A (2:15)

The newest person has to bring the snacks.

C (2:17)

Three years at this, and I'm tired of bringing the snacks.

B (2:19)

Okay. All right, noted. Does anybody have any dietary restrictions?

C (2:23)

Well, the good news is we don't have a studio anymore. So the snacks are for you.

B (2:26)

Right. But sometimes, you know, like on Reddit, like, how People, like, will mail each other snacks. Like, maybe. That would be fun. I could mail you guys snacks. Does anybody have any dietary restrictions or anything?

A (2:35)

No, you don't need to mail us snacks. That's too much.

D (2:40)

I should also point out that the thing about having to deliver them in the inflatable dinosaur costume, that was just a joke that Alex and I kind of pulled on Jason. That was never a thing. So if Jason's telling you that you had.

C (2:50)

I'll never forgive you for that.

A (2:52)

He looked good with those wrappers.

C (2:53)

Totally worth it, Jason.

D (2:54)

Just totally worth it.

A (2:55)

We're just hoping it wouldn't fall over

D (2:56)

because it just, you know, that was. February was always the best month on the. On the twit calendar, because that would be like the. They always have the photo of you in the. In the snack room, in the dinosaur crossroom. Live and learn.

C (3:07)

Live and learn.

A (3:09)

Anyway, it's great to have you, Christina. Welcome. You've been pretty public about your situation, so I hope it won't be remiss if I mention you're at GitHub now, which is great. Kind of your return to GitHub.

B (3:23)

Yeah.

A (3:24)

Which was a return to Microsoft.

B (3:25)

So you've kind of. Yeah, so I've kind of come back. Yeah. I was at Google for about a year and at DeepMind, and now I'm back at GitHub.

A (3:33)

Are you totally NDA'd about your experiences over there?

B (3:36)

I mean, not really, but, like, I don't think anybody cares all that much.

A (3:41)

Oh, my God, do I care? Okay. We just were dying to know what was going on. See, all these AI companies are such black holes. Not that Apple's not a black hole, but.

B (3:51)

Well, yeah, I mean. Well, that's the thing. Even inside of it, it's. It's really limited how much, you know, like, you might know depending on the week and what launch you're working on and whatnot. But, like, you don't know much beyond that. And, and, and at this point, you know, because I've been gone for a couple months, everything that I. That I did know, that's true. Out of date. Right.

A (4:11)

It's already changed. Yeah.

B (4:12)

Genuinely. Right. Like, because there's so many ships and so many changes and all that stuff. And so even. Even, like, working there, and I'm sure this is probably true for all the Frontier Labs. It is one of those things where I'm sure it depends on your role. Right. Like, some people are going to be really plugged in on everything, but I think a lot of people, it's like, okay, I know what I'm working on and I know what's coming in the very near term future. And that's about it and everything else. It's like, you get to know people and talk to them and maybe hear some things and see some things. I got to see some really cool robotics stuff that. That was incredibly impressive that the. The DeepMind, you know, team is working on. But beyond that, like, I don't, you know, I didn't know anything, right? So other than what we were trying

A (4:55)

to launch, I know nothing, she says. Actually, interestingly, DeepMind just yesterday released a new model that scored almost 50% on humanity's last exam, which is the best test of AI intelligence.

C (5:11)

For those who don't know, I just want to say people are like, well, why is a person from developer relations on this panel? It's like, Kristina is old school Mac blogger from the official Apple web blog, among others, as well as you did Rocket on Relay for a while, like

A (5:27)

one of the greatest podcasts of all time.

C (5:29)

So much, so much old. Old school Mac credibility going way back.

B (5:34)

So you can't see what I'm wearing right now, but I'm wearing like a. See if I can adjust my camera.

A (5:39)

It's a daring.

B (5:39)

It's a fireball shirt, the baseball one. So I don't even know how old it is, except that it was. It's so old that it's like. It's American Apparel. Okay. American Apparel was still a company, right? So, like, I am have. I have. Like, I. I still have like, somewhere, one of the. The. The Twitter riffic, like, like, plushies, that icon factory made, like, they made like, like the vinyl figures. I had those up for years. No, I'm like, yeah, I see a

A (6:04)

Teddy Ruxpin behind you. That's how old you are.

B (6:07)

I know, I know. I have that. That's. That was. That was my husband's. But. But I. Yeah.

A (6:14)

Does it still talk?

B (6:16)

No, it's broken, unfortunately. And we probably could fix it, but I don't know. But I just kind of like, I'll

A (6:20)

get Burke in on it because he's very good. He's fixing my old ma.

B (6:25)

Oh, that's cool.

A (6:25)

Yeah, he's had to replace all the capacitors. He's now replacing diodes. He says his voltage is low. It's a great story. Anyway, Christina, welcome.

B (6:32)

Oh, I'm thrilled to have you. I do have a. Because we're gonna talk about that. I have. Yeah, you can. I have the Steve Jobs plushie.

A (6:38)

I see that. Well, that's a good thing because today would be Mr. Jobs 71st birthday. He, he, he died. He passed way too young.

C (6:49)

No kidding.

B (6:51)

Cancer was so terrible.

A (6:53)

Yeah, it's so terrible. You know what's really sad is I just saw the kind of cancer he had. Pancreatic cancer. They have what might be a cure in progress right now. And so he literally did pass too soon. Anyway, I think it's appropriate to recognize that this would be his 71st birthday. You have the plushie? I had the plushie somewhere. I don't know what happened. When we cleared out the studio, I lost many things. The Steve Jobs archive, which is a great place to go to. I have the book that they released. They have released something they call Let Letters to a Young Creator, including submissions by Tim Cook. Jony, I've. And more. This was in the. The print version, which I have, but you can also go to steveletters.stevejobsarchive.com and wait while it slowly writes out.

D (7:54)

Yeah, good web design is there's a skip button at the bottom of it that should have told you that maybe. But once you get through your. Once you get through, it's a really good time. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of little essays like that. It's not just Apple people reminisce about Steve. It's more like here is just interesting general advice from people who are. Who definitely put some thought and put some time into what they were going to say.

A (8:17)

There's quite a few of these. Tim Cook's letter, which he wrote last August, actually two Augusts ago. So they've been collecting these for a while. I think this was collected for the, for the book. I won't read them all, but you might want to check it out at. Steve Jobs Archives Letters Steve Jobs Archives.

C (8:37)

I was thinking about this today, seeing that it's his birthday and there's no way. I mean, we've been saying this since the day he died, which is don't play the what would Steve do if he were alive Game. Because especially the. The longer you go, the less you know. But I will say this. I. With all of our talk about Tim Cook and the way that he's chosen to approach the Trump administration during this term, I. I couldn't help but wonder what Steve Jobs would have done in this. And I don't have an answer. I don't think anyone really would know for sure because I would say I feel like people who believe, oh, Steve would have stood up for what was right and all of that. Like, I Feel like Steve Jobs often made decisions that people were like, I don't know about that, Steve, but at the same time, I also know that he didn't suffer fools gladly. And it makes me think that, you know, my best shot of it would be that I think he would try very hard to basically, like, manage, like, literally manage Donald Trump. And if there was anybody around who could maybe do that and like, get him to do what he wanted, maybe it would be Steve Jobs. But I, I, you know, I keep thinking about that and think that that probably would have been like throwing gasoline on a fire to get those two guys together in that situation, but we'll never know. And maybe it's all for the best, but he, He. To have been robbed of so much of his, like, I mean, we were not just robbed of his life since the day he died, but think about how long he fought cancer and how hard that was and how that sapped him of his energy. And I feel like with some of these mo. These amazing people that we lose too soon, especially because of cancer. That's what I keep coming back to is it's not just a personal tragedy for him and his family, but as a person in the world, I feel like we got, we got robbed of more of Steve Jobs's time on this earth with a. With his very interesting brain that made very interesting decisions. And, you know, on his, on his birthday, I feel like that's the best tribute I can pay him is. Is that I wish he had been here a lot longer.

D (10:40)

Yeah, you. You hear a lot about how most, Most of the more interesting stories about him from people who worked with him were all about how once somebody that he respected explained the importance and the potential of something in a way that he could understand, he. And if he agreed, that was it. The pivot was in place and Apple was committed. And I think back to. There's the story that came out a couple of years ago about how Apple's original foray into large language models, the reaction to Google's breakthrough AI paper in the late teens, caused the. Basically, the engineers who are working on the photo pipeline to not just simply say, oh, well, here's how we're doing machine learning to improve photos. Here's another technique that we can now use to try to improve photos. They immediately saw the import of this, and it makes me think about what would have happened if they had had enough contact with somebody that could talk to Steve or get a meeting with Steve. And what if Steve had seen that and had decided, you know, what that is going to be super, super important. Not that Apple would become the chat bot company, but the reason why Google can do it can do today is because back in the teens, its CEO said, you know what, this is going to be important. We're going to basically restructure our company to make this into a priority. And it's interesting to imagine that and so many other topics. What would have happened had Steve said, you know what, this is interesting. We're going to have to re, we're to restructure our company to put resources into it and try to make this an Apple product or an Apple service.

B (12:15)

Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I, and I do think that like Jason said, like, it's, the longer you go, the harder it is. And we didn't know him. We don't, we can't say, like, what would he have done?

A (12:25)

Right?

B (12:25)

And I hate to play that game, but I have found myself weirdly, like, in the last couple of years, like, thinking more and more, okay, what would things be like if there was different leadership? Right. Maybe even if it's not Steve Jobs, but if it was more product forward leadership. And I think that's the thing that, that we've, we've lost the most. Right? Just not just for Apple, but just for the industry, for, for the world. Right. Having someone of his caliber with his creativity and to your point, Andy, the ability to, to listen and change his mind on things when necessary. Right. Which I think was, was a great skill. Even if, if he would kind of turn around and kind of make it seem like, oh, well, I had this idea all along. Right. Which is fine as long as you get to where it needs to be. And he's gone far too soon. Cancer is terrible to Jason's point too. Just having to fight while he was sick, it's such a loss and it's depressing to think about what types of things we would have had he still been alive. I think that that's the thing that I think about more than, oh, Steve wouldn't have done this or that no one knows. And, and that's, that's a what if. But it's, it's just more, I think more of like the loss of what the potential could have been.

A (13:40)

Yeah. One of the things we got from that book becoming Steve Jobs is there really were two Steve Jobs, I'll even say three Steve Jobs. There was the young Steve Jobs who was brash and mean and, and ruthless in his, in his pursuit of his vision. I remember Woz saying Every time I'd come up with an idea, Steve would say, I can make a business out of that. Which was kind of characterized the early Steve Jobs, for sure. There was the Steve Jobs who went to next, was exiled into the wilderness and then came back somewhat wiser and a much better leader. I think that's the premise of becoming Steve Jobs. I'd say there's even a third Steve Jobs, the kind of the wisest of the Steve Jobs, which is after he got really sick. We will never know. I think had the young, brash Steve Jobs had to interact with, with the current administration would be a very different thing than the later leader, Steve Jobs, who understood his responsibilities as an executive. But I will show you this. This is from that book Make Something Wonderful, which I thank Jameson for sending me his copy. Cause they were very hard to get. But in here, there is a piece from a notepad, a picture notepad that says, Steve, President Clinton is holding. So while Jobs didn't talk a lot about his interactions with presidents and kings, I have a feeling that he was asked a lot and he did interact with them a lot. We just will never know. Exactly.

D (15:02)

Also when the, I mean, it's, he's, he's. The stories about him being really, really hard to get along with and being abrasive and aggressive and kind of a jerk are famous because they are, they're pungent stories. They're easy to repeat. But also he, he had the ability to lay on the charm like nobody. So if.

A (15:21)

Absolutely so.

D (15:22)

I think, I think that's a, that's an interesting observation. The young one would, the young Steve would have said, this guy's a bozo. We want no, we want no part. The older guy might have said, I know, I know how this guy ticks. I know how I can. I know what buttons to push and I know what carrots to lay in front of him.

A (15:41)

Look how Mamdani has handled Trump. I think it would have been a Mamdani kind of.

C (15:45)

And also if Steve Jobs is there as a, you know, fellow billionaire, titan of industry, I think that, I think that that is exactly what Donald Trump reacts to in a way.

A (15:54)

I just wear a nice suit.

C (15:56)

I also, I mean not just, not just Trump, but like, I do wonder. You talk about the. In the discord. Somebody said he would have been the leader of the tech bros and would have led them in a different direction. I think that that is, that's Jammer B in the. In the discord. And like, honestly, I know how much Mark Zuckerberg looked Up to Steve. I know how much Sam Altman looked up to Steve. And I do wonder even if Steve was alive and just a chairman of the board of Apple or had retired entirely from Apple at this point, although I kind of can't see that happening, I wonder what kind of advice he would have given today's tech titans that might have steered them into better places than they are now. I don't know. I, you know, who can say? But I think that's interesting to think about as well. That they, they really viewed him as, as a mentor and, and then they lost him. What that guidance would have been, who

A (16:51)

knows, might have been a better Silicon Valley because of, because of him. Certainly we are all better off because of Steve. So happy birthday, Steve, on your 71st especially.

C (17:01)

We're coming up to the 50th anniversary of Apple.

D (17:03)

Yeah.

C (17:04)

And so a lot of thinking right now, certainly by me, about, you know, why Apple is what it is and how that started 50 years ago. It really did. And like that journey that Steve took, that on one level, getting fired by the guy you hired and the board who was supposed to support you, it was just a brutal thing to happen. And there are a lot of what ifs about what Steve might have done to Apple if he had stayed. But I think you're right, Leo, that it's the right thing to do. To say he needed to be laid low. But more than that, he also needed to learn a bunch of things about how brutal business was and by the failure of the factory. I mean, he had Apple set up a bunch of us factories that failed, and then he had NEXT set up that beautiful factory that failed. He learned a lot about manufacturing. I think that maybe was why he was so simpatico with Tim Cook in the end, is he, he, he got a lot of his innocence wiped away by being a CEO, especially, you know, when he was at NEXT and Pixar, I think taught him a lot of fundamentals about business. Working closely with Disney in the, in the really rough film business. Like, boy, what, in hindsight, what an education he got. And then he didn't really want to be the CEO of Apple. Right. But in, in the end, he felt like he had to be that there was no one else. And so, and he had just gotten such an education in those years, so it was all for the best. But it's really interesting to look back at the span of 50 years of Apple and realize that journey that he kind of had to take to be in the right place at the right time.

A (18:36)

We should mention April 1st will be the 50th anniversary of Apple's incorporation. April 1st, 1976, March 10th, just a couple of weeks from now is the day David Pogue's big book. On April 50, David posted a little video. I guess his, his galley copies arrived at the Poke household. Anybody who's written a book knows this is a very, it's a special moment, isn't it? Yeah.

D (19:00)

And also. Oh using the wrong knife, you're going to cut all the, cut the covers, the only free copies the publisher is ever going to send you.

A (19:08)

That's true Apple. So this will be prize. And look at Steve on the back of that. Yeah, this will be a prize.

C (19:15)

I've read it. I'm not supposed to. I don't know if I'm supposed to admit that yet, but I have read it. It's good. I mean more to come about what I think about it, but it's a, it's he, he put a huge amount of work. There are a lot of interviews. He did a lot of original interviews plus all the archival stuff we have. And like he wanted, clearly wanted to be a definitive history of 50 years of Apple.

A (19:33)

He put a lot, well, he was there through it.

C (19:35)

So lots of photos. It's funny the photo I actually got contacted. I first knew about this book because of the photo research. We got contacted because I had in my back in 2020 I did this 20 max series and one of the essays and videos was about the duo and Stephen Hackett who co hosted the videos with me and is one of the co founders at Relay. He has lots of old Macs and he took photos of lots of them. And basically David's photo researcher contacted me and was like where did you get that photo of the duo in the duo doc? And I'm like, it's Stephen Hackett. Go talk to Stephen. And Stephen's photo's in the book, which is awesome.

D (20:12)

Yeah, I found out about the same way. He wanted to validate a quote of something, something I wrote in either review or something you in there?

C (20:20)

Yeah.

D (20:20)

Was it, was this in the Sun Times or was this. And I had to be forensic about my own. I think it was the Sun Times, like exactly. I was like, okay, this definitely sounds like me. I'm trying to remember like where was my. I think he was trying to identify like which publication I'd written it for. And I said yeah, I was able to, I, I, I haven't to thank for having like making, made sure that my backups of the backups of the backups are still working because I did actually find it.

C (20:44)

Yeah.

A (20:44)

Amazing.

C (20:45)

It's, it's. Yeah. Well, I'm sure we'll talk about it more when it comes to release.

A (20:48)

I'll try to get it on, actually.

B (20:50)

Yeah, that would be safe.

C (20:51)

He's making a tour, I think. I think I'm interviewing him for upgrade. Yeah, he's definitely available.

A (20:56)

Oh, you already got him.

C (20:57)

Oh, I got him. I got him.

A (20:59)

Hurley have him?

D (21:00)

I guess.

C (21:00)

No, you should get him too. They want him on every possible channel

D (21:03)

to sell that book.

B (21:04)

They're trying to sell a physical book at that. Right.

A (21:06)

He knows he's going to sell plenty of books to this crowd.

B (21:09)

I mean, maybe, but, but still, it'd be great to talk to him.

D (21:12)

I can, Yeah, I can imagine like hundreds of people that we all know. At least say, I just need to check the index. Is my name in the index?

C (21:21)

Anyway, I can, I can tell you I, I, I am not quoted in the book. So there is that. I did have a moment where I was like, david, you quoted Cult of Mac, but you never called it. You never quoted me. But I'm over it. I'm. It's okay.

B (21:38)

No, David, I love you.

C (21:40)

I love David. You know, Andy and I have, and Leo, I think, I mean, we've been, we were on a bunch of cruises with him back in the day and I was for a little while his editor at Mac World. He wrote a bunch of features for us back in the day before he went to the New York Times. So it's kind of. He, he's again talking about.

D (21:59)

Took over his column when he left, went for the New York Times. We did a whole bit about it at the Mech. He's already Awards, I think.

C (22:04)

Yeah, that. Absolutely. So, so just like I talked about Christina and her bonafides. I gotta say, like, David Pogue is one of those people. If you just think of him as the on NOVA or the guy on CBS Sunday Morning or the guy from the New York Times back in the day. He, he worked for Macworld for a billion years and then also did all of those missing manual books. So he's, There's. When I heard that he was doing it, I was like, oh, that that's the right person to write that book.

