MacBreak Weekly Episode 888 Transcript

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Mac Break Weekly. Leo Laporte is out I am subbing in for him today Mikah Sargent, to talk to Andy Ihnatko, alex Lindsay and Jason Snell about this the new iPhone 15, at least one iPhone 15, and at least two people's hands and we are looking forward to having a conversation about the cameras, the new action button and, well, mac OS. Sonoma is also out and Jason Snell just published his review. We talk a lot about the new features you can expect there, what you may or may not like about the new iPhone 15, and let's talk about this case that has some people all bothered by the way that it feels. All of that and more is coming up on Mac Break Weekly. This is Mac.

Break Weekly episode 888 with Mikah Sargent, jason Snell, andy Ihnatko and Alex Lindsay, recorded Tuesday, september 26, 2023. It's not a sport, it's a state. This episode of Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Brooklinen. Experience the difference for yourself and check out Brooklinen's new fall collection for bed and bath. Visit in-store or online at brooklinen.com and use code MACBREAK for $20 off your online purchase of $100 or more, plus free shipping. And by Mylio. Mylio Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit and manage years of important documents, photos and videos in an offline library hosted on any device. And it's free, don't wait. Visit mylio.com/twit. And by Miro. Miro is your team's online workspace to connect, collaborate and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems and plans with the whole team and get your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast.

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. This week with Mikah Sargent. That's me, because Leo Laporte is in Green Bay, where you put cheese on your head and throw around a pig skin. That's what you do in Wisconsin. Is that where Green Bay is? Wisconsin, wisconsin I got it. Sports. We are joined, as always, first and foremost, by somebody who knows a little bit more about sports than I do and was able to say Wisconsin. It's Jason four-iPhone Snell.

0:02:41 - Jason Snell
Just to be clear, wisconsin is not a sport, it is a state, micah. Oh well, yes, Green Bay is in Wisconsin. They have a football team there and, as you referenced, I has all of the iPhones.

0:02:56 - Mikah Sargent
All of them, all of them. Some of them have three cameras, some of them have two, some of them have two. That's how you can tell them apart. That's the only way, and we'll talk about them in just a moment. But let me introduce our other guests joining us with a beautiful new lighting setup, although I don't know, was that last week as well. It's Andy Ihnatko.

0:03:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I wish I wish he hadn't like these teas like that, because I just I haven't figured out like how the power thing works on these, because it just cut out, oh no, and so so I think, so I don't know. Let's, this is the news. I love these lights. These are quite lovely. They work great last week, but then, like I had them on for like five minutes and now they just turned, off and I don't know Otko noir. But that's. But that's okay Well.

0:03:44 - Mikah Sargent
Alex Lindsey is also here and might be able to help us out with this.

0:03:47 - Alex Lindsay
Are they? Are they plugged in USB C to USB C or USB A to USB C? What's on the other end of that one?

0:03:53 - Andy Ihnatko
A USB charging brick from anchor but is it a US?

0:03:58 - Alex Lindsay
is that a USB C or USB A input? Usb C on both ends, on both ends. Yeah, that's the problem.

0:04:05 - Andy Ihnatko
So it wait wait, let's not just gloss over that. The problem is that you're charging it using the USB C standard and you decided to have the same connector on both ends. How could now? You know I'm going to sit back and you're going to explain how that's a problem.

0:04:20 - Alex Lindsay
That's not. That's not the cable that came with that light. So the, the, the cable that comes with the light, is like a little one that has like cloth on it. It's USB A on one side and USB C on the other. And the idiosyncrasy with that light specifically which I have maybe 30 of those lights because we use them in our kits the idiosyncrasy is is that you have to use the USB A because it only has the five volts that go out, the, because the USB C has more volts that can go out. What it does is that the safety what happened to Andy happens to pretty much everyone because we switch the cable that we're like.

Well, of course, usb C will charge it faster, it doesn't charge it at all. So if you do a USB A to USB C into that, it's a great light, you can stick it to things, it's compact. I put it in my kit but it has this one little thing, which is that you the name like 60 you have to plug the USB A into. I have a cheap, like an old USB connector that I power all the lights with in my kit, specifically because of this one little idiosyncrasy.

0:05:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's, it's, it's. I actually know it is, it is legitimately. I like the idea. I like so many the like thoughtful features of this, like, like for like the idea that they have like connect mounts on both sides, that it is magnetic so you can good chance of sticking things, stuff that the only police lights, oh yeah, exactly, but the only the only place where it falls short is actually providing light, when I wanted to provide light. If that's got a big issue for you in a video light, hey, you just no notes, you're just not holding it right.

0:05:49 - Mikah Sargent
There it is, there it is. You got to get a bumper for it with USB C and USB on either side.

0:05:55 - Andy Ihnatko
So now I have. I now have a USB A to USB C. See if it works.

0:06:02 - Mikah Sargent
I actually have a minute for a device that needed to charge and because I was using a newer cable, it didn't work with it either. So you know that same voltage issue, it looks like it's still.

0:06:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Like it's still getting its basic charge.

0:06:14 - Alex Lindsay
You can see it doing its little charge now I can see doing that. Yeah, yeah, that's but that I was confused by that.

0:06:21 - Andy Ihnatko
As any, as anybody would be. Again, if you have, if you have a power, a power device connected to power, as not powering on, that would be quite confusing, that would be a befuddlement, yeah.

0:06:31 - Mikah Sargent
Well, while Andy gets his light situation sorted no, I'm fine, it looks great. I'm fine, I'm not upset.

0:06:37 - Andy Ihnatko
You're not going to have grumpy Andy for the next two hours You're going to have completely level headed, able to roll with the punches, not feeling as though he counts amongst God's most least beloved today. I'm ready to go Right, let's do it. Let's do it, great show.

0:06:52 - Mikah Sargent
We've had some phones. Some of us have just gotten them, you know, on launch day. Others of us have had them for a little bit. Some of us have 12 hours longer.

0:07:02 - Jason Snell
Yes, exactly.

0:07:04 - Mikah Sargent
For a few hours longer. Some of us don't have them, but let's talk about the new iPhone. It is here. It comes in four different versions iPhone 15, iPhone 15. Plus thank you. Iphone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. So tell me about. Let's talk about the standard iPhones, right, Because we know that a lot has come to the new pros, but I think that there's. You know, we got to talk about the regular ones. What did you think of this new look and what color did Apple send over to you?

0:07:41 - Jason Snell
Oh, apple sent me yellow, which, if you can't see that it's very slightly yellow, and they also sent me pink, which is a color that I cannot see.

0:07:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, they both look the same to me, to be honest.

0:07:58 - Jason Snell
Although I have it on good authority from I think it's Mike Hurley that the pink one looks nice.

0:08:02 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, and that's right. You literally cannot see that color.

0:08:05 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I literally can't see light pink, and so they send them to me sometimes and I think there's just an ongoing bit where they're like listen, jason, the pink one, because then he won't know what color he got, because I'm a little bit red, green color blind and it mostly comes out when it's things that are very lightly pink. I had a girlfriend in college with pink socks that I called gray socks for the longest time, and then she realized I was serious and because I couldn't see the pink. So, yeah, they're nice. My wife is here too. She's upgrading this year. I think she's going to be really happy with it. She's coming from a 10 s, so kind of a ways back, and I think I think they're really nice.

I think they feel great in a hand. They did this thing. That's like it's the okay. I know they're not made of wood, they're made of aluminum and glass, but I'm going to say that it feels like if you had a wood, one of these that they took like sandpaper and then, just you know, sanded down the sides to make them all kind of smoother. I don't know why they weren't like that before, but they do. They do feel a lot nicer and it's a good. We get so jaded here with all the tech nerds who do these podcasts about the pros and all of that, but like as a mainstream phone, the iPhone 15, I think it's really. I think it's really nice. The camera is is very good. It's last year's pro camera and last year's pro processor, but for a lower price. You know there are features that are missing, but all in all, I think it's, I think they're pretty nice.

0:09:27 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. I definitely that. The curved sides, I think, is a nice. I do wonder to why they hadn't done that until now. It does make a difference in any of the new phones that you have holding it in hand and I definitely noticed, at least whenever we, you know, we talk about the pros, the change in the lightness is pretty dramatic in comparison to what you might think, given the light change in the actual numbers. But with these, with the question that I had, we had this this morning, so in the presentation for the new iPhone 15 pro and pro max and maybe you'll be able to answer this, maybe not there was talk of a new feature with the camera where if you were holding it up and you were taking a photo of a person, a cat or a dog then the three characters.

Yes, exactly they walk into a bar. They do walk into a bar and you take a photo of each of them and in each of them you don't have to turn on portrait mode to make that happen. That was sort of marketed as something that was part of the pro line. Is the standard iPhone 15 able to do this recognition of portrait without having to be in portrait mode, or is that only for the pro line?

0:10:52 - Jason Snell
Oh wow, I didn't know there was going to be a quiz.

0:10:54 - Mikah Sargent
I'm sorry about the quiz. I think it does.

0:10:56 - Jason Snell
I think it does, because I think it's the the camera system on it, but I'm not 100% on that, okay that's what.

0:11:05 - Mikah Sargent
I had to say this morning too.

0:11:06 - Jason Snell
They're doing a lot of work behind the scenes in order to get that to happen, because, think about it, they are doing subject detection on every shot. Essentially, they're first off, they're using machine learning to say, is there a person or dog or cat? And then they're saying you know they're doing running it through their segmentation, which they do with all the portrait mode stuff, but they're doing with everything now which is depth detection, subject detection, depth map is created. All of those things have to happen, and so the only question for me would be, as we do research on the air, the only question for me would be is it? Does it require the extra oomph in the processor or the neural engine of the new processor, or is it okay and I don't know the answer to that one Okay, yet.

0:11:53 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yes, exactly that's what I, yeah. The person who asked this morning thought okay, I'm just gonna have to test this. I'm not sure yet.

0:11:58 - Jason Snell
Yeah, no no, this just in Mikah I'm hearing now from my sources, which is applecom slash iphone-15. Yes, the iphone 15 supports those features too. So it's basically portrait mode. If you're in something that's eligible to be portrait mode, it will capture portrait mode data regardless, so you can go back later and say, oh, wouldn't it have been nice if there was a little background thing.

And it's like what it's doing is it's keeping the depth map around and letting you turn it on and do its depth effect after the fact, if you want to, which is awfully nice, they could fake it. Right, they could fake it, but they don't have to because they just they keep the depth map around. Now, I don't know if it's better on the pro because of the LiDAR scanner, though the LiDAR sensor might make it a little better quality depth map. But they, you know they're doing a lot of machine learning to identify the subject in the image and make a lot of guesses about what's the subject and what's the background, and then they make a blur out of it and then magic happens Magic tries to happen at the very least.

0:12:54 - Mikah Sargent
Now, andy, every year there needs to be. I've just hold on, I've cracked open the book, I've got white gloves on so that I don't break it. It's a very old book and it is the rules of technology reporting. I don't know why. It's a really old book. They should have just done it on the Kindle, but anyway. And here it says in subsection A, passage B, sort of written as a wow, as a PS. It says every year we must have a controversy at the launch of iPhone. And this year, as I close the book and put it away, it seems to be that people are complaining about the devices overheating. Have you heard about this? That we're experiencing temperatures up to something like 160, 116 degrees Fahrenheit?

0:13:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this is and, for context, yeah, you set it up correctly that when you have a brand new phone, there's always the first, like first weekend of people unboxing it, testing it out, seeing something that doesn't jive with their experience with their iPhone 14, 13, whatever, and they're concerned about it. And, yeah, a lot of people are noticing like what they consider to be overheating. The question here is, as with all of these observations, will this stand up like a week later, two weeks later, three weeks later? Because when you unbox a brand new phone and now you're, the first thing it does is it does a whole bunch of updates you install and you optimize a whole bunch of different apps. So, yes, it's going to feel very, very hot in the hand. The question's going to be like if I'm like, if you put it through a real stress test, if you're shooting like HD video for duration as opposed to quality, does it then get really, really warm?

There's a lot for Apple to live up to, because we're not used to our phones feeling like unusually warm because of all that Apple silicon. We're kind of used to it, like on Android phones, because some of these Qualcomm chips like the way that they're implemented in these phones. Sometimes they're asked to do a whole lot more than the engineering is going to enable them to do. But I don't. I mean the thing is, yeah, a lot of people are reporting this. A lot of people are reporting that, hey, my microfiber case, like it, looks like crap after one day. Hey, this titanium band is really really easy to scratch, and that's the sort of stuff where, okay, that's notable. Let's find out if people are still noting it after two or three weeks or if this is just something that's making to the very, very top of the of the of the news queue, because it's a brand new phone and it's a brand new experience.

