MacBreak Weekly 1037: Mechanical Donut

Summary

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MacBreak Weekly 1037: "Mechanical Donut"

Date: August 12, 2026
Host: Leo Laporte
Panel: Christina Warren, Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko
Main Theme: Apple’s seismic battles: legal fights, RAM bottlenecks, control of platforms, and the future of personal tech.

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Overview

This episode dives into several pivotal issues in Apple’s universe: its escalating legal fight with OpenAI, supply chain headaches from RAM shortages, the fragility exposed by Telegram’s brief removal from the App Store, and broader debates about the future of device openness, AI, and Apple’s wearable ambitions. The tone is characteristically witty, skeptical, and occasionally nostalgic, as the hosts try to make sense of where Apple—and the tech universe—are heading.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Apple vs. OpenAI: The Legal Showdown

• Background: Apple seeks a court injunction against OpenAI, alleging intentional exfiltration of trade secrets via employee hires and dubious document sharing.
• OpenAI’s Counter: OpenAI filed a sharply worded blog post (more PR than legal content) as well as a detailed legal response questioning whether real "trade secrets" were stolen, essentially challenging Apple to prove actual damages.
  • Jason Snell (05:15): “The legal case they’re making is very interesting…show us the trade secret that was violated here.”
• Technical Issues: Both companies argue over Apple’s iCloud practices, and whether Apple’s own, arguably brittle, account system made data commingling inevitable or excusable.
• Public vs. Legal Theater: Both sides use media (blog posts, leaks to journalists) to shape the narrative.
  • Andy Ihnatko (18:48): “So they were playing the PR game from the very start...very, very careful usage of the media here.”
• Trade Secret Definition: The question becomes not just if something was taken, but whether it legally qualifies as a protected secret.
• Implications: Sets up a broader industry debate about employee mobility, data control, and company overreach.

[04:00–18:50] Main segment on Apple vs. OpenAI and legal strategies

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2. Mechanical Donut: OpenAI’s Leaked Smart Speaker

• Rumored Device: Leak of a donut-shaped OpenAI smart speaker—hardware by LoveFrom, possibly a $300+ agentic “companion” with moving parts for physical feedback.
  • Leo Laporte (21:29): “It actually has a cool…streaming speech capability conversation.”
  • Christina Warren (26:11): “But it’s more about if this is what they’re actually doing…getting kind of cloud-based agents so to speak in people’s homes.”
• Ambient AI Competition: Raises stakes in the next-gen “agentic” device space, directly challenging Apple’s ambitions for Siri and local/on-device AI. Apple’s control of personal data could be threatened if users fall in love with cloud-based agents.
  • Andy Ihnatko (31:25): “If you have an AI that is…just the ghostly spirit that can live anywhere…It has the power to make the iPhone irrelevant as a specific brand choice.”

[20:34–33:21] Discussion of OpenAI's hardware ambitions and strategic ramifications

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3. Telegram/Apple App Store Takedown Drama

• Incident: Telegram briefly removed from the App Store over a report of CSAM (child exploitation imagery) posted by an extortionist to trigger Apple’s nuclear response.
  • Andy Ihnatko (39:36): “CCSAM is the nuclear bomb that you have to negate immediately. [Apple’s] gotta shut this stuff down.”
  • Christina Warren (41:59): “But would Apple have removed X [Twitter] or YouTube for the same thing? I don’t know if they would have.”
• Broader Issues: Single point of failure for communication apps and the immense (and perhaps arbitrary) power Apple and Google have as app store gatekeepers. This is a recurring theme, intensifying discomfort with closed platforms.
  • Leo Laporte (46:35): “But they could [remove Telegram entirely]. They have that control and it shows you it’s a single point of failure and that’s a big problem.”

[38:15–51:30] Telegram takedown and critique of App Store power

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4. The Right to Repair, Sideloading, and Utopian Tech Regulation

• Calls for Openness: The hosts discuss what laws or regulations might genuinely empower users—unlockable bootloaders, mandatory sideloading, and right-to-repair rules.
  • Jason Snell (58:02): “A bunch of influential regions make it illegal for companies that make computing devices to prevent sideloading. Done, solved.”
  • Andy Ihnatko (60:02): “If all they did was say…you must have an unlockable bootloader on every device you ship…”
• Comparison to Disney: Apple compared to Disney’s philosophy of perfectly engineered, “no bad time” user experiences—leading to paternalism and a loss of autonomy for power users.
• Market Forces: Recognition that only regulation can resist the tendency of tech monopolies to tighten control.

[57:59–67:41] In-depth discussion of regulation and tech product openness

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5. RAM Crisis and Its Impact on Apple and the Industry

• Global RAM Shortages: Apple’s attempts to secure RAM from Chinese supplier CXMT fail as the supplier refuses discounts and is sold out until 2030.
  • Andy Ihnatko (79:34): “Even if they could do a deal…all their RAM is already allocated and it won’t solve their immediate problems at all.”
• Consequences: Phones and computers may ship with less RAM, prices spike, and some products become worse over time (lower specs at the same or higher price points). Secondary effects hit old machines (warranty replacements, repair).
• Consumer Advice: Buy now rather than wait for new devices, since specs may not improve and prices are going up.
  • Christina Warren (89:34): “Should I buy an iPhone now when they’re the normal price instead of next time? Well, maybe they won’t be the normal price for a lot longer.”

[79:34–94:17 and 89:34–92:30] Segments on the RAM shortage

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6. Smart Wearables: Rethinking the Apple Watch

• Rumors of Change: Mark Gurman reports Apple is exploring new wearable form factors (bands, rings, screenless trackers) to supplement, not replace, the Apple Watch.
  • Jason Snell (100:29): “I have friends who love those health bands…why wouldn’t you make other products?”
  • Andy Ihnatko (102:03): “I respect the Apple Watch but I just don’t have room for it in my lifestyle. I want this—a very simple, light [band].”
• Saturation & Opportunity: The Apple Watch market is mature; Apple risks missing out to simpler, more targeted wearable competitors.

[100:01–108:55] Apple Watch and expanding the wearables strategy

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7. Vision Pro: VR/AR's Next Sports Move

• Baseball Experiment: Apple announces immersive baseball broadcasts for Vision Pro, expanding from basketball to “stadium-sized” immersive experiences.
  • Jason Snell (117:27): “What is an immersive baseball game? Are you sitting behind home plate? Do you switch? … I love to see stuff like this.”
• Significance: Live sports and theater may be killer apps for headsets, but success and execution remain uncertain.

[115:19–125:07] Vision Pro and immersive baseball

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “I think there is a tendency…to use what happened as a lever to make people scared about the bigger issue now. The bigger issue—look, it’s true. If you want to have an iPhone, Apple determines what software you get to run on it.” — Jason Snell [47:00]
• “[The RAM crisis] will be…an active downgrade because they just don’t have enough RAM to fill all of these things.” — Andy Ihnatko [85:51]
• “It is problematic that [Apple] so control this device that I spent lots and lots of money on that they can take an app away.” — Leo Laporte [46:34]
• “Say that your computer should run whatever software you want is probably a good rule. That’s all.” — Jason Snell [66:20]
• “We’ll be able to lease that $3,000 iPhone…We will own nothing and we will like it.” — Christina Warren [89:07]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Apple vs. OpenAI lawsuit & trade secrets: 04:00–18:50
• OpenAI donut smart speaker leak: 20:34–33:21
• Telegram’s App Store takedown & platform control: 38:15–51:30
• Debate over sideloading, regulation, and device freedom: 57:59–67:41
• RAM crisis & shortages: 79:34–94:17
• Debate on when to buy your next iPhone (pricing/specs/AI): 89:34–92:30
• Apple wearables innovation beyond Watch: 100:01–108:55
• Vision Pro immersive baseball: 115:19–125:07

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Picks of the Week

• Jason Snell: Letterbox (letterbox.app) — A Mac app that acts as a dedicated newsletter reader, making it easier to scan and organize the flood of Substack, Buttondown, and other newsletters outside your inbox. [134:05]
• Andy Ihnatko: Sony Walkman NWA-306 — A dedicated Android-powered, high-fidelity music player with upgradable storage, classic tactile controls, and all modern features but separated from phone distractions. [138:27]
• Christina Warren:
  • AI Skill: “I Have ADHD” — An instruction set for coding agents that keeps output focused, concise, and actionable (based on the Adult ADHD Toolkit). [147:24]
  • Maxell Bluetooth Cassette Player — Plays actual cassette tapes wirelessly through Bluetooth headphones, marrying nostalgia with modern convenience. [149:26]
• Leo Laporte: Mac Classic Clock (CocoGall) — A charming ESP32-powered Mac “Classic” clock with working floppy disk slot; fun ESP32 hardware for the desk. [152:17]
• Collective Geekery: ESP32 e-ink readers, DGX Spark hardware, and open-source hardware nostalgia.

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Conclusion

The hosts blend banter and deep technical insight as they survey Apple’s legal skirmishes, the fragility of ecosystems, and looming hardware constraints. Throughout, they champion user rights, platform latitude, and the creative hacker spirit—urging both Apple and the larger tech world to embrace more openness, more competition, and above all, more user choice. The encroaching realities of hardware shortages and monopolistic control prompt both frustration and a call to arms for smarter, more human-centric tech policies.

Final sign-off from Leo Laporte [159:20]:
“We ride at the gates of dawn, and we take no prisoners. We're very famous for that. And that's what the titans of industry fear most. … Now go back to work—break time is over.”

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Transcript

[A]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Christina and Jason are here. We're going to talk about the fight between Apple and OpenAI. It continues and it's getting brutal. Why? Pav Al Durov is upset about Telegram's takedown and what it really means. Plus, the Chinese RAM company Apple was counting on says. Yeah, no. All of that and more coming up on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[B]

This is TWiT.

[A]

This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 1037, recorded Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Mechanical donut. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show that covers the latest Apple news with Christina Warren from GitHub. Hello, Christina. Where she's in developer relations.

[C]

Hello, hello.

[A]

And a frontier AI pioneer, Ms. Co Pilot 2026.

[D]

Leo's coffee there. Leo's drinking his coffee. He's caffeinated. Watch out.

[A]

Also, that would be Jason Snell, who's narrating golf style.

[D]

Yeah, that's right. We're at the 13th hole now. Brought his coffee up with him.

[A]

Sipping his coffee.

[D]

Yes. Hello, Jason.

[A]

Six colors. You've been busy. A busy, busy guy.

[D]

Busy times, lots of busy. To busy Summer as it so often is. It's true, it's true. I filed the GitHub issue just moments ago. So. Christine, I'm flying the flag. The GitHub flag.

[A]

Love the GitHub.

[D]

I found a bug. I had to file an issue. It happens.

[A]

Love the git.

[C]

Amazing.

[A]

I want to tell you, my agents are always saying, hey, you want to file a bug report? And I always say, no, no, no, no. They probably know also here. There's something about you, Andrew, that is odd. And I'm just. I'm trying to figure it out. Andrew Natko. He's never looked so good.

[B]

I did change to a different brand of body wash. It used to be herbal organics. Now it's sort of like a cherry wood and like fresh sea.

[A]

I can smell it over here. Where are you, Mr. Inaka? Where are you?

[B]

I am just not. Is it a vacation when you just decide I'm going to take a week and just like visit friends in various places. So I am in Maryland, not far away from a government science facility.

[A]

Okay. I'm not sure what I'm to take from that.

[D]

Where they keep the alien bodies.

[B]

I will say that it's lovely to be podcast to be broadcasting from a sofa for the first time.

[A]

I know. You look comfortable. Have you. Is there. There's something else that you shaved or something? Did you have another style of facial hair? At another point, some point, not since

[B]

1992, when I see the baseball test.

[A]

I did okay.

[B]

I did well. I did like, just about before I left on this trip. I did get a haircut and I did, like, trim, give myself the full.

[A]

They're not so bushy as they were. Maybe that's it exactly.

[B]

But once every few weeks, I try to get it from at the narrow end, There's John Lennon, 1965. I want them to be fuller than that without being as full as, like the go. The full Asimov. So somewhere in the middle is usual target.

[A]

And as usual, I'm exactly the same as I ever was. Let us talk about same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Let me start. Let's start with OpenAI, because this is going to be, I think, an ongoing scenario here. Apple has asked for an injunction, a court injunction to prevent more harm. I don't think. Last I checked, the judge hadn't ruled on that. I don't know if the judge is going to give Apple an injunction. I don't even know what the injunction would be like. Knock it off, OpenAI. OpenAI also went to the judge and say, your Honor, dismiss this lawsuit. It was filed without adequate investigation. In fact, I really enjoyed the little brief that OpenAI wrote, which was, you know, depending on your point of view, this was whiny, or it stuck it to the fruit company. Apple's getting this wrong. Apple wrote, OpenAI is one of the greatest companies of all time and built a reputation for obsessing over the smallest details. This careless, aggressive, and oddly personal lawsuit, sadly does not live up to that reputation. And they go over some of the points we've already gone over, like that Apple's outside attorneys emailed the wrong person after, quote, confusing two Asian last names. And only after we brought this to their attention, Apple claimed they had a discussion with our general counsel, which they now admit never happened. Is that true or is that. But this is. The problem is. I don't know. You know, these are. This is an adversarial.

[D]

I don't know. We talked about this a little last week, and it feels to me very much like somebody at OpenAI was really mad and was like, we gotta write a blog post. And I don't think it's a very good blog post, and I don't think it serves them very well. And the irony is that then they filed a legal filing from their law firm, Quinn Emanuel, that is much more forceful and detailed and shows that they actually do have deep disputes about some of what Apple did. But the blog post, the blog post is like, I don't know, it's, it's kind of like pr. It's kind of like just trying to cloud the waters and make people not.

[A]

It's not a legal filing as you point out. No, it is, it is more for us, is for them.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, I think the Verge called it, you know, the court of public opinion is what the blog post is for. I thought it was funny because the court, the actual court filing is much better. It's much, much better, much clearer about where Apple. And again I, I mean the court filing also contains a lot of things. They're like that, that I could lift an eyebrow about. Like the idea that the reason that they took the Apple offboarding document and used it with the people they were recruiting was just to remind them of what they should not, you know, should do and not do. It was just a helpful thing to have a little far fetched really. And it's like the, the, you know, the, all the questions about what I do with my stolen Apple documents are answered by the stolen Apple documents on my T shirt kind of thing going on there. But it's stronger case that they make that essentially if I am not a lawyer. Okay, but I'll say it this way. I think that the legal case that they're making is very interesting because what they're basically saying is what is a trade secret? I don't see any. Which is funny because what I don't think it does is deny anything about that there may be a whole plan inside OpenAI to get people out of Apple with everything they know and with documents. Which is the difference between, you know, like people, people taking documents out of their employer is not the same as people taking their knowledge out of their employer. And I'm a big fan of the idea that if you're a worker and you want to go somewhere else, you should be able to. But that sort of what Apple is alleging is, it's more than that. It's actually this kind of conspiracy to get all sorts of documents, technical documents outside. And what OpenAI's lawyers response is, which I think is actually really smart is show us the trade secret that was violated here, show it to us. Which is not saying that they didn't have this whole strategy, it's just saying where, where is the illegality here? And it's a, I don't think it's necessarily going to win a lot of hearts if they say look, the stuff we stole we were allowed to steal, but legally, if that's the case, there's no case here.

[A]

They also said we did it to help the Apple employees.

[D]

We did.

[A]

Contacted Tang Tan saying, hey, I need some stuff. Tank Tan happened to have access. Apple said it is not an icloud failing. Just.

[D]

Yeah, there is an also argument. It's not, it's not so much with Tank Tan, it's with that other guy who left.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[D]

But, but, but, yeah, that one of the arguments is like, look, Apple's cloud document practices were bad. And, and like, I think we're all going to agree that that's true.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

But it is a weird argument. Again, a weird argument to make that that is. Look, they left that stuff out and so we took it.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

If Finders keepers. And like, finders keepers may not be a legal argument.

[A]

Doesn't work that way. Sorry.

[D]

I don't know. And I want to try. Like, I see a lot of people are very polarized on this. Just like, oh, Apple so right here. Or open AI so right. And I'm like, I don't know. I kind of feel like maybe where this is going is that Apple's got some real kind of like moral points here, but does it have legal points? And I think that was the big thing I got out of the filing from the legal filing was again, I think it comes down to show us the trade secrets being violated here. And I think Apple's response will probably be, that's why we need discovery, because we, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg here and what, what have you stolen from us underneath the surface? And that's what they're going to fight about Apple, actually.

[A]

Well, the information says, and I don't know if this is confirmed, although the information's usually pretty good, that when employees join Apple, they do get their own company icloud account, but they're encouraged to connect it to their personal account. And that when you leave the company, well, of course your personal account continues and there may in fact be confidential documents on the personal devices.

[D]

Yeah. It mounts an extra folder in iCloud that is your apple stuff. And if you copy stuff elsewhere, it doesn't disappear. When your Apple stuff disappears, that seems to be the deal. Which is true, by the way. Which is true of anything. If you copy something off of a cloud service to somewhere by your employer. Like, I mean, I'm not, I've been gone a long time, but I'll just say that. Did all my email from IDG get deleted? When I left idg, it didn't, you know, because I copied it to another computer in it. And when I turned off my email accounts, those emails are still there. Right. Like that kind of, that kind of stuff happens all the time. It's just that Apple seems to have done this in a weird way.

