MacBreak Weekly 957: Slap and Flop

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 957: Slap and Flop – Detailed Summary

Recorded on Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Hosts and Contributors:

• Leo Laporte – Host
• Micah Sargent – Guest host (filling in for Jason Snell)
• Andy Inako – Contributor
• Alex Lindsay – Contributor

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1. Apple Intelligence and Siri’s Performance Issues

Discussion Points: The episode delves deep into the recent shortcomings of Apple Intelligence, particularly focusing on Siri’s inability to accurately answer specific queries about Super Bowl winners. Paul Kavalcis, a renowned Mac developer, highlighted these issues in his blog post, revealing that Siri could only correctly identify 20% of the past 58 Super Bowl winners.

Notable Quotes:

• Andy Inako [04:31]: "The only good thing that Apple Intelligence asked me was, 'Would you like me to look this up on OpenAI? Would you like to switch to OpenAI for this?'"
• Alex Lindsay [09:09]: "Apple's biggest mistake is not so much making Apple Intelligence, it's just promoting it so heavily because it's not what people are buying their phones for."

Insights:

• Comparisons were made between Apple's Siri and other AI assistants like ChatGPT and DuckDuckGo, with the latter offering more accurate and reliable information.
• The integration of AI into Apple’s ecosystem was criticized for prioritizing advanced features over reliability, leading to inconsistent and often incorrect responses.
• Contributors expressed concerns that Apple's heavy promotion of its AI features without ensuring their reliability could harm user trust and the company's reputation in the AI space.

2. Apple Software Updates and Security Patches

Discussion Points: Apple released significant updates across its platforms, including macOS, iOS, and tvOS. A critical fix addressed a zero-day bug in Core Media, which posed a severe security risk by allowing potential buffer overflow attacks through malformed media files.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [22:46]: "Apple has introduced updates to macOS, iOS, probably tvOS this week... The bug is in core media, as is often the case if you listen to security."

Insights:

• The patched zero-day vulnerability underscores Apple's ongoing challenges in securing media processing components.
• The importance of users updating their devices promptly was emphasized to protect against potential exploits.

3. Artist Payouts in Music Streaming Services

Discussion Points: A report by Duet Defensive analyzed and compared artist payouts across various music streaming platforms:

• Spotify: $3 per thousand streams
• YouTube: $4.80 per thousand streams
• Apple Music: $6.20 per thousand streams
• Amazon Music: $8.80 per thousand streams

Spotify responded by highlighting their billions paid to artists but acknowledged the lack of transparency in per-stream payouts.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [36:01]: "Spotify, this is for 2024. Payouts per thousand streams is the lowest. $3 per thousand."

Insights:

• Apple Music and Amazon Music offer significantly higher payouts per stream compared to Spotify, sparking debates on fairness and sustainability for artists.
• The discussion touched upon the broader impact of streaming economics on musicians, with many relying more on live performances and merchandise for income.

4. Safety Concerns Over Apple Watch Bands

Discussion Points: A class action lawsuit emerged claiming that Apple Watch bands contain PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), which are harmful “forever chemicals.” The lawsuit was prompted by an incident where a female employee found a male colleague’s 1040 form on a printer, revealing salary discrepancies.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [99:07]: "Apple says its watch bands are safe to wear despite the fact that the fluoroelastomer contains forever chemicals..."

Insights:

• Apple responded by asserting the safety of its watch bands, citing rigorous testing and independent laboratory analyses.
• The lawsuit highlights growing concerns over environmental and health impacts of materials used in consumer electronics.

5. iPhone SE 4 Rumors and Leaks

Discussion Points: Rumors surrounding the new iPhone SE 4 were discussed, with specifics including:

• Absence of the Dynamic Island feature
• Single-camera setup
• Leaked video featuring an avatar resembling the anime character Majin Buu

Notable Quotes:

• Andy Inako [58:28]: "Having a really cheap phone that is still on board with Apple Intelligence, meaning future-proof for the next five or six years..."

Insights:

• The iPhone SE 4 is positioned as an affordable yet capable device, aimed at attracting price-sensitive consumers worldwide, especially in markets like India.
• The focus on Apple Intelligence integration signals Apple's commitment to embedding AI deeply into its devices, even in budget models.

6. Developments in Apple’s Smart Home Ecosystem

Discussion Points: The conversation covered Apple’s advancements in smart home technology, particularly focusing on the upcoming HomePod with a 7-inch screen and enhanced smart home capabilities through Thread and Matter protocols.

Notable Quotes:

• Micah Sargent [62:50]: "More likely, it's going to provide all of the necessary background components. If people are confused about whether their device is a thread border router..."

Insights:

• The integration of Thread and Matter aims to create a more seamless and reliable smart home environment, addressing previous compatibility issues.
• The new HomePod is expected to serve as a central hub, simplifying the management of smart devices and enhancing user experience.

7. Vision Pro and Immersive Content Creation

Discussion Points: Participants expressed excitement and skepticism about Apple's Vision Pro headset, discussing its capabilities and the challenges of creating immersive content. The focus was on how new camera technologies and software pipelines could revolutionize content creation for VR and AR experiences.

Notable Quotes:

• Alex Lindsay [116:19]: "This is the first camera at high frame rate and 8k per eye. And most importantly, there is an actual post pipeline that can generate the content that is going to be available for the headset."
• Micah Sargent [119:43]: "I think Apple is going to spend a lot of effort on not trying to do this all themselves but empowering people."

Insights:

• The Vision Pro represents a significant step towards mainstream VR/AR usage, but content quality and creation tools remain pivotal for its success.
• Collaborative efforts between hardware manufacturers and software developers are essential to fully harness the potential of immersive technologies.

8. RetroBatch App for Mac Users

Discussion Points: Andy Inako introduced RetroBatch 2, a Mac application designed to automate repetitive tasks related to image processing. The app allows users to create workflows that can batch process images, apply filters, generate classifications using AI, and more.

Notable Quotes:

• Andy Inako [121:48]: "It's really, really cool. If you don't download it and try it right now, just remember that it exists and the next time you have anything that involves a repetitive action, download it and try it."

Insights:

• RetroBatch 2 streamlines workflows for professionals dealing with large volumes of images, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
• The app’s flexibility and integration with Apple’s ecosystem make it a valuable tool for content creators and developers.

9. Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against Apple

Discussion Points: A class action lawsuit was filed alleging gender discrimination at Apple. The case centers on a female employee discovering a male colleague’s 1040 form, which showed a significant pay disparity for equivalent roles. The lawsuit seeks to establish class action status for over 12,000 current and former female employees.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [82:09]: "A tax form left on an Apple office printer has sparked a proposed gender discrimination class action lawsuit..."

Insights:

• This legal challenge underscores ongoing issues related to pay equity in the tech industry.
• Apple’s practices are under scrutiny, highlighting the importance of transparency and fairness in corporate compensation structures.

10. Club Twit and Podcast Support

Discussion Points: Towards the end of the episode, the hosts urged listeners to support the podcast through Club Twit, a membership program offering ad-free content, exclusive shows, and other perks.

Notable Quotes:

• Leo Laporte [104:38]: "But all were, it's a podcast, all you got is RSS feeds. But once a year, we do put out this survey..."

Insights:

• Club Twit represents a direct support mechanism for the podcast, enabling sustained content creation and offering listeners enhanced engagement opportunities.

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Conclusion: Episode 957 of MacBreak Weekly tackled a range of topics, from the pitfalls of integrating AI into Apple’s ecosystem and ensuring the safety of consumer products, to the dynamics of artist payouts in the streaming era and the legal challenges faced by tech giants like Apple. The discussions emphasized the importance of reliability and transparency in technology, the evolving landscape of smart home integrations, and the continual push towards more immersive digital experiences. Listeners were also encouraged to support the podcast through Club Twit to ensure the continuation of high-quality tech discussions.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inocco is here. Alex Lindsay and filling in for Jason Snell. Yay, Micah Sargent. We'll talk about why artists make more on Apple music per stream. Trump's tariff proposal that could cost Apple a lot of money. Why it's safe to use Apple's Fluoro elastomer bands, at least Apple says so. And why you should Never leave your 1040 in a company printer. Or maybe you should. Mac Break Weekly is coming up next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 957, recorded Tuesday, January 28, 2025. Slap and flop. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover. The latest news from Apple. Jason Snell is on assignment today. Fortunately, we don't care because we've got Micah Sargent in his place. Hi, Micah. Hello. Hello, Leo.

[Micah Sargent]

Hello, everyone.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you just get off iOS today? You're working hard today.

[Micah Sargent]

Actually, we record the show for two weeks, so this is not a record day, which is nice. This is my first show of the day, so I'm happy to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Good morning.

[Micah Sargent]

Good morning.

[Leo Laporte]

As Tim Cook might. Good morning. Also with us from. But obviously I don't need to introduce Micah, but I will. He is, of course, the host of iOS today, as you might have gathered on this network, Tech News Weekly. He's doing such a great job and of course, whenever we can get him on, we get him on Hands on tech and all of those wonderful shows. Thank you for being here. Micah. Andy Inacco is here. Gbh Bo Stone in Bostonia. Hello, Andrew.

[Andy Inako]

Hello. We're under a gale warning. You might want to. You might be. Oh, it's. You can tell it's bad when, like, I don't wear my unusual hat. I'll wear, like a baseball cap. And then it's doubly bad when I take two steps out and I have to actually turn the bill backwards to keep from losing it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better than a Karen warning. That's all I'm saying. Enjoy. Enjoy your Karen Allen.

[Micah Sargent]

I thought it was funny.

[Andy Inako]

I was warning this movie is going to be awesome because Karen Allen is in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Karen Allen is awesome. And Mr. Alex Lindsay from Office Hours Global. Hello, Alex.

[Micah Sargent]

Hello.

[Alex Lindsay]

Hello. It's good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful to see you. Sorry about your Steelers, but, you know, do you kind of get a little. Do you get a little Eagles pride? Anyway, I mean, you know, we.

[Alex Lindsay]

There is a hierarchy of cheering that has to go on here, but I'm very split in the super bowl because after the Steelers are out, I usually then decide, well, what Steelers that we know well are playing other teams. The problem is that Kenny Pickett playing for the Eagles and juju Schuster Smith Schuster is playing for the Chiefs. I'm split. I, I do. I, you know, so I think that I'm leaning towards the Eagles mostly because they're from Pennsylvania, but also because it'd be great. I really liked Penny Kenny Pickett. He grew up as an Eagles fan, and for his second season, if they even let him play a couple, you know, to walk out on a Super bowl and play a couple of plays at the end of the, you know, end or middle, they probably won't. But if they, if he gets to play a little bit, that'd be kind of a dream come true for a kid who wanted to play football. So, so I think that, so I'd love to see that. I think I don't really care who wins. So I just, just, just looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

The human talking about sportball. For those who are confused by the whole.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, but, but there, but there is at least there is a Super Bowl super bowl tie in for, for Mac for iOS news this week.

[Leo Laporte]

So what is there?

[Andy Inako]

Yes. Paul Kavalzis, who one of the greatest Mac developers of all time, wrote a blog post in which he basically pointed out how bad Apple Intelligence is even with the new update. He basically asked it, gave it questions about who won, who won like the past, who won the last super bowl, who won the previous one. He discovered that it could correctly name 20% of the past 58 Super bowl winners. And the rest of it. He did a really good amusing. He was not an angry takedown of Apple Intelligence, but he a sort of dumbfounded oh my God. Well, I got to give it a softball. It's got to get this right. No, it didn't get that right. The pull line from the blog post that I think should be on a T shirt is that the only good thing that Apple Intelligence asked me was would you like me to look this up on OpenAI? Would you like to switch to OpenAI for this?

[Leo Laporte]

It used to say here's what I found on the web.

[Andy Inako]

It doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's kind of. Yeah. This Siri. The headline Jon Gruber reporting on this Siri is super dumb and getting dumber. So he did his own. He did his own test and confirmed CafeSIS results. Other Answer engines handle the same questions with aplomb, writes Gruber. He says, I didn't run a comprehensive test from Super Bowls one through 60 because I'm lazy. Also, Paul did it so he couldn't do it, but everybody else could. And, well, I mean, it's. I don't know. Do you? Yeah, it's.

[Micah Sargent]

My question is, did it used to be able to answer this question when it wasn't trying to do all of these smarts, and when it was more reliant on something like Wolfram Alpha, for example, that likely has access to this information directly?

[Leo Laporte]

So Gruber composed his own very bizarre, very obscure question. Who won the 2004 North Dakota High school boys state basketball championship?

[Micah Sargent]

Always wondered that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Actually, I've wondered that.

[Andy Inako]

I thought he was from Pennsylvania. Is he trying to, like, eke out some North Dakota gory?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, apparently he was a schoolboy basketball player, but that's the only connection, he says. A question I completely pull out of my keister, but which, amazingly, Kagi answered correctly. For Class A, ChatGPT did both Class A and B and provided a link to a video of the Class a championship on YouTube.

[Andy Inako]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

DuckDuckGo got partial credit. But old Siri, which is to say pre Apple Intelligence, Siri does okay. In the same question, he says. She declined to answer the question and provided a list of links search engine style, including a two page PDF listing the complete history of North Dakota Class A boys and girls championships. However, new Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence with ChatGPT integration enabled, gets the answer. And this is the real problem. Completely but plausibly wrong, which is the worst way to get it wrong, he writes. It's also inconsistently wrong. He tried the same question four times, got four different answers, some of them completely made up. In 2004, the Dickinson Midgets North Dakota Classic.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh no.

[Andy Inako]

Okay, that's from the, from the boomer version of ChatGPT.

[Leo Laporte]

If that's the mascot, I don't know. Yeah, the Dickinson Midgets did in fact win in 2003. So I guess there's something. Anyway, he goes on and tries a.

