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MacBreak Weekly 1026: Double-Wide Mode
02:18:26
How Apple May Lean Into AI Features for Its OS's
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy's here, Jason's here, Christina's here. We will talk about what we expect at wwdc. Apple has some tantalizing tidbits, including in the things they mentioned about accessibility. Plus what the Pope had to say about AI and what that means for Siri. That and a whole lot more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 1026, recorded Tuesday, May 26, 2026. Double wide mode. It's time for Mac Break Weekly.
- [00:44]
B
Yes.
- [00:45]
A
Hello, everybody. Another Tuesday and another fabulous day of Apple news shared with us by our peerless panel of Palm de procrastinations.
- [00:57]
B
You could just say pundits. Peerless panel of pundits works.
- [00:59]
A
Pom pundits. I mixed some French in there just to get another pomegranate. That's Jason Pomegranate pundits, hello. That's Jason Snell, 6colors.com the last time he'll be with us. No, no, you'll be with us next week.
- [01:11]
B
Next week. And then I have two weeks where I'm going because I will be in the wilds of Cupertino and then I will be in the wilds of Oregon watching my son graduate from college. So two weeks off Tuesdays. It's inviolate. You know, we do the show whether there are people here or not at 11 Pacific on Tuesday. So I will not.
- [01:28]
A
So I hope we'll find somebody to fill the seat. Who knows, maybe Alex Lindsay will be
- [01:34]
B
able to whole summer to talk about wwdc.
- [01:38]
A
That's a good point. Christina Warren is here now. She won't be here next week.
- [01:44]
C
I will not.
- [01:45]
A
I will not develop relations at GitHub. Are you doing a GitHub thing?
- [01:48]
C
Well, it is Microsoft Build, so I will be at Microsoft Build next week.
- [01:52]
A
That's right. It's Build. It's a big deal. Build's a big deal. Christina will be. I'm hoping. I don't know, John. Ashley, were you able to get Shelley Brisbane to fill in?
- [02:01]
B
Oh, yes.
- [02:02]
A
Oh, good. Because I want to talk. There's a whole accessibility story with the next iOS and I wanted to kind of talk about that. And Shelly is our accessibility expert. But we will miss you, Christina.
- [02:15]
C
Well, thank you. Thank you. But I look forward to tuning into the show as a listener, so that'll be fun.
- [02:20]
A
Well, and we'll think of you in the enemy camp, as it were.
- [02:24]
C
In the enemy camp, as it were. Sure, sure.
- [02:28]
A
Being in the enemy camp in this case is its own punishment.
- [02:30]
B
Now. Now I feel like they're frenemies at this point.
- [02:35]
C
More than that, I was going to say I definitely feel like there's, it's, you know. Yeah, it's frenemy. Come on.
- [02:41]
A
Well, I won't say anything then about the Microsoft update. They pushed out that bricked high end HP and was it Lenovo laptop?
- [02:51]
B
Let me be clear. As a Mac user since the 90s, my wife was issued a Windows laptop and occasionally it's hanging around the house and whenever I see it, I put it in its case and put it in another room because I don't want that thing out in my vision. I don't like it. But reasonable people can say Microsoft and Apple are fine these days.
- [03:10]
A
It's true, it's true.
- [03:11]
B
I just don't want that stuff in my house.
- [03:12]
A
Also with us, Andy Inocco, who, you know, he uses Android, so I guess he's apostate in other ways. Hello, Andrew.
- [03:18]
D
I'm ecumenical. I embrace all fates. And I would say, Christina, that like, I encourage you to spend next week like bringing down Microsoft from within. But Microsoft is already doing that so
- [03:29]
A
there's no to take the effort. You were just so mean. We're so mean.
- [03:36]
D
I'm watching all the Real Housewives. I'm sorry.
- [03:38]
C
No, it's good, it's good. But yeah, you're not the one who's paid in their stock, so. Yeah, tell me about it.
- [03:42]
B
Yikes.
- [03:42]
A
I should warn, well, the stock is fine. That's a good thing to be paid in these days.
- [03:46]
D
I'm sorry, I forgot who owns. I forgot who owns.
- [03:49]
C
It's completely fine. It's completely fine. I think it's hysterical, actually. Genuinely, I think it's fantastic. Please do more.
- [03:55]
A
And they, you know, look, Microsoft has a thick skin, let's put it that way.
- [03:59]
B
And come on.
- [04:00]
A
Yeah, we know many people from Microsoft. Listen, the show are. You are in fact a lot of people at Microsoft use Macs. So I don't, I don't. I have nothing against the wonderful people who work at Microsoft, including those who work at GitHub who are Faboo. But enough of that. I guess I'm a, I'm a little bit. I have a religious mindset because the Pope weighed in.
- [04:22]
B
Oh, yeah, big Pope news.
- [04:23]
A
Big Pope news. And at first I'm thinking he did this encyclical on AI Pope Leo xiv. And at first I'm thinking, what do I care what a medieval religion leader thinks about artificial Intelligence. But then I read, I didn't read the whole thing, it's 42,000 words. But I read part of the Magnifica Humanitas and I thought actually it was quite sensible.
- [04:51]
D
It's very to the point about what lots of people have already been saying about AI. AI ethicists basically saying that, look, we can't build this thing that only benefits rich people. This has technology has the power to help all people of all kinds. But if we just simply make sure that the people who need it the most are paying the cost of it, but aren't getting the benefits of it, that's really not what we're put here to do. I've only read the first four to 5,000 words, but I did download it. I intended to just skim it, but the damn thing is just very readable and modern.
- [05:25]
A
It's good, it's really good. He said, among other things. And by the way, Jeff Jarvis has an excellent analysis on his Buzz Machine blog, buzzmachine.com and of course we'll talk about this tomorrow on Intelligent Machines. He said the Pope Leo by name, said, technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home. True, right? But it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice. Also true in the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. However, in practice, technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Ah yes, I think this is exactly our attitude here.
- [06:13]
D
Right, I'm sorry, I'm excited about this, but I'll try to wind myself up. It's just there's so many of like the common sense greatest hits in this encyclical, including there's a famous slide deck I think was IBM from like 30, 40 years ago when computers were steady enough and accessible enough to automate processes. And so they basically came up with a bunch of their own encyclicals about how this technology should be used, including because a computer does not have a sense of responsibility, cannot be blamed, cannot be burdened, cannot be punished. That means that no computer should ever be allowed to make a management style decision. And in the encyclical he says something very, very similar about how, look, we can't allow AI to basically do the work of humans because it doesn't have the responsibility of humans, it doesn't have the ethical grounding of humans, and that to think otherwise or pretend otherwise is going to lead to very, very, very bad things. He doesn't even say it in Latin. He says it in. He says it in clean English.
- [07:19]
A
There was some Latin.
- [07:21]
D
Okay.
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A
It wasn't all Latin.
- [07:23]
D
Yes, Timon. Just for abundance. Am I right?
- [07:26]
A
In tribo. Whatever. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was. It was actually pretty reasonable. It was also not fire and brimstone,
- [07:35]
B
you know, I mean, he literally had somebody from Anthropic drop their advising to talk about this, which is, I think, fitting because Anthropic has always been the most kind of philosophical of the AI companies. They spend a lot of time and people can be cynical about it and say that it's part of their marketing. I think that it may be, but I think they also do believe it. I think Dario Amodei actually does think lots of deep thoughts about what it means to do AI while also pressing on his foot, on the gas to go full speed ahead. I think both of those things can be true. I thought, who. The part that struck me of that, I can't believe it. But, you know, again, there's a first time for everything. Let's talk about a papal encyclical on a tech podcast.
- [08:16]
A
Why not?
- [08:17]
B
Was I thought. And this. This goes to the heart of a lot of debates that I see in our communities these days, which is, he said, just because you can use a tool for good or for ill. I'm paraphrasing the Pope here because I love saying stuff like that.
- [08:36]
A
Do it in Latin if you.
- [08:37]
B
Just because. Just because a tool can be used for good or ill if the tool is fundamentally ill, if. If the tool is fundamentally poisoned or evil, doing good with it may not be morally acceptable. And I think that a lot of us are grappling with this idea of, like, you can have, like. I feel very much like I am uneasy about the resources being spent on data centers and on the power that is used to power all of these AI setups. And I worry about what it might do for our society in a whole bunch of different ways. And I also recognize that there are lots of ways that people use AI that I am not in favor of, that I think are kind of anti humanity, as the Pope points out. But I also see the benefits in lots of ways. I think, like, computers, writing computer code is an amazing benefit for people. And it does, you know, give me pause when the Pope says, look, morally. And who. Who better to talk about this than the Pope? I suppose, morally, are you okay only using it for good if it's fundamentally not good? And I mean, you got to think about it. I think that goes to the root of a lot of our conversations about it.
- [09:57]
A
It's something I grapple with all the time because as a technology journalist, I think we're all in the same boat. We cover. For my whole life we've been covering things like smartphones and gadgets and things that are filling up the landfill and destroying our environment. And we're encouraging people to buy more just in our very reviews, without even saying it. So I think there is a moral struggle that all people who deal with technology, especially those of us who cover technology, have to think about. So I think it's a good thing to think about. I just watched last night, I just watched a very weird movie, Gore Verbinski's latest, which is called Good Luck, Don't Die, Good Luck, don't have Fun, Don't Die, which is really about this. A guy, Sam Rockwell, comes back from the future to save the world. He's got on a USB stick, AI safety software that the future folks have designed. And he says, in an hour, a nine year old is about to set off an AI bomb that will destroy the future. I have come back from the future to save it. It's a little terminatory. And we've got to install this software on the kid's computer before he presses the go button, which is hysterical. And the whole movie is them, you know, them trying to get there. It's a little tough, but it was
- [11:18]
D
an Apple Power product and it forbids side loading. So we're doomed.
- [11:21]
A
Yeah. Well, the other thing, though, that's great is that the kids, two of the characters are high school teachers and the kids are literally glued to their phone the whole time in class. And the teacher's saying, isn't this against the rules? Shouldn't you have your phones put away? So it's a commentary. The movie is a commentary both on AI and on smartphones. And honestly, I don't know why the Pope hasn't done an encyclical on smartphones and social media, because I think in many ways it's just as destructive. And yet here we are. We constantly talk about it. I, on my shows, promote, in many ways, promote it. We all use it. So I think, I don't know, should I feel guilty, Christina?
- [12:04]
C
I mean, I don't know, because I grapple with the same things that everyone else on this panel grapples with. Right. And from an additional perspective of someone who's been actively working on some of these technologies for the last six years or so. And so there is, yeah, you're, you're embedded in AI. Absolutely, I'm embedded with it. I know that like, you know, my, my last job was, I mean my, my next job will be with AI. My last job was with AI. My current job is with AI. Like, I, I, I know that that's how that is going to work. And then yet you, you hear the stories, you see the, the layoffs that happen because whether it is directly because of artificial intelligence or people are just blaming it, as you more than likely the case so far, but you can also see very real places where people's budgets become different for different things because they're prioritizing one type of, of, of spend over another. And there's, there's guilt that's associated with that. And I think there's also thought about, okay, well how do we ensure that this is being used the right way? And I don't think that we can ensure that. Right. I think that's actually kind of one of the, the, the scariest aspects of any sort of new technology is that you can't really control how every party is going to, to use those things. And the best thing that you can do is you can try to inform the, the people that are using it. You can try to have good conversations with world leaders and in this case even clerics about what the moral and ethical things should be. And then we should all as humanity be taking steps to make sure that we're not losing ourselves in these things. Because what bothers me more, I think, than some of the doomsday prophecy stuff is just when you see and you hear anecdotally from folks how much people are more willing to turn aspects of their brain off because these technologies are so much more accessible and are so much easier to use. And when you see that like, you know, test scores are going down and that, you know, even in my own just kind of like day to day life, I can think, oh, I can just, you know, do that with, with, with AI versus asking the question, okay, I can, but should I? Right. And these are all the things I think that we all have to grapple with. And so it is sort of a, I was not expecting a 43,000, 42,000, whatever it is, you know, missive from the Pope on. I also can't necessarily say that whether it will have any impact or not. And I tend to be cynical there.
- [14:26]
A
Well, remember there are more than a billion Catholics in the world.
- [14:28]
C
Well, yes, but, but I, but I think that even like putting aside like my own cynicism, it's, it's Nice to see this sort of weigh in coming in from, from, from different, you know, leaders from the world.
- [14:39]
A
These are important questions.
- [14:41]
C
Yeah.
- [14:42]
A
Maybe we don't agree with the answers. I mean, I know I disagree with him when he says you shouldn't use AI even for good. I think I'm more of the opinion all technology is agnostic is neutral.
- [14:55]
B
Yeah, but he hates that. He hates agnostics.
- [14:57]
A
I know. I believe technology is neutral and the humans put the stamp of good or bad on it, and it's the humans that we have to watch out for.
- [15:06]
B
I am more inclined to believe that, although I do think that there is a larger point there, which is I don't think all AI fundamentally has to be the fruit of the poison tree. Right. Bring in my biblical, which is what he said references. Well, he's suggesting that if it is, you can't use immoral technology morally. But I think part of the question there is also how do we navigate? Because I don't think the Pope is like, look, hey, everybody, put your computers in the water. Let's just walk away. I think he's saying build to the people who are building this stuff. Think about the consequences of what you're doing and try to approach it.
- [15:46]
A
Yeah, well, I agree with that.
- [15:47]
B
You're right. Like, you're not absolved from making something if it's useful, but also dangerous. That you need to think about the consequences of the act of creation. Boy, wow. The biblical references are fast and furious here, but. Right. Like, like. And I think that's worth saying. I. And I also suspect that that's Anthropic's influence a little bit, because that sounds very much like them, which is how do you. How do we do what we do but also not be, you know, evil and not bring about the destruction of society? And, and while also not. I think what Anthropic's point has always been is if, if we can think that it's going to happen, it's probably going to happen. And if we stop, everybody else won't. So what we need to do is keep rushing headlong into it, but also figure out how to do it in the right way. And like, I don't know, maybe. But worth. You know, I think it's worth reminding everybody who's building this stuff, like, think about the decisions you're making and the assumptions you make about this because you should try to create what you're doing in an ethical and moral way.
- [16:55]
A
Agreed. I wasn't going to bring this up, but I'm glad I did.
- [16:59]
B
Thank you. I mean, it's not every week that the Pope steps on our turf. It's true.
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D
It's not every week that, like, I come across a papal encyclical and have to say, damn it. Okay, I need to put this down. I got to get some work done, but I'll set aside. I'll get back to it tomorrow because this is really, really a good read. It's the source thing where you just keep putting it down and thinking and then reading more and then putting it down and thinking.
