MacBreak Weekly 954: Lickable Interface

Summary

MacBreak Weekly Episode 954: "Lickable Interface"

Release Date: January 8, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Alex Lindsay, and Jason Snell
Podcast Network: TWiT.tv

---

Introduction and Episode Highlights

Leo Laporte opens the episode by celebrating an important milestone for Mac users—the 25th anniversary of OS X. The hosts, including Andy Ihnatko from WGBH Boston, Alex Lindsay from OfficeHours Global, and Jason Snell of Sixcolors.com, delve into various topics ranging from Apple's recent $95 million fine to the latest developments in Vision Pro and AI-related features in macOS.

---

Apple's OS Updates and Security

Discussion on macOS 18.2 and 18.1 Updates:

The conversation begins with the announcement of macOS 18.2, highlighting its significant size increase from 4GB to 7GB, attributed to enhanced Apple Intelligence features.

• Jason Snell (02:32):
  "I think that the size of it has to do with Apple Intelligence that from now on there just aren't going to be any compact updates because they got to shove a new on-device model to you."

Security Implications:

The hosts discuss the opaque nature of Apple's security patches, noting that while updates are recommended, Apple rarely discloses the specifics to avoid informing potential bad actors.

• Leo Laporte (03:48):
  "Apple's never very open about what kinds of security patches they're providing."

Andy emphasizes the importance of applying these updates despite uncertainties:

• Andy Ihnatko (04:32):
  "But clearly when they say you should update it, that means there's something there."

---

25th Anniversary of OS X: Reflections on Apple's Evolution

Historical Significance:

Andy shares his deep connection with the 2000 Mac World Expo where Steve Jobs unveiled the Aqua interface, marking a pivotal moment in Apple's history.

• Andy Ihnatko (07:40):
  "It all turned around when they brought Steve Jobs back. And along with Steve Jobs, they brought the next step."

Impact of Unix Foundation:

The discussion highlights how OS X's Unix-based foundation has ensured its robustness and adaptability over the years.

• Leo Laporte (26:52):
  "The real reason this is still an operating system 25 years later is based on Unix Darwin and the Darwin kernel."

• Jason Snell (27:05):
  "Unix, by the way, invented in 1970, is also still in widespread use."

Software Evolution:

The transition from classic Mac OS to OS X introduced crucial features like protected memory and real multitasking, addressing previous system instability issues.

• Andy Ihnatko (09:17):
  "You can see he demos that that too. And you can see his delight in it because he loved that app."

---

Privacy Concerns and Apple's Siri Settlement

$95 Million Fine:

Apple has agreed to a $95 million fine related to unintentional Siri activations, where Siri was reportedly triggered without user prompts.

• Leo Laporte (39:00):
  "Apple has agreed to pay a $95 million fine. Actually, the fine is, is de minimis from Apple's point of view."

Public Reaction and Conspiracy Theories:

The hosts discuss public skepticism regarding Apple's handling of Siri data, with allegations of misuse despite Apple's denials.

• Andy Ihnatko (39:14):
  "Apple said unequivocally told Ars Technica, Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles."

Technological Surveillance vs. Data Profiling:

Alex Lindsay offers insights into how data profiling occurs without audio surveillance, emphasizing that extensive data collection already enables accurate user profiling.

• Alex Lindsay (42:35):
  "They don't need to listen. And also Apple, I mean, like, Apple doesn't even know what apps you're using in the App Store."

---

Antitrust Issues: Apple and Google's Search Engine Battle

Apple's Position on Developing a Search Engine:

Apple has opted not to develop its own search engine, citing economic risks and potential loss of revenue from Google partnerships if antitrust rulings are unfavorable.

• Jason Snell (58:57):
  "Apple actually filed a brief in this is that they may lose their $20 billion or so a year from Google if the court rules that Google has to stop those payments."

Impact on Users and Market Dynamics:

The discussion explores how AI advancements are shifting the landscape of search, with tools like ChatGPT reducing reliance on traditional search engines.

• Alex Lindsay (61:33):
  "I think we've also got to a point where operating systems are a little... it's a pretty mature operating system."

Future of Search:

The hosts debate whether search as we know it is evolving beyond traditional search engines, with AI-driven tools becoming primary sources of information retrieval.

• Jason Snell (61:09):
  "I also think that the appetite for iPhone sales is not going to go down anytime soon and Apple has plenty of time."

---

Apple Intelligence and AI Missteps

Faulty Summarization in News Apps:

Apple's AI-driven summarization feature for news apps like BBC has led to factual inaccuracies, causing misinformation and frustration among news organizations.

• Andy Ihnatko (74:11):
  "It's a broken feature that spreads misinformation and an era where misinformation online is one of the biggest crises."

Calls for Feature Termination:

Critics argue that Apple should disable the flawed summarization feature until it can be perfected to prevent the spread of false information.

• Jason Snell (76:43):
  "They need to terminate this feature and come back with it in 18.3, 18.4."

---

CES 2025 Insights and Technology Trends

Micro LED Displays:

Foxconn announced the mass production of Micro LED displays, signaling advancements in display technology suitable for VR headsets and other high-resolution applications.

• Leo Laporte (101:24):
  "It might make a lot of sense in a VR headset of various kinds."

Nvidia and Vision Pro Integration:

Nvidia revealed that GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, will support Apple's Vision Pro, allowing users to stream games directly to their headsets.

• Jason Snell (102:40):
  "Nvidia's GeForce now, which is their cloud gaming service, are going to get supported."

---

Picks of the Week

Software Recommendation: GhostTTY

Leo recommends GhostTTY, a new terminal for macOS that offers advanced features like Metal integration, multiple shell support, and built-in nerd fonts.

• Leo Laporte (118:21):
  "GhostTTY.org if you aren't using the terminal you ain't MacKin."

Hardware Recommendation: Anker's 140W 4-Port Charger

Jason endorses Anker's latest 140W 4-port charger, praising its efficiency, OLED display for monitoring power distribution, and compact design.

• Jason Snell (117:24):
  "140 watt, 4 port power delivery...It's a little bit bigger than this, but not terribly bigger than this."

---

Closing Remarks

The hosts wrap up the episode by reflecting on the ongoing challenges and advancements in Apple's ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of community feedback in shaping future updates. They also celebrate the longevity and evolution of MacBreak Weekly, promising continued insightful discussions in upcoming episodes.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Leo Laporte (02:58):
  "When are the days end where we would, like, pay attention to the size of files and like, the Internet."

• Andy Ihnatko (07:40):
  "It really was a remarkable moment."

• Jason Snell (27:05):
  "Unix, by the way, invented in 1970, is also still in widespread use."

• Alex Lindsay (26:43):
  "There's so many things that Apple does that are in that little world that are subconscious things people make decisions about."

• Andy Ihnatko (74:11):
  "It's a broken feature that spreads misinformation and an era where misinformation online is one of the biggest crises."

• Jason Snell (76:43):
  "They need to terminate this feature and come back with it in 18.3, 18.4."

---

This detailed summary captures the essence of Episode 954 of MacBreak Weekly, providing listeners with an insightful overview of the discussions on Apple's software updates, privacy concerns, antitrust issues, and technological advancements showcased at CES 2025.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly, reassembled for 2025. Andy, Alex, and Jason are all here. We're gonna celebrate a very important birthday for Mac users. We'll talk about Apple's $95 million fine. They agree to nothing, admit nothing, and a couple of new Vision Pro ideas. All that coming up and a whole lot more next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 954, recorded Tuesday, January 7, 2025. Lickable interface. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple News with Mr. Jason Snell of Sixcolors.com occasionally you'll see his stories at Mac World and elsewhere.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Happy New Year to Julio, to everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Happy New Year to you and your and your brain and your many visits this year to Sky Harbor Airport.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh, yeah. So many flights.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great to have you at home today. You had a wonderful holiday. Also you, Mr. Andy Naco. You're celebrating the. So if it's called Little Christmas, is this little Boxing Day there?

[Jason Snell]

Should be. I didn't. I use little Christmas as an excuse to, like, have a nice dinner, but. But actually, now I have an excuse to do some shopping. Excellent. Thank you very much.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy Inatko from WGBH in Boston, who celebrates Christmas twice. And from Officehours Global, Mr. Alex Lindsay. Happy New Year, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hello.

[Jason Snell]

Hello.

[Alex Lindsay]

Good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

2025. Welcome to the Gulf of America.

[Jason Snell]

It does feel like a yawning gulf, doesn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we're all in it. The maw of America. That would be even better. Let's see. So 18, two. One, right? I feel like I got an announcement. Is that not true?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. But when I see point something, point something, I figure, okay, whatever it is that they didn't have time to fix for 18.2, they finally said, yeah, that's enough of a bug to fix it in point 2. Not enough of a bug to, like, fix it at the time. So, yeah, I didn't really pay attention to it.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't pay any attention to it. There it is. We got it right there.

[Jason Snell]

I was distracted. There was figgy pudding everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Everywhere.

[Jason Snell]

You know, that stuff goes bad, like, and you can't freeze it. So it's like, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

So this update provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all users and is half a gigabyte. When are the days. When are the days end where we would, like, pay attention to the size of files and like, the Internet.

[Jason Snell]

I think that the size of it has to do with Apple Intelligence that from now on there just aren't going to be any compact updates because they got to shove a new on device model to you. Like if they have to fix anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that makes sense. In fact, we did learn that the Apple Intelligence is doubled in size.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, 95.95max said something about how they. But it's 7 gigabytes for 18.2 versus 4 gigabytes for 18.1. So that's how much Apple Intelligence is going to cost you for storage.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how much more intelligent it is. Well, we're. I'm doing the update now. I guess it's for iOS and iPad OS. Do we know anything? Presumably there's some security stuff. Apple's never very open about what kinds of security patches they're providing. Right. Because they don't want to give the bad guys any hints.

[Jason Snell]

Well, no, don't they usually do. There's a. Isn't there a page that basically says here's what this. Here's what the security update entails.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like they don't really say until later. Like I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. Let me look and see what the security update.

[Jason Snell]

This update provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all users. That's the entire thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the one I'm talking about. Yeah. Okay.

[Jason Snell]

You might have a problem there.

[Leo Laporte]

18 iOS, an iPad. Yeah, it doesn't. There's no CD published CVE yet.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But clearly when they say you should update it, that means there's something there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. I guess what I'm getting to is this is for security as well, whether they say it or not.

[Jason Snell]

And just as a rule, there's never a reason not to download a point something point something update because the integer updates are always huge disruptive changes. Even if everything works properly, the point something changes can inflict new problems that you aren't prepared to deal with. But the point something. Point something is always okay, we fixed something minor that we didn't have time time to do like three months ago. And so now here it is.

[Leo Laporte]

What say you to that, Alex? Lindsay, I know you have a rule about point updates.

[Alex Lindsay]

I update. I'm pretty aggressive about my. My mobiles, probably too aggressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Should be.

[Alex Lindsay]

You should be. But I'm pretty. So my mobile, my iPads, I just. I'm on the beta. I just upgrade whatever it says upgrade on my. On a handful of my computers. On my Mac Minis, I'm usually upgrading to the newest released Schedule So not, not betas but, but I'm doing those and then for my main computer I'm still, I'm usually a year behind, you know, so. And that has to do. It has less to do with Apple. I mean it has something to do with Apple but it also has to do with. I use a lot of software that takes a long time to update. So things like Don Autonates Dante is a good example of something that is not still. It just, just might be just starting to work right now.

[Jason Snell]

So.

[Alex Lindsay]

So you know, because they're. And especially when you're dealing with loopback or you're doing with anything that's digging os, there's more for them to update and it. And takes them a little longer once they have it there and once people are using it. So I let you know, I stay back on my main, my main production computer for typically a year. You know, I might start thinking about it February, March. But the other ones I'm pretty aggressive about because I feel like I need to know what's going on and there's all this good stuff. There's all this candy that's laying around and I want, I want some of the candy too.

[Leo Laporte]

Not in this case.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it's point ones I'm not too afraid of.

[Leo Laporte]

This one is not. Does not have any new features. So that's probably why it is a bug fix.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. But I, yeah, but I think, yeah, as a bug fix, the point ones I think are oftentimes the most stable updates because they're not. All they're doing is doing house cleaning, not doing any kind of adding features.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, not anymore though. Now that now they're plowing in new features and Apple Intelligence.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, I think stuff like that again, like for my, for my mobile devices I'm pretty like, yeah, whatever, let's just keep going. And with my, with my, again with my. My Mac studio is the one that stays way behind so that I can always have something to go back to and get stuff done.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There are some 18.3 betas that are cycling through. There were new ones that dropped earlier today. Those are so far quiet. I don't know whether that's just going to be a quiet cycle or whether there's going to be another beta that gets released that adds features in that aren't in there. But it sounds like maybe 18.3 is being worked on quietly and then there'll be an 18. 4 that will be out later that will be the one that has those kind of last remaining Apple Intelligence. Features, it's kind of unclear right now, but they're still working in the background.

[Leo Laporte]

So the general, our general devices update. You should update. It's good, good update. No, no noticeable problems. This, by the way, yesterday was the. I didn't note this, but I will note it now. The 20. I didn't like note it yesterday, like have a party or anything, but it's the 25th anniversary of OS 10.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I mean, or at least the. It's the 2000 Mac World Expo where Steve Jobs unveiled the Aqua interface and showed off what we really think of. I mean, I watched the whole video. I wrote a piece about it at Macworld, actually, technically, I wrote a piece about it at Macworld in the year 2000. And that's, that's up there. You can read that. And I found the files on my, in an archive on my server and I still have the word files that I wrote. It turns out I wrote that whole story that day. Like I got, went back to the office. I've still got the timestamps on it from that day, January 2000. And anyway, I wrote a new story on Macworld about it on Sunday and it's quite a trip to watch that event because, I mean, there are so many anniversaries of OS X because there's like when 10o shipped and when the public beta shipped and when they brought Steve on stage in 1997 and when they brought him back in 1998. And he was there talking about the transition. But like, for me, this is the big one because so much of what he's demoing, first off, people are reacting to it like they've never seen anything like it. And yet from the perspective of 25 years later, it all seems totally normal. And that's the thing is at the time, it did kind of blow you away as a Mac user because it was a completely new interface. But all that stuff, I mean, keep in mind the Mac was only 16 years old at that point. And Steve Jobs even undersold it and said, you know, this will be the foundation of what we do for the next decade. And it's like, well, okay, a quarter of a century later, still so much of what he showed is just what the Mac is now. It really was a remarkable moment. So if you need to celebrate a single kind of birthday for OS X, I think this is it. I think this is the one.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And 100% the significance of OS X, remember that OS X was from the very, very get go, designed to be the foundation of everything Apple does in the future. So when it came time to do a phone interface, there's OS and now we've turned that into iPhone OS. An iPad became a version of OS X that was an iPad OS. Everything is now built on OS X. And also from the very, very get go, it was designed to be CPU non specific, so that if at any point they wanted to make a change to what CPU they were using, they wouldn't have to undo everything in order to do it. And also make sure that we all remember those of us who were there for the 90s. Man, macOS was in a really sad state. People were switching lifelong, like Mac lovers was switching to Windows because it was simply more stable if it had the ability to let a piece of code crash by taking the entire platform down with it. And so many even. Not only that, but the creature comforts of life, prettiness, things like that. It was so stagnant that we felt as though, thank goodness we don't have to leave the Mac. Apple realizes they have a problem here. They're not going to try to just keep polishing the same incandescent light bulb. We're going into the LED.