[Andy Inako]

Bunch of stuff and yeah, Micah had a good point. It's like the thing is, like a lot of the personal assistants were a lot more useful before they were wired into AI because they were specifically wired up to do the things that we are likely to ask them to do. I had the exact same problem when Google switched from the Google Assistant to Gemini for its voice assistant. Because now it's things like, hi, could you. Things I've been able to do for years, like, hey, remind me tomorrow to do this. At this time it would say I'm sorry, I'm just a large language model I'm not allowed to do like you could do that a year ago and maybe you're supposed to be smarter now. So we might be seeing this is part of the year long I think grace period that we should give Apple intelligence while noting how terrible it is to rely upon it for anything pretty much. But still Apple's going to have to figure out like okay, I think the problem was they tried to do this on device and it can't do this on device and the on server model is not equipped for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yet he does point out that the Google AI overview gave the single worst answer. Picking a South Dakota team to win the North Dakota high school boys championship.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the average iPhone user asked how does this affect my photos?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh come on, it all is photos for you.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm just saying that it's like, like, but people pay it like we've talked about this a lot in office hours and, and when you talk to people who are not geeks about this and they, you, you would get into all these details they're just like okay, well but the camera like that all people like we just wait for those presentations.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah but app. Okay, but wait, talk about the Apple's pushing Apple intelligence.

[Alex Lindsay]

I know that they're pushing it. I think it's a mistake as hard.

[Leo Laporte]

As they are 183 and 153 came out and you are opted in. Now by default you have to turn it off.

[Alex Lindsay]

It increases their sample rate and allows them to figure things out. But it's I, I think Apple's biggest mistake is not so much making Apple, it's just promoting it so heavily because it's not what people are buying their phones for. Like it's not what they're buying the hardware for, it's not what they're buying the iPads for. We all have a whole bunch of AI that's I have on an individual on a day to day basis I have three or four AI windows open Mid Journey, ChatGPT, Sonnet, possibly other ones that are popping up and down, opening up and I'm doing that all on my Mac. Like I just don't care whether Apple like I don't interact with Apple intelligence. And again I think that the average person doesn't care.

[Leo Laporte]

I would argue the one thing people were hoping with Apple intelligence is that Siri would get better.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sure you're right, they didn't care about.

[Leo Laporte]

The rest of it but I don't care.

[Micah Sargent]

Like Apple would take the time where we would see other Because Apple was, as it's all been reported, late to the game that there would be more care given. I also think it's too soon to say that people don't care because Apple is just now making it the default on option. So we have to see. Still we have to see how this plays out.

[Alex Lindsay]

Also, I just don't see people leaving their, their iPhone because they can't. Because they want to go to.

[Andy Inako]

Okay, no, I'm saying.

[Alex Lindsay]

But I'm just saying like, like it's like Apple has plenty of time. Like no one. I just don't think that it's so far. And the thing, all I need Siri to do is play the song that I asked for and not pick the live version. Like that's the only thing I need them to fix is like, hey, how about not play the live version? Because that's not what I asked for.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

What I needed to do though is to get this stuff right. So you needed to play your music correctly. I needed to have the AI respond appropriately if I'm going to expect it to.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I have very low expectation of what it could do.

[Andy Inako]

So I don't try.

[Micah Sargent]

That's fair.

[Andy Inako]

The big thing is always going to be, you're right, we're in a kind of a grace period for everybody right now where it's not yet like the graphical user interface was like in 19. It took a few years before people started looking over to computers with graphical user interfaces and ask themselves, why isn't my computer as easy to use as that? Why can't I do this with, with, with my PC? We still have a few, a couple of years, I think, before AI gets to that level. But Apple can't let themselves get into a position where again, someone's contract is up, they're in the store for a new phone. They're not someone who's necessarily like tied allegiantly to any one platform and they see a demo of a Samsung phone or a Pixel phone and they see that group of AI features that make them say, why doesn't my iPhone do that? And that's why Apple can't simply rest on the idea of, well, it's not a big deal. There have been polls that say that only 17% of, of even iPhone users think that Apple intelligence is important. At some point, if they don't start hit this ground running, they're going to be in the position where the iPhone is the phone. That has to use your metaphor, like it's the phone with a camera that's decent but can't do night shot that, can't do low light photography that, can't do this, can't do that. You don't want people to be saying why doesn't my iPhone do this cool thing that I've seen my friends phones do.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think Apple needs to continue to work on it. I just think that when, when articles come out of like it's horrible and it's all falling apart and everything else and it's like, like someone cares. Like, like, like, like that person cares and there's like 5% of the users that care. And so it just, it just, it's a little hyperbolic. Like sure, when ChatGPT came out at first it was very rough and it would say all kinds of crazy stuff that wasn't anywhere close to reality. And you know it. You need to get the feedback to make it, to make it better. And so I think Apple has to do what it's doing now. But I don't think I get quite as riled up as some of the articles that I see written about it. Like it's a travesty that it can't tell what the Super Bowls are. I don't care.

[Andy Inako]

Well or not, I don't know if I use the word travesty, but it's bad if you again, you have a very, very heavily hyped by Apple product. It's not, hey, sign up for this special beta list to get exclusive early access to this thing we're working on. Or Even now with 18.3, here's a feature set that if you turn it on, it will start doing things. This is something where people are sort of being led into using a system that just doesn't work. I would be much more pleased with Apple's way of implementing this if they really almost made this like a huge like toggle switch that simply said all Apple Intelligence features on or all Apple Intelligence features off, with the implication that if you turn this on you'll have a really cool adventure. You're going to learn how to use this stuff. You'll also be helping us train Apple intelligence to become better. But do not trust any facts that it gives you and be prepared for some wobbly experiences. It's bad if again I use the same voice assistants I've been using for years and suddenly instead of saying I don't know, which is even with humans, one of the most powerful and important things that an intelligence could learn. How to say I don't know, but I will help you look that up. You don't want someone who says confidently, gee, I don't know. Well, the thing is, in Walpole, Massachusetts, the boys basketball team got 412 points in December of 2041. That's when you start to, wow, I paid $1,000 for this phone.

[Micah Sargent]

Something that the people shouldn't do. We know they shouldn't, but that they will do if they rely on being able to search for a question. I can imagine someone like me who has dogs and who's holding three different items in their hand and the dog's looking up lovingly wishing that they could have a bite of this. And normally you could say, can my dog eat avocado? And it would return a search result. But for it to confidently, absolutely, your dog can eat avocado. And it turns out that it's not good for the dog. If you relied on it being right before then, that, that's an. And that's, I think that's the, the, it's the confidence that's at issue here. And that's why I'm happy that Apple, as Andy, you pointed out or suggested for the company when they released this new update and completely disabled the ability to summarize. And I know we'll talk a little bit about it, probably news and entertainment notifications. They've specifically said if you go in to turn on any summary notifications at all, there will be errors. There are likely to be errors, expect errors. And that's the thing is just I think it's our job to remind people that if they are going to use this, if they do care about it, if they are curious about it, just be mindful, not, not necessarily that the sky is falling because Apple's getting it wrong. I just want them to get it right.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I just, I just think that we should do that with all of the Internet. Like, you know, like, like the thing is that with the Apple intelligence, there's no single point of, of truth on the Internet. I find myself constantly searching, especially in technical areas that I work, and getting just the craziest answers, you know, like, like, you know, and these are not, these are not AI AI answers. These are people who said that they were experts who have web pages that people pay advertising for. And I read it and I go, that person has no idea what they're talking about. So the problem with all of AI is it's basing its content on a whole bunch of people that kind of know what they're talking about and a lot that don't know what they're talking about and a lot of people that are just lying. And, and so the, and so the thing is is that, is that the whole Internet is inaccurate. And I think that it's important. I think we have this thing like, well, I picked it up and it was wrong. Well, most of the Internet's wrong too. Like, you know, it's, it's like, you know, and so you, you know, anytime I'm looking for something, I got to find it in a couple different places and I got to see it from a couple different angles before I start to figure out whether what I'm looking at is real or not. Because it's, it's, it's a constant problem.

[Andy Inako]

This is why I like Google's overall approach or their consistent, their consistent approach for the past year or so in I will give you the answer. I will also tell you why I think that's the answer. It will name its sources as I.

[Alex Lindsay]

Think the summaries work well.

[Andy Inako]

I think the Google summaries. Oh no, absolutely no. I think there's still a piece of blanket advice that almost my obligation in 2025 to spread like Johnny Appleseed, which is that the current state status of artificial intelligence is that it is awesome at anything that does not require an absolute yes or no right or wrong answer. So when you give us a task like here's a thousand page PDF of records, could you tell me what sections I need to look at if I want to learn about this part of it? Or can you summarize section 8 of this or any place that mentions Massachusetts Transit Authority? However, if you say that this is 1000 pages of filings of contributions to campaigns and you ask it, can you tell me if so and so and so how much money was donated within the state of Massachusetts? Don't trust that information. Anything that, that's a, that's either yes or no, right or wrong, don't trust that. But everyone should be starting to figure out how to use these not necessarily right or wrong answers as a way to improve their, improve their workflow. It's, it's really had a big, big impact on how I do my job that I don't let it do my homework for me. But now when I've, during those weeks when I literally do have six or seven hundred pages of PDF to go through, it can at least triage stuff for me and say that I don't. I'm going to skim through this later, but this is, AI is telling me that there's probably not the information I'm looking for in this document and if there is, it's not telling me the answer. It's saying, here's where you look in this PDF for that answer.

[Leo Laporte]

So I leave the summaries on because they're comedic, just for the comedy of it all.

[Andy Inako]

Like Zippy the Pinhead is handling your notifications. It's all nonsenters.

[Leo Laporte]

But I have to say, probably that's not the best for Apple's reputation, shall we say, in the AI space. They did make some changes to the AI team. I mean, whether Alex takes it seriously or not, Apple does. And they've moved Kim Vorath over. She is their fixer who has been on many projects. She got the Vision Pro out the door. She's been at Apple for 36 years. She'll serve as top deputy, the Verge says, to AI boss John Giandreya. Actually, Bloomberg says that. So, I mean, I guess you move the fixer in when you realize there's a problem.

[Alex Lindsay]

And Apple historically has had problems when they launch stuff out and then they put what they do, what they can do well, which is throw an incredible amount of money at the problem. And so, you know, when Maps came out, it was a disaster. And now, you know, I, it was one of those things I wouldn't. I installed Google Maps immediately when Maps came out. I just kept stuck with Google Maps for years. And today I'm using Apple Maps. I open up Google Maps and I feel like I'm going into the past. Like, I just, you know, Apple Maps is considerably better from a, you know, I don't know about accuracy. I mean, I get to where I'm trying to get to. But I will say that visually and workflow wise, I feel like it's better than Google Maps at this point. And so in the same way, when Apple TV came out, I thought that all of their content and I said it on the show was a disaster. Like, I just thought it was all bad, you know, and I was like, wow, you spent a lot of money on this, you know, and now I think that consistently, percentage wise, the number of swings that they make, they're making the best content of any streamer. But it took them a couple years to get over that, over that mess, you know, and so I have a feeling that Apple Intelligence probably will follow the same pattern.

[Andy Inako]

Note also that when Apple Maps came out, which is probably an equivalent, I don't use disaster, but equivalent bad black eye for Apple. Tim actually published a letter that said, yeah, we, we released this, essentially, we released this too early. It's not the way it wanted we want it to be, but we're going to keep working on it. It might be appropriate for a more humanist sort of dialogue between Apple and the users about Apple Intelligence, that we are not promoting this as full polished features yet we are building this. It's going to take a while before it's where it's at. For people who can find usefulness in the features that work well, we're offering it there for the features that don't work well, we're offering it for people who consider themselves explorers who are willing to in effect help us develop Apple intelligence by letting it look at all of these notifications and get smarter and smarter as it goes by. I really think that a letter like that, or at least an open dialogue would be helpful to get people to understand their expectations and Apple's expectations in the future.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple did push out updates to macOS, iOS, probably TVOS this week. I updated everything and you might want to because there is, according to Apple, a zero day bug that may have been actively exploited. Now it says against users with phones running Software older than 17.2, so it sounds like it was patched in later versions. The bug is in core media, as is often the case if you listen to security. Now, software that renders other media is often vulnerable because you can send a malformed file and then cause a buffer overflow which then allows you to do elevated privileges. And that's exactly what happens here. This is the first iOS bug of the year, so they managed to get it in right before the end of the month, which is great. I'm not sure if you need to do this if you are running a later version of iOS, but there are other, I'm sure, fixes as well. And the big change of course is that they're now adding reminders to Apple Calendar. So did you talk about that on iOS today? Oh, you will next week, probably.

[Micah Sargent]

It's surprising how I didn't realize that people wanted that so badly. But when it came out I saw so many people like finally, finally I.

[Leo Laporte]

Pay for fantastical for that reason, almost entirely alone. They also added a few other cosmetic changes to Calendar. The big, I think the big one is that they enabled Apple Intelligence by default on 18 3.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And turned off notification summaries again for the time being for yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So go in and turn them on for news. Can you turn them on for news or no?

[Micah Sargent]

No, right now you cannot turn them back on.

[Andy Inako]

And also when it uses Apple Intelligence summaries on a lock screen like for other notifications, it's in italics to make sure you give you. And also, when you turn it on, it actually is more explicit saying, yeah, we're still working on this. So wackiness might ensue.

[Leo Laporte]

Fine. Or it could be hilarity. Hilarity could ensue.

[Micah Sargent]

Would you like a chuckle? Turn this feature on.

[Leo Laporte]

The very first thing it told me is there are. There are many people at your front door.

[Andy Inako]

We're making our users happy. When you found out that your dog hadn't actually been kidnapped into a Russian rodeo, weren't you really, really happy to learn that he was actually safe and sleeping at home? You're welcome.

[Micah Sargent]

You don't know what you got till it's gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Speaking of which, if Your iPhone has TikTok installed, hold tight, because TikTok, of course, is still not in the Apple store or the Google Play store and now being listed. If you go to ebay and search for iPhone and TikTok, there are quite a few iPhones now. They're not selling for this price if you limit it down to the ones who've sold. But there are some list. This is an $8,000 iPhone 16 Pro Max original inbox unlocked with TikTok and cap cut installed. Both, of course, ByteDance apps that have been removed from the App Store. Marvel Snap is back. But that was a kind of a gray area because they're just a publisher.

[Andy Inako]

It was a distributor. Right. So they switched to a different publisher.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me. Let me go down show only sold items and just see. Yeah, well, here's. Yeah. 350 bucks. 275 bucks. Ooh, somebody did buy an unlocked iPhone 13 with TikTok for $1200. Little over value, I would guess.

