MacBreak Weekly 953: Best of 2024

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 953: Best of 2024 – Detailed Summary

Release Date: December 23, 2024 | Host: Leo Laporte and the MacBreak Weekly Team

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Introduction

In the Christmas Eve edition of MacBreak Weekly, host Leo Laporte presents a special "Best of 2024" compilation. With regular hosts Jason Stell, Andy Ihnatko, and Alex Lindsay taking a two-week break, Leo introduces the episode as a curated selection of the year's most significant discussions and insights from the show.

Vision Pro: The Year’s Highlight

Initial Impressions and User Experiences

The year kicked off with the introduction of Apple's Vision Pro, a groundbreaking foray into spatial computing. Leo mentions that several community members, including Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell, have been early adopters, sharing their firsthand experiences with the device.

Jason Snell [01:34]: "One thing you don't know about this that's actually interesting is the camera angle is based on where the window is. The zoom window. So if I move the window, it's like. There's like a cream shot going on, which is pretty wild."

The Vision Pro's uncanny resemblance to avatars and its integration with Zoom sparked mixed reactions. While the technology impressed with its 3D capabilities, users found the avatars somewhat disconcerting.

Leo Laporte [02:51]: "There's a couple of things. You look a little bit like Bobby Hill from King of the Hill. You look a little bit like Tim Cook. You look like a thumb with your face painted on it."

Technical Challenges and Adaptations

Hosts discussed various technical issues, such as camera angle limitations and avatar depth problems. Despite these challenges, the Vision Pro showcased impressive capabilities in rendering high-resolution 3D models and immersive experiences.

Micah Sifry [05:09]: "It's really clear. It's. It's. Yeah, I was kind of amazing."

Leo and the team explored different use cases, from watching movies in a virtual theater setting to interacting with messages and other applications seamlessly within the headset.

Applications and Future Potential

The Vision Pro's potential extends beyond entertainment. Hosts highlighted applications in aviation with Ray Maxwell discussing the "Voyager" app for 3D airport and air traffic visualization, and Micah mentioning spatial music applications like the "Spatial Music" and "Moog" apps.

Ray Maxwell [25:35]: "What might be coming... a 3D app that lets you look at a given airport and see all the air traffic in 3D..."

Despite current limitations, such as the need for a US Apple ID for full functionality in Canada, the Vision Pro's ecosystem is poised for growth as more developers create specialized applications.

Antitrust Lawsuit Against Apple

A significant portion of the episode delved into the Department of Justice's (DOJ) antitrust lawsuit against Apple, alleging violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Covering the perspectives of hosts and referencing insights from industry experts like Stephen Sinofsky, the discussion underscored the complexities of applying century-old laws to modern tech giants.

Jason Snell [78:56]: "One of the fundamental problems with this entire suit... they are deeply constrained by the laws. In the US we talk about Europe in the DMA, but that's specific legislation targeting big tech gatekeepers like Apple."

The hosts debated the merits and challenges of the lawsuit, emphasizing Apple's ecosystem's strengths and questioning whether current legislation adequately addresses the nuances of modern technology monopolies.

Andy Ihnatko [86:01]: "Apple felt feels as though as part of their strategy they have to make sure that not only is that there's a reason for people to buy super, super powerful smartphones... but it's more than that..."

Apple Keynote and Product Releases

New Mac Mini Launch

Apple unveiled the latest Mac Mini equipped with the new M4 and M4 Pro processors. Hosts praised the Mac Mini for its impressive performance upgrades, including increased memory bandwidth and enhanced CPU/GPU configurations.

Micah Sifry [187:09]: "The memory bandwidth is really high compared to bus bandwidth as well as, you know, being integrated with the CPU."

Despite its compact size, the Mac Mini offers substantial power, making it a favorite among professionals who require high performance without the bulk of larger desktop systems.

iPad Pro and Accessories

The episode also covered the newest iPad Pro releases, highlighting features like the Nano Texture Display and the upgraded Apple Pencil Pro. While the Nano Texture offers a matte finish reducing glare, some hosts noted its impact on screen brightness.

Leo Laporte [99:54]: "They introduced a nano texture display on the one and two terabyte models of the new iPad Pro."

Alex Lindsay [124:15]: "Nano cling is stronger than magnets, according to Astropad."

The discussion extended to the practicality of accessories like the Magic Keyboard, with insights on its design choices affecting usability during travel and everyday use.

Closing Remarks

As the year wraps up, Leo Laporte expressed gratitude towards the MacBreak Weekly team and the supportive Club Twit members. The hosts reflected on the diverse topics covered throughout the year, from innovative hardware launches to significant legal battles, underscoring their commitment to providing valuable tech insights.

Leo Laporte [176:55]: "I think we're in a position where 2025's going to be a very interesting year and you can bet we will be here to cover it."

Notable Quotes

• Jason Snell [01:34]:

  "One thing you don't know about this that's actually interesting is the camera angle is based on where the window is. The zoom window."

• Leo Laporte [02:51]:

  "There's a couple of things. You look a little bit like Bobby Hill from King of the Hill. You look a little bit like Tim Cook."

• Micah Sifry [05:09]:

  "It's really clear. It's. It's. Yeah, I was kind of amazing."

• Jason Snell [78:56]:

  "One of the fundamental problems with this entire suit... they are deeply constrained by the laws."

• Andy Ihnatko [86:01]:

  "Apple felt feels as though as part of their strategy they have to make sure that not only is that there's a reason for people to buy super, super powerful smartphones... but it's more than that..."

• Micah Sifry [187:09]:

  "The memory bandwidth is really high compared to bus bandwidth as well as, you know, being integrated with the CPU."

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This episode of MacBreak Weekly encapsulates Apple’s strides in spatial computing with the Vision Pro, navigates the intricate landscape of antitrust litigation, and showcases the latest in Apple’s hardware innovations. For those seeking a comprehensive overview of 2024's pivotal tech moments, MacBreak Weekly's "Best of 2024" offers an insightful and engaging recap.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Well, ho, ho, ho. How are you? Welcome to MacBreak Weekly Christmas Eve edition. We've given the gang the week off. Jason Stell, Andy Inako, Alex Lindsay. Actually, two weeks off because they're not gonna do a show on New Year's Day either. New Year's Eve either. But for Christmas Eve, we've got a little special thing for you. Our wonderful staff has put together, as we do every year, a best of. So in moments, ladies and gentlemen, the best of 2024 on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWIT. This is Mac Break Weekly, episode 953 for Christmas Eve, 2024. The best of 2024. Hello, everybody. Santa Leo here. And while I don't have any gifts to give you, I do have. Well, it's a gift, I guess. The best of Mac break weekly for 2024. It's kind of hard to remember, but the year began with a bang. The Vision Pro. Remember that? We, of course, have a few Vision Pro owners in house. Alex Lindsay has one, Jason Snell has one. And our good friend Ray Maxwell, the former host of Maxwell's House, he has one, but he's in Canada, and that caused a few little issues. Watch. Well, let me start with you, Jason, since you're actually an avatar and probably aren't gonna last.

[Jason Snell]

I don't think so. I don't think so. One segment only. Unless I am visiting my mom, in which case this may be what you get from now on, when I'm traveling, I don't know. I can't attach my good microphone to it.

[Leo Laporte]

You sound fine.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Also, like Dr. Strange, it's hard to maintain your presence. Qu. Corporal presence on this mortal plane. So you could fade out at any moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

One thing you don't know about this that's actually interesting is the camera angle is based on where the window is. The zoom window. So if I move the window, it's like. There's like a cream shot going on, which is pretty wild. Although the background doesn't move. So no, to zoom, you got to work on that one. But it is. It is everything that I expected it to be, which is uncanny and yet also kind of amazing that with a quick capture, you're a character in a 3D, like a grand Theft Auto or something like that. The tech is pretty amazing, but at the same time, it's also a little weird when you're in a facetime with somebody else who's wearing one of these things. The context, actually, it all kind of starts to feel A little bit better because you hear their voice and you're in the context of it. But, I mean, there's no doubt. I would not call my mom with my digital Persona. That would be weird.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a couple of things. You look a little bit like Bobby Hill from King of the Hill. You look a little bit like Tim Cook. You look like a thumb with your face painted on it. That's part of the problem.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. There's definitely a depth problem where I've been saying it's like a brick. Like there are ears back there sort of. But really, you know, it's a face shape with your face put on the front of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Also, hair is a problem. Short hair. They're kind of in there and that's okay. But like, Ijustine had her like hair down and it's like, no, there's just sort of a charcoal smudge that doesn't really rotate correctly. And also I've heard from a couple people who say, had I. I was so excited to get this working, I didn't bother to shave, I didn't bother to fix my hair. And now my avatar is stuck looking like I've just been awake all night waiting for the sign for my package.

[Leo Laporte]

You could do a new avatar, actually.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you, you, you. It's not stuck. In fact, that's the. That's. I think one of the brilliant things about this is if you're somebody who, whether it's your haircut or getting or primping or putting on makeup or whatever, you do your capture then. And then that's your face until you want to recapture it. You can't save more than one. But that gives you the ability to sort of like be locked in as whoever you want to be and then. And then don't take a shower before.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re on a podcast I was reading earlier before the show, and I'll refer back to it to zjkingsley on Reddit who said Apple has mismarketed the Vision Pro and reviewers have, as a result, mistakenly focused, for instance, on this avatar thing. He said, this is not what it's all about. And I think maybe some people who have it agree. He says the killer use for him is lying in bed in a VR environment looking at the stars in crystal clear clarity. A small window open, talking to a friend via messages, and just beyond that, mounted in the Sky, a 100 foot wide screen which had the social network running in. Simply the clearest quality I've ever seen outside of 1570 IMAX. You know, I think everybody who has this might have a different killer app. But what is your experience of watching movies? Is it crystal clear? Does it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Does it?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, it is.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, it's really clear. It's. It's. Yeah, I was kind of amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And we lost power on Sunday. And of course, I have a UPS for my. My router, so I still had Internet. I just didn't have any lights. And. And so my, My. My retreat was to sit on the couch and put Superman man of Steel up and just watch, you know, watch it until the power came back.

[Leo Laporte]

How big did you make it?

[Micah Sifry]

It probably would have been the equivalent of about 150 inches or maybe 200 inches.

[Leo Laporte]

Like a theater then, like, seeing it.

[Micah Sifry]

Oh, it's like a theater. It's like, it's 100. Like, I, like, I would worry if I was a theater looking at this, because the. And. And I also would say that I would. Over the weekend, I got to the point where if I want to hang out with my family, which, you know, I. We watch a bunch of shows together. And so that's still. That's still. But, you know, that's the only time we really all sit down around a TV is when we want to watch a show together. And we kind of, you know, that's kind of an evening thing to do. You know, obviously I'm going to still do that with them, but if I was, I don't think I would ever again sit down to watch once. YouTube TV, which isn't out yet for the. For the.

[Leo Laporte]

YouTube, says it's on their roadmap, by the way, which is. YouTube.

[Micah Sifry]

TV is not. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, not YouTube TV. YouTube is. Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

It asks you to put in a number, but there's no, like, where. Where do I find that number? It says, your device will share this number. And I'm like, I don't know where that would be. So. So it's not there yet. But as soon as YouTube T. I don't. I don't see myself ever sitting in front of my TV again to just watch a show unless I was eating. Like, if I was eating. I don't think I eat with a headset on. But if I was like. But I think that I very quickly was like, this is a much better experience. I do notice that there's a lot of. There's a lot of things that are different on the headset for viewing things, though. One. One is that you're just constantly reminded that 24 is really framing and because everything else around it is not. It actually is more apparent that the framing of 24p is probably. This is. These headsets maybe may undermine that, because higher frame rate.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're watching on these headsets, the.

[Micah Sifry]

Problem is you have an environment right behind it that's moving. So this is. It took me a little while to figure out why it was so much more apparent on the headset than it is on the. When I watch a tv, the wall doesn't move right behind me when I watch. And the wall behind it, the environment behind it is working at 90 frames a second or 92 frames a second or whatever. So the. The background is at a high frame rate. And because of that, there's something about it that you notice really quickly because there's not a wall there, that the frame rate is low. And so I think that it became much more apparent to me than I had before.

[Leo Laporte]

I also found it doesn't match your experience. Although, honestly, when you're watching a 24pmovie anywhere in real world, you have a much higher frame rate in the real world, don't you?

[Micah Sifry]

Right, but you do. But you have a frame, but you have a frozen wall. And there are some theaters, like IMAX and. And Max and a couple other ones and Apple have their own theaters. The problem with the theaters, ironically, is that the screen in the virtual theater is too small. Like, it's not as big.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can't make it as big.

[Micah Sifry]

Because it says, oh, this is the frame I'm gonna put it in. And I couldn't get it to go bigger. Like, it locks into the frame. That it Disney.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, Disney lets you get in, sit in the front row if you choose the Disney Theater, but that's it.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, and I haven't been in Disney yet because, of course, Disney required a login and I don't know what it is. And I was like, I'll get around to it eventually.

[Leo Laporte]

And so you don't have bitwarden or 1Password in there.

[Jason Snell]

Well, here's the. Yeah, 1Password for the iPad can be installed on it, and it will auto fill your passwords with Optic id.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Jason Snell]

It's actually kind of remarkable. This device is an iPad, right? It's like a 3D iPad. But the good news is if your apps work on the iPad, then you can get them. If they are on the Vision Pro, you can put them in there and they all interact and they all work. And I agree with Alex. I was watching. I was using a Vision OS exclusive app called Juno, which is a YouTube client, because YouTube isn't there yet. And it is the quality of a standard 2D image. When you're not confused by, like, oh, it's 3D or whatever, it's really good. It's remarkably good.

[Leo Laporte]

As just a video viewer, here's one of our discorders. Vision Mad, who's watching right now while eating his cereal. But honestly, how is that different than having a TV in your kitchen? I don't.

[Micah Sifry]

Except when you walk around and you can move.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you move and the TV follows you.

[Micah Sifry]

And the other thing is you constantly are moving the window. I found myself constantly moving windows. So I'm constantly. Oh, I want to put this over here. I want to put this over here. I want to put this over here. And I was watching that. I had a client that was texting me on Sunday while I was watching the movie. And I just simply put my messages up above the screen. And so if I saw them change, I looked up and as I said, oh, I want to say something, the movie went down, got quieter, and I said what I needed to say in the text. And then I went back to what I was doing. And so I just didn't really think much of it. It was totally in that environment.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one thing Apple's very good at, is kind of making those affordances feel natural, even if you're in a spatial computing environment that you've never experienced before.

[Micah Sifry]

I will admit that I think the thing that frightened me the most about the headset was actually that thing, which was that there was a moment last night, and it's probably 10 or 12 or 15 hours into the. Into using the headset, and not in one day, just over the. Since Friday morning. I had been in it, and I suddenly. I was watching YouTube and there was some point where I looked down. I realized, oh, I'm in the headset.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I was.

[Micah Sifry]

I was just watching YouTube and just kind of like. Cause I have a lot of screens anyway, so it doesn't show. Like, I have eight screens around me. So a lot of screens doesn't really show up.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I'm somewhere so different from your.

[Micah Sifry]

It's also different than my normal life. But I suddenly realized, oh, I'm in the headset. And there was some point yesterday afternoon where I looked at something and I looked at it, and I found myself tapping, and I was like, oh, no, I'm not in the headset. And so, like, I'm like. It was like.

[Leo Laporte]

I've heard people say that. Yeah, that you just, like, with the iPad. You get used to pinching and zooming and then you start using a magnet.

[Micah Sifry]

I tap my laptop screen all the time. Like I just tap, tap, tap like why is this working?

[Leo Laporte]

Ray?

[Micah Sifry]

Ray, what are you lower brain was getting?

[Leo Laporte]

What's your killer app so far, Ray Maxwell.

[Ray Maxwell]

Well, I have bad news. Oh, you. We really should start with my experience of buying it from Canada.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this is the first part is I didn't even know you could use it in Canada.

[Ray Maxwell]

Well, you can and then you cannot. You could. Okay. On the January 19th at 5am in the morning, I signed on and no sweat. Oh, there's Ray Maxwell. Yes, we'll take your $3,500 plus accessories. $4,800 with taxes us when I'm all done and. No sweat. Yeah. Place an order. And then I, I went down to the Alderwood Mall Apple store in Linwood, Washington, walked in, you're in the, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Buying in the US Then. So you went over the border.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well here's the thing. Apple has to understand that 90% of the population of Canada lives within 200 miles border.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's not unusual. We go.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah, we, we, we cross border shop all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ray Maxwell]

Okay. And they really haven't allowed for that. And, but anyway, I go in. Oh yeah, we have your order ready for you. They do the demo. But I had a. Not a good experience there. The poor girl, I think she was an extra brought in because there's so many people store. And by the way, they were going out like hotcakes. The VPs. Any rate, it took her 20 minutes to get the demo went to work and by the way, that's fine. When they, when they fit you out, they do not fit your unit to you. They fit the demo unit to you. And check all the settings and everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the demo's on that unit. Yeah, yeah.

[Ray Maxwell]

And then they bring you in sealed cartons. Your unit that makes you exit with. Yeah, you exit with sealed cartons. Now I said to the manager of the store, very nice fellow, very helpful. I said, now I have a Canadian Apple id. What's. When I get back to Canada and sign on. How's everything going to work? Oh, no sweat. Now I'm going to switch to my view here. This is my view and I'm going to take us to Haka Aliyah or whatever that is. And yeah, right. And now I get home and here's my view and oh, I'm all excited. I can. Oh, my microphone's too close to me. Now, anyway, it, it, it. I can open up Safari, and here's Safari, and I can bring in 3D models and. Oh, it's all exciting. And then the message from hell.

[Leo Laporte]

What does it say?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not available.

[Ray Maxwell]

Not available. The App Store isn't available in your country.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you can't even get into the App Store at all?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's frustrating. So you couldn't add apps to this at all. How are we talking to you right now? Oh, I get it. You're on Zoom on your computer and you're airplane. The view. Or you have another device that you're putting the view in, switching over to.

[Ray Maxwell]

I have coupled my VP to my iPad Pro and it is plugged in by HDMI to my ATEM Mini.

[Leo Laporte]

I can see it. Yeah. So what can you do? Can you watch a movie?

[Ray Maxwell]

Yes. All the movies I bought here in Canada I can watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Ray Maxwell]

In 4K.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, honestly, they don't say it's available in Canada. So you're. You're an example of an early adopter who was willing to take the chance. But they aren't selling it in Canada.

[Ray Maxwell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. By the way, Jason Snell had to give up. He's switching over. He couldn't take it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's the face I love.

[Leo Laporte]

So let's see, 16 minutes in and he says, why are we not seeing him? I see him in the. I see him in the. We gotta. Oh, we gotta reroute. Okay, we're just gonna reroute it. And now we want to hear him too. There. Oh, you don't look like Tim Cook anymore.

[Jason Snell]

Good morning.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, those are those hairs.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't look like Bobby anymore. So what was it wearing?

[Jason Snell]

The trick is to use an ID from the US and so the ones who are gray market importing these things, most of them, the people I know, they all have a. Even if it's not their primary, they have a US Apple ID that they can use to get access to the store and all those things.

[Ray Maxwell]

Right now, the only trouble with that, Jason, is I am setting up a US ID so I can get to that. The only trouble with it is I lose my eco. My Apple ecosystem. I can't copy and paste.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because everything is on your old.

[Ray Maxwell]

My other devices.

[Jason Snell]

That's why you're not supposed to do this. You're supposed to wait until it's for sale in Canada later.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, Ray, you will be able to use this in a few months.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm sure Apple has a wonderful plan for your life. Why don't you Give yourself to it willingly, Ray.

[Ray Maxwell]

Exactly. By the way, have any of you looked at this 3D model of the VP on Safari? It. It. The detail is, is just incredible. I don't know how well it's coming through, but I'm seeing, I'm seeing every thread in the fabric.

[Micah Sifry]

I think that one of the things we're going to see is we see a lot of 3D that's in there and a lot of it doesn't look good. But one thing that I will say is that if you look at some of the things that are actually doing the full resolution of the, of the, of, it's not the headset that can't do the high quality 3D. It's the fact that the developers or whoever is building it just didn't go through that much trouble. It's a lot of trouble. Like what Apple did for that one is a lot of trouble to get to that level of quality. And people haven't spent that time yet.

[Leo Laporte]

They will, they will now that they know that there'll be people looking at it in that kind of quality. And I should. By the way, just so we don't besmirch the Vision Pro. Jason, it wasn't the Vision Pro that we were tiring of. It was just that Zoom was kind of.

[Jason Snell]

I think the Zoom app on Vision OS is. It's kind of iffy. I had some sound problems, I had some lag problems. I was having some frame skips where you guys would pause and then jump and I'd lose some of it. And it is also on a WI fi connection when I use a wired connection when we're doing the show. So there's a bunch of different stuff going on there. We actually had somebody. It is a 1.0 OS with a 1.0 app on it.

[Leo Laporte]

We had somebody call ask the tech guys on Sunday wearing his. And the lag was like five or six seconds. It was really laggy. So that's. Yeah, they'll fix that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And there are a lot of interesting. I thought there were a lot of interesting, like choices that Apple made. Like on the one hand it's cool that like when you're using your Persona, wherever you're. Jason, you mentioned this earlier that wherever you're looking is where wherever you're looking relative to the window that owns the camera. Like so the Zoom window, that's where it puts your avatar looking. On the other hand, is there a setting so you can simply say, look, I just want make it look as though I'm always looking Directly at the camera.

[Micah Sifry]

No. What I noticed was it was. I was talking to somebody who was like, so are you doing something else? Because you could see that I was like, moving some windows around to talk to them. So I'm looking over here. So you do get to see that that person is not looking straight at the camera all the time. It's not like turning it off. It was definitely clear.

