MacBreak Weekly 956: Asparagus Chips

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 956: Asparagus Chips

Release Date: January 21, 2025
Host/Participants: Leo Laporte, Andy Ihnatko, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay

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1. TikTok and ByteDance Apps on the App Store

The episode kicks off with a heated discussion about the status of TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps on the Apple App Store. Despite widespread optimism following proclamations that TikTok had been "saved," Apple continues to block ByteDance apps from being available in various regions.

Jason Snell [03:16]:
"Apple and Google have decided to adhere strictly to the law passed by Congress and signed by Biden, which imposes severe fines for every download of these apps marked as illegal."

Alex Lindsay [04:42]:
"ByteDance's actions, such as temporarily disabling TikTok as per Trump's directive and then swiftly restoring it, exemplify the manipulative tactics the law was designed to prevent."

2. Apple's Geopolitical Maneuverings

The conversation delves into the geopolitical tensions influencing Apple's decisions. Tim Cook's participation in the recent inauguration and the political statements from figures like Senator Tom Cotton highlight the intricate dance between technology companies and government regulations.

Leo Laporte [03:20]:
"Senator Tom Cotton is saying, we're going to enforce this law," emphasizing the political pressure Apple faces.

Jason Snell [03:59]:
"Apple and Google are navigating a complex negotiation phase, balancing executive branch directives with legislative mandates, all while dealing with the potential for enormous fines."

3. Impact on Creators and Users

The ongoing TikTok saga has significant ramifications for content creators and users. With ByteDance's indecisive maneuvers, creators are left in flux, unsure of the platform's stability. The group discusses the shift of users to alternative platforms like Instagram Reels and the challenges faced by creators who relied heavily on TikTok for revenue.

Alex Lindsay [07:31]:
"Some of my friends decided to move to Reels, but transitioning isn't seamless. For instance, a friend quit his job to focus solely on TikTok and is now facing setbacks."

Leo Laporte [08:40]:
"It's crucial for TikTokers to diversify their platforms now more than ever, ensuring they aren't solely reliant on a potentially unstable platform."

4. Broader Implications for Tech Giants

The episode explores how the TikTok situation may set precedents impacting other tech giants. The discussion touches upon potential ripple effects in international markets, especially in Europe, where similar regulatory pressures might mount.

Jason Snell [13:05]:
"This isn't just about TikTok. It sets a concerning precedent for American tech companies operating globally, potentially inviting more stringent regulations and fines."

Alex Lindsay [13:51]:
"Trump's unilateral decisions could embolden other nations to impose their own restrictions, complicating the global tech landscape further."

5. Vision Pro: One Year In

A substantial portion of the episode is dedicated to assessing Apple's Vision Pro headset one year post-launch. The hosts evaluate its market performance, content ecosystem, pricing strategy, and user adoption.

Andy Ihnatko [57:33]:
"The Vision Pro has been a niche product, primarily serving early adopters and enterprise users. However, the lack of killer apps hampers its mass appeal."

Jason Snell [62:58]:
"Spatial Personas and immersive FaceTime are steps in the right direction, but the high price point remains a significant barrier to widespread adoption."

Alex Lindsay [74:09]:
"Content is king. Without a steady stream of engaging, affordable content tailored for Vision Pro, the headset struggles to find its footing in the consumer market."

6. Apple's AI and User Experience Challenges

The group shifts focus to Apple's AI endeavors, particularly critiquing the Apple Intelligence feature. Joanna Stern's experience, where the AI incorrectly identifies her marital status, serves as a case study for the broader challenges Apple faces in refining its AI integrations.

Jason Snell [81:40]:
"Apple Intelligence repeatedly misidentifies Joanna Stern's husband, highlighting the limitations of current LLMs in understanding nuanced personal contexts."

Andy Ihnatko [84:35]:
"The issue underscores the broader problem of AI models struggling with persistent personalization, especially when reliant solely on probabilistic data without comprehensive contextual understanding."

7. Sonos Anecdote and Historical Insights

An intriguing anecdote reveals that in the early days, Tony Fadell suggested Apple acquire Sonos. Instead, Steve Jobs opted to sue, a decision that has had lasting repercussions for both companies.

Leo Laporte [113:31]:
"Tony Fadell wanted Apple to buy Sonos, but Steve Jobs responded by choosing litigation over acquisition, a decision that arguably affected Sonos's trajectory in the market."

8. Zscaler Sponsorship and Security Insights

Amidst the discussions, the podcast includes a segment on Zscaler, emphasizing the evolving landscape of cloud security and the inadequacies of traditional security measures in combating modern threats.

Leo Laporte [78:26]:
"Zscaler's Zero Trust and AI-driven solutions are essential in today's security environment, where traditional firewalls and VPNs fall short against sophisticated cyber threats."

9. Goldman Sachs and Apple Card Exit

The episode touches upon Goldman Sachs's potential early exit from its partnership with Apple Card, citing financial losses and regulatory challenges as primary factors.

Jason Snell [80:32]:
"Goldman Sachs has faced significant financial losses with the Apple Card, including a $90 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for various compliance issues."

Leo Laporte [83:07]:
"This move signifies the complexities and challenges financial institutions face when innovating within tightly regulated environments."

10. Final Thoughts and Upcoming Topics

Concluding the episode, the hosts reflect on the dynamic tech landscape, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of tech regulations and the continual evolution of consumer behaviors.

Andy Ihnatko [86:50]:
"We're approaching a period where traditional tech norms are being upended, leading to both positive innovations and unforeseen challenges."

Leo Laporte [90:09]:
"As we navigate these changes, it's crucial to stay informed and adaptable, ensuring that both creators and consumers can thrive in this evolving ecosystem."

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Conclusion:
MacBreak Weekly 956 offers a comprehensive exploration of the intricate relationship between technology, regulation, and user experience. From the ongoing TikTok debacle to Apple's ambitious yet challenged ventures in AI and AR, the episode underscores the volatility and rapid evolution characterizing the tech industry in 2025.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inako's here. Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay. Of course we're going to talk about TikTok. It's none of the ByteDance apps are on the App Store again. Why is Apple holding back when everybody else is saying, Yay, TikTok has been saved? Did you know that Tony Fadell wanted Apple to buy Sonos and Steve Jobs said, buy them, we're suing them. We'll talk about that anecdote and Apple Intelligence. Somebody's gotta gotta tell Apple Intelligence. Joanna Stern does not have a husband. All of that and more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 956, recorded Tuesday, January 21, 2025. Asparagus chips. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news from Apple and others. Hello, Andrew. Andrew Anotko is here from the library. Wearing a crewneck, you look like you're on your way to the quadrangle.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If I were walking to the quadrangle in 12 degree weather. Yes, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How is it? It's 12.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This is the time where even wingletters stop saying, this isn't cold, this is crisp, and start saying, yeah, this is col is cold.

[Leo Laporte]

You're in a polar vortex.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Congratulations.

[Leo Laporte]

Sunny polar vortex.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's chilly here, isn't it? Jason Snell, and he's from GBH Boston. Jason's from Six Colors SixColors.com yes.

[Jason Snell]

In fact, it got down to a brisk 28 degrees overnight in my backyard and I'm in my unheated garage, so layering. Might put on the gloves later, you know, but we'll survive here in California. We can. We can survive it.

[Leo Laporte]

And also in Northern California, Alex, Lindsay.

[Alex Lindsay]

A little chilly outside office hours.

[Jason Snell]

Global.

[Leo Laporte]

Also in layers.

[Alex Lindsay]

Not very many layers, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm the only one in short sleeves because this room gets toasty.

[Alex Lindsay]

I got a radiator, so it just keeps it a little bit warmer.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a radiator too. It's called a Mac M3. As a radiator, it's not as radiating as I should have a PC. Then I'd really have to worry about anything. So TikTok's back.

[Alex Lindsay]

Kind of. Kind of not in the App Store.

[Leo Laporte]

So Marvel Snap is back. Capcot is back. These are all Bite Dance content.

[Alex Lindsay]

Content is back. The apps are not back. If you go to the Apple store, it says TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available in Your country or region in the country, region you're in and you learn more.

[Leo Laporte]

Basically, Tim Cook was at the inauguration yesterday. Surely he could have worked something out.

[Jason Snell]

Well, so here's, here's what's going on, right? Is that, is that the, the cloud providers for TikTok, like Oracle, have decided to take Trump at his word that it's all fine, just do it, just turn it back on, it's fine. And Apple and Google have decided to take the law that was passed by a large majority in both houses of Congress and signed by Biden that says.

[Leo Laporte]

You will get fined by the United States Supreme Court and approved by the.

[Jason Snell]

Supreme Court that says you will get fined enormously for every single download you allow of this thing that's marked as illegal. And so they've just decided, you know, Chance, the president's okay, because the thing is, if you look at that law, the law doesn't say the President can just do whatever the law actually says. The president can say, well, he's got a, he's got a discretion. His discretion is a up to 90 day wait if there is a transaction in progress, which there isn't. But he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. But like, there's no guarantee that he, I mean, first off, if you're Tim Cook, if you're Sundar Pichai, you're like, when has Donald Trump ever gone back on anything he's ever said? And like, the penalties are enormous.

[Leo Laporte]

Senator Tom Cotton is saying, oh, no, we're gonna enforce this law. Not that Congress is in charge of enforcement. The executive branch.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, we're in, we're in this negotiation phase where they're trying to say we're going to save it if China lets us save it, but that, like, if China won't sell it, if, if the Chinese government won't let ByteDance divest itself of the American operations of TikTok the law unless they repeal the law, which would be interesting because they would need everybody on side in the House of Representatives, which they probably can't do for almost anything. Then if China won't sell it, then it's illegal. And there's no ifs, ands or buts about it. It's pretty, pretty stark.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the problem is is that the ByteDance did exactly what Congress was worried about when they passed the law in the process of what they did on Saturday and Sunday. So what they did on Saturday is they poked everybody in the Congress and the Democrats and Biden by saying, we're getting, we're turning off because they Told us we had to turn off. And then 12 hours later, they turned it back on and said, thank you, Trump. So they told 170 million of their users that these people are bad. And then they told 170 million people these people are good. And that is exactly the manipulation that the law was designed to stop. And so the problem is that if anyone looks at the nuance of that, they've actually done what everybody's worried about, which is a big push because you're going to have a bunch of users of TikTok, they're going to look at Trump differently based on that, you know, based on that community, just, just that communication, because there was no reason for them to turn this off. This is all show like it was. There was like they, you know, no one was tell. Everyone was saying, we'll handle it later. Turning it off for 12 hours was totally theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Big win for Trump, though, and a big loss for the Democrats.

[Alex Lindsay]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is what TikTok wanted, really. But if I'm TikTok putting myself, it's not even a geopolitical thing. This is the game. They played the game very well and.

[Alex Lindsay]

Won, and Trump played the game very well. I, I wouldn't be surprised if Trump didn't tell them to do that, you know, like, didn't want to be the one that came and turned it on. And so, so I think that the, I think that it's, it's problematic, you know, of what they, you know, what they did there. But none of their apps are back on. So Apple and Google are like, hey, we're just going to wait until we can. Until someone actually tells us what is legal.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you can download now, right? You can.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I can. On the App Store. I mean, online.

[Leo Laporte]

Not Cap Cut, not Marvel Snap.

[Alex Lindsay]

I went to Cap Cut and I got, I got the TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available in your country region.

[Jason Snell]

And Marvel Snap is a little different because that is a company that has a publisher that's owned by ByteDance. So they're in the process of basically changing publishers.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right.

[Jason Snell]

Which I think given, given that their publisher is not allow distribute software in the US anymore, I suspect that's in violation of their contract. And they can find a new publisher now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I get that same disclaimer. TikTok and other ByteDance apps are not available. Okay. So I guess the servers were turned back on and if you were using capcut, you'd be able to use it. If you were using Marvel Snap, you'd be able to use it just like you can TikTok.

[Alex Lindsay]

And you know, of course Meta's trying to make hay with it with they have an app, I guess this is edits that they announced. Edits.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not out yet, but they announced it. Yeah, is not out for two or.

[Alex Lindsay]

Three months or two months or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need cap cut because we've got to have edits. But it does. They're the potential winners from with a TikTok banners, of course they feel like Instagram will be the replacement.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, a lot of folks that. A lot of friends of my kids said, oh, we'll just go to reels. Like it definitely was kind of like a. That's. That was the next step.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked Henry, my son Salt, Hank, who made a lot of. Is making a lot of money. It started with TikTok. TikTok made him go viral. He was smart enough to also expand to Instagram and reels. And I asked him, first of all, have you ever made money on TikTok? He said, well, not from TikTok, but I make a lot of. All my advertisers want to be on TikTok. And I said, ah. And he said, but that's not a problem because they're just going to take those ad dollars and move them to Instagram. So he's not too worried about that. In fact, he just got a couple of big buys, including one from Google. So he's kind of sanguine about the whole thing. But he also said, I have a lot of friends who are only on TikTok. I have friends who. He had a friend who just quit his job to devote his time to his TikTok account because he was making money there. Oh man, those people. Yeah, bad timing. He's going hat in hand today to get his job back. But those people, you know, I mean, it's not easy just to now go to reels, is it?

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, well, and there was a lot of warning. I will say that there's a little bit of the. The ants versus the grasshopper parable here of they've been talking about ban. I mean this law was passed a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

People didn't believe.

[Alex Lindsay]

They talked about Trump started. Yeah, I know they didn't believe it. But that doesn't mean that you should. Just because you don't believe it's going to rain doesn't mean you shouldn't have any rain gear. And so, you know, and I think that there's. I think that the issue is you Saw a lot of tick tockers, you know, pushing people towards YouTube, pushing people towards Instagram, you know, using the platform. You know, I had a friend, I was. When I was starting up, when Pixel Core was starting to do production, and I was talking about the fact that, oh, I only have one. I only have one client when I first started, you know, and he said that's what always happens is you end up with one client when you start. They build you up. But as soon as you get to a certain size, you got to open up, you got to find other. You got to diversify your. Right, your. Your income.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what Henry did. He was smart, you know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. But you can't do all that at the beginning. You can't take a bunch of clients at the beginning. You don't have enough attention.

