MacBreak Weekly 948: Wicked Hard

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 948: Wicked Hard – Detailed Summary

Released on November 19, 2024, MacBreak Weekly Episode 948, titled "Wicked Hard," features host Leo Laporte alongside technology experts Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell. The episode delves into a range of topics from Apple's strategic moves in the entertainment sector to updates in professional software tools. Below is a comprehensive summary of the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode.

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1. Annual Six Colors Graph and Apple's Push for Apple TV

Jason Snell introduces his annual Six Colors graph, highlighting an intriguing trend that suggests Apple's intensified focus on expanding its Apple TV ecosystem.

Jason Snell [02:00]: "It's big game week... Berkeley is great. Go Bears."

The panel discusses the potential motivations behind Apple's strategic push, linking it to broader revenue streams in the wearables, home, and accessories categories. Andy Ihnatko notes the correlation between Apple's revenue strategies and the upcoming introduction of new home devices.

Andy Ihnatko [11:43]: "Although they should have done this five years ago, maybe 10 years ago... it might be the start of that little, little square screen thing."

2. Final Cut Pro Updates

The hosts move on to discuss the latest updates to Final Cut Pro, unveiled during Apple's recent FCP Summit. These updates focus on enhanced stability, support for spatial video, and the introduction of advanced smart masking AI and transcription features.

Alex Lindsay [40:57]: "They have a new smart masking AI... and transcription. And that's almost table stakes at this point."

The conversation touches on the divergence between Final Cut Pro on the iPad versus the Mac, with the iPad version receiving unique features tailored for touch and stylus input, enhancing its usability for creative workflows.

3. Logic Pro's New Sound Plugin

A significant highlight is the introduction of a new sound plugin for Logic Pro, the Quantech Room Simulator, which has garnered praise from renowned musician Peter Gabriel.

Leo Laporte [46:11]: "The Quantech room simulator has been a key element to my sound for many years... it's wonderful that Apple's bringing the Quantech QRS back to life."

Despite mixed opinions regarding room simulators, the panel acknowledges the value of integrating vintage sound elements into modern digital audio workstations, expanding creative possibilities for musicians.

4. Apple's Potential New Wall-Mounted Display

The discussion shifts to rumors about Apple's development of a new wall-mounted display, resembling a large iPad, intended to serve as a home hub and media center. The panel expresses enthusiasm for the concept, emphasizing its alignment with Apple's design philosophy and ecosystem integration.

Andy Ihnatko [07:12]: "I like the Nest thermostat because it is like instead of just giving you what's the number of your temperature, it is actually a smart display... something where all anytime when I'm getting dressed and I want to know... I've got a display that's always at that same spot."

Jason Snell speculates that Apple’s entry into the home device market aims to capitalize on the seamless integration valued by Apple users, offering devices that complement existing products without directly competing with established categories.

Jason Snell [10:18]: "People in the Apple ecosystem will pay money for things that are easy and nice and fit into the Apple ecosystem with ease."

5. Apple TV Plus Movie Strategy

The panel critiques Apple's current strategy with Apple TV Plus, particularly its approach to feature films. While acknowledging successes like "Coda," they express concerns over high-budget investments in films that may not yield substantial returns.

Jason Snell [18:59]: "Apple's movie strategy has been kind of broken... they spent all that money on Napoleon and they didn't get anything from that."

Andy Ihnatko suggests that Apple may need to recalibrate by investing in lower-budget productions with broader distribution strategies to enhance financial performance.

Andy Ihnatko [21:03]: "It's like saying fast, easy... you know like you have to pick two of those."

6. AppleCare Refunds and App Store Regulations

Leo Laporte brings attention to ongoing changes, including Apple providing refunds for AppleCare Plus agreements post trade-in and the removal of certain apps from the Russian App Store at the behest of regulators.

Leo Laporte [74:23]: "Apple shares the most popular podcasts of 2024... There are also reports that the ads for iPhone workers for Foxconn India were a little bit discriminatory."

Andy Ihnatko emphasizes the implications of these actions, highlighting Apple's commitment to ethical practices and regulatory compliance, while also discussing the challenges Apple faces in balancing global market demands with local regulations.

7. Security Updates and Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

A critical segment covers recent security updates released by Apple addressing a zero-day vulnerability in Safari's WebKit engine. This flaw, exploited in the wild, allows attackers to inject malicious code, underscoring the importance of timely software updates.

Andy Ihnatko [71:05]: "Apple has just released a flurry of really important security updates for iPhone, Mac, iPad, VisionOS, everything."

The panel strongly advises listeners to promptly apply these updates to safeguard their devices against potential exploits.

8. RSS Reader Recommendations and Digital Content Management

The discussion transitions to digital content consumption, where the panel explores various RSS reader options. Andy Ihnatko praises Feedbin for its robustness and integration capabilities, while Jason Snell and Alex Lindsay share personal preferences and workflows involving Feedbin and other RSS tools.

Andy Ihnatko [131:46]: "Feedbin is one of the advantages of having... it's easy to focus in on just the stuff that's Apple News you can have within feeds."

Leo Laporte expresses interest in integrating these RSS tools with automated workflows, highlighting the evolving landscape of digital content management.

9. Apple’s Chip Design Philosophy

Jason Snell elaborates on Apple’s chip design strategy, emphasizing the advantages of vertical integration. Unlike competitors who produce general-purpose chips, Apple co-designs its chips in tandem with its hardware and software teams, enabling optimized performance and seamless integration across devices.

Jason Snell [76:11]: "Their philosophy of building chips... gives them some power and flexibility that other companies don't have."

Andy Ihnatko concurs, noting that this approach allows Apple to innovate without the constraints faced by manufacturers reliant on third-party chip suppliers.

10. Closing Remarks and Upcoming Events

In the concluding segments, the hosts share personal anecdotes, upcoming events, and promotional content, maintaining the episode's engaging and informal tone. They also encourage listeners to support their content through the TWiT.tv Club and highlight upcoming streams and special events.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Andy Ihnatko [01:44]: "The money makers are in full bloom, man."

• Jason Snell [10:18]: "People in the Apple ecosystem will pay money for things that are easy and nice and fit into the Apple ecosystem with ease."

• Leo Laporte [46:11]: "It's wonderful that Apple's bringing the Quantech QRS back to life."

• Andy Ihnatko [21:03]: "It's like saying fast, easy... you know like you have to pick two of those."

• Jason Snell [76:11]: "Their philosophy of building chips... gives them some power and flexibility that other companies don't have."

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Conclusion

Episode 948 of MacBreak Weekly provides insightful discussions on Apple's strategic initiatives, software updates, and broader industry trends. The panel offers a balanced analysis of Apple's ventures into the home device market, critiques its media strategies, and underscores the importance of security vigilance. Additionally, the conversation on digital content management tools like Feedbin offers valuable takeaways for listeners seeking efficient ways to manage their information consumption. Overall, the episode encapsulates the dynamic interplay between technology innovation and market strategy, delivered with the characteristic expertise and camaraderie of the MacBreak Weekly hosts.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Alex, and Jason, they're all here. We'll talk a little bit about Jason's annual six Colors graphs. There's actually an interesting tidbit in there which explains a little bit why Apple's pushing hard on Apple tv. Plus, we'll talk about updates to Final Cut Pro, the new sound plugin for Logic Pro that even Peter Gabriel loves. And watch out for Porch Pirates. They've got a new way of tracking your iPhone. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break Weekly, episode 948, recorded Tuesday, November 19, 2024. Wicked Hide. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show we find out what the heck's going on over there in Cupertino on the Apple campus with the Apple experts. And they are expert Andy Anako from GBH in Boston, the man with the hat and the sideburns, which somebody commented last week, and I think it's perhaps true. They seem to be growing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Depends on, like, it's not as though there's a seasonal change. They tend to, like, sheds through the summer.

[Leo Laporte]

And it depends on, like, when I.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Get out of bed, I'm a side sleeper. So, like, I get out of bed and I go to the bathroom to, like, brush my teeth and stuff. If it really looks Van Buren because they. Because they've been on the pillow, then I know it's time to give them a trim. Sometimes it takes a while, but yes, during the winter hours, winter years, I have to. I have to be ready for, like, seasonal times where if I want. If someone wants to draft me in as. As Scrooge in a community production, I got to make sure that.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to be ready.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, the money makers are in full bloom, man.

[Leo Laporte]

And we now know why. Martin Van Buren. That's such a fan base.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Also here, dressed in his bumblebee costume, it's Jason Snell from Six Colors. Only two colors today.

[Jason Snell]

I got my. It's blue and gold, baby. It's big game week. So I am against Stanford, and that is. That is lock up all the people from Stanford. They've committed crimes, but Berkeley is great. Go Bears. So good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

So rivalry ax doesn't belong to any one of the two.

[Jason Snell]

It's the winner gets the axe. It is called the Stanford ax, I believe, because it was at one point stolen by Berkeley students after beating them in football. Or maybe not just they stole it. And now it is Handed back and forth to the winner of the Cal Stanford.

[Leo Laporte]

And you have a replica axe.

[Jason Snell]

I have a replica ax behind me. Indeed. It is our ax. We will bring it back.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You know, if. If I had stolen the ax, that would be saying, that's a replica. That's Jason's. A pretty sharp cookie.

[Jason Snell]

You don't know how big it is back there. It could be. It could be a very small plastic replica handed out to people who attended a game last year, or it real.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The only way to know for sure is to check for the telltale rust stains from the tears of the Stanford team.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, come on over.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, Mr. Office Hours, Alex Lindsay of 090 Media. Hello, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hey. Good to be here with his.

[Leo Laporte]

With his fake elemental lights behind him.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they're not fake elemental lights. They're just not a whole server behind them.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no elemental attached. I have my. I'm sad because you got the original green ones and we traded in the green ones once Amazon took over and got the. What is that now?

[Alex Lindsay]

I do actually have the servers in my. I have the servers just putting them on the shelf. They'll stick way out because they're really long.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I don't have the server anymore. I just. It's like.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's kind of like a. It's kind of like a gold back dollar. I have the. I have the front pieces, you know, but. But the rest bit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the backing. Yeah, exactly. Adios, amigo. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to press that button. I have the. I have. Oh, no. Shut up, Arnold. I'm trying to plug in my elemental. It doesn't. It doesn't quite fit in the USB thing here. That's what. That's how I keep it lit. Somebody must have wired this. Or did they sell it like this?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, they. Well, they. They. They sold them wired. Yeah, they. I mean, they wired them up. It was. I remember.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was wired into the server. It was a way to know the server was running.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it was really just marketing. I talked to someone who did it. They were like, you know, it was just marketing. Marketing so that you. It would be different. He said, was it effective? I was like, I sold more than $2 million worth of production on those lights.

[Leo Laporte]

It was effective because I see the green lights and I know immediately that you have the.

[Alex Lindsay]

And most importantly, when you're at an event, someone sees the green lights and they go, what is that? Because it sticks out on the whole thing. And you go, well, let me tell you, kids use Software encoding like obs and blah blah, professionals use appliances, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, and then that's a good way to start it. But that just shows you that all server mounted devices should have colorful, interesting, but not orange.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sorry. We were very upset when they went from green to orange.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I guess they had to distinguish. The Amazon version, it was AWS.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, thanks to West Decker in our YouTube chat who's just donated $10. What is that called? Super Fund. There's something, there's a name for it.

[Jason Snell]

No, that's for toxic waste. Leo.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, love Canal.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube is a super fun site. My sincere appreciated the whole Mac break. Think of the Joe Rogan experience on and off screen. Thank you, West. We appreciate that. Let's see here.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I love that long, long pause that happens on every show. That's like just a week or two before the big holidays.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the telltale.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There's stories here but nothing like, oh my God, I'm bouncing in my seat to talk about this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, is anybody bouncing in their seat to talk about anything? I guess we could talk about German. It broke at the end of the day, last episode.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, he broke at the very end of the last episode, almost as a teaser to this episode that he's been writing a lot about Apple doing smart displays. Mostly writing about, hey, there's going to be a home pod with a screen attached or hey, there's going to be a robotic home pod with the screen on an arm. This time is something that I actually really, really like the idea of. It is a wall hanging display. Not a TV sized display, more like a big iPad. That is going to be that supposedly, according to his information, is going to be a home hub. It's going to be a media hub. It's going to be, it's going to respond to AI, to Shlomo.

[Leo Laporte]

You can use device. Right, Exactly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For calls and stuff like that. I like that idea because that's very, very, that's very much in line with what I see Apple thinking is a great idea like having a display that when it's doing nothing, it's giving you a little corner of useful information and a piece of artwork or family photos. But as soon as you turn and you look at it or you approach it, because it has sensors and it has cameras and knows, oh, the display, the display knows oh, I have the user's attention. I'll go into more detailed like display about what's going on in your inbox and I'll await a command that seems like something that Apple would be really keen on and something they could do something really interesting with.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman says he already has a code number for it which, you know, when you throw that into your leak that gives it some credence. J490. He says next year though, right? We're not going to get that this year. I think it's too late to get anything this year. That's very. Screen looks like a square iPad. Square is interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I would like this. I'll probably buy it, right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. I love the Nest thermostat because it is like instead of just giving you what's the number of your temperature, it is actually a smart display that's at a fixed location and you always know where it is. And that really got me thinking about the usefulness of such a thing where there's something where all anytime when I'm getting dressed and I want to know again, what do I need to take with me in terms of being warm or being dry? I've got a display that's always at that same spot on the kitchen wall or the same spot on the living room or the bedroom. Given that I've always been such a huge fan of the idea of a voice only user interface as the ability to simply make things happen just by talking to something. Having a display that can not only interpret commands but also give me visual results. In an era where Apple's trying to make a mark for itself in artificial intelligence and chatbots, that seems like again an area where Apple can actually do something significant. There was also this week he mentioned something about, oh, the idea of an Apple tv. An Apple TV panel is not off. The table is back on the table or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't know if I ever like that because again, what could they do with a TV that they can't already do with an Apple tv? And also the amount of competition there is. I mean I haven't shopped for TVs in a long time. The prices of if you just want a halfway decent 100 inch screen. Oh my God. That's what I. The competition there is so cutthroat that I don't think that Apple could bring anything to that. But this idea of a small panel that's just a decorative beautiful object that helps you out and is sort of the HAL's unblinking eye in your kitchen or living room. I like that idea a lot.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's good. And there are some other rumors that they're working on some other home stuff which I really like. The TV thing was an aside that I, I agree with you, Andy. It doesn't make sense to me. My theory about that is that what he's hearing is maybe more if Apple wanted to embed some intelligent TV circuitry in their displays going forward. Because one of the things that I reviewed a Samsung equivalent to the Studio display last year and one of the things that I noticed about it is it has Samsung's smart TV platform in there, which can be annoying, but also if you using it, I mean, it does feel silly, right, to have a 27 inch or 30 inch or whatever display you're going to have. And it can only possibly be used to attach a computer to it because you may want to give it, let it be double duty. It's got speakers, it's got a big screen. Maybe it will work for you in a dorm room or in your office or wherever as a TV as well. And I could see them doing that and saying, why don't we make sure that our displays are also TVs. But making a regular TV doesn't, doesn't really track.

[Leo Laporte]

But I can see putting it in the kitchen. Some people watch, like have the news on while they're, well, having a device.

[Jason Snell]

That'S like iPad sized or this thing which is a little smaller I get. But like building a big tv, that's an Apple thing. They're never going to be able to compete with the commodity TV manufacturers. But there's other stuff. I love it. I mean, I think if you look at the charts. Sorry, I brought up charts again. And you look at my way to six colors, you look at Apples wearables, home and accessories category, what you will see is that while services keeps going up, the wearables category is like a curve that is kind of like flattened out or gone back down a little bit. The wearables, home and accessories. And I am getting the feeling that although they should have done this five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, that somebody inside Apple has basically said, hey, why don't we generate more home revenue? And the answer is because we haven't tried it. Sounds like maybe they're going to try. And I think that's good. They don't need to play in every category. I know Alex sometimes advocates for them spreading, but they can pick and choose ones that are going to be profitable and where there's no real obvious winner and that they can make it simple and still make a big profit margin. And this might be the start of that, this little, little square screen thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the graph.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you know, somebody At Apple's looking at that, at that wearables thing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't like that.

