MacBreak Weekly 958: You Can't Handle the Sharks!

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 958: You Can't Handle the Sharks! – Detailed Summary

Released on February 5, 2025 | Host: Leo Laporte | Network: TWiT.tv

In episode 958 of MacBreak Weekly, titled "You Can't Handle the Sharks!", host Leo Laporte and his panel of technology experts—Andy Inako, Alex Lindsay, and returning guest Jason Snell—delve into Apple's latest quarterly performance, new product launches, challenges in international markets, and ongoing developments in Apple's Vision Pro augmented reality headset. The discussion is rich with insights, critical analysis, and engaging banter, providing listeners with a comprehensive overview of the current state of Apple and its ecosystem.

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1. Apple's Stellar Quarterly Financial Performance

a. Record-Breaking Revenue

Jason Snell opens the discussion by highlighting Apple's impressive financial results. Despite a slight downturn in iPhone sales, Apple achieved an all-time record quarter, driven by robust growth in services, Mac, and iPad segments.

• Jason Snell (04:30): "iPhone sales were down 1%, but services and Mac and iPad were all up, raising the entire company to an all-time high."

Leo Laporte adds context to the figures, emphasizing the scale of Apple's profits.

• Leo Laporte (06:16): "Revenue for three months was $124 billion. That's a billion dollars a day profit. $3 billion a week."

b. Services Sector Surge

Alex Lindsay emphasizes the consistent growth in Apple's services division, which has seen record revenues for eight consecutive quarters.

• Alex Lindsay (06:15): "Services had a record quarter. A matter of fact, it was one of the lead metrics in the financials."

c. Gross Margin and Profitability

The panel notes that Apple's gross margin reached a record high of 46.9%, underscoring the company's strong profitability.

• Jason Snell (06:56): "Gross margin also at a record high of 46.9%."

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2. Challenges Amidst Success: Apple's Struggles in China

Despite overall financial success, Apple faces significant headwinds in the Chinese market, experiencing an 11% year-over-year decline.

• Jason Snell (07:02): "Tim is more like we're fighting it out in a tough market there."

a. Shifting Sentiments of Tim Cook

Tim Cook, once bullish on China, has shifted his perspective, acknowledging the competitive and challenging environment.

• Jason Snell (07:43): "He said we're fighting it out in a tough market there. It's been flat to down for the past three years."

b. Impact of Tariffs and Supply Chain Issues

The panel discusses ongoing tariff challenges and supply chain disruptions exacerbated by political tensions.

• Jason Snell (20:28): "We are monitoring the situation and don't have anything more to add than that."

c. Strategic Moves and Future Outlook

Apple's strategy to diversify manufacturing by building factories in India aims to mitigate some of these challenges, although the effectiveness remains to be seen.

• Jason Snell (22:02): "When they build phones in India, they'll ship those phones around the world."

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3. Developer Relations and Vision Pro: Areas of Concern

a. Developer Relations Report Card

Jason Snell presents Apple’s annual report card, highlighting that while the Mac remains highly regarded, Developer Relations has plummeted to its lowest since the inception of the survey.

• Jason Snell (55:30): "The Mac is at an all-time high, but Developer Relations is the lowest since the first year of the survey."

b. Issues with Vision Pro

The Vision Pro augmented reality headset receives a grade of D, reflecting dissatisfaction among developers regarding support and ecosystem maturity.

• Jason Snell (61:52): "The Vision Pro is a lot better than it was a year ago, but it's still struggling with developer support."

c. Impact on New Products

Poor developer relations are seen as a contributing factor to the Vision Pro's lukewarm reception, impacting its potential success in broader markets.

• Jason Snell (61:52): "Developers just don't trust Apple enough to develop for it."

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4. Apple's New Offerings and Features

a. Apple Invites: A Modern Evite Clone

Mark Gurman reports that Apple has launched "Invites," a feature akin to Evite, previously codenamed "Confetti." The panel explores its integration within the Apple ecosystem.

• Jason Snell (39:20): "I have both invited and been invited."
• Leo Laporte (39:54): "You have to be an iCloud Plus subscriber to use Invites."

b. AppleCare Changes

Apple has revised its AppleCare offerings, restricting multi-year plans to online purchases and limiting in-store options to monthly or annual subscriptions.

• Leo Laporte (84:48): "They are now only offering monthly or annual subscriptions in stores, but multi-year plans are available online."

c. First iPhone Porn App in the EU

Following the European Commission's regulations, Apple's Alt Store has introduced the first iPhone porn app, "Hot Tub," marking a significant change in App Store policies.

• Alex Lindsay (86:19): "The first native iPhone porn app is available now in the EU through the Alt Store."
• Jason Snell (86:53): Discusses Apple's disingenuous stance on not approving the app while complying with regulatory requirements.

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5. Vision Pro in Healthcare: A Niche Success

Despite mixed reviews, Apple's Vision Pro finds a valuable application in the healthcare sector, with Dr. Broderick from UCSD endorsing its use in surgical environments.

• Leo Laporte (112:54): "UCSD's Dr. Broderick says it's not uncomfortable or distracting to use it during operations."

The headset's capacity to provide surgeons with virtual displays enhances operational efficiency, although broader consumer adoption remains uncertain.

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6. Security Concerns: Gravy Ad Network Leak

A significant security issue arises from the Gravy ad network, which infiltrates thousands of apps, exposing sensitive user data such as location, IP address, and device information. The panel discusses the implications for privacy and Apple's ecosystem.

• Jason Snell (110:29): "Gravy is an ad network on thousands of apps, leaking your location and personal data constantly."

a. Privacy Implications

The leak exemplifies the ongoing challenges in safeguarding user privacy, especially with third-party ad networks embedded within applications.

• Alex Lindsay (111:29): Advocates for federal laws protecting personal information, emphasizing the need for stringent data ownership rights.

b. Apple's Role and Countermeasures

The issue underscores the necessity for Apple to enforce stricter controls on app permissions and enhance transparency regarding data handling by third-party networks.

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7. Retrospective: The Sims and Open Sourcing Pebble

a. Celebrating The Sims’ Legacy

The panel reflects on the enduring popularity of The Sims series, noting its cultural impact and the unique creation of the Simlish language.

• Leo Laporte (102:04): "Simlish is a gibberish language spoken by the game's characters, adding depth to The Sims universe."

b. Repebble Initiative: Reviving the Pebble Smartwatch

Andy Inako shares excitement about the open-sourcing of Pebble's operating system by Google, facilitating the creation of new, simple, and reliable smartwatches that cater to enthusiasts seeking alternatives to mainstream options.

• Alex Lindsay (139:27): "Google has open-sourced Pebble's OS, allowing for the development of new smartwatches that maintain the original's simplicity and functionality."

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8. Recommendations of the Week: Hazel by Noodlesoft

Hazel 6.0: Automating Mac File Management

Jason Snell recommends Hazel by Noodlesoft, a powerful utility that monitors file systems on Mac and automates tasks based on user-defined rules. The latest version, Hazel 6.0, introduces auto OCR of images, enhancing its ability to process and organize files intelligently.

• Jason Snell (129:40): "Hazel watches your file system and allows you to set up rules to automate file management, such as archiving unused stories after 14 days."

Leo Laporte endorses the tool, highlighting its efficiency and versatility in streamlining Mac operations.

• Leo Laporte (131:37): "Highly recommended. Hazel 6 is out now for $42, perfect for automating and tidying up your Mac."

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9. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, the panel reflects on Apple's multifaceted performance, balancing significant financial achievements with notable challenges in developer relations and international markets. The introduction of new features like Apple Invites and the Vision Pro's specialized applications in healthcare indicate Apple's ongoing innovation, albeit with areas needing improvement.

Leo Laporte emphasizes the importance of staying informed through comprehensive analysis and engaging discussions, inviting listeners to subscribe and support the podcast through Club Twit for ad-free experiences and exclusive content.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Snell (06:40): "If you're viewing this just as how much revenue did Apple generate, it's a record quarter. But looking through the lens of a Wall Street analyst reveals signs of growth challenges ahead."

• Alex Lindsay (17:29): "The innovation that matters the most is the camera. No other feature gets people to upgrade as consistently."

• Jason Snell (55:30): "Apple is blowing it with developers full stop. Developers feel Apple takes too much without giving back to the ecosystem."

• Leo Laporte (112:54): "Dr. Broderick says it's not uncomfortable or distracting to use the Vision Pro during operations."

• Jason Snell (110:29): "Gravy is leaking your location and personal data constantly, which is a significant privacy concern."

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This episode of MacBreak Weekly offers a deep dive into Apple's current landscape, providing valuable insights for tech enthusiasts and industry watchers alike. From financial triumphs to developer frustrations, and from innovative product launches to pressing security issues, the panel leaves listeners with a thorough understanding of where Apple stands and the directions it might take in the near future.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Andy, it's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy in Akos here. Alex Lindsey. Jason Snell is back. Jason's had a busy week. Used up all the color in his inkjet, doing those six color charts for Apple's quarterly results. Suffice to say, it was a very good quarter. We'll get the report. Also, Apple's report cards that Jason does every year with some of the biggest names in Apple punditry. Fascinating to see what they think is good and bad about Apple. And then porn comes to the iPhone. All of that. Yes, it does. And Apple's really annoyed. All of that and more coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 958, recorded February 4, 2025. You can't handle the sharks. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple. And there is news from Apple. Jason Snell's back just in time to dump some ink on us. Some colorful ink.

[Jason Snell]

What do you want? I got financial charts. I got a report card.

[Leo Laporte]

You got the report card. That's in color, too, isn't it?

[Jason Snell]

I've been busy this week, Leo. I mean, there's just. I'm running out of ink. I need some new toner for my charts.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's okay. HP can put you on a subscription. You'll be set. We're just glad you're back. Welcome back. Also with us from 6colors.com. Also with us from GBH in Boston, Mr. Andrew and not co. Yeah, and.

[Alex Lindsay]

You know what the big problem is for Jason and why, you know, you should be basically supporting six colors? Is that just because he's out now of red and green and yellow, they'll still make him replace the black cartridge, even though it doesn't make any sense. Even though it's perfectly full. It comes as a set. You have to replace all.

[Jason Snell]

My report card contains 34,000 words of commentary from 59 different people. Trust me, the black cartridge is linked heavy use.

[Leo Laporte]

I do have to apologize. I did not respond to your request for comments. I should have just said, I'm stupid. I don't have anything to say, so ask the experts. That's what I would have said had.

[Alex Lindsay]

I thought that wouldn't look good in a pull quote. It's probably better that you didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo had nothing to say, amazingly enough. Also with us from Office Hours Global, Mr. Alex Lindsay. Hello, Alex.

[Andy Inako]

Hello. Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you growing a beard? Or did you just, you know, are you Just here, suit man, you only couple days. Hectic. Oh, yeah. Good.

[Andy Inako]

I got busy. I was like, oh, I need the shave. And I just keep forgetting because I'm busy. So it's been. I'll get to it next week. I'll be clean, shaping again. I'm not trying to grow a beard. My wife doesn't like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. She doesn't like it. Mine doesn't either. I want to grow a beard.

[Andy Inako]

I usually say, just for you, Leo. So it's very unusual because I almost ran out, but I was afraid I'd be late. There was one comment that Leo made many, many years ago and I never forgot it, which was.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry.

[Andy Inako]

No, no, not to me. That's the funniest part. We were on the set of Screensavers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Andy Inako]

And you talked about the fact that at some point, Patrick doesn't always shave before the show and you didn't like it. And I have been clean shaven, except when I was growing a beard. I've been clean shaven for your show almost every time.

[Leo Laporte]

Like if I'm really.

[Andy Inako]

If you see any facial hair, it means it's hectic. But almost every show Tuesday morning is when I shave for the show because of that one comment 25.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the one thing that's changed 25 years since is that now that is a style using these.

[Andy Inako]

The what?

[Leo Laporte]

The 0 or the 1 on your shaver. So you have a little stubble.

[Andy Inako]

But I just always think about. I think about it every time we shave. Oh, I gotta shave. It's Tuesday morning. I gotta shave for Leo.

[Alex Lindsay]

So.

[Andy Inako]

So anyway, it's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson doesn't shave either. So it's funny.

[Andy Inako]

And then I just don't shave until the next Tuesday. And you can always tell if I haven't been on the show for a couple weeks because then I get really.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Andy Inako]

I don't. I don't, you know, do it naturally.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like counting the rings on a tree on a redwood.

[Andy Inako]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So let's get to the news, I guess. Boy, I want to talk about this new Apple Invites thing, but before we get to that, I guess we should not.

[Jason Snell]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, it's not, you know, it's disappointing because they had a great code name. According to Mark Gurman, it was called Confetti. Then they released it under the name Invites.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, if you launch things by a spotlight, the last thing you want is people who come up with clever names. I still can't find my banking app because it's not named by the bank. It's named as like Glorioski. Like I don't think Glorioski.

[Leo Laporte]

Capital One calls their app like Eno and it's like what, it's. Oh, it's one backwards. Oh, thanks. That makes, that makes it.

[Alex Lindsay]

How much did that cost you Capital One? I'm guessing a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, let's, let's start with the thing that the problem is a little bit old news because it broke right after the shows on Wednesday. Apple's first order, I guess it was on Thursday. Its first quarter.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Results well. And the, and the top line looked like, hey, it's really good. You made a billion dollars a week.

[Jason Snell]

The record record quarter. Record quarter. So if you, if you're viewing this just as how much revenue did Apple generate and how much profit did they make? It's at the top. It's at the tippy top. However, if you are looking through the lens of a Wall street analyst, you're looking for growth and signs of weakness because you're thinking about the future. And you do that for those who don't, aren't big investors. You do that because the stock price is based on what the estimates of the future viability of a company is going to be and how much growth they're going to have. And it's not quite the same as is Apple doomed? Which is what we always joke about because it used to not be a joke and now it is a joke. But, but yeah. So I think, Leo, I would say the funniest thing about this is it was a record quarter, all time record quarter. And iPhone sales were down 1% which is like iPhone is 56% of the revenue of the company. And sales were down 1%. But services and Mac and iPad were all up and that was enough to raise the whole company up to an all time high.

[Alex Lindsay]

Services had a record quarter. As a matter of fact, I think it was one of the lead always in the financials.

[Leo Laporte]

21 billion.

[Jason Snell]

I think it's like eight record quarters in a row for services. It's kind of amazing. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Revenue for three months was 124 billion. That's a billion dollars a day profit. 36 billion. That's a billion dollars a week. That's nice.

[Jason Snell]

Pretty good profit. Just profit.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. No. Is that $3 billion a week? Whoa, wait a minute. My math is all screwed up. It's three months, right? 12 weeks. $3 billion a week.

[Andy Inako]

If you had a, if you had a printer in your house and you were printing Money.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't print it.

[Andy Inako]

You couldn't print it that fast.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah. That's amazing. Yet there are signs of trouble in paradise. By the way, gross margin also at a record high of 46.9%.

[Jason Snell]

Is China paradise, Leo?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Trouble in paradise. 11% drop in China.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that something to worry about? What did Tim say?

[Jason Snell]

Tim no longer remains bullish on China. I would say Tim is more like we're fighting it out in a tough market there. I think that's the truth of it. Right. Is that there was a period in there where Apple was able to expand in China and get a lot of growth and they still make a lot of money there even now. But it's been three years of flat to down and to be fair, they're down 11% in China year over year this time. But they were flat. They were zero last quarter. But if you look at the numbers, they had a period in 2021 where they were expanding rapidly and growing rapidly in China. But since then it's all been flat to down.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's encouraging that the Mac and the iPad went were improved services. I'm not so worried about Mac.

[Jason Snell]

I think Mac is really interesting because although we can say like yeah, MacBook Pro with M4 and Mac mini and people bought a bunch, it really was for as small as the Mac mini market is, it did kick off a Mac mini buying cycle, there's no doubt about that. But the thing is the MacBook Pro, like yeah, there was an M4 MacBook Pro but it's really not that different from the M3 MacBook Pro the previous year and yet some combination. My theory is that people who bought M1 generation are now buying new models and that, that we're back on the. You know, everybody switched over in the first couple of years of Apple Silicon and now we're maybe starting to see people upgrading those systems and maybe that's part of it. But like it wasn't like a Mac, like they didn't. It wasn't a new MacBook Air. It wasn't like it was a huge MacBook Pro update after they hadn't done an update in years. And yet the Mac had a really great growth quarter. IPad I understand, right. Because they didn't ship any iPads last year. And he's. Tim Cook said that the iPad Air did really, really well, which makes sense. It's sort of the key. The best product in that whole product line in terms of price and value. But, but the Mac.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, the Mac I think The Mac mini M4 is just a beast. Like in my industry everyone's talking about the fact that it's just a beast like to be able to buy something for $600. I mean I was running, I was doing a test where I had the M4 doing, I think I mentioned it before. 120 frames a second out of HD footage and it's at like 3%. Would you like me to do 10 other things at the same time? It'd be great. So it's just a, it's. And I've talked to some folks that have the pro and they're just super happy with it. And so I think that was the kind of the real breakthroug. I don't think they break those out, but I think the Mac Mini probably was the thing that a lot of people were buying into. It's a great form factor. It's really, really powerful. It kind of clicks off all the, you know, things and no one, it turned out no one really cared about where the power button was.

