MacBreak Weekly 1032: I Like Turtles

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 1032: "I Like Turtles"

Date: July 8, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panelists: Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Glenn Fleishman (filling in for Christina Warren)

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Episode Overview

In this lively post-holiday episode, host Leo Laporte welcomed longtime panelists Andy Ihnatko and Jason Snell, with a guest appearance by Glenn Fleishman in Christina Warren's absence. The team dove into Apple's ongoing “sticker shock” as MacBook Pro prices soar, the AI-powered evolution of Apple software, legal battles over App Store commissions, regulatory showdowns with the EU, rumors of new iPhones—including potentially five new models and a folding iPhone—and even a sidestep into the art of manhole cover T-shirts. True to form, the episode blends deep technical analysis with warm banter and a trove of insider anecdotes.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Apple’s MacBook Sticker Shock ([08:57]–[15:52])

• News: MacBook Pro prices hit new highs, with some SKUs reaching $10,000, causing widespread “sticker shock.”
• Panel Reaction:
  • Jason Snell points out that Apple's years of static pricing (even during inflation) were effectively ongoing price cuts “[13:06]”. Now, as margins get squeezed and component costs rise, the price hikes are hitting all laptop brands, not just Apple.
  • Glenn Fleishman stresses the importance of talking about these increases in inflation-adjusted terms:

    “If you're not going to show me an inflation adjusted chart...I need to see the inflation number on that. Because...the way we feel as consumers...inflation is a real thing.” ([11:41] Glenn Fleishman)

  • Andy Ihnatko calls out Apple's expensive storage upgrades:

    “Mobster style markup on storage...never had any tether to reality whatsoever...” ([15:52] Andy Ihnatko)

2. Apple’s Supplier Strategies & Regulatory Tightrope ([16:18]–[20:13])

• Apple is sourcing RAM from Chinese suppliers with military ties—controversial, but not illegal under current U.S. rules. Apple claims the RAM will only be used in China-sold devices ([17:00]).
• Apple renews Broadcom deals for legacy infrastructure but is moving modems in-house.
• Different modem strategies for U.S. (Qualcomm) vs. international iPhones, especially around mmWave support ([19:36]).

3. App Store Legal and Policy Drama

U.S. Supreme Court Battle: Apple vs. Epic ([31:44]–[35:30])

• The Supreme Court will review whether Apple is in contempt for maintaining high App Store commissions after being ordered to open up payment systems.
• Jason Snell explains Apple's tactic:

  “It's like that kid who got away with everything in your school...Apple's like, well, you didn't say it that way. You said this and that's what I did.” ([33:06] Jason Snell)

• Glenn and Andy critique Apple’s combative and legalistic approach while Google is more constructively evolving its practices.

EU AI/Privacy Regulatory Tensions ([36:40]–[47:45])

• AI feature delays in Europe: Apple is postponing new Siri AI and other features due to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), citing uncertainty and demanding 18 more months to comply. The Commission refuses to budge.
• Snell spotlights the mutual distrust:

  “One of the other problems here is the complete lack of trust between the two parties...if they believe that this could just be solved by the boffins, bring in the boffins, they'll solve it. Then if they're diluted, that's really bad.” ([41:31] Jason Snell)

• Andy: The regulatory “win” may simply be forcing Apple to admit what is or isn’t possible rather than immediate compliance.

EU’s Ongoing Encryption Drama ([52:21]–[54:55])

• The revived “Chat Control” proposal would undermine end-to-end encryption across private chats—companies like Signal and Apple threaten to exit EU markets if it passes.

4. AI-Powered Software Upgrades ([61:50]–[69:13])

• Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro see new AI-driven tools (auto-transcription, smart masks, improved chord detection). Glenn marvels at AI for repetitive tasks:

  “10,000 hours of time...has just disappeared.” ([62:28] Glenn Fleishman)

• Apple expands the Safari browser’s MCP server, enabling deeper AI/agent integration and automated browser-based workflows ([69:28]–[78:10]).
• Detailed discussion on how these integrations streamline debugging, code improvements, and modern web development.

5. Siri AI Public Beta and App Intents ([81:03]–[84:11])

• Third developer beta of iOS 27 brings “Siri AI” the ability to interact with third-party apps via intents (e.g., check EV battery in the Tessie app).
• Jason tempers expectations—much relies on developers adopting new APIs, so broad usefulness takes time.

6. Hardware Rumor Mill

Five New iPhones—Including a Folding Model? ([94:27]–[103:35])

• Multiple sources say Apple may launch up to 5 models in the iPhone 18 family, including a long-rumored folding phone.

  “Are any of us going to buy a folding Apple iPhone?...We’re a bad set of examples. I will absolutely have one.” ([96:32] Jason & Andy)

• Expected price: $2200–$2500, which Andy and Jason agree will keep it a “niche product” for early adopters.
• Panel weighs the potential cannibalization of iPad sales, the risks of 1st-gen hardware, and Apple’s strategic volume production signal.

MacBook Pro Redesign ([107:15]–[109:44])

• Mark Gurman says new MacBook Pro design with OLED touchscreen could arrive with M5 chips; M6-based base models to follow later. Apple is breaking from its chip sequencing tradition, possibly skipping the M6 for Pro models temporarily.

7. Show's Character: Banter, Recommendations, & Memes

• Notable Moments:
  • [04:46] Glenn describes the “We should improve society somewhat” meme-turned-book project, relating memes to artist profit.
  • Glenn's T-shirt made from Berlin manhole cover prints ([22:01]–[24:56]); sparks discussion on unnoticed urban art.
  • Glenn’s “turtle rescue” and the classic “I like turtles” meme returns ([128:54]–[130:20]).
  • The team’s Star Trek “California class” tangent and AI hallucinations ([109:44]–[111:36]).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

On Apple’s Legal Tactics:

• “[Apple’s] like that kid who got away with everything at your school… ‘Well, you didn’t say it that way…’”
  — Jason Snell ([33:06])
• “You can just agree, do something reasonable…you might increase [customer loyalty]. There's a value for not making your customers angry at you…”
  — Glenn Fleishman ([34:58])

On AI in Creative Tools:

• “10,000 hours of time...has just disappeared. This is great.”
  — Glenn Fleishman, on auto-masking and auto-transcription ([62:28])
• “That’s where it becomes really difficult and awkward to have these totalitarian arguments against AI. We have to keep moving those goalposts…”
  — Andy Ihnatko ([65:29])

On Device Prices:

• “Mobster style markup on storage…never had any tether to reality whatsoever.”
  — Andy Ihnatko ([15:52])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [08:57] MacBook sticker shock and inflation context
• [13:06] Apple’s years of static pricing as “ongoing price cuts”
• [17:00] Apple’s RAM supplier controversy in China
• [31:44] Supreme Court Epic-Apple contempt review
• [41:31] Misunderstandings between regulators and Apple—AI and DMA
• [52:21] EU “Chat Control” and the future of encryption
• [61:50] Apple’s new AI-powered features in Final Cut, Logic Pro, and Safari
• [81:03] Siri AI’s third-party app integration in iOS 27 developer beta 3
• [94:27] Rumors: Five iPhones, folding model, and strategic production choices
• [107:15] Next-gen MacBook Pro design and chip sequencing
• [128:54] Glenn’s turtle rescue and “I Like Turtles” callback

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Picks of the Week

Glenn Fleishman:

Finding and Rescuing a Turtle—A whimsical but heartfelt plug for moving a turtle safely off a busy bike path.
(“It’s like a Blade Runner question. You find a turtle in the middle of the bike path. What do you do?” [129:03])

Jason Snell:

Default Folder X (St. Clair Software)—Utility for enhanced Mac open/save dialogs, praised for longevity and recent macOS compatibility.
[131:59]

Andy Ihnatko:

Readest—An open-source cross-platform ebook/PDF reader with robust features and a clean interface.
[133:49]

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Useful Resources Mentioned

• fruitspec.com (Glenn’s tool for Apple hardware compatibility queries)
• Mr. Plimsoul (Glenn’s Mac app to warn of impending full volumes)
• Default Folder X
• Readest

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Closing Remarks

The episode concludes with reflections on Apple hardware rumors, a brief Vision Pro gaming update (Logitech Muse stylus works with ping pong apps), and excitement over Apple TV+’s upcoming adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The hosts remind listeners to support the show via Club TWiT for ad-free content and chapter markers.

“Get back to work, because break time is over!” —Leo Laporte ([145:59])

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inocco's here, Jason Snell and filling in for Christina Warren, the wonderful Glenn Fleischman. We're going to talk about the sticker shock. We're all going through it. What Apple's doing, trying to replace or reduce the cost of your next Apple device. How much will that folding phone cost? Speculation. And five new iPhones coming in the next couple of years. What could that be? We'll talk about it next 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 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 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 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 [e-mail] us26 that's B L A C-K H A T.com us26 podcasts

[Jason Snell]

you love from people you trust.

[Glenn Fleishman]

This is TWIT.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Mac Break Weekly episode 1032 recorded Tuesday, July 7th, 2026. I like turtles. It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for. I don't know what that is. The show where we talk about all the Apple news with Mr. Andy and Nako from the world fam in notco.com hello Andrew.

[Andy Inatko]

Hello, hello, hello. Coming at you with my brand new not $300 paid extra for MacBook G5M1.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you lucky dog.

[Andy Inatko]

Yes, I can full screen you now. The M1 was like, you know what, what if we were to minimize that window? Andy, that would be great, wouldn't it? Yeah, M1, that's fine. We can minimize that window.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy arrives at the library singing I've got the power. Also with us, Mr. Jason Snell, who is no longer wearing the USA jersey. Did you retire it? Is it.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, there's a reason I wore it last week, Leo. I did wear it last night as well. No, I've got my Apple rainbow on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice. Very nice. Christina, as we mentioned last week, has the week off. She's in Berlin for some sort of Microsoft confab. But that's good news, because that empty seat means Glenn Fleischman can sit down instead of just standing the whole time.

[Jason Snell]

Hello, Glenn.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Hello there. How are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Always a pleasure to see you, my friend. How's the. Is the Kickstarter over? Is the book funded? Are you doing the thing?

[Glenn Fleishman]

I've done two. I've done so many Kickstarters, I can't even keep track.

[Leo Laporte]

I did, you know, Jason said you were his Kickstarter consultant.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, I was a concierge, I would say, because he and Mike Hurley ran their design in California.

[Leo Laporte]

Campaign.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Like champs, like pros.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he did really, really well.

[Jason Snell]

Glenn was just there to tell us when we did stupid stuff, which was very helpful.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Or like that. Don't know that. That button there's that weird setting in Kickstarter. No. Flick. No, no, no. Not that one. But, yeah, Kickstarter is. Kickstarter is. You remember V'Ger from the original Star Trek movie where it becomes part of this massive cloud of additional function. Kickstarter is like a little probe going through space, and they're like, maybe we should just keep bolting things onto it until it's the size of a planet.

[Andy Inatko]

So.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But it's wonderful and it's a great. So, yeah, for a long time. No see. Funded earlier this year. And then I did that one, Matt Bohr's comic. An entire book about a single panel of a single comic. And it did very well in Kickstarter.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the name of that? So you can pre order Flong time. No see.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. And the other is.

[Leo Laporte]

That is official.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That one, Matt Bohr's comic, which you can. That one more. That one. Matt Boars comic.com.

[Leo Laporte]

you can type and how do you spell Matt? Bore.

[Glenn Fleishman]

M, A, T, T, B, O, R, S. Matt Boars. He did the comic everyone cites, which is, we should improve society somewhat. And there's a smirk. Smirking guy. Ah, curious yet you. You participate in society. I am very intelligent. So this became a meme and we're doing a whole book about kind of the nature of memes and this particular thing and neoliberalism and I'VE got essayists and cartoonists, and we're pulling a lot of mashup art from. People have done things where they'll put, like, AOC in one face and, like, Bernie Sanders on the other, and it's a lot of fun. So that was a. That's also coming out this year.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a fascinating subject how just moments in time can become memes, and it's unpredictable. I mean, I see people trying all the time to go viral, and it's just unpredictable, and it's fascinating. And I think this is a great subject for a book.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But artists don't typically make money when their thing becomes a meme. And there are exceptions. Like on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Peter Steiner, who's still with us, sold his original a couple years ago for, I think, $175,000.

[Jason Snell]

Nice.

[Glenn Fleishman]

And his Cartoo cartoon was licensed and continues to be licensed by Cartoon bank, which is part of the New Yorker. And he's made well over 100 grand, maybe a lot more from it. So he's one of the few people you can say his meme took off because it was from 1993 and he actually made some money.

[Leo Laporte]

I was just watching a presentation of Family Guy's 25th anniversary, and they were talking about how lines in the script become memes and how unpredictable it is. It just. Why that one? You know, it's fascinating, but I should mention something.

[Andy Inatko]

You did mention Christina. She did. Remember last week she promised to trust me with her recap of her thoughts on the Taylor Swift wedding. Whenever we're ready. I've got it in front of me. I've got it standing by for when you think it's an appropriate moment.

[Leo Laporte]

I think now would be a good time. I am shamed because I actually posted a picture from the wedding before I learned that it was actually Adam Sandler that officiated. And intentionally, I decided to make Travis Kelce wear his football helmet, knowing that would pretty much anybody who's paying attention say, this is fake. But I am embarrassed. So tell us what was. I think Christina was saying it was kind of tacky to hold at Madison Square Garden. She was hoping that they wouldn't, but they did.

[Andy Inatko]

It's good. And here we go. We must hand it to Page Six and tmz, who had details of this wedding down to a tee. I'll admit that when details first started to leak, I was sure they were wrong. But as I said last week, as tacky as I still feel like getting married at Madison Square Garden, is I can't deny that it's a good event space. With Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks performing

[Leo Laporte]

and with Frost play I want to hold your hand for the first time.

[Andy Inatko]

First time in years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, 60 or something.

[Andy Inatko]

And with a broadcast camera and audio setup, one might wonder if a TNT wedding concert might be in the works. Isn't that, to quote Taylor Swift, a little gauche? It is, but we've already had a wedding at Madison Square Garden. That sounds just ridiculous. If I can focus on just one area, it's the truly insane guest list for every blockbuster name you have a what?

[Jason Snell]

How? Like, what do you mean?

[Andy Inatko]

Mgk, Fergie and Tom Cruise and Chris Rock were all at the same wedding. What do you mean? It was officiated by Adam Sandler.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you mean?

[Andy Inatko]

Carly Kloss was invited, but Blake Lively wasn't On an Apple angle. Ted Lasso himself, Jason Sudeikis was there, so was Bob Iger. Tim Cook was not there. Were. So hang on. There are so many open questions about the guest list, the ceremony, why there was a raffle for attendees. And I look forward to unpacking it all with you and our unwitting audience who definitely didn't sign up for this. Love, Christina Warren.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. I was told after the fact there were many complaints about our coverage of the Taylor Swift wedding. I don't care. Some things are just so important. We can't let them lie. Anyway, on we go with the show. Thank you, Christina. We'll look forward to seeing you next week. Meanwhile, you were proud of your last minute purchase of an M5 MacBook, Andy, and you are even more glad. Now America, according to Atlantic magazine, is having MacBook sticker shock. And then they say the $10,000 MacBook Pro is here. Good luck getting a $10,000. You could build it, I guess.

[Andy Inatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't know if you'll ever get it. Apple still kind of, you know, the stock tumbled at first, but it's now recovered fully. In fact, it's gone up considerably. So the real question is, is this going to cost Apple sales or not?

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah, I think Apple announced that their quarterly call is going to be at the end of this month. And also, and maybe in light of that, Merrill Lynch, I think they actually upped their. Up their. Their prediction up their target for Apple. So they're figuring that these price changes are going to at least help the. Help the stock. But yeah, it's like it's going to be a lively conversation because they're just coming off of a of a call in which they were able to say, oh my God, we sold so many Neos we've sold. We can barely make enough of these. We're having so much success. And now they have to face the fact of. Here is our guidance. There's going to be. Most of the questions are going to be headwinds and can you give us some color, Tim, about how you feel the price increases are going to affect sales in the future? There's a. Now the analysts have had some time to think about it and make their, make their guesses. They're also basically feeling. There's another report that says that they feel as though that's going to depress laptop sales in general across like all categories, mostly led by declines in MacBook sales.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I don't know, I got this attitude that like a lot of, you know, there was pent up or not pent up demand. There was a massive flow early in the pandemic and then there was, you know, an ebb because people had bought the machines. The M series is a more robust machine, although Andy is finding the advantage of upgrading already to a newer one. But, but people don't need to upgrade the M series on a, on as fast a cycle as I would say people often used to. So people are buying a Mac laptop out of need, not out of like, oh, I need to get a new one. I don't know. I don't think the particularly. This is my big problem with everything these days, let me tell you. My big problem with everything is.