D (22:27)

On top of everything else, he was, he was on the list of getting that phone call from 2am From Steve Jobs personally about something that he wrote. He was a list that I don't think anybody else wanted to be on.

C (22:40)

No, no. At idg it Was it was the president of, of of Macworld. So it was Colin Crawford who got those calls. And all the senior editors there were so happy that Steve just didn't want to talk to editors. He just wanted to talk to Colin. And we're like, you should be offended as an editor that they don't want to talk to editorial. What are you talking to the business guy? You should be talking to me. And all of us were like, nope, talk to Colin. We don't want to. Nobody else wants to be in Steve Jobs's Rolodex. Nobody.

D (23:04)

I got my, my, my one personal interaction face. I wouldn't even call it a face to face interaction with Steve Jobs was when I was talking to Colin at the opening of the first Apple Store and then suddenly there starting a conversation with Colin as though I was not standing, standing literally like 20 inches away wondering at what point do I say what the hell Steve?

B (23:26)

Or right. Classic like famous person behavior.

C (23:30)

Yeah.

D (23:31)

Like is. Is it. What are the risks. What are the risks to my ego versus the risks of still being employed by anything the colony has the power to publish If I say dude, it.

A (23:44)

I was just looking for some pictures of Mac Mania 2004 with David Pog. Haven't found him. Yeah, but there were some.

C (23:51)

I did some snorkeling in Bermuda with David Pogue. Like, I mean we go way back. It's great. So he is. And his, his, his tone like just as a writer he's always like just. He's just a good writer. He writes really easy to read prose that I think for. That's why he was so good at covering tech at the New York Times is because that's the. It's like a super right level. You don't want to go too down and get too techy because it just puts the brakes on it. And this book is. Is like that too. So that's my. That's like my pre review. I am writing a full on book review of it that'll come out later. But it's. Yeah, it's great. His style is perfect. It's.

A (24:27)

People should check it out. If you're watching here he is on a cruise working on his book.

C (24:33)

Yeah. Well the missing manuals. That was a whole business unto itself.

A (24:37)

I loved the missing manuals.

C (24:38)

Yeah. He's. It's. If you're watching Mac Break Weekly, that book should already be in your Amazon cartoon.

A (24:44)

Absolutely. All right, let's see you. I will talk about. You're going to go to New York City. So we're going to talk about the upcoming event. That's the next thing on the Apple calendar in just a little bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Jason Snell. Are you going to New York City, Christina?

B (25:00)

Oh, no, I am not on the media list.

A (25:03)

You don't get that. Good. I won't feel bad then because I often when people join the show, I figure I'm going to tarnish them.

C (25:10)

It hasn't happened to me yet, Leo, so I think you got. I think the, the stink only goes so far.

B (25:16)

I don't even know. I think, I think that honestly it'd be weird to invite me considering I like, you know, work for some of Microsoft. I think that that would be so. I, they. They did. I will say this. For a number of years, the, the comms team continued to send me holiday cards to Microsoft Office, which is actually quite nice.

A (25:33)

I don't think they're. I don't think they're that way. I don't.

C (25:36)

That way we're all grown up.

A (25:37)

Just don't record them during the iPad announcement.

C (25:40)

But I will, I will not be here next week because I will be literally on a plane going to New York. As long as it doesn't snow, I guess. Next week we'll see.

B (25:49)

I think it'll be fixed by then. I think, I think it'll be good. Just, just take a major airline that isn't like based primarily in.

D (25:56)

Yeah, just, just, just don't connect through TF Green Airport in Providence because they're 37 and a half inches, man.

C (26:01)

Nice San Francisco to New York routes. There are of lots. Lots of them.

B (26:06)

Yeah.

C (26:06)

Yeah.

B (26:06)

United will get you there.

A (26:07)

Yeah. New York will be safe. We think actually they didn't. They shut the airport down. They also, they shut down on street parking so they could plow the thing. But the worst thing is no Ubereats. I mean, I don't know how they're surviving in Manhattan.

B (26:19)

People are gonna have to. Have to use the old, old school, you know, bike delivery stuff.

A (26:25)

But I did see some pictures people going out in the street. Paris got some great pictures of, of delivery driver, something.

B (26:32)

Oh yeah. No, I mean I, I haven't lived in New York in a number of years, but I remember like the blizzards like that would come down like this and that would be the sort of thing you would have like the guys who still, like some of the, some of the local guys nearby who still would deliver and like you tip the hell out of them if you do.

D (26:47)

Monster modern day Valkyries. I've seen them too. It's like modern day Valkyries. It's like, nope, they hear that music swell and they are on that damn bike.

A (26:59)

Our show today brought we'll get back to Macrate Weekly in a moment. Our show today brought to you by a new sponsor. We want to welcome Pebble. Not that Pebble P E B L Quick question for you. Are you hiring in another country right now? Once you do, things can get complicated fast. But that's where pebble can help you. Pebble can help send offers to anyone in the world in minutes. Get them onboarded fast. Pebble is an AI powered global human resources platform built for founders, HR leaders and operators who are hiring and supporting teams around the world. Pebble helps you hire, pay and manage talent in over 185 countries with fast onboarding that can be done in minutes. And it's great for you because instead of juggling separate tools for contracts and payroll, benefits and compliance and all that, pebble brings everything together with built in guidance and even local expertise to support you. This is especially helpful if you're managing teams internationally or you're planning to grow. The fastest growing companies in the world. Use pebble to stay organized and reduce risk. Founders use it to scale faster without having to become HR or compliance experts. Rated number one in compliance on G2. And just read the customer testimonials, they speak for themselves. For example, Company Page needed global talent to align with its bold mission as a digital diagnostics company revolutionizing cancer pathology with AI. Page's VP of Finance and operations said, this is the review quote. Over the past year we've doubled, if not tripled our global headcount. That growth has been largely thanks to our partnership with Pebble. Bottom line, it simplifies global people operations so you could spend more time growing the business and supporting your team. Pebble's new standard Discount pricing at 399 USD per month per employee helps you contain costs too. Go to Hypl AI to get a free estimate. That's H I P E B L A I for a free estimate. Hypebel AI H I P E B L A I thank them so much for their support. Now if we can only get Simone on here to do the ads, we would be set. I Is she. Is she still doing anything? What is. What is she up to? Christina? Oh, am I all alone?

C (29:22)

I think she's muted.

B (29:23)

Oh yeah, I'm muted now. You know, I haven't, I haven't talked to her in a little bit. I know that she's still at Polygon and you know.

A (29:31)

But she does such a good job.

B (29:32)

Oh, no, she's the best. Absolute best. And like, I miss doing a podcast with her all the time for many reasons. But honestly, the ad reads were like always the funniest and the best and like, nobody did it like her.

A (29:43)

Nobody. I'll try. I'll try to emulate her in future.

C (29:46)

Just the only time I ever got recognized at my curling club because I do curling. We've established this is. One of the members came up to me and said, oh, you're on Relay FM with Simone. And I said, what? She's like, oh, yes, I am a childhood friend of Simone's.

A (30:02)

I'm like, wow.

B (30:03)

What? Amazing.

C (30:04)

Yeah, hilarious. But that was so. It turns out I'm only really basking in the. The reflection of the glory of Simone.

B (30:11)

Of Simone. Yeah, Simone de Rochefort. I mean, look, we all are, right? Actually, Ben Tendusky, who I think most of us know, the developer of Halide and other things, who's great. He was so excited because he lives in New York now. And he texted me and it was the most random thing. He was like, I finally met Simone. And then Simone texts me. She's like, I met this guy Ben.

A (30:33)

I was like, okay, that was a little weird, huh?

C (30:36)

Okay, am I safe? Is it okay?

A (30:41)

Yes, it's okay.

B (30:42)

I was like, no, he's great. I was like. I was like, you probably. You travel in the same circles. Like, I promise you, he's great. But he was like, I finally met Simone.

A (30:50)

That's pretty funny actually. You must have enjoyed the curling on the Olympics. The Winter Olympics.

C (30:55)

Sure did.

A (30:56)

I think a lot of new fans of curling.

C (30:59)

Our club has been inundated with people who want to, who want to. Some of them, they want to take lessons, which is great. We're filling those up and making more lessons whenever we can because it's all volunteer, but there's so much interest in it. And we also had, I have to say, being in the Bay Area, it's probably not surprising that our curling club is very online capital V, capital O. But like people were showing up to the club, which we're all volunteer. There's no staff. Sometimes there's nobody there. People are showing up and saying, can I just watch? And we're like, I guess. And now we're like, do we need a phone number? Do we need a sign out front that beyond just the name of the club? Because we hadn't really thought about walk ins. But it's that level of interest where people's kids are being like whoa, there's a curling club. Why don't we go see them curling? And it's great. It's great that people are interested in it because this is our big shot. And as a volunteer organization and a non profit like we need more members. Right? More members makes the club healthier. So this is, you know my wife and I, four years ago this is what we did. We. We saw that there was a curling club in Oakland and we went over there and now we do it twice a week. So. So it's great. It's great for, great for the sport of curling. It's especially great in America that we got a, a medal in curling again in mixed doubles this time and that the women made it to the. The semifinals.

A (32:15)

That was an exciting semi.

C (32:17)

So that, that kept American interest in curling as well. So it's fun. If you, if you're near a curling club you should try it. It's. You can do it at any age, any skill level you can. If you can't squat down, you can use a stick. You can. There's wheelchair curling cur and for seniors like the whole. We run the run the gamut. So yeah really exciting time. This is peak curling for us right now.

A (32:39)

Bayareacurling.com if you're interested in the San Francisco Bay Area and actually I was scrolling down and I see there's a Wine Country Curling Club.

C (32:47)

Yeah they're up in. It's the wrong. I mean they're in like Placerville or something. Roseville.

A (32:55)

I did this once before.

C (32:56)

They're far, they're far away. But yeah. And if you do to the Bay Area Curling Club, look at sheet four and see that it's sponsored by six colors.com the hogline is the six colors logo. So yeah. Yeah.

A (33:10)

Friendship, community and ice. It goes together.

C (33:14)

Did the.

D (33:14)

Did the Canadian donnybrook like cause like an uptick conversations. I need more people coming in.

A (33:22)

They call it boot gay boop boop

C (33:24)

gate because you're booping. You're booping the rock there. No, I would say no. You could not formulate a better faux scandal to generate interest in your sport because it didn't matter. It was pointless. It what didn't advantage anybody was literally just a rules violation. It didn't actually. It wasn't cheating in the sense that it wasn't an attempt to nor could it have really affected the outcome at all. But it was technically not something you're supposed to do. And then they yelled at each other which is not in the spirit of curling and like, it's all a tempest in the teapot. But the fact is, every curler I know has had people come out of the woodwork even more than the existence of the Olympics to say, what about that thing where they touch the rock? Like, okay, so perfectly formula. I would be, I'd be. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if world curling was like, why don't you poop the rock once? It's fine. Just to get people talking. Just to get people talking.

A (34:17)

Yeah, I, I'd watch it and I think I'm amazed at how you guys scramble around the rocks and you're pointing at stuff and don't touch anything. I know I would slip and fall and I would be cast aside.

C (34:29)

This came up on Jon Gruber was talking about it on with Ben Thompson on the dithering podcast that they do about, like, how they couldn't believe how curlers step around all those rocks. And I'll just tell you, after you do it for about two months, it's the self preservation instinct kicks in and your brain makes a map of where all the rocks are so you don't step on them and then, then you're fine. But it is one of those things where you're like, you're walking down the ice and suddenly you kick a rock and you're like, oh, no, I better never do that again. And then you learn and you figure it out.

A (35:00)

Sorry, Christina. You probably didn't expect to show and talk about it.

B (35:03)

No, I actually. No, that's fantastic. I didn't know that you curled Jason, and I think that's so fascinating.

C (35:08)

You're the last one to hear it.

B (35:10)

Well, I watch it on the Olympics every year and I'm always fascinated by it. I'm always like, this is really fun. And this year I watched and I thought it was really, really good. The Olympics in general this year, like, actually were so good. The women were so fantastic. I was, I was like having like the time of my life, like last week, like, watching the Olympics and Peacock.

C (35:28)

I mean, NBC has nailed it, I think, about how to do Olympics on streaming. They've got their stuff that's on cable. But, like, for the last couple Olympics, the Peacock experience has been pretty much immaculate. Yeah, they do a great job. Everything was there.

B (35:42)

Yeah, no, they've nailed it to your point, like, because it used to be hard, like, you know, free streaming. NBC would use all of their stations. They'd use usa, they'd use, you know,

C (35:53)

the msnbc,

B (35:56)

they would use the E Network. Right. Like, they would literally, like, use, like, I mean, I'm not joking.

C (35:59)

Sci Fi Channel.

B (36:00)

Yeah. Yeah, they would literally use, like, everything Express. Right. You know, so that they. So that people could try to tune in live. And then obviously, obviously, they have the primetime broadcast, and they're still doing the primetime broadcast, but increasingly it's just like, you already know what's happening because in the app you can immediately go to the sport. You can immediately go with what you want. It's a great experience on Apple TV, on the iPad. When I was in the hospital, actually, because, like, the Olympics started when. Right when I had surgery, I had my iPad with me and I was kind of still a little bit, like, conked out, but I was like, oh, I can. I can see what's happening. And, yeah, it was. It was great to watch.

C (36:35)

Yeah, they did a good job. It's. They. I mean, they have to. They spend so much money in the Olympics. It's so important to them. But, you know, in those early days, we're like, are they going to fumble this? And, you know, the first try wasn't the best, but, like, at this point, they've got it locked in. They do the Gold Zone channel, I want to mention, which is like, they got the guy from the NFL red zone and the other guy from the NFL red zone, and they do like, it's a whip around where they're like, if anybody's going to be with a gold medal on the line, they go there live and they just. So you can watch one event all the way through, or you can watch this thing, like, NFL red zone, where you just turn it on and just. Just sit there in the hospital maybe. And. Yeah, and they just take you over here and then. So, no, now we're snowboarding and. Oh, now we're ice skating. And it's. Yeah, they did a great job. It's. There's so much we have to complain about, about the world of streaming and about the world of traditional linear television and TV networks and all that, that I. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out when they. When they nail it. And they did.

B (37:31)

Yeah. I would also. I also want to give them like, a shout out for how quickly they were able to get their clips edited for social and get those up, which it was. Was really fantastic because in. I remember even like a little over a decade ago, probably three, you know, four Olympics ago. Three Olympics ago, I guess, you know, they were still really, really hesitant to. They. And they still do. You know, people cut their own clips and get too popular, they will get DMC notices and get taken down. But NBC wouldn't even put anything up. And so really hard for people to see the moments as they happened and now like their teams are on it. Like they're clipping that stuff. They're clipping it, you know, immediately. They're putting it on social and that's great to see. And, and frankly I think, like, I know for me anyway, like I would see something on social and be like, okay, I need to open up the Peacock app and watch the actual broadcast. So good stuff.

A (38:16)

March 4, which is not long, not long off Jason Snell's heading to New York City. Other Apple journalists go in and mostly influencers are going to Shanghai and London. London for unveilings. Actually, it's March 2nd, 3rd and 4th, isn't it?

C (38:33)

Well, no, no, no. So March 4th is the event. Nobody knows about the rest of it but the population.

A (38:38)

I'm looking at Mark Ehrman's predictions.

C (38:42)

Jon Gruber and Mark Gurman both have said this and I think they've got to be right. Right. This has the vibe of a they'll announce something small on Monday and something slightly larger on Tuesday and then something larger on Wednesday. Wednesday and Wednesday is when everybody will get the hands on about all of those products. That's. There's no confirmation for Apple because Apple's never going to say. Apple is the company that just drops a newsroom post at 6am Pacific and everybody scrambles. Other than the invitation to be at a physical event, which takes a couple of weeks of warning. So we don't know. But that, that's makes sense to me. Right? Like, why not make three days worth of news instead of putting three days worth of news in one day.

A (39:23)

So we'll be covering it, I guess, next Tuesday, whatever they announce on Monday.

C (39:27)

The first two thirds of it.

A (39:29)

Gurman says from what I've heard, Apple is planning a three day flurry of announcements.

D (39:34)

Don't say flurry. Please don't say flurry.

A (39:37)

Not a good word.

D (39:38)

That's a trigger word.

C (39:39)

Guy on the west coast says what?

A (39:41)

Yeah, Gruber says a Wednesday product launches out of character. Most of them are, as we know, are on Tuesday.

C (39:49)

Yeah, I mean, my best guess is that it'll be like maybe iPhone 17e on Monday and then the new iPads on Tuesday and then new Macs on Wednesday. But that's just a guess. I mean, that part of it is still shrouded in mystery, but it seems to me like the most weighty things. They've got are the Mac because you're going to have MacBook Pros. They might have a new MacBook Air. They might have that new MacBook that's using the A Series processor.

A (40:13)

What does Apple want the most attention for? Is it that new MacBook? I bet it's that new MacBook.

C (40:17)

Well, the new MacBook is the thing that's new and is going to make a splash. But also again, they sell so many Airs. That's their most popular computer. They sell so many MacBook Pros and they make a lot of money on those. And then if the studio display gets an update as well, that's the perfect time for that is to have that conversation. So yeah, I think over a, remember it's like going to be base iPad and maybe iPad Air and the low end phone. So those are less interesting than all those Mac announcements. This feels to me, it feels like a more like a Mac event. But I mean, but we don't know. We don't know.

B (40:49)

Yeah, because on the phone, I mean, look, I had major problems with the 16e to begin with. I thought it was a hundred dollars too expensive. I thought that they made a lot of compromises that didn't need to be made. And that was even more clear when the 17 came out. And I have a base 17 that I use as my work phone and it is phenomenal phone and it is, is a genuinely like really good value for a phone. Like not even for an iPhone, but just for a phone in general. And so I do wonder with that, like I feel like that's a press release release because no matter, unless you price it at 499, which they're not going to do, there's, there's no reason. I do understand that for some people $200 can be a big deal and $200 might be the difference between getting the phone and not getting the phone. And I, and I respect that. But for people especially if you're going to be buying something on a payment plan, which most of these carrier plans are over three years, you're talking about $5 a month difference between like whatever the 17e is and the full 17. And so I just, I feel like that's a press release. You know, the iPads, I'm excited to see what they do with that. Um, I liked the base iPad update they did last year. So it might just be an error, who knows. But yeah, I agree with Jason. I mean, I think this is going to be about the MacBooks. The MacBook Air is such a huge hit and it's such a great value and such a great machine. If they do do the long lower priced MacBook, I do think that that'll be a big deal. Right? That'll be. If they do do the A Series MacBook Air type of thing to replace the M1 that Walmart sells for you know, 5.99 or whatever the price is.699. I feel like that is the sort of thing where you're like okay, that would be significant and you want hands on time because that's going to sell like gangbusters because will that ever replace Chromebooks and school schools? No, but this is the sort of thing where now you actually have like a true genuine like entry level low cost machine that you can point people to to say why would I bother getting these low end Windows laptops? Why would I bother getting you know a, a Chromebook at this point that is capable of doing anything is going to cost about that when I can get you know, a Mac.

