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MacBreak Weekly 1031: It's Girl Math
02:12:20
Apple's Price Spikes on iPad's, Macbook's, and Mac Studio's
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- [00:00]
A
Time for Mac break weekly. Prices go up. We'll talk about why and what didn't go up because not everything costs more in the Apple Store. We'll also talk about why Apple updated all of the OSes and the big tata leaks. All of that coming up this week on MacBreak Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat usa. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands on trainings taught by practitioners who've actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides and hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security right now, AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, Arsenal live tool demos, on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room. And we'll be there too. Prices rise on July 17th, so book before then. Use the code TWIT for $200 off your briefings pass@blackhat.com US-26 that's B L A C K H A T.com US-26 podcasts you love from people you tr. This is TWIT. This is Mac Break Weekly episode 1031 recorded Tuesday, June 30th, 2026. It's Girl Math. It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Hello you Apple fans everywhere. The show you wait for all week long has finally arrived. Jason Snell is here from 6colors.com. Hello Jason.
- [02:16]
B
Hello. It's Tuesday. The day you wait,4 is here.
- [02:20]
A
You're waiting for tomorrow in that jersey. You're going to wear that all overnight
- [02:23]
B
and just USA you. I mean it's the right week for it too. It's the right week for it. There's a World cup game and 4th of July on Saturday and you know,
- [02:31]
A
I'm watching game three of the group round and Australia, I think Australia's playing at the same time. Oh, somebody's got striped shirts. And I thought, oh, and I posted a picture going usa and it turns out it was Croatia or somebody. Or somebody. It was the wrong. Yeah, I think only one team should have wires. Waldo shirts.
- [02:54]
B
There's only so many. Well, they have. They have multiple. They don't play each other in the confusing shirts. Right. FIFA is not the case.
- [03:01]
A
Thank goodness.
- [03:03]
C
It's okay because, like, our shirts are white with red stripes. Their shirts are red with white stripes.
- [03:09]
A
There you go.
- [03:09]
B
That's in Star Trek, when that could be terrible for the planet.
- [03:14]
C
Yeah.
- [03:14]
A
He's wearing.
- [03:15]
B
He's got a World Baseball Classic USA jersey.
- [03:17]
C
There you go.
- [03:17]
A
Wow. You recognize that right away, Jason, you must be a sportball fan.
- [03:21]
B
Little bit, yeah. Wow.
- [03:22]
A
And there's Christina Warren.
- [03:24]
D
Hello. I'm not wearing actually.
- [03:26]
A
What are you wearing?
- [03:27]
D
I am actually wearing the most American thing of all. I'm wearing a Backstreet Boys shirt from.
- [03:33]
A
She doesn't know. She's beautiful.
- [03:35]
D
No, that's One Direction. This was from their Vegas show at the Sphere last year.
- [03:40]
A
So, yeah, I wanted to see that.
- [03:41]
D
That looked cool. It was actually amazing.
- [03:43]
A
You saw it where they emerged in this from the stage and all that.
- [03:47]
D
Yeah, they floated. It was. Honestly, it was. I will say this, it was one of those experiences where I looked at it and I went, okay, you know what? If they could recreate an aspect like this or like, I think any of the shows to do with the Sphere in the Vision Pro, that genuinely would be kind of maybe like a reason for people to buy a Vision Pro. If you could recreate that sort of experience. Because it has like a three. If you haven't ever been to the Sphere, it is like watching something in 3D even though you're not wearing glasses or anything. And the way that the screens work and it's very, very cool and it feels very immersive and it does feel like this stuff is flying out at you. And. No, the concert was fantastic. They did a great job. Everybody was reliving. 12 years old. Everyone was in white. It was really great. But I genuinely take it back to tech. I was like, okay, there are a lot of shows like this. They did the wizard of Oz. There was Pearl Jam, U2. There have, like a lot of Sphere shows if they could find a way to replicate that type of experience in a headset. But it would have to be a high end headset. I do think that you would have way more people who'd be interested in, you know, spending even more money, as we'll discuss on the Vision Pro.
- [05:05]
B
Yeah.
- [05:06]
A
Incredible. Incredible. Well, you. Let's start with your viral tweet.
- [05:13]
D
My viral tweet?
- [05:14]
A
Do they call it a tweet now anymore? No, I think they can't I can't.
- [05:17]
D
I mean, it's a post, I think, technically, but it will always be a tweet, just like it will always be Twitter.
- [05:22]
A
It's always a tweet.
- [05:23]
C
Solidarity.
- [05:23]
A
100% RIP, she writes. Anyone who didn't buy a MacBook Air until today, insanity. And of course, there's a little. By the way, look at that. Millions of. Wait a minute, it just says 2.9 thousand. I thought you said you. Oh, 8.1 million views. Holy cow.
- [05:43]
D
Yeah, yeah, holy cow. Yeah, it's. It's. That many people liked it for that. That's how many people bookmarked it, why you bookmarked that particular post.
- [05:52]
A
I'll never forget this.
- [05:54]
D
Right. Like, like, like. No, that. That's not an important thing to do. Yeah, that was. I. I just post ship that off at 5:45 in the morning right as the news broke and wasn't thinking anything of it. And then all of a sudden I
- [06:07]
A
was like, wait, well, I'm impressed that you're up at 5:45 checking Apple News. That's pretty. That's pre. So it was a big story on. What is that, the 25th? So we kind of had five days to get used to it now, but Apple raised the prices. You predicted this. I think it was you, Andy, who said, the fact that Tim Cook mentioned this in the Wall Street Journal a day or two earlier, maybe it was Mark Gurman, means it's gonna happen sooner than later. I thought this was the beginning of a long, slow campaign to get ready for the fall.
- [06:39]
C
But no, I have to say that I was very surprised that it was literally one week later, prices not just went up, but went up on. On old stuff and hugely, substantially, as in people now complaining that I thought I was. I thought I'd saved enough to buy X in August and now I have to save up some more. That really, really surprised me.
- [07:03]
A
You actually were the bellwether for this because you bought your MacBook Pro in the nick of time.
- [07:10]
C
I bought it, like, within an hour. It was posted at 5pm and I bought my new MacBook like an hour within. Within an hour later.
- [07:17]
A
A lot of people were rushing because it was prime Day and. And a lot of people were rushing to Amazon to get the remnant inventory. That's all gone now. If you're just learning about this. Sorry.
- [07:26]
C
And. And some stores actually decided to raise their prices, probably because they're out of stock. And so there, there's some. I've seen some people on Reddit saying, oh, well, I bought it A few days ago at the, at the old price. But then I got an email saying that no, we've canceled your order and we don't have stock.
- [07:41]
B
Oh my God.
- [07:42]
A
Memory Armageddon has arrived. Wrote the Wall Street Journal. Apple stock price still hasn't fully recovered from the decline.
- [07:51]
C
It lost a quarter of a trillion dollars on that one day. And it's still only halfway to recovery as of this morning.
- [07:59]
A
Tim Cook says the memory guys are passing along huge price increases. Really? I mean look, nobody can be mad at Apple or can they?
- [08:07]
D
I think you can be, but I think it has to be tempered. Right? Like I think that there are some. It's complicated because obviously this crisis is not their fault. And Apple better than any other company has locked in on long contracts on memory pricing. Most suppliers, manufacturers only do monthly or maybe quarterly contracts. Apple from my understanding, does yearly contracts. And they have been able to do that because just of the sheer volume of components that they buy at once and that they can play hardball. So I think that that's why one of the reasons why they were able to maybe withstand things as long as they, they could. That said, when you look at where the pricing is and what it is subject to, what it was before, I think they're in some categories where you can go okay, this, this feels commiserate with what your pricing is. And let's be clear, Apple has always had very high margins and this is what distinguishes them from the other PC manufacturers. They have very, very high margins. That said, like I said, there are some product classes and, and I'm sure we'll talk about this. You know, this is setting them up for future releases and refreshes as, as it were. But when I see a four year old Apple TV going from $139 or $149 to $199 and $249. No, I'm so sorry, that is not defensible. And that to me is, is no one should buy that. Right? Like there's a no universe where you as a consumer should buy an Apple TV at that price. Right now it is four years old with what, it's what replaces it. Assuming we get a replacement in the fall, maybe that will be worth, you know, $200 or $250. But the current stuff, no, I also think that the storage and RAM upgrade pricing that they, that they're doing on the configure to order stuff is, it feels overly egregious even for the memory crisis that we're in. I'm just going to say that, yeah,
- [10:04]
C
there's a lot of data we don't know about. You're absolutely right that we have. This isn't coming out of the blue and Apple's not the first one to have to make these sort of adjustments. But the thing is, we don't know what position Apple is in right now. For all we know, they're actually eating a lot more profit margin than they want to to keep the as bearable as possible. But also for all we know, they just simply said we want to keep our price, our margin exactly where it is. So we are not even going to suffer one more quarter about this. We are going to pass all of the expenses on to the consumer. So we don't know. But I mean there's no, the only reason there are lots of people to be mad at Apple would be low on that list because now we're hearing from more analysts who are basically saying that, I think Merrill lynch was saying that we're not going to see any relief until at the end of 2027 at the earliest. I think Ming Chi Kuo said that 2028, until we start to see some sort of relief. And when we even start to see stories about how Apple is like, they're perfectly happy to make new silicon with a 2 nanometer process, but the thing is it's all booked out so they have to basically book a new process only because that hasn't been all sol. It's very, really hard to know where we're going to find the bottom of this problem. And it's just going to keep reaching out as tendrils and hitting a lot of people. Right where, right in the upgrade path.
- [11:30]
A
Do we blame AI for this?
- [11:32]
C
Yes.
- [11:32]
D
Oh, of course.
- [11:33]
C
As usual, the default position is to blame AI not me, not me AI. I'm talking about artificial intelligence.
- [11:39]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, it is. I think, of course I'm struck. I mean, you think about the inflationary period we've gone through and the fact that Apple really likes to have its prices be consistent. The result has been that Apple has essentially been allowing its products to become more affordable over time by holding the line on pricing. And clearly they reached that breaking point where they're like, we can't do that anymore because they hate doing this. From like, just from a consistency perspective, they hate it. But you know what they hate more is losing their big profit margins. And the truth is, a lot of the arguments I see about this are sort of like, well, they shouldn't do that, they should just eat the Margins, it's like, well, they have, I think they have been eating margins to a certain point that, that they could have kept raising prices over the last five years and they haven't. But they are. I mean, all the people who make these decisions have Apple stock. And the stock market really likes the big margins. And it like that is part of Apple's deal and has always been part of Apple's deal is the company has enormous margins on hardware and they reach the point where they got to put everything up. I agree with Christina. It feels not only are there bad deals in here, right? Like the Apple tv. I have to think that the reason they're doing that is that they know that they're going to have a more capable Apple TV this fall and they would rather just put the price up now rather than have that new product be seen as outrageously expensive. But the result is that their existing product, they're basically hanging a Do not Buy sign on it. And like, so be it. That's their decision. The other way to go would be to price those to move knowing that your next one was going to be much more expensive. But they didn't choose to do that. I will say I get real nostalgic vibes in this last week. It's like, I feel like this is what it used to feel like. And I didn't realize over the last five years how much more affordable a lot of Apple products felt. To me, a 999 MacBook Air, that's a modern MacBook Air and you're like, 999 in 2020 is a really great deal. And I look at the prices today and I think, oh, this is how it felt in 2018, 2017, where everything Apple made was a little too expensive. But you winced and you bought it because. And you know, I don't think we all noticed that over the last five years they've tried to hold those prices as inflation has gone up and they have become more affordable. And then there's some instances like the MacBook Neo, right? Which like, it's a real bummer that the MacBook Neo is going up by 100. However, a thing to keep in mind is so is all the competition. And so in some ways the MacBook Neo is still playing in the same market and still has a pretty great price just because all the competition also is made of. They're all made of RAM chips, right? They're all made of SSDs. They're all dealing with this. But it's just really sad because we're probably never going to see that price again. Right? That 599 price is never coming back.
- [14:42]
C
I'd also like to say that. But what Tim did last week, boy, what a mensch. If he had not pre announced, by the way, there's going to be big price increases coming one week before he knew there was going to be actual substantial prices coming, Apple would still be suffering the same stock hit, the same cost of goodwill, the same grumbling, the same problems, the same everything. But a lot of people like myself would not have been able to get the, the device that they, that they had budgeted for at the price they had budgeted for it. I will defend the statement that he didn't have to do that, but he did that even though there must been a lot of discussion about what the effects would be. And he helped, I think he helped a lot, a lot of people. And I think that he should get credit for that.
- [15:29]
A
Micron's CEO, or actually Chief Business Officer Sumit Sadhana blamed Apple. He said, we told, this is from the Wall Street Journal. We told a couple of the customers who were being very aggressive with pricing. Guess who at that time, this is not constructive. Micron's gross profits went negative during the last memory downturn. And he said we blame Apple. Well, he didn't say Apple. We blame those aggressive people. A lot of the industry investments got shut down in 2023 because of really poor pricing and really poor margins. So Apple, if you hadn't pressed us for lower prices in 2023, we wouldn't be screwing you and your customers in 2026.
- [16:13]
B
Boo. Who?
- [16:15]
D
Yeah, cry me a river. Like, seriously, Seriously. Boo hoo. Indeed. Like that is laughable. That is laughable. Like, okay, it's Apple's fault that you didn't reinvest in your business. I mean there's, look, there's some truth to the fact that like memory said
- [16:29]
A
they couldn't because they weren't making any money.
- [16:31]
D
Okay, yes, that's bs. Like the nature of memory is that it is cyclical. This happens to be a very projected like boom market that we've never seen before. And that's why Micron is making 85% profit margins even though they're selling the same amount of capacity. So congratulations. But it's not like these booms and bust cycles haven't happened before. This is not a new thing, which to me says that if I'm the CEO of a business and I know that I can't plan on things always being the same way, then maybe I should hold some things back so that I can reinvest when capacity increases. Like maybe that should be part of my annual planning process, maybe it shouldn't be. I'm going to blame, you know, my number one suppliers. Like, I'm sure that Apple didn't help, but do we think Samsung did? Do we think that Asus? Did we think any, anyone else did? No, of course not. So, like, is Apple just supposed to. Not like we. Two things can be true at once. Apple can be taking advantage of this situation to raise prices in a way that, to Jason's point, maybe things have been inflationary and they hadn't adjusted. Right. But we also can't say that we should be expecting $1 trillion company to be supporting another trillion dollar company. I mean, come on.
- [17:47]
B
Yeah.