[Andy Inatko]

What's your big problem with everything, Glenn?

[Glenn Fleishman]

I need to see everything inflation adjusted. If you're not going to show me an inflation adjusted chart, inflation was, I think it was 28% between 2020 and the current day. And if you don't show me a chart of prices where it says, well, Apple in 2019 was charging $2,000 for this and now they're charging 2700. I'm like, well, I need to see the inflation number on that. Because, I mean, not that wages have kept up, that's issue. But the stock market has grown enormously. So there is a sense that the actual price of the thing isn't fully tied to like, you know, the way we feel as consumers. And yet inflation is a real thing. So if you're going to say a dollar is now worth a $28, you got to tell me that and adjust that into the price. When you talk about price increases.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, it might be, I mean, just, just quickly. Apple has been historically holding the line on certain Price levels like the, the, the MacBook Air has traditionally been $999, sometimes 1099 but they' will make adjustments to features capabilities to hold that priceline. So it is significant for people who were might be have thinking gee, I'm going to, I'm going to need a new Mac book like in next year. So I'll save up about $2,000 which is the usual price over the past five or six, seven or eight years for a base level with some extra goodies on it. And so it is, it is relevant. But that is a good point about buying power.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And that Apple, was Apple holding those prices level for as long as they did really essentially were ongoing price cuts as inflation went up.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Absolutely.

[Jason Snell]

And then they hit a point where felt that they couldn't do anymore because they were losing their margins because of all of these other issues with chip availability. I want to point out that a few years ago we mentioned that they're going to do their quarterly results at the end of the month. So they do every three months like clockwork. Well, a few years ago they said we're not going to tell you unit sales anymore. We're only going to report revenue. And that has a couple advantages. One is when they forecast their revenue, even if their sales drop, if everything costs more, their revenue might not drop. Which is a nice trick because you're not looking at the total number. If everything costs more but you sell fewer of them, you may still make more money. And to Glenn's point, this is a point when I do all my charts that I yes, the laser printer is warming up, the color ink is being prepared. One thing I don't do is inflation adjust. Mostly because it's not how Wall street reports it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

But I do think it is important to always keep in mind that as if Apple's revenue is growing at a fairly nice clip but not enormous, you could argue that what it's really doing is just treading water against inflation. And it's worth keeping that in mind too.

[Leo Laporte]

MacBook price hikes expected to contribute to a 13.6% drop in global laptop shipments according to Trendforce. I'm sure some of that includes Apple's laptop shipments, but of course every laptop costs more. So I don't know if you can blame that on Apple price hikes.

[Jason Snell]

I mean it's the same thing about that MacBook Neo. The MacBook Neo isn't going. It's a shame that it's going up in price, but it's not going up in price in Isolation, its competition is also going up in price.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I mean Apple, I think there's this idea too that Apple was keeping that price steady over time during periods of low inflation and then during high inflation, keeping kind of a stable price because they squeezed their competitors. They had bought all the chips in the world at one point. They had bought all these capacity. They could reduce their margin slightly and still keep that very high margin they have relative to almost everybody selling anything that's comparable in the industry. So when you come to a point where they're like, ah, we have squeezed like not only have we squeezed everyone else to the wall by buying capacity, we are now squeezed to the wall ourselves. Well, they can raise the price and I don't think it has the same impact on them that it would if they hadn't spent that many years sort of destroying any effective alternative to them. Right. I mean at the same, not you can say like I'll buy a MacBook or I'll buy a Dell, whatever, but it really does, I have an industry wide impact. When they've been pushing the price that low, it really does hurt their competitors when they're doing superior sourcing and you know, quantity purchasing.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. And let's not forget the absolutely insane like mobster style markup on storage where it's like you can either, you can either spend one quarter the amount of that upgrade on like an external SSD or you could have it put inside the machine and spend four times as much. It was like that was never something that was, had any tether to reality whatsoever. So we'll see how that affects things.

[Leo Laporte]

One way Apple's trying to ameliorate this crisis is buying ram. We mentioned this last week from two blacklisted Chinese RAM suppliers. Apple trying to reassure the US Government that no, no, we're only going to use that ram in Chinese MacBooks. It's not a security, it's not a security issue. We're going to keep it in China.

[Andy Inatko]

It's not, it's not actually a security issue. The government has right now. They're, they're not on the, they're not on the, the federal blacklist of you can't do business with these companies. They're on the Pentagon's blacklist that basically says that. And their position is that if you do business with this Chinese company, they are so closely tied to the Chinese army that you are essentially giving money to the Chinese military.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Inatko]

And so that's why there's, and so there's, there, this is where all the Apple diplomacy has to come in because they are actually free to deal with this company. But there will be serious political consequences if they don't have the taste at approval of the government. Also, Apple was trying to get assurances that, hey, I know that we can legally make this deal right now, but you're not about to actually put them on the actual blacklist where we can, we suddenly can't actually serve these contracts, are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Because, so that would be a bad thing because they would have maybe spent the money but not get the chips. Yeah. All right, so they're lobbying Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and the Trump administration just to. This is. According to Bloomberg, nothing's final yet. Now why would it help to only use this in China? Well, that frees up chips for the rest of the world. So to the degree you can do that, it helps you all around. We'll see if they succeed at that. China still has some RAM chips to sell. I guess that's because they can't sell

[Jason Snell]

it in the U.S. yeah, I mean this is the challenge, right, Is that those are constrained in a way that the others, the sales are constrained in a way the others aren't. And so there's more available there.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. That's very interesting. All right, the final story in this sticker shock story is at Broadcom and Apple have agreed to keep their deal through 2031. Broadcom makes is it legacy nodes? They don't make the main processors or the GPUs they make.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's legacy nodes. They used to do all the Bluetooth and WI fi stuff for Apple although Apple has sort of moved that to their own chips. But they are still. Yeah, they're making useful bits and I

[Leo Laporte]

think that's what Apple screen controllers A6 for inductive charging. IFixit found four Broadcom chips in the iPhone air including radios and a charging chip. Although Apple is moving all of their modems to Apple made modems right away from, away from Broadcom, right?

[Jason Snell]

Well, they were using Qualcomm for modems that they were using Broadcom for WI Fi and Bluetooth.

[Andy Inatko]

Also there was a, also there's a story about how I think, I think it happened. It was put out this week that they are for the next series of phones they are going to use Apple Silicon for foreign. For phones intended for foreign markets. For US markets they're going to stick with Qualcomm because Qualcomm has MM Wave and they first and they don't have it in Apple silicon yet.

[Leo Laporte]

So in fact that takes us to the iPhone 18 Pro leaks. Either Qualcomm or Apple would make the modem according to these. These leaks. Right.

[Jason Snell]

Because Millimeter Wave is. Is basically not implemented anywhere other than the US but it is here. And John Gruber had a bunch of good posts about this. The idea is that the carriers in the US who have invested Millimeter Wave are not thrilled with the idea that Apple might roll out a phone that doesn't support it. Because even though it's not. It's like. It's like WI fi almost, but it's super fast.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And it's not in very. It's in some city centers in various places, but still Verizon did. Did the work and they want to boast about it. And it sets a high speed at. And T has done less work and I think nobody else has done any work on it. But it's like it's around. And if you go to the Apple chip that they're planning, it doesn't implement it. And that is why you will probably get a Qualcomm chip in the US if you buy an iPhone 18 Pro, but you won't the rest of the world, because the rest of the world doesn't care. So it's a little like how there are. I mean, there are always been fluctuations in iPhone models between countries based on what frequencies were supported, so they would put different parts in. This is just going to be more dramatic because it's going to be a different supplier. It's going to be Qualcomm instead of the Apple modem.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, we'll talk some more about the future coming up because we're starting to get more and more tips as we get closer and closer to September. Also iOS, 27, Mac OS, GoldenGate and more. You're watching MacBreak weekly. Glenn Fleischman filling in for Christina. It's great to have you, Glenn. And apparently Glenn has no interest in Taylor Swift or Travis Kelsey. And we're happy for that. Thank you.

[Jason Snell]

Our producers approve.

[Andy Inatko]

It's not a snub. They only had a thousand seats. They were capped at a thousand seats. I understand that not all of Travis Cousins could come.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Inatko]

They have to cut the line somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

But why Blake Lively? I mean, that really is a question. We'll get to that next week.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Amazingly, I don't know anybody who knows somebody who knows the mailman of Taylor Swift.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, how could that be?

[Glenn Fleishman]

What's your T shirt?

[Leo Laporte]

What's your T shirt? This week we have to do the T shirt.

[Glenn Fleishman]

This is the T shirt. From which is the thief printer. And she's an artist in Europe, I think, based in Berlin. Who does. She does. I'll have to send you the URL.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you give us a twirl.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Rubbings of service covers, you know, formerly called.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's like a manhole cover. Yeah, that's cool.

[Glenn Fleishman]

She calls herself, you know, raub Thief, because she. It's not illegal, but she goes into. Finds them, cleans them off, inks them, and then makes T shirts from them. And so it's just a great. It's a great little. It's like having a piece of the city with you in a weird way, because I'm sure there's grime in here. I've watched it. But it's the actual. That tactile sensation.

[Leo Laporte]

So that shirt itself was rubbed on a man.

[Glenn Fleishman]

This is not a silkscreen. This is literally created from it. And what's even better is my spouse, who knows me very well. I got this for a birthday or Christmas a couple years ago, and I was like. I had not even mentioned how much I love these shirts, but she knows me. It's German. It looks like a letterpress, you know? Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

How could you not love.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's actually, it's. I've noticed that. That we have such a paucity of creativity in manhole covers here in the United States. Japan has the most beautiful, often colorful.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, I've seen those. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Manhole covers are gorgeous. So, yeah, I think it's an interesting tribute to brutalist zine.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Great fun. We have fun manhole covers or service covers in Seattle. There's actually quite a few, I've thought.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, do you.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Once I thought about doing. In my copious spare time, which, you know, I have. I thought about doing a project where I would, like, geolocate the most interesting, like, metal street furniture, manhole covers, and other kinds of plaques and things. And then I thought, I. I think I'm. That's. I've gone too far. I can't do that. That's too much.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, what I love about it is there's art all around us, and we often don't notice it. And it's kind of cool. This is the. The website.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, my God.

[Andy Inatko]

She's pulling shirts right off the sidewalk.

[Glenn Fleishman]

This is literally. That's why it's so cool.

[Andy Inatko]

I thought you meant she sourced them from, like, a scrap yet or something and then put it in her studio.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, no. That's why she's a theater.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why she goes sneak around because to print the local constabulary.

[Andy Inatko]

Now I love it even more.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's even great. She's gone to some other places and done it too. It's just fun. There's 99% invisible podcast. Their statement Roman Mars statement is always, always read the plaque. And it's like you're in some weird place. I don't know. There's a little sign. It'll be like on this spot, 100 people had a mini uprising and took over Boston City Hall. I don't know what, like, I don't even know what this is about. So always read the plaque is that I love this.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I'm going to buy. They're cheaper than they should be. She should charge more given that she has to run around a manhole cover.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Well, wait till you see the. Wait till you see the shipping price on it from.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's tariffs on the Berlin M hoodie, isn't it?

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's a great idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is gorgeous.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I would love to say this hoodie.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that. And then you can explain to people why the radio tower is on your shirt. Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Isn't that great? That Berlin tower. I love Berlin.

[Leo Laporte]

That is so cool. Also, Andy Inako. And you're just wearing a plain brown shirt, but maybe your hat has something.

[Andy Inatko]

No, no, no. It's, it's, it's. It says Dickies on this little tag.

[Glenn Fleishman]

How dare you.

[Andy Inatko]

So and so basically it's a tribute to one half of the Smothers brothers. I have a Tommy shirt and this is the same color as their usual performance shoots suits. They have those maroon suits with a. With a like neighbor collar.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Wow. You are. This is. I have not talked to Andy for a while and I forgot the unending source of fabrication you were capable of without any provocation. That's incredible.

[Andy Inatko]

I like to keep on my toes.

[Leo Laporte]

Keeps me out of jail. His mind is a terrible and wonderful thing.

[Jason Snell]

You know, in this July season, remember, no fabrication without provocation. So

[Leo Laporte]

of course Jason Snell is wearing his six colors.

[Jason Snell]

His beautiful apple kept the apple rainbow going because it's on brand for me. I just. I leaned it 11 years ago, I leaned into the same six colors and then, then apple started leaning into it. I'm like, great. It's like, give it to me. Yeah, More, more. Six colors, apple rainbows. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm wearing a shirt with apples on it. But I. Maybe I'm too literal.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I like that in my.

[Leo Laporte]

My understanding of what apple means, this is. This actually are the apples from the orchard that Steve Jobs worked in Barefoot. That started the whole thing. So.

[Jason Snell]

So I see.

[Andy Inatko]

Sure.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Very good.

[Leo Laporte]

The master of fabrication that, Mr. Inacco, is. Our show today, brought to you by Delete me. This is something you don't want to make up. There are people out there, malicious, horrible people who make a lot of money by taking your information and selling it on. And this is a problem for anybody who puts themselves out there, especially businesses. This really hit us as a small business. When you're a business owner, you can't hide. Putting yourself out there is part of the job. But the uncomfortable truth is promoting your business leaves you and your team exposed. Right now, 90% of business owners have their home address easily discoverable online. We did. And the average owner has more than 600 pieces of personal information just sitting there on the open web. I mean, when I say personal, I'm talking personal. Email, phone number, home address, even details about your family. And what worried us is also details about your direct reports, their phone numbers, their information. And hackers can use that data they did against us to hyper target phishing attacks. It makes the phishing attacks more credible. They have real details. They don't sound like strangers. They sound like clients or partners we already trust. We got an RFP request for a proposal from a company we've dealt with many times. It had a link, a link that one of our employees clicked and it wasn't from our partner. They'd been hacked. Or maybe the hackers just knew the information because that link had a man in the middle of the attack that gave away our Google workspace credentials. Attacks using verified personal information like that are five times more likely to succeed. And believe me, you don't want it to happen. We were lucky we got away with it. They didn't manage to exploit it before we caught it. But that's not always the case. The average incident can cost a small business more than $120,000. That's the average. And one in four businesses will be impacted this year alone. At least we're not alone. We're part of the 1 in 4. And that's where today's sponsor, delete Me comes in. Reducing exposure by up to 95%. We use delete me and we have to. Delete me removes the boss, my, our employees, personal information from hundreds of data broker websites. Starving hackers are the fuel they use to build their target lists. And it's not just a one time thing because these data brokers are slime bags. They're like cockroaches. You can't get rid of them. Some of them pretend to go out of business and then change their names and then all that data repopulates. So that's why Delete Me constantly monitors and removes your data. You'll also get regular privacy reports. We get them on a regular basis. So you always know where things stand, what they removed, what they found, where they found it. Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have trusted Delete me for over 15 years. That was a big part of why we trusted them. And now you can get that same enterprise level protection for your small business at a price a small business can afford. Protect your business and your peace of mind. Visit joindeleteme.com TWIT-BIZ to start protecting your business with Delete Me today. And if you use that link, you're going to get a free year of social media protection for every seat you purchase. That's huge. Joindeleteme.com TWIT-BIZ Now I know that's a long URL and it's important you get it right. Don't Google it because there are other companies with the same name in the EU and they don't do the same thing. You want to use the [e-mail] and if you would, for our sake, would you please use the Twit Biz. That'll give you that extra year of social media protection for every seat you purchase and also gives us credit, which is important to us. So joinedeleteme.com twit biz we thank them so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly. I think we had this as a late breaking story last week, but let's fill in the details. The Supreme Court agreed in their last week of term to yes, hear the Apple appeal. I think this was the third time Apple had gone back to the Supreme Court. This time they're it's the Apple Epic case. They're not going to rule on the ruling. They're just going to rule on Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers declaration that Apple was in contempt of court. Oh, Apple petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in a last ditch attempt. This is from Ars Technic to keep fees at an acceptable rate. In the petition, Apple argued the 9th Circuit's spirit based approach. Judge Gonzalez Rogers said they violated the spirit sharply conflicts. That's that 27% violated the spirit. Right. Sharply conflicts with the contempt standard in other circuits which only find contempt when companies defy explicit language in a disrespectful order. Your Honor, the judge didn't say we couldn't do 27%.

