, worth worthwhile for me because I've been spending a couple years listening to a lot more music. So it's a, it's a valuable, it's a valuable proposition for, it's a great

Leo Laporte (01:51:37):
Combination. I think the Ciara headphones from high-fi man and the IFI

Andy Ihnatko (01:51:42):
Hip deck, even, even you, even, you guys listen, like just without the deck, even you I've plugged these, these into my normal, like audios sounds, oh, you guys sound a lot better than, than you did, but the other one's okay. Oh, you do look see the, the other, the other thing is that you don't look quite so foolish. They're they're. Once you get to like $2,000 headphones, it's like, clearly this person wants people to know <laugh>. And so I, I was just looking at this. It is, I'm talking about like two huge bell funnels. I'm not joking this stick out like this far. Yeah. Or, or you look like one of the, one of the Cybermen, cause it's got this huge, like pull ha like I, about as far as I'm gonna go,

Alex Lindsay (01:52:18):
You're no longer going into low profile. You're saying, I want the absolute, positively best audio experience, you know, and you put them on and they sound great, but I'm always like,

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:27):
You're, you're also like, yes, everybody in Starbucks, least ask me about my headphones, because I want to talk to you. But for 28 minutes, about how my ears are so sensitive and my I'm such, so, so discerning that. No, no, no. I, I, I can't. I AirPods max. No, thank you, sir. I don't want apple to decide what quality of, of, of what, what to do with the audio that I put into these ears. Thank you very much. The max,

Alex Lindsay (01:52:48):
The max hurts my ears. It hurts them. <Laugh>

Andy Ihnatko (01:52:51):
It's so weak. And I mean, emotionally not physically, then what the process signal processing. I mean, it's like, how about I take the 1952 Toscanini recordings and listen to it through a can of baked beans? Why don't I do that instead? And I'll burn $500 while I do that.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:08):
You might as well, not even use the Sharpie on the outside of the CD. If you're going to do that, the title of course doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:53:13):
Support Apple's spatial, but it does do be atmo spatial. There's a lot less it's so three sixty's not as good.

Alex Lindsay (01:53:20):
Oh, well the problem is title. Okay. Yeah, because, because apple, well, and the other thing app, you know, Apple's push you all that stuff through and, and Apple's doing its own spatialization of EV stereo. So sometimes it's hard to tell what you're listening to and, and it, it, it's not always working. I will say that it's interesting to hear the ATT most, like I was listening to I've listened to a lot of versions of Appalachian spring. It's one of my favorite pieces of music. And, and there was, there was an Atmos version. I was like, oh boy, this is gonna, I mean, this, this is what I was waiting for. And I got into it and I was like, wow, did that not work? <Laugh> like, like whatever they did, like that was like that, that did not turn out well. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, yeah, well, no, no, it was just, it was, it wasn't, there was no center. It was like they had gone, they had lost too far center mass. And so, so I couldn't, it, everything sounded really quiet, you know, in a, in a weird <affirmative>. And unfortunately I know, I mean, I know that music probably better than almost anything else in, so yeah. Yeah. Sensitive. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:13):
Mr. Renee Richie, I'm sure you have something to share with us this week.

Rene Ritchie (01:54:18):
Sure, absolutely. It's well it's, it's not a gadget. It is a charity, a movement, a thing a team sees was a project that got started after team trees. And it's an attempt to remove a ton of garbage from rivers and oceans. It's going into its final stretch. The goal was to was to raise three 30 million to remove 30 ton, 30 million of a dollar, a, a pound of garbage from rivers and oceans. And it's at around 20 right now. So Mr. Be Jimmy Donaldson and mark Rover are doing a live stream to try to raise the rest of the money before the end of the year. It's using all the typical U YouTube tropes. I think if you donate a certain amount, they'll actually get slapped. So if you've always wanted to slap Mr. Be or mark Rover, like you think they have a totally coming right now and put your money where your aggression is and just buy into it completely.