[Leo Laporte]

His point was he wouldn't have had the same success on Instagram, right. Or. Or YouTube shorts. So he was able to parlay existing.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

But he says there's nothing like that TikTok algorithm there. Literally, it is the best algorithm there is.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know. I will say I'm not sold that it's the algorithm. Like, I think that. I think that it is. The nature of the content itself is. I think a lot of people put a lot of weight on the TikTok algorithm, but I think that a lot of the algorithm has to do with the fact that of the sharing culture that's inside of TikTok. The idea that people post content that they not only, but expect other people to riff off of, to take their content and use it for something else. And that along with the music that they used illegally for a while and then were able to kind of parlay into a contract, I think produces a different kind of content. I'm not clear that the algorithm is as powerful as everyone, because nobody else is doing that part, that part where people are just grabbing other people's content. If you do that in YouTube, everyone's all upset. YouTubers get all upset.

[Leo Laporte]

Cory Doctorow on Sunday said, the other thing TikTok does is they anoint accounts so they will manually say, we're gonna make you a star. We're gonna make you a star.

[Alex Lindsay]

And he says, a lot of people do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, sure. I'm sure. YouTube does that, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Everybody does it.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, everybody does it.

[Alex Lindsay]

So that's not new, right?

[Leo Laporte]

So Henry was just kind of lucky, I guess, that somebody at TikTok said, We like those cooking videos. Push the button.

[Alex Lindsay]

Back in the old days, you look at Twitter and when you join Twitter, it said, hey, you should check out these people. That was all driven by Twitter. We were all, I mean that's when they left all the tech F behind and started making Obama and actors and everything else. That was all them just putting the thumb on the scale. Like, hey, it would be good for us for all these people to bring their fans to our platform, you know.

[Jason Snell]

Okay, well keep, let's keep in mind that sort of Trump started the, the band TikTok bandwagon and it's worth saying that he might double back and all of his statements about this are, I'm bringing back TikTok. But it's also, well, China's going to have to make a deal with me and you know where that could lead anywhere. So that what I love about this is there is no way to predict what will happen. I think anybody who says certainly TikTok will be back and fine, or somebody who says certainly TikTok will never be back. I mean, check their pulse because TikTok, like we don't know all the ways this could go because it takes what the Chinese government wants and what Donald Trump wants and what the Congress wants. And like there are so many variables here.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and crazy grandpa says TikTok was worth. Is worthless if it's banned, but it's worth what did he say? A trillion dollars if it's not. And I want half.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that seems to be a non starter. But I don't, you know, but also.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The Chinese government has been using this as basically a rallying point. They feel as though this is the case of the west trying to steal something valuable. That Chinese business they might get more.

[Leo Laporte]

Value out of not selling it to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, exactly. So they're not very well motivated to say, well, you know, now that we think about it, you know, this isn't. They could, they could use it. As Jason says, there's a lot ways this would go down. They could use this as leverage for something else that they want. But there is no particular downside to China basically saying, no, no, we don't. You, you have to get our permission to sell. We're not even going to sell half of it. Go, go pound sand. And hey, and hey, and hey, new president. I'm glad you stuck your neck up by telling everybody how you had the power to make us come to heel because haha, you don't. Yeah, put that in the news release.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. There is danger though for all American tech giants, which is for all, you know, because Trump has also been like, oh, in Europe, they're trying to do mean things to Apple and Google and Facebook and we're going to, we're going to tell Europe not to do that anymore. It's like, well, I'll tell you one major region banning entirely a social media app. It is not a great precedent when you have most of the tech giants that are playing in other parts of the world. It's not like it's not the greatest look in the world either to be in that situation. So I think the problem is Trump.

[Alex Lindsay]

Doesn'T believe in precedent or anything else. He's just, he deals with every transaction on its own. And he let's go. And he'll just go, well, Europe, if you keep on messing with our companies, we'll attack your wine. 80%.

[Jason Snell]

But TikTok. And he'll be like, I don't want to hear about it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, well, no, totally. And the thing that this is for Tiktokers, this is the, when your hard drive crashed and you only lost the last day, this is the warning that you should probably get a backup right now, like the next three months. There's probably a three month window of whatever this is going to look like. TikTokers should be not leaving, but definitely finding other boats that they're going to have in their little group.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly though, that's always advice.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it should be the advice for everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Shouldn't be a monoculture. You should, as soon as you have enough clout to diversify, you should.

[Jason Snell]

I have, I have some friends who are TikTok or who are YouTubers and it's the same thing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right?

[Jason Snell]

The YouTube there, it wasn't a ban, it was. YouTube just changes the terms of what it's doing and changes its algorithm and all of that. And so the wise TikTokers or YouTubers will, will do things like build up a Patreon, build up a newsletter, do anything they can so that, that YouTube isn't the only relationship. And TikTok is the same. Like regardless of their long term future. Being stuck on someone else's platform and not having your customers be your customers is a mistake for all anyone on the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Although as Henry pointed out, there's nothing as good as tick tock from his point of view. TikTok is a kingmaker.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. You don't have to leave it, but you gotta, you gotta make sure. You gotta hedge. Right. You gotta hedge.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you still have to do it. In fact, I always said to him, every time I saw him, I said, you're not just gonna be on TikTok. You know, you don't know that you could lose your account. Anything could happen. You should always. And he didn't listen to me until about a year ago, but he did start moving a year ago. And so. Yeah, and then the other thing to do is open your own restaurant in downtown New York. And after that, you know, because restaurants.

[Alex Lindsay]

Are really easy businesses.

[Leo Laporte]

I hear that, like, I don't say anything about that.

[Alex Lindsay]

You open a restaurant and it just. And everything turns out and some of the money just starts rolling in and margins, it's great margins. That's the best part. No regulation. Great margins.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Really easy business.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the other thing. I said, you're going to be Republican soon, Henry, because have you run into a guy named Eric Adams yet? Yeah. He said, yeah, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of hoops to jump through to open a restaurant. I said, yeah, you're going to throw those liberal credentials out the window soon. I know he's got. It's going to be nice. It's called Salt Hanks. The good news is it's right next to the best pizza place in New York City, John's. There's always a line around the corner going right in front of his restaurant. So he's going to put his studio, his sandwich making studio in the window. So people in the line might say, hey, that looks even better. I'm going to go in here anyway.

[Alex Lindsay]

Making stuff in the window is good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a good idea, huh?

[Alex Lindsay]

Good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I know you hear that beep, beep, beep. That is my Nixie clock trying to contact TikTok something. I don't know. I don't know what it's doing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Connects via slip server.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds like it doesn't. All right, so enough of the TikTok. It is interesting. Do you think what will be the trigger for Apple to put it back? Because honestly, regardless of whether the servers are working or whatever, if TikTok's not in the App Store, I mean, they.

[Alex Lindsay]

Could repeal the law. I mean, there's a. You know, that would be the. It would require.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they're going to wait for. Something like that.

[Alex Lindsay]

It would require an enormous push from Trump because there's a whole bunch of Republicans that also voted for that ban. And so they all have to go reverse themselves, which no one likes to do. So. So I think that it would be very complicated to reverse it, but I think it would have. They're going to be owned by somebody else or they're going to repeal the law, but I don't know if there's a lot of other options. Like there's still a law there until. I mean. I mean, president can't do everything, so he's going to have to actually figure out the way to fit it inside the box.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony Nielsen says there are some folks working on. And I'm sure there are people working on TikTok alternatives everywhere, but some of them are working on the app protocol, which is what drives Blue sky, which might be interesting, a distributed TikTok alternative. It won't be as successful, of course.

[Alex Lindsay]

The problem with. But the problem with all of this is that it's hard to get critical mass and it's hard to do it unless you break all the rules that they broke when they started it. And Musical Ly was breaking those rules when they bought. They didn't start TikTok from scratch. They bought Musical Ly and then they took that culture and moved it forward and then added more to it. I don't think that anybody's going to just jump in and create another TikTok, because number one is you don't have enough people. You just don't have enough views. You know, that's the big. The big things, you know, like this is the problem with Blue sky is that you drop a stone and you just listen to it echo. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So if somebody bought TikTok, China has said, we're not selling the algorithm. Assuming that China does not sell the algorithm, could you recreate TikTok in the U.S. it'll be called TikTok. It'd be on the App Store without the algorithm.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think you could.

[Leo Laporte]

The algorithm isn't that important. You think?

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't think it is. It's. It's a. It's an. I mean, it's a complex version of a nearest neighbor and it's not. It is. I don't think it's the algorithm. I really think it's the content. I think it's the kind of content that was built up that had DNA and Musical Ly that has a DNA in copying other people's stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Have they permanently damaged that?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I think that they left it off for a couple, given how laissez faire or just blase that my kids friends were about it. If TikTok shut off for a month, they're dead.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was surprised. Henry was very blase about it.

[Alex Lindsay]

He's like, yeah, we'll just go to something else.

[Jason Snell]

Like.

[Alex Lindsay]

And although they were downloading Red Book which in Chinese is actually little red. What is it? Red light Red. It's little red book is what it is in Chinese. It's little red book. Yeah. You always do a little research to figure out that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hong Shu is. Yeah, Red book.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's not quite redneck.

[Leo Laporte]

The founder says, I made it red because I went to Stanford. Sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

The founder who has Mao in his name.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way. Yeah, that's right. His name is Mao. And by the way, you can't post any Chinese content on.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or many other things.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of things. It's much more censored than TikTok was. Yeah. You know, that was more of tweaking, spiteful. We'll show them. I don't think anybody really wants to use it.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's horrible. I did download it to find out what it was like. Yeah, It's a horrible interface.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It does point to how complicated and weird 2025 is going to be in tech, because everything is going to have that factor of what is transactional here. So now Trump, for instance, has put his neck out on the line saying, congratulations, I have brought TikTok back to you after that evil president who shall remain nameless was actually me roused Congress to ban it, but I am bringing it back to you. And now Apple and Google, both of whose CEOs were front and cent at the inauguration, to the detriment of other people who are usually front and center at the inauguration, can come to and say, yeah, we could do that. We're obviously concerned about the penalty parts of this law, but it would also be lovely if you could make some of these National Labor Relations Board inquiries go away. We would love it if you would put pressure on the EU to not make their. Not make us subject to another couple billion dollars in fines. Apple and Google, I think there was another report this week about exactly how many billions of dollars in fines that they were issued by the EU last year. Apple is number two behind Google. Nothing is going to be linear, as complicated as every decision tree used to be, where government and tech was before. Everybody has a seat at this poker table, everybody has chips in front of them. Nothing is going to be linear and nothing's going to be terribly predictable.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think Apple's chief focus will be the eu. Like, if they're going to talk. One thing about Tim Cook, when he talks to Trump, it seems like he knows what he needs out of that conversation.

[Leo Laporte]

He needs no tariffs from number one.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I think that his primary focus will be getting the EU off of Apple's. Back, you know, like, I think that's.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Billion dollars last year.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, well, yeah, tariffs is number one. EU is number two. Tariffs. Make sure the tariff says no. No, because, I mean, if they tariff every single thing that gets, every iPhone that gets imported from China, that's number one. Although it sounds like that's already kind of a deal we saw four years ago, or, sorry, eight years to four years ago in the first Trump administration that Tim Cook is, he knows how to play the transactional game with Trump. He understands the language he's speaking and that's why we saw Trump at the, at the Mac Pro Factory and we saw Tim at the roundtable and it's happening again now.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, I think Tim was at the inauguration.

[Jason Snell]

Exactly. So, so this is the, this is the thing is that I think Tim Cook understands what, what he needs to do for Apple to sort of like being in Trump's good graces and they will do those things like, like the Mac Pro Factory thing was. And Trump apparently has already talked about how Tim, Apple told him that they're going to do all these reinvestments. And Apple has been planning, they make PR statements about their US Investments. They do all of that because they know that that's part of the quid pro quo with the Trump administration to get what they want, which is, number one, not get killed on stuff they import. And then, number two, anything he could do about the EU would be nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that's, that's kind of embarrassing, isn't it? I was, I was kind of embarrassed when I saw that statement. So the day before the inauguration, Trump was talking about, oh, Apple has. I talked to, I talked to Tim Cook of Apple yesterday, and he's promised to make a massive investment in the United States because, because I got reelected. So he's basically saying that Apple wouldn't be investing much money in their business inside the United States had he not been reelected. And I hope that that's not gonn trend that again, part of the transaction is that Apple agrees to sort of lay back and allow themselves to be used this way. And it's, again, it's not a good look. It's not a good fit. It's also not a good look for any company, Apple included, to say, yes, eu, you have, you have the sovereign right to make your own laws. But we are insisting, by virtue of the fact that we are corporations of trillionaires, that with influence, that we can basically announce that your laws don't affect us. Well, even though we're operating Inside your country. We're not. We're not. The EU is also not a good look.

[Alex Lindsay]

The EU is doing what Spotify is asking them to do. Like Spotify is like chattering, chattering, chattering into their little ear. And all these little European companies are going, you got to do something about this. Because. No, it's not. This isn't about users. This is about European companies complaining that they, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so the EU is doing something about it. And so our companies are now complaining to our folks to fight, you guys. Fight with. But they're, but these are two. This is a proxy war between European countries, companies and American companies of complaining about how this goes into the EU is doing. They're supporting their EU companies and the United States now maybe will support their American companies, but it's a proxy war between these two corporations, between all these corporations.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Okay?

[Alex Lindsay]

There's a lot nothing to do with the user. The user is a collateral damage to all of this fighting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It has to do with users, has to do with markets. There's a long list of things that the EU and other nations are, are lambasting Apple. I don't care that the users don't care. The users might not care that my car got stolen last week. That doesn't mean that that was right or there shouldn't be a law against it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Okay, all right.

[Jason Snell]

No, I mean, Europe has a regulatory regime and the idea of protecting its consumers. And you say that the users don't care and therefore they're not protecting them. That's not how it works in Europe. Their users are sometimes protected from themselves. And so what I think you see is a real, A real worldview difference between the way regulation happens in the United States and the way it happens in Europe. And, and, you know, we'll, I just keep thinking about this. Like, in the end, what's going to happen here is there's going to be some, some chaos. And some things that we thought were intractable are not going to be intractable. And it's because we're ending a relatively stable period where everybody sort of said, okay, well, this is how it is, and this is how countries behave, and this is how heads of state in the west behave. And Trump doesn't behave like that is, I think, emboldened to not behave like that. And a lot of things that seem like they're going to be in a status quo are going to suddenly not be. And I'm not saying that positively or negatively because I suspect there will be some surprisingly Positive outcomes and some surprisingly negative outcomes. And you know that thing about may you live in interesting times being a blessing and a curse. Well, things are going to get interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. He withdrew the AI Protection executive order that Biden put into place a couple of years ago and said, oh, you know, let's full speed ahead. And of course, that's David Sacks and Elon Musk and the others promoting that. Sam Altman. I'm not sure I'm against that. Let's just see what happens.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I mean, if there's, if there's a positive, if there's a reason for optimism, it's that, like, if there's the Elon Musk school of CEO Dom, in which I learned about this. You ever heard of the concept of seagull management?