[Leo Laporte]

The, the Apple ad, the no sweat ad really kind of brings home what you're saying. And I think this is a smart ad. This is the weightlifter who's wearing M4 on his chest. Looks like it's AI generated by the way. I don't know if that's a real person.

[Andy Inako]

I doubt Apple did you think they.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they actually hired an actor?

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, they probably hired.

[Leo Laporte]

But what it shows is, you know, not only can he lift that, but he's got so much extra power he can start to spin the 300 pound weight, dance around with it and eventually lift it with his pinky. This kind of what you were saying, Alex.

[Andy Inako]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just another way to, to put it. Yeah, it's a pretty funny ad. And I think that the point is, you know, this is obviously aimed for at real people. Yeah, I think it kind of expresses that point.

[Andy Inako]

I think the hard part for Apple is that they're going to have this big push. But if you're not doing a lot of work, the numbers, it's just like anything else is going to go. And I think that's always the challenge is that, that you get these big pushes and people like me buy, will buy potentially many of these. But does the average person have anything that goes there? And that's why games are really important for Apple is to figure because games press, you know, upgrades and they push the envelope, but they're not. A lot of the games aren't really pushing the envelope right now. It's potentially a great gaming platform, but I think that they haven't figured that one out yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, because I think a normal person is going to use it the same way they would use an indel.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, it's just like I try to tell people, I'm like, what are you going to do with it? Well, I'm going to use Zoom and I'm going to, going to do this, I'm going to open up some spreadsheets and I'm going to surf the web. And you're like, okay, well anything in the last five years, we'll do that.

[Leo Laporte]

You got a weightlifter and all you're asking him to do is lift 2 pound dumbbells.

[Andy Inako]

I mean, the big thing that was surprising for me is the work that Apple has done with both the MacBook camera and the microphones, you know, because we bring people in to interview for Michael Krasny Show.

[Leo Laporte]

That's something that affects people really more, doesn't it? Yeah, they still have.

[Andy Inako]

And we had someone from Michael Krasny Show a couple weeks ago that they had, I think the M3 or M3 laptop and we had sent them an S, or we had sent them an MV7 and we had them all set it up and they just couldn't quite get it in the right place in their desk and they didn't sound very good. And we said, we'll just try to unplug it. Let's just see what it sounds like with the Mac. It sounded better than the mic.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

You know, like, and it, it was just boom. And so the, the work that they've done there has paid off. I would, I, I generally would want to send a mic if someone had had a good, could get the mic close to them. It's always going to sound better, but in an unusual situation, it was the laptop. I've never had a laptop be better than the studio mic that I sent, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's kind of amazing.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What did, what did. Tim did Tim or what is it? Kavan.

[Jason Snell]

Kevin. It's Kevin. Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like Kavan.

[Jason Snell]

It's K V A N, but it's Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I'm going to call him Kavan. I don't care.

[Jason Snell]

I mean, you can if you want to. It's funny too, because after years of liquor, Maestri, the former CFO who's now sort of retired into another cushy job at Apple, he had the Italian accent and I was like, oh, what will Kevin Parrack sound like? And the answer Is he's just a guy. He was just like, yeah, you know, we could do some stuff, you know. Yeah. Oh, all right, cool. Just a guy who's the CFO of Apple now. So now, you know, it's fine. I'm sure he's fine. I'm sure Luca is right off screen, like, pointing at him like, don't mess this up, kid. Don't mess this up, kid.

[Leo Laporte]

Make it a good time to do a good job.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the most interesting thing. So we covered China, where Tim used to be real bullish on China and now he's like, it's tough in China. It's tough in China. But so, so be it, you know, I don't know. I. He doesn't say a lot in these. Right? Like, that's. That's the truth of it. He's. He doesn't say a lot. I will say, and I know when we were. Before we started the show, you were kind of joking about this and conflating two different stories, but I will say I think it's interesting and suggests that Tim is well aware that Apple has not really done anything with the iPhone in years. Right. Like the last three or four years, this has been, I would say, design wise, the most static, like, physical design period in the iPhone's history. It's just been. We haven't had a, like a totally new looking iPhone in a while. And they asked him about it and he said something again, little scraps is all you get out of these calls. But a little scrap I found interesting is he specifically said somebody was like, so is this it? And is the smartphone just kind of boring and not interesting? And he's like, no, no. And he pulled out the pipeline, right? It's like, no, I'm excited. We have some amazing iPhones coming down the route. And like, of course he's going to say that stuff. What I thought was interesting is he felt like he needed to actually say and reassure analysts that they are working on new iPhone stuff that's interesting and that the iPhone and the smartphone industry is not entering a cul de sac. You know, you take it or leave it. But I thought, I thought that was interesting that he stood up and said that.

[Leo Laporte]

Ben Wright asked him, he says, do you feel like there's a lot of room for form factor innovation of the future as the current lineup shows where you're going, I guess, without pulling punches, wondering if you thought in terms of the iPhone innovation is there's a lot more to come. And you could see the kind of current market changing a bit over the next two to three years. Ben says, tim, I think there's a lot more to come. And I could not feel more optimistic about our product pipeline. So I think there's a lot of innovation left on the smartphone.

[Jason Snell]

That's a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it depends what you call innovation. I mean, is. Invites innovation. I mean, no, I think many of us might call it incremental.

[Jason Snell]

No, I think he's. I think he's probably. Andy, go ahead. I think he's thinking about some future hardware developments.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, exactly. It seemed like he was doing what you have to do in these situations. Saying, I want to say, are you coming up with something like a folding iPhone? How about that? But he has to couch it in terms of do you feel there's a lot of room for form factor innovation in the future or do you feel the current lineup should shows where you're going? And so that's where I think there's a lot more to come. And I could not feel more optimistic about our.

[Leo Laporte]

And I can't say anything about future products.

[Jason Snell]

The decoding, you know, I didn't want to do the math of how many years I've been on these calls times four about how many of these I've heard. But I've learned enough to learn the language of these calls. And that's exactly right. Ben writes this might as well be blinking the word fold in Morse code. Right? Like that's what he's doing here. He's like, hey, what's, what's on with phone innovation? And here's the thing is they decide all this stuff beforehand. Tim and Kevin and everybody had decided that if there was a question about smartphone innovation lagging, Tim would say, yeah, do one of his hype y kind of like the pipeline. I'm really excited here to reassure, to be fair, I mean, I can be a little cynical about it, but to reassure his investors and his shareholders that Apple is working on some iPhone innovation stuff because really that's the name of the game. It's. It's 56% of their, of their business. And really it's more than that because services comes from the iPhone primarily too. So, yeah, it's telling that they, that they wanted to make that disclosure and it does dovetail with everything Mark Gurman's been telling us that they're working on that thin phone for this year, that they're working on foldable prototypes. Like there's a lot of that stuff in there and they're never going to say anything. This is by far the most you will ever hear them. I mean, beyond him saying sort of like folding remains an area of interest or something. Like, he could say that maybe, but this is about as close as he's going to get.

[Andy Inako]

And I'm, I'm just going to do my, my weekly the innovate. The innovation that matters the most is the. Is the camera. Like, you know, like the. There is nothing else. When I show someone a picture that I took with a recent iPhone or whatever, the only thing that has someone look at the phone and go, oh, I need to upgrade. Is the. Is the pictures. You know, like it's. It's all that really matters.

[Jason Snell]

Like I talk about like folding phones or thin phones that requires more camera innovation. Alex. Right. Because they're like, oh man, we gotta make that. Because, like, it might be okay. We've got the 48 megapixel in there in a standard iPhone thickness. We're good. And then they say, well, we're making it way thinner. And then it's like, all right, I guess we need to make that camera better again.

[Andy Inako]

Well, but I also think I'm just like, when they see it thinner, I'm like, if I was going to put your time into it, just keep putting it into the camera. Because all of us sit there and watch the keynote just waiting for the camera. Like, if you put the camera part at the very beginning of the iPhone announcement, like, here's what we do in the camera, 90% of the viewers would disappear pretty.

[Jason Snell]

I don't think it's that percentage. I think that there are people who are motivated by the camera and we should never forget about it. I think there are also a lot of people who are motivated by the look and that's why they push through things like, like thinness and they pork no less dose. Right. Like they have to do all of these things.

[Andy Inako]

But I would say, like thinner is not. I mean, I guess maybe, you know, I just don't know if thinner is really pushing that many people over the right.

[Alex Lindsay]

But yeah, and it's the. I think that all, all, all phone manufacturers are having a problem at the high end because it's so hard at this point to do any sufficiently compelling. Even the camera, which I agree is what people notice the first time it is now we're really ferreting out every corner to find every edge case photo that you can do a little bit better. And it's so tight right now that it really is down to personal preference of what do you want your photo to look like. And what is the screen that it's being displayed on? Is it like a really super crisp, super oversaturated OLED screen or is it a different kind of screen? I think that one of the reasons why Apple and Samsung are both trying to get into super thin phones is because it gets people thinking that this is something that's brand new.

[Leo Laporte]

And Tim did say that the iPhone sold better in markets where Apple intelligence was available.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's bogus. Yeah, that's. I mean, it's not available in China and it was, it was down in China and so that he's using that as a proxy, but it was almost not available anywhere except the US in his medium.

[Alex Lindsay]

In a medium post. And also, and also he had a. You could. This. Jason was talking about like how we've been reading these for so long that we can kind of decode a lot of this and like, the more confident Tim is, the less detail he will give out. And so when you parse out all the things he was saying about, about China, he was not just simply saying it's down and it's really, really competitive, even though he did say it was very, very competitive. But he was also talking about, oh well, we had supply channel issues also. There are, there's dollars that, that haven't been applied yet that already in. So it's. They have a big, big challenge there. Where Xiaomi is, is leaping and leaping and leaping and they're taking those gains out of Apple's pockets and Apple doesn't really have a good solution to that yet.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they ask him about tariffs at all?

[Jason Snell]

Yes, and it was the most Tim answer ever about any of this stuff. That's about politics, that's about Trump is, and I will quote him directly, this is his entire statement on it. We are monitoring the situation and don't have anything more to add than that. That's it. No comment.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably smart. I mean, what are you going to say?

[Jason Snell]

Well, you know, people complain. I mean, Tim Cook is a, is a politician in a lot of ways and he is managing up. And the person, the person he's managing up is the President of the United States. Okay. What a job to have. I mean, if you've ever had a problematic manager that you've had to deal with, who's your manager? And you have to sort of like steer them and know what buttons to push and what buttons not to push. Now imagine doing that with the President of the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Tim works. There's only one person Worse would be Elon Musk.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, that's Tim Cook's job for now. And Tim is also probably, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I think one reason Apple says we're going to buy more ads on X.

[Jason Snell]

I think one of the reasons like him spend so much time with Donald Trump is that he doesn't want to get told that there's been a reorgan. Now he reports to Elon Musk. Right. I think that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a matter of time.

[Jason Snell]

It serves him. Commenting on tariffs does not serve him, not publicly at all. So he'll just, he'll just shrug it.

[Leo Laporte]

And the tariffs are currently 10% on China. There were rumors that maybe TSMC would be tariffed in Taiwan.

[Andy Inako]

Well, interestingly enough, that has not happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And he backed Trump, backed down on both Canada and Mexico. So maybe the tariff thing is somebody.

[Jason Snell]

Asked them about, about making phones in India especially and why they do that and is is their goal to have this stuff be in market? They're building for the market. And, and he said it very clearly. He said, we don't, when we build a factory somewhere, the scale that, that Apple requires means that it's not for domestic consumption only. Right. Like that they can't. If they build a factory in India, it's not just for India because Apple's never going to build a factory so small and build up a supply chain and all of that so small that it just serves a single country. And so, yeah, when they build phones in India, they'll ship those phones around the world.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but you're going to build it in the country that has the highest tariffs because that will be the least cost to you in that country for now.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, but, but you're going to, but you're also going to hedge. Right? And that's, that's part of it too. Also, keep in mind that the last time the tariff thing happened with Apple, I believe Tim Cook basically went to Donald Trump and said, if you, if you do this this way, it's going to advantage Samsung, a Korean company, over Apple, an American company. And the answer was, oh, we'll fix it, we'll fix it for Apple so that doesn't happen. So we'll see what the impact is on Apple in the long run. But if Tim is in, in Trump's good graces, they may skate on this because, I mean, we saw this week with, with the Mexico and Canada tariffs that, you know, were, I mean, they were going to take effect until suddenly there was a negotiation and they weren't. There's Going to be a lot of that stuff where like, it's kind of for show, it's kind of to get concessions. It's a threat that's met with a response that maybe makes, you know, he wants to come out looking powerful and strong even if the net result is nothing. And there's going to be a lot of that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And it's not going to be a problem that's going to be able to go away no matter what Tim Cook does. Because, I mean, when Trump was talking about tariffs on TSMC, Apple was down 3% because the market is like, we don't know how this is going to turn out. We would much rather, given that we were already a little bit soft on Apple to begin with. The stock price is down, down, down over the past year, year and a. This is another reason for a lot of analysts to devalue the stock and to basically make people nervous. And Tim, Apple collectively needs to address that.

[Andy Inako]

I don't think Apple needs much from the stockholders right now, but I would say that the tariffs are dumb. And he said he was going to do it. He didn't say for how long. So he's done the tariffs and then the question is whether he just goes, well, we got something out of it and then we get it out of the way and go, yep. Like, I just think, I just think he, it was a, it was a populist thing to say during the campaign. He fulfilled the promise that he had. He didn't promise how long the terrorists would run. If he gets something that looks anything like results, he'll stop doing something because it's a dumb thing to do. Like, and so, so eventually it'll, he'll either stop or he'll just keep looking more.

[Leo Laporte]

So it sounds like it was a very good quarter for Apple despite, okay.

[Andy Inako]

You know, China, all time record, record revenue.

[Jason Snell]

I mean if your holiday quarter at Apple can be an all time record, then that means it's a good quarter.

[Andy Inako]

Because that's, this is the big quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one they have to do.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah, they're, they're in their product categories. They're a very seasonal business. There's a lot of revenue that's driven because people are buying hardware in the third quarter. It's the new iPhone quarter and it's just two weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

New iPhone though, right? It wasn't, it's not a huge.

[Jason Snell]

No, this is the rest of the new iPhone. This is, this is October, Novemb December. So, so this is, this is a big spike and if you look at the iPhone numbers, they're very seasonal. They sell a lot of iPhones in that, in that quarter. But even something like the iPad and the Mac shows some seasonality. So. But the iPhone especially is seasonal.

[Andy Inako]

Businesses that run their run, run on the 12 month curve, of course are going to buy a bunch of stuff in December. So that's usually you see so.

[Alex Lindsay]

And also there's a piece of good news with canalous, I think when the one, the one of the iPhone market analysts issued their latest report that said that the iPhone 16S had a stronger opening buy session than the iPhone 15 did last year or the year before. So that would indicate that, yeah, people are going for the iPhone 16. Well, though it remains to be seen whether people are specifically going for Apple intelligence or not. But nonetheless more people were buying iPhone 16s and the 15.

[Leo Laporte]

How about Apple Intelligence? Because Gurman is saying, and I think I'm saying, and a lot of people are saying Apple intelligence is kind of disappointing, that it is not as intelligent as in fact it's even less intelligent than it was.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's pretty common.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he respond to any criticisms? Was anybody critical?