[Jason Snell]

Also, nothing says 1.0 operating system. Like, is there a setting to take it from the default to do something else? And. No, no, no, they're not at the part where there are settings for. I mean, there's like iOS settings, but that's when. I mean, we've all been there using a 1.0 operating system. There's this just like, flavor, this smell of it, which is just like it's new car smell. But also you get that moment where you get to the edge and you're like, oh, are there options? And the answer is, nope. There's a question mark. There's a cloud with a. You know, it's a mystery about what that option will eventually be, but it's a 1.0. I get it. I get it.

[Micah Sifry]

Occasionally you get into apps and you're like, how do I get out of here? And like, I don't. I don't know. I'm like. And I did learn how to force quit, which is the whole.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, so that's. Yikes.

[Micah Sifry]

And the. Well, the funny thing is, is that I was like, it was so, so the. But, you know, and it's not so much Apple. These are app developers who just aren't putting the hooks where we want them, you know, so they're. They're building this thing. So you get into their app and then there's. And you can tap on it and get it. But then you're like, how do I actually turn that off? Because what'll happen is you'll click on it, the apps will come forward, and you realize that other app that you left go into the apps. It's still out there. It's like, it's still opened over there, like, doing its thing. And so you, you kind of get used to that. The, the. The App Store, by the way, if you, if you download it and you have any trouble downloading apps, the update fixes it. So there was an issue that I was having where on the 1.0, I couldn't. I just got to a point where it would just look like it was trying to download apps. And I just went to app, to app, to app. And then when I did the. Ran the update to one, whatever, it. It fixed it. But there was a point where I couldn't download anything yesterday to make that happen. And so. But, but. So again, some rough edges, but again, I. What I was surprised at was how long. Like I. I have most of the headsets and I've been using some version of a headset on and off for 30, 25 years. And I was surprised at how long my sessions were. Like, I was losing track of time, you know, like I was there and I was like, doing things. And mostly, obviously it's new, so I'm like watching some movies and I'm trying some 3D things out. I'm downloading apps and I'm opening things up and playing with them and everything else. But it was very comfortable to be there for. I mean, I don't think I did any session that was less than like 90, 90 minutes. I mean, I put them on every once in a while to set something up, but it was like it was. I was there for a long time and I didn't think about the time while I was there. That was the, the interesting thing.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I agree. I was. One of my big open questions with this thing was it, can you wear it for any amount of time? And I had two different experiences. In June last year, they put the. A weird thing that is not available as a band, where it was like the soft part, but also the head strap. And it hurt my forehead the whole time. And then a couple weeks ago, I did a half an hour and they just did the dual band and it felt just fine. And so the mystery was like, what is this going to be like? And the answer was, I got it. It comes with the solo loop attached. I put it on my face. I got that exact same headache right in my forehead that I got last June. I detached it, I put on the dual loop, and I've worn it for as much as six or seven hours in a day. I'm writing my review, guys, I have to do this. And it was fine. And everybody's head is different, but I can say that it's least conceivable that you could wear this for an extended session and it would be fine.

[Micah Sifry]

And I definitely feel like you get used to where to put it and how to put it on and how to pull the strap. I'm using the two strap. I found the single strap to be really not useful. And so I. I do feel like with. With the meta quests, I feel like that hook in the front that goes front to back would definitely improve my experience. I've been thinking about like printing a little thing to grab onto it and just let it pull back because I feel the weight under my, on my cheeks.

[Leo Laporte]

All the weight is in that device on your face.

[Micah Sifry]

I don't feel like. But again as weight on my head it doesn't bother me as a, you know where the weight, how the weight unbound cantilevered has, you know and it doesn't bother me. Although I will say that like when I try to. It's when I notice it is when I'm speaking into, I'm into messages because I do that a lot when I'm in there. I'm like oh. I don't try to type and so I just look up and hit the thing and say it. I can feel it bouncing again like pressing against my cheeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray, I noticed that you're wearing it bareback. Do you not like the dual loop? You or you don't need it?

[Ray Maxwell]

You know what, I, I've been wearing this thing for hours yesterday and the day before.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks very natural on you I should say.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah, it, it, it is quite comfortable. I haven't had a problem with it. I, I was going to try out the dual strap but I just, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know, I haven't done it.

[Ray Maxwell]

Necessity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah. Now let me tell you a few of my other impressions of this thing. Number one, the things that are missing. I'll give you my gripes and then I'll tell you all my good things. I tried to load a Prores file in. Now this thing isn't really made for editing or the high end uncompressed stuff but, but it, it wouldn't go in now. I don't know, it was just that one time. But it doesn't like Pro formats as I see it. And the other thing is I thought they had learned their lesson with the iPhone 14 and 15 Pro that they put USB C in a high speed IO to load large files. And the good news is I have found out the developers do indeed have a dongle that will connect into this battery connection and give you USB C in and out. And it sells for only $299.

[Micah Sifry]

And that's for testing. I mean it's just there to, it's there to tie it together. I will say that I did find that it's pretty chunky. If you take a 550 meg USDZ file, try to rotate it around, you give it a couple, you know, 50 million polygons and it's like It's a little, you know, so we were trying to push the outer edge of that.

[Ray Maxwell]

Now the app that I'm dying to get my hands on, as soon as I could reach the App Store and we're all talking, everybody's calling Apple support and saying, come on, turn on the App Store to Canada. You know, be nice. Any rate, the app I'm waiting for is the foreflight company who makes a lot of aviation Software, has a 3D app that lets you look at a given airport and see all the air traffic in 3D going in and out of the airport.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really cool. The Voyage. That's called the Voyager app.

[Micah Sifry]

You set it. I downloaded it. You tend to set it over in one corner, like a little below you, because you can decide where you're going to set it. And it definitely makes a difference because of where you see the planes, but you kind of set it over kind of like about chest high somewhere over to the side. And it's just nice because you'll be working. You're like, I wonder what's landing in San Francisco. All these planes, like, terrain kind of coming in. It's really.

[Leo Laporte]

I should mention, though, it's made by Boeing, so, I mean, you might want to check the bolts on that before.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, exactly. The engine or the, the sensors? The sensors on the front.

[Leo Laporte]

Check the sensors.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Don't set it to goose mode. It'll be very, very intense, I promise you.

[Ray Maxwell]

The. The other thing I found out is NordVPN does not make an app for the Vision Pro yet because I wanted to try VPN and put myself down.

[Leo Laporte]

In the U.S. oh, that would be a solution.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

You could do it at the router level. I mean, you, you could do, you know.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yes, right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. Just pretend you're in the U.S. let.

[Ray Maxwell]

Me give you my overall impression. My overall impression is a lot of people have not. I mean, if you read the technical spec on the Apple site and you only take even the marketing stuff and set your expectations to the literal meaning of everything, I'm not disappointed at all. I. I'm just wowed by the tech. I'm way very much wowed by the resolution and the 3D models and the whole thing, but people have set their own personal expectations way high, you know, and, you know, are dreaming about things that nobody's promising and. And, you know, I. I think they're disappointed.

[Micah Sifry]

Then, you know, there's not. There aren't. There's. There's 600 apps that were built for it. There's Whatever. A million apps that you could theoretically run on it. There's about eight that are worth looking at right now. Like, I think part of the thing is you go through them and you go like, I now people, you know, you can put it into guest mode and hand it to somebody and say, okay, and they have to, you know, calibrate their. Their eyes and show their hands and that type of thing. And then you go, okay, go to the dinosaur. Like, you take them to go to the dinosaur demo. That's a good demo. And then go to Jigspace and see Jigspace. Then watch a movie and then you're done. Like. Like, you see that? I can show you the. If I show you those three things, you get a sense of what the thing can do. The other stuff gets too hard to explain to someone. The Moog app is unbelievable, you know, but. But that's a. That's a whole nother. So there's. There's a lot of, you know, there's. There's definitely apps that are coming out, but there's probably eight or 10 that are like standouts. The rest of them are like, oh, this is a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

They're.

[Micah Sifry]

They're on their way. They're thinking about it.

[Ray Maxwell]

I'm looking forward to virtual music apps. There's got to be a visual theremin, the mood. Oh, it is.

[Micah Sifry]

Okay. So there's spatial music. There's one called Spatial Music. And then I knew that would happen. So spatial music is like a theremin. Like, you can sit there and play with it and kind of move around. And then there's. The Moog app is crazy. There's a bunch of different instruments and different things that you can play. And the crazy thing is, is that you're playing notes with your eyes and tapping when you want it to happen. And it's a really. I found it to be really crazy experience because they're trying to play because you can't. You have to look at exactly what you want to play next. And. And then there's. They've. They started to kind of experiment with other tools and everything else. And so those are the two that are kind of. I felt like, gave you a sense of what is coming, you know, like, it's not like that we're going to have different kinds of ways of interacting with music, interacting with data, those types of things, but it's not there yet. But it's. Those two are the. Probably the ones that kind of show you that.

[Ray Maxwell]

And of course, the thing I'm really looking forward to is a. I'm hoping X plane. X plane I think already works with some VR headsets, but I want to see it on this thing. Flight simulator. Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

I think, Wait, I think we were talking about this in office hours. I think that one of the things that is going to happen is you have like that Logitech, you know, your controllers. And I think what's going to happen is they're going to give you two little trackers that you just set on the, on the top part of your control deck or whatever. And it will just snap the fuselage in. Like, it'll just go like, I know where you are and I'm just going to snap that in. So the rest of the fuselage looks like it's going around your. So you can look down. This is where the AR stuff comes. You can look down and grab onto your, the physical handles and see them. You're not like in a virtual world. You're just looking at them. But when you look up, you get, you know, sky.

[Leo Laporte]

How about, how about 360 video? I have a bunch of stuff I shot in Rome on the insta360. Is there any way to look at that in the Vision Pro? I can do it in Quest three.

[Jason Snell]

Obviously, but you need an app and there are some apps. There's one app that is in the App Store. I'm not going to name it because it doesn't really work yet, but I have no doubt that there will be apps to support all of those formats. Apple doesn't seem to be supporting it, which I'm actually a little disappointed by because they made that statement to somebody saying, oh, it doesn't meet our standards, blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, if you shoot with one of these 360 cameras or 180 cameras, it's not going to be 3D. But it still could look really good.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it'd be great. I'd be able to be around and see what I, you know, see everything.

[Jason Snell]

I, yeah, the panoramas, which are also 2D panoramas, are spectacular. They look better than panoramas. I, I understand now why they put that feature in there. They look so good when you're in a 3D space.

[Leo Laporte]

And our discord is saying, I took a pano from my hotel balcony in Barcelona a few weeks ago and I did not disappoint when I opened it in the Vision Pro. Super detailed, excellent unwrapping of the geometry to make it look realistic.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yes. I have a pano of my living room. I have a. Now I have A what I am impressed with is I can take my iPhone 15 Pro Max and I shot a little 3D video while the gal was demoing the thing to me and playing that back. The resolution and the surround sound of being at the Apple store was incredible.

[Micah Sifry]

I will say that. So I benefited from the fact that I didn't realize I had taken so many, but evidently, since whatever. I knew that you had.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew that you had.

[Micah Sifry]

I have 600 Panos from all over the world of like in the White House and in weird.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're always a little dissatisfying on. On the phone itself. On the 2D.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, it is. But this was. I finally paid off all those panos, you know, like I was. Because I've never, like I've taken them and I almost never look at them again. Like I. And I take them all the time, but I never go back and look at them. And I was like, oh, this was amazing. I did that for the last decade.

[Leo Laporte]

How does the spatial video you shoot on the iPhone compare to spatial video you shoot on the Vision Pro? Because we've been for a while. You think it's better?

[Jason Snell]

It's not.

[Ray Maxwell]

You really think so?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. IPhone video is lower quality, smaller. It's like a smaller aspect ratio because they're cropping from one to the other. The one on the Vision Pro, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Spatial video is superior and a better interocular distance. Right. It's a more. It's a wider.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, exactly. Right. So everything is more wider. Like your eyes and not like a little camera.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, I found that the quality. I mean, again. Yeah, I shot some with the. With the phone and I just. I haven't shot any with the headset yet, but I shot some with the phone and I was like, I don't know if I'll do that. Like I shot.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Micah Sifry]

And one of the things I did is I shot the same footage with the phone with and without stereo. And if you told me which one would you rather watch? I'd rather watch the higher resolution version that was not stereo than the low, lower resolution that was stereo. And you know, stereo, even in the movies that they have, it has. I thought, I will admit I thought it would be better than it was, which is that it still suffers from idiosyncrasies related to motion blur. So you get feel things that look hard, you know, in 3D. And so I don't feel like. I mean, you see some of the geometry, but I don't know. I don't know if it's worth it yet to watch a lot of, a lot of the things.

[Ray Maxwell]

By the way, there's, there's talking about comparing 3D movies and 3D in this. To me, the experience is quite different. And I, I, I don't know how Apple solved this, but in 3D movies, the actual plane that your eyes are focused on and the binocular verging sometimes doesn't match your binocular eyes turning in doesn't match the plane you're focused on. Convergence. All right. And I don't know how they're doing it, but I, and that, by the way, makes people nauseated or gives him eye strain and so forth. I don't get that at all in watching 3D things in this.

[Micah Sifry]

I definitely didn't get it at all. I think that the only thing that I was really conscious to was low frame rate and hard edges around things. I felt like the, the 3D niche of it was good. I just felt like it was like, you know, like. Now I will say they're hidden in Apple music. Apple, as this post that we were talking about at first, they definitely buried some of the, the buried sum of the story. So hidden in music, there's an Alicia Keys video of her doing a concert, which it looks like they probably shot with a Canon R5, four of them. So they, they shot. It's a, it's a 180 video experience of Alicia Keys.

[Jason Snell]

It's in the TV app.

[Micah Sifry]

Is it in the TV app?

[Jason Snell]

Oh, I'm Immersive performances list or immersive video list in the TV app with the Alicia Keys thing where they, where they try to mask out where the cameras are, but you can look like, spot them. They're in little white kiosks.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, yeah. And they, and she walks around and, and I, and I guess I would say that I thought it was a great example of what might be coming. And I, given that Apple bought Next VR, I have a feeling we're going to see a lot more of this, not less. It is much more compelling than, than a lot of the 3D movies is to see this 180 stereo. Yes, it was. And I'll tell you the thing that they, I think that what they missed there and again, I've done a lot of this and so we've kind of gotten into this habit. What they really should have done there is taking the rest of the band out of there. Let her play the piano and have her just play to you and just sing to you. There's moments where she looks right at the camera and, you know, it's much. It's very compelling, you know, and, and. And I think that this idea of putting too much around them, you know, you end up in a more observer status than a presence status when you start changing the cameras. And I think that that's what. And so I think that there's. I don't think you need a lot of cameras to make this work. And I think that you can build that out. And we've done a lot of testing in this area. So, so the. And so I think that that was the only thing. You know, it felt a little over Apple overproduced. You know, I mean, the typical. Like we spent all the money on it.

[Jason Snell]

I think it was a. I think it was a good choice. I see what you're saying. There is a real question philosophically about whether you want to be a fly on the wall or whether you want it to feel directed. Right. Does the camera move? Are there multiple camera angles? And all of that. And the Alicia Keys video, while it is. It is spectacular, but it is also a choice. And there's some questions about spatial audio. Right. When you change your location by switching cameras, does the audio shift? Does it stay the same? How does it affect the soundscape? But I will say, one of the things that struck me in the Alicia Keys video, and this is about how our brains work, is that when she is singing at the very beginning, she is looking right into that camera and it is like she's singing to me.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And that some people in our Discord sounds so good. I. I didn't like it. I was like, no, Alicia Keys. I am an intruder. I don't deserve to be here. Sing to someone else and just let me watch. And I think that is a brand thing. It's a human brain thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little creepy, but you will get used to it and soon you will fall.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's just a different.

[Jason Snell]

It's just different. Right. And different people are going to react differently. But a lot of people in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Discord not like it. I'm actually amazed how many people in our club have Vision Pros. I think we're going to have to do a lot more Vision Pro coverage. I'm not.

[Micah Sifry]

So I admit we talked about Vision Pro on Office Hours this morning. It's the most viewed non WWDC show we've ever done. Yeah, it was definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a break. I want to give you a last chance before we go into the break and we let you go because you are in Canada. Can you see the Alicia Keys thing, for instance? Can you download that? Can you do some of these?

[Ray Maxwell]

Oh, one of the. One of the disappointments is I thought when I got home and unpacked my thing that the whole demo thing that I saw would be available to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the demo's not.

[Ray Maxwell]

It isn't.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, it is. So if you're maybe not in Canada, I can't speak to that. But if you're in the US and you wonder about that demo, it's hard to find. You have to go open the TV app. You have to go to the search tab and without searching, it provides a bunch of suggestions. And one of them is a bunch of spatial suggestions. And the last one of those is the demo reel, which does include. Somebody was asking in the Discord. Are those series? And they are those videos where they're like, you know, performance episode one and Dinosaurs episode one and the Immersion Adventure episode one with the woman at the fjord. There are clips from things that we haven't seen yet that are in that demo video and you can watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think fiction TV will do in this? Will there be a Sopranos or a succession for Vision Pro that will transform the way we see television?

[Jason Snell]

My guess is webisodes because it's experimental, like Alex said, right. Our vision of movies and TV involves a point of view, a director, mixage, montage, right? Cuts and zooms and all sorts of stuff that you learned about in film school, if you went to film school. But is that the best format for immersion? You listen to Alex and he would say, you kind of don't want that. You kind of want to. To let people be in the environment. Which is why I feel like, at least at the start, it's gonna be more like webisodes. There's a rumor that they did a bunch of behind the scenes stuff for the Godzilla show on Apple tv. So that's what I think is gonna happen first, is people are gonna like, do that and then maybe the next step is sort of like, you know, those Christopher Nolan movies where there are selected scenes in imax, where there'll be things like that too. But I feel like we're in experimental mode. Alex, what do you.

[Micah Sifry]

I agree, I agree. And I think that. I think that the behind the scenes is gonna be very compelling. I think that when I think about what I think think will happen Vers and I have no idea, but the Matrix white. The white rabbit version, if anyone remembers the old dvd, there was a white rabbit. You turn it on, the white Rabbit version of the Matrix. And as you watch the Matrix, little white rabbit would pop up in the DVD and you'd click on it. It would show you a whole behind the scenes of how that shot got built. You know, you wouldn't want to watch it the first time. Right when you want to watch it again, you'd watch through it. And I think that, you know, they've seen these stereo cameras bouncing around the Apple sets for a while. So we assume that, you know, probably you may see a scene that might be done in 180. You might see a. A lot of behind the scenes that. That are done in 180. I don't think we're going to see a lot of 360 again. 360. The problem with it is, is that the lift between 180 and 360 is fairly dramatic and the payoff is almost.

[Jason Snell]

Zero because you have to stand up and turn around.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah, you've got to stand up to use it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well.

[Micah Sifry]

The other thing is, is that for. For us to create. The reason that the return is very low is because you have to stand up and look at it. The reason that we don't like to do it is because we a have to now clean up everything.

[Jason Snell]

You never have to hide a movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Set is a proscenium. You never have the stuff behind the camera visible.

[Jason Snell]

Alex, you probably noticed this. I really enjoyed looking at the Alicia Keys video especially. But all those immersive videos are fascinating because you can actually see if you look at where the crop is, that 180 immersive. There are moments like early on in the Alicia Keys video, they want to crop out one of the cameras. And so the right side is a little bit narrower before you get to the black space. Like that's all going on there too. So it's very clear. Like, it's hard. Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You tell.

[Micah Sifry]

They wanted to sell you on the. On the feeling of it before you. As you watch it, you slowly realize. You slowly identify where all the cameras are. Yeah, you know, it's kind of part of the show. But. But it's. But I think that you're right. I was like, I don't think I saw that at the very beginning. You didn't. So it was. And. But I do think that you're going to see a lot of experimental. I think for music, for performance and everything else. This is going to be a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Of people talking about sports being perfect for sports.

[Micah Sifry]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Man.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, we talked about that.

[Jason Snell]

It looks so good that that demo One of the reasons to watch that demo video is because it does have a couple of sports clips.

[Leo Laporte]

Courtside with the warriors would be pretty amazing.

[Jason Snell]

Wouldn't. Wouldn't it, though? So the question is, like, what are the rights issues? However, Disney is Apple partner and they have espn. The NBA app is on there on day one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think NBA.

[Jason Snell]

And then, yeah, Max is an NBA partner and the Max app is there on day one. So there's lots of options.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you're an F1 fan, you'll get this. There is an F1 viewer program for my Mac that lets me see F1TV. Their own video feed has every driver's view. It has all sorts of data views. It has, of course, the race view, but it also has. I mean, it's. It's 20 screens. If you open them all. I would love to have that in replace. That would be for sports.

[Micah Sifry]

I definitely think for sports you're going to have the ability to open up a couple windows. You know, eventually these are fixed, fixed windows that you can always open up and you throw bits over here or multiple games. Like, I think with mls, we're going to see a lot of the refinement of this where I can have four or five games up and I can look at one and tap my fingers and hear the audio and look at another one, tap my fingers and hear that audio. And I can, you know, possibly. And I do think that you'll have what we found with 360, at least with, with soccer was that you. You generally wanted to experience a moment in 360, but you didn't want to watch the whole game that way because there's a lot of cut. There's a reason. There's a lot of cameras there. And so you still want to see the cut, but you also want to, like. It'd be really great to be standing on the pylon or right behind the pylon, right when someone is diving over the goal line or something like that. In football, those are the kind of things. But you don't only want us to be there for the moment that it happened or right after it happened, not the rest of the game.

[Leo Laporte]

Despite James Cameron's advocacy and support, 3D did not really happen in movies and it really didn't happen at home on the TV set. Is this going to bring 3D back?

