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MacBreak Weekly 959: A Bricolage of Features
02:18:12
iOS 18.3.1, Powerbeats Pro 2, F1
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy's here, Alex is here, Jason's here, and we have a lot to talk about. Why did Apple update everything yesterday? Turns out a pretty big security flaw. But here's the good news. Probably not something you have to worry about, something we're all worried about. The United Kingdom says Apple must provide them with a backdoor not just to UK citizens iCloud accounts, but to everybody's. We'll talk about that. Some great Vision Pro news. A new source of immersive video for you. And where is the iPhone SE4? We speculate next on MacBreak Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 959, recorded Tuesday, February 11, 2025. A bricolage of features. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest Apple news with my good friends Jason Snell from six colors.com. hello, Jason.
- [01:11]
Jason Snell
Hello, Leo. How are you?
- [01:12]
Leo Laporte
The lava lamp is working again.
- [01:14]
Jason Snell
The lava lamp is functional. The light bulb has been replaced. It may be the only incandescent left in my house, but it's back because it's got to heat up the wax so that it bubbles around. You can't. If you had an efficient thing that just emitted light and wasn't very warm, what would be the point? Anyway, it's good to be. It's also kind of chilly out here.
- [01:32]
Leo Laporte
So this. Also with us, Andy Anako, WG BH Ballston. He's in the library where no lava lamps are allowed. Hello.
- [01:43]
Andy Ihnatko
Of course, Jason. It must be. It just occurred to me that that must be like, working on, like, a classic car from the 50s and 60s where you have the lava lamp. Like, I understand absolutely everything about how this lamp works. I can replace the bulb. It turns on and off via a switch. That I can understand. There are lamps in my house where if it stops working, it's like I can either fix it in 5 seconds or I need to buy a new lamp.
- [02:08]
Jason Snell
You got a little product that is designed around the inefficiency of the light bulb, of the incandescent light bulb, where it's like, well, eyeballs get hot. We could do something with that. Yes. Now, of course, we've engineered a lot of the heat, not all of the heat. The LEDs can still get hot, but, like, a lot of the heat out. And so what. What will become of the lava lamp? I have to build, like, a heater in there and stuff is like, that's too much. Too much.
- [02:33]
Leo Laporte
Alex. Lindsay Good to see you. Good to be here.
- [02:36]
Alex Lindsay
I think, I think it was properly said when they first decided of like dude, man that is so hot. Let's put some stuff around it, man.
- [02:44]
Leo Laporte
Let's just melt some wax, man. Whoa dude. Yeah, that was the origination.
- [02:50]
Alex Lindsay
We've used it for much other other things but I think that might be in the origination.
- [02:53]
Jason Snell
I just put this wax bottle on this hot plate and Whoa dude.
- [02:59]
Leo Laporte
Actually I'm gonna guess it came from. Do you remember the light? No, nobody. I'm the only one old enough. The light shows during the Electro Kool Aid acid tests and similar concerts. They would do two plates with oil in between them and then cast and so it was kind of moving blobs. I have a feeling it was a descendant of. Ah yeah but that's just a, that's just a thought from an old man who remembers the 60s well.
- [03:23]
Andy Ihnatko
I love how like all these really sophisticated looking like effects from the 50s and 60s when you think back that. Well they can't have been that sophisticated.
- [03:30]
Leo Laporte
More digital.
- [03:32]
Andy Ihnatko
The times when I real. When I, when I learned that I saw a tear down of one of those like funky like space super, super computer props from the 50s and 60s. Wow. How do they get like all those patterns of flashing lights? Well they have a motor that spins a disk with some metal dots on it and some copper brushes that contact some. And because they have a stack of those that rotate at different speeds that means they can get it almost random. And I'm like that is way more elegant than anything that I would have thought of. I'm so. Okay, first of all I'm going to need two. No, three Arduinos.
- [04:06]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [04:07]
Andy Ihnatko
One that's connected to an atomic clock.
- [04:10]
Leo Laporte
Just quick reminder that Apple has, as they seem to do every week now, updated iOS, Mac OS, all the OSes it seems now you're going to see articles with people with their. Your hair on fire. It's already been exploited. Gotta update to 18:3:1 or what is it? 18. Yeah, 18:31. But. But if you read the security bulletin, it requires physical access. A physical attack may disable USB restricted mode on a locked device. So unless you've got a bad guy.
- [04:48]
Andy Ihnatko
Living with you or unless you've handed your phone over to a cop.
- [04:53]
Leo Laporte
Right. And they say Apple is aware. And this is from the Apple security Bullet novel report. This issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.
- [05:05]
Jason Snell
Could be that USB charger kind of thing to write. You swap out a charger or some other Kind of block.
- [05:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's what it is. Sure.
- [05:11]
Jason Snell
Right.
- [05:12]
Leo Laporte
That's exactly what it is.
- [05:13]
Jason Snell
And then you've got access if you've got a. But the extremely sophisticated suggests me that there was an operation, right, an operation to insert this, you know, a USB something somewhere where they would then plug in and they.
- [05:25]
Leo Laporte
Jason Bourne did it is what you're saying.
- [05:26]
Alex Lindsay
And yes, it is a good argument for. There are cables that are power only, you know, that you may want to have. I have one of them in my bag that I have marked. I almost never use it because I'll almost never plug into a car or you know, that I don't, you know, someone else like a rental car or. Or a. Definitely not something at the airport where there's a usb. Like I'm not gonna do that. But just in case I do carry a cable that is. Got that, you know, I've tested it. There's no data there. Like I can't get data to show up there. So it's just power.
- [05:57]
Leo Laporte
It's possible to do that. You just don't have a data line. I buy. I have quite a few of these portapow. They're cheap data blockers. Data blockers. And in fact I think Steve Gibson called them USB condoms, which certainly brings it home. And this is your type A, but I'm sure they have type C and so forth.
- [06:18]
Andy Ihnatko
You know, you no longer feel quite so paranoid. I recently bought like a new like Faraday bag for my phone and I keep decided to keep it like in my laptop bag because I don't necessarily think that oh God, like a stingray is going to affect my life at all in any way, shape or form. But if I'm ever walking through Boston and I see a big protest and if I have that Faraday bag in my laptop bag, maybe I'm going to turn my phone off and put it in there just to make sure that I don't get caught in some sort of a sweep. And I hate the fact that I'm now thinking about that now.
- [06:51]
Leo Laporte
David Schaub in our YouTube chat says something interesting. He says USB C PD, the power delivery standard does not have a no data line. I don't know if that's true, but that might be something to be. You know what? Get 1831 is what you should be doing. And while Apple doesn't say that the Mac OS update has the same problem, I note that they did Update Sequoia to 1531, Sonoma to 1474, Ventura to 1374. Watchos 1131 and even the Vision Pro was updated. So there, there's something going on. I feel like this is, you know, they didn't, they didn't have any CVEs associated with those other devices, but no published CVE is what they're saying. So I'd be, I'd be doing that. Once again, the government is getting involved and there's nothing we can do. Oh, this case, it's the uk. The United Kingdom's Snooper Charter. Snooper's charter, which is the Investigator powers Act of 2016, is now giving. Has given the UK the means to secretly require Apple to provide a backdoor in icloud. This is a exclusive to the Washington Post who says they have sources because neither Apple nor the government, UK government are talking about it. And Apple I think, is enjoined from talking about it. But of course, leakers are gonna say, hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is a big deal. Remember, Apple did provide backdoors to icloud for a long time. In fact, they even told the FBI when the, I remember the terrorist attack in Southern California, they said, yeah, San Bernardino. If you just let the guy, just brought the guy's phone to his house, it would have backed up to icloud and we could have given it to you. But yeah, they've, they've added something called advanced protection now, which does not give them a backdoor.
- [09:01]
Andy Ihnatko
You know, two years ago.
- [09:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that's what the UK is, is concerned about.
- [09:07]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and that's, it's a huge deal because it's not, it's not like the San Bernardino case where the FBI went to Apple, say hi, we need you to get us into this one phone. The, this one is we want to have the ongoing ability to simply, anytime we want to get into somebody's secure icloud backup, just to be able to do that without even having to go through you. So they're asking for a permanent open gate into people's private data. And that's, that's going to be. Boy, Apple is gonna. That's one demand you make of Apple where Apple almost has to say, okay, guess what? Nobody gets encryption in the UK anymore because we would much rather have everybody understand that all of their data is vulnerable than simply provide a backdoor. The first step for the UK to simply to start saying, hi, we also wanna backdoor into imessage. We also wanna backdoor into VPN apps. They just simply cannot get in. They simply cannot condone this. They simply cannot participate in this. And the only Way out.
- [10:05]
Leo Laporte
You might say, well I'm not in the UK but it's everybody. So the UK would have access to America Americans data in icloud as well.
- [10:16]
Andy Ihnatko
And because they're part of the five eyes, if the United States wanted access to it, they could simply ask their friends and say great.
- [10:24]
Leo Laporte
The president of Signal said using technical capability notices, that's what the UK is using to weaken encryption around the globe, is a shocking move that will position the UK as a tech pariah rather than a tech leader. If implemented, the directive will create a dangerous cybersecurity vulnerability in the nervous system of our global economy. Cryptographer Matthew Green from Johns Hopkins and Alex Stamos, who's a regular on our show, wrote a op ed piece saying the only solution at this point is for the United States Congress to pass a law forbidding it. Because then that would, when you have opposing laws from two different countries, ours in this case because it's a US company, would trump, if you will, the UK law. I can't remember where that op ed is and I can't find it anymore. And I noticed Stamos pulled down his post on X saying hey, we just wrote this op ed. So I don't know, maybe they, maybe they were told ex nay on the op ed. BBC has confirmed it. So it's not now just the Washington Post. Eff reminds everybody that there's no such thing as a safe back door.
- [11:40]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I think my concern with this, right, like first off, yeah, there's no such thing as a safe back door. If there is a key and Apple has it because Apple needs to have it, that means that anybody who has access at Apple could get that key and it could spread from there. But even if it just stays at Apple, it means that anybody who for various legal reasons can get Apple to unlock data, Apple will be able to. And I mean, I hope you guys can talk me off the ledge here, but this feels to me like the death of big tech companies. Large companies offering complete end to end encryption where they don't hold a key feels to me like the future, the path we're going down, the future is going to be you may be able to compile it from source, you may be able to get it off GitHub, you may be able to find it in an app store, you may not even be able to do that, but that if it's anybody who is sort of a legitimate size or not to offer this, they are going to all end up having to hold a key and be a man in the middle, essentially, because you've got governments who just, you know, they don't, they want to be able to unlock stuff if, if they ask. And you know, the UK's arguments are stupid because the UK's arguments are like, oh no, it's okay, it's not gonna be for everybody. It's just gonna be when we ask in a secret court that nobody ever knows about for reasons that are good, trust us and people won't be informed.
- [13:02]
Leo Laporte
And Apple cannot tell anybody. It's one of those, you know, things.
- [13:05]
Jason Snell
Where it's secret, it's all secret, so there could be no oversight. This obviously leaked because somebody is bothered by this. But I don't know, it feels to me like we are going to enter an era where if you're a large player, you're going to have to hold the keys like that. And, and, and if somebody else wants to read your encrypted stuff with that key, they're going to have to, they're going to be compelled to give it to them. And then, you know, this is the, this is.
- [13:29]
Leo Laporte
Thank you. Scooter X. He found the link. It's a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Matthew Green And Alex Stamos, two of our most respected cryptographers in the U.S. said UK kicks Apple's door open for China. Beijing would quickly exploit the British order to allow access to encrypted data. They said Congress must immediately enact a law prohibiting American tech companies from providing encryption backdoors to any country. This would create a conflict of laws situation allowing Apple to fight this order in UK courts and protect American safety and security. Somehow, I don't know if that seems likely.
- [14:04]
Alex Lindsay
The problem is, is that our, you know, our representatives are digital children and so they, you know, their understanding of this will be very well.
- [14:11]
Leo Laporte
Also they're told by the FBI, the.
- [14:13]
Alex Lindsay
Ns, they're told by intelligence agencies.
- [14:15]
Leo Laporte
That's good.
- [14:17]
Alex Lindsay
We have to have this. The five eyes have been trying to pry this, this door open for years, a decade, you know at least where. And so they use different countries. They, there's been laws we've seen in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, uk. They can't get it done in the United States because every time they bring them up, there's enough people that get upset that stop it. But it's one thing to stop it, another thing to get them to do a whole new law to stop it. That's the hard part is that, but the five eyes have been trying to pry this open for a long time and it comes probably from a Relatively good place. Their job, they get. It's kind of like when you're talking to someone in it and you ask them for extra ports to be opened. What do they get out of that other than getting in trouble when things don't work? When there's a terrorist act and something happens in UK, they're going to blame, you know, MI5 or MI6 or whatever for not doing what they need, everything they could have done to protect it. And they. So they're. They're coming from this kind of. When. When you have a hammer, everything's a nail. Like, we get blamed for things that get through, so you get where they're coming from. But it is a pretty horrible thing to. I mean, there's just, as Jason said, there's no way to put this back in the. In this back in the back. And it's just really a bad idea.
- [15:30]
Leo Laporte
For the people who say, well, you have a backdoor and it could be secured. I remind you that in 1994, the United States passed a law, CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement act, which allowed law enforcement to wiretap in the United States. The back doors that were provided to law enforcement in 1994 are the ones the Chinese hackers are using with Salt Typhoon to monitor government communications in the United States. You can put a backdoor in there. And by the way, at the time, director of the FBI said, oh, no, it'll be safe. We'll make sure that that back door is never breached, et cetera, et cetera. But it was, and it's the Chinese who did it. And there's no going back on that. You know, we can't get the Chinese hackers out of our phone system now.
- [16:24]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, they're hoovering up. I think that people don't understand. Also, they're like, well, I'm a regular person. I'm not breaking any laws. How does this affect me? They're trying to get. The Chinese are trying to get an angle on everybody and all the things that they could, because they're not just interested in taking your money and taking your bank account. They're interested in potentially, somewhere in the future, being able to move the population one direction or another. You're talking about a country that has a merit system for how you get things done. They're looking at. They're playing a much deeper game than what we're talking about.
- [16:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, they also tapped the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign, but they tapped Congress. So even if it's not just if it's only big shots that's bad.
- [17:11]
Alex Lindsay
But what. Oh, no. And what I'm saying is, is that. That they are selling us digital frames that are gathering our data. They. I had a radio on my. For my car that won't let you. You can't connect to the radio unless you give it your address book and connect and turn your phone into a hotspot, you know, like. And you're like, no, thank you. And so the. The. So they're constantly. Because you get. Just the same way the NSA does it. You gather all this information because you don't know who you need to spearfish or who you need to leverage somewhere in the future to get access to something that's bigger than you know, that person may be the cousin of someone who works at a power company or works for a campaign. And what you need is to be able to send an intelligent email to somebody else going, hey, can you click on this? I want to show you something. And boom, you're in. You know, and so it's your. All of these things are connected, and it's just. It is really dangerous, what we're talking about here. And we'll, you know, we'll pay the price because we'll actually have bad things happen because they're trying to protect us from the bad things.