[Jason Snell]

I like it when they go up.

[Alex Lindsay]

Graph going the wrong way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is your post for the annual revenue you mentioned last week.

[Jason Snell]

I get to do the sum up of the annual revenue where you can really see kind of long term trends and for a few years there wearables, home and accessories had a long term uptrend and it doesn't now. It's been flat to down for a few years. And look at home as a category. Apple TV is in there. Sure. But if they do this device and then they've got a higher end device with a robotic limb coming later and they do a camera and maybe there are some other categories where they can play. I think that's really interesting. People in the Apple ecosystem will pay money for things that are easy and nice and fit into the Apple ecosystem with ease. They don't need necessarily to be, they need to be competitive in the sense that they can't be twice the price of decent competition. But Gurman's report says that they are, he says competitive with the other products in the market. My guess means it's still probably 100 or $200 more than those products. But they can afford to do that because a lot of Apple customers are happy to pay for something that's nicer and just works and that, that is an opening for them in the home.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And on top of everything else, I'm sorry Alex, this quick, the hidden. It's also if they don't make it like a 4 by 3 display, if they make it something that looks unique, it is another thing that says I own an Apple product, like I have something. I don't, I don't mean that to denigrate Apple users as oh look, I've got the latest Apple thing. Do you have the latest Apple thing? But it's Apple users that they like the stu. They like having these things out in front in public. There's a reason why the imac comes in so many colors because it's cool and it looks nice and people will enjoy having it out in front like that. So not only as a piece of technology that does technological things but as a piece of style, as a piece of design. Just like again, people will often choose the make of TV because they like the way that they like the way that it fits in with the rest of their decor. Again, I just think this is a really, really strong idea for an Apple product.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And I think it also depends on who they're competing with as well. So if you look at like for an 85 inch screen TV or a 65 inch screen TV or whatever the number is, you know, there are obviously Vizios and you know, TCLs that are $900, $1,000. But there's also, on the other side of that, there's an LG market that is $4,000 or $5,000. So there's a wide range in what, when we say an Apple, I think would look at the LG market before they looked at the $900 TCLS. As someone who buys a lot of monitors and a lot of TVs, there's a lot of room for improvement. I mean most of them are not, I mean other than the LGs, most of them are not great and all of them are underpowered. So we deal with this all the time and there's a lot of interactions where the Apple TV is a little clunky compared to if it was just the TV doing it. That said, I think that the chances of a large tv, Apple being a large TV is very low. I think something that was somewhere between an iPad and a TV size, you know, that is something you put in your, again in your kitchen, you're watching while you're doing things. But it has, it's a touchscreen, it's got a nice, you know, it's, you know, you can, everything works and you can do your cooking with it. You can also watch the news and it can run all your other home devices that Apple will hopefully make, I think could be really, really interesting. Probably more interesting than putting something on a wall.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman says $1,000, which is Apple price typical. And Apple, I don't know if this is true, hopes that people will buy many of them to put them in every room of their house.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that squarely pegs it at about. No, no, $1,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't be.

[Alex Lindsay]

1,000 is, if it's $1,000, it's no longer, it's no bigger than 16 inches.

[Jason Snell]

You know, this feels like a 200, 250 kind of thing. Maybe 300 if we put in the Apple thing. And the idea that, yeah, that you put one in the kitchen and you have one, you know, in the bedroom as a, as a control smart home controller or whatever. Like, or on, or on the coffee table or wherever. Like I can, I can see that. But if they, if that's the dream, then they do have to price it more aggressively.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have heterogeneous system with echoes and Google devices and Siri devices all over the house in different spots. And it would love it to have some sort of, you know, homogeneous, you know, every room has the same kind of thing in there, same commands.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and I still think it comes with everything.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be very nice. That's a good, I think that's a reasonable goal for Apple and something that would be attractive to buyers.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think if Apple put that screen and the five devices I've talked about in the past, a lot of Apple users would just go, well this is what I'm. As they upgrade or move forward, it wouldn't be like they would just kind of go around, the wagons would circle.

[Jason Snell]

Even if there's a HomeKit camera out there or there's some other camera that says it's compatible and all that, if Apple's got a dead simple one that's got the perfect integration with this that you can put and you know, you can trust it because it's from Apple like it would be. That's such an easy, easy sale.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and again it would devastate. I mean each, each market they moved into. If Apple built locks, for instance, a lot of people would just, you know, an Apple, A lot of Apple users would just buy the Apple lock. If you bought, if you had the outlet, they would just start getting the Apple outlets and the switches and the lights and the. Because they would just be like, well I pick it up, I put it next to my iPhone and it pairs with the network and then we're off to the races, you know, and, and that's the, and that's the difference. And yeah, you know, it's, I mean.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It'S different people, people who like the Apple ecosystem, they like to invest in it. It's not like I do. I also like the, of Apple planning, excuse me, anticipating people buying more than one of them. It's not like they'd buy a four pack for a discount of $80. So $3,800 to $4,000 like AirTags. But I can definitely see you buy one because it looks nice and you figure, oh that's a nice, that'll be a useful thing to have like in one room of the house. And then next year you buy another one and then the next year there's an improved one. So you move that into the one room we use the most. And now the kitchen has one. And that's how five years from now they wind up having four or five of these around the house. That's exactly how it happened with Google Smart displays with me. That I bought one just so I could write about it and then it just became so damn useful that I wound up having like three of them for $100 each. Let's say, let's be clear. But Apple people are used to spending more thousand dollars. I don't know what they could deliver to justify $1,000, but iPad style pricing, I could definitely see like $500, $400. I could definitely see.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's looking to also bolster its revenues by licensing stuff from Apple tv.

[Jason Snell]

Plus, yeah, movies. Their movie strategy has been kind of broken, right? They spent a lot of money on a lot of prestige movies. They won't picture for one. But that wasn't an expensive one, that was a cheap one.

[Leo Laporte]

Which one was that?

[Jason Snell]

That was Coda. Coda, which they picked up at a film festival and for not a lot of money. And it won best Picture. So go figure. You can't always, you know, but then they spend all that money on Napoleon and they didn't get anything from that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Wolves.

[Leo Laporte]

The latest wolves.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but so they good movie. They like being in deals with stars and famous people and they like the shine of the Oscars and all of that. But if you look at it, it's not a strong strategy. And I think streaming in general struggles with movies. Netflix spends a lot of money on movies, but they are changing their strategy to be a little bit lower budget with a lot of their movies because of how expensive they can be and what the return is in terms of driving people. It's not just about retaining people, it's about getting people to sign up for your service. I think Apple has realized that they need to calibrate their movie strategy a little bit differently. Spend less money on it. One of the ways that you make it lose less money is it's got a lifespan that ends up being after it's been on Apple TV for a while, it goes somewhere else too. And you make some money from that and the exclusive period ends instead of saying, well, no, we paid for it, we want it here forever. And I think that just, I think that makes sense. There are lots of other streaming services that have an audience that your audience doesn't contain and they might want to see that movie too. And why would you turn down the money on that? They are not talking about doing that with tv. That may happen, but with this movie strategy. Because I think their TV strategy has worked a lot better. But the movie strategy, they're losing a lot of money. And I do get the sense. And there are reports that say that Eddie Q is basically like you can't, you can't lose this much money on.

[Leo Laporte]

I thank Andy for actually tipping me to this screen. It's Bloomberg's Scream Time newsletter now I subscribe. I already pay for Bloomberg and get Mark. But this has a lot of juicy stuff. Yeah, good stuff. It says Lucas Shaw says chief executive officer Tim Cook and services boss Eddie Q have pushed the team overseeing Apple TV plus to lower costs, improve the financial performance and deliver more hits. Well, I imagine that that's the easy to say, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like saying fast, easy, you know, you know like, you know like there's. You got to get pick two of those. And I think that that's going to be the challenge for them. I think that the idea of a two and a half hour movie has probably got less than 10 years left. So in any way, shape or form. So, so and the reason for that is that, you know, theatrical is kind of, you know, going as tanking, you know. And the problem is that the things that are really successful for a lot of these are a six episode series, eight episode series. Writers like it better because they can develop the characters a lot further. A lot of people like to. It's hard to get my family now to be willing to commit to two and a half hours. Everything's an hour or we watch half a film. No one really wants to watch a two and a half hour. So I think the behavior is changing because there's so many series. Series is better for retention. It just doesn't like the molecules of that aren't adding up anymore. And I think that especially when you see really big films constantly. I was just talking to someone at the theater yesterday and the fact that.

[Leo Laporte]

You, you were in a theater.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was in a theater. I was in. Wasn't in the actual theater under diverse. I was in a theater complex. So the.

[Leo Laporte]

You just came in for the popcorn. You didn't stay for that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For the popcorn bucket.

[Alex Lindsay]

Something like that. So anyway, so the. But you know what we were talking about was really the, the fact that you know all these movies. It used to be, well, we have this actor and we have this kind of film and we're going to do this release with this marketing and none of that math is adding up anymore. You know. And so the, the thing is is that the. So the math just isn't. And it's really expensive to have the math not, you know, the, you know, Hollywood are bankers. You know, they're not really. I mean the people who pay for them are bankers. You Know, and they, and they want.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S part of the problem in Hollywood is.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they want re. They want to, they want a known risk. And you know, creative is really hard movies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because I mean, everyone just goes for, oh, there's money over there, let's go over there. You know, and, and so, and obviously there's tons of creative people who just want to create their. They want to tell their story, but they still have to get through the bankers to get their story told. And the problem is, is that a lot of the bankability of feature films of the two, two and a half hour is really dropping like a rock, you know, and so, and so it's just, it's just a very unpredictable environment. So I think that when you see.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple, do you think it's. The movie industry's as we know it is dead.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's changing. It's going to change to something else. I mean it's the theater.

[Leo Laporte]

It really does. I mean, I look at it as a real estate. You know, I used to every time I'd go to Apple tv, look at the new movies to see what I wanted to watch. I don't, I hardly ever do that anymore. It's mostly junk I watch.

[Alex Lindsay]

The thing is we get caught up in the series and we get surprised by some series. Someone in our family watched one of them and says, oh, we got to watch this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think that's what happens, you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Know, and then of that. So I think that. But I think the real problem is that if a movie gets any bad reviews now what happens? So much. Everyone's got so much content at home, they're just going, well, I'll just wait until that goes. Yeah, I can, I can watch it in stream. I know I make that decision all the time. Like, I just go, oh, that didn't that got a medium, you know, if it doesn't get like 85, you know, freshness or whatever, you go, well, if it doesn't like slam, like, like with Tenant and Oppenheimer. Yeah. I was like, hey, I really want to see that on a big screen, you know, like, but, but, but I know, I know what Nolan's going to do with it, you know, and so, and so. But there's like a handful, a handful.

[Leo Laporte]

Of James Cameron, Christopher Nolan. They're just a handful.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I mean, you know, like I want to go, I want to see Dune on a big theater, you know, on a big screen, that kind of thing. So, so the thing is, is that those are, those are. But there's like five directors that are directing films that really get people to go to a, to a. And when you have that lack of supply because, you know, Christopher Nolan can only make one of those films every two or three years or whatever it is. Right. That you, you know, it's just not enough to keep the theater industry going. And again, for all these streamers who are really spending all the money now, they, the film doesn't, I mean, they're not performing. They're not like films are not performing for streamers, like 100% never. None of them are performing. So they're all moving to more and more series. And again, if you talk to writers, they're like, oh, I want, I'd much rather have a series because it's much easier to turn key another series than it is the turnkey.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's interesting. Alfonso Cuaron, who did the Academy Award winning Roma, which is an amazing black and white film shot on Alexa cameras, decided to make his next thing a series disclaimer.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And I'm surprised that in this report, I don't think they, I don't, I don't think this Bloomberg report says specifically that they're not thinking about tv, excuse me, series. I mean, I'd be surprised if that weren't part of the strategy because that is the entry point for a lot of people where if suddenly it's a big leap to sign up for Apple TV just because you've heard that Ted Lasso is a cool series. But if the first couple of seasons, if before they do, there's a lot of, there are stronger rumors now. There's going to be like a new season of Ted Lasso coming out. But if like before they did the fourth season, they actually put it out to bid and had Hulu or Netflix or somebody get the first three seasons and then people get hooked on it and they realize that, oh, if I want to see season four, I'm going to have to sign up for Apple tv. Plus, I'm surprised if that wouldn't be a great strategy. I did a big weeding out of my subscription services earlier this year and HBO Max was definitely on the bubble. And it's not that Chopped was the one thing that saved it, but I said, oh wow, Chopped. I didn't realize they had that. I haven't seen that in a while. And just season one, episode one and several months later I've binge watched all the way through and now I'm on season 23. That's the sort of stuff that keeps and holds people and keeps people coming back. I'm thinking of reactivating my Hulu at least temporarily just because. Oh, that's right. I did see the first two seasons of Only Murders in the Building and I really liked it. Now I kind of want to see the next two seasons too. And if I forget to cancel it, that's all win free Hulu.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I have to say that I think if it's one thing to take the feature films because again, I don't know if they're making any money on the feature films, but if they, if the feature film, if they want to license those, I think if they just start saying we're going to license everything we make to try to offset the cost, they might as well just stop doing it because it's not going to, it's not going to drive.

[Leo Laporte]

It is though, what others do. Right?

[Alex Lindsay]

I understand that.

[Leo Laporte]

What HBO does that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't think Netflix does that. I don't think you see Netflix series somewhere else. Netflix thing is, you get to know. The problem is as a viewer, I barely know what I'm, I, we have to, when I go, oh, what, what service? You know, we got really into the Devil's Hour. My family got really into the Devil's Hour, which is a great series by the way. And, but we couldn't, I couldn't remember where it was like, I was like. And you know, I was like, where did this go? And Apple makes it a little easier because it just shows the last thing you watch. So I could find it that way. There's Amazon, I think, but, but it's, but the, I think that Apple can afford. I guess I would say that from a branding perspective, I will say a lot of the new shows that Apple's, they've kind of just gotten into the zone where they're starting to produce some really great content. I mean, I thought that when they started Apple TV plus most of the series were kind of jokes and they would spend a lot of money on something that was not watchable, in my opinion. Now they've really gotten it working. It would be unfortunate to see them kind of water it down after. And this happens, by the way, in Hollywood. This is like 80% of Hollywood is you just got it working. But someone says, oh, let's pull the plug on that, let's water it down. It happens all the time. Everything you work on is like, hey, let's not do that anymore. And just as you figured it out, and I think Apple's just figuring out how to make great content a lot of their series are really good and be unfortunate for them to start trying to shop around.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. Netflix follows Apple's strategy of not selling their stuff on as does Amazon prime, but according to support is about movies.

[Jason Snell]

Right. And the movie business is a very different business than the TV business. I don't think that there is any substantial report that Apple is considering breaking apart what they're doing in tv. I think they've really got a lot of momentum and they're building up a good catalog. It's this thing of like you want to dabble in movies, you want to. You don't want to get an Oscar. All of that. It's like, okay, but it needs to make sense. And keeping those forever I think doesn't make sense. So maybe that's a different strategy for.

[Alex Lindsay]

What you just said. The only reason to bank a feature film is to try to get a. An Oscar. Like that is the, like that to make a feature film and do the release and then. And then run it out and then you can sell it off for whatever it wants. That's the like to get the exposure that everyone thinks is important to.

[Leo Laporte]

Although the movies that cross the billion dollar revenue mark or not don't get any. They're not Oscar Oscar bait.