[Glenn Fleishman]

She didn't say, we couldn't sit in the backseat of the car and keep touching my brother. And I wasn't touching him. My finger was only this far away.

[Jason Snell]

Make me pull this curve.

[Leo Laporte]

Said that Apple clearly could not be held in civil contempt at other circuits for charging a commission that's nowhere mentioned in the underlying order. So the supreme said, yeah, all right, we'll take that. Which is surprising since they had rejected two previous Apple requests. Another. Other areas of the same decision.

[Glenn Fleishman]

There are times when I say, apple, would you just grow up? You're like this giant company.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're fighting.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Got a lot of money. It's just. But it's sunny. They're fighting for what's not enough money to be fighting for. And that frustrates me because it feels like there are plenty of things we could say we wish they were doing at Apple, and this ain't one of them. And I don't think it even benefits the shareholders that much. I think their money is infinitesimal versus

[Leo Laporte]

they're like Argentina two goals down in the last minutes, and they just won't give up. Up. I don't know. I had to make it a soccer analogy.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Some people like Argentina. Apple makes themselves seem fair.

[Leo Laporte]

Epic is preparing to fight. Epic said, we're heading to the Supreme Court.

[Andy Inatko]

Woo.

[Leo Laporte]

Where we'll continue to fight against junk fees Apple charges on third party payments. Remember, they charge 30%. The court said, you can't do that. So they said, well, okay, 27%.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

Plus. Plus an immense amount of bookkeeping that no one wants to have anything to do with.

[Jason Snell]

And this is the core of this case. The case is that. That Judge Gonzalez Rogers said, look, what you're doing is not good enough. You. There's no competition here. You can't do 30%. You need to come back with a remedy. And Apple said, great, we've done a remedy where it's basically, if you do all the calculations, it's essentially 30%, and it won't address the underlying issue of competition. But you didn't tell us how low we had to go. And so we did the minimum possible to. To do this ridiculous, you know, literal read of what you said, even though you also made clear why you were ordering it. And Apple says that's fine because she can't hold them in contempt. It's like, it's like that kid who got away with everything in your. In your school, Right? Whereas, like, Apple's like, well, you didn't say it that way. You said this and that's what I did. And, and, and the teacher's like, you know what I meant. Right. So that's what the argument's going to be at the Supreme Court. It's literally Apple saying, yeah, but she didn't say it needed to be a lot less. So we didn't make it a lot less. She just said it needed to be less and the counter would be. She also made it clear it needed to foster competition. And you built this in such a way that it will not. But that's why the Supreme Court took the case is they think there's an interesting legal conversation to be had about judges instructions and whether Apple can be held in contempt for, in Apple's opinion, a thing that she didn't specifically ask them to do. I roll my eyes at that, but I also see the argument which is like, you know what I meant is not the strongest legal argument. You should, if you meant that, maybe you should have said that probably though the, the result will be if Apple even wins this case, they'll just send it back to Judge Gonzalez Rogers and say, okay, give them specific instructions this time. And she will. And then they'll have to do it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Could they make just. I just want to like, there's various things Apple does where I'm like, you're just being petty. Or there are lawyers in there who've convinced the management that this is the right course of action and they've been given too much free. It's like robots turning the planet into gray goo. It's like everything is a lawsuit. We don't need everything to be this way. You can just agree, do something reasonable. You give up a little money maybe, but you might increase. There's a value for not making your customers angry at you and feeling like they have to find an alternative.

[Andy Inatko]

And meanwhile Google has, in the face of the similar amounts of just losing, losing, losing, losing this issue everywhere, decided for whatever motivation that they haven't been explicit about. Okay, you know what? We will absolutely now totally revamp how we approach app stores and app installs. We will actually bring Epic Games in on the conversation so that we know that, that if we can make these people happy, then we can make courts happy and we can make other developers happy. And it is a comprehensive plan that seems to cover, we'll see of how well it works out, but how the needs of developers, the needs of markets and the needs of individual users who need to get access to apps. As like at some point, Google, at some point, I'm just, I'M totally with you. It's like at some point Apple has this, as should have said, okay, you know what? It's not, this isn't, this is not an isolated thing in which we're retreated unfairly. We are losing, losing, losing, losing this battle every, everywhere. It's time to figure out how to adapt and hopefully surrender on terms that are at least partially beneficial to us rather than just be petulant. And they're just being petulant.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's spending millions. I mean, it doesn't cost them nothing to do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, Tim Cook on the line with the European Commission head trying to negotiate. This is kind of going to be Tim's new job once he steps down. He's going to be the governmental liaison fella. And you know, remember that EU users were pretty much cut off from Siri, from Child Safety, from the Apple foundation models because they didn't, you know, the DMA prevented them. They didn't like the interoperability requirements of the Digital Markets act. And they said, we don't want to do that. Can you, can you give us a break here? We talked about this a couple of weeks ago where Apple said, just, all it's going to take is 18 months. Can you give us 18 months? And the EU said no. And I'm sure that's what Tim's saying is. Let me explain. We don't want to do all this development if we, you know, if you don't give us the 18 months to do it. Right. Am I saying that right? This is a report from the Financial Times. Tim Cook met with. And I'm going to botch her name, Hannah Birkunen. Constructive talks on Tuesday last week as the two sides aim to lower the temperature in a bitter dispute over the iPhone makers new Siri AI. Is it a bitter dispute? I don't know. I guess if you're in the EU and you don't get the new Siri, you may be, maybe you're a little.

[Andy Inatko]

I would swell. During wwdc, both sides were, I think, unusually vocal where they put, like Apple right into the keynote. Oh, by the way, don't blame us. Those dinks over the EU are the reasons why you're not going to be getting features. Exactly. And then the EU at the same time said, look, we, we were trying to work with Apple. They said, well, can you give us like a year and a half to not comply with this? He said, no, we're not giving you a year and a half. We don't think you need a year and A half. And it wasn't like. It wasn't diplomatic language, it was, why do you have to be this way, Apple? Well, because if you, maybe you were being that way first, like, oh, for God's sake.

[Leo Laporte]

The Financial Times says it's Apple's lack of engagement, or Apple says, sorry, it's the EU's lack of engagement that's preventing it from launching Siri AI. In other words, they're not negotiating with us. And so Tim's placed a personal call hoping that that would perhaps clear the log jam.

[Andy Inatko]

And to be fair, Apple is. This isn't. This is the same as the App Store stuff where the. For. For fairness across platforms, they. The EU is essentially saying that whatever Siri can do to control apps across the platform, third party AI should also be able to do across the platform. And it is completely, wildly, I think, unknown whether you can actually allow that to happen and preserve some semblance of security and privacy across the device. So Apple's not being a jerk here. They are actually. I think they're defending an actual important principle and it's possible that, look, we can't figure out how, we can't. We're not going to figure out compliance in a month. It really is going to take us a year and a half. But the eu, the way the EU regulates this stuff, it's not basically, here is the hammer. You are underneath the hammer. The hammer is about to fall. You might want to get out from under the hammer. It actually is set up to be an ongoing conversation for compliance with a lot of conversations after a decision has been made.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But it's. Nobody wants to make a. I mean, I don't think the, the EU is sort of implicitly legislating API access, but I remember right, they don't build a standard for it. So it feels like, I mean, you know, I don't, I don't disagree in principle that the EU wants certain things to be open to more platforms, to reduce or, you know, to make things that are exclusive available in a fair way. And I don't disagree with Apple that there's certain things that they do that if they opened it up in the way that the EU is saying, would actually have significant problems or issues that could come up. So that's, you know, but the conflict is like, the EU is really good at making standards. Why can't they make an API after all these years, sit down with the companies involved? I mean, the companies would not all act in good faith or any of them. But it feels like you could come up with an API that you would then move towards for EU citizens that might still only be implemented there, but would allow, I don't know, a happy result instead of whatever is going on. Maybe Apple would never agree with that,

[Leo Laporte]

or Google or whoever.

[Andy Inatko]

I think the, the, I think the EU's position is basically that we're not, we're a government regulatory agency, we're not experts in APIs. All, we're all. It's our position, it's our. We are correct to ask you to tell you what we want you to do, but then you are free to figure out the technology that will best do it. We will tell you whether it's okay or not. And sometimes it is very, as you say, we don't even know if this is feasible or not, but we're just going to make this rule and it's up to you to figure, figure out if this is even possible.

[Jason Snell]

That's where for veers into insanity, honestly, is when it becomes, well, you're the tech wizards, you figure it out and then it becomes like that, you know, famous Washington Post editorial where they're like, surely somebody can invent a secure golden key that fixes encryption. And it's like, no, you're illiterate, you have no idea what you're talking about. And that's the danger when you have a regulator is like, if they believe that this could just be solved by the boffins, bring in the boffins, they'll solve it. Then if they're diluted, that's really bad. And I think one of the other problems here is the complete lack of trust between the two parties. And I get why the EU doesn't trust Apple, but the problem is they are viewing Apple, I would say, quite reasonably, saying, we're going to need to build something special for you. They view that as a lie or a stalling tactic. And while it might have the side effect of being a stalling tactic, it might. It's also true that like Apple saying, why would we build something to maybe match your kind of squishy definition of what you want here, but you won't tell us if it will or not, and it's going to take us a year to build it, which again, they may be dragging their feet and they could do it faster, but again, and that's a lack of trust, is like, they don't trust Apple. That Apple isn't just kind of fibbing about all of this and dragging their feet because Apple's got a track record of doing that. They want to do as little as possible. See the other case, the epic case in America about this. But Apple is frustrated because I think they realize that the EU doesn't understand what they're asking for and how complicated it is, and because of that, perhaps won't give them approval to find a solution. And what it says to me is this is a broken relationship. And if Tim Cook is indeed talking to the EU people about this, maybe what he's trying to do in his new role as chief diplomat is find, you know, can they reset the relationship so that there's an understanding? Because, like, look, Apple doesn't want to do it, but Apple does want to be in the EU and they do want to bring their features to the eu. I don't think ultimately Apple, Apple has brought a lot of things to like, it would be different if Apple was like, we're just not going to do the App Store in the EU because you want us to do extra app stores, so we're out of there. But they're like, no, no. They built support for third party app stores, a thing that they despise, but they did do it. So they've got a history of playing ball in Europe, at least to a little bit. But with this, with the AI stuff and access to personal data, you are hitting on some of the real, like, huge triggers for both sides and there's a lack of trust. And that's why I kind of despair for this unless Tim Cook and the regulators can kind of reset and there can be some, ideally, some understanding on both sides. Because I think where we are now is that Apple feels like there is a bunch of stuff they need to do and that the EU doesn't understand what they're saying. And I think the EU says Apple goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about all this stuff they're worried about, but they're just a bunch of liars. They just don't want to do it because they want to have complete control and both sides have points. But that is no way to have a relationship with these two parties. And that's why it feels broken right now. So good luck, Tim Cook. Another tough job for you, Mr. Chairman.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you get the big bucks. Yeah, Jaws. Greg Jaswiak, Chief Marketing Officer at Apple, says, quote, this is from the Financial Times. Again, this is not some sort of effort for us to be punitive over our feelings with the dma. We've worked very hard to avoid this outcome, but the Commission has not accepted our proposals or meaningfully engaged with us. There's that phrase. The EU says Apple's seeking an unacceptable carve out from its interoperability obligations. They push back at what they call, quote, a regulatory holiday, which would. And this, I have to underscore this, this is what they care about, would harm competitors. We've seen this before with EU regulations. It's really about protecting competitors. Competition. Now, the Financial Times does say that there is some pushback from the general public. The dispute triggered a fierce public backlash against the Commission. Hundreds of emails from consumers accusing Brussels of depriving Europeans of a new technician. One EU official said a Commission spokesperson had received a stream of abusive messages, including death threats. So I think this is part of Apple's strategy is let them hear from the people. We're going to cut you off and see what the people have to say. I don't know how responsive to the people.

[Jason Snell]

The e. It is a strategy. I mean, it is a political body, right? Like if they get elected, if people in the EU are grumpy about what the European Commission is doing, it gives Apple some ammunition. It gives Apple some ammunition to say your attitude here is making your people angry because they want these useful features that you refuse to allow us to give them. Now, again, a lot of complexity there and it absolutely serves Apple, but it's got to be part of the conversation because theoretically the European Commission is serving the people of Europe. And if the people of Europe are mad, then they're going to have to explain themselves, at the very least to the people about why they're doing it the way they're doing it. And I don't know, I just think my frustration here is that it seems like both sides have reason to not trust the other and they're not even on the same page at this point, which is, you know, again, good luck to Tim Cook. But it's, it's, it's, it's tough. I, because looking at it like, it's funny, because we've, we've had a lot of debates on this show about European regulations and Apple, but like I see their argument is, AI seems to be kind of important. Maybe giving another, giving a platform owner another lever on top of all of this to completely control it and box out competition is bad, bad. But I also see Apple saying, yeah, letting random AI companies have complete, unfettered access to personal data on the phone is also bad. Like, I think both of those things have truth in them. But how do you square the circle then? I don't know. It's.

[Andy Inatko]

Sometimes the win is not so much that the regulatory Agency gets their regulations in force, but simply that the company that doesn't want to play ball is forced to say, look, we are going to prove to you that this is not possible, that this is not tenable. And I think that even that is a positive thing. You can't have these companies basically saying, thinking we don't want to do this and saying, well no, this is just technically impossible and we'll destroy the product. And for that reason we're doing the valiant thing. I mean, I'm thinking about, I think during the Biden administration there's some sort of a rule or a law based, the regulation saying that car companies have to figure out how to essentially how, how to make, how to, how to make, make car car ignitions that will not start if the driver is inebriated. And, and there is a, there was a long timeline for that, but there was also a part of it that says that you have a timeline. If you can't make by this timeline, you automatically get an extension. And also if by the end of the extension you can't do it, but you just simply have to explain to, you have to simply have to prove to us that you tried. And here are the technical reasons why that's not possible. So that is a case of saying, okay, you boffins go at it. Just let's, let's wave the magic, magic pixie stick of technology and science and hope that it'll work. But basically saying that it's worth trying, it's a goal that's worth exploring. Don't simply tell us that you can't do it. Try it and then tell us what you tried and why it didn't work. And then we'll say, okay, I guess that wouldn't, that wasn't going to work out at all.

[Glenn Fleishman]

An interesting counterexample may also be RCS encryption and RCS encryption, because I don't, Apple was always kind of like, we don't really care about RCS and people complained about it. And you know, it's the green bubble, blue bubble issue with text messaging. But then Apple's like, all right, we're going to push RCS out, but there's no standard. But when there is a standard for end to end encryption, we're going to do it. And Google worked it out. And so you can get end to end encryption and RCS based messaging now. And then Apple suddenly releases a beta. It was a few, like two months ago or six weeks ago, they pushed that out and this was all done with what I can tell with no arm twisting just because there was a sense in the industry that they needed interoperability. Maybe also because it arose from Apple's desire to do user facing privacy things too.

[Jason Snell]

Think well the original RCS I think was a regulation in China that drove them to implement it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh they had to do, but they didn't have to do it worldwide. They could have limited it but that would have annoyed people too.

[Jason Snell]

And I think this is the truth is like when you see Apple get pushed into doing something it doesn't want to do, it does seem to follow its principles in doing so. And so when it said look okay, we're going to do rcs, fine, fine, fine. But they also said the problem we have with this is we really want it to be encrypted and it's not in a lot of circumstances. And in their initial announcement they said we are working with the standards body to see if there is a way to get RCS to meet our standards for privacy. And, and time passes 15 minutes later and they, and they did it right. Like they got it there. And that's a case where Apple didn't just they got pushed to do a thing they didn't want to do but in the end it kind of made things better for everybody. And it's like that's a good model, you know, we'd like to see more of that I think. Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

Well also that's also the reason why Airdrop now works across Android devices. Not because there was some brave coalition between these two companies but because there was a regulation that simply says there is an open WI fi standard standard. You have to simply support this standard. You don't have to do this yourself Apple, but you have to support this open wise standard that actually exists. Once it existed. Google was saying hell yes, we're going to basically build Airdrop support into our own version of that. So it's like Jason said, it's a complicated issue that involves lots of discussions. Sometimes Apple doesn't help its case when it really does act like a petulant child on things like the App Store stuff. Because that's when we're saying okay, you know what? What we're not going to take your word for this Apple. We're going to fight this out and make sure that you have the documentation. Especially since during discovery on oh gosh, I can't remember what case it was. It came out that Craig Frederick inside Apple they had conversations about improving the cross platform performance of imessage on Android and one of the end comments from Apple Communications was I think Craig Federighi saying, we just, just, we don't see any way that if we do that, it doesn't encourage people to buy Android phones. So we're not going to do that. That's like, okay, I wish, I wish I had done that as a phone call instead of as an email that could be revealed.

