MacBreak Weekly 951: Launder It Through Belkin

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 951: Launder It Through Belkin
Release Date: December 10, 2024
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell
Platform: TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)

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Introduction

In Episode 951 of MacBreak Weekly, the team—Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell—gathered to delve into a range of Apple-centric topics. From Apple's ambitious plan to replace Qualcomm modems to the evolving landscape of the Vision Pro headset, the discussion was both comprehensive and insightful.

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Apple's Stride Towards In-House Modems

A major focal point of the episode was Apple's multi-year endeavor to develop its own 5G modems, aiming to reduce reliance on Qualcomm. Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported that Apple plans a three-year rollout to replace Qualcomm modem chips across all its devices, including the Vision Pro headset.

Jason Snell highlighted the strategic placement of these modems:

"[...] Apple is confident its modem will work."
(12:10)

Andy Ihnatko added that this transition allows Apple greater freedom in hardware development, potentially shaving off valuable millimeters from device thickness:

"The modem they're developing will ultimately help them not just build their own but integrate it into the rest of their silicon."
(08:56)

Despite hefty investments—billions poured into testing and engineering labs, acquisitions like Intel's modem group, and hiring top engineers—the journey has been fraught with challenges. Issues such as prototypes being too large, overheating, and insufficient power efficiency were significant hurdles.

Leo Laporte remarked on the potential impact on Qualcomm:

"Qualcomm receives more than 20% of its revenue from Apple. If Apple succeeds, Qualcomm could lose a major customer."
(13:37)

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The iPhone Air and Design Innovations

The rumor mill is abuzz with speculations about the iPhone Air, a rumored slimmer variant of the iPhone. The hosts debated whether Apple might also explore folding phones.

Andy Ihnatko expressed skepticism about making devices thinner solely for the sake of aesthetics:

"I usually disdain making things thinner for the sake of it, but the phone is an area where 1 millimeter off can make it feel significantly smaller in hand."
(06:26)

Jason Snell concurred, emphasizing the technical challenges of folding phones:

"If Apple is interested in making a folding phone, they'll have to figure out how to make it thinner."
(06:47)

The discussion also touched upon the Dynamic Island feature, with Leo Laporte preferring the flip form factor over folding mechanisms due to thickness concerns:

"I prefer the flip over the fold because folding increases thickness."
(07:54)

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Vision Pro: Modems and Gaming Enhancements

Apple's Vision Pro headset is another significant topic. The integration of the new in-house modem, codenamed Prometheus, promises enhanced capabilities, including satellite support for next-generation networks.

Alex Lindsay pointed out the potential for augmented reality applications:

"Future glasses make a lot of sense when those headsets get smaller or become glasses."
(30:07)

However, challenges remain, particularly in gaming. The lack of precise hand controllers compared to competitors like PSVR2 and Quest was a concern. Jason Snell noted:

"The precision of hand controllers in PSVR2 and Quest makes those platforms superior for certain games."
(57:25)

To address this, Apple is collaborating with Sony to potentially integrate PSVR2 controllers with Vision Pro, aiming to enhance the gaming experience:

"Sony will have to pull them out of packages of PSVRs that are unsold and repackaged as something that can be sold standalone."
(55:40)

Leo Laporte expressed optimism about third-party collaborations improving Vision Pro's functionality:

"We're seeing some of these things that are missing pieces, and it's good they're being addressed."
(58:26)

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Security Concerns: Scammers and QR Codes

A troubling segment discussed the rise of scammers impersonating customers at Apple Stores to pick up devices fraudulently. Scammers exploit QR codes sent via email or text to claim device pickups.

Alex Lindsay emphasized the vulnerability:

"Scammers might be getting hold of email QR codes, which shouldn't be the sole verification method for high-value purchases."
(124:55)

Andy Ihnatko speculated on the exploitation method:

"They might use malware to access compromised accounts, retrieve QR codes, and deploy mules to Apple Stores."
(125:00)

The hosts advised vigilance, urging users to ensure the security of their accounts and verify pickup procedures rigorously.

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App Store Policies: Brazil's Involvement

The episode also touched upon Apple's ongoing legal battles in Brazil regarding App Store policies. A recent overturning of an injunction that would have mandated sideloading (installing apps outside the App Store) was highlighted.

Jason Snell explained:

"Apple might use this as a negotiation tactic, but ultimately, it complicates Qualcomm's licensing issues."
(15:00)

The hosts discussed the broader implications, including Apple's commitment to maintaining control over its ecosystem while navigating regulatory pressures.

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Enhancing Mac Performance: CleanMyMac

An advertisement seamlessly integrated into the discussion introduced CleanMyMac by MacPaw, positing it as the ultimate solution for Mac optimization. Features like Smart Care, Moonlock antimalware, and user-friendly dashboards were highlighted.

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Developer Insights and Tools

The conversation ventured into developer tools, with Alex Lindsay sharing experiences using ChatGPT and Claude to program with Xcode. This segment underscored the evolving landscape of app development, where AI assists in rapid prototyping and code generation, lowering barriers for non-programmers.

Alex Lindsay shared:

"I learned a lot about Xcode in 3 hours using ChatGPT, which accelerated my ability to prototype apps."
(136:38)

Jason Snell echoed the sentiment, emphasizing the efficiency AI brings to repetitive and mundane tasks, allowing developers to focus on creativity and refinement.

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Entertainment and Accessibility

Tim Cook's interview with Stephen Levy was discussed, where Cook addressed the challenges and successes of the Vision Pro headset, notably its accessibility features. The integration of feedback from individuals like Stevie Wonder underscores Apple's dedication to inclusive design.

Jason Snell remarked on the potential of AI in medicine and Apple’s role in advancing health-related technologies through devices like the Apple Watch:

"Apple's investment in health sensors allows for holistic monitoring and proactive health insights."
(51:19)

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Closing Remarks and Holiday Picks

As the episode drew to a close, the hosts shared personal updates and recommended holiday picks. Andy Ihnatko recommended Patrick Stewart's one-man show rendition of "A Christmas Carol", while Jason Snell highlighted the Festivitas app, which adorns Macs with customizable holiday lights, blending nostalgia with modern functionality.

Leo Laporte emphasized the importance of support for the show through Club Twit, encouraging listeners to contribute to sustain the podcast.

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Conclusion

Episode 951 of MacBreak Weekly provided an in-depth exploration of Apple's strategic moves in hardware development, the ongoing challenges with regulatory environments, and the intersection of technology with everyday usability and security. The hosts balanced technical discussions with personal anecdotes and valuable recommendations, making the episode both informative and engaging for tech enthusiasts.

For more detailed insights and ongoing discussions, listeners are encouraged to join Club Twit and stay connected through the various platforms where MacBreak Weekly is available.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy Ionkos here. Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. The whole gang is assembled. Time to talk Apple. Lots to talk about too, including Apple's plans to replace the Qualcomm modem in all of their devices with their own brand modem. And that even means in the Vision Pro. We'll find out more about that. Apple's first competitor on the iPhone for Apple Pay is arriving in Norway. What does that mean and why? You should be very careful with that QR code you get before you pick up your new laptop. Plus a special present under Jason Snell's tree. All of that and more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Mac Break Weekly Episode 951 recorded Tuesday, December 10, 2024 Launder it through Belkin Is your Mac feeling slow, cluttered, or just overwhelmed? Meet the all new Clean My Mac. Your ultimate solution for Mac control and care. Crafted by MacPaw, CleanMyMac has been optimizing Macs since 2008 and now it's more than just about cleaning, it's about care. With Smart Care, you have a user friendly dashboard that lets you take control of how your Mac feels and performs and every moment organize your digital space with my Clutter, removing duplicates in your downloads and instantly freeing up valuable space. Cleanup takes care of system cache development, junk and unnecessary files, preventing issues and boosting performance. Stay safe with Moonlock antimalware, scanning for viruses and threats, ensuring your Mac remains secure. And with the Assistant and menu app, get helpful tips for battery life, overheating and more right at your fingertips. Think of CleanMyMac as your digital gardener, transforming your Mac into a refreshing, organized oasis, simple, secure and optimized. Ready to tidy up your Mac? CleanMyMac is available on the MacPaw website, Mac App Store and SetApp. Use my promo code MACBREAK10 that's M A C B R E A K10 for 10% off on any CleanMyMac subscription plans.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required Card has no cash access and expires in six months, it's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Apple, most of which will be rumors today because it's that time of year as it's getting to look a lot like Christmas. Notice we have decorated the twit attic with bottle brush Christmas trees acquired at very little cost from Amazon.com. hello, Andy and Akko. Where's the library decorations?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Actually, I stole them all because I thought that my place wasn't looking very festive. So I thought, why should the public have these?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is a lending library they should lend you, and I'm going to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Bring it right back as soon as, like, the feast of the epiphany is over with, by the way, not one day later.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy, I think, has cornered the market on Dr. Pepsi. Tall boys. Is that a tall boy you're drinking there? Oh, well, you got to switch to him or we won't know. There you. It does look like it's. Oh, yeah. 23 ounces.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So 16. 16 ounces. A full pint for people in freedom units.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a leader of Dr. Pepper. Good to see you, Andrew. Also here from office hours global and 090 media, the one, the only, Alex Lindsey. Hello, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hello. Hello. Good to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Am I supposed to say Lindsay?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, it's just. Lindsay's fine. The ey typically, is the English Lindsey's, and the ay is the Scottish Lindsey's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're the Scottish.

[Alex Lindsay]

But we all say Lindsay all the way.

[Leo Laporte]

If it doesn't have an A, it's not great. It's crap.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, we split up, and then some of us ended up fighting with.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

William Wallace.

[Leo Laporte]

A is wearing a kilt. All right, that's good enough. Hi, alex. Also here, Mr. J. Cisnell. Six of them. Colors.

[Jason Snell]

So many.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. You're in the living room.

[Jason Snell]

It's. It's a lie. It's a lie. I just felt like I needed to get in the Christmas spirit because you made me. But it's. I'm just. You know, I'm where. I'm always here. I'm always here. But I do have. Yes, that's. You know, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

If we had a Burke back in the studio days, we would really overdo it. I think we would really decorate this. There was one year a couple of years ago where I noted probably I think was on a MacBreak weekly. I noted that we had not yet decorated, and it was already well into December, and Burke threw up on the set. He just brought Everything in and threw it in. I don't have a Burke. Well, he's here, but he's not here here. So I had to do my own decorating. I kind of like those. We ordered them live on this week in Google and they finally arrived. So. Oh, let's talk about the modem, because that's. That's probably the source of most of the new rumors, including the iPhone air, which everybody acts as if, like, oh, that's a given. They're going to definitely do that next year. I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I guess it depends on whether you think that they're going to be making it as a separate product in a separate SKU and a separate name with a separate product line, or whether they're just thinking of ways that, gee, because we've got all these hardware changes that no one has even rumored about yet, we are actually going to be able to make them thinner. And because people who get access to this information only has part of the story, they think, ooh, there's something called the iPhone air that's going to be really, really making a lot news in 2026, 2027. It's. I mean, I like the idea of, like, having a new, like, new kind of fashion, for lack of a better word, iPhone. Because when you make. I usually. I just. I disdain making things thinner for the sake of it. But the phone is the one area where if you take 1 millimeter off of it, it is shocking how much smaller it feels in the hand.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Because we're talking a couple of millimeters at best.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Exactly 2 millimeters, they're saying. And the other thing is that if they are interested in making a folding phone, they're going to have to figure out a way how to make that phone thinner. So maybe this is just laying the groundwork for. Here's the boards and here's the chips we're going to be using. If we decide that making a folding phone is ever a good thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's not the iPhone air. Maybe it's the iPhone bend. Is that what you're saying?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Ooh, and they get Ben Kinsley to promote it.

[Jason Snell]

Interesting survey.

[Alex Lindsay]

I do know someone who had a folding Samsung and they now have an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

I bought the first and second fold. I have the flip. Let me go get it.

[Alex Lindsay]

They used it every day and then they didn't, you know?

[Jason Snell]

So, yeah, it's. It's. I think. I think Andy is right that the path to building a folding phone, you have to learn how to get everything miniaturized and thinner. And all that. And they've got that slot that with the mini and the. And the plus has obviously not sold to their, to their satisfaction. So they want to try something else in there. And so differentiating based on fashion feel, making it feel thin and light and you give up some camera for it. Maybe that is more. You know, I would actually probably guess that it is going to differentiate that phone way more than just saying it is slightly larger or it is slightly smaller.

[Leo Laporte]

They won't say it's the thinnest phone we've ever made. It will be actually a separate sku.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it'll actually be impossibly separate line. I think, I think when we think about.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the flip and this is exactly what you're talking about because by the way I, this is the form factor I prefer to the fold. I don't think Apple will do this because it's just a folding standard size folding phone. But you see how thick it becomes, right.

[Jason Snell]

So they got to get that, they got to get that dimension as thin as possible if they're going to, if they're going to fold it over.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it's not, not having the wrinkle on that screen which we could see when you opened it. Oh yeah, that's the real thing also.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they should be. I see that I'm like if I get the light right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it depends like on that style of phone. We're just taking a standard phone and just making it smaller inside your pocket by folding it lengthwise. I think that is a serious thing when it comes to like the idea of I want an iPhone that turns into a de facto iPad mini. I've used those kind of folds before and yeah, the first like day you can't help but notice it. The second day onward it's, you just don't notice it at all. It's sort of like remember when phones had a big forehead and chin and it's like oh my God, look at all this screen. And then you. It's not an issue. Like after three or four hours, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know what I don't get used to is that in order to make these foldable they have to use a different material for the. And maybe this is just a Samsung thing but this is a little rubbery and I don't like it compared to glass. But now if you use a screen protector already, maybe you won't, won't feel bad about that. I don't like screen.

[Alex Lindsay]

A lot of the screen protector protectors are either glass or Glass like I mean, yeah, I do hope that if they're going towards an air, I'm hoping that the pros go the other direction so they give us sicker, sicker, heavier, bigger cameras, bigger stump. Like that would be the.

[Jason Snell]

It's already sort of happening, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

It is happening. But I would, I think that creating a thin one gives them more license to go towards a more pro one, you know, one that you know that I put in a backpack, you know like a big phone.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And also I don't think it's a bad idea for Apple to again they can't have like, they can't go back to like the Mac world of like of 1993 where they had 100 different kinds of Mac Macs and no one knew which one was which. But I think they could, there is room for them having a. Let's have, let's experiment with doing a line of phones that is not necessarily the high performance phone and not the budget phone but this is like the fashionable nice looking phone that it doesn't have the greatest camera, it doesn't have the greatest specs at all but it looks really, really good because internationally we forget that like the iPhone is not marginal but it's an aspirational product. It's not the phone that necessarily everybody wants. So anything they could do to have an edge to do the things that no Android phone can do, which is usually look like a thousand million bucks that might get people to save. Instead maybe instead of buying this Samsung or this Oneplus or this whatever, I will buy an Apple phone because I just want this thing in my hand.

[Leo Laporte]

This whole conversation began with Mark Gurmans and others. Bloomberg report that Apple plans a three year modem rollout in bid to top Qualcomm company. So this is Apple and we know they've wanted to do this forever to replace the third party modem chips they have in there with their own, some of their own making won't necessarily save them a lot of money. I think they probably still have to license at least GSM from Qualcomm.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. But it would give them a lot more freedom with again developing everything they want that the one is the big one. I guess one of the most interesting things from this report was that this is going to be responsible for knocking another millimeter or two off the thickness of the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And more than half a decade in the making. Apple's in house modem system, Gurman writes will debut next spring. So obviously that's not the regular iPhone. Next spring is going to be an se.

[Jason Snell]

That's an se. It starts with the se. Right. Which is low stakes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He says, because it will not be as fast as Qualcomm's modem initially. So putting it in the SE makes kind of sense until they get it to that performance level.