- [17:19]
A
I'm going to have 11 labs read it to me in Father Guido Sarducci's voice. That way I will both be entertained and learn, educated. The reason we're spending so much time on this isn't really. This is the drought before the storm. Apple's. We're less than two weeks away from Apple's WWDC in which Apple will announce how much a. Exactly, they're going to put in the phone. And by Apple doing that, by the way, they will probably be the single biggest purveyor of AI going forward. Right. With a billion phones in people's pockets, that's going to be the number one way people access AI. The real normal people access AI. Right.
- [18:01]
C
Yeah.
- [18:02]
A
I mean, you could say Google with Google search, you could. And they certainly last week really double down on AI. I mean, basically, they're changing the search page for the first time in 25 years to be an AI chat window as opposed to blue links. Yeah, that. In response, of course, to companies like Perplexity kind of stealing their thunder with AI search.
- [18:26]
D
Well, also, they, also, they keep saying every quarter that they have data saying that, look, when we put AI features in search, people were using, Were interacting with search more. Actually, we went up. Usage went up about 10, 11%. And that trend keeps, they keep saying that this trend keeps continuing, whether or not that's actually applicable to making Google search into a continually relevant product as opposed to sandboxing the AI into a separate product or a separate environment. Who knows? But they've demonstrated to themselves and their shareholders that they don't feel as though AI is going to kill the search business and consequently their advertising business.
- [19:07]
B
Yeah.
- [19:07]
D
So it's, it's, it's. I won't, I won't jump back to what we're talking about earlier, but sometimes we have that there's, there's an, there's also an argument to be made that I think that search is not as interesting. Classic search is not as interesting as AI search because I, I turned, I had a switch turned off in my, in my Chrome browser so that it would automatically every time I did a Google search, it would just give me the classic search, none of the AI stuff. I had to turn it back on so I could test all this stuff. And the thing is like, it is more engaging. You could have the follow up question that would have been okay, alt, alt and alt T for a new tab, do a separate Google search for a follow up question or for a side question. I can basically say, oh, well, okay, that information was mostly what I was looking for, but it lacks a nuance. Am I right in saying that this A, B and C are actually true based on this information that you're providing me and these sources that you're, that I'm going to follow up on? Yes, it is great. And it's also going to be adding a generative user interface and generative interfaces. It's again, according to the keynote. We'll, we'll have to see how well this works to make it even more interactive and basically to give you the information you were looking for, ideally in a way that is easier to consume based on the type of content that you are looking for. But the thing is like sometimes that's, you can't, you can't sugar, you can't dump sugar onto something. You can't add carbohydrates to something. That's how you make junk food. Okay, it's more palatable and it's more, you can eat it all day long. But the thing is, Google search, classic Google searches. Here is a resource, here is a reference to that we think is relevant to the terms that you gave us. It is now on you to follow through to this link, read what is provided there, consider the source, and then decide for yourself whether or not this is relevant as opposed to having the AI digest all this for you and then create a highly processed form of that information.
- [21:04]
A
Well, there's also the larger issue of if you're the company, your former publication Mashable, Christina or the Verge, and all of your content is now pre digested, pre chewed Charlie and spit out by Google without any traffic to your page, you may not be too happy.
- [21:23]
B
No, this is what Milei Patel at the Verge has been calling for years, Google zero. And where he has never been wrong. The references to from Google to websites keep going down and down and down. And the problem with that is that the websites are also the source of the information that they're chewing on.
- [21:42]
C
So they are, they are. But I will Say this, and this is not in any way to try to like, victim blame, but a lot of, A lot of publications, publications that Jason and Andy and I have all worked for, purposely made their bed and got into bed with the social media companies, with the search engines and took the money. They took a lot of money. They took an enormous amount of. And they took it even though they knew that this was going to not be a thing that would last forever.
- [22:08]
A
Deal with the devil.
- [22:09]
C
It was, but. And it wasn't as if, like, I can look at like the, the late 90s, the early 2000s, and I can say, okay, you know what? You didn't know what was going to happen. When we go into the 2010s, you absolutely knew it was going to happen because you'd already seen it happen multiple times, and in many cases, it had already happened multiple times to you. So at a certain point, I look at this and I have to go, okay, I'm so sorry. But you're continuing to adjust your content, adjust your algorithm, adjust your output ad you're hiring to please, you know, the people at Google, the people at Facebook, the people at what, at TikTok, at whatever algorithm you want to be at. You cannot be upset when that changes and when you lose everything you've invested in because you. You chose to be party to that. Now, is it. Is it impossible to completely detangle yourself from that? Yeah, it is. But you don't have to go as far in as many publications went in and got into bed and purposefully created content not just to be serviced by the algorithm, but to be served by the algorithm and to drive traff directly given to them by the search engines of the social media sites.
- [23:11]
B
I mean, it was very hard. It's very hard to completely stand on the sidelines in that. So I understand how trying to focus on search traffic, having worked at a publishing company during this period, there's a line to be drawn where you're like, okay, there's a lot of people searching. We want to reach those people. But what I would say is that over time, the companies that I don't have a lot of sympathy for are the ones who basically gave up on actual content. And everything they started to do was just SEO garbage. They no longer were writing for people. They were just writing to capture views that were coming from search. And you're right, Christina, in a way, this is just a long playing version of that Facebook pivot to video, where everybody said, do video, and they did it. And like two years later, it was all over. This took more like two decades. But you're right in a way that you end up with these media companies that have just become completely dependent, some of them, on, on search traffic. And they've also forgotten they no longer cultivate an audience because search traffic doesn't come from an audience, it just comes from Google. So that you have no loyal audience. And why would you have a loyal audience? Because everything you post now is SEO. And for people who don't know, like, if you ever read an article and you're like, why are there subheads all the way through it, asking questions with very simple answers, and the headline is only answered at the end of the article, and it's like, because a consultant said that is the most effective way to rank in search. It's not an article for people, it's an article for Google to get you to click through and see some ads that you also aren't paying attention to. And so, yeah, my, my sympathy to somebody like the Verge, which has tried to do a lot of stuff right, and has seen this coming, is a lot greater than some of these sites that, that you and I could name but won't, where they no longer care and have not cared for a decade about their readers. Just about SEO.
- [25:13]
C
Correct. And that's what I'm talking about. Obviously, there are people who've been hurt by this, you know, and you know, who are. Have tried to do the right things, to your point, but there have been lots, lots of the big media companies have not. And, and so I have sympathy for the people who work there. My sympathy goes away for the executives who, again, it's been more than a decade where they've, they've chosen to get into these financial relationships. And, and to your point, to not build an audience. And that doesn't mean that it's not incredibly difficult to build an audience harder than ever and to, to get found, like, at all. Like, it's a. Not a good business. It's, it's a difficult place. But it, you know, I, There's a certain point where I look at this, I'm like, but you did this to yourself, especially the larger companies. I look at some of the bigger newspaper conglomerates and I go, no, you had leverage at one point and you chose to give that up.
- [26:04]
A
Well, there's a certain irony in the fact that the Verge was just sold to James Murdoch.
- [26:10]
C
It was not.
- [26:11]
A
Oh, the Verge wasn't. Vox was. The Verge is.
- [26:15]
B
The Verge remains at the company that was there before.
- [26:19]
A
Oh, they're not going to spin out a new company with. No, no, but the podcasts were. Is very confusing.
- [26:25]
B
Well, it's a podcast network.
- [26:26]
C
So they sell the podcast in New York magazine. The podcast. New York Magazine. Those were the ones that were. Those were in box which became as part of the podcast were deemed as the ones.
- [26:36]
A
So the Verge is staying with its existing ownership?
- [26:41]
C
Yes. Yeah. And then the, the last I read was that they. Pinsky will either buy all of it or none of it. Pinsky is the biggest outside investor. They do the Hollywood Reporter and Variety and a bunch of other things. Rolling Stone. A bunch of other things is that they potentially could buy all of the existing publications, but it'll either be an all or nothing.
- [27:02]
A
These are kind of fire sales though, right? These are being sold at a much lower value than.
- [27:07]
C
It depends. It depends. I mean, look, clearly the one who got out a lot of money was the, the Murdoch. James Murdoch's thing buying Vox, the, The podcasting arm in New York magazine. Yeah, those are the ones. There's the ones who got the, you know, the billionaire.
- [27:22]
A
It's a little bit like a page out of the succession TV show because completely is. He's. He's Kendall Roy saying, well, this old style media of my father's is dying, so we got to go digital. But maybe picking the kind of the wrong time to jump ship. I mean, from one dying medium to another.
- [27:42]
C
I mean, I don't know. I think that the James Murdoch, I mean, he's been, you know, he's the, he's the liberal Murdoch.
- [27:47]
A
He was cast out.
- [27:48]
C
Right. And he left and he's just like Kendall.
- [27:51]
A
I'm telling you, it's.
- [27:53]
C
Yeah. Succession is a mix of Paramount and Fox in terms of those two families. But the, you know, but he's made investments in other media companies too. And so I think it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. Right.
- [28:07]
A
Is his strategy forward thinking or is he stuck a little bit in the past?
- [28:11]
C
I mean, he might just want to save New York magazine, which I'm not upset about at all.
- [28:14]
A
No, I'm glad.
- [28:15]
C
That means New York Magazine gets to continue to exist for another, you know, few decades, then like.
- [28:20]
A
Yeah, I mean, I don't care. That's kind of old school Medici patronage where you got a billion bucks and you can afford to lose 100 million. Keeping a kind of mainstream.
- [28:31]
B
It's what Lorraine Powell jobs, I was going to say the Emerson Collective is doing with the Atlantic.
- [28:35]
A
Yeah, the Atlantic. And unfortunately it's what Jeff Bezos looked like he was doing. With the Washington Post. But it turns out, no, no, no. He preferred to spend that money on a yacht. Thank you. Anyway, where are we? Let's take a break and then we'll talk about Apple. Apple. There's not much to say, but we will talk. We'll talk a little bit about Apple. It is Mac Break weekly, after all. And guess what? We have a vision Pro story, so there's to look forward to. You are. Well, I'm glad you're here. You know what? This is the thing. When you get smart people together, you shouldn't be tied down to any one thing if there's an important topic. And I think this was a good conversation.
- [29:11]
D
It's not how thin you slice the melon, it's how you serve it.
- [29:15]
A
Do you prefer the melon ball or do you prefer the kind of the crescent of the melon?
- [29:20]
D
Ooh, I like the crescents.
- [29:22]
A
I'm not a melon baller kind of guy. Our show, thank you. Andy and I go, Jason Chanel and Christina Warren for that conversation.
- [29:31]
D
You see, on a slow week, we can talk about. And mangoes. Do you like to do the thing where you slice it, then you turn it inside out and you wind up with these cubes on a little. Little serving curve.
- [29:39]
A
No, fancy, fancy. Yeah, I like to put a little lime on the. On the old mango. And that is not a euphemism in any way. Our show today, brought to you by Cash Fly. Literally brought to you by Cashfly because Cashfly is our content delivery network. They've been keeping our content moving for years, almost two decades now. Every stream, every download, every on demand episode, Cashfly quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes with no drama, no fuss. And I love that. If there's ever an issue with our feeds, it's never Cash Fly. It's, you know, they are absolutely reliable. They've been around for more than two decades and they are anything but static. I like that about them, too. They're always innovating. Here are a few things to know if you're evaluating CDN options for your infrastructure. On Cash Fly. Game downloads are up to 158% faster than competing providers. Video, very important to us. Sub second video start times on any device at scale. That's super important. I know that when you go to our webpage and you want to play a video, it should start up right away because I know I'm the same way. We're all impatient. Wait a second. And it's like, no, this isn't going to work. I'M going somewhere else. So we need that rock solid software delivery even on those chaotic launch days and live streaming to millions of concurrent users without breaking a sweat. That's Cash Fly. And as I said, new features all the time like the new advanced analytics for deep CDN visibility in the portal or your observability stack Edge control for programmatic request and response handling at the edge Terraform integration to manage CDN resources as code. All of that kind of also points to AI helping you with the management with more than 75 points of presence across six continents. And I bet you they're working on Antarctica. Over 5,000 customers. We're one of them. And get this 100% uptime SLA 100% uptime SLA and the best support 24. Seven engineer to engineer. Enjoy flexible billing that was important to us and no strong arm contracts that were very flexible with us and have been all along Cashfly is the CDN built for your business. Learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com twit how many years have I been saying this? Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by Cashfly at Cache Fly. Thank you Cash Fly thank you. Mark Gurman just as stymied for stuff to talk about as we were. He did say though, some interesting things. Due to EU requirements, the Digital Markets act supposedly Apple will build support into the new iOS iOS 27 for third party airplay streaming alternatives like like Google Cast you could use. I mean I've been able to use Google Cast in Google Cast enabled apps, but now it'll be in the operating system. In fact, says German, it could be the default if you want to instead of airplay if you want to beam video, photos and audio from an Apple device to a speaker or tv. Thank you. Eu, right?
- [32:57]
D
Yeah, that's kind of overdue. I'm glad to see just in the past year, year and a half just because the EU has not ordered Apple to include support for X, Y and Z inside your software, but simply support an open standard that already exists within say a WI FI standard. All of these things are now kind of possible. All these things like airplay or Airdrop from yeah, Google does Airdrop to Android. All these things that really should have been able to do years ago because it is such a bone of contention and it feels like such an unnecessary source of friction that like again my Google smart speakers that don't work as well as Apple smart speakers that transferring files between two machines depends on what what operating system they're running and yeah, I mean not that I would say that the EU's DMA is always great for every single application, but. But it's things like this that make me give the EU the benefit of the doubt when it comes to regulatory stuff, because it is making things materially different. And I will also say that it's not a case of them dragging Apple by the ear. Inside Apple, there's always arguments. There are always people saying, look, wouldn't it be great if we did make this easier to do? Wouldn't this be a great benefit for our users? And it would be such a simple thing for us to do? And then it gets shouted down. They just simply lost the argument. Now they're winning those arguments and we're seeing how quickly you can make these changes happen.
- [34:22]
A
Speaking of losing arguments, we're still waiting for Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers to tell us and Apple how much they can charge in the App Store. That'll be interesting for companies that don't use the Apple App Store. Right? It would only be for companies that don't use the App Store, that use a third party App Store. Wouldn't it be for all App Store customers?
- [34:41]
D
That's part of what Apple's arguing. There are a whole bunch of different balls in the air. Last week, Apple and Epic filed basically a joint thing with the court saying that, okay, we have basically agreed on a timetable for Apple to at least propose a percentage that they can charge out of App Store purchases. That mean that they're going to be.
- [35:06]
A
Instead of 27%.
- [35:07]
D
Exactly. Basically say Apple's going to come up with a number within 75 days. They're also going to give us the data that they use to calculate to get to justify that data. And we're going to have time to basically respond to this. But it's movement. But there's the second thing in which they're basically trying to get the Supreme Court and other courts to basically say that this order forces us to create changes to the Apple Store worldwide, when actually the judgment only should apply to our dealings with Epic. We should, we should maybe be able to just make changes within the United States or within one principality. It is beyond the scope of this court to order us what we have to do in a worldwide market.