- [18:18]
Leo Laporte
I mean, honestly, I would guess. Bet most of you don't use advanced data protection on your iPhones. Do any of you?
- [18:25]
Jason Snell
No, because it.
- [18:26]
Leo Laporte
It's a pain in the ass, right? Yeah. So it doesn't really impact you guys, because we all are. Apple has our icloud keys. We. There is a backdoor. This is only really for people who want to. Really want to protect themselves with advanced data protection.
- [18:43]
Jason Snell
And that can be. You're like, okay, well, those are the criminals and the bad guys, and they don't need to be protected. And that's the argument of all of these law enforcement agencies. But the truth, you know, if you are a dissident, if you are somebody who is being targeted by your own or some other government. And we've seen there are plenty of examples of this. There are people being targeted in their own countries. There are people who have left the countries who are being targeted elsewhere. You can just look at Khashoggi, right? Like, he was surveilled, and then he was brought to an embassy and murdered by his government outside, right?
- [19:19]
Leo Laporte
And so probably why the Washington Post has journalists.
- [19:22]
Jason Snell
You know, it's. It's journalists who are talking to people who are in danger, and they want to find out who they're Talking to so that they can then find those people and put them in danger or they're trying to save. Like there are lots of those kinds of issues. It's not just the bad guys. And the problem is once the bottle is open again, not to make these slippery slope arguments, but like once there is a mechanism, they will use it, which is why people talk about not allowing the mechanism. And law enforcement will always tell you they want more tools.
- [19:52]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [19:53]
Jason Snell
There has to be somebody else to say you don't need more tools. And I, I always bring this up when we talk about this, but when the Miranda ruling came out in the early 70s, I believe, where you have the right to remain silent, etc, law enforcement said that that's it, crime will run rampant, everything is ruined because we have to read people their rights. Well, that didn't happen. Like that didn't happen. But they're gonna make this argument you just need somebody on the other side. And, which means in the UK's case, in practical terms, what you really need is for a whistleblower to leak this to, you know, a journalist who is going to write about it, which starts a conversation which leads to it being politically impractical. So that the political people in, in, in this case Parliament in the UK and in the cabinet in the UK can go to the intelligence source and go, we can't do this, this looks bad. Otherwise they'll just take whatever they can get.
- [20:49]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And for me, I agree with absolutely everything that you said. In addition to that, there's such a fundamental principle that if you make encryption illegal or impossible, you can't have a situation where the government is saying that a citizen does not have the right to know something that the government can't know as well. We're not allowed to hold a secret. That is the sort of thing where if it had been Even conceivably possible 250 years ago, this is something that would have been in the, in the Bill of Rights. Because until, until digital encryption, encryption, you can, if you write something down, well, at some point someone can find it. At some point someone can dig it up. Someone can, someone can, can get it. Now we have encrypted, basically I can put something in a safe, but that safe can be opened with a court order. I can create a code, but that code can be broken. That's, that's never, it's never come up. Now it is actually possible for us to have a secret that we don't want anybody else to know. Doesn't matter if it's the government doesn't matter if it's our next door neighbor. We can't have a situation where we are not allowed to encrypt this with the strongest cryptography available if we so choose. Because again that statement is that you are not allowed to know something that the government cannot find out from you. That is on principle something that we have to resist fully.
- [22:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. What should Apple do?
- [22:20]
Andy Ihnatko
They can't play ball. Absolutely cannot play ball.
- [22:23]
Leo Laporte
We're out of here.
- [22:24]
Andy Ihnatko
They can't, they, they can't say we participate.
- [22:26]
Jason Snell
We, we.
- [22:27]
Andy Ihnatko
They can't say that we, we, we, we have to go by whatever rules and laws are enabled in the country that we, that we operate in. Because that essentially is. Nobody can believe them ever when they say that they actually believe in privacy. This is such a wholesale destruction of everybody's privacy in the entire world that this is Apple's purity test. Do they actually believe in privacy or is this a marketing thing that they can keep promoting themselves on because they don't make any money off of anti privacy. So no, they have to basically say that, guess what, we're not going to participate. The only way we can comply with this law is by not, not offering any product or service in the UK that is under the umbrella of this law. I don't see any other way around it.
- [23:18]
Alex Lindsay
I mean in the past they've made, they've made icloud available, I mean they made the servers available to secure to, to law enforcement when subpoenaed. You know, like the, I think it's.
- [23:29]
Andy Ihnatko
Not the same thing.
- [23:29]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, yeah, so, so I think that, but I, so that hasn't been a line that they drew in the past. Where they've drawn the line in the past is the phone. Like you can't, like they will, they have not given anybody the ability, including the United States government, the ability to actually get the data that's on the phone. And so I think, and, and I think that a lot of the security things that we've seen Apple do, you know, add to the phone is not necessarily to protect you from people trying to steal your bank account. It's to protect you from governments. You know, they've been slowly, you know, you know, welding off the doors, you know, for years. And so it'll be interesting to see, you know, where they, where they cart that off. Like, I guess my question is also is like if you are an end to end encryption and between two phones is there any way to do that without the icloud infrastructure? Like is that, does that you know, because the messages themselves could be encrypted. Sure, you can have the back end to icloud, but you don't get. But if the messages are encrypted on both ends, even having access to icloud wouldn't necessarily give you access to the messages.
- [24:36]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, this feels like we are. I'm sorry, just quick, just quickly. It did occur to me that this is another argument for the ability to side load apps. If the thing is that We've discovered with TikTok that there is an ability to simply choke off a nation's access to any app simply by choking off access to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, if you have the ability. If we have a nightmare situation in which in a country that any sort of encryption is illegal, signal is illegal, and anything that cannot be eavesdropped on is illegal, the only way to get around it would be to sideload an app that can't be choked off from the Apple App Store. So that's just another data point, because.
- [25:21]
Jason Snell
That'S the next step here. The next step here is literally making it illegal for any company to offer an encryption system of communication that does not include a key that they possess. Right. That's essentially what they would do. Because you can't outlaw encryption, really. Right. Like, because it's math, you can't do that. But what you can do is require the builders of all encrypted systems to hold in their possession away to decrypt messages. And, and if, and as Andy said, and Alex, as you pointed out, like, you could build a system where you're not involved and there's no one in the middle and it's all direct and they do their own key exchange and all of that. But if they say legally you can't build that, you have to add a step where you possess the keys, even if you're not in the middle, if they have to send you the keys as well, so that if their encrypted data is handed off, you have to decrypt it, then what are you going to do? And that's, that's essentially outlawing signal. And Andy's right, that is, that shows the weak point here, which is if you outlaw all of these systems and then all you have to do is go to the two app stores and you've choked it off of at least everybody's phone and tablet.
- [26:29]
Leo Laporte
And it's kind of interesting because it really is going to be a whack, a mole because the encryption is well understood. The software, the source code, is out there. It is not hard to roll your own, to be honest.
- [26:39]
Jason Snell
It's not going to stop any bad guys.
- [26:40]
Leo Laporte
Libraries bad guys will have encryption. And anybody who's really technically sophisticated will also be able to create a messaging app that is as secure as signal. This is not some magic technology. It's out there. And so I guess what's going to. It's, it'll create kind of an underground, a black market of encryption.
- [27:01]
Jason Snell
I mean, this is where we were in the 90s, I feel like, right where it was like people, real people knew they could get PGP and you could print it in a book and then type in the code or you could get. Or it also reminds me of like DCSS, right, where it's like you can't rip DVDs except everybody knows the server that's in a country that doesn't care that lets you have the code to decrypt DVDs and that's. And the net result is yes, Leo, the bad guys will not be stopped. People who are very technical will not be stopped. Everybody who is not really bad but is non technical and is doing stuff will now be subject to this kind of scrutiny. And you can say, I have nothing to hide. But again, sometimes you do have something to hide. Sometimes you do something that you think is fine, but there's somebody in your country who has decided that they're going to target you and they're going to find out something about you that they're going to use or they're going to make your life hell or whatever. And those are the people who will be not protected by.
- [27:57]
Alex Lindsay
But I mean, or it's someone two or three, you know, degrees of separation away that they're trying to get to and you're just, you know, just, you're in the way on that way.
- [28:06]
Jason Snell
Yeah.
- [28:07]
Alex Lindsay
You know, and so that's the thing is, it's that the, the exponential math there is, is gathering all that data and we will absolutely be exposed if they do this. Like, you know, you know, and it's absolutely a problem. And it is a, it's a, it's a big deal, you know, and they've been, again, they've been trying to pry this door open for a decade because they feel like they have to do everything they can. This is what everyone does. This is their mission. That's why you join the NSA or the CIA or everything else. But the issue is, is that we make decisions all the time about what's appropriate. We're willing to put up with a certain Amount of danger based on the fact we could make it so that no one dies driving cars. It would just be really not, not a great experience, you know, like to, to actually drive cars around if we made it, you know, life in prison. If you get into an accident, you know, like, like, okay, well then, then everyone's going to stop driving, you know. And the thing is, is that there, this is, it's not good for the industry, it's not good for the country. It's not good for us. It's not, there's nothing, you know, and you can't be absolute about protection. We have to make decisions about what. But, you know, and I sound callous, but acceptable loss, you know, like that we're not going to give up all of our freedoms out of fear, you know. And that's, that's what, that's what we're talking about.
- [29:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [29:16]
Andy Ihnatko
To me, just quickly, I mean, it just. You don't even have to have a reason. You don't have to have a secret to hide. You don't have to have consequences if a certain secret gets out. You can simply decide that I, My personal, private information is my personal, private information. You are not entitled to it. I am entitled to create as thick a barrier of security against a third party learning this or seeing this as I desire. And that is my right. As you say, we forget that 250 years ago. A lot of the things that we take for granted today are just simply agreements that were made that became sacrosanct. The idea that, guess what, cops, you need a warrant to come in here and search my place. The government cannot actually shut down a printing press. The government cannot actually shut down a website for saying things that it doesn't like. Those are, those could have gone the other way. We would have a lot more convictions and a lot of crimes would be stopped. If the cops could simply come in, basically rough up anybody they want and throw people in jail because they're pretty sure that someone did something. As you say, we've decided that the idea of giving up that form of liberty for a little bit of safety is not an acceptable trade off. And so it has been a sacrosanct part of our rights as Americans and through other countries, basically looking at our Constitution saying, that's pretty good, let's cut, copy and paste it. It's become international. So again, it's not a case of I have nothing to hide or I have something that I need to hide or my life could be in danger. If a hostile government were able to track me and who I talk to. I can simply decide that I don't want people to know a certain thing. And that's where no is a beginning, middle and an end of an argument when it comes to that.
- [31:07]
Leo Laporte
I wonder if you're going to create a kind of a cadre of Mr. Robots where there's a subculture of people who understand that you don't use commercial phones or PCs, that you run your own software and that you have your own cryptography built into, not your own. Probably there'd be an underground of these tools. That's dangerous. Yeah. De Googled.
- [31:34]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. You can buy a phone, put a clean ROM on it, put a clean version of asop Android on it, choose very, very carefully the apps that you put on it and basically have the most difficult to trace phone on the planet. It's not going to be nearly as convenient, nearly as fun, nearly as enabling.
- [31:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you're not going to spend fortnite on it.
- [31:54]
Andy Ihnatko
It's important to have that power if you choose to go through that.
- [31:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is how many people care enough to do that? By the way, again, if you're not using advanced data protection, this really doesn't apply because Apple already has the keys. So I wonder, has Apple ever said how many people use adp? I kind of.
- [32:15]
Jason Snell
I don't think so.
- [32:16]
Leo Laporte
Tiny fraction. It's going to be, it's going to be government people, people who have, you know, secret agents. People have a strong reason to keep their stuff private because it is inconvenient. Most of us, all of us on the panel, I bet most listeners aren't willing to take those extra steps. It's an interesting world we live in, as they say. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. There's a lot more news, including rumors flying. I thought maybe today we'd have a brand new iPhone SE. Could it be any minute now? We'll talk about that in just a little bit. Jason Snell is here from Six Colors, Andy Inocco from gbh and Alex Lindsay from officehours Global. This episode of Mac Break Weekly, brought to you by Stash. Saving and investing can feel impossible. But with Stash, it's not just a reality. It's easy. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster. They'll provide you with personalized advice on what to invest in based on your goals. Or if you want to just sit back and watch your money go to work. You can opt into their award winning expert managed portfolio that picks stocks for you. Stash has helped millions of Americans reach their financial goals and starts at just $3 per month. Don't let your savings sit around, make it work harder for you. Go to get.stash.commacbreak to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.stash.com MacBreak paid non client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee Investment Advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC. SEC registered investment advisor investing involves risk offers subject to TNCs Apple had to Remove Some Malware actually, it was both Apple and Android screen reading malware that was designed to capture your crypto wallet backup password. Wow. This is called sparkcat. It infested more than one app, but a small number of IO apps. Kaspersky discovered that Apple has pulled those apps from the App Store. Some of the apps that had the malware included nothing you've ever heard of. Cumcum, WeTink and any GPT. 11 apps in total. Although according to MacRumors, when removing the apps, Apple found another 89 with the same code that had been rejected or removed previously for violating Apple's prod policies. So it was a very actually it's kind of an interesting hack. The SDK that was built into these apps wasn't part of the main functionality of the app but but it had OCR capabilities and so it could look at images and screenshots stored on iPhones. And I guess if you have a crypto wallet and you get a recovery phrase, you might do a screenshot of it and save it so that you can recover your wallet. I wish I had. Although if I had, maybe malware would have stolen it anyway.
- [35:53]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's pretty sophisticated too. Like if, if it got confused by what we're seeing, it would actually load like a different translator ocr. It's like damn, these people are well financed and damn clever.
- [36:05]
Leo Laporte
That's amazing. So let's talk about the iPhone. Se Mark Gurman said it any day now, right?
- [36:13]
Andy Ihnatko
Yes.
- [36:14]
Leo Laporte
Has that been debunked? Are we going to say no sooner?
- [36:17]
Jason Snell
I think he said no sooner than now and it hasn't happened yet. So he's right. Exactly. He nailed it. It happened no sooner. But it's a minute. I think he said this week or next. So you know, either either it's about to happen or it'll be next week. We don't know. And I can say and Sometimes I go visit my mom in Arizona and people are like, oh, I think Jason is going somewhere secret for a briefing. I have no briefings or anything about this. So either they're not telling me or it's not imminent, but I honestly don't know.
- [36:43]
Leo Laporte
It will be, According to Gurman, $499. $499, which is a little more right than the old SE, but it will have an A18 I think. So it can run Apple intelligence. That's kind of the main point, I would think. And according to. And I don't know if this is credible. Yanko design. Spigen accidentally revealed the iPhone SE4 design with its, you know, Spigen makes those lovely clear cases and so you can see the action button, a bigger screen and more. Again, I don't know how credible this is sometimes case manufacturers guess and just so they'll have something ready day of and then they'll quickly pull it back if it doesn't work.