[Alex Lindsay]

How do you leave the app on without logging? Like, do you log out?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good question.

[Alex Lindsay]

Like, I was like, I guess you could log out of your app store and leave it as the only app.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

But then I thought that if you.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sign in as a new person, I guess you could. But I couldn't figure out how. I have a bunch of old iPhones and I was like, I could make some extra money, but. But I was like, I couldn't figure out, like, how I would completely extract myself from the phone because I don't want to give somebody else my phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Think of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. With anything left on it, usually you want to dump it completely to the ground before you hand it to somebody. So you're not doing that, which means you're kind of leaving yourself opened, I.

[Micah Sargent]

Think, because that's tied to your user, your Apple account.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think it's a bad idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I don't. I don't think that that's. I thought about it. I. And then I thought it was a bad idea. So. But I. But I definitely considered the opportunity.

[Leo Laporte]

Mac OS15.3 has now finally full Gen Moji support.

[Micah Sargent]

One feature I really adore.

[Andy Inako]

Tim got my letter.

[Leo Laporte]

Is anybody using Gen. Are you guys? Are you?

[Andy Inako]

Of course.

[Micah Sargent]

I think they're fun, they're silly, they're fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And so give me an example of what you've used.

[Micah Sargent]

Okay. Yeah. So I just. The other day was having a conversation with my clockwise co host Dan Moran, and we were talking about something to do with the show and I sent a message and he sent a message right after, and we both said the same thing. And so immediately I was thinking of like a shared brain emoji. So I typed in shared brain and this horrific but hilarious image was generated where it was two emojis side by side with this ugly pink brain above it. And then I've done things like I'm talking to somebody about my dogs, and so I did like a chihuahua wearing a crown, for example. So it's just little kind of references to conversations that have me creating these genmoji. And then sometimes it's easy.

[Leo Laporte]

So you have to. So just so you go to the plus sign, you say, I want to put a. But we know. How do you get a genmoji in there? You go to the emojis.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. You go into the emoji. And then at the top where it says describe an emoji.

[Leo Laporte]

That.

[Micah Sargent]

That's that search area when you type it in. If it's something that exists already, it will serve it to you. If it's not, then it will let you generate. But you can also.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a button. I see. It says create new emoji.

[Micah Sargent]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. And now it's launched. Okay. Okay. And now where'd it go? All right, well. Oh, there you go, Dustin. Thank you. Fortunately, we have Club Twit to do our genmojis for us.

[Micah Sargent]

Indeed.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that as good as the shared brain you came with?

[Micah Sargent]

Let me see if I can share my shared brain. That's a little more horrific than that one.

[Leo Laporte]

This one's cute. It's a little gray brain with a smile, happy face on it. And the lobes are split left and right.

[Micah Sargent]

There's mine.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's creepy. So that is two smiley face emojis with the brains on top looking like scrambled eggs.

[Andy Inako]

And Then there's committed murder and they're flunking it.

[Micah Sargent]

And anyone who's had a cup of coffee will understand. This next one I'm sending.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's see. Oh, no. I've had a cup of coffee and I feel great. Is that what that means?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So gross.

[Leo Laporte]

Or I'm using. I'm staying at inferior coffee maker. And that could also be.

[Andy Inako]

I love soft serve ice cream.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. What is an affogato?

[Leo Laporte]

That's what you just made. A soft serve affogato. For those listening, you're just going to have to use your imagination.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. That's one thing. Now we can do that. Notification, summary revisions. We mentioned that. That also not just iOS but also is extended to macOS 153 calculator app. There was a bug in 15 3.

[Alex Lindsay]

Talking about getting the facts wrong.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Basically you couldn't repeat a calculation that you had done before. So if you did 72 times 2, you hit enter and then you want it to do times two before we'll be able to hit enter. Enter, Enter, enter. That stopped working. So they just put that back in. It's not that exciting, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Okay, There you have it.

[Micah Sargent]

That's what's changed.

[Leo Laporte]

Given that there was a zero day that they fixed, I think it's probably worth doing this. There's probably other security patches.

[Micah Sargent]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not real forthright on that. 20 plus security updates. Actually, according to Mac rumors, that's quite a few. One could allow attacker with physical access to. Oh, this is this. We call this the Alex Lindsay. We. It's an attacker with physical access to an unlocked device can access the Photos app even when an iPhone is locked.

[Alex Lindsay]

Turns out that the current Photos app was a defense against people actually wanting to hack into it. They were like. They opened it up and they're like, ooh, wow.

[Leo Laporte]

There were several issues with airplay that could allow attackers to execute code or crash apps. That's not good.

[Andy Inako]

Five different things.

[Leo Laporte]

Two, kernel vulnerabilities could let malicious apps gain kernel privileges.

[Andy Inako]

Unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. Those are the three words that you.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T want to hear.

[Andy Inako]

A brown trouser moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yeah. And Apple did admit that the core media bug had been found in the wild. It hadn't been exploited. So you want to apply those. You absolutely do. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Alex Lindsay, Andy Inocco and filling in for the Snell. It's wonderful to have Micah Sargent with us today. Thank you for being here, all of you and all of Our club, TWIT members and all of our listeners. Our show today, brought to you by, and I mean this quite literally, cashfly for 20 years. Cash for 20 years cash fly has been the leader in high performance, ultra reliable content delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. We were struggling, you know, TWiT's been around for 20 years. April will be our 20th anniversary of the first TWiT show. And even from that day we were struggling with bandwidth, with getting shows to you. It turns out you can't just put them on a website that's not going to work, especially when you have 30, 40,000, 100,000, 200,000 downloads as it eventually became. So we tried BitTorrent. Some of the shows were served by AOL Radio. Do you remember those days?

[Alex Lindsay]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Mac Break Weekly. It was brought to you by AOL Radio in the early days. Eventually Matt Levine, the founder of Cashfly came to me and said, leo, please can we help? And they did. And they have ever since. They've been doing it for 20 years. We've been using them for almost 20 years. CashFly is the only CDN. That's what we use them for. Content delivery network built for throughput ultra low latency video. Streaming video to over a million concurrent users with less than a second latency. Yeah, Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster with zero lag or glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device, any size screen. The thing that made a difference to us, we didn't really, you know, I never used a cdn. We didn't even know how much. We had no idea in the beginning who was going to download the show, how many people were. It was a kind of a shock and we just didn't want to pay for more bandwidth than we were going to need. So they worked with us and that's what they'll work with you. Flexible month to month billing for as long as you need it once, you know, then you get discounts for fixed terms. The point is we designed our own contract when we switched to Cashfly. You can too. They have some new stuff that's pretty exciting. They're always adding new features. They're really a leader in innovation in this space. Manage object storage Cash Fly is a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability at industry leading levels. How? The hardware is entirely based on NVMe. It'll be better suited to users with a large number of small objects and of course still completely S3 compatible. It'll easily integrate into your cachefly, MOS, S3 or other toolset you've designed. There are no egress or ingress costs. That's nice. Just a flat volume fee. See what I mean? Cashfly makes it easy. They also opened a new point of presence in Vienna, Austria. So if you're a waltz king, you'll see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. Actually, all of our Central European listeners will see that benefit immediately. That's what's nice about having a cdn. They've got points of presence all over the world. If you are a reseller, some new reseller features in the portal. You can be classified as a reseller, have multiple full accounts under your reseller account, but each of them can operate independently but billing remains centralized. They're very responsive. I really like that. Cash Fly. They deliver rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. You can shield your site content in their cloud. We've done that for some years now, which means we have a 100% cash hit ratio. No cash misses. And that means, you know, no delays getting our content to you, the listeners. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you're going to get the VIP treatment you'll get. A dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring smooth implementation and reliable 247 support when you need it. I love Cashflow. We are so grateful. I just did Matt Levine's podcast. It'll come out sometime in the next couple of weeks. I'll let you know when it does. Learn how you can get your first month free. Cash fly.com twit. You've heard me say it for years. After I stopped saying brought to you by AOL radio, I started saying bandwidth for Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by cash fly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT. Thank you, Cashfly. We really appreciate it. Speaking of radio, it's been interesting. Spotify's a little butthurt, shall we say, by a company called Duet Defensive. They're very defensive and they're a lot and they're kind of defensive and not a good way. Duetti published a report analyzing the state of artist payouts for music streaming services. This is from Apple World Today. So Spotify, this is for 2024. Payouts per thousand streams is the lowest. 3 bucks per thousand. Then YouTube $4.80. Then Apple Music more than twice as much as Spotify. $6.20. Amazon is the big winner though. $8.80. Almost three times as much as Spotify. Now, Spotify said. Well, in fact, Spotify just today released, you know, the. How much they've paid artists? Oh, we're looking at the billions we've paid artists. What they don't say is how much per stream or how much. They just say total, we've paid billions.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think that their argument is that. And I don't usually come to the defense of Spotify very often, but. But I will say that the math I think is important to understand is that Amazon has a membership that a lot of people are kind of automatically paying, I think. And no one uses it. I mean, I don't, I don't know anybody that uses Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

I use it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Okay, you use it. So. So there we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I also use Apple Music and YouTube Music. The only one I don't use is Spotify.

[Alex Lindsay]

But how often do you use. How often do you use it?

[Leo Laporte]

I used it yesterday because they have a, A. No, lossless. They have a lossless version of all their music, which is really nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

Okay, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

So they have some very nice playlists. And I don't trust Spotify's playlist because as we know, Spotify lies or misrepresents what's on those playlists. If you ask for bossa nova dinner time, more than three quarters of the artists will be phony. Artists will be AI generated or commissioned artists, not real artists. So I think Spotify is not the best. I'm gonna let you defend them.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, I'm just defending them.

[Leo Laporte]

But I'm not that crazy about them.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm. I greatly dislike Spotify. I think that they've. So, like, I just want to make sure it was clear. I'm not a, I'm not a Spotify fan at all. I think that they've destroyed the podcasting market.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's another reason.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I don't think that they're good for artists. So. But I think that the, what you're looking at when you look at that number is how much, how many, what percentage of subscribers are using an ad supported system versus a subscription supported system. And as the subscriptions increase in, it means that there's less people downloading, but there's. Everyone's always paying, you know, and so I think that that's why Spotify's at the bottom. YouTube's a little bit higher.

[Leo Laporte]

And then Spotify says nobody calculates payment per stream, which I find hard to believe.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think everybody calculates Payment. Everybody thinks that way. They may not think that way, but every artist.

[Andy Inako]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

And they released a press release that says, no, we paid $10 billion to artists last year.

[Alex Lindsay]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

And again, that's only because they're the biggest.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. And to get back to what you're saying is when you, when they're commissioning artists and when they're commissioning AI driven audio, it definitely calls into question what the artists are getting. You know, it's watering that down. And so. And I think that Apple is, is getting good at that kind of value. Add to the. I think it's taking them a long time. I think Apple tv again, as I said, what's interesting is with Netflix, increase in cost for the cost of Netflix. For one subscription of Netflix, you could have Apple Music, Apple games, Apple plus Apple TV plus Apple is actually. And when you watch those, you can see the money literally pouring out of the front of your screen. From a production value perspective, I mean, it just looks so good. And so, so the thing is, is that they. And the Apple music is clearly. I don't know, I mean, I haven't listened to Amazon music, but it's definitely better than Spotify. Like my call, my daughter is like, oh, she, she listens to Spotify for the recommendations, but she, she said, I listen to everything else in Apple music because it sounds better Spotify.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is their blog post titled for the Record. They say, we, we help artists because we grow the pie. And it is true. They are by far the largest with half a billion paying listeners. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It says today there are more than half a billion paying listeners across all music streaming systems. Oh, a world with 1 billion paying listeners is a realistic goal we should collectively set. Well, yeah, I mean, if you were an artist, you might say, well, I kind of wish they'd buy the album. That might be a better goal from an artist's point of view. They basically say, look, you can't base it on the cost per stream because we've grown the audience base. Artists make more money from us. Even if it might be if you calculate it by stream.

[Andy Inako]

I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, I think artists aren't gonna. Most artists are not making more money with Spotify than they used to make with CDs.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, like, I think when they compare it, I'm like, well, but we.

[Leo Laporte]

Are in a different world. Right? Nobody's. Those days are gone. I mean, as much as we might like them. Spotify, this is interesting and I kind of like this. And this is Kind of what the Internet has promised. Growing careers beyond the superstars. I've said for a long time an equitable music system wouldn't have a half dozen people making billions and then hundreds of thousands making nothing. It would be more. I mean, they're wonderful musicians all over the place. So they say, we estimate in 2014, at least 10,000 artists generated $10,000 a year on Spotify. Today, well over 10,000 artists generate over $100,000. A living wage, in other words, on Spotify. And I think that's fair.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know any artists other than the very top ones that make 100,000. Maybe. Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they say 10,000.

[Alex Lindsay]

Most of the artists that are doing well are leveraging that into Patreon or other tools to generate revenue they're seeing.

[Leo Laporte]

On Spotify per year from Spotify alone.

[Alex Lindsay]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

So that, I mean, that's exactly what you would hope with the Internet was democratization of it and a chance for more artists to make a living as opposed to making a killing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, I think that you're seeing that in the video market in the. In the sense that There are many YouTubers that are making a solid living without, you know, they're not making millions. They're just making enough to do what they love to do at a regular, you know, at a rate that they can afford wherever they live. And I think that that is a. You know, that terrifies Hollywood that.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

That you. That people could just do it out of their house, you know, and I think that the cost of production for a lot of this stuff has gone down. But again, it's. I think with Spotify, it's really hit and miss. I just don't know. A lot of artists that feel like they could live on what they make on Spotify, they usually look at as a loss leader for their concerts. You know, live is what kind of live and merch are what generally pay the bills for most music artists at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

I just, you know, I. You go down in the subway in New York City and there's some guy playing the fiddle like a genius or a guitar like a genius, and you think it's brutal. There are so many talented musicians who aren't able to make a living. In the old days, it was much worse. You had to get a label, and then the label would take the cost of your studio time out of your. Out of your.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the dinners that they took you out to. But the label takes the band out to dinner. That's coming out of the band to be fair.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my deal with iHeartRadio also for years was the, you know, they would, I would. Every time they took me out to dinner, I said, you know, I'm paying for this, right? But that's fine. That's, you know, they make these deals, right? And as if you're an artist and the only path to success is going through that, you know, barrier, you're going to do it. Thank goodness that's not the only path anymore. It's easier now. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. We're glad you're here. Alex Lindsay, Andy Inako, Jason Snell Taking the week off. Micah Sargent here.