[C]

Well, yeah, exactly. I was going to say that the problem is, is I think, and frankly, this doesn't mean that anybody should be allowed to take things they shouldn't take without permission or anything like that. But Apple's ID system and the fact that, you know, you can only be, except for very specific circumstances, logged in to really one icloud account at a time because of the primitive nature of how Apple accounts exist, because they're, they're brittle, as all of us who've used them know do that. The fact that you can't easily switch between accounts, I think that makes it more likely for people to have overlap than you might have at other institutions that had, you know, multiple accounts through, through Google, for instance. Right. Microsoft accounts are also a little bit complicated, but they do make it easier, at least like default not on a phone device but on, on a, you know, computer to be able to switch between the two universes relatively easily. And you can see different drives appearing, you know, in your sidebar or whatever the case may be. You'll see OneDrive personal OneDrive business. And with Google, you know, they, there are ways, obviously you can copy things from one drive to another or move things from one account to another, even from an internal Google employee drive. But they, it's not one of those things where they're telling you an onboarding. We need you to log in on your work devices with your personal accounts because that's the only way you can access certain things. And this is going to now become a more difficult, you know, data residency practice, because if I accidentally saved it to the wrong thing or clicked the wrong link from the wrong place, stuff can get intermingled. I don't think that's a legal defense, to be honest with you for at least in terms of OpenAI, I don't think the fact that it's a pain, you know, to be able to switch between things is a legal defense. But I do think that if it comes down to if the argument is was this intentional or was this not, which it might come down to, I think that there will be at least something to be said for. Okay, well, you've made it very difficult for me to keep my, my two worlds separate. And as part of your own official processes. You literally tell me to essentially link these two accounts together.

[D]

Yeah. What's weird about it is that, I mean, Apple's allegations are that there's a plan here, right? That it's not like, whoops, I ended up with documents. It's like telling people to copy documents. And like, to me, that's, that's what it ends up coming down to. OpenAI's story here is basically like, no, we were just, we don't want it. We don't have a plan. Some stuff got commingled. It was never in any direction. In fact, we were passing information back to Apple, which is one of the stories that I think is really interesting, which is like, people, people's manager left to go to OpenAI and they're like, and we've all dealt with this, right? Where somebody leaves your company and you're like, oh, what is the answer to this question? And you try to contact the person who's left your company. And some of those people are like, I don't care. Goodbye. And other people are like, I will help you. And OpenAI is like, we did some of that. Like, they're helping out their friends back at Apple. It's not a big deal. And Apple's allegations are, no, you had a whole system to exfiltrate documents. And like, that's what it's going to come down to. Not, it's. So it's a little bit silly to have it be like, oh, was there a secret Apple document that happened to be on that person's hard drive at home? It's like, well, if it happened to be there, it's what are we even doing here? But if it was copied as a part of a plan, then it's different. But how do you prove that?

[C]

How do you prove that? And I would also, but I would just also ask that quaes like, I understand directly suing the individuals that you think are involved in that, but I think it takes a much bigger leap to then say, oh, the company itself, OpenAI was responsible for this. That. And obviously Apple's point is that's what we need the discovery for. But I also understand OpenAI pushing back and going, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to let you have access to all of our files and everything else in wild goose chase just because you have some evidence that some of our employees might have handled data in an unideal way. Because to me, like, one plus one does not necessarily equal to there. Like, you have to actually, to me, like, very much Prove like that there was a conspiracy and that this was a, you know, directed like open AI practice where employees are being told at an employee level, this is what you need to do so that we can gain access to these documents versus, you know, the way. Because the text that they release could be read a number of ways. One, it could be people are sharing things they shouldn't be sharing. Or it could be to your point, because I've certainly had this happen where, where I've created a document, I've left a company, somebody doesn't know where something is or they say, hey, this was on your personal drive. Can you share this with me? Because I need to use this. And I'm like, yes, of course. Some people might say, no, I'm not going to do that. But in my mind I'm like, no. If I had this on my personal drive in almost all cases wasn't because I was trying to hoard from my personal case. It was never because I was trying to hoard anything that I didn't have access to. It was usually a permissions issue where I had to have it on my personal drive because that was the only way that I could present something. And so I'm like, yes, I will delegate and even change ownership to you directly. It's not clear to me what the circumstance is here, but it feels like it's a bit of a stretch to just immediately go to some documents existed and we have some text messages from employees that talk about these documents to there was a high level conspiracy in the company to direct people towards, you know, not only saving data when they left in a way that would not be, you know, understood or infiltrated, but then to continue to pass information back and forth after they've left the company.

[A]

By the way, I apologize to everybody for relitigating this, if you will, but we're getting more information. Actually, Jon Gruber, while we were doing the show last week, kind of published some interesting stuff which sounds like he has somebody inside Apple talking to him. For instance, he says that whole thing about emailing the wrong person. Gabriel Gross, the outside attorney, sent one email to the wrong address, quickly emailed an apology. And it was a short email. It wasn't the full, you know, cease and desist that was sent to the appropriate person, OpenAI's general counsel, Chae Chang. And Chang never did respond to Apple's lawyers. Now this is Gruber talking. I don't know where he's getting this information from. Somebody at Apple, probably somebody at Apple. He also says it wasn't Apple kind of implies this. It wasn't icloud drive. It was a third party drive. He says it was box.

[D]

Box. Apple does use box. That is a standard.

[A]

That was interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like John has inside information, which he's not, of course, revealing, but there's a lot of information in this post John put up from last week. So I apologize for bringing it back up. But you know what, we're going to be talking about this for months.

[D]

And the story advanced because they did, because they did their legal filing and that pushes this whole thing further.

[C]

Yeah, the legal filing, I agree with Jason, I think is much more interesting than the blog post, which I think is, you know, partially PR exercise. But honestly, that's what Apple did too. Right. Like, I mean, I would argue that Apple's entire original legal filing was a PR move. And, and then we'll go beyond that. I will say, and I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how to read this. I don't think it's really damning one way or another. In terms of the emailing the wrong person, it certainly looks bad. But if I received incorrect communications as a lawyer and you had to address the wrong person and other things and then I told you I don't know what this is, and they said, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that for you. I, I think that it's reasonable for someone to say, I'm not going to respond to any of your communications now. You need to actually resend me almost a new email and start over from scratch. Because I don't know at this point, I don't know whatever was intended from the beginning. So I could see that in either direction. But I think that getting caught up on those details of, oh, the wrong person was emailed or we didn't respond to the email, I think kind of not this is the point because I can see both perspectives there.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, the entire blog post, like, it's hard to take it seriously because it was just so poor, so poorly thought out. As Jason said, it really does smack of somebody high up saying that we have to hit back. I want something on the blog quickly. And for all the details they put into it, it was a lot like a friend takes your car and wrecks it. And then when you say, look, you've wrecked my car, what are you going to do about it? And he says, I didn't wreck it. I was able to drive it from the scene of the crash. So it's not wrecked like you are missing the point. You're arguing semantics. You're not arguing the actual point of discussion here. So yeah, that's why the legal filings are really the meat of the issue. Apple's filings however, were in the past five years. I think all of us have gotten five or 10 years with all the meaningful lawsuits that have been slung back and forth between different companies. We've all gotten into the habit of reading like the downloading and reading these PDFs. They are rarely as literary as what Apple filed about here is. Let me set the scene of what actually they've been doing and let me see, here's. Here's how they, here's how they would prepare new interviewers for their meeting to bring hardware, bring this, bring that, bring that other. No legalese. They really are. It seemed as though this was a document that, that was meant to be read and then basically turned into news items about malfeasance as opposed to we were seeking legal recourse to get a company to knock some stuff off. So they were playing the PR game from the very start. Not to say that they shouldn't have, but I'm saying that there is a lot of very, very careful usage of the media here.

[A]

And all of this over a donut shaped smart speaker because

[D]

I don't.

[A]

You know, this is a rumor that this is what OpenAI's vision of the future, as Fast Company puts it, is. It's a leaked device, a piece of hardware. This is something very jony I've. It has moving parts inside it to indicate its thinking, which is hysterical. It comes from the love from Studio. A smart speaker for three to $400. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Everything's going to cost more of course, including all of Apple's stuff. But I think we've seen these smart speakers from Amazon and Apple at this size. I don't know but it's connected to ChatGPT. Is that the selling point?

[D]

Yeah, it's using their live version, future version of their lives.

[A]

They actually have a very cool. And you can do it on your iPhone now streaming speech capability conversation.

[D]

I hate it because it's trying too hard and it's inserting a lot of ums and us while. While I'm talking. And then every single time you say something to it, it does the filler sentence because it doesn't have an answer yet. And like. And I've heard people say, oh well you know, people do that. It's like they don't do it Every single time, which is what it does. But they'll make it better, they'll make it more natural. And that, yeah, that's their killer app is that they think ChatGPT is so great and conversational that you will want a device that you can, you know, park or carry around your house that lets you interact with it. And you know, is it a smart speaker? Is it just kind of like a, you know, an outgrowth of OpenAI into your house? I don't know. I think having ambient computing devices that you can talk to is not a bad idea. And if they were really smart that would really help because the current ones are not that smart. So I don't know about the. Like it's your Droid companion that makes little. With a Wiggles a little or whatever. We'll see. We'll see about that.

[A]

But like, no, I'm gonna buy one because I'm stupid. But I don't see it as appeal. I mean I'm wearing a shirt made out of corn. So you know, I'm the target audience for this.

[D]

It's.

[B]

I mean it could be interesting. Remember that like a year ago we're wondering if there was going to be some kind of a wearable even something

[A]

which along the lines of a pen, let's be honest.

[B]

But the thing is like if it'. If we're. It's easy to underestimate a product like that if we're comparing them to the same sort of Google smart speakers they used to basically give away like, like M&MS. If we talk about. If we stop talking about a smart speaker and we start talking about an agentic speaker. Meaning that again it's still just a speaker that has a reasonably good speaker in it and a good 3,360degree microphone that can basically display appear in any, any decor so it doesn't look like there's this big gadget there. But nonetheless you can just basically while you're tying your shoes say I want you to email everybody that I'm supposed to be meeting today. Make sure you send the collect the latest reports on this project and make sure everybody's up to date and then create a new Google Doc in which they can basically assemble all their. Basically if you base. If you're. If you give it the the abilities of an actual human being to not just simply say what is the weather? Turn the thermostat up to 38 degrees. If it can actually be. No, it's actually doing things that. And making decisions based on your instructions. That would be something that maybe someone would be spending 2 or $300 for. And if OpenAI does have an agencic approach that is that effective, then yeah, you could. It's one of those things where just like we sold, each one of us, I think sold a lot of smart speakers to friends and family 10 years ago when without even thinking about it, when we had a guest over, we just picked them up from the airport, got them, and got inside the house and say, hey, Sammy, turn on the lights in the office and what's the weather tomorrow? And suddenly a voice gives these answers like, wait, what did you do to that? Oh, yeah, it's a smart speaker. It's this thing that Google now has or Amazon now has. So basically agentic speakers could do the same thing.

[A]

I should give them a call because this is an ESP32, which cost me $60. It has a motion sensor, has a moisture sensor, it has a screen. It has a speaker. I can talk to it. Hey, Quicksilver. It'll respond. It actually talks to me through my Sonos speakers. It also will do things like open the window, open the window shades. It'll play music on my Sonos speakers. It's connected to my local agent too. So it knows who I am and knows more about me. And if I wanted to connect it to ChatGPT as the model, I could.

[C]

I think that that is easy to do. Those are easy to do. And I think that honestly, kind of what Andy was talking about, the way that I would look at this, if this is back to the direction they're going in, would be that it's much less about the hardware and the speaker itself, which, to your point, Leo, and even what we've already seen, is relatively rudimentary, right? It's a, it's a360 microphone. It's, it's a, it's a good sounding speaker. It's something that is, you know, 10 years ago. But, but if you power that with. Now you have a cloud based, always on agent, right? Because your system, Leo, you have a local agent that lives somewhere with you and we have people who have like their own, you know, Hermes or Open Claw setups and whatnot. I could envision a world where if open AI is saying, we are going to give you your own cloud version, maybe it doesn't have all.

[A]

Well, that's what they want. That's what they want. They want you to send all your data to them and they want to store all your memory.

[C]

Well, yeah, but I'm going one step beyond that, obviously. They want all that information. But I'm saying, to Andy's point, if they can then do the powerful computing stuff and I can then pick up and get that information from any number of devices, whether it's a web browser or an iPhone app or an iPad or something else, and I'm starting things off in my car by talking to it, or I'm in my living room and I'm talking to it and then a few minutes later, later I'm getting an alert someplace else that this has now been delivered to me in a way that I can interact with it. I think that's powerful. And so that sense, I think that the speaker aspect itself is rudimentary. Who cares? It's more about if this is what they're actually doing, if this is going to be the way that they get kind of cloud based agents, so to speak, in people's homes where people are going to be willing perhaps for a subscription fee, I'm going to pay 20 or $30 a month on, on top of whatever my ChatGPT plus subscription would be to have the ability to do all this additional processing where it's connected to my email, it's connected to my documents, it's connected to other things and it's just going to kick off those tasks for me. And I don't have to worry about how to set up the hardware or anything on my end. It's just happening and I can interact with it on a number of services, including voice.

[A]

Well, we'll find out. It's not even coming out this year, but the timing of this leak kind of tells me that either OpenAI wants you to think Apple was trying to block it or Apple was trying to block it.

[D]

Also. This is a Mark Gurman leak and I would say, I think his track record suggests that there are a lot of hardware designers and designers in general at Apple who leaked to him and some of them went to OpenAI and they're now leaking to him there whether and Open Air may want it. Gurman has also picked up things that were, that OpenAI gave to him as sort of like statements, but not officially. So I mean, this is clearly meant to be the narrative. The other thing I would say is, you know, you said Leo, you know, is this what Apple's trying to stop? I wonder if this is not. I wonder if what Apple's trying to stop is whatever comes next. Because this strikes me as being a real low hanging fruit kind of product. It is the easiest product for OpenAI to make as a first product, which is their take on the smart speaker except backed entirely by chat, GPT and whatever powers that they can give to it. And I think that's a great first move for them. This is not the kind of product it strikes me that you steal trade secrets for, but I don't know but and we've heard that like they have a lot of other ambitions of things that are more phone like or more wearable. This is not that this is just a place to start. And I think to Christina's point it points the way for what table stakes are going to be. And I, you know, even putting this in an Apple perspective, I think that this is really interesting. Apple is just getting on the board with Siri. It's good enough to be functional. Great start. But you look when you describe something that's more agentic and you start to think how do you compete in that space? And the answer probably involves Apple. You know, especially since Apple can lean on the personal and they're trying to do that with Siri AI that it's on your devices. That means Apple is going to need to keep working on ways that your, whether it's your watch or your phone or your smart speaker that it's able to talk to a device that has your personal information on it. And in terms of agentic actions it probably means they need to keep pushing down the road that they've only barely started now which is things like app intents. It's the idea that in the end they probably need to create the ability for developers to have their functionality be, you know, in the ecosystem so that if I'm using my voice to talk to my Apple version of this that it's able to go to my device with my personal information and run my apps that I paid for and they have their knowledge bases and that I can use that to do a personal version a in my own home version of what Open Air might be doing in its cloud. And like it does feel to me, as Christina was talking about it, like that feels plausible for what the table stakes in this are going to be in the next three, four years is you're really, you know, going to have to, Apple will have to compete in its own way with these more kind of like how do you take things that are more agentic but also make them more friendly?

[B]

Well again there's a, there's a lot to play for amongst many, many players. Chiefly because as, as Christine has said that if you have, if you have an AI that is not connected to the super soup, this super super stylish phone or this super, super stylish laptop. If people aren't. If people are just connecting it with this is the, the ghostly spirit that can live anywhere. Okay. It becomes irrelevant whether you have any. And this becomes when of your most important tools to get you throughout the day personally and professionally. It's make. It has the power to make the iPhone irrelevant as a specific brand choice.

[A]

Yeah, that's a good reason to be scared, huh?

[B]

And so, and, and so like this is, this is the Coke or Pepsi moment. Like if, if you get people to be loyal to a certain product at this outset where I'm again, I use Gemini for nearly everything. Not necessarily because I'm in the process every single month of doing a comparison between what's the latest model and what. How well does it all these things at. After a year and a half starting two and a two years starting with Bard for God's sake, I'm comfortable with it.

[A]

We forgot all about you.

[B]

I mean the thing is like I know how it works. I'm comfortable with it.

[A]

Predecessor Gemini we should mention.

