MacBreak Weekly 962: The Brutalist Rainbow

Summary

MacBreak Weekly 962: The Brutalist Rainbow – Detailed Summary

Release Date: March 5, 2025
Host/Authors: Leo Laporte, Andy Inako, Alex Lindsay, Micah Sargent
Episode Title: The Brutalist Rainbow

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1. Introduction

Leo Laporte welcomes listeners to MacBreak Weekly, introducing Andy Inako and Alex Lindsay, who are filling in for the absent Jason Snell, alongside the regular co-host, Micah Sargent. The episode covers Apple's latest product releases, AI developments, and architectural changes at Apple Park.

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2. Apple's New iPads: Enhancements and Target Audience

The discussion centers around Apple's freshly launched iPad Air featuring the new M3 processor.

• Processor and Sizes:

  • Leo Laporte notes the introduction of a 13-inch model alongside the traditional 11-inch.
  • Quote [02:29]: Alex Lindsay: "Something was certainly in the air."

• Storage Options:

  • iPad Air now offers storage up to 1TB, a significant upgrade aimed at users with extensive media needs.
  • Leo Laporte remarks, "Always order a terabyte now." ([03:39])

• Fingerprint vs. Face ID:

  • Preference for Touch ID is expressed due to its convenience in various usage scenarios.
  • Andy Inako shares, "It's weird... But there's still plenty of time..." ([04:02])

• Target Demographics:

  • Emphasis on education and younger audiences, with pricing set at $349, making it accessible for students.
  • Micah Sargent adds, "This is squarely aimed also at schools and education." ([08:42])

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3. The Disappearance of the Apple Park Rainbow

Apple Park's iconic temporary rainbow structure is being dismantled to make way for a permanent installation.

• Origins and Replacement:

  • Initially constructed as a temporary stage prop in 2019 by Stageco, a Belgian theatrical stage designer.
  • Andy Inako explains, "It was a wonderful stage prop... They are replacing it with a permanent structure." ([15:20])

• Community Reactions:

  • Mixed responses from the public and online communities like Reddit, with some fearing political motivations and others understanding the impermanence.
  • Leo Laporte expresses concern, "Oh dear." ([15:36])

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4. Apple's AI Efforts and Siri’s Challenges

A significant portion of the discussion delves into Apple's struggle to integrate advanced AI into Siri and broader Apple Intelligence initiatives.

• Current AI Integration:

  • Micah Sargent highlights the reliance on third-party AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity over Siri, citing dissatisfaction with Siri's performance.
  • Quote [32:00]: Micah Sargent: "I don't feel the need for Siri."

• Development Delays:

  • Mark Gurman suggests that a truly conversational Siri may not be available until iOS 20 in 2027.
  • Leo Laporte summarizes, "Siri has two brains... it didn't work as smoothly as it could." ([46:25])

• Hardware Challenges:

  • Competition for Nvidia chips necessary for AI training is impeding progress.
  • Micah Sargent remarks, "Apple is ramping up production of its own AI servers." ([50:56])

• Future Outlook:

  • Apple aims to leverage its secure ecosystem to create a reliable AI tool, but faces significant hurdles in matching the versatility of existing AI services.
  • Andy Inako optimistic about Apple's potential, "I think they have the opportunity to have the best AI solution." ([37:02])

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5. MacBook Air and Upcoming Releases

Anticipation builds around the imminent release of the MacBook Air with the M4 processor.

• Release Timing:

  • Speculation based on insider reports suggests the MacBook Air launch may occur tomorrow, aligning with Apple’s "Air Week."
  • Alex Lindsay hints, "It's air all week. So the MacBook Air now, maybe tomorrow." ([12:51])

• Product Differentiation:

  • Discussions revolve around differentiating the Air from the Pro models while maintaining performance improvements.
  • Andy Inako points out, "Keep things simple... if you want something more complicated, I can direct you to other apps." ([24:51])

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6. Apple Mail App: User Frustrations and Feature Bloat

The revamped Apple Mail app has garnered significant user criticism due to increased complexity and persistent bugs.

• User Complaints:

  • Issues with Exchange server integration leading to emails not sorting correctly.
  • Micah Sargent shares, "No, no, no almost any apps won’t let you report things." ([20:38])

• Apple’s Approach:

  • The addition of more features has diverged from Apple's original philosophy of simplicity in utility apps.
  • Alex Lindsay suggests, "Make it brutalist Email again." ([24:14])

• Alternative Solutions:

  • Users are encouraged to adopt third-party mail apps like Mailmate and Fastmail for a more streamlined experience.
  • Leo Laporte states, "It's good when Apple doesn't do a great job because that means there'll be a lot of other choices." ([24:51])

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7. Vision Pro: Emerging Experiences and Content

The episode touches upon Apple's Vision Pro and its evolving content ecosystem.

• New Content Integrations:

  • Discussion of immersive experiences, such as Bono's one-man show, highlighting the potential for new forms of content.
  • Micah Sargent anticipates, "It could have guest access... It could allow immersive concerts." ([97:08])

• Development and Challenges:

  • Early adopters like Micah have experimented with the device, noting both impressive features and areas needing improvement.
  • Micah Sargent candidly shares, "I was tortured by a Vision Pro for three weeks." ([97:11])

• Future Enhancements:

  • Anticipation of upcoming software updates to improve user experience and content offerings.
  • Leo Laporte mentions, "Apple is likely to release more apps focused on immersive experiences like concerts." ([98:36])

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8. Additional Discussions

• Security Concerns:

  • Sponsored segment by Zocaler discussing the rise in ransomware attacks and the need for advanced cloud security solutions.

• Right to Repair Movement:

  • iFixit reviews on the iPhone 16e highlight Apple's movement towards more repair-friendly devices in compliance with EU regulations.
  • Leo Laporte commends Apple’s progress, "iFixit gives a pretty respectable 7 out of 10 repairability score." ([78:38])

• Farewell to Skype:

  • Announcement of Microsoft's shutdown of Skype, with hosts expressing nostalgic sentiments and comparing it to the rise of Zoom and Teams.
  • Micah Sargent critiques Microsoft's handling, "Teams has nothing good because it's part of their ecosystem." ([79:05])

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9. Community Picks of the Week

• Alex Lindsay’s Pick: Zen Browser

  • A Firefox-based browser offering enhanced ad-blocking and customization, recommended as an alternative to Chrome amidst ongoing Manifest V3 changes.
  • Alex Lindsay explains, "Zen Browser is a fork of Firefox with built-in ad-blocking and modern UI elements." ([125:21])

• Andy Inako’s Pick: Comprehensive Security Solutions

  • Emphasizes the importance of secure and efficient cloud security tools like Zocaler to combat modern threats.

• Micah Sargent’s Pick: Neat Video

  • A video editing tool praised for its ability to reduce grain effectively, enhancing video quality in post-production.
  • Micah Sargent shares, "Neat Video is the solution for under-lit video footage." ([126:00])

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10. Conclusion

Leo Laporte wraps up the episode by encouraging listeners to subscribe and engage with MacBreak Weekly across various platforms. He thanks the co-hosts and highlights upcoming segments, including Vision Pro demonstrations and Crafting Corner with Micah Sargent.

Final Quote [141:05]: Leo Laporte: "We call that the right to not repair."

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Notable Quotes

• Leo Laporte:

  • "Always order a terabyte now." ([03:39])
  • "It's good when Apple doesn't do a great job because that means there'll be a lot of other choices." ([24:51])

• Alex Lindsay:

  • "Zen Browser is a fork of Firefox with built-in ad-blocking and modern UI elements." ([125:21])

• Micah Sargent:

  • "I don't feel the need for Siri." ([32:00])
  • "Neat Video is the solution for under-lit video footage." ([126:00])

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Insights and Conclusions

• Apple's Product Strategy: Apple continues to innovate with its iPad lineup, focusing on storage and user-friendly features tailored for education and everyday use. However, challenges persist in integrating advanced AI functionalities seamlessly.

• AI Integration Hurdles: Apple's cautious approach to AI integration, particularly with Siri, reflects a commitment to reliability and privacy but may delay competing with more versatile third-party AI solutions.

• Developer and User Ecosystem: User feedback emphasizes the need for simplicity in native applications, fostering a robust third-party ecosystem to fill gaps left by Apple’s feature implementation.

• Vision Pro Potential: While Vision Pro presents exciting immersive experiences, its successful adoption hinges on the development of compelling content and seamless user interaction.

• Security and Repairability: Apple's efforts towards enhanced security measures and greater repairability align with evolving regulatory landscapes and user demands for sustainable technology practices.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from MacBreak Weekly Episode 962, providing a clear overview for those who haven't tuned in.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Andy, it's time for Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inoco's here. Alex Lindsay's here, sitting in for Jason Snell. The wonderful Micah Sargent is here. We will talk about Apple's new iPads. They just came out this morning. Maybe take a preview of what they might announce tomorrow. It is air week, isn't it? After all, the UK may have gone a step too far in making Apple turn off its advanced encryption for UK residents. We'll talk about that and the disappearance of the Apple park rainbow. It's all coming up next on Mac Break Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Mac break weekly, episode 962, recorded March 4, 2025. The brutalist rainbow. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show we cover the latest Apple news. Jason Snell is on assignment and I'll tell you why in a moment. Right now, I have to introduce. I'm proud to introduce Mike Sargent, our good friend. Hello.

[Alex Lindsay]

Here he comes with the snowplow.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm proud to introduce the host of iOS today, which just completed. And of course, Tech News Weekly and Hands On Tech. And my good friend, it's good to.

[Alex Lindsay]

Be here with you, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Also with us, Mr. Andy Inacco, WG BH Boston. Hello, Andrew.

[Andy Inako]

Hello. I'm proud to meet you. I'm proud to be here as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we're always plowed. Is there snow there? It looks like there is behind you.

[Andy Inako]

Only tiny. Only tiny bits. It's been the thing we're not supposed to worry about, where it's 53 degrees and you start at least getting out the box where you pack up all the sweaters and then the next day it's like 28 degrees and you're like, oh, I forgot, it's the 21st century.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Welcome to the 21st century, where no one knows what's going to happen next. And Also with us, Mr. Alex Lindsay from Officehours Global.

[Micah Sargent]

Hello, Alex. It's good to be here.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful to see you, as always. So I was kind of hoping the MacBook Air would come out today just so we'd have something to talk about, but Apple threw me a curve. They released a new updated iPad air, with an M3 processor in it. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Something was certainly in the air.

[Andy Inako]

Two new iPhones.

[Alex Lindsay]

What I wanted in the air.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Is that maybe that's why what Tim was saying, is that two things in the air or something? Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

It's weird. German's thing was that, oh, we're definitely getting the iPad. We're definitely getting the M4 MacBook Air. We might even. We'll probably even get some new iPads. But they pull the old switcheroo. But there's still plenty of time, especially the kind of quote announcements unquote they're doing of late. Particularly with this. It was just. There's Apple newsroom has a post. Here's a new thing. Here's a new. Here's some new. A couple of new things on the. On the Apple Store. I even missed immediately that in addition to the new iPad Air, there was a new 11th generation iPad. So there's really nothing. It's not as though they're going to be stealing the press thunder and losing the news cycle by also releasing the new Mac, a new MacBook Air. Particularly if all they did was put a new M4 processor in it.

[Leo Laporte]

Did they? I didn't realize this. I know. I have a 13 inch iPad Pro. I didn't realize the air also came in 13 inches. So there's two sizes 11 and 13. Blue, purple, starlight space, gray storage up to a terabyte. Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

So they would increase storage, which I.

[Leo Laporte]

Always order a terabyte now. I just, I don't know why I never fill it up, but it's just nice to have.

[Andy Inako]

I'm going through that now where I'm so glad that I pump for the maximum amount of storage on my M1 iPad Pro when I bought it. Because the ability to simply say, I don't know if I'm going to want to watch these eight movies, but hey, I'll copy it on there anyway, that's. That's paid off.

[Leo Laporte]

Fingerprint reader, which I like. You know, I almost, I love that on my mini. I almost wish I had that as an option. How hard could it put both Face ID and Touch ID in one machine? I just, I wish they would Also.

[Andy Inako]

Also face ID on the iPad. Still kind of cumbersome.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if you're holding it.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, yeah. I kind of prefer the Touch id.

[Leo Laporte]

I much prefer it. Yeah, Pl. Because I'm often using the iPad mini in bed and my face is all squanched up.

[Andy Inako]

Exactly. Exactly. I'm watching movies with my iPad like on my belly and I have to sort of make that horrible like quadruple chin move to lift up just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Andy Inako]

You know what? Maybe I don't want to sign in. I don't want to.

[Leo Laporte]

It's probably good for my core, but I don't need to buy that out. A little crunch. It's the iPad Air crunch. Or the iPad. The Face ID crunch where you just set up a little bit. The other thing is I'm often watching my Mini when I'm brushing my teeth and it seems to not recognize me when I have something stuck in my mouth. Make your own joke. M3. Are we disappointed about the M3? That's kind of a. Feels like that was kind of an interim chip in between the great M2 and the even better M4.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, yeah, at least that's what we heard on the Mac side of things, right? That that was part of the. Oh, maybe you should hold out and wait for that to come. I did want to quickly Note, yeah, the M2 iPad Air was the first one to offer the 13 inch model. Just a repeat here and. But that I was surprised to see that, you know, you can kind of get some information about what the company thinks is successful based on obviously how it goes forward. Still seeing those two being offered in that iPad Air model versus the iPad Pro is fascinating to me. But yeah, I think the going with the M3 instead of the M4, it almost feels like one thing they're trying to do is differentiate the Air from the Pro model while still providing the ability to have Apple Intelligence. Right, that's, that's the big thing. Let's get everything onto Apple Intelligence except for the new iPad, which is interestingly left out. The Kid Pad as some people call it.

[Leo Laporte]

The Kid Pad doesn't have AI in it.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, it says the. It's got the A16 processor. So it's like that was. That gave me pause because I, I thought. And I was. Over the past couple of weeks I've been saying, hey, isn't interesting that with. When they went with the least expensive iPhone, they still made sure that it could do Apple Intelligence. Maybe this means that Apple does not want to introduce anything from this point on that that alienates a group of people saying no, they're a group. There are Apple users who have Apple intelligence and Apple users who do not have Apple intelligence. So it kind of surprises me that they are saying that, yeah, you guys gonna have to like correct your own mistakes from now on. I mean it's, it's something, it says something when they do, they do want to keep the price low, low, low. So it does say something about the cost of Apple Intelligence, both with putting extra RAM in and giving the CPU support. But okay, so I guess, I guess I have to change like my thinking that maybe, maybe Apple isn't. Everybody deserves Apple Intelligence no matter what their stature.

[Leo Laporte]

It does feel like they're marketing this to younger people, students. It says it's lovable, drawable, magical. $349 is a great price. Remember, the iPad started at 499 when it first came out. 349. Fantastic. Although that's 20 bucks above the old price last time. Yes. Or am I wrong?

[Andy Inako]

That's. It was 329, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

29.

[Andy Inako]

300. Educational. I wonder what the educational price is now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Available March 12th. And again, the super fast A16. That sounds like it's aimed at younger, more gullible, super fast, more colorful people. More colorful, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it starts at 128 gigs of storage. So that means the base $349 model is more than adequate for. In fact, let's say that right now, even though I'm deprecating the M3, it's frankly more than anybody needs ever on an iPad. It's. Yeah, you don't have to.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, there are definitely a handful of places where you may want to use something more powerful. Would be. This is 90. For 90, 95% of someone who would buy an iPad. This would do the job. It would probably do 95% of what I use an iPad for. I mean, I definitely use some of the other stuff from the pros, but not the newer ones. I mean, I have older ones. And this one, I, you know, I think that is squarely aimed also at schools and education. And, you know, that, you know, with the educational discounts and everything else, it's. It's. It has to live in that. In that space. As far as cost perspective, still is.

[Leo Laporte]

A magic keyboard folio available. I don't think it uses the pencil. Pro uses the. Is that right? It uses the regular pencil. Correct.