[Alex Lindsay]

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[Andy Inako]

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Visit t mobile.com CarrierFreedom via virtual prepaid.

[Leo Laporte]

MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24.

[Micah Sargent]

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Qualifying port and trade in service on.

[Leo Laporte]

Go5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreement as do you have bill credits and if you pay off devices early marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today. This is. I don't want to raise alarms unnecessarily, but it's kind of the way it's been for the last week. Apparently the new president is threatening to tariff Taiwanese chip makers 100%.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now he hasn't done it yet. He hasn't done yet. And that's the thing is it would be. Who is it? Tsmc. He said they took all our jobs offshore and we're gonna charge them 100%. But of course, if you doubled the cost of a chip from TSMC via tariffs, it's gonna cost us a lot more.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, it's its way down. If you read the statement, it's, it's disheartening because it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. He was actually just basically making fun of and disparaging the Biden administration's Chips act, which is say, well, how, how do we get more chip manufacturing back in the United States? And the answer is, well, we incentivize with money. We basically say, here, we'll help you make factories. We need to establish and build up. Trump's statements seem to be. He's basically saying that, oh, well, we want to move those jobs back to the United States. As if, no, those jobs don't exist. We don't have the ability to make chips in the United States. There's a reason why we went to, we went, we went overseas for that, because they can actually build that, that capacity. Tariffs are not going to magically put 2 nanometer process plants in the United States. So it's disheartening to hear that kind of policy statement.

[Alex Lindsay]

You are, you are expecting rationality and, and thought process out of the White.

[Andy Inako]

House that we have. I, I am, I've made it a policy on this show to not to stick to the facts and stick to whatever and not make editorial comments.

[Alex Lindsay]

I can't imagine this going.

[Andy Inako]

If I start, where do I stop?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it may just be a threat, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Garbly gook like this is like, well.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S kind of like Indonesia saying, hey, give us a billion dollars if you want to sell iPhones here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's a holdup.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a stick up.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's gotta be something. Tim Apple is gonna, you know, go over there and sing and, you know, pull out his harp and sing a song to Trump.

[Leo Laporte]

Trump said they left us and went to Taiwan, which is about 90% of the chip business. And we want them to come back. We don't wanna give them billions of dollars like this ridiculous program Biden has. He's talking about the CHIPS Act. They already have billions. They have nothing but money. They need an incentive and it will be. They will not want to pay a tax. They will want to build a factory with their own money that will come in because it's good for them. Now, this article did not say 100% tariff, but that is a number that has been bandied about. It would certainly, if any tariff would, of course.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, the question is whether it's A tariff of direct input or like, how does the tariff apply? Like, is it applied?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there are lots of questions, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, if those chips go to China and then they get assembled in China and then come here, is it the 100 do. Do the team.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good question.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So like, does it, does that. Is it the China tariff or the, or the TM TSMC tariff? You know, we don't know what that means.

[Andy Inako]

In previous administration's tariff proposal, it was. There's an assessment of percentage of whatever that. That represents a tariffable content. So it's not as though iPhones would be 100%, 100% more expensive. There will be a determination possibly after lots of, lots of dinners with Tim in Mar A Lar that hopefully Apple can live with. But it's really. Is topsy turvy. Another thing that got me super concerned was so he gave a web. He participated in the Davos conference, the Web, the World Economic Forum conference via the Web, via webcam. And he was saying almost explicitly that. And you Europeans and you're passing laws that put billions of dollars of fines and penalties on the United States and you can't do that. We're not going to allow you to penalize United States companies. That's unfair. And essentially I don't have the statement in front of me, but essentially saying that we're not going to allow you to pass laws to protect your citizens if it in any way impacts American businesses. And given America's history with. You mean a terrorist diplomacy of saying, hi, we really wish that. We love the fact that you want to pass all of labor protection laws for your country, but that's gonna affect like our American businesses. So you can either not pass those laws or we can inflict a regime change on you. Already they're talking about regime change in Greenland, for heaven's sake. It's like, this is why I get concerned about not only this, not only the larger picture, but also in terms of Apple. It's like we've had very good, very good discussions about the pros and cons of Tim developing this, such a close relationship with the Trump admin. How necessary it is for the CEO of a large company to have as good a relationship and a working relationship with the government that they operate, the governments that they operate in. However, at some point we're going to have to ask ourselves, are we okay with Tim saying, hi, we're two. We're a $3 trillion company. We would like to not. I know we keep saying that we have to pay. We have to observe all the laws that are enabled in the, in the countries that we participate in. It would be great though, if we could basically have our government with either diplomatic pressure, economic pressure or military pressure, tell this country that you're not entitled to pass any law that would affect us in any way. That is, that's a much bigger mud stain on Tim's face than Apple intelligence messing up a notification.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, my guess, it's all transactional. So my guess is I don't think.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think you have to pay a lot of attention to Trump because I don't think he's not worried about fairness or rightness or anything else. He's just looking at the next deal. And every deal is, is its own transaction. And, and he has, he's going to take say I have leverage in this deal, which is that I'm the United States and I will use that leverage.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look what he did, you know.

[Alex Lindsay]

Mildly Colombia, I mean that was. They would have been in a coup in like two or three weeks if he had just. If they escalate that. I don't know. I think, I think they kind of backed down. Well, they backed down and then they said, oh, we're going to tear up the United states goods by 25%.

[Leo Laporte]

And well, as off as is always the case and we're not. It's not the province of this show but as always the case, there are consequences down the road. You're pushing them to China. And so, you know, does TSMC. What is TSMC's reaction? I mean they are already building a plant in Arizona using chips Act Money Money by the way, which is now frozen, illegally frozen and impounded by the President. So I think that what he's kind of chaotic time. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

If I think what he's probably looking for is and we don't know it's hard to tell with him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

But, but I think that there may be a. I'm going to say this big thing and then tmc, tm TSMC is going to announce a new factory in Detroit and he's going to say look what I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Good, we got it.

[Alex Lindsay]

I got what I needed. I didn't think it's like so I think that he's now looking for. By saying this big thing I think he's going to. We should the other foot to drop will be in the next. Exactly the next. Within the next three months there'll be an announcement and TSMC and Apple I'm sure can say, you know what, we'll spend $100 million in, you know, Poughkeepsie, New York, or. Or in Denver, Colorado, or whatever. And. And just like the players, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, it doesn't really matter if that plant ever gets built or.

[Alex Lindsay]

Or is efficient. Like, you know, some of these might get built. But as long as, you know, as long as people see. You know, people are not good at math. So as long as they see something happening, they have a shortcut span.

[Leo Laporte]

And then as long as the cycle.

[Alex Lindsay]

Is short, it's just got to be big enough that when you walk through it, it looks big on the camera. That's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, they didn't even bother in Wisconsin. They broke ground, they built a dome, and then they walked away from it. And by the way, the only people holding the bag, of course, is the state and the local governments that did all this funding for this and got a dome and no job, just a dome. Yeah, I'm sure it's gonna be something like this. And this is where, you know, you're lucky. You've got Tim Cook, who the last time the president. Well, it was President Trump in his last administration, threatened this. Tim went to him and said, look, all you're gonna do is help a Korean company sell phones in the United States. It's gonna kill us. And he backed down. He changed it. And I imagine they'll be similar negotiations.

[Andy Inako]

There's a lot of. It's kind of scary. I don't know. It's scary or reassuring to know how many bad ideas get modified later on after people who know what they're talking about get the ear of the person who said that thing. And we've had so many stories about Steve Jobs basically deciding that this is no good, we're never going to do this for the iPhone. And then because he surrounded himself with smart people who knew that they could talk to Steve, basically, here's why this is actually a good idea. And so he'll reverse himself. The difficulty is when you have the person who's walking through the building saying, those sprinkler heads in the ceiling, they're ugly. Take them all out. You need to have another layer of people who say, here's why those sprinkler heads are super, super important and why we can make them look better, but we can't remove them. If the things that we've been. This is still very, very early weeks, of course, but part of what we've been hearing is removal of everybody who knows why those sprinkler heads are there and why they're important and what laws you'll be breaking and what disasters you'll be calling into being by removing them and being replaced by people who don't know why the sprinkler heads are important. They just know that their boss said we need to get rid of them and they want to look for the good for the boss. Diplomacy is all about goodwill as a commodity. And if at some point you need to have a conversation with that other country in which they feel as though they're being heard, they feel as though they're getting something out of the deal. If the United States is just a position of we are trying to shepherd in the new golden age of America and you are interfering with our security and our progress and our prosperity and we can't have that, that's gonna work. Just like any bully can eat very well off the lunches of the other people in the playground for the first few weeks. By week number four, when they realize that yeah, we don't wanna live the rest of our lives this way, they'll realize that a lot of little kids can beat the hell out of one big kid very easily.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're wondering what some of those now impounded grants federal grants fund they funded among other things the Air Force Office of Scientific Research which came up with slap and flop which is not what I'm doing to my focaccia later today but in fact speculative attacks on the Apple processors. This has been Intel's problem and AMD and ARM as well. Speculative execution, predicting what's going to happen which speeds up a processor considerably also opens up some holes for exploit. It's happened to Intel, AMD and ARM and it's happening sadly on the Apple chips. Apple CPUs starting with the M2 are equipped with a load address predictor which improves performance by guessing the next memory address the CPU will retrieve data from based on prior memory access patterns. But if it guesses wrong, and this is the problem, it causes the CPU to perform arbitrary computations on out of bounds data which should never have been accessed to begin with under speculative execution. And so they've found and this is a, this is from the US Air Force, which I think is fascinating. They've even come up with a cute little logo. The slap logo has a slapping hand on a chip. The flop logo has flip flops on the chip in both cases. You know, these are the problem with these and I'm sure Steve will cover them on security. Now we'll have to listen is that often these are difficult to implement without access to the machine and so forth. But still, it's a proof of concept. Predictors Fail is the website and the research is from Georgia Tech School of Cybersecurity and Privacy supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. And I hope they spent that money before it got cut off. All right, enough politics. For the next five minutes, let's talk about what Alex wants to talk about. The new iPhone SE. The new iPhone SE SE 4. It's been shown off by a leaker. No sign of a dynamic island and there is a single camera. I don't know if you trust Majin Buu the leaker here. He shared a short video over the weekend that shows the.

[Micah Sargent]

Sorry, it's almost certainly a reference to the anime Dragon Ball Z. Oh, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Know you recognize Majin Buu?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I do. Oh, and now I know for sure because the low, the avatar is of Majin Buu.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's good we have somebody under 50 here because.

[Andy Inako]

So Mike, you're saying a known celebrity who has a reputation on the line.

[Micah Sargent]

Who is, is a jolly evil character has done the leak.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the video. I mean look, they're in manufacture by now.

[Micah Sargent]

We could only turn this, turn down margins. Music please.

[Leo Laporte]

Majin Bu. And this looks like it's China and it's probably is something that was, you know, exfiltrated from one of the factories as they're making it. Right. I mean that's not.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, we are getting too far fetched. Rumors or rumors have it appearing as early as next month, which probably is not going to happen but in the next couple of months. So we're definitely in a window where as we keep saying, as you get closer to a ship date, you start letting in having to let in more and more people into what this is and what it looks like and what it does. And so leaks become a lot more possible. So I don't necessarily know if I 100% believe it and I don't have to because it's going to be a couple months. We'll find out in any event. But yeah, I mean it lines up with a lot of the stories we've been hearing from multiple leakers. I mean the most interesting thing about the new SE would be that simply that it runs Apple Intelligence. So having a really cheap phone that is still like on board with Apple Intelligence, meaning future proof for the next five or six years, that's a pretty significant statement from Apple about how much they're investing the future of the platform in Apple intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

The iPhone SE3 came out almost exactly three years ago March 2022. So it this spring 2025 seems like a reasonable time is there there. I think there's a good market for the SEs right?

[Andy Inako]

100% especially worldwide because remember that Apple is, Apple is needs to keep, keep selling iPhones and they're, they need to find the people who are not buying iPhones right now, convince them not to buy Android phones. And one of the reasons why they're buying Android phones worldwide is because not only they localize but also because they're a lot less expensive. They're not, they're not all like luxury aspirational items. So just the ability to put an iPhone SE in someone's hands at half the cost of a traditional iPhone that will help them a lot. In India for instance.

[Leo Laporte]

I am going to wait for the new HomePod hub. Yeah there are rumors about new HomePod minis coming out soon but Mark Gurman did say over the weekend a new HomePod like Smart Home Hub with a 7 inch screen remains on track to launch this year. This is obviously a mock up but you know I would like, you know I guess some of this depends on Siri getting a little smarter but I would love to. I like the big home pods, they sound great. I have several, four of them I think in the house. I have a lot of the Minis because I thought well I want to be able to command Siri from every room but I think this would be more sensible. A 18 chip according to Kuoming Qi 6 to 7 inch display there would be Apple intelligence. Kuo says it would enter mass production in the second half of the year and that smart home capabilities would be a core aspect of the device. Of course there was a rumor last week I think from Gurman that the WI FI capability in this chip or in the new Apple networking chip might mean these also are WI fi base stations.

[Micah Sargent]

I think the big thing here is that well one, it will likely provide all of the necessary background components. If people are confused about whether their device is a thread border router and whether it can serve as a home hub and this and that and the other, this can be that consistent device that does all of those things and that there's no question about it remaining in the home and kind of always being accessible as such. With a, with this purpose built device that's supposed to run home os I think it's going to be really important. More so I feel that any device that makes it easier in a family, in a I should say multi person home for people who are not incredibly smart home minded. To be able to access and control different devices without having to do the weird thing of shouting out loud or fiddling around with some app and not knowing exactly what they're doing is always a good thing. And so I look forward to this as a potential opportunity for more people to get into some of the smart home stuff and not feel sort of put off by, okay, I just want the light to turn on. Why do I have to talk out loud to make the light turn on? That kind of thing. And ultimately seeing Apple focus directly on what, what in theory will be called home os, very exciting. As a person who's paid attention to the smart home for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

This is your Bailey, this is your bait, this is your bailiwick, home automation and so forth.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, we're pretty excited about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And oh, I should also note really quick before Andy pops in, I have been working a lot with different matter devices recently and seeing how well that is actually working and how there are many, many more devices that can now work with my Apple home that used to not be able to has been very impressive. So I really think this does start to open things up a lot more in a good way and make it so that people aren't kind of, you know, a little shy about should I make this purchase? Because I don't know if this device is going to work with the smart home that I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you run homebridge? Do you use Homebridge?

