MacBreak Weekly 952: Everything Smells Like Fresh Paint

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 952: Everything Smells Like Fresh Paint

Introduction

In the final episode of 2024, MacBreak Weekly brings together Leo Laporte and his esteemed panelists—Jason Snell from Six Colors, Andy Inako, and Alex Lindsay—to discuss the latest developments in Apple technology. The episode delves into groundbreaking announcements, including a new Blackmagic camera tailored for Apple's Vision Pro, rumors surrounding foldable iPads or Macs, updates on Apple Watch Ultra, advancements in AirTags, and the integration of AI features in Apple’s ecosystem.

---

1. Blackmagic Ursa Cine Camera: A Game Changer for Vision Pro

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the Blackmagic Ursa Cine camera, a $30,000 high-resolution camera designed specifically for immersive spatial video content creation on the Vision Pro headset.

• Specifications & Capabilities:
  • Resolution & Frame Rate: Capable of capturing 8K resolution per eye at 90 frames per second, enabling highly detailed and smooth spatial video.
  • Integration with Apple: Developed in collaboration with Apple, ensuring seamless compatibility with the Vision Pro and leveraging Blackmagic’s robust post-production ecosystem, particularly DaVinci Resolve.
  • Market Positioning: Positioned as a rental option for $1,000 per day, making it accessible for production houses without necessitating outright ownership.

Notable Quote:

Alex Lindsay: "This is probably one of the most exciting cameras we've seen in maybe a decade." [04:15]

---

2. Enhancing Content Creation for Vision Pro

The introduction of the Blackmagic Ursa Cine camera is seen as a pivotal step in expanding the content ecosystem for Vision Pro, allowing creators to produce high-quality immersive content without the complexities of building custom rigs.

• Ease of Use: Unlike previous art projects that required significant engineering effort, this camera offers a turnkey solution for spatial video production.
• Content Expansion: Facilitates the creation of diverse content, including behind-the-scenes footage, live concerts, and more, enhancing the Vision Pro’s appeal beyond Apple’s in-house productions.

Notable Quote:

Jason Snell: "Everything we've seen on the Vision Pro up to now has been something that Apple has basically made. This opens the doors to other options and other capabilities." [25:09]

---

3. AI Innovations in Apple’s Ecosystem

Apple continues to integrate artificial intelligence into its suite of applications, introducing features like Image Playground in Notes and Genmoji.

• Image Playground:
  • Functionality: Allows users to draw sketches and generate images based on textual prompts, enhancing creative workflows.
  • User Interface: Praised for its intuitive design, enabling users to iteratively refine generated images.

Notable Quote:

Alex Lindsay: "Apple's UI here is fantastic." [76:34]

• Genmoji:
  • Features: AI-generated emojis that can be customized to represent users or specific prompts, fostering personalized communication.
  • Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other Apple applications, expanding the versatility of messaging and content creation.

Challenges:

• Accuracy Issues: AI-generated news summaries have faced criticism for misrepresentation, highlighting the need for refinement in complex content generation.

Notable Quote:

Jason Snell: "If Final Cut doesn’t support it yet, specialized linear editing software might not be ideal for immersive video." [12:06]

---

4. Rumors of Foldable iPads or Macs

Mark Gurman reports on Apple's ongoing exploration into foldable devices, hinting at a revolutionary iPad akin to Samsung’s Galaxy Fold but without the visible crease.

• Design & Functionality:
  • Seamless Folding: Early prototypes suggest nearly invisible creases, aiming to offer durability and aesthetic appeal.
  • Market Launch: Targeted for a 2028 release, indicating Apple’s strategic long-term investment in flexible display technology.

Notable Quote:

Lee Gurman: "Apple is honing the product for a couple of years, aiming to bring something to market around 2028." [30:53]

---

5. Advancements in Apple Watch Ultra

The upcoming Apple Watch Ultra is expected to introduce several new features aimed at enhancing user health and safety.

• Satellite Connectivity: Enables emergency calls even without cellular coverage, ensuring users can reach help in remote locations.
• Health Monitoring: Potential inclusion of hypertension detection, offering users proactive health insights beyond traditional measurements.

Notable Quote:

Mark Gurman: "The new Watch Ultra will likely include the satellite feature that's on the iPhones." [115:57]

---

6. Updates on AirTags

Apple is set to release next-generation AirTags with enhanced capabilities, including longer range and improved integration with Apple’s ecosystem.

• Enhanced Tracking: Utilizes Ultra Wideband (UWB) for more precise location tracking, addressing previous limitations in range and accuracy.
• Integration: Better synchronization with Apple devices, offering users more reliable and seamless tracking experiences.

Notable Quote:

Alex Lindsay: "I put them in my car and kids’ backpacks, making it easier to keep track of everything." [129:51]

---

7. AI Features and User Experience

Apple's integration of AI extends to various applications, enhancing productivity and user interaction through intelligent automation.

• Writing Tools:
  • Capabilities: Allows users to perform complex tasks like formatting documents, generating tables, and more through natural language commands.
  • User Feedback: Positive reception for eliminating repetitive tasks, though challenges remain in handling nuanced content accurately.

Notable Quote:

Alex Lindsay: "There are writing tools where you can describe what you want, and it builds it for you. That's pretty exciting." [87:13]

---

Conclusion

MacBreak Weekly episode 952 offers an insightful exploration into Apple's latest innovations and collaborations, highlighting the transformative potential of the Blackmagic Ursa Cine camera for Vision Pro and the anticipated advancements in foldable devices, wearable technology, and AI integration. As Apple continues to push the boundaries of technology, the panelists underscore the significance of these developments in shaping the future of immersive content creation and user experience.

Final Notable Quote:

Jason Snell: "It's a long term play... Apple is investing in making this future happen." [52:52]

---

Looking Ahead

As the panelists wrap up the year, they express optimism about the forthcoming year's technological advancements and the continued evolution of Apple's ecosystem. The integration of cutting-edge hardware and intelligent software promises to redefine user interactions and content consumption in the coming years.

---

This summary captures the essence of episode 952, focusing on the pivotal discussions around Apple's Vision Pro, Blackmagic collaborations, and the integration of AI in enhancing user experiences. For the complete insights and detailed conversations, listening to the full episode is highly recommended.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly, our last show of 2024. Andy, Alex, Jason are all here. We're going to talk quite a bit about a new camera that Alex just can't wait to get his hands on. Could be the beginning of the turnaround for the Vision Pro. I think it might be. Also, lots of rumors about new foldable iPads. Or is it a Mac? New Apple watch ultras, even new airtags. All that and more coming up next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts, love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 952, recorded Tuesday, December 17, 2024. Everything smells like fresh paint. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news and hallelujah. Hallelujah. There is Apple news. Let's first introduce our esteemed panel, Jason Snell from Six Colors, now that he's got a purple mic.

[Jason Snell]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Could be seven. Hello, Jason. Good to see you.

[Jason Snell]

It's one of the colors.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, darn it. I forgot to wear my sweater with the magic inscription from the Lord of the Rings on it.

[Jason Snell]

Speak for end and enter. It's a really bad password. It's. I don't know what it says. I don't do Elvish. But. But that's a bad password etiquette. I'm sure you could talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

What else is on it? Is there other Elvish stuff on it? Oh, there.

[Jason Snell]

It's got the fellowship and the whole thing. This is my holiday sweater. This is our last show of the year. Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

It is. It is. And as soon as I introduce the rest of the panel, I'm running downstairs to get my holiday sweater. I forgot. That's Andy Inaco. Inaco.com WGBH in Boston. I can now say anato.com with confidence.

[Andy Inako]

Well, it's. It's not available to the world yet. Yeah, but it's available to close personal friends right now who are giving me feedback and telling me, ooh, that person died, like, just like three months ago. You sure you want to say that about him?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear.

[Andy Inako]

Again. That's good. I'm joking, of course. I've also decorated for the holidays. That's why I was a minute and a half late, because I thought, hey, why don't I just, like, put some Christmas lights on a shelf behind. Not realizing that I've got, like a thousand watts of lights. When the background gets darker, maybe you'll see these LEDs.

[Leo Laporte]

They hold the place together. They really add a certain.

[Andy Inako]

Well, I mean, there's, there's, you know, 2024 is ending, you know, on kind of an expectant note. Maybe we shouldn't be too festive. So I'm putting the lights out. I'm not turning them on.

[Leo Laporte]

He's half festive. That's good.

[Andy Inako]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it.

[Andy Inako]

I made the effort. My heart was in the right place.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I added little sparkly Christmas trees. We had a tree lighting last night.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And Al, actually Lisa said I have lots of stuff I could give you. I forgot it was the last show of the year, so I better. Next week we are going to do a best of. So you'll hear the best of 2024 and then we have a week off for New Year's Eve and then we'll be back on the 8th. Let's say hello to Alex Lindsay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hello. Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Office hours global and 090 media. And a man who has probably just this morning spent $30,000.

[Alex Lindsay]

I haven't spent the $30,000 yet, but I'm pretty excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Should we play the Vision Pro jingle? Just because this is kind of a Vision Pro.

[Alex Lindsay]

We have going straight into it.

[Jason Snell]

Become a Vision Pro show now.

[Alex Lindsay]

Getting the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Play the Vision Pro jingle.

[Alex Lindsay]

What do you see?

[Leo Laporte]

What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro and what we're talking about is the final. The pre order availability of the blackmagic Apple camera. This is very exciting. This is not the software camera you have on your phone. This is a physical $30,000 kind of. I shouldn't. Is it specifically for the Vision Pro or. It's just, it's a spatial camera.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean you can, you could use it for shooting for the Meta Quest as well. It is, it's very high resolution, you know, 180 camera.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the Blackmassic Ursa Cine.

[Alex Lindsay]

Immersive, 8K per eye and 90 frames a second. And that the processing required for that much resolution at that frame rate is not trivial.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is really a big computer with two eyes in front.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, Blackmagic was getting close because they had a 17K camera that they've been working on. And so, you know, they're very close to the same resolution for that. And so it was already kind of, there was parts of that pipeline that were already built. But it is still a huge undertaking to get this right. And there's a lot of, you know, metadata and all kinds of other things that have to be kind of managed inside of that process. So it's a pretty exciting camera and it really solves the big problem that people have had about why you don't see a lot of this kind of content is because it's hard. It's been very much an art project every time we build one. I built a bunch of these rigs. I've machined parts for these types of rigs. Not personally, but I've had them machined. And getting all of this right and consistent is not a trivial problem. And it's been something that everyone had to build from scratch. And this is the first time we've seen, the first time someone's going to release a camera at this resolution and at this frame rate that is really built and it's really built lockstep with what Apple needs for what they wanted. They want for what they're doing now. They may still be using their own special sauce on some of the. Their own cameras, but being able to provide this out to the, you know, to a lot of production folks. And again, when you see $30,000, some people are going to buy a camera for $30,000. A lot of people are going to rent a camera for about $1,000 a day. So $30,000 will lean into one to $3,000 a day somewhere, depending on how people schedule it. It's going to be in that range. So when you, when you figure out your shoot, you're not trying to figure out, how do I buy a $30,000 camera? That's for the rental houses to buy. To buy. So. But it's, you know, knowing blackmagic, this is as little as they could charge for it. They're not, they're not known for high margin, you know, production. It's, it's an incredible lift to build what they're, what they're building there.

[Leo Laporte]

And they worked with Apple for this? Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the. I think Apple had already been kind of working with at least parts of some of their cameras to figure stuff out that they were doing. And, and I think that there was a, you know, I think Apple saw, saw the need and the opportunity to, to get the. Rumors are anyway, that Apple had, you know, saw the need. They have a need, which is they got to get the, they got to make it easier for people to generate content. You know, so a lot of us can use our phones, but that's still kind of just cute. You know, those are cute little tests. Being able to have a camera that can actually start to take full advantage of the, it's not even as much resolution as the headset can handle, but 8K per eye is a lot further down the path than we have been in the past. So it's a really, really exciting camera. I mean it's probably the, in my opinion, one of the most exciting cameras. I'm not saying, you know, like we've seen lots of great cameras coming out over the last couple years, but this is probably the most exciting, different camera that we've seen in maybe a decade. So it's, it's, it's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're saying the Vision Pro can do better than 8K90?

[Alex Lindsay]

It can support higher resolution than, than. I don't know if it can do more than 90 frames a second, but I believe that it, it can process higher than 8k per eye.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but it doesn't have screens that could do that, right? I mean the screens are 8k per eye, aren't they? What are the screens?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that they can, I think they can resolve a little bit higher than that, I believe. Yeah. And so, so the wonder is 3,500 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And so, but they'll definitely be able to resolve to the 8k per eye at 90 frames a second. And that's kind of the, that's where things get pretty interesting, you know, where you start to really feel like you're, you're there. I mean a lot of us are hoping that the next, the next higher end version of the Vision Pro will probably go to a little bit higher resolution and probably 120 frames a second is what we're hoping is a lot of us are hoping to see a little bit more frame rate out of it because there's a kind of a, there's a place, there's a jump from about 96 frames a second where things look a lot different to the human brain. And so that's what we're all hoping we get over that hump sometime soon. But anyway, but I think that it's, it's, it's a really, really exciting camera.

[Leo Laporte]

So 42.85 Alex is according to John Ashley.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I mean it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, you wouldn't buy one unless a client came to you and said, hey, we need to do a show in spatial.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have been pitching clients on this camera for the last three months. Yeah, like, yeah, I got people very close.

[Leo Laporte]

If a client buys it for you, that's different.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or you rent it or you, you know, like again, you don't have to get someone to buy it. I mean, if you're doing a project, I mean a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're not going to do more than 30 days of a project. Right? I mean.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. I mean. Well, I mean you might. And then that's when you, when you realize over the next year I'm going to do 30 of the 30 days of production, then you start thinking about buying the camera. But, but I think that what, what I look at is, you know, I've got a sh. Like I have a lot of shoots and the budget might be, you know, 80 grand for the shoot, you know, and, and it's if it's that number making it 81 or me just eating $1,000 to put the camera in to shoot as test footage. Usually what happens is, is that you, a lot of us will bid on a production, will eat some of the margin which you know, and do it, show it to the client. And the client, once they see it, they're like, oh, we would like to have that all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It comes with this lens. But is it interchangeable? Could you put it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't think it is. I don't think that it's built. I mean I wouldn't want to interchange it. It might be interchangeable. It has the buttons on it that would look like it could be popped on and off. You know, the thing is, is that the sensitivity of the registration of those lenses is so tight. I would tend to want to leave it the way it is. But it could be something where you could get a slightly less or more field of view. So you could have lenses, lenses can go further than 180 degrees. You know, they're capable of doing I think 220, 240. Some lenses can get around you and so there's a potential that you're going to spend this much on the camera. It wouldn't. I think a lot of people would love to see a version that they could do it, but I think these are going to be all part of the camera. I don't think they're going to be interchangeable.

[Leo Laporte]

Blackmagic says that they've created a new format for blackmagic Raw for this camera. It will shoot in that format natively. And of course if you're using DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic it will all kind of suck up all the data that's.

[Alex Lindsay]

Being provided and that, that's one of the things that's really pretty exciting about this is that where this gets really interesting is that blackmagic has resolve and this is where you see the power of them building the camera and the post production pipeline at the same time, which nobody else is doing so, no one else. Building an editing package and color package and, and effects package. It makes cameras, so so. And that was fine. It was somewhat interchangeable. When we were talking about just 8k cameras or 12k cameras or 6k cameras. And you. Oh, we'll just take our Arri footage and put it into Resolve. But when you start talking about something like this, where there's warping and there's inter axial versus interocular and there's metadata and there's all these other things, having the camera be able to save. Exactly. And knowing what you need to deliver on the other side is a very powerful vertical integration that really puts blackmagic in a particular location for this kind of production. So it'll be really interesting to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Oddly, Final Cut does not support it, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Not yet. I mean, I think that we probably assume that Final Cut will be able to handle this in the future. I think that right now we're seeing Final Cut.