[Leo Laporte]

No. It's pooping on people's head.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's actually a term. It's like a style of management in which the manager is nowhere, but then they swoop in, crap all over everything, make a lot of noise, but then they fly off again for another few weeks and they're not. So basically you only have to deal with them during the period in which they are in the office actually crapping on everything. But then you can fix everything or ignore the stuff that they told you to do. And that's pretty much Elon Musk's like, management style. The question is that are there going to be enough lifer civil servants and lifer experts in the executive branch to basically say, okay, I know he said that. I know that he's getting votes on that. I know he's getting applause based on that, but obviously we are not gonna turn off all electricity to California, New York State, all of New England, unless they, unless they, they, they override X, Y and Z. We're not going to do that. So we'll just let them know that. Yes, we're working on it, boss. Great, Great decision making.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's going to be, it'll be an interesting time. I'm not watching any news for four years. I'm just saying.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm just telling you. I'm joking. You're joking. But I used to have like PBS News News Hour, like, subscribe to my, my YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

I do.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I had to turn, I had to turn them off temporarily until, like, like, I don't want my feed to be like all of this news. I want to be. When I come there, just seeing. Hey, does Techmoan have a new video about, like an absolute tape format? I don't want to hear eight different things about how things Might become really, really awful. I want to segment that into what I'm actually looking for. Hard news.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm with you 100%. My stomach can't take it. We'll be back with more Apple news in just a bit. But first, a word from our sponsor. 1Password to your end users. A question. This is for the IT department or the ciso. Do your end users always work on company owned devices? They always use IT approved apps. Aren't you lucky? Oh, they don't. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, because that's the way it is in the real world. But the question is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has a very good answer to this question. It's called Extended Access Management. This is not just one password, this is one password plus something we used to have as an advertiser called Kolide. They acquired Kolide and they created this really very cool thing that helps you. It's called Extended Access Management. I think I said that. It helps you secure every sign in for every device, for every app. It basically solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM cannot touch. If you think of your company's security as the quad of a college campus, I need a new analogy. I keep using this analogy. What's a nice tidy thing as your garden, right? Your lovely little garden with rows and rows of lovely flowers and plants. Everything is just so. There are paths all around. Beautiful, isn't it? That's the way you hope it would be. Company owned devices, IT approved apps, managed employee identities. Unfortunately, no garden grows without some attention from little vermin and bugs and so forth and paths and rivulets of water. This is what happens when the real world hits. The shortcuts worn through the beautiful, perfect rows that are actually the straightest line from point A to point B. Those shortcuts, those vermin, those bugs, they're the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities, like contractors. I'm not calling your contractors vermin, but they're a little hard to monitor, right? Because most security tools assume that you're in this, you know, perfect little happy world. But most security problems happen in the real world on those little rivulets running in between the poppies. 1Password. Extended access management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, all these apps, all these identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified and they do regular third party audits which prove that they exceed the standards set by various authorities. 1Password, as you know, is a leader in security. 1Password Extended Access Management. It's security for the way we really work today. Generally available for companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra. They're in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones at1Password.com MacBreak all lowercase. That's 1P A S S W-O-R-Com MacBreak we thank him so much for their support of Mac Break Weekly. Good friends of the Network. Thank you. 1Password I guess we should do the German report. I won't play that silly song. But he's, you know, he does this now every Sunday. He comes out with his long.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, there's not a lot in this one. Pretty cool. Pretty, pretty scant Gurman newsletter this week.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, a couple of things though.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, fire away, Andrew. Well, what's this WI fi router thing? I thought that was weird.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That was kind of nothing. That was speculation. He's basically talking about the new in house WI fi chips, saying that well, one feature of this chip will be that any device that has it could potentially maybe act as a wi fi router should that feature be wired up and decide to be a good idea. And that's obviously wild speculation. The headlines were like oh, Apple don't. Apple hasn't quit on WI fi base stations yet according to new rumor. No, it's like, no, here's a feature of the chip they're going to be putting speculation.

[Leo Laporte]

Although he points out, and he's right, Google does this. I've had their WI FI router speaker, the Google WI Fi, it wasn't very good. But that's just Google. That's not necessarily what Apple would do. Yeah, I don't know. Is there a market for that?

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's a feature. I mean given that if this is true, and I'm saying that basically this is a capability, a low tech capability of this chip, you can imagine ways in which it could add functionality to all kinds of other things. Like for instance, if you wanted to have, if you wanted to be able to use an Apple TV without necessarily being connected to the Internet all the time, like if you have spotty connections or if you wanted to take it as a travel device but still you wanted to be able to use it as a central video access point for something or if you wanted to Again, this is things that you want to speculate. If you think that, okay, if every chip that has WI FI in it on an Apple product could basically be its own access point as opposed to simply a peer to peer. That means that now eight different phones on the same network can be contributing videos to your playlist as you're in the living room. As opposed to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of analogous to using an iPad or an Apple TV as a HomeKit base station. Right. You could have a mesh network maybe of some kind.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you gave up on trying to integrate with everyone else and decide you're going to build all your own home apparatuses, having everything have these access points would be super useful. Right. We're all guessing right now, but if you gave up and said we're not going to worry about material or threads or whatever, that, whatever, you know, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Re just going to make a giant mesh throughout, we're just going to start.

[Alex Lindsay]

Doing this all ourselves. This would be one of the, one of the many things that you would do to start going down that path.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, but the thing is like if you wanted to make that a feature of a certain product, it's easy to just basically make that a feature of a certain product as opposed to this is something that every single thing that uses this WI FI chip is going to have. Again, this is far off in the future. For all we know, there's going to be different series of these WI FI chips and maybe they have a die for it that is going to be, that's going to have, that's going to have like centralized hub features, but you also have different versions of it that are for different applications. So that's why it was in a thin week for Mark Hermer's newsletter. This was one of the thinner ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, sometimes there's not a lot to say. There is a new mail app coming in Mac OS 15. 4.

[Jason Snell]

Well, maybe. I mean he's. Well all he's really saying there is that they're going to add the thing that's already in iOS mail to iPad and Mac. He actually made a mistake and said it was already in iPad, which it's not. This is that thing that's not technically an Apple intelligence feature. It's just a different machine learning feature that categorizes your messages and lets you sort of like sort them and filter them. This is stuff that was state of the art for kind of alternative mail clients like five or 10 years ago that Apple finally kind of got, got put in this year. But it's been iPad, iPhone only, which is baffling. Right? Like why not even on the iPad, let alone on the Mac. And so yeah, maybe it's. He says in in point four coming to Mac and iPad as well, a feature that's already on the iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm just trying here to find something very exciting.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, there was a leak that was non Gherman that we could talk about that was a little interesting. So the elec. No, I'm sorry, not the elec. Front page tech, which occasionally has come through with some stuff, basically has information and a mock up that the next version of the camera app for the iPhone is going to take some UI cues from Vision Pro, which I thought was interesting. Not in that I think that will necessarily make the app better, but the idea of taking UI elements that were designed for one platform and deciding, wow, that's actually a really neat idea. And it's also flexible enough that maybe we should make this a constant across all of our platforms. That's kind of. It would be the first instance we see of Vision Pro basically cross pollinating and enhancing other experiences.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know if it's enhancing necessarily as much as I think that Apple is constantly trying to wrestle with the fact that they've got a bunch of oss and they're trying to get them all to work the same way. You know, they were all doing. They all approach these UIs differently and I think Apple's where they can. And I don't know if it's necessarily making our experiences better on all of them. They're kind of, you know. But if you look at kind of the list views inside of Apple tv, which I hate, and most of the other upgrades that I don't like very much.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean that column on the left?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh my gosh, drives me crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can't delete the old store icons.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, and half the time you get into the movies, you can't find the movie. Like it won't give you the full list or you get in and you can't get out. And it's not why did they do that? It's just again, I think that there's a goal here to get everything working the same way, especially if getting all the interface. I have a theory that, a completely unfounded theory that the change to the preferences is largely driven by things that Vision OS needs. It's much more navigable in a Vision OS because they change the preferences inside of Mac os.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're making it look nice for Vision.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, they're Making it so that it's easier to get to on certain with less dexterity. And so I think that there's. So I think that all of the stuff. I feel like everything's trying to find its way together. I mean, we've seen this happening between ipados and Mac OS for a long time where they're kind of both impacting each other as they try to find a middle ground between.

[Leo Laporte]

They famously did this with Windows 8 and it was a bomb because people who don't use their fingers hated it. And I think there's a risk of appealing to a very small group of people, the Vision Pro users.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I feel like the risk that Apple has right now continuing to develop for development's sake. You know, like a lot of the interfaces, I feel like the new stuff that they change with the phone, the mail app are to me, garish at best. That's the nicest way I can say it. You know, it's the same problem that I had with Photos is that I don't like using mail on my phone anymore. You know, like they put all these big things on it and the way it's sorting now and I just don't like using it. So now I'm, you can turn that off. But, oh, like I just, I wish I just, I couldn't figure out where to turn it off. And I just was like, oh, stop using it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what happens. People just go, oh, screw it.

[Jason Snell]

Yep.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like it.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I, I'll just say, I mean, who knows Jon Prosser, who's front, front page tech, he has gotten some things and you know, he's, he's sort of a divisive figure, but he has definitely gotten some stuff that's been interesting. I will just say there is zero chance that Apple is changing the iPhone interface because they want to make things easy on vision Pro users.

[Alex Lindsay]

Zero, not only iPhone interface. I don't think I was talking about, I was talking about that there's other things that are happening that are, that feel like they're trying to go that again.

[Jason Snell]

I don't, I think, I think there is zero chance that any Apple product is being changed to make it easier on Vision Pro users because 0% of Apple's users use Vision Pro. It's such a small thing. I do think they play with interface ideas on other platforms that inspire them to change interfaces on different platforms and. But I 100% agree with Alex. There is a tendency and I think it's dangerous to. I don't want to say that it's like fashion, but it is like, well, we need to ship changes because that's what gets people to update the software and that sometimes novelty becomes the winner over utility. And like, I don't want to be a stick in the mud who's like, oh, just don't ever change anything. That's not what I'm saying. But I do think that you have to be really disciplined to not ship things because they're different, even if they're worse, and you just have to try to avoid that. And the worst software updates are the ones where things get changed that actually degrade the user experience for changes exactly you want to have. And that is antithetical to Apple's fundamental philosophy of products and has been their philosophy for decades now. And when they do something like that, that, you know, I think it's because of a misguided sort of sense of priorities where some, you know, group has gotten the upper hand over another group and maybe there are sort of like design changes that are not being thought through from a usability side. And it does happen. And it's, it's not great, right? I mean, it's not great. Like, I can understand, like, Alex, I know, hates the photos app and iOS 18, I understand 100% why they did it that way. I think that they have very good reasons for doing it that way. And I think that in some ways they didn't have a lot of options to try to solve the problem that they were trying to solve. But the problem is you've got people with, at this point, decade, a decade plus of history of how that app works well. But I think you break it at your peril.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it was a sudden change too. What I know is that in the last version, I literally opened iphoto to see what it gave me. Like, I opened it up, up just to see open up photos. I'm sorry, I opened up photos just to see what the new little movie was or what the cool little thing is that I could, the cool images that it picked so that I could send them to my, to my wife of my kids or whatever, you know, like, it would just pull good things out and I would literally open it just for, for no reason other than to open it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, me too.

[Alex Lindsay]

And now I, I, the big thing is I search and then when I click on a thing to look at it, it's, it selects it and I'm like, I don't want to select it. I don't want to select it. I just want it to open up. Like, I When I hit assert, I want to hit the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

The same on the Mac and iOS. Is it the same?

[Alex Lindsay]

No, it's not happening on the Mac. I mean, I use the iPhone. What happens is I take pictures on my photo on my phone, and then I just never see them again until I'm on my Mac. I open up the last ones I took, but the photo one, it's the selection problem. The selection is. The problem is that it defaults to select photos very quickly when I don't want it to. And that just makes me just insanely frustrating. Like, it just makes it not worth using to me.

[Jason Snell]

And so this is the. And I think some of the challenges in the details, right, is like they're trying to solve a specific problem, and in solving it, they've caused another bunch of problems. And, like, I can't. Like, I. I think they did a pretty good job solving it. And I don't have a problem with the Photos app, but Alex's problems with it show that they made a decision with perhaps some unanticipated consequences. And that's the danger. These are complex. That's part of the problem with a lot of this stuff, is we all want our phones to do new things and be more advanced, be more complicated. But the more complicated they get, the harder they are to use, the harder it is to intuit anything. And you end up saying, I, I'd rather this be really super simple. Which, by the way, they could totally have done by splitting the Photos app into two separate apps, but they chose not to do that well.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think that the problem is, is that this isn't an Android crowd. I don't want it to be more complicated. I want my technology to be in the background, and when I need something basic, I want to pop it up. If I wanted an Android, I'd buy an Android. And that's what I figured. Like, the phone is becoming is an Android phone, which is this is all that is a danger stuff is why I don't like Android phone.

[Jason Snell]

That is a danger that Apple, Apple. It's not as true now as it was in the earlier days, but like the arms race with Google over iOS and Android features, there is the question, I think this is true with Apple intelligence now, of if Apple is afraid of being seen as being behind while adding things that their customers don't necessarily actually want and complicating what's already there. But it's a tough thing to do because you risk not implementing a feature that everybody demands and losing market share to Android. So I get it. It's just a tough situation to be.

[Alex Lindsay]

I get the problem is, like, the average Apple user, like, my wife is, you know, she works on websites and she's technology, you know, she's. She has chatgpt open all the time, and she's, you know, she, she does a lot of tech stuff. Stuff. I asked her if she felt like she needed to get a new phone so she could do Apple Intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

She.