- [35:45]
A
So wait a minute. All these things. Supreme Court already say no to this? They keep going back to the Supreme Court.
- [35:52]
D
Yeah, but they're back again.
- [35:54]
A
The court keeps saying no, no. Ask Judge Gonzalez Rogers. What are you bothering us for? We're busy here anyway. Yeah, Apple has refiled to reverse the lower court Ruling on the App Store injunction. We'll see. What? No, no. The response to the last time was almost instant. No response yet on the Shadow docket. The Rocket docket, EPIC gave a response to a 9 to 5 Mac on all of this. The Supreme Court has already rejected Apple's attempt to overturn the injunction. This case, this challenge to the contempt order is one last Hail Mary to delay a conclusion to this case and avoid opening up the gates to payment competition for the benefit of consumers. The court's proceedings in Apple's own documents made it clear that Apple intentionally designed its sham compliance with the district court's order to prevent competition, clearly violating the district court's injunction. And in fact, Judge Gonzalez Rogers said Apple lied to her.
- [36:58]
C
That was the bit. Yeah, I mean, that was the biggest thing. That was one of the biggest smackdowns I've ever read. Oh, was she pissed in any court filing ever. That was literally when that came through, I was like, okay, this is the popcorn gif that everybody always shares because this. That was. Wow.
- [37:13]
D
Wow.
- [37:15]
A
Well, anyway, we'll watch with interest to see what the Supremes say. You can't hurry love and you can't hurry the.
- [37:23]
D
If we, you know, if we have a theme for. For the Vision Pro segment, I almost think, like, we should have a theme for the Epic versus Apple thing.
- [37:30]
A
It's epic.
- [37:31]
D
Just about as weak.
- [37:32]
A
Hey, Andy, are you wearing that new Google Fitbit watch band there? Is that what you're showing off?
- [37:37]
D
Indeed I am.
- [37:37]
A
You're like one of those Formula one drivers who right after the race immediately straps on the watch. The watch they get endorsement money for
- [37:45]
D
tell and holds the.
- [37:46]
A
Yeah, holds that up. Tell us. Is it Red Bull? It's gotta be. Tell us about that. This is actually. This is. The other thing Mark Gurman said is that Apple is perhaps sitting a little bit back on its laurels with the Apple watch in the face of competition from Google's new Fitbit band, which is competition itself for the whoop band from Amazon, or the Oura ring, which I wear, and I know a number of you also wear. Tell us about this Fitbit band. Now, you don't wear an Apple watch, so you don't have anything to compare it with.
- [38:21]
D
Well, but the thing is. That's true. But on the other hand, it's possible that this band is made for somebody like me who has tried Pixel, who has a Pixel watch, has an Apple watch. I don't like wearing either of them day to day because, number one, I don't like having to keep them Charged every couple of days. I don't like all the distractions that come through the display. I don't think they're as good a watch as, like my favorite little Casio watches. I like being able to switch things up several times a day. Even the health stuff, which I'm very, very interested in, doesn't really hit me because it's giving me numbers but no insight and no real information. And it's also a $300 thing. Typically. This is really interesting because it really is. There's no screen on it. It really is just the sensors. Okay. Which means that it gives you most of the stuff that one of the cheaper Apple watches give you. So I get blood oxygen, I get heart rate. I get. I get low heart rate warnings. I will get. I think it even has afib. Don't quote me on that. But basically a very, very wide range of stuff just from sensors. It's also very, very small. It's very, very. You can wear it and you don't feel like you've got your techno Joe with a million different de gasses on your wrist. It's lightweight. It's more comfortable to use. This arrived last Monday. I have not charged it since and it hasn't been off my wrist really since. And the battery is still at 26%. And what I really. But the interesting thing that I'm really, really enjoying about it so far, and there's only been a week, so I'm not going to write about it for another two or three weeks, is that I'm going to use that horrible word. But Google Gemini is part of the new Google Health app, so it doesn't simply say, you made your. You. You make your step. Beat your step goal by 10%. This is your third day of seven days in which you intended to increase your heart rate by. No, it will actually, like take the data and then say, wow, you really. You, you. You really made up for the lack of sleep you had. You had earlier today because it's going to be raining later today. I suggest that maybe you should take your walk early today. Try to get your heart rate up because let yesterday's walk. You were kind of slow.
- [40:40]
A
The distance was so annoying.
- [40:42]
D
Well, no. Well, again, these are not like alerts that come up on a screen.
- [40:46]
A
I have a wife for that, you know. I don't.
- [40:48]
D
Well, I don't. Are you the king of.
- [40:50]
B
King of happiness?
- [40:51]
D
Some of us have to simply row our rowboat with only one oar and it's not a lot of fun. Leo.
- [40:57]
A
Okay, okay.
- [40:58]
D
Let me have this. Anyway, the basics is that it gives me information in a way that I feel is useful and actionable and I can actually ask questions back. Such as that. Well, I might ask. Based on your sleep last night, you didn't get a lot of deep. You slept for six hours, you didn't get a lot of deep sleep. How are you feeling? Are you feeling kind of up or down right now? I was like, actually, I'm a little bit, you know. Okay, great. Maybe you can get. Take a 20 minute nap around 2 or 3 o'. Clock. That might.
- [41:26]
A
So it's very, it sounds like it's very AI advice focused.
- [41:29]
D
It is. And it's not. Again, it's not, it's not gabbly and it's not like more information that it's basically saying instead of this stack of numbers, instead of these dials, it is basically helping me make sense of the data that it collected.
- [41:42]
A
It's.
- [41:42]
D
I'm finding, I'm finding it very, very useful and it's helping me get, it's helping me with health and fitness and basically awareness stuff that I never really got from previous watches. Also, it's 99 bucks, which is easy to afford. You can get, of course, a range of fashion.
- [42:00]
A
But there's a subscription, right?
- [42:03]
D
It gives you most of it for free. That's between this and the, and the Whoop Band or whatever. The Whoop band's like $300 and the band is free. And that's every year. The. Because I paid 20 bucks a month to subscribe to Gemini Pro. The advanced features are basically I get for free because I'm already subscribing to that. But I'm very, very positive on it for now because again, I will say that this is the first time I've had a fitness band on my wrist every single day for a week on end. It's the first time I've been actually really kind of paying attention to what it's been saying and trying to get information from it. I'm also really keen to see when you set it up. It basically wants to interview, have a conversation with you about what your goals are, why you're wearing this, what you're hoping to, what your current energy level is. And I literally, I didn't want any part of that because I was just too busy. So I, I literally just typed in like, well, how about you just like watch my data for a few weeks and then come to some conclusions that we can talk later. And they said, great, that sounds like a great plan. We'll just simply play it by day by day. And I'm like, all right, this is something that I can actually work with. I don't know. I've been reading reviews.
- [43:14]
A
Can't do that with a wife, by the way. Andy, I just want to mention that
- [43:16]
D
other things you can do with a wife you can't do with a fitness band.
- [43:19]
A
That's a good point.
- [43:20]
D
You're still.
- [43:20]
A
All right, all right, you had me there.
- [43:22]
D
Yeah, I will, I will. I will say that again. I'm obviously not someone who's doing fitness training. I'm not training for a half marathon. I'm not doing a million reps. It will detect the kind of exercise you're doing and log it correctly. Or you can actually go into the app and actually specify, oh, this is what I was doing during that time of day. I've been reading other reviews and other people who are again, in training and they, unsurprisingly, are saying that the $99 band that doesn't have a display on it is not great at, like, helping you get through these kind of serious training goals.
- [43:56]
A
Yeah, I look at my watch for my heart rate, which zone I'm in, how long I've been going. The watch is giving you a readout all the time.
- [44:02]
D
Yeah, you can.
- [44:03]
A
The other advantage the Apple Watch has is Apple Fitness Plus. So you can have that on the screen and tie it to that again.
- [44:10]
D
Yeah, it is. Through the app you can, like, get instant read of. If you feel like your pulse is going wacky, you can open up the app and it will show you what you're submitting. And later on, you can. You can simply go through, like, each of the little tabs of the app to see, like, the data that it collected at the conclusions that it drew, like, throughout the day. But I do. I don't believe this is going to be a general appeal device. I think it's going to be for people. Like I said, I don't like having. I don't like this. The solution to the answer to distractions on the screens that I have in my life is not adding another screen on my wrist. And I've pretty much defined that for myself. I cannot get myself into. It's a fun. It's a useful thing to have if I'm having a really, really busy travel day when I do really do need to have a notification on my wrist about a gate change or something like that. Day to day to day, however, it's just a nuisance and again, eventually the battery will run down Because I left it next to the keyboard. Also because it's so big and so chunky. I took it off because I was writing for three or four hours and it was kind of irritating my wrist. So I put it. I put my Apple Watch or my Pixel Watch next to the keyboard and then forgot I left it there. And then it's two days later and the battery's down. And then I just got out of the habit of wearing it. Whereas this is comfortable enough that I really haven't had a need to take it off. And again, I probably won't absolutely need to charge it for another two or three days.
- [45:33]
A
Nice. Where will your review appear?
- [45:38]
D
On a site that will be opening very, very soon.
- [45:41]
A
That might be a good time to. To take the sheets off of it
- [45:49]
D
before.
- [45:49]
A
There'll be a lot of interest in that.
- [45:50]
D
Exactly.
- [45:51]
B
It should be. I agree. I think it's ready to go now. I keep telling Andy that. He's like, no, no, no. Not quite. Not quite.
- [45:57]
A
He's a perfectionist. We like that.
- [45:58]
B
He'll get there.
- [45:59]
D
I wanted to say, I just want to make sure the shelves are fully stocked before I invite the first visitors in.
- [46:06]
B
They're stocked. I just wanted to say, you know, The Apple Watch 11 years ago was conceived of as an app platform because Apple sort of thought of everything as an app platform back then. And then they sort of found out that fitness was a major part of what it did. And, you know, I do wonder sometimes. And I use the app platform. I am listening to podcasts when I walk my dog with my Apple Watch. Like, I. I use it for things that are not fitness tracking. But I wonder if they made some mistakes that they continue to make in terms of focusing not enough on making it easy to see all of your fitness stuff on the Apple watch, that maybe WatchOS needs a little bit of a rethink there and then the other part of it. Yeah. I think I know that they are really excited by how many people love the Apple Watch, but I'm a little bit baffled that they don't think there's another market of people who don't want an Apple Watch. That it's overkill.
- [47:08]
A
Yeah.
- [47:09]
B
Where a simplified fitness band that syncs to your. That is still an iPhone accessory because the iPhone is the most important product here and syncs to Apple Health and does all the health things. But it has Apple Pay and maybe. I mean, you have to. You have to decide how you want to do it. And does it have a little tiny screen like some of the Fitbits did or does it have no screen at all? But, but I feel like there's a product there for somebody who doesn't want to wear a watch or has a watch and doesn't want to wear two watches or change their watch, but they just want a little add on thing that does the monitoring and it continues their story. It continues the whole kind of Apple Health, you know, you saved my life kind of stuff, but in a different format. And I find it a little bit weird that 11 years later they haven't considered that, like they haven't changed the Apple watch or bust approach to this feature because it feels to me like there's another product in there somewhere that goes on the wrist and does all of the nice stuff with Apple Health that you want. But isn't a full scale computer on your wrist like the Apple watches?
- [48:13]
C
No, I agree and I would go one step further. I mean, I would say either on your wrist or look at the smart ring market. Right. Like, I honestly feel like a ring would be a fantastic accessory here if you didn't want to cannibalize, you know, your potential Apple watch sales because you say, oh, we only want one thing that's going on the wrist. Great, okay, so have a smart ring. That can be something that people can wear when they're sleeping. Right? Because no matter how much money I spend on an Apple watch and I buy a new one every couple of years, I can't sleep in it because I don't, you know, a, I'd have to switch the bands and whatnot. But because I have a smaller wrist and I'm not gonna buy the gigantic Ultra no matter what anybody tried. Like, like, no, it looks terrible on my wrist. You know, like the battery life is such that it's like, you know, you'd have to take it off and charge it every day and whatnot. And so I even went through the process for a while where I had an older Apple watch that I would sleep in and then I'd have like my, my newer one that I would put on during the day. And that's annoying to try to kind of even have multiple watches, you know, synced with, with your phone and. But there are these passive experiences to your point, Jason, where people either have a watch they want or they don't want all those features, but they still want to be in the ecosystem. You have other modalities you could have that I think that would, would really kind of reinforce things. And I don't know, I feel like a ring would be a great device, because in that case, you know, it. It's not going to have a screen on it. It's not going to be one of those things that you're going to have to be more connected to your phone. And so if you want to go to that next level where you want to be able to really, you know, see the. The alerts in the moment or have a be. Have an opportunity to go on a workout without your phone, then that's the device that you buy. So, yeah, I agree with that. It's odd that they've just gone in with the. All we're doing is the watch and that's it. At the same time, I do think that we have to all kind of concede that with the exception of, like, the very specialized smartwatches, you know, from the garments of the world and whatnot, no one else has managed to make a dent in this, this market, you know, the Fitbit kind of world world. It's great that, like, Google released this, this new device and it seems like from what you're saying, Andy, like, it's really spectacular, and that's awesome. But like, a decade ago, we had a million fitness trackers, and all those companies went bust and all those things went away. And nobody ever talks about the Pixel watches and nobody talks about the Samsung watches, and it's not that big of a deal. But, you know, the Apple watch continues to sell very well, so they've done something right. But I do agree that I feel like there's this additive area where they could get either a broader piece of the pie or something else if they looked at a different modality.
- [50:45]
A
So you're watching MacBreak weekly. I'm glad we brought this up because this was kind of the point of Mark Gurman's Power on newsletter on Sunday. We'll talk some more about that in a second. Mac Break Weekly with Christina Warren, who wears the watch, but not a big one. Andy Anaka, who wears the band. And the Casio. And the Casio. And Jason Snell, who's wearing his watch. You have an ultra, as do I.
- [51:14]
B
Nope, mine's just as a regular series.
- [51:16]
A
Oh, just. I'm the only one with the big one, huh?
- [51:18]
B
Regular series? Yeah.
- [51:19]
A
Mine's bigger than all of yours. And I love it. I really love it. I talk to my AI through it. I press the action button. I can have a conversation with my AI I. The only thing I don't. And the reason I wear the aura, somebody's saying, well, why do you wear the aura? Is because I don't want to wear it to bed. I don't want to sleep with a watch on. So the aura does my sleep tracking.
- [51:38]
B
Yeah, that's why I would say that, you know, Apple make a. If Apple makes a band, one of the use cases is going to be that you wear the band all the time and you take the watch off at night and then you still get all of that sleep tracking stuff. I mean then you sell another product.
- [51:51]
A
You put a sleep tracker in your mattress though. I mean there's all sorts of ways it.
- [51:55]
B
They bought a company that did that and then they discontinued the product.
- [51:58]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:58]
D
I do, I do. I mean a ring.
- [52:00]
B
Hold on, hold on.