0:15:22 - Jason Snell
And there's not enough outrage about USB-C quite yet. So we have to. We have to do find some of those I shot. I shot two two hour videos on different iPhone 15s in 4K on Sunday and you know they were fine. I will.

I will say this could there be an issue? Like Andy said, we, we just don't know. Also, when you talk about the volume of Apple products in, maybe not in this case, but like there'll be, like some, oh my God, my iPhone did this thing and it turns out we don't know if that's 15% of iPhones or.0015% of iPhones and there's no way to tell for a while whether that's the case. I'll also point out that this, a version of this story, happens every year, because what happens when you move to a new iPhone is lots of stuff kicks off on your phone that's happening behind the scenes.

That on your Mac you can look at activity monitor, on your iPhone you really can't look and see. That, for example, photos is going to download every photo in your iCloud photo library and then it's going to run them all through their machine learning algorithm in order to tag them all with faces and identify them, as you know. Is there a cat in there? Is there a cow in there, is there a beach in there and like there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's going on behind the scenes. So your phone and most Apple devices do more work, use more battery and run hotter the first week maybe that you own them. So it's possible these temperatures are further out of line because it's a 3nm processor. I mean it's possible that, like being Chiquot said in a story that we've gotten our notes, you know that the titanium isn't as good and they reduce some of the thermal aspects of the design and all that. That may all be true, but this still may all mean nothing or next to nothing, because week one everybody's phones are working way harder than they will work the rest of their lives.

0:17:11 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and the other thing is that every time that Apple does like a major revision to hardware, we're not. It's not necessarily that the first rounded buyers are the beta testers, but there are a lot of problems that only get discovered once you have a couple of million in the field as opposed to a couple of thousand in the field, and this is why I'm not. Actually, it's been a while since I double checked on this, but for a long time Apple used to give every single Apple store like a hunting license at the Genius Bar, saying that we want to see like, if you, we want you to capture and send back to Cupertino up to five iPhone, 15 Pros that have a shattered black glass. If you have, if you're, if any of these phones are showing overheating, we want you to capture that and send it back to Cupertino. You can, you can. You can just simply swap out with a brand new one for the customer, even if they dropped it, and even if they dropped it accidentally. On and on and on, because they, the engineering team, needs to take a look at what broke, how it broke, so that when they do an update to either the manufacturing process or the design process, the next wave of phones that come out of the factories won't maybe won't have that problem.

So that's why I always say that if you, even if you accidentally dropped it, and now the back screen is like completely shattered and you're like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot, it's not hopeless to go back to the Apple store or be honest, don't make up stories. But oh, just spontaneously shattered in my hand. And then a friend of my, my dad, who's a cop, said to come back here and get a free one or else he's going to press charges Like they might actually have. Like, oh no, no, actually we have a black, we have a black sarcophagus from Cooper Tina, ready to receive exactly this kind of machine, this kind of device. And, yes, we'd be more than happy to even though it was your fault, to simply give you a brand new, free one, because you tried to take care of the device. It helps us out and we want you to be happy.

0:18:51 - Jason Snell
Men in dark suits in a limousine pull up to your front door. They've got sunglasses on, they've got little curly things coming out of their ears and they're like you know, the iPhone that's at least for the you know and I.

0:19:02 - Alex Lindsay
When I was young, we used to spend a lot of time out in the cold and we had a hand warmer.

0:19:07 - Jason Snell
Cause there were no heaters back then.

0:19:09 - Alex Lindsay
And so and so we would have these little hand warmers in our pocket and they and they and they smelled like carrot. You would smell like kerosene, because there was, you had kerosene burning in your pocket, and so now you don't have to do that.

0:19:21 - Andy Ihnatko
You can just watch TikTok and you'll be able to have your a heredity Slip one and each slip one and each of your hunting boots, One of the have a transcode video to like to 1080 and then you're Exactly, and then just put in your gloves or just keep transferring, starting, you just restart, reset the phone and transfer over again.

0:19:40 - Mikah Sargent
One of the first things I did when I got the new phone was and I am just going to AirPlay one, if you want to show it in the settings went into camera and went into formats and now in formats down at the bottom, I've got under video capture Apple ProRes of course, but now we've got these ProRes encoding options, alex, including HDR, which has been there for some time, sdr, but now log. I think it's important. I'd love if you did a little bit of a PSA. If someone's watching a TikTok or sees a Twitter come across and they hear about log and then they go and turn it on but don't really know, and then they get video they're not happy with. Why would it be that they would be unhappy with that video?

0:20:24 - Alex Lindsay
Well, the good news is is that log is going to keep the most information that you need. Now, when you're shooting in, you're getting something kind of like log when you're shooting HDR, but it's really hard to. It's not hard, but you need the right tools and the metadata to pull that back out. Again, if you think about a curve, a color curve let me make that a little bit thicker of them. So if you think about this and you think, normally when we think of what we're looking at right now, this is usually considered linear. So that is. That means that what's coming in goes out at the same amount. The thing that happens with log is that it will go up like this and go over like this. This is a very rough version of this, but you'll see this long area here. That is, it's a logarithmic rather than linear curve, and what that means and that's why it's called log. But what that means is there's a ton of values up here that are representing white, and why that's important is is that it protects all of that white, all that white sitting here. Now the problem is, if you do eight bit, you can't do this because there's not enough. If you stretch, because what you're going to have to do eventually is stretch this back out. So you take this and you you're going to pull all of this up and so that it goes up like this and you're going to pull all those whites back out so that you see that you're able to use them later. But the problem you end up with is, if eight bit, you'll see, you'll see banding. So you'll see banding, posterization, those types of things with 10 bit, which is what the camera is capturing, and now in log you can recover that. And where that really becomes important is things like clouds. So when you're shooting someone and you shoot them in log and you'll still get a lot of that brighter detail there that would have clipped otherwise. So in linear that information would have clipped off the top. In log you're gonna protect that information and then you can go back into resolve or final cut or other things and pull that back out again and so and you can do that under your control as opposed to just you know, rather than it just doing a straight linear output. So log is really important.

We shoot, I shoot almost everything in log on a, typically on either a black magic camera, a Sony camera, an airy. These are all things that we, when we're doing, when we're shooting anything that matters, we're shooting it in log. Then what you need to do after that is you need what we call a lookup table, and a lookup table is literally a set of a series of math equations that's just like this curve that I just that I just drew. So you have this curve here and but a lookup table instead is a cube, and it basically transforms your red and I'll do this red, green and blue. So you have red, green and blue here, and this is gonna be confusing because I didn't do this right. So, but red, green and blue are the different coordinates of X, y and Z and so, and so what it does is it? The lookup table says transform or move. When these points come in, move them to over here like a curve in Photoshop.

But it's moving them in 3D. So the lookup table is saying I have 33, let's say, 33 point lookup table, or 17 or 65. But the most of the time we use 33s because they work. They have enough resolution but they also work in live. Anyway, you take these points and you move them in 3D space to say I'm gonna transform the color that's coming into here into a new color, and what we do is we use that to transform from one color space like log or HDR or SDR to another color space like HDR or SDR typically. And so these LUTs or lookup tables are the thing that transforms from one place to another and we need the right. You know, if you have the right LUT which there are LUTs, I think, already produced for this phone that'll can go from that log to another to something that looks a lot more normal. The key is that you have way more data. If you just went from the regular linear, that you went out and shot without log and you go to anything else, you may see start to see posterization because you don't have the data there to grab it, or you may see clipping in the sky. The log is gonna give every LUT a lot more information to work with, and so it's really powerful it does.

We had a problem about eight years ago when it first came out for cameras. Everything that went to YouTube was in log and I think, just because the creators didn't know what they were shooting, they didn't know that they had to apply a LUT to them. So that became the look, remember that's? I don't know if people remember that super low saturated, no blacks, no whites, just kind of grayish look that was on YouTube for a while, and that was mostly because I don't think the creators that were using at the time knew what that meant, yikes, and so they just put it out and then it became a fashion. You know, like it was something that was an accident became a fashion.

Fortunately, we've gotten out of that and LUTs are very, very powerful. It's really exciting that they're in a phone Like they're in a phone that you can shoot like real log footage. It's kind of amazing. So anyway, so you should play with it. You do need to have understand how that. You're gonna have to apply a lot, and the LUTs are a drop down in final cut and they're also you apply them in the color page on Resolve.

0:25:25 - Mikah Sargent
Now, Jason, you said that you were recording video over. I was yeah, Tell us about. Well, if you, I know we'll have to save some of that for your review, but just tell us about the general experience you've had with the camera on the iPhone, the pro models.

0:25:42 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's really good.

I mean the video was not that exciting. We recorded the upgrade podcast and we did it in person. So I just set to you know, put them in glyphs on tripods and just shot, for you know, two hours at 4K 30, which is still that's. Those are big files which I transferred off using a USB three cable and they just came right off. You could actually see the progress bar moving, which, oh my God, that would have taken forever with USB two. So that was really nice Shooting.

So I was in Memphis for the St Jude relay FM fundraiser. We did a telephone for 12 hours on Friday and I got my phones on Thursday afternoon in the hotel in Memphis. So I ended up shooting some photos out and about in Memphis, which was kind of fun. The yeah, the thing that sticks with me the most is the image stabilization that they've added, the new 3D image stabilizer and with that 5X, not only is there the 5X, but what you know, you start to zoom in beyond that and you can see it desperately trying to hold your image steady as your hand is moving minutely. But it's enough to make a big difference. And then also they've added that little postage stamp where you can see the frame of the full sensor and then what part you're shooting, so that if you kind of lose the plot you can kind of find. You know where was. I wanted to be back up here a little bit and that's all there too.

Really nice upgrade for that. I think it's very impressive. We're seeing. Those are the. You know we've been talking a lot about that tetraprism right that allows Apple to do this 5X design, but that 3D image stabilizer so it's able to move in you know any of these directions and counteract your minute. You know human frailty, body movements, in order to keep the shot steady.

Very impressive stuff. Looks really great and I was able to like I was standing at a hotel room window looking down on Main Street, south Main Street in Memphis, and with the 1X and the 2X you could kind of like see the buildings across the street over the rooftop and with the 5X like it's the storefront of one of the places across the street and that picture looks really good. And then if you move in, if you zoom in a little bit on it, you can read like the signs in the window and like it is, it's a big deal. It is a really great camera and takes takes out, at least for iPhone users. You know it's a place that they've never been before and the quality is very good. Stabilization is really good. Unsurprising, right, because this is clearly the biggest priority you know in a phone is be a good camera. And so so Apple, you know they didn't, they didn't skimp on that, especially on that, that Pro Max camera it's. It's pretty amazing.

Now, between between what? Two and five, it's doing a process digital zoom of the 2X at that point because it can't go any further in and the 5X is too far out. So there is a, there is a uncanny valley in there. But I think the truth is most people are probably working in one one to 2X or they're looking at something that's really far away and it it totally. You know it does it, it walks the walk. That's what.

0:28:58 - Alex Lindsay
I'm saying yeah, and the stabilization was absolutely necessary. There's no way to really effectively unless you're gonna force everybody put something on a tripod to really effectively have 120 and then have it be something. And I do think it's interesting that now they're not telling you what millimeter it like, what lens you're using, as opposed to just you know they're 1X or 2X. There's like you're using this millimeter lens.

0:29:17 - Jason Snell
Right, which is fake because it's still all just coming out of the camera into the image pipeline. But if it makes you feel better that you're shooting in 35 millimeters, like, all right, that's. We call that 1.5X, but okay, whatever, yeah, sure.

0:29:28 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple. Apple says that for each one of these supposed click settings that they are, the image pipeline is optimizing things for a virtual lens of that length. But as usual, it's the sort of thing where you listen, you nod, you write it down and then you only say Apple claims that, quote, unquote, because it's hard to know exactly what they're doing and if it's actually doing anything useful.

0:29:47 - Jason Snell
What I got out of them. I was led to believe that everywhere between 1 and 2X goes in the image pipeline and gets processed, and that those stops are there for your benefit. To say, I'm shooting at 35 millimeter equivalent but that if you went a little bit above it or a little below it, it's still putting it into the image pipeline, taking multiple images and generating the best 24 megapixel image they can. I'm not sure I got the impression and this is also very Apple that neither of us really knows. Yeah, yeah.

But it feels like everything from 1 to 2X is processed and there's no special like when you're at 35, it's not like doing a special thing. It's just at that point, throwing it in the image pipeline and doing the same magic that it does between 1 and 2.

0:30:30 - Andy Ihnatko
And it could be just some simple razzle-dazzle, like if Apple's continuing to correctly claim that hey look, this is not just a phone camera, this is legitimately a wonderful camera. It's becoming harder and harder to do a side-by-side between, like the three primary flagship phones that are out there about which camera is the best. So if you can start talking about the features of your phone camera in professional photography terms, maybe you get a little bit of that whiffle dust that oh wow, no, this is a 40 millimeter lens I'm using here. Oh no, this is a portrait.