[Micah Sifry]

I think you'll see more 3D production. I mean, I know a lot of people who own the. You know, James Cameron did it, right? And so that everyone loved it and then everyone Else did it very badly. And so everyone burned out of it really quickly. If you're cutting people out and putting them on cardboard, little cardboard planes, people aren't going to enjoy it. The reason that Avatar made us see that 3D was a future was because he actually shot it in 3D. So. So a lot of the movies that are just kind of fake 3D are probably not going to. You know, that model isn't really going to work. But I do know that Everybody who's got 3D rigs back from the last wave of 3D are all dusting them off and trying to make sure that they can run and everything else. Those are. These are like $60,000 rigs that. That need to be turned back on again. And they were selling for five. Like I could have bought three of these like two years ago for five grand each. You know, like just almost a hunk of metal, you know. And so. So there's a. A lot of people are going back into that. I don't know to be honest, if 16x9 3D is really going to be the future. I think it. I think that there's a lot that's going to go on with the 180 stereo and and so I think that that's going to be a really interesting thing. I also watching on the headset and this won't change the way people make movies. I do find that the wider the screen the less quality the experience for me as a Viewer. So the IMAX 143 or even one to ones which is. I think you get one to one when you shoot with the headset. But that more squarish. You know when I was and I noticed it because I. I put on the wizard of oz which is a 1, 3, 3 I think and I put wizard of Oz on. I was like wow, it looks really, really good. And then I put something on that was like 2, 3, 5. And you have to zoom it back so that you can see everything. And so now you just feel like you got a lot less, you know, like in the. As an experience. And so the. Because the headset does have a limited field of view that you. You notice that limited field of view on a widescreen video that more than you see it in a squarish.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

You know experience.

[Jason Snell]

And so I think on Max looked really great actually. One of the nice things is you get out the of the box and the movies are just whatever shape they are.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah. They're no letterbox. Yeah. And that so what was felt less you Felt like you were being pillared now feels now you can zoom it up more and it actually feels bigger and better in a lot of ways in that more squarish format.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray, we're gonna take a break. I want to give you a final thought before we go to the break because I don't want to keep you here forever.

[Ray Maxwell]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

He's sweating right into that thing and I.

[Ray Maxwell]

No, no, I'm very comfortable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How many hours have you spent in it so far?

[Ray Maxwell]

Oh, I've spent three or four hours in it and you know, didn't. Didn't find uncomfortable. I, I sat on FaceTime with mine. A friend of mine went down with me, another Canadian, and picked up his and we've been sharing our experience. By the way, lest you feel too sorry for me, everything that's on Apple TV that I had access to before I went down there, I have access to in my Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's good.

[Ray Maxwell]

All the TV shows and movies and so forth, I have been viewing those this and I have to say I think this is the best 3D experience I've had. What do you think, Alex?

[Micah Sifry]

Of for viewing 100% best viewing, best 3D. And we always knew that headsets were going to be a better viewing experience. I think that the problem with the meta, the quest was just resolution and so the resolution has been solved on this one. And so it's definitely the best 3D viewing experience that I've had. I think that again, I think that what we're going to start to see is increased frame rate. You know, so as the frame rate goes up and I, you know, I was talking to someone else about it and I didn't really think about it from a gamer's perspective, but they said, you know, the, the older folks generating content or the people who've been doing it for a long time are really into 24p. But the gamers, the next generation are gamers and they want to see 144, they want to see 120, they want to see high frame rate and they don't want to see 24. And so, so there's a pretty strong push I think for.

[Ray Maxwell]

Right.

[Micah Sifry]

You know, there's, you know, rumors that wonder why Production requests are 8K120.

[Leo Laporte]

I wonder why Apple didn't make this just a screen and have. Since you're already tethered to a battery, why not just put the whole computing device separately? You could make a much more powerful computing device.

[Micah Sifry]

I don't know. I think that was the problem with The Oculus. I mean, the Oculus did that. And it was a computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

You know, and I think the problem is that what's very convenient. Like, I. And I've worked with ones where they have huge, huge cables coming down from the ceiling that hook into your head and so on and so forth, and it's cool. And some of them had a lot of performance. They had Onyxes running them and all.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my first experience. And that was in the early 90s.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, exactly. And so the. The. But I think that again, for me to be able to walk over to my living room, sit down and watch.

[Leo Laporte]

So mobility is important.

[Micah Sifry]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Be able to lie down and walk around.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If. If I want to go all day, I have power. You know, I have this for my Blackmagic 6K Pro. I can plug it in and go all day and clip this on my belt. It has a belt.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as you have power delivery, I think the wattage that the adapter that comes with it is, I think 30. So anything that you deliver, which PD absolutely can do, so anything that could deliver full power to it.

[Micah Sifry]

Well. And it doesn't even need to be full power because you're powering the battery, trickling it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Micah Sifry]

So even if you had 10 watts, it would just slow. The battery would slow.

[Leo Laporte]

The.

[Micah Sifry]

It would last for five hours instead of two or whatever.

[Ray Maxwell]

Anyway, I am not disappointed. I am wowed by it. I'm having a lot of fun playing with it, playing with my friend who got one. And thank you for having me on today, Leo and the rest of the team here. And I am enjoying it. And stay in touch.

[Leo Laporte]

Always love having you on, Ray. You're the greatest. You never have anything to plug. You're still doing photography. Are you gonna change how you do photography with this in mind?

[Ray Maxwell]

Oh, yeah. Well, I can't wait till summer comes and I can take this to the glider and the airplane. I'm still flying.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Ray Maxwell]

And I think I can have a lot of fun with this, especially doing 3D of the cockpit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Or just a loop to loop, because I'm not going up there. But I'd love to watch. I'd love to experience it in the safety of my own home. Thank goodness Jason did not continue to join us with his Vision Pro avatar, because that was a little creepy. The avatars did get better later in the year, you might remember. But the Vision Pro still, even to this day, is looking for that killer app. You know, we'll continue to cover the story as Long as there is Vision Pro news, we will bring it to you on MacBreak Weekly. Speaking of bringing it to you, MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by quite literally our CDN, our content delivery network. The best in the biz. Cashfly for over 20 years cash fly has held the track record for high performing ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5000 companies in over 80 countries including by the way us. Now Cashfly is better prepared for the holidays than ever before. The only CDN built for throughput. That's why we love it. Not only ultra low latency video streaming, delivering video to over a million concurrent users, but lightning fast gaming which delivers downloads faster with zero lag glitches or outages. And mobile content optimization offering automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device. We loved it because they gave us flexible month to month billing for as long as we needed it to figure out what was going on. And then once we understood our download patterns and so forth, they gave us a discount for fixed terms. The point is you can do the same. Design your own contract when you switch to Cashfly. Some exciting updates to announce as we begin a new year. Managed Object Storage Cashfly has a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels. This is incredible. The hardware is entirely based on NVMe, so it's particularly suited to users with large numbers of small objects. Still completely S3 compatible, so it easily integrates into your cash fly, Moss, S3 or any other tool set you've designed. And Cashfly, I love them for this. No egress or ingress costs, you're just getting a flat volume fee. They've also opened this year. A new pop in Austria in the capital city Vienna. Perfect for New Year's Eve, right? A New Year's Eve in old Vienna. Central Europe is going to see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. And if you are a Cash Fly reseller, you'll like some of the new features they've added to your portal. You can now be classified as a reseller, which means you can have numerous full accounts under your reseller account, each of which operate independently, but billing is still centralized. Cashfly, it's the best. They reach out. They give their customers stuff that really matters, including us. We're really happy with Cashfly Rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and we've been doing this for a while. It's really great. Cashfly allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, ensuring a 100% cache hit ratio. And of course, with Cashfly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24. 7 Support when you need it. Learn how you can get your first month free at cash fly cashfly.com Twitter how many years have you been hearing it? Bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Cash Fly at Cache Fly. Thank you casually. All right, moving on. Another big event early in the year. Kind of a shocker. Apple decided to cancel the Apple car. Jason Snell has breaking news.

[Jason Snell]

Leo, this just in. This just in.

[Micah Sifry]

Yes.

[Jason Snell]

I hope you were not planning your financial future around buying an Apple car.

[Andy Ihnatko]

What?

[Jason Snell]

Because Mark Bloomberg, as we like to call him, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, short shortened to Mark Bloomberg, maybe he's been put in the will, I don't know. Has reported that Apple today canceled their car project after spending, you know, more than a billion dollars, several billion dollars on it. And for more than a decade they have finally thrown in the towel and said, you know what, we could probably use these resources better on places that are relevant to our core products and where we're behind, maybe like generative AI. And they do have a bunch of people working on machine learning stuff because they were trying to build automated self driving cars that they then started backing off of. And as Gurman reported, I think a month ago, they really were at a point where they were trying to basically make or break is this going to be a product? And let's run the numbers and when can we release a product and what can we make? And it sounds like their analysis was, I gotta be honest here, what all of our analysis has been for the last five years, which is that it doesn't really make sense and they shouldn't do it. So they have killed that project.

[Leo Laporte]

Mark says Apple made the disclosure internally today. Didn't take long for him to get the memo. Surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project. Said the people who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn't public at the time. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams. Kevin lynch, vice president in charge of the effort, they're going to wind it down. As you said, employees may move to the AI division. There are 2,000 people, several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. I don't know if they'll, I mean, Elon is probably hiring across town. Maybe that's the, that's where they'll end up. They often seem to end up over there at Tesla I'm disappointed a lot.

[Jason Snell]

Of them end up at the core car, the traditional automakers too because they want that, they want that talent.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, not only that, Apple for a while. Not only that, but they might be sending that talent back where they started. I mean one of the, one of the, one of the few things that got me I thinking that maybe this is they've got something they're committed to was that at the, from the beginning all the way to just a few years ago, they were hiring people like top executives with amazing careers away from BMW, away from, away from Mercedes, away from like major car makers, not Apple people who were gone into cars. But hey, why don't you leave the stable job at this real, at one of the best, best motorworks known to mankind and come to work for a company that has not even officially committed to making a car. And always made me thought that whatever that pitch deck was, it must have been something incredible. So I wonder what those executives are thinking about right now. I mean again, if anything, they're foray into Apple probably made them more valuable because they can now I'm sure they signed lots of stuff but you can't make them forget discussions that they were having with Apple about like what a platform needs to be. So now they can bring all that expertise from the consumer electronics and back into BMW, back into gm, back into God forbid, Tesla. Oh actually they could use it.

[Micah Sifry]

When you really, when you do the math on that 2000 by the way, that's like conservatively 3 to $500 million a year. Like think about how much they've been spending on this. Just, and that's just the staff and that's not the, you know, everything else. So you're probably talking about at least a billion a year that they were spending on trying to figure this out. And.

[Andy Ihnatko]

At the end of this piece mentions that the board was also concerned about continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a project that may never see light of day.

[Jason Snell]

So I mean we said, I think here, we've talked about this quite a bit and I think what's happened is as time has gone on, I have gotten less and less enthusiastic about this idea because it feels like they had a moment, right? There was a moment where the car, the major automakers were not really getting it and Tesla was on the move and it felt like Tesla was doing it right and nobody else got it and there was a place for another technology company like Apple to come in and insert itself. But boy, it feels like that time passed like Five years ago. And everybody else has sort of gotten on board with more electronics and with moving toward electric and, and other companies like Rivian have kind of come up in the meantime too. And now you think what could Apple contribute to the auto industry in 2030? And I just, it would just be another car. And like that's the last thing Apple should waste its money on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And also remember that when, even when this story first broke, I think it was the Wall Street Journal that broke it in 2014, something like that. At least that's when we first started talking about it. I think Jony I've was in his ultimate ascendancy. He was maybe, I imagine that his voice was also saying here is something. We are a design company that works in electronics and consumer goods. The car is the ultimate design statement, the ultimate consumer good. Here is a place where we can make an amazing statement. I mean again, this is the same shop that came out with a 2018 MacBook Pro. So maybe that was another force that was at least causing this to get a good launch, to launch to orbit.

[Jason Snell]

Initially a lot of alarm bells went off when there were those reports about how they were only going to launch it without a steering wheel and with complete autonomous driving. And it was one of those moments of like what, what are they, you know, what are they smoking inside there? Because it is not. It was never going to be like it was. That's like a worse delusion than Elon Musk. Elon Musk has these delusions of full self driving that he keeps saying is just around the corner, just around the corner and it has never come. But at least he builds cars with steering wheels. Right. Like he's got at least a little bit of realism that this needs to be a real product. And Apple I don't think. I think that Apple in the early days of the car project was a victim of, of some people on the inside thinking big dreams like they could magic it into existence and not being real about what needed to be done to make the product happen. And I think that that's why they miss their money.

[Micah Sifry]

And I think that when you take away the steering wheel, you have to. It forces you to solve the last mile. And, and that is just the most brutal last mile. I think that most of us would be really happy if you just solved the highway. Like if you just said this is always going to work on a highway, I, I would be all in. But there's so many vagarities once you get off a highway of all these weird intersections and things in people's driveways and all these other things that it, it, it, it becomes very difficult. And so taking the, taking away all ability to make that adjustment makes a really, really high cliff to go over. I think that's the challenge there.

[Jason Snell]

Don't go over a cliff, don't do it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think Tesla has a patent on that technology. They're pretty litigious about that.

[Micah Sifry]

When I was in Rwanda, this is the problem is the maps think that there's things there. I was in Rwanda just blindly following Google Maps and came up to a cliff and the water had washed away the road in between. But you know, it was, and it was at night and I almost went over it, you know, and that was, that's a human following that, not a, not a machine doing it in kind of an unparalleled experience.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And so I do think that we're in like chatbot AI and generative AI where we might have been like in 2013, 2014 with self driving cars, where it was early enough in the game that nobody I think was 100% sure how easy or difficult this was. Kind of like how in the 60s like we met as, as it turned out, NASA had a very linear path to landing, landing people on the moon. But they had, when they, when they committed in 1959, 1960, they weren't sure. Could we make these engines work? In theory, it could work. We don't know. Can people live and work in space? Can they spend two weeks in microgravity? And as they went, oh great, no, it turns out this is easy. Turns out this is solvable. Turns out this is, it was very linear. I think that in 2013, because so much investment and so much talk and research went into this, they were at that stage where we don't know if this is a linear set of problems that we can simply throw enough money and experience at and solve them, or whether we are going to at some point hit a brick wall that is insurmountable. And I think that there was a time when everyone realized that no level two is, Level two is a perfection zone. We might make it to level three, but self driving is a fantasy that requires a breakthrough that is unpredictable and unforeseeable. And I think that AI is in the same level right here as we're seeing with. I mean, Gemini is getting all the punchlines right now, but it's true of every single large scale project to create a very functional, useful AI. They're still struggling to figure out how do we make this thing? So it's stable and doesn't wind up spitting out 2,000 words about how it is a God and you must bow down before it and honor no God before chatgpt.

[Micah Sifry]

Well, I think that also there's pre Covid and post Covid in the sense that when city, you know, a big argument for self driving is the commute. And when cities are 30%, you know, with a 30% vacancy in downtown, it's not clear that that commute is going to return at the same level again or if it will remain like over time. More and more people. You saw this kind of, it jumped obviously during COVID then it backed up people coming back to the office. But I talked to people who are, if they're being forced to go into the office, their LinkedIn is fresh and moving like they're looking for rope, they're looking for remote. They're not quitting but they're looking for the next, next place that they go. And these are people that love their job, they love the people they work with and they love the company they work for. And they're still looking at moving because they don't want to drive. And so I think that the other thing is, is that the next, in the next generation, I mean my kids are in no rush to get the license. It's hard to get, you know, like the next generation just isn't interested in cars, you know. And so I think that that's the other thing is if you, if you're not going to get this done in 10 years, then the industry, the market for the cars may be a lot smaller than it was, you know, when you started doing the development.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

It'S just a different world too. I mean not only are, you know, there are issues with electric car sales sort of like slowing down. Although I do think in the long run electric cars, we're in a transition from electric to gas. There are some challenges there involving the marketing of the cars. You need cheaper electric cars and you need used electric cars. There's lots going on and you really need a charging infrastructure that is for everybody which has not happened yet. But I do think all the major automakers are like they're on it now. They all have sophisticated computer systems that they're building that let you delayed guidance and, and if not full self driving, some level of autonomy and like all of the little like Silicon Valley secret sauce that was there is, is, is everywhere now it's spread out everywhere. And you know, true also that this is a real not invented here moment because Apple could have, I Believe at one point, Elon Musk wanted Apple to buy Tesla from him. Rivian was a startup that probably could have gotten sniped. There are some other, like, Lucid is a company out there that is very Apple like, but is an electric car company that they could have probably gotten at some point. Like, if they wanted, if they believed in this, they could have bought somebody. But I really think that in the end, they had this dream that they were going to make the car that nobody else could make. And then they hit reality. And so, you know, at that point, you just walk away, I guess.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it just. It just never made sense to me at all. If Apple was the kind of company that at CES or at some flashy show would say, hey, we made a concept car like Sony has made concept cars of. Here is a Sony badge, Sony design, Sony interior, Sony electronics project. And of course, they build it on a chassis that someone else provides. It would have been a very interesting design project. And, And. But of course, Apple never does that. But when you. If we wished into existence an Apple car that was a functional, practical, wonderful car that hit all the buttons, you'd still wind up with, okay, Apple. But you're going to have to put in. Someone's going to have to service these things and someone's going to have to sell these things. It's not going to be the mall in Lemonstone. You're going to have to have a dealership. You're going to have people who know how to sell these things. And again, how much money do you think you can make off of every single copy of this car that you can get a hold of all the real estate you're going to have to acquire just to make this happen. And it's just something that. This is why I always settle into the phrase, I don't understand this decision, because as soon as you say, oh, this is stupid and it's going to be a big mistake and they're going to rescind this, that's when, oh, well, it turns out that Apple knows something that I don't, which is a lot of things. But nonetheless, when things don't make any sense, you hope that Apple comes up, say, no, we figured something out, but it turns out that they didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

How soon before we see the same memo on vision Pro?

[Andy Ihnatko]

No.

[Micah Sifry]

15 years. No, I'm not.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

It took 10 years to do this with the car. Right. It'll.

[Micah Sifry]

They won't really, but they will. They will. This is a.

[Jason Snell]

You mean the product Is shipped.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

I mean, but, but I once Apple ships product, I mean it is Apple's notorious. If you talk to people that have used to work at Apple.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

Spending hundreds of millions of dollars and billions of dollars on products that never get out the gate, they just go, eh, you know, and it just, the Titan was so big that they had to do it on the street so people could see it. But there's those buildings in there that are top secret and you know, all the other things that they're building all kinds of, you know, products. I've never been, I've never been in one of those buildings, but I've heard about them exist and, and that they have tons of products in there that are never, you know, that are a big reason that they're super secret is because that stuff may never leave the building. You know, but they go through the full, you know, production process and figure things out and, and everything else. And that's what I think. We've heard stories about that happening with the Vision, you know, the Vision Pro. But the Vision Pro is, is there's at least three or four versions they're going to release before they even think about whether it's successful or not.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

And I gotta say as a user, I think that the only thing that worries me about the Vision Pro right now is how much time I spend in it at a time. And I just forget that I'm in there for so long and I'm like, oh, I was just in there hanging out and then I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I lost four hours, you know, like, you know, and, and so that's the thing that I'm having. You know, I watch movies in it all the time now and, and I. Anyway, I just find it to be, It's a fascinating. I'm more concerned about my health of keeping it on for so long, but it's a very comfortable experience and I think, I think that they're on a pretty good path that they're probably going to keep on expanding. So. But they're not going to change course for 10 years. Like there's no way they're changing course for 10 years. This is where we're, we're 10 years into a 20 year curve and there's no way they're going to stop.

[Jason Snell]

In fact, they may be. There was another report, I forget who made it, that they may be working backward to this as well. But there's some talk that they're also experimenting with other wearables that would be more like glasses and the idea there is not glasses to cover your vision, but glasses to give a perch for cameras so that you could have, if you imagine like a camera plus AirPod or cameras on the AirPods, but that's tougher because of where your ears are. And I don't think there are any big human ear upgrades coming, like where they're going to move to a better location. So they may have to do something else. So they may start working the other way too. If you can imagine putting a computer interface that can, you know, can see and can hear and can talk to you and maybe even can notice your gestures and respond to them, that's not Vision Pro. That's a very different thing without screens, essentially, but it's still like an AR product of a sort. And I think that they're pretty committed to the idea of finding ways to get computing into, you know, these other spatial environments by, you know, whether it's outside in or inside out.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I mean, I've said it before, but I think that every company is missing a trick by the idea of one Bluetooth earbud that is a really, really good assistant that can simply talk to you. Be a fully immersive, excuse me, be a fully reactive interface to software to do simple things that you might want to do in the real world with an optional, like, sort of like tie clip size button camera. So that if you want to give the assistant the added advantage of being able to see your environment and being able to ask, hey, where is, where is my lunch date? And so the end, so the earpiece and then tell you, oh, well, it's the, it's the look for the red building. There's a door to the left, that's number 12. That's the restaurant you're trying to meet at. And when you need privacy, you take it off, take the camera off and put it in your pocket where people can't see it. I mean, the ironic thing is that I do think that the more, the more I read about, again, I still don't have a Vision Pro, but the more I talk to people who have it, the more I read about experience about it, the more I think that Google Glass had roughly the right idea. Not the right time, not the right technology, certainly not the right understanding of how such a device would be perceived by the general public. But the idea of a very lightweight device with, as you said, it had a camera, it had bone conductive audio, it had a microphone. And in terms of giving you a layer into reality, it was just a tiny, tiny little like three by five card at the. At your peripheral vision. That would simply put information that you were asking for that might be helpful at that moment. It's. I think that once we can get that technology into a pair of eyeglass in obtrusive eyeglass frames, that is a product that a lot of people are going to be very, very interested in, especially matched with a really good AI.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. It'll be crazy, but. All right, if you think so.