- [52:01]
A
I just want to take a break.
- [52:01]
D
Sorry. Go, go.
- [52:02]
A
Andy. Christina, Jason, you're watching Mac pretty quickly. All right, Andy, I, I made you hold that thought.
- [52:09]
D
No, no, you're right.
- [52:10]
A
Continue on.
- [52:11]
D
I. It's rings. I wonder why Apple hasn't. We haven't heard good rumors about like an Apple ring because it does seem like a natural for them to do style plus technology plus manufacturing at scale. The only. But the. I do have a little bit of a problem with rings in that they are just by their very nature they have to be e waste in about two and a half to three years. It kind of bugs me but because the way touchable.
- [52:41]
A
I agree.
- [52:42]
D
There isn't even like a third party cowboy operation that can replace the batteries and that sort of thing once they lose their power. And so you have this $300 thing that has to cost $300 because it is such an exceptional piece of manufacturing that can't be repaired because it's such an exceptional piece of manufacturing but is going to be disposed of in two and a half to three years. That kind of bums me out and I wonder if Apple I wonder if part of the argument or excuse me, the conversations that Apple is having is that how does that fit in with we don't make plastic phones for a very good reason. Are we compromised if we make such a difficult to recycle item as a ring, would we have to actually make sure that as part of the marketing when we launch it? Here's the machine that we have built that will tear it apart and separate into recyclable components so that at least it's not going to be landfilled?
- [53:31]
C
I think you've thought of that more than anyone involved with Apple has, Andy, to be honest with you. I mean, look, AirPods are also not in any way recyclable or, or anything.
- [53:44]
A
This is our sin that I was talking about as tech journalists is that we talk about and recommend or at least in our effusive descriptions of these things, push these things. And I feel guilty because we can't recycle this stuff.
- [54:04]
B
The Pope agrees with you.
- [54:06]
A
The Pope agrees with me.
- [54:07]
B
Well, no, this is, yeah, look, I think there's the, the wanting to move forward but also coping with reality and thinking about the long term. And I think you see it in places. An example I always like to bring up is, is the iPhone where if you look at the repair ability, it started out not being particularly repairable, got worse and then has gotten a lot better. And it's because at some point to make cutting edge technology, which is what people want, you end up doing things like gluing stuff in and things that you wouldn't normally do. But it's like because people want it smaller, they want it lighter, they want the. And so you've got reasons for it. I think the question is, do you realize that in the long run that is a compromise and you need to step back from it and you need to. Do you need to change your, your ways over time or do you just not care about it? And I think that goes for a lot of categories where if you're on the cutting edge, there's going to be more disposability, but that the goal is not disposability. The goal is to get to a place where you can be more sustainable while not giving up the thing that happens when you're out on the cutting edge. Because I think, I do think that that's kind of the give and take. If you look at what Apple does now with a lot of their products is they are, you know, they have built those machines to tear all of the metals out of there and they are building more and more of the things in their products out of material extracted, you know, their recycled metals and recycled materials and a lot of that stuff recycled from Apple devices that have been, that have been captured and they've picked it all apart and they're doing more of that. But, but at the same time, you know, I think if you said you can't make AirPods unless they are, you know, that the batteries in them are replaceable or something like that, I don't think they would have made AirPods. And so that's the challenge at the,
- [55:58]
D
at the other end of the, a company of the scale of Apple or Samsung or any of these other huge, huge, huge manufacturing concerns, there is an argument that they can do anything that they think is important for them to achieve. And yeah, the iPhone has become incrementally more repairable or you might more accurately less impossible to repair for the past two or three cycles. But a lot of that has become again, once again response to EU regulations saying that this battery has to. You don't have to have a replaceable battery, but it has to be basically conceivable that this is. This battery can be replaced during the useful life of the device. And that's the reason why we suddenly have an iPhone where you literally do not have to excavate from the screen all the way to the back of the device before you can get at this consumable object. So oftentimes it is government, consumers and corporations kind of interlocking their own power and their own expressions of what is important for us to make things. Because again, I would look conceivably, God, my favorite laptop in the world that if it's not. If it's not a MacBook is the framework laptop. Just the idea of this company saying, okay, well all these manufacturers, including Apple, saying that, oh, look, if we, believe me, if we built a laptop that any user could upgrade, replace, repair using just simple tools, you wouldn't want to use it. It would be so big, it would be ungainly, like, well, no, here is basically a MacBook that you do are paying a price premium. But everything is upgradable and replaceable, again using only one tool, which one or two tools which we include inside the box. These things are possible if you think it's important. The shift is that consumers got something that was maybe more valuable than easy repairability or easy swappable batteries. And they made choices that are arguably as important for the environment as easy repairability. What they did was they make a foam that is sealed up so tight that it's probably going to live for five or six years. It's not going to die because you got caught in a rainstorm. It's probably going to survive. If you fell into a pool, you forgot you threw it in your pocket,
- [58:16]
B
but you drop it in the toilet.
- [58:17]
D
All this because it's glued up so tightly. It means that it's sealed against dust and against water and it's not going to be replaced by after an accident in two or three years. It's a complicated thing. But the thing is, sometimes these companies need to be pushed and that's why consumers need to say, here's what we want. And sometimes governments have to say, we don't care if there's no market for this. We don't care if you're saying it's impractical. We're saying that it is very, very important that you make machines with replaceable batteries. So you can either continue what you're doing and not sell in the EU or you can figure it out with your $4.5 trillion. It's up to you.
- [58:50]
B
I don't disagree. I think it's just interesting on how you. Everybody's going to have some different measurements there. But yeah, it is a push and pull. And I just, I was more saying, I think even within the company there is a push and pull where they make. Even if people are ideally, you've got a culture that is inclined to have that be more repairable and more recyclable. That culture can also be affected by the outside world, but that there are times when you compromise on it and there are times that you don't. And what I, I've seen is that Apple and making new product is not going to make it what they perceive of as worse or not be able to ship it based on something like battery replacement. But they also have this culture of clearly. And I think to Andy's point, it's also a business strategy point, which is it's a lot better if they use recycled materials than if they have to go to some country that has those materials, which is increasingly fraught. So it's, it's a little bit of both. But that's, that's, look, we say it on this podcast all the time, which is Apple is so huge and their scale is so huge now that everything they do has an enormous impact and it's a global impact and every little teeny deviation decision about what component they use or what percentage of recycled material they can put into a product has huge ramifications. So they might otherwise not go. It's, it's. I mean, again, this is why they pay the executives the big bucks.
- [60:19]
D
Yeah,
- [60:22]
A
well, we got a lot of mileage out of the Watch discussion. I'm very happy and proud. Let me see what else I can drag up to keep us going for another couple of hours here. You're watching. Quickly, the traditional dry spell before WWDC. We will cover WWDC's keynote. January, June 8th. I'm sorry, June 8th, 10am Pacific. Micah Sargent and I will do that on the Tuesday and then immediately following it'll be Mac break weekly. I do have to tell you though, that the coverage of Keynotes now is exclusively inside the club. And the reason for that is just simply that Apple will take us down if we put it on YouTube and we just don't want any more Strikes on our YouTube account. It's too important to us. So if you're not a member of the club, you won't be able to follow our keynote coverage. We did this last week with the Google I O keynote. We will be doing it in two weeks with the WWDC keynote. Most of the stuff we do in the club is public, but this will not be. So I just want to let you know and if you're not a member of the club and you do want to watch our coverage, Twitt TV Club, TWiT and of course MacBreak Weekly will be available to all and sundry and that will do our analysis. We'll have to wait a couple of weeks for Jason Snell's opinion on the whole thing. I'm very excited about this. I think WWDC is going to be the debut of the new Siri. I'm really curious, given what Google announced at Google I O and we talked about this last week, how that's going to change what Apple announces in a week from Monday.
- [62:01]
D
Honest to God, I've rarely been more excited about WWDC keynote and it's not like last year where it was make the popcorn and watch them grovel and apologize. It was no, this is legitimately a great year of opportunity. I really, really keen to see what they do with Xcode because some of the most exciting stuff that came out of Google I O last week was simply pivoting a lot of their developer tools from hey, we've got this IDE that you can do sort of agent decoding and a little bit of vive coding with to no, we are basically making that a core thing because we recognize that this is a core competency that the software engineering industry is going towards. Words I'm interested to see if some of the newest and least reported AI features that debut at WWDC is simply Xcode is now a lot easier to manage because we have an agent or we have an AI that's helping you through it. I don't think it'll be as ambitious as what Google was showing off last week, but it's going to be interesting to see if, for one thing, If Swift programming SwiftUI apps become a lot more accessible where it's not no, it's not going to be as easy as simply Vibe coding a Python script, but maybe it'll be as difficult as doing a good Apple script as opposed to doing a full Xcode project.
- [63:24]
A
I'm actually Apple do something that Google did last week which is make it somehow an agentic Siri. Christina, do you use agents in your data?
- [63:38]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [63:39]
A
And so help me out. How would I characterize an agentix series versus Siri versus what we have today?
- [63:46]
C
Well, I mean I think, I mean I think that you would have a Siri who would be set to either be set up for a specific task. Like maybe you have a health Siri who could be similar to you know, kind of like with the thing that's built into to Andy's Fitbit where I can talk to it and say hey, I want to talk to Siri right now. Like I think the way I would kind of of foresee this working would be that you wouldn't go into different modes but Siri would be able to ascertain which agent am I speaking to say okay, I'm talking about my health data right now. And so it's going to say, hey, yeah, this is, these are what your latest stats are and this is what you need to do if you want to close your circles today. And you know, this is like I've noticed like your, your, your sleep patterns going up. Maybe try going to bed at you know, this time tonight or, or whatnot versus you know, right now I think Syria is just kind of, it's, it's theoretically task based but it's not really. It's just kind of more of a general, you know, either set an alarm or you know, look up this thing for me or send this test and
- [64:41]
A
you can't right now tell Siri to remember something. Right? It doesn't have any memory.
- [64:44]
C
It doesn't have memory, it doesn't have memory. And I think that would be the biggest thing that would be great about kind of an agentic Siri would be if it has a memory of the previous conversations you've had, the previous things you've asked.
- [64:54]
A
That's what personalizes it, right?
- [64:56]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean that's what would make it, it stand out, right? Like if it knows okay, every single day, you know, Christina is setting an alarm for a certain period of time because you know, at 6:45am even though she actually, you know, wakes up at 7:15am or whatever the case may be, you know, if it's automatically going to go ahead and re set that alarm for me, you know, just, just knowing, okay, hey, do you want me to set your alarms for tomorrow?
- [65:22]
A
It's a challenge for Apple though, isn't it? Because, because memory implies some Sort of privacy invasion. Like, oh, I know you, Christina, you wake up at 7:15.
- [65:32]
C
Yes.
- [65:33]
A
Some people would say, well, I don't want Apple to know that much about it.
- [65:36]
B
But they just say it's on device and that Apple never sees it, it's encrypted and maybe it syncs with icloud, maybe it doesn't even do that. I think.
- [65:43]
A
So there are ways to dodge that privacy bullet.
- [65:46]
B
I think there are. And you know, one of the things that at least we've been thinking for the last two years as a core of Apple strategy here is app intents. The idea that every app is going to be able to kind of like break up its individual features and have them accessible via shortcuts, but also presumably via Siri. And that is how you get to agentic features in Siri. Right. And the question is, does that happen now or is the is the state of the art, as is rumored? Not necessarily that state of the art, but one of the features is like build a shortcut with, you know, with text basically. Well, you're not that far from saying ask Siri to do a task and have Siri be able to understand all of the app intents that are available to it and be able to perform that task and potentially even remember to do that task, automate that task or whatever. I'm not sure they're going to get all the way there, but I think app intents suggest that Apple has actually been thinking about doing things that are more agentic for a while. Typical for Apple, doing it through the lens of sort of app functionality. But you know, you would get there
- [66:50]
A
if you went app intents kind of maps nicely to what agentic harnesses call skills. And I also noticed that a lot of the things that I have my agent doing over and over again have actually become services on my Linux box. But Apple has launched E it could have. So what ends up happening is that the agent isn't always running. Periodically these services run like, oh, it's seven o', clock, it's time to open the curtains and shake the bed so that Christina gets up for her 8 o' clock meeting. But that could run not continuously, but as a service. Yeah, Apple can do that now, right?
- [67:34]
C
I mean, seriously, Siri can't. I mean, yeah, you would need to have it running some sort of a skill like you said, some sort of kind of cron job, self running thing, right?
- [67:42]
A
It's a cron job.
- [67:43]
C
Yeah, it's a cron job essentially. Right. And you would need to have that running Someplace. Could it run their cloud? Yeah, of course it could. Right. And your, your phone or your laptop or anything else would just be the client for that. I think they have not done that, but there's, there's nothing that would stop them from being able to do that. You know, what they, what they would charge for it and what they would make available would be up to them. But yeah, there, there'd be zero reason why you couldn't do something like that now. They just haven't. And when we talk about the privacy questions, I mean, I think that that's a fairly easy one for them to kind of get around and that this is opt in. It's not like you have to use these things. Right. So if you're uncomfortable with, you know, Apple or anybody else having this information about you, then don't use these tools. It's not.
- [68:29]
A
Yeah, I built my agent to run entirely locally. The models don't because they're frontier models. In fact, I've been using DeepSeek lately because it's really cheap.
- [68:38]
C
So cheap. I was going to say they just cut the pricing permanently. It's great.
- [68:41]
A
15 cents for a million tokens compared to like 5 bucks for ChatGPT. So deep seek is running, so I guess China is getting the prompts, but all the stuff that's running is running like all the skills, everything, all the memory, it all lives locally on a machine locally. So I guess Apple could do it in a kind of local first.
- [69:00]
D
Yeah, but this, this is why the idea of privacy. There's good enough privacy and then there's Apple's policy of no, no, no level of privacy is good enough. We want to give our users the most privacy that we can possibly give them while, while not compromising on features. And that is something that most people want as an abstract concept. If you say, hey, they've got this, Google announced this, this agentic thing, but it doesn't run exclusively locally on your phone. It actually operates in their own cloud. And that's when people will raise the red banner and say, oh God, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to entrust Google servers to like, all this information about my workflow and my email inbox. But if you say, okay, but what if you were able to simply, in English say, I want you to keep an eye on my mailbox. And every time I get, if I get emails from these two people within the 20 minutes of each other, I want you to pull the following series of reports, summarize it, send me a link to it, so I can verify what you've done on my watch. And then when I click a verify button, it means that these two people who were coming in to ask me for a report got the timely report that moment just by my touching a button on my watch. And it can do that for you whether you've got a Mac mini running 24. 7 at home or not. Because it's running an instance in a virtual server and it's always running 24 7. You don't have to do anything after you've made this request. It will simply run ad infinitum. So long as you keep paying 20 bucks a month for Gemini Pro.
- [70:34]
A
I worry about that.