[B]

So, so basically OpenAI. OpenAI is not likely to win me as a customer chiefly because I would have to test out a new product. I'd have to get used to its own rhythms. It would have to. I would have to train it on my own data. So it knows when I'm talk about, hey, can I get my phone to do this? It knows that I'm referring to a Pixel 7 Pro running Android 17. All this other stuff. If Apple. Apple probably does not want to get itself in a situation where as good as the iPhone is, it's just another device that runs Instagram or runs WhatsApp or runs whatever. And this use of agenic AI, once it arrives and people are able to do things like, hey, know that report I wrote yesterday? Check to see if I need to update it and if nothing's changed, then send it to the usual group and that it simply happens. That is something that it doesn't matter if it happens on an iPhone or not. So anything that I don't think that that's exactly why they're doing this against OpenAI but they definitely have, like I said, everything to play for to make sure that people get. They want people to fall in love with Apple intelligence and they don't want them to form an emotional or professional commitment to any other AI at a point where, where everybody is still kind of shopping around and playing the game. It's the 1970s, everybody's bed hopping. No one's ready to put a ring on it yet, but the 80s are coming, man, and at some point they're

[A]

gonna have to forget what happened then, right? Okay, let's take a break. There is other news, but I have a feeling we're gonna have to create a theme song for the OpenAI versus Apple battle, because this will return like a bad penny every. Every single week. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Christina Warren, Andy Inocco, and Jason Snell. Our show today, brought to you by Horizon 3. Here's a name you need to know. The most dangerous threats are always the one you don't see coming. You know the football that hits you in the back of the head. The feeling of uncertainty is one of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity. I know. I've talked to many cybersecurity professionals last week. In fact, thanks to Micah for filling in for me last week. Last week I was at Black Hat, and man, the palpable fear in the air. I mean, you can have the best people, the perfect stack, solid processes, but you never feel comfortable. There's always that, like, what am I missing? 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It finds the problem, you fix it, and in one click, you Confirm it's secure. Horizon 3, it's so good, it's trusted by NSA. The NSA? Yes. CISA, yes. Big Fortune 100 companies. Look, if they trust it, you know, you could trust it too. See exactly what an attacker would find in your environment before they do. Go to Horizon 3 AI MacBreak and request your free node zero demo. Visit Horizon 3 AI MacBreak again. That's Horizon 3 AI MacBreak. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. This is what you need. Remember the URL, and please use the full one. Horizon 3 AI. Just so I know that we get credit because we sent you Horizon 3 AI MacBreak. Yeah, it was really interesting wandering around Black Hat. And of course, the talk of Black Hat was that hugging face hack that OpenAI did. It's all anybody could talk about. And it really brought terror into the hearts of everybody at Black Hat. Of course, DEFCON followed immediately, which I didn't. I wish I'd been able to go to. But I can imagine that the victory lapse that some of those hackers were taking. I'll tell you who's not taking a victory lap right now. It's Pavel Durov, the creator and founder of Telegram, who is mighty peeved. It scared the hell out of me, I have to admit. This was last week also. Did you. I don't think you talked about it. It happened. Maybe it did. It happened later on Tuesday. If you talk about. See, I wasn't here last week, so I don't know exactly what was talked about. So I woke up on Tuesday in Las Vegas at Black Hat to the news that Telegram had been actually was the night before I left, the Telegram had been pulled from the App Store. Now, Telegram is important to me, not only because I love it as a messaging platform. I know, I know it's not secure, but I love it as a messaging platform. It's fun, it's cool, but most importantly, I use it to talk to my AI. It's how it communicates with me on the phone and on the road. And I thought, man, this is a single point of failure. It turned out, by the way, it came back within a few hours, not before I had completely removed my agent's interactions from Telegram to a Matrix server I was running myself. But that's another story. It came back and it turned out that and this is Pavel Durov was pretty miffed. He posted on X saying it was an extortionist. A bad guy had posted CSAM to a Telegram group and then contacted Apple and said, there's CSAM on here. To which Apple responded by immediately pulling Telegram down. Durov writes, the attacker was a takedown extortionist, someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. They use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them. Now everybody knows Telegram is a hive of scum and villainy, among other things. But what messaging system isn't? Maybe Apple messages. But you know, Apple at least, I mean, I'm sure Pavel has a phone number of somebody and Apple at least put it back. But he's very concerned about this single point of failure. Others have raised the point that Telegram might not be getting fair treatment considering that X never was taken off the App Store despite being for months hosting nudified content and other very questionable content. Your thoughts?

[B]

Well, but there's a. But there's a big, big difference. CSAM is the nuclear bomb that you have to negate immediately. Whereas as unpalatable as X is in general and nudify apps are, it's not quite the same thing. I believe that Apple has so many responsibilities to make sure that they lock that crap down at the first twitch of a report that that does absolutely start a forearm fire immediately. It's not no debate, no discussion, no, let's investigate this. It's like, no, we gotta shut this stuff down.

[A]

But don't you think that empowers take down extortionists?

[B]

It certainly does. And it's part of what is on a lesser scale. Excuse me, lesser dramatic scale. It's what's empowering YouTube to become the problem that it is, where it's very, very easy to target a very, very popular channel and simply get it taken down with multiple spurious copyright.

[A]

Okay, Andy, don't mention that.

[C]

But, but, but I think that's an interesting point though, Andy, because obviously I agree with you. Like, like CCM is going to be a nuclear option and if you get reports, you need to take action. I think what is an interesting thought experiment is if someone had reported that CCM content existed on Twitter, on X, whatever, or on YouTube, if Apple would have made the same decision, and I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think they would have. Now part of that you could argue is that at least in the case of Google, they have their own teams that scan things and are incredibly proactive to dealing with that type of content in a way that maybe you can't be on a messaging platform, especially if there's any sort of kind of, you know, encryption involved. But I do still think that it's, it's interesting, it's worth noting because, you know, I'm not going to say that Apple would not have removed X from the App Store, but I don't know if it would have. At the very least. I mean, I think that in a circumstance like this, I think Pavel has A right to be frustrated. Because if you're going to take an action like this, I think at the very least you should give the CEO of a company which is a very popular and, you know, a very used app in your App Store, a heads up, even if you're not going to change the decision, just, just at the very least, you know, reaching out and going, this is what's up. We can talk about it, you know, when, when you've dealt with things. But, but we have to act in this manner.

[B]

I wonder if it speaks to how. What kind of lines of communication Apple has with different companies like versus there was problems like this and problems in terms of deep fakes and other kind of content on X before where I mean the US and other people were clamoring like why are you allowing this to continue with this is they are via, they're in direct violation of App Store policies and you have shut down other apps for doing the same because

[C]

they have a different tier.

[A]

Right.

[C]

There are different rules.

[B]

But, but also, but in addition to that, it comes, it came out soon, soon afterward that, yeah, Apple was basically having deep, deep threatening conversations with them saying, we need you to fix this and take this very, very seriously because we are contemplating the nuclear option, but we do not want to do that right now. So I'm just, I'm just not even suggesting anything might or might not have been the case. But it does make me think about all the different times where a nuclear option was averted because as it happens, these two very, very key people have had a really good professional reputation at their respective companies and even at different companies before they came to Apple and whatever. And so they were able to pick up the phone and say, what, Josh? What the hell is going on? And what are you doing about it? So I wonder if there was just less communication between Telegram that might have affected things. But if nothing else, though, my first reaction to this is that it does show you how quickly Apple can move if it is properly motivated. That if we were ever wondering about. Well, the thing is there's so much bureaucracy and so many layers that they have to go through, say no. Under certain situations of high motivation, Apple can just grab for the wall switch and just yank that plug out immediately if they so desire to. Which might provoke us to think back in the past five or six or seven years about times when again, it seems like they weren't doing anything very, very fast. That doesn't mean that they can't do something very, very quickly, but that this category of problem is not something that they resort, that they devote those kind of resources to.

[D]

I also wanted to mention, this is somewhat tangential, but, like, to be clear, so, like, there's a quote from the Telegram guy saying if an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be. There's been a lot of, like, freakouts about this. And I just want to be clear. If you use Telegram, nothing happened. They removed it briefly.

[A]

Yeah, I could still use it, but

[D]

it would from the App Store for new users who had to download it from the App Store. That's it. This was. And to Andy's point, feels to me like this was somebody at Apple saying, why isn't Telegram talking to us? Well, we'll get their attention. This is serious enough that we're going to get their attention by doing something like this. But. Well, I mean, if they had a line of communication, why would they do it this way? Unless Telegram was like, no, we're not going to do it, which I really doubt. But I just want to be clear here that, like, this is one of those areas where this stuff, like, there are lots of detailed issues about Apple's control and stewardship of the App Store and their choice to make it the only platform for iOS and iPados. Lots of issues there. But to see people cover this story like Telegram stopped working on people's iPhones, it's like, it didn't happen. None of that happened. All it did was disappear. If you went and tried to get it new in the App Store, which affected probably approximately nobody.

[A]

Okay, I understand your point, but I completely disagree with you. It's just, as far as I'm concerned, another nail in the coffin of Apple's complete control of this.

[D]

I don't dispute that at all.

[A]

It made me immediately say, all right, I need to own this channel. I need to put up matrix, have my own server. And I am absolutely. Every time this happens, it's a little Nick in Apple's reputation. The minute there's something other than the iPhone that I can use, I will. And I think that that's really important. Apple, yeah, it's a nick. It's not a big chunk. But these add up. And it is problematic that they so control this device that I spent lots and lots of money on that they can take an app away. They didn't take it away from me,

[D]

but they didn't take that.

[A]

Well, wait, but they could. They have that control and it shows you it's a single point of failure. And that's a big problem. And I just. I mean, maybe it's just me, maybe nobody else got that message, but I got that message loud and clear, and it is a chink in their armor.

[D]

Like I said, I think there are lots and lots of issues with Apple's choices here, and we've talked about it, and we'll continue to talk about it, but I think there is a conflation of two issues, and I think there is a tendency among some of the people who talk about this stuff to use what happened as a lever to make people scared about the bigger issue now. The bigger issue. Look, it's true. If you want to have an iPhone, Apple determines whether what software you get to run on it.

[A]

And by the way, so does Google

[D]

to a certain degree. Right. They're different, but similar in some ways. And. And people should know about that. But in my opinion, it's irresponsible to say. And I saw headlines that said this. Apple pulls Telegram.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[D]

From iPhones.

[A]

And I understand that's not what happened.

[D]

Not true.

[A]

And I still was using Telegram.

[D]

So why does the CEO of Telegram then say this is outrageous? It's because the CEO of Telegram feels like you feel, which is this individual item is not outrageous. But isn't it a reminder of the power Apple wields over its platform? Yes.

[A]

And wheels over its business. Because, yes, if. If Apple pulls tele. If Apple were to pull at some point. And by the way, let's face it, Telegram is under a lot of assault, quite rightly by Ukrainians saying Russians use it to plan their warfare, by Russians who say Ukrainians use it to plan their war warfare, to American governments who say terrorists use it. And see, Sam is on it. All of that is all true, I should point out, at least as far as I can tell, there's a lot of junk on there. And I think Durav is quite rightly concerned that at some point Apple may say, yeah, you know, Elon has an in. In the White House, but you, my friend, do not. In fact, he's. He's under indictment in Moscow. If he can't go back to Russia because he'll be thrown into jail. I understand his concern. That's his business right there. Yeah, he'd still have Android.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, I do understand, Jason, I do understand your point that oftentimes these get.

[A]

It was overstated for link bait. I completely agree.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And also for what might even be as bad a problem, which is someone being lazy and not understanding someone who's in the job and career of communicating news and communicating information, not understanding that words matter and the sequence in which you put the words into a sentence also really, really matters. I do, however, think that this is yet another really, really important opportunity to talk about the problem of the choke point for every single phone now being if you can intimidate, if you can strong arm Apple into pulling an app, and if you can strong arm Google into pulling an app, you can censor an entire channel of communication worldwide. And how much do we trust Apple or Google to say if they said, by the way, our country of 1.8 billion people, we've decided that we don't want any kind of security of any kind, or we decide that this platform is becoming too popular for people that we don't like, or here is an art platform that is allowing types of art that we think communicate bad ideas. We decide that rather than pass a law to censor that that our people will be very, very unhappy with, we've decided to simply basically strong arm you into pulling it with just two of those choke points. That's a big, big problem. And Android, which used to be like a good case study, is saying, look, if you don't want your app, it's your phone, you're free to do whatever you want with it. If you want to side load an app with all the risks that that entails, by the way, here's fine, here's an APK file, go ahead and sideload it. Now Google has gone back on that with essentially making sure that every app at least has to be signed by an understood, known, identified developer. Now we're just basically down to aosp, the Android Open source project version of Android. And that comes with so many downsides that even a big, big nerd like myself who loves the cache of saying, oh no, no, I run pure open source on my phone and I've de Google fied everything like, yeah, but now you can't get any of the cool apps or services that you actually rely on. You can't call an Uber on this phone. Like, yeah, maybe I don't mind some control and surveillance. That is just a big, big problem that can't be shoveled under the rug.

[A]

Well, I also think that, and this goes back to the previous conversation, there is a threat to Apple that, you know, right now, you know, I don't have a whole lot of choice. As you point out, I can run an AOSP phone. I mean, I have phones that are like this E Ink phone that runs, I don't know, some sort of Very stripped down AOSP version of Android and

[B]

I noticed that you use it so much that you've got a dead battery indicator on the screen.

[A]

It's got a long battery life because it's E ink. But yeah, I haven't used it. In fact it's really useless. But we're going to see, I think in the next few years, AI based devices that don't have apps, that don't have app stores that are capable and I think that most of them are

[D]

going to be run by giant companies.

[C]

I was going to say I. You're not wrong, Leo, that we. They are definitely facing competition but there is zero reason to believe that whatever the next big operating system is and I do believe that at least one of the AI companies is going to take a very big swing and potentially be very successful by doing like their own operating system. I have zero reason to believe that their policies will be demonstrably different from the policies that Google and Apple have. Honestly, it's.

[A]

But it's true. But there are competitive pressures there. You know who might actually end up doing it. Believe it or not, the last people you'd expect Meta because they've lost the AI race and they spent so much money hiring Wang and building this ASI group that's nothing's happened. So a couple of things have happened for Meta in the last couple of weeks that make me think maybe they're saying, well maybe there's other ways to make money than sucking people's data.

[C]

Oh come on.

[A]

Meta. Meta.

[B]

Wait a minute, just.

[A]

Let me just give the two data points then you can rebut. Meta released an open source repo. It's on your platform GitHub, I know that lets you take these Meta glasses and point them at your agent, not Meta. Even the cameras. And they've released Glimmer and are about to release. What is it? Muse. Another model, an open weights model. Their first in years. They released the first open weights model Llama and started a whole thing by the way. Thank you. With Llama cpp. But they've been back to releasing. They're not the best fairly capable models. Maybe they're seeing that maybe there's other ways to make money than pointing everything towards meta properties. And look who else is doing it. And we know they have ways to make money. Nvidia who are making very capable open weight models knowing that well, maybe we won't collect your data but we'll get your money for the hardware. Anyway, those are my data points. What do you think?

[C]

Well, okay, so I Think on the meta end you're. It is interesting and I do like that they have finally returned to doing open weight models again after, you know, basically the, especially after the Llama 4 benchmark scandal and whatnot. And I'm glad to see that. But let's make no mistake, the whole enticing thing of that model, the whole thing that they are betting on is that if you are willing to let meta train on your data, you get it insanely, insanely cheaply. Their normal pricing is fine, but you can do better from other models. So the whole reason that anybody would bother with it is that they are letting you train on their data. And I think that it's great that they can have an open source repo to let you use.

[A]

I can run Glimmer on my own server.

[C]

Yes you can, but most people are not going to Lia. That's the thing. And the thing is that yes, you can release these things open weight, but at a certain point open wait becomes a bit, little, little bit meaningless in the sense that yes, it's open weight, But I need $2 million minimum to be able to, you know, get enough, you know, H1 hundreds to be able to run them.

[A]

I can run glimmer on a 64

[C]

gig many yeah, but it's not going

[A]

to be the best thing in the world.

[C]

But it's not going to be competitive. The models that people are actually excited about, you know, are the ones that are being run in data centers, period. And so it's great that it can be open weight, it's great that we can like today though that yes, that's today, but given the hardware, you know, crunch and whatnot, I don't know when it will be, you know, actually feasible for us to, on a mainstream level, self host these things. I'm all for it as you know, I've been, you know, tell a 20

[A]

year old who's thinking about what they want to do with their life that the best thing to do is to aim at that future day when there'll be hardware and software that people can run in their house that will give them privacy.

[C]

And I think that's, that's a great ideal. But I also think that there are financial incentives from all the companies involved, including Nvidia, which will make it difficult for people to actually have access to those things. So I wonder at a certain point how much it just becomes almost marketing copy where you're saying, oh well, it's open wait and anyone can do it. But it's not actually conceivable Right.