[Jason Snell]

And then. Yeah. And so the idea there is that there are places this can go, but it can go in the se, it can go in that thin phone. The idea there is these are phones that are not expected to be the highest possible performance. Right. It allows Apple to test this out, although apparently, you know, first they send people around and test them. But nothing beats testing in the real world. Right. You're going to do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Millions of millions of gamma testers is useful.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. So. So that'll be good. But it'll be again, like if. Remember when they had two different modems in the iPhone and people were like, some iPhones are faster than others and you're paying premium for an iPhone and you might not have gotten the fastest data. They don't want that to happen. So you put it in an se, you put it in a model that is all about compromise. In order to get it thinner, you try it out. That's a good shakedown cruise for you. I was struck by, in Gurman's report. I didn't quite realize this, but Gurman says Qualcomm receives more than 20% of its revenue from Apple. And obviously some of that is going to be patent licenses if Apple makes their own 5G modem, because they have the patents there. But clearly Apple is also an enormous customer of Qualcomm and Qualcomm. I mean, if we've all been following this, right, Qualcomm has been telling its shareholders and warning that a major customer will probably transition away from them eventually. For a while now. I mean, the good news is it's taken them five years and they still haven't done it. So. But. But once this starts, it will. If Apple can continue and ultimately go through what Gurman says, multiple chip generations to get to the point where they're at parity, and then maybe they can even succeed in, if not best in Qualcomm getting benefits by integrating the chips that will be a big hit for Qualcomm because the, you know, patent patents are great and all, but like, having them buy your chips is better and they're going to lose that potentially.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They. Qualcomm does, however, have a big brand new customer in Microsoft which is using its Snapdragon Elite chips in Their Windows on arm. And it's not just Microsoft, it's all the other PC makers. But I'm sure that they're hoping that that will. It's never going to reach the numbers though that iPhone reaches.

[Alex Lindsay]

Has anything happened with the ARM lawsuit and cancellation of Qualcomm's license? I mean is that, is that gone anywhere? Because that's a really. You combine that. Well, Jason just said and arms attack on that could get.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Complicated for Qualcomm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no kidding. Because everything they make is an ARM chip.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's just a negotiation. It's a lawsuit, but I think it's a negotiation ploy to get more money out of Qualcomm. Let me just check and see.

[Jason Snell]

They are going to court this month.

[Leo Laporte]

This December.

[Alex Lindsay]

They're going court this month. The one that doesn't necessarily fit inside of court is that evidently there's a part of the contract that says that either one can cancel the contract. Which is what?

[Leo Laporte]

Arm issued a 60 day notice, informed Qualcomm that ARM would cancel its license to use arm. The ARM architecture that was. Let's see this, this story came out in last month. A month ago, exactly. So that's interesting. If they really did do that, that means there's one more month.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

So Qualcomm did Qualcomm.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is a negotiation tactic, but it's in the contract. Like that gets really hard to get out of, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think this is all, I think we can assume it's all negotiation.

[Alex Lindsay]

And this, all, this, all this all comes back to Apple because this is all over the licensing related to the team that left Apple and went to Qualcomm. Qualcomm bot. Right. So this is Nuvia. Yeah, Nuvia. This is related to when Nuvia was purchased. ARM said that they should renegotiate the contract. And Qualcomm said no, no, no, the contract's the same. ARM said it would be different if it was you than Nuvia.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm sure in these contracts it says under if there's an acquisition we have to renegotiate. And that's usually what's the case. So Gurman writes Apple's modems. With a longtime company coming, this is the kind of sad saga of it. When the company set out to build the chip, it originally hoped to bring it to market as early as five years ago. To jumpstart the effort, the company invested billions of dollars to set up testing and engineering labs around the world. It spent a billion to acquire you may remember this Intel's modem group.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Millions more hiring engineers from other silicon companies. Setback after setback. The prototypes are too large, ran too hot. Weren't it sufficiently power efficiently.

[Jason Snell]

Is this revenge or is this like they're like are we just getting back at Qualcomm because we don't like them or are we benefiting from this? But I think Johnny Sruji who heads their chip group felt like this was important because they could ultimately not only build their own but presumably eventually integrated into the rest of their silicon which.

[Leo Laporte]

If you could put it into the system on a chip into the.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. Although it does, it does not speak well. I mean this has been a rough couple of weeks for Intel. Rough couple of weeks for Intel. But, but one of the things German reports is that one of the things they did after they bought Intel's business and they, and they worked on it for a while was start hiring people from Qualcomm. Right like that, that the intel they weren't so team was not so, so hot. Which I mean we'll just take them at his word. I'm not surprised that they went and this is a whole setup and especially in San Diego where they're just like.

[Leo Laporte]

Hired levels about this. Gurman writes but after adjusting development practices, reorganizing management and as you say, hiring scores of new engineers from Qualcomm, Apple is now confident its modem will work.

[Alex Lindsay]

And this is one of the biggest.

[Leo Laporte]

So this changes a lot. This changes everything. Go ahead.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is one of the big advantages for companies in California, both advantage and disadvantages that there's no non competes. So you can't, you know, you can just freely steal each other's employees. To end there were going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

No non competes nationally but the courts throughout President Biden.

[Alex Lindsay]

But here in California it's a, it's a pretty big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been the law in a long time.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it's huge.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually the law since I remember this back when I was making contacts with tech TV they tried to insert that in my contract saying I couldn't go to work for another failing cable company. And non forceable. It wasn't anywhere you could.

[Jason Snell]

I definitely have had friends who couldn't work in the same business for months. Right. Because they were in a state that is not as enlightened as California in this case. But I think, look, I think all of us have talked about this a lot and said you don't, don't discount Qualcomm and the value of their Years of experience all over the world dealing with other carriers and different regulatory regimes and different frequencies and different. Like one of the things this chip's not going to do is millimeter wave, right? Which is a frequency that is used some places but not other places. But the flip side of that is I don't think you should ever bet against Johnny Sruji and Apple's chip team, right? Like if there is, honestly, if there is a single best part of the last 10 years of Apple, it's the chip team. Like they have, they have killed it. And so if they're building this, I mean, not saying it's a guarantee that they won't mess it up, but I would not bet against them.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Also it sounds like if, again, if these rumors are true, sounds like a really smart play the way they did, they were to do it because a, there's going to be a heartbreak period the first time they try to manufacture these things at scale. So no, with the last thing they want to do is put it in an iPhone where they sell those numbers. There's also going to be, there's no way you can test a brand new, brand new modem like that until you get truly millions and millions of people worldwide using it in every single situation. This isn't about the 99%, this is about the 1% for whom your new modem fails. You can't just simply wipe that away. Oh well, that's just an edge case. No, that's a case of someone who's getting basically dial up modem speeds on a phone that they spend a lot of money for. So the first round is going to be a bunch of beta testers. But to put it into something, into a product where there's going to be lesser expectations is a good play. Lower sales, also a really good play and will also give them the experience they need to adapt this for all the other pieces of tech that they want to put it into. Because another part of that story has been that look, if Apple is really as Jason says, I mean they really are about let's put everything on the die. Let's basically not just have our own chip, but also we can also integrate and package all these components the way we want it to. Has that ever been like one of the biggest stumbling blocks in finally having a Mac that has a built in modem? All these other things hopefully will be opened up once Apple has the ability to not just buy a chip off the shelf and somehow shoo it into whatever the RF profile of this device is, whatever the Power and heat profile is of it, but designed it exactly for this specific MacBook Air. We could finally get something that I've been wanting for at least eight years now.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Alex Lindsay]

All I was going to say is that I think that as Apple gets over the hump, it is, yeah, the amount of innovation that starts to get added to this of all kinds of ways that different devices interact with each other over longer distances, over all these other things allows them to innovate in a way that is going to be very hard for anybody else to do because they don't own the whole stack, you know, and that the, the, the fact that Apple, you know, makes X code and has all the opera, has the operating system and all these other things continues to be something that they're able to leverage. So I think it's going to make a lot of sense. It's probably still going to take a long time. You know, it gets back to, you know, there's a lot of things that we, we do not because they're easy, but because we thought they'd be easy. Apple, Apple's got its, its hands into that tar and is I think what they come out with will be great but it probably take an extra 10 years longer than they expected.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman writes the modem won't be used in Apple's higher end products. Going to come to a mid tier iPhone codenamed D23 later next year. Far thinner design than current models, the chip will also start rolling out as early as next year in Apple's lower end iPads. Codename Synop. Two possibilities for where that codename comes from. One, it is a moon of Jupiter with a retrograde orbit. I don't think it's that. It's probably the Naiad from Greek mythology who was abducted by the God Apollo granted, offered to grant a wish. Apollo. She wished to remain a virgin and Apollo honored her request. So she's the virgin. Nayak. That's just like a modem, isn't it? I don't know. I don't know why they call it sign up. There might be a better rate. Maybe there's an engineer in there. Surugi, parenthetically we should note, is one of the named candidates for the new CEO at Intel. I'd be shocked. I think we mentioned this last week. I'd be shocked if Johnny would think about that. Even I saw coverage throw a lot of money at him.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I saw coverage from another from a business publication that was saying no, that's kind of nuts. I mean they would basically have to lay before his feet, see our business in ruins. You and only you have the opportunity to start from the basic. From the bare bones foundation and build an empire that this galaxy has never seen. And we shall rule it hand in hand.

[Leo Laporte]

But he's already done that at Apple, so it's kind of not much of an offer, really. All right, so synop, isn't it as advanced as the latest modems from Qualcomm? Says Gurman. So it will be a downgrade from what you get in the iPhone 16 Pro. What does that mean? If it's not as. Is it not as fast?

[Jason Snell]

I think it's. Yeah, I think it's missing. Maybe missing support for some band.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it doesn't support Millimeter Wave, which is that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But that's not a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

5G that you can't get anywhere but Philadelphia in New York.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Exactly. It's hugely, hugely, hugely fast. But like, you have to be like within line of sight and within like throwing a fast. Throwing a football distance of the. Of the tower in order to get things. So big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

I do remember when. Remember this? Apple had. I can't remember which version of the. Which iPhone it was, but they had iPhone that had two modems. One was from intel, one was from Qualcomm, and they actually had to slow down the Qualcomm modem. So that would match the performance of Intel. You remember that. Remember that story from back in the day?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I have to admit, I have such a low expectation of my cellular coverage. And I don't know whether it's just that anymore. Yeah, well, no, it's just that. It just. I feel like we have dropped calls all the time that it's. People are like, I can't hear you. And I have to.

[Leo Laporte]

You're the last one still using a phone as a phone, though. If the data is okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

The data sometimes is okay, sometimes isn't. You know, like, I check it a lot because I'm always trying to figure out, oh, can I stream from my phone from here? And so I see it. I see the data a lot, and a lot of times it's not particularly impressive. You know, under 10 megs a second in many places that I'm at. And so I'm kind of like.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman has some pretty good sources. He says in lab tests, the first Apple modem caps out at Download speeds of 4 gigabits a second. That seems like sufficient. It's not millimeter wave speed.

[Jason Snell]

You're buying an se.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but sure, theoretically. But the question is how does it interact with the antennas? And then again, I don't know how much you'd even know because. Because the. I mean again, on a day to day basis, I'm not seeing. I'm not seeing speeds oftentimes. So there's some places you get to and you're like, wow, I got 80 megs up and down. But it's pretty few and far between.

[Leo Laporte]

Vermin also says the modem is better in terms of radiation. It's specific absorption rate or SAR is better, is lower.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I think his suggestion there too is that it's talking. Apple has been able to design it to talk to the system and modulate that better because it has complete control over the device and that, that helps. By the way, I can't tell whether they're. Remember, you know, they used to do the Os with cat names. I can't tell. But Gurman's got like all the code names.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of.

[Jason Snell]

These are all mythological figures. They're all also outer solar system moons. So Centipede, Ganymede and Prometheus, all figures from mythology. But also the first two are Jupiter. They named mythology. So the question is. Yeah. Did Apple say outer solar system moons or did they say figures from mythology or figures from mythology that are named, that have outer system moons named after them? I don't know. But anyway, they said that Centipede is like starter.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you say it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, it's a starter chip. And then Ganymede is supposed to get them sort of caught up with Qualcomm. And then Prometheus, good name for this is the we take it over kind of thing. And that's their three stage.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Remember and get tied to a rock.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Prometheus did not end well, but okay. That eagle can really get you that kind of smarts. Modem will work with another new Apple component, a radio frequency front end system or RFFE called Carpo. Is that a moon and Jupiter?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think it's one of the first Marx Brothers. The one that's what.

[Leo Laporte]

Counting before the part will also take away business from Qualcomm and can eventually affect Cuervo. That's who makes it.

[Jason Snell]

Carpo is a satellite of Jupiter.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Figure from middle moon.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Carpo a mythological figure though?

[Jason Snell]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Because all the outer solar system moons are. Or all the Jupiter and Saturn moons are mythological figures. There's like Uranus. I think it's like Shakespeare characters or something. But like Jupiter and Saturn, it's all mythological figures. So. Yeah, that's what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the streets in our city. They're all named after the daughters of the developers. So there's, you know.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can't do butthead astronomer anymore, so you got to wear trees.

[Leo Laporte]

It used to be trees. Let's see. The Ganymede is expected to go into iPhone 18 as well as upscale iPads. I love the thought. And this is one. Another Bloomberg rumor that Apple will start putting these chips since it's making them not only into the iPads, which they're already offering cellular connectivity, but into MacBooks.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you like that?

[Jason Snell]

About time. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a big believer in the iPad. Cellular, iPad. I've bought cellular iPads for the last, like, five or six years. And it's just so. And I know everybody's like, oh, but you can tether. It's like, tethering sucks, and it drains two batteries at once. And, like, it's. Tethering's better than nothing. But having a cellular modem in your device is better. Like, it's just better.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And on top of that, what if you don't live in the United States where everybody has an iPhone? What if you are. What if you live in an Android land? Like, that's. It's. It can be done. But there's a difference between. Even if you have an iPhone, there's a difference between. There is facility that makes it super, super easy. And. No, this is a function of the computer. You don't have to do anything. You just have to, like, not turn the feature off. Yeah, that's no different. No. I would, without question pay extra for a modem inside a MacBook.

[Leo Laporte]

You might be waiting till 2027, but. Okay, that's the third modem, Prometheus, which will also have satellite support for the next generation satellite networks. You know, T Mobile already got the green light from the FCC to use Starlink to enhance its cellular connectivity. I think in the years to come, we may see that everywhere.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That could be a very big deal, because the incoming head of the FCC is much, much more bullish on satellite connectivity than his predecessors were. That's one area. I know that I. I said some mean things about him that I thought that are true, but on many areas, I think that he's got some. Exactly. In many areas. In many areas, he actually has some good ideas. One of the reasons why that Starlink contract got nixed was for a lot of good reasons, but also because the head of the FCC at that time thought that if our goal is to bring broadband to rural communities and underserved areas. We don't want to give an opportunity to create a new super monopoly in satellite Internet. We want to use this to foster building a brand new infrastructure that stays in place for everybody, which is fine, but it's the difference between sending out trucks to lay out all that fiber versus we ship you something, you flip a switch and congratulations, you now have 200 megabits up and down.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman also says that modem might look pretty good in a Vision Pro down the road.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sure.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Assuming we get one week use outside.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think one of the challenges really is that for a lot of the Vision Pro content, it's so big that you need a lot of cellular. You'd be using up a big part of your cellular to pull the data.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe as an AR device, it would be more useful. So you know where you were. You'd.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just don't. I. I don't see a lot of people, even myself. I mean, I'm pretty aggressive about using my Vision Pro. I use it almost every day at some, at some point. And I do not put it on outside unless I'm in a plane.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You know, like, this is the only.

[Alex Lindsay]

Time I turn it on is if I'm sitting window seat, I close the thing and off I go, you know? But outside of that, I don't really use it in public.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be more for augmented reality. And that's actually what Gurman says.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think future. I think future glass makes a lot of sense when those headsets get smaller or become glasses. And you need to be able to design your own cellular capacity.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine a meta radio with a cellular connection. Actually, the way it does now, it works now it connects to your phone, which seems fine, but. Yeah, well, there you have it. That's the entire grist for the rumor mill. Boy, it's gonna be. It's gonna be a tough show. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with Andy Inako, Alex Lindsay. Jason Snell will make up some more rumors.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

It's better over here. ATT customers switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll Pay off your existing phone and.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

Qualifying port and trade in service on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Go 5G next and credit required.