- [37:28]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but they would. But it wouldn't be terribly off. It's huge when they do that. It's usually based on like tooling and manufacturing, even for like a limited run costs enough money that. But they must have somebody who slid them enough information that, okay, we're going to go with this.
- [37:44]
Leo Laporte
Every year people offer blank versions of a new phone that are either prototypes or aimed at phone stores or somehow exfiltrated from Chinese manufacturing. Probably they have some information.
- [38:01]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And as we've said many times in the past, if it really is going to be released this week or next week, this is about the time you would start seeing accidents of this kind.
- [38:11]
Alex Lindsay
Right.
- [38:12]
Jason Snell
I mean case. The other thing is case. The CASE business leaks early because they pay a lot of money and it is where most of the industrial design leaks come from. Because in there, in China they got money to spend and they need to know the dimensions so that they can get their cases ready. So it totally happens. And Andy's right. We're now in accidental leak season, which I don't know, it feels a little bit like the iPhone SE. Like it's not even the high. It's not red alert. It's like a yellow alert for leaks. They're like, yeah, we prefer it to be secret, but it's not the new iPhone and the new iPhones leak like crazy. So yeah.
- [38:54]
Leo Laporte
I'm sure it's not the most popular iPhone, but I know a lot of people who would like an se. Right.
- [38:59]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And it's a very important phone. The minimum buy in for an iPhone has to be competitive with mid range Android phones, not only the United States, because if you think that it's such a lesser version of the iPhone that kids would not be interested in buying it, maybe the kids are not the ones who are actually paying for it, it's the parents who are buying it. It's a way to keep it in the family and internationally. The price point of a regular iPhone is prohibitive for a great number of people. And Apple still has to keep. They're still making what, 52% of their money off of iPhone sales. They can't risk losing a lifelong iPhone user simply because they don't have a decent phone that can compete with a really, really good $300, $400 Android phone, of which there are a great, great many.
- [39:49]
Leo Laporte
Gurman says, as I said, 499, that's 70 bucks more than the current SE. The current SE by the way, along with the iPhone 14 discontinued in the EU because they don't have USB C and law requires that in the EU. So that's another reason to get going on the SE.
- [40:07]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I do like the fact that Gurman's rumors are basically saying this does not feel like a terribly cut down phone. The fact that it is fully capable of Apple intelligence means that Apple is really, really committed to the long term and not manufacturing a divide between Apple intelligence users and non Apple intelligence users. They really want to make sure that even if you got in the door for the cheapest ticket possible, you're still getting enough CPU power, enough AI to be able to use Apple Intelligence.
- [40:34]
Leo Laporte
No home button. That will be the end of the home button. It will have face id. And I think it might be most interesting to us because it should be, according to Gurman, the first Apple iPhone with the Apple designed modem instead of the Qualcomm modem. So I'm sure there'll be a lot of benchmarking and a lot of interest in this.
- [40:57]
Jason Snell
Yeah, at the same time they're a little bit insulated because if it turns out, gasp 5G speeds are not as fast on the iPhone SE as on the regular mainline iPhones. Everybody's gonna, the response is really gonna be, eh, it's an iPhone SE. Of course, like they can get away with some issues as long as they're functional with them not being up to par with the latest and greatest from Qualcomm. I'm not saying that'll happen, but I'm saying that they, it is, it is their cheapest new phone so they can get away with it on there or on an iPad or even on a Mac in a way that they can't on the mainline iPhone. They got to get that right.
- [41:33]
Andy Ihnatko
And it's also completely in line with the idea of having a budget phone, not having to pay to pay other people for licensing or for their own modem technology. That actually is going to affect the price as well.
- [41:44]
Leo Laporte
Sure.
- [41:45]
Andy Ihnatko
I think Qualcomm is. Qualcomm position has always been, I don't care if you make your own modems, you're still using our technology. You still got to pay up.
- [41:52]
Leo Laporte
License.
- [41:52]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, but there's got to be a savings there.
- [41:54]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [41:55]
Jason Snell
They're not buying the chips. Right. And so that's a big deal.
- [41:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, and I wonder. They're not going to build in cdma, which was Qualcomm's big license. So. Yeah, you're right though, Andy. If you need a small phone, there's always the Paris Hilton Razor Plus. Brand new pink, Very pink, aggressively pink. It's a flip phone from Motorola. They call it the Razer plus. And it comes with a little purse case. So that's nice. Also pink.
- [42:28]
Andy Ihnatko
Get one for your dog. Your little tiny fluffy dog.
- [42:31]
Leo Laporte
You know, I'm so tempted. I'm so tempted. It is a folding phone. Does it have a folding screen? It's kind of hard to tell from the pictures, but there's Paris using it. Hilton, not Martineau. There she is with her little pink purse. Pretty in Paris. Pink is the color. Oh, it even says that's hot on the hinge. Paris's trademark. So your wallpaper, her signature style.
- [43:05]
Andy Ihnatko
Is that a Motorola?
- [43:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Moto.
- [43:08]
Alex Lindsay
Every time I see that, I'm always like, Motorola still makes phones like, yeah.
- [43:13]
Leo Laporte
It'S an Android phone. Yeah.
- [43:15]
Andy Ihnatko
And they make really great cheap phones. Like, no kidding, they make a. Their $250, $280 phone is probably going to be okay without Apple Intelligence. It would be as good as Apple's se. There are those well made who would.
- [43:30]
Leo Laporte
Prefer not to have Apple Intelligence. And in fact, there are those who turned off Apple Intelligence who are now saying, wait a minute, whoa, it's back on. Is it a bug?
- [43:44]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I don't know. The story when it first hit, after 18 hit was that, wow, wow, Apple is now automatically turning on Apple Intelligence when you install the new os. And then there's some people who are taking a look at it saying, it's not happening for me, but it's happening for me. And they're sort of like tracking through the install process, seeing that, well, I'm not seeing this welcome screen. And if I saw the welcome screen, people who see the welcome screen are having it turned on automatically, people who are not seeing it. So there's some speculation it might be a bug. I don't know that Apple would create a bug that accidentally turns on Apple Intelligence. I think that they might decide that we're good.
- [44:27]
Leo Laporte
According to developer Jeff Johnson, who was one of the people experienced it, he had apparently disabled Apple Intelligence in 18.3 and saw it re enabled after the update to 18.3.1 yesterday. He says, I personally have two different Apple Silicon Macs running Sequoia updated to 15.3.1. Apple Intelligence re enabled on the MacBook Pro, but not on the Mac Mini. Hmm. So I've turned it on. I mean, I'm not sure why you wouldn't want Apple Intelligence. I know it's not that intelligent. What is going to happen? Is Apple going to somehow fix Siri? Is something going to. Is 18.4 going to fix it? Jason, have you been playing with the latest developer edition?
- [45:14]
Jason Snell
I haven't used the latest beta, the 18 4. The idea is that it will have some improvements to Siri and it'll have the context, the personal context stuff that is a value. But then again, this is what we were all really hoping was that this was going to be a big step forward for Siri. And then Mark Gurman rained on our parade and said, well, the really good Siri is not going to be for another year. So I think, I mean, Apple's problem here is that they recolored Siri. They changed the animations of Siri back when they shipped 18, and that was a mistake because it implies a level of improvement of Siri that has not existed. It might be that series better in this. I hope it is better understanding your personal context at the very least. We'll see. But if Gurman is to be believed, and I think I believe him, there's going to be, you know, there's the biggest work on Siri is yet to come, which is disturbing. Although when you think about it, like, Amazon is about to do an event to promote their future release of an improved agent. Right. Like a lot of companies are sort of still struggling to do a comprehensive overhaul of their old agents. Apple's not alone in this, but, boy, it is. I mean, I would say it's desperate times, but it was desperate times like five years ago with Siri. And again, we'll see.
- [46:37]
Alex Lindsay
I'll keep on saying, go back to the disaster that Apple maps was and now it works just fine. You know, like it just, it just, there's time, money, lot. They have some time and they have lots of money, you know, and those things, time and money fixes a lot of things, especially when you have a company that pretty good at executing. So I have a feeling like it'd be very hard for us to, I think we should come back three or four years from now and say, well, did they figure this out? Because that's about how long it took Apple Maps to figure it out.
- [47:04]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And when we wouldn't we all be shocked and surprised and suspicious if Apple in so many words said that, oh, Siri is so expandable and flexible and extendable that we were able to give it AI features without doing a whole gut and remodel. We know it always seemed like the sort of thing where they will keep the name, they will keep the interface, but it's the ship of Theseus. It's like everything has been replaced to make it notoriously.
- [47:31]
Leo Laporte
Amazon's been having a lot of trouble putting AI in Echo. They have announced an event, as you said, Jason, February 26th. We'll stream it if it's streamed because I think it'll be very interesting. Panos Panay Ex of Microsoft, the guy who's so pumped about Microsoft Surface Devices, is now their senior vice president of devices and services. He'll be the keynote. But according to cnbc, Apple executives have scheduled a go no go meeting for Valentine's Day. They are not confident that they'll be able to put the AI in. It has done. Apparently, you know, leaks from Amazon say it's awful. It will be an add on, by the way. They'll have traditional Amazon Echo and then for five to ten bucks more, you'll be able to get an AI based Echo. But that's not confirmed because Friday they're going to. Their poor sweethearts are just going to have to be left in the lurch because they're going to have a big go no go meeting to decide whether to, according to Reuters, to decide whether to put the smarts in. So we shall see. I'm very curious about all this. They're committed. They sent press invites out for February 26th. But.
- [48:54]
Andy Ihnatko
It'S difficult. The road for every single smart assistant that's been trying to make this adaptation is that before you can make the assistant smarter, you have to make it a lot dumber. When you start rolling out these AI features, suddenly the assistant that was hardwired to do the 80% of things that everybody wants it to do. It does all that stuff. Well, now it might not take.
- [49:17]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that helps.
- [49:19]
Andy Ihnatko
I can definitely help you set a timer for cooking your brownies. Cooking brownies requires three different, like, no, no, no, no. Don't just set a timer.
- [49:25]
Leo Laporte
Seven minutes. Well, and Siri has, I mean, remember the Gruber piece that Siri has gotten dumber. Well, it's claiming to know stuff it doesn't know instead of saying, well, here's what I found on the web about that.
- [49:41]
Jason Snell
Well, and the ChatGPT integration that they added. I, I, I understand why, but I am actually a little bit surprised that it isn't more integrated. That if you say, I'm happy to get chat GPT results should just be there, that it doesn't sort of take those in and pass them on to you. Because instead you end up saying, you know, hey, lady, ask Chad GPT to do this thing. And at that point, you know, it should probably, like, again, you shouldn't use it if you don't want to, but if you're, like, okay with it, then they should do a better job of letting Siri kick things to GPT. And it still feels Siri is all patched together. They keep adding things to it. Like, it's a mess. And it's built up over years. It is this, you know, bricolage of little sticks and strings and things that have been built on and built on. It's like a nest or something or a beaver dam. Bricolage is a great word, but that's what it is. It's kind of a mess. And then you put GPT on top. And the weird thing is that sometimes it says, no, no, no, I know this. And then it gets it wrong when it should say, let's ask ChatGPT that if you want. Which I would choose to.
- [50:44]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [50:45]
Leo Laporte
What is a bricolage?
- [50:47]
Jason Snell
It's like a mess of stuff that's just kind of like added, added together and built up over time.
- [50:51]
Leo Laporte
It feels like a hobby. Like, like somebody would be. I'm really Collage.
- [50:55]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I think it's the same kind of French root there. But it's, Yeah, a bricolage is like, you know, imagine just you keep on adding sticks and strings and twigs, and you built up a thing and then you look at it and you're like, what the heck is this thing? It's bricolage. That was the name of our CMS at macworld back in the day. That's how I know that. What that was excellent.
- [51:14]
Leo Laporte
Says it's a term used in Arts and literature work made from available things.
- [51:21]
Jason Snell
By Levi Strauss with whatever materials are to hand. So you construct it out of the pieces that are around you.
- [51:28]
Leo Laporte
In French, bricolet. To bricolet is to fiddle or tinker, I think.
- [51:33]
Jason Snell
I think Siri is bricolage if ever I saw one. Apologies to bricolages everywhere for that.
- [51:40]
Andy Ihnatko
I never heard that word before. And now I'm like, like, how is this not the name of one of those absolutely insufferable tech startups where, like.
- [51:49]
Leo Laporte
Such a good name?
- [51:49]
Jason Snell
You don't know.
- [51:50]
Andy Ihnatko
You don't know what the product is. But they got to start. Let me explain what a bricolage is and why we think it's pertinent to our vision for mobile computing.
- [52:00]
Leo Laporte
I am the bricolet. Let's take a little break and come back. Lots more to talk about. You're watching Mac Break Weekly with some actual intelligence in the form of Andy and Akko, Alex, Lindsay and Jason Snow. Actual intelligence. That's what AI stands for. Actual intelligence. And our sponsor of the moment is Delete Me. Now, I have to ask you, when's the last time you. I'm not encouraging you to do this. When's the last time you searched for your name online? I did it years ago and I was so appalled by how much was out there, I immediately started to go around deleting stuff. But doing it by hand is very, very hard. And there's a real problem with that because even though they're required, all of these data brokers are required to have a, you know, a page where you can delete your data, it's not permanent. They start re accreting your dossier almost immediately. Plus there's new data brokers all the. When the big national public data breach happened a couple of months ago, do you remember that? And they said hundreds of millions of people's Social Security number was revealed. Steve Gibson and I both, there's a site that, where you could look up and see if you were in that data breach. Both looked it up and yep, there was our social gosh right there in public, available for sale to the highest bidder. But then I thought, you know, we've been using Delete me for my wife for Lisa for some time because I think it's really important in a business the management not have that information online for security reasons. Lisa was not in the breach. No, nothing. That's amazing. That's why we use delete me. DeleteMe has accounts for families, for businesses and for individuals. And I'll tell You why? It's really important for a business. We were starting to get scams pretending to be Lisa. They knew her phone number. They knew the phone numbers of her direct reports. They would send text messages to send them saying, this is Lisa, I'm in a meeting, but please buy, you know, $1,000 worth of Amazon cards and send them here. I gotta give them to all the employees. And fortunately, our employees are neither greedy nor dumb. They have actual intelligence and didn't fall for it. But it scared the heck out of me. So I immediately signed her up for Delete me for the Delete me family plans. It's great. Cause you can make sure everybody in your family is protected. Delete me helps reduce risk from identity theft, from cybersecurity threats like those spear phishing attacks. I mentioned harassment and more. And you could, yeah, in theory, do it yourself. First of all, there's hundreds and hundreds of these data brokers. You'd have to know all of them. But like I said, it doesn't end there. There's new data brokers all the time. So Delete me's experts know all of these sources. They will go out, remove your information from hundreds of data brokers and then they will continue to scan and remove your information regularly. With the family plan, you can assign unique data sheets to each family member. So it's tailored to their what they want deleted, what they don't want deleted. You can manage privacy settings for the whole family. I'm talking everything from addresses and photos and emails, all removed, relatives removed phone numbers, social media property value, and on and on. Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy. It's a really good service and we know it works. JoinDeleteMe.com TWiT if you use the offer code TWiT, you'll get 20% off TWiT. JoinDeleteMe.com TWIT the offer code TWiT gets you 20% of all privacy plans. Choose the one that's right for you. Really, really works. We extremely happy with the results. I gave up. I mean, I don't. It's like everybody in the who works for me knows if you get a text message from Leo, it's definitely phony. It's not. It's not the real deal. I did order something this morning. I was very excited. I ordered my new power beats Pro 2. Same price as AirPods Pro, but but. And you get transparency mode, noise cancellation, personalized spatial audio. The H2 chip is in it, but. And this is the first time in an Apple audio product. Heart rate monitoring also Built in. I did buy the orange ones. So you'll.