[Alex Lindsay]

She said, what's Apple intelligence? Yeah, like, literally didn't. She didn't even know where it was, you know, and. And doesn't care. And I said, what would get you to update the phone? And she said, the camera. I would like to get a new one because I, I need a better camera.

[Jason Snell]

I talked about this, like, a year or two ago on this show. But, like, my wife didn't realize that there were multiple lock screens, that you could edit your lock screen, that you could put like a photo gallery on your lock screen. And she, she did not. The update to iOS that allowed you to free place apps and move them off the home screen and just into the app library completely passed her by. Because it was probably a single. This is one of the discoverability problems, right? A single thing came up on her phone that said, oh, you do this thing. And she went, okay, okay, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. And we were sitting at a restaurant and I explained this to her, and once I showed her what those features were like, she still gets delight. Every day, her lock screen changes to a picture of our kids, a different one shuffled from the photo library. It's an amazing feature, but the challenge is, how do you. How do you express it? How do you motivate people to find this stuff? And that's, that's sort of. My point is, like, we don't want to make our phones more complicated, but we would love for them to do more things. But the problem is making them do more things makes them more complicated. And so it's a real problem. Problem.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just, it just feels very much like the. It's starting to feel to me like the 90s with Apple. Like, there's all these things that they're adding, and it's just like, I don't need most of this stuff, and I don't know if everyone needs most of this stuff. I mean, I think that the, like, the thing that mattered in photos that I do, like, in photos, the one reason that I'll go into it is because I can select things and delete them. Like, you know, that's magical. Like, I'M like that add that don't. If they had not changed anything and just added the whatever that AI removal or whatever, I would be over the moon, you know, like, like it would be the best thing ever.

[Jason Snell]

So I think one of the possible challenges here is what Apple is trying to do with app intents and with Apple intelligence which is potentially a solution to a lot of these problems, right? Which is our phones and our apps have gotten way too complicated. But if the apps can provide to the system all of the things that they can do via app intents and you have sort of an agent running on the device that will take your request for what you want to see and do it then you could end up with a much, could a much simpler process because the system knows what it can do and you don't need to know how to get there and how to do it. You just tell it. This is what I want but I feel like we're a long way off from that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's play the Vision Pro theme John Ashley, because I have. It's time to talk to Vision Pro. On 1-19-2024 the Vision Pro went up for pre order and this guy on the Apple website has been blinking for an entire year now and a new era began. And new era began in head worn computing. We are one year into that era. Anything to report?

[Alex Lindsay]

It's, I mean you know I think that, I think that they have the same. I'll keep on coming back to it. It's about content. Like they have a tool that has a lot of great things and there's not enough content. And I think, I think Apple has missed the boat here. Like I think that they, you know they, I don't think they, they can still get to the boat. Like it's not like the boat's so far away they can't see it but I think the boat is out in the bay and they are still on shore and they, they had, so they've had so many opportunities to shoot content. Like if they had taken their, these VR cameras and shot behind the scenes of the shooting of Silo behind the scenes of these other things. You know, like there's all these moments that they could be shooting that just putting up these. It doesn't have to be a big production like just get. And now and again this blackmagic camera which is getting closer and closer to the surface opens up the possibility that many people could do this. And so that may change things. But I think that the possibility of the video content number one not Being there. Number two is I don't think putting enough money into app development, either by Apple or funding other people or helping them get enough out there that is unique. I think there's a lot of people throwing things against the wall and there's a handful of things that look pretty impressive, but it's kind of like all the ingredients aren't there. You know, you've got flour over here and salt over there. The water's bad over there, and someone's still looking for the yeast. And so. So they just can't quite get all the pieces together to make that happen. I mean, I definitely enjoy my. My Vision Pro pretty often. I mean, you know, almost every day I'm watching something on it or doing something with it. But I. But I will say that I feel like I'm going back to the same things all the time. Like, I'm not really, like. And I go over, I download any free app. I mean, when people say, oh, I want $29.95 for something, I'm like, this better be really good. You know, like, I'm like, you get, you know, to do that. But, but I think that, and I think that, you know, people are playing with ideas, but I think that there are things that, again, we see the glimpses and we've said that we've talked about this over and over and over again, but something needs to be easy and cheap that does what Jigspace does. Lots of people would use ikea, should be using ikea, should be using what Jigspace has for how to build their furniture. And they should just post now with less swear words and more screws. But I just don't think that that kind of stuff is getting out there and being accessible.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I'm keen to see what we see at wwdc. How much are they going to talk about Vision Pro? That'll tell us whether or not they think that. We think that the current Vision Pro did the job it was intended to do, which is to give us a target of something to build and to give a certain part of the market enterprise people who again, are not going to necessarily own these things, but are going to buy these things for their business, like, and are they satisfied with that? And this is just basically, we will never make a version 2 of this necessarily. We will make a new vision that takes what we've learned from the marketplace and what we've learned building from this. Or are they going to introduce a whole bunch of stuff for developers to get developers more excited about developing for this platform? I'm guessing that it's going to be the first of those two things. I don't think that Vision Pro has been a failure. They sold about as much as they thought that they were going to sell, as much as anybody was going to sell. But I think that it's a product of its time that fills a gap two years in the running until they can start to build stuff that is a little bit more meaningful and a little bit more relevant to what people actually are going to use. I'm not going to get into the discussion all over again. I do think that immersive video content is kind of like asparagus chips where you can release them and people either release the snack food and people like them or they don't like them. Turns out they're not really into that. And it's not going to be about, oh, well, maybe we need to have like new like Cajun ranch flavor. No, it's like it's a good product. It's just that it's not something that a lot of people want at this time. I think that it's going to be the hardware. It's going to require a modification of the hardware as opposed to new kinds of content. And like I said, WWDC is going to tell the tale of whether they are thinking that again, this is a two year product. This is for, as Tim said, like in an interview earlier, late last year, this is an early adopter product. They didn't say that before the launch, but of course they're smart enough to admit actually what's happened. It's an early adopter product. We're not going to be necessarily making a second version of this, but this is going to help us learn to make the next thing and also give developers a leg up on what they're going to be building when this next thing comes out.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I don't want to be the metaphor police here, but I would say it's not asparagus chips. It's more like chocolate that's in a store that, that costs $3,500 to enter. Chocolate's not for everyone, but it's pretty good. But I'm not paying $3,500 to buy some chocolate. It's not gonna happen. And I think that, I mean, the, the idea might be if there was a lot of great immersive content, because I think most people who' really liked it. But, but it's two things. One, more content, especially specific content, might motivate certain audiences to get on board, but it's Also true that you got to lower that price to entry. You just. You have to. You have to buy a lot. And I think maybe immersive content. While it's one of the legs of the stool, it can't be the only leg of the stool. I was just going to say, I think it's amazing, honestly. Honestly amazing that other than this week where Leo played the theme, knowing there were no Vision Pro stories, I have been shocked, shocked at how much we've been able to talk about what's going on with the Vision Pro over the last year, because I kind of thought it would all just dry up completely. But there's been a. There have been drips. Right. It hasn't been a flood, but it also hasn't been complete radio silence. We've had stuff to talk about, and that's not bad for a product that is absolutely. They admitted, you know, eight months after they released it is a work in progress. That's for early adopters only, which everybody knew on day one.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It fires the imagination, doesn't it? It's like, you know, there's something here, you know, that. That's. This isn't it. But, you know, I'll continue the food. The food analogy where you're in the kitchen, you're trying something new, you know, that, ooh, this combination of this plus this isn't quite right, but there's something about that blend of sweetness and umami that I want to continue to develop. There's something here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Here.

[Andy Ihnatko]

This ain't it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, but I do think when I put the headset on, and I'm not one of the people that, I guess, for whatever reason, I don't. The head. The weight doesn't bother me. I have talked to people who say, oh, the weight's too heavy, and I have a big head. I guess it's used to carrying a lot of. A lot of weight anyway, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, so. So, so, so I. It doesn't. Like, I don't notice it at all, but the, you know, I feel like a lot of it is there, and there's a lot. Like the technology's there. Sure, the price is high, but that's, you know, Tesla came in really high, and then they started lowering the price. That's what you, you know, you can come in low and then make a ton of technical compromises, or you come in high, figure it out, and then figure out how to be more efficient about it. And I think that. I do think that they'll probably fork. I think, you'll probably see one that's the same price or more and another one that's less expensive. You know that, that they go, they go for that lower market and start to figure out where they're going to where they can cut those corners. But I really do believe that they haven't. Like I think part of it is Apple's self correction system when they release content. It is so much work for Apple to put a piece of content out. And because no one else cameras and no one else had anything else, it has to go through Apple's thing. And even the stuff that came out, I wouldn't necessarily agree with putting it out. I think that the artist or whatever concert for one is literally a textbook of what not to do with VR. And so I think that. But this is Apple trying to let's work with big names with lots of experience and that oftentimes comes with old ideas. And so the. So I think that it'll be interesting. I'll be very interested to see what happens if this blackmagic camera gets out and suddenly a whole bunch of filmmakers, like all my friends are all trying to get it. Like we're all trying to like hey, when can we get a hold of that camera? There's a lot of folks that are, you know, excited to jump into that, into using that camera both for meta and for, and for Apple. And so I think that when we see that content it'll be really interesting because it's the first time it hasn't been like a huge science project to do dual one 180.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're one year in. I think we've always said all along we need the killer app. Is there a killer app? Is it the screen? What is the killer app?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I think the screen is definitely what people are gravitating towards. Just the simple idea of I can wear something on my face and create virtual displays that greatly exceed the amount of space I have available. That's killer. Everybody gravitates towards that. It's something that is very easy to explain. I think even if you're not stuck on a plane for six hours. It's something that is attractive to a lot of people. The idea of having virtual displays even inside your own office. I mean again, I'm sitting in front of you. I walked about a mile in teen degree weather carrying enough gear to have a two display setup here with my iPad and my MacBook. Because having different tasks in different discrete corners of your peripheral vision is such a productivity booster. Such a great way to get Work done. So the idea of having different. Being able to simply generate more displays for your workspace for whatever, that's a really, really big deal. I think that simply is the killer app. The fact that we've been here for a year and know developer and remember that Apple developers, they are some of the most brilliant, crazy geniuses ever. If there is something interesting about a piece of hardware, it will trigger their creativity and they will build something that either has never existed before or will make you completely rethink an existing product category. The fact that nobody has come up with it hasn't really inspired those developers as yet. Even the people who are not trying to make money off of it. People who just say, well, I'm a developer. I want to buy this because I want to play with this. Ooh, isn't this an interesting idea? I want to play with that. That doesn't seem to have materialized yet. I think that speaks to a failure to inspire the creativity, the creative impulse of the developer community. That's why I think that the killer app is simply virtual displays. It's wonderful. I've used them. I don't own one myself, but every time I borrow one and use one, that's the thing that I find a position finding my headspace in. And I think that will point towards whatever the second version of this is going to be. Give me, Give me great virtual displays, give me greater connectivity with all my, all my other devices, and make it affordable so that the next time I'm considering buying a $500 monitor for my screen for my. For my office, I might consider, well, that's $500 more or $1,000 more isn't a small amount of money.

[Leo Laporte]

But.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But what could I do if I bought $1,000 headset or $1,500 headset? Get me on board that way. Not by trying to give me a vision of spatial computing that, again, they haven't been able to deliver on.

[Jason Snell]

I'd throw 3D movies and immersive movies on the pile as additional things that would motivate the purchase of a, let's say, thousand dollars, $900, $750 version of this sort of thing. And then the other thing I'd throw on there, that was something that they shipped late, but they sort of. I don't know what they were thinking originally, but they got there eventually, which was spatial Personas and FaceTime, which, when we first saw the Personas, they were weird and creepy and they were in little boxes. And today I can tell you the Personas are Really good. And they're not in little boxes. They float in the air or in an environment. And I have done multiple spatial Persona conversations with friends, and it's like we're there in person. It's a killer feature. But get. Guess what? Everybody has to have a $3,500 headset. So part of this, it is a chicken and egg problem in a way. Andy, you said, like, search for the killer app. The developers aren't that motivated. They are, in part, not that motivated because there are no users like the people I know who've done Vision Pro apps. Like, the number of users they've got is in the dozens. Right. Like, there just aren't people with it. So if more people bought it, they might be able to find the killer app or be motivated to seek the killer app. But, you know, that's. That's the challenge here, which is why I think Alex and I have talked a lot about if there was a theater or live sports or some other entertainment product, that was enough to motivate people that that would be another way you could sell these headsets. But in the end, I think the most important thing to know about the Vision Pro is what we knew on day one, which is it cost $3,500. And there are very few reasons you would spend practical reasons that you would spend $3,500 on this if this product was cheaper. And I don't know what that right price is. And obviously they can't get there with this version of it. I do think it has enough applications between the virtual displays and the. And the entertainment aspects and other things we might learn that it could really give it a go. But, like, we're. We're so far away from there right now that all we can do is sort of imagine and wonder and play around with the impractical technology in the meantime.

[Leo Laporte]

And you talk to lonely sandwiches Adam Lysagore about his app, because I thought that was very innovative.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, they have two apps now. They have two apps, and they're. They're still actively developed. I don't think they're selling very well, but I think they're really interested in that as a future. So they've got television, where you can actually put a television in a space that plays television, even retro tv. And then they have theater, where you have a virtual theater space, and you can do plex and you can do YouTube. That just came out and is. The first version was a little rocky, but it's actually getting better rapidly.

[Leo Laporte]

And so there's like, that should be something that does well.

[Jason Snell]

I think they're very interested in that as the future. They want to be there if Vision OS leads to products that are entertainment based which I think is a. There's a pretty good bet that they will be and so great.

[Leo Laporte]

There'd be a market for $800 again.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Said that you could watch movies.

[Jason Snell]

The issues are and the software. I think one of the shames is that one crying shame of this whole thing is that John Syracuse, my friend who is an amazing critic of user interfaces, refuses to use one, won't buy one, doesn't think it's worth the money. And it's a shame because I actually, I would love to hear his criticism of it. But I think, I think the way it's implemented is really quite brilliant and they and thoughtful and they are doing some. Apple is doing interesting things with interaction and gestures and things on Vision os. And so I think the again I think the work on the product is great. I think it's a very impressive bit of hardware. I think that there are some potential killer apps already emerging charging again. The problem is it's just never ever, ever going to be worth it at this price. And so if I was at Apple I would not be, you know, beating up the people who did the software or I mean I would really be pushing the hardware engineers. What can we do to make this thing affordable?