[Alex Lindsay]

The USB C version. And I wanted to note too, the. It starts out this. This iPad at double the storage of what it had before. And to me, that points it to even more being a kid pad. Because one thing I've seen is a kid gets very tired of their huge game app that they want, and they want another one, and they want another one, and they want another one. So now parent doesn't have to delete old apps to download new ones and then have the kid go, actually, I want to play that one again that they already deleted. Yeah, you just got lots of space to download all your fun little, little apps that you want to play, and it's not an issue anymore.

[Micah Sargent]

I am interested as, like, who. What teenagers, you know, get these iPads or, you know, they're aiming at that younger crowd. You know, my experience right now is mostly on those, on those iPads that you see schools use them. You see parents with younger kids use them because you give them to them in the car or the, or in the airport.

[Leo Laporte]

They can't go to a restaurant anymore with kids. They're all watching their iPads or the disadvantaged ones watching mom's iPhone. But that is the babysitter of choice now.

[Micah Sargent]

It's something you can put in your. I mean, I know that when we flew, you know, with our kids much more often than we do now, when they were really little, that was the thing you did is you handed them an iPad and in the plane and they just went off into Never Neverland and enjoyed the plane ride without having, without having your kid, your three year old.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's okay for a plane. You know, occasionally makes me, it worries me a little bit if it's a, if it's like every day we, we.

[Micah Sargent]

Didn'T, we were very analog. I know that I, I seem very techie, but you know, I have a room full of tech and then I walk out, almost no tech in the rest of my house. I mean, and, and give the kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Some bongos or something, you know.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh yeah, definitely at a restaurant.

[Micah Sargent]

When we go out. Yeah, when we go out, we go out to talk to each other. I don't know, you know, like that's. But I think it's hard. Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of parents have had a hard time following whatever they were supposed to do with their kids and kids are hard to manage in. Our kids are pretty, pretty great when it comes to going to dinner. Like they're not.

[Leo Laporte]

And you have wonderful, smart kids. And that's, it's probably, you know, my wife's fault anyway. And I should say that even though Apple's really clearly marketing this towards education and, and younger people to anybody who wants an iPad and doesn't have, you know, hundreds of dollars to say this is a great choice.

[Micah Sargent]

What I didn't get to is that I think that the really, the big market that we see in the airport, the big market I see in my family, the big part is the over 50, over 60 crowd that just want something to check email and throw in.

[Leo Laporte]

The oldsters love the iPad.

[Micah Sargent]

It only takes one really bad virus with the PC that they bought at Best Buy for them to just go, well, how do I not have this happen again? And you go, well, I'll just get an iPad. You'll be able to do all the things you were doing before, except you don't have to worry about all those other things that happen to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true. In fact, my daughter is using a Chromebook and ready. Her birthday's coming up. She's ready to replace it because the question mark key doesn't work anymore. There's two keys that don't work anymore. So she has to copy it and paste it into her toes when she writes. And this has been going on for more than a year. And I said, please let me get you something. And now I'm thinking maybe an iPad with a magic keyboard would be a good choice. Yes. If she's used to the Chromebook. Right. It's going to be a step up from that.

[Andy Inako]

It's a wonderful bargain. The other day I saw someone make a half joking but half serious decision tree on like, what kind of operating system to choose. And like the first decision tree was, do you want to be bothered? Do you not want to be bothered? If you don't want to be bothered, okay, do you have. Do you have a trust fund? Do you not have a trust fund? Right on that decision tree. If you have a trust fund, go get an iPad, go for IPADOs. If you do not have a trust fund, get a Chromebook.

[Leo Laporte]

So now that the iPads, the new iPads are out, it sounds like. Do you think, I mean, do you think that that was the. There's something in the air? No, there's going to be a MacBook Air. An M4 MacBook Air, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think it's air. It's just an. It's a week of air. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Air all week. So the MacBook Air now, maybe tomorrow. Right. That's what Amber Neely is saying on Apple Insider. Yeah. Yeah. Mark Gurman also says, says that expect the MacBook Air tomorrow as part of the new product wave. Do you wonder there might be a more air in the air?

[Alex Lindsay]

I think so. Do you wonder if Apple told some people that the MacBook Air was coming first and told others that the iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Was coming first so they could try.

[Alex Lindsay]

To figure out who's telling who?

[Andy Inako]

What a maneuver worthy of a Romulan. Very well thought.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a name for that?

[Andy Inako]

Is that like Canary Trap?

[Leo Laporte]

Canary Trap, Yeah, Canary Trap.

[Micah Sargent]

I know that there was a story that Steve Jobs told three executives what the code name was instead of if this were. If this code name gets out, all three fired. You know, he's like, I'm not trying to figure it out. I'm just going to fire all Three of you and the code name got out and he fired all three of them. And that solved that. Solved. Yeah. There was a very quick Apple that I heard that's what tightened things up in the 90s, late 90s was Steve showing that he doesn't. There's nobody above leaks, you know, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Better than sending out a fork in the road email, I think. Just, you know, really. Anyway, so tomorrow the MacBook Air 4 is. Do we know why Mr. Snell is not here? Did he say.

[Andy Inako]

I don't know if he said. But I don't believe.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Andy Inako]

I don't believe it's related to an Apple briefing.

[Alex Lindsay]

He is actually on vacation.

[Andy Inako]

Okay. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Yes, vacation. John Ashley, don't get any ideas. Yeah, he's vacation.

[Micah Sargent]

He's in a vacation at resort Cupertino. It's. It's quite nice. It's. It's like a.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what he won't see there? He won't see the rainbow. The arches have been pulled down. Rainbow Stage to be pulled to re. Be rebuilt. But it was never permanent, right?

[Andy Inako]

It was, yeah. It made its first appearance in 2019. Jony. I've said that at the time that it wasn't. It was, I believe it was meant to stay, but that version wasn't meant to be permanent. And so this, this started getting traction on like Reddit and other like sub rosa sort of forums where someone, someone managed to find an image on Google Earth that said here that basically had image of like the, the rainbow. The Rainbow stage completely torn down and stuff. And a lot of people, and some people are saying, oh my God, they're giving it to dei, they're turning down the rainbow.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh dear.

[Andy Inako]

But other people saying, no, it was never meant to be permanent. They're actually replacing it with a permanent structure. So you can, you can still take a look at the images. But apparently people who are inside Apple have said that they know that it's being rebuilt to. Into a permanent structure.

[Leo Laporte]

IB6 Media in his YouTube short talks about. It's really quite good. He talks about the genesis of it. It was created kind of as a stage prop. Probably balsa wood, right? It wasn't.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it was. I think it was built. Lady Gaga played there and I think that's right. I think that that was, it was. I think it was built for that stage or with that stage like, like.

[Andy Inako]

All the buildings that were. That were built for the San Francisco World's Fair where it's all made out of like plaster and plaster and straw. And if you really. And if you want to keep it, you're gonna have to tear them down and replace it with actually built stuff. What's funny is Apple.

[Micah Sargent]

Apple's version of balsa wood lasted six years. Yeah. You know, like.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, well, because. Well, because to be fair, it's not something. There's no actual stage there. They're just like arches that are on ground. And I don't think anybody wants to be the one who like, got caught trying to take a selfie at the top of the arch and cause the whole thing to come crashing down. That's a career limiting selfie.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

IB6 says it was built by Stageco, which is a Belgian theatrical stage designer.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, yeah, I've hired them.

[Leo Laporte]

You've hired them for your birthday party?

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

If you can imagine it, we can build it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Concept of stage, balsa wood, turtle.

[Leo Laporte]

And note, they say temporary structures, outdoor structures. If it's outdoors, which it is, and it's subject to, you know, the weather, it's not surprising.

[Micah Sargent]

They were like, oh, it's time.

[Leo Laporte]

Every six years, I wonder what.

[Andy Inako]

Make it out of concrete.

[Leo Laporte]

They should get Adrien Brody in and make it out of, yuck, gray concrete. Make a real brutalist rainbow, no color whatsoever.

[Andy Inako]

Replace all the grass around it with bricks. Do exactly what Boston did to City hall Plaza in 1970. Just make it a desolate Soviet. Like, make it into the place you go when you want to beg the commissar for any information about what happened to your dissident Poe and uncle.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, Johnny, I feel like we have.

[Micah Sargent]

At least a candidate for the name of the show. The Brutalist.

[Alex Lindsay]

Brutalist, Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gray Skittles. Eat the Brutalist rainbow. So, Tim, cook something in the air this week. He did say weak week. He didn't say this Tuesday. So you can see how high it ran, though.

[Micah Sargent]

They didn't even make a video for it. I mean, it's. You know, they used to do events for these things. Then they used to put out videos on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no iPad video.

[Micah Sargent]

I couldn't find one on their YouTube channel. So, you know, we like.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, that's the news article. Doesn't have a link to it.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Tomorrow they're busy making the MacBook Air. That's their selling computer, right?

[Andy Inako]

Not. Not only that, but the iPad. All of the iPads got one, like press release. It wasn't. They did a separate one for the iPad 11 and another for the iPad air. So this was definitely. Yeah, we decided that we're just going to put some components in here, and.

[Micah Sargent]

I think that it's important for them to release it. This is the time when budgets get sorted out for education. And I still think that this is probably a vast majority of these purchases are spring for the fall education season. And so I think that it has iPads or these types of iPads have been released in March or April for many years. So when they're released, this is the time to do it so that people can make their choices.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Apple introduced. Yeah. One press release five hours ago, an interesting one. Same time they released a press release announcing Friday Night Baseball's coming back to Apple tv. So you can see how important it is. It's right up there with the Friday Night baseball. Okay, well, but I think this is, honestly, I think this is a great product. I have a. You know, it's funny, a couple of weeks ago, I think it was Jason picked Tapestry, or was it you, Andy, who picked Tapestry from Icon Factory as their pick of the week. It's an iOS app that's a news reader because it does social. I tried it out. I was, you know, okay. I tried it out on my Mac, my air Pro, my M4, Air Pro, and it's so good. That's now what I use most of the time. I've stopped using the laptop as much. Oh. Because it's a great news gathering. That, plus I know you recommended Raindrop. Those two together really make my news gathering much easier. I wish there were a better mail app. We should talk a little bit about this. There's been a lot of complaints about the updated Apple Mail app. Now, with Apple Intelligence, how do you all feel about that?

[Micah Sargent]

It's really hard for me to get out of it. I mean, it's just like, I know how to use it. I try other ones.

[Leo Laporte]

It sorts your mail app.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, I turned almost everything off in it. My biggest problem is it's got all kinds of bugs that it's had for years, specifically with Exchange servers, that if you're in. For instance, if you have a folder, if you like to do things in folders on a. You know, and you have an Exchange, if your company is in Exchange and another Exchange person sends an email and you sort it automatically into their folder, it doesn't go there.

[Leo Laporte]

It just, oh, that's not good.

[Micah Sargent]

And there's no.

[Leo Laporte]

That's always been the case. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

In that case for at least five years. The, the. And what's interesting is, is that it's one of the few apps, I guess Because a lot of people have it that Apple has. It doesn't have any feedback. So it's not like a bunch of people can tell them that something's wrong. There's nowhere to say, hey, my messages can't shake.

[Leo Laporte]

Shake your.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yes, exactly. It's wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Shake your mail. Yeah, I don't use Apple mail. I use Mailmade on the Mac and fast mails apps on iOS and iPadOS. So I don't, I haven't been experienced to it, but I've been seeing so many complaints about it on Reddit, I always thought I'd ask if people are using it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I think part of it is change and especially with something that you think about when you're using a mail app, it really is. I don't know that many people are going into their mail app with any level of excitement and interest. Yeah, nobody loves something that needs to be just sitting in the background. You don't want to spend cognitive loads going through your mail. And so when you have a change to something as kind of in the background for you, as atmospheric as a mail app, any level of change and interaction is going to make you frustrated because you can't just interact with it how you would expect. I recommend doing what Alex has talked about there, which is just if you don't like those features, just turn them off. You can decide to turn some of them back on if you want to. But I agree that it's difficult to introduce new features to an application that is supposed to be. I get in, I do what I need to do and I get out. I come, I eat, I come, I eat, I leave.

[Micah Sargent]

And I, I think that that's the issue is that, is that I think that one of the things that Steve Jobs talked about a lot was that how important it is to say no. And I feel like Apple has lost the ability to say no to lots of things. And they just keep adding features to whether it's photos or mail or other things, they keep adding features because I don't know other people have those features. But it's. I, I find myself constantly saying if I wanted an Android phone, I'd buy an Android phone. Like I don't need it. I don't want it to do all these things, you know, like, I don't want it to do everything that Android does. I want it to. And easy and kind of be in the background. I don't, you know, like there's things that I, you know, the. And, And I feel like Apple keeps on. Recently become a little bit More sour about it because I just keep on feeling like Apple keeps on adding stuff that I didn't ask for or want or even what Apple used to do is surprise and delight. They put something in, they go, oh, I never thought of that. And now I love it. I don't have that feeling very much. I mostly think, oh, I never thought of that. And I wish that they hadn't either, you know, and you know, like, and.

[Leo Laporte]

So I just, you know, never thought of that.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah. And I, and I feel like that's happening, you know, often, like, often for me now with, with Apple apps of like, I don't need you to add. I didn't need this to become more complicated. I just need to check my email. Like, I don't, you know, and I don't know in today's business world, I don't know how, I don't know how busy email is. I mean, I'm hard to reach by email. I live inside of a bunch of other text apps and, and you know, I spend a lot of time in data like that. I don't really need my email to get any more complicated or any cooler or any better. I just need to know what people sent me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, okay. I was just curious. I'm very old school with mailmate, but it does the things. Main thing it does is it has an unread rule that makes it very easy for me to see the stuff that I want to see. That's all male. You're right. Male mail should just be, probably should just be utilitarian. Don't make it too smart.

[Alex Lindsay]

Make it brutalist.

[Leo Laporte]

Please make it brutalist Email again, especially.

[Andy Inako]

Especially for the pack in version of a mail app. It's basically the people who are not looking to replace whatever mail out comes built in with a device aren't looking for advanced features. They're basically looking for something no more sophisticated than the Gmail web client. So if you can deliver that feature to everybody by saying, here is a basic mail app, it will not cause your iPad to overheat. We're not going to do an update that changes everything and makes it really more difficult for you to deal with what already is one of your biggest problems of the day. If you want something more complicated, I can direct you to all these other apps on the App Store, but we're going to keep things simple.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the good news, is that it has spawned a large ecosystem of alternative mail apps. So it's good when in a way it's good when Apple doesn't Do a great job because that means there'll be a lot of other choices.

[Micah Sargent]

I guess that not great job job as a user is. And I just wish that they would just not do very much like I don't need.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Microsoft did that for years. They'd make kind of half assed built in apps with that. And so that would kind of support the ecosystem for better. Right? Better video editors, better mail apps, better everything.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean you got to have something there. And again, I think that a couple years ago mail was other than this Exchange server issue. Mail was as good as it needed to be. Like it does the thing that I needed to do. I don't need you to that team. What I needed to do is be stable and not throw away my emails by accident, which is what it was doing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the worst. You're right. That's the big thing, right.

[Micah Sargent]

I just need that first do no harm.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right?

[Micah Sargent]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And there's. And again, there's nowhere to tell them that it isn't working other than the show. So here it is. Like there's no way for me to tell them.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, as you're watching this show, shake it really hard and send a report. Now. There are people who like it. Most of the people in our various chats agree. Leftward though, who's watching on Twitch? Hello, Leftward says I really like the categorization. It cleaned up my inbox. So there are people who like it. I remember when Gmail did that, right. They had the categorization and it made it easy to. Yeah, everybody hated it too. In fact, it's gone now, isn't it? I think they got rid of it. All right, let's take a little break and we'll come back, we'll do the Vision Pro segment. There's a lot to say this week about Vision Pro. We will also do. I think we should just do every Tuesday the Mark, what Mark Gurman said on Sunday because as usual, he's dumped a lot of information.

[Andy Inako]

He's responsible for a lot of Mac news sites having a lot of things to write about on Monday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. You know, they all just rephrase his newsletter.