- [56:39]
Alex Lindsay
Did you really? I was like, yeah. I was like, these look really good, but I'm not going to get orange. And then I saw they had other colors.
- [56:45]
Leo Laporte
They have black, gray, purplish and orange. But I thought, I'm going all in, man. I want everybody to know I'm wearing the Beats. I just really want to see how the heart, how well the heart weight works. The other thing I do like about it, it has an over the ear clip. And it's sometimes when you work out with AirPods, especially when I'm on my peloton and my head's really shaking, it's the worst thing. You're on a peloton, you're locked in in bicycle clips and then the AirPod falls out. It's really inconvenient. So I think I'll. That's what I want the hooks for. They're lightweight. I don't know if I like the Beats sound. My memory of it is. It's a little bass heavy. But I have the AirPods Pro so it'll be good to compare. And I'll give you a review. Mine come on Valentine's Day, which is very nice.
- [57:37]
Alex Lindsay
I think the only thing I really use the AirPods Pro, I have so many headsets.
- [57:41]
Leo Laporte
Me too.
- [57:41]
Alex Lindsay
I've worked and I use a lot of different ones for different things. You know, I've got. Got a regular shock shocks, open comms, which is the one I use when I'm talking on the phone because it sounds the best for the other side. And then I have the shocks that I swim in, the swim ones. And then I have the ultimate ears that I work out in the ultimate ear fits because they.
- [58:01]
Leo Laporte
I have all of those too.
- [58:02]
Alex Lindsay
And, and the max is the max I kind of use with my Vision Pro. But I also, I find that the ear. The Apple Pro. Apple. The Pros are. The AirPod Pros 2 are just nice and lighter to use the Apple Vision Pro with than putting the headset on. But I find myself that's about all I use. And part of it is because I just don't like the way it pairs. I'm like I'm on a phone call on this device. It would be great if you just stayed there. And I'm working on getting it to not look at all the other ones. And I know that there's people text me all the time when I say this on the show, but holy smokes, when you take it out of the box, you know, trying to get it to just do the one thing. And so like my headsets only talk. My, my open comps are only paired with my phone, so they can't do anything else. You can't, you can't pair to anything else. So I put them on, they always work. And, and I find that the pairing stuff, like I'm in the middle of a call and still go somewhere else. And I keep, people keep on saying it's getting better, it's still happening. You know, it'll be.
- [59:06]
Leo Laporte
This is going to be interesting. I'll, I'll test that for sure. Because I have the same problem with my AirPods, but it also ties into the Peloton software. So instead of wearing the heart rate monitor across your chest, I can just use. We'll see. But I can just use the heart rate monitor.
- [59:21]
Alex Lindsay
I mean, in fairness, the speech to text works best with the Apple products and the AirPod Pros specifically.
- [59:29]
Leo Laporte
But this is gonna have the H2 in it. It is an Apple product, right?
- [59:33]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it does. It does have the H2 in it.
- [59:34]
Leo Laporte
We'll see. This will be interesting.
- [59:36]
Alex Lindsay
But if you want it to be like text this person, do this thing, do whatever when you use the other headsets, it's all very clunky. Oh, I agree. It's really clunky, really fast, you know.
- [59:45]
Leo Laporte
So this is this. I'm hoping that the H2 inclusion means it will do everything just like the AirPods. Why should it should? It says, according to MacRumors, thanks to the H2 chip, the full suite of Apple integration features one touch pairing, automatic switching between devices via icloud. That's what you don't like. So audio sharing allow multiple people to listen to the same source hands free. Shlomo, find my support. Yeah, so it sounds like it's. You know, I always wondered why Apple has Beats and AirPods. Different markets, I guess.
- [60:20]
Jason Snell
I mean, I was watching Marques Brownlee's review of this today and he said that in his briefing, applebeats claimed that these, that the powerbeats originals are the best selling headphones in the world. Best selling in ear wireless. I forget what the qualifier is, but the suggestion there is they do better than AirPods do. And I think that part of that the Beats branding is real. It has stuck around. It is the rare branding that is better in its category than Apple's branding. Certainly different. The sound is part of it. There is a beat sound that's bass heavier and some people really love it. And this is also the case where if Apple ever Thought maybe we should make some AirPods that have kind of over ear so that they hold in better and all that. They don't need to because that's what the power Beats are for and people really love them. So now, now those people will get, get that Apple noise cancellation and all of those other features and that's great.
- [61:14]
Andy Ihnatko
And I think, I wonder how much that's affected by the idea that Apple AirPods feel like pairing them with anything other than an iPhone. You can do it just as a basic dumb Bluetooth device, whereas a Beats set of headphones is ecumenical catholic. Doesn't matter where it is.
- [61:33]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I think that it the AirPod Pros fit in someone's ear. Well I just don't mind. Like they fit okay, like they work okay.
- [61:42]
Leo Laporte
Well that's why I want the.
- [61:43]
Alex Lindsay
Over the years I'm constantly worried about them coming out and I've tried the bigger ones and the smaller ones and the, you know, left all the different things.
- [61:52]
Leo Laporte
Do you think it will do the hearing aid thing or is that going to be an AirPods exclusive?
- [61:58]
Jason Snell
I mean they didn't mention it, right. Unclear on what the difference is because you'd think that it's got pretty much the same tech but I know that, you know, it's not necessarily all the same sensors, not the same noise canceling. So you know, you would hope that they would. Of course they're even more obtrusive than AirPods Pro are, so maybe not.
- [62:19]
Leo Laporte
But that's why I bought orange. I thought I'm going all in.
- [62:23]
Jason Snell
Nobody's going to miss it either way. So you might as well let your.
- [62:27]
Andy Ihnatko
Fly fly pick the color that's going to be easiest to find when you're emptying your pockets.
- [62:31]
Leo Laporte
That's precisely why I was going to get black. Then I thought no, it'll hide. Those are, those are, those are to hide. I don't want to hide. I want to know exactly. Everything I have now lately is like that's why I'm going to get a pair of silk.
- [62:44]
Alex Lindsay
I know with my, with my pink or something, right? With my shocks open comms. They are wiry and, and if they, if I set them on a pile of wires I will be like, I.
- [62:52]
Leo Laporte
Don'T know, like I'll take them are in this pile over here.
- [62:56]
Alex Lindsay
I finally had to give them their own little special hook and they, they're on my head or on the hook but they can't.
- [63:01]
Leo Laporte
I did get for the AirPods Matte Pro Max, I got the pink, which is really more Orange. So they'll match. They'll be nice.
- [63:10]
Andy Ihnatko
You're absolutely right, Alex. It's such a bummer that like you might want these really beautiful $250 in earbuds no matter who makes them, because the sound is great. You can pair with more than one. You can keep connected to more than one device at a time. A, B, C, D, E. All these features you love and then you get them and the only thing you don't like about them is that they don't. Don't fit really comfortably no matter how you do it. And it's annoying to me that the most comfortable pair of in earbuds I have are a $22 set of USB C buds that is found in a drawer. I don't like them more than my wireless buds. I just like they sit comfortably enough that I always get the full audio. Whereas my second favorite pair of buds, which again sound much better, have a lot more features and are wireless. The thing is, if I don't have them because, because of where the vents are placed, if I don't have them sitting exactly in the right place, I'm going to lose like a third of the audio. And it's like, it's just such a bummer that you really do have to take them for a test drive no matter how good they are.
- [64:16]
Alex Lindsay
Well, and I think the hard part is, is that they. I just want them to stay in there and I just want them to stick. And the. I will say that again. They were a former, I guess, sponsor of the show. That's why I got them. And then I just got hooked on them. Was the ultimate year fit. Fit, you know, fits. I'm so spoiled because they just pop into your ear and they're just, they just snugly. They're part of my ear. The problem is their audio isn't very good. So the audio is good to listen to your. I have to talk on the phone. So I have to make all these. Like in my bag I've got three or four different headsets and they're all based on. On what am I doing. Like I'm, I'm. I'm. I'm now going to do a phone call. So I put on the, the, the Shokz open comms. I'm listening to music to work out or walk. I'm going to put on the boat. I'm going to put on the. The ultimate ears. I want to have things happen with my phone. I put on. You know, it's goofy, I know, but they're fortunately, they're all very small, you know, and they used to be. I used to use Atomotic, you know, the Atomotic phone ones, which were great, they sounded good. I stuck them in my ears. They had the little tree, you know, that you stick in your ear.
- [65:17]
Leo Laporte
I still have a bunch of stuff.
- [65:18]
Alex Lindsay
And they were great. I thought that I would never give up the wires until I did. And then now I put them on and I'm like, what am I doing? It's all stuck around me. I can't. Like, what am I? How do I live this courage. It's so funny how it got to.
- [65:30]
Leo Laporte
A point I don't, I don't miss wired headphones. I really don't.
- [65:35]
Jason Snell
I still use them for podcasts. And that's literally it, right? I just, I was an in ear headphone snob, but especially when the AirPods, I mean, the AirPods were good. And then the AirPods Pro came out and I was like, well, forget it. And now it's only. I'm only using these in ears with wires for podcasts. That's literally everything else.
- [65:52]
Andy Ihnatko
I gotta say that my favorite setup is still Bluetooth earbuds, but the kind that have the connecting wire. Because the number of times where, like I'm taking my walk, I stop in, in a store, I need to unplug. Unfortunately, I'm jovial and people and the clerks know me and they want to talk and banter. So I have to yank out one of these buds, hold this little thing in my hand and somehow not lose it while I'm doing my shopping. Whereas when it's connected by cord, you can unplug one, let it drop, and listen only with one ear, or let them both drop, have them wrap around your. I will say you can buy, you can buy like little silicone like straps that kind of do that same thing. But, like, my favorite is still going to be that variety of Bluetooth and they're not, unfortunately, they're way out of sync.
- [66:37]
Alex Lindsay
I will say that I used to really make fun of people who had bone induction headsets because I just thought they looked goofy. But man, when you get used to it, you know, you know, being able to just sit there and hit stop and nothing's plugging your ears. You're just talking to someone and you hear everything around you. You can, even if you don't play it really loud.
- [66:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you could do the dishes and listen to a book and people could talk to you and yeah, it's.
- [67:01]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, it's. They're kind of amazing.
- [67:03]
Leo Laporte
It's come a long way from the bone phone. Remember that they used to advertise in the 70s in Rolling Stone? They'd advertise and it was bone conducting headphones that somehow would hang around your neck.
- [67:14]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [67:15]
Leo Laporte
It was like a scarf, a little rubber.
- [67:17]
Alex Lindsay
And the first time I had ever heard it was when Google Glass had it. And I was like, whoa, what is that? Because you could feel it tickle you in the back right behind your ear and then. Yeah, so that's good. They're good.
- [67:30]
Leo Laporte
I'm just curious if they still sell bone phones.
- [67:32]
Andy Ihnatko
It's also. Oh, I think techbone has a great video about it. I think he got one and basically confirmed that it's crap.
- [67:40]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, I knew that they always sent it off. Oh, yeah, look. See, they're like little. That is ridiculous. The thing that's different about the aftershocks is they're actually on your temple. So it's like, you know, these are just. This was hanging around your neck. Yeah.
- [67:59]
Andy Ihnatko
But there are modern kinds that are like that Bose and couple make like essentially a collar that ends at your collarbones so that you can. So it's basically firing small speakers up towards your ears, which is not a terrible. The thing I like about the bone conductive headphones and these other ideas is the idea that if I'm walking, like, if the fidelity of the music is not the issue, I just want to listen to a podcast or whatever that I do want to have awareness of what's around me when I'm on my bike, when I'm walking. I don't want again, I live in a neighborhood where it's like a sitcom where people will call to you across the street, hey, Andy, I didn't see you. Blah, blah, blah. And you wind up in a 30 minute conversation. And if they don't see your bright orange earbud, they wonder why you're all stuck up and whatever. I mean, I'm glad that there's a variety of earphones now that don't necessarily want to take over your entire sound view because there really is something to the idea of being able to just add a layer of custom audio to the mix of what you're naturally hearing. And that's what these other designs will offer you.
- [69:06]
Leo Laporte
The technological breakthrough of 1979.
- [69:10]
Andy Ihnatko
The best thing about that device was the ad. Go ahead, show off your new. While you're skiing, surfing or.
- [69:22]
Leo Laporte
It was a different time, folks. It was a different time.
- [69:24]
Andy Ihnatko
We were excited about other things. It was easy to make us very happy.
- [69:29]
Leo Laporte
We may look back and say, gosh, those were the good old days. I guess maybe we already are. The information says Apple. You know, remember we were talking last week that maybe Deepseek was going to be a great solution for Apple intelligence in China because the Chinese government won't let them use anything but a Chinese AI? Well, according to the information, they passed over Deepseek and they have partnered with Alibaba to do Apple intelligence for iPhone users in China. Alibaba's had an AI chatbot for some time.
- [70:05]
Alex Lindsay
Seems like the Apple way to go. Deepsea seems pretty sketch.
- [70:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't, I don't blame him.
- [70:11]
Andy Ihnatko
The information said that Apple, Apple definitely considered them, but decided that the team is not ready to support AI for millions and millions and millions of iPhones yet.
- [70:19]
Leo Laporte
They lack the manpower and experience.
- [70:22]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And oddly enough, for an Apple such a privacy focused company, the information also said that one of the reasons why they went with Alibaba was that they have so much data about consumers and people that would like help that would be helpful in some way, shape or form.
- [70:38]
Leo Laporte
Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple intelligence works much better in China because of that? They passed over Baidu as well, which is, you know, Alibaba's biggest competition, the Google of China. So it's a big win for Alibaba.
- [70:53]
Andy Ihnatko
I guess it helps to cushion the blow of all those tariffs for those. For the $8 scarves that now can't be shipped.