[Leo Laporte]

Specialized linear editing software is okay for immersive video. I would think you'd want something specialized to it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, you have to remember that when you're cutting it, you're just cutting eyes. In that case, it's not like we're doing a 360 and trying to pan around. We're just cutting what those eyes look like. Now, one of the things that they've said, I think, in this press release, is that Resolve will be able to preview this into a Vision Pro. So if you have a Vision Pro and Resolve and you're working on the footage, you'll be able to look at what you're cutting and looking what you're.

[Leo Laporte]

So the director's in the editing room now looking in a vision, in a.

[Alex Lindsay]

Vision Pro, like seeing how this, how this works. And again, that vertical integration between them is going to be really important. And, and part of it's also being able to support the metadata. The metadata is really important because you have the metadata of the inter axial distance and, and a lot of the information that's. That's there, that's coming into the camera, but you also have to match that up with the inner ocular distance, which is different for every person you put that headset on, you push a little button and it lines up your eyes. And so the, the headset knows what the interocular distance is of every person who, who puts on the headset.

[Leo Laporte]

That's part of the setup. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

They also know if you put a lens in, they know that you put a corrective lens in, you know, and they know what it is, you know. And so, so that, that data. And again, when you're paying 3, 500, that's part of what this $3,500 or you know, is part of is all this little, these little bits and pieces that the other headsets don't have is that they're paying attention to all those bit, those, those pieces. And so anyway, it's hard, you know, we don't know how well it will work until it comes out, but it's pretty exciting. I think you do a pre order because you want to see like how many of these are we going to have to make in March, you know, by, by the end of March, you know, because they're going to want them in the field before they get to nab. I think, I think they're definitely going to want to show them at nab, but I think they're going to want to get them into the field as well. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. So, yeah, it says they'll take orders now with deliveries to start in early 2025. You think that's more like March than January?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think. I think it's. I think it's the day before. I think the time before nab, day before they got to be shipped. People have to get them the week before, have to have them in their hands at nab or. I don't think that anybody at blackmagic likes to stand in the booth. Anybody but Black Magic. Black Magic has had a history sometimes of things taking longer than a year after they announced it. And they got really good at not having that happen for a while. That's a long time, you know, but we're waiting for, you know, there's 2110 routers we're still waiting for. So the, so that, you know, it.

[Leo Laporte]

Has 7 terabytes, comes with 8 terabytes of network storage. Is that like frame IO or what does that mean? 8 terabytes of high performance network storage built in?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that. I don't know. That's not a.

[Leo Laporte]

If you said high performance storage without the word network, I might say, oh, that's a lot of hard drive. But it's network, which sounds like it's frame IO more than.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they have their own blackmagic cloud as well. So when they say network storage, it could be something that's networkable. It's a storage unit that's there and it. And it can be easily what that may Capture. I'm not 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Two hours of video on the camera.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that's wild. Well, and you have to capture a lot of it. I, you know, one of the problems we have, for instance, I have the 12K. I've got a couple of the 12K cameras. And one of the problems that we have is that the throughput on the output of, you know, I can get a drive that's really fast, but I can only get a gig a second out of the camera. And so I can, you know, when I'm doing 8K 120, I have to compress it 12 to 1 to just get it out of the camera. Like there's no way to, you know, like there's no way to record it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

So the internal storage becomes super, super important. And like many of the other blackmagic cameras, it can be accessed from the net. From the net. So there's an ethernet port on the 10 gigabit ethernet. Right. So, so imagine this being able to be published quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

Four ten gigabit ethernet ports. Apologies. Four. And that's. So you gotta have different workstations connected to it that envision people doing post production as you're shooting.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, that's having four, four of them.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the client, the director, the producer and the studio exec.

[Alex Lindsay]

You could do that and you could also. There's a potential there that you could be pulling all, using all of those to grab frames because.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Alex Lindsay]

When you think when you're talking about that kind of resolution, you're talk about an enormous amount of data. In fact, 40 gigs is not anywhere near what that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's two 58.7 megapixel sensors.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. So you're talking about an output of, you know, it probably wants something closer to 100 gigs a second uncompressed. So by compressing it, you know, you know, so what, what's coming out of the back of there is going to be a compressed format.

[Leo Laporte]

It does create a proxy file in, in H265, I think or something.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right? Yeah, 264, you know, and people like me, what we're really interested in is what does, what do we get live, you know, so it's got to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Live with this, you think?

[Alex Lindsay]

We don't know, we don't know what the live support is going to look like. But we're, we're taking, you know, a lot of us are tracking it. I think it has two 12G. It has an A and B 12G output, which would be 4K. So some of us are hypothesizing that we're going to get potentially 2 4k 60 outputs out of the back of the camera that we could do left, right, right, right eye on, which would be great for a lot. I mean 4k if that's the case, that would look great. It wouldn't be as good as what's being recorded on the camera, but if we were able to get that. But again, all of us are making this stuff up right now. We don't know until we have the camera that we have a press release, you know, and so, and we have a lot of us guessing about what those are.

[Leo Laporte]

But imagine this was the topic of the day on office hours.

[Alex Lindsay]

We've talked, we talked about it over the weekend. Yeah, yeah, that was, that was a big, you know, definitely. But it is, it's a one of a kind camera and it is. And again, for the folks that get in early, I mean all of us who have been doing this kind of immersive work for the last 15 years have been again, putting these things together. It's like building your own car. And this is the first time we're like, hey, how about we give you, you know, it's still a Model T probably compared to where it will be and in 10 years. But it's like here's, here's a whole car all in one place and you don't have to build it yourself. But that's really what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been a bottleneck do you think, for vision production?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, it's been a huge bottleneck for, yeah, I don't know what all the bottlenecks are for Apple producing more content, but it has been a huge bottleneck for everyone else to.

[Leo Laporte]

Does Apple have something like this in house?

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I think that what we've seen is Apple building a lot of their own solutions in house.

[Leo Laporte]

Building your car.

[Alex Lindsay]

You have to remember the person who worked on the Sphere camera works at Apple. Now the next VR folks are at Apple. You know, so there's a lot of people who engineering wise, really know understand cameras and understand this kind of camera. So, so they, there's a lot of, there's an incredible group of people that know what they're doing at Apple and really know this down to the, you know, down to the hard tax, the, the. And then Blackmagic of course has been building cameras now for 10 or 15 years. And the thing about Blackmagic is they're usually a little bit more adventurous than everyone else. You know, so they're, you know, like when we do, there's a bunch of Shoots that I do that I use Aries and I use, you know, Sony Venice's. But when we're doing testing, I almost always use blackmagic because the cameras are much more flexible, you know, and I still, and I still shoot a lot of blackmagic cameras when it, when it, when it matters. And so, so I'm using a lot of those cameras because the cameras are far more flexible when it comes to frame rate, far more flexible when it comes to integration. And so they're kind of the perfect camera company to work with Apple to, to figure this stuff out. And so it's going to be. But I think that it will unpop. I think there's a couple things that it'll be a lot of different people doing things with the, with the cameras. I think that Apple has made a bunch of decisions on their immersive stuff that's been, you know, some of us wouldn't agree with and you know, with some of the stuff that's come out. So the, and so allows, it's going to allow a lot of us to have our own take on it without having to, you know, I mean, building the pipeline for this is not trivial. It's why Facebook built their own camera for a while. It's why and did not necessarily succeed at it. It's why Google built its own camera. Everyone builds their own cameras because this is a new world that isn't a mass market. And this is the first time that the third party has been, I mean, Red was talking to Facebook about building an immersive camera, but never actually built it other than the spec that was at some, you know, one of the conferences, one of the F8 conferences. So the, this is the first time we're seeing it getting really close to the ground. And I think that it really could revolutionize not only, I mean, not only for Apple, but for, for the meta quest and so on and so forth. I think that there's going to be a lot more great content and a lot more, you know, options. You'll see a lot more people, be a lot more experimental. Because the other thing is when you build these art projects, they're very heavy and you can't like just pick them up and move them like, you know. And so it's, it's, it's this kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is, this looks pretty.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's a camera that we can put on. We can put this on. I don't know why we put it on a steady cam that make you sick, but you can put it on. You can put it on a tripod. You can put it on.

[Andy Inako]

Just answer your own question there, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was just like, well, that would be horrible. We did that.

[Leo Laporte]

We.

[Alex Lindsay]

We did that with Ozo. We put the ozone. My brother's a Steadicam operator. We did put an ozone on it on a Steadicam. And it's really funny. What we did is, is we went. My brother does this thing when he wants to relax that he turns the thing sideways. He just turns the whole thing because it reduces the weight. And we walked really slowly, then turned it sideways. You could always tell when people got to that part of the demo because they ripped the headset off. We were like, oh, they're done. Anyway, so. Anyway, so I think that again, a lot of us are really excited about. About this camera, you know, and those of us have worked in this for a long time because we know how hard it's been to do this. So if blackmagic can do what it says, all they have to do is provide what they said in the press release, and we're all going to be pretty excited about it. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

And as owners of Vision Pro, people should be excited too, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. You're going to see concerts.

[Leo Laporte]

This is maybe what we've been waiting for, which is some way of doing.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you look at.

[Leo Laporte]

Up to now, it's been Apple and Apple only pretty much. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just. It's just been. There's other people with the capabilities, but it's just been really heavy and it's expensive and it takes a team to show up to run the camera system. And, you know, it's, you know, like, this is something I can throw in the back of my car, go to a concert venue and like I shot the Verve Pipe at. In Mill Valley at Sweetwater. I could take this camera down, just set it down and record and, you know, and it might be. I'm already talked to a couple venues about, you know, we're thinking about, like, during the sound check, once they're all kind of lined up, let's do a couple songs to, you know, to an immersive camera.

[Leo Laporte]

That'd be amazing.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, and so that's the. That's the kind of stuff that. And then post that that's great for the band and for the location, so and so forth and so. So I think that there's, you know, but that's the kind of thing I can't do with the kit camera. The kit camera, like, I have to get there for three hours and get it set up and sync it and make everything work. And this is something that I can theoretically with internal. Com, I can set it down on a tripod and be shooting, you know, 10 minutes later. You're going to see a lot of great footage. Like it's going to be, it's the probably the most, this is the most exciting addition to what Apple, the Apple Vision Pro that affects all of Immersive, not just the Vision Pro because Apple is basically. This wouldn't happen without Apple figuring out what they needed and without blackmagic being willing to move forward for immersive content in general. This is probably the most exciting camera we've, we've the most exciting, not even just camera, but anything that we've seen in probably the last decade.

[Jason Snell]

And it feels like it takes, it takes the content creation of this out of it must be basically an Apple joint, right where Apple's got to be. I think everything we've seen on the Vision Pro up to now has been something that Apple has basically made. Even if, I mean at one level or another Apple has held the keys to that. And it's great, like it's, it's paid for for sure. This opens the doors right to other options and other capabilities. And also, yeah, like you said Alex, other platforms so that somebody could create an immersive thing and have it be on Vision Pro and on Meta Quest and other platforms that you know that are, that are forthcoming, like the Google XR platform. Like that's good, right? That that opens a lot of potential beyond the house generated material that we've had up to now. That's what excites me as a user.

[Andy Inako]

Particularly because you need, you need the weirdos. That's the first people you need to call. You need to call the weirdos who are just going to grab a camera like this and screw around with it and create the kind of content that you can't imagine how this could, this story or this experience could have been done in flat 2D streaming. So the more we were get their hands on this the better.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think that one of the challenges has been because the budgets need to be so big when Apple's doing it. And this happens. The same thing with Meta and Apple. They're like, well we're spending a lot of money so we need to bring in a Hollywood director. And that all comes with their own old opinions. They're old ways of doing everything. Like we have to make sure that we direct who you're looking at and everything else and old fashioned ways of Thinking as opposed to. So there's a mixture of. To your point, there's people that we don't even think about right now that are just going to go out and get a hold of that camera and rent it and shoot crazy things and we're going to see things that work that we didn't think would work. And then there's people like myself and there's probably, I don't know, it feels like there's like 20 of us in the world that have done, you know, hundreds of hours of immersive that now can do this on our own budget. You know, just go and rent it for the, a couple days and shoot things that we have ideas for and then we have again, big productions. And again, there's other things. This isn't just making content that you would do as a movie. This is, this camera means that when they're shooting silo or when they're shooting any project, they can take this camera and just set it down and record the recording of that scene. And that content would be better than almost everything else that we've seen so far. As I would love to just see behind the scenes shots of, of silo, of slow horses, of any of these things. And, and right now, every time we've done that in the past and I've done a lot of that kind of thing, it's an art project, like to get high quality. It's a thing, you know, and this is going to be something that can be quietly put next to the camera, over to one side and for as, as little extras rather than trying to build narrative content with it. Just little extras, you know, is going to be for provision pro users. You know, I was talking to somebody about this and they were like, well, there's only 450,000 Vision Pro users. I was like, yeah, it's 450,000 people that spent $5,000 on something they didn't need. And you know, like, like, you know, like that's good, that's good market. And how many times have we seen streams for 2,000 people? Almost never.

[Andy Inako]

So, so like, so like a lot of golf coverage? A lot of coverage.