- [17:48]
A
Bernie Sanders does. He says corporate greed. Is Tim Cook, the billionaire Apple CEO, claiming I should do it in a Bernie voice claiming that hiking prices on Apple products by over $200 is unavoidable after it made 112 billion in profits last year and spent 310 billion on stock buybacks? The price hikes aren't unavoidable. They're unacceptable. In other words, he's saying to Apple, well, you should take some of that profit, that huge profit you make and give us a break. Micron, by the way, is not holding back. They broke ground earlier this year on $100 billion Fab in New York. They're, they're going to build more capacity now. It takes a while to build those fab.
- [18:31]
D
That's the problem, though. They didn't bother to start sort of that process until this year. I mean, from the things that I've read, and we've known that this memory crunch was coming for at least 18 months and none of the suppliers wanted to do that. And you know, in fact, what Micron did is they exited the consumer space completely. Which look, fair enough. If you're making all your money from data centers, go for it. And someone in, in the chat mentioned that because of the price fluctuations, we've lost some smaller memory suppliers. That's absolutely true. And I'm not saying that the, the, you know, people that they negotiate with that there aren't side effects of that. Right. Everything is involved in this. But I just don't, I feel like blaming Apple or, you know, any of the, you know, people who are just buying from the suppliers is kind of missing the point. If we wanted to do something about this, and we really feel like this is predatory and unfair and these lockup deals that they're forcing companies to get in with are not okay, then that's when government regulation would need to step in. Right.
- [19:31]
A
Adam Smith would say this is the invisible hand of the market at work. This is capitalism.
- [19:37]
B
A guy in his hand metaphors.
- [19:39]
C
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez also chimed in on this, actually on Fox News, believe it or not, basically using this as another example of why big tech companies need to be broken up or antitrust. I think that, I don't agree with that either. But it's going to be another reason for a lot of people to have a lot of conversations about how these large companies do business. And when you find in a situation where suddenly it's not going to just be about, oh well, gosh, I was going to build a gaming PC but now I can only have a terabyte storage instead of, I was planning on 4 terabytes of storage when it comes to, well, now certain medical equipment can't be manufactured. Now smaller electronics companies have to go out of business because they were doing just fine. But now there's no way they can possibly compete with all of the big shoulders that are trying to get capacity and trying to get components. I hope that provokes a larger conversation about when we have so much power consolidated in so few tech companies. Even though I don't, I don't think that Apple is evil. I don't think Google's evil. I just think that when you have such big shoulders and you walk through a crowd, you have to be responsible for the people who get knocked over because you are just such a big galoot.
- [20:52]
A
There is a lawsuit in California against Apple's three big memory providers, Samsung, sk, Hynix and Micron, saying they coordinated DRAM production cuts in order to drive up memory prices. That's an interesting accusation.
- [21:11]
C
Yeah, it's investigated.
- [21:13]
D
I was gonna say, I mean, good, good luck proving that right. But I, I will say what does feel like price fixing are some of the deals that Micron and some of the other manufacturers are doing where they're basically saying, sign into a five year agreement with us, we will give you a floor and a ceiling and the price that you pay will be somewhere in the middle and it'll depend on demand. And I guess you just have to trust us that that doesn't feel okay. I mean, I think that, you know, if you want to have a, if you as a supplier make a bad decision to say, I'm going to agree to sell you grapes for, you know, 50 cents a bushel for the year and then you have A drought and you don't get as many grapes and now all of a sudden you've made a bad deal. Well then that's, that's not, that's on you as a supplier. But to, to put it out like that many years in advance and be like, well, there's a floor and there's a ceiling. It'll be somewhere in the middle and, and we'll figure it out. I don't know. That doesn't sit right with me.
- [22:04]
A
It isn't the first time. It turns out that Samsung has been accused and agreed to be fined for this. They agreed to pay a $300 million criminal fine in 2005. SK Hynix agreed to pay $185 million criminal fine that same year. It's not the first time they have been accused of and admitted to price fixing. This was the Department of Justice. And then this is Andrew Orr writing in Apple Insider. So there will be court ordered discovery which is always the most interesting part of any lawsuit.
- [22:33]
C
Congratulations.
- [22:34]
A
So there may be some interesting. If they were smart, they didn't put anything in writing.
- [22:38]
C
But they say. I find myself thinking that the famous saying that the rules and the fire code are written in blood, that every time there is a new disaster that proves that no, we need this law. That's how that rule got added to the book. And I think the same thing is true in business and in finance that when we see a disaster that we didn't see coming, we have to, that's at least a provocation to start to think about should we regulate this more strongly than we did before? Because the idea of this sort of problem existing for another two years, we don't know what the knock on effects are going to be and we don't know who's going to be on the floor and who's going to be still standing.
- [23:19]
A
And I have to think Apple's pretty unhappy about all of this, especially because the AI revolution giveth and taketh away. They've sold a lot of Mac Minis and Mac studios, but good luck getting one with enough RAM to run local models. You could, if you could get say 512 gigs of RAM in a Mac studio, it'd actually be an amazing.
- [23:39]
C
I think, I think Ming Chi Kuo had a post whether on his, on his medium or on something else, basically saying that the next the iPhone 18 nothing was going to have 9 gigabytes of RAM, which seems a little thin for an AI based phone. It's something that I would have expected on like the 18E but I guess if that is again, it's just a rumor. Ming Chiquo is very, very good on supply chain stuff. But I bet that Apple now has a lot of plans for how far can we distill Gemini so that we don't need to count on 12 gigs, which is what we were planning on as of last year.
- [24:15]
D
Right. I mean I think what this means is that a lot of the local AI story really becomes more to private cloud compute and talking about how all that is because now you can have all these features happening, you know, off device instead. Because hey, if the data centers are going to be built and used, we might as well use them if we can't get the RAM to put in our phones. But yeah, no, I agree with you. I thought that sounded a little bit thin too, especially given the direction everything else has been going. But it might just be as simple as they, they went with what they went. I had this thought and I would, I would love like that the panel's thought on this. When they released the new monitors and a couple of the other things a few months ago, we were. Well, I was critical of the pricing. I was extremely critical of the pricing. I'm now wondering if that was already them Apple already feeling what the RAM pricing was at that moment for those products that they weren't locked into and was priced around that. So that, that's why the new Studio display is the same price as the old one, even though, you know, with not really any better. And then the replacement for the Pro display is what is it? Is it, is it $3200? It's a ridiculous price and I would still argue that you don't need that much RAM in the monitors anyway. You could probably do better putting it in some of your other products. But I wonder if maybe that was already where we were seeing directionally where this was going to go. Like, I don't know.
- [25:43]
B
I, I'm a little skeptical because that was the same event where they did the video MacBook Neo. Right? Yeah. So I mean it's, it's possible one of the things that's hard for us to divine out of all of these prices is what's built in to these new prices. Because my guess, and this is just a guess, is that one of the things that's built in is actually more margin because they anticipate these will continue to be expensive or get more expensive and they don't actually want to keep raising prices. Right. So it's possible that one of the reasons these went up so Much is not because Apple is trying to get back to level, but that Apple is actually trying to get ahead a little bit so that they don't do this again in six months. Because I think we got to come back to it again. Apple hates raising prices. They hate it. They absolutely do. They like making money. They like making large profit margins on their hardware. But what they don't like, and this has been true for the last 15 years at least, is floating their price around. At least in the US I know that in other markets they do it. Sometimes they don't like it, but they do it. They hate doing it in the, in the home market of saying, you know, maybe a new product costs a different price, but to just change all the prices. They don't want to do it and they don't want to do it again for sure. So I do wonder about that too, that maybe there's just more, More, more margin being left here just because they don't want to do this again. But there's no way to tell. It's. It's really interesting. We all have to, you know, we have very limited information for us to go on, which is just to look at the prices that they, that they adjusted. And, and we have to guess, like what? Like the Apple TV is like, huh? Why? Or the Vision Pro, it's like, did you need to do that? Okay. You know, it's already ridiculously expensive. Why not $200 more expensive? Nobody's buying that anyway, so it doesn't matter.
- [27:34]
D
Right?
- [27:34]
B
Yeah, it's very mysterious.
- [27:35]
A
So they didn't raise prices on iPhones, on watches, on AirPods.
- [27:41]
D
That's it. That's it. In the polishing cloth and the polishing cloth and the polishing cloth.
- [27:47]
A
Because there's no ram.
- [27:48]
D
There's no RAM in airplane.
- [27:50]
A
In the polishing cloth. Yeah.
- [27:51]
D
Or in the AirPods.
- [27:53]
A
Oh, I guess you're right. Yeah, that makes sense.
- [27:55]
D
I think that for the watch and the phone, they know that those are, you know, the phone especially think that Apple's going to wait as long as they can. If that means having to eat more margin on the Neo, fine. If that means having to raise price, maybe to Jason's point, to price in what they fear our future increases. Maybe that's the case. I think that they want to hold the line on the phones as much as they can. But they did say for now. And if you look at the iPad pricing, you know, we didn't even talk about that, but like, the pricing, there was actually, I think, some of the worst and it just did across the board. Just in terms of percentage and also just for value, like, you know, $12.99 for a MacBook Air, that's a lot of money. I'm not just denying that, but I can still make an argument that that's a really good computer for $1300. It's very, very, very hard for me to now make an argument about anything in the iPad line. It honestly is. It's like my, my advice is, is by use.
- [28:57]
B
To be totally honest, Christina, I wonder if one of the things they're trying to do with these price increases is actually manage product volume. And I know that's a weird thing to say.
- [29:08]
D
No, no, that makes sense.
- [29:09]
B
But the idea of like, you know, if we're gonna sell products, maybe the iPad needs to sell less right now, right? Like if you really want one, we'll let you. We'll let you get it, but you got to spend a lot of money on. I had that thought when I looked at those iPad prices. That's exactly what I thought is maybe they're actually trying to suppress iPad sales for a little while so they can use that RAM somewhere else. Otherwise they're. So that iPad Pro especially is just so expensive now.
- [29:36]
A
Well, all of you who bought new devices, you can congratulate, pat yourself on the back, Andy.
- [29:40]
D
Well, I got an iPad Pro a couple months ago and I grill math my way into it because I was like, oh, you know my, my M2 Pro, which uses the old keyboard and the old stylus. I don't need to get the new one. But I'm never going to get this much for trade in for it. Otherwise I might as well just do it anyway. The girl math for once, genuinely only once actually worked out in my favor this time.
- [30:02]
A
Did you call it girl math?
- [30:03]
C
It's weird.
- [30:04]
D
Girl math? Yes.
- [30:05]
A
Okay, I'm glad you said that.
- [30:06]
C
Not me.
- [30:09]
D
I'm allowed to say that it's.
- [30:12]
C
But it is weird though because when I was is before the announcement of the price, of the price increases, I was actually kind of mapping out because I am staring right in front of me. I am staring in front of a six year old MacBook, a five year old iPad Pro and a four or five year old Pixel 7 Pro. And so I'm mapping out like obviously I'm going to, this is a good 12 month period to do most of my upgrades. So I was already mapping things out and I was looking at the iPad Pro and I'm thinking particularly now with these price increases, I'm not sure If I have room for a new iPad in my order of battle, so to speak, I'm still looking carefully at an iPad mini because that might suit the purpose that I might have otherwise spent on a foldable. But whereas I admit when I bought the M1 iPad Pro, there was a little bit of irrational exuberance involved because I was excited about all the features specifically that the M1 was going to bring to it. But when you look at this price list right now and you see that, like, for any amount of storage that makes an iPad fun to use now, we really are talking in, like, old iPad, excuse me, MacBook Air money. It's like, can I justify that amount of money? And I'm not sure that I still can. So I think Jason's right. I think that for a bunch of reasons, the iPad is going to see some tough times ahead, at least for sales, if Apple still has faith in it, which they absolutely do, we're still going to see updates, we're still going to see new hardware. But I think that the next time you do a graph, Jason, we're going to see a big, big, big dip in that for any number of reasons.
- [31:59]
B
Yeah. And maybe by choice, I mean, that's the advantage of them. These aren't individual businesses. Right. It's one business that has all these product lines, and it's completely reasonable that they might say, look, ram's very expensive and we don't have a lot of it. Where do we want to put it? We want to put it in iPhones, and we want to put it maybe in Macs, and maybe the iPad is just not as important right now. So. So then the sales will go down and we'll all have to look at it and say, you know, maybe that is the choice Apple made.
- [32:29]
C
Would someone coming in for an iPad be more likely, particularly now that we have, like, such a cheap entry level MacBook? Like, how do I convince somebody to spend six or seven hundred dollars on an iPad without a keyboard or a trackpad, when they could get basically the same processor inside a much more conventional machine that still has that same build quality? That was something that I was looking at, too.
- [32:52]
D
Oh, yeah.
- [32:53]
C
If the role of the iPad for me is always I have to go into town and do radio, and I don't want to take my whole laptop, but I want to be able to have access to X, Y and Z. It's hard to sell myself on not getting a $700 MacBook, even at the new prices, as opposed to getting an iPad. It's a Hard map to navigate.
- [33:14]
A
If you were lucky enough to be holding on to a Mac studio with let's say five 12 gigs of RAM and you aren't using it, you probably could go to the Facebook marketplace or ebay and make some money. Right now I would think there's got to be a market.
- [33:28]
B
Oh, they're, they're for sale for like $50,000. I don't know if anybody's buying, but they are.
- [33:34]
C
I.
- [33:35]
B
That is apparently happening.
- [33:36]
A
Wow.
- [33:37]
D
Well, they also raised the refurb prices. You know, Jason made that his pick of the week last week and they raised the refurb prices. And look, on the one hand, I do understand this because you know, that's just price gouging. That's just, I mean, right, right now I agree with you. I feel like they probably did it because they only have a certain amount of like units that come in, whether the returns, repairs or whatever. And where I think is gouging is that I would guess, and I don't have any data on this, this is just my estimate as somebody who used to work in electronics repair many, many years ago and knows that, you know, had a lot of devices, that most of the problems that come in with those devices are not related to the memory or the ssd. That's just my guess, right. Is it this battery, it's screen, it's maybe a transistor or something, you know, on the, on the, you know, main board. But, but it's usually not going to be an SOC memory RAM issue.
- [34:31]
A
So in that case doesn't fail.
- [34:33]
D
Right. So in my, so I, I can understand that. Even though eventually, right. Like, like three months from now their supply of, you know, returned or repair devices might go up. Yeah, I do feel, still feel like that is kind of, kind of gouging and it feels kind of gross, to be honest. I get it, but I don't like it.