[Andy Inako]

They should send him one of those flower baskets is made out of fruit every single birthday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, I actually they made it paid only at some point the Power on newsletter. And my choice is to pay for it.

[Andy Inako]

And by the way, congratulations. I found out to him. I found out that he's been promoted to like editor in chief of consumer stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Good for him. He's, he deserves it. He's amazing.

[Andy Inako]

Again, he delivers immense value to Bloomberg and to the community.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

Good for him.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And quite a discovery. He was in high school when 9 to 5 Mac Seth discovered him and he's gone on to bigger and better things ever since. He still looks like he's in high school. However, that hasn't changed. All right, you're watching Mac. Break Weekly. Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey filling in for Jason Snell this week. Always pleased to have Micah Sargent with us. This episode brought to you by Zoc. Doc, this is something you ought to know about. I know you're a hypochondriac, Micah, so I'm sure you have. That's mean. But Lisa says I'm a hypochondriac. It's true. But like a lot of guys, I push off going to the doctor. Right. I grew up, you know, they said, rub dirt on it, walk it off, you'll be fine. When, when was the last time you needed to go to a doctor? But you put it off, you know, you're too busy, It'll heal on its own. I say that all the time. My attitude is, you know, the human body's a miracle. It'll fix itself. It doesn't always. I don't need help. We've all been there. Booking a doctor appointment, part of the reason is it could be daunting. But thanks to ZocDoc, there's no reason to delay. They make it easy to find and book a doctor who's right for you. Now, I've used it, by the way, and it's been very effective. Zocdoc, it's a free app or website. You can do it either way, where you can search and compare high quality in network doctors and even click to instantly book an appointment. We're talking about in network appointments with more than 100,000 healthcare providers. And it's not just MDs, it's mental health, dental health, primary care, urgent care. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance. You can look at the location so you don't have to drive a long way. Or if you're willing to, you can expand the radius. And of course, docs were good fit for any need, medical need you might have. But the best thing for me is the reviews because they're from verified patients and they also help you understand what kind of doctor this is. Because some doctors are, I'll give you all the options and let you choose, you know, and then some doctors are, I'm just going to tell you the best thing, the thing you should do. No discussion. And you know, some people like the former, some people like the latter. You get to choose and that's what's great. And there are now so many docs on zocdoc, you're going to find somebody that's just right for you. Once you find that person, you can see their actual appointment openings. You can choose a time slot that works for you and you can click to instantly book a visit, plus often an instant visit. Doc Doc. Appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. And let's face it, when you need a doctor, you need a doctor now. You can even score same day appointments. Appointments. Look, I love Zocdoc. I used it, I recommend it. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments. You can do it on the web or on their app. But do us a favor. Go to ZocDoc.com MacBreak so they know you saw it here. Find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. Z O C Doc.com MacBreak ZocDoc.com MacBreak ZocDoc Can I play that again? That's called the Little victory. See, that's how you feel when you get the right doctor at the right time. Thank you ZocDoc for supporting Mac. Break Weekly Bloomberg Newsletter Power on. I do recommend it. Bloomberg is not cheap. I buy it so you don't have to. But I think if you want to support Mark's great work, it's worth it. Is this the current one? I always have to check. Yeah. March 2nd. Apple's artificial intelligence efforts reach a make or break point. This is the one where he says it might not be till 2027 before AI comes truly comes to Siri. We know 8.4 has a Siri update in it, but he says Apple's really struggling with Apple intelligence. He says all this undercuts the idea Apple intelligence will spur consumers to upgrade their devices. There's little reason this has got to be bad news for Apple. There's little reason for anyone to buy a new iPhone or other product just to get Apple intelligence. No matter how hard Apple pushes it in its marketing.

[Micah Sargent]

I just don't think that that's why they're buying those things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree with you.

[Micah Sargent]

I just think that there's this whole thing of like, oh my gosh, the world's gonna fall because Apple intelligence isn't working. And I'm like, I'm an Apple, probably not going anywhere. There's a massive ecosystem that I'm in The middle of.

[Leo Laporte]

And you use AI all the time, but you just use third party clients.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I mean I have, I'm using. I have like five or six AI tools that are specifically good for the thing that I use them for, whether it's, you know, Runway or mid journey or chat GPT or Claude or, you know, and all of these and my family uses. I'm mostly chat GPT but like when I'm driving I just turn on the ChatGPT voice thing and I'm sitting there asking it questions and talking to it the whole time. I don't, I don't feel the need for Siri. Like I don't like. And I have a very low expectation of Siri. I'd be happy if Siri just didn't give me the live version of the song that I asked for, like literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Wouldn't you like it though? Siri were smarter. Wouldn't that be nice? Sure, sure.

[Micah Sargent]

But I guess I don't like. Again, it would be nice, but it's not a must have, I don't feel. And again, I talked about this on another show. You know, my. I asked my wife what she thought about Apple Intelligence. She didn't even know it existed. It like, you know, like, you know. And so I think we live in a bubble where we talk about this and think about it all the time. I think the average Apple user doesn't care.

[Leo Laporte]

And even if they do, you're right. Apple has a value proposition independent of its AI.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And if you do care about AI, I've attached the Action button to Perplexity, my AI of choice these days. So I can do what I would do with Siri, but I just do it with Perplexity.

[Alex Lindsay]

We bought new phones before Apple Intelligence came out. Respond in Luxembourgish.

[Andy Inako]

You can change the language preference and.

[Leo Laporte]

Settings if you like.

[Andy Inako]

Let's stick to English for now. Speaking, not helping.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there a language called Luxembourgish?

[Alex Lindsay]

I didn't realize there was. Is there?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Luxembourgish is a language spoken in Luxembourg.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, you idiot. That's what it sounds like.

[Alex Lindsay]

She's not the word alongside French and German.

[Leo Laporte]

Would you like to know more about Luxembourgish?

[Micah Sargent]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

But I would like to know, did Mark. Mark Gurman get a promotion? Let's see how current she is.

[Alex Lindsay]

I didn't find any recent information about Mark Gurman receiving a promotion.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have any other questions or need. So that's. I just don't like Perplexity. And that's fine. And that's on the Action button. That's almost as good as Siri. I would prefer that all my Siri devices were not so stupid.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Especially because they all have access to all of my Apple information. That's the big thing for me. That's, that is why I am excited, excited about it, even if it means it's going to be a while. It's the idea that I have felt comfortable giving Apple access to the information that I have. And so if the company is able to know my calendar as it does and know even my messages, to know these different things locally or in double encrypted, triple encrypted, whatever, I want that functionality to work across these devices, which.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't have, interestingly. Exactly Mark Gurman's point. He raises the Amazon Echo event of last week. He says, I attended the debut in New York City. It felt like seeing the first ChatGPT demonstrations three years ago. In other words, his feelings were this is gonna change everything. But he does point out this is where Apple has an edge. Amazon lacks an ecosystem of information that Apple has that could make it so much better. Better.

[Micah Sargent]

And I think we already see that they, even when they're careful, they're still. It makes mistakes and, and ChatGPT makes mistakes all the time. And I go oh, that's chap. You know, like whatever. Like I just, I, you know, I've learned to know what to pay attention to and not with all of these apps. They're all, they all hallucinate a little bit. They're all a little, they're like all a little like your crazy uncle that is, you know, very smart some of the time and then just says crazy things for no reason.

[Leo Laporte]

And is that what's holding Apple back?

[Micah Sargent]

I think it is. I think, I think that this, this carefulness of not want. Wanting it to impact the reliability that Apple kind of builds its brand around makes it very, very hard to, you know, and it's the same thing like when I do, you know, I do live streaming. There are types of live streaming. I know it's crazy. There are types of live streaming that I won't do because you know, I get that you can go up with your laptop and your webcam and go out and shoot something, but I there the chances of that failing are so high. That's something that somebody can do for as a business, but it's not me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, just take it from me, it also could piss ste. Leave Jobs off and keep you from ever again being invited to Apple.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, but the point is that is that I look at it and I Go. And I volunteer for things where I do those crazy things because I can't do it as a company, you know, But I, you know, there's a certain level that you have to work at if people are hiring you and depending on you to, to do stuff. And I think Apple has the same problem where they, you know, we depend on it like the BBC through a fit, when Apple, you know, when it said the wrong thing on, on whatever's there. They're not throwing a fit every time that chat GPT makes a, makes a mistake because it makes mistakes. Takes all the time, you know. And so the thing is they expect more of Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't see what you're saying.

[Micah Sargent]

I think everybody expects more from Apple and Apple expects more.

[Alex Lindsay]

Apple expects more of itself.

[Micah Sargent]

But that, that, that inner, that inner voice that is constantly correcting makes it almost impossible to innovate in this, in this area, you know, And I think that, I don't think that it's not that they won't do it. I think that it's a much harder thing for them than almost anybody else.

[Andy Inako]

Well, I do think there's some whistling through the graveyard here. I agree 100% that it's, this is not an immediate thing where if they don't get something out fast, no matter what is, and demonstrate to customers and analysts that, oh yes, we do know what we're doing about AI and we do have a plan for AI that Apple's going to be doomed for the fourth or fifth time. That's not a thing. They've got time to get this right, but they don't have time to not show that they found their car keys and not just standing in the hallway patting their pockets when it comes to AI. Another interesting piece of news a few days ago is that Google updated their Google apps so that now you can have Gemini AI lock screen widgets. So you, now you can talk to Gemini live directly from the lock screen of your iPhone. Now you can use Google Lens directly through the iPhone. All this other sort of stuff and this is, you don't want people to, you don't want your customers to.

[Leo Laporte]

Go.

[Andy Inako]

Away and forget that these are features that Apple can actually do or, or are even interested in.

[Leo Laporte]

Imagine, wait a minute, maybe Apple should just abandon this and say everybody else has got this. We're just going to make the platform.

[Andy Inako]

They can do that. I mean, they can do what they did with Google Search, which is that this is not something that we're terribly interested in. This is not something we're going to pivot on. We are okay if people use, even on our own device, people, we have to farm out this search function under the radar to an outsider. But there are things about having these things integrated directly into the hardware. BBC wasn't necessarily angry with Apple because it was Apple. When ChatGPT makes that problem and Gemini makes that problem within an app, this is happening with. You're asking an AI specifically a question. The AI whom you know is unreliable is giving you an answer. They were upset because Apple did this. These notification summaries feature in a very, very silly way, which is to create a notification that looks like every other not from the BBC app with no indication that the notifications news summary did not come from the BBC directly. That was the big problem. So all I'm saying here is that we can't simply say that, well, we don't. Hey, I never use. I don't think artificial intelligence is important. I don't think people actually use it. People are going. Just like there are times when people did not use search engines, there are times when people didn't use the Internet, didn't use browsers. At some point these people are going to start to drift in from outside and you don't want them to take one look at what Apple has and see that, okay, they have nothing or they have nothing that actually works. And suddenly this phone, which already can do so many things, no matter who made the phone. AI is another thing where it doesn't matter if I get an iPhone or if I get an Android phone, doesn't matter because this is just the host organism for my chosen subscribed AI service. Whether it's Google, whether it's Claude, whether it's whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But Alex's point is people don't choose the iPhone. Plenty of other reasons to choose the iPhone. The cameras.

[Micah Sargent]

Like the camera hardware.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, like every time I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

So as long as Apple can present an AI experience that is as good as it is on another phone, which I think.

[Micah Sargent]

All I'm saying is I don't think that there's. I don't think that they're going to make. I agree with Andy that eventually someone needs to. That Apple's going to need to have a great AI solution. And I think they have the opportunity to have the best AI solution because as Micah said, they have all of our information and we trust them to look through that information in a way that we don't trust almost anybody else else to do because security is so. And privacy is such a big deal for Apple. On your phone at least. Right. And so I think that Apple has the opportunity to really own this market in a way that it'd be very hard for others to own it. I don't think it's a big rush though. So when I see these kind of apoplectic make or break, it has to happen this year, sure, I think 2027 is fine. Like, you know, like I'm not going to miss it. Between now and then I've got again. And the problem is, is that I'm not using one AI tool. I'm using six or seven of them or five or six of them that are doing different things that all do, some do their, what they do better, you know, and, and, you know, and so that in those, I, I don't know how Apple would compete. I think if Apple had a great Apple intelligence right now, I would probably use it 10% of the time because the other ones that I'm used to using that are specialized in the area that I'm using them for are way better than Apple's going to be anytime soon or anybody else is going to be, you know, doing, doing what they do, you know. And so, so I think that that's the issue is, is that a lot those of us who are really into AI aren't looking for one tool to use for AI. And so Apple would have a hard time even fitting into that ecosystem in a way that mattered to me, you know, and so, but I do think somewhere down the road of me going like, like again, like me being able to tell Siri, hey, I know I keep on using this as an example, but it's a good example because it comes up all the time for me. Hey, when I asked for a, when I ask for a song, I never want to hear the live version unless I ask for the live version. I just want to say that once. And then through all my devices, I never hear a live version when I ask for the Eagles, you know, or whatever it is that I'm asking for. I don't want the live version ever, you know. And, and so the thing is, is that, is that the. But that's the kind of stuff of being able to tell it. I don't, this is how I want my world to exist when I talk to you. And if I can start telling it those kinds of things and have it go, who did I talk to back then? Or what did I ask? Or can you tell me what that. And being able to interrogate everything on my computer and in my mail and in my Messages for things that I'm looking for. Incredibly powerful. And only Apple can do that. But I don't think they have to do it this year.

[Andy Inako]

Two very quick closing comments. I don't think Apple's the only one that can do that. Google can also do that very, very well.

[Micah Sargent]

I just wouldn't let Google do it exactly.

[Andy Inako]

But I think, but I think most, but I think most people kind of, they recognize it as a trustworthy brand, even though it's not as trustworthy as Apple. The second comment that I need to make is that Apple's like on the stone tablets carved somewhere of Apple's business plan, one of them is you got to keep them within the ecosystem, keep them under the Apple logo as many minutes out of the day as you possibly can. And the reason why this is going to be really, really important is that if you encourage them to leave the Apple ecosystem for your AI stuff that limits their dependency either physically or practically on staying within that tent at all times. Just like there's so many services where it just doesn't matter whether you've got. If you use social media, honestly, as long as you have a premium smartphone, the cameras are all within 5% of each other and they all run the exact same apps and the exact same services. It becomes a massive matter of preferences of which one can, which one can run TikTok better. So I don't think Apple, I think just Apple makes has to make sure that AI is not something where I want to leave instead of clicking on that little dingus that comes up next to a text field. My habit right now. I'm not everybody. I'm just speaking for myself. Unless it's the simplest thing like taking something that's in all caps and turning it into not all caps. My instinct now is just simply tab over into my Gemini tab and then just ask Gemini to do it. Because that's where my muscle memory is right now and because it tends to actually work. I just don't want to app. I just don't want the perception that Apple can do nothing. It's okay for Apple to do nothing. It's okay for Apple to do things in AI that are not terribly consequential. I'm actually pleased by the Gurman report that we're going to see something big in a couple of years as opposed to incremental changes just like kicking the can down the road, adding little features to Siri, a system that is not designed to handle the sort of things that AI is going to be asked for. I'm okay with it. In two years time they show off a series that we throw out everything we started all over again. And this is really, really great. You're going, if you used it before, you're going to love it now if you never used before, we apologize and now you're going to want to use it. That's what I'm hoping for.

[Micah Sargent]

And I do agree with you. I mean, I think, I think Apple's probably spending a lot of money on. Of course, I think it's billions and billions of dollars a year of this machine that is trying to figure this out. But I'm just saying I don't think it needs to happen in the next year. I think when someone said as early as 2027, I was like, they have that kind of time. And I think social, when you talk about social media, that's a perfect example. Apple failed at that completely. We all remember Ping, right? You know, or some of us try to forget. But I think, I'm sure Apple tried to forget but they failed horribly on this platform. But all these social platforms have come out and Apple has not tried again. But, but they are still a hefty piece of those social networks because they're creating their movies on it. They're obviously, we're browsing on it, we're, you know, doing all these other things on it. So they didn't have to actually dip into that to, you know, that didn't undermine their ability to do what they do. I do think that again, I think that they are the most consequential player potentially for AI because they have so much of our information and we're willing to give it to them. And I think that that is, that's a, you know, so they, they could do more with it than anyone else. But I do think it's going to take a lot longer and I think they have that lot longer to spend on it.