[Leo Laporte]

High end.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, well, I was just. It brings up something that I hope that we get to and may as well get to it here where I'm so fascinated by how the fact that now everybody has a really good quality video camera in their pocket at all times and access to non linear editing has generated such a groundswell of innovative filmmakers. Even the people are just making stuff for themselves and sharing it on streaming. That wouldn't have happened like in our generation where, yes, we have. Even though we had camcorders, we didn't necessarily have the permission from mom and dad to take it out. Skateboarding and then even editing it would have been a real problem. And then publishing would have been a real problem. And so this is why getting this sort of technology in more hands and more weirdos is such a good idea. But there was a rumor that was started off by the information like a couple of months ago and kind of was bolstered by a supply chain rumor this week that Apple is considering putting like a pixel style camera bar like on the next iPhone or a future iPhone. And the thing that after thinking, well, I wonder why Apple would even consider doing that. The only thing that I thought of was, well, if you're trying to continue to work, continue to use the, promote the iPhone as, hey, this is something you can actually shoot 3D image, capture image 3D video with. Having the camera bar on this side would allow you to have wider interocular distance on the cameras. What do you think of that? And again, and also I realized that you'd also have to be shooting pretty much everything vertical. But does that make any sense?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that many of us have been talking about wanting to move having even two of these on either side. But definitely the width. If you look at the width here, it gets very much closer. This gets much closer to my interocular distance, the interact distance. If you grab those two corners. And a lot of us would love to see those two corners being used. And I don't care. I mean, because we have so much resolution now, you could shoot vertical and get the stereo version. You know, like you could get the 4k per eye with two that are on either end. And I think that we've been drawing that up and sending it to people for a decade. Like as soon as the hydrogen came out, you know, the hydrogen that you have one and I have one, those were, you know, we saw the possibility of what was there with the hydrogen and we were just like, we just need to spread those out, you know. And the same thing that, that's here. And I've actually built rigs with two identical iPhones that are one's upside down. So the two of them are like. So I have printed rigs that look like that, right? And so, and so we can record them and I can record stereo. The hard part is syncing the two cameras up is a thing, right? So, but, but that's, that's what you want and you're 100% correct that, that, that would really. And I think that Apple, I don't think Apple expected as many people to play with state spatial as they did. And I think that now it has more attention. But if it's a bar, that bar is probably 2027 at the earliest. If they decided to pivot 2027, 2028 would be the first time we'd probably see it. I'd be surprised if we saw it any faster than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

The only reason why I've been skeptical about VR headsets as like for consumption devices for content created specifically for spatial video is that it's such a rare bird to see something that actually makes me think, wow, this is much better than having like a flat picture. I mean it just seems often it feels like, okay, there's an extra dimension to this, but I don't see a change in the storytelling. But the idea of having like the sort of thing where people can start off shooting again with a much better device, like an iPhone with a horizontal bar, but then move up to something that's more prosumer. I'm thinking that maybe I'll start to see a lot of people who are again, just because they're doing nothing but shooting spatial video all day long after school and every weekend and basically learning storytelling from the ground up from this. That really could get me interested in this.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like, you know, I'm the skeptic of course on the Vision Pro, but it feels like when you said the behind the scenes stuff, Alex, that the things that would be most naturally fit the Vision Pro experience would be something you would want to see in person. Like being on the set as they shoot silo or being on a courtside at a basketball game or at a theater performance. Those things seem like they lend themselves very well. What doesn't seem like it lends itself well is storytelling is feature films.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that people will create storytelling that's inside of this. That is. I think that there are definitely places where I think it's going to start simple because it's just it. We're figuring out the language. We're still kind of crawling down that path of what works and doesn't work. But I definitely think, because I think the, the problem is we keep on thinking that we're going to use the 180 degree frame, but that's not really not advisable. It's somewhere between a 90 and 120 is about what you. And that's really just still kind of a movie frame and you can, you know, cut between those things. And I don't think the close ups are working very well and big wide shots don't work as well, but there's a lot there. And I think what you'll start to see with this camera coming out is that you'll start to see people experimenting with short films. I think it'll start off with like three to five minute narratives and eight minute narratives. And if, and if you, you know, if we don't think that we can tell a story, just watch Apple's ad about the AirPods or the first 10 minutes of up or you know, like you can do something in a very short amount of time that generates emotion. So, so I think that there's, that you can definitely tell these short little stories with these things. And, and I think the other thing to get back to what Andy was talking about a little bit is I'm shooting the 3D. I shoot a lot of 3D footage and especially of like, like my daughter's in all these bands that she plays and I shoot all that in immersive because I know that AI will make this immersive look completely different 10 years from now. So I'm gathering data that I, I don't know, you know, like that having a stereo image, a video image of content that you're interested in doesn't mean that it always has to be at that resolution or anything else in the future. I think one of the problems really with that, the, the spatial camera on the phone is that Apple's display of it is so bad in photos. Either I have debris on top of it or I have this weird soft thing that is just unusable in my. I just hate that view and otherwise. Or I can't get rid of the debris and I just want a clean image. That's why I use Stream voodoo to watch everything because I'm. I'm kind of like, I just want to you. I just want to see it, just the hard frame and make it as big as I wanted to make it. And Apple trying to protect us from ourselves is a good example. This is a good example of us, of them not creating something that's that compelling because they're so afraid we're going to see edge violations or other things that are there that they're not giving us what we, what we really want. And so I think that that's limiting the usage of it a little bit. But I think it's exciting. And again, I think that the. Yeah, I think when we start when this camera comes out, I think they're gonna, I don't think, I think they'll sell as many as they can make and I don't think it'll be very many. It's a hard, it's a very hard camera to make and I think it's gonna, it's gonna come out slowly, but they'll probably be, it'll come out of the gate at 50 or 100 of them and you're going to start to see, you know, within, by the summer you're going to start to see some great content. If we're able to get a hold of one, we're going to cover nab with it, you know, like if they, you know, like if we can get a hold of one for the, for the show. So I mean a lot of us are, are pretty, are pretty excited.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good example of somewhere you'd like to have that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh my gosh, you, you know, what we've been perfecting is ambisonic converted to 5:1 or, or back to Binaural. And so we've been working on this pipeline to allow us to re. Embed that. So what we're being, I think we're, what we're going to be able to do is deliver back eventually with this camera or another camera, like it be able to deliver back to you this feeling that you're there because you can hear everything around you along with this more spherical view and the stereo view. And I think that expos are a great example of something that people would want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we live in interesting times. Good. On Apple, they took a big chance with Vision Pro and it seems like things are starting to move along.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think that what you're seeing is, you know, a certain level of will and funding that's, that's required to make this work is they're creating the environment. They're not, you know, they're creating the future. They're not waiting for it. They put out this piece and this is, this camera is exactly what needed to happen for them to start generating much more content. I think that there's more to do, I think especially around the interactive stuff we've talked about in the past being able to make something like Jigspace more cost effective on the graphics side. But them, you can also see why it's important for them to own their own editing software and everything else is because they're going to be able to implement things at the speed that they want to. But they're also, you Know, working hand in hand with blackmagic to, to do a lot of the. And that's going to help push the industry forward because no one wants to fall too far behind. You know, like, that's the thing is that blackmagic and Final Cut using it and Apple using it forces Adobe and at least Adobe to think about it. And I don't know if it forces Avid to do anything. They kind of have the market they have and they're not getting bigger or smaller. But, but I think, well, you see.

[Leo Laporte]

Google releasing as, as Jason said, the new Google xr and yeah, there's definitely more believers in the industry than there might have been before Apple. And it shows you because Meta, of course, has had this app for ages, but without putting all the wood in those arrows, as Apple has done, you don't make much progress. So.

[Andy Inako]

But I'm sorry, go ahead and, and it really is like I've. Competition is what fuels perfection and innovation or at least as close to perfection as you can get. Because first, first set that had some success was the metas, which were very, very limited in what they can do. It mostly turned out to be mostly a gaming experience. Then the next one to make a big splash was Apple's Vision Pro, which is like, oh my God, this is like the best, the highest quality components you could possibly make one of these things out of, but it feels like it's super, super overkill. There's still no reason for it. And now Samsung partnering with Google, this headset that seems like it's in some ways reacting to a lot of what they've seen out there, which is that, no, we're not going to give you the magic fake eyes in the front. Maybe the specs are not going to be as good as what you see on the Vision Pro, but maybe it'll be more affordable and more accessible and it'll be available on like a open, excuse me, a more widely available platform. He said. Far very much aware that this was more of a teaser announcement than. Here's the date, here are all the specs, here's the prices.

[Leo Laporte]

This is roughly equivalent to Meta's announcement of their Orion glasses. Right? I mean, it's. Yeah, we're still a few years, at least a few years off.

[Andy Inako]

Well, they're saying, well, no, actually that's not it. There's both the glasses and the, and the Samsung headset. I think that both companies were saying 2025. Yeah, assuming late 2025. And again, go, go, guess what the price is going to be or whether it's actually going to be any good, but one. I thought it was a good pair of announcements.

[Leo Laporte]

It's 10 years after Gear VR and the Daydream. Well, and the Trickle for a long time. Right.

[Andy Inako]

And it does mean. It does mean that Google has a lot of 3D content already on YouTube, that most of it's like 8 to 10 years old, like TV behind the scenes of a TV show that got canceled like 11 years ago, but still they've been. They haven't thinking about it for a while.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the tricky part is, is that Apple has raised the bar. So it's kind of like if you, if everyone wants to play by. By creating this expensive headset, regardless of it's expensive or not, if you, if anybody, if you walk into an Apple Store and you put that headset on and you watch it for a while and then you go back to another headset, you're going to know the difference, you know, and it makes it much hard. It doesn't mean that people won't buy the other ones, but they'll know that they're buying a Honda and not a BMW very clearly. You know, and they. And, and I think that, that, that Apple, I think, wanted to do that because it just makes everybody have to play a lot harder to, you know, it's. Everything's more expensive and everything's harder to do to try to get anywhere near what Apple's doing. It doesn't matter whether the price is there or not. It's just the effect of, you know, of where it goes. And I think that, I think that content creators are going to want to, especially folks out of la, you know, what they want to see is their stuff in a Vision Pro. You know, I think that, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think, yeah, but, But Google has YouTube, and if you're a content creator, you're very aware of the fact that the channel, all the channels are shrinking down to YouTube. And if you can do something for YouTube, it could work. Yeah, as a content creator, I'd be much more interested than that. Right. Maybe saying, well, you got to buy a $3,500 headset.

[Alex Lindsay]

And again, there's a, There's a market there. You know, there's a. The folks that spent money on it. It's not a bad market. If I can find 10. Like, for me, there's a lot of content that I look at that. If I can find 10,000 people with a Vision Pro, I just have to be able to get a hold of them. That's, you know, that's the hardest part is being able to have a mailing list that just says, hey, we're doing a concert with Toad the Wet Sprocket or the Verve Pipe or Billie eilish. And it's 20 bucks a person to sit there. There's lots. A big chunk of the people who spent $5,000 on a vision Pro would tune into a band that they barely know just to see the content, what the content looked like, you know, and that's, that's, I mean, again, not the people who don't have it, but the people who do have it, you know, are desperate for, for content. I think that's going to be the opportunity this camera is that there's going to be a bunch of content coming out and it may cost a little bit of money to do it so that people can pay for the productions. And I think that there's, there's people are gonna. I know I would pay for experiments because I spent a lot of money on this and I want to see something, you know, I want to see the new thing, you know, and so, and again, I don't think it's for Everybody, but there's 450,000 people that bought something they didn't need.

[Leo Laporte]

What Google does will be McDonald's compared to your, you know, high end dining experience. But McDonald's will sell a lot more hamburgers.

[Jason Snell]

If you can, if you can build content and vend it on Samsung and vend it on Meta and vetted on Apple, you're going from half a million potential viewers to a few million potential viewers. And that makes a difference. I mean, it makes a big difference. I saw an ad the other day for X Stadium which is like live immersive sports on Meta Quest and I haven't tried it. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try it out. But I thought, well, that's interesting. But again, it's a platform play where it's only on that platform. And that's great when we're in this experimental phase where that's gonna happen. But, but one of the things that I think will make if anybody's going to invest time and money into this, if you can reach 5 million, you know, headsets instead of half a million, boy, that makes, that makes a big difference. It might not make it a great business deal, but it certainly would be worth the investment if you knew you could roll it out across multiple platforms. Even if the Apple platform is better in some ways. Just to, just to say, yeah, but we'll also be there on all the quests that are out there and whatever Google is doing, I think that.

[Andy Inako]

But.

[Jason Snell]

Right. The problem is doing things just for Vision Pro at this point is a tough sell for a lot of people who aren't getting backed by Apple money.

[Alex Lindsay]

And again, I look at it as, you know, as someone who does, like, for concerts is, you know, I look at multipliers. If I put $1 in, how much more than $1 can I get back? And if I can figure out how to make that work, it makes it work. So if I spend, you know, $20,000 on a, on a, on a concert now, if I have a. If I decide that it's a single camera, I build a set that's going to stay the same. It's going to be kind of like Tiny desk. Tiny Desk, by the way, would be incredible on the Vision Pro. Yeah, I know. It just popped into my head when I said that. I was like, why is not Apple not talking to Tiny Desk? You know, like, that would be huge anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Tiny Desk, tiny audience. But go ahead.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but I'm just saying that, you know, I agree with you.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I would love it. I would. Like I said, any performance, anything where you would want to be sitting there looking around is a natural.

[Alex Lindsay]

But specifically. So the reason that, again, I'm just. I'm now riffing because I just thought a tiny desk, I haven't thought about before this is that the action area that you want to live in for immersive is 5 to 20ft. And that's what Tiny Desk is. If you could put a camera in there to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

For people who don't know, it's an NPR music thing, but anyway, by Bob Boylan, who, by the way, was a longtime listener. He's retired. But Tiny Desk goes on, and they have new and established artists performing in front of a tiny desk.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And so, so the. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But it would make an excellent place for that. I think you're right.

[Alex Lindsay]

If I, if I built a space that's really built around the Vision Pro and I figured out how to get 10,000 people to pay 5 bucks or 10 bucks to watch a show and have these kind of intimate experiences with artists, it doesn't matter that I only can get all that matters, the 10,000 that pay, you know, and so the.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing, Tiny Desk, by the way, the.

[Alex Lindsay]

Potential audiences, what they don't show is.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S actually an audience on the other side of that desk.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, yeah. It's a huge room. It's like 100 people there.

[Leo Laporte]

But it started behind Bob's desk. And now it's kind of expanded.

[Andy Inako]

Big old desk now.

[Leo Laporte]

Big old desk now. But it's still. But it's exactly what you're talking about, Alex. A constrained environment. Just right. 20.

[Andy Inako]

But the one thing I wanted to jump in on that is that I don't doubt that you're right, that there's an audience for that. But that means that if your market is a small audience of people who all spent $3,500 on a device without an obvious use case, who basically had enough money that I want to be an early adopter. Hey, I want to try this out. Hey, this might be fun to have. It doesn't matter if I kind of eat it for $3,500. The group of people who are going to be spending $20 to watch watch a band, it's probably not going to be Rage against the Machine. It's probably not going to be like anti capitalist, you know, Eat the Rich sort of band.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know. I mean.

[Andy Inako]

All I'm getting is that like the content, if you're, if you're designing content for that kind of market, you're kind of limited to. Okay. We can't really, we can't have the Pete Seeger singing about, about justice and about.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't, I think, I think you're making a pretty big generalization given the fact that.

[Andy Inako]

No, I'm just, I'm just saying that, yeah, I foresee a lot of golf, a lot of yachting maybe.

[Alex Lindsay]

I, I don't, I don't know if that's the case. I mean, for the people that I know that have the Vision Pro. I mean I'd be the first in line to buy a ticket to see Reg against the Machine in front of a Vision Pro, you know, and so it'd be the bunch of times I've seen them already. So, so anyway, so the, so the. But I, I don't, I don't know if that's the case. And I think that number one is that, I think the problem that Meta has is that Meta is constantly trying to. And Apple's doing this a little bit at the same time as well. They're constantly creating content for the target market of, of, of what they want. So Meta sold all these headsets to people who are 25 to 50 and they make all their content for people who are 18 or 16 to 22, you know, so, so they, so there's all these hip, hip people and the people who bought the Meta Quest is not those people. And they keep on not serving them with any content that they want to see, you know, like, they, you know, like. And so, like, I've talked to people who have and I've, I look at like, who's coming out and I'm like, I don't even know who that is. Like, for the most part, you know, like, I don't, I don't know who the band is and I'm not, I'm not interested in even going for free to the, to the Meta Quest because it's just like, okay, whatever. And so I do think that there's an opportunity and I don't think it has to be, you know, again, I don't, I don't think that has to be necessarily yachting and everything else. There's a ton of 80s, 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy's impression of what rich people do is a little bit dated.

[Andy Inako]

That's why I retract. I retract a course concept and we'll substitute it with. You have to make content that is for the community of Apple Vision Pro users as opposed to, hey, we just want to do it doesn't matter who the audiences. We're going to just make. We have a great idea for a movie and we're going to do it. Or short or.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that's the case everywhere. I mean, I think that you, you know, when you look at theaters now, people don't really make, you know, romcoms for theater anymore. Like, or they don't make very many. Like, if you. That's a really hard sell in Hollywood now. And that's because the medium doesn't support that anymore, you know, and so, and so that's, you know, I say every medium has its own limitations.

[Leo Laporte]

So, okay, we're in the middle of a big transition. We have been for decades, but this is an even bigger one. And I think it's, I mean, look, feature films seem to be suffering as well.