[Alex Lindsay]

The problem. We were polishing 80 light bulbs. I mean, I remember trying to buy my parents a computer and I got an Apple IIe when I was 12 and have Apple computers all the way up into it and it's 1996 or 1997 and I'm trying to buy my parents a computer and I couldn't figure out which one to buy because there were so many and they were all so close together. Like, do I need the TV option or do I need the cd? You know, like there was so many versions of it and I, and I just was so frustrated that I ended up not getting them one. I got something else for them or something. Like I was just like, I'm not. Like, I just. It was like it was a disaster. I mean, you know, it just. And it was. And I think most companies have fallen to this thing where they try to compete with Microsoft head to head. Like we're going to do everything that Microsoft does and Microsoft's a different beast. Like it just, it's, it's got its own ecosystem and you know, learning, you know, trying to do what Microsoft does is usually a recipe for disaster. And Apple went down, was one of the first ones to really go down that path.

[Leo Laporte]

Keep it all. It all turned around when they brought Steve Jobs back. And along with Steve Jobs, they brought the next stop.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, that's the thing is Jobs came back because they needed an operating system. Right. And they had tried multiple times to do that in those 16 years. They had tried telling. They had tried Copeland Symphony. What ended up shipping is OS 8 was really just a cleanup of System 7 and the classic Mac OSBOs building. They were BOS. They wanted to sell BOS to Apple and Apple didn't want to buy it. Guess they. Guess they tried that. And the thing is, like, classic Mac os, as much as it was loved, I mean, it was a product of that late 70s, early 80s, early days of personal computers. And it was not a modern operating system in any sense of the. Of the word. And so they were desperate to do something. Next step ended up being the answer. And then Steve came along with a ride. Pretty good throw in, if you ask me. And. And yeah. And, you know, yeah, Andy's absolutely right, by the way. In that era, I was working a Mac user magazine in the. In the. Those mid to late 90s, and I remember I have these visceral memories of rebooting, force rebooting my Mac multiple times a day because it would crash to a dead stop. And. And that was because there was no protected memory. The multitasking wasn't really real. And that's part of what's in this Jobs presentation. It's like there's a moment where he's playing a video and he drops the. A menu bar down and the video keeps playing and people lose their minds and you're like, as a modern person, you're like, why? But like, back then, if you drop that menu bar, the whole Mac stopped to drop a menu item because multitask.

[Leo Laporte]

I was doing the radio show at the time, and I was very critical of Apple because System 7 and OS 9, which is the current operating system at this time, had terrible memory management.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's what you're talking about because it couldn't. It couldn't. It didn't have modern memory management. It couldn't do anything a modern computer could do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

One bad app took down the whole system. In fact, Jobs demos it. He has an app called the Bomb that he runs in this 2000 demo. And he says this does everything. It writes to memory everywhere it can, and he's playing a video. It's actually Mission Impossible 2 trailer, because Tom Cruise is immortal and he runs the Bomb app and the video just keeps playing in the background. And again, people lose their minds. But, like, as a Mac user, like, something like that just takes down the system and you got to reboot and they couldn't do it. So the other thing about this that's really interesting is he's trying to sell, I mean, Jobs, what a salesman, right? He's trying to sell OS 10 to Mac users here. And the thing about it is it's important that he does this because to Andy's point, especially Windows in this era, the era of the wind in the sails from Windows 95, like already, everybody especially like the design pros, everybody's like, go to Windows nt, go to Windows, drop the Mac Apple. Steve Jobs can't just sell this thing as hey, we built you a brand new operating system for you to switch to. Because if they do that, everybody who's got a brain in their head is going to look at it and say, well, if I'm going to have to adapt to a brand new operating system that is nothing like what I've used before, I'll just go to Windows. The only thing holding people on the Mac was familiarity with the Mac. So all these Next Step engineers come in and there is huge friction between the Next people and the Apple people. But they've got like the Next has the code base. If they implement Next features, they don't have to rewrite the code. But then it doesn't look like the Mac because NextStep is very weird and not very Mac like. But if they don't make it Mac like enough to satisfy Mac users, they'll just switch to Windows. So it was really an existential moment for Apple to get OS X right. And keep in mind they bought next in 97. This is 2000 where they announced what they were going to do in terms of the interface and they said they'd ship it that summer. They didn't ship it that summer, they shipped a public beta, they shipped it the next summer. So we're talking like a 4 plus year period just to get to 10.0 shipping. It took them a long time, but what is brilliant about it is what they shipped. It took, it took a while. Point zero wasn't very good. Point one was a lot better. They had to optimize for speed. 0.0 was really slow. But like they did indeed build the foundation for Apple's future. Not just for a decade, not just for the Mac, but for all these other interfaces and for, you know, quarter century and counting. It's really quite remarkable. It's a very hard problem to solve and they did end up getting there.

[Alex Lindsay]

And not only did they solve it, they sell, they sold it. And I think we just have to keep on coming back to how Good. Steve Jobs was at selling things like.

[Leo Laporte]

He was this his best example of it was an early example. But is one of his better examples of, of, of Steve Jobs the pitch man, the seller?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think, I think so. I mean, I mean I think that his pinnacle was this is the one.

[Leo Laporte]

Where he said one of the design goals.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But this is real.

[Leo Laporte]

You quote this in Mac World's your Mac World piece. One of the design goals Steve said was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it. Yep, very famous, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

And then how long did we deal with all that Aqua? How many buttons did we have to create? I have finally created a set of actions in Photoshop that would create the Aqua button. So you could just select it and hit a button, you know, hit go and it would just go and turn it into an Aqua button. Because it was, that was, that's how you look modern. And then there was some point that it all was not modern anymore.

[Jason Snell]

Like, you know, like I remember, remember for like a hot minute there, they said, hey, we thought that the Apple Menu would look good in the middle of this menu bar instead of to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The side non functional logo. And then, yeah, that was one of those public beta things where people are like, no, you need an Apple Menu. And they, and they retask the Apple Menu.

[Jason Snell]

It really wasn't until 10.4 until it was a finished, like usable operating system. It was like they made lots of progress and I think but there was a while before, okay, will it print? Yes. Will it file compatibility? Yes. Will all the multitasking work? Yes. All this sort of stuff that we were waiting to actually. And the thing is Steve Jobs and created a picture of an Apple that finally had its stuff together. And that if they said that this is we have a plan and we have a plan to execute that plan, you might even start to believe them. I mean, this was before, before OS X. This was when they were trying to develop Rhapsody, when they're trying to develop like Symphony, Copeland, all this other stuff. This was still, this was the time where I was still getting emails that were intended for worldwide Apple executives at the VP level. And so I was hearing about lots of backbiting about lots of stuff of wasted effort. Oh well, the print system kind of works. But we decided to toss everything and put this under a new manager for organizational reasons. And that as much as anything else, I mean you can write an entire book just about all the things that Apple needed to do and successfully did to convince each other that they had their act together finally and to actually become the seeds of the company that they would once become.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and I think part of it.

[Leo Laporte]

James Thompson talks about watching this because of course he's very well known as the author Peacock and drag thing, but before there was drag thing he wrote the doc for this and he talks about his experience of watching and this is the original doc which was hideous with Square. He talks about watching Steve hoping it didn't crash from his home in Ireland. It's a really good piece by the way, if you haven't read it for his. From his three letter acronym.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He's given a bunch of presentations about this but never put it down in words. And I was writing my story for Mac World and I said, I sent him an imessage and I basically said is that like, is there a preferred link where you tell this story? And he's like, you know, I don't think there is. I think there's just various presentations I've given over time.

[Leo Laporte]

So he wrote this up because of.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You and so he wrote that that's so I could have something to link to. And it's great. And it's got that classic moment because the thing is Steve really wanted everybody in Cupertino. So the classic moment is somebody offhandedly mentions that they'll get their developer who's working on the doc in from Ireland. And Steve was like, okay. And goes to another room and finds the manager in charge of James and basically says it has come to my.

[Leo Laporte]

Attention that the engineer working on the dock is in effing Ireland.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And then. And so he was given an ultimatum that he had to, he had to move to Cupertino or he had to quit. And what? Instead he refused to move to Cupertino. So what they did is they like gave him an office and they had him fly in and they like hid him for quite a while. And then finally he was found out and he was. And he just said I'm, I'm not going to move to California. So that was it. And he went back to doing drag thing and they threw out his doc. They actually rewrote the next person on the project, rewrote that doc again. Also that doc demo is weird. There are things in that demo that are very strange. Like the one, the single window mode that you clicked on another button that was on the right side of the title bar, they got rid of that. The Apple menu in the center was very weird. And the dock, at that point there's actually a doc folder in your user folder so you could drag a file from the Desktop. And Steve does in the demo, onto the dock, and the file disappears from the desktop. And as a modern Mac user, you're like, what? Wait, what? Where to go? And then he takes the file off the dock and drags it back to the desktop. And then. And it goes out of the dock onto the desktop. You're like, what? Wait, huh? How? Because that. Completely later on, that metaphor, because it used to be you could literally just save a file into the Doc folder and it would show up on the dock.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, that's how Microsoft did it. And so that's naturally the way that they would attempt it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's easy to configure then, but much easier just to drag it to the dock. Pretty incredible.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. Yeah. So it's a big. I mean, it's a long thing. But even if you just watch the part where Stephen throws it, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Where people go crazy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So much of it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Genie effect, which was definitely a. Steve.

[Leo Laporte]

Tom Cruise jumps out of the dock.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But it doesn't play in the dock. And Steve actually says, we're going to make it. So you can actually see the video playing in the dock. But it doesn't actually. Actually do it during the demo. And they did get there with that. And there are a bunch of things that clearly are just for Steve. Right. Like the Finder. He talks about the Finder. And Finder is very different. It's more like a browser than it was in the original, where there was sort of.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the next step. Finder.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Next.

[Jason Snell]

I love that browser.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But they did the. They added. So what they added was they added. They had icon support and list support, which were the things that Mac users were used to. And then they. And the. Steve, you can hear it in his voice.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And then you've got this really cool column view, and it's like, well, yeah, that's. That's the next view. That's Steve's favorite view.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And he's really into that. Just like he introduces Mail, apple mail, also, 25 years ago that it was introduced. And that was because Steve's favorite email program was on NextStep. And when he went back to Apple and he was using the Mac, he was really mad because he didn't like the email programs on the Mac. And he got them to start moving Next step mail over. And so he's. You know, it's Steve Jobs. If you hate Apple Mail or love it, you know, either way, blame Steve Jobs, because that was. That. That was Next Mail. And that's what he wanted. And so he got it. And you can see he demos that that too. And you can see his delight in it because he loved that app. So those certain things that Steve clearly made happen because he liked him so much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, he does this genie effect.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Genie effects so many. They wired in the slow motion of it so that he could hold down. You could hold down a couple of keyboard commands and do the slow mo. And he just kept doing it. Oh, my God. It is showing off that they're using a much more advanced graphics imaging system that's based on PDF, just like how Next was on display postgres.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how happy he is, though.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But he. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's literally. It is kind of a masterclass too, because it's just a dude at a keyboard and a mouse. Like, there's not a lot to it. He's just a guy using his computer on stage. He does a pretty good job, is.

[Alex Lindsay]

Doing things that other app, other computers couldn't do, you know, and it wasn't like, you know, and suddenly it was like, well, it doesn't do that. And I think that one thing that Apple's good at and I think Steve was exceptionally good at is picking out things that they're not functional, but they give you, like, a little like, oh, that's cool. Like that surprise and delight, you know, and that surprise and delight. It's pretty important doing something. Well, I think it's actually one of the most important things, because what happens is people make decisions.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what sticks with you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, people make decisions subconsciously about products, and that's the most dangerous place for them to make those decisions, if they make a decision. Because when they do it consciously, you can argue with them and persuade them that. To go some other direction. But when they subconsciously decide it's cooler or that it's a little sleeker or whatever. You know, when you talk to big companies, they talk about this, all the design teams, like, they're thinking about things like, about that kind of thing all the time of. Of how, you know, if something looks just a little bit more refined or just a little bit cooler, not crazy, but just a little bit more people, like. And that gets into the radiuses of the corners, the. The. How it feels in your hand, all this stuff. And I think that the companies that have done really well have paid a lot of attention to those things. And I think a lot of times, you know, when people don't pay attention to those Things, they pay a price because people make that subconscious decision, there's nowhere to get to it. That's like in the bios. Like, you can't get. You can't get to that decision and change it because they don't even see it. They don't see that they've made that decision. And I think that this kind of. There's so many things that Apple does that are in that little world that are subconscious things people make decisions about.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Things that seem trivial now and may have even seemed trivial then that are still really important. I mean, you're absolutely right, Alex. There's a subconscious level going on here. And to again, beloved, hallowed, venerated classic Mac os. But here's the thing about classic Mac os. It was a black and white operating system designed in the early 80s. And although, yeah, system 7, 8, add color and graphite interface and all these things, the bottom line was it was a black and white interface and that color was sort of like stuck onto it to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got color. But even then, like, yeah, sure, you can have a colorful backdrop, but like everything was still really monochrome with little tiny highlights. And so one of the messages he's sending with aqua and the lickable interface and taking the graphics and maximizing them and minimizing them and doing all these things, he's showing you cool special effects that you could call, you could probably just wave your hands at it and say, it's just sort of trendy graphic junk and it's meaningless and it's just empty calories. But it serves the larger purpose of, like, the Mac being the weak sister of computer operating systems in terms of graphics, ironically, as a graphics powerhouse in Photoshop and all that. But the OS itself being kind of this pale thing from the early 80s. That's Steve making it very clear that the era of the Mac being a kind of colorless computer is gone because of the graphics power that this thing had. Now, ironically, all that graphics overhead meant that it was super slow until 0.1 or 0.2. They got there. Like the hardware advanced and the software got tuned. But he was sending that message right up front that this was not the old Mac interface with its kind of black and white things everywhere. This was just, you know, everything. Even the, even the buttons were animated, rendered blue, glossy, lickable things. Right? Like that was. That was. It was. On one level, yes, sort of silly. On another level, super important to send that message.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to speak for the geeks here and say that none of that mattered at all. The real reason this is still an operating system 25 years later is based.

[Andy Ihnatko]

On Unix Darwin and the Darwin kernel.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was based on the Mach.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Kernel and had a real largest install.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of Unix in the world.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Unix, by the way, invented in 1970, is also still in widespread use.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We did, we got to do all these articles at macworld in that era where we started to. I basically hired one of my friends from college who was a Unix guy and said write articles about how to use the command line because no Mac user knows how to do it. And I found it funny because I learned how to use the command line in college too. And. And suddenly OS X comes out and I think to myself, wait a second, I know how to use vi, right? It's like, why are all these skills I learned in 1990 suddenly relevant again? But it was actually a huge boon to Mac users to get access to that command line for the first time. Because before that there was like max bug and stuff, but really there was no proper command line like you could get on Unix. And then we got it.

[Leo Laporte]

More than, to me, it's more. It is that, of course, and I use the command line more than anything else on the Mac and Emacs. But. But it's really the idea of you changed from what people thought. Not, you know, kind of the people at Bell Labs looked down on them, but people at companies like Microsoft and Apple thought, yeah, this would be a good idea for an operating system to a real operating system, an operating system that was robust, that had memory management, that was scalable, that would have get better and better with age instead of break down with age. And that was really the right choice. It was very lucky they did that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

In those early days. I don't think the software story gets enough credit. There were. And Jobs talks about this in the presentation, right? There were Coco apps, which is basically their next step apps. And there were some of those, the Omni Group had those and Stone Design had some and Apple brought some over from Next as well. That was what going forward was the native Mac app, Cocoa app experience. And they built Carbon, which was this API that was like basically the Mac compatibility layer that let you spend a little bit, he says, like three months or whatever, to convert your app so it runs natively on OS X using the carbon APIs from classic Mac OS. And that's what the bulk of the apps were. But it took time for them to come over. What I don't think gets enough credit is that there was Also an influx of software that was basically never intended to be on the Mac and was never built for the Mac. It was Unix stuff, it was X Windows stuff. And they did over, over those first few years you kept seeing all these apps that looked terrible, but they were very powerful. And the reason was that that Unix underpinning meant that they could bring it over. And that was in the early days of the Mac. Some of the most mind blowing apps that that came out were actually these ugly things that were brilliant and powerful and they had never even considered running them on an Apple like vi. And so. Well, I mean, and they would put gui's on them and there was a whole, whole class of apps. There are still a few around. Caliber. The Ebook app is a good example of this where it's really not a good interface on top of it, but it is a cross platform app that would never have existed.