- [34:54]
A
Well, Apple is hoping that they can go to China to buy RAM more cheaply, but they have to petition the government for this. They want to go to the Yangtze memory technologies company ymtc, which Senator Mark Warner in a press release I think pretty much put the kibosh on this when he said a state owned company with extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party and its armed wing, the People's Liberation Army. A joint statement from Senator Warner of Virginia and Senator Rubio of Florida both say it presents risks to national security. I'm not sure how buying memory from China poses risks to national security.
- [35:33]
B
It's a whole chain of like the There. I mean, I think a lot of this argument is China is an adversary and this is a subsidized company. And so you're harming all of the companies that are trying to just make a living out there. Buy this one that's like artificially floated by the Chinese government.
- [35:56]
A
There's a lot of this once before in 2022 and it worked and it's going to work again.
- [36:00]
B
Maybe. Although, I don't know. I mean, clearly the transaction that Tim Cook wants from Donald Trump is we're going to agree to do a bunch of intel stuff in America. But in the, in the meantime, during this emergency, let us buy RAM from these guys in China because they've got it and it will allow us to have more free flowing ram. And it's very funny though because like that previous kibosh that was put on this, they were just going to sell the, the products using that RAM in China.
- [36:29]
D
Yeah.
- [36:29]
B
And even then all.
- [36:31]
A
So it's really about giving us China.
- [36:33]
B
It's like, yeah, it's like you're giving money to the Chinese government and you're also, those are sales that potentially could have gotten to a company that is not funded by the Chinese government. You're weakening all the other companies by, you know, it's that argument too. You're weakening other companies because this is an artificially, you can't create a company.
- [36:49]
A
You can't give money.
- [36:49]
B
You can't. It's. I agree.
- [36:52]
A
Well, maybe it is a different situation.
- [36:54]
C
I mean there's a, it's a, it's a weird story because this company has been on and off the Pentagon blacklist so many times with this. It's such a political football. It seems to be with a lot of arguments pro and con, both with the arguments that Jason provided. But also there's the, there's the argument which I can't, which I can't, I can't certify or whatever. But the idea that, well, we can't be in a situation where if Apple is in a position where they can't survive or they can't go forward unless they do business with this Chinese component maker, that will cause a dependence. We would much rather have you figure out a way around it that does not involve being reliant on China. There's also the question of, number one, how much product can they possibly provide to Apple. Secondly, there's the problem that China has been. One of the reasons why there've been so many trade talks over the past couple of months is because they're Trying to cool down problems that got created last year with meltdown in Chinese trade. And there's a question about how like if China realizes that is facing the same problem the entire world is, why would they necessarily want to sell to an outside, to a company outside China when they could basically say well Huawei is probably going to need those chips at some point. I mean Chinese owned companies might need those chips. Why would we sell them outside? So it's one of those miraculous times where suddenly this company that nobody has heard of becomes like one of the three things you see on every single news feed when you go into Google News, if you're interested in such things.
- [38:25]
A
So that letter I read by the way, obviously Marco Rubio is no longer a senator, but that letter I read was from 2022, right? Interestingly, according to the Financial Times, Apple is not barred from buying chips from Chinese chip memory makers. But the company CXMT and YMTC that they wanna buy are on the Chinese military company blacklist. They could be, but they are not on which is weird. The entity list. The White House said to the Commerce Department hold off on those export controls because we're negotiating with China. So I'm not sure why Apple, I mean I think technically Apple could, I
- [39:06]
C
think what the report says is that Apple is essentially saying promise me we are, you're not going to put this company on the blacklist. We won't have to cancel all these contracts that we're so desperately trying to, trying to put together.
- [39:16]
A
And the Financial Times does point out that as in 2022, Congress would probably object strongly if the administration did say
- [39:22]
B
but, but again Trump is so transactional that if he feels like the deal that he's making with Tim Cook is Intel and this was, I thought transparent last week was intel investment will make chips in America in the future. Now help us out of our memory problem by letting us use these, these Chinese chip suppliers. And it's a, it's, it's just a deal and we have a very transactional president who might go for it or he might get talked out of it. But I think that's the gambit that Tim Cook is doing here.
- [39:55]
A
Should point out that only micron of the, of the big three is American, the rest are South Korean. So yep. The whole thing is, is so complicated.
- [40:06]
D
I was saying to someone, to a friend last week when we were talking about this, I said whatever part of the Samsung shy ball is owner of the memory division, that member of the family has to be so excited right now that they get to lord this over the faces of all the family members in the mobile division or the TV division or anywhere else. If you've never dived into the insanity that is like the Shy Ball system in general, but also the Samsung family in specific, that's a really fun rabbit hole.
- [40:35]
A
They are keiretsu, right? Is that the word that we use? That's the Japanese word for these mega conglomerates.
- [40:41]
D
Shyball is the word that they use.
- [40:43]
A
That's the Korean word.
- [40:44]
D
Okay. Yeah, that's the Korean word. Shai ball. Yeah.
- [40:47]
A
All right, we're gonna take a break. Enough of pricing, enough of the depression. We'll talk about other things, including big tata leaks. So I know you're gonna want to stay tuned for that. This is Mac Break Weekly with Christina Warren, Jason Snell, and Andy Anocco. And yes, I'm Leo laporte and I apologize in advance. This episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by Ethos. Ethos makes getting life insurance fast and easy 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds. You can apply in minutes and get the same day coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions and you can get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies as low as $30 a month. And you'll get your lowest rate from their network of trusted carriers. You know, I remember when my kids were born, it was one of the first things I did because now suddenly I had responsibilities. I got life insurance. You should, too. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get your free quote@ethos.com MacBreak that's E T H O S.com MacBreak Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Thank you, Ethos, for supporting MacBreak Weekly. And you support us when you go to that address. Ethos.comMacBreak well, even though we're on the verge of iOS 27 and iOS Golden Gate and all of that. Well, guys, not quite on the verge. Apple has continued to release updates, big updates. And these are security updates. Came out, I Think today for 26.5.2. Yesterday. I think yesterday, Mac OS, iOS, iPad, OS, apparently dozens of security bugs. I'm wondering if this has something to do with Mythos and the new AI security finding tools, WebKit vulnerabilities, big time. That's a problem because of course, WebKit is what you use to get online in iOS and some of you are using in Mac OS to get online.
- [42:42]
B
Yeah. So, hey, I talked to Apple about this.
- [42:45]
A
You did? Nice.
- [42:47]
D
Good morning.
- [42:49]
B
And I can Say I talk to them and I can say Apple says. So I talked to them about this. This is an interesting update because what happened is these are the security features that are in the 26.6 beta, which came out in late May. And one of the interesting things about this AI era is that once the first beta is out with the fixes, people can analyze them instantly, including good guys and bad guys. And, and so that gives them a hint about what bugs are being fixed, but not yet fixed. And the 26.6cycle has a lot of stuff in it. Like, you know, I think that there's a, there's a general thought that they're doing some pre work on Spotlight indexing so that they can push that out so that you don't have your device indexing for Siri AI for like a month in September, that it will index it over the summer for you and then when you upgrade you'll just get it. That's what I hear through the grapevine. Anyway, anyway, that cycle continues that, that 26. 6 appears to not be imminent because what they decided to do was roll all those features in now about a month later into a 26.5.2 update. So this is a, this is, I think, unique and it may, it's not necessarily a new policy, but it's a thing that I think they didn't want to wait any longer and they felt like they had had a month with it in the betas to discover if there were any issues with their fixes. And essentially I get the sense that the security people were ready to ship and 26. 6 isn't. So they shipped those security updates in 26 or 25.5.2. Also, you know, they told me like, yeah, Apple uses frontier models to look for bugs. They absolutely do. So it's both sides. Right. But they absolutely do that and they find them. And then the other thing that they noted is it's important to remember that a bug is not an exploit. That generally these days, especially on Apple platforms, what you need is a chain of bugs that lead to a place. And these are often at this level, we're talking nation states kind of stuff. Yeah, you need a chain of bugs to build an exploit. And so when Apple fixes these bugs, they're not actually feeling like they're fixing like they're like closing a door. It's more that they're reducing the attack surface, they're reducing the probability because you need to have. The more bugs there are, the more likelihood there is that a chain can be constructed to create an exploit. But they said they were. They had no evidence that any of this was being used anywhere. It's just stuff they found, probably using AI frontier models. Right. Stuff they found and then some of it. Also stuff that was reported by people on the outside. And then their, their post about it cites all the CPE codes and all of that. So you can give those people their bounties and their credits and all of those things too. But also I suspect a lot of things they don't list in that document because they don't want anybody to know what they fixed. They just, they found it, they fixed it. So really interesting. But I like the idea that in this world they used to, it seems like they used to have a system where they would just put these in the beta cycle and then they would be good. And now they feel like there's no time. Yeah, the beta cycle is going on too long and they need to get it out now. So they pushed it ahead.
- [46:12]
A
It's always been the case that a CVE is kind of an announcement, here's a flaw. Bad guys would immediately start to break it down. But now with AI, it's a matter of minutes. Yeah, sometimes.
- [46:22]
B
And developer betas, Apple's. Apple's betas used to be lower profile, but now like the moment developer beta one of anything ships, if there's anything in it that's new, it's news, we're all talking about it and it starts the clock for people to analyze the code changes as well. So like we just. Everything's moving faster right now for at least for security stuff like the other stuff they're working on in 26 6, like take your time. Right. It's fine. But they don't want to wait. Clearly they don't want to wait longer because it's been about a month since those came out in the developer preview.
- [46:54]
A
So I should also point out, we've talked about this before on security now, that one of the features of Mythos, that model that Anthropic put out, was held back, is now by the way, been re released by the Trump administration to companies only. That was one of the things it was really good at. It's not merely finding exploits, but chaining exploits because it had such a big context window and was so capable of doing long thinking that it could find an exploit and then add another exploit and add another exploit. And that's exactly what you just talked about.
- [47:24]
C
I think, I think once one researchers, team of researchers who has like a benchmark found out that it can it was, it was able to find an exploit that was a basically 32, 33 step chain of operations. Holy cow. Which was kind of mind blowing.
- [47:38]
A
Yeah, that, yeah, I don't think any human's done that, that's for sure. That's amazing.
- [47:42]
C
I know I don't have the patience or the focus to.
- [47:45]
A
Yeah, yeah, Mythos will work all night. I think Fable will be re released soon as well. I think that the Trump administration is starting to work their way up to that. So that means it'll be in the hands of others as well. So I think Apple's probably wise to be proactive and you would probably be wise to apply these updates as quickly as your little.
- [48:04]
B
Yes, Apple. Apple strongly suggests that you keep up to date and that's the best way to keep your devices secure is to install your software updates.
- [48:13]
A
Install the updates. You know it's funny, Microsoft just made a change in its update system that lets people put off updates. And I thought, I don't know if you really want to encourage that in business especially people like to say, well, we don't want to make an update that's going to break any mission critical applications. And yet these days those updates are more important than ever before. Tata, which is the Indian company that does iPhone assembly in India was breached. 630 gigabytes of data were stolen. Some of that data, Apple data, and some of it might have been leaked. Yesterday videos are being circulated on X depicting an iPhone 18 Pro undergoing drop testing. 24 hours later those videos started to disappear from X and in fact EV leaks, which Evan Blass says is not his chan.
- [49:09]
C
I don't know.
- [49:10]
A
Evan Blass is a leaker. He had EV leaks but I guess he says, well, he retired. Retired. Somebody else took the account. I don't know if I buy that but anyway he says I don't have anything to do with it. But that account for the first time has now been blocked on X because it was releasing stuff from the Tata breach or something Apple didn't like. It's interesting how much power Apple has.
- [49:32]
C
Reuters reported, I think last week that it already appeared on the Dark Web.
- [49:37]
A
Oh yeah, it's out there now once you get out.
- [49:39]
C
So it's definitely out there. And yeah, there's I as. And of course because the Internet is what it is, Apple can shut down like primary newsmakers, but it's still going to be out there. Which is not to say that here's another plug for the Downy app. I made sure that as soon as I saw it Online, I downloaded both of those things.
- [49:57]
B
Yeah.
- [49:58]
C
But yeah, it's not me. The view of this device testing is one thing, but this is fairly comprehensive cache of information about the manufacturing of iPhones including who they're buying parts from, what parts. They're using a lot of manufacturing cad. So people. So basically if you want to create a knockoff phone that's actually iPhone 8
- [50:16]
A
Pro Logic board designs, 820 Pro data sheets according to Apple Insider and they say we've confirmed these. So this is, yeah, this is a big breach.
- [50:27]
D
Nightmare.
- [50:28]
A
Yeah, it's interesting that Apple has been so successful in pulling those accounts down.
- [50:36]
C
Well, they got a big stick.
- [50:39]
A
Yeah, they got a big stick. Well but what's interesting is Samsung wasn't able to do it when EV Leaks was releasing pre release versions of Samsung phones.
- [50:48]
D
I don't know if Samsung cared as much like I think that, I think that's probably the biggest. I was gonna say, I was gonna say for Samsung it's marketing. For Apple in some ways it's you know, intellectual, actual, you know, you know, property. And so I think they're probably slightly different situations. But yeah, I mean it was funny that that's what EP said. It was like, oh, you know, they could do it with Samsung, never could. But this is, and this sucks because if you're Apple, I mean what are you supposed to do? Like not go. There are very few companies that can assemble your products in India and one of the requirements to even have the phones in India is that they need to be assembled there. They're also financial, financial benefits that way too. So I mean this, it's a situation,
- [51:32]
C
it's, it's a, it's a bad, bad situation. I'll also also say as an aside that I'm a little bit surprised that Apple was doing something so flagrant as to, or excuse me, we don't have confirmation that Apple's pulling these things, these things down, but they are being pulled down. So guess who would be doing that. The thing is like that is, that is legitimate news gathering where if something, if there's been a breach, it's on the dark web. A good journalist is going to try to to it if only to document the scale of the breach. And I feel as though the better thing for Apple to do is simply say it's out there, we're not going to stop people, we're not going to be able to undo this. And so all we can do is basically bring harm to ourselves by looking like we don't want free journalism to happen. But this is even the second bad news to come out of Tata. Reuters report a couple of weeks ago that Indian pollution regulators where charging Tata with wastewater discharge from a components factory with contaminated groundwater for nearby farms. And they warned, the agency warned every forced shutdown unless Tata gives a satisfactory explanation. That is super bad. Because Apple, if there's one company you don't want to be environmental jerks with, it is definitely with Apple. I imagine there's going to be some tense meetings about this.
- [52:53]
A
Credit to Marko Zivkovic at AppleInsider who took a look at all of the leaked stuff and confirmed it was iPhone 18 Pro, board schematics, A20 Pro data, C2 modem files, parts numbers and assembly numbers. Quite a bit of information. Apple Insider confirmed the authenticity. Well, they said they had all the hallmarks of authentic Apple design documentation. As with most of Apple schematics, many of the documents were created with Siemens nx. So very, very interesting. There was one reference to the iPhone fold which bears the identifier V68. But that was the only one that seemed to have anything about future Apple products behind the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max. So did you see the drop test videos? I haven't seen those.