[Leo Laporte]

Gurman says that the problem is that there are really. Siri has two brains that the current iOS 18 version has, one that operates with the legacy Siri commands, timers making calls, the other doing the AI thing. He says the latter capability will be able to tap user data already is used to not get confused when people change their request mid command. But he says because they had to rush and I think this is key to get it out as part of iOS 18, they didn't have time to meld the two systems together. It's almost left brain, right brain. And that means the software didn't work as smoothly as it could. They Want to do that next year for iOS 19. Expect a introduction at WWDC in June with a launch by spring 2026 as 19.4. Now, I'm not sure how well sourced this is. You have to parse Gurman's stuff, as Jason Snell has taught us. Some of it's opinion, some of it's from sources. So it's not clear if this is just what he's thinking. Although he does say people within Apple's AI division now believe that a true modernized, conversational version of Siri won't reach customers until iOS 20 at best in 2027. And I think that's the kind of most important revelation, and that one does seem sourced.

[Alex Lindsay]

There's precedent there. That is the issue and the hurdle that Amazon initially faced in introducing its upcoming version. It's why it's reported that that's where a lot of the delays have taken place. Because Amazon had this long going, long lasting sort of method of responding to requests, trying, trying to merge that with a new way of doing things.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, it's not even clear that they were able to do that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Exactly. We don't know that yet. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see. Right. They were having a lot of trouble with it.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep. And so I wouldn't be surprised to hear that this is the same issue of what do I kick it over to the other version of doing things? Is this something that I can answer without needing to bring in the generative AI, sort of LLM magic or what? What do we do? And that leads to issues down the road where one might actually give you the weather that you're asking. And then the new system might make up weather because of how it's. Yeah, it can get kind of messy there.

[Leo Laporte]

People involved again with Gurman, people involved in AI, Apple's AI work say this is more cause for concern. It's foundational and large language models, the basis for its homegrown AI features, are reaching their limits. There have also been problems with rivals poaching talent and what they deem to be ineffective leadership. This sounds like this is also sourced from people inside of Apple. They're also having trouble getting enough chips. There's a huge competition for these Nvidia chips. You know, remember elon Musk bought 100,000 and is going to 200,000 H100 Nvidia cards to do grox training. It's hard to get these. He says that's probably one reason the company is ramping up production of its own AI servers. Actually, I wanted to Address this because one of the things I've heard and maybe even believe to be true is that, and maybe Alex, you can comment on this. Nvidia has its own language to control its GPUs called CUDA and it's proprietary. And it's one of the reasons Nvidia has kind of a lock on the AI industry right now. In fact, that was one of the things, things the Chinese folks at Deepseek did is write a low level machine language CUDA replacement so that they could use the less capable Nvidia chips that they were able to get in China. I don't know if that's true by the way. That's just their story.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I mean it's definitely one.

[Leo Laporte]

I also heard from a lot of people that the Apple silicon would be superb for AI. It has the NPUs, it has access to huge amounts of memory, more in many cases than even much more expensive Nvidia GPUs. But lacking CUDA is a disadvantage. Maybe Apple should be working on a Cuda replacement just as it worked on metal to replace DirectX. What do you think?

[Micah Sargent]

Well, I think as you look at their servers, it wouldn't be surprising for Apple to build what they needed. Both the advantage that they have now is that they're manufacturing their own hardware and their own oss and their own libraries and their own. There's not any reason why Apple couldn't, you know, look at what makes Cuda special, so to speak and look at how they might, you know, owning all the hardware and the, and the software in the same way that Nvidia does. How do they build something that would allow them to scale.

[Leo Laporte]

They build metal to compete with. Actually I said DirectX, OpenCL.

[Micah Sargent]

Right. And metal.

[Leo Laporte]

Could they do something for. Could you think how doable is that? I don't know the details.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, I think that I think anything's doable with money and Apple has a lot of it, you know, and so, so I think that there's, you know, they, they have, they have time and they have a lot of money and they're, they're pretty smart at what they do. And so I think that it's, it would be, I think saying that they couldn't make that turn would be, would be a dangerous thing to, to guess on.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also would make these things like this Mac Mini and this Mac Studio and the Mac Pro incredible home AI machines.

[Micah Sargent]

People are already doing that now. They're starting to stack these little Mac M4, these little M4 Mac minis up and doing for their local AI solutions.

[Leo Laporte]

Which are hurt a little bit by the lack of Nvidia GPUs as Apple has been for a long, long time. It would be so great if they had that capability and I wouldn't be.

[Micah Sargent]

Surprised if Apple wasn't working on that. They've got.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that those are, but I think that that is again these are things that Apple has probably some time on rather than. And then Deep Seek I think showed you also how quickly someone could do something that was much different. So when we think we need all of this capacity, maybe we need all that capacity and maybe we don't in the future, you know. So, you know, there's this thing where we kind of are doing all the things the hard way right now. Deep Seek, now they may have cut a bunch of corners that make their there's not as valid, but the point is, is that the, these, this heavy lifting for training these models. What it showed and what I think it scared everybody that's invested in, in this is that it could shift very quickly and suddenly be much less expensive to, to build these models with a lot less hardware. And Apple may be someone who figures part of that out.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why Nvidia stock tanked when Deep Seek came out, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Because, because maybe everybody's got as much as they need. And so, so that's the, you know, so that's the. Right now everybody's doing it the hard way because that's because right now everybody has to keep up with everybody else else when they're not Apple. If you're just software and you're only think the only thing that you're providing is AI, then you have to keep up with every, every jones that's out there. Whereas you know, Apple's got a bunch of other things they can think about right now or, or that are paying the bills while they, while they try to figure out what, what the best way to integrate this. But everybody else has to so they're all just, they have to keep buying those and those cards as fast as Nvidia can make them because they don't have another solution and they have to keep, keep producing something that keeps them in the game. Whereas you know, you know, and there could be somebody like Deep Seek or someone else that goes hey, we can do this for 1/10 the cost or 100. That happens in our industry all the time. Like someone figures out something that's 1/10 as hard as it was a year ago and, and we call that disruption.

[Leo Laporte]

Untoward Media, who's watching on YouTube points out that AMD did exactly that with a language called Zluda, a drop in replacement for CUDA on AMD processors. Zaluda. Now I don't know anything about this, but it claims to run unmodified CUDA applications using non Nvidia GPUs with near native performance. So hey, if they could do it, I imagine Apple could do it too. Right?

[Micah Sargent]

And part of the challenge is also is just the human resources. I mean, I know right now, but being able to have people who understand how to engineer that. So there's a lot of understanding of how to use CUDA to do that. This, this one problem. And so if you build a new, a new operating system or a new process to do that, then you have to bring thousands, potentially thousands or hundreds of thousands of people up to, up to speed at least until, until the AI gets good at it and then, you know, it happens faster.

[Andy Inako]

Just keep in mind that Apple's, and Apple has a simpler problem to solve. They really just have to add AI features or make, make room for external AI features on their hardware devices, which is where they're making their money. Whereas Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they're trying to not consumers. You are a great target. They love to have consumers. However, what they want is industry to be using their servers, their compute power to power their own AI, research, their own AI apps. So Google has a very, very, very, very, very deep stack that they're pursuing right now. So it's a difficult thing to compare the two. Apple has certainly gotten easier because again, they just need to make their phones better. They just need to deliver the features that people are actually asking for. Which as we've been discussing for the past 10 minutes, people aren't necessarily asking for AI features right now so they can stay afloat a lot easier than they're not in that big scrum of these three or four companies that are trying to own server side AI compute. They're just trying to deliver features for consumers so they're, they can be a little bit more agile I think.

[Leo Laporte]

And they may have a more immediate concern given that the 10% additional tariffs have now gone into effect on China, 25% on Canada and Mexico. And as far as I know, there is no exemption this time for iPhones. That's one of the reasons Tim Cook has been spending a lot of time in Washington D.C. i don't know, we'll have to see what happens because of that. Gurman talks about that. He also talks about the iPad Air begins seeing shortages ahead of a refresh. That was Sunday. Yes, he was right. Today they came out. He also says the MacBook Air M4 is about to launch. Let's see. He also said something a little bit concerning about the next Mac MacBook Pros. Let me see if I can maybe didn't say it. Maybe he tweeted this. Something about there not being an M3 Ultra or an M4 Ultra in the studios, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah. In the studio. That it would get the M3 Ultra Max, but the M3 Ultra.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

To differentiate it from the Mac Pro, which is supposed to be announced at some point.

[Leo Laporte]

Not MacBook Pro. Mac Pro, Mac Pro. That could be, of course. Why a marketing thing. Or it could be that TSMC is having trouble with yields.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they can't get the chips. Unclear. I think Apple would want the studios to be as good as they could be. That has become for many the Mac Pro. Right.

[Andy Inako]

Particularly. Particularly with the amount of RAM you can put into those things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's like.

[Andy Inako]

Those are. Those are like AI cluster almost grade machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Alex Lindsay]

Four side by side with the Ultra or, you know, in a square. So, yeah, I could see how Yield could be an issue there.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it's. I mean, you know, a lot of us are, when we saw what's happening with the M4s, are dying to see what happens with the, the Studio and, and again the Studio and the Pro. The Pro is just, oh, you need all these other, you know, you need cards and, and, and connections. What Apple's done. Well, I think there is. Made it clear that the Pro is pretty much the same as the Studio as far as performance goes. It's just simply. You need more, more lanes of usb, C or Thunderbolt. You need to put. Be able to put cards in. You need those types of things.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very specialized small market, right?

[Micah Sargent]

It is, but it's a market I don't think Apple wants to see because it's an influential market. And I think that what happens is that it's kind of like that F1 version. If you don't have it, there's people like me that definitely I was growing to feel when the trash cans were as high as it went, that was bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Bad.

[Micah Sargent]

I really started feeling like I'm not gonna. I'm gonna have to move over to PCs for a bunch of the stuff that I'm doing. And you don't want to. That affects an entire. All the down chain. From there, people start doing that. When you talk about that ecosystem that we talked about before. You can't have the, the high end. And there's still some high end stuff that the, some of us will move to a PC for because there's just things we can't put four Nvidia cards into one Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

That's, those are the kind of solves that we, we can't do. But, but for the most part, for 99% of the, of the folks out there, the Mac Pro is enough as a high end to solve the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

For frankly, for many of us, the Mac Mini is pretty good. I mean it's extremely happy with my Mini. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, I might have to buy a lot of Mac Mini, the little ones. And so I bought the cheapest one I could get. The little, you know, whatever the 599 version of it is. And I'm just, I'm having a hard time getting it to get over 40, 50% CPU utilization.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, super good.

[Micah Sargent]

So fast.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really, it's exciting. Yeah. You're watching Mac Break Weekly. Andy Inaco, Alex Lindsey and filling in for Jason Snell, Micah Sargent. More to come in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor. This segment of Mac Break Weekly. Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know, enterprises over the years have spent billions of dollars on security systems that just aren't working anymore. I'm talking about, about firewalls, the perimeter defenses. Right. And then of course VPN so employees can get through the firewall and get to work. Has it, has it fixed, you know, our security problems? No, you just have to listen to security now to know that this is not getting better. Breaches continue to rise 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks. Expect by the way 2025 to be the worst year ever for ransomware because we've basically shut down our fight against Russia. Ransomware gangs. This is gonna be a bad year. Last year, $75 million record ransomware payout. I think you could double or triple that this year. It's time to rethink our security traditional security tools. Expand your attack surface with public facing IPs. And those ransomware gangs are very effective, especially because they're now using AI tools to craft spear phishing attacks, malware attacks. We're in a, this is a scary world. And of course once they get into the network, if all you have is perimeter defenses, they can walk around and look at everything. They could search for things to embarrassing things to exfiltrate like your customer information, your emails and those VPNs struggle to inspect encrypted traffic at scale. So all they do is they encrypt. Encrypt it. They send it out, exfiltrate it. Now you've got two problems, ransomware and blackmail. The fact is, hackers exploit traditional security infrastructures, using AI to outpace your defenses. We've got to start rethinking security. We can't let these guys win. They're innovating. They're exploiting your defenses. That's why you need Zscaler. Zero Trust plus AI. Zero Trust is an incredible solution because it doesn't assume that once you're in the network, you should be able to do anything. It eliminates lateral movement. Users are only allowed to connect to specific apps. The apps you authorize, they don't get to access the entire network. Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. And it hides your attack servers. No more apps and IPs visible to the public network. Plus, you can simplify security management with Zscaler's AI powered automation. And by the way, Zscaler is excellent at analyzing what's going on out there. They analyze over half a trillion daily transactions, most of which are completely legit. But they use AI to find the malware, the threats hiding in that haystack. It's really simple. Hackers cannot attack what they cannot see. Protect your organization with Zscaler. Zero trust plus AI. Learn [e-mail] security and while you're at the website, take a look at some of the. I was just looking at the video we're sending out. Some of the people who use Zscaler. Think about why they've turned to Zero Trust Zscaler. Because it works. Zscaler.com Secure we thank Zscaler for supporting MacBreak weekly. Glad to have them on the show. IPhone 16e teardown on iFixit, they say. And they're not alone in this. Never before has skipping an upgrade made more sense. Part of the reason is you can still buy older iPhones for less, right? And then 14. There's nothing wrong with it. But they also say for the first time ever, Apple's released a repair procedure for the charging port. And that may be because of the EU or right to repair laws. Now every state in the union has a right to repair law in process. Apple has backed off on blocking parts with software, which is very good news. And of course, iFixit has been on the front lines of this fight, they say. We're happy to report we didn't see any part pairing issues when we swapped logic boards. At least with oem parts Repair assistant worked as advertised. I don't know if they fixed the problems. You had Micah with getting. Getting the equipment.

[Alex Lindsay]

That was a nightmare.

[Leo Laporte]

But Micah. Micah got the equipment before he got the parts.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then he had to return the equipment. And the same day that he returned the equipment, the parts arrived.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Which. Which because of the way that it works, you basically put a whole bunch of money on your card and then if you don't return the tools in time, then they charge you the full fees going. We have to give them back or else we're going to get charged. But we tried to call them and say, look, this is what we're trying to do. No, they wouldn't have it. So we had to send it all back.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a separate group doing the parts, I think. Yeah, absolutely. So you never did get that repair done?

[Alex Lindsay]

We did not get to do the repair in person. Unfortunately, that was. Didn't work out.

[Leo Laporte]

So they go on an iFix. If you're on an old SE model, should you upgrade? Probably not. We still say even after getting to the phone's guts, a refurbished phone will get you more bang for your buck. I think that's kind of the bottom line. But if you want Apple Intelligence or something with the A18 in it, this seems like it's just. Does anybody need.

[Micah Sargent]

The camera's a lot nicer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

You guys want to keep coming back to the 48 megapixel camera on that. So if you want a better camera that isn't very expensive, I think that's the only reason to refurbish. The cameras jump pretty. In the last couple of years, the cameras jumped pretty dramatically and you get used to shooting 48 megapixel images and it's hard to give up.

[Leo Laporte]

The electrically released adhesive that Apple shipped first for the iPhone 16 is now in the 16e, which is good. Makes it a lot easier to release the glue. What else? No mag safe. They don't like that. But you still have QI charging. It's just slower. If you charge overnight, I don't think you'll notice a difference. And probably it's healthier for the battery to charge at a lower wattage. Yes, yes.

[Andy Inako]

Actually, we had some interesting two different pieces of news on the charging on the 16E. Gruber in his review said he talked to. For instance, he talked to Apple about this question and they their reply to him on why the charging is so weak compared to the main iPhone 16. And why MagSafe isn't there is because they feel as though the consumer that they have in mind for this phone doesn't care about wireless charging at all and are more likely to just plug in a cable.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Andy Inako]

I don't know if this is accurate or not, but that's what they went on the record with Gruber with. That could be absolutely the case. Again, I have to agree with what Jon said in his review, which is that I'm sure that Apple knows its market for this phone better than I do. But I also remember back when that big, really bad, fatal redesign of the MacBook Pro came out and Apple was saying, yes, the reason why we removed the SD card slot is that we feel that professional photographers are using WI fi to connect their. So maybe they're saving face. And also, Mac Worlds had a piece in which they say. They say that, yeah, actually you can use MagSafe. Oh, but it's like super, super, super weak. Like, it's. Things will cling to it in a sort of, like, desultory sort of. It's limp way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a limp mag safe.