0:31:06 - Jason Snell
And you can set your defaults that way too. So if you fancy yourself, a real photographer wants to shoot 35 millimeter, equivalent in settings camera. You can say when I open the camera, go to the 35 millimeters. So at one point, whatever X that is becomes your default, so you can. You'll be like I only shoot in 35 on my iPhone.

0:31:26 - Mikah Sargent
It's like okay, you can do that. Now I have a question about this because so over time we've added now they talked about all the different lens equivalents and they've talked about we were just talking about shooting in ProRes with log encoding and did you find as someone who knows and has tested these phones for some time, did you find the number of settings and options now cumbersome and how do you think this is going to be for someone who is maybe not reviewing iPhones and aware of iPhone, like it's complicated right?

0:32:03 - Jason Snell
I think Apple has done its Apple-y best to keep it fairly simple, right, like there's a lot there, but the platonic ideal of well, platonic ideal of Apple is you see something and it knows that it's what you want to shoot, and it takes a bunch of different versions of it and then later you go back and you pick it. We're not quite there yet, although we may get there, but it is close to that ideal in the sense that they have tried to hide most of the complexity. So, like bottom line, it behaves sort of like there are four cameras or three cameras where you've got little buttons that are like 0.5, 1, 2, and then three or five and that's what you've got on the Pro models and you press the button to get those zooms and then, if you want, you can you know. Then you're stepping out and you've got, you're taking that little wheel and you're zooming in and out, but, like I will agree that they got a bunch of icons that you can set, although some of those you have to turn on, and you're like, oh, what is this? And I'm shooting live photos and all that. But I think what their goal is that if you are just a person who wants to take a picture and you open it up and you go that you will get what you wanted right. Like you will press that button and you will get what you wanted and something like that instant like always collecting the depth map. That's a great example of doing the right thing, which is portrait mode is fun. You don't have to think about entering portrait mode, we will grab it for you. Think about it later.

So a lot of this stuff is the truth is there are people who fancy themselves professional, semi-professional or hobbyist photographers, and Apple knows that and they wanna feed those people. But they also want it to be like if all I do is open the camera app, I'm gonna get something good, and that the buttons that are there are fairly self-explanatory. So I don't think it's gotten too junked up. Like the heaf max thing that we talked about last week, you can finally shoot at 48 and get a heaf file out that's like five megabytes instead of a 100 megabyte raw file. Like that button's not there unless you go in camera settings and turn it on right. It's not there.

So you have to know and that I think that's a good impulse on Apple's part to just try to make the. It's like out of box experience. It's the open app. Experience should just be boop, take a picture, done, happy with it, go back later maybe add portrait mode, walk away and like I think they're doing pretty good there. Like nothing is perfect and there's complexity under the surface, but I don't know. I'm always watching for that moment where it's like oh Apple, no, you're kinda. But like I think they really know the bottom line. It's just regular human being, non-techy people who wanna take a good picture and that's the number one audience.

0:34:45 - Alex Lindsay
I do think, if anything, the iPhone app has become a little too complicated, like too many features that are at the surface that should be hidden somewhere else.

0:34:52 - Jason Snell
But you wanna keep Like portrait mode should just disappear, right?

0:34:55 - Mikah Sargent
I agree yeah, Make it a photos feature, not a feature in the camera.

0:34:59 - Jason Snell
Just one sorry, alex, just as an example, but I think you're right like you wanna see less because you want the device to be smart enough.

0:35:06 - Alex Lindsay
Yeah, and I think the thing is is that I have other. I think in many ways Apple can build this and take advantage of the hardware but also leave space for other people to develop apps for it, in the sense that I would rather, when I'm shooting video now I'm really the black magic camera, something I'm using more and more as I experiment just on my regular phone here, because it's got so much control and it's all on there. But if I just wanna shoot a video of my kids or I just wanna do something, I wanna just open up the photo app. I don't wanna tweak all the dials and I just wanna make sure it works.

And I've had a couple of times when I've opened up that photo app and because I was fiddling with something else, I ended up shooting bad video, and so I was just kinda like the one thing that the photo app has to do is always shoot solid video. It doesn't have to have all the tweaks. And I've gotten myself into States and I know a fair bit about cameras and apps. It makes me worried. It's because I've been experimenting and then I open it up. But it should like, when I open it up, it should just go back. It should be some state that just says I'm gonna shoot something that looks normal when it comes out.

0:36:06 - Jason Snell
Right and the video is a good. I mean, there's some settings to like revert back that you can set, but you can also turn them off, but your video is harder. It's very easy to end up in a state where you're shooting 4K 60 when you really just wanna be shooting HD 30. And again, in the long run, apple should know like. The cinematic mode is another good example where Apple should sort of say oh, I should shoot this in cinematic mode, but right now it's a mode you have to enable. It's an ongoing process, for sure, and there should be room for halide and obscura and apps like that for the people who really wanna tweak it. And there still is, which is good.

0:36:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, all right, we do need to take a quick break before we come back to continue talking about the new iPhones. I am Michael Sargeant subbing in for Leo Laporte today, as he is in Wisconsin which is a state and not a sport where he is there for the Packers game and a bunch of other stuff. Who knows what he'll be getting up to, but he'll be back next week. I am joined as always by Jason Snell, andy Anato and Alex Lindsay, and now it's time to tell you about my Night of Sleep, which is brought to me and to all of you, and it was bringing you this episode of Mac Break Weekly by Brooke Linnan. Fall is finally here. Oh, I love fall, and now is the perfect time to upgrade your bedding collection, to get cozy season home essentials from Brooke Linnan. Yes, I have talked before about Brooke Linnan. Brooke Linnan sheets are what I have. I have the classic percale sheets on my bed, and we'll continue to use them into the fall because I am a very warm sleeper. And Brooke Linnan sheets these classic percale sheets. They're really breathable and so they help me stay cool at night, which is so, so great. Brooke Linnan has all of the details figured out when it comes to bedding, and I really enjoy the fact that they kind of pay attention to the small things labeling the long side on the sheets or making the pockets in the pillowcases extra long so that the pillow doesn't come out. Those little things make all the difference.

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0:40:27 - Jason Snell
I have the new series but not the ultra and I honestly it's still in the box, just not a high enough priority for me so far, since I was traveling and getting these things. So it's on my list. Then again I've got a series seven, and series nine is not that different, so I'm not sure it's faster and I'm looking forward to seeing if that feels better. Also, the most interesting feature, which is that sort of double tap feature, is not currently in the software, so there's more to be done there.

0:40:56 - Alex Lindsay
Embarrassing Ultra two.

0:40:57 - Jason Snell
I'm curious about two. But I got to see an Ultra two because Mike Hurley this weekend had his new Ultra two which looks just like the. Ultra, it looks just exactly One except the screen's a little bit brighter. That's about it, but that's it for me right now.

0:41:12 - Mikah Sargent
So on, ask the Tech guys over the weekend, leo brought in his new Apple Watch Ultra two and I said oh, so how are you liking the new gesture? And he said oh, I forgot about that. And he said well, how could I use it? I said I think if you open up the music app and play something, then you can pause it and play it. And so we do that and we're sitting there on camera as we was doing this over and over again.

And then we realized that that isn't shipping until next month. So yeah, there's not a whole lot to talk about with the Apple Watches, but I was just curious if they ended up sending those, or if they too had kind of acknowledged that I do have one of those.

0:41:51 - Jason Snell
I just haven't put it on yet, but it'll happen. It'll happen. Iphones are the priority right, Like they definitely are.

0:41:58 - Mikah Sargent
Now the Pro models got a new feature that we do not see on the standard models Instead of taking away a port or I don't know, removing another button, a button has been added, Although I guess it was a swap for a switch to a button Right. The action button is here and I have to tell you the team or individual or whomever that designed the UI for that just really had a good time you could tell. Like it is. It's so unlike, in my opinion, the rest of the UI that it really stood out to me as something that felt like it came from a video game or something. But tell me about your experience with the action button and then maybe you can do what we've had everybody else doing, which is sort of reveal how you are using your action button.

0:42:55 - Jason Snell
I'm still figuring it out. I've seen a lot of people do shortcuts that like bring up a menu Somebody called it today Control Center 2, basically it's like I actually think that's personally. I think that's gonna be the wrong way to use the action button, that using the action button to bring up more UI you have to tap, versus something that is a little more contextual, that's sort of like, because it only does one thing right. So I think most people are gonna probably either keep it with ring silent or they're gonna move it to the camera. And I've heard people say, oh, why would you use camera when you can swipe or you can tap on that button? But the fact is, if you can pull your camera out or your phone out and, by feel, put your finger on the action button, press it down, the camera comes up and you keep your finger right there and then you use it to snap pictures is actually a pretty good use case. Like it makes your phone into a camera, like a camera camera like with a button that makes it a camera and that takes the pictures, which is pretty great. But using focus modes is a fun idea, using the flashlight is a fun idea and what I've seen in the nerd set and I think that there's some opportunity here is shortcuts, one of the things Apple added in iOS 17 this year. That's actually very clever if you looked at shortcuts and were like nope, nope, nope, it's too much.

They added this thing called app shortcuts, which basically allows app developers to do little standalone things that do stuff in their apps that you might wanna do, so that you don't have to write a shortcut. You can just choose one of the shortcuts that they've given for you to access some feature of their app. That's pretty cool and might be useful for some people. But I think the real awesomeness for the nerdy set is contextual shortcuts. So the idea, like John Gruber wrote about how he's got a shortcut that if his phone is down in his pants pocket and he presses it, it's a ring, silent toggle, but if it's laying on a table or if it's in his hand, it does.

There's an app called Actions that just adds more actions to shortcuts. It's free and one of the things in Actions is device orientation, so you can actually say if it's face down, do this. And that's interesting because you could imagine right, if it's this time of day, if I'm in this location, if I'm connected to my home wifi, if I'm connected to my work wifi, you could start building up this thing where the action button you know, you know what it's gonna do and it knows what it's gonna do, but it varies based on context. That, down that path I think, lies a lot of possibility. But even for Apple in future OS releases to try and like spiff that up a little bit. But people are gonna be experimenting with it and you know, for now mine is on camera, I think, but I wanna play with the shortcut stuff because that sounds like a lot of fun to be able to say there are certain cases where I'm not taking a picture right, and in those cases, what does it do? It's a fun idea.

0:45:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I absolutely am going to do shortcuts eventually, the contextual method, particularly because you can set up sort of custom shortcuts where if you're connected to your home wifi, then do something. So I'm thinking about that, where maybe it's, it is a way for me to turn on lights in my home. Or if it's after dark and the lights aren't on in the bedroom, then obviously I want to turn on the nightlight, because that's a common thing, to turn on the nightlight and see in the room without blasting my eyes. So there are all those different contexts, but I hadn't thought about that one specifically. I was thinking it was using the ambient light sensor or something to determine that it was in a pocket. So that's a very clever use of it. Rosemary Orchard this morning on iOS Today showed off what she's doing with the action button thus far, which, as you can imagine, is very powerful yeah, especially coming from having an ultra that also has an action button and what you can do there. I did see a number of folks who have created, essentially, a folder in their shortcuts app and put different shortcuts into that folder and then when you trigger the shortcut with the action button, it pops, open that folder on the screen and then you can choose among the eight options. But I agree with you because, jason, what you just said there I had not quite synthesized how, when I looked at that, something just didn't feel right for me.

I thought, oh, that's a cool idea. And then, as I thought about it more, I thought I don't know, I don't know, I don't think I would want that. But you've basically explained it for me in my own head, which is the idea that it's almost just like having another control center and having just another UI addition, more taps and stuff. And, yeah, you just want the button to do what it does.

I have it set to voicemails right now, because I am a person who I'll just be walking along and then the thought pops in my head and I wanna just record something. And I use Just Press Record on my Apple Watch and so this gives me kind of a Just Press Record setting on my iPhone right now and I've found that helpful so far. But I know several people who are. They use their flashlight so much in a given day, or their torch for UK listeners, and so they have set it to the flashlight. I think it's exciting that people can kind of customize their phone in a new way, and I'm kind of curious, andy do you think that we'll see Apple bring this to every iPhone in the future, or do you think this is gonna remain a pro level feature?

0:48:22 - Andy Ihnatko
I think that it's too useful and too simple to implement for them to ignore it.

And remember that the path of the iPhone Pros is always that whatever's in the Pro this year is likely to be in the baseline models next year, the year after that.

Also, they hate cutting holes on the sides of their beautiful iPhone frames and this allows them to avoid having that thing again, and it just it makes Apple look really, really good.