[Micah Sifry]

I mean, you know, the, you know, there's a lot of. We'll see what happens at nab, but between NAB and wwc, we expect to also see a lot more support hardware and so on and so forth of shooting stuff for it, which is interesting because the market is so much smaller than metas, and people weren't necessarily building a lot of tools for that. But I think that might have been also meta building its own cameras and stuff like that. But I think that we do see a fair bit of excitement related to how do we generate content for it. So it'll be interesting to see. And they dribbled new things out. We got a. One of the. I don't know. Jason, did you see the. The new dinosaur, the new thing from their, you know, their dinosaur documentary. There's like a now five. There was the one where it walks over and looks at you, but now there's like a five minutes of an interaction.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Fascinating. Can't wait. Wow. Apple will never ship another Vision Pro. This is the only one, so enjoy it as long as you're okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll put my money on it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Mark that clip for future use.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please, there, let's never.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that'll be a great button on. On the, on the super cut of all of your Vision Pro negativity. That'll be a great last shot. And then it'll dissolve to a future where everybody's wearing them on their heads and they're like, shaking their heads.

[Leo Laporte]

If that's the future, I don't want to live there. Yeah, really don't.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, that's an even better button right there. Actually. Let's put that in the clip. Put that in the super cut.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you could teach my obituary, you know, and then he died.

[Jason Snell]

It's going to be in a hologram hovering over your tombstone, but only if.

[Micah Sifry]

You have the headset on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

To. To be fair, Leo, like, I, I 100% agree that the hype of last year, the product did not match that halfway. This is Apple deliver. Again, we were all speculating so This, A lot of this is on us. But what Apple delivered turned out to be a very simple and obvious device whose only real distinction at this point seems to be that the components they put into their version of this version of this thing are way better than the components that existing products already had. But they didn't like, they didn't fault, they didn't solve any problems. They didn't figure anything out. They just said, what can the, what can we do that's really, really great. If money were realistically, almost no object whatsoever. I mean, there was, I was, I was always hoping that the great demos would not be, hey, look, there's a dinosaur in your room, or hey, look, you've got floating virtual screens in front of you. I've always hoped that it would have been, we figure out a way to make augmented reality, virtual reality more relevant than simply education, training and entertainment. And I don't think they've demonstrated that yet. Maybe in a couple years, maybe in three years. I don't, I'm not writing enough yet that could. This is, this is an Apple TV trajectory where it's a very simple, boring box that simply gets progressively better and keeps making enough money or being interesting enough to Apple that they keep making it. It's not, it's not going to. It's not the next iPhone, it's not the next Apple Watch. I don't think it's the next AirPods either.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's Apple.

[Micah Sifry]

Hi. That's what I, I think it's the next, it's the next 80 inch monitor. I don't think Apple's doing any monitors at this point. I think that they are, they're building toward again. When I want to watch with my family, I take it off and I watch a big screen and we all have fun watching some rerun of something that was made years ago. And. But when I'm actually watching movies, I just put this on because I can see. I can, I'm getting to the point where I can tell what kind of film it was shot because I see it so much sharper in, in the Apple TV than I see on my tv, you know, and I think that that's the, that's the thing that, that I'm getting used to and it's kind of burning up my. I'm, I'm. I'm now shopping for a bigger screen for the family because the screen I have now is not keeping up with the Apple TVs movies.

[Leo Laporte]

So Apple has added quantum safe crypto to its imessage. Even though there is. And there's another thing, by the way, that will never ship is a quantum computer. But okay, now you're safe, y'all.

[Jason Snell]

You almost said quipto. And I love it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The whole check of stiff chips into the center of the table.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going all in. Well, honestly, it's more likely great for.

[Jason Snell]

The editors because they don't need to consult through hundreds of episodes of Mac Break Weekly. They're going to get it all. And it's got all of Leo's pronouncements in it. It's great. Perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

So, of course, as most of you know by now, Thursday morning, the Department of Justice and was it 18 state attorneys general from blue and red.

[Jason Snell]

18 plus D.C. yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. 15 in D.C. new York, New Jersey, California. You know, it was a nice mix, I thought of. Attorneys general sued Apple for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The venue will be New Jersey, unless Apple convinces a judge not to make it New Jersey. The thinking being that's a positive place for the DOJ to go after any trust. It's a court, a circuit that's very antitrust focused. The DOJ wrote a very nice 88 page, well written, I thought, complaint that read more like a novel than it did legal pleading. And I will say, before we get to your opinions on the whole thing, that there is, and I think Stephen Sinofsky kind of nailed it. Now, he's an interesting person to write about this since he was this Genius Behind Windows 8 Monopolist comments on monopolies.

[Jason Snell]

Was what I was thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

But he did point out he's against.

[Jason Snell]

He's against the action of the doj. You'll be shocked to discover the guy from Microsoft back in the day is.

[Leo Laporte]

Against some history with. With. He's a very smart guy and so he had some interesting things to say. But his. The point that I wanted to extract from his blog piece was there is a. There really are kind of. He said, two parties. I'd say there's a spectrum going all the way from people who say big tech is evil and big tech needs to be regulated and broke and. Or broken up. And anything the government does in that regard is a good thing. And then there are, of course, on the absolute other end of the spectrum, there are the cult of. He called them the cult of Ma. Oh, no. Cory Doctorow called them the cult of machists. Corey likened them to a religious culture. He said.

[Jason Snell]

Of course he did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He said the foundational tenet of the cult of Mac is that buying products from a $3 trillion company makes you members of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. So that's the other side of the scale.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, to be fair, Apple, like most major religions, doesn't pay taxes. So I mean one half dozen the other.

[Leo Laporte]

So there are the cult of Mackists, they're the government regulationists. And I suspect all of us are probably somewhere in between the opposite ends of that spectrum. I've already expressed my opinion on Twitt on Sunday, so I'll hold back while I let you. I thought, Jason, you wrote a very good piece at Six Colors about this.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you. My Thursday morning I woke up to a push notification, read 80 pages of legalese and then sat at my mother's kitchen table and wrote a thousand words about it.

[Leo Laporte]

As you know, I was in Mexico and Lisa pointed a camera at me. She said, do a TikTok on what you think. I said, no, I have no, I am holding back my opinion till I hear from Andy, Alex and Jason was my. My reaction. So Jason, you said, while I am not a lawyer, by the way, I n a l applies to this entire panel. We did have an attorney on, on Sunday. Kathy Gellis was here. You said, I've read all 88 pages. Good for you. And you said some of this is absurd. Apple is for instance, not a monopoly.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. I think this is the challenge is for a lot of us. And this is why I'm so disappointed in somebody. I mean, I kind of expect it from Corey Doctorow, but it's disappointing. Cause that's such a lazy take to say, oh, they're a cultist. There are those people out there who say Apple can do no wrong, but it's a straw man argument. There are a lot of people. I think one of the fundamental problems with this entire suit, at least the document as written, is that it seems to be coming from a place of people who had this sort of fantasy that, that, that really is very familiar to anybody who's been using Apple products for a long time, which is this fantasy that people who use Apple products are dupes of marketing sheeple and that and that they are the I sheep and that they only do this because they're, they're conned into it and then they're trapped by lock in and they can never escape when the truth is the iPhone, people love the iPhone. The customer satisfaction is off the charts. The fact, the fact is people, I think politically that's the hardest sell for this is that they're trying to Attack a product for trapping people. And it's actually a very popular product that people like. And therefore what exactly is this? Is this a win for them? But you know, it is. I think leaving that aside for the moment, I have some frustration about this because I feel like there are many behaviors that we all, as keen observers of Apple might call out as being anti competitive in some way. And so many of them are just not in here at all. And part of that is because they're deeply constrained by the laws. In the US we talk about Europe in the dma, but that's specific legislation targeting big tech gatekeepers like Apple. In the US we have failed to pass any such legislation. Even though we have theoretically a functioning Congress, they don't function. And so we're left with the Sherman Antitrust act, which, which is about, you know, it's railroad barons and oil barons. It's from more than 100 years ago. It's almost 150 years ago. And that's the challenge is that they have to come in and say Apple's a monopoly. And that is again, I'm not a lawyer. And the reason they chose New Jersey is that there is at least one case in New Jersey where they found a company with 60% market share and said that they were still exerting monopoly power. But the fact is they need to prove that Apple fits under Sherman. And the challenge is to do this. You can see them contorting themselves to one, redefine monopoly as being based on revenue share and not market share. And then two, they, they have to specify that it's because it's U.S. market share, it's not worldwide, it, it, it's just revenue share. And then they say, well, it's the smartphone market, but if that's not good enough, we're going to make a new category called the performance smartphone market in order to get it to be an even larger number. And then honestly I, I think their weakest moment in this monopoly argument is they want to have the big number, right? They want to have the big scary number in, in court. They're probably going to say that Apple is functionally a monopoly, but for the general public, they want a big scary number in their document. So they finally get to 90 and 95% which is, whoa, that's a monopoly if it's in the 90s. And their example is, for example, Apple, Samsung and Google. Sorry, let me say that again. Apple, Samsung and Google have 95% of the performance smartphone market. And it's like, well, but that's irrelevant.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's a made up market.

[Jason Snell]

Sherman is not about duopoly. Monopolies are triopolies. It's about monopolies smelly.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're gonna have.

[Jason Snell]

They're struggling with that one.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I had that same impression. But smelly thief in our discord name checks out. Says it isn't exactly about monopoly. Let me tell you what the Sherman act says. Every contract combination in the form of trust or otherwise trust is a monopoly or conspiracy and restraint of trader commerce. The act prohibits monopolization or attempts at monopolizing any aspect of interstate trade commerce and makes the act a felony. So you don't.

[Jason Snell]

There's also 150 years of law.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right. And Microsoft was 90% of the desktop market when the DOJ went after that.

[Burke]

But.

[Jason Snell]

But it is still a factor. Right. Because you have to show that something is either a monopoly or is attempting, like I said, attempting to exert monopoly power.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And it's not, I will say it's also not illegal to try to be successful in your market. That's not enough either. You have to show that you're exerting a. And I'm not saying that they can't. That's why they chose New Jersey. Is that in New Jersey they made that ruling that said that the denture accessory manufacturer or whatever with 65% of the market was controlling the market because it was such a big fish in a small pond that it was able to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

There's monopsony as well as monopoly. I'm just saying that Apple might have a monopsonistic position in the App Store.

[Jason Snell]

Right. And again not a lawyer, but I just want to say that the challenge here is that they have to use Sherman like they have to use Sherman and all the law around it because. And so when all of us reacted they're like well what about this? And what about this bad thing that Apple does? And what about this thing? And the answer is they didn't think that they could use that in the framing of Sherman because they have no 21st century legislation to use. They only have 19th century legislation and the case law that's built up around it. And it's gonna be a challenge for them. I'm not saying they can't do it. I'm just saying that there's going to be a real argument that this is actually a brutally competitive market worldwide and that carving it into the US and then rev share and then performance smartphones in order to try and prove that Apple has this Kind of power. There's a strong counterargument that they may, the court may buy it or they may not buy it, but like it's. It's a case that they. Even in this document, I would say are. You can see them sweating to make it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I would also sort. So it's good. We should clarify what Sherman says. And we know we have a Congress that passed 27 laws in the last year. So they're not exactly an activist Congress in this regard. Despite the fact that I think both the Lina Khan at the FTC and others have said, please give us some tools.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, like the DMA in Europe.

[Leo Laporte]

Kathy Gellis on Sunday, who is again an attorney, made the point. Maybe this is a good point. I don't know what you think, Andy, that. That it really is an attempt to attack the notion of a walled garden. That it's not necessarily about a monopoly, but about the fact that Apple wants to create a lock in with its ecosystem.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that was definitely one of the consistent themes that they were making throughout the whole complaint. I mean, they're also smart enough to put one of the money quotes right in the preamble where they quote an internal Apple communication. They're talking about why they have to keep people locked into Apple and how they have to make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll read this if you want. This is actually the first paragraph that's very good. In 2010, it reads like, you know, a magazine article. You know, like this is from the New Yorker. In 2010, a top Apple executive emailed Apple's then CEO Steve Jobs about an ad for the new Kindle E Reader. The ad began with a woman who was using her iPhone to buy and read books on the Kindle app and then switches to an Android smartphone and continues to read her books using the same Kindle app. The executive wrote to Jobs, one quote message that can't be missed is that it is easy to switch from an iPhone to Android. Not fun to watch. Geez, you really shouldn't put that in writing. Jobs was clear in his response. By the way, this is 2010. This is 14 years ago where they.

[Jason Snell]

Had 15% market share.

[Leo Laporte]

Jobs is clear in his response. Apple would force. Force developers to use its payment system to lock in both developers and users on its platform.

[Micah Sifry]

Which by the way, completely okay when you have 15% of the market.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

The thing is that, you know, like you can't. If they, if they said that after they had. Assuming that they get to a point where we say they're monopoly, they have to Start doing those things after they became a monopoly, not before.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we do have to point out that the DOJ has the benefit of the Apple epic lawsuit and many other lawsuits before Google and Samsung. So that there is a lot of documentary evidence, a lot of emails, some much more recent. Go ahead, Andy. You wanted to. You brought up the paragraph.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, I'd say that was one of the two of them. The other one was imagine buying a expletive Android for 25 bucks at a garage sale and it works fine and you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an Apple manager in an email.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's an Apple manager.

[Micah Sifry]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And that's. So one of the. There are a bunch of larger themes that they're making here. One of them is that Apple felt feels as though as part of their strategy they have to make sure that not only is that there's a reason for people to buy super, super powerful smartphones, which is one of the reasons why, as we've been saying, they created this category of premium smartphones to say this is the market they're trying to defend. But it's more than that, to be sure. There are some real. When I broke it down, I basically had to take the case down and really label certain things as like get real plausible. They got them dead to rights and they had stuff like, oh well, Department of Justice basically saying we're very, very curious as to why. How come HTC has withdrawn from the smartphone market? How come LG has withdrawn from the smartphone market? And I'm there in the back of the room saying, because Samsung spends a whole lot more money marketing.

[Leo Laporte]

And the most, the most obvious boner there was saying even Amazon's fire phone couldn't make it.

[Jason Snell]

Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

That was a boner.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, there are a lot of reasons that.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's another boner, by the way, I have to throw this in. They gave themselves credit for Apple's success. This is Apple's fortunes changed around the iPod. In 2001, a path clearing antitrust enforcement case brought by the United States against Microsoft opened the market. And it's thanks to us that Apple was able to offer iTunes on Windows.

[Micah Sifry]

PCs otherwise known as the last time we won.

[Jason Snell]

The last time we won, this was great. By the way. I appreciate them extending the DOJ extended universe from past cases.

[Micah Sifry]

Well, the funny thing is, other than the last time we won, it was great. And oh, by the way, Microsoft is still like some days the biggest company in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you can Make a strong case. Mike and I covered this back in the 90s that Microsoft's. I mean the lawsuit with the DOJ was beneficial. It didn't break up Microsoft. I think that was their initial goal. They ended up saying you're gonna have a consent decree, we're gonna have an ombudsman inside Microsoft and we're gonna stop some of this anti competitive behavior. I think it's fair to say Google for instance would not exist if Microsoft had continued along its path. One will never know. It's a completely hypothetical but I wanna say I am not on the side that says no government regulation ever. That the antitrust regulation is a very necessary component of a free market. Without competition, free markets fail.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, they have to. Again, this is an opportunity for Apple to actually defend in court a lot of their decisions and some of the things in this complaint are actually, actually have some teeth in it. When they, when they talk about getting. We've been talking about imessage for the past year now they really have to explain why were you not including feeds they keep. They keep. The DOJ complaint keeps making references to you are intentionally nerfing your own products to make sure that they still maintain a competitive edge. So Apple has to explain here is why we decided that no, we don't want iPhone users to have secure messaging. No, we don't want those beautiful iPhone photos they've been taking when they send them to their grandmother. We don't want them to look as good as they would on an iPhone. They also have to talk. They also had a big section on Apple pay about saying the EU has made a big point of well how come you're not allowing outsiders to have access to the NFC chip? And a lot of the reason could be we just don't like the security opening that that creates. But they're also applying that correctly by saying well that means that why do I, if I want to do tap to pay through an iPhone, why do I have to do it throughout Apple pay? Why can't I just allow my bank to directly do that transaction itself? Why are you taking 0.15 of a cent? I think it is off of every transaction as they have to really defend a lot of these things. So there's, there's a lot of things that are really, really silly. We won't go into every one of them but there are some of, some of them that will probably contribute to some sort of a settlement. Remember that it wasn't necessarily when they, when the DOJ talks about the victory of The Microsoft, Microsoft Internet Explorer case, it wasn't that. It wasn't that. They were. They found a conclusion and Apple, excuse me. And Microsoft was, was. Was sent to the doc. It was. It ended the way that most of these things end, with some sort of a negotiation. As the trial goes on, the government figures out the arguments that they're making that aren't really landing the plane. The defendant figures out some arguments that, oh, we are really having trouble figuring this out. I think we can negotiate a better out of this than we're going to get if we let this go all the way to the very, very end. So I do think that this is going to end in probably a better environment for users. But in any event, one of my maxims is that I think that antitrust actions like this are very, very valuable because they at least force a company like Apple to stop saying, well, because we told you so, or well, because we know what's best. No one else knows what's best for our users. Great, that's fine. You should be able to prove it. And you should not have 80, 80 gigabytes worth of internal emails contradicting what you're saying in public.

[Jason Snell]

Antitrust is a blunt instrument, though. And I think that what bugs me about this is that there are things that we all could point to that I think are not illegal and that probably should be. But, but in. And in Europe, they actually tried to pass some legislation to talk about some of those issues that are more appropriate. And so they. I agree with you, Andy, in the sense that antitrust is all they got and barring an act of Congress. And so, you know, you could say they're being activist and that they're doing this for political reasons. You could say that this is the only line of defense in the entire US To a company as big and powerful as Apple. I can see the merits in both of those arguments, but I think the challenge. I mean, the risks for Apple are high because some of what I think people inside the doj, I mentioned the I sheeple kind of attitude. I think there are some people inside the DOJ who really don't get it about why Apple has. I mean, they say, I mean, it's amazing. They're like, Apple has always made overpriced products that are for the high end. And it started with. And the ipod was like, it's like, that's not true. That's ahistorical. There's a lot of stuff that's wrong. But what Apple always has done is tried to integrate hardware and software. And there was a thread running through this, this document that suggests that what they want is competition with smartphones. But the danger is that they define it ultimately being there should be no cost to switch, which it read a certain way, is the iPhone hardware should be functionally, you know, the software that runs on iPhone hardware should be functionally identical to Android. And at some point you're basically saying Apple, you can't do your business the way you want, which is to build in your special sauce. That's the extreme argument. But I'm saying like, so what we have to do is kind of find some sort of middle ground and Apple has done itself no favors. I, I think the Apple Pay argument is a great one because I would argue that Apple built Apple Pay the way it did because it needed, in order for it to get it to be successful, it wanted complete control so it could launch that product in a market that had resisted contactless payment for ages. And they didn't want to go out with a bunch of bank partners that they have to beg to write into an NFC API in different ways from different apps and have it be all scattered. So I think their strategy was we're just going to put it in the wallet app and we're going to let you put in your credit card number and connect it. And that's Apple Pay. I think that that's why Apple Pay succeeded. The problem is that they, they never, ever, ever, ever opened it up to third parties to compete with Apple in other ways. And, and, and like, if you're at the doj, you might argue it's an original sin. They never intended it. By the time, like with imessage, by the time there were other secure communications mechanisms, everybody was already using messages because it's where the SMSs were always and that's where they put imessage. But there's a counter argument to be made that Apple, you know, Apple might not have even succeeded with Apple Pay if they weren't able to do it the way they did it. And it's not an original sin. It's an, it's a later cardinal sin of, very typical of Apple basically keeping its ball and saying no, no, no. Why? Because I feel like a lot of their attitude is not we can't compete, which I think comes through in the, in the document. It's like they're afraid of competition. I'm not sure how afraid they are of competition. It's more like this imperious. Why compete if we don't have to? We own the real estate, so we're not going to bother. And I think that's where they get in trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see. I mean, it's going to be five years before we find out what happens with this antitrust lawsuit. So I'll probably be covering that all the way up to 2030. That's my guess. You're watching MacBreak Weekly's year end best of. Well, I hope you're enjoying this. Best of it's always fun to do these and I have to tell you, it's a lot of work and I really appreciate our team, the people who work so hard. Anthony Nielsen, our creative director. Our producers and editors, Benito Gonzalez, Kevin King, John Ashley. They work so hard to put this all together for you. All of our hosts, our contributors do. And of course there's the office people who do work in continuity, like Viva and Sebastian. Our CEO Lisa. Twit is a big effort and we think what we're doing is really important. I hope you do too. I hope you enjoy the company and learn from the information. And if you do, I'd like you to consider joining our club. Because frankly, in 2025, that's the only thing that's going to keep Twit going. If you like what you hear and you want to continue, please, seven bucks a month, consider joining Club Twit. Twit TV Club Twit. You get ad free versions of all the shows, access to our Discord special programming you don't get anywhere else. But really, the main thing you get is that warm and fuzzy feeling that you're keeping Twit going. We need your help. I hate to beg, but we really do. Twit TV Club Twit. But enough of that. On with the show.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

On We Go with the best of. And now we're going to talk about, I think, one of the most exciting developments in 2024, the M4 processors. Did you get up for the. I mean, it wasn't. This is the weird thing. It wasn't an event. It was more of a viewing party. Right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Did you get up and. I got up. I got up and I really thought like, maybe it was going to be like two hours for some reason. I was like, man, they're going pretty fast. And it was about 48 minutes or whatever. So it could have been a TV show, but first time I watched it on Apple TV instead of YouTube, just out of curiosity. And it's glorious. And it was. When you open the Apple TV app, it was like the, you know, the giant hero and it looked really good.