[Micah Sargent]

I do, I have Homebridge for a couple of devices that don't have matter opportunities. So for example, my Eve or excuse me, my Elgato lights that I use here, those are accessible via Homebridge so that I can control those. And there's one more device that I am run. Oh, the house that I'm in now had it came with a Nest thermostat and Nest does not by default work with home. So homebridge is what makes it possible for me to control the thermostat.

[Leo Laporte]

Nest thermostats as well. Yeah, I just have a big folder on my phone with 25 apps installing all of the different devices.

[Micah Sargent]

It's, it's. We know how to do it, we've been doing it. But if you have someone who's not super keen on all of that stuff, it is nice to say you've got one place you need to go, you can make it all work there.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be nice someday.

[Micah Sargent]

Andy, I think I interrupted you though.

[Andy Inako]

No, no, I was just gonna ask you like, did you see the. The Verge interview with V?

[Micah Sargent]

Of course I did, yes.

[Andy Inako]

I thought that was really interesting what he had to say about Threads and what it mounts to for the future of iPhone.

[Micah Sargent]

Absolutely. So a couple of things there. One, shout out to Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, my regular co host on Tech News Weekly, who is the Verge's like supreme smart home writer and is incredible at the stuff she does. So the the CSA spoke to Neelai Patel, but also to Jennifer Pattison Tui, as we call her jpt, directly in an interview. And some of the conversations surrounded how and why the iPhone has a built in thread thread radio. And there was some early, you know, kind of what's the point of that? Why do we have another device? And the big thing there is that if your WI FI network is down in your home for whatever reason and you've got your smart lock and you're trying to get into your house, having that phone that has that thread router in there, being able to commute radio, not router radio, to communicate directly with that device is really nice. And speaking as someone who this device that I have right here, it's from Waymo and for when I first bought.

[Leo Laporte]

It, it only not Waymo, Waymo, Self driving cars.

[Micah Sargent]

Wemo, Wemo, Belkin, wemo. It used to only work with Bluetooth and later enabled the thread router or the thread radio. And it is wild. The difference that makes Thread is an incredible technology because it's one of the first that says instead of the case where adding more devices usually means there's much more crowded network and the communication kind of drops. No, the more you have, the better because the more connection points there are and the more mesh you have. And so this thing is super fast in controlling my different devices all over the place.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a remote? What is it?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's a little remote. So I have it set up to control my lights. I literally just hit the button and all of my lights just went off. I hit the button again already the lights are all on.

[Leo Laporte]

My house is sprinkled with hubs and remotes. I mean, everywhere there's a plug, there's something plugged into it that's blinking red or blue, depending on whether it can see the curtains and stuff. It's just a mess. It's such a mess. So yeah, we'll refer people to JPT's piece in the Verge matter will be better. She in 2025, say the people who make it. And she interviewed three, not just one, she interviewed somebody from the CSA. You mentioned vivid Sita, who's president of the Thread Group and director of software engineering at Apple, and Kevin Robinson. It's nice that Apple director is president of the Thread Group. That's good.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And Kevin Robinson, who's the CEO of the WI FI Alliance.

[Micah Sargent]

CSA is a little bit less like the Emoji Group in that it is made. It's a trade group. It's made up of the people who are making the technologies that are, you know, affected, which is good.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Yeah. Tobin Richardson, CEO of the Connected Connectivity Standards Alliance. But you can see in this very interview, it's a little bit of a. I mean, you gotta have three people, three different, you know, protocols. It's all. I mean, this is the mess we're in. You can't even figure out what's going on in this space unless you have three people in the room to interview. So I don't have high hopes, I'll be honest, but I have hopes.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. It's good you have hopes, and I understand why you wouldn't. I push back a little bit on. I think that what needs. For most people, there's no reason to get into the weeds in that way. You don't need to necessarily know what the three people are doing and what each group is bringing to the table, because that's part of it. Matter is using Thread as a means of. Of device connection and communication, but matter is the language that they all speak. And so it's just getting the perspective of these three. It's not three different protocols that all are, you know, trying to connect devices in different ways. It's instead the. I can't think of the. What? Transformers. The, you know, the Transformers joining together to make the Ultra Mega Robot, whatever, you know. Yeah. Ultron. Part of it is matter. That's the arm.

[Leo Laporte]

First, Dragon Ball Z, now I have to know. Voltron. I swear. I swear. And of course, JPT appears every month on Tech News Weekly with Micah, and as often as we can get her on any of our shows, because she's fantastic. She maintains a list of every smart home device that works with matter from Apple, Amazon, Google and Samsung at the Verge. So if you want to see if your device works with matter, you can check it out here.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So all Apple stuff will work with matter, right? That's their commitment?

[Micah Sargent]

Essentially, yes. And in fact, it's almost the reverse is the more important thing. If it's Matter certified, Apple recently said if the device goes through matter certification, it automatically goes through the works with Apple home certification. And so yes, that, that's, that's how it's supposed to work. And in fact, I can confirm recently we purchased a little light that goes in our living room from Govee. And Govee does not have a direct integration with HomeKit, but I was able to set it up via Matter and it works just fine. Works in the home app just like everything else and is instant just like everything else. So it's, it's, it's been very robust so far and that's only continuing to improve. Where before we've seen some kind of lagging behind from different companies. They really are getting their act together this year. But I understand the skepticism that remains and I think it is on these companies to prove that there's not that same fear of everything breaking apart into different protocols.

[Leo Laporte]

I do have. This is the Home Assistant Green server with the Home Assistant connect ZBT dongle.

[Micah Sargent]

Is that what zigbee, Bluetooth?

[Andy Inako]

What is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so it connects to. This is in theory a matter compliant thing. It's plugged into my network and then you run the Home Assistant software and it's supposed to discover everything. And I pay for Nabukasa. I subscribe to Nabukasa, which. So it's funny because Richard Campbell is a big automation. Automation guy and he recommended the HA green and using HA and so forth.

[Micah Sargent]

That's for the big nerds, which is great. Involved. Yeah, exactly. And I love Home Assistant because it is just so incredibly granularly amazing. You can, you could say if I turn the volume up by one on my Sonos speaker, then unlock the front door and make my home pods scream this. You know, I mean, like, it's so wild.

[Leo Laporte]

If Sonos only worked with that, that would be wonderful, right? I. Don't get me started. Don't get me started. All right, you're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy, Inako, Micah, so good to have you. We don't normally get into these things, so I'm so glad you could be here for that. Good to check. And Mr. Alex Lindsay, I think all of us have a certain degree of home automation in our lives.

[Alex Lindsay]

I have a dream of it. I have to admit that I have a dream after 15 years of buying random stuff and putting it in like you, I'm like, I'm just waiting for the next Apple device to come out that is in a HomeKit package. I'm not really buying anybody else's products anymore. Like, I'm just waiting. I'm waiting for the camera, I'm waiting for the thing I'm Waiting. I'm gonna wait for the lock. I'm gonna wait for the. Like, I'm just like, I'm done.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, and Icara lock, in theory, will work. It will be updated soon to work. Or maybe I have to get the new one with. See, for instance, the iPhone car key thing, which works with my car is great, great. And if my lock would work the same way. So the door opened up when I came close and all of that stuff. So I feel like we're just. It's tantalizingly close.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just feel like I'm just. Life's too short. Like, I have so many other things to work on and I'm just gonna wait until I can just pick it up and it'll just do the thing.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, there's just so many problems, and probably I'm close to the second time in the history of home automation in my house that I'm close to okay, I'm going to have to get rid of everything and start all over again because I have such a mishmash of things that sometimes, you know, the problem is when you get used to just getting into the door and you bark that command and then the first time it doesn't work, and you're like, either something. Is it either. Either something. Either my wifi is down or I'm going to end. I'm in for four days of hurt trying to figure out where the break in the system is.

[Alex Lindsay]

And the hard part is like, yeah, to your point. Like, I got. I got an eve. You know, just a outlet, like three. Three plugs. And it worked for four months or whatever, and I walked in, I could just turn it on. And then one day it didn't work anymore. And then I, you know, like an update.

[Andy Inako]

Then.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I don't even know what I updated. Like, just. It just stopped. Stopped reacting. And then I said, and then. And I looked at the instructions. It's like, if you want to work again, you got to do this thing, you got to reset it, you got to stand on one foot, wink with your left eye, and then it'll come back on again. It'll be just fine. And you're just like, oh, it happens.

[Leo Laporte]

All the time with all of these. And if you've got, like, I do 95 different smart devices in the house, there's only so much you can wink with your left eye. Before you just go.

[Andy Inako]

And before. Before we leave the topic, let's mention just how terrible most of the. Most of these smart locks actually are. Like, I have a Lock pick kit. Like a 15 lock pick kit that I just use to test, like when I get a lock in. Or one that I just paid like $200,000,000 for a simple wave pick that doesn't require any. You could learn how to use it in less than 10 seconds. I'm not even lying about that. Okay. And. Okay, so. Well, this again, this is. Tell me about how secure it is that, no, you can't trick it with another phone. No, you can't trick it with a magnet. No, you can't just pull the batteries. Like, okay, but will this $10 piece of metal simply. Simply pushed in and out and in and out for five seconds. Will that unlock it? Hey, yes, it does. Okay, so this is now garbage. Or in the case of the lock that I bought since I get it, since I couldn't get a refund, I had to take it to an actual locksmith and pay him like 220, $130 to say, I would like this to be resistant against any idiot who watched a YouTube video. It's like, I know that it's a fool's errand to try to like, make any door, like, impossible to get through because one. One place well placed.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a serving suggestion.

[Micah Sargent]

And you'll have.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't come in here. I don't want you to come in here.

[Andy Inako]

I just, I just, I mean, historically, I don't worry about the professional thieves because I know they're going to win anyway. I worry about like the knuckleheads who are like, hey, wow, look, I just read this thing on the. Hey, look, I'm just going to go start, see what kind of doors I can open. Hey, look, I can open this. No one's home. Those are the people that will again, turn on all the faucets and then leave and then like, okay, thank you. Aren't you adorable.

[Leo Laporte]

Poop on the carpet and get the hell out. Anyway, you are watching Mac Break Weekly. We're very glad you're here, but I want to ask our listeners for a little help. There's just a few days left for our annual survey. I mean, literally just two days left, I think for our annual survey. We would really love to know more about you, not individually, but as a group. The survey is the one thing we don't know about you. We can't. We're a podcast. All we got is RSS feeds. But once a year, we do put out this survey, hoping to get at least a representative sample of you so we get to better idea of who's listening, what kinds of shows you like, what you wouldn't want to hear. And also, I'll be honest, we use it with the advertisers. They're very anxious to know all about you. We don't tell them anything about you. But it's nice if we can say, yeah, you know, 53% of our audience is it decision makers or whatever. So that's what we use it for. Your privacy is guaranteed. We don't want to spy on you. We don't need to spy on you. We certainly don't sell this information on if you would like to help us out though, it is a way you can really help us on the air. Just go to Twitter. TV survey shouldn't take more about 10 minutes. It's pretty quick. It's just a, you know, online survey. Check, check, check, check, check. And I do appreciate for all of you who've already done it and for those of you about to do it, thank you. Twit TV Survey if you love your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Phone but not your carrier, just switch to T Mobile.

[Andy Inako]

You can keep your phone, keep your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Number and we'll help pay it off up to $800 per line. You can also use our savings calculator.

[Leo Laporte]

To compare our plans and streaming benefits.

[Andy Inako]

Against Verizon and AT&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 ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required.

[Micah Sargent]

Card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple earnings are coming. Maybe that's what Jason Snell's doing. He's buying ink for his six color graphs. The earnings will be Thursday after market close. Analysts are downgrading the Apple stock. Interestingly, although Apple has the one company that kind of survived the AI apocalypse after the Chinese AI deepseek R1 scared the crap out of Silicon Valley. Seriously, Apple actually went up a little bit.

[Alex Lindsay]

Turns out being behind has its benefits.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, well, actually, yeah, specifically like they. So I guess the investors didn't completely lose their minds because they're like, okay, well if this means that if this is going to this idea is going to clobber companies like Google and OpenAI, Microsoft, everyone else, they're betting their futures on being able to charge a fortune for artificial intelligence. But Apple, who is a company that's going to be buying artificial intelligence services from other services. The idea of a system that can run on cheaper hardware that doesn't cost that much money to grade. That's going to benefit Apple. Apple. But yeah. God, $600 billion in one day. That's, like, amazing that someone decided, you know what? I've been working way too. I'm gonna take 90 minutes off and just, you know, get. Get aromatherapy, get a massage, get a deep pore cleanse. And then when they come, when they get. When they get back to their car, they find out that there are a hundred notifications and they're all, yeah, our valuation has been pretty much wiped out.

[Leo Laporte]

Just remember, Andy, when times like these, just remember the. The 1860s English economist William Stanley Jevons. Okay, Just keep Jevons paradox in mind, because it turns out the more you use AI, the more efficient it becomes, the more you use it and the more need there is for it. He observed it with coal. He said that the increased efficiency in coal use led to increased consumption of coal. And our own power company in California has been invoking Jevons Paradox, saying, you guys are conserving, so we have to charge you more. Which is incredibly annoying. As our utility bills skyrocket, a number of people said, you know, don't panic. This is good news, because the, the cheaper it is to make AI, it's.

[Alex Lindsay]

The people who are panicking, people are.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to use it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Are the people who, for the last year and a half, who created a bubble.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you just said. If you just said AI, AI. And then they say a million dollars.

[Micah Sargent]

Like, here have this money.