[Alex Lindsay]

So the good news is, is we get to find out in three months.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, I hope I live long enough to see. You know, it's only, it's only a matter of time, maybe another decade before you have the same capabilities in the iPhone that you have in the blackmagic camera. I mean, this.

[Alex Lindsay]

It'll take a while. That's a hard one. It's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of hardware.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a lot. The thing is, is that it's hard to replace sensor size and it's hard to replace the subsystems and the specialties and everything else. I think that the camera may become less expensive. I mean, Blackmagic is notoriously aggressive about pricing. So $30,000 is what they can do.

[Leo Laporte]

Before you put that kind of capability into the headset, wouldn't that be the ideal way? Then everybody's a content creator.

[Alex Lindsay]

Again, too hard to get. Well, again, you can capture something. The headset. Right now, I don't particularly find it that compelling. I find the headset capture to be. I used it once and went, I'm not gonna use this anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

The iPhone's better than the headset.

[Alex Lindsay]

So yes and no. The iPhone is a higher resolution the headset. The inter axial distance is much better in the headset. So the 3D feel feels way better in the headset than it does in the iPhone. The iPhone's more comfortable to watch.

[Jason Snell]

Right. But if you shot an iPhone with the quality of the camera that's in the Vision Pro, you'd be really upset because it's very clearly a low quality camera. But. But the 3D effect is much more natural. And that's. Yeah, that's just where we are. I don't know, I mean, we talk about like, oh, this is all going to be in a phone and this is all going to be in the headset. I feel like, you know, this is why we have a standalone camera, that standalone cameras just evolve to do all the things that don't make sense in a little compact thing. And you know, still 2D still photos are getting better and better and better in a phone. But it's not the end of the world if we just get a cheaper and more portable and more capable immersive standalone camera. That's, you know, it's like the blackmagic, but it's 10 years on and that thing is whatever, a thousand dollars and you can just carry it around with you and shoot your kids basketball game.

[Leo Laporte]

Most content these days on YouTube, is it created in a camera.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I mean, the stuff. So the progression always seems that people start with their phones, you know, and then they progress to a Sony camera. Like they, like Sony. Sony just owns the. Sony just owns that world. And so they progress to a Sony camera. And then. And then, you know, I mean, I think Justine and, and Marquez are using reds, you know, or they have them. Yeah. You know, and so. So they, you know, they go right back to the same level of production that you see. And you know, when you get to, you know, 5 to 10 million followers, you're back to Hollywood specs or higher than Hollywood specs in a lot of cases. So. So I Mean, Marquez, Brownlee I think is 4K60 for everything that he does, you know, or many of the things he does, but he still grabs a phone and does it. But I think that I am interested in seeing 28 years later because I haven't gotten a chance to look at it yet. But that was all shot on an iPhone. It was funny. I watched the trailer, I was like, what is weird about this? And I couldn't figure it out. And then I read the thing, I was like, oh, it's right, it's shot on an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to point out that Apple, which only recently broke the $2 trillion company Mark ScooterX just posted its market cap is now 3.828 trillion. It's approaching $4 trillion and they were up this year 31.5%. So regardless of. Yeah, right. Regardless of what we say, Apple is on a, at least from the stock market's point of view, a role.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and I think that if as you, again, as you look at the headset, you just have to realize you're in year 10 of a 20 year plan. And you know, this is, and it's going to be a 10 more years like it is. They're not going to. This is Apple. This isn't like Google Timelines. This is Apple Timelines. And this is going to grind for quite some time.

[Jason Snell]

I got a question on one of my other podcasts the other week that we didn't have time to answer. That was, is the Vision Pro the Newton? And I said, okay here. Yes, in a way it is because the Newton was too early. The difference is Apple, the Apple that did the Newton had no money. Was going out of business. Yeah. Had no money.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Today's Apple can afford to make the Newton and then just keep spending on it until it becomes the Palm Pilot and then it becomes the iPhone. Right. Like, that's the whole strategy.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is a big difference.

[Jason Snell]

There is nobody inside Apple who thought we're going to release a $3,500 headset and it's going to be a hit and we're going to win and that's the end of time, you know, and then, and then smell you later, I'm going to cash in my stock. That like the only explanation for this product is that it is a long term play. Because they think it may be that something like this is the computing of the future and so they can afford it now. Right. I mean they may get pushed back just like Mark Zuckerberg did for spending a lot of money on a product that doesn't seem to be there yet. But Apple and Mark Zuckerberg actually agree that it's worth spending money on this. Because if in 2030 or 2040 or 2050, all the things we rely on our smartphones to do now are things we just wear on our, our, our faces as, as a pair of glasses or stick in our ear or whatever it is, or are in a drone that is beaming images into our eyes, whatever it is. And you're a billionaire with a giant tech company, you would be remiss not to be investing in making that future happen so that you could be a part of the, you know, a part of the tech cabal that runs that platform, whatever it is. And so, so I think that it is, yeah, it's year 10 of a 20 or 30 year plan. You're absolutely right.

[Andy Inako]

And a lot of these companies are definitely going to be guessing wrong. So it's for sure. And that's not a problem either. Again, Zuckerberg earlier on was saying, hey look, everybody's going to live as an avatar, saying, maybe not.

[Jason Snell]

I want legs, I need legs.

[Andy Inako]

And Apple was really, again, even though I absolutely agree with you that there was no smell you later, thanks for their runaway success, I also think that they thought that boy, the developers, as soon as they get their hands on this, this, so they're going to embrace spatial computing. They're going to do this. And everyone said, wow, I really love the virtual screens. I can't get enough of virtual screens. Like really?

[Alex Lindsay]

That's all you're talking about?

[Andy Inako]

And I think that that's, that's why the, that's why we're going to see iterations. But I think you're all absolutely right in that it's, it's worth Apple putting the investment into learning about how these devices work, learning how to write APIs that developers can take advantage of so that by the time like the ball stops spinning in the top of the funnel and actually drops down into a successful product, they have everything that they need in order to take advantage of that successful product.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the only way to find that is to do it. And, and so the thing is, is like, you know, like for the watch, like everyone had opinions about what the watch was going to do, but it turns out health and timers is what makes the watch the watch. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, so like, you know, that's.

[Alex Lindsay]

An Apple's double, double and tripling down. I don't think that's what Apple had planned for right now when they made the Watch.

[Andy Inako]

But I don't hear wearable computing a lot in the, in the ad. In the ads, in the market.

[Jason Snell]

Well, it's, it's this truism that Apple doesn't listen to focus groups, but it's also true that Apple does listen to customers and how, and pays attention to how customers use their products. And Andy. Yeah, I, I agree. I think one of the other untold stories of the Vision Pro launch is Apple assuming that it had enough cred as a platform launcher that developers would rush in to Vision Pro, and a few did. But a lot of the people that Apple has cultivated as developers are there because iOS is so huge and they can make a lot of money. And that's not true with Vision Pro. And that goes back to what I said last week about how I think Apple's just not wired to launch a developer kit. And so they launched this thing as if it was the greatest new platform. And, and, and they, they can't think any other way. But it's not. This is much more invest. If you want to build software or make content for this platform now, do it because you want to be one of the people who understands it. When it gets big in five or 10 years and you gotta. That's a scary investment because like Andy said, you might be wrong, but that's what you need to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I have to admit, my previous company made millions of dollars on me fiddling with something for years. And so I had all the pieces laying there and suddenly someone looked for somebody that knew how to do it and I was like, oh, I know how to do that. And suddenly we're in production. And that was for the last push in 3D or the first push in 3D in the aughts and then the next push in 3D and spatial in the 2015 range. In both cases, I had been fiddling with something for a couple years and working on it, and then it. Suddenly it was a, it was a product and then it wasn't like it was like it was there. There's a whole bunch of business. And then it went away. And so I think the mistake people make is going, well, this is not going to be here in 10 years. Who cares? It's here right now. Is there production to be done? Absolutely. I mean, you know, there's still, even though Meta is. We don't talk about the Quest very much, there's still millions of dollars of production being done for the Quest right now. There's still people doing projects for a lot of these things. And so I think that, that, you know, and I do think that there is some kind of wearable that's going to make sense 30 years from now when everything is in quantum computing and all the chips are, you know, 1/10 or 100th the size they are now. But, but you don't understand the beh people's behaviors until you've interacted with it for years. And I think the only way, I think Apple knew more than anything else that they will not be able to catch up with Meta if they don't get in right now and have people interacting with something that they built best. Foot forward, don't worry about the price, figure out what people do with it and then keep moving forward from there. So I think it's, I think it's a valid.

[Leo Laporte]

And that concludes your Vision Pro hour.

[Alex Lindsay]

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

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. An hour.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll come back with more in just a little bit. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Of course, this is a big story, a huge story with Jason Snell, Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsey. Our show today, brought to you by the folks at zocdoc. I hope you are having a healthful, pleasant holiday season. But if you should get a little tummy ache or a little headache or something going wrong with you, you don't want to take chances. Some things in life, you know, it's okay if they're a total crapshoot. Trying a new kind of milk in your coffee. I hear they're making it out of pecans now. Or buying things in the middle of the night from Instagram. It only gets worse. Or gas station sushi. There are things one just doesn't want to take a chance with and that most important thing is your health. Finding the right doctor should not be luck of the draw. Fortunately, you got zocdoc. And it's not because zocdoc gives you all the options, everything you need to find the perfect physician for you. It's a free app. Also website Zocdoc.com MacBreak you can search and compare high quality in network doctors. Choose the right one for your needs. Click instantly to book an appointment because when your head hurts, you don't want to take the time. And I'm talking about in network appointments, appointments that take your insurance, more than 100,000 healthcare providers. It's not just MDs. It's everything from mental health to dental health to eye care to skin care and so much more. I've used Zocdoc to Find geriatric care for an elder in our family. And it really was a great way to find a doctor near us who took our insurance, but most importantly, who had great reviews. Because ZocDoc has verified patient reviews from actual patients. Not just whether a doctor's great, but whether a doctor has the style you want, offers the services you're looking for, that kind of thing. So you can filter for doctors who take your insurance, you can filter for doctors who are located nearby. You can filter for any doctor that's fit for the medical need you have. But you can also filter for doctors that are highly rated by verified patients. Plus doc doc appointments happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of books. You can even score same day appointments. So if you're not up to speed today or anytime during the holidays, don't put off those doctor appointments and don't take a chance by going phone roulette in the phone book. Does anybody have phone books anymore? I don't know. Don't Google it. Go to Zocdoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated doc today. Z O C. Zocdoc.com MacBreak it's free and it's a great way to find exactly the right physician or doctor for you. Zocdoc.com MacBreak we thank him so much for their support of MacBreak weekly. We use supporters too, of course, when you go there. Zocdoc.com MacBreak Tim Cook earned his $63 million a year last week. On Thursday he was, he was visiting with King Charles, King Charles III at Apple's UK headquarters. There they are walking down the reception.

[Andy Inako]

That's even, that's even more impressive. He made him come to his turf. He doesn't have time to go to Buckingham palace or anything like that. Come on, he's a CEO.

[Leo Laporte]

Come to the Battersea. This was the Battersea Power station Apple store we were talking about, which is I think actually, actually pretty cool.

[Jason Snell]

Well, it's not, not just Apple Store, it's, that's where Apple K headquarters is. All their offices are there, this historic building that used to be a power station.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, so I think that's probably why the prince, he met with the.

[Jason Snell]

Prime Minister the day before too.

[Leo Laporte]

He met with Trump the next day at Mar a Lago.

[Jason Snell]

Well, he's flying home. He just. It's on the way, it's on the way.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll stop off in Florida, have a little well done steak.

[Andy Inako]

He's going from right to left. Yeah, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Who do you think was a better conversationalist? I'm gonna. I'm gonna guess the President elect, but who knows, you know, they also gained King Charles a plaque made out of. Andy. Say it for me.

[Andy Inako]

Aluminium. It looks like the. I had. It was. It's beautiful. It's impressive. It's a, like, it's like this almost like a manhole cover, like a disc of aluminium. And I just. I just want to imagine like in the royal, like gallery of like 300 years of royal gifts, all this rococo stuff, all of these like detailed and then like2020, 24. Oh. It's like a round minimalist disc with.

[Leo Laporte]

His name on it. That's the funniest thing.

[Andy Inako]

It's like to look at it at an angle to see the engraving.

[Leo Laporte]

If he forgets his name, he can go down in the basement and find the plaque.

[Jason Snell]

It is the year 10,000. Archaeologists unearth the only trace that is known for this strange era of history. We know nothing about this man but his name. He was King Charles ii.

[Andy Inako]

The weirdest part of it, you can't see in that picture, but there's actually like a little loop so you can wear it on a chain. I think that's improbable.

[Leo Laporte]

I doubt it. By the way, look how sartorially perfect his royal highness is with his double breasted frock coat or whatever that is. And then Tim's wearing it looks like, like kind of a pea coat. I don't know what. I don't know what he's wearing. I guess it was cold at the Battersea.

[Jason Snell]

Long way from Alabama. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

But also, when it comes, like, you're always going to look like crap.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to look rumpled next to the king. You can't help it.

[Andy Inako]

I'm not even joking. Like, when I was looking at these pictures, like, I couldn't help but notice, like, my God, the tailoring on Charles's suit is perfect. Nobody gets a suit that's tailored so.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfectly as them head the hie thee to Savile Row, my friend.

[Andy Inako]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

You can get war eagle embroidered. Embroidered on the inside. That's okay, but wow. Yeah. Even in this shot, Tim's suit looks just a little more rumpled than the king's.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, the king also knows how to hold his arm at the angle. Yes.

[Jason Snell]

Never.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite saying. Somebody said it's interesting being the queen. Everywhere you go it smells like fresh paint.

[Andy Inako]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think that's probably the case. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why the entire world smells like Sherwin Williams, but it does anyway.

[Alex Lindsay]

That is kind of interesting. You're impressing the world. It's true, though.

[Jason Snell]

Very clean.

[Leo Laporte]

It's always clean and freshly painted.

[Alex Lindsay]

Probably not used to bad smells.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm thinking Mar a Lago probably didn't smell like fresh paint, but I could be wrong.

[Andy Inako]

Probably sound like expired frying medium. That kitchen needs an inspection. I'm guessing.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, when he was. While he was there, Mr. Cook. Did Mr. Cook give him the envelope of money? I don't remember. The envelope has arrived from Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Pichai, Mr. Bezos. All have donated a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund. So has so many other companies. But you know what?

[Jason Snell]

He just works there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

I mean, that is distressingly traditional, no matter who the new.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know. You always do that. And it's the inaugural, so it's like you're giving it to America.

[Andy Inako]

A, there are no limits on how much you can contribute. B, you know that this person won't. There's no. There's no betting on it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. There's not a bet.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a sure thing. This horse has won this race and.

[Alex Lindsay]

And especially with this one. This horse is particularly feisty. If yes, don't get some hay.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently. According to phone Arena, Tim Cook showed King Charles a specific. So Tim Cook was overheard talking to Charles about Apple Intelligence. The feature that really got the King's attention was Image Wand, which it can turn a rough sketch into an image. Oh, God. It's not fair, really. Fantastic. Said King Charles, according to the standard. It's fantastic. How did you do that? Show me again, Timmy. Show me again.

[Andy Inako]

There was a video of. Fortunately, it seemed like almost like raw video of, like, him doing what he does when he visits, like a store like this, which is like all the employees, like, lining up dressed, looking fancy, but as fancy as they can dress without looking like they're dressed fancy and having the 30 second conversations in which you really, really have sympathy for people on both sides where King Charles has to give these people their moment because if he gives the slightest withering twitch, that's going to devastate that person for the rest of their lives. And so meanwhile, the store manager was trying to have the conversation. Oh, and we were employing so many people. And she tried to try to explain Swift Playgrounds, I think, in the context of, oh, and we're teaching people how to code using swift, Swift Playgrounds. And so. And he did seem. His practice at being. At sounding Engagement.