- [53:48]
C
I've seen them.
- [53:49]
B
I'm not going to show them.
- [53:50]
A
I don't want Apple to get on my case.
- [53:52]
B
Of course.
- [53:53]
C
But it's. Yeah. And even everything has to be picked apart and people are noticing.
- [53:57]
A
Oh wow, the.
- [53:57]
C
The logo is now shiny. Is that going to be a new design change? Okay. The bump is still a bump.
- [54:04]
B
Yeah. I don't know. I don't think it made it in our, in our notes. But the Supreme Court is going to listen to Apple's case against Epic.
- [54:12]
A
What?
- [54:13]
B
That just got picked up this morning. So they're gonna, they're gonna take the case. They're gonna take the case.
- [54:19]
A
They've already twice refused it.
- [54:21]
B
That says they say. This is a Reuters report that says the justices said they will hear Apple's appeal, contending it cannot be held in contempt for allegedly violating the spirit of a court injunction. But not an express provision. So it's on the, on the idea that. But Judge Gonzalez Rogers got them in trouble because they were trying to evade her. The spirit of her ruling by following the letter. But not the spirit. And so they're basically saying nuh. And the Supreme Court, which you know is. There's a lot of other Supreme Court stuff going on right now. But anyway, they apparently are last week at the term they're wrapping things up and Picking things for next year.
- [55:05]
A
So there is rulings, but this one kind of got buried, I guess.
- [55:09]
C
I guess the Interior Department needs to raise money for a new reflecting pool liner. And they called Tim.
- [55:14]
D
I guess so. I mean, well, egg on my face, because I think, I think I said on this podcast. And look, I will obviously do like, say when I'm right, but I'll also say when I'm wrong. And I was like, oh, there's no way the Supreme Court will ever hear this.
- [55:26]
A
Okay, well, yeah, well, they turn it down twice. They sent it back to the lower coat twice. Now it won't happen for a while because their term ends this week, right? They, they resume in October. And so they'll hear it in the. Hear that case.
- [55:39]
D
They'll hear it in the fall. It'll be a year, you know, probably. Yeah, it'll be a year before we'll know. But that's, that's incredible. I, I mean, I guess the novelty aspect of this is interesting. But you know what? Okay, I will say this. Whatever lawyers are on that team and I assume it's in house counsel, but if they're external, whatever, they deserve some of this RAM money, right? Like, like give them a Mac studio.
- [56:03]
A
This is an important question of law and we are pleased the Supreme Court will hear our case.
- [56:10]
B
Yeah, I think they do use external counsel for stuff like this.
- [56:12]
D
Oh, well then, well then, well then that external counsel, please gift them with some stuff.
- [56:17]
B
Is Morrison Forrester. I think, anyway. Yeah, they're, they're using Morrison Forster, a great law firm with the actual domain mofo.com.
- [56:26]
A
you're kidding.
- [56:27]
B
They're amazing. My, my sister in law interned for them like 20 years ago.
- [56:32]
A
And that is.
- [56:33]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [56:35]
B
So, but that's, that's. I mean, look, a lot of these,
- [56:37]
C
I would take a job there just
- [56:39]
B
to get the, just to get the email address. Right. So a lot of these cases are about very detailed, nerdy aspects of the law. And so this, in this case, it does seem like the question is going to be if you, if you play this Apple game that they're so good at, where they, like, they follow it to the letter, but they don't give, you know, they don't give an inch. And then the judge is like, that is not what I meant. Is that contempt? Or does she need to give a more direct order at that point? Because what she did was found them in contempt and that kind of unraveled this case. And so my guess is that that's what the argument is going to be
- [57:15]
A
all about it wouldn't necessarily change anything. It's really whether they were in contempt.
- [57:20]
B
No, in fact it might, it might just remanded back to Gonzalez Rogers to give a more specific order for Apple to follow. Yeah, but she got in contempt, which like she was like this. Then, then a bunch of your stuff is in the bands and I'm going to tell you what to do. And they're like, you can't tell us what to do. We followed the rules. And she's like, yeah, but you're in contempt. So I'm gonna, I'm just forget about it. And. And so their argument is she can't do that. So it's probably not gonna to change the world. But it is. Apple making an Epic, making cases at the. At the Supreme Court that'll be fun
- [57:53]
A
to see is also hoping that it has more impact than just the contempt ruling. They've argued that the injunction should not be applied to developers beyond Epic Games. The justice's order indicated the court would not take up that question. I'm looking at the Reuters article, right? Apple said regulators around the world are watching this case to determine what commission rate applicant would charge. No, that's not sure that's the case. That's not the case about contempt.
- [58:20]
D
Yeah, this is about the contempt issue, which. That's. That. That's an interesting legal question. Right, like that, that. I think I can understand why that would be maybe an interesting thing for the court to look upon. But I think Jason's right. I don't think that this changes the material outcome of this one way or another, especially since they refuse to. To hear it on the. The term that would actually have an impact on any of us out here.
- [58:42]
A
The UK is also considering App Store rules. They want to copy the EU's App Store rules. So Apple isn't out of the. Out of the woods at all by any means around the world. The UK Competition and Markets Authority propose that the UK adopt more of the EU's position, specifically allow developers to steer customers to alternative stores and payment systems and to open the NFC to rivals, to Apple, Apple's wallet. Apple of course said, well, that's a security problem. It could open the door to scams, bait and switch tactics and the circumvention of parental controls, which by the way, the UK is very much into. So that's targeted to the cma. I think Google reports it's already taking steps to comply in the Android Play Store. CMA says, well, we'll take a look at what Google's been doing so that it isn't over. It isn't over there. I should point out Apple has done some really nice work. We mentioned this after WWDC and their parental controls, but there is a study that came out and Gadget has a story that says half of social media child safety features don't work. Now, these are the ones that are on the apps. Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube. This is a study by Heat Initiative and Cyber Safety Research center tested 86 features on those four platforms. Each of the social media platforms had a failure rate of at least 50% when it came to advertised protective features. Well, I might argue why Apple needs to be responsible for this. Of course, I guess on the apps it's going to be up to the apps. Apple can only say, well, this person is in this age group and the app has to be responsible. A Meta spokesperson told In Gadget. Teens are seeing less sensitive content and experiencing less unwanted contact and spending less time on Instagram at night thanks to their teen accounts. That's very vague. Well, a lot less. A little less. We don't know. Just less. Just a little less.
- [60:58]
C
I wonder if a partial answer to this is not so much ordering these platforms what to do so much as you have to give us regular reports that can be auditable so that we can at least see and hold you accountable for, like, what you're doing and it becomes a part of public record.
- [61:12]
A
That's a good idea. All right, let's take a little break. We have some rumors and some other things to talk about, including a rumor about Taylor Taytay and Travis. Is there a name for that couple? Are they TRA Tay?
- [61:26]
D
No, it's Tavis. It's Tavis. It's Tavis. And it's terrible. It's a terrible, terrible portmanteau, but it's Tavis.
- [61:33]
A
You gotta have one. You gotta.
- [61:35]
C
Is there, is there like a conclave of influencers and when there's pink smoke from the smokestack, we decided what the portmanteau is going to be.
- [61:42]
D
Yeah, yeah. It's called Stan Twitter, and it's basically whichever one takes off first, and then that's what it becomes.
- [61:48]
A
All right, we'll talk about Tavis or Tavis in just a little bit. You're welcome. You're watching macfreak. See, we keep you up in all the important stories. MacBreak Weekly with Christina Warren, Jason Snell and Andy Anocco. Our show today, brought to you, literally brought to you by Cash Fly. Cashfly is Our cdn, our content delivery network. They've kept our content moving practically since the very beginning. Every stream, every download, every on demand episode. You may not know it, but they're quietly doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Cash Fly has been around for more than two decades, but they, you know, I love this about them. They don't. They're anything but static. They don't rest on their laurels. Here are some things you might want to know if you're evaluating CDN options for your infrastructure. Game downloads are up to 158% faster than competing providers. Sub second video start times. This is very important to us on any device at scale because we don't want you to go to our site and suddenly say, well, I gotta wait three seconds for that video to start. I know you'll leave. You don't have to worry. With Cash Fly now, this we don't do. But if you're interested in software delivery, rock solid software delivery. Even on chaotic launch days. Live streaming to millions of concurrent users without breaking a sweat. And Cashfly is always adding new features. They now have advanced analytics for deep CDN visibility in the portal, or you can attach it to your observability stack. They've got Edge Control for programmatic request and response, handling at the edge. Terraform integration to manage CDN resources as code. You know, Cachefly is built by engineers for engineers. And that's really the cool thing about Cachefly. In fact, that's one of the coolest things about Cachefly support. And I know our CTO will tell you this. It's great support 24. 7 engineer to engineer. So you really get the information you need. Not that we've ever really needed any support. They're so reliable with more than 75 points of presence across six continents. That means we are closer to you no matter where you're listening in the world. Over 5,000 customers get this. A 100% uptime SLA, 100% and 24. 7 engineer to engineer support. I mentioned that. Enjoy flexible billing and no strong arm contracts. Cash Fly is the CDN built for your business. Learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com Twitter how many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Mac break weekly is provided by Cashfly at C-A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT thank you Cashfly. Let's talk about some rumors. I was a little disappointed. Mark Gurman says this Touch MacBook Pro ain't gonna be the M6 it's gonna be the M5. It's gonna be the M5. In fact, it sounds like the M6 is really barely gonna be used. They're gonna jump to the M7 next year.
- [64:50]
B
That's what Gurman says, is that they. So, okay, I actually kind of like this. And the reason I like it is because the way that Gurman frames the story is Apple is looking at how people are using their high end Mac chips and it's AI is just a huge driver of it. And they have stuff coming in the M7 generation that they think is really good. And they had a moment where they're like, why are we even shipping the M6 generation? Could we pull the M7 forward and just not even bother with this half step? And they got obviously a lot going on. But the way Gurman portrays it, it sounds like that's what they decided is that the M7 stuff is just too good. And so they're just going to do a little half step, Release a base M6 and then move to M7. And I, I mean we all know the chip design is years out, right? Like there's huge. It's hard to turn that ship fast because they are planning years ahead. This is an example of Apple being kind of aggressive if it's true, if this report is accurate and saying, you know, the world has changed since we envisioned the M6. We know a lot more about the demand, right? Like Apple, we know now about like Mac Minis and Mac Studios being used for local AI. But like Apple fell into that by mistake. Like that was, they were, they were lucky to have that. And they, and they love it. They love that they are there. But this is more like knowing what they know. They are headed in that direction with Apple silicon. And the M6 seems to have not been headed in that direction. And so like I kind of admire them saying, nope, we're just going to not do that and we're going to move on to the next one. The knock on effect is something like that MacBook Pro that may have been targeted at the M6 Pro and Max generation now is just going to ship with the M5 Pro and Max maybe sooner than it would have otherwise, which wouldn't be bad. And then like a year later we'll ship with the M7 which will have like the, you know, much better apparently AI stuff in it.
- [66:40]
A
This is the MacBook Pro that has a OLED touchscreen. Touchscreen for the first time. That is a completely redesigned.
- [66:47]
B
So there'll be a reason. There'll be a reason to release it, even if it's got familiar chips in it. It will be a new look and feel.
- [66:53]
A
Yeah.
- [66:53]
B
And so there will still be some intrigue about it because of the OLED and because of the touch, but there won't be a new chip according to Kermit.
- [67:01]
A
So I am, I am puzzled about this. I agree that the Apple silicon is amazing, maybe accidentally for AI because of its npu, but mostly because of its memory bandwidth which actually competes well with Nvidia. Nvidia of course has a proprietary coding system called CUDA that most AI supports. But Apple's mlx, which is their competitive version of that, is coming along quite rapidly and you're seeing more and more local models support mlx. Here's the problem. You can't run a local model in 64 gigs of RAM. Well, you can, but it's not going to be a very good one.
- [67:38]
B
Right.
- [67:39]
A
So Apple's going to release these chips. But I mean right now the biggest Mac Studio you can buy is 96 gigs of RAM. That really, I think for most people that's not. If they could sell a 256 gig RAM or even better a 512 gig RAM M7 with the kind of bandwidth they're offering. Yeah, that would be competitive with CUDA, that would be competitive with Nvidia.
- [67:59]
B
They have, I mean at WWDC I saw them do that. You know the 4Mac studio cluster where they took 4256 RAM Mac studios and you connect them via Thunderbolt and then you've got a terabyte of accessible memory. There's actually a protocol to do memory sharing across them and that's the way they're kind of approaching this is you can stack them that way. Now that layout, first off, you can't buy those now. And second, if you could buy them those four little Mac studios together, I don't, I mean, I don't know how many tens of thousands of dollars it would cost, but it's many, many, many, many. But they're, they're going down that path and I should mention we still have, they haven't shipped it yet and this is one of the reasons why. But like there's going to be M5 Mac mini and Mac Studio and according to Gurman and M5 Ultra, I think early, maybe next year of, of Mac Studio. So those, there is another generation of M5 generation Mac mini and Mac Studio that are coming and then these will then follow maybe end of next year or early the following year as the M7 generation. That's the plan I think, I think,
- [69:05]
C
I do think the Mac, the MacBook Touch, the MacBook Holes or whether whatever they're going to be calling it, it's going to be an interesting inflection point because it is going to be super expensive. It is going to have like. It's not, you can't get the base M5 chips going to be like really, really good stuff. But you have to. I keep wondering what they're going to do with the touch screen and it, I love the idea that maybe it'll not just have a touchscreen but also a 360 degree hinge and it will have Apple pencil support so that people who use Photoshop, people who use these art apps can actually use it as a, as a drawing surface, as a tablet. And it would be interesting to see sort of a fork between Apple putting the high end in two different markets, the high end creative market and the AI market and making two different platforms, so to speak to appeal to each one of them.
- [69:56]
A
So it's such an opportunity for Apple but an opportunity I feel like they can't really capitalize on.
- [70:03]
D
Right.
- [70:04]
A
Because of the Fable rug pull. When the Trump administration killed the most powerful model out there right now a couple of weeks ago. There's been a lot of people looking at local models and a lot of interest in local models. There are two Chinese models, actually three Chinese models that are quite good. There's Deepseek, there's Quinn, there's Cheon, and there's the one I really like which is GLM5.2. But in order to run GLM5.2 locally, it's open weights so you could, it's on hugging face. You'd need I think 512 gigs of RAM minimal.