C (42:53)

Yeah, it's literally a place that Apple has never sold a laptop top before at that price. And there, there is an Indian is going to say the same thing as me probably. But it's like there's an audience we think, you know, as Mac users especially we're like oh you know, you know maybe some people will buy it or buy it instead of an Air, but it's like there's a whole collection of people that have not been properly addressed by Apple who just are not gonna buy, they're not gonna prioritize a computer to the point where a thousand dollar laptop makes sense for them. And Apple has never. That M1 air that they've kept around at Walmart is the first time they've even experimented with addressing that market directly and so just could be a big game changer for that segment I'll say too.

B (43:37)

You know Apple has not sold in that market directly but because of sales and other things the, some of the older MacBook Airs have fallen that way. Even this year even you know, holiday season, you know Amazon and other people had like the, the actual, like you know the, the M4 MacBook Air for $750, which is unreal. I got my sister the 16 gigabyte version of the M2 Air I think for $600 at Best Buy as a Cyber Monday deal which was amazing because it replaced a 10 year old MacBook Air for her. And I'm telling you, I fully agree with you Jason. There's a whole segment of people who for a variety of reasons like you said, don't want to, can't spend a thousand dollars but they can go below that. And Apple has, has for various reasons not gone after that market. Now I feel like if their machines are good enough, especially now that prices on everybody else are going up and Apple will be hit by that eventually, but right now they seem insulated by it. I feel like this is a massive opportunity.

D (44:31)

Yeah, especially if it's going to be cool to see how Apple decides to market and sell this like they could. I think they're going to stay away from the idea of oh, you know how we have all these MacBook. Well now we have a super cheap one. One it I think they're going to really go all in on saying that no, no, no, this is, it's going to be called a MacBook. I'm still holding out for Ibook, but it's going to be still going to be called a MacBook. But they're going to say no, no, this is an entirely fresh, new, interesting take. They're not going to, they're not going to broadcast, oh, assuming the rumors are correct, that's using an A series CPU instead of, instead of M series. They're not going to broadcast, oh, we're using the same CPU as the iPhone, but they might be able to flex that into we have the longest battery Life of any MacBook we've ever made. They're going to basically be pushing every single button they can push to say that this is a special experience, that you're not getting a lesser than, you're getting a different MacBook, you're not getting a lesser than MacBook. And the opportunities that they have at this moment there's a. Microsoft has handed Apple a big opportunity in discontinuing Windows 10 and suddenly rendering entire collections of older perfectly functioning Windows machines, Windows laptops, none basically non tenable. So now, not that they're going to scoop up every single Windows user and convert them into Mac users, but a lot of them are going to be saying, well you know, if I'm going to, I haven't bought a laptop in four or five years. I wonder what's out there. It's probably going to be another Dell, probably going to be another Lenovo or an Asus. It's like wait minute, a, a minute Mac, I can get a MacBook now what's that like? And again, this is, this isn't. And also let's not put too big of a golden crown on Apple's, Apple's head. One of the problems with the MacBook line has always been that for $1,000 you can get a really nice Windows notebook. It's not, that's not a budget Windows notebook by any means. That's a major manufacturer. Really great build quality, really good longevity to it. Again, if you're okay with Windows, that's going to be a very, very good time you're going to have with $1,000 or. And it won't even be like necessarily a base model mid range laptop. But what we've been talking about about this event now that we have some rumors about how it's going to be an extravaganza, it's going to be a festival, it's going to be a three, it's going to be a Mardi Gras where there's going to be two or three, there's the big parade, but then there's going to be like two days of drinking like before it. That really does indicate that they've got a lot of things that aren't going to mean very much. And they decided that rather than do it as a press release, we may as well do this as a preamble because we haven't been hearing anything about the iPads. It's just that, oh my God, that's going to transfer. If you've been holding off on an iPad, this is why you've waited six months to buy a new iPad. It's going to be, no, it's going to be incremental. I mean it's going to be nicer than the last one, but it's not going to be revolutionary. New MacBooks, MacBook Pros, again, same thing. Everything that is on the rumor list is not suggested as hey, that's a whole new design, a whole new capability, a whole new redefinition. But the idea of, well, if we're going to be, I don't want to say taking out the usually take out the trash day analogy, but it's going to be what if we were to, if we're getting people, if we get people in for just the, the budget level MacBook, why don't we get a lot of attention on this other stuff too and we can basically flex the entire product line. So it's kind of, I got to say that my, again, rumors are rumors. Nothing's confirmed until it's actually real. But that's actually going to got me kind of interested in how Apple decides to put on the show because the. How Apple decides to put on the show has always been an, one of, one of the more interesting parts of Apple's product line, not just the product itself, but what kind of a show are we going to be put on and putting on about this?

C (48:11)

Yeah, I always say it's about storytelling with Apple. And like, what is the story that they're trying to tell? I think if the rumors are true, they're going to have a MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro at this event, which means they can tell a whole story about their range of laptops. And you know, we know that three quarters of the max, at least, that they sell are laptops. Right? Like that's, that's what a Mac is. It's a laptop. The, the desktops are a smaller, a much smaller audience. So the laptops matter, the MacBook name matters. And then how do they tell that story? I agree 100%. The last thing Apple's ever going to do is say, hey, we got you this cheap crap, right? Like that's not. But, but what it don't get, don't

D (48:47)

get it wet because the case is water.

C (48:49)

They're going to say, they're going to say it's power, even though we all know it's, it's not as powerful as the others. They're going to say it's powerful. They're going to say it's fun. The rumors are it's going to have like colors and stuff that the other ones don't. It's. They're going to say it's fun. They're going to say it's accessible and affordable in a way of like, you can buy this, not in the way that this is cheap. And this is, I think, a really interesting dynamic to watch. Apple's brand means something. It's one of the most important brands in the world. And I think there is an audience for whom Apple's brand is absolutely aspirational, but also a turn off because it's just not in a price range that they're willing to go to. But what it means is that if there's an, if there's a MacBook, that's a MacBook, it's an Apple product that's priced at whatever it is. It's not, it's not meant to come across as cheap. It's meant to come across as a, a real value because now you can get into a high quality Apple computer and it's going to be aluminum, it's not going to be plastic, it's going to be, be. It's good. I'm just going to go out and say it's going to be really nice, right? Yeah. No matter what the price is, it's going to be nice. And that allows that brand to come down a little bit. And I mean, forgive me for repeating myself from a few weeks ago, but like Apple Silicon made this happen. The Apple Silicon is so good that it took what used to be like the bar of we can't really make a laptop less than this because it's not going to be very good. And that bar like dropped a long way to the point where they look at the A series and they're like, why not? Right? And it will still be a good computer. So I just, I can't wait to see about the product. But I also am just really interested to see in the long run how they tell this story where they try to reach with this product. Because I know we all have gotten excited about this product over the last couple of years while it's been out there as a rumor. But like it is an area that Apple has just not gone in before and that's, that doesn't happen that often. Honestly. This is really interesting for the map back especially.

D (50:44)

Yeah, there's, there's another dimension here that again we don't, we don't know what A series chip will be in there. Of course. Rumors, rumors, rumors. We don't know if it's going to for a fact it's going to be an A series chip. But it would be interesting if, when they take a, when outsiders take a look at what this design is. This is an A series chip based on older fab technology that could reasonably be manufactured inside the United States. One of the limits, one of the gates they have that they're working on right now is that how do we get, get more CPU production out of Taiwan? For a number of reasons, both, both foreign and domestic pressures to make that happen. It would be a very interesting observation if, if that, if that design were to, were to be examined and was like, you know what TSMC is not, TSMC is, is right now under certain obligations to the government that Taiwan gets first grabs on manufacturing of their latest, latest fab technologies. That's something they have to deal with. But if Apple designed a chip that would allow TSMC to manufacture this inside the United States, given how big the Mac book line is, as Jason said, Apple Macs, the Mac market is essentially MacBooks. It's nice that we have desktops, but the Mac market is MacBooks. If they were to make a blockbuster selling laptop that they could manufacture most of the components inside the US not necessarily this year, but in the next two or three years, start to bring all these other factories online. That would be a very intriguing development.

A (52:15)

Yeah. Tim Trip Mickle reporting in the New York Times that in 2023, the CIA briefed a bunch of executives in a secret briefing room in Silicon Valley, including Tim Cook, Lisa Su from amd Jensen Huang of Nvidia saying our intelligence says based on Chinese buildup that they are looking to invade Taiwan probably in 2027. Cook said after that briefing, I slept with one eye open.

D (52:48)

I read that scene. I'm like, what was. What was? I hope they had like video capture seeing four of the most important CEOs in the entire world doing a spit take at the same time.

A (52:57)

Turning pale. Turning pale, yeah. Afterward, Mr. Cook told officials he slept with one eye open. That was probably. You could probably date to July 2023. Apple's serious efforts to move out of Taiwan as best they can. And well, we'll see. There are going to. I think this is going to be the year of color for Apple. Apple had such success with the orange iPhone. Mark Gurman says that he thinks there's going to be a deep red iPhone 18, which I would, by the way, probably buy. I think that's a nice color.

C (53:37)

We're all showing our orange iPhones now. Christina.

B (53:39)

Orange gang rise.

A (53:40)

Orange gang. Everybody got em. Oh, you got a little. You got a little one. I got a big one. Show em. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Andy. All right, we gotta get the thumbnail. Everybody hold up your orange iPhone and make some sort of YouTube be.

D (53:56)

What?

A (53:58)

Okay, good. That's very important if you're going to be on YouTube.

C (54:02)

Audio listeners are loving it.

D (54:04)

Oh, wait, wait, I'm sorry.

A (54:05)

You can use your imagination.

D (54:07)

I'll use. I'll use my, my iPhone. IPhone 4. Like that.

A (54:10)

Okay. In a nice yellow Spec case. So you got.

B (54:14)

I did get the. The classic case from who's. It's from speaking that they made it look like a Mac Se.

A (54:21)

Oh, that's cool. I like that it even came with

B (54:25)

like, I even got a little, I guess, wrist thing that says, let me see if I can show this. It says hello, hello. In like the Apple font, which is pretty cool.

A (54:35)

Yeah.

B (54:36)

So I do like that.

D (54:37)

I wish they'd bring that. I'm sorry for an aside, but spec, please bring this case design back.

A (54:41)

That's a great.

C (54:42)

I love it.

D (54:43)

It's so grippy. It's. It's you. You feel like you could just basically throw it in anger, then pick it up and nothing will happen, which is not such A good thing, but it's a good thing for if you're spending money for a kid case. Which makes you wonder why Apple would

A (54:54)

put any effort into making color phones, since everybody's going to put it in a case. Apparently, though, in the Chinese market, the orange phone did. Really.

C (55:01)

It did.

D (55:02)

That was. That was.

B (55:03)

Well, in the US it did, and

C (55:04)

in the US too.

D (55:05)

But it was particularly cited in China as a reason why it. It's a. It's this visible flex that, hey, this is. This colorway has not been available in a phone ever. So therefore, if I visibly have this orange iPhone, it means that I have actually. Absolutely. I'm absolutely capable of buying and owning the latest and the greatest.

B (55:22)

Yeah, well, I'd said from the beginning I knew and everybody told me and the Internet told me that I was wrong. And obviously Apple doesn't break out, you know, like product sales. But I had a very good gut feeling. I was like, the air is not going to be a big seller. Everybody is going to buy the orange iPhone. And I was completely right because my mom got an air.

A (55:43)

Really?

B (55:44)

Yeah. For her, her, it's perfect because she wanted a lighter, smaller phone so she wouldn't have thinnest. She wanted something that was lighter. She'd had a pro max before, and she doesn't, you know, take a ton of photos. And so the downsides, I got her little battery attachments. The downsides, you know, for her, it's not a big deal. For her having the sleek, small phone, not small, but, you know, but like, thinner phone was perfect.

A (56:05)

And she probably doesn't draw a lot of battery. She probably gets through the day.

B (56:08)

She gets through the. And then I got her the battery, you know, add on pack. Right. Which obviously includes increases the stuff. But she can keep that in her car. And so for her, like, it's perfect. And the way that I kind of looked at it, I was like, oh, well, this is like, this is your second phone. This is the second phone that executives have because they have someone else who can manage their calendar for them. So this is like a great phone for Tim Cook, but for the rest of us, to Andy's point, you either want to show off that I've got the latest and greatest and that I can afford to buy the latest and greatest, or, you know, they did a hell of a job with the base iPhone this year, which was so good that it's like, okay, okay, you're asking me to pay more money to get a worse phone that. That doesn't track. But, yeah, I Mean, I do feel like they, they nailed with the color thing this year. I'm, I'm a big orange fan, but even if I wasn't, there's no way I was not going to buy the orange iPhone.

A (56:56)

You know, I'm disappointed because the rumors are, and Gurman reiterates this, that the folding phone, if it does come out, by the way, all we're going to start getting much more serious rumors now because this is the time when they start building manufacturing.

D (57:07)

Yeah, yeah.

A (57:08)

The folding phone's gonna be in more subdued grays and blacks and stuff like that.

D (57:14)

They kind of have to. Like when you're charging what was going to be $2,000 for a phone, you can't take the risk that there's going to be people. I love it, but I can't be walking around with a sky blue phone. That's the thing is I make a lot of fun about how. But now the new MacBook is available in two exciting new colorways. Slightly not gray and slightly less gray.

A (57:34)

Are you saying rich people don't like color?

D (57:37)

No, I'm just, I'm just saying when you're manufacturing these things in bulk, you, you know for a fact what color, you know for a fact what people are buying. And when you know that, okay, the thing is, it's the reason why you don't see a whole lot of yellow cars. You don't see a lot of purple cars. You see what, you see a lot of boring colors because a lot of most people are going to choose the boring color and decide to just put like a really cool thing hanging from the rear window, the front, front, the front mirror instead, as a way of customizing it. Because, because, because the other problem that people are, I. Over the past two or three years, I've had to really remind myself that a huge, huge factor in, in the marketing these phones is people turn in their old phones to trade in for the new ones or they try to sell them or something like that. And once again, again, you'll enjoy your, your pink phone for the two or three years you have it. But then when you're trying to find someone to buy it for you, you, you're going to wish you had something that was more conservative. Again, you can always sell a gray phone. You don't necessarily have the ability to sell anything that's not a gray phone.

A (58:37)

We're going to take a little break. When we come back, we'll talk about other Apple rumors. So nice to have you, Christina Warren on the panel. Thank you for putting up with us. We're thrilled. Christina Warren, Developers.

D (58:48)

She's already a member of the group. This is awesome.

A (58:50)

She fits right in, doesn't she? Developed well, she always has developer relations. Film girls develop relations at GitHub. And always glad to have her in the house with the snacks. Jason Snell from Six Colors. The report card is out. We'll talk about the results in just a little bit. And Andy Inocco who is in his home proving that he doesn't have to go to the library. There's sufficient snow, I'm barricaded.

D (59:15)

And if anybody has like canned goods, any wood that will burn, just go FedEx it over. Drop it. No, the car.

A (59:24)

You got the sweater on. That's good. That's good.

D (59:27)

I got the sweater on. I've got. And I've got my Relay FM blanket.

A (59:31)

Oh, nice.

D (59:32)

In my lap.

A (59:33)

Very nice.

D (59:34)

Because I, because I'm sitting. When I picked this location for my, for my desk it was because, well, I've got a nice neighborhood. It'd be nice to look out the window, the windows of 120 year old building. Not the most like insulative properties.

A (59:46)

So I just realized this is how incestuous the podcast business is. All three of you had or have shows on Relay fm. Well, that's the way. Yeah, that's the way. Okay. You don't have to show off the swag.

B (60:01)

I was going to say you got more swag than me, Andy. I love that.

A (60:05)

Our show today, brought to you by Cash Fly. I mean, and when I say brought to you, I mean literally. You've heard me say it many times. Bandwidth from Mac break weekly is provided by cashfly@C-C-E f l y.com Twitch. For over 20 years, CashFly has delivered high performing, ultra reliable content through our content Delivery Network or CDN to more than 5,000 companies, including ours, in nearly 100 countries. We've trusted them for it's almost two decades now, since practically the very beginning. We love their lag free video, their hyper fast downloads, their seamless site interactions and for a tech savvy audience like you guys, that's pretty non negotiable. We know if you go to our website and press the play button on the video and it doesn't start within a second, you're off to somewhere else. I know I am. Cashfly delivers real performance and real results. Events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide. Online games start 70% faster and play without lag. Software releases download flawlessly. No failed patches or updates. HD video Plays on demand with sub second start times on every device. And of course podcasts like ours reach global audiences at record speed at any scale. That's really important to us because we know we have an audience all over the world. And with Cashfly, you get us from the server that's closest to you geographically. Plus, Cashfly has an amazing 100% availability record for the last 12 months. You don't get any better than that. Cashfly is the fastest, up to 158% faster than other major CDNs with its 100% cache hit ratio. Your content stays where it belongs. Cashfly also shields your site content and it's cloud for instant access. So build your own contract with Cashfly. That's what we did. It was really great for us because we didn't understand how much our bandwidth needs would vary over the week, over the month. So they were very flexible. We enjoy that flexible billing. It suited our business needs. And of course, as soon as you know what you need, you can get fixed rates even better discount. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com twit that's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com twit. Thank you, CashFly.

D (62:30)

Leo, I'm sorry for offending you so I've gone and put on my.

A (62:34)

Oh, thank you. Okay. We don't do a lot of swag anymore these days. We do have a twitch store. I guess you could.

D (62:40)

But this is one of my. This is actually my usual house coat during the winter.

A (62:44)

I love that it's warm enough.

D (62:46)

Really, really beautiful. Thank you.

B (62:47)

Thank you for saying, you know, a listener. Leo, a while back. I wish I could remember who sent me a bunch of old shirts they had, including some tech tv.

A (62:57)

Oh, nice. I know you collect.