[A]

You're on the front lines and I

[C]

trust your opinion well and well, but you might be right and I hope that you are right. Like, right, like, I hope that that is where we can get to do that. I really hope we get to that place. But when I look at what Meta is doing right now, I'm going, okay, well, no one is taking you seriously. You've spent all this money. The only way that you can get anybody to pay any attention to you because the Chinese models have caught up so quickly, is basically by all but giving it away in a hosted variance. And the way that you're doing that is by training on the data. I mean, Facebook's entire thing, Meta's entire company ethos, has been the fact that it, it knows everything about you and it tracks your data, like even more than Google. That has been from the very beginning kind of their M.O. so I would love to have see them like turn another leaf, but I actually see this open weight strategy, this return to open weight in some ways is them trying to be like, okay, no one is using our stuff and we need a way to be able to get additional training information and something else. And if we make it cheap enough, that's great. And maybe in an ideal world people will be able to fork that and use some of that information to have models that you can host without having to give them any data, which would be wonderful. But it kind of becomes, to Andy's point, kind of like an AOSP sort of thing, where, yeah, it's great that I can run graphene OS and that I can do all these things with it, but I can't call an Uber and I can't use Google Wallet and there are other things that are just not going to work. And for some people, for the idealist, the people are going to be willing to, to jump through enough hoops, that will be fine, but I think more people will just kind of be like, I'm going to go with whatever is easier and if it's training on my data, so be it.

[D]

Can I be Utopian for a moment, please?

[A]

I don't want to be the only one.

[D]

Well, and boy, this is going to make some people angry. But there's a real good solution here, which is that a bunch of influential regions make it illegal for companies that make computing devices to prevent the side loading of third party software. Done, solved. And honestly, it should be illegal.

[C]

It should.

[D]

If I, if I buy an iPhone and I write a piece of software for it and I want to just stick it on there. If I want to download a piece of software and just stick it on there, I should be allowed to. And it doesn't have to be for the general public. It wouldn't be for the general public necessarily, but it would allow a little latitude. And, and I wrote a piece about this like five years ago. But like the Mac does it, Apple's got all sorts of security levels on the Mac. But in the end, if you say yes, yes, yes, do this, you can get any arbitrary code to run on a Mac and it's fine and good and it provides a degree of latitude that allows things. In fact, I would say it allows things that Apple doesn't anticipate, like the flowering of AI.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Models and agents on Apple's Mac platform to happen. It allows all that to happen without Apple needing to be involved at all. Because Apple didn't have to be. It didn't have to approve anything or disapprove of anything and like. And is it likely that the governments of the world are going to do some sort of digital freedom like that to allow our devices to have that level of freedom if we want them to? I don't know, probably not. You know, that's the pessimistic part. But my optimism is, there's a simple answer here, which is make it so that if you make a computing device, people can put software on it if they want and that the idea of a monopoly control of the platform and all the software on it is just not allowed. That is basically what we have to do.

[B]

I would, I would do, I would suggest something that's either more serious or simpler and it actually mirrors something that. IFixit wrote an editorial the other week, something that I've been basically hoping for for a number of years. If all they did was simply say that if I were to give them the, if I were to be able to create the mass delusion in lawmakers to make it, to make this one kind of law happen, I would say no. You know what? Instead of making it illegal to have a device that can't sideload apps, I'm going to basically say that you must have an unlockable bootloader on every single device that you ship so that yes, you can still restrict your iPads, your iPhones, whatever, to your specific app store. But if, because someone likes your hardware but doesn't like that policy, or simply because, okay, you know, my five year old iPad is still working great, but you're about to drop support for it and no more OS updates with an unlockable bootloader now suddenly if there is an open source project that says that wants to bring Linux to the iPad or Linux to the iPhone or something like that, they can actually do that Very very. Not, excuse me, not easily but basically the thing that makes it impossible will have been done away with on other devices with God. I've got Chromebooks because I've been such a fan of Chromebooks. The idea of, well, that they don't make it. They don't make it so easy that you would get yourself anybody who doesn't understand the Chrome, the importance, the severity of what they're doing, but do it accidentally or just because they're bored. You literally have to take the case apart and physically break a seal on the motherboard often case to do that. But once you've made that choice to do that, essentially you can rewrite everything on it. Which is why I've got a beautiful six or seven year old Chromebook Pixel that is now running a very, very good version of Arch Linux on it. Because again it could simply do away with everything. I feel as though it breaks my heart a little bit that I still have like a early generation iPad mini that I love in no small part because I've got the most beautiful hard case for it that just makes into the most Ford Prefect hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy looking and feeling device ever. If I could. And of course it's been obsoleted a long time ago, breaks my heart that it still works great, the battery still charges great. If I could install Linux on this, I would do that in a heartbeat. But it is now essentially e waste. The idea of just being able to use the apps that are still installed on it that don't connect to a server and say I refuse to run anymore because you're not running on an OS that I approve of. It breaks my heart and like if I spend that kind of money on a device I should have the, the ability to influence the disposition of the device. I can understand how a company like Apple would be is fighting sideloading for a number of good reasons in addition to the majority of bad reasons why they're advocating against it because it does make things a lot more difficult for them. It's something that they have to do. But if they just simply say, look, once you basically say if you, if you tap, if you go to the about box and tap the about box 11 times to the tune of Yankee Doodle, okay, you'll. When you get to stuck a feather in its cap you'll get a dialogue saying if you tap and call it Macaroni, the bootloader will be unlocked. It will decertify iOS. It won't function as an iOS device anymore, but the bootload. So think really carefully if you want to, if you continue to tap and call it macaroni, but I assume that if you're going to tap it at this point, you know what you're doing, do that and then let the open source community figure out how to take advantage of it. And now it's no longer your problem. Apple.

[A]

Well, we are all now just proven dewy eyed utopianists.

[D]

Yeah, we're saving the world here. We'll throw it, we'll do Andy's bootloader thing. Christina mentioned in our members discord. The idea of like at the very least say that if you're going to end of life a product that the bootloader needs to get unlocked, we'll put that in there along with my app thing. And then I think there's a lot of sort of right to repair Cory Doctorow stuff that should go in this same reform package. This is your tractors that can't be serviced by third parties or you know, parts to repair a product that can't be blocked out if they're not from the approved vendors via some sort of serial check. Like. Yeah. And look, I think what we're really saying here is at some point companies realize that the real way to make money was to control all the horizontal and the vertical. Right. And part of that, look, I will, I'll admit part of that is they decided that they, that consumers wanted things to be cheaper. And so they're like, all right, okay, we'll be, we'll make them a little cheaper. But we're gonna, you know, we're gonna sell you the printer real cheap, but we're gonna sell you the toner. And that, that, that blade, razor blade model has been applied to technology to the point where like every single freaking thing is a part of the gestalt of the company. And it's like a company like Apple that's the size of Apple can point at something like putting ads in maps. And it's like it's a key part of their strategy to add a little bit of map ad revenue. It's like this is what gets us to this point is we can't give up control of the App Store. Do you see how much money we make on it? We can't allow people to repurpose older devices because we need to sell them new devices prices and you know, the Only way to stop that. This is even bigger picture is, you know, the point is that capitalist profit driven organizations want to make as much money as possible and the only thing that prevents them from doing the worst things to their customers other than the open market. But the open market is limited when there are fewer and fewer players is regulation. And so this, my fellow Americans, that is today why I am introducing the Notco Snell Warren plan.

[A]

Yes, we are now going over the top from utopianist to communist and I want to stop it. Nip it in the butt.

[C]

No, you know, no, no, this is capitalist.

[D]

Who are you? This is capitalism. It's the classic genuinely regulated capitalism because you can't unregulate capitalism.

[A]

Even Adam Eat the world I think said that while the, you know, the hand of the market is great, you still need.

[D]

Yeah, but you still need redress, you still need rules. And saying that your computer should run whatever software you want is probably a good rule. That's all.

[C]

I would also argue that frankly the anti capitalist argument is kind of where we are now. Where you did you have an uneven playing field where it is not a market. It's being controlled by monopolists, it's being controlled by major parties and there's no way for you to even have an open market.

[A]

Right. One last bit before we take a break, which is thanks to the courts and Epic, Google has started hosting its first third party store including, well, there's only one so far. But in the App store you can get Aptoide, which is okay, not the. It sounds like hemorrhoid, but it's not. It's a game focused store that you can, you could sideload it in the old days, but is now officially in the Google Play. This is part of what they agreed to in their settlement with Epic. So I'm not going to rush to get Aptoid after looking at it. But nevertheless, this is a chink in the armor. I don't know if Apple's been fighting this. They're still going to the Supreme Court to try to stop this. But I think that that is a step in the right direction. Not much of a step, but a little bit of a step.

[C]

I think it's a big step in the right direction, at least in a sense that you would have, you know, potentially other ways of getting things now. I don't know, I haven't looked into this enough. I think Andy would know if the, the new app stores can have different policies over what can and can't be installed that can override whatever the Core, you know, Android policies are. If this is similar to the, the way the alternative app stores can work in the EU where you can access things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do, I doubt we will see anything like this happen to Apple because even the judgment that they are fighting did not require this. Right. Like they, like they lost in a. Or they won, I guess. More, more to be more clear in a way where Google lost in a much larger way. And so this is one of the concessions Google is having to make.

[A]

I still have ironic. Because honestly, Apple's more of a monopolist than Google isn't.

[C]

Right. I mean, look, it was different courts, different, different judges, different, different lawyers, even though very similar, you know, facts and whatnot. And so I don't know if this means that, okay, if I install the. God, the name is so terrible. Aptoid.

[A]

Aptoid.

[C]

It's awful. Awful. I don't know if, like, you would be able to install apps that otherwise would not get through Google app review. That's what I'm not clear on.

[A]

That's the question.

[C]

But, you know, I think it's good that there are alternatives there at the very least for people not having to rely on, you know, Google's payment policies and, and that sort of thing. Now, will people actually use this? Almost certainly not. Which is kind of the sad thing with this, which is like, you know, if you would allow these sorts of things to exist, I promise you, 80, 90% of the people are still going to use the default. As long as you make the default experience better and as long as you can, you know, show, you know, the use cases for why it's better, people are going to do that because they're going to look at the alternative stores. They're going to go. It's a lot of junk. It doesn't have the big players. Maybe I can do something weird with it. But like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, the F Droid, you know, store, which, to be clear, I'm a big fan of. I'm glad that that exists. But in most cases. But the number of people who are going to be bothering installing F droid versions of things on their phone is so small. It's not impacting Google Play. It really isn't.

[A]

Yeah, they might as well. Yeah, absolutely. And you said 80 or 90. I think it's 99.9. I mean.

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, I was.

[A]

Everything we've been talking about in terms of freedom is for the tiniest slice of people who have the technical expertise and the interest. And so Apple and Google don't have to fear for their profits. But I just think people ought to have the right to do what they want. You can, you, you can't root an iPhone, can you? There's no way to do that.

[C]

Yeah, but. Well, you can, but it was interesting. One of the stories was in the document was actually that there was a new jailbreak version that was released. The thing is, is that it has to be a certain version. You better not be updated past anything else. It's very limited in what you can do. Some of the older hardware is easier to get than others. But I mean Apple, Apple is really good at even going way, way back and doing stuff. And then the hard thing with Apple devices is that they only sign the older versions of the operating systems for a certain period of time. I think it's two weeks. And so if you didn't have that exploitable version of the OS already running on your device, even if it is capable of running that version, good luck getting it because it's not signed, so it's not going to run.

[A]

And Apple has a strong case saying, well, that's a bad idea because Apple, of course that makes you highly insecure. This is the story, thanks to Andy, iOS26 has a jailbreak. The dopamine folks have created dopamine 3.0. But you have to have very specific, very old hardware.

[C]

Very old hardware.

[A]

Which is okay.

[C]

Which is okay, absolutely. But again, to my point, the interesting thing here is that again, you'd need to have a version that you were running iOS 26 or I guess like 26 point, like 01 if you were running. And what are we on right now, 26.6, 0.1, 0.1 or something. So we're, you know, many, many, many releases past that. So be one of those things where if you happen to have hardware that could do it and it is running that specific version, you're good. But where you would run into trouble is like, let's say I'm running iOS 18. If I want to update that, I can't just go into this version that you know, rootable or exploitable because the only signed version that I can get is the latest version.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. And that, and that illustrates another, another problem with the freedom that you should have on your phone. Like if you have like a 5 or 6 year old iPhone and it's not, let's say it's not been obsoleted yet. Okay, you're sure? It looks like you're still going to get iOS27, you're still going to get at least a year worth of updates. But you're aware that, man, I don't think this phone has been ever as fast as it was when it was run iOS 16. I would love to roll it back to iOS 16 just to get that performance back. But no, because that OS is no longer signed for this device. That's again, it goes for. I just believe that unless you're giving them away for free or you're selling them at well under cost if you're. You really do have to. I do feel as though these companies should give you the ability to have control over the device because you can't just treat people like children.

[A]

This is.

[B]

That's one of the things that has made me so annoyed about Apple's control versus Google's control. Even though oftentimes Google and Apple are have the same level of control. Apple's attitude has always been the thing is we can't. These people are idiots.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

We are so much smarter than they are.

[A]

There is this kind of patronizing.

[B]

Yeah. On a more positive. To put it in a more positive way. There's a line that I heard a Disney executive who worked with actually was with the organization long enough to have worked personally with Walt Disney. He told the story about the characterization of the Disney theme parks, which is that Walt wanted to make sure that if you came to Disneyland, you would have a really, really good time. He felt so strongly about that that he wanted to make it impossible for you to not to have a bad time. Meaning that there's so much that is tightly, tightly, tightly controlled to make sure that whatever kind of mischief you want to get in that has not been controlled by Disney, it is not possible to even do that. And that's. I've always thought about that as a really good analog for Apple. Like maybe their intentions, or at least originally were correct, that look, if we lock down this operating system, we're going to. To prevent our users from having a bad time with this phone. And yeah, I mean, having access to an alternative app store that doesn't have any of the content that's on the regular app store is a bad time. Installing it, unlocking a bootloader and installing like a kind of flaky mobile Linux can possibly be a bad time. But sometimes the most fun you can have is not to go to Disney Disneyland, but just to rent a car and drive around Anaheim and say, you know what, Krustytown. Yeah, that food truck. Look, looks like it's Serving something really, really cool and I might get, I might get violently ill from it, but I, it smells great and I'm going to order from that truck, you know.

[A]

Well, let's not forget that after the sale of Pixar to Disney, Steve Jobs was the number one individual stockholder in Disney. It is. Disney definitely influenced Apple to, to a great degree. Let's take a little break. Kim back with more. By the way, happy birthday to Steve Wozniak. It's his birthday today.

[C]

Yay.

[A]

Yay.

[C]

Happy birthday, Woz.

[A]

Yeah, happy birthday. Was. We'll have more with.

[B]

He is the anti tech bro.

[A]

He is, isn't he?

[B]

He's like if he, you know, Woz

[A]

would agree with everything we've discussed.

[C]

I was gonna say Woz would have insisted that the bootloader be easily to, to unlock and, and offered his own, you know, alternative operating systems himself.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Why wouldn't we print a hex dump of our ROMs in with the instruction manual? Why wouldn't we?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Woz is 76 today. Happy birthday to Wuz and I'm sure Janet, his wife, who we all know is throwing him a heck of a party. And we are not invited, at least as far as I know. Maybe you are. We'll have more with Andy, Christina and Jason just a bit. But first our show brought to you today by sarasync. This is a pain point for everybody who has an iPhone or a Macintosh laptop or a Mac. Even in, you know, 100% Apple Shop, the back office is very often still running. Microsoft 365. Right. So many businesses are, which means, well, your company directory lives somewhere your iPhone doesn't naturally see. Now notice I don't say can't see, but just doesn't naturally see that way. Unfortunately, everyone's contacts app is full of personal numbers, but none of the work ones a co worker calls. It's just a number on the screen. In fact, if you've got your iPhone set, as I have, not to accept calls from unknowns, you may not even get that call. You, the new guy, your boss, they all somehow wind up with different numbers for the same department head and she ends up declining your calls. Right, because she doesn't have the right numbers either. Well, that's where Sirasync comes in. They fix it. Sirasync pushes your whole company directory, contacts and calendars right to the native contacts app on every iPhone and Mac automatically. It just shows up. It stays current on its own. It solves a real pain point for those of us who Are, you know, working with iPhones or MacBooks. Go to Cirasync.com MacBreak and book your free demo. The Cirasync team will walk you through how convenient and hassle free it is. They can even help you get set up on the call so you can roll it out across your whole organization. That's sirasync.com macbreak to get your whole company's contacts on every iPhone in the office automatically. C I R A s y n c.com MacBreak I'm so glad Siriusync exists and, and we're very grateful to them for sponsoring MacBreak weekly. Sirasync.com MacBreak Ram, ram, ram, ram, ram. It's, it's in short supply. Apple thought very wisely. Oh, they thought, oh, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna go to a Chinese RAM suppliers, CMXT or cxmt and get the RAM from them. Now don't worry us RAM suppliers who won't sell us your ram, don't worry because we're only gonna use it in the Chinese iPhones. Well, guess what? After going back and forth and Apple went to Congress and went to Trump saying, can we please now see, XMT has rejected Apple. Well, to be specific, according to a Korean technology site, Digital Daily, they've rejected Apple's demands for discount pricing. Yeah, and you know what, they're in the driver's seat on this. Apple, you know, just doesn't have the, they're not the only buyers, let's put it that way. CXMT provides Huawei and Xiaomi with of course, RAM chips. So much so they don't really need Apple. In fact, CXMT had the gall, the nerve to tell Apple, you're gonna pay the same price you're paying now to Samsung and SK Hynix, who apparently are sold out through 2030.