[Leo Laporte]

Handbrake is, is really FFmpeg with a nice UI. Yeah, there's actually quite a few of these.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. But in the early days, yeah, and the UIs were really bad in the early days, but getting that influx of this stuff where like literally how many people. I knew a lot of people who were basically UNIX nerds and they all started buying Macs because they could get a nice UI when they wanted it and they can get a command line when they needed it. And that was super powerful. So it was incredibly good decision to have Unix underneath. And then of course that meant that that's the layer that was the most easily transportable to the iPhone, the iPad, et cetera.

[Jason Snell]

It actually made it more saleable because just like they say, you don't market dog food to dogs, you market dog food to and you package it and advertise it for the people who buy the dog. The dog. And by suddenly giving all these system administrators and IT people, here's a command line that you will enjoy actually using, it makes it more likely that they're going to recommend this as why don't we make or approve a buy of 100 of these units? Because they know that they're going to have a good time using this on their desktops to administer the rest of the network.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's interesting because at this point, no, you know, 25 years ago, people couldn't wait to get away from OS9. But at this point nobody's saying, oh, how do we replace OS10? It's so superannuated, we need something better. Nobody's saying that as far as I know. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think we've also Gotten to a point where operating systems are a little. It's a pretty mature operating system. We don't know what we would add.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we got there because we had a solid base.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I think, I think nowadays, I think I find most advancements in the operating system to be something I complain about more than more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, don't mess with it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Like, I'm just kind of like, okay, we got it, it's working. Let's just make it. It.

[Leo Laporte]

Make it fast. You're watching Mac Break weekly. Happy birthday to OS10. So they, in fact, come to think of it, every January we probably are going to have Happy birthday because it was all announced at Mac World Expo. Yeah. How long before OS 10 shipped, Jason?

[Andy Ihnatko]

So they shipped. They said they would ship it that summer. They shipped instead what was called the public beta. So they had some developer previews and then they had the public beta, which you had to pay for and was broken and that. And. And then the next summer 2001, they shipped 10.0 and it was super slow and we didn't. Nobody was recommended to use it then they did 10 one the next year. And I, I actually thought the 10. One, that was the first time that I officially moved over and used Mac OS X. The whole like every day, all day was 10.1. And even then it was right on the edge, but you could do it. So it was a real transition. And they made the classic compatibility layer, which was essentially, you could run old apps in classic Mac OS on top of OS X. And that kept them for a little while. And it wasn't really until Steve did his little funeral for Mac OS X for Mac OS 9, where they brought out the Mac OS 9 casket and everything. And that was WWDC 2002. So that was the moment, you know, two year, two and a half years later, where Apple really just said, guys, it's over. Like, it's over. Stop, stop.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is when the big cats began. This was Puma to be followed by Jag. You are.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. They weren't originally weird. They were. Yeah. They were originally code names that nobody knew. And then they started just using them in the marketing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Was kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Puma was secret or a secret code name. I do have one story I'll mention back when Steve was out in the wilderness, still working at next in 1995, I think it was. I got to hang out with him a little bit for a weekend. And I remember him vividly saying, and this is a little bit Bitter because he's not at Apple yet. They haven't started the conversations. We had a 10 year lead on Microsoft with the Macintosh and we blew it in 84. They had 10 year lead by 1995. Windows 95 came out. He said there was nothing, no reason to buy a Macintosh. And remember he's not at Apple. But I think even then in his mind he's thinking how do we get rid of, you know, how do we replace, how do we put next step in the Macintosh? And it was a very smart move on Apple's part. They did the right thing. Great to have you all on this very special birthday. Jason Snell, thank you for writing that article and getting James Thompson to put down his thoughts.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I didn't realize that was your whole chain of events.

[Leo Laporte]

Very good idea. I was really pleased to read that. Jason Snell of course. Sixcolors.com Andy and Nako WGBH Boston from office Hours Global Alex Lindsay your ladies and gentlemen, your Mac Break weekly crew. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler. You've probably heard people talk about zero trust. This is the way to protect yourself in the modern age. Zscaler is the leader in cloud security. Problem is that enterprises have spent billions of dollars, maybe yours has too on firewalls and VPNs and, but breaches continue to rise. 18% increase year over year in ransomware attacks last year and, and I think this is an underreported figure. $75 million in ransomware paid in 2024. I'm sure it's twice that. This people just aren't admitting it. The problem is that traditional security tools, perimeter security tools really don't help. They expand. In fact your attack surface with public facing IP addresses exploited by bad actors more easily than ever nowadays with their AI tools. And those perimeter defenses can't really, they, they, they struggle to inspect the encrypted traffic going out of your system at scale. Which means it's much easier for these bad guys to exfiltrate all of that private information. We see it in the headlines. Breach after breach after breach. How do they do it? Well they get through your perimeter defenses. VPNs and firewalls do another have another problem. They enable lateral movement because as soon as you're connected to the network, yeah, you can go anywhere. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. Hackers, this is really the bottom line. Exploit traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it better than ever. Now with AI to outpace your defenses, it is time to rethink your Security to stop bad actors in their tracks because they're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses. You need to get smart. You need Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI. Now you've got it on your side. It helps you. It hides your attack surface. So apps and IP addresses completely invisible. It eliminates lateral movement, connecting users only to specific apps, not the entire network. And even better, it continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. That's the whole idea behind Zero Trust. Trust no one. Even if they're in the network, trust no one. They have to have explicit permission. Zscaler Zero Trust AI simplifies security management with AI. Powered Automation detects threats using AI to analyze 500 billion daily transactions. A human couldn't analyze half a trillion transactions a day, but AI can do it and give you actionable insights. Look, hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler zero trust plus AI. Learn [e-mail] Security please use that address. That way they'll know you saw it. Here. Zscaler.com Security we're really great product and we, we thank them for supporting Mac Break Weekly. You do the same when you use that address. Zscaler.com Security Speaking of security, Apple has agreed to pay a $95 million fine. Actually, the fine is, is de minimis from Apple's point of view. I mean, that's, that's pocket change. That's in Tim Cook's couch. But. And by the way, you may get as much as $20 each for up to five and Siri enabled devices. So 100 bucks, that might be not pocket change to you. The point more is that Apple is, you know, after five years, finally kind of said, well, all right, they don't admit any wrongdoing, but the settlement refers to, and this is what you want to know, the actionable thing. Unintentional Siri activations that occurred after hey Siri back in 2014 and later recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying, hey, you know who. And oh, I'm sorry, I activated. I apologize, I shouldn't have said that. Hey, you know who? Sometimes Shlomo would be inadvertently activated. Yeah, a whistleblower told the Guardian when an Apple watch was raised. Actually, I turned that feature off pretty darn quick. And worse, it seems Siri might have sent that out to marketing people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, no, that's, that's an allegation that is never supported. Apple denies it and there's no, there's no way there's no, there's no way that happened. That this is the. The phantom thing. It's the conspiracy theory.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been talking about breadsticks all day, and now I'm getting an olive garden.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's people who don't understand how good Internet tracking is.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't need to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They don't need to listen. And also Apple. I mean, like, Apple doesn't even know what apps you're. You want in the App Store. And they're gonna. They're gonna perfectly target like, it's not gonna happen. Apple doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple said unequivocally told Ars Technica, Siri data has never been used to build marketing profiles. It's never been sold to anyone for any purpose. And they said Apple settled to avoid additional litigation. We just want to get, get, get, get.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And this is the story that we all. We all talked about before that. I mean, this was actually a few years ago now. Right. But it's the idea that they used to have a human crew of people who would listen to activations as part of their, like, quality for Siri. But it meant. And then there was that story about how those things were being shared among the people in that human group where there would be, like, an activation and people would be having sex and you could hear it in the background and they'd like. It was like high school. They were basically, like, sharing these audio clips around. And Apple had to apologize profusely and actually put a feature in that's still in there. If you've ever gotten that warning that is like, would you like to improve Siri by sharing audio? That was the feature that was added because of this, where you could say, no, I do not want to share my audio files with Siri. So there. I mean, obviously Apple made some mistakes here, and they're paying a very small amount of money for it, to be honest. But, like, let's not get like, that one statement that's in there is never corroborated. There's no evidence about it. It is. And it is going to feed every conspiracy theory. And like, seriously, the fact that people want to believe that assistants are listening to them and feeding all that information so that you can be profiled the next time you open a web page, versus the very clear way that people are profiled and tracked in our world today, the fact that people would rather believe that it's Siri listening to them than. Than that everybody knows everything about you without needing to listen to you, I find it kind of baffling. But there we are.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was talking to someone who works on that algorithm for a network and not. Not Apple, somewhere else that does a lot of, a lot of it where you think that they can hear you. And they said, you know, the idea of using the audio is just so inefficient. He said, it just, it just, it would be such a mess. He said, no, no one uses that. He goes, the person. I can tell whether you' standing next to somebody and whether you're talking to them because your body and their body move in a certain way with the accelerometers when you're standing and talking to someone or, or interacting with them. There's these things that we know, so we know the two of them. As soon as we link the two of you. I know all the information that, that they searched that they bought at Safeway 10 minutes before that. They did all like all that. I have all that data. And, and so I, I can guess really quickly what they're talking about because this is all on top of mind for them. And you know, oftentimes people thing which is searching while they're talking, like, they're talking and they're searching some item or whatever, you know, and they don't. It's so invisible. People don't even know that they're doing it. Like, you're constantly asking Google for something or figuring something out while you're talking to someone, like, what is that? Where did that come from? Whatever. And you forget that you even did that. But, but the idea that we would use audio, he said that would just grind our servers to the ground. You know, he goes, he was like, even the NSA doesn't use.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all right, I'm gonna pause here because I would contend otherwise, but I don't think Apple does it. I don' Google does it, and I don't think Amazon does it. If your smart TV does do it. Oh, yeah, your smart tv, which has a microphone and a camera and has a lot of incentive. That's why TVs are so cheap to send this stuff back.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't, I don't think.

[Leo Laporte]

And with AI, you could do. NSA does it. With Echelon, they've admitted it. They're looking for keywords. The AI could do that too.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't think they're listening. The smart TVs are listening to what you say in your room as much as they're just watching what you watch and are able to infer everything about, about you from what you watch.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and you should never connect your TV to The Internet.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, don't do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Don't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't do that. Like, you know, we've never had so many reasons and I think there probably are people out there who are packet sniffing and looking at what's going back, although it's hard to see because it may be encrypted, it may be, you know, in some way parsed before it goes out on the network. You probably don't want to send the audio of the conversation out. Let's, let's face it. But cars and TVs, I think continually we cause concern because both manufacturers of cars and TVs in their privacy statements say we could if we wanted to. Secondly, Cox and I bet others have, there are companies out there marketing this ability to target using audio from consumers. Now, they may be lying. I mean, God knows.

[Andy Ihnatko]

My guess is that it's not content. My guess is that it's things like they've an algorithm that will predict the number of people in the household and the gender and the age.

[Leo Laporte]

We know they're doing that, right? Obviously, I'm not sure they're transcribing Cox marketing material. They said we hear what people are saying and we know what they're talking about.

[Andy Ihnatko]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

They specifically say that. Now, I'm not sure I believe them.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I believe because nobody, nobody lies more than sales people. So I have a feeling that that's more them pitching their non existent services.

[Andy Ihnatko]

However, there's, there's no trust, zero trust.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no reason to trust them and there's no reason to trust the TV makers or the car makers.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it's not just that. It's just that the worst part is, is that the technology that you're getting is so bad for that Internet, you know, the, the chips. I mean, I have to, you know, so when I build streams, I have to. We have to dumb down all of our stuff. Stuff for these stupid TVs, you know, because their chipsets are so bad, you know, And I have to admit, it's a luxury. I stream a lot of stuff to Apple tv. The Apple TV is by far. I mean, there's not any other chipset that's close to the Apple TV from a power perspective. So you can throw anything at it and it just will do what? Anything. Anything. Over the last five years. It'll just crank through whatever you're sending it. The. But when you deal with these TVs, you realize how we, because we look at the chipsets because we have to figure out what what can we deliver to those TVs? And we have to dumb everything down so much because they're just such cheap pieces of electronics. And the same thing in the cars, you know, it's a cheap piece of electronic. Like I have a, I just got a new radio for my car and you know, I'm a very old car. I'm not a car guy. And I put a. I replaced the radio because the headphone jack was broken. That's all I cared about was can my iPhone connect to my headphone jack? And the headphone jack finally gave out. So I paid $100 and some dollars and bought one with a new screen on it and everything else. It doesn't know how to do anything other than play music and. But I hook it up and, and it does Bluetooth to my, my phone and it looks better than it, it looks better than most. Most. You know, the, just the carplay makes the whole thing work. You know, and so, you know, Apple's ability to build all this stuff up or other people. I mean, Google's making great stuff with some of the Android tools as well. The. But I, but what I would say is that the, the stuff that's built into the cars and the stuff that's built into your TVs is not worth the trouble. Like, you should just disconnect as much of that as you can because you're giving up a bunch of privacy for, you know, fast food at best. You know, bad, badly made fast food.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

And the damage that can do to you. They're selling that information to insurance companies. So God forbid, like you actually have to make a claim if it's a serious enough claim, they can just basically buy information from your car maker saying, yeah, but you know what? We did analysis and you tend to break a lot more stiffly than 18% of the. So we're gonna. Yeah, that's.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well. And, and I would say the, the one that's more apparent is that they charge you differently for your flights. They charge you different. They're. They're doing, they're using that profile to decide, oh, you're the kind of person that would pay more for your flight than somebody else. And so you're, you're not even seeing the same price. We're getting to the point where you're not seeing the same prices if they decide that you're that kind of person. And that's, you know, and so it's, it's, it's not even something that's theoretical or it might happen at some point when you re up. It's happening every single day when you're on there. And, you know, it's known that you get.

[Jason Snell]

It's known that you get a better price if you're. If you're accessing the app or the, the hotel chain or whatever from an Android phone than from an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, it's very difficult to separate. I mean, there are people now in our chat saying, you know, I was. This is my favorite. I was talking about pierogi Christmas tree ornaments during the day, and I got ads for pierogi Christmas tree ornaments that night.

[Alex Lindsay]

That.

[Leo Laporte]

You hear that all the time. I hear it from every. All normals. Absolutely believe this is happening. And I guess what I try to say is it. And I think this is what you were saying, Jason. They don't really need to listen to what you're saying because they already know so much about you.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, if they could, they would.

[Jason Snell]

But it's like trying to avoid microplastics. Like, okay, but what bubble that has been unsealed since 1803 are you going to live in now? So.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and they know that it's Christmas time. They know that at some point you bought those pierogi.

[Leo Laporte]

They know you love pierogies. Right.

[Jason Snell]

You probably observe little Christmas because pierogies is. Are what I had on little Christmas. Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or, or that the pierogi, the pro.

[Leo Laporte]

The.