[Burke]

So, yeah, don't tell the antitrust people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I think there's the first one that really felt like an infomercial. I was almost expecting like a chiron with an 800 number on it. Like, it was just like, okay, well, if there's. If you're. All you're going to do is post like a highly produced video with sales points, marketing points. Okay, I'll, I'll definitely like bookmark that for watching later. But it's like, it takes the eventness out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I commented on the same thing to Micah early on is that it really felt like an advert, not a, an event. And I guess that's what happens if Alex were here. We'd say, no, no, this is the way. Because in 48 minutes they got everything that was supposed to be 25 minutes. I guess German got that wrong song.

[Burke]

Supposed to be. No, it was rumored to be.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it wasn't supposed. Well, I know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I actually, of course, I used our. One of our favorite apps, Downey, to download like the, the actual video. And so it's 41 minutes, 40 seconds, minus probably the three minutes that took to launch for the countdown. So, yeah, this was pretty short. This is pretty brisk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the countdown was very smooth transition. But the one thing that I thought was funny. I don't know if you noticed is when Tim was doing the talk, Tim had this bounce and he would like every syllable. He was doing like a karaoke ball bounce every couple syllables. He would like pop, pop. And I was waiting for him to just.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim is always a little pressured in his speech.

[Micah Sifry]

A little.

[Leo Laporte]

Good morning. But he seemed more so. I don't know why, but he did seem more so. There was something going on.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He was. I noticed. I noticed that too. He was a little bit of. He was a little bit of. In his gestures. Yeah, that's maybe that's one of the other reasons why I got the infomercial sort of vibe off of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim didn't stay very long.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He.

[Leo Laporte]

He just stayed long enough to say the good news is the Vision Pro selling exactly as we intended.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. All the superlatives that we thought we would miss out on, like all the irrelevant superlatives that we thought we miss out on by not having a live event. So the third, the new, the new MacBook airs on the best selling notebooks in the entire world. That's nice. We didn't get a walkthrough of like a new architectural maven. Apple Store, flagship store. But it'll do. It'll do.

[Leo Laporte]

No mention of the big product that Apple sells, half of their revenue which is the iPhone. But this was really iPad day and pencil day. I'm on the Apple store which was closed this time. They got up right after the event. They wanted to give you a chance to buy and everything we're going to talk about, you can order right now for delivery. Well, it was next week. I don't know if they're getting sold out. So there's an iPad Pro in 11 and 13 inches. They're not saying 12.9 anymore. There's a new iPad Air in 13 and 11 inches which looks interestingly a lot like the old iPad Pro. It even has an M2 chip in it. They dropped the price in the 10th generation iPad that's now the base model at $349, which is a great price really. I mean for an iPad that will do everything these other guys will do. And there off to the right it says new, new, new. And the iPad mini where there was absolutely nothing new.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that's a bummer. That was the thing I was really looking forward to. And also they really seem to have cluttered like the top end now it's. I was amazed. We'll talk, I'm sure we'll talk about this later. But it Just seemed weird that okay, so you now you have the iPad Air, which has most of the functionality that would attract someone. IPad Pro. If they're assuming that they don't, they're not made of money. They don't want to necessarily spend top dollar on the on the top, on the top device. But it's no longer the thinnest. The iPad Air is not the thinnest one. It's like the easiest one to hold is still is going to be the iPad Pro. And so it's. It bums me out that they missed an opportunity to really differentiate the iPad by bumping up the iPad mini, which again, it's such a great device.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm curious what you all thought. My takeaway from this, and I guess I'm coming at it from a Mac user, a Macintosh user, is that Apple is now doubling down on this notion of what's a PC. This is the post PC computer and it really is looking more and more and priced more and more like a full fledged laptop. I really feel like they people like me who are worried, oh, what's going to happen to Mac and Mac os. I think the alarm bells are going off again. I was lulled to sleep for a while, but I think they're going off again.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My take was still that, gee, it's impressive. These are great leaps in performance. They made great. Hey, about what Final Cut could do on an iPad with AI features and selecting things and selecting foreground objects from background object, that's just touch of a button, blah blah, blah. All I could think of however was wow, that's really, really impressive. Imagine how impressive an achievement they could have made if five or ten years ago they had not decided that touchscreens do not belong on Macs. This could be a Macintosh. This could be a next evolution of a hybrid desktop tablet, sort of OS sort of interface. And now, I mean, as I so ably demonstrated last week, you can't really sub an iPad for a laptop's work to this day. The same thing that is true today as it was the first day. An iPad is great so long as you can really predict exactly what you're going to need it to do and everything works fine. It's the moment when you have to call an audible in the middle on the day and in the moment that it really starts to let you down. So, so again, kudos to making a really wonderful, really wonderful tablet. I've got an iPad Pro. I love it. But what I would love this iPad Pro to be is just no iPad at all and just a Mac that is that flexible.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think it's coming. I think the vergence is getting closer and strangely the. The rosetta stone of this if you will is the Apple Vision Pro Pro. Because that is the first computer that's not a computer but it is a computer and it's. It shows that you can put computer as appliance. So I think we're three to four years out but you're. I believe your wish comes true sooner than you think.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not wishing for this, believe me. The. The Vision Pro is an iPad inter internally. Right. I mean it's basically the iPad. Yeah, yeah. I wonder, you know I don't think Apple stopped making the Mac but it really feels like they want. This is the computer they want people, even pros to buy. Here's the Just so people know what we're talking about, the comparison on the left is the new 13 inch M4 that's very important based iPad Pro. This is a M2 based iPad Pro, the last generation and the new iPad Air also M2 price wise. I don't know why they don't have the. Maybe did they stop selling the iPad Pro sixth generation. They don't have a price for it. Screen now 13 inches instead of 12.9. You can see that Ultra Retina XDR on the new iPad Pro, Liquid Retina XDR on the old iPad Pro and Liquid Retina Node ER on the air. You don't get promotion either. But all three are P3. All three are True Tone. All three have NA reflective coating. And they introduced a nano texture display on the one and two terabyte models of the new iPad Pro. Now that's the same nano texture I think that's on the monitor. Right on the XDR monitor which is I think pretty sensitive. Micah, you stopped me from ordering the nano texture display. Please don't get it because you said it's dimmer.

[Burke]

That was the thing that I didn't hear people complaining about any sort of sensitivity or that it would chip or something. It was just that by having that on there you're reducing. They felt that the brightness was reduced.

[Leo Laporte]

But remember when the XDR display came out with a nano texture they said don't touch it. And they sold a $19 cup polishing clothes with it. Maybe they've got a more durable.

[Burke]

Hopefully this is. Yeah, this is a different kind.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean don't touch it doesn't work for an iPad.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

You gotta touch it.

[Burke]

Kind of a problem only with the Apple pencil.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the M4 chip is now out. I'm not sure. We're gonna have to really dive deep into that and we will in a bit. 10 core CPU up to. They didn't talk about the 10 cores. They talked about the 6 and 4. 10 core GPU, 16 core neural engine. That's the same 16 core neural engine it looks like in the M2 versions of the iPad. In fact, it's very similar to the M2. So we'll be interested to see, camera wise, they're still going with that 12 megapixel even though they promoted the idea that you might want to shoot video with your iPad. Please don't.

[Burke]

Yes, but you'll notice that they lost a lens. We only have one camera lens on the new iPad Pros, whereas the previous model has both the wide and ultra wide. It was an interesting choice to get rid of a lens, but I think one that suggests, hey, maybe the iPad's.

[Leo Laporte]

Not the best place to be taking.

[Burke]

The photos of the videos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Even though they showed it. But they did also release it specifically.

[Burke]

For files, you know, they were really.

[Leo Laporte]

Scanning kind of as a.

[Burke]

Yes. Document scanning or if you need to.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, they also, they also released a Final Cut camera app which is designed for multi camera shoots using Final Cut on the iPad. So I think they want you to use your iPhone. I don't know. That's confusing. They did. Thank God they moved the camera. Always been a problem for me on the iPad Pro was the camera was on the left hand side if you held it in landscape mode. In fact they even show it here in portrait mode as if. Oh, of course that's how you're supposed to hold an iPad. But the new one, they put it on top like they did with the air. So that's good. It does have the true depth camera system. It'll move around with you on center stage. Connectors. Yep. Thunderbolt USB 4, just like the previous version. Face ID. Here's one you're going to be interested in though. Apple Pencil Pro is not supported on your old iPad Pro.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, it requires an M2 or an M4. Excuse me, a new Air or a new Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because this is 12th generation. I mean 12.9 inch sixth generation iPad is on M2, so it's not the M2. They just. I declined to support the Pencil Pro on the older iPad Pro. Maybe a little nudge to get you in there.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. So now that means that now they have three pencils they have to keep like I checked to make sure even the first generation pencil is still on the. On the books. Which is I suppose is fair because they want to make sure it's compatible all the way down. But wow. That's. I'm sure that's a non optimal roadmap they. That they were trying to avoid.

[Leo Laporte]

They have bumped the minimum memory storage which is a good thing frankly. That was a little low at 128 but it's now 256 gigs. Let's do a little shopping, shall we? So Micah, you're going to get you like the 11 inch eh and black or silver space?

[Burke]

Black space.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to love that. Right up to 2 terabytes. Notice though, 2 terabytes is $1,000 more than the 256 gigabytes.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. It's not just storage. I'm thinking you get a better processor. I don't know what do you. You get something more. I don't know.

[Burke]

Anyway, people have not yet pulled that apart but I think that is you know in the works of trying to figure out. Exactly. Because we have seen in the past that the terabyte models have more RAM or have other features that the non terabyte models have.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's what it is.

[Alex Lindsay]

My current one is two terabytes and. And I mainly got it because I just was going to be using it to dump a lot of photo and footage when I'm traveling. I use it to edit and at this point in time like I would say one would have been fine but I always overdo it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because you can't add it right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, you can't really add it later. But it is super handy being able to like you know, take pictures with my cameras or take footage with my camera or the Osmo Pocket 3 now which is my favorite camera. Camera. Dump it straight to the iPad, get the chopping and then you know, output stuff on the fly. So it's. It's helpful but I don't really notice anything other than the space.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If you go up it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It might sound a little bit weird given how cheap you can buy a terabyte of storage like as a Thunderbolt device. But there. It's possible. It's likely that it's. It's not just the amount, it's the kind of RAM that they want to put in there. I thought it's still kind of weird that on the iPad air you can still get the minimum of 128 gigs which is like really seriously. But I think that might be equally a reflection of. Here's how much Apple spends on ram and here's how much it would affect the really, really comfortable buy in price of the iPad air if they made the minimum just 256 gigs.

[Burke]

That reminds me too, you were talking about the nano texture glass. Speaking of storage size impacting nanotexture GL glass is only available on the 1 TB and 2 TB models.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Burke]

So they you can't even get that nano on the smaller and that's probably.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because they're doing something with the image in order to make it work properly with the new nanotexture especially with the new sandwich displays. So it might need that extra space in order to do something. Who knows.

[Leo Laporte]

You're very generous Doc. Rock it could also be because they just want you'd have to get more, spend more money.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I never take that approach because that is the easiest way to ruin a business. And this business, business has not ruined itself for all of this time. But everyone always goes through oh, they're just doing this to make money. I'll tell you how I run my business. I do things to make money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're pushing you. They are giving you reasons to buy more. There is also thanks to a James B. Who's looking at the tech specs. The 1 and 2 terabyte models have one more performance core. They have twice the RAM 16 gigs. The lower storage units 256 and 512 have three cores in performance cores and 8 gigs of RAM. So that's what the bump is you're getting. But it sounds like you really want to at least get a terabyte if you want the nano texture or more ram. I think 16 gigs of ram seems like a good idea personally.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, especially with the investment in AI now that they're really going both shoulders ahead with that. We've at least on other platforms we've seen that these models, if you're trying to run them on device and that seems to be what Apple wants to do, you really do need as much RAM as possible to get them to work efficiently. And that was after people were already signing complaining that eight gigs seemed a little bit chintzy. At least not for undervice that might not have the option of getting more RAM than that or a really, really big price jump for getting more RAM than that. So. So I mean they did, I think a lot of us were kind of paying close attention to what do they say about artificial intelligence. Because they're going to part of the messaging going forward for Apple is going to be. Yes, but we acknowledge that we live in an AI driven tech world. Believe me, all of our hardware and software and operating systems are going to reflect that. So we're going to spend Even on a 41 minute or 40 minute presentation, we're going to spend at least 3, 4, 5 minutes explaining exactly how powerful the M4 is for how, how profitable new neural engine is. I think they actually even said that with a lot of fudge factor in it. The iPad Pro is the most powerful, has the most powerful onboard AI of any desktop desktop computer. They're basically saying that all the intel stuff has not come out yet. It is faster than all the stuff that is currently existing. It probably won't be as fast as what's going to happen in six months from now. But at least for now we can say that we have the most powerful AI hardware support in the CPU on any mobile or desktop computer.

[Leo Laporte]

If numbers are your thing, you can remember the number 38. 38 tops, which is what they're claiming for their AI engine. You can compare that when Qualcomm stuff comes out, which is any minute now. Yeah, I don't know if Intel's gonna even be in the game, but Qualcomm is claiming of course to be outperform the M2s. Nanotexture glass costs you 100 bucks more. Wi Fi, I mean, plus cellular, rather cellular costs you 200 bucks more. That's kind of a bump. It used to be one 29 bucks. It's now in 200.

[Burke]

And some people were caught off guard, I guess by the fact that the cellular models no longer have a physical SIM drawer. It's only esim.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Burke]

So if that's a thing that bugs you, be aware of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, and I imagine that will be more of an issue outside the US but here in the US I think every carrier does esim. Now let's see what else. Apple Pencil Pro is 129 bucks. Apple Regular Pencil Non Pro is $79. They are not offering the less expensive pencil.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Apple Pencils Dilettante Edition pencil like two.

[Alex Lindsay]

Weeks ago because I left one in the airplane. I just bought a new pencil two weeks ago. And it's funny, now a pencil can be found with Find my. And I was like, oh, oh, I see we're getting to tear apart my whole house looking for the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

They packed a lot of, a lot of stuff into that pencil. I I don't know if they have UWB in there or what, but it's pretty impressive. So let's see here Magic to add the magic keyboard. Let's see.

[Alex Lindsay]

Something I would never buy again, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? You like the third party ones?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I love my magic keyboard. But here, when I'm traveling, it happens so many times when you're set up on the. The tray table, right? And I have, I have a 12.9-inch Pro. It's bent back like that. Everything is glorious. I'm in my movie and the person in front decides to throw the chair back slowly and then it bites the top of that little clippy thing and the iPad either hits the tank or. Yeah. And I'm like, you know what? I'm not even going to bother anymore. I'm just going to get a regular folio and a. Some portable keyboard and just be happy because, yeah, it's. It's nice to type one. It does make it way heavier too. And so now that my most of my life is in an airplane or an airport, I'm like, yeah, I'm not buying one of those ever again. And I actually like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, well, that's gonna be true of any laptop. Of course. I do love my magic keyboard. I generally keep it. That's generally where the iPad lives. I find, though, that I think for the reason, like, for reasons that you were mentioning, I also tend to keep the standard, just like keyboard. Excuse me, the standard cover in the bag as well. Because if I'm going to be out for like a day, even overnight, it's kind of nice to have that option of being able to actually fold it as flat as I want it to go. The only thing I don't like about the magic keyboard is that it bends only to a certain extent and no further. And oftentimes that extra, like 15, 20 degrees is the difference between perfect viewing angle and. Okay, I guess that'll do.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes, exactly. And you know, here's it, so. This is so crazy, Andy. I often forget to take it out, out, like, because it lives there so much that in my brain it's just part of the deal. So oftentimes I'm sitting there, I'm holding it uncomfortably. I'm holding the magic keyboard uncomfortably. And my brain never says, hey, dummy, just pull it apart. Oh, look, you can just carry this, you know, and so, yeah, I agree with you.

[Leo Laporte]

Magic keyboard is $300.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's cheaper. It was 350.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right. That's a. That's a blessing. It does have a function row. So when key a win 300 bucks.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But it does make it a challenging proposition because now, again, I love the iPad Pro. But if Apple is positioning it as something that is competitive with a laptop, by the time you add in a comfortable keyboard case like that, you are not just. You are almost in the arena of like a performance grade Windows notebook with a touchscreen and with, with a pen that was probably not as good as the pencil, but as good as most people are going to want. So it's an interesting proposition to suddenly say once you look it's. I mean I cheaped out about it. I did get the iPad Pro I wanted. I did not get the keyboard case until like eight to ten months later when the previous generation model was on sale and I found out that you can actually use them in the new models too. So I was able, able to cheap out and at least spread it out a little bit. But if I had, If I had 15, $1600 worth of iPad in my basket at once, I would have need to take a good 48 hour breather to figure out what can I buy for $1600 that might do as good a job as this iPad Pro combination and can I do even better than that for the same amount or as good for 4 and $500 less if.

[Leo Laporte]

You are a mini fan. By the way, Gurman is saying that there will be a seventh generation mini at some point relatively soon. So we'll see, you know, and a.

[Andy Ihnatko]

New pencil to go with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe. I like the mini.

[Burke]

Exactly. IPad mini, pencils.

[Leo Laporte]

I use the mini far more than I use any other iPad. But okay, let's see. Have we covered all of the. Oh, I forgot to tell you your price. Micah with a terabyte 1899. It is. It's a laptop. It's an expensive Windows laptop. And that's the 11 inch model you put in the 13 inch model. It kind of goes up a little bit more as well. 2199, 21 niner niner.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I just put it in the chat. I paid 25.99 for my last one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, I should probably keep track of prices and stuff. This is I think the same price. Yes. As the old one was pretty close. It feels like it's the same, roughly the same price.

[Alex Lindsay]

So. Micah, I have a question. Sorry Leo, I know you're in boss, but I had to ask a question because you mentioned earlier, you guys said that not to get the nano. You think that the regular screen and paper like or something of that nature is better.

[Burke]

So I the reason why I was suggesting Leo not get the nano texture display.

[Leo Laporte]

He knows me because that's why? He knows.

[Burke]

Yeah, I know, Leo.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Is.

[Burke]

And B, the comp.

[Ray Maxwell]

Yeah.

[Burke]

The complaints that I've heard is that you do see a drop in brightness by doing that. And so for some people, that's annoying, even if it means that there's less reflect, you know, reflection. But I can't speak to the textural differences.

[Alex Lindsay]

See the thing that got me this morning. And again, my eyes were still halfway focusing when they talked about this. The stage jacked OLEDs.

[Burke]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

This time we're getting OLED. That's a difference. It should be brighter. It's a thousand nits or stop that stupid reactance. And then it also has. So the double. You have the double paddle. So that just has me intrigued. And normally I would just be triggering now, but now I think I have to go in and see for myself.

[Burke]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

How does it. How bright it is? Because you're right as you, you as you get. What's the word we say now, Leo? Vintage brightness is the difference between being able to see clearly or not.

[Micah Sifry]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

People need light.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I also. Yeah. I had the liquid paper on mine because Alex told me to and it gives it a nice texture with the pencil. I took it off because I just. I want the glass. I like the smooth glass. Now we'll see with the new pencil. We'll see. So you like a little texture on your. Your. On your screen, Doc.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, only because, you know, they show. One of the first things is like people taking actual notes when it comes to writing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is you want glorious for everything else.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's irritating and I wish I could just clip it on like, you know, the old grandpa shades. I wish I could just clip on the texture. Right. And then take it back off.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that is the advantage of the screen. Now the screen cover is you. You can at least remove it if you decide you don't like it when you buy the nano screen. You got it. It. It's yours there. Yeah.

[Burke]

I can't remember who it is, but somebody has figured out how they. The outside is a magnet and so. Or something like that. I'll have to send you.

[Jason Snell]

I'll.

[Burke]

I'll find it and I'll.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll tell you the whole way around the whole perimeter.

[Burke]

Yeah. They basically make the outside the sticky part, but it's not sticky.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can have a magnetic screen and then.

[Burke]

Yeah. Pull it off afterwards.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because you remember the old school CRT3Ms, they were just clip on right. When you wanted the privacy screen. Anti glare. It was just a Little frame.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, we need more Velcro in a. In a $2,000 table.

[Burke]

That's it. Thank you to Mike in the chat. It's from astropad, and it's called Rock Paper Pencil.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Burke]

And, yeah, it just goes on the outside is where it connects, and then you can just take it off. It's nano cling. It's not magnets.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, nano cling is even better than I want to get from that new. From ceramic fan wrap. Nano cling. Okay, so it is just a cling. I don't. That seems like that's.

[Burke]

I have one.

[Leo Laporte]

You do.

[Burke]

I haven't installed it, though, so I.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Can'T talk about that.

[Burke]

It's just been sitting in a box for, like, a month now. Because I bought it. I was like, oh, this is so cool. But, yeah, I'll have to try it and let you know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Nano cling sounds like something that is sponsored by the mill trimming products that's on all the podcasts.

[Burke]

I was thinking it was sponsored by Shark.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God, you guys. You mean. Okay, so it uses static. Basically, it's stronger than magnets, according to astropad. Huh. Huh. And they also have their own Rock Paper Pencil tip, which looks like a ballpoint pencil.

[Burke]

Comes with a kit. Yeah, yeah, you can get that with the kit if you'd like. But the problem is I have to. This is so stupid. But I have to clean the iPad screen first, and I just am lazy, so I haven't done it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you want it perfect, don't you?

[Alex Lindsay]

Might we recommend you a bottle of swoosh?

[Burke]

I have swoosh. I've got all the stuff I need, except for the desire to make it happen. That's the one thing I like.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't it funny how geeks converge on a product? It's just odd. Like the Nilay Patel said. The printer everybody has that nobody talks about, which is. What is that?