C (62:59)

Oh, good times.

A (63:00)

You collect.

B (63:01)

I collect vintage stuff like that. Exactly. That's why they sent it to me.

A (63:04)

Especially from different defunct companies.

B (63:06)

Yep.

C (63:06)

I'll just take a drink from my Relay FM water bottle here.

A (63:10)

I just. You know, I don't even have a twit mug here or anything. I do have a ZDTV mug downstairs. I'll send.

B (63:16)

Oh, man, that's amazing.

C (63:19)

Actually, I still.

D (63:20)

I still have my. One of my mech week. I can't remember what it's called the monkey got when you.

C (63:26)

I tipped off Mac the Knife.

D (63:27)

There you go. I got. I still got one of those.

A (63:29)

Oh, that's cool. When you give them a tip. What happened to that? All the magazines had those, you know, kind of. I Guess Mark Gurman is replaced.

C (63:39)

When I was at Macworld, we made a mug for the Macalope that was inspired by the maca knife that said I'm the Macalope, right, And I have one, but so does the Macalo. So, you know, it's great.

A (63:52)

I have. And I'll send this to you, Christina. This is a zdtv. Amaze yourself. Cute. And for no apparent reason, a Tech TV Super Ball. But it's not lit up when you. There's electronics inside.

B (64:05)

That's so cool.

C (64:05)

I remember that. I think I had one of those.

A (64:07)

Yeah, it lit up when you bounced it.

C (64:09)

It's a good time.

A (64:10)

Put that back on the.

C (64:11)

Somewhere on the Internet there's that great clip of me giving a Mac World Mac tip on Tech TV to Leo. And we. There's a lot less gray hair in that clip, let me tell you, on both sides.

A (64:22)

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

C (64:23)

More hair, less gray.

A (64:25)

Gurman says the next big thing for Apple is a push into visual artificial intelligence. Do you think this will be one of the announcements or will they talk about this next week?

D (64:35)

No, Nope. Nope.

A (64:35)

Not even will they talk about the new Siri? I guess they.

C (64:37)

No.

D (64:39)

No promises. No promises of any kind until they have actual working stuff to do. An actual live demo. They were burned so badly. They burned everybody so badly a couple of years ago that they are not going to touch that stove again.

A (64:54)

So do. Why do we think that the visual intelligence is the next look?

C (65:00)

I think Apple is placing bets, assuming that future AI will be really good at a bunch of stuff. And the problem is because look, isn't the story of Apple right now that they are killing it on hardware and then they're struggling on software? Like that's what's happening. And we know, know from German that they, they've had like home products built around Siri, basically built around good AI that they can't ship because the AI isn't any good and they're still waiting for that. And, and this seems very much like the same idea, which is they've got these amazing hardware people and they're like, okay, let's imagine having working AI. What would that be like? And one of the thoughts is if you can get cameras in glasses, in a pin, in AirPods wherever, we could do stuff with that. But you need to be able, if the phone's in the pocket, you can't see out, you can't see what's going on. But once we can see out, we can use our AI to do stuff. So the hardware people are like, okay, we're on it. Because those people are very competent at Apple and they are building great stuff. But right now it feels like they just kind of have to imagine that and put their faith in the fact that the AI stuff will catch up. Because I can imagine that. Right. I can imagine how valuable it might be to have my personal assistant see what I see, know where I am, know who I talk to, know what I'm reading, all of those things in a sci fi kind of context. But. And it takes a long time to develop hardware too. So I think they play some bets and they're like, maybe this is a direction we'll go because they think that there's a lot you can do once you can see what's around you. The problem is that they have to, you know, the, the software has to come along too. And for Apple that, that's, that's killed so many things up to now.

A (66:44)

Yeah. So in the report card it says in fact, hardware reliability. Jason, if those who don't know surveys his fellow Apple journalists every year. How long have you been doing this, Jason?

C (66:56)

11 years. For that now.

A (66:58)

Yeah. And of course Andy and Christina and I were all asked, but only one of them replied. But Christina made up for both of them.

B (67:09)

I think I made up for everyone I wrote to you.

A (67:12)

She typed a lot. But I have to point out hardware reliability. Got a great score, 4.5 out of 5.

C (67:18)

Yes. People will appreciate that. Three different panelists individually made the joke that maybe the guy in charge of hardware should be put in charge of

A (67:25)

the company because OS quality 2.7, app quality 3.1. I mean, really poor scores on this is the Story.

C (67:37)

I mean just look at the rumored home home controller device. Apple finally says we're going to make a home product and they base it on Siri and App Intents, neither of which have shipped. And it's now a year and a half since they were announced. That product is, according to Gurman, was ready to go last year at this time and they can't ship it because the software is not ready. By the way, my understanding is the same was true with the Vision Pro where they had the Vision Pro hardware locked maybe a year before and the software is just no good. So they had to wait until the software was good enough that they could make an announcement and then ship it. This is a recurring story and I don't know, they have made changes and maybe those changes will be effective. But right now this is the state of Apple, which is they have this amazing hardware group that can build whatever you want, it seems. But is the software going to be there to support it? Because you end up with that moment where you have to put a bunch of home controllers in a warehouse somewhere because there's no software to run them because they assumed it would be ready and it, it failed completely. So that's, I mean it's right there in the numbers. Apple right now as a company that fuses hardware and software, one side of the house is doing great and the other side not so good.

A (68:49)

Yeah. Is it liquid glass? I know a number of people. Brett Simmons said of liquid glass. Let me see if I can find it.

C (68:58)

I. Yeah. Oh yeah. Craig Hockenberry had a good line too. There were a bunch of good. A lot of. A lot of good one liners. Christina did a hundred line. A lot of good.

B (69:07)

I had a good one liner for the Apple tv. Okay.

C (69:08)

Yeah, yeah.

D (69:09)

Promise over deliver. It's the Apple way.

C (69:12)

There's a lot of like this is a, you know, this is a. The hardware is really great and the, the software is a really great mess, basically is what everybody said. I think, I think liquid glass came up a lot. I think liquid glass is the straw that broke the camel's back. Honestly. I think liquid glass is more a symptom of a larger disease. I don't think it's like, ah, with liquid glass they've lost me. I think it's more like, like liquid glass was the breaking point where people who've been grumbling about Apple not. Yeah. For years, the last few years, especially last five or ten years about Apple deprioritizing usability for Flash, you know, and just not worry. Being worried about computer interface design as much as the look of it all. And then liquid glass was like, everybody's like, okay, them's fighting words. We're gonna get into it now. And if I look at the pan, that's my diagnosis is I think that it just broke a lot of people where they're like, can we finally admit that Apple has lost the plot when it comes to usability. Yeah.

A (70:09)

Christina's comment on the Apple TV was Apple TV continues to be a product in the Apple ecosystem.

C (70:14)

Yep.

A (70:16)

Which is kind of like Conor Roy was interested in politics from a young age.

B (70:20)

Exactly. That's exactly it. No, no, I mean, look, what is there to say about Apple tv? It exists.

A (70:26)

It exists. That's it. You know, it's the best, best of the bunch. I would say.

B (70:32)

Well, this, okay, this is to me, if I can go on a rant for a Second, this is what is so frustrating to me about the state of Tahoe, the state of liquid glass, the state of software at Apple. It is so degraded and it is so bad compared to what we had a decade ago, let alone 15 years ago. I've never seen such a degradation in our usability and whatnot. And we've all accepted it. And we've accepted it because as bad as Tahoe is, as bad as these decisions are, are as as much like lack of care there is in the usability. Like when you see things about resizing Windows not working and resizing, you know, like, like, you know, columns not working. And then the fix not really even being a fix. The fact that like on the latest beta HFS plus drives don't work. I'm sorry, what are, what type of testing are you doing? This is still the way that Apple even recommends that if you have, you know, a non Apple ssd, you format your drive. This is only a file format that Apple like maintained for what, 20 plus years? Okay. As bad as all these things are, it is still better than the alternative. And that is what is so frustrating.

C (71:37)

Yes. Yeah, that's actually. And the Apple TV is the perfect example of that. Where I bought all the boxes last year and tried them all and Google TV is okay.

B (71:46)

Google TV is the closest.

A (71:48)

My favorite is Nvidia's Shield. Excellent. But the software's so limited. And it's not because Nvidia's fault. It's Android TV or Google tv.

C (71:56)

Yeah, and that's the thing that there does seem to be complacency. And the Apple TV is the worst of it because that's a product. You can look at what Amazon has done and Amazon, their stuff is their TV streamer is garbage because it's just full of junk because they're trying to sell you stuff. But functionally it's got amazing features. And Apple TV is just, it's like they think it's fine and therefore they're not going to do anything with it. And I do wonder if some of that component complacency happens on especially the Mac where they're like, look, it's the Mac. It's great. You don't want to use Windows, you want to use the Mac. It's like, okay, but it also should be better, right? Like it should be better.

B (72:31)

It should be better. Well, and I'll tell you this, we can be complacent now because the alternatives aren't good. But I'm telling you, you know, there are companies who are younger who are coming up. You know, Apple is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. There are companies out there that are going to develop another opportunity operating system that is going to be AI first. That is not going to be Windows, that is not going to be Mac os. And I don't know if it's going to be open AI. I don't know if it's Beanthropic. I don't know.

A (72:55)

It might be Microsoft.

B (72:57)

It could be Microsoft, right? I mean I think that would be hard. I obviously, I don't know. I think, I think for Apple or Microsoft it would be difficult because you have the encumbered like legacy stuff, right? And unless you're willing to do what Apple did in 2000, 2001 with Mac OS X and do a clean break break, that can be really difficult. But there will be companies that are going to come out with like AI first operating systems and re envisioning what these things look like probably based on Linux, who knows.

A (73:23)

The same thing that happened to coding.

B (73:25)

Yes.

A (73:26)

Is going to happen to computing where it is. You no longer have to mouse around and click and have a finder and look at files and documents. You just tell it what you want.

B (73:36)

Right? And when this happens, the complacency that Jason talks about and the fact that the willing to like Apple TV again is the perfect example of the, oh well, this is good enough, we don't have to bother and even try any harder. What will happen is the same happens anytime things get disrupted. Your, your, you know, your stuff gets rocked. Because, because I don't want to, want to, want to curse, right? And that's what's good. That's what's going to happen. And I feel passionately about this because I'm such a huge Mac fan. I love the Mac so much. I will not put Tahoe on any of my main machines. I haven't computer because I have to. I will not do it. I think it's terrible. And, and, and it's just, it's such a regression in usability. I won't touch it. I've never felt that way about a main OS before. I'm like, no, I'm waiting for you know, 27 and we will see what they will do then. But, but it, it angers me and it frustrates me because this complacency will have negative consequences far beyond this because it's not about like okay, well I can't go to Linux because that's still too Linuxy. And I, and I, I'm not Going to use Windows. Windows. Okay, well what about when like another OS entrant that doesn't have the encumbered legacy that is given more chances because it's new and so we're not going to hold it to as many standards as we hold other things to. What about when that comes out and it turns out that everybody realizes what's been true for a while, which is almost every application we use is a web app and these apps that we love and that we depend on, these niche things can be recreated even if it's not perfect in a way that's still usable. And I might be more efficient and get things done. And, and for those of us, you know, on this panel, it might be frustrating. I mean I can only speak for myself, be like, okay, the younger generation comes in, they don't even know what files are. So what, what happens when like you really do have a ground up rewrite operating system that can take on these new paradigms? What happens to the Mac then? Because the hardware is perfect, they can do anything with the hardware, but if the software sucks. Yeah, at a certain point you're stuck.

A (75:32)

Well also according to the reviews that you garnered, Jason, in your report card, the same thing that Amazon has done so wrong, Apple is kind of doing. You call it upselling fatigue. And Casey List said enough with the upsells. My God. Apple's focus on subscription revenue has led to many nagging please to subscribe and spend money with Apple. That says Joe Rosenstiel. I mean people were pissed.

C (76:00)

It is, it's definitely an issue and I think it's a cultural issue. I assume there is probably somebody at Apple who's arguing for the user experience. It reminds me of, I mean my last few years in a corporate media job. I spent a lot, I don't want to say most of my time, but it felt like most of my time in meetings where I was the only person in the room arguing that maybe slight amounts of incremental revenue that destroyed the user experience was bad for our business and mostly not getting listened to. I'm sure that there's somebody at Apple who is doing this, but they're clearly not getting listened to. And this is the issue is, look, I understand the difference is that Amazon's marketing, not its own stuff only, but like all of its partners because it just wants you in the funnel to buy stuff. Apple is just promoting its own stuff. So it's a little bit different. It's self marketing. The problem is because while I admit that Apple needs to have the Latitude to reach its customers and say, hey, did you know we're doing F1 that somebody needs to be have a conversation about? Like what does that look like? It's like, well, you can interrupt at once or you can be on this carousel. But like it definitely feels like there's nobody to say. You are destroying the user experience of the TV app on Apple tv. You are inserting the creator, Creator Studio, like as ads in pages, like ads in the ui, like literally a panel that opens and there's an upsell in pages to the creator Studio, which is not only the wrong product for most users of Pages, but it's the only way to get these features that are now in the ui. And this is where everything is just a little out of balance. And, and what needs to happen is that there needs to be more advocacy. I can't actually say that because it's a black box. There probably is advocacy people in positions of authority need to understand. I mean, forgive me for going back to my Hawaii hotel analogy from a couple of weeks ago, but it's the idea that you can't be a cut rate, fly by night operation and a premium brand. You have to, if you're a premium brand, you have to have standards and there has to be a limit and you have to have respect for your customers. And that's what I think Apple has lost the plot on. I think Apple thinks it's okay to heavily market market to a captive audience in its ecosystem. And again, a little bit of that I'm actually okay with. But I, but it's got to come with choice and the user's got to be able to say, I don't want to see this again. I want to hide this, stop showing this to me. And Apple seems to have just completely lost that.

D (78:25)

One of the ways that you can keep a customer for life is when the customer regards you as this, this company is a, or this product is a safe refuge from fill in the blank. And for everybody it's going to be a list of different things. And when you start erasing things off of this thing like, okay, so, but you know the reason why I use a Mac, it's a safe refuge from software that just doesn't work. Okay, that's not really true. It's a safe refuge from being treated like a, like a, like a mark. Okay. Or being advertised against for everything. Okay. It's refuge against being treated like I'm supposed to basically put all of my money, all my money and more of my money into to things as a consumer as opposed to being given a compelling reason to. Dang it. And so you're going to. As those things get removed one by one by one when you get into a situation where I'm almost. I spent. One of my little tasks last week was to update a 2017 Chromebook that I bought at the MIT Flea Market for 35 bucks to the very, very latest edition of Pop OS, which also runs a bunch of the same apps that I rely on every single day. It was annoying, it was almost annoying to me that comparing this to the like $2,000 MacBook Pro that I usually run the Joplin text editor in, there was really no difference in how easy it was, how reliable it was. The biggest difference was that the keyboard was way, way, way better on the $35 flea market version. Okay, so you get, you start to get down to when. And it's not just, it's not really. I would put the blame as much on the thing is that. But other operating systems, including Open Source, including Linux, have had now 10 years to fix all of the problems that they were having. And now the difference between Windows and Windows and macOS and even Mac OS and certain versions of Linux is thin enough that the fact that this is a Lenovo grade laptop keyboard is enough to make me think, you know what, I really need to work for two or three hours here. Maybe I want to use the flea market laptop and not the really, really nice, nice one. What is Apple going to be left with? And the thing is they're going to be left with is clinging it to like the branch that the Coyote is desperately clinging on to at the end of the Warner Brothers cartoon is going to be security and privacy. That's one card that they can always play. And as soon as they start to compromise on that too, that's when the branch is going to start to weaken and crack. And I would like them to be hanging on to something more substantial than one single branch that is only there because their, their business marketing, their business plan is such that it's irrelevant to collect personal information.

A (81:07)

I hate to say it, Andy, but if that's all you care about, I think Linux is probably more secure and more private. So yeah, I know that I won't

D (81:14)

bring it up, but the, But I will say the difference between for myself is that I'm not interested enough in Linux as a hobby to learn everything. I feel as though I would need to learn to make sure that I understand what the security layer are and how to make sure I'm engaging them properly. But yeah, you're right.

A (81:32)

I have Claude code, do all of that. Does a great job of that. Locks it down and knows exactly what to do.

D (81:38)

But Christine was absolutely right. The thing is like more and more,

A (81:41)

because I'm giving Anthropic all my personal information, so that's another matter.

D (81:45)

But more and more often, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, anything, it is the container in which we use the services that are pretty much platform agnostic. There are a handful of apps on my MacBook that I absolutely cannot find a substitute for on any other platform. And I still, again, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not using this as a long diatribe against Apple. I still love my MacBook. I still love Mac OS. I still use it because it is the best operating system for everything that I want aesthetically and for all kinds of other reasons. But the thing is, the fact, as soon as Apple forgets that the thing is my, my, my company runs on Google Docs. It just has to run, run Chrome. The thing is, I do so much of my work through Claude code or an AI and that's an app that's available on anything or through any web app. As soon as Apple loses the sight of the fact that I know, you know, 2004 was a great year to be a boastful Apple person, but that was so very long ago. And you can't just simply give us the same thing each and every season without thinking about giving us something that is, that is absolutely, materially an improvement upon all the rest.

A (82:55)

Jason, is this the worst Apple report card?