[Alex Lindsay]

Not really. And you could see how much faith he had in Apple intelligence by how much he put into his opening comments about Apple intelligence. He did get kind of a parallel question about Apple intelligence, but basically he just stuck to hey, we're really happy with how it's doing. People are really going for feature A, feature B, feature C, and in April we're going to be expanding it to more countries. That's going to be great. The more interesting thing for AI came during the Q and A and people asked him, someone asked him about Deep Seq, which a lot of analysts are pointing to as wow, looks like that Apple was stupid like a fox because they weren't putting tens of billions of dollars into capital expenditures to basically have these huge, huge models that require millions and millions of Nvidia processors. Now there is this new very, very cheap and efficient model that they can put on their phones directly, that they can adapt for their servers. So that has been seen to benefit Apple in some way. Although of course, as, as you've been talking about all week, Deepseek is still very much trying to figure out what it is, what it's good for, what lessons we can take away for other open source projects and who will actually be the ultimate winner here. Yeah, actually the thing that I'm most keen to see is if this gives Apple a way to get Apple intelligence running in China. So if they can Basically use deepsea, which would work for them because it is open source. They can say that, hey, look, we examined all of this code. We know how it works. We can figure out, we can, basically, we're at a point, we can manipulate it so that we can have a good conversation with the Chinese government and use that as the engine behind Apple intelligence in China. So that would be a very, very good thing. I don't think it would, I don't think it would solve their problems in China with the iPhone. But part of their future involves having Apple intelligence working in as much of the world as possible.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been saying that Apple's hindered because of its privacy stance, that the really powerful AIs require you to send information to their servers and Apple wants to keep everything on device, or at least within the Apple ecosystem, in their server farms. And that to me seems to be the problem with having it be as smart as it can be. Agreed. Or maybe the deep sea it could be, but I think Apple would solve it.

[Andy Inako]

I think it's a long play. So this is the kind of, this is, you know, I. If you watch one of those videos with the rabbit and the turtle, the turtle often wins.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Inako]

Like you see the rabbit. So, so what you have is a lot of, a lot of AI bouncing around. Apple is doing something that will be slower at the beginning, but potentially, you know, having that all on your phone, having that all onto, you know, secure service.

[Leo Laporte]

If they can do that.

[Andy Inako]

If they can, I'm doing well, but.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's way to do it.

[Andy Inako]

But the play is they go from their stuff supplying 10% of the solution to their stuff supplying 90% of the solution over five years. That is brutal to compete against. If they do that, who knows if they can do it, but we won't know until 2030, a few years.

[Alex Lindsay]

And it also depends on how you consider the market. Apple is never going to be in a position where they can do anything but add AI features to their own hardware products, which is what they do. They make their hard, they sell high markup hardware where they give you reasons to buy their hardware instead of somebody else's. Other companies like Google, like OpenAI, like Microsoft, are interested in essentially being the steel mills that create the steel for any industry that uses steel. So part of what Google is doing is to create features for Google software and Google products. But a lot of it really is that we want to see that if 10 years from now any large industry is using AI, they're running it on a Google server. On Google CPUs, using Google's, Google's AI.

[Andy Inako]

APIs and they're running it on Apple products. The issue again gets back to again, my wife uses ChatGPT all day, every day. When I asked her about Apple Intelligence, I mentioned this last week. She didn't even know what it was. She didn't even know that it existed. TV we don't watch ads so we don't see anything. So she literally didn't know what Apple. She goes, what is Apple Intelligence legends like? And I said oh, don't worry about it, just go back to ChatGPT. So, so the, you know, but the, but I think that that's the issue is that there's a lot of Apple users that are already using AI quite happily. And you know, Apple has a long, they can play the long game because they aren't a software company trying to compete with everybody else. You know, they are a hardware company. No one's going anywhere. Yeah, and, and, and, but I wear.

[Leo Laporte]

Again I wear this thing which is a huge invasion of privacy. It's the B computer. It's recording everything. It's recording our conversation right now and then gives me notes at the end of the day. But this is a first step in what I really think people want, which is some sort of agentic AI partner.

[Andy Inako]

An AI partner that creates a legal document for you all day, every day.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So your lawyer might to do list and it does all sorts of useful things. If now I'm putting up with this, they don't even say where the AI is, where this stuff is going.

[Andy Inako]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I have no idea. And you know, for me that's a experiment. I don't have anything to hide. But I think most people would say, well wait, I want to make sure that it, I would like this. But I want to make sure, I mean there's do it to somewhere that is secure and private. And Apple has a great opportunity to put that in the, in the AirPods for instance.

[Andy Inako]

Well, I mean Apple has the opportunity if they can pull it off. And I don't know if they're going to be able to pull it off, but if they pull it off the gate, the play here is they have all, all of our mail, all of our messages, our biometrics, all of these other things that are in this kind of safe enclave and their ability to manage that to see like right now when I go to the gym, they don't even know that I'm at the gym again. And maybe they should put that app up when I maybe they you're here and you have to. I have to open the app every time I get to the gym so that I can, I can use my QR code. Be great if it just popped up because it was like, hey, I see that you're doing the same thing again. You know, and those are the kind of things though, or saying, you know, I'm checking eventually your blood pressure and your glucose and all these other things and you know, you shouldn't be eating.

[Leo Laporte]

That, Alex, whatever it is, I want.

[Andy Inako]

To add a little less salt to that soup. So, so the. So I think that that is. But they have the advantage of doing that, that, that in a way that no one else is going to be able to do anytime soon. I agree that because of the process.

[Leo Laporte]

They need, they need the smarts.

[Andy Inako]

But I think they, I think they have a lot of time to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Years. I agree. If they, if five years, they come. I mean, it's easy to disintermediate. I'm using an iPhone, all of a sudden it can do what this can do on an iPhone. Then I would do it to go back to Maps.

[Andy Inako]

I. It was a disaster. Maps was a disaster when they released it. It was horrible. It didn't work. It took you to the wrong place, took you through the wrong everything. Right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Tim apologize for it. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

And, and, and they asked him to your point. Tim apologized for it. I. Now if I go to Google Maps, feel like I dropped back a couple years. Like I just, I don't like it's on. At least on the iPhone. I don't feel like. And I used to never use Google. I mean, Apple Maps, I was always used Google Maps. And at some point I kind of broke down to the fact that every time you hit a text, it opens up Apple Maps. And then next thing I know, I was using it. And now it just feels. It's not that it's more accurate. It just feels better than what.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they have time. I agree. We're in the very earliest stages of AI and they have a lot of time. Yeah. Sometime it's unknown. I mean, things are happening faster than anybody thought.

[Andy Inako]

But again, all these tools are still available on your Apple platform. So it doesn't like it. Like I'm using on any given day, I have three or four AI apps open that I'm using for something.

[Leo Laporte]

This device only works with the iPhone and it has an app on the iPhone and actually kills the iPhone's battery because it's always sending stuff to the iPhone for processing. So, yeah, I have an AI folder. It's full of AI of all kinds of little AI things. But I would so prefer to do it in Apple's nice warm bath. But not yet. So maybe someday we're going to take a break. There was one more little piece of information from the quarterly results. Apple now has more than 2.35 billion active devices worldwide. So Oprah, you can update that. It is billions, 2.35 billion devices in your pocket now.

[Alex Lindsay]

Do they, do they include like all of the AirPods that people have lost?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm sure they do. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you take out the ones that people lost, that's it's got to be at least 600 million lower than that.

[Leo Laporte]

The ones in my sock drawer that I can't find.

[Alex Lindsay]

I know that. I know I have a pair of original AirPods somewhere. Somewhere in my house.

[Leo Laporte]

I know they say active, but I guess, you know, if you haven't deactivated them, then it's still active. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Lots more Apple news still to come with Jason Snell, Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey. This episode of Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by our good friends at Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. They've been doing it longer than we have. Well, the Melissa's launch of the Melissa address validation app in the Shopify App Store. Shopify plus merchants now have access to a critical data quality tool directly from the address experts. Key features of the Melissa address validation app include real time address validation. Customers are notified immediately if the address they enter contains errors or needs correction, which is great for you. It prevents shipping delays, reduces return rates. And by the way, Melissa's got global reach. The app validates addresses in over 240 countries and territories. I didn't even know there were that many. 240. Standardizing them according to local postal regulations. Even if Google's Auto Suggest is enabled, Melissa's app can correct better than Google can can standardize addresses can add missing components like postal codes, ensuring compliance with local formatting rules. It's CAS and SERP certified, which means the address engine certified by the United States Postal Service and Canada Post. So great validation for North American addresses, but again, it's global. It's everywhere. You also get smart alerts. So as your customer is shopping and then checks out in your Shopify account, the app will provide a warning on the thank you page if there's a potential issue with a shipping address, which gives the customer one last chance to update the information before the order is processed. Frankly, I wish everybody had this. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally sent stuff to the old studio. If it would just correct it. If it would let me just once correct it. Shopify plus merchants can easily install the Melissa address validation app to improve customer satisfaction and avoid the costs associated with returns and redeliveries. And don't worry about your data. With Melissa, you get secure encryption for all file transfers and an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies to SoC2. They're SoC2 compliant, so your data is absolutely safe. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. I don't have enough time to go through all of the amazing things Melissa can do. Check it out. Melissa.com twit if you want to try the API, you can get 1000 records clean for free. Melissa M E L I-S-S A.com twit We thank him so much for supporting Mac Break Weekly. We really appreciate it. You support us too when you use that address. Melissa.com twit so Mark Gurman on Sunday said Apple's working on an invitation you kind of an Evite clone called Confetti should be released any day now. Well, it was. It was released this morning. And they call it not Confetti but Invites. I think Confetti was better, but all right, Invites. You know what it is? It's very clear. Jason, it looks like you've played with this. I'm looking for this.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, yes, I have. I have both invited and been invited.

[Leo Laporte]

You have a flash mob coming up.

[Jason Snell]

I do. And Alex invited me to a rock band concert. So, I mean, everything's come out.

[Andy Inako]

I haven't gotten to Leo yet, but I was trying to do it before we got to it of inviting people. I invited Andy too.

[Leo Laporte]

Do I have to install it on my phone to get.

[Jason Snell]

No. So. So you have to be. To use invites, you have to be an iCloud plus subscriber, which means you actually need to be paying for icloud storage. Or in the Apple one bundle will work too. Okay, so it's not. That's an interesting little quirk. And then everything else is coming to. It's a link that just can open in a browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I just got an invite to.

[Jason Snell]

Rock Band Concert concert.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how exciting. Thank you, Alex.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I'll be there. And they've tied it into all their ecosystem stuff. So there's a. You can have a shared app, album of pictures from the event. You can have A playlist.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a nice idea of content.

[Andy Inako]

Shared album is the. Is the. That's the dark horse. Like that is hard to set up.

[Leo Laporte]

So we don't know yet because nobody's.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But February 11th, you're going to have that.

[Andy Inako]

You can put a photo in if you want. Now, once you've accepted it, I put one photo in for mine. But if you accept it, you should be able to post a photo. As someone who does a lot of events, shared photos, easily done by an average person without a big service, is not trivial.

[Leo Laporte]

Figuring out who can do what, Google can do it. Right. And you know what was. We had our tech TV reunion and that was a service like party time. What is this?

[Andy Inako]

Right. But it's always been a separate service in a sense that, you know, like for an Apple user, just being able to open this up and have it be easy and be able to use the thing and it feels about the same. I mean, Apple Maps is about the same as Google Maps too. We just talked about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Inako]

The thing is, if it's on your computer, if you download invites, Apple's going to probably do some PR around it.

[Leo Laporte]

And Apple Maps, you can share music playlists too, it looks like. Right. Okay.

[Andy Inako]

It's just, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this an actual event? I must say I'm going.

[Andy Inako]

It is actually an event.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So Carlita says looking forward to it. Jason Snail says, I like rock bands. So we've got a little text thing going on.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, I'm a. Maybe. So, you know.

[Alex Lindsay]

So where's this coming from?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I should say maybe.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, I texted it to you.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's the same.

[Jason Snell]

So one of the things that it works to you.

[Andy Inako]

Landy.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah. One of the things about how this works on the invite side is you have to add people one at a time and then you can choose to send them via messages, in which case it slides up a sheet in the app and you send them a message with the link or an email and it slides up a sheet and you send an email with the link. Or you can grab it and put it on your clipboard and then you have to go manually, put that wherever they're going to see it and then.

[Alex Lindsay]

They respond by the webmail to reply. Okay, contact.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool. It also shows. Here you can pull up my screen. There you go. It also shows their weather for the.

[Andy Inako]

Event, a map of where to go.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm using the iPhone, sharing and it's not really sharing.

[Andy Inako]

Let me.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not your fault. I think it's the iPhone sharing.

[Alex Lindsay]

I will give them credit that getting this invite by text message, it looks very, very pretty. It doesn't look like you don't get a pretty background. You don't get any fonts. You just get stupid, stupid, unprotected SMS text.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you even have an Apple map telling us how to get there.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, Apple weather with the, with the weather forecast for the event. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's for the date of. That's really.

[Alex Lindsay]

Sign in with Apple account. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's the only problem is my email is now. Is now my Mac address which I don't really use but it shouldn't, it.

[Andy Inako]

Shouldn'T require you to do that. I think that was part of the asks. But doesn't. It doesn't.

[Alex Lindsay]

Don't have an Apple account create yours. Oh, it's. I'm approaching this simply as a user.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Who only understands what is. What is shown to me and which.

[Andy Inako]

Is why I sent it to you.

[Alex Lindsay]

It said sign in with Apple account and there's no, there's no option other than that. Yeah, I have to, I have to verify email to reply.

[Leo Laporte]

It becomes an icloud photo shared concert. Which is kind of cool.

[Jason Snell]

I think you don't need to do that. But it's also possible that they are looking to see if there's a cookie that, that you have logged into Apple before. At which point it asks you to log in. So it's tied to your account. But I don't think anybody needs to make an icloud account in order to use it.

[Alex Lindsay]

All I can tell you is that what I'm looking at here doesn't say I don't have an icloud account. I don't want one. Just show me the invite. It's asking me to enter an email address and when I enter an email address it really wants that to be an icloud account because I gave it like a non icloud email and it said hey, why don't you sign into icloud Said, no, I don't want to. Well, we're not going to give you another button for anything else. Maybe I'm just. There is a full Apple support page for this.

[Andy Inako]

Again, this is rough edges of something. Of course the reason I sent it to you is because you had an Android and I wanted to see what the experience was in the Android. It turns out not very good. So it looked pretty and then it.

[Leo Laporte]

Was like oh, an Android.

[Alex Lindsay]

I mean as, as something. I mean as something that like you're supposed to Be sending to everybody, whether they're tech people or not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you have to be a blue bubble dude. What do you get with it?

[Andy Inako]

Well, I mean if, if you.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm a maverick. Unbroken, untamed.

[Andy Inako]

The cynical side, I don't want to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Get into your big plastic bag that you seem to be so comfortable and cozy.

[Leo Laporte]

And comfortable and cozy.

[Andy Inako]

The cynical side of me would say that, that if you made an attempt to include Android but didn't do it very well, it would push lots of people, like people. It'd be back to the blue bubble thing. Like, oh, it was really easy on an.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope you're not in the group, Andy. Sorry.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think that Tim's, Tim's like staff has already like given him like the shock collar treatment thing. And if somebody, if a reporter asks you about a relative who had a problem with in fights because he has an Android, what are you not going to say? So I'm not going to say they should buy a five phone. That's right.

[Jason Snell]

I can, I can verify that this works for anybody. And you don't need, need an Apple account. If you don't have an Apple account, you put in your email address and they send you an email verification link and that's it. So that's, that's the difference there.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm adding it to my, my calendar. So it has a very simple way to do that.

[Andy Inako]

That's nice. And then, and then the photo that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Got posted up to here, I'm not, I'm not seeing that. I did exactly that. I gave it, I gave it an email address. Now goes to the next page. Sign in with Apple account, email or phone number. Continue with password. Sign in with Passkey. Requires a device with iOS 17.

[Jason Snell]

If they're doing that have screwed this up badly. If they require everybody who's involved in the invitation to create an Apple account and use it as lead generation, then what are they doing?

[Leo Laporte]

That would be bad. Okay, but you know what? If you're going to use Evites, you have to create an Evite account. Right. To accept or no. Is that not true?

[Jason Snell]

I suppose, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, but I'm having trouble adding a photo.

[Andy Inako]

Oh really?

[Leo Laporte]

Photos.

[Andy Inako]

So you saw the photos down below and it says add photos and you hit.

[Leo Laporte]

So again, show my screen, please. Thank you. So should I click Add Photos? Yeah, I'll click Add Photos. Then it shows your photos. And it doesn't say, it should say.