[Leo Laporte]

He was very good at that.

[Andy Inako]

He did seem engaged and he did seem like a very friendly chap to meet up.

[Leo Laporte]

Fascinating. Yes. How do we like 18 2? 182 came out this week. How do we like the image playground?

[Alex Lindsay]

It almost never does what I wanted to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's terrible, let's face it.

[Alex Lindsay]

So it's. I mean, sometimes you get a cartoon version that's kind of like what you asked for. But I mean, I like the idea of. I'm going to give you three different. Like it's got these little circular things of this plus this. Plus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. The interface is actually pretty good.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think the interface is good. Think. I think it. It's. It's creative compared to all the other AI things that I've used. And it lets you kind of iteratively build things. Yeah, it would just. But I just doesn't produce the things that I want, which. Which I think is a. The funny thing is the interface is really hard and Apple can backfill like how much better over time it can make it. So I have a lot of, you know, I have a lot of faith that this will get better. I love where they went as far as the creative process. It's just not painting anything that I want yet, but. But it's not, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is what it thinks I look like, which I disagree heartily. This is what it thinks Paul Thurot looks like. That actually does look more like Paul Thurot as a Superman. And then this is Jammer B. Cause we were talking about Pink Floyd's the Wall. So I said, give me Jammer B in front of a wall. And it did. It did a pretty good job. And actually you can recognize it's John Me. Do you think that looks like me? Really?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think no one thinks any of these look like themselves. Like, you know, I don't think that that looks that you. I think that that has been one of the things. Like I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on device. Is that the problem?

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know. I mean, the issue is I wish you would actually dumb it down more than it does if it. If it took me and made me look like a memoji. You know, like really like that simple. I think less of us would go, this doesn't look like. Like my memoji.

[Leo Laporte]

It's doing too good a job.

[Alex Lindsay]

You're saying it's actually too. Since it can't really hit us, just go back, simplify it more. Because all I want to do is have me doing something fun. But I want the Memoji. Version of me, you know, I don't want more cartoony. Exactly, exactly.

[Jason Snell]

By the way, there, there is. In the upper left corner of the little picking interface, you can choose an appearance, it's called, which is. I missed this feature entirely. Show me where obvious. So if you, if you tap on the. Like to pick a person.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Choose upper left. It says appearance.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Jason Snell]

That is a generic person. So you can get out of the game of trying to. Trying to be generating a human that you know, and you can just get a generic person. You pick a skin tone, you pick a. From one of three sort of gender. Ish buckets. And then it'll generate using generic people, which is. I didn't know it was there, but that's nice because I, I agree it is not fun to play the game of let's try to generate something that looks like somebody I know because it doesn't do a great job most of the time. And so you can, you can kind of get out of that. But I, I want to agree with Alex. They can maybe fix their generator to be better, but what they have done, which I really love, the UI is fantastic, is build this ui. Because I am so sick of AI companies trying to sell me on the idea that the command line is the future of user interfaces. They're like, oh, you just talk to a bot and tell it what you want. Well, we did that already. Then the Mac happened and we realized it was dumb to do it that way. So I love this interface. Not only are you picking kind of tokens and then you've got an interface for people.

[Leo Laporte]

Here I am in a space disco.

[Jason Snell]

Sure. I mean, it goes without saying, but the other thing that I think is brilliant about it is it brings you to a generator screen where the whole implication is, look at all of these things we're generating and find one that's good. Unlike some UIs that are like, oh, oh, I did your picture for you and now I'm done. And you're like, well, this picture sucks. Do it again. Apple knows that some of those pictures.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic.

[Jason Snell]

And so you just keep swiping and there are more of them. And then you can swipe back and forth. And when you close out or when you add a token and then remove it, it remembers the images it generated in the previous set so you don't lose them. Like the whole ui. This is Apple really at its best, is the UI here. The problem is. Yeah. That the images it generates aren't very good. Good. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, UI though, spectacular. So they can always make that better, right? I mean, yeah, the UI is the.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hardest thing to come up with in my opinion. And then the AI stuff will, will follow behind it. But I think that it, it's definitely it. You can see where it's going to go and I love where it's going to go. It's just not there yet.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. And they, when they did a very smart thing by calling it the image playground, implying that you're not going to, it's not going to stick around, stick in coin, get picture. It's no, you're going to play with this and get what you want.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I will, I will say everything is so solid, you know, and some of the things that pop out are so kind of cartoony and very object oriented. I kind of feel like there's some point where we start being able to generate 3D objects faster than in other places because it's really, knows a lot about that or it's really building that into the process and so saying like giving me a cupcake. The cupcake looks very, very like solid, you know, and so the, the idea that it gives me a 3D model of a cupcake probably is, isn't super far behind.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, that's why it's so hard to even take Tailing back to what we were talking earlier about spatial video.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, everybody's dog looks like that. There's one dog image in there for some reason. I don't know why, but go ahead.

[Andy Inako]

I was just going to say that.

[Leo Laporte]

Spatial. Yes.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, yeah. It's hard to know how AI is going to transform everything. Like the idea of Adobe already has a feature where hey, Here is a 2D drawing of a cupcake. Please turn it this into 3D because I want to actually be on, I want the camera to be a bit above and behind it. I don't want that full on thing. So a lot of what we're doing is not just simply again, press the button, get a feed pellet. It's going to be interactive and iterative. Whereas artists tools right now are who can manipulate, who can hold the brush better, who can operate the pen nib, who can mix colors better. I think the next generation of artists are going to be people who know exactly how these models work and how to describe what they want to get yet. So it's not going to be so much about almost anything you can describe can become a 3D object. Almost any 3D object can become an element in like an actual video. And then God knows what happens after that.

[Leo Laporte]

Where do you do the thing that King liked this sketch pad that is.

[Jason Snell]

In when you're in the pencil kit. So like you could do it in notes or whatever, but you have to activate pencil kit and then you draw something and then you select the image wand tool and circle around the thing you drew and give it a prompt. And basically I wrote about this a little bit last week. It basically uses your prompt and the thing you drew as input to try to build a model, which is nice. So, like, if you drew, like I drew a spaceship that I've been doodling since I was a kid in elementary school. And it kind of looks like a pyramid, but it's a spaceship. I assure you, as a 10 year old artist, I assure you it's a spaceship. Anyway, I drew that, that and circled it and said this is a spaceship with rocket engines at the bottom and a capsule at the top. And some of those were pretty good. Like, but it knew the shape was going to be that shape. Or I drew a frog sitting on a lily pad and then I gave it the prompt. A frog is sitting on a lily pad made of a computer motherboard. And it took a couple of generations, but it got it. But the frog was sitting in the exact orientation that I had sketched. A very, very bad sketch of a frog. So that's the idea is that, is that you draw a sketch that's kind of what you want it to be, and then you circle it with the image wand and then give it a prompt still. It's still using text generation, but it's using what you drew as the other input so you'll get something closer to what you were trying to draw.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this on six colors? I'm looking through here. I see a lot about Apple.

[Jason Snell]

This is in notes on six colors. It's in our review of the 18.2 features.

[Alex Lindsay]

You.

[Jason Snell]

You can see my. My frog and my spaceship.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to see. I'm looking. I'm dying to see your frog.

[Jason Snell]

There's also a Tim Cook. Tim cook as Scrooge McDuck is in there too.

[Alex Lindsay]

So it's in notes and you draw something. I'm trying to draw something.

[Jason Snell]

Anything. Anything.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have to turn on the pencil kit.

[Jason Snell]

Anything. Yeah. So you, you make a new note and then. And then you tap the thing in the toolbar. That's the pencil.

[Alex Lindsay]

I did that.

[Jason Snell]

Then you're in drawing mode. Right. And so do you see the palette of tools at the bottom of the screen?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

Okay, so select a drawing implement and draw something. And then you select the magic Wand.

[Alex Lindsay]

Which is that part I don't see.

[Jason Snell]

Image wand. Well, I don't know. Are you on that?

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the sketch that you did, which is terrible. You're right.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a really awesome computer motherboard and a frog sitting on a lily pad. And that's pretty good.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. And my spaceship again, it does sort of look like a pyramid, but it sort of looks like a spaceship. And what it didn't do is turn it like. Okay, here's the story. When I was turning 10, I asked my best friend's mom, or my. My mom asked my best friend's mom to make me a birthday cake. She was, like, doing custom cakes. And I gave the drawing and specified my little pyramid guy. And what I got back was like an Apollo capsule because she didn't follow my drawing at all. And I was struck by the fact that this AI system was like, I know that looks like a pyramid, but I tell you, it's a spaceship. And it's like, okay, whatever, ship now. But, yeah, like that. That lousy frog is faced the right way with its legs in the right way. Because that's how I drew it. That's the idea.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty cool. So this looks like image playground inside of notes. I mean, it has the same kind of ui.

[Jason Snell]

It looks like it very much is, with the one difference being that you can use a sketch as input.

[Leo Laporte]

As input, yeah. Right. So I think Apple's smart. This is. So this is going to be the kind of general image generation UI for all of its stuff. And I think this is a really well done ui. So that's good. But currently always limited to on device. Is that right? Is that your Scrooge McDuck?

[Jason Snell]

We don't know. That was. I was trying to do a Tim cook as Scrooge McDuck, and all I really got was Tim Cook wearing a blue top hat in a cave with money, which is not quite what I was going for, but. Okay, fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's close enough.

[Jason Snell]

It's close enough.

[Leo Laporte]

It's close enough. He's not swimming in it or anything, but that's close enough. And that's an animation style you use.

[Jason Snell]

That one is Animation style.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, Good. This is [e-mail], if you want to read the review. This is the other features Genmoji, which I was trying to do desperately before the show, and unfortunately, it looks like iPhone mirror does not do as well as if you're actually using the phone. I think that's where the issue was.

[Jason Snell]

I think Genmoji is really good. I think it's the best of these features because it's using a very limited training set, which is Apple's emoji. I do want wonder. It's funny because Apple commissions an artist to build their emoji, right? There is no. People don't understand this. There's no emoji factory where all the emojis emit from. A Unicode consortium approves what the emojis are, but all they're approving is the code points and the descriptions. They're not doing it either. And so Apple and Microsoft and Google and lots of other companies build. They hire artists to build these emoji. So they're training Genmoji on Apple's emoji that are in there. And I wonder if maybe even other commissions that they've done of emoji that don't exist in order to feed more into the engine. It's certainly an interesting idea that they could do that. But as a result, it's super constrained. It really is constrained to make it look like an Apple emoji, but. And then you can choose a person or again, an emoji, which. You can choose it to look like somebody you know or you can choose in that same upper left corner, you can choose male, female or neutral emoji person. And then you can say, you know, I did. What did I do last week? Chicken riding a motorcycle. And it's like, boom, it's a chicken riding a motorcycle emoji. Like, it just is. It was perfect the first time. And it's giving you that same interface where you can, if, if you are not pleased by option one, you swipe to option two and maybe you refine it and add some features in. And they're. They're a lot of fun. They're not. It's not the same as hiring an artist to. As somebody who actually has hired an artist to do an emoji like piece of art, which takes time and it's beautiful because it's got more interpretation in it because it's done by a human. But this is really easy and fun and sort of disposable, although you can also save them and then use them later. So, yeah, I think it's a really good feature.

[Alex Lindsay]

AT&T customers switching to T Mobile has never been easier.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll pay off your existing phone and.

[Alex Lindsay]

Give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com CarrierFreedom to switch today pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days.

[Andy Inako]

Free phone up to $830 via 24.

[Leo Laporte]

Monthly bill credits plus tax qualifying port in trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. The flavor, the tradition and the spirit of Carne Asada lives on at Del Taco. Join the Asada today with Del Taco's new limited time half pound chipotle carne asada steak burrito. Packed with sweet, spicy and smoky flavor.

[Jason Snell]

Wrapped up and grilled to perfection, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Whole carne Asada steak menu delivers the bold flavors you crave with epic burritos.

[Jason Snell]

Loaded fries and street tacos starting at.

[Leo Laporte]

Just $2.99 only at Del Taco. I like Dan Morin in front of all those microphones.

[Andy Inako]

That one was good.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. It's very good. That's good. I think these are pretty cool. Yeah. Nice. All right, so I can expect now a lot of weird hybrid emojis in my, in my text messages.

[Jason Snell]

I guess probably good news is if you like them, I think you tap and hold on them and you can save them, save them to your sticker. And all the stickers are also emojis, which means you can use them to tap back as well as in text. So you can do tap backs of emojis of Genmoji stickers. So it just kind of keeps on going.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa asked me a weird question. She said, how do you like the summarize features? And I said, well, they're okay. I like the notification summaries. Those are kind of cool now that we've had them for a while. What do we think of the, of the text stuff, the summarized stuff?

[Andy Inako]

It's at. It's generally okay. It doesn't blow.

[Leo Laporte]

This is exactly what I sounded like. Well, yeah, it's okay.

[Andy Inako]

It's what I expect from every feature like this I've seen over the past couple of years. And as usual, like when it's wrong, it's very wrong. Like when it screws and other features, like when it screws something up, it screws something up really, really bad. There's another story about the BBC complained at.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, they were really upset. Yeah. BBC had a news story that Apple's intelligence misrepresented.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, it, it's the, the, the shooting of the executive last week. Basically the summary, the AI summary said that the shooter had shot himself. That's like that didn't happen. AI powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News head and it wasn't just like the Apple saying, oh, here is, here is, here is an Apple generated summary from Apple News on an Apple thing. It was a notification from BBC News that said Luigi Mangione shoots himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, like, yeah, that's not what we said at all.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're not suing, they're just complaining.

[Andy Inako]

They're just saying, hey, we are the BBC. We can make Apple look really, really dumb and make their, their key, their keynote feature look like it's Apple absolutely worthless. And meanwhile other people are having the same complaints that were emerging during the beta, which is that great. You're supposed to be like prioritizing emails and notifications. But the more dramatic a piece of spam's subject line is, the more likely it is that you're going to select that to make sure that I see it at the very, very top of the list. So that's not something that we weren't expecting that obviously you're going to have to be fine tuning things as you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It just shows in their article, article found a whole bunch of other examples just to show, for instance here, the New York Times, three different articles summarized as Netanyahu arrested. Of course he was not.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's, Yeah, I think these are problematic. I probably wouldn't trust news summaries.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. The question is, if you're Apple, what do you do next? Do you try to create some sort of heuristic that says take it easy, be less aggressive on news summaries or do you start, start sort of quietly turning off this feature for certain apps because you're uncomfortable with the output? We'll, we'll see what they do. Right now they have remained silent, which is also really interesting since the BBC was so public about it. I mean, anybody who's used these summaries knows that they, they, they do invent things like this because they misunderstand what the, you know, it's also a small if, if the BBC sent the text of these articles and asked it to summarize them, I think it would do a vastly better job. But it's already a headline that's then being crammed into space with three other headlines or two other headlines.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good point.