[Alex Lindsay]

The p. Ornaments are somebody that you know or someone that. That you. Or maybe you ordered them somewhere in the past and now it's the right time, you know, for you to. To do that.

[Leo Laporte]

They explain it. Absolutely.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, even. Even just positional data, they know that you're walking around in a way that would be what you do when you put things on the Christmas tree. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the thing, though, that does make people, I think, reasonably nervous is. Is the capacity of computing, of the cloud and with AI has increased so exponentially over the last 10 years that marketers can do so much more with this data than they could ever do. And that's why it seems like magic. And I think people should reasonably be afraid of what people are doing with AI and the vast volume of data that they, the nsa, they didn't build that giant data center in the Midwest because they could crack encryption. They just figured down the road we'll be able to. And. And so they've. All this is being collected, has always been collected, and now they really have some powerful tools.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's. That's why it's absolutely imperative that collectively society Decides that we are going to make this a priority for our lawmakers that you. We need. We need a set of laws enforceable that basically protects personal private user information. I've always wanted a framework that basically says that your private. These are. Here are some specific categories of information that belong to you. And ownership cannot be transferred to any other entity under any reason. It can be leased, but it cannot be transferred. Which would create a requirement to say that every year or so, whether they do it in a lame way or in a legitimate way, they have to basically renew that lease with you in a direct and specific way. But unless there are consequences, you file what I always refer to as the big bag of money on the table phenomenon. Where if there's a big bag of money on the table and a sign on it saying it is not illegal to take this bag of money and take it home with you, people are going to take that big bag of money.

[Leo Laporte]

When do we get to despair of this, Andy? Because I don't think it's ever going to happen any more than we're going to get money out of politics. Well, there are just some fundamental structural problems here that every clear minded person knows are a problem. But because of money and because of the power that billionaires and marketers and these oligarchs have, we're never gonna see any reasonable privacy.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well the only thing I don't know what we can do, the only thing we can't do is give up. Because as soon as we cause that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Desperate despair is what you're saying.

[Jason Snell]

The modus operandi of the devil, metaphorically speaking, is to lower our standards until we don't care anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

I read the Screwtape letters. I know.

[Jason Snell]

Actually I was more quoting Broadcast News.

[Leo Laporte]

Albert Brooks, but it started with CS Lewis. I promise, if you want to know the devil's ways, the Screwtape letters is hysterical anyway. And there's a John Cleese version of it on Audible that I really enjoy.

[Alex Lindsay]

But anyway, I think that it is typically when these kinds of things happen that when people start to have a lot of friction or start to have it upset or start to become conscious to it, it also, beyond the government provides market opportunities for a new way of doing things.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an interesting point. Point. That's what Tim Berners Lee is trying to do with solid. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And that turns into disruption. You know, like when you see disruption a lot of times it's people being built up and more and more frustrated with something. Someone comes in with something that solves that, that itch that's become, you know, intolerable. Suddenly everybody jumps over and that's when you see something happen really quickly. Suddenly everyone moves over to something else. And so, you know, I don't think that, I think the government may be able to do something about it. I think it's actually going to be more likely that someone like, I think that there's an article for social media, someone's going to build a human only social media that requires you to biometrically log in all the time. That is not going to allow any bots that's going to, you know, and it'll be a little harder to communicate. It won't be as automated. There won't be, there won't be any automated posts. There won't be any way to do, you know, like it's going to have to be you. And I think that that kind of thing is going to crop up because people are so tired of what, you know, like that half of meta is, you know, half of meta's bots now, you know, like what they said, or half of Facebook is going to be bots.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you feel like though that maybe we're just the tin hat wearing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't think, I think that we're talking minority.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

I guess what I would say is we are consciously talking about it. But I think that when you look at depression rates, when you look at upset, you know, when you look at this, it's, it's affecting everyone. Yeah. And they're just not, you know, like, they're not conscious to it, you know, like it's. But they're, but it's affecting, you know, a lot of people, you know, and I think that, you know, we're, we become more, more as a group, we oftentimes become more sensitive to this. We become more sensitive to like for instance, right now, ultra processed foods, having a moment, you know, like where suddenly everyone's like, hey, maybe we shouldn't be eating everything out of a box, you know, and, and you know, and there's a whole bunch of market opportunities that are occurring underneath all of that. And I think that, you know, so what happens is, is that I think a lot of, a lot of folks, you know, we see these, these snaps. Does it fix everything? Probably not, but I think that you will. You know, I think, and I also think that that's why, I mean, as an Apple user, you know, a lot of times I want Apple to keep on tightening all those bolts. I want them to say, you know, I don't Want to share the third parties. I want them to be able, I want to keep having them close that stuff down, you know, because, you know, I think that that makes explain that.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S still hundreds of millions of people using X. I think you're an optimist, I guess is what I would say, Alex. You're a, a wide eyed optimist.

[Alex Lindsay]

You just, you know, but, but I think that, I think that it's again, I, I, to, to take Elon Musk for a moment. Maybe I'm a, is that everyone was really resigned about, about that there's no way you could build an electric car until Tesla came out. And so it's just, he took advantage of a moment that people were paying attention to that and didn't try to have us eat broccoli to do it. He just said we're going to make something that's cooler that happens to be electric. And, and so that, that, you know, so I think that that shows you where there's weak points in a lot of these things and I think that.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, to bring it back full circle, there is no car made today that spies on you more than your Tesla. Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't have a Tesla. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I could tell you for a fact I have a, I have a.

[Alex Lindsay]

10 year old Dodge Caravan that I had to pull by the radio that the headphone jack broke on.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't, yeah, you're smart. And by the way, you said I'm not a car guy. Car guys all own old cars. Car guys, guys love old cars.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have, I have an enclosed truck. That's what, that's how I look at it because I put all the seats down. I literally have a 4 by 8 piece of plywood that just sits on it until someone has to get into it. Every once in a while you have to open the windows because it smells bad if it gets wet. So, so it's, but outside of that, I'm, you know, a country boy with a truck that, that I can close, I can close the top on. And so, so, but I, but when I, but I do look at some of the newer cars and I do think about, oh my gosh, there'll be a lot of tracking going on that I don't, you know, deal with. I also don't put a lot of miles on cars. I don't drive that much.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're going to take a little break, come back. I'm sure there's other things to talk about and we will find them and Talk about them with MacBreak Weekly. Andy Inocco, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. And they've been doing this longer than we've been doing this since 1985, since the Mac came out. With Melissa's debut in the Stripe App marketplace, Stripe customers now have access to the same data quality services leveraged by large global enterprises every day. Key features of Melissa's Stripe integration include address validation. You know this is where addresses get munged up is when your customer or your customer service rep is entering in an address and flips numbers or gets the phone number wrong or the email or wrong wrong. Melissa's app validates global addresses at the customer and the invoice level within Stripe. In fact, they do it with autocompletion, so you reduce the number of keystrokes required and ensure that only valid addresses enter your database. If you use Stripe, you want this, right? How about user friendly configuration? Stripe users can easily configure the app with a few steps and their support. Support not only for the invoice level validation, but for the customer account as well. It also helps with subscription management. Melissa and the Stripe app offers smooth management of API keys and subscriptions, facilitating transitions from free to paid services. And of course you get comprehensive support and quality assurance. Users have direct access to Melissa's experts, ensuring the best service and the best support. Melissa is really the best at doing this and the ability to integrate it directly into your apps, whether it's Stripe or any of hundreds of other apps is fantastic. It enhances operational efficiency, it boosts customer satisfaction, and it helps you maintain overall financial health. These should be goals for any forward thinking business. If you rely on Stripe, you need this ever expanding tool set at the ready with Melissa. So take a look at Melissa integration. Melissa services understand compliance like no other too. By the way, with Melissa you get secure encryption for all file transfers. It's an information ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They support GDPR policies, SoC2 compliance. Of course they treat your data like the gold that it is. Treat your data like gold. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. Melissa.comtwit M E L I S S A We thank Melissa for supporting us for so many years. They're back again in 2025. Welcome back Melissa. We really appreciate the support. Melissa.comTWIT do we care why Apple won't make a search engine? Eddie Q says it's economically risky to compete with Google. You know what the risk might be though, and Apple actually filed a brief in this is that they may lose their 20 billion or so a year from Google if the court rules that Google has to stop those payments. That's the real risk. This was part of that, that briefing that they filed with the Department of Justice.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. This is part of the remedy portion of the antitrust case against Google Search where they lost the case. And now we spend lots of months with the DOJ and Google arguing about, okay, well how do we remedy this?

[Leo Laporte]

Won't go on much longer. I think the judge has to decide soon, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, in a couple of months, I think. I. Oh, is it that long? Okay, but not too long. And of course the DOJ is asking essentially Google shut down everything sell Chrome. One of the things that the DOJ is asking for is, sorry, backing up one step. DOJ does not have the ability to make an order. They simply file a document with a judge saying, here's what we think will remedy the situation and restore balance to the force, so to speak. One of the things they want to do is Apple. They can no longer have any special deals with Apple that benefit Apple in any way. On that basis, Apple filed a brief basically saying that, hey, we think that this means that we get to be part of this conversation. Because now you're directly interfering with Apple's ability to do business. Because if you basically, if you put a 10 year ban on Apple having an agreement with Google that benefits Apple, that means that not just with search, we can't like support Android devices, we can't do links to have links that, that go out to Google Docs. Anything that involves Google will sort us out. And because Google, and this is, if you read the document, it's actually very, very like very plain English, very English, very easy to understand. They're saying that because Google has more than their hands full worrying about themselves, Apple, they're not going to worry about protecting Apple's interests. So we have a very important interest in being able to have a voice in this conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the development of us. This is what Eddie wrote in the filing with the federal court court last week. It says his name. I don't think Eddie really wrote it. Eddie, the lawyers who talked to Eddie wrote this. The development of a search engine would cost Apple billions of dollars and take many years, diverting investment money and employees away from other growth areas. It would hurt us. Your Honor, the search business is rapidly evolving that I'll admit to due to artificial intelligence. So it would be economically risky for Apple to create A search engine. That's not true.

[Alex Lindsay]

I, I just don't. I think that sometimes we get into this thing where we get antitrust by the time something's ending.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and for Google, I think search is ending.

[Alex Lindsay]

I spend way more time asking chat GPT or, or Claude or sonnet or whatever questions than I do Google search now. I mean, the Google search, the, the summaries are pretty good, but, but outside of that, I find that I just answer much faster with chat GPT.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't think ARC now, which uses perplexity and, and it summarizes search results much better. I very rarely know.

[Jason Snell]

Also, also. So Google has. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Alex, I interrupted you.

[Alex Lindsay]

All I was going to say is that I think that, that, number one is. I don't think this has gone to the Supreme Court yet. So we don't know what, you know, unless they actually force them to do something. This is still a couple years away. Maybe, maybe all the years away. And by the time they get to the Supreme Court, will search still be a thing in the. At the level that it is now? Number two is that, you know, we're about to have a new doj. Like, are they going to continue to fight it? Like, you know, so if it goes into a.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well, at this point, I think it's up to the court, right? I mean, no, I mean, if it got the doj, can he go to the court and say, hey, your honor. No, no, if, no, because it was.

[Alex Lindsay]

If it's done deal, if it gets. It hasn't gone up.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they don't have to defend an appeal.

[Alex Lindsay]

They could just say if they appealed it, the, the DOJ could decide not to move forward. Like, they can just go, you know, this is not. Oh, you're right on about it, you know, so, so in the next four.

[Leo Laporte]

Years, that explains why Tim Cook put a million dollars down on the inaugural ball.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's why everyone's putting. It's pretty transactional, this one. You know, I think Trump's a lot easier to calculate for when it comes to, like, will it make a difference?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's much easier. It's much simpler. No guessing involved at all.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, but, but this could affect Google search because they're putting together so many products that leverage off of essentially the Google search product. They have a brand new. The marketing hype that they're putting together for AI in 2025 is now they're going to move the Gemini model into agentive. What they're calling AI which is stuff that actually uses other tools and apps to do things for you. And one of the first things they introduced to people who are paid subscribers are essentially research this topic for me on Google Search and here's what I'm interested in. Here's your parameters and it will come back not just with a Google search, not just with a search summary, but here is like a couple of pages on this topic and a whole list of here web pages to take a look at for more exploration. And if you say, oh, refine this, I really want you to talk about, limit the talk. Tell me more about Paris and the 1890s. So if, if Google is barred from using Google Search, not only will it bar that, it will also bar them offering Google Search as a product to essentially double check other people's AIs, which is another service that they're trying to offer through Google Search for developers. So, so it is, it's a moving target and it is a very, very complicated thing. And yeah, it's million dollars, small amount of money to pay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

As a user, I guess the question is like, is this going to make my life any better? I don't know if it will will. Like, I don't know if the breaking this up is going to make it is going to make my search any better. Like, I just don't think that sometimes I think we go down this path and it's like Google search is so much better than everybody else's search. Like it's not really. I don't feel like it's close. Like I try other ones. So they're like, they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's why the argument if you're going to still use search is in fact the best remedy for this is for Google to be forced to freely license its search index. I use Kagi. I actually paid money to use Cogi. And they use in a very kind of clever derivative way the Google results along with other results, results. And it's, it's. So it gets the benefit of all the, of the Google index without the Google Ads, without the Google algorithmic placing of its own properties up at the top. And it's. So it's. I haven't used Google in ages. I stopped using it a long time ago. The problem is Google's still in there. Right. And so what, what the judge has to do I think is tell Google, look, you got to give companies like Kagi access to your index at either a reasonable fee or no fee. No fee would be a punishment, right?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And go ahead and that's, and that's one of the remedies that the DOJ is proposing.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't propose that.

[Jason Snell]

And I think that's the one. It's a long list of. Obviously this is like, well, how much my car got dented? How much you dented my car. How much do you rather, I'm sorry, your car got dented by my construction company. Like, how much do you think you should get in compensation? You started a million dollars and you negotiate now down because you ask for everything knowing that you're going to have to settle for what you settled for. But yeah, the problem is that Google is the word that people use for searching something on the Internet. That's how popular it is. And this is another one of those things where people in this conversation might understand that there are other tools that if nothing else, give you a different perspective, a different ranking of search results. People still, I mean Google is simply the concierge to the Internet for the entire world.

[Leo Laporte]

This might be one case where Alex's thesis of the market changing things might actually hold. I more talk to normal people who are dissatisfied with Google's results. I hear that a lot.

[Jason Snell]

I 100% agree with Alex on this point because Meta's ruling was so bizarre when you read it because almost every paragraph could been used in a billboard ad for Google search. Okay? Because everything that he was saying said that, that it is the best. It's what everybody wants to use and it's not because they're being unfair. It's because it legitimately is the best. Other companies don't want to compete with them because they would cost. They don't want to start 20 years of research and spending on it on and on and on and on and on. Nonetheless, we feel as though they're abusing their market power and so we're going to have to fix it. It's not like I thought that, I thought that the big deal, I thought that the search was going to be something either a win, a minor, minor, minor, minor win at best. I thought there would be something that the DOJ would have to appeal really to get a win on. I thought that, I mean they still got the ad business antitrust suit over their heads and that's where they're going to absolutely get destroyed. I don't think that anybody is benefited by breaking up Google Search. I do think there could be a benefit by giving third party searches and third party tools access to their search rankings. Not the algorithm, but at least give, but at least what is the value of this link as a result for these words and get that information back and use that to build like a cooking search engine, an academic search engine that I think is more within the ballpark of what's good for the market and what's good for users.