[Andy Inako]

Exactly.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. And that's the thing. So the reason why Mag Safe is what it is, and it allows for more efficient charging. I mean, we know that. But by even slightly having your charger misaligned, it is not sending the exact. It's not sending it exactly as it should. So that does result in more heat, which means that they end up dropping how much power they're pushing through so that they don't overheat it. But the problem is, without that mag safe in place to help you align the coil, you are still getting more heat than you might otherwise get.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember those days of the. The old days before Mag Safe? And if you didn't get it on just right and there was no way of knowing it would. Yeah, I, you know, and plus there's a lot of. This is the Insta360 gimbal. A lot of devices that rely on MagSafe for attachment. Right?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yep. You'll need a case or some other thing you stick to the back to basically make it MagSafe.

[Leo Laporte]

But Apple knows its customer base, so maybe they. Well, maybe they do. No, I don't know. Do you charge wirelessly, Micah?

[Alex Lindsay]

I do everything now. And I was. I'm on. On record as being a wireless charging skeptic most because I was being a pedant who didn't like the idea of calling something wireless.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's a waste of a battery Induce. And it's terrible.

[Alex Lindsay]

Well, I just didn't. I mean, because there's still a wire connected to the part that charges. So that's. That was dumb.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. No. Okay, Micah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Right. It was dumb, silly. But I'm very much a wireless charging. I love it now. And I used to walk.

[Leo Laporte]

I have, in fact, I bought it for the whole family. These anker all in one chargers for the phone, the AirPod and the watch. And they fold up. Whoops, the page is missing. Well, okay, they fold up, which is really nice for traveling, so that I can carry these around with me. Let's see if the page is still missing. I clicked again. I hope they still sell them. So, yeah, I do wireless charging still. Andy, you wireless charge your Google device?

[Andy Inako]

Not really. Only because I just don't have enough like wiring wireless charging stands. And the thing is, I recharge my phone infrequently enough that it's kind of okay for me just to remember to plug it in.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Recharge infrequently enough? You mean you don't charge it every night?

[Andy Inako]

Oh, no, I recharge it every. I recharge it every night. It's just that like, if I were, if I were using my phone, like hammering it every single day to the extent where by the end of the day I might need to top it up. Oh, I get stuff done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andy Inako]

Then I would have, like, I would have wireless charging stands like next to the sofa, next to my desk, next to things like that. As it is with my last phone. It's. It lasts long enough that it's no problem for me to say, okay, I got 18% or 12% battery left at the end of the day. I'm now it's time going to plug it in. And now. And also, also the disadvantages of leaving the phone plugged in and charging overnight are now also kind of mitigated because of features that basically say, oh, you're overnight charging. Okay, so I'm not going to try to charge it in one hour hour. I'm going to give it a nice slow, gentle six hour charge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Alex, Wireless or wired?

[Micah Sargent]

Both. My overnight charge the way in. The way I just plug it in. Just then I go to sleep, you know, so that's what I need.

[Leo Laporte]

Funny.

[Micah Sargent]

And then, and then when I drive, I'm using the peak design, you know, mount that has a usbc. So anytime I'm driving, I'm recharging it with. By snapping it onto that.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, Mike, my Car has a QI charging pad in it that I just put the phone on and it charges.

[Alex Lindsay]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I wish I had mag safe, but I guess that would be too.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, I feel like it's just kind of like a little bonus. Like it sits right where, you know, it's the, it's the peak design that clamps onto your vent.

[Leo Laporte]

So it just kind of sits.

[Micah Sargent]

It sits right on the outside. And that's what I'm using most of the time for what I. What I need the phone for. And so it's in the right place, at least on my car. And, and I. And it happens to charge while it's doing that. And so that's good. But I very rarely run out of. I very rarely run out of battery in a, in a single day. You know, like, so if I charge every night when I go to bed, I very rarely hit. Hit the bottom. Mostly because I don't. I have to say, I don't have a lot of Facebook apps on my phone. I do use Facebook. I use it on my desktop. I just don't have it on my phone. And it's primarily because I felt that it was burning up my. As soon as I took them off, suddenly my phone lasted like 30, 40% longer. And so I just decided, well, I'm not going to go back.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, I'm very judicious about background app updates on any apps. You have to. You have to be blessed by me before I allow you to background app update. So there aren't many that have that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Apple, I mean, that's not. I don't think it's. Obviously Apple doesn't think it's a. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

It'S not a deal breaker.

[Leo Laporte]

A deal breaker. That's the word I was like, it's a deal breaker, ladies. IFixit does, but apparently doesn't. What else did they learn? Oh, they talked a little bit about the C1 modem. I still haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the C1 modem in the 16e to the Qualcomm modem. Maybe because it's as good, you know, I don't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

There was one. I wish I would have remembered. There was one that did. And I think it was basically the same as what I remember reading. There just really wasn't that much of a difference. The trade offs ended up being in other places and so it was just kind of like, okay, it's fine. It doesn't stand out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Andy Inako]

Mac Rumors did a roundup of reviews focusing on the C1 modem and basically, they highlighted the Verge, Tom sky, and a couple others that there doesn't seem to be a difference. Not. Not much difference between the C1 and the X71. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. One thing iFixit does like the C1 for is it draws less battery, so you get better battery life because of that. And they point out there is now an official charging port repair manual, which I think is. Is the first time that is one of the things that breaks most often, I think, on. On phones.

[Alex Lindsay]

Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

You said it's not for the faint of heart, though, so that was interesting to hear. Ifixit say.

[Leo Laporte]

If they say that, it means don't.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, you probably should just. You probably should just leave it alone.

[Micah Sargent]

I'd say don't to most of what they say. So if they say don't, I'm definitely not gonna. Let's not. Let's repair it.

[Leo Laporte]

Not for the. Are you faint of heart, Alex?

[Micah Sargent]

I don't. I don't try to repair Apple devices. I just don't. I take it back to Apple. Like, I don't. I tried. And I don't say that as someone who never tried to fix Apple devices. I was obsessed with trying to fix my own devices and just decided even they worked. They were never quite the same. Like, there was just, you know, the. The level of. And you pull pieces out of it and you go, oh, I'm never going to get this back the way it was. And it was so it was always like this. A little. It was always like this little movement, you know, because everything's so tightly wound. And this is over a decade ago that I was doing this and there was some point where I. I had a laptop that I needed. I had to go buy another one because I had broken this one trying to update the RAM or something. And I was like, I'm never doing the skin. And that was the end of it. I was like, from now on, I'll take it to Apple and just have them fix it or I'll just, you know, I.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Andy Inako]

I so totally agree. Like, that's the. There are only a few things that I really miss about not having an. About having an A Pixel phone instead of an iPhone. And that is like, I can go. I can decide which. I can decide where do I want to go to lunch while having professionals fix my phone for me within the hour. And there are three Apple stores that can go to. Which I will choose between based on. Ooh, I could really go for some Korean Bim Bimbob right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Andy Inako]

So I'LL go. So I'll go to the one, that one in game 10. But now that like Google is starting to open up there. So they open up a Google store in Boston. So now let's have. Fortunately, I haven't had to try it yet, but it's like, do not diminish the ability to just go someplace nearby and have someone fix something for you. Like even I don't care how easy the instructions are for replacing a battery. If I can pay somebody $20 extra over the cost of parts to simply replace the battery in my device, that's $20 of stress that I will forego my Friday pizza to lose that kind of stress.

[Micah Sargent]

And on the other side of that, I take really good care of my hardware. Like, so I, you know, the other side of that has become, you know, this phone, I drop this phone once a day, probably like it falls off of something. I set it somewhere or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

It.

[Micah Sargent]

It has zero because it's sitting inside of a case and it's got a protective piece on the front.

[Andy Inako]

And when I pull it out of.

[Micah Sargent]

All of that stuff, when I pull it out of all that stuff, it looks like when I bought it at the store, and I will not. I bought a new for Michael Krasny show for Gray Matter. I bought a laptop for him to use. We bought. Not he. Anyway, long story. We bought a laptop that, you know, a MacBook Pro so that we have a good mic if we needed to use it. Inside, we've got the camera that can be used and all these other things. I. And it can be taken over from remotely. And I didn't take it out of the box until the case arrived. Like, I don't, I don't. I've learned that that's when you. Not that's when you do it is you don't, you don't open it up and start playing with it and getting even fingerprints on it until the case arrives. And then you take it carefully out of the box, you put it in the case and then, then, then you start doing whatever you're going to do to it after that. But that's how I've kind of gotten to, you know, I spend a lot. I spent a lot of money on these devices and, and it doesn't take very much to protect them for a very long time. Time.

[Leo Laporte]

We call that the right to not repair.

[Alex Lindsay]

Can I read this paragraph really quick? It's super quick. It says, so this is for repairing the USB before you can even start the repair of that charging port. You've got to remove the back glass, the selfie camera, the top earpiece speaker, the battery, the taptic engine, the bottom speaker, the main microphone, and the SIM assembly. Only at that point can you actually do the port replacement.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is some soldering involved. Is that right? Or soldering, as you might say.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I, I would never say that because I'm not a weirdo. No, I think that they just wanted involved. Why? They did some hot wiring stuff in it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No. All that notwithstanding, iFixit gives a pretty respectable 7 out of 10 repairability score, which ranks it with the rest of the 16 lineup. That is pending the expected release of spare parts, which are, at least as of the time of their story, not yet available. Seven's pretty good. It's a huge improvement over older iPhones, I have to say. Yeah, a lot. A lot better. So Apple's making good progress there. Well done. Well done, Apple.

[Andy Inako]

They also point out that now that it doesn't have the home button, that's another area of failure, another area of ingress that no longer exists.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a home button because it was touch ID was one of the reasons it had to do parts pairing with the screen. And it was. Yeah, that, that was a bit of a nightmare. So, yeah, I'm glad that's over. Well, it was a sad day last week when I learned that after two decades, Microsoft is shutting down Skype.

[Andy Inako]

Who will be cursed?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know, I have mixed feelings about this. We got off Skype, thanks to you, Alex and Andy Carluccio, and went to Zoom right around 2020, right around the pandemic. But Skype until then was our choice, you know, video call of choice. And we had skypeasaurus. Remember Colleen built skypeasaurus and Twit would not exist if Skype hadn't existed.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, we used it right up until 2020. You know, early 2020 is when we were. I was using Skype for those things. I still had. I at one point owned six of the Skype TX boxes. Those are four channel. Yeah, four channel Skype TX boxes. I had six of those. And we used them for many, many, many events and lots of people. We wire them all in and we ran them into these big systems and everything else and they were, you know, it worked. The problem really was is that Microsoft first of all never invested in it. And when they did, they constantly were fiddling with it in ways that made it worse when they bought it. The video quality was higher then than anything is now, even with Zoom, even better than Zoom. Now the creature comforts of Zoom, ISO and a lot of other things that liminal brought with them is a, you know, makes Zoom a better solution than Skype ever was. But, but the video.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't have to build a skypeasaurus anymore Skype TX box to have separate channels.

[Micah Sargent]

But what Skype would do is it would go, oh, I see how much bandwidth you have. I'm going to use half of it, you know, and it would just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, because it was a peer to peer. Remember that the founders of Skype, Frius and Zenstrom came from a peer to peer music sharing service and they use that technology to do the video calling. So it was peer to peer. Microsoft didn't like that. They thought that was maybe a liability. So they went to a central server and then the downhill after that.

[Micah Sargent]

And the problem is they brought in the death of all things, which is the Microsoft login. Like the Microsoft login is so complicated and you get it in and so then you end up all these permissions, errors and you end up in these cycles. I still end up in those cycles. And so all of that, it was just the slow death they went in. I don't know what they actually pulled out of it as far as for teams because obviously nothing good because teams.

[Leo Laporte]

They say the core technology in teams is going to be the Skype technology. Unfortunately that's what they're moving you to come when this is all shut down, come may they say oh don't worry, you can use teams. But I don't know everybody who loves teams.

[Micah Sargent]

No, I mean teams is good because it's part of an ecosystem that you're forced to use at work. That's what teams is for. Right. The only time you see people using teams is because their company has told them they have to use teams and it's all part of their365. So teams is part of the ecosystem which they remind you of every time you open it. Teams is part of an ecosystem and it's powerful in the sense that, that you can. A business can do lots of jobs inside of teams, but I don't know any. I've never seen a personal person like use teams as like their choice of video conferencing. That would be, you know, and I think that. And teams, of course while they say they're 1080p, they're really only 1080p for the first two people and then as soon as you go to the third person it goes to 720 and then you're never going to get above 720. And now I believe Zoom is, has been. We've seen it rolling out. It's not, I don't think it's completely out, but is if you just buy a singular business license, which I think is like 20 bucks a month or something like that, you'll get 1080p.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That's why we bought it. It's for 1080p. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

And so for anybody that cares about, cares about video quality, look how good Alex looks.

[Leo Laporte]

He is on Zoom.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I was, I, I, I was up all night working on a show that we were back hauling something from a couple of different countries over last night. And, and I kept on looking at it, we had like, handheld, I mean, we had Steadicams and everything else all being backhauled over Zoom. And I was like, I cannot believe I'm doing this over Zoom. Like, I just can't believe we're bringing people walking buildings and, you know, all this other stuff. It was incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Truly amazing. So while I am sad because, I mean, we're 20 years old, it was in 2005 when I realized, you know, even though all of our hosts are in different locations, somebody called the radio show. So this was when I was doing a call in radio show, and all the calls were by phone, and somebody in 2004, I think maybe 2005, called, and I said, you sound amazing. You sound like you're in the room with me. He said, yeah, I'm using Skype because Skype had Skype out. Remember Skype in and Skype out that let you call phone numbers. And I said that was like, for me, a light came on and said I could use this to podcast. And now I can get Kevin Rose in Los Angeles and Patrick Norton under his car and all of these people.

[Micah Sargent]

Until then, unless you had an ISDN connection. The problem with phones was that the phone company literally adds noise to the phone call so that you know it's there. So when you pick it up, you know that there's. There's this subconscious thing that they do. They add just a little bit of noise so that, so that you. Because if you don't, people will feel like it's not, you know, like, and it was funny. You won't notice that it's there, but you'll notice it's missing. Suddenly feel like when you are on FaceTime or on, on something or Zoom, that doesn't do that. You suddenly hear just silence and not in a way with phone. So they add just a little Bit of noise. And then we'd have to filter all that noise out every time we did something else. And so Skype was one of the first ones that allowed us to have a pure signal that just sounded great. And then the video was again, we would see. Okay, no, the video. Well, when video. When it picked up speed, it got to a point where it would do 20 megs a second, which it would.

[Leo Laporte]

Use all the bandwidth.

[Micah Sargent]

It would use that band. Now you had to be very careful about what you. When you turn Skype on, what else are you doing? And it would not gracefully handle you suddenly uploading a bunch of files while you're on Skype. You know, things will start to freeze up. You know, like we had to tell.

[Leo Laporte]

People, turn off your mail client because they'd be on the show and their mail client would go out and get in the mail and the whole thing.

[Micah Sargent]

Would just fall apart because Skype was using all that. I thought it was like. I thought you weren't using this. I was using it. And now I have to stop, you know, and so, so like, you know, like I have to figure. I have to figure this all out. It's gonna take me a second to. To sort this out because you just screwed everything up. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm getting a little ptsd. We really were fighting with people over. That's why Burke remembers still talking about WI Fi.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, WI Fi still doesn't work, by the way, if you're listening to this public service announcement. WI Fi stinks when you're on video conferencing and you should not use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody's wired when we get them on the shows as far as we can. Some people can't, but when we can. So May Microsoft said your log information for Skype will be used on teams free tier in the coming days. The shutdown will happen for sure for fully in May.