[Leo Laporte]

Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. The Brazilian court is overturned. This is a tattered tail. The injunction that they had imposed on Apple's App Store. You may remember Apple was ordered by a Brazilian antitrust regulator to open up the App Store. Apple appealed. Brazilian courts decided last week to overturn the injunction imposed on Apple, which would have forced the company to sideload to allow side loading within less than three weeks. That was a little quick, the court said. Yeah, that, yeah, that was disproportionate and unnecessary. They said it in Portuguese, but you get the idea. The judge understood that this is from 9 to 5 Mac. Measures imposed by the regulator change in a sensitive and structural way. Apple's business operation Obrigado. So now this is still going to have to happen. It's just not going to have to happen right away. I don't know. I don't know. Judge overturned the injunction. The Brazilian regulator can still appeal. Investigations will continue. Apple could still be forced to enable side loading in Brazil. They just have more time to think about it and fight it.

[Jason Snell]

I think that's, I mean, yeah, they will. And it is a, it is a thing that they can use as an excuse because it's different from what they've been asked to do somewhat in the past, I think. Right. Like tech companies do need time to make changes and test them and roll them out. I mean, like, even no matter where you feel about like Apple and its regulation and all of that, they do need time. I mean it is, it's not unreasonable to say you've got a relative. As long as you do it, you can have six months to do it or whatever. Like, because it is hard software, they can't just flip a switch. Now if they ask them to like do the Europe thing here, maybe they could try to expedite it. But even then you, you know, you give them some time.

[Alex Lindsay]

Give.

[Jason Snell]

That's not unreasonable to me.

[Alex Lindsay]

Anytime someone gives someone like 20 days to do something, it takes 20 days of meetings to figure out what to do. And you just. I immediately make budget decision decisions about how technologically you know, salient. The person making the decision is like, should they be even talking about this? Like, should they be in this conversation when they, when they say 20 days, you're like, you have no idea what you're talking about.

[Jason Snell]

Just flip a switch. It's literally the governmental equivalent of users being like, I want this new feature. It'll only take you a couple of hours to do. Right. Where they have no idea about the complexity of the situation. And this is the, that would be the government equivalent, which is like, oh, just it's, you know, it's that. It's law enforcement saying, oh, just. You wizards just invent a golden magic key that fixes encryption. You just invent it. It's like, it doesn't work that way. But everything.

[Alex Lindsay]

People don't know. Everything's easy when you don't know how it works.

[Jason Snell]

Oh man, that's so true.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's a common denominator in a lot of like, Australia's very, very consumer forward regulation. But a lot of it is when you read the law, it basically comes down to, I don't know, you figure it out. We're just ordering you to do it now.

[Leo Laporte]

They literally, they literally said that in the blocking social media for kids under 16. They'll figure it out. They're smart people.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's the equivalent of a guy sitting, sitting in the stands saying how he would be quarterback. You know, like, you know, like I would go back there.

[Jason Snell]

Of course, this reminds me of. There's that Onion story from like 20 years ago that somebody should do something about all the problems. That is this exact mindset. Right. Which is. I was reading that the other day and the. They build a wall across China and a thousand years later I'm still putting up with my neighbor's pine trees, dropping cones on my front lawn. I mean, it's like, what do you, what do you want? Like, it doesn't work like that. It's complicated. Sorry.

[Alex Lindsay]

Complicated.

[Andy Ihnatko]

At the same time, sometimes you do have to push back and say that. Yeah, you're telling, you're telling us that if we, that if you allow develop outside developers to like tell their users directly about a discount, that it would actually undermine the security and privacy of the entire platform. We're going to guess that maybe you could figure out a way around that so that. That's an Apple problem. Oh, that's for sure.

[Jason Snell]

For sure. And they can use these installing tactics and that's not ideal, but there is. I'm also, I want to say that I also hear people who Say, oh come on, they could do this. And it's like, that's not true either, right? Like it is. It is complicated to roll out software changes that change the way the whole thing was conceived. And the eu, which has been very aggressive on this, still basically gave Apple like a year plus to roll this out. And that's not unreasonable. But yes, it can also be used as a rope, a dope kind of thing where they're like, oh, I don't know, we just don't know what to do. And they're like, come on, come on, just do it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is why I respect mostly the way that the EU does it. If we're both talking about the same thing, it wasn't okay. Now as soon as they don't do things like a taskmaster challenge, like you have 10 minutes starting now, they say, here's what we spent two years or three years proposing this with your input of the industry. Here is the framework that we have developed publicly. We are not going to implement it for another year and a half and in the meantime we are going to have an open process and board for you coming to us. When you see areas that you're going to have a problem complying and you want clarity on exactly what compliance actually consists of, then it becomes really, really. That's the point which you, I start to turn around where, okay, you're a $2 trillion company, I think having a two year timeline to do this as after having three years before this to think about it, be prepared for it. It's not unreasonable for you to actually have some forward progress on this to meet this law.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Mr. Debunker Andy Inacco. I got all excited when I saw this 9 to 5 Mac rumor headline, OLED MacBook Pro without a notch coming in 2026. I said, see, I was right not to buy an M4 MacBook Pro. I'm holding out for the 2026. And then you said, not so fast.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Bucky, I don't know. Okay, it was so. It was interesting. This story came back from a timeline from a very, very legitimate industry analyst firm that claims to have a timeline of and a timeline of. Here's what the panel display technology is going to be implemented in across most Apple products lines over the next like five, six, seven, eight years. And so. But then you dig in. Okay, did the firm itself release this? No, it comes from a Twitter user who I hadn't heard of, doesn't mean anything, but I haven't heard of him. The account is only two months old. Okay. And the avatar looks a little AI generated. Ish. So any. And he doesn't say exactly where he got this documentation from.

[Leo Laporte]

He looks like he brushes his teeth with pepsida. That's what he looks like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Cyber precedent. Cyber pepsident.

[Leo Laporte]

So. So even the provenance of this slide is questioned.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Again, it looks like a good slide. It would be risky for him to say oh here's where I got it from. But you have to say here's how I got it. You even have to just say a source from inside Blank Hoover food. Well but also I'm not identifying because to protect their anonymity it's like, oh look, here's something I found on the street while I was. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

We should also say that this is not. This is neither Apple nor an Apple supplier but just an analyst. Omd. Yeah. So analysts make up stuff all the time because they're trying to help their stock market clients know what to do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It depends on the firm because they're not trying to get clicks. They're selling services. They're selling packages of information to people who intend. So if they can get away for that for a very short time, but not for a long time again, the claim source seems is legitimate. They've been around for a while. If it's true, it says that the dynamic island on the MacBook is going to be replaced with just a pole punch for the camera and that's it. Which would be nice. I love the Dynamic Island. I think it's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do too. I don't mind it at all. It's funny how we got used to it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's again something that seems like a dumb idea but then okay, but use it for a couple of days. See if you still feel like it after a few days. I think it's one of the most innovative, creative and functional and practical ways to address what is foundationally like a hardware limitation where we want the screen to get all the way to the edge, but we have to put a camera and some sensors in there. How do we do that? The Apple solution got me thinking on both the phone and everything else got me thinking, not so much like, oh well, this dynamic island is intruding upon the space of the screen. It's actually my thought is that no, it's giving me extra pixels to the left and the right and just above and below it that it would be just bezel if it were not for that. So there are all kinds of ways. So I'm not debunking it. I'M just saying that as root sources go, it's the sort of thing that makes me add the suffix interesting if true, as opposed to interesting data point interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of companies moving to OLED displays. I've had some OLED laptops that I really like the screen. They're not battery, I guess they're not real battery friendly, but at least that's what people have told me.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're becoming better. And the biggest complaint that I think Apple had internally about OLED when Samsung started rolling them out is that it's like seasoning a McDonald's burger where they put lots of fat and lots of salt and lots of carbs in there because people like fat and salt and carbs. But if you are more of an aesthetic, not super accurate, you're like, exactly. Yeah. But now that's been. I think the benefits of OLED are hard to argue against when it comes to user interface. When just looking at apps, it's only when you're looking at videos and photos that you might see is this punchier than it should be. But OLED since the, since the middle ages has become, become a lot more sophisticated, a lot more sensitive. When it needs to be accurate, it can be accurate. And so now it starts, you start to ask yourself, why do I not, why wouldn't I not want those super, super dense blacks on the display that I can get with oled but I can't get with any other.

[Leo Laporte]

I only buy OLED TVs now. I mean they're just really gorgeous. And I'm aware of OLED laptops only because my daughter's sensitive to LEDs and really likes OLEDs. And so I'm always looking for. But she uses Chromebooks and yes, Samsung makes an OLED Chromebook. So there's no reason to think that Apple wouldn't be using oled. Regardless of this story, at some point in the next couple of years that seems completely likely.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Getting back to the iPhone SE this year, another part of the rumor package, not only was that modem but also a way upgraded camera, but also OLED display. So that makes you think that Apple is thinking that OLED is basically table stakes for the product line. Unless there's some really bad technical reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Why they can't do the iPhone Pros now have OLEDs, is that right? I think they're IPS. I think they're still.

[Jason Snell]

No. All the iPhones are OLED.

[Leo Laporte]

All the iPhones are OLED. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you, Jason.

[Jason Snell]

You guys seem to be Having a good time. So I thought I'd just let you go.

[Leo Laporte]

But wait. Tim Cook wants to save your life. Stephen Levy with an interview in Wired, actually a video interview in Wired with the CEO of Apple. I don't ever read or watch interviews with CEOs because I'm. I feel like they're never going to say anything. Did they? You know, that's like oh wow, did, did he say anything that's oh wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not a while, but there's a lot. I liked it because a, it was kind of a rapid fire interview at. In which Steve Levy seemed to have control of the interview as opposed to oh no, I triggered the, I triggered the CEO keyword of oh no. He's going to spend six minutes, six minutes saying the stuff about artificial intelligence as anything else. He also gave as much pushback as I think that anybody can against the CEO of that level about talking about things like the recent Apple Intelligence videos, demos of somebody writing off a very, very jokey sounding business email and Apple Intelligence will convert something that's a lot smarter, more professional. Basically saying that, well my. Are you basically helping this person dupe a potential employer into thinking that they're actually more sophisticated, actually more grown up than they actually are? Which I thought was relevant given that Apple was a few months ago talking about how their attitude towards using generative AI in photo editing is that we believe that the photo should represent what was actually there. So we're being very cautious about features that let you remove something and replace it with more background or something like that. It's like, yeah, but again, are you helping somebody to say here is very, very sketchy language that I'd like you to turn into a very, very long professional piece of email. That's an academic debate, not like a practical one I should say, but I think that's interesting if you're going to make the statement we want the reality of photos to represent reality despite the fact that photos never represent reality whatsoever. Is there a problem with basically make giving somebody a tone of voice they don't actually have so erasing their personality, so to speak.

[Alex Lindsay]

I will say the health app, I mean if you haven't dug into the health app, it is incredible. I mean it is like looking into the sun. I've had to spend more time with it recently on tracking some stuff and it is just there are so many features and so many pieces of hardware that tie back. I'm starting to buy all this hardware that ties back into the phone and it's really amazing. Like it's you know what Apple's doing there. And I still think that the. I know it's going to be the hardest thing that they're doing is the glucose levels. If they figure that out, I don't know if they'll crack it, but if they crack it, it's yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just going onward though, there were a couple, there are a couple of things. Like there was a rumor a couple of months ago where Apple had decided was planning on investing in OpenAI there's going to be a closer relationship. And Steve Levy asked Tim Cook directly about this that nope, that was not going to happen. There was a follow up. He said, well, I'm going to say yes or no that we never considered it, but any idea that this was something that was on deck, ready to go is just not true. That's the sort of interview this was like a lot of asking questions specifically about that Tim Cook knowing that he's talking to Steve Levy and not just somebody that is not going to be taken seriously no matter how the interview comes out. I'm going to give you some sort of a substantive response. There was a lot of coverage that came about from the this because oh my God. Tim Cook acknowledged the existence of smart glasses as opposed to AR VR because with any other interviewer if asked about that he would have absolutely parried off of it or said we won't comment about an products at least with someone like Steve Levy who's had such a close relationship not just with Tim Cook but also with Steve Jobs before him. So he was kind of grandfather. Danny was part of the club that, that Tim Cook inherited. He can at least say that yeah, that's definitely a good place to go. That's definitely on our horizon. But that's not something that we're doing right now, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good. Thank you for making it so I didn't have to watch it. I agree with the health stuff, Alex. I mean I think this is the right way to go with the watch for sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean there's so much track. I mean I find myself suddenly using it all the time when I'm doing swimming laps or doing walks. But then it's also like blood pressure and weight and all kinds of and heart rates and everything else and it's all tied together and it's done at Apple level kind of. And again, I think that the glucose one, I think that's like sell all your stock from admit it will destroy the current food industry. If it comes out grail though, because people, people go oh, you know, it's not going to make that big of a difference. I'm like, if you have glucose levels on your wrist all the time and you connect the dots between what you're eating and how you're feeling with your phone, I mean, with your watch, it will be. It'll make Atkins look like a walk in the park, you know, like for most of the, you know, processed food companies, you know, it's just going to be brutal, you know, and so it'll be really interesting to see if Apple's able to. And Apple's probably one of the only companies that could probably make it work on the watch just because it's going to be really expensive.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I would doubt that, but I agree that's going to be an important revelation.

[Leo Laporte]

For wearables, I use an alternative to Apple Health called Gentler Streak, which is a little gentler, but it also, and I don't know if this is valid or not, but it has extra activities like walking your dog. It makes a distinction between American Rules Football and Australian Rules Football blood loss. It makes a distinction between walking your dog and walking a guide dog. You know, I mean, it's a very weird. I don't know, I mean, there's some.

[Alex Lindsay]

Things that are like, Apple will tell you whether you're walking evenly between your feet. That's the kind of stuff that is. Yeah, this is like some crazy gate.

[Jason Snell]

Analysis that will tell you from your iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Jason Snell]

Whether you might have some issues.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is just on top of Apple Health. So I still get all of that. And anything I record in Apple Health goes into that. But the best thing is it says, oh, you're really killing it. Oh, yeah, that walk was great. You know, or sometimes it says you walked, you did too much. You know, take next tomorrow off, which.

[Jason Snell]

Is, we're already, you know, an Apple watch just added the latest WatchOS added this whole thing about effort where you can actually grade your effort after you're done with a workout, which is a good piece of data because if you had a rough time, it, it knows that. And we're seeing more AI graded features or AI created features. The sleep apnea detection. Right. And some of the other features like that. I think, and I do think there's a lot of potential for Apple here, which is why Tim Cook is so excited about it, that there's also this frontier, which is AI medicine, where we see it now. It happens kind of on the larger scale where there's institutions that are doing analysis of X rays and analysis of MRIs and things like that. But the other, the bottom up approach is using AI algorithms to look at your vitals. Look at, I mean Apple has the vitals app now, but to look at your Apple health data over time and start to say more holistic things about you where right now they're not comfortable doing that. So they're like, oh, well, here's your oxygen uptake change or here's your sleep total. But you know, we could potentially get to the point where through a collection of devices that you wear, an ML model on your phone could say I'm worried about you. Right. Like that. And it wouldn't be about one item, it would be a little more holistic than that. And that's really, I mean, again, Apple likes running those videos, but this has the potential to affect people's lives where they might not call their doctor or they might not go get checked. But an algorithm that's got access to even a limited set of data might say, I think you might have a problem. And it's not just as simple as you might be an afib because the heart monitor says so, but something more about. I know all of this stuff about you and now I'm worried about you. It's very interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I still think that the anonymized data is going to get to a point where it's, that eventually it's going to be able to see things six months ahead of time that we never thought of. Like, I see a pattern and I've seen this pattern a hundred thousand times and this pattern means that you're going to have a heart attack within the next six months, you know, like, like that's going to, you know, like it's. And this pattern is something that we can see because we have so many people wearing the watch.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And delivering that anonymized data is.