[B]

Yeah, I imagine Apple thought that the idea of securing Apple as a customer would, in the long run, they would be so excited about it that they would like give them better pricing. But that is kind of remarkable. Even so, I think it was the Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal had a long article about the larger situation. Said that even if they managed to get through all of the political headwinds against doing business with this entity, I mean, half of the people that they're lobbying, Apple is lobbying in D.C. are actively trying to get them added to the exclusion list right now. They're not, it's just a, it's just a political, it'll just cost them politically if they Go ahead to the deal. But no, they're actually pursuing the nuclear option against this company. That's how bad, like, this situation is. But Wall Street Journal was saying that even if they could do a deal with this company, they all their RAM is already allocated and it won't solve their immediate problems at all. So it's like, wow, it's like the first reel of any Charlie Chaplin movie where it's just depression after depression after depression, slam door after slam door after slam door. And the fact that they got. They carried the clipping in their wallet. But we're. Look, look, we're a $5 trillion company. This shouldn't happen to us. Yeah, it's happening to all of you. I'm sorry.

[A]

The three big RAM manufacturers in the world have announced they are sold out through the end of next year. Through the end of next year. According to Digitimes, this crisis isn't gonna end. Now. There was a rumor which Ming Chi Kukuo has debunked. I don't know what the truth is that TSMC was sitting on as many as a billion processors because Apple does integrated ram. They can't finish the die until they get the RAM for the processor. And the story was where they're sitting on a billion processors and they can't get the RAM to finish them. Now, Ming Chi Kuo says that's not true. I don't know what the case is, but, whoo, it is. It is tight out there. That's another one of the reasons I, I went out and spent a lot of money to buy machines that had enough RAM for me to run local AI models. I feel like this is gonna. I may not be able to buy those next month. I may not be. You know, I'm.

[B]

I'm totally, I'm totally with you. It's like. So I'm, as I've said before, like, I'm also. I'm also like, kind of really. This is like the last year I can possibly run this phone that I have. This, this, this Pixel phone that I have. Like, it will almost certainly lose support, like, at the end of next year. And I'm really like, this is a good. And I almost pulled. I almost bought a Pixel 10. Even though the Pixel 11 is going to be released, it's actually tomorrow. Because Google was offering such a good discount on it, like a few weeks.

[A]

It has 100. They went to 256 gigs of storage, which is good, right?

[B]

And also. Yeah.

[C]

And.

[B]

But that.

[A]

What's the ram? We don't know. What the RAM is.

[B]

I'm sorry, I know about tomorrow 16.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

I think.

[B]

But for the Pixel 10 that was again it was on sale 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage for that model. And my concern was that not knowing for a fact what the capabilities of the 11 would be, it's like we are all looking at a future. We're all looking at a future where a year ago we would just simply assume that if we're buying a premium smartphone it will have 16 gigs of application RAM. Now we're thinking the premium level might be 12 gigs. Maybe we can't even count on 12 gigs. And that's.

[A]

Christina says the 10 is 12.

[C]

Yeah, the 10 is 12. I think the 10 Pro is 16.

[A]

And so I'll be honest, I'm sitting On my Pixel 9 with no urgency because they haven't really made much of a difference in the 10 and I don't think the 11 will either. But Andy, you have something much older.

[B]

Well yeah, I have a Pixel 7 and that's actually my backup phone because my Pixel 6 like went the ways of Jesus, called it home October of last year. And the thing is like this has. And again I feel the same way as you do. The thing is like with the. When I upgraded my MacBook I could before, before I even bought it. Like I hear the here's like a half dozen things I will be able to do immediately with this M5 MacBook Pro that I cannot currently do with my M1 with the phone. It's like whether I. Even if I switch to iPhone, my thinking is like I just. The camera is the. I'm. I am satisfied with the camera on my five year old phone. I'm satisfied. Satisfied with the storage and the speed on my five year old phone. It is a little bit laggy when I test out like when I have got other phones to test out but it's not bad. The only thing that I would be looking forward to is on device AI models that might and AI features that might require more, more capability, more TPUs or more neural processors or more RAM. And it's. That's why I didn't wind up buying that 10 Pro because it's like I just this. I don't like the idea of upgrading a phone just because I feel as though I need to because I'm being imperiled by maybe I won't be able to get the phone that I want anytime next year and it's just very, very difficult. Again, I don't know. I would love to be able to hang on to this phone for another year just to see or just, or at least give, give allow my bank account to like heal over the scabs that it acquired after spending 22 $2,300 on a new MacBook. But the thing is like, this is the first time that I'm. I think we should all be concerned or at least be aware that it might not be if the difference between whatever you might have bought in 2025 and the new phones that are available in 2026 might actually in some ways be an active of downgrade because they just don't have enough RAM to fill all of these things. And it might be that, yeah, there will be a 16 gigabyte model of whatever, but that will have to be the 512 gigabyte option or the 1 terabyte option because they have to save that for the highest price points and the highest profitability. And the ones that most people would buy are just not going to have as much RAM as you would otherwise like it to have. It's an unprecedented situation, I think.

[A]

Yeah. Well, you know, of course these RAM companies think this is a great opportunity and they are breaking ground. Micron's been $100 billion on a New York state plant. SK Hynix says they are about to break ground on a $38 billion plant. TSMC is building $100 billion worth of fabs in Arizona. None of that will come online for, for years. Right. And that's the problem. We will have, I can promise you, a ram glut in 2030.

[C]

Well, this is the frustrating thing, right, is that they had years and years to be able to invest and just

[A]

they didn't want to because RAM was so cheap.

[C]

Right, I know. Well, because, you know, there are there rises and falls, but I mean, I've seen this before. We have seen this before, but this is the level. And like, I don't know, know to me, when you start seeing your projections go up, when you start seeing other companies other than your main suppliers starting to buy a lot from you, when you start seeing the crunch, which you know that they had to be seen two years ago, you know that they did. The fact that they are only now announcing these, you know, these new fabs which are going to take years to get online, even if they'd invested two years ago, we still would be in this problem. But the fact that they didn't, that's what kills me is that, you know, like they're, they're pretending like, oh, we had no way of knowing. But yeah, we're completely sold out through the end of the year, through the end of next year. And, and too bad there's nothing you can do about it. Like, come on. I think Andy's point is great. I think that there are going to be a lot of devices, not just phones, but laptops too. We're already seeing this with some laptops where. Not on the Mac side, but on other sides where, you know, the RAM amount is going down. And that's very unfortunate. I would hope, I'm not hopeful, but I would hope that maybe this would be an opportunity where, especially with some of the advances that we're getting with, you know, with latest, you know, coding models, that maybe people would build more efficient software that would be able to run better in these constraints. Again, I hope, but I'm not actually hopeful of that happening. But I think this is going to be an interesting kind of journey for, for a lot of people because. Yeah, but I do think Andy's right. I think that what's going to happen is that there are going to be a lot of people who, yeah, I bought a phone three years ago, I'm buying a new phone, and it's not going to feel demonstrably better than what I used to have. And that's because, yeah, the chip's going to be faster, but there are going to be a lot of other aspects of it that are not going to be a big improvement. Whereas, you know, I think people kind of used to like these, these big kind of improvements, and that's just not to going. Going to be the case because the supply is what it is unless you are, you know, fortunate enough to have the money to buy the highest end component you can get. And even then I would be surprised if, you know, as companies are starting to plan out their future products that they have to keep in mind. Okay, well, are we actually going to be able to get as many RAM chips as we think we need or do we have to spec this differently, you know, however many years in the future? But it also, I think, is increasingly clear that none of these major companies care a whole lot about consumers. Their, you know, primary.

[A]

No, Micron even said we're not going to sell the consumers.

[C]

Right.

[A]

They don't. Crucial.

[C]

They shut down.

[D]

Crucial.

[C]

Right. But I bet, I think, you know, Nvidia has made that clear for years too. And I think it's just kind of one of those things where you're like, okay, well, we will own nothing and we will like it. Hey, we'll we'll be able to, you know, lease an iPhone. We can lease that $3,000 iPhone or whatever. I'm being hyperbolic. I hope that we don't ever reach a point where an iPhone is $3,000. But I've been to that point.

[A]

I've been buying, buying as much stuff as I can. My wallet's hurting.

[D]

But I hear a lot from people asking about, like, should I buy an iPhone now when they're the normal price instead of next time?

[A]

Well, maybe they won't be the normal price for a lot longer. We also heard a rumor that the 17 is going to go up in price and before the 18 comes out.

[D]

Keep in mind that 18 is not coming out until next spring, probably. Right. The 17 base is. Is staying around, so they're going to have to raise its price. But the pro might, because they're finishing up the 17 Pro line and then they could reintroduce at a higher price. But I think there is a strong argument if you have an aging iPhone. The iPhone 17 has been a hit because it's really good. The base model is really great because it's got a lot of pro features. The pro models are really nice. I look, I mean, I am going to have phones because I have to test them and all that, but I'm telling you, looking at the prices, looking at the future, looking at what's going on, and I got my. I got my Little Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro here. It's like, I wouldn't mind using this for the next two or three years. It's great. I love it.

[C]

It's a great device. It's a great device.

[D]

Maybe think about getting an iPhone now and not waiting until next month because, you know, I'm sure they'll be better, of course, but like, what are they going to cost and what are the specs going to be and how much better exactly?

[C]

Well, that's the whole thing, right? Is that how much better? I mean, the one thing I guess you could say is a ding against the iPhone 17, and I don't think that's that big of a deal, is that it doesn't have all of the new, you know, siri AI features, but that's only the kind of the local stuff because it only has 8 gigs

[D]

of RAM and really limited, too. It's just right now it's just like the better siri voices, it's like it's not enough.

[C]

I was worried about. That's what I was going to say is be, you know, having usage on my iPad now like it's, it's nice. But I think that most features and honestly I think this makes sense. This is, Google is doing this too. Is like yeah, you could run this locally, but especially if we're in supply constraints, if you can show that you're doing it in a private way, which Apple has been taking great strides to do, why wouldn't you use it, you know, hosted if possible. So yeah, you have some better voices and some other local things, but it's not going to be a massive difference, especially if you're looking at is this going to be, you know, $200 more or whatever because we don't know what the prices will be. But it used to always be. But it's so funny because you always tell people, you know, the worst time you could ever buy an iPhone would be August of.

[A]

You know, change that.

[C]

That's changed. We don't, we don't know in, in a month what the prices are going to be. And I certainly think that if you are still somebody, let's say you're on like an iPhone 11 or an iPhone 12 and you can get a good deal through a carrier or through Apple or whatever on a 17 or 17 Pro, I would not buy an air. But like the other two, I would definitely consider. Do you need the latest and greatest factoring in that there's probably going to be a 20% price bump.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And also it's hard to believe time is going so fast. Maybe it's because I'm an old man, but we're three months, three weeks away from the next iPhone.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, we are that close. At least its announcement. I don't know.

[D]

Four probably four.

[A]

Four, you think? What do you think the day will be? Do we know?

[D]

Seventh, maybe ninth. Seventh is Labor Day.

[C]

Oh, seventh. Labor Day. Okay. Sorry about that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Sooner than the 9th, 8th or 9th.

[D]

Yeah, they could do it on the 8th. They've done it the day after Labor Day especially.

[A]

It's all pre recorded now. That's not a big deal.

[D]

They prefer to. Yeah, that's. Oh yeah. But they do have people that they will invite to come and do the

[C]

program and they have executives and they have executives who might not want to have to immediately travel, you know.

[D]

Yeah. Right after Labor Day, you know, eighth or ninth.

[A]

Feels still wearing my white shoes, man. I can't come down to Cupertino.

[D]

Yeah. Yeah. So if, I mean German said it and I agree with him. I think, I think nine, nine is the most likely but you know, they could surprise us.

[A]

Well, that's a month away.

[D]

John will be in charge. He's going to have to decide. It's up to him.

[A]

John Ternus DEBUT We've seen these RAM ups and downs. Nightscape in our club. Twit Discord says it's gonna be like the 90s. I bought 16 megabytes of RAM for 600 bucks. A month later, something shifted was 300 bucks. It hurts so bad. I never forgot, actually, he said counseling helped. Now we're going the opposite direction. In February of last year, 16 gigs of RAM DDR5 cost 100 bucks. Today, 600 bucks.

[D]

Yeah, I looked up almost exactly a year ago, I bought a replacement for one of my drives in my raid. So it's just spinning hard drive, but those are needed in data centers too.

[C]

Yep.

[D]

And I looked at that same model. It's like a Western digital red, I think. Or maybe it was a Iron Wolf, you know, but you know, a NAS drive and it's twice the price. It was a one year ago.

[B]

Twice.

[D]

Just straight up twice the price.

[B]

Honest to God. Like, so I needed, so I needed some extra storage and I wasn't even looking for, like to build an additional NAS for my network. But the thing is, by the time it came to the point where, you know, I do think that it would be nice to have another 16 terabyte drive or like a 20 terabyte drive. By the time I got around to basically saying, yeah, maybe we should put some, devote some money to that, prices had gone up so high that it actually cost less for me to buy like a NAS enclosure and recycle four or like eight terabyte drives that I'd pulled from a previous, previous thing than to simply buy like a brand new zero hours. Hours hours old operation, old device with the, with the correct capacity. It's like, it is like just so nuts.

[A]

It's getting so bad. It's making that open AI$300 mechanical donut sound pretty appealing.

[B]

I can, I can afford $300. That's.

[A]

I could afford a mechanical donut on me.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it really is weird. Like, I mean, and, and I'm sorry just to. Not to retread what we were talking about like a couple minutes ago. But the thing is like, part of. Because I've been, I have been thinking about this a hell of a lot and one of the things, one of the things that I'm thinking about is, well, what if you were to buy like an A series or an E series phone just to last the next two or three years partly because like, it's been a long, long time since I've decided to try to daily drive like an A series phone as my own device. Because part of the thinking is that by the time if I let this go for two or three years, the chip crisis will be over, the flagship phones will be two or three years better. But also if the thing that like, like I mentioned earlier, the thing only thing that I kind of don't want to miss out on is the idea of like really, really good on device AI making this into a much more useful device. The thing is like, like as of everything we've seen in iOS 27, that is not going to be seen anytime in 2026. Unlikely to be seen in force until we're well into 2027. If we're talking about wanting to use Gemini for that or want to use OpenAI for that. It's not as though next year is likely to be the revolutionary year in which everybody stops using apps and tries and starts using AI agents to get all the work done for them. So again, if I decide that I'm going to try, try to see what a $500 nothing phone will be like to rock for a couple years, or an 18e or a pixel 18a would be like for two years by the time it's over with, that will be the transformative upgrade. When I spend $1,300 on a brand new flagship phone in 2030 or 2029 and my God, I can't believe I'm talking about 2029, 2020, 2030, as though there's things I can plan for. Oh my God, we're living in the future.

[A]

I feel very fortunate. I bought two Western Digital Red Pros from my NAS last December. They were about 300 bucks for 16 terabytes. Now they're 700 bucks. Yeah, I put them in. I hope I don't lose another drive. I can't afford them up for cheap. Yeah, I can't afford to replace it. It's a five drive box and I only replace two. Oh no.

[C]

Well, and then and Paul pointed out in the members chat that he had a drive go bad and that Amazon, rather than warranting it, just gave him his purchase price back. But that's only going to cover half of replacing it. Right. And there have been other companies who are doing that sort of thing too where they don't want to deal with the warranty issues. I trust that Apple will not be that way here. But I have had this thought in my head where I'm going Oh man. I've got, got a, you know, almost three year old MacBook Pro. It has 128 gigs of RAM in it. I sure hope nothing happens to it. A I'd hoped that I'd be able to upgrade this year. Looking at pricing and everything else, I just, I just don't think that I'm gonna be able to necessarily do that because it's gonna be so much more than what I already spent. And I already spent a lot of money on it three years ago, but now I'm like, okay, well, I sure hope nothing happens to this thing because me too. Who knows how long, you know, if it was the screen or something else, I'm sure they would deal with it. But I'm like, I don't know how many of these things they have, you know, held back to do warranty replacements. I trust that Apple would figure something out. But this is going to become a problem, I think with other companies who are, it's not so easy to be able to be like, okay, well, you know, your device broke and you're under warranty now. We're going to replace, you know, your drive for you. Whatever. It's like, okay with what?

[A]

It's time to invest in. Buy now, pay later companies. That's for sure. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Home of the Mechanical Donut with Andy Inako, freshly shorn with the mini mini chops and visiting friends.

[B]

Wait, I've got this. It's the speed chops. More aerodynamic for hot weather.

[A]

His new site, innotco.com is up and running and your membership is much appreciated. Great content there. In fact, at this point, Andy, I'm just going to let you do all the show rundowns. You do a much better job than I do. Thank you for all your contributions. Christina Warren, of course, film girl everywhere. She is in developer relations at GitHub and my personal AI guru. So I appreciate all you. You do. Christina, we are so glad to have you here. A very, very valued newest member of the MacBreak weekly panel and Jason Snell. I didn't get to talk about all the colored ink last week. I hope Mike helped get all that out of your system.