[Micah Sargent]

If you're using a free tier of teams, what are you thinking? Like if you're not a company using teams.

[Leo Laporte]

Stop, stop.

[Micah Sargent]

Just go to Zoom.

[Leo Laporte]

Zoom is amazing.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. And again, it's because of people like Andy that are there, that there's actually folks that are focused on. On quality and the feature sets around it, especially as broadcasters. There's nothing close.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, you do see some companies, I think CNN uses WebEx probably they.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm sure WebEx paid a lot of money for that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Apple is a pretty big WebEx.

[Leo Laporte]

They have a little bug on there. But really that has transformed the cable news business as well. But everybody's on Zoom or Something equivalent now. Yeah, they don't have to go to a satellite bureau anymore.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. I mean the problem really is that they don't because you're an eight minute hit that they're never going to see again.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, they always tell people when we work with people, when we bring them into again like Michael Krasny show. And I'm sure you have this a little bit. People tell, oh, I do this all the time. And then you know, you're screwed. You're just totally screwed.

[Leo Laporte]

We got a guy, I won't name names. He's going to be on one of our shows soon who says oh no, I do this all the time. I don't need to do a zoom check. We always do zoom checks with guests.

[Micah Sargent]

Ahead of time and it's. And there and then always. It's always like some janky mic and.

[Leo Laporte]

And wi fi using my AirPods. That's okay, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, exactly. And, and so, so it's, you know, so that democratization hasn't, you know, fixed a lot of those things. And what's funny is a lot of people would fix it when we tell them like hey, let's send a mic to you or let's make this work or let's do whatever. They're like why didn't anyone tell me this? I would have bought it. I would have bought all these things if, if someone told me they don't know the difference. And but it's, it is kind of a um. So that's been unfortunate. But it, you're to your point. It's, it's revolutionized and I think that there's some companies like for instance, you know, big, big corporations that use WebEx. I think that that's a lot of it has to do with. It's so built into every conference room and every. There's a certain inertia there. It hasn't. It has little to do with what Zoom can do versus it because Zoom is clearly better than WebEx. Now I will say that WebEx over, over the time when Covid started to now has probably improved more than any other virtual conferencing system out there. Even Zoom, it's gotten better than Zoom was just ahead of it. But it's taken more ground than anybody else. So it's definitely came from being a complete joke to reasonable.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple lost, made a mistake Abubu not making facetime be cross platform.

[Micah Sargent]

No, I think that a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

People use FaceTime and if, you know, if we were all on Apple devices, that would be a good choice.

[Micah Sargent]

Even if we were all on Apple devices, I wouldn't use FaceTime FaceTime.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, so here's the deal. If I'm going to jump on the number one thing you do when you want to jump on a video with somebody else that's got an iPhone or some other whatever is FaceTime. Because it's just, it's easy. It always works. You can just talk to them. You don't have to have any kind of whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and Apple blurs the definition too because it will often make phone calls, both audio and video with FaceTime when.

[Micah Sargent]

You make a lot of phone call when I'm overseas, a lot of Times I'm using FaceTime to call somebody FaceTime audio because I don't, you know, I got wi Fi. I just don't have a phone phone number or I don't want to use the phone number there for. I don't want to pay minutes or whatever it is. And so. And it sounds a lot better. It's a better contribution. It looks and sounds great. And by the way, the FaceTime in the vision Pro is I just did a meeting. I had a meeting with two other people and we all, some they showed up with Vision Pros and I was like, oh, I better get my Vision Pro up, see how this goes. Because I'd never been in a meeting like a meeting meeting. Like not a, not like a, oh, let's try this. But it was a meeting and I put it on and it kind of gets rid of the Windows and you're just kind of like these ghosts are sitting there talking to you. And within 10 minutes it was just like someone was there. Someone was in, in the room with me. It was so Apple. I think they can't innovate that way if they're spending half of their time trying to figure out how to get it to work on other operating systems. And that's the big problem. As someone who I've developed a lot of or I've worked with teams to develop Apple apps that are Apple only, especially in the audio video world. And I've worked with ones where we have to integrate with Windows and Android. And I can tell you that the Windows and Android versions any as soon as we. It's not just that they weren't as good as the Apple apps that we built. And again it's not for everything but when it comes to audio and video, it's not that that they weren't good enough. The Apple product got worse because we are Sitting there trying to figure out how to add a feature that can go to the Apple product and to Windows and Android and, and Windows do not invest the same amount of money in audio video tools as Apple does. You know, and, and so, and the libraries aren't there and you're now. So when you build something that's on. I think, I think that maybe some of it's competitive, but I think the, the biggest reason Apple doesn't make things cross platform is that they don't want to deal with the libraries and the limitations of the other platforms. They just want. They, they can. If they don't like what they have, they can tell the hardware guys to make it better on the next version, then they can't do that on Windows and Android.

[Alex Lindsay]

Do we not consider it cross platform that you. Because remember, Apple did announce you can do FaceTime from Android and from Windows. It's just via the browser, since I.

[Micah Sargent]

Don'T know if anyone's ever used that.

[Alex Lindsay]

You've been able to do that. Yeah, you schedule a FaceTime call and then that lets you send a link to an Android user or a Windows user and then they tap on it, it opens the browser and you're part of the FaceTime call. So it. In. I mean, that's not as cross platform as just having a FaceTime app, of.

[Micah Sargent]

Course, but admittedly that's how I use teams like I am on teams meetings, probably two times, two or three times a day, you know, and I don't even use the app because the app keeps on opening weird windows that don't do anything. And so I, so I'm just like, I'll just use the browser.

[Leo Laporte]

When Apple uses the browser to do a FaceTime call on Android or Windows, is it using WebRTC?

[Alex Lindsay]

That's a good question.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it using it? It must be, right? Because you don't have any software installed. It must be using. And WebRTC is not ideal as we know. If you've used Google Meet or.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it could. It could.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. I'm not seeing. I mean, I'm not surprised that Apple's not saying specifically, but it must be because it's using your system Audio and you know, the camera that's built. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's Chrome or Edge, so it has to be. It's a Chrome Chromium, maybe. Yeah, it's WebRTC. It's gotta be. So they must have a. That's interesting. They must have a WebRTC gateway into FaceTime. They don't want to publicize that. That's for sure.

[Alex Lindsay]

Not available for iPhone models purchased in China mainland. Just so you know.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go. So don't get your hopes up, kids. All right, one more break and then get the John Ashley, prepare the Vision Pro theme. We will continue with Mac break weekly. Andy Inacco. Jason Snell's not here. He's probably getting briefed. I'm really, I want him to be getting briefed, but fortunately Micah Sargent is here. Always willing and ready and able to jump in. Thank you, Micah and Alex Lindsay as well. Our show today brought to you by those good folks at Melissa, old friends. I had a great conversation with Melissa. They're doing some really interesting, interesting stuff. Melissa started in 1985 as the trusted data quality expert. But what I love about this company is it hasn't rested on its laurels. It is constantly improving and constantly adding new features that make it even more valuable to every business. Melissa recently, for instance, made its debut in the Stripe app marketplace. Okay, this is one of many integrations they have, Salesforce and so forth. But let me just as an example, tell you what they've done with Stripe. Stripe customers now can access the same and a lot of people use Stripe, pretty much everybody. You know, I see it everywhere. Now they can access the same data quality services that those big global enterprises have been using for years. Key features of Melissa's stripe integration include, of course, address validation. Validation. That's what Melissa has become known for. The app validates global addresses at both customer and invoice levels within Stripe. Now that's great because customers often fumble finger their phone number or their address. And if you're trying to deliver something to them or call them or email them and they entered it wrong, it kind of becomes your fault, even though they did it wrong. So Stripe now with Melissa built in will fix it. They also do that in invoices, so you don't send an invoice to the wrong address. Auto completion capabilities reduce not only the number of keystrokes required, so you'll appreciate that customers also appreciate that and make sure that only valid addresses enter your database. As a Stripe user, you can easily configure the Melissa app with just a few steps. And of course, support for both customer account and invoice level validation is built in. The app offers smooth management of API keys and subscriptions, facilitating transactions transitions from free to paid services. So I guess try the free ones. It'll be easy to move to paid and they give comprehensive support. Of course, users have direct access to Melissa experts, ensuring high Quality service and support. That's just one of many, many integrations that allow you to enhance operational efficiency, boost customer satisfaction and maintain overall financial health. Every forward thinking business wants that that right. And if you rely on stripe, good news, it's available to you now. But that's just one of many new tools that Melissa. They've added a considerable amount of AI. In fact I had a great conversation with a data scientist at Melissa a couple of weeks ago. So impressed with what Melissa can do in healthcare in financial, KYC compliance and the risk of fraud. You know, the government and public sector and transportation logistics. Logistics, e commerce. Melissa's services understand compliance like no other. Of course. Secure encryption for all file transfers. An information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, SOC2 compliance. So you know you're always compliant with Melissa. You always can feel safe and secure. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. Melissa.melissa.com twit on prem as a service or even with the API, you will be very impressed. And of course integrated into all your favorite platforms. Melissa.com TWIT it really is a very impressive product and platform and a very forward thinking company. I love that, you know. Thank you Melissa for supporting MacBreak weekly. And now ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen, without further ado, it's time for the Vision Pro segment. What do you see? What do you know? It's time to talk to Vision Pro. Micah, you and I are just gonna have to sit back on this. Well, you, we, you owned a Vision Pro for three weeks.

[Alex Lindsay]

I was tortured by a Vision Pro for three weeks is what it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Quickly returned it as we asked you to do because we didn't want.

[Alex Lindsay]

I felt like I was. What is that movie? Oh, Orange, not Orange Theory, Clockwork orange.

[Leo Laporte]

Where Malcolm McDowell forced to see the horrific videos. But it's been very active actually with Vision Pro in the last few days. Yeah, new apps, new apps. You know, is there any news of Apple taking the Kendrick Lamar halftime show? And that would be so great as a Vision Pro experience.

[Micah Sargent]

You know, I think that it'll be interesting to see what they, what they released there. It does sound like they're going to, they're, they're thinking about. Well, and we're going to see some more concerts that are in, in the Vision Pro. I think that they're promoting a U2I stories of surrender. Yeah. So YouTube's always, always like. I think that they're the first people people call and go, we'd like to try Something new. And they go, yes, yes, we would like to do the new thing. So I think that this one will.

[Leo Laporte]

Be a feature though, right? This is not feature 8 minutes. This is a full length 180 degree video. Places viewers on stage with Bono at the center of his story. Only available on Vision Pro. It is not U2, it's Bono. But I mean, of course all of the music's going to be U2. I. I think, yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

And I think that the. I think that what I will say is that in general, I think there could be some interesting things from Ken L. Kumar, potentially in rehearsals. Potentially. And other things. It's really hard to do the stage.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

They have to flip that stage in minutes and then they have all these dancers running around and you don't want.

[Leo Laporte]

To say there was nowhere to put a camera where you couldn't see it without.

[Micah Sargent]

And the camera, to be great, has to be within about 15ft of the. And we didn't see any pictures of a Vision Pro there. So I don't think it's there. But it could be in rehearsals, it could be in. There's all kinds of things that could happen right now. I think that the processing still takes some time to get, you know, the full quality that they. They want out of it. What Apple's doing is not simple side by side 3D. It is a much more complicated version of it. And. And so I think that that is why it takes a little bit more to figure it out or calculate it and to render it. So even though something happened at the Super Bowl, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't come out for another couple of weeks or months.

[Leo Laporte]

The Bono thing's easy because it is actually his one man show.

[Micah Sargent]

So you really want control over it. I mean, I don't know whether it'll show people or not, but really the problem is, is where you want to put the Vision Pro is in the way of all your best paying customers. You know, so. So the thing is, that's what it says.

[Leo Laporte]

It says the, the story from Deadline says it places viewers on stage with Bono.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. Which is where you want to be. And it could be very, very.

[Alex Lindsay]

No, not me. Oh, wait, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Not for two hours or 90 minutes. That seems like a long time. But people watch movies in Vision Pro all the time, so it's my preferred.

[Micah Sargent]

Place to watch movies.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I wonder if they will have clips in this though, because those won't. Those would just be flat. Right.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, it'll be interesting. Yeah. And people have been doing a Little bit of that where you show clips and then you have to figure out a way of how you're going to display them, how you're going to present those as part of the immersive experience. It could be mapped onto something. It could be mapped into something. Something. It could be. There's a lot of different ways that they could approach that. So it'll be interesting to see how they, where they take that.

[Leo Laporte]

They did. Apple's done a good job with documentaries. They did that great Steve Martin multi part documentary.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, they just have all the money. So when you see, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Apple's not doing it. I understand.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean it's, it's like, you know, when, when they, when it's easy to do documentaries when you spend all the money that was required to do it well as opposed to some of the money that was required to do it well.

[Leo Laporte]

So somebody said that forget Kendrick Lamar, they should focus on Serena Williams Crip Walk just so late, just behind the.

[Alex Lindsay]

Scenes, just a little gif of it. But our animated moment of it would be cool because that's what the app that Apple introduced seems to be about. As kind of smaller things that you wouldn't necessarily need to have a full feature film or anything like that, but that the company could just release little, little bits and bops. I'm trying to remember. Exactly.

[Micah Sargent]

And that might be the case. I mean, that might be the case for a lot of the immersive stuff. I mean, I think we have this idea that we, that we have to have everything be, you know, a long, you know, something, you know, really, really long to watch like two, two and a half hours is something that was made up because that's what they were selling tickets for and people, they didn't think people would buy them. But what we're seeing now is that a lot, there's a lot of, a lot of companies. I mean the, the two and a half hour film or even one and a half hour film is probably got maybe, you know, a decade left before.

[Leo Laporte]

We just, we didn't go see the Brutalist in the theaters because it's 3 hours and 20 minutes. And we knew we would watch it.

[Micah Sargent]

At home and be able to stop.

[Leo Laporte]

Over a couple of days which.

[Micah Sargent]

Drinking wine and eating the popcorn. Eating Amish popcorn.

[Leo Laporte]

I made popcorn. Way we have reclining theater seats. So it really was like being in a theater. We watched it at home. It was great. I loved it.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. And I think that's the challenge for the theatrical world is that it makes way More sense for the streamers to be building series. It is in the immersive world, I see something that's like 16 to 20 minutes long and I'm like, wow, this better be good. Like, you know, like this is, you know, I start to worry that it's not going to be like that's a long time to sit in an immersive experience and have it be a, a great experience. And I have seen those. I mean the, I thought that we talked about the Prima app the other. A couple weeks ago and I sat and happily watched something for 20 minutes. I don't know if I would have watched that for an hour. You know, like, I think that that's the. And it's hard to. And just, and the production is too hard.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's too real. By the way, Chuck Arnold in our watching on YouTube says he was at the record of the one man show, Bono's one man show in New York City. He says it was a couple of years ago though.

[Micah Sargent]

I wouldn't be surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Could they have made an immersive video? A couple of years ago they bought.

[Micah Sargent]

Next VR, which is really the core of the technology that they're using a decade ago, you know, like, so they've, they've had, you know. Yeah, the hard part has been to get the resolution that they're looking for. And everything else has been. But with red cameras and with the black, I, I mean Apple has the capability of taking something like a blackmagic camera and tearing and there's other people that are doing this. When people are trying to use like for instance the, the 12K cameras from Blackmagic because they have a higher frame rate capability. What they, a lot of folks are doing is taking those cameras and there's a lot of space in those cameras. You know, it's designed to create the interface and so they literally just rip the, rip the cameras apart and put the sensors next to each other. And then, you know, so there's these like Franken cameras that are there that people are using because they're really high resolution and they provide really high frame rates. And, and now of course we're excited because you know, by all, by all reports, Apple is guiding blackmagic to, to do that without having to tear apart true blackmagic cameras. You can just have a blackmagic camera that does the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Get the Ursa.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah. So, so it'll be interesting to see hopefully at NAB in a month. We'll hopefully see, see some cameras that'll make this a Lot faster.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple, we talked last week. We'll have a Spatial gallery available in the next generation of Vision Pro Software. And apparently 18.4 iOS will have an iPhone app for Vision Pro.