[Leo Laporte]

Help with Vision Pro as it stands, Ryan Christofal at 9 to 5 max says 184 is going to get him. Is getting him really excited for the Vision Pro's future because it's more AI on top of it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sure. I mean I think that the.

[Leo Laporte]

Price down.

[Alex Lindsay]

I still think it's a supply line issue in the sense that, I mean I was talking to someone about live streaming to the headset and they're like, well, I don't know if there's enough people. I'm like, well there's 400,000. How many times have you had 400,000 viewers? Okay, not very often. In fact usually the stat that no one wants to talk about is if you have more than 100 people watching, watching a live stream on YouTube, you're in the top 1%. So the thing is that YouTube's got this massive number of users but only a handful of people to watch any given stream. And part of it is that part of that's a promo pipeline from Apple being able to right now there's just so many apps getting.

[Leo Laporte]

We have 729 people watching on YouTube right now.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

No more than A thousand watching.

[Jason Snell]

We rolled.

[Alex Lindsay]

You were a thousand on Sunday.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello? Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

I thought this was just us. Yeah, exactly. So the, so the thing. And to put it in perspective, when we streamed, we had I think 650 watching on the Vision Pro when we streamed Twit, the last Twit that we streamed from the, from the Twit house, from the, from the Twitch studios. So it was 650 people were watching on a Vision Pro. It didn't require, you know, hundreds of millions of users to get to that number. It just required people to knowing it was there. And I think that that's one of the big challenges is that there's 400,000 people that you can't get to, you know, like that, you know, and that one content, they spent a lot of money on those headsets. I mean, they just don't know where to go. And Apple, there's not a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Content that rings when there's something to walk.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I mean, I think that if people started to build those. And again, I think that there's a huge supply line issue, which is that, for instance, USDZ is potentially really powerful of being able to share models and look at models and play with them. But Apple hasn't finished. They don't have a way to create those models, easily, animate those models, easily, put them into place. Keynote does a little of it, but whoever wrote it in Keynote doesn't really understand 3D spaces. And the thing is that you've got to make it easy to make the content for the device. If content creation is hard, no one's taking advantage of what makes the device different. And right now I don't think Apple has built those tools. I think that the camera will be a big tool that if it works, it's going to be a big part of. Suddenly there's a lot of interesting content that's coming out. Because I think that if 100 or 200, not thousands, but if 100 or 200 of those cameras get into the wild and people start shooting, shooting like immersive content with those that you can only see if you have the Vision Pro or whatever, I think that that's going to. You can only see it resolute at the right resolution or whatever, that's going to change the model a little bit on how that works. But I think that there also are all these 3D opportunities, but the tools to get. It's hard for me to get 3D tool content into the Vision Pro, let alone someone who just has the idea for content.

[Leo Laporte]

But if maybe Apple put too much capability into it, could they make a very simple device like a View Master that's just there for watching content and make it down?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think you could definitely make one. That's just the problem is, is that playing the videos at the problem is the movies look amazing. And to play that resolution at that frame rate requires almost all the horsepower that you have in that Vision Pro. And so the issue is like if you take, you can't take that, I don't think, I think that it just becomes like everybody else if the resolution goes down again, you know, and so.

[Andy Ihnatko]

If they include, I think that as part of the Apple ecosystem it could really, that could be like assigning a booster to a very, very plain and ordinary product. If they, if the video experience is really, really good, okay, and they have enough horsepower that it can do the sort of video that you're talking about as a playback experience or even slightly less. Maybe they don't necessari need that top thing. If its killer feature were simply continuity that whatever you're doing on whatever device, it can be found by that iPad, by that iPhone, by that MacBook, by that Mac as a thing to throw a window onto or to change a stream from what you're watching here to what you're watching over there, that in itself, even if you had a thousand dollar Apple headset that had exactly the same sort of video specs as something that meta came up with or anybody else, the fact that it does continuity that well, that it's not a special, it's not a special weird thing that you're doing this kind of integration that would really make it an interesting product.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the only challenge is the desktops that you were talking about that are one reason to use it only work at that resolution. Like if it gets much lower resolution, you can't use them, you know, like you can't, like so what makes that, that virtualizing your desktop, which I of course I have nine monitors in front of me, so the idea of going down to only the ones that the Vision Pro does. But when I'm on a plane, I've opened it up and it was magical. Like I will say, like, I was like, oh, this really works. Like to have my laptop closed and be sitting there typing on it.

[Leo Laporte]

I was, are there any physical liabilities? You get nauseated? Do you. Your head get tired? None of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

You just get, I don't have that other. Okay, you know, I don't, I've never.

[Jason Snell]

Had an eye problem or a nausea problem, problem. I have had times when it, I feel the weight of it usually an adjustment of the straps to get it to be fit better works for me.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I admit everybody's different back strap, I don't like that.

[Leo Laporte]

So they may have immediately logistic issues that really plagued early VR.

[Jason Snell]

It feels, it feels very much like, and I everybody wants everything now. It feels very much like this is one of those products that we have to sell. Check back in three years honestly because, because right now it is essentially a developer kit. It is an early adopter thing. We are all geeking out at the fun things that you can do with it but there's very little content there. And, and like the people who should be using it now are thinking what content could be there and what could we do and experimenting and all of that. And that if Apple really is viewing this as a long haul product, and I think they are, because otherwise why would you make this product? If you're not thinking about the far future and where you evolve it then like they. Because I think the truth is those displays, those Sony displays on the inside, those are a huge portion of the cost of the product. And you can't get rid of them. Right? You can't. I think they will slim down the cost of everything around them and they can throw in an M5 or an M4 or whatever. But like even then the next one of these is still going to be too expensive and I think it's going to be see multiple generations before it gets. But, but the good news is there's this like crossover effect where if the software, if the content, if the functionality keeps getting cooler and cooler and the price keeps getting lower and lower, you will start to pick up an audience for whom that price is like okay, now it's worth it. I travel a lot. I want that virtual display, whatever it is and like over time you can push it down but like you can't, I would say say you can't really see it from here because it's just, it's just not there yet.

[Alex Lindsay]

And again I think that you know, it's not just that the hardware doesn't have enough people like Apple could get, could change this a little bit. They spent billions on this headset and they have put in a lot of social capital into expanding this thing. They're just not spending enough money on content. Like they are not spending enough money on developing things that would get people excited. There are plenty of things that many of, of us. And I'll tell you the company that figured this out was Epic and Apple doesn't pay attention to what anybody else does. They only do what they do. I know that, but Epic has the Megagrants and man, that when Epic launched the Megagrants, developers just stopped hearing the word unity. Like there was Epic and Unity and it was all you had. Unreal and unity, Unreal and unity. And then the Megagrants came out and then it was just unreal, unreal, unreal, unreal because, because everyone was trying to figure out how to pitch for a Megagrant. Apple should be doing Megagrants. They should be doing, you know, up to a million dollars of, of. I mean, because they were. I don't know what, I don't know how much Epic was putting in. It was like tens of millions of dollars. I think they did a hundred million dollars of mega grants for $25,000. You barely had a napkin, you had to write down barely anything on a Napkin. To get $25,000 from, from EPIC. You had to start showing them how you might make money with it at quarter million, you know, like, you know, like, you know. And, and, and so the thing is that there's, I think Epic did that very, very effectively and it jump started this massive ecosystem into a market that didn't have a lot of people when they did it. And I think that Apple should have something like a Megagrant where they're saying, hey, if you've got an idea, because this is the exact problem that we were talking about earlier is that a lot of developers are like, well, I don't know how to pay for six months of my time to work on something that really is finished. So most of the products that we see are not finished. And then you put them on, then you don't come back to them again.

[Leo Laporte]

Five has a great idea. He says put the final season finale of Severance require a Vision Pro.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, that would change how to make everybody hate you. So but I think that, but you.

[Leo Laporte]

Got to buy a Vision Pro.

[Alex Lindsay]

People would be, I don't think it would sell more Vision Pros, but it would make a lot more Vision Pros use their Vision Pros more often, which has a chain reaction for the developers and everything else. If they put more 3D content in. I mean Apple should consider developing new 3D or new immersive content should be coming out at least once a week. At least once a week.

[Leo Laporte]

There's an opportunity here because for at least some portion of the populace, Meta has turned into the evil empire. And so there is an opportunity, I think for Apple to say, yeah, we're still the nice guy guys and you should if we. They just need to get the price down. We're got to take a break but man, we sure got a lot out of that. The one year anniversary amazing of the Vision Pro as we say.

[Andy Ihnatko]

For a thing that hasn't made much of a splash anywhere commercially or socially, we can again it's a lot soup kids. There's a lot to. It's a very inspirational topic.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. I mean we're all tech nerds and this is cutting edge weird future tech. And I think given the age of this page panel, a lot of us got into computers when they were all like this impractical and expensive and ridiculous.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But the future were Mac people. I mean I, I love having to swap discs 20 times to write a nine page turn page.

[Alex Lindsay]

I, I felt, I felt so bad for my parents when I did what is the equivalent of when I bought my Apple Iie When I got my parents to buy my Apple Iie by having a hunger strike. I literally laid on the couch and cried for three days and wouldn't eat until I got an apple to E.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't they glad they did?

[Alex Lindsay]

The equivalent was $6,000, you know, like back in 19. You know, like they $6,000 for this apple IIe that I then did nothing useful with. I mean I wrote programs and my entire future was created from it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

But, but at the time, it's not like it generated any revenue. I just did my papers on it and wrote and wrote useless apps. You know about Dungeons and Dragons here.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a break, come back. We will talk about severance and we'll talk about the future of the Apple car. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy and Ako, Alex Lindsey, Jason Snell, so glad to have you here. Now, you know we're done talking the Vision Pro.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security enterprises have unfortunately gone down kind of not a great road in security. They spent billions of dollars on two things. Firewalls, perimeter defenses, and then you need to have a VPN to get people into the network. Right. So they could do some work. But neither have helped with security breaches continue to rise. An 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks. The payout in 2024 was a record $75 million. But you know that that's just the tip of the iceberg because most people aren't willing to admit that they had to pay out for a ransomware attack. Attack. It's bad news out there. Because these traditional security tools don't help. In fact, they expand your attack service. Surface with public facing IPs that are easily exploited by bad actors and they're better than ever because of AI. These guys are using AI to create new and crafty zero days. And then that VPN struggles to inspect encrypted traffic at scale. Why does that matter? Because it's outbound traffic. It's the bad guys exfiltrating your customer list, your email, emails, all the stuff you don't want anybody to see. Your VPN's not protecting you against that. VPN's and firewalls also don't protect you against lateral movement. Once a user is connected to the network, they can move all over the place. They can look for all the juicy bits and then easily exfiltrate it using encrypted traffic that your firewall can't stop. It is a mess out there. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructures using AI and that's how they're outpacing your defenses. You've got to rethink your security. We cannot let these bad actors win. And I'm not talking Nicholas Cage, I'm talking hackers. They're innovating. They're exploiting your defenses. That's why you need Zscaler, Zero Trust and AI. By the way, my opinion of Nicolas Cage is my own only and does not reflect the opinion of Zscaler or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. Zscalers. I don't want to get anybody in trouble. Actually, I like Nicholas Gage. Zscaler Zero Trust + AI stops attackers, bad actors by hiding your attack surface, making apps and IPs invisible. It eliminates lateral movement. Just because somebody's in your network doesn't mean they should have full access to it, right?

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[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't their business.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're trying to do for. They're hoping that the Apple credit would do for Goldman what the iPhone did for AT&T, singular, that we want to get into this market. We want to be a major player. This will take us there. And it was just all the different ways that Apple wanted to think different and revolutionize the credit card business without really, I think, super appreciating how difficult it is to achieve compliance if you are going to make those big changes, as well as the difficulties of doing things as simple as everybody gets the same credit card statement on the same day, the billing date is the same for everybody. It's like this is an industry that's been around for decades and a lot of the things they. The way they. One of the reasons why they do things the way they do isn't because they're fuddy duddies and they don't like innovation, but because they tried it the other ways and the other ways created disasters.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the way they do it. Joanna Stern would like Apple Intelligence to know she does not have a husband. Yeah, she has a wife.

[Jason Snell]

She has a wife and she has sons, but not a husband.

[Leo Laporte]

But Apple Intelligence keeps telling her that she does.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, we know why. Right. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, oh, well, by context, this is a person in a marriage and there's a wife and they're talking about a male who is in the family. And then it's like, well, percentage wise, because that's what LLMs do. It's a husband and it's not. It's her son. Although I also think that says something about the math of like, well, this male person in this family is acting rather juvenile. It's probably a husband. Yeah. But it's just one of those things that, like Apple make this statement and they're like, look, we've tried to train this in all the ethical ways possible. I think the point, and Joanna makes it, is the point is that it's still an LLM and it's still based on probability and it still doesn't really know. And so it makes assumptions that are not intended to be homophobic or like, they're just percentages. It's just math. But the end result is it's a shipped Apple feature that is telling Joanna repeatedly that she has a husband. There is no husband in that relationship.

[Leo Laporte]

I would be annoyed. I don't blame her. So Apple's response, and actually, I think they're responding more to the BBC, who really was miffed. On Thursday, the latest developer versions of the iPhone, iPad and Mac software temporarily disable those. Those notification summaries for news apps.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, I'm glad that that's really the only thing they could have done until they get this thing. Like, again, it's bad enough when it's malforming ordinary notifications, but when the BBC or the New York Times logo and app says that, hey, it turns out that it's going to be raining canned hams tomorrow and everybody gets a free Chihuahua, like, okay, I didn't write that. I didn't write anything even similar to that. I didn't publish anything like that at. And now we, the institution, look more like morons. You can't let that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Ihnatko]

One of the problems, though, with relying on LLMs is that it learns things in the conversation with you and as you use it, but that has an upper limit and a rollover. And they're trying to figure out ways to basically figure out, just as I might mispronounce somebody's name the first couple of times. But eventually I learned that, no, this is how. How this name is pronounced, or I learned that this woman has a wife, not a husband, and those things will stick. LLMs have a very difficult time in getting things to stick that way because again, they have a limited amount of memory and it tends to roll over and that's going to have to be the next thing to be fixed. The idea of a personal chatbot of an AI that essentially is attached to you, that is being used to process your information and help you you out. That's not a negotiable thing. That's something that's going to have to remember.