- [71:01]
Leo Laporte
Speaking of which, there's a lot of noise and it hasn't happened, so I don't. It's not in the news category. It's more in the rumors category about tsmc, a trade war, tariffs on tsmc. TSMC has said there's just no way we can build what we have in Taiwan and the United States. We would if we could, but we can't. This is going to be interesting to watch. This will really be a test of Tim Cook's diplomatic skills.
- [71:32]
Andy Ihnatko
There was a lot of coverage and worrying about this because Trump has said something about how the chips act is just stupid and it's ridiculous. And basically it's a Biden program that's actually working to finally get TSMC and other makers interested in actually manufacturing chips in the United States.
- [71:52]
Leo Laporte
Again, billions of dollars, more than 6 billion went to Intel. Another big chunk went to TSMC, which built a plant, is building a plant. Actually did build a plant in online.
- [72:01]
Jason Snell
In Phoenix, in Arizona.
- [72:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but it's making legacy nodes. It's not making the Apple chips the biggest somewhere.
- [72:09]
Jason Snell
I mean, I It's very hard to analyze this stuff, Leo. Right.
- [72:13]
Leo Laporte
Like that's why I'm not. Yeah, it's a rumor.
- [72:16]
Jason Snell
Logical. What he's. What he's doing. You're right. I think you mentioned it's a Biden program and so therefore it must be bad. Even though it's trying to actually provide incentives to get chip developers to invest in America. Money being spent in the U.S. you know, so what, what can you say? I mean, it is a. The US Is behind in chipmaking. It's way behind. And it needs to catch up if you want to have an alternative to Taiwan, given that Taiwan is potentially, you know, a target of China. So there are lots of logical things that you could do here. I think the best we can hope for is that, you know, the CHIPS act will get slightly modified and called something else and then Trump can take credit for it.
- [73:02]
Leo Laporte
Tim Culpin, who was a Taipei based, former Bloomberg Opinion columnist, wrote an opinion piece saying that it is his belief. He says what he thinks the President really wants is simply for Trump for TSMC to kiss the ring and pledge to invest more in the US and that's why the 100% tariff is a threat. But remember, he did the same thing with Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs. So maybe it's just justice.
- [73:30]
Andy Ihnatko
I think. I mean, that's a good point. He was trumpeting about how, hey, we got, had a showdown with Colombia about accepting. Accepting and basically what the agreement was that. Yeah, you know that the agreement that we had with Biden a few years ago. We'll do that again.
- [73:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [73:45]
Andy Ihnatko
And that's literally Canada did as well.
- [73:48]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [73:48]
Andy Ihnatko
So like.
- [73:49]
Leo Laporte
But that 1.3 billion we pledged to spend on the border. Yeah, we're going to spend that.
- [73:53]
Andy Ihnatko
Oh, but good now, now it's Trump's deal, so that's okay.
- [73:56]
Leo Laporte
Exactly, exactly. So I guess really the news is things are uncertain.
- [74:04]
Andy Ihnatko
Exactly.
- [74:05]
Leo Laporte
And it's very hard to know what's going to happen.
- [74:08]
Alex Lindsay
I think that's going to be the case for a while. I think that's the general state of our situation. So I don't think that's going to settle anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I think that Apple would love to get out of China. It's just that there's a lot of infrastructure that makes that hard, you know, and I think that that's the, you know, and getting out of, you know, unwrapping all of those things will take a decade at least. And there you can see them building capacity in Vietnam and in India. And in other places. But it's something that, you know, when we're talking about trying to fix a moving train, this is a really, really large train with a lot of cars. And you're trying to make subtle change, you know, you can't turn it on a dime. And I think that that's the problem.
- [74:54]
Andy Ihnatko
Apple's problem is that. And I'm sure they don't want to pull out of China because they also have to maintain a really great relationship with that company because of all the hardware they sell there. So they have to walk a very careful line. Like when they just. I think there was a story that I read, I think a few days ago that there's. That India's plants are going to start manufacturing MacBook Airs for the first time. But the thing is, more manufacturing. They move out of China is another reason for China to say, well, what have you done for us lately? Lately? Why should we make it easy for an American company to sell American products to Chinese individuals when we could essentially be steering those people towards Chinese products from Chinese companies? So it's a sticky situation.
- [75:36]
Alex Lindsay
And if China does that slow enough, Apple will just get. Will extract their need for them. The problem is that, you see, China dropped a lot in the last quarter, and Apple's profit did not drop. So Apple is also, I think, working if China does it all at one time. But if China does it slowly, Apple will slowly fully disengage, and that's China's risk as well.
- [75:59]
Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break, and then when we come back, John Ashley, producer man, if you will, prepare the Vision Pro theme.
- [76:08]
Jason Snell
My finger's on the button.
- [76:09]
Leo Laporte
You almost said your button's on the finger, which would not be good. Thank you, John Ashley. Alex Lindsay is here. So is Jason Snell. So is Andy Inacco. Glad you're here. Thanks to our club members, by the way, who made this show possible and all the people watching live. 1164, people watching on Twitch and YouTube and LinkedIn and Facebook and TikTok and X and Kick and all those places. We're so glad you're watching live. But of course, you don't have to watch live. We've got a podcast you can always watch later. Usually it's about 5% of the audience watches live and the rest watch download. But it's nice to have the live audience and see the chats going. I see all the chats. Ladies and gentlemen, our show today brought to you by 1Password, a name you know well, Let me ask you a rhetorical question. Do your end users always work? Always, constantly, never without exception on company owned devices and IT approved apps. They're good users, right? No, of course not. You see them holding their iPhones, bringing in their laptops. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged devices and apps? Well, 1Password actually has a great answer to that question. They call it Extended Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM just cannot touch. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There's a nice brick paths, you know, paved paths between the buildings winding their way from building to building. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. Then there are the paths people actually use. The shortcuts worn through the grass that are actually the straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools only work on the nice happy brick paths, right? They don't know anything about the muddy little paths. The problem is, that's where all the security problems happen. 1Password Extended Access Management now on the other hand, is the first security solution. It brings all those unmanaged devices, all those apps, all those identities under your control. It ensures that every credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified. They do regular third party audits and exceed the standards set by various authorities. They're truly a leader in security. 1Password Extended access management and security for the way we work today. Now generally available to companies that use Okta or Microsoft Entra and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones@1Password.com MacBreak all lowercase1 the number1Password.com. Thank you. 1Password supporting Mac Break Weekly. And now if you will, Mr. Ashley. Hit it. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. There's actually stories in the Vision Pro stack. Oh look, he's, he's, he's. Jason. You look weird with that on. I don't. Oh, look, look. But did you guys send out a memo? Jason and Alex are wearing their Vision Pros.
- [80:00]
Jason Snell
We did not send out a memo, but we, you know, we've always got them at the ready.
- [80:03]
Leo Laporte
Always ready. You never know when you're going to.
- [80:05]
Jason Snell
Need never know when there'll be a.
- [80:06]
Leo Laporte
Vision Pro segment video. I wanted to actually ask you about this. I saw this on Reddit and I wanted to ask you what it means unlocking Apple immersive video quality for all.
- [80:18]
Alex Lindsay
I don't know what it means by for all. This is a new company that is shooting some great footage.
- [80:25]
Leo Laporte
Okay. They say we've cracked the code to match the fidelity of Apple's immersive video and just launched today. It's an app on the app store Prima Immersive. When my co founder Andrew and I first met last year, achieving the same fidelity as Apple immersive video was difficult if not impossible. To reach the quality we wanted, we had to build a prototype 16K 90 frames per second camera, a commercial post facility that could handle it, the petabytes of data, an advanced immersive player to handle 16K 90fps HDR 10 without overheating, a custom Dolby Atmos renderer for Vision Pro with spatial head tracking and a cross platform encoder that achieves 40 to 80% lower bit rates than regular MV HVE HEVC or HEVC alone. Apparently they did it. So tell me about the app. So is this all true? That you couldn't do this until they did something?
- [81:19]
Alex Lindsay
It's been hard. I mean, the question is, will you not be able to do it two months from now when the new blackmagic camera's out and there's safe solved a.
- [81:26]
Leo Laporte
Problem that the blackmagic camera will solve? Probably, right?
- [81:29]
Alex Lindsay
We don't know, but we think it will. I mean, Apple's working pretty hard on making sure that the blackmagic. Well, it sounds like Apple's working hard on making sure that the blackmagic camera is going to be able to do the things it needs to do. What Apple's doing is more complicated than anybody else has done on a headset and part of it requires some processing power. So part of the reason, one of the reasons you can't do what Apple's doing on their headset even if you have the resolution, it's doing some pretty intelligent things with all that content. And it's 90 frames a second. And so the 90 frames a second is hard. It's hard, hard to find a camera that will do 90 frames a second. You know, so they, you know, different companies have hacked different cameras. The Blackmagic 12K is the most common camera to hack, you know, for that because it has a lot of resolution and a lot of frame rate. And so I don't know, you know, I'm not sure what they use, but that's the most possible one. There were some pictures floating around of their behind the scenes and does look like they've kind of. They must have torn some cameras apart to get to the camera that they're doing. But I don't know exactly what that looks like. What I will say is that it's called. Is it Prima. Prima Vision, I think, or something. It is, yeah. Prima Immersive is the name of the app. I downloaded it. I ponied up for the $3.99 to watch the concert. It has immediately become one of the things I would show somebody if I showed them an Apple Vision Pro. So I have this, like, there's this hidden list. You know, someone says, hey, can I see the Vision Pro? And you're like, okay, well, you got to see jigspace and you got to see the dinosaur thing, and you got to see, like, there's like, like, these are the things to. To wander you through.
- [83:11]
Leo Laporte
This would be. There hasn't been anything new for a long time, right?
- [83:14]
Alex Lindsay
Well, they have new. Apple puts out new content, but none of it. I, I. It's not stuff that I would show. Like, this is something that I would actually go, you know, like a lot of the immersive stuff that Apple's put out, some immersive stuff. I think that, you know, watching Submerged is definitely on that list. I don't know about the whole thing, but so it would definitely. I think the Submerged is there. I think a lot of the other more live action stuff that Apple's done has not been as compelling, in my opinion. I think they've tried too hard. This did not try too hard.
- [83:42]
Leo Laporte
They're doing concerts, right. Or music.
- [83:45]
Alex Lindsay
It's a little. It's a bluegrass kind of, I think bluegrass or, you know, kind of a, you know, a band at a house.
- [83:53]
Leo Laporte
Well, they're going to do more. I mean, that's just the first one.
- [83:55]
Alex Lindsay
Oh, yeah, they're going to do more. I think that they. It. It's a very good band that plays really good music. It's always a good start.
- [84:05]
Leo Laporte
And it does look better than what the video toolbox can do.
- [84:10]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [84:11]
Alex Lindsay
So there's a bunch of things that Apple does as far as figuring out where you are dimensionally. And it also has to figure out the difference between the inner axial that you had in the inner. Well, your inner ocular and the inner axial. So when it says, oh, I'm moving the lenses to where your eyes are, it's also measuring, oh, this is what your interocular distance is between them. And it has to make conversions to make that, because the camera's not the same. And so Apple has to do some trickery to do that. And no one's had those tools to do the trickery up until. This is probably one of the first things that outside of Apple that somebody's been able to do, because just the two flat images by themselves don't generate the same experience. And so the. So it is a. Again, it's very compelling. There's a lot of things that. Not a lot of things, but a handful of things I probably would have done differently. You know, the camera's a little too high, a little too close. There's a interview with her that she's looking off camera, and you're kind of like, I don't understand why.
- [85:09]
Leo Laporte
Look at me. I'm right here. I'm over here. Hey.
- [85:12]
Alex Lindsay
Hey. It's super weird.
- [85:13]
Jason Snell
Yeah, they're learning. But Alex sent me a link and I went and I watched it too. And it's good. It's really good. I mean, it just says the same thing, which is. Is more people need access to this stuff. And the fact that these people cooked it up themselves and have figured out how to do it, it just means now there's another stream of content that can be out there that is immersive. And it looks. Because it is. It's really nice. It just. It is so comfortable. It is like you are just sitting there getting a private concert. It's such a nice feature of this product.
- [85:43]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I would pay $4 for every concert they do. Like, this is, like, it was no brainer because, you know, they're gonna only get better. And this one was great. I mean, again, this is probably one of the top immersive videos I've ever seen. And this was their first try. So I think that they're off to a pretty good state. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, I've seen a lot of immersive for a long time. And I did find. And I think that there was. I think they broke through some myths, at least for me. A lot of people say you can't have someone looking at you the whole time during a show. And I think they even broke away from that by doing these interviews where she's looking away, but when they're playing, the artists are looking right at you, like they're playing right to you. I did not find that to be a problem.
- [86:28]
Leo Laporte
That's kind of Cool.
- [86:29]
Alex Lindsay
I didn't like. I actually felt more connected to them having them just play straight to me. I think that one thing that I think that was missing there, obviously someone who mixed it, I think it was a very well known Atmos engineer. Sounds great. It's missing the environment. So whether you put up a Deka tree or you put up an ambisonic mic, you had to get a little bit of the environment and just kind of bring some of it back in just to kind of hear a little bit of the ambience of the room itself. And I think Apple has some tools that do that automatically but it doesn't feel like they used any of them. But I think that it portends towards. I think a lot of headset owners are going to really be happy if more content like this comes out with the new cameras. I think this is going to be a really exciting. I was excited to see it. So I think that it's a pretty nifty content. If you own an Apple Vision Pro, you should run, not walk, download it, pay the 399. Watch it. I'll tell you the. I'm selfishly telling you to go buy it because I want them to make more. I want them to go, hey, look at all the money that just came in. You know, because it's, you know, it's 390,000 or 400,000 or 500,000 or whatever of these out there is plenty to support someone if a bunch of us go, hey, let's go buy, let's go buy the, you know, and that's why I'll buy. I'm voting for more of this content by paying the price of not even a latte anymore. I think this is just a black coffee at Starbucks at this point for the ability to see new bands. I think it's a really intimate space to watch the bands in. So again, I was probably a little too close for me. I feel like I'm standing right up in front of them. But anyway, I think it's going to be made me more excited about the new camera coming.
- [88:30]
Leo Laporte
So it's also the other thing that's interesting, not restricted to Vision Pro. It supports Meta's Horizon OS and Android xr. So the core technologies apparently would work on those, all three.
- [88:42]
Alex Lindsay
And if you, if you have those, just don't watch it on an Apple Vision Pro and then go back to them.
- [88:47]
Leo Laporte
Okay?
- [88:48]
Alex Lindsay
No, no, no. But I'm just telling you like it is. It will look fine. It will look fine, but it will not look like that. Because there's a lot of processing that's going on and a lot of resolution there that is not representable on the other headsets. And you will definitely feel it, you.
- [89:03]
Leo Laporte
Know, like, are they making their video encoder available to others or is it going to be theirs and theirs alone?
- [89:08]
Alex Lindsay
I think that they're. I think that there's a couple companies involved there, you know, so I think that one company's doing the shooting. Another company I think is hoping to do processing for folks.