[D]

Spilled a lot of colors last week. Yeah, it's true.

[A]

6colors.com Apple made a lot of money.

[D]

That's all you need to know.

[A]

Yeah, Apple made a ton of money.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Still great coverage. Everybody should join sixcolors. Com.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

Glad to have you on Mac Break weekly. Time for our weekly Mark Gurman report. Actually, Mark kind of found Something interesting to talk about here. We are three weeks or four weeks away from Apple's big iPhone event and his story on Sunday. Apple explores shaking up its smartwatch for a new era. This is a response to AI, isn't it? What are they going to do? Not. It won't happen this year.

[D]

I think it's also, I mean, this feels like it's, it's, it's like Apple has been resting on the one Apple Watch for more than a decade, where they thought, we'll make an iPhone that's a watch. And there is this rise of all of these, like, I wear it or screenless bands and, and smart rings and all of that. And, and I. It feels to me like as they're making changes at Apple, people are looking at wearables, home and accessories and going, what's going on over there? Like, is anything happening at all? Because I like my Apple Watch. I think the Apple Watch is a very nice product, but why is that the only one they make? It doesn't. And I hear from people who are like, I don't want a computer watch, but I like the idea of the health sensors. And some people will end up getting bullied into wearing an Apple Watch that they don't want to wear. But, like, I also have friends who love those health bands that have no screen or a tiny screen that has almost nothing. It's super simple. Like, why would. And we're all talking about syncing with your iPhone and single with Apple Health. Like, why wouldn't you make other products? So Gurman says maybe they will. Although this is early days. They're like, they're talking about it now. Which, you know, the best, best time to talk about doing something other than the Apple Watch was five years ago. Second best time is now. Great, let's talk about it now. But like, they should. Absolutely. I mean, because the health platform they've got is great, but like one size does not fit all. So the idea that they could have not just different Apple watches, but other health wearables that might fit into people's lives. I was thinking I would. I don't like wearing my Apple Watch to sleep, so I don't use any of the sleep tracking.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

And like, I might buy a band for sleep and then put on my watch during the day, but if I do, it won't be from Apple because Apple just doesn't make that product.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, this is so this is the Fitbit Air that I got one for review and I had to actually buy one for myself. Because I just like it so much. This. That's Jason. That's exactly like what we're talking about. It's like, I like the. I like the Apple watch. I respect the Apple watch, but I just don't have room for an Apple Watch, like, in my lifestyle. I want this. A very, very simple light.

[A]

I bought that Casio watch you talked about two weeks ago. I might add 17 bucks. How could I not buy it?

[B]

I like this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, there's. There's a meme from Top Gear where. Where Jeremy Clarkson is like, like, the difference between, like, the super, super high tech, like, supercar, but this, like, little simple, little car like, this is brilliant. But I like this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And the. I mean, there's so much opportunity. Because not only. Not only that, but see, the part of the brilliance of this design is that it's not built into the band. It pops. All the electronics just pop straight out, which just.

[A]

Like a Fitbit.

[B]

Exactly. Well, exactly.

[C]

Well, it was a Fitbit.

[A]

It is a Fitbit.

[B]

It's not just to attempt.

[A]

Thank you, Google, for not killing it. I'm.

[B]

There's a. Google did something really, really interesting where they basically say they published like, this.

[A]

That looks exactly like the original Fitbit that I lost in the wash four times.

[B]

No, it looks like the original Nike Apple.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Oh, the thing that went in your shoes.

[C]

I loved that. I loved that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But. But the thing that makes this brilliant is that. So Google decided early on, say, guess what? Here are the complete CAD plans for the holder for the. The. The receptacle for this. So if anybody, including any commercial entity, wants to build. Make something that this snaps into, go for it. And so that's why the people who, like, want to wear it on an armband, great. It's what you can. You can wear this, like, on your. On your bicep, like. Like the. Like some competitors do. I bought a.

[D]

Some.

[B]

A group started 3D printing an adapter that just simply, like, attaches to, like, any watch band. So if I wanted to just basically be. Not. Not even be wearing, like, this thing on my other wrist, but basically integrate this into any watch band that I want so I can wear whatever watch I want, I could wear my $5,000 Rolex. I don't own a $5,000 Rolex, but I don't even know how much a Rolex cost, and I'm thinking It's probably a $22,000 Rolex. But anyway, basically, the idea of the. The idea that if I want to integrate this into whatever device Whatever thing I want to wear, wherever I want to wear, I can do that. And like Jason said, it's like, it's brilliant, it's lovely, your Apple Watch, but it's not for everybody. It doesn't matter. It doesn't. No one's going to get the, that customer is not going to get the benefits of this because they don't want to. They don't want to wear it when they sleep. This is, this is lightweight enough that I do wear it when I sleep. It's like, because there's no big strap or buckle on the bottom of it, I don't have to take it off when I'm like at my keyboard for like eight hours a day and because it has this big lump underneath me. So that's not, that's not saying that the Apple Watch is a bad design, it's just that it's been, it was just, it was introduced a long, long time ago and a lot new ideas have come across. The Apple health software and ecosystem is still top notch, but the Apple Watch itself has been equaled by so many other companies and so many other products and exceeded from certain points of view and others. So it is long past time for Apple to give access to, basically to give access to people who again, have looked at your Apple Watch. Respects the Apple Watch, but I do not have room for an Apple Watch in my life.

[A]

So they're thinking about ceramic white coming back, which would be great. They haven't done that since 2016. They're thinking about a round face, according to German.

[D]

Yeah. He says that they're like, not that hard. Not that hard.

[A]

Not that hard. Thinking a little, kind of had a dream.

[D]

They thought about it. They don't, they don't like it so much. But yeah, I think other good, other wearables are probably a better move for them than the Apple Watch. As, as computer people we tend to tend to frame this as. Are they going to replace the Apple Watch with the new product? It's like the Apple Watch has been around more than a decade. It's iconic. You look at watches out there like Andy's Casio watch that Leo also has, like, these are things that last for, they're around for decades as a design. I don't think the Apple Watch as we know it, the series is going anywhere but make other ones. Right? You could make more than one product.

[C]

Apple.

[D]

Hello.

[C]

Well, I was going to say, like having a sleep one alone would be to me one of the easiest things to do because I have an Hermes edition Apple Watch. So which, okay, whatever. It's great and I love the band and what I can put on like a elastic band, but that means, because it was, you know, sixteen hundred dollars or whatever, and then the band was more than that, we're not going to talk about it. I'm not going to wear that to sleep, period.

[A]

But you could bridle a horse with it. So that's the good.

[C]

Well, maybe, but like, you know, but it's stainless steel and I'm not going, I'm not going to wear that to sleep. So I don't get any of the advantages of, you know, the sleep tracking stuff. Now I have an older Apple watch that I could pair and I could wear that to sleep and then, you know, switch between the two, you know, one up, but they make that clunky. But like, there are plenty of situations where even if you were comfortable wearing your watch to sleep in. Okay, well, now when I wake up in the morning, I have to charge it because it's going to be dead. And, you know, there are a lot of other things. So, yeah, having a ring, having another sort of wristband, having other form factors so that can tie into this ecosystem. I think that would be great. And it wouldn't take anything away from the Apple Watch. To Jason's points, it's iconic. It's been around for 11 years. It's. Or, yeah, 11. Right. And it's, you know, been very, very successful. I think when they tried it as fashion, it failed. As soon as they pivoted it to, you know, fitness and health, it became a huge success. And I feel like that's an opportunity for them to go even harder in that direction. Especially if you were like, in a perfect world, you open it up in some way to have trusted partners create, you know, you know, wearable type of activity activities the same way that you have certain other devices that can talk to Apple health, like where Apple wouldn't even have to be the ones to, to do all of it. But yeah, I think that it'd be, it'd be great for them to expand into this area because I think at this point I'm not, I'm not claiming that like the Apple watch market is dead or anything, but I do feel it's saturated to a certain point where I don't know how many new people are going to buy an Apple Watch, if that makes sense. Right. Like, I feel like the people that

[B]

you're going to get and get more

[C]

people, which is a ton of people, to be clear. But I don't feel like there's like this huge hockey stick of growth, you know, beyond that. I feel at this point, you know, most people who thought they wanted a smartwatch or in the Apple ecosystem have, you know, looked at an Apple watch or have bought one even if they ultimately kept the Rolex or something else.

[A]

Excuse the knocking. There is a person on the other side of the wall behind me who's trying to tear our house down and just, you know, you know, it's normal. It's normal. Yes. Hello. Hello,

[D]

Johnny.

[B]

You got there before Johnny.

[A]

A little ax in his hand. Yeah. Something important. I don't want to let this slide. There is a very important update to your Mac OS. If you're using 26 or even an

[C]

older one or even 25.

[A]

Yeah, there was a bug in screen sharing which would allow an attacker. They'd have to be on your network. So that's, you know, probably not likely but if they were, they could authenticate to screen sharing without valid credentials. In other words, see what you're doing. This has been fixed. Kind of an out of band update that Apple pushed out. So everybody should apply that if it's offered, you know, if they're on your network. I guess the real risk would be if you were at a hotel or an airport or somewhere on a shared network that, that could be risky. At a coffee shop somebody could be looking over your shoulder without looking over your shoulder. Also a new report. You had it at your blog. Jason6colors.com, Dan Moran writing it up that Apple's private relay may not be as private as thought. This comes from 404's Joseph Cox. He's been really looking at all this. He was the guy who, you know, told us last month about the Hide My Email flaw. It's apparently due to the implementation of passkeys.

[D]

So yeah, it's wild. It's basically like passkeys take a different path that reveals who you are. I mean it is a classic bug, right, where there's like, they're handled differently and one of them is not going through the pathway that privatizes information and oops. But you know, you also get the vibe that these features were built and then sort of like left by the side of the road and that there's nobody like actively working to make them better as so often happens with new Apple features. And yeah, that's, that's kind of disappointing. But hopefully they'll, they'll address. This is not a huge deal but it does make you feel like, you know, is anybody paying attention to this.

[A]

Well, you know there's, every software is going to have bugs and I think some of this is because we now have very good AI tools to find these bugs that we're studying.

[D]

That's probably part of it.

[C]

I'm sure that's how we found it.

[D]

Of course Apple is also using good AI tools to try and find their bugs and you end up in this very weird kind of state. But I, I wonder if these icloud privacy features are being looked at in that way or if they're just, we're not quite sure who's in charge of those.

[B]

But it's also, but it's also like it's, it's established it, it establishes a need to take a look at Apple's track record. We're not so far away from the hide my email privacy problem which Apple knew about for an entire year without really doing much about it. Regarding the proxy browser leak and WebKit, the makers of Silo, which is a privacy focused browser, basically a did a really good job documenting also the proxy protest problem. But also I think they put this on their socials basically saying that you know what, we are not confident. They basically issued a vote of no confidence in Apple's ability or interest in fixing this really big problem really quickly. So that's why they're informing all their users that we have basically disabled certain features in WebKit that might affect your compatibility of our browser with, with the entirety of the web. But we feel as though given that what we are selling you with this browser is privacy and security, we cannot allow this unpatched bug to be in our software anymore. But again it seems like the responsible thing to do given the nature of their browser. But it really was a vote of no confidence. They did cite not only the hide my email problem but also they cited personal experience that they have had with the. Excuse me, that they claim to have had with the App Store about. Look, we're telling you about this problem. When are you going to fix it? Well, maybe we will, maybe we won't. And again it's Apple starting to have, it's not a crisis by any definition, but they are starting to. I think that there is, we're getting towards a point where Apple kind of needs to start talking about this sort of stuff. And even if they're not directly addressing this, they're basically saying we're going to be a little bit more, more open. We're going to be a little bit more open about how we process these security vulnerabilities when we get these reports basically to restore faith and confidence that if a bug is reported we immediately jump on it. And if we have not updated it, if we've not fixed it in six months time, it's not because we don't care or that we don't have a process. It's because there is a correct time for us to release that into the main os. And that time was not now, it was four months from now.

[C]

The part that bothers me about a lot of this honestly is just the fact that, and this came up when I was on clockwise last week is, is the fact that like this is part of a paid service ostensibly. That's because otherwise like bugs happen and, and I'm glad that they are acting, it seems like more quickly than they were before. I will also similarly with the way I felt about like the, you know, private email. I, I never personally looked at the private relay as actually being all that secure a break. Sometimes if you use it for certain things, you'd have to turn it off a B. Like I just, my personal threat model was such that I was like if I, I, I, I'm not, you know, using this as my way to try to feel like this is the end all, be all security. Having said that, I do think that it is, it's a little bit, I understand how hard it is to try to maintain software and, and keep up with all your different features and your bugs and different teams and whatnot. And I understand that better than most people. Right. And I can give a lot of leeway to that. Where it is a little bit frustrating is when this is bundled as part of a paid service and then when these types of things happen and I am glad that they acted, you know, at least in this instance it seems like, or hopefully they're going to act as quickly as they can. But when you're talking about the other instances where they've just let things go for a long time and it hasn't been prioritized, that's really disappointing especially when in your, in the iOS ecosystem you don't have alternatives. For instance with the, you know, with the web browser and things that you can use. And that's, that's frustrating.

[A]

It's time for thanks to Andy Inacco, the Vision Pro segment. Who would have thought Andy Inako be the church chief advocate for Vision Pro content on this show now this week

[D]

we actually have something to talk about finally.

[A]

So that's a big story. Friday Night Football.

[D]

No, football.

[A]

Baseball.

[D]

Baseball, yep.

[A]

On clear hearts and clear high. Anyway, no no, no, that's football.

[C]

That's football.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

The lights are brighter there.

[D]

They're doing the thing we assumed that they would do when they invented day one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Pull it out.

[D]

Baseball.

[A]

Jason, you want to pull it out? I can tell you want to pull it out. Just pull it out.

[D]

I mean, it's right here, but it's like. I know it's ready to get ready to watch some baseball at the end of the month. So they're going to do four immersive baseball games. Wow. And the question is, why did they

[A]

do this a few years ago?

[D]

Well, you know, if you can think back to when Alex was on the show, that blackmagic camera and the live version of it took a long time to come to fruition, and that's what enabled them to do those Lakers games that they did. The big difference here is. Well, there's two big differences. One is this is on apple TV plus or Apple TV now. So you won't have to have, like, a charter cable subscription in L. A to watch the Lakers. Right. Like, everybody basically who has Apple TV will get to watch this if they've got a vision pro. And if you've got a vision pro and you're not paying for Apple tv, I don't even know what to tell you. Like, that seems weird. Anyway, it is. So they're going to use, presumably, a bunch of those blackmagic live cameras, and they figured out how to do it. The other big difference, though, is a basketball court is tiny and baseball stadiums are enormous.

[A]

Yeah. How are they going to cover it?

[D]

Where do they. That is what I can't wait to see again. This is all basically, like, so new, really. The reason this is interesting is it's like early days of tv, and it's like, what is a TV show? Like, is it just a play that we run, record, or do we do other things? Well, like, what is an immersive baseball game? Like, what makes that good? And are you sitting behind home plate? Are you in the outfield?

[C]

Are you.

[D]

Yeah. Can you switch? Are they switching for me? Do they switch too much? Do they switch too little? They're going to have, like, the. Like, their NBA broadcast. They're going to have a bespoke, immersive broadcast. They will have different announcers for the immersive broadcast. And they also said something fun, which is like, the regular broadcast has ads. And they said, no, no, we're not doing ads for the immersive broadcast. The immersive broadcast. You're going to stay in the stadium and there's going to be, like, stadium vibe in the stadium. I don't know, like, will there be

[A]

a T shirt again?

[D]

Again, Leaving aside all of the baggage of the Vision Pro, I would just say I love to see stuff like this because I don't know what they're going to do. And I love baseball and I love going to baseball games, but, like, there are so many different choices they could make. And I'm sure we will. We will all debate after they start.

[A]

Will they cover it like the FIFA World cup, where they just sit with it, you know, wide angle shot on the whole stadium?

[C]

We don't know. I don't know.

[D]

You can't. You can't be close because there's no such thing as close. The stadium is enormous.

[C]

Right?

[D]

They switch, like, all of that. So anyway, there's four of them. Starts with the Yankees, Red Sox. I got a Giants, Dodgers. They got a Dodgers.

[A]

They've picked good games. These are massive rivalries. The Sox and the Yankees. The Dodgers and the Giants. The Phillies and the Mets. The Reds at the Brewers. I mean, no, that's too.

[D]

That's too many.

[A]

Well, I'm looking at the newsroom. It says, here's the schedule.

[C]

There are four days, Jason, but there are actually seven games.

[A]

Yeah, these are all the games. So you're going to be able to watch. I don't. You probably. It depends on your market. Because I noticed this. Angels of pirates, 6, 30.

[D]

No, okay.

[A]

No, no, no, wait.

[C]

I'm wrong, I'm wrong.

[D]

No, they're only doing.

[A]

Oh, I see, they put a little logo on it. There you go. So this is the schedule.