And once again, I'm left thinking that, wow, one of the best, best, best business moves that Apple acquisitions, apple ever made was to basically just buy workflows.

It's like you know what this is way, way, way too useful for us to trust another company to run this feature. We want this and the fact that it was instinctive for them to say if we're gonna make this an action button, we're not gonna let people choose between six predefined actions. If we just simply say activate, fire off a shortcut, we basically have now just leveraged the power of this whole platform and like and I totally agree with you it's like our frequent or at least my frequent complaint about iOS versus Android is that it is Apple does have a beautiful plan for your future that insists you not deviate from even by one micron. And so when it finds a way to make, give you freedom, power and customization without compromising what it thinks is important about the iPhone's safety, security and simplicity, it's just a thing of beauty, it's. I mean I would. It's another point in favor of my switching back to iPhone at some point.

0:49:52 - Mikah Sargent
Now, Alex, I know you don't currently have the new iPhone, but I would like to know what case, if any, do you have on the iPhone that you do have? What case are you using?

0:50:03 - Alex Lindsay
I'm using the peak design so I find that if I lose, I can lose my wallet and I lose my phone, but I rarely lose both of them and the phone has a find my phone. So I'm that habit of losing things. So this is a magnet, so it just snaps on. So I keep these together most of the time. The only time I take this off is I have another peak design thing that takes it claws into my vent on my in my car, so I can just put my, I can slap my phone up and it's got inductive charging through the back. And then there's this little service. You see this little square, this is actually an indent into it. So there's a tripod mount and if I pop it in there the magnet guides it. But then it snaps in and it's like becomes part of the phone and so it's a. It's a kind of a multi-use. And I think I even have another one where you can I haven't used it yet you can peel it off and just stick it to something and then stick your phone to it if you need to. And so it has been. I mean I've used in the last couple of months.

The biggest problem I have now is.

My wife has my old one with the old peak design, and so we have to decide who's phone it is.

It used to be easy I pick up the wrong one, but the that's the case I use and then I put a screen protector on the front. So between that and the screen protector, when I send this I think I'm going to send this one back. I'm having a hard time now because I've always kept them, but I was like I should send this back and save $650. But when I send it back, it should be in mint condition, cause the very first thing I get, I generally don't take it out of the box and because I was 30 minutes late to buy the phones on Friday, I still have a couple of weeks. So anyway, so the you know I'll have all that stuff together. I literally take it out of the box, I look at it for a second and then I put the, I put the, the coding on the front and I put it into a case and call it a day, like it's you know, and it stays that way the whole until I get the next one.

0:51:49 - Mikah Sargent
Will this peak design have a case for the new iPhone or are you going to be using a different case?

0:51:54 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know. You know, I think that there's some folks have I'm probably going to test a couple of cases. There's some folks that have said wanted to send me some cases to look at. So I'm going to look at those. I do think that I'll I have a hard time thinking that I won't end up back in the peak just because I have a whole system around it. So I think that's the advantage that you get into. But I'm but I'm excited to look at what the other options are as well.

0:52:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah. So that leads me to talking about the new fine woven or in some cases not so fine woven case that we've seen lots of write ups, lots of complaints.

0:52:29 - Alex Lindsay
It's not just write ups and every person I know that's gotten it is complained about it. They're like, oh, I don't like this, I don't like this case.

0:52:34 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Some people have had an ick feel about it. I didn't know that part of it, but apparently for. So I guess I'm sharing one of my weaknesses with the world. So please be kind, Don't send me cotton balls. I cannot stand the feel of cotton balls. I don't understand why I can't. I just I can't grab a cotton ball without freaking out. It just feels awful to me. And some people are having that same sensory experience with the with these cases. So they put their hand on it. John Ashley, stop it. They put their, they put their hand on it and they get like grossed out by the feeling of it. I don't have that, thank goodness. Is it cloth?

0:53:14 - Alex Lindsay
I don't have one, so I don't know.

0:53:16 - Mikah Sargent
So it's a I hesitate to call it anything because I don't know what the material actually is, but it is. It resembles like a nylon. I Fix it did a really great tear down where they actually worked with a company that does magnification up to 500 X, I believe it was and if you zoom in very, very closely, what you have with this case are threads that are, of course, woven, but these threads are made up of even finer individual threads, and so these individual threads yeah, scroll down past the 52 for folks who are listening. We're looking at the I Fix it thing, that black rod. There is a human hair, which that's gross. They just have a random human hair there, but they do and the things that are running at diagonal are the threads. Each of the kind of thicker pieces are the larger threads that are made up of these tiny individual smaller threads. And what they did was they went around the office and they found people's coats and jackets and they looked at them at like 500 X magnification as well and a Patagonia like rainproof coat and another like Arctic X, some $500 ridiculous jacket were both made of a very similar material. Essentially, what they're doing is taking these incredibly fine threads and they're kind of putting them together to make bigger threads that are then woven. And what's happening when you run your fingernail or a key or some other object across it is you're not actually damaging the threads, you're instead redistributing them, and when you redistribute them, then the light reflects off of them in a different way, which gives it that scratched look where it looks different from the rest of the case. Of course, if you take a knife to it, which they also did, then it will cut the threads. And if you put a hot sauce on your fingers and run it across there, they noticed that the vinegar in the hot sauce actually marred some of the threads. They burned it, and so this is how they kind of tried to determine what it's made up of. They burned it and smelled it, and due to the way that it burned and the sweet smell that it produced, they believe it's some sort of like polyamide or polyurethane, something that's a pretty common plastic that's used, and so all of that together kind of gave them the impression of what this might be made up of.

Of note, apple is not using an aquaphobic or hydrophobic coating. Those are really bad for the environment and so they are not using that on this, and so if you do pour water on it, it will get into the case, but then it will come off of the case. If you sop it up because there's nothing for it to like soak into, so to speak, oil would show up in it and kind of stay around for a period of time. There's where they showed the hot sauce kind of getting into the fibers. There's some oil that they put on it. If you were to put like a sopping cloth on top of the oil, though, it would soak the oil out of it, because you are, in effect, it's not like a material that can be bonded to, if that makes sense. So it was, I think, an interesting tear down overall.

But I am curious about because, andy you kind of talked about earlier. You said whenever these phones first come out, it's an opportunity for folks to kind of say, hey, this and this and this and so. Okay, that's worth noting. But then we wait down the line and see if this is something that is more common than we think it is. I think the same thing applies here.

Yes, well, everybody's trying to decide if they wanna spend the same amount on this case as they would on a leather case. It's good to know how people are feeling about this, but if I run my fingernail or a key or a knife across an Apple leather case, does it not also make a mark on the leather? That's kind of where, in terms of the where everybody is about this. I didn't agree necessarily that it's, you know, the worst thing that Apple's ever made. However, jason, I'm sure you saw the conversation For me, yes, you, you saw the conversation about the sort of quality control aspect here and how it's sort of imprecisely punched and there's an argument that the USBC cutout is misaligned on the bottom of the phone and I don't know if we can get like an over the headshot here and zoom way in, but yes, I can see part of the screw on one side.

0:57:55 - Jason Snell
On one side and not the other, right and not on the other. Yeah, so what do you think happened here?

0:58:00 - Mikah Sargent
What's going on? Is this just a rushed design? Did Apple test this with their materials experts? What's going on?

0:58:07 - Jason Snell
I mean I'm sure they did. I think my suspicion is that somebody at a high level said yes, I'm convinced, no leather. And then somebody in Apple's accessory group was basically told we need a replacement for leather. And this is what they came up with and it was solving a very difficult problem because it's about making a price point, it's about having your margins and about being within a essentially a carbon footprint or environmental footprint limitation, and you end up with something that they're trying something different and some people are not gonna like it because it's not a leather case. It doesn't feel like a leather case.

In fact, I wonder if Apple had like Apple has one-to-one swapped fine woven in for leather right In the watch bands too, and I wonder if they had done something different and priced it different and phrased it differently and had it look different in some way, if it might be easier, if they're like well, no, this isn't the leather case, it's a different thing. But they're trying to sort of slide it in as a substitute and I can understand why some people wouldn't like it, because it's not leather, it's different and I think some people will like it, but it feels compromised to me. I don't particularly like the feel of it. I don't like that kind of fuzzy back on it I was and the sort of texture as my finger runs on the back of a case like it's not for me. I think they're gonna get a lot of pushback. Then again, it's the iPhone. As with everything we've talked about today, probably overstated because it's only been a few days and it'll probably settle down. That said, it's also I.

You know there have been reports now that Apple retail is getting like the word from on high about how they're supposed to explain fine, woven, and like the words they're supposed to use when somebody complains. Nobody will be satisfied because they're just saying well, do you understand? It's a premium micro twill. Yeah, okay, great, so yeah, it's a funny thing, of course, anybody who makes a leather iPhone case. Those companies are thrilled because people are gonna buy away from the first party case.

But it's an important thing for Apple because Apple makes a lot of money on the accessories that are sold when the iPhone is sold and there is this perception, I think, that they're more expensive but that they're good. Right, like you can rely on them that they're good. And you're buying the first party and you get the Apple logo on it, which you don't get anywhere else, and that's nice, but also like, yeah, it's expensive but it's got quality. And the danger with the fine woven thing is if everybody looks at this and says this is a $60 case and that Apple loses a little stickiness that was getting people to be willing to pay and put it in their cart when they order their iPhone because it's like, yeah, it's expensive but it's gonna be good. That's a real danger.

1:01:01 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, that's exactly. I mean, that's the reason why you buy specifically from Apple, because you can buy any case you want and they're typically 30 bucks or less. 30 bucks is a really is a nice case in most price lines and the reason why I say you know what? I'm already in $1,100 for this phone. I may as well round it up to an even like 1,200 and spend an extra $60 on it, cause I know the fit will be absolutely perfect. It'll feel as though it was dipped inside this fine Corinthian leather or whatever they're calling it.

1:01:32 - Alex Lindsay
I feel like they dipped in Corinthian leather.

1:01:34 - Andy Ihnatko
Exactly. And so when they get it out of the box and the reports that people are saying and we're not talking about the people who are there to, who buy the bloggers and the YouTubers, who buy an extra two phones just because, hey, we're gonna fire a bullet and see how well it survives to a bullet, and we've got this diamond and we're gonna scratch it with a diamond and see if it scratches Well, duh, of course it's gonna do all that sort of stuff but we're also talking about people who are just on social media saying, geez, I just took this out of the box and already it looks like crap. I'm holding it in my hand. It just feels really, really cheap and I feel really minused by the fact that I mean, I would not be bothered by a $20 case. That is a slight amount of misalignment on the bottom, but this is an Apple case and also, as I mean, as you've been pointing out, like leather you get. This is like a 15 year old wallet and it looks nothing like the color it looked like when I first got it and it's just. It's more. It doesn't leather doesn't age, it simply gains character, even when you have a scuff and a scrape on it for some reason, just like on a person's face.

Those lines basically say history. It says this thing has been around for a while, it's been kept for a while, it's been loved for a while and, oddly enough, the fact that you're handling it and putting your like hand grease on it actually helps to survive, thrive and look better. And that's not what happens when you get the fine micro twill sort of thing. It just feels like cloth that looks all scuffed up and realize this is dissatisfaction after only two or three days. What happens in like a month? Will the edges start to look like the threads are coming apart? Will there be like just simply we're not talking about salsa stains, just the normal oils of my skin? Is that going to create like stained portions of this cloth that I'm not going to be able to get out?

Apple does have a tech note or something about how to clean your micro twill fiber case. Who's a fine dish washing, fine fabric detergent, blah, blah, blah. But like I don't want to have to clean my fine, fine, I wish I had spent like half the money, gotten something like more like a conventional, like you know, unabashedly proudly plastic case. They simply wiped down with a cloth and it looks perfectly fine. So, yeah, I mean that's like, like Jason says, the reason for the Apple. Apple has never compromised on the quality of its hardware products because they realize that, again, when people they don't sell anything in the budget range in terms of hardware, they sell mid, aggressive, mid range and higher. So the moment that you get something out of the box expecting a high end experience and you don't get it, that's when Apple customers start saying, yeah, well, I'm going to get the phone, but I'm going to buy, like I'm going to buy an in case. Or I'm going to buy, I'm going to buy a, an order box because there's nothing special about Apple cases.

1:04:23 - Alex Lindsay
I have to admit I don't buy any of the Apple accessories Like I for these phones. I get the phones, I get the chargers from Apple. I always get the cables from Apple, almost always because they like adapters and stuff like that, because they just tend to work better. So you know, you're, you're what used to be the lightning to HDMI and those types of things I tend to get from Apple because they've already tested them and they work. But when it comes to cases and watch bands, I still have the same. I mean I got the, I don't know the, the. I still have the watch band that came with it. You know, just like the rubber one. I don't really get into the. I haven't found that I've had a real strong record with. I mean, I love a lot of Apple products but the accessories have never really landed for me and so I think that it's. It is kind of a taste thing.