C (82:59)

It's funny, I feel like we've come back around to the first few years of it where we were in a. The Mac was in hardware doldrums. The developers were really up in arms about a lot of App Store policies that Phil Schiller came in and. Well, no, it did. Phil Schiller came in and made a lot of things more transparent and they introduced the 15% cut for, for independent developers and things got better, but all of that has eroded away. I think, you know, it. Look, this is a challenge for Apple in terms of what it stands for and what its brand means. And I hate to say it, but remember when Steve Jobs said that thing about the problem with Microsoft being that they let the sales guys in there to run it? It's, it's not. Tim Cook's not a sales guy, but I would say is I get the sense that Apple has made so much, much money over the last 15, 20 years that they have Become very revenue focused, which is not fundamentally bad. But I think what has happened, and again, I just get the scent of it from the outside because I lived in an organization the last five or ten years I was at IDG that was, that was driven like this. It's the same idea. The people, the leaders were all people who came from the sales side, not the editorial side. And they were, the good ones understood that we were selling a product and the product was the editorial. And the bad ones just thought that it was a sales machine and that the product was meaningless. And I get a whiff of that from Apple that they're so focused on driving revenue and they've, and they don't have enough people or enough people who've been empowered to stand up for the product and the brand. And the problem with it is, you know what, it's very hard to be the person in the room, take this from me to say, I know that this will make us more money, but it will intangibly degrade our product or our brand because the, the money is tangible and the brand erosion is intangible. And so tangibility is a real easy choice. Well, we'll add this ad unit. We'll, you know, it's fine. It's, it's not going to erode it that much and you can't give me a million measurement for it. But you do that long enough and you build a culture where you don't care about your brand anymore. And I would say to anybody who's watching this, inside or outside Apple, Apple's one of the most valuable brands in the world. If you do not have very strong representation for the quality of your products and living up to your brand promise, you are squandering your company's single biggest asset, which is what Apple means. And, and right now if I look at everything that is going on and it goes to the top, obviously it goes to Tim Cook. I think that is the root of a lot of Apple's problems is that they have lost the culture that Steve Jobs emphasized. And Steve Jobs wanted to make money too, right. But he emphasized the brand and what it meant and that products had to be good and that that was why people bought Apple products. And right now it feels like, like Apple feels like sorry for getting on a rant here, but like it feels now that Apple feels like people use Apple products because they're trapped in the ecosystem and because, and so they can do what they want to them. And that's a mistake. And, and as Christina quite rightly points out, you can get away with that for a while, but there will come a time when the reaping will happen and you won't be able to get them back because you've treated them so badly. And that, you know, know the, the I work thing where they're putting ads to upsell you out of free apps. I'm sorry to keep coming back to that, but that is a, that is a sign of a company in, in deep distress in terms of what its brand promises.

D (86:37)

Yeah, that's, that's the reason why after I download a free app off of a, off of a phone app store, I will re, I will stop using it after the first 15 seconds because the pop up that they ads for, hey, what if we buy this free store? Hey, get this, we got those. Hey, we can become a subscriber. It's like this is a low quality, low interest sort of thing and I don't want to use it anymore. It is such a tacky thing. It is the panel gaps in a car that makes you think that they aren't really paying attention to quality in here. And I don't need to. Even if I'm wrong about that first impression, it just basically makes me think that, you know what? I don't need this. I also come back to. There's a line from the Sting that keeps coming back and back and back to me where the senior con artist is basically mentoring the junior con artist. And one of the biggest lessons he teaches him is that you can't treat your friends like Marx Son, meaning that you cannot make the people that you are trying to be working with feel as though they're there to be exploited by you. And that is the fundamental fraction in most business relationships. The moment that if I think that while you've got a business plan, you're pursuing that business plan and you trying to increase revenue per customer. And I'm your customer. I understand that. I understand commercialism and capitalism. However, once I feel as though a company is treating me like a mark boy, you better be giving me something that I cannot get anywhere else to keep me as a customer.

A (88:03)

If there's anybody who you would think would be pro Apple, it'd be Pixar. But in the latest Toy Story 5, the Evil Leapfrog tablet is apparently running Mac OS. So I don't know if that's a comment or what, but I wonder if

D (88:22)

that's in the trailer. You can see it's using the same stoplight in the upper left hand corner of the window. So he uses the same Windows manual. I wonder if that's going to survive through the actual release. It must be too late to re. Render anything, but I wonder how that got past the goalie.

A (88:38)

It's interesting. It also seems to be running Python, so in the terminal window, so I don't know what's going on there.

C (88:46)

Like.

D (88:46)

Like every kid's tablet computer should make them. Make them write the. Wrote their own code. No AI says. And. And the console is your main interface to all the games.

C (88:55)

Right. Also. Also, toys are alive and talk, so there's lots of things wrong.

A (88:59)

Yeah, it could be. Yeah. It is just a. Yeah. Bad.

D (89:02)

Well, also, there's a. There's a Toy Story. They made two movies after Toy Story 3, so there are a lot of problems with this, with this movie. Let's just say.

B (89:08)

Let's just say this is true. This is true. Look, I'm tenably excited about Toy Story 5 just to get on a completely different rant. I did not like Toy Story 4, so it'll be interesting to see how they try to kind of.

A (89:20)

Is Toy Story 4 like the Matrix 4? Is it kind of. That kind of.

B (89:23)

Yeah.

A (89:24)

Yeah. Okay.

B (89:24)

Yeah. It's also hard because Toy Story 3 was, like, a perfect movie.

C (89:28)

Yes.

B (89:28)

Perfect way to go out. Like, it was so good. I'll never forget. I was in the theater and I was. I was kind of crying, and this woman, like, came up to me. She was like, were you crying?

D (89:36)

Were you crying?

B (89:36)

I know I was. I know. Funny. I was like, yes, Yes, I was.

A (89:41)

I got some catching up to do, I think. I've only seen the first one, so I don't have children. Wait a minute. You guys don't either?

D (89:47)

It's. It's kind. It's kind of a perfect trilogy, Christina.

B (89:50)

It is, honestly. And the third one is like. It is. It's so good.

D (89:53)

It felt like you. You put the final brush stroke on the painting. The master puts the paint brush down. Say, if I put one more mark on this canvas, I will. Will not necessarily ruin it, but I will degrade it. And then again, if you like Toy Story 4, that's great. If you're interested in Toy Story 5, that's great too. But I just felt like they could have ended it on perfection, but then they made more movies. Also, as a side. Christina, this is your first episode. We should reassure you that getting off on tangents is kind of our brand. So go for it.

A (90:24)

Yeah, go ahead.

B (90:25)

Thank you.

A (90:26)

Did you buy the Steelbook version of the toy store Quadrilogy or Quintology No,

C (90:33)

I mean, you'd have to buy Toy Story 4, which she doesn't want.

B (90:36)

Well, I will know. I'm trying to think, though, because, like, I bought like so many special editions over the years. Like, there was like a big Toy Story toy box, like a DVD special edition that had, like, extra features. That was great. And then I bought, like, definitely. I have all of them on Blu ray. I don't know. If I had the Steelbook, I probably would. Even if I had Toy Story 4, I, you know, it would depend on the extra piece features, I guess.

C (90:56)

So I did, I did buy the Indiana Jones box set, and that has movies in it that are non.

B (91:00)

Oh, yeah. No, I mean, look, this is how that goes with, like, box sets, right? It's like you, you acknowledge that you're going to be getting, like, if you're buying the Rocky films, you acknowledge Rocky 5 is going to be there.

C (91:10)

It's. Yeah, yeah. I have the. I have the Star Trek box set. And you know, Star Trek 5 is Star Trek 5.

B (91:15)

Hard one, too.

C (91:16)

Yeah.

D (91:18)

Technically one of the Three Stooges. So I suppose that a complete set would include Curly Joe Durant, I guess.

C (91:23)

Shia LaBeouf is an Indiana Jones actor, Right?

B (91:26)

Exactly. You're like, okay, all right, this is weird. And why are you. Why are you. Yeah, exactly. Shia.

D (91:32)

Going through issues right now.

B (91:35)

It's a perfection. So, yeah, it happens.

A (91:37)

You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Our vaunted. And we haven't explained this yet to Christina. I don't know if you got the briefing, but our vaunted Vision Pro segment coming up, it is in fact, we are, in fact the premier Vision Pro podcast.

C (91:52)

Yes.

A (91:52)

Podcast in the whole world.

C (91:54)

By default. But yes,

B (91:57)

congratulations, I do not have one. Wasting space.

C (92:02)

Still just me. Still just me then. All right,

A (92:07)

this is back Break Weekly. Great to have Christina Warren with us as a regular member of the panel. What a. What an improvement that has been to us three. That's Andy Inocco in his home for a rare treat.

D (92:23)

It's a lot warmer at the library. It was built a lot more recently than the late 19th century, let's just say that.

A (92:29)

And Jason Snell for 6colors.com, where you get the entire 6colors report card. It's worth reading. All 32,000 words.

C (92:36)

Yes, 30,000 of them by Christina. But that's fine. I'm happy to provide her the spot space.

A (92:45)

She was just so happy to be out of the hospital. She said, all right, I'm right.

C (92:48)

You know, you can. You can tell. You can take her out of the blog, but she's still going to be an old school blogger and she's going to. She's going to write.

B (92:55)

But I felt so bad. I like looked at like the thing. I was like, oh my God. I really did go on because I felt it at the end and I was like, should I go back and edit? And I was like, no. And thank you, Jason. I apolog.

D (93:07)

I think, I think Jason will. Will agree. You can always tell somebody who, when they grew up as a writer, they never had a. Had the idea the concept of column inches, like so true. Why not? If. If 400 more words will enhance this. Why not another 400.

C (93:22)

Yeah.

A (93:23)

Views are. Are coming in. David schaub on our YouTube channel. Christina. Great to have on the show. It's made better by a bit of rocket energy.

C (93:31)

Ah. But not too much. Just a little bit.

B (93:35)

Enough. Just enough.

C (93:35)

Yeah.

A (93:36)

Yeah. All right, let's. Let's continue on. It's time for the Vision Pro segment.

B (93:42)

What do you see? What do you know?

D (93:45)

It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

A (93:48)

There is.

C (93:49)

Yes.

A (93:49)

You even know the dance. Gosh, she's just fitting right in.

C (93:54)

You gotta get the vibes. Get the vibes.

A (93:55)

There's only one story and it is from Andy Anako, oddly enough, but he found it Disneyland. Muppet Vision 3D will be released on Apple's Vision Pro.

C (94:06)

Yeah, yeah. And other platforms, I guess. But isn't it great? Like, there are all of these. So I bought on Vision Pro, I bought Dial in for Murder, the Hitchcock movie, because it was shot.

A (94:17)

That was a 3D movie.

B (94:21)

I don't think they ever released the birds in a 3D format.

C (94:24)

I think they did. I think it's just Dial M. But like, this is, this is. And you know, there's a lot of 3D stuff out there that's just dead. And in this case, The Muppet Vision 3D was in Walt Disney World. Right. And they pulled it. So it's not available anywhere. And I guess it turns out the story that Andy linked to from Daily Dot is sort of like, fans wish that instead of this it was back. Which is like, well, yeah, I get it, fans. I get that you wish that it

D (94:51)

still existed in 1996. That we would like to revisit.

C (94:54)

Yeah, Disney.

A (94:57)

It was the last thing Jim Henson worked on before he died.

C (95:00)

It's an open question about how Disney's been as a steward of the Muppets. I'm encouraged by the new Muppet Show. I thought it was really good and I Like the idea that why not make that available on VR platforms so people can actually see. I've never seen Muppet Vision 3D because I've never been to Orlando. So this is great. I mean, I have seen Captain Eo and I don't need to see that again, but. Although I would if I got that. Oh no, I mean, I would totally watch.

B (95:26)

I was gonna say, I was gonna say like as somebody who spent a lot of time in Orlando as a kid and has seen them up at 3D thing many times and actually I saw it when I was there a couple of years ago with my girlfriends before they dismantled it. It's, it's a fun thing. I'm glad that this is a thing that's available in Vision.

D (95:39)

Probably you gotta be, gotta be a Francis Ford Coppola completist. And that's why you want, you want the Michael Jackson movie. But I love this because it's one of the things that I think is kind of heartbreaking as society is when you allow something that has been created, particularly something by such an important creator as Jim Henson, to simply disappear and go away and just only live on in the recollections and essays and critics reports. These things need to live on. This is one of the reasons why I'm in complete support of people pirating certain types of apps, pirating games, because otherwise, yeah, you know what? This video game platform from 1994 is not going to be remade ever again. And people are not going to keep trying to buy them just to play this game. We need to re. Keep, keep them in emulation. So anything that allows these movies to continue to exist, you think? I came across an alarming statistic that estimates are from anywhere from 25 to 50% of all the movies that were made in the 1920s simply don't exist anymore simply because again, the film stock just simply degraded. They weren't preserved. And now there's. There are like Norma Talmage movies, movies the Call from the Minaret that like, again, lots of stills from it, a lot of reviews saying, oh my God, this is one of the most amazing, does not exist anymore. So anything that can be done to preserve any piece of serious creative work, even if it's a silly creative work like the muppets in a 3D theater. What is more valuable than Muppets being silly in any format.

C (97:10)

Do it, do it, do it.

A (97:12)

It was a live show. It wasn't.

D (97:14)

It was a show.

B (97:15)

It was a show, but it was like pre recorded. So like, so, like, so like there were animatronic Muppets there. And then they would play like a video segment which I guess is what's been preserved. And so you would have your 3D glasses on and you would have like the, the. The pre recorded aspect that you would see kind of like Captain Eo. And then there are things in the theater that would happen and that you would experience. It wasn't quite a moving ride exactly. It was kind of things like that. And it was, it was fun. It was always air conditioned, which is a big plus. So it's one of those ones where like the line would often get long in the afternoons because it's air conditioning and people want to get inside. And then it's fun for family members of all ages. Right. It's. It's the, the. It's definitely not the adult Muppet humor, but it's like the, the family friendly Muppet humor.

A (97:57)

So they. The Daily Dot went to, apparently Jim Henson's son, Brian Henson does a live improv comedy show starring puppeteers at the Montalban in Los Angeles. And they went and asked Brian Henson what he thinks. He says better than it not coming to VR. He also said yep, yep. That they did a thorough job capturing the show. He said users will be able to sit in any seat in the house while watching Muppet Vision changing up the view, which is a good use, I think, of the Vision Pro.

C (98:27)

Yeah, I mean, you can like or dislike 3D movies or other stuff like that, but bottom line, if you've got devices capable of playing them, it would be really nice to make them available so that they don't just vanish. Like there's. I've got a. Was it the 50th anniversary of Doctor who? They shot in 3D. And it was only, it's, I think, only ever released on like a DVD where you could get the 3D and the nut. And I had to rip it myself using like a Windows app in emulation to get it in a format. It's like that. That is. And I can see that on my Vision Pro now. And I can watch it on my meta quest and, and it's cool as a Doctor who fan to have that, but also it's like, what a shame if that thing that they built was shown in movie theaters.

A (99:09)

Right.

C (99:09)

And then never seen again in 3D. Like, it just went away. Like no movie should. Like, Dial M for Murder is such a great example. Hitchcock shot a 3D movie. Why would we lose that?

D (99:20)

And he shot it intentionally in 3D. It wasn't like oh, well, gosh.

C (99:25)

Was it the SCTV?

B (99:27)

No, no, it was. It was digital and it was released that way. I mean, this is what's. I'm so glad that that is available, like in 3D, like, on. On itunes. And in those ways. I wasn't aware of that. I actually saw the birds in 3D, which was, I think, one of the only times I've ever done it that way. But that was in a theater. And this was.

A (99:42)

That would be scary 12 or 13 years ago.

B (99:45)

Oh, it was fantastic. Universal Studios used to have a thing in Florida. Universal Studios, Florida. They used to have. It was replaced by, I think, the Simpsons area. But they used to have, like a classic Hollywood section because that was kind of their motif. And one of the areas was they had like an Albert Hitchcock exhibit. And there was like a museum and there was like a gift shop, which was great. And then they had, you know, like an area where they would show parts of his classic films. And they showed the birds a portion of it in 3D. And with the birds flying at you, it was incredibly scary. And then they would do a demonstration of. From Psycho. It was a great, you know, all around kind of thing.

A (100:24)

Are you in the shower and he's coming at you?

B (100:26)

They would take somebody from the audience who would, like, put on, like, the Alpha B mother. They would have somebody who was playing like Janet Leigh. And they explained how they shot it and they explained how they used, you know, chocolate sauce as blood and all that stuff. It was actually very informative. And I remember it's my favorite part

A (100:40)

of the Universal tours. Studio tours in la. You go by the Psycho house. And as you go by in your little tram, an Anthony Perkins lookalike comes out with a knife, looks at you, then goes back in the house.

D (100:54)

But one thing that's important to see, I actually saw the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. Actually got the original 3D print. And it's not like red, green glasses. It's actually. There are two projectors inside the lamp house. And so when I say he uses intentionally, like you think 3D, you think. And now would you like to see a menu? Right.

B (101:15)

He was shot. Yes.

D (101:17)

I remember it in ways where, like, it's frustrating because an important conversation is happening, but he decided to put something in the foreground.

B (101:25)

Yeah.

D (101:25)

Increase the tension of. And I. I still remember Coolidge Corner Theater. Like 500, 800 people at the same time leaning to the left to see around the obstruction. That's what I mean about, like, the intentions of directing a movie. This way. No, totally, yeah. Fling things on the camera. It's like I'm going to make people even more nervous because they are being deprived. They feel like they can't see something they're supposed to be seeing anyway. Amazing.

B (101:51)

No, I fully agree. I mean, Psycho was a similar thing and so that famously he 3d became out of fashion by the time that Psycho, the Birds became out of fashion by the time it was released. So they removed the 3D element, but they were able to restore it 10 or 11 years ago. And I saw it at the AMC Union Square in New York and, and it wasn't. You know, it's really cool.

A (102:10)

You had to wear glasses though, right?

B (102:12)

Yeah, you had to use the glasses and it was a fantastic experience or what? I don't know. I think that it was actually like more the modern ones. So I think that, I think that whatever they did. Yeah, the shutter one. So whatever they did for the, for the transfer was, was quite positive. But I'm, I'm sad that that hasn't come to, you know, home video in any way. But to Jason's point, you know, if you wouldn't even want to rip these things, you have to use these like very weird esoteric tools.

C (102:36)

Extremely weird.

B (102:37)

Like you have to run it through like a, like a converter and all these things. Because I looked into this when I was considering getting a Vision Pro. I was like, if I got one, it would just be for movies. How many 3D movies are out there? What's the situation? And then I had a come to Jesus moment with myself and I went, this is going to sit on a shelf and, and I'm not going to use it and I'm going to be mad that it's heavy on my face and be mad about like the, you know, lines it's going to put on my face face. So I'm not going to buy this. But, but I, I did like look at probably the same forums that Jason looked at to figure out how, how to do that.

C (103:07)

Yeah, you have to, you basically have to take something like make MKV and you have to pull off the, the, the 3D version and then you have to run it through this app that's only available on Windows that converts it into a side by side and the quality is okay. It's more like HD. It's more like a 720p. It's not, you know, you're not going to get.

B (103:24)

And then you have to silo your

C (103:25)

Vision Pro and then you have to side load it. But it's all doable or to the Meta quest is where I actually started with this. And it's perfectly fine in that too. But I will say this about it. We've litigated how impractical the Vision Pro is so many times in this very segment. But I will say this as somebody who's not a fan of going to the movie theater and seeing a 3D movie because you have to wear the polarized lenses, which mean that by definition it's half as bright as it should be. 3D movies on the Vision Pro or on the Meta Quest are great because it's full brightness and then you just get the 3D effect. And I watched Avatar recently on the Vision Pro and it looks great that there aren't that many 3D movies.