[Jason Snell]

That's how the sleep apnea thing works. Right. So if they can, if they can validate based on data for a broad population, which is what the sleep apnea detection study did then. And that's the potential. And that's why I think Apple's really interested in as many sensors as they can get on the watch or on other devices, as much data as they can get. Because there is this feeling, I know I've mentioned it here before, but there's that story about the woman who could smell Parkinson's. And it was literally like they found out that there's a molecule that people with Parkinson's and there's dogs can smell and dogs can do it and some super smellers can do it, but it's like it's finding data, mining data that you don't even know is there until you see enough of it. Like Alex said, until you have so much data. And that's what, that's a thing that AI is very good at is picking out the patterns and throwing a red flag. And you know, maybe it's only right half the time, but like if you could make a deal that say, I'm going to, I'm going to alert you if you have a 50% chance of having a heart attack in the next six months and tell you to go see your doctor. Well that's, I mean that's worth, that's worth going to see your doctor, right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. There's this story came out this week of a long term study of mammograms that women who paid extra to have their mammograms analyzed by AI had a 20% better result. AI is actually being used now to predict subtle changes over time to predict a five year risk.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and there's been situations where the AI sees something that says this is, you know, this person has this, they don't even know what it sees. It just knows that it's there.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like it just, it's figured out that there's something there that tells that it's going to be connected. And so it's fascinating.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And that's why we need progressives or tech progressives working in government because a lot of this is going to have to be policy. The only reason why we have the hearing aid feature on AirPods is because the FDA a while ago decided that we are going to have to have a different lane that technological and software, medical products and consumer products can go through that is practical, safe and relevant. That is not necessarily going to be as strict or as laborious as testing a new drug therapy. That's why they were able to actually get this going. So that's why it's weird because AI, you want to stay way clear of the idea of ever saying that, oh well, technology will save us because it rarely will. It's only human beings who can save us. But at the same time you have to be in the sort of mode where, where. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I've spun a little bit here. All I wanted to say was that it's going to take not just the technology, but also the technology, the medical community and regulators working hand in hand to make sure that things are not being handcuffed, that this technology can actually help people and not being used as just another way of saying, hi, yeah, you're paying $1,200 a month for health insurance, but we basically screened everything through an AI system that decided that you don't have cancer after all. So we're not going to okay any treatment whatsoever. And no, there's no transparency here. And no, we won't let you see any of the data that we did. We still need regulations to stop that from happening. We still need regulations to stop people from companies from being able to sell a piece of software that will predict Alzheimer's based on AI, based on an app on your phone. We have to stop that. But we also need to make sure that the gate is left open and encouraging for all this stuff when there is the ability to do stuff like that to actually make it happen. Ah, too much caffeine. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's see. According to Tim Cook, Stevie Wonder likes his Vision Pro, or maybe doesn't. He says it's always great to get feedback. He didn't say what the feedback was. Okay, okay, what else? Apple, according to Gurman, is working with Sony to improve gaming on VR.

[Jason Snell]

This is a Vision Pro. Are we there?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I forgot. Play the jingle. Oh, my God, I need some AI help. Actually, it's not.

[Jason Snell]

It is. Sony and Apple, according to Mark Gurman, are working together. Because you see, Sony has this PSVR2. It hasn't sold very well, so they've got a lot of extra controllers around. And Apple is thinking, oh, maybe we should actually build in an API to support hand controllers so that games could be run on the Vision OS platform. And so they're talking about, about Sony will actually have to pull them out of packages of PSVRs that are unsold and repackaged them as something that can be sold standalone. And then Apple will have to do a Vision OS update that supports it. But I'm all for it because, I mean, I wrote a column about this back in June. It's like there are a lot of games, games are good on VR. They're pretty good. And the fact that Apple doesn't support game hand controllers, like it supports regular video game controllers on all its platforms, platforms means that there are a bunch of stuff, bunch of games that just can't come to Vision Pro because the hand tracking isn't precise enough. So it sounds like maybe this is one of those things where it's like we could get these two together. And it sounds crazy, but it just might Work. Also, I wonder if Apple is using this as a pilot program so that they can just have an API and support third party hand controllers of all kinds. Because they seem to be in a mode with the Vision Pro right now where they're very slowly using third party partners to fix all of the things that were broken when they launched the Vision Pro, like that other case from Belkin and the new head strap. And now here we go where we may actually have some actual hand controllers on Vision Pro via Sony, of all people.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the ones with the ping pong balls on the end of them, aren't they? I remember that from the psvr.

[Jason Snell]

The PS move.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, the move.

[Jason Snell]

I think it looks like an ice cream cone. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Upside down.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Are we talking about the ones that are more like. Like the gauntlet of a fencing sword?

[Jason Snell]

I think PSVR2 has ones that are more like. Like the Quest ones.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry, the Quest ones. That's ones we see elsewhere. Yeah. It does show like where we thought the Vision Pro would be versus where it is. Where it's like, no, we're not going to develop, we're not going to totally. We're not going to develop a brand new game for Vision Pro because that would be a waste of money. Like, no. And we're not going to even try to convert our old game because it relies on controllers, which is what people are expecting and what makes the game experience so great. So sorry, we can't think of a way to do this. I don't care how much you want to encourage us to do it. And so this is a good part of the process, I will say.

[Jason Snell]

Gurman just calls it out too, which I'm not sure. It's one of the first times I've seen it where they basically say, yeah, Jony, I've. And a bunch of designers had this vision for what this thing was going to be and one of the things was like no hand controllers, no games and they.

[Leo Laporte]

I just like no styluses.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's another thing that Gurman mentions and he has reported this before, that they also talked about doing something like the Apple pencil as a, like a precision thing that's got. Because you know, hand tracking is all based on vision, it's cameras. And the problem is that you, you, if you can put physics actual like accelerometers on the hands, you could be way more precise and you don't necessarily have to actually see the hand and if there's occlusion, you don't have to deal with it because it's, it's okay that you've got some occlusion because I know what's going on with those hands because they're in the, in the controllers or they're holding an Apple pencil or whatever. So it sounds like, yeah, they're, they're this. Look, anybody who's used like Fruit Ninja on the Vision Pro and has used similar games or their knockoff of Beat Saber on the Vision Pro, it's not close. A $300 quest is so much better at those games because of the precision of the hand controllers. So it sounds like this is another one of these things where Apple has belly flopped enough with this product that the sacred cows that were put there by Johnny and company have finally been put out to pasture. Huh? Sacred cows out to pasture. Anyway. And it's good because it's. All of these things are things that everybody, even people who love the Vision Pro would agree. We're kind of missing pieces. And I think at this point, why would you not experiment with the idea that what if they could bring a bunch of good VR games to the Vision Pro? And if nothing else, if it doesn't sell a lot of Vision Pros, maybe it lets them be primed for a more affordable one down the road and get their act together. In the meantime.

[Leo Laporte]

Those sacred cows are outstanding.

[Jason Snell]

I'm so lost on the sacred cow.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, in India they can't kill them.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what they look like, by the way. That was wrong. That was the move controller put them up to pasture. They do.

[Alex Lindsay]

They literally take them and just leave them on the mountain and then they'll do the best they can. They're like, they're not going to be here anymore.

[Jason Snell]

Good luck cows.

[Alex Lindsay]

Good luck cows.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Domestication was fun, wasn't it? Now you're, now you're on your own.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, there's some grass here. We're going to leave you out in the spring.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But you'll figure now we have every confidence in you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sure, you'll last a couple weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But it's. But just a reminder that like this is, this is not like a come to Jesus moment for Apple or design team. You can be sure that there were like long and very, very thorough arguments about should there be hand control? It should be not. And this is just the evidence that got outside to say, yeah, maybe we should now do this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's ridiculous.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Support for third party controllers is fine. Just like third party game controllers.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it's also.

[Jason Snell]

Besides, they can Just launder it through Belkin if they want to have a design and put it out there.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's also important when you release a product to not necessarily put in, you know, take the past and put it into the future immediately. So by saying we're not going to have any of these controllers at the beginning, it allows people to see where they're going to go with it and what they're going to do with it. Otherwise, they'd be immediately on those controllers and they wouldn't expand past that. You know, they wouldn't be interested in the other things. And so I think that there's an argument for delaying that a little bit. And then again, this is. We really are part of the R and D part portion of the Vision Pro. So these are R and D headsets that have just been made available to a lot of people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Very famously, the first Macintoshes did not have cursor control keys. They didn't have anything that you could use as an alternative to the mouse, because they knew that if they did that, people would not learn to use the mouse. Again, I don't know if this is exactly the same thing with the Vision Pro, only because. Because you know what's out there and you're not creating something brand new that has never existed before, which arguably they tried to do with a Mac. They are trying to take an existing market and make it their own and build upon it. I could see where both arguments went on, not having hand controllers, but the difference between playing games or even just using creative stuff like doing digital sculpting versus, oh, no, look, I'm waving my hands in the air and I'm just imagining that I'm touching things. I'm just imagining that I'm clicking a button, that I'm activating this, versus I don't have to look at my hands or think about my hands. There's a button right here that I press in order to remove stuff from the sculpture as opposed to add stuff from the sculpture. So it was a lot of things.

[Alex Lindsay]

There are a lot of things you can do with your hands, though. I mean, like. I mean, SGI had a solution for VR in the 90s that you could have gloves on and go, I want a sphere this big. And it would just appear. And then you grab onto it, just stretch it. And you were able to do that with your hands. And now they were gloves. And. But that was 25 years ago. More than 25 years ago.

[Jason Snell]

Apple has a long history of arrogance in product development. And I don't say that negatively. I think that arrogance in product development is important to a certain extent, but it also can meet reality in ways that are difficult as a product designer to accept. And my example is going to be the original Mac, which did not ship with arrow keys because Steve Jobs was like, no, they need to use the mouse. Was he right? Kind of, yeah. But can you, but can you imagine not having arrow keys? And they put arrow keys on the keyboard eventually because although the impulse was good and the idea at the moment was like, we want people to accept that you can click around on the, on the ui, in the end, arrow keys were very, very useful, especially for editing text and not having to take your hand off the mouse. And honestly, I feel like the same thing happened here where they said, look, hand tracking is so great and we can do such a great job. And it sucks and it does. To put on one of those headsets and then have to put the. Find your hand controllers. Are they charged? Do I need new batteries in them? Get them paired? All right, now I'm ready to go. Versus just popping it on and just using your hands that you use since you, since you were a baby. Right. And all of that is true, but there are limits. And I think that's what this is, a real arrow key moment. Right. Which is I, I do think, think Apple needed to boast about how great their hand tracking is. It's great in Vision Pro, it really is very good. But then you play Fruit Ninja and you're like, oh no, no, no. It's just not for that thing for very precise where you need timing and you need exact hand position. Which games usually do you know? Certain games, it's not even all games. Certain games, you need that. And so I get why they did it, but I think in the long run the right solution is probably to support third party hand controllers, make them available in the Apple Store, probably not build your own because they don't do that with video game controllers on their platform. They just support them all and then let you know, people who want that precision buy the controllers. I think that's the right decision. I understand why, how we got to here. And I don't think it's like a fundamental failing because it is like those arrow keys, I think they had to go through that process. But I think that having hand controllers is as inevitable as having arrow keys on a. I thought that was, I.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Thought that was a great point you made about arrogance. Not necessarily as a bad thing, but the arrogance of Apple design saying we are in this entirely elaborate, academic, theoretical mindset of what this environment, what this world should be like and how we. The reasons why we don't want hand controllers. And then sometimes they release that and they realize that now you're in the world of the actual user who says, this is terrible. I don't like using this. This is uncomfortable. Or what do you mean?

[Jason Snell]

We want to prime them because, like, we, we need them to learn that the new thing is good by taking away the old thing, even though the old thing is also good. Right? Like you're like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But sometimes, like, what you made me think of immediately is like, right in front of me. I've got like the last generation of the pre design, the Touch Bar Design MacBook where when they first came out with it, it's like, oh, well, the escape key. Oh well, that's part of the touch bar, the virtual. Because people don't really need an escape bar. It'll look ugly if we put an escape bar escape key, like a physical key to the left of it. And then everyone said this.

[Leo Laporte]

I did not talk to the Emacs.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Users, did not know how often I used the escape key until I finally had to like take apart like the little dancing dolphins to make it, make it appear. And well, what do you know? The next generation decided, hey, why don't we just put an escape key right there to the left. That's not so ugly after all, is it?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just going to hold out thinking it was Vim and Escape and Emacs users that changed the tide on that one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So you don't want Richard Stallman coming, coming at your house like 2am to complain about anything.

[Leo Laporte]

To go back to the Stevie Wonder story, this is part of the Steven Levy interview with Tim Cook. Levy had heard the rumor. He said I'd heard but hadn't confirmed. Apple gave a demo of its Vision Pro to Stevie Wonder and Cook confirmed it partly for accessibility reasons. Now, obviously Stevie Wonder is not seeing the video, but I guess for accessibility reasons, they wanted to get input from somebody. Tim Cook called a friend of Apple. It's great to get. Tim said it's great to get feedback from Stevie. Accessibility is important from us, always from designing all of our products, so you don't bolt accessibility on at the end. It's embedded in the design product.

[Jason Snell]

Sighted people might look at this and be baffled and think it's a non sequitur. But if you turn on Accessibility and you use the Vision Pro, what do you get for its sensors? Right? The idea here is that it's a head mounted, a set of sensors that can detect what is around you. And I think really, I mean the point that this is a developer unit is absolutely right. This is one of those examples where in the long run, you know, you're wearing those sensors on something that doesn't cover your eyes but it still can see around you and it can read what you know there's a door in front of you and you know now your fingers over the two, which you can do on your iPhone some of that now too. So I think that that's the idea there is you put in it in accessibility modes and you get, you know, Stevie Wonder is not looking at the screen, but he is probably hearing a lot of stuff that's marked up. And then in the long run, that's what the dream is, is that you've got something on your body or on your head that's got displays and has some ML training where it can give you information about what you're seeing around you. And that's the, that's the relevance here.

[Leo Laporte]

Cook was asked about Vision Pro sales. There was an article, I don't know how accurate from WCCF Tech saying the Vision Pro has recorded less than half a million units in sales. That's not surprising. That's about what Apple wanted to say.

[Alex Lindsay]

When they released it. Everyone was saying, well, they can't make more than 400,000 this year, so Sony.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn'T have this capacity for the screens. So that's not a surprise. But there is an interesting second point. Internal data revealing re reduced usage among buyers. Who kept the headset.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I think that comes down again, it comes down to apps and reasons to use it. What apps are there that are really taking full advantage of the process? There's some good apps, but a lot of the apps feel like someone threw something against the wall. Okay, I get it, but it's not something I'm going to keep coming back to. The killer app, of course, which has been the killer app for every headset, is that watching movies on it is great and it's better than any of the other headsets. So that's what gets you to come back. If you spent the last 15 years or 10 or 15 years buying Apple movies, then it's a great headset. If you didn't, then it's probably not as useful. I have 600 plus movies in my account, so it's really nice for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim Cook said, I don't know if you're using it very much, but I'm Sure. But I'm there all the time. I see new apps all the time.

[Alex Lindsay]

I play with new apps. I go oh, look at this, let's open it up and play with it. I don't know. There's not a lot of new apps that I go oh. I go oh, they're getting there. Like they've. That was kind of an interesting idea but that's usually my response to most of them so far.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Steve Levy asked. Reports are that hasn't sold at the level you folk expected. What happened? And Tim could just say it's an early adopter product. That's it. Yeah. For people who want tomorrow's technology today, those people are buying it and the ecosystem is flourishing. That was one of the few places in the interview I thought, okay, I'm going to start, I'm going to keep a straight face because I was lucky to get this interview with you Tim, and I don't want you to throw me out.

[Jason Snell]

I think Apple only has one gear which is full on product launch and I think we all, I think even before they announced it we were talking about how at $2,000 it was a developer kit. Right. And an early product. And then when we got more detail it was like nobody, this is not going to be a hit at $3,500 nor did should any reasonable person have expected that. But Apple's hype and marketing and PR and all that, I just don't think they're capable of marketing anything as anything but the next greatest biggest hit ever. And you see it even in his responses where he's like not quite sure what to say because. Because first off they very rarely have anything that would even be considered a flop. And I'm not even sure I'd call the Vision Pro a flop. It's just sort of a weird thing that they put out using their normal conveyor belt o products when it really probably should have been sold out the back door at the in a corrugated car, you know, rolled up aluminum loading dock. Right. Like that's probably where it should have been but they don't have that. They just have the two that's silver and made of the finest air space grade titanium that blasts it out to the whole world. And I mean seriously, I just don't think they've got another gear. And so when this weirdo thing came out and they're like well let's try it. They're like right on it chief. We're gonna blast this thing out there. And I just don't think there's anybody even capable of saying no no, no, no, no, let's be subtle because this product doesn't have broad appeal because like when's the last time Apple made a product like, like that ever?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but I think there's also a chicken or egg thing where if you don't have at least a half a million people with, with the product, it gets hard to get people to even think about developing something for it because it's not, you know, so, so I think that there is like if there were 10,000 people, it's then a science project. Like it's not going to be, you know, so, so at, at 400, 500,000 people. It's a function of figuring out how to let them know that it's there. But there are plenty of good business models in that number of, of users because, because those are users that spent a lot of money on something that isn't absolutely necessary. That's a really valuable market. So it's just a function of figuring out how to serve that market effectively.