- [89:15]
Leo Laporte
Okay, yeah, Amazon's involved as well as Balenciaga, so maybe there'll be some shoes that can do immersive.
- [89:24]
Alex Lindsay
My guess is Amazon's involved because the processing to make this stuff work at 8k 90 frames a second is non trivial, you know, and so it is a. I think that what's required there is that you can spend the next eight months rendering on your Mac studio or you could put it up on Amazon and pay a bunch of money and have it done in a week.
- [89:43]
Leo Laporte
They are asking if people are interested in distributing their video on Prima or using their studio services or scoping out an immersive media production to come to them. So it's going to be a business for them over and above the app and the concert tickets.
- [90:01]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [90:01]
Leo Laporte
So that's interesting, huh? Immersive Company is the name of it. Immersivecompany.com and good. I wasn't sure. You know, you read stuff on Reddit and say you don't know. Is that real? I knew I had to ask somebody who knew something.
- [90:14]
Alex Lindsay
I started getting pings early yesterday morning. I think they released it at 5am Pacific Standard Time. By 7 I had gotten three or four people going, hey, have you seen this yet? Have you seen it yet?
- [90:23]
Leo Laporte
It sounds so good. Okay, Jason, you actually wrote a piece celebrating the anniversary of the release of the Vision Pro. One year with the Vision Pro.
- [90:33]
Jason Snell
Yeah, I feel like. I mean, we sort of talked about it last week. This is the great podcasting and writing cycle where some people listen to podcasts, some people read articles, and I do both. I like doing both. I wouldn't stop. I wanted to take. I wrote that review a year ago and I wanted to take the opportunity to write a lot of words about it. But basically the short version is. I called it ridiculous and impractical. A year ago when the review came out, it was never going to be a hit. It is a. It is a dev kit, essentially. And the important thing is going forward are for Apple to keep pushing to make more immersive Content to get more developers developing interesting software for it, which is a big issue. And you know, and otherwise just keep their eye on the future because we all know, like, even the next one of these is going to be impractical and too expensive, even if it's half the price price. And that's okay as long as they keep pushing. And we've learned some things that it does really well. Immersive video does really well. They could create a killer app if it was NBA courtside or NCAA tournament courtside or, you know, or a Broadway theater. Immersive or, you know, or immersive concerts. Right. Like they've got, there's some pieces there and they just need to keep working at it. But, and then I guess Mac Virtual display is another one that I think is a winner. I think that's a great feature that is again, probably not worth $3,500, but is a sign that there is a feature there. And then I wanted to save some praise for the Personas, which when we saw them in the initial demo, which is in 2013, and then when they first came out were weird and uncanny and bad and, and in over the course of their development of Vision OS over this last year, Vision OS has really improved. And one of the big improvements is the Personas are way better and they made spatial Personas, which. It is like being in a room with people. I know it is the closest other than reality that I have ever experienced. It is vastly better than a FaceTime call. And so it's another thing to keep pushing on. But again, who, how many people who use Vision Pro know anybody else who has a Vision Pro? The answer is probably not that many. But I, I, I am one of those people who does. I know lots of Vision Pro users, so I get to hang out with my friends in Vision Pro Land on the Bora Bora virtual beach. And that's great, right? But, but like, I don't know, it's just lessons learned. We have a standing. We have a standing. Every two weeks we try to get together and just, and just really shoot the breeze. Talk, don't talk about work mostly. And it's, it's, it when it comes off, it's really present. I wish, I wish there was more of that out there. There.
- [93:17]
Leo Laporte
I don't. That would almost be a killer app for me. I would consider buying it for that.
- [93:23]
Jason Snell
Yeah. And that's why I think when it's, you know, it doesn't have to be. Look, if it's $2,000, it's still too expensive. But every dollar you take off the price lowers the barrier for somebody who's got money to spend and just needs a reason to use it. The problem with a Vision Pro now, and I don't know how Alex feels about this, but, like, I want reasons to use it. I don't often have reasons to use it. And when I do use it, I want to stay there, there. And I look for reasons.
- [93:48]
Leo Laporte
That's a great sign.
- [93:49]
Jason Snell
And the prop. And the problem is right now, there aren't that many reasons to stay there. But, like, it is a place that I like to be and I want to be there more. And these are. These are Apple's challenges is how do you get people over the hump? And, and, and, you know, I hope that they continue to work on that because there is stuff in the. Not only is it a genuinely impressive product, I think the whole, like, UI is really good. I think Vision OS is actually very good. Good. It's just, what's it for? And it costs too much to do it. And like, these are all the questions and it's going to take years probably to find the answers. But. But what is there is pretty well done. It's just. It's a little too empty. And obviously the. The barrier to entry is way too high.
- [94:30]
Alex Lindsay
And I think that. Again, I think that. And we'll see what happens this summer. But I think that the. And I've said this a thousand times now on the show is that Ibooks is a great example of what Apple shouldn't try to replicate, which is that they didn't do enough. And I think that EPIC showed you exactly how to. They did the model, which is the Megagrants. Like, we're going to give away $100 million and we're not going to make it hard for you to get it. And we're not going to ask for anything back. We just want to just charge the ecosystem. And I think Apple could easily throw a billion dollars down and just say, hey, we're looking for. And they may wait. Maybe they'll do that this summer, maybe they'll do it at some point, but they have a billion dollars to spend. They spend a lot of money on this. And if they dropped a billion dollars in increments of 25,000 and 50,000 and 100,000, there's a whole lot of people that'd be building content for this headset right now. Like, you know, like, you know, they would. And they just throwing stuff against the wall and some of it would work and some of it wouldn't. And if Apple, you know, and it'd.
- [95:25]
Jason Snell
Be worth it to learn. It'd be worth it to learn.
- [95:28]
Alex Lindsay
You know, I couldn't, at the time, I couldn't make the turn. But talking to some folks at Epic, they were like. I was like, well, how do I get the money? And they're like, well, if it's over 25,000, you're going to have to, like, tell us what you're going to do with it. I mean, it was like that. I mean, that's how quickly.
- [95:41]
Leo Laporte
I mean, like.
- [95:42]
Alex Lindsay
Like, it was kind of like. It was like anybody who had some history in doing something, they were like, let's give you some money, and you get. And you get a car, and you get a car.
- [95:49]
Andy Ihnatko
I think I could do this for $24,999 suddenly.
- [95:53]
Alex Lindsay
And I have friends. I had a whole slew of friends that all got about 20,000, and some of them got 50,000, 100,000. And you had to write a plan and everything else. But they're not asking for money back. And if you don't, if it doesn't work out, they'll go too bad. And it made all of us there was like, oh, I don't know whether I should work on Unity or Unreal Engine. And as soon as that happened, they were like, hey, I heard there used to be this thing called Unity, but let's just develop on Unreal Engine. Because it was just like, I can get money for it. I can run this test through it. And suddenly everybody's antennas went straight to it. And maybe there's an antitrust problem with Apple doing it, but I think that if they put a billion dollars into some kind of mega fund, whatever they want to call it, I think we would see a lot of exciting things.
- [96:43]
Leo Laporte
Jason, what do you think? So there really are two different questions here. You say, and I think you're probably right, that at some point we will wear things over our eyes that annotate the world around us. I think you're probably right about that. But that's not the only thing Apple selling here. They're also selling something called spatial computing.
- [97:02]
Jason Snell
Yeah. Yeah.
- [97:03]
Leo Laporte
What do you think of that?
- [97:04]
Jason Snell
I. I'm unclear on what the future products are here. I do feel like, yes, when we're out in the world, one of the devices we will eventually have is something that allows us to have things. Yeah. AR with within a nation of the world around us, like, that seems inevitable. Right. The question is, is there? I mean, I think inevitably, if you're going to do that, then said a lot of things we think of as computing right now would be part of that. And so inevitably, the idea that you would need big slabs of glass to watch TV or to use a computer would also probably vanish at some point. I don't know. I mean, this is the open, this is an open question. I think that spatial computing is good. Like, I think they've done a really good job. I don't know whether it's necessary. Right. Like, I mean, it is something that the Mac virtual display is one of the killer features here because that's just a floating window with a Mac in it. And it, I mean, I don't want to downplay it. It's not just, it's actually very good, but it's not revolutionizing computers. It's putting a floating computer window in virtual, real, virtual reality. And like, I don't know whether people really desire to have an intense 3D minority report kind of space, or if the future of augmented computing interfaces is literally a virt virtual monitor that you can look at in glasses instead. And I mean, that's an open question for me.
- [98:32]
Alex Lindsay
I think meta is in some ways going down the path of what am I looking at here? And so on and so forth. But there's no video support for it at the moment. Like, you don't see the video that you're, you know, that's being projected in front of you with the Ray Ban. But I think that there is. The way I, when I look at how I use ChatGPT, I open up Resolve, let's say, and I got something complicated I'm trying to do in Resolve. I had some audio pipeline or some kind of compositing or color correction, and I just open up ChatGPT. I don't even try to. I don't even. I don't Google. I don't look for movies anymore. I just go, okay, I'm trying to do this. How do I do this? And it goes, okay, that's not working. What do I do here? And I just sit there and go, you see these conversations with me just going back and forth with ChatGPT. And in 15 minutes, I do something that would have taken me half a day to figure out how to do. And now I understand. And I also understand the pipeline because I can say, well, how does that actually work? Or what is this actually doing? And it just tells me what those things are. And I don't need it to know whether it's the truth or not it's working or it's working or it's not working. When I get to the other end of it, my wife will ask. Last week she said, I've got all the stuff in the refrigerator. Tell me what I can make with this. And Chatgpt just gave her a recipe and we ate it on Friday and it was great. And the thing is, did she take.
- [99:48]
Leo Laporte
A picture or type in what was that in the fridge?
- [99:51]
Alex Lindsay
She didn't take a picture typed in. She could have taken a picture, though.
- [99:54]
Leo Laporte
Would have been nice if you could take a picture. I would do that.
- [99:56]
Alex Lindsay
I have done that. I've had. I've gotten stuff at the farmers market. I have a bad habit. I go to the farmer's market and if I don't, if I can't identify what something is, I will buy it and try to cook it. Just because I'm like, what am I doing here? So, by the way, what was. Yeah, there's a couple of them I wouldn't recommend again anyway. No, there's like a. There's like an Asian. This Asian plant that just tastes like dirt when you cook it.
- [100:21]
Andy Ihnatko
Anyway, I'm going to interject and praise you for adventure.
- [100:25]
Leo Laporte
You learn something.
- [100:27]
Andy Ihnatko
That's all. That's all that it took.
- [100:28]
Leo Laporte
You learn something.
- [100:29]
Alex Lindsay
I didn't like that part, but I'll do it. My family gives me a hard time about it because I'll just bring home weird.
- [100:34]
Leo Laporte
I did the same thing. Delicata squash.
- [100:38]
Alex Lindsay
I keep on trying to learn how to open pomegranates.
- [100:40]
Leo Laporte
I don't know what delicata squash is, but I'm going to buy it and it's still sitting in my kitchen.
- [100:45]
Alex Lindsay
I buy a pomegranate like once a month to try to make the video and I try to cut the square out of the top, pull the thing open. It never works anyway. So the. But I keep working on it. But the thing is that when we get to a point, I think the danger for any company not paying attention to it is that this is really, really, really hard to do. It's going to take an enormous amount of technology to figure it out. And you got to figure out UI that is different. So you got to be doing it right now for something that's going to happen 10 years from now. But I'm going to put on. But we're going to get to a point like our phone. I do think we're going to be post phone at some point where I just say, call this person. Call also going to be like, how do I do this thing? That's in front of me or what is this? And you're going to get to a point where information is just, you're in a gel of information and communication and everything is very, very fluid. And these headsets or whatever, it's a mixture of the headsets and ears and everything else. You're just going to be connected to that. And I don't think it's going to be something that's going to take you away from the world. In fact, I think it's going to be something that a lot of times, as Apple said in the past, something take you into the world because you're going to be exploring things that you wouldn't explore otherwise and doing things that you wouldn't do otherwise. I mean, the existence of things like the satellite based connectivity makes it safer to go into anywhere hinter regions in a way that wouldn't be safe otherwise.
- [102:06]
Leo Laporte
Don't wear your Vision Pro into hinter regions.
- [102:08]
Jason Snell
No, not yet. Spatial computing. Yeah. It does feel to me like spatial computing is a, is what they can do now and it's a pretty advanced sort of thing. But that to Alex's point, you do get the sense that with LLMs and the advancement of AI that the ultimate interface for this is probably not, you know, tapping to open an apps list and then putting your fingers together, right, it's having a conversation. But you can see how that would still be spatial potentially where you're saying, hey, show me this thing and a window opens up and it knows where you're looking or what your other open windows are and it puts it in an appropriate place and then you ask, ask some context and it knows what you're looking at and it, and it opens something else or it makes a modification, you can see that that may be a place where this goes, although they're not always places where you want to talk. And you know, there are other kind of people have different ways that they prefer to interface with technology. I think it's all to play for though. And I just keep coming back to the idea that something that augments our vision as a part of a larger set of features does feel inevitable. And so as Alex said, now's the time to be playing with this stuff because it won't appear fully formed in 2040. Right. It will be the hard work of technology companies who have been learning and building this stuff over the previous 15 years who get there well.
- [103:34]
Alex Lindsay
And I think that incredible lesson, if you're in Northern California or if you visit Northern California in Fairfax, I was in Fairfax over the weekend. My daughter and I go somewhere on Saturdays and Fairfax won. This Saturday there is a museum of bicycles. And it was paid for mostly by the. Mountain biking began in Fairfax. Like the very first mountain biking races were all done right in that area. And all the guys that started it were all there. And so they put some money into it and bought a bunch of old bikes and everything else. And so there's this museum, but it starts back with a wooden foot. Like you run along, you sit down on your farm and you move your feet, there's no crank. And you should go there in Fairfax and get them to give you a tour because they won't give it to you unless you ask for it. They give you a 20 minute tour and you get to watch technology over 150 years. And man, did it look, you know, like the big wheel.
- [104:33]
Leo Laporte
You know that big wheel, the penny farthing bike. Yeah, I've ridden those.
- [104:37]
Alex Lindsay
They have very hard to ride.
- [104:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [104:39]
Alex Lindsay
And that. And I asked them, I said, have you ever ridden one of those? And he's like, I tried when I was younger, you know, like, like, you know, like.
- [104:45]
Andy Ihnatko
And then he pointed to a scar here and a scar here.
- [104:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly. He goes, I never getting on them.
- [104:50]
Alex Lindsay
He said, I never actually got, got, got. I never actually went anywhere with it. I just kept falling off. And he goes, and, and, and so the thing is, is then, then you get, you wander through that and you get through this piece of wood and then they're like, maybe we should get springs and maybe we should put air in the tires, maybe we should put shocks in it. And you come all the way around and they've got these like $8,000 wonders of technology. Well, we're in this. What we're doing right now with these headsets is the wooden bike that doesn't even have pedals yet compared. And so you can make fun of, we can make fun of it, but there's a big world coming in this area and there's a lot of money going towards. So I think that it's going to be interesting to watch.