[Leo Laporte]

I should point out in a kind of. This is somewhat related to the RCS discussion. The EU had a proposal back in the spring called Chat Control which would, experts say have undermined basically encryption completely. Chat Control was voted down, fortunately, but it's back and on Thursday they're going to vote with new rules that make it more likely to pass. And that would be a big shift for encrypted messaging. It would require this.

[Glenn Fleishman]

One of these things on device scanning

[Leo Laporte]

or on device scanning.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Apple backed off from that because people were so angry about. And yeah, I mean, you know, this is the problem, this is the problem. It's like, you know, it's like, how often do you beat your wife kind of things. It's like, oh, so you love child pornography? It's like, no, nobody does. But it's such a blunt instrument against everyone's privacy. And you know, from what I can tell, like a lot of things that happen with like law enforcement actions and cases being solved, things like that, a lot of the work that ever happens is because people are sloppy or they do real world work and that's where they take these outf down, they infiltrate them. It's not, you know, having a backdoor doesn't actually help because that's not how these groups of people work because it's groups. If it's one person solo who possesses a lot of stuff, well, you're never going to find that person anyway. And this might find one person like that. It's the trading of stuff and the creation of stuff that's the primary issue and that's where law enforcement focuses and they get into it because all those people have lots of issues. You don't get involved in this because you are a competent, well functioning person who has no, you know, is just like, oh, I'm going to violate the law in this one horrific way. It's like, no, that's. So anyway, all these things are like, we need this for protect children against, you know, child sexual abuse. And it's like, you know, you're using it for entirely to invade our privacy. But you have a weapon and you're going to use the weapon against us,

[Leo Laporte]

the Greens party, which is against Chat Control Said children are protected by smart enforcement, not by scanning the private messages of millions of innocent children people. So we thought this was dead in the water last spring when Germany withdrew its support of it. Apparently it is not. In fact, because they've been able to find a parliamentary maneuver to change the rules, it does seem likely that it will be implemented on Thursday. We'll watch that with interest, I'm sure. Steve Gibson.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Well, see, every time those things come through, it's just the devil's in the details. And as they start to try to enforce the things and they realize that companies will withdraw. I mean I don't know if Apple is going to withdraw on message.

[Leo Laporte]

Very famously, Meredith Whitaker of Signal said if, if chat control passes signal is out of the eu. And this is that same kind of maneuver that Apple's using. Like you want our, our, our, our features, you're going to have to, you know, do the right thing. I'm not sure this is in the same ballpark. Clearly chat control is not the right thing. And on the other side of the Caucasus, Russia which really wants to insist that Apple install state required apps on the iPhone. Pretty mad that Apple's not doing that. They're going to find them a whopping $52 million. So I don't know if that's enough to get Apple to. Do they even care about the Russian market?

[Jason Snell]

No.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, you know, but, but, and it's causing them more and more trouble because number one they have to navigate sanctions which are very, very complicated. So if they're operating an app store, they're already. This is reason why Russian banking apps are disguising themselves as other apps to get into the. It's happened twice in the past month and it's because Apple with other apps, it's so difficult to figure out. Well, there are. They got into trouble and they had a pair fine several months ago because of an app that was created by a company that was legit at the time it was submitted but then changed hands a couple of times and then was in violation of sanctions. And so they had to withdraw, withdraw it and pay a fine. Meanwhile, Russia is. The number of takedown requests of apps in the App Store is I think well into the thousands. And they're also having all this political trouble where they're being insisted to put all these states, the state sponsored messaging app, the state sponsored social media apps. I mean they're not making enough money to make it worthwhile to all of this, all of these headaches. I wonder what those conversations are like.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Apple hasn't sold its products directly in Russia since 2022. They did remove Russian applications from the App Store. The these applications made by vk, so they're called the VK apps were with withdrawn from the App Store. Russia says without warning or explanation. I know that's not how they talk. Without warning or explanation.

[Jason Snell]

There now.

[Glenn Fleishman]

There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Boris Bednov. Now the country has taken even stricter measures, says Apple Insider, issuing a warning to Apple saying you could face $52 million fine by June 15 or July 15 if you don't apply.

[Glenn Fleishman]

There's a great sociological study waiting to happen about which accents are acceptable.

[Leo Laporte]

I know Lisa Offset can't use that one anymore. I think if. I don't know, I think you can do Russian stuff. Russian is okay, fine, we can all do Russian Russian. So these are. This is Max, which is a messenger program which obviously the Kremlin has access to all the encrypted encrypted messages in Max and a Russian and Russian search engines which actually I think that's not unreasonable to say. You have to put our own search engines on there. But Max, I can understand why Apple

[Andy Inatko]

and also remember that they also forced Apple to add a page to the setup process for iPhones. So that basically to add in Vice we hear a selection of authorized government approved apps that are within the Would you like to download, install these apps right now? I think that happened a couple of years ago. I don't know if it's still applicable but again, it's just such an unusual

[Leo Laporte]

extent that they've removed apps from the App Store on the request of the Russian government. The Russian government's not happy they removed the VK apps. However, I don't know how Apple will respond. I don't think they really care particularly. And that Fine is not going to change anything. Right?

[Andy Inatko]

I mean, or 18 pairs of authentic Levi's Blue Levi's Saint Levi's Beatles albums, Levi's blue jeans.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's a, it's a new version of Goodbye Lenin. But I don't know how it ends.

[Andy Inatko]

Tell me you grew up during the Soviet Union without saying I grew up during a period when the Soviet Union Union was the thing.

[Glenn Fleishman]

They're having nostalgia now in the Soviet Union because everyone's waiting in line for gas and people are like, listen. People are like, did you not remember

[Leo Laporte]

you are watching a special broadcast of Apple Break Weekly on tweet. I know, I know. Oh no. Andy has. Has a Slavic origin. His name tells the story.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I've got. I had family From Danzig, which is now Gadonski, Polish. From a town that I grew up. My family would say we have relatives from Dakshit ski is what they would say. And I thought this was some silly family joke. There's a town called Russia.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Which does exist.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Your family is. Is from the same part of Europe that my wife's mom's family is from, which is very much like, where are they from? And it's like, well, all the places. It was Poland, it was Russia, it was Germany, and they didn't go anywhere, but. Yeah, like that part of Europe, really. You know, they've kept moving the borders around and the people inside it.

[Leo Laporte]

So all three of you have some origins.

[Jason Snell]

Not me, but my. My wife does. Not me. I am. I am super British Isles guy here. Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

My spouse is Scots, Irish, German. So my family is. My. My children are a cavalcade of Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So good to have all three of you here on MacBreak Weekly. So good to have all of you watching. We appreciate it. We do Mac Break Weekly. I think you've figured that out. If you're watching live. We are not unfortunately able to stream to all the normal outlets today. Having a little trouble with one of our providers. We are on YouTube. So those of you watching on YouTube, thank you for being here. Normally we do YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, not TikTok X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. And of course, Club Twitter. Discord. But we're glad to have all of you watching on YouTube today. Thank you.

[Jason Snell]

Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways

[Glenn Fleishman]

to tell you that Mint's offer of

[Jason Snell]

unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun

[Glenn Fleishman]

if we made $15 bills.

[Jason Snell]

But it turned out, turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of 45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month. Equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy.

[Leo Laporte]

See terms on. We go with the show. Let's talk a little AI. An update to Apple's creator studio given you A little bit of AI. If you have this subscription, you've got AI powered features in Final Cut Pro. Apple Insider says whether you want it or not, well, you don't have to use it. Right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they're doing some auto transcription stuff which is cool. They've got a smart mask feature that I've heard people have been, people I know who've tried it out have said that it was very impressive. I haven't had a chance to.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, these are the two greatest things and kind of across all the Adobe apps I use too is like when they added good auto transcription and then like Photoshop's you know, find object thing. It's like oh like a 10,000 hours of time. My life silhouetting things has just disappeared. This is great. Yeah. So good.

[Leo Laporte]

And generate captions is great too. I don't know why anybody would complain about any of this. They said that people, the word AI

[Glenn Fleishman]

just those are more like machine. I mean machine learning component, you know neural network components, deep learning components are not driven by LLMs I think. I don't know there's some level where there's crossover I don't always get but I'm like the silhouetting is a machine learning algorithm because you can't generate that. It's not a generative thing to generate it you have to actually have tons of analysis that lets the machine learning algorithm determine what the edge is. So that's still like LLMs. It's fine.

[Andy Inatko]

It's kind of funny though because the new, the latest updates to Photoshop Creative Suite suites, they, they. I think they bought a. I can't, I wish, I can't remember the name of the company but a very, very famous company that does like AI Denoise and AI Sharpening and that sort of stuff. So in addition. So now when you go to the sharpen menu you have basically two or three options. You have the old fashioned. No, we're just using algorithms to do it. B Machine learning AI. And now the. And now this new like actual, actual AI. AI AI. And when you try. I tried all three and the AI AI AI one was by far not the best one. It was like. It was, it was unnatural. It was, I mean it was fine. But when you then like zoom in you're like oh God. That's not, it's not wrong but it's not as good as simple like a simple basic like been around for the past 15 years. Sharpening algorithm.

[Leo Laporte]

I could say the same thing about the out painting the new outpainting In Apple's photos.

[Jason Snell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks good until you really pixel peek.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's funny. I've used out painting a very little bit because I don't like. Well, I don't want to do. Most of the stuff I do is. Has documentary aspects of it, so I can't. The only out painting I'll do is literally in the margin that's trimmed off. But I don't have that eighth of an inch. So it's not even seen. But you have to give an image that goes to that whatever. And then they literally cut it off. But that's sort of a fix.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fine because you're never going to see it.

[Andy Inatko]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

[Andy Inatko]

I'm just saying that those are the. Those are the categories where it really tests like what you actually believe about how. How wrong AI is. Because I think most people will say, oh well, an AI actor on an AI student set that. That doing a script that was generated by AI. Oh, that's horrible, horrible, horrible. But when you talk about tools like, like all the time, like we, you. I want to rotate this photo just like this, but I can't. That introduces like empty space that needs a sliver of space that needs to be filled in. Or in video editing, like, I just need this shot to go like half a second longer. I turned off the camera too early. The beat is wrong. It needs to hold on that shot for another half a second. Okay. And it can generate a half a second of not just simply freeze and stay, but actually now the person is blinking and turning away and it looks perfectly fine because it's only half a second. Is that wrong? Because it's helping to fuel a very, very. What the director and the editor thinks is a very, very important creative choice. That's where it becomes really, really difficult and awkward to have these totalitarian arguments against AI. It's almost like we have to keep moving those goalposts in our head because they keep extending the length of the playing field about how good and how practical some of these tools actually are.

[Leo Laporte]

Are other new features, new creator themes, new auto mask feature. That's actually. We talked about that color match. They've updated Final Cut camera too, with clean HDMI out, which is nice. I'm surprised it didn't have that before. There's now Prores LT in there, which if Alex were here, I'm sure he would give us a dissertation on why that's good. But no idea. If you know, then you know no. And Logic Pro has a redesigned Chord ID that Could identify extended chords and inversions more accurately. That's gotta be AI. That's pretty cool.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's funny too, because that was a feature before, so it's like a. I think maybe at least my read on that is you're seeing the technology accelerate there where they built this AI based cord ID and then like, I don't even know how many, like a year later, maybe they like threw it, they redesigned it and that strikes me that they decided they could do it better and so they threw it out and brought in a new model that does it. But it's pretty cool that it just will look at your. Your tracks and know what chords you're playing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a model upgrade. I'm sure that's all that is.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's almost certainly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Maybe some design changes around it, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Anyway, bunch of new features if you're a subscriber. Pixelmator Pro. I'm glad they're giving some love to pixelmator Pro.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, a lot of, lot of connectivity between all those apps and pixelmator where there's more kind of like getting things in and out of pixelmator now. I should also say for people who are fans of like the broader audience who uses numbers and Keynote and pages, there are some feature updates in those apps that do not require the subscription. If you're not a subscriber to the Creative Bundle, you will still have some new features in those updates too. And that's the thing they got to do now is they got to differentiate. There are a few like AI connected features or suite connected features, like the pixelmator stuff that they. That's just for people who are paying the subscription. But there are also a bunch of new features that are in there that are for everybody for the free version of those apps. I hate that we have to differentiate between the free versions of those three apps and the pay versions, but that's where we are.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you subscribe to iWork?

[Jason Snell]

I don't. I mean, I don't pay for the creator studio because I already have Logic and Final Cut on the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too.

[Jason Snell]

So all I'm really getting out of it then is Logic and final cut on iOS where I might use Final Cut Camera and Final Cut on the iPad once a year or twice a year, in which case I should probably just turn it on for a month. And I don't find the AI features in the iWork apps compelling at all. So it's one of those things. Like it would be a much more compelling thing if I didn't already have Final Cut and Logic, but I do so. And you can have those on the Mac and you just get to keep it them. So I have no motivation now.

[Leo Laporte]

If they upgraded pixelmator Pro significantly, I might. I mean, photo editing is one of the things I still really do a lot, especially on the iPad. I might take a look at that for that.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But I'm so excited about the next story. I'm like chomp, champing, chomping.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you champing at the bit as one does the horse might as.

[Glenn Fleishman]

As one does at the MCP story, which sounds obscure.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is obscure, but if you're an AI user, you'll understand why it's important. Safari has an MCP server. So I, with my AI work, have special versions of various browsers that are controllable by the AI. Safari was never one of those, but now it is. So Glenn, this has made you champ.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, because I think the great uses of coding agents is fixing web web crud. Right? And solving problems. Like I could spend the rest of. I mean, I know that it's like people who spend their entire career so far doing web stuff, doing JavaScript and doing server side components. I know it's all split up now and some people are full stack still or whatever, but like there's just so much. But I like so many people have cruddy old sites and I've gone through and been like, hey, Claude, look at this cruddy old site. I can't figure out what's wrong. And also the HTML is bad. Can you modernize it? Can you put an open graph? Can you solve the. Can you clean it up? Can you pass it validation? And it would take me vastly longer if I could do it and not be worth it. But I think that's one utility. But I'm actually using Claude with something called. It's not Orchestrator. What is it? It's a headless Chrome browser that it can control. Playwright, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Playwright.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, yeah. So I can say do this thing until it's right. And it just does it behind the scenes. This doing it in Safari makes it, I think. I mean, I know I could do it with other browsers, but saf, the browser I tend to use. And I also, you know, I think Apple integration is often better than things than third parties. So they're going to let it work with coding agents. But I just love the idea of going to, you know, letting it have access to everything. Like, all right, here I'm on a site, mess around with it, figure out what's wrong, tell me and then I'll. We can deploy the fix instead of, you know, I just can't Keep all of JavaScript in HTML and in CSS in particular. Oh my God. I have some.

[Andy Inatko]

Oh goodness.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. I mean CSS justifies Claude code in my mind 100%. No human being can. It's the worst thing since send mail configuration files for those in the know back years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Anyway, I was just. The days I was excited for better integration.

[Andy Inatko]

I was going to say like building my, building my own site. It's like it was so stagnating because trying to get css to do 1/2 or 1/10 what I wanted to do was impossible. Even when it was just okay, I've got a commercial theme that is noted for being very, very easy. Adapt just by using style sheets. Could not get anything to work the way I wanted to. But then once Gemini got really, really good at it, I could simply say, here's what I want you to do, here's what I think the approach should be. And now one of the great things about putting agency resources inside the browser is that now like, whereas the development cycle used to be okay, I want to implement this and it would generate some CSS and some JavaScript and I'd implement it. Okay, it doesn't work. Here's what, here's what, here's a screenshot what it looks like and I think it's not targeting this correctly. With when the Safari's agents is agentic, then the agent can simply put in the change, look, generate the page, look at what, what comes out and then realize that, okay, that didn't work correctly. So now I'm going to need to keep adjusting this, that and the other.