[Andy Inako]

Up in the top it says select upload.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay, so now I can upload from here. So I'm going to upload. Let's see a concert of some kind.

[Jason Snell]

Andy, I think you're right. It seems like after it tells you that all you'll need to do is verify your email, the next step is that it asks you to create an Apple account with that email, which is not. Not verifying your email. Yeah, so that's, that's. So basically you have to create an Apple account in order to say that you're going to the. Your kid's friend's party comes down. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, but you know what? Everybody who's anybody is in Apple.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but they should have. Right, they should have a. I get the idea that you want to capture people if they've got an Apple account because then it ties everything together and that's, you know, it's really great. But like, like if all you're doing is trying to say yes to your kid's friend's birthday party, having to fill out and you're not in the Apple ecosystem at all, having to fill out a. Create an Apple account in order to do this with all those boxes that you have to fill out. That's ridiculous. Come on.

[Andy Inako]

And did you upload something or did you have trouble?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm uploading some pictures of Bret Michaels, I think. I don't know. Anyway, just to give people a concert feeling.

[Andy Inako]

And then in the shared albums, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Andy Inako]

They're starting to come up. So then the shared albums, you can see the Leo's popping up in my photo. This is on my desktop. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So it showed up.

[Andy Inako]

So it showed up in the folder. Yeah. And the reason.

[Leo Laporte]

That's Madonna, I think, punching somebody in the face.

[Andy Inako]

But I think that what's interesting about that is a lot of us want to do things where we display lots of images. Like we select them and display them in a. You know, on screens during the show, during the event. And so having a shared album, that isn't. No, I love that all the other ones have been. Are a little bit. And I haven't done it for years. So it was like five years ago, we kind of gave up on doing that because it was all quirky, like all these quirky services that did this and being able to give everybody an event and having them all put it in, I mean, it's not going to work for a stadium, but for a party, like a wedding, having 150 people posting images to it and then you end up with all those images. Right. So as a bride and groom, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Get all these one would expect it works best with people who are on iPhones.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And if Johnny wants to come to the party. Johnny darn. Well, better get an iPhone.

[Andy Inako]

No pressure.

[Leo Laporte]

No pressure, Johnny. I like it that it comes as a text message. You know, obviously one of the reasons you need an icloud is cause the photos are being added from Apple's photos. Right. I don't know if you can add them from another from Google Photos.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, you can. I'm about to do that thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, good. Okay. I think this is nice. I think this is really nice. As I said, we used for the tech TV party a similar third party app and you had to make an account but you could then upload photos but they all ended up in a text stream.

[Andy Inako]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is just all because now it's in my photos app.

[Jason Snell]

We should say it's iPhone only. But the. You can also just do this from the web. You can make an invitation for the web again if you're an iCloud+subscriber you can just go to iCloud invites iCloud.com invites and you can do it there. And yeah, I think, I think it is nice. My question is going to be how is Apple going to keep this up or is this going to be like clips and cards and all sorts of other things that they ship and then they forget that they exist at all because it's, you know, it's fun. I'm also a little surprised that, that what they're doing is an Evite. I thought they might try to tackle like let's all get together kind of more broad, like maybe a little more businessy and they're like not interested in that. I guess it's very much just I'm having a fun event. Let's share music and photos which I think maybe it's more Apple y in.

[Andy Inako]

Some ways if you look at the sub 18 year old group that could be a pretty powerful, you know, mix a mix of people to make this really easy for them to just throw something together. I could definitely. I mean I'll have to, I'll have, I'll talk to my, my experts, my kids after the show and find I just you know and see what they think of it. But if they would use it. But I think that the music and the photos and all that stuff really fit into a, you know, the, the teen category which is their largest segment of users.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I don't know. You have teens. I don't have them anymore. They're all adults. But my sense is that teens kind of don't like big tech and kind of. It's not kind of cool to just use an Apple thing. You know, they want to use something kind of.

[Andy Inako]

Well, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

They do it on TikTok if they're possible, or Snap or something. Right.

[Andy Inako]

It's just that these, these other ones don't have this.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have it.

[Andy Inako]

You know, and so, you know, it all depends. I mean, I think that there's still a pretty heavy talking to, again, to my, to my daughter about it. She said it is softening a little bit, the Android thing. Like, it's. A couple years ago, if you talk to my kids, they were like, like everybody's got an iPhone or people are, you know, no one wants to come in with a green bubble. And now it's like, oh, there's half of her friends are on both. So it's a little easier. So it'll be interesting to see how. But I can see that for kids that have most of their friends on iPhones or willing to put an email in, they would. I could see how this would be really easy for them to.

[Leo Laporte]

Jason, if you had just used this for inviting me to participate in your Six Colors report card, maybe I would not have forgotten it and blown it off. Now it's too late. It's too late. Now the Six Colors report card is in. You go out, you ask writers, editors, developers, even podcasters what they think about a broad variety. You have a series of questions, you ask 14 different subjects, you ask them to rate them on a scale of worst to best one to five, and then text commentary. So let's go through the report card.

[Jason Snell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything of interest that you noted from your experts. By the way, Alex and I both blew you off, but Andy did it. So. Thank you, Andy, for representing.

[Jason Snell]

Thank you, Andy.

[Andy Inako]

I missed it.

[Alex Lindsay]

It was an honor just to be involved.

[Andy Inako]

I'm embarrassed. I don't know how I missed it.

[Alex Lindsay]

And Jason only had to remind me.

[Jason Snell]

I sent you a few emails.

[Leo Laporte]

I apologize. I just feel like I don't have anything relevant. I just want it to say, I.

[Jason Snell]

Mean, honestly, doing those.

[Andy Inako]

So I literally didn't see it.

[Jason Snell]

So when there's 60 different people, your scores aren't going to really change things. It means that you don't get quoted. Yeah. What did I take away from this? I think the Mac really is at an all time high in. Not just in sales, but in terms of people. Like, if you look at the. I've been doing this 10 years now, so I've got 10 years of data, which is amazing. And you can see the trough in the late 2000 and tens, mid to late 2000 and tens on the Mac side. And the Mac is, you know, it's got a 4.2 out of 5 average now. And it's like it came Apple silicon brought it back to life and it's still at this high plateau after a really, really rough five or six years. And then hardware reliability. Somebody said, I forget who, like hey, there were no gates this year. I mean that's another place where Apple's killing it. It is very funny to think that Apple is basically better at hardware than at software, but it's really been better at hardware than software for quite a while now, for probably a decade that the software is kind of old and, and they've struggled with aspects of their software but the hardware honestly I think has never been better. And then on the other side of it, it wasn't an all time low for developer relations, but it was the lowest since the first year of the survey, which was in the depths of some real App Store disaffection. When Eddie Q. Was running the App Store before Phil Schiller came back or was given the control of the App Store and did some reforms. And that I think that has to do with the dma. It has to do with Apple has exerted its control over developers in the long run. I think a lot of people pointed to the lack of interest in developing apps for the Vision Pro as being Apple reaping what it sows for not treating developers well on its platforms and that. So that's not surprising. So you know, I think again the goal of the, of the report card is not to break news. The goal of the report card is to give people the feel of what the general trends of vibe. Check it is, it is the vibe in the room for 2024 about like what did Apple do in all these different areas? How's everybody feeling? And I will also say if you are immersed in the conversations about Apple, whether they're on blogs or podcasts or video or wherever, I don't think anything in this will surprise you because this is trying to quantify those conversations and, and it's a, so it's a nice time to like pause and reflect about the year, get everybody's take, check everybody's temperature on it and see maybe how it's changed over time. And so that's what the developer report.

[Leo Laporte]

Card I think is very valuable because you talk to a lot of developers, you've got Craig Harkenberry, Marco Arment, James Thompson and Ianaco who says if Apple treated all of its customers the same way they treat developers, we'd still be waiting for cut copy and paste on the iPhone. Of course you always get the balmo in there. It is a bad report card, not the worst, but as bad as it's been since 2015 for developer relations.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean that, that is, that is the truth of it. And some. Yeah, Craig Hockenberry, longtime developer, you know what he said is Apple is blowing it with developers full stop. That's just his, that's his whole thing. Apple is doing a lot of taking these days and not giving back to the developer community that has helped make its products thrive. And I think that's very much how developers feel about this is Apple. Apple's attitude seems to be very much that developers are, are getting rich on Apple's greatness in building these products and never really acknowledging the fact that one of the reasons the products are successful and great is because of the thriving App Store ecosystem which Apple takes credit for instead of all the content that's inside it. And that's a very extreme view, but I will say there are a lot of developers who feel that way. And so when European Commission comes along and says, okay, we're going to change some of these rules in our. Apple fights it. And they fight it by making claims about what the whole App Store is about that are frankly, you know, insulting to developers who feel like Apple has an opportunity to maybe mend some fences and instead is waging all out war against being allowed, you know, giving developers any latitude on iOS. So it's not great, it's not a great scene. And I think they're right about the Vision Pro. I think that's a great example where one of the reasons that, that there has not been a great experimentation by developers because again, Vision Pro was never going to sell very well. But I think if developers were enthusiastic about playing ball with Apple and being a part of this, there would have been like more of an attitude of well, I know it's not going to pay off now, but like it gets us, you know, it gets us in good with Apple and it lets us experiment with new Apple technology and it's going to be, it's going to be fun and we'll just do it. And you know, if you treat those developers as a pretty serious cold legal relationship where you take your cut and it's just strictly business, which I think is what developers have felt for the last few years that stuff's not going to happen and it didn't happen a lot of the sort of more let's, it's fun. Let's try out this platform. The developers just don't feel that enthusiastic about their relationship with Apple that is.

[Leo Laporte]

And it can hurt you with, with new products. There seems to be some consensus that the Vision Pro is struggling because developers just don't trust Apple enough to develop for it. Yeah, John Gordon.

[Jason Snell]

And you probably have to develop on vibes and the good vibes are gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And the regulation is just brought to the fore because that's where Apple has to make claims about why it does what it does. And it just reinforces how developers feel that they're basically like employees of Apple unfunded employees of Apple who have to just, you know, know, do what they say and that there's no other options on at least on iOS.

[Leo Laporte]

There's also a side effect to Tim Cook's politicking with the new administration. It's seems to have hurt Apple's grade. It's the worst grade yet. Used to be their environmental, social, now it's their world impact.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, because everybody, it's the, it's the Rorschach test of the entire thing. People just read into it whatever they want. My goal with it, and I tried to be a little clear with at this time is the idea is Apple talks a lot about its goals and philosophies and how it wants to leave the world better than they found it and all of those things. And really this category is how do you think they're doing in those terms? And it's all over the place. A lot of praise for shipping carbon neutral products, including the first carbon neutral Mac, which is that Mac Mini. But it's tempered with the idea that they're going all in on AI and there are some serious energy and climate climate implications for doing that. Praise for accessibility. Not only Braille screen input updates, but AirPods Pro hearing aids and like and a general commitment to accessibility. But at the same time, you know, several of them brought up Tim Cook, you know, spending a million bucks on the Trump inauguration and feeling bad about that. And like, again, it's not everybody. It's. It's almost 60 people. But people that are not happy about that part. I. My favorite comment maybe in the whole thing is from, well, there are two comments in this category. Mike Hurley said Apple's too big and too complicated to be a pure good force in the world. Which, yeah, I mean It's a corporation. That's what it is. It's not a. It's not a charity. It's not your friend. It's a corporation. And then Zach hall said, sometimes Apple reminds you that it is a corporation. And it is. That's just what it is. And I. You. But that's what I like about this category is Apple is a corporation, but it's a corporation that says it has corporate values. What do you think about that? And 59 different people gave me different opinions about it. And that's like, that's, that's why I do it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I had to think kind of hard about this one and like, I had to finally decide that next year's ranking is going to be a doozy because we get to see after a year of Apple working in this unique political and economic environment, what they're capable of doing or how bad they can act. I ultimately decided that not enough has happened yet to have that affect the score. But even so, it was like, I gotta take a point off. It's normally a three. I think I did. I give it a three or two. But anyway, I'm basically, look, oh, God, next year is going to be. It's gonna be a tough one.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is one thing that we're a year in which is the Vision. And it received. It tied for the lowest average score with Developer Relations. Yep.

[Jason Snell]

It's a D. In report card terms, that's a D 2.4. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Which is. I, I don't. I mean, I don't entirely agree with that score because I, I think the Vision Pro is what it is. It's, it's. It's a year of Vision Pro now.

[Leo Laporte]

It is still tbd.

[Jason Snell]

It is as weird and expensive and not something that normal people should buy as it was a year ago. I think, I think, you know, some people are judging it, that it's not, you know, it's not a popular product, which I think again, at that price, it was never going to be that. Some people are judging it based on Apple's seeming lack of support for things like more content or supporting the development effort. I will say the Vision Pro is a lot better than it was a year ago. The Vision OS updates have actually made it more useful and better.

[Andy Inako]

I found it has more features. I found that the Vision Pro is less stable. Like, for me, at least. It's just like yesterday, I was looking at immersive content, which I could. The shark content, which I could hear but I couldn't see. You know, like And I required me to kind of back up and drop out and come back in.

[Jason Snell]

It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They're like, they're trying to protect you by dimming the glasses so you're not frightened by the choo.

[Alex Lindsay]

Chanted, I just saw it.

[Andy Inako]

Like it just showed the video throughput. But no, no, no sharks. And you don't want to see the.

[Leo Laporte]

Sharks because you're not ready for the sharks.

[Andy Inako]

Happened for the Vision Pro, for me.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that it's just a little cockeyed.

[Andy Inako]

Like it's just a little. There's something about it. Like my screen now comes up just a little off. I didn't think it would bother me, but bothers me a lot. So, like it's so anyway, I feel like they've added more features to the Vision Pro. I feel like it, and I feel this all the way across Apple's ecosystem is that it has got more features and less stability. And I just feel like, I feel like I run into that everywhere, which is that the interface is a little bit more quirky, it does weird things, it crashes more often. I feel like there's a, like, let's just keep on trying to put all these features in and keep up with Android or whatever. And I just feel like we keep on paying the price in stability and to be honest, ui, I feel like the Apple UI almost on every platform is getting worse, not better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's take a little break. You're watching Mac Break weekly. There's still lots more Apple news, believe it or not. A busy, busy week from Apple. Andy Inocco. Alex Lindsay, Jason Snell. Thank you, Jason, for the report card. Thank you for the six colors graphs.

[Jason Snell]

Busy week.

[Leo Laporte]

Great job. Sixcolors. Com. Yeah, yeah, I'll get you on that HP Inkjet subscription. I think it'll solve many of your woes.

[Jason Snell]

Shaq has a big tank for me. I guess that's Epson, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's Epson.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, but it's just a big tank full of ink and I'll dive in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Epson decided not to cover me in ink. I had a long term sponsorship relationship with Epson on the radio show and for some reason they decided not to. They thought I was too political and so they said we're not going to sponsor you anymore. We got Shaq. I think is what they were really saying is Shaq was not cheap. We can't. That's what they really saying. Yeah. The radio show was far from political, but you know, it was on a right wing network. So maybe that was. Ah, yeah. This episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by the wonderful people at Sock Doc. These guys. I love Excuses, excuses. Shame on you. When was the last time you needed to go to the doctor? But you pushed it off, right? You made the excuse you're too busy. It'll heal on its own. I do this all the time. Lisa's always said, go to the doctor. I don't need help. I got it. I got this. I'm gonna get better all by myself. We've all been there. And part of it is, you know, just finding the right doctor then booking an appointment is daunting. I bet you, many of you have said, yeah, well, I'd go to the doctor, but it's gonna be a three month wait. No, no, go to zocdoc. There is no reason to delay. Zocdoc makes it easy to find and book a doctor who's right for you. Zocdoc, It's a free app or website. You can do it either way. Where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and even click to instantly book an appointment in network appointments with more than 100,000, 100,000 healthcare providers, not just MDs. Everything from mental health, dental health, primary care to urgent care. I was looking for a gerontologist for my mom. Easy to find, easy to book. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance. You can say, I want them to be nearby. You want to be a good fit for the medical need you have and for the style you like. Because there are reviews from verified patients. So you can say, I want a doctor who's highly rated. And then read the reviews because the patients will tell you what kind of. Is this a doctor with a great bedside manner or is this a doctor with, with superior intelligence? You know, and that may not. Those may not be the same person. The reviews will help you find the right doctor. Then once you find them, you can see their actual appointment openings. They're right there on there. This is why docs love it. You could choose a time slot that works for you. You don't even have to make a phone call. You just click to instantly book a visit. So really, if you've been putting it off, you don't need to anymore. Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within just just 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same day appointments in many cases. Look, I love Zocdoc. I use Zoc. Doc. Stop putting off those doctor appointments. Go to Zocdoc.com MacBreak to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. Zocdoc.com MacBreak Z O cdoc.com/macbreak Zoc Doc, you're gonna love it. Wait a minute, I gotta do that again. It's so much fun. Thank you ZocDoc for the little music there and for, for supporting Mac Break Weekly. And don't forget folks, when you use that address, you support us. So yes, I know you can go get the app, but just go, just go to the address too. Just, you know, click the link from there. That's just, that's all I applied. I have a T Mobile iPhone and Apple is now teaming up. You know, Apple has satellite connectivity in areas where there's no cell connectivity using Global Star, but they are now working with Starlink to provide satellite phone access. T Mobile's in a beta test I applied. I have not yet been accepted. The minute I am, I will let you know because I am a T Mobile customer. It really makes you wonder, you know, how much longer you're going to need a mobile carrier. Starlink's pretty much everywhere. Who pays for this? I guess is the question, is it going to cost money? Apple's put a lot of money into Global Star. Will they continue to do so?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's different because this is still just an extension of the existing cell network. So it will never basically use Starlink. Instead of a local cell tower. It's for places that have absolutely no access whatsoever. But it's very, very interesting in that emergency SOS works by again, hold up your tricoder, lock onto a satellite that it tells you to find. This is just by description of how it works. It's not as simple as just simply taking the phone out of your pocket. But you don't necessarily have to set it up on a tripod with a Pringles can wrapped around the antenna to aim it specifically somewhere. And it's not just for heavily filtered and optimized SOS messages. It is meant to be used as a regular mobile broadband connection.