[Alex Lindsay]

Things like the Incredibles they usually get they Despicable Me or nominated for best visual effects. You know, like that's the kind of, you know, best costumes.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe what you're going for is the billion dollar box office.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't think so. I don't think that. But I don't think the box office is like for them to release it in box office.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple wants prestige.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's also knowing that the movie exists, one of the big problems that you get it when you do a traditional movie launch, you're putting marketing out. There's a reason to talk about it. The hard part with streaming in general and the hard part with movies. This is another big problem with movies. I know this weekend, it's not this week in movies, but actually one of.

[Leo Laporte]

The things it does is show.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we.

[Alex Lindsay]

So one of the, one of the mechanics that people are dealing with in marketing is that there's a huge number of viewers that aren't seeing any ads ever, you know, and they're not, they're not watching.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you gotta market on TikTok.

[Alex Lindsay]

But the problem is they identify like someone like me. I can see the extra line that says this is promoted and I skip it in like a second. Like literally it's Open for a second and then it's gone. And so it's really difficult to get the word that it's not that it can't be done, but it has to be done with lots of organic marketing and lots of this. Very, very. It's very complex. It's not just let's throw a million dollars at billboards anymore. And that's the real challenge for the market right now. People don't even know that the movie's happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody knows Wicked's happening. My God, everything's turned emerald green.

[Alex Lindsay]

And they have spent.

[Leo Laporte]

So that must be a massive budget for marketing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're not telling anybody it's a part one of two, though, are they?

[Jason Snell]

They're not telling anybody it's a musical either, but that's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're avoiding that.

[Jason Snell]

Wicked is a good example that actually is relevant to what we're talking about because they're also investing in that marketing, knowing that they have to get part one to be big because they also have a part two and they need to sell that too. So there's sort of marketing and there's some. Some trickle down there. There's some fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. There really is two. It is a two parter.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yeah. It's only. It's only actual play.

[Leo Laporte]

The play wasn't a two parter. Had three acts.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well, I saw all three of.

[Leo Laporte]

Them in one evening.

[Alex Lindsay]

And this tells you also.

[Jason Snell]

So my point is that movies on streaming. One of the advantages of doing movies on screen streaming, if you've got a theatrical release, is that you've got a big theatrical marketing promo. And what that does is it creates awareness of that movie. And then you put it on streaming and what you're getting is people going, oh, right, I know that movie. It's a lot harder if you don't do a theatrical release with the marketing. So there is a. A model there, because Netflix doesn't even want to do a theatrical release. So there is a model there to have some of that Benefit of your movie marketing engine is also basically your streaming marketing engine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you've learned something here. First of all, Wicked is two parts and you won't see part two. It's like Dune. That's very frustrating, especially if theater goers don't know that going in.

[Jason Snell]

They've shot it though, right? Dune. They hadn't shot part two.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Dune shot a green light on part two. Yeah. This is intentionally two parts. The other thing is it's a musical, just in case you didn't know it's a musical. Wow. And they're so. They're hiding. See, I think that's gonna. I think it's a bad idea. What?

[Alex Lindsay]

How does someone not know it's a musical, though? I mean, it's wicked. I mean, it's like. I mean, everybody. I mean, I don't know it's based on.

[Jason Snell]

People don't. People don't know. They think.

[Leo Laporte]

And people don't go see musicals either. Right.

[Jason Snell]

And there's no saying. I mean, obviously they don't think it's a musical because the marketing doesn't show.

[Leo Laporte]

People there's no singing.

[Jason Snell]

So that's a clue that they're like, aha. We don't. Just don't tell them until they get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Hollywood traditional.

[Alex Lindsay]

See how the second week goes. That's always like the first week. I think that they're tracking for like 65 million for the first week.

[Jason Snell]

So I think the word of mouth is also pretty good. So we'll see how they do lines for the red.

[Alex Lindsay]

The red carpet. It was like. Or the premiere. It was like two days of lines in London. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just looking to see if we have any figures there. There are wicked LEGO sets, wicked makeup lines. There's a custom wicked Lexus suv. There are wicked Crocs, Starbucks beverages.

[Jason Snell]

We had. We went to Target yesterday and there was some weird wicked, like, totally inappropriate, like, wicked rubber balls. They're just. You can bounce them, but they're green.

[Leo Laporte]

They bought the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and lit it up in emerald green. This is really interesting. I think, you know, the 2023 was a good year for movies because of Barbenheimer, primarily. Barbie made one primarily.

[Alex Lindsay]

That was it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But one and a half million dollars.

[Alex Lindsay]

The challenge is what floats the movie industry is 10 to 12 tentpoles, and there just aren't 10 to 12 tent poles a year anymore. And that's the. That's the part, like, all the math isn't working anymore. And so I think that that's what everybody's trying to figure out. And, you know, I mean, it's. Something's going to happen. I mean, the theaters are very, very valuable real estate. They were given a lot of room during COVID where, yeah, they might not have to pay the rent every day, every month because they're such a huge part of the flow of people through a mall that, you know, they were given a lot of room. It's a very valuable real estate. There's a lot you could do if you get Everybody together. It just may not be theatrical releases or at the same rate. So we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Stanley tumblers in Wicked colors representing Glyn.

[Alex Lindsay]

For me, as I'm not going to say it on the show, Andy might know, but in Boston, there's a term for when it rains really hard and it's a wicked.

[Leo Laporte]

It's wicked hide. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, it's not.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not. Not Wicked hot. Okay. Target merchandise. Target launched over 150 Wicked inspired products. Home decor and apparel base luggage introduced Chic luggage themed around Wicked with green and pink designs.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's like, it's like we're getting a sneak preview of every yard sale in 2027. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it's kind of amazing.

[Alex Lindsay]

So we'll see. But the question is not what, you know, it looks like they're going to. All this marketing can bump up the first week when we get to work.

[Jason Snell]

3.

[Alex Lindsay]

The question is, did they get three times as much as they spent? That's when you see those things. And internationally, can they do it? But can they get. They got to get to at least 3x to break even 3x of the cost of the film. So that'll be what we see.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we'll get back to Apple News in a moment. We're gonna take a break, but I would like to plug. Jason, you cover this stuff on your very own podcast?

[Jason Snell]

Yes, I do. Downstream on Relay.

[Leo Laporte]

I wanna give you a plug. Dude.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that was like. There was like a on you do like. Yes, I do. It's called Downstream. You can find it where all great podcasts are sold. It's the one with the purple remote control button on it. And it used to be me and Julia Alexander, but now it's me and Abe. Rotating group of.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Julia left because she, she really.

[Jason Snell]

Was kind of Julia got a job at an undisclosed streamer. Yeah. But I've got Joe Adelian from Vulture and Will Carroll, who's a sports expert who was one of the founders of Baseball Prospectus. And we talk about all the sports streaming stuff. And I'm going to have.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd love to know covered Tyson Paul fight.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What it bodes for Netflix Christmas Day football.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I know. It's, it's. I am going to have to talk to Will about that before we get to Christmas. And I'm having next week I'm having Natalie Jarvie, who used to work at Hollywood Reporter covering digital entertainment and then was at Vanity Fair. And she's going to pop on and we're going to talk about stuff. So it's been kind of fun. It's tough to replace Julia, but I found some really smart people and they know about the business. So yeah, people should check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you for the point.

[Leo Laporte]

I just wanted you to get some credit because if people are interested in the last half hour, they'd be very interested in that podcast. Absolutely. We'll talk about Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. The updates are out and a lot more in just a little bit with Jason Snell, Andy Anatko, Alex Lindsay. Our show today brought to you by 1Password. I know you know 1Password, but I'm not talking about the product, you already know, the password manager. I'm talking about something brand new from 1Password. And I'll let you. I'll give you a question that will help you understand why you need this if you're in IT or you have a company. I have a question. Do your end users, your employees always work on company owned hardware, Right. They never bring their own phone. Do they always work on IT approved apps? They're never watching their Plex server in the background while they're coding, right? Wrong. So obviously you know that. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has the answer. Brand new 1Password Extended Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device. It solves problems traditional password managers and MDM just can't touch. It's easiest to imagine your company's security like the quadrangle of a college campus. Beautiful green lawn with brick paths leading from ivy covered building to ivy covered building. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. Everything's peaceful, it's idyllic. But then as it happens, everywhere right there are the paths people actually use. The little muddy shortcuts worn through the grass that are the shortest distance between building A and building B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities like contractors on your network. Problem is that most security tools just assume, oh no, that's the happy brick paths. Yep, yep, don't have to worry about that. But the problem is a lot of the security issues happen on those little muddy shortcuts. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that brings all those unmanaged devices, those apps, those identities under your control. It assures that every user credential is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we work right now. And it's generally available right now to companies that use Okta or Microsoft Entra and they're in beta for Google Workspace customers. It's time to try it out. You know you need it. 1Password.com MacBreak that's the number. 1p a s s w o r d 1Password. We thank them so much for supporting the MacBreak weekly program. And we thank you supporting us for supporting us by going to that address. So, you know, that way they go, oh, these people came from MacBreak. 1Password.com MacBreak the updates we have heard about that Apple had touted are now out for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, both for the imac and the subscription version on the iPad. I thought you guys would probably want to talk about this. Am I wrong?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, they had a big get together. So Apple had this summit, the FCP Summit last week and usually that's when they're going to release something. Not a lot of changes in motion. I think they just had some basic stability updates. Compressor has some more support for Spatial Video and then Final Cut. The big jump obviously was Final Cut. As far as the updates to the video products, they have a new smart masking AI. I think they're calling AI masking, but it's smart masking that's very detailed and then also transcription. And that's almost table stakes at this point. If you have an editing package, you kind of have to have it be able to do that. One thing that's interesting is you're starting to see a divergent from Final Cut was on the iPad. And we've seen this with Keynote as well. They're starting to add features to the iPad version that doesn't exist in the Mac version. So some of the draw on stuff that they have, you can just grab your iPad and oh, I want to draw something that'll get painted out during, you know, for the, for the show. That kind of thing is easy to do on an iPad, harder to do on a Mac, you know, with a pen. So. So that's the kind of thing that they're starting to kind of move towards in that area. So that's, that's kind of, kind of interesting, but pretty, you know, and then a lot of new spatial tools. So the ability to view your spatial work, be able to convert spatial work, be able to. One thing that's interesting is like we're getting to this point where Resolve and Final Cut feel very Complementary in the sense that Resolve has some tools that Final Cut doesn't. So Resolve has some stereo tools that are really cool. Final Cut has better viewing viewability than Resolve. I mean some of these, they might catch up with each other over time. But it was interesting to see both of them kind of going towards the same thing, but not in the same way. It does look like it's kind of interesting. You'll be able to view even with an anaglyph. So just the red blue glasses you'll be able to view stereo in final, you know has a way for you to kind of play that back. So they are. And this is the reason I bring this up is that it's a big reason that Apple has Final Cut at this moment. I mean there's a lot of other reasons to do it. But I think that one of the big reasons that none of us think that Final Cut or motion or compressor going away anytime soon. People worry about that sometimes is because Apple needs to have control of that pipeline if they ever want to do anything with Spatial, you know, like they have to be able to develop their own tools for that. So we'll probably see more tools in that area. So those are some of the big, the big updates for it. Logic had some new preview and you can preview some stuff I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Peter Gabriel was really excited about the built in Quantech room simulator plugin.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. So I think it's mostly that I have a very low opinion of room simulators. So what these do. And so I think that when I saw it I was like really? That's what we got. Like that was the. Like that's the best you got is a room.

[Leo Laporte]

It was hardware. Right. In the 80s that in fact Peter Gabriel used a great effect. It was part of his famous sound. Right. I think the drums and so forth. But now you, I mean comes to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Logic, you know there's a lot of stuff. A lot of the stuff. There's a lot of it been a lot of room simulators. There's also there's preview simulators on you know and I find that a lot of them just don't ever. I could be wrong. I use Logic. I haven't had time to really dig into it to play with it. So I don't want to say any more until I get play with reverb.

[Leo Laporte]

And echo or shapes the sound a little bit.

[Alex Lindsay]

It can, it can. There's two different types. There's simulators which are going to let you listen to it as if it was in a room. So that you can simulate a larger room while you're working on it. And then there is the actual simulating what this sound would sound like in a room. And that can be done. It's done in a lot of different ways. One way is an impulse where they make a loud. You know, they oftentimes pop a balloon. And what it does is it tells you what that reverb is like. But mostly they do sweeps. So you sweep from the lowest tones to the highest tones and you're listening to things. And that kind of sampling can get a lot more complicated or a mixture of those two things to capture how long that reflection lasts. Because the issue is the reflections. The reason the sweep is important is that the reflection lasts longer in some frequencies than others, depending on the space. And so to really model the space, you have to hear what's happening at many, many frequencies to understand that. So, anyway, those are some of the simulators. Again, I don't know a lot of people that use them heavily. Except for Peter Gabriel. I'm sure there's others that do.

[Leo Laporte]

And he used it in the 80s.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. So I think that. But I could be wrong. I'm probably going to get a bunch of. A bunch of people pinging me going. I use it all the time and I mix for film and everything else. And I think you can use it to build something up. You're not going to really try to match something that you have there, but you may try to use it as part of your build.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. John Voorhees at Mac Stories had Peter Gabriel quote, which probably was published by Apple.

[Jason Snell]

It's in the newsroom post.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in the news report. The quantech room simulator has been a key element to my sound for many years, appearing on records like Passion. And I also used it to build harmonic drones to start my live set, which then evolved into songs like across the River. It's wonderful that Apple's bringing the Quantech QRS back to life. That gives you a hint.

[Jason Snell]

So what I get from this is that there's vintage equipment that people like the sound of. I mean, shocker. There's vintage equipment that musicians like the sound of. And it's not available anymore as hardware. So somebody actually spent some money to make it something that they can now just use as a plugin on their computer. And that's, you know, that's great. The people who love it will love it. And I kind of love the idea that this thing that used to be this presumably expensive piece of hardware, it's just A logic plugin. Now that's nice. That's nice. You can get that gaseous cloud effect of like Red Rain now if you want it.

[Leo Laporte]

Red rain. Greg Scott in our YouTube says that is not what Peter Gabriel sounds like at all.

[Jason Snell]

Not at all. He became one of the Beatles there at the end. But it's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

He comes from Salisbury Hill. That's all I know.

[Jason Snell]

I don't even know where he lives down in Bath now. But that was a sound. They were in the 80s as a child of the 80s. That was definitely. There were a lot of people who wanted that. Peter Gabriel, Daniel Lanois. Gaseous cloud effect, they called it sound. And you hear it in various degrees in so. And in the Joshua Tree and in Robbie Robertson's solo album. And like it is a sound of that era especially.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, but that's the thing. It's like eight bit video games. It's a nostalgia.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Although there's a lot. I mean, if you listen to a lot of contemporary alt rock, it's all 80s and 90s sounds now. Like the 80s and 90s came back and there are bands that want to be very 80s and like, I'm sure. Do I think the 1975 will use this plugin at some point? Yes, I do. Because they have a lot of songs that are aggressively 80s retro sounding.

[Alex Lindsay]

And a lot of times an artist has a sound, it's not that it simulates a certain room, but it gives them a certain. It's a warmth or a sound that they like. And so it's more of an instrument. It's called a room simulator, but it's really just another instrument or a way to edge their instrument. One way, it's just shaping it. And so he happens to like the way that that one sounds.

[Jason Snell]

It may even be a literally one setting on the room simulator. Right, right. And he's like, no, no, we don't touch. We don't touch the knobs. Now this is how it just gets used like that. And now he can save that as a preset. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

I have turned on my Deep Cave room simulator. Does that improve the overall sound of the show?

[Jason Snell]

Sound like you're in a cave room.

[Alex Lindsay]

All I can tell you is that we spent so much time. We spent so much time.

[Jason Snell]

Now the producers are crying.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's a lot of work that I do to get rid of that sound from the thing. So that's part of why I don't like to.

[Leo Laporte]

Today I consider myself.

[Alex Lindsay]

Did.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, maybe you did. Do you have a MacBook M4 MacBook Pro for review. Jason?

[Jason Snell]

I do.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you note that it has a quantum dot display?