- [70:36]
D
That's when people will say, I'm willing to make an open eyed, well informed deal. If I'm willing to give up maximum privacy, if that means that I can be out walking my dog and suddenly I simply have to tap a button on my watch to get this done and make sure that my coworkers get the information they want immediately instead of 20 minutes from now, that is to me worth the trade off in privacy.
- [70:59]
A
That's what I've built by hand though, and I think that is huge. I'm sure, Christina, you're doing something similar. I think that would be hugely valuable for the vast majority of iPhone users who don't know how or have the desire to do that by hand.
- [71:14]
D
And Sparks is coming to the gemini app on iOS. I think Spark is their agent.
- [71:20]
C
Yeah, it's kind of their version of openclaw, basically.
- [71:23]
D
Yeah.
- [71:24]
A
I think in a way Google could just kind of bypass Apple. It just ends up on your phone and then you don't have to use Apple at all.
- [71:32]
D
There is a. The proof is going to be in the pudding. Now obviously the fun part of these developer keynotes is that they, Google and Apple and Microsoft and everyone, they explain what's possible and what they've got planned
- [71:44]
A
and that's what they do.
- [71:45]
D
Exactly. It's going to take, it's going to take us to find out how much of this delivers, but you can't. There's. So they put together, Google put together such a, a great presentation and story about how they see what Gemini 3.5 is capable of doing and all of the other things that they've added to it. That made me think that in some circumstances what they've got going could be a challenge to part of the App Store because the idea of just on the phone being able to say, create me a widget that does this function and you don't Just simply get like, oh, a Python script that looks something up from a JSON table and then puts markdown text inside a viewport. It's like, no, it will actually create a modern looking user interface, a very modern looking widget that does all the networking for you, that does all the validation for you. And that was a very, very useful thing that can live on your home screen that you might have not found on the App Store. And if you found it, it might be like $1.50 a month, but you've got something that is specific to your needs and you have no need to go looking on the App Store for this sort of thing. Now it's not, it's not a broad thing where suddenly you don't need an App Store at all. But this is the little, this is the first, the first sign of the T Rex testing, the, testing the electric fence and seeing, oh, there's a gap right there. This is, there's, there's a, there's a hole right there that maybe could be exploited later on or is maybe the first sign of something that could be much, much bigger in two or three years. I don't think that the App Store is under real threat, but this is another instance of a certain type of use case that I would normally go to the App Store to find a solution. Now gets me thinking, perhaps I should just see if this tool can create a widget for me or this one can create a shortcut for me automatically or this one can create a Linux desktop app based on Python with a modern ui. For me, that was, it can't be done with all types of apps, but this is the first year in which that is actually not an insane way to go about finding an app to solve a problem for you.
- [73:54]
B
Now
- [73:57]
A
I think there's something interesting going on. Unfortunately, Christina won't be here next week because of Microsoft build, but we are going to take advantage of that. Getting Shelley Brisbane on to talk about these new accessibility features Apple revealed. And I, I think some are saying that what these really are are previews of features that will be available through Apple Intelligence to all of us at some point. So this is the Apple Press release from May 19 with Apple Intelligence, detailed descriptions and natural language navigation are coming to features such as Voiceover Magnifier, Voice control and Accessibility Reader. They're pitching these as accessibility features, but if you have AirPods with a camera, if you have an iPhone, if you have an Apple Watch, many of these features could reasonably be applied to Apple Intelligence generally. Right? Is this a Preview of what we might expect.
- [74:53]
D
There's a long history of accessibility features making their way. For instance, if you use a mouse or trackpad on your iPad, you are using essentially what was originally an accessory accessibility feature for iOS and iPados. And yeah, there's a lot of. Again, I'm looking forward to talking to Shelley about it because I'm not qualified to really. It all looks very, very impressive, the Apple Newsroom piece that they posted last week, but I don't know what the true meaning of it is. I do recognize features that like for instance, live captions on any audio coming through the iPhone. This came out for the Pixel two or three years ago and it's obviously a really good accessibility feature, meaning that you don't have to count on if they're not captions burned in on whatever media that you're watching, there will be an AI approximation that's at least better than nothing, hopefully. But I use that all the time for live streams where the audio is not really that good in the place where I'm listening to it, but I want to read something while I'm watching it. I just keep activating that time and time again. And these are features that affect the usability across the board, not just for people who benefit from that, specifically from accessibility features.
- [76:05]
A
Voice control gets natural language. So that's really interesting. Of course, voice control is how people control the screen when they can't use touch or a mouse. But having that natural language control of the screen, the iPhone and the iPad can easily be extended to natural language.
- [76:28]
B
Siri, keep in mind, I mean what andy said is 100% true, that a lot of features begin as accessibility features. One of the great things about accessibility, and just the fact that if you don't use accessibility features now, you probably will at some point in your life, is that some of them really are like trying to solve a specific issue involving accessibility. But there's a broader issue there and it ends up being something that reaches everybody in the user base. But the other part about announcing these features in advance is that sometimes they tip their hand a little bit and you look and you say, oh well, natural language access may suggest something about natural language access to other parts of the operating system. And you know, Apple's not going to give too much away, but they will sometimes tip their hand a little bit about what might be in the main OS release. Because remember, this is all pre announce of what's going to be in the oses this fall. And that's what I thought of the moment that I heard the words natural language control. I was like, this could be broader, couldn't be interesting.
- [77:30]
D
And last year the machine language group at Apple published a couple of papers about an AI model that can look at the user interface of a phone screen and figure out what the controls are and what the interface is. And that again seems like a very dry subject, but that, that a is good for. Again, if you're trying to create an accessibility feature so that someone can simply describe what they're looking at and say, yeah, click the OK button or create an email and then send it with that kind of verbiage. But it also means that if you have an app or a website that is not wired up for app intents, for instance, it can still figure out how to send a message through a messaging app. It can still figure out how to operate a fitness app. It basically is the gateway to making any Surface on your iPhone or iPad or Mac into an agent operable resource.
- [78:24]
A
Accessibility Reader adapts even more. This is all from the quote Accessibility press release. Accessibility Reader is a customized reading experience for users with a wide range of disabilities, from dyslexia to low vision. And with Apple Intelligence, the reading experience is more accessible than ever. Accessibility Reader works on more complex source material like scientific articles, handling text with multiple columns, images and tables on demand summaries provide readers the option to get an overview of the article built in translation, it can generate subtitles for video. All of this of course immediately applicable Accessibility, but maybe to all of us. And I really am intrigued by. Do you think they'll talk about AirPods with cameras on the eights?
- [79:08]
C
No, no, no, no. If that's the thing that, that, that's a September announcement, I think I should
- [79:13]
D
have done that in harmony.
- [79:15]
A
No, no, no, no, no, no.
- [79:19]
B
You always announcements that are where you have suspicion like well, I mean it's nice that this is a feature that you can do on your iPhone camera.
- [79:29]
C
Right.
- [79:29]
B
But it would. And then you think but cool. It would be better if that was on a camera that was always looking everywhere around you. And like that. That stuff does happen sometimes, but they're not, you know, they don't. They very rarely will pin a hardware announcement on if there's a hardware announcement at WWDC at all. They usually try to make it sort of plausibly developer related, which is why. Yeah. So I think like if we have any chance of any hardware and I don't think we do, it would probably be like the Mac Studio. But given the chip shortages now, I think that's Less likely that we would see something like Mac Mini or Mac Studio being announced. Because they don't need to do hardware announcements to wwdc. They just don't.
- [80:11]
D
Yeah, that's what I mean. But this will be. There's two parts to wwdc, obviously. The keynote gets the most scrutiny. The developer keynote gets the second most scrutiny. And then there are like a hundred specific developer videos the rest of the week. And it'll be two weeks later you finally got around to something with this totally nondescript title that seems so boring. And that's the reason why you waited to the very last group of viewers to see it. And then he says, and so, like, if you were to have like a holographic display on a fitness watch, this would be how you would wire up. Wait, wait, back 10, back 10, back 10. What did he say? Holographic.
- [80:47]
B
What if you had an app on an iOS device, let's say an iPad, and you resized it to be wider. You should probably. If you're an iPhone developer, you should probably should probably do that. And everybody's like, okay, holding iPhone. Got it. But they won't say that. That's. That is.
- [81:07]
A
So we have to read between the lines as we, as we listen.
- [81:10]
B
Absolutely. 100%. This is what they did. I mean, the first time they went to flexible size classes. Instead of every iPhone app being hard coded pixel perfect, they spent two years actually saying, it's not always going to be this way. It would be really wise if you did this this way. I actually wonder if they might do something like offer a. Almost like a Potemkin feature, like wide iPhone app mode on the iPad where it's like, you know, we're gonna add this nice new feature where you can run an iPhone app and have it be resizable on the iPad. And by default, what it's gonna do is it's gonna. If you're in landscape, it's gonna go to double wide. And you. I like that. Double wide mode. And everybody else will be like, or if you have a folding iPhone that unfolds. I see. But you know, you could do that. You could say, well, no, this is really just. I mean, because first off, the iPhone. IPhone apps on the iPad still kind of suck and they should do a better job there. But this would be a great way to lean into iPhone app developers and say, no, really, really, your apps need to be able to expand and you'll get this benefit on the iPad and anything else we release.
- [82:22]
A
Great article. From a website. I'm not Familiar with called gadget hacks. IOS27AI voice control. What it tells us about the Siri revamp and it talks about the notion that. Well, what this tells you is that Siri can read the screen, can see the screen, knows what's happening on the screen. And that is a very key AI capability for a lot of things. There's also this issue or capability of Siri as a router routing requests to external models when Apple's own falls short. And that's something I think a lot of people are playing with. The idea that you might have multiple models, you might have Siri on device. I mean Apple's already doing this. Right. And then you might have Gemini or OpenAI available to you. Sure, right now that's in the chat interface. But that could go beyond simple chat.
- [83:18]
B
No, the way Apple has their infrastructure, they're not doing this now. But you could absolutely have a cascade of start on device and have a model on device that quickly determines if it can be done on device and if it can't send it to private cloud compute. Right. Like that. There's a whole space there to have an efficient kind of like cascade of models and have it the right apply the right model. And who knows, maybe that's even like Apple's private cloud computer. Maybe it goes to Google's private cloud for a more Gemini kind of task and they can make that seem fairly seamless. And that's a smart way to do it for sure.
- [83:57]
A
Kadgethack says watch closely on the 8th whether Apple identifies the model powering voice control, whether it confirms that model is the same architecture going into the new Siri. Third, whether on screen awareness ships at iOS27 launch or gets staged across subsequent updates worth how broadly app intents is expanded. We talked about that a little bit earlier.
- [84:19]
B
Yeah. Think about on screen awareness is like on screen awareness means you don't need app developers to do all that extra work. This is a thing that like Mac users, if you've never used Keyboard Maestro, I'm just going to say this is not my pick of the week because I've done it before. But like Keyboard Maestro is incredible. Or if you use computer use mode in Claude or anything like that, that. Because what it means is if, if you can't script something, if you can't use shortcuts to do something, you can literally say open this app and just click this button. Or even like if you see this thing on screen, click this button. If you don't click the tab and then click the button and It'll just do it and it's using accessibility features that are built into the OS that you can do this sort of thing. And it's. Yes, it is the last resort but it's amazing and like once, once the, the LLM or whatever assistant you've got wants to like if it can see what's on your screen, then it doesn't matter if that app doesn't support whatever like if, if it can. If if can know or you can tell it. I want you to tap on this and then tap on that and then share it it and put it on the clipboard and then we'll take it from there or whatever. That's a. I mean it's a big deal because while you would want it to be a more integrated approach using app intents or something like that.
- [85:48]
C
Wow.
- [85:48]
B
It is really amazing for the app to see the context. There's a. There's a utility right now and the name escapes me. I'll look it up. That is a. An auto Completer for Mac that just came out a couple weeks ago and one of its features is it uses accessibility to look at your screen. But that means that if like you're writing an email about something that's on a web page, it also knows that that web page is open and it knows all the wording on the web page. And so as you type, if you're typing things that are on the webpage, it will suggest those as autocompletes because it knows what that text is like. It really. Yeah. The more your system knows what you're seeing, the more powerful it can be. So I love it. More of it, please.
- [86:30]
A
Well, so this all makes it very exciting. Do you think Christina Apple will have what it takes to become a peer with the existing agentic solutions from Anthropic and OpenAI and Spark of course from Google. Do you think that they will go that far or are they going to take smaller baby steps?
- [86:52]
C
I think it depends on what they want to do and I think it depends on of. So far, all of their experiments and kind of entrees into AI have been more limited or have not worked super well if we go back on the last two years. So I don't expect them to come out this year and be going head to head on the highest end kind of features and capabilities that the Frontier Labs have A because they don't have their own Frontier model, they're obviously paying for someone else's, although they might be doing a lot of. Of training and other sorts of customization data to really make it refined and do things that will make it very different from a stock Gemini model. But B, I think that they have to kind of prove themselves. And so this is not the moment where I don't want to see Apple come out and bite off more than they can chew when the last time they did that it was a disaster for everyone involved. I really want, want to have a good Siri and to have them kind of meet us where the table stake things are. And I don't necessarily know if I need them to do the full on agentic stuff that you're seeing from the other frontier labs. I also don't know. I mean, the thing is, is that because like people like you and I, Leo, like we're so embedded in the developer tooling space and all the changes that are happening in that area that for us, some of the stuff that we'll see come out on the consumer end will be like, okay, but that. So however many months ago or however
- [88:19]
A
many years ago, that's so last January.
- [88:21]
C
Right, right. Whereas I think we have to kind of remind ourselves that, you know, Apple is like, granted they, they do make developer tools and people use their products to build many of the things that we have. But like, they're still kind of a general consumer company so they don't have to be as cutting edge on all those other things. It just has to work really, really well when it does come out.
- [88:42]
A
So it kind of reminds me of the early days of MP3 players. The first MP3 players were big and clunky and hard to use and had terrible user interfaces. Apple was able to, this is what Apple's.
- [88:54]
C
That's what they're great at is they, they kind of wait until a lot of the, the, you know, kinks are, are worked out and they are able to put it in a very refined user interface. The MP3 player is a great example. I mean, they were expensive, they didn't work for a lot of reasons. It wasn't just the clunkiness and the, you know, the interface. It was that to get a card, you know, which is what people were using at the time to get an hour's worth of music. It was $100 to get, you know, an SD card or a compact flashcard for 64 megabytes or something. And there wasn't, you know, a great software solution to it. And so, you know, first they, they have itunes, you know, which they, they bought from someone else and kind of rebadged. And then they were able to kind of you know, build in a way of okay, we'll make it very easy to sync to our device. But beyond that, they were the smart ones who said no. Rather than, you know, messing with people having to put removable cards in, we're just going to give you a ton of storage and you're not going to think about it. And that completely changed what everyone else was doing. I was in high school at the time and I had a mini disc player and I had MP3s that I stored on MiniDisc because that was a hack to do it less expensively. But when the ipod came out it was like, no, who's going to be doing anything other than what the ipod does? So I think that they have the benefit to your point of doing that and I also just don't think, I mean, I think that they will be doing some agentic stuff, but it doesn't, they don't need to own it end to end. As long as you can have those agentic experiences within the Apple ecosystem, I think for now that's enough. Now if we're going to be talking a couple of years from now, maybe that changes. But I think that, that all they need to do now is still make sure that the platform where, you know, everybody's using their devices, which really is iPhone, is still a good place to be able to run those agentic experiences from, from others. What will be interesting I think is when we talk about things like openclaw and Gemini Spark and these other types of always on things, it will be interesting to see if they add anything to imessage to make that easier in terms of treating that like, okay, hey, maybe here's a protocol or developer tool where you could use this to have a completely Apple federated way of communicating with and securely communicating with your devices that I would love to see Telegram right now.