[Jason Snell]

And, and so there's very little data for it to even infer what's going on here and surface area. So of course you've got, you've got this going on. So it's, it's kind of unfortunate. I do think the writing tools are pretty good. They added Some features to those. So there are places where you can summarize or do things with tag in a writing context that I think are actually pretty good. So aside from the summaries, the summaries of notifications or in email are a little bit different. But there are those writing tools, like for people who are uncomfortable writing things or eliminating drudgery. My friend Federico Viticci over at Mac Stories has a story about how he was working on a document and somebody he knew he was collaborating with had written this whole thing out. And he was like, oh, I just want the headers so that I can make the same thing for my article with the same headers. And it would normally. What would you do? You would copy it and paste it and then go through and delete what the one person wrote so that you could write your thing in there. I do that stuff all the time. So he selected it and then he went into writing tools and he said. And he pasted it and selected it and said, remove all of the content that was written here and just leave the structure with the. And press the button. And it did it. And I thought, okay, that's right. It's. Eliminating drudgery is the best thing that user automation can do.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think it'll be interesting. Go ahead, Andy.

[Andy Inako]

Just very quickly. Yeah, Just adding to what Jason said. That's one of the things I use Gemini for a lot. I will just simply say, I'll cut something out of like a transcript and it's got all kinds of time codes and names on it, and I'll just paste it into Gemini and say, please remove all the line breaks and time codes from this and format this as just a regular RTF paragraph. And boom. Great. Again, eliminating drudgery. That's. That's how you. That's how you make me a fan.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And I, And I do stuff in ChatGPT where I'm saying, you know, like a lot of times I'll have spreadsheets and I'll go, oh, I need the spreadsheet. I need you to take this data and make it this data. And I need to take this from this spreadsheet and concatenate it with this one. And I want you to put all of this data in against these things. And I can. Pretty complicated solution. And it just. Here's your new Excel file that does all those things. Right. And I think. And that would take me days. Like, there's been a couple of them that I've been dealing with that are like 4,000 items that I have to move around and I'm just kind of like, oh my gosh, like I couldn't do this, you know, like I couldn't. And. And so it has been kind of, you know, that kind of thing. But that doesn't exist yet in numbers where I can start to tell it. Like, I want this. What I. It's fine for them to add things that will fill out things for me in numbers of words, but what I really want is to grab onto a cell and say, I need you to go and grab this, this, this and this and create a calculation and then do this and explain the calculation rather than me trying to figure out how I want to, you know, build a pivot table. So, you know, like that's the kind of stuff that's going to get pretty. And you know that it's a year or two away like that you're just going to be able to say, this is what I want and it's going to build it. And it's pretty exciting.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Federico said that he was already doing a thing where he had like different currencies and they were ordered in different ways and he was able to select them using writing tools, just the Apple Stories stuff, and say, can you format this in a table with the currencies and make sure the currencies are in the same format in all, you know, because they were in various formats and just, just do that. And then right in place in his writing app, it goes and it's all formatted properly and like Chef's Kiss. That's beautiful.

[Andy Inako]

I mean this is definitely an area where Apple can absolutely score ahead of Google. Like as impressive as the Google's announcements of Gemini 2.0 were last week. And it was super, super impressive. One of the most impressive things that an AI and a chatbot can do is just be an assistant that is sitting by your side and can see what you see. Imagine the ability to look at that document and simply say, hey, I want you to take the text that's in that window and do this to it. And then it just simply flicks and does that change for you automatically. As much as I am impressed by what Google is doing in AI, they are really amazing. I don't know if I would allow Google to have like screen access just as an ongoing basis, no matter how good this extra automation would be. Whereas Apple don't trust any huge company, any huge tech company. But I would more likely trust Apple to say, yeah, you can take a look at be watching my entire screen as everything I do on screen. Yes, absolutely. Take a look at it. Because that way I can say, hey, I've got this Omniautliner document. I want you to turn it into a spreadsheet, but I want you to add two columns in front of this. I don't want you to have all the headers here and I want you to. The second indent should be actually the first item and then suddenly watch a Google Doc be created. Whereas this morning creating the show doc for us today, it's like three regular expressions and an export CSV.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, and pro computer users can do it, but the idea that this is what user automation is always supposed to be, but there's always been that hump that you have to get over where you learn how to use AppleScript or Shortcuts or Perl or Python or whatever or Kotlin, you know, any, you name it and. And then the next step is, remember that, right? That's. The next step is, hey, it's a month later and you say, remember the thing I did last month? I need you to do it again. And then you got this from Simple Automation. And that's, that's the best, right? So I'm very. And this is things, you know, again, some of the stuff that AI is being applied to, I think it's not very good at and that we're going to go through a period where we're like, yeah, yeah, you know, that BBC summary based on a headline is maybe a bad idea and it would be better to build a back end infrastructure where it actually looks at the article and summarizes it. And you know, there'll be stuff we discard or practices that we'll change but there's also going to be some stuff, and I think this is one of them where it will be revolutionary because it's it, it knows how to use, it's a computer that knows how to use our computers and can save us time because, you know, a lot of computer work is drudgery and computers save us from drudgery, but they also make drudgery and it needs to stop. Right? And I think that tools will let us do less of that kind of garbage stuff and instead spend time doing what human brains should be doing.

[Leo Laporte]

I should point out that Lou Mm, who for a long time hosted Twiet, works on Microsoft, on Excel and he's in fact in charge of Excel with Python and there's a lot of stuff going on in Excel with AI and the Python coding language, a lot of stuff you can do. And I suspect that Some of these features that you wish you had and pages you might already have, but you have to use Excel on Windows, probably. And you may also have to use Microsoft's recall, which would remember what you did a couple of weeks ago. Maybe not. Maybe you wish it hadn't. Apple did put all of those features, the Apple Intelligence features, into Pages, numbers and Keynotes last week for Both Mac and iOS.

[Jason Snell]

Right. And there's a writing tools API. So a bunch of the writing tool stuff is now in sort of lots of different apps.

[Leo Laporte]

So Obsidian or BB Edit's got it.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, really? Yeah, anything that's. It was already in anything that used standard text controls, but there's an API, so anybody can build it in on iOS or Mac OS. And then, yeah, they added one of their demos initially. Right. Was like, oh, I'm giving a keynote presentation and I need an image here. And it's one of their use cases. So, yeah, Image Place Playgrounds basically is also something that is tied into the iWork apps.

[Andy Inako]

That's going to be another big use case when Gemini is available for developers. And so there was a Mac developer that had basically wired it up so that it could watch him as he codes and doing things like copilot stuff, saying, I need a function here that does X. And then, great, here's the function. Great. Now it's inside the code saying, I try to execute this code. Doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? And because Gemini was. Was watching, say, okay, here's how. Here's a new version of the code. That's the sort of thing that makes you think, ooh, the next five years are going to be super interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

The ability to sound like a scene from another Godzilla movie. But Apple's giant iPad is on the horizon. Here it comes. We'll talk about that in just a moment. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell. I do want to ask for some help. I wish we could do this automatically. We could automate this. This. What is that in my hat? There's something in my hat. There it goes. Now it's in my hand. We are doing our survey a little earlier than usual this year, so we'd like to invite you to tell us a little bit about yourself. This is what we do. Instead of spying on you, instead of putting bugs and things in the software or the hardware or the web pages or whatever, we just do a survey. Seems like an easy thing. Twit TV survey. I'm going to guess it's 2025. Let me see if that's right. Survey 2025. Nope. Do you know what it is, John Ashley? What's the URL? I believe it's just survey 25. Oh, 25. I added a 2.0. Okay. Survey 25. If you go there. Oh, just twit TV survey as well.

[Jason Snell]

But that works too.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that works too. Okay. Twitter TV survey. You will be sent over to SurveyMonkey and we ask a few questions. We'd like to know you a little bit better because our advertisers want to know you a little bit better. So it's very helpful to us answer the questions you can. I think you can skip the questions you don't want to answer. These look like you have to answer them. Is that true? Try this.

[Jason Snell]

Let's do.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just see. We have added some other choices. I am not an employee or staff. I am owner, president and C level. And this kind of thing and the reason this is important is advertisers want to know what they don't say. Hey, tell me more about you about this particular person. They say, how many of your listeners are C level executives? How many of them? Actually one of the biggest things they want to know, how many of them make IT decisions. Are they IT dms decision makers? So that's the kind of thing that's very helpful for us to know so that we could say, well, in fact, it is a very high number. Something like 70% of our audience are it decision makers. That's great. That's one of the reasons you hear so many IT focused ads on the shows. That's the kind of thing that will help us going into 2025. I know we ask for your help a lot by joining the club. This is one more thing you can do to help. TWiT TV survey shouldn't take more than a few minutes and it's very helpful. We do this every year, once a year, and we start a little bit earlier this year. So if you would twit TV survey more with MacBreak weekly in just a moment. Twitter TV survey.

[Andy Inako]

Okay, time's almost up on holiday shopping and so are amazing deals at Amazon.

[Alex Lindsay]

On.

[Andy Inako]

You'll save so much on holiday fashion gifts like cozy fits and stylish shirts. You'll have money left over for the matching sweaters everyone definitely wants to wear for the holiday card.

[Alex Lindsay]

Cheese.

[Andy Inako]

Or that ugly holiday sweater that's like really ugly.

[Jason Snell]

Omg. That's like really ugly.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, what fun it is to save shop. New deals added every day.

[Leo Laporte]

Now at.

[Alex Lindsay]

T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with.

[Leo Laporte]

Eligible trade ins, all on America's largest 5G network. 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 continue book credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement to bill credits and if you pay off devices early ct mobile.com all right, now let's talk about the giant iPad on the horizon. This actually comes from Mark Gurman. As usual. He's got, you know, on Sunday, he comes out every Sunday with Bold Visions. He says Apple wants to do a giant foldable iPad. We're not talking about something like the Galaxy Fold old. We're talking an iPad that is effectively two iPads together without a crease. We're not expecting to see this for a few years. Right. He does say the company's been honing the product for a couple of years now, is aiming to bring something to market around 2028. They don't want to. I don't know how you do this without a crease. So far nobody has been able to Samsung, Google, nobody's been able to to. Prototypes of this new product within Apple's industrial design group have a nearly invisible crease, he writes, but it's too early to tell if Apple can get rid of it altogether. Would you want a 20 inch foldable iPad and is it really more a computer at that point?

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, if I were an artist, I would want one.

[Jason Snell]

I want to. Yeah. The, the big question for me is there is a totally bizarre paragraph in this story where he talks about where Gurman talks about this and one of the challenges is it's he doesn't know. He doesn't know. He says it's unclear. He calls it an iPad. Okay. But then he says it's unclear what operating system it will run, which is sort of like what does that mean? So yeah, it's not yet clear what operating system the Apple computer will run, but my guess is that it will be an will be iPad OS or a variant of it, whatever that means. I don't believe it will be a true iPad Mac hybrid. Okay. But the device will have elements of both. Okay, that's kind of sounds like a hybrid Mark, but okay.

[Leo Laporte]

The key is guess by the time.

[Jason Snell]

2028 rolls around Ipados should be advanced enough. You took it off the screen. I was reading it off the screen. Should be advanced enough to run macOS apps. What? But also makes sense to support iPad accessories like the Apple pencil. Okay, so is he like, I really have questions about should be advanced enough to run macOS apps on iOS iPadOS. Because that is not something that's been reported before and is very intriguing to me. Right. Like wait a second. And then he says, well, it might not be a hybrid, but it might have elements of both which also. What does that mean? So, so I think when we he phrases this as an iPad, but there was another supply chain rumor a little while ago that said that they were making a foldable device that was a laptop. And I think it's the same device. And so, so the truth is whatever vision Mark Gurman has and his sources are great, but like his sources don't know or can't say some of these answers and maybe nobody knows. But calling it an iPad alone is like not sure. It's a iPad like foldable device that might be Mac. Like if it's not a Mac, it might be iPad like but not an iPad, which is really interesting. And, and maybe it is a hybrid ish device that is like kind of like an iPad but also could run macOS stuff. I don't know. It's really weird, really.

[Leo Laporte]

He does point out that there are Windows devices already today that do something like that, including Yoga.

[Jason Snell]

Sure. But Apple doesn't. I mean this is the question is like what does Apple want to do here? Because Apple's got everything, right? They've got an OS that is a tablet, they've got an OS that is. Is a desktop computer that could be used in a laptop. They haven't really like the thing is, is this a hybrid? Is it a hybrid convertible? And what is Apple's vision of a hybrid convertible? Is it. It also is a Mac. Is it an iPad but it can run Mac software? Is it a Mac that can run iPad stuff and have more touch? We like, they haven't committed to anything like that. And it sounds like whatever that this, this product will force them to commit to something because it sounds like it is a hybrid product.

[Andy Inako]

It's weird because Apple seems to have one of its most ingrained dogmas is that there are Macs and there are touch devices and Mac is not a multi touch device. So if you're talking about multi touch devices, you are talking and with a big screen you're talking about the iPad. And I agree with you. There's a lot of weird stuff. And if it weren't Mark Gurman talking about this, maybe I would file this to the back of the drawer with Mark Gurman talking about this though, you know that he has part of this story and I'm wondering like what parts he's trying to fill in or what types he's speculating about. The idea of if you have the information hypothetically that Apple is developing a device that is a foldable touchscreen that is the size of two iPads or the size of a 13 inch screen, let's say that fold in half to create one thing. Okay, so what is Apple building this? Are they trying to make a laptop? Well, no, because that would mean that the keyboard half of it would be a virtual keyboard. And ain't nobody's going to be trying to sell something that you tap just strictly on glass. Are you talking about this is a 20 inch iMac that is as portable as a MacBook? Maybe not because you can't use the multi touch. You can't use touch with the Mac unless Apple is planning on adding touch for that reason. So the logical thing to say is that this is going to be something like, like an iPad. And if your information is that this is not something they're planning in 2024, 2025, you see none of the industry stuff that says that Apple's trying to put out vendors who can create a special screen for them at least to test with. You're saying that this could be long enough in the future that yes, this could represent a next generation sort of device in and of itself though I don't think the idea of having like a large screen iPad that folds to make it portable is a bad idea at all. That's the true hybrid between having something that's very, very portable but gives you the desktop sort of experience. And as I was saying that, I realized that I'm speaking to you in front of a 13 inch MacBook with a 12.9 inch iPad as a second display above that thing. That's. So basically I'm obviously very, very primed to think that this is a good thing to have.

[Jason Snell]

You're already there.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. So. And again, as a. I'm sure that anyone who is using the iPad for, for art of which there are many, many people, a lot of cartoonists, the idea of having like a 19 inch, 20 inch like work tablet, canvas. Right. Would be a very, very big deal. That. But that's the area in which like the ditch in the middle would be a very Very big problem. For other people, it wouldn't be that much of a problem, but for that person, yeah, it would be.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Notably, the two images that they include in this Bloomberg article have hinges. The Courier, Microsoft Courier and the Lenovo Yoga 99 both have hinges. So it's not a continuous screen. I think the most important caveat here is it's Mark with his sources saying they've been working on something for years. But it's very important to point out they work on all sorts of things and there's no reason to think they're going to release this.

[Jason Snell]

This sounds like there's a higher degree. Again, we're reverse engineering. I do a lot of that with Mark Gurman's reports. Like what. What information could he have received that would make him write it this way? And it feels to me like he's saying they're probably, they're making this thing right. Like that the hardware is kicking into gear in terms of, of getting ready to design and build this thing. That it seems to be that it's a go but that he doesn't know all the details. And that's. And like I said, that's a lot of my re. Engineering of how weird that paragraph is, is there's a lot of uncertainty there where probably his source is like, yeah. Either uncomfortable saying, like they draw a line at what they leaked to Mark Gurman or has not been allowed in the room. Like probably. So let's say it's probably a hardware source. The hardware source either doesn't know or knows that they've tried a bunch of stuff and doesn't know what they've settled on, if they've settled on anything. And so they can say, yeah, we're building this thing. It's probably an iPad, but I don't know, might have some Mac like things in it. And then he has to run with that. But it does sound like this is a piece of hardware that Apple is going to build, even though we are talking about several years out now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And we don't know what operating system or what it would look like. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say you could run Mac OS apps on an iPad, you can run iPad apps on a Mac.