[Jason Snell]

And on the developer side, I think that their attitude going in was similarly like that they were only, they only have one speed and it's, the App Store is a hit, so developers will come and not the, oh, this is a platform that's kind of weird and doesn't really, isn't really going to have a lot of sales for a while.

[Alex Lindsay]

So they do that. But I think that also there's again, I think that there are some developers that you're seeing experimenting with this stuff and there's a huge advantage if a product ends up, I mean who knows what will happen with the product. But if the product ends up being successful, there's a huge opportunity to be there when no one else. When the, when the thing isn't moving very fast, you get to, you don't get that very often, especially with an Apple platform. The other thing is that a lot of us are watching very closely watching the blackmagic camera and we can't keep, I can't under. Understate how important that camera is to Apple's headset because, and you know Apple how, how many times have you said we're working directly with this company to build a piece of hardware from Apple? Like that doesn't, I don't know if they've ever said that before. Like we're building hardware with, through somebody else or, or with somebody else. And that, and it's really important because that camera and resolves integration and everything else else means that suddenly there could potentially be a Lot of very, very good content that's made available to folks that isn't just Apple making it. I mean, the Apple stuff has, you know, it's been an interesting experiment. I mean, I think that this is the same problem that we talked about earlier, where Apple doesn't pay attention to when they're building a product, they don't pay attention to anything else that's there. And it feels like when they made the content, they didn't pay attention to any other VR content that's been made. And what we've learned over the last 10 years, there's just a lot of like really basic mistakes that were made in from a design perspective. And I think that giving VR the V, there's, you know, a handful of us that have done a lot of VR and when we get a hold of those, that camera and I think that there's going to be a lot of new content that's out there that will give Vision Pro folks, it's not going to make, it's not going to sell a lot more headsets. It's just going to make the folks that own them a lot happier with what they have.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you own a headset, you're going to be invited to Porsche's media events. No. Maybe they're going to provide one. Probably they'll provide one for the audience. Auto press, anything to get cut through the noise in the auto press. Porsche says they're going to be giving Vision Pros with pass through and a display system with 4K resolution for each eye to the press so they can peel back the outer layers of the.

[Alex Lindsay]

I wonder if they're using. When I saw this, I wondered whether they're using Jigspace, you know, because this looks so much like they either they either looked at Jigspace and said, can we do that? Or they are doing it inside of Jigspace.

[Leo Laporte]

But Jigspace, the one that came with the demos on the Vision Pro that you could take apart the race car, that thing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the same. Because it does look like that, doesn't it?

[Alex Lindsay]

It looks exactly like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it's, it is. I mean, I can say that JigSpace is still probably as a, as if you. If I was going to pick one app outside of movies that I show to everyone first, that is the one like it is, it's, it's, it's really impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is actually despite the fact that it's obviously just, you know, kind of come on, press, you want to do this. It Actually is probably a pretty good use of this technology to show what's going on in the engine on their turbo. Right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, you can, I mean plus it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Porsche So I mean 500 bucks. No big.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well again that's the market, that's the market that bought the headset is very lined, aligned with Porsche and Ferrari and Range Rover and you know, all those things.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And there's always something that if Apple had failed to do this, well then that's the only way that I think this would have been a failure as a product that there were going to be lots of people who are willing to spend 10, $20,000 to have these in a lab or in a demo area and then to create specific experiences for high end customers or people they really, really want to get a message to in a very, very direct way. Because that's it really is the idea of I'm going to, we're going to take apart this car and you can actually anything you want to know about like where does this. I know I don't know enough about cars to say if you want to get the flumistone I want to see exactly where the flumistome connects direct. Is it directly through the manifold or is it obliquely to the manifold? Yes, we're going to let you actually do that without actually having to take the car apart. All kinds of industries in which you need to train people, which you need to inform people, in which you have an assembly task or an education task you need to do again or design task. If you fail to allow a huge architecture firm to allow your client to have a walkthrough of their latest $200 million development project, make changes, make notes, make design changes and have that come across as a wonderful experience. That would have been a failure. And they're absolutely not failing on that basis.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, what I will say is that I don't think Apple is moving fast enough and this is the same problem they had with ibooks and I'll keep on coming back to that is that the tools to develop the content is still too hard, you know and the is, you know, the Jigspace is a great example. I love showing Jigspace but it's really expensive and I don't even know how the development works. And that is something if Apple, you know, really should be if they were going to spend money on something, is get this into keynote, get this into something else, get buy like Moto I think is getting End of Life or whatever and there's people from the Moto team that are at Apple, they should just, you know, just buy the app, you know, and make a 3D development tool or something. But the idea is that I think Apple has to figure out how do we make creating a lot of this content much, much easier. And that was the problem with Ibooks, is that it wasn't developed well, it wasn't supported very well, and then the platform itself didn't do very well. And I think Apple has another opportunity to do this and it feels like they're doing all the same things again. So that's the challenge challenge.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the Vision Pro segment.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now you see, now you know, we're done talking.

[Leo Laporte]

The Vision Pro. Yeah. You might have noticed during that segment the disappearance of Jason Snell. Santa Cook has come early. Let's find out what's under the Snell Christmas tree.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

Or that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[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 Jason, I hear the UPS guy came a little early today. What you got there, Jason? Which one?

[Jason Snell]

Mine. All mine. M4 max.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, that's not a review unit.

[Jason Snell]

14 inch? No. I wrote about this at Macworld last week. Got a lot of weird responses from people who are very angry. I don't know why. I mean, it's the Internet, I guess, but like. Well, they're angry that I. That I'm not. That I. I wrote that I. I made a personal decision to buy a laptop instead of a desktop to replace you.

[Leo Laporte]

Going back and forth on Mac Studio, Studio versus Mac Mini.

[Jason Snell]

So in the. Yeah, Mac Mini I decided that the M4 Pro chip was not a big enough leap from the M1 Max that I have in my Mac studio. And then I had that moment where I realized, you know, I. I have two different desks in my house, plus I. I travel and I have two different computers that I use in those, and it's a pain to switch between the computers. And, you know, they make a laptop that has the Max chip in it, and I can dock it at two different desks and have my screen and be very happy. Happy. And it's literally the same computer. So I had. I used to be a laptop user where I would dock it, and then when the Retina imac came out, I was like, all right, well, that screen is too good. I'm going to do it. But I'm back to the laptop life now, getting the M4 Max. And I'll just use that everywhere. Mostly docked. Mostly docked to a studio display and an external keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it is a desktop, basically. Desktop that you could take with.

[Jason Snell]

With you, but if I visit my mom in Arizona, I will bring it with me and it'll be my computer. And, you know, it's just every time you switch between Macs, all of our documents sync now. But, like, then I set this thing or I download an app or I update an app, and then I go back to the other computer. I'm like, why isn't it doing this thing? Oh, right, that was happening on the other computer, not on this computer. Now I have to do it here. And I'm looking forward to not only having a much faster computer, but also having the same computer everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

We might have gotten some of that hate by the headline. Why I'm finally ditching my desktop Mac for something better.

[Jason Snell]

Suffice it to say, I didn't write the headline. And I. I wrote to the editors afterward and said, could you change the headline?

[Leo Laporte]

They said, I actually think that that's.

[Jason Snell]

A lighter headline than it was. Like, we're getting rid of the Mac or whatever. My, Here's a program.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all about clicks.

[Jason Snell]

My. My Mac World columns, you don't do that. I post links to them on six colors and you can see my headline there. Which is what's better, one Mac or two?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, much better headline.

[Jason Snell]

But I don't click.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not as good for clicks.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well, those were baited and angered, and I hope they're happy or angry or whatever state they prefer.

[Leo Laporte]

And I did, by the way, the other thing. I actually did buy the Max Mac Mini to replace My Mac studio, very happy with it. Partly was decided by the fact that I had done the same thing as you did by buying an M3 Max last year year to make a portable desktop. It's ended up basically running the shows now, so it's kind of tethered.

[Jason Snell]

That's not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to wait for that OLED M6. That's what I'm waiting for.

[Jason Snell]

It's not for everybody. Right. And I'm very clear in my piece that like I have this weird setup where because my garage in the winter, the only way to get it to be even close to usable heat wise is by plugging in an oil heater, electric oil heater. And it uses a lot of electricity and it's still never really that warm. And I could just work in the house. So I set up a second desk. Except then I'm using my MacBook Air, which isn't very fast and is also out of sync with my desktop system. And so for me this unifies everything and so it's very convenient. But I also wanted again missed by the people who are just angered by the headline. I also wanted to use it as a moment to reflect on the fact that in the 10 years since I abandoned being a MacBook Air first person, Apple's game when it comes to hardware and macOS is so much better than it used to be for laptops. Right. Like we've been in a period for 20 years, 30 years, maybe even that the percentage of Macs sold that our laptops just keeps going up and up and up and up and up. And Apple has noticed and like in the intel and even PowerPC era when I would have these laptops that I would dock to a external display, like the experience was bad. Like it would lose track of what monitor was where everything would move around, all the Windows would move, all the icons would move. It got really confused.

[Leo Laporte]

That was one of the reasons I stopped doing it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, sometimes it would not go to sleep when you unplugged it. So I'd get home and I'd take my laptop out of my backpack and back. My backpack was like super hot because the laptop had just been running in the backpack. Like at my point is Apple, Silicon era. None of that stuff happens anymore. It is, it's not perfect, but it's almost perfect. Because I would wager now that probably there are more people who use a Mac laptop attached to an external display than use a desktop Mac. I actually think that that's probably the case because laptops are so Popular now, it's more than three quarters of all Macs sold are laptops. So the story is they've gotten a lot better, they work a lot better, better docking stations. With Thunderbolt especially, the dock story is a whole lot better than it used to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I ordered that new Otherworld Computing Thunder. What is it? Thunderbolt 4. Yeah, it hasn't come yet, but.

[Jason Snell]

And I've got a cal digit dock here so you can literally make it that it's a single cable to your laptop that does all of your data through the hub and it will power it. Yeah, and. And that's the dream. So like that was part of my point is that as somebody who didn't do the primary laptop thing for a while, I have gotten to see 10 years of advancement. I mean, yeah, I see a little of it in my MacBook Air in the back of the house, but like to. It's enough to make me commit because it's not a sort of second class lifestyle. Whereas back in 2013, even then, not even 2008, 2005, 2013, you still were not. You're not using the laptop the way that they intended it really to be a desktop. Like they kind of just didn't put in the effort and boy, they have put in the effort and the engineering on the hardware side and on the software side. So here it is, my new computer that I will take everywhere with me. I'm looking forward to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Specs please.

[Jason Snell]

It's a base. I actually almost bought it on Amazon last week because it's a base model of the Max.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right?

[Jason Snell]

Right. Except for storage because I wanted to go. I wanted to have two terabytes because I did not want. My current Mac studio has 2 TB and it's using 1.5. And like I never want to go back to that. Like I never want to play that game where I'm put. With the one terabyte iMac I had. I was constantly shuttling things off and on in order to do video projects. So two terabytes is good for me. So instead I did a configure to order model. But everything else it's the base RAM, but the base RAM is like 36 or 48. I forget it's. It's enormous and it's the base model so you can build more CPUs and GPUs, but it's still a lot because it's a, it's a max. It's the high end stock configuration plus a little more storage and space. Black and no nanotexture because I don't care. So yeah, that's, Oh, I don't actually even know but I think all in with taxes it was about three grand but, but I also got a disc, I got a, an Apple Friends and Family from a. And family. So I got a little bit of a discount that way too, which was nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Yeah, I wish I could afford it. I'd love to do that. But since I did buy this M3 max just.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you just did it. Don't buy a laptop every year. Don't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm going to. Wait, I'm telling you, the oled with the M6 coming out in 2026, that's the one I'm holding out for. And if Mark Calendar steered me wrong, I'm going to be pissed or Om Dia or whoever it was or that, or that two month old account X, I'm gonna be pissed. No, I think that even if, even if they don't know what they're talking about, I think that's, that's gonna happen. So do you, what do you think? Every other year a noon laptop?

[Jason Snell]

I mean it depends on what you want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

If you, if you are finances, I guess.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, it absolutely does. I think you could go years without getting a new laptop. Honestly, I think most book air day.

[Leo Laporte]

In, day out and I'd be very happy with it.

[Jason Snell]

It's, it's good trade also for, it depends on what kind of work you're doing. And then, you know, I do know people who sell or trade in their old laptop and that allows them to increase that cycle a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and I do that with phones.

[Jason Snell]

Yes, that's good too. So like it really depends. But yes, I, I, I decided that I wanted the Max chip because I do have enough stuff between video and some podcast transcripts where I'm using Whisper and a bunch of stuff like that. Like I'm, it's my job. This is going to be my sole computer. I'm going to take that extra speed. But the fact is, is for most people, I think we've talked about it here, you just get a MacBook Air and you'll be fine for years. In fact I, I had somebody ask me about like a friend of mine was like, my kid is just going back to college and he needs a system that'll like, he can use it as a computer but mostly it'll just be like do Python scripts and all of that. And I said, well for that you should just get the 649 MacBook Air M1 at Walmart. Right. Like even that computer is more than most people. People need. And that's an old MacBook Air. But it's still great because the M1 is still great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. David Schaub says they do now have M4s in the Apple refurb store. I'm looking, I don't see any, but they're all mushed together. I guess I could do a find. I shouldn't show it to you, so I'm not gonna.

[Jason Snell]

I got the sweet discount. I'm doing fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You got the sweet discount. That's good. How much is that discount?

[Jason Snell]

I don't even know.

[Leo Laporte]

Too bad I don't have friends at Apple. That's the real.

[Jason Snell]

I just gave my friend my credit.

[Leo Laporte]

Card and said, nobody at Apple knows me. Or at least if they do, they don't admit to it, let me know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Before the Internet days, I used to work for Sony and Sony, if you went to the Sony store in New York, you could buy everything for 60% off. It was just as an employee and I said, can I buy this for people that I, my friends and family? And they were like, sure, yeah, you can do that. And I was like, really? And I was like. They were like, yeah, so just don't sell it. They said, you know, don't sell it to people you don't know. And I said, can I get it for people that I, that I, you know, sort of know, I was a marketing person. Can I get it from music? Can I use it to help them buy stuff for their, like, for. As a music director, you know, can I tell them I can buy them stuff? No. They said, oh, no, no, sure. In fact, that's what, that's what we want you to do. And I was like, why do you want us to do that? It's because everyone wants to know the Sony. Everyone wants to know a Sony employee. So it was, it was an influence pedaling thing, I think. I'm sure it ended when the Internet came because you would scale too quickly. But in the pre Internet days, that was a. You always wanted to know somebody there so that you could get, you know, your next stereo system for 60% off.

[Jason Snell]

Well, Pro tip is the Apple friends and family discounts reset at the end of the year. So if you have a friend or family member who works at Apple, now is a good time to see if they have an extra that they haven't used because then they reset at the end of the year. So that's a thing. You could just Tap your little personal network and you might be able to get, I don't know, 15% maybe is what it is. Something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good. The educational discounts like 10%. Right. So that's right. That's pretty good. Well, congratulations on the new members of your family.

[Jason Snell]

I'm excited. Big, big, big move. Haven't bought a new computer in a while.

[Leo Laporte]

So what's the first thing you're going to do after the show?

[Jason Snell]

Migrate my old computer to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Do you do a full migration, just.

[Jason Snell]

Like a regular everyday migration assistant via Thunderbolt cable?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's what I do. Yeah, that's what I did anyway, to the mini. My only problem with that, and I've been doing that for a while and I've realized now I use, as I mentioned, you should take a look at it sync thing to sync them all up. And if you do that, syncthing thinks the new computer is the old computer. It doesn't reset itself. So I have to remember now, from now on. Oh, yeah. Delete the certificate files and it'll reset itself. So there's probably a few apps like that where you're taking along the old. I guess if you're decommissioning the old computer, it's not too bad. But if you were continuing to use it, it could be confusing for some apps.