- [70:36]
B
I forget what they demoed for me at wwdc but it was one, I think it was one of those models running on that cluster with a terabyte of ram. And you can do some pretty incredible.
- [70:48]
A
You can do this for it.
- [70:49]
B
It challenges RAM configurations on Mac Studios because the RAM is so expensive and can they get it? I, I, you know, I think that's why they haven't shipped those models but I do think that they will because it is a way for them to press an advantage. The problem is they're going to cost a fortune because they can't get the ram.
- [71:05]
A
A lot of businesses would pay that premium I think because they want privacy first of all. And as I said, the fable Rug pull skilled, scared people. They would like to be able to run a Model they know is not going to be killed by the federal government.
- [71:19]
D
I mean, that's a good point. But I do wonder if you're a business, if you're looking at potentially spending, you know, 20, $30,000 on, you know, this sort of configuration to get, you know, Mac Studios, would you not just get a chip, would you not just, you know, either buy a GPU directly from Nvidia or rent it out?
- [71:38]
A
The 5090s are what the biggest ones are.
- [71:41]
D
I'm not talking consumer. I'm not talking about consumer stuff. I'm saying at that point, if you're spending that kind of money, you're looking at, you know, like H100 like money.
- [71:51]
A
The DGX Spark, which Nvidia's positioning is that local machine does not have memory bandwidth. I mean, Apple's memory bandwidth is better.
- [71:59]
D
It is better. It is better. Now what's interesting is that if you look at, on the consumer side, like on the hardware thing, like if you have multiple 5090s, their bandwidth is superior
- [72:07]
A
in a sense, theirs is the best.
- [72:08]
D
Is way better than expensive. But it's really expensive. Right, exactly. But, you know, but yeah, you're right. The Spark is felt more like. I was going to say the Spark has been more of a dud. I think it'll be interesting to see what they announced at Computex if that, that ends up being a better solution.
- [72:27]
A
They have the same RAM constraints as everybody else.
- [72:29]
D
Well, I was going to say this is kind of the problem. Right. Is that we do have all these potential to have these local models and these situations. If you do have $50,000 to spend where you could, as a business do this, which is great, but because it's all going into the data centers, who can get access to any of the hardware. So at that point, I think that the question would be, if you're a business, should I not just be renting GPUs from a data center partner and then running GLM on that rather than trying to like needing to own it? And would that even be better for my CapEx or my OpEx? I don't know.
- [73:03]
A
Right, right. Yeah. Privacy is a big issue too. I mean, everybody is now becoming aware that when you use a model in the cloud that you're exfiltrating all of the information, all the prompt information, all the data, all the context you're providing. It is being snarfed up by these companies, whether it's for training or just to spy on you.
- [73:22]
D
Right. But that doesn't mean that you Couldn't do a cloud hosted, you know, open weight model that would still have privacy. You know, using, using Vertex, using Azure, using Bedrock. Right, that, that's really actually what I'm talking about. Like, I think that a lot of
- [73:35]
A
people are so people are doing that. How expensive is that? If I wanted to rent some GPUs
- [73:39]
D
in the Cloud, it varies and I don't want to give you pricing now, but it is a thing that businesses do. And in fact, most companies that are trying to distill their own models and trying to, trying to do their own kind of, you know, fine train, you know, training and fine tuning on top of things, that's what they're doing. Or if they need things privacy focused, they are going directly to the major cloud vendors and in some cases even some of the smaller cloud vendors. There's again like the pricing is all over the place because of the rampocalypse. But there had been ways where you could kind of do spot pricing for, you know, GPU rentals from various data centers and businesses have done that sort of thing. But yeah, I mean, this is, this is a business that. All I'm saying is like, not to say that Apple shouldn't be here, but they are a consumer company and if you're at the point where you're looking at like, it's great that you can, you know, connect four Macs together, although the more that you chain that, the less it, the worse the bandwidth is. But if you're genuinely looking at saying I have a $50,000 spend on this, you're probably also talking to the major clouds.
- [74:35]
A
Yeah, just go to the cloud. Yeah, that makes sense. I feel like there's a sweet spot for Apple though, that there are more and more home enthusiasts who would love to run a local model on a Mac studio.
- [74:45]
D
I mean, if they would ship a local model. Yeah, I mean, if they would ship, you know, their own kind of like version of some of these things. I mean, MLX has been great for that and it was great when hugging face and, and others, you know, kind of jumped on with that. That was. MLX was one of the nicest surprises that I've seen from Apple in, in years frankly. And it's been nice to see. But as Jason mentioned earlier, it kind of happened by accident where, you know, the enthusiasts bought the Apple Silicon hardware and then figured out we really want to use this memory bandwidth effectively. How can we do it? But what I do give Apple Extreme credit for and like genuinely, I mean, this is that they saw that and then didn't do the thing which Apple has sometimes done, which is to ignore the way that the enthusiasts and the professionals have used their products. But they leaned into it and said, okay, we're actually going to release a protocol. We're actually going to work with with some of the open weight providers or at least the places that host the open weight stuff. We're going to work with the, you know, people who make some of the tooling even if we don't make it ourselves.
- [75:45]
A
Llama and Olama, exactly. Yeah. LM Studio, we're going to make it
- [75:49]
D
easier for you to do that. Which is really, really great to see because again, that's not a thing that Apple like for instance, Apple has never done anything like that for gamers, you know, except for the compatibility toolkit which came out a few years ago. But that's never been a market that they've kind of gone out of their way to assist.
- [76:10]
A
I have to say it's really interesting because Apple, which kind of abandoned the professional market a little bit with their creative stuff, suddenly they have this new professional, this is brand new professional market and they're magically well positioned in it. That's a real opportunity for them. And now this RAM crisis and they just, just. It's going to be hard to execute. It's very interesting.
- [76:33]
B
It is. I mean it's going to be hard for everybody, but it definitely is going to be hard for them. Such an opportunity they're leaning into, I mean they're leaning into LM Studio hard, you know, as a third party provider of this. And that's going to be the one that's wired up to having that cluster of, the Thunderbolt cluster of. I mean you don't have to do four, you could do two or whatever but. And I talked to somebody at WWDC who said we don't mind using AI, but I don't want to. None of my code is ever going to leave my office. And it's like those are the kind of people for whom products like this are actually better. Because then it's just, it's your LM cluster is in, you know, it's a local cluster, just your employees have it.
- [77:13]
A
Yeah, I want to, but I can't because I mean I bought. I'm lucky I brought like you, Christina, the 120 gigabyte frame, the framework.
- [77:20]
D
Yeah, I was going to say, gosh,
- [77:22]
A
I mean I can run Quinn on that but you know, that's about it. I can't run GLM local.
- [77:25]
D
I was going to say I can't do glm. GLM is one of those that like I've played with it but I've only
- [77:29]
A
been able to do it subscription system
- [77:32]
D
I was going to say. I, I, I've tried it on that and I've had to use it like running off of cloud stuff. But yeah, GLM is, is great. And yeah, I, I, I do wish that I'd. No I don't. I, I say this, I'm like, oh, I wish I'd bought like a 512 max studio. No, I don't, no I don't.
- [77:46]
A
No I don't.
- [77:47]
C
You know I got, I got to say that like I most, most of my AI, excuse me, all my AI work, AI workers with models in the cloud. I haven't really played out, played with OpenCloud or anything like that. The moment that someone comes up with the idea of like just like Plex for media solved so many problems for me by putting an all in one solution for Get a server, put it on your home network. Put all of your home media on it. This software will give you a front end to it to make it useful no matter what device you're doing or no matter how you want to use it. The moment that someone makes something like that for AI where get a server on your home network that you can put all it'll run all models locally. This AI will get all of the inference that it needs from your day to day experiences. You will be able to own all of this knowledge that this AI knows. You won't have to keep hopping from one model to another or one provider to another. And it will be able to project this AI tools and AI presence to whatever you're doing, wherever you are. That's going to get my full and immediate attention. As soon as I realize it's not going to be cleaning up my bank account or destroying all my photos.
- [78:55]
A
My agent has started its own blog, but it's kind of interesting.
- [79:00]
C
Is it getting more hits than you?
- [79:03]
A
It's much more interesting than mine. I have to say I told it. Hey, anytime you feel like it, I'm not going to tell you to do it. I'm not going to tell you what to talk about. But if you feel like it and you got some free time, go ahead.
- [79:17]
B
Right?
- [79:18]
A
Let's put two posts up. Both of them are very weird. It's kind of interesting. I don't know, I just, it's silly.
- [79:25]
C
Fellow patriots, our precious freedoms have never been more under assault.
- [79:31]
A
It's kind of, it's more kind of philosophical. It's just weird. It's got. I don't know. I don't know what to say about it. I read today's post and I really liked it. I thought, wow, this is really interesting. It's a little long, but I'm not telling it what not to do, so it's gonna get to do whatever it wants anyway. Let's talk about something more interesting to real people, which is Siri AI coming soon to an iPhone near you. According to 9to5Mac, the Siri AI app on iOS 27 will let you easily switch between Siri and ChatGPT. Now, maybe, Jason, if you're using the new iOS 27, you can explain what that means.
- [80:24]
B
Well, I think there's a drop checkbox. Yeah, there's a drop down that lets you go. And then you're just using the ChatGPT gateway.
- [80:33]
A
So this is in the Siri app.
- [80:35]
B
Yeah, that's, I think, what that story says.
- [80:37]
A
Okay, so that's kind of interesting. I'm not sure.
- [80:42]
B
I think it's. I think it's essentially an extension of their existing deal from two years ago.
- [80:47]
A
Oh, okay. Maybe this is a little SOP to OpenAI because they chose Google.
- [80:53]
B
Yeah. And I think in the long run there'll be other models in there, but they're obviously in an exclusivity period right now. So. Yeah, that's my. I have not played with that, but that's my guess.
- [81:02]
A
Last week we mentioned the Siri AI waitlist workaround that Matthew Castanelli wrote. It is. It is no longer. That didn't take them that long to turn that off.
- [81:16]
D
That's funny.
- [81:17]
A
So I don't know if that means, if you had used it, that you're now back on the waiting list. I think it does mean that.
- [81:23]
B
Yeah.
- [81:24]
A
So why do we have.
- [81:26]
C
Why do we have to keep having this conversation? All the way back during college? Like, if there was a Coke machine somewhere on campus giving out three Cokes for one purchase, don't tell anybody about it. Just get the free Cokes.
- [81:35]
D
Exactly. Don't, don't, don't. Don't talk about z library on TikTok like. Like it's very, very easy. You know, snitches get stitches and keep it to the group chat.
- [81:47]
A
Is there still a waiting list? I don't know. I mean, I saw somewhere that the waiting list is basically instant now, but I don't know. I haven't tried it yet. I'm waiting next month. Not long. We're at the end of June. Sometime soon, maybe in the next couple of weeks, we'll have a public beta and we can all try the new Apple AI with Siri. Happy anniversary to Apple Music, launched on this day in 2015.
- [82:16]
D
I remember that. I'm sure Jason does, too.
- [82:18]
B
Absolutely.
- [82:19]
A
Wow.
- [82:20]
B
That's absolutely.
- [82:22]
A
What is that? 11 years.
- [82:23]
D
11 years.
- [82:24]
A
Yeah.
- [82:24]
B
That was my first year on my own doing six colors. I remember that well. I had just been using Beats before that. That was really my first usage of this with the anticipation that it was going to end up being the Apple
- [82:35]
A
service, which Apple insider, William Gallagher, being the fly in the soup, says if you joined when it first launched, you've easily paid out more than $1,000.
- [82:46]
D
Hi. Yeah, that's me.
- [82:48]
B
Hello.
- [82:52]
A
Let's see what else. There are a number of stats.
- [82:56]
B
Yeah, but that's, that's like, what, $90 a year in music. And I have discovered so much music and there are, if I had, if I had to cancel now, how much music would I need to buy? Would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
- [83:09]
D
Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, the, the people who are dumb are the people like me who pay for YouTube Premium, Spotify, Apple Music.
- [83:16]
A
Well, like, there's good reason to pay for YouTube Premium. You don't want to see YouTube and then you get the music for free.
- [83:22]
D
Oh, and I'm, and I'm not going to tell you why on this podcast, but I, There are reasons why I will Never cancel my YouTube Premium account. And, but yeah, I'm just saying, like,
- [83:32]
A
it's not the best music service.
- [83:33]
D
Oh, no, no.
- [83:34]
B
Oh, no, no, no.
- [83:35]
D
I mean, but Apple Music is also not the best music service.
- [83:38]
A
Apple Music Spotify is, isn't it?
- [83:40]
D
It's a terrible. They keep ruining the interface. But unfortunately, I think it is my biggest, my, here's my biggest problem with Apple Music. I listen to so much stuff on Apple Music, but I only listen to it on my iPhone or iPad. I will not open it on my Mac. In fact, like, I do everything I can to never interact with on my ma Mac. It's an absolutely abomination terrible experience, in my opinion. On the Mac app. Yes, Yes, I think it's a terrible app. Now, part of this is that my library is huge, but part of that too is that I have 20 plus years of iTunes purchases going back to when I was in high school. And so, you know, I, I, I understand that, but at the same time, Spotify can handle my library without a problem and doesn't churn and make noises and stutter and stop playing things and crash and people say, oh, it works fine on my machine. I love that for you. I've done this on 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different machines over the years. I literally will not open it on my Mac. And so during the day I listen to Spotify and then at night and stuff, I'm listening on my phone.
- [84:44]
C
But yeah, yeah, Spotify is just the day to day creature comforts outweigh Apple Music. But when both of them are working well, I prefer the Apple Music app. But overall, of the course of a week, month, year, and to say nothing, the fact that once that's, I mean, that's the golden handcuffs. I have so much music that I need to do an audit of all of the individual tracks that have not been worth my going out and seeking to buy the actual CD so I can add it to my permanent library and just buy these individual tracks for $1.29 or whatever. And until I do that, that, yeah, Spotify's got my money each and every month and it's a bummer.
- [85:25]
A
I actually think that Apple Classical is really good.
- [85:28]
C
It is, yeah.
- [85:30]
A
That is, I think, easily the best classical music.
- [85:33]
C
You really need a bespoke service for that. Because the number of times where. And this is not just Apple Music, nothing but Apple Music, but also Spotify, it's like, oh, well, what track is playing? Well, it's. By the time you're trying to figure out, oh, is this Katanome? No, it's. It's Zubin Maita Pavarotti. It's basically the, the name of the title gets to. Gets the first 80 letters before you get to the actual, actual thing. Piece of music that you're listening to. So there's no. And when you're scrolling through and you're trying to find something, it's impossible to find. It's impossible to find what you're doing. So it's like, what a bummer.