[Alex Lindsay]

I guess I think it would still be like noise like, I mean the number of people that would do that would be noise like and it. And I think that it is. And I think the era of the government, you know, trying to fix all the remedy, all these things is probably over. And so, you know, so the, you know, like, I think that that was a moment like that the government had to do that and I think they, they still have to get to the Supreme Court. I don't think the Supreme Court is the kind of court that's going to think that this is a good idea. So I think that this is the current, you know, it could change and there's lots of things that can change. So. But if it hits over the next three or four years, I think that the chances of it succeeding at the level that the DOJ is asking for, if the DOJ continues to appeal it, which will be in question because, you know, it's not going to be Google because I don't think that Trump cares about Google, but it might be, you know, Tim Apple talking to talk, you know, you know, whispering like, hey, this is dumb, let's not do this. And so I think that I don't, I just don't think that there's any. And again, I don't know if it's relevant. I guess I'd probably think more about it if I thought that search had a future, but I just don't see what the future is. And I, my whole family just sits there and finds things on ChatGPT all the time. Like just, it's just like a constant. Like there's not.

[Jason Snell]

And TikTok and. Yeah, but TikTok is a search engine for the young.

[Alex Lindsay]

When I, when I need. I needed to figure out how to do something pretty complex and DaVinci resolve through three pieces of hardware to output to a stream and all I did is ask ChatGPT how to do it and just ask one piece after the other. I can't find. It was such a weird connection there. I couldn't find that on the Internet. Like I started in Google and then in that moment six months ago or whatever just changed everything for me, which is that I, I start with Chat GPT and if I'm not sure, then I go to Google. But I rarely, I mean like now like nine like. And I'm someone who, we used to joke that in our family it's not what you know, it's how well you Google. You know, like it's you know, and, and that, that all that information was out there. We don't need to figure it out. And now I'm constantly, I'm using sonnet for other things and, and you know, and, and I, I just feel like I don't. I, it's so I can go a whole day now as someone who used to Google five or ten times an hour at least I now go. Can go a whole day without opening Google. Like and, and I think that, so I think we're sitting there building all this legislative stuff around something that I don't know how relevant it is. I think they are worried that they don't know how relevant it is. And I think that now starting to weight it down with a bunch of legislation when it's, they're going to be. I think Google's going to be fighting for its existence because ad, you know, Google search and Google AdWords. Nothing else at Google really works like you know, like, like you know like it's like, it's like nothing else makes money like nothing else makes money like ad been in a lot of Google events and I can tell you, you can tell when you're at a Google Ad event because it's like the, the money spent on it for the big thing is like looking into the sun like it. And, and when you look at what they're doing. But the only thing that's really generating lots of money at Google is ads, you know, like, or is, is the Google search and display ads and YouTube. You know, and, and so the, the, the I think that this disruption that's happening with AI around search is the end of search. Like I just don't think it's going to happen that it's going to. And so I, you know, I didn't think that until six months ago when I again when I started asking complex questions. I'm writing whole apps without having to open, you know, without having to know how to code like you know like it's and when you do all of that, I used to Google all of that to try to figure it all out and I just don't do that anymore.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I kind of disagree. I still think that most people's first point of access is Google. Google for myself. I mean for instance, for reasons not unrelated to Tim Cook's alleged million dollar donation to Trump's inauguration fund. I had to learn a whole lot about the Federal Election Commission and how donations are registered and that sort of stuff. And the number one, the first place I went to was Google Gemini just to ask for a broad what do I need to know? But the next step was to Google search to find. Okay, now I know I need to find form FE13 for each of these election commissions. I also need to know what names these election commissions are registered under. And that's when chatgpt all these search bots, A, are not going to produce the results that I wanted and B, if they did, I would have to run that back through Google Search anyway because I wouldn't trust it. AI is not a place where you trust any fact that it gives it at this point. Again, it's really good at sending you on the right direction, giving you that overview for things you can verify yourself, but it's not something that I would use that way. All I'm saying is that Google has a plan that goes beyond simply Google search involves keeping that monetized. And lastly, yeah, you're absolutely right. The ad business is to Google Alphabet what the iPhone business is to Apple. It's roughly the same percentage of their revenue. And if something were to destroy that market, they'd be in super, super big trouble. And for the record, Google has fewer great, successful, profitable bets than Apple does. Google Cloud is working extremely well, but it's still in the launch phase. And the thing is, the appetite for iPhone sales is not going to go down anytime soon and Apple has plenty of time. Whereas if in two or three years, Google has to find a way to replace 52, 53% of its annual revenue, I don't feel like they're in a position to do that right now.

[Alex Lindsay]

I guess what I would say is that also that it's. That no other search. It doesn't make sense to go into the search business now or to even try to suddenly. If Google suddenly just, you know, is disrupted or told that it has to do all these things, it's just not a. That's just not a good business for other people to get into. Not just Google's. Google's is the. They're the best at what they're doing, but you're in a deteriorating market, why would you invest? You know, it's not a good. I just don't know if it's a good.

[Jason Snell]

I disagree. And that's.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's all I have to say.

[Leo Laporte]

BBC says Apple has been urged to withdraw out of control. AI News Alert, alerts urged by the BBC, I believe. But they left that out of the headline. You read it, you wrote a good piece, Jason, on how you were taught back in the day how to write headlines.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Back in my day, back in my.

[Leo Laporte]

Day they created clicks but. But did it without hiding information.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So the problem, the problem is there's a lot going on here. So the BBC has had its apps push notifications summarized by Apple Intelligence. And what gets created is things that are factually untrue. And the problem is, and Apple has said that they'll address it, it sounds like they're going to put a more prominent warning label on it, which is not the same as saying don't understand.

[Jason Snell]

What the feature works like.

[Leo Laporte]

Warning would be like, we made this up. But here's what we think the BBC is saying.

[Andy Ihnatko]

There are, there are a lot of things going on here. Part of the problem here is that what, what Apple is doing is summarizing a summary. It's. They're summarizing a, if not a headline, a push notification text written by somebody that's being sent out through the BBC app. And it depends, some of those are automated. Sometimes the people who write the headlines write the push notification text. Sometimes it is the headline doesn't matter. It is a summary made by a human. And then what Apple is doing apparently is throwing all of these summaries in a bin, you know, all, all together into their LLM and saying summarize this. And the problem there is that you get weird crossover, you get mis parsing of phrases and you know, it's an LLM. But the challenge here is that you end up with things that are not factual. And the BBC has been making noise about this because it keeps happening where like there was a headline that was like the shooting suspect of that healthcare CEO had made some like gestures and stuff as he was being led into court. And Apple summarized, took shooting suspect and the guy's name and turned it into that he was shot. Yeah, because it misread and it's using that.

[Leo Laporte]

Big difference.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So yeah, so, yeah. So I mean my complaints about modern headlines being bad are, are there was a, there was a, a company called Artifact that went under that they had an app where you could actually mark a headline as clickbait and have the AI rewrite it and the AI rewritten headlines about it. Yeah, the AI rewritten headlines were pretty good. But the thing is, and this is a key point point, the AI headlines were based on the story text. And here Apple is rewriting a summary of a story. It is a summary of a summary and of course it's going to do a bad job with that. So the question is in the long run, I mean, first off, I think this is an effect of Apple rushing Apple Intelligence forward because I think there are ways you could do this in terms of classifying the push notification as being a news app or something else. Changing the behavior of summarization. Maybe you ask the news app to supply more information and you summarize that.

[Leo Laporte]

Rather than just, is Apple using the on device model to do this?

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's part of the problem is this is kind of not a super smart model.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It is, yeah. But I think that if it had better data, it's. Yeah, it's not a stupid model. The problem is it's summarizing a summary and so there's so little data for it to infer what's going on and our human brains can do it.

[Jason Snell]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And so, so like Apple's, Apple has not even responded to stuff like this before. So this, this response, which is very brief and very vague saying we'll, we'll, you know, we'll do some more labeling later. It's like it's a start. But I think what really needs to happen is Apple needs to, you know, and they, and they also said it's a beta, right? Which is fine, it is a beta, but it's a beta in a final version of an operating system. So that's only already a little shaky, sticky and it's heavily marketed and they don't say in the marketing, oh, but it's a beta, be careful. So I think Apple just needs to be more diligent here and I think we all need to not be as understanding about the fact that Apple is trying to struggle to, to catch up here. Because the fact is Apple is shipping a feature that takes news and a certain percentage of it turns it into things that didn't happen. And that's bad, right? That's, that's bad and we should say it's bad and we should say they need to do better and if they can't do better, they need to turn that feature off until they can do better. Bottom line, that's what they need to do.

[Jason Snell]

Not only that, but they're not, this isn't Apple intelligent. The notification that Apple Intelligence says, blah blah, blah blah blah. There is the BBC says, and here's the logo for the BBC next to it. They are basically not only coming up with things that are pat, not just a little wrong, but Completely wrong. Yep. It's. They're basically also putting other people on the hook for it. The BBC and others are very, very right to be miffed off about this. And I also think that it's super, super weak sauce for Apple to simply say, oh, well, we'll be modifying how these things are notified. They need. This is a broken feature that spreads misinformation and an era where misinformation online is one of the biggest crises that the news industry faces. They need to terminate this. They need to unplug this feature right now and come back with it in 18.3, 18.4. And you're absolutely right. Like, it's not just. They're not just. You can't hide behind. Oh, well, we're still working on it. It is a beta. Not only are they putting it out as anybody who has the full version, the mainstream edition of the golden version of iOS can use this, but they're also all their marketing is, wow. It's part of Apple intelligence. It's magic and it makes everything better. Like, no, it doesn't. This feature is bad, bad, bad. You need to take responsibility for what it is doing and just basically turn it off, off. It's perfectly fine to this. You aren't the first organization that's had this problem with AI summaries of these kinds. Certainly not to say nothing of how early you are in your adventure towards implementing AI. No harm, no, excuse me, it's not embarrassing or humiliating, but if you decide that, no, it's perfectly fine to keep this feature going even though we know it can cause harm, that's not the responsible thing to do. They need to terminate this feature and come back to it later.

[Leo Laporte]

Fair enough. What's your prescription in that art? You wrote a great article, by the way, and I appreciate the nod to Ben Folds, although I doubt very many people.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Brett Jones. It's a bed folds deep cut. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a wonderful, wonderful song. But what is your prescription? Maybe they could do what Artifact did.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think, yeah, I think there are a lot of things they could do and that the fact that they didn't is because they rushed the feature out, because they're rushing all of Apple intelligence out. And that's why, why I think that we need to not cut them as much slack because I think we need to say, this isn't good enough. It isn't up to your standards that, that, you know, they could classify those apps by what they're doing and they could make it even make a judgment and say, you Know what? We're going to turn off summarization of news headlines now. Or they could do something like summarize each headline on its own and then put them together. Because I think one of the things they may be doing is putting them together in a, in a bushel and summarizing the bushel and you end up getting kind of like leakage between headlines. I don't know that for sure. That's just a guess. Is that they're feeding different headlines, crossing over, which is also bad. They could also build something in where. And again, this takes time because you got to work with developers and you got to work in the app store and you might need to build a new API. But like, I think it's a great idea. The reason I brought up the idea that you could summarize full articles is if the push comes with a URL as well as a payload, maybe you have your LLM go look at the URL and summarize that instead. Because it is, and this was my point in my follow up article, is LLMs are actually pretty good at writing headlines. If you give them the whole article, if you give them 8,000 words or 4,000 words or even a thousand words, they can do a pretty good job at writing you a headline. But when they're given 20 words or 10 words, all they're doing is rephrasing based on very little information. So I think that they're, you know, from letting apps opt out, which I know that Apple doesn't want to do because it wants apps to take advantage of this feature. Letting classes of apps like news apps opt out or changing the rules of the game a little bit so that there's more information that they can glean for their summary. All of these are options. Some of them are harder to implement than others. But like I think the problem is just, you can't just throw this out there and say, okay, we got it. And I know it's a beta, but like part of being a beta is that it's incumbent on the developer to take the feedback and make changes. And I think we risk Apple thinking they got away with this. And I think that's why the BBC shouting like this is really valuable because it's them saying this is not okay, you have a lot of work to do here. This is, this is not how we want our content to be presented to our customers. And I think that's fair enough.

[Jason Snell]

Independent press organizations are also calling for the same thing. So they're not, it's not a quiet problem.

[Alex Lindsay]

I Know that this is going to sound basic. Where is this showing up? And the reason I ask is I don't ever see any, any, any summaries turned off.

[Leo Laporte]

The AI summaries.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. If you, if you have AI summaries turned on and you have a news app that feeds you lots of headlines, like the BBC app, if you opt to have them fed to you, then in the lock screen or in the notification center, instead of seeing a stack of headlines, you'll see, see a single notification bubble that will summarize with little semicolons in between a few of those headlines together. Which again, as an idea of you, you know, 10 push notifications have gone by. We're going to tell you what you really need to know in a really quick blurt. Like that's okay, that's not a bad idea. The problem is when it says Rafael Nadal comes out as gay, when that's not the headline, that's not the story. It's not true. But the BBC now is allegedly saying that because it's been filtered through.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't have any, just any notifications.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It doesn't sound like you, does it? It doesn't sound like you.

[Leo Laporte]

What is, what is our. There's the. By the way, the New York Times headline trudeau will be the next Congress. I think that's pretty darn exciting. I just read that one.

[Jason Snell]

And it's not just these summaries either. Remember, remember that, that one of the things that Apple Intelligence was supposed to benefit us for is that, hey, we're going to make sure that we're not going to give you alerts for every single email or message that you get. We'll make sure that the most important ones get special alerts. But it's too dumb to know that. Yeah. The reason why spammers put extremely lurid and attention getting things like oh my God, call me right now is because things, it's because it's attention getting. And so great. So now spammers are getting at the top of my notifications outside of like my mom, my friends, my doctors. It's, it's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

So how do we feel about it with notifications? I mean messages, notifications. They are also sometimes hysterically wrong. But I think it's not quite the same. Right.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I wish, I wish they were better, but I think they have more context because they get to summarize the entire text of the message. So it's, it's sometimes wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen some really crazy.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, absolutely. But it's, I think that there's potential there for it to be useful, but it's not, you know, and the stakes feel a little bit lower to me than I like these.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, when I first turn it on, my ring doorbell said there were multiple people at my front door. I got a little nervous until I realized, so that's just a roll up of all the different people that came and went over a five hour period. It sounded like they were there with pitchforks and torches and I wish should. Should immediately bar the door, but that wasn't it. So you learn. It's funny. I think that one's useful. I don't. But the difference is it's not claiming to come from a news organization.

[Jason Snell]

I really think that one of the simplest things they could do to at least partially address this is to simply say, guess what? Every notification that you get that's been filtered through Apple Intelligence has a special background on it that is.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Jason Snell]

Just get. Just give it a different shade of color that's associated with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. All right, let's take a little break. More to come. You're watching Mac Break Weekly on the TWIT podcasting network. This is our. By the way, when did we. When did you start Mac Break, Alex?

[Alex Lindsay]

This was. It would have been, I think this week in 2000.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's 2006 because it was Mac World Expo.