Rene Ritchie (01:55:11):
But it's a really cool concept, a really cool execution. Almost every creator I know on YouTube has either made a video about it, donated both, you know, not anything they can to raise awareness. So if you or anybody, you know, feel strongly about, and I know there's all these different theories about removing the guard bridge, doesn't stop it from going in to begin with. And that's the most important thing. And yes, but there are communities out there who just, it, they, they have so much garbage. They like the waterways going to their homes are just fasted with trash and getting that out of there offers them a, a modicum of a better life. So I think it's entirely worth it. You can go to it's hashtag team CS on social. You can go to team cs.org, take a look, check it out. You can go to Mr. Be's channel on YouTube to watch the live stream. I think it's gonna shift to mark Rob's channel later today, mark Rob is the former NASA and apple engineer who makes like elephant toothpaste that almost knocks the moon out of all. Orbi so there's a ton of fun stuff that you can watch that's going on, but it's, it's a really great cause. And if it's something that's near and dear to you, it's, it's a great way to help out.

Leo Laporte (01:56:10):
Yeah. I would point out that you should really reduce your use of plastics. That would be a much more effective, long term solution.

Rene Ritchie (01:56:19):
I, I also argue that if you well was gonna say, I'd also argue, like we get, like, this gets put on us a lot, like reduce our use of straws. There are companies that are contributing, like even when the whole world shut down, it turned out our cars are only a very small amount of the toxic nonsense that these vast corporations are spewing in the world in a daily basis. Well, let me put it this way. So do what we can, but lobby them

Leo Laporte (01:56:41):
Hard. 2 million pounds of plastic are dump the ocean every hour. Yes. They're removing 30 million. Yes. 15,

Rene Ritchie (01:56:48):
15 hours. Absolutely. Totally. I mean, it's

Leo Laporte (01:56:51):
A good, I'm not no to it. And especially the river cleanup, which is actually a different thing from the seas cleanup, but it's part of this team seas thing. That's really important, but stop using plastic, you know, I've started shaving those old fashioned blades instead of the plastic blades. I mean, just stop using plastic. That's that's the real way to solve this long term, cuz we are pumping so much plastic into the ocean. Yeah. Sadly

Alex Lindsay (01:57:19):
I, I just wanna point out that was a great use of the word FTO <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:57:23):
I

Rene Ritchie (01:57:24):
Was like, I was,

Alex Lindsay (01:57:24):
That is not a word you hear all the time, you know, like it's just, it was just so well dropped into the, of the thing. I was like, I just get

Rene Ritchie (01:57:30):
A little time cranky because like big companies are really happy to tell us about recycling and us about not using straws while they, because it's a distraction from them continuing to degenerate 90% of the ways in non-consumer products. So like push the companies hard. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:57:44):
Yeah. And, and the best way to push it is to vote with your well, with your, your wallet, you know, and not buy stuff that, you know, like I, I know that I'm getting more and more. I don't wanna see, you know, for me it's plastic. It's also what chemicals are in the food that I'm eating. It's, you know, all that stuff is stuff that I'm just voting with. I, I that's the first thing to do is just, I I'm not gonna buy it anymore. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:58:04):
That's, that's the trick useful. I mean, you know if you just look at the amount of plastics in your, in your garbage every day, well, and we get better cut back on that. It really is. As we get better

Alex Lindsay (01:58:15):
At it, what I'm noticing is that my recycling in our trash is largely, it's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. It used to be just all packed up and now it's all like, oh, it's not that much left. You know, I have plenty of room to get of the old stuff that had been sitting there for a long time. I just was doing that this morning. Yeah. And, and, but I was just noticing that we just don't go through as much because we're not buying as many things with containers.

Leo Laporte (01:58:35):
Yep. I wanna just a quick, it was a news story, but I stole it because I wanted to really give it a big plug swift playgrounds four is now out for the iPad and I've been playing with it at home. This is Xcode. I mean, it's so good. It's you can write an app, a real app on the iPad and push it to the app store and sell it on your iPad. Amazing. And if you, you know, if you've equipped your iPad with a keyboard, cuz you really wouldn't wanna write code with the onscreen keyboard, but if you've equipped your iPad with a keyboard it is, it is a great experience. It's got a lot of the features of Xcode. You can actually take what you've written and swift playgrounds and move it over to Xcode. So you, you know, you, you have full capability, a great way to learn swift. It always has been, but now it's a way to actually write relapse with real code. And I just think it's pretty amazing that Apple's finally done this. We said for a long time, I want, we wouldn't think of the iPad as a, an iOS is a serious operating system until X code was available. Well, yeah, they've kind of done it. They've kind of done it. It's pretty impressive.