[Jason Snell]

I did not. It just looks real good. That's all I know. I did not run.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you know.

[Jason Snell]

I mean those displays are so good. But apparently, yes, apparently if you use this UFO test or whatever, you can see that they're, they've switched from their old coding to a quantum dot coating. The issue with quantum dot and quantum dot, I don't know if we've got the time to even talk about it, but the technology is bananas like the name would suggest. This is not fake. It's using quantum mechanics essentially to filter the colors that go through the display. But it sounds like Apple wanted to use quantum dot but that it contains some elements that are toxic. And they're like that's not fitting with our environmental pledges so we're not going to do it. And then it Sounds like these MacBook Pros are using a quantum dot coating that is not using that toxic element. So I mean, good for them.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. The idea, we've talked about it on Scott Wilkinson's home Theater Geeks show. Scott. Quantum dots came out. Samsung had the QLED QLED TV using quantum dot technology. And the idea is a better color gamut. I think Ross Young it's filtering the.

[Jason Snell]

Different wavelengths in order to get the very particular color on each dot which is using, actually using the, the light and quantum physics to get them. So it's not a, it's, it's wild stuff to get, you know, very, very specific colors filtered through.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's still an IPS LCD screen.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But the quantum dot layer replaces a different KSF phosphor layer.

[Jason Snell]

And no cadmium. Cadmium is the element.

[Leo Laporte]

No cadmium.

[Jason Snell]

Keep the cadmium out.

[Leo Laporte]

Cadmium. Young says better color gamut and better motion performance. And one commenter said this is from 9 to 5. Mac pixel response is clearly significantly faster when the test UFO motion tests are seen side by side.

[Jason Snell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can go to the Apple store and run test UFO if you want. Woohoo. Okay, so that's like a. Oh look nice.

[Jason Snell]

I mean they were already the best displays that Apple has ever made.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Jason Snell]

And now they're even better.

[Leo Laporte]

Like literally the trigger warning or something display. When I showed this test UFO page.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

It'll make caution computer explode.

[Leo Laporte]

Caution could cause seizures. Yeah. Okay. So it's just a web based test that's kind of, kind of cool. And you can see how different frame rates make A difference in the progression of a cartoon UFO over the screen. So that's kind of neat.

[Jason Snell]

And punch the monkey while you're there.

[Leo Laporte]

It does look like that, doesn't it?

[Jason Snell]

Does a little bit, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Flashbacks from that era.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the flashback.

[Jason Snell]

A little bit.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Literally a flashback back there.

[Jason Snell]

Hamster dance going on in there too. They should have the hamster dance benchmark. That would be a great one. Yeah, let's sign me up for that one.

[Leo Laporte]

That actually, you know, might, might actually work.

[Jason Snell]

I love the hamster dance. It's great. Yeah, sure. Who does it in there? Check your quantum dots. Get the hamster dance. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple might have a fairly big find from the UK over iCloud. According to TechCrunch, Apple faces a iCloud monopoly compensation claim worth $3.8 billion. The claim was filed by a consumer rights group called which which under the competition law. It's a class action lawsuit. 40 million users of iCloud. They're looking for $3 billion in compensation damage. Sorry, £3 billion, which is $3.8 billion in compensation damages. No idea whether this will. It's basically a class action lawsuit.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And there's. And there's a point to it. They're basically saying that all the good stuff, that because Apple does all of its core Services syncing through iCloud, if you want more space for your photos, if you want more space for backups, if you want more space for anything, you have only one vendor you can go to Apple and they keep raising their prices and you can't do anything about. So the point of the lawsuit is that why do I have to, why do I have to be tied only to Apple? Why can't I choose the cloud service that I want? So it's not like a government agency, it's not like an EU trying to apply a fine. But still, this isn't just like some fly by night lawyer trying to get a lawsuit.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead and try to use Apple Photos with another cloud provider. It's really designed for iCloud.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. And I think backup is a really great example where on the Mac you can choose your background backup system of choice. But on iOS, iCloud, backup is the only one that will do the job. And so they've got it locked down. And again, I don't think any of us would say Apple shouldn't offer those services. I think the idea there is that wouldn't it be nice if there was some competition? But there isn't. Apple just hasn't built it that way and it can be again, would I choose use a different service over Apple for Photos? Probably not. Right? Probably not. It's probably very convenient, but I don't have the choice.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Let's have a look at less secure.

[Alex Lindsay]

Clunky version of what Apple does and have it as another option.

[Jason Snell]

Right, but that's what it would be. But would I roll my backblaze account in if I could do back blaze on my iPhone? Maybe I would. Right. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And similar to like the conversations that we've been having about upgradable storage on the, the new Mac Mini and other machines. It's like why do I have to pay like a four times at least markup for storage? Well, because Apple will not let me put in my own upgradable storage. I would not. I would certainly not be choosing Apple's, Apple's prices for, for internal storage if I had any option whatsoever. And that's maybe why Apple does not want to let me do that. And it's the same sort of thing. It's like Apple cloud storage is, it's not a really great value unless you add the intangible value of it's all under Apple. And again the app. Apple privacy is certainly a thing. But I have all my photos being backed up automatically to Google Photos and it cost me barely anything to store these things in Google Photos.

[Leo Laporte]

And you have to launch Google Photos though each. Oh, because you're on a pixel you don't. Well but on an iPhone you have to launch it. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But also I like, you know, it's, it's, it's also something I can, I can launch through any web browser. So it's, it's okay. I mean it's not as, it's not as streamlined but, but the fact that I'm even using Google Photos to back up like I've got a 32 gig card of a parade that I shot and I just want to empty out the card. I'm even using Google Photos to back that up because the storage is so affordable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, when you buy a Pixel you get free storage unlimited.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well actually it's not for the Pixel. I think it only affects what you're actually shooting with the Pixel. Things that I upload side load different but the data plants that they have are, are a lot more attractive than what it would cost for me to do the same thing on Apple Storage. So if it gives, I don't know the law in the UK but if it just like these sort of things have worked out in the past, if it nudges Apple to say we've got a lot of unhappy customers, we could avoid a lot more trouble in the future and make our customers more happy by revisiting our pricing for certain things. That would be a wonderful outcome for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is icloud storage comparable to others? I mean, the prices of it, I don't know, because I use Apple, I have Apple one. I mean, that's really what they're saying.

[Jason Snell]

No, it is.

[Leo Laporte]

You're strongly incentive to have Apple one or something like that.

[Jason Snell]

Sometimes it trails behind a little bit. But in general, the prices, it used to be that they were more expensive. But honestly, what happened is Amazon and Google and a bunch of companies made a lot of cheap or unlimited storage available. And then a few years went by and they're like, yeah, no, that's really expensive and we're going to need to charge you. And so every year when I write a book about the Photos app and I check in and like two or three years ago, I realized, oh, this whole sidebar about comparing the prices is irrelevant now because the prices are all pretty much the same. Like, there's some deals and it depends. And yeah, if you're an Apple one, you get a different. You roll it into your bundle and all of that. But in general, it is the rare place where Apple, I feel like, isn't charging twice for the same amount of stuff. And that's because Google kind of set their prices right and Amazon got rid of their tier where you could upload as many photos as you wanted for free as long as it was below a certain resolution, because they all realized that's really expensive. And so, yeah, Apple actually competes pretty well there.

[Leo Laporte]

I've asked my artificial intelligence assistant to make us a table of icloud, Google Drive and OneDrive price price comparison. And yeah, Apple's definitely competitive right in there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Does people.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, I've told, I think I told my mom or somebody when they got a new phone, just get the 99 cent a month iCloud so that you can back up the phone and your photos. Yeah, that's 50 gigs, $3 a month for 200 gigs. And many of us have two terabytes because we have.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And pro tip, if you have a loved one who is who, you're worried about them backing them up.

[Leo Laporte]

You could share it.

[Jason Snell]

You could be put them on your family plan and then they get access to your pool. And that's what I did with my mom. I had my mom paying Apple $0.99 a month. And at one point I was like, I'm just putting you in the family.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop paying them.

[Jason Snell]

It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations, Mom.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, she can also, I guess, use our apps. I don't know. She's not going to do any of that. But her backups are happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple did recently add 6 terabyte and 12 terabyte tiers, which is. Wow. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

You get a lot of photos and videos. It'll happen fast.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's like, I do have. But I do have to. I feel like I can't do without having both Apple Icloud storage and having. And also paying for Google Cloud Storage. And I think I'm still paying for Dropbox for some reason that I'd have to do another investigation to remember. It'd be nice if you simply say that I want to buy one provider and just simply connect it. And that would be wonderful.

[Alex Lindsay]

My problem with Dropbox, I pay for Dropbox too. And the problem is that I have to set up a computer and then set the drive up on the computer and let it sync because of the problem. And they've made so much money. Dropbox has made thousands of dollars for me over years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Because subscriptions.

[Alex Lindsay]

They won't let you, say, grab the whole folder and download it. You have to, like, do the sync thing. And it's on my list. It's like. And it gets higher every day. Like, every time they send me another. Like, you paid $75. I'm like, oh, my gosh. You know? And yeah, so. But that's.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, actually, you want to really know. Annoying. Try using Windows with Microsoft's OneDrive. Or rather, try using Windows without Microsoft's OneDrive. They harass you. You to death. And a new install of Windows is particularly. I found out because I got one of the new Snapdragon development kits. I just wanted to see how Snapdragon compared with Apple's M series. And if you watched Windows weekly that week, you saw me struggling because OneDrive just decided it was going to index the entire drive and it spent hours doing it. Finally, Paul showed me how to just turn it off permanently. So you could be more intrusive, I guess, is what I'm saying. Apple's not as Apple. Apple has a good excuse. I think that this is Apple's excuse. In many cases, it's easier for users. We just don't want to bother them. Just make it simple.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's money in our pocket.

[Alex Lindsay]

Time versus money. You know, like, it's kind of like a lot of Apple users just. They value their time as the same as like, you know, and they don't want to spend a bunch of time working on this because that, that equates to something for them. And I think that. And I think that that's the. But I feel like, should they have.

[Leo Laporte]

A higher, lower free tier? Is five gigs enough for the free tier? Google offers 15 gigs.

[Jason Snell]

Sure. I mean, sure. I think it should probably be related to how many devices you've got connected and how much their storage is. And I feel like, right, they could probably scale it there. They're making enough money on the hardware that they could give away a little more for free. Because really, if you're going to do your whole photo library, you're going to need to pay them. And that's fine. But I think Alex is exactly right. This is what we were talking about, about the home stuff too. And this happens when we all talk about this. And when I write stories about this, it always comes up where you're like, Apple's selling this thing and it costs whatever, $500 and you just plug it in and you configure it and it works with all your stuff and it's great. Then somebody comes in, they roll in the door and they're like, well, actually, if you get a Docker container on a server that you run in your house and then you take a rest pie and you attach this camera to it and it only costs a hundred dollars. So you could save all that money. And the answer is, yeah, you could do that. And if that is fun for you. But there. And I am a nerd too, but there are moments where I'm like, I just am going to pay for the Apple thing. And it's easy and I don't want to bother with all that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, my, my problem is that I. Anything that I do that I don't like to do, I equate to my. How much I'm getting, what my hourly is like. I just literally think about you. Like, so, so like, I just go, if.

[Jason Snell]

If Alex's rate is very high.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I just go, I go. And I learned this from my father. My father was a lawyer and he makes. His rate was much higher than mine is. And. But he. I said like, why don't you wash your own car? And he's like, because I don't like washing my own car. And if I don't like anything, it's the hour. I think about my hourly and it's cheaper to pay you $20 to wash my car. So the. Think about that and I think a lot of Apple users, I mean they don't maybe not consciously think about it, but I definitely think about like I don't want to do that. And that means like, what would my hour like? If it's going to take me two hours, it's X number of dollars that, that, that I add on to the cost of owning that piece of equipment. Like literally I just think of it as, it's that plus the buildup, the build of it is the cost of the, you know, cost of ownership, you know, and I think that. And so I guess I kind of feel like when people are suing Apple over this stuff, I'm kind of like, well, when you buy, you know, it's not like Apple sudden up and did all these things. When you buy an Apple device, you're kind of buying into the experience and if you don't like it, go buy something else.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, I mean, I do always like the idea of Apple having to explain themselves and having to do such thing in a way that's not emotional, that's rational. And to be fair, sometimes something that is not right can go unchallenged for a long time before all of the elements come together to say. I'm going to have to ask you to spend some time with your lawyers to explain to an impartial third party why this behavior is okay. I mean, all of your points are absolutely valid and I don't think that this is, this should go to the point where like Apple has to change their patterns here at all. It would be nice if they offered alternatives, but again, that would require so much. Reengineering of icloud disrupted so many developers. Okay. When it first came out the first time, Apple put their foot down and said, okay, we are not you, you have a tic tac toe game. We are not going to allow you to put it on the App Store unless it supports iCloud. And the amount of developers that there was so much gnashing of teeth because we have solutions that work great. Icloud does not give us any advantages whatsoever. And having to support it now is causing us three to four months of heartache that we would much rather apply towards actually improving our product in ways that our users have been demanding for a long, long time. Imagine having to do that like at the, at the, at the, at the low level that would be required to like re engineer icloud for every single Apple service that uses it. But again, I like the idea of Apple and Microsoft and Google occasionally having to step in front of a court and say, here is why we've made this decision. And in doing so, so the people inside Apple who might have been arguing all along that maybe it's time to increase the free tier or maybe it's time to revisit our pricing structure, though they now have another argument to be made when they're in the conference room having this discussion that they might not have had in years before.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. Come back with more. Our esteemed panel, Jason Snell from six colors.com WGBH, Boston's Andy Inotka in the library. And and of course, Alex Lindsay. Do you have an opinion, Alex, on the Stanford vs. Cal football game coming up this weekend?

[Alex Lindsay]

Go Steelers. The Steelers had a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost the same colors, actually. So, yeah, it was a good game.

[Alex Lindsay]

We have another game on Thursday. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Terrible towel. Steelers out. Fit.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show. What?

[Alex Lindsay]

Go ahead. I was gonna say, you guys. I mean, everyone else tries to do the towel and it doesn't work out nearly.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there's only one terrible towel.

[Jason Snell]

Well, the funny thing is the Steelers.

[Alex Lindsay]

Played at the with the commanders, and the commanders tried to make up their own towels to keep up. And then still half of their state, their stadium, was full of Steeler fans with terrible towels.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You can't invent a tradition. You could, you couldn't have planned the terrible towel when, when that, what was that? That sports journal.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He just, basically, he did not think that I'm going to cause a revolution.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, but he did. In Pittsburgh, if you can't figure out what to get someone for Christmas, it's totally acceptable just to get him another towel. Like, you just, oh, here's a terrible towel. It was like, okay, okay, here's some.