[Alex Lindsay]

The Mac World Expo. We. We ran around with Emory Wells and Amber MacArthur and you and I. Yeah. And we covered it. And then we. That week we recorded a whole bunch of episodes that took me a long time to put together.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is the 19th anniversary of Mac Break?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it is. We are in our 20th anniversary for twit in April. We've been doing this a long time. Almost as long as you, Jason.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Wow, wow, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty amazing. So happy birthday to us. Our show today, brought to you by Cashfly. That's one of the reasons I ask is because practically since the beginning we've been literally brought to you by Cashfly. You heard me say it over and over, you know. Bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is provided by cash fly at C-A-C-H-E F L Y dot com. Actually, in the early days, I think I said a L L radio, BitTorrent. I mean we were trying everything. That's when Matt Levine from Cashfly came to me and said, can we help? For over 20 years, CashFly has had the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. We're one of of them. We've been using Cashfly as our content delivery network, our CDN practically since the beginning. I mean we love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. Cashfly is the only CDN built for throughput. In fact they can do something. I don't know anybody who could do this. Ultra low latency video streaming, less than 1 second latency to over a million concurrent users. They also, if you're a gaming company, they offer lightning fast gaming downloads are faster. Zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. If you've got images on your site or on your content. Their mobile content optimization is automatic. It automatically optimizes the size of the images for every screen so your content loads faster on any device. One of the things we loved about Cash Fly is we didn't know exactly what our bandwidth was going to look like, where the peaks and valleys would be. They were very flexible with us giving us month to month billing for as long as we needed. And then once we figured it all out, discounts for fixed terms. The the point is, and this was something we really valued, you can design your own contract when you switch to Cash Fly. Cash Fly rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. You can shield your content in the cloud. We've been doing that for some years now, ensuring 100% cash hit ratio, no cash misses. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you're treated like a vip, which you know from Cash Fly's point of view, you are. They'll assign a dedicated account manager who'll be with you from day one, making sure it's a smooth implementation. And of course they're there 247 with reliable support whenever you need it. Learn how you can get your first month free. Cashfly.com that's C-A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT real thanks to Cash Fly. I think I'm doing Matt's podcasts in a few days. I have to check my calendar. I remember I'm doing that. It's coming up. All right. Strava integration into Fitness Plus. Nothing.

[Jason Snell]

I don't exercise enough to have a comment on this.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't use Strava actually. I really like Fitness plus as it is in Apple's Activity I've been using something called Gentler Streak, which is basically the same stuff Apple tells you, but in a nicer way.

[Alex Lindsay]

I like that I Love all the Apple health. I mean, I think that it's so valuable. It's so great. I finally. My wife was kind of like, I don't want to watch. I don't want to watch. I don't want to watch. And then she said, do you have any of the old Apple watches? Right around Christmas. So I very quickly got our 10. Like, I just went and bought her, but, like, here, have a new one. I don't. I want to make sure you have a great experience. And she just loves it. Like, she's gonna go into the Apple Store and, like, do the little tutorial on how to use it and. And all this other stuff. She's. She just really enjoys it. And. But I think that the biggest thing is the health is. Is the sense that all this biometric data, sleep data I have. I don't feel like if I go to swim that I don't have my watch or if my watch battery died, you know, if I. If my. If the battery ran low or whatever, I feel like the swim doesn't count. I have to go do something else, you know, like, so. So the. The tracking of that has been kind of amazing. Like, and just all of that, I think that that's the biggest. I think Apple had a lot of assumptions about what I think we talked about before, but what the app would. What the watch would do, and what it's really done is timers and health, you know, are the two big. You know, that's what they. Like, that's the lock in. I can't imagine using something else at this point, but I think they're. Their. Their fitness stuff is great. I haven't found a space that I wanted to do. I've done it a little bit, but hadn't found a space that I really found that was the right space to do it in. But I think that the. What's fun as a production person is to watch what happens when someone builds fitness videos where they used all the money. Yeah. Like, the production value on the business was so high.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're gonna have some Strava athletes in the fitness videos. I love the fitness.

[Jason Snell]

There was a. Yeah, they. There was an Apple newsroom mark, so it's big enough. They decided to put a newsroom piece in it in addition to a whole bunch of, like, little new features for fitness plus, such as pickleball. You can now pickleball counts as it.

[Leo Laporte]

Should, for crying out loud. They got everything else.

[Jason Snell]

Yes. For Strava.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you get.

[Jason Snell]

Do you get credit for, like, the fist fights you get into with tennis players as you're trying to use the same court, that should also count too because that's very, very aerobic and manages your blood pressure and stress levels. But yeah, so the Strava stuff is that essentially there's integration between the fitness app and the Strava app. And also the Strava app can get access to data off of your phone that's fitness related and that content related. And also that they're having a whole bunch of Strava instructors available in Apple's fitness offering. So yeah, I mean they're going where the money is. Their services, services, services, services. They got to keep making as much money as they can from services by making fitness plus more attractive by hooking it up to the, the, the kind of, the, the name. The, the only other name that you kind of think of when it comes to fitness services is Strava. So it's a, it's a high tide that can float both of those boats.

[Leo Laporte]

I have my. There you go. There's, there's Strava. It's usually mostly used by runners I think for training and so forth. I have my go gentler I think I presume it's taking this from Apple Fitness. It can record dancing. So when I go out to dance, I turn on my Apple watch. People think I'm a complete dork. Tai Chi. I turn on my Apple watch when I'm doing my tai chi. It records a lot of those things. It's pretty cool. Adding more is always a good thing. Incidentally, there was a breakthrough. I know Alex, you have said that the, the, the company that comes through with a way of doing non invasive blood glucose monitoring is going to be very, very rich. University of Waterloo announced that they have now created a non invasive continuous glucose monitor that you could, would fit in a watch uses radar. Now I, I'm sure Apple came a calling almost immediately.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was like, I was like also seen as a bunch of Apple executives having dinner.

[Jason Snell]

And to break this technology from benefiting anybody who doesn't buy Apple products, Apple decided to come in and write the check.

[Leo Laporte]

So we'll see. I mean actually this paper came out last year so. Radar near field sensing using Meta Surface for biomedical applications. You might have missed that in your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Inbox, but I don't know if it would have the same impact with almost any other manufacturer because the, the watch is so, you know, it's everywhere ubiquitous now.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but if know Massimo came calling too. They don't have the billions that Apple does.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I Think that if I was, I was, if I was looking for the right deal, I would definitely do it with Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be whatever. Plus, the piece says the team is currently working with industry partners who introduce the technology to be installed in the next generation of Whaler wearables. We have a minimum viable product that's already being used in clinical trials. That's the key though, isn't it, to get the FDA approved and make sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

It doesn't like, turn your skin into leather, you know, like, you know, like.

[Jason Snell]

By the way, like you're being licked.

[Leo Laporte]

By a cat, smell of, of roasting meat as you wear your watch. Yeah, you don't really listen to that.

[Alex Lindsay]

The. But I, but I think that it, if, if Apple releases that watch again, if for anybody, like, like Dunkin Donuts, I would definitely sell my stock. Like, it's gonna be, it's just gonna. For desserts and, and ultra processed foods. It's, it's gonna be a apocalyptic like it is when people can see the data. When they, when it's easy, it's on their watch and they can see their data. It changes the way you, it changes the way you operate. Like, it changes the way, like my watch definitely changes my behavior, you know, and, and I, you know about a lot of things. And so, so I think that it's, I think that when people start to see their glucose levels and start connecting it with what they ate, it's fantastic.

[Jason Snell]

But there's gonna be, there is, there is an ethical component to this. Like, it's nice to have enough money, you expensive phone. Nice to have enough money you can afford expensive smartwatch. What about people who necessarily don't have to. I think there's an ethical component. If Apple were to decide that this is great technology, it's the only one that seems to work. We're going to make sure that this is absolutely exclusive to us. And Samsung can get at it. Any other smartwatch manufacturer can't get at it. We want to make sure that if you want the revolutionary improvement in health that glucose monitoring constantly can provide, you have to buy an iPhone and you have to buy an Apple watch. But that's where I start to have an ethical issue.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think that the thing though is that what it's going to do is it's going to affect the entire discussion about food. So.

[Jason Snell]

Sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

It won't be just the people who have the watches. It'll be the, you know, like, actually.

[Jason Snell]

Watches will benefit, though.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, no, I think everyone will benefit.

[Leo Laporte]

From the Long run.

[Jason Snell]

Because everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Word will.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because everyone's going to realize. Because everyone's going to realize that eating ultra processed food is poison. Processed is poison. And they're going to get that really clear when, when suddenly a whole bunch of press people and all, all these people are wearing the watches are, are posting on their social media about look at what's happening to my thing. It's, it's, it's going to change how food is sold. It's going to change how. I mean like Atkins did it. What do we have it didn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Whether they forever chemical detector in your watch. That's when you're going to really see some changes.

[Jason Snell]

Can I just, just quickly. Well actually two things on that. All I will say is that imagine it's 1950 and Apple decided that it's going to buy the polio vaccine. Yeah. And we're have lots of press about how wonderful it is that when we beat polio and here's people are aware of how communicable polio is. I'm not directly equating the two, but I think it's in the same broad category. Sometimes a technology is important enough that to say that hey, we've got these. We're going to start the next WWDC community keynote with a video about everyone's firsthand accounts about how their lives were saved and how they almost got. They're now on top of their health. And adding to that, well, by the way, we're going to need at least a thousand bucks out of you before anybody. But here's the thing is that that's not good. That's not good.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that what's going to happen is people are going to become really conscious to it. I talked to a couple people who have glucose monitors because I'm looking to get in a glucose monitor. And they were like, you know, the bottom line is that you take the glucose monitor and what it does is it underlines for you, you that there's a whole bunch of foods that you already knew were bad for you that you shouldn't be eating and you shouldn't be eating it. And you now, you just now see the results. He said, you know, you can take the glucose monitor for a month or two and immediately know that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I wore one for about eight months and I know. Yeah, exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And so, and so by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

It hasn't slowed me down but I still ate bread and pasta. But I know now I'm killing myself. So that's the difference.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly, exactly. You know why you drink the wine and, and you know, you know so either. Oh yeah. But the, the but I think that there's something about it when it's in. It's on a certain. A lot of things affect overall societal change when only a certain percentage have it. I don't think that. I don't. Number one is. I don't know Alex.

[Leo Laporte]

I understand that but I think Annie has a good point too which is I just don't bad for lock up technology like that maybe and it's really going to be up to the University of Waterloo to make sure that they don't do you know that they do something. Something that's. That's you know, appropriate to society or maybe the government puts these out. I know it's you know who you know. The problem is it's going to be expensive to make a device.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That does this.

[Jason Snell]

It'll put Apple in a real awkward position when inevitably of course someone has. They have exclusive access to this technology. But the research is out there and people and other individuals and researchers and companies try to create another technology that uses that same system. And then Apple starts suing people saying no, we're not going to allow you to have like to create life saving equipment for other people. Again not a good look for Apple. Especially during those times of the year where they dust off that aluminum aluminium halo and put it on themselves and adjust that and say gosh, thank God, is he doing the business with us and not Apple or not Facebook, huh. Because they're the angels.

[Leo Laporte]

The battle between Massimo and Apple over the blood oximeter is really not in the same category because. Because knowing your blood glucose is a life or death thing compared to. I mean I guess if you've got Covid you want a good but you can buy a cheap blood oximeter. I think you're right Andy. I think it's something Apple should be aware of and I would hope Apple would be smart enough to do the right thing.

[Jason Snell]

Although on that other thing you said though did you see that there was a much overinflated research paper that came out where researchers were investigating fluoroelastomer's ability to get into the bloodstream basically to get into the body through.

[Leo Laporte]

And they said oh gosh, expensive watch band.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. And a lot of this turned into headlines. Oh, is your Apple watch actually killing you by introducing microplastics? And that's of course kind of nonsense. All they were saying is that they decided that researchers said that we don't think that anybody's really done this kind of research before but yes, we did test like a dozen different straps. I think they including. I don't know if they mentioned Apple specifically because I can read the summary.

[Leo Laporte]

But the more expensive fluoro elastic.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, exactly. They hinted at it and they also mentioned that. Well and also because you're sweating into this that's going to increase like the transfer all they. And they, they didn't do any human studies. They basically just demonstrated that yeah, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Can fluoro get my phthalates like the normal way through. Through my food so.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not too worried about my watch band. Hey John, Ashley is on vacation. He's in Japan. I hope he's having a great time. That means Anthony Nielsen is producing the show today. Anthony, I say this to wake you up because it would be a good time right now to play the Vision Pro. Yep. Theme.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, that's the jingle. My bad.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Hold on.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a theme and there's a jingle.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's time to talk of Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't really have any fishing pro news today except for mass production of micro LED displays will begin next year says Foxconn. And I guess it's not going to be for. That'd be probably too expensive for a laptop or a tablet or even a phone know. But it might make a lot of sense in a VR headset of various kinds.

[Jason Snell]

There were a couple little pieces but we got. Remember that back in October or something there was a story about. There's basically evidence that perhaps Apple has stopped manufacturing new units because they have enough of a backlog that they can feel, they can feel as. They feel as though they can fulfill all orders that they're going to get through 2025. And that was via a supply chain analyst who realized that okay, well these companies that were manufacturing displays for the Vision Pro are no longer manufacturing in that kind of volume. There are a couple of kind of interesting things from CES Nvidia, both of them through Nvidia's keynote.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I thought this was a good news. Yes.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. So basically Vision Pro is going to support Nvidia's GeForce now, which is their cloud. Cloud gaming service. Are going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

I've used it. It's quite good.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's really nice. So that's, that's good.

[Leo Laporte]

It won't be a VR game or. Right. Because it'll, it'll just be a screen, you know, as usual in your, you know, 100 inch screen in your vision. But still.

[Jason Snell]

And we'll be through Safari, not through an App, but that's, that's something you weren't able to do before. They also mentioned that they. Last year one of their big announcements was they're creating this new AI platform for training humanoid robots. It's called Groot GR00T.

[Leo Laporte]

It should be.

[Jason Snell]

And part of the system is that you can basically train this, this robot AI by example, by showing it video, by showing it things you captured. So one of the other things in the keynote, I think was that now you can use the Vision Pro as a source of movement capture for training those robots. So researchers and professionals love them. It's a great hardware.

[Alex Lindsay]

It was impressive. A lot of the announcements are impressive. Did you watch the whole keynote?

[Jason Snell]

I haven't yet. I got, it's literally on my laptop right now. I downloaded this morning.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I was curious because I, I found myself, I was like, you know, because I think Jensen's one of the best at, at it and. But I still found myself skipping through the 12 minute version. Like I just, I was like, I just still feel like the keynote era is over. Like I just like when you have out there and the 12 minute.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand why the CES era isn't over. The whole thing seems like an exercise.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Century.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that the, the, the presentations at CES are kind of worthless. The Expo is. I don't get to go this year, I'm too busy. But nab CES namm a couple other ones. The big thing is that I think the real value is the Expos. Not so much. I think that the actual sessions are old ideas, not old ideas that they're talking about an old way of presenting them. We created these conferences when we didn't have video and you had to come and watch something to actually get the knowledge. And we're way past that now. So I think that the actual sessions are kind of a waste of time presentation. But the, the Expo, the networking, the dinners and the, and the most importantly, the Expo, you go, when you go to the, I will say when you go to the Chinese section of ces, you're just looking at the future because they're trying to, they're looking for brands to buy, buy up the thing that they made and put their, their, their, their logo on it and sell it and you're, you're two years and you just walk two years into the future of things that are being created in, in the Japanese area, in the, in the Chinese area. But also. So you get to see all these little things. I mean we see big announcements, but there's so much at CES that you get to kind of explore and see new technologies that aren't going to probably come out for sometimes four or five years. And they're sitting on some little 20 by 10 booth with some dude, you know, talking, you know, trying to get your attention. And so I think that there's a value to that. I think that the CES unveiled and a lot of the kind of the press events are probably more valuable than the, the, than the larger event, but it's still, I think there is a reason to bring everybody together because we can go there.