[Glenn Fleishman]

The iterative feedback is so great that you can say like, keep doing this until it's right is right. I feel like it's relatively new now in the agentic stuff. Like you could get some of that before and certain, certain structures or you could build them. But now I feel like a lot of the stuff I do is like, here's my outcome, let's talk about it and then just do it and leave me out of it until it's correct and then I can do the next design phase.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you the one that found a bug like your 10 year old website?

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh yeah, yeah. I said, what's wrong with this site? I've been running for 29 years.

[Leo Laporte]

29 year old. Okay, yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

And it said, oh, here's a whole bunch of injection things that, you know, they were never exploited to my knowledge. Here's all this stuff that you should fix immediately. I'm like, oh, my God. Well, so I hit a button and it essentially ran through them.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a sad day today because this is the day that Fable is no longer available in my Claude Max subscription.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, is it the expiration date?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's July 7th. I don't think it's been turned off yet, but I don't dare use it because if you use it and it's not covered, it's very, very, very expensive

[Glenn Fleishman]

today and this week in tech news, Leo the port ran up a $500 million bill with anthropic easily. He's fled the country. No sign of Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

I stayed up late last night trying to use every last drop of Fable before. Before it was gone. I'm using it to do a big redesign of our. One of our most important workflow apps, our ad sales app. And it's doing a great job, by the way. It's incredibly good. So what I said is, look, I'm going to lose you tomorrow. Could you please. I'm going to have to use Opus 4.8. Could you just tell it how to do it so you know it can do it right? And I'm hoping it did that properly. And we'll see, we'll find out it did it. So far, so good. I mean, it's amazing.

[Glenn Fleishman]

And a friend of my wife asked me the other day, she said, what are tokens in this context? And I said, I don't know if I'm well enough informed, but what I want to tell you is, like, when you type something into an AI, it then actually generates all the instructions for the AI. You're not actually talking to the AI. And if you look at the transcripts of what it actually does, like, that's all the tokens, as I understand it. It's kind of. It's breaking it down to the task.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's direct and then it's tokens out, too.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, tokens out. And then it has to summarize it, but I'm like, you're asking, hey, Fable, talk to your slightly less intelligent sibling.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Using tokens all the. It's tokens all the way down. Web browser integration, though, is very important. And I think it's nice for Apple to do that in Safari because Safari is not, not, not like the others. So to whatever degree, you can make your site work well on Safari as well as on Chrome, that's a good

[Jason Snell]

Thing also I've heard from people who are aficionados of MCP servers that this is a really good one. That.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh good.

[Jason Snell]

I mean it is, it is, it's conflicting. Two things. One is AI moves really fast so you always expect the newest one is going to be the best. But also it's Apple and Apple has like got a weird relationship with all this stuff. It's the, it's the former of those. Apple is doing this now and it's apparently a very good MCP implementation. This is called Safari Technology Preview. You can download it from Apple's website. We, a lot of us call it Purple Safari because it's basically a second Safari app that runs but it's the stuff that isn't yet in the official shipping Safari. And so the icon is the Safari icon but purple. And you, you may, I mean it's been a great preview of all sorts of things. There's a bunch of, you know, that's where they implement stuff first so you can look at on your website and go oh, do I want to turn this new CSS feature? Like last year I think they did the feature where there's a new multi line composer for text and if you turn that on, it breaks text on lines differently in order to make them more pleasing. And that's a CSS feature and you can turn it on or not. And the nice thing, I was able to experiment on my website with that feature before it ever shipped to customers by using Safari Technology Preview by the Purple Safari and this and then you go in and you turn on basically this allow remote and agents to control this browser at which point the MCP server is on.

[Leo Laporte]

So what people will do, this is the new world is they will point their AI, whether it's an agent like Hermes or Claude code or codecs at a page introducing the Safari MCP server and just say implement this, it'll turn away and you'll suddenly have an MCP server which is very handy to have.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, I saw a Dropbox extension people really liked. I never used it. It's end of life. I think the developer decided it's just they're not using Dropbox and I think John Gruber wrote about it, Nick Hare over at Pixel Envy and I was like, oh well somebody's discovered to describe it and there'll be a, I mean maybe not a replacement, that's too much. Maybe there's other things going on. But when apps die now, as long as they're utility size, I think we're going to see and John wrote about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Or if they're open source and you can take the code and adapt it, forking it is no longer the tragedy that it has to be. In fact, actually the tragedy now is that there are infinite numbers of forks of popular open source projects. If you go search for an open source project now on GitHub you'll have to really work hard to get the original as opposed to somebody's fork of it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

And we need some kind of curation. We need a Yahoo for the best version.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is the original. Yeah, yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

This is the one that will actually work.

[Leo Laporte]

Interestingly, this isn't technically coming From Apple, it's WebKit. Right. So it's really WebKit doing this. But it is Apple. Right.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I love WebKit's posts. They're just so much more bulient and open. They'll be like hey, we added 733 things and here they are. And this is just kind of blow it all out. And they're not reserved in the way that other Apple postings often are or the tone of the developer site which is very flat.

[Leo Laporte]

If you go to the WebKit site it says a fast open source web browser engine which is just primarily used on Apple stuff. And I presume that everybody on the team works for Apple. Maybe not. I don't know. It's pretty much that way with Chromium. Is that Chromium is pretty much a Google. Google project. I don't know what WebKit is. WebKit was originally an open source tool. I think it came from. What was it? Conqueror. The.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Kde.

[Leo Laporte]

The KDE browser.

[Andy Inatko]

Khtml.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And then adapted by Apple and Apple's support I think keeps it alive which is good because we don't want to be in a.

[Andy Inatko]

We need multiple. Need multiple engines. Particularly given that how wired up Chromium is for. For sending signals.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like yeah, well and everybody, I would say everybody using AI who's working with the web is probably using some sort of Chromium MCP server. So it's really good to have one for Safari.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

To make for if nothing else to ensure compatibility.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. Particularly when. When. When these agents are the job is going to be hey, book me hotel here. Make sure that it's kind of. It's not. It's near a place where I can order a pizza and don't have to eat from the hotel restaurant. Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

My God, sometimes when you say things like that I'm like oh yeah, Yahoo Pipes is basically what we, what AI could do for us now is find me a pizza place within 10 miles of this thing.

[Andy Inatko]

It always. The history of the Internet is commerce and porn and pizza. It's like those three are the main drivers. How can I make it easier to get porn, pizza or that pizza place

[Glenn Fleishman]

that took bitcoin briefly. I think they have a billion dollars of the bitcoin if they can find it. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that guy bought one one pizza for like 12,000 in Bitcoin or something like that. I think we have a title, Commerce, Porn and pizza. Let me just put right, that's good.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That's it. I remember. Boy, that was funny. Many, many years ago, I met the Netscape webmaster. Really lovely guy forgetting his name at a conference. And he said maybe 97, 96. And he said he had been on a panel at another conference about video. And he said, yeah, we're really striving to get like, you know, know 320 by 240 at like 12 frames per second. And somebody next to him worked for a porn site and said, do you know how much people pay for that on our site? Like, we're already doing that. We're streaming. They don't care. Yeah. He's like, oh, okay, you want 18K?

[Andy Inatko]

We got it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, it was worthwhile.

[Leo Laporte]

As good as the real deal. Speaking of good, Siri AI finally. Good.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yay.

[Jason Snell]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

It can. And it's being, you know, it's interesting. Have you tried the new develop. What is it? Developer beta 3 is out.

[Jason Snell]

Yep, Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So we've got to be close to the public beta because I really would

[Glenn Fleishman]

like to be happening.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. I mean, it's possible that this is a potential candidate for public beta release and that might happen next week. They only say July and sometimes it happens. I think it even happened last year where we all kind of assumed that a particular build would be the public beta and then it wasn't and it sort of slid back and then there was a public beta, but it had a different build than the developer beta, which means they did another build because there was. They were not ready to release that build build. So. But yeah, I mean, I think they. I think what they do is they target mid month and have room to slip because they want to ship it in July. So, yeah, I would not be surprised. And I don't know anything about this. There's my canary. I don't know about the public beta. Sometimes I do, but I do not know right now. I would say beta 3 feels a little bit like it might Be a candidate to be the public beta build, but only if they don't find it only came out yesterday. Right, so. So if they find issues, they have the ability to say, no, not that one. But you know, if it looks good, maybe there would be a public beta release, I don't know, next week sometime. But they've got time because they only promise July.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the most exciting features of Siri AI has now emerged in the third beta. The ability to talk to third party apps. And a 9 to 5 Mac has an example of checking your electric car for the battery level. That's just one example. I mean, presumably this will happen with other apps as well, but this is good, you know, I mean there's obviously more you want to do than that, but it works with Tessie, but not the official Tesla app. So I guess app developers have to turn that on. They have to. It's an intent, I presume that they have to.

[Jason Snell]

Right. And Tessie is generally for those who don't know, that's like the indie Tesla app that controls everything that. Because you know, as, as is the story from throughout history, the official app from the vendor is slower to, to do new things and the ones that are built by fans and other third parties, they're on the cutting edge. So are we surprised that the fan indie Tesla app can do this? And I think I saw that the Ford app does it too. So like it's obviously, I think, yeah, I think it's probably app intense and Tesla will presumably update their app. But like it's a first inkling, right, that of what, what you're supposed to be seeing here, which is Siri AI is supposed to look at app intents and be able to figure out that, oh, I need to ask that app for this information so that I can give it back to you or tell that app to do something for you. That's the dream. And it's, I think it's natural that there's not a lot of that right now because it's beta season. Like developers of third party apps are worried about getting their apps running by the time that the OS ships. Not, not for people who are in the beta. And this is always the problem is that, you know, there's stuff that it's hard to test during the summer because the apps aren't there, because the app developers also are taking the summer to develop their apps.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Default folder didn't work for the first one or two betas. And I was like, I'm lost without

[Jason Snell]

default folder spoilers for my Pick of the week. By the way, spoilers. They've updated, but it's updated now. Thank you. Stay tuned.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, the Discord chat tells me that they have extended fable to the 12th, so I got five more

[Jason Snell]

days working on it. Leo. Yes.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Before it's too late.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's been. It's so funny to watch. The place to watch this now is x.com, which I'm sad to say because I was off X. But if you want to know, you know the good and the bad of AI, that's the place to be. And, and I've been watching people freak out and like there was a lot of posts yesterday saying here's how to take Fable and take its rules and apply it to opus 4.8 so it's as good as Fable and which of course is nonsense. And then there was all this speculation that OpenAI would release their updated ChatGPT or GPT 5.6, which is rumored to be very, very good, on the day that you could no longer use Fable. That would be smart. Like, oh well, you can always move over here. And so I have subscriptions with both. So I'm just, I'm just waiting.

[Glenn Fleishman]

My first, I was using Siri AI the other day because I'm writing, I have a mere, I want to say nine Take Control books to update this summer and two new ones to write. Yep, it's exciting. It's exciting when Apple changes everything. But it's at least the interface is not completely changed in the way it was the last year. But I was testing, I went to like oh, where was it? I was someplace and you could right click and one of the options oh, you're in it's obscure thing. You're in System Settings, Privacy and Security and you're looking at startup items and log up login items. So you right click and it has some options. At the top is Siri AI. And I'm like oh, I will say tell me about this login item. And it says the login item section is blah blah blah. I'm like, oh, you don't really, you shouldn't really be contextual because you don't have information about the thing. I just right clicked on on. But you're pretending like you do. Maybe a later version. Well but I thought that would be kind of awesome. If you click, you right click a thing in System Settings which has so many things now, it's particularly a specific installed thing and say what the heck is this? It'll be like, oh, this is in System Agents and you should install Lincoln X to remove it and. I don't know, something advice instead of just a listing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, I have to leave now because I have some.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Some AI coding just tabled the O.

[Jason Snell]

The port. I heard from a friend of mine who's a developer who said, here's what you do. Every time you get access to a new model, the first thing you do is you point it at your code base and you say, find the bugs. I do that, and then keep doing that until it can't find the bugs anymore, and then somebody else. So you'll do that with Claude, and then OpenAI will have a new model, and you're like, all right, new model. Find the bugs. Because they do it. This is. I think I might have mentioned this. Last week, Marco Armand released a beta of Overcast, and he said he found four incredibly subtle bugs that he'd been trying to track down and couldn't find in his own code that he wrote. And he pointed an AI tool at it, and it found those bugs. And then he would look and he'd be like, why is that? And then he has that moment as a programmer. He's like, oh, right. But it was not something he saw. And then. And ask a new model to find your bugs and it found them, which is just. It's just amazing. Incredible.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I like Cindy Crawford, and she had no insight into my code base at all, though, so I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

Well, you got to ask an AI model and not a supermodel, and that was your big mistake.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Super AI.

[Jason Snell]

There are other questions to ask supermodels, Glenn. Come on. I love Claude, but I wouldn't call Claude a supermodel model. No, in the same way.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Not that Claude does the bathing suit issue of Sports Illustrated. Siai. Although I think SI is already running

[Jason Snell]

AI Storage Artificial Illustrated.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Glenn Fleishman]

You said it come into existence.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, sorry.

[Andy Inatko]

Also known as deviantart.com.

[Leo Laporte]

yeah. Let me ask for. Is it just you, Jason, that's used developer beta 3. Anybody else?

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, I've got two. I'm just installing three now that I know about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm just curious. Have you been playing with it, Jason? Are there any other features you've noticed, new features?

[Jason Snell]

I've only started there. Like, yeah, that App Intents. Hints of App Intents is a good place to start. And what else is in there? It's little stuff. Like, there's still some stuff trickling in, and there's some tweaks going on.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Here's what I found In Apple Home, just by accident, we installed a new camera in the house and we have three. Not because we're paranoid, that sounds terrible. It's just we've had issues. So we have cameras and we never see anything on them except raccoons and cats and squirrels basically. But so I go to the home app and now when you see video, instead of it showing you each camera device you had to go to to see clips, now all the clips are lined up in a row, at least in the Mac version. And you can just scrol through your entire library of things that were motion

[Jason Snell]

sensor recorded, which is how we know that Apple is totally doing a security camera. Because they wouldn't just be doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a golden. Yeah, probably. Those are the rumors. Golden Gate Bridge wallpaper is in now because it's Golden Gate. That's nice. The reminders app icon changed pretty dramatically in a nice way, I think. But it's basically instead of it being a dark bullet on a little lighter ring, it's. It's a kind of a light bullet in the center of the darker colored ring. And you can tell I launched it and I was like, oh, reminders, what have you done?

[Glenn Fleishman]

We're also getting inline and messages now. You're getting stuff like every time you mention anything with a date or time or place, it'll be add to reminders and add to notes.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think that was a beta 2, but yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

How does that work? Does it pop up? What is it?

[Jason Snell]

No, it's like underneath.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's subtle like the text suggestions.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's a little like that. And then it looks. I haven't seen it yet, but it looks like the, the tab grouping feature might be added to Safari at the very least. The, the alert that it got added as a new feature is in there now. But is the new feature there? I'm not sure. Not 100% sure yet. We've only seen that because that's the idea that you can take your tab. Your tabs and say to Safari, organize these for me. And it makes like little subgroups of your tabs. So you don't have a billion tabs.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's AI, Right?

[Jason Snell]

It's just. And that's. That's. Yeah, that's AI. I don't know. I've only seen it happen in icloud tabs where it summarizes tabs that are open in other browsers of yours on your icloud account. But I haven't Seen it in actual safari yet. But that is a feature that's supposed to be coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's from MacRumors, the new Golden Gate wallpaper. That's pretty.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Kind of love the Golden Gate bridge. I mean, not that I didn't like a lot of the other, you know, High Sierra or the other ones. I'm still waiting for macOS Fresno, but I don't think we're going to get it. Mac Os, Encino. I have to go to Star Trek. I don't think lower decks for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I doubt we're going to see it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Wasn't it the Encino class in the lower decks? It was like the California class.

[Jason Snell]

It was the USS Cerritos, but I'm sure the Encino was one of the ships in the California class.

[Glenn Fleishman]

There's one episode in which all the California, California classes come in.

[Jason Snell]

It's like. And it's not good names though.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's the Vallejo.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. It's all the rejected Apple macOS names that were made into starships. I think that's. I think that's a die. I'm still holding out for Shasta. I feel like Shasta is going to be a great future one for people who are not in California. A spectacular volcano that we have here that makes for good photos, good photo opportunities at Shasta. So we'll probably get there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also a sacred site with our first nation folks. And it is, it is, it is. You get that sense when you approach it.