A (104:09)

No, this is Vision Pro.

C (104:10)

This segment.

D (104:12)

I think our producer is getting a little bit impatient.

C (104:16)

Look, that's good. They opened and closed the rat hole.

A (104:18)

I didn't touch it. I didn't touch it.

C (104:20)

Anyway, it's good. Three movies are good on, on headsets. It's way better than they are in movie theaters. That's all I'm saying.

A (104:25)

I think it's an opportunity for Apple. I mean there is, I guess I didn't realize much more content out there that they could take advantage of.

C (104:32)

They got to find a market for it. Although somebody dropped. Who was it that, that was it Netflix guy Sarandos who said that, that, that Cameron is working with Meta on a movie viewer headset, which I don't know. I mean there's an argument that you don't want a spatial computer. You want a thing you can use to watch 3D movies. And also I would say like live sports events and things like that. There's a product there.

B (105:00)

There is. And, and, and weirdly, I mean, I think that those are the people who are going to be willing to like. I think that initially Meta especially kind of thought, okay, gaming is going to be where the, the audience for this is. And, and at a certain point there was. But then that's expensive. Having, you know, full room stuff isn't a thing a lot of people can do. So that kind of fell off. And more casual gaming, I don't think people care as much. So what is the primary use case of these headsets? If you're not going to use it as a computer, it is going to be to watch films. That's why I would buy a Vision Pro. I have a massive library in itunes and that's why I would use it. But, and I have a massive DVD And Blu Ray library as well, which I would rip, you know, to do something. So if Cameron and Meadow worked on something that works, I would. That would be something that I would be much more considering buying, you know, especially if they said, this is what this is the use case for than, oh, I want to be, you know, your Super Mac. It's kind of cool, but not really be a Mac.

A (105:53)

Apple doesn't do this with stuff it produces. Like Monarch's coming out this week. I would think Monarch would be a perfect use of the Vision Pro. This is the Monarch drone show that they did in Los Angeles to promote the new release.

B (106:09)

Well, the Olympics. Where is Vision Pro in that? Right? I mean, there were so many opportunities with big sporting events where you could partner with people and even if you can't do the whole thing, create some sort of experience. So, okay, I can be watching these things and feel like I have some sense of place and I can kind of move around and I can see different shots because it's not like they weren't capturing a million different shots. With the Olympics, like, that could have been a great partnership opportunity.

A (106:30)

It's a.

B (106:31)

This drone thing you're talking about would have been fantastic.

A (106:33)

Is Kurt Russell. The poor man's Jeff Bridges. That's the first. Yes. Okay, I'm just checking. This is the drone thing.

D (106:38)

Jeff Bridges was not in the thing, sir.

A (106:41)

This would be really good for Vision Pro, wouldn't it?

D (106:44)

You know, yeah, but the thing is, like, this is why, like, I really think that the future of this sort of thing is always going to be something along the lines of the meta quest. Something along the lines of, here is a dedicated screen for watching movies. Because that's a great. It's a great suggestion. It's a great pitch. Say, well, who's going to be able to watch it? All the people who spent $3,500 on the most top of the line headset that exists. They said, that's going to be a great demo for Apple. It's going to be a great way for Apple to sell another 18 of these things this quarter. But it's not worth our time and trouble to now figure out. It's because, again, if you just say we're going to shoot this in 3D and that's it, you're not doing it. I am still lobbying to design it in a way that makes sense for

A (107:25)

3D for next week at the event. A little just aside saying, oh, and by the way, Formula One Vision Pro will be coming out when the Formula one race Starts a week from Sunday, so it'd be perfect timing.

B (107:41)

Okay, here's a genuine question I have on that. Obviously they would be doing it over streaming and whatnot, but the base Vision Pro only has 256 gigs of storage. Right. I do wonder because of how much space is taken up by the operating system and by other things, if that inhibits what they can realistically do for some of these streaming things because they're so bandwidth intensive and you need to have certain caching. Like, maybe I'm wrong on that.

C (108:07)

No, I've got the base model because I wasn't going to spend a dollar more than I had to to cover it. And it's got so much empty space in it.

B (108:15)

Okay, that's good to know, because I know that that was a problem with blockchain. Like, at least that was what I perceived the problem to be. Like when they released the Metallica thing or whatever, which I was like, okay, I guess, you know your audience. It was only a partial set. And that I felt like, okay, that's because they couldn't guarantee that there would be enough space on the Things, but for streaming, it might not be an issue.

A (108:39)

Yeah, I mean, F1 is live, right?

B (108:41)

Exactly. I was just trying to think from a caching perspective. But if Jason was saying that he has plenty of space. Space for you on his. Then, then that, that Apple did announce

A (108:48)

they're going to put five of the races on imax, which will be kind of nausea inducing.

D (108:54)

But that, but that's a, That's a good thing. If, if, if the messaging for F1 is that. Oh, by the way, if you ever want to see one of these shows live again, you're going to have to buy into Apple. You're going to have to have a subscription to an Apple thing. The idea of. Also, I kind of. I would kind of watch that at least once.

C (109:08)

So.

D (109:08)

So long as I. So long as the. The audio is not, like, roaring in my ear. We want you to be as deaf as anyone who's working the pit crew. Like, I don't want to be as deaf as anyone who's working. The people who work in pit crew have protective headgear. I don't want to have Formula One.

A (109:21)

Unimaginably loud. It really is.

D (109:23)

I've been to NASCAR once and it's like, yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of noise for four hours.

A (109:31)

And that's the Vision Pro segment.

D (109:33)

Now you see.

B (109:34)

Now you know, we're done talking the Vision Pro.

A (109:39)

Yeah, yeah. In Other news, Apple has said this is all. Remember Apple promised $600 billion worth of investment into manufacturing in the United States. It's going to be hard for them to do that, but they are going to start manufacturing the Mac Mini in Houston. It'll be assembly. Right. It's going to be a Foxconn facility.

C (110:00)

Sure. This is where they're already building their servers for private cloud computer. And there's actually a photo of somebody assembling a server and it's this like giant rack computer and you're like, what is in there? Right? Like what is like, what is that? It's like X computer enhance, baby. But yeah, they're gonna. This is like the Mac Pro, except higher volume product than the Mac Pro.

A (110:24)

Especially now with AI.

C (110:25)

Yeah. And the way they put it is it'll be assembled. They said something like assemble for the local market, which I think is just so funny. So it's like, well, make it in America for America. Isn't that nice? You can have a nice thing made

A (110:35)

in America, but just for America they should make it. Look how big this plant though. This is a. Oh, it is a. You could make an ice. ICE detention facility out of that. That is huge.

D (110:47)

It's an ambitious. The, the, the Apple press release also mentions it's not just going to be for manufacturing. They're also going to be doing like training. They're also going to be using it for like a whole bunch of things that, that boost the idea of hey, Apple is all in on helping American manufacturing grow. It's, it's an interesting step. Like Jason said, that's an interesting cutout saying oh for the local market. So that could mean that certain build to order stuff inside that shipping inside America will be going to this stuff. And even if it were that much of a limited thing, realize that the Mac Mini, as much as we love it, as much as it's terrific, as important as it is for the Mac lineup, it's still like Apple doesn't release shipment data, but it's less than 5% of the entire Mac line, less than 1% of all their revenue. So it's a very significant say rather than making fun of, oh well, this is just all for show. They have to start with something. They're going to start with something that's very low stakes and it seems like an interesting place to start.

C (111:46)

Also I would say they mentioned as a part of this they're going to do another one of their kind of like manufacturing engineering institutes in Houston and they already have one of those in Detroit. And I think this is, I think, yes, it is in some ways eyewash, in some ways trying to please the people in power about them investing in America and all of that. But I think it has another motive, right, which is, is how do you build up American capability to do manufacturing? One of the ways Apple's decided to do it is to build centers where they can literally teach people in America what goes into manufacturing and try to create, if you know, a new generation of Americans who are knowledgeable about this stuff that we have kind of lost or never had in the US And I would argue it serves some other motives that they don't talk about as much as given the demographic compositions of Houston and Detroit, that it is Apple's way of also sort of like feeling like it's living up to some of its diversity promises without saying so out loud because it's apparently not allowed to do that anymore. But I think that it. And simultaneously pleasing the people in power by having them invest in American workers. So I think that there's, it's not just that they're building some Mac minis, it's that they're trying to like, again, maybe this will amount to nothing. But like, if they're ever going to have to do more manufacturing in the US they're going to need people who know about manufacturing. And if Apple just decides to start training them, just starts shelling out money to train Americans to understand tech manufacturing processes, I mean, that's a necessary requirement if you're going to do more of this in the United States.

B (113:24)

1,000%. I mean, that's been the biggest problem with, for years, everybody has said, well, you know, why can't you make an iPhone in America? And there have been lots of reasons and obviously price was a big one. But the thing, the thing that came out over and over and over again when anybody would do these assessments and I used to talk to manufacturing specialists about this and whatnot, and they explained to me, and this was a long time ago, but this is, I think, still true. Obviously, Apple's having to train people. It came down to there's not. You don't have the people and it's not that you don't have the quantity of workers, although that's part the of of it. It's that you don't have the skilled labor in this particular field to be able to do it when. And, and, and this is the problem that, you know, the fabs have had for a long time. And so I do, I think that if Apple is actually Going to train people to your point, Jason, how to do this, what to do. That's a really good thing for a lot of reasons. Right. And we shouldn't be reliant on one part of the world for manufacturing, period. And that doesn't come down to any sort of, you know, like, like geopolitical thing. It's good to have more people knowing how to do that. This, and obviously manufacturing left the United States for a lot of reasons, but because of that gulf of the last 30 years, you don't have the labor force that knows how to do these things. And so I think building that up becomes necessary. And if you can do it for a product that is relatively low volume, even though the volume might be increasing because of data center usage and whatnot, that's a really good training ground to say, okay, now we can move on to another thing and another thing. And maybe eventually, you know, again, like, I just don't think that we don't actually have the number of people to be able to do, you know, the high volume products. But you could do some of the, some of the things.

D (115:00)

Yeah, it's, I mean, it is a very, very good goal to diversify your manufacturing globally is a very good idea to be able to do some manufacturing inside the United States for any number of good reasons. So, and that thing is, this is an example as, as inclined as I, being a cynical Gen Xer are to make fun of this. This is all just for show. The thing is, you got to start with something. It's the time Taiwan became a powerhouse of manufacturing because they didn't do something for one year. They came up with a plan that went on for decades. You got to plant, you got to plant a tree, the fruit from which you will never taste because it takes a while to grow these things. So, so this is, this is a very, very good thing. One thing that kind of I wouldn't say worried about at this point, but observant about is that there are a lot of reasons why manufacturing in the United States is more difficult than it is in Taiwan. One of them is simply the regulatory environment you have to treat your workers a lot better by. And my worry is that, and this may not. This was not necessarily a worry that I might have had three or four years ago about Tim Cook or whoever's going to be running Apple is the. That are you now going to pressure the government to say, we would like workers in the United States or at least in our place, to have fewer rights and have us to have fewer obligations towards those workers because that would help us to bring more manufacturing and great, let's weaken labor laws. I don't know if Apple is capable of doing that. I but is certainly a question that has to be in play as we discuss like what happens when Apple keeps trying to, to move more manufacturing in the United States.

A (116:35)

So I don't think this is going to make it into an Apple ad. We had a great tragedy up here at Lake Tahoe where eight skiers died in an avalanche. They were backcountry skiing. Six survived though. And according to the New York Times, it was the satellite feature on the iPhone that allowed them to seek help and allowed emergency responders to find things them on the hillside. It's not going to make a good ad.

D (117:04)

But, but, but still is. But isn't it great that this is just part of the chip sets of almost every phone that is not $100 and no name from AliExpress. The table stakes is bec to satellite is becoming table stakes for almost every phone. And that is such a welcome advance.

B (117:24)

Yeah, it really is. I, I hope though, I hope that when these things happen that that can help convince Apple to like and I know they keep extending how long they're going to do the free SOS stuff and they haven't started charging for it, haven't made it part of a subscription. I really hope that they don't ever do that. Right.

C (117:37)

I don't see how they can.

B (117:38)

Right, right. Because to this point. Right. Like with this example where like literally people were found because of this feature. Right. And it was such a tragedy that it happened. And this is not the only time that this has happened. I mean Apple has found like better cases where people have said, okay, I was, I was stranded, I was someplace and this was able to help me. I just hope that as we were talking before about the revenue driven things, you could see very clearly how this could become part of like, oh well, if you're part of, you know, Apple, you know, you know, one, you know, Premiere plus whatever you, you get this feature. I hope that they will maintain that for the life of the iPhone. This is just a cost that they eat because I think it's important.

A (118:16)

Yeah.

D (118:18)

I don't want any tragedies to befall anybody. But again, now, now let's get the Gen X cynicism kicking back in. The worst, the worst day, a bad day for Apple would be if someone was rescued and they survived. And amongst the, amongst the coverage is that survivors saying, I have a, I have a Garmin watch that has an emergency SOS but I wasn't able to connect because it's incompatible with the iPhone. And then Apple has to say, why is it not compatible with the iPhone? Well, because we, we didn't want the SOS people to get access to the user's personal information. We were just protecting him. Not that that's something that's likely to happen, but that's something that's always on my mind that as we continue to become more and more reliant and more expectant of the services that are on our watches, the limitation, the artificial limitations Apple puts onto third party smartwatches. I'm wondering how long it's going to be before it really bites them in the process.

A (119:13)

Butt. Here's a watch that will not save your life. But designed by Apple employees and then Google employees too. They customized their own Tudor watches. The Apple watch has the pirate flag that flew over the Macintosh development building on Bandley. And the Google version has that little Google dinosaur terrorist Rex. Isn't that cute? This was done by the Swish Wash brand Tudor. Two of them on the market for auction. The watch made for Google recently sold at $10,000. Before you rush over, the Apple watch will conclude tomorrow at the watch auction house loop this current bid $13,500. It's the pirate limited edition.

B (120:04)

Beautiful.

A (120:05)

It is. It's pretty nice. I'm not going to spend $13,000.

B (120:08)

Oh no, absolutely not. I mean and people get spend far more than that on watches. Me, I'm like, I bought the Hermes like Apple watch last year.

D (120:14)

Did you.

B (120:15)

And I did.

A (120:15)

And did you get the band to the Hermes crust?

B (120:18)

I did.

A (120:19)

I.

B (120:19)

Well, well actually I got a couple bands but the main one I got was the, the, the titanium or, or the metal. Whatever. The, the.

A (120:25)

I like the metal band.

B (120:26)

Yeah, it was, it was beautiful. And it was very, very difficult to get. Like I had to go to multiple countries to be able to find it in stock because they hand make it. So it's. Well it. Yeah, it was for, for the.

A (120:35)

It's kind of the Hermes metal band.

B (120:37)

Yes, exactly. And you know, it's like $1200 or something.

A (120:42)

It's stupid but more expensive to fly around to many countries.

B (120:46)

Well that just happened to be a side effect. I happened to countries while I was there. I would go to go to an Apple store and go to the Hermes store and be like do you have this? And finally in Italy they did.

A (120:56)

Did you get the Satine? Is that the one you got?

B (120:59)

Yeah, it was the, the, the grand H was the one.

D (121:01)

Oh.

A (121:02)

Oh, that's pretty.

B (121:04)

Yeah, it's really, really nice. I. I don't have it on right this second, otherwise I would show it off. I'll show it off next week, but I'm cap. Yeah, but it's beautiful. Yeah, it's. That was the thing when I saw that and then I saw it. I think Ijustine or somebody had it on.

A (121:19)

Yeah. I was like, oh, it makes it more dressy.

B (121:22)

This is nice. I was like, I have to have this.

A (121:24)

Yeah. You got the narrow one.

B (121:26)

I didn't get the narrow one. I got the. The regular one. Now. Now I'm kind of of at the point where I'm like, oh, maybe I kind of want the narrow one, but it's not available.

A (121:32)

It's pretty.

B (121:33)

It is beautiful. But. Yeah, but the problem is, is that, like, they're sold out of them everywhere because, again, like, they only make them in, like, limited quantities. So.

A (121:42)

Yes. Currently unavailable. Sorry.

B (121:45)

Right. So you have to go to the Hermes store or you have to, like, actively watch the Apple webpage. There's a. There's a forum thread on Mac. Rumors of, like, I think, like, the very dedicated amongst us, like Hermes, like, people, they're far more dedicated to me. They're. They, you know, collect the bands who will, like, add, like, avidly, like, watch and be like, oh, this country has it. This country has it. You can buy online, but, like, a lot of times you've got to go to the stores and be like, do you have this? So.

A (122:11)

And I again, will credit Andy for this story. The Paul Brainard, one of the creators of PageMaker, which was the legendary page layout program that Aldis really released. He was the Aldis founder. Passed away and little young, actually 78.

B (122:30)

So Aldis was so important. PageMaker was so important. Right. Didn't Adobe eventually acquire it?

D (122:35)

Yep, Yep.

B (122:36)

It became InDesign. Right.

C (122:38)

Well, they rewrote it indesign.

B (122:41)

The basis of. Right, right. Because. Because it was. I was trying to explain this to somebody a few. A few months ago. Like, it was Quark first. Right. Like, everybody was on Quark. It's like Quark or pagemaker. Was that the big battle?

A (122:50)

I think pagemaker was the first one with the link working with the laser writer.

B (122:55)

Right?

A (122:55)

Yeah. Then Quark. Quark Express. Yeah, yeah. He. It says in this GeekWire obituary that Paul Brainerd coined the term desktop publishing.

B (123:04)

Ooh, wow. Thank you. Thank you, Paul.

D (123:06)

Look at that.

A (123:06)

That's a original classic next to the original laser writer with PageMaker.