[Leo Laporte]

They've been doing this on some Samsung phones for a while, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, but as you say, I mean, this is not going to be something they give away for free. This is going to have to be something.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a beta. Right now you do have to have iOS 18. 3. There will be a toggle switch in your cellular data settings to manage the satellite feature. Apple spokesperson declined to comment. T Mobile said, and this is from bloomberg.com, the test will begin with Selected optimized smartphones, whatever that is. And then the full launch will support the vast majority of modern smartphones. They apparently have opened the beta. Some users running Android 15 on Google or Android device. This news tanked Global Star in the stock market, by the way. I really think it's not really a threat so much to Global Star because that's still the emergency connectivity. It's more of a threat, I would say, to the carriers. So it's very interesting. That's T Mobile. That's in this first test, maybe they.

[Andy Inako]

Feel like they have the most connectivity problems for a long time. I had T Mobile AT and T and Verizon. So you got a real good sense of what was good and what wasn't. And T Mobile consistently has problems like everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to qualify what you just said because it's very dependent on your location. So that's true for where you are. It is not true for where I am, but for some I have also AT&T, Verizon, T Mobile.

[Andy Inako]

But for someone who travels all over the world, I'm just saying that T Mobile, like I had a lot of sample points all over the US and I'm not saying that there aren't places where T Mobile is super fast and very, very effective. It's just that it's spotty. It's just a spotty experience. So that's all. And so of course, that they would be the first one. And they're also the ones that tend to be the most aggressive because they're still the outside. They're on the outside curve, you know, so they're going to be the first ones that want to make a deal and do something cool.

[Leo Laporte]

So the initial version, just texting, that's all you get. SpaceX and T Mobile say they plan to expand into all data and even voice calls in the future. U.S. only something to pay attention to. I mean, honestly, Starlink is well positioned to be. The problem is you need, don't you need a clear view of the sky? I think you do. I don't know how this would work.

[Andy Inako]

I don't think it's going to work the way your cell phone works for a long time. Like it's going to, it's, it's as a backup that, oh, I need to get a hold, you know, I need to be able to make a phone call and I have to walk outside or do whatever. I don't think you're going to be able to pick up. You're going to be in a building using your cell phone. With Starlink anytime soon. So I think that it's good if you're in the middle of nowhere and it may be able to give you. There are places, as you know, you drive to Bodega Bay, there's a section of that dead. Like there's nothing. And that's where something like T Mobile would be great just to get the map data, just to. Because a lot of times I go, oh, we're going to Jenner, or my brother lives up on Jenner. And so we're going to go up there. And if I want to do that, I'm going to go save the map. Save the map to figure that out, because I may not have it when I get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this will be interesting. We shall see. It's the biggest change in cell phone connectivity since cell phones.

[Andy Inako]

It is, but I still think it's early on. I mean, I think that this is a decade away of us using it regularly. This is not something, I mean, we're going to. This is oftentimes. And I think the problem when we're in technology is we see things. I talk about this all the time. We see things. And you think it's going to be next year or years from now, and it's really 20 years away. You know, like, it's just. We have. We have kind of a problem with Zoom also.

[Alex Lindsay]

We need. Also we need competition in that space. We need different constellations. So it's not just Starlink that has access to basically global satellite connectivity. And Elon was nice enough to basically petition the FCC last year to say, oh, no, no, no, we can't allow Boeing to add more status to launch some of those satellites. It's too crowded up there.

[Leo Laporte]

Too crowded.

[Alex Lindsay]

How are we going to get 20,000 more satellites of our own up there if we. If you let them launch a test constellation of 4,000?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Elon does have now a Brennan Carr, a very formidable friend in running the FCC and apparently running every department of the government. So I think Elon will get whatever Elon wants.

[Alex Lindsay]

One of the less crazy things that Brendan Carr was talking about like before, during the Biden administration was, was basically saying we should be more flexible about what constitutes broadband in underserved parts of the country. That we should basically not be insisting that every single provider lay fiber optic cable. Physically, we should be okay. We should allow ourselves in the interest of spreading broadband as far as possible, allowing satellite providers to do that as well. So that's.

[Andy Inako]

Again, it's a bummer, though. I mean, like, we figured out how to run power. We figured out how to run telephone lines, we figured out how to run plumbing to the, to, you know, to everywhere in the United States. The advantage of the 30s, we figured that out. I know, a long time ago. We figured out how to do this and we figured out how to make it work. And instead what we're going to do is everything's going to be just a little crappy, you know, because the satellite connection, I mean, I have a, I have a Starlink. It's not the same as fiber, fiber, like. And the thing is that it won't scale and the fact that it's used everywhere will, you know, will slow down us putting real connectivity in. And the thing is, is that people that I talk to are looking. There's a lot of people who, you know, want to move or do whatever. First thing they do is can I, like people that I work with, if they're going to move somewhere, the first thing they want to know is, is there fiber? And so for small towns and rural areas and everything else, if there's no fiber, there's like, literally there's no chance that they're going to move there. And it's, you know, because that's, I think that it's not good for the rural communities. They think it is, but what it's, it's just sugar, you know, like. And the problem is, is that it's not enough. And as you have more people subscribing the satellite, I know they keep on putting up satellites, but it is not scaling with the number of people and you end up with congestion. It was great when we first got Starlink. I got a Starlink and it was like 150 up and down. It only drops 20 seconds every 45 minutes, which means I can't really use it. So but now it's like, you know, it's 30 or 40 up and down and it keeps on shrinking down. Whereas, you know, my Comcast is a gig down and 300 up, you know, and we're not going to see that kind of speed anytime soon with satellite, you know. And so you get 300 up on your Comcast. It's funny. So here's the funny thing. I bought a new modem.

[Leo Laporte]

There's 34 of my Comcast, and they'll.

[Andy Inako]

Tell you you can't do it. I bought the two gig down and one gig up. Yeah, two gig down and 300 or 400 up or something like that. And then they told me I couldn't have it. Like, I literally paid for it. And then said I couldn't have it. When I switched my modems, I had to reset the modem. I'm using this new Ubiquiti or whatever and someone who I talked to just flipped a bit and. And I suddenly had 300. I shouldn't have said, can I talk.

[Leo Laporte]

To the same person? Because I'm on Ubiquity as well. I need to.

[Andy Inako]

Probably shouldn't have said this on the show. I'll be back down to 40. But, but, but the. And I was like, he's like, is everything okay? Are you able to get your, is your connectivity working? I was like, yes, it's working great. Thank you so much.

[Alex Lindsay]

Change of things.

[Andy Inako]

Like I was like, go now.

[Leo Laporte]

So I just tested mine. It's 816 down. It's supposed to be a gig 1.6.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's 19 up. It's supposed to be 30.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. Mine's routinely 300.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm so jealous. Now I should mention when I talk to the Comcast people, DOCSIS 4 is coming this year and that will change that. That may be you're maybe getting DOCSIS 4 somehow.

[Andy Inako]

Well, we're waiting. Yeah. Well, I put a brand new like high end. I mean I put a very expensive modem in. Like it's the, the ubiquity, you know, modem. And, and it definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm using Comcast business modem.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, I never use the Comcast. Well, I have, I don't want to. You don't have to.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they say you have to for business. You have consumer or business?

[Andy Inako]

I have consumer. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you don't have to. If you're business, they want to manage.

[Andy Inako]

If, if your business, your, your, your bandwidth is so much better than consumer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wait, yeah, I know. So, yeah, it's by the way, twice as much. I pay twice as much.

[Andy Inako]

I pay like 120 for it for that speed, you know, Anyway. But the thing is is that satellite is just, it's, you know, the thing is, is that if everyone's got satellite they won't, they, they'll be like, oh, we don't need fiber, which is great for Elon Musk but not good for the rural communities. And, and the thing, if we, you know, it's, it's, it's not good for the rural communities, it's not good for small towns. It's not good for all of those things because what would vastly improve people moving to those communities is fiber. Like, you know, structure. Yeah. Is. Is fiber something that And I. And I'm not willing to listen to anyone talk about we can't do it because we have done it a couple times now, you know, and it would be a huge, you know, workforce development process of all these people running fiber and everything else. But we should, because then when we want to change to 10 gigs up and down or 40 gigs up and down, we already have the infrastructure to do that. You know, like, we don't. We don't have to run more lines again. Again, you know, it's just. It's insanity. It's insanity. And it's really. It's. It's a. It's a bummer, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I've got bad news for you. Elon Musk, among all of the other things he's done this week, has frozen the infrastructure bill's broadband funds that we're.

[Andy Inako]

Going to go to those little communities is competition. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that. All that money, it was literally, I think hundreds of millions, if not billions is frozen right now and probably will never. That'll be. That'll be it.

[Andy Inako]

Maybe. At least for the next four years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. As long as we can get elections, we'll be okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, we'll get elections.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

We, we can. We can have the fun of walking. Walking to a place and giving a piece of paper and getting a sticker.

[Leo Laporte]

And dipping your finger about it. Yeah, yeah. Apple is scrapping works, according to German on its Mac connected augmented reality glasses. Now, is it important to say that those were the ones connected to the Mac? They wanted, of course, to make these AR glasses work with the iPhone, but apparently they needed too much battery power and too much computing power. So are they still going ahead with those or.

[Jason Snell]

Gurman knows very little about this, and you can sort of see it. His sources are good, but, you know, they only tell him so much. I would say what he just. What we know is, according to Grim experiment, is Apple was working on an AR glasses product, like how Meta is working on one, and they were trying to tether it to an iPhone to use for all the computing resources and use. You know, basically the iPhone would drive this thing. It would be the brains and this thing would be the output. And they realized it, you know, it doesn't work. There's not enough. It needs too much. So they said, well, let's do it with a Mac because the Mac is way more powerful. And then, then. Okay, stop there. We know that according to Gurman. And then Apple executives looked at what they were working on and said, this isn't It I've seen a lot of people say, oh, well, see, Apple has killed this whole project and they're not going to make glass AR glasses. I don't know if that's necessarily something you could assume from this. I looked at it and said, well, I mean, who wants AR glasses that like, that you have to attach to a Mac? Like, I'm just going to walk around with my Mac and my glasses on and. But they were doing it because it.

[Leo Laporte]

Would be a first step though, right?

[Jason Snell]

Well, but I mean, but here's the thing they were doing it for. The idea is you want it eventually to be something that you can walk around with and we don't know any of the details of this product but. And we don't know whether Apple was like, nope, we're never doing AR glasses again. I would guess that's not what they said. Or this ain't it really like, this ain't it. The thing you were trying here, the path you were walking down where you started with the iPhone and then you went to the Mac and then you made this thing. It actually makes me wonder if they're doing something like saying, back to R and D with you. This, this path is the wrong path to walk. Go back and start again. It's not going to be a product we can make in the next three or four years. Let's push it out a little bit more and, and that that's normal. So I think we don't know whether this is an abandonment of the category again. I would guess not. Or if it is Apple having a particular project that they were working on that at some point they said, this is not going to lead to a product that people want, want. I, as an optimist, what I would say is maybe part of this is they're looking at the meta Ray Bans and saying if we're going to productize anything right now, AirPods that are glasses is a better play than this five years out ar glasses thing. That's just, I mean it's going to be, it's going to be years before we have powerful enough computing and enough battery that is light enough to put in glasses. Right. Like it's just going to be a long time. So we don't know. That's the part we don't know about this story.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I agree 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Erman does say the company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro, including updated versions of the original model. It also has other concepts in the works, such as AirPods with cameras and executives still hope to eventually create a set of standalone AR glasses someday. So he even says this doesn't mean that's down.

[Andy Inako]

And Apple is. I mean, these are leaking. But Apple's notorious for killing projects that they've spent hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on. And, you know, I've talked to folks that used to work at Apple and they won't say what those are, but they'll say, there are things that I saw that we had in our, that we were testing in our living room that I would have happily thrown down money for. And Apple just decided now the market's not big enough or we're not doing it as well as we could. And, and they're not worried about the fact that they spent. You know, one thing about Apple is very rarely do they go, well, we put money into it, so we're going to put it out no matter what. But they're really like, if it's not going to represent the brand or the way we want it to do it, we're going to kill it, you know, and before, until they've released it, once they release it, they're going to hang on to it. But all before that, it's all, you know, it's all up for grabs. And I think that, so I think that, yeah, I think that they probably decide, I, I'm going to guess that they've decided to put it back into research and like, just start over. Like, take all the technology we figured out and let's rethink this again and build it up again.

[Leo Laporte]

But nothing to panic about.

[Alex Lindsay]

It doesn't seem like they're leaving any money on the table by not having this product. However, I hope that they don't allow best to cloud their judgment of good because again, meta Array bands are a really nice product. The only problem with it is the first word in that product name. Meta. Just the idea of having a camera that can basically be the object of AI requesting, basically saying that how many calories is in this? Or can I take this with this medication, or where can I go in this neighborhood to get a cup of coffee? All that sort of stuff where I don't need to have text in front of my eyeballs, I just need to be able to say the thing I'm looking at. Please help me interact with that. And that's a really, really great product.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple has, according to Gurman, also changed how Apple cares care plus works. Usually when I buy AppleCare and I don't always buy it, but I buy it for what I consider the life of the product a few years. No longer according to Gurman. Will you be able to do the two to three year pay in advance at least at physical retail stores. Only monthly and annual subscriptions. But you still will be able to get those multi year plans in the online store, which is weird. Weird that you would have something different in the physical store. Is that, does that make sense? Why would they even do that?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Andy Inako]

I think it's because it's easier for them to turn do the other online stuff and they probably have some mechanisms in the store that take longer but they're probably just gonna, they're probably gonna. Good night. All of it back to yearly. That's my guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Or go to monthly or monthly.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, I mean but they're not gonna, they're gonna go away from, from.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the same amount of money if you do it monthly as yearly. Right. It's not like. Or is it a break if you do it yearly? I think it's the same.

[Andy Inako]

It's not, it's not very much different. It might be a little bit more and that could be a lot of money for Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I think people like to do it though if they're, if they say, well I might get a new phone in a year, which I always do. You don't want to buy for more than a year. I don't know. It's a strange note, but it's, that's what it is. Is. So the first. I'm happy about this. The first native iPhone porn app is available now in the eu.

[Jason Snell]

Congratulations, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called Hot Tub. But you have to be in the EU because you have to get it.

[Jason Snell]

Get me in the water.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Hot Tub. You have to get it at an alternative store, the alt store Palm. This is something the Digital Market act forced Apple to do. Apple not happy about this.

[Alex Lindsay]

Especially, especially when like the, when the, when the developers basically tweet out it's the first, first porn app approved by Apple and Apple said no, no, no.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Alex Lindsay]

We didn't approve it. We did the legal thing we had to do to certify it so that it could be sold through an app store we do not approve of.