[Alex Lindsay]

We're gonna. We're gonna make. We're gonna make pancakes with AI. And they're like, here's dollars, you know, and. And so the thing is, they put all this money into the assumption that everything's gonna be hard. And then it got easy. So all the money that's already, like, they're talking about, like, if this turns out, no one knows. This is so brand new. No one knows if it's real. It's got. It definitely calls home. So until someone goes through the open source and removes all the. We're gonna store everything on. On Chinese servers. It's sort of. It's storing everything on Chinese servers. And so. So there's a bunch of things about it that, that are problematic, but if it turns out that it opens up a new level of this, there's a lot of people that already committed money. And some of this is potentially an existential, you know, event, you know, extinction event for many VC firms because they, they put everything into AI thinking that, well, one of these is going to work. And what if none of them work? Like, what if all of them are suddenly, you know, competing with a thousand things? So it's a really interesting bubble.

[Leo Laporte]

The market's already rebounding. Apple is up 4% today. Microsoft 3%. 7%. Nvidia 7 and a half.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but it's still down.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, it's down 7 and a half. Down 7 and a half.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's on top of the 16 from last yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So Nvidia, the problem is, is that they may just go, well, we may have enough Nvidia cards now. You know, like if it, if it's 95 more or if it's, you know, if it's 5%. Takes 5% of the thing. There's a lot of Nvidia cards out there. It just means that this painful demand for Nvidia cards may slow down a lot, which is the.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll definitely be covering deep seek and all of this tomorrow on what is currently the show formerly named this week in Google, soon to be renamed Intelligent Machines, our AI show. So, yes, next Tuesday, I guess Jason will be here, right? And we'll do the colorful charts. Do not leave your resume. I'm sorry, your 1040 on the office printer. A tax form. Thank you, Andy, for this. This is from sfist. A tax form left on an Apple office printer has sparked a proposed gender discrimination class action lawsuit involving more than 12,000 current and former female employees at Apple who claim they were systematically paid less. It started when somebody. When Justina Zhang discovered her male colleague's tax form on a printer. His 1040 showing her 10,000 more than she did for an equivalent role. Judge in San Francisco Superior Court gave the case a go ahead to proceed. They're still trying to get class action status.

[Micah Sargent]

On the contrary, do leave your 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, do. I guess it's a good thing so.

[Micah Sargent]

We can make sure everybody's getting paid the same.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is why it is. Employers are always telling their employees, don't tell anybody what you make. And it is illegal to do that. You cannot not retaliate for people doing that, at least in the state of California.

[Andy Inako]

And Apple's actually still in trouble for basically asking people, well, how much were you making at your previous role? The things that basically questions during job review and the offer process that are illegal in California.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's all right. Everything's gonna, it's all gonna be legal soon. Apple. Apple has bought a street in, in Boston on Boyle Street. You know, Boylston is the best Boston street I think $88 million. What are they going to put there, Andy?

[Andy Inako]

Well, actually no, they, they, they're, they basically bought the property that the Boston like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Boston Apple Store is in.

[Andy Inako]

Landmark Apple Store has been in.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Andy Inako]

Which is, which is interesting because I didn't realize like they had been, I, I, I didn't realize that they've been renting it for quite that, for that long like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Since 2008.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That's the, that's the, It's a very pretty store.

[Andy Inako]

It's very pretty.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the gas cafe.

[Andy Inako]

It's I guess, I guess what you'd call the, a glass staircase Apple store. There are glass staircase Apple stores and then there are not glass staircase Apple stores. It's three floors.

[Leo Laporte]

One of them.

[Andy Inako]

It's all huge glass front. There's also, it's also in a really good spot. It's like two blocks away from the Boston Public Library from Copley Square. Coincidentally, it's also only two blocks away from the brand new Google Google Company store that opened on Newbury street just like a year ago. The Google store is not nearly as nice. Also the WI fi is not quite as fast. I have tried both of them. It's easier to find a seat at the Google store.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. Should we do a Vision Pro segment? Do we have enough material to do a Vision Pro segment?

[Andy Inako]

No, there's no.

[Micah Sargent]

Unless we want to talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Yes, there is. Play the Vision Pro theme. I found a story.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's time to talk to Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

1 Story. Apple's next immersive Vision Pro film involves bull riding and is coming soon.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm not excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Man vs Beast arrives next week to take you on a bull riding adventure that's guaranteed to make you barf.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I was going to say that's just. Well, my guess, the poison control center will say try this out. If you've just swallowed something you shouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Friday. Well, if January 31st it'll come out. Apple's description hang on tight as professional bull riders take you inside the rodeo and show you what it takes to compete in the dangerous sport.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that, I think that they, I doubt they're going to put them on the bull but, but I think that what you're going to get is the advantage of a bull riding situation is that there's a lot of close quarter stuff that's got a lot of vanishing points from a 3D perspective. So you'll, it probably feel very, you know, there's a lot going on that Will feel very dimensional when you look at it. I think that I don't. Again, I. When we talk about Apple intelligence, like, so far, the content that Apple's put out as immersive has. I get less interested every. Every time. Like, I'm not more interested in doing it. Like, I was like, immersive. You know, we were excited about the first movie. The movie was pretty good. And then the next thing was not quite as good and the next thing was not quite as good. And so I.

[Leo Laporte]

This. The second episode of Elevated, which takes viewers to a. Which is serene.

[Alex Lindsay]

One of the worst things that they did because there's no. It's. The problem is, is that the resolution. The resolution doesn't support. And. And there's no. There's no spatiality to it. There's no. There's no 3D to it because you're too far away from everything. So there's no parallax. Like, what. What makes immersive look great is 5 to 20ft. Feet. Everything more than 5 to 20ft just looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, maybe you'll be excited about free solo climbing in Mallorca. That's also gonna. Sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, if it's anything like that, Parkour, like, the parkour was a disaster. Like, it was just like watching the grass grow, you know, like, it was, you know, like, it was like, you know, so. So I, you know, like the. I mean, parkour is one of something.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually like to watch Corell to be. To do that Park. Parkour.

[Alex Lindsay]

Parkour, yeah. So. So.

[Andy Inako]

Maybe Dwight Troop operating the camera for that.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean, you know, you know, Justine Ezarik did a. Did an original.

[Andy Inako]

She did.

[Alex Lindsay]

She did one of her early videos on YouTube was parkour. They should have Justine do a parkour.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, you know what? I think a lot of people would.

[Alex Lindsay]

Watch that would be very popular. So the.

[Leo Laporte]

She does like jiu jitsu, right? She's like.

[Alex Lindsay]

Now her first early Parkour was probably 2007 or 2006, and it was her and her sister, I think, and they were just like, no, they're kind of. Just kind of hopping kind of. That was the joke.

[Leo Laporte]

So they were.

[Andy Inako]

They were.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know, they were just jumping around, but they were.

[Andy Inako]

It was.

[Alex Lindsay]

It was. It was a good. It was a good classic early YouTube video. So the. But the. I think that. What I'm really excited about is I think that the camera is probably getting closer to the. You know, we expect to see the new camera before nab. And I think getting. Once this. Get. Once the immersive camera gets into the hands of. Of many people who've already done this a couple times. I think that the kind of content that we're going to see available on the headset is going to change dramatically. I think that it's even 10 or 15 or 20 of these cameras out there. You're going to start seeing content. So I think that April is where a lot of us are looking to see what do my friends do with it? I don't know if I'll get one, but what do my friends do with it?

[Andy Inako]

But that's something I've always wanted to ask you, Alex. I thought that one of the most interesting things about Apple's then hypothetical VR headset with cameras would be not these Dr. Tongue 3D house of would you like another Diet Coke? But the idea of a YouTube sort of thing where people are creating immersive videos based on where they are, what they're doing, what they think is interesting. That where could people post videos that other. Other Apple Vision Pro users could then benefit from even with. Even if they do have to have that 30,000 rent, that $30,000 camera.

[Leo Laporte]

She was so young. I'm watching the video. This is hysterical.

[Andy Inako]

Oh my God. She's not even wearing completely pink. It's only the top. That's how long ago it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Parkour. Wow. They were so young. Wow. Wow. That's so funny. This is back when mommy packed my lunch.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I would watch an immersive video of this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I would watch it.

[Alex Lindsay]

If I get the camera, we'll get Justine to do one in LA or something like that. So the. But the, the.

[Leo Laporte]

That was 18 years ago.

[Micah Sargent]

Where to put this content.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

We're getting old.

[Micah Sargent]

So.

[Alex Lindsay]

But, but the. So I think that it's not that it's not the, the big whatever. But you do have to feel it. And, and there's two different things. There's spatial and immersive. So spatial is what you're shooting with stereo. 16 by 9. So it's two left and right. 16 by 9. And that's what you can shoot with your phone. There's other cameras that'll do that. Immersive is the 180°3D that you feel like you're there. It doesn't mean that you're in that environment. But doesn't really feel that special if you don't see any kind of 3D element to it. I think that Apple took it too far in some places with a variety of things. You see glimpses of genius in the Rhino section where the rhino walks up to you and I don't know, I even felt myself pull back a little bit as it runs up to you. There's moments of that of like, oh, that really works. But a large portion of it, you know, number one is you don't want to cut that much. So Apple keeps on showing stuff where they're cutting all the time and that's not really. It's not as good of not as good. I don't think it's as good as experience when you start cutting quickly between a lot of things. Apple has a tendency to want to drive you towards a lot of their content is driving you towards the edges. So they're having. You want to look back and forth. The problem is that you really want to use that outer area as ambient content and not remind the person that they're only seeing 180 degrees all the time. So you don't actually want to drive their. You want them to feel like they're looking at something, but it's still kind of happening comfortably. Like you were in an audience and you were looking at something that's there. That's usually where it's been the most effective in our experience. And I've done a lot of 360 and 180 and 16x9. So it's just that you look at them in very different worlds about what you want to do with those and I think that it'll be interesting. I just feel like Apple keeps on hand and this is the, this is the pitfall that every company has made. So it's not like Apple is new. Meta has done the same thing and Google did that as well to some degree, which is you get a bunch of cinematographers that, or directors that you respect who have only done films and then you ask that you give them a new camera and they just do goofy things with it, you know, like in. And they, because they've never done it any, any immersive.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't.

[Alex Lindsay]

They. So they don't know what that looks like. They just have a bunch of opinions about how this is all going to work. And, and there's a bunch of people that have never. We've all had these cameras that are like, you know, I have this, this is the, the best you can do right now, which is, this is the, the Canon R5R, you know, R5C. And so this, this is. But it's, you know, it not as high resolution, it's not as high frame rate. And so it is. This is the first camera at high frame rate and 8k per eye. And most importantly, there is a, there's an actual post pipeline that can generate the content that is going to, that's going to be available for the, for the headset. And that hasn't exist. Right. You know, because what's happening is blackmagic's not only building the camera, but they're also building the software that's going to manage the camera that's going to output it to it. And they're working with Apple to do it. Like, it's not like they're trying to figure this out and look at the tea leaves. And so that generation of those now to the point was asked before is who's going to be able to watch it. Those that pipeline and SDKs are available. And I know that, you know, with Stream Voodoo, I know that we're already able to do it with the phone. And the reason that I'm shooting with this camera so the folks at Stream Voodoo and others can take that immersive footage and figure out how to get it into being able to make it available. And they'll be. I think Vimeo is another partner for Apple that's already started doing Spatial. I would expect Vimeo to make it available to be able to let you watch immersive as well as Stream Voodoo is probably another one. I think that Sandwich is probably going to, I'm going to guess is going to build something because Sandwich has already been building theater experiences for Spatial and Apple has, has done a fairly good job. There's still a lot of stuff left out of the SDK, I think, and the, and the APIs, but especially the SDK. It's there, but you have to kind of hunt for it. So I think that. But Apple, I think is going to spend a lot of effort on not trying to do this all themselves, but empowering people. And this is the first time we've ever been empowered with a camera that is relatively affordable like the cameras that do this. When I bought the Ozo camera, that was $60,000 and it did not do the same quality that this one does. So. So it is. These are. I think it's going to be interesting, I think, but I'm less interested in what Apple's releasing now and more interested in. I think that Apple had to do what it did so that it would know what it wanted from a camera and how to build the stuff. This tie into the camera and they're doing what they're doing with that headset, by the way, is revolutionary, you know, like how they're managing the matching up of inter axial from the camera and interocular on the headset. And how they're doing all the bits and pieces is unlike what anybody else is doing. And so it's exciting. It's just that we need more people to be able to go out and shoot it.

[Andy Inako]

And we're about to have that 100%. I mean, that's why I'm not. So my level of interest and excitement is not so much in, oh, wow, we finally have a really good, almost professional grade $30,000 camera that can be leased out. I'm more interested in, I don't care if it's being produced, but if they're being recorded by people who are just wearing a Vision Pro or even that feature that I can't remember the name of where app Apple's getting spatial photos and spatial videos just out of the. Taking video through multiple lenses, multiple sensors, on an iPhone at the same time. I don't care if it's not terribly good and it's not professional. I like the fact that here is an experience through somebody's eyes that all they decided was this is going to be worth taking, taking spatial video of and then being able to share that like the, the here. I'm thinking back to when Google had their Google Cardboard, which their basic idea of, well, what if we just like have your phone like held like two inches from your face and have two different stereo visions. The idea of I could be standing in the middle of the Boston Public Library, suddenly think that, gee, I think this would be a really good space for people to be able to stand here and just look around at will, at all this artwork. And I could just simply take a photo sphere using this one lens and upload it anywhere. And now somebody who has one of those phone holders can actually view it. That's what I'm really excited about.

[Alex Lindsay]

When I think my. From a 16 by 9 perspective, you know, right now with something like Stream Voodoo, I can open up the phone, send you a link from that phone, just like, hey, there's a link. This is what we did with Twit. We, we took a, we took. I started the video, I sent a link. It was sent out to a couple thousand people that had downloaded the app. And 650 people were watching Twit in their headsets, you know, in their, in their, in their Apple Vision Pros. And it was that easy to do that. So the technology's there and you know, and you can do that as a live stream right now, you know, so the technology is there to do that as well. The immersive is going to be at 90 frames a second. At 8k per eye. You're talking about more than 100 megs a second potentially. So it's a lot of like being able to do that live and how that looks live is going to take a little bit more time to kind of figure out. But, but we'll see when, as it comes out, what, what we can do live. But as far as, as experiencing things, I think it's going to be, it's, it's the camera that I'm, I've been the most excited about probably in a decade. You know, like it. Just because we, because, because we've, we've been on those rocks for a long time. And finally it's like, you know, we've been, you know, cutting our legs on the ice for a long time and they're like, hey, we've got an icebreaker. We're like, oh, looks really pretty. So anyway, so hopefully we'll, we'll get to play with it soon.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the Vision Pro segment.