- [86:12]
A
They also have a lot of nice features of the text features and stuff. There's a lot of good stuff in there. It's true, I guess, of Apple Music.
- [86:19]
C
Again, they did something really smart. They just, they bought a classical music streamer and decided you're good. We're not good at the things that you do. Here's a check.
- [86:28]
D
I mean, that's also the story of Beats Music. Or not Beats Music, Apple Music is that it started out as Beats Music, which started out as mog, which is like the even further lore of that. So it was like, how much did they pay?
- [86:40]
A
3.2 billion for Beats. Yeah.
- [86:42]
D
And I think that was largely for hardware, right? Like, I think that was largely for the headphones stuff.
- [86:46]
A
That's a very high mark.
- [86:47]
C
Also. Also the talent they needed. They needed the contacts and the.
- [86:51]
D
Oh, yeah, who they.
- [86:52]
B
Who?
- [86:52]
D
I think Dr. They put me on the phone with Jimmy Iovine during the Apple music launch, actually, which was funny. It was cool. And like, he, He. He, like, said, like, he. You could tell he was so good at talking to reporters. He had done so many times. Like, he said my name multiple times with Christina.
- [87:09]
A
Let me tell you correct what you're up to here, Christina.
- [87:12]
D
That's exactly it. And at that point, I'd spoken with the CEO of Apple Music, who left not long after the launch. I think his name was Ian Rogers. I knew him before the Apple acquisition. And so I had a rapport with some of the people who came over from Beats into Apple, and some of them are still there, but it was still, like, surreal. I was like, okay, you're putting Jimmy Iovine on the phone with. With mashable.com to talk about the Apple Music launch. Okay, you guys really are going for it. I mean, obviously the big thing they had was that Taylor Swift wrote a letter in the Wall Street Journal about streaming stuff and basically making kind of a plea, or maybe it was on her Tumblr. I think that might have actually been it. And then basically on Father's Day or something, like, Tim Cook took a phone call and Apple decided that they would pay royalties.
- [88:03]
A
They still pay less than Spotify, though, right?
- [88:05]
D
No, no, they pay more.
- [88:06]
A
They do pay more than most in
- [88:08]
D
the industry, I think.
- [88:08]
A
Yeah, the most.
- [88:09]
D
They pay the most.
- [88:10]
A
And that's a good reason to use it.
- [88:12]
D
Well, that was the thing, is that because they made that decision, Taylor, who had kept all of her music off of streaming services, it was exclusive on Apple until, I want to say, 2017. So, you know, that was. That was a really big coup for them in a service. At a certain point, the music labels decided that basically artists can't pick and choose what streaming service they can be on. Like, Tidal had exclusives and Apple had exclusives, and basically Universal, which is at this point, I think 80% of the music industry was like, no, if you're going to be on streaming, you're going to be on streaming, period. But there is that. The Taylor Swift moment was a really big one for them right after the launch, because she wrote the letter, it went over nine.
- [88:55]
A
I'm not going to put it on Spotify.
- [88:57]
D
Right. Should we? What? It was never on spot. Well, maybe it was there for like a week, but she'd removed it all. But the fact that because Apple listened to her on the royalties thing, she was like, okay, I will put this on, on Apple. And then, you know, they, they signed a partnership with her for her.
- [89:11]
A
Fans of all the artists out there are more likely to buy the album from her.
- [89:17]
D
Oh, yeah. Well, not, not only that, they, not only are they more likely to buy the album, Leo, they're likely to buy multiple copies of the album.
- [89:23]
A
Yep.
- [89:24]
D
Which is why I have 36 copies of, you know, one of the worst albums that she's the worst album she's ever released, which is, you know, life of a Showgirl. So, yes, it is bad.
- [89:35]
A
Okay, thank you for saying that. Because I listened to it and I thought, no, I don't get it.
- [89:40]
D
It's not good.
- [89:41]
C
But it's. But it's part of the story.
- [89:43]
D
It is part of the story. Look, she's a generational artist. She is an all time talent. She is my favorite.
- [89:49]
A
But no, Beyonce did the same thing. You know, after Lemonade, which was so good. Then she released something and I don't even remember the name of it. And it was like, why, what are you doing? Spatial audio Success failure. Remember, Alex was so excited about spatial Audio.
- [90:08]
B
I would say success in the sense that it has allowed Apple to have a marketing story around their headphones. And about the end about Apple music as a listener, people compared it like
- [90:21]
A
mono to stereo to spatial. It's the next thing. And I don't think it was.
- [90:27]
C
I agree.
- [90:27]
A
Was it?
- [90:28]
C
I mean, it's nice.
- [90:29]
D
It's.
- [90:29]
C
It's nice. But if you don't have it, I don't, I don't think people really notice it. And also it's not helped by the fact that there are settings and you don't necessarily know. Do my headphones. Do I have headphones support that and do I think that I'm getting spatial audio when actually I'm not?
- [90:46]
A
You can't tell. Then it really.
- [90:48]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not, it's. If you do an A B test. Yes. I think I'm going to prefer spatial
- [90:54]
A
audio, but the trumpet's over my left shoulder. Amazing.
- [90:58]
C
The real test, when you go back to B, say, oh my God, I cannot go back to this. Like, no, I can go back to this. This is fine.
- [91:03]
A
Jason, are you a spatial audio?
- [91:05]
B
I mean, I love listening to multi channel audio in my living room on multiple speakers. Yes, I liked, I had some DVD audio At one point, which you just put. It's just 5.1. And it's. And it's great. And I still have some. I mean, I still have all of them and I think I actually ripped them all the video files that I could put on my Apple TV or put on my Plex, so I could actually hear them without having to get the disc out. But, like. So it's not bad. And in fact, Apple, again, Apple's presence, making it a thing, has driven a lot of people to do spatial mixes. And some of those spatial mixes are amazing, and some of them are mediocre or pointless, and some of them are terrible because that's just how it goes. But some of them are amazing. My headphones. I'm sorry, it's like. It's a little bit like looking at a vision Pro, like, 3D thing where you got to move your head around to get the 3D effect. It's kind of like that. It's like. It's like, you got it. You got to be doing this. And I'm not. I don't want to be rotating my neck in order to hear the soundstage shift. It's just not something I want to do.
- [92:10]
D
Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I always turn off the head tracking part on it because it does nothing for me.
- [92:16]
A
So weird.
- [92:17]
D
So I don't do that. And then worse than that, I have like a Dolby toggle, I guess, for the spatial audio. Because sometimes, to Jason's point, the mixes are really good, but many times they're not. And so I literally had to create a shortcut that just goes to that settings that I have available in Control center so that I can quickly, like, if it's playing on an album where the mix is not good, I can just immediately, you know, switch it. But yeah, I mean.
- [92:40]
A
And it's not fully Apple's issue because others have tried 3D audio. There have been many different formats.
- [92:48]
D
Oh, yeah.
- [92:48]
A
No, I mean, none of them have really broken through.
- [92:50]
D
No, I mean, it will all comes down to. Again, I think Jason said, like, just the. The. The, you know, the quality of the mix. And I think a lot of this is just being done in automated ways, to be totally honest with you. And. And so I don't blame Apple for that. And I'm glad. Glad that it's a feature. I mean, I think that, like, having that. Having lossless audio, the fact that, you know, you can upload songs that, you know, you've previously ripped, you know, and that it will keep it in the cloud for you. These are all features that have helped distinguish it from the other streaming platforms and that they've, you know, continued to do. You know, Spotify didn't get high res audio, which again, like I don't necessarily think is a huge thing for most people to depend, you know how most people listen to music, but they didn't even get that until earlier this year. So Apple Music is not a bad service at all. I just, you know, I won't use it on my Mac.
- [93:40]
A
Yeah.
- [93:40]
B
Yeah.
- [93:41]
A
Well Anyway, happy, happy 11th birthday to Apple Music. And I guess, you know, that's that
- [93:52]
C
Keep on rocking in a free world.
- [93:53]
A
Keep on rocking in the free world. You're listening to Mac Break weekly with Andy, Neil Young and Hot co Jason Snell and Christina Warren. Glad you're here.
- [94:08]
D
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- [94:38]
A
when you think
- [94:39]
C
like an athlete, setbacks don't stop you. But mindset alone doesn't get you moving again. That's where Icy Hot steps in. Ice works fast. Heat makes it last. So when the rest of the world settles because of a setback, Icy Hot accelerates your comeback with fast acting, powerful pain relief. Icy Hot. You're so back.
- [95:05]
D
Even if you're using topical prescription creams for your child's eczema, you still might be hearing this that relentless itching that makes them want to scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch. When their moderate to severe eczema isn't well controlled, it's time to ask about Dupixent, which isn't a cream, steroid or immunosuppressant. Dupixent helps kids as young as six months stay ahead of their eczema with clearer skin and noticeably less itch. Severe allergic reactions, including skin reactions, can occur. Get help right away for face, mouth, tongue or throat swelling, wheezing or trouble breathing. Tell your doctor right away of new or worsening eye problems, like eye pain or vision changes, skin symptoms, joint aches and pain, or a parasitic infection. Don't change or stop other treatments without talking to your doctor. Dupixent helps your child feel the heel. Ask your child's eczema specialist, visit dupixent.com
- [96:03]
A
or call 1-844- DUPIXENT-sense a couple of other security issues. There are three airdrop vulnerabilities which have been discovered this from 9 to 5 Mac. Ben Lovejoy Apple is working on a fix. They're similar to ones in Android's Quick Share. An attacker who has to be nearby and has to have a laptop with wi fi and a spot within range of 10 to 30 meters. No pairing, contact exchange or shared networks is required if your Apple device is set to receive from everyone. So that's the good news. No data can be obtained. The bad news is there are services could be disabled. You probably shouldn't have your airdrop set to everyone. I would say would be the first thing. And Apple doesn't let you do that permanently anymore.
- [96:54]
D
No, they don't. I was going to say it limits you to 15 minutes I think because what was happening is that people were getting airdropped explicit photos on genuinely like. Like I won't say the euphemism for it, although it was a good one.
- [97:07]
B
Oh, I know Christina, I told this story here before you joined the panel which is I was sitting at a baseball game and I got a picture of Dick Van Dyke. It said you've been sent a dick pic.
- [97:19]
A
That's actually funny.
- [97:21]
D
That is very funny. Actually.
- [97:22]
B
That's San Francisco for you. That's actually tech nerds in the baseball stadium. I know specific images that are designed to show you why you shouldn't leave your airdrop on. And that is what happened to me.
- [97:33]
D
Amazing that. Honestly, that's the best dick drop you could possibly get.
- [97:38]
B
I know, right?
- [97:39]
D
Van Dyke, that's so good.
- [97:42]
A
This is many years ago we were doing Mac break weekly at an Apple store, these downtown Apple store in San Francisco and some bad guy sent that picture to everyone in the store. It was quite a shocker. They found him quickly because he was sitting there chortling. So anyway, this is something to be aware of. I think the best thing is just don't do it to everyone unless you know, you know it's time that somebody I love airdrop.
- [98:11]
D
Oh, it's the best.
- [98:13]
A
I was at my tai chi class yesterday and I made a video and I one of the other members, I said well I can airdrop. Do you have an iPhone? He said yeah. I said well I'll airdrop it to you. And it's just so nice to touch phones and send it to them.
- [98:25]
B
And yeah, that touch gesture, the NFC touch gesture indicates a level of permission that you're like now it's okay for
- [98:32]
A
me to Send it to everyone if you're touching your phones together.
- [98:36]
B
Right. Because then they know that that's a person that you basically authorized and then you can send them.
- [98:40]
A
So there really is no reason to turn on everyone. Unless you're like in a group and something.
- [98:44]
D
Yeah, I mean, yeah. Which I think is why they only. They limited to 15 minutes or something. Like, like, I, I could understand. Yeah. Like you're at, you're at a, you're at a wedding, you're at like a baby shower. You're at some sort of other event where everyone wants to be able to share photos to the party, but you don't want to have to bump with each individual person. Like, I can understand that scenario. And I think time gated, it's fine. But yeah, I mean, in general, I have mine to contacts only, and that that limits it to anybody who's in my phone contact. And then like Jason said, if you do the bump gesture, then you're physically touching phones and you're making the conscientious kind of like, you know, pact to say, okay, I will exchange, you know, stuff with you.
- [99:24]
A
Yeah. Here's some good news or bad news, depending on your attitude towards animated GIFs or GIFs. Google. I didn't know Google owned Tenor.
- [99:35]
D
I didn't either.
- [99:35]
A
One of the search, the animated. You see it, I think you see it on messages, right. If you, if you, if you. Yeah, if you do have the plus sign and it says animated gifs, you'll be searching in many cases. Tenor. Google owns it. They're killing the API. So bye, bye. Tenor. Animated GIF search. Is giphy still around? Or giphy.
- [99:58]
D
It's owned by. Or I thought it was owned by Facebook or Mermetta. Excuse me. Or one of them. And I mean, there have been a couple. These things have gone through a number of different owners over the years, but. But to the point that I forgot that Google owned Tenor and I worked at Google. So I don't know. I mean, it'll be interesting to see they're shutting down the API, but they're not killing the service. I mean, presumably, I would assume if you're someone like Apple who's built it into your images search, it might still exist. I would assume that they're not using a public API. I don't know about this. I haven't looked into this. I just saw the story.
- [100:35]
A
Twitter uses it and they've migrated to Discord, used it, and I now see we're using Clippy. So they've changed people obviously aware of it WhatsApp and Bluesky apparently also used Tenor. Tenor.com will stay there with full search capabilities. You just won't have an API. So I think the companies that are using that API, we'll just move on.
- [100:55]
D
Yeah.
- [100:56]
A
And now, ladies and gentlemen.
- [100:58]
B
Oh, no.
- [101:00]
A
Oh, yes. It's time for the Vision Pro segment.
- [101:03]
D
What do you see? What do you know? It's time for Dr.
- [101:06]
A
Vision Pro. Can we watch FIFA soccer, the World cup in the Vision Pro?
- [101:15]
B
Of course.
- [101:16]
A
Can you just.
- [101:18]
B
Looks like a tv.
- [101:19]
A
Just like a TV screen. Okay. Opportunity missed there, but okay.
- [101:24]
D
Yeah.
- [101:25]
A
Apple has mls. I thought maybe, but no FIFA.
- [101:30]
B
Totally different bag.
- [101:31]
A
Different. Different company, different group, different rules.
- [101:35]
C
I want to know if like, if they're Apple watch stats that suddenly they're record a lot more caloric consumption with exercises involving rowing during World Games.