1:05:03 - Jason Snell
Yeah, yeah. But a lot of people I mean because of the convenience right, you get it when you get your phone.

1:05:08 - Mikah Sargent
It makes sense.

1:05:09 - Jason Snell
The average selling price of an iPhone I'm sure includes this nice chunk of the percentage of people who get that very high margin case and it's because it's convenient and it or it's right there, Like only only Apple's case is in the online ordering right when it's a, would you like an Apple case too, Right, and even at the Apple store. It's so easy yeah. Yeah.

So, there's lots of reasons. It's not the, it's not earth shattering stuff, but it is a big money maker for Apple as part of the the whole iPhone experience and it's an important part of the experience for a lot of people too. But you're right, yeah, a lot of people are like I'm going to shop around, I'm not going to do it, but there is a it's part of the money making machine that Apple's got here and any, any disruption. I mean. Also we should say they knew this was going to happen. Even no matter what they made, they knew that dropping leather was going to affect the quality of their products. And I said this on upgrade yesterday.

But for those who don't remember, when Apple took all of the, the really so iPod cables used to be real supple and nice and then all of a sudden they got stiff and bad and that's because they were chemicals that made the softening plastic. That was terrible for humans and the environment and they took them out and it made the product worse and it was appreciably worse for quite a while. And then they sort of like, over time they got better and we found some new things. We've got these braided cables now that I really hope don't kill anything or anyone because I love them and that that's where we are.

That's where we are with this stuff, right Is? It's a start of a process of Apple trying to change and this is going to keep happening with their whole 2030 initiative. Like they're, they're going to take some hits. We're like, okay, yeah, we had to. We had to drop the leather because it's part of our goal and this is our first crack at it and I I have confidence that they will get better at this and they will make better products.

But this is like day one of we're not, you know, we're not going to give you what you are used to and we're going to try to build something better. And they've got the money and the and the resources and the motivation to do that. But this was inevitable whenever they, when they made that decision to drop a popular material from their accessories, it was nothing was ever going to replace it. They could either abandon the category or they could try to do like fake leather, which they can't really do, right, because it's plastic, it's all, it's all not, not very good for the environment, fake leather. So here we are, you know, with this, this thing that some people are going to think is perfectly fine and they're going to like it, but all the people who loved the leather cases are going to be like well they're just going to go buy leather cases for somebody else.

And they will right that's what they'll do, Yep and that's fine.

1:07:53 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, all right, we've got a lot more to talk about, but I do want to take another quick break. We are here. We are here, yes, we are, and so are you. No, I am Michael Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte, who will be back next week, joined as always by the wonderful crew Alex Lindsey, andy Ihnatko and Jason Snell. We are talking about iPhones, and soon we'll be talking about macOS Sonoma but let me tell you about Mylio, who are bringing you this episode of Mac break weekly by way of Mylio photos, a smart and powerful digital management system that's done right and, honestly. It's as simple as that. From photos and videos to important documents, milio handles it all and works with your filing systems to create a faster and smarter way to organize, to edit and even recall important documents and files from over the years. You have heard Leo, you've heard me, you've heard several of us talk about it plenty on the show, so if you haven't checked it out already, you should seriously go and check it out, because it's free. It's free to try. You got to check it out, you got to see what it's all about.

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1:13:02 - Alex Lindsay
by the way, this solves the question I had about Mylio, which is that suddenly in office hours people started asking about Mylio.

1:13:08 - Mikah Sargent
I was like where are you hearing about this? It was like a new question.

1:13:11 - Alex Lindsay
I don't know anything about this. Now I understand. Oh, there we go, there we go, it's good.

1:13:16 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's funny, Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you, milio, and thank you those of you out there who've checked it out and were asking Alex some questions about it. So let's round out this iPhone conversation here. I guess I would ask Jason, any kind of surprises for you or moments of delight that stuck out that maybe weren't necessarily talked about on stage, or maybe they were talked about on stage but they ended up being better than you expected, or has everything kind of been what you expected, based on what you'd learned about these phones leading up to testing them?

1:13:54 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think it's mostly what was expected. The let's see, like I said, zooming in, especially going even past 5X, and seeing the stabilization kick in on the Pro Max, seeing that little window that tells you where you are in the frame, that was delightful, because it's just amazing to see your iPhone go there and for it to try to stabilize your movement, and all of that. I'd say that was pretty good. I'm gonna. I'll throw out one thing, which is I have been extremely critical of the color choices that Apple has made. I think that they make a lot of boring colors and that if colors don't matter, then I guess why do we have colors at all? If you're gonna have color, maybe there should be a variety and that some of them should be more fun, and they just haven't done that, and it's a very pale year.

In the main line, I have two points about. The one is having shown Mike Hurley, who can see pink, the pink phone. He said, oh, actually that's a pretty nice pink. So take that for what you will, but what I will say is natural titanium, which is maybe not a thing, it's still just a color that they chose. It looks really good. It really does. I think that there's something to the idea of this really nice metallic look and the matching back that it's. I was a little skeptical because I usually get the black phone or maybe this dark blue phone that they're making now. But you know what? Natural titanium really does look great and it's a good match for the Apple Watch Ultra if you are one of those folks. But so that was a surprise because I thought, oh yeah, whatever gray phone, whatever, but it actually it does. It looks really nice. I think it's going to be the most popular of all of them.

1:15:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's been my experience. I have the blue titanium and Rosemary Orchard ended up with the blue titanium as well, but we seem to be a small subset. We've all actually formed a club of blue titanium iPhone users because there weren't as many as I had expected there would be. I really think that that natural titanium that was my secondary choice because I do like the brushed look of it and it just yeah, it looked good. There's something about it, it just looked good. So that would have been my other choice if the blue was sold out whenever I ordered. But yeah, that's kind of what I had expected. I have heard and read that this seems to be a good sales year for the iPhone. Is it just? What do you think has kind of led to that? Is it just time for people to upgrade phones or was there something about this year's models that really seems to have resonated for folks?

1:16:39 - Jason Snell
Yeah, if you look at the history of iPhone sales, we're about three years out from the last big spike and there's a question. There's a philosophical question about does the new phone cause the spike or does time cause the spike? And I think there's a little of both going on here, where they had a big design change three years ago and those people want new phones right now, and so I think that that is part of it. Also, the titanium is a different look and the lighter phone with the better you know, better feel in the hand, maybe people really tempted by the 5X zoom. I think all of those things are kind of like driving this.

But this is a much more modest upgrade than what we've seen as the big spike in previous years and it makes me think that part of the reason is that all those people who bought phones three years ago need a new phone and they've waited it out. Because how long is the average now? It used to be two years, right, it used to be that you get a cell phone plan that came with a phone every two years. Now you're kind of like left with your own decisions about how often you want to get a new phone. So this is my question is maybe it's just time, maybe it's just three years on, they're ready for a new phone. All those people.

1:18:01 - Mikah Sargent
All right. Well, I think it's time to talk about something else that came out this week, because we've had iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 ship and early reviews of that. But I believe on SixColorscom there is now a macOS Sonoma review. Because macOS Sonoma is here, it's out.

1:18:28 - Jason Snell
It's out.

1:18:28 - Mikah Sargent
It's available, you can download it.

1:18:30 - Jason Snell
You all know about macOS 10, right? Well, this is macOS 14. Also named for the county you're in, it is yes.

So yeah, it's out, it's. You know most of the features. This year on SixColors, what we did is we reviewed iOS, ipados, macos and platform features. We wrote a platform feature story because so many of Apple's features are shared across platforms. But there's some nice stuff, I think.

When we were talking about the settings interface for the action button earlier, I feel I'm getting this feeling from Apple that they are putting a little more effort into those extra touches that maybe we maybe have been lacking for the last five years or 10 years. So I'm just like there are two features in Sonoma that make me think why? Like, in a good way of like, you didn't need to do this and you chose to do it. It's that Steve Jobs anecdote about having the back of the furniture look good Like they added this. So they added all those aerial screensavers from the Apple TV in and you can also have your wallpaper be based on those aerial screensavers and they have a little. It's like a little combo platter. You pick one and you say you also make this my wallpaper. That's all fine. They're nice screensavers, they're nice desktops, that's fine.

What blows me away is like the moment where you activate and you say I would like this screensaver to be done and I would like to now have my computer back. That animated screensaver doesn't you know? We all know what you'd expect a computer to do right, which is bloop. Like that goes away and things flicker and you put in your password and you go to a wallpaper and maybe it's from that same movie, but that's it. That is not what happens.

Somebody at Apple is like no, no, no, no, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take that video and we're going to slow it down until it coasts to stop and like why it is beautiful, it is smooth, it feels right, it is extra and I'm impressed with that. I like that. It's a little bit extra that they went to the trouble to do more than they needed to do in order to make it feel good. That is what Apple should be doing. That's not it. But on the video, there is a video. I think further down in my review there's a little literally a video that you can play that shows it, but it's a. That's not it either.

Anyway, there are a few of those features that are just a little bit extra and like it's. You know, it's just. This is. This is why people like Apple products, I think, is that there are these moments of delight and you're like, oh, that's so good, right, and it's like it's not necessary but it's so good, it's so nice, it is often often thought, often referred to as surprise and delight.

1:21:36 - Alex Lindsay
And apple Yep, apple just masters that like that. I mean, it is one of those things that, as a user it's they do so many things that you don't need and you just go oh, that's so, that's cool.

1:21:49 - Jason Snell
The other one that I'll mention the two that really got me is that one and also so they added this new screen sharing feature. That's really nice that you can from any window if you're on a compatible VoIP app. So FaceTime does it. Now obviously Zoom and all the rest are going to get this feature. You can right click, you can just click on the green button on any window, click and hold and then get a screen share control where you basically say share the screen and that's fun. Okay, that's nice.

But it's still sort of a side by side but they also have this feature, which is the presentation feature. The idea there is you can present with your screen and again, this is one of those things that's like the extra mile is what gets me. So the small version of that. You share the screen and it's the window, and down in the bottom quarter there's a little circle and your head is in it, but it's not what you think which is like, well, we just take your webcam and we make a circle and we put it there. It's like no, no, no, no, no.

First off, if you've got something that is compatible with a center stage, you are gonna be aligned with your head in the center of the circle. They use their object detection technology to erase your background and replace it with a flat background and the circle is not. You're not in the circle, because they know that your head they actually designed it, so your head sort of sticks out of the circle a little bit. The circle, it's like why? Why did they do that? And the answer is because it looks cool. It is cool and they've built this entire pipeline for image detection and layer detection and subject detection and video that allows the fireworks to go off and all of that kind of stuff. But there are these other things they can do with that pipeline. And similarly, in the large screen share it drops down behind you center stage, moves you to the side so that you're not blocking the share, but if you put up your hand over the screen share, it appears over the screen share because you're layered above it and then your background is behind it.

Again, was this necessary? No, but it's real nice and that's what they were going for. And just there are a few moments like that the re-center button, so that if you don't like center stage and you don't like your camera moving around, all that, but you're not satisfied with where the Apple studio display parks your image where you like your head is at the bottom you click. You don't have to use center stage, you can click re-center and all it does is put you in the center and then hands off again. Like again, just a really nice little thing. So this is an update that's got a lot of those like really nice little touches, not huge things. I don't think any Mac user out there once Apple to totally rewrite the Mac experience is like don't do that, I like my Mac, I just like it to be a little bit nicer in a few areas, and that's Sonoma. That's what it does. How?

1:24:41 - Mikah Sargent
long does it take you, Alex, before you choose to update to the latest Mac?

1:24:47 - Alex Lindsay
OS. I'll start. I'll wait for a couple more weeks and then I'll start updating some of my less important machines to it to like just see how it goes. I tend to move very slowly. My main machines are usually somewhere between. I usually update in February and the reason is that I noticed that there's a lot of churn in updates and everything else. And then February it feels like engineering is no longer looking back and looking and they're now looking forward. And you know WWC is on the way and everything else, and so I think that. So I find that February is when they stop fudging with it, they start going forward. So I usually just wait until that settles. So usually my main machines all get upgraded in February.

1:25:28 - Jason Snell
One thing that's tempting me, because my server is usually my server was on Mojave until I upgraded to an Apple Silicon Mac mini and then I had to go to the latest version. But the one thing that will tempt you and it is tempting me is they updated screen sharing, which is this it used to not have an interface. There's an app that does screen sharing, but they put it in the utilities folder. Now you can find it. It's got a window that lists all the places, like it's. Somebody cared about this little utility, which a lot of this use all the time. But they also added a totally new mode that is compressed video. It uses Apple Silicon processors only, so it's not on Intel, but it is a super high latency and quality screen share and I know that sounds kind of boring.