[Jason Snell]

It is beautiful and magical.

[Leo Laporte]

Magical happening.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. You're literally just driving through flat, not nothing landscape and then you look up and hovering above the mountains to your north is a volcano.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like Fuji almost. It's just, it's just there.

[Jason Snell]

Very dramatic, incredible, beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah. So last question. When the public beta comes out sometime in the next couple of weeks, do it probably.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty stable, right?

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yes, shockingly. I mean no. No one should do it on their primary machine if they're lose worry about losing work and productivity and need a restore. But if you want to have fun and you're not, it's not like a mission critical thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's my only phone. I think that's why I want it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I've got a backup phone. It's my night phone. No, I'm just kidding. I got a backup phone that I got just for testing. I bought a old enough phone that is new enough to run every feature that I need to test it on in the new releases. But I spend the money to do that because I'm writing nine books.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you doing a take control for that too?

[Glenn Fleishman]

Which phones or. No, we're doing Joe and I do iOS and iPados 27. So we list all the new features. We're going to do a different thing this year probably because the OS, he does Mac OS, he's doing Mac OS 27. Goldengate. The updates for the operating systems are all so focused on Siri AI and Apple intelligence, with some exceptions, that we're probably going to do a Siri AI book, an Apple Intelligence book, and then link the two system update books to it. So we have, we have work ahead of us, as they say. It's fun today. This year feels like a positive year. Every time I poke at a feature, I go poke. And it goes, oh, that works better or it didn't break it. Right. And I'm like, last year it was like poke. And it's like, oh, oh, I got my finger in there. Yeah, I gotta wash it off.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's like those Roman gargoyle walls where you stick your hand and if you're a liar, you're going to get your hand bit off.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all right.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm going to. As soon as the public beta comes out, I'm putting it on my phone and if I don't get your call, well, now you'll know why you're watching macrase. Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Auto reply. Leo has installed public beta cannot reply new os.

[Leo Laporte]

Who dis?

[Andy Inatko]

You're watching Mac Break to file a radar on my behalf.

[Leo Laporte]

Just shake it as hard as you can. And then my watch says, did you just take a fall? Andy Inocco, Jason Snell Sentinen for Chris Warren. Christina Warren, of course. Glenn Fleischman. Great to have all three of you. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Let's talk about rumors. Rumors, rumors. Nikkei says Apple will launch 5. Five new iPhone models to gain market share amid memory crunch. Well, I could think of. Let's see the folding phone, The Ultra, the iPhone 18 Max Pro Max. The iPhone 18. Nothing.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. What would the fifth air.

[Leo Laporte]

The air. Do you think they're going to do another air?

[Jason Snell]

German says that too. In the spring. In the spring it's probably 17 for the regular and 8, they're saying.

[Andy Inatko]

Also with a slightly bigger battery and a second lens, like a wide angle lens.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So less, which would be wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Bigger battery would make a difference.

[Jason Snell]

So this is the iPhone 18 model series. So it's right. It's 1818 Pro. 18 Pro Max 18 or Air 2s or, or what. What is the. The. The E. The E. It's not an SE anymore. 18E.

[Leo Laporte]

And the folding phone, that would be six.

[Jason Snell]

That's six models.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Maybe the folding phone is for real. I keep reading about it like it's for real. And I was like, are they really

[Jason Snell]

going to folding phone? Well, I mean, we won't, we won't know until the fall, but it sure sounds like they're making them.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I've saw somebody with one and they're like, oh yeah, we have a couple of the Samsung one. I'm sorry. And they're like, yeah, we had a couple of them. Like, do you ever have any issues? Like, that's fine. I was like, okay. I guess it got. Apple just sat it out until they could perfect it.

[Jason Snell]

So typical Apple, right? They're like, yeah, we'll just wait.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll.

[Jason Snell]

We'll come in and then people are going to get excited and Samsung will be like, really? But that's how it goes.

[Andy Inatko]

Thank you for helping US sell another 10 million million screens.

[Leo Laporte]

The other rumor is that Apple has decided to up the production of the folding phone to 10 million. Interesting, right? Some real confidence. They were originally going to make 7 to 8 million. This is all rumors.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Are any of us going to buy a folding Apple iPhone?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, we're a bad set of examples. I will absolutely have one.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So I'm going to predict.07 sales then.

[Andy Inatko]

There are a lot of Vision Pro owners in this conversation, so we're not, we're not a good.

[Jason Snell]

I only have two Vision Pros near me right now. What are you talking about?

[Glenn Fleishman]

There's always. There's a spider and a Vision Pro with an eight feet.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. At any time.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually have the Samsung Fold. I've had several of them. But I'm excited because I like the idea of it. I love my iPad mini and I love the idea of a phone that is both that.

[Jason Snell]

I'm with you, Leo. I think I fear what it's going to cost. But as somebody who's very iPad. I use the iPad all the time. And so for me, what I find intriguing about this is so many people are iPhone first and then maybe they have an iPad or not. But my iPhone is only really when I'm kind of roaming around. When I'm in the house, it's mostly the iPad. Could this, this product become my primary computing device? Maybe. But that's what excites me about it is that there's a, at least a possibility that I would have this kind of One device that could be my roam around phone and also sit down on the couch and fold and open it up and use it there. Like I use my iPad now for

[Andy Inatko]

me the use case is always all those little like what like when I spent the I spent another Friday in Boston like a few days ago because I had to run had to pick up the new thing laptop and like that's the perfect circumstance for I don't want to take even my iPad Pro with me. But I still but the thing is I'm going to be on commuter rail for an hour on the way there hour for way back. I'm probably going to be in town for the two or three hours and it's going to be super hot. So maybe I don't want to do a whole lot of work like and assume that I'm not picking up I'm not going to be coming home with a new MacBook but like I need to have something in my pocket and a keyboard so that I can at least get some work done or respond to something that's very, very important important. But it's not worth my taking like the big even even a lightweight iPad with me. But the thing is like the whereas the older Rumors were about 2,000 to start with and maybe it'll go up for the now I think I don't know if it was Ming Chiquo had a lot to say this week among them like basically saying that not only, not only they the he was saying 6 to 7 million the Nikkei up that to 10 but he's saying that also by the way only about 10% of those are going to be like made in, in the third quarter. So if, if they are planning to actually sell whatever the first round is for sale it's going to be in very, very limited quantities. But the other thing maybe this is updated to represent the price increases that we're all dealing with now. The they're basically saying entry level to 2200 to 2300 probably 2500 for the one that you actually want. And that is to me rarefied air for somebody to safely say I want not just, not just a MacBook nicely outfitted M5 MacBook Pro or and I you know, I'm sorry, what I'm getting at is that there are not a whole lot of people it's a niche product. If it basically is people choosing between a really, really good iPhone Pro plus a MacBook Neo for when they actually need that kind of firepower or that that plus a an iPad mini, I Guess not that big. It's just, but the idea of folding something, putting your shirt pocket, not a whole lot of people are going to say no, I'd much rather have this not device but this version 1 hardship device which is going to be, I mean you always have. Even when it's something as robust as a MacBook. You would think I'm going to wait for the first revision just to be sure if I can. This is going to be, I imagine there's, I imagine that despite Apple doing all they can to make sure that this is a very, very nice rollout, there's going to be a disproportionate number of people that are going to have to go back to the Apple Store a couple of times before this gets sorted out. But like it's, it's hard for me to imagine $2,500 for a primary phone where you are absolutely happy that you have the extra convenience of having this dual device absolutely justifies 2,500 bucks. Unless, unless you have the sort of buying power where just like, just like, you know, I, I think, I thought nothing about buying like a $2,200 laptop instead of something that cost $1,000 because it is that valuable to me and thank God I can afford it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Hey, it's 100 bucks. $2,500 is $100 dollars a month over two years at 0% interest of Apple Cleave. $600 a month is. But it's, you know, if you're not, you're paying the tax up front. There's a couple things you have to do in some cases. Right. But maybe Apple will do a 36 month tier for it or something to reduce the cost.

[Jason Snell]

I think Apple knows people are going

[Andy Inatko]

to trade in too.

[Jason Snell]

So yeah, I think Apple knows who's buying especially a first generation of this device. And it is not somebody who is saying if I buy this I have to buy a MacBook Neo. It's just not, I mean we have

[Andy Inatko]

to say one for college.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, this is a product especially the first generation, but it's at the top of their product line. This is a product that's targeted for the people who have the money to spend on Apple gear and they want the best and they want the coolest and they want the cutting edge. And this is going to be both of those things. And, and you know, it's not like Apple will say well we do make an affordable iPhone and it's the iPhone 18 or the iPhone 17 or you know, and this is not that. This is a new category. And they know that a large number of the people who buy it are not going to be weighing like whether they get this or a computer. They're going to get both because they've got the money to do it. And over time it changes. I agree, Andy, that this is a first generation product. Right. So part of the appeal of it, but also part of the thing that a savvy shopper might be repelled by is the fact that it's going to be a first version and it's going to be weird. And it's going to be weird on the hardware side where who knows what's going to be going on there. And it's going to be weird on the software side because again, Apple's going to be shipping software for this for the first time and they're going to have to work on that. And you know you can. Some of us, and I know our listeners are among them. Some of them love the ride. A bumpy ride, right? Because it's like, it's bumpy. But we're here, that's what life is here on the cutting edge. And we love it, but it's a little bit bumpy. And then there are other people who are like, hell no. Not a, in a million years am I going to do that. Both are reasonable. Depending on what you want out of life, depending on what your budget is, I think it's fine. But yeah, I, I would have a hard time saying now, here's a, here's a tip that'll save you some money. Buy the expensive folding iPhone. I'm not. I mean, because then you won't have to get an iPad. It's like getting an iPad for free. And it's like, well, it kind of isn't. And also. No.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not saving you money.

[Jason Snell]

You could buy, you could buy an iPhone and an iPad and a MacBook Neo for that price.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Right. Like Apple's got to capture the margin or the sale revenue and margin that they're going to lose from not selling an iPad. So that's part of the price too, is there's a high price of manufacturer, but it's also because they are going to, I mean, it could cause iPad sales to crater in a specific chunk. People I don't think are going to go, yeah, I'm buying a folding fold and an iPad. So they have to. Apple has to deal with that impact as well.

[Andy Inatko]

Yeah. It's also a question about what the margins are on a device like this because those screens are hella hella expensive. Expensive. It's like disproportionate to any other phone they've made before. I said this before when Jon Gruber was on but one of the things that really, really spelled that out to me was when Motorola, who are the kings of making incredible phones at affordable prices like where you put them side by side with something that cost twice as much and you can't see really where the money went on the more expensive ones, they finally came out with their like iPhone Ultra style like or Samsung style foldable. And I'm thinking oh great, so maybe this will be like the first one of that size that like be $1500 or oh $1600 still be better and it was exactly $100 less than the Samsung. That's how much these displays cost.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inatko]

And it's, it's, it's going to be a ride.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you and Mike Hurley on Upgrade created a pool for the price, the final price of the Ultra yet It feels like something you guys would do.

[Jason Snell]

I, I, I agree. I think that when it comes to that will probably do it. We usually do a draft right before and so that'll probably be, they'll probably be some pricing related things because one of the great things for people who complain that Mark Gurman reports everything and spoils everything that Apple's going to announce and it's not fun anymore or whatever like okay, one of the things that Mark Gurman can't be that good at is names and prices because the names and prices come out of the market group and out of the product group at Apple. They are not supply chain sources. They are not even software sources. Those are very high level and that's so if you want your excitement it's going to be what's this going to cost? And what's it going to be called because sometimes those names leak like the NEO leaked like the day before but that product leaked two years before and we were talking about it two years before the NEO came out that they were going to do a Chromebook killer. But that's what it was clearly. But we didn't know the name until the day before and we didn't know the price until it was announced. Nobody got it right. So that's the, it's going to be fun to find out. And then you throw in this, the, the price increases and it's like well now what's it going to cost? And I'm reminded of how when there was a rumor that the Vision Pro or whatever we, the Apple Vision Whatever we thought it was going to be called the Apple Visor. There was a rumor that it was going to cost 2,500. And I remember being outraged and being like, are you kidding? 2000 is even too much. It can't. It can't be 2500. And they're like, how about 3500? It's like, what? So, yeah, we'll. We'll see. The Apple. Apple is not shy to make things expensive. They're just not. They're shameless about it because they make lots and lots of money. But, you know, so it'll be fun, but it'll be a good guess. We have not done it yet. And I think nobody knows except, like a small number of people at Apple.

[Andy Inatko]

One question, though, for everybody. Is every. Is anybody surprised that there. If these rumors are true, that they're going to start off with, well, we'll build 10 million of them and we think we'll sell through all of these.

[Jason Snell]

It's. It suggests that they really are high on the product and that they're probably going to be more aggressive than we think. That's. I think, I think you don't, you don't up your. If, if it's true. I don't think you up your estimate to 10 million if you're worried that you're going to have to set the price so high that nobody's going to buy them. I think you, I think you do that if you're a little more aggressive and you're like, we want these out there. We're going to price this pretty well. We think people are going to find this a hot product. Now, they could be wrong, too, but that is a. That, that's my reaction to that, is that they seem to be doing that from a position of confidence, which also suggests maybe they'll be a little aggressive on price. I think when margin to give, they'll have margin to give in this product.

[Leo Laporte]

I think one of the most interesting rumors to me is that there might be a upgraded MacBook Pro sooner than later. Like the new design. We might see the new design sooner than later.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Gurman says that the low. So I think the original intent was the OLED model was going to come out with the M6, and it was come out at the end of this year, beginning of next. And now Garmin has said they're not going to do an M6. So if that model comes out the end of this year, beginning of next, It'll be an M5 Pro or M5 Max. The same chips we already have seen but with an OLED and a touchscreen and new controls and stuff like that. But what about the base model? Well, it turns out they are also doing a design for the base model and, and German says that will get the M6 because the base model M6 is going to ship. So. And that design, which will be a new design but not presumably not oled, not touchscreen but sort of like more reminiscent of the higher end models is going to happen. So you know, interesting quirk but because we always forget it's almost like a different laptop. Right. It's the one that's not redesign though.

[Leo Laporte]

Though it's going to be the new look.

[Jason Snell]

They said, he said it was going to be reminiscent of the look. So it's like they look, they're not

[Leo Laporte]

going to give it an OLED touchscreen that doesn't exist. That's looking back.

[Jason Snell]

Well, we don't know the sequencing of it. We don't know the sequencing of it but because they may do the, the M5 Pro models first. In fact they probably will. Right. And those will be OLED touchscreen and then in the spring let's say they'll do an M6 base model.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now I'm confused. So you think the OLED touchscreen will not be even an M6 but, but an M5.

[Jason Snell]

Gman says it'll be an M5. Why? Yeah, because they, because they killed the M5 Pro and Max and that it'll be an M5 or the M6 Pro and Max. So it'll be M5 Pro and Max and then a year later they'll do M7 but they'll just jump right over M6.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you advise against an M6? Nothing?

[Jason Snell]

No, I mean I'm sure it's a perfectly fine chip. They just want to move on to the next one. And if, if you're in the market for something like it'll be in that low end MacBook Pro, it'll probably be in the iPad Pro, it'll probably be in MacBook Air and like it's not a stinker. I think it's more like they decided the high end ones weren't doing because they weren't worth doing because there were even more impressive high end chips right behind them and that maybe they should just skip to them. But I don't think there's going to be a problem with that. We're in for a bumpy year, year and a half of weird chip sequencing though for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Speaking of weird, I asked my AI agent what The California class ships are in Star Trek and I am getting a dissertation.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, did you see? I pasted a list in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw, but I, but I thought. Well, let me ask. I didn't know about the USS Protostar. Did you know about that?

[Jason Snell]

Oh, that's the, that's the subject of Star Trek Prodigy, which is a different show. That's the animated show. That's not a California class though. I think that's a experimental show.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe it's hallucinating because I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. The US says the Protostar is a California class ship which is a prototype vessel that, you know.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I don't think that's right. I think that's a hallucination. I was going to say, you know, nerd information about Star Trek on the Internet scraped by. AI pinch me. I had no idea.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's why I'm checking it with you because it sounds like it has hallucinated.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think so.

[Glenn Fleishman]

We've got things like USS Sherman Oaks. Great city.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. USS Fresno, USS Berkeley.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Burbank, Home to wonderful students.

[Leo Laporte]

I think those are much more interesting than the Protostar.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That's a terrible USS West Covina.