[Leo Laporte]

Blue angel Steelers fans. Here's some astronaut Steelers fans.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I love. I only recently learned that. So he was smart enough to trademark it, but not so that he can shut out anybody else who's trying to do yellow towels. It's a charity thing. So that makes basically not only you buying, like a legitimate towel, but also you're benefiting an important charity. Like, wow, that is super, super awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to watch a Steeler game, especially when they're at home because the whole place is just bonkers. Just a bonker place to watch football games.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Our show today, not brought to you by the Terrible Tower or by my cope, but an equally useful thing, actually, Zocdoc. Now, when you need a doctor you know, what do you do? How do you find a good doctor? You ask a friend, ask a neighbor, go online. You know, that's kind of a crapshoot. There's some things that's okay in life that are a little bit iffy. Trying a new type of non dairy milk in your coffee, maybe buying something on an on an Instagram ad in the middle of the night. Gas station sushi. They know me so well. But finding the right doctor, you don't want to take a chance. Thankfully, there's Zocdoc. It is such a great way to find a doctor. You've got more options than you know. It's a free app. You can go to the website and do it too where you could search and compare high quality in network doctors. Choose the right one for your needs. Click to instantly book an appointment. I mean I'm talking about in network appointments with more than 100,000 healthcare providers across every specialty. It's not just MDs by the way. Mental health, dental health, eye care, skin care, and much more. You could filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located nearby, who are a good fit for whatever your medical need may be. And here's the thing I like the best about sock doc. You can see actual verified patient reviews and ratings. And that is so useful not just for telling you that this is a doctor whose patients love them, a doctor who gets the job done, but also the style of the doctor, friendly office, you know, great bed, bedside manner. Or maybe very quick and to the point, which I kind of prefer. You get to choose. Plus Zoc Doc appointments happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same day appointments. So stop putting off those doctor appointments. You know you need to go. Zocdoc.com what is this strange mole on my hand? Zocdoc.com Search for dermatologist Zocdoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated doctor. Zocdoc.com MacBreak we thank you Zocdoc so much. I use them and it's really handy. You can say look, this is the insurance parents, this is what I need. Can I get somebody now? Zocdoc.com MacBreak and if you eat gas, Discord says and if you eat that gas station sushi you may need, you may actually need Zocdoc sooner than you think. Let's see what else. Apple has removed another app from the Russian app store at the request of Russian regulator Roscommon. Another Radio Free Europe app is gone. They've removed others before, I guess. What are you going to say? They've removed VPN apps. They do it Radio Free Europe slash. RL was placed on Russia's list of undesirable organizations in February. RL is the app for Siberia realities and north realities. And this is from Radio Free Europe. I understand Radio Free Europe has always been kind of a thorn in the side with the former Soviet Union and they don't want the apps on there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep. Again, they gotta do what they gotta do. Even though they're not selling iPhones in Russia anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. They pull off some podcasts as well.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Can I interject that there's also a piece of news that just came across after we started recording Apple? Apple has just released a flurry of really important security updates for iPhone, Mac, iPad, VisionOS, everything. There's Google discovered a zero day that is in the wild and I've been reading for the past half hour about it. Apparently it has been used in the wild against intel based Macs. One of the flaws I'm reading a summary for PCMAG here. One of the flaws can cause a cross site scripting attack through Apple's WebKit browser engine, which is used in Safari and Web browsers for iOS and iPad OS. The resulting attack can inject malicious computer code into a legitimate website or app. And there's a second vulnerability that can trigger Apple's JavaScript core software to run malicious computer code without the user's permission. Apple's advisory suggests hackers use both flaws together to target older intel based Macs, which the company started transitioning away from in 2020 in favor of using its own ARM based M chips. But yeah, they just. I have links on the show notes at support. There's a support page supportapple.com so update vision OS 2.1.1 iOS 18 iPados 1/1/18/17 has been updated.macOS sequoia 15 have been released. So obviously it's something that is affecting the Safari render of the Safari engine. So it was very, very important. So don't wait on that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, I see it on my iPhone right now. So 18 and it sounds like Mac everywhere. Right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Everything that does Safari apparently.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I wonder if you don't use Safari. Here's the iPhone. Important security fixes Update now By the way, I love this iPhone view on Sequoia. Isn't that great? I can pull up my I could.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Be scared on two platforms at once.

[Leo Laporte]

If I click Update now. Does it update? Oh it does. Look at that. That's Kind of cool remote management for an admin. And now it's in use and I can't do anything with it. Okay, maybe you can't do the update directly. All right. Thank you for that important update. Safari has a problem and it's in the wild. That's what a zero day means. It's in currently out there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's the worst case. Not only in the wild, but also means that it's been used by somebody.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess my watch doesn't have Safari, so I'm probably okay there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, there's no WatchOS update in this update. Sweet.

[Leo Laporte]

18 hackers are trying to access your.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Watch and change the color scheme to something that doesn't actually match the standard three color Zorn palette.

[Leo Laporte]

Damn. Don't have to worry about your Apple TV monsters. Yeah, you're safe on the Apple TV blue and brown.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess Vision Vision Pro. You'd have to update Vision OS.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, Vision OS is updated to 2.1.1.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Wow.

[Jason Snell]

Okie dokie.

[Leo Laporte]

Weirdly, people are starting to get refunds for Apple Care plus many years after an Apple trade in. This is a 9 to 5 Mac report. Dear customer, I would love to get this. Our records indicate you're eligible for a refund associated with their Apple Care plus agreement for your iPhone 12 Pro Max, you returned or traded in and this person got a $200 refund. So check it's in some cases more than it would be for your unused portion of Apple gear. So I guess if you traded in your phone and you had AppleCare plus and it was still running, Apple didn't automatically refund you at the time, but now they're, they're getting around to it. Somebody did an audit.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's. It's nice that this didn't come from any sort of a lawsuit or any sort of responding to 9 to 5 Mac or Macromers discovered something. It's like, no, that's. Someone was doing their job. Someone realized that, oh, we owe a whole bunch of people money. We should get on that. That's good for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Let's see what else Apple. This is from the Indian Express. I don't usually do stories from the Indian Express, but they had a. I guess they had an interview with Tom Boger, vice president of Mac Product Marketing, saying we don't leave any money on the table. Table. Wait a minute. We are not a merchant silicon company trying to leave nothing on the table. In other words, we're not going to sell. We do not build chips and sell them to other People, we do not make money that way. Folks who do make money that way have the burden of adding margin on top of whatever they buy. He's obviously talking about amd, intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm.

[Jason Snell]

It also goes to how their philosophy of building chips, which is that they, they build the chip for specific Apple products to use that chip. Whereas if you're making a product that you sell, you need to build it with certain specs that you maybe have idealized and then you put it out on the market and people buy it. Or maybe you work with some partners to make sure you meet their specs. Apple, when they designed the M4, they're like, all right, this is going to go in the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air and the low end MacBook Pro and the imac. They know exactly what computers are going to use. The chips that they design, they're basically planned together and that gives them some power and flexibility that other companies don't have because they have to. Even if they've got a tight. Like Apple used to have a tight relationship with intel in the early days and they designed the chip that went in the first MacBook Air together. But even then intel is like, yeah, but we got to sell this to everybody else too. So what are we going to make our design decisions about? Apple just doesn't have to do that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, specifically they said our secret weapon is our ability to co design these amazing chips with the system teams and the product designers as they are imagining possibilities. Which is one of the reasons they are. I mean, here they are four years in and they have already exceeded, considerably exceeded, the performance of the first edition.

[Jason Snell]

If you're a chip designer, isn't that a great feeling to know exactly where your chip is going to be used? I would assume instead of having to be like, oh, the marketing people say that, the partners say, and all of this. And it's like, no, once they get alignment on it inside Apple, that's it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and what's funny is the only other competition to them in the ARM area was from people that came out of Apple. If they hadn't lost those guys, then no one would be anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

That proves the point because yeah, okay, these same guys went to Nuvia, which was then acquired by Qualcomm and Qualcomm has released this new Snapdragon Elite with that technology. But that's old technology, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Not there is a handful of people.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's still a general purpose chip for a variety of machines. So it doesn't have that built in ability to design specifically for the hardware. And I think you can see that in the Snapdragon Elite. It's good. It just doesn't keep. Apple's already ahead of it with the. They compare it to the M3 because they can't compare it to the M3.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I mean, and you've. Tim, Tim's said things like, you know, well, the phone still has a lot of legacy components. Like eventually I think Apple wants to make the whole thing like, you know, it's just like you open up the. I think at some point if Apple's vision is you open it up and there's a display, there's a chip, there's a battery, you know, and there's. And it does all the things that it, it needs to do there. And so I think that that's the. They, they want to internalize that because it allows them to innovate. I mean Apple is not good at integrating with other people. What they're really good at is vertical integration and this is a huge advantage. And as all these components keep on getting smaller and need to be faster and with less power, it's very, very hard to take components and kind of Swiss army knife them together and try to have them compete. Someone asked about, someone was asking about the office hours, asking about the aura. Remembering. Yeah, no, no, no, the Aurora. Aurora. The, the. It was Aura was Aura or Ara or Aria.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Was it Project Ara?

[Alex Lindsay]

Ara. Yeah, that was.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, from Google. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

They're like, why didn't that work? And I was like, well, because really phone design, it's really exciting except that all those pieces are not going to work together forever. You know, it's just like. And that was, it was just too complicated or ever.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't think they ever got like a straight.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they did.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Their system never posted. It was a great idea.

[Leo Laporte]

It was Google.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have a list of ideas that I love even though I know that they're not great ideas and nobody wants them. And modular phones is definitely one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, follow in the footsteps is the Framework and the Framework laptop is a success.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That is rough because it's not a fun idea. It doesn't have to be waterproof and also it's not a single package that has to be as compact as possible. And also people are more, they're more attracted to the idea of why do I have to get rid of this entire laptop? When really all I want is I want to switch from intel to amd. Okay, that's very, that's a very, that's a huge, that's a huge change.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's amazing you can do that with a Framework. You can take an Intel Framework and put an AMD chip in it. Which is really the idea.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, the idea that you can, you can upgrade, you can have bought a laptop three years ago and now your needs change and now you really need something that's more heavy duty, more powerful and it's not just adding more memory, adding more storage, changing out the wanting an HDMI port built in or wanting an Ethernet port built in. So now you can basically take the entire daughter board, swap it out. But then they're also willing to say, well gee, you still have this three year old intel chip that's still perfectly fine for a lot of stuff. We will let you put it in a case and use it as a thin desk desktop. It's like, honestly I have not been tempted to get a Windows laptop since Apple got its act together with a MacBook. But if I got one, oh my goodness, would I love to have, love to have one of their laptops because.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S just such a great idea. I had a team for a long time and ran Linux on it. I gave it away. I don't know who got it. And it was part of Leo's garage sale at one point. Somebody has it and I hope they've treated it well and upgraded it to AMD and all of that. Yeah, yeah. So it's possible. I mean modular is possible. There was a lot of thinking after Framework came out that maybe other manufacturers would do this. But no, they all see the same advantage Apple does with a single kind of highly compact device. You can make it better, cheaper, faster.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I mean we can put things together with glue instead of screws. That's much, much cheaper. And to be frank, if the public. Look, we're 100% clamoring at the castle walls for upgradable storage, upgradable RAM on every laptop. No company would even think about not doing it. You can see even on Windows, you only see that because there's a Windows laptop for every market out there. And a lot of the market is people who are buying them by the hundreds and they need to be able to. They can't just like can an entire laptop because it needs to be deployed to a department that needs more storage. So I don't think that it's an evildoers sort of perspective, but I like the idea that if anybody has ever said oh, but it's impossible to do that to do upgradable storage, upgradable RAM in a modern laptop that you would hate the trade offs like okay, here is Framework laptop, show me what trade offs I'm giving up for this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not unified memory. I mean let's face it. So it's a little slower. It's off on the memory bus and instead of in the die. Apple has some advantages there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, well, it's interesting. I don't know if I put it in like last week's show notes or the week after. There is a master Mac hacker that has a shop where, that has a shop where they will modify a motherboard on the old intel platform. So if you want to have modular storage, it will have modular storage. And he released a video just a couple of weeks ago in which he actually created an upgrade platform platform for storage on Apple Silicon Macs. So it's not as though it can suddenly take. It's not something you could do yourself. You would have to ship. You have to send the laptop to his shop to have this thing surgically grafted in. But you don't have, they don't have to cut anything. They found. He found room for it inside the case. I don't know what it does for heating or it does for ventilation inside the thing. But at that point you can buy memory modules that he creates and upgrade it whenever you want up to two. And he released some casual benchmarks that said that, well, it's not as though, yeah, it's slower than unified memory, but it's not as though like you will really notice it unless you are doing some pretty intensive stuff. So I don't know. The only thing that I would use that as an example of is again to oppose the idea of oh well, it's impossible to do it what Apple is doing like without having replaceable storage. I think that they simply decided that here's the complexity we would have to add to our own engineering to make this work. Here's the complexity we would have to add in order to support people actually doing it outside of Apple. And here's the numbers of how many more Macs we would sell. MacBooks we would sell because we have this feature. And that last number was just not high enough to justify any of the other trouble that it's going to have to go through.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of trouble, there was some trouble in Indonesia. The government in Indonesia was going to ban the iPhone 16. It wasn't even close. Clear if they meant new iPhone fixed 16s coming in for sale in the country or tourists carrying iPhone 16s. There was, there was some concern over that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The government minister that's in charge of this, actually, this is. I saw the headlines and I thought, well, let's take a look at the actual statement, like in Indonesian press. And he actually said, I don't have the quote in front of me, but it was like. And also, not only is it not lawful to sell it in Indonesia, also it's not licensed. It's not licensed to work on our networks. And he's actually said, if you see somebody using an iPhone 16, you should report it to the police. Which makes me wonder if you're just a tourist who came in.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a lot of tourists in Bali and other places carrying iPhones. Yeah. So Apple, which obviously Apple didn't like this, initially offered them $10 million. They are now proposing to invest almost $100 million in Indonesia over two years. Years.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The original kerfuffle was that they had made a. There was some sort of an agreement of some billions of dollars that they were going to invest. They. Indonesia felt that they fell short by like a small amount and they basically lost their wig over it. And they said, oh no, you're cheaters, you're liars. No, we're not going to allow you to have operate here. And given that like Indonesia is what, like the fourth, fifth most populous nation. It is a huge market. Market like Apple is very well motivated to make sure that people can still spend their money on Apple things.

[Leo Laporte]

In Indonesia, they, they say the iPhone hasn't met a 40 domestic content requirement. And that means, I mean, that's pretty hard for the iPhone to do that. I don't know what country you could do that and. Except China, but I guess Apple's gonna. Or India. Yeah. Because they're building them. Well, they're assembling them in India. But are they Indian parts? Is the. Is the question.

[Andy Ihnatko]

O. I have to double check that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Things a little all over the place. I mean, most of these things are get assembled and Yeah, I don't think they're making everything from scratch.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can assemble it, assemble it in Brazil or India or Indonesia, but you got to have somebody who can make all those little fiddly bits.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, well, Taiwan is obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

Taiwan makes chips. Yeah. Or the main CPU anyway.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That is super significant. Like 20 to 25% over the next year or so. I think 20 to 5% of all iPhones sold everywhere are going to have. Are going to have Indian origin, and that's up from like just 12% the year before. So Apple is clearly moving things up. Well, like the largest, like the Samsung of India just bought a huge iPhone manufacturer. So basically now there's, now there's. Yeah, sorry, thank you very much there. So now there's competition between Foxconn and this other company to again ramp up, ramp up supply, ramp up manufacturing. So, yeah, that's a pretty big deal.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and there's, there's obviously a concern of tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

So like, you know, like that's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Big Barron's and I saw an article in Barron's that says it could add $240 to the cost of an iPhone. And President elect Trump could actually make that happen on January 20th with this, the signature of a pen because he has emergency powers when it comes to China and Terra. So it'll be interesting to see.

[Alex Lindsay]

So far, Apple's been pretty good at avoiding these.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you know, Tim cooks in.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Tim talked their way out of it the last time. I'm sure that they still did pay a, pay a tariff, but it was way, way lower. Also he's talking about 60% tariffs on all China, China exports from China. But it doesn't affect like it's not 60% of the, of the retail purchase price of an iPhone. It's not, it doesn't involve cost of marketing overheads, a whole bunch of other stuff like that. So it's a smaller percentage. The $240 is. If they were forced to pay a full 60% per unit of phones that land in the United States, I suspect that that would be a lot lower because of again, Tim's diplomacy and also being able to land a bunch of phones from India. Who knows what their capacity is going to be like. By the times, tariffs become a really big deal because I think that this, I was reading about that new acquisition and they're manufacturing something to 6 to 10 million iPhones per beat. And how, I'm not sure how, if any one supplier in India could provide, could keep up with iPhone demand in the United States. So Apple certainly wouldn't go for two tier Congratulations, you happened to get one in the lottery that was shipped from India. So you get, here's another $800 back. That's going to be a big mess.