- [105:28]
Leo Laporte
Speaking of a big world and a lot of money coming towards it, Apple's last gasp at feature films comes out in a few months. And I don't know if you saw the preview on the Super bowl, but F1 with Brad Pitt and featuring a number of famous F1 personalities, by the way, it should be interesting.
- [105:50]
Alex Lindsay
One thing that I thought was interesting is that when you look at the end of it, I don't think has Apple anymore. Like it just says Warner Brothers.
- [105:56]
Leo Laporte
Like, it's not interesting.
- [105:57]
Alex Lindsay
So I'm wondering whether, you know, they're. Because I think part of the problem is if you. If you're a streaming company.
- [106:02]
Leo Laporte
Oh, there's a little Apple. No, wait a minute.
- [106:04]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, I thought. I thought the Warner Brothers.
- [106:06]
Leo Laporte
Look. Look at the show. My. Yeah. See in the lower left, Apple Original films. Warner Brothers on the right.
- [106:11]
Alex Lindsay
Right. It just felt like. It felt like they're not. Not making.
- [106:14]
Leo Laporte
I didn't realize they were doing an imax. That's going to be a good way to see.
- [106:18]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah.
- [106:19]
Andy Ihnatko
The thing that struck me is it's not you. I think that they must have cut together shots that they had and complete, as opposed to. Because you still. I still don't know what real. What's really about. But the thing is, it looks like a compilation of, like, actual F1 footage. Like if you're. If you're watching a live F1 race, it's like. Yeah, exactly.
- [106:38]
Leo Laporte
I mean, so I've been.
- [106:39]
Andy Ihnatko
The cameras are exactly where.
- [106:41]
Leo Laporte
As an F1 fan and the F1 Reddit subreddit has a lot of information about it. The plot is Brad Pitt is an older driver who's going to mentor a new young driver. There is a lot of shaky cam footage, but the way they did it is very interesting. In some cases, they took existing. By the way, these cars have eight or nine cameras on them. They took existing footage from a race and then digitally modified it so that Brad Pitt was driving. I've seen. There was one shot where a camera operator, probably your brother alone, Alex, had his camera behind a race car and he had a drill with an oddly shaped thing attached to it to shake the camera.
- [107:25]
Alex Lindsay
No. You think that's funny? There's a shot in Star Wars Episode 1 where a little droid runs across and gets sucked into the engine. And the engine goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and blows up and everything else. And that was literally a drill. They ran it in slow motion. I was actually there when they shot it, and they took it outside of Windward and they put it out outside to get sunlight, and someone was underneath it and just hit the model with a drill and it just shook. But done at 240 frames a second. If you go back and look at it with little droid get sucked in right before the pod race starts, that's just a drill on a slow.240 frames a second on a model that's about 2ft long.
- [108:09]
Andy Ihnatko
Can I say that? I absolutely love that. But the things that. The way that Digital effects Pull me out of the movie is when they decide we're going to have everything look like it was shot via a 12 axis stabilized drone that can fly from the left eyeball of the driver of the car, do a complete circle, stable circle around and then fly from the car into the stands to get a close up of the coach. And like, that doesn't look, that looks like a Nintendo. That does not look like reality. I can't get me excited about it.
- [108:39]
Alex Lindsay
And a lot of that came from one shot. That was the shot from, from there was the Tom Cruise Alien Invasion. Alien Invasion movie I can't think of at the moment. End of the world battle.
- [108:50]
Leo Laporte
War of the Worlds. War of the Worlds, Yeah.
- [108:52]
Alex Lindsay
In that shot, there's a shot where he's driving and the camera goes all the way around. Around, through, in, out. That was the Genesis because all of us looked at it and go, oh, I want to do that someday. And then people started doing it someday.
- [109:06]
Leo Laporte
That was an amazing.
- [109:08]
Alex Lindsay
But it was an amazing shot.
- [109:09]
Leo Laporte
It's quite amazing.
- [109:09]
Alex Lindsay
The first time it happened and we were all like, ooh, let's do that. And the problem is then we did it.
- [109:14]
Leo Laporte
This is why you should never go to the movies with Alex because he's always going, oh, how'd they do that shot?
- [109:20]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah. Or I go, that was horrible. Like why did you.
- [109:23]
Leo Laporte
Or that was horrible. Yeah, that's why. So it's been very interesting. They have used the last race of the season. Apple was there shooting for the movie. I think it will be fairly authentic, they realize. And it's interesting because Formula One is a very valuable property owned by Liberty Media, of all people, and Netflix is bidding for it right now. I think Apple probably would be a great candidate to own the F1 rights in the United States.
- [109:50]
Alex Lindsay
It's.
- [109:51]
Leo Laporte
It's really fun to watch these races and it's very highly technical. That's what got me into it. It's amazing.
- [109:57]
Alex Lindsay
And it's the state of the art of streaming like it is. I mean they have, they have. Oh yeah, Telemetry, they have video, they have. I don't remember we. Someone that I, someone came on and talked to us in office hours one time about it a little bit. And it's just, it's so many cameras and all of that's getting backhauled and all this stuff shows up in containers that all just kind of click together and all of it's backhauled to London or to the uk.
- [110:23]
Leo Laporte
I use an app for the Mac that I would highly recommend called F1 multiviewer. If you have a paid account with F1TV, which I do, you can then watch the race in a very interesting way on your tv or I suppose on a Vision Pro. Every car has its own camera, so you can watch each driver's camera view. You can also listen to each driver's radio. So you can listen to all the radio and there's all sorts of data coming across that you get. There's a driver tracker, there's a data channel, and you could put all of these on your screen all at once if you have a couple of screens or a big enough screen. Here's a guy who's apparently quite a fan who has used every screen in the house so that he can see everything that's happening during the race.
- [111:13]
Andy Ihnatko
That setup probably costs less than more than $3,500. He has a good use case for the Vision Pro.
- [111:20]
Leo Laporte
I honestly, I was very sad. There was apparently an F1 app on vision Pro that was discontinued. But I use multi viewer on my. On my big 55 inch model.
- [111:30]
Andy Ihnatko
I hope it's because F1 bought them and said, this is good. Have some money. Let's do this officially because that's how we sell a lot of subscriptions, I hope, and sell some visions for it.
- [111:40]
Leo Laporte
But yeah, all right, let's. I think we could take a little break here and come back and get your picks of the week. What about that, boys?
- [111:49]
Alex Lindsay
Now, you know, we're done talking.
- [111:50]
Leo Laporte
The Vision Pro.
- [111:54]
Jason Snell
I was waiting for 10 minutes and.
- [111:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's had to. Yeah, we can't. Gotta close. Gotta do it, Gotta do it. We. We have a lot of OCD listeners.
- [112:06]
Andy Ihnatko
You're like. You're like that director of the super bowl halftime waiting for Michael to take off those glasses because.
- [112:11]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, I was just seeing that video. That's hysterical. There's an interview with him, right? And it was driving across because Michael said, don't start until I take off the glasses. And Michael, it's the super bowl halftime. Is just standing there.
- [112:24]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. And you and the video, you hear like his actual. The director's. Come on, Michael. Michael. Come on, Michael. And he's in his old age. He's like saying. Basically looking with perspective, saying. And live television. One second feels like five hours. And I was going, come on, Michael. Michael.
- [112:42]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, Michael.
- [112:43]
Andy Ihnatko
Come on.
- [112:44]
Leo Laporte
It's a YouTube. It's Dan Mishner. Here it is. Is Don Misher directing on directing Michael Jackson's Super Dole bowl halftime show. It was on the Rich Eisen show on The Roku channel, but you can also see it on YouTube. It's fascinating.
- [112:58]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah.
- [112:59]
Leo Laporte
What did you think? By the way, Apple sponsored the halftime show at the super bowl with Kendrick Lamar. It was pretty subversive. I don't know if anybody knew, though, because you couldn't really understand what he was saying.
- [113:10]
Alex Lindsay
Anyone thought that Apple was going to go clean because they were. Because they're the brand or whatever they.
- [113:15]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [113:15]
Andy Ihnatko
Wow.
- [113:16]
Alex Lindsay
Definitely did not go that direction.
- [113:17]
Andy Ihnatko
It was a theatrical presentation. It wasn't just a, hey, here's five greatest hits and a couple of guests. As great as those performances in the past have been, this was clearly something that right click save to hard drive, because you just want to watch that over and over again.
- [113:34]
Leo Laporte
Well, and I needed. As an old guy, I needed the Cliff Notes. So I watched after the fact. I mean, when I'm watching it, I'm going. Going, scratching my head, you know, And I have a lot of respect for Kendrick. My daughter turned me onto him. And he's very political, very interesting, smart fellow. And it's not the usual rap misogynistic stuff. But I couldn't really understand what was going on. Samuel L. Jackson's playing Uncle Sam, and it was very interesting. So I watched the Cliff Notes later, and a number of people put up analysis of it. And then that's when I realized that was subversive. I don't know. Did Apple know what was going to happen? They must have.
- [114:17]
Andy Ihnatko
It was brilliant. It knows, like, here is the aperture that we can squeeze communications through. And so we're going to adapt this message so it will fit through the aperture that will get us live to a billion people worldwide.
- [114:33]
Alex Lindsay
And, boy, and you know that there's one song in there. You know, there's a bunch of conversations about whether that song was going to go in or not. And I'm sure that Apple's like, we can pay it.
- [114:46]
Leo Laporte
Dan studders, in our YouTube chat, is saying it proves Apple had full creative control because there's. I can absolutely guarantee you the NFL would not have approved a lot of that stuff.
- [114:57]
Andy Ihnatko
As soon as you see, oh, Samuel L. Jackson is going to dress as Uncle Sam. That's. You know, I thought you're going to get political, but I'm glad that you just went patriotic.
- [115:05]
Leo Laporte
Well, on the surface, it did. It was red, white, it looked like, until the end where Kendrick says, turn off your tv. Which I'm sure the NFL is going, what? What?
- [115:19]
Andy Ihnatko
Again, you got to get that message to the size of the aperture. People. The people are going to Say, oh, good Uncle Sam. And again, just like patriotism. And it's like, no, think about the context of this and think about who's actually portraying Uncle Sam. And oh, boy, it was beautiful.
- [115:36]
Leo Laporte
It was a very strong political scene.
- [115:38]
Andy Ihnatko
Beautiful at the surface, beautiful underneath. It was just beautiful.
- [115:44]
Leo Laporte
You know, you remember that there were huge fines paid, millions of dollars of fines paid on a Super bowl halftime where I can't remember who it was. Somebody flipped off the camera and everybody had to apologize for the. For flip for the bird. Bird. This was a subliminal bird.
- [116:03]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah. It almost makes up for taking end racism off the. Off the end zones. Not quite.
- [116:08]
Leo Laporte
That was very, you know, what do they call it? There was a term that Kathy Gillis used on Twitter on Sunday. It's like compliance ahead of time. Like, let's just not go there. We're just gonna, you know, And I loved it. There was a PlayStation controller. They talked about the game, but it wasn't the NFL game. Anyway, let's take a little break. When we come back, get your picks ready, gentlemen, because the picks of the week are coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. I just wanted to give a little shout out to our Club Twit members who really make a huge difference on our bottom line. Yes, you see ads on the shows, and that certainly covers a lot of our expenses, but not all of our expenses. If it weren't for Club Twit, we would be cutting shows, we would be cutting staff, we would be cutting the honorariums. I guess we pay to our other hosts because we wouldn't have the money and we don't have the resources. There's no investors here. It's just me and Lisa. And so your contribution to Club Twip makes such a big difference. I know it's only seven bucks month. And we try to make it worthwhile. We try to keep the price low and make it worthwhile. For seven bucks a month, you get ad free versions of every show we do this show and every other show. You get special versions with video of shows that don't have video in the public. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a fabulous place to hang up. Hang out, not hang up to hang out. And I highly encourage it. Just for that alone. I feel like it's really nice to have a place to go where other smart people are talking about, not just the shows, but everything else that's going on. We do a lot of special programming in there as well. If you are interested, I invite you to go to Twitter TV club TWiT. Your seven bucks makes a big difference to us, and we thank you so much in advance.
- [118:12]
Alex Lindsay
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Andy Ihnatko
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Leo Laporte
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Alex Lindsay
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- [118:43]
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- [119:12]
Leo Laporte
This just in, by the way, Google did it. Now Apple says it's renaming the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on its Maps app again. We need that. What is that phrase?
- [119:26]
Alex Lindsay
I really thought we could have compromised and just had Gulf of Merica. You know, like it's kind of Mexico, it's kind of Mercado.
- [119:36]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. The change will occur for US Users, but Apple, unlike Google, is going to roll it out globally. Microsoft and MapQuest did you know they were still around with Maps? Have not yet made the change, but I think they're going to do that. And I presume it doesn't say in this Bloomberg article, but I presume they're also going to rename Denali to Mount McKinley.
- [120:02]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, fortunately or unfortunately, they can fall back on an established policy that predates this by a number of years. They recognize one geological truth. Official source for this when that government agency makes a change, they will honor that change within the region in which Google Maps is operating, but not necessarily to her other region regions.
- [120:27]
Leo Laporte
That said Federal Geographic Data Committee. Yeah, but they are of course enjoying by what the President does with his executive orders.
- [120:38]
Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I don't blame Google for doing this. I also don't blame Apple for doing this. But it would be a wonderful gesture if they Said, look, it's not like this has been a contested area for. It's not like this is a war zone. It's not like there's anything to suggest is anything more than a political stunt. We don't change maps based on political stunts.
- [121:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [121:01]
Andy Ihnatko
Or just simply, oh, well, gosh, we're waiting for a form.
- [121:04]
Alex Lindsay
There's.
- [121:04]
Leo Laporte
There.
- [121:05]
Alex Lindsay
There's just. No, there's going to be so many battles to fight. I think they were like, yeah, you got to pin up your battles.
- [121:10]
Jason Snell
Yeah, exactly.
- [121:11]
Leo Laporte
Probably more important that TSMC doesn't get 100% tariffs in the long run. Alex Lindsey, what's your pick of the week this week?
- [121:19]
Alex Lindsay
So it's been a year for the Apple Vision Pro, and I was watching Adam Savage's untested. He was talking about apps that he really enjoyed and thought that they were great that he saw over the last year. And I downloaded one of them called Magic Room. I don't know if. Jason, have you played with Magic Room or not? So this is a headset app, and what it does is it doesn't save any models, but it creates them. So what you do is you start walking around your. You walk around your room, and then you hit reveal, and suddenly it is building a 3D model of your house while you're walking around. And it is. It is. It doesn't save it. It doesn't do anything with it other than make it. And it is. And that, by the way, makes you really sick. It does this wavy thing that you can turn on, which is. I would not recommend. Don't do that anyway. But. But it is.
- [122:09]
Leo Laporte
I'm getting sick just looking at the video.