[D]

On the 28th, they're doing Red Sox at Yankees. On the 4th, it's Angels at Pirates, Great Stadium. 11th, Padres at Giants, Great Stadium. And then September 18th, the Giants at the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, where cows go to die.

[A]

So, yeah, I want. You know what, that's where I'm going to buy a Dodger Dog and have it shipped up to me just so I can.

[D]

Just so you can get the full immersion.

[A]

I have been in the bleachers at Dodger Stadium with a Dodger Dog, and it's a great experience.

[D]

And by the way, also, I was saying about the NBA stuff being so limited, and then they were supposed to have playbacks. I could never get the playbacks to work. Right. This one, it's available live and of course as a replay, and it's in the US And Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the

[A]

UK So like, baseball loves this. That's great.

[D]

All these places. If you've got a Vision one Pro you will be able to see what would immersive baseball be like? And that's the question that, you know, we get to have at least a first answer to starting on 28.

[A]

They also let you listen to the radio if you're in the US and Canada. The local radio, the home, it's a

[D]

nice touch for the Friday night baseball. They got all.

[A]

I hate when I hated the network announcers. I wanted to hear Ron Fairly. I want to hear our local announcement. And so I used to do that and it's hard to sync it up. And so I'm really glad that they're doing that. It's a nice feature too. I wonder how much do you think how much this has to do with Alex Lindsay.

[D]

I'm sure he's involved to some degree. I mean, they've been experimenting with this stuff before. But he's one of the people down there who cares about this stuff. So I'm sure if he were here,

[A]

he would help from day one. Right?

[D]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, live sports, right, is a whole other level. And I think when we talk about the Vision Pro or a product like it and it being relevant to consumers, something like this is the way that that would first happen is like if you could do live sports really, really, really well. Live theater is another one that I keep thinking of. Like these are things that could sell a headset, maybe not a thirty dollar five hundred headset, but maybe a fifteen hundred dollar headset in a way that, that could drive some use of these kinds of products. So right now it's just an experiment, but I'm looking forward to it as a baseball fan especially now.

[A]

I want to start a conspiracy.

[D]

Oh, let's do it.

[A]

Because these games, some of them at least, probably two of them will be after the big announcements. And I noticed they're brought to you by Essalor. Okay. Am I. Maybe I'm pulling, maybe I'm pulling the straws, but those are the eyeglass manufacturers.

[C]

Oh yeah. I

[B]

was going to say I've only seen the Lord of the Rings movies. I haven't seen. Read all the books, so I don't know all the characters.

[A]

No, not Erebor Esselor.

[D]

The.

[A]

I think that's Exotica. That's their new name. That's the people who make the Ray Bans for Meta.

[C]

I was going to say they make Meta's things.

[A]

I mean, I'm just saying maybe that's. That's really pushing it. But Apple certainly isn't ready with glasses.

[C]

No.

[A]

Does SLR make the lenses in your Vision Pros?

[D]

I don't know. They don't.

[A]

They don't. So why would SLR sponsor this?

[D]

They're sponsoring Friday night baseball. Not this particular thing, just the Friday

[A]

night baseball run in general.

[B]

Getting. Getting the name out there, even though

[A]

they're not with the first game of each weekly doubleheader presented by Slor. And actually the first games are only August 28th and September 4th, so.

[D]

That's right.

[A]

Take it all back. That boy, you debunked that rumor fast.

[D]

Sorry.

[A]

I was going to call Mark Gurman and everything.

[D]

He's just been Vision Proed.

[A]

I've been Vision Proed, by the way.

[B]

Jason Snell, Joy Popper.

[A]

Boom. There is another one down. There is another Vision Pro story. Not quite as exciting as that. Andy, I'm going to let you do the honor since you found it.

[B]

Okay. Well, this is a project on GitHub to allow, like Android APKs for Android VR apps to be run on Vision Pro hardware.

[C]

That's cool.

[B]

And still.

[C]

Excuse me, I said that's cool.

[B]

Yeah. I'm sorry, it's still early days, but they say they've already got Beat Saber pretty much working. And they have also said that Steam, like they get the Steam VR Link library running in Toto. They say that they're, they're, they're working on Steam VR Link, improving general generalizability, build tooling still work in progress. But the idea of just if all that happens is people can play Beat Saber on this device that will rescue so many of these devices from so many drawers and lead so many people to break so many wrists and fingers. Because it's such a great game.

[C]

It is a great game.

[B]

Most of the injuries you get from VR are like swinging. Swinging.

[A]

I have to admit that's the only game I played on the Meta Quest more than once. And it was really fun.

[C]

It was a really fun game. Yeah. I mean, I love seeing a project like this. I do think that this is, to me, the saddest part of the failure of the Vision Pro is that the developer ecosystem never happened for so many reasons that we've discussed on the show. I won't relitigate that. But it's nice that we're finally seeing, two and a half years later some stuff like this because, yeah, being able to run the APKs and the quest and the Android XR stuff on Vision os, even if it's not perfect, that's pretty Compelling. That's pretty cool. Certainly would never say you should go buy a Vision Pro for this or for baseball, but if you have it to Andy's point, you can pull it out of the drawer now.

[B]

And it's good to see, like, people just have developers saying, gee, wouldn't be great if we could do this on Vision Pro. And then because they are clever and because they're determined and they think it's a good idea. And to be clear, this isn't running Android on Vision Pro, right? Basically, there's compiled so libraries that are responsible for these VR apps. And this team have figured out a way to. To basically translate that into retrospective Apple like libraries. And that runs underneath a runtime that they've also created.

[A]

I love it that the project is called Klepton. Same root as Kleptomaniac. We're stealing apps for the Vision Pro. Nice job. Nice job. Actually, one of our. One of our club members, Nightscape, has apparently built. He's watching the show right now in his Vision Pro, so.

[C]

That's so cool.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

People are doing stuff with vibe code, I guess you're vibe coding, right? Nightscape. That's pretty cool. All right, one last break and then it is your picks of the week. I'm giving you fair warning, ladies and gentlemen. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. And

[C]

now you see, now you know. We're done talking. The Vision program again.

[D]

I almost forgot that vital four times.

[A]

The vital period at the end.

[D]

I mean, if we're going to do it, do it, we got to do it right, or we're going to get trapped in a long line of parentheses. And that's very bad.

[A]

As a programmer, I'm completely comfortable with that. Actually, I haven't. I haven't coded in lisp since AI came to town.

[B]

Bang. Forever, man.

[A]

Yeah, man, I tell you, this was

[B]

the AI language of the future, Remember?

[A]

It was. Now it's go and rust. You know, it's funny. My agents were programming furiously all last night, and I said, what was. You know, there was review back and forth. They were going back. So what's going on? They said, it's 148 lines of bash. He said, what are you. What are you doing working in bash? They said, well, the original software reported was in Bash. I said, dude, cut. Cut the pain, man, and the sand. Sanity. And then I said, I bet you can rewrite it and go in about five minutes. And they did. So no more bash. I said, no more bash. Okay, Don't. Don't do that to yourselves. Also here, Christina Warren and Jason Snell. So pleased to have all of you. Jason, how's the history podcast going to.

[D]

Oh, man. We're going to launch with our episodes that we previewed later this month. And then the first week in September, the whole thing kicks off. Our first full series is about Apple's OS crisis, the System 7, System 8, Copeland, Gershwin be next. The whole thing that ends up culminating in Steve Jobs standing on stage at Macworld Expo.

[A]

If you can get to the bottom of that, I have to hear that.

[D]

There's just fun stories to tell. And we have John Syracusa who wrote all the definitive like Mac OS X reviews in the early days. He's our guest for that. He has blisters on his fingers from those movies. So that's what we're kicking it off. And then we're going to roll into the, you know, this October, November is the 25th anniversary of the ipod. So after that series we're going to do a history of the ipod origins. Story of the ipod, really. So I've been writing a lot and we've got a lot of episodes kind of in flight right now in order to do the launch so people can check it out. Designed FM Nice.

[A]

Very exciting. Congratulations on that. Thank you. And Christina Warren, you came back from Berlin all refreshed, talking to developers and all excited. What's going on in your life there? GitHub?

[C]

Yeah, I mean we've got, we're releasing updates to GitHub Copilot all the time. We launched the Kim K3 model on GitHub Copilot at the end of last week.

[A]

Oh, I bet that was popular.

[C]

Yeah, definitely. And it's a very, very good model, I have to say.

[A]

Have you played with it?

[C]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, it's funny because one of the things that I did because I was making the demo video to go out on social and I said, okay, you know, I gave it a screenshot and I said, okay, you know, create a flappy bird style game based on the Screenshot, make it GitHub themed and retro. And it was like a terminal like Screenshot from the GitHub clique. And it actually, its first pass was quite good. I then wanted to refine it and make the little robot look a little bit better. But yeah, I was able to in just a couple of minutes and very inexpensively create like a fully HTML5. Exactly. That you can play. This is live on GitHub. I'll put a link in the chat.

[A]

So Kimmy wrote this in one Shot.

[C]

I had to go back and forth maybe twice, but the crux of it was basically one shot, which was excellent.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

Wow. So it's a good coding. What did it write it in?

[C]

Just HTML and JavaScript.

[A]

Oh, that's what you said. Yeah.

[C]

Which is nice because it even put in sounds, which is actually pretty fun too. So I was basically just looking for something that I do a lot of test projects where I can. Exactly.

[A]

That's very funny.

[C]

No, it's very good. It's very good. And, you know, usually when I'm making these videos, I just. I, you know, build a bunch of tests and toy projects. And this was one where I was so impressed with even its first shot. It wasn't completely perfect, but I said, okay, we'll make the pipes get lines instead. And then, you know, make. Make the. Make the robot.

[A]

Oh, they're get lines. Oh, I didn't even get that. Yeah, this is pretty cool.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, it was. It's. It's. It's dumb and, like, there are things that I could go back and modify with, but the fact that it took me a few minutes and then I could just immediately get up pages.

[A]

Amazing. It's not cheap.

[C]

No, but it's a lot cheaper than, you know, other models that Fable. Right. Or even Opus. Right. Like, obviously, like 56 SOL is a really good model and. And I'm not taking anything away from that, but I was very impressed. It was one of those things where I went into it with fairly low expectations, and I gave it a screenshot, went back and forth, and what I was able to get out of it, and then I've used it on some other tasks too, and I've been very, very impressed with what it can output.

[A]

Have you published Flappy Copilot somewhere?

[C]

I have, yeah. It's on GitHub, actually. I'll put it in the Discord Find my window film.

[A]

Filmgirl. GitHub IO flappy dash copilot.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

You can play the game.

[C]

You can play the game. And maybe I will. This would take more work, but, you know, if I deployed it to a different place, I had a database layer. I could have, like a high score, you know, type of thing or whatnot. But just the fact that this was.

[A]

It's kind of mind blowing that you can just do this.

[C]

Well, the fact that, like I said, because usually I try to work on, like, real projects and I wanted to show something visually, you know, for the purpose of the video. And I was just. I was shocked. I was like, oh, okay, this Actually is quite fun. This is. This is really cute.

[A]

So, wow, we live in Amazing times, Kimmy. K3 and Copilot. And of course, now you have that desktop app. Makes it even easier.

[C]

Absolutely.

[A]

Or harness, I guess I should say not a desktop app, but the Copilot harness. What do you call it?

[C]

Well, we call it the Get a Copilot. I mean, it is the Harness, but it's the desktop app. It's mainly basically the same thing as the GitHub copilot CLI, which is the harness, but we've created a desktop application. Application you can use on Mac, Windows and Linux to maintain your sessions and preview things and whatnot. That was actually part of the fun as it was building loads up the web server automatically so I can test it out as it's going back and forth. That's when I was able to basically be like, okay, this is great, but let's refine this a little bit. You know, let's make the pipes get lines, let's make the robot look a little bit like that.

[A]

And one of the things I love about these harnesses is the ability to retain the session and go back to it. So all the context is there and you can just pick it up. I think that's really a nice convenience, quality of life feature.

[C]

It's nice too, because this is the case not just on our Harness, but on a lot of them. But the sessions will maintain themselves and you can can pick them up from other devices too, and from other services. So, for instance, if I start something on my computer, I can also use VS code, or I can pick up those sessions. As long as I have the remote kind of thing enabled, then I'm able to resume those sessions even from another device, which is really nice.

[A]

That's really nice. Yeah. My quicksilver told me the other day I have 22 gigabytes of sessions and that maybe I would like to prune that tree at some point. I said, well, it's a four terabyte drive. I guess we can leave it for a while. You're watching Mac Break Weekly time for our picks of the week, and I think Jason Snell should kick this off. Hi, Jason.

[D]

Sure. I get a lot of newsletters. A lot of people do that now. There's newsletters. Substack sort of started something.

[A]

But everybody's got a newsletter.

[D]

Everybody's got a little newsletter, substance, stack a button down, a ghost, whatever. They're all over the place. And I was thinking to myself, and I think I made a joke on a podcast Where I said, you know, probably shouldn't do this, but it's an interesting idea. Like, what if you made a reader app like, well, or put it as an email client for newsletters. What if you did that?

[A]

I like that. That's a good idea.

[D]

And somebody did. It's called Letterbox with two X's at Letterboxwith2X's app. It's in the App Store. It's a Mac app. Right now, I think he's working on an iPad and iOS or iPad and iPhone app. But this is what it is. If you look. I don't think mail clients are good for reading. I think they're kind of unpleasant. They're for email. They're certainly not for newsletters. And so you can do a few things. I pipe them into RSS for the most part now. I do it that way and then use an RSS reader. But this is an actually really good idea, which is maybe instead of just having an email client for email, you also have a newsletter reader client, and it looks at your email and it'll follow rules and it'll find the newsletters that you want where you want them, and then you can just scan around and read those newsletters in the app. And, like, if email's gonna be your content delivery medium, maybe try an email client that designed to help your reading be better your reading experience. It's just a really good idea. I like this idea a lot because I read a lot of stuff in newsletters now. And again, email client is not the place to do it. It just isn't. It's just not very good in an email client. So letterboxd is a really interesting idea. I hope the developer developer keeps going with it, because I find a lot of my best content these days comes from newsletters I subscribe to. And in fact, as RSS feeds from a lot of big commercial news organizations fade away, one of the things you can do is subscribe to their newsletter, which is a daily list of links or whatever, however, often about the subject you're interested in. And I do that for the newspapers I subscribe to now is I just get their newsletter, because then I can tap on all those links to read those articles. So the newsletter ends up being the front end instead of the rss. Not ideal. I like rss, but it's not a bad fallback. And, you know, again, don't read your newsletters in an email client. That's not a good reading experience. So letterboxd, it's a nice idea.

[A]

This is very cool. And you know who else likes this? All those newsletter people who are sending me newsletters. They're just ending up in a pile right, in my email client.

[D]

And so you don't have to manage them like you manage email now. You manage them like you manage your reader app, because your reader app looks at it, right?

[C]

I love this. I've had the same idea before, Jason. Like, I've literally thought this to myself. I really wish that I had an app just for my newsletters, right. The closest I've come is using feedbin, where I basically kind of try to assign things.

[D]

That's what I do.

[C]

Email address and forward it and use it that way. And that's. That's okay. But I like this. You can either use a dedicated email or you can connect it to your own thing. I think this is great.

[D]

It's a good idea, right? Like, as absurd as it is to say an email client for newsletters, actually think of it more like Instapaper or some other. Or an RSS reader using your. Using email as the transfer, as the delivery method.

[C]

Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, it's funny because I had. When I was thinking about this idea, I'm glad that someone else did it. I was like, well, what do I call this? A newsreader. And then I was like, that's actually kind of funny that we're almost going back in time to like the Usenet of old, which. Which I don't actually even have any real experience with other than downloading things illegally off the Internet. But, you know, I never actually used a newsreader for mailing lists. But, like, it feels like, well, that made sense, right? There was like a dedicated application for that type of communication.

[A]

And instead, how does it know that it's a newsletter? I mean, I. Presumably getting your email, it's looking for some signals.

[D]

And also I think you can set it up to, like, look in particular labels or mailboxes or follow rules or set it to senders and say this is a newsletter. And then build your newsletter kind of subscription list that way. Yeah, it's a good idea.

[A]

Very cool. I like that idea. Andy Inaco, your pick of the week.