[Jason Snell]

And Apple is working on something called the personal context that would actually put a lot of this in practice. And the problem is they, it's hard and they don't have it yet. And so you end up in this position where it's kind of contextless. I do wonder, I mean, this, this particular feature is one where I feel like the LLM is probably not the answer anyway. The answer is probably to summarize a news feed from the BBC by creating like a new bubble that's a little taller, that has a few bulleted items in it and then says tap for more and then concatenates all the headlines into like a headline summary. But this feature got built because they're like, where can we stick an LLM? And they stuck it here. And I hope that what Apple's doing is saying, oh, actually that's the wrong tool for this job and we've got a different job that'll do it. But for Joanna's story. Yeah, I think that, I think that that's one of the ways that they could make this, this work better in general is if it actually knows who you are and all the relationships of everybody in your contacts and like all the data that's on your phone and can infer from that, then, then the, the model knows the name of Joanna's wife, the name of Joanna's kids, all of their connections and can use that to say, oh, I'm Joanna's phone. They're talking about your wife is talking about your son here. But right now it's just not there. It's just not hooked up. So it's good, good on Apple, Apple for turning some of this stuff off and making warnings, but at the same time, like, how do you fix it? Like, turning off, temporarily turning off the news summary is one thing, but like, it's not like they can tinker with a couple of lines of code of the LLM and say, okay, fixed it, turn it back on. This is a, a larger problem that kind of dates from the inception of this feature that they're going to have to address.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And the thing is like Apple and every other company is trying to do features like that. They really do have to when as part of the planning phase, they're going to have to have on the conference room. Here's how long, long we're going to have to take a bunch of lumps because it really still is all about training data. And as good as you build this model, as much as you test it internally, it's only going to get better when it starts seeing tens of millions of data points on a regular basis. At that point, eventually it becomes smarter and eventually becomes better. However, that first round or first couple of rounds of users are going to have some psychedelic experiences.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also the case that Apple's trying to do this on device, which is hampering it a little bit. I'm wearing and I'm trying more and more of these devices. This is one that was announced at ces. I've ordered one that you might have seen advertised on TikTok called Plod. But this is a microphone. It's B dot computer that's always recording and then sends me summaries. But it does another thing. I have it up on my screen, screen. It listens and then it generates facts and asks you to verify them. I don't know what this is going to say, so this is potentially embarrassing. But let me review. I am associated with a speaker piano. No, no, no, that's discard. That one. I've seen Hart perform at least 100 times. That's Lisa. I like sole proprietors. I do. I prefer making connections for brain stimulation. We were playing the New York Times connection game. It's important not to get absorbed in negativity to maintain mental peace. I think this was from today's conversation, et cetera, et cetera. So it's got facts about me, my hobbies, my health, my wife. And then it does do summaries. So, for instance, this is a summary from today's show. Leo discusses the complexities and frustrations of managing multiple devices and applications, particularly focusing on the ongoing issues of machine rename. That was before the show started. Oh, it's changed again. While discussing the implications of TikTok's potential ban on the evolving dynamics of social media platforms. It gives you summaries, it gives you a to do list, some of which is spurious, but you can throw those out, but some of it's not. And basically all of this is generated by an AI. And yeah, I mean, anybody who's using this is going to understand there's going to be bad stuff, stuff in there. But I do think this is the future and I think that Apple is being frankly lapped by these companies that are taking a little bit more chances. I love this idea of something that goes with me everywhere, remembers what I promised to do, reminds me of what I did, gives me notes. I think it's very handy.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I would do that with Apple. I don't know if I would do that with anyone else. That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem. So it doesn't work very well with Apple because they're private.

[Jason Snell]

Well, yeah, but I think they could do it pretty well. But they're like struggling to just get the basics up and running. Now I do think that that is their plan is they've got, they got a watch on many wrists, they've got a phone in everybody's pocket and they're going to have all your personal context from all the data that you have on your phone. And although that is a disadvantage in terms of the processing power, those iPhones are pretty powerful and they get the advantage of all of your personal data that never leaves your device. And like, I think that's the dream. The problem is, like, they're, they're still struggling to execute the basics right now because they got a late start. But I do think that that's what they want to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at this is a to do list. Cautiously check and clean the hallway for any more potential hazards like the turd found, like the cat turn off the heater before going to bed. Research the competition between Vegas and local casinos. These are all extracted from conversations, which I think it's very interesting. Yes. I have. God knows where this is going. Probably the China, I don't know.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But this is why companies like Apple and Google have a big advantage over OpenAI and Facebook and the others, because they have the ability to put those features where they're of the most use, like actually embedded into your own devices and the tools that you use every single day. You don't have to leave your workflow or what you're doing in order to tab over to a chatbot or a different app in order to get this done. It can actually be well integrated. And I mean, Apple is definitely pretty far behind. And it's unnecessary for people to like, write, oh, no, they're not behind. They've been doing AI for years. No, they are behind for this. It's perfectly fine to acknowledge that they're behind. But the thing is, look at the list of all the different companies that were behind for years and years and years. Once you catch up, that's forever. They forget that if you still survive and if you wound up with a good product at the other end of that process, people don't care that you were two or three years behind. People don't care. Or, excuse me, Android users don't care that Apple was first with an iPhone like multitouch interface and, and it took Android a number of years to solve a whole bunch of very, very fundamental problems. But they got there and now it doesn't matter that they were behind because people can walk in and get a finished, polished product. Apple is in the same position. Yeah, they're going to have, it's going to be hard rowing for a few years at least, but they're going to get there and they have a lot of really great things to offer. So let's come back in five years time and acknowledge that everybody at Apple is working really, really, really hard and they acknowledge that. Yeah, we are on the back foot right now, but this is a, we're trying to get someplace. We're not trying to win this leg of the race.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break. When we come back, finally, we're going to talk about severance. Leo had a busy and productive day yesterday, juggling various tasks and conversations. He spent time practicing piano, working on a coding project with Leah. Lisa. That's not true. And cooking a delicious meal. That, that is true. He also addressed several household issues including arranging for a contract. So this is all relatively accurate and as long as you understand that it's an AI. The overall atmosphere of Leo's day was a mix of lightheartedness and productivity. There were moments of humor such as the discovery of a quote turd in the hallway and moments of frustration, particularly regarding the ongoing issues with the house's railing system and the lack of response responsiveness from the builder. This is true. Despite these challenges, Leo maintained a positive attitude and enjoyed connecting with Lisa and friends. The day was filled with the sounds of piano music. Yeah. Practiced for like three hours. Lively conversation and the aroma, I don't know how it knew how good that smelled. The aroma of home cooked food creating a warm, inviting ambience. It's a little froofy. Makes me happy though.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Just, just keep in mind that that kind of summary and extracting useful information can be done from any device made by anybody that has a microphone on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Including the Apple watch.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that's why it's so interesting. You're making me remember that like I have a device for like interviews and certain other like situations where it's a Sony stereo, little tiny, tiny little like digital micro recorder that stores on micro SD cards. And the thing is like at its lowest setting it can record for 20 hours straight. I can just, there are times when like I don't, I'm going to be in and out of conversation, conversations all day long. I want to remember something, I will just simply keep it clipped to a pocket and running all day long. And you're making me think that, gee, would it be interesting to, as a workflow, at the end of the day, unclip this, plug it into usb, not only be charging it, but also have that file handed over to a transcription service and then be able to plumb those documents for information later on.

[Leo Laporte]

I have friends who are doing that. And that's what the PLOD is going to do. That's kind of what this does, by the way. This is only 40 bucks and there's no subscription because it's like a developer thing. But I'm sure there will be a cost to all of these, a monthly cost and a cost to the health of the planet.

[Alex Lindsay]

Privacy cost.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, you know what? So this is why I'm the canary in the coal mine, because I'm on the air all the time. There's no secret secrets. So I don't care. I don't care. But you're right. I mean, a lot of people care. Most people should care. But I'm willing to take the chance. The plod uses for ChatGPT4O and Sonnet, and it says it encrypts the data to them and encrypts the result back. They're making an effort, although it is, I think it's a Hong Kong company. So, you know, all bets are off. But I don't see this is why TikTok didn't bother me. What are the Chinese going to do about me finding a turd in the hallway? Nothing.

[Andy Ihnatko]

By the way, I did add turd in the hallway to the show title list. I know you're not going to pick it, but I just want to make sure that was part that was in the mix somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Nako, Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. We're so glad you're here. And if you're glad you're here, I'd like to invite you to join the club. We do this for you. We do this for us. Us because it's a great way for us to hang out with our buds. But we also, and I think this is true of every single show we do, we try to illuminate what's going on in the world around us. And as the world gets crazier and new technologies come online that are going to change everything, I think we have a. There's some importance to what we're doing. We want to Keep doing it. Advertising is up and down. It is sometimes good, sometimes not. It is usually not enough to maintain the operation. But fortunately, we have this great club and 12,000, 13,000 people who are, you know, supporting us and helping us stay on the air. And I'd like to invite you to join that group. Right now. It's only about 5% of our revenue. I'd love to get it higher. Maybe you could help. It's only $7 a month. You get lots of benefits. There's ad free versions of all the shows. You also get access to our fabulous club Twit Discord, which is where all the smart people hang out talking not just about the shows as they're going on, but everything, every subject under the sun. I mean, this is the ultimate geek hangout. You also get special shows that we only put out for the club. For instance, Home Theater Geeks Live is coming up February 3rd. Iowa Today Live. February 4th. We got a photo time. February 6th. Micah is doing his crafting corner every month. Just did that. Stacy's book club is. Is coming up. Did we, oh, I wonder, did we finally settle on a book? It looks like Orbital. No. Oh, there was a sudden turnaround and we're going to be reading those beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson as our book for Stacy's book club. It's done. Right. That was. People were worried. Orbital was close. 39 to 30. That was a. That's a good vote. All right. So that's the kind of thing we do in the club. It's a lot of fun. Seven bucks a month. Find out more at TWiT TV Club TWiT. Thank you very much to all of our club members. You make this all possible. Including streaming. Used to be on eight different platforms. Only on seven because we don't stream on TikTok anymore.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, we're on TikTok.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you got it. We couldn't get on it the other day. Oh, good. So we figured it out. So good. Hello, TikTok. So you were on Twitch, YouTube, Discord, of course, for our club members. X.com, kik, LinkedIn, Facebook, and yes, on TikTok. We're streaming how many. John, Ashley, do you have a overall number of how many people are watching on all those different streams? Do we have that? Do we have to go to each stream individually?

[Jason Snell]

Roughly maybe over 1000.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I don't have a number number on Tick Tock.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was 749 on YouTube alone. So that's nice. Thank you. But of course, most people don't watch live, they watch after the fact. But however you watch, we're glad you're here. Thank you.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you love your phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You can keep your phone, keep your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Number and we'll help pay it off up to 800 per line.

[Jason Snell]

You can also use our savings calculator.

[Leo Laporte]

To compare our plans and streaming benefits.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Against Verizon and Hydrogen AT and T.

[Leo Laporte]

So switch and keep your phone, keep.

[Alex Lindsay]

Your number and keep more of your moolah@t mobile.com up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card.

[Leo Laporte]

Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days with device into eligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expires in six months. All right. Have you seen Severance yet, Andy?

[Andy Ihnatko]

I have not. I do want to. I just haven't. I'm not. I'm not an Apple TV plus subscriber. It's on the. It's on the when when the new season of Ted Lasso comes back on and I read and I basically sign up, however long it takes to get through that, that's on the Severance is on the list of things I want to see, but I'm okay with spoilers. I do know what it's about.

[Leo Laporte]

Season one was three years ago.

[Jason Snell]

Three years ago, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I had to rewatch the last episode to even remember what was going on.

[Jason Snell]

We're rewatching the whole season. I think it's worth it, actually, and it is. In fact, I don't do a lot of rewatches. But the great thing about rewatching Severance Season one is you can see them laying all the groundwork for the things that they pull out in the last couple of episodes. You can see all the foreshadowing that you now understand what they're trying to foreshadow. It also makes it honestly, the pace is kind of weird and dreamlike. And at the time I was like, what is this show doing? And having watched it once, watching it again, I was like, oh yeah, it's separate, right? Like, I get it now. I get what they're trying to do. And I want to be like fully engaged before dying.

[Leo Laporte]

Season two creator, showrunner and director says they do have an end. They do know how it's going to end. This is not lost, thank God.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think there's a little bit of a Easter egg because the name of the production company changed from season one to season two and is now something like fifth season or something. So I think they're subtly telling us there will be five seasons. Anyway, season two has debuted according to Deadline. The series has made more than $200 million forever.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, this is using Parrot analytics demand Forecast, which is really interesting. I used to do a podcast. I still do it called Downstream, but my host used co host used to be Julia Alexander, who worked at Parrot. She has gone on to work for Disney, but. And so she can't podcast anymore, which is sad. But Parrot really does this interesting research where they're trying to measure what demand there is for various streaming services.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because nobody pays content for streaming severance individually.

[Jason Snell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how you would get.

[Jason Snell]

So they use, they use demand for. For content as a proxy to determine again, is it made up? A little bit. But I think that there's truth behind it, that this is sort of like, what value does Apple glean from a given show or any streamer? Because it's complicated. Right. It's not just ratings. It's also, do you bring new people to the platform or is it just the same people who already pay? Are you preventing people from churning and going somewhere else? Or. Or it's complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also growing it. Parrot says that Emea and Latin American regions have seen the greatest contribution from Severance.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it helps grow.

[Jason Snell]

It's one of those things. I saw a piece somewhere, I don't remember where this week where somebody was complaining like, Severance is this great show and it shouldn't be on Apple TV because nobody's seen it. And it's like, well, that's the point, dude. That's the point is they want them. This is how an Apple, like they put all the cast in a glass box in Grand Central last week.

[Leo Laporte]

That is wild.

[Jason Snell]

And like, this is, this is an opportunity for one of these shows that really takes hold and you're. And you're going to get a second season. And it's also been a while for Apple to make that kind of re. Engagement of like, this is. This is a must see show and you should sign up for Apple TV plus to get with the program. And like, this is their moment to do that with severance. And, and I hope it goes well for them because it's a spectacularly good show.