[Jason Snell]

I need to find it a new home little program.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Here's the next question, which may be for the panel. I hope listeners will evaluate on their own. When you buy, when it arrives, how long before you stop washing your hands before you use it? When I bought this one, it was like, it's going to be on the desk and it's going to stay on the desk. I'm going to be carrying it carefully. And then it took me like four months before it was like, yeah, I'll just take it into bed and like I'll be eating a peanut butter jelly sandwich with.

[Leo Laporte]

I got crumbs. I admit it. There's crumbs in my M2 error. Yeah, there's definitely.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But there is a time where you're like, no, no, this is going to be the nice one. It's going to be. No, no, no, no. I'm going to be wearing a tie while I use it. I want to look good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny that you said that because I just cleaned my MacBook Air. I had purchased new microfiber cloths, which, by the way, there is a certain process to cleaning these that I didn't know about. I was just throwing in the laundry. Don't do that. Go to Reddit and look up microfiber cloths. How to clean. Seen them? Apparently there's a thing. And then I found. I don't know what this is. It's called apple juice. It's for screen cleaning, screen device cleaner. And I realized the only. It's probably just water because it smells like apples is the whole point of it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, definitely don't. Don't use actual apple juice. We just want to make sure we tell everyone, you know, we said apple.

[Leo Laporte]

Juice smells like apples.

[Alex Lindsay]

It will get sticky. That's all we're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

We. We used to have a couple of screen cleaners I really liked. They're. They're all. I think they went out of business so that we can't get them anymore. But.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And by the way, these things are shockingly cheap. Like, you can get like a thousand microfiber for 20 cents.

[Leo Laporte]

You're the king of microfiber.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, because this is. This is what I wrap my camera, my web camera in, like for transport to the library and back because it'll be soft. And also I can clean the lens. I always have, like, one of these, like, in my laptop bag. Not only.

[Leo Laporte]

So don't throw them in the laundry with your other clothes. You have to wash them on the gentle. Dry them cool. Because you don't. You can't get them past, I think, 67 degrees centigrade because it'll melt the fibers.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They are very much plastic. They're not.

[Leo Laporte]

They're plastic and they suck up lint. So if you put them in with other stuff, you're actually filling the fibers. The idea is you've got to empty out the fibers so they'll continue to. They'll restore them to their pristine state, apparently. Stop reading Reddit. I got to stop reading Reddit. It's just. It's a bad habit I have now. I'm an expert on all sorts of useless things. I guess we can go to the entertainment segment in just a moment. Andy has. Andy has kindly divided up all his stories into segments.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I did. I did. Can we. Before we move on, though, there's something. One last thing from that Steve Levy interview that I wanted. Oh, yes, like talk about. Only because I wanted to get, like, Alex's take on it because they took. So they. Of course, it takes place on the Apple campus. And he's asking, hey, you mentioned the Steve Jobs Theater, which was designed with product keynotes in mind. Now you launch products with pretend videos. We ever go back to live. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad he asked.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And then. Yeah, and then he. And then he basically gives you the logical one. Well, you know, during COVID we learned the audience is primarily online. Very few people can fit into the theater, and we want have more people engaged. And so you got more productivity on tape than you can live because of live transitions on stage and as both. But then this is why he's such a great interviewer. So Steve. Then Steve follows up with. But don't you miss the vibe of a live keynote? And then Tim says, I do miss it. I do miss it twice.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sure interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I mean, just so. It's really hard to have. Have that many speakers be good on stage. And I don't think Apple ever really hit that mark. I mean, Steve Jobs is really good at it. He was exceptional at doing this. I think that it takes so much effort. It's not. When you record something, you got to get it right once out of X number of tries. When you do it live, you have to get it right every time. And, like, when you go out there and there's a whole bunch of moving parts and you got to get them all right and they got to sort them out, there's so much rehearsal. It's not just that it's more efficient or better for people to watch. It's just a huge tax on an enormous number of executives to actually get them to be ready to actually look good. And about half the time you miss the mark, and then it's not as good as what it was when it was recorded.

[Leo Laporte]

So I get that he misses it.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I'm just kind of like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But I do enjoy the thought that even the CEO of this company as like, this is not what was said, but this is what I'm referring. It was kind of nice to have this really, really exciting day when everyone was cheering. You'd meet all these people and it's. It was going to be wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

They still do that a little bit. You just show the video and then you have the demo room afterwards.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, true. But it's not like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not the same going up on the table, good morning, and having people.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think we should also take all those comments with a. With a little bit of a grain of salt. You know, a lot of bands talk about how much they love going back on tour until they do. And there was. I mean, the most telling one was there's an interview with Eddie Vedder on. On Sunday morning, and they said, you know, do you still enjoy touring? And this is a band that Tours all, you know, Pearl Jam tours all the time. And Eddie looked at, looked at him and just said, wrong question.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, like he was, he.

[Alex Lindsay]

Wasn'T gonna, he wasn't gonna sugarcoat it. And I think that a lot of times bands talk about how much they love seeing their fans and being with their fans and everything else, and most of they just need the money, you know, And I think that the, I think that the. A lot of times people will say that they, you know, they'll say a bunch of things because it probably sounds good. I don't know if they really miss stage. Being on stage is a really nerve wracking thing that most executives don't particularly.

[Leo Laporte]

Look forward to, even performers. Lawrence Olivier had paralyzing stage fright for his entire career, but I think he probably still loved going out on stage. He just. It was scary. That's part of the, that's part of what's fun about it is the, is the adrenaline you get, the rush you get.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, it doesn't sound as good. I mean, his answer's a little disingenuous, right? Because what, what he, what he's really saying is, well, when Covid happened, we had to pre record instead of using a live stage. And we discovered that that was better because we could control everything. And like, they didn't suddenly discover that more people watched online than were at the theater. Right. Which is what he said. Like, come on. But that's okay. What they decided was the pre record gave them complete control and it let them do multiple takes and it let them, you know, mix and match how they did their editing and they added fun, like little video flourishes as Easter eggs and like, and it's. And it's more effective for something that was always a video presentation for 99.99% of the people who watched it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, and one of the same time, at the same time time, they had a lot of decision points while designing the Apple campus to say, how much money do we put into an enormous amphitheatre, enormous live theater, up fed to the gills with the greatest AV and the greatest everything. And they still decided that it's going to be worthwhile to be able to get a couple thousand people on campus to do something live in front of them. But that's the value that's definitely always seen.

[Jason Snell]

But, but that's not what he said. What he said was, oh, in Covid, we realized most people watch online, which is like, duh. Of course that was the case. What, what they were doing was Saying we're really good at live. We invented, invented tech presentations as live theater. Steve did it. We're going to continue his legacy. We're going to build a theater. And then they were forced by Covid to do a completely controlled thing. And we're like, oh, actually, this works better for us. Let's just do this. But that's not a. That's not a pithy response to Stephen Levy's question. So instead he says this thing that's, you know, it's just not true. Which is the. Like, we realized most people are online. Come on, like. No, it's just that they have better control in production over something that they build as a film.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm just going to add a show, possible show titled Jason Snell says Tim Cook is a lying liar whose lying mouth is filled with lies.

[Leo Laporte]

There, you get the comments that one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Episode 951.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Good. Mac world headline. Good job. Good job.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Lots of clicks on that, man.

[Jason Snell]

You know, I'm done. I'm done with desktops people and subhead. People who use desktops are stupid.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right?

[Jason Snell]

Let's just get that out there now. I'll bring in the hate mail. That a thing? I didn't actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's get them all.

[Alex Lindsay]

All right, bring it in.

[Jason Snell]

Bring it in.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a little break. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy and Jason Snell, Alex Lindsey and yours truly. More to come. We actually have a bunch of stuff still to talk about.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

Plus right now you can switch keep.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and AT&T.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

Four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expires in six months. Let's do entertainment news. What do you say? I always like doing a little bit of this. Lisa saw the Trailer. She came running into the room and said, severance is coming back. I said, yes, that's exciting. That's very exciting. That'll be sometime early next year, right? January, I think. Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, January.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Golden Globes are in. And Apple, as usual, does pretty well in the Golden Globes. Apple, Golden Globe nominations led by the show. I love Slow Horses. We all agree.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think we all.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing disclaimer. I watched. I had. I don't know, I had some misgivings, but Alfonso Cuaron, who's a very famous director to, decided he would rather do a miniseries out of this book on Apple TV than bring it to the movie theaters. So it got nominated for a best female performance in a limited series. Cate Blanchett, which actually she does deserve. Kevin Klein, who is the horrific old man. Best TV male performance. But he's going to be competing with Gary Oldman from Slow Horses, who should win every time.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Slow Horse is also best TV drama. Jack Loudon. I'm not sure which one he is. In Slow Horses, he got best support supporting Jason Siegel in Shrinking got a nomination for male performance. And Harrison Ford in Shrinking got a nomination for male supporting Male. Oh, this is in comedy.

[Jason Snell]

Comedy, yeah. Good show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I hear it's a good show. I've. I've tried to watch it several times. That's kind of the story of my life with Apple tv. I've tried to watch it and I, for some reason, I just. I get disappointed. I don't know why.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think I find I'm watching more series from Apple TV than any other platform.

[Leo Laporte]

So I gotta watch. Black Doves on Netflix just came out. That's a good one. That's a Slow Horses. Quality entertainment.

[Alex Lindsay]

I got. I got hooked on. What was it? Paramount's? I would not watch it. I was like, this is not Yellowstone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yellowstone, no.

[Alex Lindsay]

Lioness.

[Leo Laporte]

Lioness. I heard Lioness is incredible.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's really good.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was like, watch that. That can't be. You know, and then I. And then I, you know, got through the first one. I was like, it's okay. And the second one, is it about a lion? No, it's about spy women that are in CIA and. But they're brutally good at what they do, let's just say.

[Leo Laporte]

And they just coincidentally are gorgeous. Right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know. You know, so like Charlie's Angels, it.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Jason Snell]

They were chosen, right? It's like.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like Charlie's Angels, you know, with. With a lot more weaponry and more swearing. So at least I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll. I'll definitely.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's Charlie's Angels with a hard edge and there's.

[Leo Laporte]

It Is Taylor Sheridan the same guy who's did Yellowstone?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So it's, it's. I, I put it off for a long time. I was like, I'm not going to watch it. That can't be any good. And I was, I was wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

And as Andy always. In fact, I don't want to steal a pick from you, Andy, but he always does like to mention you can watch Charlie Brown.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have an alternative. We can. Let's talk. I'm glad to talk about this in the main show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I did watch it, the Thanksgiving one. That was Great Pumpkin. Charlie Brown is a classic. And you're right. You can see the, you could see the. It's in four. It's in high quality. So you can see the lot that. It's like you're watching a drawing come to life. It's really amazing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And you can, you can tell when there's like three or four cells like in the stack. That's when. And you can tell that, oh, the Charlie Brown cell must be the talk because there's a shadow line off to the right of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that amazing?

[Andy Ihnatko]

And it's like again, this is, this is one of the many trivial things that like younger gener. Youngest generations don't understand that we were never meant to see it like this.

[Leo Laporte]

We were meant to be over 400 lines, SD standard definition with snow ghosting and.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So it's shocking to see all these details to see the brush strokes in the back. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Again. Yeah. It's like you could. Oh, they did that one with a crayon on. I mean it's really, it's, I love it. It's great. You're really seeing into it and it's really fun. So Charlie Brown Christmas, that's the one with the little tree that's, you know, funky like mine will be on Apple TV again. Apple bought these but they're going to make it available for free this weekend. Yes.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So if you have the app, if you have to have the Apple TV app installed but it will be for free on Saturday and Sunday this week.

[Leo Laporte]

December 14, which is a perfect time to watch a Charlie Brown.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm sorry, you can, I think. Okay, I'm sorry. You can also go to tv.apple.com I keep forgetting that they.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they stream it on the web. Nice. Very nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You do need an iconic cloud account. That's all.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to get your data in the show biz. You quote the Major League Soccer commissioner, Don Garber in an interview with cnbc. Subs for the Apple MLS subscription are higher than be expected, although he did not say any specific numbers. Is that right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it was. It wasn't. Because we haven't. Obviously, Apple doesn't talk about, like, any specific numbers, but it's interesting to now to know that. No, we had. We at Apple had expectations. They were. Exceeded the expectations. This was an interview all about mls, but it was like a couple different things and also. Also interesting and tantalizing that he was basically saying that we'll have more. We'll be a little bit less opaque about that in the future. I don't know whether that meant he's going to release viewing numbers, but apparently he has decided that MLS could benefit by people knowing exactly how popular this service is, as opposed to just allowing the Apple TV aura to lift it up as high as it possibly can.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I'm not surprised. Apple promotes it like crazy. You cannot. I mean, you can't get through the Apple TV app without being offered soccer games over and over and over again. The cup streams free this Saturday if you are following it.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, I was. I was watching. I haven't paid any attention to Hard Knocks because it wasn't the Steelers and now it's the Steelers, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, great show. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I really. When I was watching it, by the way, as if you're a Steeler fan, you have to watch Hard Knocks because makes Tomlin look so good.

[Leo Laporte]

He is good.

[Alex Lindsay]

He's really good, but it really shows it.

[Leo Laporte]

We know Mike very well.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I was really thinking about Apple Vision Pro and the ability to do something that's kind of like what Hard Knocks does with mls, where you're following teams around and getting locker room experiences or on the side of the field. I think that that might be actually more interesting sometimes than trying to watch the game in immersive. And they've shown little bits and pieces of that. They show little slices, but I think longer samples of that could be really interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. We. Lisa watched the Dallas Cowboys one, I think, and it gave. She always called them the Cowgirls, but gave her a new respect for the Cowgirls.

[Alex Lindsay]

So a really nice facility. That's. They show much.

[Leo Laporte]

They do. They really, really.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, the pants are green because they look silver on tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's like a weird color. It's a weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, of course Apple TV would get that color, right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The Major League Soccer cup streams free on MLS season pass this Saturday. But I think you would know that if you.

[Jason Snell]

That was last Saturday.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it was a day that will live in infamy. Okay. I won't tell you who won. It's no Premier League. Is that what you're saying? Jason? Who cares?

[Jason Snell]

I didn't say that. You said that. That's like a Mac World headline. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

There. I did notice that after the F1 race in Abu Dhabi, Brad Pitt posed with one of the drivers and his co star. And there's Tim Cook in the paddock, as they say in the Formula one season ender. So I guess they were still shooting this, this Brad Pitt story. So it's almost. It's. It's in the can now. It's. It's down. They're taking it over to Lucas Sound to polish it up. It's coming out sometime next year, probably later next year. I don't think you want to come out too early.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I think it's in June or July. I think that an article, an article that I read.

[Leo Laporte]

June 27, 2025.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I think I was reading a business, Sports, sports business article that was saying that because this is like the next F1 season doesn't start until like 2 months before the release date. So this would have been their last opportunity to get any actual footage of F1. The article, though, made this little. Not a rumor or anything like that, but made the notation that, yeah, you know, ESPN's exclusivity on F1 ends in 2025. Maybe there's a reason why Tim Cook has been so Buddy, buddy with F1 for the past year or two, which would be tantalizing, particularly like how we've been discussing about how cool, like Apple covers.