[Jason Snell]

At which point the developer of this of, of alt store pal sent a screenshot of his email from Apple saying Apple has approved this for sale. Well, they should change that word then. I mean look, look, this is, this is Riley Tested who does All Star poking the bear, putting a big thing out that says it's the first Apple approved porn app is like an Apple would say there are actually rules against suggesting, implying an endorsement by Apple. And I think that this is, I think, I think he's making trouble where he maybe needed to not make so much trouble. At the same time though, the letter of the law in the EU is that Apple should not be using any of its mechanisms to prevent apps that it would. It doesn't want to exist because alternative app stores should be allowed to make their own rules. And that's what's happened here. I'll tell you the immediacy of Apple's response. I got an email sent to me by Apple PR almost immediately with a statement and that was on the record and then a whole bunch of on background stuff that was pretty wild in its vociferousness about this and about how it was about, I mean you wouldn't, you name it, they said it about how this is linked to hardcore pornography and then therefore to human trafficking. How Alt Store, because they took some money from Epic is therefore a puppet of Epic Games. And how, how the, how, how Alt Store having this in Fortnite which is played by children is so inappropriate. Like they went down the list and you know, I get what they're saying, but they also see this as an opportunity and this has been coming for I would say more than a year. They've been waiting for their opportunity to point and say see, this is what happens when we can't have complete control over our platform. There's an app that has porn in it. I mean leaving aside that like literally you could just use Safari and see porn if you wanted to. And that's an Apple made app because that's the Internet and that's how it works. They've been waiting for their opportunity to say see, look at the Pandora's Box that has been opened by the European Commission. And like I, I get it. What makes me angry about this is how disingenuous Apple is about this. Because there have been two instances in the last year where Apple has used it's, it's supposedly neutral notarization process that it's not allowed to interfere with, which is what they did here. They notarize this app even though they don't agree with it because it's not supposed to be a de facto app store acceptance or rejection system. It's supposed to just scan for things that would harm your system. But there's not supposed to be any ideology behind it all. Twice in the last year and we've talked about it here Apple has just, just used that system, pulled that lever to stop Mac emulators from appearing in other app platforms, alternative app stores. There's no rule about that they should use other means for that. But they had no problem pulling that lever and turning notarization from something that was supposed to be neutral into something that has a big lever that Apple can pull whenever it wants to. So when Apple says, oh no, we couldn't stop porn because we don't have a lever to pull, our hands are tied. What makes me so angry about this is their hands aren't tied because they pulled the lever twice already. But this time they didn't pull the lever in part, I believe, because they want to be able to point to it and say, oh no, everything is going to hell because Apple doesn't have complete control of iPhones in the EU.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the statement I'm getting reading this from TechCrunch issued by Apple which We are deeply concerned about the safety risks that hardcore porn apps of this type create for EU users, especially kids, this app and others like it. Consumer trust and confidence in our ecosystem, we have worked for more than a decade to make the best in the world. Contrary to the false statements made by the Marketplace developer, we certainly do not approve of this app and would never offer it in our App Store. The truth is, is we are required by the European Commission to allow it to be distributed by Marketplace operators like Alt Store and Epic, who may not share our concerns for user safety. Did I give Apple full justice in that?

[Jason Snell]

Well done.

[Andy Inako]

You know, functionally, the challenge will be for the Alt Store is that if there turns out to be a whole bunch of these, it doesn't matter whether Apple's disingenuous or not. Turns out to be a bunch of porn apps that all go as soon as they keep on stepping the wrong side. If it becomes a place for that, it's great marketing for Apple and they'll use it. And anytime you, you know, like it's, you know, like they're gonna, they're gonna grab that and just beat the crap out of them with it, you know, and so the, you know, and it'll destroy the entire Alt app market because they'll use this one and dema fy it and makes it makes every other Alt Store harder to run.

[Leo Laporte]

No, so it's.

[Andy Inako]

So I think that it's. I think that they, you know, know, they. We can talk about whether Apple's being disingenuous or not, but that's. This is what we all thought was Going to happen. This is what we've been talking about it happening and now it's happening.

[Jason Snell]

Inevitable.

[Andy Inako]

There's no surprise here.

[Leo Laporte]

Does, do. Do Android phones have porn apps available?

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't know. I've never, I never would know.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course you wouldn't know. Why am I asking you? No, because you do a show about Android, that's the only reason.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Putting you on the spot there.

[Alex Lindsay]

I've all, like, all I can say is that I've never seen them on the app store. I've never seen them on the Google Play Store even, even accidentally. I think that that's more of a side load sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Which you can do. On which you can.

[Alex Lindsay]

Which you can do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need an app store to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't want to feed the algorithm. Oh, now Andy's looking for porn apps.

[Leo Laporte]

On the Play Store? Come on.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I mean, let's be clear. I mean this is, this is Apple using this because Apple doesn't want anybody to tell it what it can approve or not approve. And this is going to give it ammunition, as Alex says, because this is going to let people who think there shouldn't be pornograph on computers. Sorry to those people, by the way, because it's always, you know, there's a fundamental rule of the Internet that everything has pornography anyway. It allows them to wage a PR battle and it's another front in their PR war against regulation. And like, seriously, I looked it up. I predicted this like a year and a half ago on a podcast. Like, because it's inevitable. Like it's, I mean it wasn't a hard prediction to make that the moment something happens that is bad ad, Apple will point out and say, see, we told you so. And they've decided. In fact, I think that's why Riley at Alt Store went out as loud as he did with this because he could have been quiet about it. Apple would have still made it a big story. So he just went out loud and, and shouted it to the rooftops. What happens now? I don't know. Like again, I feel like for me the angle that's the most interesting is if, if they are going to get fined or rebuked in some way for using their notarization system as a lever to prevent things from going in the stor. Like they can't make the argument that they, their hands were tied for this and yet have used it to prevent, to protect users from the scourge of, I don't know, using HyperCard doing, doing Mac paint on an iPad like that. Like old Mac emulators, they're like, no, you can't do it. But, but porn. They're like, yeah, okay, we, we can't pass that through. I think that was a. I think that was a mistake on their part strategically to, to do that because it makes it harder for them to point at notarization and say, this is a neutral process and our hands are tied. Because their hands haven't been tied in the past. But they chose to act as if they were tied this time so that they could, like, let's just say it, Apple didn't want this thing to be an alt store. They could have just not notarized it and that would have caused a scandal, but they could have done it because they've done it for the emulators. I think the point is this is a more useful, useful thing for them to complain about.

[Leo Laporte]

And out of respect for Apple, I'm not going to make the show title be we're hard when our Hands are Tied. So I just. I won't, I won't do it.

[Jason Snell]

Okay?

[Leo Laporte]

I just. Not. I'm not going to do it. We're going to take a break.

[Alex Lindsay]

Kill Joy, you're a classy dude.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard when our. Nothing but class with a capital. I don't know. My mind just went there. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't. But we will have more in just a moment. Moment with our great panel. Jason Snell, Andy Inocco, Alex, Lindsay. You're watching Mac Break Weekly on the Twit Podcast Network. And I just, I want the folks at the Icon Factory to know this is, as far as I know, the oldest Macintosh podcast still active. As far as I know. I believe it is. Just want you to know. Icon Factory, you know, Just want you to know you'll understand what I'm talking about in just a moment. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler. Let's talk security. Security. Let's talk cloud security. Here's the problem. Companies, maybe your company, certainly our company, have spent so much money over the years on firewalls, perimeter defenses to protect themselves, and then, of course, to get the employees in through the perimeter defenses. VPNs. Has this worked? No. Breaches rise every year. In fact, There was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024 and a record $75 million payout. Now, I have to say that's gotta be just the tip of the iceberg because I'm sure most companies don't want to admit that they paid the ransomware bad guys to get their data back. It's not. Look at the point being, it's not working. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface because they give you public facing IP's and bad actors can go right at them. And now that they're using AI tools, they can go at them faster and more efficiently than ever before. Plus there's another problem with this. Perimeter defenses. When you're running a firewall, you're assuming anybody in the network, well, they got in with using that vpn, they must be okay. There's two problems with that. It enables lateral movement because once the user's connected, they can go anywhere in the network. And because these firewalls struggle to look inside encrypted outbound traffic, the bad guys start exfiltrating all that stuff. You don't want anybody to see your customer information, your emails. It's. It's really a nightmare. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure using AI to outpace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. Don't let the bad actors win. They're innovating and exploiting your defenses faster than you can defend. That's why you need Zscaler Zero Trust + AI. Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. It protects you by hiding your attack surface. It means your apps and IPs are invisible. There's nothing to attack. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. It also eliminates lateral movement, connecting users only to specific apps. That's the whole point of zero trust, right? Just because you're inside doesn't mean I trust you. You've got to have permission. And not only that, Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. And it uses AI powered automation. Fight fire with fire. They're able to detect threats using AI to analyze the over half a trillion daily transactions they're receiving. They find the needles in those haystacks to let you know ahead of time what you need to protect yourself against. Hackers cannot attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. You can find out [e-mail] Security please use that address so they know you saw it. Here. Zscaler.com Security a new way that really works to protect your security. Thank you Zscaler for supporting Mac break weekly today in 19. No, I guess it was 2000. The year 2000 on February. 2-4-2000. The Sims were released into the world. Did you. Any of you play the Sims? Can any of you speak Sims?

[Andy Inako]

I played sim.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet you Alex you can speak Sim.

[Andy Inako]

Cannot. SimCity is something. I played a lot of Sims. I've never.

[Leo Laporte]

So Will Wright created SimCity and they wanted another Sim. Maxis wanted another SimCity executives. This is from an article in the New York Times. Executives at the game studio urged Wright to focus on the SimCity franchise, his urban planning simulator from 1989 that put the company at the forefront of American game design. Everyone, Will Wright says everyone in the room hated the idea of the sim. Then Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997. But Will Wright forged forward and created a game that is now 25 years. Do you speak Simlish? Anybody speak Simlish? No.

[Andy Inako]

I did do a music video with the Sims. Did you? Stacy's mom? Yeah, it was ah.

[Jason Snell]

Founds a Wayne the We.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, so we did. We did. I was. We did this thing called video mods for VH1 and one of them was the Sim. So we converted a lot of models.

[Leo Laporte]

There actually is a language, by the way. You know, my daughter speaks Simlish. I think she might have spent a little too much time playing with the Sims. It's very funny when she does. Does it. They actually hired somebody to write the language. Claire Curtin. She invented Simlish, a gibberish language spoken by the game's characters. Said developers refined its social system by imbuing the Sims with needs like hunger, comfort, hygiene and of course, let's not forget Woohoo, which before you could download porn for your iPhone, you could. You could have a little Woohoo in Sims. It's actually a great article because they have a lot of animated right above our picks.

[Andy Inako]

I put the link to the video that we did with the Sims.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, oh, let me go look at.

[Andy Inako]

It's on YouTube. It's kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, fun.

[Andy Inako]

So we did this a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

This is probably in Simlish.

[Andy Inako]

Over 20. We didn't do it in Simlish. We did it in Fountains of Wayne. This is Stacy's mom, but animated. We love the music video out of.

[Leo Laporte]

The Sims to turn it into.

[Andy Inako]

We got all the assets from ea, so we got all the assets and we put them into I think motion builder and then rendered it all out. But it's. So it's a whole music we probably can't play.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it the actual Fountains of Wayne?

[Andy Inako]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. So I probably have to. I stop the music. So we'll get taken down even Though I love Fountains of Wayne. Anyway, so this is our funny. Who's we when you say we?

[Andy Inako]

Pixel. Pixel Core or DV Garage. One or the other. I don't know which was along time. It was 2005, I think, or 2004 or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Stacy's mom is hot. I didn't know they had such hot characters in. In the Sims.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, this was like a summer for me. Like, it was like 10.

[Leo Laporte]

You spent the whole summer doing this?

[Andy Inako]

Oh, no, no, this was. This song was one of 10, I think we did 10 of them, I think. And this was just one hysterical.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a. It's a really great song.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. So we had motion capture and. And we applied it to their characters and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh. Oh, that's interesting.

[Andy Inako]

So it was. Yeah, it's not. We didn't play it out of the game.

[Leo Laporte]

You couldn't play this in the Sims. You just use their resources to apply to.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, we used the 3D resource. We did that. We did. Come on. Come on. And I don't know. Evanescence.

[Leo Laporte]

Stacy, out of the way. Looking at your mom. Okay, okay, I gotta stop now. Otherwise we're gonna get banned from the Apple Store.

[Andy Inako]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Very funny. Anyway, 25 years of the SIM, I looked. I was sad to say. You can only get Sims 2 in the App Store for 30 bucks. Sims 4 is not available in the App Store. It's probably. Probably on Steam or something like that.

[Jason Snell]

They recently re released Sims 1 and 2 on the Steam Store yesterday.

[Andy Inako]

Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

To celebrate the anniversary. Okay, that's cool. Cool icon. Is this one of your picks? Should I not mention the Icon Factory's new. Let me see. No, it's not. So I can mention this. And I shouldn't give them a plug because they didn't give us a plug. But the Icon Factory, the team that behind the late lamented Twitterific, which of course they had to stop making because Elon yanked the API, has made a new app called Tapestry, which combines Blue Sky, Mastodon, rss, and so forth. And when you launch it, it gives you some suggestions for podcasts to subscribe to. Not ours. Not ours. I'm sad to say. They do add six colors. So. Jason, you get. You get a mention in there.

[Jason Snell]

Yay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. And they like the Accidental Tech podcast a little bit better. But I understand. I'm not really part of that. You know, that hip with it Apple crowd, I guess. Subscription options available to remove ads. Although you can run it with ads for free. They have other features that get unlocked. $1.99 a month.

[Jason Snell]

Ow.

[Leo Laporte]

19.99 a year. Ow. Or one time purchase of $80. Ow. Ow.

[Jason Snell]

Well, you know, a lot of people worked hard on this software. So. So this is from a category of new apps. There are several of them out there that are trying to cross the streams basically and say if you Want to read RSS, if YouTube channels, if you want to have podcasts, if you want a blue sky, if you want to Mastodon, sort of like anything that is a feed, you can put it in here and it's got multiple timelines and you can use it as kind of like your master feed reader. It's not a client in the sense that you can't reply to social media. You can scroll it, but you can't reply. It's not posting out.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's read only.

[Jason Snell]

It's read only, at least for now. I mean, maybe they'll change that over time.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's using RSS only for.

[Jason Snell]

No, it's got a whole plugin architecture. It will read all sorts of different things that are RSS and, and generate items that go in this stream. And that's part of the idea is if it can be turned into a feed of any kind, they should be able to read it. This is a, I think what we've seen, icon factory, you know, they made Twitter Riffic and they are among the people who have decided that building a whole software system on top of a platform that might be run by people who could change the terms at any point and kill your app is not something that they really wanted to do. And so instead they've built a thing that is sort of broad and is meant to work with any kind of thing. Now, in the long run, I don't know whether multi purpose apps are going to beat single purpose apps or not. You know, I think this is a really nice implementation, but it's a starting point and there's more work to do. And I that work will only happen if people show that they're interested in an app like this. I think there's a place for it. It's almost like if you think of it as a next gen version of a classic RSS reader, where instead of just rss, you can do like one of the things that I know a lot of people have used, Tapestry have praised is they can put, they can make a YouTube timeline that they put their favorite YouTube channels in. And so instead of going to YouTube and having to go through their interface where they really didn't want to show you the algorithm and not just the posts from the channels you care about, you can just add them to a timeline and when there's a new video it shows up in timeline and you can similarly do that with a podcast. And you could build different timelines for different subject areas or different content types. And it's an interesting idea. We'll see where it goes. I think in the long run it would be nice if it played the podcasts. If it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it doesn't do that. It just shows you there's a new one.

[Jason Snell]

It might in a web embed. But like this is. The point is that it's not really meant to be the end point. It's meant to be the feed list and then it's your doom scroll or maybe, you know, the opposite of doom scrolling, whatever that's that is. So it's an interesting, really interesting idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, and I love the Icon Factory. I'm just giving them a hard time. I wish they loved us as much.