[Alex Lindsay]

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

[Leo Laporte]

More Vision Pro content per hour than the next leading Vision Pro podcast. I just want you to know Apple has introduced the 2025 Black Unity Collection. Very pretty. I like the colors. Apple watch, Black Unity sport loop, watch face, iPhone, iPad, papers, of course, because just a few days away from Black History Month, the shortest month of the year. These are nice. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

I wonder, I wonder if anybody's going to during the. Either during the shareholders meeting next month and the financial results this week, if anyone's going to be foolish enough to challenge Tim Cook on DEI initiatives.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Andy Inako]

Because I don't. I think that, I think that's where you'll see, like, I see Tim.

[Leo Laporte]

I see Tim.

[Andy Inako]

Come.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple says its watch bands are safe to wear despite the fact that the fluoroelastomer contains forever chemicals, a high level of per, and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or pfas. This is a class action lawsuit was filed by somebody saying, well, there was a study, right. That said there was PFAS in these things. And the University of Notre Dame did research. 22 fitness tracker and smartwatch bands, 15 had PFAS. Apple said it issued a statement saying the bands are safe. In addition to our own testing, we work with independent laboratories to conduct rigorous testing and analysis of the materials used in our products. Including Apple watch bands. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

And I think they also did not.

[Leo Laporte]

Deny that the chemicals were there.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. And that study didn't say there was a link between those chemicals and anything bad happening. Just simply establishing that, yeah, they exist and, yeah, they could. Could be transmitted through the skin. And because these are fitness watches where you're probably going to be sweating into them, that's probably more of a thing to think about than on any other sort of thing. I think that they also.

[Leo Laporte]

Cheap bands, don't have them. That's the funny thing. It's the more expensive bands.

[Andy Inako]

But didn't Apple say like a couple years ago that they were, as part of one of their environmental impact things that they're trying to get rid of those things from?

[Micah Sargent]

The fact that they take so long to break down is the biggest issue.

[Andy Inako]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And that is something that they were looking at. I'm pretty sure I remember that as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No Oscar nominations for Apple this year. Apple, of course, won a Best Picture award a couple of years ago with Coda. Zero nominations this year. But I think that reflects what we've been saying all along, which is that Apple is very squirrely about its movie ambitions. It does have a big movie coming out this year, F1, a Brad Pitt vehicle and based on the, of course, F1 Formula One motor race. If it doesn't do well, I think that might be the end.

[Alex Lindsay]

The rumor is that within two years, most of the streamers are not going to be doing too much features. They just don't. They don't. We've been talking about this for three or four years. The feature film does not pan out for a streamer. Like it's a. It's not a good. It's not a good investment. And. And since streamers are doing all the production, you know, it's. It's pretty. So I. The. So it looks like almost everybody's moving towards series. It'll be really interesting to see. This is a make or break year for Hollywood because a bunch of the movies got delayed. So they're all coming out this year. If this year goes well, they buy another couple years. If this year goes bad, there's going to be a lot of, you know, a lot of work to write the ship for next. The next couple years because people expect it to do really well. They expect this to be a blockbuster year. And if it's not, it's going to be difficult.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say. They've got some great shows. And severance is back. And Tim Cook apparently is. Is sending his Audi in. This is Ben Stiller's tweet. Tim entering like, this was a little on the nose. I was like. I was like, you know, everybody says.

[Alex Lindsay]

That severance is about Apple. And then Tim does the. The thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I was like, watch, watch him change from his Audi to his innie. A little aggressive acting from Mr. C. Look at that. Wow.

[Andy Inako]

He's happy now.

[Leo Laporte]

He's happy now.

[Andy Inako]

He doesn't have to think about Apple intelligence. Just diddled numbers.

[Leo Laporte]

Diddle with numbers. This is actually great. They have been doing the best promos for this show.

[Micah Sargent]

My favorite, of course, live people, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Grand Central Station where they put the actors in Grand Central Station. That was.

[Andy Inako]

That gives you an indication of how successful this show is. Not just for prestige, but monetarily. That they got time on Tim's schedule to shoot this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's Mr. Milchick. He's gonna welcome Tim.

[Andy Inako]

Tim C. Core of the Apple.

[Micah Sargent]

Please have a seat.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course, then they show some promos for Sapphire, which is a great show. I'm excited about season two.

[Andy Inako]

20 inch tube TV on a rolling cart has made me nostalgic for middle school.

[Leo Laporte]

The retro. There's been a lot of talk about the retro tech because they make a real effort to put real retro tech in the Lumon offices. So it's very cool to see that stuff.

[Alex Lindsay]

By the way, if you're into Silo, after you've watched Silo, don't do it before you watch Silo tested with Adam Savage has a series of behind the scenes. Oh, that are really good. Like, really good. I was actually, as a visual effects person, I was actually surprised at how much visual effects they're doing. Like how much is not physical versus. And it's, yeah, really good coverage. I would highly recommend, highly recommend it. But watch Silo first before you watch the behind the scenes.

[Leo Laporte]

It was 15 years ago today that I burned my invitations to all Apple events. Events forever with Skype.

[Alex Lindsay]

Skype hit a laptop with Skype turned around. I saw it. I saw yesterday I stall the. The stink eye. I remember see watching it, watching Steve look down at you and give you the stink eye.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, it's on tape. There's a video of it. Anyway. Steve Jobs announced the original iPad15 January 27, 2010. Fifteen years ago yesterday. One and a half decades. Yeah, it was at Herba Buena Center. So last Apple event I went to, I never, never got invited back again. They sold 300,000 units on launch day in April 2010.

[Andy Inako]

Wow, that was really big. I mean there was usually like, we're all. This was not like the big celebration, all these civilians in this really was like more of a press oriented event. And so we're all like taking our notes. We're all trying to make sure that our MIFIs are still connected to the Internet so we could live, blog and live. And when he announced the price, nobody was expecting it to be. That's stunning. There was actually a gasp because people just look suddenly. What? I didn't just hear that. Did I just hear that?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, $500.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, it just totally exceeded expectations. And it was also big because, like, it was a reminder of how Steve was winding down physically at that point and how important this must have been for him to be there. And he was still. And what I. So I spent most of a lot of my time just watching him. Like, even when they were playing the videos, I was like, he could sort of. If I leaned a little bit, I could sort of see him like off the side of the stage, like watching, but still like with his hands behind his back watching the video. And it was, it was a very big day for a lot of reasons. I think that it's a. It bookends the Steve Jobs era very, very nicely. This was another thing that he couldn't summon the sort of energy that he had for the iPhone rollout. But you could still, you could see the same sort of, of like, I can't wait to show people this finally. We've been sitting on this for a while.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I think the iPad was. Was really designed first, right? It was. The iPhone was the test for the iPad. And I think that. And I think that the. And I think that. I think that Steve thought that the iPad would be more popular than it is. I mean, it's very popular. A lot of people use it. But I think he really thought it was the complete replacement for the.

[Leo Laporte]

I think he thought it was the next generation.

[Alex Lindsay]

Next generation. And I just. Well, the funny thing is, is that I think one of the biggest problems that iPads have is that they last for so long. So effectively I have an iPad here. I realized I installed something and someone said, oh, you're using that on an older iPad. And I was like, how old is this? And I realized it's like five years old, but it's working great. And I think that's the challenge that Apple has, is that the problem really is that a lot of the software doesn't push the iPads hard as much as they can actually go. And so you end up being able to use them forever, which isn't as good if you're trying to sell them.

[Leo Laporte]

But apparently if you want, you can buy four of Karl Lagerfeld's iPod Nano, fifth generation. Just what I always wanted for a mere €600.

[Andy Inako]

But they are super blinged out there. He was like an ipod fan and collector. He had like hundreds of them. So you see, like, when did they make a yellow colorway in the iPad? No, they never did. He just basically had one made for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. So after third party did it or aftermarket or. He didn't get Apple to do it, did he?

[Andy Inako]

I don't know. But it looks. They have professional. They have professional photos in the Sotheby's catalog and it looks like a professional job. It doesn't look like they just got like a vinyl wrap around it.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Andy Inako]

I mean, he's Karl Lagerfeld. He has manufacturing contacts who could basically say, prototype me one of these.

[Leo Laporte]

It's estimated that Lagerfeld, of course, was the lead designer for chanel. Had over 500 iPods when he passed away. Lagerfeld, this is from Warren Ellis website, famously had an ipod nanny to digitize his collection for the ipods and add new music to the devices. He treated them like cassette tapes, basically.

[Micah Sargent]

So each one had its own little wow. Just talk about having so much money.

[Andy Inako]

I didn't have a CD case, but it's filled with like different pouches with ipods on them. Ah, there you go. So easy listening. Yacht rock.

[Leo Laporte]

And then here's the ipod. Classic. And a microphone, all blinged out. Only €500 the current bid.

[Micah Sargent]

What's the microphone for?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. What do we care? Right style. It's an SM58 with an on off switch. So I don't know. You know, maybe. Maybe he had that when it. Yeah, it's shiny. Maybe he has it.

[Micah Sargent]

It's just an interesting pairing. I'm like, who decided those two went together?

[Leo Laporte]

I am singing to my ipod on my blinged out microphone. Yeah, yeah. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Gentlemen, prepare your picks of the week. We are about to wrap things up. Before we do, though, I want to make a emotional plea. You. What are you laughing at? Micah, I'm on my knees here begging you to join Club Twit. Actually, Micah and I both do special content for Club Twit. You do that amazing crafting corner, which is wonderful. If we get a hundred new members today. I will stream my flop and fold on my focaccia later today. Nice. How about that? We did stream Lisa making her famous bolognese the club is a great hang. It's a great place to hang out. We have a club Twit Discord. We put special programming in there, but you also get ad free versions of everything that we do, even video for some of the shows that we don't put out in video, like Micah's. Hands on Macintosh, hands on tech. But mostly you're getting the warm and fuzzy feeling that you're helping us keep this show on the air, helping pay for. It's expensive to do this. And. And while we do have advertisers, they don't cover the entire cost. We need you to make up the difference now. I think we make it pretty affordable. $7 a month. You get all of those benefits. Lisa is working on me. She's wearing me down, saying, bring back the annual. So maybe we're gonna end up doing that. But don't wait till that happens. Join for a month. And then if we bring back the annual, you can convert it to an annual subscription. Twit TV Club. Twit. I think for seven bucks, you get an awful lot of good stuff. And if you appreciate what we do here and the hard work we put in and you want all these guys to get paid, join the club. That's. That's the best way to support us. We appreciate it. Twit TV Club Twit. And thank you in advance.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you have a locked AT&T phone.

[Micah Sargent]

We'Re here with bolt cutters.

[Andy Inako]

T Mobile will help pay off your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Locked phone and give you a new 5G phone for free.

[Andy Inako]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Alex Lindsay]

Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom via virtual prepaid.

[Leo Laporte]

MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a $10 device connection charge. Qualifying port and trade and service on Go5G next. And credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account.

[Micah Sargent]

To continue bill credits or credit stop.

[Leo Laporte]

And balance on required finance agreements. Deal bill credits. And if you pay off devices early. Now, Micah, since you're our special guest, I'll let you kick things off with the picks of the week.

[Micah Sargent]

All right. I got a really awesome present for Christmas this year, and I've been using it for a while now. And it is the bee's knees. This is.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty.

[Micah Sargent]

This is a bottle from Lark Larq. And here's the cool thing. When I got this, I thought that the extent of it was one of the features that it had or two of the features that it has. And it ended up being three features. So I wanted a water bottle that would sanitize itself so that I could use it for a lot longer until I needed to wash it again. Because I only use it for water, right? I'm only putting water in here and I don't want to have to be washing it every single day if I don't have to. This has UV C light in, in it, in, in it. And so every 15 minutes it shines UV light and keeps the bottle sanitized. That was the extent of what I really wanted from this water bottle. But it came with a couple of other features as well. It is also a Bluetooth connected device that will let you track your water intake and it integrates with Apple Health. So if you want to track your water, then you can do that. And then it has. This is an LED light strip sort of thingy across the top and you can set it to kind of flash and give you a reminder. Hey buddy, you said you wanted to take 90 ounces in today, so do that. Um, and then last but not least, this is the thing that I didn't even know that it had. They now have a straw that has a little filter at the bottom and so you can use like tap water, put tap water in there and it filters that tap water as you're drinking it. I don't, I don't use tap water. I use a reverse osmosis water. But if I was in a situation where, you know, I knew that only tap water was going to be available to me, I can go ahead and stick that straw in and it'll help to filter that as I'm using using it. The other cool thing is if you ever need to say you, you know, you're going to a place and you aren't 100, sure. You can activate the UV light for an extended period of time and it will help to clean the water, not just the bottle itself. So yeah, this is the lark bottle, PureViz 2. It's got all of that in there because Lark also makes a pitcher. So this is the bottle and then this is the second version of the bottle. It is pricey. That's why it was my big Christmas gift at $120. But a, it comes in green, which already sells me, and B, it looks great and it has all those cool features in it. So I. This has been basically with me non stop since Christmas and will continue to be with me because I think it's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Wow. And how big is this? 25 ounces.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, this one's 24, 25 ounces. There's a larger one that's a little more pricey. So if you take in a lot more water, you don't like refilling it a lot, then you can get that one instead.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that straw. That's a hefty little filter. Is that Must be carbon.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it does. It has actually a few things in it so that it filters. Not giving just what you'd expect, but also chlorine and a few other.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I might have water.

[Alex Lindsay]

And can you choose to use it with or without that filter?

[Micah Sargent]

Yes, I use it without most of the time because I have reverse osmosis. So, in fact, if I unscrew the lid, you'll see I don't have the straw attached at all. It just has a spout at the top, and then you just connect the straw, and then the spout becomes. Which you can suck out of the. It's closed most of the time. You flip it up to actually access the sprout out. It's really nice. Oh, and USB C charging, which obviously is a big thing. I want to make sure that it.