[Leo Laporte]

Adam Levine writing In Barron says 45 to 50% of the cost of an iPhone is imported content. 60% of that would come to a tax of 216 to $240 per iPhone 16. So it is not on the total price. You're right, but it is, but there's enough of it. Yeah. It's all up in the air. No one knows what's going to happen.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The tactic that Tim supposedly took last time was that, hey, look, if you make it harder for us to, for us to sell iPhones in the United States, given how much, given how much market share that we have in the United States, you're basically handing a gift to Samsung and you don't want to hand a gift to Samsung, do you? President, Mr. President.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And that was the chisel that he used to try to get some leeway there.

[Jason Snell]

So, yeah, yeah, it's politics and deal making. Tim Cook has. Did it four years ago, do it again. I think that, that I, I mean, that's when people say, oh, how Derek, Tim Cook congratulate Donald Trump is like, it's politics, man. And it's their business and this is how they have to do it, is you gotta figure out a way. And that's why he was, you know, at that Austin factory where they assembled Mac Pros and like since 2013.

[Leo Laporte]

But all that stuff, it's okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, from, from 100% Chinese components.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Mark Gurman, writing in Bloomberg, says Cook will be able to tout a large number of iPhones now made in India. And of course, India is run by Narendra Modi, a Trump ally. He also can continue to argue taxing the iPhone will only help non American rivals. As you mentioned, of course, the new Mac Pro launches presumably in 2025. I can, I imagine we'll see another little tour of the factory. And you know, that's good PR for both parties and probably an important concession. There's also a new Arizona plant for building chips for the legacy nodes. This is part of the Chips act, the Chips and Science act. But of course, Trump can claim it for himself if he goes and visits the plant. There's a new campus in the North Carolina, Gurman points out, that's been on and off again, slowed down the work on the development this year, but says it still plans to open the office. Another way to show Apple's commitment to the US would be to finish that. Yeah, he's done, he's done all this. He's done all this. So. And Tim, Apple is well liked, I think in the White House, Mark points out there was reason for Apple not to like the Biden administration, including by not stepping in, in the Massimo debacle.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and also, I mean, I think that the math with Europe will change, you know, when Trump's in. You know, like Trump may use that as a, as a wedge, you know, like he may want to use it as like a. Telling Europeans to back off. You know, it's a fun way for him to swing a stick.

[Leo Laporte]

So Apple is currently being sued by the Justice Department for antitrust.

[Alex Lindsay]

Although it does look like the folks that they're bringing in aren't much different than Lina Khan, which is really interesting because a lot of folks in Silicon Valley thought that, that. I mean, one of the big reasons they want to get rid of the Biden administration is they want to get rid of Lina Khan. And it. And it doesn't sound like the incoming FCC point is going to be that much different. So they may not have gotten what they.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The FCC is a horror. The FCC had. Do you mean the ftc?

[Leo Laporte]

You mean.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm sorry, ftc. Ftc. But FTC has a horror show in. In all of the. In all of the cases around this going after. And I apologize. Yeah, not fcc, but ftc. But in all of those areas where Apple and some of the other tech companies were under pressure, it doesn't look like that pressure is going to let up that much in the new administration. It seems that the people they're bringing in are going to be as. Not maybe as aggressive, but close to it. So I don't think Apple got a lot of space there.

[Leo Laporte]

Reuters reported that the ads for iPhone workers for Foxconn India were a little bit discriminatory. Apparently those ads ended after the Reuters report. Apple has no comment. The ads for iPhone workers in India said that women must be applying for the positions with Foxconn, must be unmarried age 18 to 32, which obviously you couldn't do that in the U.S. but that's very specific. That's kind of weirdly specific.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, that Apple put the kibosh on that I think, pretty quickly. Although as Reuters points out, it's not clear if the ads ended or the discriminatory hiring ended. Maybe the ads didn't continue, but the rules did. We don't know. Let's see. Apple is starting to sell ads in Apple News. That's interesting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They used to have the third party do it, but now they're doing it all in house. That's interesting. It means that they're definitely muscling in. They're definitely trying to make advertising a bigger part of the wedge. On a future six colors chart.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a story from Sarah Fisher and Axios. This is the first time they've sold directly into Apple News. It's not the first time they've had ads in Apple News. It's just that Somebody else was selling. Selling them.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And realize Apple does have an ad platform. It's just that we don't see it in the terms of punch the monkey ads. We see it in terms of why am I being recommended this app and not this other one. You know, things like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Interestingly, if an ad is put on your content as a publisher, you'll get 70% of the ad revenue. Apple will keep 30. So that's kind of, that's. I haven't done Apple News in a while. The only reason I don't use Apple News and I don't know why they persist with this, is you can't link out. You can only. Yeah, you can only send a link to Apple News, not to the publication.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It made it absolutely useless to me. That was so frustrating.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't use it because every reason, every time I'm reading news, I want to save a link so that we could talk about it. But I'm not going to put a whole bunch of links to Apple News in our, in our rundown. NBC Universal used to sell at those ads, but that relationship ends at the end of the year. And as we mentioned before, Apple is going to work with Taboola.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that's not a, that's, that's a really good look, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

So good.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not sarcastically. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Such a good look. But anyway. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Yanako, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. Let's see what time it is. I think we're going to, I think. Should we go to the picks of the week? John Ashley, producer man. Or is it too early?

[Andy Ihnatko]

A touch early.

[Leo Laporte]

A touch touch early. All right, we'll come back and we'll go to the picks in a bit, but there are some, some more stories we could talk about in just a bit. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states AT&T customers Switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com CarrierFreedom Switch today. Pay off up to $650 via Virtual Prepaid MasterCard in 15 days.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax qualifying port.

[Leo Laporte]

And trade in service on Go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. I don't like this story. I'm not going to do this story. But anyway I will because it's we need them. Apple shares the most popular podcasts of 20244 boo hiss. I don't know how they know what the most popular podcasts are.

[Jason Snell]

I guess everybody uses the podcast app.

[Leo Laporte]

They know you have to use the podcast app. So it's really the most popular podcast on Apple's podcast on Apple's podcast app. Let's make that clear. Number one. The Daily New York Times Michael Barbaro, Crime Junkie it's always the same for the Joe Rogan Experience. Dateline Smart Huberman Lab. This American life used to be really dominated this American life.

[Alex Lindsay]

They got used to just be number one for like a. Yeah, for years, two decades.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course the newcomers Jason and Travis Kelsey doing very well with their podcast. I've seen Spotify, I think say that it was number three on the Spotify list. Then NPR is up first. Another news podcast and morbid. So death news, news, health and politics, plus a little football.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Top news shows, Tucker Carlson show number 13 Mortal Sin, drowning Creek, the Rise and Fall of Ruby Frank Top series cereal still up there.

[Alex Lindsay]

What I thought was interesting was that the only one that I actually listened to is this American Life. I was like, I'm out. I feel like I'm out of whack because I like everything I listen to is more vertical than that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not any of those number one episode. You would have thought it would be Joe Rogan's interview with Donald Trump. That was number two. Number one is Crime Junkie, Serial Killer, the Alphabet Murders Part one. Interestingly, part two isn't even on the list. So I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. Never mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it seemed like a good idea. Idea. Most shared shows, like people send it out as links. The Huberman Lab, Scamanda. I don't even know what's wiser than me with Julia Louis Dreyfus. The Daily the Bible in a year. You need to read this. You need to hear this. The Bible in a year. The Bible Recap. Very popular. Who Killed JFK is in there. Most shared episodes anyway, a lot of lot of stats. But just a reminder, this is we're not on there because I don't know why we're not on We've never.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We've never decided to dig into the tragedy of somebody being murdered and sensationalize it for profit.

[Leo Laporte]

There we go. You know, I did. I did at one point. This is mostly when we were trying to sell the company. Didn't work. I thought, you know, maybe Twitch should do a true crime show. We could do that. I just lost my audio. What did I do? I unplugged. There we go. I thought we could do that. And I was looking for a true crime, and I thought the strange death of Adrian Lamo might make a good. I'll give this to anybody who wants a true crime series, because we're not going to do it. Because while Adrian, it said that he killed himself, I don't think he did, because he had some. He had a stuff taped to his thigh. There was some weird stuff going on. I thought it'd be a very good true crime. Should we do that? Alex, you need a true crime podcast.

[Alex Lindsay]

I could do a really interesting true crime one, but I'd have to get some permission. But I have a lot of data on.

[Leo Laporte]

So you know some true crimes.

[Alex Lindsay]

I know one from your dad.

[Leo Laporte]

From your dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His father's a.

[Alex Lindsay]

Might be too hot. It's a really hot one.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's. It's recent.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, it's not recent recent, but it comes up every once in a while. Yeah. So I'd have to. It's a. It's a really. Yeah. I'm not going to get into it on the show, but. But it's. But it would be a good true true crime.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever thought about doing a true crime?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I have not. I'm so busy doing stuff. I got so many shows. I'm like, you don't need another show. I looked at. I mean, I've.

[Jason Snell]

I.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, it's. It's interesting, but the problem is, if you get one that's really interesting, it just. There's going to be a lot of energy around it, and then people are going to send me, you know, threaten me on Twitter. And I was like, I don't have.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Also, unless I really have a problem with true crime podcasts and Dateline, unless there's talking about a story where every family member who knew the person is long gone. I can't imagine anything worse than. Even worse than not just true crime podcasts, but so many of these are being done by people who aren't journalists. They haven't been trained in sensitivity. They don't understand the import of what they're doing. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But it sells, baby.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think the ones that I'm interested in if they're going to do them are ones that are about somebody who probably didn't do it. And we're uncovering a bunch of things using journalism to get someone who was wrong. Because the problem is that once you get accused in a court of law, your chances of winning. Winning are. Once you're charged, once it goes to court in a criminal, your chances of winning are about 5%. And it's just everything stacked up against you unless you have really good lawyers. So I think that evening out that. Wait, that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know why John Ashley wouldn't let us go to the picks. We've not yet done the Vision Pro segment or the music.

[Alex Lindsay]

You were just ready? I was ready.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you know? I thought it's time to talk. The Vision Pro thought I gave him enough heads up.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no.

[Jason Snell]

So I was trying to look through the doc and I wasn't in Splash shop to be able to get ready and I scrambled.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a very good scrambler. I have these visions. I don't see him, I can't see him. These visions of him kind of off looking at a book or something and running back to the console, hitting the button. Let's see. Well, the weekend is here, so to speak. I know it's only Tuesday, but the weekend's Vision Pro, ladies and gentlemen, the weekend.

[Alex Lindsay]

I only saw pieces of it. I, I was traveling in my bandwidth. I was bandwidth impaired for the last couple days, so I haven't been able to see it. What did you, what did you think?

[Jason Snell]

I mean it's a music video so. So it's all about the visuals, it's not about the narrative. But what I liked about it and what I took away from it is I'm sure that Submerged had vfx, right. But it was meant to be naturalistic. This is not meant to be naturalistic. So you can see the VFX throughout and they look really good. And I thought that was a really great example of what do you do with a vfx? Heavy immersive. How does that work? And it was beautiful. It was.

[Alex Lindsay]

They.

[Jason Snell]

There were some very mind bending kind of like you look over there and through a window and over here and you see different things and it's very clearly special effects. But I think, I mean that's really what it was. It was all about the visuals and you know, his music playing. Well, I don't know what the story is. It didn't really make Any sense he's in an ambulance and then he's like on a bus or whatever. Like it doesn't matter. But I thought it. It's really just a purpose. Here's the kind of imagery we can do in an immersive space. So that's why I took away from it is to see something that's very. Visual effects forward. And that. I mean, that's. That was the goal, I'm sure of doing it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think it'll be, you know, unfortunately, because we had all this spherical stuff years ago. You know, Nuke and a bunch of other tools already have a lot of the spherical stereo compositing all built in. So doing those. Doing those effects are something that is a known quantity. In fact, 180 is a little bit easier than the 360 that a lot of us were doing. That's really useful is that those tools have been around. Obviously, Apple's magic sauce makes it just a little bit better. I saw pieces of it again. I saw little sections of it because I was having bandwidth issues in the hotel. They have another one coming out I think this week or next week as well. This one I think is more. More. It's interesting because it's more of a solo artist playing for you, or at least that's how it's being sold. Which I think is actually going to make way more sense for the Vision Pro than a lot of kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Alicia Keys video that they released with the. A little.

[Alex Lindsay]

Little, you know, it'll be interesting to see how many camera angles they use. I mean, I think that a lot of times what I want to see is just one, you know, one really, like, I just want to sit.

[Jason Snell]

I don't need them looking right in my eyes. Right. I want them to just sort of like. I want to be a fly on the wall and not somebody that they're singing to. I'm. Because that made me very uncomfortable with.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite part concert for one. It features a British artist named Ray. It's coming Friday and a global release, not out yet. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I do like these ones where they don't work very hard to make it an immersive experience where it's just. We put. We put a bubble camera in the audience and you are free to look wherever you want. Someone performing in front of a band because sometimes you kind of want to see John Endwistle. You know, all the pyrotechnics are going on between like three. Three other band members who are trying to be the front man. At the same time, sometimes you want to say, hey, what's that happening? That's kind of behind that other riser over there. And you're seeing somebody who's prepping, prepping hardware for a guitar change or something like that. That is really immersive. Because there are very few experiences that you can really absolutely nail in VR. One of them is standing still in one spot and not being able to walk forward, backward, left or right, but being able to turn your head and listen to something and watch something. And so being an audience member is definitely one of those things. It sounds boring, but I've never felt more immersed than those times when people were doing these presentations from studio audiences at TV tapings, audiences at concerts, things like that. I'd like, I would love to see a turnkey solution for something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

So Ray is more like a big band experience. They recorded the set at AIR Studios in London, a 20 piece band. She does R B, jazz and pop. And they say from the best seat in the house. So that implies. Well, we don't know what that means.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I think it could be though, it could be one of those things. Now the hard part is with 20 people it's hard to fit that into a 180 in a way that works. But, but we'll see, we'll see what they look like. Because what the problem is again is that what makes sense is 10 to 20ft. And you know, some people are only more than 10 to 20ft maybe, but it'll be. What I love is that Apple keeps experimenting. So there we get one thing, we're going to get another thing. They're going to keep on, you know, showing us different looks and feels of what, of where they're going. So I think that's interesting. So it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that the Weeknd is trying out and his management team and his label the idea of releasing music videos in immersive.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think Apple said, hey, we've got this great idea, idea, we'd love to do this with you. They had a bunch of meetings with his management. Then he came in and said, hey, that sounds great. How much? Like that'll be a million dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

How much?

[Alex Lindsay]

And they were like, sure. They pulled a dial up. I don't know anything by, by the way of this, but I'm saying I've been, I've been in these kind of meetings. So it's a big brand comes up and says we, we have a vision for what this could be, that, that it could be in spatial. And then what would you like to do if we did that? And then he brings in a director and they do the thing and they. And there's a bunch of guidance of, well, this will work in the camera and this won't work on the camera. And this is da, da, da, da da. And everyone goes back and forth and he gets a big check and then they get something that has the weekend in it. And so I think that that's probably how that. My guess is that's a pretty good idea of how that worked. But it's. I mean, I think that that's what Apple can do that no one else can do. Well, not no one. I mean, Meta has done some of that as well. They've done, you know, worked with artists, you know, and paid, you know, to have artists do stuff inside of the Meta quest and so on and so forth. But I think Apple can continue to go down that path. I will say that I finally.

[Leo Laporte]

I.