[Jason Snell]

As I love them.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway you can. It's a very good idea. I think it's an interesting idea. Mike McHugh of Flipboard is doing something I think called Surf that's similar. You're seeing more and more of these. You're right. These multi feed things and I think it's probably a good way to get people into the Fediverse and to Bluesky so they can see all of the different feeds that are out there. I think that's probably a good idea. Anyway, you might want to check it out. You could try it for free. Icon Factory's tapestry, brand new today in the App Store. Let's see what else. Oh, I thought this was kind of interesting. You remember we talked a little bit about the Gravy leak. Gravy is an ad network that is on thousands of apps, many of them on your phone. And the leak showed that really your phone is bleeding your location to everybody all the time. This is from a blog. Tim Sh. Everyone knows your location. He decided he was going to see if he took an old iPhone, I think an iPhone 11 and put one gravy based app on there just to see all the information was sending out. This is the thing that kind of opened my eyes was it turns out Unity Unity has a mobile game ad network now. Many, many iPhone and Mac games, other games are running on the Unity platform. It was very popular. It's the only one that works on iPhones. Unity has its own network and many of the games, in fact this is their main revenue Stream. They made $2 billion on it in 2023, many of the games running Unity will be doing the same thing. Sending out your location, your timestamp, your IP address, all going to an ad network. This is kind of an eye opener. We'd seen the great but this is really things Unity even knows. Things like your connection type, your screen brightness, how long your system's been booted for, how many CPUs you have, how your battery's doing. You might say, well, who cares if it knows this? But all of this can be used to fingerprint you because the more of these unique identifiers you can combine, you can pretty much narrow it down to one person. So some very interesting information being leaked by your iPhone and every phone. Frankly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. This is why I keep wishing for the reality in which basically there's a federal law that says that your personal information belongs to you can never be sold or transported. It can only be leased for a period of one year and it can only be renewed with your explicit permission. It's not even worth joking about anymore. The fact that this device that provides way more benefits to us on a day to day and hour to hour basis than it takes from us with our personal information, that's bad. I wish that there were a better way to negotiate that transaction than simply say that. Well, you just got to deal with the fact that there are always going to be some sort of ad package somewhere in the calculator app or the weather app or the whatever app you just downloaded. Because that's how they're making money off of the app. Not by your in app payments, but because again they agreed to put all these, put all these libraries in there.

[Leo Laporte]

That is just often the case. We found out after the Gravy Breach and 404reporting on this that these, that the developers didn't, you know, they put an ad network in. They had no idea what they had. I mean if you use Unity, Unity. Do you hear you saying, well I'm going to use Unity. You have no idea that you've just installed a tracker in your app. So a lot of app developers claim to be surprised by this information. Play the John Ashley we got to do a Vision Pro segment, so if you would. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. Andy Lyrics by Andy Music by I don't know who who gave us that music? Did you do that, John?

[Jason Snell]

No, someone in our Club Twit club did it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, thank you, Club Twit. See one more reason we love club twit. Harry McCracken Dear friend Harry McCracken in Fast Company, how Apple Vision Pro is finding a home in healthcare. He actually went to a conference, I think, where he found a bunch of medical professionals who love the Vision Pro. 300 people are gathering in San Diego to explore the uses of Apple's spatial computing headset for surgery and other medical applications.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

San Diego's Health uses it, apparently, and that's why people have gathered.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And a lot of that is just simply, I want a virtual screen. I'm using instruments that have cameras on them. I need to basically keep an eye on screens. There's a. He got some. He had chatted with a couple of surgeons who were saying that you never believe how much trouble it is just to, like, get a display angled and positioned exactly where I need it to be. Whereas for the Vision Probe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. As long as you. I mean, I guess you could see everything that you need to see. And that's the. That would be the key, right? Yeah. $3,500 is nothing for a surgeon or a hospital.

[Andy Inako]

Hospital, which is a syringe in most hospitals.

[Leo Laporte]

Good article, though. So if you are a Vision Pro fan, we have clearly found at least one great use for it. UCSD's Dr. Broderick says it's not uncomfortable or distracting to use it. It's pretty much, quote, pretty much not noticeable when you're in the middle of an operation. The learning curve is near zero. Operations typically last 45 to 90 minutes, which is good because that's all the Vision Pro can do on a single battery charge. He's very bullish.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. It's still kind of disappointing, isn't it, that every time you see people who are like, oh, my God, I love this, I would pay. This is so worth it. I use it every single day. It's like, oh, wow. What feature of spatial computing are you using it for? It comes. Oh, I love having a virtual display. Like, in my field of vision. It's like, okay, that's not necessarily. It's encouraging, I suppose, because that means that if Apple did want to simply say, here's how we take $1,500 off the price of this. We find a way to get displays that are good enough. We don't have to basic, if that's what people are buying them for, we can optimize on that feature and go forward. It's bad news because it means that Apple's secret sauce is not quite so potent and that competing devices might be.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to point out that's when the Google Glass came out There were a lot of stories, same thing with Microsoft's HoloLens, about how it's used in hospitals and used by doctors. It seems like that's the last gasp for one of these devices is well, the doctors love it so.

[Andy Inako]

Well, I mean I think that, and I've talked to a lot of folks that in medical from everything from patients being given something that they can look at to doctors using it for training. I haven't seen doctors actually using it for operations. The again, I think we're pretty early on most of those. You know, I think the thing that killed Google, I mean I just found my Google Glass of all things. It's broken it broke it. Right. It had a tendency to break right over the, right over the ear. There's a weak point in the, in the system. But the, you know what killed it I think still was mostly was the camera. Like people just didn't like I was even. It was a lot of people that just said hey, you can't. Like I, I was, I was in Rwanda with the, and with the President's team. And they were like, oh no, no. They all took pictures of it. They loved it. They all came over in a long line to go through it and they said, but you cannot, you cannot have the Google eye on when the President is in the room. You know, like that was it was it. You know, like it was. So the, so the camera was the problem there. But I think that you get so much trouble.

[Leo Laporte]

You brought, that you brought the laser pointer to the White House.

[Andy Inako]

You came so much trouble. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the, this is the successor to Google Glass. These are the brilliant labs. They have a camera there.

[Andy Inako]

I mean the killer have a little.

[Leo Laporte]

The Google Glass style prism right here for the heads up display.

[Andy Inako]

And can you see what you're shooting? Video, the video you're shooting with those, with that camera.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it right now. Can't do anything because it's all in. It's open source and nobody's written anything.

[Andy Inako]

The killer app. The killer app.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the Gl. These are the glasses I like to wear. These are the Meta Ray brands and they sound, I mean the problem, the.

[Andy Inako]

Problem is, is that, is that the. For me, the thing I loved about Google Glass was being able to see what I was shooting. Like a heads up display of a video that I can see what I was actually, I could actually frame it and shoot what I wanted to. And I knew what I did. Yeah. When you said, when you said Google take a, take a video or shoot a Video or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

See the video in the.

[Andy Inako]

The video would pop up in that little screen and. And you would then. And I was taking pictures of me and my kids and I was taking pictures of things I wanted to show people. In the early days they did. You could do hangouts between two glass and they turned it out off the security issues. But I think that that is a really interesting puzzle. I think that. I still think that we should remember that we're still pretty early on, even compared to the other platforms. There's two big things coming up in the next couple months and one will be the camera, which I've talked about every week that we talk about this. The cameras are getting much closer to the surface. There'll be some number of them that'll probably come out before nab because NAB is where no one wants to show up again without. Without them, without the camera. So NAB is the first week of April, so we expect to see some cameras by then. And it's the first time ever in the history of all these goggles that there was a unified way to shoot and post video. And that's going to. I think it's going to make a difference. And I also think that we're going to see more libraries available at wwc and I think that those things we should, you know, we're going to. We're not going to know whether the Vision Pro was successful or not for. For another couple years. And I think that, that it may not be successful or it may set up for the next one, but there's still a lot of room. I think Apple still has a lot of. What's made some things easier in the Vision Pro are libraries. I think the thing that's missing for the Vision Pro are libraries. There's more that needs to be done to make it easier to develop for. And some of it's development and some of it's just being able to post to it. Being able to have a better 3D experience inside of Keynote means that anybody could. Things that look like, you know, that we should be able. Apple should have an app that is, you know, like Jigspace and easy to develop for. If they just fix that one problem, they probably have a lot more usage with the headset, you know, like. And it's just. Jigspace is great. It's just that it's complicated and expensive. Apple could fix that problem.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have to say though, I have spent with all the glasses and the AI devices and the pins and the notes and all I have spent Far less combined than one Vision Pro. So.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, but I, you know, I was watching the, I was watching the shark video last night.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Andy Inako]

Finally got around to it. Man, I could watch a lot of video that way. Like, that's the, I mean, it is. The shark video was finally.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the only particularly good. That's the thing.

[Andy Inako]

It's really.

[Leo Laporte]

And I get to watch movies and.

[Andy Inako]

I've shot a lot of video for, for VR and you shoot a lot of video and the resolution is never quite there and the frame rate is never quite there and you're like, eventually we're going to get somewhere where it actually looks and sounds really good and it plays back well and someday we'll get there. And you know, I put it on. I was watching the shark stuff last night and I was like, oh, we're pretty darn close now. You know, like, it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty great experience. The rodeo thing or the bucking bronco thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did you see that one yet? Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

Okay. It's again, it's, it's, it's a filmmaker who got really aggressive about how they use the camera and not in a way that I, that I liked.

[Leo Laporte]

You really don't want 3D video on a bull?

[Andy Inako]

Well, no, no, they didn't put it on a bull. They were shooting stuff, but it was just like lots of cuts and then we got really, really close and then we did this thing. You know, it was just like a lot of things that make at least make me uncomfortable. And I'm pretty thick skinned when it comes to watching VR because I've watched a lot of bad VR because I've shot a lot of bad VR myself. And so I just felt like that wasn't a great experience. But, but the, but the underwater, by the way, shooting VR underwater is so hard. Like that is not like, to shoot it at that level of quality is not a trivial problem. And so that was a pretty, that was just a flex. I mean they were just flexing on that. But the 3D looks pretty good. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony Nielsen says they're really good when you're washing the dishes.

[Andy Inako]

They're really good when you're washing.

[Leo Laporte]

Wash the dishes and watch show sharks at the same time.

[Andy Inako]

I don't think you do that well. It's immersive though, because it's.

[Jason Snell]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Andy Inako]

You can't. You have to sit and sit and watch it. It's only six minutes long.

[Leo Laporte]

Anthony, what are you doing with the dishes then? Are you just watching TV or something? Oh, well, I can see anyway.

[Andy Inako]

I can see putting up. I could see watching other videos that way. Be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he says he's watching YouTube.

[Andy Inako]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no YouTube app I thought though, is there a YouTube app?

[Andy Inako]

You just watch it in Safari.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you just use a browser. Okay. And that's our Vision Pro segment.

[Andy Inako]

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

[Leo Laporte]

The real world. Apple TV is impinging on the real world. First they had the severance cast at Grand Central Station doing their lumon thing. Now Dr. Rickens book, the Youur is available from the ibook store. Has anybody read the Youur? This is the book if you haven't watched the TV show that kind of stimulated the whole revolt because they realized that they could get out, I guess. And it turns out Rickon's the brother in law, the lead and I don't.

[Jason Snell]

Know, it's a self help book that's supposed to empower people to take control of their work life balance. And when you show that to people who are fundamentally only workers who never leave the workplace. Yeah. It kind of instigates a revolt.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm watching the new Severance. Loving it. Of course it's weird and hard to figure out. Here's a little Dr. Ricken a book begins.

[Jason Snell]

It's said that as a child Wolfgang Mozart killed another boy by slamming his head in a piano. Don't worry, my research for this book has proven the claim untrue.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. That much we had heard on the TV show.

[Jason Snell]

It is terrible idea is that it's really terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

It's terrible. He's awful.

[Jason Snell]

And yet the Innies are become obsessed with it and thinks he is so wise. Whereas outside Mark and his sister roll their eyes at the stuff that Rick and does. It's great, great. I love.

[Alex Lindsay]

Don't you love the COVID design? It is like exactly one of those like really bad, cheap 80s like self help book pop psychology books that sells like a million copies for two months. Then everybody else, everybody after that is like kind of embarrassed they even bought it like this. This would be an Oprah's Book Club selection like in the 90s or the early 2000s.

[Leo Laporte]

Exclusive Epps excerpt a spiritual biography of you by Dr. Ricken and people.

[Jason Snell]

That's Michael Chernis who was in the great, great, legitimately great TV show that nobody saw called Patriot. Bad title.

[Leo Laporte]

He was in Patriot Now I wrote no words.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, he's the brother in Patriot.

[Leo Laporte]

The lame brother.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, exactly. Very similar part to Severance. And people should check out Patriot, which should be called, by the way, if you've never watched it, because you thought Patriot. What does that mean? And I don't like that kind of show. Whatever it means.

[Leo Laporte]

We call bad Spies.

[Jason Snell]

It could be called Sad Spies.

[Leo Laporte]

Sad Spies.

[Jason Snell]

Sad Spies.

[Leo Laporte]

He has to go and sit.

[Jason Snell]

Michael Dorman. Michael Ternus, Kurtwood Smith. Terry O'Quinn. Fantastic cast about very sad Spies. Yeah. So, so good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so good.

[Jason Snell]

So Michael Turner. Seek him out if you enjoy Rickon on.

[Leo Laporte]

I knew I'd seen him before. Oh, my God. Now I realize it's the same character. That's the.

[Jason Snell]

Basically, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Two seasons is all we got of Schmigadoon. It's probably all we ever really needed of the weird Apple TV plus musical. However, it was fun. It was weird.

[Jason Snell]

It was.

[Leo Laporte]

It is now going to the Kennedy center with a stage adaptation. It was a spoof of kind of 50s Broadway musicals, including with songs.

[Jason Snell]

Season one was a spoof of 50s Broadway musicals. Season two was a spoof of 70s Broadway musicals. 80s Broadway musicals.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Jason Snell]

Season two was a little like a different angle. There was some Sweeney Todd and Chicago and stuff like that in season two. And. Yeah, so it's perfect. One of the reviews said it was like watching season one of Schmigadoon in two hours. Pack it all in there. But it was a. It's a fun. Yeah, it's a. It's a. A musical about musicals, basically. It's a super. It's a meta musical. I suppose it was.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a great parody. It was hysterical and it had two wonderful actors in it. This is. These are the broad. These are the Broadway versions of the same actors. Wow. Wow.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's at the Kennedy center for only like nine days. So it's not like a. But. But this. But this seems like too good a thing to just. Basically, I mean, at minimum, in five years time, I hope that this is available for like junior high and high school drama clubs.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that would be awesome.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because the guy who actually wrote the songs and everything wrote this musical. I learned about it from TikTok. I saw some of the rehearsals and I thought, what is that? What are they? Why are they rehearsing Schmigadoon? And then I found out. So good. Schmigadoon is back. I haven't watched the second season. You can tell. So it's.

[Jason Snell]

It's weirder. It's darker and weirder than the first.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, did somebody order corn pudding? This is their rehearsal.

[Jason Snell]

Oh, man. So good.

[Alex Lindsay]

Apparently they're too. New songs in there too, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I love watching Broadway rehearsals. They're so. They're so vigorous or something. Let's see what else? Is there any. What else? Have I missed something after two hours?

[Jason Snell]

Probably not.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you ready to go? Aren't you? All right, well, we'll take a break.

[Jason Snell]

Longer episodes now, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't really need the long episodes, actually. We could probably make them shorter. Let us take a break and then when we come back, your picks of the week. Gentlemen, you're watching Mac Break Weekly. A great big thanks to our Club Twit members who made this show possible. You probably note we have ads. That's good. We thought for a while back in December we might not, but somewhere they. They came from somewhere wonderful. But the ads we run do not cover the full cost of the network. They do not pay for our wonderful hosts or our staff. They don't keep the lights on. We need some help. And that's why a couple of years ago we started Club Twitter. It's been really a boon. It has not transformed the business, but. But it's about 5% of our revenue. And we thank you, every one of you, and I would love to expand it because the more people in Club Twit, the more we can do. One of the things we're doing tomorrow is relaunching this week in Google as intelligent machines. We're booking some very interesting people next month. The man who coined the term intelligent machines, Ray Kurzweil, will join us on that show. Many AI innovators, philosophers, educators. So it's going to be a great way for everybody, all of us, me especially, to learn about AI. That's thanks to the club because frankly, we never were able to get any ads on this week in Google. So if you would like to support our efforts, we think they're pretty important and valuable. If you enjoy the shows, may I invite you to join the club? What do you get for seven bucks a month? Yes, that's all it is. Probably should raise that. We probably are the least expensive podcast network out there, but we feel like we want to make it accessible to everybody. Ad free versions of all the shows. Shows you get special programming we only do in the club, like Stacy's Book club and a whole lot more. We got Chris Marquardt doing a monthly photo show. He talks a lot about iPhone, photography. Hands on Mac with Micah Sargent. Anyway, please help us. Seven bucks a month visit Twit tv. Club Twit Nuff Said makes a Big difference. And a big thanks to all of our club twit members who in fact are not here hearing this if they listen to the ad free version. But anyway, thank you, we appreciate it. Let's get our picks of the week. Jason Snell, he's in a hurry to go home. Well, he's in his garage. He's not, it's not really, you know, too far. He is home. What's your pick of the week, sir?