[Jason Snell]

The chances to put people together and network is always very useful every year, with some exceptions. The most useful stuff is, as you say, some Chinese or Japanese or Korean manufacturer who has this component or they have a manufacturing technique for a certain component and they're trying to sell it. Obviously not to consumers. They're trying to figure out that, hey, if you're building phones, here is a new way to build that illumination. Here is a way to do a lens array. And that's the stuff where, the stuff that you see like in every YouTube video about CES and every like, Good Morning Ottumwa, Iowa show, like, is your rice cooker old tech? I guess it doesn't do bitcoin, does it? Well, that changes with a hot new product. At ces, that stuff is garbage. But the stuff that is really interesting are these small companies that don't necessarily need pr. They're just there for the deal making.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now, I will say that if the companies who go to CES spend as much on a company like video studio to stream about their products as they do on the booth, it would probably die.

[Leo Laporte]

Because these are, you know, these are.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like $2 million for, you know, $2 million and $7 million. And if you're cheap, 250,000, you know, for most of these booths, you know, you know that, I mean, like a 10 by 20 booth is, is 30, 40, $50,000, you know, and you know, with all the costs that are related to. Yeah, yeah. So, so the, so the thing is, is that if they took that and they, the, the big reason that we need to go to CES to cover things is because no one will invest in their own video production systems at their own office, you know, like where they could, they could do streams and talk about it, because otherwise we just have them call in and talk to them. But we have to go there because they don't have any things at the office.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I, I just don't think, think I've seen anything interesting at CES in years, but okay, I haven't been there.

[Jason Snell]

For years and Nvidia is now the king of ces. They're the ones who like okay, well now you've got a, now you've got a $3,000 like affordable Mac mini style computer that can run multi billion number models. Like privately speaking of Nvidia, since we're.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Still in the Vision Pro segment, they did say that the GeForce now is going come to Vision.

[Leo Laporte]

You mentioned that. You weren't. You must sleep.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I was just. I'm sorry, I got swept away in all of the other weird conversations about. Did we talk about the humanoid robots? I don't even want to talk about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's not. So Apple, Apple, yes you can now.

[Andy Ihnatko]

GeForce now, but no you can't now. This is the, this is the thing how they said they're going to do it Safari, you can't do it. Well yeah, but GeForce now you've got to save the site as a, as a, as a web app bundle bundle to the launch screen. It's going to launch and you can't do that on Vision OS now. So here the theory is that hidden in the vision OS 8, what is it, 2.3 or whatever beta is a, is either a way to do that or some kind of like thing that they've worked with Nvidia on to make it usable. So it's interesting. It is of course the least interesting kind of gaming on the Vision Pro. It's just like from out Apple's presentation about it which is like hey, gaming on the Vision Pro hold a controller and play an iPad game. It's a little like that. But still it's interesting that Nvidia has apparently Nvidia's been working with Apple, Apple's been working with Nvidia. Somebody seems to be motivated to have.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple Insider says Nvidia says players will be able to stream games to their headsets when the newest app update starts rolling out later in January.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, so this is the challenge is what, what there's things that are not in Vision OS right now that are going to be required for that to work. But what are so, so what's going on there?

[Alex Lindsay]

And as a Vision Pro owner I just have like zero interest. I just don't understand a kind of a half baked interface into.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean you can't play it on your Mac right now. You can presumably play it on your Mac and then watch your Mac on your Vision Pro.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I know people who do stuff like late at night they're playing games using the Vision Pro because there's no light leakage and they can just sit there, there in bed and do that while their partner sleeps. And I, I think that there is a. Why not? Right? Why not?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a really small market that, that I think that there are places that that small market could be capitalized on. I just don't think that this one's going to be, you know, I, I, I, Anyway, yeah, it seems it's, it's.

[Jason Snell]

It'S not difficult for Nvidia to do. It's not difficult for as long as.

[Alex Lindsay]

It'S not difficult for, I mean you.

[Jason Snell]

May as, you may as well have this thing that you can't have before. Again, they, if it's true, Apple has stopped manufacturing them because they figure, yeah, we've made about as much as we will ever sell any ever. So let's, at least for the next year so we don't anything, we will take anything we get on the more successful version of this product.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think there's a very viable market and there are things that are very viable in the Apple Vision Pro. I'm just not sure that like repackaging cloud games is one of them. That's all. I mean, I like, I think that there are things that, that I'm working on that I think, you know, I think when the new camera comes out, we're going to see a lot of things. I think that there's a lot of educational opportunities, I think there's a lot of gaming opportunities. Like, I still think that some of the immersive stuff that we see on Meta, on the, on the Meta Quest is very engaging. You know, whether it's, you know, supernatural or you know, a lot of the Robo Recall. And there's things that in VR are amazing. It's just that we don't, I just feel like we're not seeing any of that on the Vision Pro. I think that this is where Apple.

[Jason Snell]

The money is not on that Vision Pro right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I think if you loved, if you love John Chu's amazing movie Wicked, then you can thank the Vision Pro.

[Andy Ihnatko]

John Chu loves the Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

He loves it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

He's been raving about it since the moment that it came out. He loves it so much.

[Leo Laporte]

He says he was using it in post production. He would watch the video on a giant virtual screen while he talked to other people working on the same project for Wicked. He said, we have a lot of visual effects around the world. I could be at my house and I could have a screen that was bigger than the one in the screening room and I could be talking to all the people, people in all the different continents, and I would watch the playback. It's still a crappy movie, but hey.

[Alex Lindsay]

But what I will say is that, that the, the, the screen inside the Vision Pro is still the sharpest experience I have of any movie.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably so.

[Alex Lindsay]

The thing is, if you wanted, if you wanted to look at visual effects, like a lot of times until, like when I, when I worked on Star wars, you know, they would come in and look at everything and they look at it on my little like, you know, and approve the shot to go to film out based on a little screen that we're looking at. And then that would go. That would get filmed out and put onto a big screen to look at it. Well, you couldn't approve it until you have the big screen. I think that at this point, the Vision. I have seen that screen, obviously that we approved stuff for Star wars, and I've seen Star wars on my Vision Pro and it would be easier to affect. It would be easier to approve the shot on the Vision Pro than it would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that John Chu doing this, this promotional video for Apple TV about how he used the Vision Pro is the equivalent of paying a million dollars for Trump's inauguration? Like, it's just John Chu doing something nice for Apple, hoping that they'll do something nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

No, he loves, he loves. He's a nerd.

[Leo Laporte]

He's wearing an Apple watch too, in the video.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So he's, he is everybody else super.

[Alex Lindsay]

Every other filmmaker.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I guess it's like, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Think that here he is in his house watching the playback. It's, it's, it's a moving moment. I don't know. I think maybe the movie would have been better if he didn't have a Vision Pro. I just.

[Andy Ihnatko]

We're all truth detecting you in the chat room. LEO88 Rotten Tomatoes score.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you seen it?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I've seen the. I've seen the. The musical. I haven't seen the movie.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the musical was fine. I'm not great, but fine. I just started watching the movie because you can watch it now on Apple tv and I'm shocked the people who watched the movie started watching one song from it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Well, yeah. Defying Gravity. It's a banger. What are you talking about? So what, you just started watching the movie? So is this your review of the.

[Leo Laporte]

First three and a half freaking hours of the movie. Believe me, I saw enough. I saw enough. I watched 45 minutes of it. All right, while I was rowing, there's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Leo's review of the first 45 minutes of Wicked.

[Leo Laporte]

This is terrible.

[Jason Snell]

All I'll say is that as it happened, I spent a lot of my last days of mid break vacation building the ultimate Broadway playlist on Spotify for myself. And a lot of it reminded me of, oh God, that was a good movie. But they had to cut four of the best songs out of it for this. Even though the soundtrack album has one of the best versions of one of the killer songs. So on the one hand I'm glad that when they made 1776 into a movie, they decided screw it, three and a half hours will include the entire thing. On the other hand, yeah, I'm not sure if you can maintain the delight of a musical over three and a half hours then go home for a year and then. But I do, but I do want to. But I do want to see it because it looks like I know someone who knows one of the stars and they've been telling me a lot about it during the production and got oh, so this person like 110% cares about this and it's been okay, this is going to be fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's fine. If you liked it, that's fine. Wasn't for me.

[Jason Snell]

That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

And I like the original wizard of Oz. I thought that was good.

[Alex Lindsay]

I pre sorted myself. I was like that's not my, that's not my film.

[Leo Laporte]

Not my jam.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like because I was, I was like.

[Jason Snell]

I didn't, I was. I will, I will say that when I, when it first became a musical and I heard about like the of clumsy version of a condensed condensation of the storyline, I thought oh, that's exactly what I don't want people to do with something in the public domain. But then, then like I actually saw it say okay, the thing that I hate when they people do to certain movies and they didn't do it. They did something completely different. It's like okay, great. It was. I thought I liked it a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

I like and I like musicals. I'm not saying I don't like that's fine.

[Jason Snell]

Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Again and I'm holding space and I love.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I will say I love Wizard. Like, like if I. Yeah, I love the Wizards. If I ever have like a lot of time in my hands. My, my not because I think it's a good idea. I I want to go back and replace all the matte. All the matte paintings with like really high quality matte paintings.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, God.

[Alex Lindsay]

You gotta run this. I'm hop this.

[Jason Snell]

Satan. Satan is inside your mouth. Spit out.

[Leo Laporte]

Do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Because it'd be.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, no, there isn't enough resolution in this matte painting. No, it's perfect the way it is. No, no, it'd be great. Ouch.

[Leo Laporte]

Just don't put Jar Jar Binks in it. Okay. I'm just saying. And that's our vision. That's our vision Pro segment for the.

[Alex Lindsay]

Day now, you know, and was like, what happened there?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't even. Anyway, I don't like CES anyway. That's it.

[Jason Snell]

I haven't been.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been grumpy today. I didn't like ces, I don't like Wicked.

[Alex Lindsay]

I said how great CES is, but I realized I haven't been there since COVID and, and, and I. And I have to admit that I talked to a lot of folks and like, with the H5N1 as close to the surface as possible, I was like this, this was going to be the year I went and I was like, I think I'm gonna take one more year off and just see.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, but don't worry, because we are really prepared for a panic pandemic this time around.

[Jason Snell]

Absolutely. We got people who are on top of it. Robert Kennedy is going to be. Boy, I'm so happy.

[Leo Laporte]

Forget the vaccines. Forget the masks.

[Jason Snell]

The man's a Kennedy. How could you want anyone better than.

[Leo Laporte]

A Kennedy good this year?

[Jason Snell]

I don't. I don't know much more about him than that, but. Oh, my God. Cut this off.

[Leo Laporte]

Cut this off. You're watching Matt Weekly.

[Jason Snell]

I will stop talking.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish we'd get Merlin man back just for one visit. Maybe do a Merlin Man. Scott Born. You were there, Alex.

[Alex Lindsay]

Be great. I'm in.

[Leo Laporte]

You were there. And you were there. Mac Break Weekly continues with our picks of the week. Now, since I am the guy who said the best part about Mac OS X is the UNIX underlying underpinning things, I'm going to recommend what is oddly become a cause celebra, a new terminal for macOS. A lot of people use iTerm, of course. It comes with a completely competent terminal. There's no reason you need to use a different terminal program. But this new one's really fun. It's free, it's open source, it's [e-mail] it does use metal, which is nice. It's available for Linux as well as Macintosh. But on Macintosh it uses Met. It has a lot of nice configuration features. It's got a very nice API. I think it's quite pretty. It's got built in nerd fonts which is probably a dumb idea since it's so easy to download the nerd fonts but you want but if you don't want to download them built in themes. And it works with a variety of shells, not just Z shell which is the now the Mac OS default but bash my choice shell fish and a shell called Elvish. I really like it. Ghost TTY.org if you aren't using the terminal you ain't Mackin. Jason Snell, your pick of the week.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Ah, just added to the document in time. In the nick of time I finally bought some of those smart LED Christmas tree lights. The Govee Christmas lights too. And I know Christmas. It's only 350 murmurs days till Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

Now start to get read. Ready man. Got it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That means that these hundred dollar lights are currently sale for $63 at Amazon as we're recording this 66ft. It will fit around a reasonably sized Christmas tree and in fact it's got wi fi and Bluetooth and what it will do is you can actually hold up their app to the lights on your tree and it sees the lights and then it maps them and then it can have effects like the lights go around or the lights go from the bottom to the top and other things that are just, you know, they're not super smart but they're smart enough. Enough. They've got a bunch of different patterns. I used them this year, first time I've ever had them. They were really nice. Literally I could be like oh, I'm in the mood for red and green blinking. I'm in the mood for something like for New Year's it got all like purpley and stuff. There are all sorts of different patterns you can load in there. And yes, you can load in a thing where it moves along to the audio of whatever your like, music you're playing in the room or movie that you're watching and you can have that be coming out of your phone via the app or it's got a little block on it with apparently a little microphone in it that you can have it use that will also kind of like vibrate the lights to whatever sound is playing in your room. Lots of variation. They're pretty. They're pretty and they're blinky. I like the blinking lights on the Christmas tree and these are really well done. I was very impressed. I mean, the app isn't great, but it's good enough and it would. And it does some really amazing things on your Christmas tree. And, and you know what? You don't have a Christmas tree the rest of the, the year. It's fine. Put them somewhere. Put them around a window and something and have a, have fun, whatever like that. You can use them anytime. There's no law against it. There's no law in the rule book against, first off, that a dog can play basketball. Yes, a dog can play basketball. And two Christmas lights are for all the time. Just light up your life.

[Jason Snell]

And what about Scarecrow's brain? Yeah, that's. And when you take. I have, I have a set of those twinklies I got like three or four years ago. And yeah, like when, when they're off the tree, like sometimes I, for certain occasions I will like hang them in just like vertical strips and because it's this most miraculous thing. Okay. Just aim this, aim the phone camera at the lights. However you've hung them, it will map them and essentially turn them into a really low resolution video display. And just now you can basically put anything on there and it will just plain work. It's super fun to have just as a thing to mess around with.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And I think our tree, we had the same ones last year or something by Govi. I don't know if they're the exact same ones. Worked great for the tree and now they're part of my daughter's room.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like they were mounted, not just for Christmas anymore.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Because they're so, they're so controllable and, and if you haven't played with programmable string lights and there's lots of different flavors of them, they're so much fun. Like in. And, and the apps are all a little quirky and, but they all do enough and they're really, really great. So.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And I've, I've tried these out so I can, I can recommend them. They're, they're, they're really well done, made and the software is usable and you get a pretty fun result.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week. I like it because it's 0 Alex's.

[Jason Snell]

It's 0 Alex's.

[Alex Lindsay]

It already comes with your phone if you have an iPhone. I have to admit that when I just. This is me eating a little crow. When the cinematic mode came out of the iPhone, I was like, oh, this is dumb. Like, you know, like as someone who does this, I was like, I'M never going to use that. Like I, you know, Bear, you know, I'm like, I'm serious about something. I'm going to use the Black Magic magic camera and I'm gonna do whatever. I'm gonna use Kino or, or something like that. And, and, and so I was at a concert and I was. There's a. There's a band in, in Marin actually playing in Mill Valley on Friday, A Z dz, which is a cover band for acdc. They also.

[Leo Laporte]

They're the best band ever. Oh my God, I love acdz.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And, and the guitarist is amazing. And the, the half of the band. Half of the band.

[Leo Laporte]

Josh Z. Is that his name?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, he is.

[Leo Laporte]

He is second only to the guy in the school boy outfit. Angus.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, he's just, he's just amazing. And, and, and half the band is also in the Illegals, which is the Eagles. Yeah, Joey. And, and and for New Year's, for.

[Leo Laporte]

New Year's Eve I went to see Petty Theft whose lead singer is the keyboard artist in the Illegals.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, right.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the drummer is in the. In the drummer for Petty Theft is in. Is in the. Is the drummer and the bass player for Petit Theft or Rhythm Guitar are in azdz. Very complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

So the, there's all these bands, the guitarist, six bands. Count them so good. Anyway, when I saw Petty Theft he came in late because he was driving up from an. From another band he's playing in Ocasio and he had to drive up to the Mystic.