[Leo Laporte]

I would watch F1 on Apple TV and I would pay for it. I pay for F1TV. I would definitely pay for that. I would be excited about that. Let's see. All right. Wow. We got through all the entertainment you have. You have put in a ton of hardware stuff which is kind of interesting. Here is a flat Mac.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so this is from Kevin Noke, who he says he saw an iPad concept from 1980s and this came out from Frog Design and he decided he was going to make it himself.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. This is from. There's a famous, really wonderful book by Harmon Esslinger who basically published this art book about. Here are all the designs that we came up with that are just concepts. And he's like a legendary designer. He came up with the design language of Macs and apple throughout the 80s. And one of them is this tantalizing looking like kind of a fusion between a Macintosh and an Apple 2C with an integrated screen and an integrated handle. And he decided, this guy who's well known amongst circles about hey, I like to basically build Macs from scratch, meaning I will even design the case and build it, got in touch with Harmon Eslinger saying, hey, is it okay if I actually build one of these for real? And he actually gave them not like blueprints, but here are the dimensions of the mock up that we made. And the keys are all custom everything you start. And it's not like, oh well, we've got an emulate. Technically at the heart of it, emulation is running on a Raspberry PI. But don't think this is just, hey look, I 3D printed a box and it boots up into Linux and then you can do. No, it's like you turn it on, you hear the system chime. In the 40 minute video, he explains that to get the startup chime when you power it on, he needed a special controller that just does that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And it wouldn't be a Mech if the 3 1/2 inches drive floppy didn't auto eject and you can't get those drives anymore. So we basically built a mechanism for a modern drive that would have it eject and wrote all the code so that the eject function would actually eject the thing it works with. He wrote, he created code and a custom microcontroller. So it works with adb. Yes, it's because it's built based off of Raspberry PI. You also get HDMI out, you also get usb. You also get other things. But again, it wouldn't be 1984, 1985 Mac unless you could plug in an Apple desktop bus like mouse and keyboard. The keyboard is exactly the same kind of weird frog design keyboard. It is completely functional. The display that he sourced does have a touchscreen. So he thought, okay, why not just actually have that work as well. But it's not as though this is. Again, for all intents and purposes, this is a perfectly functional Mac that looks identical to this.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like it's running System seven. What is the. It's an older system.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, yeah, it's running System seven. And again, it's so accurate that it's not as though he created an SD card and put it on the internal like Raspberry PI. He installed System 7 on this thing from floppy disks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. He also, I know, took a picture of it with a Sony Mavica that uses a floppy disk and then he pops it into the Mac. He decided to Kevin Noki. You win.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

You just won the Internet. Wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And of course. And it runs off of an internal battery. And again, it's worth. It's a 40 minute video. It's worth watching because he doesn't like teach you how to do this, but he walks you through everything he did step by step by step by step. Where there were no shortcuts taken whatsoever. If Apple had. Where if this were something that he were hired to prototype, this is exactly the way that it would have been done. Step by step by step by step.

[Leo Laporte]

And the last show this to Steve Jobs and Steve would say, yeah, exactly. It's like, oh my God, thank you.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It was a delight to watch.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really cool, really neat. So he does this. This is what he does. He does a lot of stuff like this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. I think I mentioned a video of his like several months ago. He did. He decided to make an entire Macintosh out of nothing but brand new components. So which. Which started off with, okay, so I need to come up with a 3D design, a 3D model of the actual original case so that I can 3D print it and everything. Again, internal was nothing. It's not like he cut down a Mac lc, keep a Mac LC motion motherboard to do it. No, this is all like modern off the shelf components. But once again it's like, well, I don't want to switch this on. And then you see the Raspberry PI load up screen and then you see all these lines of text and then it boots into.

[Leo Laporte]

I have his Raspberry PI case. The one that looks like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes, yes, yes. I think he sent me.

[Leo Laporte]

And you sent those to me. Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And yeah, and a mouse based on the frog design and a mouse. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Kevin.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So freaking talented.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I know who you are. He's joking. German. He is also on Insta as K E V I N O K I thank you for the mouse and the 2F the Raspberry PI case. I forgot all about that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The Raspberry PI case was he's not having these made in China. He's basically 3D printing. So he occasionally does low run productions of some of these things. So he's a good follow because you'll see something which he will not say it, but it will be implied that, yeah, I'm making like maybe a dozen of these. So if you want one, buy it right now and don't even think twice about it because you're not gonna get another chance.

[Leo Laporte]

Very cool.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And yes, that is still my Raspberry PI case on my desktop right now.

[Leo Laporte]

I still have them. Yeah, that's very nice. A French company says they figured out a way to do upgrades for the Mac Studio. Third party upgrades for the Mac Studio. The company Polysoft has reverse engineered the storage modules. They're proprietary and plans to offer. Oh, upgrades. Pretty nice. Pretty sweet. Maybe you shouldn't throw out that old M1Mac studio just yet.

[Jason Snell]

Jason Snell Sell it and say it's upgradable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is the new one, the one that can be upgraded.

[Leo Laporte]

They have something they call Ryrop R I R O P which is Rossman is right over Voltage Protection Detection. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. We're not recommending it. It's brand new.

[Alex Lindsay]

What could possibly go wrong?

[Leo Laporte]

What could possibly go wrong? I'm going to leave my Mac Studio sealed shut. But still something to know about if you have one. Let's see you refer to a fast company interview with the designers of the Mac mini. Apple's M4 Mac mini is a tiny miracle inside the drastic redesign Michael Grothaus story. It's behind a paywall, so I can't see it, nor can.

[Andy Ihnatko]

As usual, the other Apple sites grabbed it. But basically it's interesting. It wasn't as in depth as a regular engineer interview might have been, but it does address things like this was exactly as small as we could make it and not more small than this. Or I'm saying we probably could have been even more aggressive with the smaller size of the Mac Mini if we decided to only design for M4 before adding that it was important to design for pro consumers as well. So it's like, yeah, we can't have a different one for the M4 pros.

[Jason Snell]

And keep in mind they know what the profile of the M5 and M6 and M7 probably are and they know that this case has to support all of those.

[Leo Laporte]

It's small enough. It's so cute on my desk. I love it. It's so cute.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And also contrary to what we were saying before about like certain, like again, arrogance, locate lowercase A. Arrogance where there was discussion of like, do we want to put ports on the front of this? And again, according to the interview, they basically said that. Yeah, I mean this is. People love this on the Mac Studio. Let's basically vote in favor of customers having the convenience that they want as opposed to. But there are Holes cut into our beautiful facade. But whatever shall we do?

[Leo Laporte]

Apple Pay's first competitor has arrived in Norway. Don't get your hopes up. Ever since Apple opened up nfc, it's been theoretically possible. VIPS is a mobile payment app. Vi PD party app to offer tap to pay on iOS's story from the Verge. Actually, it was Mac Rumors who had the scoop. So let's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

As usual, we'll be standing by with bated breath to see if the world comes to an end because a third party had access to shocking. To the NFC chip on the iPhone, probably. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If anybody's in Norway, let us know. Tell us how it's working. And you know, this story kind of bugs me. I don't know what to say about. About it. You remember Apple proposed a system that would scan for child sexual abuse material on its devices, and Hue and Cry caused them to stop doing that. They are now being sued by victims of abuse, seeking more than $1.2 billion in damages, saying they shouldn't have abandoned that, that it made it possible for them to be abused. I think that this is what their story. But I don't know if Apple's responsible.

[Jason Snell]

This is the Heat initiative too. This is basically that same group and they're the ones who organize the protests out outside.

[Leo Laporte]

They go and look for people they can use to. Yeah, okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think this is what Apple is trying to head off at some point when they first started it and then there was so much pressure to not do it that, that it became, you know, because of the, you know, all the other things that are connected to it. So. So I think that, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there is one thing that confuses me because I. It is my understanding that they do scan for CSAM on icloud, but that is. The lawsuit says that they are not.

[Jason Snell]

No, because it's. The stuff that is in. Your icloud is encrypted.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah. They can't scan.

[Jason Snell]

They don't have the key. And if they don't have the key, they can't scan it. So the story is that they built a system that basically sat on your device and compared images only when you were going to upload them to icloud. Before they uploaded to icloud, they would compare them to the database using a fingerprinting method and basically refuse or throw a warning or something if it was detected. Which is a really weird system in a way. Right. Because they wanted to not be able to decrypt it on their end because they believe strongly that they shouldn't have access to your stuff, but the fact that they, you know, they also didn't want to have it be actively scanning every image on your system, so they made it part of the upload process. And, you know, I think that there is a philosophical disconnect here where it's a little bit like our conversation earlier about, oh, the wizards will come up with a magical technology to do this. And basically the people behind this lawsuit say child sexual abuse material is evil, which it is, and therefore you should do everything in your power to find it, including if you have to, build it so you can peek on, on the cloud and create a back door. We want you to do that. If you're going to create a cop that sort of scans all files on every iPhone in existence, you could do that. And if you don't do those things, you're responsible for what happens next. And I think that's where the disconnect is, that Apple's like, well, but no, there are lots of other reasons why we don't do those other things that preclude us from doing it in this case, but it's more complicated than just this one issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're not doing it to promote CSAM by any means.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, exactly. The center of this, according to. I've got the PDF in front of me that they're basically the center of the four allegations they're making is failure to act. That the fact that they came up with this idea and they did not implement it meant that they knew that this is a problem and they willfully decided not to do anything again, according to the language of the lawsuit. And I don't, I don't. I obviously, I don't know what, how that will play out in court. And there are a couple other allegations that are more subtle, but that's the smoking gun that they want to sort of leap upon. So, yeah, it's. It's difficult. I mean, there's. It's so difficult to walk that line. As always, like, as always, we have to find that balance between keeping people safe and being able to get at the people who want to hurt other people and being able to maintain privacy. And so sometimes we have to. We don't throw people in jail without a trial and without the state having to prove that they committed a crime. Obviously, this means that a lot of people who are guilty go into jail, go free, instead of getting taken off the streets. But it also means that people who are innocent don't have to have as big of a problem as they would have. This is the decision that we decided to make, we could have made a different decision 500 years ago. 4, 3, 2, 1, whatever. This is what we're doing. So I think that's where we are.

[Leo Laporte]

A scam. You might want to watch out for this. From the Los Angeles Daily News. Scammers are going into Apple stores and pretending to be you and picking up Apple products that you had ordered before you could get in there to get them yourselves. Now you may say, well, how could that possibly happen? The QR code. Don't they need the QR code from your order?

[Alex Lindsay]

It sounded like that someone might be getting a hold of their email and then getting that QR code. And that QR code probably shouldn't be the only way. If you have a $4,000 device, it might not be the only way that Apple should check your id.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's denying responsibility, saying, they didn't steal it from us, they stole it from you. Even though they picked it up at their store.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it's weird. This was also in the Orange County Register, who had a longer piece about it. This is not just. It seems to be isolated to Southern California, mostly around la. But it's not like just this one or two oddball thing. There are a bunch of people who have reported this. The Orange County Register reporting isn't 100% clear on whether or not the Apple Store was absolutely checking IDs. There are some of the incidents, evidence in which the claimant said that, oh, Apple checked the persons that said they checked the ID and that's why they did everything that they could. There are some in which they didn't say that. They just said, oh, well, we saw the QR code and just, we then. And we just handed it over. But they are consistent in that. Apple's position is that, no, no, they didn't steal anything from us, they stole it from you. So you're going to have to call the police and good luck with that, but get out of our store because our transaction has concluded. And I would love to see this.

[Leo Laporte]

Tested because I think that's not the case. Because you could say, well, they had a higher responsibility to make sure that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I. Yeah, there was, it was in there. It was in. Yeah, that's, that's why I hope this, this gets looked into. And I made, I made some cursory checks. I couldn't get anywhere in the last couple of days about it. But that's really interesting where it's been paid for, but they have control of it. What is their legal responsibility to not release it? To the wrong person. It seems to me as though, especially, especially if they can demonstrate that this person was. That the person at the Apple Store was supposed to check an ID but did not. And that's why this person was able to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if your car gets stolen from a valet station at the local restaurant, it's not your problem, it's the valet's problem. It seems to me similar. But anyway, but there's also, like Alex.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Said, there's also the big question of how did the criminals get a hold of the QR code to begin with. That implies that there's just people swapped them or. Well, but again, it's complicated. Like how would they know that this person had bought an Apple device? Or they just simply have thousands and thousands of compromised accounts. They're using basically malware as a service so they can basically ask the company they're getting malware as a service from. Please alert us to if any of our compromised accounts have an email from the Apple Store with a purchase confirmation so that we can then go in, grab that QR code, send a mule out to go pick it up. That's, it's, it's interesting. It's worrisome to think about how this could have happened. One, at least one of the people who are cited in the story says that no, I, I don't have. I don't get any weird phishing emails. I don't think I've been confirmed. Of course, how would you know? But it's not as though, like this is grandma who said, hey, look, free USB drive lying on the street. I'm going to take it and plug it into my Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to remember. I've only done this once and it was a couple of iPhones ago. They send you a text or do they send it via email? They send you a text. I'm trying to remember how I proved I was me. It seemed like a pretty painless process. Very quick, painless process. Yeah, it just wasn't showing a QR code. I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

One of the people said that they found only found out that it had been stolen because they got a confirmation either text or email from the Apple Store saying, hey, congratulations, someone enjoy your new Mac. Someone picked it up, said, that wasn't me.

[Jason Snell]

Me.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, one last story before we take our final break. The FBI says, yeah, because hackers are in the phone network. This salt typhoon Chinese hacking exploit and we really can't get rid of them. They're like cockroaches. So you should stop using unencrypted encrypted apps. You should use encrypted apps to message like Apple's own system or perhaps signal. And then it turned out they actually said responsibly managed encryption, which means that we have a back door into which honestly I don't know what that would be. So what they're admitting is, hey, salt typhoon hackers used the backdoor we gave law enforcement 20 years ago with Kalia to get in our system. We can't get rid of them now. We want you to use a new system with a new backdoor. Thank you very much. Maybe I won't.

[Jason Snell]

It's called cognitive dissonance. You're trying to hold two differing opinions in your brain at the same time, which is that backdoors are good, but oh, also our enemies have exploited our backdoors. Yeah, it's probably when you read all.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The, when you read all these, I guess the FBI and this and CISA and others, like basically a conference call and from the, I haven't seen the transcript, but from the reporter it seems like they said, wait a minute, we. Wait, we didn't just say use encrypted. Encrypted messaging, did we?

[Leo Laporte]

No, because now we're going dark. So use encrypted messaging that we could subpoena for the clear text, which I don't think there is any. Not with end to end anyway. Oh, there is one exception. Do not use RC on your iPhone to message an Android user because that is not encrypted.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, they did say that explicitly, didn't they?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And like maybe that's how this is happening. I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Don't know. But part of. I guess there was one way in which they were saying nice things about the iPhone. Basically. One person who was on the call said that, he said only use a phone that has timely security updates and updates them automatically. And, and he seemed, according to the person who was on the call, he seemed to be trying to say iPhone without saying iPhone. But yeah, RCS, Apple could have. Google generally supports end to end encryption through their rcs. Through rcs by having their own service that does that. There's a proposal through the committee to make that part of the open standard. While they debate that Google has basically put it into their own RCS support platform that carriers can actually support.

[Leo Laporte]

Excuse me, subscribe if you're Android or Android. Chances are that RCS is end to end encrypted. Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And so, but Apple basically, not, not necessarily incorrectly said that we don't want to have to implement a third party security protocol. We would much rather work with the government governing agency to develop an encryption protocol, basically help help them to build the protocol that will become part of the free thing. Kind of like how they were contributing to usb see along the development of the thing and basically their suggestions made its way into the final specification.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the irony. All right, let's take a little final break and then your picks of the week. Gentlemen, thank you for helping me fill out this show with as much stories as we could. And really thank you to Andy who's been really great about filling out the rundown. Thank you, Andy. Most of those stories were Andy's I lived in contributed a handful. You're watching MacBreak weekly on the Twit network, I hope you know that. And many of you watching live right now. 1100, sorry, 1,114 people. That's really great. 1114 people watching us live on our eight streams. There's a discord stream for the club twit members. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook. In fact, I was chatting with some Facebook, which is nice. Nice to have you kick LinkedIn eight different platforms. You can watch us live on every Tuesday, 11am Pacific. That's wonderful. But I have to say that's because we have some very generous contributors in our club, Club Twit. Now it's not super generous. Club twits only $7 a month. But it really makes a huge difference to our bottom line. Right now you're covering half our payroll. Club Twit, thank you. We still have to cover the other half and I have to pay the electricity bill. But other than that, you're making a big difference and we really appreciate it. It is not however, enough of a difference for us to grow or even to maintain at this level. Unfortunately. Ads. We had no ads on this show. Ad sponsorship has really dwindled. So it's become more and more important, if you can afford it, that you join the club. I would love to get 5,000 new members before the end of the year. We need that to sustain what we're doing right now to continue just doing what we're doing right now. Find out more. Twit TV Club Twit $7 a month. In short, the benefits are ad free versions of all the shows. Video for shows. We don't put out in public with video, like Hands on Macintosh with Michael Sargent. We have Hands on Windows. The ultimate, rather sorry, the untimely Untitled. The next show, which is the ultimate Linux show. The Untitled Linux show with Jonathan Bennett. We have Scott Wilkins, home theater geeks. All of those are available in audio only to the public. But we have video. We do shoot video and you can get that video if you're a member of the club. There's a special Twit plus feed that includes a lot of the events we do. The club has been. One of the great things about the club is we've been doing a lot of interesting special events. Micah's Crafting Corner. Stacy's Book Club is coming up. By the way, we're reading the new Mercy of the Gods, the new essay Corey book. And it's fantastic.