[Leo Laporte]

It really is.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And when was the last time you saw that kind of like intensely flashy, expensive promotion for a streaming show? Usually, like, it's not, it's not as though like Netflix and Hulu. Yeah. I mean, it's not as though they just let something just find its Own audience. But it's like that's the sort of stuff that you. You're used to doing in the good old days.

[Leo Laporte]

Been in Manhattan for this. This is so interesting.

[Jason Snell]

There's a blog post that I put in the show. Notes from somebody who was there who bluntly about it, and it's so great. And it was so. It started out and it was not the stars of the show, but then the stars of the show went in and for several hours they were doing the macro data refinement, which is this nonsense work that they do on these vintage computer term with. With like these weird keyboards. And they were.

[Leo Laporte]

Milkshake.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, they're all in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Mrs. Cobell.

[Jason Snell]

They're all. Yeah, they all showed up. It was pretty wild. But I also love the idea that if you went there at like 1, at like 10am There were drones in there doing the macrodata refinement who you've never seen before. And then. And then the cast showed up, which was pretty cool.

[Alex Lindsay]

Man.

[Leo Laporte]

I would have hung out all day. That's just the coolest thing ever. Ever saw.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah. It's a. It's a. It's a great show. It is. I mean, what's funny about it is that Apple is definitely one of the references that they're making because it's these long white hallways and it feels very Apple like. And it's like a. It's a tech company and it's a kind of a cult. And. But it's also like. And we. And we can laugh about that, but really I think it's more broadly about corporate work culture and how weird corporate culture can be and how weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's.

[Jason Snell]

Corporations are in terms of wanting you to behave your work life as if it was separate from your rest of your life.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a commentary on work from home. I don't know if it's intentional, but we are now in. You know, one of the things the president did yesterday is order all government employees back to the office. And companies all over the country are doing this. You know. Wow. I mean, this is. We're all getting into this weird anomie of the office. Oh, yeah.

[Jason Snell]

So that's. That's what I mean. That's what severance is all about. Plus, I mean, it is. It's about lots of stuff, but it's just. It's such a rich vein and it's weird and creepy and funny. I mean, it is funny. It is strange and funny.

[Leo Laporte]

In theory.

[Jason Snell]

It. Yeah. Is it? I'm not sure. I would call it a comedy, but it is funny and also dramatic and it's great. So. So I love that Apple is putting their. Their marketing effort behind this. And those people complain that nobody knows about Apple TV and nobod knows about the shows. This is a good example where Apple is choosing to strike when the iron is hot. All the people are on talk shows and stuff, and they did this big stunt at Grand Central, and it's great because this is. How do you get people to watch Apple tv? You get them through the content and through the debuts of shows that are really well thought of and have fans and are trying to build the word of mouth, and this is how you do it. So I'm glad to see them doing it for a very worthy show.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I. And I have to admit, when there was rumors that Apple was trying to cut back on the cost, I was like, why would you do that? The whole thing about this is that it just oozes production value, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, yes and no. I mean, they're trapped in a cube farm, basically. In fact, the first scene of the first episode of season two is a very long sequence which apparently took days to shoot, of Mark S running down identical hallways. And apparently they used it. I would love you to look into this, Alex. And you got to watch it because they used a camera crane, they used a robotic arm. He was on a treadmill for some of it because they want to make it look like he's running down this kind of infinite series of hallways over.

[Jason Snell]

They had to shoot in so many different setups that it took. They did. It didn't take five months to shoot, but there are shots in that opening scene that were gathered over the course of five months because of all the different setups they needed to do to get that cinematic thing. I will just say most of the reports about Apple wanting to spend less money are about them spending less money on movies, not on TV shows. And that's good. You got to pick your spots. Not. Not every show needs to cost a fortune, but, like, if you've got a. Like this that looks like it's kind of popping, put that money in there.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think in general, Apple has. Except for the ones that they bought. I mean, you can. As someone who does production, you can just look at the frame and go, wow, they spent a lot of money on that frame. And I think that. I think movies are a waste of money at this point. You know, like, theatrical releases are like, I don't. All I watch are series at home. Like, I don't watch. Like, I'm like, oh, do I have to commit to like two and a half hours at one time? Like, it's not like my family doesn't watch movies very often. And so I think that, I think that, that I think Apple should probably. I think of the streamers are moving away from features because they, you know, the problem is, is that they try to offset the cost by releasing the theaters and then everyone says it was a failure. They're like anything. Any money that came in for something we're building for our streaming platform is free money. Like, it's free money and free pr. But that's not how all the press.

[Leo Laporte]

That Ted Lasso has made them $600 million.

[Alex Lindsay]

I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

That's movie money, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And, and I think that again, it's, I think that, I think you're going to see a continual movement towards more and more money, going towards more and more series. But, you know, because I think that that's how you hang on to people is you have a bunch of episodes that are, you know, that are there not one. One moment that you're shooting and trying to hit. And I think that these are. And when you talk to writers, they much prefer working on series. Number one is it's more work. Number two is it. Is it. You can flesh out the characters so much more effectively over eight series that might go into three or four seasons than you're ever going to get in two and a half hours. And so I think that. But it's good and hopefully that's the direction they're going.

[Leo Laporte]

I recommend Vanity Fair piece with Ben Stiller and Mark S. Whose real name is Adam Scott. He'll always be on Mark S. To me, describing how they shot this. They did not want to use a Steadicam because it would have been too difficult for. I bet your brother could have done it, Alex. But too difficult for the operator to keep up with Mark's escalating pace of running. Scott said he knew he'd be filming a portion of the high intensity scene whenever he was asked which flavor of Gatorade it.

[Alex Lindsay]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little bit, you know, it's. This is what it really in, in a nutshell is severance. It's challenging to the viewer. It's not. It's like this is going on a long time. It's not completely comfortable.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the way the whole show is. It's not completely comfortable.

[Andy Ihnatko]

I get the one. One of the things that. That attracts me to it. Again, I haven't seen it yet, but, like, every time I talk to somebody who's seen it, every time I see some more piece of information about it, it reminds me the prisoner where it's like, creepy, you know, that something big is afoot. You know, don't know. There's no covenant between you, yourself and the creator that they're going to explain what's afoot, but they're going to use that eerie feeling and that sense of disconnection to really land some important. Really land some big points. So, as I said, Ted Lasso, next season I might actually watch Severance first.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But it should be prepared. It's not a completely. It's not a show where you go, I'm loving this. It's difficult. It's a little. A little challenging, to be honest. It's a little weird.

[Jason Snell]

Well, you can toggle in with Bad Monkey and Silo and shrinking and like, you could program like a little network block with. There's so much good stuff on Apple TV plus. If you would ask me, Bad Monkey is Apple TV Plus. But Vince Vaughn, it's so good.

[Leo Laporte]

It is good.

[Jason Snell]

It's so good. And that kind of garbage animals for hours.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Little something, something.

[Alex Lindsay]

I. I think that they're. They're right now as a group, I mean, there's definitely a couple things that I'm watching in other places, but as a group, the vast majority of what I watch, if I'm not watching YouTube is Apple TV. Like, it's. It is really the best content out there right now. And I did not like when. If we go back to old Mac breaks, when they came out, I was like, this is all garbage. Like, all these. All these movies are garbage. And. And I've. They've come around and I think Silo is one of my favorite shows out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I got a little tired of it after the first season when we stopped watching because it was a little claustrophobic. But everybody's saying season two is.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, my God, so good.

[Leo Laporte]

Incredible. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple. It's funny because Apple did. It was a slow burn for Apple. They didn't.

[Jason Snell]

Well, they had nothing, and they started with nothing. Now they have a little catalog. Right. Like, that helps to have a catalog.

[Alex Lindsay]

Netflix had nothing. Like, when you look at the early Netflix stuff, it was. Oh, it's okay. You know, like, it was. And they got better.

[Jason Snell]

House of Cards had some movies, though, right? Like, Apple launched with almost nothing at all, but now they've got a catalog and a system and it's built up and I just again, I could never have predicted there would be so much good original material on Apple tv. Plus, like the executives there have done a very good job in programming, at least to me. I mean, thanks guys.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I know our worry was it was all going to be, it's all for you, Jason. It was all going to be G and pg. And that is not what Apple TV is big of. It is like dystopian world, you know.

[Jason Snell]

Like it's modern high quality streaming tv.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if they'll make a commercial out of it, but. Tim Cook says the Apple Watch saved his father's life.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, that came out of a podcast interview where his father, his late father was like living alone, fell over his. His watch gave an the usual story watch gave an alert. He was not responsive when emergency services came to his door. When they didn't get a response, they knocked the door down and got him help. And the punchline is that at the end of the episode he said that at the end of this incident his dad was more upset about the broken down door than about the fact that he almost. Than about being really impressed with the fact that what the Apple Watch had done.

[Leo Laporte]

That's gotta be a good feeling though to know that you created and manufactured and marketed at something that actually saved your parents life.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And that's why I skipped over that a couple times. Okay. Another case of okay, that's great but we've seen this 100 times before. But this was like from Tim. But also I love to imagine like having had like experiences with my father that were, you know, typical for like his generation. Like just the idea of well I guess, I guess your son likes the son's company's products are pretty good. And then him just like parrying it off somewhere because you know, fathers and sons have weird relationships. It's like oh yeah, I guess but God dang, what about my door son.

[Leo Laporte]

To get my door the information which is one of my favorite subscriptions. It's expensive but it's well worth it. Of course Paris Martin know from the information is on this week in Google broke an interesting story. Nick Winfield said he revealed that an unnamed former Apple exec tried to persuade Steve Jobs to buy Sony knows Jobs wasn't interested. In fact he wanted to sue him. Jon Gruber had a theory. Might be Scott Forstall or maybe Tony Fidel. He reached out to Fidel and Fidel said yeah, it was me. Gruber writes, I asked Tony Fadell he confirmed to me it was him saying it was back in the earliest days of Sonos when Sonos was set to deal debut with a device featuring an obviously ipod like scroll wheel for input. Oh, I don't remember that.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Oh, yeah, no, it was, it was a, it was essentially like a, A living room, living room coffee table controller that was essentially an ipod cut in half with the scroll wheel on one side of the screen on the other side.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I sue.

[Andy Ihnatko]

You can understand why Steve was a little bit salty about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. He. Fadell said no, no, we should buy him and, and try. I wish they had. Now, of course, Sonos is just falling apart. They've lost their CEO fired, they lost their chief product officer fired because they.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just have to say, just a little late. Like their screw up was a long time ago. Like this was, I don't know, years ago, wasn't it? I mean that they did that. They really threw us all into the.

[Leo Laporte]

They switched from series one to series two. Made all the series one stuff incompatible. The real final straw for me was when they released a really terrible app last year that was unusable and they tried to fix it. They tried to fix it, never could. And I'm stuck with a lot of Sonos gear and it works all right. But Jobs response when Fidel said you got to buy this thing is no one wants what they're selling. That was wrong. Sonos for a period of time was very successful. Not so much anymore. Everybody's doing it. That's part of the reason. Oh, there it is. There's the device. I had the base station, the Sonos connect, but I didn't have this remote. Yeah, we had. Sonos is all over the old studio. John, John got to take them with him. And how many speakers do you have, John? He's got like 20, 20 Sonos speakers. All the old, old ones. And I guess if you stick with the old ones, you're all right, you know, it's just that it didn't work with the new software. Finally, Apple wants to help LA and wants to make it easy, as they have done in the past with natural disasters, to donate to the Red Cross. There's a Red Cross donation flow in the App Store and the Apple Music apps. So many people who listen to this show, so many people who've been on this show have lost their homes, including Kevin Rose. Apple has donated money, but of course they don't say how much, which is, I think even more respectful, respectable. So you can, you can do that. In fact, you can do it right in the App Store if you want to donate.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They're also going to be streaming that, that benefit concert.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be something. Are they streaming that? Oh, good. Oh, good. That's going to be something. Can't wait to see that. All right, let's take a final break and then, if you will, your picks of the week coming up. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inako, Alex Lindsay and Jason Snell.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Leo Laporte]

That's AI.domo.com Time for the picks of the week. Who wants to go first? Jason, why don't you start this time?

[Jason Snell]

All right. I got a weird one, but a good one. It is yet another app that is using AI transcription models and you might be saying to yourself, oh, so boring. Oh, it's another app with Whisper in the name. This is called Super Whisper.

[Leo Laporte]

Super. Well, it's got to be better. Wow.

[Jason Snell]

Here's what I like about Super Whisper. Super Whisper. It's on Mac. It's also on iOS on the Mac though it does really interesting things based on context. So, yes, you hold down a keyboard command and you dictate to it and it puts your dictation. And why is this not just. Just use the stuff that's in the system. What Super Whisper does that's interesting is it's got lots of models you can try, but it also does post processing of your dictation model by a LLM, which is interesting to clean up the garbage. And it's all contextual and this is my favorite feature of it so far. I've just been trying it out the last week, week or two. If you're in a particular app, it can change what it does to the processing of whatever you said. So like if you're in mail, you can have it transcribe what you say and it and it passes it on to the LLM for checking and formatting with special instructions to say this is going to be an email. You can have it have a different set of instructions if you're in notes and it automatically changes. And the best part is you can set up custom contacts per app or per website even for your web browser. And if you want you can give the instructions. So you can say to the LLM, basically format this as a, as a blog post for a website and like give it all the instructions it needs. And it creates this really interesting cascade where you are transferring, transcribing, you are passing it automatically to an LLM for proper formatting. The LLM knows the context in which you are giving the transcription and then it outputs the text and sends it back to you to check. I really like the idea of adding all of that extra sauce on top of the bare LLMs because yeah, whispers great and it generates okay transcripts, but they're not perfect. And LLMs are good and useful, but they have weirdnesses too. And it would sure help if I could give custom instructions about what I'm doing. And it can on the Mac. It knows the context of what you're doing. I think that's a really smart idea. I think the results from this are pretty good and I think it points the way toward what this sort of stuff might look like in the future where you've got multiple layers that are. Some of them are LLMs, some of them are other AI based things, some of them are huge human suggestions based on particular contexts that are being inferred from what you're doing on your device. And they, they build in a stack to the point where instead of just getting a dumb transcript out, you get something that knows exactly what context you want to transcribe the words that are coming out of your mouth. I think it's really smart.

[Leo Laporte]

So is it based on OpenAI's whisper?