[Jason Snell]

There would be a lot more overhead in iPados, but you could do it and you could even use a virtual machine to do it and have a virtual Mac that's running in the background. Sort of like old classic mode on Mac OS when they went from 9 to 10 where you actually have Like a. There was a little. In classic mode, when they went to Mac OS X, there was a virtualized Mac OS 9 that just ran in the background and apps appeared. And you could totally do that if you wanted to do that. Apple could do that today if they wanted to.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, they call it coherence mode when you're running Windows on a Mac.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. Same idea, right? It's a different os, but it basically kind of layers in. And it isn't too weird. It's a little weird, but it's better than. And honestly, I think this is. One of the existential questions about the iPad is if you're pushing touch screens into places like this thing, do you want to invest in taking ipados that much further? Maybe. Or since you've already developed macOS, do you say, why don't we just let these things be Mac, like in Mac, like context? Even if they don't say it. Dual boots or something like that. Even if it's sort of like halfway in between, that would be. That's why I'm interested in this story so much, is that. Is that we don't know what Apple thinks the right thing to do is for a product that is really right between Mac and iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

How much pressure is them on them to do it anyway? I mean, don't they. I've seen some people cynically say, well, they sell twice as many products. I think it was Mark Gurman who said, Tim Cook likes it that most people who have Macs also have iPads. There can't be that much pressure to combine them.

[Jason Snell]

I know about pressure, although I do feel like what. Another thing I love about this story is I like the idea that Apple might be exploring a different kind of shape for a device. Because the iPad's been here for almost 15 years. Mac books have not changed at all. Pretty much perfect, though, right? Well, but again, if you're Apple, maybe you say, are there some other devices we could make? It's a little like how they've experimented with different sizes of iPad and different sizes of iPhone. Like, are there other. Other kinds of Macs? Right. All the competitors are making these convertibles. So I like that they're trying it. Right. I like that they're exploring it. I'm not sure that whether there's a market for this product or not, but I like that they're giving it. Giving it a go anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

People have pointed out for 15 years, Mark says that Apple's mouse design is less than perfect. His grip wasn't ergonomic or comfortable. And of course, the charging port on the bottom is a source of endless jokes. He says there's good news. There's a new magic mouse in the works. Don't get your hopes up. It's a few years off also. But something he said, I wouldn't expect anything in the next 12 to 18 months, but they are working on something. He doesn't know what.

[Andy Inako]

But I love the. Sometimes these things are really great signal flares to see how interested is everybody in this idea. Let's see how far. Let's see how widely this story goes. And my goodness, it was, like, all over all of my feeds. Oh, my God. Apple's finally fixing the mouse.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, my God.

[Andy Inako]

They're finally taking the port off the bottom. And. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, what Apple could do to, like, make the. Make a mouse competitive with, like, the Logitech 720 or anything that Logitech is doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Which has a charging port in the back so you can use the dang mouse while it's charging. Just a minor detail.

[Andy Inako]

It also.

[Leo Laporte]

It also can't be that hard.

[Andy Inako]

It also has two other innovative features. One, it's shaped like a human hand would be operating it.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at that.

[Andy Inako]

Secondly, look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

Secondly, in the palm of your hand, kids.

[Andy Inako]

There you go. It's like, it's not like, it's not designed to look pretty when you're not touching it. It's designed to feel good when you're using it. And also, it has mechanical buttons on it that you actually click. And I can actually pick up. Like, I have a magic mouse, but I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's buttons.

[Andy Inako]

The multi touch surface again, it looks nice as a static object. I'm not being sarcastic. It's a gorgeous object. But, like, I can't get through a task as quickly. I wouldn't say no, not even as quickly. I can't get through a trap. Through a task with a magic mouse that's not at least a little bit frustrating. And that includes dumb things like I'm moving the mouse from one place to another on the desk. Oh, no. Now I'm looking at the. Now I'm looking at another desktop. That's not what I meant to do. Magic. Magic mouse. The only way to make it work is to go into settings and turn off all the multi touch settings features. Yeah. Please don't. Please don't be anything but a mouse that responds to left click, right click, and scroll. And if I am, like, scrolling down and stopping to look at something and I Happen to shift my finger a little bit. No, that's not an intentional thing. That's just a human hand that sometimes the fingertip moves a little, little bit. Please don't move me to another place. It's just a bad thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to wonder how many people. By the way, this is the one that came with the Mac Pro. Nice and black. How pretty is that? How many people are like me, have drawers full of these things that came with Macs that they don't use because they replace them with a Microsoft mouse, a Logitech mouse, anything.

[Jason Snell]

I would imagine that the bulk of people never even think about it and they just use the default Apple mouse. And if they choose it, and that's why they have to make one is because. Because people want them. Because they want their computer to come with all the things and so they make it mouse.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Jason Snell]

But I will say my prediction here is that they're going to give us the same spiel that they've done for the last couple of AirPods revisions, which is they're going to say they're going to come out with a new mouse in a couple of years and they're going to say, oh well, we did a lot of ergonomic analysis. Like they, like they changed the shape of the AirPods and I bet they will claim that it's going to be ergonomically better and it won't look like. Like a polished pebble found in a stream by Johnny.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And it will be a little more utilitarian while not satisfying Andy I think is probably the most likely scenario. But that it'll be bad. Right. Like it feels like modern Apple is much more in the we're going to the AirPods look weird but they fit better kind of mode. And I feel like that's what a mouse would be from them. Now is. Is not for everybody, but for a wider swath of people it would be a more comfortable device to use.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

And also I'm sure Apple knows that you can get a mouse that's conventional and really, really good, well made, well lasting for 30 bucks or less. So people. So this is their opportunity to make something that's stylish, that fits into the design language. The thing that I always think about is that like imagine like a very, very fancy business that has like lots of clients coming in. Every desk in the office in the back has like a Logitech mouse. The fancy imac at the front desk with all the glass and the chrome has, has a, has a magic Mouse because it looks classy. It matches with the design aesthetic of the imac. It makes a good impression. It's hell on the temp that has to actually push it around the desk all day long. But again, that's the, that's the price of fame.

[Leo Laporte]

The other thing I thought was interesting and then, by the way, this is going to be the new home of my magic mouse is right there. It fits perfectly onto the microphone and adds just a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole arrangement. The air tags are gonna be updated with long time coming with UWB built in. He says he's already reported this a couple of times, but he says Apple is preparing a new airtag for next year. We've been hearing this one for a couple of years. Will make finding better, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

I would like it just to Support more than 32 because I'm at the.

[Leo Laporte]

Limit how many you have, cheeks. Louise, you are the outlier. I must, I must say I have.

[Jason Snell]

More of them that I can't even.

[Leo Laporte]

Add because they're sitting there. Like I was, like I was going.

[Alex Lindsay]

To put that on some more things. I, I put them on every. And we put them in all of our cases. So when I ship, when we, you know, like if I move, if we do an event, I might have to take 10 cases and put them in luggage or ship them or whatever. And so having those air tags in there makes it a lot easier for us to know where those bags are. I put them in have I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Built in four bit identifiers and that's why they can only do 32 of them.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. The, the, I have. I put them in my bag, in my travel bags, in my backpack, in my, my kids backpacks, in my cars. I even have gotten to the habit now of I'm starting to. When I FedEx something to someone, I'm putting them in self, self, self addressed damned envelopes of I just throw it into the bag and I FedEx it to the person and all, all they got to do is just take that and put it back in the mail and send it back to me. I know if something's lost, I know exactly where it is. You know, I know when it's going to get there. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So also Ultra 3 smartwatch, which Gurman says will have the satellite feature that's on the iPhones so you don't have to be on a cell phone network to make an emergency call. He says it will. He says he doesn't anticipate that it will be Coming to non ultra models. It'll be a perk used to justify the ultra price and maybe even hypertension detection, which I think is very cool. Right now you have to use an ashygmomanometer. I'm just looking for reasons to say asygmomometer to measure your bp. Isn't that funny? I'm willing to say asygmomometer, but I shorten blood pressure. I don't. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, is that just a blood pressure armband?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what the cuff is in a sphygmomomometer? Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

How many times have I said that in the show?

[Alex Lindsay]

Now I know you've got it down. You've got it.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a sphygmoma monometer down. Of course I'm gonna get an email saying, actually, Leo, that's not the name of the device, that's just the name of the cuff, the actual device.

[Andy Inako]

I don't know the name of the monster either.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think having blood pressure, it wouldn't probably tell you what your blood pressure is, but like the AFIB feature, it might warn you if there's something odd going on, I would guess. And then you use a cuff to get the actual blood pressure. That's what Kerman guesses as well. So that's ahead. That's the. That's the look ahead. Thanks to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sorry, I was just imagining your watch just getting tighter really quickly and then letting go like.

[Leo Laporte]

That is such an unpleasant feeling. I don't lie. I don't like that at all. He also says there's a new Apple TV and Hope on mini on track for next year. Good news.

[Andy Inako]

There was a lot of protein in this week's newsletter. Man, I think he wanted to take the next couple of weeks off.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Also they're moving it behind a paywall next year. You used to be able to get it for free, but they're going to move it to a. The weekly will be a paywall to Bloomberg subscribers. They're also launching a new product that is just like I thought you were.

[Leo Laporte]

Talking about an Apple thing. Oh, you mean the newsletter.

[Jason Snell]

No, no, Gurman's newsletter is going to be paying walled, which it isn't now. And they. They introduced a new product. Like if you just want the tech news, you can don't have to pay the full price for Bloomberg. But as a result I think also they're bulking up the content to make. Because they're giving every. All the free. Subscribers are getting like a free preview for a month or something. So I think there's some Marketing going on here as well.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. Once again, analyst Jason Snell has the inside story. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Jason Snell, Andy and Oko, Alex. I think we gotta. We gotta wrap it up. We haven't gotten to anywhere near the rumors. We wanted to like the thinner foldable phones and all of that, but we'll save that for another week. Our picks of the week coming up in just a bit. If you are not yet a club member, I have a pick for you. Club Twit. This would make an excellent gift for the Twit listener in your family. Twit TV ClubTwit. It's seven bucks a month. Yes, it's still seven bucks a month. We thought about raising the fee, but I don't want to make it impossible for people who are on a tight budget. I feel like seven bucks, a couple of cups of coffee is a reasonable amount to ask for all the programming we give you. You do get ad free versions of all of our shows. You get access to the Club Twit discount Discord, which is no mean feature. This is. This is my social network. I love hanging out in here. Smart people, interesting people. We are going to extend our opportunity to try it free for two weeks. And we still have the referral program, which means you can get a referral link when you sign up and share that to all your friends and get a free month for every one of them that signs up. But the most important part of Club Twit is it is what is making it possible for us to continue. We do, you know, have advertising, but advertising dollars have dwindled. I just saw a stat that said only that 50% of all the advertising in podcasting goes to the top 10 shows. 10 shows get half of all the advertising dollars. We are not in the top 10. So we don't get that. You don't get as many advertising dollars as we used to or as Joe Rogan's getting. And that means we want to come to you. And there's all the Club Twit members in the discord. Say hi, everybody, and ask you to help us out. I would. I mean, ideally, I would love to just run on the club and nothing else. That's kind of the pipe dream, though. Right now we have fewer than 2% of our audience is a member of the club. If we could get to 5%, maybe. I will tell you this. 2025 looks pretty. The cupboard is kind of bare. I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the business community. I'M not sure what's going on, but I think people are just waiting. They're hesitant to buy ads. So that means we are at a shortfall for the even the first quarter of next year. You can make the difference. $7 a month really does make a difference. Keep these shows going, keep our team employed. None of it goes to me. It all goes to John Ashley and Benito Gonzalez and Kevin King and Anthony Nielsen and all the people you see in front of the camera as well as behind the camera. That's, that's who we want to keep going. Twit. TV Club Twit. Please, I beg of you. If you've got seven bucks to spare, send it our way. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you, everybody.

[Andy Inako]

Time's almost up on holiday shopping and so are amazing deals at Amazon. You'll save so much on early holiday wireless gifts like wearables and wireless accessories luxuries. You'll have money left over for an electric guitar to take your caroling to the next level.

[Leo Laporte]

Or that Bluetooth speaker for a little.

[Andy Inako]

Extra help when the carolers forget the words. Oh, what fun it is to save. Shop.

[Leo Laporte]

New deals added every day AT&T customers.

[Alex Lindsay]

Switching to T Mobile has never been easier.

[Leo Laporte]

Easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and.

[Alex Lindsay]

Give you a new one free.

[Leo Laporte]

All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to 650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days.

[Andy Inako]

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

[Leo Laporte]

And trade in service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. All right, time for the picks of the week. Let's start off with you, Mr. Jason Senel.

[Jason Snell]

All right, I have a second recording set up in the back of my house and I do podcasts back there, especially in the winter because it's heated something this garage is not. But here in the garage I have a wonderful mute switch by a company called Rolls. And it's a physical mute switch that you push a button down, down and then you can hear me and you push it again and you can't hear me. And on the, in the back I have a USB microphone. It doesn't have a physical mute switch. There's a little button on it, but you got to kind of like reach around to get it. It's not ideal. So I have, there have been apps that do this. They, they Tend not to work the way I want. A lot of them are pushed to talk. They're really meant for like Zoom meetings so that you can do that. I found an app that is my favorite kind of app. It is a Mac app made with care that has lots of features. It's a version 2.0. So they've definitely listened to their customers and followed up their 1.0 with a version 2.0. And it's mic Drop. So Mic Drop, it is a. It is a floating menu. It can be in your dock. It will show a status if you want, when things are muted on air.

[Leo Laporte]

Light in your menu. That's cool.

[Jason Snell]

You could set different. There are different choices for what goes in your menu bar, including one that just says on air and it says off air when it's muted.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Jason Snell]

Super smart. Lots of feedback. It'll give sounds if you want. It'll not play sounds if you don't want. You can pick which microphones you want to have. Mute. And I was like, all right. And it supports hotkeys. And I'm like, okay, well I can write a keyboard Maestro macro that presses the hotkeys. And then. And then I read on. It was like, no, no. Also they support AppleScript. And I'm like, oh, okay, great. So I can write a little one line Apple script that says tell app Mic Drop to toggle. And then I read and it said, oh, you can also get the mute status from mic drop via AppleScript. And I'm like, oh my God. Because now I can. So I have a little keyboard Maestro macro on my stream deck. And it, it actually shows when it's muted or not based on the icon changes. And that's all because the macro can ask Mic Drop what's the status and then do the right thing and also paint the right image on the stream deck. It's like, again, are there workarounds? Sure. Are there ways to do this in other ways? Yeah, right. I could have worked around this in 10 different ways. But the beauty is they've already thought about all those things and they put it in here. It's free to try and for some basic functionality. And it's five bucks. Five damn dollars to unlock this thing with the Pro feature, the Super Pro, as they call it, features for $5. That's it. $5 dollars. It's in the Mac App Store. It's really good. They've got a website. They. It's. It's actively being maintained because they just did a 2.0 update earlier this year. I didn't know anything about this app before I looked for it because I needed it. If you have a mic that you want to have control over with a hotkey or something that is not clicking in the little mute thing on Zoom, I really recommend it. It's very good. It's, it's, it, it has, it's in my Stream deck now. Like that is how I'm going to control, control all my podcast recording from here on. So. Mic Drop, really good. Love it. I love everything about it. Love that it. They thought of everything and it's all in there. And then there are settings to let you turn it all on or off and it's. And then it's five bucks on top of that. Like, that's great. I wish there were more Mac apps this simple, this clear, and this well built.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. And you said you've tied it into your Stream Deck. Does that Stream Deck pull, push, trigger an Apple script or.