[Jason Snell]

It's Hazel by neutral. I love Hazel and I just thought it would be a good reminder. They came out with a version 6.0 recently and a bunch a bunch of clever things. So Hazel in general watches your file system on your Mac and then lets you set up rules where it will do whatever you want. So for example, I have a folder that I use for writing stories and after 14 days or something of, of a file not being used, it moves it to an archive. I've got a thing with old podcasts that will run a script that compresses them after a week so that they take up less space space or for some podcasts, just delete some after a month because I'm never going to use them again. So you can use it sort of to file and move and act on anything. I actually have one where I download a calendar file from my airline website. It runs a script that reformats it in a way that I want and then adds it to my calendar. Like you could do anything with this. Version 6 adds, among its very clever things, auto OCR of images so we can actually look at an image image and see what the text is and match on the text and then do something with it, which is kind of wild. And it's just a really great utility. It's in my core, you know, probably core five, maybe, maybe it's top 10, I don't know. But like it's. It's in my core Mac utilities where it just makes using the Mac better to have this little agent that runs in the background and based on the rules that you set, does stuff for you, cleans things up, tidies things up up for you so that you don't have to worry about it. Like I don't have to do a spring cleaning of my working stories folder because Hazel is always running that spring cleaning in the background.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Yeah. This has been around for some time.

[Jason Snell]

Ages. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic tool. Hazel 6 is out now $42. There's a family pack or an upgrade if you already had previous versions, which I did for $20. Yeah, highly recommended.

[Jason Snell]

Noodlesoft Utilities calm.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Jason. Alex, Lindsay. Pick of the week.

[Andy Inako]

So this isn't necessarily one of my cheaper picks.

[Leo Laporte]

How many, Alex is we talking here?

[Andy Inako]

A couple. So sorry. So I. But I wanted to show this off. I'm going to try to find. I'm working on a less expensive version, which maybe in a couple weeks I'll show. I've really gotten into. So I've been doing a lot of spatial video and, you know, with the phone, but I wanted spatial audio too, so I wanted an Ambisonic mic. And how do I get ambisonic? And then the problem is that then how do you get Ambisonic into the phone? Because you're shooting spatial with the phone and then you want to be able to have spatial audio. Really what you need is binaural. Not spatial, not spatial, not ambisonic, but binaural. So it needs to convert the ambisonic to binaural and then get it into the phone live so that you can stream spatial video with spatial audio. Or that. That was the game. So. So this is the rig. This is the first rig that I built for it. So this is. This is what you have here. This is at the. At the San Rafael store, Sam Rafael's Thursday farmers market, which is the best one in the Bay Area. And anyway, so this guy was playing this incredible. It's called a Chapman stick, which is just insanely cool by itself. Yeah. And. And so, so what I did is I have. This is a Sennheiser Ambeo mic. So this is actually, I have it around here somewhere, but it's got four mics in it. So they're all.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a 3D mic.

[Andy Inako]

It's building a sphere 3D mic. So it builds a sphere, an Ambisonic sphere. Now that goes in as four different channels. And then I borrowed this MixPre 10 from Sound Devices. I'm going to end up buying a mixpre 6. The 10 was a little overkill and so I put it in here and then what it does is it processes. It's got an Ambisonic plug in. So it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It only needs four inputs for that mic. Is that right?

[Andy Inako]

That's right. So that's why I can go down to an ambit mix pre 6 to do it. But. But I wasn't sure, so I got the 10. I borrowed the 10. I'll get the 6. Anyway, so the. This converts the ambisonic. It records it. You can see. You kind of see like little levels down here, but it records it. But it also will Convert it to Binaural. Now Binaural is really designed so I can listen to it through the headphones and I know what's actually happening. But I can also route the binaural to the USB C out of. Of the MixPre 10. And I don't know if anyone's done this before because sound devices asked like how did it work? And so then this goes into the. This shows up and it just shows up as a stereo input to anything. I'm using stream voodoo here. But it shows up in the Apple. If you want to record the Apple the spatial record. Spatial video record in the Apple camera will work as well. Well and what you end up with is this Binaural either stream or record straight into your phone from equipment that's, you know, more expensive than the phone. So anyway, but. But it's kind of a cool. And I gotta say I'll post some stuff up there. Hopefully by next week I'll have some stuff that's. That's on YouTube or whatever because you can put it on YouTube because it's just stereo as long as you have a headset on. And so. But it's. It's a pretty cool experience to hear things all around you. And the Ambisonic you actually hear the music much closer to what it would sound like when you were there than the straightforward.

[Leo Laporte]

This is really. Compare Binaural to surround to spatial audio.

[Andy Inako]

Well, so when you have surround, a lot of times we're using oftentimes multiple speakers. So we've got what we call beds and objects. So in Atmos for instance, we might have a bunch of beds that go into the 5.1 or 7.1 or 9.1 space. Then we have objects up to 120 some objects that we can put into the space as well. And we can kind of have them sound like they're going all around. You have a lot more explicit control. Ambisonic is I'm going to record and I'm going to build this sphere of sound around you and then that can be rotated. The sound is in a sphere. So you can move it around and reorient it if you need to to have some control. And that's recorded in what's called Ambisonic A and then convert to 1 of 2Ambisonic B formats that you can then work with. And you can actually convert that ambisonic to 5.1 or other formats as well. But it doesn't have quite the same resolution in some ways that some of the more the others like something Like Atmos would have. And then there's what's called a Deca tree, which is what some people do, which spread mics out away from the source. That's going to give you more spatiality. But I found that the ambisonic is pretty great for. For what it is. You know, it's. It's much more compact. While this looks like a kind of a little bit of a science project, the. It is much more compact than a. Than a Deka tree. So it's easy. Something. I can pull it out of my backpack, put it on a tripod, and make it go. And now I'm trying to find a. I'm working on a less expensive, much more compact version of this that hopefully I'll show in a couple weeks. But I'm kind of. You know, I have this problem where I get kind of obsessed about a certain thing, and so I have to learn. I have lots of spatial. I have a lot of ambisonic mics right now. This is just the one that I'm using at the moment, because there's first order, second order, third order, fourth order. I've got a couple second orders, and this is the first order. And then I've got a smaller one that's less expensive, but it's dramatically more spatial or more. It fills up your space, but only when you're wearing headphones. It fills up your space in a way that stereo doesn't, in the same way that spatial music oftentimes will sound more like it's all around you, and it kind of tickles your brain in a different way. And so anyway, I just. I was. The challenge was to get it. I've done this a lot with cameras. The challenge was to get this into a phone. And that was a successful one, by the way. If you're interested in that. That. I just want to make sure I said, that guy. But Bob Culbertson. This is. This is a picture of his that I took while he was doing it. Bob Culbertson is. And he's. It turns out he is an OG related to. He's. He's kind of a. An OG when it comes to doing the Chapman stick. And he's got a lot of followers on YouTube. So Culbertson is. And it's. It's an amazing. I've never heard the instrument before. I know that. I said, is this new? Is this a new instrument? He's like, oh, from the 70s. Yeah, it's old.

[Leo Laporte]

I recognize it.

[Andy Inako]

And so he and I are gonna. He and I are gonna do some more streams and records now that I've met him and he lives up in Sebastopol, so it's easy to go up and do some stuff. So anyway, that's the. But that's the. And we'll talk more about. I'll show more and I'll post some stuff that I'll have up by the next show.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Yeah. I'm wondering why we even bother with Apple Spatial if we just could do Binaural.

[Andy Inako]

Well, you just don't have a lot of control. I mean, binaural is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's lower resolution. It's in the recording. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

I mean, in some ways that's what, what Apple Spatial is kind of doing is placing all these things into a binaural field. So it's not that we're not using.

[Leo Laporte]

Binaural headphones with Apple Spatial.

[Andy Inako]

Right. So it is in some ways that way. I don't want to say it's exactly the same, but you are getting essentially something that's very related to a binaural feel for headphones. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Andy and Akko's pick of the week. We'll wrap things up. Andy, what do you think?

[Alex Lindsay]

Mine is more of a philosophical pick. You might have heard last week the makers of pebble, the, like, first real smartwatch that crashed, they did a really great job, but they were eclipsed by of course like Android smartwatches and Apple smartwatches.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they were purchased by Fitbit and then Fitbit was purchased by Google and then, you know, three generations later, there's no more Pebble.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. But it was a. But it was a beautiful thing. And also this ties in with like a realization I had last year, which is that like, I like the idea of smartwatches, but I just can't deal with the idea of I have to charge it every single night. And if I miss out I'm going to have to like find another watch for the day because I forgot. And also finding out that I don't use most of the features of the Apple watch or a Pixel watch. And so that's why I've been wearing like, I've been very, very happy buying like 20$30 Casios that like will tell you the tide and the phase of the moon and that sort of thing. So what? So the makers, the guy who originally started up pebble, started up the original Casio Kickstarter, has been wearing his old watches for forever, even though they haven't been supported since 2016. But there's open source communities that have been trying to Keep it going. So he called his people at Google and said, hey, what would you think about open sourcing the pebble operating system? And I'll be damned. Google said, okay, sure, we'll do that. And so the entire pebble operating system is open sourced on Google. And now he has website called repebble.com in which he intends to not reinvent the Pebble. So it's not like he's going to start to make watches that have oh, it's got a heart sensor and it's got like a three color flashlight. It's like no. In interviews he's given to the Verge and others, he's saying I just want to remake the original pebble maybe with like modern components, modern stuff. So a better E Ink display, like better Bluetooth, better whatever. It's not going to have a touchscreen, it's just going to to have like physical like touch physical buttons on the side, which is not to me a disadvantage because like you can actually push these things with gloves on. And so for something that will convey notifications, have custom watch faces, be able to like control my Spotify playlist that I'm watch walking on and be something other than like the same Apple watch, the same Samsung Galaxy watch everybody's wearing, sharing, I'm really, really keen to see this get going. So all he's doing right now is go to repebble.com and say yeah, I'm kind of interested in that. He hopes to get going on this project and start making basic pebble watches. Who knows after that? But I definitely was quick to sign up because if this is a reasonable amount of money, the idea of having a simple epaper E Ink smartwatch that lasts about a week and only has the features that I like to have on it and has an app store on it and independent watch faces. That's something I would spend X amount of dollars on and be very, very happy with.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Micah interviewed Eric Menzikowski on last Thursday on Tech News Weekly. So if you want to hear that interview, that's a good place to go. Twitter, tv tnw, Google open sourced it. It's a shame because the open source repository does not compile as is. Google had to take out a lot of the proprietary stuff so you really wouldn't have a working smartwatch. But it's too bad because honestly, and I'm sure Eric has all of the pieces he needs to rebuild the pebble watch, but I would love to see this capability built into a variety of devices, right? I mean, yeah, it would be really cool.

[Alex Lindsay]

I love all the interviews he's been given which he's been saying, I just wanted open source. I want it to be true to the open source origins of pebble so that people want to, if people want to make their own, that's great. If people want to make their own apps, that's great.

[Leo Laporte]

So he will open source what he does as well.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it sounds pretty cool. But again, all I want is a simple pebble watch that don't have to like find that I don't have to find like the, the, the, the dongle, the, the magnetic charger that I probably have somewhere in a drawer somewhere. But I just, again, I love the whole idea of this and I agree and I'm hoping that this actually comes through.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish more companies when they abandoned stuff like this would open source the code because give the hobbyist community a chance, anything.

[Alex Lindsay]

I don't want to create a business. I don't want to. It's not going to be like a Kickstarter where we get millions of dollars. It's like I want to create a world in which we can manufacture some of these watches and the people who want to own them can buy them.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm very great.

[Alex Lindsay]

I'm here for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't order it, but you can give them your email and be on the list.

[Andy Inako]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Andrew. When are you going to be on GBH next?

[Alex Lindsay]

Not this week, but a week from Thursday at 12:30 Eastern Time. Go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later or any of my previous shows.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, sir. Jason Snell is at sixcolors. Com his [e-mail] Jason, go there for the graphs of the Apple results and the Apple report card is annual foray into sentiment.

[Jason Snell]

Yeah, I published so many graphs and probably 40,000 or 50,000 words of various comments by various people over the last week. So there's plenty to read about Apple stuff. Just check it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Go take a nap now. You're done. Probably going to go out and write more stuff and do more podcasts. He's a busy guy. Thank you, Jason. We missed you last week. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it.

[Jason Snell]

My night. I'm going to go take a nap now.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex Lindsay never takes a nap. He never seems to sleep at all. He does shows all the time. Doesn't even have time to shave anymore.

[Andy Inako]

I know. It's just gotten out of control.

[Leo Laporte]

Office hours global. What's coming up more Q and A.

[Andy Inako]

It turns out Q and A is a big thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. People love the Q and A.

[Andy Inako]

It works well. So we've got. It's thriving. So we're continuing to do Q and A and so we're going to keep doing that. And we're playing around with a lot of formats. We're getting ready for nab. NAB is two months away. So we're starting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes.

[Andy Inako]

Test our gear and make sure that everything's ready to go.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you go to namm? I kind of wish I'd gone to Nam to look at a lot of cool stuff.

[Andy Inako]

I wanted to. My schedule right now is pretty hectic. So I haven't been able to get out. I'm hoping to be able to go to nab. We're going to cover it. Me going is the big open thing. Just because of my current breaking news.

[Leo Laporte]

Alex has work.

[Andy Inako]

My day job is very busy.

[Leo Laporte]

090 Media if you want to add to his stack pile of things.

[Andy Inako]

Insane.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. It's great to have you too. All three of you. It wouldn't be the same without you. Wouldn't be Mac Break Weekly so we're so glad you could be here. We do Mac Break weekly every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. Streaming live. If you want to watch live. I mean it's a podcast. You really. We don't even expect people to watch live. And only frankly a small percentage of the audience does. But it's there for you. The live streams. Of course, if you're in the club, you get access. Access to the. The Discord. The Club Discord. And you can watch there. But there's also YouTube, there's Twitch. We're on TikTok still for as long as President Trump allows it. We are on x.com for as long as President Musk allows it. We are on kik.com I don't know who's in charge of that. We are on what I LinkedIn and we're on Facebook as long as Vice President Zuckerberg allows it. So we really were everywhere. We're everywhere. The oligarchs are everywhere.

[Alex Lindsay]

We're allowed to be everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

We're allowed to be America. We like to stream, but you don't have to watch a stream because we also offer downloads of the show, both audio and video at TWiT TV MBW. That page has a link to our YouTube channel where the video of the show lives. And that's a great way to share clips from the show. If you want to do that we appreciate it. It's a great way to spread the word about Mac Break Weekly. And of course the easiest way to get it is to subscribe. Maybe use that new Tapestry app to add Mac Break Weekly. All you have to do is add Twit tv, MBW and Tapestry will say, oh, oh, you really want to listen to that, huh? Okay, okay. If you insist. And let add the feed or to whatever podcast client you like to use. We appreciate your listening. We're glad you are here. Unfortunately, it is now my sad and solemn duty to tell you get back to work. Break time is over. See you next week. Bye bye.

[Jason Snell]

Hey, Focus up. That is what I said to Hands On Tech when we looked at the relaunch. It is time for us to focus on one topic at a time and make sure we're answering that question. I am answering that question as thoroughly as possible. If you are a member of Club Twit, you can watch the video version of this show completely ad free. Of course, listen to the audio version ad free if if you're not a member, the show will still be available to you in both ways. You can watch the video on YouTube with ads, or you can watch the audio as you always have. I mean, listen to the audio as you always have in our feeds. In any case, you gotta tune in to Hands On Tech because I guarantee there's going to be a question you're going to want to have the answer to. And from time to time I also review a gadget, a gizmo or something of the sort you gotta check out Hands On Tech and I can't wait to get your question. Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile.

[Andy Inako]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Andy Inako]

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Will pay it off at the 800.

[Andy Inako]

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[Andy Inako]

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[Jason Snell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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