[Leo Laporte]

Does USB C and eucalyptus green, which was, of course, very important to you.

[Micah Sargent]

I know exactly 100%. It's funny, I told a friend there, she said, what did you get for Christmas? And I said, I got this water bottle. Her first question back to me was, is it green?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Micah Sargent]

I said, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody knows Micah pretty well. Nice. I think I'm gonna get one of these. That looks great, but I'm gonna get black because that is pretty sleek, dark person. And I want to get the giant one. I don't. I want more ounces.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I will say that's the one. They were out of stock when my significant other purchased them of the larger one. And so the smaller one, I do find myself refilling it a couple of times during the day, which isn't a huge deal, but if you are a pretty big water drinker, you might want to get the largest, larger one.

[Alex Lindsay]

I just found. When I travel, I, it's. I, I, I thought I would want the larger one, but then it turned out with the smaller one because I can't fit it in my bag.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, travel's different. Yeah. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

That's the other thing, too, is that the water bottle I was using before didn't fit in my cup holder very well. This one, easy, which I, I like. So, yeah, that can be sometimes. The difference is how are they, you know, designing it so that I know if it's Going to fit where I want it to.

[Leo Laporte]

Or as you recommend, the silicone boot.

[Micah Sargent]

I didn't know there was a DAS boot.

[Alex Lindsay]

You didn't know.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't know. Why? What is it for?

[Alex Lindsay]

What is it for? I can tell you why. I can tell you. I don't know. I don't know why they put it in. But. But I work and I've worked on some, you know, at events, people, there's. The move to metal is like. You hear clanking in seminars all the time.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And if you're in like a theater that has a incline. Clink, clink, clink.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, no. Which it's not his fault. Every time, every time someone sets one down, you hear it go dank. And so I'm sure that someone said, hey, if we put silicon on it, it won't make any noise when you set it down.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

So that's what it is.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't recommend it because I'm not in a place where that happens a lot. But if you plan on going to a lot of seminars, Leah, maybe seminar.

[Alex Lindsay]

Was like hardwood floors. And I'm just telling you, with 200 people.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's a constant din. Like it's constant. Like it's just a dink, dink, dink, ding. And if you're. And if you're the person doing AV and it's getting your mics, you're special conscious to the fact that people are ruining your mic, your record because you're just like. So anyway, yeah, I'm sure that that's why the boot's there.

[Micah Sargent]

That's probably why. Yeah. Because it is. It's a nice. Well, I don't know if you can hear that. Maybe as I'm talking.

[Leo Laporte]

It's metal, metal, metal. Yes. Scooter X says you need a silicon boot. Alex Lindsay, Pick of the week.

[Alex Lindsay]

So I don't use teleprompters all the time, but when I do, I like to try to have a lot of control over them. We. We have clients who oftentimes want to have a teleprompter and a lot of creators that we work with want to have teleprompters. And so I'm always on the scout for a new one that is even better than the last ones. And so we got into. We started discussing this one called Power Prompter and I really like it. This is by Suborbital IO and I just can't find any tool that it doesn't have that I would want. So if you look at this here. So now you can see it kind of of. It looks a little odd right now because it's feeding back into itself. But that's a semi transparent overview shot there. You can see yourself underneath it right now. Kind of an arty feature here. Now you have the controller here. And what's interesting about it is you have a lot. You can decide overlays. I can set up different background images. I can decide how many lines are highlighted. You know, in that. In that process there. I'll turn this video preview off so that you can. So you can just see it there. And then you have the arrow. Of course, you can decide, you know, what color, you know what you want to have there. You can decide what the position is like, where is your target. Depending on your teleprompter, oftentimes that's important. Of course, you have the flip controls now in video, you can record video here, which is kind of interesting. So what that's really good for is if you're a creator and you want to be able to talk and see yourself, but you're also looking at your teleprompter, how do you read and see what your reaction is at the same time? And you can do it right inside the app, so you can do the recording here, which is new for me to be able to do that. Also with displays, a lot of times what happens is we want to display this teleprompter and have different settings for different. Like the person who's doing it wants to see it one way, I want to send it to a confidence monitor another way. And I can actually use. I have three other monitors that are connected. So I could just grab one of these monitors. I just click it on and it'll take over that monitor as a teleprompter. And it has its own settings in that teleprompter. I can also just spawn a new window. So I can say I just want another window and I can drag this. Now, this one still has a variety of setups here, but I can basically turn a lot of the displays on and off, off. And so this is a. But I can just. And then you can do it to n number of. Of devices. And so if you're looking for a teleprompter software, I think this is my new favorite. You know, this. This one here, as far as you know. And again, we oftentimes get into productions where someone really needs a teleprompter, really wants a teleprompter. And we always want to have and little things like being able to edit easily. You know, we get kind of touchy about being able to just kind of grab onto stuff and just type it in and not have it be something that is instantly results here. But you don't see my work if you're the end user. Anyway, it's pretty useful for us. And that's again, it's become my new favorite. And it's written. One of the things that makes teleprompt software better on a Mac is when it's written for the Mac like it's not. This isn't a cross platform. Like it kind of works on both. It really is just built to use the subsystems on the Mac. And so I definitely. Again, this is the new software that we're using now and we're pretty happy with.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell me a little bit about the physical setup. Because it's just software. You have to use the software.

[Alex Lindsay]

You still need to put it on a screen. You still have to. Have to have a teleprompter. But you can also run this on a confidence monitor that's right under the screen or right over the top. Again, it does the overlay over top of video. So you could throw it. That video could be anything. So I could be throwing. One of the things that we do a lot of is we might have someone who wants to do a prepared talk. And that video isn't them. It's the remote room that they're speaking to. So it's everybody. They can kind of see everyone behind them, whether they're nodding or not. And they're still able to do that. Now we've had to do that with overlays. This does it right in the SO software. So it's a. It's pretty convenient as far as how that works. You would still need a physical teleprompter. But it does have like for each screen, whether you want to. You can decide whether you want to flip the, you know, flip the text back and forth. That's a usually pretty important thing with teleprompt software.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because if you're using a mirror, you need to be able to do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. So you have that, you know, you have both the vertical flip here. So you can see it. If I open up a new one here. I think you can.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Alex Lindsay]

You'll be able to see it. But you can do the vertical flip and the. And the horizontal bottle flip. You know, that's there.

[Leo Laporte]

So very nice. It is. There's a 30 day free trial even from suborbital.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I think that they, they do a 90 day. I was reading on their website. I didn't know that until today when I was getting the link for this. I guess they do 90 day, no questions. You know, return if you don't like it. So you can. And it's, it's not a subscription. It's 50 bucks once. And, and then you're, you're off to the races. But, but they say that they'll return your money if you're not happy with it. And if you're doing teleprompt work again on the Mac, I haven't seen a better one.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Thank you, Alex Lindsey. And finally, Mr. Andy Nutko's pick of the Week.

[Andy Inako]

We mentioned earlier a blog post that Paul Cavasses made about how badly Apple Intelligence can tell you who won the Super Bowl. He mentioned a graphics tool in the blog post that I had not heard of, but I've instantly become a huge fan of. It's called retrobatch. And the point of this app is to produce it's hard to limit what it can do whatever you want to do with any file or collection of files or source of files, it can do it for you automatically. And it does it by basically, here is a toolbox of things that it can do with image files, and then you simply click them together into a workflow like Lego. So for instance. Nice. So for instance, when I dump my SD card and clear it out, I normally archive it, but just basically it's just a folder full of raw files. So I can just simply create a workflow that says take everything from this SD card, convert each one of these raw files into JPEGs of 800 by 600. Also create an image grade and then write it and all of those files to this other removable device that I have so I can archive it correctly. Or you can do things like Here is a PDF. Please spit out all of the pictures from this PDF, but I also want you to classify them using artificial intelligence. And anything that has a picture of a baby in it, I want you to divert it into this folder and I want you to scale it down. Apply an unsharp mask, crop it down to these dimensions, add this watermark, and and then send it over here. You can script it, you can set it up so that anytime a picture hits a certain folder, it will automatically be processed with the workflow that you've defined. It even works on Clipboard. So if you're in a repetitive task where you're just looking for stuff and then copying it from one place and then pasting it into a new document, you can have it so that it basically waits for when an image file enters your clipboard automatically apply the transform, the workflow you've applied to it, and then essentially the next time you paste it will take this 1600 by 2400 image that you created. And on your clipboard will be a downsized, sharpened, compressed JPEG version of it with a drop shadow and with a watermark and all this other stuff with it. It's really, really cool. It's. If you don't download it and try it right now, just remember that it exists and the next time you have anything that involves a repetitive action, download it and try it. There's a free seven day free trial. There's like a basic version and a pro version. Like the pro version allows you to do scripting, it allows you to do the AI stuff. The basic version is 20 bucks and you own it. The pro version is 40 bucks and you own it. And I wish I could go back in time and hand this back to me when I was writing books and the number of times that I would hear from my publisher one week before the drop deadline said, oh, by the way, we've just decided that we need all of your image files in a different format. Even though. Yeah, you talked to us about this at the start of the project and agreed that anything that needed to be done you would do on your end, but we decided that we don't have to do that anymore. I could have just created this with Retro batch, basically pointed it at my project folder and it would have automatically transmogrified in any way, shape or form that I need it to. Really, really great app. And it's so beautifully done that I just want to keep playing with it to see what it can do. It's the chainsaw effect. I sometimes talk about a great tool or great piece of software. First time you have electric reciprocating saw or chainsaw, you cut up the fallen branches. The reason why you bought it and then does such a good job with that, you start looking for other things you can cut with it because you just want to see what it can do. And that's how good this app is. It's called Retrobatch 2. It's from. Sorry, I just tabbed away from here. It's from flying meat software, flyingmeat.com and they do Acorn.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, they know they're fantastic. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

So yeah, it's just great stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Really great. I was not aware of this program. Good to know.

[Alex Lindsay]

I thought I was not aware, but I have to admit, I went to look for it and I was like, oh, I own the original.

[Leo Laporte]

I own it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Retrobrat Pro. I haven't used it as much as I think I used it a lot when I got it. And then I just haven't had one of those things.

[Leo Laporte]

When you need it, though. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

If you could say if there were a kid in my neighborhood that would take $20 to process these 800 photos, I would feel like I was taking advantage of them, but I would pay it. Yeah. That's why even if you don't. Even if you just don't just download it to have it there so that you remember that it exists. And you will say, I would much rather have the next two hours of my life available to me than $20. I can make another $20. I cannot make another two hours of my life.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Retro batch two from flying meat dot com. That's Andy and Ako. When are you going to be on GBH next?

[Andy Inako]

Next week from Wednesday, I believe at 12:30pm Go to wgbhnews.com.com to listen to it live or later.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it. Mike is crafting Corner coming up on the 19th. Mike will be back Thursday for Tech News Weekly. What do you call covering? I know you tried to get the pebble guys on and they're too busy.

[Micah Sargent]

They are, but. Well, I'm, I'm going to pre record the interview. So we still will be.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good.

[Andy Inako]

Excellent.

[Micah Sargent]

About the return of pebble. So I'm really excited about that. And this is the fourth Thursday of the month, so we will also be joined by Emily Forlini of PC Mag for our stories of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

Emily. Yeah. Oh, that'll be fun. Yeah. The pebble is now open source. It's back. Google allowed them to. They freed it free.

[Andy Inako]

They're trying to make new ones and. Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, Very exciting.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool. Oh, I can't wait to watch that. That's this Thursday. And of course Micah does hands on Tech and iOS today and they're recording next Tuesday and we'll see you soon, I hope. Thank you, Micah. Absolutely.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's been great.

[Leo Laporte]

Always fun to have you. Jason will be back next week, but it's always nice we can get Micah on. And of course, Alex Lindsay. He's at Office Hours Global. What's the latest?

[Alex Lindsay]

We're answering questions. Turns out every day we just get up.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all people want. They just want questions.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, we went. Tomorrow is our, our audio day. We have A lot of audio experts from all over the world and so we get tend to get heavy questions in that area. Thursday is video day. We've got a lot of video experts and Friday or it. So cloud production in the cloud or AWS questions and, and then on this, on the weekends we just kind of, we, we, we don't publicly and we all just have internal conversations. So those are some of my favorite. Sunday is a day that people ask about office hours itself and we just kind of have more of an internal chat. So those are all things that we're doing on a weekly basis. Very good. Almost. We're approaching, quickly approaching our five year anniversary of not missing a day.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that amazing? Crazy man, crazy.

[Alex Lindsay]

And we're now, you know, we're about to start streaming to LinkedIn. We if you watch it and the color looks at all odd. We are working on, we're streaming HDR to YouTube. So it's HDR 4K60 to YouTube. We're about to add 5.1 to it just because we can. But it also is pushing the outer envelope of what YouTube streams. So if you're watching it in an HDR set it's going to look great. If you watch it in SDR sometimes it's, you know, we're still working with YouTube engineers to perfect that look. So we're constantly kind of trying to push the outer edge there.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Thank you Alex. Thank you Andy. Thank you Micah. Thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our club Twit members who make this show possible. If you're not yet a member, TWiT TV Club TWiT. It's thanks to you we can stream in all those different platforms. Discord for the club members. YouTube Twitch. Yes, we're on LinkedIn. Yes, we're on TikTok. I don't know how that happened but we are also on Kik and Facebook and I'm sure something else that I've left out. Eight different platforms so watch us live. Ox.com watch us live and that way you get to see the show, the first draft of it but of course it's a podcast. So after John Ashley takes it in hand we'll have a polished final version available for you at the website Twitter TV MBW. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips if you want to tell your friends about something you saw here today. And of course the easiest way to get a subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll get it automatically audio or video the minute it's done. Thank you everybody for being here. We will be back next Tuesday as usual. 11:00am Pacific 2:00pm Eastern Time 1900 UTC. Unfortunately the time has come for me to say get back to work because break time is over. Bye bye.

[Andy Inako]

AT T Mobile we'll give you four free 5G phones and four.

[Alex Lindsay]

Lines for only $25 per line per month with eligible trade ins. And no, it's not a contest, it's every day for a limited time.

[Andy Inako]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Andy Inako]

Charge for well qualified customers.

[Micah Sargent]

Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on required finance agreement to bill credits and if you pay up devices early. CT mobile dot com.