Alex Lindsay (01:59:43):
Yeah. I, I think that, you know, I think that if they, the next step, I really still feel is gonna be some kind of low code. This is lower code, but I think that we're gonna get to a low, no code, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
We're, this is not no code. This is, I mean you have to, to write code you're writing swift.

Alex Lindsay (01:59:58):
Yeah. But I think the next step is some kind of nodal interface that you could basically, you know, just start putting things together and then publish that out. Yeah. And I think that, that, that's probably the only, you know, this, they, they just keep on making it more and more available. Well, we we're building a lot in a program called Isadora and when you start realizing what I can do inside of a nodal nodal platform, and then when you can't do something, you just put, we just put JavaScript, you know, just, you know, just it in

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
Two. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (02:00:24):
Absolutely. So if you, when you combine it where you can do, I can do a whole bunch of things. That's kinda

Leo Laporte (02:00:27):
What this is though. And the other thing I like about it is you getting visualizations right next to the code as you write it. So you can drag and drop a lot of stuff. I mean, you know, playgrounds does that, but you can also write real code and see the output immediately. I think this is a great environment for learning to code. I think that

Andy Ihnatko (02:00:46):
The key word in playgrounds is play. Yeah. And the way to build an amazing developer is someone who just has an idea and wants to play with it. And the more of it that they develop, the more potential they see and the more ideas they have until a year later without having any sort of concept I've I think I should learn how to develop iPad apps. They've developed something amazing and astounding and bizarre and heroic because they were simply playing around with ideas. Yeah. You don't reason why art

Leo Laporte (02:01:13):
Is good. Unlike the kind normal environment where you write it, compile it, then put it on a phone and test it. You're actually it's real mean your iPad is interacting directly with the code. So touch works, everything works, Sprite kits there, Bluetooth, and it uses a lot of swift packages. So you really have access to almost a complete set of tools. It's kind of mind boggling. I and because the other day, and I couldn't believe it. Go ahead. Yeah. I was

Andy Ihnatko (02:01:39):
Just saying, and, and because you're learning in swift you're, you're because you're learning to develop in a way that apple really, really wants you to develop. It means that you're less likely to become completely upended in the future when they decide they're not gonna, they're no longer gonna support a certain technique or a certain package, or they're gonna require that you support a certain thing that does put limitations on the scale of the stuff that you can write. However, it does, it, it, it does give you a good, warm, fuzzy feeling, knowing that you're not the rug under your feet is gonna stay where it is for the foreseeable future when you're developing with this. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:14):
Yeah. And of course, it's, I should mention, you can also run it on a Mac because it's cattle list. So there you have it, folks have a great new year. We won't see you again until January 4th. Yes. I can't believe it. Time flies when you're having fun, Alex Lindsay, office hours.global, it doesn't stop even for the holidays. It will continue on forever.

Alex Lindsay (02:02:40):
It, it keeps getting better. I, you know, I think that we, we keep on having these moments, especially in after hours where we just go, I, I feel bad that other people don't know that it's here. <Laugh> so I would,

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
I would definitely try, we do our

Alex Lindsay (02:02:49):
Best to spread the word that's for sure. Yep. No, absolutely. But it's, it's a good, it's a good it's. We really just keeps getting, you know, better and better. We're really experimenting. Now we have a test feed that goes out that's HD and, and 4k. Wow. And I know it sounds crazy to bring it over zoom, but when we, when we push it from zoom to 4k HDR, it, it looks really good. <Laugh> wow. It's, it's like, you're like, wow, this looks good on. And, and you have to watch it on your phone or your iPad because you know, it's HDR on, but it's on YouTube. And people are watching it on their TVs and it's, it's, it's looking pretty good. So we're, that's in test phase right now and it'll probably be published sometime in January. Neat.