[Jason Snell]

Good book.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? Have you read it all?

[Jason Snell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I'm only. I'm only to chapter eight, but. Or nine, but it's. I'm loving it. It's better than I expected. They are the guys who wrote the Expanse. Maybe it was your recommendation. I think it was that we added it to the vote and it won. So that's fun. That's coming up December, I think 19th. Let me check the event. Scott schedule Chris Marquardt coming up this Thursday for his monthly photo review. Micah's Crafting Corner will be coming in the morning on the 19th and in the afternoon in the 19th. Stacy's Book Club. There's lots of other stuff we've been doing. Some advent of code specials, some live coding. I even did some live coding, which was a lot of fun. All of this benefits the club. You can get those shows in the Twit plus feed if you don't watch live live. I just want to encourage you to consider joining the club, not for all of those benefits, but because it makes a big difference in what we can do in the next year in 2025. It's going to be a little bit tight in 2025. Thank you in advance. I appreciate it. Twit TV Club. Twit ready, set, gift.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The holidays are in full swing and so are amazing deals at Amazon. You'll save so much on holiday gifts for the kitchen, like appliances and cookware. You'll have money left over for an ice cream scoop that's perfect for serving up dessert. Or a perfectly shaped snowball. Think fast.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotcha.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Or that cutlery set so you can carve up the turkey with surgical precision. Oh, what fun it is to save. Shop Amazon for all your gifty needs.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better over here. Now, at T Mobile, get four 5G.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Phones on us in four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with auto pay 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 Time for the picks of the week what do you got? Alex Lindsay so it doesn't have to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Be chatgpt, but I will recommend. I want to recommend using something like ChatGPT or Claude or others and try programming with Xcode with those.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. So this is a new feature of XCODE that it actually does it in Xcode because I saw I wasn't even doing it in.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just did it Saturday I decided I'm going to try to write an app. I have to admit that I've never really gotten into the whole like I wrote a lot of code when I was a kid and the whole like XCODE or IDE process just never really resound, you know. And I tried a couple things but then I get bored because not, you know, the I have to write something that's boring so that I can learn how to do the thing that I want to do. What I found was on Saturday I was like, I'm just going to try to do something that I want to do. And I'm not, I can't talk about the app right now. But, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to write an app. I'm just going to prompt the code and then, and then I just sit there and ask Chat. GPT Chat will just create the code and say hit copy, open up. It literally it's open X code, select this app, select this thing, paste this into this. This is how you publish it. You know, this is how you and anything you don't know, you just go, well, how do I do that? And whereas this and how do I do this? And how do I do this? And I learned more about Xcode in 3 hours than I had learned in years. Because what was happening was this gets into the equation that I use a lot of times. Action equals possibilities greater than circumstance. Suddenly my circumstance was way down and my possibilities I can actually have an app I can play with. And I was literally playing with it within 15 minutes I had something that I was playing with and I was like, oh, okay, But I don't want this. And then I tell it what I don't want and then I put these things out and then now I want to publish it to a different computer. Now I got to go through all of that process. But the point is that I suddenly was just bouncing around asking questions. And if you haven't coded, it's really, really interesting because I very quickly also ran up against the limits. Like, I'm going to have to learn how to code to fix this problem. This is not going to be. This is not fixing everything, it's not building the whole app.

[Jason Snell]

Or.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or I'm now going to partner with a programmer, hand them. This is what I wanted to do. These are the things that aren't working. Look at what this created. But I'm able to. The ability to prototype very, very quickly is astounding. And if you haven't played with it, you need to play with. If you have an idea that's been sitting around. Now I've got all these app ideas that I've had for years and I'm just going to start making prototypes and play with them and work on them. But I just think that it's a really fascinating process because I learned a lot about the mechanics of XCODE almost by accident, things that were stopping me before. And I'm starting to understand the whole structure and where I put everything and how I make it all work. It doesn't have to be an Xcode, as you said. ChatGPT can integrate with it, I think now, and Claude can do some of those things, but I was just doing it straight out of the app and just cutting and pasting in. Part of that is kind of. I wanted to do that first because it actually forces me to know a bunch of things that I wouldn't know otherwise. But I think that it's. And I talked to some folks that. And one of the things you can do is you can take the URLs for documentation for libraries that ChatGPT hasn't seen and give it those, like, here are the libraries. Libraries. Now program this for the. Especially when you're talking about Vision Pro and other things like that, you can hand it the information it doesn't have and let it use that as a guide to build the code that you want to do that. And again, I don't know if I would ever build an app that I would end up releasing from this, maybe, but I doubt it. I think that what I'd end up doing is being able to hand a very competent prototype to A real programmer to analyze and build something cleaner and better and ready to actually be released.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, 100%. There's a Jason scene when I do my Google podcast, we hand to the editor an edit log that basically anytime there's something that, okay, we need to stop and restart here, or here's the act break, here's the commercial break. And I used to basically make these notes by hand. And so I finally said, okay, you know what? Technically you went to RPI for computer science. You are a programmer. You should be able to script, release, automate this. And as soon as I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The thing is, the difficulty is when it's. The thing that you do regularly is enough of a pain in the butt that you think, that wouldn't be great to have an app for this, but it is such a pain in the butt to actually automate it or write an app for it. That's like, maybe doing it by hand isn't so bad. But just starting off with, okay, well, what if instead of typing this stuff into the spreadsheet myself, I used Google Sheets scripting? And it won't give you. I find that it's not good at giving you the entire code, but it will give you a good first cut at it. And if you are already at least basically familiar with programming, you can look at the code, say, okay, I understand exactly what's happening here. It's calling out to this function here. And then, oh, this is how you basically put data into a spreadsheet. Okay, I get it, I get this, I get this. I get that you might have to tweak it, but it will actually work. And now it's like an actual web app because it's like, as soon as you. And the great thing is the more you learn, it helps you to learn what you need to know. And then when you know a little bit more, you can be a little bit more specific saying that, I want you to write this completely in CSS and JavaScript. I don't want you to use any external frameworks. I want the result to be an HTML file that runs completely on device. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And just like you say, I want you to use this framework, I want you to use this external stack. And you can even do things like, because these. These models are multimodal, you can actually just go into, like any drawing app and draw a picture of the app that you want and then say, this green button here should start the clock. This is the table. So on the left side you should have like a note the right side should have the actual time. I want this button to do this. And it's shocking and almost like belittling how close it will give you to a complete app just by doing what you might do with a developer, which is, here's a picture of what I want, here's what I want it to do. Can you build this for me to be averse to say it's not going to be as good, but again, especially for some, something like I have this task that is repetitive and is boring and I want to pull my hair out, but it's not worth my. I can't find a third party app that does it and it's not worth my learning to program and it's not worth paying a developer what they should be getting for writing an app like that. But you can make something that is functional a lot more easily than you think you can just with these. It's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex, where is the assistant in. It's an Xcode, right? The AI.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm just opening up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're not even doing that. You're just opening chat GPT and saying, how do I do this?

[Alex Lindsay]

The reason I did it that way specifically is I didn't want it to do certain things for me in xcode. I wanted to learn Xcode. And so my whole thing is that I want to force it to tell me like go to put it here and put it here and put it here and do this. I didn't. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's writing a little manual for you in effect.

[Alex Lindsay]

It says.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because what it does is specific to your question. Question.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's generating the code and it says copy this and put it into your. Into the content, you know, folder. And but the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so it's also. You're also using its code.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh no, I use the code to write it. I mean, I'm not writing any code.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it Swift code?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's Swift. I'm asking, I asked for Swift, you know, and so you have to tell.

[Leo Laporte]

It what language and what. Right, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And so. And I may be limited and I'm also learning that like it's like there's no Swift doesn't. It was like SwiftUI doesn't support this right now. It's something that I wanted to do. But what it does do is then gives me very explicit instructions on how to set up the app, how to put. And that's the kind of thing like taking the code and just sticking it in. I realized that coding. I think one of the problems with coding is that it's like expecting a child to understand college level English. English to get started. And I've always thought that there needed to be something in between shortcuts and xcode that is, I was always thinking nodal interfaces, which I still think would be a great idea. But this was like, oh, I can really. I built something that was very good at what I did. There was lots of little bugs that if I'm making it for myself, it wouldn't bother me. I'd be like, oh, just jiggle the handle kind of thing. But if I was going to publish it, I would probably send it to someone again to go through it and clean it up. But, but I think that just thinking about ideas, I think a lot of times I'm very responsive. I need to see something to make a decision about whether I like it or not. And so I want to, I want to be able to throw something together, play with it, go, oh yeah, that button doesn't belong there or this doesn't work this way or I should have thought of that and be able to do, go through that process without driving a programmer into the ground round of asking them to hand write a bunch of new things. And by the time I hand it to them I've got a pretty good sense of what it looks like and it's just, yeah, it's really.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll actually be talking a little bit about this next on security now using ChatGPT. He was somewhat surprised. Andy Yanako, your pick of the week.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My pick of the week is a beloved holiday traditions for God. Must be 20 years since Star Trek the Next Generation was still on the air. Patrick Stewart's one man show rendition of A Christmas Carol. Now don't be, don't be misguided into getting the Hallmark Channel movie version that he did of A Christmas Carol. This is so even before he got the job of being Captain Picard he had this one man show of a Christmas Carol that he did that he'd been doing like off and on for years and years and years and they recorded it for an audience and it is just amazing. He's just doing all the voices, all the characters, all the situations and yes, what he does. Tiny Titan, he says he speaks in this voice only, probably with a cockney accent and it's just amazing. I think it's like 90 minutes long and the first time I got this it was on cassette at Billy 19 in an insurance salvage store that used to exist in the Boston area and, and when those tapes wore out, I got them on CD. Then I ripped the CDs to audio files. Now it's available in a lot of other places. For instance, if you have a Spotify Premium subscription, it's part of your Spotify Premium library access. If you want to buy it as an audio book, it's only less than 10 bucks, but you might actually already have access to it, depending on what you subscribe to. It's weird how these Christmas traditions or holiday traditions don't happen because you tried to make it happen. They happen because you realize that it's like the second or third week in December and you're wondering, like, what feels off. And then I realized that, oh, that's right. I have not listened to Patrick Stewart doing his one man show of a Christmas Carol yet. And it's not. I can't navigate December as highly as I possibly can without hearing Patrick Stewart doing his one man show of a Christmas Carol. Super, super high recommendation. Recommendation.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Andy Anako. And now, ladies and gentlemen, we'll wrap it up with Jason Snell and another holiday pick.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, in the early days of the Mac, there were a lot of silly things on the Mac that people wrote, like the talking moose. And there was a thing, the one I remember.

[Leo Laporte]

Buddha.

[Jason Snell]

Yes, I remember. Yeah. And the Oscar, the Grouch and the trash can. And there was even a program called Underwear, which basically was like after, after dark, a screensaver, but it ran on your desktop, so it would animate on your desktop.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what a waste of CPUs it was amazing.

[Jason Snell]

And so speaking of that, Speaking of wasting CPUs and GPUs, Simon Stavring, who is the developer of some excellent software including runestone, the text editor that is across Apple's platforms, and Scriptable, which is an amazing, amazing piece of software that lets you Write stuff in JavaScript and like deploy it as widgets on your iPhone and stuff like that. He got inhabited by the holiday spirit and created an app called Festivitas. It costs whatever you want. Pay what you think it's worth. I think €4 is the suggestion. And what does it do? It hangs Christmas lights or holiday lights that you can choose the colors and you can choose the thickness of the cables and how far they droop. And it'll hang from your menu bar and it hangs off of your dock. And that's all it does. It is wasting CPU and GPU cycles to draw. You can animate them, you can have them not animate. Sort of amazing the options that he's got here, but he has done the work.

[Leo Laporte]

There's Plenty of cpu, extra cpu.

[Jason Snell]

But you know what? I installed this and it brightens my little Max screen to have little Christmas lights hanging on them. It's adorable. So I highly recommend if you're feeling inhabited by the holiday spirit to just.

[Leo Laporte]

Take a don't be like my neighbors and leave the lights up all year round. Okay. You gotta, you know, January 1st, take him down.

[Jason Snell]

Although it's customizable. So if you want to put like Easter colors and have them go do that, you can do that, too.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fine. You're talking.

[Jason Snell]

It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Jason Snell]

That's it. Festivitas. Brand new but reminiscent of a lot of old classic, fun, silly Mac apps.

[Leo Laporte]

Festivitas app, bring the silly back to your Mac.

[Jason Snell]

That's right. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And Jason Snell wants to bring some joy into your life with his wonderful website, 6colors.com. Some of those colors in your life.

[Jason Snell]

I immediately program Festivitas to have the six colors.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Jason Snell]

Of the apple rainbow as my colors. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. Jason does a bunch of podcasts, including Upgrade, where he and Mike Hurley will talk about Jason's new laptop.

[Jason Snell]

That's exciting. Undoubtedly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Sixcolors.com Jason to see all the different shows he does. Thank you, Jason.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you very much. Thanks, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to have you as always. Mr. Andy Anako, GBH is calling. Hello, Andy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes. Thursday 12:45 wgbhnews.org unless I get bumped, there's some news that they are covering this week that might, the mayor might want some time. So as always, I'm thinking. Okay, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know what you'll talk about yet?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm doing, actually, I'm doing the rundown tonight. And a lot of it, unfortunately is going to be like, okay, I know that the FBI, you're being told that the FBI said don't text anybody under any circumstances. But here's what's actually happening. And maybe it's okay to say happy Christmas to your grandmother this season. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Mr. Alex Lindsay, office Hours Global and Graymatter show. What's up?

[Alex Lindsay]

We had Cory doctor on last Friday, I think. I think the episode might have just come out.

[Leo Laporte]

Dan, I've got to listen. That's on Gray Man.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. On Gray Matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Corey's.

[Alex Lindsay]

He was great as always. So very articulate fellow to listen to. So great, great conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Did Michael get a word in edgewise?

[Andy Ihnatko]

It was a good conversation.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, you know, Michael makes great. Is that he's able to kind of keep that conversation rolling. And so he covered a lot of ground obviously with Corey, and it's not out yet.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just looking at Gray Matters.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's going to be out, I think tomorrow, coming out tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Looking forward to that.

[Alex Lindsay]

So that's coming out and then otherwise every morning for an hour a day we get up and we answer questions and we're focused really right now on moving our tech forward, our tech stack forward. So you're going to see little. We're working with a variety of engineering teams across many pieces of software and hardware to maximize what we can do. And so we're running right now at 4K HDR. We're getting ready to add higher frame rate and 5.1 and all kinds of other things and then start to stream out to a lot of other platforms. And so right now it's one hour day, but it's some great experts every morning getting up and answering questions. And still we haven't missed 1 since.

[Leo Laporte]

March 25, 2020 Office Hours Global thank you Alex. Thanks to all of you. The happiest of holidays. Glad you're watching. Glad you're listening, listening and keep up the good work. Don't forget to subscribe to Club Twit. It makes a great gift for the holidays too, by the way. Two weeks free. Plus there's a referral code which you could share everywhere and get yourself a free month. TWiT TV Club TWiT. We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time 1900 UTC. Watch live, as I mentioned, on eight different platforms or get it after the fact. Usually that's more convenient at our website twit tv mb. You could also watch it on YouTube. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Nice thing about that. Great way to share clips, little pieces. If you want to share something you saw on the show with a friend or a family member, that's a great way to do it and a great way to promote our show. Thank you in advance. And of course you could subscribe in your favorite podcast client and you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Just look for MacBreak Weekly Audio or video version. Get it every single week. Thank you for that as well. Now though, it is my sad duty to tell you, get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

On us in four lines for $25.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

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