[Alex Lindsay]

Have a lot of screens. So when there was a virtual screen on the Vision Pro, I was not that interested because I was like, ah, whatever, it's not enough screens. I don't go away. I was on a plane this morning. I actually woke up this morning in New York.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, thank you for rushing home to do this.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's only one flight that gets home before the show. So anyway, it does require getting up very early anyways, so the. But I was on a plane and I, you know, I bought the. Had to get the ticket at the last minute and so I ended up in like this, like the back row, like the, you know, and in the back row you can't open the, you can't open your laptop. So I was like, I'm going to try this. And I took the, you know, I hadn't even tried to connect them, you know, or anything else. And I opened my laptop just enough so I get my fingers over the keyboard because that's all I could open it up for the thing. And then I opened up the screen and I got this giant, you know, what felt like a 55 inch screen TV thing. And I was like typing away notes and I opened up Final Cut. I did a whole bunch of stuff on the laptop and it totally, I have to admit, I babooed it. But it totally worked. I was like, I'm going to use.

[Jason Snell]

This all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Selling point for the Vision Pro. Perfect for the economy.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you spend $4,500 on a headset, you can save money on the seat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, you know, how did you Type, though.

[Leo Laporte]

So you left the laptop kind of open a little.

[Alex Lindsay]

It was open. It was kind of like, yeah, cracked open and, and I just, I could sit there and just type away and I. Everything. It just felt like it was a big giant. I mean it was, it was pretty nice. Like now I understand. Like people have been saying that this is incredible. And I was like, yeah, as good as the nine monitors that I have on my desk. I don't think so. And it. But on a. In an environment like that, because I have a little laptop too. I don't even have a 16. I mean, I don't travel all the lot. Why I'm going to now, but I haven't for a long time. And so I've got like a little 14 inch Intel Air like or Intel MacBook Pro or whatever. So it's like a tiny little thing that I just haven't bothered to upgrade because I don't get out of the house for work very often. And anyway, so I thought it was, yeah, old computer headset using Sequoia or whatever and nice.

[Leo Laporte]

How about that? Have you. Has anybody tried that widescreen yet or is that not out?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's in the developer beta and I haven't been adventurous enough to put the development beta on, but Jason has, I have.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think?

[Jason Snell]

Looks really good. I'm not sure if I'm willing to go to Mark Gurman's level and say it is the killer app, but it's a very good reason to get a Vision Pro if you are a very certain kind of person. Because if you travel a lot, because the wide, Ultra wide is a little extreme. Although it's kind of amazing, it's just like it wraps all the way around you, but even just a wide view gives you a lot more space and it's. I, I find it very clear. I know some people don't, but I thought I find it pretty clear and very usable.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there distortion at all?

[Jason Snell]

No, no, no.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's.

[Jason Snell]

It's designed to basically be kind of a magic curved screen so that you're just. Wherever you look, it's sort of right in front of you. But no, it's, it's, it's very well done and, and the quality is very good. And you know, with Ultra Wide, you basically got two giant monitors, but there's no seams. It's just all wrapping around. And what I find useful sometimes in Vision Pro in general is taking an app that I'm only using occasionally and just kind of putting it off to the side and I can, I can look way over there and adjust it if I need to. But mostly it's out of sight. And you can do that on the Mac now where you are sitting there working maybe in the center. But if you're an ultra wide mode, you can put a drag slack or discord or whatever and put it off in the corner where you're not going to see it all the time or your calendar even. But then you can go like this and it's there. Plus there's some apps like Final Cut is a good example where having a very, very wide window is actually pretty great because you've got a bunch of ancillary stuff on the sides that you might need to look at or drag something from. But most of the work is happening in the center that it's pretty powerful for. I think it's a great feature. I don't know if it's going to sell more Vision Pros, but I'd say that it is one of the best things going on. Vision Pro, being able to have a giant Mac display with you.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think with the new content and with the updates, it doesn't sell more, it just makes the current owners more.

[Jason Snell]

Feel better about themselves. Yes. And their bad decisions. Yes, for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like it's just like, okay, this is cool. This is something fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's your Vision Pro segment. This is audio. Vision Pro.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like you sit right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I was ready this time, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Porch pirates appear to be. This is from 9to5Mac. Ben Lovejoy writing. Accessing AT&T data to track iPhone delivery. Oh, that's our worst nightmare.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, apparently so. Apparently people inside are basically teaming up, selling the information about and a thousand dollar iPhone is going to be delivered to this address at this time. And they can. And because they have the tracking information, they can track the delivery and basically within a minute of it being dropped off at.

[Leo Laporte]

How do they get the track? How do they. You have to be an AT&T insider.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Somehow someone's breaking the law inside AT&T and selling this information.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. This by the way, I should give credit to cnet. This is Tyler Lacoma got the scoop on this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Apparently this is a big deal everywhere. Where again there are people inside the shipping companies, for instance, who are pairing up with burglary rings, crime rings to again tip people off that this expensive thing is going to be left out in the open at this place. Sometimes drivers are also involved again not just with Apple products, but all like expensive phones and electronics where they were going to the driver is in on it and they're going to deliver it to an address that is kind of nearby, but not at the actual address where someone might be waiting for it. And so someone is right behind the truck to grab it as soon as they can log in that oh yes, this was absolutely delivered to the correct address. And because most of these delivery places, they don't act even though you might check off, require a signature for delivery, even even people who are not criminals, it's like they, oh well, we're just going to drop it off without a signature and that's fine. And then you're really out of luck because you have because the Apple, Google whoever and the shipping company are going to trade off on whose responsibility it is. Meanwhile, you've got to the clock is ticking down on when you can basically ask for a chargeback. It's really terrible. There was also frequently it comes up on Reddit and other forums where people who are ordering stuff from the Apple Store using the Apple app and asking for same day delivery delivery, it just never shows up. Because the same day delivery route, that last leap of it is basically it's an Uber driver who comes to the store, picks it up and drops off your house. And apparently it's not uncommon for the Uber driver to simply steal it. And then whose word is it that they take or how long is it going to take for it to unwrap? It seems like if you have to have an expensive piece of electronics shipped to you, you just got to be ready for it to be stolen. The amount of trouble that I will now go through to avoid having something simply dropped off that I've paid for, I will drive 20 miles to a depot to pick it up at a depot, I will drive 40 miles, I will drive 60 miles to the one Google store that's nearby to buy a Google phone at the store and pick it up. Because again, it's not as though every single thing gets stolen, but once it gets stuck stolen, none of these sellers Apple isn't alone, it's everybody. None of them are really proactive and saying, oh my God, that's terrible. We're going to make this good. We're going to cancel the building, we're going to ship out a new one. It's like, oh well, we've opened a ticket check back in a few days.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there are also people who say I didn't get it when they did get it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that doesn't help you. And also again, the number of people who the driver isn't in on it hasn't been stolen stolen, but somebody at the depot broke into it, took out the phone, put in like a bag of rice, sealed it back up, and sent it on its way. It just seems like, how can you possibly win, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Courage Part 2. Apple is phasing out the Lightning to headphone jack adapter. At one point, I bought a dozen or a half dozen of these because I just kept, you know, I kept. Couldn't find them. And I probably still have a bunch of them. But if you didn't, I don't know why you would need one anymore. Since lightning doesn't exist anymore on new phones and headphone jacks. Well, you probably don't have any wired headphones anymore. Apple's adapter sold out on the online store in the US and most other countries. But you could still go to France, Denmark, Finland, Norway or Sweden if you need. If you really need one, you may remember these came in the box with when they first first phased out the headphone jack. But pretty quickly I still have type C to wired. Apple doesn't sell those. Maybe they do sell those. I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh yeah, I've got a couple in my bag. I keep those. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So 2016, they phase out the headphone jack. 2024, they phase out the adaptation. First they came for the headphone jack and I said nothing. Then they came for the adapter and.

[Jason Snell]

I said nothing because I wasn't using that phone anymore.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have to admit, like when the first us when they started with USB C, I was like, I really like my lightning. And I got all this stuff with lightning now, like the handful of things that still have a lightning connector. You're like, oh, I went on my trip this last weekend and I forgot I didn't take a lightning cable. And so then I'm trying to figure out how to charge my headset and.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, I literally bought another pair of AirPod Pros just so I wouldn't have to use the lightning adapter.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that sad? 250 bucks so I could have a type C connection.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, no. It's even sadder every time I connect to like my Sony earbuds or my Pixel earbuds. I see the guilt creating ghost still, says Andy. Andy's iPods. Eric AirPods. The AirPods that I lost like four years ago and is still somewhere in the house. I'm sure I still have the case for it, but it's gone. To the land of ghosts and winds. But I can't Bring myself to have it. Forget this item because otherwise I lose one of the friends I made along the way.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, now we can take a break and get ready for your picks of the week coming up next. You are watching Mac Break Weekly and of of course we thank our great contributors, Andy Anako, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. But we also thank another kind of contributor, our great Club Twit members. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Who make all of this possible. We've been looking at ad sales for 2025 and it's a pretty grim picture. I thought maybe after the election people were just waiting to see what happened. I don't know. It has not exactly opened up. And so it's really becoming more and more vital that we, we get the club going and get people to support us through the club. Seven bucks a month is not a lot. You get all the shows we do. You get access to the Discord and you get ad free versions by the way of all the shows. You get video for shows that we only do audio in public like hands on Windows and hands on Macintosh. You would get special events. We've got John Ashley just told me he's going to do a little special event of him upgrading his computer. I think that'll be fun. Micah's Crafting Corner. We do a coffee thing every once in a while. I think we got a tasting coming up. Stacy's Book Club. There's just, in other words, there's a lot of stuff going on and the club is really full of wonderful, interesting people, the people who support what we do and who like to talk about tech. So I think you would like being in there. So if you would consider Twit TV Club Twit. Seven bucks a month, first two weeks are free. You get a trial. If you're not convinced, try it for free for two weeks. And we now have a referral program. So when you sign, sign up, you'll get a special link. Anybody uses that link to sign up gets you a free month. So, you know, if you got a lot of friends who aren't yet members of the club, you could probably pay for your club membership for some time to come. Twit TV Club Twit. I really, really appreciate your support. It is, it is going forward more and more important to be honest, if we want to keep doing what we're doing, we do, we've done everything we can. We've shrunk as small as we can get. Got rid of the studio cut shows, unfortunately had to lay off people there's not. We're pretty much down to the bone now. So. Twit TV club twit. And thank you so much for your support. I appreciate it. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundled your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] progressive casual insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. It's better over here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now AT T Mobile get four 5G.

[Leo Laporte]

Phones on us and four lines for.

[Andy Ihnatko]

$25 a line per month when you.

[Leo Laporte]

Switch with eligible trade ins all on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com pick of the week time let's spend some Alex Lindsey's money.

[Alex Lindsay]

Alex so, so I've been building these little phone rigs. I've talked about this, the these little interactive phone rigs, iPhone rig and one of the big things that you get into to is how do you get all the USB stuff to get connected like so how do I connect USB to. Because you've got hard drive, you've got a maybe an external monitor. You have, you want to plug that all into your iPhone. You have maybe have a mix pre or something else that's there and it's been cobbled together. You find a clamp and then you attach it to the rig and it's all painful. Well Condor Blue just came out with this and this is a, this is a USB is if I can my face out of it. This is a. This is it. It's a mount.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a dock for the iPhone.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well it's not a dock, it is a. What this is is this attaches to a rig that you a camera rig that you would have except that it has quarter 20s. See it's got like quarter 20s on the bottom. It's got a cold mount. A cold shoe. Cold shoe mount. The problem with my Sony is it wants to focus on my.

[Leo Laporte]

I got it right here, you got it there.

[Alex Lindsay]

So yeah, so it's got, it's got all the it's basically has the same connections that you would get with, you know, another little piece that you'd clamp on, except that it can screw straight into a, you know, your, your rig that you might have for your iPhone. And it, you know, this has been a big pain point for a lot of us being that are building these rigs is how do you attach, how do you get.

[Leo Laporte]

Show us what it looks like attached to your iPhone.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't have. Oh, I'm afraid I got back here right before the show. I was going to try to attach it something but I'll, I'll show it in the future. But a lot of times what I'm using is a lot. You know, you can get a rig that you put your phone into and they don't. The funny is a lot of people that are talking about it don't actually. There you go. You can see them attaching it. It's yeah. A very simple rig. But, but you get the idea. It's really cool getting this, getting these, these, these hubs. It's just, it's just like a media hub like you would get from many other companies, except that it's made out of metal and it screws straight into the phone rig that you're building. I'm building kind of a. I have this really complex rig that I'm building with a Sony camera, but I'm trying to build a simplified version as well with, with, with an iPhone that you can do two way communication with people on, in the field. And, and this is a big, this, this was a big piece of that puzzle because you're always trying to figure out where to put the clamp and then how to find one that has all the things going out the right direction. And so this is. Anyway, it's, and it's. I mean it's expensive for a hub. It's not a very expensive item overall. It's about, I think it's about $80.

[Leo Laporte]

Or something like that, $89 that. And you get. It comes in space gray or raven black.

[Alex Lindsay]

Black. And the only problem with the black one is I lose it all the time every time I set it down. Like I, right before I did this I was like, where did I just put that?

[Leo Laporte]

I was like looking at it like stealth.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just like. It's like stealth. It just, it doesn't look like anything descript. So it just kind of blends into everything. But I'll, I'll show the rig in more detail maybe next week actually.

[Leo Laporte]

And this, this company, Condor Blue is a good. It's a good tip. In general. They sell a lot of interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

They. They sell really high end. I mean, this is like, this is not just for phones. This is Condor Blue is. There's kind of like a. There's an. You know, like there's small rig. I have a lot of small rig stuff, mostly because I got into it because of the rigs that I have. So I got, I got into small rig and then there's Tilta. And then you go up to Condor Blue. And then after that you start talking about like wooden camera and a bunch of specialty company, you know, like they're. We all know what they all are. Everybody's got a rig and you look at it and there's like this.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what it is?

[Alex Lindsay]

Immediately you measure everybody up. So I have the cheapest rig mostly, you know, which is the. I mean, there's newer is below is in the pecking order. Newer. The newer rigs are below the small rig rigs, which is what I have. And then Tilta is a little higher and then again Condor Blue. So they're American made.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's. They're out of la and they're really, They're. It's a good brand overall. So if you look at it, there's lots of camera rigs they build. And then after, again, after that you go up to more expensive ones that are, you know, and it jumps. The prices seem to double every time you go from one to the next.

[Leo Laporte]

Condor Blue with a K. Thank you. What a good tip. This looks kind of cool. I don't need it, but I want it.

[Alex Lindsay]

When you see the rest of the rig, I'll.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll show the rest of the classic Alex Lindsay thing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have another. I have a.

[Leo Laporte]

But I want it.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, it's a mix. I have some more pieces of the rig arriving this week. When I get the new rig put together a little bit more. It's absurd because it of course, streams in binaural surround from a phone in HDR because as you do, it's in spatial. So it's a cool rig. So we'll show more of it when we get a little closer.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy. And pick of the week two picks.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Of the Week one is a reminder that Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is still within the evil clutches of a $2 trillion super company. But you can watch it for free on Apple TV this Thursday and Friday the 23rd and 24th. You do not have to subscribe to Apple TV to get it there. And if you haven't seen it in a while, please try to see it like on streaming there because it is such a trip to see you can actually see the shadows from like the layers of cells that are there. It is almost disconcerting to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's too clear.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It is quite wonderful. But my other pick of the week is Feedbin. Every once in a while I try to make a point of if there's a tool or service that I rely on. I try to take a moment every year or so every once in a while to check out others to see if other services can do it better. I've been using Feedly for quite a while, chiefly because it's. Sorry, Reader for quite a while because it was pretty much what I was using. I switched to the new up updated revolutionary version of Reader, which has it's still in. It's not. It's in beta, it's not quite finished yet, it's not feature complete yet. And I kind of needed something kind of better than that. And so I actually spent some time switching everything over to Feedbin for it's been around. Feedbin's been around for over 10 years. A lot of people that I know and respect use it a lot. I just never happened to click into it. Or maybe it's because at the times when I was looking at it years ago ago, it wasn't quite what it was right now I like it a lot because it gives me everything that I'm looking for, primarily the idea that it doesn't matter what screen I'm looking at and what operating system it runs and who made it. I can still get access to my feeds, obviously.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's web based.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's web based. You can use it has a page on the product site on actual dedicated apps that are compatible with it. And it's like all iOS, all Mac Mac, all iPad, and like one or two lonely Android apps. But I discovered that you really don't need it because the phone interface, no matter what device you're using it on, whether you're using it on desktop, whether you're using it on a phone, is so clean and so easy and so simple that it's exactly what I would be looking for. And it has so many really great features to organize everything so that when I'm preparing for Mac Break, I can just focus in on just the stuff that's Apple News you can have within feeds, you can create other feeds that just like anything that's on the Barrons.com site that references Apple or references the iPhone make that into a separate feed if they don't have like a special specific like Apple feed alerts, it integrates really well with third party services. One of my previous picks of the week was Raindrop, which is what I still use and love for bookmark organizers.