- [91:05]
A
What are you using?
- [91:06]
C
Yeah, I mean I'm kind of using a mix of things and like I have Blue Bubbles installed and because I have enough devices that I could do that. But like, yeah, I'm using Telegram because that's. It works everywhere, that it works everywhere and, and I don't need to worry about it. But I would love, and, and this wouldn't even require them opening, you know, itunes up, although I would love that. But if they had a federated way of saying, okay, this is like a, you know, a bot that we're verifying that we're saying has a direct connection with, you know, your machine and that, that you can create like that, you know, kind of like secure interface between the two. Like that would be fantastic. I would love to see something like that.
- [91:40]
A
I use a, on my watch, I use a telegram. The nice about telegram is an open standard. So there's a, there's an app on my watch called Pigeon that is kind of a better telegram and that I can use to talk to my agent, dictate to my agent. Even when I was in Hawaii I was able to talk to my agent through my watch. That's pretty cool. And I think Apple, because they have messages, they really, they could make that a lot better. I didn't do the blue bubbles thing because it just was clunky.
- [92:10]
C
It's clunky and it's not like the most ideal thing. And so. Yeah, so most people wind up using another discord. Exactly. And even if you have a Mac Mini that you're running it off of, you might not always be in a situation where you can always access imessage for one reason or another. And so again, like that would be a really great thing if they open up APIs for developers to be able to say, okay, we're going to recognize that this activity that's taking place is with a bot on your account that you've federated and that you've verified and have, you know, authorized and approved versus having to have people use, you know, third party chat software which might not be secure and, and might might, you know, potentially open up other problems.
- [92:52]
A
So you said you wanted your Steve Jobs American Innovation Coin. We're all very jealous of Scooter X and our club twit. He says, my Steve Jobs $1American innovation coins arrived. The roll I received has the front of the coin facing out at both ends so you can't see the Steve Jobs picture on it. The Mint says the direction the coin coins in, each roll is random. And I'm guessing that you don't want to open that roll because that will reduce the value. I don't know. I would want to see what's on the other side.
- [93:24]
B
I don't know. I ordered mine.
- [93:26]
A
Did you?
- [93:28]
B
Look, I know enough people that I'm going to give those out. That's going to be awesome.
- [93:31]
A
Oh, that'd be a good thing. Yeah. You got how many challenge coin?
- [93:35]
B
I don't know what, how many are in a roll. Whatever that was, that was my limit. I wasn't going to buy like a sack or whatever they sell. I bought a roll. There'll be enough there for me to keep. Keep one and I'll give.
- [93:44]
A
That's a Great challenge. Steve Jobs challenge coin, right? Yeah, but don't take them to wwdc. You'll, you'll be, I'll set off the alarms. Right.
- [93:53]
B
Don't put them in a sock and whirl it over your head either. That'd be a bad thing.
- [93:57]
A
Christina did not order them, so.
- [94:00]
C
Not. Well, I, I, I didn't. They were sold out. And I didn't bother to put in the, you know, alert me thing, what
- [94:05]
B
you have to do, because I got an alert on email the next morning, and it was, they were already gone. And then I said, text me me. And then I, I, it was early in the morning and I woke up and I'm like, reading things and I get a text that says, they're available now. And I was like, it's the mint.
- [94:20]
A
Make more.
- [94:21]
B
Well, they did make. I don't know what's going on, like, with their shipping and, and what they've got and all that, but I did manage to get some.
- [94:27]
A
So they, the technology.
- [94:29]
C
They had the technology. They can do it. 9,600. I'm like, give us more.
- [94:35]
A
They're more valuable the fewer they you make, right?
- [94:37]
C
I, who cares? Come on. I'm, these are, these are collector coins. I'm like, now I'm looking at ebay and there is someone who's selling one for $3.30 or best offer. I might pay. I might pay.
- [94:49]
D
I mean, that's, that's fine.
- [94:50]
C
That's fine. That's fine.
- [94:51]
D
That's like, that's like squished penny money.
- [94:53]
B
You have to give me one the next time.
- [94:55]
C
My whole thing is I'm just not gonna like. And, and I'm saying this to hold myself accountable. Let's be very clear on that. I don't want to spend an exorbitant amount of money, money for stupid dollar coins, for, like, the novelty of it. Right.
- [95:06]
A
Because they're not face value. Right? They're, they're right, Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a dollar, right?
- [95:11]
D
You can put it, you can put it for a bag machine and get a dollar.
- [95:14]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [95:15]
A
Well, yeah, but you'll never see it in a vending machine.
- [95:18]
D
So the one that I'm saying, I'm
- [95:19]
A
saying that, like the one that Scooter X got, the, the 25 coin roll, which is the face value is 25 bucks, costs $61.
- [95:27]
C
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
- [95:29]
A
But I love the challenge coin I idea. Now I have to get some.
- [95:32]
C
I was going to say, like, I, I, I, I would spend like, the four time Multiple, right? Like that's fine, but I don't want to spend like, like the 50 time multiple. Like I'm not doing that. And that's.
- [95:41]
A
They have a subscription.
- [95:42]
C
I'm saying that to like hold myself accountable.
- [95:44]
A
You could subscribe and then you'll get them.
- [95:46]
D
No, so remember how they, they have to, they have to defeat that, that, that really, really wonderful like trick that they, that happened was it 15 or 20 years ago where they used to sell coins, money at face value and you could charge it. So there are people who are basically, I'm going to buy $100, $1,000 worth of, worth of dollar dollar bills, basically get $1,000 worth of points on my card. And then basically I basically just traded $1,000 for $1,000 cash. And now I have a thousand dollars worth of points, but I still have the money to spend. So that's. I like to think that there's probably a profit margin involved here, but it closes off a very nice little loophole.
- [96:26]
A
I guess. You subscribe, you'd get each state in succession. Because I went there and I was almost made an order and then I realized, no, no, that's the Minnesota one that commemorates mobile refrigeration.
- [96:40]
D
They're not all cool.
- [96:41]
A
I don't really want that one. So, yeah, I might have to find the Steve jobs American Innovation 1.
- [96:51]
D
They still got to compete against the commemorative like Apollo 11 lunar landing Eisenhower silver.
- [96:58]
A
Ooh, ooh, look at that. That's cool. That one. You've been used.
- [97:03]
D
Yeah, well, that's my grandparents. There's a story behind it. My grandparents used to go to Las Vegas like every few years. And this is how cool they were. For an Italian immigrant and the child of an Italian immigrant. We went to the house for Sunday dinner, like all my family and my cousins, whatever. And the long table was set with the second table for all the children. And at some point in the dinner, like you said, everybody lift up your plates. And my grandmother had put like an Eisenhower like Apollo silver dollar underneath every single plate.
- [97:41]
A
And so it's like, oh, so I keep this in. That is, that's kind of a nice. That's more than just a silver dollar. That's a memory. That's really cool.
- [97:49]
D
Yeah. And also it's a nice. I mean, God, this is why they had so much trouble like getting people to under. To get, get behind these like tiny, tiny new like dollar coins because these, like, you could put someone's eye out with this thing. So big.
- [98:02]
A
So I just put a little. I gave it My phone number. And I said, text me if there are any more of those mobile refrigeration coins. No, wait a minute. No. Text me if there are any more of those Steve Jobs coins.
- [98:15]
D
Utah, birthplace of twine,
- [98:20]
A
I guess. It's an annual release, so California is in that annual release, but so is Minnesota. So is Arkansas, Iowa. You want. You want to make sure you get the right state, I guess, is what I'm. What I'm saying.
- [98:35]
D
California. It is a cool coin. We love Steve Jobs, but it's also a cool looking coin. They're not.
- [98:41]
A
Is it golden?
- [98:43]
D
It's. It's clad. Like all.
- [98:45]
A
It's not actual solid.
- [98:46]
D
Like all $. No, no.
- [98:47]
A
Like all.
- [98:48]
D
Like all dollar coins are.
- [98:49]
A
It's like the Trump phone. It's a thin veneer on top of a cheap zinc stamp.
- [98:56]
D
Was anybody else surprised that that thing had 512 gigs of storage? Like that's okay for 500 bucks. Not a bad.
- [99:03]
A
I should point out it's the same phone that T Mobile gives you for free if you sign up. But it's not gold. That's the difference.
- [99:09]
D
Yeah, but it's one of those Jaejun phones that puts the correct number of stripes of the American flag. This 11 stripes is.
- [99:17]
A
Can you believe that?
- [99:18]
D
Special.
- [99:19]
A
Can you freaking believe that?
- [99:21]
B
Yeah.
- [99:22]
A
They didn't even get the flag correct.
- [99:24]
D
Of course, the question is, which of the two colonies did they specifically exclude? You know, that there were.
- [99:29]
A
Well, it's going to be the blue colonies, right? Or I guess in those days they were. What are they, Tories or wigs?
- [99:36]
D
So we know that New York was one because that was the. That was the. The district attorney that. That got the felony conviction.
- [99:42]
A
There you go.
- [99:42]
B
Taxachusetts.
- [99:43]
A
Letitia James immediately removed from the American flag. I. Enough of that. Let's talk about the Vision Pro.
- [99:52]
B
Oh, let's.
- [99:54]
C
What do you see? What do you know?
- [99:57]
D
It's time to talk to Vision Pro. Yes.
- [100:00]
A
From America's number one Vision Pro podcast. It's time for the Vision Pro segment.
- [100:06]
B
It is.
- [100:07]
A
I only have one story, but maybe Andy has found more. Real Marie. You say Real Madrid?
- [100:15]
D
Yep.
- [100:16]
A
You saw it? The documentary is out.
- [100:18]
B
I watched it. Yeah, it came out Friday.
- [100:20]
A
Is it good? The weight of greatness.
- [100:22]
C
Okay.
- [100:23]
B
Yeah.
- [100:23]
A
I mean, the weight of the Vision
- [100:25]
B
Pro, it is the ponderous. Like, is it a sports doc with the music where they've got some really great sports footage and then a lot of it is, like, uplifting music as athletes say platitudes while you see them practicing or walking into the Stadium. Yes, because all of these are like that. But I will say this, the big highlight of this, I'm going to be Alex here for a minute is they say that they shot this with more than 30 Blackmagic Cine immersive cameras. And it shows. And this is the difference between the immersive stuff that is being made now and the immersive stuff that that was being made when the Vision Pro first came out. And you could see the evolution. Here is blackmagic, which we've talked about before. I think they did not believe there was much of a market for immersive cameras and they were very surprised by the amount of a market and it's been hard to get them. They have produced a bunch of them now. And this movie, so many of those early immersive movies, you could feel that they only had one or two cameras. So like they could capture an event, but they could really only capture it from one angle or maybe two angles. And this one has many, many cameras positioned in various places around the stadium. So you can actually see that exciting goal from multiple perspectives, which is really nice. They've got one high up so you can like see the players right beneath you, which is an amazing perspective about soccer tactics that is like nothing I've ever seen before. They had them in the goal, they had them all over the place. And they had one with the 94 odd year old oldest member of the supporter group as he watched it in his home. They had one with, with the president of the supporters group who was a bartender. And it was at the bar. So there was a bar.
- [102:04]
A
Was this all at the same time? Like they were doing this simultaneously, same
- [102:06]
B
time, the same match. And a taxi driver who was watching it on his phone in his cab pulled off to the side of the road and all of the same reactions to the same things happening.
- [102:17]
A
Oh, that's cool.
- [102:18]
B
In the early ones you would have different shots, but they would from be from different times. Because we only have two cameras, we got to move them if we want to. And so, yeah, it's just, it's maturing once again. It's a 20 minute minute doc that only shows you tantalizing bits of sports footage. And they've, you know, instead of it being like a year plus after the event, this was like six months ago, so seven months ago. So that's better. I guess it's the same old story. But so for me, like, are there amazing shots in it? Of course there are. There are amazing shots in every immersive movie that's made. But what I really got out of it now is the feeling like this is actually shot by people who can get the shots they want because they've got cameras that they didn't used to have because it used to be you can have one or maybe two and that's it. And now they can. They can get two dozen of these things and put them everywhere, and that makes a difference. So it's a. It's an incremental step in this totally experimental format.
- [103:17]
A
Nice.
- [103:18]
B
But it's fine.
- [103:19]
A
And that's the Vision Pro segment.
- [103:20]
C
Thank you.
- [103:21]
B
Signing off.
- [103:23]
C
My done talking.
- [103:25]
B
The vision are done.
- [103:27]
A
But speaking of football, the. What is it? The most beautiful sport. What do they call it?
- [103:32]
B
The beautiful game.
- [103:34]
A
The beautiful game. Apple TV will broadcast the first major professional live sporting event shot entirely on iPhone 17 Pro did, in fact.
- [103:44]
B
It was Saturday.
- [103:45]
A
It was Saturday.
- [103:46]
C
That's awesome.
- [103:48]
B
Okay, look, look, it looked fine. They had cameras everywhere, too, including in the goal and all of that. And this is just like the conversation about how Apple shoots its events on iPhone. The point here is to create a little bit of a marketing halo around the iPhone that fundamentally, the camera that you have in your pocket is so good that you could attach it to a professional rig and shoot a movie with it or shoot an Apple event with it, or in this case, shoot a soccer match with it. And it's true. And then, you know, then the Internet posts a thing that says, oh, my God, look, they had to put it in this whole rig, and they had to put a giant lens that cost $20,000 in front of it in order to get it to shoot it. And it's like, well, yeah, well, yeah, of course that's what they use when they shoot a soccer match. It's not. The point is not that you can just pull one out of your pocket and just hang, hold it out there and go like, oh, I'm shooting the soccer match. But the point is like that, that inside the phone are the optics and the quality to make it possible. So they did baseball. They had a camera at some baseball games on a rig with a black magic breakout box. And they did it with all the cameras at this one match. And, you know, it looked fine, it looked normal, but it, you know, it's proving the same point as the shot on iPhone and the Apple event. It's like, it's not shot on a stock iPhone with nothing.
- [105:06]
A
What's amazing is the point is just do it.