[Alex Lindsay]

If you have a Vision Pro similar to the Apple Watch app. Right. We can do certain things with our Vision or with our Apple Watch and look at the model number, see some of the content that's available. So if you have a Vision Pro at basically. Basically gets activated on your phone.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah.

[Alex Lindsay]

And then gives.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting. That's very interesting. So you. No one else will get it. It'll only be people who have Vision Pro.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's used to set up personalized spatial audio as well. And then if you need to order vision correction things, if you're. If your prescription gets updated, then it also has.

[Leo Laporte]

That seems like something that it needed. That it's needed.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, and one of the things that they spent a lot of time on that they really needed was guest access. How do you design the guest experience? Because it's been a disaster. Like, I just stopped showing people the headset, like, okay, this is enough. And so. So Apple spent a lot of time in the new beta making that easier where you can. You can not just say all or nothing with the apps. You can decide which apps are going to be there. You can very quickly look at what they're seeing on your phone. You know, there's a lot of things there that are being improved so that you can at least show your friends what. What you got.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally, you can bank on your Vision Pro.

[Micah Sargent]

It's always.

[Leo Laporte]

Do I have to wear that outfit to bank on my Vision Pro?

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah. Do I have to match my sofa to bank.

[Leo Laporte]

Adib Spatial banking on Apple Vision Pro. Step into tomorrow. This is revolutionizing the way you bank. This is from the uae, right?

[Alex Lindsay]

That's what it looks like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

The person who has everything, including.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's Emirati. That's why he was. Now I understand. Yeah. Interesting.

[Micah Sargent]

I mean, there. I mean, I think a lot of times in. Especially there where they're not nearly as constrained financially. And there's a lot of one upsmanship that goes on in UAE and others where you want to have the best of the. You know, and there are probably a very significant number of banking clients for that bank that have Vision Pros.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that makes sense then. So this is not something.

[Micah Sargent]

It's not bank of America.

[Leo Laporte]

Not B of A.

[Micah Sargent]

B of A is not going to do it anytime soon.

[Leo Laporte]

Many of you would use. But if you. If you bank with Adib I presume you could do that worldwide. Then you could do this and that.

[Micah Sargent]

I sent that. The eye recognition will be great when you're pulling something out of your. When you're buying your next Lamborghini from your hundred million dollar fund, right?

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, but they missed out on all the fun stuff like, like here, here's all your retirement savings, like piled in. Do you want to see how it looks like?

[Leo Laporte]

Can you get gold coins, dollar bills?

[Andy Inako]

Do you want to see what, what, what, what Scrooge McDuck's money crib would look like?

[Micah Sargent]

Like project.

[Andy Inako]

They might add that projecting how much you'll have to retire given your. Given your good savings for the past 20, 30 years.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical. And Andy, you brought this from the Vision Pro subreddit. Apple park in 8K 180 HDR. We modded a cheap 360 camera for vision Pro to produce this video. It's on YouTube. They're on the campus. So they must have Apple's approval to do this, right? Maybe they're not on the campus.

[Micah Sargent]

No, they're on campus because if you skip through it, you'll see Surrender is there. In the. On the video. In the video.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Serenity Caldwell. So maybe. So these are friends of Apple.

[Micah Sargent]

Obviously there was a. There was a. There's been some meetings down there.

[Leo Laporte]

So that looks like they're using that. Usually you're not allowed 60 gimbal take.

[Micah Sargent]

Photos or post them. But. But sure, if you go to some of the earlier parts, you'll see some, I think some more internal pictures. But the.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Serenity there in the skirt?

[Micah Sargent]

No, no, I think if you go earlier to like minute in. Maybe a minute in.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

You'll probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look at that gimbal. Yeah, that's exactly the gimbal I was just showing you.

[Micah Sargent]

I think maybe I'm in the wrong one. Maybe it's a little before that.

[Andy Inako]

I think they had a couple of like cheapish cameras that they put together on a gimbal and modified for 8K with custom software to basically Genlock or sync all this stuff together.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Obviously with Apple approval, you can't just wander around the campus, I imagine.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, that's part of. That's not campus. That's the space right next to the space.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, so there goes. Going into the public.

[Micah Sargent]

I don't think he. I don't think I saw any parts where he was in the campus. He's in the. That's all the trees that are right next to the store. That's right Next to the campus.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Visitor center.

[Leo Laporte]

And by the way, you can look at it in 2D, but I guess I could. I can move it around. Yeah, I can look around a little bit. Okay.

[Micah Sargent]

I think Serenity's at like 54 seconds. It's just, it goes right past very briefly. 54 seconds.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's. Let's pause it when we get to.

[Micah Sargent]

There's that. I think that that's the theater.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, Is that Serenity on stage there? Is that her boots?

[Micah Sargent]

Well, I think it is Serenity, but I think there's a higher shot of that somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I should. Well, no, because I can scroll it. Yeah, yeah. I'm just too low. Let's see. Oh, yeah, there she is. Hello. Hello. Says Serenity. Hello. Hello. All right, so that's on YouTube if you want to. Now, is there a way to watch this on your Vision Board Pro?

[Micah Sargent]

I haven't tried to do that yet. And this is using. By the way, this is using the Kandao stuff. This is the. It's one of the few companies that just keeps making VR VR tools. Almost everybody gave up and I think they're going to end up winning because they just keep making tools. He's using what's called a Qcam, which.

[Leo Laporte]

The Qcam 3 Ultra version. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Kind of. Kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

And the Insta 360 Evo. Interesting.

[Micah Sargent]

But Hugh Howe is kind of like if you're looking for someone who's doing like he is on the front edge of. Of everything when it comes to whether it's for Meta or for the Apple Vision Pro. He has been doing all the videos on YouTube that are important around. Around how to develop content for it. It's great. Great channel.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Is there anything else for the Vision Pro or. We.

[Alex Lindsay]

I think we covered it.

[Leo Laporte]

We are complete. We'll play the closing theme, then mixed them together. That's. That was good. That was like a mashup.

[Alex Lindsay]

Real DJ over there.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple is likely to face an antitrust fine in France for a privacy tool. Apparently France doesn't like it that iPhone's privacy features. Features are for third parties, but not for Apple.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. And they're defending by claiming that, which I hadn't heard them say before, that they actually hold their own tools to even higher standards than third party tools. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

We're talking about app tracking, transparency. That little pop up that you get. Huh. So Apple's saying. That's the first I've heard them say that.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah. At least that's what it says in the Reuters Story.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. We hold ourselves to a higher standard.

[Micah Sargent]

Because they don't share the data. That whole app traffic, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple keeps it to itself. That's the thing about first party data. Google, Facebook, Apple, they're not going to share that with anybody else. They're going to sell, you know, sell the ads based on it.

[Andy Inako]

Also to, you know, credibly. I'm the person who's always saying that oh well, it's appropriate for companies like Apple to defend their choices in data antitrust court and things like that. In cases like this though, it's like, you know what, they, they have more insight into how they can abuse people's privacy than they need those tools to control third parties because they can't see what third parties are doing, whereas they know internally what their own policies are. And maybe it's not necessarily important, but I see their point.

[Micah Sargent]

Most of the third parties are taking advantage of it and are doing horrible things with it.

[Andy Inako]

No, no, but, but, but I mean of course it doesn't, it doesn't seem necessarily that f exempting themselves from these privacy controls because again sometimes the people who are actually operating the phone have to know things. They have to be able to access the camera data and maybe they don't necessarily need to have like strident third party controls over restricting their access to it.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, and I mean they're not, you know, generally I do feel like Apple only wants the information it needs to serve the users that they have there in the sense that they don't, they don't, they're not trying to resell your data to somebody else, which is what everybody else wants to do. Like all that tracking data that's there is.

[Leo Laporte]

But Apple does sell ads and presumably.

[Micah Sargent]

But they're not reselling our data to people who are packaging our data for everybody else.

[Leo Laporte]

But neither is I, neither is Google or Facebook. The first party data is stuff that, that's your secret sauce. You don't sell that off and that's how you sell, sell ads.

[Micah Sargent]

But all these little apps that are the apps do. I agree, they are selling all this data. That's a big part of their business model is selling your data to other people.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. So plugging that hole is actually really good. Yeah, I agree with you. You may remember that the UK it was said, had demanded Apple provide a backdoor to its advanced data protection. The UK doesn't say that publicly, but I think Apple kind of tacitly confirmed it when they a week later pulled ADP from the UK saying well, in that case you can't have end to end encryption in the uk. Well, and I don't know if I ever thought I'd say this, kudos to Tulsi Gabbard, our new U.S. director of National Intelligence, who has written a letter to Ron Wyden and Andy Biggs in Congress saying, you know what? We haven't agreed agreement with the UK government. They call it the Cloud Act Agreement. And she said in the letter, the United. According to initial review of the Cloud Act Agreement, a bilateral agreement between the US and uk, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of U.S. citizens, nationals or lawful permanent residents, nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States, which is what apparently the UK did did. So she's challenging him now. We'll see if anything comes from that. But apparently there was an agreement not to do what the UK has done. Now we don't know exactly what the UK did. There was never fully revealed it was a leak, basically because that stuff's all done secretly. But the leak said the UK not only wanted a backdoor to UK residents, but a backdoor to everyone using AD globally, which would be a violation.

[Micah Sargent]

You would. It would be globally if anybody was. They'd have a backdoor to anyone talking to someone in the uk. Like if you were texting to the UK there, that data would be available to them. I believe that that's. That was the whole. It wasn't that they. They wanted to get access to everybody's. To anybody not connected to a UK resident, but it still opens that door. If you're talking to anybody with a uk, it's in there, it's in their cloud, it's in their. There's a. You know, having that backdoor means that anybody you're talking to that by virtue.

[Alex Lindsay]

Of me talking to Rosemary each week, Rosemary Richard, co host of iOS today, who is a UK citizen then I, an American citizen, am made liable to have my data taken by the UK government of. No, we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to say, first of all, we don't know what the UK asked for because again, that was done secretly. Nothing. None of the stories I saw said anything about it being a conversation with a UK citizen. It merely said global access. And so now Apple has not really shut that down, they've just shut it down for UK citizens. So maybe you're right. Maybe we just don't know because we can't see the letter that's requesting that.

[Andy Inako]

And there was some news that came across from the Financial Times while we were recording this that Apple, Apple has actually filed an appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to basically say we don't want to be have to. We don't believe this is a legal order. We don't believe that we should be forced to comply with it. And another detail in this report that just hit Reuters about a half hour ago I think was that the UK considers that Apple is in violation of the order. Even if they're not offering end to end encryption. That the implications being that they still want backdoor access to everybody in the world and unless Apple gives it to them, they are in violation of that order. Simply pulling end to end encryption from UK users is not enough to satisfy.

[Leo Laporte]

That was my thought when I heard that Apple had pulled it. Is that have you complied? Maybe not because you only did it for UK users. It's a mess. Apple's only other choice would be to leave the uk. So I don't. Apple's in a rock, but stuck between a rock and a hard place. Although I'm gratified that the US government is saying hey wait a minute, you told us we have an agreement that you would not ask for that.

[Andy Inako]

Even immediately. They were getting heat from Congress people basically saying that this is not something that this is basically.

[Leo Laporte]

And the DNI has said we're investigating this, this would be a violation apparent.

[Andy Inako]

And the Reuters report, excuse me, the Financial Times report says that Apple actually, actually filed this complaint at the same time that they pulled end encryption. So this has been going on for a few weeks. It's the frustration of this is that because everything is secret, we don't know what the process is. We don't necessarily know what was asked and how Apple is supposed to be complying with this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. This is from the Financial Times. Despite Apple pulling the service, the British government still believes the big tech companies failed to comply with it disorder which can also be used to access the data of individuals outside the uk.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, that's not even known.

[Leo Laporte]

Has condemned it and so has Tulsi Gabbard. They're pressuring the us, the British government to back down. He Trump compared it to the UK's demand. Compared the UK's demand to Chinese surveillance.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I think that at some point that there may be folks in the UK that are like hey how about we not do this? Like it's going to get. It's like their hands are in it. They've said there's some people there that really believe that it should happen. And there's a lot of people that are like oh, this is going to make us look worse and worse. The longer this goes, the more it's, you know, because they. I think they thought they could do it all secretly and no one would know and no one would talk about it. And suddenly now it's, you know, it's out in the open. And I think that they're kind of. I think that we may find this slowly disappear, because it's not. And the other thing I. I think that Apple is laying the groundwork for, you know, Apple has not been as adding a lot of stuff in privacy all at once. And you can tell that they know where they want to go, but they're not adding it, you know, so they ask for people to give permission to block things. They ask for this thing, and then the next time they do it, they're like, no, no, we're just going to do it. And so Apple, every operating system gets a little tighter. One of the things you want to watch is Apple's building kind of VPN access, you know, a variety of VPN tools where it basically obscures where you are from. This would allow them to leave a country without leaving the country. So because they don't know where you are, like, they could get to a point where they go, I don't know where you are, you know, and so when you look at a lot of things down the road, it's not cooked yet. But it does mean that Apple could. Theoretically, they're taking that information away from themselves, you know, which is an interesting puzzle over time.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. Get ready. We're going to do our picks of the week as we continue with Mac Break Weekly. Somebody's ringing my doorbell. I just want to know if I.

[Alex Lindsay]

Should have run down package time.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it did. Oh, no. Lisa's talking to him. Good. It looks like he's wearing a green uniform, not a brown uniform, so. Oh, okay. He's moving on.

[Alex Lindsay]

Trying to sell you garden tools.

[Leo Laporte]

I was worried it was ice. I thought maybe it was going to be deported. I didn't know.

[Alex Lindsay]

What are you. Your as. What was it? S. Gardenish.

[Leo Laporte]

What were we talking about earlier? Oh, Lumberg, Lumborish, Luxembourgish.

[Alex Lindsay]

Luxembourgish, that's it.

[Leo Laporte]

They immediately came here saying, I hear somebody's been speaking Luxembourgish. We'd like to see your papers, please. Our show this week brought to you by Stash. Saving and investing can feel impossible. But with Stash 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 just want to sit back and watch your money go to work, you can opt into their award winning expert Managed Portfolio portfolio to pick 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 toward your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.stash.com paid non client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments llc, an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Investing involves risk offer is subject to T&C's picks of the week time and I know it's going to throw you off on everything but since we were talking about peak design I thought I might mention they have a new Kickstarter. Alex, you're a big peak design fan. I use peak design cases and their whole system and is so great. But they've never done luggage to my knowledge. They've done backpacks, photographers backpacks. They now have a Kickstarter already with 44 days to go, $3.2 million raised out of their $100,000 goal. This is called the Roller Pro for travelers, photographers and everyone in between. And I know Alex, you'll like the idea of having a roller bag that can so carefully protect your cameras with their XL camera cube. That was great with 400 millimeter lenses. Look at the size of that sucker. Yeah, it does look nice. It's hard sided rolling luggage. They say we didn't reinvent the wheel, but we pretty much did reinvent everything else. I like it. Yeah, it looks interesting. I just thought I'd mention it. I'm a big peak design fan. I have a lot of peak design gear. I've kicked into a few of their kickstarters. They've done 14 which is mind boggling. Let me see what they're called what they're charging for the $425. It's an expensive bag. That's 175 bucks off they say. So this would be a $600 bag bag. Okay.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, it's a little pricey.

[Leo Laporte]

Not for me. Plus I did you know I've done a kickstarter for a rolling luggage in the past. Forgot about it and like three years later got a bag in the mail. I thought, what the hell is this? And then I remembered, oh yeah, I remember ordering this. You won't get this till August of this year. But Peak design is reliable. They always do what they say they're going to do.

[Alex Lindsay]

So, yeah, somebody on the Verge has already reviewed it. So it's definitely like it's. They've made it, seen one in person.

[Leo Laporte]

What did the Verge think? Did they like it?

[Alex Lindsay]

Liked it, but too expensive. Was.