C (123:10)

Amazing to see people Coming out of the woodwork this week, talking about how so many people. Harry McCracken, I. I saw several Glenn Fleishman and I'm one of them too. Like pagemaker was a formative part of me becoming a Mac user. I went to my college newspaper and they just converted to Macs and they all were laying out with PageMaker. And my ability to pick up PageMaker really fast basically led a path that I could draw a pretty straight line between that and now in my career. It was a huge part of the beginning. We used for our college paper, I did one of the first Internet magazines on we. I did a text version, but I also did a postscript version that you. Before there was PDF that you could dump to a laser printer and get a magazine out of that. I laid that whole thing out in PageMaker. Like PageMaker was a huge part. Even though it got eclipsed by QuarkXPress in the professional sphere. It was just a huge part of that desktop publishing revolution. It made such a difference. And in that era you went from paste up to just composing everything on the computer. And it was transformative and just a huge part of so many people's lives

D (124:20)

and careers came out of PageMaker and just power the people create, giving power to people who have not enough of it. That's one of the effects that PageMaker had because just it's. I could almost be as transformative as publishing on the web where. Okay, great. I want to. I want to create a newspaper, I want to create a magazine or even I want to do a zine. How do I do that? Well, you have to have access to lots of technical knowledge about how do you actually paste wax. Print out these things and wax. Wax. Put. Put wax on the backs of them and paste them up and then send it off to a printer to have X, Y and Z done versus do you have a Mac? No, but I know someone who has a Mac. Great. Here is where you can download a bootleg copy of PageMaker and now you can actually just create a professional looking. A publication that is a going to be easy for you to put together, does not require a lot of technical training or knowledge and most importantly, maybe when you actually publish it and hand it out to like a comic book shop to say you want to carry my zine? It will look like a professional serious publication that its creators invested a lot of thinking into as opposed to no. Well, I have an Epson FX80 printer and I did have it printed at high quality when I took it down and photocopied it at my dad's workshop. I'm being a little bit glib about this, but that really is a lot of what this was about, that it gave power to people who do not have access to the infrastructure of publishing. And suddenly you have access to the infrastructure of publishing. And that is transformative to so many communities.

A (125:55)

I remember my good friend Tom Santos, who later founded Mac Adam, which was one of the great Mac third party stores in San Francisco, when he spent huge amount of money, I think, what is it, $5,000 on a laser writer and a page of page, make a copy of PageMaker and a Mac, put it in the back of a van and drove around doing mobile desktop publishing for people who needed it. Brilliant. Talk about an entrepreneurial vision. That was back in 85. PageMaker came out in July of 85. So it was really early.

D (126:27)

We should also point out that this, when, during the first two or three years when the Mac was really, really struggling as a niche product that could not do one half of what an IBM PC could do at more money than it costs for an IBM PC. This got people to finally stand up and take notice that this is something unique that cannot be done by anything, by any other computer. And even people who are not interested in desktop publishing were able to take a look at this and think, yeah, there's something new and different about this.

A (126:53)

It justified the gui, right? Suddenly a GUI made sense, you know.

B (126:58)

Well, that was the thing, right? I mean like there's kind of a conversation in the chat right now about like, which was first and I don't think anybody can reasonably argued that, that, that PageMaker wasn't like the, the granddaddy of all of this. And yeah, I think that obviously this was before my time, but from what I've read and seen, like nothing, I mean you, you, you could say spreadsheets, right? And, and that would be like a good way. But you had a way, you know, visit Calc or whatever to be able to kind of do that before Excel on the Mac. But, but desktop publishing, be able to actually see, you know, on a monitor. This is what this is going to look like. And then having like a laser printer that wasn't out of the range of expense for, you know, universities or for, you know, home users if they really want to spend a lot of money or inkjet printers and be able to go, okay, I can actually create something myself. I mean I remember as a, as a kid I was probably PageMaker, I don't know what it was, but like creating like My own newsletters, like in elementary school and printing that out and like having the joy of that. Right. Which, which is, you know, with Jason and point is so important to be like, okay, I can actually have this idea and now I can put it out there and I would draw a direct line between that and the web. Like what drew me to the web as a kid was the exact same thing which was I have this idea, I can use HTML and I can create what I want and I can then publish that and people can see it. And I think that there is a direct line between desktop publishing and, and the web. And this is such an important innovation. He was such an important figure in so many of the things that all of us do because we all come from, you know, writing and publishing and, and we wouldn't. I at least feel like I wouldn't have the type of career that I've had if it weren't for those, those.

C (128:42)

I mean we didn't have an Internet back then. Right? This is how you had to get your words out. I mean we did have an Internet. Like. And like I said, it wasn't, it

B (128:50)

wasn't the same thing.

C (128:51)

It was not like this where, where this is how you comm. Distributed things to whatever your group was, whether it's a zine or, or whatever

A (128:59)

this is that you were cutting stuff out, putting it on a piece of paper and xeroxing it or.

C (129:04)

Yeah, you're giving me. Get some hot wax on the back and, and, and we're, yeah, we're debating about, about who was first and all that, but it doesn't matter.

A (129:13)

I'll resolve that argument. PageMaker came out in July 85 Ventura publisher late 86. It wasn't even close.

C (129:20)

Also, and it wasn't going to be a fair fight because the Mac at that point with the graphical interface, with font support, with PostScript. PostScript because, you know, Apple made the deal with Adobe and PostScript laser laser printers. It was always going to be the Mac software. And Pagemaker was the one that had the stranglehold. You know, QuarkXPress came in and they gradually just basically bumped Pagemaker out of all professional publishing. But, but in those early days, I mean, in fact, just in terms of the classic Mac magazine thing, when I was at Mac User is where I started and Andy was a columnist there, we used pagemaker.

A (129:57)

Yeah.

C (129:58)

And then we merged with Mac World and they used Quark. Oh my God.

B (130:03)

You're like, oh my gosh.

C (130:05)

I'm like, I didn't even know because I had I had used pagemaker all the way from college. So that was, you know, boy, tucker, about two magazines that were exactly the same and yet completely different.

D (130:14)

But fortunately, that was the only cultural clash of the merging of those.

C (130:17)

Yeah, there was no, there were no tears and bitter recrimination beyond that. No, but I mean, like, so, so, you know, Cork ate their lunch and then InDesign ended up. Actually kind of. We ended up switching to InDesign after a while.

B (130:28)

I was going to say InDesign killed Quark. That's what's so interesting. Yeah, Quark had the whole market. Adobe bought, you know, this, this lack, you know, this, you know, lagging company, I guess, for some IP or whatever, and then rebuilt it and then had the Creative Cloud or suite at the time and completely just like decimated Quark. Like, Quark was so huge. I remember, like going to a Mac world probably in 2009 or something, and Quark still had a booth. And I did not ask this, but I very much wanted to ask, why are you here?

C (131:01)

Yeah. So Quark. Quark was a. I don't want to say they were a badly run company, but I certainly would say they were deeply arrogant about, about their position in the market. And I think what they, what they failed to realize and that Adobe realized is every single QuarkXpress customer was an Adobe Photoshop customer.

B (131:18)

Bingo.

C (131:18)

And an Adobe Illustrator customer. And that if Adobe could build a new version of PageMaker, essentially, that was. That could match all the things that their customers told them that precluded them from switching from QuarkXPress, then that would be the end of QuarkXPress. And that's what happened, like, bottom line, because if you build a better product

B (131:36)

and then they integrate the whole suite.

C (131:37)

Yeah. And you already were paying Adobe for Photoshop and Illustrator and that was the end for Quark, really, at that point.

A (131:43)

So to fill people in on the history, the young people amongst us, the Laser Writer was announced at Apple's annual shareholder meeting. This is from Wikipedia. January 23, 1985. 85, the same day Aldis announced PageMaker. Now the Mac in the meantime had been kind of laggard. Right. But the LaserWriter completely changed things.

C (132:04)

Transformative. Yeah.

A (132:04)

It came out In March of 85, July of 85, PageMaker comes out.

B (132:09)

Postscript.

A (132:10)

Yeah. By the way, the laser writer costs seven. I got the number wrong. Seven thousand because.

D (132:15)

And this is when I, when I used to write the trivia competitions for Mac World Exposition, when my. One of the, one of the questions that got everybody was what's the most powerful computer that Apple makes. They say, oh, the Mac sd, Like, no, the Laser writers actually has the most computing power of anything that Apple ships.

A (132:30)

And that's certainly the most expensive.

B (132:32)

Well, yeah, because I had to have the most memory to be able to store all those fonts and to be able to process the postscript rasterizer for all that. So that's.

A (132:39)

It says the combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript PageMaker and the Macs GUI and built in Apple Talk networking would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop.

C (132:50)

It gave them 15 years of success in certain markets when they really desperately needed it at the end of that time. It's funny, I just wrote a piece for, for Macworld a few weeks ago about Apple's history with super bowl ads and the super bowl in general. And that 1985 announcement was the Lemmings ad, which is famously a bust because it was for this thing called the Macintosh Office, which was like a truest sign that the suits were in charge at Apple where they're like, oh, we're going to do a file server and it's going to be really exciting. And it was not. But the LaserWriter was part of that announcement. It turns out that the vision that they had for the Macintosh Office was a bust. But they, the seeds were there that got picked up and it was for the DTP revolution and that's what made the Mac what it was.

B (133:31)

Well, I mean, it's so fascinating to think about, like how transformative it must have been for, for magazines, for newspapers, for, you know, which again were pre Internet. Right? Like the Internet still technically exists, but we're pre wrap, we're pre that revolution and all of a sudden you're talking about taking things that would have cost so many multiples of $7,000 to then be able to, you know, do on like, you know, like consumer equipment.

D (133:56)

Yeah, we should, I want to take half a step back and remind people that at the time we had the Internet. But the Internet is what you use to email somebody to warn them. Hey, I FedExed you a floppy with the information. Hey, I FedExed you the document that I printed out at my link.

C (134:10)

It was not a media, it was not a media escape back then.

A (134:14)

Right.

C (134:15)

I mean, like I literally, when I mentioned.

A (134:16)

No, no, let me get this. Let me make sure I was alive back then. In 1985, you were using MCI Mail, which only emailed MCI mail or you was in copy serve, which only emailed a copy. That's true.

C (134:29)

That's True.

A (134:30)

Only colleges had the Internet. It was very, very Limited in 1985. The Internet was not on anybody's radar at that time.

B (134:37)

It was no, you might have BBSs. You might have, yeah, BBS.

A (134:40)

I ran a BBS. That's why, I mean, I know I was running a Mac BBS in 1985.

C (134:46)

I tried to explain to somebody, I tried to explain to somebody a while ago about this magazine that I started in 1991, in January of 91, Intertext. That's still my email address. And I had to explain to people the concept. It wasn't just that I published a magazine on the Internet in 1991 when there was no web and there was not even any Gopher really at that point. I had to explain to them the reason I did it is because there was a short story magazine on the Internet. And the guy who did it said, I'm not going to do it anymore. And that meant there was no short story magazine on the Internet. I want you to think about that. It was a time in the Internet where there could not be a thing on the Internet that that time rapidly ended. Where they're like, there's always whatever you're thinking of that's already on the Internet, right? But in that moment, that was it. Like, there was literally, it was an empty space. I was like, okay, I'll fill it. I'll do Intertext. And I did it for like 10 years, but like, it was a very different time. And, and I had to distribute it by posting it to news groups and making it available via FTP so you could dump it to your laser. Right. It was so primitive. And that's what we're talking about is that, is that it? Publishing on the Internet content that everybody could see was a mid-90s thing.

B (136:01)

And 95, 96. Yeah, totally.

C (136:04)

Yeah. So this is, we're talking about a decade and then, then for every magazine and newspaper, right? Like, I know magazines and newspapers in print are now kind of irrelevant, but like it was a, it was a game changer for all of them. And then I'll throw in one other thing, which is the best demo I've ever seen in my life, which was Sal Segoian at WWDC where he realized that there was a database full of classified ads and he wrote an applescript and this was his job until he got hired by Apple. And you literally double click this thing and it queries all the classifieds in the database for the day in question and automatically lays them out in QuarkXPress address without any human involvement other than double clicking. Most amazing demo I've ever seen. So transformative in terms of productivity at the newspapers as well.

A (136:45)

You're watching Mac Break Weekly and a bunch of Internet historians here.

C (136:51)

We're glad, Christina. We do this too. We do this. This is the thing we do.

B (136:55)

I feel at home. Like you don't even understand. I am so excited. I found my people. People like you don't even know.

D (137:02)

Can I just say the 24 hour period. I have a explained what the Internet was like in 1986 and also explain to a neighbor in there who is in their mid-30s what how this storm compared to the Blizzard of 78. I have never felt more dried up.

A (137:20)

My poor sister. I wish I could show you the videos of her house in the providence. Granted, it is a nightmare and apparently there's more to come. It's not even done.

D (137:32)

I didn't hear that.

A (137:33)

Yeah. She says another six inches on the way next week. I can't show you on the screen, but I can hold up. That's my mom's house and it's three feet. I mean it's incredible to me it looks beautiful. I said, gosh, I'd love to be there. She said, no, you would. Wouldn't. We're waiting. We're waiting for the snowplow. If it doesn't come, we're gonna have to dig ourselves out tonight.

D (137:59)

Again. I'm super lucky in that I'm in for. I'm in what is essentially like the Times Square of my sleepy little. I've been there.

A (138:08)

That's a little overstatement, but okay, I'm saying, I'm saying it is the center of town. Yes.

B (138:15)

You have access to things.

D (138:17)

The thing is like, they're businesses here. And so there's the flowers. I have to absolutely prioritize coming through here and. And I have not seen a single car. A single. I haven't seen pedestrians outside my window. And I know. And I have friends who are also like kind of nearby who are like, yeah, we're not getting out of here till like Thursday at the most. We could. We can shovel our driveways, but at the end of the driveway there is three feet of snow. So there is immobilization as default setting for unbelievable part of the community. I've. I've never been again of living in New England my entire life.

A (138:48)

Life.

D (138:48)

I have never experienced 30 inches plus of snow.

A (138:51)

It's incredible. Yeah.

D (138:53)

This is big.

A (138:53)

Yeah. Let's continue on with the picks of the week. And I don't know if they warned you about this, Christina, but I bet you you could pick something.

B (139:03)

I do. I have one. It is. I have. I have one. And then I have, like, a better backup if you haven't already talked about it.

A (139:11)

No, go pick away.

D (139:12)

We.

A (139:13)

We don't mind repeat picks at all.

B (139:14)

Okay. All right. So the Mac Updater has ceased to exist as of January 1st. It still kind of works, but the server isn't being maintained anymore because it's expensive to do. And I don't know if you've ever talked about that.

A (139:30)

No, I didn't even know there was such a thing.

B (139:32)

Yeah, there was a great app called Mac Updater, and it would basically check all of your Mac apps from various sources. Not just from Sparkle, but from other sources, too. But the. It cost money to run the server, and the guy who was running it, he wasn't charging enough, in my opinion, for his software. He didn't want to go to subscription. He ceased running the server. I had actually inquired about me and Brett Tro inquired about how much it would cost to buy because he said it was up for sale. It was a figure that was far, far higher than I could even think about. I'm like, I can't get a loan for this because I think there's a business here, but I don't know if there's a business of this size. So there have been a number of different people who've been trying to kind of build, I guess, kind of replacements for this. And the best one that I've seen is called Update Us. And it's.

A (140:22)

I was guessing. And I guessed right.

B (140:25)

Yeah. And this guy, he posts a lot on Reddit and he is actively developing this app. I bought it at the beginning of the year. I like it. It's called Update, and it is 13

A (140:38)

bucks once only, which is great.

B (140:40)

Which is great. Yeah. Now, I am a bit concerned about the no subscription thing, because I think if he's looking at wanting to potentially add a server element into it, and once you do that, you have ongoing costs, which is the same problem Mac Updater had.

A (140:52)

But I use Brew for this, but it's on the command line. Is this different from that?

B (140:57)

Well, this does Brew, but it also does Sparkle. So this is what is great about this, is that you can a. You can convert your existing installed apps into homebrew casks and then Brew will handle it for you, which is great. But not all apps are on homebrew. And it will also check, you know, to see. Okay, well, is this a Sparkle app, can I update it that way? And then now, recently they've introduced like a community database where community members can kind of say, hey, there's a new version of this app just in the event that like the, the updater, you know, they have their own update mechanism and it, and it's, you know, not something that you would, you would naturally find. So I think that it's, it's, it's, it's the best. It's not as good as Mac Updater, I'm going to be honest about that, but it's the best replacement that I've seen. And there have been a number of them out there that have been trying to kind of fill that void and, and I think it's the best out there. And I like the fact that it recently, like I said, introduced the community aspect. You can turn it off if you don't want it, where people can, you know, kind of submit their own versions and say, okay, this is the version that I'm using and, and give you a shot to at least, even if it doesn't have a direct link, you can be like, okay, I can open up the app or I can go to the developer's website and see if I can get an update.

A (142:03)

Nice. Updatest $12.99 for up to 3 max. Which is great. Yeah, I understand your concern because we saw what happened to Updater.

B (142:14)

Mac Updater.

C (142:15)

Yeah, this is the replacement, but so far it's great.

B (142:18)

And I really like the homebrew aspect aspect because that's what I already use to manage a lot of things. And I like the fact that that it, with one click lets you transfer your existing installed apps into casks.

A (142:29)

Into casks. That's great.

B (142:30)

Yeah, yeah.

A (142:31)

Because I have to do Homebrew and then go to the App Store and check the App Store.

B (142:34)

Right there is, there is a homebrew command. I'm sure you have it installed mas where you can I use masks? Yeah, I was gonna say at least open up the, the App Store and

A (142:44)

I use Proof file. I export all of the installed stuff into a proof file, which makes it very easy to set up my Mac. But I still think it's missing things. So this is good. I will, I will check this out. Updatist Andy Inotko, your pick of the week.