- [105:09]
D
Yeah, but even so, like, the Apple insider had a nice roundup of like, they're following commentary like that was happening live, like about the show, about the, about the game, like on Reddit and elsewhere. And the consensus was that every time that there's like a close up, it's really, really great. Every time there's like a wide shot of the field, like quote being at the match felt like being at the match. And also watching through an iPhone 17 the grasp of textures look smeared or muddy during pans and transitions. Others noted the issues were more noticeable larger televisions where compression artifacts and sharpening were easier to spot. So it was like, I'm going to
- [105:47]
B
just be honest, people are looking for it and so they see it, but that's not representative. Especially during a live stream where your bandwidth is going to be the biggest impact. I watched a replay, it looked normal.
- [105:56]
D
It's just you're also looking for it when the hardware that was designed and optimized specifically for this type of use is in use. And you don't tend to.
- [106:06]
B
No. When the story is what camera is shooting the show, you are looking at the, you're looking for changes in what it looks like. And if you're just watching the sport, you're not. And it's a human observer issue more than anything else.
- [106:20]
D
I just, I don't think it's baloney that Apple's doing this. I do, I. But I understand that this is a stunt. This is, this is like no, of course no sense. No sensible broadcaster would use a consumer grade phone, even an Apple Apple top of the line phone for anything like this. Isn't it great that hey, wow, look, this is even like conceivably possible. Even if we put it in a harness and put all this other stuff on it. I'm just saying that it's not. I just feel like it's kind of weak sauce. It's like it's being used for stuff that no buyer of this phone is ever going to use it for. If they are trying to tell it it's a great cut. It's the best content creator tool that there is. There are more effective ways of demonstrating it. I think again, it's a nice little gimmick but to me it just, it's like a stun. It's like over the weekend where they decided, hey, Oscar Mayer, why don't we like do like a NASCAR race but with wienermobiles? It's like again, you got us to think about the wiener mobile.
- [107:15]
B
It is a stunt.
- [107:17]
C
It's definitely a stunt, but I don't think, I mean, I'll defend it a Little bit. Just because I do think that it is notable. Even if a consumer is never going to use this in this way, the fact that, that a $2,000 camera, granted you're putting $20,000 of equipment around it is still able to get you broadcast quality, I think that's actually pretty incredible. Especially when the other cameras that you be buying to put in that $20,000 rig, let's be very clear, no matter what you're going to be doing, you're going to be spending that much money on lenses and breakout boxes and other stuff would cost in most cases many, many times more than that and be much larger. So I fully agree it's a gimmick. But I also, I'm not mad at it because at the very least, if you're an individual, let's say you run your own business and you're thinking, okay, do I need to rent out a big bunch of, you know, studio gear to shoot, you know, the commercial, my local ad that I'm going to put on Facebook or whatever. No, actually you don't. Your iPhone, even if you don't have a 17, your last generation iPhone is probably going to do a really good job. I think that, that that message maybe is it, maybe it's not as elegant as it could be, but that does eventually kind of trickle down.
- [108:25]
B
I think it's a, I think it's a gimmick, but I think it's a branding gimmick where the point is to say, yeah, the iPhone camera is this good, that, that you could use it in a professional context with the accoutrements and you could still do it because it's that good that the core of it, the core camera part of it is good enough to do that. But it is. No, it is absolutely a gimmick. It's one that they have. It's not the only thing they do, but it is a thing they do. They especially since they have sports rights. I will, I want to take issue with one thing you said which is no, no self respecting broadcaster would do this. I would say if somebody does the math and finds out that it's actually a lot cheaper to use iPhones to shoot.
- [109:05]
C
That's my point.
- [109:06]
B
With the rigs and everything, they would do it, but I'm not sure that's actually true, but they would.
- [109:12]
D
I was referring to like a professional sports at this highest level. I think that, I think that that's a good, I think that you're going to find. I wouldn't be surprised if there are all kinds of consultants out there that says basically for minor league, like AAA ball, for like college ball, that basically we basically I've, I can, I can come to your field through your event with like two pelican cases and basically be live broadcasting like your game and, and giving you feeds that the people in the booth can then call the show from. And it will be more than good enough for Facebook live, for Instagram, for any streaming platform, for YouTube, for any streaming platform you want. If you've got like a high def college cable station, it's good enough for that too. I'm just saying that, I mean, I think I'm arguing.
- [110:03]
B
You're making a quality argument. And I guess I would say, cause I'm not an expert, we would have to listen to the broadcast experts about this. But if it's the same quality and it's cheaper, they would be interested. My guess is they wouldn't do it with everything. They would do it with ones that need to be roving or lighter or easier and all that. But like, if it's cheaper and just as good, that would be the argument. I'm not convinced that either of those is actually true. But there is a point at which they would be like, look, you know, we, we like this. I will also say, I don't know if this is true about the MLS game, but the major league baseball games that they did last fall, they weren't even using most of the features of the iPhone. Right. Like it was, I think it was 1080. It might have been HDR. It might not have been.
- [110:42]
D
But like, I'm not even sure these image playground. Come on.
- [110:46]
B
I'm not, I'm not sure if these, what if the stunts. I'm not sure these stunts are even actually pushing the iPhone's camera that hard.
- [110:54]
C
No, I don't think they are. I mean, they use drones for a lot of these broadcasts. Right? For a lot of these games they have, they have massive drones, which granted are going to be better than what you can get for the consumer. But it's not like they're, they're leaps and bounds better. Like the sensors are not demonstrably that different from what's in an iPhone. And that's a very common thing that you have in professional sports.
- [111:12]
B
They can all do 4K HDR wireless at this point.
- [111:14]
C
Right, Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, like, I'm with you, Jason. I don't think this actually would turn out to be cheaper for a lot of people, especially if you've already invested in the equipment. But the fact that It's a nice thing for them to brag on. It's a gimmick for sure, but it is a gimmick. I'm not at it.
- [111:30]
B
Marketing. I'm with you. It's a marketing gimmick. What does it mean? I mean, anybody who's trying to do a gotcha out there is sort of like missing the point of it anyway. Just like with the made it, you know, made with an iPhone for all the Apple events. It's like it, like, yeah, it's a gimmick. I'm not too mad at it. I think it's fun that they're good. The whole point I take away from it is isn't it interesting that you did a stunt where you shot a whole match with iPhones and it was okay, and then I take nothing further away from it.
- [111:58]
D
Nothing broke down. Yeah. That's impressive.
- [112:01]
A
Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
- [112:04]
B
See, Leo, we're like your own little agentic model. You just throw it. Throw a scrap at us, and we
- [112:09]
A
go throw little things into the cage and you guys toss it back and forth.
- [112:14]
D
And we also often hallucinate thanks to
- [112:17]
A
some of the stuff that we're watching. Mac Break Weekly with Jason, Andy and Christina. And it's always a pleasure to have all three of you on our microphones. Next on MacBreak weekly are picks of the week. I admit, I got suckered. I saw a microphone. So one of the things I did when I was in Hawaii, I really started thinking about, and actually this applies to our previous conversation. What would be the minimum kit I could take with me on the road to do a podcast? And after using, you know, the Insta360 camera and lights and a bunch of stuff, I thought, this is overkill. It's not giving me a great picture. On the final show I did there, which was a twit, I ended up using my iPhone with camo, and it was better. And then one of the things I struggled with a little bit was the microphone. And you saw me kind of at one point holding it in my hand. I really couldn't. Couldn't get a good microphone. Obviously, these are going to be the best, these kinds of studio mics, like the Heil PR40 we use with dynamic coils and all of that stuff. But what I'm really intrigued by is would it be cool if I could just have some sort of little lapel mic that I could wear like this that I wouldn't have to hold up, that could go directly into my iPhone, provide audio into the iPhone and sound, it wouldn't be as good, but maybe 90% as good as a heil. And then I saw these insta360 mics and I said, I gotta have them because they have an E ink screen on them. And I put the little twit. Look at this on my lapel. I'm wearing it.
- [114:01]
C
So cool.
- [114:02]
A
It's got the little twit logo. In fact, I have two of them. So to distinguish them, one of them has the twit logo facing left and one of them has a twit logo facing right. So I know which is which. And you can actually put text on here. You put anything on here. It's an E ink screen, but it's like a mic flag. And the sound quality is really good. I actually don't know if I can get you the sound quality now. During the show. I'd have to kind of. I don't know what I'd have to do. I'd have to change it.
- [114:32]
D
Please tell me that the. That the phone app that it comes with with has a feature where you can take a picture of your shirt and it will camouflage the. It'll camouflage the microphone so it blends in with the.
- [114:43]
A
Oh, wouldn't that be clever? Yes, it would be very clever. Honestly, I feel like this is a really good alternative for me. You see, I have the transmitter. It just. It plugs into the. It has a little USB C adapter plugs into the bottom of it. But it also comes. Comes with analog cables you can plug into your SLR and so forth. I feel like this is a pretty good solution, certainly for somebody who wanted to walk around with a camera and, you know, do social media and that kind of thing. I've been listening to some samples from this. I've recorded some samples. I think it's a pretty good sounding quality on this and it does pretty good noise reduction as well. I'm very happy the Insta360 Mic Pro and I really like it that you can put your logo on it.
- [115:39]
B
Also a gimmick, but a great one.
- [115:40]
A
It's a gimmick. I bought the one with two mics and a receiver and it has a little. The receiver has and comes with a little charging case that you could put it in so you can charge it up. All three of them. Charge them up. And it's very compact.
- [115:54]
B
Does the receiver record or do you
- [115:56]
A
have to have a receiver? The mics record so you can get a local recording on the mic, but the receiver, so you can also send via Bluetooth.
- [116:05]
C
So it'll do both.
- [116:06]
A
It'll do both local and that's cool.
- [116:10]
B
So you could do a whole session and then just connect and download the.
- [116:13]
A
So if there's any wireless switches, you have a recording on the mic.
- [116:17]
B
That's awesome.
- [116:18]
A
329.99 for the two transmitters, the one receiver and that includes the battery case.
- [116:22]
B
This is a sound nerdy thing, but you didn't mention it does 32 bit float which means you don't over modulate. This is for people who don't know the. The latest generation of audio gear all does 32 bit float which means you no longer like if you have the volume. Used to be you had the volume up too high and you would just over modulate and blow everything out and it would be unusable recordings. And with 32 bit float doesn't happen. Doesn't matter what volume you set it to. Basically it will just get it right and you can fix it later if you need to. It's awesome, right? So much better.
- [116:50]
A
So I. I think the next time I'm in Hawaii or remotely buy more stuff.
- [116:57]
B
Aren't you.
- [116:57]
C
I was going to say. Leo, have you. Have you used the. Because. Because Rode has like the Pocket series that also has similar features and then
- [117:03]
A
I have the Insta.
- [117:04]
C
DJI has those too. How have you used.
- [117:06]
A
I have the DJI ones and I would say this is marginally better than the DJI ones. The noise cancellation on the DJI gets a little thin and I think it does a bet this. These Instas do better than the dji. So. Yeah. Yeah. That was the only reason I shouldn't have bought this is I had just recently purchased the DJI version.
- [117:24]
C
Yeah. Because I have the Mic 2. I don't have the Mic 3 because one of them came with the Pocket 3. And then I got extra ones and I like those a lot because similar to what Jason said, it does the float stuff, it will record locally as well as on the receiver itself, which is nice. And then I've got the receiver so I can use it with an iPhone. But I know I'm intrigued by this
- [117:48]
A
because this comes with all the same accessories that the DJI does. The analog thing, it has the kitty and the nice thing about, you know, the little air kitty. But the nice thing about that is it clips on the top so it doesn't actually hide the logo.
- [118:01]
C
That's cool. And have a little ink thing like that's. That's. I like it. I'm not mad at it.
- [118:07]
A
My biggest thing about the DJI's is it looks like a little ugly blob on, on your, on your shirt, but this. And I'm using the magnetic clip which I just dropped somewhere. But I'll find it this. Because it has a logo on it. It kind of looks cool.
- [118:25]
D
Yeah.
- [118:26]
A
And it identifies who you are. It's a, it's a built in mic flag. So anyway, I just thought. I mean, I'm a nerd, I'm a mic nerd. But I can get this with the magnet. I get this pretty close to my mouth and I can aim. It's the top address. So I can aim it kind of my mouth. I think that's one of the reasons it sounds pretty good. I think from now on, I think this is my remote kit. It's going to be basically an iPhone and the Insta360 Mic Pro.
- [118:49]
C
I mean, I think that's awesome. I mean especially since, you know, like DJI isn't allowed to sell in the US right now. We don't know when they will.
- [118:55]
A
They can't sell the mics either?
- [118:57]
C
No, they can't sell anything.
- [118:58]
A
Oh, that's a falling.
- [119:00]
C
We can sell the existing stuff. Sorry. They can't sell new things. Sorry. If it's already been released, then you can buy and they can continue to do it. But like whenever the four comes out, they're probably gonna have to release it under a different name.
- [119:12]
A
That's crazy.
- [119:13]
C
But the upside is that means that some of us, Leo, you and I, we could save money and not buy things we don't need and just use our existing iPhones. If only cameras, imagine.
- [119:24]
A
Right, See, look how this goes, right? All of this goes very conveniently right into the charging case, which is like an AirPods case. You know, it has its own battery. Battery. So it's all charged up. So it's very convenient. You're carrying this around with everything you need and it's all charging up for you and everything. I think this is just a really.
- [119:41]
B
And if you've got your Mac using Zoom for twit, will you. Can you get it in to your Mac as an input?
- [119:48]
A
Yeah, with camo. Right. Because I'll be using it with the camera as well as the.
- [119:53]
B
Oh, okay.
- [119:53]
A
Right. So camo, I think actually, you know, I, I haven't tested that part, but I believe camo will let me choose the. Because the iPhone thinks that's its mic. Like it immediately says, oh, that's the mic.
- [120:08]
B
I just does it. I mean, I'll have to check. We'll See, that's right. Because I would love to do that and to have it also potentially be like, I can attach the receiver to my Mac and just use it as my.
- [120:19]
A
Oh, I see what you're saying.
- [120:21]
B
Oh, right.
- [120:23]
A
Oh, I see.
- [120:23]
B
I just don't know if the receiver has, like, a usb.
- [120:27]
A
It's USB C. Okay.
- [120:29]
B
So probably if you plug it into the Mac via usbc, just show up as an input device. Yeah.
- [120:32]
C
The problem is I have a MacBook
- [120:34]
A
Air, so I don't have enough.
- [120:35]
B
That's cool.
- [120:36]
A
I don't have enough room to put it in here.
- [120:39]
C
I've done that with my other ones, Jason. So I assume it's the same way, which.
- [120:42]
A
Yeah, it just thinks it's a microphone.
- [120:45]
C
And it's actually nice in that regard because I've actually used it that way to.
- [120:48]
A
I didn't even think of it that way.
- [120:49]
C
Yeah, like for social videos where, like, the audio quality is gonna be better using, like, a mic like that rather than onboard.