[Alex Lindsay]

Totally probably coming from Rancho Nicasio up to there. And, and the. But how do we get into this?

[Leo Laporte]

I forgot.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I was. So the Legals did a bunch of test stuff with me when we were testing some. Some shooting at. For theaters and. And so Joey, Joey pointed out that they're going to play and I was like hey, can I come down and shoot some high frame rate stuff and everything else. So I was down there shooting it and so once I shot, I shot it during the sound check and so. So then I was just there. My kids came to see it then. My kids love going to live shows and so we're watching it and I thought I'd just pick up. I was like, I wonder what cinematic mode is. Like I was playing with it a little bit when I was doing my. I had a bigger Blackmagic camera shooting 120 frames a second. But I had my little camera. I kind of went back and forth and I was like, oh, the focus works pretty well. Like it just. It's Zooming. And then so I figured I'd shoot a song, you know, like sometime during the show. And, you know, and so it was good. I was like, I can touch the screen and focus on who I wanted. And I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. I was talking about it on office hours, and I had forgotten all the features that it has. And so someone pointed out. I was like, you know, it did pretty well. It missed a couple here and there. And someone said, you know, you can refocus that in Final Cut. And I was like, what? How do you. And so, you know, so if you look at it here, this is the. Them playing here. If you look at this, you know, this is in post. You know, I just want to kind of point out, like this, that that's Josh right there playing away. There's Dave and. And. And there's Dave.

[Leo Laporte]

So good.

[Alex Lindsay]

So Davis, David's singing over here. But if I want to change the focus, I just. I just tap on it. You just tap on and. And you can, but you're actually re. You're re. Like, if I want to. If I want to go over here, I want to come back up here. And I can animate how I'm doing all of that in Final Cut. With the. With the.

[Leo Laporte]

How is it doing that? It's recording multiple images, so there's nothing in.

[Alex Lindsay]

Everything's in focus. Right. Because it's just a phone. And so it's doing computational. It's all soft focus, software focused. So you can sit here and you can. You also have the depth of field here. So I can make it even shorter depth of field or longer depth of field, so I can move around with what I'm doing here and play with what it's focusing on in that range. And the thing is that, again, I'm not probably going to do production with it, but I was like, this is the first year of film school. You could totally do short films for school. Or. I think that there's a lot of social media stuff. But I. I have to admit, I just. I'm a little late to the game. I know, but I think I didn't. I think it's worth saying, like, hey, this is actually a pretty impressive feature that I kind of totally skipped over when Apple released it and thought it was kind of a kid's toy, just parenthetically.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're that guy who's at the concert, not dancing, recording the whole thing.

[Alex Lindsay]

One song. One song. Okay. I didn't.

[Jason Snell]

I.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I'm not loud. I'm not so I'm, I'm definitely not the person. I barely.

[Leo Laporte]

There are always people at every one of these that don't do anything but stand there and record the whole thing.

[Alex Lindsay]

And then they dance with it. I'm like, I always look at it going, you're never going to use that. Like, like you're never going to look.

[Leo Laporte]

At it again anyway.

[Alex Lindsay]

You're dancing and you're going like this. Like, this is my, you know. And so usually what happens is I, when I shoot, I usually find a place where there's no one behind me because I'm really sensitive to it. So usually you'll always see me over at some angle or I'm standing right in front of a post. You know, that's usually where I, you know, like where I'm kind of covered and, Or I'll shoot. If I'm shooting close up, I, I might shoot like for 30 seconds or one minute, you know, of, of something to gather.

[Leo Laporte]

When you see me, I'm the guy with his iPad and the slap on the COVID hanging down, shooting the whole show.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. So I, so I, no, I, I, I did it as a test. I, I did not shoot the whole. I'm not that guy, definitely. And so, but we have to hang out.

[Leo Laporte]

We're friends with Joey and Fernanda. We could get together and.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a little party.

[Alex Lindsay]

We should.

[Leo Laporte]

We should.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know you knew Joey.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of the stuff that I think is on there, on the Illegals site is stuff that might have shot. I didn't know some of it is. Anyway, so, so, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think arguably that's the best cover band name is Illegals.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And the Eagles are going after them. You know, the Eagles are going after them for the, you know, Eagles are just like, it's. Don Hen is just like maniacal about the Eagles songs, you know, and so, but, but they're, they are, they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Spell it the same as the Eagles now.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's just the music. But they do sing the same songs. So the, so the, the, It's a tribute. It's a tribute band. And, and they're probably one of the, One of the better ones. And, And I, you know, it was really interesting going to, it was at Sweetwater and going to Sweetwater and having it packed and, you know, you really only live on your, I mean, how good you are as a cover band to be able to pack one, because it's not like you have released any new song, new albums, you know, and, and, and they're just, they're. They're fantastic. And so anyway, so it was fun. But to get back to the cinematic mode, I would highly recommend if you have a new, new iPhone that does it go out and play with it. It's kind of amazing. It's kind of. And it's not just. I thought it was amazing when it was just doing cinematic mode. I didn't realize. I forgot. I had just forgotten. It's been so long. I'd forgotten that I could all refocus this in post in five. Final cut. Pretty, pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you recommend always using cinematic instead of video?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, not necessarily. I think that, I think that I would.

[Jason Snell]

I.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's definitely things I shoot with video. I shoot with video more often. You know, if, but a lot of times what I'm shooting, I'm shooting like I want to remember this. I'm not trying to make anything special. I just want to remember this moment for a second. You're going to get lower resolution, lower frame rate. I'm mostly shooting in 4K60 so. So you know, I can't do that in cinematic Mode. I think it's 1080p and 24 or 30 and so. So I don't think that, I don't think that cinematic is the thing specific use. But if I like one thing I was thinking about doing is, you know, it'd be good if you had like a, if you have a business and you're not a filmmaker but you want to shoot something about your business for two or three minutes, put on your website or put on Facebook or something like that, I bet you could shoot a pretty impressive little 2 1/2 minute video with it that looked pretty awesome that most people would think was, was great. You know, so that's the kind of thing I think it'd be good for and social media.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. One more pick of the week. Andy and Otko, you're up.

[Jason Snell]

One cool thing from CES that I obviously have not, I don't own because it just got announced yesterday. I'm recommending it because it's actually available now and it's on sale for 10 bucks. 10 bucks under Anker, which is like my, my official, my official provider of, of chargers because they're awesome, they last forever, they're really good value and they solve lots of problems. So they came up with, they introduced a brand new one which is a 140 watt 4 port charger that looks to be like about the size of an old MacBook charger. It's a little bit bigger than this, but not terribly bigger than this. And 140 watts means if you go to the site and you take a look at how that's distributed depending, that means that if you have an iPhone, an iPad Pro and a MacBook Pro plugged into this at the same time through USB C ports, I believe that means that all three of them can fast charge. So it's not just so if you've got like a half hour in the airport and you can find maybe one outlet if you're lucky, you can actually get, you actually get your entire menagerie pretty much charged really really really quickly. And it's not just that it's 140 watt like 4 port. The 43 ports are USB C, the other one is USB a legacies and how much power it delivers depends on whether you're using just one or whether using all four. So you can really get all 140 watts towards your MacBook Pro if you want to. But the other thing that makes it really really cool is that it has an OLED display on it. So again I've had this for I have two or three of these which is a 100 watt charger that does pretty much the same thing, only about two or three ports here. But the thing is like I have to remind myself how much the MacBook is drawing, how much the phone is drawing. This has a color display that while you've got things plugged into it will tell you, okay, your MacBook whatever's plugged into this port is drawing 70 watts, this thing is drawing 30 watts, this other thing is drawing 12 watts. So you know that you're fast charging all these devices and as someone who likes to bop around and get out of the office and sometimes gets out of the office with a half charged device, the ability to do handle everything I've got in my backpack with this one little Hostess cupcake size thing and the right and four cables. That's really attractive and really solves problems for me. It's 90 bucks. If you go to anchor.com, you can get 10 bucks off for the next week. So until next Monday like the 13th or whatever. But yeah, I've already ordered it because it's like the ability to like not have to travel with like this bag full of stuff and just simply if I've got this one thing I'm good. Actually it's not if I've got this one thing plus one of these little like 10 for 10 for $20 little like 8 inch extension cords because oftentimes like oh great. So the only thing I can plug into is going to be completely blocked by other things. This will, you know, maybe it's a double pick of the week, but that means, means that if you don't have enough room for this entire block, you can just plug it into this and now it'll just plug into basically any one little thing. Again, it sounds stupid. It's the most low tech thing in the world, but the number of times that this has saved my life has been kind of incredible. Oh, and the last thing about it, I love these simple things that a manufacturer like Anker only learns after accidentally screwing things up or making a choice that wasn't really great. So one of the problems of having a three or four port adapter like this is that like, if you design it like the way that you might imagine that you want to do because hey, you plug this into the wall and now you want to be able to see what you're plugging into. The problem is that now you've got these cables that are like hanging off of this and are going to be like trying to pull it out of the wall. So they moved all those four ports to the bottom so now it's actually pulling downward which hopefully will make it not fall out of the outlet quite so well.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're showing the old one. That's the new one.

[Jason Snell]

That's the old one again. It just got, got announced and released like yesterday. Started pre started orders actually direct orders like today. It's not, I don't think it's pre order.

[Leo Laporte]

I've already purchased it. I just bought it thanks to you. Look for the anchor charger. 140 watt. That's how.

[Jason Snell]

140 watt, 4 point power delivery. 3.1. Yeah. If you go to the anchor site it will say new because it is new. It was just 24 years, 24 hours old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is, you know, this is, we're now seeing the payoff on this Gallium nitride technology. I want to see more of it. You get so much power, 140 watts in that little thing is.

[Jason Snell]

And if you think oh gosh, I got enough chargers as it is and I got USB C chargers. The thing is if you bought it like five or six years ago, maybe it maxes out at 40 watts. And that's the reason why you can't, you're wondering why you can't get out of the, away from this. You can't charge up your devices that quickly. So last year I think it was a Black Friday sort of thing where I said, screw it. I'm going to. I'm inventorying all my chargers, and I'm going. Going to relegate the ones that I'm going to replace all the ones that I really need to use. I'm also going to replace the cables so that I know that they're capable of charging at these kind of wattages. And it was a very positive life move. Actually, it was two years ago, but. Which is how I explained to myself, no, this is a special new charger. I know that the old chargers work great, but this will be special and it will help me. We've got $90. We're gonna make eight. We're gonna make $80 again. Real quickly.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Let's buy it.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a drawer labeled chargers.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I actually have, like, a white paint mark that had a mark on every one of the old ones. This is old. One of the. What are the charging capabilities of each one of these? Because otherwise. Yeah, otherwise you're just pulling it out of a. Out of a box, and then you screw yourself up.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I always have to, like, take off my glasses and look at the little print and see how many watts. How many watts?

[Jason Snell]

Oh, God.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't even put. The ones I put in my car are 100 watts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. Just get rid of them all now.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, get rid of anything that's less than that. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There goes Andy.

[Jason Snell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

He's going in his bag. Watch out, everybody. He's going in his bag. Anything could happen.

[Jason Snell]

This is. This is like one of the power adapters for one of my lights here. And at one point. At one point, I decided to basically label every one of them on their voltage because nobody can see, nobody can read the bottom. You can't read that as much as. As much as I. As much as I like, like anchor. It's dark gray printing that's minuscule on, like, a slightly darker gray background. You have to use your camera and then. Exactly. Same with that. Yeah. At some point, this white paint marker I got and going through that entire box, making sure that I've got everything readable has changed my life in a positive way in that I'm no longer exploding as many things by putting in the wrong adapters.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Andy, for your pick of the week. Thanks to everybody for a great show. Andy, Anako, when are you going to be on GBH next?

[Jason Snell]

Next time I'm on a week from what, Thursday at I believe, 12:30. Go to wgphnews.org to listen to it live or later or listen to any of the previous stuff I've done there.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Mr. Jason Snell is at sixcolors. Com. You can find his writing there. Also a link to all his podcasts at sixcolors. Com. Jason, anything particular you'd like to mention? Mention?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, check out the piece that I wrote about OS X and you can link to from there, James Thompson's piece, which is worth a read and there's a lot of fun. And you can find that story that I wrote I'm also linked to, that is from the year 2000 that I wrote the day of that announcement that went in the magazine. And I know that only because I found my old word file, which is dated that day at 6:50pm so obviously I walked back to the office, spent the afternoon writing and then that story went into the magazine history. You know, it's fun. Anyway, so check that out and you can get to all of the stuff that I write everywhere, even at Mac World, by going to Six Colors Calm.

[Leo Laporte]

If I had the video of you then coming on, call for help to talk about it. I would play that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Man, there's a VHS somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, somewhere. Thank you, Jason.

[Alex Lindsay]

Thanks, Leah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Alex Lindsay, office hours Global. Anything to report?

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, every morning we're getting up, answering questions. One of the things we're starting to do, which we, we're not warning anybody about, we just do it is we have special guests that come on just for a couple minutes, like just, hey, we've got something new coming on though. I will tell you that. I think that Laura Davidson from sure will be on tomorrow morning. So she's going to talk about that new MV7i. But just for a couple minutes, like, rather than a whole hour of it, we're just like, hey, here's something new that we thought was cool. Or somebody else that can come on and answer a couple questions. And so you'll see more of that coming out. But otherwise it's seven days a week. We get up and at 7 o'clock in the morning, Pacific Standard Time, and answer an hour of questions and then go back to what we're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the suggestion from our YouTube chat. Kevin Schurz says, andy, when you got the white macar out, you should write Property of Andy on all of those as well. We'll call out to Toy Story, I think.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. On the bottom of its boot. Yeah, that's good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

On the bottom of its boot. Hey, before we go, one more little thing. I'd like to ask you to do Take our survey. We only do this once a year. It helps us with advertisers. It helps us understand what you're interested in, what you want to hear more or less of. The 2025 survey is open at TWiT TV. Survey should only take you a few minutes. And thanks in advance. Thank you all for being here. We do Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday Tuesday we're back. The brand new year and I hope another 52 exciting episodes of Mac Break Weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That would be 1800, no, 1900 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different platforms now. Of course, our club members get behind the velvet rope in our club, Twit Discord. But there's also YouTube.com Twitch Live, Twitch TV, TWiT, LinkedIn, Facebook, X.com TikTok and Kik. All of them. Of course. Who knows what'll happen in two weeks with the TikTok one? But you know, we'll find out. We'll find out. If you don't want to watch live, you don't have to watch live. If you're live, then you can chat with us as many of those platforms. But if you don't want to watch live, just download a copy at the website TWiT TV MBW. When you're there, you'll see a link to the YouTube channel dedicated to the MacBreak Week weekly video or subscribe in your favorite podcast, client, audio or video. Your pick. They're free. Just go to, you know, Pocket Casts, Overcast, whatever you use Apple Podcasts and subscribe. That way you'll get it every day the minute we're done. Thanks for being here everybody. We'll see you next Tuesday. Stay tuned if you're watching Live Security now coming up next. But unfortunately is my sad duty to tell you all to get back to work because break time is over. Bye Bye.

[Andy Ihnatko]

People are driven by the search for better. But when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn'T to search at all.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Don't search match within Indeed. The hiring process can be slow and overwhelming. Simplify hiring with Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, according to Indeed Data and a matching engine that helps you find quality candidates fast. Ditch the busywork. Use Indeed for scheduling, screening and messaging so you can connect with candidates faster. Join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent. Talent Fast Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed com Podkatz 12. That's Indeed com Podkatz 12. Terms and conditions apply.