[Burke]

Is that brother laser brother HL2 something something.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then. Go ahead, you can bring me the swoosh. And then apparently we have without. It's like our menstrual cycles have synchronized. We all have this same cleaners. Oh, wait. But this is not a swoosh. This is whoosh.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, he meant whoosh. I meant whoosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. What a relief.

[Alex Lindsay]

Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

What a relief. I wouldn't want to be. Yeah.

[Burke]

We were going to have to find a new product called swoosh, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I never heard of whoosh, but apparently our team does.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, man, it tastes really good with a single malt. I'm joking.

[Leo Laporte]

Do not drink your whoosh. All right, let's take a little break. We have lots more to talk about. We'll go to the 11 inch, we'll talk about the new pro pencil.

[Burke]

You take the break. I'll clean my iPad screen and put this nano cling on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Put your, put your woo.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Use your meats. That's something you should do spontaneously and in a rush.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So what was the, the feeling of the Office Hours crew?

[Micah Sifry]

I think, I think that, I think a lot of people enjoyed it. I think that there's definitely, I think overall there was a little bit of a. Yeah, they caught up to some degree, you know, with things that were already out there. But also I think that Apple's, their approach to it, I think is, is definitely unique and very uniquely Apple, you know, in the sense that they basically created what we kind of of thought of as three layers. You know, they have the. You're going to ask, you're going to do some things on your device, some things on the cloud, some things into the, into the private cloud, and then for all the other things you still have access to right now, chat, GPT and eventually Gemini and other things. But I do think that number one is that I think that Apple always looks at what will 90% of the population, 90% of their users do 90% of the time. And I think if you look at what is being produced by the device and the private cloud, it's probably between 70, 90% of what the average person wants to do with their phone or with their device. And then they still have this kind of release valve and they can, and they have the freedom to keep on expanding, watching, you know, like expanding what people are doing on their devices and on their private cloud while still never having it not be able to scale up. I think that the other thing is they're giving most of these, these tools or almost all these tools back to the developers. And so developers are going to be able to add this, you know, I think before they had to kind of figure out what it was going to do and how much it was going to cost and all those other things. And a lot of those things now are getting tied in to the, you know, being made available to the developers to add to it. So I think that, I think we definitely saw a very, you know, fairly unique way of approaching the problem that is something only Apple can do. Doesn't necessarily make it better or worse, just makes it an Apple version of AI. And so I think that that's. But I think a lot of folks are pretty excited about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy, what'd you think?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I thought it was really, really great. The. When you. It's great that we're talking about this a day later as opposed to the day of, because this is true of pretty much all Apple keynotes. But I think especially this one, after a day when like your first enthusiasm wears off, that's when you start looking at exactly what was shown off and you realize that, okay, they didn't show off a lot that was really new or really fresh. A lot of the most interesting stuff, like the intelligence and Siri, they were really vague about exactly how this is going to work and when it's going to be released. So this was all like a lot of hypothetical stuff. But when you compare it to Google I O's AI keynote last month, it's pretty much the same thing. Actually almost lasted exactly the same amount of time. I was surprised it lasted nearly two hours. But whereas Google was extremely hyped about talking about the basic technology and talking about the core research and talking about the layers that they were putting into this, Apple really wanted just to focus on. Here are some actual things that. Here are some demos of actual things our intelligence are going to do built into our actual products right now. And it doesn't really matter that they can't really. That they. That maybe it's not quite so ambitious as far as what they can announce right now. It gives people a sense of comfort that, yeah, Apple does have a strategy. Yeah, there looks like they're not going to make the same mistakes that OpenAI and Google made, which are myriad and legendary. And it looks like they bought enough time to actually make these things happen. So I'm really, really very pleased with it.

[Micah Sifry]

And one of the things is that it. While it. The keynote was very cursatory, I definitely encourage people to look to look at. The State of the Union was much deeper into what Apple was doing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

You know, so it was a much deeper deep dive. It's not like, oh, we just kind of added. I think that there was this little bit of like the kind of uninformed press was saying, well, they've incorporated chat GPT and it was kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's a little deeper than that.

[Micah Sifry]

You know, like they're doing an enormous amount of work on the device and enormous amount of work in the private cloud and then they're basically a release valve is. Oh yeah. And you can have all these other things on the periphery if you want to be able to Add them. And by the way, if you're a developer, you don't have to do anything other than turn, you know, open it up. If you're already using Apple's tools, it's very easy to add.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I mean we're, the State of the Union had a lot of really, it really did bring home the idea that no, they didn't just say, okay, well, we entered into a desperation agreement with OpenAI to get basic text summaries and basic rewrites somewhere on our device. No, when you look at things like the private cloud compute, which I'm sure we'll talk about in more depth later on, that's what they're talking about. How not only surprised me that it's going to be running on Apple's own silicon in the cloud, but also that it was only about 10 or 15 minutes of the State of the Union. But they're mentioning that. Well, basically we started with like iOS X for the operating system that these servers are running and we removed everything that we don't need and not just to make it faster, more performative, but saying we even removed from the operating system persistent storage because this is not, this is supposed to not actually keep any, any people's data. So we've removed anything that can actually make that happen. So this is, it's, it's great. Because if in the next year some naysayers are saying, oh well, gosh, look at, look at ChatGPT12, hey, look at Gemini81. Look at what it can do. Apple really is, has a long term plan. They're making, they're making a statement, they have a point of view about how they want to go about this. And so long as they stay focused on delivering actual appreciative tools that are better or as good as what we can actually see through a third party app on Gemini or OpenAI. They got time. They got time.

[Leo Laporte]

Maika, you're nodding.

[Burke]

Yeah, with the last part there. I think simply the most important aspect for me yesterday, and we talked about this a lot during our coverage of the event, was the very clear and thoroughly thought out method by which Apple is introducing Apple intelligence and kind of setting the, not just the groundwork for it, but also kind of how its approach looks and how it differs, I think from other approaches and the way that it was so clearly explained. And we talk about the capabilities that it has, we talk about the architecture and then we talk about the most important aspect for consumers, which is what can you actually do with it? And I just felt it was very considered and I really appreciated that aspect of it. I kind of felt comfortable because here's the thing, there are a lot of people, a lot of my colleagues who feel a type of way about Generative AI and for the most part I've existed outside of that. I understand the complaints about Generative AI, I understand the worries and the concerns about how it's impacting different folks. But I am also enamored of the things that I have been able to do with it. And so seeing a more considered approach from a company that I cover quite a bit, I liked that. I was happy that there was that consideration that went into it and that it was clear that the company said we're not just going to give you this blank canvas. I think it was actually it was either Tim Cook or it was Federighi who in an interview talked about not just giving the teenager the keys to the car. That isn't what Apple wanted to do with generative AI. Some very specific use cases and some very specific demos showing how it can be used in day to day life. And I think that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me show some outside opinions. During the event, you and I were watching Apple's stock go down, then up, down, then up. It was down quite a bit. Well, since then it's gone up quite a bit. It is now $12 up. It was as low as 191 bucks yesterday. It's up to 205 bucks today. The market says yay, this is a, this is a good thing. Elon Musk says if Apple integrates Oi AI OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned in my companies. This is an unacceptable security violation and visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door. Will they be stored in a Faraday cage? He's sounding nuts. I think it's only a matter of time before he starts talking about sharks. It's patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to make their own AI yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security and privacy. Apple has no clue what's actually going on. Once they hand your data over to OpenAI, they're selling you down the river. Should point out Elon has been in a feud with OpenAI. He funded it initially, but pulled out when he decided they weren't going in the right direction and they wouldn't let him run the show. Sam Altman was at the Apple event signaling at least some support from OpenAI. And then there's this from Charlie Warzel at the Atlantic the iPhone is now an AI Trojan horse. Now that's not all bad. He says generative AI has become truly inescapable. I think that my takeaway, I mean, look, I kind of like AI. I don't think generative AI, you know, AI chat bots is all that interesting. I was really glad actually, Apple didn't show that. But there is a lot of things you can do with A.I. that's really cool. In fact, it's my opinion Apple Sherlocked AI because AI now stands for Apple Intelligence, not artificial intelligence. And I think from a marketing point of view alone, Apple did exactly the right thing. They said, this is AI, as you guys have said, for the real people, for the masses, doing stuff that real people really want to do.

[Micah Sifry]

And, and I think that we have to remember that we were talking about this this morning in Office Hours, that, that most people have not used any AI. So, you know, we talk about it and it feels like something like everybody's using it all the time. I have ChatGPT open all the time. I'm using Mid Journey at least once a day. Like it, it seems like it's all around us. But if you look at the average person using their iPhone, they're, they're not using ChatGPT. They're not using any of those things. So as you look at all the features that Apple's bringing to the device into the private cloud, cloud by itself, that's gonna, that's gonna become ubiquitous with using your computer, you know, and then you are going to very easily be able to jump over and get some, get more if you want to, from Chat GPT. So it really is, for the Apple consumer is going to introduce a lot of people to AI and so, and a lot of their stuff that they do day to day is going to probably exist on their device or on the private cloud. The, the memo, the genmojis, the, the little images, the fun stuff that they're going to do, filling something in, doing some correction. You know, all of that stuff is going to be stuff that it, that, that is done very seamlessly for them. That's going to be their introduction. And again, because it's everywhere for developers, it, it has kind of commoditized the service, you know, in a sense that a lot of people could say they were doing AI. Now most Apple developers can just add it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm sure you're right that most people haven't tried it. ChatGPT had 100 million monthly users, users at its peak. So somebody's using it I think certainly the public is very aware of AI. It's been widely reported. I think probably most people have just tried it just to see what would happen. Remember, Microsoft has it built into Windows, the biggest operating system in the world and you know, it's kind of hard to get away from it frankly in Windows. So I think more people have tried it than you think, Alex. But I do think Apple is being fairly judicious. Tim Cook, in an interview you with the Washington Post admitted that AI is going to hallucinate. Let me see if I can find the quote. What's your confidence?

[Burke]

That might be where they talk about giving the teen the keys.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Josh Tyrangil who's an opinion columnist, writes about AI in the Washington Post. He says what's your confidence that Apple Intelligence will not hallucinate? Tim Cook says it's not 100%, but I think we've done everything that we know to do do thinking, including thinking very deeply about the readiness of the technology in the areas that we're using it in. So I'm confident it will be very high quality. But I'd say in all honesty, that's short of 100%. I would never claim it's 100%. So he's, he's hedging a little bit saying yeah, yeah, you might get something weird. I think the biggest risk for they're smart because they're not just kind of giving AI an open field that everybody can just try, you know, try stuff. But they didn't introduce a brand new app Image Playground, which is, you know, this is where Google has gotten in trouble. Stable diffusion mid journey, even Microsoft Designer have gotten in trouble because their AI image generators have been used to generate images. You know, people say, oh that's problematic, Apple's got an image generator.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, but you notice that it's not. None of the demos that they gave showing anything that was nearly photorealistic. It's all like just these playful images and only three styles. Animation, illustration, illustration, style or sketch. So yeah, I think they're right now they're putting such strict guardrails on what this is used for and what they're willing to endorse sending out in the world that was generated by image playgrounds. Hey, make a cartoon. Make a Pixar cartoon version of your mom riding a horse.

[Leo Laporte]

That solves one of the problems is just people taking AI generated deep fakes and passing them off as real because it's not going to be real to.

[Burke]

Have it right there.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't solve the problem. Google had where people said, show me some Supreme Court Justices and they were all black, or show me some Founding Fathers and they were all black. Now, I personally don't think that's a problem, but there are plenty of people who did. And Google had to step back and really retreat on its image generation. How long before iOS 18 comes out? And by the way, this will not come out with iOS 18. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

We're just.

[Burke]

Wait, it's not out with the betas yet at all. And when it does come out, I, I think based on the words have been used, it seems like it will be in beta even when it's in.

[Leo Laporte]

Public, even after the iPhone comes out. Probably. I think it's going to be later, much later this year. But how long it'll be seconds after it comes out before somebody types in, show me some Supreme Court justices. Right. Or show me some Founding fathers.

[Burke]

I'm curious to see how they walk things out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Burke]

Are there how much words I can't type in?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How much safety? And we know that safety does not work work because all of these companies, not so much up in AI, but certainly anthropic and Google have tried to.

[Burke]

Be safe and there's always, quote, unquote, jailbreaking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So, you know, I'm sure Apple Red teamed the hell out of this before they let it go. And this is one of those things that if you listen really closely, you would maybe assume that this is coming in iOS 18 when it's first released, but the only timeframe they ever gave for a lot of this stuff was sometime in the, the next year.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're not even done probably red teaming it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, it's a good demo, but they're not. Yeah. There's so much. Again, the things they learned From Google and OpenAI is that the more ambitious that you get, the more powerful a thing you tool you want to give to people, the more dangerous it's going to be in the hands of people who don't understand what it is or people who understand exactly what it is and want to use it to perform acts of extreme mischief. And they're again, they got time. So they're very, very willing to simply say, okay, we've got a great image generator. Generator. It really is just for making cartoons and illustrations. It's going to be for things like in notes, if you just draw like a rough sketch, you can have our image generator turn it to something that's a little bit more refined. Really. The notes app has so much, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think we should spend some time. That was really.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We'll get to it. A killer like my goodness, it reminded me of the Newton in good ways. Not an egg freckles way, but in a good way way.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm sorry, I'm just not to jump what we're going to be talking about. But I think it was pretty amazing how very quietly they slipped in. Oh, and if you want to like, you don't have to just do handwriting to text. You can do just do handwriting to handwriting because we will figure out what your handwriting looks like. So we'll do spell check and we will correct the spelling in your handwriting if you want. If you want to use our generative AI to like tighten something up, it will tighten it up in your handwriting because we will build a facsimile of your handwriting. That's the. And if this were being done by Gemini, it would be a wonderful tech demo. It would be an amazing white paper. But oh my God, the Internet would be absolutely choked to death with the Congratulations. Now Google knows how to fake your signature everywhere. Apple really set up the stage very, very well by saying that here is what they talked about privacy and basically guardrails before they talked about anything else. And again they're doing very, very simple things. They're showing exactly what this is being used for. Not now. You can make a font out of your handwriting. It's no. Here's a way that we can now have your natural handwriting be editable, cut and pasteable and more natural to work with. If you like to work with handwriting, we will.

[Leo Laporte]

We're still seeing Apple intelligence. Just the other day we got the update to 18:2 still. So Apple is getting more and more intelligent all the time. Right. And we will continue to cover it on MacBreak Weekly. You're watching our special year end best of episode. Glad you're here. I do want to ask a little tiny favor from all of you, not just club Twitters. Every year, you may remember, we do a survey of our audience. We want to get to know you a little bit better. It helps us with sales because we can say, you know, as we often do, 70% of our audience are it decision makers, that kind of thing. It's a very quick survey. Shouldn't only take you a couple of minutes. TWIT TV survey. This is the new 2024, 2025 survey. We're starting a little bit earlier this year than we usually do. It just helps us and it would be be doing us all a favor if you, if you did it so in between shows. Maybe. Maybe. Twit TV survey. Thank you so much.

[John Ashley]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

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

[Leo Laporte]

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. As time went by, we realized that the amount of news about the Vision Pro was shrinking. We decided maybe we should just carve out a little. A little niche in MacBreak Weekly. In order to do that, we introduced the Vision Pro jingle. All right. We apparently John Ashley, our talented producer and technical director, has created for us. Oh, but you don't have it.

[Burke]

No, no.

[Jason Snell]

See, this is where when you do.

[Burke]

The thing now, now it's going to just show up magically in post production as.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, so even though you don't have it and people watching live won't.

[Andy Ihnatko]

See it, a premiere for everybody except for the people who are actually doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. You are so lucky.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For the email. Email us and tell us on Discord. Tell us how you like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, tell us how you liked it. Does it say anything, John Ashley? Or is it just like.

[Burke]

Oh, it's actually based off of what Andy did last week.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, jingle.

[Leo Laporte]

You made the song.

[Jason Snell]

No. So what do you see?

[Leo Laporte]

What do you know? It's time for vision, bro.

[Burke]

It was be more 236.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Be more 236 and I used it. Yay.

[Burke]

So which is happening right here.

[Leo Laporte]

So right now I will say, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to talk Vision Pro.

[Burke]

Andy, that's your cue.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Go.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you have to do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk.

[Leo Laporte]

Bing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Vision Pro.

[Burke]

That was for the last live audience.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just the, you know, the sketch version. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

[Jason Snell]

Wow. What a great theme song that was, everybody. Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

If only there were.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm running my congressman. That's our new national anthem. If we have any pride in this country at all.

[Leo Laporte]

If only there were some Vision Pro news. Tim Cook in an interview says he. He wears it regularly to watch videos.

[Jason Snell]

Yay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

With. To an Australian journalist, I believe, who had to fly to Cupertino to interview Tim Cook. I. I thought that was also a flex, right? It's like, oh yeah, it's launching in Australia. We've got a view, an availability for you to talk to Tim Cook. Oh, amazing. Is he coming to Sylvia, Sydney?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but you are coming to Cupertino.

[Jason Snell]

Fly on over. Fly on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a long flight.

[Jason Snell]

It really puts my 70 minute drive to Apple park in perspective when I meet people who flew in from Australia or the UK to go to an Apple event. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is the quintessential Vision Pro user waiting for more content. That is one of my favorite memes. It's from Narcos. That is. What's his name? Yeah, Bad guy Canada. This Friday, Ray Maxwell's very excited because he bought a Vision Pro Australia and he bought a Vision Pro from America that he couldn't use some things with. So I guess, Ray, now you'll be able to be legit. You can come out of the closet and tell them.

[Jason Snell]

My friends in the UK are excited because first off, if it breaks, they could take it to a store and instead of flying to New York. And second, it means that they can also buy some other accessories and stuff and like it's. And they can use their own Apple id and it's like there's lots of good things for all of those people out there and it'll be interesting to see, you know, new markets. There will be an influx of new users to a certain extent and we'll see what happens happens with that. The betas are great. I've been enjoying the Vision Pro betas because again, they're actually adding, like, why are you even on the Vision Pro if you're not using the beta? You should, like, what are you even.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing you're going to be cutting edge.

[Jason Snell]

Requires you to stay on 1.0. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Be cutting edge.

[Jason Snell]

The only reason you use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So what do you use to dust your Vision Pro?

[Jason Snell]

I keep it in a case.

[Leo Laporte]

I keep it in a case and every day you take it out of that case.

[Jason Snell]

I do not use it every day but I do use it, I would say two or three times a week. And whenever I get in there then I'm like, I don't want to leave.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? You still. So see that's good. That's a good sign. So you go like this is good. I like this. I'm enjoying it.

[Jason Snell]

There's a lot of good stuff. And then beta, I can write in it a lot better because the beta's got the pass through for the keyboard. So you can be on the beach and still see your keyboard, which is nice because it used to be you could see your hands but not the keyboard. And so it's like ghostly typing. It's not as good. This is better. And yeah, I did a special Persona meeting where we use shareplay.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you do that a lot?

[Jason Snell]

They're doing some stuff. And Apple Intelligence, as we said, I think last week Mark Gurman said it is coming to Vision Pro. It'll be next year like everything else. But it's not like it's not going to show up there. So it's progressing. They need to do more content. That's the bottom line. They need to do more content.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see if Apple like where they go. It's partially needing more content and partially building the tools to develop that content. And so it'll be really interesting to see if Apple does more work on both of those things. I mean I think that one of the things that is going that a lot of us think is going to happen is when the blackmagic camera comes out, we think a lot there'll be a lot of 180 degree spatial that comes out. Because every time you do 180 degree spatial it's like a art project. Like it is like not everything is difficult, everything is hard. And so and this is a big piece of like when we're Talking about the 90s, like bunch stuff came out and then nothing happened and you know a bunch of stuff, you can build all that technology but if things aren't able to generate the content for that, it will die off by itself. And so I think that, you know, the blackmagic having resolved and obviously Final Cut will have some of the tools as well of being able to effectively generate the 180 degree content. Because I think a lot of people, when they see the 180 degree content, there's a pretty, you know, a high, high number of people think it's really great. The problem is, is that it's really hard to make right now. And so I think that having a camera that can shoot 90 frames a second, 8K per eye, you know, nothing that's never existed before, like to have a single camera, camera that does that well, has never existed in the wild before for what will probably be $25,000. And you don't want to say, like $25,000 is a lot of money, but that's not what it rents for. It rents for. It'll rent for, you know, a thousand fifteen hundred dollars a day, which means people can go out and shoot a concert or shoot something else with it. So I think it's going to be really interesting. I also still think that there's incredible opportunities for things like Jigspace if their business model was more effective, you know, like. Like, you know, Jigspace is a really cool product that is just really expensive to develop for.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's your Vision Pro segment.

[John Ashley]

Now you see.

[Leo Laporte]

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

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna use the Vision Pro, every Vision Pro signature to remind people they should go and they should sign up for the stream Voodoo.

[Leo Laporte]

When is that?

[Micah Sifry]

Spring. Voodoo dot com. I'm. Well, we're working on getting it updated so that we can come up to twit and stream it. So we want to stream on. We're a week or two away.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, exciting.

[Micah Sifry]

So. So we're. So we're working on that.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't wait too long.

[Micah Sifry]

By the way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not. We're shutting down the studio. So you don't want to have to do that in the attic. It just won't be.

[Micah Sifry]

I've been using that. I've been using that as a. It will be actually pretty cool. Anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway.

[Micah Sifry]

But the. But I'd rather do it in the. In the studio there. So. So we're. I'm using that as a. Hey, we don't have all day. So. So we're good. So it's not. And by the way, it's not me. It's not like I own the company.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Micah Sifry]

Or even part of it. I just, I'm just working with Streams and they're very grateful, doing great, great work on it and we're really excited because I want to do that before. Before you're not using the studio there.

[Leo Laporte]

Where will you. Is it one camera or is it one camera? And where will you put it? Like right in front of me.