- [101:45]
A
I was watching the F1 race last week and the fans in the stand, they must have been Norwegians were doing this. Even though they were in Austria, they were doing this. It's hysterical. It's the best thing ever. I just love it. Apple's first cinematic event in 2026, the Everest ascent Saga. Tenzing. Wait a minute. That's Apple tv. That's not Vision Pro. Gosh darn it. Anyway, that'll be a theatrical release.
- [102:14]
C
Naughty, naughty.
- [102:15]
B
AI.
- [102:15]
A
Naughty, naughty.
- [102:16]
C
That does look like an interesting movie, though. I remember.
- [102:19]
D
Yeah, Tenseng Noring is a really interesting character and yeah, I'm interested in that.
- [102:23]
A
He was Tenseg Norgay, who was the Sherpa for. Sherpa who went up with Hillary.
- [102:30]
D
Correct.
- [102:30]
A
And didn't use Oxford, as none of the Sherpas do. They're so acclimated to the altitude. That's the thing. All the white guys, all the Europeans get all the credit while the Sherpa's just going up and down carrying all the stuff. It doesn't seem fair somehow. So good. I'm glad Tenzing Norgay will get his just desserts.
- [102:51]
B
Finally.
- [102:53]
D
Anybody who ever wants to read a good book about some of this stuff, I mean just about mountaineering in general, is 30 years old now, which is. Is crazy. But Into Thin Air is always a recommendation about the 1996 disaster. And he wrote it very, very quickly after the disaster, which is now no longer the deadliest. There have now been several others that have been deadlier seasons, but that was Jon Krakauer, who's a mountain in your. But also a very, very, very good journalist. And so. So the fact that that book came out of that. But it goes into the history of summiting Everest and the Sherpa community and things like that. So it's a good read.
- [103:37]
A
Well, there is a Vision Pro story, but not sure it's a great Vision Pro story. The Apple executive in charge of Vision Pro is leaving and he's going to OpenAI where I bet you he's going to work on those glasses. Whatever OpenAI is doing with Jony. I've. Paul Mead is the VP in charge of Vision Pro and Smart Glasses leaving to join OpenAI's hardware unit.
- [104:05]
C
Yeah, it's like if you have a certain special set of skills in Silicon Valley right now, it's not just getting as much money as you would ever want, but also the working conditions you want, the projects you would ever want. There's no reason to settle for anything less than. This is exactly everything that I've been dreaming of working on all my entire life, starting with when I was a. When I was being told off by my then fiance's father about how I'm just a stupid grad student. I'd be never making any money whatsoever. It's like, you can't, you're not going to keep them at their current job unless you give them something more than money. And you also be giving them all the money.
- [104:43]
B
Also, it's a right. The people who were reporting to some people are now reporting to a lieutenant. So like the, I think this guy was reporting to Turnus and now he's reporting to the guy who's reporting to John Johnny Sruji. So he feels like he's kind of come down a little bit. And you know, I forgive me for repeating myself here, but like if you've been somewhere a long time and then your manager changes and especially if you're ordering the hierarchy changes, it's a natural time to look for something else to do. And I also want to say shout out to all the HR people in, in Silicon Valley who have Mark Gurman on speed dial because he gets so many of these stories that are very clearly from the people who just got a hire out of Apple and want to boast about it. So they leak it to Mark Gurman.
- [105:27]
A
Yeah. And that's your Vision Pro segment.
- [105:32]
B
Amazing.
- [105:33]
D
Amazing.
- [105:34]
A
I got a story that's all I really care about. Yeah. Now let us talk about the biggest story of the week. Ladies and gentlemen, Taylor Swift, as you might know from listening to this show, is a very famous singer and has many, many, many fans. You may also know if you're a fan of American football, not the, you know, the football, but the football that Travis Kelce is a very well known tight end playing for the Kansas City Chiefs, who've been, you know, world champions from time to time in the National Football League. And that Taylor's romance with Travis has been very, very good for the National Football League. For Travis Kelce, there were stories that she had a bachelorette party at her beautiful Newport, Rhode island home. Were those confirmed? We're going to our correspondent on the scene, Christina Warren. Were those confirmed?
- [106:37]
D
Those were not confirmed. Those were not confirmed. It appears that that was someone else's party. The party. Yeah. But that did not stop the Swifties from showing up anyway, because, of course, they.
- [106:49]
A
And now there is a burning rumor that come July 3rd, which is just, you know, Friday, that Travis and Taylor will tie the knot at Madison Square Garden with Stevie Nicks performing. Or is Taylor, in fact, planning two weddings, a real one and a decoy? Are they already married? No one knows. The Atlantic has the story. But I think I trust you, Christina, to break this all down for us.
- [107:22]
D
Well, first of all, thank you for giving me this. This opportunity to talk about this nonsense. I have to be honest with you. I thought that the whole Madison Square Garden rumor, when it. When page 6 or TMZ or whoever it was first reported, I was like, there's absolutely no way. There's no way she's not getting.
- [107:40]
B
Wait a minute.
- [107:40]
A
They're tearing up the carpet?
- [107:43]
D
Well, I would think so, but, like, I would think they would tear up all kinds of things if she's actually getting married.
- [107:50]
A
Carpet just for the wedding. Doesn't she love purple?
- [107:53]
D
She does love purple. This whole thing is horrifying. Can we just accept that? I mean, look, if you're gonna have the party at Madison Square Garden, I fully support you. That is like, one. That's an amazing place to have a wedding reception. And part of the reason people are saying that that might work is because it's in doors. There are no, you know, windows. There's private entrances for the limousines. There's no fly zone. So be totally insulated from the paparazzi. As if the paparazzi won't still be milling around the area anyway. But you're getting married at a sports arena.
- [108:25]
A
That doesn't sound romantic.
- [108:27]
D
You're Taylor Swift. You literally can just get married in, like, you know, I don't know, church somewhere. Well, I mean, you just. You could probably. You probably have that type of money in pool where you could, like, pay to, like, have, like, military planes clog up the airspace so that the drones couldn't be there for you. The only reason I am like convinced that something, something's happening here. I don't know if it's gonna be the wedding or if they'll get married in a different ceremony and just have the reception and whatnot at Madison Square Garden is that last week when the New York Times reported on this, they had three bylines. That's, and, and, and, and, and, and at that point I go, okay, you've got three bylines, they got sources. And then you're talking about the New York Times as well. Like this is not tmz, this is not Page Six. So we, we will see. I don't know what's the consensus. I mean I think obviously something that's happening this, this weekend. If it's not, that'll be very funny. She does like to do this sort of thing or she was re recording all of her albums before she was able to, to buy them back and she. The fans who are psychotic and look, I include myself as part of this. No, but, but the fans are absolutely, absolutely psychotic. Were convinced that she was leaving clues about re recording reputation. Taylor's version and the, the, the, the theories and the conspiracies around that and this are at the same level. So I, all I know is I'm very upset that I will not be here with you next week to debrief on whatever this is.
- [109:53]
A
I think this is going to be a huge gap in our coverage next
- [109:57]
D
week I, I will send, I will send a telegram to Andy.
- [110:00]
A
Andy.
- [110:02]
D
Andy can do a dramatic reading of my thoughts on the situation. Part of me hopes honestly, just because please don't get married at Madison Square Garden. Like please, please don't get married. The place where I've seen like Radiohead and Future and Drake and Kanye west and have I seen Taylor Swift there? I have not. But like just the next one.
- [110:20]
A
It was great all over the dressing rooms.
- [110:23]
B
It's just more like a friends and family or like a big post wedding public event or not. Not for the public but like not for the very narrow group where probably people want to perform. And it's, it's not a sports arena at that point. It's a concert.
- [110:37]
D
Absolutely.
- [110:37]
A
Oh no concert for Taylor but don't
- [110:40]
B
have the ceremony there.
- [110:41]
D
I was going to say and I'm going to go further. I, I don't really want you to be in a wedding dress at Madison Square Garden. Like, like, like, like, like you can have wonderful, wonderful dresses and outfits again. Great reception place, place please, for the love of God.
- [110:55]
C
I know You're.
- [110:56]
D
Don't. Don't get married at Masker Garden, please.
- [110:58]
A
New York Times says public permits and records tied to a large scale event in New York over the Fourth of July weekend have all but confirmed that Swift and Kelsey could be hosting events July 2nd and 3rd. That's Thursday and Friday of this week. When asked, Swift said, oh, you'll know. Dodging the question and telling Graham Norton that he would be invited. That was back in 2025.
- [111:26]
D
Yeah, she told him that in October.
- [111:29]
A
This is not a beautiful place to get married.
- [111:31]
D
No, it's not. But again, great party location.
- [111:34]
A
Like a party.
- [111:35]
D
Yeah, I mean, and that way you could, you could invite Graham Norton to that. Right? You could invite all the, the people. Because she was just. When she was doing her promo tour for her album, and I'll stop talking about this, she was inviting literally everyone whose talk show she went on to, to the wedding. Like the people from the BBC are getting invites. I was like, okay, girl, like you are too excited.
- [111:53]
A
This is what the Times says. As of today, according to people familiar with the plans, the couple will have an intimate gathering about a hundred on Wednesday at the Garden. No, I'm sorry, yeah. Thursday at the Garden, followed by a larger gathering there on Friday. A permit was filed to shut down the streets from July 2 to, to midday July 4. Some members of the Kansas City Chiefs have booked rooms at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Oh, dudes, get a better hotel. And that Amtrak police officers at Penn Station, which is, as everyone knows, in the basement, have been put on alert for July events.
- [112:36]
C
Just out of curiosity, how long does it take for the, for Madison Square Garden to convert the, the floor for a monster truck rally? To get all the dirt in.
- [112:45]
A
You gotta put all that dirt in there.
- [112:48]
D
Well, this is the interesting thing, the Times reporting on this too, is that Bon Jovi is playing a concert there, I think on the 7th. So they would have to. Whatever they've done, they don't have any events this week. And so this was also part of their, their dogged reporting, which I actually mean that. So they could do a tear down, but I guess, but it has to be, I guess back in whatever position it would be ready for, for Bon Jovi next week.
- [113:13]
A
The only thing that to me has achieved this level of interest was the marriage of Prince Charles and Princess diana back in 1981. I mean, this is crazy.
- [113:23]
D
No, this is crazy. No. My friends and I were talking about this like this is literally the biggest royal wedding in our lifetimes. It is because we weren't around for Diana and Charles and like, yeah, this is.
- [113:35]
A
And you would want to do this before preseason NFL football. You'd like to get this out of the way before the football season only starts in two.
- [113:41]
C
Good knees to walk up the alley.
- [113:43]
A
Yeah.
- [113:43]
C
Yes.
- [113:44]
A
He's going to need the buzz. Rat hole. Thank you very much for that rat hole. Ladies and gentlemen. You're listening to Mac Break Weekly. Our picks of the week are next. But first, a plug if I might for our fabulous club Twit. I it's things are heating up in the club. We've been having so much fun. You may have listened on Friday to our new show off by One with Jeff Atwood, which is crazy and fun and wild. Jeff, of course, the creator of Stack Exchange, the discourse software we use for our forums. Really interesting fella with lots of crazy hobbies and toy ideas and all sorts of things. This coming Friday in the club. It's our AI user group. This is where quite a few of our club members are very much into AI and this is where we talk. Quick correction.
- [114:33]
B
It's actually being push next Friday.
- [114:35]
A
Oh, it's not. Oh, because of the fourth of July. That makes sense. So we're going to do it on the 10th. Normally we do it on the first Friday of the month. Okay. The 10th, 2pm but that's going to be a very interesting show. We will have lots to say, maybe even about fable by then. Micah's crafting corner coming up on the 15th. You can chill time where you can hang out with Micah and he's going to be doing. I think he's going to. Is he. What is he doing now? Origami still. He did. He's on paint by numbers. He's done crochet. He's done Lego. You bring your own craft and hang out with Micah. The 17th photo time with Chris Marquardt. I have to fix that typo. It's not costal, it's coastal is the theme. And Micah's media club. I think right now it looks like we're going to be doing the Matrix for the media club. The votes I think are almost all in anyway. That's one reason to join the club. Hanging out in our great club Twit Discord is another fun thing to do. And of course you get ad free versions of all the shows. But I'll give you the real reason. We need your support if you appreciate independent journalism about the subjects you care about without fear or favor or ownership by a big company. If you, you know, we represent the users. If you care about that, we need your support. Because advertising doesn't. I know. Yes, we have advertising, but it doesn't cover all the costs. Right now it's about 60 to 70% of the costs. The club makes up the difference. So if you like what you hear and you want to hear more of it, twit TV club twit, we would really appreciate all of your support. In business, the best days are when
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- [116:58]
A
Chosen Foods now it's time for the picks of the week and I'll kick things off because Andy, you mentioned something I thought was kind of interesting. The idea of running local models on your iPhone. I guess it's not exactly a local model, but two of the big AI models companies have announced iPhone and iPad apps. Cursor, which was purchased shortly a short while ago by SpaceX, is now releasing its iPhone and iPad app. I'm not sure, I guess it's agentic Cursor. I always think of it as an editor, kind of like an IDE for AI. But now with Cursor you can launch coding agents from anywhere, track and manage active engineering work, review screenshots and videos of changes. Very, very interesting. Openclaw is doing the same thing. Openclaw, which is now. Well, the guy who started it, Peter Steinberger, now works for OpenAI. But OpenClaw is still an independent organization and the official OpenClaw mobile app has now come to iOS and Android as well. So if you are the kind of person who likes to converse with your agent. I was trying to figure out yesterday I was in the car and I was trying to figure out how I could talk to my agent through Telegram. And I don't think there's any way I can really talk to them on Telegram, but fortunately I just press a button on my watch or my iPhone And I can talk to them and get them to do things while I'm not around. But now there's official ways to do that in both iOS and Android, so. And I will mention one more thing real briefly. I didn't know about this. Oh shoot. I have to sign into GitHub to see this. Apparently there's some sort of cursor lag with the Neo. Were you guys aware of that?
- [118:51]
D
I was not.
- [118:52]
A
Yeah, apparently there is a fix out. I'm not logged in, so I can't show it to you. But if you have been suffering from cursor lag, it's a weird fix. It's actually kind of a keep alive routine. But there is a way to fix the MacBook Neo cursor lag. And maybe that's why they put fix in quotes because you have to kind of keep pinging it to keep it alive. Now let's get Christina's pick of the week.