[Jason Snell]

That's what it does. The Keyboard Maestro macro is run by the Stream Deck because there's a plugin for the amazing macro utility that I plugged here before Keyboard Maestro. And then, yeah, there's a one liner. It's literally Tell App Mic Drop to Mute. Tell App Mic Drop to Mute.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any latency? How quickly does it drop?

[Jason Snell]

It's instant. I mean, that's the thing. The question I have was, well, if I use AppleScript, does it take longer than it does to do command option shift M. Right. Which I could have told Mic Drop, use a keyboard shortcut. And then I'll just have Keyboard Maestro fake that. But it would be better because sometimes emulated keystrokes in automation don't work or you have to put in a pause. But the Apple script was also instantaneous. That's good enough. It's beautiful. And that's one of my favorite things about by the way. I know I've mentioned this before, but a little side note is if you like the Stream Deck, you really should use Keyboard Maestro. Because. Because Keyboard Maestro has a plugin that lets you set a button on the Stream Deck to be anything you want it to be as an action. And it allows you to create like great interactivity where you press the button and it changes to something else and then you press it. I've got one that's a three state toggle where I press it once and it's streaming music to my podcast live stream. I press again and then it's recording and it shows me the icon changes and I press it another time and it Stops the recording all through Keyboard Maestro, a really great tool to use with the Stream Deck. Stream Deck software is not great. Keyboard Maestro is great. And then, yeah, mic drop just slid right on in there. Super easy to use.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Thank you, Jason. Six colors.com yes, sir. And sixcolors.com Jason for his podcasts.

[Jason Snell]

Indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex, Lindsay, your pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

So previously I talked a little bit about Shokz. Shokz makes these headsets that I use. Actually, I have two of them because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they used to be a sponsor. In fact, I got the OpenCommerce one because you recommended it. I love it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have two of them because I use them all day, so I got to make sure that one stays charged.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got a little. Little microphone on it so you can.

[Alex Lindsay]

Use it for calls and the audit. Yeah, the boom makes a huge difference in quality. And most importantly, you can do the dishes while on calls and no one notices. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

And they can still talk to you because they're not in your ears.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. Which makes your wife love the headset because you're doing dishes while you're on a call. So. So anyway, so these are great. The boom makes a huge difference. And the open ear. I use them a lot when we're using them as comms for our shows because I can put other things in my ears or listen to them and still be able to talk on comms. But I started to swim a lot and I swim every day now and. And I needed something that was a little bit more waterproof. And so it turns out, shocks makes open swim. And so these are the same as the other ones. They don't have the arm in them. Obviously, that'd be not as fun if you were swimming. But they will very safely go underwater. I've not taken them more than probably four or five feet underwater, but they seem to work great. I use them every day. And they have a Bluetooth mode, which is great. Does not work well in water. In case you're wondering, Bluetooth does not carry through water very well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's good.

[Alex Lindsay]

They have an MP3 mode. So what you do is you plug them in. In. This has got, instead of the same power, it's got like a little communicator. So if you've got the right usb, you plug it into your computer shows up as a hard drive, you drop songs on how much storage? As much as I put on, I don't know. I don't know how much it is. Like, I've got way more than I need on any given. Because there's not really a lot of playlist stuff. You just kind of turn it on, it goes MP3 mode and starts playing, you know, so, so usually I just get, I'm, I graduated from my pool to a gym, you know, 25 meter pool. So as I'm walking out, I kind of just turn it on and, and set it to MP3 mode and, and then I'm in, in ready to go. They come with little, you know, earplugs, which is great. And, and again, I'm, it's definitely well tested, you know, at this point for me. And, and they make swimming a lot more fun, you know, Like, I, I don't know if I could, I think if my, if my watch or my headset doesn't work that day, it's really hard to get a lot of swimming done.

[Leo Laporte]

32 gigs of MP3 storage, which is more than enough for a couple of laps.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. So I, I, it's, yeah, I need it for about a, yeah, half an hour.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's also on sale right now for Christmas. So this is a good time to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Get some good time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

What were you gonna say, Andy?

[Andy Inako]

No, I was just gonna say that I was on the swim team in, in high school and I swam like the, the distance races. And so for every single practice while all the other kids that were doing the sprints were like having fun and not. I had to after lap after lap in an era where there wasn't. Yeah, it's like basically me and my thoughts for like an hour and oh my.

[Leo Laporte]

Too much thoughts.

[Andy Inako]

That was a challenge.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's so nice. It's just like, you know, and I have. The playlist doesn't change very much. So I'm kind of in a mode of the playlist. You know, like, I just get like, this is my playlist of songs and this is my swim songs and I just kind of. Yeah, and it is, I get bored really easily, so it is hard for me to otherwise do anything that's the same over and over and over again. Although I'm still avoiding. I mean, I've been doing this now for a couple months and I'm still avoiding drowning sometimes. But you know, like, I, you know, get, but I'm getting better.

[Leo Laporte]

They, yeah, they, they used to be a sponsor aftershocks or they're now just called shocks.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, it was, you know, one of the work. Jj who I, who used to work with me, he just got a better, got a better job than what we had. He's the one that kind of got me thinking about it. And another someone else in office hours. John got me thinking, thinking about it. You know, kept on talking about all this and I'd never used bone induction except for like the Google Glass or whatever. And, and I really love it. You know, I love the fact that I'm fine. Like a lot of times I wear these. Also, like, if I'm shopping or I'm wandering around and I still need to be able to hear people, but I kind of want to listen to, you know, news over audio or some music or whatever. It's not the same quality, obviously putting something in your ear, but it is really nice to be able to continue to be. Have situational awareness and be able to still listen to something else.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really good for audiobooks or podcasts because voice is more than adequate for voice.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Thank you, Alex. The shocks, underwater headphones, his pick, they call them the open swim pro. Andy Inotco has a holiday, a festive holiday pick for us.

[Andy Inako]

Yes. Now there's endless, endless debates on who's what your favorite Christmas album is. I don't think that there's much room for debate on which one is objectively the best one. And that is, of course, the 1960 Ella wishes you a swinging Christmas. This is the Ella Fitzgerald Christmas album. It has like, the problem with, with that I have with like modern Christmas albums is that there'll be something where, like, maybe they'll do Jingle Bells, but then they'll be like, and then when we saw by the clock Tower. What does this have to do with Ho Ho Ho and Jingen? You know, and so that's fine that you're being creative, but it's like, I don't want to hear the story of the poor little match girl who's selling her shoes or whatever. Okay, again, when I my friends over, when I'm decorating the house, I want to hear Santa Claus come to town. I want to hear have yourself merry little Christmas. And while I'm drinking whiskey and have a little bit of cry, I want to sing the Christmas song and basically, you know, let us know.

[Leo Laporte]

Her Jingle Bells is a cl. I mean, it's amazing what you can do with such a simple song is an amazing version of Jingle Bells, Frosty.

[Andy Inako]

The Snowman and Christmas Island. The Leon Redbone version is, I think, the classic version of Christmas Island. But still, she does a very good job. But yeah, this is, this is what people think of when they think of a holiday album. So, like if you want to put on some holiday music, this is the one that probably will make the most people extremely happy. And you'll know what I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

At least for 51 minutes anyway.

[Andy Inako]

At least for 51 minutes. There's, there's expanded edition also on Apple Music that gives you alternate takes of a few of the songs. But yeah, this is, it's great stuff. Like, like I, I cannot put it more simply than that. That like when people, people are thinking I want to play Christmas album, this is almost certainly the one that you're thinking of. Even if you've never heard of it. This is the one that you.

[Leo Laporte]

I would agree with you. I would agree. There is no question. Ella wishes you a swinging Christmas is definitely. It's 1960. She reported that. Wow. This is our last episode of the year. We will be back next week, but it'll be a best of some of the highlights of the 2024 for Mac break Weekly year. Then the following Tuesday is New Year's Eve and I didn't have the heart to make you guys come in for that. So we'll take that week off and we will be back. What is that? January 7th for the next Mac Break Weekly. Is that right? Yeah. January 7th, everybody. Have a wonderful holiday. We're so glad you joined us during the year. We are especially thankful to our, our Club Twit members and to our wonderful panel. Alex Lindsay is at Office Hours Global. You'll also hear his podcasts that he does with Michael Krasny at Graymatter Show. An excellent show to subscribe to. Always interesting conversations there anything you want.

[Alex Lindsay]

To plug I don't have. You know, like we're, we're continuing to do. I mean we're really excited about a lot of the changes we're making right now and obviously hours as far as the quality and the structure and everything else. So this is just a great time to listen and we're just having great conversations. So every morning, 7:00am Pacific Standard Time, we get up and answer those questions and it's just we, we kind of took a hiatus from the second hours so that we could really focus on the quality of the first hours. And they're getting just better and better and better. So definitely ask if you have questions around media production, that's the time to do it. I will say not promoting my thing thing but I just will say I, I almost put it as a pick. Nate Bargazzi's got a Nashville Christmas on on Thursday. Nate Bargazi is like my, my currently my favorite comedian so we can't wait to see what that looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have no involvement with that. You weren't there shooting in 3D or anything like that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm just excited. I will say that there's. You may have seen an announcement that. About AMC and. And Rocklitz and. And Tata getting it. Getting together.

[Leo Laporte]

What's that all about?

[Alex Lindsay]

Live. It's, you know, live transmission to theaters. So the ability to take concerts in VR? No, no, just the theaters. You know, just lots of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Like what Andy does when he goes to see the opera at his local multiplex. Okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

But probably more so. So. So the. So something. Something that's similar. Similar to that, but probably at a different scale. And so something that I'm. I'm pretty excited about and I might be tangentially connected to.

[Leo Laporte]

So maybe just in a little, tiny, teeny way.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So very cool. Happy holidays, Alex. Hope you have a wonderful.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Christmas and New Year and spend time with your beautiful family and we'll see you in. In January.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sounds good.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Andy. And Ako, do you do GBH during the holiday weeks?

[Andy Inako]

Nope. Because there's reruns of. And all kinds of other stuff I've wrapped for the season. But you'll be seeing me, I think, the first or second week in January. I'm concentrating on eggnog.

[Leo Laporte]

But eggnog is God's gift to mankind, I must say.

[Andy Inako]

If you don't like it, more nog for the rest of us.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. And Lisa doesn't like it, which is fine with me. And some come someday soon. A website, maybe a newsletter in your future.

[Alex Lindsay]

We.

[Jason Snell]

It's coming.

[Andy Inako]

The live fire exercise has begun, and I'm receiving feedback, and I hope to have something to announce very, very shortly. Now I'm only handicapped by. Oh, I need to fill out paperwork that is really, really, really, really, really not looking forward to doing.

[Leo Laporte]

What about Russian Orthodox Christmas? Are you celebrating that this year?

[Andy Inako]

Actually, I usually do because in my household, we would have what many households think of as big Christmas and little Christmas. The little Christmas was. Was more like a really nice, simple family meal of, like, ham and, like, ham and stuff like that. No presents. Just looking forward to such a great idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Big Christmas and little Christmas. Yeah, I love that.

[Andy Inako]

And it was like this sort of like the official. And it was also the good sign that. Okay, so now we'll think about taking down the tree. Now we'll think about, like, putting the beginning of the end because, you know, if you get. I do think that, like, if you turn it all off. Like on December 26th, it's like, oh, it seems like we just put that up three weeks ago. But little Christmas, it's like, okay, that's not. That's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it turns out little Christmas is the same time we're coming back. So January 7th.

[Andy Inako]

Here's the epiphany. There you go. The three kings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the three kings will join us on January 7th to celebrate. Maybe bring some ham.

[Andy Inako]

Yes. Leftovers.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a great holiday, Andy.

[Andy Inako]

You too. Thanks, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

A real pleasure work, working with you all year long. And of course, Jason Snell, 6colors.com One of the colors, bright red for his festive hat.

[Jason Snell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Special times. Are you going anywhere for the holidays? Are you staying home?

[Jason Snell]

Whole family's coming here.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jason Snell]

So I'll do some cooking and we'll all be together and that'll be nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're doing a Christmas Eve dinner for the family. The turkey that we didn't get for Thanksgiving, we're going to have. So that'll be. I'm responsible for that. That'll be a lot of fun. Well, Jason, have a wonderful holiday. Andy, Alex, it's been a real joy working with you this year, and I look forward to a wonderful and interesting 2025.

[Andy Inako]

Every Tuesday is a joy for me. Thank you very much, everybody. It's always a great time.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you everybody for joining us. We do Mac Break weekly, as andy mentioned. Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. There are eight different streams you can watch. If you're a club member, you get the behind the Velvet Rope stream in our Discord. But there's also YouTube.com twit live, Twitch TV, twit. There's x.com, there's Kik, there's Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok. Now, I'm not sure if we'll be on TikTok much longer. I don't. I have a bad feeling about this. In which case, we'll find another place. But we are on TikTok. Maybe. With any luck, we'll still be on TikTok into the new year. So you could watch us live on those eight different channels. Or if it's not convenient or you just want a copy, you can always download a copy of the show. We have audio and video available at Twitt TV MBW. When you're there, you'll see a link to a YouTube channel. Great way to share little clips with friends and family and help spread the word about MacBreak weekly. And of course, the best way to listen is to subscribe. You can get audio or video in any podcast client. Just search for Mac Break Weekly and you'll have it the minute we're done fixing it up. Thanks to John Ashley, our producer, who worked hard and put together a best of so his work for next week is done and John will be back here January 7th.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I won't be.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're going to Japan. You're on vacation.

[Andy Inako]

I'm going to be in Japan then.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Very good. Who's filling in for you? Anthony?

[Jason Snell]

Most likely.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony. Yeah. Okay, well, Anthony Nielsen's our creative director and our he does all the all the jobs when no one's here. He is the one who jumps in. So Happy Holidays to all of you. Thank you so much for being here for Mac Break Weekly. We'll see you in the New Year. Meanwhile, it's my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. Buh. Bye. Happy New Year.

[Andy Inako]

After investing billions to light up our.

[Alex Lindsay]

Network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep.

[Andy Inako]

Your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800.

[Leo Laporte]

See how you can save on every.

[Jason Snell]

Plan versus Verizon and AT&T.

[Leo Laporte]

@T mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines.

[Andy Inako]

Via virtual prepaid card.

[Leo Laporte]

Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service ported 90 plus days with device ineligible carrier and timely redemption required. Card has no cash access and expires in six months. And now a next level moment from AT and T Business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep Sleep Day. You've got at and T5G so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T5G lets you deal with any issues with ease so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly. Especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com 5g4u for details.

[Alex Lindsay]

We know you have a lot on your holiday to do list and at.

[Leo Laporte]

The UPS store we're here to help.

[Andy Inako]

With our pack and ship.

[Leo Laporte]

Guarantee your gifts will arrive intact or you'll be reimbursed. Got holiday cards to print?

[Alex Lindsay]

We're also the premier printing store.

[Leo Laporte]

We've got everything you need for everywhere you holiday.

[Alex Lindsay]

Visit theupsstore.com guaranty for full details. Most locations are independently owned. Products, services, prices and hours of operation may vary. See center for details. The UPS Store the Unstoppable Come into.

[Andy Inako]

Your local store today.