[Leo Laporte]

You convinced me. Boy we use that like boy was.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That that was was one of the greatest switches I ever made because it makes so many things so much easier and it supports it. So I can quickly send something to my bookmark manager to check it out later, send it out to other apps. It doesn't have built in integration into bluesky yet, so we're hoping to wait for that. But I'm sure that's going to be an in demand feature and let's assume you can't simply roll it by yourself. Essentially what I'm getting at is that it doesn't try to be super super flashy. It attempts to be really, really attentive to the needs of people who need to keep on top of dozens if not hundreds of news sources and drill right down to I need to check to see what's going on right now. Again, that alert about the zero day that happened that came out about an hour or two ago. It was because it was so easy for me to have a feedback window open and check clicks specifically on just a topic site that would only give me things that are breaking news that made that so efficient. On top of all that 30 day free trial after that's five bucks a month. I hesitate to be this enthusiastic after only two days, but I can't find a single fault with it. It is exactly everything that I want. I'm definitely signing up for five bucks a month after initial giddy irrational exuberance spoils down. But I can't recommend it highly enough for again for somebody who needs to have a long curated list of feeds that they need to keep adding to and keep adding stuff to. I know that Jason's been recommending it because it has a bunch of other features for newsletters and Jason's word is actually Jason having mentioned that last week on bluesky was oh yeah, feedback. I haven't checked that out in a few years. I wonder what that's like. And he didn't lie. So it's a great service.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to definitely look at it because right now I use a web based service called Sumi News Sumi. But I do. I mean that's my daily. I do that more than anything else is look at feeds and select stuff for the show and if it has direct integration to Raindrop. That will be a very nice feature.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just to button something off. It's like a lot of RSS services and apps that I've used, including again, the app that I was using for the past couple of months. I've recommended it. The new version of Reader is like, oh, but we're doing more than just RSS feeds. You can also have your subreddits and you can have your YouTube videos and comic strips from Comics Kingdom and the other subscription services. And that's nice, but I'm very, very much. It's more than what I want and it complicates the experience. But Feed. But this other service is like. It will also. It gives you just enough. Yes, it will allow you to subscribe to feeds of your podcasting, and they are RSS feeds, after all. But it also made it. I'm not certain that it will become like a replacement for Pocket Casts on my phone, but the ability to very, very quickly see something. I want to check to see if there's a new episode of the Bugle dropped. If so, I want to download it here and now and actually play it as opposed to, oh, let me check your 100, and 300 different podcast feeds and then show you what's new. It's like, no, just let me check to see if there's a new Office Ladies podcast, and if so, let me download it and play it. So it's, it's. It's really nicely done. The last thing is that if you have newsletters, it can also it give you a custom email address. So if you sign up for newsletters, it will automatically grab your newsletters and turn those into feeds as well. So it really is one window where I give anytime I want to find out what's going on right now in any of a thousand different topics. Very, very great single dashboard.

[Leo Laporte]

And again, well, I'm looking for something because the newsreader I used and recommended in the past, Omnivore, got purchased and shutting down at the end of the month. So I am looking for something that can do that. It was the same idea. I would use a custom address and then it was kind of a. Because I mailing, mailing lists. I don't know why they're so successful. It's more spam from my point of view. So something I can read. The newsletters is great.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's great.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They are a little bit rough. And you're also hitting the nail in the head of one of the problems that I was having where it Seems like every time I change to a different RSS service or RSS app, most of them have some sort of an export command. But keeping the truth, truth, as you call the central truth, consistent between experiences is so hard, especially with. Again, I don't want to be denigrating the new version of Reader, but one of the things is it's not quite complete yet, so it can't export your feeds yet. And so I finally bit the bullet yesterday and said I'm going to spend 20 minutes seeing if there's a hack or a script I can do to automate the process. After 20 minutes, if I fail, I'm just going to put on a couple of movies and spend two hours manually exporting all of my specific Reader feeds into this new thing because I don't want to ever have to do that again. And it seems like this is a good service for. If you want to use a different app for front end, it will let you do that, but your central truth will always be for this feed app. And again, great stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Thank you for the recommendation. I should have listened to J. Jason.

[Jason Snell]

But yeah, now you got two of us going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's two. I think once it's two out of three, I have to.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just got my. I just got the 30 day. So I'm gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I did.

[Alex Lindsay]

It'll probably be three.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is how this works. This is how. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We help each other. That's right.

[Jason Snell]

Spend money. We do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Do I want to count the things that are in front of me right now that came that I bought like during a pick of the week?

[Alex Lindsay]

I know. Expensive friends.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Literally.

[Jason Snell]

My web webcam is from a pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Your pick. Jason, though, is another thing.

[Jason Snell]

So I'm glad Andy got into Feedbin. It is great. The newsletter thing is the thing that really started me down the path of using it all the time. Because then I had not only some favorite news sources that have rss, but all the newsletters I subscribe to also pour in there. And they just show up in the morning. And that's my morning reading is that list, which is great. It has an excellent web interface, but there are also lots and lots and lots of clients, especially on iOS, that support feedbin and they can add their own nice UI on top of it.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is in addition to Feedbin?

[Jason Snell]

Yes, this is. I use. So ReadKit is my choice. It is an excellent iOS app. I use it on the iPad. That is my RSS reader of choice. It works with Feedbin. You log into feedbin and then it will use the feedbin source. One of the things I really like about it, its interface really works for me. It has three different reader modes. So it will show you the text that's in the RSS enclosure, or it will show you the HTML rendered in a certain way that's in the RSS enclosure, or it will load the content of the webpage it links to and display that instead. It's got a bunch of different ways of doing that and you can set it per source, which is great because you might get one that looks great using type A and then type B. It's really bad. So, like I've got some where I'm a New York Times subscription, if I tap on a New York Times link, it just loads the New York Times page and I make sure I'm logged in there and I don't worry about it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want that though, right? I kind of want a reader version of it.

[Jason Snell]

Well, it depends on what you want and the style you can choose. And you can choose a per source. I really like Reader. It's really nice. I also want to mention another good iOS RSS reader that also, I believe works with Feedbin, which is called Unread. Unread is a very simple RSS reader, but it's really well designed. It's just very basic. I think that's its appeal. But they just added a feature that Federico Feticci wrote about at Mac Stories today, which is very clever. And every rss reader on iOS should do this, which is a shortcuts integration where you can literally say, I want to add this shortcut that I've got in the shortcuts app to read. And then when you're on an item, one of the commands that you can attach to that item is now that shortcut, which means that now you're sort of super powered in terms of taking those items and putting them in a bookmark, or adding them to a spreadsheet, or quoting them in a markdown of a blog post or whatever it is. I love that. And I want to see more of that kind of automation support. Because the idea that you just sort of like take a shortcut that you wrote and now here it is as a command inside an app like, oh, give me more of that. I really like. It's not just you could share it and then choose a shortcut and all that. It's like literally it's in the UI of the app now because you designated it as a shortcut. So there are A lot of really great RSS readers out there. If you want to go beyond the basics of like the feedback interface. ReadKit is my favorite though.

[Andy Ihnatko]

RSS is live and well, yeah, especially.

[Jason Snell]

If you throw in newsletters, that helps a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

If I'm using Read Bin, do I need Redir or.

[Jason Snell]

Feedbin is like Google Reader. It's like the place where you put all. You subscribed to all of your things and it's got a web interface and then you can. There are a long number of clients that will also work with it if you would rather use a specific client.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For me it serves two functions. One, to be the central truth of all of my RSS feeds no matter how I access it. And two, I happen to like the web client for the phone and desktop really, really well. So I also use it for now as my regular RSS reader and newsreader. But if you just want to use it as the central truth, meaning every time that you find a new website, say oh wow, those are three great articles. I want to start following this. Every single day you open up feedbin.com, add it or use a keyboard, use the bookmarklet to add it to that. And then if you have a third party app with a nice Mac interface interface to actually do the reading that. If you want to use that, that's fine, but it's not your truth of subscriptions is not going to be locked up within this third party app. It will be feedbin. So if you decide that oh wow, this other RSS app works so much better or this RSS app I like isn't available for Android, what can I do on Android? That doesn't matter. They'll be both giving you the same access to that same database of feeds.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm paralyzed by too many children choices.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Get feedback, pay money.

[Jason Snell]

Start with feedback in the web interface and then see if you want to add an app on top of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, now there's Newswire and there's. I have Innoreader, which I've been paying.

[Jason Snell]

For for years and most of them work with feedbin.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, what do I need Feedbin for?

[Alex Lindsay]

They don't.

[Jason Snell]

Well, Feedbin is one of the advantages of having. It's like Google Reader. It's the idea that there's a central thing that contains all your subscriptions and it knows what you've read and what you've noticed and it'll sync it and it's the one who's polling so that when you open the app it doesn't sit there and pull 80 different RSS feeds one at a time. It's doing it in the background, on the server, in the cloud. And so it's just convenient. You don't need feedbin to read rss. It just, as Andy said, it gives you a central repository. They're the ones doing the querying. And the best, again, for those who remember Google Reader, it's basically that idea. It is its own service that does that in the background, the cloud.

[Alex Lindsay]

And none of them are reading out loud yet. Like, I feel like there's a. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Feel like that's what OMN for was bought by eleven Labs. Because that's what's going to happen is.

[Alex Lindsay]

I feel like we're on the cusp of just saying, just read these articles. Like, just like, while I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Because 11 reader.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, totally, totally.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because maybe that'll integrate with Feed Bin.

[Jason Snell]

It probably will. I mean, that's the beauty of it.

[Leo Laporte]

But what about this unread? Should I not even look at that? Because I like the shortcuts idea.

[Jason Snell]

Well, I just. I mean, you, you can. It's an app, so you can try for free and it will sync with feedbin. So you could give it.

[Leo Laporte]

Although the shortcut syncs with the paid for.

[Jason Snell]

I think it syncs with feedbin. I mean, they mostly do. So I would start with.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. Yeah. Everything syncs with feedbin.

[Jason Snell]

You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Feedbin is the central repository for all of this.

[Jason Snell]

It's a good central repository. I think the way to think of it is just like the idea of having an email client. Like you choose a client that works for you. Email is email. This is sort of like that, where you choose RSS client that works you. And if you want to use Feedback as the central repository. It's nice. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I'm so confused.

[Jason Snell]

And newsletters. Pipe your newsletters in there. It's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the main thing I wanted to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be nice to have one central place where all the stuff lived and then you had all the. And I like the idea of shortcuts. So I have, you know, I could send it to my microblog, I could send it to my tweet Storm or whatever and then that would be kind of nice to. Okay. One of these days I wish I had some free time. I could just sit down and set this stuff up. Thank you, Jason Snell. Six colors.com is the place to go. Sixcolors.com Jason will give you all of his wonderful podcasts and go blue.

[Jason Snell]

Go on you bears. Go bears.

[Leo Laporte]

Go bears.

[Jason Snell]

Go bears.

[Leo Laporte]

Go bears.

[Jason Snell]

Bring back the ax again.

[Leo Laporte]

We have the ax.

[Jason Snell]

To be clear, we have the ax.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's like to keep confused on that issue. The ax is ours. How many years has the ax been yours?

[Jason Snell]

Three years in a row, maybe at this point.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's about time. Yeah, it's about time. You get to keep the ax.

[Alex Lindsay]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, Andy, Anaka, when are you going to be on GBH?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Next Thursday. Thursday at 12:30 Eastern Time. Go to WGBH news.org to stream @ live or later.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Thank you, sir. And Mr. Alex Lindsey, do you have an RSS reader recommendation? I do not.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm following. I've been trying to find one. You know, I think. I think I feel like I've been in the wilderness trying to figure it out, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've just downloaded all of these to like, play with them. Because I do think that. I mean, I have to admit, most of my news is Apple News and Flipboard. I still have Flipboard after all these years, right? But they started. They changed. It's funny how something changed. Like Flipboard changed something with the way they managed ads. And I completely stopped using it. Like, it's. That's the thing that always scares me about changing products is that that it was like something I used for 10 years and then I, like, within a month I was not using it anymore, you know, and so now I'm kind of like, well, I gotta find somewhere else to get news because I'm not using that anymore. So. And it was just something like, you know, too many ads or the ads were. They were. Here's what they were is they were scrolling down from the top. I pretty much, much hate Windows moving across other windows, you know, like when I'm browsing. And so if a website does that or anything does that, I stop using it. So anyway, so that's. So I'm interested in what Jason and Andy have to say.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I've downloaded those and play with them. I just want something that'll read them to me because I don't, you know, like, I love being able to work on other things while I listen to all the articles.

[Leo Laporte]

So 11 Labs has Lawrence Olivier's voice. You have Larry reading you to try that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm trying.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we've all learned something today. I thank you so much for being here. Oh, I forgot to ask you. Officehours Global, what you got coming up?

[Alex Lindsay]

Gotta give you a plug. All you're going to see is us, right now what's happening is that of course we have, you know, we got bored so we made more shows. So we have, you know, so on Monday nights we have extra hours, which is a much slower discussion. So we only deal with a couple subjects in two, over two hours. And then we have the rundown which is on Thursday and that is again slightly different play on the format. And then, and then otherwise we're not doing as many second hours right now because we're doing all this R and D around the quality of our stream. So we've, we've moved to 4K. That's working fine. We're now adding HDR, which is still a little hit and miss. We're having some, you know, we're figuring out some esoteric, esoteric ways of getting to YouTube. So we're working on that right now. We're going to expand the number of play. You're already ahead of us where you're streaming to lots of platforms. We're going to start doing that over the over December and then we're adding some frame rate again. A lot of this has to do with we want to cover a bunch of shows next year and we want the whole thing to be in 4K and 5.1 and HDR and when we're on site. But we need to build our entire platform to support that. So every day you're going to see things. So if you want to watch the thing, generally we're answering lots of questions while we figure that out. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. Thank you very much. Andy, Alex, Jason. Thanks to all of you. Special thanks to our club members for making this all possible. We do stream remarkably amazingly. Thanks to restream. Restream IO on eight different platforms. Club members get to watch in the club. Twit Discord. A lot of them choose YouTube anyway because YouTube's quality is very good. YouTube.com Twitch Twit Live, Twitch TV, Twit. There's also X.com Facebook, LinkedIn, Kik and TikTok. So pick your favorite platform. You can watch us stream as we do the show for most of our shows, but in this case every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. After the stream is over, we then polish it up. John Ashley adds his special little and we put a copy of it up on the website. Twit TV, MBW audio or video you choose. There's also a YouTube channel you'll see at the website the link that is the entire show video that's useful for sharing little clips like if you have a friend who's saying, you know, I wonder what RSS reader I should use. Just confuse the hell out of him and send him that clip. And that way maybe he'll be turned on to MacBreak weekly and certainly he will have come up with some good ideas for how to do rss. There's also the best way to subscribe is in a podcast client of your choice. Pocket Casts or Overcast or Apple's podcast. Whatever it is that you use, just look for Mac Break Weekly. Subscribe to the audio or video and that way you'll have at the minute we're done fixing it up so you can listen to it whenever you're in the mood. I would do all of the above. That way you get it all. Join us in the club Twitter and join us next week for another Mac Break Weekly. Now it is my sad duty to tell you you must get back to work because break time is over. Bye Bye. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] progressive casual insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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