[Jason Snell]

That's a good USS Carlsbad.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

And somebody in the Discord said, you know, Encino really isn't a city, it's just a neighborhood.

[Jason Snell]

So tell that to Encino Man.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Wait, there is no uss. I got that wrong. Encino is not one of the California. That's my belt. I just. I just. Neighborhoods. I know.

[Jason Snell]

Apparently we just canonize her right here.

[Glenn Fleishman]

USS Glenn. Glenn Oaks or something. I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

USS Glenn.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Glendale. USS Glendale.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually am glad that they're not going to release the OLED M6. Whatever, because that means my budget will be a little bit more capable of affording an Ultra, which is going to be M6 priced probably. Well, anyway, we've now just determined that the Protostar is not a California class.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely not.

[Jason Snell]

Totally different show.

[Leo Laporte]

But the West Covina is without a doubt. All right, all right, let's see. What are we doing here? What are we doing? I have so much more to talk about. Is there any. Andy, I couldn't find any. Is there any Vision Pro? Because we've got to do a Vision Pro segment or lose our identity as the nation's premier Vision Pro podcast.

[Jason Snell]

We can skip it.

[Andy Inatko]

It's fine. We can. I didn't find a single darn thing there.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I looked and I looked. Maybe I'll have my agent hallucinate.

[Jason Snell]

Okay, I. I'll tell you what. I have an item. I have an item.

[Leo Laporte]

Play the theme. Oh, what do you see?

[Andy Inatko]

What do you know?

[Leo Laporte]

It's time to talk to Vision Pro. However weak and. And feeble this item may be, it does.

[Jason Snell]

Thanks for the setup, Leo. That really helps me.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I still don't believe the Vision Pro exists. I don't think Apple would ever sell something like that with.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the latest Vision Pro news?

[Jason Snell]

It has come to my attention that the ping pong app in the Vision Pro now supports the Logitech spatial stylus Muse. And I'll tell you, this is why it's important to support hand controllers in Vision os, folks, and why Apple really missed the boat by not doing. Doing it is ping pong. You know, table tennis on. On the. The meta quest is so good because you've got the hand controller and it maps perfectly to your like ping pong paddle. But you. Not the. Not the table tennis app on the Vision Pro or the pickleball app on the Vision Pro. Well, good news, everybody. This kind of weird spatial pencil that Logitech makes the. The museum, in addition to supporting a lot of weird, interesting 3D art things where you can literally draw in space, which is wild. And I think it did a fishing app that it supported out of the box. Now it also supports those paddle games. And I'll tell you, holding it in your hand and playing table tennis, really good. They did a much better job with that. It's part of the story of watching this thing, they ship the product, but over years, slowly, you're watching all the pieces of this platform actually start to make sense, including spatial peripherals that are relevant. So that's my news is if you want to play a paddle game or do fishing or draw in 3D space, Logitech sent me this Muse as a review unit. I don't know what to write about it, but I've mentioned it twice on this show. Now, there you go. Because it's deeply weird, it's kind of brilliant, but it's like, but what do I use it for? And I've got an answer now. Ping pong.

[Leo Laporte]

Ping pong and fishing.

[Jason Snell]

And that is the Vision Pro segment now, you know, we're done talking.

[Leo Laporte]

The Vision Pro silo came back a couple of days ago. Have I haven't watched it. Good.

[Jason Snell]

It's a great show.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

Best show.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I think you mean the silo going

[Leo Laporte]

to be the best.

[Jason Snell]

The silo.

[Glenn Fleishman]

The silo. Sorry.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's just a Silo it's not the Silo.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I famously said the silo once on Blue Sky. Jason took me a task and then somebody said the silo on Jeopardy. I screen captured it, sent it to you. They said the silo and it was marked wrong.

[Jason Snell]

It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

It was marked wrong.

[Glenn Fleishman]

No, it's not marked wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because the, the. I think they just don't say you guys are the Jeopardy Experts, but I'm just the Silo.

[Jason Snell]

It's a good show. It's a. It's a surprisingly good show, in fact. Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Can't those spoilers. Can't do any spoilers.

[Jason Snell]

Rebecca.

[Leo Laporte]

Rebecca Ferguson.

[Jason Snell]

I think she's fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Just adore her.

[Jason Snell]

Common rapper. Common is a scary villain. It's great. He's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I was surprised. I didn't expect much from him and he's turned out to be quite good.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I'll also say Rebecca Ferguson is one of the. I think she's one of the executive producers. Right. She really wanted footage of her climbing and being in water and climbing out of water a lot because there was

[Jason Snell]

a lot of that.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I still love the last season. There was a lot of that, but still a lot of it.

[Jason Snell]

She's great. Yeah. Still good. And they know where they're going because the Hugh Howey books obviously have mapped it out and they're going to do. They announced before this season that they're doing four seasons. They picked it up for two seasons and then they're going to wrap it. So they, they know what story they're telling. It's based on the Hugh Howey books. So it's not going to be one of those things where you get. You get to the end and you're like, but wait. It's like, no, they've got a plan and they're. This season they're doing. They started in the last episode of last season. They're flashing back to explain from sort of our time, how did the Silo happen?

[Glenn Fleishman]

I remember being so. I was watching it. I was in. I was in another country. I was watching it on a giant TV with earbuds in because nobody in my family watches it. And I, They. The rain started and I went holy allowed because I was so shocked. I wasn't expecting it. Can I say that on this show?

[Jason Snell]

Well, you did.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, no. Will I ever be us back.

[Leo Laporte]

How closely does this hue to the Howie hew. To the Howie can.

[Jason Snell]

It's pretty good. I mean, he's involved. He is a. According to him, he is involved at a. At a decent. He's not the showrunner, but he talks to them a lot. And I think that the idea is they are. It's a challenge because they gotta adapt it for tv, which means you've got a bunch of standing cast members and you can't do like in this book we go to a completely different place and we don't see any of your existing cast members for a while. You can't do that on a TV show. Right. So they've had to like move a bunch of stuff around. But it seems pretty faithful to the storyline, sort of filtered through. Through what a TV show needs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

You got to make a good TV show.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I haven't read the book, so I'm kind of excited when I'm not going to touch them. I've been avoid. I've somehow avoided all spoilers because I think enough people haven't read the books. They're all kind of, you know, cherry about it. So I want to watch all four seasons and then I'm just gonna go and devour whatever Murderbot coming back.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of books.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Books are so good, Alex.

[Glenn Fleishman]

First season was.

[Leo Laporte]

Love that show.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Good. Now short episodes.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one I'm very nervous about. Apple has announced that they are going to make Neuromancer.

[Andy Inatko]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

They've been teasing it for like a year now.

[Leo Laporte]

One of my favorite books of all time. The book that really introduced us to the cyber space.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think it can be made into a. I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

Totally. We just read it. Glenn and I just read it for the Incomparable. There's an episode. We read all three of the Sprawl novels by William Gibson from the 80s. And yeah, it's totally. I mean it, it's a. It's an almost like a noir detective

[Glenn Fleishman]

story, but it's very scene based. It's got lots of scene. We were talking about it like has points of view change and it's kind of moves. It's like it's already interleaved stories. Well, not all the books but I think. And I know they're only talking about the first one, but it has, it just has great visuals and I'm thinking of like when I was reading it, I was like, oh yeah, this in space would work great because they, they've already shown. So many shows have shown us interesting space environments. Of course they can do it and make it feel like it should for this show because it's feasible to do.

[Jason Snell]

It's right today. Today you can depict these things. It's mind blowing to Think that Gibson wrote this on a typewriter and had never used a personal computer before. He was kind of inspired by going to a video game arcade, like. And yet it is so prescient because he is. He is an observation observer of culture and he extrapolates culture. He's not extrapolating technology. The technology there is to kind of, like, buttress his observance of culture. So, yeah, I'm excited. They've only. They showed they had a still, I think, basically of the Chatsubo. And then they've got this trailer which is not, you know, from the show, which is of the show as a teaser.

[Leo Laporte]

It's reminiscent of the opening lines of the novel.

[Jason Snell]

That's what it's referencing, Right, Exactly. So. So we haven't really seen any footage from it, but they keep hyping it and it sounds like they're literally. It's a miniseries, so they're literally adapting the whole novel.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I'm so excited.

[Jason Snell]

Very excited.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I mean, Johnny Mnemonic. Not a great film.

[Jason Snell]

Not a good film.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Not really.

[Jason Snell]

And then. And then it's amazing. It's never been adapted up till now. Just. Just that short story, Johnny Mnemonic. But the thing is, the Matrix kind of ate. It ate its lunch. And the Matrix was deeply, deeply inspired by Neuromancer. But once they did the Matrix, it was sort of like. Like, well, I guess we can't really make another VR adventure for a decade plus. Right? Like, because it's. Everybody's just going to think about the Matrix and now maybe we've got it at the time. Where we can. Where we can do it. I'm really looking forward to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was it Amazon that made the Peripheral? Peripheral.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But they only did one.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, one season. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

Shame, because I. I thought that had a lot of promise.

[Jason Snell]

I did, too. Really good. Another Gibson novel. More recent Gibson novel.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So many shows cut off in their prime.

[Leo Laporte]

In their prime, so to speak.

[Glenn Fleishman]

They're Amazon prime.

[Leo Laporte]

So Amazon does that.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Unintentional.

[Leo Laporte]

They seem to. They Netflix, too. They have a short fuse, a short attention span. I hope Apple will give Neuromancer its due. I know they'll spend the money. Did they. So that. Why did they Release this trailer July 1st? Is it coming or is it.

[Jason Snell]

I think. I think just to keep people talking about it, they did that set. They did that set preview and now

[Leo Laporte]

they've done this for it.

[Jason Snell]

And then there'll be a trailer at some point, and then they'll give it a date. I think it's shot.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Jason Snell]

I think it's shot. I think they said production started on it like back in January or something like that. So I think they. I think they've shot it and now they have to put it together and do the effects and all of that. But I hope, I have high hopes for it because it's a classic.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally, before we get to our picks of the week, an Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max has been buried in a time capsule to celebrate America's 250th cosmic orange. It will be open 250 years from now. I wonder what they'll make of Cosmic Orange. I really do.

[Andy Inatko]

I wonder how long before that battery ignites and sets fire to everything else in a time capsule and how Apple PR 250 years from now is going to like, respond to that PR crisis.

[Jason Snell]

Maybe remove the battery and then just put in a USB USB cable.

[Leo Laporte]

It has been filled with Items from all 50 states. It will be buried in Philadelphia or was buried in Philadelphia on the 4th. If there is anybody left 250 years from now, they may be digging it up. It might be Charlton Heston saying.

[Jason Snell]

I was going to say, what will the apes think of this?

[Glenn Fleishman]

They should just put a USB C cable in there, Jason. Just that and no other baffle them and it'll be like, oh, this standard, the one that we adopted, it has caused peace and prosperity for the last 250 years.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they throw out the phone and they're like, all hail the USB C cable.

[Leo Laporte]

They might look at that phone as the progenitor of everything that went well, either right or wrong, in the following 250 years.

[Glenn Fleishman]

They could bury X in there too. That would be great.

[Jason Snell]

But yeah, they're gonna. They get that and they back away and spray paint that. Like, this is not a place of honor on it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Not build this Torment Nexus. Here is the Torment Nexus.

[Andy Inatko]

And, and that is, by the way, the, like the, the America 250, not the Freedom 250 time capsule. So it's not just so, oh, it's a real one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a real.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It is actually a real one. It's not going to be. It's not going to be dug up three weeks later and sold on ebay,

[Leo Laporte]

Kid Rock in it or anything like that.

[Andy Inatko]

There was probably some.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Can we put him in a time capsule? Is that legal? I don't know.

[Jason Snell]

I don't think so. I don't think you could. It's. That's buried alive. It's basically the cask of a Monteado. Except you don't Want that?

[Glenn Fleishman]

You can put rocks.

[Jason Snell]

Nobody should.

[Andy Inatko]

Well, we should just like tell Keith Richards and Willie Nelson what they should tell the people who open the time capsule. Like how to charge the phone and Mel Brooks.

[Leo Laporte]

But Mel Brooks in there.

[Andy Inatko]

Now, I know it's going to sound weird. They can only get apps from this one app store and it's not. You can't sideload anything. They were a little bit freaky.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a directory of time capsules somewhere? Like, are we due to you.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Have you have tapped into. Excuse me, I'm booting up my Glenn module for time capsule. There is actually an association of. That formed itself based in part on the crypt of civilization at Ogletree Oglethorpe University in Georgia, which I wrote an Atlantic article about a number of years ago. Because the vault of civilization was established by this very wacky guy who revived the university. And he wanted to put stuff in there for I don't know what it was like 3,500 years, some insane amount. So in the basement of some building, they put in a bazillion things. It was well documented. They had my relative, Robert Sarnoff, one of the. Or David Sarnoff, rather, one of the.

[Leo Laporte]

David Sarnoff is your relative?

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, he's one of my mom's cousins.

[Leo Laporte]

He sent radio or.

[Glenn Fleishman]

No, no, no, he didn't. He didn't invent the right. He. He. He invented a lot of myths about himself, including that he received the SOS from the Titanic, which he may have been present. It's unclear if he personally received it, but he parlayed that into becoming head of RCA for many decades. They got David Sarnoff to come out to dedicate the door for the vault. Anyway, there's some OGLE 3 show.

[Leo Laporte]

Show the screen, if you will. You keep showing my screen when I

[Glenn Fleishman]

don't have anything to show Oglethorpe University

[Leo Laporte]

some of the stones there, right there.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That's Oglethorpe. Yeah, it's in the basement and it's. You can't see it because it's just a door. There is a picture of a door and these guys are. Some of them are former Oglethorpe students, including. I want to say it's. Newt Berger is a local. I think it's. Newt Berger is a local Seattle area, well known storyteller and documentary maker.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, they got a map of all the time caps.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Anyway, so I was doing a story about Craig Maude, the most interesting man in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Craig Mod.

[Glenn Fleishman]

He's incredible. He was trying to preserve a site he'd Done. And they wound up. I think they were etching it on nickel plates so that they could store the website forever for like 10,000 years. And it turned into a whole story about, like, him and this Oglethorpe thing.

[Jason Snell]

Wow.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yep. So there is. You can find a directory. People.

[Leo Laporte]

Time capsule.

[Glenn Fleishman]

And now I will be. Let me hit the reset button on the Glenn time capsule module to turn it off. Didn't know that I knew something about it.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is, by the way, which is nice. Instructions on how to build your. Your own time cap.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's good. I think they got fed up. That you couldn't find. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Select a retrieval date. What is the shortest and what is the longest window for a time capsule? I'm wondering.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, the. I think the Oglethorpe one is one of the longest. I don't know. I don't know what the shortest is.

[Leo Laporte]

Who cares about the shortest? It's over.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Well, we put it in the closet, then we opened it the next day.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's easy. It's the long ones.

[Andy Inatko]

We needed a typewriter for a definition. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder if it says at any point do not include electronics, especially phones.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. There's some interesting stuff. The guy who ran Oglethorpe University, he was. I would say he was not a racist. That's how you started a sentence. Right. But there are some interesting things. I want to up buying some old books of his and just to research it out a little further.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. A racist.

[Glenn Fleishman]

He's not exactly.

[Andy Inatko]

He had some thoughts about Canadians that were.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. There are a few things in there. There's an inventory of what's inside. There are a few things that I think would not pass muster.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not put a time machine into the time capsule. That's all I could say, because everything goes backwards and it's a mess. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with the Autodidact, the phenomenal Glenn Fleischman filling in for Christina Warren. I wish we had an extra seat for you, Glenn, because I just. I love having you on the show. You're fantastic. Also here, Andy Inatko and the wonderful Jason Snell. And we are all glad you are here for the show. We are especially glad to our club twit members who make this show possible. Not a month goes by where Lisa doesn't come to me and say, thank God for the club. We can make payroll this month. I mean, it's literally that important to us. Not so much me, but to our staff, our team, the people who work so hard, people on the shows. The people behind the scenes, we make payroll every month and it's really, it's thanks to you in the club. You make up a good portion of our operating costs and without you, I don't know if we'd do it. So here's the the deal. If you like the shows, if you like this show and all the other shows we do, if you appreciate access to the club, Twit Discord. If you enjoy the special programming we do just for the club and if you like, you know, ad free versions of the shows and if you like the now, the shows with the ad free versions also have chapter markers so you can jump around, find the part you like. Those features are made possible by members like you. We'd love to have you in the the club. We really would. Twit TV Club. Twit. To find out more, please join the club. Join the cool kids. I didn't think the pain from the shingles rash would affect simple everyday tasks like bathing, getting dressed, or even walking around. I was wrong though. Not everyone at risk will develop it. 99% of people over the age of 50 already have the virus that causes shingles and it could react to. I developed it and the blistering rash lasted for weeks. Don't learn the hard way like I did. Talk to your doctor or pharmacist today. Sponsored by gsk. Now, ladies and gentlemen, time for our picks of the week. And since Glenn, you're our guest of honor, I'll let you kick things off.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Well, I'll just do a weird thing as I usually do, which is I don't seem to have a Mac or technology related pick of the week because I'm going to.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have to be. It could be any, anything.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I'm going to pick finding a turtle on a bike path and taking it off to the side of the path for safety, which is what I did on Sunday.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the website for that?