D (142:59)

A really exciting, a really exciting app that is also very, very timely for me. It's also a brand new app because if you type in the name of this weather app, Acme Weather, into Google, it will not give you links to this it will tell you that it's Acme wash. It is 44 degrees participation, 0% humidity, 61%. What I'm actually recommending as pick of the week is this new app called Acme Weather, which is an iOS app made by the same team that made Dark sky, and they basically went to Apple, then they left Apple, and then they decided to create another new weather app. It really, again, I'm so ready for the pump is so primed for me to appreciate how well this app is conceived. The idea is that there are so many, so many models out there for figuring, trying to predict what the weather is going to be. And oftentimes it's not just the models that a forecaster chooses, but also their own sense of intuition about having done New England weather for the past, like 10 or 15 or 20 years and figuring out that I think this model is going to be more appropriate than this other model. As a result, you can get a lot of fluctuation in what you think the storm is going to be. Again, in my example, example, I, I will, I will, I will confess that I was shopping for the best forecast. I was like, okay, well, you know what, this forecast says that maybe we'll only get about 14 to 18 inches. Maybe that's going to be it. And so this app decides to say, you know what, there is insert uncertainty in all weather forecasting. So the central tenet is going to be that we are going to give you not just a pronouncement of here's what the weather's going to be tomorrow, but here is essentially be a visualization of the range of all the different forecasts for what's going to happen tomorrow and over the course of the week. So if you see, if you take a look at the weather, like, what's, what's the temperature going to be like two days from now? And if you see in this graph that all of these, all of the different, like, graph lines are sort of converging towards one common line, then you have the idea of, okay, it is definitely going to be 42 degrees two days from now, because every single forecaster seems to agree, because these are all, like, lining up. But when you see that there is sort of like a median line, but surrounded by all kinds of little gray lines, showing you here's the divergence that's happening, all these sort of things, then you know that, oh, goodness, there is, this is a situation that is not fitting any current model very, very well. And so therefore don't be surprised if things are a lot different Thursday than you think it's going to be. It has a whole bunch of other nice features that I really, really appreciate. Again, as, as I demonstrated earlier when we were all holding up my phones, I am not going to be able to benefit from this app on my Android phone. However, I am. I do have plenty of iOS devices and this was. I felt as though this is definitely worth the 25 bucks a year because there are so many times over the course of the year where I really do need to know. Not just oh, I don't. Should I, should I make. Should I wear a sweater on Thursday? Should I make sure that I clean one of my best sweaters for Thursday? Sometimes it really is. Especially during the winter. Winter. Do I have to simply do my normal grocery shopping a day or two early or do I have to be necessarily ready for maybe two or three or four days of not being able to leave the place? And if you are in any way in that same boat, this seems like exactly the way to go for, for everybody. It's so ACME Weather. Again, don't Google ACME Weather. Acme Washington will give you the weather report. But they did. They are funded well enough that they actually were able to get acmeweather.com as their URL. So. So clearly they left Apple with a good enough pay package, I'm guessing.

A (146:26)

Really nice to see these dark sky guys come back because that was besides a great looking app. Their real secret sauce was figuring out how to make weather more accurate. I really like the way they do the graphs and stuff on this. This is 25 bucks a year, two week free trial. Immediately subscribed. I agree with you.

C (146:44)

Yep, me too. Me too. It's good.

A (146:46)

I'm sure we all did. Yeah.

C (146:47)

Living in the Bay Area where there are microclimates, what I've realized is that, that you know, when I get a forecast, sometimes it's for Mill Valley, it's Sausalito, it's San Rafael, it's places that are in the summertime especially very different temperatures. So seeing a range and getting the idea that, that it's not even necessarily the models, it's the nearest place that they'll do a forecast. Yeah, might disagree because that happens a lot with me in the summertime. Being able to see that and go, oh, it might be 75 or 65 today. And like being able to know that is great because we in the Bay Area we sometimes have those ranges where could drive 15 minutes and gain 20 degrees. And so I really want to know is this a real 80 degree day or is it a fake 80 degree day? So this is. I can't wait.

D (147:32)

And that's another thing that really attracted me about this. It also took a trick from way from the Waze map, where you can actually just simply say, here is what my weather conditions are at my actual location actually right now. And because this is a world that makes the SAP are so good, I'm sure they're, I'm sure they've got, got some protections against somebody who does not want to over there doing, gee, it really feels like 38 degrees now. I'll just put in 38 degrees. But that's, that's exactly the sort of thing that you're kind of looking for where somebody who has boots on the ground. I don't, I don't need the weather at the air, at the airport because I'm not going to the airport right now. I need to know when I, when I drive past this, when I drive through this really, really rough stretch of I95, am I going to be dealing with a deluge of whether this is going to make travel hazardous or not? And nope. Seems to be very, very. Seems to be clear enough right now. It's not raining over there. Good. Let's go.

A (148:21)

Nice.

C (148:21)

My only complaint is needs an iPad layout. Doesn't have one. It's iPhone only right now. I mean, it'll run, it'll run on your Mac, but only an iPhone.

A (148:29)

The fact that they've already said that we're going to do an Android version of this implies to me that they've got some development chops and they're probably

C (148:36)

going to do an iPad Apple. Good place to start. The iPhone's the right place to start.

A (148:39)

It's got widgets, which is the most important. Got some very nice.

B (148:43)

I do hope they have like an iPad version sooner than later. It was a little annoying to be like, yeah, me too. I'm like, look, I'm not even asking for a well designed app. I'm just saying, can I get like, can you just use the viewport, like

C (148:55)

the defaults, please a little bit?

A (148:56)

Yeah, that was weird that they didn't.

B (148:58)

Yeah, yeah. Because again, like, widgets are great. And I was like, okay, I can deal with it this way. But I was annoyed. I was like, all right, I'm going to pay you because I love Dark sky, but can I please use this on my, on my iPad?

A (149:10)

By the way, look at a visitor from the north. Renee Richie popped into our discord and our YouTube channel saying throwing huge Love to Christina and the whole panel. He's glad to welcome you to the show. He of course now works at YouTube and he's amazing. Is no longer part of the show.

D (149:27)

Also, he's, he's, he's a, he's a, he's a fellow Hermes bro. So you got your, he's got everyone.

A (149:33)

He's got them all, I think.

B (149:34)

Oh yeah, totally. No, he, he way outclasses me. And I was fortunate enough to be able to see Rene a couple of times when we were both at Google and he's the best.

A (149:43)

Yeah, Rene's fantastic. He says this panel keeps getting better and better. No, no, we lost you, Renee. That was a loss. But we did get Jason Snell in your place, so we're glad to have him.

D (149:52)

We seem to have no trouble keeping the quality level of the panel up.

A (149:55)

Yes, some of you may not like Jason Snell so much. After his pitch.

C (150:00)

I have decided to be a rascal. The report card came out and everybody hated macOS. Toss Tahoe. And my pick is Mac OS 26 Tahoe. Yeah, I said it. Yeah. And Christina, he's an edgy guy, you

D (150:14)

know, he pushes the buttons and he doesn't care.

C (150:16)

Here's, here's what I have to say which is look, Liquid Glass is a regression. The good news I guess for Mac users is they, they did a half hearted job of converting Mac OS to Liquid Glass to the point where I thought, I don't think it's the point. Worst implementation of Liquid Glass because I think it's the least implementation of Liquid Glass. Also I've been running TAHOE since developer beta 2 and what I will say is I think it's, I think it's a design regression but I think it's, it can be overstated. And I think the, it is the best productivity set of new features in macOS in a decade. And that a lot of people should not get too worried about Liquid Glass, which is you can change the view settings also. You'll get used to it. Like do I like all those icons in the menu? I don't. They shouldn't be there. It's annoying. But what I do like is all the new features. Access to Apple's cloud models from within shortcuts. The new Spotlight which is really, really, really good. It's so much better. Clipboard History for the first time as a standard feature on macOS. The new control center that allows you to have much more control and I would say more Mac. Like control over what goes in your menu bar. There are lots of really good things in Tahoe. It's a shame that it's been poisoned by liquid glass. But what I would say is, as somebody who's been using Tahoe since last July, you know, it's. Should it be better? Yes. Am I disappointed by parts of it? Yes. Has it interfered with my usability of my computer at all? It hasn't. It's fine. It's still usable. It's still the Mac. And those new features are really good. So I am kind of blown away that people like Christina and Jon Gruber are like, I'm just never gonna update to Tahoe and wait for the next one. Because I think it. I. I just don't agree that it's so bad that you need to bypass it. I think it's perfectly usable and has a bunch of nice new things in it. And it's a real shame that the liquid glass rollout got conflated with a really good update in terms of functionality. So here it's me. You can listen to me or not. I'm going to say, don't be afraid. Tahoe is fine.

D (152:32)

Wow.

C (152:32)

Yeah, Wow. I said it. I'm a rascal.

A (152:34)

You're brave.

C (152:35)

You're making trouble. I'm making trouble. Yeah.

D (152:38)

I don't.

A (152:39)

I don't think we've recommended this before. As somebody who has a notch on my screen on my laptop and a menu bar that just extends well beyond the notch, you need something. I've used a variety of tools. I think. Jason, you recommended ICE at one point. What do you use for your menu?

C (152:59)

I am using ICE right now instead of Bartender. I moved to ice, which is free and open source.

A (153:03)

I'm ICE with you. But ICE has been somewhat neglected. And there is a fork of ice.

B (153:08)

Good. I know what you're gonna talk. I know what you're gonna recommend. I love it.

A (153:10)

It's called Thaw and it has an ice cube logo, which is good. It is free and it is very complete. They have added. I mean, this goes well beyond. I mean, this is really nice. He's added quite a few features and has many more on his roadmap. If you need to make room on your menu bar so that you don't have hidden icons under the notch. If you want your menu bar to do more. If you'd like to be able to drag and drop to arrange menu bar items. If you'd like to customize its appearance, you can even change its spacing and it has search. So if your menu bar is so out of control that you need to search for something. You can now search for items on your menu bar. Best of all, it's open source and free. A fork of ice. It's called Thaw and it's on. Oh, yeah, it's on GitHub.

B (154:03)

GitHub, huh?

A (154:04)

It's on GitHub where all the best projects.

B (154:06)

Genuinely, genuinely, genuinely. You know what's so funny, Leo? I literally had this. And, like, this was one of mine that I had on my short list of ones that I was gonna recommend. I was like, oh, no, I'm sure they've already talked about all the.

A (154:15)

No, we hadn't. So.

B (154:17)

So I'm so glad you mentioned Thaw, because Thaw is one that I started using recently because similar thing, like was Bartender or Went Ice. I stopped getting developed and I was like, I'll try out Thaw. Thaws Barbie is another good one. But I really like Thaw.

A (154:28)

Yeah. And I like it that it's free. So that's. That's another reason to like it. And inactive development. And I like GitHub a lot. I don't know how many projects I have on GitHub now because I do a lot of vibe coding and Claude just always puts everything up on GitHub automatically.

B (154:43)

Of course.

A (154:43)

I live. Look at all these repos. I even have a few stars, which I'm very happy.

B (154:47)

Hell, yeah.

A (154:48)

I have seven whole stars. So there. Whoa. Christina, it's so great to have you. Thank GitHub for letting you participate on this show. I really appreciate it. We mentioned the hospital. I should probably mention, or do you want to mention what's going on? You've been public about it. It's not.

B (155:09)

Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. Not a big deal. You can actually see my. My healing scar.

A (155:13)

Holy cow.

B (155:14)

Yeah. Looking pretty good, huh?

A (155:15)

They had to go into your neck.

B (155:17)

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this was major.

A (155:18)

So was that to get to your spine?

B (155:20)

Yes. So I had a. Basically a bulging disc, herniated disc on C. C5 or C7, I guess C67 of my cervical spine. So that's like your neck. And where it was hitting was hitting a nerve and it was cutting off my spinal cord. And so I had. I didn't have a lot of movement or a lot of feeling rather in my left arm and both of my hands and I had weakness in my left arm. And so to fix that, what they do is they go in through your neck and they shove your esophagus and your Larydex aside.

A (155:51)

Oh, my God.

B (155:52)

And then they find the badges they dig in, they find the bad disc in, in your spine. They, they pull that out, they put a new disc in and then they like rearrange everything and then you're, you're, you're done. So.

A (156:03)

Yeah, well, I'm, and it worked. Your hands are great, your arm is great.

B (156:07)

I mean I'm feeling like, look, I still can't lift anything more than like five or ten pounds. Like I'm on like, well, you shouldn't,

A (156:12)

that's what you have a husband for. Make him do it.

B (156:14)

But, but you know, but I'm having, I'm going to be starting physical therapy soon. It was, it was, was three weeks ago today.

A (156:22)

And so that's why, by the way, we couldn't get her right away.

B (156:24)

That's why. Exactly. I was going to say I was going to try to like join like the week after, but then I was like, oh. But then the following week I've got my follow up appointment. So like we, that's why we decided she's perfect. But yeah, the reason I, I, I didn't, I, I did not join sooner was I literally had major surgery. I literally had neurosurgery. So. And the reason neurosurgeon has to do it is because it's connected to, you know, your spinal cord and all the nerves and all that. I'm fortunate that things seem to have gone well. I'm still in pain at this point. It's primarily on my right side, not my left. But I'm hoping that's just muscular and we'll deal with all of that. But yeah, I know things are going

A (157:04)

well and yeah, I'm so happy and we're so glad to have you. Welcome. And I'm going to wave the session snack requirement.

B (157:11)

You don't have to.

C (157:14)

Hey, come on, man.

B (157:16)

Look, I will have snacks next week. Okay,

D (157:20)

that's, that's just a reflection on how good a job you are as the snack person. We want to continue that service onward.

A (157:27)

We're so glad to have Christina. So glad to have you, Andy. Not trudging through the snow today. Stay warm, don't do any shoveling. That's bad for the heart. And we will see.

D (157:37)

Yeah, I'll stick with that. When people ask like, oh no, that's the healthiest, you know, what a bastard of health I am.

A (157:45)

And Jason Snell, of course, 6colors.com, where you can read his review, his power review of Mac OS 26.

C (157:53)

Maybe it will convince you if you want to. Or you can read the Mac report card and find out why everybody else is not using Tahoe. Do that too.

A (158:02)

Like Andy. Jason's also on the Replay Network with Upgrade with Mike Hurley. Andy does material on the Relay FM Network with Flowion. Yep, with Flowion. Right. The wonderful Flow Ion. And Christina, you don't have any other podcasts on the Relay Network?

B (158:20)

No, on the Relay Network? No, I don't. No, I don't. I do do a podcast occasionally called Overtired with Brett Terpstra and Jeff Severance, counsel. And that's a great one.

A (158:29)

That's a good name for a podcast.

B (158:30)

It is. It is. Because we frequently Overtired. I think I came up with it like when we came up with the show a million years ago, we were like both in San Francisco when I think we were leaving, like the Twitter offices and it still was Twitter at the time and they still had an office in San Francisco. And we were in the elevator and I was just like, what about Overtired?

A (158:49)

I love it. Overtired. The overtired pod.

B (158:52)

Overtiredpod.com and so that's not. We're not as frequent or consistent as we used to do, but hopefully we'll be. Be more consistent in the future. And. And I used to have a show on Relay at them that was. That was great. And I.

A (159:08)

Classic show.

B (159:09)

Classic.

C (159:10)

One of the.

A (159:10)

One of the first ones. Yeah.

B (159:12)

And. And I still obviously listen to. To Jason and. And Andy shows. So.

D (159:15)

Yeah.

A (159:17)

Thank you all three of you for joining us. Thanks to our wonderful audience for supporting us. I see you all in the chat rooms and we appreciate it, especially Renee. Richie. Nice to see you, Renee. We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11aM Pacific, 2pM Eastern, 18. Sorry, 1900 UTC. Although. Although that's only for one more week because we're going to summertime Daylight saving Time starts in a.

C (159:39)

It's always the same UTC though. UTC doesn't change.

A (159:42)

UTC never moves. We do.

C (159:43)

We do.

D (159:45)

Sorry.

A (159:46)

So it does change the time. It's very.

C (159:48)

Oh yeah, we move in there. So the UTC does move, right?

A (159:52)

It refuses to move. Yeah. As a result, we have to change anyway. If you could figure it out, more

D (159:58)

power to you, you can call this time change. Andy not go is a stupid idiot. So long as I. I get sunsets at 6:30pm that's all I want.

A (160:06)

I feel the same way.

B (160:08)

Pacific Northwest here, I definitely would like.

A (160:12)

Yeah, that's. I mean that's a big deal. People, you know, we. People in the southern latitudes say, what do we change the time zones for? We do it for people like Christina, who are so far north, she'd be waking up, it would be dark until 10 in the morning.

B (160:24)

Yeah, totally. I mean, it spends some time in Finland, especially like in the December, and they have like, like six or seven hours of daylight.

A (160:32)

Oh, no.

B (160:33)

And it's wild.

A (160:34)

Yeah.

D (160:35)

I got. I got so bummed out about. I'm sorry we were winding up, but I got so bummed out about it that though the latest thing that I like, I had Gemini did was create me a visualization of how much later daylight is every the rate of change of sunset over between January and April. Because it wasn't just. I didn't just need to know that it was. Oh, it's a sunset is a minute and a half later. I need to know, is the rate accelerating?

C (161:01)

Oh, good.

D (161:01)

The rate is accelerating. We're actually at the maximum rate of change. Okay. This will get me through March 8th.

A (161:07)

I have to point out Scooter X is reminding me that earlier this month the house proposed a compromise where we would change our time by half an hour and just leave it. So it's halfway between daylight saving time and halfway between standard time. That will not only will it not pass.

B (161:23)

That's awful.

C (161:24)

Hard. No. Hard.

D (161:26)

No.

C (161:26)

This is. This is.

B (161:27)

This is like how Arizona refuses to ever change.

A (161:30)

Yeah.

B (161:31)

And. And makes it a pain for anybody who's like, dealing with Arizona stuff. No. And no. We're not doing that.

D (161:37)

Sounds like a beast story on an episode of the West Wing.

A (161:41)

What about. I got a compromise.

C (161:43)

What about half an hour the Beast

B (161:45)

around the west or like a full on plot on Veep? I could see this being like a Veep storyline. I know how I'm. Selena's so excited. I know how I'm gonna win people over. I'm gonna propose the half time zone thing and then becomes the face of it. And everybody hates her.

A (162:00)

Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. The reason I mentioned the live times, despite the fact that I have to do math every single time, is we stream it live. You can watch it if you're in the club. Please. If you're not in the club, join our club Twitter. At $10 a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club, Club Twit, Discord, and all the special programming we do in there. But you can. And you can also watch us in the Discord. But everybody is allowed and encouraged to watch live on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We stream live. You can watch after the fact too. At twitt tv, mbw. That's our website. Audio and video there. That's why I say watch, listen or watch. You can watch on YouTube. YouTube? We have a version that we put up on YouTube that's great for sharing clips if you want to do that. Best thing to do, of course. Subscribe in your favorite podcast clients so you get it automatically as soon as we're done. You could choose audio or video or both. And if you do subscribe, would you do me a favor? Leave us a nice review. Give us five stars. Let the world know about the number one Vision Pro podcast in all the world. Thank you all for being here. Special thanks to our club Twitter members who make this show possible. We'll see you again next week. And as I have done for the last 20 years, I shall say now it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you to get back to work because we're all leaving. Break time is over. See you later.