[Jason Snell]

Whisper is, is the model that is doing the transcription and you can choose the various different whisper models. There are ones that are faster and slower but more accurate and all that. And then on top of that, and again there's a, it's free to try, but there's a PRO version that they want you to pay for. Actually if you pay for the pro version, it'll process a lot of stuff using GPT and you don't have to be a GPT subscriber because it's actually covered under their subscription.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cheaper than subscribing to ChatGPT.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, you can only use it for this. Right. You can't use it for everything, but they're kind of like lumping it together. Really interesting. Again, I wouldn't say go out and spend, you know, a lifetime on. On it. I bought a month to try it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Bucks forever for Lifetime.

[Jason Snell]

It's $84 a year or just $8.50 to try it out for a month, which is what I'm doing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think monthly is probably the.

[Jason Snell]

I think so, because this stuff is changing so fast. But what I like about this is this developer is thinking, not, can I slap this OpenAI whisper engine in an app and call it a day? But, like, what could I do if I layered all of this stuff and use some good Mac stuff enough to. To put context inference on top of it? And yes, it also works on. On the iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Very, very interesting.

[Jason Snell]

Smart. Smart. Like contextual. We've been talking a lot about contextual AI and like, this is one of the first examples where I thought, oh, the fact that it's going to process it differently if I'm in my mail program than If I'm in BBEdit, that's really interesting. Right? Like, I like that. That's an interesting idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm telling you, this year is going to be a wild year for AI. I really think so.

[Jason Snell]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

We are repositioning the Wednesday show this week in Google. I kind of lost interest in Google, to be honest. I don't think it's worth a whole show. We're going to call it Intelligent Machines, and we're going to focus on what's happening in AI. Jeff and Paris have a big interest in that. I certainly do. And we're going to have people like these people on the show to talk about what. What they're doing. I think it's gonna be really interesting.

[Jason Snell]

Check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Super Whisper. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna check this out. I. I am very excited. I don't know exactly how it's gonna shape up, but it's wild. Alex Lindsay. Pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

I got a new keyboard. It's more of the same, but still great.

[Leo Laporte]

I could buy new keyboards every month. I swear to God, it's.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I got these. I've got. So here's what happened was I was sitting. I was. We were doing a production a couple years ago and. And the EVS operator. The EVS operator, they do the playback. If you watch, like a replay of a football play or something like that, there's an EVS operator. And they kind of. She came in and she just Pulled out this little. Pulled out this little case and opened up her little keyboard and set it down.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, Like a pool professional.

[Alex Lindsay]

I know she did. It was like a pool professional.

[Leo Laporte]

And I.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I looked at it. I was like, what is that? It looks like such a pretty keyboard. And I. And I. And I, like, I, like, I said, can I type on it? Can I? And she's like, yeah, sure. I was like, I typed a little bit. And I was like, it's really nice. And so I put it off for a little while. I bought one, and that's the one I'm using here. And then I got a smaller one for the road. So I'm doing a bunch of stuff that I'm on site doing stuff. And I needed to have a keyboard that needs to be able to do wireless, needs to be able to, you know, connect via USB C if I need to. And so I've got hooked on these new fees. These are N U P H Y and I just got the Air 75, which is the new one that they have out there. And it's just such a nice keyboard. There's nothing crazy about about it. It's built really well. I never thought I would be key color. You know, all these cut. All these keys have different.

[Leo Laporte]

Ooh, it folds up.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. So I got that little case for it, and. And so I can just throw it in my backpack. You know, they come in different colors. And you can get. I have a dark. The darker.

[Leo Laporte]

Which switch did you get?

[Alex Lindsay]

I got the red switches.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the clickety clacketiest.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, they're softer. They're soft switches. I have a. So the one that I have in front of me is the moss. And now that I got the red one, I was like, I thought I would never be a switch person. Like, I was never going to be like, oh, you haven't used the red switches yet. But now I am that way. I'm like, oh, you've never used the red switches. So the red switches are. I feel much more pleasing to type ones. And now. Now I'm looking at my keyboard I have now, and I'm like, I don't know if I want to type on the moss anymore. You know, the red ones are better. So, you know, it's a geeky. I will admit it's a pretty geeky key collection of keyboards and switches and things, but they are really well made. That's all I have to say. And it's kind of become my. I just thought I'd bring it up because it's become kind of my standard now. Like, if I'm going to get a keyboard, these are the ones that I've gotten kind of hooked on.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Andy Ihnatko]

They say never cheap out on shoes. And I feel the same way about keyboards because for the same reason that your hands are always on it, you're using it like hours and hours a day. And the difference between an okay keyboard and a really great one is rarely that much money. And they generally last longer.

[Alex Lindsay]

A couple weeks if you're out. If you work. If you work out of the house.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah, exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Newfy N u p h y.com and he likes the Air 75E2 Andy Inocco.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Pick of the Week I got a couple of picks. I was very, very late to the Letterboxd bandwagon. Letterboxd L-A T T E R-B O X-D.com is like a song social network for people who like, watch movies. It's kind of like that book review site where you can log all the books you read.

[Leo Laporte]

All the books you read.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yeah. And I came to it late because last week I came across a letterboxd user who wrote a review of Wicked that was just amazing. People have been complaining about the length of the movie. People have been complaining about some of the background characters. This, that and the other. This guy was just. It was not with a newspaper or anything. He was just. All he was writing about was the cinematography about. It's nuts. Why is. Why is the. Why is the background so well lit? It's nuts. And you. And every single thing you could have to do with lighting and like setting up a scene, a shot he was like basically making. Unburdening his pain about in a very, very rational way. And some of those other stuff. Stuff is like the. I could tell that he was someone who would be worth following because he mentioned another movie saying, well, why is this in Cinemascope? And one of the comments below is, ah, win the drinking game. He said, why is this in Cinemascope? So that's. That's when you take a drink. And that's when I kind of got into like. It's a good place to find not just recommendations.

[Leo Laporte]

Trader's review of Blue Velvet here. That's wild.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It was a. It was. Someone pasted in a comment that he made for. I think it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. He didn't write it, but somebody pasted it in. Okay.

[Andy Ihnatko]

But there's. Yeah, it's. I found myself getting kind of sucked into it because. Yeah, there it's when you go to. There are other services like that, or you go to Rotten Tomatoes to have a look at a roundup of reviews, you can go to IMDb to see people falsely claim that an explosion on set was actually an improvisation. Okay. But this is nice in that it does seem to be all about, like, individual people just saying what they feel about certain movies. And yeah, a lot of it is like, oh, my God, this is the greatest movie ever. Like, and it looks like it was the first movie they must have ever seen, but nonetheless, it's sincere and it's a good way to find out about movies that I've never heard about that nonetheless have a lot of people talking good things about. It's free. It's. Again, it's a social media app, so obviously they're going to try to monetize your wish list. And hey, I've seen this movie and your social connections, but I haven't been run out of town by it yet. And so it's. It's. I signed up for it. I'm trying not to get too sucked up and sucked into it, but I'm finding that when I'm interested in a movie but not really convinced about it, looking on the site for reviews is usually something that will either I feel as though I've had the entire experience of watching this movie from this person's reaction to it, or, wow, this person really talks about it in a way that really gets to the heart of why I like movies. Movies. So it seems to be worth my time so far.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I should join. I like this.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And there's a phone app, and there are phone apps for iOS and Android. So if you want to use this while waiting for a bus or while standing at a movie line, that's fine too.

[Leo Laporte]

Letterboxd. No E. In the end.

[Andy Ihnatko]

The other thing is that I wanted to. A little bit of self promotion, a little bit of pride. We're doing episode 500 of our Google podcast for the Relay FM network. The material.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations. Wow.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep. I've been doing. I've. I've been on board since episode one. Flo joined in Florence. Ion, who worked right through Gizmodo, has been doing it for, I think, for the past 200, 250.

[Leo Laporte]

I apologize for everything I said about Google. You. No, no, that's a. I hand you the baton.

[Andy Ihnatko]

That's okay. As I often say about other things, it's like. It's not so much that I think that this topic is stupid and not worth talking about so much as I believe That I would not do it. I don't find the interest in it and I want not do a good job on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So you have to be interested in what you're talking about. I agree.

[Andy Ihnatko]

So, so long as Google keeps, you know, getting sued by people, as long as they keep dabbling in AI, you know, that's. As long as they keep making a mockery of do no harm. That's always, it's, it's. There's always something to be to.

[Leo Laporte]

To.

[Andy Ihnatko]

To be to talk about. We have good conversations.

[Leo Laporte]

July 2, 2015. It's been a long, strange trip since.

[Jason Snell]

Just before the AI era with Yasmin, who was so good at it that Google hired her.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, really?

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, she works. I hired her to work on material design and like. Yeah, that was quite a developer Advantage Coup there. And Russell. Right. Who Pocket Cast.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, wow.

[Jason Snell]

Come a long way. Flo is great. Flo used to work with me at IDG and great co host.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hysterical because nobody who's ever been on any of our shows has ever gone anywhere interesting. So that's good. It's accomplishment. That's very good.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's because we're happy here. This gives us our chance to be ourselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Many of the people who've been on this show, hosted this show, have been hired away by Apple.

[Andy Ihnatko]

And YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

And YouTube. Yeah. Come to think of it, it's actually a problem.

[Andy Ihnatko]

It's a spot springboard. It's an incubator.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good for them, bad for me. No, actually not. Because we found. I think we have the perfect cast. Jason Snell, sixcolors.com When did you start on this show actually?

[Jason Snell]

Oh, it is celebrated. Two years ago. Yeah, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

When Rene took off for YouTube.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because thanks to Renee for leaving.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we're really glad we could fill his seat with a. You know, he's the Wally Pip. You're the Lou Gehrig of Mag Break Weekly. What's coming up on 6colors.com? Anything, any podcast you want to plug, anything exciting you want mention.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. Oh, I looked, I looked. It was middle of 22. So it's been two and a half years that I've been there, you know, Six Colors. We are working on the. The annual Apple report card, which should be out probably next week sometime as well as of course, there will be some results at the end of the month. So it's going to a bumper month later this month on Six Colors. People should check out what we've got going We've always got something going on. And on the podcast front, TheInComparable.com has a lot of shows I do, including the Incomparable Mothership is my pop culture podcast. And Total Party Kill is our D and D actual plays podcast, which is very popular. People love it and so, yeah, people should check those out. And the Incomparable Game show, which is just silly and fun and if you want a game show in your pod feed that is a winner, it is always fun.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you. I don't understand how you find time to do this.

[Jason Snell]

I got people now. I got people. It's really amazing. I got some very nice producers. Those shows, Total Party Kill and Game show would not happen were it not for the fact that I got people to produce them because I couldn't produce them anymore because I didn't have the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of work.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jason. Great to have you here. Andy. And Ako, when are you going to be on GBH next?

[Andy Ihnatko]

My February schedule hasn't been set yet, but it will probably, probably be the second Thursday in February, probably around 12:30. In any event, go to wgbhnews.org to listen to last week's show and everything else I've done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. Enotco.com Coming soon.

[Andy Ihnatko]

As soon as I get the bank stuff rolling out, I'm thinking about like just basically putting on hold the idea of monetizing it just to get it actually up and running because I've been writing a lot of stuff that I'm disappointed that people aren't seeing right now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the Silicon Valley way, you know, just gain users you can figure out how to monetize later.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Exactly. Step two, question mark. Step three, profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Andy. And of course, Mr. Alex Lindsay, host of Office Hours Global. He works at 090 Media. What's going on at Office Hours?

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, we're answering questions every day, seven days a week.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you kind of refocused, huh? To be a Q and A thing.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, we started as a Q and A thing and then we started inviting people on for second hours. And the problem was that it turns into 260 shows a year that were pre pro and doing all the other things. And I was like, I think that, I think that we wanted to refocus so that we're going to have kind of a less predictable. Now we do have people just jumping on every once in a while. So we've had folks from. Sure. From, from YouTube, folks from you know, just jumping on for the first 15 minutes to talk about something. But I wanted to keep it a little bit more casual and kind of get back to our center and just be able to answer questions, which has been great for me. So, so anyway, so I got your business.

[Leo Laporte]

Monday, your graphics. Tuesday, your video. Thursday, your foundation.

[Alex Lindsay]

Friday, audio on Wednesday, audio on Wednesday, the audio. The audio one especially is, is there's some deep experts, you know, that, that if you've got an audio question, people ask some pretty deep questions and they handle. But every day we've got both generalists and specialists showing up and answering, answering the questions. And I'm still surprised, surprised that we fill up an hour every day for the last almost five years and we haven't missed a day yet.

[Leo Laporte]

So YouTube.com OfficeHours Global or go to OfficeHours Global on the web and you can actually, you know, go in there and ask them questions. Like that's where the questions come from.

[Alex Lindsay]

You, the people, you can vote on them too. You can chat on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Jason. So great to have all of you here as well. We do make break weekly Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. As I mentioned, we stream it live every freaking where, including TikTok.

[Jason Snell]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

After the fact. Though, of course it's a podcast, so after the fact you can download a copy of the audio or the video, your choice from the website Twit TV, MBW. There's also a link there to the YouTube channel, which is all video, but a great way to share clips, little pieces. You want to get somebody watching Severance or something, you can just clip that and send it to them. It's good because not only do you look like a smart, intelligent, connected person, your friend will say, oh, I gotta watch that show. And we like that. After the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and that's probably the easiest way to get the show, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to all of our club members who make this possible. Our producer, table td, John Ashley. Do you edit today too? Oh, every time, every day. He's got work to do, so we're gonna, we're gonna let him get it, get out there and start editing it. Thank you, John Ashley. Thank you, Alex, Andy, Jason. Thanks to all of you. Now it is my sad duty. I hate having to do this to tell you, get back to work because break time is over.

[Alex Lindsay]

Foreign if you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters.

[Andy Ihnatko]

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[Alex Lindsay]

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[Andy Ihnatko]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Alex Lindsay]

Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom via virtual prepaid.

[Leo Laporte]

MasterCard in 15 days.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Free phone up to 830 via 24.

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Monthly bill credits plus tax and a.

[Andy Ihnatko]

$10 device connection charge. Qualifying port and trade in service on.

[Leo Laporte]

Go5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on required finance agreement as do bill credits and if you pay off.

[Andy Ihnatko]

Devices early Big shout out to you.

[Leo Laporte]

For making it through the hectic holiday season this new year.

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