- [122:10]
Alex Lindsay
Exactly. There's probably some other. Anyway, so it will. You can walk around and it'll just build. And you just walk and look around in your house, and it will build a 3D model. But what's really interesting is it's semi transparent. So my house has three stories, and as you go up to one story and look down, you can see all the way to the basement, like, all the wireframes.
- [122:29]
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's cool.
- [122:29]
Alex Lindsay
So it's like an X ray of yours. And what I realized was, as an example, I realized that there's an Ethernet that I want to put where my wife works because I have to kind of run a long run to her right now. And I thought, oh, it's going to be really hard. I got to go around all these things. And when. When I looked at the X ray of my house, I realized the way that the overhang Worked from where her office is to where my server room is. I was like, oh, that's 15ft. Like 15ft through the basement. That's not even that far. It's just that the way it was in my head was there's no way it could be that close. And so you see all these relationships between your house and your rooms in a way that you hadn't seen before, and it just totally sticks, you know, that's what the headset's really good at. It's totally just wireframe going across your. It feels the closest to the matrix that I think I've felt.
- [123:21]
Leo Laporte
They have a matrix mode. Yeah. So you could be in the matrix. I didn't know that. A clear ceiling mode, which I love.
- [123:27]
Alex Lindsay
I didn't try. All I've done is the wireframe thing and that was enough. But the clear ceiling mode and the matrix mode looks really cool. But it's not cheap. It's like $15 for something that has no use other than it's really enjoyable. But it will save me a lot in installing that Ethernet cable. So that's my argument. But, but I, but I, I, I. It's pretty magical. It is. When they say magic room, it is magic. Right.
- [123:54]
Leo Laporte
So really, you know, I think that's very creative because it doesn't do anything. It's just giving you another chance.
- [123:59]
Alex Lindsay
I was like, where do I save the model?
- [124:00]
Leo Laporte
And it doesn't save the model.
- [124:03]
Alex Lindsay
It's just like, you got to go back to Polycam for that. But, but, but one thing in a very neat. It's another one of those things like I talked about in the other one. This is now part of the Alex Lindsey tour of an Apple Vision Pro.
- [124:16]
Leo Laporte
Let me show you what this room really looks like.
- [124:18]
Alex Lindsay
Just put this on and walk around and see what happens.
- [124:21]
Leo Laporte
Magic room lidar environment from Infi Labs. Infy$15. Mr. Andy Inatko, your pick of the week.
- [124:31]
Andy Ihnatko
Mine is a file manager. We were talking last week about next. For some reason I blurted out, oh, I love the way the file manager worked, where it's like worked in drill down panes. It reminded me of one of my favorite intermittently indispensable apps. It's called forklift. And what it is is it's a single window file manager that is absolutely perfect for those times where like, you've got a whole bunch of like removable drives or you've got a whole bunch of things that are on Google Drive or icloud or drop box and you've got stuff on your internal drive. And you just need to basically figure out what is on this, what needs to now be like backed up and I can remove it from here. What is it that's on my internal, that should go into the cloud or should go onto an external drive, all that sort of stuff. It's so easy to do with forklift. You can do it with a finder. Yes, but this is so much more than just having like a window on the left and snap a window on the right and do copy left and right. It's a single panel interface, so we have basically intermediate tiles. So you can basically have here's where the source is, here's where the destination is. It will help you analyze what's in which folder it will mount. Pretty much anything that's mountable. So not just stuff that you've attached via usb, C, not just your internal drives, but also FTP, Remote File sharing, Dropbox, again, any of these services. It will also automatically do things like automatically sync between two folders. So when I need to update the SD card in my Walkman, I do usually use it with an rsync command, but that's still a little bit like cutting and pasty. With this one, I could just simply open up the SD card, open up the folder that's on my NAS that has my music library on it, and then just say, please sync these two folders and boom, you're done. On and on and on. Just has all these little features to it that, that, that's why I call it intermittently essential. It's not something you're going to be using every day or necessarily every week, but like the dozen times a year when you need to do something like this, it will cut the time in half. And it's not that expensive. It's 20 bucks and it's not a subscription model. 20 bucks includes one year of updates. So if they. Right now they're up to 4.23, I think. So any updates in the next calendar 12 months, you will receive for free. After that, yeah, they're gonna want another 20 bucks, I think. But it's not a lot of money for an app that really, really just cuts so much mess out of a task that has to be done that I keep putting off because it is such a hassle to get this stuff done.
- [127:11]
Leo Laporte
This is a category of app I really like on the Mac, where it's probably a front end to Rsync and a few other tools, but it makes it just accessible and easy to use. And like Handbrake, which is A front end to ffm. That's one of the things that makes the Mac so much fun, is you can, you can get these gui's that give you real power. I use sff, sft, SFTP all the time to transfer files. I wish I'd had this. This would have been great. When I had to do that, I wouldn't do it anymore.
- [127:40]
Andy Ihnatko
Just quickly. Also, sometimes what you're doing is very, very visual. Like I have. So I have these Samsung T3, T4 whatever drives. Those are my, like, I have only five 12 gigs on my MacBook. These are my like external storage that usually travels with the device. So this could have, have anything on it from just silly things that I downloaded to just try out. But I decided I just needed to make some room. So I didn't want to even go through what was in this folder. So I just dragged it on there and then deleted it off the internal to something that was absolutely essential. And I'm glad I didn't know I still had it, but I'm glad I found it. So it's very easy to. SFTP and RSYNC are great if you know exactly what files you want to keep and what you want to do with them. In terms of just sitting there with some music on and in mental flow state. Just no, no, no. Yes.
- [128:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God.
- [128:31]
Andy Ihnatko
That's from the beach trip in 2002. I still have those and the originals. This was so worth it. That's what this, this app is great for.
- [128:38]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. Jason Snell, your pick of the week.
- [128:42]
Jason Snell
My pick of the week is so A while ago I got a, like a cheapish E Ink screen and a Raspberry PI and I had this project where I wrote a Python script that generates an image that burns onto the E Ink screen. And I made a little calendar. It's a fun project, but, you know, I, I, I would tell people about it and like, nobody's gonna, nobody else is gonna do that, right? Like, it's not a product.
- [129:06]
Leo Laporte
I've been meaning to do that for so long. I got the pie, I got the rooney Easy.
- [129:10]
Jason Snell
And then you gotta do a 3D printed case and there's all these steps. So what I, this is a product version of that. And it's still nerdy, but it's much less nerdy and therefore our audience might be interested in it. It's called Terminal. It is literally the same E Ink screen that I have, but in a beautiful case that is nice and thin and well designed and not like 3D printed and thick and all of that. You can prop it up, you can hang it, you can do whatever. It's got a battery in it. USB C for charging the battery.
- [129:41]
Leo Laporte
Home Assistant.
- [129:43]
Jason Snell
So here's the deal with Terminal. Terminal has a plugin system. And it will also, by the way, they will. You can get their firmware, you can hack the firmware, you can run it off of a server that you control, but by default you run it on their server. And the way it works is there are these plugins. You can create them yourself, you can create as many of them as you want. You can query web sources, you can set the formatting. It's basically using an HTML templating language on the server for these plugins. And then there's a refresh system. So you set the plugins to refresh every so often on their server. Server. And then it builds an image. And then all this thing does is as you set how often it checks, it will check and say, is there a new thing for me to display? And it downloads it and puts it on here. So it's a. It is everything I have grappled with with my own E Ink devices, except that I, I can see how they're handling it. I can see that they're like, oh yeah, yeah, that's, that's no good. We're going to have to set up a refresh and all that. Because what you want, because this thing's like using an ESP in it, right? Like it's super, not a brain. So all it really knows is like when to wake up and when to check. It's very low power and. And then it, it checks and is given an image or it's not and that's it. And then it updates the screen or a series of screens. You can actually have a rotate through a few and there's a button on the back to refresh if you want to force an auto refresh. Otherwise it does it automatically. So it is a, it is a, a closed product only in the sense that they wanted to have control to make it usable. But if you wanted to make one yourself, you could. And if you wanted to take it off of their servers and instead use it with some other system, you could, if you're so inclined. I would argue at that point what you're really doing is just buying this really nice productized case. But you know what, that's where I may end up. I may end up putting the same content that are on my IAN calendar on this. But like this is so much nicer than that is because it's a full on product, comes with a lot of built in plugins so you can get your Google calendar and your weather and all of that on there automatically. And again, if you're a developer, even if you're a web developer or if you've got data sources like jsons, you can point it at. You can pretty much build whatever you want and have it display on here. So if you've ever thought about getting like an E Ink fan, but thought it's kind of too much trouble, it's nerdy. But I'm not just not that into it enough to go that extra mile. Terminal might be your solution. It's a use terminal T R m n l dot com. It's 130 bucks. They're back ordered because this is a very small company and every time somebody mentions it on a podcast they sell a bunch of them, they run out and they make more. They have more coming in March. I ordered mine in December and got it a couple weeks ago ago. But it is if you've ever wanted to play with the fact that E Ink allows because E Ink doesn't. It's not just for Kindles. The beauty of an E Ink screen is that when it's not refreshing, there's no power being drawn. And as a result with this little tiny embedded chip and this E Ink screen, the battery life on this is long. So you can put it on a wall or whatever and charge it every few weeks or longer. And so it makes this whole new class of Internet connecting connected ambient information devices available a lot of fun to play with. I love this category and this is a beautiful piece of hardware. You know, again they spent, they spent a lot of time building this, this plastic shell and the little fold out stand and then getting it manufactured from an actual plastic manufacturer instead of just printing on a 3D printer. They did a great job. It's a really nice product.
- [133:35]
Leo Laporte
Patrick Delahanty says I'm gonna have to get one and use the Twit API to make a plugin. You know what Patrick, I will buy you one, put it on your Twit card because that'd be a great thing to have. I'll hang it behind me. Or I was thinking I could put the current value of bitcoin on it and then underneath it how much money is in my wallet that I can't access. Which would be a be like a little, little kick in the great and.
- [134:02]
Jason Snell
A put a countdown timer to when quantum computing is able to unlock.
- [134:07]
Leo Laporte
I'm counting yes, exactly. I hope bitcoin is still worth something by then. They do have a retirement countdown, so I might use that in the meantime. That would be fun. Very cool. Very cool. Use Terminal T, R, M, N L. Just as you would expect.
- [134:23]
Jason Snell
Terminal, terminal.
- [134:24]
Leo Laporte
Terminal.com. thank you, Jason. Jason Snell6colors.com A great blog for Mac lovers. And of course, more than a blog, a news site for Mac lovers.
- [134:38]
Jason Snell
It's a blog. It's fine. Whatever. I write words and also do podcasts, so whatever. 100% of the people hearing this listen to podcasts, so please check out my podcast too.
- [134:50]
Leo Laporte
Sixcolors.com Jason for a list of all of them.
- [134:54]
Jason Snell
All of them. So many.
- [134:56]
Leo Laporte
And Mike Hurley's going on maternity leave. Eh?
- [134:58]
Jason Snell
That's great. Is that his first? It is their first child. He is. His last episode should be Monday. Unless something happens in the meantime. And then I'll have a parade of guest stars after that while he's gone.
- [135:13]
Leo Laporte
Very nice. That's for the upgrade podcast that he does on Mike's network, which is, remind me, Relay. Relay. That's it. Relay FM. Mr. Andy Inako, when are you going to be on GBH next?
- [135:28]
Andy Ihnatko
A week from Thursday. And I've spent already a week trying to figure out all the government agencies that keep technological infrastructure up and running. How can I a. How can I compress this into something we can talk about during our slot? And secondly, I'm going to have to rehearse it so I. My eyes don't twitch and I don't go. Son of a.
- [135:49]
Leo Laporte
Well, with any luck, GBH will not be defunded between now and then. And you'll be able to do that.
- [135:55]
Andy Ihnatko
Fingers crossed. I have tote bags and umbrellas that I can, if I'm out on the street will keep me warm. But yeah, next Thursday at 12:30. Go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later.
- [136:05]
Jason Snell
All right.
- [136:06]
Leo Laporte
Hey. Thank you. And Alex Lindsay does OfficeHours Global. The Q&As are every morning. In fact, Lisa and I were in bed Sunday morning and she said, alex just started streaming again. I said, God, does he never. Does he never stop.
- [136:21]
Alex Lindsay
Sunday's the best one, too, because it's very relaxed. Sunday is not like the other days. It's. It's.
- [136:26]
Leo Laporte
You get up. What time do you get up on Sunday to do that?
- [136:30]
Alex Lindsay
I get up the same time every day. I get up from probably 5:00 or so. And so I don't. I don't.
- [136:35]
Leo Laporte
You don't get to Sleep in ever, huh.
- [136:37]
Alex Lindsay
Every once in a while, like once a year I might sleep in. Like it, it's. But like literally once a year and then I'm. Then I feel like I've lost the day and I'm like, why did I.
- [136:44]
Leo Laporte
That you're probably better off.
- [136:45]
Alex Lindsay
Yeah, so the. I like watching the sun rise and all that stuff. So. But the. Yeah, Sunday is like. Sunday is the day where people can ask questions about office hours, complain about office hours, have ideas about office hours, you know, like, and have suggestions or, you know, questions or whatever. And so and it. And we can answer like during the week it's usually two or three minutes an answer, maybe three or four minutes an answer. On Sunday, our record I think is like 42 minutes. Like we just sit there and talk about something. You know, relax. Shoe on.
- [137:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [137:16]
Alex Lindsay
So it's the only remaining two hour show and so we sit there and just. Yeah, so that's what we do on Sundays.
- [137:23]
Leo Laporte
Officehours Global for all of the goodness. And you can join them in the after hours and ask questions in the Q and A and all of that stuff too. Thank you, Alex. Thank you Andy. Thank you Jason. Thanks to all of you for being here. We do Mac break weekly Tuesday mornings. For me It's a morning anyway. 11am Pacific. That's 2pm Eastern Time, 19 UTC. You can watch us live, as I mentioned, on eight different streams. Our Discord channel for our club members, but also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Eight of them. But honestly, most people decide to watch it at their own convenience, whenever in the mood. And to do that you have a variety of ways you can get a copy of the show. Either our website, Twit tv. There's audio and video there just for you to stream or watch or download and listen later. Although if you're going to do that, probably the best thing to do is get a podcast client. There are so many good ones. And subscribe and then that way you'll get it. You don't even have to think about it. It'll be there on your device and you can listen and watch whenever you feel like it. There's also a YouTube channel, very handy if you want to share clips, little bits of it. And please do tell the world about Mac Break weekly. The longest running I think Mac podcast in the world. I might be wrong, but I think we are. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time next week. And as I must say, every week it is my solemn duty to tell you. Get back to work. You don't have to return to office, but you got to get back to work because break time is over. See you later.
- [139:13]
E
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com backslash keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card left 15 days qualified unlock device, credit service port in 90 plus days device knowledgeable carrier and timely redemption Required card is no cash access and expires in six months.