1:26:13 - Alex Lindsay
Low latency, but high quality oh yeah, low latency, high quality.

1:26:16 - Jason Snell
So if you're on a fast network like an ethernet network or even a good Wi-Fi network, I mean it's like you're using the other computer. It's that good, it's so good and I use, I control my server all the time remotely from out here at my servers in the house and I'm in my garage and like it's so good. That is gonna get me to upgrade it to Sonoma pretty soon because it's so much better. And like Apple is even saying that if you're on an ethernet network and you've got another Mac that's doing like video editing guess what you can use it for video editing. The latency is low, it's sending, it's streaming the audio to you from it Like I had a few glitches with that, but like dang, anybody who has got multiple Macs in multiple places, which is a lot of us nerdy people, it's, I know, screen sharing. Who cares? Right, it's so good, it's so much better.

1:27:14 - Alex Lindsay
I think the problem is there's always something in the thing that makes me wanna update, Like Ventura, there was a couple new things with Keynote and there was a couple things that I needed to. I thought, oh, I gotta have it, and then I just ate it, for, like there was like an 8thiasp fault for, like you know, three months of like Because there's some app that isn't compatible Because it doesn't work, and there's quirkiness and everything else, and I was like oh, that was about it Like, and it was one of the first.

I've only done it like twice in I don't know 20 years. Have I updated quickly? In both times it was like three or four months of just oh, that was dumb.

And again, I think if you're not using a lot of production apps and you don't have a lot of those types of dependencies, I think you're fine. I think that it's just that I have so many archaic apps that do all kinds of weird things that take a little longer to not just archaic but just take a little longer to get all the code you know updated and everything else. It's that I just find that waiting, giving everybody a little time, is good.

1:28:10 - Mikah Sargent
Jason, how much oh go ahead, please, andy.

1:28:13 - Andy Ihnatko
No, I was gonna tag onto what Jason was saying by screen sharing this. That's always been like my favorite unsung feature of Mac OS that they've got this built-in feature that says, hey, if you got a Mac running someplace and you've got some sort of other Mac device that's running elsewhere, we'll let you run like those remote apps locally. And no, it won't be just like running them directly in front of the console, but it will be good enough that it will be a solution to a whole bunch of problems, including just some problems of just convenience. Ie like I'm just I'm in the living room with like the inexpensive, older, lightweight, cheap laptop but I wanna check in on the progress of a transcode or something that I'm doing upstairs or I want to launch or do some work with them with that I've got upstairs. It's so easy to do and there are third-party apps that do that pretty well but they can be so obnoxious in what they have to do in order to do screen sharing that, like just three weeks ago I won't name the app because I don't know exactly what the problem was but I've had this app installed like for like a year without a peep and then suddenly something updated and then all of a sudden, like I couldn't do. I couldn't use Skype or Zoom and record my podcast, because after 10 minutes this other like remote access app would steal my mic and I would suddenly go mute and I was like, ah, damn it. And then you have to go through, and really go through a whole bunch of library directories to make sure it's not only terminated but it's terminated with complete prejudice. You really have to nuke it all the way to the ground in order to get things to go so, and it would be just wonderful if Apple yeah, basically made the, just as Apple has on the iPhone the point and shoot version of the camera app and they leave the professional features to third-party developers.

It would be lovely if they said you know what? You get this for free, the basic stuff that for just one person who just has multiple Macs, we will let you do this. It's not good for enterprise, it's not good for really administrators, but in terms of, I want to be able to locate my running Mac somewhere on the internet, safely and securely connect to that Mac and be able to access its files and access its apps. That would be wonderful. Double-sew, if it's a way to leverage the power of your iPad.

This is the reason why I even have those, had those remote access apps installed on my Mac, because there are many times where it's just so cool to say I get, oh geez, I could leave my MacBook at home and just use my MacBook Pro. If only I didn't have to use this one app. And then, well, actually, I only have to use this one app for like a couple hours a day. I'll risk it and I'll just simply remote back to it and it's a solution to a problem, unless you get more value out of the $1,000 iPad you just bought. So, yeah, I'm glad to see remote access getting some love.

1:31:01 - Mikah Sargent
One other thing, of course, is the introduction of widgets on the desktop. I found myself in testing macOS over the summer using the widgets a lot, but what I did almost immediately was turn off the ability to show widgets from my iPhone on my Mac. In reading through your review, you had some struggles with the iPhone widgets. Do you think you'll be a widget user going forward, and has Apple addressed any of the problems with getting the iPhone widgets to display on macOS?

1:31:35 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's weird because we're talking about macOS here, but I have to say this I think there are widget bugs in iOS 17. I think that's the bottom line is there are times when widgets lose the plot. They don't update and sometimes it just happens randomly. Sometimes it happens when an app that the widget belongs to gets an update, whether it's in the app store or in test flight, it loses its connection, it stops and you literally have to restart the phone in order to make it come back. It's like that's not acceptable. They need to fix that.

On the Mac it's even worse. I actually had an app that updated while I was sitting here. Its widget was on my desktop and the widget just disappeared like gone, like you had to re-edit. It just is gone because the app updated, not the app is gone. The app updated and its widget was also blank and I had to turn off my phone and turn it back on. So there's iOS 17 bugs here.

But my feeling I'm really ambivalent about widgets on the Mac. I'm like I'm glad that they're there on the desktop they were already in notification center. I'm glad that they're more visible. I'm glad that the iPhone widgets are there, because there are apps that aren't on the Mac that have widgets that you might find valuable. I've got a weather widget that I wrote for the iPad and the iPhone that I can put on my Mac now and that's great. The reason that I'm ambivalent is one the big new feature this year is interactive widgets, which make a lot of sense on the iPad and the iPhone because they're a one app at a time interface. But I was thinking about it like okay, like all the to-do apps are creating widgets now where you can check off your to-dos and see them and all in a widget. Well, that's great, but on the Mac, you just got your to-do app open right Like it's open, you don't, so it's not as revolutionary as all that.

I'm sure there are gonna be specific simple use cases where it's nice to have a little clickable button, like for home devices maybe.

1:33:23 - Mikah Sargent
You don't want to want to use the home app.

1:33:26 - Jason Snell
I get that, but it's less. It's just less exciting because the Mac can do that. Or another example is widgets are great for glanceable information and they were previously in the notification center where you couldn't see them unless you clicked. So now you can put them out on your desktop. Okay, but the desktop on most Macs is a very small space because they're laptops and they're gonna be covered by other windows. Now you've got to use a keyboard shortcut or a trackpad gesture or a new thing where you can, by default, click on the desktop and it sort of hides everything else.

But that's not glanceable, right? That's viewable with a click, just like you could click on notification center to see them. Before. And backing out from that for a second, the Mac already has an area for glanceable information. It's the menu bar. So again, not that they're bad, but, like I already have things on the Mac, these are solutions to iOS problems that are nice to have on the Mac, but they're not like giving a man in a desert a glass of water. They're like giving a well-hydrated man a glass of water. Water is nice, but you know right, you get me. It's like the Mac is not the iPhone and the iPad, and so these are not quantum leaps in the same way that they might be on the iPhone and the iPad.

1:34:39 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, with widgets. They didn't address the. The reason why I'm not using widgets is not necessarily because hey, I would use them if I can move them between my iPhone and my desktop. Hey, I could use. I would use them if they were actionable. I don't want to use them because, like you said, I have to expose the desktop in order to even see them and if I'm gonna do keyboard actions like that, I'll probably use the keyboard action to tab right into an app that will do the thing for me and I'll count on that that app to actually have a good interface. If it, if they did have like a transparent layer on top of the screen where I could just simply put again, where I could just put a layer of widgets, that would always be on top of everything else.

1:35:16 - Jason Snell
Like picture and picture.

1:35:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, exactly, and the number of things that I would apps, workflows that I have where it's like, oh, I'm doing a podcast, so I definitely am gonna have a timer widget up there. I'm definitely gonna have, I'm definitely gonna have a notes taker so I can take notes for editing and stuff like that. Because, again, there's I have so many documents open at the time, it's easy to cover something up temporarily, on and on and on and on, and I just don't know why this wasn't an obvious choice to make when they're designed to. I'm sure there's a technical reason that I have no idea of.

1:35:48 - Jason Snell
I think they wanted to keep it simple and so, if you think about these widgets, they're like. What I said in my review is they're like stickers put on the desktop. That's what they are. They are on the desktop. They're not like floating above the desktop. I know, technically maybe, but the way that the UI works they are stuck to the desktop. They don't come off of that. Nothing goes between them and the desktop. They are like stickers.

And the problem is exactly what Andy said, which is I think there are lots of cases where you might wanna float them and not just hide all the other windows on your system in order to see them, and maybe that'll come down the road. But, like I think that it's a missed opportunity to let the users have a little more to treat them as what they are on iOS really, which is like little mini apps or little glanceable bits of data, and because you can put things in the menu bar and stuff like that, it's just less of a priority. But yeah, so they're nice, right. Also, there's a scale problem.

I mentioned this in the review too. Everything's a little too big, right, like it's at a touchscreen scale and on a Mac it doesn't really make sense. So they're nice. I don't wanna be ungrateful. Like they're nice. It's a new feature. Getting them out of notification center so you can actually see them is great. The iPhone thing super clever and will be better once iOS 17. Doesn't forget about widgets from time to time, but they're just not as essential on the Mac, because it's a Mac and yeah that's just how it is.

1:37:11 - Andy Ihnatko
It does feel like this is consistently.

We keep hearing about how features get added or don't get added to Mac OS, usually because there are features that they've been. They've got their advocates, they've got their champions inside of Apple. They are on the whiteboard, but they keep getting pushed back, like release after release, because something is an all hands on deck situation in terms of, hey, we gotta get this stage manager thing out and going. Hey, we've got this iCloud thing that isn't working correctly, so we need everybody just to focus on that, and so it stays in the drawer until you have a release like this one, where there is no big, huge revolution pressing. It's finally time to address widgets, and so this is why it doesn't have as many generational evolutionary cycles as it should have gotten if this were just simply where, every year, we're gonna do something to make widgets a little bit better. So I don't think it's ever gotten to the point where, yes, it's exactly where it should be. It's always gonna be two steps behind, I think, where it's gonna be something that people are actually aware of.

1:38:10 - Mikah Sargent
There was one thing that I failed to mention during the iPhone chatter, and that's because I think, ultimately, it is a bit of a well, yeah, anything for you where USB-C was more than you expected it to be or where it came in handy. I know you did talk about it briefly, but maybe you could bring it back up again.

1:38:30 - Jason Snell
The video transfer. Right, you're transferring a 30 gigabyte file. I remember I mostly do my podcast video actually tethered using camo and I record on my Mac so I don't have to do that. But when I have shot with the iPhone, I get that 4K video afterward and it's like it takes so long to get that thing onto a Mac and to see. I mean, I mentioned it earlier but like the open image capture and you see the file and you're like, well, that's a big file and you drag it out to the desktop and then a progress bar comes up and you have to sit there for a long time to see if progress is being made. It's gonna take so long and with the USB 3 speed you can see it's not moving super fast because it is a huge file, but it's moving the whole time and that was really great.

And I did have a moment where I had a lightning cable that I brought with me, because I brought my previous iPhone with me, and then I got the review units at the hotel and I had that moment where I was holding it and I was like, oh, you're almost not quite, but almost totally irrelevant to me now. And that was a weird moment because I think that this is different than the Switch 2 lightning and this is so. Many of us have USB-C infrastructure in our lives already, right, like we already have cables. We have USB A to C cables, we've got C to C cables, we've got USB. I've got USB C plugs in my wall that you just changed the cable out Like it's more familiar than like a Switch 2 and an unknown plug connector would be.

1:39:59 - Alex Lindsay
So it's been pretty easy, and pretty much everything for the last five years, except for the iPhone, was USB-C. I mean, I think that there's. I read an article over last week that they said the EU finally brought Apple to the USB-C and I think that an equally valid narrative since we don't know exactly what happened is Apple successfully stalled until they were good and ready Because they had everything else in USB-C. I mean, the writing was on the wall that they were eventually gonna get to USB-C. It was just a matter of when they released it and I think that they were able to delay it long enough so that it was in a pipeline. We have to remember that, like the EU, passing a law a year ago or two years ago is long after Apple spec-ed it. You know, like for next year, next year's iPhone was spec-ed out, you know, a year or two ago, you know in the roadmap. So there's very little that is, it's already on the pipeline.