Leo Laporte (02:03:28):
Very cool. Oh nine oh media too, if you wanna hire Alex because he is available. I don't know when

Alex Lindsay (02:03:36):
We do things that are hard. Well, no, I, all this, all the stuff I do for office hours ends at 9:00 AM and I go back to work. Yeah. You know, so, so I go, I go off to work and, and have my day job. And, and we do, you know, mostly we solve complex streaming problems. That's, that's what, that's, what I specialize in at least is the tough stuff. Tough. That hasn't been tough. It hasn't been done before is usually where I'm

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
And I love seeing the Macintosh classic in bill Davis's background there. That's that's sweet. That's nice. That's nice. Andy and ACO. Are you still doing w GBH, even though the holidays are upon us?

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:11):
Well, no. Oh man. Fazzy wick. He said, nobody works on Christmas Eve. We all up the carpets we're gonna have dancing and punch was actually doing a one day early because of, of, of, because of near, excuse me, Christmas Eve. So I'm gonna be on Thursday at 1230 in the afternoon. Go to w GB news.org to listen to it live or stream it later. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:04:33):
Thank you, Andy. Have a wonderful holiday. We'll see you before the traditional Eastern Orthodox Christmas though. So we can celebrate twice with you. Exactly. Completely. <Laugh> I think that's like the eighth this year. I can't remember. We looked at pierogis for all. Yay. Of all shaped sizes and fillings, many cheeses, many sour creams. I don't know what Canadian Christmas is like, but I bet it's nice. Renee Richie youtube.com/renee Richie. I bet you'll be putting out videos all week long. I would guess

Rene Ritchie (02:05:05):
I don't handle boredom. Well, Leo, so yeah, I just keep going. <Laugh> I just double down, double down on the holidays.

Leo Laporte (02:05:10):
Nice, nice. Anything else you wanna plug any anything coming up?

Rene Ritchie (02:05:17):
I'm doing a new version of my secret origins of the iPhone, but a very, a more Aaron SOEs thing where I go up to the event and then stop. Nice. Just because you all know the event already. So everything that happens at apple, all the challenges, all the, all, all the, the strangeness, is that a good way to put it that

Leo Laporte (02:05:31):
Led to the creation of the iPhone and next year, the Claymation Renee Richie, which would be really great.

Rene Ritchie (02:05:36):
George, just how she's gonna make a puppet Rene Ritchie. But I think she just wants to take my nose off. <Laugh> I think that's

Leo Laporte (02:05:41):
Cool. Pop it right off. Yep. We do Mac break weekly every Tuesday again, next week. It'll be the best of, so you we won't have a live show to watch, but there will be a news show with the best moments from 2021. Normally though and starting January 4th, we'll be right back here. Tuesdays 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern 1900 UTC. You can watch or listen live@livedottwi.tv. There's a variety of streams to choose from there. If you're watching our listening live chat live@ircdottwi.tv, or go into our fabulous discord club, TWI members are so much fun. And the discord turns out to be really the clubhouse where everybody gathers, not just for the shows, but for all sorts of topics. We've been doing the advent of code in there and John Arnold is blowing me away. He's amazing. You can also do Stacy's book club.

Leo Laporte (02:06:35):
We have the untitled Linux show, the GIZ fizz, many other things. Those all make it to the TWI plus feed. We thought the big benefit of club TWI would be a free versions of all the shows and, and it is still a benefit, but there's lots more too $7 a month go to twi.tv/club to find out more. And yes, there are corporate memberships and at least two companies now are doing that for the holidays. Maybe it'd be a good one for your company. TWI TV slash club TWI on demand versions of the show available at the website, twit TV slash M a B w there's also a YouTube channel devoted to Mac break with you. You can watch the videos there, and of course the best way to do it is to subscribe my favorite anyway, in your favorite podcast application. And if you do that, you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you can leave us a five star review, cuz that would be nice. Thanks everybody. We appreciate your being here have a wonderful Christmas, a happy new year. We'll see you in 2022. Now get back to work cuz break time is over. Bye bye.

Mikah Sargent (02:07:44):
Hey, you don't have to wait till the weekend to get the tech news. You need join Jason Howell and myself, Mikah Sargent for tech news weekly, where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news.