[Jason Snell]

I was.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah, turtle move turtle to off the side of. It's like a Blade Runner question. It's like you find a turtle in the middle of the bike path.

[Jason Snell]

It is, isn't it?

[Glenn Fleishman]

What do you do?

[Jason Snell]

Literally another you pass the void comp test.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I'm biking along and I see this thing moving up ahead. I'm like, what, what is this?

[Leo Laporte]

Glen is not a replicant, everybody.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's just a turtle. It's near a slew. You know, it's near a wildlife area. But it was looked like it was coming from this 5la. I'm like, buddy, Come on, this is not the right place for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Now here's the interesting. It was actually Mitch McConnell.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Oh, that's. It was. He transubstantiated his.

[Jason Snell]

Nobody knew.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good on you, Glenn. You are a savior of turtles.

[Glenn Fleishman]

One turtle. That's my. That was my goal this week. Apparently my goal and I fulfilled it. So that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well done. Bravo. And apparently our producer, or you, has put in a video of I like turtles.

[Jason Snell]

Turtles.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I don't know about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this you rescuing a turtle?

[Glenn Fleishman]

No, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's just a baba, dude.

[Jason Snell]

Kid who likes turtles?

[Glenn Fleishman]

I don't know, maybe not. Awesome face paint job.

[Andy Inatko]

What do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

I like turtles.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I had a tortoise when I was growing up. We were great friends. But then eventually, one year it hibernated and it never came back.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason Snow, Pick of the Week.

[Jason Snell]

Well, let me tell you what I saw walking down the street yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

I like turtles.

[Jason Snell]

Glenn mentioned it earlier. It got a lot of love on a recent member episode of Accidental Tech Podcast. And I thought this would be a good time to mention it because it hasn't been recommended since Andy recommended it like hundreds of shows ago. It's default folder X from Sinclair Software.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this still around?

[Jason Snell]

This is one of the new beta that supports Golden Gate, just came out. This is an app I've been using since the 90s on classic Mac OS. Yes. And what it does is when you got an open or a save dialogue on your Mac and you want to have it open to a default folder that is different from what the system wants, you can set that, you can set it globally, you can set it per app. So like my writing apps open in the folder in Dropbox that I keep all my stories in every single time. It's got a bunch of other great features it can bring up, like Chrome around the Open and Save dialog box to let you navigate to the right place or find the right thing. I think the killer feature is if you've got a whole bunch of windows open and then you choose Save and it says, well, where do you want me to save this? And you know you've got that folder open on the desktop in Finder, but it's completely covered and it's going to take you many steps to go out to the finder and get that and then drag it back in and whatever. It's got this feature where you just move your pointer, you hover it over where that folder is, you know where it is even though it's not visible and like a little dotted line goes around it and says, oh, this one. And then you click and it moves to that. That folder in the. In the safe or open dialog. It's just a classic Mac utility that makes it a lot easier when you're opening and saving files.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's 10,000 times a day is option up arrow, option down arrow, which is move between recent folders. Because it doesn't always. I'm saving in a lot of places. Sometimes you just go. Instead of like navigating, you go up, up, up. And it's. Oh, there it is.

[Jason Snell]

It's got a recent pop up too. If you want to look and be like, where do I put this? Oh yeah, right here. It's just really good. And there's a reason it's. It's been around for 30 years. So glad he's still developing it and still. Yeah, so. And I thought that what better time. What better endorsement for a very old tool than the fact that it just got its beta update that anybody can download for Goldengate. So it's actively being developed by John, the developer who's been developing it since I saw this on usenet in the 90s when I was in college.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It was a replacement for Desktop for me. I felt it was true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a name I haven't heard.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I miss discovery so much. And default folder is the best thing since Discop. There's my app.

[Leo Laporte]

$40. It's keeping his kids in college.

[Glenn Fleishman]

He doesn't. What does he charge for updates? I can't even remember if you pay updates.

[Jason Snell]

I'm not even sure you do whatever he wants.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Whatever amount of money he wants.

[Leo Laporte]

I should amortize that over 30 years. It's a buck 50 a year. It's worth it, Every bit of it. Default folder X from St. Clair Software. S T C L A I R Software. Thank you. What a. What a memory. He also does App Tamer, which I don't.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I just. I love these apps that have been around. Like it's like James Thompson's PCalc. It's like literally these apps have existed since the 90s and they still exist.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Is that a quote for me on the front the Mac world Quote?

[Leo Laporte]

It is me. TikTok on my utilities list.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I think that is me. I'm not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Five mice.

[Jason Snell]

Who among us has not given five mice to default folder in their career? I think I have.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Right? Yeah, I know.

[Jason Snell]

Very nice.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Shouldn't brag.

[Jason Snell]

Very nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Five mice. And now Andy Inotko for his pick of the week.

[Andy Inatko]

I deal with a lot of PDFs and I do read a lot of free ebooks and I finally found an app that I like, a cross platform E reader app that is open source but not too open sourcey if you know what I mean. It's called Readest R E A D E S t. Go to redest.com and it is available for pretty much any platform you can possibly think of. There are iOS versions, Mac versions, Windows versions, there's an Android version, there are versions for Linux. And again that the scary thing when you say oh, it's open source and it's available for every platform, you know that that sounds like okay, so it basically performs like a HyperCard stack that was designed for a 4K screen. Like buttons and pop ups, everything. No, it's a very, very clean, very very nicely done app. It supports I got it in front of me epubs, PDFs, most Adobe Kindle, FTP2, comic book, CBZ files, text files. I just wish it supported HTML because when I need to capture something from an article that I need to make sure I have a local copy of it. That's I have, I have lots and lots and lots of HTML files but it's very robust. It will do things like you can select stuff and oh, look that up in the, in Wiktionary. Look it up in Wikipedia. Wikipedia. It does text to speech. You can do side by side reads of similar documents. You can customize the appearance so that it looks exactly like the way you want it to. Which is another problem that I have with a lot of reader apps where it's like this app has every feature I want but the layout and the page design looks like. But. And I can't deal with that. And that's the only reason why I can't, I can't deal with this. So I think it's cool kind of. It hasn't been around for a long time but it's gaining momentum and it's on GitHub. But if you go to Redesk.com and, and give it a, give it a trial again for people like, people like me who again I've, I've got every, I'm invested my. All my platforms are Apple except for my phone. So it's nice to have like be able to start reading something like on the, on the bus on my phone, then come back to my, to my MacBook and have the exact same PDF in the exact same place synced up and with all my notes that I've attached to it. This also by the way supports notes It's a very, very full featured reader, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Good stuff.

[Andy Inatko]

And again, it's free.

[Leo Laporte]

Pair it with a caliber and you're an old Kindle and you've got something

[Andy Inatko]

here and actually integrates with calibre, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm sure it does.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Calibre, like, call it what you want.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's just caliber.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there really a canon? Well, maybe for you Jeopardy. Champions there, I think.

[Jason Snell]

I think. I think we. We dealt. We talked, we thought it was calibre for a long time, and then I think somebody revealed that it actually is just Caliber.

[Glenn Fleishman]

We had a fight in my house during Jeopardy. Last night over Babel versus Babel. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

And what is the conclusive.

[Glenn Fleishman]

They're both okay. Babel is preferred in the uk, but Babel's fine. That's what I learned.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I learned show that I had misinterpreted the Tower of Babel. The Fable of Babel. Or is it the Fable of Babel?

[Jason Snell]

So, yeah, if you listen, it's Babel. If you watch Star Trek, it's Babel. If you did Hitchhiker's Guide to the

[Glenn Fleishman]

Galaxy, the Tower of Babel wasn't built infinitely high. It had languages written on the top or something. Isn't that it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And it was an attempt to unify the languages of the Earth. And God said, no, you gotta all talk different tongues.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I've got this. I've got a thing. This is a misprint, apparently, or it's a. It's from the Folks along now foundation. You can see that it's many languages. Yeah, it's got micro. Super micro printing on it. And this was a struck one. The person who created it gave me not one of the ones they were selling because there was some minor error. Anyway, you can look at it under a microscope with like one kind of lens. So they think in the future you'll be able to review. They have larger versions that have the Universal Declaration of Human rights in like, 75 languages.

[Leo Laporte]

What's on there now?

[Glenn Fleishman]

What's on what? The one.

[Leo Laporte]

What would I read if I had a super microscope?

[Glenn Fleishman]

No, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think, is the text. And then it's in a bunch of languages. There's other information on it. So there's like a disk that they.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought it'd be better if it was like the Library of Congress.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Well, that is. You can't do that with nickel printing. Apparently, ironically, the person who invented it, she's allergic to nickel, so she can't handle it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no. Oh, no.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But it's a great thing for the future, possible future descendants of us who have forgotten things. Well, Mr. We won't see.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Fleischman, I thank you so much for spending some time with us. We really appreciate it.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you want to plug? You've got the Take Control books.

[Glenn Fleishman]

I would love to talk about a thing that I've been putting things out into the universe with the help of certain, as Jason calls them, albino alligators. Claude Code. There's a story behind that. Jason could tell, but the Maybe already has anyway. But I've been doing projects that are outside of the. Of my ability by myself and I've been doing code assisted things. So one of them is fruitspec.com, which is a site you can go and search on hardware stuff about Apple and OSes and other kinds of things, and you can say, like, all right, which one of the items I added? These are like off like people writing books kind of things, but other people have been using it too. It's like, which version is the last version of this phone that will let me. If you do which in the upper right corner there, which OS I think it is, and you can say, you know, you can say, like, what versions will this run? Like, what hardware will run Goldengate and whatever. You check a couple boxes.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this is handy.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. And then it gives you the thing that I did for myself, gives you markdown and RTF output you can download. So if you just want a list you can use and a bow somewhere else.

[Leo Laporte]

This is very handy.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Yeah. So you do that and then if you scroll down, it'll show you all versions. Yeah. And it's complicated and I could copy

[Leo Laporte]

as Markdown or copy this rtx. That's nice.

[Glenn Fleishman]

But you can just do. I'm doing this all the time while I'm writing books and I thought, I've made this tool for myself. I'm just going to make sure everyone has access to it. The other one is Mr. Plimsoul, which has been a fun little project I

[Leo Laporte]

have installed on my computer.

[Jason Snell]

I think that was a pick of

[Glenn Fleishman]

the week by me, but yeah, that's been fun. I don't know how many people are using it, but. But I needed it and I made a Mac app and now people can have it for free, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have Mr. Plimsoul. I have my Plimsoll line installed.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Even the genesis of the name is so awesome. Now, unfortunately, I have too many items on my menu bar. And I can't remember which is which. Which one is Mr. Plimsoll? I don't know.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It's the one. It looks like a London.

[Leo Laporte]

There it is. Yeah, I got it. Okay, now. Forgot what it does, though.

[Glenn Fleishman]

It does. It's a. It tells you your volumes are getting too full. Apparently nobody else had. I mean, I didn't need to write it. I just couldn't find the utility as writing a six colors column.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I am. Look at this. I'm 76% Mr. Plimsoll. Thank you.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So if somebody wrote in and said, how do I tell if my volume is getting full? And I said, should be a tool.

[Leo Laporte]

And there wasn't.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So like, well, we all write something. And that's my first.

[Jason Snell]

I actually got a text from Mr. Plimsoll the other day and I texted Glenn. I was like, it's exciting. It happened. And it was installing a software update, and I think it crossed the 90% full threshold. And then it rebooted down to 80% again. And I was like, okay, it's fine.

[Glenn Fleishman]

That's great. But it's. Otherwise, you don't know. And you get. I had one. I got a warning from IT a few weeks ago. It was like one of my Mac went insane. I think it was time machine snapshots. And there's a point, you know, there's like the event horizon for a Mac sometimes where it's so full you can never delete anything from it. This happened to one of my kids. So I'm like, it hit 95%. I'm like, I'm running downstairs to the computer like, duh, quick delete files, reboot. And then it was fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is so cool. You can have notifications, email imessage. You can even phone. Will it call you?

[Glenn Fleishman]

No, it'll do web hooks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Glenn Fleishman]

So you can enter or Pushover things. It'll do push. What's the one that you like, Jason? It's called Push. Pushover. Yeah, Pushover. Which I didn't know about. And then Claude's like, hey, do you want to add Pushover Webhook support? I'm like, yes, I do. And tested it through. And so Pushover is nice. Nice little utility. Also great new functionality.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's another one called NTFY that is cross platform. I think it's worth looking at. I use that for some things as well. Mr. Glenn. Thank you. And everybody should check out Glenn's many things at G L E N N F U N. Because he's fun sometimes. Thank you. Sir, Andy Anako is now on the web. Fully human written, no AI involved at I.

[Jason Snell]

It's all AI. It's all AI on Andy and Jason.

[Andy Inatko]

You. You don't know how much I went back and forth about making that joke. But then I thought there's. Ironically, there's going to be some AI scraper that identifies that and then downgrades the site.

[Leo Laporte]

AI stands for in this case, Andy Ando. And there's the site I H N A T K O Com. Going quite well, it looks like.

[Jason Snell]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy for you. And then of course, Jason Snell, who is very [e-mail]. All his [e-mail] Jason, including Upgrade, he does with Mike Hurley. And anything particular you want to mention. I know Glenn is a regular on Six Colors.

[Jason Snell]

We should. Yeah, Glenn. Glenn is writing there. And of course, Glenn helped us. We funded last week. So Design in California is a new podcast coming this fall with me and Mike Hurley. We funded it. The money. The money sound there. The. The we. Our final number was 303030, which I think is amazing. $303,000.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Two weeks to drop it in your account two weeks after it's over. And I was like, jason, when do you hear the sound of like.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think I got a week left before the kaching happens. The bills are already coming in, but the kaching will happen. So, yeah, so that'll be a new project about the history of Apple, stories from all over the 50 years of Apple that we're going to be doing this fall.

[Andy Inatko]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. And you're probably deep in the writing stage of that one, I would guess.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Cranking up. Well, the beauty of Kickstarter is, you know, we did enough to provide samples, but we didn't, like, we didn't jump into the project because we need to make sure that it would exist. But yes, now I'm cranking up the writing machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Lots of say, I'm so happy. People were so excited about it because we knew that you'd do well with it because you've got a dedicated audience. But, you know, it's that just, you know, it's happened overnight after 11 years of building success.

[Jason Snell]

Overnight success from Mike and from me. But we got there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you see Jason in the library, you know, he's doing some research for his exciting new podcast. Andy is in the library, but he's the only one there, so that's where he goes.

[Jason Snell]

If you see him there, that's because he's there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very quiet in the library.

[Andy Inatko]

It's quiet. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's quiet.

[Andy Inatko]

It's private. There are no it's summer. Which means that hey, wow. I spent my entire winter and spring making my motorcycle even louder. Now it's time to rip forward and backward. Outside of Andy's office window.

[Glenn Fleishman]

Art Buckwall column years ago where he was visiting Italy and he was talking about the Italian sport called Far rumore, which just translates as to make noise. And it was how they had all these people designated at different places around Italy to keep him awake. It was amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Glenn. Thank you Andy. Thank you Jason. Thanks for our club members for making this possible. We do Mac Break weekly on Tuesdays 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I mentioned all the places you can watch it in the club. YouTube, TikTok. No keep saying TikTok. No. YouTube, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik and Twitch TV after the fact on demand versions of the show on the website, Twitter, tv, mbw and of course you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player and you'll get it automatically as soon you as it's available. Sad to say though, our time has come to an end. Which means it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work cuz break time is over. See you next time.

[Jason Snell]

Bye bye.