[Micah Sifry]

I'm gonna try to put it right in the middle. I mean we're gonna play with it a little bit and try to put it right in the middle. So we'll put it over.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you get surround sound as well? Like we can't.

[Micah Sifry]

We think we can. That's what, that's what I'm working on right now. So basically I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want me to try to get all live people for that episode? Episode. Would that be better? Let me.

[Micah Sifry]

Let me see. Yeah, that would be great. You know, it looks better.

[Leo Laporte]

Since you have a date, let us know and I'll get bonito on that and we can, you know, get people who can come up to be here.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah. So we're gonna try to do. And we will try to. I mean with everyone sitting in front. I don't know how much it's going to make a difference to have like surround audio, but we are going to try it. So basically we'll have Ambisonic folded down into binary.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, can you want come up for that?

[Jason Snell]

Okay. I mean, depends on.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't know the date yet.

[Micah Sifry]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And Alex is, is in. In the area. So that's two. Get Kathy Gellis to come up. Ian Thompson's in the area. There are quite a few people. So we'll try to do an all live twit for that one. That would be much better, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Micah Sifry]

100%. So. So anyway, so but you just go to stream voodoo.comspatial and make sure you have the app. It won't be hard to figure out what to do because we'll tell you it's going live and then what we're building into it is that I can just turn on the phone and you turn on the app and you see it so you don't have to figure it out. So. So we're working on that.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is what they specialize in.

[Micah Sifry]

And just sign up for it. I think you still have to sign up for it. I think they're still rolling it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it says join beta.

[Micah Sifry]

It's a beta. Yeah, but, but you should sign up for it. It's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

I would imagine if you have a vision pro, you. You're pretty much in. You like it's not.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally.

[Jason Snell]

It's.

[Micah Sifry]

It's. And, and I think that again you know, I think that there's a lot of. A lot of opportunity. I. I just want to promote the idea that people start to realize how cool it will be to see 3D, so. And we saw a little bit of that at WWC with Daring Fireball. And I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're going to do it better. We know that, but now, does this mean I have to buy a Vision Pro? I guess I do.

[Micah Sifry]

You don't have to. I'll show it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I use yours?

[Micah Sifry]

I have one. I take the lenses out and you'll have to reset it and you'll be.

[Leo Laporte]

Able to see it. I just see. Mine would be just getting dusty. In fact, I got rid of the Meta Quest Pro. I gave it away. Who took it? Do we know, John? No, we don't know. The HTC 5 has been sitting in the giveaway room for a long time. As far as. I don't know what he wants.

[Micah Sifry]

The Supernatural. I think Supernatural is, Is the best VR exercise tool so far. Like, I play with that a fair bit.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke got it. Burke got it. Congratulations, Burke. You're a winner for the htc.

[Micah Sifry]

The Vive.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he took the other thing. What was it? The Meta Quest. You know what, that's not bad. I mean, it was $1,400 when I bought it, but it was fun. I just. I don't want to strap a computer on my face. I just. It doesn't feel good.

[Micah Sifry]

I think, again, I think the Quest, especially the. I think there's a lot that I enjoy on the. Just on the little $250 quest. Yeah, that's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, for people who are interested, who don't want to spend 3500 bucks, the Quest 3 is a very good choice. Apple is now sending out money. If you had a butterfly keyboard and if you responded to the class action suit in 2022. Apple agreed to pay $50 million for MacBook owners from 2015 to 2019. I was one of them. But I, you know, I didn't, you know, fill out the form in the claims process back then. Settlement got final approval last May. Apple is now sending out up to $395 according to 9 to 5Mac.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I got a friend, A friend of mine got a check for $395.

[Leo Laporte]

That's sweet. Yeah, that's better than you usually get in a class actions lawsuit. It's better than a bag of pop chips. You have to have two of the keyboards to get 395. One keyboard, 1 25. And if you had to replace keycaps, 50 bucks. You could only claim the settlement if you lived in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York or Washington. So if you weren't in those states, you weren't even eligible. That's how the 50 million gets divided up so nicely. Look at that. This is. Who is this? Is this Michael Burkhart? At 9 to 5, Mac got two $395 checks. Wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. There could be a really great 90 minute documentary that will not air on Apple TV all about that model of MacBook. I remember getting it for review and having to get into the mindset of has Apple lost their minds? Every step after component after component after component, decision after decision was just not just the wrong decision, but the sort of thing that we like Mac users make fun of like Dell and Lenovo and the Windows World 4. I can't think of another Mac that's ever been sold that was just such a touch titanic sticky rice ball of failure than that machine. And the keyboard was just the most glaring part of it. I would love to, I would love to see a documentary in which, in which we walk, we get walked through every level of every one of those decisions that went into that thing.

[Leo Laporte]

On this day, August 6, 1997. What is that? 37 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld Boston, Boston, and was joined by a giant, Bill Gates, who said I'm going to pump 150 million into Apple. We didn't know at the time, but Apple was on a very short Runway to running out of money, like literally months from running out of money. So Bill Gates saved Apple on this day in 1997.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And it wasn't, I don't know, I have to refresh my memory about the financials. But it was just as big that at the same event he announced that, oh, by the way, we will be committing to several years of updates to Microsoft Office for Mac. And that also gave a lot of confidence to Apple, to observers of Apple at the time when Apple really needed someone to say, yeah, we don't think that you're going away. I mean I remember the only time I ever said, sent an email to one of my colleagues kind of calling them up for not doing a good job, was a reviewer for a newspaper reviewed one of the latest power books. I think it was one of the PowerBook titaniums. And it was a typical review, like I don't know, like 600 to 800 words but every like second or third paragraph was of course it doesn't really matter how good the screen is because Apple's going to be going out of business in about two months anyway. A good six to eight hours worth of power off of one charge. I mean it's. Who cares? Because Apple's going to be going out of business in a couple of months anyway. And I'm like, that has nothing to do. Review the thing in front of you. Not reviewing the company, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Apple didn't go out of business, gosh darn it. Thank goodness.

[Micah Sifry]

Well, and if you look at the volume of the, of the stock, the stock was on the 6th was about 16 times more more than it was on the 5th. You know, on that day. Like it, it definitely like everybody understood how important it went up about about 25% that day.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's probably because Microsoft felt like we need a competitor because we're on the next year. The DOJ was going to sue them.

[Jason Snell]

It's a couple things. It is true. Boy, that was the low point, I would say. And it started turning around. Macro Expo August 97 for me was the absolute low point. And it was Jobs coming back. Back. He killed the clones. The clones. You know, clone makers were there at that event and it was like it was clear that they were gonna get.

[Micah Sifry]

Bulldozed them like they just had them thrown into like they had a power.

[Andy Ihnatko]

PC, had, had had the zippered case that he famously held over his head that this contains a 60 what, 603040 based laptop but we are not allowed to release it to you. And you know, you could hear the Ritz crackers crunching inside the case. Who knows? But still.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, so the, so it was, it was a bad time. And although my understanding, and this is a funny thing, I know a lot of people talk now about how what Microsoft was primarily doing is making sure it had a competitor that it could point to so that it wasn't a, you know, an even bigger monopoly than it already was. And I'm sure that that was part of the aspect of it. I my understanding from talking to people at Microsoft and in the Mac unit at Microsoft back then, then in the years surrounding 97, is that Apple or that Microsoft made more money when a Mac was sold than when a PC was sold because everybody who bought a Mac bought Microsoft Office and, and that Microsoft made money on the Mac, they made a lot of money on the Mac and they didn't want the money the Mac to go away. But the OS 10 transition was looming and Apple was almost going out of business. And I think there was A real fear that Microsoft was just going to say, forget it. At which point the Mac is not viable. Right. Like in this. I know it seems weird now, but at that point, like now we would say like if, as long as you got a web browser, you're actually doing pretty good. But back then, if Office didn't exist on the Mac, no one would be able to buy a Mac. You couldn't justify it. PageMaker and Photoshop would not be enough. You would not be able to do it. So it was a real lifeline and they made the investment in Apple as well. And they clearly were just like Steve obviously talked to Bill Gates and said, need your help, need your commitment, Keep this going. We got a turnaround plan. You can make an investment, you're going to make that money back, you're going to make a big profit. And so they did it. But like that was the moment where the Think different campaign had just been unveiled. It was unveiled at that event, I believe. And, but that was it. Like all Steve Jobs had for, for taking over was marketing the, you know, they didn't have the imac yet, they didn't have the ipod, they didn't have OS 10 yet, although it was clear that it was coming because they bought Next. So you know, it was a, it was bad. People were talking like that, got that event, got on the COVID of Time and Newsweek. Like it was a huge deal for Apple. At a moment where everybody else was thinking that Apple was about, I mean, I got the questions was like, was Apple going to go out of business? Listen, I know this is a little insidery, but those who lived through it back then, the two big Mac magazines were Mac World and Mac User. They were, I worked at Mac User at the time. They were pitted against each other. We were arch rivals. And it was so bad that the arch rival owners of those two companies, IDG and Ziff Davis, they got together and decided that they could cut their losses by merging macworld and Mac User into a single magazine. The, the hope for Apple was so low that they decided it would be better to get into bed with their arch enemy and make a 50:50 joint venture rather than throw money against the wall doing a Mac magazine now. You know, did they regret that? Almost instantly they did that. That merger was announced the week before Mac World Expo in Boston where Bill Gates went on the big screen above Steve Jobs. Like, that's what I mean about the low point. It was a personal low point for me for sure, but like that, I just, I can't say this Enough. Two businesses who are at each other's throats across many markets, PC World, PC Magazine, you name it, gave up. They're like, forget it. Let's, let's, let's cut our losses. Let's cut our costs. And it was binding. They couldn't get out of it afterward. And eventually IDG bought Zip Davis out. And Zif Davis was contractually precluded from doing an Apple magazine after that too. Which is like huge regrets, right? But like, so people, people who don't remember that era, it was real bad. And when we say Bill Gates appearing on that screen was kind of all that stood between Apple and the abyss, it's kind of true.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, the, the, the talk about Lowe's, the number is still etched in my mind. 12 and 78 was how low the stock price of Apple went. And I remember leaning back in my chair and thinking, thinking, ethically, it's wrong for me to invest in Apple. Moreover, I have inside information into Apple that would make it illegal. I cannot buy Apple stock. And so I was telling people that this is if there is. I was trying to get people to buy not because I wanted Apple to live, but because I wanted somebody to benefit from my supposition that this is. Apple is in danger. But I don't think they're doomed with a capital duh. And this is a very, very low price for what could be a very, very valuable company.

[Micah Sifry]

And I wonder.

[Leo Laporte]

Design in our YouTube chat says, I bought Apple at 16. And I think he's, I think he's joining us from his mansion in the sky.

[Micah Sifry]

I have a. I had a person that I was, that I knew that it was at the time, and I didn't have any money. Like, I was not making any money. So it was. No, there was not. I had nothing to invest. But he said, what should I do? Apple's going down. And he had some stock already. And I like, buy more. Buy a lot more. Buy a lot more. And I said that. And he, he no longer works. Yeah, he dumped a bunch of money into it over, you know, over a good time. I think he bought a winery or something.

[Leo Laporte]

According to Mr. McIntosh on X.com, neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates was happy with the looming Bill Gates. Steve Jobs said that was the my worst and stupidest staging event ever. It was bad because it made me look small and Apple look small. Well, it's compared to Bill Gates, that's for sure. But Bill Gates said, I didn't know my face was going to be blown up to looming proportions shown Here.

[Jason Snell]

Relative market size.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, it's funny, you know, we do, we do these. I. One of the businesses that I do on a pretty regular basis is take someone from their office and put them into events like this. And I, when I look at this one, I'm always like, that's why we tell people they should do this. Like, if you're an executive, you're better off, off, you know, coming in over the screen because you're going to be really big. It's a whole wizard of Oz, you know, kind of thing. Especially when you tune it. It. It usually comes out pretty well.

[Jason Snell]

But if you ever wonder why. Why was it that Eric Schmidt came on stage at the iPhone?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Why was it that the guy from Singular came on stage.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

At the end. Why? It's like they never did that again. They never made that mistake again. That was clearly lodged in Steve's mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Dancing in. Dancing clean room outfits on the stage at Mac. Yeah, that' don't do that again, Steve.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this. All of our chat folk are now telling us what level they bought Apple stock at and then when they sold it, and I feel bad, somebody bought it at $12 and. And then sold it at 14. Big mistake.

[Jason Snell]

This, this is why you need to support the club for Twit, is that we're not allowed to do that. You know, we can't make these tech investments.

[Leo Laporte]

Wish we could, but we could hint about that.

[Jason Snell]

Although to Alex's point, like in 19, in the summer of 1997, when my magazine just got folded and I didn't know if I was going to have a job, I. I was not going to put more of my life and career into, and money into Apple at that point. Like throw more bad money into the pot. But it turned out it worked out. It worked out.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, that's it. Speaking of Sherlocking, that's it for the last Mac Break Weekly to come to you from the east side Studios. This copper bar behind me. Gone. Gone. The giant gear. No, I kept half of it. This half is gone. But I have half in my attic. The desk.

[Jason Snell]

Unclear. Unclear.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's going to get this big old desk? Somebody's going to get it and they're going to be happy. I have in my attic a Mac just like yours, Jason. So I hope you won't think I'm cocky copying. I promise not to do the, the lava lamp. Lava lamp thing because that's, that's your trademark.

[Jason Snell]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

I will have a Nixie clock. How about that?

[Jason Snell]

Okay. I'll counter with a little that's how.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Ll be able to tell the difference. And I hope I'll have Internet because as I mentioned, the Internet went out during the show today. I was in the studio but Lisa was not and she said we're there's no Internet Internet, which caused me to, during the show order a Starlink. So I'll let you know let you know how that works out. Tomorrow we'll do Windows Weekly and this week in Google and that'll be that. We'll say a fond farewell to our cherished studio manager, John Slonina, who will wrap up his duties at the same time. That was one of the sad things that happened in 2024 that was hard to leave the studio. I love it here in my new attic studio. It's very Christmassy right now, but I do miss hanging out with all the people at the at the studio. You're watching our Year End Best of for Mac Break Weekly.

[John Ashley]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

Monthly bill credits plus tax.

[Leo Laporte]

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 on we go with the best of More Apple Intelligence iOS 18 next Monday.

[Jason Snell]

September 6th 16th big day. All the OS's are shipping iOS 18, iPadOS 18 watchOS 18 is that 18 now? TVOS update is coming out. Vision OS up 2 is coming out next Monday. So basically Monday about 10 Pacific is usually when they flip the switch. Unless something goes horribly wrong. Everybody's updates are going. Even if you're not on a beta, you're just going to get the update and say, hey, here new OS versions are coming right at you. MacOS to quote, included. So get ready. And then we also got a little bit of detail. IOS 18.1, which contains Apple intelligence, Apple has now said will ship in October. I love. Let me give you a little sense of the layer cake of what a beta might be to Apple. There's the developer beta. Developer beta is the thing you have to especially install and it's supposed to be scary because it's like, oh no, only developers can use use it. It's scary. Anybody can actually use it, but only developers should use it because it's super scary. Then there's the public beta. How does the public beta differ from the developer beta? Well, I mean, usually it's like they let the developers use the developer beta for a week and if nobody's computers explode, then it's the public beta. All right, and you get that for the summer. But what's going to happen now? So 18.0 is going to ship on Monday. Great. Is that a beta? No, it's a final. It's a final. But it has no Apple intelligence in it. 18.1 is going to ship in October. They said that on Monday. Great. What's going to be, Is it a beta? No, it will be 18.1. It will be final. What will be in 18.1 final is Apple Intelligence Beta. So it's going to ship.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Good luck.

[Jason Snell]

But they're going to call it beta. And then, you know, Silicon Valley has a long tradition of this. I believe Gmail was in beta for like more than a decade. Well, more than a decade. I keep, I keep saying there ought to be a rule, like after a while, if you're still in beta, you have to start saying you're in gamma. Okay. You got to. We're going to, we're going to step you through every letter of the Greek Alphabet if you have to. But anyway, so it will be out, it will be in beta, but it will go to everybody who's got an Apple Intelligence compatible device and they will be able to enable Apple Intelligence. So sometime in October, October, if you buy a shiny new iPhone, they're going to. All this stuff's going to ship or be picked up in, in, in store on the 20th. But before that, that's a Friday next week on the Monday, the OS updates will push out to everybody else. Not with Apple Intelligence. It'll come later in a final OS as a beta. Just to make things clear. Perfect.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Everybody clear now here you go.

[Burke]

So clear.

[Micah Sifry]

Clear.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And remember that like when you see the beta, beta in this context. Have you ever played chess with somebody who like moves the piece but keeps their finger on say I haven't gone yet. Wait a minute, I haven't gone yet. Take that back. Yeah, that's pretty much what you're talking about. But I'm not going to kid Apple too much about this because I think every AI feature, once it leaves the corporate captive, it's not done being tested until you have millions and millions and millions of monkeys hammering on it. And that's when you find out that, oh, every time you ask for a picture of a chocolate cake, you get pornography. We didn't see that one coming. Okay, let's roll that back. We're gonna roll that back. Yeah, adjust our parameters a little bit. So yeah, it's gonna be a ride over the next several months. Months. And it's so long as people know that there is they see that big beta slug on there saying that don't really rely on this when you take out the camera and you take a picture, rely on that happening. We got that on lock. When it comes down to a generative AI edit to remove something in the background, maybe it'll remove the garbage can, maybe it will put a picture Paul Lyndon its place. You might like Paul Lind instead of the garbage can. We really don't know what he's the secret square, center square at the very least. Yeah, absolutely saucy. No doubt.

[Jason Snell]

I think calling it beta. Yes, the beta says we're still figuring this out, which they very clearly are, as are we all at this point. Really? Really? Yeah. So okay, in next month if you want to try out Apple Intelligence and you've been afraid of the betas, I mean of those betas, the developer betas, it's okay. There will be a beta living in your phone that you can turn on and try it out in October.

[Burke]

Oh God, it's alive in my phone. The beta was coming from inside the phone.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Honestly, I think that's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

The scariest part because all this time we've been waiting around, as I say, the market watchers and the pundits have been waiting around for Apple Intelligence and.

[John Ashley]

Tut tutting about how behind Apple is. But one, once Apple Intelligence is out.

[Leo Laporte]

On people's phones and they have a.

[John Ashley]

Chance to break things with it.

[Jason Snell]

I think that's when the fires are.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Really going to be going on in Cupertino.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. I think it'll be a lot of, like, it's always fun as like, industry observers who happen to also be Apple fans to see like all of the hand wringing and all of the hot takes about, oh, look at that big camera bump on, on this Samsung phone and this Pixel phone. Apple would never do it. They have taste. Until Apple does the camera bump, in which case, oh, no, they did it right. They did it the right way. And so we see a lot of. And so I think we're gonna see a lot of, like, people hoping that you didn't see like the blog post or the social media post a year and a half ago about, you know, Google releasing artificial intelligence when it's just not ready. It just goes to show the irresponsibility of this company not caring about the user experience. Experience when it's really about. Look, we have to put it out at some point. We have to. If it's going to actually be built into useful things, we need to get people using it. That's why we're calling it a Google Labs feature and not actually rolling it out into anything yet. Apple's going to have to eat the same cold cream of mushroom soup for a few months or a couple of years until they get it right. But they will get it right.

[Leo Laporte]

So Today, this morning, 8:00am Pacific, Apple announced the new MacBook Mini. Were there any surprises? The one thing people seem to be noticing is that the power buttons on the bottom.

[Jason Snell]

That's fun.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, it's got to be somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's got to be somewhere, says Andy. No, it's got to be somewhere.

[Micah Sifry]

Someone has a stack of Mac Minis. It is a little bit inconvenient. Yeah, you know, like, it's, that's, that's not. I mean, I don't really care. I know that people were talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

The never turn it off charger at.

[Micah Sifry]

The bottom of the, of the mouse or whatever. I was kind of like, you know, know, I, I don't think about that ever. Like it, you know, like, like you put it in for lunch and walk away and come back two months later. You have to do this again. But, but the, but the, the power on the bottom is a little bit of a bummer because I've got four of them stacked up and it's kind of like, okay, now I'm going to have to, like, if I want to restart them. It's not as trivial.

[Jason Snell]

That's true.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it looks like it's the same, roughly same shape as the, it's like a short Mac Studio. Is that right?

[Jason Snell]

Okay, so it's, it's, it's 2 inches high and 5 by 5. So it is half the size of the old Mac Mini in terms of volume and quite a bit larger than the Apple TV people who are like, oh, is it like an Apple tv? It's like, no, not really. It's, it's not that small.

[Micah Sifry]

It's probably not like it's, it's 70. It's 80 versus 50. It's a little bit more than half. I mean it's. Because it gets taller.

[Jason Snell]

It's like, well, I think it's 100 square inches to down to 50 square inches. I think it's actually about exactly half the volume of the Mac. Volume is weird, right? Because you're losing a lot in two of the dimensions.

[Micah Sifry]

I did the calculation. I think it's 80 versus 50, but it might not be. So it's not quite half. Again, it feels like I was like, oh, it's half the size. And then I actually typed, I actually did the math to figure out like, is it really half the size? And I was like. And the reason I bring it up is that a lot of us are looking at it like, hey, this would be great that we're going to have a higher density solution for our servers. And no, it completely doesn't make any sense anymore. They definitely don't care about people using Mac Minis in a server environment. That was definitely not one of the things that they thought through in this process.

[Leo Laporte]

Stadium uses a lot of them, right?

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah. We think that you could turn them sideways and stack eight of them sideways across A3U so the density would be marginally higher but not a lot higher. And it's like one of those things like if it was a little shorter or a little smaller. Smaller. Like you know, if it was just a little less on one dimension or another, we could, we would get much higher density. But right now we're not right.