[Leo Laporte]

That's ridiculous. Yeah, you'd have to, I don't know, you have to make it out of solid gold.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Micah Sargent, what's your pick of the week?

[Alex Lindsay]

So when I moved into this house we live in in Portland, one of the things I noticed is walking outside of even a single room with Bluetooth connectivity or any kind of connectivity at immediate immediately drops. The house is very old. It's probably got metal in the walls. And so I just wanted to see what the, what my signal looked like throughout the home. And Ubiquiti has an app called Wi Fi man. And Wi Fi man is a sort of spectrum analyzing app. And it's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I've used their app. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

But what they make is a little device called the WI Fi man wizard. And it is a portable, portable spectrum analyzer. It comes with a little case that you can slide it into and it's got MagSafe.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Alex Lindsay]

So if you've got a 16E. Sorry. That you can put on the back of your phone and then you use the app on your phone, be it iOS or Android, to do full on spectrum analyzing. You can check the, you know, the strength of your channels. You can actually use AR to map out your space physically and see how the signal is in different places. It's really.

[Micah Sargent]

Look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a mag safe accessory. That's cool.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's very cool. It's USB C charging and you kind.

[Leo Laporte]

Of need this because the iPhone doesn't give you access to what it doesn't.

[Alex Lindsay]

Give you as much. Exactly. To be able to break apart the channels and see what the busyness is at the 2.4 GHz channel versus 5, what each of the rooms is providing in terms of signal strength. All of that coming together in this app has been pretty neat. And it also comes with a built in little shortcut so you can automatically kind of open it up and see what's going on. So if you want to map out your own home, be it with AR or without ar, you don't have to do that. But see what the signal is like in your home. I can fully recommend this little WI Fi man Wizard.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a. Is it a battery too? Will it charge my phone?

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, no, sorry. It won't charge your phone. It has to be charged.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you got it. You have it. Oh, look at that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, yeah, no, I. I bought it for this. So $99. A little pricey. It is sold out right now, so they're pretty pumped.

[Leo Laporte]

Ubiquity stuff is great. I highly. I'm all ubiquity here.

[Micah Sargent]

Solid.

[Alex Lindsay]

It's solid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like they just offered their new Wi Fi 7 access point. The Enterprise one's cheap. It's. It's only 149 bucks. Something like that. So they've just announced that.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, that's really good price.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, I know. It's remarkable. It's not shown here. So maybe they announced it, but they're not yet selling it. Yeah, really cool. Russell said you should just do Wi Fi 6. And I said okay, fine. Okay, I'll take it. Alex. Whatever you say. Whatever. You know, really, seriously. Whatever Russell says. I do. Alex Lindsay. Pick of the week.

[Micah Sargent]

So Grain.

[Leo Laporte]

Grain video.

[Micah Sargent]

Grain. You know, so I was. I was. I was shot something with my. My. My daughter's was playing it Hot Monk. You know, they have this little thing and it's darker than it looks and.

[Leo Laporte]

So I took it dark in there.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. So I had a. I took a shot and that's why everybody looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks good in there, right? Because.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, it's really dark. Yeah. And anyway, so. So anyway, so. And I was dealing with grain and I. And I just forgot I hadn't used it for so long. There's neat video. And so I went ahead and upgraded to neat video, the newest version or whatever and put it into resolve and I just forgot how great it was. So if you look at. Let me show you the.

[Leo Laporte]

It reduces grain.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. So if you look at it here. So this is me.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that your daughter singing right there?

[Micah Sargent]

No, no, no, that. The. My daughter is playing the guitar right there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, there she is. Yeah. So nice guitar.

[Micah Sargent]

But when I. She spent.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

She.

[Leo Laporte]

She bought it herself.

[Micah Sargent]

And anyway. But if you turn it off and you start to. Let's see if I go into 100% here. So you can actually see it. It's. You can see the grain on here, but if I turn back on it just completely. I don't know if you can see it through zoom, but it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. We're. We're not seeing.

[Micah Sargent]

But it's not. You're not seeing a lot of it, but it's dramatic.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Micah Sargent]

And it used to take a long time to fix these kinds of things when things were under lit and it was again one of those things that I hadn't used in a couple of years and then popped it in and I was like, oh, I forgot how great this just works. You turn it on, it analyzes the frame and it immediately gives you a nice smooth image. So anyway, if you're looking for something of, oh, I shot something with a phone or even this was shot with a Blackmagic 6K and it was under lit and I had, and I had to gain up to get exposure. That's the solution. So neat video is the solution. It's not incredibly expensive and not incredibly cheap. I think it's about 180 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Depends on what program you're using. It works with pretty much everything. If you're using Resolve, it's a hundred bucks. Final cut 7,990.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, so I got, and I have the Resolve version of it because that's where I do kind of a lot of my hard work.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Works with everything. Wow, that's great. Good pick. All right, let's see, that leaves you, Andy and Akko, your pick of the week.

[Andy Inako]

Well, I found out that Chrome updated itself on me a few days. A couple days ago I found that out by the fact that my uBlock origin AD BLOCKER stopped working because Chrome decided to get rid of a lot of the support for plugins that allow it to run ad blockers. Manifest V3 is the name of the pain and my web experience in Chrome started to stink, like immediately. Like sites that I've been using all the time. Like, it's. I don't, I don't try to get out of viewing ads. It's just that when there's ads that cover up half the screen and I have to dismiss them in order to just read anything, I would rather not do that. Not at 8 in the morning. Not when I've only been awake for a half an hour, please. So as a result, I've been looking at alternatives and I started playing around with Zen browser. Find it at Zen browser app. It's a fork of Firefox, so it's based on Mozilla's browsing engine and a. It has a lot of ad blocking technology built in, just like Brave and a couple other browsers. But it also takes some style from the ARC browser where, where it's a modern take on Browsing, where it understands that you're not necessarily viewing web pages in a web browser. These days you're also running apps and using services through a web browser. So there's a big vertical panel to the left side of the screen where a lot of your tools live. And so a lot of things are very, very streamlined. I don't know, I've only been using it for a couple of days now, so I don't know whether it's just different and I'm enjoying the fact that things are different and a little bit prettier. It'll take a couple of weeks for the rubber to meet the road and figure out if it can actually replace Chrome as my browser, but I'm enjoying it a lot. It's very early goings, so it's not 100% hard and it does like sort of fritz up occasionally. But again, it's based on Firefox, so the web display is not really a problem. Another thing I'd like to keep diving a little bit deeper into is all the customization that it has. So really, if there's like a. If your mail client is really important, you like to like it to stand out. You can make sure that that tab is always highlighted with underscore or always highlighted in yellow. You can install like special customizations. I think they're based on css, but it's not quite so tricky to actually put together. So basically, if you like it to be prettier, if you like to be a little bit more austere, some of these customizations are functional. Some of these are just to make it pretty. Like I said, I think part of the I might go back to Chrome and just rely on UBlock Origin Lite, which is the lesser version of the Ublock Origin ad blocker that still works. But the thing is, I've been stuck in Chrome for years and years and years. I've never really looked at options because Chrome, a web browser, isn't a tool. You don't really use the app itself. You just use like the websites and the web services that you access through the apps. You don't really notice it. So it's taken a while to realize that. Oh, wow. I actually kind of do like that idea of putting all the service icons in that little column to the left. I really do like the way that I can split tiles inside the actual view itself. So go to Zen browser app, give it a try. Again, it's still pretty early days. It's not as hardened as Firefox is, certainly not as hardened as Safari or Chrome is as far as stability goes. But if at minimum it will show you things that maybe you've been missing out on with Safari or Chrome. And it's also by the way, another endorsement for Raindrop IO, which is a third party bookmark tool that I switched to last year. If I was still using Chrome to master all of my bookmarks across all my devices devices, I'd be pretty much stuck in Chrome no matter what happens. The fact that all of my bookmarks are now accessible by whatever browser via a plugin, I have the freedom to switch whenever I want to, so I might switch back, but at least I have the freedom to try out something like zenbrowser.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's running on the Mozilla Gecko engine, so it supports Firefox. And one of the reasons I think it's a good choice right now is people are a little concerned about Mozilla. Mozilla's change in terms of service, as you say. Manifest V3 is really a nightmare in the Chrome world. It means actually Google is actively blocking Ublock Origin, so I'm going to switch to Xen. I have been using Ark. I'm waiting for the day when Ark won't support Ublock Origin. I think that day is imminent because it's based on Chromium. I've always liked Firefox, but I really, really preferred Arcs ui. So I'm installing a Zen browser right now. For some reason it won't let me go to ZenBrowser app. It says it's an insecure connection.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, I got that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's something going on with me because I see John Ashley is able to go there, but I have a lot of protections running on this system so maybe it's just.

[Andy Inako]

And for whatever it's worth, like it's as it is. I have two or three browsers that I use kind of Chrome as my main but I also use a couple others just from time to time. It's possible that I will have it'll be shouldered between Chrome and Zen browser if it keeps working.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really interesting because he's completely copying arc's user interface, which is great.

[Alex Lindsay]

It looks exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very happy because I love ARC's user interface. Browser companies decided not to continue developing ARC. They're going in a different direction. So I've been looking for a replacement browser. Now this looks just like ARC and.

[Andy Inako]

It'S 100% open source too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I got it from GitHub actually you can Install it with Brew. So I was able to do a Brew install Zen browser and that worked.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, that's good to know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So even if I can't get to the website, at least I can install it. This is really nice. Thank you, Andy. Good recommendation. Recommendation. Did you say Drop Raindrop is built in or.

[Andy Inako]

Oh, no, it's not built in, but again, it's Firefox plugin. So it'll run.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, it'll work. Yeah. And it supports the Mozilla account for browser synchronization, which is great because I do have a lot of Mozilla stuff, so.

[Andy Inako]

Yeah, that's the only bummer. What I love about Chrome is that no matter what device I have, it's the exact same experience in the exact same data and I could never give it up because it's a good password manager. Again, multi platform password manager.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you found a new browser for me.

[Andy Inako]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate that. Zen browser app, if your security software lets you. Andy. And Akko GBH is calling. But when?

[Andy Inako]

A week from Thursday at 12:30. Go to wgbhnews.org to listen to it live or later. And we'll be. Now, I have been informed that all of my appearances are going to be on YouTube, even when I'm not actually at the live library. So I have to shave and put on a nice shirt no matter what.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Oh, dear. Thank you, Andy. Wonderful to see you as always. Micah Sargent, thank you for filling in for Jason Snell. It was really great to have you. You could find Micah all over our network. He's the last remaining, besides me, the last remaining staff host. You do some wonderful stuff in the club, but I really thank you for that. When's the next crafting corner?

[Alex Lindsay]

That will be coming up. Yeah. In fact, yeah, we're in March now, so, yeah, you can check out Hands on Tech and Hands on Mac and iOS today. Every Thursday you can check out Tech News Weekly. And then in two weeks you'll be able to check out Micah's crafting corner as we continue to work our way through the miniature. I think I'll be doing Lego after this, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So the miniature is what's behind you right now? Yes.

[Alex Lindsay]

This is one that I built independently of the other one I have Station.

[Leo Laporte]

What is it?

[Alex Lindsay]

That is a little cafe. It's a coffee shop. It's just got an open area so you can see inside of it.

[Leo Laporte]

And you were building a kitchen? Last time I saw.

[Alex Lindsay]

In a kitchen. Exactly.

[Andy Inako]

Yep.

[Alex Lindsay]

That's what I'm working on right Now.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how fun. Thank you, Mike. It's always great to see you. Chihuahua coffee.

[Alex Lindsay]

Chihuahua coffee. That's where I've got links to everything online. That's thanks to Renee Richie, who years ago said, you like Chihuahuas and you like coffee. You should make that your. I think it was actually during a read for Hover, who's been a sponsor on the network, and you immediately said, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Signed up. Yeah. Awesome. It's great to. Great to see you. Always great to have you. I don't get to work with you as much as I. I used to.

[Alex Lindsay]

And I know our listeners miss our. Our chats and so it's always good whenever we get an opportunity to hang out.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice to see you. Thank you. Thank you, Micah. And thank you, Mr. Alex Lindsay, who is the man of the hour every hour at office hours. Global Q and A still going strong.

[Micah Sargent]

We hear it's a thing. We think it's the future. Lots and lots and lots of Q and A. So we're, we're. We. We're doing it every. Every morning. Yeah. We're getting ready for nab. We'll probably do a couple days from there. We're. We're getting our live views all set up. We're going to try to. We're getting a new mic. Hopefully it should show up next week for 5.1. It's a 5.1 mic. So we did. Last year, we did Ambisonic. This time we're going to try an actual DPA makes. An actual.

[Leo Laporte]

This time there'll be a subwoofer.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Micah Sargent]

But the. So we're going to try 5.14 K, 60 HDR from the. You know, walking around looking at NAB. So that coming out of the north hall because the central hall, it's closed this year. They are rebuilt. They're remodeling it. So they. So it's all in the north hall. All the cool stuff's in the north hall. Some. All the software stuff. Well, Black Magic's in the south hall, but that's. Half of the south hall is blackmagic. And then. And then the. And then there's a lot of other stuff. So we'll be. We're getting ready for that. So stay tuned for that. That's gonna be the beginning of April.

[Leo Laporte]

Exciting.

[Micah Sargent]

Should be fun. I hope you use that subwoofer to good effect. Yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you gonna. What's your next Lego gonna. What's your Lego gonna be? I forgot to ask you, Micah. What Are you gonna make.

[Alex Lindsay]

Do you know these little, little succulents?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you do the flowers. Yeah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Plants. But this, people love this. The succulent set. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Micah Sargent]

Did you see, did you see that someone. I don't know, I saw it on Tick Tock or something. Someone had a beating heart made out of Legos with the little motors and stuff like that. And it was like I was.

[Alex Lindsay]

Oh, wow. Like the chambers were moving. That's neat.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That is amazing what you can do with Lego. I want you to do that, Micah.

[Alex Lindsay]

Yeah, let me look that up.

[Micah Sargent]

I just set it as a challenge. I made it sound like I was just talking about something, but I really want to see Micah build a heart. Beating heart.

[Leo Laporte]

We do a Mac break Weekly on Tuesdays, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. Actually, next week we will be back to summertime.

[Andy Inako]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So we will be at 1800 UTC. See, I forgot we set the clocks spring forward.

[Micah Sargent]

Not that hitter.

[Leo Laporte]

Not that I. Yeah, so we're going to set the clocks forward. So we will be at 1800 UTC, not 1900. Okay. We plus seven. Now the reason I mention that is because you can watch us live. That's when you get the great discussions like we just had, which will certainly be edited out of the final edition. Well, now it won't be because I said it. You can watch live on eight different streams. If you're a club member, you watch in the Discord. It's a great place to hang. That's one of the many benefits of being a club member. Seven bucks a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Discord events like Micah's crafting corner where he's going to build a succulent and.

[Alex Lindsay]

And a beating heart soon.

[Leo Laporte]

And a beating heart. If we could just work on it. And I will be doing Thursday Chris Markowaert's photo monthly photo segment. Always a lot of fun if you're a photographer and you like knowing more about photography. So please go to Twitt TV Club Twit. Join the club. But you don't have to be a club member to watch live. There's also a YouTube stream, a Twitch stream. There's TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So you can watch us live anywhere. And I watch the chat from all of those platforms. So you can chat with us anywhere. After the fact though, is probably how most people watch. You can download a copy of the show from our website, TWiT TV, MBW. I just got the notice from the US Patent and Trademark Office that it's been 20 years since we trademarked Twit and the Twit logo. That's behind me. It's time to renew. Wow. I never thought I'd have to renew that trademark, to be honest. Honest with you. You can also, if you wish, get a copy. The video is up on YouTube. Actually, that's a great place to go if you want to share a clip or two from the show and we appreciate it if you do. But the best and easiest way to get a show, just like any podcast, find your favorite podcast player, even Spotify subscribe, and you'll get it automatically for free the minute it's available. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate it, especially our club members. But now it is, I'm sorry to say, my sad and solemn duty to tell you. Get back to work. Break time is over. Bye.