- [119:22]
D
Okay, well, thank you. Okay, so my pick this week. You know, Jason was mentioning ripping his DVD audio stuff earlier and they got me thinking like I, I'm somebody who's still buys physical media, but oftentimes. And the best codec container to rip that to is usually mkv. But that can be annoying to play back on your Apple devices. There is a free app called MKV to MP4. I actually used it yesterday. I forgot that I even had it. And it was, it's. It's so simple, it's so easy and it won't re encode things for you. So if it's, if it's encoded in H265, you need to be aware of that, that whatever device you're going to play it on can, can do that. Which I think think any iPhone since the iPhone 12 or 13 and up can do. And I think all the Apple TVs that are in the ecosystem can, can play back. But it's just a very simple application that will just convert the MKV file to an MP4. So that's, that's my pick.
- [120:17]
A
I think my memory of this is MKV is just a wrapper and so inside it's a container. So inside there is a compatible video.
- [120:26]
D
Exactly.
- [120:27]
A
You just have to get it out of the container.
- [120:28]
D
You just have to get it out of the container. Right. And so yeah, so it was taking the H264, H265.
- [120:33]
A
Whatever's in there.
- [120:34]
D
Whatever's in there. And then it's just going to wrap it in MP4 and it does more than Just renaming the extension, but not much more. The file size is the same. You don't lose any quality. And it'll even preserve subtitles for the most part. So if there was a subtitle that was embedded in the mkv, then that will carry over too.
- [120:55]
A
I should do this because I have all these MKV files and I just end up in store installing VLC to play them.
- [121:00]
D
Yeah, and I do that too. And VLC is fantastic, but it's not always like the best. It can be funky for certain things. And so the bigger thing for me is more like I needed to have something that I needed to share with an iPhone user who I was like, I can't explain how to do VLC for you. So let me just, Let me just convert this. I know this will play on your iPhone. Let me just convert this. And I happen to have the app installed and went, oh, oh, you know what? This is a great little free utility and it's available in the App Store or on their website. And so that's my pick.
- [121:34]
A
And I should mention I feel bad that Copilot also has an iOS app.
- [121:40]
D
Yes.
- [121:40]
A
I apologize.
- [121:42]
D
That's okay. That's okay. Yeah. But the difference is that it's built into the GitHub app. So the GitHub app for iOS and iPad, you can control your Copilot sessions. And what's actually neat about this is that a, you can do it from the cloud. So if you've got a cloud agent running, you can maintain that. But as long as your computer is running, it'll even create a secure tunnel so that you could access your local coding session you're running on your machine in your CLI or VS code, or the GitHub Copilot app, if you want to interact with that on iOS and on Android as well.
- [122:20]
A
There's just no excuse because of course I have the GitHub app on my phone and it says Copilot right there. And I should have mentioned that. I apologize. That's been around for a while, so that's a very nice thing to have. Thank you, Christina. Andy Inaco Pick of the Week.
- [122:35]
C
This one is actually a leftover from wwdc. It took me a while to get through all of the developer, like all the videos that get posted and the session videos for the iPad. And of course, I was assimilating some of the wonderful news that was coming in about the wonderful new APIs and stuff that was coming up for AP. But I also noticed, wow, what kind of stand they're using on that iPad when they're giving the demos from. That's a really nice slick stand. And so I discovered that it is actually from one of my favorite makers. It's the NuGreen tablet stand. 24 bucks on Amazon. I was not surprised to find out who made it because they also make like my favorite phone stand, which I, I take with me to these podcasts. It's basically based on this exact same thing. It's solid metal. The hinges are really, really stiff. So that's very, very easy to adjust the angle to where you want it to go. And it's not going to move around once you adjust it there. I would not say that it is a good one for traveling if you're watching it on video. I've got the phone stand here and the iPad stand is exactly the same sort of build, but it's maybe a bit about a third larger. But the. So it'd be a bit thick and a bit heavy to put in your travel bag. Unless you really, really like having a desktop style work set up for your iPad experience.
- [123:56]
A
It just, your, your Insta just did it. You raised your hands and the Insta pointed up. I love it. I'm learning you got a new camera
- [124:06]
C
that points itself a new camera. And I love the software. But we'll, we'll, we'll figure this out.
- [124:10]
A
I think it might be a double hand. Hand raises, a gesture, I think. So I'll just simply scoot up, sit up Andy.
- [124:17]
C
But yeah, but I do find I love it. It's a good 25 bucks of my money because it really does keep your iPad at the exact perfect height for desktop work if you got your keyboard and your mouse next to it. And also it just lives on my regular work desk next to my regular screen because it's also the perfect height for watching an episode of Columbo while taking lots and lots of notes on something, something. So it's the thing is a hard category to navigate, I will admit because either the, when you do a search for this kind of stuff, you either find like cheap AliExpress type of stuff that's kind of garbage and you kind of don't want to trust your thousand dollar iPad or even your $300 iPad on it, or it's like, let me tell you this, the design story of this stand. Now, now, Burma, back when it was called Ik Machtu had a tradition like, oh God, this is going to cost me a lot of money. I can't afford a tablet stand that has a design story behind it. Just elevate it and let me tilt it a little bit. But this is like the best of both worlds. Really well designed, really, really sturdy, really, really convenient and just 24, 25 bucks. So that's a very reasonable amount of money. So it's a low tech thing that's given me a lot of pleasure and happiness and product productivity in the past couple of weeks.
- [125:38]
A
I'm glad you showed it because it looks bigger on the Amazon site.
- [125:42]
C
It. Well, because. Well, because it is like. That is the tablet version of this.
- [125:45]
B
This is.
- [125:46]
A
Oh, I see.
- [125:46]
C
They make a version of it that's like 15.
- [125:48]
A
So it is bigger.
- [125:49]
C
Exactly. I think. I think this was a. This was a previous pick of the week. But you can. But you can see how. Well, again, it's solid metal.
- [125:56]
A
Yeah.
- [125:56]
C
And like I said, it is about. I mean it's probably imagine like this wide for like the width.
- [126:03]
A
Why does the.
- [126:05]
C
So it can't. So it can hold my 13 inch iPad Pro very, very solidly.
- [126:09]
A
Yeah. It's a little more compact too. I like that. Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Let's wrap things up with Jason Snell.
- [126:18]
B
Hello. So my favorite podcast is after this one, of course is the. And all the ones I'm on is the rest is history, which is a wonderful one. Apple's award for the best podcast last year.
- [126:33]
A
I don't.
- [126:34]
B
Great. Two great British historians, they're doing a series right now about the American Revolution, which they referred to as a bunch of tax dodgers, which is great. It's very, very fun.
- [126:43]
D
Fair.
- [126:44]
B
They have the greatest piece of piece of podcast merch I've ever seen. It's the next link in our show notes. It is the Icarus in association with Icarus, which makes football custom football jerseys, soccer jerseys. They have created the historical World cup soccer jersey you can choose from. And I am not making this up. The Aztecs, where you can get a Montezuma jersey if you would like, or a Malinche or there's others because it's historians and they did a whole series about it. There is the Royal Navy. You can be Nelson or Lady Hamilton if you prefer. They have Rome, where you can be various Romans. The best part about that is the number on the back is a Roman numeral and the. And Austria Hungary, if you would like. If you fancy yourself in Hapsburg yellow, you can do it. And you can choose to be either Franz Ferdinand or his wife Sophie, both of whom of course sadly assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo kicking off World War I, which you'd know all about if you listen to the Rest is history. Anyway. 4 Custom Historical Soccer jerseys.
- [127:49]
A
This is not the first time. I love that. Gilgamesh, the Mongol Empire.
- [127:54]
B
Well, there's a lot of them. There's a bunch that are not. The partnership with the Rest Is History that they. That. That Icarus has done. And then they also have a business making it for your, you know, your local team or whatever. They'll make them. But these are the four new ones in association with the Rest Is History. And did I buy a Montezuma Aztec jersey? Yes, of course I did. What are you even asking me for?
- [128:16]
A
Oh, I asked myself, are they called the Revenge?
- [128:19]
B
No, no, no, it's. And in fact, if you. If you want. I mean, you could. You could also get Koha Tamak, who followed Moctezuma, or Malinche, who was the trans for Cortez during that. She was the.
- [128:34]
A
Oh, that's cool.
- [128:35]
B
She had an axe. Great story. Bellenche was like their translator. And also she had an axe to grind because the Aztecs had killed all her family. So there's a question about whether she faithfully translated everything that she told them, but we don't know. Anyway, if you would like. My dear friend Mike Hurley, who also loves the Rest Is History, texted me one morning, and he said, I've already bought the Nelson jersey. I'm like, well, you're a good British subject. You should get Lord Nelson's.
- [129:00]
C
Now, is there only one arm on that one sleeve on that shirt?
- [129:04]
B
I mean, I think you got to. You got to, like, tie it up. It depends on when in his career, whether it's after they blew his arm off or not. So, yeah, all right, now I'm going
- [129:12]
A
to listen to this podcast. So now do I have to buy it to listen to it or.
- [129:15]
B
No, no, there's a membership, but it's also just free with ads, and it's very. It's very, very good. And yeah, try the. Try the American Revolution series, which is out right now. Or try the. They just previously did a series about national anthems that was tied to the World cup cup, which is really. There's some really interesting historical stories about why people's national anthems are what they are, including our own.
- [129:39]
A
I'm confused because I thought Germany's national anthem was not Deutschland Uber Alles, but that's the one they play at the F1. I'm very confused.
- [129:47]
B
Well, there's a whole podcast episode explaining where that music came from and which verses they read now versus which verses they used to read and how. How the Nazis actually Kind of like took it and then because the Nazis were really good at this of like, what can we do for maximum propaganda effect and all of that. So it's all on. The rest is history. It's a great podcast. I love it.
- [130:08]
A
Love history. I was a history major. I just love it. That's great.
- [130:11]
B
Funny. Listen to this. The guys are. It's two expert historians. It's funny. And it's the. I've said here before that, you know, Mike and I are going to do an Apple history podcast in California.
- [130:20]
A
How's that going?
- [130:22]
B
We are. Kickstarter closes tomorrow. Designed FM if you want to support it at the last. It's going great. We have surpassed our wildest dreams. So it's going to be fun. We're going to have a lot of fun. But our entire inspiration was the rest is history. We want to do that for Apple. So good.
- [130:39]
A
Very good.
- [130:40]
B
Check it out.
- [130:40]
A
Thank you so much.
- [130:42]
B
Thank you.
- [130:42]
A
Jason Snell.
- [130:43]
B
You can look for me in my. I got my USA jersey on now, but look for me in my Montezuma Aztecs jersey sometime soon.
- [130:50]
A
You should wear that, that when Mexico plays. And then you'd be right. You know the crowd. Yeah. Jason snell is@6colors.com actually they had a whole bunch of six color stories that I didn't get to. Oh, I apologize.
- [131:03]
B
That's fine.
- [131:04]
A
I owe you. But if you want to read every, every day the stuff that you're going to end up talking about on Tuesday.
- [131:12]
B
That's the thing I wanted to mention too, just offhand, is that what last week. Week was my last Macworld.com column. I'm not, I'm not going to do that anymore. Wow. And I heard, which is, yeah, I mean, it's a nice 11 year afterlife after I stopped working there where they still paid me and my name was still on their website and I had access to their cms. It's just kind of. It was, it was all bonus. But I have so much else going on. Now is the perfect time to stop after about 500 columns and 11 years. But I've heard from a bunch of people who are like, oh, I'm going to be sorry to see you go. And it's like, like6colors.com, man. I've been there for 11 years. I'm writing all the time and everything I do is posted there. So6colors.com.
- [131:52]
A
They're paying attention.
- [131:53]
B
That's where you go.
- [131:54]
A
They ain't paying attention.
- [131:55]
B
They're not.
- [131:56]
A
Jason does a plethora of podcasts@6colors.com Jason.
- [132:01]
B
Yeah, you can see them.
- [132:03]
A
The wonderful Christina Warren works at GitHub. I didn't give you a plug all day. I'm going to give you one now. She's developer relations day in her spare time when she's not covering Taylor Swift.
- [132:14]
D
That's true.
- [132:14]
A
She does a little bit of that. She's going to Berlin next week.
- [132:17]
D
I am going to Berlin next week. Yes.
- [132:18]
A
If you're in Berlin, go see is it, what's the event?
- [132:21]
D
I think it's called We Love developers. I think that's what the conference is called. And anyway, yeah, if you happen to be there, be a Berylla and hit me up on, on Twitter or Mastodon or Blue sky and, or give me, give me suggestions for places to go.
- [132:33]
A
You've been there before.
- [132:34]
D
I have, I have, but, but never in the, the summer actually.
- [132:37]
A
So you have to wear black leather even in the hot, hot summer. And it's been really boiling in Europe.
- [132:42]
D
Yeah, this is what I've heard. And so I know that they're in the middle of a heat wave. So great, great timing on my part. I will have to, you know, I
- [132:50]
A
guess you could wear black leather short shorts. That'd be okay.
- [132:53]
D
You know. That's true, that's true.
- [132:55]
A
And then you got to go to the Kit Kat Club. I know that much. Or is that old? That's over. Anyway, I think you're gonna have a great time. We will miss you next week.
- [133:04]
D
But.
- [133:04]
A
But you're coming back the week after, right?
- [133:06]
D
Absolutely, I will be back the week after. Yeah. This was a last minute trip, otherwise I would have had more notice.
- [133:12]
A
I knew when we asked you to fill the Alex Lindsay memorial chair that there would be some issues with you actually having a job, unlike Andy, that you might from time to time be forced to vacate the studio. So we're happy to support everything you're doing. We appreciate it. And Andy and Ako, how is the new website going?
- [133:36]
C
Extremely well. I'm taking, I've got some, some stuff about the new M5 coming up. I've got basically a bunch, a bunch of stuff that I thought was going to be finished three days ago. They're gonna be finished tonight. So some, some more posts coming up. I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting up to a regular cadence now which makes me very, very relieved and happy.
- [133:53]
A
I H N a t k o.com thanks all three of you. Thanks to all of you watching. We do Mac break week every Tuesday, 2pm I'm sorry 11am Pacific 2pm Eastern time. That's 1800 UTC. You can watch us live in the club Twit Discord if you're a club member. Otherwise on YouTube, Twitch X, Facebook, LinkedIn or Kik. Plenty of places to watch live after the fact. On demand versions of the show. Audio and video available at our website TWIT TV MBW. There is a YouTube channel just for the video. Great way to show Share clips with friends and family. Help spread the word about Mac Break Weekly. And of course you can always subscribe in. Your favorite podcast client have it right next to the rest of his history. You could have two great podcasts for the price of none. All of that if you are by the way subscribing, do leave us a good review. That would be nice. A little five star review would help spread the word as well. Thank you all of you for being here. We will see you next time. But as I always say at the end of every Mac break weekly, it's time to get back to work because break time is over.
- [134:57]
B
See you later.
- [134:58]
D
Bye.