[B]

My pick is a kind of a treat that I bought for myself. I've got a. I do have subscriptions to streaming services. However, like the truth, as the. As the saying goes, for Cloudstream, it is always like the. My physical media collection of like, music that I've ripped or downloaded and put on my media server because I feel as though I don't want to have to. I'm happy to pay Spotify X dollars a month for access to every single piece of music that's ever available if I want to just sample stuff. But the thing is like I want to make sure that my Dave, my David Bowie albums, I never have to. I'm never required to pay money to get access to all the music that I've deemed like worthy of actually owning. And so I decided to upgrade my Sony Walkman. So thanks to the MBW pics site I found out that my previous Sony Walkman, the NWA 55 was a pick in episode 700. I've upgraded now to the NWA 306 Sony Walkman. This is actually made by Sony, it is a Sony Walkman product and it is like in Mac terms or Apple terms, this is like the, it is like the ipod that used to run iOS. This actually runs Android Ipod Touch kind of thing. Thank you very much. The Ipod Touch, which I don't know why I wish they would they bring that back because this device reminds me of exactly how useful that sort of thing is. The old player that I had was again it was not, was not Android but didn't have an app store with it. It just had a built in music player which is great. But the thing is like this runs Android so it means that not only can it run, doesn't it? Yes, it comes with a Sony Walkman app, but also if I want to replace it with a better music app like Music oled, then I can replace it with whatever music app I want. And because it has a micro SD slot that accepts cards of up to 1 terabyte, I literally have every album I have ever, every track of music I have ever collected accessible on on Shuffle Play on this device. And unlike the previous one, this is actually quite sprightly. But not only that, but I also have Spotify on this and I also end up my downloaded playlist. I have Apple Music on this. I. I have the Audible music player on this. I even have YouTube on it because it can actually play video. Not really well, but it can play video. Like if I want to download an audiobook that's been posted on YouTube I can do that just fine. It runs the Google Play Store so I also have Google Drive installed on it or and Dropbox so that if I have music that's basically in the cloud because again I can install any music player app I want, I can point it at that cloud storage folder and now it can basically stream from any cloud folder that I want. Basically it means that no matter how you enjoy music, this will play it for you. Now you might ask, well, not cheap, is it?

[C]

No, but although it's cheaper than it used to be.

[A]

Oh, it's cheap.

[B]

Well again it depends on your version of cheap. Just to wind things up, I mean the question is, is always going to be, well, you have a phone that can also run iOS or run Android. Why bother like getting a separate device a particularly in this day and age to get enough storage to put like several hundred gigabytes of music on it. The idea of I don't want to just sync certain albums or certain playlists, I want everything available on this. Ask yourself how much it's going to cost for five 12 gigabytes of storage or more like on a phone. But the other, the other thing is that this is my phone and this is the Walkman. It is more portable, it's more tiny. But also on top of all of that it is a music player. It has a headphone jack. It also has dedicated like push buttons on the side for volume up, volume down, skip tracks, things like that. And the number of times when even when I'm just streaming to like my home stereo or like my home speakers to just like pick this up like it's a remote control and just click a next track button. There's just something that's a lot more satisfying about it. I also really like the fact that this is a separate device with a separate battery so that I'm not basically wasting battery on this. I'm also not getting notifications on this because I don't have any social media apps or messaging apps, miss messaging apps on it. Downsides you do. You didn't say the, the, the bad part which is that this lists at $399 that the. I will use that opportunity to say that you can buy even higher fidelity versions of this kind of thing for $1,000. Even Sony makes some that are close but those are the audio file like Balance Gold, Solid Gold, whatever. But you can also buy if you don't want something quite as ambitious of this. There are Android based music players from names manufacturers you might not actually recognize like FIO or high buy that can actually cost $100 or less and they're not nearly as featurific as this and they're a lot slower than this but it will still allow you to play local music. It will still allow you to install Spotify or Apple Music. It'll work just fine. Other disadvantages is that battery management is that of a phone style Device meaning that there are always. Even if I put it into. I would love to be able to turn this with the, with the old machine because it was just a music player. If I actually powered it off in 2 weeks time I could power it back on again and I would still have my 72% battery left on this one. It is like any other device that you've got that runs an operating system where I power it off and then, then if I come back to it four or five days later, the battery's dead because there was some sort of a process in the background waiting to, to light the screen up in case I touch a button or something. So that's a, that's a bummer. It's not a debilitating bummer, but it's the sort of thing where I have to kind of remember to put it on the charger like before I board like a train, Amtrak for three or four hours or at least bring my battery pack with me. Also, if you're expecting this to be as lively as a phone, they did. It is older hardware to older lower power hardware. So it's not as responsive as you would find on another. On a modern device, but it's responsive enough. It's perfectly fine. Again, if you're, if you were looking for the ability to play lots and lots and lots of music files, you own all the way up to the most highest definition files that you can get. Even streaming to high definition earphones with spatial audio. This will handle all of that, which is something that the cheaper ones won't do. It runs Android 13 even though we're on Android 17. But that's not a big deal because most of the stuff that Android updates is actually now done through the Google Play store. So. And in addition to that, even though this is not like 2026 hardware, I think this hardware came out like three or four years ago. Sony's actively updating this. I got that my last firmware update just about a month ago. So again for the. And also it is a nicely device. It feels like a Sony product. It's aluminum, it's really nice fit and finish the usbc so you don't have to worry about crazy connectors. The $100 ones are a lot more affordable, but they're very, very, you know, cheap, plasticky feeling sort of stuff. It's not going to be for everybody, but for someone like me, I'm very. I get a lot of pleasure out of this because there's something, maybe it's because of my age, but there's something about I've got a dedicated player that has music on it. When I listen to music, I pick this up and scroll through playlists, scroll through my albums and play things as opposed to picking up my phone, getting past my notes app, getting past my Instagram, getting past all this sort of stuff. So like I said, not for everybody, but if you're looking for something, I think this is a nice, happy medium between the cheap ones that aren't very performant and don't really have many features and the thousand dollar ones where it's like, what if you can afford a thousand dollar pocket music player? Why are you not like just hiring Jack White to just follow your around and play guitar as you walk down the street? That's where I, that's where I am.

[A]

Christina, I, I have my pick of the week just arrived in the mail. But I want to give Christina Warren her due. It's your chance for the pick of the week.

[C]

Okay, well, I have two. One is actually inspired by, by Andy's because I appreciate the extensive review on that, Andy, because I bought previous versions of that Walkman before and for single purpose devices, yeah, they're downsized, but I think they're pretty fun. So the, the first, my first pick was this is a skill that I don't think should have to exist. But, and this is niche, but Leo, you might appreciate this. This is a, if you haven't added this to your coding stuff already. It's a, it's an AI skill and it's called I have adhd. And it is basically a way to stop your coding agent from being super verbose and varying the answer.

[A]

I don't know this. I need it.

[C]

It's great. It's great. And so basically what it does is that it follows 10 rules. And these 10 rules have been basically kind of, I guess adapted from one of the known, like, kind of, you know, like ADHD kind of guidebooks. And so that the full skill is basically, you know, lead with the next action number. Multi step tasks end with one concrete next step. Suppress tangents, restate every turn, specific time estimates, you know, make wins visible, matter of fact errors. The cap the list at five items, no preamble, no recap, no closers, and you can tune it, you know, if you want to, you know, do that too. If you want to make your own kind of modifications, you can do that as well. But this is something, this should not have to exist.

[A]

But it does.

[C]

But it does. And, and, and honestly, since I've installed it and I'M not a huge. Like there are too many skills at certain points and you can get kind of bloated with them. But this is one that I have actually found that I really like because

[A]

we should mention that a skill is simply text.

[C]

It's just text. It's basically just kind of giving an instruction. In some cases it means you're going to be running, you know, a certain shell script or something else. And in other cases it's just text and kind of instructions. But the fact that you could have this. So if you're running, you know, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot or Codex or anything else, yeah, I really like it. It has definitely improved my output and I spent a lot of time in an editor. But my second pick, I'll just say

[A]

this, you know, it's hysterical. It's based on a kit for humans called the Adult ADHD Toolkit.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

That's hysterical.

[C]

Which I think is excellent. I was like, you know what? Love it. I love it. And I am adhd, so I do appreciate, you know.

[A]

Yes, I'm going to put this in my brain.

[C]

Yeah, but, but even like if you're completely like, you know, neurotypical, I think that this is. Leads to better output. But my second pick, if, if Andy's $400 MP3 player is too rich for your blood, but you still want to listen to music in oh my God, really dumb way. And I'm not saying Andy's way is done because Andy's way is actually opposite of dumb.

[B]

I have this. I have the same product. I endorse it.

[C]

Yes, I have this product too. I have this product too. So this is a Maxell wireless Bluetooth cassette player that has USB C fast charging and like a built in battery. It also has a headphone jack. It has actually pretty good battery life. 11 hours or so is what they claim. And I was my experience. I don't listen to a lot of cassette tapes because who listens to cassette tapes? But you know what? I have a lot of cassette tapes because Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo and other artists.

[A]

You never threw them out? Oh no, no.

[C]

Oh yeah. It's a whole thing. It's a whole. They'll release multiple editions and, and the, the reason. I know, but. And then the thing is I, I don't even open them, Leo, because I have problems. And, but honestly the secondary market is really high on some of these things that I won't sell my vinyl, but I think I will sell my cassettes at a certain point. But I have listened To a few. And I have to say, being able to like have your AirPods in and listen to a cat cassette tape, it's kind of a vibe. So if, if you don't want to spend $400 on listening to, you know, 20 year old technology, you know, MP3 is. You can spend $80 to listen to 40 year old technology in much lower fidelity. But. But hey, it has USB C. So.

[A]

And this does something that Andy's fancy dang player won't do. When you're running down, you know, doing your little jog, this thing warbles as you run.

[C]

It's exactly, it's great. It's exactly. It. Absolutely. It's gonna. Well, no, well, it won't warble. The tape won't warble. But get caught. Like your CD player would warble. But yeah, no, this thing, you're gonna have to switch sides.

[A]

You know, let me tell you, when the walkman came out 40 years ago or whatever, it was that expensive. It was as much as Andy's. It was four or five bucks.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, I mean they were incredible. And like, you know, CDs were expensive and you know, there was no.

[A]

I had a cassette walk mix.

[C]

That's what I'm talking about.

[A]

Yeah, okay.

[C]

But that same 40 years ago CDs existed, but they were expensive. And so tapes were like the way to kind of do it. And so yeah, if you want to go back in time and be like, oh, I have to switch sides now. Hey, 80 bucks. It's great.

[A]

I know that it has a USB C port. Is that just for charging or can you use it to convert your tapes to MP3s?

[C]

Because it's just, it's just for charging. If you could convert it. I think that, I think it unfortunately costs more than $80 to have to have that.

[A]

So I've been waiting, waiting all morning. I kept getting the messages that I was going to be getting a special, special package. And I disappeared for a bit because I ran downstairs because it came and I'm so excited. It is my new Mac for $30. This is a Mac clock. The co. What is it? Coco Gall. Now it looks like the one I got. Looks like the box is kind of beat up. But maybe that's just. I don't know, maybe it's. I don't know if it's used or not. I haven't turned it on yet. It's nice and big, unlike that little baby Mac I have back there, which actually boots Mac os. This is just a clock.

[C]

Oh, this is so Cute, but it's cute.

[A]

I'm going to put this right on my desk. I can't wait. So I haven't yet turned it on. It has a USB C port and it, and it has a disc. I don't know what's in the disc, but it has a little floppy disk.

[C]

This is adorable.

[A]

1.44 megabyte floppy disk right there. Just coming.

[B]

And, And Leo, you'll be pleased to know that ever since, like, this became really, really widely available, there are many projects that will allow you to convert that into a working Mac.

[A]

Oh, my God. You're kidding.

[B]

At an ESP32.

[A]

It's an ESP32. See?

[C]

Everything amazing.

[A]

Everything's ESP32.

[C]

I love the ESP32. It's awesome.

[A]

I do, too. I have so many of them all

[C]

over the place and badges and stuff.

[A]

Three more of these so I could put them all over the house. Which leads Elisa's not gonna like, but it doesn't have a camera.

[D]

Yeah. I can't stop buying the ESP32E readers.

[A]

Oh, I got the new Pro. Yeah, I just got.

[D]

The Pro is right here. That's got a backlight on it. I love those esp32. What can it do?

[A]

You told me not to do the stuff. The XTE Ink firmware and use Crosspoint. Are you still using Crosspoint or is there anything better?

[D]

It's so good. Crosspoint is the one. Yeah. And they're building a plug in architecture for it. And like, it's so good. Yeah.

[A]

Oh, that's great. I, okay, I'm gonna put that on there because I just got it. And then there's something else came in the mail, and I don't know what this is, but I got, I got this thing and I actually, what's weird is I got it. Two of them came, so I don't know what I'm gonna do with this, Christina, but I, I, I'll find, I'll find something to do with these little boxes. We'll probably talk about this tomorrow.

[C]

You're so lucky, man. That's, that's, that's fantastic.

[A]

Not lucky. Yeah, well, it cost me all more than the car, but other than that.

[C]

Yes, but, but they're hard to get, man. Like, even costing more than a car. Like, they're, they're.

[A]

I, I bit the bullet because I didn't. I couldn't. I, I really want to be local. Anyway, it's their DGX Sparks, and I have two of them now. And I hope I do because you know when you buy these things, you hope that there's one in the box, that it's not just a brick. I didn't get it on ebay, so maybe I'll. So anyway, that's our picks of the week. That's our show, everybody. Thank you for being here. We appreciate your kind support and your kind attendance to this show. We do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific. If Leo shows up on time, I. I'm okay, I'm gonna admit it. I kept running downstairs to see if my. My clock came. That would be 2pm Eastern time. There'll be 18 UTC. You can watch it live if you're in Club Twit. Of course in the Club Twit Discord. But if you can't get there, you can always watch us on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We stream on seven different platforms after the fact, you don't have to stream it. You can watch anytime at your convenience. We have copies of the show audio and video at our website, Twit TV. There is a YouTube channel with the video also dedicated to Mac Break weekly. Actually you'll find all of our shows YouTube channels at the main headquarters which is YouTube.com twit and then of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That'll do it. That's the way to get it. And then you don't have to even think about it. You just have it the minute it's done. Christina Warren is film girl at GitHub and everywhere else in the world. So great to have you, Christina. If you ever want to come over and touch my sparks, you can.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you, Andy Yako. I hope you have a wonderful time couch surfing. So great to see you. Of course. Follow andy@his website.com I h n a t k o dot com and become a member and support this ink stained rich in his daily trials, Jason Snell. He's now a media [e-mail] with many [e-mail] Jason and he's got lots of ink and lots of colors. And you of all of us will likely get an invitation in the next few weeks.

[D]

I don't know. IPhone's a hard event. I didn't get an invitation last year.

[A]

You didn't see, but you got in, didn't you?

[D]

Or no, no, no. Last year I've been working. It is the toughest ticket.

[A]

So it's all those influencers. Damn them.

[D]

I don't know.

[A]

You know it is.

[C]

They've shifted.

[D]

Very influential.

[B]

Should we start, like, every time we. Because we are our.

[A]

We're influencers, ladies and gentlemen.

[D]

We should.

[B]

Well, our problem is that we don't, like, start the show by saying, hey, guys.

[A]

Hey, guys. Like, and subscribe, you know, every month, more than a quarter of a million people listen to this damn show. And I feel like that's an important number.

[D]

That's pretty good.

[C]

Very good.

[A]

It's all right. I'll never get to go to another Apple event, but that's okay. I have my little baby Mac here.

[C]

Well, I mean, is it.

[B]

Is it time to do, like, you know, because people after. After the Sundance Film Festival got, like, really, really popular and like, a lot of different, like, creators were getting shut out. They decided to host Slam Dance Festival at the same time in the same city. Should we, like, do our own actual event, like, at the same day for people who do not get competing event

[A]

across the street in Cupertino at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant? By the way, I just. Separate checks.

[B]

Separate checks, everybody. Separate checks.

[A]

This is the funniest thing there is. Whoops. Instructions on the top on how to insert the diskette in case you don't know. Maybe it does something. Maybe it's functional. I don't know.

[B]

But don't put it in back. I think. I think it activates a switch or something. My fun part was that I see it advertised all the time and in the ads it has dozens of. Doesn't have the Apple logo. Does not have like, the Macintosh branding, but, like, the sticker set contains like, as an alternative to the not Apple logo that goes into the Apple logo slot. Oh, well, there's an Apple logo here if you want to put the Apple logo in that.

[A]

Oh, that's. I. Oh, let me see if I have.

[B]

I don't know which version of it is label that's a reproduction.

[A]

They're sort of Apple logos, sort of six color Y logos. Ah, very clear. And it looks like it has a disc hub, a disk shutter, a disc label, front logo. Yeah, they're not an apple, but they are six.

[B]

Okay. Some makers will sell it will include among on the sheet. Like, yeah, don't. We couldn't put that in the ad.

[A]

But don't tell anybody, but we've got six colors. Emerick says with all the Apple negativity on this show, Leah will never be in invited to another Apple event. Are we negative?

[C]

We're honest. We're not like that. Well, I mean, I think that, like, people like Jason who have earned a lot of respect, understandably, like, are able to toe that line. And Apple is willing to overlook certain things, but I. Yeah, I think, unfortunately,

[A]

John Ternus will never grace our microphones, I'm afraid.

[C]

Hey. He's my link. He is my LinkedIn friends.

[A]

He is your LinkedIn friend.

[C]

He is my LinkedIn friend.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Pretty fancy.

[B]

We ride at the gates of dawn, Leo, and we take no prisoners. We're very famous for that. And that's what the titans of industry fear most.

[A]

Thank you, everybody, for joining us. We'll see you next week on Mac Break Weekly. And now, as I have said for lo these many years, it is my sad and solemn duty to tell you, get back to work, because break time is over.

[C]

Bye.

[A]

Bye.

[C]

Sa.