1:40:52 - Mikah Sargent
Now continuing to talk about iPhone, but a little bit more related to the design of the device. One of you has put in the show notes the story from the Wall Street Journal about how Apple has tried for some time to kind of break ties with Qualcomm and create its own chip for a modem and how that just did not go as expected. So perhaps was that you, andy.

1:41:27 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I put that in there. That was a really interesting story because it told a story that's not typical for Apple in terms of what actually gets out there. It's long been rumored that Apple I mean just dogmatically Apple wants to make every significant component that goes into all their stuff, and it's a strategy that's worked extremely well for them. Witness, apple Silicon worked great, and so the story that we're getting behind the scenes is that in 2018, tim Cook decided you know what? The Apple Silicon program is going really, really great. Now let's get rid of the modem chip. Let's build our own modem chip. And also remember that Apple and Qualcomm have been almost as they haven't been as poppy and bluto as they have been with Samsung, but still not a great healthy relationship. They've been suing each other and Apple's been saying you're trying to stick us for licensing fees that we don't actually owe Qualcomm. No, actually you do owe them and you are going to pay them, and so it was significant that their agreement with Qualcomm to deliver modem chips for the iPhones ended this year, but then also really, really so everyone was kind of assuming that, okay, they've got their first generation of Apple Silicon modem chips going. That's gonna be. The 15 is gonna be the first iPhone that has them.

So the Wall Street Journal says that, yeah, there's a reason why Apple renewed their agreement with Qualcomm for at least the next three years, because they haven't working on it, but it's been a failure that they have. It's one thing to build a chip, but to build a chip to the level of quality and consistency and speed of Qualcomm's is becoming almost a nightmare for them. That they've got chips that work, but they run really hot, they consume a lot of energy, they're not nearly as fast or as compatible as Qualcomm's chips are, and so that's why they decided to delay it for two or three years. And that's not surprising, because a modem chip is super, super difficult. It's not like implementing USB 3.1, it is essentially making sure you're developing a modem that will work with every working broadband network everywhere in the world at the speed that everybody expects, no matter what the circumstances are, and that also involves, as the Wall Street Journal article points out, that, no, you can't do all this inside of the Cupertino. You have to send people all over the world to test these things out, and it's.

The thing that was kind of atypical for Apple, though, is that they were mentioning how there was a lot of division within Apple even after the decision had been made about whether this was even a good idea or not. You had people who were according to the article. You had engineers and executives were saying I don't know why we're doing this and we're gonna try, but I don't know why we're doing this because this is a dumb idea. They also are talking about how some managers were so intimidated by the deadlines and the priority of this that they were not allowing bad news from their teams to find its way upward. So they were always confronting deadlines and schedules that were by no means practical, leading to even worse failures along the road, which is, again, not something that I'm used to hearing from Apple.

I mean, they're a company like any others. There's always gonna be warring factions underneath, but their management style once they decide at the top that something needs to be done, everybody acknowledges that. Okay, this is where we're headed. Everybody, point your vehicles towards that direction and make sure that we actually get there on schedule. So it's very, very weird to hear this kind of deep division from people who used to be on that team and are talking to the Wall Street Journal. By all means.

1:44:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, everyone should go read the piece. There's a lot in it and the kind of conversation around, as you mentioned. Not just the fact that they thought, oh, because we can do this kind of chip, we can definitely do this kind of chip no, it doesn't work that way but also what they were able to come up with and it being so large that it wouldn't even fit to an iPhone as it stands. And, yeah, this is an ongoing process and eventually we may see a chip from Apple, but as it stands, they've got to continue to deal with Qualcomm.

1:45:27 - Alex Lindsay
There's a reason a lot of people are buying Qualcomm chips. Yeah right, it's really hard, Like and they already outlined that but it's what they're doing is super hard, and I think that even for Apple, I do think that they'll eventually get there, but it could be another four or five years, you know, before they, before they mussel their way down into that. We should be clear here.

1:45:47 - Jason Snell
Apple hates Qualcomm they really do hate them.

They do not want to work with them. And you could see it when Qualcomm put out that release saying Apple has signed for another couple of years the Glee that's in that release. I'm like you still got to use us, still got to pay us. We got the chips and the patents and what are you going to do about it? And they know Apple's spending so much money trying to get out from under them and you know they probably will.

But it's this Wall Street Journal story has got a lot of narrative building into it and John Gruber and Daring Fireball took it apart and, like I think John's issue with it is, there's a lot of narrative building. There's a lot of sort of like assumptions that are being made that are probably not correct. But the bottom line is Apple thought that they would have modems now and they don't and they're not close, it seems, and it's going to be a while before they have their own modems, because building modems is hard and Qualcomm, like they made Qualcomm, is not like winning the game. Qualcomm made the game and is the game, so it's a huge nut to crack. They haven't cracked it yet. It's a great story, right, because it is this enormous tech giant trying to enter an area that they're sort of connected to and just discovering how hard it is.

And you know I wouldn't. I wouldn't bet against Apple because they've done this in the past and they've ended up making it work and it is deeply important to the iPhone that Apple you know that it's a key component that Apple doesn't control. All of that is true. But, like, regardless of what you think about that journal story sort of like narrative building portion of it the facts really stand on their own that Apple is having a hell of a time trying to get this modem chip built and makes you wonder like Intel's got to be. Like yes, yes, yes.

1:47:29 - Andy Ihnatko
That's why we sold it to you Exactly. They thought that they saw this ad for really, really cheap classic Corvette on Facebook Marketplace. They practically stole it from that guy. No, no, the guy knew exactly what he had and exactly why he wanted this out of his garage. Yeah, yeah, because.

1:47:49 - Jason Snell
Intel was like forget it, we're out of here and Apple was the right buyer because Apple actually cared about it. But I don't think the world is particularly healthy when a company like Qualcomm dominates at this level. I mean, honestly, you look at smartphone ships. It's a very similar thing right, where there's kind of Apple and Qualcomm like it's not healthy, you should have more competition. And so it's great that Apple's trying to crack the game, but Qualcomm like just don't put, try to put it past them there. They are gleeful that Apple's still paying the money, writing them checks.

1:48:19 - Andy Ihnatko
It's great and it's hard. It actually ties into I don't think we have time to get into the Google Antitrust case Apple's testifying under protest as a result of subpoena. This government is basically trying to say that Google has a monopoly on the search engine business. But it's kind of similar to what's going on with Qualcomm, where there's a reason why they are they have this monopoly they have is because, arguably, they have the best product. And unless it's hard to start, you can't.

You have to acknowledge that. Yes, it's bad for one player to pretty much have the market locked up, but you also have to acknowledge that they locked up the market by working for 15 years or more to basically get as good as they've gotten at this one thing. And so yeah it. Yeah, it is going to be hard to compete with the results of someone who has who's been working at this for 15 years. If you just started, you know, trying to learn the saxophone today, it's going to take you a number of years before you can even play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, as Apple is discovering.

But that that not necessarily that doesn't necessarily mean that Qualcomm or Google has done something bad. It just means that this is the reality of how hard this work is, and Apple is probably one of the best people to get into this, because Apple Silicon did not take. It was not a three year project either. You could argue that it started with the very first version of iOS 10, when they decided that we're going to architect this operating system so that it doesn't matter what chip it runs on, that we could port it to something else without making it into a total reinvention of the OS.

1:49:49 - Alex Lindsay
So and I think that also in some, in some cases, this technology doesn't exist without a company becoming as big as Qualcomm working on it.

You know, like that, I think that's we always have to balance when we talk about antitrust is that you want to keep the competition in there, but you also don't want to make things impossible to do because the companies themselves are too small. I mean, we've not gone down the path of creating new utilities when we probably should have to some degree for some of these things. But you know, with phones we just said, hey, we need, we need to be able to centralize what's happening. With cable, we did the same thing and with a lot of these things we created that we don't do that anymore. We don't create utilities anymore, but we do need companies to have a certain scale that act like utilities to some degree, and maybe we, maybe we need more utilities, I don't know. But the bottom line is is that you have to have the scale and the safety that they have to create a lot of the things, because it just takes scale to get them done.

1:50:43 - Mikah Sargent
All right, Let us. I think it's time to take another quick break, and then we're going to come back for our picks of the week as we wrap up this episode of Mac Break Weekly, with your constant companions Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell and Andy and Nautco, and your temporary companion, Mikah Sargent, subbing in for it.

1:51:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, you're always. You're always our companion, you're just. You're just not always our host.

1:51:09 - Mikah Sargent
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1:53:32 - Alex Lindsay
Just a little excited about this. I've only been talking about one. I wanted this one feature out of Keynote or out of anything for the last 25 years, like when I built my very first website and I was trying to put some objects on them, I was like, oh, I just wish these were 3D models and I just rotate them around and just put them where I want them. And what Apple has done is inserted USDZ into both pages numbers and Keynote. I'll talk about Keynote here in a second. If you look at what we have here is let's see if I get this right. So here is, this is a. Now this is a. It was called the Clarity node. This is clarityio and you can download this model from their website. So a friend of mine I worked with Chris Fritchie modeled it, so he built we built this a long time ago. But here this is what I have a 3D object and that is a pretty high quality 3D object that is inside of Keynote, so I can move this around and then drop it. Now remember I can do that with any USDZ object and that what's important there is that you can do the same thing in Pages and Numbers. I don't know why you do it in Numbers, but I'm sure we'll think of ways to do it.

But imagine you're doing some documentation and you want to show this part or this part. So, for instance, I threw this together in about 10 minutes here and I have another one that I did as another test. That's already on the Office Hours Global page that I just put a little short video on. But if I go into Head and Play this, what you'll see here is that when I want to convert over to this and then I have now that's the little wireless part, that's a 2D animation, and all of these things are here. But if I want to show something in the back, I can put these together and these are all. Just I'm just tapping on it and this is 10 minutes of work. Now I've been doing this for a long time and it's usually more than 10 minutes. So anyway, but this is all. These are all animations and I'm simply using Magic Move to get to each location and it's figuring it out. It's got the dynamic thing on the back behind it.

Now I also there was a question we had oh, can you animate stuff in it? And so here this is coming back to the back here and then the. What I did here instead is this is a animated. I got this out of motion, but this is an animated USDZ. So USDZ can carry lighting information and so I can sit there and rotate around and again, I'm still just doing this all in Keynote and I could do this. I can't animate it, but I mean I can. I can still rotate these things around inside of pages as well, and then I can have a fly away. So anyway, so that so, and that was a, that was a butterfly model from motion.

Now this is. I downloaded this USDZ from Smithsonian Smithsonian's digitizing a bunch of things already, and so here you can kind of see, you know, we can get up and zoom in on it, we can rotate it around and you can see how, from an educational perspective, this is a pretty, pretty useful. This is. This is more of a, you know, just to kind of show you, but all I'm doing here, if you think about, for education, whether it's education and marketing or anything else, this is, you know, very high-performance. You know it's, it feels good, it looks good and I just feel like, you know, this has been some version of this has been around in other presentation tools, but Apple has really nailed it. I made it really simple to use and I think that we're just going to see a lot of 3D used.

And again, it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be keynote, it can also be pages. So imagine just being able to throw objects in and rotate them to where you want them, whether you're a teacher or you're doing a documentation or marketing. You don't have to. You don't have to do any. You don't have to just come up with a big photo shoot. You don't have to try to find photos or take them with your iPhone. If you have the models, they're going to be out there and I think this is going to. We're at the very beginning of something that's going to become very popular.

I also think that you know as this this is the first step. It sits inside of keynote, but I can imagine sending somebody a pages document and eventually being able to tap on it on your phone and have it pop open, you know, and have the object appear in front of you. So that's not happening yet, but I think that that seems like the next logical step. It's anyway. I just want to make sure everybody knows it's there and download the new keynote and play with it.

That first object that I showed you can download from that's probably the highest quality one that I've been able to throw in there which is the clarityio Node, node-s. You can download that and we did a video for them years ago and we modeled it and I said, you know you'll, eventually you'll be able to use this for presentations. This is the little demo, what you see, the video. There is a demo that is on the Office Hours Global YouTube page and it just kind of walks you through the same thing that I just talked about. It just I took again, I grabbed something from Motion and I this is a model from Motion and I just did very similar things to the clarityio. I thought the clarityio looked a little bit better, so I, after I did that one.

But the point is is being able to mix and match all those presentation tools inside of Keynote. I think it's really powerful, so so it's just in time for educators to start playing with it. But I think there's a lot there. So, anyway, check it out. It's free and you can find models again If you, apple has a bunch of models on their website. If you have Motion, you can reveal and find, or just click on any of the 3D objects in Motion. Reveal and find, or you can pull them into Keynote, if you, and then the Smithsonian has a variety of them. If you're a developer, you can use what's called Reality Converter to convert OBJs into it, and the best, the best thing to resurface them is probably Substance 3D from Adobe.