[Jason Snell]

85 versus 50. So there you go, Alex. That's your, that's just so not quite half volume wise, but there because it's slightly taller. Good math. Good math thing. Well done. A gold star to you, Mr. Lindsay.

[Micah Sifry]

I know how to use a calculator.

[Jason Snell]

I did math. You know the problem I had is that I, I, I did not know how high high the old one was. And it is a little taller. Right, but it's much it's much narrower. Yeah. Now and it's, it's. It's really interesting. So surprises. Surprises. That they did leave Ethernet on all of them. That it's got it full hdmi. That it's got a headphone jack, although it's on the front. So depending on how you use your headphone jack that could be more or less convenient. But I think it's great. It's five ports including two on the front, which it was always like in these Johnny Eye days. It was. Was heresy to put ports on the front. But they did it with a Mac Studio. So we knew it was coming.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And it's also a great way to separate that. Some of them are USB C, some of them are Thunderbolt. So they know that the ones in the back are the Tabasco ones. 1 the front is for your, you know, for your keyboard.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, I do. In a nod to American made. They are an even five by five by two and some random amount of millimeters, you know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know it's like a two by four. It's not really two by four.

[Micah Sifry]

Somebody but somebody definitely decided that it had to be like even like it's really easy to remember what they are because they are like is the Last one was 1.41 high and this one is 2.

[Jason Snell]

It's 5 by 5 by 2. It's like a little teeny tiny. If it was, we could make it. If it was black, we can make it like a 2001 mini monolith. It takes you halfway to the end of time. Anyway, it's. It's really interesting because the, I mean it's a base model M4, but there's also the M4 Pro, which means this is the first time that we've seen that chip. The M4 Pro chip is, you know, it's got more cores. I think it's got 8 performance and 4.

[Micah Sifry]

The memory bandwidth is 273 gigabytes per second.

[Jason Snell]

This is the most, I would say the most surprising single.

[Andy Ihnatko]

4 performance, 6 efficiency cores on the bottom line, 8 performance and 4 efficiency cores on the pro chip.

[Jason Snell]

Right. 8, 4. And the idea there is that's the 12 core core is the probably the full extent of the Pro chip. Right. They have the bin versions but that's the full extent of it with. And a bunch of CPUs too. But the memory bandwidth I think is the real story here with the M3 generation. When they did rolled that out, we talked about it that it was curious that the Pro was sort of like a. Took a Little step forward. And then the MAX took a big step forward. And of course, we don't know anything about the MAX chip yet because maybe tomorrow, right? What day is it? It's Tuesday. Well then, I don't know about other chips, but this one, like 75% generational improvement in memory bandwidth is huge. Like, that is a big step forward. So there was a small step forward for the Pro chip last time, but a huge step forward this time.

[Leo Laporte]

That's more than twice as much.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, 120 gigabytes per second on the M4, 273 gigabits per second on the M4 Pro. They're clearly not as much as they're making this, this cute little, like tiny little computer computer. They are clearly not marketing this as, oh, here's the meet. Meet Maxi, your family, your cute little tiny little pocketable Mac. It is this, this is some serious crap and serious stuff here.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's presumed that a studio will then be with the M4 Max.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, studio bandwidth is already 400 gigs and the Ultra is already 800 gigs. So, so these are already, I mean, These are the M2s that are there. So if we see any kind of proportional increase in their speeds. Oh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

What does this memory bandwidth give you, Alex?

[Micah Sifry]

It just, it's. If you're moving a lot of data back and forth between things, you have to hold that data. It, it, it can be a huge stopper, especially with huge amounts of texture maps or massive amounts of video or massive amounts of, of scientific data or massive amounts of 3D data doing pol. Doing a variety of photogrammetry. All of these things kind of max out these systems as they start, you know, and it really becomes a churn. So again, this gets back into what I was talking about. If I'm doing a bunch of effects on, a bunch of, on something in resolve and I've got a bunch of 6K or 8K footage, that bandwidth gets saturated pretty quickly, you know, and so, so those are the kind of things that it will, it will do. Well, you know, I think that again, it's not going to be. I mean, I, when you see these specs, you can't wait to see what the Studio and the Pro look like, you know, like, you know, like. So, so, but, but these, it's a really powerful machine. It's still not probably as powerful as, you know, it's not. I don't think the top of the line here is competitive with the, the studio, you know, M Ultra or, or, or Maxes. But I, but I do think that it is extremely fast for the. I think the Mac Mini is the best bang for your buck for power of any computer made right now.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. I hope that it keeps the same role that it had historically. Where there's always. For historically there's always been. If you are a power user but not necessarily someone who needs a Mac Pro, you can have the choice between buy a lower spec Mac Mini but then do a built to order and give it all the RAM you want, give it all the storage you want, give it all the extra you want, get the best processor you want or go for a low level pro level machine. I hope that's still going to be kind of a distinction between like the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini where yeah, there's going to be a very clear jump to get to a Mac Studio including like I don't know, five displays instead of three. Maybe a better fan. I'm assuming the Mac, this Mac Mini has a fan. Looking at the side of it, it has vent holes. Okay. In the bottom. Great. That was one small fear of mine that they would say well we're going to have this throttled by heat performance so that we don't really. So to make it fit in that tight little space we're going to have it all naturally cooled. But it would have been weird to have the same sort of features into a MacBook Pro that is absolutely going to have to have a fan. But yeah, I think this is. I'll speak for myself, I won't speak for you guys. It's the Mac Mini I definitely, definitely want and it's the one that can basically I can kit out exactly how I want because I don't again, I don't need to spend $5,000 on the top of the line anything. But I have certain needs and I'm if I can suit them better with a 599 base model machine that I can then spec up to fifteen hundred dollars than I can with say a fifteen hundred dollar like pro level machine. I think they've got that.

[Leo Laporte]

It could support three displays which is nice. Also support for DisplayPort over USB C the Pro. Well actually it looks like the M4 and M4 Pro have the same video support. Yes. Maybe a little bit higher resolution on the M4 Pro. DisplayPort 2.1 over USB C HDMI 68 up to 8K resolution over HDMI at 60Hz 4K at 240 mega 240Hz. Wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's not just the displays, it's the Fact that they. These are a multiple of really good displays.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty high quality. Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And Thunderbolt 5, I mean, that's the other thing is It's. It's Thunderbolt 5. So what is Thunderbolt 5? Thunderbolt 5 on. On the Pro chip, faster speeds.

[Leo Laporte]

Three times faster than Thunderbolt 4 speeds.

[Jason Snell]

More power. And. And then you combine that with the video out is different because there are more GPUs. So you can do 6K at 60 or, you know, so there's a little.

[Micah Sifry]

Bit more than 8k at 60 and says 8k. Yeah, you can do one of each. Yeah, yeah. And it's 120. I think it's up to 120 gig pipeline 80 is the base for it. And so it's. So you're talking about being able to move 10 gigabytes, theoretically 10 gigabytes a second, which is twice as fast as my studio does internally. This gets into. Again, if you're editing or you're trying to get in and out of things, being able to have something that has that kind of bandwidth is pretty, you know, pretty exciting. And where this makes a difference for a Mac Mini is if you want to build a distributed rendering platform. So I want to have 10 of these able to do a bunch of distributed processing. The speed at which you can deliver that content to the thing that oftentimes is the biggest bottleneck that we get into is actually sending the frame. So let's say you want 10 of these to run compressor or you want 10 of these to run a 3D render. How fast can you get that data to the machine is a big deal. And being able to have this kind of speeds is pretty exciting. And again, if you're editing something really heavy, a Mac Mini of this size with 64 gigs of RAM can absolutely do all the big editing that I was just talking about. With six channels of 6K, it's the drive speed that kills you. And so being able to have the new, you know, I imagine OWC within a couple months will be delivering things that can do eight, you know, eight gigs or 10 gigabytes a second. And now you can stack up a lot of these things inside of whether it's Resolve or Final Cut or others. You can have a lot of really uncompressed data that you're working with. You don't have to do any kind of, you know, you don't have to burn anything in. Everything can be sitting there floating as you're working with it. So it's really, it's exciting. It's exciting box. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But obviously if it can do that then you might want to wait and see what the studio will do. Will the studio be this week or. No, it'll be next year.

[Jason Snell]

Next year. Mark Gurman says mid next year that it actually slipped a little bit. But it's really four computers, right. You've really got based on the four different chip models, you've got two Mac Minis and two Mac Studios. And I was thinking about this, that I've got a Mac Studio now the base model which has got the M1 max chip and then there's also the Ultra and let's assume that they're going to do an Ultra this generation for this and then you've got the M4 and the M4 Pro. Where do you fall if you want a desktop system and there will be, you know, maybe some crossover but not in terms of the specs. You could spec up a Mac Mini Pro chip with a bunch of RAM and a bunch of storage and get it to be over with. The starter price of the studio probably will be but not with the specs that you want.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think 27.99 when I did.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. I mean I, yeah I was my price 1 for 25 or something like that. But the question is who needs the higher end one? Like I, I'm not sure I need anything more than the, than the M4 Pro Max mini, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

More than the M1 Max.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Let's be honest.

[Jason Snell]

It's true, it's true. Actually that's the truth of it. I, if I did I would have ordered a Pro Mini today. And the fact is my M1 max max max Studio is still great honestly. And, and so probably I'll just wait and see what the, what the studio holds. But it's nice that they offer exact thing these things because M4 base model is super powerful and I know that it's got a little bit less storage than people would like and a little bit less ram. Although it's got 16 now so that's good. But, but it's still an incredible value. And then with the Pro chip you have got a very powerful system. I have a friend of mine who works from home and is a professional, creative professional in the film industry and he texted me today and he was like bought a Mac Mini because he was, he had an old intel imac that was on its last legs and this is a serious professional person. So like it's an impressive product on both fronts.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can up. So let's see let's start with the highest end Mac Mini. Upgrade it to the M4 Pro with 14 core CPU, 20 core GPU, 64 gigs of memory. That was 600 bucks. That's the Apple Premium right there. And you can go up to 8 terabytes of storage. But I think I'm going to do two. Yeah. Now we've got. This is the 2799. I don't need 10 gigabit ethernet. Nice though. Alex, do you have 10 gigabit ethernet?

[Micah Sifry]

No, I don't, but I'm probably going to as someday. Well, the bandwidth now coming into, into my house, I'm trying to get it all upgraded to two and a half gigs, right. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So you would point.

[Micah Sifry]

You start to think, oh, one gig might. It starts to feel a little compressed now, you know, so. And a reminder by the way, if you're, if you're an educational, if you're in education, all those numbers go down a little bit. So this. The. If you're a student, the M4 is. The base starts at 499. So.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great price for very competent.

[Micah Sifry]

My kids are going to be so.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Happy at Christmas when you start. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

You would prefer this than a laptop for your kids?

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, because I mean the thing is, is they do a lot of stuff at their house. They don't really spend a lot of time somewhere. If they do do it. I mean they both have monitors. The problem is, is that I really like. The problem with imacs is dealing with the monitor and the machine. Like my daughter wants to make me music. It's easier for me to give her a Mac Mini with a monitor. She can kind of place wherever she wants and have the Mac Mini where it needs to be to get all the instruments in and everything else. I find it very. And again, as someone who has a lot of monitors, I've got like nine monitors up here. I, I have a hard time understanding like where would I put. I look at the imac and I'm like, where would I put that? Like, I don't like all of my monitors hang on, on arms so I can move them around and get them to where I want. And so when you get used to that lifestyle, it's really hard to go back like. And so the, so having a computer that's sitting, that's contained and sitting on your desk seems like a really hard thing. And. And again, I think, I think unless you really are going to be on the road, having a laptop doesn't necessarily. If you're using it at home all the time. Doesn't necessarily make sense. You're getting so much more bang for your buck from these Mac minis with a monitor. You can go out and buy a, I mean of course you can get a nice monitor and then you're paying about the same amount. But I have, I get, I have one nice monitor that I can do color correction. The rest of them are these cheap, you know, $150, 1080p, 24 inch. They work great.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Not only that, but we're forgetting there's almost a community of people that are like iPad Pro or even iPad mini users that essentially had travel with a Mac Mini as a headless Mac and they use their iPad as a display for that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And so that's going to make this even better. And the fact that the power supply is completely integrated, that's good news and bad news. It's obviously good news because it's just one simple cable you can replace for like 10 bucks if you lose it or if you want multiples of them. I was, when we were talking about this a while ago, like about, oh, it wouldn't be great if they'd made like an Apple TV sized Mac mini. My fantasy would be that it would be powered by like power delivery over usb so that in certain scenarios I could just like power it with a, with a power brick and just have that complete like. But it's going to make all those people really, really happy too.

[Micah Sifry]

I really wanted it to be that way because in our school in Africa the number one thing that dies is the power supply. So we ended up with a bunch of PCs because it was too hard to update, it was too hard to fix them. Imacs like we started off with 40 iMacs and over 10 years ended up with a bunch of PCs because it was just as the imacs died one after the other when the PC we just replace the power supply. So I was hoping to see it go to USB C the same way you had because A, you could also power theoretically with some of these bricks. You could power two or three of these iMacs or Mac minis at one time. But also if it blows out the power supply, you just buy another one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Even. Even so though, I mean it was, it must have gotten really close. I mean the power on the specs page consumes less than 150 watts.

[Micah Sifry]

Right?

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's amazing. I mean I've, when I mike's when I look at like even compact, like Windows PCs, like they start at like 300 watts and stuff. With this kind of power, if you do, if you, if you don't limit yourself to like tiny, tiny little nuc sized devices, like 500 watts is like almost the minimum that they consider to be a decent power supply for anything of any power. So this is an amazing accomplishment to get it to work in under those circles circumstances.

[Leo Laporte]

And I bet it very Rarely gets to 155.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Sure, that sounds right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's maximum. It's probably operating at half of that or less. Very quiet too. They say five DBA at idle, which is basically silent even though it doesn't.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And they're saying, they're saying the first carbon free, completely carbon free Mac. I think they're saying.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, first carbon neutral.

[Ray Maxwell]

Neutral.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Carbon neutral, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

That means they're buying credits though, right?

[Jason Snell]

No, it's a combination nation. They changed the way they manufactured it and they remember their power is all not credits. Their power is all green and they're using, it's 50% recycled materials in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Good job.

[Jason Snell]

And it's, there's a lot less aluminum because they say they're using a new process that uses much less aluminum than old processes did. So yeah, it's just all, that's all part of the story. This is, I mean literally 14 years since they redesigned the enclosure of the Mac Mini Mini the last time. So it's about time.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Also we're all now very aware that when you make it smaller, all the great reasons that we like things that are smaller, including being able to Velcro it to the back of a display. But also that means that you can get more Mac Minis per master case, more master cases per shipping container now, fewer shipping containers. So it'll cost less to ship.

[Leo Laporte]

What about, I mean one reason people do buy PCs is for discrete graphics cards. What about graphics performance? Alex, do you have an opinion? Are they keeping up? Are they catching, not keeping up.

[Micah Sifry]

Catching up for the vast majority of the audience? Absolutely. You know, the integrated graphics, when you start looking at that memory, the memory bandwidth is really high compared to bus bandwidth as well as, you know, being integrated with the cpu. So it's a different problem because you can cut these things if you're building it for the computer. The way that you use the CPUs and GPUs is very different than the way you would use a discrete gpu. Gpu. Now for some of the stuff that I do, we still need Nvidia and AMD cards, you know, so, so these are you know, so it, it is like I have things that we do that we need three or four of them in one computer. I can't do that with, you know, obviously we can't do that right now with any of the Macs. So, so, you know, there's a, there is a world that doesn't, that needs more than what the max can do. When you're talking about a Mac Mini or you're talking about these things, I think that the performance is very, very good for 99% of the market, you know, and I think that there is a 1% market that's going to still keep on buying Linux or PCs because they need more dedicated and specific hardware. Yeah, but I think that has the more, by the way, I think that has more to do with how the apps are written than what the computer can do. So when we talk, talk to app developers who write from the ground up and they write to the metal, literally. So when they're writing to metal, they're taking full advantage of all of Apple's APIs. The performance is outrageous on these machines. It's where people don't want to commit that much and they just want to port code, do what they did before, use the old ways of doing things that you need a lot more horsepower. So it just depends on how much they dedicate their code to, to what Apple is proposing. In the infrastructure that Apple is providing.

[Leo Laporte]

Metal is good. Metal is good, but you need to write to it, right?

[Micah Sifry]

You need. I mean, again, with any operating system, the more you abstract from what the operating system wants, whether that's Windows or Linux or Apple, the less performance you're going to get out of that hardware. You're going to just need to. Because a lot of people are essentially lazy, you know, and, and I mean lazy. I don't mean lazy like they're laying around, it's just that they don't want to. They've got a lot of other things.

[Leo Laporte]

Lying around, but they're just, they don't.

[Micah Sifry]

Want to do that. If, when you talk to, you know, like, you know, good example is like Zoom dedicate, they have dedicated apps for every single platform.

[Jason Snell]

Right.

[Micah Sifry]

You know, and it's written to take full advantage of every platform that they're interacting with. And it feels, it's why Zoom runs so much smoother than all the other video conferencing apps is because, because they're writing something and they're not trying to abstract anything. You know, they're, they're taking full advantage of each platform. And so, so that's a good example. You see that, you know, you see that anywhere in app and that's why a lot of times we like to work with Mac only apps because we know that that developer is developing for the platform that I'm using, not trying to figure out how we get the same code to work on three different platforms. And that's, you know, because that's never going to be as good as writing it straight to the, you know, straight to the. The OS's native. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Mac. Break weekly. The big Apple week continues. Jason Snell is here Thursday. He'll be covering the Apple quarterly [e-mail] his blog with his world famous patented colored charts. Are you gonna do one for Halloween? Like an orange and black chart, you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Know, with a pumpkin.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, it's an interesting idea. Yeah. But probably not.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Alex. Lindsay is also here. Office hours global. Do you do a Halloween show for office hours?

[Micah Sifry]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

No. You don't dress in costume.

[Micah Sifry]

I'm not really a different thing kind of guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you know, I know you're very consistent.

[Micah Sifry]

Yeah, I don't have a lot of. So I don't really shift gears that much.

[Leo Laporte]

I do know you've added an imac to your display. Display behind you. Is that keeping up with the Joneses thing?

[Micah Sifry]

This one here?

[Leo Laporte]

Not an imac, a Macintosh. An old Macintosh. Well, you got a Bondi blue imac.

[Micah Sifry]

I got a Bondi. This is a. This is a 24P Bondi Blue. It's not. It's not. It's a. It was like hand built for movies. This one.

[Leo Laporte]

And then there's the older one.

[Micah Sifry]

The old Mac classic. I've got some elemental.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just the plates.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the elemental plates. After you said that apparently Russell had scavenged the plates swimming the orange ones though which is. Oh, is that good or bad?

[Micah Sifry]

A lot of us were a little upset about the whole orange plate thing. You know we were like come on kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Was a $25,000 machine.

[Micah Sifry]

I just want to point out, not to show off but each one of those plates was $130,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God. And we've effectively replaced it with in software in the cloud based basically the.

[Micah Sifry]

Ones that I had.

[Leo Laporte]

We used to need this to stream to though a variety of platforms.

[Micah Sifry]

The ones, the ones that I had were still pretty competitive. You know like even though they're. They don't even make them anymore. But 16. 16 inputs with 32 individual streams is still pretty powerful. But the. But they. But yeah. So that's what Those were. I got a little. I got the cube up here.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So, yeah. Oh, you got some good Macs.

[Micah Sifry]

I like to, you know, it's my, it's my wall of depreciation. Everything here used to be worth a lot of money.

[Leo Laporte]

Problem with the new Mac Minis, they'll be too small to even notice up there.

[Micah Sifry]

You wouldn't even receive. They're out of focus.

[Leo Laporte]

They'd be like, we got flying toasters running on our. On our Mac Classic.

[Micah Sifry]

John, my Mac Classic doesn't work. I have to go. I have.

[Leo Laporte]

This is actually a 128k Mac. This is the original and it didn't work. The floppy didn't work. So we. John, bought a device that you can plug in into the floppy port that emulates a hard drive.

[Micah Sifry]

I want to just put an. I keep on looking, I go, I should just put an iPad in there. Like just put an iPad. Yeah, iPad and stick it back there.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I was going to cut out a piece of. Because I couldn't get the scan right. Right. I was going to cut out a piece of white paper and just put flying toasters on. But no, we got the scan working and everything.

[Micah Sifry]

That's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. I did buy one of those Mac Minis. Boy, do I like it. I have to say I'm very excited about what Apple has come coming up hardware wise, especially with Macintosh and Apple Intelligence. 2025 is going to be a very interesting year and you can bet we will be here. Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell and myself to cover it. We thank you so much for your support all year long. A Mac Break Weekly with special special thanks to our Club TWIT members. I know this has been a little bit of a rocky year, but I'm very excited about what 2025's going to bring. Not just for TWIT, but for Apple and for all of us. Have a wonderful holiday. I hope you're enjoying it and I will see you and all of us will see you in the new year on Mac Break Weekly. Bye bye. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Jason. Thanks to all of you, especially our Club Twit members for joining us. We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live on YouTube. YouTube.com when the show's on. All of our shows, when they're on, when we're recording them, you can watch us record them live on YouTube after the fact. On Demand episodes are available at the website TWiT TVW. There is also a YouTube channel dedicated to MacBreak Weekly's video. We have video and audio. Or you can subscribe to the video or audio in your favorite podcast player and get it automatically as soon as it's available. That way, listen at your leisure. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time. Now, it is my solemn duty to tell you. You having trouble with your green. It's green screen. It fell off.

[Jason Snell]

I'm gone.

[Micah Sifry]

I'm gone.

[Jason Snell]

I'm not here. Never mind.

[Leo Laporte]

Never mind. Back to work. Break time is over. Did it pop? Is that what happened?