- [120:56]
A
I completely didn't think of that. Yeah, I was just connecting to the iPhone and using camo, but that works too. That would work. Or a continuity cam probably would do the same thing. Yeah. Because it thinks it's the iPhone's camera. So I mean, microphone. So anyway, that's my pick, Jason. What's yours?
- [121:13]
B
Well, I'm gonna defer the inevitable BBS pick.
- [121:17]
A
This was a tricky one. One because I had to diplomatically decide who.
- [121:21]
B
Jason, I referenced another app earlier today, and so I will mention it now. I haven't used it a lot, but I think it's very clever. And if you're somebody who really likes autocomplete, this is called Cotypist. It runs on the Mac. It's free to try and do. I think it's ten completions a day. And then you can subscribe and get more. And it is using local models. Nothing leaves your Mac and it ties into the accessibility settings to look at your Mac screen. I think this is the most clever thing. And like I said earlier, if you're looking at a webpage and referring to it while you're writing an email, it can see the web page. It knows the text on the web page, and it will use that as part of its auto completion. So it gets really smart really fast because it knows your computing context when it's offering autocomplete, which is so smart, so really clever app. And again, for people who are really concerned about privacy issues, the nice thing about having Mac power is you can run these models locally and nothing ever leaves your Mac and it's going to predict what you type. And if you're somebody who really likes having good autocomplete and obviously it'll like you can say not in this app and yes in this app and all of that. But it works a little magically. Like you're typing an email while that webpage is open and it knows what app you're talking about or what context is on that web page and that you might want to talk about it. And like. Super smart. So Cotypist is the name and you can try it out for free, which I really like. And like I said, I think it's 10 completions a day in the trial mode, the free mode. And you know, autocomplete is not for everybody but for some people it's really helpful because you are not a fast typist. And if it knows what you're going to say, just hit tab and move on with your life. So Cotypist app is the name or the URL?
- [123:11]
A
Ah, I've just installed it. Very cool. How much is it? If you want to pay for unlimited,
- [123:16]
B
there are a couple of different levels. There's like a 72 a year, 108 a year or you can pay monthly but the free will give you. You'll find out whether it has that value for you or not.
- [123:26]
A
Nice. And you just hit tab and it completes it one word at a time.
- [123:31]
B
Oh, nice. Or, or it'll do multi word. And there are a bunch of settings too.
- [123:36]
A
Like I like how they call it dancing with the AI. Nice. Okay, all right. Very cool. Cotypist. Thank you for not stepping on Andy's pick of the week. Andy, you go ahead.
- [123:53]
D
I'm looking forward to Jason jumping in on my pick of the week.
- [123:57]
A
Good.
- [123:58]
D
1991 was a banner year. It had notable for two major world shattering events. It would mark the fall of the Soviet Union. And in a small office in New England, a plucky young developer by the name of Rich Siegel created a text editor for Macintosh and He called it BBEdit. That was BBEdit 1.0. And if this is not the oldest still in operation commercial piece of Mac software, I don't know what is, because they just released bbedit 16 and it just keeps getting incrementally better and better and better without having to ever do a full revolution that disorients everybody. Rich inadvertently bet on a very, very winning horse. Nobody could have predicted that text editors would be very, very important for developing software and then they would be critical for Developing like HTML websites, and then they would be critical for markdown text editing and then they would be critical still for development, but also for AI and all kinds of stuff. So as a result, this is the text editor that can truly do it all without looking like it's had 18 different skin graphs holding it together year after year after year. It's still a cohesive tool that will do anything you need a text editor to do. It's. I mean, both Jason and I at one point were using BBEdit as our primary word processor. I wrote like probably six years worth of Chicago Sun Times columns just with BBEdit because it will give you a simple, plain. It's a lovely environment for writing in and it will give you a text file that you can then just give to your editors and will just plonk into any CMS that you're using it. With BBI 16, as always, again, it's never a big revolution. It's just Rich is very, very attentive to what his users are asking of the tool, what they actually need, and also what makes sense for BBI that he, he doesn't just simply wave a magic wand and grant every single request. It has to make sense. That's why BBEdit 16 is still as cohesive as BBEdit 1 was. But some big, big additions and enhancements. I think the marquee feature is that Gritsch has greatly expanded support of shortcuts in the App Intents.
- [126:16]
C
App intents. Very cool.
- [126:17]
D
Exactly with app intents. So now automation is a big, big bump. It's always been scriptable from top to bottom, left to right, right. But now it really is ambitious and comprehensive in supporting every single scripting and automation environment that the, that the Mac has. It's always been notable for being a killer tool for just for search because it has the most muscular set of regular expression search tools and grep tools out there. So if you have. There are times where again, I've had a web server that has had like 800, 900 files on it that I need to change the header on it because this is back in the day when everything was hard coded HTML, you didn't use a database. I could just simply essentially point that file on that folder on the FTP server at bbedit and do a grep search and simply have that whole block of text changed on every single file that's out there. So this one, this 16 gives it a big bump. Now it could also search through images for text that's inside images. And just like with text files. If you point it at, if you point it at a folder that has like a thousand files of license plate photos and you say, give me a list of all. Get me a list of all of the license plates that come from Minnesota. It will return a list of all of the files that have a work and discern the word Minnesota in the license plate or in the bumper stickers or anywhere else. And a whole bunch of other little things. Like one of the things that that's big for me is that obviously it's still a killer app for if you're coding HTML. I do a lot of scripting in which the output is HTML5 and I use bbedit as the output bin that receives the results of the script. And I will do some more modifications myself. So it's always had really good HTML5 checking. He decided with this release to now use the industry standard W3C HTML5 checker, syntax checker. So to make sure that the syntax checking is always completely up to date and pretty canonical, you can still use the built in checker if you want. If you don't have access to the Internet while you're doing this, check. But that's an example. One of the little things that there's about 100 different changes, lots of little things that with all the diversity of uses to which people use bbedit and how has fans that like me have been using it for more than a couple of decades. One or two of these things will be, oh my God, that changes everything. That's wonderful. And it won't disrupt my workflow through editing text. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. And the good news is that there's a very, very attractive price structure. It is as cheap as free. If you've never used it before, you get all features for 30 days. After 30 days it will revert to the free version of BBEdit which is still a probably one of the best text editors that you can find anywhere. And it is free and it is free for life. If you have never bought it before, it's 60 bucks. If you bought it a couple of years ago, the Upgrade is like 40 bucks. If you bought it more than a year ago, it's 30. Yeah, it's basically the longer ago you paid for you bought it at full price, the more you have to spend for the upgrade. But if you bought it like as of like November, if you bought, if you paid for 15, it's still a free upgrade. A year before, that's 30 bucks. Another year after that. But again, it's the Sort of stuff where after 30 days of using this, if you live in text at any part of your life whatsoever, you'll be like, you know, it's 59, but I'm gonna give rich $60. I want him to get that pack of gum on me because I'm so grateful for it. One of my favorite.
- [129:49]
B
I think every, every Mac user should have bbedit because it's free at this point. You should have it because it's just useful to have as a text editor and it's free. And then if you want the extra features, it's there. I think the free is a big feature. I talked to Rich about this and one of the things he told me is that there are places where he was literally using bbedit and thought, why is that not instantaneous? Why is that taking time? And he said, they're actually. You get an app this old and sometimes you look in the code and you're like, oh. And it's not like, oh, I wrote really bad code 15 years ago. It's more like, I wrote this 15 years ago when Apple said the right way to do this was X. And then later they changed it so the right way was Y. And we're still doing X, which works, but Y is, as it turns out, in some cases, an order of magnitude faster. And so there are a bunch of speed ups in here where he's. I always get the impression it's like a little part of the code where he opens it up and like a moth flies out and he's like, ah. And then he. And then he doesn't work on it. So there's a lot of. There's speed ups. The emoji support is really good. This was not an app created when emoji were a thing. And I always used to delight in accidentally pasting emojis into BB Edit with text. And it would often break them up into, like, you could. You could see the constituent parts because a lot of emoji are multiple parts where there's like an astronaut and then the zero if join.
- [131:07]
A
Yeah.
- [131:07]
B
And then like the female symbol, and that's the female astronaut, but it's made of two symbols. And. And that's. You'll actually get your emoji now, which is, you know, he just keeps rolling it. But it's worth trying out because it is free. And the App Intents thing I think is great because, like, the whole point of App Intents, there are so many things that I use bbedit for as a utility. So it's like sorting lines, processing duplicate lines, counting lines, matching a regular expression, and pulling those lines out of a document that I use all the time. A lot of that stuff is in an App Intent now. And that means you can use it in shortcuts. And it's not like applescript where you would be like, open a document, put in the text, do your bbedit thing, and then give me the result. Result. You can actually use those features in a shortcut with BBEdit not running. And they will run and work and give you the output that you want. And what's happening in the background is the App Intent is actually secretly, invisibly launching bbedit, handing it data, getting the data back, and then quitting bbedit. But like, essentially what it does with App Intents is add all of these BBEdit text utilities just to your tool palette of shortcuts, which is pretty awesome too. It's a good. It's a nice modern example of what App Intents are actually supposed to do. That I think is exciting because I've always thought of bbedit is not just a writing tool, but a text utility.
- [132:26]
D
It's a resource for the entire thing.
- [132:27]
A
Free to try, so say we all. Christina, your pick of the week.
- [132:32]
C
Well, mine was going to be BB Edit. So let me just say plus one to everybody. We're all going to pick BB Edit. So we did, because we love.
- [132:41]
A
Love Rich.
- [132:41]
C
We love Rich, but it's also a free application. So just, you know, plus one on everything that Andy and Jason said, if you haven't used it, it should be part of. At least the free version should be part of your Mac tool belt. Like it just. In my opinion, it's just one of those applications. I don't use it as my primary text editor, but I use it still, you know, multiple times a week for so many different things. And it's just a great application. But my pick is not software related at all. Probably my favorite TV show of the last, I don't know, five or six years has been Hacks, which was on hbo. Well, first was on Max, then it was first. First I think it was HBO Max, then it was Max, now it's HBO Max again. But the series finale is going to be on Thursday. And I just.
- [133:28]
A
How many seasons is this?
- [133:29]
B
Five.
- [133:30]
C
Five or. Yeah, five, I think. And. And it's. It's. Jean Smart has won the Emmy every single year she's been nominated for it for Best Actress in a Comedy series. And Hannah Einbender won Best Supporting Actress last year.
- [133:44]
A
You know, I love is Megan Stalzer in this.
- [133:46]
C
Meg Salter is amazing.
- [133:47]
A
A TikTok star who really made it really blew up.
- [133:51]
C
Paul W. Downs, Luciano, his wife and the other creator. The three creators are great.
- [133:59]
B
Jen Skatsky.
- [134:00]
C
Jen Skatsky. Thank you. Thank you. It's just, it's a fantastic show and I would say as it ends, and I don't know how it ends yet because I don't have screeners but I'm sure that they will nail the ending the same way that they were able to nail the ending of Broad City which was a show that the creators of this also worked on. Yeah. So they didn't create Broad City but they worked on and they were eps on it. A lot of the.
- [134:25]
B
From the Mike Schur. So like Good Place and Brooklyn9.9 kind of group as well.
- [134:30]
C
Exactly.
- [134:31]
B
Working on this.
- [134:32]
C
Yeah, yeah. And so it's got a lot of good stuff in it, but really good
- [134:35]
A
comedy lineage I was gonna say.
- [134:37]
C
Yeah. This is one of those shows as It Ends. If you haven't watched it, it's a really, really good show that it's kind of, you know, two different generations of women who kind of form kind of a friendship and kind of relationship as the, as the series evolves. But it's very funny. It's to hard, heartwarming. It's one of those rare shows that I always try to explain to people. I'm like, it's very, very funny and it's not rooted in reality at all. But in some ways it feels like it is and yet it has heart to it. Which is something I don't think that you see enough on. On shows that are as, as funny as, as it is. And so Hacks As It Ends is is going to be my pick because I, I just think it's fantastic and if you haven't watched it, give it a shot. It's great.
- [135:17]
A
And a brilliant, brilliant Laurie Metcalf cameo.
- [135:19]
B
Yes.
- [135:20]
C
Oh my gosh. Yes.
- [135:21]
B
Such a good show. Such a good show. I love it.
- [135:23]
C
Killed it. Weed, weed. Just fantastic weed.
- [135:27]
A
The roadie. So funny.
- [135:30]
C
So funny.
- [135:32]
A
Good picks all round. It's been a great show. Given that there was absolutely nothing to say, you managed to find something. Thank you. As always. I count on you, Christina. We'll miss you next week. Have fun at Build.
- [135:43]
C
Thank you so much.
- [135:44]
A
Christina Warren is in developer relations at GitHub. We're so glad to have you on this show. We really appreciate it. Andy Inako is still working on filling up his content pin, but someday you'll Find it on the web.
- [135:59]
D
It's exciting.
- [136:00]
A
It is exciting.
- [136:01]
D
I had a very exciting workday yesterday and the day before. And forward to some more exciting. It's not drudgery, it's like, oh my God, it's almost there.
- [136:09]
B
Great.
- [136:09]
A
Nice. Very good. I, H, N, A T, K, O. Just remember how to spell that. That's all I'm saying. And Mr. Snell, Jason Snell is at sixcolors. Com. Jason, if you want to see all his podcasts. What you up to these days?
- [136:24]
B
Check it out. I am launching a Kickstarter next week, so tune in. Next week Mike Hurley and I are going to Kickstart a new podcast.
- [136:32]
A
Oh, how exciting.
- [136:34]
B
So, yeah, you can sign up, you can go to to, you can go to Designed FM now and sign up to be told when we go live. But we're going to go live next Monday so you can check it out. It's a. We're going to do a podcast about Apple history. Oh, and I'll talk more about it next week, I'm sure.
- [136:51]
A
All right. Jason will be here next week, but of course, in two weeks, wwdc. He'll be in Cupertino and we will be covering, of course, that Apple keynote at WWDC in two weeks. Micah Sargent and I will be doing it, but it'll be club only. Don't forget, you gotta join the club. Twitter, TV club.
- [137:11]
B
The all seeing eye of Apple does not extend into the club, you see.
- [137:15]
A
It does not. At least so far. Let's not give many ideas. We do Mac break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live if you're in the club in the discord. But everybody's welcome to watch live if you want to see the latest, you know, freshest version of the show on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik after the fact, you'll find us on the website Twitt tv, mbw. There's audio and video there. The video also goes to a dedicated YouTube channel. Great way to share clips with friends and help publicize the show for us as well as share the good information. And finally, of course, the easiest thing and best thing is to subscribe in your favorite podcast client and you'll get it automatically. You don't have to think about it. Leave us a nice review. Help spread the word about the nation's number one Vision Pro podcast. Thank you everybody for being here. And as I've said for now for almost 20 years, it's time to get back to work because break time is over. We'll see you next week. Bye.
- [138:16]
B
Bye.