1:59:15 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, those are some great tips. Yeah, I, I. I saw the USDZ support and immediately went to Apple's little page that has some stuff and started playing around with it. And then I saw your video and I thought, oh, this looks so great. I remember in college being in a public speaking class and, like everybody else was using PowerPoint and I was using Keynote and people were just kind of like what are you doing? How are you doing all this stuff? And it would have been fun to have some of this, because I had to teach people about a printing process that you know like in history, and being able to show some 3D models of how those printing processes work would have been cool.

1:59:54 - Alex Lindsay
You know, I think that I do think that it's going to sales. People are going to be hammering their wanting a demo of every product that they have. Because, again, if you want to put together a little, a little PDF, or you want to put together a presentation and be able to move these around, it's really a super tool to make that, to make that actually happen, absolutely.

2:00:12 - Mikah Sargent
All right, let's go next to Bum-Brum Andy Anato.

2:00:18 - Andy Ihnatko
Mine is a quick pick that's pretty simple and pretty cheap. You know that I've said before that I'm not that when it comes to gaming, I'm not the person who likes to spend like weeks or months in a really, really deep, immersive game. I don't even like. I like racing games, but I don't even necessarily like investing hours a day like mastering a skill through the game. I like like little shallow dive games. We just I'm bored for 10 or 15 minutes, I just want to play a simple little game and then get back to whatever, whatever I need to do, or the bus shows up and I'm ready to board. So I'm really.

I was pleased to be reminded of a I'm an experiment that Google did a couple of years ago, in 2021, called Game Snacks. You can go to gamesnackscom. It is like a library of 120 HTML5 based games, so it'll run basically on any browser, ideally a mobile browser Cause. One of the first points of this initiative was to bring gaming to customers in India, who don't necessarily have powerful phones, don't necessarily have wide broadband at the time, but it's exactly the sort of games that I like, meaning they're they're not. They're not the. They're not the greatest pinnacle of the of the gaming storytelling medium. It's just miniature golf and it's fun to play nine holes of this cartoony miniature golf with game mechanics that are very, very simple. Where you don't have to, you don't have to read the greens, you don't have to choose with the loft of the club, the racing game is. The racing games are simple, like the, the, the, the, the faster you, the longer you go around the track without crashing, the faster you go, and when you crash you slow down again. That sort of stuff, again, I do have. I do have a couple of F1 racing games. It's fun to have that kind of like learning a skill, but this is not that. This is get weighed in up to your knees, splash around, have fun, you know, poke a stick at a really, really gross looking dead jellyfish and then get back out of the water and go back to what you're doing and it's all free and it's there.

120 of them, and a lot of them are, admittedly, quite derivative. There are, there are, there are one or two games in which you were invited to slash a sword at food that is being thrown in the air in a parabolic arc. But that's not. That's not, as all those games aren't fun and again the price is right. So, yeah, it's a good thing to book bookmark, like you might forget about it now. But then, like after the third delay of your flight, suddenly, suddenly, you're like boy, you've basically burned through all the stuff you brought with you to play with. Like hey, game stacks, I'll play with that.

2:02:47 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, ah yeah, kick slice ninja legally distinct. And also, you know fruit ninja stole it from them. How do you?

2:02:53 - Andy Ihnatko
know that may have been the case, there's no way to tell.

2:02:56 - Mikah Sargent
No way to tell. No way to tell. All right, let us go to Jason Snell. Andy, that really hurt.

2:03:02 - Jason Snell
My flight was delayed six times yesterday.

2:03:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Oh, I didn't run out. I didn't run out of things, but yeah it just kept getting delayed.

2:03:11 - Jason Snell
Anyway, I'm home, I'm fine. How are you? I'm fine, I'm gonna. Since we mentioned it earlier, I'm going to make this these my picks Syndra Sohoos, who is a mostly open source developer from Norway who lives in Thailand now he has apps on the App Store that are great If you're using shortcuts.

One of the beautiful things about shortcuts is they take actions from other apps. They built that feature so that, like your, if you use Fantastic Cal, you get some Fantastic Cal actions to go with it. Any app can have its own actions, but some very clever developers, including this developer, have built apps that have no face. They just contribute all sorts of useful actions. So Syndra Sohoos' app actions is in the App Store. It's also. It's for the Mac or iOS. That's the one that John Gruper is using to detect, like when his phone is in his pocket and having the action button do something different, and there there are dozens of extra actions, actions that Apple, for whatever reason, has not added. You can add.

Toolbox Pro is another app that does this sort of thing, but, like actions, it's really good. There are a lot of great actions there that you can use. The only drawback is if you want to share an action with a friend, you have to say download actions and then you can use my shortcut, right, Because your shortcut is using the actions app actions and therefore your friends who download that shared shortcut would need to download it too. But it's free and there's a new version, a new app called AI actions that he just came out with. The reason for this is hilarious he wants actions to be available in China and there's a law about putting AI stuff in the App Store in China or something like that. There's a whole like, and the developer was like I don't want to bother with that.

So there's, if you're, if you're everywhere else in the world, you can download AI actions, put in your chat GPT API and you get a whole collection of, you know, basically a shortcuts interface to the chat GPT or to the image, one that Alex loves Dolly or not, mid-journey, I think it's just Dolly. So sorry, Alex, it's not the one you love. I'm sure there'll be more of these going on, but basically it's like yeah, you could do that yourself with a web query, but you know what? What if there was just an action and shortcuts that lets you do that? So if you're thinking, I tried shortcuts but I'm frustrated that it doesn't let me do X. There are a bunch of free apps as well as some paid apps that will give you way more power. I wish it was. I mean, I don't know why those things aren't in the base of shortcuts actions. But hey, free app gives you all of those extra controls to put it on your fingertips to do things like program your action button.

2:05:48 - Mikah Sargent
Nice. Yeah, the AI actions thing is pretty cool. As an addition. I use Toolbox and I didn't know about actions as well. One of you said a faceless app. That did scare me for a moment because I thought no face, but then I yeah, I have no face and I must scream, but no, it's, they're really good.

2:06:06 - Jason Snell
And the AI actions. He actually has a little instruction. That's pretty funny. That says because you can get things as a JSON file it's basically a dictionary and shortcuts and then parse those fairly easily and the app actually will tell you here's what you say, so that you get a JSON file back and you have to say give this to me as a JSON file, with no other things. I don't want any other things, just the. And then the AI engine will give you back that file that you can parse however you want. It's pretty cool.

2:06:34 - Mikah Sargent
Cool the my pick this week is an app called IMAZING. It starts at $39.99. And it is basically the app that I end up recommending when someone is having a problem with an iPhone backup or they want to pull something from an iPhone backup or they want to make adjustments to their device. Imazing is currently working on IMAZING 3 in beta, which kind of simplifies the process but also adds new tools like looking at your battery health on your phone. Of note, much of this is possible with Apple's own configurator app, but Apple configurator, I find, is a little bit more complicated and in some cases does not have the features that IMAZING has, at least in ways that are easily accessible to consumers. With IMAZING, one of my favorite things to do is so if you do like a backup using Finder and encrypted backup, it is saving it somewhere on your Mac by default and getting the system to change where it saves it is not a simple process. With IMAZING you can do encrypted backups and choose wherever you want to put it. So if you have like an external drive or perhaps network attached storage that has a lot more space on it, then you can tell it. I want you to backup to that. And then, because it's using Apple's own, like APIs and other tools, it can also do wireless backups, so it can archive your backups and keep them backed up in the same way, and then if you ever need to pull something from an encrypted backup specific files or messages it's a great way to do that too. It may have been around for some time, but they're really talking also about their enterprise stuff. That's what different they've got, like a legal version of the app so that folks that work with legal documentation can do proper transcripts of messages. But it's a really great tool for all sorts of kind of troubleshooting with your iOS device, but also, again, with your iOS backups as well. We just had someone call in and they were saying I want to, I don't want to do a complete restore of my phone, I want to be able to have it start as new, but only when it comes to like apps, everything else. I want to still move over to my new phone, so photos and settings and all of that. And so I was able to tell them well, what you'll do is do a complete restore as if it was normal. Then you can pop that into your computer, open up iMazing, and then it will let you, just like we used to be able to do I believe it was in iTunes at the time go in and select the apps that are installed and tell it to uninstall those apps like all at once, as opposed to having to do it one by one, by one by one and again. Apple Configurator can do much of this, but iMazing just really simplifies the process and it has become an indispensable tool in my tool belt. So that is my pick. I think I said it starts at $39.99. You can pay one time and it's by device. So $39.99 is for one device and then it goes up from there for multiple devices. Or you can pay the yearly subscription, in which case you can have unlimited devices. So if you've got lots of iPads and iPhones that you want to use with iMazing, the unlimited option might be for you.

Quick mention as we round out this show this Thursday Lou Moreska is going to be in the club at twittv slash club twit doing an AMA. So if you are in the club and you have questions for Lou, you will want to hop into the Discord and get those lined up for Lou or tune in live and ask questions at that point If you're wondering what is he talking about? The club? Well, you can learn more at twittv slash club twit. When you head there, you will find the option to subscribe to the club, starting at $7 a month or $84 a year.

You can join the club. When you do, you get some great stuff. First, every single Twitch show ad free. It's just the content, none of the ads, because you are sponsoring the show, in effect. You also get access to the Twit Plus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show special club twit, and you can get some free content from the Twit events. And what's great is, when you join the club, you get access to that back catalog of the events that have been published in that feed leading up to this point. So it's a great way to get all sorts of new content. You can also join the best social media network on the internet, which is the club twit discord, a fun place to hang out and chat with your fellow club twit members Also many of us here at twit Now.

I said starting at not because it's a tiered subscription where paying more gets you more, but because we've heard from some folks who said you continue to make the club more valuable. We'd like to offer more than $7 a month. So if you pay $7 or if you choose to pay more, you'll get all of the same stuff. It's just an option for you. If you'd like to take it Now, along with all of that great stuff I just mentioned, you will also get to subscribe to some special club twit exclusive shows the Untitled Linux show, which is all about Linux.

Hands on Windows, which is a program from Paul Therat that covers Windows tips and tricks. Hands on Apple or no, hands on Mac, which is my show, you'd think I would know which covers Apple tips and tricks that's where I was getting those mixed up as well as Home Theater Geeks from Scott Wilkinson, which is all about the home theater interviews, device reviews, settings I mean everything that you can think about when it comes to the home theater. And Jason Howell also has an AI show, ai Inside, which covers all sorts of news topics and the latest and greatest tools and updates to do with AI. So if all of that sounds great, head to twittv slash club twit to check it out. Andy and Nutco, thank you so much for your time. What would you like to plug this week?

2:12:49 - Andy Ihnatko
Well, I had a really good conversation of my usual tech wrap up on WGBH, boston Public Radio last week, so go to wgbhnewsorg to listen to that or pretty much anything else I've ever recorded for them. And next time I'm going to be on is next Thursday at 1230. You can stream that at that same URL, wgbhnewsorg.

2:13:07 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful Alex Lindsey. What about you?

2:13:11 - Alex Lindsay
I'm doing the Office Hoursglobal thing. So if you go to Office Hoursglobal, if you go to the Office Hoursglobal on YouTube, we talked about USDZ, so exactly what I talked about here. We talked about it for an hour or earlier today, so you can find that video there. And yeah, that's every morning from seven to nine Pacific Standard Time. We get together and answer questions. So if you've got questions around media production, check it out.

2:13:34 - Mikah Sargent
Or apparently about Miley of Photos you can check it out.

2:13:38 - Jason Snell
Exactly. I was like where did this come from it?

2:13:40 - Alex Lindsay
was a new one. It looks cool. It looks very cool, but I hadn't seen a lot of questions about it until a couple days ago.

2:13:48 - Jason Snell
And Jason Snell how about you Check out my macOS review and the other reviews at SixColorscom and I think this week's episode of Upgrade is a good one that we recorded in person talking about the iPhone and more stuff about the accessories and the cases and other stuff like that. That's at relayfmslashupgrade. So check those out.

2:14:07 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome, Awesome. Thank you three. If you're looking for me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chiwawacoffee. That's chihuacoffee. That's where I've got links to all the places I'm most active online. Thank you all for tuning in to this week's episode. Of course you can head to twittv slash live every Tuesday roundabout 11 am Pacific to watch the show as it's recorded, or you can head to twittv slash mbw. Doing that will let you subscribe to the show across audio and video formats in your podcast application of choice. That way you get the show as soon as it's ready, sort of packaged, put together, pretty, and hits your earbuds there. I think that covers it. So I guess all that's left is to say get back to work, Because break time is over. Bye-bye.